Black Friday broke $9 billion in sales for the first time yesterday, with online sales of $9.12 billion, according to figures from Adobe Analytics. This is a record figure for the day, and up 2.3% on sales figures a year ago, and slightly higher than Adobe had estimated leading up to the day. Adobe doesn’t break out volumes in its report, so it’s hard to know if those figures are due to items simply costing more this year because of inflation, or if the higher numbers are a result of more buying.

Black Friday is a key focus for those gauging how the e-commerce market, and consumer confidence, are both faring in what is the most important and biggest period for shopping in the year. 

Salesforce publishes its own figures based on 1.5 billion shoppers, and it noted that online sales reached $8 billion in the U.S. and $40 billion globally at 5pm ET on Black Friday with the most discounted items in the U.S. appearing in home appliances, apparel, health and beauty, and… luxury handbags.

“Our data shows such a strong correlation between discount rates and online sales as consumers held on for the biggest and best deals,” said Rob Garf, VP & GM of retail at Salesforce. “Consumers with stretched wallets are seeking value and price. And retailers responded on Black Friday with the steepest discount rates of the holiday season.”

Adobe said that toys, gaming and consumer electronics were the most popular categories for people seeking out deals and discounts on Black Friday.

The day before, Thanksgiving, also had stronger than expected numbers: shoppers spent $5.29 billion online on Thursday. That is up 2.9% on a year ago, and ahead of the $5.1 billion Adobe initially said it was expecting for the day. Salesforce noted that online sales grew 1% on Thanksgiving day to $31 billion, while in the U.S. specifically they were up 9% to $7.5 billion. Salesforce also said that 78% of sales traffic came from mobile devices. Average order values, it said, were $105 globally and $120 for U.S. sales. 

The shape of “holiday shopping” has changed massively with the rise of e-commerce. Not only has shopping online extended the days and hours that people shop, but it’s extended and blurred the whole concept of seasonality in “holiday” shopping.

The day after Thanksgiving, Black Friday, used to mark the ‘first day’ of holiday shopping; that went out the window years ago with sales starting on the Thursday.

It has of course has also impacted how people shop. Mobile devices are playing an ever-bigger role in that. A record 48% of all e-commerce sales on Black Friday were made on smartphones (versus 44% in 2021). Note: Thanksgiving is still a stronger day for mobile sales, in part because people are not at their computers — they’re with friends and family, and not at their desks! — and they are not in stores. On Thursday, some 55% of online sales were on mobile devices yesterday, up 8.3% over a year ago.

“Mobile shopping had struggled to grow for many years, as consumers found the experience lacking compared to desktop,” said Vivek Pandya, lead analyst, Adobe Digital Insights, in a statement. “Thanksgiving this year has become an inflection point, where smartphones drove real growth and highlights how much these experiences have improved.”

And the use of buy-now-pay-later services is up, a sign of both the growing ubiquity of this as an alternative to credit, but also of the need for consumers to take this route. Black Friday saw BNPL orders shoot up 78%, and they are up 81% by sales figures, compared to the same day a week ago. Notably, this is a big spike compared also the the day prior. On Thanksgiving, buy-now-pay-later was up 1.3% in terms of sales and 0.7% in terms of orders (indicating more of it being used for bigger-ticket items). All fine and well, as long as this doesn’t translate into untenable debts longer term.

Adobe says that it analyzes some 1 trillion visits to U.S. retail sites, tracking sales for some 100 million SKUs and 18 product categories. Its analytics will include anonymized data from some of its customers: it says it is used by some 85% of the biggest online retailers in the U.S. It said that so far some $77.74 billion has been spent online since the first of November.

Salesforce and Adobe may have different figures and measurement parameters, but both are seeing growth, so the bigger question may actually be whether the bump in activity seen on Thanksgiving will be sustained through the rest of Cyber Week — which includes today’s Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the weekend in between — and indeed the rest of the days and weeks leading up to the New Year. Overall, Adobe has predicted that Cyber Week will generate $34.8 billion in online spend this year, up 2.8% on a year ago when the week brought in $33.9 billion in sales.

2021’s Cyber Week was actually down 1.4% compared to 2020, so this represents a turnaround.

As a point of comparison on those figures, the National Retail Federation is predicting holiday sales growth of 6% to 8%, while another analysis group, Digital Commerce 360, is predicting growth of 6.1% for the period.

Be that as it may, sales may not be totally sustained or even in the coming days. Adobe predicted that sales for today — the famous Black Friday — are expected to hit $9 billion, which is up only 1% on 2021 figures.

The holiday shopping season is an important period to track for a couple of reasons. First, it is traditionally a retailer’s most lucrative selling period, one that can make or break its whole year. (That is the reason why Amazon’s recent earnings, where it provided reduced sales guidance and warned of lower-than-expected holiday spending, sent its stock tumbling nearly 20%.)

Because of that outsized importance, collectively, e-commerce holiday figures can serve as a bellwether for the e-commerce market as a whole.

But if growth is what we’re after, there are some indicators of stormy waters ahead. Adobe found that the first three weeks of November saw flat online sales of $64.59 billion, up just 0.1% over 2021.

That’s against a backdrop of physical retailers getting increasingly aggressive in capturing back their audience. The National Retail Federation in the U.S. said it expects 166.3 million consumers to shop during the long weekend.

“While there is much speculation about inflation’s impact on consumer behavior, our data tells us that this Thanksgiving holiday weekend will see robust store traffic with a record number of shoppers taking advantage of value pricing,” NRF President and CEO Matthew Shay said in a statement. “We are optimistic that retail sales will remain strong in the weeks ahead, and retailers are ready to meet consumers however they want to shop with great products at prices they want to pay.”

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IPhone maker Foxconn imposed Friday a five-day anti-epidemic operation at its Zhengzhou-based factory in its latest bid to locate all Covid carriers and isolate them from the facility. 

The anti-virus operation was launched after video footage showed hundreds of Foxconn factory workers clash with police on Tuesday and Wednesday. The company has since offered to pay newly-hired workers to leave the company to avoid further unrest, CNN reported.

The clashes are the latest imagery to put markets on edge as earlier hopes for a quick exit from “zero-Covid” measures start to wane. Covid cases have continued to rise since the central government unveiled on November 11 a 20-point notice to ease anti-epidemic rules.

On Thursday, China reported 32,695 new Covid cases, more than the daily peak recorded in Shanghai between March and May this year. More than 90% of the identified infected were asymptomatic, government officials said. 

Although local governments have refrained from citywide lockdowns, residents are still adversely affected by frequent PCR tests and small area lockdowns.

The anti-Covid measures are starting to impact social stability, including in economic hubs like Guangzhou and Zhengzhou where people and law enforcement officers have recently clashed over restrictions. Last week, residents in Guangzhou were seen tearing down barriers that surrounded their homes.

In late October, thousands of workers at Foxconn’s iPhone factory in Zhengzhou were seen in social media posts climbing the facility’s fences to escape lockdown measures, with some reportedly walking 10 hours to return to their home areas.

Chinese social media has been full of footage of workers walking home from the Foxconn factory. Image: BBC / Screengrab

On October 30, the factory said it would double daily bonuses from 50 yuan (US$6.89) to 100 yuan for workers who could show up between October 26 and November 11. It also paid a premium to lure workers to return to the production lines.

But due to salary disputes, thousands of Foxconn workers rallied in the Zhengzhou Science Park on Tuesday and Wednesday. Citing an unnamed source, Reuters reported on Friday that Foxconn’s iPhone production in Zhengzhou could drop by 30% in November from normal levels due to the unrest.

Lou Yangsheng, party secretary of central Henan province, on Tuesday visited the Foxconn factory and urged the local government to restore order and ensure smooth operations at the facility. 

Lou emphasized that the Foxconn factory played an important role in maintaining Henan’s external trade.

Yang Guoxing, a Chinese expert on industrial agglomeration, said the Zhengzhou government should provide support to the Foxconn factory, which he said is one of the most important supply chains in the world.

Yang said that if the Foxconn factory could return to normal operations, the economy and job markets in Henan would be stabilized.

A Henan-based commentator said people should not defy the Covid rules as protests and riots would only make the situation worse. He said the government will further ease Covid rules when the coronavirus wanes. 

However, a Beijing-based commentator said it is time to consider the “living with the virus” strategy as the current Omicron variant isn’t as lethal as previous strains. 

He said people mistakenly calculated that the Covid-19 death rate in Hong Kong was 2.35% as 10,634 out of 452,483 Covid patients died. However, he said if natural deaths were deducted from the figure then the Covid death rate was only about 0.12%.

He estimated based on unclear modeling that if China eases its Covid rules then around 450 million people will be infected and 540,000 will likely perish. He said such a mortality figure seems high but actually is insignificant as 8.9 million people die in China every year.

On November 11, the central government announced that the standing committee of the CCP Central Committee’s politburo had decided to relax China’s Covid rules. It urged local governments not to expand without limits the scale of their lockdown measures or freely suspend classes, production and transport.

A State Council logistics task force told Xinhua on Friday that some local governments were still irregularly blocking domestic roads and interprovincial highways, although the 20-point notice urged against such measures.

It said local governments should ensure the smooth transportation of food and necessaries, and should not stop postal and express delivery services.

However, it has become increasingly challenging for local governments to cut off virus transmission chains without large-scale lockdowns, according to some medical experts.

Chongqing in Central China recorded 6,500 infections on Thursday, around 95% of which were asymptomatic.

The People’s Daily reported that the Chongqing municipal government will fully implement Beijing’s 20-point notice while achieving “zero clearance” at the community level within a short time.

The report said Chongqing has implemented strict anti-epidemic rules in high-risk districts and has urged people to stay at home since November 20.

Covid testing in Chengdu. Image: Screengrab / BBC News

Chinese Vice Premier Sun Chunlan visited Chongqing on Tuesday and Wednesday and ordered the municipal government to locate all the Covid patients at the community level and send them to quarantine centers as soon as possible. 

Sun said Chongqing must ensure the smooth operations of its auto factories.

In Beijing, 1,845 cases were reported on Thursday, up from 1,611 on Wednesday. The city government locked down individual residential buildings where infections were found.

Some residents rushed to purchase food online as they were worried about potential wider lockdowns. Most online grocery shops stopped taking new orders as they were running out of capacity to deliver, reports said.

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I USED TO scuba dive way more than I should. I pretty much did everything: open-water dives, technical dives, spearfishing, and cave diving. It's a fun sport that allows you to see some incredible things, but there’s also tons of science that goes into the process of safely putting a human underwater. So let’s discover what scuba diving can teach us about physics.

Perhaps the first thing a scuba diver thinks of when dealing with pressure is tank pressure. Scuba tanks contain a lot of air in a relatively small volume, and the only way to do this is to compress the air, producing high pressure. A diver can determine the amount of air left in a tank by using a pressure gauge. Usually, a full tank has a pressure of 3,000 pounds per square inch (psi). If you get below 200 psi, you should be out of the water.

Normal air—the stuff that blankets the Earth—is mostly nitrogen molecules, which make up about 79 percent of it. The rest is oxygen, at around 21 percent. We can imagine that these molecules are like super-tiny balls moving at different speeds and in different directions. If this gas was in a container, some of the molecules would collide with the wall, bounce off of it, and change direction. This change in motion means that each molecule exerts a small force on the wall. (A bigger wall or container will experience more collisions and a greater overall force.)

One way we describe the motion of gas molecules is to think about the force per unit area. This is the pressure of the gas:

Another unit is the bar, where 1 bar is equal to 14.5 psi. The value of 1 bar is very close to the pressure of air on Earth. The atmospheric pressure of the air that surrounds you right now is probably 14.5 psi. (Yes, I said "probably" because I don't want to judge you. Maybe you are reading this from the top of Mount Everest, where the pressure is just 4.9 psi, because there is less air above you pushing down. If so, send me a picture.) In terms of force and area, it is equal to 100,000 newtons per square meter.

 

Water is also made of tiny moving molecules that act like balls, and those molecules collide with underwater objects (like people), producing pressure. Water has many more molecules than the same volume of air, which means there are more collisions to produce a greater pressure. But just like going to the top of Mount Everest decreases the air pressure, going deeper in water increases the pressure, because gravity pulls downward on the molecules of water. For every 10 meters of depth, the pressure increases by 1 bar, or 14.5 psi. That means that on a dive 20 meters (around 60 feet) below sea level, there would be a water pressure of 43.5 psi, three times greater than the air pressure at Earth’s surface.

