2020 was the year of Covid lockdowns, 2021 the year of vaccines, and 2022 the year of worldwide reopening. 2023 will be the year of variant prediction. The first Covid SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern that were identified—from Alpha in the UK to Beta in South Africa—muddied the picture of where the pandemic would go next. Alpha was inherently better at transmitting, while Beta was able to evade preexisting immunity to some extent. What would the longer-term pattern of evolution look like? 

The picture became clearer in 2022, with the Omicron BA.1 variant causing large epidemics. This led to an accumulation of immunity within populations, followed by declining transmission, only for a new subvariant, BA.2, to emerge, against which this immunity was less effective. Large epidemics followed and the cycle started again, with another cycle in mid-2022 when BA.5 emerged. 

If this evolutionary trajectory continues, we’ll see this cyclic pattern in 2023 and beyond. It is a similar dynamic to the seasonal coronaviruses that have been causing epidemics for decades. A 2021 study by researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center found that coronaviruses gradually evolve over time, so prior immunity is less effective. 

This will create a challenge for Covid-19 vaccination campaigns; if viruses evolve in this way, we’d ideally update vaccines, so the viral proteins in the vaccine are a closer match to the ones our bodies will encounter in circulating variants. But updating vaccines takes time. For influenza, the World Health Organization makes recommendations twice a year about which variants should be in that season’s vaccine in each hemisphere. Because of manufacturing and distribution timelines, decisions about winter vaccines are made more than six months earlier. That makes vaccine selection a prediction problem.

When it comes to selecting influenza vaccines, teams use a range of data, from the growth rates of circulating variants in genomic data to tests of their immunological properties. An additional complication is variability in what different populations have previously been exposed to. Some countries may have more preexisting immunity than others, and hence variants that can evade this immunity have more of an advantage. We often see different influenza viruses dominating in different continents and countries. 

In 2023, this prediction challenge will become routine for Covid as well. Some countries have already approved shots that are adapted for the Omicron BA.1 subvariant. But how well will these new vaccines match the variants that circulate further down the line? Decisions for winter 2023–24 in the northern hemisphere will likely have to be made in early 2023. Getting the choice right could have major implications for the size and severity of future Covid waves. For the H3N2 influenza subtype, which tends to cause the largest seasonal epidemics, challenges around vaccine selection and manufacturing mean effectiveness against symptomatic disease is typically less than 50 percent.

Further into the future, there is hope for progress on “universal” coronavirus vaccines, which will be highly effective against a wide range of variants. But the history of development for other universal vaccines, such as for influenza, suggests outright success is far from guaranteed. As a result, the coming year will be the start of a long game of cat-and-mouse, pitting vaccine updates against an evolving virus. Solving this prediction question—and rolling out the resulting vaccines—will be one of the major health challenges of 2023.

Get Ready to Play 'Guess the Viral Variant'

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EDITED: Author confuses COVID-19 (the disease) and SARS-CoV-2 (the virus).

Solar Probe

China has is making massive strides in space exploration. The country has successfully sent multiple probes to the surface of the Moon and is making moves to establish its very own orbital space station — as well as landing on Mars.

Now it's also angling to get a closer look at the Sun, as the South China Morning Post reports — a further flex of what China's leadership wants to see become a growing space supremacy.

Predicting Space Weather

The upcoming mission, called the Advanced Space-based Solar Observatory (ASO-S), is scheduled to launch in the first half of 2022 and will "perform 24 hour continuous observation" of our star from a Sun-synchronous orbit of 720 km above Earth for at least four years, according to state-owned news outlet Xinhua.

The goal of the probe is to study space weather, particularly solar storms that can wreak havoc on sensitive scientific equipment back on Earth and in its orbit. ASO-S will be able to predict solar storms "at least 40 hours ahead of their arrival," according to Xinhua, providing an advanced warning of any damage.

The mission will include three payloads that it will release upon reaching : an X-ray imager to track the Sun's magnetic fields, as well as a magnetic detector and solar telescope.

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A Texas and California-based coffee chain dedicated to making a positive impact is flipping the script through its drive-by kindness videos that have become a hit on TikTok.

How it works: It's as simple as saying something nice to a total stranger. Some of the random compliment bombs dropped on unsuspecting pedestrians:

“Do you work at a restaurant? Because you’re serving looks right now!”

“Do you ever get tired?” (“Of walking?” asked the woman.) “Of being so beautiful!”

“Did you drop your crown? Because you’re a literal king!”

A HAPPY ENDING: Dozens of people said they would go to her book signing — they didn't. Thousands of strangers made sure that wasn't the end of the story.

La La Land Kind Cafe, a kindness-focused organic cafe chain that first launched in Texas in 2019, began posting drive-by kindness videos on TikTok in November 2020. The side project was the cafe's way of continuing to spread joy even as fewer people visited cafes and other public indoor places during the pandemic, founder Francois Reihani said, “My team and I wanted to do the same thing we were doing in our stores, but do it out in the communities,” Reihani, who employees former and current foster youths in his cafes, told USA TODAY.

Drive-by kindness: How it works

The random acts of drive-by kindness are on-brand for La La Land's business model – it's a company so dedicated to normalizing kindness toward strangers that its employees tell customers they love them as they exit their cafes.

"They're very strong words you're normally only used to hearing from a very close loved one," Reihani said of the coffee shop's out-of-the-ordinary practice. "The world needs to hear them because there should be a love between random human beings. We all go through the same things in life."

La La Land still fully operates as brick-and-mortar cafes. But when its content creation team occasionally takes to the roads to serve up kindness, the recipients’ reactions are typically the same: a huge grin, an appreciative chuckle – such as the police officer who was told he had the right to remain handsome – or a look of disbelief that a complete stranger could be so kind.

“I love you!” a complimented man once shouted as he continued on his way.

< Do watch the video at the Source page. >

When the business's drive-by kindness side project started in 2020, La La Land’s content creator, Jeremiah Sabado, whipped out his phone as his colleague shouted kind and encouraging words to strangers on the street.

“He nonchalantly posted it on TikTok, and we woke up the next morning to a million-something views and the thing going viral,” Reihani said.

“At the end of the day, we're all human beings, we're all connected in a certain way,” he said of his company’s mission to spread joy to strangers both inside and outside cafes.

La La Land Kind Cafe has continued sharing kind, unexpected messages with strangers from car windows even as the height of the pandemic winded down. The random compliment videos have since amassed over a billion views on TikTok as of 2022, according to Reihani.

“I think it's our generation’s duty to kind of take this upon ourselves to bring people a lot closer together," he said.

'It'll always stand out to me'

Dallas resident Francesca Schell, a recipient of La La Land Kind Cafe’s random acts of kindness, said she felt like a mess after a tough day at work in the spring of 2021.

Schell stood outside of the law firm where she had recently started working and mulled over some negative feedback she’d gotten from an attorney.

“I think whenever we’re criticized, especially in a job or when we have someone we look up to, we tend to kind of make that a part of ourselves, it tends to just drag us down,” she told USA TODAY.

An unexpected compliment turned it all around.

A car drove up to the curb, startling Schell. The friendly passenger, a La La Land Kind Cafe employee, told her, “You look so put together!” Schell recalled.

“It hit home in a really good way,” she said. “It’s not something that happens a lot – that a random stranger gives you a compliment, especially one that feels quite genuine, so I think it'll always stand out to me because of that.”

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Researchers have found an effective method of getting people to drink less alcohol: Highlight the increased risk of cancer that comes with imbibing and pair that with counting each and every drink.

This particular combo of 'why to reduce' and 'how to reduce' messaging can be useful for promoting good health in a population, said the team behind the 2021 study.

Too much drinking doesn't just lead to cancer, of course. Overdoing it on the booze is associated with a whole range of problems, including premature death, heart disease, digestive issues, and an increased risk of dementia.

"We found that pairing information about alcohol and cancer with a particular practical action – counting their drinks – resulted in drinkers reducing the amount of alcohol they consumed," said economist and psychologist Simone Pettigrew from The George Institute for Global Health.

For the study, three surveys were filled out: 7,995 people completed the first, 4,588 of those people completed the second three weeks later, and 2,687 people finished the final survey three weeks after that. The participants were split up into different groups and shown different advertisements and messages about drinking.

One combination stood out, compared to a control group: A TV ad linking booze and cancer, together with a suggestion to keep count of your drinks, was one of the most effective at getting people to try and cut down on alcohol intake.

It was also the only combination where people actually did significantly reduce their alcohol consumption over the six weeks.

Other approaches – like encouraging people to decide on a number of drinks and then stick to it – did prompt some of the volunteers to try and cut down, but there was a clear winner based on the people taking part in this research.

"Many people don't know that alcohol is a carcinogen," said Pettigrew. "It's important information that drinkers should have access to. But telling people alcohol causes cancer is just part of the solution – we also need to give them ways to take action to reduce their risk."

Alcohol consumption can be attributed to as many as 7 percent of premature deaths worldwide, according to the World Health Organization, and making drinkers more aware of the health risks is one way of tackling that problem.

While health agencies have also looked at ways of making booze less readily available and more expensive, ultimately, personal choices will determine whether or not behavior around alcohol will shift in the long term.

In this particular study, the participants were chosen to be "broadly demographically representative of the Australian drinking public", so it's not an approach that will necessarily work elsewhere – but it seems that counting your drinks could be one option to try if you want to cut down.

"There are limited resources available for alcohol harm-reduction campaigns, so it's important to find out which messages resonate best to ensure they have the best chance of working," said Pettigrew.

The research was published in Addictive Behaviors.

An earlier version of this article was first published in June 2021.

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Now that it is passing through the Kuiper Belt, away from the light pollution of the inner Solar System, it has another lucrative mission: measuring the brightness of the Universe. These measurements will allow astronomers to make more accurate estimates of how many galaxies there are, which is still the subject of debate. According to new measurements by New Horizons, the light coming from stars beyond the Milky Way is two to three times brighter than the light from known populations of galaxies – meaning that there are even more out there than we thought!

