The incident unfolded around 4:30 a.m. local time in the eastern city of Gold Coast when Steve Middleton found a young male suspect in his garage rummaging through his car, according to 7news.au.com.

The intruder tried to flee the scene, but the naked homeowner decided to throw on a pair of underwear and chase the young suspect, according to the report.

“I was naked, found a pair of underpants, threw them on [and] ran outside,” Middleton reportedly said. “It was 4:30 a.m., and it was daylight. If it was dark, it could have been a different matter.”

Not all heroes wear capes, in fact some just wear a pair of undies.

Steve Middleton was up early on Boxing Day when he spotted some thugs trying to steal from his car – the tradie decided to take matters into his own hands. #9News pic.twitter.com/ocg3s37W2f

— 9News Gold Coast (@9NewsGoldCoast) December 26, 2022

But things didn’t stop there, video footage reportedly shows a group of young men brandishing a knife and a baseball bat during the confrontation.

“I had another two fellas come at me with weapons and that was it,” Middleton said, according to 7news.au.com.

Middleton and the group of young men wrestled before the suspects fled in two separate cars, according to the report.

“The young fella got away from me,” Middleton reportedly said. “All I wanted to do was hold onto one so we could get the police here and they could sort it from there.”

Source

Hobart woman Kirsten Lynch got the fright of her life on Wednesday night when she went to pick up her golden retriever’s Tasmanian devil plush toy and it ran away.

“I went to reach for it, the devil shot underneath the couch,” she said.

The toy was actually a real Tasmania devil and Lynch said her yelling woke up the whole house.

While her husband chased the little devil out of the house with a broom, Lynch and her children had to take refuge on top of their kitchen table.

“We were concerned that if she or he was cornered and scared they would bite someone,” Lynch said.

“So at some stage, the family were standing on the dining table, which in itself was classically funny.

“I got the fright of my life. But to be honest, I think the poor thing was more terrified of us.”

Tasmania devils will rarely enter homes, but this time of year juveniles can be in urban areas looking for food and water as they learn how to survive without their parents.

The young devil did not appear hurt, and Lynch, whose property backs on to bushland, believes it came inside behind their new puppy, Gecko.

“The devil got through the fence behind Gecko and walked in through the door that we leave open for her as she’s still potty training,” she said.

“It was very cute,” she said.

Videos of the incident show the little animal scurrying underneath the tables and chairs while her husband gently shoos it out of the house.

Source

There have been no reports of new variants to date, but China has been accused of not being forthcoming about the virus since it first surfaced in the country in late 2019. The worry is that it may not be sharing data now on any signs of evolving strains that could spark fresh outbreaks elsewhere.

The U.S., Japan, India, South Korea, Taiwan and Italy have announced testing requirements for passengers from China. The U.S. cited both the surge in infections and what it said was a lack of information, including genomic sequencing of the virus strains in the country.

Authorities in Taiwan and Japan have expressed similar concern.

“Right now the pandemic situation in China is not transparent,” Wang Pi-Sheng, the head of Taiwan’s epidemic command center, told The Associated Press. “We have a very limited grasp on its information, and it’s not very accurate.”

The island will start testing everyone arriving from China on Jan. 1, ahead of the expected return of about 30,000 Taiwanese for the Lunar New Year holiday later in the month. The new Japanese rules, which restrict flights from mainland China, Hong Kong and Macao to designated airports beginning Friday, are already disrupting holiday travel plans.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin noted Thursday that many countries have not changed their policies for travelers from China and said that any measures should treat people from all countries equally.

< Watch the video at the source page.>

Every new infection offers a chance for the coronavirus to mutate, and it is spreading rapidly in China. Scientists can’t say whether that means the surge will unleash a new mutant on the world — but they worry that might happen.

Chinese health officials have said the current outbreak is being driven by versions of the omicron variant that have also been detected elsewhere, and a surveillance system has been set up to identify any potentially worrisome new versions of the virus. Wu Zunyou, the chief epidemiologist at China’s Center for Disease Control, said Thursday that China has always reported the virus strains it has found in a timely way.

“We keep nothing secret,” he said. “All work is shared with the world.”

Italy’s health minister told the Senate that sequencing indicates that the variants detected in passengers arriving from China are already in circulation in Europe. “This is the most important and reassuring news,″ Orazio Schillaci said.

That squares with what the European Union’s executive branch has said. The EU refrained Thursday from immediately following member Italy in requiring tests for visitors from China, but is assessing the situation.

More broadly, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has said the body needs more information on the severity of the outbreak in China, particularly on hospital and ICU admissions, “in order to make a comprehensive risk assessment of the situation on the ground.”

China rolled back many of its tough pandemic restrictions earlier this month, allowing the virus to spread rapidly in a country that had seen relatively few infections since an initial devastating outbreak in the city of Wuhan. Spiraling infections have led to shortages of cold medicine, long lines at fever clinics, and at-capacity emergency rooms turning away patients. Cremations have risen several-fold, with a request from overburdened funeral homes in one city for families to postpone funeral services until next month.

Chinese state media has not reported the fallout from the surge widely and government officials have blamed Western media for hyping up the situation.

The global concerns, tinged with anger, are a direct result of the ruling Communist Party’s sudden exit from some of the world’s most stringent anti-virus policies, said Miles Yu, director of the China Center at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington.

“You can’t conduct the lunacy of ‘zero-COVID’ lockdowns for such a long period of time … and then suddenly unleash a multitude of the infected from a caged China to the world,” risking major outbreaks elsewhere, Yu said in an email.

Dr. David Dowdy, an infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said the move by the U.S. may be more about increasing pressure on China to share more information than stopping a new variant from entering the country.

China has been accused of masking the virus situation in the country before. An AP investigation found that the government sat on the release of genetic information about the virus for more than a week after decoding it, frustrating WHO officials.

The government also tightly controlled the dissemination of Chinese research on the virus, impeding cooperation with international scientists.

Research into the origins of the virus has also been stymied. A WHO expert group said in a report this year that “key pieces of data” were missing on the how the pandemic began and called for a more in-depth investigation.

Source

Is that shrunken head really human? Combining imaging methods yields clues

Make no mistake: smoking tobacco is utterly terrible for you. Along with upping the risk of heart disease, diabetes, and strokes, the overwhelming majority of lung cancer cases are directly linked to smoking. Despite this risk, though, only 10 to 20 percent of lifelong smokers will actually develop lung cancer. Some people manage to smoke pack after pack of cigarettes for decades and somehow avoid lung cancer.

While this is influenced by sex, smoking status, and wider health, the ability of some smokers to dodge lung cancer might not just be a matter of sheer luck, according to the latest research.

In a study, reported in the journal Nature Genetics, scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York argue that some smokers may have a robust mechanism or resilience that helps to limit mutations in the lungs that protect them from lung cancer.

It’s long been assumed that smoking leads to lung cancer by triggering DNA mutations in normal lung cells. As the team expected, the researchers found significantly more mutations in the lung cells of smokers as opposed to non-smokers.

It also appears that the number of cell mutations was closely linked to the amount the person had smoked – but only up to a point. Once the person had smoked 23 pack years (one pack year of smoking equals one pack of cigarettes smoked per day for one year) the rise in cell mutations stopped.

The study authors believe their bodies have some kind of system for repairing DNA damage or "detoxifying" smoke to make it less prone to causing mutations. However, more evidence is needed to confirm this explanation.

“The heaviest smokers did not have the highest mutation burden,” Dr Simon Spivack, co-senior author of the study and professor of medicine, of epidemiology, population health, and of genetics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, said in a statement.

“Our data suggest that these individuals may have survived for so long in spite of their heavy smoking because they managed to suppress further mutation accumulation. This leveling off of mutations could stem from these people having very proficient systems for repairing DNA damage or detoxifying cigarette smoke.”

The team reached their findings via a technique called single-cell multiple displacement amplification that can provide a more accurate depiction of peoples’ true mutations without introducing sequencing errors. They used this technique – which was only developed in 2017 – on the epithelial lung cells collected from 14 never-smokers, ages 11 to 86; and 19 smokers, ages 44 to 81, who smoked varying amounts.

If their findings hold true, this could offer a new strategy for the early detection of lung cancer risk. To follow up on this study, the team hopes to find out whether it’s possible to determine a person’s capacity for DNA repair or detoxification, thereby revealing the risk of them developing lung cancer from smoking.

“We now wish to develop new assays that can measure someone’s capacity for DNA repair or detoxification, which could offer a new way to assess one’s risk for lung cancer,” explained Dr Spivack

“This may prove to be an important step toward the prevention and early detection of lung cancer risk and away from the current herculean efforts needed to battle late-stage disease, where the majority of health expenditures and misery occur.”

The article first appeared in April 2022.

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The moon, which seemed so far away for so long, is rapidly becoming the new hotspot for space activities. Following the successful launch of the Artemis program in November, NASA is now looking ahead to moon landings and a lunar space station. China’s space agency aims to deploy lunar landers and rovers and to build a research station on the moon. Companies in the US and Japan have plans in the works for their own moon landers too.

But in the long term, all eyes are on Mars.

NASA chief Bill Nelson considers Artemis to be a stepping stone, part of the Moon to Mars program. The European Space Agency, a longtime NASA partner, has its own Terrae Novae 2030+ program, which is also aimed at eventually sending crewed missions. China’s space agency is at work on landers, rovers, and orbiters. And of course, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk can’t stop talking about how he wants to build Starships that, like “Noah’s arks,” will make humanity a “multiplanetary species,” including building sprawling civilizations on the Red Planet.

But the hellish conditions on Mars make it hard to imagine living there, let alone sending millions. The Red Planet lies on the edge of our solar system’s habitable—or “Goldilocks”—zone, where it’s not too hot or cold to have liquid water on the surface, which is probably necessary for life as we know it. More than 3 billion years ago, Mars was likely much more life-friendly, with some flowing rivers and lakes, a more temperate climate, and a more substantial atmosphere. But today, the thin air is almost entirely made up of carbon dioxide. The temperatures are as cold as Antarctica. It’s many times drier than the Atacama Desert in Chile, the driest place on Earth. 

The first astronauts to travel to Mars, perhaps in the 2040s, will need to cope with a nine-month journey cooped up in a tiny spacecraft. Then they’ll need to survive the landing. If they get that far, life on Mars will be harsh. Frequent sandstorms can bury key equipment or solar panels. There’s no soil for growing food, so they’ll have to rely on whatever they brought with them. A hole in one’s spacesuit would mean certain death. Any significant problem on base—like a loss of power, oxygen, water, food or communication with Earth—would probably doom the whole crew. If something goes awry, they’ll be on their own. While the moon is nearly 1,000 times as far away from Earth as the International Space Station and the Tiangong space station, Mars is hundreds of times more distant than that.

The isolation of the Covid pandemic might give us a small taste of the psychological challenges of life on Mars. Those first visitors will be trapped in one or two small structures with the same few people for something like 2.5 years, counting travel each way and around a year on the ground. Just going for a walk outside would be a huge ordeal. They would never see a single tree in any direction, never dip their feet in a river, nor fill their lungs with fresh air in the morning. Everyone will have a good chance of getting cancer (thanks to a high dose of space radiation) or losing bone and muscle mass (thanks to the long flights and the planet’s weaker gravity). 

So why would anyone even want to go?

Well, there aren’t that many other options for the intrepid space traveler. Despite its many challenges, after the moon, Mars seems like the obvious next stop for exploring the solar system. It’s more hospitable than greenhouse-smogged, excessively hot, high-pressure Venus. It’s much closer than asteroid belt inhabitants like Ceres and Vesta. The moons of the gas giant planets, like Europa, Enceladus and Titan, look intriguing, but they’re so distant that Earthlings probably won’t be able to visit them until the 22nd century. Mars, to its credit, has ice that could be used by astronauts, and it’s close enough to the sun for a colony to generate solar power. 

