What is a hangover?

A hangover is a group of unpleasant signs and symptoms that can develop after drinking too much alcohol. As a general rule, the more alcohol you drink, the more likely you are to have a hangover the next day. But no magic formula can tell you how much you can drink and still avoid a hangover.

Hangover signs and symptoms typically begin when your blood alcohol content drops significantly and is at or near zero. They're usually in full effect the morning after a night of heavy drinking and can include fatigue, excessive thirst, dry mouth, headache, and nausea.

However unpleasant, most hangovers go away on their own. In the meantime, you can ease the discomfort by taking these measures.

When is a hangover an emergency?

Severe signs and symptoms that accompany heavy drinking may indicate alcohol poisoning, which is a life-threatening emergency.

Signs and symptoms that may indicate alcohol poisoning include:

•     Confusion

•     Vomiting

•     Seizures

•     Slow breathing (less than eight breaths per minute)

•     Irregular breathing (a gap of more than 10 seconds between breaths)

•     Blue-tinged or pale skin

•     Low body temperature

•     Difficulty remaining conscious

•     Passing out and can't be awakened

A person who is unconscious or can't be awakened is at risk of dying. If you suspect that someone has alcohol poisoning—even if you don't see the classic signs and symptoms—seek immediate medical care.

Are you concerned about your alcohol use?

Alcohol use disorder is a pattern of alcohol use that involves problems controlling your drinking, being preoccupied with alcohol, or continuing to use alcohol, even when it causes problems. This disorder also involves having to drink more to get the same effect or having withdrawal symptoms when you rapidly decrease or stop drinking. Alcohol use disorder includes a level of drinking called alcoholism.

Treatment for alcohol use disorder can vary, depending on your needs. Treatment may involve a brief intervention, individual or group counseling, an outpatient program, or a residential inpatient stay. The goal of treatment is to stop alcohol use to improve quality of life.

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Pillars of Creation (MIRI Image)

Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, J. DePasquale (STScI), A. Pagan (STScI)

How the James Webb Space Telescope changed astronomy in its first year

Enlarge / "I spy with my dolphin eye... something that looks like prey!"

Scientists attached GoPro cameras to six dolphins and captured the sights and sounds of the animals as they hunted and devoured various species of fish—even squealing in victory at the capture of baby sea snakes, according to an August paper published in the journal PLoS ONE. While sound and video has previously been recorded for dolphins finding and eating dead fish, per the authors, this is the first footage combining sound and video from the dolphins' point of view as they pursued live prey while freely swimming. The audio element enabled the scientists to learn more about how the dolphins communicated while hunting.

Sam Ridgway and his colleagues at the National Marine Foundation in San Diego, California, have conducted previous research on dolphins. They thought they could learn even more about the animals' hunting and feeding strategies using inexpensive commercial GoPro cameras to record sounds as well as visuals. The high frames per second (60, 90, or 120 FPS) enabled them to observe changes in behavior frame by frame.

The US Navy trains captive dolphins to identify mines, among other uses. (Although the dolphins are technically free to swim away, most "choose" to stick around.) Two of those dolphins—identified as S and K—were led out by their trainer's boat into San Diego Bay. There they were given free rein to forage for food for 50 minutes. Footage was captured for 15 such outings for dolphin S, and 5 outings for dolphin K. Dolphins B and T wore cameras while swimming in an above-ground 6x12 meter sea water pool. Live Pacific mackerel, sardines, and Northern anchovies from a live bait supplier were set free in the pool so  B and T could hunt. Finally, dolphins Y and Z were filmed incidentally capturing prey while freely swimming in the open ocean.

Over the course of the study, S caught 69 fish and K caught 40 fish, including spotted sand bass, barred sand bass, smelt, yellowfin croaker, California halibut, and pipefish. The fish were captured both near the surface (notably smelt) and, more frequently, on the sea floor, lurking in patches of vegetation. The audio revealed that S, for example, would buzz and squeal to find the hidden fish in the latter scenario, gobbling up a mouth full of the sediment, swallowing the fish and ejecting the sediment and any plant material back into the water. (One fish did manage to escape the dolphin jaws of death and swim away.)

T had been stranded on a Florida beach as a baby in 2013 and raised at Sea World of Florida, so T had never been observed catching live fish before. But after watching B capture prey, T caught on and began hunting with glee. "His captures were attended by much squealing," the authors wrote.

Dolphins Z and Y were also recorded squealing in victory while capturing prey, and Z actually fed on 8 (possibly newborn) yellow-bellied sea snakes—an unusual choice, since dolphins haven't previously been known to feed on sea snakes (although they have been observed playing "cat and mouse" with sea snakes). "Perhaps the dolphin's lack of experience in feeding with dolphin groups in the wild led to the consumption of this outlier prey," the authors wrote. Fortunately, "Our dolphin displayed no signs of illness after consuming the small snakes."

DOI: PLoS ONE, 2022. 10.1371/journal.pone.0265382  (About DOIs).

Dolphin Z catching sea snakes in the Pacific Ocean with head jerks and a victory squeal. Credit: Ridgway et al., 2022

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If you're a radio fan, or have merely been stuck in a car as day transitions into night, you may have noticed that you don't get quite as clear signal in the hours of darkness.

Before you assume that it's a plot by reverse vampires (possibly in conjunction with the saucer people) in order to make radio listeners go to bed, you should know that it's actually the result of a requirement by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to power down or turn off at night, and the FCC in turn are required to do this by the laws of physics.

It all has to do with wavelengths and the ionosphere. During the daytime, AM signals primarily propagate close to the ground (known as ground wave propagation) and follow the curves of the Earth. In the daylight hours, AM signals sent by radio stations can cover around 162 kilometers (100 miles) before you will struggle to hear the signal.

As good as this is, at night the ability of long waves to propagate large distances becomes a problem, thanks to the ionosphere. Between 80 and 600 kilometers (50-373 miles) above the Earth, particles in the Earth's atmosphere are bombarded with Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) and x-ray solar radiation, ionizing them as they do so. The ionosphere grows and shrinks (on your side of the planet) depending on the time of day.

At night, the layer reflects AM radio signals (known as "skywave" propagation) to a much greater degree than during the day, allowing the signal to be carried for hundreds of miles further than during the day. While this may sound like good news, it is what's known as a "pain in the butt" for any communication regulators out there, or people who want to listen to anything other than an indiscernible mess of static.

"Because of this change in signal propagation from daytime to nighttime, if every AM station kept its daytime operating power at night, massive interference would result," the FCC explains on their website.

In order to compensate for this, and "in recognition of the physical laws that govern AM radio propagation", the FCC requires that certain stations lower their power at sunset, so that the station does not interfere with others.

"Other stations, which cannot provide the necessary protection at night to other AM stations, are presently licensed to operate during the daytime hours only," they add.

So that's why, thanks to the laws of physics, your favorite AM station might shut down at night. But to be fair, it is the laws of physics that allow you to listen in the daytime, so let's not get too mad at the rules which govern our universe.

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The logic of getting up and heading to another room comes from considering stimulus control (we learn to behave in a certain way in the presence of a certain stimulus). We want to pair sleep (rather than being awake) with the bedroom environment. Only return to the bedroom when you are ready to sleep.

Although people will differ in terms of what they want to do while up at night, some might be keen to try out relaxation techniques. Breathing exercises come in different forms, but one technique is to breathe in through your nose for the count of four (feeling your tummy fill with air) and then breathe out through your mouth for the count of four (stop immediately if you feel faint).

Mindfulness, which involves being in the moment, without judgment, can also help to reduce stress and support sleep, and some people enjoy taking part in guided meditations.

Mental imagery can also be helpful, and in a study by the eminent psychologist Dr Allison Harvey from the University of California, Berkeley, it was found that the participants of a study who were asked to remember a relaxing scene in detail (and considering how it impacted their different senses) fell asleep more quickly than those who were not asked to do this. One explanation is that the relaxing scene filled up ‘cognitive space’ that could not then be used to engage in stressful or distressing thoughts which could interfere with sleep.

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In 2020, during the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic, concerns around food supply were high. This prompted big changes to the way some food is produced: There was a rise in the use of regenerative farming principles—methods of growing food that also support nature by, for instance, keeping soils healthy and stable, improving water and air quality, and improving local biodiversity—and an expansion of food production in and close to cities, leading to less waste. 

In 2021, PepsiCo, Danone, Nestlé, and Unilever—vast, multinational, fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies—announced they were adopting regenerative agricultural practices across millions of acres of farmland. This has been complemented by growth in urban farming, with vertical farming business Infarm recently opening the largest urban farm in Europe, covering 10,000 square meters. These are significant steps toward a food system that is resilient and better for people and for nature. 

Today we know that building food systems that are resilient to shocks such as the pandemic is no longer enough. In 2023, we will be redesigning food to also help us solve pressing global challenges including climate change and biodiversity loss.

For that to be possible, the whole system needs to be regenerative by design. This means that rather than bending nature to produce food, food needs to be designed for nature to thrive. In 2023, FMCGs, retailers, and innovators will take up this mantle, working with farmers to begin creating a circular economy for food. 

They will start to choose ingredients that aren’t only regeneratively produced but are also lower-impact, diverse, and upcycled. For instance, rather than making breakfast cereals using only wheat grown with conventional methods, the same product can be made from a mixture of wheat and peas grown using regenerative farming methods. According to a recent study, making cheese, cereal, and potato products using this approach could reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the food industry by 70 percent and reduce its impact on biodiversity loss by 50 percent in Europe. This is hugely significant given that the current food system is the primary driver of biodiversity loss globally and is responsible for a third of all human-made greenhouse gas emissions.