The study was led by a team from the Center for Detectors (CfD), an academic research group at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). They were joined by researchers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Space Exploration Sector (SES) at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL), the University of California Irvine, and the Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL) at UC Berkeley. The paper that describes their findings recently appeared online and has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.

The overall brightness of the Universe is known as the Cosmic Optical Background (COB), which includes the diffuse light given off by all the stars and galaxies in the Universe combined. Like the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the relic radiation left over from the Big Bang, this value is important to astronomers because it allows them to take an inventory of all the normal matter (aka. “luminous matter”) in the Universe. This is a challenge here on Earth because of interference caused by sunlight and the way it’s reflected by ice particles throughout the Solar System (known as Zodiacal Light).

Space-based telescopes that orbit close to Earth are also subject to interference because of dust between planets that creates foreground light. But any interfering light in the foreground is minimal for a mission like New Horizons, now deep into the Kuiper Belt and on its way out of the Solar System. To calculate the COB, the team analyzed hundreds of images of background light taken by the New Horizon’s Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI). Teresa Symons, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California Irvine, led the study as part of her dissertation while studying for her Ph.D. at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). As she explained in a recent RIT press release:

“We see more light than we should see based on the populations of galaxies that we understand to exist and how much light we estimate they should produce. Determining what is producing that light could change our fundamental understanding of how the universe formed over time.”

Previous measurements made in 2021 by researchers from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) revealed that the COB was brighter than expected. This was followed by an independent team of scientists earlier this year that found that the COB was twice as large as originally believed. These latest results validate these previous studies using a much broader set of LORRI observations and hint that there must be additional light sources in the cosmos we have not yet accounted for.

Currently exploring the Kuiper Belt, New Horizons is just one of five spacecraft to reach beyond 50 AUs, on its way out of the Solar System and, eventually, into interstellar space. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/SwRI

The New Horizons mission is currently more than 55.85 Astronomical Units (AU) from Earth (or 8.35 billion km; 5.19 billion mi) – almost 56 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. At this distance, where the foreground light is minimal, astronomers have a much clearer view of the cosmic background and can make more accurate inferences about its galactic population. Symons and her colleagues hope that these observations will pave the way for future missions and instruments that can help explore this discrepancy further.

These include Caltech’s Cosmic Infrared Background ExpeRiment-2 (CIBER-2) and NASA’s Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx), which will conduct spectro-photometric fluctuations of the cosmic background to learn more about galaxy formation and cosmic evolution since the Big Bang. Co-author Michael Zemcov, a researcher at NASA JPL and a research professor at the RIT’s CfD and School of Physics and Astronomy, will play a major role in the SPHEREx mission and its data pipeline.

“This has gotten to the point where it’s an actual mystery that needs to be solved,” he said. “I hope that some of the experiments we’re involved in here at RIT, including CIBER-2 and SPHEREx can help us resolve the discrepancy.”

Further Reading: Rochester Institute of Technology, arXiv

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Physicists at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) are bringing the Christmas cheer by using a 3D nanolithography tool called the Nanofrazor to cut the smallest record ever. The tune they "recorded," in full stereo no less: the first 25 seconds of "Rocking Around the Christmas Tree."

”I have done lithography for 30 years, and although we’ve had this machine for a while, it still feels like science fiction," said Peter Bøggild, a physicist at DTU. "To get an idea of the scale we are working at, we could write our signatures on a red blood cell with this thing. The most radical thing is that we can create free-form 3D landscapes at that crazy resolution.”

Back in 2015, the same DTU group created a microscopic color image of the Mona Lisa, some 10,000 times smaller than Leonardo da Vinci's original painting. To do so, they created a nanoscale surface structure consisting of rows of columns, covered by a 20-nm thick layer of aluminum. How much a column was deformed determined which colors of light were reflected, and the deformation in turn was determined by the intensity of the pulsed laser beam. For instance, low-intensity pulses only deformed the columns slightly, producing blue and purple tones, while strong pulses significantly deformed the columns, producing orange and yellow tones. The resulting image fit in a space smaller than the footprint taken up by a single pixel on an iPhone Retina display.

The DTU physics group acquired the Nanofrazor in order to sculpt precisely detailed 3D nanostructures quickly and relatively cheaply. The Christmas record was simply a fun holiday project for postdoc Nolan Lassaline to demonstrate the capability of shaping a surface with nanoscale precision. Instead of adding material to a surface, the Nanofrazor precisely removes material to sculpt the surface into the desired pattern or shape—a kind of gray-scale nanolithography.

"The Nanofrazor was put to work as a record-cutting lathe—converting an audio signal into a spiralled groove on the surface of the medium," said Bøggild, who is also an amateur musician and vinyl record enthusiast. "In this case, the medium is a different polymer than vinyl. We even encoded the music in stereo—the lateral wriggles is the left channel, whereas the depth modulation contains the right channel. It may be too impractical and expensive to become a hit record. To read the groove, you need a rather costly atomic force microscope or the Nanofrazor, but it is definitely doable.”

The initial goal is to use the Nanofrazor to develop new kinds of magnetic sensors capable of detecting the currents in living brains. Lassaline plans to create "quantum soap bubbles" in graphene in hopes of discovering new ways of precisely manipulating the electrons in that and other atomically thin materials.  “The fact that we can now accurately shape the surfaces with nanoscale precision at pretty much the speed of imagination is a game changer for us," said DTU physicist Tim Booth. "We have many ideas for what to do next and believe that this machine will significantly speed up the prototyping of new structures."

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In the seven or so years that I have been the food scientist for BBC’s

, the episode that had people stop me in the supermarket was the Christmas special where I gave my top science-based tips on cooking the perfect Christmas turkey.

In these times of rising fuel prices and climate concern, however, it feels more important than ever to pick a way to cook your prized bird in a way that makes for a killer dish without murdering the planet or your bank account.

Oven roast

© Sam Brewster

If you’re cooking a roast this Christmas, you’ll probably be doing it in the oven. From a physics point of view, oven roasting is a ridiculous way to cook anything. Your oven is essentially a hot, dry chamber that blows air around, just like a hairdryer, and is perfect for dehydrating rather than cooking. This is because heat transfers pitifully slowly from dry air into anything solid or liquid – just try hovering your hand in a 200°C oven and it will feel warm, whereas a mere splash of 80°C water would instantly scald.

It’s going to take roughly three hours and 30 minutes of preheating and cooking time to roast a 6kg turkey (enough to feed 8-10 people). Modern electric ovens will fizzle through some 3.2kW worth of power during this time, sending up a 600g plume of carbon dioxide. Gas oven owners have a less efficient appliance that will blaze through 5.4kW worth of gas, belching out nearly a kilogram of carbon dioxide. A gas-cooked bird will have a lower energy bill, however, such is the price of electricity now.

For a tastier turkey and a faster result, try spatchcocking. This means cutting out the turkey’s backbone using a serrated knife or pair of heavy-duty kitchen scissors then squashing the bird flat in a large roasting tin, skin side up, so its limbs are butterflied outwards. The surface area is doubled and the cooking time roughly halved. The most flavourful bits of the turkey are the browned outer edges formed by the Maillard reaction, and a spatchcocked bird has more of these tasty surfaces, making it extra delicious.

If you want to know more, check out our guide on the best way to oven cook a turkey this Christmas.

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Wednesday, December 28

The first mission of the week will see SpaceX launch a Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 in Cape Canaveral, Florida. It will carry the first batch of Block v2 Starlink satellites into a polar low Earth orbit. These upgraded Starlink satellites a significantly larger than their predecessors, weighing around 600 kg, and are more capable. The launch should be available to watch on SpaceX’s website on the day. It’s due for launch at 9:45 a.m. UTC.

Thursday, December 29

The second launch of the week will be yet another SpaceX Falcon 9. Rather than Starlink satellites, this mission will deliver EROS C3 Earth observation satellites into space where they will image the Earth. They’re being launched for ImageSat International, an Israeli remote-sensing company. This mission will also be streamed on SpaceX’s website and it’s due for launch at 6:58 a.m. UTC.

Friday, December 30

The last mission of the week will see China launch a Long March 3B/E carrying two BeiDou navigation satellites into orbit. It’s not certain but they could be replacing some ageing satellites that China previously launched. If you have a smartphone, there’s a very good chance that it will connect to these two satellites when they come online to give you positioning data. Smartphones also connect to the US' GPS satellites, the EU’s Galileo satellites, and Russia’s GLONASS satellites. The mission is due for launch at 6 a.m. UTC.

Recap

The only launch we got last week was a Vega C launch carrying the Pleiades Neo 5 and 6 satellites into a Sun-synchronous orbit. Apparently, there was a problem with the second stage so the mission didn’t reach its intended orbit.

That’s all we have this week, check in next time and Merry Christmas!

TWIRL 97: SpaceX to launch larger, more capable Starlink satellites

There’s a reason why your Christmas dinner tastes so good—the turkey, gravy, potatoes, and trimmings make up one of the saltiest meals you’re likely to consume all year. Add to that the crisps, cheeses, and other snacks that we like to tuck into over the holiday period, and our salt levels across the festive season can end up far beyond what’s needed or recommended.

The physical effects of this are well known. As salt levels rise, so does blood pressure, which can increase the risk of a heart attack or stroke. But scientists think that salt could also have another influence: on behavior. In particular, they’re beginning to unpick how it’s linked to stress. 

The topic has, until recently, been underexplored, as the impact of salt is a difficult subject to examine in humans. Monitoring people’s salt intake, even under controlled conditions, is hard because of how ubiquitous it is in our food. Plus, since salt can increase blood pressure acutely and over time, knowingly adding salt to the diet of study participants poses an ethical problem. 

