The study, led by Israeli epidemiologist Hagai Levine, updates 2017 research which had come under scrutiny for only including North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.

The new study includes data from more than 57,000 men collected over 223 studies across 53 countries, making it the largest meta-analysis ever conducted on the subject.

With the additional new countries, it confirmed the 2017 finding that sperm counts have halved over the last four decades.

Between 1973 to 2018, the concentration of sperm in men not known to be infertile fell by more than 51 percent, from 101.2 million to 49 million sperm per millimeter of semen, the new study found.

"Furthermore, data suggest that this worldwide decline is continuing in the 21st century at an accelerated pace," said the study published in the journal Human Reproduction Update.

Sperm counts are dropping at a rate of around 1.1 percent a year, the research found.

More action and research is urgently needed "to prevent further disruption of male reproductive health," it added.

'We genuinely don't know why'

Sperm count is not the only factor that affects fertility—the speed of sperm movement, which was not measured in the study, also plays a crucial role.

And the lower sperm concentration of 49 million is still well above the range considered "normal" by the World Health Organization—between 15 million and 200 million sperm per milliliter.

Sarah Martins da Silva, an expert in reproductive Medicine at Scotland's University of Dundee not involved in the study, said it showed that the rate of decline in sperm count has doubled since 2000.

"And we genuinely don't know why," she added.

"Exposure to pollution, plastics, smoking, drugs and prescribed medication, as well as lifestyle, such as obesity and poor diet, have all been suggested to be contributory factors although effects are poorly understood and ill-defined."

Other experts said the new study did not resolve their skepticism about the 2017 research.

"I remain concerned about the quality of the data in the papers that were published, particularly in the far past," on which the analysis is based, Allan Pacey of the UK's University of Sheffield told AFP.

While hailing the "very elegant meta-analysis", Pacey said he believed we have "simply gotten better" at the difficult task of counting sperm, which could account for the falling rates.

But Martins da Silva dismissed critics of the study's results, saying that "the numbers and consistent findings are difficult to ignore".

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Phoenix-area emergency physician Dr. Nicholas Vasquez said his hospital admitted a growing number of chronically ill people and nursing home residents with severe COVID-19 this month.

"It's been quite a while since we needed to have COVID wards," he said. "It's making a clear comeback."

Nationally, new COVID cases averaged around 39,300 a day as of Tuesday—far lower than last winter but a vast undercount because of reduced testing and reporting. About 28,000 people with COVID were hospitalized daily and about 340 died.

Cases and deaths were up from two weeks earlier. Yet a fifth of the U.S. population hasn't been vaccinated, most Americans haven't gotten the latest boosters and many have stopped wearing masks.

Meanwhile, the virus keeps finding ways to avoid defeat.

The omicron variant arrived in the U.S. just after Thanksgiving last year and caused the pandemic's biggest wave of cases. Since then, it has spawned a large extended family of sub-variants, such as those most common in the U.S. now: BQ.1, BQ.1.1 and BA.5. They edged out competitors by getting better at evading immunity from vaccines and previous illness—and sickening millions.

Carey Johnson and her son Fabian Swain are photographed in their Germantown, Md., home on Monday, Nov. 14, 2022. Both Carey and Fabian have recovered from COVID. Credit: AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster

Carey Johnson's family got hit twice. She came down with COVID-19 in January during the first omicron wave, suffering flu-like symptoms and terrible pain that kept her down for a week. Her son Fabian Swain, 16, suffered much milder symptoms in September when the BA.5 variant was dominant.

Fabian recovered quickly, but Johnson had a headache for weeks. Other problems lingered longer.

"I was like, 'I cannot get it together.' I could not get my thoughts together. I couldn't get my energy together" said Johnson, 42, of Germantown, Maryland. "And it went on for months like that."

HOT SPOTS EMERGE

Some communities are being particularly hard hit right now. Tracking by the Mayo Clinic shows cases trending up in states such as Florida, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico.

In Arizona's Navajo County, the average daily case rate is more than double the state average. Dr. James McAuley said 25 to 50 people a day are testing positive for the coronavirus at the Indian Health Service facility where he works. Before, they saw just a few cases daily.

Carey Johnson and her son Fabian Swain are photographed in their Germantown, Md., home on Monday, Nov. 14, 2022. Both Carey and Fabian have recovered from COVID. Credit: AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster

McAuley, clinical director of the Whiteriver Indian Hospital, which serves the White Mountain Apache Tribe, said they are "essentially back to where we were with our last big peak" in February.

COVID-19 is part of a triple threat that also includes flu and the virus known as RSV.

Dr. Vincent Hsu, who oversees infection control for AdventHealth, said the system's pediatric hospital in Orlando is nearly full with kids sickened by these viruses. Dr. Greg Martin, past president of the Society of Critical Care Medicine, sees a similar trend elsewhere.

Pediatric hospitals' emergency departments and urgent care clinics are busier than ever, said Martin, who practices mostly at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta. "This is a record compared to any month, any week, any day in the past," he said.

Looking to the future, experts see the seeds of a widespread U.S. wave. They point to what's happening internationally—a BA.5 surge in Japan, a combination of variants pushing up cases in South Korea, the start of a new wave in Norway.

Fabian Swain stands in the entryway in his Germantown, Md., home, Monday, Nov. 14, 2022. Fabian and his mother, Carey Johnson, have recovered from COVID. Credit: AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster

Some experts said a U.S. wave could begin during the holidays as people gather indoors. Trevor Bedford, a biologist and genetics expert at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, said it could peak at around 150,000 new cases a day, about what the nation saw in July.

A new wave would be rough, said Dr. Mark Griffiths, medical director of the emergency department of Children's Health Care of Atlanta-Spalding Hospital. "So many systems are on the brink of just being totally overburdened that if we get another COVID surge on top of this, it's going to make some systems crack."

One bright spot? Deaths are likely to be much lower than earlier in the pandemic. About 1 in 2,000 infections lead to death now, compared with about 1 in 200 in the first half of 2020, Bedford said.

