He played the lottery, like he had been doing for over 20 years.

His intuition told him: don't just buy one ticket, buy six. And don't just use any numbers, use the exact same numbers on each ticket.

As luck would have it, Raymond Roberts' numbers came in, and were worth $390,000 (£324,000) each as a cash prize.

Mr Roberts chose to take a lump sum for five of the tickets - earning nearly $2m (£1.6m) in total.

For the sixth ticket, he chose the annuity option - meaning he will also get 20 annual payments of $25,000.

The lottery awards a set amount for correctly drawing five balls, as Mr Roberts did, meaning multiple wins with the same numbers are possible.

The winning numbers Mr Roberts chose were a carefully concocted combination of birthdays and anniversary dates. He had used them on other lottery tickets, on other days, but had drawn a blank.  

The veteran, of Fall River, 50 miles (80km) south of Boston, picked up his winnings on 15 December.

So what does he plan to do with his unexpected riches?

For starters, he'll buy a motorcycle, according to the lottery.

Lucky for Life was the game Mr Roberts played, and indeed that's what some might call him.

According to the rules of the game, the odds of winning just the $25,000 per year for life prize are one in 1,813,028.

Residents of Massachusetts spend the most per capita on lottery and scratch-off tickets than anywhere else in the US.

Source

By Simer Chawla: With Covid-19 once again spreading in China, speculations of lockdown in India have started surfacing. Amid all this, the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IIT Kanpur), has said that people should not panic as 98 per cent of India's population has developed natural immunity against Covid.

Professor Manindra Aggarwal, IIT Kanpur, said "It is possible that some people's immunity is weak and a small Covid wave may be witnessed. Other than that, it won't matter."

Based on his mathematical model, professor Aggarwal said that by the end of October only 5 per cent of the population in China had natural immunity.

"It increased to 20 per cent in November. Infections in China have increased rapidly since November. The Chinese government is reporting only one case in more than 500 cases of infection. Because of this, the number of daily cases in China are less," he added.

The professor also stated, "The countries of the world which have achieved natural immunity are not in any danger. The rise in cases in Brazil is due to the spread of a new, more virulent mutant of Omicron. 25 per cent of the population in South Korea, 40 per cent in Japan and 20 per cent in the United States have not been able to acquire natural immunity."

Source

Frigid temperatures are expected to sting two-thirds of the continental US this week as a powerful storm system races eastward. The timing couldn’t be worse, hitting right before the holidays, when many Americans are planning to travel. Those journeys — and even just being outside in some of the hardest-hit regions — may become treacherous as brutal cold blankets the country.

 

“What better way to kick off the official start of astronomical winter than with numerous winter weather hazards impacting a majority of the Nation,” a National Weather Service (NWS) forecast said early Wednesday. This morning, the NWS updated its forecast to warn of “widespread disruptive and potentially crippling impacts across the central and eastern United States.”

 

The biggest culprit behind the holiday madness is an extremely cold air mass moving in from the Arctic. That’s ushering in conditions surprisingly similar to the legendary “Great Blizzard of 1978,” experts tell The Verge. Fortunately, forecasters can now issue more accurate warnings much earlier than they could in the ’70s. Hopefully, that’ll give people enough time to prepare and keep themselves safe. This storm system packs a number of punches — from rapidly dropping temperatures to dangerous winds, snow, and ice.

 

“You won’t see the like of this kind of a storm probably another time in the next 25 or so years,” Jonathan Martin, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, tells The Verge. “It’s really intense, and in some locations, the impacts will be extraordinary.”

 

Dropped luggage sits at O’Hare International Airport on December 22nd, 2022, in Chicago. More than 1,500 flights were canceled across the US by Thursday morning as a massive winter storm upended holiday travel plans with a triple threat of heavy snow, howling winds and bitter cold. 

Photo by Kamil Krzackynski / AFP via Getty Images

 

Why is the US facing a record-breaking cold air mass? Well, the sun set at the North Pole on September 21st. The Arctic is in the dead of its months-long winter darkness. With no sun to warm the air up, Martin explains, “All that the air can do is cool off because it’s a 24-hour-long nighttime. So you can generate exceptionally cold air masses at this time of year.”

 

That cold air mass was able to hitch a ride south thanks to a buckling jet stream, which is basically a narrow band high up in the atmosphere of strong winds that blow from west to east. “The jet stream essentially is doing what would you could call a roller coaster ride. It’s basically picking up that cold airmass from western parts of Canada and the Arctic and driving it almost due south across the Great Plains and Great Lakes,” Greg Carbin, chief of the Forecast Operations Branch at the NOAA Weather Prediction Center, tells The Verge.

 

The jet stream pattern we’re seeing now happens to look a lot like it did back in 1978. That year’s “great blizzard” in the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes region stripped hundreds of thousands of homes of power and heat and killed over 70 people. “This once-in-a-lifetime storm will always be the standard by which the severities of all future winter storms to hit this region are judged,” according to the National Weather Service website.

 

Rapid temperature drops and devastating wind were hallmarks of that storm and are the biggest concern for forecasters now. Across the central High Plains, temperatures have free-fallen some 50 degrees Fahrenheit within a few hours as the leading edge of that cold air mass, the cold front, advances. Yesterday in Laramie, Wyoming, temperatures plummeted from 27 degrees to 3 degrees in only 15 minutes. The quick drop in temperature raises the risk of ice suddenly building up on streets and roadways, particularly in places forecast to get rain before the cold arrives. A couple dozen daily temperature records could be set in the days ahead, according to Carbin.

 

The sharp temperature contrast between the cold front and the warmer air it meets is also the perfect recipe for an intensifying cyclone with fierce gales. The storm is expected to intensify quickly enough to be considered a “bomb cyclone,” which is when atmospheric pressure in the center of a storm drops at least 24 millibars over 24 hours. A cyclone is another term for a low-pressure system, and lower pressure leads to stronger storms.

 

Wind gusts with this storm system are forecast to reach over 60 miles per hour. That’s a dangerous combination with even moderate snowfall. Those blizzard conditions could knock out power and make travel impossible ahead of the holiday weekend. And even weaker gales will make it feel even more frigid outside. Wind chills as low as minus 70 degrees Fahrenheit are possible in parts of the Great Plains through the rest of the week. Without taking precautions, exposure to wind chill that bad can cause frostbite in less than five minutes, according to the NWS. More than 30 states face wind chill warnings, watches, and advisories as of today.

 

“Definitely the scale of the storm itself is much larger than your typical nor’easter or Midwest blizzard,” says Andrea Lopez Lang, an associate professor of atmospheric and environmental sciences at the University at Albany. She’s already expecting scientists to descend upon the dynamics of this cyclone for their research. The conditions surrounding this storm, she says, are “a textbook example of how to get storms to intensify.”

 

 

Here’s what’s driving the frigid storm that’s messing up holiday plans across the US

Backup Soyuz can’t get to ISS before late February

Triston and I were standing in the shade of a tree of heaven in Pisgah National Forest, on the fringes of the Appalachian Mountains. We were with his crew of four AmeriCorps members, enjoying a respite from the hot North Carolina summer sun. To my unstudied eye, the tree looked like just another beautiful inhabitant of the ecosystem—and in its native East Asia, that’s what it would be. But here, the species grows so quickly that it takes over the forest canopy, stealing sunlight from the trees, shrubs, and grasses that live below. Its leaves are toxic; when they fall, they poison the soil and suppress the germination of any plant that tries to survive in its shadow.

The crew members, all in their early to mid-twenties, were on a mission to find and kill as many invasive plants as they could. They were outfitted with identical PPE—long pants and sleeves, turquoise nitrile gloves, safety glasses, and hard hats bearing the logo of their employer, American Conservation Experience, a nonprofit that coordinates environmental restoration work around the country. But each member of the ACE crew retained a personalized style: Triston was neatly ironed and tucked in, a carabiner tidily clipping his car keys to his belt loop. Eva Tillett had tied her pants up with a length of tattered white rope. Carly Coffman hung her safety glasses from a cheerful rainbow-coloured strap. Lucas Durham had threaded earbuds through his shirt and under the straps of his helmet so he could listen to jams while he worked. 

To kill the tree, the ACErs would use a technique known as hack-and-squirt. Triston held up a hatchet. “Would you like the honors?” he asked me. I felt a pang. I steadied myself and cut 10 shallow notches into the trunk—minor enough wounds, we hoped, that the tree wouldn’t go into hydra mode. The bark curled off like half-peeled scabs. Eva passed me a squirt bottle full of bright blue liquid containing Triclopyr, an herbicide. “Spritz it, yo!” Lucas said. I spritzed. The liquid filled each wound and dripped down like alien blood. 

Hack-and-squirt allows the Triclopyr to stealthily infiltrate the tree’s vascular system. The tree, oblivious, carries the poison to its roots, where the chemical mimics one of its own growth hormones and forces its cells to divide themselves to death. Like something out of a Greek myth, the punishment parallels the crime.