So researchers at the University of Edinburgh have been running experiments with the next best thing: mice. They’re very similar to humans in terms of anatomy, physiology, and genetics—and how both species respond to stress is governed by factors that can include diet, explains Matthew Bailey, a professor of renal physiology at the university. Mice also typically don’t eat a lot of salt, which makes testing its impact on them easier.

To investigate the link between salt intake and stress, Bailey and his colleagues fed male mice—some for two weeks, some for up to eight weeks—a high-salt diet, containing a proportion of salt similar to the typical intake of humans. When the researchers then analyzed blood samples from the mice, they found that levels of the stress hormone cortisol were always higher in those on the high-salt diet compared to mice in the control group consuming low levels of salt—both when they were in a resting state and after being restrained in a Plexiglas tube to induce stress. The stress response wasn’t turned on and off by adding salt to the mice’s diet, but amplified, Bailey explains. “It’s like a dimmer switch in a light,” he says. “The stress system was kind of turned on a little bit more.”

How the different stressors—the salt in the mice’s body and the stressful Plexiglas environment—affect each other and compound is particularly interesting, Bailey continues, because humans are also often exposed to multiple stressors at once. So it’s possible that something similar could be happening in our own bodies. Just think of the last-minute gifting spree or heated debates at the dinner table at Christmas with annoying relatives, which send people’s blood pressure soaring—and then add to this the overindulgence in salty food over the festive season. “I think that for some people, the diet that we’re eating is going to make us deal with it less well than we would otherwise,” says Bailey.

In the study, the researchers also took tissue samples from some mice after euthanizing them and found increased activity of genes that produce the proteins in the brain responsible for the stress response. “It is interesting to notice that these effects are present after a brief exposure of two weeks to a high-salt diet,” says Giuseppe Faraco, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Weill Cornell Medicine, who studies the link between salt and cognitive impairment but wasn’t involved in this study. What Faraco would have liked to have seen, however, is data on how the overactivation of these key genes relates to the behavioral response of the mice.

Bailey is working on that. Over the next few years, he plans to collaborate with neuroscientists to observe and record how increased salt intake and stress levels manifest in aggression or anxiety-like behavior when mice are placed in specially designed mazes. For example, anxious mice tend to seek safety behind opaque walls and spend more time in enclosed parts of a maze rather than exploring the open parts where they are more exposed.

Lee Gilman, an assistant professor of behavioral neuroscience, already conducts these kinds of experiments in their lab at Kent State University in Ohio, examining how salt intake affects a phenomenon known as contextual fear generalization. This occurs when conditioned fear responses, generated in response to threats that have been experienced, become memorized and extended to safe stimuli. It’s considered a hallmark symptom for anxiety-related disorders. “It directly relates to anxiety processes in the brain,” says Gilman.

Fearful mice will freeze when exposed to the same context in which something threatening took place. But when conditioned mice go beyond this and freeze in a novel environment where they have never been before, “they’re generalizing their fear,” Gilman says. In their study, which is in preprint, male and female mice were conditioned in a chamber containing a patterned background, an ethanol-based scent, and a light, receiving mild electric shocks on a floor of stainless-steel grids.

Four weeks after conditioning, Gilman found that a high-salt diet increased the generalized fear response in females, while the same diet reduced the fear expression in males, which surprised the neuroscientist at first. But in previous behavioral studies on salt intake, most researchers had experimented only with male mice, which would explain these sex differences only now becoming apparent.

Although these two studies better our understanding of the effects of a high-salt diet on the brain, Faraco warns that we need to be careful about translating the results to humans. There are differences in how animals and humans absorb, use, and metabolize salt, he says. “Comparisons between rodents and humans must be interpreted with caution, given the uncertainty in estimating minimum salt requirements in mice, the relatively short exposure in animal models compared to lifetime exposure in humans, and the known underestimation of human salt consumption.”

Behavioral research is still in its infancy when it comes to salt, but Bailey and Gilman are both working to improve and expand their experiments to track the behavior of mice over longer periods of time. And while their findings cannot be directly extrapolated to humans, they hope that people will be a little more conscious of their salt consumption, both in general and at times of abundance like Christmas. Currently, most consumers pay attention to the calorie and sugar content when being served a feast at a communal table—“the salt aspect goes very much under the radar in people’s awareness,” says Gilman. That could all change if we discover just what impact it has on our mood and how we feel.

Eating Too Much Salt Could Cause Stress Levels to Rise

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In 2023, the relentless increase in global heating will continue, bringing ever more disruptive weather that is the signature calling card of accelerating climate breakdown. 

According to NASA, 2022 was one of the hottest years ever recorded on Earth. This is extraordinary, because the recurrent climate pattern across the tropical Pacific—known as ENSO (El Niño Southern Oscillation)—was in its cool phase. During this phase, called La Niña, the waters of the equatorial Pacific are noticeably cooler than normal, which influences weather patterns around the world.

One consequence of La Niña is that it helps keep a lid on global temperatures. This means that—despite the recent widespread heat waves, wildfires and droughts—we have actually been spared the worst. The scary thing is that this La Niña will end and eventually transition into the better-known El Niño, which sees the waters of the equatorial Pacific becoming much warmer. When it does, the extreme weather that has rampaged across our planet in 2021 and 2022 will pale into insignificance. 

Current forecasts suggest that La Niña will continue into early 2023, making it—fortuitously for us—one of the longest on record (it began in Spring 2020). Then, the equatorial Pacific will begin to warm again. Whether or not it becomes hot enough for a fully fledged El Niño to develop, 2023 has a very good chance—without the cooling influence of La Niña—of being the hottest year on record.

 A global average temperature rise of 1.5°C is widely regarded as marking a guardrail beyond which climate breakdown becomes dangerous. Above this figure, our once-stable climate will begin to collapse in earnest, becoming all-pervasive, affecting everyone, and insinuating itself into every aspect of our lives. In 2021, the figure (compared to the 1850–1900 average) was 1.2°C, while in 2019—before the development of the latest La Niña—it was a worryingly high 1.36°C. As the heat builds again in 2023, it is perfectly possible that we will touch or even exceed 1.5°C for the first time.

But what will this mean exactly? I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the record for the highest recorded temperature—currently 54.4°C (129.9°F) in California's Death Valley—shattered. This could well happen somewhere in the Middle East or South Asia, where temperatures could climb above 55°C. The heat could exceed the blistering 40°C mark again in the UK, and for the first time, top 50°C in parts of Europe.   

Inevitably, higher temperatures will mean that severe drought will continue to be the order of the day, slashing crop yields in many parts of the world. In 2022, extreme weather resulted in reduced harvests in China, India, South America, and Europe, increasing food insecurity. Stocks are likely to be lower than normal going into 2023, so another round of poor harvests could be devastating. Resulting food shortages in most countries could drive civil unrest, while rising prices in developed countries will continue to stoke inflation and the cost-of-living crisis.

One of the worst-affected regions will be the Southwest United States. Here, the longest drought in at least 1,200 years has persisted for 22 years so far, reducing the level of Lake Mead on the colourado River so much that power generation capacity at the Hoover Dam has fallen by almost half. Upstream, the Glen Canyon Dam, on the rapidly shrinking Lake Powell, is forecast to stop generating power in 2023 if the drought continues. The Hoover Dam could follow suit in 2024. Together, these lakes and dams provide water and power for millions of people in seven states, including California. The breakdown of this supply would be catastrophic for agriculture, industry, and populations right across the region.

La Niña tends to limit hurricane development in the Atlantic, so as it begins to fade, hurricane activity can be expected to pick up. The higher global temperatures expected in 2023 could see extreme heating of the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico surface waters. This would favor the formation and persistence of super-hurricanes, powering winds and storm surges capable of wiping out a major US city, should they strike land. Direct hits, rather than a glancing blow, are rare—the closest in recent decades being Hurricane Andrew in 1992, which made landfall immediately south of Miami, obliterating more than 60,000 homes and damaging 125,000 more. Hurricanes today are both more powerful and wetter, so that the consequences of a city getting in the way of a superstorm in 2023 would likely be cataclysmic.

El Niño Is Coming—and the World Isn’t Prepared

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Most of us have been spending a lot more time at home these past couple of years, prompting us to ask questions about the quality of the indoor air we breathe. Pre-COVID reports show that we Brits spend more than 90 per cent of our time indoors, where levels of some toxins can be up to five times greater than they are outdoors.

The internet is full of claims that houseplants can help, with just about every wellbeing site boasting its own top-10 rundown of the most powerful air-purifying plants. But is there any truth to the claims?

Unfortunately, not much. Most of the articles, if they cite any evidence, point to a NASA study from 1989. Back then, scientists were investigating plants’ ability to remove harmful chemicals called volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from the air of sealed environments such as space stations.

In our homes and offices, sources of VOCs include paints, varnishes, furniture, carpets and printers. The study found that over a 24-hour period, several species of plants could indeed remove up to 70 per cent of one, or more, of the three VOCs tested.

But the results don’t translate well to the typical home or office, according to a 2019 review that revisited the NASA data, along with 11 other studies from the decades since. For starters, the experiments typically used fans to waft the VOCs over the plants, and carbon filters to collect them – setups that most of us don’t have in our homes.

More importantly, the plants were placed in small, sealed chambers. But the buildings we live and work in are surprisingly leaky. In fact, the researchers estimate that you’d need to squeeze between 10 and 1,000 plants into each square metre of your home to approach the rates of VOC removal already happening through passive indoor-outdoor air exchange.

Research shows that houseplants do have a range of other benefits, however. They help regulate humidity. They can improve mood and boost productivity. And they look good, to boot. But if you want to freshen up the air in your home, your best bet is to buy an air purifier with a high-quality filter or – depending on where you live – to open a window.