We’re already seeing seeds of change that will grow in 2023. Brazilian coffee producer Guima Café, supported by Nespresso and reNature, is becoming a regenerative coffee farm, producing more types of ingredients from the same land and diversifying its offering. Products that are made with upcycled ingredients are appearing on supermarket shelves, including Renewal Mill’s Dark Chocolate Brownie Mix and Seven Bro7hers’ Sling It Out Stout, brewed using upcycled Kellogg's Coco Pops. British food company Hodmedod is seeking out less-well-known but lower-impact foods like the fava bean and black badger peas.

Policymakers are also taking action. For example, in the UK, new government schemes reward farmers and land managers for services such as ensuring that clean and plentiful water is available to plants and wildlife, allowing them to thrive and contributing to climate change reduction and adaptation. Pilots are already running and, in 2023, more land managers in the UK will be taking part.

This is only the beginning. In 2023, we will see the launch of an innovation challenge—supported by the People’s Postcode Lottery—aimed at FMCGs, retailers, and food innovators to bring more iconic food products made with lower-impact, diverse, upcycled, and regeneratively produced ingredients to market. The development of these products will showcase the potential of circular design for food. 2023 will signal the beginning of redevelopment of entire food portfolios, designed for nature to thrive.

The Food Chain Should Be a Food Circle

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Maybe Edward the Black Prince didn’t die from chronic dysentery after all

THIS STORY ORIGINALLY appeared on High Country News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Dozens of once crystal-clear streams and rivers in Arctic Alaska are now running bright orange and cloudy, and in some cases they are becoming more acidic. This otherwise undeveloped landscape now looks as if an industrial mine has been in operation for decades, and scientists want to know why.

Roman Dial, a professor of biology and mathematics at Alaska Pacific University, first noticed the stark water-quality changes while doing field work in the Brooks Range in 2020. He spent a month with a team of six graduate students, and they could not find adequate drinking water. “There’s so many streams that are not just stained, they're so acidic that they curdle your powdered milk,” he said. In others, the water was clear, “but you couldn't drink it because it had a really weird mineral taste and tang.”

Dial, who has spent the last 40 years exploring the Arctic, was gathering data on climate-change-driven changes in Alaska’s tree line for a project that also includes work from ecologists Patrick Sullivan, director of the Environment and Natural Resources Institute at the University of Alaska Anchorage, and Becky Hewitt, an environmental studies professor at Amherst College. Now the team is digging into the water-quality mystery. “I feel like I’m a grad student all over again in a lab that I don’t know anything about, and I’m fascinated by it,” Dial said.

Most of the rusting waterways are located within some of Alaska’s most remote protected lands: the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, the Kobuk Valley National Park, and the Selawik Wildlife Refuge.

The phenomenon is visually striking. “It seems like something’s been broken open or something's been exposed in a way that has never been exposed before,” Dial said. “All the hardrock geologists who look at these pictures, they're like, ‘Oh, that looks like acid mine waste.’” But it’s not mine waste. According to the researchers, the rusty coating on rocks and streambanks is coming from the land itself.

The prevailing hypothesis is that climate warming is causing underlying permafrost to degrade. That releases sediments rich in iron, and when those sediments hit running water and open air, they oxidize and turn a deep rusty orange color. The oxidation of minerals in the soil may also be making the water more acidic. The research team is still early in the process of identifying the cause in order to better explain the consequences. “I think the pH issue”—the acidity of the water—“is truly alarming,” said Hewitt. While pH regulates many biotic and chemical processes in streams and rivers, the exact impacts on the intricate food webs that exist in these waterways are unknown. From fish to stream bed bugs and plant communities, the research team is unsure what changes may result.

The rusting of Alaska’s rivers will also likely have an impact on human communities. Rivers like the Kobuk and the Wulik, where rusting has been observed, also serve as drinking water sources for many predominantly Alaska Native communities in Northwest Alaska. One major concern, said Sullivan, is how the water quality, if it continues to deteriorate, may affect the species that serve as a main source of food for Alaska Native residents who live a subsistence lifestyle.

The Wulik River terminates at the village of Kivalina, a community of just over 400 people, 80 miles north of the Arctic Circle, that relies on the river. “We are always worried about drinking water,” said tribal administrator Millie Hawley, adding in a written message that her friends and neighbors fish for trout in the river year-round. The community has seen the river become increasingly turbid in recent years, she said, and some people blame the nearby Red Dog Mine. But Hawley said everyone is aware that the permafrost around them is melting, and that increased erosion is causing the level of dissolved minerals and salts in the Wulik to rise.

In addition to present-day impacts, the researchers are also considering the historical record. “I'm sure it has happened before,” said Dial, “because, in some sense, this is a natural phenomenon.” But Dial and Sullivan note that the rate of climate warming is greater than anything recorded in the past. “So it's very possible that something like this has happened before, but it happened really slowly. And maybe there wasn't just this massive pulse of orange that wound up in these streams,” Sullivan said.

The team believes there could be more than one climate-change-related factor at play. 2019 and 2020—two of the warmest summers on record—were both followed by winters with unusually high snowpacks. “Snow is a great insulator of soils, and it can be a potentially potent driver of permafrost thaw,” said Sullivan. He likens it to adding an extra blanket to the ground before it freezes. For now, the researchers don't know for sure whether the orange streams and rivers are an anomalous occurrence, coinciding with a handful of unseasonably warm seasons followed by high snow pack. And only time will tell how long it might continue.

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Public-health experts are sounding the alarm about a new Omicron variant dubbed XBB that is rapidly spreading across the Northeast U.S. Some studies suggest it is as different from the original Covid strain from Wuhan as the 2003 SARS virus. Should Americans be worried?

It isn’t clear that XBB is any more lethal than other variants, but its mutations enable it to evade antibodies from prior infection and vaccines as well as existing monoclonal antibody treatments. Growing evidence also suggests that repeated vaccinations may make people more susceptible to XBB and could be fueling the virus’s rapid evolution.

Prior to Omicron’s emergence in November 2021, there were only four variants of concern: Alpha, Beta, Delta and Gamma. Only Alpha and Delta caused surges of infections globally. But Omicron has begotten numerous descendents, many of which have popped up in different regions of the world curiously bearing some of the same mutations.

“Such rapid and simultaneous emergence of multiple variants with enormous growth advantages is unprecedented,” a Dec. 19 study in the journal Nature notes. Under selective evolutionary pressures, the virus appears to have developed mutations that enable it to transmit more easily and escape antibodies elicited by vaccines and prior infection.

The same study posits that immune imprinting may be contributing to the viral evolution. Vaccines do a good job of training the immune system to remember and knock out the original Wuhan variant. But when new and markedly different strains come along, the immune system responds less effectively.

Bivalent vaccines that target the Wuhan and BA.5 variants (or breakthrough infections with the latter) prompt the immune system to produce antibodies that target viral regions the two strains have in common. In Darwinian terms, mutations that allow the virus to evade common antibodies win out—they make it “fitter.”

XBB has evolved to elude antibodies induced by the vaccines and breakthrough infections. Hence, the Nature study suggests, “current herd immunity and BA.5 vaccine boosters may not efficiently prevent the infection of Omicron convergent variants.”

A New England Journal of Medicine study published last month provides more evidence of the vulnerability caused by immune imprinting. Neutralizing antibodies of people who had received the bivalent were 26 times as high against the original Wuhan variant as they were against XBB and four times as high as they were against Omicron and the BA.5 variant.

Similarly, a study this month in the journal Cell found that antibody levels of people who had received four shots were 145 times as high against the original Wuhan strain as the XBB variant. A bivalent booster only slightly increased antibodies against XBB. Experts nevertheless claim that boosters improve protection against XBB. That’s disinformation, to use their favored term.

A Cleveland Clinic study that tracked its healthcare workers found that bivalent vaccines reduced the risk of getting infected by 30% while the BA.5 variant was spreading. But, as the study explained, the reason might be that workers who were more cautious—i.e., more likely to wear N95 masks and avoid large gatherings—may have also been more likely to get boosted.

Notably, workers who had received more doses were at higher risk of getting sick. Those who received three more doses were 3.4 times as likely to get infected as the unvaccinated, while those who received two were only 2.6 times as likely.

“This is not the only study to find a possible association with more prior vaccine doses and higher risk of COVID-19,” the authors noted. “We still have a lot to learn about protection from COVID-19 vaccination, and in addition to a vaccine’s effectiveness it is important to examine whether multiple vaccine doses given over time may not be having the beneficial effect that is generally assumed.”

Two years ago, vaccines were helpful in reducing severe illness, particularly among the elderly and those with health risks like diabetes and obesity. But experts refuse to concede that boosters have yielded diminishing benefits and may even have made individuals and the population as a whole more vulnerable to new variants like XBB.

It might not be a coincidence that XBB surged this fall in Singapore, which has among the highest vaccination and booster rates in the world. Over the past several weeks a XBB strain has become predominant in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts, making up about three-quarters of virus samples that have been genetically sequenced. The variant has been slower to take off in other regions, making up only 6% of the Midwest and about 20% in the South. The Northeast is also the most vaccinated and boosted region in the country.

Hospitalizations in the Northeast have risen too, but primarily among those over 70. One reason may be that the T-Cell response—the cavalry riding behind the front-line antibodies—is weaker in older people. The virus can’t evade T-Cells elicited by vaccines and infections as easily as it can antibodies. Because of T-Cells, younger people are still well-protected against new variants.

Another reason may be that monoclonal antibodies are ineffective against XBB, and many older people who catch Covid can’t take the antiviral Paxlovid because they have medical conditions such as severe kidney disease or take drugs that interfere with it.

The Biden administration’s monomaniacal focus on vaccines over new treatments has left the highest-risk Americans more vulnerable to new variants. Why doesn’t that seem to worry the experts?