 

(The fact that pressure increases with depth prevents all the ocean’s water from collapsing into an infinitely thin layer. Since the pressure is greater the deeper you go, the water underneath pushes up more than the water above it pushes down. This difference compensates for the downward gravitational force, so the water level stays constant.)

 

It might sound like 43.5 psi is too much for a person to handle, but it's actually not that bad. Human bodies are very adaptable to changes in pressure. If you have been to the bottom of a swimming pool, you already know the answer to this pressure problem—your ears. If the water pressure on the outside of your eardrum is greater than the pressure from the air inside your inner ear, the membrane will stretch, and it can really hurt. But there is a nice trick to fix this: If you push air into your middle ear cavity by pinching your nose closed while attempting to blow air out of it, air will be forced into this cavity. With more air in the inner ear, the pressure on both sides of the membrane will be equal and you will feel normal. This is called "equalization," for hopefully obvious reasons.

 

There's actually another air space that you need to equalize while diving—the inside of your scuba mask. Don't forget to add air to it as you go deeper, or that thing will awkwardly squish your face.

 

There is one other physics mistake a diver could make. It's possible to create an enclosed air space in your lungs by holding your breath. Suppose you hold your breath at a depth of 20 meters and then move up to a depth of 10 meters. The pressure inside your lungs will stay the same during this ascent, because you have the same lung volume, and they contain the same amount of air. However, the water pressure outside of them will decrease. The reduced external pressure on your lungs makes it as though they are overinflated. This can cause tears in lung tissue, or even force air into the bloodstream, which is officially bad stuff.

 

Buoyancy

 

There's another problem to deal with when you are underwater: floating and sinking. If you want to stay underwater, it’s useful to sink instead of float—to a point. I don't think anyone wants to sink to such depths that they never return. Also, it’s nice to be able to float when you’re at the surface. Luckily, scuba divers can change their "floatiness" for different situations. This is called buoyancy control.

 

Things sink when the downward-pulling gravitational force is greater than the upward-pushing buoyancy force. If these two forces are equal, then the object will be neutrally buoyant and neither rise nor sink. It's like hovering, but in water, and it is essentially what you want to do when scuba diving.

 

Water actually has neutral buoyancy. Yes, water floats! Suppose you have a cubic volume of water that’s 1 meter on a side, and it’s in the middle of more water. We know that this water will just stay there, which means that the upward buoyancy force and the downward gravitational force must be equal.

 

Now replace that cubic meter of water with a rock of the same shape and size. Since the buoyancy force is due to the interaction between the object and the water surrounding it, this rock will have the same buoyancy as the cube of water. However, since it has a greater mass (and therefore weight) than the water, the total force on it will be downward and it will sink.

 

We can expand this to any generic object to say that the buoyancy force on something is equal to the weight of the water that it displaces (some volume V). It's useful to think about the mass per unit-volume of water. We call this the density. (Physicists like the symbol ρ for density.)

 

ILLUSTRATION: RHETT ALLAIN

 

Since the weight of the displaced water depends on the density of water (ρw) and the gravitational field (g), we get the following expression for buoyancy:

 

ILLUSTRATION: RHETT ALLAIN

 

The weight of an object depends on the density, too. If the density of that object is less than water, then the buoyancy force will be greater than its own weight and it will float. Most wood has a density lower than water, so it floats. A metal boat can float because it's not solid metal—the air inside makes its density lower than that of water. Also, very small rocks, a great gravy, and cider might float. (If you don't know that quote, I won't judge you.) On the other hand, an iron nail has a density that’s greater than water’s, so it will sink.

 

But now we have an idea of how a scuba diver can control buoyancy. If you increase your volume (and your mass stays the same), then your density will decrease. This will increase your buoyancy force and you will rise.

Decreasing your volume will decrease your buoyancy force, and you will sink. You can actually change your volume underwater just by breathing. Inhaling from a scuba regulator will make your lungs expand, which increases your volume and your buoyancy. Exhaling does the opposite.

 

Scuba divers also wear an exterior device to change their volume. It's basically an inflatable bag that you wear on your back called (not surprisingly) a buoyancy control device. It connects to a scuba tank so that you can add or remove air to change your buoyancy.

 

Thermal Conductivity

 

When the air has a temperature of 72 degrees Fahrenheit, it feels quite nice. But have you ever been in water at the same temperature? Oh boy, that stuff feels super cold. Really, the difference is not the temperature, but rather how fast thermal energy transfers from your body to something else. That’s called thermal conductivity, or the rate that thermal energy can transfer between two objects. (In this case, from your body to the colder water.)

 

Here's another example: Suppose you have a wood block and a metal block sitting at room temperature—they’re not in direct sunshine nor sitting on a heater. If you touch both blocks, the wood will feel warmer than the metal, even though they are actually at the same temperature. This is because metal has a higher thermal conductivity than wood. The hand touching the metal will decrease in thermal energy faster, making that one feel colder.

 

The exact same thing happens with scuba diving. Since water is a much better thermal conductor than air, the rate that thermal energy moves from your body—which is almost always warmer than the water—to the water is faster than the same process in the air. In fact, you can lose energy so fast that it's very possible to decrease your core body temperature, which can cause problems like loss of muscle function and even respiratory and heart failure.

 

The most common solution to this water problem is to wear a wetsuit, which is usually made of a material like neoprene with a very low thermal conductivity. This decreases the rate at which the human body loses thermal energy. It's called a wetsuit because you still get wet: Exterior water gets trapped in between your skin and the tight-fitting suit, and your body warms it up.

 

If you don't like being exposed to water, you could get a dry suit, which has watertight seals on the wrists and neck, and built-in boots, so that water doesn't get in at all. (OK, maybe just a few tiny leaks.) This does add an extra task for the diver, though. As you descend to greater water pressures, the air inside the suit will decrease in volume, causing a “shrink-wrap” effect on the body, so that there is no space inside of the suit to bend your arms and legs. You can fix this by adding air to the suit at greater depths—but you also have to let that air out when you go back up toward the surface.

 

Underwater Vision

 

I've been on some dives in murky water where I really couldn't see much. Spoiler alert: It wasn't very fun. The point of diving is to see cool stuff underwater. But even in clear water, you need a mask in order to really see anything. The mask creates an air space between your eyes and the water, which is what they need to properly focus. Here's how the lens in your eye works when you're on land, as humans are meant to be, compared to what happens in water:

 

ILLUSTRATION: RHETT ALLAIN

 

A lens bends light based on its shape, as well as the difference in the speed of light in both the lens material and outside of it. (We can describe the speed of light in a material with the index of refraction.) The speed of light in water is only 66.7 percent the speed of light in air. That's a problem, as it makes the lens in your eye less able to bend the light to focus on your retina. The result is blurry vision.

 

When you put on a mask, you once again have air in front of your eyes, which allows your lens to bend the light the proper amount. But light is still traveling through the water at a slower speed than it does through air. When light goes from one medium (like water) into another medium (like air), the light's path bends. We call this refraction, and it can make things underwater appear closer than they actually are.

 

How does this work? It's important to remember that we see things because light reflects off objects and then into our eyes. Take the example of a fish you spot on your diving trip. Rays of light bounce off the fish, travel through the water and then into the air inside the scuba mask. Because of the difference in the index of refraction between air and water, the light rays bend. But our eyes and brain don't know that the light changed directions. They just assume that it traveled in a straight line, as it does in the air. This makes it appear that the light came from a spot that is closer than where the fish actually is.

 

This diagram should help:

 

ILLUSTRATION: RHETT ALLAIN

 

There's another issue with seeing fish (and especially coral) underwater: color. Although we like to think that water is transparent, it's only sort of transparent. If you have pure water, visible light will be absorbed as it travels through it. After 300 meters, essentially none of the light will be left. That means even in the clearest water, it would be as dark as night at a depth of 300 meters. (You shouldn't be scuba diving that deep, anyway.)

 

The absorption of light isn't the same for all colors. Almost all red light will be absorbed after only 5 meters of water. As you go deeper, you will only see light that is more blue than red. Without red light, red things, including fish and coral, will seem to be dark gray.

 

But you can fix this problem with a simple trick: Bring a flashlight. The light from your flashlight doesn't have to travel as far as light from the surface before it reflects off that pretty fish, so you can still see the red parts.

 

Partial Pressure of Gases

 

Recall that air is normally a mixture of 79 percent nitrogen and 21 percent oxygen at a pressure of 1 atmosphere (1 ATM). But we need to think about oxygen and nitrogen differently, since they interact with the body in different ways. We can deal with gas mixtures using the idea of “partial pressure.” Air at 1 ATM (with a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen) is the same as oxygen at a pressure of 0.21 ATM (21 percent of the mixture) and nitrogen at 0.79 ATM.

 

Let’s look at how both of these gases impact the body. I’m going to start with the partial pressure of oxygen, which we often just call PPO2. People need oxygen, but not too little or too much. Say you’re traveling in a plane at high altitude, where the air pressure is lower. If you get to a PPO2 below about 0.17, it’s just not enough oxygen for your brain to function. You won’t be able to think straight, and you might even pass out. (This is why high-altitude aircraft have pressurized cabins; if they don't, people have to wear supplemental oxygen masks. It’s also why the flight attendants in a commercial airliner go over safety procedures in the event of a decrease in cabin pressure.)

 

But underwater, the problem is likely to be too much pressure. If the partial pressure of oxygen gets around 1.6 ATM, it can cause people to have convulsions.

 

How do you get a PPO2 that high? Consider the following case: You have a tank with pure oxygen (and no nitrogen) and you dive to a depth of 10 meters. In order to actually breathe from a scuba regulator, the pressure delivered to your lungs must be equal to the ambient pressure, or you wouldn't be able to inhale. That means the pure oxygen will be at 2 ATM. (Remember, you get 1 ATM of pressure for every 10 meters of depth.) Breathing this would produce a PPO2 of 2.0—which is greater than 1.6 ATM. So, don’t do that.

 

This is why scuba divers don't use pure oxygen and instead use normal air that’s only 21 percent oxygen. Its PPO2 at that same depth would be 0.42 ATM, which is not likely to cause problems. Also, it's much easier to just pump regular air into tanks. Using other mixtures involves complicated stuff like compressions and the kind of oxygen tanks you see in hospitals.

 

Now suppose you put a custom mix of gas in your tank. How about 40 percent oxygen and 60 percent nitrogen? (Note: This is real stuff, it's called Nitrox.) This increases the ratio of oxygen to nitrogen, above what’s in air. If you breathe this gas at a depth of 20 meters, which is 3 ATM, the oxygen would be at PPO2 of 0.4 × 3 ATM, which equals 1.2 ATM. This is getting close to a PPM of 1.6 ATM, so maybe you shouldn't go any deeper than that with this gas mixture.

 

What is the advantage of adding extra oxygen to your tank if you can't go as deep? The answer is that increasing the oxygen decreases the nitrogen. Although your body doesn't use nitrogen gas, it does get absorbed by your tissues. When you go to lower pressures (like when coming up to the surface), this nitrogen comes out of your tissues, which is called outgassing. If too much nitrogen comes out too fast, it will form bubbles that get in your blood and cause serious medical problems. This is commonly called decompression sickness, or the bends. Using less nitrogen will mean your tissues absorb less, giving you a lower chance of decompression sickness.

 

You can also prevent decompression sickness by moving to shallower depths very slowly. For recreational dives, the goal is to only absorb an amount of nitrogen that can be safely outgassed in the time it takes to swim back to the surface.

 

The actual calculation for the time you can stay at a certain depth is complicated, and it relies on rough estimations about the average human body. This is why most modern scuba divers use small dive computers that constantly calculate the time they have remaining based on the depth and time.

 

That’s not enough physics for you to actually go on a scuba dive, but it's enough to give you a sense of what's going on. If you’d like to try it out, a dive instructor at a scuba shop can help you learn the rest. Just remember to bring your flashlight.