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If you celebrate Christmas then you’re almost certain to devour an enormous meal at some point on 25 December, your plate overflowing with proteins and carbohydrates. But should you add breakfast to the mix?

A recent ‘big breakfast’ study by scientists at Aberdeen and Surrey universities found that the time of day when you consume your calories does not affect metabolism. Funded by the UK’s Medical Research Council, the trial involved 30 people on weight-loss diets, with some eating more in the morning, and others loading calories later in the day. The researchers found no difference in resting metabolic rate or weight loss for the two groups.

However, those eating a big breakfast were significantly less hungry later in the day. Using breath tests for octanoic acid, a fatty acid absorbed in the intestine, the team showed that it took far longer for the volunteers’ stomachs to empty after they’d had a larger breakfast.

The results tie in with another study showing that levels of a ‘hunger hormone’ called ghrelin are suppressed more after breakfast, than after an evening meal.

So, if you fill up on breakfast, not only will you be less likely to overindulge in your main meal, but you’ll also have enough energy to fuel the hours spent over a hot stove cooking it.

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In response to a recommended diary, which suggested gargling with and swallowing sodium bicarbonate, I want to drop a quick note to advise against this.

Antacids such as Tums, or baking soda are very effective at neutralizing stomach acid and can bring on immediate relief for reflux symptoms.  

But there is a cost to this.  To put simply, the stomach does not like having its acid neutralized, and over time will respond by producing more and more acid to overcome the antacid.  

In medicine, this is called a rebound effect.

I have seen rebound reflux spiral out of control, and my first piece of advice to reflux sufferers, is to stop using antacids, except occasionally in small doses.

Here are some quick lifestyle tips to reduce or eliminate symptoms:

Take a proton-pump inhibitor such as over-the-counter omeprazole.  These drugs reduce acid by reducing acid production, rather than neutralizing it, and therefore no rebound.  They do not work immediately, unlike antacids, so use prior to symptoms when you can, usually once a day for a week or two.   Protip: omeprazole is usually much cheaper by prescription than buying it over the counter.  It can interfere with drug absorption, so clear with your doctor if on prescription meds or needed for more than a few weeks. 

Do not eat or drink at least 4 hours before bed.  Reflux usually occurs when people are laying down, and while you may be aware of it happening while awake, it is generally unnoticed while sleeping.  Keep your stomach empty before bed.  This includes drinking anything but little sips of water.  Even a glass of water can bring on reflux.  Of course some things are worse than others, so definitely avoid high caloric or fatty foods, alcohol, caffeine and peppermint.

Do not prop your head up with pillows.  Counterintuitively, this increases reflux by putting more pressure on the muscle than keeps acid in your stomach.  If you want to elevate, elevate the head of the bed and not your own head.

Eat small portions and small meals.  Smaller loads allow the stomach to process and move food more quickly.  Eating more calories at one time increases risks.

Weight loss.  If overweight, losing weight is highly effective at reducing symptoms and in itself, may be a cure.

I am traveling, so these are just some quick thoughts, and I won’t be able to regularly check comments.

Standard disclaimers apply, these are standard lifestyle tips, and may not be appropriate for all people.

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China this month has rapidly dismantled key pillars of its zero-COVID strategy, doing away with snap lockdowns, lengthy quarantines and travel curbs in a jarring reversal of its hallmark containment strategy.

Cities across the country have struggled to cope as surging infections have emptied pharmacy shelves, filled hospital wards and appeared to cause backlogs at crematoriums and funeral homes.

But the end of strict testing mandates has made caseloads virtually impossible to track, while authorities have narrowed the medical definition of a COVID death in a move experts have said will suppress the number of fatalities attributable to the virus.

A news outlet operated by the ruling Communist Party in Qingdao on Friday reported the municipal health chief as saying that the eastern city was seeing "between 490,000 and 530,000" new COVID cases a day.

The coastal city of around 10 million people was "in a period of rapid transmission ahead of an approaching peak", Bo Tao reportedly said, adding that the infection rate would accelerate by another 10 percent over the weekend.

The report was shared by several other news outlets but appeared to have been edited by Saturday morning to remove the case figures.

China's National Health Commission said Saturday that 4,103 new domestic infections were recorded nationwide the previous day, with no new deaths.

In Shandong, the province where Qingdao is located, authorities officially logged just 31 new domestic cases.

China's government keeps a tight leash on the country's media, with legions of online censors on hand to scrub out content deemed politically sensitive.

Most government-run publications have downplayed the severity of the country's exit wave, instead depicting the policy reversal as logical and controlled.

But some outlets have hinted at shortages of medicine and hospitals under strain, though estimates of actual case numbers remain rare.

The government of eastern Jiangxi province said in a Friday social media post that 80 percent of its population—equivalent to around 36 million people—would be infected by March.

More than 18,000 COVID patients had been admitted to major medical institutions in the province in the two weeks up to Thursday, including nearly 500 severe cases but no deaths, the statement said.

© 2022 AFP

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"They say there's no beds here," she barked into her phone.

As China grapples with its first-ever national COVID-19 wave, emergency wards in small cities and towns southwest of Beijing are overwhelmed.

Intensive care units are turning away ambulances, relatives of sick people are searching for open beds, and patients are slumped on benches in hospital corridors and lying on floors for a lack of beds.

Yao's elderly mother-in-law had fallen ill a week ago with the coronavirus. They went first to a local hospital, where lung scans showed signs of pneumonia. But the hospital couldn't handle COVID-19 cases, Yao was told. She was told to go to larger hospitals in adjacent counties.

As Yao and her husband drove from hospital to hospital, they found all the wards were full. Zhuozhou Hospital, an hour's drive from Yao's hometown, was the latest disappointment.

Yao charged toward the check-in counter, past wheelchairs frantically moving elderly patients . Yet again, she was told the hospital was full, and that she would have to wait.

An ambulance prepares to transfer a patient in critical care to other hospitals due to overcapacity at the emergency department of the Langfang No. 4 People's Hospital in Bazhou city in northern China's Hebei province on Thursday, Dec. 22, 2022. As China grapples with its first-ever wave of COVID mass infections, emergency wards in the towns and cities to Beijing's southwest are overwhelmed. Intensive care units are turning away ambulances, residents are driving sick relatives from hospital to hospital, and patients are lying on floors for a lack of space. Credit: AP Photo

"I'm furious," Yao said, tearing up, as she clutched the lung scans from the local hospital. "I don't have much hope. We've been out for a long time and I'm terrified because she's having difficulty breathing."

Over two days, AP journalists visited five hospitals and two crematoriums in towns and small cities in Baoding and Langfang prefectures, in central Hebei province. The area was the epicenter of one of China's first outbreaks after the state loosened COVID-19 controls in November and December. For weeks, the region went quiet, as people fell ill and stayed home.

Many have now recovered. Today, markets are bustling, diners pack restaurants and cars are honking in snarling traffic, even as the virus is spreading in other parts of China. In recent days, headlines in state media said the area is " starting to resume normal life."

A patient rests in a bed at the emergency department of the Langfang No. 4 People's Hospital in Bazhou city in northern China's Hebei province on Thursday, Dec. 22, 2022. As China grapples with its first-ever wave of COVID mass infections, emergency wards in the towns and cities to Beijing's southwest are overwhelmed. Intensive care units are turning away ambulances, residents are driving sick relatives from hospital to hospital, and patients are lying on floors for a lack of space. Credit: AP Photo

But life in central Hebei's emergency wards and crematoriums is anything but normal. Even as the young go back to work and lines at fever clinics shrink, many of Hebei's elderly are falling into critical condition. As they overrun ICUs and funeral homes, it could be a harbinger of what's to come for the rest of China.

The Chinese government has reported only seven COVID-19 deaths since restrictions were loosened dramatically on Dec. 7, bringing the country's total toll to 5,241. On Tuesday, a Chinese health official said that China only counts deaths from pneumonia or respiratory failure in its official COVID-19 death toll, a narrow definition that excludes many deaths that would be attributed to COVID-19 in other places.

Experts have forecast between a million and 2 million deaths in China next year, and the World Health Organization warned that Beijing's way of counting would "underestimate the true death toll."

Relatives attend to a sickened patient in a wheelchair at the emergency department of the Langfang No. 4 People's Hospital in Bazhou city in northern China's Hebei province on Thursday, Dec. 22, 2022. As China grapples with its first-ever wave of COVID mass infections, emergency wards in the towns and cities to Beijing's southwest are overwhelmed. Intensive care units are turning away ambulances, residents are driving sick relatives from hospital to hospital, and patients are lying on floors for a lack of space. Credit: AP Photo/Dake Kang

At Baoding No. 2 Hospital, in Zhuozhou, Wednesday, patients thronged the hallway of the emergency ward. Patients were breathing with the help of respirators. One woman wailed after doctors told her that a loved one had died.

The ICU was so crowded, ambulances were turned away. A medical worker shouted at relatives wheeling in a patient from an arriving ambulance.

"There's no oxygen or electricity in this corridor!" the worker exclaimed. "If you can't even give him oxygen, how can you save him?"

"If you don't want any delays, turn around and get out quickly!" she said.

The relatives left, hoisting the patient back into the ambulance. It took off, lights flashing.

In two days of driving in the region, AP journalists passed around thirty ambulances. On one highway toward Beijing, two ambulances followed each other, lights flashing, as a third passed by heading in the opposite direction. Dispatchers are overwhelmed, with Beijing city officials reporting a sixfold surge in emergency calls earlier this month.