OMICRON'S YEARLONG REIGN

The same widespread immunity that reduced deaths also pushed the coronavirus to mutate. By the end of last year, many people had gotten infected, vaccinated or both. That "created the initial niche for omicron to spread," Bedford said, since the virus had significantly evolved in its ability to escape existing immunity.

Fabian Swain wears a Wolverine face mask in his Germantown, Md., home, Monday, Nov. 14, 2022. Fabian and his mother, Carey Johnson, have recovered from COVID. Credit: AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster

Omicron thrived. Mara Aspinall, who teaches biomedical diagnostics at Arizona State University, noted that the first omicron strain represented 7.5% of circulating variants by mid-December and 80% just two weeks later. U.S. cases at one point soared to a million a day. Omicron generally caused less severe disease than previous variants, but hospitalizations and deaths shot up given the sheer numbers of infected people.

The giant wave ebbed by mid-April. The virus mutated quickly into a series of sub-variants adept at evading immunity. A recent study in the journal Science Immunology says this ability to escape antibodies is due to more than 30 changes in the spike protein studding the surface of the virus.

Omicron evolved so much in a year, Bedford said, it's now "a meaningless term."

That rapid mutation is likely to continue.

"There's much more pressure for the virus to diversify," said Shishi Luo, head of infectious diseases for Helix, a company that supplies viral sequencing information to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Carey Johnson wears a butterfly face mask in her Germantown, Md., home on Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2022. Carey and her son Fabian Swain have recovered from COVID. Credit: AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster

Doctors said the best protection against the bubbling stew of sub-variants remains vaccination. And officials said Americans who got the new combination booster targeting omicron and the original coronavirus are currently better protected than others against symptomatic infection.

Dr. Peter Hotez, co-director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children's Hospital, said getting the booster, if you're eligible, is "the most impactful thing you could do."

Doctors also urge people to continue testing, keep up preventive measures such as masking in crowds, and stay home when sick.

"COVID is still a very significant threat, especially to the most vulnerable," said Dr. Laolu Fayanju of Oak Street Health in Cleveland, which specializes in caring for older adults. "People have to continue to think about one another. We're not completely out of the woods on this yet."

© 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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Hundreds of rare gold coins worth over $1.6 million were stolen from a Bavarian museum in a span of just nine minutes, Bavaria’s State Police announced on Wednesday.

The coins, unearthed during a 1999 archaeological dig near Manching, Bavaria, Germany, from what is considered the largest discovery of Celtic gold in the 20th century, were stolen from the Celtic and Roman Museum in Manching. The coins stolen were worth $1.6 million, said Rupert Gebhard, who heads the Bavarian State Archaeological Collection in Munich.

Dating back to 100 BCE, they showcase how the Celtic settlement at Manching had links across Europe, Gebhard said. Experts fear that, because stolen items are hard to sell in the public market, the coins will likely be melted down and sold for gold value – approximately 250,000 Euros, Gebhard added.

“(It) would be a total loss for us,” Gebhart added. Markus Blume, who serves as Bavaria's Minister for Science and Art, said the coins provided a glimpse into the daily lives of Bavarian residents over 2,000 years ago.

A CASTLE in Bavaria is illuminated in the tri-color. The author argues that terrorism seeks to bring the world back to the dark ages, when castles and human existence was brutish and religious zeal dictated the pattern of violence and life. (credit: REUTERS)

A daring robbery in just nine minutes

Deputy head of Bavaria’s State Criminal Police Guido Limmer said thieves cut the wires at a telecommunications hub about 1 km. from the museum, which disabled power in the area. In a nine-minute span, the thieves smashed display showcases and stole the entirety of Manching’s 1999 excavation.

“It’s clear that you don’t simply march into a museum and take this treasure with you. It’s highly secured and as such there’s a suspicion that we’re rather dealing with a case of organized crime.”
Markus Blume

“It’s clear that you don’t simply march into a museum and take this treasure with you,” Blume told public broadcaster BR. “It’s highly secured and as such there’s a suspicion that we’re rather dealing with a case of organized crime.”

Further, Limmer linked the robbery to prominent museum robberies from the past few years such as the 2019 robbery of Dresden’s Green Vault Museum, where up to $1 billion worth of diamonds, art and jewels was stolen.

“Whether there’s a link, we can’t say… We are in touch with colleagues to investigate all possible angles,” Limmer declared.

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We can probably all agree that it is good to be kind, moral to be kind, nice to be kind, but does it lead to success in life? After all, isn't kindness about putting other people's interests first? Doesn't it require self-sacrifice?

Yet consider these well-known people: James Timpson, boss of the Timpson chain of shoe repairers; Jacinda Ardern, the prime minister of New Zealand; and Gareth Southgate, one of the most successful managers that the England men's football team has ever had. All three of them are clearly "winners" in their fields, and yet all put kindness at the heart of their strategies for success.

What they have found is that taking a more compassionate and apparently "softer" approach to business, politics and sports management brings positive results, not just for the benefit of people who work for them, but for their own benefit too. The traditional notion that you have to be ruthless, driven and focussed on number one if you want to achieve success is being discredited.

There's a growing body of scientific evidence that kind people can be winners. In 2020 I was part of a team at the University of Sussex which carried out the biggest study of its kind on public attitudes to kindness. More than 60,000 people from 144 countries chose to fill in an extensive questionnaire called The Kindness Test which was launched on the radio shows I present – All in the Mind on BBC Radio 4 and Health Check on the BBC World Service.

When asked where people saw the most acts of kindness happening, the workplace did rather well, coming third after home and medical setting both as a place where people witnessed kind acts and where kindness was truly valued. So, a place that might have the reputation as cut-throat and impersonal, where people compete for positions, is home to more empathy and consideration than you might think.

England football manager Gareth Southgate's success has been built on empathy and compassion (Credit: Getty Images)

We do have to bear in mind that this was a self-selecting study, and at first sight, the results of a survey conducted by a branding consultancy of 1,500 people working in the UK were less positive, with only one in three respondents strongly agreeing that their immediate boss was kind, while a quarter considered the leader of their organisation to be unkind.