 

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Patients with nasopharyngeal cancer are often treated with drugs that activate their immune system against the tumor. Scientists feared that vaccination against COVID-19 could reduce the success of cancer treatment or cause severe side effects—until now. A recent study now gives the all-clear in this regard. According to the study, the cancer drugs actually worked better after vaccination with the Chinese vaccine SinoVac than in unvaccinated patients.

The results of the study, which was conducted by the Universities of Bonn and Shanxi in the People’s Republic of China, are published as a “Letter to the editor” in the journal Annals of Oncology, but are already available online.

Many cancer cells are capable of subverting the body’s immune response. They do this by pushing a kind of button on the immune cells, the PD-1 receptor. In this way, they effectively shut down these endogenous defense forces. Drugs can be used to block PD-1 receptors. This enables the immune system to fight the tumor more effectively.

Vaccination against COVID also stimulates the immune response, involving the PD-1 receptor. “It was feared that the vaccine would not be compatible with anti-PD-1 therapy,” explains Dr. Jian Li of the Institute of Molecular Medicine and Experimental Immunology (IMMEI) at the University Hospital Bonn. “This risk is especially true for nasopharyngeal cancer, which, like the SARS Cov-2 virus, affects the upper respiratory tract.”

Together with cooperation partners from the People’s Republic of China, the bioinformatician has now investigated whether this concern is justified. More than 1,500 patients treated in 23 hospitals from all over China participated in the analysis. Such multi-center studies are considered to be particularly informative because the participants are very diverse and, moreover, the results are not distorted by regional characteristics.

Vaccinated patients responded better to cancer therapy

A subset of 373 affected individuals had been vaccinated with the Chinese COVID-19 vaccine SinoVac. “Surprisingly, they responded significantly better to anti-PD-1 therapy than the unvaccinated patients,” explains Prof. Dr. Christian Kurts, Director of IMMEI and member of the Transdisciplinary Research Area “Life & Health” and the Cluster of Excellence ImmunoSensation. “Furthermore, they did not experience severe side effects more often.” The researchers cannot say why the treatment was more successful after vaccination. “We assume that vaccination activates certain immune cells, which then attack the tumor,” says Prof. Dr. Qi Mei of Shanxi University Hospital. “We will now investigate this hypothesis further.”

Nasopharyngeal cancer is quite rare in this country. In southern China and other countries in Southeast Asia, however, the disease is widespread. One of the suspected reasons for this is the frequent use of air conditioning in the hot and humid regions. Nutritional factors also appear to play an important role. In Taiwan, nasopharyngeal cancer is now considered one of the leading causes of death among young men.

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Hebrew University Professor Hagai Levine. Credit: Avi Hayon_Hadassah

 

Alarmingly, this study also shows that the decline in sperm counts in North America, Europe, and Australia—reported by this team in 2017—has continued and even accelerated in the 21st century. Sperm count is not just an indicator of human fertility either, it is also an indicator of men’s health overall. In fact, low levels are associated with an increased risk of chronic disease, testicular cancer, and a decreased lifespan. The decline reflects a global crisis related to our modern environment and lifestyle, with broad implications for the survival of the human species, according to the authors.

This latest analysis, with data from 53 countries, was published in the journal Human Reproduction Update on November 15. It includes an additional seven years of data collection (2011-2018) and focuses on sperm count trends among men in regions not reviewed previously, specifically South America, Asia, and Africa. The data shows, for the first time, that men in those regions share the significant decline in total sperm counts (TSC) and sperm concentration (SC) seen previously in North America, Europe, and Australia. Furthermore, this study shows an accelerated post-2000 decline in TSC and SC globally. As Levine summarized these results, “Overall, we’re seeing a significant worldwide decline in sperm counts of over 50% in the past 46 years, a decline that has accelerated in recent years.”

Icahn School of Medicine’s Professor Shanna Swan. Credit: Axel Dupeux

 

While the current study did not examine the causes of sperm count declines, Levine pointed to recent research indicating that disturbances in the development of the reproductive tract during fetal life are linked to lifetime impairment of fertility and other markers of reproductive dysfunction. Additionally, Levine explained that “lifestyle choices and chemicals in the environment are adversely affecting this fetal development.”

Levine cautioned that time is running out. “Our findings serve as a canary in a coal mine. We have a serious problem on our hands that, if not mitigated, could threaten mankind’s survival. We urgently call for global action to promote healthier environments for all species and reduce exposures and behaviors that threaten our reproductive health.”

Swan stressed that low sperm counts do not only affect men’s fertility, but have serious ramifications for men’s health more generally, and are linked with other adverse trends, termed together as testicular dysgenesis syndrome.

“The troubling declines in men’s sperm concentration and total sperm counts at over 1% each year as reported in our paper are consistent with adverse trends in other men’s health outcomes, such as testicular cancer, hormonal disruption, and genital birth defects, as well as declines in female reproductive health. This clearly cannot continue unchecked.”

Source

Several Roman coins unearthed in 1713 — long thought to be forgeries — are likely authentic, according to a new scientific analysis. This provides evidence that the leader portrayed on one of the coins was indeed in power during the 260s CE. These findings were presented on November 23, 2022, in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Paul Pearson of University College London, U.K., and colleagues.

For much of ancient Roman history, Roman mints produced coins featuring portraits of current emperors. In 1713, a group of such coins was allegedly discovered in Transylvania, some of them featuring a portrait labeled with the name “Sponsian,” although there are no other historical records that a Roman emperor named Sponsian ever existed.

While the Transylvanian coins follow the general style of mid-third-century Roman coins, they diverge in certain stylistic characteristics and in how they were manufactured, leading many experts to dismiss them as forgeries created to sell to collectors. However, the coins are also uncharacteristic of the forgeries that would have been of interest to past collectors. Additionally, in 1713, “Sponsian” was not yet known to be a name that had ever existed in ancient Rome.

To further investigate the Transylvanian coins’ authenticity, Pearson and colleagues conducted a deeper assessment of the physical characteristics of four of the coins, including the Sponsian coin. They applied visible light microscopy, ultra-violet imaging, scanning electron microscopy, and reflection mode Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy to the four coins and, for comparison, two undoubtedly authentic Roman gold coins.

The analysis revealed deep micro-abrasion patterns typically associated with coins that were in circulation for an extensive period of time. The researchers also analyzed earthen deposits on the coins, finding evidence that after extensive circulation, the coins were buried for a prolonged period before being exhumed. Together, the new evidence strongly suggests the coins are authentic.

Considering the historical record alongside the new evidence from the coins, the researchers suggest that Sponsian was an army commander in the Roman Province of Dacia during a period of military strife in the 260s CE.

Lead author of the paper, Paul N. Pearson of University College, London, adds: “Scientific analysis of these ultra-rare coins rescues the emperor Sponsian from obscurity. Our evidence suggests he ruled Roman Dacia, an isolated gold mining outpost, at a time when the empire was beset by civil wars and the borderlands were overrun by plundering invaders.”

Curator of Numismatics at The Hunterian, Jesper Ericsson, adds: “This has been a really exciting project for The Hunterian. Not only do we hope that this encourages further debate about Sponsian as a historical figure, but also the investigation of coins relating to him held in other museums across Europe.”

Source

A new study of online dating site users found a correlation between the perceived originality of text in dating profiles and higher perceptions of attractiveness. Tess van der Zanden and colleagues from Tilburg University in the Netherlands recently published their findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE and outlined the characteristics of “original” profiles.

Previous research has shown a relationship between the originality of texts, such as poetry and song lyrics, and their popularity. Less is known, however, about how originality affects readers’ perceptions of the writer and what aspects of a text make it seem original. Furthermore, no prior research has specifically looked at the relationship between perceived originality and attraction in the setting of online dating profiles.

To shed new light, van der Zanden and colleagues polled 1,234 online dating site users on the originality of text in several real dating profiles, as well as the personality and attractiveness of the profile owners. The majority of users on the study’s included sites were over 50. To protect the privacy of the owners, all 308 profiles utilized for the research underwent modifications.

Examples of the original Dutch dating profiles used for the experiment. Credit: van der Zanden et al., 2022, PLOS ONE, CC-BY 4.0

 

Analysis of the participants’ ratings showed that owners of profiles perceived as being more original tended to also score higher on perceived intelligence, sense of humor, attractiveness, and likelihood of participants wanting to date them. In general, participants showed high agreement on which profile texts they perceived as original and which they perceived as odd; odd profiles were generally not considered to be original.

In a second analysis, the researchers analyzed the 308 anonymized dating profiles to investigate text features that may contribute to perceptions of originality. They found that text perceived as being more original used original stylistic features, such as metaphors, and these profiles also disclosed more and more concrete personal information.

On the basis of their findings, the authors suggest that crafting effective text in a dating profile may require owners to carefully balance novelty and appropriateness. They outline several directions for future research, including analyses involving younger participants and exploration of the originality of texts in other areas beyond online dating, such as job cover letters or advertisements.

The authors add: “An online dating profile text considered original boosts personality and attractiveness evaluations.”

Source

I used to scuba dive way more than I should. I pretty much did everything: open-water dives, technical dives, spearfishing, and cave diving. It's a fun sport that allows you to see some incredible things, but there’s also tons of science that goes into the process of safely putting a human underwater. So let’s discover what scuba diving can teach us about physics.

Pressure

Perhaps the first thing a scuba diver thinks of when dealing with pressure is tank pressure. Scuba tanks contain a lot of air in a relatively small volume, and the only way to do this is to compress the air, producing high pressure. A diver can determine the amount of air left in a tank by using a pressure gauge. Usually, a full tank has a pressure of 3,000 pounds per square inch (psi). If you get below 200 psi, you should be out of the water.

Normal air—the stuff that blankets the Earth—is mostly nitrogen molecules, which make up about 79 percent of it. The rest is oxygen, at around 21 percent. We can imagine that these molecules are like super-tiny balls moving at different speeds and in different directions. If this gas was in a container, some of the molecules would collide with the wall, bounce off of it, and change direction. This change in motion means that each molecule exerts a small force on the wall. (A bigger wall or container will experience more collisions and a greater overall force.)

One way we describe the motion of gas molecules is to think about the force per unit area. This is the pressure of the gas:

Illustration: Rhett Allain

If you measure the force in pounds and the area in square inches, you get pressure in pounds per square inch, or psi. That's the most common unit for tank pressure in the United States.

Another unit is the bar, where 1 bar is equal to 14.5 psi. The value of 1 bar is very close to the pressure of air on Earth. The atmospheric pressure of the air that surrounds you right now is probably 14.5 psi. (Yes, I said "probably" because I don't want to judge you. Maybe you are reading this from the top of Mount Everest, where the pressure is just 4.9 psi, because there is less air above you pushing down. If so, send me a picture.) In terms of force and area, it is equal to 100,000 newtons per square meter.

Water is also made of tiny moving molecules that act like balls, and those molecules collide with underwater objects (like people), producing pressure. Water has many more molecules than the same volume of air, which means there are more collisions to produce a greater pressure. But just like going to the top of Mount Everest decreases the air pressure, going deeper in water increases the pressure, because gravity pulls downward on the molecules of water. For every 10 meters of depth, the pressure increases by 1 bar, or 14.5 psi. That means that on a dive 20 meters (around 60 feet) below sea level, there would be a water pressure of 43.5 psi, three times greater than the air pressure at Earth’s surface.

(The fact that pressure increases with depth prevents all the ocean’s water from collapsing into an infinitely thin layer. Since the pressure is greater the deeper you go, the water underneath pushes up more than the water above it pushes down. This difference compensates for the downward gravitational force, so the water level stays constant.)

It might sound like 43.5 psi is too much for a person to handle, but it's actually not that bad. Human bodies are very adaptable to changes in pressure. If you have been to the bottom of a swimming pool, you already know the answer to this pressure problem—your ears. If the water pressure on the outside of your eardrum is greater than the pressure from the air inside your inner ear, the membrane will stretch, and it can really hurt. But there is a nice trick to fix this: If you push air into your middle ear cavity by pinching your nose closed while attempting to blow air out of it, air will be forced into this cavity. With more air in the inner ear, the pressure on both sides of the membrane will be equal and you will feel normal. This is called "equalization," for hopefully obvious reasons.

There's actually another air space that you need to equalize while diving—the inside of your scuba mask. Don't forget to add air to it as you go deeper, or that thing will awkwardly squish your face.