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The Hebrew University has discovered an ivory comb from 1700 BCE that is inscribed with a plea to rid oneself of lice. The inscription reads: “May this [ivory] tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.”

The alphabet was developed around 1800 BCE and was used by the Canaanites and later, many other languages throughout the world. Until recently, there had been very few Canaanite inscriptions found in the Land of Israel, with only a few isolated words having been discovered. However, a recent discovery has changed this, as an entire sentence in Canaanite was found engraved on a small ivory comb. This sentence, which dates back to around 1700 BCE, contains a spell against lice.

The small ivory comb containing an entire sentence in Canaanite, dating back to around 1700 BCE, was discovered at Tel Lachish in Israel by a team from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Southern Adventist University. The team was led by Professors Yosef Garfinkel, Michael Hasel, and Martin Klingbeil. The inscription on the comb was deciphered by Dr. Daniel Vainstub, a Semitic epigraphist at Ben Gurion University. The ivory was tested by Professors Rivka Rabinovich and Yuval Goren and was found to have come from an elephant tusk. The team’s findings were published in the Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology.

Aerial view of Tel Lachish. Credit: Emil Aladjem

 

The letters of the inscription were engraved in a very shallow manner. It was excavated in 2017 but the letters were noticed only in subsequent post-processing in 2022 by Dr. Madeleine Mumcuoglu. It was cleaned and preserved by Miriam Lavi.

Hebrew University Professor Yosef Garfinkel. Credit: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

 

The ivory comb is small, measuring roughly 3.5 by 2.5 cm. The comb has teeth on both sides. Although their bases are still visible, the comb teeth themselves were broken in antiquity. The central part of the comb is somewhat eroded, possibly by the pressure of fingers holding the comb during haircare or the removal of lice from the head or beard. The side of the comb with six thick teeth was used to untangle knots in the hair, while the other side, with 14 fine teeth, was used to remove lice and their eggs, much like the current-day two-sided lice combs sold in stores.

There are 17 Canaanite letters on the comb. They are archaic in form—from the first stage of the invention of the alphabet script. They form seven words in Canaanite, reading: “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.”

“This is the first sentence ever found in the Canaanite language in Israel. There are Canaanites in Ugarit in Syria, but they write in a different script, not the alphabet that is used today. The Canaanite cities are mentioned in Egyptian documents, the Amarna letters that were written in Akkadian, and in the Hebrew Bible. The comb inscription is direct evidence of the use of the alphabet in daily activities some 3700 years ago. This is a landmark in the history of the human ability to write,” shared Garfinkel.

Ancient combs were made from wood, bone, or ivory. Ivory was a very expensive material and likely an imported luxury object. As there were no elephants in Canaan during that time period, the comb likely came from nearby Egypt—factors indicating that even people of high social status suffered from lice.

The research team analyzed the comb itself for the presence of lice under a microscope and photographs were taken of both sides. Remains of head lice, 0.5–0.6 mm in size, were found on the second tooth. The climatic conditions of Lachish, however, did not allow the preservation of whole head lice but only those of the outer chitin membrane of the nymph stage head louse.

Despite its small size, the inscription on the comb from Lachish has very special features, some of which are unique and fill in gaps and lacunas in our knowledge of many aspects of the culture of Canaan in the Bronze Age. For the first time, we have an entire verbal sentence written in the dialect spoken by the Canaanite inhabitants of Lachish, enabling us to compare this language in all its aspects with the other sources for it. Second, the inscription on the comb sheds light on some hitherto poorly attested aspects of the everyday life of the time, haircare and dealing with lice.

Third, this is the first discovery in the region of an inscription referring to the purpose of the object on which it was written, as opposed to dedicatory or ownership inscriptions on objects. Further, the engraver’s skill in successfully executing such tiny letters (1–3 mm wide) is a fact that from now on should be taken into account in any attempt to summarize and draw conclusions on literacy in Canaan in the Bronze Age.

Lachish was a major Canaanite city-state in the second millennium BCE and the second most important city in the Biblical Kingdom of Judah. To date, 10 Canaanite inscriptions have been found in Lachish, more than at any other site in Israel. The city was the major center for the use and preservation of the alphabet for some 600 years, from 1800-1150 BCE. The site of Tel Lachish is under the protection of the Israel Nature and Parks Authority.

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So, are we headed toward the next global housing market crash, or merely riding a cyclical fluctuation more typical of the real estate market?

Reasons to worry

Housing market crashes typically follow real estate bubbles. A real estate bubble is to be understood as a situation in which the average price of a house is much higher than its value based on price-building fundamentals. The 2007 housing crash was one prominent example of when a bubble – here, created by overly permissive mortgage policies adopted in the late 1990s – finally went pop. Economic recessions can also push the housing market over the edge.

As it stands, a number of indicators are in the red. Following the recession caused by the pandemic, consumers are now having to grapple with inflation and shrinking household budgets. In response, central banks around the world have hiked interest rates. In Germany, for example, rates for 10-year loans rose to 3.5% in September. They are now heading toward 4% and possibly beyond. In the United States, the average interest rate for a 30-year mortgage exceeds 6.8%. The United Kingdom’s 10-year mortgage rate is currently fixed at around 4.21%, up from 2.4% in September 2020. At 4%, fixed interest rates for 10 years in the Netherlands are at their highest point since 2014.

There are exceptions, however. Take France. Although the current European Central Bank (ECB) key interest rate is fixed at 2.5%, the national interest rate for a loan longer than one year is currently at 1.58%, due to a legal cap on real estate loans. This means that interest rates in the country are only rising with a time lag and do not depend solely on current market developments, such as in the United States or Germany, despite the latter also falling under the ECB’s monetary policy.

… and be reassured

OECD/Provided by authors

That said, a global real estate crash remains highly unlikely. To put things into perspective, it is worth remembering that interest rates were higher in the early 2000s and have ebbed and flowed since (see table above). While this is unlikely to throw the housing market off balance, it can be argued it might turn investment away from single homes to multi-family properties. Institutional investors also reinforce this trend by tending to favour multi-unit properties.

There are also a number of factors that are bound to stabilise the market. First, high interest rates for construction mortgages and rising land costs hold down the amount of construction. This in turn results in less living space in cities, maintaining demand. Second, the world market draws a certain resilience from its diversity, each market having different economic and geographical attributes. As there are many real estate markets spread across the world, many remain stable and offer fair value prices, such as Warsaw, Poland.

There is a lot of capital sloshing around, and real estate would generally gain proportionately in asset allocation. In the third quarter of 2022, cross-border real estate transactions around the world were estimated at over 62 billion US dollars. The Americas region alone was the leading source of international real estate investment, with nearly 15.6 billion US dollars.

This follows a general trend of increasing transactions across 2021 in many countries, economic consequences of the pandemic notwithstanding. In Germany alone, the office transaction volume totalled 28.2 billion euros, amounting to around one third of European transactions.

Overall, the likelihood of borrowers defaulting on their mortgages is generally low. This is due in part to the stringent lending practices implemented by financial institutions in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, which have led to a decrease in the number of mortgages granted to individuals with questionable finances.

Much goes to show the global real estate market will adapt and recorrect itself over time, as has been the case up to now. It remains a solid and stable asset class, and fluctuations are part of its normal cycle.

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Famed French astrologer, Michel de Nostredame - commonly known simply as Nostradamus - prepared a book of chilling predictions called Les Prophéties, which he published over 450 years ago. And, despite the book's age, many of his predictions have proven to come true.

The contents of the book made dire predictions about World War II, Adolf Hitler's rise to power and the French Revolution, all of which were eerily accurate. Not only did he predict these events, but he successfully predicted the assassination of the 35th US President John F. Kennedy, and even the September 11 terror attacks against the World Trade Center.

Although his predictions never have a specific date attached to them, here are some that could come true in 2023:

A failed economy that could lead to cannibalism

Nostradamus predicted that humanity may face the threat of cannibalism due to a failing economy, writing: "There are no abbots, monks, no novices to teach. Honey will cost much more than candle wax, the price of wheat will be high. Man will be agitated and eat his friend in despair."

These words, apparently, predict that the cost of living will only continue to rise in 2023, and leave many hoping that the reference to cannibalism is only metaphorical.

A depction of 15th century French astrologer Michel de Nostredame, or Nostradamus. (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

The Great War of 2023

One line in the mystic's book stands out in particular, and it reads: "Seven months of great war, people die because of evil but their light will not fall into the hands of the king."

This prediction could refer to the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine that runs the risk of turning into World War Three, should it escalate further. However, there is dispute regarding the analysis of this line, since the war has surpassed seven months and is approaching the one year mark.

Change on the British Isles

The most recent world event that people have claimed is linked to his book was the passing of Queen Elizabeth II in September 2022. Following her death, the book broke sale records, and it seems to be linked to the following prediction:

"Because they disapproved of his divorce, a man who, later, they considered unworthy, the people will force out the King of the Islands, a man will replace him who never expected to be king."

Some consider the passage to be referring to King Charles III and his famous divorce from Diana, Princess of Wales. They believe that, based on this, the King will abdicate in the coming year.

Moreso, they believe that the prediction states that he will be replaced by Prince Harry, rather than heir to the throne, William, Prince of Wales, due to the reference to a man "who never expected to be king."

An off-planet disaster for Elon Musk

The astrologer predicted in his book that humanity's quest to colonize Mars - a quest which is being led by Elon Musk's SpaceX - may come to an end in 2023.

SpaceX SN15 starship prototype liftoffs from the company's starship facility in Boca Chica, Texas, US, May 5, 2021. (credit: REUTERS/Gene Blevins)

The prophet wrote: Heavenly fire when the lights of mars go out," and with  Musk repeatedly promising a plan to reach Mars, something terrible could happen to the first humans who eventually reach the red planet.