But dig a bit deeper into the results, and you find that respondents who did have kind bosses were more likely to say they would stay at their company for at least another year, that their team produced outstanding work and that their company was doing well financially. Meanwhile, 96% of the employees that took part in the survey said that being kind at work was important to them, suggesting that kindness at work does matter if an organisation wants to succeed.

This idea is backed up by research from Joe Folkman, a psychometrician based in the United States (psychometrics is a branch of psychology concerned with testing and measurement). He studied the 360-degree feedback ratings of more than 50,000 leaders and found the leaders rated by their staff as more likeable also tended to be rated highly on effectiveness. Perhaps more tellingly, scoring low on likeability and high on effectiveness was so rare that there was only a one-in-2000 chance of it happening. Folkman also found that the businesses with likeable leaders scored higher on a whole range of positive outcomes, including profitability and customer satisfaction.

It's notable that in the field of business research, kind leadership is more often referred to as "ethical" leadership, maybe because it sounds less soft. But whatever you decided to call it, studies have shown that it can result in a more positive atmosphere at work and that employees perform better too. Positive behaviour can cascade through the workplace, as seen in a study by the organisational psychologist Michelangelo Vianello from the University of Padua in Italy. He went to a public hospital near Padua and asked nurses questions about their managers, in confidence, including the extent to which they were fair and self-sacrificing and whether they stood up for the team. Where this was true, the nurses were more likely to report a desire to do something good for someone else, to be more like their boss or to become a better person.

The now-retired tennis champion Roger Federer has been held up as an example of a player who has achieved enormous success while being kind and approachable (Credit: Getty Images)

There's evidence that even small acts of kindness and co-operation by anyone can make a difference in a workplace. Within psychology there is something known as "organisational citizenship behaviour". An example might be getting the printer mended, rather than leaving it broken for the next person to find, or watering the plants in the office. These actions aren't required as part of the job, but if we carry them out, the working environment is a little better for everyone.

They matter more than you might expect. In 2009, a researcher from the University of Arizona called Nathan Podsakoff synthesised the findings of more than a 150 different studies into a meta-analysis and the results were clear. These sorts of behaviours, though small in themselves, were associated with higher job performance, productivity, customer satisfaction and efficiency.

Approval ratings of congressmen and congresswomen went down when they were uncivil in their speeches in the House, and up if they were more polite and generous

There's one arena in life where you might think there's no advantage in being kind and that's the dog-eat-dog world of politics. But even in politics there's evidence that a gentler or kinder style can still get you to the top, as Jacinda Ardern has shown in New Zealand. But what about more robust politicians such as Donald Trump? Doesn't his success show that a tough approach ultimately prevails?

Between 1996 and 2015, the academic Jeremy Frimer analysed the language used by members of the US Congress during floor debates. In his study, he showed that the approval ratings of congressmen and congresswomen went down when they were uncivil in their speeches in the House, and up if they were more polite and generous.

TV shows such as The Apprentice thrive on the idea that successful business leaders have to be ruthless and uncompromising (Credit: BBC)

More recently, Frimer's team analysed reactions to Donald Trump's tweets (before he was banned) and they found that very few of his supporters actively "liked" his nastier tweets. The tweets didn't stop them supporting him, but they carried on doing so despite, not because, of, his incivility.

Of course, there are still plenty of examples of people who do well in life who are self-centred and unkind to others. But the point is that despite what we might see in The Apprentice or Succession, you don't have to be hard-nosed and obnoxious to get on in business or other highly competitive walks of life.

You can't be a winner simply through being kind of course – you need motivation, dedication and skill too – but there's more and more evidence that showing some kindness as you pursue your goal is no barrier to success.

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Claudia Hammond is the author of The Keys to Kindness: How to be kinder to yourself, others and the world, published by Canongate.

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Oxford scientists crack case of why ketchup splatters from near-empty bottle

There was no prospect of getting any more oil out of the old well. It was just a depleted cavern hiding beneath the sun-baked Texas soil. But then some folks came along and squirted a special liquid into it. They went away for five days, and when they came back it was no longer an oil well. It had transformed into a hydrogen source.

Cemvita Factory, a biotech firm in Texas, had spritzed a carefully selected combination of bacteria and nutrients down the bore hole. Once inside the well, the microbes began breaking down the residual oil hydrocarbons in there—dregs that would be unprofitable to extract—to generate hydrogen and CO2. This field test in July, though small in scale, was a “huge success,” says chief business officer Charles Nelson.

Nelson would not comment on what bacteria and nutrients the company is using, but he says his firm aims to produce hydrogen for $1 per kilogram, which would be competitive against other methods of obtaining the fuel. He estimates there are more than 1,000 depleted oil wells dotted around the United States that are suitable for the same kind of microbial treatment: “A lot of these reservoirs are abandoned, they’re in the custody of the state, they’re orphaned and waiting to be cleaned up.” 

Hydrogen, which releases zero carbon emissions when burned, has long been touted as a future fuel. Even though it’s the most abundant element in the universe, with copious amounts on the Earth’s surface in molecules such as water, some effort is required to obtain large quantities of pure hydrogen. There’s a long list of techniques currently vying for supremacy. People have taken to color-coding them, and there is now a veritable rainbow to choose from.

There’s green hydrogen, where renewable energy is used to split water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen. Blue hydrogen, meanwhile, involves extracting hydrogen from natural gas. Cemvita Factory describes its product as “gold hydrogen”—“to pay homage to the past era of oil as the black gold and it now being used as a feedstock to make subsurface hydrogen,” says cofounder and CEO Moji Karimi.

Nelson explains that the firm’s goal is to treat oil wells with bacteria to enable steady, long-term hydrogen production—perhaps lasting for decades. Existing, disused infrastructure above and around the well for taking off gasses could be brought back into service in order to collect the hydrogen, he adds.

It will be important to prevent the CO2 byproduct from leaking into the atmosphere and contributing to climate change, however. Cemvita Factory argues that it can keep the CO2 locked underground, use other microbes to fix it somehow, or find commercial uses for the greenhouse gas. There could be barriers to simply storing it below ground, though. A major blue hydrogen project in Louisiana is currently on hold due to local opposition over a plan to store any CO2 generated beneath a lake, as some residents fear it could pollute local water resources. Exactly what solution Cemvita would use in each location—and how successfully—isn’t yet known. 

