The US Army has acquired its first Typhon land-based missile launcher, marking a significant development in its efforts to create a Pacific missile wall to deter China. 

This week, multiple media outlets reported that the US Army had received the first of four prototype Typhon land-based missile launchers as part of its mid-range capability (MRC) program that fills in the service’s requirement for long-range precision fires in the Pacific theater.

The Typhon is designed to fire Standard SM-6 or Tomahawk missiles between 500 and 1,800 kilometers, filling in a gap between the US Army’s precision strike missile (PSM) and the long-range hypersonic weapon (LRHW), which have ranges of 482 and 2,776 kilometers respectively. 

Each Typhon unit consists of an operations center, four Mk 41-derived vertical launch system (VLS) launchers towed by M983A4 tractor trucks, and associated reloading and ground equipment. Four Typhon units will compose one battery, with a battery having 16 missiles. 

The Typhon is also expected to deploy the latest Standard and Tomahawk missile variants. The latest Standard SM-6 Block IB features a redesigned body and larger rocket motor, which, as noted by The Warzone, potentially gives it improved anti-air and anti-missile capabilities and a possible secondary land-attack function. Also, the latest Tomahawk Block V missile features new communications, anti-ship capability, and multi-effect warheads. 

The MRC has had a short development time, starting from scratch in July 2020 to having working prototypes in just two years, enabling US and allied forces to train on the system quickly, notes Lieutenant-General Robert Rasch Jr, a senior officer at the US Army Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technology Office (RCCTO), which oversees the system’s development. 

Likewise, the US Marine Corps has pursued similar projects to the Typhon. Given that, Asia Times has previously reported on the USMC’s tactical land-attack missile (TLAM) that can be positioned on ships, shores, and islands to provide the Marine Corps with a powerful weapon capable of sinking large enemy warships. 

Apart from the TLAM, Asia Times has previously reported on the US Army’s and USMC’s OpFires land-based hypersonic weapon project, which possibly marks the high end of the USMC’s planned land-based precision-strike missile capabilities. 

Land-based launchers may be more survivable than ship-based systems, providing increased effectiveness for less cost. They can also complement air and naval power by providing a constant presence on or near contested areas, providing tactical support and operational cover for US and allied forces.

At the strategic level, their mere presence on allied territory makes a pre-emptive strike against them a significant escalation of hostilities. 

The Typhon and other similar projects may signify a change in US strategy from doing things itself to enabling its allies to support its efforts through implementing their own anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) bubbles. 

In a February 2021 article in War on the Rocks, Paul van Hooft wrote that overcommitment has always been a pitfall of US grand strategy and that this posture may not be feasible in the Pacific, as China now has the means to inflict massive losses on the US. 

Also, the Typhon may be part of efforts to shore up declining US conventional deterrence. In a November 2022 article in 19fortyfive, Mackenzie Eaglen notes that US conventional deterrence is in decline due to bureaucracy, complacency, and underinvestment in military industries.

The short turnaround time of the MRC may be an attempt to shore up the sagging US conventional deterrence posture by integrating already-existing subsystems into a new system. 

Further, van Hooft argues that the US should ensure that its allies have access to standoff precision weapons to build their defensive bubbles.

For example, the US and its partners can deploy standoff weapons such as the Typhon in what Josh Heivly describes in a February 2022 article for the US Naval Institute Blog as stand-in forces, featuring small, dispersed units equipped with long-range standoff weapons operating inside adversary weapons ranges. 

Moreover, Luis Simon argues in a June 2017 article in War on the Rocks that the US and allied deployment of A2/AD capabilities will not give way to Chinese hegemony in the Pacific. Instead, this deployment aims to achieve a more differentiated pattern of control, wherein neither the US nor China enjoys total wartime freedom of maneuver over contested airspace and waters.

Simon describes this situation wherein the US maintains influence over allied landmasses while China maintains control over its mainland, with a contested space in the East and South China Seas. This situation keeps a tense but stable military balance of power in the Pacific. 

In addition, a 2017 study by RAND Corporation also describes the US and its allies defeating China’s A2/AD capabilities using land-based, multi-domain forces with long-range ballistic and cruise missiles to strike at its warships and naval and naval air bases throughout the Pacific theater. 

The US Pacific Deterrence Initiative envisages creating a precision strike network in the First Island Chain spanning Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines and an integrated air and missile defense network in the Second Island Chain.

Reluctant allies

However, this strategy has its pitfalls. A 2022 study by RAND Corporation notes that finding a US partner willing to host missile systems such as the Typhon is far more challenging than looking for partners looking to host other types of US military presence, such as air and naval bases.

It says it is doubtful that the Philippines, Thailand or South Korea would be willing to host US ground-based long-range missile systems and that Australia and Japan would be less reluctant to do so, albeit marginally.

The report notes that the Philippines’ unpredictability as an ally, Thailand’s efforts to build better ties with China, and South Korea’s susceptibility to Chinese pressure make them partners unwilling or sub-optimal choices for hosting the Typhon.

Likewise, Australia’s distance from China and public reluctance to get dragged into a conflict are strong reasons against the deployment of the Typhon.

Similarly, Japan’s long-standing reluctance to host explicitly offensive capabilities is a strong argument against the probability of hosting such systems. 

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Back in 1997, Microsoft's then-CTO, Nathan P. Myhrvold, made headlines when his computer simulations suggested that the enormous tails of sauropods—specifically Apatosaurus—could crack like a bullwhip and break the sound barrier, producing a sonic boom. Paleontologists deemed it an intriguing possibility, although several were skeptical. Now a fresh team of scientists has tackled the issue and built its own simulated model of an Apatosaurus tail. They found no evidence of a sonic boom, according to a new paper published in the journal Scientific Reports. In fact, the maximum speed possible in the new simulations was 10 times slower than the speed of sound in standard air.

 

While still at Microsoft in the 1990s, Myhrvold—a longtime dinosaur enthusiast—stumbled upon a book by zoologist Robert McNeill Alexander speculating about whether the tails of certain sauropods may have been used like a bullwhip to produce a loud noise as a defensive strategy, a mating call, or other purpose. The structure somewhat resembles a bullwhip, in that each successive vertebra in the tail is roughly 6 percent smaller than its predecessor. It was already well-known in physics circles that the crack of a whip is due to a shock wave, or sonic boom, arising from the speed of the thin tip breaking through the sound barrier.

 

Myhrvold wanted to put that speculative suggestion to the test, and struck up an email correspondence with paleontologist Philip J. Currie, now at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. (Fun fact: Currie was one of the inspirations for the Alan Grant character in Jurassic Park.) The two men analyzed fossils, developed computer models, and conducted several computer simulations to test the biomechanics of the sauropod's tail. They also compared those simulations to the mechanics of whips.

 

They concluded that a side-to-side flick of the tail could send a wave of energy accelerating along the length of the appendage, gaining momentum so that the tip of the tail reached speeds of more than 750 miles per hour. The speed of sound changes depending on the medium and ambient conditions, like temperature, but it's generally pegged at 740 MPH in air at 0° C (32° F). Myhrvold and Currie noted in their published paper that only the last two to three inches of the tail would reach those supersonic speeds. They also suggested that the furthest part of the tail could have extended past the last vertebra by virtue of a piece of skin, tendon, or keratin—similar to the tips of whips made of cow or kangaroo skin, which are robust enough to withstand supersonic speeds.

 

Myhrvold gave an update on his research at a conference in 2002, reporting a maximum potential speed of 1,300 mph, which would have produced a sonic boom of around 200 decibels. Among other evidence: Some fossil specimens of sauropods have fused vertebrae in a key transition zone between the stiff base and the flexible section of the tail—much like a bullwhip eventually fails near the junction between the thick handle and the flexible leather portion.

 

Paleontologist Kenneth Carpenter was one of the most outspoken skeptics of the sonic boom hypothesis. "To be blunt, the computer simulations are another case of garbage in, garbage out," he told The New York Times in 1995. Carpenter said he would be more receptive to the idea if a scale model could be built. It took nearly 20 years, but Myhrvold presented just such a model at the 2015 Society of Vertebrate Paleontology conference.

 

Made of aluminum, stainless steel, neoprene, and Teflon, the model was 12 feet long (3.6 meters), or roughly one-quarter the size of an actual sauropod tail. All 82 bones in the tail were included with the correct joint angles, and Myhrvold placed weights on each vertebra to simulate the weight of flesh. There was also a "popper" at the end: a bit of treated leather to simulate the tip of a bullwhip. The model was attached to a camera tripod, representing the "dinosaur butt." Myhrvold et al. then performed a series of tests, tugging on the tripod handle to cause the model tail to swing around, producing sharp "cracks" like a bullwhip. They caught all the tests on high-speed video to ensure exact measurements.

