Now a new study finds these ready-to-eat foods can lead to greater risk of cognitive decline as we age. And you don't have to eat much to be affected.

According to the study, the amount would be about 20% of the 2,000 calories recommended daily. As CNN determined, that equals a regular McDonald's cheeseburger and small fries, which is 530 calories.

It isn't just fast food you have to watch out for, however. A study published last year determined more than 73% of the U.S. food supply is ultraprocessed.

The most recent study involved 10,775 participants in the Brazilian Longitudinal Study of Adult Health. Compared to people who ate the least amount of ultraprocessed foods, those who consumed the most experienced a 28% faster rate of global cognitive decline and a 25% faster rate of executive function decline.

"While this is a study of association, not designed to prove cause and effect, there are a number or elements to fortify the proposition that some acceleration in cognitive decay may be attributed to ultraprocessed foods," Dr. David Katz, a specialist in preventive and lifestyle medicine and nutrition, told CNN. Katz was not involved in the study.

"The sample size is substantial, and the follow-up extensive. While short of proof, this is robust enough that we should conclude ultraprocessed foods are probably bad for our brains."

The study was published in the journal JAMA Neurology.

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The clarity of the atmosphere above the site from where the observations are taken has a delicate relationship with the quality of the ground-based astronomical observations. Therefore, locations for telescopes are chosen with great care. They are often high above sea level, so there is less atmosphere between them and their targets. Since clouds and even water vapor make it difficult to see the night sky clearly, many telescopes are also constructed in the desert. 

Caroline Haslebacher, lead author of the study. Credit: Caroline Haslebacher

 

In a study presented at the Europlanet Science Congress 2022 in Granada, a group of researchers led by the University of Bern and the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) PlanetS demonstrate how one of the greatest problems of our time, anthropogenic climate change, is now even affecting our view of the cosmos. The study was recently published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

A blind spot in the selection process

“Even though telescopes usually have a lifetime of several decades, site selection processes only consider the atmospheric conditions over a short timeframe. Usually over the past five years – too short to capture long-term trends, let alone future changes caused by global warming”, Caroline Haslebacher, lead author of the study and researcher at the NCCR PlanetS at the University of Bern, points out.

Therefore, the group of scientists from the University of Bern and the NCCR PlanetS, ETH Zurich, the European Southern Observatory (ESO), and the University of Reading in the UK decided to demonstrate the long-term perspective.

Worsening conditions around the globe

Their analysis of future climate trends, based on high-resolution global climate models, shows that major astronomical observatories from Hawaii to the Canary Islands, Chile, Mexico, South Africa, and Australia will likely experience an increase in temperature and atmospheric water content by 2050. This, in turn, could mean a loss in observing time as well as a loss of quality in the observations.

“Nowadays, astronomical observatories are designed to work under the current site conditions and only have a few possibilities for adaptation. Potential consequences of the climatic conditions for telescopes, therefore, include a higher risk of condensation due to an increased dew point or malfunctioning cooling systems, which can lead to more air turbulence in the telescope dome”, Haslebacher says.

The fact that the effects of climate change on observatories had not been taken into account before was not an oversight, as study co-author Marie-Estelle Demory says, but was not least due to the state of the art: “This is the first time that such a study has been possible. Thanks to the higher resolution of the global climate models developed through the Horizon 2020 PRIMAVERA project, we were able to examine the conditions at various locations of the globe with great fidelity – something that we were unable to do with conventional models. These models are valuable tools for the work we do at the Wyss Academy”, says the senior scientist at the University of Bern and member of the Wyss Academy for Nature.

“This now allows us to say with certainty that anthropogenic climate change must be taken into account in the site selection for next-generation telescopes, and in the construction and maintenance of astronomical facilities,” says Haslebacher.

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Last week, inside a gold-plated drum in a Northern California lab, a group of scientists briefly recreated the physics that power the sun. Their late-night experiment involved firing 192 lasers into the capsule, which contained a peppercorn-sized pellet filled with hydrogen atoms. Some of those atoms, which ordinarily repel, were smushed together and fused, a process that produces energy. By standards of Earth-bound fusion reactions, it was a lot of energy. For years, scientists have done this type of experiment only to see it fall short of the energy used to cook the fuel. This time, at long last, they exceeded it.

That feat, known as ignition, is a huge win for those who study fusion. Scientists have only had to gaze up at the stars to know that such a power source is possible—that combining two hydrogen atoms to produce one helium atom entails a loss of mass, and therefore, according to E = mc2, a release of energy. But it’s been a slow road since the 1970s, when scientists first defined the goal of ignition, also sometimes known as “breakeven.” Last year, researchers at the Lawrence Livermore Lab’s National Ignition Facility came close, generating about 70 percent of the laser energy they fired into the experiment. They pressed on with the experiments. Then, on December 5, just after 1 am, they finally took the perfect shot. Two megajoules in; 3 megajoules out. A 50 percent gain of energy. “This shows that it can be done,” said Jennifer Granholm, US Secretary of Energy, at a press conference earlier this morning.

To fusion scientists like Mark Cappelli, a physicist at Stanford University who wasn’t involved in the research, it’s a thrilling result. But he cautions that those pinning hopes on fusion as an abundant, carbon-free, and waste-free power source in the near future may be left waiting. The difference, he says, is in how scientists define breakeven. Today, the NIF researchers said they got as much energy out as their laser fired at the experiment—a massive, long-awaited achievement. But the problem is that the energy in those lasers represents a tiny fraction of the total power involved in firing up the lasers. By that measure, NIF is getting way less than it’s putting in. “That type of breakeven is way, way, way, way down the road,” Cappelli says. “That’s decades down the road. Maybe even a half-century down the road.”

The trouble is inefficient lasers. Generating fusion energy using NIF’s method involves shooting dozens of beams into a gold cylinder called a hohlraum, heating it up to more than 3 million degrees Celsius. The lasers don’t target the fuel directly. Instead, their aim is to generate “a soup of X-rays,” says Carolyn Kuranz, a fusion researcher at the University of Michigan. These bombard the tiny fuel pellet consisting of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium, and crush it.

This must be done with perfect symmetrical precision—a “stable implosion.” Otherwise, the pellet will wrinkle and the fuel won’t heat up enough. To achieve last week’s result, the NIF researchers used improved computer models to enhance the design of the capsule that holds the fuel and calibrate the laser beams to produce just the right X-ray dispersion.

Currently, those lasers emit about 2 megajoules of energy per pulse. To fusion scientists, that’s a massive, exciting amount of energy. It’s only equivalent to roughly the energy used in about 15 minutes of running a hair dryer—but delivered all at once, in a millionth of a second. Producing those beams at NIF involves a space nearly the size of a football field, filled with flashing lamps that excite the laser rods and propagate the beams. That alone takes 300 megajoules of energy, most of which is lost. Add to that layers of cooling systems and computers, and you quickly get an energy input that’s multiple orders of magnitude greater than the energy produced by fusion. So, step one for practical fusion, according to Cappelli, is using much more efficient lasers.

The headaches continue on the other side of the energy equation, he adds. A conventional combustion engine is about 40 percent efficient at converting the energy it produces into electricity. For fusion, that might be more like 10 to 20 percent, he suggests. And researchers aren’t even close to thinking about that type of conversion. By definition, fusion experiments are exercises in destruction. The fuel pellet is designed to be crushed in one go; the surrounding instruments are destroyed by the release of fusion energy; the mirrors are damaged by the powerful lasers. So to produce sustained energy, scientists need to figure out how to repeatedly fire the powerful lasers and get many pellets in front of them. That could involve multiple pellets and laser firings per minute, Kuranz says. By comparison, NIF currently fires three times per day.

Still, the progress announced today is a big deal, she adds. An overlooked aspect of this type of fusion experiment, known as “inertial confinement,” is that lasers themselves are a relatively new technology—newer than technology like nuclear fission. “The multi-megajoule lasers we have today are an amazing engineering feat,” she says, compared with the lasers first developed in the 1960s. And the NIF researchers have done more with that energy than many people thought they could. Some thought that to get anywhere close to ignition, it might take 10 or more megajoules of laser energy. Plus, she adds, lasers have continued to improve in the decades since NIF broke ground in 1999, meaning tantalizing possibilities for the facilities that could someday replace it.

That’s exciting, she says, because in the past inertial confinement has gotten less attention than another type of fusion technology known as “magnetic confinement.” This involves a donut-shaped device known as a tokamak, in which hydrogen gas is heated into plasma and then trapped by magnetic fields. Commercial fusion companies have generally taken the magnet route, in part because of the challenges of lasers. But recently, inertial facilities have seen more investment—and today’s success may mean more of that ahead, Kuranz says. 

So will fusion help fix climate change? The Biden administration has high hopes, directing significant investment to fusion research through the Inflation Reduction Act. In April, it announced a 10-year vision for building toward commercial fusion. The actual timeline remains hazy, on the scale of “decades” (plural). But “with real energy and real focus, that timeline can move closer,” said Kimberly Budil, director of Lawrence Livermore National Lab, at today’s press conference.

Still, some find it a distraction from the path to achieving the US goal of net-zero energy production, given the tremendous costs. After all, if the goal is to do that by 2035, “decades” won’t cut it. “Despite today’s announcement, fusion is neither commercial nor close to commercial, so it is still vaporware,” says Mark Jacobson, an energy researcher at Stanford who has argued for more investment in available solutions like solar, wind, and hydropower. Indeed, you would be hard-pressed to find a plasma physicist who thinks fusion will be in the mix in the next decade. 

But for nearly a century, since astronomer Arthur Eddington speculated on the relationship of hydrogen and helium powering the sun, people have been attracted to the “what if” possibility of building a power plant that worked like a star. There’s an Icarian quality to it, of course, a humbling from decades of high expectations that are rarely met. But fusion researchers press on toward an elusive goal, even if it may not be attained by any generation alive today. “I think we should look at this with optimism,” says Dmitri Orlov, a research scientist at the University of California, San Diego who studies tokamak design. “Today is like watching a baby learning to walk. Eventually, it will run a marathon.”

The Real Fusion Energy Breakthrough Is Still Decades Away

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The US is considering the deployment of so-called “lightning carriers” to defend Taiwan, a clear departure from its use of supercarriers to signal intent to protect the self-governing island from Chinese threats during previous Taiwan Strait crises.

Last week, Business Insider reported that the US is experimenting with a new lightning carrier concept. The relatively smaller carrier will be able to hold around 20 combat jets, compared to the 50 carried by supercarriers, and is reportedly more versatile and cost-effective.

The US is building the lightning carrier concept on its amphibious assault ships designed to carry Marines, helicopters, amphibious assault vehicles and vertical takeoff aircraft. The lightning carrier concept will reportedly help the US Navy and Marines spread out their forces, increasing their survivability and enabling them to simultaneously confront multiple Chinese threats.

In any Taiwan Strait conflict scenario, the US believes that its lightning carriers will be far more capable than China’s first two aircraft carriers. Vice Admiral Karl Thomas, commander of the US 7th Fleet, has claimed that the US lightning carrier with 14 F-35Bs is superior to China’s Liaoning and Shandong, both built off the Soviet-era Varyag class.

Thomas has also touted the lightning carriers’ operational flexibility. “One day you can have F-35Bs on the flight deck. The next day you can have MV-22s and you can be putting Marines at the shore, and so it just is a very versatile instrument,” he said, according to Business Insider.

China’s rapid military modernization and fast improving anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities have likely forced the US to rethink its supercarrier-centered naval strategy in favor of more but less-capable lightning carriers.

In a June 2020 article for Proceedings, J P Bunyard discusses the rationale for lightning carriers. In particular, he notes the need to match China’s massive shipbuilding program and increase survivability by dispersing capability over more naval assets as drivers for the lightning carrier concept.