For years, space agencies have been exploring it with robots, like NASA’s Perseverance rover, the Maven orbiter, and the InSight lander. Even more are lined up, including China’s Zhurong rover and Tianwen-1 lander, Europe’s Rosalind Franklin rover, previously known as ExoMars, and NASA’s sample return mission that will pick up the rocks Perseverance collected. But there’s only so much the agencies can study from afar.

To really advance scientific discoveries, learn more about the Red Planet’s climatic and geological evolution, and unpack the history of our solar system, they think they’ll have to send small crews. The first human visitors might just orbit and map the surface, studying its ancient geology while looking for possible landing spots—the same function the astronauts aboard the 1968 Apollo 8 mission and the Artemis 2 mission planned for 2024 serve for moon exploration. Later on-the-ground crews might uncover crucial details about the origins of life, and maybe even evidence of never-before-seen life-forms. 

That’s a powerful motivator: To learn about humanity’s role in the vast cosmos. Humans have always explored, and we want to know what’s out there—and who’s out there. “One of the best things about us as a species is our curiosity and our desire to know how we are part of the universe. I think that that larger perspective is very valuable,” says Sasha Sagan, daughter of science communicators Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan and author of the book For Small Creatures Such as We.

What vision of Mars exploration will humanity realize? Wernher von Braun, America’s first real celebrity space figure, envisioned launching spacecraft to the moon and Mars, a vision we’re still following today. But in his view, these would be military-led expeditions, establishing dominance on other worlds while looking for military applications for new resources and technologies. After leaving Nazi Germany in 1945, von Braun led NASA’s development of the powerful Saturn V rocket used in the space race with the Soviet Union.

Carl Sagan, the author of Cosmos and Contact, was arguably the US’s next major space leader—with his more hopeful, peaceful, and science-focused perspective. While he wasn’t against crewed spaceflights, he generally advocated for sending robotic probes to learn more about our cosmic neighborhood as a less risky and more efficient use of resources. Sagan contributed to the Pioneer and Voyager programs, and played a major role in the Voyager Golden Records. 

Today, that celebrity role largely belongs to billionaires with more apocalyptic visions, who are raring to quickly send huge populations off-world, citing fears that Earth could be destroyed or become uninhabitable. “The new von Braun is of course Elon Musk,” says Jordan Bimm, a University of Chicago space historian. “He presents himself as a potential ruler of a Mars society.” The SpaceX CEO has referred to the sun’s eventual death, and to killer asteroids on collision courses, as motivators to build a civilization on Mars, even though such events happen on geological and cosmic timescales, not human ones.

He isn’t the only one. Billionaire Jared Isaacman, who bought seats on the Inspiration4 spaceflight last year, has made similar comments. So has Blue Origin CEO Jeff Bezos. And so have a few top aerospace executives, including SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell and Tory Bruno, CEO of the United Launch Alliance, a Boeing and Lockheed Martin joint venture. While Musk has proposed somehow sending a million people to Mars by the year 2050, Bruno proposed dispatching a few score for short visits, setting the stage for colonies in the next century, when self-sustaining technologies advance and trips become cheaper. Meanwhile, Bezos dreams of billions of people living in orbit around the Earth, while treating our world like an unpopulated national park.

But so far, none of these commercial space companies are anywhere close to realizing these audacious visions. SpaceX has flown taxi and cargo rides to the ISS for NASA and the private company Axiom Space, but otherwise it has only flown a single crewed spaceflight in low Earth orbit, Inspiration4. SpaceX has invested heavily in the Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy Rocket, which are currently undergoing fueling and rocket engine tests; they are planning an uncrewed orbital test launch in early 2023. NASA has tapped SpaceX to provide a modified Starship for the Artemis 3 and 4 moon-landing missions, but those won’t happen until later this decade. 

Blue Origin, for its part, has only launched a handful of suborbital spaceflights that briefly flit along the edge of space. The first flight of the company’s massive, reusable New Glenn rocket, which could send crews and cargo into orbit, has been delayed for years, with its launch now planned for late 2023. Boeing’s Starliner, a potential SpaceX competitor for NASA’s commercial crew program to the ISS, has been delayed as well, with the first crewed flight scheduled for April 2023. While these companies have made significant accomplishments, they’re far behind the out-of-this world comments made by some CEOs.

Such off-world ventures can also seem hard to justify when we Earthlings are plagued by climate change, pandemics, risks of nuclear war, and rampant inequality. Setting up a research station and living quarters for a half dozen visitors—as space agencies might eventually do—would likely cost tens of billions of dollars. (If Musk really intends to send thousands of Starships to Mars, that’s more like a trillion.) 

Some people would rather invest these resources in solving global problems, not launching astronauts to other worlds. People in the 1960s questioned the Apollo program for similar reasons—it was also a time of systemic inequality and fears of nuclear war. Today, in public opinion surveys of US adults, NASA’s climate-related efforts and monitoring of near-Earth asteroids are more popular than crewed missions to the moon and Mars. 

“It would be easier to justify going to the moon and then Mars if people weren’t starving and dying. I don’t think there’s a scientific rational reason for it, and that’s OK,” says Natalie Treviño, a space theoretician at the Open University in the UK. Yet as she points out, the drive to explore isn’t always logical. “Why do we make art and make music? Living in contradiction is what the human experience is. It’s both amazing and tragic.”

Depending on the animating vision behind Mars exploration, the first astronauts could be scientists, poets, tourists, or military officers. They could be viewed as visitors, settlers, cowboys, or colonists. Treviño prefers the term “migrants”—partly to destigmatize migration on Earth—and she favors including an artist to make sense of the existential experience, and enormous culture shock, of living on this ruddy, barren world.

Let’s say it works: Humanity overcomes the cost and practical barriers of settling Mars, and the migrant Earthlings arrive. There’s one thing left to consider: Maybe Mars would be better off without us.

If our treatment of Earth’s atmosphere is any sign, we’ll corrupt the Martian one too. We’ll litter it with junk, as we have despoiled our own world. Maybe we’d geoengineer the atmosphere, or live out Musk’s desire to terraform the world by blowing up nukes to create a “nuclear winter”—something we’ve managed to avoid so far at home—to raise temperatures, initiate a helpful climate change, and melt some of its polar ice. As with geoengineering proposals meant to combat climate change on Earth, such schemes carry huge risks.

We’d also mine the surface, likely reproducing the economic inequalities and unsustainable practices already prevalent on Earth. For example, Treviño says, there’s a limited supply of Martian ice, but no binding rules exist saying who could use it, how much, and for what purpose. Plus, if any Martian life-form lies underground, terraforming and mining attempts may well destroy them and their ecosystem, and who are we to decide their fate? It’s the height of hubris for one species to decide what should be done with an entire planet that’s not their homeworld. 

So as we venture toward Mars, let’s be ambitious and curious, but also thoughtful, ethical, and sustainable. Our travels many millions of miles away will likely serve to remind us how lucky we are to have our own world, says Sasha Sagan: “I suspect that the further we go, the more we’ll realize how precious and valuable this one planet is.”

Let’s Go to Mars. Let’s Not Live There

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In the 5th century, in early medieval Ireland, Conall Gulban, an Irish king, gave his name to an area of land at the northwest tip of the Irish coast. His kingdom was called Tír Chonall, the “land of Conall”—or, today, Donegal. 

Somewhere along the king’s descendant line, known as Cenél Conaill or “kindred of Conall,” it’s thought that a mistake arose in a scion’s genome—specifically, a mutation of a gene responsible for producing a protein called transthyretin (TTR). The genetic error resulted in the birth of a rare condition known as hereditary transthyretin (ATTR) amyloidosis.

The TTR protein is made predominantly in the liver and is responsible for shuttling vitamin A and a hormone called thyroxine around the body. But in those with hereditary ATTR amyloidosis, the genetic mutation produces a botched version of it. This misshapen TTR aggregates and leaves clumps of amyloid, another protein, in tissues around the body—mostly the heart muscles and the nerves. These amyloid clumps interfere with tissues as they try to do their job, wreaking havoc. 

Today, along a 15-mile strip of the coast of Donegal, where the Irish language is still predominantly spoken in many areas, the mutation is found in about 1 percent of the population. The resulting disease—colloquially known as Donegal Amy—has ravaged Donegal natives for decades. 

It’s estimated that there are about 50,000 people with hereditary amyloidosis across the world, and Donegal Amy is just one type. It’s caused by a Thr60Ala mutation in the TRR gene, but there are more than 130 mutations of this gene that are thought to trigger other forms of the condition. Carriers of these mutations tend to crop up in hyperlocalized clusters. The most common mutation, Val30Met, first described in 1952, can be found in northern Portugal around the city of Porto, and has also been found in northern Sweden and Japan. Another, Val122Ile, primarily affects people of West African descent—about 4 percent of African Americans are estimated to carry it.

While each mutation produces a slightly different version of the disease, in the case of Donegal Amy, the condition typically makes itself known after the age of 60. It starts with a numbness in the body’s extremities, such as the hands and feet, and moves inwards as it progresses to causing tingling, unbearable pins and needles, and muscle weakness—all symptoms of polyneuropathy, or damage to the peripheral nerves. The disease quickly moves on to attack the autonomic nervous system, which regulates involuntary bodily processes, triggering weight loss, diarrhea, constipation, and urinary incontinence. The polyneuropathy is also accompanied by cardiomyopathy, a disease of the heart muscle where the heart isn’t able to pump blood as easily, causing breathlessness, chest pain, and swelling of the legs, ankles, and feet. Patients die between three and 15 years after diagnosis, usually due to chronic heart failure. 

Because the symptoms of hereditary amyloidosis are so heterogeneous, doctors rarely know when they’ve got a case on their hands. A patient wouldn’t usually tell their heart doctor about their carpal tunnel syndrome, nor would their neurologist know to scan for a heart block. “The entire diagnostic pathway is riddled with pitfalls,” researchers have noted.

“It’s a truly awful disease,” says Julian Gillmore, head of the National Amyloidosis Centre at University College London, who has been at the heart of efforts to develop treatments for it. It doesn’t just take away a person’s health; it erodes their ability to work, to socialize, to leave the house. The disease is progressive, devastating, and always fatal. 

THE FIRST FEW cases of Donegal Amy were reported in the Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences in 1983. The authors conjectured that there might be a hereditary element to the disease, based on the fact that some of the patients had reported relatives suffering from a similar condition as well as their oddly close geography. In 1987, a further seven cases in seven families in Donegal were documented. 

The same year, a similar condition was reported in a family in the Appalachian region of the United States. Researchers identified the genetic fault causing it as a Thr60Ala mutation to the TTR gene. In 1991, a genetic analysis in two more patients from Donegal isolated the same genetic variant. As the ancestors of the Appalachian family had emigrated to West Virginia in the early 1800s from Derry in Northern Ireland, which borders Donegal to the east, scientists hypothesized the families shared a common ancestor. When the Irish diaspora drifted across the world in the 19th and 20th centuries—forced to leave by the Great Famine or a lack of jobs—the genetic mutation seemingly drifted along with them.