A worker in protective gear attends to visitors at the emergency department of the Langfang No. 4 People's Hospital in Bazhou city in northern China's Hebei province on Thursday, Dec. 22, 2022. As China grapples with its first-ever wave of COVID mass infections, emergency wards in the towns and cities to Beijing's southwest are overwhelmed. Intensive care units are turning away ambulances, residents are driving sick relatives from hospital to hospital, and patients are lying on floors for a lack of space. Credit: AP Photo

Some ambulances are heading to funeral homes. At the Zhuozhou crematorium, furnaces are burning overtime as workers struggle to cope with a spike in deaths in the past week, according to one employee. A funeral shop worker estimated it is burning 20 to 30 bodies a day, up from three to four before COVID-19 measures were loosened.

"There's been so many people dying," said Zhao Yongsheng, a worker at a funeral goods shop near a local hospital. "They work day and night, but they can't burn them all."

At a crematorium in Gaobeidian, about 20 kilometers (12 miles) south of Zhuozhou, the body of one 82-year-old woman was brought from Beijing, a two-hour drive, because funeral homes in China's capital were packed, according to the woman's grandson, Liang.

"They said we'd have to wait for 10 days," Liang said, giving only his surname because of the sensitivity of the situation.

A sickened patient is moved onto a gurney at the emergency department of the Langfang No. 4 People's Hospital in Bazhou city in northern China's Hebei province on Thursday, Dec. 22, 2022. As China grapples with its first-ever wave of COVID mass infections, emergency wards in the towns and cities to Beijing's southwest are overwhelmed. Intensive care units are turning away ambulances, residents are driving sick relatives from hospital to hospital, and patients are lying on floors for a lack of space. Credit: AP Photo

Liang's grandmother had been unvaccinated, Liang added, when she came down with coronavirus symptoms, and had spent her final days hooked to a respirator in a Beijing ICU.

Over two hours at the Gaobeidian crematorium on Thursday, AP journalists observed three ambulances and two vans unload bodies. A hundred or so people huddled in groups, some in traditional white Chinese mourning attire. They burned funeral paper and set off fireworks.

"There's been a lot!" a worker said when asked about the number of COVID-19 deaths, before funeral director Ma Xiaowei stepped in and brought the journalists to meet a local government official.

As the official listened in, Ma confirmed there were more cremations, but said he didn't know if COVID-19 was involved. He blamed the extra deaths on the arrival of winter.

A hospital worker prepares to perform tests after placing electrodes to the chest of a man sprawled out on a stretcher outside the emergency ward at the Langfang No. 4 People's Hospital in Bazhou city in northern China's Hebei province on Thursday, Dec. 22, 2022. As China grapples with its first-ever wave of COVID mass infections, emergency wards in the towns and cities to Beijing's southwest are overwhelmed. Intensive care units are turning away ambulances, residents are driving sick relatives from hospital to hospital, and patients are lying on floors for a lack of space. Credit: AP Photo

"Every year during this season, there's more," Ma said. "The pandemic hasn't really shown up" in the death toll, he said, as the official listened and nodded.

Even as anecdotal evidence and modeling suggests large numbers of people are getting infected and dying, some Hebei officials deny the virus has had much impact.

"There's no so-called explosion in cases, it's all under control," said Wang Ping, the administrative manager of Gaobeidian Hospital, speaking by the hospital's main gate. "There's been a slight decline in patients."

Wang said only a sixth of the hospital's 600 beds were occupied, but refused to allow AP journalists to enter. Two ambulances came to the hospital during the half hour AP journalists were present, and a patient's relative told the AP they were turned away from Gaobeidian's emergency ward because it was full.

Relatives gather near the beds of sickened patients at the emergency department of the Langfang No. 4 People's Hospital in Bazhou city in northern China's Hebei province on Thursday, Dec. 22, 2022. As China grapples with its first-ever wave of COVID mass infections, emergency wards in the towns and cities to Beijing's southwest are overwhelmed. Intensive care units are turning away ambulances, residents are driving sick relatives from hospital to hospital, and patients are lying on floors for a lack of space. Credit: AP Photo/Dake Kang

Thirty kilometers (19 miles) south in the town of Baigou, emergency ward doctor Sun Yana was candid, even as local officials listened in.

"There are more people with fevers, the number of patients has indeed increased," Sun said. She hesitated, then added, "I can't say whether I've become even busier or not. Our emergency department has always been busy."

The Baigou New Area Aerospace Hospital was quiet and orderly, with empty beds and short lines as nurses sprayed disinfectant. COVID-19 patients are separated from others, staff said, to prevent cross-infection. But they added that serious cases are being directed to hospitals in bigger cities, because of limited medical equipment.

The lack of ICU capacity in Baigou, which has about 60,000 residents, reflects a nationwide problem. Experts say medical resources in China's villages and towns, home to about 500 million of China's 1.4 billion people, lag far behind those of big cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. Some counties lack a single ICU bed.

A patient rests in a wheelchair at the emergency department of the Langfang No. 4 People's Hospital in Bazhou city in northern China's Hebei province on Thursday, Dec. 22, 2022. As China grapples with its first-ever wave of COVID mass infections, emergency wards in the towns and cities to Beijing's southwest are overwhelmed. Intensive care units are turning away ambulances, residents are driving sick relatives from hospital to hospital, and patients are lying on floors for a lack of space.

Credit: AP Photo/Dake Kang

As a result, patients in critical condition are forced to go to bigger cities for treatment. In Bazhou, a city 40 kilometers (25 miles) east of Baigou, a hundred or more people packed the emergency ward of Langfang No. 4 People's Hospital on Thursday night.

Guards worked to corral the crowds as people jostled for positions. With no space in the ward, patients spilled into corridors and hallways. Sick people sprawled on blankets on the floor as staff frantically wheeled gurneys and ventilators. In a hallway, half a dozen patients wheezed on metal benches as oxygen tanks pumped air into their noses.

Outside a CT scan room, a woman sitting on a bench wheezed as snot dribbled out of her nostrils into crumpled tissues. A man sprawled out on a stretcher outside the emergency ward as medical workers stuck electrodes to his chest. By a check-in counter, a woman sitting on a stool gasped for air as a young man held her hand.

Hospital workers discuss their work at the emergency department of Baigou New Area Aerospace Hospital in Baigou, in northern China's Hebei province on Thursday, Dec. 22, 2022. As China grapples with its first-ever wave of COVID mass infections, emergency wards in the towns and cities to Beijing's southwest are overwhelmed. Intensive care units are turning away ambulances, residents are driving sick relatives from hospital to hospital, and patients are lying on floors for a lack of space.

Credit: AP Photo

"Everyone in my family has got COVID," one man asked at the counter, as four others clamored for attention behind him. "What medicine can we get?"

In a corridor, a man paced as he shouted into his cellphone.

"The number of people has exploded!" he said. "There's no way you can get care here, there's far too many people."

It wasn't clear how many patients had COVID-19. Some had only mild symptoms, illustrating another issue, experts say, People in China rely more heavily on hospitals than in other countries, meaning it's easier for emergency medical resources to be overloaded.

Over two hours, AP journalists witnessed half a dozen or more ambulances pull up to the hospital's ICU and load critical patients to sprint to other hospitals, even as cars pulled up with dozens of new patients.

A beige van pulled up to the ICU and honked frantically at a waiting ambulance. "Move!" the driver shouted.

A hospital worker in protective gear disinfects the ward of an emergency department of Baigou New Area Aerospace Hospital in Baigou in northern China's Hebei province on Thursday, Dec. 22, 2022. As China grapples with its first-ever wave of COVID mass infections, emergency wards in the towns and cities to Beijing's southwest are overwhelmed. Intensive care units are turning away ambulances, residents are driving sick relatives from hospital to hospital, and patients are lying on floors for a lack of space. Credit: AP Photo

"Let's go, let's go!" a panicked voice cried. Five people hoisted a man bundled in blankets out of the back of the van and rushed him into the hospital. Security guards shouted in the packed ward: "Make way, make way!"

The guard asked a patient to move, but backed off when a relative snarled at him. The bundled man was laid on the floor instead, amid doctors running back and forth. "Grandpa!" a woman cried, crouching over the patient.

Medical workers rushed over a ventilator. "Can you open his mouth?" someone shouted.

As white plastic tubes were fitted onto his face, the man began to breathe more easily.

Others were not so lucky. Relatives surrounding another bed began tearing up as an elderly woman's vitals flatlined. A man tugged a cloth over the woman's face, and they stood, silently, before her body was wheeled away. Within minutes, another patient had taken her place.

© 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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In April 2016, Waseem Qasim, a professor of cell and gene therapy, was captivated by a new scientific paper that described a revolutionary way to manipulate DNA: base editing. The paper, published by David Liu’s lab at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, described a version of Crispr gene editing that allowed for more precise changes than ever before. “It seemed like science fiction had arrived,” says Qasim, who teaches at University College London.

The genetic code of every living thing is made up of a string composed of four chemical bases: A, C, G, and T. These pair up to form the double helix structure of DNA. Traditional Crispr and previous gene editing methods work by cutting DNA’s double-stranded helix in order to knock out a disease-causing gene, for instance. Base editing, on the other hand, simply swaps one chemical base for another in order to correct a mutation or disable a gene. The first base editor that Liu’s lab described could convert a C to a T. Others have been invented since. 

Scientists immediately recognized the value of base editing. Many inherited diseases, such as cystic fibrosis and sickle cell anemia, are caused by single-base changes in DNA. Now those mutations could, in theory, be fixed by converting one base for another. Qasim and his team wanted to use base editing for another purpose: altering immune cells in an attempt to treat cancer.

Using Liu’s paper as a guide, Qasim and his team created their own base editors and found that they were incredibly efficient at making genetic changes to cells in the lab. Over the next six years, they worked to improve the technology, and in May, they put it to the ultimate test, using it to treat a leukemia patient in hopes of curing her cancer. It was the first time this new form of gene editing was used to treat a human being.

The patient, a 13-year-old named Alyssa, was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive type of cancer called T-cell leukemia in May 2021. An important part of the immune system, T cells normally protect the body from infection. But in T-cell leukemia, they grow uncontrollably. Doctors tried to treat Alyssa with chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant, but her cancer came back.