The military value of lightning carriers is still being debated in military circles, with analysts arguing for and against the utility of the warships. For example, in an October 2021 article in War on the Rocks, John Bradford and Olli Suorsa argue against the utility of lightning carriers, claiming that the ships will not affect the military balance in potential US conflicts in the Korean peninsula, Senkaku Islands and Taiwan Strait.

USS America amphibious assault ship, one of the ships envisioned to operate as a lightning carrier. Photo: US Navy

Bradford and Suorsa mention that lightning carriers offer marginal value at a high cost compared to what can be achieved with more flexible and resilient land-based options. They also note that these carriers would have to run the gauntlet of China’s A2/AD defenses, making them just as vulnerable as the supercarriers they aim to supplant.

Ben Ho, in a January 2022 article in Proceedings, presents the counterpoint. While Ho acknowledges that lightning carriers have a limited air wing compared to supercarriers, he points out that the ships will be deployed to operate with their larger cousins in a coalition setting.

He also mentions that comparing lightning carriers to supercarriers is spurious, describing the former as a multirole vessel that can perform all military operations below the threshold of conventional warfare.  

Ho points out limitations that may restrict the use of lightning carriers in conventional warfare, noting that they suffer from an offensive-defense dilemma due to their limited air wing since allocating more aircraft to an attack means fewer aircraft for defense and vice versa.

Ho also notes that lightning carriers lack early warning aircraft, such as the E-2 Hawkeye, potentially limiting its small air wing’s situational awareness and command and control.

However, developing a major surface combatant that cannot perform effectively in conventional warfare, especially when the premise of operating under a coalition framework still needs to be strengthened and improved, could be flawed strategic logic.

US allies Japan and South Korea may be unwilling to commit to the defense of Taiwan for various reasons. Asia Times has previously noted Japan’s reluctance to be involved in a Taiwan Strait conflict with the Japanese government issuing ambiguous statements and polls indicating that a military intervention over Taiwan would be a hard sell to the Japanese public.

Moreover, South Korea’s naval capabilities are tailored for the waters surrounding the Korean Peninsula. Seoul handles its differences with China in a more muted manner due to the two sides’ extensive economic ties and China’s strong influence at the negotiating table with nuclear North Korea.

In addition, deploying more lightning carriers means more targets for China’s growing arsenal of anti-ship ballistic missiles and hypersonic weapons.

As such, the lightning carrier may eventually be replaced with drone carriers, which can launch drone swarms that some simulations show could prove decisive in a Taiwan Strait conflict. In that direction,  Asia Times has reported on Turkey’s TCG Anadolu light carrier, which may be repurposed into a drone carrier following Turkey’s removal from America’s F-35 program in 2019.

As a drone carrier, the TCG Anadolu is envisioned to carry 30 to 50 drones, with Turkey planning to operate its new stealth Kizilelma drone from the ship. However, although the drone is touted to conduct missions typically assigned to manned fighters, it may need help to carry out air-to-air missions as advances in software, AI, command, control and processing power are still beyond Turkey’s technological reach.

The TCG Anadolu light carrier in port. Photo: Turkish Defense Ministry

Unmanned drone motherships may supersede the lightning carrier altogether. For example, Asia Times has reported on China’s unmanned AI-powered drone mothership, which is equipped with an AI system that allows it to carry 50 flying, surface and submersible drones that can be launched and recovered autonomously.

In addition, China last year tested a catamaran drone carrier that can launch and recover small swarms of aerial drones designed to unleash electronic attacks on enemy ships. While still in the experimental stage, the catamaran drone carrier can be scaled up to enable attacks on onshore targets and air defenses and possibly even conduct air-to-air operations, given advances in drone AI and sensor technology.

Ultimately, enabling Taiwan to build a small fleet of networked, unmanned drone carriers may be more effective in mounting an asymmetric defense of the island, as Taiwan has the semiconductor industry and shipbuilding capabilities to build such combatants. Moreover, these unmanned combatants avoid the high cost and vulnerability pitfalls of lightning carriers and their supercarrier counterparts.

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In Physics of Fluids, researchers from the University of Virginia and Virginia Tech explored the lift production mechanism of flying snakes, which undulate side-to-side as they move from the tops of trees to the ground to escape predators or to move around quickly and efficiently. The undulation allows snakes to glide for long distances, as much as 25 meters from a 15-meter tower.

To understand how the undulations provide lift, the investigators developed a computational model derived from data obtained through high-speed video of flying snakes. A key component of this model is the cross-sectional shape of the snake's body, which resembles an elongated frisbee or flying disk.

The cross-sectional shape is essential for understanding how the snake can glide so far. In a frisbee, the spinning disk creates increased air pressure below the disk and suction on its top, lifting the disk into the air. To help create the same type of pressure differential across its body, the snake undulates side to side, producing a low-pressure region above its back and a high-pressure region beneath its belly. This lifts the snake and allows it to glide through the air.

"The snake's horizontal undulation creates a series of major vortex structures, including leading edge vortices, LEV, and trailing edge vortices, TEV," said author Haibo Dong of the University of Virginia. "The formation and development of the LEV on the dorsal, or back, surface of the snake body plays an important role in producing lift."

The LEVs form near the head and move back along the body. The investigators found that the LEVs hold for longer intervals at the curves in the snake's body before being shed. These curves form during the undulation and are key to understanding the lift mechanism.

The group considered several features, such as the angle of attack that the snake forms with the oncoming airflow and the frequency of its undulations, to determine which were important in producing glide. In their natural setting, flying snakes typically undulate at a frequency between 1–2 times per second. Surprisingly, the researchers found that more rapid undulation decreases aerodynamic performance.

"The general trend we see is that a frequency increase leads to an instability in the vortex structure, causing some vortex tubes to spin. The spinning vortex tubes tend to detach from the surface, leading to a decrease in lift," said Dong.

The scientists hope their findings will lead to increased understanding of gliding motion and to a more optimal design for gliding snake robots.

The article "Computational analysis of vortex dynamics and aerodynamic performance in flying-snake-like gliding flight with horizontal undulation" is authored by Yuchen Gong, Junshi Wang, Wei Zhang, Jake Socha, and Haibo Dong. The article will appear in Physics of Fluids on Dec. 13, 2022.

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Be kind to all.

Kind Hearts Trust has expanded its services with the launch of resources promoting kindness in early childhood education centres.

Who Are Kindness Heroes? is written by Kind Hearts schools co-ordinator Raewyn Marshall and illustrated by Audrey Larsen. There are discussion points at the end of the book.

Larsen is the co-ordinator for Kind Hearts’ early childhood education programme.

When she left school, she worked as an illustrator for the printery and photographic unit at Massey University. She had done art and tech drawing at school. Larsen has been a primary school teacher for 22 years and has also been a play centre supervisor.

She is a teacher of English to speakers of other languages at West End School.

Her Kind Hearts role is a voluntary one. Larsen comes from a service background - her mother was in Lions, and her father was on every committee he could be, she says.

The kete to promote a kindness culture in schools also contains kindness hero red capes, a kindness memory game, whakataukī to display, certificates, Kind Hearts cards, and craft ideas and materials.

While different centres have different values, most of them are underlaid by kindness or manaakitanga, Larsen says.

Kindness can be as simple as a smile or a kind word. It could also be helping pack up after a game or activity, listening or sharing.

When a centre registers they not only get the kete but access to Larsen as a facilitator. She can visit a centre and read Who Are Kindness Hereos? to the children and facilitate a professional development session for staff.

Kind Hearts is also selling the book, cape and badge as one package.

Kind Hearts will be at the Downtown Christmas Market 4pm-9pm on Thursday.

To register for the kete and programme, visit kindheartsmovement.org or email ece@kindheartsmovement.org.

Arohamai aroha atu.

Love received, love returned.

This is a Public Interest Journalism funded role through NZ On Air

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Role-players in the Cape Winelands are making kindness their mission, launching various activities just after the recent celebration of World Kindness Day on13 November 2022.

The Western Cape Government Departments of Education, Health and Social Development in the Cape Winelands District, as well as the Cape Winelands District Municipality are encouraging staff and their clients to actively show kindness towards each other. During a meeting between these role-players, Education mentioned previous initiatives they launched to help learners readjust to school, after the many disruptions that came with the COVID-19 pandemic. They also wanted to raise awareness of the importance of mental health with their initiative. “We saw that learners (and adults!) had to ‘relearn’ how to engage with each other. We started with an anti-bullying campaign and integrated it with one focusing on being kind to one another,” said Sura Swart, Acting Head: Learner Support in the Cape Winelands Education Department.

This sparked the idea for this group to collectively drive a Be Kind Campaign, focusing on ways to be kind to yourself, others, the environment, and people you meet in passing. Besides a social media campaign running on the Cape Winelands District Municipality’s Facebook page, Health has challenged its staff members to identify ways they can show kindness. “This time of the year many people feel tired, and we must be intentional to make a positive contribution. Kindness benefits everyone,” says Handri Liebenberg, the Director for Western Cape Government Health in the Cape Winelands District. “We are very excited to hear what our staff is taking on. Some of our teams are going for brisk walks during breaktimes. In Stellenbosch, staff are sponsoring benches for use in one of the gardens at the facility, and staff plan to remove a dead tree and replace it.”

“Acts of kindness play an important role in your mental health, says Clinical Psychologist, Leilanie Phillips-Losch. “Performing an act of kindness lights up the brain’s pleasure and reward system. It releases feel good hormones, which calms us and stimulates positive feelings,” she says.

The Western Cape Government Departments of Education, Health and Social Development in the Cape Winelands District, as well as the Cape Winelands District Municipality would like to encourage members of the community to actively participate. Here are some examples:
 
Be kind to yourself:

•     Make sure you speak to yourself in a kind, loving way.
•     Identify phrases that you can repeat to yourself on a regular basis, for example: I am caring. I do my best. I am worthy of love.
•     Drink your medication as prescribed.
•     Ask for help if you feel down, stressed, or anxious.

 
Be kind to others:

•     Show kindness by attentively listening when someone is speaking.
•     Surprise your neighbour with a plate of food!
•     When you see someone is having a difficult time, offer to listen or help with a task.
•     Leave a ‘Thank You’ note on a colleague’s desk.
•     Introduce yourself to a new learner/student/colleague.

 
Be kind to the environment:

•     When you are out for a picnic or braai, avoid lighting a fire in areas where it is prohibited.
•     Throw cigarette butts, nappies and other waste in bins.
•     Think of clever ways to reuse items, or to recycle it.

 
Be kind to people you meet:

•     Compliment a stranger on their friendliness.
•     Smile to the person you meet in the shop.
•     Make eye contact with others to acknowledge them.
•     Offer someone your place in the queue.

 
“In celebration of World Kindness Day, I hope that each citizen of our beautiful district will take the time to be kind to themselves and their loved ones, our environment, neighbours, and strangers too. Being kind to one another is the easiest way of building a positive society and thus an environment in which we can all prosper- after all, we can only rise by being kind to others,” says Ald (Dr) Elna Von Schlicht, Executive Mayor of the Cape Winelands District Municipality.

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Last year, an archaeologist in Peru told The Guardian he thought scientists had found only 5 percent of all the Nazca lines out there in the desert. Researchers at Yamagata University in Japan are now working with local archaeologists to change that, and their latest haul of ancient lines nearly doubles the previous number of known designs.

Drone surveys and aerial images in southern Peru have now identified 168 new geoglyphs in the Nazca Lines World Heritage Site, with roughly 50 of these large-scale geographical drawings depicting human-like figures.

One of the humanoid illustrations even appears to be sporting a bit of facial hair, Homer Simpson-style.

