The conversation on AUKUS and Australia’s defense indicates the need for an advanced industrial base in the country, which can sustain not only the development of nuclear-powered submarines but also align capabilities like hypersonic and artificial intelligence (AI)-led military systems.

Limitations like the lack of capital and human resources drag down Canberra’s ability to develop better weapons.

Collaboration with AUKUS partners (the United States and United Kingdom) is crucial for Canberra to procure, test and commercialize the latest military technologies. At the same time, deeper engagement with Quad partners Japan and India can help ensure a robust supply chain network for Australia’s defense industry sector.

Both AUKUS and the Quad are driven by shared motives of stabilizing regional security in the Indo-Pacific.

The developing geopolitics of the Pacific necessitate credible offensive and defensive capabilities. Mick Ryan from CSIS suggests that Australia should move to short-term “asymmetric” deliverables that can deter Chinese aggression, instead of its heavy focus on longer-term force structure plans.

Nuclear-powered submarines will take more than a decade to be ready, but escalating tensions demand at least some capability enhancement within 3-5 years. Since the threat is regional, it involves multiple stakeholders. The development of Australia’s defense industrial base would be easier and faster through institutional collaboration with like-minded partners in the region.

Australia has a strong foundation in research and development. It also exports some defense items, such as the Nulka Active Missile Decoy and Bushmaster Protected Mobility Vehicle. According to the 2020 Force Structure Plan, Canberra will commit more than US$20 billion to develop high-speed weapons and build defense capabilities against ballistic missiles and high-speed weapons.

Australia’s HMAS Hobart firing a RIM-66 missile. More such projectiles will be trained on China in the years ahead. Photo: Australian Department of Defense

The Australian government’s Defense Innovation Hub allocates grants to businesses developing AI technologies with military applications. Some of these include improving situational awareness using available intelligence and achieving intelligent virtual reality for better simulation, modeling and training of the Australian Defense Force.

Other programs like the Australian Industry Capability program and Local Industry Capability Plans aim to increase the participation of local defense manufacturers in defense infrastructure projects. Agencies such as Austrade have helped domestic tech firms set up research facilities to test advanced technologies and market commercialization.

Limited capital affects manufacturing for the market and drags down innovation. Even though Australia attracts considerable foreign direct investment, the financing for defense manufacturing remains limited due to reasons including risk, institutional hurdles and lack of trust.

Japan ranked second globally in video game equipment exports in 2020 and has seen strong exports in digital items and semiconductor equipment despite the Covid-19 crisis. In 2021, Japanese foreign direct investment in Asia and Oceania amounted to $655 billion, with investment in Australia exceeding $162 billion.

Japanese banks have led the growth in project finance in Asia and are apt contenders for financing progress in critical technologies.

The signing of a Reciprocal Access Agreement between Japan and Australia was accompanied by increased bilateral cooperation in the digital and cyberspace sectors. There is potential for work on innovative technologies, AI and autonomous robotic systems that target the grey-zone operations of an adversary.

India has a formidable base in cyber services and digital technologies. A Defense Artificial Intelligence Council and Defense AI Project Agency have been created within the defense establishment to work on AI-enabled defense products.

The Indian Navy is working on 30 AI-related projects covering areas such as maritime domain awareness and autonomous systems, while the Indian Army has set up an AI center of excellence in Mhow.

India’s defense minister released 75 AI-related products at the “AI in Defense” symposium in July 2022, which have been developed through partnerships between the armed forces, defense research organizations and private industry.

India also declared massive “Make in India” initiatives for self-reliance in defense manufacturing, which may be vital for critical defense supply chains in Canberra’s defense industrial development plans.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, US President Joe Biden, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi attend an event during the summit of Quad leaders in Tokyo, Japan, on May 24, 2022. Photo: Pool

Even though the Quad members have unique strengths in AI, their collaboration and investment in AI-related projects are minimal. For Australia, it may be useful to align more with Japan and India for focussed efforts on the military applications of AI technologies.

Washington has robust cooperation and investment across all three countries on AI. But there are reasons to believe that among the AUKUS partners themselves, technology sharing is a sensitive issue and there are comprehensive regulations in place to prevent it.

The role of the US Congress in reducing export controls and streamlining information exchange will be critical to allowing greater collaboration.

Loosening export controls can help Canberra to capitalize on the strengths of Japan and India in developing Australia’s defense base. The policy discourse around AUKUS in London will be important in engaging the Quad for achieving AUKUS objectives and Britain’s own “Indo-Pacific Tilt.”

The Sydney-based United States Studies Centre recommends an “AUKUS Visa” to ensure a steady flow of talent to sustain the momentum in defense production under AUKUS. To facilitate the development of Australia’s defense industrial base, Canberra also needs to engage with Quad partners.

Though AUKUS and the Quad are different in their objectives and orientation, they aim for a stable Indo-Pacific where the rules-based order prevails. Canberra needs to find ways of synchronizing the two to deter disruption in its Pacific neighborhood.

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Turkey’s indigenous TF-X fighter is finally taking shape, a homegrown plan to put the country in an elite club of middle powers that have successfully built and tested stealth combat aircraft. 

Last month, Turkish Aerospace Industries (TAI) released video footage of its TF-X fighter under construction, images that affirmed the country’s determination to develop an indigenous fighter aircraft.

The video shows the TF-X in the apparent early stages of construction, with the aircraft’s fuselage and wings visible while its engines, control fins and avionics remain out of view. 

Although little is known about the TF-X’s specifications, Thomas Newdick notes in The Warzone that it will not immediately be in the same league as the US’s F-22 and F-35 stealth fighters. He reports that the TF-X’s prototype is expected to be unveiled in March 2023, with the first test flight set for 2025 or 2026 and the first units entering service in 2028 or the 2030s. 

Airforce Technology notes that the TF-X is primarily designed for air-to-air operations, with a secondary air-to-ground role. In line with its emphasis on air-to-air missions, TAI mentions the TF-X will have increased air-to-air range using new weapons, most likely the domestically-developed Gokdogan beyond-visual-range (BVR) missile. 

It will also feature an internal weapons bay to maintain stealth, artificial intelligence and neural network support. With a 14-meter wingspan, 21-meter length and 6-meter height, the TF-X will be smaller than the F-22 but bigger than the F-35.

The TF-X will be powered by two US General Electric F110 afterburning engines or Turkish-made, license-produced F118 non-afterburning engines derived from the F110. 

The TF-X under construction in a YouTube screengrab from Savunma Sanayii Dergilik.

However, Asia Times has reported that the US may be reluctant to sell engines or transfer technology to Turkey given the latter’s ambiguous relationship with Russia, seen in its purchase of Russia-made S-400 surface-to-air missiles in 2017 and Turkey’s removal from America’s F-35 program in 2019. 

Newdick notes that the UK’s Rolls Royce could be another potential engine supplier but disputes over technology transfer and intellectual property rights would likely hinder any deal. Newdick also notes that while Russia could supply jet engines, the threat of sanctions and Russia’s need to replace its own fighter losses in Ukraine make this a dim prospect.

For a middle power like Turkey to develop an indigenous stealth fighter is no small feat. 

In a 2021 article for The Diplomat, Jacob Parakilas notes that as fighter aircraft have become more expensive, it has become rarer for middle powers to produce their own. He also notes that successfully designing a combat-effective fighter is one thing but doing so in a financially viable way is quite another.

Even leading military powers such as the US, China, and Russia are not immune to cost constraints. For example, cost-death spirals led to the termination of US F-22 production at 187 units in 2009. This is likely the same reason why China has only around 200 J-20 stealth fighters. Likewise, Russia has only between 3 to 15 Su-57s, which may be too few to be effective in combat. 

Parakilas notes that it is impossible to determine whether 5th-generation fighters developed by middle powers can compete with those from more established manufacturers. 

Turkey’s TF-X may thus be comparable to Japan’s Mitsubishi X-2 and South Korea’s KF-21 Boramae fighters, as both middle powers have sufficient resources, knowledge and technology to design such aircraft. 

Japan’s Mitsubishi X-2 was first developed in 2009 in response to a US decision not to sell the F-22 to its allies. As noted by Defence Aviation, the single prototype X-2 features 3D thrust vectoring, enabling it to execute tight and fast turns, and active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar. 

Compared to the TF-X, the X-2 is relatively tiny, with Aerotime Hub listing its dimensions at 14.2 meters in length with a 9.1-meter wingspan. The X-2 is powered by two IHI XF5-1 low-bypass after-burning engines. A 2016 test flight saw it hit a speed of 370 kilometers per hour at an altitude of 3,600 meters. 

Japan’s X-2 fighter jet makes its maiden flight. Photo: Wikipedia

Although the X-2 exists only as a single prototype, lessons learned from its project have been instrumental in advancing Japan’s F-X 6th generation fighter program, which in partnership with the UK aims to field an air superiority fighter to overmatch China’s existing 4th and 5th generation aircraft by 2035. 

Asia Times has previously reported on South Korea’s KF-21 Boramae fighter, an F-35 lookalike 4.5 generation aircraft. The KF-21 lacks an internal weapons bay, making it necessary to carry its weapons on external hardpoints, thus reducing its stealth compared to other 5th-generation fighters equipped. Korea Aerospace Industries (KAI) lists the KF-21 as having an 11.2-meter wingspan, 16.2-meter length, and 4.7-meter height. 

It is powered by two US General Electric F414 after-burning engines used in the F/A-18 Super Hornet and JAS 39 Gripen, giving it a maximum speed of 2,250 kilometers per hour. The KF-21 is also designed to carry a wide variety of Western and South Korean armaments, such as its indigenous BVR missile, still under development, and the Swedish-German Taurus KEPD-350 cruise missile.