Our work on the big tree took just a few minutes. Then the crew fanned out and went after its offspring. The saplings were too young to have bark, so instead of notching them we shaved a bit of stem off with our hatchet blades and dabbed herbicide into the scrape like antiseptic on a skinned knee. Triston found a sapling that another crew had already tried to kill. It had been cut down to a few knotty stumps, but a bundle of tenacious shoots was erupting out of it. “It doesn’t want to die,” Triston said. We unceremoniously skinned and squirted it. Maybe this time the herbicide would take. 

Almost 20 years ago, around when American Conservation Experience was founded, the US Forest Service estimated that invasive plants covered 133 million acres in the country, an area as big as California and New York combined. Every year since then, they have claimed millions of additional acres in the United States, incurring billions of dollars in crop losses and land management costs and introducing numerous new pathogens and pests. (The tree of heaven, for example, is the primary reproductive host for the infamous spotted lanternfly, which managed to infest New York City within two years of appearing there.)

At a time when Earth’s ecosystems are under constant assault from habitat destruction and climate change, invasive plants present a uniquely unsettling global threat. Like Triclopyr, they kill silently and slowly. First they choke out native flora, which means some native herbivores and pollinators start to go hungry, which means some native carnivores do too. Eventually, those species may depart or die out, draining the landscape of biodiversity. The rich, layered variety of the ecosystem gives way to a bland monoculture. Some evolutionary biologists warn of a dawning Homogocene, an era in which invasive species become increasingly dominant—and uniform—across the globe.

Triston and the ACE crew were here, hacking and hollering, to fight one tiny part of that global advance. They would measure their success not in millions of acres or billions of dollars but in freshly sawn bittersweet stumps, withered spiraea tendrils, and native seedlings winding toward the light. 

By 7 pm, we were all starving. Dinner was at the sprawling, ranch-style crew house in Asheville where Triston, Eva, Carly, and Lucas lived with an ever-rotating gang of ACEers. The vibe was a combination of college dorm, co-op, and barrack; there were bunk beds, comfy mismatched sofas, and a cherished collection of Star Trek videotapes. 

When I arrived, Ron Bethea, 25, was choosing a garnish for a shakshuka he’d made with Carly. He picked out a few herbs from an old lunch box crammed with spice blends he collects from every new city he visits. Ron, I learn, is a bit of an ACE legend. A born-and-raised North Carolinian with a sharp sense of humor, he keeps crews entertained with horror stories about rogue birders. (“Birders do not play. They get violent.”) Ron started as an ACE crew member in 2019, became a crew leader in 2020, and was recently promoted to project manager. He watches out for the younger crew members, gently reminding new recruits to brush their teeth. The seemingly endless grind of fieldwork can be a shock, but Ron brings out the fun and drama in the job; when you’re working with Ron, you’re not just weeding, you’re waging war. “I don’t know if you’ve seen anyone play Call of Duty, but that’s exactly how it feels,” Ron said. “We have our ammunition, we’re coordinating our strategies. Like ‘Hey, you go around this tree line, I’ll go around the other side, and we’ll meet you in the middle.’”

“He’s a great cook,” Lucas told me. “He’s so iconic.” Carly pulled out her water bottle and showed me a sticker of Ron in his trademark tie-dye bandana. Wreathing his head was one of his catchphrases: “It be ya own bitches.” As in, trust no one. 

The six of us sat down at a big scuffed-up table, surrounded by crew members’ handmade artwork and goofy photos tacked to the walls. Over dinner, while we passed around Ron’s garlic confit, everyone told their funniest stories from the summer. Like how once Ron ugly-cried after accidentally chainsawing in half a turtle that was hidden in an old log. There was the time a crew member peed on a hornet’s nest and sicced the hornets on the rest of the crew; the only person to escape unscathed had his oversize T-shirt to thank. “He was built like a toothpick in a garbage bag!” Ron said—the stingers just couldn’t find him. Another time, an angry wasp flew down a crew member’s shirt, but he stayed so calm no one believed him. “I’m being stung. Ow. I’m being stung,” he’d said, serenely. 

The crew’s easy camaraderie had formed over just a few months. ACE functions as a contractor for government organizations that need conservation work done, including the Park Service, the Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife, the Bureau of Land Management, and municipalities. Its funding is pieced together from federal agencies, grants, and other nonprofits, like the Conservation Fund or the Nature Conservancy. For labor, the organization relies on training inexperienced young people to be, essentially, short-term volunteers; besides room and board, crew members receive a living allowance of $240 per week. You don’t need a college degree to serve in AmeriCorps, and the program grants an education award that can be applied to tuition or student loans. It gives aspiring conservationists a chance to build land and forest management expertise that can only come from being in the field. 

Everyone around the table was there for different reasons. Triston hoped the field experience would help him get a long-term job with the Forest Service. Carly was shadowing Triston. Lucas was looking for something interesting to do during his summer break from college. Eva had a degree in ecology and was hoping to leave her office job for something more hands-on. Many ACEers are trying to jump-start conservation careers; others just want to work in nature for a while. Some stay for a few months; a few, like Ron, stay for years. 

In his time at ACE, Ron has worked on invasive plant removal projects across the East Coast and all the way to Kansas; he’s traveled to seven states this year alone. Over his tenure, he’s grown to appreciate the wiliness of his floral foes. “These plants are smart. They know what they’re doing,” Ron told me. “They’re invasive because they know.”

Out of all the non-native plants that arrive in North America, only a fraction become invasive. Most either perish immediately or weave themselves into their new ecosystems, participating in the normal push and pull of predation, symbiosis, and competition. But even a small number of invasive species can quickly provoke disaster because they share traits that make them impressively resilient: They are hyper-fertile and fast-growing, with an arsenal of botanical superpowers that allow them to decimate native flora and transform their surroundings according to their own tastes. 

Climate change is only accelerating the problem. Across the country, growing seasons for invasive plants are getting longer. In the Southeast, winter freezes were once an effective natural weapon against tropical plants that tried to grow in the temperate ecosystem. Now, as the region warms, the plants can survive year-round.

It’s worth noting that most invasive plants aren’t true invaders; they are escape artists. Every one of the invasive plants I saw in North Carolina was brought to North America deliberately in the 18th and 19th centuries, during a kind of horticultural free-for-all. Wealthy enthusiasts scooped up attractive plants from across the world and promoted them as exotic, hardy additions to gardens, parks, and hedgerows. Then, one by one, the plants escaped from cultivation, and these luxury goods transformed into ecological disasters. Some of America’s most noxious invasive plants—floating heart, Asiatic bittersweet, Japanese meadowsweets, princess tree, porcelain berry—are the botanical pets of aristocrats, gone feral. 

The sun was about to rise when I joined Ron and an ACE wetland restoration crew in Raleigh's Walnut Creek Wetland Park for the start of their work day. The park preserves a corner of wilderness within one of the city’s lowest-income areas. For decades, the nearby creek was a dumping ground for sewage. Local residents started doing volunteer cleanups, and in the 90s funding was secured to create the park. This was a big win for biodiversity; wetland ecosystems like the park support more than 70 percent of North Carolina’s protected species. Now, the park is being eaten by kudzu, and this crew was tasked with removing it. 

Kudzu, the infamous “vine that ate the South,” lives up to the hype. Most of the roadsides I saw in North Carolina had been fully digested into a surreal kudzu-textured world. Tree-shaped kudzu. A delicate curve of telephone-wire-shaped kudzu. Barn-shaped kudzu, with little kudzu chimneys. “If you leave for six months, your car belongs to the wilderness,” Ron said. “It’s not your car anymore.” The vine can grow a foot a day.

Invasive vines tend to be serial stranglers. Not only do they climb high enough to cover the canopy and steal sunlight, they can wrap trees so tightly that they squeeze the sapwood, making it harder for water and nutrients to travel between the canopy and the roots. It’s yet another ability that allows invasive vines to outcompete their native counterparts. On the bright side, it makes them easier for an inexperienced invasive-plant hunter like myself to identify. Just keep an eye out for the stranglers, one ACE project manager told me. “Native vines that are meant to be here don’t girdle trees just for fun.” 

Ron and Emery Harms, the crew leader, drove me and the crew into the park to get us closer to the day’s first target site, and we armed ourselves with hand tools from a fat plastic bucket: thick gardening gloves, handsaws that unfolded like switchblades, loppers, and squeeze bottles with spongy tips for blotting herbicide. Thus equipped, we began the kudzu massacre. Whenever the crew and I painstakingly unwound a kudzu vine from the tree beneath, it left craggy scars in the bark. Slowly, native white ash and Eastern cottonwood trees appeared from below the kudzu, like freed hostages. Then, to make sure the vines didn’t just climb right back up, we had to find and chop the root—or rather, roots, because a single vine can have several root sites. It was like untangling a colossal, fragile knot, except every mistake generated a new knot. More than once, I pulled on the end of a kudzu vine, chasing the stem up and down trees and under old logs—only to find one of my crewmates pulling on the other end, like a giant, botanical version of the spaghetti scene from Lady and the Tramp. Meanwhile, every tug on a vine covered us in kudzu bugs: chunky, invasive sap-suckers that pinged off our safety helmets like hail. 