A recently re-discovered geoglyph of a humanoid figure in Peru's Nazca desert. (Yamagata University)

Some of the other designs etched into the landscape feature birds, orcas, cats, and snakes. A few are just simple lines or trapezoidal patterns.

It's hard to say when the designs were made, but clay pots found near the lines date back to a time between 100 BCE and 300 CE.

Many of the ancient illustrations are scratched into flat terrain, making them difficult to see from nearby vantage points. Because the lines were constructed through the removal of rocks and debris to reveal contrasting-colored soil beneath, erosion has only contributed to difficulties in their discovery.

Drones have become our celestial eyes in the skies. These flying devices have allowed experts to glimpse the Nazca Lines with more clarity than ever before.

Some of the information they are gathering is even being analyzed by artificial intelligence programs, which can pick out different patterns faster and more reliably than the human eye. In 2019, a new Nazca line design was actually discovered by AI.

A snake geoglyph in Peru's Nazca desert. (Yamagata University)

The Nazca lines are one of history's most intriguing mysteries, and even if archaeologists find more, it might not bring us any closer to understanding their purpose.

For some inexplicable reason, between 500 BCE and 500 CE, societies in southern Peru constructed simple lines, shapes, and figures across the landscape, many of which can only be seen in their entirety from directly above.

The lines have been interpreted in numerous ways over the decades, but the most common explanation is that they were meant for gods in the sky who were looking down on humans. Another popular theory suggests these figures and patterns were drawn for ritualistic astronomical purposes and were meant to somehow reflect the stars.

A bird geoglyph in Peru's Nazca desert. (Yamagata University)

In 1994, when a part of the Nazca desert was designated a World Heritage Site, only about 30 'geoglyphs' had been found, and they were mostly of plants and animals.

As it turns out, that was just the tip of the iceberg. By 2019, archaeologists had found nearly 200 geoglyphs in total, several of which depicted humanoid figures.

With these latest additions uncovered by researchers from Yamagata University, the official number of known Nazca lines is now 358.

A geoglyph of a cat-like animal. (Yamagata University)

In all likelihood, there are still many more ancient artworks hiding out there in the desert.

With permission from the Peruvian Ministry of Culture, scientists at Yamagata have made it their mission to tally as many of these mysterious designs as they can. The team plans on mapping out the full length and width of the desert canvas along with the help of local archaeologists.

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The industrial revolution began in Britain in the late 18th century and came to the United States in the 19th. By the beginning of the 20th, the United States was the world’s leading industrial nation. It remained number 1 until 2010 when it was surpassed by China.

Today the US and China are geopolitical rivals. Neither side wants rivalry to devolve into war, but both sides’ militaries have to plan for that possibility. That’s why China’s rise as a manufacturing powerhouse and America’s relative decline raise troubling questions.

Manufacturing might can win wars. In the US Civil War, the North’s industrial base played an important role in its victory over the South. America’s vastly larger industrial base was decisive in World War II. President Franklin D Roosevelt rightly called the US the “arsenal of democracy.”

In the late 1940s, in that war’s aftermath, the US was producing more than half of the world’s steel. Today, China produces half of the world steel. America’s steel output is less than a tenth of China’s.

And it isn’t just steel; the US and China have traded places in the manufacture of many other critical products. Should, God forbid, the US and China ever become engaged in a lengthy war, China would replace depleted weapons supplies faster.

According to a retired Air Force general, war games show that in a war with China over Taiwan “we run out of munitions in the first week.”

Taiwan military forces conduct anti-landing drills during the annual Han Kuang military exercises near New Taipei City, July 27, 2022. Photo: Taiwan Ministry of National Defense

Indeed, the US industrial base’s limits are already being tested as the Russian invasion of Ukraine coincides with fears of a Chinese attack on Taiwan. Supplying Ukraine with the weapons it needs to defend itself is taxing the US, while the backlog of arms shipments to Taiwan has swollen to $19 billion.

According to the retired general, “Ukraine uses 20,000 rounds of artillery a day. We produce 20,000 rounds a month.” US industrial capacity, he says, “is a huge issue.”

Two of the troubling questions arising from the US-China industrial role reversal are why it happened and what to do about it.

An admittedly oversimplified answer to the why question is that US post-World War II policies were based on economic logic rather than geopolitical logic. If we’d followed geopolitical logic, we’d have leaned over backward to protect our industrial base as a matter of national security even if it made our economy less efficient.

Economic logic offers lower prices and higher living standards through the free flow of goods and investment capital. In economic logic no country makes everything. Nations produce the goods and services they can make competitively, and they trade for the rest. Financial markets allocate capital to the most profitable producers.

For many decades after World War II, economic logic yielded the prescribed economic benefits without undermining national security. The US industrial base was strong enough to produce most of what was needed for national defense.

Two things have changed. In recent decades, economic logic took American companies beyond manufacturing overseas for overseas markets to manufacturing overseas for the American market. Worse, the “offshored” factories went heavily to China, a country that has gradually emerged as a geopolitical rival.

It’s uncomfortable depending on a rival for vital products. American companies are increasingly “reshoring” (returning manufacturing to the US) or “friend-shoring” (moving China manufacturing to friendlier countries) instead.

Uncle Sam is promoting reshoring, offering financial incentives to build things like semiconductors and electric cars in the US and imposing buy-American requirements.

Reshoring image: Cass Precision Machining

So far, reshoring and friend-shoring are the main answers to the what-to-do-about-it question. But these are random efforts. There’s no strategy underlying them. We’re sleepwalking into industrial policy.

Switching to geopolitical logic and industrial policy has risks. If we’re not careful we could blunder by propping up parts of our industrial base that don’t need propping up. Worse, we could fail to back the development of industries that are small now but will be critical in the future.

A strategy would minimize those risks.

What’s needed is a national commission to study the industrial base and recommend a way forward. It should include Republicans and Democrats, businesspeople and labor leaders, economists and national security experts. It should have a staff and a budget that’s up to the task.

Farmers and ranchers need to stay on top of the industrial-base issue. Agricultural prosperity depends on trade, and industrial policy affects trade policy. Trade partners hurt by buy-American policies may retaliate with barriers to US exports.

And just as the US is increasingly wary of dependence on China, China is increasingly wary of dependence on the US. We still sell China soybeans but we’re no longer the preferred supplier.

The United States must have an adequate industrial base. Let’s hope it doesn’t come at the expense of agriculture exports.

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Japan, Italy and the UK have jointly formalized cooperation to develop a 6th generation fighter, marking a rising trend of US allies and partners developing advanced indigenous combat aircraft rather than purchasing them from the US.

In a joint statement on Friday, the three sides announced their intent to merge the UK’s Tempest 6th generation fighter with Japan’s indigenous F-X program into a new Global Combat Air Program (GCAP) that aims to field an advanced fighter by 2035.

The move comes amid rising geopolitical tensions driven by the Russia-Ukraine war and China’s increasingly belligerent moves toward Taiwan and underscores the formation of new rival geopolitical blocs in what some see as an emerging new Cold War.

The merger aims to fortify Japan against China’s rapidly growing military might and give the UK a more significant security role in the Indo-Pacific. Reports indicate the GCAP will be NATO-compatible and open to collaboration with other like-minded nations pursuing similar fighter projects.

Asia Times previously reported on Japan’s perceived need to counter China’s increasingly advanced fighter aircraft in the context of their contest for the Senkaku Islands, and the UK’s desire to rebuild its air superiority capabilities, which have atrophied after decades of involvement in counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.

The GCAP is one of several fighter development programs that seek to move away from US dependence, including the French-German Future Combat Air System (FCAS) project, Turkey’s TF-X indigenous fighter, and South Korea’s KF-21 Boramae fighter.

The programs are being fueled by the fact that US client states are often required to surrender a degree of their foreign and security policy in exchange for joining a US-dominated logistics train. They aim variously to assert strategic autonomy, fill capability gaps and jump-start domestic defense industries.

Although Japan operates the US-made F-35, the advanced fighter may still be defeated by China’s older-generation fighters such as the J-10 and J-20. David Axe mentioned in a 2015 article for War is Boring that the F-35 is comparatively sluggish compared to the older F-16’s maneuverability and thus would be at a disadvantage in close-in dogfights with Chinese fighters.

Japan’s F-X fighter. Image: Japan Ministry of Defense

However, Alex Hollings notes in a May 2022 article in Sandboxx that the F-35 was flying in the cited 2015 tests with software restrictions that prevented it from maneuvering beyond design limits, aiming weapons using the pilot’s helmet-mounted sight and lacked stealth coatings – and thus was flying at just a fraction of its full combat capabilities.

Asia Times has reported on China’s use of an aerial attrition strategy to grind down Japan’s aging aircraft and aircrews and cause miscalculations leading to unintended encounters, equipment losses from wear and tear and accidents caused by fatigued personnel. Japan thus needs new aircraft that can replace its increasingly obsolete F-15s and outmatch China’s latest fighters.

For the UK, maintaining strategic autonomy is likely the driving factor behind its pursuit of an indigenous combat aircraft. A 2020 Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) paper mentions that a robust national combat air sector will allow the UK to defend its interests without relying on others and add credibility to its claim as an independent military power, which is increasingly in doubt.

A November 2022 RUSI paper notes that the Royal Air Force will need replacements for its aging Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft, which have similar operating costs to the F-35 despite being less capable, by 2035. It also has increasingly expensive tranche upgrades, which may make building an all-new design more logical than keeping the late Cold War-type operational.

The paper also notes that the prolonged absence of a significant project for the UK defense aerospace sector will result in it being eroded or dissolved for commercial reasons.

Italy’s decision to join the Tempest project aims to position itself as a significant player in the European defense aerospace sector. In a 2019 article for Defense News, Tom Kington notes that while Italy could have joined the French-German FCAS project, it would have been the weakest member of the three.

Kington also notes that Italian aerospace firm Leonardo already has a large-scale presence in the UK, which may make cooperation with the latter more feasible than teaming up with France or Germany.

The GCAS program will face several challenges in getting up to speed, including costs, division of labor, production numbers, technology-sharing and maintenance.

The Wall Street Journal reported this month that although the Japanese Ministry of Defense does not know the program’s official cost, it has requested US$1 billion for research and development for fiscal year April 2023. The article notes the three countries have not yet decided whether to work as a consortium or joint venture.

US F-35, F-16, F-18, F-22, and F-15 jets flying in formation. Photo: Facebook / Popular Mechanics

Although production numbers have yet to be decided, the GCAS is slated to replace Japan’s 94 F-2 fighters, the UK’s 114 Eurofighters and Italy’s 94 Eurofighters. Reports indicate the three sides will work in a “spirit of equal partnership” regarding technology sharing, a perennial sore point between Japan and the US.

For example, the US has in the past refused to release critical F-16 software to Japan to preserve its dominance in fighter technology when the latter was developing the F-2, which was derived from the F-16.

The Wall Street Journal report said Japan, the UK, and Italy have all agreed to be able to maintain the GCAS within their own territories and that each would maintain domestic-based maintenance facilities.

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In October 2022, the Biden administration introduced export controls on China, prohibiting the sale of cutting-edge semiconductor chips, the advanced equipment needed to manufacture them and semiconductor expertise from the United States.

The controls are the Biden administration’s most serious attempt to undermine China’s military modernization and the most damaging measures US President Joe Biden has taken against China.

Advanced semiconductors underpin everything from autonomous vehicles to hypersonic weapon systems. Chips are imperative to the defense industry and technologies of the future. By targeting this critical input, the Biden administration aims to freeze China’s semiconductor suite at 2022 levels and impede its military development.

China will probably struggle to maintain its rapid advances in artificial intelligence, quantum and cloud computing without access to US technology and expertise. Chipmakers like the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) — China’s largest logic chip producer — will lose access to machine maintenance and equipment replacement under the new controls.