South Korea envisions the KF-21 as a high-end alternative to the F-35, costing half as much as the US-made latter. The country also expects to pitch its KF-21 on global markets as a more affordable option compared to Western 4.5 generation fighters such as the Eurofighter and Rafale, offering 4.5 generation capabilities for a fraction of the price.  

Turkey’s TF-X may aim to follow the example set by Japan, with the fighter serving as a testbed for an even more advanced combat aircraft in the future. On the other hand, it could also follow the example of South Korea in seeking to enter the export market for affordable 4.5-generation fighters. 

The US has withheld the F-35 from Turkey due to its relations with Russia. Image: US Air Force

In any case, the TF-X should be a significant stimulus for the Turkish aerospace industry. In a TRT World article last month, Ibrahim Karatas notes that TF-X production can build from where Turkey’s involvement in the F-35 program left off in 2019 after being removed by the US.

According to the US Naval Institute, eight Turkish firms were involved in F-35 airframe and engine design, with Turkey selected to be the first European F-35 engine maintenance hub. The source also notes that Turkish-made F-35 parts were set to be fielded globally, with the companies slated to do US$12 billion worth of labor on the F-35 over its lifetime. 

Given those losses, Karatas notes that the TF-X will provide a lifeline to the Turkish defense industry as a significant revenue generator, an affordable combat aircraft for the Turkish military and a contributor to the country’s strategic independence.

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As its shock troops battle to storm the defenses of the strategic Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, Russian private military contracting firm the Wagner Group is coming under fire on different fronts.

News from the Central African Republic states that an airfield used by the Russian mercenary unit came under bombing attack from an unidentified jet fighter on Monday.

Separately, US media report that Washington, seeking pressure points on Moscow, is considering dubbing the Wagner Group – widely alleged to be a deniable operations unit that carries out the Kremlin’s dirty work both near and far – a “foreign terrorist organization.”

But none of these matters were what raised the hackles of Douglas Nash, a US historian who was putting the finishing touches to a new book covering Nazi Germany’s most notorious combat unit, when he viewed recent Ukraine war news.

“When I saw it, I was appalled,” Nash, a retired US Army colonel and himself a veteran of three wars, told Asia Times.

The footage that stunned Nash was of Yevgeny Prigozhin, Wagner’s chief executive, speaking to assembled prisoners in the yard of a Russian penitentiary. The ex-felon, a confidant of President Vladimir Putin, was offering the prisoners pardons in return for six months of frontline service with the Wagner Group in Ukraine.

Nash, himself a US Army combat veteran and retired colonel, was appalled for two main reasons. First, the newsreel made clear how murderous the fighting in Ukraine has been for Russia’s regular forces.

“It dawned on me that the Russians must have suffered a far higher casualty rate than they have admitted,” said Nash, a Pulitzer nominee whose recent works have covered armored warfare and Germany’s Waffen SS on World War II’s Eastern Front. “Taking in ‘volunteers’ from prisons is an act of desperation.”

Russian businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin’s operations, including the Wagner Group private military company, are believed to be closely intertwined with Kremlin interests. Image: Facebook

Having formerly recruited ex-members of elite Russian units, Wagner now seeks lower-grade fodder to feed to the cannons outside embattled Bakhmut.

“My thoughts centered around how desperate the Russian military must be if one of their leading and most effective military organizations – albeit a private army – has to resort to such actions to fill its ranks,” Nash said. 

The second thing that triggered Nash was the practice of recruiting imprisoned criminals for combat recalled the practice of the historical figure who is the central personality in his upcoming work: Dr Oskar Dirlewanger, a Nazi officer who recruited criminals to don SS uniforms and fight in the ranks of the eponymous Dirlewanger Brigade.

Dirlewanger was a tough, veteran soldier – and an alcoholic, a sadist, a convicted child rapist and a likely psychopath. His unit has rape, torture and mass murder to its discredit; so vile was its behavior that it is difficult to write about its excesses even today.

Yet, Dirlewanger’s sinister shadow does not loom exclusively over the Russian side of the front lines.

The association of some Ukrainian combat units with the Nazi SS – in terms of their insignia, and in some cases, behavior – is by now well-documented. Even so, David Park, a retired US Army major, was dumbfounded to see the crossed grenade patch of Dirlewanger’s band adorning a Ukrainian sleeve.

“For a unit to openly wear the Dirlewanger patch, knowing what it stands for, shows the level of Nazi inculcation and acculturation that has occurred in the Ukrainian Army up and down its chain of command,” said Park.

More broadly, the savagery unleashed – from the deployment of criminals to the throat-cutting of captured personnel to the razing of civilian energy infrastructure at the onset of winter – raises troubling questions about the evolving nature of the Ukraine war.

Dirlewanger and Wagner

Dirlewanger’s unit originally comprised convicted game poachers, who, it was believed, possessed ideal skills to track Soviet partisans. As it grew, it recruited from among disgraced troops, imprisoned felons, concentration camp inmates – even the criminally insane.

In Belorussia, the brigade’s counterinsurgency missions turned up thousands more dead “partisans” than captured weapons. Amid 1944’s Warsaw Rising, it participated – alongside renegade Russians and Azeris – in the biggest civilian mass killing of World War II, when some 50,000 Polish civilians were murdered in the Wola Massacre.

In Warsaw, Dirlewanger’s record included the incineration of three hospitals, complete with patients, and the murder of babies with bayonets.

There is poetic justice in the end of both unit and leader. Fighting the Red Army at war’s end, the brigade was annihilated. Dirlewanger is believed to have been beaten to death by released Polish prisoners.

In 1985, the unit was resurrected on screen in Belorussian auteur Elen Klimov’s traumatic masterpiece “Come and See.” The film’s climax – the liquidation of a village by SS troops who herd the populace into a church, set it alight with flamethrowers and grenades, then mow down escapees with machine guns – is precisely based on Dirlewanger’s operating procedures.

Although Dirlewanger is not mentioned, the SS commander in the film oversees the slaughter while nursing a possum on his shoulder – recalling Dirlewanger’s pet monkey.

Wagner Group has nowhere near this level of misconduct to its discredit. Even so, correspondences between the Dirlewanger Brigade and the PMC are striking.

Just as Dirlewanger was a highly experienced soldier, who had fought in World War I and the Spanish Civil War, Wagner’s founder is believed to have had extensive military experience.

Dmitry Utkin, a retired lieutenant colonel of GRU-Spetznaz (military intelligence-special forces), was a veteran of the Chechen Wars who missed combat. Uktin is “a lover of not leaving the shadows under any circumstances,” according to an exhaustive 2018 report by underground Russian-language online media Daily Storm. “The available information about Utkin is fragments of a mosaic that still cannot be put together.”

Utkin was active in the Hong Kong-listed Moran Security Group and is believed to have been a key figure in recruiting and commanding Russian mercenaries in Crimea, Donbas and Syria.

His unit was originally dubbed the “the Slavonic Corps,” but Utkin is “fond of the history of the Third Reich,” Daily Storm alleges in its report. Online images show Utkin sporting SS tattoos, though these are unconfirmed. What is clearer is that the company’s current brand stemmed from Uktin’s call sign, named after German composer Richard Wagner.

Certainly, Wagner’s music stirs military hearts. His “Ride of the Valkyries” famously accompanied a US heliborne assault in Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War epic “Apocalypse Now.” 

Decades earlier, the same piece had been used by Nazi propagandists as a soundtrack for footage of Stuka dive bombers and was chosen as the regimental march of the UK’s Parachute Regiment.

The Wagner Group’s fighters are often referred to as Russia’s ‘shadow warriors.” Image: Twitter / Salika

But Wagner’s personage is controversial. Not only was he Hitler’s favorite composer but he also was a noted anti-Semite who shared Nazi ideas of racial purity. Due to this notoriety, as recently as 2018, Israel’s public broadcaster was obliged to issue an apology after airing a Wagner piece.

Wagner-lover Utkin certainly has high-level connections: The Kremlin confirmed his presence at a 2016 “Heroes of Russia” reception, which praised those who had shown courage in battle.

What is less clear is how and why oligarch Prigozhin took over the Wagner helm. Such firms are – or were – technically illegal under Russia’s criminal code. What is known is that Uktin was employed by one of Prigozhin’s legitimate companies, Concord, which provides services including catering and consulting, in 2017.

A 2020 joint investigation by Bellingcat, The Insider and Der Spiegel suggests Utkin was largely a frontman and field commander. It was Russian military intelligence officers – allegedly impressed by the flexible and deniable nature of private military companies such as South Africa-based Executive Outcomes – who requested that Prighozin assume the funding and management of Wagner.

The probe found that Prigozhin’s “disinformation, political interference and military operations are tightly integrated with Russia’s Defense Ministry and its intelligence arm, the GRU.”

Managing a mercenary force fits Prigozhin’s modus operandi. The entrepreneur, who runs a range of companies, is an associate of Putin and, according to the probe by Bellingcat and others, has logged multiple phone calls with senior Russian officials, including those from military intelligence. He has also been indicted in the US for 2016 electoral interference, allegedly to assist Donald Trump.

Many rumors were substantiated in September when Prigozhin mentioned the name “Wagner” during his recruiting drive at the Mari El prison colony. And last month, the formerly deniable firm publicly opened a flashy HQ in St Petersburg.  

Like Dirlewanger, Prigozhin appears to be a dangerous “can-do” man, capable of dubious tasks. Like the German, he has a criminal background – he spent nine years in jail for robbery and fraud. And just as Dirlewanger was patronized by SS recruitment head Gottlob Berger, Prigozhin is close to Putin.