Capturing or otherwise neutralizing the CO2 must be done safely, says Stephen Wallace, who runs a microbiology lab at the University of Edinburgh. But he adds that Cemvita Factory’s idea of harnessing microbes for hydrogen production is “indicative of a lot of the really interesting work going on in biotechnology right now.” Wallace and his colleagues are themselves experimenting with bioreactors and have had some success in getting microbes to yield hydrogen from things like moldy bread or the lignin in paper industry waste.

But while some microbes help produce hydrogen, others are the scourge of these projects, as they can eat up stored hydrogen or consume the gas in natural wells, says Jon Gluyas, a geologist at Durham University. “We’re trying to keep bacteria away from our hydrogen because they love feasting on it,” he explains.

And he has another quibble. He argues that “gold hydrogen” is different from what Cemvita Factory is proposing. To Gluyas, that term refers specifically to hydrogen that has been produced naturally underground. He should know. “I named it,” he says. That Cemvita has given the same name to its hydrogen—which, the company makes clear, is “produced biologically, by microbes, and through a human-driven process”—is just a “coincidence,” Karimi claims.

For more than a century, geologists have been pondering how much of the natural hydrogen to which Gluyas refers could be freely available in the ground beneath our feet. The German scientist Ernst Erdmann described in 1910 how he had detected an outflow of hydrogen at a salt mine and tracked it for four and a half years. But the possibility of widespread subterranean sources was still poorly understood, even into the 1980s, says Barbara Sherwood Lollar, a geologist at the University of Toronto.

She recalls surveying sites for gasses back then and realizing that significant volumes of hydrogen were present in the ground. “Good lord, it was hydrogen, these rocks were full of hydrogen,” she remembers. Yes, the Earth hath bubbles. Since then, she and colleagues have mapped the locations of potential hydrogen sources—based on geology and known deposits—around the world.

Different processes can give rise to natural hydrogen wells. One example is radiolysis, in which subatomic particles naturally emitted by radioactive rocks such as granite cause certain molecules to break apart, releasing hydrogen. In general, hydrogen is associated with crystalline rocks, rather than sedimentary ones.

But as Gluyas mentions, microbes often gobble up hydrogen formed in the ground before anyone has had the chance to siphon it off. So the tricky part is finding a subterranean hydrogen source that is both large and intact. “No one, I think, can pronounce on whether or not these accumulations of hydrogen within the crystalline rocks … will be viable at scale,” says Sherwood Lollar.

Some firms are already targeting hydrogen deposits, though—such as the company Gold Hydrogen in Australia. It estimates that there could be a total of 1.3 billion kilograms of hydrogen at depths of around 500 meters in the Ramsay Peninsula and Kangaroo Island in South Australia. There is also a large and well-known source of hydrogen in Mali. Both this and the Australian deposits are associated with “fairy circles”—where bare patches in the middle of vegetation indicate that hydrogen is coming out of the ground. Commercial extraction of hydrogen from any such locations, at scale, has yet to happen.

Whether you call Cemvita Factory’s approach “gold hydrogen” or not, one advantage of it is that access to oil wells is reasonably straightforward—and they are often in well-serviced locations with nearby infrastructure for transporting gasses. Cemvita Factory is not the only firm to have considered this point. A completely different method of getting hydrogen out of old oil wells involves injecting oxygen into them to stimulate a flow of oil and chemical reactions that result in the production of hydrogen and other gasses. Canadian firm Proton Technologies has demonstrated this technique—which it refers to as “clear hydrogen.”

Hydrogen production linked to depleted oil wells is interesting, but such projects are still at a relatively early stage, argues Richard Lowes, senior associate at the Regulatory Assistance Project, a clean energy NGO. “I’m initially skeptical, particularly when you can produce hydrogen quite easily with electricity—it’s just easier,” he says. And he questions whether such technologies could potentially shore up fossil fuel firms and fossil-fuel-related industries, in contrast to hydrogen production systems that rely on renewables. If new oil wells can eventually be transformed into green energy sources, they may appear more palatable.  

All of these ideas for obtaining hydrogen are currently jostling for attention—and investment. That, and the abundance of this crucial element in so many different places explains the rich color palette of hydrogens now emerging. From green to blue, gold, clear, and beyond, no one yet knows what will triumph. As Gluyas says: “We’ll probably have more colors than Crown Paints by the end of this process.”

‘Gold Hydrogen’ Is an Untapped Resource in Depleted Oil Wells

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The resurgence of infections, nearly three years after the pandemic emerged in the central city of Wuhan, casts doubt on investor hopes for China to ease its rigid zero-COVID policy soon, despite recent more targeted measures.

The curbs are taking a toll on locked-down residents as well as output at factories, including the world's biggest iPhone plant, which has been rocked by clashes between workers and security personnel in a rare show of dissent.

"How many people have the savings to support them if things continually stay halted?" asked a 40-year-old Beijing man surnamed Wang who is a manager at a foreign firm.

"And even if you have money to stay at home everyday, that's not true living."

The streets of Chaoyang, the capital's most populous district, have been increasingly empty this week.

Sanlitun, a high-end shopping area, was nearly silent on Thursday but for the whirring of the e-bikes of delivery riders ferrying meals for those working from home.

Brokerage Nomura cut its China GDP forecast for the fourth quarter to 2.4% year-over-year from 2.8%, and cut its forecast for full-year growth to 2.8% from 2.9%, which is far short of China's official target of about 5.5% this year.

"We believe re-opening is still likely to be a prolonged process with high costs," Nomura wrote, also lowering its China GDP growth forecast for next year to 4.0% from 4.3%.

China's leadership has stuck by zero-COVID, a signature policy of President Xi Jinping, even as much of the world tries to co-exist with the virus, saying it is needed to save lives and prevent the medical system from being overwhelmed.

Acknowledging pressure on the economy, the cabinet said China would use timely cuts in bank cash reserves and other monetary policy tools to ensure sufficient liquidity, state media said on Wednesday, a hint that a cut in the reserve requirement ratio (RRR) may come soon.