The mutation was also initially suspected to have drifted into Ireland too. The authors of the 1987 paper on the Donegal cases speculated that hereditary amyloidosis had been brought to Donegal in the 16th century by Portuguese sailors with the Spanish Armada, many of whom ended up shipwrecked on the coast of northwest Ireland on their return home after a punishing defeat by the English. The first case of hereditary ATTR amyloidosis was documented in 1952 in Portugal, so the researchers reasoned it had begun there (though cases there are in fact driven by Val30Met rather than Thr60Ala mutations). But further analysis uncovered that six of the seven Irish families originally found to have the condition shared a common ancestral surname, with the original family with this surname descending from Donegal’s namesake—Conall Gulban. 

The disease was also initially believed to be rare—ultra-rare even. But as methods for diagnosis have become more sophisticated, it has proven to be far more common than once thought. In 1999, Gillmore’s unit had about 150 referrals a year; today, it gets 3,000. The most commonly missed version of the condition is wild-type ATTR amyloidosis, which arises sporadically—it’s thought to affect between 200,000 and 500,000 people worldwide. Hereditary ATTR amyloidosis, on the other hand, is an autosomal dominant inherited condition, meaning that carriers have a 50-50 chance of passing the mutated gene on to offspring. Not all carriers of a mutated gene will go on to develop the disease, and the likelihood of doing so varies according to specific mutation carried.

GILLMORE ENTERED the amyloidosis field on a fluke. As a medical student, he applied for a research job in immunological medicine. He flubbed the interview so badly that his interviewers told him so to his face immediately afterwards—but he was the only applicant, so he got the job. He worked under one of his interviewers, Philip Hawkins, who became head of the National Amyloidosis Centre in the United Kingdom, the role that Gillmore now holds. 

Back then, when he was starting out seeing patients, the disease was, in effect, a death sentence. “It was such a depressing clinic,” he says. All they could offer patients was symptom management: stronger painkillers for nerve pain or medication for their diarrhea. Liver transplants helped a little, but it could only be done early in the course of the disease, and it didn’t help those whose condition affected their heart.  

So when Rosaline Callaghan, whose family hails from the Inishowen peninsula in the north of Donegal, learned in 2007 that she carried the gene, she had no inclination to suffer the devastation of the disease. She knew the likelihood was high: Her aunt—one of the case studies in the 1987 paper—had died from the same condition in 1982, and she had watched her father die slowly from it over the course of seven years, finally passing away at 67 after 22 months in a hospice. She was told it was highly unlikely that she would see a treatment in her lifetime. Eight years later, she quit her job as a barrister, sold her house, and went traveling. “If I’m lying in bed for months, I’m gonna regret not doing this,” she thought. The disease’s harbinger finally arrived in October 2018; she lost feeling in the soles of her feet. She was diagnosed in 2019. She reached out to a friend who agreed to help her get to Switzerland, where assisted dying is legal, when the time came. “I had an exit strategy in place.”

But in the time between Rosaline learning she carried the gene and being diagnosed with the condition, the ongoing genomic revolution had borne fruits in the form of genetic treatments for ATTR amyloidosis. Gene silencers, such as a drug called patisiran, choke off the production of TTR in the liver, including the abnormal kind. Patisiran became available in Northern Ireland in 2019, and after much protest and lobbying, in the Republic of Ireland in October 2021. In June 2019, Rosaline received her first infusion, and about nine months later, she awoke one morning and her nerve pain levels—previously near unbearable—had plummeted down the pain scale. With her condition now treatable and euthanasia no longer her only option, she says she feels she can do whatever she wants, because it’s all just on extra time. “I can decide to go horseback riding in the fucking nude on the beach,” she says. “I just need to find somebody who will lend me a horse.” 

But while these drugs have been shown to slow disease progression or even reverse it long-term, they require continuous administration—lengthy infusion processes every three weeks in the case of patisiran—and can have serious side effects. 

Enter Crispr. Gillmore is the lead investigator of the first ever gene-editing clinical trial in human patients with ATTR amyloidosis—and it is one of the first times Crispr has been used to edit a gene directly inside the body. The trial is not only to demonstrate that gene editing can be safe, but that it can potentially cure devastating diseases by simply correcting a typo. 

Paddy Doherty, who has strong roots in Gweedore in County Donegal, was the fifth person in the trial to receive the infusion. Paddy’s own father died from the condition in his sixties, although at the time it was put down to angina. It wasn’t until a cousin living in England got in touch and asked to come over and talk to the family that Paddy learned that it was more likely his father died from something he had never heard of—ATTR amyloidosis. The cousin had been diagnosed with the same condition and died within the same year; his sister urged Paddy to get checked for the gene.

But Paddy felt healthy. In his early sixties, he was an avid walker, hiking the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage in Europe and trekking the Himalayas. However, in the autumn of 2020, while walking his dog, a steep hill that previously posed no problem left him breathless. At the urging of his wife, he visited the local hospital and was diagnosed with ATTR amyloidosis. In early 2021, Paddy traveled to London and was screened for the Crispr trial by Gillmore. In April of that year, he received an infusion of the treatment in a London hospital. 

The drug, called NTLA-2001, works by inactivating the TTR gene and stopping the genetic expression of TTR in liver cells. It contains a protein that functions as a pair of molecular scissors, as well as an RNA molecule, analogous to a GPS, that guides the scissors to the faulty gene. When the scissors arrive they cut into the gene, turning it off and stopping the production of the TTR protein. 

All six patients in the trial, which included Paddy, had hereditary ATTR amyloidosis, with polyneuropathy as their major suite of symptoms. The results were reported in The New England Journal of Medicine in June 2021. While the trial was just a Phase I, which primarily just tests for safety, it was found to lower levels of TTR by an astonishing 90 percent after 28 days. And this reduction was found to last four to six months after the initial injection. “It’s a real milestone for modern medicine,” says Kiran Musunuru, a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and author of The CRISPR Generation. “It impressed everyone in the field—it just seemed like a home run.”

Gillmore’s unit had already established the basic paradigm behind the Crispr trial: that if you knock down the TTR gene, then this quells amyloid build-up—halting and even reversing the disease—and data on the gene-silencing drug patisiran has suggested this to be true. The goal with the Crispr treatment is to reach a point where existing amyloid deposits are cleared at a quicker rate than new amyloid is being deposited, which is when Gillmore suspects significant improvements will reveal themselves. But this will likely take a few years to show—although Paddy says he already feels improvements in his health. He recently had his 18-month followup, and his TTR levels had stayed reduced by about 96 percent, one of the most dramatic reductions in the trial. The study has since been expanded to include a further 12 patients with cardiomyopathy. 

“It is the one trial that has by far shown the most success so far,” says Musunuru. Ultimately, it could extend the lives of these patients by a few years, which, at first blush, may not sound like a big deal, he says. “But, you know, when you’ve been diagnosed and only have a few years left to live—because the diagnosis is so grim—being able to double that time, that’s actually such a big deal.” 

One concern that accompanies all Crispr treatments is the possibility of off-target editing—where Crispr’s molecular scissors cut into an unintended gene, with the capacity to trigger something like cancer. “I think we have to acknowledge that that is a potential risk,” says Gillmore. So far, animal studies with the drug have yet to show any off-target editing. The other big issue is the eventual cost: genetic treatments are likely to be astronomically pricey when they become fully available. 

Nevertheless, the trial marks the first time it’s been shown to be safe to edit the genomes of cells in the body. “It’s not just about transthyretin amyloidosis,” says Musunuru. “This is just the beginning—this is going to transform the way we practice medicine.” 

For decades, Donegal Amy was an illness shrouded in secrecy, a familial problem kept behind closed doors. “There was a common theme running through, which was that the people who had it didn’t speak about it, because there was no cure,” says Paddy. Instead, sufferers were said, in hushed tones, to have “took to the bed.” In a densely Catholic area, many believed it was God’s will—that they had been served the hand of God, and they should not fly in the face of it. 

That’s all changed now. Families previously afraid to admit to carrying the disease have begun to emerge from the woodwork, ready to receive the treatments that science is becoming able to impart. “I just feel so, so privileged to have been part of this revolution,” says Gillmore.

Crispr’s Quest to Slay Donegal Amy

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Artificial intelligence has promised much, but there has been something holding it back from being used successfully by billions of people: a frustrating struggle for humans and machines to understand one another in natural language.

This is now changing, thanks to the arrival of large language models powered by transformer architectures, one of the most important AI breakthroughs in the past 20 years.

Transformers are neural networks designed to model sequential data and generate a prediction of what should come next in a series. Core to their success is the idea of “attention,” which allows the transformer to “attend” to the most salient features of an input rather than trying to process everything.

These new models have delivered significant improvements to applications using natural language like language translation, summarization, information retrieval, and, most important, text generation. In the past, each required bespoke architectures. Now transformers are delivering state-of-the-art results across the board.

Although Google pioneered transformer architecture, OpenAI became the first to demonstrate its power at scale, in 2020, with the launch of GPT-3 (Generative Pre-Trained Transformer 3). At the time, it was the largest language model ever created.

GPT-3’s ability to produce humanlike text generated a wave of excitement. It was only the start. Large language models are now improving at a truly impressive rate.

“Parameter count” is generally accepted as a rough proxy for a model’s capabilities. So far, we’ve seen models perform better on a wide range of tasks as the parameter count scales up. Models have been growing by almost an order of magnitude every year for the past five years, so it’s no surprise that the results have been impressive. However, these very large models are expensive to serve in production.

What’s really remarkable is that, in the past year, they have been getting smaller and dramatically more efficient. We’re now seeing impressive performance from small models that are a lot cheaper to run. Many are being open-sourced, further reducing barriers to experimenting with and deploying these new AI models. This, of course, means they’ll become more widely integrated into apps and services that you’ll use every day.

They will increasingly be able to generate very high-quality text, images, audio, and video content. This new wave of AI will redefine what computers can do for their users, unleashing a torrent of advanced capabilities into existing and radically new products.

The area I’m most excited about is language. Throughout the history of computing, humans have had to painstakingly input their thoughts using interfaces designed for technology, not humans. With this wave of breakthroughs, in 2023 we will start chatting with machines in our language—instantly and comprehensively. Eventually, we will have truly fluent, conversational interactions with all our devices. This promises to fundamentally redefine human-machine interaction.

Over the past several decades, we have rightly focused on teaching people how to code—in effect teaching the language of computers. That will remain important. But in 2023, we will start to flip that script, and computers will speak our language. That will massively broaden access to tools for creativity, learning, and playing.

As AI finally emerges into an age of utility, the opportunities for new, AI-first products are immense. Soon, we will live in a world where, regardless of your programming abilities, the main limitations are simply curiosity and imagination.

Humans and AI Will Understand Each Other Better Than Ever

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Ever since The Verge reported that Twitter shut down its communications office, it’s been harder to confirm information about the company, which seems to be the way that CEO Elon Musk likes it. However, increasingly, Twitter trust and safety chief Ella Irwin seems more willing to confirm or deny rumors to media outlets, a move that’s possibly irking Musk. Over the holiday weekend, Musk tweeted to directly contradict a statement Irwin provided to Reuters, causing even more confusion over what’s going on at Twitter—and whether there’s tension brewing between Musk and Irwin.

The timeline of the contradictory statements went like this: On Friday, Dec. 23, Reuters reported that Twitter had seemingly removed the social media platform’s #ThereIsHelp feature, which was designed to share suicide-prevention resources alongside certain content.

Shortly after Reuters’ report went live, Irwin emailed Reuters to confirm that the feature was “temporarily removed.” She said that it would be brought back this week, once Twitter finished “fixing and revamping our prompts.”

"We know they are useful, and our intent was not to have them down permanently,” Irwin told Reuters.

The very next day, at 6:27 a.m. on Christmas Eve, Musk tweeted to contradict Irwin’s statement, saying that Reuters’ report was false and the feature was never removed. In another tweet soon after, Musk declared Reuters’ report “fake news,” while reminding Twitter users that “Twitter doesn’t prevent suicide.”