Dry land to get drier and a forecast of floods

The earth may suffer another climate disaster in 2023, according to the words of Nostradamus. "The dry land will dry up even more and there will be great floods when you see the rainbow," he wrote. As climate change continues to worsen, this forecast doesn't seem far-fetched for the coming year.

Riots and revenge in the streets

The prophet wrote in his book: "Sooner or later you will see great changes made - horrors and terrible revenges."

This prediction implies that there will be more social upheavals and civil rebellion in the coming months. The astrologer went on to write: "Trumpets are shaking in great controversy," and "an agreement that has been broken," which once again alludes in some way to a rebellion or revolution somewhere on Earth in 2023.

The speculations are that the prophecy refers to the riots in Iran following the death of Mehsa Amini, which are not expected to stop soon and are even predicted to escalate.

What events did Nostradamus accurately predict in the past?

One of Nostradamus's most cryptic prophecies is believed by many to have been foreshadowing the Great Fire of London in 1666.

The full quote reads as follows: "The blood of the just will commit a fault at London, burnt through lightning of twenty threes the six: The ancient lady will fall from her high place, several of the same sect will be killed."

A depiction of the Great Fire of London, 1666. (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

According to Sky History, the reason why some believe it to be in reference to the deadly fire of the 17th century is that "twenty-threes the six" could be interpreted as 20x3+6, which equals 66, as in, 1966.

However, they add, the passage remains disputed as the fire was started by a flame in a bakery and not by lightning, and the reference to an ancient lady puzzles people to this day.

One of the great mystic's more chilling prophecies is thought to allude to the rise of Adolf Hitler in 1930s Germany and the ensuing Holocaust, as he wrote: "From the depths of the West of Europe, a young child will be born to poor people, he who by his tongue will seduce a great troop; his fame will increase towards the realm of the East."

Later, he writes: "Beasts ferocious with hunger will cross the rivers, the greater part of the battlefield will be against Hister. Into a cage of iron will the great one be drawn, when the child of Germany observes nothing."

It's important to note that the word Hister is simply the Latin term for the Danube river, and is not the most enthralling part of the 450-year-old prophecy.

Hitler's rise to power and the invasion of Poland and Europe at large was assisted in part by his oratory talents, and so the line " by his tongue will seduce a great troop," is thought by some to be a direct reference to these events.

Other widely-believed prophecies included the assassination of Kennedy following extensive death threats ("The great man will be struck down in the day by a thunderbolt, an evil deed foretold by the bearer of a petition") and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ("Near the gates and within two cities, there will be scourges the like of which was never seen, famine within plague, people put out by steel, crying to the great immortal God for relief.")

Most notably, some believe that Nostradamus predicted the September 11 attacks with the passage: "Earthshaking fire from the center of the Earth will cause tremors around the New City, two great rocks will war for a long time."

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Mindfulness exercises can, in some cases, be as effective as antidepressant drugs when dealing with anxiety disorders, new research reveals.

The findings highlight how mindfulness meditation could be a useful approach to treating these conditions.

The study put a course of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) techniques up against a course of escitalopram – a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) class medication also known as Lexapro, considered to be a gold standard antidepressant – across eight weeks.

Follow-up surveys were carried out up to 24 weeks after enrollment using an assessment called the Clinical Global Impression of Severity scale (CGI-S), measured on a scale of 1 to 7 (with 7 being severe anxiety).

Those who had tried mindfulness saw their scores drop by an average of 1.35 points, while those on escitalopram saw their scores drop by an average of 1.43 points. In terms of statistical significance, both interventions are on the same level.

"Our study provides evidence for clinicians, insurers, and health care systems to recommend, include and provide reimbursement for mindfulness-based stress reduction as an effective treatment for anxiety disorders," says psychiatrist Elizabeth Hoge from Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

Two-hundred-and-eight patients completed the course of treatment prescribed by the researchers. The mindfulness program involved two-and-a-half-hour in-person classes once a week, with a day-long retreat during the fifth or sixth week. Additionally, there were 45 minutes of daily at-home exercises.

Antidepressants can be helpful in treating anxiety, but they don't work for everyone; even SSRIs like escitalopram fall just below the standards used to evaluate adherence to medications, with significant numbers of patients failing to renew prescriptions. They can also be difficult to obtain and can come with side effects such as nausea.

"A big advantage of mindfulness meditation is that it doesn't require a clinical degree to train someone to become a mindfulness facilitator," says Hoge. "Additionally, sessions can be done outside of a medical setting, such as at a school or community center."

More than 300 million people are thought to be living with some form of anxiety disorder, making it the most common type of mental disorder at the moment. The term includes conditions like agoraphobia and can lead to an increased risk of suicide and disability.

And while mindfulness programs have previously been shown to help with anxiety, they haven't been directly compared with an antidepressant drug until now. These results are a strong indication that MBSR techniques can reduce anxiety by a similar level, as well as give individuals tools they can continue to benefit from in the future.

However, the researchers emphasize that mindfulness does require more commitment and time than taking medication. It's also not clear how effective app-based meditation exercises might be, without the in-person element.

"It is important to note that although mindfulness meditation works, not everyone is willing to invest the time and effort to successfully complete all of the necessary sessions and do regular home practice, which enhances the effect," says Hoge.

"Also, virtual delivery via videoconference is likely to be effective, so long as the live components are retained, such as question-and-answer periods and group discussion."

The research has been published in JAMA Psychiatry.

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A recent image released by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has captured just a small glimpse of that on a cosmic scale: a dark nebula 7 light-years long looking like a titanic lighthouse keeping watch over the cold, black void of space.

Perhaps it's a cyclopean giant seeking planets to devour. Or death itself, haunting the heavens, cloaked in shadow.

Far from a destroyer of worlds, this darkness represents something far more fertile.

The new image comes from ESO's Very Large Telescope to celebrate the observatory's 60th anniversary. The image's eerie subject is the Cone Nebula, part of a larger complex 2,500 light-years away called NGC 2264 in the constellation Monoceros (the Unicorn).

It might not look like most other nebulae you're accustomed to seeing, glowing brightly with a complex array of colors. That's because not all nebulae are the same. Some reflect the light of nearby stars. Some, ionized by the stars within them, emit their own light.

And some, like the Cone Nebula, are dark, thick with dust that absorbs visible light. Only light at wavelengths invisible to the human eye, such as infrared and radio, can penetrate them.

The full image of the Cone Nebula from ESO's Very Large Telescope. (ESO)

Opaque nebulae of this type are known as molecular clouds. These include some of the most interesting nebulae to be found: places where baby stars are born. The dust is an efficient emitter of infrared light, which carries away thermal energy and causes the cloud to cool. Without the outward pressure supplied by heat, gravity overwhelms the clumps of the dust and gas and forces them together.

It's these dense clumps form the seeds of stars; spinning, they draw in even more mass from the surrounding cloud, providing the growing protostar with the pressure needed to kick-start fusion in its core.

At a certain mass, the star produces what astronomers call feedback. Jets of plasma accelerated by the star's magnetic field lines erupt from its poles, and powerful radiation pressure generated by the star's ultraviolet light. Both contribute the a stellar wind that pushes away material from the baby star.

This is what gives the Cone Nebula its iconic shape. Baby stars, burning blue and hot (although appearing gold in color in the new image), are at the stage of their life where their feedback is blasting away at the dusty nebula. Similar processes carved out the famous Pillars of Creation structures within the Eagle Nebula.

Because infrared light can penetrate these dense clouds, instruments that can see the Universe in infrared light – such as the James Webb Space Telescope – are invaluable for revealing the particulars of the star formation processes that take place therein.

But visible light images, like the VLT's, show details that disappear in other wavelengths. It's only by studying the full spectrum that we can obtain a comprehensive understanding of everything at play in these enigmatic, fascinating structures.

You can download wallpaper-sized versions of the new image from the ESO website.

Source

Enlarge / Auroral display over snow-capped mountains in Hangzhou, China.

A pair of researchers has identified the earliest description, in an ancient Chinese text, of a candidate aurora yet found, according to an April paper published in the journal Advances in Space Research. The authors peg the likely date of the event to either 977 or 957 BCE. The next-earliest description of a candidate aurora is found on Assyrian cuneiform tablets dated between 679-655 BCE, three centuries later.

As we've reported previously, the spectacular kaleidoscopic effects of the so-called northern lights (or southern lights if they are in the Southern Hemisphere) are the result of charged particles from the Sun being dumped into the Earth's magnetosphere, where they collide with oxygen and nitrogen molecules—an interaction that excites those molecules and makes them glow. Auroras typically present as shimmering ribbons in the sky, with green, purple, blue, and yellow hues.

There are different kinds of auroral displays, such as "diffuse" auroras (a faint glow near the horizon), rarer "picket fence" and "dune" displays, and "discrete aurora arcs"—the most intense variety, which appear in the sky as shimmering, undulating curtains of light. Discrete aurora arcs can be so bright, it's possible to read a newspaper by their light. That was the case in August and September 1859, when there was a major geomagnetic storm—aka, the Carrington Event, the largest ever recorded—that produced dazzling auroras visible throughout the US, Europe, Japan, and Australia.

The Bamboo Annals is a chronicle of ancient China, written on bamboo strips, that begins with the age of the Yellow Emperor and runs through the so-called Warring States period (5th century–221 BCE), when rival states were engaged in intense competition. It ended when the state of Qin unified the states. The original text of the Bamboo Annals was buried with King Xiang of Wei, who died in 296 BCE, and wasn't discovered until 281 CE, thus surviving Emperor Qin Shi Huang's burning of the books in 212 BCE (not to mention burying hundreds of Confucian scholars alive).