However, Prigozhin has no known military background – hence his early reliance upon Uktin and others like him.

The two units’ combat trajectories are also similar. Originally, Dirlewanger’s specialists were used in counter-guerilla missions. But expansion, deployment to more intense operations and the need to replace casualties, necessitated recruitment from wider criminal classes.

Likewise, proto-Wagner is believed to have recruited from among ex-Russian commandos for shadowy missions in Africa, Syria and Latin America. When the Ukraine war exploded in February, its troops fought effectively during the capture of the Donetsk town of Popasna.

But since then, Wagner – also known as “The Orchestra” – has been bogged down in months-long combat for the city of Bakhmut. The fighting is World War I-style; footage from some sectors recalls the devastated landscapes of the apocalyptic 2016 battle of Verdun. In this battlespace, skilled commandos are a waste of talent – hence the need for criminals to conduct infantry assaults, inching Russia’s grinding offensive onward.

Still, the Dirlewanger Brigade is not the only historical precedent for recruiting criminals.

“Both the Wehrmacht and Red Army, due to manpower constraints, did follow such practices,” said Nash, listing a range of probationary and penal units. But he doubts if criminals will prove to be the battle winners Prigozhin hopes for.

“In a conventional fight, such men, having had little training or incentives, have very little value,” Nash said.

The resurrection of prison recruitment by Wagner is highly unusual. “I have not heard of such units being raised since World War II,” Nash said.

One conflict that did see criminals enter battle followed the breakup of Yugoslavia. In Croatia and Bosnia, the “Tiger” war band led by Serbian mobster “Arkan” (Zeljko Raznatovic) included criminals and hooligans. Western Europeans were shocked by the cruelties of that conflict – as they are by the horrors emerging from Ukraine.

A wide range of alleged war crimes – rape, torture, murder – committed by Russian troops is now under investigation by Kiev courts. And Wagner does not hide its brutality.

In what may be a fear tactic aimed to obviate desertions among criminal recruits, one ex-murderer fighting for Wagner was infamously executed with a sledgehammer blow to the skull, on camera. Prigozhin himself commented on the video, posted on a Telegram channel linked to Wagner, calling it “a dog’s death for a dog.”

“The Wagner Group, perhaps influenced by their service in Syria where they battled ISIS – no stranger to extreme brutality and cruelty – may have decided to copy similar methods to keep its men in line,” Nash opined.

Western media were understandably horrified. But while they focus their cameras almost exclusively on Russian brutality, it is not only Moscow’s men who are conducting atrocities.

Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin rolls out his Wagner recruiting pitch to convicted criminals. Image: screengrab/YouTube

Brutalities of war

Ukraine lies in an unfortunate geopolitical space – a battleground between the Orthodox traditions of the East and the Catholic traditions of the West. Its dark soil, rich agriculture and large populace make it a key prize. And its vast open spaces, ideal for maneuvering, have long been fought over.

It is no stranger to horror. Before World War II was unleashed on the country, Russian leader Joseph Stalin conducted genocide via “Terror Famine” – the Holodomar – that killed between 3.5 million and 5 million Ukrainians in 1932-33.

When Hitler’s armies invaded in 1941, they were welcomed by many Ukrainians, who saw them as freeing them from the communist yoke. The savagery of the Nazi regime soon turned much of the populace against the invaders and Ukrainians, after Russians, made up the second-largest ethnic group in the Red Army that crushed Hitler’s Wehrmacht in 1945.

Even so, plentiful Ukrainians sided with the Germans, including a full – and over-subscribed – division of Waffen SS troops. Moreover, Ukrainian turncoats were employed by the SS to oversee the liquidation camps at Sobibor, Chelmno, Majdankek and Treblinka.

In recent years, as Kiev squared off against Moscow and nationalism hit new fever pitch, troubling trends have bubbled to the fore in Ukraine. A cult has arisen around the late Ukrainian wartime nationalist, anti-semite and Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera. And some paramilitary and military units have adopted far-right ideologies and SS and other Nazi insignia.

“Nowadays in Ukraine, the veterans of [the Ukrainian SS division] are viewed as patriots,” said Nash. Displays of insignia are “a sign of respect for these Ukrainian ‘patriots’ as it might be for the Waffen-SS in general, which still has the reputation of being one of the most effective military forces in history.”

However, some Ukrainian troops are paying homage to the very worst SS unit. That, reckons Park, suggests poor leadership.

“I have noticed Dirlewanger patches on some Ukrainians soldiers in Twitter posts,” said Park – suggesting that this relates to poor leadership. That, in turn, explains, “why there are regular killings of prisoners and civilian ‘collaborators’ by the Ukrainian forces,” Park said.

Asia Times has viewed atrocity videos shot by Ukrainian soldiers. While the veracity of these clips cannot be confirmed, they have circulated among the retired military community online, where they are taken at face value.

One captures Ukrainian soldiers shooting bound Russian soldiers through the legs, a torture tactic known as kneecapping. Another shows Russian bodies twitching on a road with their throats cut, apparently after surrendering. Yet another shows the bodies of Russian POWs being rolled down a hillside into a pit.

One reason for these atrocities may be the intra-Slavic nature of the conflict. Civil wars are often especially brutal and many Russians view Ukrainians as junior members of Russia’s former empires.

That is reflected in front-line language. Russians call Ukrainians “kholkols” (an ethnic slur); Ukrainians dub Russians “orcs” (after the goblin-like marauders of JRR Tolkien’s fantasies).

“Dehumanizing your opponent makes it easier to kill them, it’s a technique as old as time,” said Nash. “Strong conditioning has to be inculcated in order for human beings to overcome their moral revulsion and resistance against taking the life of another human being.” 

Though Nazi Germany – due to its genocidal conduct – remains the black standard for warfighting, one expert suggests that basic Russian practices of war, too, may be more brutal than those adopted by Western armies.

“I always thought it very difficult (and questionable) to measure the level of atrocities committed by men and women fighting through the ages and the horizons,” said Gastone Breccia, an Italian military historian who teaches at the University of Pavia.

“War crimes have been and still are committed by every army everywhere.”

But he continued, “Maybe the ‘Russian way of war’ is particularly harsh due to a series of factors, chiefly related with the environment – extreme climate, not only during the coldest months; vastness of the battlefield; hardships related to long-distance delivery of supplies.”

A Ukrainian serviceman walks as seeds burn in grain silos after being shelled repeatedly in Donetsk region, May 31, 2022. Image: Twitter / Inquirer / Agencies

Moreover, customary operational doctrine dictates the meatgrinder tactics Wagner is deploying.

Russian officers display “a willingness to use manpower disregarding the level of losses, especially in the initial stages of attack,” Breccia said. “And to use firepower with no second thoughts about any kind of collateral damage – saturation fire instead of precision fire.”

But even if Wagner’s methods are representative of old-school Soviet-Russian warfare, Nash expresses disgust at convict troops’ presence on a battlefield.

“I, and most of my peers, would have viewed their presence as an affront and an insult to professional soldiers,” he said, noting that regular German officers treated Dirlewanger’s unit with contempt.

“There has always been a code of honor amongst military professionals, and it is clear to see that the Wagner Group’s military arm is neither honorable nor professional.”   

Source

According to a recent study of doctors, the more hours per week someone works in a demanding job, the greater their chance of developing depression is.

Working 90 or more hours a week was associated with changes in depression symptom scores three times larger than the change in depression symptoms among those working 40 to 45 hours a week.

Furthermore, compared to those working fewer hours, a greater proportion of those working many hours had scored high enough to be diagnosed with moderate to severe depression, which is serious enough to need therapy.

The University of Michigan-based study team employed advanced statistical methods to simulate a randomized clinical trial while accounting for several other factors of the doctors’ personal and professional life.

They discovered a “dose response” effect between hours worked and depressive symptoms, with an average symptom increase of 1.8 points on a standard scale for those who worked 40 to 45 hours, reaching up to 5.2 points for those who worked more than 90 hours. They come to the conclusion that, out of all the stresses that impact doctors, working a lot of hours is a major contributor to depression.

Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, the team from Michigan Medicine, U-M’s academic medical center, report their findings from studying 11 years’ worth of data on more than 17,000 first-year medical residents. The recently graduated doctors were in training at hundreds of hospitals across the United States.

The data come from the Intern Health Study, based at the Michigan Neuroscience Institute and the Eisenberg Family Depression Center. Each year, the study recruits new medical school graduates to take part in a year of tracking of their depressive symptoms, work hours, sleep, and more while they complete the first year of residency, also called the intern year.

The impact of high numbers of work hours

This study comes as major national organizations, such as the National Academy of Medicine and the Association of American Medical Colleges, grapple with how to address the high rates of depression among physicians, physicians-in-training, and other healthcare professionals. Though the interns in the study reported a wide range of previous-week work hours, the most common work hour levels were between 65 to 80 hours per week.

The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, which sets national standards for residency programs, currently sets an 80-hour limit on residents’ work weeks, but that can be averaged over four weeks and there are possible exceptions. ACGME also limits the length of a single shift and the number of days in a row that residents can work. Studies have shown mixed results about the impact these limits have had on resident wellness and patient safety risks.

The authors say their findings point to a clear need to further reduce the number of hours residents work each week on average.

“This analysis suggests strongly that reducing the average number of work hours would make a difference in the degree to which interns’ depressive symptoms increase over time, and reduce the number who develop diagnosable depression,” says Amy Bohnert, Ph.D., the study’s senior author and a professor at the U-M Medical School. “The key thing is to have people work fewer hours; you can more effectively deal with the stresses or frustrations of your job when you have more time to recover.”