Approximately 12 hours later, Reuters confirmed that the feature was restored, continuing to contradict Musk’s statement that the feature was never removed. That second report credited “two people familiar with the matter” as saying that the #ThereIsHelp feature had been down for two days and claiming that the takedown order had come from Musk.

As of this writing, it’s still unclear which Twitter executive is telling the truth. A tweet linking to the initial Reuters report currently displays a community note sharing Musk's statement clarifying that the report is false, suggesting enough users rated Musk's statement above Irwin's. Musk did not respond to tweets from both legacy blue checks and Twitter Blue verified blue checks, asking if he was calling Irwin a “liar” or if he planned to fire Irwin.

Twitter did not respond to Ars’ request to clarify. Perhaps due to the holidays, Irwin has gone silent on Twitter; her last tweet was sent on Dec. 20.

“Direction of Ella”

According to her LinkedIn profile, Irwin joined Twitter’s trust and safety team last June, after working in similar roles at Google, Amazon, and Twilio. She rose to the top trust and safety post after Yoel Roth exited Twitter shortly after Musk took over.

Many Twitter users became familiar with Irwin after her handle appeared as a watermark during Musk’s release of “The Twitter Files,” indicating that she was the one feeding journalists internal files from Twitter.

A few days later, when Twitter began suspending journalists, the Washington Post reported that internally, the suspensions were marked as ordered not by Musk, but by “direction of Ella.”

It’s possible that after a few media cycles scrutinizing Twitter safety features, Irwin’s interest grew in setting the record straight, and she will likely only continue to be scrutinized for any trust and safety policy changes as long as she remains at Twitter.

But with the communications department seemingly nonexistent—and after Musk’s rush to contradict one of the few official statements provided by a Twitter exec to media since his takeover—it seems unlikely that Irwin will clarify anytime soon whether she made “false” statements about Twitter removing the suicide prevention feature.

While Irwin dealt with some backlash from users who have defended Musk as a proven truth teller, Musk was busy introducing another new Twitter feature that has become controversial. On Dec. 22, Twitter added Views to the other metrics publicly displayed on tweets. These view counts now appear alongside likes, comments, and retweets.

Over the next couple days, however, many users had criticized the new feature. Some suggested that it went against research on platforms like Facebook and Instagram and could negatively impact mental health of Twitter users. But perhaps millions more hated the feature simply because of how janky the views display looked jammed next to retweets and likes. By Dec. 24, Musk announced that soon Twitter users would be able to toggle the feature off.

“I think almost everyone will grow to like it,” Musk tweeted, almost like it was his Christmas wish to introduce a universally popular Twitter feature and blissfully break free from all the backlash he's faced since stepping up as Chief Twit.

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Twitter rival Mastodon has rejected more than five investment offers from Silicon Valley venture capital firms in recent months, as its founder pledged to protect the fast-growing social media platform’s non-profit status.

Mastodon, an open-source microblogging site founded in 2016 by German software developer Eugen Rochko, has seen a surge in users since Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in October amid concerns over the billionaire’s running of the social media platform.

Rochko told the Financial Times he had received offers from more than five US-based investors to invest “hundreds of thousands of dollars” in backing the product, following its fast growth.

But he said the platform’s non-profit status was “untouchable,” adding that Mastodon’s independence and the choice of moderation styles across its servers were part of its attraction.

“Mastodon will not turn into everything you hate about Twitter,” said Rochko. “The fact that it can be sold to a controversial billionaire, the fact that it can be shut down, go bankrupt and so on. It’s the difference in paradigms [between the platforms].”

This month, Twitter temporarily suspended the accounts of Mastodon and several journalists, after they shared content about the flight path of Musk’s private jet. Twitter also suggested it would ban links to rival social media platforms including Mastodon but later reversed course on the policy.

In a blog post in response, Rochko said this was a “stark reminder that centralized platforms can impose arbitrary and unfair limits on what you can and can’t say,” adding that monthly active users of Mastodon increased from 300,000 to 2.5 million between October and November.

Daily downloads of Mastodon rose from 6,000 on October 27, the day Musk acquired Twitter, to a peak of 243,000 on November 18, according to data from Sensor Tower. Usage of other smaller rival sites, such as Tumblr, has also rocketed.

Mastodon has similar features to Twitter but is made up of many decentralized, independently moderated servers. Users join one server but can connect with people on other servers throughout the so-called “federated” system.

Rochko is Mastodon’s sole shareholder and, according to its 2021 annual report, he paid himself €2,400 per month last year, a figure he said has since risen by €500.

Mastodon will continue to rely on donations to fund the platform. The site has more than 8,500 donors on the membership platform Patreon, through which it is raising over £25,000 a month. This compares with total earnings of just over €55,000 in the six months from June to December 2021.

According to data from Sensor Tower, the initial wave of new joiners slowed to 6,000 new daily downloads on December 9 but rebounded to 64,000 on December 18, when Musk restricted links to other social media sites on Twitter.

New users have encountered problems, with some servers struggling to cope with the increased level of activity and confusion over moderation policies on different servers.

Josh Cowls, a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute, said Mastodon could evolve into a “satellite” platform to Twitter, “seeing greater use at times when Twitter is down, as well as in response to further Musk-related outrages.”

Rochko said his long-term ambition for Mastodon was to replace Twitter and other commercial social networks. “It’s a long road ahead but at the same time, it’s bigger than it ever has been.”

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Some day soon we might be making popcorn with infrared poppers

Through a variety of tests on Earth and throughout the universe, physicists have measured no changes in time or space for any of the fundamental constants of nature.

All of modern physics rests on two main pillars. One is Einstein's theory of general relativity, which we use to explain the force of gravity. The other is the Standard Model, which we use to describe the other three forces of nature: electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force. Wielding these theories, physicists can explain vast swaths of interactions throughout the universe.

But those theories do not fully explain themselves. Appearing within the equations are fundamental constants, which are numbers that we must measure independently and plug in by hand. Only with these numbers in place can we use the theories to make new predictions. General relativity depends on only two constants: the strength of gravity (commonly called G) and the cosmological constant (usually denoted by Λ, which measures the amount of energy in the vacuum of space-time).

The Standard Model requires 19 constants to plug into the equations. These include parameters such as the masses of nine fermions (like the electron and the up quark), the strengths of the nuclear forces, and constants that control how the Higgs boson interacts with other particles. Because the Standard Model does not automatically predict the masses of the neutrinos, to include all their dynamics we have to add seven more constants.

That's 28 numbers that completely determine all the physics of the known universe.

Not so constant

Many physicists argue that having all these constants seems a little artificial. Our job as scientists is to explain as many varied phenomena as possible with as few starting assumptions as we can get away with. Physicists believe that general relativity and the Standard Model are not the end of the story, however, especially since these two theories are not compatible with each other. They suspect that there is some deeper, more fundamental theory that unites these two branches.

That more fundamental theory could have any number of fundamental constants associated with it. It could have the same set of 28 we see today. It could have its own, independent constants, with the 28 appearing as dynamic expressions of some underlying physics. It could even have no constants at all, with the fundamental theory able to explain itself in its entirety with nothing having to be added by hand.

No matter what, if our fundamental constants aren't really constant — if they happen to vary across time or space — then that would be a sign of physics beyond what we currently know. And by measuring those variations, we could get some clues as to a more fundamental theory.

And physicists have devised a number of experiments to test the constancy of those constants.

Constants to the test

One test involves ultraprecise atomic clocks. The operation of an atomic clock depends on the strength of the electromagnetic interaction, the mass of the electron, and the spin of the proton. Comparing clocks at different locations or observing the same clock for long periods of time can reveal if any of those constants change.

Another ingenious test involves the Oklo uranium mine in Gabon. Two billion years ago, the site acted as a natural nuclear reactor that operated for a few million years. If any of the fundamental constants were different back then, the products of that radioactive process, which survive to the present day, would be different than expected.

Looking at larger scales, astronomers have studied the light emitted by quasars, which are ultraluminous objects powered by black holes sitting billions of light-years away from us. The light from those quasars had to travel those enormous distances to reach us, and they passed through innumerable gas clouds that absorbed some of that light. If fundamental constants were different throughout the universe, then that absorption would be altered and quasars in one direction would look subtly different from quasars in other directions.

At the very largest scales, physicists can use the Big Bang itself as a laboratory. They can use our knowledge of nuclear physics to predict the abundance of hydrogen and helium produced in the first dozen minutes of the Big Bang. And they can use plasma physics to predict the properties of the light emitted when our universe cooled from a plasma to a neutral gas when it was 380,000 years old. If the fundamental constants were different long ago, then it would show up as a mismatch between theory and observation.

In these experiments and more, nobody has ever observed any variation in the fundamental constants. We can't completely rule it out, but we can place incredibly stringent limits on their possible changes. For example, we know that the fine structure constant, which measures the strength of the electromagnetic interaction, is the same throughout the universe to 1 part per billion.

While physicists continue to search for a new theory to replace the Standard Model and general relativity, it appears that the constants we know and love are here to stay.

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The research, which took place in Germany, was part of a study into how artificial gravity might affect the body. Participants were paid €16,500 (US$18,500), but not as it sounds. The 24 people selected spent 60 days laying down, with all experiments, meals, and leisure activities done while horizontal.

The experiment, however, is just one of many ways you can get paid for helping out with scientific research.

If you want to aid the science community (and potentially save some lives), there are some unconventional yet potentially lucrative steps you can take.

Below is a short list, though be warned: these strategies aren't all easy money.

Lie in bed for 60 days straight as part of NASA research

Payout: US$18,500

NASA will pay you to stay in bed.

But there's a catch: you have to remain there for 60 days, 24 hours a day. Bed-rest studies help NASA researchers see some of the changes that an astronaut's body goes through due to the weightlessness of space flight.

Researchers have already selected participants for its inaugural class, but NASA announced in November 2021 a nearly US$50 million contract to continue to conduct bed rest studies. (More info here.)

Getting paid to lay down for a few months may sound like easy money, but keep in mind that the selection committee is looking for participants that possess the physical and psychological traits of a real astronaut.

You'll have to keep your head tilted down six degrees at all times while you lay there, even when you're washing, eating, and using the toilet.

As Roni Cromwell, a senior scientist who's done bed rest studies for NASA before told Forbes: "We want to make sure we select people who are mentally ready to spend [two months] in bed. Not everyone is comfortable with that. Not every type of person can tolerate an extended time in bed."

Sell your blood plasma

Payout (per donation): around US$50

Plasma is the largest component in human blood. It's a protein-rich liquid that contains mostly water but is also filled with enzymes, antibodies, and salts. This gooey, sticky yellow-ish stuff can be used to create therapies that treat people with blood clotting disorders, autoimmune diseases, and even burn victims.

Donating plasma is often called "the gift of life," according to DonatingPlasma.org, since treatments for some conditions can't be made synthetically, and require this human contribution.

During plasma donation, blood is drawn and an automated machine separates the plasma from other blood components, which are returned to the donor. Plasma donation pay varies from site to site, but the average payout is typically around US$50 per donation.

You can donate safely roughly once a month, according to the American Red Cross, and a typical session takes less than two hours. To find a licensed and certified plasma center, click here.

Sell your poop

Payout (per donation): usually US$8,000 to US$14,000

Egg donation allows people whose ovaries do not produce healthy eggs to become pregnant using another person's donated eggs. In the United States, The American Society of Reproductive Medicine used to suggest it was "not appropriate" for someone to be paid more than US$10,000 for their eggs, but in 2016, the ASRM scrapped that guideline as part of a federal anti-trust settlement.