 

The model tail reached speeds of 360 meters per second, or about 805 mph. Carpenter was impressed but still had his doubts, noting that the scale model lacked the connective structures from one vertebra to the next in the tail, which would have restricted the side-to-side motion, as would layers of skin and muscle. As for the popper, Carpenter told Live Science that cracking its tail at supersonic speeds would likely cause the skin at the tip to break or bleed, eventually leading to inflexible scar tissue. "I have a hard time envisioning evolution taking sauropod tails down a path of having a structure that could only be used a few times and then is worthless," he said.

 

That brings us to this latest paper. Along with several colleagues, Simone Conti of the NOVA School of Science and Technology in Portugal set out to improve upon earlier computer simulations by employing more of a multi-faceted approach. They combined state-of-the-art multi-body modeling with simulations of soft tissue resistance to stress to test the biomechanical performance of the Apatosaurus tail.

Their model tail was more than 30 feet (12 meters) long and weighed 3,187 pounds (1,446 kilograms). It had 82 cylinders representing the vertebrae attached to a fixed hip bone base, which moved in an arc to cause the tail to move with a whip-like motion. The maximum speed of their model tail was just 33 meters per second, or just under 74 mph—much too slow to generate a sonic boom—suggesting that sauropod tails were much stiffer than previously thought.

 

Furthermore, when they did subject the model tail to supersonic speeds, the tail inevitably broke, unable to withstand the stress. Conti et al. also tried adding structures to mimic the tip of the bullwhip to their simulations: one with three segments of skin and keratin; one made of braided keratin filaments; and one made of soft tissues. None of those could withstand the stresses of supersonic speed, either.

 

"The hypothesis of a sauropod supersonic tail is unsupported by the evidence obtained by the computer simulation and the estimates on the stress-bearing of soft tissues," the authors concluded in their paper. "The limitation at the base of the tail imposed with the articulation with the sacrum and the action of air drag reduces the maximum speed achievable. A soft tissue popper would not withstand the high stresses imposed by the motion at the speed of sound since the increased mass would lead to failure of the tail, or the increased air drag would further reduce the tail speed."

 

DOI: Scientific Reports, 2022. 10.1038/s41598-022-21633-2  (About DOIs).

 

Listing image by Simone Conti

 

Myth, busted: Apatosaurus didn’t produce sonic booms when whipping its tail

WHERE THE WILD meets civilization and the natural world fades into the built environment lies a zone called the “wildland-urban interface.” Think the foothills of California, or the lush forests of the Eastern United States, where trees, grasses, and shrubs intermingle with homes, roads, and other infrastructure.

From a fire safety perspective, this is a problem. Wildfires in the Western US have become increasingly devastating in part because of climate change, but also because more humans are moving deeper and deeper into areas that were once intact forests. The overlap between civilization and wildlands exposes more people to fires and provides more opportunities to spark them—flicking cigarettes out of car windows and installing power lines that jostle in the wind.

In fact, Americans are “flocking to fire,” say the authors of a study that publishes today in the journal Frontiers in Human Dynamics. Using census data, the researchers found that people are moving en masse to areas increasingly prone to catastrophic wildfires or plagued by extreme heat.

“They’re attracted by maybe a beautiful forested mountain landscape and lower housing costs somewhere in the wildland-urban interface,” says University of Vermont environmental scientist Mahalia Clark, the paper’s lead author. “But they’re just totally unaware that wildfire is something they should even think about. That’s not really something that the realtor is going to tell them about, or that’s going to be on the real estate listing.”

“If no action is taken to better understand and reduce the impact of climate change on insects, we will drastically limit our chances of a sustainable future with healthy ecosystems.”

This warning comes from 70 experts from 19 nations in a timely paper published in the journal Ecological Monographs. However, they also provide management techniques and approaches to help insects in a warming world.

Yes, we’ve heard about insect decline before. But no, we haven’t made much progress in stopping it globally. Climate change is still currently at the top of the world’s to-do list.

“Climate change aggravates other human-mediated environmental problems,” says Jeffrey Harvey from the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW) and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. “Including habitat loss and fragmentation, various forms of pollution, overharvesting and invasive species.”

He leads the major paper by an international team of scientists. They provide a clear outline of how climatic extremes and climate change contribute to the decline of insects.

Local environmental characteristics can either harm or benefit insects (left panel), especially when insects are exposed to climatic extremes such as droughts and heat waves. Ecologically targeted management strategies (right panel) can help insects to adapt to climate change and other human-caused environmental problems. Credit: Netherlands Institute of Ecology, scientists’ warning on climate change and insects

 

The paper is part of the Scientists’ Warning series. “Insects play critical roles in so many ecosystems, but we are rapidly losing at least part of them,” Harvey stresses the urgency. And this seems the case, especially in temperate regions. The authors emphasize that both longer-term events and short-term extremes are harming insects in several ways.

“The gradual increase in global surface temperature impacts insects in their physiology, behavior, phenology, distribution and species interactions.” Harvey adds: “But also, more and longer lasting extreme events leave their traces.” Hot and cold spells, fires, droughts, floods.

Piling up

Evidence of the effects is piling up, and it’s all presented in this review. For instance, fruit flies, butterflies, and flour beetles can survive heat waves, but males or females become sterilized and thus unable to reproduce. They become “living dead.”

Bumblebees in particular prove very sensitive to heat, and climate change is now considered the main factor in the decline of several North American species.

Climate-change impacts on insects can be categorized into two major groups: gradual long-term change and extreme events that will increase in frequency and severity. Interventions include formal mitigation of change through policy and public approaches which in turn help to reduce impacts in various ways. Credit: Netherlands Institute of Ecology, scientists’ warning on climate change and insects

 

“Cold-blooded insects are among the groups of organisms most seriously affected by climate change because their body temperature and metabolism are strongly linked with the temperature of the surrounding air,” says Harvey.

One major concern with insect decline in a warming world is that plants – on which insects depend for food and shelter – are similarly affected by climate change. And as insect numbers dwindle, it in turn works its way higher up the food chain. This has happened to many birds, for instance, over the past decades.

Supporting the global economy

Think pollination, pest control, nutrient cycling, and decomposition of waste. Insects represent the overwhelming bulk of biodiversity and perform vitally important services that sustain human civilization, all worth staggering amounts of money (billions of dollars) annually to the global economy. Another reason to act on climate change. Harvey: “The late renowned ant ecologist Edward O. Wilson, once argued that ‘it is the little things that run the world.’ And they do!”

“Over time, insects must adjust their seasonal life cycles and distributions as the world warms,” says Harvey. “However, their ability to do this is hindered by other human-caused threats such as habitat destruction and fragmentation, and pesticides.”

Furthermore, heatwaves and droughts can drastically harm insect populations in the short term, making insects less able to adapt to more gradual warming. “Warming over different time scales poses different kinds of threats to insects.”

What to do

Importantly, the scientists not only describe the problems but also discuss a range of solutions and management strategies. These may help to buffer insects against climate warming. Individual people can help by caring for lots of different wild plants, providing food and areas where insects can shelter to ride out climate extremes. And by reducing the use of pesticides and other chemicals. “At the larger scale, we need to address climate change. Rewilding programs also need to consider micro-scale ecosystems which focus on the conservation of small animals like insects.”

“Insects are tough little critters and we should be relieved that there is still room to correct our mistakes,” according to Harvey. But time is running out. “We really need to enact policies to stabilize the global climate. In the meantime, at both government and individual levels, we can all pitch in and make urban and rural landscapes more insect-friendly.”

Source

Researchers call on authorities all across the world to heal the divisions in society left by the COVID-19 pandemic as the vaccinated are motivated to exclude the unvaccinated from family relationships and even protected political rights.

People show prejudice and discriminatory attitudes towards individuals not vaccinated against COVID-19 across all inhabited continents of the world. This is the finding of a global study from Aarhus University in Denmark, which has just been published today (December in the journal Nature.

Many vaccinated people do not want close relatives to marry an unvaccinated person. They are also inclined to think that the unvaccinated are incompetent as well as untrustworthy, and they generally feel antipathy against them.

The study reveals that prejudice towards the unvaccinated is as high or higher than prejudice directed toward other common and diverse targets of prejudice, including immigrants, drug addicts, and ex-convicts.

In sharp contrast, researchers found that the unvaccinated display almost no discriminatory attitudes towards the vaccinated.

“The conflict between those who are vaccinated against COVID-19 and those who are not, threatens societal cohesion as a new socio-political cleavage, and the vaccinated clearly seem to be the ones deepening this rift,” says postdoc Alexander Bor, who is the lead author of the study “Discriminatory Attitudes Against the Unvaccinated During a Global Pandemic.”

Human explanation for prejudice

According to the researchers, the reason for these discriminatory attitudes appears to be that the vaccinated perceive the unvaccinated as free riders. High vaccination uptake is crucial in order to combat the pandemic and secure the public good of normal everyday life without great human or financial losses. And when some people help increase vaccine uptake while others do not, it evokes negative sentiments.