The wetland itself was lush and lively with animals, with a warm buzz of crickets, grasshoppers, and frogs. After a few hours, one of the crew members called everyone over and we stopped working for a moment to watch a wolf spider carrying her egg sac, a perfect blue marble, through the grass.

In the afternoon, we tackled a clump of wetland where kudzu, bittersweet, and invasive privet shrubs wrapped thickly together into an evil matrix. We were “windowing”: creating an open space between the bottom of the canopy and the ground to remove the invasive vines’ access to soil and bring sunlight back to the forest floor. While Emery tackled the nearly foot-thick privet trunk with a chainsaw, I kept carefully outside the “blood bubble”—the hypothetical circle circumscribed by an outstretched arm holding a chainsaw—and hacked away at a smaller shrub with a handsaw. Once Emery cut completely through the trunk, I braced for the tree to fall, but instead it hung in the air like a ghost, its whole weight suspended from above by the vines knotted around its canopy. We cheered as Ron dragged the tree, 10 times his size, to the deadwood pile. By the end of the afternoon, we’d turned the shady thicket, clotted with privet, into a sunny, airy clearing. “It seems like you’ve got a bloodlust now,” Emery said to me. 

In that new clearing, native plants will have a chance to gain back a little ground. Other parts of the park are too far gone. As we walked back to the ACE van at the end of the day, Emery pointed out a monster tower of kudzu, too dense to chop; “I’d have loved to hit that,” they said wistfully, “but it would have grown back in three weeks.” With limited manpower, crews have to ruthlessly prioritize areas where they can have the most impact. The goal is to do enough to keep native plants in the game until their next visit. As Ron put it, “it’s never a one-and-done deal.” Even in the best-case scenario, the same fight will keep playing out season after season. “On the one hand, it looks better than it was,” one crew member said. “But compared to what it could be … woof.” In this field, every victory is a small win. If the birds, amphibians, insects, and other creatures that rely on the wetland can flourish for another year, that will have to do. 

Is the painstaking, piecemeal work of halting invasives more trouble than it’s worth? Some ecologists argue that if the plants are left alone, the ecosystems will manage themselves. Invasive species, the thinking goes, will eventually become less dominant as they build connections to other organisms and as those other organisms evolve defenses against them. Given some time, native species can put up a fight against the Homogocene. When I asked Joost Besijn, the director of ACE’s eastern division, about this idea, he said that in the long term it could prove true—but in many cases, “long” might be longer than people can afford. “I guess it all depends on the time scale you look at,” he said. “In a million years, does it really matter? But in the short term, many invasive species will completely decimate the carrying capacity of an ecosystem.”  

In the face of such enormous and intractable environmental problems, the public tends to look to the white-collar experts—scientists, researchers, policymakers—for answers. But in North Carolina, I saw that some of the United States’ most immediate needs depend on an entirely different set of skills. The truth is that once invasive vegetation takes hold, the only viable mitigation strategy is to send in crews of people—mostly young, underpaid people on temporary contracts—to wield hatchets, chainsaws, and herbicide in the tangle of the forest, taking out plants one at a time.

ACE’s conservation corps model has its appeal. The chaotic gaggle of young people in Triston’s and Emery’s crews transmitted an infectious energy. They showed me which plants had serrated leaves or backward-hooked thorns and hairs on their stems. They taught me which plants smelled like root beer and Froot Loops. When we walked alone into the forest, we stayed within “whooping distance” of each other; every so often a “WHOOP!” or a “YEE!” would drift through the trees and we would each hoot back our locations. I sneezed, and someone shouted “BLESS YOU!” from far away. When our hands were too grubby to accept a stick of gum, Eva went around and placed a piece in each of our mouths like a communion wafer.

The care each crew leader had for their members was plain. Emery checked on everyone’s bug bites and always knew which crew members had leaky boots. Triston took on all the hardest jobs himself. Ron handed around his contact info in case anyone ever needed a job reference or a pep talk. Several crew members talked to me about the new skills they were learning, even beyond the field of conservation: budgeting, teamwork, harmonious co-living.

Camaraderie, though, may not be enough to sustain a vital front of conservation work. Most of the people I spoke with who do plant removal feared long-term financial struggle. Full-time, hands-on positions in conservation generally require field experience, which is often unpaid. One route to a viable career is the Forest Service, but much of that work is seasonal. Some people work second jobs; others depend on savings. Ron would like to go back to school to get an advanced degree, but he’s hesitant. “I need to get on that train, but I am in debt too bad,” he told me. “I just need to breathe for a minute.” ACE’s most significant challenge right now isn’t finding funders—it’s finding enough members willing to do the work.

Recently, ACE leadership, alongside other conservation corps from across the country, took part in conversations in DC about how to replace volunteer or poorly paid labor with a paid conservation workforce. In Ron’s estimation, even a wage of $15 an hour, plus benefits, “would change ACE entirely.” But President Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill was passed with only about $250 million set aside for an invasive plant elimination program. That’s not a lot of money to tackle one of the country’s biggest biodiversity threats. 

As it stands, invasive plants are gaining ground in the vast majority of the country’s natural areas. Once I started seeing them, I couldn’t stop—since my visit to North Carolina, I spotted a baby kudzu twisting up a tree in a city park, hogweed on a hiking trail, garlic mustard in parking lots, a spiraea bush behind a taco shop. They have us surrounded. Check your backyard, and your local park; maybe they’re there, strangling trees or casting a deadly shade. If you’re lucky, a troop of young conservationists will stop by, when funding allows, to give native plants and wildlife a fighting chance for another season.

Driving out of Pisgah National Forest after a long day of cut-stumping, stump-squirting, trunk-hacking, and vine-pulling, the ACE crew spotted a massive bank of bittersweet on the roadside, choking a telephone pole. The vine was only a few months away from reaching the top and winding along the wires like a Christmas garland. “Don’t look!” someone squealed, and we all covered our eyes.

The Secret Life of Plant Killers

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Rodti MacLeary started a Mastodon instance, mas.to, in 2019. By early November 2022, it had amassed around 35,000 users. But since Elon Musk bought Twitter and unleashed one chaotic decision after another, people have signed up for mas.to and other instances, or servers, in surging waves that have sometimes kicked them briefly offline. The influx of users is propelled by each haphazard policy update Musk professes from his own Twitter account. Last week, Twitter’s billionaire owner suspended several high-profile journalists and accused them of doxing him, and then briefly banned links to any social media competitors, including Mastodon. But the mas.to instance continued to grow, hitting 130,000 total users and 67,000 active users by Tuesday.

That’s minuscule compared to Twitter’s hundreds of millions of tweeters. But it’s a heavy lift for someone like MacLeary, who has a day job and no paid staff, and has funneled time and money into mas.to as a labor of love. As a decentralized, open-source social media platform, Mastodon is markedly different in its construction from Big Tech platforms like Meta, Twitter, and YouTube. That’s part of its appeal, and it’s working its way from a niche into the mainstream consciousness: Mastodon now has more than 9,000 instances and some nearly 2.5 million active monthly users.

China-owned TikTok’s been living rent-free in many American lawmakers’ minds all year. Some lawmakers—who have been monitoring US tensions with China and coping with growing concerns that TikTok in its current form shouldn’t be trusted with millions of Americans’ data—reached a breaking point this December. In the past few weeks, many state and federal agencies introduced and passed various laws, campaigning hard to remove the popular short-video app from US devices.

It looks like the US could end up following through on Donald Trump’s thwarted 2020 plan to ban TikTok nationwide.

Possibly the only thing potentially keeping TikTok operating in the US has been an elusive deal that President Joe Biden’s administration is discussing with TikTok—a deal that just days ago, The New York Times reported, included terms that were “unlikely to satisfy anyone.” Now, Reuters has released an exclusive report, revealing new details about the terms of Biden’s deal and providing the first glimmer of hope for Americans increasingly worried that their TikTok access might soon be revoked.

According to people familiar with the Biden-TikTok deal—which includes the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), as well as Treasury and Justice Department officials—TikTok has already invested $1.5 billion into reorganization and hiring efforts to set up Oracle Corp to take over management of TikTok user data in the US. This plan was already in motion following a divestment agreement TikTok previously made with CFIUS under Trump.

But now TikTok has apparently agreed to provide even more US oversight during talks this summer with the CFIUS. TikTok hopes these new concessions will alleviate lawmaker concerns over how American user data is managed and how Americans use the app.