At the NYU Langone Fertility Center in New York City, the compensation per egg donation cycle today is exactly US$10,000 and includes a free medical screening. Weill Cornell Medicine outlines the standard steps for egg donation, which requires about a four-week time commitment.

During the donation cycle, patients are injected with fertility drugs so that their ovaries make more eggs. (Eligible women are generally between the ages of 21 and 35.) The egg retrieval procedure takes about 20 minutes, but may require several days of recovery.

You should be aware of the risks involved in the egg donation process before signing up. Complications can include health problems like long-term abnormal tissue growth outside the uterus ( endometriosis), moodiness, infection, kidney damage, and in rare cases, death.

Donating eggs might even cause cancer, though scientists say it will take decades to determine for sure whether there's a link.

And, of course, since children born from donated eggs will share common DNA with their donor, women who donate should also be aware that the children they help create may someday want to reach out and make contact.

Donate your eggs

Payout (per donation): usually US$8,000 to US$14,000

Egg donation allows people whose ovaries do not produce healthy eggs to become pregnant using another person's donated eggs.

In the United States, the American Society of Reproductive Medicine used to suggest it was "not appropriate" for someone to be paid more than US$10,000 for their eggs, but in 2016, the ASRM scrapped that guideline as part of a federal anti-trust settlement.

At the NYU Langone Fertility Center in New York City, the compensation per egg donation cycle today is exactly US$10,000 and includes a free medical screening. Weill Cornell Medicine outlines the standard steps for egg donation, which requires about a four-week time commitment.

During the donation cycle, patients are injected with fertility drugs so that their ovaries make more eggs. (Eligible women are generally between the ages of 21 and 35.) The egg retrieval procedure takes about 20 minutes but may require several days of recovery.

You should be aware of the risks involved in the egg donation process before signing up. Complications can include health problems like long-term abnormal tissue growth outside the uterus (endometriosis), moodiness, infection, kidney damage, and in rare cases, death.

Donating eggs might even cause cancer, though scientists say it will take decades to determine for sure whether there's a link.

And, of course, since children born from donated eggs will share common DNA with their donor, women who donate should also be aware that the children they help create may some day want to reach out and make contact.

Donate your sperm

Payout (per donation): typically US$35-US$125

Donating sperm, of course, is much easier and less risky than egg donation. You can be paid anywhere from US$35 to US$125 per donation, according to SpermBankDirectory.com and The Sperm Bank of California.

Many programs require a six-month or one-year donation commitment. Manhattan Cryobank says it pays donors US$1,500 a month for their sperm.

Generally, sperm banks are picky about donors. They're looking for men who are healthy, relatively tall (usually at least 5'7″), young (under 40), and educated.

Sperm donors should bear in mind that even if they choose to donate anonymously, sperm donation is never really 100 percent incognito. Your DNA always knows who you are, and with the rise of more DNA testing services, your offspring could one day reach out.

Become a surrogate mother by carrying a baby in your womb

Payout: US$24,000-US$45,000

Women who carry a baby for another couple can make quite a large chunk of cash for the nine-month incubation, known as "gestational surrogacy."

But enlisting and paying for a surrogate mother is not legal everywhere. State laws around surrogacy in the US are complicated and contradictory.

In New York and in Michigan, there's a ban on surrogacy contracts, and you can serve jail time or pay hefty fines for going through with one. Some states, however, are pushing to change those rules.

Washington state made it legal to pay someone outright to carry a baby in 2018, while California has allowed surrogacy since 2013.

Sign up for a paid clinical trials

Payout: Varies by program

The National Institute for Health runs a searchable database, ClincalTrials.gov, for human clinical studies around the world. Participants may be guinea pigs for new medical products, like drugs to treat high blood pressure, or they take part in observational research, like a study that records the effects of different lifestyles on heart health.

Subjects are generally paid to be a part of clinical trials, and most of the time, the bigger the risk, the bigger the reward.

If you do decide to enroll in a study, choose wisely and carefully because not all of the studies on the site are regulated or evaluated for safety by the US Food and Drug Administration.

Enroll in a psychological study

Payout: Varies by program

Paid psychological studies, such as those that examine human behavior and brain function, may not generate as high of a return as clinical trials, but they are generally lower risk and require a shorter time commitment.

Most research universities keep an online database of studies so people can easily sign up.

For example, here's a list of the most recent paid research studies offered by New York University. You can make US$10 to identify some colors or US$130 to get some "mild shocks to the wrist" and dip your arm into an ice water bath.

Donate your bone marrow

Payout per donation: a reimbursement for travel and other costs

Similar to selling blood plasma, you can also sell your bone marrow. For people in need of a bone marrow transplant, the wait can sometimes be long and grueling.

Bone marrow is one of the hardest organs to find a match for when looking for a transplant. The likelihood of finding a match is 29 percent to 79 percent "depending on patient ethnic background," according to Be The Match.

While Be The Match does not pay for bone marrow donations, they do reimburse donors for the cost of the procedure and travel costs and can reimburse other costs on a case-by-case basis.

Give your dead body to science

Payout: A free cremation

This last idea is sort of morbid, but if you're worried about being a bother when you're dead, you can donate your body to science. This helps with a variety of types of research and education.

Places like BioGift and Science Care will cover the costs of cremation, which can run upwards of US$1,000.

This article was originally published by Business Insider.

Source

According to the data, almost 40% found their new job within one month of starting their search. Just over 40% took between one to three months. Around 15% took three to six months to land a new job, and about 5% took more than six months. One reason for the quick turnaround time in finding a new job is likely to be that they have experience in the sector so they don’t need as much hand-holding in their new role.

For those wondering, 74% of the workers that were rehired remained in the tech sector. The other 26% decided to switch industries and get jobs in retail, financial services, and healthcare. ZipRecruiter's survey was responded to by 2,550 residents of the United States that started a new job within six months up to mid-October.

This year, Neowin has covered plenty of layoffs that have taken place throughout the tech industry. Twitter and Meta have laid off considerable numbers of people to get their finances in better shape as interest rates rise and credit becomes more expensive.

As things stand right now, interest rates in the United States are expected to rise to 5% by March 2023 and be held there for most of the year. As mentioned, higher interest rates will make it more difficult for businesses to hire as many people as they have been and fewer startups may be created so there could be fewer employment opportunities there too. Nevertheless, the data from ZipRecruiter does show that the majority of people have managed to get a new job so that’s a positive.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

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In Southern Australia, vandals have broken into Koonalda Cave and destroyed 30,000 year-old sacred Indigenous rock art. The vandals forced their way past barbed wire and dug under a steel gate to get into the Koonalda Caves, where they etched graffiti into the limestone wall over the ancient Nullarbor Plain drawings. The cave is considered sacred by its owners, the Aboriginal Mirning people.

“This is quite frankly shocking,” South Australia attorney general and Aboriginal affairs minister Kyam Maher told Australia’s ABC Radio. “These caves are some of the earliest evidence of Aboriginal occupation of that part of the country.”

Authorities have yet to find the vandals, but the suspects could face a $10,000 fine or up to six months in prison for writing “Don’t look now, but this is a death cave,” over the ancient geometric patterns carved into the rock.

“The vandals caused a huge amount of damage. The art is not recoverable,” Keryn Walshe, an archaeologist of ancient Aboriginal sites, told the Guardian’s Mostafa Rachwani. “The surface of the cave is very soft. It is not possible to remove the graffiti without destroying the art underneath.

It’s a massive, tragic loss to have it defaced to this degree.”

Koonalda Cave, which has been on Australia’s National Heritage list since 2014, plays an important role in the country’s, and human, history. It had long been believed that humans first arrived on the continent some 8,700 years ago, but archaeologists upended that misconception when they found that the cave's drawings date back at least 30,000 years. The findings “transformed the scientific community and publics’ understanding of Australian and World prehistory,” according to the Australian National Hertiage Places registry.

The Mirning peoples had been in talks with the Australian government over needed changes to the site’s maintenance, asking for increased security and better access for the tribe to the caves. Currently, the tribe needs to request a key from the local environmental department to access the site, making it difficult for tribe members to visit and for the Mirning to protect the site. Trespassers have been entering the caves for years and carving their names into the soft limestone rock with their fingers.

“The failure to build an effective gate, or to make use of modern security services, such as wildlife monitoring cameras that operate 24/7, has in many ways allowed this vandalism to occur,” Clare Buswell, chair of the Australian Speleological Federation’s Conservation Commission, wrote to Aboriginal lands parliamentary standing committee in July, according to the Guardian.

Rock art, like the drawings destroyed in Koonalda Cave, is the oldest known form of early human art. In many Indigenous cultures, the drawings are a part of their cultural heritage and oral histories. Visiting the Nullarbor Plain art was part of a Mirning Elders ritual in communing with ancestors.

“Me and my Mirning Elders are very sad, disturbed and hurt by what has happened,” Mirning Elder Uncle Bunna Lawrie tells Hyperallergic’s Elaine Veile. “Koonalda is our most important, sacred place.”

He tells Hyperallergic that it’s likely the destruction was “premeditated”: the drawings are deep within the tunnels of the dark caves, and Koonalda is miles away from civilization.

“It is not coming back,” says Lawrie of the ruined drawings. “It is one of the oldest cave art in the world and it is now damaged. It is so wrong.”

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It might finally be happening. For years now, technologists have promised that the age of the electric vehicle cometh. After false starts in the early 20th century (when electrics, for a short time, accounted for a third of US vehicles), the 1970s (thanks, gas crisis), and the early 2000s (when two American engineers founded a company called Tesla Motors), electric vehicles are going mainstream.

Data from research firm BloombergNEF shows that the world hit an annual passenger EV sales record of 7.1 million halfway through 2022. The firm projects 10.6 million in sales by the end of year—even despite ongoing stresses on the vehicle supply chain that have made it difficult to get electrics into dealership lots.

In the first half of 2022, 13 percent of worldwide passenger vehicle sales were battery electric, plug-in hybrids, or fuel cell vehicles, according to data from BloombergNEF. Still, the growth is uneven, with Germany (26 percent), the UK (24 percent), and China (23 percent) leading the way. Only 7 percent of the passenger vehicles sold in the US in the first half of the year were zero-emission. 

What’s going right? For one thing, government efforts to combat climate change through progressive transportation policy seem to be bearing fruit. Since 2020, Germany has offered car buyers up to 9,000 euros in incentives if they choose to go electric, a scheme that’s worked so well that the government will reduce the payout in 2023. China has aggressively invested in its domestic electric car industry for nearly a decade. And the US government this year passed a raft of new programs that not only extend vehicle purchase incentives but also aim to support a more American electric vehicle supply chain, from vehicle assembly all the way down to the mining of the rare minerals that go into EV batteries. 

Automakers have also ramped up production of all sorts of electrics. After years of limited electric options, more people are now able to find an EV to meet their needs, whether they’re a single gal out for a weekend joyride or a busy parent toting a couple of kids plus accessories. In the US, that has produced a diverse menu of new all-electric SUVs, including the Tesla Model Y and VW ID.4, trucks including the Ford F-150 Lightning and Rivian R1T, and zippy sports cars, including the Porsche Taycan and Ford Mustang Mach-E. Europeans have gone for smaller hatchbacks, including the Fiat 500 electric and Peugeot e-208—and have even been courted by Chinese automakers who have worked to meet high European safety standards. 

There’s reason to think that the EV surge can continue. Before the end of this decade, top global automakers have pledged to spend an astronomical $1.2 trillion to produce 54 million electric vehicles, according to a Reuters analysis. Governments have pledged to spend billions on charging infrastructure. Battery makers have pledged billions in factory startup costs.