“The vaccinated react in quite a natural way against what they perceive as free-riding on a public good. This is a well-known psychological mechanism and thus a completely normal human reaction. Nonetheless, it could have severe consequences for society,” says co-author Michael Bang Petersen, who is a professor of political science at Aarhus University and head of the research project of which this study is part.

”In the short run, prejudice towards the unvaccinated may complicate pandemic management because it leads to mistrust, and we know that mistrust hinders vaccination uptake. In the long run, it may mean that societies leave the pandemic more divided and polarised than they entered it,” says Michael Bang Petersen.

Professor Michael Bang Petersen, Aarhus University, Denmark. Credit: Ida Marie Jensen, Aarhus University

Fundamental rights could be in danger

A survey fielded solely in the United States as part of the overall study shows that not only do vaccinated people harbor prejudice against the unvaccinated, they also think they should be denied fundamental rights. For instance, the unvaccinated should not be allowed to move into the neighborhood or express their political views on social media freely, without fear of censorship.

“It is likely that we will encounter similar support for the restriction of rights in other countries, seeing as the prejudice and antipathy can be found across continents and cultures,” says Michael Bang Petersen.

Researchers warn against condemnatory rhetoric

In many places, low vaccine uptake still poses a challenge to pandemic management, but the researchers warn authorities against employing a rhetoric of moral condemnation in their attempt to make more people get vaccinated. A strategy otherwise deployed in a number of countries, including France, where president Emmanuel Macron has stated that he wants to ‘piss off’ the unvaccinated to a degree that will make them get vaccinated.

 ”Moral condemnation may strengthen the cleavages and further feelings of exclusion that have led many unvaccinated to refuse the vaccine in the first place. Our prior research has shown that transparent communication about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines is a more viable public-health strategy for increasing vaccine uptake in the long term,” says Michael Bang Petersen.

Source

New kilonova has astronomers rethinking what we know about gamma-ray bursts

Eugene Cernan is seen inside the Lunar Module after a long day's work on the lunar surface.

Andy Saunders/Apollo Remastered

 

Shortly after midnight, 50 years ago this morning, the Apollo 17 mission lifted off from Florida. With Gene Cernan, Harrison Schmitt, and Ron Evans on board, this was NASA's sixth and final spaceflight to the lunar surface.

 

Cernan and Schmitt spent three days on the Moon, setting records for the longest distance traversed in their rover—7.6 km—and the amount of lunar rocks returned. But today, what the mission is perhaps most remembered for is the fact that it was the last time humans landed on the Moon—or even went beyond low Earth orbit.

 

Memorably, before he boarded the Lunar Module to blast off from the Moon's surface, Cernan radioed back to Mission Control on Earth. People, he said, would return to the Moon "not too long into the future." Speaking to him much later in life, it was clear from Cernan's frustrations that he did not mean decades into the future.

 

When he died five years ago, at age 82, Cernan remained the last person to walk on the Moon.

 

Earlier this year, a British photographer named Andy Saunders published a book titled Apollo Remastered, which showcases 400 photos from the Apollo missions to the Moon. Astronauts took about 20,000 images on Hasselblad cameras during the Apollo program. Saunders has used various editing techniques, including stacking images from 16 mm video film, to create much clearer images from these iconic missions than have been seen before. The results are revealing and beautiful.

 

To mark the historic launch of Apollo 17, Saunders shared eight high-resolution images from his book with Ars, along with captions. You can click on any of the photos to enlarge them.

The photos

Harrison Schmitt, dressed in his coveralls, has floated through the tunnel, into the Lunar Module for its checkout. He is pointing the Minolta Space Meter (to assess the lighting for the camera settings) back at Ron Evans, who is in the tunnel. Gene Cernan’s portable life support system backpack is near his right elbow.

 

Fifty years later, remastered images reveal Apollo 17 in stunning clarity

The Squad Solar City Car is a low-speed vehicle that uses the power of the Sun to charge its batteries.

Squad Mobility

 

It's that time of year when the CES email spam goes into overdrive. I won't be on the ground in Las Vegas in 2023 for the gigantic consumer tech trade show, but one pitch almost—well, ok, partly—makes me regret that, because it seems like an interesting idea. It's a new city car from a Dutch company called Squad Mobility; a relatively ungainly thing if I'm honest, but one that suggests a tantalizing solution to the problem of city-dwellers needing EVs but not having anywhere to charge them.

 

That's because the Squad solar city car, as its name suggests, uses the power of the sun to recharge its battery. Now, this is not a new idea; solar-powered cars have raced, albeit at quite low speeds, for many years now. Ars even rode in one, in Manhattan of all places.

 

But there's always a trade-off. Those solar-powered racers are ultralight-weight creations, built with as little drag as possible. As day-to-day transport they would make even a vintage-car owner wince at the lack of creature comforts.

 

The problem is that, while solar panels are a great way to get energy, you need quite a lot of area to harvest enough to run something as power-hungry as an automobile. Covering a sedan's roof with photovoltaics—as Hyundai has done with the Sonata hybrid—might generate a peak of 600 W, which is enough to run the air conditioning and keep the 12 V battery charged.

 

One alternative is to have extendable panels that you put out to charge. That's the approach taken by a group of Dutch students from Eindhoven University of Technology, but even then the car takes two to three days to recharge.

 

Lightyear (yet another Dutch company, and are you sensing a theme yet?) has built something more conventionally car-shaped, a highly aerodynamic streamlined sedan called the 0. This, too, is solar-powered and has a maximum charging rate of 1 kW from its roof-mounted panels that can add up to 43 miles (70 km) in range on the sunniest of sunny days. The catch here? A $262,000 (250,000 euro) asking price and the fact that fewer than 1,000 will be built.

 

Which brings us back to the Squad solar city car, designed by a pair of former Lightyear employees. Much smaller than the examples listed above, it conforms to the regulations for Low Speed Vehicles here in the US, meant for EVs that have a speed cap of 25 mph (40 km/h).

 

Built around a solid-looking tubular roll-cage, the solar city car is styled mostly for practicality. On its roof is a solar panel with a peak output of 250 W that feeds the 6.4 kWh battery pack. It has three-point seatbelts and even cupholders, but the biggest draw might be the price—$6,585 (6,250 euros) when it goes on sale in the US in 2024. That battery powers a pair of 2 kW motors, one driving each rear wheel.

 

Squad says that on a sunny day in the Netherlands, the solar panel adds up to 13.6 miles (22 km) of range per day; in sunnier Las Vegas, that could be as much as 19.2 miles (31 km). The battery packs are swappable and portable, and fully charged the pack has a range of 62 miles (100 km). And yes, you can charge the packs via plugging them into a 110 V AC outlet if it's not sunny.

 

"We are seeing a tremendous interest from the USA, specifically for markets such as sharing platforms, gated communities, campuses, (seaside) resorts, tourism, company terrains, hotels and resorts, amusement parks, and inner city services," said Robert Hoevers, one of Squad's co-founders.

 

New cars too expensive? This solar-powered EV will cost $6,250

Marsquakes, recent volcanism suggest Mars still has a mantle plume

A team of engineers at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney has figured out a way to run a diesel engine on a mix of diesel and hydrogen, dramatically lowering its emissions.

Why do we even need a diesel-hydrogen hybrid engine when there are already many great electric vehicles available? EVs are definitely great for households, but they still don’t match heavy diesel engines’ performance in some contexts, such as mining, long-distance transportation, power generation, and agriculture.

At present, there are 26,000 trains in the US that run on diesel, and there are potentially millions of trucks, generators, and other industry-grade equipment that require diesel to deliver optimum performance. It might take decades for EV technology to replace diesel engines in such industries. While it’s easy for a normal person to sell an old car and buy a new EV, such changes come at a high cost to industries.

So we’re likely to be stuck with diesel engines for a while. But what if there was a way to reduce the CO2 emissions from their existing equipment by 85 percent?

This is what UNSW’s hydrogen-diesel hybrid engine technology promises. The researchers claim that their modified diesel engine can run on 90 percent hydrogen with an improved efficiency of over 26 percent. In a press release, Shawn Kook, one of the authors of the study and professor at UNSW, said, “We have shown that we can take those existing diesel engines and convert them into cleaner engines that burn hydrogen fuel.”

He added, “This new technology significantly reduces CO2 emissions from existing diesel engines, so it could play a big part in making our carbon footprint much smaller, especially in Australia with all our mining, agriculture, and other heavy industries where diesel engines are widely used.”

A dual-fuel system

A vehicle powered by diesel has a diesel-injection unit that releases fuel into the combustion chamber. The engine’s piston compresses the fuel-air mix to high pressure and temperature, which causes it to ignite. This creates the pressure that powers the engine.

During this process, a diesel engine produces carbon dioxide and NOx (nitrogen oxides), which are harmful to our environment. The researchers say that directly mixing hydrogen with diesel in the combustion chamber would increase NOx pollution. In order to overcome this problem, they developed a hydrogen-diesel dual-fuel system that uses a timed, high-pressure hydrogen direct-injection unit inside a diesel engine that was already equipped with a diesel-injection unit.