There is one other physics mistake a diver could make. It's possible to create an enclosed air space in your lungs by holding your breath. Suppose you hold your breath at a depth of 20 meters and then move up to a depth of 10 meters. The pressure inside your lungs will stay the same during this ascent, because you have the same lung volume, and they contain the same amount of air. However, the water pressure outside of them will decrease. The reduced external pressure on your lungs makes it as though they are overinflated. This can cause tears in lung tissue, or even force air into the bloodstream, which is officially bad stuff.

Buoyancy

There's another problem to deal with when you are underwater: floating and sinking. If you want to stay underwater, it’s useful to sink instead of float—to a point. I don't think anyone wants to sink to such depths that they never return. Also, it’s nice to be able to float when you’re at the surface. Luckily, scuba divers can change their "floatiness" for different situations. This is called buoyancy control.

Things sink when the downward-pulling gravitational force is greater than the upward-pushing buoyancy force. If these two forces are equal, then the object will be neutrally buoyant and neither rise nor sink. It's like hovering, but in water, and it is essentially what you want to do when scuba diving.

Water actually has neutral buoyancy. Yes, water floats! Suppose you have a cubic volume of water that’s 1 meter on a side, and it’s in the middle of more water. We know that this water will just stay there, which means that the upward buoyancy force and the downward gravitational force must be equal.

Now replace that cubic meter of water with a rock of the same shape and size. Since the buoyancy force is due to the interaction between the object and the water surrounding it, this rock will have the same buoyancy as the cube of water. However, since it has a greater mass (and therefore weight) than the water, the total force on it will be downward and it will sink.

We can expand this to any generic object to say that the buoyancy force on something is equal to the weight of the water that it displaces (some volume V). It's useful to think about the mass per unit-volume of water. We call this the density. (Physicists like the symbol ρ for density.)

Illustration: Rhett Allain

Since the weight of the displaced water depends on the density of water (ρw) and the gravitational field (g), we get the following expression for buoyancy:

Illustration: Rhett Allain

The weight of an object depends on the density, too. If the density of that object is less than water, then the buoyancy force will be greater than its own weight and it will float. Most wood has a density lower than water, so it floats. A metal boat can float because it's not solid metal—the air inside makes its density lower than that of water. Also, very small rocks, a great gravy, and cider might float. (If you don't know that quote, I won't judge you.) On the other hand, an iron nail has a density that’s greater than water’s, so it will sink.

But now we have an idea of how a scuba diver can control buoyancy. If you increase your volume (and your mass stays the same), then your density will decrease. This will increase your buoyancy force and you will rise. Decreasing your volume will decrease your buoyancy force, and you will sink. You can actually change your volume underwater just by breathing. Inhaling from a scuba regulator will make your lungs expand, which increases your volume and your buoyancy. Exhaling does the opposite.

Scuba divers also wear an exterior device to change their volume. It's basically an inflatable bag that you wear on your back called (not surprisingly) a buoyancy control device. It connects to a scuba tank so that you can add or remove air to change your buoyancy.

Thermal Conductivity

When the air has a temperature of 72 degrees Fahrenheit, it feels quite nice. But have you ever been in water at the same temperature? Oh boy, that stuff feels super cold. Really, the difference is not the temperature, but rather how fast thermal energy transfers from your body to something else. That’s called thermal conductivity, or the rate that thermal energy can transfer between two objects. (In this case, from your body to the colder water.)

Here's another example: Suppose you have a wood block and a metal block sitting at room temperature—they’re not in direct sunshine nor sitting on a heater. If you touch both blocks, the wood will feel warmer than the metal, even though they are actually at the same temperature. This is because metal has a higher thermal conductivity than wood. The hand touching the metal will decrease in thermal energy faster, making that one feel colder.

The exact same thing happens with scuba diving. Since water is a much better thermal conductor than air, the rate that thermal energy moves from your body—which is almost always warmer than the water—to the water is faster than the same process in the air. In fact, you can lose energy so fast that it's very possible to decrease your core body temperature, which can cause problems like loss of muscle function and even respiratory and heart failure.

The most common solution to this water problem is to wear a wetsuit, which is usually made of a material like neoprene with a very low thermal conductivity. This decreases the rate at which the human body loses thermal energy. It's called a wetsuit because you still get wet: Exterior water gets trapped in between your skin and the tight-fitting suit, and your body warms it up.

If you don't like being exposed to water, you could get a dry suit, which has watertight seals on the wrists and neck, and built-in boots, so that water doesn't get in at all. (OK, maybe just a few tiny leaks.) This does add an extra task for the diver, though. As you descend to greater water pressures, the air inside the suit will decrease in volume, causing a “shrink-wrap” effect on the body, so that there is no space inside of the suit to bend your arms and legs. You can fix this by adding air to the suit at greater depths—but you also have to let that air out when you go back up toward the surface.

Underwater Vision

I've been on some dives in murky water where I really couldn't see much. Spoiler alert: It wasn't very fun. The point of diving is to see cool stuff underwater. But even in clear water, you need a mask in order to really see anything. The mask creates an air space between your eyes and the water, which is what they need to properly focus. Here's how the lens in your eye works when you're on land, as humans are meant to be, compared to what happens in water:

Illustration: Rhett Allain

A lens bends light based on its shape, as well as the difference in the speed of light in both the lens material and outside of it. (We can describe the speed of light in a material with the index of refraction.) The speed of light in water is only 66.7 percent the speed of light in air. That's a problem, as it makes the lens in your eye less able to bend the light to focus on your retina. The result is blurry vision.

When you put on a mask, you once again have air in front of your eyes, which allows your lens to bend the light the proper amount. But light is still traveling through the water at a slower speed than it does through air. When light goes from one medium (like water) into another medium (like air), the light's path bends. We call this refraction, and it can make things underwater appear closer than they actually are.

How does this work? It's important to remember that we see things because light reflects off objects and then into our eyes. Take the example of a fish you spot on your diving trip. Rays of light bounce off the fish, travel through the water and then into the air inside the scuba mask. Because of the difference in the index of refraction between air and water, the light rays bend. But our eyes and brain don't know that the light changed directions. They just assume that it traveled in a straight line, as it does in the air. This makes it appear that the light came from a spot that is closer than where the fish actually is.

This diagram should help:

Illustration: Rhett Allain

There's another issue with seeing fish (and especially coral) underwater: color. Although we like to think that water is transparent, it's only sort of transparent. If you have pure water, visible light will be absorbed as it travels through it. After 300 meters, essentially none of the light will be left. That means even in the clearest water, it would be as dark as night at a depth of 300 meters. (You shouldn't be scuba diving that deep, anyway.)

The absorption of light isn't the same for all colors. Almost all red light will be absorbed after only 5 meters of water. As you go deeper, you will only see light that is more blue than red. Without red light, red things, including fish and coral, will seem to be dark gray.

But you can fix this problem with a simple trick: Bring a flashlight. The light from your flashlight doesn't have to travel as far as light from the surface before it reflects off that pretty fish, so you can still see the red parts.

Partial Pressure of Gases

Recall that air is normally a mixture of 79 percent nitrogen and 21 percent oxygen at a pressure of 1 atmosphere (1 ATM). But we need to think about oxygen and nitrogen differently, since they interact with the body in different ways. We can deal with gas mixtures using the idea of “partial pressure.” Air at 1 ATM (with a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen) is the same as oxygen at a pressure of 0.21 ATM (21 percent of the mixture) and nitrogen at 0.79 ATM.

Let’s look at how both of these gases impact the body. I’m going to start with the partial pressure of oxygen, which we often just call PPO2. People need oxygen, but not too little or too much. Say you’re traveling in a plane at high altitude, where the air pressure is lower. If you get to a PPO2 below about 0.17, it’s just not enough oxygen for your brain to function. You won’t be able to think straight, and you might even pass out. (This is why high-altitude aircraft have pressurized cabins; if they don't, people have to wear supplemental oxygen masks. It’s also why the flight attendants in a commercial airliner go over safety procedures in the event of a decrease in cabin pressure.)

But underwater, the problem is likely to be too much pressure. If the partial pressure of oxygen gets around 1.6 ATM, it can cause people to have convulsions.

How do you get a PPO2 that high? Consider the following case: You have a tank with pure oxygen (and no nitrogen) and you dive to a depth of 10 meters. In order to actually breathe from a scuba regulator, the pressure delivered to your lungs must be equal to the ambient pressure, or you wouldn't be able to inhale. That means the pure oxygen will be at 2 ATM. (Remember, you get 1 ATM of pressure for every 10 meters of depth.) Breathing this would produce a PPO2 of 2.0—which is greater than 1.6 ATM. So, don’t do that.

This is why scuba divers don't use pure oxygen and instead use normal air that’s only 21 percent oxygen. Its PPO2 at that same depth would be 0.42 ATM, which is not likely to cause problems. Also, it's much easier to just pump regular air into tanks. Using other mixtures involves complicated stuff like compressions and the kind of oxygen tanks you see in hospitals.

Now suppose you put a custom mix of gas in your tank. How about 40 percent oxygen and 60 percent nitrogen? (Note: This is real stuff, it's called Nitrox.) This increases the ratio of oxygen to nitrogen, above what’s in air. If you breathe this gas at a depth of 20 meters, which is 3 ATM, the oxygen would be at PPO2 of 0.4 × 3 ATM, which equals 1.2 ATM. This is getting close to a PPM of 1.6 ATM, so maybe you shouldn't go any deeper than that with this gas mixture.

What is the advantage of adding extra oxygen to your tank if you can't go as deep? The answer is that increasing the oxygen decreases the nitrogen. Although your body doesn't use nitrogen gas, it does get absorbed by your tissues. When you go to lower pressures (like when coming up to the surface), this nitrogen comes out of your tissues, which is called outgassing. If too much nitrogen comes out too fast, it will form bubbles that get in your blood and cause serious medical problems. This is commonly called decompression sickness, or the bends. Using less nitrogen will mean your tissues absorb less, giving you a lower chance of decompression sickness.

You can also prevent decompression sickness by moving to shallower depths very slowly. For recreational dives, the goal is to only absorb an amount of nitrogen that can be safely outgassed in the time it takes to swim back to the surface.

The actual calculation for the time you can stay at a certain depth is complicated, and it relies on rough estimations about the average human body. This is why most modern scuba divers use small dive computers that constantly calculate the time they have remaining based on the depth and time.

That’s not enough physics for you to actually go on a scuba dive, but it's enough to give you a sense of what's going on. If you’d like to try it out, a dive instructor at a scuba shop can help you learn the rest. Just remember to bring your flashlight.

The Physics of Scuba Diving

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The evolution of whales from land to sea

Pushed by climate change, almost every part of the ocean is heating up. But off the west coast of the Galapagos Islands, there is a patch of cold, nutrient-rich water. This prosperous patch feeds phytoplankton and breathes life into the archipelago.

“The cool water sustains populations of penguins, marine iguanas, sea lions, fur seals, and cetaceans that would not be able to stay on the equator year round,” says Judith Denkinger, a marine ecologist at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador.

Over the past four decades, this cold patch has cooled by roughly half a degree. Its persistence has scientists wondering how long it will hold. The Galapagos Islands are already famed for their biodiversity. Could it be that the water offshore will become a refuge for marine animals seeking cold water in a warming world? The answer, it seems, is yes. At least for a while.

There are other cold pools on the planet. One, in the North Atlantic just south of Greenland, is caused by the weakening of a global current that carries heat north. But according to a new study led by Kris Karnauskas and Donata Giglio, climate scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder, the Galapagos cold pool is a product of the shape of the seafloor and the rotation of the planet—two things unlikely to change because of rising greenhouse gases. And the Galapagos are not the only islands seeing this effect.

Along the equator, several islands have unusually cold water lying immediately to their west. According to Karnauskas and Giglio’s work, this cooling is the product of upwelling caused by the collision of a deep ocean current against the islands lying in its path.

Analyzing 22 years’ worth of ocean temperature data collected by Argo floats, along with observations from satellites, ocean gliders, and cruises, the scientists constructed temperature profiles around several equatorial islands and pinpointed the location of the Equatorial Undercurrent (EUC), a cold, fast-flowing current that travels eastward about 100 meters below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. The EUC is held in place along the equator by the Coriolis force, an inertia brought on by the Earth’s spin on its axis. This same effect twists hurricanes anticlockwise north of the equator and clockwise south of it.