Yu Fang, M.S.E., the study’s lead author and a research specialist at the Michigan Neuroscience Institute, notes that the number of hours is important, but so are the training opportunities that come from time spent in hospitals and clinics. “It is important to use the time spent at work for supervised learning opportunities, and not low-value clinical service tasks,” she says.

A population ripe for study

The new study uses a design called an emulated clinical trial, which simulates a randomized clinical trial in situations where conducting a real randomized trial is not feasible. Because nearly all interns nationwide start at about the same time of year and are subject to varying work schedules set by their programs, studying people going through this stage of medical training is ideal for emulating a clinical trial.

This opportunity is what led Intern Health Study founder Srijan Sen, M.D., Ph.D. to launch the research project in the first place: New physicians entering the most stressful year of their careers make a perfect group in which to study the role of many factors in the risk or onset of depression.

The authors suggest that studies parallel to this work on physicians should be conducted in other high-stress and high-work-hour jobs. “We would expect that the negative effect of long work hours on physician mental health would be present in other professions,” says Sen.

The average age of the doctors in the study was 27, and just over half were women. One in five were training in surgical disciplines, and 18% were from racial or ethnic groups traditionally underrepresented in the medical profession.

Less than 1 in 20 met the criteria for moderate to severe depression at the start of the intern year. In all, 46% had a stressful life event such as a family death or birth or getting married, during their intern year, and 37% said they had been involved in at least one medical error during the year.

In analyzing the results, the researchers adjusted for gender, neuroticism, pre-internship history of depression, early family environment, age, the year they began the internship, marital status, whether they had children, and stressful life events and medical errors during the intern year.

Make a difference for today’s residents

“National initiatives on clinician well-being have put increasing emphasis on the complex set of factors that affect clinician well-being, including the electronic health record, regulatory burden, resilience, workplace violence, and culture,” says Sen, the director of the EFDC and the Eisenberg Professor of Depression and Neurosciences. “I think this emphasis has inadvertently led to the feeling that the problem is infinitely complicated and making real progress is hopeless. This paper demonstrates how big of an impact the single factor of work hours has on clinician depression and well-being.”

Sen is part of the National Academy of Medicine’s Working Group on Navigating the Impacts of COVID-19 on Clinician Well-Being, part of a larger effort that recently issued a National Plan for Health Workforce Well-Being.

Bohnert notes that residency directors running training programs for new doctors could reduce work hours by prioritizing efforts that increase efficiency and decreases unnecessary work.

Fang also notes that the data from U.S. residents may apply to junior doctors, as they’re called, in other nations. The Intern Health Study now enrolls interns in China and Kenya as well.

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The next day his brother called to tell him that 3,000 miles away, in Wilmington, Del., their father had died. He had bled into his throat, choking on his own blood at the same time as Beitman’s mysterious episode.

Overcome with awe and emotion, Beitman became fascinated with what he calls meaningful coincidences. After becoming a professor of psychology at the University of Missouri-Columbia, he published several papers and two books on the subject and started a nonprofit, The Coincidence Project, to encourage people to share their coincidence stories.

“What I look for as a scientist and a spiritual seeker are the patterns that lead to meaningful coincidences,” said Beitman, 80, from his home in Charlottesville, Va. “So many people are reporting this kind of experience. Understanding how it happens is part of the fun.”

Researchers who study coincidences are divided over their significance. Some, like Beitman, believe they suggest a deeper connection between our minds and the material world than modern science can explain. Others see coincidences as pure mathematical probabilities akin to the "infinite monkey theorem" that states that a monkey hitting keys on a typewriter randomly for an infinite amount of time will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare. Unlikely perhaps, but not inexplicable.

Still, most coincidence scholars agree that noticing coincidences and interrogating them help us gain a greater appreciation of the way the world works.

Beitman defines a coincidence as "two events coming together with apparently no causal explanation." They can be life-changing, like his experience with his father, or comforting, such as when a loved one's favorite song comes on the radio just when you are missing them most.

The element of surprise is essential, said Mark Johansen, a psychology professor at Cardiff University in Wales. “When you experience a coincidence, you are surprised because there was an event that conflicts with your causal model of how the world works,” he said. “There’s a mismatch.”

Although Beitman has long been fascinated by coincidences, it wasn’t until the end of his academic career that he was able to study them in earnest. (Before then, his research primarily focused on the relationship between chest pain and panic disorder.)

He started by developing the Weird Coincidence Survey in 2006 to assess what types of coincidences are most commonly observed, what personality types are most correlated with noticing them and how most people explain them. About 3,000 people have completed the survey so far.

Beitman is still collecting data, but he has drawn a few conclusions. The most commonly reported coincidences are associated with mass media: A person thinks of an idea and then hears or sees it on TV, the radio or the internet. Thinking of someone and then having that person call unexpectedly is next on the list, followed by being in the right place at the right time to advance one’s work, career and education.

People who describe themselves as spiritual or religious report noticing more meaningful coincidences than those who do not, and people are more likely to experience coincidences when they are in a heightened emotional state — perhaps under stress or grieving.

The most popular explanation among survey respondents for mysterious coincidences: God or fate. The second explanation: randomness. The third is that our minds are connected to one another. The fourth is that our minds are connected to the environment.

For Beitman, no single explanation suffices. "Some say God, some say Universe, some say random and I say 'Yes,'" he said. "People want things to be black and white, yes or no, but I say there is mystery."

He's particularly interested in what he’s dubbed simulpathity — feeling a loved one’s pain at a distance, as he believes he did with his father. Science can't currently explain how it might occur, but in his books he offers some nontraditional ideas, such as the existence of “the psychosphere,” a kind of mental atmosphere through which information and energy can travel between two people who are emotionally close though physically distant.

In his new book published in September, “Meaningful Coincidences: How and Why Synchronicity and Serendipity Happen,” he shares the story of a young man who intended to end his life by the shore of an isolated lake. While he sat crying in his car, another car pulled up and his brother got out.

When the young man asked for an explanation, the brother said he didn't know why he got in the car, where he was going, or what he would do when he got there. He just knew he needed to get in the car and drive.

“I don’t say I’m right, but I’m telling you this stuff happens,” Beitman said. “Scientists have difficulty believing it because they don’t know how it happens.”

David Hand, a British statistician and author of the 2014 book “The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day,” sits at the opposite end of the spectrum from Beitman. He says most coincidences are fairly easy to explain and specializes in demystifying even the strangest ones.

“When you look closely at a coincidence, you can often discover the chance of it happening is not as small as you think,” he said. “It’s perhaps not a one-in-a-billion chance, but in fact a one-in-a-hundred chance, and yeah, you would expect that would happen quite often.”

Take winning the lottery twice. If you have a 1-in-a-100-million chance of winning the lottery once, he said, then the chance of winning twice is 1 in 100 million squared — a seemingly impossible event. But, if you consider the number of people who play the lottery, and the number of times they buy tickets, then it becomes almost certain that someone, somewhere, will win twice — and in fact, several people have done just that.

Hand calls this the law of truly large numbers. “You take something that has a very small chance of happening and you give it lots and lots and lots of opportunities to happen,” he said. “Then the overall probability becomes big.”

Asked how he understood Beitman’s experience with choking at the same time as his father, Hand questioned whether another person, less sensitive to coincidences, would have noticed the coincidence at all. Such a person might simply have assumed he had a dry throat.

Would Beitman have been just as amazed if he’d choked at the same time as a sibling lay dying — or a friend, a professor, or a neighbor? Each additional person on the list makes the probability of one of those events happening more likely, Hand said.

But just because Hand has a mathematical perspective doesn't mean he finds coincidences boring. “It’s like looking at a rainbow," he said. "Just because I understand the physics behind it doesn’t make it any the less wonderful.”

Beitman quotes Hand's work extensively in his latest book, and said Hand's thinking has sharpened his own perspective. Still, he finds Hand's take limiting. "Whether they say it's probability or God, I just go crazy with people who think there's only one thing that causes coincidences," he said.

Johansen, the psychology professor at Cardiff, and his colleague Magda Osman, a professor of basic and applied decision-making at the University of Cambridge, are particularly interested in how we determine whether a coincidence is a chance event or not.

Paying attention to coincidences, Osman and Johansen say, is an essential part of how humans make sense of the world. We rely constantly on our understanding of cause and effect to survive.

"Coincidences are often associated with something mystical or supernatural, but if you look under the hood, noticing coincidences is what humans do all the time,” Osman said.

Even scientists are not exempt.

For example, the COVID-19 pandemic is largely believed to have begun when a virus jumped from an animal host to a human at a wet market in Wuhan, China. Is it also just a staggering coincidence that in Wuhan there is a lab facility that studies coronaviruses?

"This question has driven scientific decisions in examining alternative pathways to the origin of the virus," Osman said. "Whether or not the second explanation remains just a coincidence or a viable alternative, causal explanation is now a matter of considerable scientific, public and international debate and controversy."

Charles Zeltzer, a clinical psychologist and Jungian analyst in Santa Barbara County, offers another perspective. Zeltzer has spent 50 years studying the writings of Carl Jung, the 20th century Swiss psychologist who introduced the modern Western world to the idea of synchronicity. Jung defined synchronicity as “the coincidence in time of two or more causally unrelated events which have the same meaning.”

 (Jim Cooke / Los Angeles Times; photos Getty Images) © (Jim Cooke / Los Angeles Times; photos Getty Images)

One of Jung’s most iconic synchronistic stories concerned a patient who he felt had become so stuck in her own rationality that it interfered with her ability to understand her own and emotional life.