With no other treatment options left, Alyssa was eligible for a trial testing the experimental base editing therapy. Qasim and his team collected T cells from a healthy donor and used base editing to make four separate changes—all C to T base conversions—to the cells. The edits allowed the donor T cells to slip past the body’s defenses, recognize a certain receptor on leukemia cells, and kill the cancer. Doctors at Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, part of University College London, then infused the edited cells into Alyssa’s bloodstream. 

After receiving the edited cells, Alyssa experienced an inflammatory side effect known as cytokine release syndrome, a common side effect with cancer immunotherapy. In some patients, it can be life-threatening, but Alyssa’s symptoms were mild and she recovered quickly, Qasim says. A month after her infusion, her cancer was in remission, and she continues to do well. “We’ve confirmed the disease levels are still undetectable,” Qasim says. He presented these preliminary results earlier this month at the American Society of Hematology meeting in New Orleans. (The findings have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.) 

It’s early days for base editing, so researchers will need to treat more patients and follow them for much longer to know whether the treatment is long-lasting. Qasim’s team plans to treat up to 10 children in the trial and monitor them for a year as part of the study, and then to continue with regular checkups.

Qasim and other scientists think base editing may be safer than Crispr since it doesn’t cause breaks in the DNA—a well-known drawback. Crispr works by slicing out problematic chunks of DNA, but it often cuts more than necessary. The cell naturally repairs the damaged area, but the fix is not always seamless. Sometimes, the repair process causes random rearrangements of DNA around the edited site—and in the case of multiple edits, there’s more risk of these rearrangements. While rare, these mistakes could theoretically give rise to cancer. Base editing, on the other hand, doesn’t cause this kind of cellular damage. 

This potential advantage has led US biotech companies Beam Therapeutics and Verve Therapeutics—both of Cambridge, Massachusetts—to pursue base editing treatments for cancer and a handful of inherited diseases. This summer, Verve began a human clinical trial in New Zealand, and both companies are ready to begin trials in the US. “If you want to knock something out, Crispr is a pretty good way to do it. But if you want to fix something, it’s a lot more difficult,” says John Evans, CEO of Beam Therapeutics. “Base editing is this next-generation style of editing that allows us more precise control of the change we want to make.”  

Sekar Kathiresan, CEO of Verve Therapeutics, says the company chose base editing over classic Crispr after comparing the two approaches in mice, monkeys, and human cells in the lab. In a 2021 paper in Nature, scientists at Verve and the University of Pennsylvania found that in monkeys, base editing was able to disable a gene called PCSK9 in the liver, shutting down the production of low-density lipoprotein, or LDL. High levels of LDL, also known as “bad” cholesterol, raise the risk of heart disease and stroke. An infusion of the base-editing lowered the PCSK9 protein by 90 percent and LDL levels by 60 percent. The effect lasted throughout the 10-month study—as well as over the two and a half years the company has followed the monkey since then, Kathiresan says.

Kathiresan sees a future in which base editing becomes a routine treatment for people at risk of repeated heart attacks. In the US, about one in five people who have a first heart attack are readmitted to a hospital for a second one within five years. After a heart attack, it’s common for people to get a stent—a small mesh tube that props open an artery—to improve blood flow. Kathiresan imagines that they might one day receive a second preventative procedure: a one-time base-editing treatment to permanently lower their LDL levels.

For now, the company is focusing on testing the treatment in patients with a genetic form of high cholesterol. In July, a patient in New Zealand became the first person to receive the treatment, which is delivered as a one-time infusion. The company is enrolling more patients in that trial and has yet to announce results. 

Trials in the United States may take more time, because the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is closely querying base editing applications. Verve has applied to bring a version of its cholesterol study to the US, but that is currently on hold until the company can provide more safety data to the agency. In a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Verve said the FDA has asked for more information on the risk of accidental edits to cells other than those in the liver—in particular, eggs and sperm. If these are accidentally edited, the genetic change could be passed on to future generations. 

“We’re not intending to do that,” Kathiresan says. “Our goal is to have the edit happen in that person and affect the cholesterol of the person that we’re treating.” Kathiresan says the company has animal data showing that editing did not occur in sperm or eggs in mice and monkeys.

Meanwhile, Beam Therapeutics has gotten a green light from the FDA to go ahead with a trial testing base editing in patients with sickle cell anemia, an inherited blood disorder that causes severe pain. People with the disease have sticky, misshapen red blood cells because they have abnormal hemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen through the body. Beam’s treatment makes an A to G edit to activate a fetal version of hemoglobin that counteracts the effects of the sickle cell mutation. Beam is screening potential trial candidates and plans to begin dosing patients next year.

But the company also faced questions and a temporary hold from the FDA when it proposed a second trial, this one for a leukemia treatment that uses base-edited T cells. In an August financial statement, the company disclosed that the FDA wanted more data about potential off-target edits. The agency lifted the hold on Beam’s trial earlier this month, allowing the trial to move forward.

Evans is not surprised with the FDA’s caution. “This is new science and we have patients in mind,” he says. But once trials get underway, 2023 could be the year that base editing joins Crispr at the avant-garde of gene editing.

A More Elegant Form of Gene Editing Progresses to Human Testing

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From Lake Pontchartrain to the Texas border, Louisiana has lost enough wetlands since the mid-1950s to cover the entire state of Rhode Island. Using a first-of-its-kind model, NASA-funded researchers quantified those wetlands losses at nearly 21 square miles (54 square kilometers) per year since the early 1980s.

In the new study, scientists used the NASA/USGS Landsat satellite record to track shoreline changes across Louisiana from 1984 to 2020. Some of those wetlands were submerged by rising seas; others were disrupted by oil and gas infrastructure and hurricanes. But the primary driver of losses was coastal and river engineering, which can have positive or negative effects depending on how it is implemented.

Centimeter by centimeter, wetlands are built by the slow accumulation – accretion – of mineral sediment and organic material carried by rivers and streams. Accretion makes new soil and counters erosion, the sinking of land, and the rise of sea level.

Human intervention and engineering often hold back or divert the flow of sediments that naturally accrete to build and replenish wetlands. For instance, reinforced levees and thousands of miles of canals and excavated banks have isolated many wetlands from the Mississippi River and the network of streams that course through its delta-like veins and capillaries. In a few cases, engineering projects have added sediment to delta areas and built new land.

By analyzing Landsat imagery with tools from cloud computing, the researchers developed a remote sensing model that focused on accretion or the lack of it. Basins that failed to build new soil, such as Terrebonne and Barataria, experienced the most land loss over the study period – more than 180 square miles (466 square kilometers). Other areas gained ground, including 33.6 square miles (87 square kilometers) of new land in the Atchafalaya Basin and 43 square miles (112 square kilometers) in the area known as the “Bird’s Foot Delta” at the mouth of the Mississippi River.

“The Louisiana coastal system is highly engineered,” said Daniel Jensen, lead author and postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “But the fact that ground has been gained in some places indicates that, with enough restoration efforts to reintroduce fresh water supply and sediment, we could see some wetland recovery in the future.”

A map of soil accretion in coastal Louisiana showing higher buildup in parts of Atchafalaya and the “Bird’s Foot Delta,” where the Mississippi River system deposits mineral-rich sediment during flood periods.
Credit: Jensen et al. Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences

 

Understanding wetland dieback and recovery is critically important because the Mississippi River Delta, like many of the world’s deltas, drives local and national economies through farming, fisheries, tourism, and shipping. “For the 350 million people who live and farm on deltas around the world, coastal wetlands provide a key link in the food chain,” said JPL’s Marc Simard, principal investigator of NASA’s Delta-X mission and co-author of the paper.

In several airborne and field campaigns since 2016, the Delta-X research team has been studying the Mississippi River Delta, the seventh largest on Earth, using airborne sensing and field measurements of water, vegetation, and sediment changes in the face of rising sea level. The Landsat analysis builds on this airborne mission. Delta-X is part of NASA’s Earth Venture Suborbital (EVS) program, managed at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

The new model by Jensen and colleagues is the first to directly estimate soil accretion rates in coastal wetlands using satellite data. Working with ground-based accretion records from Louisiana’s Coastwide Reference Monitoring System, the scientists were able to estimate amounts of mineral sediment from water pixels in the Landsat imagery and organic material from the land pixels.

The researchers said their approach could be applied beyond Louisiana because wetland loss and resiliency is a global phenomenon. From the Great Lakes to the Nile Delta, the Amazon to Siberia, wetlands are found on every continent except Antarctica. And they are declining in most places. Wetlands were recently called some of the “most vulnerable, most threatened, most valuable, and most diverse” ecosystems on the planet, according to an international analysis co-authored by NASA researchers.

But they also said a new generation of spaceborne tools, such as synthetic aperture radar, can increasingly inform conservation policies on the ground. This is because satellites support near-continuous mapping of ecosystems at a scale and consistency that is nearly impossible through traditional surveys and fieldwork.

The futures of our wetlands and coastal communities are intertwined with climate change, so sustainable management is critical. By storing decomposing plant matter in soil and roots, wetlands act as “blue carbon” sinks, preventing some greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide and methane) from escaping into the atmosphere. When vegetation dies, drowns, and fails to grow back, wetlands can no longer sequester (bury) carbon in soil and vegetation. At current rates of wetland loss in coastal Louisiana, carbon burial may have decreased 50% from 2013 estimates.

“Forty percent of the human population lives within a hundred kilometers of a coast,” Simard said. “It’s critical that we understand the processes that protect those lands and the livelihood of the people living there.”

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I heard some good news recently. My 91-year-old grandfather called me to test his new hearing aid. For the first time in a long time, he could hear my voice. It thrilled us both.