US chip equipment suppliers like Lam Research, Applied Materials and KLA Corporation have suspended sales and services to Chinese chipmakers while ASML Holding, a Netherlands-based supplier, told its US staff to stop servicing Chinese customers until further notice.

The new controls exploit China’s weaknesses in developing talent and research. They require all US citizens, residents and green card holders — including hundreds of ethnic Chinese educated and trained in the United States — to seek permission from the US Department of Commerce to work in Chinese fabrication plants.

Since such permission is unlikely, US citizens working at Chinese semiconductor companies will be forced to sacrifice their citizenship or their job. Most will have to give up their current jobs. Indeed, Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp has already asked core US staff to leave the company.

Despite the bleak short-term outlook, it is wrong to assume that US controls will hobble China for years. In the case of nuclear weapons, significant resources were poured into acquiring bomb technology once political leaders decided that they were essential for national defense.

That effort inevitably starved other sectors but more often than not successfully delivered nuclear weapons programs.

China is taking a “whole of nation” approach to countering the US’ tech war. Image: Twitter

Now that advanced semiconductors are seen as essential to national defense, Beijing is adopting the “whole of the nation” approach and investing national resources into the industry.

Many engineers and computer scientists are likely to be assigned to semiconductor design and manufacture, assisted by espionage against US, South Korean, Taiwanese, Japanese and European chip firms.

The export controls won’t cripple the Chinese military. According to a 2022 RAND Corporation report, China’s military systems rely on older, less sophisticated chips made in China on which US export controls will have no effect. If China needs more advanced chips for AI-driven weapons systems, it can likely produce them, albeit at a very high cost.

Many semiconductor industry experts agree that China has the technical capability to produce cutting-edge chips yet lacks the commercial capability to scale up production. This means that the US ban will have less effect on weapons systems, instead delaying the rollout of civilian applications, such as autonomous vehicles.

Nor will US semiconductor firms emerge from the sanctions unscathed, given many have China as their largest market. China comprises 27% of sales at Intel, 31% at Lam Research and 33% at Applied Materials.

Both Applied Materials and Nvidia expect the new export controls to cut US$400 million (6% and 7%, respectively) from next quarter’s sales. Lam Research — one of Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp’s largest suppliers — expects the controls to cut a whopping US$2.5 billion (15%) from 2023 sales.

These dramatic cuts come at a particularly difficult time for the US semiconductor industry, which is experiencing falling revenue and increased input costs.

By one estimate, the damage US sanctions inflict on research and development and capital investment in the Western semiconductor industry “will exceed Washington’s modest subsidies for the chip industry by a factor of five or more.”

Tit-for-tat retaliation against Washington is not an option for China, given its heavy reliance on foreign technology. Any reciprocal measure would inflict more damage on China itself.

Punishing US companies with big exposure in China — like Nike or Apple — would harm the Chinese labor market since those firms employ many Chinese citizens. Other foreign supply chains and Chinese businesses supplying Nike and Apple would also suffer.

Imposing export controls on products China dominates, like rare earths or pharmaceutical ingredients, would accelerate the US movement to “restore”, onshore and “friend-shore” manufacturing of those products, as was the case with Japan in 2012.

Excavators load trucks with rare earth on a quay at the Port of Lianyungang in east China’s Jiangsu province, March 10, 2013. Photo: Imaginechina via AFP / Wang Chun

Instead of overt retaliation, China will probably seek alternatives to US chip technology. But since alternatives are decades away, intellectual property theft and the nationalization of foreign semiconductor firms could spike.

Whether US chip controls represent a stand-alone policy or foreshadow sanctions across a wider range of high technology sectors is unclear. In the run-up to the 2024 US presidential election, many Republicans will call for harsher controls.

At his recent meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the G20 summit, Biden sought to tamp down US-China hostilities. But unless he resists calls from the US “China hawks”, Biden could find himself dragged into a Second Cold War.

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US battery production is set for massive growth in the coming years. First, the pandemic disrupted shipping, exposing the fragility of global just-in-time supply lines. Then, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 tied an EV's potential tax credit to the domestic content of that EV's battery pack, in terms of raw materials and final assembly. Each year, an escalating proportion of the battery must be domestic in order to qualify for the credits of up to $7,500.

However, it's unlikely that the automakers or their battery suppliers were taken by surprise. Linking EV incentives to local manufacturing was proposed in 2021 by a group of lawmakers in a more ambitious infrastructure bill that would have added an extra credit for vehicles made by unionized workers. (That bill did not survive contact with Senator Joe Manchin.)

Consequently, we have seen a flurry of new battery factory announcements of late. In September 2021, Ford said it and SK Innovation would create 11,000 new jobs at three BlueOvalSK battery factories in Kentucky and Tennessee. A month later, Toyota said it would spend $3.4 billion on US battery production. That same day, Stellantis revealed it had created a joint venture with LG to open a 40 GWh/year battery plant in the US by 2024.

This July, we learned Volkswagen was looking for US sites for closed-loop battery factories, each with an annual output of 40 GWh. In October, BMW announced a $700 million investment in a battery assembly plant in South Carolina, near where it builds most of its SUVs. And Honda and LG inked a joint venture to build another 40 GWh/year facility in Ohio, home to several of that automaker's manufacturing sites already.

As for GM, it has begun a massive electrification effort, underpinned by a new standard battery platform across its brands. The batteries, called Ultium cells, are pouch cells that use nickel-cobalt-manganese-aluminum chemistry and can already be found in new EVs like the BrightDrop Zero 600 delivery van, the Hummer EV, and Cadillac's Lyriq SUV. But GM has many more EVs arriving in the near future, including an electric Silverado truck and a $30,000 Equinox EV, plus a range of cheaper EVs made in partnership with Honda due for 2027.

The loan was granted under DOE's Advanced Vehicle Technology Manufacturing program. Dating back to 2008, the ATVM program was vital to Tesla's early success, but other EV makers funded around that time did not fare so well, and the loan program barely survived the Trump government. But now, under US President Joe Biden, supporting green manufacturing is once again a national priority.

"DOE is flooring the accelerator to build the electric vehicle supply chain here at home—and that starts with domestic battery manufacturing led by American workers and the unions that support them," said US Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm.

"This loan will jumpstart the domestic battery cell production needed to reduce our reliance on other countries to meet increased demand and support President Biden's goals of widespread EV adoption and cutting carbon pollution produced by gas-powered vehicles."

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With the successful conclusion of the Artemis I mission, NASA has taken a big step toward returning humans to the Moon. But a big rocket and a deep-space capable capsule are only the beginning of the new technologies needed for lunar surface operations.

Most notably, there's the lander. Much attention has been given to this component of the program, especially after NASA selected SpaceX's large Starship vehicle to fulfill that role in April 2021. Starship will rendezvous with the Orion spacecraft in lunar orbit and ferry astronauts down to and up from the Moon. With Orion and the Space Launch System rocket having completed a critical flight test, Starship is now on the clock as NASA works toward a lunar landing later this decade.

But just as astronauts cannot go down to the Moon without Starship, they also cannot go outside on the lunar surface without new spacesuits.

In June, NASA announced that it would partner with two industry groups, one led by Axiom Space and another by Collins Aerospace, to develop spacesuits for both the Moon and spacewalking in low-Earth orbit. In September, the space agency said that Axiom would develop Artemis Moonwalking suits. Last week, NASA said Collins would develop suits for the International Space Station and other in-space applications.

These will be NASA's first new spacesuits in decades, and as they are mini-spacecraft, the new suits are complex machines. The spacesuit design must include life support, pressure garments, avionics, and more in a self-contained unit. Developing a suit for the lunar environment will be especially challenging because it has not been done for five decades, and the Apollo astronauts had to contend with a lot of gritty dust on the lunar surface.

To get a sense of how this work is progressing, Ars recently spoke with Chris Hansen, who is the deputy program manager for spacesuits and lunar vehicles for NASA.

"We think they’re doing great," Hansen said of Axiom and Collins. "These companies are so motivated and excited about these projects, they have invested a lot of their own money into the suits."

Each company has been able to fully leverage the design and research that NASA put into the internal development of a next-generation spacesuit known as "xEMU." NASA invested $420 million into this research and development effort over more than a decade. "They've been able to use it heavily in their designs," Hansen said of the companies and the xEMU prototype.

NASA has set a target for the Artemis III mission to land two humans on the Moon by 2025. While that doesn't seem reasonable—Artemis II will more likely fly a crew around the Moon that year, setting up Artemis III later this decade—Hansen said Axiom is still working toward that goal.

To that end, the company is scheduled to deliver two flight-ready suits to NASA by mid- or late 2025, Hansen said. While Axiom will be required to demonstrate the suits in a flight-like environment, most likely a pressure chamber on Earth, its first flight test will likely occur on the Moon.

"Artemis III will be the demonstration mission," Hansen said. "We're holding our contractors to their time schedules. I’m very confident that they’ll make these schedules that we’re talking about."

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A confluence of factors is leading people in the nation to gravitate toward extremist views.

ALL ACROSS THE country, there are signs of a more radicalized American populace. It’s become impossible to ignore over the past few years. The US has witnessed an insurrection, the rise of QAnon, increasing anti-Semitism, attacks on the LGBTQ community, and more. While radicalism has risen to some degree in many other Western nations, this trend has been exceptionally more pronounced in the United States. It is, therefore, necessary to determine the root causes of it and what makes America, well, exceptional. 

To better understand extremism in the US, it’s necessary to understand who is being radicalized. It’s primarily right-wing extremism, but right-wing extremism covers many different groups and types of people who engage with it. It’s not just the people who join militias like the Proud Boys or the Oath Keepers, it’s the seemingly ordinary people who latch onto QAnon or other conspiracy theories. 

The January 6, 2021, attack in Washington is a good case study on what kind of people have become radicalized in the US. There were members of militia groups there, but research has shown roughly 90 percent of the people who stormed the Capitol were not affiliated with militias or other far-right groups. Many were business owners or regular working people who became convinced over time that the 2020 election had been stolen from Donald Trump.

Conspiracy theories like those under the QAnon umbrella have infiltrated many groups of people one might not expect. They’ve found their way into yoga and parenting groups. A neighbor you regularly encounter at the grocery store and don’t think twice about could be in the process of being radicalized. People from all walks of life can be influenced by these conspiracy theories. 

All of that said, there are some notable psychological and social factors that could be causing Americans to become more prone to embrace extreme ideologies. One of the key factors appears to be a strong sense of uncertainty. The human brain doesn’t like uncertainty, and it can cause people to seek out a path to feeling more certain and assured by any means possible.

J. M. Berger, an author and researcher who focuses on extremism, says there have been many reasons for people to feel uncertain over the past decade or so. Rapid changes in technology, major shifts in the labor market and the economy, the Covid-19 pandemic, and more have caused many Americans to feel unanchored. This creates a situation where extremism can flourish.

“What you find is people are most vulnerable to authoritarianism and extremist impulses when they don’t know what they’re supposed to do,” Berger says. “They don’t know where they fit in the world.”

Arie Kruglanski, a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, says that something that motivates people in uncertain times is a need to feel significant. 

“These things increase the motivation to reassert your significance. Once you have that, you’re vulnerable to narratives that promise you a restoration of your significance,” Kruglanski says. “Many of these conspiracy theories—most of them, I would think—do that.”

Extremist movements can make people feel significant, give them a sense of purpose, and provide them a narrative that explains why everything seems so screwed up. They also give them a sense of community and support. Kruglanski says the more you feel embraced by a network of people, the more you feel motivated to embrace their narrative, even if it’s extreme. Oftentimes, he says, people don’t realize how extreme the group they’re joining actually is until they’ve become invested in it.