One day, the patient was recounting a dream in which she'd received a golden scarab. Just then, Jung heard a gentle tapping at the window. He opened the window and a scarab-like beetle flew into the room. Jung plucked the insect out of the air and presented it to his patient. “Here is your scarab,” he said.

The experience proved therapeutic because it demonstrated to Jung's patient that the world is not always rational, leading her to break her own identification with rationality and thus become more open to her emotional life, Zeltzer explained.

Like Jung, Zeltzer believes meaningful coincidences can encourage people to acknowledge the irrational and mysterious. “We have a fantasy that there is always an answer, and that we should know everything,” he said.

Studies suggest most people notice about one coincidence a week, and most of us have at least one favorite to share, including the author of this story.

I'd been on the fence about writing about coincidences when I arranged to meet a friend at a cafe about 20 minutes from my house. When I arrived, I was surprised to see the foreign editor of The Times. (Coincidence one.) I hadn't seen him since the beginning of the pandemic, and he invited me to join him until my friend arrived.

I mentioned that the friend I was meeting works as a foreign correspondent for another newspaper. It turned out he was possibly looking to hire someone in the same city where my friend is living. (Coincidence two.) When my friend arrived, she said she was looking for a new job. (Coincidence three.)

At this point, I pulled Beitman's new book out of my bag. (Coincidence four.) I'd grabbed it just before leaving home in case my friend was late and I needed something to read.

Later, as I drove home, I thought, "How can I not write about coincidences after this coincidental cascade?"

Beitman was delighted by my story. He said it represented a meta-coincidence — a coincidence about coincidences. Hand wondered how often I'd been to that cafe (several times) and if the foreign editor is a regular (he is). Perhaps it was inevitable, he said, that we would see each other.

Osman assured me that writing a story based on what might be a random procession of events was not as illogical as it might seem. "Sometimes the options available to us are pretty well equated — should I write this story or look for another one? — and so you look for something to tip the balance," she said.

Honestly, I'm not sure what to believe, but I'm not sure it matters.

Like Beitman, my attitude is "Yes."

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

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For researchers seeking to understand the effects of climate change on the weather of the North American Southwest, the answer lies in traveling millions of years back in time on wings of wax—leaf wax.

Plants make waxes on their leaves composed of carbon and the hydrogen drawn from rainwater. When the plant dies, those waxes turn into dust that floats on the wind, then drifts down to form layers preserved in marine and terrestrial sediments. Trapped within those sediments is a timeline tracing pictures from prehistoric times: which vegetation flourished, or the intensity of the rainfall. 

“Plants lock in the environments that existed when they were growing,” says Tripti Bhattacharya, a professor in Syracuse University’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences who led a recent study examining the Southwestern monsoon season in the Pliocene, 3 million years ago. 

The story of what happened then is the story of what will happen to a warming world. Summer rainfall in the Pliocene created wetter conditions and a landscape of lakes—not the deserts of today. And now, she notes, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are once again what they were in the Pliocene: “It’s a snapshot of the world we’re likely to go toward if we don’t curb emissions.”  

The leaf waxes reveal that the Pliocene had intense monsoons during the summer, shifting the narrative of previous research that attributed wetter conditions only to winter rainfall. “Our paper presents the first direct evidence that monsoon changes caused wet conditions in the middle Pliocene,” Bhattacharya says.

The Southwest currently has a monsoon season that typically runs from June to September and stretches from Western Mexico into Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, and some parts of California, Colorado, and Utah. These rains can be severe: Earlier this summer, a so-called 1,000-year-storm flooded the driest place in North America, Death Valley, stranding hundreds of visitors and causing extensive damage. In Las Vegas, two people drowned and a casino flooded during what was called the worst monsoon in a decade. In Arizona, monsoons flashed through the state during July and August.  

Monsoons today will likely follow the Pliocene pattern and intensify, but also expand their range in Southern California. (Bhattacharya says additional data from other sedimentary deposits would help map the expansion in more detail.) Their extremes, she adds, will likely match what was normal during the Pliocene. That’s bad news for a region not built to withstand the storms. 

“Those floods made headlines because they were so unprecedented. You have to think about how intense extreme rainfall puts unique stress on infrastructure,” Bhattacharya adds. “It’s worth thinking about how we plan infrastructure for more extreme intense rainfall in places that don’t get a lot of rainfall today, like the desert Southwest.”

The advantage of using proxies like leaf wax to understand climate is that while predictive computer models are helpful, they can disagree. There’s no denying history, says Jessica Tierney, a University of Arizona researcher who was a part of the study. “The only real evidence we have of how our planet behaves in a warmer climate is from the geological past,” she adds. “It tells us exactly what happened.”

Leaf waxes also predate climate records from Antarctic ice cores, which go back only about a million years and require a climate that can support ice. One study used leaf waxes to glimpse the climate of a warmer Spain some 15 to 17 million years ago. Another looked at the moisture history of Southwest Africa for the past 3.5 million years. 

Bhattacharya began using them while working as a postdoctoral fellow in Tierney’s lab. Five years ago, she and Ran Feng, a coauthor, came up with the idea of studying the Pliocene while riding a bus during a conference for young researchers. 

Their analysis started with marine sediments collected decades ago by the research vessel Joides Resolution, which roams the oceans drilling cores from as deep as 6 miles below the surface. The samples used for the study were taken off the coast of California: one off the Baja peninsula from a depth of more than 2,600 meters, and one from the East Cortes Basin at a depth of 1,700 meters. During the Pliocene, leaf waxes would have been transported west on the wind to become part of this marine sediment. 

The team got a cube of each core, freeze-dried them, and ran them through “a glorified espresso machine,” says Bhattacharya, using a solvent under pressure at high temperatures that extracted the waxes. Then they measured the hydrogen and carbon isotope composition using a gas chromatograph-isotope ratio mass spectrometer, which separated the waxes by their molecular mass. 

“The hydrogen that’s used to make the wax is coming from rainwater that the plant uses to grow. You can think of isotopes as like a fingerprint,” Tierney says. “These isotopes actually trace the kind of rainfall you have, which is pretty cool. They can also trace the amount of winter rainfall versus summer rainfall. So, it’s pretty powerful.”

For the second part of the study, climate modeler Ran Feng, a professor at the University of Connecticut’s Department of Geosciences, ran simulations to determine how sea temperatures influenced the stronger monsoons of the mid-Pliocene. Feng found that when marine temperatures—in an area that extends from Alaska to off the coast of Baja, California—were higher relative to the usually warmer tropical waters off Central America, they created conditions for stronger monsoons in the Southwest. Warmer local air acts like a heat pump, drawing the relatively cooler tropical air and warming it, pulling in moisture. “So it creates this loop,” she says. “That’s why this is able to drive moisture into the Southwest North America regions.”

That kind of marine heat wave has occurred off California in recent years and will become more prevalent as temperatures rise, feeding more intense monsoon storms. 

Monsoons will help with drought as the Southwest dries. But they will be stronger, dropping inches of rain in a short time and causing more frequent flooding. “The monsoon accounts here in Arizona for about 60 percent of our rainfall for the year,” Tierney says. “It’s an important source of water in the desert. It does, in certain hydrological systems, recharge the groundwater. But the flip side of that is that these monsoon storms can be so intense and so quick that a lot of the water can end up running off into the watersheds and off the landscape. So, it’s not always the case that it recharges groundwater.”

Those storms also threaten the built environment, and as the climate has changed, design standards for infrastructure like roads, bridges, dams, and stormwater systems have not kept pace. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association’s Atlas 14 reports for the US Southwest rely only on historical rainfall amounts, not a changing future, for its projections. The agency’s Southwest study was released in 2004 and last revised in 2011.

There is another troubling connection between more intense monsoons and disasters: wildfire. Stronger rainfall, Bhattacharya says, increases the growth of fuel loads by encouraging plant growth. Subsequent droughts set the stage for bigger fires. 

“We think a stronger monsoon season creates unanticipated hazards from fire and flooding,” she adds, noting that more research will bring the picture into focus. “We’re planning to go further and study this in the Pliocene to see how fire and flooding respond to a warmer climate.”

Pliocene-Like Monsoons Are Returning to the American Southwest

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The United States has unleashed its arsenal to go “full throttle” in the chip war against China regardless of the potential consequences, including the impact on its allies.

On October 7, 2022, the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) of the US Department of Commerce laid out high-level export controls on supercomputers and semiconductors to China.

The market was shaken in September 2022 by restrictions on the sale of graphic processing units by NVIDIA and Advanced Micro Devices to China. Companies had already begun to pull their staff out of China in response to new controls prohibiting US citizens from supporting the development and production of chips in Chinese firms.

The new license requirements for items destined for a chip fabrication facility in China are blocked subject to a number of thresholds. The new measures are meant to halt Chinese chip companies at their current levels of progression.

Ten days after the BIS announced the reinforced export controls, the US International Trade Commission announced a Section 337 investigation into semiconductors in response to two cases filed by the non-practicing entity Daedalus Prime LLC, which holds intellectual property of US chipmaker Intel against Qualcomm, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and Samsung.

TSMC and South Korea’s Samsung and SK hynix have received one-year waivers from the BIS regulations, but the doors may soon close on upgrading their businesses in China. SK hynix is reluctantly contemplating selling or relocating its equipment in China to South Korea.

South Korea’s Samsung is caught in the middle of the US-China tech war. Image: AFP

The BIS move comes at a time when the US Department of Commerce, in concert with the US Trade Representative, is soliciting Asian counterparts to join the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework.