The original text consisted of 13 scrolls that were lost during the Song dynasty (960–1279 CE). There are two versions of the Bamboo Annals still in existence. One is known as the "current text," consisting of two scrolls printed in the late 16th century.

Many scholars believe this text is a forgery, given the many discrepancies between its text and portions of the original quoted in older books, although some scholars have argued that some parts might be faithful to the original text. The other version is known as the "ancient text," and was pieced together by studying the aforementioned quoted portions found in older books, especially two dating back to the early 8th century CE.

Independent researcher Marinus Anthony van der Sluijs and Hisashi Hayakawa of Nagoya University relied on the ancient text for their new analysis. This text describes the appearance of a "five-colored light" visible in the northern part of the night sky toward the end of the reign of King Zhao of the Zhou dynasty. Auroras tend to only be visible in polar regions because the particles follow the Earth's magnetic field lines, which fan out from the vicinity of the poles. But powerful geomagnetic storms can cause the auroral ovals to expand into lower latitudes, often accompanied by multicolored lights. Per the authors, during the 10th century BCE, Earth's north magnetic pole was about 15 degrees closer to central China than today, so the people there may well have witnessed such displays.

While this is technically an unconfirmed candidate aurora, "The explicit mention of nighttime observation rules out daytime manifestations of atmospheric optics, which sometimes mimic candidate events," the authors wrote. Furthermore, "The occurrence of a multicolored phenomenon in the northern sky during the nighttime is consistent with visual auroral displays in mid-latitude regions." According to van der Sluijs and Hayakawa, the 16th century current text's translation of the passage in question described the event as a "comet," rather than a "five-colored light," which is why the candidate aurora has not been identified until now.

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Life expectancy in the best-performing countries has been increasing by three months per year every year since the early 1800s. Throughout most of human history, you had a roughly 50–50 chance of making it into your twenties, mainly due to deaths from infectious diseases and accidents. Thanks to medical advances, we’ve gradually found ways to avoid and treat such causes of death; the end result is perhaps humanity’s greatest ever achievement—we’ve literally doubled what it means to be human, increasing lifespans from 40 to 80 years. On the other hand, this has allowed one scourge to rise above all the others to become the world’s largest cause of death: aging.

Aging is now responsible for over two-thirds of deaths globally—more than 100,000 people every day. This is because, counterintuitive though it may sound, the chief risk factor for most of the modern world’s leading killers is the aging process itself: Cancer, heart disease, dementia, and many more health problems become radically more common as we get older. We all know that factors such as smoking, lack of exercise, and poor diet can increase the risk of chronic diseases, but these are relatively minor compared to aging. For instance, having high blood pressure doubles your risk of having a heart attack; being 80 rather than 40 years old multiplies your risk by ten. As the global population ages, the magnitude of death and suffering caused by aging will only increase.

But this isn’t my prediction—apart from being depressing, extrapolating a two-century trend for a further year is hardly groundbreaking. What’s far more exciting is that, in 2023, we may see the first drug that targets the biology of aging itself.

Scientists now have a good handle on what causes us to age, biologically speaking: The so-called “hallmarks” of the aging process range from damage to our DNA—the instruction manual within each of our cells—to proteins that misbehave because of alterations to their chemical structure. Most excitingly, we now have ideas of how to treat them.

By the end of 2023, it’s likely that one of these ideas will be shown to work in humans. One strong contender is “senolytics,” a class of treatments that targets aged cells—which biologists call senescent cells—that accumulate in our bodies as we age. These cells seem to drive the aging process—from causing cancers to neurodegeneration—and, conversely, removing them seems to slow it down, and perhaps even reverse it.

A 2018 paper showed that in experiments in which mice were given a senolytic cocktail of dasatinib (a cancer drug) and quercetin (a molecule found in colourful fruit and veg), not only did they live longer, but they were at lower risk of diseases including cancer, were less frail (they could run further and faster on the tiny mouse-sized treadmills used in the experiments), and even had thicker, glossier fur than their littermates not given the drugs.

There are more than two dozen companies looking for safe and effective ways to get rid of these senescent cells in people. The biggest is Unity Biotechnology, founded by the Mayo Clinic scientists behind that mouse experiment and with investors including Jeff Bezos, which is trialing a range of senolytic drugs against diseases like macular degeneration (a cause of blindness) and lung fibrosis. There are many approaches under investigation, including small proteins that target senescent cells, vaccines to encourage the immune system to clear them out, and even gene therapy by a company called Oisín Biotechnologies, named after an Irish mythological character who travels to Tir na nÓg, the land of eternal youth.

Senolytics aren’t the only contenders, either: Others currently in human trials include Proclara Biosciences’ protein GAIM, which clears up sticky “amyloid” proteins, or Verve Therapeutics’ gene therapy to reduce cholesterol by modifying a gene called PCSK9. The first true anti-aging medicine will very likely target a specific age-related disease driven by a particular hallmark, rather than aging writ large. But the success of a drug targeting an aspect of aging in clinical trials will allow us to consider this loftier goal in the not-too-distant future.

In 2023, early success of these treatments could kickstart the greatest revolution in medicine since the discovery of antibiotics. Rather than going to the doctor when we’re sick and picking off age-related problems like cancer and dementia in their late stages when they’re very hard to fix, we’ll intervene preventively to stop people getting ill in the first place—and, if those treadmill-shredding mice are anything to go by, we’ll reduce frailty and other problems that don’t always elicit a medical diagnosis at the same time.

A Drug to Treat Aging May Not Be a Pipe Dream

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Tuesday, January 3

The first launch this week will be from SpaceX, it will be launching a Falcon 9 carrying range of smallsats as part of a mission called Transporter-6. Similar to other Transporter missions, this one is a rideshare so private interests can launch missions to space at a more affordable price. One of the payloads is called MethaneSat and is being sent to space for Bezos Earth Fund and Environmental Defense Fund. The launch should be available to stream on SpaceX’s website at around 2:56 p.m. UTC which is when the launch is scheduled for. It’ll take off from Cape Canaveral.

Sunday, January 8

The second and final launch of the week also comes from SpaceX. It will be launching another Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral at an unspecified time. It’ll carry 40 OneWeb satellites into orbit. Funnily enough, OneWeb is a competitor to SpaceX as its satellites beam internet down to Earth just like Starlink. The mission will be known as OneWeb L16 internally and should be streamed on SpaceX’s website on launch day.

Recap

The first launch last week was a Long March 4B carrying the Gaofen-11 04 Earth observation satellite from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in China.

Next, SpaceX launched 54 Starlink satellites atop a Falcon 9, these, as always, will beam internet back to Earth.

On the 29th, China launched a Long March 3B carrying the Shiyan-10 02 satellite from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center. The satellite will test new technologies.

Finally, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 carrying Israeli satellite EROS C-3 which will perform Earth observation tasks.

That’s all for this week, Happy New Year!

TWIRL 98: SpaceX to orbit rival company's internet-beaming satellites

If you’re getting ready to set your yearly goals for 2023, stop. Chances are, you’re going about building and breaking habits all wrong, according to the experts—especially if you’re extremely motivated in January, but find yourself getting distracted or overwhelmed come February. Before we get into the specifics of how to start or break a habit that you’ll actually stick to, there are a few things you need to know.

The most important thing is that habits are actually separate from goals. “Goals are how we make decisions—how we commit to an exercise program, or to eating healthily, or to saving money,” says Wendy Wood, provost professor emerita of psychology and business at the University of Southern California and the author of Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick. “But habits are how you stick with a behavior.” 

That’s because once something becomes a habit it’s extremely hard to break, Wood says. This can either work in your favor or against you. You’re forming habits regardless of whether you consciously decide to—it’s the brain’s way of freeing up mental space for more important things—so you might as well be deliberate about it. Otherwise, chances are some of your habits will be ones you don’t want or that are actively sabotaging your efforts to achieve a goal.

In fact, studies have shown that a substantial number of our behaviors in a day are habitual. “Almost 45 percent of the time, people repeat behavior in a familiar context while not thinking about what they are doing,” says Wood of the studies she’s conducted. When we’re stressed out or tired, we revert back to our established habits. This makes trying to form new ones based on our goals even more difficult—let alone trying to break a bad habit.

“We’re trying to do many things in life, not just follow through on a New Year’s resolution,” Wood says. “We get focused on these things and then our commitment to change actually gets diluted by the multiple other goals we’re pursuing and the other things that we’re trying to deal with on a day-to-day basis.”

Building a habit can take a lot of time and energy, so it’s important to make sure you pick behaviors you actually want to do and enjoy doing. While there’s no typical amount of time it takes to build a habit, it is something that will eventually get easier. “It’s a cumulative, iterative process over time,” says Wood. “So be patient with yourself.”

Thankfully, there are a few things you can do to make forming a habit easier so that, hopefully, when you get stressed or tired you have good habits to fall back on.

1. Make a List of Your Goals, Prioritize Them, and Pick One

The worst thing you can do when trying to build habits is picking multiple goals and trying to do everything at once, says Alana Mendelsohn, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Columbia’s Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute. 

Instead, Mendelsohn suggests making a list of the goals you’re trying to achieve and ranking them in order of importance. “When people say ‘I want to build better habits,’ almost always it’s three things,” she says. “I want to go to bed earlier, I want to eat healthier, and I want to exercise.”

While these three goals may very well be on your list, it’s important to be honest with yourself about the goals you’re writing down and think about why you’re trying to achieve them. “There are things that people feel like they should do or things they feel like they’re supposed to do, and they pick that,” says James Clear, author of Atomic Habits. Once you’ve finalized your list, pick one of them to start with.