In addition to protecting user data and overseeing content moderation for US users, Reuters’ report confirmed that Oracle will now be reviewing app and server codes. This is TikTok’s way of granting Oracle even more oversight regarding monitoring updates to TikTok’s design and user interface, as well as its search and recommendation tools. Building out TikTok’s United States Data Security (USDS) division, TikTok will open its first “transparency center” in Maryland in January, providing a destination for Oracle engineers charged with overseeing TikTok’s US operations. TikTok is also hiring independent auditors and monitors to report on TikTok US operations directly to CFIUS, reportedly hoping to identify qualified candidates by mid-January.

Another key concern for lawmakers involves Chinese laws that require Chinese companies to share data with the government. Some lawmakers see this as a deal-breaker, and the only acceptable solution is TikTok’s sale to an owner that’s not based in a country considered a foreign adversary to the US. Sources told Reuters that TikTok owner ByteDance offered the US another option for consideration to alleviate this perhaps most pressing concern.

Instead of selling the company, ByteDance suggested setting up an independent, three-member “proxy” board to “run the USDS division independent of ByteDance.” To appoint board members, CFIUS would conduct screening, the US would control who’s appointed, and ByteDance's only involvement would be paying for it all.

Until the deal is finished, Reuters reported that ByteDance has recommended that a former US Secret Service agent, Andrew Bonillo, should head the USDS division. According to Bonillo's LinkedIn profile, he worked for the Secret Service from 2000 to 2010, then had a brief stint as an academic lecturer before turning to the tech sector for employment. Bonillo's been with TikTok since 2021, serving as its interim general manager for US Data Security since May.

TikTok spokesperson Brooke Oberwetter told Ars that TikTok disputes nothing in Reuters’ report. Oracle could not immediately be reached for comment. The White House declined Reuters' request to comment.

“The solution under consideration by CFIUS is a comprehensive package of measures with layers of government and independent oversight to address concerns about TikTok content recommendation and access to US user data—measures that go well beyond what any peer company is doing today,” Oberwetter told Ars.

Reuters’ report shows how far TikTok has been willing to go to ensure it doesn’t lose access to 100 million US-based users, but one source said it’s still unclear if Biden will reach a point when he’s ready to sign the deal. And the decision's not solely up to him.

To close the deal, Biden would need consensus from various stakeholders across multiple government agencies. So far, the deal's progress has been delayed while pressure has been mounting from at least a few Congress members to scrap Biden’s deal and go the easier route to end national security concerns—by blocking TikTok entirely.

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CRAZY COLD TEMPERATURES, heavy snow, and strong winds are coming just in time for the holidays, all thanks to a bomb cyclone. It’s a catchy and menacing name for a type of winter storm that can create extremely dangerous conditions. Forecasters predict this one could be unprecedented in its scope, sending freezing temperatures across Canada and most of the US. 

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has forecast extreme cold to hit between Thursday and Monday. Temperatures could fall as much as 40 degrees Fahrenheit below average, with wind chills feeling like –50 in the northern Rocky Mountains (from Alberta in Canada to Idaho) and the Northern Plains (around North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Wyoming). The Midwest, Central Plains, Great Lakes, and areas to the south could see single-digit temperatures that also drop below zero. The Northeast is predicted to get two days of rain, followed by possible flash-freezes. 

The National Weather Service (NWS) in Buffalo has forecast a “once-in-a-generation” storm. This bomb cyclone is particularly nasty, whipped up by a perfect mess of conditions. A big cold-air mass is moving down from the Arctic, propelled by high-pressure systems in Canada. It’s the unlucky result of those systems working together, and the timing couldn't be worse, with many people traveling by plane, train, and automobile for Christmas and Hanukkah. 

One stat will have everyone turning up their thermostats: Areas of every US state could drop below freezing on Christmas Eve. (Yes, even Hawaii, where volcano summits can be that cold.) The storm’s span is huge; some 240 million people could see local temperatures drop below 20 degrees Fahrenheit this week, says John Moore, a public affairs specialist and meteorologist with the NWS. Fifty-five million of them may feel temperatures below zero.

“We typically get Arctic air masses that move down to the continental United States from Canada during the winter, but this one is unprecedented,” says Moore. “It gets a lot further south than these really cold air masses typically get.” 

To qualify as a “bomb,” the pressure at the center of the storm must drop rapidly at a rate of at least 24 millibars over 24 hours. (A millibar measures atmospheric pressure, and it translates to the amount of force it takes to move an object weighing 1 gram for 1 centimeter in one second.) Bomb cyclones form when a cold air mass meets a warmer one, and warm air is drawn into the storm. Air pressure continues to drop rapidly, and temperatures swing: In Montana, temperatures dropped 26 degrees Fahrenheit in just three minutes Wednesday morning, according to the NWS. 

Extreme pressure drops like this cause storms to intensify. Normal air pressure sits at around 1,013 millibars at sea level. Between Thursday and Friday night, the system pressure could fall from 1,003 to 968 millibars, a drop that would catapult the storm into a process of “bombogenesis,” according to the NOAA.

A glass or two of champagne with Christmas lunch. A cool crisp beer at the beach. Some cheeky cocktails with friends to see in the New Year.

There seem to be so many occasions to unwind with an alcoholic drink this season.

But if you're taking certain medications while drinking alcohol, this can affect your body in a number of ways. Drinking alcohol with some medicines means they may not work so well. With others, you risk a life-threatening overdose.

Here's what you need to know if you're taking medication over Christmas and plan to drink.

Why is this a big deal?

After you take a medicine, it travels to the stomach. From there, your body shuttles it to the liver where the drug is metabolized and broken down before it goes into your bloodstream.

Every medicine you take is provided at a dose that takes into account the amount of metabolism that occurs in the liver.

When you drink alcohol, this is also broken down in the liver, and it can affect how much of the drug is metabolised.

Some medicines are metabolized more, which can mean not enough reaches your bloodstream to be effective.

Some medicines are metabolized less. This means you get a much higher dose than intended, which could lead to an overdose.

The effects of alcohol (such as sleepiness) can act in addition to similar effects of a medicine.

Whether or not you will have an interaction, and what interaction you have, depends on many factors. These include the medicine you are taking, the dose, how much alcohol you drink, your age, genes, sex, and overall health.

Women, older people, and people with liver issues are more likely to have a drug interaction with alcohol.

Which medicines don't mix well with alcohol?

Many medicines interact with alcohol regardless of whether they are prescribed by your doctor or bought over the counter, such as herbal medicines.

1. Medicines + alcohol = drowsiness, coma, death

Drinking alcohol and taking a medicine that depresses the central nervous system to reduce arousal and stimulation can have additive effects.

Together, these can make you extra drowsy, slow your breathing and heart rate and, in extreme cases, lead to coma and death. These effects are more likely if you use more than one of this type of medicine.

Medicines to look out for include those for depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, pain (except paracetamol), sleep disturbances (such as insomnia), allergies, and colds and flu.

It's best not to drink alcohol with these medicines, or to keep your alcohol intake to a minimum.

2. Medicines + alcohol = more effects

Mixing alcohol with some medicines increases the effect of those medicines.

One example is with the sleeping tablet zolpidem, which is not to be taken with alcohol. Rare, but serious, side effects are strange behavior while asleep, such as sleep-eating, sleep-driving, or sleep-walking, which are more likely with alcohol.

3. Medicines + craft beer or home brew = high blood pressure

Some types of medicines only interact with some types of alcohol.

Examples include some medicines for depression, such as phenelzine, tranylcypromine, and moclobemide, the antibiotic linezolid, the Parkinson's drug selegiline, and the cancer drug procarbazine.

These so-called monoamine oxidase inhibitors only interact with some types of boutique and artisan beers, beers with visible sediment, Belgian, Korean, European, and African beers, and homemade beers and wine.

These types of alcohol contain high levels of tyramine, a naturally occurring substance usually broken down by your body that doesn't ordinarily cause any harm.

However, monoamine oxidase inhibitors prevent your body from breaking down tyramine. This increases levels in your body and can cause your blood pressure to rise to dangerous levels.

4. Medicines + alcohol = effects even after you stop drinking

Other medicines interact because they affect the way your body breaks down alcohol.

If you drink alcohol while using such medicines you may feel nauseous, vomit, become flushed in the face and neck, feel breathless or dizzy, your heart may beat faster than usual, or your blood pressure may drop.

This can occur even after you stop treatment, then drink alcohol. For example, if you are taking metronidazole you should avoid alcohol both while using the medicine and for at least 24 hours after you stop taking it.

An example of where alcohol changes the amount of the medicine or related substances in the body is acitretin.

This medication is used to treat skin conditions such as severe psoriasis and to prevent skin cancer in people who have had an organ transplant.

When you take acitretin, it changes into another substance – etretinate – before it is removed from your body. Alcohol increases the amount of etretinate in your body.

This is especially important as etretinate can cause birth defects. To prevent this, if you are a woman of childbearing age, you should avoid alcohol while using the medicine and for two months after you stop taking it.

Myths about alcohol and medicines

Alcohol and birth control

One of the most common myths about medicines and alcohol is that you can't drink while using the contraceptive pill.