Karnauskas and Giglio’s work shows that when the EUC gets within 100 kilometers west of the Galapagos Islands, it suddenly intensifies as it’s diverted upward by the islands. This causes the water to be up to 1.5 degrees Celsius cooler than the water outside this cold pool. The researchers found a similar, yet weaker, effect west of the Gilbert Islands in the western Pacific Ocean.

In a separate study, Karnauskas shows that over the past few decades, the EUC has been getting stronger and deeper. It’s also moved about 10 kilometers south, bringing its path more in line with the Galapagos Islands. All of those changes contribute to the observed cooling, says Karnauskas.

For the Galapagos marine ecosystem, this cooling is “a bit of a mixed bag,” says Jon Witman, a marine ecologist at Brown University in Rhode Island who was not involved in the studies. “The cool upwelled water of the EUC certainly has important positive impacts,” he says. But when combined with other oceanic processes that also cause temperatures to drop, such as La Niña, the cooling can hurt certain wildlife, such as by cold shocking corals, causing them to bleach and sometimes die.

For the near future, this shield of cold will likely benefit life around the Galapagos Islands and other equatorial islands. But this cooling water is fighting a losing battle with a warming atmosphere, says Karnauskas. “This cooling trend probably won’t last through the century; it will eventually be overwhelmed,” he says.

If some species are protected at least for a while, however, the Galapagos could become a genetic bank that could be used to reseed devastated marine ecosystems elsewhere, suggests Karnauskas. “And it’s just beautiful that it’s the iconic Galapagos that we’re talking about here.”

The Geological Fluke That's Protecting Sea Life in the Galapagos

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Joseph Cook found the ring buried in the sand at Hammock Beach in St Augustine and immediately posted a video he shot while digging it up to his social media channels searching for people who may have lost rings.

The 37-year-old is heard exclaiming in shock: “No way, man. Whoah, look at that bad boy. Holy crap, that’s real.”

“This is the biggest diamond I ever found on the beach.”

When he went to the jewelers, they reportedly told him the precious gem set in a platinum band was worth $40,000.

“I couldn’t believe it.”

Two weeks later, Joseph began receiving calls from a number he didn’t recognize.He initially ignored them, but then realized it could be the owners of the ring.

Joseph Cook via SWNS

He joined a video call with the couple from Jacksonville, who had lost one that was similar.

“The wife said, ‘oh my god I can’t believe it’, and then she just started crying.”

Three weeks after finding the ring, Joseph met the owners near the same beach in St. Johns County and returned the piece.

“It felt really good,” he recalled. “I’ve returned sixty-thousand dollars of stuff this year, but nothing even close to this before.”

He said he really wasn’t disappointed that he had to return it, and is looking for owners of other rings he’s found in the past. He even wears a necklace with about 25 rings on it just so might be able to return them to their owners.

“Karma’s always good. Every time I return an item, I find something better, so I’m happy I could give it back.”

Source

Identifying several causes and charities in their hometown of Orillia, in the Canadian province of Ontario to give fat checks to, local news reports it making a huge difference.

First of all, MacQueen describes the moment that she scanned her ticket at the Lotto Max machine at her neighborhood Shoppers Drug Mart.

There was no ring-a-ding-ding, indeed there were no sounds at all. The screen simply read $1,000,000,00 and a free play.

She recalls being stunned, and that she began to shake; “it was pretty cool,” she remembers.

They donated varying amounts to places that MacQueen’s brother, who died recently due to alcoholism, might have accessed during his life, which included Soldiers’ Memorial Hospital, the Orillia SPCA, and the Farley Foundation, an Ontario-based charity that helps low-income pet owners take care of their animals.

They also donated to the Salvation Army, the Royal Canadian Legion poppy campaign in Orillia, Mariposa House Hospice, the Comfie Cat Shelter, and the Sharing Place Food Center, which helps the economically disadvantaged get access to nutrient dense fruits and vegetables.

“They are completely focused on how can they help to make this community a better place through this win,” Chris Peacock, executive director of the Sharing Place, told local news. “Not many people win a million bucks and have the core goal of spending it on others and improving this community.”

For the Comfie Cat Shelter, the $10,000 check they received was the fifth highest donation in this no-kill shelter’s history.

“It covers our vet bill for October, and it gives us money for more spay and neuters,” said shelter manager and founder Barb MacLeod, who described it as “fantastic” and bringing her to tears.

Orillia Matters reports that the pair plan to split the remainder among their family and friends, as well as take care of some renovations.

Source

Alandria Worthy tells WXIA-TV that her labor was intensifying and her fiancé was driving her to the hospital Wednesday morning when they stopped so she could use the bathroom at the fast food restaurant.

“I went into the bathroom and my water broke immediately,” Worthy said.

Worthy said she started screaming. Restaurant manager Tunisia Woodward went to see what was happening.

“I open this door, didn’t see anyone, but I saw feet (under the door),” Woodward said. “I opened, and she was on this toilet lying back, screaming.

Then I knew to tell my crew, ‘We’re having a baby today.’”

Woodward and two workers began to help. The fiancé, Deandre Phillips, came in to check what was taking so long, only to find Worthy giving birth.

“I was trying to calm her down because she was frantic,” Phillips said. “I was like, ‘Just breathe.’ I got her on the floor, and I took off my clothes.

The ladies at McDonald’s were at her front side, holding her hands, I had her feet propped up on my knees. We told her to push three pushes. She was a fighter.”

Less than fifteen minutes later, Nandi Ariyah Moremi Phillips was born.

“Oh, my God, it’s still crazy that it happened,” Worthy said.

“Yes, she popped out onto my hand,” Phillips said.

The parents tell the TV station “divine intervention” brought them to McDonald’s where three women could help.

“We all are mothers and so we put our heads together and all we needed daddy to do was catch the baby. And he did,” Woodward said of herself and her coworkers, Sha’querria Kaigler and Keisha Blue-Murray.

Although the baby’s birth certificate reads “Nandi Ariyah Moremi Phillips,” the McDonald’s crew gave the baby girl another name.

“I said, we’re going to name her Little Nugget. That’s her nickname: McDonald’s Little Nugget,” Woodward said.

That nickname may stick.

“She’s definitely a nugget,” Phillips agreed. “My parents loved the name, too. We were like, okay, it fits her. My little nugget.”

Steve Akinboro, who owns the franchise, awarded the employees $250 gift cards. Woodward said she’ll spend all the money on Nandi.

Source

The key analysis from the US midterms coverage over the past two weeks has been that the so-called “red wave” turned out to be a ripple and that the Republican Party underperformed.

Former president Donald Trump, the theory goes, is losing: Trump-backed untraditional candidates in swing states were largely defeated, and only one US Senator has publicly endorsed the former president’s 2024 presidential bid.

The “Trump is on the wane” narrative was given further impetus this week when every one of his three appointees to the US Supreme Court agreed to a decision forcing him to hand over his tax returns to Congress.

Many seem to have concluded that the American people have spoken and the strange phase of “MAGA” politics – based on Trump’s rallying cry to “make American great again” – in America is over. While many of his opponents may wish this to be the case, it is an oversimplified and selective conclusion.

The MAGA movement runs the House

Yes, the Democrats survived what many had predicted would be a 2010-style “shellacking.” Democrats have lost only nine seats in the House, and retain control of the Senate. This defies the usual midterm election losses by the president’s party – an all the more remarkable outcome given the president’s unpopularity and a struggling economy.

But that does not mean the influence of the MAGA movement and Trump-like politics are any more diluted in the chambers of the US government than before. In fact, Trumpian Republicanism has as much, if not more, significant representation in US politics than before the midterm elections.

With Democrats officially out of power in the lower chamber beginning in January 2023, Representative Kevin McCarthy will likely take the speaker’s gavel from Nancy Pelosi (and purportedly try not to “hit her with it”, as he joked in 2021).

McCarthy is a long-time Trump ally whom the former president affectionately called “my Kevin” throughout his presidency. Indeed, McCarthy has few legislative accomplishments or little notoriety on his own accord beyond his fundraising prowess and the support he received from the former president.

Republican and Trump-supporter Kevin McCarthy (left) will take over as Speaker of the House from Democrat Nancy Pelosi (right) in March 2023. Photo: Michael Reynolds / EPA / AAP via The Conversation

As House speaker, McCarthy would be second in line to the presidency. He would also have important administrative responsibilities, including determining which issues are debated and which bills are voted for on the House floor. He will also decide when such votes might occur, as well as which of the chamber’s 435 members serve on the various committees with subpoena power.

Unlike Pelosi’s decades-long leadership of House Democrats, Republican leaders in the House have faced shortened tenures in recent years amid dramatic intra-party fights. These are now even more likely given the slim majority Republicans are expected to gain once all House elections are finalized.

As of this writing, it appears Republicans will only be able to lose four Republican votes without compromising their numerical advantage. This gives the hard-line conservative House Freedom Caucus – a congressional bloc of roughly 40 Trump-aligned House members with a reputation for derailing legislation – outsized influence in the way McCarthy and the House majority will govern.

Beyond the Freedom Caucus, at least 140 of the elected House Republicans in the next Congress still question the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election. That’s more than half of the Republican representatives in the House, and over a quarter of the total number of House representatives.

Unsurprisingly, the House Committee’s investigation into the former president’s role in the January 6 insurrection will be disbanded as of next year. Key Republican figures who voted to impeach Trump and served on the Select Committee – such as Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois – either did not seek re-election or failed to win their primaries.

Those seats are now filled by two vocal Trump supporters, Harriet Hagemann in Wyoming and Mary Miller in Illinois.

Accordingly, the House Republican agenda so far appears more investigative than legislative. This has already seen House Republicans pledge to launch an investigation into a laptop belonging to President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter.

They’ve also stated intentions to impeach several members of the Biden administration, including Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas.

Republicans have a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden (left) in their sights. Photo: Susan Walsh / AP / AAP via The Conversation

MAGA politics is still competitive and popular

Yes, most Trump-endorsed candidates did not win their Senate and governor races in swing states. But that does not mean Trump-like politics are not competitive or popular.

The Arizona governor race between so-called “Trump in a dress” Kari Lake and Democrat Katie Hobbs was incredibly close. Only 0.8% of voters (just over 17,000 votes) decided the election in Hobbs’ favor.

Lake has, unsurprisingly, refused to concede the result and mounted an official legal challenge to investigate the process of election.

Slim margins were also at play in Nevada for the US Senate (0.9%, or less than 10,000 votes) between Adam Laxalt, a co-chair of Trump’s 2020 campaign in Nevada and one of the “stop-the-steal’s” most vocal proponents, and Democrat incumbent Catherine Cortez Masto.

Then there are the races where Trump-aligned Republicans actually won their elections. More importantly, these victors replaced Republicans who were not as enthusiastic about the former president.

Retiring Republican Senators Rob Portman of Ohio, Roy Blunt of Missouri and Richard M Burr of North Carolina – each known as moderate pragmatists willing to buck Trump at times – have all been replaced by Senate newcomers far more closely aligned with the former president and the MAGA movement.

Perhaps the most well-known of these is JD Vance – a proud 2020 election denier who famously said he “doesn’t really care” what happens in Ukraine. Vance won the Ohio Senate seat with a 6.6% margin.

What’s more, he won by such a margin in what was once a swing state despite facing a conservative Democratic challenger in Tim Ryan, who similarly embraced populist rhetoric against free trade and China.

J D Vance took hard aim at China on the campaign trail. Image: Wikipedia

There are 17 Republican 2020 election skeptics now in the Senate. There is also one near miss in Adam Laxalt, and one election denier still possibly joining the list in Georgia’s Herschel Walker, pending an election run-off on December 6. Only seven GOP Senators voted to overturn the 2020 election in the hours after a mob overtook the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Ahead of this year’s midterms, Biden said “this is not your father’s Republican party.” The Republican victors of this month’s midterms are not even last year’s Republican party.