According to Kook and his team, the concentration of a gas—hydrogen, in this case—can be made to vary within different sections of the combustion chamber. These variations can affect the chemical reactions and control the amount of NOx produced by the engine. The researchers used the timing of the hydrogen injection to limit NOx production.

By using hydrogen as 90 percent of the fuel, they were able to limit the engine’s CO2 exhaust to just 90 gm per kWh. This is 86 percent less carbon dioxide than a standard diesel engine would release. Furthermore, NOx emissions were also found to be reduced significantly. “We have shown in our system that if you make it stratified—that is, in some areas there is more hydrogen and in others there is less hydrogen—then we can reduce the NOx emissions below that of a pure diesel engine,” said Kook.

Although it took the researchers 18 months to develop their first hybrid engine, they claim they can now turn any diesel engine design into a dual-fuel system within a couple of months.

Hybrid engine designs made easy

Traditional methods of hydrogen production involve the oxidation of hydrocarbons that lead to CO2 emissions. However, if hydrogen is produced using renewable energy, it can be a much cleaner source of power than electricity from the grid. While there are still emissions associated with the use of diesel fuel, that's a trade-off against the challenges of recycling lithium batteries.

The vision behind the hydrogen-diesel direct-injection engine system is to provide industries with a practical solution for their carbon emissions problem. Mining companies that employ a variety of diesel-based machines and equipment alone generate up to 7 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Powering the growth of such sectors with hydrogen fuel could drastically improve the health of our planet.

Kook and his colleagues have already patented their hydrogen-diesel, direct-injection dual-fuel system, and they are planning to bring it to market within the next year or two.

Source

IF COLD AND flu season seems to be hitting your household harder this year, you’re not alone. This is the year when common viruses that took a backseat to Covid-19 finally return. 

Positive tests for the flu in the United States stood at 25 percent in late November, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, compared to 8 percent at the same time of year in 2019. Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) has pushed some children’s hospitals to capacity. And Covid hospitalizations are rising again. It’s the tripledemic that epidemiologists feared—those viruses, with the help of a few other seasonal recurring ones, are working together to fuel weeks of coughing, runny noses, and fevers. So if your kids, your coworkers, and everyone you know has been feeling sick, that’s why. 

“This season is truly unprecedented,” says Katelyn Jetelina, who writes Your Local Epidemiologist, a newsletter about infectious disease spread. The high rates of flu-like illness could be an early peak, or an early warning of a monumentally bad season. “How high it will go, and how severe it will be, is unfortunately something we have to wait and see,” she says. “We’re at the mercy of time.”

The problem goes beyond making everyone feel sluggish and icky. CDC director Rochelle Walensky has confirmed that the flu, RSV, and Covid are putting stress on US hospital systems. It’s the unintended consequence of measures that sought to save lives—social distancing and mask-wearing curbed the spread of flu and RSV in 2020 and 2021. (Although there was a warning sign in 2021, when RSV cases in the US had an out-of-season uptick over the summer, an indicator that things were shifting in the wake of Covid.) Now these viruses are roaring back, and hitting a burned-out health care system that’s spent three years treating Covid infections. 

These viruses are sweeping through young children who have no prior exposure to them and no immunity. Older people and the immunocompromised are at higher risk too. Experts aren’t recommending dropping all guards to build immunity. But they do note that social distancing and masking measures played a role in throwing other viruses off their historical patterns. “By doing that, you prevent all these other things that are less infectious typically,” says Mary Krauland, a research assistant professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh. “Over time, people are a little more susceptible.”

RSV typically causes mild illness, but it can prove particularly dangerous to young children whose small lungs cannot cough forcefully enough to clear mucus. Nearly all children contract the virus before the age of 2. But more kids are getting sick at the same time now, and pediatric hospitals have been overwhelmed in recent weeks by the sudden surge. In the United States, hospitalizations for kids 4 and younger spiked to 61 per 100,000 in mid-November, according to data from the CDC. That rate peaked at 26 young children per 100,000 in the 2019 to 2020 RSV season. And some hospitals are now short on pediatric beds. Because Covid largely spared children from severe illness, some hospitals pivoted, opening spaces designated for kids up to adults. Some of those beds never went back.

Eric Biondi, director of the Pediatric Hospital Medicine Division at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center in Maryland, says the beds there are full. The center even opened surge beds, but those are now full too. The children’s hospital is no stranger to fielding severe illness from RSV and the flu, but this year they’ve hit simultaneously. 

“It’s been rough,” Biondi says. “The [RSV] spike happened quick. There was no flattening of the curve. It just went up.” Now, those cases have fallen off; RSV hospitalizations in the US steeply declined by the end of November to about 18 young children per 100,000, but that number is still high for November and December, compared to prior years.

But the flu continues to circulate. This year, the flu has already caused 78,000 hospitalizations and killed 4,500 people, the CDC estimates. It killed an estimated 25,000 people in the US during the winter 2019 to spring 2020 flu season. “Minimal flu activity” left the CDC without estimates in the winter of 2020 and spring of 2021, but the agency noted that less than 1 person for every 100,000 was hospitalized with influenza, compared to 66 people per 100,000 the prior year. 

The threats are seen in Europe too, where the World Health Organization notes that flu season also got an early start. England is also seeing more than a quarter of influenza tests come back positive, and RSV hospitalization rates there are on the rise. German hospitals are strained with RSV infections. But babies in countries without robust medical systems are most at risk.

Scientists have uncovered the biological reason why colds are more common in colder temperatures.

A study suggests the newly discovered immune response inside the nose is suppressed by colder temperatures, and the illnesses are not more common simply because people are stuck indoors.

Scientists say this finding offers the first biological evidence for why respiratory illnesses such as colds, flu and Covid are more likely to spike when the temperature drops.

The upper respiratory tract (nose, mouth and throat) is the primary way people get infected through either inhaling the bug or depositing it with their hands.

Researchers at Mass Eye and Ear hospital and Northeastern University in America have discovered a previously unidentified immune response inside the nose that fights off viruses responsible for upper respiratory infections. Further testing revealed this response becomes blocked in the cold.

Benjamin Bleier, senior author of the study, said: “Conventionally, it was thought that cold and flu season occurred in cooler months because people are stuck indoors more where airborne viruses could spread more easily.

“Our study, however, points to a biological root cause for the seasonal variation in upper respiratory viral infections we see each year, most recently demonstrated throughout the Covid-19 pandemic.”

A 2018 study led by Dr Bleier and Mansoor Amiji, distinguished professor of pharmaceutical sciences at Northeastern University, uncovered an innate immune response triggered when bacteria is inhaled through the nose.

It found that cells in the front of the nose detected the bacteria and then released billions of tiny fluid-filled sacs called extracellular vesicles into the mucus to surround and attack the bacteria.

For the new study, the researchers wanted to see if this immune response was also triggered by viruses inhaled through the nose, which are the source of some of the most common upper respiratory infections.

According to the study, the number of virus-fighting sacs released fell by nearly 42pc when temperatures were reduced significantly for test subjects.

The new study is published in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology

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Humanity has become a weapon of mass extinction and governments must end the “orgy of destruction”, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, has said at the beginning of the biodiversity Cop15.

“We are out of harmony with nature. In fact, we are playing an entirely different song. Around the world, for hundreds of years, we have conducted a cacophony of chaos, played with instruments of destruction. Deforestation and desertification are creating wastelands of once-thriving ecosystems,” he said.

“Our land, water and air are poisoned by chemicals and pesticides, and choked with plastics … The most important lesson we impart to children is to take responsibility for their actions. What example are we setting when we ourselves are failing this basic test?

“The deluded dreams of billionaires aside, there is no Planet B,” Guterres told the opening ceremony of the conference in Montreal, Canada, where governments will begin formal negotiations for this decade’s UN biodiversity targets on Wednesday.

At the ceremony, the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, urged countries to agree a target to conserve 30% of Earth for nature in the final agreement.

“We have not chosen that 30% number at random. It is the critical threshold according to the greatest scientists to avoid the risk of extinction and also to ensure our food and economic security. Thirty percent, that is quite feasible,” he said in a speech that was interrupted by protesters holding up a sign about the murder of Indigenous peoples.

Trudeau’s speech echoed the comments of Canada’s environment minister, Steven Guilbeault, a former environmental activist, who said the 30% aim would be equivalent to the 1.5C climate target, although this is strongly disputed by some scientists and activists.

The target, known as “30x30”, is the most high-profile proposal under consideration by governments for this decade’s agreement to protect biodiversity. Led by the UK, Costa Rica and France, it has the backing of a coalition of more than 100 countries but faces significant concerns from some Indigenous peoples and human rights campaigners, who warn it could legitimise further land grabs and violence against communities shown to best protect nature.

“We’re a big country with big ambitions,” said Guilbeault. “We’ve committed as a country to protect 30% of land and waters by 2030. We’re working in full partnership with Indigenous peoples, as well as provinces and territories.