China stocks fell on Thursday, as concerns over record-high domestic daily COVID-19 cases overshadowed optimism from fresh economic stimulus, and missing out on a rise in global stocks to two-month highs.

WIDESPREAD OUTBREAKS, LOCKDOWNS

Wednesday's 31,444 new local COVID-19 infections broke a record set on April 13, when the commercial hub of Shanghai was crippled by a city-wide lockdown of its 25 million residents that would last two months.

This time, however, big outbreaks are numerous and far-flung, with the biggest in the southern city of Guangzhou and southwestern Chongqing, although hundreds of new infections are reported daily in cities such as Chengdu, Jinan, Lanzhou and Xian.

Nomura estimates that more than a fifth of China's GDP is under lockdown, a share bigger than the British economy.

"Shanghai-style full lockdowns could be avoided, but they might be replaced by more frequent partial lockdowns in a rising number of cities due to surging COVID case numbers," its analysts wrote.

While official case tallies are low by global standards, China tries to stamp out every infection chain, a tougher challenge as China faces its first winter battling the highly contagious Omicron variant.

China recently began loosening some norms on mass tests and quarantine, as it looks to avoid catch-all measures such as city-wide lockdowns.

Instead, cities have been using more localised and often unannounced lockdowns. Many people in Beijing said they recently received notices about three-day lockdowns of their housing compounds.

The far northeastern city of Harbin announced lockdowns of some areas on Thursday.

Many cities have returned to mass testing, which China had hoped to cut back as costs rise. Others, including Beijing, Shanghai and the Hainan island resort city of Sanya, have limited movements of recent arrivals.

The central city of Zhengzhou, where workers at the massive Foxconn factory that makes iPhones for Apple Inc staged protests, announced five days of mass testing in eight districts, becoming the latest to revive daily tests for millions of residents.

A sharper than expected slowdown in China, which is hurting domestic demand in particular, would reverberate across countries including Japan, South Korea and Australia, which export hundreds of billions of dollars worth of products and commodities to the world's second largest economy.

(Reporting by Beijing and Shanghai newsrooms; Writing by Bernard Orr; Editing by Tony Munroe, Clarence Fernandez and Raissa Kasolowsky)

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Horizon Quantum Computing is recruiting for at least 10 roles in Dublin, with the city to be a focus for software engineering in particular.

Horizon Quantum Computing, a Singapore-based company founded by Irishman Dr Joe Fitzsimons, is planning to expand into Dublin.

The new Dublin office will be the company’s first base outside Singapore. It will look to serve customers in Europe and attract talent from the region.

Speaking to SiliconRepublic.com, Fitzsimons confirmed that there are at least 10 positions earmarked for Ireland, with the possibility of more.

Recruitment is already underway for several roles in Dublin, with the region to be a focus for software engineering, in particular.

“We recently advertised a director of engineering role in Dublin, so we’ll be hiring at quite a senior level,” said Fitzsimons, adding that there is also a range of jobs for software engineers of all experience levels.

Fitzsimons, a quantum physicist who is currently based in Singapore, founded Horizon Quantum Computing in 2018. He has more than 18 years of experience in his field and holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford on quantum computing architectures.

As well as Fitzsimons, who is CEO, the leadership team at Horizon Quantum Computing includes chief science officer Dr Si-Hui Tan, who holds a PhD in physics from MIT and has been actively involved in quantum research for 18 years.

The company focuses on developing a new generation of programming tools to simplify and expedite the process of developing software for quantum computers.

It is working to remove the need for prior quantum computing experience for those who want to develop applications for quantum hardware.

Since quantum computing is still an emerging technology, Fitzsimons said that some of the more experienced, senior or expert-level roles – particularly those which are scientific in nature – will be filled wherever the company can find suitable candidates.

These may be in Singapore, Ireland or further afield, he said. However, Fitzsimons is confident that his company will be able to fill out its team in Ireland. It is currently looking at office spaces here to establish a physical presence in the city.

He mentioned the fact that Trinity College Dublin has a number of industry-led postgraduate programmes in quantum computing as a promising sign that there is a pipeline of skilled people beginning to emerge in the sector here.

Horizon Quantum Computing is hoping to positively influence the further development of this skills pipeline by providing internships to graduates.

For more information on careers at Horizon Quantum Computing, visit its website.

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When you consider that each lighting strike travels at more than 320,000 kilometers per hour, that's a massive amount of electricity.

Ever wondered about lightning? For the past 50 years, scientists around the world have debated why lightning zig-zags and how it is connected to the thunder cloud above.

There hasn't been a definitive explanation until now, with a University of South Australia plasma physicist publishing a landmark paper that solves both mysteries.

Dr. John Lowke, former CSIRO scientist and now UniSA Adjunct Research Professor, says the physics of lightning has stumped the best scientific minds for decades.

"There are a few textbooks on lightning, but none have explained how the zig-zags (called steps) form, why the electrically conducting column connecting the steps with the cloud remains dark, and how lightning can travel over kilometers," Dr. Lowke says.

The answer? Singlet-delta metastable oxygen molecules.

Basically, lightning happens when electrons hit oxygen molecules with enough energy to create high energy singlet delta oxygen molecules. After colliding with the molecules, the "detached" electrons form a highly conducting step—initially luminous—that redistributes the electric field, causing successive steps.

The conducting column connecting the step to the cloud remains dark when electrons attach to neutral oxygen molecules, followed by immediate detachment of the electrons by singlet delta molecules.

Why is this important?

"We need to understand how lightning is initiated so we can work out how to better protect buildings, airplanes, skyscrapers, valuable churches, and people," Dr. Lowke says.

While it is rare for humans to be hit by lightning, buildings are hit many times, especially tall and isolated ones (the Empire State Building is hit about 25 times each year).

The solution to protect structures from lightning strikes has remained the same for hundreds of years.

A lightning rod invented by Benjamin Franklin in 1752 is basically a thick fencing wire that is attached to the top of a building and connected to the ground. It is designed to attract lightning and earth the electric charge, saving the building from being damaged.

"These Franklin rods are required for all buildings and churches today, but the uncertain factor is how many are needed on each structure," Dr. Lowke says.