MAGA movement ahead of 2024

From former Vice President Mike Pence to former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, many Republicans traditionally loyal to Trump and his Make America Great Again movement have been less vocally supportive of Trump’s 2024 presidential ambitions.

But Trump’s power is not waning where it matters. In the 2022 primary races, Republicans largely voted for those who Trump told them to vote for – even candidates like Doug Mastriano (who suggested women who have abortions should be tried for murder) and Blake Masters (who attributed rising gun crime to black people).

Trump-endorsed candidates might not have won the general elections, but they won their primaries 93% of the time.

Much like in the early days of 2016, many Republican elites are against Trump, but his supporters remain steadfast. America’s 200-year experiment with democracy charges on. And the MAGA movement charges on alongside it.

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TOKYO — One of the worst-kept secrets in global central banking is the extent to which Chinese officials are swapping dollars for gold.

Governor Yi Gang’s team at the People’s Bank of China isn’t admitting as much. The PBOC doesn’t have to, though, given the clear policy trajectory Chinese leader Xi Jinping has pursued in recent years: internationalizing of the yuan as the top rival to the dollar.

Xi’s position hasn’t changed so much as other governments are catching on that trust is waning in the global reserve currency and an alternative to the dollar is badly needed.

Particularly as the US national debt zooms past $30 trillion, inflation is at 40-year highs, the Federal Reserve is pushing the biggest economy into recession and a band of firebrand Republicans threatens to play politics with Washington’s debt limit again.

Not surprisingly, central banks that once hoarded dollars are buying gold at the fastest clip on record. In the July-September quarter, central banks more than quadrupled gold purchases from a year earlier — adding nearly a net 400 tonnes to already sizable stockpiles.

These figures from the World Gold Council are no aberration. The year-to-date flurry of gold buying already well surpasses any 12-month period since 1967. This has traders guessing who the real whales are here.

Punters doing the math can confirm that about 90 tonnes worth of purchases can be traced to Turkey (31.2 tonnes), Uzbekistan (26.1 tonnes), India (17.5 tonnes) and other developing nations. The other 300 tonnes, it’s widely assumed, bear Chinese fingerprints.

Xi’s ambitions to increase the yuan’s use in trade and finance would get a huge boost if Beijing made it fully convertible. Ditto for giving the PBOC independence from Communist Party meddling.

In the interim, though, US officials are doing Xi’s work for him as Washington takes for granted the dollar’s “exorbitant privilege,” as 1960s French Finance Minister Valéry Giscard d’Estaing put it.

The yuan wants a seat at the table as a global reserve currency. Image: iStock

One can connect dots back decades, but the last four presidents all share in the blame. George W Bush, president from 2001 to 2009, blew Washington’s budget surplus on a giant tax cut for the wealthy. Then he launched a costly and credibility-slamming war on terror.

Next, Barack Obama (2009-2017) failed to treat the underlying causes of the Lehman Brothers crisis, tending to the symptoms instead. It was on his watch that Republicans played around with the government’s debt ceiling. In 2011, S&P Global Ratings yanked away Washington’s AAA credit rating.

Donald Trump’s arrival in 2017 saw another budget-busting tax cut, one that dwarfed Bush’s. Trump’s China trade war, meanwhile, undermined trust in US leadership. His browbeating of Fed chairman Jerome Powell into cutting rates was followed by one of the world’s most incompetent Covid-19 responses, resulting in an unthinkable one million-plus deaths.

Joe Biden’s arrival in 2021 saw a fresh explosion of government spending. It added to an already chronic public debt challenge and pumped money into an economy already running hot amid supply chain turmoil. Biden hasn’t worked fast enough to increase productivity to take the onus off the Fed to curb inflation.

Fast forward 671 days and dollar selling is picking up speed. To some extent, this reflects investors betting that the days of the Fed’s hiking of rates in 75 basis-point intervals are over. Yet the warning signs from central banks racing to buy gold are hard to ignore.

The yellow metal is shining at the moment thanks to its nature of not being “another nation’s liability,” says Nikos Kavalis, managing director at precious metals consultancy Metals Focus. “We think overall central banks will remain net buyers” for the foreseeable future.

Some of this rationale reflects the difficult public debt calculus now dawning on global markets. Economist Emre Tiftik at the Institute of International Finance notes that the global debt-to-GDP ratio — near 343% — is now 20 percentage points lower than its peak in Q1 2021, “helped by strong growth and flattered by inflation.”

However, he says, “the emerging market debt-to-GDP ratio continues to rise, notably in the financial sector.”

Tiftik explains that global debt issuance adjusted for inflation is now at multi-year lows. Yet “as governments look to support growth and meet higher funding needs, 2023 should see more sovereign issuance” at a moment when currency depreciation is “creating additional headwinds for borrowers, including in mature markets with US dollar liabilities.”

Bottom line, Tiftik says, the “global sovereign interest bill is set to increase rapidly,” notably for sub-Saharan Africa but also in EM Europe and Asia. This explains some of why demand for gold is surging.

Whether central banks’ gold buying continues remains anyone’s guess. Economist Gregory Daco at EY Parthenon notes that it appears the Powell Fed “recalibrated monetary policy at the November FOMC meeting by adopting a new ‘speed versus destination’ paradigm – indicating an intention to reach a higher terminal fed funds rate while doing so at a slower pace.”

Jerome Powell is trying to bring down inflation while avoiding a recession Photo: AFP / Graeme Jennings

Daco adds that “central banks’ determination in tightening monetary policy aggressively along with the lagged effects of monetary policy on the economy increases the odds of an overtightening.”

US Fed Board of Governors member Christopher Waller said last week, “we’re not softening. Quit paying attention to the pace and start paying attention to where the endpoint is going to be. Until we get inflation down, that endpoint is still a way out there.”

In the interim, Beijing had been dumping US debt. Between the end of February and the end of September, China sold at least $121 billion of US Treasuries. That selling intensified around the time Vladimir Putin’s Russia invaded Ukraine.

Since July, China’s imports of gold from Russia have increased sharply. That month alone, China’s gold transactions surged to roughly 50 times the year-earlier level.

Granted, Beijing has been pruning its dollar holdings on and off since 2018, when Trump launched his trade war. At mid-year, China’s Treasuries stockpile was the lowest since 2010.

That was a year after then-Chinese premier Wen Jiabao said Beijing was “concerned about the safety of our assets” and urged Washington “to honor its words, stay a credible nation and ensure the safety of Chinese assets.”

Two years later, in 2011, S&P confirmed Wen’s darkest fears when it downgraded US government debt. That was in response to Republican lawmakers refusing to raise Washington’s statutory borrowing limit, risking default.

Now, as Republicans prepare to hold power in the House, there is chatter about holding the debt ceiling hostage again. This burn-it-all-down tactic would make it hard for Biden’s government to pay its bills. Fallout from a resulting default could dwarf the 2008 global crisis.

Fiscal profligacy, meanwhile, would leave Biden’s Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen little latitude if another Covid variant emerges and slams the economy. The resulting slowdown at a time of elevated inflation could spell doom for corporate profits and US stock prices.

This dynamic would unfold at a moment when the yuan is coming into its own. The latest figures from the Bank for International Settlements rank the yuan as the world’s fifth-most traded currency. China’s currency leapfrogged to fifth place from eighth in just three years.

The PBOC also is miles ahead of the Fed in creating a central bank digital currency. During the Beijing Olympics earlier this year, the e-yuan was used in limited fashion. It was a first for a major monetary authority, giving China a first-mover advantage in rewriting the future of money.

Yet Washington’s biggest fear now is that major monetary authorities will see a first-mover advantage to dump dollars. The way the US pulls off the magic trick of a massive and growing debt not causing yields to skyrocket is Asian savings. Along with Japan and China, Asia’s top 10 holders are sitting on about $3.5 trillion of US IOUs just as inflation surges the most in decades and political polarization deepens.

Gold bars are a good dollar hedge. Image: Twitter

Fed policy turmoil also matters. Analysts at UBS write that “investors have had mixed feelings towards gold in 2022, in part due to the crosscurrents of rising real rates and a strong dollar (bearish gold) versus high inflation and elevated macro uncertainty (bullish gold).” They expect the Fed to begin cutting rates in 2023 from 5.0% to 3.25%, driving gold up to 1,900 an ounce from about $1,740 now.

China’s assumed gold hoarding comes at the dollar’s expense, suggesting the momentum for the yuan’s use as a reserve currency is accelerating. Of course, China’s economic stumble this year bears watching. Xi’s growth-killing “zero Covid” lockdowns pushed GDP growth to the slowest pace in 30 years. That’s added pressure on a cratering property market.

As even China bull Ray Dalio, founder of hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, notes, there’s great “confusion” over whether Xi is easing up on his draconian Covid lockdowns — or doubling down.

As economist Tyran Kam at Fitch Ratings notes, “we expect the government to take further steps to stabilize the sector. However, policies aimed at supporting home demand will remain measured and selective, as the government avoids policies that could lead to home-price reflation.

“The direction of the ‘zero-Covid’ policy and timely delivery of pre-sold homes are also key factors to homebuyers’ sentiment. Effective implementation of recently announced measures to support private developers is also important for liquidity.”

Yet the longer-term trajectory for global currency markets remains dollar-negative as China and other top Treasuries-holding powers switch into an asset John Maynard Keynes once dismissed as a “barbaric relic.” That relic is now flashing red alert for dollar bulls.

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Huawei Technologies is eyeing new emerging markets and novel strategies in response to setbacks and sanctions on its expansion plans in the West, company chairman Liang Hua said at a corporate forum held this week in Shenzhen.

Liang said at the “Connectivity+: Innovate for Impact” forum held on Wednesday (November 23) that Huawei plans to provide telecommunication services to 120 million people in rural areas across 80 countries by 2025. In particular, he said the Chinese tech giant is targeting new markets in Southeast Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

That marks a hard strategic pivot for the embattled technology firm. In May 2019, the US Commerce Department put Huawei and its 70 affiliates on its Entity List and banned the sale of hardware and software involving US technology to Huawei and its subsidiaries.

Those punitive measures, imposed in the name of national security, have included a ban on the use of Huawei-made products in the US as well as blocks on the sale of US-made high-end chips to the company. The US has also barred Huawei’s use of Google’s Android operating system.

The United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan and Taiwan have all said they would follow suit. Some European countries such as France and Germany have not announced formal official bans on Huawei’s products but analysts believe even those countries have “implicit” bans in place.

Those sanctions have torpedoed Huawei’s bottom line. The company announced in August that its net margin declined by nearly 50%, from 9.8% to 5%, in the first half of 2022 compared to the same period last year. Huawei’s net profit fell by 52% to 15.1 billion yuan over the same period.

In response, Huawei’s founder, chief executive Ren Zhengfei, wrote in an internal memo in late August that the company will shut down or reduce its unprofitable businesses and focus more on its high-value lines in the coming years.

“Our respite period is 2023 and 2024. We are not sure whether we can achieve any breakthroughs these two years,” Ren said in the memo. “Therefore, everyone should now not present concepts but talk about reality, especially in business forecasting.”

Six main businesses

Wednesday’s forum appeared to outline at least one aspect of the company’s new international strategy.

The event was attended via the internet by ministers and regulators in Cambodia, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Pakistan and South Africa. Industry experts from South Africa, Belgium and Germany were also in virtual attendance.

Liang said Huawei’s six main businesses are information and communications technology infrastructure, terminal devices, digital power, cloud, intelligent automotive solutions and its fabless semiconductor business branded as Hisilicon.

“Our vision and mission are to bring digital technologies to every home and organization,” Liang said. “We will apply innovative technologies to our solutions so that we can enable connectivity and reach people’s lives.”

Huawei held its CSD Forum in Shenzhen on November 23, 2022. Photo: screenshots

“Over the past few years, we have made a lot of efforts working out the problems with our products, solutions and services,” he said in comments on Western sanctions. “We will continue to work on our supply issues so that we can continue to supply our products and services to our customers in the future.”

While expanding overseas, Liang said Huawei would also be mindful of its social responsibilities. He said one of the company’s latest efforts was to join the International Telecommunication Union’s Partner2Connect digital alliance.

The ITU is a specialized United Nations agency responsible for information and communication technologies (ICTs) that seeks to facilitate international connectivity in communications networks and improve access to underserved communities worldwide. 