“One might argue, and I guess I am, that our 1.5 degrees is protecting 30% of lands and oceans by 2030. It is the biodiversity equivalent of the 1.5 degrees on climate change. And I think that’s one of our collective goals [for this summit].”

Guilbeault made the comments at the opening press conference of the biodiversity summit today, where he appeared alongside the Cop15 president and China’s environment minister, Huang Runqiu; the UN’s biodiversity head, Elizabeth Maruma Mrema; and Inger Andersen, the executive director of the UN environment programme.

Mrema and Andersen said the summit could have big consequences for tackling emissions from land, the second-largest human source of greenhouse gases after burning fossil fuels.

“If we look at the recent disasters – floods, drought, heatwaves, wildfires – yes, we always say it’s because of climate change,” said Mrema. “But where are these disasters that happen? They all happen in ecosystems. It is clear that unless we protect and restore biodiversity, climate warming will continue to rise. And we may fail to reach the 1.5 degrees.”

Ahead of formal negotiations for the agreement at Cop15, which begin tomorrow, talks received a significant boost from the EU as the bloc agreed a ban on all products judged to have contributed to deforestation. The world’s second-largest importer of agricultural product made the rules, which will affect the trade in cattle, cocoa, coffee, palm oil, rubber, soya and wood products, all linked to the loss of tropical forests.

“This legislation is a gamechanger for the world’s forests,” said the Mighty Earth CEO Glenn Hurowitz. “For the first time, European governments are telling companies selling agricultural goods, ‘If you or your suppliers destroy forests, you can’t sell your products here.’ With this law, Europe is putting real action for wildlife on the table.”

However, Hurowitz cautioned that there were gaps in the legislation, including a failure to protect Indigenous rights and other important non-forest ecosystems such as peatlands.

Talks in Canada are scheduled to conclude on 19 December but are likely to overrun, with significant divisions between governments already evident at pre-Cop negotiations, which took place over the weekend.

At the opening press conference on Tuesday, Huang said China took its role in helping countries forge a final agreement seriously, noting that it had been a hard decision to move the talks from Kunming, China, due to the pandemic.

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Investigators found that 38.7% of participants reported persistent pain, and 27.8% reported intermittent pain. ("Persistent pain" was defined as being bothered by pain in the last month in two consecutive annual interviews and "intermittent" pain was defined as bothersome pain in one interview only.)

More than one-third of participants described pain in five or more sites. Over the subsequent 7 years, participants with persistent pain were more likely to experience declines in physical function (64% persistent pain, 59% intermittent pain, 57% no bothersome pain) and well-being (48% persistent pain, 45% intermittent pain, 44% no bothersome pain), but were not more likely to experience cognitive decline (25% persistent pain, 24% intermittent pain, 23% no bothersome pain).

"The findings from this study point to the importance of access to effective treatment for persistent pain in older adults and the need for additional research in chronic pain to optimize quality of life," said lead author Christine Ritchie, MD, MSPH, of Massachusetts General Hospital.

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UPDATE 12/7: Not surprisingly, the idea of giving robots the ability to kill humans ruffled a few feathers. As the San Francisco Chronicle(Opens in a new window) reports, the Board of Supervisors backtracked on its approval this week, though it didn't axe the initiative entirely. Instead, it returned the issue to a committee, which will discuss the issue. So it could come up for a vote again.

On Twitter, Supervisor Gordon Mar said(Opens in a new window) he regretted voting to approve the measure and reversed his decision this week. "Even with additional guardrails, I've grown increasingly uncomfortable with our vote & the precedent it sets for other cities without as strong a commitment to police accountability. I do not think making state violence more remote, distanced, & less human is a step forward," he wrote.

Supervisor Hillary Ronen, who was among the initial "no" votes, tweeted(Opens in a new window) that "common sense prevailed" with this week's reversal. Supervisor Dean Preston, who also voted against it, said the update "is a crucial change that will make us all safer."

Original Story 11/30:

San Francisco has voted to allow police to use remote-controlled robots to kill, but only in emergency situations involving mass shooters or terrorist threats.

On Tuesday, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors voted 8-3 to pass the controversial measure, despite objections from civil liberties and police oversight groups, the AP reports(Opens in a new window).

The measure permits San Francisco police to use deadly force through the department’s existing robots, which are currently deployed to diffuse bombs or conduct video surveillance. At the Supervisors board meeting, San Francisco police said it had no plans to arm the robots with guns. Nevertheless, the department wants the option to equip the robots with explosive charges in the event police officers need to deal with a deadly threat such as an active shooter.

San Francisco Board Supervisor Rafael Mandelman was among those who voted for the measure. On Twitter, he defended(Opens in a new window) his vote, saying: “Under this policy, SFPD is authorized to use these robots to carry out deadly force in extremely limited situations when risk to loss of life to members of the public or officers is imminent and outweighs any other force option available."

The AP also notes the measure was amended on Tuesday so that only a limited number of high-ranking police officers can authorize the robots to use deadly force.

However, San Francisco Board Supervisor Dean Preston still opposed the vote and criticized(Opens in a new window) the measure as a “dystopian military equipment policy” that local police could abuse.

“Allowing police to arm remote-controlled robots on the streets of San Francisco is dangerous, and like any other weapons used by police, will place Black and brown people in disproportionate danger of harm or death,” he wrote in a statement, which noted the city of Oakland scrapped(Opens in a new window) a similar measure involving armed robots last month. 

Other critics, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, fear the policy will open the door for more armed robots to enter US police forces. “Opposing police deploying deadly robots isn't sensationalist —it's informed by decades of military technology creeping into everyday policing,” the group wrote.

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With two huge two telescopes, one (low-frequency) in Australia and the other (mid-frequency) in South Africa, the project will see further into the history of the Universe than ever before.

Astronomers like me will use the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) telescopes to trace hydrogen over cosmic time and make precise measurements of gravity in extreme environments. What’s more, we hope to uncover the existence of complex molecules in planet-forming clouds around distant stars, which could be the early signs of life elsewhere in the Universe.

I have been involved in the SKA and its precursor telescopes for the past ten years, and as the chief operations scientist of the Australian telescope since July. I am helping to build the team of scientists, engineers, and technicians who will construct and operate the telescope, along with undertaking science to map primordial hydrogen in the infant universe.

Construction on the Australian component of the world’s largest radio telescope observatory, the SKA-Low telescope, is starting in Wajarri Yamaji Country in remote Western Australia. The SKA telescopes will be made up of more than 131,000 antennas in Australia and almost 200 dishes in South Africa, will provide an unparalleled view of the Universe, and be one of the biggest science facilities on Earth.

What is the SKA Observatory?

The SKA Observatory is an intergovernmental organization with dozens of countries involved. The observatory is much more than the two physical telescopes, with headquarters in the UK and collaborators around the world harnessing advanced computers and software to tailor the telescope signals to the precise science being undertaken.

The telescope in South Africa (called SKA-Mid) will use 197 radio dishes to observe middle-frequency radio waves from 350 MHz to more than 15 GHz. It will study the extreme environments of neutron stars, organic molecules around newly forming planets, and the structure of the Universe on the largest scales.

The Australian telescope (SKA-Low), in Western Australia, will observe lower frequencies with 512 stations of radio antennas spread out over a 74-kilometer (46-mile) span of the outback.

The site is located within Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara, the CSIRO Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory. This name, which means “sharing sky and stars,” was given to the observatory by the Wajarri Yamaji, the traditional owners and native title holders of the observatory site.

Artist’s impression of some of the SKA-Low antenna stations. Credit: DISR

Tuning in to the Universe

After decades of planning, developing precursor telescopes, and testing, a ceremony to mark the start of on-site construction was held on December 4. We expect both telescopes will be fully operational late this decade.

Each of the 512 stations of SKA-Low is made up of 256 wide-band dipole antennas, spread over a diameter of 35 meters (115 feet). The signals from these Christmas-tree-shaped antennas in each station are electronically combined to point to different parts of the sky, forming a single view.

These antennas are designed to tune in to low radio frequencies of 50 to 350 MHz. At these frequencies, the radio waves are very long – comparable to the height of a person – which means more familiar-looking dishes are an inefficient way to catch them. Instead, the dipole antennas operate much like TV antennas, with the radio waves from the Universe exciting electrons within their metal arms.

Collectively, the 131,072 dipoles in the completed array will provide the deepest and widest view of the Universe to date.

SKA sites in Australia and South Africa. Credit: SKAO

Peering into the cosmic dawn

They will allow us to see out and back to the very beginning of the Universe, when the first stars and galaxies formed.

This key period, more than 13 billion years in our past, is termed the “cosmic dawn:” when stars and galaxies began to form, lighting up the cosmos for the first time.

The cosmic dawn marks the end of the cosmic dark ages, a period after the Big Bang when the Universe had cooled down through expansion. All that remained was the ubiquitous background glow of the early Universe light, and a cosmos filled with dark matter and neutral atoms of hydrogen and helium.