There are also hundreds of structures that are currently not protected, including shelter sheds in parks, often made from galvanized iron, and supported by wooden posts.

This could change with new Australian lightning protection standards recommending that these roofs be earthed. Dr. Lowke was a committee member of Standards Australia recommending this change.

"Improving lightning protection is so important now due to more extreme weather events from climate change. Also, while the development of environmentally-friendly composite materials in aircraft is improving fuel efficiency, these materials significantly increase the risk of damage from lightning, so we need to look at additional protection measures.

"The more we know about how lightning occurs, the better informed we will be in designing our built environment," Dr. Lowke says.

The paper, "Toward a theory of stepped leaders in lightning" is published in the Journal of Physics -- Applied Physics. It is authored by Dr. John Lowke and Dr. Endre Szili from the Future Industries Institute at the University of South Australia.

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Pale green hills dazzle against a lead-gray sky. In the foreground, two beggar girls sit on the grass. One has just turned her head to look over her shoulder. Behind her, a double rainbow extends over the nearby buildings. The second girl, older, has her eyes closed and her chin slightly raised, as if listening to something in the distance, an act of flamboyant disdain for the colorful phenomenon. The secret is revealed by the title of the painting by John Everett Millais: “The Blind Girl.”

The sun, seeming to shine from behind the observer, warms the blind girl’s face. She is calm, combing the soft grass with one hand, and squeezing her companion’s hand with the other. Although the expression on the other girl’s face is not visible, one can guess that it is full of delight, perhaps tainted with fear at the sight of the storm clouds behind the rainbow. On the one hand, immersion in a nature devoid of light; on the other, fascination with a dramatic weather spectacle. Looking at this picture, we can’t help but wonder which of these experiences would allow us to “see” more. Millais gives his answer: on closer inspection, the sign hanging around the older girl’s neck reads “Pity the blind.”

Dual Arcs

A skilled eye will quickly notice the painter’s precision. Perched on the roofs of the village, the rainbow appears opposite the direction from which the sun is shining—exactly as it should be. It is a double rainbow; in fact, almost every rainbow is accompanied by a faint, paler copy. The color order of the outer arc in Millais’s painting is the reverse of the inner arc, just like in reality. Interestingly, the artist initially painted both rainbows the same way, with red at the top of the arcs. He made the change later in order to present the optical phenomenon correctly according to the laws of physics.

However, there is something else in Millais’s painting that becomes clearer after considering how rainbows are formed. The rainbow often features in paintings and texts as something tangible, constructed of a mysterious, luminous material. This is the case in Greek mythology, where the rainbow is personified by the goddess Iris, and similarly in Norse legends, where the rainbow is a bridge guarded by Heimdall that leads to the realm of the gods, Asgard. However, a rainbow is in fact not a physical object, but a projection created when light is bent and scattered by water droplets hanging in the air. Therefore, each person sees a specific rainbow, and the rays of light that comprise the arc reach each person’s eyes differently. Two people standing side by side will see it in a slightly different space, perhaps with varying tone or intensity. We “see” the rainbow from “The Blind Girl” as observers of the whole scene. This means that the young girl with her head turned away sees a different rainbow, her own; it is one that the viewer will never see, for they would have to become that girl, enter the picture, abandon the role of observer.

Personal Rainbow

For a long time, the idea of having one’s “own” rainbow struck me as something completely abstract. It is hard to accept that a “structure” the size of a rainbow, linking the sky with the earth, could be something ephemeral, no more real than the “sunbeams” projected onto a wall by a mirror being twisted back and forth. Despite its apparent size, the rainbow is a fleeting mirage, the product of two interacting components—light, and the water contained in the atmosphere—its beauty reserved for a single viewer.

It was a fascinating stroke of the obvious that made me aware of this property of rainbows during a late afternoon flight from Munich to Kraków. As the plane neared its destination and began to descend, it cut through a bank of cumulonimbus clouds and into the dense sheet of rain beneath—all in the bright orange glow of the setting sun.

At that point, the passengers and crew became participants in a spectacular physics experiment showing what a rainbow looks like when observed not from the ground—which usually obscures the rainbow’s lower half—but from the air. Yes, rainbows have a second half. This is generally invisible to us, because the ground we walk on hinders us from seeing it. A complete rainbow is a perfect circle, centered on the axis connecting our eye to the sun. And this is precisely what met my eyes (and every other pair of eyes looking out of the plane’s window during that flight—each slightly differently, of course).

The light of the sun approaching the horizon behind the plane was already yellow-orange, not white, so the rainbow did not have its usual multicolored appearance. Filtered out from the sunlight, the cold colors—blue and purple—were not visible, but the rainbow still looked spectacular. A glistening halo appeared around the nose of the plane, a complete circle painted in red, yellow, and soft strokes of green. Since this rainbow was mine, personal, private, it floated along with me and the plane. Although it seemed at every second that we would fly through it like a huge hula-hoop, the circle remained perfectly still in front of the nose of the plane and accompanied us almost all the way to landing, when its lower half was absorbed by the runway as it slid suddenly beneath the aircraft.

From Raindrop to Eye

Even when only half-visible, rainbows always make a colossal impression. Misunderstandings about them also abound. It is commonly believed that in order for a rainbow to be seen, it must be both raining and sunny. In simplified terms, this is true: besides sunlight, the creation of a rainbow relies on water being dispersed in the atmosphere. However, this does not guarantee that the phenomenon will appear every time the sun peeks out from behind the clouds on a rainy day.

The formation of a rainbow is caused not by water droplets suspended in the air around us, but in front of us. While standing in a downpour, we are unlikely to see a rainbow, even if the sun is out. But it is a different story when the air in front of us—even at a considerable distance—is filled with a suspension of tiny water droplets, whether falling as torrential rain, or sprayed into the air by a waterfall or fountain.