“You start slow,” Mendelsohn says. “Because what always happens is people bite off more than they can chew, they get very discouraged, and then they give up.”

This is because “behavior change is often a lot more complicated than it appears on the surface,” says Clear. Take this example of trying to eat healthier as a goal: “If you start to break it down, what you realize is that there are a lot of sub-habits that are associated with eating better.” This could be everything from planning meals, to grocery shopping, to meal prepping, to cleaning (because now you have more dishes instead of takeout boxes).

“If you pick three or four habits and they all have sub-habits associated with them, you can see how this gets really complicated very quickly,” says Clear. It also makes it harder to adjust to daily changes, he continues. When you’re trying to build just one new habit, then you can anchor your day around it and make trade-offs when things start to shift.

2. Strategy is Key

So you’ve picked your goal. The next step is to decide which behavior(s) will help you achieve it. This may sound simple, but a lot of people tend to skip the most important part: reflection.

Say your goal is to get fit. You’ve picked this goal many times before, but for some reason the behaviors you choose never seem to stick. Think back over your previous attempts and analyze why those behaviors didn’t work for you, or if there was anything that you did enjoy and wouldn’t mind doing again. Mendelsohn suggests starting with broader questions and then getting into the specific details.

“One person had been exercising routinely and then stopped during Covid. I had to ask, ‘Tell me about your exercise routine,’” she says. It turns out, the only times her patient exercised is when he made a plan in advance to meet his friend at the gym. “We realized that the most important thing for him to rebuild the habit was to rebuild the contextual cues that worked for him. In his case, having a friend, having the accountability, and having a place to go was the way that worked. If he tried to exercise at home, it just didn’t work.”

Or, if you’re trying to eat healthier for the first time, keep a food diary of what you’re eating on a daily basis and when to see if any patterns emerge. “You might find someone who says, ‘Well, I skip lunch every day and then I’m starving, so I binge in the afternoons,’” says Mendelsohn. Or, maybe every time you see an ad for a fast food restaurant you decide you must be hungry and stop to get something. “It becomes clear that they have a 20-year history of eating the way that they do,” she continues. “Then they get discouraged if, two months in, they’re having a difficult time making the change.”

“I think something that is useful to keep in mind is the longer a time period you’ve had living the way that you have, the harder it’s going to be to change that,” Mendelsohn says.

There are two ways to make your new behavior feel less like a chore. The first is to reduce as much friction as possible. For example, if your goal is to get fit and you’ve decided going to the gym is the behavior that will help you achieve that, picking a gym closer to you means you’ll be more likely to actually go.

“A data analytics company tracked hundreds of thousands of cell phones for a couple of months to see how far people went to a paid fitness center or a gym,” says Wood. “What they found is that people who traveled only about three-and-a-half miles, went about five times a month. People who went over five miles only went once a month, on average.”

The second is to choose something that you actually enjoy doing. “There are a lot of ways to get in shape,” says Clear. “Not everybody has to work out like a bodybuilder. Maybe you like kayaking or rock climbing or going for a hike or cycling. There’s an endless number of things that you could do. Choose the one that you are most excited about.”

If there’s nothing you’re particularly excited about or you still feel overwhelmed, scale it down, Clear says. “If the scale is too large, that makes it hard to start … if you want to ultimately read 30 books a year, scale it down so that your habit is to read one page a day.

“It has to become the standard in your life before you can scale it up and turn it into something more,” says Clear. “We’re so focused on finding the best workout program or the perfect diet plan—we’re so focused on optimizing that we don’t give ourselves permission to show up in a small way.”

One thing to avoid, as Clear mentioned, is excessive planning before starting your behavior—things like searching the internet for the perfect product or app that will help you get started, spending too much money on these products before you know the behavior works for you, and waiting to get started on building your habit until said product arrives.

3. Getting Started and Keeping It Up

The final step of setting your goal and building your behavior into a habit is to be specific about when and where you’re going to do it, and then sticking to your plan. This is something Wood, Mendelsohn, and Clear are all adamant about.

Essentially, you want to build cues that lead to the behavior so you’ll be more likely to repeat it in the future. Stacking your desired behavior with an existing habit can make it easier for you to remember to do it. If your goal is to start flossing your teeth, keeping your floss next to your toothbrush and always flossing immediately after brushing reinforces that cue—until, eventually, it will feel weird not to floss after you brush. Or, if you have a treadmill you want to use more often and you always find yourself watching TV in the afternoon, watch TV while walking on the treadmill.

“The more contextual factors that can help you build a habit, the stronger it’s going to be,” Mendelsohn says. “It’s like a spider web. The more nodes there are, the stronger the network is. If you’re trying to build a particular habit, linking it to other things such as a specific place, a specific time, a specific person—that can really be ultra-helpful.”

If you pick a behavior and a few weeks later find yourself missing a day or two, Clear has a motto that will help: “Never miss twice,” he says. “If you can get back on track quickly, the mistakes don’t really mean that much.” If you decide that the behavior isn’t for you, that’s OK, too—try something else that can help you reach your goal instead, rather than giving up completely.

If you want a way to track your behavior over time, there are a few things you can do, like using physical calendar trackers or habit-building apps such as Habitica and Productive. Although, Mendelsohn cautions against tracking a habit just because you feel like you have to, and Wood emphasizes that apps don’t work for everyone because it can feel like just another task to add to your list every day. David Kadavy, author of Mind Management, Not Time Management adds that using tracking apps can be demoralizing if you happen to miss a day. 

“Don’t make it about the streak,” Kadavy says. “Celebrate each day that you do it, but when you miss a day, keep going.”

Rewarding yourself for doing a behavior is also an underestimated motivator. “Building rewarding rituals around behavior change can be really powerful,” says Mendelsohn. “For example, treating yourself to a smoothie after going to the gym.”

Once a behavior becomes a habit, missing a day or two isn’t as big of a deal. “Habits are very forgiving,” Wood says. “Habit memories form very slowly, incrementally each time you perform a behavior, and they also decay very slowly. Which is part of the challenge, is that we’re all living with our old habits that were good at one point, but now maybe not so.”

If you’re waiting for a “fresh start” like New Year’s Day to begin your new habit, consider starting sooner. After all, there’s no real reason to wait once you’ve put in the initial work.

“Each day can be a new year,” says Clear. But, if you want some kind of motivating force to give you that extra push: “People are more likely to change behaviors on the first day of the week, the first day of the month, or the first day of the year.”

You’ve Been Choosing Your Goals All Wrong

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Do you have a habit (or two) that you really want to break, but have struggled to in the past? Maybe you spend too much time on your phone, eat unhealthy foods, or overspend on mobile games and online shopping. Whatever the habit is, there are a few steps you’re probably skipping, according to the experts, that will help you finally break it.

Mostly, it all comes down to the cues that lead you to perform the behavior. When you do the behavior over and over again in the same context without thinking, that’s when it becomes a habit. If you haven’t yet read our story about how to build new habits, a lot of the tips in there are relevant to breaking a habit—with a few minor changes and added challenges laid out here, due to your history with the behavior.

The first step to breaking a habit is the same as building one—make a list of the behaviors you’d like to stop doing and put them into priority order. If you try to do everything at once, you’ll likely just get overwhelmed and give up, says Alana Mendelsohn, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Columbia’s Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute. Even worse, when we’re stressed out or tired, we instinctively revert back to our established habits—making it harder to break the ones you no longer want.

“I think something that is useful to keep in mind is the longer a time period you’ve had living the way that you have, the harder it’s going to be to change that,” Mendelsohn says.

The Power of Data, Environmental Factors, and History

Once you’ve made your list, you need to think about your history with each habit: When did it start? What triggers it? If you’ve tried to break it previously, what approaches did you take that didn’t work? 

“If you want to change a behavior, then try to identify what might be a trigger that generates the behavior,” says Wendy Wood, provost professor emerita of psychology and business at the University of Southern California and the author of Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick. “We tend to overestimate the extent to which our behavior is driven by our goals and desires, and we underestimate the extent to which it’s driven by habit.” A big part of this can be environmental factors such as marketing and advertising: We see an ad and think it’s something that we want to do or need to have, not that we’re only thinking about it now because we saw the ad.

The main problem people run into when reviewing their history of a habit, Mendelsohn says, is that they may not know what questions to ask or be honest with themselves about the answers. If you find that’s the case for you, she says “a therapist can be incredibly helpful.” Especially if your habit was established when you were younger. “So much of our experience of developing routines and habits is shaped by our families and schools.”

James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, adds that looking at data can be a good starting point. “For fitness habits, it could be things like your Apple Watch or Whoop band or MyFitnessPal. There are many different ways to get data,” he says. “It also can be true for habits that maybe you wouldn’t think about tracking.” For example, looking at your calendar for the past year to determine whether you spent enough time at home with your family, or whether you were traveling for work too much. “If you’re so busy that you never give yourself time to think about what you’re doing ... it’s really hard to improve, because you’re just busy repeating the same thing again and again. You don’t have a chance to look at the bigger picture.”

Picking Your Habit, Digging Deeper, and Creating a Plan

Once you’ve done your review of the habits you’d like to break, you should pick one of them to start with.

“I look at a number of the challenges a patient is facing and then ask myself, ‘Which one is in the driver’s seat?’” says Mendelsohn. “Meaning if I tackle one of these problems, are the rest of them likely to get better?”