The light from the first stars transformed the Universe, tearing apart the electrons and protons in neutral hydrogen atoms. The Universe went from dark and neutral to bright and ionized.

The SKA Observatory will map this fog of neutral hydrogen at low radio frequencies, which will allow scientists to explore the births and deaths of the earliest stars and galaxies. Exploration of this key period is the final missing piece in our understanding of the life story of the Universe.

An artist’s impression of a station of radio antennas. Each station has 256 antennas, and the SKA-Low telescope will have 512 stations. Credit: DISR

Unimagined mysteries

Closer to home, the low-frequency telescope will time the revolutions of pulsars. These rapidly spinning neutron stars, which fire out sweeping beams of radiation like lighthouses, are the Universe’s ultra-precise clocks.

Changes to the ticking of these clocks can indicate the passage of gravitational waves through the Universe, allowing us to map these deformations of spacetime with radio waves.

It will also help us to understand the Sun, our own star, and the space environment that we on Earth live within.

These are the things we expect to find with the SKA Observatory. But the unexpected discoveries will most likely be the most exciting. With an observatory of this size and power, we are bound to uncover as-yet-unimagined mysteries of the Universe.

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The tail clubs of ankylosaur species seem to have been used to bash each other rather than predators.

Henry Sharpe

 

New research indicates that the tail clubs on huge armored dinosaurs known as ankylosaurs may have evolved to whack each other rather than deter hungry predators. This is a complete shift from what was previously believed.

 

Prior to the paper published today in Biology Letters, most scientists looked upon the dinosaur’s tail club, a substantial bony protrusion comprised of two oval-shaped knobs, primarily as a defense against predation. The team behind the new paper argues that this is not necessarily the case. To make their case, they focus on years of ankylosaur research, analysis of the fossil record, and data from an exceptionally well-preserved specimen named Zuul crurivastator.

 

Zuul’s name, in fact, embraces that previous idea. While "Zuul" references the creature in the original Ghostbusters, the two Latin words that make up its species name are crus (shin or shank) and vastator (destroyer). Hence, the destroyer of shins: a direct reference to where the dinosaur’s club may have struck approaching tyrannosaurs or other theropods.

 

But that name was given when only its skull and tail had been excavated from the rock where the fossil was encased. After years of skilled work by the fossil preparators at the Royal Ontario Museum, Zuul’s entire back and flanks are exposed, offering important clues as to what its tail club might target.

Target identification

Lead author Dr. Victoria Arbour is currently the Curator of Paleontology at the Royal British Columbia Museum, but she’s a former NSERC postdoctoral fellow at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. That’s been Zuul’s home since 2016, two years after its initial discovery in Montana. She’s spent years studying ankylosaurs, a type of dinosaur that appear in the fossil record from the Jurassic through the end of the Cretaceous. Some species of ankylosaurs have tail clubs, while others, known as nodosaurs, do not. That difference raises some questions about what these structures were used for.

 

“I think a natural follow-up question from, ‘Could they use their tail clubs as a weapon?’ is ‘Who are they using that weapon against?’” Arbour explained. “And so that’s where I really started thinking about this.

 

Back in 2009, she authored a paper that suggested ankylosaurs might use their tail clubs for intraspecific combat—fights with other ankylosaurs. That work focused on the potential impact of tail clubs when used as a weapon, especially as the clubs come in various shapes and sizes, and in some species, weren’t even present until the animal matured. Measuring available fossil tail clubs and estimating the force of the blows they could produce, she found that smaller clubs (approximately 200 millimeters or half a foot) were too small to be used as a defense against predators.

 

She recommended further research, noting that if ankylosaurs were using them for intraspecific combat, one might expect to see injuries along adult flanks, as an ankylosaur tail can only swing so far.

 

It’s one thing to have an idea about an extinct animal, but it’s another to have evidence. Ankylosaur fossils are rare in general; dinosaurs with preservation of the tissues that would have been damaged in these fights are much rarer. So it’s astounding that Arbour could test her ideas thanks to an animal with its entire back—most of its skin and all—intact.

 

“I put out this idea that we would expect to see damage on the flanks, just based on how they might line up against each other,” Arbour told Ars. “And then a decade and a bit later, we get this amazing skeleton of Zuul with damage right where we thought we might see it. And that was pretty exciting!”

Damage assessment

Zuul’s back and flanks are covered in various spikes and bony structures called osteoderms. Just as Arbour predicted, there is evidence of broken and injured osteoderms on both sides of the flanks, some of which appear to have healed.

 

“We also did some sort of basic statistics to show that the injuries are not randomly distributed on the body,” she continued. “They really are just restricted to the sides in the areas around the hips. That can’t be explained just by random chance. It seems more likely that it’s [the result of] repeated behavior.”

 

There are only a handful of well-preserved ankylosaurs, including at least one of a nodosaur named Borealopelta at the Royal Tyrrell Museum. The authors note that there aren’t any comparable injuries on known nodosaurs, a germane point. As mentioned previously, nodosaurs don’t have tail clubs and thus wouldn’t have been able to use them against each other.

 

Equally important, the damage isn’t accompanied by evidence of predation. No bite marks, puncture wounds, or tooth scratches are found anywhere on Zuul’s body.

New find suggests ankylosaur’s tail clubs were for bashing each other

Someone paid $95,000 for this pair of jeans recovered from 1857 shipwreck

JUST A MONTH after Twitter’s new CEO, Elon Musk, oversaw massive staff layoffs, former Twitter employees have announced that they’re filing suit over the company’s severance policies. In a press conference with their lawyer Lisa Bloom, former employees Helen-Sage Lee, Adrian Trejo Nuñez, and Amir Shevat alleged that the company’s handling of their termination constituted a breach of contract, and a violation of California’s Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act.

It might only be a handful former employees now, but Twitter could soon be inundated with similar cases and be forced to pay legal fees running into millions of dollars. Rafael Nendel‑Flores, a California-based employment lawyer, says the legal strategy of filing multiple arbitration suits, which is likely a way to get around the constraints of a dispute resolution agreement, will pile pressure on Twitter. “Just the arbitration fees alone could be massive,” he says. 

That’s because employers, in this case Twitter, are required to shoulder the cost of the arbitration process. And having hundreds or thousands of cases to contend with all at once could be a significant financial and administrative burden for a company already struggling with a massive loss in advertiser revenue. Each individual arbitration case can easily cost between $50,000 and $100,000, says Nendel-Flores. “That is, in my view, a significant pressure point—that Ms. Bloom and probably other plaintiffs’ lawyers are going to try and push these individual arbitration cases.”

Like most Twitter employees, Lee and the others had signed away their right to be part of a class action suit when they took the job via a dispute resolution agreement that routes all legal complaints to arbitration. This meant that if they had a problem with the company, each person would have to negotiate on their own. For an employer, such a legal mechanism blocks huge class action suits. But for Twitter, faced with scores of disgruntled former employees, it could lead to death by a thousand cuts.

And Bloom’s clients are not alone. Last week, Akiva Cohen, a lawyer representing another group of Twitter employees, notified the company that his clients, too, would be filing arbitration suits if the company did not “unequivocally confirm” that former employees would be given the full severance they say Twitter promised them.

“Nobody really expects to go into a workplace setting, especially a new job that you’re really excited about, thinking you’re going to end up suing your employer one day or your employer is going to treat you in a way that deserves legal action,” says Lee. 

When Musk first announced the layoffs, another group of employees filed a preemptive lawsuit against Twitter for potential violations of the WARN Act, which requires that companies provide employees with 60 days notice of layoffs. In response, Twitter agreed to keep the fired employees on its payroll as non-working employees until January 4, but the severance for fired employees as yet remains unclear. Lee, Nuñez, and Shevat allege that the severance they were offered by the company after it was purchased differed from what they had been promised before the takeover.

“As a Twitter employee working through the entire acquisition, it’s been a very, very turbulent time,” says Lee. She says that she felt more comfortable staying at the company as the specter of Musk’s purchase loomed partly because of the severance plans and compensation package—including shares—that she said she felt were guaranteed. She adds the severance package was confirmed to her in April and October of this year. But the chaos of the layoffs and the confusion around the kind of compensation former employees can expect have led to confusion and fear, she says. “I’ve lost a lot of sleep. Especially in the process of how it’s become another full-time job, looking at what my legal options are, what I can do to also recover that process,” says Lee. 

Lee will be the first in a series of individuals to file suits against Twitter in arbitration, according to Bloom. She says that there are more former employees and contractors who she anticipates will also file suit against the company, though declined to name an exact number. “We will continue to file these cases one by one, bombarding Twitter with claims,” she says.

Twitter has yet to release a statement on the filing and the company no longer employs a communications officer available to offer comment. But in the absence of concessions from Twitter, Nendel‑Flores says these cases could drag on for a while. “None of this stuff ever rarely resolves quickly.”