As the light enters each tiny water molecule, it is refracted and reflected internally, then refracted again, before flying out of the water droplet and hurtling towards the observer. This whole process takes place in each illuminated droplet, but only some of them are in just the right position with respect to the observing eye that they create the image of an arc of light. Because light of different wavelengths (and therefore different colors) refracts at the boundary between water and air at a slightly different angle, the white sunlight is split. Each color leaves the droplet at a slightly different angle relative to the direction of the sun’s rays—from 40.5° for violet to 42.4° for red. This rather specific combination of the positioning of the sun and water molecules is one of the reasons why rainbows tend to appear in the late afternoon or early morning. That is when the sun is low in the sky, so the chances of its rays illuminating a band of water droplets located directly in front of us are greater.

Another half-truth is the idea that the sun must be shining for the creation of a rainbow. One night in July, I unintentionally put this assumption to the test. I was on a nighttime owl-spotting walk with a group of friends in the Alpine village of Villa di Chiavenna on the border between Italy and Switzerland. The moon, almost full, hung low over the mountains. When we reached the small Acquafraggia waterfall, I was surprised to see a faint rainbow gleaming in the fog that enveloped the falling water. Its colors were muffled, somehow colder, but what I saw was a true rainbow—only it was created by the moonlight, not the sun.

Hello, Halo!

Even more interesting effects can be observed when the sun or moon shine through a veil of thin, delicate clouds suspended so high in the atmosphere that they are composed not of water but of ice crystals. These types of clouds include cirrus and cirrostratus, and they often evade attention, looking like a thin haze or whitish fibers floating in the sky. However, because they are made of tiny ice crystals with a very well-defined, hexagonal symmetry, they act like clouds of diamond dust, tiny prisms that diffract the light in a very specific way. From the physics perspective, the phenomena they create are as “personal” as rainbows. A given person sees an image projected by carefully selected ice crystals, precisely those that bend the sun’s rays towards that particular observer. The marriage of frozen water and light creates one of the most unusual celestial spectacles: a halo.

In fact, the halo is not really a single phenomenon, but several. The most common, and also the easiest to miss, is the 22° halo—a circle of light with that exact angular radius, formed around the sun or the moon due to the presence of chaotically scattered ice crystals with a rod-like structure (elongated, hexagonal prisms). This kind of halo often goes unnoticed, because it is typically hidden in the blinding glow of the sun or moon. However, it is worth taking a peek at the sky from time to time when its blue (or black, at night) is obscured by a thin layer of transparent clouds—especially since halos are not just circles of light.

In the most extreme cases, this phenomenon can turn the sky into an ominous spectacle, a kaleidoscope of reflections, glare, and the bright outlines of bewildering patterns and shapes. It all depends on how the water—trapped within the ice “diamonds” of the feathery clouds—is positioned relative to the sun and the observer. If the cloud contains microscopic ice pyramids, one might see a Bottlinger’s ring—an oval halo around the sun, making it look like a surreal eye. Flat ice plates oriented horizontally in relation to the observer will cause a phenomenon known as a sun dog, where the sun is flanked by fainter copies, often adorned with horizontal “whiskers.” In ancient times, this phenomenon was interpreted as a vision of the supposed site of Jesus’s crucifixion, Golgotha (with a large sun cross in the center and two smaller ones on either side).

Meanwhile, structured crystals oriented horizontally are responsible for Parry arcs­­—concave eruptions of light above (or less commonly, below) a circular 22° halo. There are many more possible configurations of ice, light, and air currents, and the complete list of light projections comprises a complex mirage of glowing lines and intersecting paths. It is hardly surprising that in ancient times, such phenomena were treated as a bad omen, a harbinger of great or dramatic events, a divine sign, or even a prelude to the apocalypse. It is known today that halos are simply a coincidence of several physical circumstances—although many details of the processes that take place are still unknown.

A Vision at Zawrat Pass

One winter’s morning, as I was hiking with two companions through the Zawrat Pass in the Tatra Mountains, the wind blowing from the Dolina Pięć Stawów valley whipped up a storm of dry snow and ice. In the frosty air, the cloud of water in the form of hexagonal crystals created the most extraordinary halo I have ever observed. I knew that phenomena of this kind can arise both as a result of high cirrus clouds, and so-called “diamond dust”—ice particles suspended low in the atmosphere. But that day in the Tatras I saw it all: a shimmering round halo, a Parry arc, a sun dog, and even a parhelic circle—a horizontal line of light seemingly threaded through the sun.

The most interesting thing about this phenomenon, however, was not its fantastic pomp, but just how very personal it was. The two climbers with me had to bend this way and that, craning their necks to get into my line of sight and see in the same detail what I was seeing. I suppose that’s why optical phenomena in the sky always evoke in me a kind of yearning that is impossible to measure or name. After all, it is highly poetic that pure, cold physics constructs the world in such a way that everyone can see their very own, personal rainbows, halos, and mountain spectra. One could even say that in this case, physics brings humans closer together, for it is only by perfectly adopting the perspective of someone else that one person can see these phenomena in the same way as another.

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The World Health Organization-led study called on young people to be more careful about their listening habits, and urged governments and manufacturers to do more to protect future hearing.

The analysis published in the journal BMJ Global Health looked at data from 33 studies published in English, Spanish, French and Russian over the last two decades covering more than 19,000 participants aged between 12-34.

It found that 24 percent of the young people had unsafe listening practices while using headphones with devices such as smartphones.

And 48 percent were found to have been exposed to unsafe noise levels at entertainment venues such as concerts or nightclubs.

Combining these findings, the study estimated that between 670,000 to 1.35 billion young people could be at risk of hearing loss.

The wide range is partly because some young people are probably at risk from both factors, said Lauren Dillard, an audiologist at the Medical University of South Carolina and the study's first author.

Dillard told AFP the best way for people to lessen their risk of hearing loss from headphones is to turn down the volume and listen for shorter periods.

"Unfortunately, people do really like very loud music," she admitted.

'Big impact' over lifetime

Headphone users should use settings. or apps on smartphones to monitor sound levels, Dillard advised.

In loud environments, noise-cancelling headphones can help avoid "cranking up your music to try to drown out all that background noise", she added.

Earplugs should be worn at loud events like concerts or nightclubs, she said, adding, "Maybe it's fun to be in the front by the speakers, but it's not a good idea for your long-term health.