He and my grandmother had been trying to replace his previous hearing aid for more than a month but confusing instructions, impatient explanations and faulty hardware meant they’d almost given up. Now they had me on speakerphone and were giving me an update in excited voices. This time their story didn’t evoke sympathy but joy.

I soon saw it wasn’t just the hearing aid that had them grinning down the line, it was the person behind it – their new audiologist, Anna.

Unlike the previous providers they’d been dealing with, Anna gave them two miraculous gifts: time and attention. She didn’t, like one audiologist, assume that because a hearing aid worked while on his desk, it would work while in my grandad’s ear, or that if he could make it work at the clinic, my grandad could make it work at home.

Anna not only ensured the new hearing aid worked as it should, she offered to go to my grandparents’ apartment to show them – really show them – how to use it.

At first she suggested dropping by before she started work, but she worried that if traffic made her late they’d be too rushed. In the end she decided on a Friday after work. She’d pick up her son, then come straight to theirs. They protested. My grandad asked why she’d do such a thing. Anna’s reply: why not?

Such kindness might sound rare, even implausible, but I’ve since started wondering: what if it’s more common than we think?

It started with some research that showed people often underestimate the willingness of strangers to engage with, or even befriend them. Then I came across a study that suggested news coverage of current affairs tends to be more negative than positive because humans tend to give negative stimuli more attention.

From an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense: because positive stimuli doesn’t pose a threat to our survival, it doesn’t warrant as much attention. But if negative news is more attention-grabbing news, it will receive more coverage, and if it receives more coverage, we might start to think of the world as a more negative place than it really is. This will affect us at an individual level and a collective one.

I wonder how often my own attention leads me to focus on negative stimuli and stories at the expense of positive ones. I wonder if I’m more attentive to the negative stories my friends and family tell than the positive ones, and whether I’m more inclined to tell negative stories too.

What about all the little stories we only tell ourselves? Are they more negative than they need to be? What if you didn’t offend this person or disappoint that one? What if that friend hasn’t been holding a grudge? What if your parents are proud of you?

Negative stories can attract our attention and prepare us for disappointment. But if we don’t also engage with positive ones, they might lead us to be more cynical, more defensive and less hopeful than we need to be; they might close our minds to happier, and just as likely, possibilities.

We might not think of being wrong as something anyone would want to be, but being wrong – even just the possibility – can be a wondrous thing.

Maybe no one’s even noticed the flaw that, when you look in the mirror, is the only thing you see. Maybe you could have got that job; maybe you will. Maybe that new neighbour would like to be your friend. Maybe that date will call you back.

And maybe there’s still hope for the planet. Maybe some leaders do care; maybe we can make a difference. Maybe even little things – realising we might often be wrong; paying more attention to good news; making a point of sharing it – will help.

Whether Anna arrived before or after 7pm depends on who you ask, but my grandparents both testify with certainty that she stayed for 90 minutes. NINETY MINUTES, they told me, their voices filled with wonder and delight. What’s more, she wouldn’t bill them for a single minute.

Anna understood that for someone with virtually no hearing in one ear and severely impaired hearing in another, speaking quickly was akin to speaking in a foreign language – and when she told my grandfather so, he finally felt understood. She not only knew he needed patience, she was willing to offer it. She spoke to him slowly, giving his brain time to fill in the spaces caused by words he could not catch. She listened, she sympathised, she treated him with kindness and respect.

Anna’s attitude was remarkable. She went beyond the call of duty and, upon leaving, refused to accept anything but words as thanks.

Why do such a thing for virtual strangers? In Anna’s words, why not?

And when we witness or hear of a kind act, why not make a phone call, tell a friend?

Why not remind ourselves that, for all of the bad that’s in the world and in the news, behind the scenes, in people’s ordinary lives, lie untold stories of extraordinary good.

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A Utah mom who was given $500 in a random act of kindness returned the favor to a local homeless shelter by paying it forward.

Sierra Sandoval, her four-year-old son, and her six-month-old baby daughter were at the Layton Walmart on Monday when a stranger approached her at the check-out line as she was buying her groceries. The stranger, a little boy, handed Sandoval an envelope and told her that he wanted to spread the holiday spirit.

Opening the envelope once she got to her car, Sandoval was shocked to find $500 and instantly burst into tears. She says that her family has been stressed due to medicine shortages for her daughter, who was recently in the hospital because she had RSV, and that this was definitely a happy surprise. Sandoval is hoping to find out whoever gave her the money so she can tell them “Thank you.”

However, Sandoval opted to not keep the money for herself, instead paying it forward to those in her community who are in need. Spending most of the cash to buy toothbrushes, canned fruit and vegetables, soup, toilet paper, and any other items that homeless people might need, Sandoval donated the items to the Lantern House in Ogden.

Lauren Navidomskis, Executive Director of the shelter, says that Sandoval’s act of kindness is exactly how nonprofit homeless shelters survive during the winter time and that her help has gone a long way, especially with the shelter in need of toilet paper.

Sandoval hopes that the young boy and his family who gave her the money see how she paid their act of kindness forward.

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China will provide its people with domestically-produced Covid booster shots instead of foreign ones, despite the fact that US-made mRNA vaccines have a proven higher protection rate against serious illness and morbidity.

The announcement pinpricks earlier speculation that Beijing was preparing to lift its ban on the use of foreign vaccines made by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech and raises new dire questions about what will happen next after its recent abrupt lifting of “zero-Covid” lockdown and testing policies.

Highly infectious Omicron strains have reportedly resulted in a high death toll among the elderly, but Beijing has so far said it can manage the escalating health crisis while maintaining steady economic growth.

Beijing’s official comments on exclusive domestic vaccine use came after the United States proposed on Tuesday to donate Covid vaccines to China while saying viral outbreaks in the country threaten to hurt the global economy.

“We are the largest donor of Covid-19 vaccines around the world. We are prepared to continue to support countries around the world, including China, on this and other Covid-related health support,” Ned Price, a spokesperson of the US Department of State, said Tuesday. “This is profoundly in the interests of the rest of the world.”

Price said the United States’s Covid vaccines were safe and effective while the US had provided them to countries around the world regardless or in spite of any political disagreements.

“We don’t want to see death or disease spread anywhere,” he added. “Whenever the virus is spreading anywhere widely in an uncontrolled fashion, it has the potential for variants to emerge.”

Price declined to disclose the private discussions between the US and China on the matter.

US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech’s mRNA vaccine in a representational image. Photo: AFP

At the same time, Caixin reported that German nationals on the Chinese mainland will be able to receive BioNTech’s mRNA Covid-19 vaccines in the next few weeks, citing Germany’s ambassador to China.

Chinese columnists speculated there was a hidden US agenda behind the proposed donations, including gaining access to now-closed Chinese vaccine markets. Others wrote Washington sought to score a symbolic win vis-a-vis China in the two sides’ competing vaccine diplomacy drives.

Since China’s government announced a 10-point notice on December 7 calling on local authorities to avoid lockdowns, reduce PCR tests and allow Covid patients to quarantine at home rather than state-run facilities, many netizens have said their elderly relatives died at home because they could not be admitted to overcrowded hospitals.

The Ming Pao Daily, a Hong Kong newspaper, reported on Sunday that funeral service providers in Beijing were overrun by a sharp increase in demand. It claimed at least 2,700 people died at home in Beijing on December 17.

Asia Times could not independently confirm the figure. China’s official Covid death toll has shown only six cases since December 7.

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a Seattle-based public health organization, forecasts that one million Covid patients in China would die in 2023 with one-third of the deaths projected to happen in the first quarter.

Asked by foreign journalists whether China would accept the US vaccine offer, Mao Ning, a spokesperson of the Chinese foreign ministry, said China would rely on local vaccines.

“Booster shots are being rolled out in China. Medicine and test reagents can generally meet demand,” Mao said. “We believe that with the solidarity and concerted efforts of the Chinese people, our economic and social undertakings will enter a new stage of steady and orderly growth.”

“We are ready to continue working with the international community to meet the Covid challenge, better protect people’s lives and health, revitalize world economic growth, and build a global community of health for all,” she said.

As of December 13, 90.4% of China’s 1.4 billion population had received two vaccine doses while 57.9% have received a booster shot, according to China’s National Administration of Disease Control and Prevention. Most people have been inoculated with the inactivated vaccines, meaning not mRNA, produced by Sinovac and Sinopharm.

On December 13, the Comprehensive Team for Joint Prevention and Control Mechanism for Covid-19 under the State Council recommended in a new guideline for people to use a different vaccine for their second booster shots.

It said those who had already received three doses of China’s inactivated vaccines should try a new one, such as CanSino Biologics’s Convidecia, Anhui Zhifei Longcom’s recombinant Covid vaccine (CHO Cell) and WestVac BioPharma’s recombinant Covid vaccine (Sf9 cell).

However, the statement did not comment on the effectiveness of the Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines against Omicron strains of the virus.

A Heilongjiang-based columnist on Wednesday published an article titled “The US will donate vaccines to China? Don’t be happy. It may have a hidden agenda.”

He said many US people did not get a booster shot of mRNA vaccines as they were worried about potential side effects as well as quality. He said Chinese people should think twice before receiving and taking American vaccines.

He also said it was ridiculous that the US donated just 80 vials, or 480 doses, of Pfizer vaccines to Trinidad and Tobago in June 2021. He also criticized the US for donating 3 million doses of Moderna vaccines to allegedly coax the Philippines into re-enforcing their Visiting Forces Agreement, a bilateral military pact that allows for US troops to station in the country on a rotational basis.

In June last year, the US Embassy in Trinidad and Tobago received negative comments on the Internet after tweeting that the US government had donated 80 vials of vaccines to the twin-island Caribbean nation, which has a 1.4 million population. Later, it said the total amount of donations would be 900,000 doses.