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The Orion spacecraft swung by the Moon on Monday, flying to within 130 km of that world's surface as it set course for a return to Earth this weekend.

 

In making this "powered flyby burn" to move away from the Moon, Orion's service module performed its longest main engine firing to date, lasting 3 minutes and 27 seconds. After successfully completing the maneuver, NASA's mission management team gave the "go" to send recovery teams out into the Pacific Ocean, where Orion is due to splashdown on Sunday, during the middle of the day.

 

By getting into an orbit around the Moon, and back out of it again during its deep space mission, Orion has now completed four main propulsive burns. This completes a big test of the spacecraft and its propulsive service module, which was built by the European Space Agency. Although a boilerplate version of Orion made a flight in 2014, it did so without a service module.

 

As part of this Artemis I mission, NASA is now three weeks into a 25.5-day test flight of the Orion spacecraft. The goal is to validate the spacecraft's capabilities ahead of a human flight of the vehicle in about two years' time, the Artemis II mission.

 

Orion has met most of its main objectives to date, with only the entry, descent, and splashdown part of its mission ahead of it. The spacecraft's heat shield must demonstrate its ability to survive reentry at a velocity of 39,400 kph. This big test will come Sunday during a fiery reentry into Earth's atmosphere.

A minor power issue

So far, Orion's test flight has gone remarkably well. Typically, with new spacecraft, there are issues with thrusters, navigation, onboard avionics, and more. However, Orion has had no major issues. The only real troubleshooting has involved a problem with power systems on the vehicle.

 

The issue has occurred with four "latching current limiters" that help route power to propulsion and heating systems on Orion. For some reason, automated controllers on Orion commanded the four current limiters to "open" when no such command was supposed to be sent. "We're not exactly sure on the root cause of the problem, but teams are doing tests on the ground," said Debbie Korth, the Orion Program deputy manager, during a briefing on Monday evening at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

 

 

This system is somewhat like a circuit breaker box in a home, and for some reason four of the breakers were opened when they were not supposed to be. This did not pose a threat to Orion, as there are backup power systems. Had a crew been on board it would have required a minor procedure to account for the problem.

 

In an interview after the news briefing, Korth said she did not think the glitch would impact the service module that will be used for the Artemis II mission. This hardware is already built and being tested in the United States.

 

"I think it's probably too early to say for sure, but ideally we will not want to perturb the Artemis II service module," she said. "This may very well be something we can handle with software."

 

After lunar flyby, NASA’s Orion spacecraft is set to splash down on Sunday

he explanation that occurs to most people is that this is something that comes from culture, religion. In my new research on autistic people, I look at a different possibility, that this belief arises from our tendency to view our mind as separate from the body. I’m interested in the possibility that this is something that is natural for people to entertain, arising from the basic principles that guide how the mind works.

This notion that there are some supernatural beings that usually are also ethereal and disembodied—ghosts—is something that is seen a lot across cultures, including in, say, the Judeo-Christian tradition. But maybe it’s not that our beliefs come from religion, but rather it’s religion that arises from our beliefs. The psychologist Paul Bloom has pointed out that newborn infants have certain psychological principles that we call core knowledge. There is stuff that they know, apparently innately, about, among other things, what objects are, and how they behave. Newborn infants know that objects are cohesive and that they only move by contact. If a newborn infant were to see one ball collide with another, they would expect it to move immediately and in the same direction as the ball that bounced into it. Whereas if they saw any violation of that, they would be surprised. You can see this by how long they look.

But here is the thing: Infants also know that people are driven by what they know and believe. For example, infants seeing a hand reach toward an object, like a bottle, expect the hand to keep reaching toward that object even if its location is changed. But when the hand moves, there is no visible, physical cause that makes the hand move. That violates this notion of intuitive physics, because for intuitive physics, a hand is like a ball.

You expect the hand to move if it was bounced by another ball. But for the infant, they see evidence that the hand moves by itself, presumably by these mental states that are not visible. And it’s this contrast between these two systems—intuitive physics and our tendency to attribute mental states to the other, called theory of mind—that may lead us to assume that those mental states are not embodied. They are not like a ball.

They are something different, something ethereal, and that, Bloom proposed, might lead people to become dualists about the mind and body.

Neurotypicals really think that there’s an afterlife?

“Well, if he’s right,” I thought, “if theory of mind begets dualism because of its interaction with intuitive physics, then it stands to reason that if somebody’s theory of mind was weaker, then they should also be less dualist.” Research suggests people with autism have a weaker theory of mind. They understand what people think less intuitively, more by relying on reasoning. If that is really the case, and if autism attenuates theory of mind, then you would also expect it to attenuate dualism.

So my colleagues and I decided to go to people with autism and evaluate their reasoning about bodies and mind, and see if indeed they are less likely to separate them. And the result that we have obtained indeed suggests that that’s the case. Compared to people with autism, it’s the neurotypicals who are strong in their theory of mind, and it is for this reason maybe that we believe in ghost stories.

We didn’t ask them about ghosts specifically. In one experiment, we asked people to reason about what would happen if it were possible to create a replica of the body of a person. Which of the person’s traits will transfer to the replica? The logic being that if you think about a person’s thoughts as something ethereal, then it won’t transfer to the replica. Neurotypical people were not sure that thoughts will transfer to the replica, but people with autism thought, “Sure, they will,” suggesting that they think about thoughts as more part of the body.

We then asked them what happens in the afterlife, when the body is no longer relevant. What remains there? Neurotypicals believed that thoughts will persist. People with autism were not sure. Another study found that people with autism tend to be more atheist than neurotypicals, which is also in line with this result.

When I talked about this work on Twitter, many people from the autism community chimed in. One person had this really, I think, telling point, which was, “Oh, what? Neurotypicals really think that there’s an afterlife?” And he added, “Well, that’s really fringe.” I think that captures it pretty well. They are completely right. It’s completely irrational to think about the mind as separate from the body. And that’s exactly what we all do.

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Using an energetic perspective, observations, and climate model simulations, a new study by the University of Chicago offers a first-string explanation for this phenomenon. They found two significant culprits: ocean circulation and the large mountain ranges in the Northern Hemisphere.

The study also discovered that this storminess imbalance had grown since the 1980s when the satellite age began. They found the increase was qualitatively in line with climate change forecasts made by physics-based models.

For a long time, significantly less was known about the weather in the Southern Hemisphere. Most of the ways for observing weather were land-based. But with the advent of satellite-based global observing in the 1980s, we could quantify just how extreme the difference was. The Southern Hemisphere has a stronger jet stream and more extreme weather events.

Thoughts had been shared, but no one had found a conclusive cause for this asymmetry. Shaw, Osamu Miyawaki (Ph.D. ’22, currently at the National Center for Atmospheric Research), and Aaron Donohoe from the University of Washington all had theories from earlier research but wanted to move further. This required combining numerous lines of evidence from observations, theory, and physics-based climate simulations.

University of Chicago climate scientist Tiffany Shaw said, “You can’t put the Earth in a jar, so instead, we use climate models built on the laws of physics and run experiments to test our hypotheses.”

They applied a numerical model of Earth’s climate based on physical rules to replicate the data. They then measured the effects of each variable’s removal, one at a time, on storminess.

They initially examined topography as a factor. There are more mountain ranges in the Northern Hemisphere, and large mountain ranges can impede air movement to lessen storms. Indeed, when the scientists flattened every mountain on Earth, about half the difference in storminess between the two hemispheres disappeared.

The other part concerned the circulation of the ocean. Water circulates across the world akin to a sluggish but potent conveyor belt: it descends in the Arctic, travels through the ocean’s floor, rises in Antarctica, and then flows up near the surface, carrying energy with it. The two hemispheres now have an energy differential. The other half of the variance in storminess disappeared when the scientists attempted to remove this conveyor belt.

After addressing the fundamental query of why the southern hemisphere experiences more storms, the scientists looked at how storminess has evolved.

They discovered that the storminess asymmetry has grown over the satellite era, which started in the 1980s, by analyzing observations from previous decades. That is, while the average change in the Northern Hemisphere has been minimal, the Southern Hemisphere is becoming even more stormy.

Variations in the ocean were linked to changes in storminess in the Southern Hemisphere. They discovered that the Northern Hemisphere also has a comparable ocean influence. Still, this influence is canceled out by the Northern Hemisphere’s increased solar absorption due to the melting of snow and sea ice.

As an essential independent check on the accuracy of these models, the scientists examined the models that were used to forecast climate change as part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment report and discovered that they all displayed the same signals—increasing storminess in the Southern Hemisphere and minor changes in the Northern.

Scientists noted, “It may be surprising that such a deceptively simple question—why one hemisphere is stormier than another—went unanswered for so long, but Shaw explained that the field of weather and climate physics is relatively young compared to many other fields.”