Yet US President Joe Biden’s “Made in America” initiative is concurrently aiming to increase the domestic production of semiconductors via the CHIPS and Science Act and the CHIPS for America Fund, and to re-shore other high-tech industries involving clean energy via the Inflation Reduction Act. This is all in the pursuit of US supremacy in emerging industries.

The BIS export controls have been met with disillusionment from allies, particularly as the measures are being imposed on them without clear incentives, while the US Department of Commerce is still approving most US tech exports to China.

Seoul has frowned upon US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo’s diversion of a Taiwanese silicon wafer firm GlobalWafers’ investment bound for South Korea to Texas. For the United States, the restrictions are not a question of feasibility but are imperative to limiting the transfer of dual-use technology.

But for allies, the reality of “friend-shoring” — manufacturing and sourcing components and raw materials within a group of countries that have shared values — raises questions as to whether they can defend their key industries.

US export controls on dual-use technology are not at all new. In 1949, the United States launched the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls against the Eastern Bloc in the aftermath of World War II.

This committee was dissolved upon the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, but the United States launched the Wassenaar System in 1996 to succeed it. During the US-Japan trade war in the 1980s, the United States did not hesitate to impose measures against its ally.

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, originally established in 1975 to study foreign investment, was empowered to reject deals from 1988 by the Exon-Florio Amendment. This revision occurred amid fears of Japanese investment after Japan’s Fujitsu tried to acquire Fairchild Semiconductor.

The United States fortified its unilateral export controls in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001. These export controls were reinforced during the US-China trade war from 2018 under former president Donald Trump. Biden’s tech war now presents an upgraded form of these export controls as uncertainty looms over the US economy.

As Chinese President Xi Jinping enters his third term, the stakes for TSMC have been raised by the likelihood of escalation in the Taiwan Strait.

The United States has been maneuvering to compel its East Asian allies — Taiwan, South Korea and Japan — to join the “Chip 4 Alliance”, for which the preliminary meeting was held on September 29, 2022.

While the partnership aims to build a more robust semiconductor supply chain, the United States has not specified what the terms would be. Taiwan and Japan have expressed a clear interest in joining the group, while South Korea continues to contemplate its membership despite attending the meeting.

While East Asian economies in the chip supply chain have each announced plans to uplift their domestic chip industries with subsidies, China is also raising the caliber of its chip production to defy US pressure.

Chinese President Xi Jinping at a chip production facility. His government is doubling down on domestic semiconductor production in response to US measures. Image: Twitter

Governments and industry players alike should brace for further fluctuations in the chip industry based on geopolitical risk, as export controls are now the baseline scenario for international trade. The new export curbs are the prelude to heightened tech protectionism that may bring about further chip supply disruptions.

The BIS measures could have unintended consequences — including record losses for chip firms in the United States, South Korea and Taiwan, and the stalling of the development of advanced chips by Chinese firms.

But what is certain is that China under President Xi will push toward indigenous chip development and that the US measures alone do not guarantee the demise of the Chinese semiconductor industry.

The mismatch of government and business interests raises concerns that backdoor channels of rerouting may be activated by certain semiconductor companies for survival, as China is the key market for chips. Without clear incentives for allies, the US goal of friend-shoring cannot be achieved.

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REBECCA WAS GETTING ready to start her work day at Apple this June when she heard that the US Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade. The decision would trigger laws banning or restricting abortion in 13 states, including Texas, where she lived. Gutted by the news, the Austin-based corporate employee debated skipping work, but pressed ahead.

As the day unfolded, Rebecca waited for Apple’s leaders to acknowledge the impact of the court’s decision on its workforce, particularly those like her living in states that were poised to outlaw abortion. Restrictions on abortion not only limit women’s reproductive choices but also can endanger the lives of anyone who needs emergency medical treatment while pregnant. She hoped the company would also publicly condemn the Supreme Court’s decision. All she got was a mass email reminding employees that their health plan covered out-of-state travel for medical care.

For weeks afterward, Rebecca heard nothing further from Apple management—until employees started calling for answers. But when managers in Texas held “listening sessions” about abortion concerns, they were at times worryingly evasive, she and other attendees told WIRED, and said company policy forbids workers—even those fearful of anti-abortion laws—from switching to remote work or transferring to an office in another state. (Rebecca asked that her real name be withheld because she fears losing her job.)

Apple is one of several large Silicon Valley companies that have expanded in or migrated to Texas over the past few years, putting down roots on very different political terrain than that in California. Now the company and its generally progressive-leaning workforce are reckoning with the spread of tighter restrictions and outright bans on abortion.

In 2021, Texas legislators passed a law known as SB8 that effectively outlawed abortions after six weeks by encouraging residents to sue anyone who helped a person access the procedure. At the time, most Apple employees were working remotely. But by the time Roe fell, further restricting abortion access in Texas, Apple was in the middle of a contentious return-to-office campaign.

Meanwhile, construction of a $1 billion campus in northwest Austin, which the company has said may eventually host 15,000 workers, continued apace. Now employees were hearing that anyone based out of the company’s Texas offices who did not want to live under the state’s laws had to choose between their reproductive rights and their job. Those unable or unwilling to leave faced a potential minefield of health care decisions.

Many people in the US faced similar or worse hurdles after Roe was overturned: The lowest-income workers experience the highest rates of unintended pregnancies, and many lack health insurance. Lots of companies in tech and other sectors have said little about the court's decision. But for some Apple employees attracted by the company’s previous outspoken support for progressive social issues such as gay and transgender rights, its silence on the issue stung.

“A lot of people join Apple because Apple tries to task itself with doing better,” Rebecca says. “The reaction, or lack of reaction, was a huge slap in the face.” Some Texas employees felt scared and adrift, unsure whether they could transfer out of the state or how reliably the travel policy would protect them. Some hesitated to even ask managers about abortion access, fearing retaliation from bosses who might support restricting access to such care.

In one Apple division, some senior managers in Texas agreed to host listening sessions for employees to air concerns. They varied in size from one-on-one meetings up to group sessions with dozens of employees, according to Rebecca and two other attendees who asked to remain anonymous and allowed WIRED to review their notes. “I think there were enough rumblings within the organization that they had to react at some point,” one employee says. “Obviously it would have been better if it was proactive.”

Apple spokesperson Rachel Wolf Tulley did not respond to questions for this story and referred to an earlier statement saying that the company supports employees’ rights to make their own decisions about their reproductive health.

Managers were clear on one point: Employees could not work remotely or switch their job to another Apple office simply because they disliked a particular state’s anti-abortion laws. Attendees say this was presented as a companywide policy: Any employees who wished to relocate to another Apple campus would have to apply for a new job within the company, although managers did offer to help employees find new roles. Now that Apple was pushing workers to return to the office, one manager said, individual teams had less power to grant remote work exemptions than before the pandemic.

Employees also used listening sessions to question how exactly the medical travel policy would protect their privacy and help them access abortion care when they needed it. Managers said leaves were handled by a third party company and that an individual’s managers would know only that they were out sick or on medical leave.

But while that assuaged some privacy concerns, Rebecca says it remains unclear how much the travel policy would help in a true medical crisis. “We’re hours from anything,” she says. “The logistics of getting out of Texas if you have a maternal emergency are really hard.” She also wondered if any health care plan employees who did not support access to abortion could get them in trouble.

In listening sessions, managers sometimes frustrated employees by playing down their concerns. Another employee asked if Apple was prepared to respond if the situation for women in Texas got even worse. Some Republican lawmakers, seemingly emboldened by Roe’s defeat, were already opposing birth control and advancing plans to punish people who traveled outside the state for an abortion.

But a manager deflected the suggestion that Texas would go any further, attendees said, saying that the state wouldn’t be so “dumb” as to enact extreme policies that drove companies like Apple to leave the state. One attendee found the idea that Apple would pull out of Texas incredulous, given its lack of action thus far. “As if a literal bounty isn’t extreme enough,” they say.

During one session, a manager championed the virtues of Austin, a blue oasis that votes Democrat in the center of a red Republican desert. “That might be great if you're going out to dinner and not wanting to see Fox News on the TV,” says one attendee. “But when you're talking about health care, safety, and life and death issues, that's just really not applicable.”

The passive approach employees say they encountered fit with Apple’s previous stance on abortion. At an all-hands meeting in September 2021, a month after SB8 went into effect, employees asked CEO Tim Cook what the company was doing to protect its workers. According to The New York Times, Cook said that the company was “looking into whether it could aid the legal fight” and pointed to the out-of-state medical travel coverage.

When WIRED asked Apple’s communication department last December whether the company was contributing to any legal opposition to SB8, it did not respond. While company leaders have told employees they are “monitoring,” “listening,” and “looking into” ways to do more, the company appears to have taken little concrete action, leaving some workers scared or angry, or both.

Apple is not the only tech company that has disappointed employees concerned about abortion restrictions. “Many women feel unsupported and isolated in this male-dominated field,” says Shea Cuthbertson, president-elect of Austin Women in Technology, a networking and fundraising organization. She says that anti-abortion laws can contribute to the industry’s long-standing lack of diversity, by adding to the burdens of working in tech. “Strict legislation impacting a large portion of our population will negatively affect companies that are actively trying to hire a more diverse population.”

Some tech workers are already voting with their feet. “We are seeing candidates ask more and more questions about company values and employee support policies,” such as health care, family leave, and remote work options, Cuthbertson says. “If someone feels like a company would not support them, they will choose to work elsewhere.”

Without the right support for reproductive rights, even a coveted position at a prestigious company can be unattractive. One attendee, disappointed by what they heard in one of Apple's listening sessions and unwilling to live in Texas, started looking for a new job.