This is all good news for governments that have set aggressive targets to phase out gas car sales by 2035. The European Union and the US states of California, New York, and Washington all formalized their plans to do so this year. But although EV sales are surging now, plenty could slow the electric revolution.

For one thing, electric vehicle chargers aren’t nearly widespread enough. Governments and the private sector need to build out a global network of electric vehicle chargers that can serve not only passenger cars but also fleets of vans and trucks with a ubiquity that can rival gas filling stations. For another, the world’s supply of battery minerals—lithium, nickel, cobalt, even graphite—is limited, and it’s dirty work to get them out of the ground. Was 2022 the electric tipping point? It’s a question that can only be answered in hindsight.

This Was the Year That Electric Vehicles Took Off

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On November 15, the 8 billionth person on the planet was born. Well, more or less. That was the date selected by United Nations demographers as the moment the world crossed its latest population milestone. The exact date is probably wrong—perhaps off by months or more—but there are roughly a billion more humans alive today than there were 11 years ago. 

I hadn’t been paying close attention to the Day of 8 Billion. Milestones make good headlines, but concentrating on a few big numbers can obscure more revealing trends that really explain how the world has changed since there were just 7 billion of us. Here are two examples. The proportion of people living in extreme poverty has steadily declined over the past decade. (In 2010, 16.3 percent of the world lived on less than $2.15 a day, while today only 9 percent of people live on such a paltry amount.) And in India and China—which contributed the most new births in the past decade—GDP per capita and life expectancy have risen even while populations boomed. To put it simply, more people are living better lives today than at almost any other point in human history.

As the Day of 8 Billion rolled around, my inbox filled with a steady drip of press releases warning that the milestone represented a planetary crisis point. I have a hunch as to why I was getting these stories sent my way. A couple of months earlier, I’d written an article about why Elon Musk is wrong to worry about falling populations. In the near term, demographers pointed out to me, the world’s population is only heading upward. Managing that increase is the real challenge facing the planet right now. In the eyes of NGO press officers and certain angry people on Twitter, this put me firmly in the camp of “journalists who are convinced that we should be less afraid of talking about ‘overpopulation’ and its effect on the environment.”

A lot of online coverage about the Day of 8 Billion came from the same perspective. “It should not be controversial to say a population of 8 billion will have a grave impact on the climate,” read one headline in The Guardian. On a basic level, that’s completely true. If everything else stays the same, more people on the planet will mean higher carbon emissions. The climate solutions charity Project Drawdown estimates that providing better family planning and education will help avoid 68.9 billion metric tons of CO2 emissions by 2050—roughly equivalent to two years of emissions from fossil fuels and industry.

We need to tread carefully when we talk about population and climate change. It’s easy to look at a world of 8 billion and conclude that there are “too many” people on the planet. But who do we really mean when we talk about overpopulation? Someone living in the United States is responsible for about 15 metric tons of CO2  emissions per year. But in the eight countries where the majority of population growth by the year 2050 will be concentrated, per capita emissions are just a fraction of US levels. In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which is projected to grow by more than 120 million in the next 20 years, each person produces just 30 kilograms of CO2  each year. Emissions are a consequence of consumption, not just population.

The world’s richest people are the biggest emitters. One study from the World Inequality Lab found that as emissions have fallen for the middle class in rich countries, those from the top 0.001 percent have risen by 107 percent. “When I see rich people with massive families I think, no, we don’t have the capacity to have more rich people on the planet,” says Lorraine Whitmarsh, a psychologist at the University of Bath who studies behavior and climate change. If we really want to reduce emissions, then starting with reducing consumption in the developed world, where populations are stagnant, makes the most sense.

But reducing people to their per-capita emissions comes with its own problems. Humans aren’t tradable carbon chips, and climate interventions aren’t just about reducing emissions.

Giving women access to good education and voluntary family planning is the right thing to do, because it means more people enjoy better lives. In the DRC, women who are educated past secondary level have about three children on average, compared with more than seven children from women who don’t have the same education. “I want to live in a world where we have fundamental freedoms and human rights,” says Kimberly Nicholas, a climate scientist at Lund University in Sweden. “We developed that system only quite recently and under a period of climate stability. We don’t have any evidence that it’s possible to have that kind of world under continually worsening climate breakdown.”

The future of our planet is about way more than the sheer number of humans living here. It’s about whether they will have good lives and live in places with stable governments, access to health care, and basic human rights. “Thinking of a population as a faceless crowd or mass—you really don’t think about people’s identities or humanity in that context,” says Nicholas. “Part of the challenge of solving the climate crisis is trying to expand our sphere of empathy beyond just the immediate circle of our closest family and friends.”

In 2017, Nicholas published a study looking at the effect that changes in lifestyle had on carbon emissions. By a long shot, the highest-impact decision someone could make was to choose to have one fewer child. Nicholas regularly gets emails from people who ask her whether they should feel guilty about wanting to have another child. Ultimately, Nicholas would prefer we live in a world where everyone can satisfy their own preferences without worrying about the effect it has on the planet. “The decision whether—and if—to have children is a fundamental human right and needs to be upheld and protected,” she says.

Whether there are 8 billion humans or 10 billion, we should be thinking about how to find ways for everyone to live good lives. “We have this carbon budget to prevent catastrophic climate change,” says Nicholas, referring to the goals of the Paris Climate agreement. “It’s very quickly running out.” Earth has the capacity for more people or for fewer people—it all depends on what those of us who are alive right now are prepared to do to make sure we don’t wreck the place before the next billion get here.

You Don’t Need to Fear a World of 8 Billion Humans

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Several areas across the U.S. were hit with an arctic blizzard Christmas weekend, with more than 30,000 people in Buffalo losing power. At least 34 people in the U.S. were killed by the severe storm.

While temperatures may have been cold, a local woman’s heart certainly was not.

The incident, which was posted by Kimberly LaRussa, who founded the blog “Sweet Buffalo,” unfolded Saturday night when a woman received a call that her 64-year-old brother, Joey, was in the care of a woman named Sha’kyra Aughtry.

“Hi, you don’t know me but I have your brother,” Aughtry reportedly said to Joey’s sister.

Joey’s sister said Joey works at The North Park Theater and likely became stuck there Thursday, according to LaRussa.

Joey allegedly decided to try and walk home Saturday in the middle of the deadly storm when Aughtry “heard someone crying and asking for help.”

Joey works at The North Park Theater so his sister believes he went there Thursday, got scared and stayed over, and then decided to walk back to his home. A woman named Sha’Kyra Aughtry heard someone crying and asking for help. pic.twitter.com/CSfS2Smc6S

— Kimberly LaRussa (@KimberlyLaRussa) December 26, 2022

Aughtry reportedly said her boyfriend Trent found Joe outside in a snow bank and had to carry him inside.

“Joey was so frozen they had to cut his socks off, use a hairdryer to dry his pants that were frozen to his legs, and cut the straps of a Wegmans bag from his hands.”

Aughtry “fed Joey, cleaned him, washed his clothes, gave him warm blankets and did everything she could to make him comfortable until she could find help.” (RELATED: Police Confirm Two Incidents Of Looting Amid Winter Storm In Buffalo)

La’Russa reported that Aughtry had Joey FaceTime his family to distract him from the pain. In the meantime, Aughtry begged for help on Facebook, prompting locals to come to Aughtry’s house and plow her driveway so that they could take Joey to the hospital for treatment.

This is such a heartfelt story, it’s almost unbelievable. Had it not been for Sha’Kyra, Joey would have died. The frostbite on Joey’s hands looked like it was turning gangrene. Helpless, Sha’Kyra posted a plea on Facebook for emergency help. pic.twitter.com/jHLwwEDlK3

— Kimberly LaRussa (@KimberlyLaRussa) December 26, 2022

Joey reportedly sustained fourth degree frostbite and is in the burn unit, LaRussa reported.

Source

Also:  Beautiful Story of Kindness Amidst Chaos in Buffalo

What should people keep in mind if they're physically or mentally struggling?

People often experience illness and loss before a major holiday or are reminded of someone they lost who was usually present in special moments—a situation that is even more common since COVID-19.

It's important to be compassionate with yourself. Don't feel rushed to feel or act "better" or bursting with holiday joy if you just aren't feeling it right now. You can also craft alternative ways to celebrate despite illness or loss, such as making something together or creating a ceremony that helps you remember someone or to show respect. Be self-aware if you are feeling down so that you do not take it out on others. Spillover from our own negativity that hurts someone else can happen to the best of us; if you do act out, it's OK to just remove yourself from a situation and apologize after you have time to recover and reflect.

It's also a time in which family and friends get together. How do you manage to keep the peace when you strongly disagree with the person sitting at the same table?

Despite almost unprecedented divisiveness or animosity between groups of late, there is good news: People generally share similar values and agree about more than they realize or are led to believe by social media. For example, people from opposing political parties think the other hates them more than is actually true. In addition, most people do believe in the science of COVID-19 and climate change.

If you find yourself in a sticky situation around the dinner table, try not to experience it as a personal attack. Feeling defensive or angry only limits the perspective-taking that we need to have a respectful conversation. Organizational psychologist and U-M alum Adam Grant advocates for adopting a mindset of humility and curiosity during such conversations. Anthropologist Elizabeth Keating describes the benefits of probing relatives like an anthropologist, seeking to listen and understand others' experiences.

You might want to prepare what you will say in advance if you expect someone to upset you, to avoid acting on strong, momentary emotions. Ideally, we are measured and compassionate with those around us. But you should be compassionate with yourself if you do get drawn into an argument. Apologize if needed and give yourself permission to set boundaries or excuse yourself if the situation is overwhelming.

Credit: University of Michigan

Some coping methods involve self-reflection. What are the signs that things have become too stressful, and at what stage would you recommend the individual seek professional help?

If the holidays produce an overwhelming amount of loneliness, anger or stress, you should step back and focus on caring for yourself. Danger signs include sleeping too much or too little, being quick to anger, and physiological cues like shortness of breath, elevated heart rate or panic. Monitor how you feel and reach out to a trusted friend or family member who you can talk to or that will help monitor your state to know when additional help is needed. Reach out to a therapist or primary care doctor if that happens. You can go to the hospital if the feelings are severe.

Call or text the new suicide hotline number, 988, if you need to reach out but aren't sure where to turn.

Coping might also include helping others during the holiday season, perhaps volunteering at a nursing home, church or soup kitchen. You've written "The Altruistic Urge." What motivates this urge to help/protect others?

We possess a biological capacity to feel empathy and sympathy for others, which motivates us to help and even makes helping feel good. This urge to help is particularly strong in situations that resemble our ancient need to care for our own helpless or vulnerable offspring, relatives or group members who need urgent aid that we can provide.

In some ways, the holidays were designed to help us refocus our attention from our everyday problems so that we can collectively rest, reflect and find ways to give to others. This cultural practice can help families and communities come together in ways that elevate us all. Our altruistic instincts and the cultural practices that support them help us all survive and even thrive.

What is the best way to manage children's present expectations, especially when times are financially tough for many families nationwide?

It helps to keep the focus of the holidays on what really matters and brings lasting joy. Research finds that genuine happiness comes from spending time with loved ones, providing for those less fortunate, and feeling grateful for what we do have. Being with others in times of joy can create what Barb Frederickson calls the "upward spiral" of positive emotions.

There's nothing wrong with presents but it is also healthy to raise financially intelligent children with a realistic sense of how possessions cost money—a resource that is limited, not tied to happiness and not shared equally across families. Friends might receive gifts that you cannot have … and that's OK. Just be mindful that children can internalize fear and insecurity about money concerns but can't do anything about it, which is very stressful. So, keep the focus on what you do and can have over the financial concerns per se.