Journal Reference:

1. Tiffany A. Shaw et al. Stormier Southern Hemisphere induced by topography and ocean circulation. PNAS. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2123512119

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Graduate students speak out about racism

Thirty-five per cent of graduate students from minority racial or ethnic groups have experienced discrimination or harassment during their current programme, according to responses to Nature’s survey of PhD and master’s students. That’s more than twice the rate reported by those who did not identify as members of those groups (15%). Twenty-one per cent of respondents identify as members of minority racial or ethnic groups in the countries where they currently live.

Minority report: Results from Nature’s graduate survey, focusing on responses from members of minority ethnic or racial groups.

A holographic wormhole in a quantum computer

Physicists have used a quantum computer to generate an entity known as an emergent wormhole. Quantum systems can be linked by entanglement even when separated by extremely long distances. The authors generated a highly entangled quantum state between the two halves of a quantum computer, creating an alternative description, known as a holographic dual, in the form of an emergent wormhole stretched between two exterior regions. They then simulated a message traversing this wormhole. Such exotic physics is part of efforts to reconcile quantum mechanics with the general theory of relativity.

Seasons of the ancient ocean

Seasonal variation in tropical sea surface temperatures doubled during a sudden warming event 11,700 years ago, as this graphic shows. The authors of a Nature paper studied sediment layers off the coast of Venezuela to infer sea surface temperatures during the abrupt transition between a period of cooling (the Younger Dryas cold event) and the current epoch (the Holocene). This revealed the increase in seasonality, calculated as the difference between the average sea surface temperature in different seasons. The seasonality increased from 0.8 to 1.8 °C (solid red lines), which is close to the present-day seasonal variability of 1.6 °C (dashed red line). The study shows that seasonal changes must be considered when inferring past climatic events, and predicting those to come.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-04365-1

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However, when painful mental states are long-lasting and interfere with our ability to function well in our daily lives and relationships, it can mean we are experiencing a form of mental illness.

Mental illnesses usually have other impacts apart from mood, including physical symptoms, changes in thinking, changes in behavior, and sometimes changes in perception, including hallucinations, severe nightmares or flashbacks.

What causes mental illness?

Mental illness is complex. Medical science, philosophy, psychology and other disciplines are still debating whether the mental "mind" and physical "brain" are separate or integrated. Some researchers believe mental illness originates in the physical body and brain, influenced by genetics, inflammatory processes, neurological development and even hormones in the gut. Other researchers believe mental illness originates in the mind, from learned responses that are unhelpful or damaging, or lived experiences that are traumatic.

Mental health is also influenced by the world in which a person lives, which might include family and kin, community, culture, Country or spirituality.

Trauma experiences are important. It is profoundly disrespectful to see a person who has experienced adversity such as intergenerational trauma, domestic violence, racial discrimination, poverty or any other systemic abuse, and apply a disease label like "depression" without acknowledging the crucial role of their trauma experiences in their health.

Managing mental health involves understanding how all these elements fit together.

Why is a diagnosis important?

Psychiatric diagnoses may be only one way of understanding mental illness, but they are important. In severe mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, medication can be essential to well-being. The evidence for medication and specific psychological strategies in therapy are often based on making an accurate psychiatric diagnosis. It is also important to make sure mental illness symptoms are not caused by physical diseases.

Most people with mental illness diagnosis should also have a "formulation", which is a description of why this person may be experiencing mental illness at this time. A formulation may include historical factors (such as childhood trauma), features of their personality (such as perfectionism), details of their lived experience (such as discrimination and harassment based on their gender identity), and acute stressors (such as living through a natural disaster).

Brought together, the diagnosis and formulation should help clinicians, patients and caregivers understand why they are unwell and develop a plan of action to optimize their mental health. A formulation includes aspects of lifestyle (including avoiding damaging social environments such as mentally unhealthy workplaces), psychosocial strategies (such as therapy) and, in some cases, medication.

Usually, a person with mental illness will choose which strategies to use in collaboration with their treating team.

Recovering from mental illness

Mental illness can range from a single episode to a lifetime condition, and from mild to severe. It can involve a single condition such as depression, but it is common to have more than one illness at a time (such as depression and anxiety). It is also common for physical and mental illnesses to occur together (eating disorders and diabetes, heart disease and depression). Mental illnesses can change over time. For many people, there will be times of stability, times of crisis, and times when mental health is consistently poor.

Because there is so much variation in people's conditions and lived experiences, different people will have different approaches to treatment. Treatment often involves social interventions such as securing safe housing, addressing lifestyle issues or helping with financial stress. It can also involve self-help strategies, helplines or psychological therapy.

Treatment needs to be individualized. Just because a treatment is said to be "evidence-based" in one context, doesn't mean it can treat everyone across the entire spectrum. Most evidence is developed through research in urban, middle-class, well-educated, predominantly white people, and it may not necessarily be the best psychological strategy to use for a person from a completely different environment.

When to seek help

If you have thoughts of self-harm or symptoms are severe enough to affect your ability manage everyday life, it is time to work with a mental health professional to get a good, holistic diagnosis and formulate a management plan.

A GP is a good place to start to check there are no physical reasons why your mental health is deteriorating. GPs are likely to have the best understanding of appropriate, accessible and affordable options for care for your needs in your area. Unfortunately, specialized mental health services can be expensive and difficult to access.

Then it is time to identify the key issues impacting your mental health, and plan your recovery.

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Striped like a tiger, with a somewhat dog-like body, the Tasmanian tiger – or thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus) – is in fact a large marsupial, more closely related to quolls and numbats. The pouched mammals were once found across Australia, though by the early 20th century its range was limited to Tasmania.

We now know the remains of the final captive thylacine were accidentally included in an educational program that traveled from school to school, teaching students about the anatomy of these long-lost creatures.

Parts of the specimen's skin still show flattened fur where children were allowed to pat it. No one realized what they were handling at the time, and in the 1980s, the body was stored away and promptly forgotten about.

It's a rather sad conclusion to a tragic life. Having been illegally captured by a trapper named Elias Churchill in May of 1936, the older female thylacine was secretly sold to the now-closed Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart, where she would die of exposure just a few months later, on the night of September 7.

At the time, no one realized this would be the last Tasmanian tiger to grace a zoo. In fact, records suggest people were still hunting for wild thylacines well after 1936.

The hope of finding another survivor meant that the body of the final thylacine at Beaumaris Zoo wasn't celebrated or labeled in any special way.

"For years, many museum curators and researchers searched for its remains without success, as no thylacine material dating from 1936 had been recorded in the zoological collection, and so it was assumed its body had been discarded," says Robert Paddle, a comparative psychologist from the Australian Catholic University.

The treasure hunt was only recently reignited when Paddle and Kathryn Medlock, an honorary curator at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG), stumbled across an unpublished report.

It was written in a 1936/1937 log by the museum's taxidermist, and the passage mentioned that the thylacine that died in 1936, the last known living individual of its kind, had been gifted to TMAG.

But it wasn't in the museum's zoological section, where researchers had looked for it before. It was in the museum's education section.

"The skin was carefully tanned as a flat skin by the museum's taxidermist, William Cunningham, which meant it could be easily transported and used as a demonstration specimen for school classes learning about Tasmanian marsupials," says Medlock.

Skull of the thylacine that died at Hobart's Beaumaris Zoo in 1936. (TMAG)

Peddle and Medlock are both hopeful that their rediscovery will finally put an end to the myths that surround the last Tasmanian tiger.

These falsehoods have been shared so widely and uncritically, they can even be found on the official web pages of the National Museum of Australia and the National Film and Sound Archive.

Both of these sites state that the last Tasmanian tiger in captivity was a male named Benjamin, but Paddle told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that is an enduring myth.

While it's true that there was a male thylacine housed at the Beaumaris Zoo in 1935, his name was not Benjamin and he wasn't the last. That rumor was completely made up in the 1960s by someone who didn't even work at the zoo.

"It's an unfortunate myth," Paddle told Adam Langenberg at ABC News.

"It's time to remove it from the literature. It's so appalling Kathryn [Medlock] and I haven't even mentioned it in the [research] paper."

The male at Beaumaris may not have been the last captive thylacine, but he was the last to be filmed on camera. A 21-second, black-and-white video of the male Tassie tiger, taken in 1935 for a documentary, was recently digitized and released online.

In the shot, the male thylacine can be seen pacing in his zoo enclosure while excited visitors shake his cage. If you listen to the audio, a narrator can be heard saying, "this is the only one in captivity in the world."

But that statement, if it was true at the time, wasn't true for long.

The female thylacine captured by Churchill joined the zoo shortly after 'Benjamin' made his film debut, and according to the museum's records, she outlasted the male.

While it's likely there were thylacines left in the wild at this time, this was the final individual ever held at a zoo. Hunting is thought to have contributed to their eventual extinction across Tasmania, along with possible diseases and habitat disruption as Europeans encroached on the animal's remaining stronghold.

The last known thylacine's remains are now on display at TMAG for any curious visitors to see.

Paddle and Medlock's paper on their re-discovery will soon be available on the Australian Zoologist website.

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