It is generally safe to use alcohol with the pill as it doesn't directly affect how well birth control works.

But the pill is most effective when taken at the same time each day. If you're drinking heavily, you're more likely to forget to do this the next day.

Alcohol can also make some people nauseous and vomit. If you vomit within three hours of taking the pill, it will not work. This increases your risk of pregnancy.

Contraceptive pills can also affect your response to alcohol as the hormones they contain can change the way your body removes alcohol. This means you can get drunk faster, and stay drunk for longer, than you normally would.

Alcohol and antibiotics

Then there's the myth about not mixing alcohol with any antibiotics. This only applies to metronidazole and linezolid.

Otherwise, it is generally safe to use alcohol with antibiotics, as alcohol does not affect how well they work.

But if you can, it is best to avoid alcohol while taking antibiotics. Antibiotics and alcohol have similar side effects, such as an upset stomach, dizziness, and drowsiness.

Using the two together means you are more likely to have these side effects. Alcohol can also reduce your energy and increase how long it takes for you to recover.

Where can I go for advice?

If you plan on drinking alcohol these holidays and are concerned about any interaction with your medicines, don't just stop taking your medicines.

Your pharmacist can advise you on whether it is safe for you to drink based on the medicines you are taking, and if not, provide advice on alternatives.

Nial Wheate, Associate Professor of the Sydney Pharmacy School, University of Sydney and Jessica Pace, Associate Lecturer, University of Sydney

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

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A pack of San Martin, Peru, students dressed in suits and dresses clustered in the center of the dance floor during the party just before the piece of the floor they were standing on collapsed, a TikTok video showed. Witnesses reacted to the incident with shrieks as the DJ stopped the music in astonishment at what had happened. The hole was fortunately only a few feet deep, and the students got up following the incident, confused themselves as to what had happened, the video showed.

< Watch the video at the source page. >

Following the incident, the teens were brought to a local hospital with zero deaths, though the condition of their injuries has gone unreported, the New York Post noted. Many TikTok users poked fun at the calamity, joking that “the real one tore up the dance floor,” according to the outlet.

WATCH: Dance floor sinkhole swallows 25 students and ruins

graduation party https://t.co/mmn95vGBWn

 — New York Post (@nypost) December 21, 2022

The cause for the floor’s sinking remains a mystery, though it could have been due to the wood flooring being unable to sustain the weight of the students moving into the center, the Peruvian news outlet Trome speculated, according to the NY Post.

The viral Tik Tok stands at over 440,000 likes with over 5,000 comments and 16,000 shares as of Wednesday afternoon.

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A chef who is believed to have invented the chicken tikka masala, regarded as Britain’s favourite curry, has died aged 77.

Ali Ahmed Aslam’s death on Monday was announced by his Shish Mahal restaurant in Glasgow, which closed for 48 hours as a mark of respect. The eatery announced: “Hey, Shish Snobs … Mr Ali passed away this morning … We are all absolutely devastated and heartbroken.”

His funeral was held at Glasgow Central Mosque on Tuesday. Members of the public were invited to attend.

Aslam was born in Pakistan and moved with his family to Glasgow as a young boy before opening Shish Mahal in Glasgow’s west end in 1964. He was married and has five children, according to a social media post.

In an interview with the AFP news agency, Aslam explained that he created the chicken tikka masala in the 1970s when a customer asked if there was a way of making his chicken tikka less dry. His solution was to add a creamy tomato sauce.

“We thought we’d better cook the chicken with some sauce. So from here we cooked chicken tikka with the sauce that contains yoghurt, cream, spices. It’s a dish prepared according to our customer’s taste. Usually they don’t take hot curry – that’s why we cook it with yoghurt and cream.”

In 2009, Mohammad Sarwar, then Labour MP for Glasgow Central, called for the city to be officially recognised as the home of the chicken tikka masala. He campaigned for Glasgow to be given EU Protected Designation of Origin status for the curry and tabled an early day motion in the House of Commons.

But the bid was unsuccessful, with a number of other establishments around the UK also claiming to have invented the popular dish.

He said: “Chicken tikka masala was invented in this restaurant. We used to make chicken tikka, and one day a customer said, ‘I’d take some sauce with that, this is a bit dry.’

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John Cleese’s classic “silly walk” burns more calories than a normal gait

Elon Musk has defended his financial stewardship of Twitter, arguing that the social media platform would have faced a “negative cash flow situation of $3 billion a year” were it not for his controversial cost-cutting efforts.

The billionaire entrepreneur, who bought the social networking company for $44 billion in October after previously attempting to pull out of the deal, gave a snapshot of its dire finances during a Twitter Spaces online forum on Wednesday.

“We have an emergency fire drill on our hands . . . This company is like you’re in a plane that is headed towards the ground and high speed with the engines on fire and the controls don’t work,” he said. “That’s the reason for my actions that may seem sometimes spurious.”

He said that the platform had been on course to spend about $5 billion in 2023. Overall costs at Twitter in 2021, the last annual period that the company reported before being taken private, were $5.6 billion, during which time it made a net loss of $221 million.

Musk predicted that Twitter’s net cash outflow, “if you didn’t make any changes,” would be about $6 billion to $6.5 billion next year. This is partly because the company has been loaded with $12.5 billion of debt to help to fund his acquisition, which required about $1.5 billion a year in annual debt servicing payments amid rising interest rates, he said.

“Not good since Twitter has $1 billion in cash,” he said. “So that’s why I spent the last five weeks cutting costs like crazy.”

His remarks suggested the company was on track to make about $3 billion in annual revenues next year. That would suggest Twitter was on course for revenues as much as $2 billion lower in 2023 than the $5 billion it achieved in 2021—which mainly came from advertising. Many marketers have pulled out of the platform since Musk’s takeover because of moderation concerns.

The picture of Twitter’s finances comes after Musk fired about half of its 7,500-strong workforce and stripped employees’ benefits, prompting concerns about whether the company is sufficiently staffed in areas such as content moderation and compliance.

On Sunday, Musk said in a tweet that Twitter had been “in the fast lane to bankruptcy since May.”

However, Musk said on Wednesday that changes he had made would mean the company would “roughly” hit cash flow break-even.

“With the changes we are making here on massively reducing the burn rate, and building subscriber revenue, I now think that Twitter will, in fact, be okay next year,” Musk said, adding that he had spoken to advertisers who were urging him to show how Twitter could provide a return on their investment.

The Tesla and SpaceX chief executive has previously indicated he plans to transform Twitter into an “everything app,” where users might be able to send funds or shop, for example, in an effort to generate new revenue streams, including payments and subscriptions.

However, an attempt to launch a new premium subscription service, Twitter Blue, has been rife with challenges after some users wielded the offer of paid-for “blue tick” verification in order to impersonate others, causing the company to pause and later relaunch the service.

Late on Tuesday, Musk said he would resign as Twitter’s chief as soon as he had found someone “foolish enough to take the job,” bowing to the result of a poll of the platform’s users he conducted at the weekend.

Musk also indicated he would continue to run the company’s “software and server teams” after stepping down, suggesting he will remain closely involved in day-to-day operations and product development at the social networking site.

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Throughout December, a social media user known as Stelfie the Time Traveller has been crafting a time-hopping travelogue using generative AI. Thanks to Stable Diffusion and fine-tuning, an anonymous artist has created a fictional photorealistic character that he can insert into faux historical photographs set in different eras, such as ancient Egypt or the time of the dinosaurs.

Stable Diffusion is a deep learning image synthesis model that allows people to create fictional scenes using text descriptions called prompts. With an additional technique called Dreambooth, people can insert their own subject or character into scenes generated by Stable Diffusion. It can also be used to insert real people into fictional situations.

So far, "Stelfie" has taken historical selfies during the ice age (being chased by a woolly mammoth), in ancient Egypt (during the construction of the pyramids), in ancient Greece (with the Trojan Horse), hanging out with Leonardo da Vinci (while creating the Mona Lisa), in the old West, while running from a Tyrannosaurus rex, and while sailing with Christopher Columbus.

The artist behind Stelfie writes social media posts (on Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit) in character as playful dispatches from a 41-year-old time traveler as he visits different locations, for example:

Log #3 - Columbus ship, 1492 DC. "Laaaaand" Now, I don't wanna brag but... After months of sailing Columbus was lost in the Oceans and well let's say I may have kinda suggested the correct direction...

The anonymous artist (a self-identified "funny old man") detailed some of the process he uses to create the images in several Reddit comments: a combination of Stable Diffusion 1.5, a custom AI model for the landscape, and a custom AI model trained on the Stelfie face, which is apparently a fictional person created using Character Creator. He uses "a lot of inpainting," which means inserting AI-generated imagery into the images to fix errors and sculpt the scene, and each image takes three hours to create.

Some may find Stelfie's attempts to sell the images as NFTs unpalatable (the tech is controversial), but simulated time travel is arguably a novel entertainment use of technology that can otherwise create deepfakes and potentially deceive others.