Many people will spend the holidays with loved ones. What would you recommend for those who will be alone?

Extensive research suggests that communing with others is good for your health and well-being. In contrast, loneliness undermines these positive outcomes. Note that being alone and being lonely are not the same thing. Many people find peace when they are alone—a state that they seek, by choice. Others benefit from company but are not sure where to turn.

The benefits of social interaction can be had without a classic holiday party or family dinner. A phone call to an old friend or a Zoom gathering with relatives helps us feel connected. Attending a community event also provides a feeling of togetherness, such as going to the outdoor ice-skating rink or light display at the zoo, shopping at local businesses or attending church services or a community potluck. One of the most powerful ways to "flip the script" when you are feeling down is to focus on how to help others, which we know feels good.

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The findings, which were presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), suggest that obesity in children may have negative impacts on brain health. These findings highlight the importance of addressing and preventing obesity in children in order to promote overall brain health.

“We know being obese as an adult is associated with poor brain health,” said researcher Simone Kaltenhauser, a post-graduate research fellow in radiology and biomedical imaging at the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut. “However, previous studies on children have often focused on small, specific study populations or single aspects of brain health.”

Childhood obesity is a significant public health concern in the United States. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that approximately 20% of American children are obese.

The cortical thickness of the prefrontal regions is negatively associated with weight and BMI measurements, meaning that higher weight and BMI are related to lower cortical thickness. Credit: RSNA and Simone Kaltenhauser

 

Kaltenhauser’s study used imaging data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study that included 11,878 children aged 9-10 years from 21 centers across the country to represent the sociodemographic diversity in the U.S.

“This dataset is unique in that it closely approximates the U.S. population,” Kaltenhauser said.

After excluding children with eating disorders, neurodevelopmental and psychiatric diseases, and traumatic brain injury, the study group included 5,169 children (51.9% female). According to the children’s BMI z-scores—measures of relative weight adjusted for a child’s age, sex, and height—the overweight and obesity rates within the study group were 21% and 17.6%, respectively.

The integrity of the white matter is extensively impaired with higher BMI in children. Most affected are the corpus callosum, which is the main connector of both brain hemispheres, and the superior longitudinal fasciculus that connects several (frontal, occipital, parietal, and temporal) lobes. Credit: RSNA and Simone Kaltenhauser

 

To gain a comprehensive view of brain health within the study group, the team evaluated information from structural MRI and resting-state functional MRI (fMRI), which enables researchers to measure brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow.

With resting state fMRI, the connectivity between neural regions—known as resting state networks—can be observed while the brain is at rest. The researchers also evaluated data from diffusion tensor imaging—a technique that helps assess white matter—and restriction spectrum imaging, an advanced diffusion MRI technique.

After correcting for age, sex, race-ethnicity, handedness, and socioeconomic status, the research team used linear models to determine associations between weight and BMI z-scores and the imaging metrics.

The researchers observed structural brain changes in children with higher weight and BMI z-scores, including significant impairment to the integrity of the white matter. Areas of degradation included the white matter of the corpus callosum, the principal connector between the brain’s two hemispheres, and tracts within the hemispheres that connect the lobes of the brain.

“It is striking that these changes were visible early on during childhood,” Kaltenhauser said.

The researchers also observed a thinning of the outermost layer of the brain, or the cortex, which has been associated with impaired executive function.

“We expected the decrease in cortical thickness among the higher weight and BMI z-score children, as this was found previously in smaller subsamples of the ABCD study,” Kaltenhauser said. “However, we were surprised by the extent of white matter impairment.”

Resting-state fMRI images revealed that increased weight and BMI z-scores were associated with decreased connectivity in the functional networks of the brain that involve cognitive control, motivation, and reward-based decision-making.

“Increased BMI and weight are not only associated with physical health consequences but also with brain health,” Kaltenhauser said. “Our study showed that higher weight and BMI z-scores in 9- and 10-year-olds were associated with changes in macrostructures, microstructures, and functional connectivity that worsened brain health.”

Senior author Sam Payabvash, M.D., a neuroradiologist and assistant professor of radiology and biomedical imaging at the Yale School of Medicine said the study’s findings provide an important mechanistic explanation of other studies that show higher BMI in children is associated with poor cognitive functioning and school performance.

“The longitudinal ABCD study gives us the opportunity to observe any changes that occur in children with higher weight and BMI z-scores,” Dr. Payabvash said. “We’ll need to watch over the next 6 to 10 years.”

Source

Let it snow: Scientists make metallic snowflakes out of nanoparticles

When Hans Eric Melin thinks of battery waste, he imagines American driveways filled with electric vehicles. They look much like the gas-powered cars of yesterday, large and handsome and well-equipped: family-haulers, boat-towers, off-road ready. They also do things that those cars didn’t do, like go from zero to 60 in three seconds and travel 400 miles without emitting any carbon. The trade-off is that they carry a burden: a massive battery pack that can push the vehicles’ weight to over 10,000 pounds. Most of the time that pack is parked, or is being used to a fraction of its capabilities on school pick-ups or runs to the grocery store. Unless those cars are flying hundreds of miles down the open highway, which they rarely are, the precious atoms of cobalt, lithium, and nickel inside of them have very little to do.

In the United States, fewer than 5 percent of trips are longer than 30 miles. For a gas engine, that represents a portion of a fuel tank. For an EV, range is the result of a more complicated set of decisions about how to best use expensive, hard-to-obtain metals. Melin, an expert in battery recycling, is often asked by governments and automakers how those resources can be stretched. It would be nice if he could tell them that recycling materials from old batteries would do the job. But it can’t. Batteries can power cars for a decade or more, and with EV adoption and the size of the average vehicle increasing every year, old batteries can contribute only so much. So Melin’s suggestion: Start off with less. Use smaller batteries in the first place.

That’s a tough sell, especially in the US, and especially at this moment of EV adoption. “The push has been for more: more power. More range. Faster zero-to-60,” says Gil Tal, a professor at the UC Davis who studies the choices of EV buyers. That’s partially driven by an effort to rescue the narrative about electric cars. For decades, the popular image of an EV was a golf cart that might maroon you on some stretch of godforsaken open road. But battery technology has improved immensely. Now automakers are eager to show off improved power and range—even if that’s more battery than most drivers can actually use. “The big issue is that we buy cars for the dream,” Tal says. “When we buy for a dream in the US, we buy bigger than what we need. We buy four-wheel drive. We buy towing capacity, dreaming that one day we’ll get a boat.” 

Mostly, that’s the same fossil-fueled dream as before. For years, automakers have sold high-horsepower trucks and SUVs as “a paradigm of freedom,” says Thea Riofrancos, a political scientist at Providence College who studies resource extraction for low-carbon products. “Really, it’s a paradigm of choicelessness.” Now EVs are carrying the same message—one that’s visible in the proliferation of luxury SUV and truck lineups in the US, Melin adds. Automakers could stretch their materials into selling more cars—like many do in China—but treating EVs as a luxury good translates into higher profit margins per car.

To be sure, EVs of all kinds are lower-carbon than their gas-powered counterparts. But battery size matters. Horsepower has been replaced by variables like range and battery size, which is usually expressed in kilowatt-hours. Those numbers make a difference when it comes to the greenness of the vehicle. According to Minviro, a consultancy that studies lifecycle carbon emissions of products, a 30-kwH battery is about half as carbon intensive as a 60-kwH battery. As Melin notes, the amount of lithium in a Ford F-150 Lightning could have built four or five Nissan Leafs, which are 3,000 pounds lighter but travel half as far. New mines for lithium or cobalt mean more waters poisoned, more species endangered, more homelands scarred. The moral calculus is still in EVs’ favor, especially if it means taking gas-powered cars off the road. But that avoids a harder conversation about what we’re using their batteries for.

When a recent New York Times op-ed asked how often people actually used 300-mile battery range, readers responded with indignation. Each person, it seemed, had a routine long-range commitment that mooted the article’s point: an extensive work commute, season football tickets at their alma mater halfway across the state. A 20-minute recharge along the way simply was not within reason. “This is the kind of silly coastal stuff Republicans like to ridicule,” one wrote. 

“People just don’t want to get stuck,” Melin says. Understandable. And in that case, those people have plenty of options for long-range electric cars, if they’re willing to pay for it. But within the climate movement, fears of those kinds of reactions have grown intense. Some prefer to instead offer a message of low-carbon abundance—that clean energy technology can do everything we do now, and more. By that theory, the electrification of the Ford F-150, the best-selling automobile in America, stands above criticism. (One analyst, who did not want to be named, said he thinks the truck is “evil,” whether it’s electric or not.)

Yet even a truck could be much more efficient in terms of materials if it did not promise trips that went as far. Long trips are “drastically overrepresented in people’s minds,” says Tobias Brosch, a psychologist at the University of Geneva who has studied why people don’t buy EVs. The trick is how to convince them otherwise. Information about where and how to charge remains confusingly abstract to people who have only previously used a gas station. They just don’t quite believe it can be convenient. One solution is careful counseling tied to drivers’ individual behaviors—effectively simulating how an EV would work in their current lives. 

The good news is that this year buyers started wising up. Tal, who conducts annual surveys of EV buyers, has noticed that as more people buy a second EV, or take a trip in their cousin’s car, they become savvier. They realize that, actually, those occasional trips aren’t deal breakers, that they can stop for a few minutes, use the bathroom, get some fro-yo, and it all feels quite normal. They have more confidence that few trips require extensive planning and that things will get easier in the future as charging infrastructure expands. They enter a new reality, one in which the rhythms of charge and discharge are regular, habitual.

At the same time, companies, pushed by government policies and supply chain pressures, are easing on the quest for “more.” Volkswagen and Tesla are bringing lithium-iron-phosphate, or LFP batteries, long popular in China, where cars tend to be smaller and charging stations are more plentiful, to the US. CATL, the world’s largest producer of batteries, has said it will soon bring sodium-based cells to cars alongside those made of lithium. Both involve reducing demand for some of the most scarce and destructive minerals—in the case of LFP, that’s cobalt, and for sodium batteries, it’s lithium—and translate into lower costs for consumers. But as a trade-off, they also typically promise shorter range.

Those developments are important, says Riofrancos. It’s a good thing if savvier EV buyers, watching their wallets, make the choice to go for the smaller battery option. That will reduce demand for materials. And it’s also a strong signal “that consumer preferences are not set in stone,” she says—that tropes like “range anxiety” are surmountable, or maybe not such a problem after all. It gets us away from that “choiceless” paradigm.

There’s a long way to go, though. There’s much more that Americans could do to get more out of each EV battery, like sharing cars or adopting new technologies that let drivers swap different-sized batteries based on their needs. Both are popular approaches in China, Melin notes. And choosing a smaller battery is less of a big deal than swapping a truck for a car, or giving up car ownership entirely in favor of a bus or ebike—options that would get us to a decarbonized future much faster. Despite localized experiments like fare-free mass transit or tax incentives to go car-free, this year of climate investments has still ultimately tipped in the favor of private vehicles, even as urban sprawl expands and major public systems are trapped in a pandemic-induced death spiral. Is it possible to have more electric cars on the road and fewer cars at the same time? “This will be much harder to change,” Tal says. “We are losing the fight.”

Dear Electric Vehicle Owners: You Don’t Need That Giant Battery

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Experts debate the risks of made-to-order DNA

For more than 250 years, mathematicians have wondered if the Euler equations might sometimes fail to describe a fluid’s flow. Now there’s a breakthrough.