Berger says social media has ramped up feelings of uncertainty. He says that’s partly due to the fact that ideas can now almost instantly be spread far and wide with little effort, which can be destabilizing.

“In the past, when transmission of ideas was slower, the ideas had a chance to evolve as they were being transmitted. This would sometimes create a sort of moderating influence,” Berger says. “With social media, ideas move so fast that there’s really no prospect for moderation. Even the most extreme ideas can spread incredibly quickly.”

Social media has also made it easier for people to become radicalized because they can easily find people who share any extreme views they may have and who will happily invite them into a movement. Someone who wouldn’t have met people who share their views in the small town they lived in years ago can easily find a community online and become further radicalized.

“Social media has radically changed how people communicate,” Berger says. “It’s radically changed the kinds of ideas people are exposed to.” 

Research has shown social media exacerbates political polarization, often pushes users to view more extreme content, and helps extremists organize and coordinate their efforts. Social media also has positive impacts in terms of helping organize activists and connecting people in beneficial ways, but its negative effects and uses are significant.

“The network support, the clandestine conspiracy narratives combined with the sense of uncertainty, sense of lost significance—these elements create a combustible mixture that can be lit and lead to radicalization and radical action,” Kruglanski says.

So, many people feel uncertain and insignificant, and social media is flooded with disinformation and groups of extremists who will invite them into a movement. That’s some of it. The more obvious aspect of this, but one that is important, is the role of political leaders in America and a Republican Party that has become more extreme itself. 

“We have people who are the top leaders of a right-wing party who are really just willing to come out and express and endorse positions that are much more radical than what used to be the norm in American politics,” Berger says. “They’re creating a permission structure for people to talk about racism and violence in ways that previously would have been outside of the realm of civil discourse.”

Thomas Zeitzoff, an associate professor in the School of Public Affairs at American University, says the Republican Party has embraced—and is now largely controlled by—extreme figures who would have been sidelined in the past.

“The people who used to gatekeep and keep out people like Pat Buchanan or kick out the John Birchers are not running the party,” Zeitzoff says. “I’m a big believer that parties have to be strong gatekeepers. You have to push people like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert out. They have no business being in a mainstream party.”

Bringing the US back to a more stable place and countering extremism isn’t an easy thing to do when extremism has become this rampant, but there may be some solutions. Kruglanski says those who oppose this extremism need to find positive ways to offer people significance, dignity, and a sense of certainty. Berger proposed a similar remedy.

“If there is a solution, I think it’s to pursue policies that give people some sense of security and understanding of where they are and how they’re supposed to interact with the world,” Berger says.

There will always be conspiracy theorists. Social media isn’t going anywhere. And political leaders will forever use fear and lies to influence people. But America will have to deal with these conditions that are making extremism more likely if it’s going to continue to function politically. A house built on dynamite is a dangerous place to live.

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        1. Be well-prepared.

Planning your meals ahead of time makes it much easier to keep your eating habit in check. As the holidays approach, make a list of every party and gathering you will participate in and create an action plan.

If you are eating out, look at the restaurant’s menu beforehand to get an idea of what healthy options are available. If you’re going to see grandma this Christmas and you know she’ll make a lot of treats that you can’t resist, decide beforehand how much you will have and be prepared to cut back on other foods to avoid overeating.

       2. Eat less at other times.

High-calorie foods are prevalent during the holiday season. But with some planning, you can still enjoy them without worrying much about gaining weight.

By being mindful of your food intake and eating smaller portions on normal days, you can eat more comfortably during special occasions. So, if you are going to a party in the evening, just have some healthy, light meals during the day. This allows you to indulge a bit more in your favorite foods while staying within your normal calorie intake.

3. Drink enough water.

Whenever you feel like you’re getting hungry, you might just be thirsty. As the thirst and hunger cues are quite similar, our brains can sometimes confuse the two.

Making sure that you stay hydrated throughout the day will make it much easier to control your food intake. If you are going to a party and you’re afraid you might overeat, try to drink a cup of water before the meal. This is an effective way to regulate your hunger and increase your feeling of fullness.

4. Don’t go to a party on an empty stomach.

People often think that if they don’t eat anything before a big meal, they can reduce their food intake. But that’s not the case. In fact, an empty stomach is more likely to lead to overeating. When you feel famished, it will be much harder to control yourself and eat in moderation. Moreover, drinking alcohol on an empty stomach is never a good idea.

If you don’t want to end up overindulging, have something to eat before going to a party. Not a full meal, but a light snack like some apple slices with peanut butter or a boiled egg would be enough.

5. Drink moderately.

Many people can be mindful of the amount of food they eat, but they often underestimate the calories in their drinks. Do you know that a half-cup (4 oz.) serving of eggnog, everyone’s beloved winter drink, can contain up to 170 calories (and that’s not counting the shot of rum or brandy you may add)? Another infamous festive drink, champagne, has about 90 calories per glass, which may not sound like much but can add up quickly.

Holiday season is the time to celebrate and have fun, so you don’t have to restrict yourself from your favorite drinks. Just remember not to overdrink if you don’t want to regret it afterward.

6. Eat slowly and mindfully.

Typically, it takes at least 20 minutes for our stomach to send the signal to our brain that we are full. Eating slowly gives your body time to register that it’s full and allows your digestive system to do its job properly. Next time you sit down for a meal,

slow down your eating and pay attention to every bite. Listen to your body’s cues and stop when you feel satisfied. Also, don’t hesitate to say no to the next serving if you’re already full.

7. Remember, consistency is key.

Have you ever heard the saying, “The first mistake is an accident; the second one is the start of a new habit”?

No matter how careful you are with your eating habits, it’s impossible to strictly follow your routine all the time. Maybe there’s an unscheduled gathering with friends, or maybe you could not stop yourself and have too much Christmas pudding. And that’s totally fine. These kinds of one-time accidents won’t affect your healthy lifestyle in the long run.

Even if you slip up, don’t try to “balance it out” after that by going overly restrictive and depriving yourself of food. One or two big meals won’t make you gain weight if you don’t turn it into a month of bingeing. Simply get back on track with your next meal.

8. Move, move, move.

It’s already hard enough to maintain an active lifestyle in the cold weather, but with all the festivities, parties, and delicious foods, it’s even more of a challenge to stay active during the holiday season.

However, as we often consume more food during this period, do not neglect your daily exercise if you want to keep in shape. Physical activities such as skiing, hiking, jogging, or even just a 15-minute walk after meals are great ways to improve your health and have fun with your friends and family.

9. Love yourself.

Maintaining a healthy lifestyle is a lifelong pursuit, so don’t stress yourself too much over food and weight gain over this short period of time. After all, the the holiday season is the season of goodwill, and that starts with learning to love yourself. So just relax, be gentle with yourself, and enjoy delicious foods while creating precious memories with your loved ones.

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After circling the moon for the past three weeks, NASA’s Orion capsule splashed down under parachute yesterday morning off the coast of Mexico’s Baja California near Guadalupe Island, marking an end to the Artemis program’s first major lunar mission. Orion was then scooped up by a recovery crew and sent to port in San Diego, carried in the well of the Navy ship USS Portland. With Artemis 1 in the books, NASA will scrutinize the capsule’s performance, making sure it is safe for future crewed trips to the moon, including a much-anticipated lunar landing in 2026.

“It’s a historic achievement because we are now going back into deep space with a new generation,” said NASA chief Bill Nelson following Orion’s splashdown. “This is a defining day. It is one that marks new technology, a whole new breed of astronaut, a vision for the future.”

During Sunday’s descent, the three parachutes fully inflated, putting the brakes on the spacecraft to slow it from 25,000 miles per hour to just 20 as it hurtled through the atmosphere. But now the Artemis team will be studying all the capsule’s metrics in detail. “First we’ll be looking at: Did the heat shield do its job in rejecting heat and taking care of the heat pulse such that the internal cabin pressure stays at a moderate mid-70 degrees for astronauts when they’re in there?” says Sarah D’Souza, the deputy systems manager at the NASA Ames Research Center who helped develop Orion’s thermal protection system. 

That ablative heat shield is made up of thick connected blocks of an epoxy resin material called Avcoat, which burns off as the shield endures scorching temperatures up to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, about half the temperature of the surface of the sun. They want to be sure, she says, that “we’ve got a design that will keep humans safe.”

Nelson, too, stressed human safety and habitability during a post-splashdown press conference. “This time we go back to the moon to learn to live, to work, to invent, to create, in order to go on out into the cosmos to further explore,” he said. “The plan is to get ready to go with humans to Mars in the late 2030s, and then even further beyond.”

Orion was originally planned to splash down off the coast of San Diego, but the weather forecast there made that a no-go, and the flight director adjusted its trajectory. That flexibility comes thanks to a maneuver the team attempted called a “skip” reentry, in which Orion descended partway through the atmosphere to an altitude of about 40 miles, then skipped upward and forward like a pebble skimming across a pond, and then entered the atmosphere for good. That kind of reentry also helps to slow down the spacecraft.

The reentry brought Orion within 0.02 degrees of the team’s planned flight angle, and the splashdown into the ocean was a near bullseye, about 2 nautical miles from its target landing site. Once the chutes drifted down, all five balloon-like bags inflated, keeping Orion upright in the water. NASA and Navy officials on the recovery team—in helicopters and boats—then made their approach, preparing to retrieve the spacecraft and stow it in the belly of the USS Portland for the trek back to shore.

In the coming months, the Artemis team will also study data taken from the communication systems and the many space radiation sensors attached to the three mannequins aboard Orion. (A stuffed Shaun the Sheep character also went along for the ride.) That information, important for maintaining a habitable capsule for the crew and ensuring communication between the craft and engineers on the ground, will help the team prepare for Artemis 2. On that trip, planned for 2024, astronauts will fly around the moon in a second version of the Orion spacecraft and scope out potential landing spots for the third mission. NASA and its international and commercial partners are already at work on that new capsule, the Space Launch System rocket and boosters that will launch it, and the European service module that propels, powers, and cools it. The team may tweak the design of some of these systems depending on their analysis of Artemis 1.

NASA already knows that much went right on the inaugural 26-day, 1.4-million mile mission: Despite several launch delays caused by persistent hydrogen leaks and the unlucky arrival of a hurricane, the massive SLS rocket successfully lifted off on November 16. The upper stage rocket then deployed 10 little satellites, which went on their own secondary missions. Orion voyaged within 80 miles of the lunar surface, and on November 28, it traveled the farthest from Earth a crew-capable spacecraft has ever gone, about 269,000 miles from home. And on December 5, Orion’s cameras took photos of the moon and Earth during its final lunar flyby, an homage to the iconic “Earthrise” image taken by astronaut Bill Anders aboard Apollo 8 in 1968.

But some of those mini missions failed. The CubeSat to Study Solar Particles, or CuSP, had what the agency dubbed an “unexplained battery anomaly,” and then the research team lost contact with it. The Japanese OMOTENASHI lunar lander failed to reach the moon. NASA has also lost contact with the asteroid-bound NEA Scout and an infrared moon-mapper called LunIR. The outlook isn’t good for them, but they’re not necessarily doomed: NASA lost contact with the Capstone spacecraft in July and then restored it, and it’s now successfully orbiting the moon. But these small satellites have limited battery power, and some could not be recharged while the rocket’s launch was delayed. That means their batteries ran low on juice. 

Despite these challenges, the Artemis program is now well under way, exactly a half-century after the final Apollo mission. After Artemis 2’s crewed orbit around the moon, Artemis 3 will bring the first woman and the first person of colour to its surface—the first people to walk on the moon since Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schnitt’s landing at the valley of Taurus-Littrow in 1972. Subsequent missions will deliver and assemble modules of the Gateway space station that will orbit the moon, and could serve as a way station and proving ground for future expeditions to Mars.