Using Dreambooth and Stable Diffusion, anyone can now insert a character (or themselves) into fantastic and fictional situations, so we'll likely see a lot more fictional entertainment scenarios in the near future.

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Often, we just do not understand a species well enough to tell how it is doing. There are thousands of plants and animals on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) recognized red list that are classified as “data deficient.”

Simply put, the researchers don’t know enough about these species to be able to say whether or not they are in danger of becoming extinct. However, with a little more knowledge now at hand, the news is once again not good.

“We looked at species that are relatively poorly known, but where at least the geographical distribution is known. These species tend to be threatened with extinction more often than ones that we know more about,” says Francesca Verones, a professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s (NTNU) Industrial Ecology Programme.

In fact, more than half of these lesser-known species may be in danger of disappearing.

Additionally, there are other species that are even less well recognized. We don’t even know whether these species are in danger.

Oedipina capitalina was discovered a few years ago. This specimen was found in Honduras. It is listed as “insufficient data” but may in fact be in great danger of extinction. Credit: Josue Ramos Galdamez, Creative Commons

1 000 000 or 147 000?

IPBES, an international panel of leading biodiversity researchers, estimates that at least one million of the species on our planet are in danger of becoming extinct. But it’s possible that you also heard other numbers. The IUCN has evaluated about 147 000 species. 41,000 of them, or 2 percent, are threatened

Why this gap?

Partly this gap exists because we haven’t discovered many of the species yet. Scientists assume that our planet has 10 million species, but we know less than 20 percent of them. Some species probably disappear without us ever knowing they existed.

If we’re to take care of life on the planet, we first need to know what exists, so it is important to find out as much as possible about the organisms we share the planet with.

However, we often know very little, including about the species that we’re already aware of. Threats and trends are constantly changing, and we just don’t have enough researchers and helpers to survey everything. But technology can help.

Computer tools calculate the probability

“We used machine learning to calculate the risk of extinction for 7699 of the little-known species,” says Jan Borgelt, a postdoctoral fellow at NTNU’s Department of Energy and Process Engineering.

IUCN lists 20 469 species as “data deficient.”

Various statistical tools can fill in some of these knowledge gaps with probabilities that computers arrive at.

These computer model-created probabilities were compared with individual examples that the researchers had gone through manually. The computer models proved to be extremely accurate.

Borgelt stresses that the intention of the models isn’t to replace the researchers’ work. But “they can provide a first estimate of the risk of species becoming extinct in cases where we don’t yet have enough data,” he says.

The researchers can save themselves work by using these computer models, which come in handy when the resources don’t match the workload. But cheerful reading it’s not.

Useful for protecting species

“We found that as many as 85 percent of the amphibians that we have limited knowledge of are in danger of becoming extinct. For other groups, like mammals and reptiles, this applies to around half of the species,” says Borgelt.

So species unknown to us often face an uphill battle. But the consolation is that the new knowledge can be of great use if used correctly.

“More areas could become worthy of protective measures if we take species that we have little data on into account,” says Borgelt.

For example, so-called biodiversity “hotspots” – areas particularly in need of being protected – could thereby become both more numerous and considered even more important.

The results can also be of help to IUCN, as well as when they arrive at their results themselves.

“We find that the probability of extinction across species groups and regions varies a lot. This could indicate that some research that’s based on the risk assessments is not always correct,” says Verones.

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Are the currently approved antibody therapies used to treat patients who have a higher risk of developing severe COVID-19 disease also effective against the viral variants that are currently in circulation? According to a new study conducted by scientists at the German Primate Center (DPZ) – Leibniz Institute for Primate Research and Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg, the Omicron sub-lineage BQ.1.1, which is on the rise globally, is resistant to all approved antibody therapies.

An immune response is triggered as a consequence of infection with the SARS coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) or a COVID-19 vaccination, resulting in the development of neutralizing antibodies that help guard against (re)infection with SARS-CoV-2 or a severe course of the disease. By attaching to the viral spike protein, neutralizing antibodies provide protection and stop the virus from entering cells.

However, certain SARS-CoV-2 variants, notably the Omicron variant, avoid neutralizing antibodies and cause symptomatic infections even in vaccinated or convalescent individuals due to mutations in the spike protein. This is known as immune evasion, and it poses a hazard to high-risk populations including the elderly and people with weakened immune systems, for example, due to illness or medication.

They often fail to develop an immune response sufficient for protection from severe disease, even after full vaccination. To protect high-risk patients, biotechnologically produced antibodies are administered as a preventive measure or as an early therapy upon confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection. Mutations in the spike protein of different SARS-CoV-2 variants confer resistance to individual antibody therapies. Therefore, it is important to regularly monitor whether therapeutic antibodies continue to be effective against currently circulating viral variants.

A team of researchers from the Infection Biology Unit at the German Primate Center – Leibniz Institute for Primate Research and the Division of Molecular Immunology at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg has investigated how efficiently approved antibody therapies inhibit the currently circulating Omicron subvariants. The researchers found that the Omicron subvariant BQ.1.1, which is on the rise worldwide, is resistant to all available antibody therapies.

“For our studies, we mixed non-propagating viral particles carrying the spike protein of selected viral variants with different dilutions of the antibodies to be tested and subsequently measured the amount of antibody needed to inhibit infection of cell cultures. In total, we tested twelve individual antibodies, six of which are approved for clinical use in Europe, and four antibody cocktails” explains Prerna Arora, lead author of the study.

The researchers found that the Omicron subvariant BQ.1.1 could not be neutralized by either individual antibodies or antibody cocktails. In contrast, the currently predominant Omicron subvariant BA.5 was still neutralized by one approved antibody and two approved antibody cocktails.

“With high-risk patients in mind, we are very concerned about the Omicron subvariant BQ.1.1 being resistant to all approved antibody therapies. Particularly in regions where BQ.1.1 is widespread, physicians should not rely on antibody therapies alone when treating infected high-risk patients, but should also consider administering other drugs such as paxlovid or molnupiravir,” comments study leader Markus Hoffmann on the results of the study.

The finding that the Omicron subvariant BQ.1.1 is already resistant to a new antibody therapy that is about to be approved in the U.S. highlights the importance of developing new antibody therapies against COVID-19.

“The ever-increasing development of antibody resistance of SARS-CoV-2 variants calls for the development of new antibody therapies that are specifically targeted to currently circulating and future viral variants. Ideally, they should target regions in the spike protein that have little potential for escape mutations,” concludes Stefan Pöhlmann, head of the Infection Biology Unit at the German Primate Center – Leibniz Institute for Primate Research.

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Elon Musk’s chaotic autumn at Twitter has produced one clear winner: Mastodon, the open-source social network, has now grown to 2.5m users – triggering a land-grab for space on it from groups including browser makers, cryptocurrency advocates and other social networks.

Despite the Twitter CEO’s best efforts to disparage the rival platform, Mastodon has grown by more than 800%, according to its founder and lead developer, Eugen Rochko, who said on Tuesday that it had jumped “from approximately 300k monthly active users to 2.5m between the months of October and November, with more and more journalists, political figures, writers, actors and organisations moving over”.

At the weekend, Musk briefly banned all links to the rival service and suspended users who tweeted out their Mastodon usernames, but has now admitted the apparent move to prevent Twitter users migrating was an error. “That one was a mistake,”

Musk said on a Twitter livestream with a former intern on Tuesday night, adding: “Fucking post Mastodon all goddamn day long, I don’t care. From an evolutionary standpoint, how’d that work out for the mastodons?”

Mozilla, the developer of the popular Firefox browser, seems to disagree with that take, joining the rush to create a presence on the platfrom. On Tuesday it announced it would begin to run a Mastodon “instance”, one of the decentralised servers upon which the social network rests.

“Our intention is to contribute to the healthy and sustainable growth of a federated social space that doesn’t just operate but thrives on its own terms, independent of profit- and control-motivated tech firms,” said Steve Teixeira, chief product officer at Mozilla, which is owned by an non-profit foundation.

“We’re living through the consequences of 20 years of centralised, corporate-controlled social media, with a small oligopoly of large tech firms tightening their grip on the public square,” he added. “In private hands, our choice is limited, toxicity is rewarded, rage is called engagement, public trust is corroded, and basic human decency is often an afterthought. Getting from the internet we have to the internet we want will be a heavy lift.”

 Elon Musk, who briefly banned links to Twitter’s rival Mastodon, admitted it had been a mistake. Photograph: Reuters

A Mastodon instance is similar to an email service provider: all users must join one instance, but can communicate with users on others once they have. Currently, two of the most popular instances are run by Rochko, with many smaller ones operated by hobbyists, but there is no equivalent to Gmail – a large company running a free and popular instance that becomes the default for the service.

However, Mastodon is also compatible with a wider array of communities using a technology called ActivityPub, which lets services like photo sharing, podcasting and social networking all share content with each other.