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For almost 50 years, researchers have been perplexed by the origin of Namibia’s fairy circles. It came down to two primary hypotheses: either termites were responsible or plants somehow managed to organize themselves. Now, researchers from the University of Göttingen have shown that the grasses inside the fairy circles perished shortly after rainfall in the Namib Desert, but termite activity did not cause the bare patches.

Instead, continuous observations of soil moisture show that the grasses surrounding the rings strongly depleted the water inside them, which most likely contributed to the mortality of the grasses inside the circle. The findings were recently published in the journal Perspectives in Plant Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics.

Millions of fairy circles may be found in the Namib, between 80 and 140 kilometers from the coast. These circular holes in the grassland are each a few meters wide, and collectively they create a recognizable pattern that can be seen for miles around. The researchers studied sporadic rain events in numerous desert regions and analyzed grasses, their roots and shoots, and potential termite root damage.

Termites, tiny insects that live in large colonies around the world, have often been blamed for the death of the grasses. The researchers took great care to investigate the circumstances of dying grasses within fairy circles right from straight after the rainfall, which triggered the new growth of the grasses. Additionally, they installed soil-moisture sensors in and around the fairy circles to record the soil-water content at 30-minute intervals starting in the dry season of 2020 to the end of the rainy season of 2022.

This enabled the researchers to record precisely how the growth of the new emerging grasses around the circles affected the soil water within and around the circles. They investigated the differences in water infiltration between the inside and outside of circles in ten regions across the Namib.

Researchers investigated grass death within the fairy circles in several regions of the Namib. The roots of the yellowish dead grasses from within the fairy circles are as long and as undamaged as the roots of the vital green grasses outside of the circles. There was no sign of termite activity. Credit: Dr. Stephan Getzin

 

The data show that about ten days after rainfall, the grasses were already starting to die within the circles while most of the interior area of the circles did not have grass germination at all. Twenty days after rainfall, the struggling grasses within the circles were completely dead and yellowish in color while the surrounding grasses were vital and green.

When the researchers examined the roots of the grasses from within the circles and compared them to the green grasses on the outside, they found that the roots within the circles were as long as, or even longer than, those outside. This indicated that the grasses were putting effort into the growth of roots in search of water. However, the researchers found no evidence of termites feeding on roots. It was not until fifty to sixty days after the rainfall that root damage became more visible on the dead grasses.

Dr. Stephan Getzin, Department of Ecosystem Modelling at the University of Göttingen, explains: “The sudden absence of grass for most areas within the circles cannot be explained by the activity of termites because there was no biomass for these insects to feed on. But more importantly, we can show that the termites are not responsible because the grasses die immediately after rainfall without any sign of creatures feeding on the root.”

Co-author, Sönke Holch, downloading data from a data logger in the Namib in February 2021 when the grasses reached their peak biomass. Credit: Dr. Stephan Getzin

 

When the researchers analyzed the data on soil-moisture fluctuations, they found that the decline in soil water inside and outside of the circles was very slow after initial rainfall, when grasses were not yet established. However, when the surrounding grasses were well established, the decline in soil water after rainfall was very fast in all areas, even though there were almost no grasses within the circles to take the water.

Getzin explains: “Under the strong heat in the Namib, the grasses are permanently transpiring and losing water. Hence, they create soil-moisture vacuums around their roots and water is drawn toward them. Our results strongly agree with those of researchers who have shown that water in soil diffuses quickly and horizontally in these sands even over distances greater than seven meters.”

Getzin adds: “By forming strongly patterned landscapes of evenly spaced fairy circles, the grasses act as ecosystem engineers and benefit directly from the water resource provided by the vegetation gaps. In fact, we know related self-organized vegetation structures from various other harsh drylands in the world, and in all those cases the plants have no other chance to survive except by growing exactly in such geometrical formations.”

This research has implications for understanding similar ecosystems, especially with regard to climate change, because the self-organization of plants buffers against negative effects induced by increasing aridification.

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Four monks including the abbot were forced to leave the monkhood after urine tests showed evidence of illegal drugs, the Bangkok Post reported.

The small religious site in Phetchabun province was raided by police and health officials on Monday.

The departure of the monks has caused consternation in the local community, which relies on them for religious functions.

There has also been concern about what will happen to several dogs and cats that also live in the temple.

District officials have reached out to the monastic chief of Bung Sam Phan district, who promised to assign some monks to the temple.

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Students who assumed their teacher 'on the older side' wouldn't be familiar with the latest cheating methods were caught red handed when he devised a brilliant method to catch them out.

A pupil in the engineering class explained that when they all sat down to take their final exam, about half the class left the room to use the bathroom during the test - far more than the usual.

The student said they assumed the vast majority were looking up answers on their phone, which 'irritated' them but they stayed focused and made their way through the paper.

After leaving the exam hall, the pupil remembered there was one particular question that wasn't related to what they had all been taught in class, which had two parts.

Part A was 'fairly easy' but they had no idea how to do part B, so they simply left it blank as it only accounted for 5 marks out of 100.

When all the exams had been marked, their teacher sent all the university students an email to explain his diabolical plan to catch out those who had given themselves some outside help.

Many of the pupils used the internet to find answers to exam and homework questions.

Their teacher decided to use it against them after becoming fed up with students using the bathroom as an excuse to look up answers on their phones.

The student wrote on Reddit: "He purposely made part B impossible to solve, and about a month before the final he got a teaching assistant to ask the exact question [online], which was distinctly worded to be unique.

"He then created his own account and answered the question with a bulls*** solution that seems right at first glance but is actually fundamentally flawed and very unlikely that someone would make the same assumptions and mistakes independently."

From the 99 exams handed in, 14 of them fell for the trick and gave the exact answer their own teacher had posted online.

All were given an overall score of zero and reported to the university for violating the academic honor pledge they had signed.

Their names were also circulated to all the other teachers in the department as known cheaters - and all the other students who hadn't cheated were given full marks for the bogus question.

Others were impressed with cunning plan, with one replying: "This is Amazing! I've seen some stories like this and it always makes me glad I don't use [the internet] for tests.

"Honestly if you're cheating on a proctored test you deserve to get caught. Study like everyone else."

A second wrote: "Honey pot the cheating site. Genius!"

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U.S. health officials are tracking a new COVID variant that's a combination of two earlier omicron subvariants.

Known as XBB, this latest subvariant now represents 3.1% of new COVID cases throughout the U.S. and 5% of cases in the Northeast.

Based on preliminary estimates from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, cases of XBB may be doubling every 12 days. However, the variant shouldn't pose the same threat that the emergence of omicron posed a year ago, CBS News reported.

"Where we've seen surges, they've seen mostly it be driven by seasonality, people coming inside, spending more time around one another, but not being specifically being driven by the emergence of a new variant," the CDC's Ian Williams told the agency's emergency response and preparedness advisers earlier this month, CBS News reported

XBB appears to have emerged from the BA.2.10.1 and BA.2.75 omicron subvariants. Along with other omicron sublineages, it appears to be replacing BA.4 and BA.5, subvariants that spread spread widely this past summer. Now, BA.5 is responsible for fewer than 20% of new infections and BA.4 has become almost nonexistent, CDC data shows.

Still, the panic button does not need to be pushed, experts said.

"There has been a rapid rise in XBB, but it doesn't look like it's particularly more severe than other variants," said Derek Smith, director of the Center for Pathogen Evolution at the University of Cambridge, told CBS News late last month.

"XBB, it got our attention and then was prioritized, even though it was small numbers, because it had quite a number of substitutions different from the currently circulating viruses in the [receptor-binding domain], which meant that it might be an escape variant," explained Smith, who helps lead a National Institute of Health's effort to analyze emerging variants.

Luckily, the new COVID boosters may offer some protection against the strain. An early study by vaccine maker Pfizer found the updated booster shots trigger better antibody responses against XBB, but the vaccine does not neutralize this variant as well as prior variants, CBS News reported. That study has not been peer-reviewed yet.

"It doesn't fall off the map, but it goes down. So, you could expect some protection, but not the optimal protection," Dr. Anthony Fauci, the president's chief medical adviser, said Wednesday during a White House briefing, CBS News reported.

COVID hospitalizations are flat or slowing in most regions, and about 75% of Americans live in areas where community levels of infection are "low" by public health standards, CBS News reported.

"However, there's a lot of worry that a new variant could emerge and start us all over again. So, there's a lot of work focusing on making sure we're prepared and thinking about that and watching if it emerges around the world, so we can become prepared," Williams said.

© HealthDay

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Marx starts out by looking at the missteps made at Tesla, where he charges that Musk has vastly overhyped the safety of his cars' "autopilot" feature.

"Tesla’s customers are also being put in harm’s way. Its vehicles have slammed into highway medians, emergency vehicles, transport trucks, and more, while using its supposedly self-driving Autopilot feature," he writes. "Musk continually misleads the public about how safe and capable the system really is, even as the U.S. traffic safety regulator is poised to recall hundreds of thousands of vehicles."

And, writes Marx, Tesla has been incredibly successful compared to other ventures such as the Boring Company that was supposed to be providing an alternative to publicly funded transportation in municipalities across the United States.

The Boring Company was supposed to solve traffic, not be the Las Vegas amusement ride it is now," he argues. "As I’ve written in my book, Musk admitted to his biographer Ashlee Vance that Hyperloop was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California—even though he had no plans to build it."

Commenting on his Time essay on Twitter, Marx writes that Musk has "always been selling us a lie, and nothing shows that better than his fake transport projects."