Huawei on Wednesday signed an agreement to join P2C and targeted the provision of connectivity to about 120 million people in remote areas in more than 80 countries by 2025. Currently, the company has already connected 60 million people overseas in a dozen countries, it said.

ITU Deputy Secretary-General Malcolm Johnson said Huawei could help improve connectivity in rural places. Photo: Screenshot

 

ITU Deputy Secretary-General Malcolm Johnson said expanding telecommunication services in rural areas refers not only to connectivity but also to affordability. 

Johnson said Huawei’s commitment to the P2C alliance would help improve connectivity and digital skills in rural areas. 

Siddharth Chatterjee, United Nations resident coordinator in China, said policymakers, telecommunication service providers, academia and civil society should join hands to end the “digital divide,” which excludes a third of the global population from connectivity. 
 
In 2018, Huawei launched a pilot program called RuralStar in the African country of Ghana to connect people in remote areas.

Cao Ming, president of wireless solutions at Huawei, said he hopes developing countries will open their markets and launch supportive policies to extend internet connections down more roads and into rural areas.

Cao said a lack of affordable terminal devices is the main problem for low connectivity in rural places. 

“We all know that 4G is 10 times faster than 3G. But in Africa, upgrading 3G terminal devices to 4G costs an extra US$8 per person, making most users stick to 3G services,” he said.

Cao said Huawei has successfully lowered costs by erecting poles instead of building expensive towers and bases, and using solar energy to power the equipment in rural areas in Ghana. He said about 2,000 RuralStar sites have connected 3.2 million people with each pole serving about 1,000 to 2,000 people in Ghana. 

Cao added that the model has been replicated in a dozen other countries as local governments and telcos are now more motivated by the shortened payback time, which he said is now about one to three years. 

Middle East and Southeast Asia

Last year, the US pressed the United Arab Emirates to remove Huawei from its telecommunications network or it would halt an earlier agreement to supply the country with F-35 fighter jets. In July this year, Washington signed an agreement to develop 5G and 6G networks in Saudi Arabia in a bid to reduce Huawei’s influence in the oil-rich kingdom.

In October 2021, Huawei Digital Power, a unit of Huawei Technologies, said it won a contract to set up a solar energy system for the Red Sea Project, a mega-property project in Saudi Arabia. The company will integrate its digital information technology with photovoltaic and energy storage technologies in the project.

Saudi customers at a Huawei store in Riyadh. Image: Facebook

“We expect the Middle East to become a major technology hub in the future,” Liang said. “The Middle East can build more data centers and use their high-computing power and artificial intelligence technologies to build smart cities and boost the digital economy.” 

Liang said the Middle East can adopt solar energy more easily than other places due to its longer daytime.

He added that Southeast Asian countries such as Indonesia already have well-established infrastructure and thus it’s a good time to develop more applications by integrating 5G and AI technologies into manufacturing and agricultural businesses. 

He said online education, medical services and e-government represent good business opportunities for Huawei in the region. 

Source

Turkey’s Kizilelma drone has just completed taxi and takeoff run tests in preparation for its first flight, a significant move in actualizing its drone carrier concept and possibly augmenting its indigenous 5th generation fighter program.

Turkish drone maker Baykar unveiled a video of its Kizilelma drone performing taxi and takeoff run tests at the Akinci Flight Training and Test Center at Corlu, in northwestern Turkey, as reported by Aerotime Hub this week. Defense publication Janes notes that these tests are crucial for the Kizilelma’s first flight, which is anticipated in 2023.

“Our goal was to run at slightly slower speeds in the first takeoff roll test, but we exceeded the limit. Thanks to God, Kizilelma completed the first autonomous taxi and takeoff test,” said Selçuk Bayraktar, Baykar chairman of the board and chief technology officer in Baykar’s video.

Aerotime Hub notes that the Kizilelma was first announced in July 2021 as a stealthy unmanned combat aircraft with characteristics akin to manned fighter jets.

It has a maximum takeoff weight of six tons, a 1,500-kilogram payload capacity and can conduct air-to-air and air-to-ground missions. In addition, it is likely to be equipped with various air-to-air and air-to-ground munitions developed by Turkey’s domestic defense industry.

Air Recognition mentions that the Kizilelma features a low radar cross-section (RCS) airframe and is equipped with an active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar. In addition, it achieves yaw control using vertical stabilizers and has coupled canard controls for increased maneuverability or for directing airflow to its main wings.

The Kizilelma drone on display. Image: AutoEvolution / Screengrab / Twitter

The same article notes that Kizilelma features an internal weapons bay to preserve stealth while operating in defended airspace.

It is powered by a single Ukrainian non-afterburning Ivchenko-Progress AI-25TLT turbofan engine, giving it a flight range of 930 kilometers, a maximum operating altitude of 10,668 meters, a top speed of 900 kilometers per hour and five-hour flight endurance.

In an article for The Warzone this month, Thomas Newdick mentions that later versions of the Kizilelma will have supersonic flight capability, reduced-observable characteristics and be able to conduct missions typically assigned to manned fighter jets.

He notes that using a drone for air-to-air missions may require advancements in flight software, artificial intelligence, command and control, and processing power that may still be beyond Turkey’s technological capabilities.

Newdick mentions that future versions of the Kizilelma may be powered by the afterburning Ivchenko-Progress AI-322F engine for supersonic flight and that there is a twin-engine variant under development.

The Kizilelma may soon operate as a replacement for the F-35 aboard Turkey’s light aircraft carrier, the TCG Anadolu. In 2017, the US removed Turkey from the F-35 program due to its controversial purchase of Russia’s S-400 air defense systems.

That forced Turkey to look for alternative aircraft to operate from the TCG Anadolu, such as its Hürjet light attack aircraft or planned TB-3 naval drone.

Asia Times has previously reported that Turkey envisions operating naval versions of the Bayraktar TB-2 from the TCG Anadolu, dubbed the TB-3, which is still under development. It is projected to have a takeoff weight of 1,450 kilograms, 24-hour flight endurance and foldable wings for shipboard storage. The TCG Anadolu is envisioned to be able to carry 30 to 50 drones.

Newdick notes that Turkey must modify the TCG Anadolu and Kizilelma to enable carrier operations between the two. He notes that, in its present form, the Kizilelma’s landing gear appears to be too lightweight to handle the stress of carrier takeoffs and landings and it is unclear if the Kizilelma has enough engine power for a ski-ramp launch.

Artist impression of UAV’s launching from aboard the Anadolu. Image: Baykar Defense

He also notes that Baykar officials have stated that the TCG Anadolu will be equipped with arrestor cables to recover drones.

“To give UAVs takeoff and landing ability on aircraft carriers, their structure must be strong because they are subjected to very high G-shocks. We aim to develop a new unmanned combat aerial vehicle UCAV that will successfully land and take off on LHD Anadolu in one year,” said Baykar CEO Haluk Bayraktar in a March 2021 article for Defense News.

However, Air Recognition notes that the Kizilelma is designed in a way that enables takeoff and landing from the TCG Anadolu without the need for a catapult system.

The Kizilelma may put Turkey into a small group of states operating loyal wingman drones. Asia Times has previously reported on the role of such drones as force multipliers, flying alongside manned aircraft and enhancing the latter’s capabilities.

Australia, China, Russia, the US and now possibly Turkey have developed such drones to complement their manned combat aircraft fleets.

These loyal wingmen drones reflect the need for mass-produced, expendable drones that provide a numbers advantage or act as mass decoys for a swarming force. They also can extend manned aircraft sensor and weapon ranges by performing reconnaissance and designating targets. At the same time, the latter stays beyond the scope of enemy air defenses and maintains electronic silence.

As such, Turkey’s Kizilelma may soon be working with its indigenous fighter, which is currently under development. Asia Times has reported on Turkey’s joint effort with Pakistan to develop the TF-X 5th generation fighter to replace or complement their aging US F-16 fleets.

First announced in 2016, the TF-X is envisioned as a twin-engine multirole fighter with air-to-air and air-to-surface roles.

A full-size TF-X mockup. Photo: TRT World

Turkey and Pakistan plan to use a mixture of US and Russian technologies in the TF-X, as Turkey produces the US General Electric F118 engine under license. In addition, Russia can provide other necessary subsystems such as avionics and propulsion systems, radar, sensors, ejection seats and data links.

However, Turkey and Pakistan have faced significant challenges in the project. The US may block the transfer of jet engine technology to Turkey due to the latter’s mentioned controversial purchase of Russia’s S-400 surface-to-air missiles.

For Pakistan, the imprecise objectives and deadlines of its national project to produce its fighter jet hint at a limited budget and technological base.

The Kizilelma may thus signify a trend of lesser military powers creating affordable, small, robotized air forces which can project power, stage precision strikes, and in the future, conduct unmanned air defense missions that are presently performed by costly manned platforms. 

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Getting bigger and heavier as you age is something that many of us can relate to. Even the sportiest of cars is not immune to this unfortunate expansion. The Porsche 911 weighed just 2,400 lbs (1,089 kg) when new in the early 1960s and was only 165 inches (4,191 mm) long. Since then, it has grown by over a foot (300 mm) and has packed on over 800 pounds (363 kg).

Mind you, the 911 is still a stellar car, sublime really, but that expanded girth has changed the Carrera from a proper sports car to something that sits on the sporty side of a comfortable touring machine. Now, though, with the return of the Carrera T, the 911 is going back to its roots—again. After spending a lovely evening carving canyons in California, I'm happy to say that the result is remarkable.

The T in Carrera T actually stands for "touring," but that's a bit of a misnomer. Here it's a designation for a lighter-weight, edgier, more engaging flavor of Carrera. The first Carrera T premiered way back in 1968, a simpler 911 that most famously conquered the Monte Carlo Rally at the hands of Vic Elford.

After 1973, that model was retired and was resurrected in 2017 for the then-current 991.2. Since then, Porsche has slapped a T onto the 718 Cayman, 718 Boxster, and even the Macan, always signifying something a bit pared back and performance-forward.

What did Porsche do to craft the new 911 Carrera T? Well, it starts with a base Carrera, with rear-wheel-drive, 379 hp (283 kW), and 331 lb-ft of torque coming from a 3.0 L, twin-turbocharged flat-six engine. That's well less than the 443 ponies (330 kW) the Carrera S offers and far below the GTS's 473 (352 kW), but trust me when I say it's more than enough. More on that in a moment.

Porsche then paired that with a seven-speed manual transmission, augmented by a subtle short-shift kit, though an eight-speed PDK transmission is available as a no-cost option if you'd rather not row your own. Porsche's torque-vectoring, limited-slip rear differential is available if you opt for that transmission, and regardless of pedal count you can optionally outfit a rear-steering system.

Interestingly, those two options aren't available on the base Carrera. That alone makes the T an enticing choice, but the exclusivity doesn't stop there. Porsche also outfitted lightweight glass and a slinkier battery, whittled out some of the sound-deadening material, and even deleted the rear seat. The net result is a 911 with many desirable performance options priced at $116,600. That's $10,500 more than a base Carrera but 100 pounds (45 kg) lighter.

Mind you, it still weighs 3,254 lbs (1,472 kg). Not exactly Spyder territory, but that reduced weight, plus the 10 mm-lower adaptive suspension and all the other sporty options, result in a Carrera that sounds and feels significantly different from the base machine. And, with gray staggered wheels—20 inches at the front and 21 at the rear—plus some subtle graphics on the door, it looks the part, too.

I honestly didn't know what to expect as I drove through LA traffic on my way to the Angeles Crest outside Pasadena. As I cruised down the highway, other than a little more road noise and a little extra squeeze from the sublime Full Bucket Seats (a $5,900 option), it all felt pretty much like any other Carrera. In other words: no real compromises.

Off the highway, as the road began to climb and double back on itself, my perspective changed. The Carrera T really came alive. A quick spin of the mode selector on the steering wheel brought me into Sport Plus and, with the sport exhaust open and the throttle sharpened, I began to appreciate just how good this car was.

The T sliced through to every apex, rear-steering not only angling the rear wheels but bending the rules of physics that govern our lives. That shortened shifter reinforced that feeling. Shifts are abbreviated and firm, over before your arm has fully committed to the motion. Grabbing the next gear was such a joy that I hopped between ratios far more often than was strictly necessary.