Tumblr, which was founded shortly after Twitter and has been owned by Yahoo! and Verizon before being sold to Wordpress developers Automattic, will begin supporting the technology in the near future, according to founder Matt Mullenwegg. Tumblr too is “dealing with waves of users right now”, but will be adding “interoperability and ActivityPub support as soon as possible”.

Corporate money is flowing into Mastodon more directly, as well. Pawoo.net, a large Mastodon instance based in Japan with 800,000 users, was acquired by crypto startup Social Coop, which runs a cryptocurrency-based “web3 social network” called Mask, with $50m of funding behind it. The company already runs two other Mastodon instances, Mastodon.cloud and mstdn.jp.

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The case left doctors shell-shocked.

A French hospital was partially evacuated Saturday after a senior citizen arrived with a World War I artillery shell lodged in his rectum.

The 88-year-old patient visited Hospital Sainte Musse in Toulon to have the antique explosive removed — but instead sparked a “bomb scare,” French publication Var-Matin reported.

“An emergency occurred from 9 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. on Saturday evening that required the intervention of bomb disposal personnel, the evacuation of adult and pediatric emergencies as well as the diversion of incoming emergencies,” a hospital spokesperson stated.

“We had to manage the risk in a reactive framework,” the rep added. “When in doubt, we took all the precautions.”

Oh, shell no! The WWI relic measured almost 8 inches long and more than 2 inches wide.
Twitter / @acommonlawyer

Bomb disposal experts at the scene determined there was little possibility the shell would explode inside the man.

“They reassured us by telling us that it was a collector’s item from the First World War, used by the French military,” the hospital stated.

Stunned doctors subsequently began the process of trying to remove the object — which measured almost 8 inches long and more than 2 inches wide — from the man’s rectum.

It’s believed the pervy patient inserted the item up his anus for sexual pleasure.

“An apple, a mango, or even a can of shaving foam, we are used to finding unusual objects inserted where they shouldn’t be,” one doctor declared. “But a shell? Never!”

Medics were forced to take the elderly man into surgery, cutting open his abdomen in order to remove the relic.

According to the hospital, he is now in “good health” and is expected to make a full recovery from the surgery.

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Elon Musk has been in charge of Twitter for less than two months but in that time has been an agent of change. He’s overhauled the company’s policy towards what is and isn’t acceptable content on the platform, has slashed costs, and thrown out many of the company’s longest and most loyal employees.

The problem is that Wall Street hasn’t taken kindly to Twitter’s new broom. This week Oppenheimer & Co, an equity research company, published a warning that it was downgrading its position on Tesla stock because of “Twitter-related risks”.

“We believe Mr Musk is increasingly isolated as the steward of Twitter’s finances with his user management on the platform,” they wrote. “We see potential for a negative feedback loop from departures of Twitter advertisers and users due to inconsistent standards resulting in increased financing needs that may lead to incremental [Tesla] sales just as Tesla’s competitive environment intensifies.”

In short: Musk’s control of Twitter, and his willingness to pour current Tesla engineers into redrawing the platform in his own image, is becoming a distraction that drags down his own companies.

Investors seem to agree. Tesla’s share price has lost two thirds of its value this year, reaching a two-year low – though the stock price momentarily rebounded slightly when Mr Musk lost a poll of his own users asking him whether he should stay as CEO of Twitter, by a margin of 57.5% to 42.5%.

The poll is “ridiculous”, says Melissa Ingle, a former senior data scientist at Twitter until she was laid off as part of Mr Musk’s firing of contractors.

“I think he fundamentally misjudged [the poll] and then tried to walk it back,” she says. “It doesn’t add up to a picture of a CEO with a clear and compelling vision.”

Mr Musk has subsequently confirmed that he’ll cede power. “I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job!” he wrote overnight.

However, finding that replacement will be tricky. “Informing Twitter’s workers that the company could go bankrupt if he wasn’t able to turn it around is the kind of mission-driven language that he has used previously to instigate innovation and change,” says Jonathan Lord, lecturer in human resource management and employment law at the University of Salford Business School. But it also spooks those who might be interested in replacing Mr Musk into thinking this is an insurmountable task.

Twitter is being seen by some investors as a distraction from Mr Musk’s other companies (Photo: Dado Ruvic/Reuters)

Anyone who takes up the offer of trying to turn around Twitter also has to wrestle with Mr Musk himself, who has said he will stick around to oversee some elements of the company he thinks are important.

That he has also said “no one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive” suggests how much he thinks of anyone who would be able to replace him – and therefore how much power any new CEO might really have.

Nor has he helped himself to put the company on a sure footing. Overnight, he revealed in a Twitter Space that the company’s advertising revenue is expected to be just $3bn (£2.48bn) in 2023, down from $5bn last year. In large part that’s because advertisers have deserted the platform, worried about the integrity of the content their adverts are served alongside.

That’s Mr Musk’s fault, say Twitter watchers. “He’s banjaxed the revenue by being a dick,” says Bruce Daisley, who was Twitter’s European vice-president between 2012 and 2020. Mr Daisley believes that his former boss still has the money and wherewithal to turn the company’s fortunes around and come out of it as a success – but it’ll be a Pyrrhic victory. “It’s like executing a 29-point turn,” he says. “Well done for turning the car, but let me show you an easier way.”

Mr Musk has hacked and slashed to the bone in the hopes of rebuilding the company in a way he wants, but with him willing to give up power at such a crucial moment, it means that whoever would replace him would be put in an unenviable position. Twitter has been gutted and beaten, battered and broken.

He must have thought that he had a plan to build it – or was confident enough in his own abilities to think he had an idea of what to do – but whoever comes in to replace him may have a different viewpoint on what’s needed.

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Eagles SOS, or Sources of Strength, is sponsored by the district's counselors. Members of the club participate in activities to help out teachers and students, share messages of kindness and let people know they are appreciated.

On Monday, the club put together a Christmas party for students in the district, complete with crafts, coloring, bingo, games, hot chocolate and a special DJ dressed in red with a long white beard.

Senior Evan Twehus volunteered to DJ as Santa for the event. He is member of Eagles SOS.

"Really it's just doing just this, putting on parties for kids, making them feel special and everything like that, just making them grow up to be great humans. That's really the main goal," he said.

Elementary students in pajama pants sipped hot cocoa as they played cards or listened to bingo being called from a sparkly light-up microphone.

There were also goody bags for students.

The club was able to pay for items for the party through a fundraiser selling blue T-shirts that say "kindness begins here."

Students in the club also got shirts to wear.

"The idea is that we wear it once a month, and we have an activity district-wide," said Tiffany Farris, elementary counselor and club sponsor.

The club is primarily made up of seniors, juniors and sophomores, and Farris said the number of students in the club is close to 24.

There are high standards for membership: Students must have good grades and attendance. They also must practice what they preach by having no office referrals and by being known for saying and doing kind things.

"You have to be kind. You can't be going around school and being mean," Farris said.

So far, the club has handed out goody bags and helped teachers with their stations at the Halloween party. It has also put on a pancake day for staff for World Kindness Day.

Twehus said the club also speaks to elementary classes about kindness and sportsmanship. He said it's important to spread kindness in school.

"With bullying being prevalent everywhere else, we're just really trying to hit the nail on the head and solve the problem as best we can, and it's not going to go away, but we can definitely make it better," he said.

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Lactobacillus salivarius, Lactobacillus reuteri, Streptococcus salivarius, Weissella cibaria, taken in the form of supplements in this study, may help freshen the breath, but more good quality research is needed, say the researchers.

Volatile sulfuric compounds are the main cause of persistent bad breath. These compounds are produced by mouth bacteria as a result of bacterial mixing and food debris associated with poor gum and dental hygiene.

Options used to tackle the problem include mouthwashes, chewing gums, teeth scaling and tongue scraping. Emerging evidence suggests that probiotic bacteria might offer a simpler alternative.

To explore this further, and find out how long any such effects might last, the researchers trawled research databases for relevant randomized clinical trials published up to February 2021.

Out of an initial haul of 238 records, duplication and incomplete data reduced the number of eligible clinical trials for pooled data analysis to 7, involving a total of 278 people.

The number of participants in each study was small, ranging from 23 to 68, with an age range between 19 and 70. Monitoring periods spanned 2 to 12 weeks.

Bad breath severity was defined by levels of volatile sulfuric compounds detected in the mouth or the OLP score, which measures breath odor at various distances from the mouth.

Tongue coating scores (3 studies) and the plaque index (3 studies) were also included in the analysis because a dirty tongue and the build-up of tartar between the teeth are often regarded as major causes of bad breath.

The pooled data analysis showed that OLP scores fell significantly in those given probiotics compared with those in the comparison study arms, irrespective of the length of the monitoring period.

A similar result was observed for the levels of volatile sulfuric compounds detected, although these varied substantially in the individual studies, and the observed effects were relatively short-lived—up to 4 weeks, after which there was no noticeable difference.