The next step is to decide how you’re going to go about breaking the habit you’ve chosen, based on your history with it and the context or cues that lead to you performing the behavior. Here are a few examples:

Spending Too Much Money

Say you spend too much money and this is the habit you would like to stop. You’ve determined that you started overspending when you added your credit cards to your Apple Wallet or PayPal. This then made it extremely easy to buy things when you saw an ad on social media or a friend sent a link to something they thought you would like. “You want spending money to be as difficult and thoughtful as possible,” Wood says. “Putting all your credit cards on your phone that you carry everywhere is counterproductive—you are further automating the process of spending money.” To fix this, you decide to remove your cards from all online payment services so each time you want to buy something, you have to physically go and pull out the card, which then gives you a bit more time to think about the purchase itself. You could also ask friends not to send you products and unsubscribe from any product marketing emails.

Checking Your Phone All The Time

If you’re trying to check your phone less often, David Kadavy, author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, suggests locking it in a lockbox for part of the day. “Make it as hard as possible to actually perform the habit,” he says. While you’re still going to get the cue to check your phone, the effort of going to the lockbox and unlocking it can help block the behavior from triggering. Or, say you’re trying to check social media less often: “Just delete the social media apps from your phone,” says Kadavy. “Block them with the parental controls or, at the very least, don’t have them on your home screen.”

Eating Unhealthily

Clear has a great example of a negative eating habit from his own life. In the house he used to live in, there was a McDonald’s right after the highway exit on his way home. He found himself stopping there multiple times a week. “I looked at myself after the last one, and I was like, ‘Am I going to do this every time I drive home? Am I just going to stop here and eat here every single time?’” he says. “Ultimately, what I decided to do was to start taking a different path home. If I went left off of the exit instead of right, it would take an extra three minutes, but I wouldn’t pass the McDonald’s. I changed the environment so that I wouldn’t be exposed to the cue. That added enough friction and enough separation that the habit would change.”

Procrastinating

“A lot of people tend to procrastinate, then rely on anxiety and fear to motivate them to get tasks done,” says Mendelsohn. “This can be effective at getting things done, but at the cost of causing unnecessary stress. Breaking tasks down into smaller ones can be a harder strategy to implement at first, but more sustainable in the long run.” To help you get started, Mendelsohn suggests writing these tasks down using a pen and paper, as it can be “really helpful for people to keep their organizational strategies separate from the digital tools we use all day.”

Sometimes, substituting a negative behavior for a more desirable one can work at blocking it—but, Wood says you have to know what the cue is, and the alternative behavior has to be both easy and rewarding. Say you’ve decided to drink a glass of water whenever you have the urge to look at your phone, instead of locking it away somewhere or putting it facedown next to you. “For most people, drinking a glass of water isn’t going to be as interesting as looking at their phones, so I don’t know if that’s going to work particularly well,” says Wood.

If your chosen way to try and break your habit isn’t working, maybe it’s time to try something else. Another thing to keep in mind is that “for some specific behaviors, like quitting smoking, multiple attempts is actually a good thing,” Wood says. “Because most people who ultimately quit have to keep trying until they figure out the right thing that will work for them.”

So don’t get discouraged if it’s taking a while to break your habit. Sometimes you just need to approach it a different way or dig deeper into the context or cues that lead you to perform it in the first place.

How to (Finally) Break That Bad Habit

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But if climbers want to summit Mount Everest, the tallest peak in the world at 29,029 feet (8,848 meters or 5.5 miles) above sea level, they have to brave what's known as the "death zone."

This is the area with an altitude above 8,000 meters, where there is so little oxygen that the body starts to die, minute by minute and cell by cell.

In the death zone, climbers' brains and lungs are starved for oxygen, their risk of heart attack and stroke is increased, and their judgment quickly becomes impaired.

"Your body is breaking down and essentially dying," Shaunna Burke, a climber who summited Everest in 2005, told Business Insider. "It becomes a race against the clock."

In 2019, at least 11 people died on Everest, almost all of whom spent time in the death zone. It became one of the deadliest seasons on Everest in recent memory.

Some expedition companies blamed these deaths on crowding, noting that the peak became so choked with climbers during a rare period of good weather that people were stuck in the death zone for too long.

On 22 May 2019, 250 climbers attempted to reach the summit, The Kathmandu Post reported, and many climbers had to wait in line to go up and down.

These extra, unplanned hours in the death zone might have put the 11 people who perished at higher risk, though it's hard to determine the specific causes of each death.

One mountaineer said climbing Everest feels like 'running on a treadmill and breathing through a straw'

At sea level, the air contains about 21 percent oxygen. But at altitudes above 12,000 feet, oxygen levels are 40 percent lower.

Jeremy Windsor, a doctor who climbed Everest in 2007 as part of the Caudwell Xtreme Everest Expedition, told Everest blogger Mark Horrell that blood samples taken from four mountaineers in the death zone revealed that the climbers were surviving on just one-quarter of the oxygen they needed at sea level.

"These were comparable to figures found in patients on the verge of death," Windsor said.

Five miles above sea level, the air has so little oxygen that even with supplementary air tanks, it can feel like "running on a treadmill and breathing through a straw," according to mountaineer and filmmaker David Breashears.

Climbers need to acclimate to the lack of oxygen

A lack of oxygen results in myriad health risks. When the amount of oxygen in your blood falls below a certain level, your heart rate soars to up to 140 beats per minute, increasing your risk of a heart attack.

Climbers have to give their bodies time to acclimate to the lung-crushing conditions in the Himalayas before attempting to summit Everest.

Expeditions generally make at least three trips up the mountain from Everest Base Camp (which is higher than nearly every mountain in Europe at 17,600 feet), going a few thousand feet higher with each successive trip before making a push for the top.

Over the course of those weeks at high altitudes, the body starts to make more hemoglobin (the protein in red blood cells that helps carry oxygen from the lungs to the rest of the body) in order to compensate.

But too much hemoglobin can thicken your blood, making it harder for the heart to pump blood around the body. That can lead to a stroke or the accumulation of fluid in your lungs.

On Everest, a condition called high altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE) is common – a quick stethoscope check can reveal a clicking sound as fluid that's leaked into the lungs rattles around.

Other symptoms include fatigue, a feeling of impending suffocation at night, weakness, and a persistent cough that brings up white, watery, or frothy fluid. Sometimes the coughing is so severe it can crack or separate ribs.

Climbers with HAPE are always short of breath, even when resting.

In the death zone, your brain can start to swell, which can lead to nausea and a form of psychosis

Acclimatization to death-zone altitudes simply isn't possible, high-altitude expert and doctor Peter Hackett told PBS.

One of the biggest risk factors at 26,000 feet is hypoxia, a lack of adequate oxygen circulation to organs like your brain. If the brain doesn't get enough oxygen, it can start to swell, causing a condition called high altitude cerebral edema (HACE). Essentially, it's HAPE for the brain.

This swelling can trigger nausea, vomiting, and difficulty thinking and reasoning.

An oxygen-starved brain can cause climbers to forget where they are and enter a delirium that some experts consider a form of high-altitude psychosis.

Hypoxic climbers' judgment becomes impaired, and they've been known to do strange things like start shedding their clothes or talking to imaginary friends.

Other possible dangers include insomnia, snow blindness, and vomiting

Burke said that while climbing, she suffered from a constant, relentless cough.

"Every second or third breath, your body gasps for air, and you wake yourself up," she said.

The air was so thin that she was unable to sleep properly.

"Humans will start to deteriorate," Hackett added. "Sleeping becomes a problem. Muscle wasting takes place. Weight loss takes place."

Nausea and vomiting from altitude-related illnesses, including HAPE and HACE, also cause a decrease in appetite. The glare from the endless snow and ice can cause snow blindness – temporary vision loss, or burst blood vessels in your eyes.

Temperatures in the death zone never rise above zero degrees Fahrenheit. "Any exposed skin freezes instantly," Burke said.

A loss of blood circulation to climbers' fingers and toes can cause frostbite, and in severe cases – if the skin and underlying tissues die – gangrene. Gangrenous tissue often needs to be amputated.

All this physical weakening and impaired vision can lead to accidental falls. Fatigue is ever-present, according to Burke.

"It takes everything to put one foot in front of the other," she said.

Poor decision-making can also lead climbers to forget to clip back into a safety rope, to stray from the route, or fail to properly prepare life-saving equipment like oxygen tanks.

Mountaineers climb through the death zone in a day, but they can wind up waiting in line for hours

Climbing in the death zone is "a living hell," as Everest climber and 1998 NOVA expedition member David Carter told PBS.

Typically, climbers attempting to bag the summit try and make it up and down in a single day, spending as little time as possible in the death zone before returning to safer altitudes. But this frenzied push to the finish line comes at the end of weeks of climbing.

Lhakpa Sherpa, who's reached Everest's summit nine times (more than any other woman on Earth) previously told Business Insider that the day a group attempts to summit Everest is by far the most difficult period of the trek.

In order to summit successfully, everything must go right. Around 10 p.m., climbers leave Camp Four at 26,000 feet. The first chunk of their climb is done in the dark, lit by starlight and headlamps.

About seven hours later, climbers typically reach the summit. After a brief rest filled with celebrations and photographs, the expeditions turn around, making the 12-hour trek back to safety and arriving (ideally) before nightfall.

This article was originally published by Business Insider.

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Where 2022’s news was (mostly) good: The year’s top science stories

Busting a myth: Saturn V rocket wasn’t loud enough to melt concrete

• The Covid omicron XBB.1.5 variant has nearly doubled in prevalence over the past week and now represents about 41% of new cases in the U.S., according to CDC data.

• XBB.1.5 is highly immune evasive and appears to bind better to cells than other members of the XBB omicron subvariant family.

• Scientists at Columbia University have warned that the rise of subvariants such as the XBB family could “result in a surge of breakthrough infections as well as re-infections.”

The Covid omicron XBB.1.5 variant is rapidly becoming dominant in the U.S. because it is highly immune evasive and appears more effective at binding to cells than related subvariants, scientists say.