As Orion gently splashed down onto the ocean yesterday, NASA commentator Rob Navia reflected on what that achievement meant. “From Tranquility Base to Taurus-Littrow to the tranquil waters of the Pacific, the latest chapter of NASA’s journey to the moon comes to a close. Orion, back on Earth,” he said. He described Orion as NASA’s “new ticket to ride to the moon and beyond.”

The Orion Moon Capsule Is Back. What Happens Next?

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Statistically speaking, more educated people tend to weigh less. That correlation alone, though, doesn’t really tell you much—you could make a parlor game out of coming up with plausible explanations. Maybe the reason is that more educated people have access to healthier foods. Maybe it’s because people who are bullied about their weight are more likely to leave school. Or maybe the people who can afford college tuition and the people who can afford gym memberships are one and the same.

In 2015, a study in Nature Genetics introduced a surprising new possibility: Perhaps weight and education are so intimately connected because they share some of the same genetic roots. Using enormous collections of genetic data, the study’s authors searched for pairs of traits that were correlated with the same genes. For each pair they calculated a metric called “genetic correlation,” which quantifies just how similar the whole set of genes linked to one trait is to that linked to another trait. A smattering of trait pairs popped out as having significant genetic correlations, among them body mass index (BMI) and years of education—as well as more obvious pairs, like depression and anxiety, or type 2 diabetes and blood glucose levels. (Researchers have since tried to explain the apparent genetic link between weight and education by suggesting that people who are genetically predisposed to be better decision makers, and are presumably successful in the classroom, are more likely to adopt healthy lifestyles.)

Compared to simpler, behavioral explanations, such genetic explanations might sound far-fetched. But the data would seem to offer few other alternatives. Genes, after all, have an unquestionable primacy. If the same genes are associated with both education and BMI, it stands to reason that those traits must have intertwined biological roots. 

Now, a new study in Science shows that this idea is illusory. It suggests that geneticists must also consider what comes before people’s genes: their parents. Even if two traits are statistically associated with the same genes, they might not have any true genetic overlap: That same pattern can also appear if people with those traits tend to mate with each other. (This is called “cross-trait assortative mating.”) 

For example, people with many years of education, who are likely to be of a higher social class, tend to seek out partners who display markers of social standing like a low BMI, and vice versa. Their children will then have genes linked to both high education and low weight. If this happens repeatedly across a population, the two traits will appear to share some of the same genetic causes, because the traits and genes will co-occur so frequently. In reality, they will have been inherited from different sides of the family.

Genetic correlations have become a popular tool because of what they seem to suggest about the underlying biology of a pair of traits, says Richard Border, a postdoctoral scholar in neurology and computer science at the University of California, Los Angeles and the study’s lead author. But cross-trait assortative mating challenges such inferences. “It is basically a way of breaking that logic,” Border says.

Border and his colleagues are not the first to raise the possibility of spurious genetic correlations. When designing studies, geneticists can control for the effects of factors like parental traits and childhood environment by comparing people who have those things in common—that is, siblings. Earlier this year, statistical geneticist Laurence Howe and a team of researchers did just that. When Howe compared siblings with each other, he observed no genetic correlation between BMI and years of education. Somehow, it was parents, and not genes themselves, that had made weight and education seem genetically connected.

But Howe’s study didn’t explain exactly how parents played a role. There were some promising possibilities. Parents don’t just pass down genes to their kids—they also pass down their socioeconomic status, which has consequences for both schooling and diet. And, of course, parents typically choose whom they reproduce with. Loic Yengo, group leader of the Statistical Genomics Laboratory at the University of Queensland, says that geneticists had realized that cross-trait assortative mating could—in theory—inflate genetic correlations. But no one had yet produced concrete evidence that it did. 

Border and his colleagues found that evidence. Studying cross-trait assortative mating in detail requires knowing how much it actually happens in the real world. It seems reasonable that depressed people might end up with anxious people due to their shared experience of living with a mental illness, or that educated people would tend to marry people who got high scores on IQ tests, but Border needed to put numbers on those trends. The team was able to find the information they needed in the UK Biobank, an enormous dataset that comprises genetic, medical, and demographic data about hundreds of thousands of UK residents. They found that the more often people who had a particular pair of traits tended to couple up, the more those traits seemed to be genetically correlated. It was reasonable to suspect, then, that assortative mating was in fact making some genetic correlations appear stronger than they would otherwise be.

Still, this observation didn’t prove that assortative mating could create the illusion of a genetic link where none existed. So Border and his team turned to a computational approach: Following the marital trends they had observed in the real world Biobank data, they simulated a population of people who paired off into couples. These imaginary couples reproduced, and their children found mates, and their children’s children—and so on. The scientists tracked the genes and traits of all these simulated individuals, and, using that information, they were able to calculate genetic correlations across each generation. What they found confirmed their suspicions—even if two traits were totally genetically unrelated in the first generation, if people who had those traits tended to mate with each other, the genes eventually started to seem correlated. Based on the simulations, they estimated that assortative mating alone could explain as much as half of the genetic correlation between BMI and education.

But assortative mating didn’t go as far toward explaining some of the other apparent correlations they simulated. It appears to play a smaller role in the genetic correlations between some pairs of psychiatric conditions, like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, or major depression and anxiety. Because each pair of conditions shares so many genetic similarities, some scientists have wondered whether they should even be considered separate conditions at all. Even taking assortative mating into account, that argument would still appear to hold water. 

That’s a particularly good piece of news given the current state of psychiatry, says Verneri Anttila, a genetics researcher at the University of Helsinki. “Genetic analysis has been a rare ray of hope in the recent decade,” he says. Whereas some approaches to understanding and treating psychiatric illness seem to have stalled, genetic studies have continued to provide new insight and could one day play a role in the creation of new treatments. 

Noah Zaitlen, a professor of neurology at UCLA and the paper’s senior author, doesn’t expect that the genetics community will immediately change its methodology in light of the evidence he and Border have presented. And that was never his goal. “You can just destroy progress by making too many checks and too many things to try,” he says. But now, he expects, researchers will have to seriously consider the potential influence of assortative mating when they interpret genetic correlation results.

The most meaningful impact of this work may take place outside of the lab, Border says. As genetic technologies advance, and scientists get better at predicting how people will look and behave just by inspecting their genomes, some people are trying to bring those tools out into the real world. For example, if you spit into a plastic tube and ship it to their lab, 23andMe will use your genes to tell you how likely you are to develop type 2 diabetes. And because it is possible to predict how far someone will go in school just by looking at their genes, some scientists have suggested that schools should use genetic analysis to better target resources to their students.

But if social phenomena like cross-assortative mating can meaningfully affect the results of genetics studies, it’s hard to say for sure that genes can tell you something about a child’s intrinsic capacity to succeed in school. “Our results,” Border says, “suggest that this is kind of a terrible idea.” 

Currently, he is investigating how familial features other than cross-trait assortative mating—like the passing down of class and wealth—can create the illusion of genetic relationships. This research, and his work on assortative mating, have convinced him that genetic prediction tools are not ready for real-world deployment in domains like education. “Especially with behavioral traits,” he says, “we really need to really understand what we’re actually measuring before we start to move forward with this stuff.”

There’s a New Explanation for ‘Genetic’ Trait Pairs: Your Parents

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He was the best boy.

A dog named El Palomo was hailed as a hero earlier this month after he managed to lead police to his 84-year-old owner, who went missing in the desert after getting lost during a walk.

Gregorio Romero left his home on Nov. 27, 2022, for a walk in Moctezuma, Mexico, when he got lost.

Romero’s family reported the man’s disappearance four days later, claiming that it was not unusual for him to wander off to visit other villages and then return a few days later.

Ramona, Romero’s niece, said she grew concerned after several days had passed since Romero suffers from memory loss.

Members of the National Guard, the Municipal Police, the Municipal Civil Protection Unit and even trained sniffer dogs spent a week looking for the man.

It was then authorities turned to the man’s best friend, El Palomo, who managed to find his owner nearly 2 miles from his home a week later — on Dec. 4, 2022.

Gregorio Romero left his home on Nov. 27, 2022, for a walk in Moctezuma, Mexico, when he got lost.
Jam Press

Members of the National Guard, the Municipal Police, the Municipal Civil Protection Unit and even trained sniffer dogs spent a week looking for the man.
Jam Press

His dog managed to find his owner nearly 2 miles from his home on Dec. 4, 2022.
Jam Press

Romero was taken to a nearby hospital for dehydration and malnutrition and received two days of treatment. All the while, his loyal companion waited right outside the hospital doors.
Jam Press

“The unconditional love of his pet allowed Don Goyo [Gregorio] to be reunited with his family, because it was El Palomo who led the authorities to where he was,” touted the police.
Jam Press

Following his brief stay at the hospital, Romero went outside to get some sun and was accompanied by his dog, who stayed close by to protect him.
Jam Press

Romero was taken to a nearby hospital and treated for dehydration and malnutrition for two days. All the while, his loyal companion waited right outside the hospital doors.

“El Palomo remained by the hospital door day and night waiting for the recovery of his beloved Don Goyo [Gregorio],” said authorities.

Following his brief stay at the hospital, Romero went outside to get some sun and was accompanied by his dog, who stayed close by to protect him.

“The unconditional love of his pet allowed Don Goyo to be reunited with his family, because it was El Palomo who led the authorities to where he was,” touted the police.

Source

Brandon Dionne, associate clinical professor in Northeastern's School of Pharmacy, urges caution.

Acetaminophen in tablets for adults is the same active ingredient in acetaminophen liquid drops and chewable tablets for children, he says. But unlike dosages for adults, pediatric dosages are based on age and weight, Dionne says.

"For adults, you have fixed dosages," Dionne says. The minimum adult dose of acetaminophen is a 325-milligram regular strength tablet every three to four hours, he says. The maximum dose for that time period is 500 milligrams.

Compare that to the dosage scale for children published by the company that makes Tylenol, a name brand for acetaminophen.

Tylenol says on its website that the dose for a child between the ages of 9 and 10 who weighs between 60 to 71 pounds is 400 milligrams.

For a 4- to 5-year-old child weighing between 36 to 47 pounds, the maximum single dose drops to 240 milligrams.

"It would be hard to make some of those doses with adult formulations," Dionne says, adding that getting the exact measurement is important.

Tylenol warns on its website against cutting adult doses for children.

But so many parents are doing exactly that that a poison control organization in Canada, which started experiencing the shortage of pediatric acetaminophen before the United States, has published a conversion dosing guide for parents.

The Ontario Poison Center guide to alternatives to infant and children's liquid pain medication lists dosage conversions for both acetaminophen, based on a 325-milligram tablet, and for ibuprofen based on a 200-milligram tablet.

Ibuprofen is a pain and fever reducer that is also anti-inflammatory, Dionne says.

For a child weighing 12.1 to 17.6 pounds, which according to Tylenol correlates to a child between the ages of 4 to 11 months, would get one-quarter of a 325-milligram acetaminophen tablet, according to the poison center guide.

A child weighing 16.5 to 23.8 pounds would get a third and a youngster between 23.9 to 35.7 pounds would get a half.

The Ontario Poison Control Center, which also established maximum doses per day, says children weighing between 11 and 22 pounds should only take a quarter of a 200-milligram ibuprofen tablet.

A pill cutter can help parents cut the tablet down correctly.

But Dionne says that is especially challenging with ibuprofen since the pills are so small.

There is also the issue of getting children to take the medication, he says.

"You're going to have to try to crush it up and hide it in some food. It's not as easy as giving them the liquid formulation or a chewable tablet," Dionne says.

The Ontario Poison Control Center advises parents to call their pharmacist for advice on crushing and serving the acetaminophen or ibuprofen, but in the meantime parent social media sites are full of advice—and admonitions.