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It took nearly 500 years for researchers to crack Charles V’s secret code

SpaceX fires up 11 engines as it prepares massive rocket for orbital test

Orion flies far beyond the Moon, returns an instantly iconic photo

Behavior-changing parasite moves wolves to the head of the pack

About 30 miles north of the equator, in central Kenya, Kaia Tombak and her colleagues stood beside a plexiglass box. Tombak, who studies the evolution of animals’ social behavior, was dressed for the power of the Savannah sun in a light, long-sleeved shirt and pants. A gang of flies buzzed nearby, and Tombak wondered whether she’d be better off wearing stripes.

That was why her team was here: to study the fly-repelling power of stripes. Inside the box hung two foot-wide pelts from carcasses found nearby. One was from a tan impala. The other was from a zebra. In between the two was a petri dish trapping 20 or so flies. A teammate tugged on a fishing line, yanking the dish open. The flies scattered and found new landing spots within seconds. To nobody’s surprise, they avoided the zebra pelt. “It really does work,” says Tombak.

Biting flies slurp their meals from the blood of Savannah animals. At best, the flies are annoying. At worst, they transmit disease. Scientists have known since the 1980s that zebra stripes repel flies, and many believe that zebras evolved their distinctive stripes because of this advantage. But researchers still don’t actually know why the stripes work. Most theories suggest some visual illusion. Perhaps, up close, the stripes affect how biting flies perceive a zebra’s motion. Or from afar, stripes may scramble the outline of the animal’s body. For Tombak’s team, this raised an irresistible question about how a parasite, rather than food or mating strategies, could drive evolution.

Writing in Scientific Reports this month, they describe how their experiment in Kenya led to two discoveries that buck some previous theories. Tombak’s team agrees there is an illusion—but since they restricted the flies to a 4-foot-wide box, they argue that the mechanism happens up close, not from afar. They also found that narrow zebra stripes don’t repel flies any better than wider ones. “That was a surprise because previous studies had indicated that there might be a difference,” says Tombak, who is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Hunter College.

In fact, the fact that zebras have stripes at all is still sort of a surprise. In African landscapes that are green, brown, blue, and yellow, painting your butt with sharp streaks of black and white seems like a death wish. Ecologists have long scratched their heads about what evolutionary advantage could support such a conspicuous change. “It could be to confuse predators. It could be some kind of social adaptation to help zebras recognize each other. It could be thermoregulation,” says Tombak.

More than one answer could be right, but the “shooing flies” theory began its ascendance after the first mention of this zebra superpower in a 1981 study. Subsequent experiments have shown that stripes repulse flies outdoors, in labs, on rugs, on plastic models, on painted cows—“we’re at a point where the phenomenon is well established,” says Tombak. But “there have been comparatively fewer studies using actual real animal pelts.”

For the current study, Tombak, then a PhD candidate at Princeton, and her team wanted to test stripe width to see if narrower ones might be even more repulsive to flies—a potential evolutionary advantage that would explain the difference between zebra species. They also restricted their experiment to close-range encounters to rule out the theory that the repulsion required an illusion that could only happen at a distance. Hence the plexiglass box.

An undergraduate from the lab, Lily Reisinger, built the box and set up the experiment. For each trial, the team hung two pelts with clothespins, unleashed the flies, let them circle for a minute, and then counted how many landed on each pelt. First, they tested an impala pelt vs. one from a plains zebra, which has wide stripes. Then the impala vs. a Grevy’s zebra, which has narrower stripes. Finally, they pitted the skins from the two zebra species against each other. They tested 100 rounds for each pair.

The flies chose the impala skin about four times as often as they chose either zebra skin. And over the 100 rounds, the team found no obvious difference between stripes of different widths.

Why does it work? First, it’s helpful to know that flies don’t see the world as you do. Flies have “compound eyes” that combine input from thousands of photoreceptors, each pointing in slightly different directions from their eye’s rounded surface. Their sense of color is limited. And while they can sense motion and polarized light and process images 10 times faster than our eyes, those images are very low-res.

But like you, flies get fooled by the “barber pole” illusion—that famous diagonal red stripe that seems to spiral infinitely upwards. “Outside of a barber shop, there’s that rotating pole that looks like it’s going up, but it’s just rotating,” says Tombak. It creates a false perceived direction of motion, and false speed as well. A zebra’s stripes, she thinks, create a similarly disorienting sense of movement, which should make it harder for flies to gauge the timing and speed for a smooth landing. “You can imagine for a moving fly, just tons of objects are passing by at a very fast rate,” she says. And it makes sense that this illusion works close-up, as the fly is on approach to land.

Narrower stripes should create an even stronger barber pole illusion—“an enhanced perceived speed effect" as Tombak puts it—and thus stronger repulsion. But, she says, only a couple of previous studies examined stripe width, and they rarely involved real pelts; one tested painted stripes up to 5 inches wide, which is beyond what any real zebra has. Instead, she says, her team’s results show that “within the range of stripe widths that occurs naturally in zebras, width doesn’t make that much of a difference.”

That, of course, begs the question of why zebras have stripes of different widths—but Ted Stankowich, an evolutionary ecologist from California State University Long Beach who was not involved in the work, says all that really matters is that zebras have them. Additional variation could come from random genetic drift, or separate adaptations meant to confuse predators. “Once you’ve got stripes, you’ve got this anti-fly effect,” he says. “Selection from many other sources can impact that trait.”

Tombak’s evidence doesn’t rule out the possibility that the stripes might play interesting tricks from afar, according to Anna Hughes, a psychologist at the University of Essex who has studied how predators perceive zebra stripes. She says it’s common for camouflage to work both near and far, in different ways: “This idea of a two-stage protection is quite well-established.” For example, from afar, poison dart frogs blend into their environment. And up close, their bright colors tell predators not to mess with them. “It would be interesting if something similar is happening here,” she says.

From an evolutionary standpoint, an optical illusion is beneficial because the zebras don’t need to waste energy shooing flies by twitching their tails or stomping. “This work has given me a much greater appreciation for biting flies as an evolutionary force,” Tombak says. “As a field ecologist, you get reminded of every time you go into the field—it really sucks to be bitten, they really drive you crazy. But when you’re an animal and you’re outside all the time and you don’t have the protections in the shelter that we do, it really does affect you.”

While the biologists agree that the mystery of how stripes work isn’t quite solved, the answers are a little bit closer. And Stankowich, who calls this experiment “the most natural test I’ve seen so far,” points out that sometimes it takes standing in a field with some pelts, being surrounded by flies, to make progress. “We can make hypotheses about the adaptive adaptations all day long,” he says. “But until you actually test them in the field, like people are now doing with zebra stripes, it’s never going to be certain what the function actually is. It’s great to see people doing this stuff.”

Scientists Reexamine Why Zebra Stripes Mysteriously Repel Flies

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The day is typically the biggest of the long weekend — in part because sales continue but people have returned to work — and it rounds out five days that overall exceeded estimates. As we reported, Thanksgiving saw $5.29 billion in sales and Black Friday had $9.12 billion in sales — both also up on earlier forecasts. The weekend between had $9.55 billion in sales. Altogether, “Cyber Week” — the period including those holidays and the days back at work as people continue to shop online — will reach $35.27 billion in sales online, up 4% over last year and accounting for 16.7% of all sales in the months of November and December.

Image Credits: Adobe Analytics (opens in a new window)under a CC BY 2.0 (opens in a new window)license.

 

Adobe expects $210 billion in sales for the two months, and so far in the season mobile has accounted for 44% of sales.

Salesforce separately released its own preliminary figures of $6 billion for Cyber Monday in the evening Monday. We’ll update these as we get more complete results.

Notably, although inflation is definitely being felt in the U.S., Adobe said that these figures were based on more transactions overall. At the peak, people were spending $12.8 million per minute on Monday, and Adobe said that its digital price index, which tracks prices across 18 categories, said that prices have been nearly flat in recent months.

Deep discounts — retailers perhaps anticipating needing to have something more to lure shoppers — have played a big role, too, as have the sheer availability of goods after shortages of the years before.

“With oversupply and a softening consumer spending environment, retailers made the right call this season to drive demand through heavy discounting,” said Vivek Pandya, lead analyst, Adobe Digital Insights, in a statement. “It spurred online spending to levels that were higher than expected, and reinforced e-commerce as a major channel to drive volume and capture consumer interest.”

Discounts on electronics were as strong as 25% off (they were 8% in the same period last year), and the biggest sales were in toys with average discounts of 34%.

Adobe says it calculates its data based on one trillion visits to U.S. retail sites, covering 100 million SKUs, and 18 product categories.

A lot of the buying was being done in preparation for the holidays, and that’s reflected in most popular categories. Top products included games, gaming consoles, Legos, Hatchimals, Disney Encanto, Pokémon cards, Bluey, Dyson products, strollers, Apple Watches, drones, and digital cameras, it said. Toys as a category saw a 452% boost in sales versus a day in October.

In other trends, buy-now-pay-later transactions (BNPL) continued to be force in how purchases are being made, although they appeared to be down slightly on Monday compared to Black Friday and the weekend: part of the reason has to do with shopping-cart sizes, Adobe said: people are more likely to use BNPL when totals are higher. Overall Cyber Week BNPL orders were up 85% over last week, with revenues up 88%.

Mobile also continues to account for a big proportion of buying, although Cyber Monday’s 43% of all online sales when people are back at their desks, was definitely down from the 55% of purchases on Thanksgiving.

The big question now will be whether online retailers, and shoppers, sustain this activity or whether this was an outsized push around discounts that will settle down in the days and weeks to come. Layoffs that we’ve been seeing in the e-commerce sector, and depressed valuations for companies in the space, are two indicators of more challenging times to come.

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