For centuries, mathematicians have sought to understand and model the motion of fluids. The equations that describe how ripples crease the surface of a pond have also helped researchers to predict the weather, design better airplanes, and characterize how blood flows through the circulatory system. These equations are deceptively simple when written in the right mathematical language. However, their solutions are so complex that making sense of even basic questions about them can be prohibitively difficult.

Perhaps the oldest and most prominent of these equations, formulated by Leonhard Euler more than 250 years ago, describe the flow of an ideal, incompressible fluid: a fluid with no viscosity, or internal friction, and that cannot be forced into a smaller volume. “Almost all nonlinear fluid equations are kind of derived from the Euler equations,” said Tarek Elgindi, a mathematician at Duke University. “They’re the first ones, you could say.”

Yet much remains unknown about the Euler equations—including whether they’re always an accurate model of ideal fluid flow. One of the central problems in fluid dynamics is to figure out if the equations ever fail, outputting nonsensical values that render them unable to predict a fluid’s future states.

Mathematicians have long suspected that there exist initial conditions that cause the equations to break down. But they haven’t been able to prove it.

In a preprint posted online in October, a pair of mathematicians has shown that a particular version of the Euler equations does indeed sometimes fail. The proof marks a major breakthrough—and while it doesn’t completely solve the problem for the more general version of the equations, it offers hope that such a solution is finally within reach. “It’s an amazing result,” said Tristan Buckmaster, a mathematician at the University of Maryland who was not involved in the work. “There are no results of its kind in the literature.”

There’s just one catch.

The 177-page proof—the result of a decade-long research program—makes significant use of computers. This arguably makes it difficult for other mathematicians to verify it. (In fact, they are still in the process of doing so, though many experts believe the new work will turn out to be correct.) It also forces them to reckon with philosophical questions about what a “proof” is, and what it will mean if the only viable way to solve such important questions going forward is with the help of computers.

Sighting the Beast

In principle, if you know the location and velocity of each particle in a fluid, the Euler equations should be able to predict how the fluid will evolve for all time. But mathematicians want to know if that’s actually the case. Perhaps in some situations, the equations will proceed as expected, producing precise values for the state of the fluid at any given moment, only for one of those values to suddenly skyrocket to infinity. At that point, the Euler equations are said to give rise to a “singularity”—or, more dramatically, to “blow up.”

Once they hit that singularity, the equations will no longer be able to compute the fluid’s flow. But “as of a few years ago, what people were able to do fell very, very far short of [proving blowup],” said Charlie Fefferman, a mathematician at Princeton University.

It gets even more complicated if you’re trying to model a fluid that has viscosity (as almost all real-world fluids do). A million-dollar Millennium Prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute awaits anyone who can prove whether similar failures occur in the Navier-Stokes equations, a generalization of the Euler equations that accounts for viscosity.

In 2013, Thomas Hou, a mathematician at the California Institute of Technology, and Guo Luo, now at the Hang Seng University of Hong Kong, proposed a scenario in which the Euler equations would lead to a singularity. They developed a computer simulation of a fluid in a cylinder whose top half swirled clockwise while its bottom half swirled counterclockwise. As they ran the simulation, more complicated currents started to move up and down. That, in turn, led to strange behavior along the boundary of the cylinder where opposing flows met. The fluid’s vorticity—a measure of rotation—grew so fast that it seemed poised to blow up.

Illustration: Merrill Sherman/Quanta Magazine

Hou and Luo’s work was suggestive, but not a true proof. That’s because it’s impossible for a computer to calculate infinite values. It can get very close to seeing a singularity, but it can’t actually reach it—meaning that the solution might be very accurate, but it’s still an approximation. Without the backing of a mathematical proof, the value of the vorticity might only seem to be increasing to infinity because of some artifact of the simulation. The solutions might instead grow to enormous numbers before again subsiding.

Such reversals had happened before: A simulation would indicate that a value in the equations blew up, only for more sophisticated computational methods to show otherwise. “These problems are so delicate that the road is littered with the wreckage of previous simulations,” Fefferman said. In fact, that’s how Hou got his start in this area: Several of his earlier results disproved the formation of hypothetical singularities.

Still, when he and Luo published their solution, most mathematicians thought it was very likely a true singularity. “It was very meticulous, very precise,” said Vladimir Sverak, a mathematician at the University of Minnesota. “They really went to great lengths to establish that this is a real scenario.” Subsequent work by Elgindi, Sverak ,and others only strengthened that conviction.

But a proof was elusive. “You’ve sighted the beast,” Fefferman said. “Then you try to capture it.” That meant showing that the approximate solution that Hou and Luo so carefully simulated is, in a specific mathematical sense, very, very close to an exact solution of the equations.

Now, nine years after that first sighting, Hou and his former graduate student Jiajie Chen have finally succeeded in proving the existence of that nearby singularity.

The Move to Self-Similar Land

Hou, later joined by Chen, took advantage of the fact that, upon closer analysis, the approximate solution from 2013 seemed to have a special structure. As the equations evolved through time, the solution displayed what’s called a self-similar pattern: Its shape later on looked a lot like its earlier shape, only re-scaled in a specific way.

As a result, the mathematicians didn’t need to try to look at the singularity itself. Instead, they could study it indirectly by focusing on an earlier point in time. By zooming in on that part of the solution at the right rate—determined based on the solution’s self-similar structure—they could model what would happen later on, including at the singularity itself.

It took a few years for them to find a self-similar analogue to the 2013 blowup scenario. (Earlier this year, another team of mathematicians, which included Buckmaster, used different methods to find a similar approximate solution. They are currently using that solution to develop an independent proof of singularity formation.)

With an approximate self-similar solution in hand, Hou and Chen needed to show that an exact solution exists nearby. Mathematically, this is equivalent to proving that their approximate self-similar solution is stable—that even if you were to slightly perturb it and then evolve the equations starting at those perturbed values, there’d be no way to escape a small neighborhood around the approximate solution. “It’s like a black hole,” Hou said. “If you start with a profile close by, you’ll be sucked in.”

But having a general strategy was just one step toward the solution. “Fussy details matter,” Fefferman said. As Hou and Chen spent the next several years working out those details, they found that they had to rely on computers once again—but this time in an entirely new way.

A Hybrid Approach

Among their first challenges was figuring out the exact statement they had to prove. They wanted to show that if they took any set of values close to their approximate solution and plugged it into the equations, the output wouldn’t be able to stray far. But what does it mean for an input to be “close” to the approximate solution? They had to specify this in a mathematical statement—but there are many ways to define the notion of distance in this context. For their proof to work, they needed to choose the correct one.

“It has to measure different physical effects,” said Rafael de la Llave, a mathematician at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “So it needs to be chosen using a deep understanding of the problem.”

Once they had the right way to describe “closeness,” Hou and Chen had to prove the statement, which boiled down to a complicated inequality involving terms from both the re-scaled equations and the approximate solution. The mathematicians had to make sure that the values of all those terms balanced out to something very small: If one value ended up being large, other values had to be negative or kept in check.

“If you make something a little too big or a little too small, the whole thing breaks down,” said Javier Gómez-Serrano, a mathematician at Brown University. “So it’s very, very careful, delicate work.”

“It’s a really fierce fight,” Elgindi added.

To get the tight bounds they needed on all these different terms, Hou and Chen broke the inequality into two major parts. They could take care of the first part by hand, with techniques including one that dates back to the 18th century, when the French mathematician Gaspard Monge sought an optimal way of transporting soil to build fortifications for Napoleon’s army. “Stuff like this has been done before, but I found it striking that [Hou and Chen] used it for this,” Fefferman said.

That left the second part of the inequality. Tackling it would require computer assistance. For starters, there were so many calculations that needed to be done, and so much precision required, that “the amount of work you’d have to do with pencil and paper would be staggering,” de la Llave said. To get various terms to balance out, the mathematicians had to perform a series of optimization problems that are relatively easy for computers but exceedingly time-consuming for humans. Some of the values also depended on quantities from the approximate solution; since that was calculated using a computer, it was more straightforward to also use a computer to perform these additional computations.

“If you try to manually do some of these estimates, you’re probably going to overestimate at some point, and then you lose,” said Gómez-Serrano. “The numbers are so tiny and tight … and the margin is incredibly thin.”

But because computers can’t manipulate an infinite number of digits, tiny errors inevitably occur. Hou and Chen had to carefully track those errors, to make sure they didn’t interfere with the rest of the balancing act.

Ultimately, they were able to find bounds for all the terms, completing the proof: The equations had indeed produced a singularity.

Proof by Computer

It remains open whether more complicated equations—the Euler equations without the presence of a cylindrical boundary and the Navier-Stokes equations—can develop a singularity. “But [this work] at least gives me hope,” Hou said. “I see a path forward, a way to maybe even eventually resolve the full Millennium problem.”

Meanwhile, Buckmaster and Gómez-Serrano are working on a computer-assisted proof of their own—one they hope will be more general, and therefore capable of tackling not just the problem that Hou and Chen solved, but also scores of others.

These efforts mark a growing trend in the field of fluid dynamics: the use of computers to solve important problems.

“In a number of different areas of mathematics, it’s occurring more and more frequently,” said Susan Friedlander, a mathematician at the University of Southern California.

But in fluid mechanics, computer-assisted proofs are still a relatively new technique. In fact, when it comes to statements about singularity formation, Hou and Chen’s proof is the first of its kind: Previous computer-assisted proofs were only able to tackle toy problems in the area.

Such proofs aren’t so much controversial as “a matter of taste,” said Peter Constantin of Princeton University. Mathematicians generally agree that a proof has to convince other mathematicians that some line of reasoning is correct. But many argue it should also improve their understanding of why a particular statement is true, rather than simply provide validation that it’s correct. “Do we learn anything fundamentally new, or do we just know the answer to the question?” Elgindi said. “If you view mathematics as an art, then this is not so aesthetically pleasing.”

“A computer can help. It’s wonderful. It gives me insight. But it doesn’t give me a full understanding,” Constantin added. “Understanding comes from us.”

For his part, Elgindi still hopes to work out an alternative proof of blowup entirely by hand. “I’m overall happy this exists,” he said of Hou and Chen’s work. “But I take it as more of a motivation to try to do it in a less computer-dependent way.”

Other mathematicians view computers as a vital new tool that will make it possible to attack previously intractable problems. “Now the work is no longer just paper and pencil,” Chen said. “You have the option of using something more powerful.”

According to him and others (including Elgindi, despite his personal preference for writing proofs by hand), there’s a good possibility that the only way to solve big problems in fluid dynamics—that is, problems that involve increasingly complicated equations—might be to rely heavily on computer assistance. “It looks to me as if trying to do this without making heavy use of computer-assisted proofs is like tying one or possibly two hands behind your back,” Fefferman said.

If that does end up being the case and “you don’t have any choice,” Elgindi said, “then people … such as myself, who would say that this is suboptimal, should be quiet.” That would also mean that more mathematicians would need to start learning the skills needed to write computer-assisted proofs—something that Hou and Chen’s work will hopefully inspire. “I think there were a lot of people who were simply waiting for someone to solve such a problem before investing any of their own time into this approach,” Buckmaster said.

That said, when it comes to debates about the extent to which mathematicians should rely on computers, “it’s not that you need to pick a side,” Gómez-Serrano said. “[Hou and Chen’s] proof wouldn’t work without the analysis, and the proof wouldn’t work without the computer assistance. … I think the value is that people can speak the two languages.”

With that, de la Llave said, “there’s a new game in town.”

A New Computer Proof ‘Blows Up’ Centuries-Old Fluid Equations

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