Acute shortage of oral amoxicillin

There is also an acute shortage of oral amoxicillin, according to the FDA. Parents of children with ear and respiratory infections report being prescribed half the amount of the liquid medication due to limited supplies.

Parents are being advised to "check back later" and grab generic alternatives if they are available, according to ABC News.

The news service says that instead of using automated E-scripts that send prescriptions directly from physician offices to specific drugstores, parents should consider asking for written prescriptions in case they have to check out several different pharmacies.

"You could ask for a paper prescription," Dionne says.

Another possible alternative is using a compounding pharmacy, Dionne says.

Compounding pharmacies combine ingredients in house to meet patients' specific needs and might be available to make pediatric versions of amoxicillin, for instance, he says.

Dionne says people can search for compounding pharmacies in their area at Find A Compounder and Find a Provider.

The shortage of pediatric medications is being spurred by a "tripledemic" of pediatric RSV, flu and COVID-19, health experts say.

Really a supply chain problem

But there's really no excuse for the problem, which is a supply chain issue, says Nada Sanders, a distinguished professor at Northeastern's D'Amore-McKim School of Business.

As winter approaches with more possibility of illness, "I would like to see more reassurances from a supply chain standpoint in terms of what does the supply chain look like," Sanders says.

"The fact that we're seeing shortages is definitely alarming," says Neil Maniar, director of Northeastern's master of public health program.

Acetaminophen and amoxicillin "are really important medications," Maniar says. "They're really important tools to help manage illness and to treat the illness."

Dionne says that while amoxicillin plays a vital role in combating bacterial infections, he adds, "It is too often overprescribed for viral infections, which can have unintended consequences. Parents can ask their child's pediatrician whether an antibiotic is absolutely necessary."

He says that whatever parents do, they should not hoard pediatric medications. That will only make it harder for children who are ill to get them, Dionne says.

"Try to only buy what you think you'll need for a short time in the future," he says.

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In many ways, Yogendra Puranik is an immigrant success story.

Mr. Puranik, 45, joined the initial wave of Indian tech workers who went to Japan in the early 2000s. He became a Japanese citizen and in 2019 won elected office in Tokyo, a first for anyone from India. This year, he was hired as the principal of a public school.

Now, though, as Japanese companies scramble to lure more highly educated Indians like Mr. Puranik to fill a yawning shortage of IT engineers, he is under no illusion about the challenges that Japan, and those it attracts, will face.

Recruiters call it a crucial test of Japan’s ability to compete with the United States and Europe for increasingly sought-after global talent. But lower pay and steep language and cultural barriers make Japan less attractive for many. Rigid corporate structures can frustrate newcomers. And Japan, which has long been ambivalent about the presence of foreigners, lacks an established system to integrate them into Japanese life.

“These foreigners are coming, and there is no communication between the Japanese and foreigners,” Mr. Puranik said at his home in an Indian neighborhood in eastern Tokyo. “There is no inclusivity happening.”

As it rapidly ages, Japan desperately needs more workers to fuel the world’s third-largest economy and plug gaps in everything from farming and factory work to elder care and nursing. Bending to this reality, the country has eased strict limits on immigration in hopes of attracting hundreds of thousands of foreign workers, most notably through a landmark expansion of work visa rules approved in 2018.

The need for international talent is perhaps no greater than in the tech sector, where the government estimates that the shortfall in workers will reach nearly 800,000 in the coming years as the country pursues a long-overdue national digitization effort.

The pandemic, by pushing work, education and many other aspects of daily life onto online platforms, has magnified the technological shortcomings of a country once seen as a leader in high tech.

Japanese companies, particularly smaller ones, have struggled to wean themselves from physical paperwork and adopt digital tools. Government reports and independent analyses show Japanese companies’ use of cloud technologies is nearly a decade behind those in the United States.

India produces a vast pool of 1.5 million engineering graduates each year who could help Japan play digital catch-up. When Indian workers do answer the call, many speak admiringly of the cleanliness and safety of Japanese cities, and say their salaries allow them to live comfortably, if not lavishly. Those who have studied Japanese language and culture can be effusive in their praise.

“As it happens to anyone who comes to Japan, you fall in love,” said Shailesh Date, 50, who first went to the country in 1996 and is now the head of technology for the American financial services company Franklin Templeton Japan in Tokyo. “It’s the most beautiful country to live in.”

Yet the Indian newcomers mostly admire Japan from across a divide. Many of Japan’s 36,000 Indians are concentrated in the Edogawa section of eastern Tokyo, where they have their own vegetarian restaurants, places of worship and specialty grocery stores. The area has two major Indian schools where children study in English and follow Indian curricular standards.

Nirmal Jain, an Indian educator, said she founded the Indian International School in Japan in 2004 for children who would not thrive in Japan’s one-size-fits-all public education system. The school now has 1,400 students on two campuses and is building a new, larger facility in Tokyo.

Ms. Jain said that separate schools were appropriate in a place like Japan, where people tend to keep their distance from outsiders.

“I mean, they are nice people, everything is perfect, but when it comes to person-to-person relationships, it’s kind of not there,” she said.

Mr. Puranik said fellow Indians often called him for help with emergencies or conflicts — the wandering father with dementia who ends up in police custody, the daughter mistakenly stopped by border agents at the airport. He once even fielded a call from a worker who wanted to sue his Japanese boss for kicking him.

His own son, he said, was bullied in a Japanese school — by the teacher. Mr. Puranik said he repeatedly talked to the teacher, to no avail. “She would always try to make him a criminal,” he said, adding that some teachers “feel challenged if the kid is doing anything differently.”

A similar dynamic can sometimes be found in the workplace.

Many Indian tech workers in Japan say they encounter ironclad corporate hierarchies and resistance to change, a paradox in an industry that thrives on innovation and risk-taking.

“They want things in a particular order; they want case studies and past experience,” Mr. Puranik said of some Japanese managers. “IT doesn’t work like that. There is no past experience. We have to reinvent ourselves every day.”

The majority of Indian IT workers arrive in Japan without much knowledge of the language or culture, said Megha Wadhwa, a migration researcher and Japanese and South Asian studies expert at the Free University of Berlin and author of the 2021 book “Indian Migrants in Tokyo.” That can hinder their careers while their peers are making strides back home or in the United States or Europe. They soon start to explore their options and often end up moving elsewhere. In the United States, average tech salaries, by some estimates, are more than twice those in Japan.

“After the pink glasses are removed, they will know the real situation, and they will feel stagnant in Japan,” said Dr. Wadhwa, who lived and worked in Japan for some 15 years.

Still, Japanese companies have made decisive moves in recent years to tap into the pool of Indian engineering graduates, either by bringing them to Japan or employing them in India.

Japanese companies like Rakuten and Mercari, both e-commerce firms, have set up operations in India. The Japanese government has funneled aid into India to support the expansion of technology education.

Kotaro Kataoka, a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, acts as a matchmaker between Indian students and tech companies. He said Japanese recruiters had gotten off to a slow start in India by focusing instead on East Asian countries like Vietnam and China that are considered more culturally similar to Japan.

But Indian recruits, he said, offer the independent, out-of-the-box thinking that Japanese companies need to kick-start their innovation efforts. “They do whatever they want, but sometimes that randomness and out-of-control aspect of Indian talent nicely works,” Professor Kataoka said.

Many Japanese argue that it’s a tall order for a country with historically low levels of immigration to match the flexibility and diversity of countries in North America or Western Europe.

Big-name American tech companies have recruited aggressively in India, offering immigrant-friendly work environments, surging compensation packages and sky’s-the-limit career advancement opportunities. Google, Twitter, Microsoft and Adobe have all had Indian-born chief executives.

Still, there are efforts to bridge the gaps in Edogawa. Mr. Puranik runs an Indian cultural center in his home where Japanese students take yoga lessons, and Indian and Japanese students gather for percussion lessons on the Indian tabla from a Japanese teacher. Mr. Puranik often hosts Japanese college students for talks on Indian culture or immigration.

Japanese officials also provide venues and assistance for Indian cultural festivals attended by the wider community. Mr. Puranik said that such symbolic gestures were nice, but that it was more important to provide expanded Japanese language training and cultural instruction.

“There has to be more interaction,” he said. “Summer festival and Diwali festival, yes, one-off in a year you can have that, that’s a bonus. But you cannot say that bonus is your salary.”

At the same time, many Indians in Edogawa say that newcomers could do more to fit into Japanese life.

Mr. Date, the technology head at Franklin Templeton, said he and a few friends wanted to counter the growing reputation of Indians as being noisy — a pet peeve in a crowded city of thin-walled apartments — and a widespread belief that they are reluctant to conform to Japanese ways.

So their running group, the Desi Runners of Tokyo, decided to have members donate 10 yen for every kilometer they run. Last year, they donated 400,000 yen, about $3,000, to a charity in Edogawa, he said.

“We all agreed: We are living here, we are earning money,” Mr. Date said. “Maybe it’s time to give back to Japan.”

Source

Here’s why NASA’s Artemis I mission is so rare, and so remarkable

A mouse is running on a treadmill embedded in a virtual reality corridor. In its mind’s eye, it sees itself scurrying down a tunnel with a distinctive pattern of lights ahead. Through training, the mouse has learned that if it stops at the lights and holds that position for 1.5 seconds, it will receive a reward—a small drink of water. Then it can rush to another set of lights to receive another reward.

This setup is the basis for research published in July in Cell Reports by the neuroscientists Elie Adam, Taylor Johns and Mriganka Sur of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It explores a simple question: How does the brain—in mice, humans and other mammals—work quickly enough to stop us on a dime? The new work reveals that the brain is not wired to transmit a sharp “stop” command in the most direct or intuitive way. Instead, it employs a more complicated signaling system based on principles of calculus. This arrangement may sound overly complicated, but it’s a surprisingly clever way to control behaviors that need to be more precise than the commands from the brain can be.

Control over the simple mechanics of walking or running is fairly easy to describe: The mesencephalic locomotor region (MLR) of the brain sends signals to neurons in the spinal cord, which send inhibitory or excitatory impulses to motor neurons governing muscles in the leg: Stop. Go. Stop. Go. Each signal is a spike of electrical activity generated by the sets of neurons firing.

The story gets more complex, however, when goals are introduced, such as when a tennis player wants to run to an exact spot on the court or a thirsty mouse eyes a refreshing prize in the distance. Biologists have understood for a long time that goals take shape in the brain’s cerebral cortex. How does the brain translate a goal (stop running there so you get a reward) into a precisely timed signal that tells the MLR to hit the brakes?

“Humans and mammals have extraordinary abilities when it comes to sensory motor control,” said Sridevi Sarma, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University. “For decades people have been studying what it is about our brains that makes us so agile, quick and robust.”

The Fast and the Furriest

To understand the answer, the researchers monitored the neural activity in a mouse’s brain while timing how long it took the animal to decelerate from top speed to a full stop. They expected to see an inhibitory signal surge into the MLR, triggering the legs to stop almost instantaneously, like an electrical switch turning off a lightbulb.

But a discrepancy in the data quickly undermined that theory. They observed a “stop” signal flowing into the MLR while the mouse slowed, but it wasn’t spiking in intensity fast enough to explain how quickly the animal halted.

“If you just take stop signals and feed them into the MLR, the animal will stop, but the mathematics tell us that the stop won’t be fast enough,” said Adam.

“The cortex doesn’t provide a switch,” said Sur. “We thought that’s what the cortex would do, go from 0 to 1 with a fast signal. It doesn’t do that, that’s the puzzle.”

So the researchers knew there had to be an additional signaling system at work.