But there were no significant differences in tongue coating score or plaque index between those given probiotics and those who weren't.

Probiotics may inhibit the decomposition of amino acids and proteins by anaerobic bacteria in the mouth, so curbing the production of smelly by-products, the researchers explain.

But they sound a note of caution in the interpretation of their findings. The sample sizes of the included studies were small and some of the data were incomplete. These factors, on top of differences in detection methods, bacterial species, plus wide variations in the design and methodology of the clinical trials, all weaken the findings.

"This systematic review and meta-analysis indicates that probiotics (eg, Lactobacillus salivarius, Lactobacillus reuteri, Streptococcus salivarius and Weissella cibaria) may ease halitosis by reducing the [volatile sulfuric compound] concentration levels in the short term, but there is no significant effect on the major causes of halitosis, such as plaque and tongue coating," they write.

"More high-quality randomized clinical trials are required in the future to verify the results and to provide evidence for the efficacy of probiotics in the management of halitosis," they add.

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In 2022, Elon Musk has attracted even more attention, which often has been associated with his purchase of Twitter. While the mainstream media and big names continue to disparage the achievements of the engineer with a very broad brushstroke, the Italian magazine The Economy has named him its Man of the Year 2022. The publication notes that despite all the buzz around Musk, often associated with his loss of $109 billion this year, meddling in politics, and impulsiveness, he “remains a great hero[...]in many areas of the most advanced industry technologies.”

For SpaceX, 2022 has been a record year for the number of rocket launches that put satellites into orbit and the delivery of astronauts to the International Space Station. But even more important is the role of Musk's companies in the strategic and military spheres. By his will, his companies played a key role in February when Russian troops invaded Ukraine. Starlink provided internet connection that allowed the Ukrainian armed forces to communicate and coordinate their actions. In addition, the civilian population also had access to the Internet, after the terrestrial communications infrastructure was completely destroyed in some regions of Ukraine. In addition, SpaceX has again launched its most powerful Super Heavy rocket after a three-year hiatus, this time on a top-secret mission on behalf of the Pentagon.

The Economy also notes that Tesla has struggled in 2022 and its share of the electric vehicle market is falling. However, one cannot ignore the fact that other manufacturers are investing heavily in the development and production of electric vehicles just because they were forced to follow Musk and his Tesla. It was he and his desire to replace all ICE-powered cars with EVs that made electric vehicles popular and forced the entire automotive industry to change. The company continues to be at the forefront of technology, continues to launch new plants, and further develops the automotive and energy industries.

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Taiwan has revealed it has long-range missiles capable of striking major Chinese cities, weapons that could change the military balance in the Taiwan Strait and potentially deter a future Chinese invasion.

South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported this week that Kung Chia-cheng, a retired rear admiral and former president of Taiwan’s National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology (NCSIST) from 2004 to 2007, revealed behind-the-scenes details of several missile development projects during his term.

In his memoirs “The Reminiscences of Mr Gong Chia Cheng,” Kung mentions Taiwan as possessing the Yung Feng supersonic cruise missile, the Hsiung Feng 2E land attack cruise missile and the Ba Dan ballistic missile.

The Yung Feng is a ramjet-powered supersonic cruise missile that flies at Mach 3 and has a range of 1,000 kilometers. Kung notes that it has “excellent penetration as it comes down vertically and hits the target,” making it exceptionally difficult to intercept for China’s known missile defenses.

SCMP mentions that the Taiwanese military has denied Yung Feng’s existence, as it is provocatively designed to hit targets in northern and central China. Its flight tests were not shared with program outsiders or concealed within other missile development programs.

The SCMP article notes that Yung Feng’s development started after the 1996 Taiwan Strait crisis. Although Taiwan has not formally declared the missile’s entry into service, it became operational in 2014 with the first batch of 20 missiles and ten mobile launchers rolled out in August 2019.

Kung also mentioned the development of the Hsiung Feng 2E land-attack cruise missile, noting its troubled development and near-cancellation in 2004 after five failed flight tests. He writes that the missile comes in two variants, with 500- and 1,000-kilometer ranges, respectively. SCMP reported that the first version could hit Shanghai and the second could hit Beijing.

Taiwan may already have built improved versions of the Hsiung Feng 2E. Taiwan News reported in 2018 that NCSIST is preparing to mass produce improved Hsiung Feng 2E missiles, which have a 1,200-kilometer range.

Apart from the Yung Feng and Hsiung Feng 2E, Kung notes that Taiwan had a secret project to develop the Ba Dan ballistic missile, which he claims has been successfully tested. However, he said the US prevented and blocked the ballistic missile project’s further development.

Kung says that the US prevented Taiwan from acquiring key missile components, forced Taiwan to buy US parts for indigenous missile projects and even at one point refused to sell missile fuel to Taiwan. The writer claims that NCSIST independently produced JP-10 missile fuel, which forced the US to grant Taiwan approval to purchase the fuel from the former.

Apart from missile fuel, Taiwan News mentions that Taiwan is seeking to purchase 600 sets of laser ring gyroscopes and control panel components from the US for its improved Hsiung Feng 2E missiles. SCMP notes that Taiwan could use these missiles to attack large, fixed targets in mainland China.

A Taiwanese flag is seen behind standard Type II missiles on the destroyer Kee Lung during a drill near Yilan naval base, Taiwan, on April 13, 2018. Photo: Agencies / Twitter

Taiwan’s covert missile project goes against the grain of its well-publicized “porcupine strategy”, which is premised on repelling an amphibious invasion rather than strategic level deterrence.  appears to address its shortcomings if faced with a Chinese blockade or shock and awe campaign.

Asia Times has previously reported on Taiwan’s vulnerability to a China blockade, with reports indicating that the island has only 11 days of natural gas and oil supplies suitable for 146 days.

China may have adopted a “squeeze and relax” strategy against Taiwan, combining snap military exercises around the island with strategic ambiguity, as any of those drills might already be the “real thing.”

Further, Dr Dennis Weng, speaking at a 2021 US-Taiwan Defense Industry Conference in Leesburg, Virginia, notes that Taiwan’s reliance on open sea lanes of communication and limited resources make it especially vulnerable to a Chinese blockade that aims to starve it into submission.

Another limitation of Taiwan’s porcupine strategy is that China may pursue a US-style “shock and awe” campaign to overwhelm its defenses. In a June 2022 article for Network for Strategic Analysis (NSA), Remy Carugati writes that China may use extensive missile and air strikes against Taiwan’s strategic government, military and civilian infrastructure to bombard Taiwan into submission.

Should China’s blockade or shock and awe campaign succeed, it would not need to put boots on the ground in Taiwan to achieve its surrender, rendering the latter’s porcupine strategy moot.

The US’ longstanding policy of strategic ambiguity on Taiwan may be counterproductive for the island’s defense. In a December 2021 article in War on the Rocks, Raymond Kuo mentions that US strategic ambiguity only encourages Taiwan’s current inefficient defense posture, which increases the self-governing island’s vulnerability in hopes of encouraging US intervention.

Asia Times has previously noted Taiwan’s preoccupation with acquiring costly, high-end, prestige assets such as frigates and fighter jets, with the idea of pitting Taiwan’s military against China head-on. However, this defense planning approach is destabilizing and unrealistic given the military disparity between China and Taiwan.

China has also been actively developing countermeasures to ward off US and allied intervention, ranging from “carrier-killer” DF-21 missiles and extensive naval mine warfare capabilities.

Taiwan thus may need to incorporate asymmetric counterstrike elements into its defensive strategy, given its vulnerability to blockade, shock and awe operations, and the counterintuitive effect of US strategic ambiguity on Taiwan’s defense.

Philip Orchard writes in a September 2021 article for Geopolitical Futures that Taiwan may be considering adopting a new “pit viper” strategy, emphasizing the ability to strike back and raise the political costs of any Chinese attempt at “reunification” through force. 

Long-range cruise and ballistic missiles would be viable cornerstones of a pit viper strategy, which the missile revelations indicate Taiwan may be pursuing alongside its better-known porcupine strategy.

As such, Taiwan may rely on cruise and ballistic missiles to put China’s major cities such as Beijing and Shanghai under threat while reserving its limited number of combat aircraft for its defense.

Taiwan’s corvette warships packed with missiles. Credit: Twitter

However, Taiwan would likely need a large arsenal of long-range missiles to deter China from imposing a blockade or mounting a shock and awe campaign in any conflict scenario. This approach would likely require maximum independence from foreign suppliers to manufacture missiles and launchers.

The strategy also implies the need for large stocks to maintain a high rate of fire over a prolonged period to prevent China from seizing the initiative and escalating hostilities in a shock-and-awe scenario.

While Orchard mentions that some in Taiwan are advocating for the acquisition of substantial counter-strike capabilities to deter China, he says that a Taiwan that could strike at mainland targets would be more dangerous and unpredictable.

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