And what about the 3.0 L flat-six engine that drove it all? It's plenty. Sure, various other versions of 911 offer far more power, but this 911 isn't about outright thrust. The Carrera T is about the experience. Just like a manual transmission boosts engagement at the cost of outright speed compared to a PDK, more power doesn't necessarily make a car more fun.

In my book, the Carrera T is the one to buy. At least, it is if you want to really maintain the taste of what the 911 was originally meant to be. Sure, Porsche's iconic coupe has grown a lot since 1964, but the pure feel of the Carrera T shows that its roots are still firmly planted.

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THE FALLOUT FROM the collapse of FTX just won’t stop—and now it’s threatening one of crypto’s most important institutions. On November 16, Genesis Global Capital’s lending unit suspended withdrawals due to “unprecedented market turmoil.” Now, the firm is seeking emergency funding of at least $500 million to ensure it has enough cash on hand to pay its customers. All the while, the crypto industry watches nervously.

On November 21, Genesis said it had “no plans to file for bankruptcy imminently,” but it has since appointed an external party to advise on its financial predicament. Such moves have done little to calm twitchy customers. Halting withdrawals has been the precursor to multiple previous crypto collapses this year, including at FTX and Celsius. Genesis did not respond when asked to confirm whether bankruptcy was under consideration.

If Genesis were to fold, it would deliver another gut-punch to an industry already reeling from the fall of FTX, one of its most highly regarded companies. If an institution the size and standing of Genesis is vulnerable, can trust be placed in the stability of any crypto firm? Yes, the industry is expected to survive the ordeal, but the days of minimal oversight, generous funding, and rapid expansion are over.

The impact from the potential fall of Genesis should not be underestimated. It might not be as well known as FTX and other exchanges, but it’s crucial to the day-to-day operations of the crypto world. In 2021 alone, the company issued $131 billion in loans and set up $116.5 billion in trades; the Financial Times has described it as the Goldman Sachs of crypto. To fund these loans, Genesis borrows from individuals and institutions that own large quantities of coins, also known as whales, who receive a cut of profits in return. 

While the market was hot, so was Genesis. But as the price of crypto tumbles, and trust in large crypto companies bleeds away, Genesis risks becoming the latest example of a crypto giant failing to prepare for the worst. Not only might customers lose their money, but the collapse of an intermediary like Genesis threatens to “set crypto back several years,” says Brad Harrison, founder of decentralized lending protocol Venus. That’s because of how Genesis enables the flow of money between organizations—which is essential to the functioning of any industry.

When it launched in 2013, Genesis was the first over-the-counter bitcoin trading desk—somewhere traders could go to buy and sell large quantities of coins. But the company is now the largest crypto lender too, as well as the backbone for yield farming services provided by exchanges, which let customers earn interest on their holdings.

Harrison says Genesis has worked with many of the largest crypto organizations over the years, and it has wound its way into practically all corners of the cryptosphere. “It’s a household name.”

Genesis has been in trouble since July, when the hedge fund Three Arrows Capital (3AC) collapsed, taking with it $1.2 billion of the $2.36 billion it had borrowed from the firm. If someone defaults on their mortgage, the bank can seize the property to recoup the full value of the loan, but in this case Genesis didn’t have that option, because only part of the loan was secured against 3AC assets.

To ensure Genesis wasn’t hamstrung by the loss, its parent company, Digital Currency Group (DCG), bailed it out. But in the aftermath, Genesis cut 20 percent of its workforce to reduce costs and Michael Moro, its longtime CEO, stepped down.

Genesis again found itself on the wrong side of a collapse earlier this month; when FTX filed for bankruptcy on November 11, the firm lost $175 million stored with the exchange. Again, DCG intervened, providing a cash injection of $140 million.

But despite multiple DCG bailouts, Genesis has failed to escape the FTX fallout. Samson Mow, a prominent crypto pundit and ex-chief strategy officer at crypto infrastructure firm Blockstream, says the brokerage is struggling to fund a surge in the number of customers asking to redeem their crypto. This led to the suspension of withdrawals, which threatens to worsen the prevailing crisis of confidence and increase the likelihood of a rush on other lenders (say, BlockFi or Voyager Digital)—and so the contagion spreads.

But Mow says it’s important to understand that this is a liquidity problem, not a solvency problem. In other words, Genesis has enough assets to pay its debts, they’re just not readily available in cash form. For this reason, a bankruptcy “seems unlikely,” says Mow.

DCG also sought to play down the situation on Twitter, saying that the decision to suspend redemptions and stop issuing fresh loans was a “temporary action,” and that the problem is confined exclusively to the Genesis lending division, which means the trading and custody units will continue to operate as normal.

Nonetheless, the situation is serious enough for Genesis to seek additional funding, with crypto exchange Binance and private equity firm Apollo Global Management tapped as potential investors.

The Board of Supervisors Rules Committee comprise of supervisors Aaron Peskin, Rafael Mandelman, and Connie Chan. Aaron Peskin initially attempted to restrict SFPD's authority over robots as a means of force. However, the police department struck out his suggestion with a thick red line (pictured below) and proposed their usage.

The wording was replaced by the department's ask for authorization to use military-style weapons-equipped robots that can be “used as a deadly force option when risk of loss of life to members of the public or officers is imminent and outweighs any other force option.”

An earlier version of this draft was unanimously accepted by the committee last week. However, as Peskin notes, “The original policy they submitted was actually silent on whether robots could deploy lethal force." However, he decided to approve SPFD's updated guidelines as the department made the case that “there could be scenarios where deployment of lethal force was the only option.”

As Mission Local reports, the draft policy has been criticized from advocates for its language on robot force. The SFPD has excluded its inventory of hundreds of assault rifles in the draft, as well as personnel costs in the price of its weapons.

Tafanei Moyer, a senior staff attorney at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, was rather less convinced with this idea. He said, “We are living in a dystopian future, where we debate whether the police may use robots to execute citizens without a trial, jury, or judge".

“This is not normal. No legal professional or ordinary resident should carry on as if it is normal", she added.

The SFPD currently has 17 robots as part of its arsenal out of which 12 are fully functional. The robots are remote-controlled ones and are typically used for investigation purpose, and tasks such as defusing a potential bombs, surveillance of areas which could be dangerous for police offers.

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“Fetal MRI is a highly specialized and safe examination method that allows us to make accurate statements about brain maturation prenatally,” said Gregor Kasprian, M.D., senior study author. He is an associate professor of radiology from the Department of Biomedical Imaging and Image-guided Therapy of the Medical University of Vienna in Austria.

Fetal alcohol spectrum disorders are a range of conditions that can affect the fetus if alcohol is consumed while pregnant. Babies born with fetal alcohol spectrum diseases may develop behavioral problems, speech and language delays, and learning disabilities.

“Unfortunately, many pregnant women are unaware of the influence of alcohol on the fetus during pregnancy,” said Patric Kienast, M.D., lead author on the study. “Therefore, it is our responsibility not only to do the research but also to actively educate the public about the effects of alcohol on the fetus.” Kienast is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Biomedical Imaging and Image-Guided Therapy, Division of Neuroradiology and Musculoskeletal Radiology at the Medical University of Vienna.

Left: Fetal brain post-intrauterine alcohol exposure in fetus between 25 and 29 gestational weeks. Note the smooth cortex in frontoparietal and temporal lobes. Right: Brain of matched healthy control case in fetus between 25 and 28 gestational weeks. The superior temporal sulcus is already bilaterally formed (red arrows) and appears deeper on the right hemisphere than on the left. Credit: RSNA and Patric Kienast, M.D.

 

Researchers analyzed MRI exams of 24 fetuses with prenatal alcohol exposure for the study. At the time of MRI, the fetuses were between 22 and 36 weeks of gestation. Alcohol exposure was determined via anonymous surveys of the mothers. The questionnaires used were the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS), a surveillance project of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and health departments, and the T-ACE Screening Tool, a measurement tool of four questions that identify risk drinking.

In fetuses with alcohol exposure, the fetal total maturation score (fTMS) was significantly lower than in the age-matched controls, and the right superior temporal sulcus (STS) was shallower. The STS is involved in social cognition, audiovisual integration and language perception.

“We found the greatest changes in the temporal brain region and STS,” Dr. Kasprian said. “We know that this region, and specifically the formation of the STS, has a great influence on language development during childhood.”

Brain changes were seen in the fetuses even at low levels of alcohol exposure.

“Seventeen of 24 mothers drank alcohol relatively infrequently, with average alcohol consumption of less than one alcoholic drink per week,” Dr. Kienast said. “Nevertheless, we were able to detect significant changes in these fetuses based on prenatal MRI.”

Three mothers drank one to three drinks per week, and two mothers drank four to six drinks per week. One mother consumed an average of 14 or more drinks per week. Six mothers also reported at least one binge drinking event (exceeding four drinks on one occasion) during pregnancy.

According to the researchers, delayed fetal brain development could be specifically related to a delayed stage of myelination and less distinct gyrification in the frontal and occipital lobes.

The myelination process is critical to brain and nervous system function. Myelin protects nerve cells, allowing them to transmit information faster. Important developmental milestones in infants, such as language processing, rolling over, and crawling are directly linked to myelination.

Gyrification refers to the formation of the folds of the cerebral cortex. This folding enlarges the surface area of the cortex with limited space in the skull, enabling an increase in cognitive performance. When gyrification is diminished, functionality is reduced.

“Pregnant women should strictly avoid alcohol consumption,” Dr. Kienast said. “As we show in our study, even low levels of alcohol consumption can lead to structural changes in brain development and delayed brain maturation.”

It is unclear how these structural changes will affect brain development in these babies after birth.

“To assess this accurately, we need to wait for the children who were examined as fetuses at that time to get a little older, so that we can invite them back for further examinations,” Dr. Kienast said. “However, we can strongly assume that the changes we discovered contribute to the cognitive and behavioral difficulties that may occur during childhood.”

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“Women are better. The female advantage is consistent across time and life span, but it is also relatively small”, says Marco Hirnstein, professor at The University of Bergen, Norway.

Hirnstein is curious about how biological, psychological, and social variables influence sex/gender disparities in cognitive skills, as well as the underlying brain mechanisms.

Will the results finally put an end to bar arguments over who is better?

“So far, the focus has mostly been on abilities, in which men excel. However, in recent years the focus has shifted more towards women”, says Hirnstein.

We thought Women were better – and they are!

The origins of these sex/gender differences; nature vs nurture – and the potential consequences of these differences have been hotly debated topics in society. Do men and women possess different talents for different occupations?

Textbooks and popular science books indicate that women are better at word searching than males. For instance, when identifying nouns that start with the letter “F” or words that fall within a certain category, such as fruits or animals. Additionally, it has been established as a “fact” that women are better at remembering words. 

However, the real results are far more inconsistent than textbooks suggest: Other studies find a female advantage, some report a male advantage, and some find no advantage at all.

“Most intellectual skills show no or negligible differences in average performance between men and women. However, women excel in some tasks, while men excel in others on average”.

This might sound like stating the obvious, but Hirnstein and his colleagues point out how their findings can be useful in the diagnosis and in health care.

Critical relevance for the diagnosis of dementia

The results are relevant in at least two ways. First, they help to clarify whether the female advantage is real. Second, knowing about this sex/gender difference is important for interpreting the results of diagnostic assessments, in which those abilities are frequently tested.

For example, to determine whether somebody has dementia. Knowing that women are generally better in those tasks is critical to prevent being women under-diagnosed, due to their better average, baseline performance. And for men: That they are over-diagnosed, due to their lower average baseline performance.

Currently, many but not all assessments take sex/gender into account.

The Method is Meta

Hirnstein and his colleagues conducted a so-called “meta-analysis”, where they analyzed the combined data of all Ph.D. theses, master theses, and studies published in scientific journals they could find. This meta-analysis encompassed more than 500 measures from more than 350.000 participants.

The researchers found that women are indeed better. The advantage is small but consistent across the last 50 years and across an individual’s lifespan.

Moreover, they found that the female advantage depends on the sex/gender of the leading scientist: Female scientists report a larger female advantage, and male scientists report a smaller female advantage.

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Scientists debate the role of a virus in multiple sclerosis