To find it, they looked again at the anatomy of the mouse brain. Between the cortex where goals originate and the MLR that controls locomotion sits another region, the subthalamic nucleus (STN). It was already known that the STN connects to the MLR by two pathways: One sends excitatory signals and the other sends inhibitory signals. The researchers realized that the MLR responds to the interplay between the two signals rather than relying on the strength of either one.

As the sprinting mouse prepares to stop, the MLR receives an inhibitory signal from the STN. Almost immediately afterward, it also receives an excitatory signal. Each signal comes on slowly—but the switch between them is fast, and that’s what the MLR pays attention to: It registers the difference between the two signals. The greater the difference, the faster the change in the inhibitory signal and the more rapidly the MLR commands the legs to stop.

“There is no information in the height of the spikes,” said Sur. “Everything is in the interval between the spikes. Because the spikes are sharp, the interval can carry information.”

M.I.T. researchers realized that the inhibitory “stop” signals going to the brain region that controls locomotion could not account for how rapidly a mouse in their experiments stopped running. “The mathematics tell us that the stop won’t be fast enough,” said Elie Adam, a member of the team.Courtesy of Elie Adam

Sharp Curve Ahead

The researchers cast the stopping mechanism in terms of two basic functions of calculus: integration, which measures the area under a curve, and derivation, which calculates the slope at a point on a curve.

If stopping depended only on how much of a stop signal the MLR received, then it could be thought of as a form of integration; the quantity of the signal would be what mattered. But it doesn’t, because integration by itself isn’t enough for rapid control. Instead, the MLR accumulates the difference between the two well-timed signals, which mirrors the way a derivative is calculated: by taking the difference between two infinitesimally close values to calculate the slope of a curve at a point. The fast dynamics of the derivative cancel out the slow dynamics of the integration and allow for a fast stop.

“There’s an excitatory signal and an inhibitory signal, and the two are being compared instantaneously,” Sur said. “When that value hits a certain amount, there is a switch thrown that makes the animal stop.”

This derivative-based control system may sound indirect, but it makes strategic sense. When a mouse navigating virtual reality or a tennis player racing across a court is approaching a stopping point, they might find it useful to know how fast they are going. But for planning what they will need to do next, it’s more useful for them to know how rapidly they are speeding up or slowing down—the derivative function of their movement.

“It allows you to anticipate and predict. If I know the derivative, the rate of change of velocity, then I can predict what my velocity will be at the next step,” Sarma said. “If I know I have to stop, I can plan for it and make it happen.”

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

Your Brain Uses Calculus to Control Fast Movements

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NASA’s Orion capsule splashed down into the Pacific Ocean at around 12:40PM ET.

Screenshot: Emma Roth / The Verge

NASA successfully completes its Artemis I mission

Monday, December 12

• The first launch of the week comes from China. A Long March 4C rocket will carry an experimental satellite to orbit called Shiyan 20A. Not too many details about the satellite are known but previous Shiyan satellites were described as experimental Earth observation satellites that perform land surveys, help with urban planning, and disaster prevention and mitigation. The mission is due to blast off at 9:20 a.m. UTC from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center.

Tuesday, December 13

• The first mission on Tuesday will see Arianespace launch an Ariane 5 ECA+ rocket. It will be carrying the Galaxy 35 and Galaxy 36 communications satellites and the MTG-I1 meteorological satellite into orbit. The Galaxy satellites will provide C-band TV broadcasting services to the United States and the MTG-I1 will provide weather imagery over Europe for Eumetsat. The rocket will take off at 8:30 p.m. UTC from French Guyana.
• The second launch will see Rocket Lab launch an Electron rocket with small radio frequency monitoring satellites for Hawkeye 360. The name of the satellite is Hawk 6A/B/C and the mission is dubbed “Virginia is for Launch Lovers”. It will take place at Wallops Island from 11:00 p.m. UTC. It should be streamed live on Rocket Lab’s website.

Wednesday, December 14

• There’s just one launch locked in for Wednesday at the time of writing. The private Chinese company, Landspace, will launch the Zhuque ZQ-2 rocket on its first flight from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center. It will be carrying 11 payloads into space. This mission will see the rocket's first stage be expendable but in future missions, it plans to recover it by landing it, similar to what SpaceX does. The launch will take place at 9:10 a.m. UTC.

Thursday, December 15

• Finally, SpaceX is due to launch a Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Surface Water Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission for NASA. The launch is due at 11:46 a.m. UTC from Vandenberg AFB in California. The SWOT mission has the objectives of taking the first global survey of the Earth’s surface water, observing the fine details of the ocean surface topography, and measuring the change of terrestrial surface water bodies over time.

Recap

• The first launch last week was the Kuaizhou-11 rocket carrying the VHF Data Exchange System (VDES) test satellite. This is an interesting launch because we don’t normally see that much of this rocket.

• Next, a Long March 2D rocket launched the Gaofen-5 01A satellite from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center. It will be used for things like pollution reduction, environment monitoring, and climate change studies.

• Next up, a SpaceX Falcon 9 carried up 40 OneWeb satellites to space. The satellites provide internet connectivity from space, similar to SpaceX’s own Starlink satellites.

• On December 9, the Smart Dragon-3 performed its first launch, carrying 14 satellites to space. Interestingly, it took off from a sea-based platform in the Yellow Sea.

• Finally, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 carrying the Hakuto-R M1 and Lunar Flashlight missions. Hakuto-R M1 consists of a lunar lander and two rovers from a private Japanese firm called iSpace. The Lunar Flashlight is a NASA mission consisting of a small satellite that will use near-infrared lasers to map ice in the shadowy parts of the Moon.

That’s all we have this week, be sure to check in next time!

TWIRL 95: SpaceX is set to launch NASA's SWOT mission atop a Falcon 9 this week

“Alcohol is a ‘dirty drug’,” says Emily Palmer, a researcher at Imperial College London, who studies hangovers. “It impacts multiple systems in the brain.”

Scientists are not exactly sure what is going on in our bodies during a hangover, but they do know it is caused by a variety of biochemical and neurochemical changes. “It doesn’t just affect the liver or the brain,” says Palmer, “it affects almost every organ.”

This Christmas, many of us will be celebrating with a drink or two or three. So is it possible to get through the morning after the night before unscathed?

The slippery slope

“You have your first drink and a neurotransmitter called gamma-aminobutyric acid – or Gaba – is released in the brain,” says Rayyan Zafar, a neuropsychopharmacologist at Imperial College London and researcher for the charity Drug Science.

“Gaba slows the brain,” he continues. “It works on receptors in the cortex, specifically parts involved in the thinking processes and control.”

The brain just shuts down. That’s why people call alcohol a depressant, Rayyan Zafar, Imperial College London

Gaba reduces a nerve cell’s ability to send and receive chemical messages throughout the central nervous system. So, for the first one to three drinks, as Gaba is released you feel relaxed, says Zafar.

At the same time, you get a rush of dopamine. “You feel good, you feel relaxed, and you want more,” says Zafar. But as you continue to drink the alcohol binds to glutamate receptors in the brain – which are important for memory formation. Their electrical activity is suppressed, “essentially blocking the formation of memories,” says Zafar.

The alcohol moves from your cortex, which controls behaviour, to the cerebellum, which is in charge of movement, motor coordination and balance.

Next, alcohol intoxication hits the medulla, right in the middle of the brain. It controls autonomic systems including heartbeat, breathing and blood pressure. “The brain just shuts down,” says Zafar. “That’s why people call alcohol a depressant; not because it makes you feel depressed, but because it depresses the whole central nervous system.”

Can I get drunk on non-alcoholic beer?

“Probably not,” reassures Zafar. “Say the average pint of beer is 5% alcohol, you’d need to have 10 0.5% low-alcoholic beers to have the same effect as a pint. I don’t think your body would be able to hold on to that much liquid.”

The after-effects of all those Christmas parties can be brutal. Photograph: Bogdan Kurylo/Getty Images/iStockphoto

The aftermath

The liver eliminates around one unit of alcohol an hour, then the hangover kicks in. Vomiting, explains Zafar, is an evolutionary survival tactic that has developed as a way of ejecting harmful substances from the body. Perhaps a small comfort when your head is hanging over the toilet bowl.

Alcohol is metabolised by the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH). As ADH breaks down the ethanol, it forms acetaldehyde, a poison and carcinogen. When blood alcohol content reaches zero, hangover symptoms are usually at their worst, as at that point all of the alcohol has been converted to acetaldehyde, which changes the way DNA functions,” says Zafar.

Alcohol damages mitochondrial DNA. Mitochondria are the energy-producing machines in our cells, and even slight damage can lead to toxicity in the brain.

“If you regularly drink enough to cause a hangover, we think that damage may build up,” says Palmer, “resulting in cognitive decline and early memory loss.”

Alcohol also suppresses the release of vasopressin, a hormone that tells the kidneys to retain fluid, so urination increases. The resulting dehydration can leave you feeling thirsty, tired and headachy.

“We think hydration is super-important,” adds Zafar. “And by hydration, we don’t just mean water. We also mean sodium, chloride and potassium.”

When your body is damaged, your immune system is activated. It sends out inflammatory cells which attack bacteria or heal damaged tissue.

“When you drink alcohol, the gut signals that it has a poison inside it,” says Zafar. “In response, your immune system ramps up to try and reverse the toxicity. This can lead to too much inflammation.”

The body has turned on itself. The inflammatory response can cause nausea, vomiting, headache, confusion, mood changes, cognitive impairment, and learning and memory deficits. Regularly drinking to excess can also lead to chronic inflammation, which is linked to diabetes, cancer and heart disease.

Do hangovers get worse with age?

Metabolism is a word we might associate with digestion of food, but the term actually describes all the chemical processes that take place in the body. “As you get older, your metabolism slows, so it takes longer to recover,” says Zafar.

Palmer suggests it may also be down to reduced tolerance due to less heavy drinking as we age, and changing our drink preferences. “When we’re younger, we might drink something like vodka tonics,” he says. “Later, we might drink wine or whisky.”

Congeners, found in darker drinks, are a byproduct of the fermentation process. They are complex organic molecules with toxic effects including acetone, acetaldehyde, fusel oil, tannins and furfural. Whisky has been found to have 37 times the amount of congeners as vodka, and studies show that drinks with more congeners causes a worse hangover.

How can I prevent a hangover?

Drink less, obviously. If you do want to have a few drinks, however, there are some tactics that can help you avoid the hangover.

Pace yourself

Dilute alcohol by adding ice, soda, lemonade or other mixers. You’ll consume alcohol more slowly so your body will have a greater chance to process alcohol and your blood alcohol peak won’t be as high.

Choose your drinks

Avoid dark-coloured drinks such as red wine or whisky as they contain more congeners than clear drinks such as vodka or gin.

Eat eggs

Eggs, says Zafar, contain the amino acid cysteine, which slows the metabolism of alcohol.

Can I cure my hangover?

Unfortunately not. According to researchers from King’s College London there is no convincing evidence that any so-called hangover cures work.

Their recent review assessed clove extract, red ginseng, Korean pear juice and other supposed hangover cures, and concluded that there isn’t enough high-quality evidence for any of them.

However, ibuprofen can help reduce inflammation, and rehydrating with isotonic drinks, such as sports drinks, can help replace lost fluid and ions and may give you some relief.

Are some people immune to hangovers?

Some people are able to rapidly make alcohol dehydrogenase to break down alcohol, and some people can’t do it quite so quickly. It all depends on your genes.

“Those who are able to rapidly regulate this enzyme and break down alcohol … probably don’t have hangovers,” says Zafar. “But they are more likely to develop alcohol addiction, because they can drink more without the negative effects.”

Restraint might be easier knowing the discomfort that follows. “We want to try to prevent the damage we’re causing to our bodies,” says Palmer, “rather than sticking plaster on it.”

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