This photo taken on August 21, 2021, shows high school students queueing to receive the Sinovac vaccine in Nanjing in China’s eastern Jiangsu province. Photo: AFP

A Hebei-based columnist said it was no coincidence that the US proposed to donate its vaccines to China after many Western media outlets made forecasts that more than a million Chinese Covid patients would die in the current gathering outbreak.

He said the US only wanted to access China’s huge vaccine market and profit from the Chinese people.

Citing Singapore’s experience, Zhang Wenhong, chief of the Infectious Diseases Division at Shanghai’s Huashan Hospital, said China’s current epidemic wave would last between two and four months. He said Omicron was less pathogenic than the previous strains but could still prove fatal for elderly people and those with chronic diseases.

A Shanxi-based writer said he had once believed in medical experts, including Zhang, who said Omicron was similar to seasonal flu but was now doubtful after so many patients had died.

He said Chinese people should remain vigilant as no one knew whether new dangerous variants would emerge next year with the disease now spreading so widely and quickly.

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Two-thirds of Antarctica’s native species, including emperor penguins, are under threat of extinction or major population declines by 2100 under current trajectories of global heating, according to new research that outlines priorities for protecting the continent’s biodiversity.

The study, an international collaboration between scientists, conservationists and policymakers from 28 institutions in 12 countries, identified emperor penguins as the Antarctic species at greatest risk of extinction, followed by other seabirds and dry soil nematodes.

“Up to 80% of emperor penguin colonies are projected to be quasi-extinct by 2100 [population declines of more than 90%] with business-as-usual increases in greenhouse gas emissions,” it found.

Published in the journal Plos Biology, the research also found that implementing 10 key threat management strategies in parallel – which would cost an estimated US$23m annually – could benefit up to 84% of Antarctic organisms.

Adélie penguins are one species predicted to decline by 2100 due to the effects of global heating. Photograph: Australian Antarctic Division/Jessica Fitzpatrick

Influencing global policy to effectively limit global heating was identified as the conservation strategy with the most benefit.

“There are multiple threats impacting Antarctic species despite the fact that we think of it as this remote and pristine wilderness,” said the study’s lead author, Dr Jasmine Lee, of the British Antarctic Survey. “The greatest threat is not coming from within.”

Lee, who undertook the research as part of a PhD at the University of Queensland, added that the study’s co-authors recognised global action on climate was less locally feasible than actions such as managing non-native species on the continent.

With increasing human activity on Antarctica – both research and tourism – the risk of introducing exotic species was growing, Lee said.

Dr Aleks Terauds, of the Australian Antarctic Division and a co-author of the study said the research highlighted that “biodiversity is under considerable pressure in Antarctica”.

“Antarctica is very well protected through the Antarctic treaty and through the protocol [on environmental protection],” Terauds said. “But the uniqueness of the continent, its wilderness values and the incredible biodiversity means that we’re still looking for things that we can do to try and ensure that things are impacted as little as possible.”

Minimising the effects of human activities on Antarctica was identified as the most cost-effective management strategy.

“We can educate our tourist companies better about areas that they should avoid with regard to some of these species that are under threat; we can educate the tourists themselves,” Terauds said.

Other avenues include reducing the environmental footprint of transport vessels and aircraft, as well as infrastructure projects and protecting vegetation from trampling and other physical damage.

Even if global heating cannot be mitigated, all regional strategies combined would still benefit about 54% of Antarctic species, the paper found.

It also highlighted the affect of the climate crisis on iconic seabirds such as emperor and Adélie penguins. “The emperor penguin relies on ice for breeding,” Lee said. “If it loses its suitable breeding habitat … that can lead to [population] collapses over time.”

Lesser-known species such as Scottnema lindsayae, a type of roundworm, are already in decline. “It’s an Antarctic specialist and it survives in quite salty and dry soils. As ice starts to melt and it gets warmer … the soils become more moist and less saline,” Lee said.

Terauds added: “Things like nematodes – as uninteresting as they sound – they are pretty amazing. They are living in some of the most inhospitable parts of the planet.”

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About 248 million people, which is nearly 18% of the population, are likely to have contracted the virus in the first 20 days of December, the report said, citing minutes from an internal meeting of China's National Health Commission held on Wednesday.

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Every time you peel a banana and dispose of the skin, you're throwing away a tasty, nutritious snack.

A recent study has shown if banana peels are blanched, dried, and ground into a flour, they can be turned into baked goods that taste just as nice, if not better than wheat-based products.

Unless you're a devoted reader of vegan cooking blogs or a Nigella Lawson fan, you've probably never considered cooking with a banana peel.

But not only is it perfectly safe, but scientists also demonstrated it really is good for you.

When their experiment's products were taste-tested, consumers reported they were just as happy with the flavors as they were with peel-free sugar cookies.

You'll even get a generous helping of minerals and cancer-fighting nutrients. Enriched with banana peels, for instance, the sugar cookies made in the study contained much more fiber, magnesium, potassium, and antioxidant compounds.

On the downside, adding too much banana peel flour did result in cookies that were somewhat brown and hard, possibly from all the extra fiber.

But when batches were made with flour containing 7.5 percent banana peel, the texture of the cookies hit a far more appealing balance.

As a bonus, the goods also kept well on the shelf for three months at room temperature.

While the study only looked at the consequences of adding banana peels to baked cookies, the results suggest using banana peel flour in breads, cakes, and pasta might also be worth considering.

Last year, for instance, a study on banana peel cake found the yellow skin of the fruit provides a natural food color to the baked product as well as a nutritional boost.

A 2016 study, meanwhile, found that substituting up to 10 percent of wheat flour with banana peel flour can enrich baked bread with higher protein, carbohydrate, and fat contents.

Not into baking? Nigella Lawson has used banana peels in curry, and vegan bloggers have recently popularized the idea of banana peel bacon and pulled peel 'pork'.

Eating the skin of this fruit isn't just a healthy option, it can help reduce food waste. Around 40 percent of a banana's weight is in its peel, and most of the time, this nutrition-packed skin is simply thrown away.

Sure, banana peels are pretty useless when raw. But if they are prepared right, they can actually taste pretty darn good. They can possibly even extend the shelf life of some products as the peels have antioxidant and antimicrobial properties.

The same goes for other fruit peels, too, like mango skin, which was also found to boost a cake's antioxidant properties and improve its flavor.

So the next time you strip down a banana for the fruit inside, consider keeping the skin. Your belly might thank you later.

The study was published in ACS Food Science & Technology.

A version of this article was first published in August 2022.

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Pharmacies in major cities have been stripped bare in the wake of the Chinese government's sudden decision to lift years of lockdowns, quarantines and mass testing.

Authorities have urged those with mild symptoms to stay at home and take treatment into their own hands, leading to a run on everything from ibuprofen to rapid antigen tests.

To address nationwide shortages, more than a dozen Chinese pharmaceutical firms have been tapped by officials to help "secure supplies" of key drugs—a euphemism for requisitioning—according to AFP interviews and local media.

At least 11 of 42 test kit makers whose products are licensed by China's medical regulators have had part of their production seized by the government or received orders from the state, local reports said.

Wiz Biotech, a rapid antigen test maker in the southern city of Xiamen, confirmed to AFP on Thursday that all kits they produce will be requisitioned by the local government.

In Beijing, authorities have sent additional staff to six manufacturers of antigen kits to help them "increase production", the municipality said on its website.

'Whole family sick'

Across China, millions are struggling to get hold of basic medical supplies.

"My whole family is sick and I can't buy medicine for the fever," Chengdu resident Yanyan, who gave only her first name, told AFP.

On Thursday, a dozen pharmacies around the country reported fever medicine shortages.

"We haven't had any for a week or two at all... I still have a few painkillers left, but very few," a pharmacist in the northwestern region of Ningxia told AFP.

Some local authorities have instituted rationing policies.

In Zhuhai city, officials said Monday that ID registration would be needed to buy fever medicines at more than 500 pharmacies, with residents now only allowed to purchase six tablets a week.

Nanjing, the capital of eastern Jiangsu province, said it had secured two million fever medication tablets, but that customers were also limited to six a week.

The eastern city of Hangzhou on Thursday urged citizens to place medicine orders "rationally" based on their needs.

"Do not blindly hoard medicines... leave them to the people who really need them," read a notice from the city's market supervisory administration.

One expert told AFP the bottleneck in supplies was a logistics rather than production issue.

"The industry and information authorities are heading up measures to secure production, but the logistics are still far from being smooth, namely the traditional channels of hospitals and pharmacies," said Zhou Zhicheng, director at the China Federation of Logistics and Purchasing.

And as cases surge, hospital wards in major cities are filling up with elderly COVID-19 patients.

In the eastern megacity of Shanghai, an AFP journalist saw corridors of an emergency department lined with stretchers filled with elderly people hooked up to oxygen tanks.

AFP counted at least 15 such patients spilling out from wards into the hallway, some with suitcases next to their trolleys.

'Sudden surge'

In the face of the outbreak on the mainland, anxious shoppers in Hong Kong have been snapping up over-the-counter flu medicine, clearing out pharmacy shelves for nearly two weeks.

"Last week, there were people who bought a dozen, two dozen boxes of Panadol to send to mainland China," one pharmacy worker told AFP.

The semi-autonomous city's largest pharmacy chain, Mannings, has limited purchases of fever, cold, flu and cough medicines by popular Western brands, as well as Chinese Lianhua Qingwen capsules, citing "a sudden surge in demand".

The chair of the Hong Kong General Chamber of Pharmacy said most of the purchased medicine was likely headed for China.

And Taiwanese authorities said they had also seen bulk-buying of Panadol and similar medicines rise in the past few weeks.

"If the situation worsens, we will consider a rationing scheme to limit the number each individual can buy," said the head of Taiwan's epidemic control command centre.

© 2022 AFP

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