XBB.1.5 now represents about 41% of new cases nationwide in the U.S., nearly doubling in prevalence over the past week, according to the data published Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The subvariant more than doubled as a share of cases every week through Dec. 24. In the past week, it nearly doubled from 21.7% prevalence.

Scientists and public health officials have been closely monitoring the XBB subvariant family for months because the strains have many mutations that could render the Covid-19 vaccines, including the omicron boosters, less effective and cause even more breakthrough infections.

< Watch the video at the source page. >

XBB was first identified in India in August. It quickly become dominant there, as well as in Singapore. It has since evolved into a family of subvariants including XBB.1 and XBB.1.5.

Andrew Pekosz, a virologist at Johns Hopkins University, said XBB.1.5 is different from its family members because it has an additional mutation that makes it bind better to cells.

“The virus needs to bind tightly to cells to be more efficient at getting in and that could help the virus be a little bit more efficient at infecting people,” Pekosz said.

Yunlong Richard Cao, a scientist and assistant professor at Peking University, published data on Twitter Tuesday that indicated XBB.1.5 not only evades protective antibodies as effectively as the XBB.1 variant, which was highly immune evasive, but also is better at binding to cells through a key receptor.

Scientists at Columbia University, in a study published earlier this month in the journal Cell, warned that the rise of subvariants such as XBB could “further compromise the efficacy of current COVID-19 vaccines and result in a surge of breakthrough infections as well as re-infections.”

The XBB subvariants are also resistant to Evusheld, an antibody cocktail that many people with weak immune systems rely on for protection against Covid infection because they don’t mount a strong response to the vaccines.

The scientists described the resistance of the XBB subvariants to antibodies from vaccination and infection as “alarming.” The XBB subvariants were even more effective at dodging protection from the omicron boosters than the BQ subvariants, which are also highly immune evasive, the scientists found.

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Nearly a third of people who celebrate New Year’s Eve will host a party this year (29%), results show. Those who usually host, typically invite about 19 guests – although a third of hosts go a bit overboard with the guest list (31%) – and this year, 71 percent of regular hosts plan on inviting more people than usual.

Themed parties are still in according to 32 percent of those who celebrate, saying they’re likely to host an event that would require a festive costume. Besides a good theme, the top party essentials are, of course, food and snacks (84%) followed by music (76%) and cocktails or other drinks (67%).

The survey run by OnePoll for Chinet also found that when it comes to being a good guest at a New Year’s Eve bash, people should bring a bottle of wine or alcohol (58%) or a dessert (48%) for the host to put out.

Similarly, 48 percent think it’s rude to stay too late, but another 45 percent think leaving before midnight is equally uncouth.

6 in 10 have entered the new year alone

Overall, most Americans agree that New Year’s Eve is the one night of the year when no one should be alone (55%). Most have had to spend New Year’s Eve alone before (59%), and 54 percent of those respondents recall feeling lonely.

The night has had a history of being special, especially for the six in 10 Americans who have made a friend or met a partner at an end-of-year party.

Respondents reflected on some of their favorite memories of New Year’s Eve spent with others. Some standout comments included: “Barbecuing and doing fireworks with family,” “Having all my sisters come for a party and then sleep over at my house,” and “When I kissed a stranger who later became my true love.”

“New Year’s Eve is a special time to round out the holiday season as you ring in a new year,” says Melissa Rakos, product manager for the Chinet brand, in a statement. “By using products that help make cleanup easier, like disposable dinnerware, people can worry less about the mess and focus on making memories with loved ones.”

Only 1 in 3 had a great 2022

Looking forward, most respondents are optimistic that next year will be better than this year (57%) – although 45 percent shared the same sentiment for this year, but this only turned out to be true for 32 percent of survey-takers.

A third of Americans already have their resolutions planned out (36%), sharing their goals of making smaller, incremental changes (21%) as opposed to major ones (18%) – but 28 percent are going to implement a mix of both.

More than half of respondents say one of their top priorities for the new year is to practice making more sustainable choices (57%) like reducing food waste (55%), using reusable bags more often (45%), and cutting down on disposable eatery (32%).

“Sometimes hosts need an easy solution. Just as consumers are committed to creating more thoughtful habits, they should have options that support these initiatives,” says Rakos. “Ridding unrecyclable foam items completely is an easy way for people to get started with making these changes in their everyday lives.”

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This is "godoksa," or "lonely deaths," a widespread phenomenon the government has been trying to combat for years as its population rapidly ages.

Under South Korean law, a "lonely death" is when someone who lives alone, cut off from family or relatives, dies due to suicide or illness, with their body found only after "a certain amount of time" has passed.

The issue has gained national attention over the past decade as the number of lonely deaths increased. Factors behind the trend include the country's demographic crisis, gaps in social welfare, poverty and social isolation -- all of which have become more pronounced since the Covid-19 pandemic.

Last year, the country recorded 3,378 such deaths, up from 2,412 in 2017, according to a report released last Wednesday by the Ministry of Health and Welfare.

The ministry's report was the first since the government enacted the Lonely Death Prevention and Management Act in 2021, under which updates are required every five years to help establish "policies to prevent lonely deaths."

Although lonely deaths affect people across various demographics, the report showed middle aged and elderly men appear particularly at risk.

The number of men suffering lonely deaths was 5.3 times that of women in 2021, up from four times previously.

People in their 50s and 60s made up to 60% of lonely deaths last year, with a large number in their 40s and 70s as well. People in their 20s and 30s accounted for 6% to 8%.

The report did not go into possible causes. But the phenomenon has been studied for years as authorities try to understand what drives these lonely deaths, and how to better support vulnerable people.

"In preparation for a super-aged society, it is necessary to actively respond to lonely deaths," said South Korea's legislative research body in a news release earlier this year, adding that the government's priority was to "quickly identify cases of social isolation."

Elderly in poverty

South Korea is one of several Asian countries -- including Japan and China -- facing demographic decline, with people having fewer babies and giving birth later in life.

The country's birth rate has been dropping steadily since 2015, with experts blaming various factors such as demanding work culture, rising costs of living, and stagnating wages for putting people off parenthood. At the same time, the work force is shrinking, raising fears there won't be enough workers to support the ballooning elderly population in fields such as health care and home assistance.

Some of the consequences of this skewed age distribution are becoming apparent, with millions of aging residents struggling to survive on their own.

As of 2016, more than 43% of Koreans aged over 65 were under the poverty line, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development -- more than three times the national average of other OECD countries.

The lives of middle-aged and elderly Koreans "rapidly deteriorate" if they are excluded from the labor and housing markets and this is "a major cause of death," Song In-joo, senior research fellow at the Seoul Welfare Center, wrote in a 2021 study about lonely deaths.

The study analyzed nine lonely death cases, and conducted in-depth interviews with their neighbors, landlords and case workers.

One case involved a 64-year-old laborer who died from alcohol-related liver disease, a year after losing his job due to disability. He had no education, family or even a cell phone. In another case, an 88-year-old woman suffered financial hardship following the death of her son. She died after the elderly welfare center she attended, which provided free meals, closed at the onset of the pandemic.

"The difficulties expressed before death by those at risk of dying alone were health problems, economic difficulties, disconnection and rejection, and difficulties in managing daily life," Song wrote.

Compounding factors included delayed government assistance and a "lack of at-home care" for those with serious or chronic illness.

The findings of the 2021 study were echoed in the Ministry of Health and Welfare report, which said many of those at risk found their life satisfaction "rapidly declining due to job loss and divorce" -- especially if they were "unfamiliar with heath care and housework."

Many of the people in the 2021 study lived in cramped, dingy spaces such as subdivided apartments known as jjokbang, where residents often share communal facilities, and basement apartments known as banjiha, which made headlines earlier this year when a family was trapped and drowned during record rainfall in Seoul.

In major cities like Seoul, the notoriously expensive housing market means these apartments are some of the most affordable options available. And apart from the poor living conditions, they also carry the risk of further isolation; these housing structures "have already been criticized as slums ... and are also stigmatized," with many residents living "anonymous" lives, said the 2021 study.

"It's concerning because the (housing concentration) of lonely deaths could be another characteristic of the poverty subculture," Song wrote.

Closing the gaps

Rising public concern over lonely deaths has prompted various regional and national initiatives over the years.

In 2018, the Seoul metropolitan government announced a "neighborhood watcher" program, in which community members pay visits to single-person households in vulnerable areas such as basement apartments and subdivided housing, according to news agency Yonhap.

Under this plan, hospitals, landlords and convenience store staff play the role of "watchmen," notifying community workers when patients or regular customers are not seen for a long time, or when rent and other fees go unpaid.

Several cities, including Seoul, Ulsan and Jeonju, have rolled out mobile apps for those living alone, which automatically send a message to an emergency contact if the phone is inactive for a period of time.

Other organizations such as churches and nonprofits have also stepped up outreach services and community events -- as well as handling funeral rites for the deceased who have nobody left to claim or mourn them.

The Lonely Death Prevention and Management Act passed last year was the latest and most sweeping measure yet, ordering local governments to set up policies to identify and assist residents at risk. Apart from establishing the five-yearly situation report, it also required the government to write up a comprehensive preventative plan, which is still in the works.

In another study published November, Song recommended authorities create more systems of support for those trying to get back on their feet, including education, training and counseling programs for the middle-aged and elderly.

In a news release accompanying Wednesday's report, the Minister of Health and Welfare Cho Kyu-hong said South Korea was working to "become like other countries, including the United Kingdom and Japan, that recently launched strategies ... (to deal with) lonely deaths."

"This analysis is meaningful as the first step for the central and local governments to responsibly deal with this crisis of a new blind spot in welfare," he said.

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