"All of these behaviours, these exposures can compound over the course of your entire life, and then when you're 67 years old, it can have a pretty big impact," she said.

Dillard called on governments to comply with WHO guidelines on safe listening, including making sure venues monitor and limit music levels.

She also urged companies that make devices like phones to warn listeners when the volume is too loud, and to include parental locks to restrict children's exposure.

Limitations of the research included the varying methodologies across different studies and that none came from low-income countries.

Stephen Stansfeld, an expert on noise and health at Queen Mary University of London who was not involved in the research, said it showed "the potential for serious population-wide hearing loss is very large".

More than 430 million people—over five percent of the world's population—currently have disabling hearing loss, according to the WHO, which estimates the number will rise to 700 million by 2050.

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Foxconn decided the easiest way to end the violent protests at the world's largest iPhone factory is to offer disgruntled workers money to leave.

As Bloomberg reports(Opens in a new window), the protests earlier this week were spearheaded by new hires at the company. Foxconn had enticed them to the factory with the promise of higher wages, but once on-site, they discovered the higher rate wouldn't be paid unless they stayed at the factory until March.

Instead of agreeing to pay the higher wages immediately, Foxconn is offering 10,000 yuan ($1,400) to workers if they decide to leave. The money will be paid in two installments and is meant to help cover the costs of traveling home. Foxconn is clearly hoping this will also rid the factory of unrest so everyone can get back to work.

In contrast, a report by the BBC(Opens in a new window) claims Foxconn suffered a technical error in its payments system, which led to a promised subsidy for new workers not being paid. Foxconn also claimed workers would be receiving the pay promised in recruitment posters, but didn't comment on the stipulation regarding needing to remain at the factory until March.

When asked about the situation at the iPhone factory in Zhengzhou, Apple said in a statement, "We have Apple team members on the ground at our supplier Foxconn’s Zhengzhou facility ... We are reviewing the situation and working closely with Foxconn to ensure their employees’ concerns are addressed."

According to a report by Business Insider(Opens in a new window) back in January, Foxconn workers typically earn around 7,000 yuan a month, so a 10,000 yuan payment to leave is certainly going to tempt disgruntled individuals eager to find work elsewhere. Foxconn could lose hundreds of workers through this scheme, which it will need to replace somehow. Perhaps some of those military veterans will turn up soon.

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Most dinosaurs famously disappeared 66 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period. Prior to that, a majority of Earth’s creatures were snuffed out between the Permian and Triassic periods, roughly 252 million years ago.

Thanks to the efforts of researchers at UC Riverside and Virginia Tech, it’s now known that a similar extinction occurred 550 million years ago, during the Ediacaran period. This discovery is documented in a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper.

Although unclear whether this represents a true “mass extinction,” the percentage of organisms lost is similar to these other events, including the current, ongoing one.

The researchers believe environmental changes are to blame for the loss of approximately 80% of all Ediacaran creatures, which were the first complex, multicellular life forms on the planet.

“Geological records show that the world’s oceans lost a lot of oxygen during that time, and the few species that did survive had bodies adapted for lower oxygen environments,” said Chenyi Tu, UCR paleoecologist and study co-author.

Dickinsonia, a creature resembling a bath mat from the Ediacaran period. (dottedhippo/iStock/Getty)

Unlike later events, this earliest one was more difficult to document because the creatures that perished were soft bodied and did not preserve well in the fossil record.

“We suspected such an event, but to prove it we had to assemble a massive database of evidence,” said Rachel Surprenant, UCR paleoecologist and study co-author. The team documented nearly every known Ediacaran animal’s environment, body size, diet, ability to move, and habits.

With this project, the researchers sought to disprove the charge that the major loss of animal life at the end of the Ediacaran period was something other than an extinction. Some previously believed the event could be explained by the right data not being collected, or a change in animal behavior, like the arrival of predators.

“We can see the animals’ spatial distribution over time, so we know they didn’t just move elsewhere or get eaten — they died out,” said Chenyi. “We’ve shown a true decrease in the abundance of organisms.”

They also tracked creatures’ surface area to volume ratios, a measurement that suggests declining oxygen levels were to blame for the deaths.

“If an organism has a higher ratio, it can get more nutrients, and the bodies of the animals that did live into the next era were adapted in this way,” said UCR paleoecologist Heather McCandless, study co-author.

This project came from a graduate class led by UCR paleoecologist Mary Droser and her former graduate student, now at Virginia Tech, Scott Evans. For the next class, the students will investigate the origin of these animals, rather than their extinction.

Ediacaran creatures would be considered strange by today’s standards. Many of the animals could move, but they were unlike anything now living. Among them were Obamus coronatus, a disc-shaped creature named for the former president, and Attenborites janeae, a tiny ovoid resembling a raisin named for English naturalist Sir David Attenborough.

“These animals were the first evolutionary experiment on Earth, but they only lasted about 10 million years. Not long at all, in evolutionary terms,” Droser said.

Though it’s not clear why oxygen levels declined so precipitously at the end of the era, it is clear that environmental change can destabilize and destroy life on Earth at any time. Such changes have driven all mass extinctions including the one currently occurring.

“There’s a strong correlation between the success of organisms and, to quote Carl Sagan, our ‘pale blue dot,’” said Phillip Boan, UC Riverside geologist and study co-author.

“Nothing is immune to extinction. We can see the impact of climate change on ecosystems and should note the devastating effects as we plan for the future,” Boan said.

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predominates option available for SFPD.” The draft policy, authored by the SFPD itself, also aims to “exclude hundreds of assault rifles from their inventory of military weapons and not include personnel costs in the price of their weapons,” according to a report. Mission Local.

As Mission Local notes that this proposal has already met with significant opposition both within and outside the Governing Board. Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who initially balked at the use of force requirements, added “robots must not be used to force people” into the political language.

The SFPD removed that wording in a later draft, which I considered a lifelong San Francisco resident unaware there was anything he could do.

The three-member Rules Committee, which Peskin chairs, then unanimously approved the draft and submitted it to the full Board of Supervisors for a November 29 vote. Peskin apologized for the decision by claiming that “there might be scenarios where the use of deadly force would be the only option.”

The police currently maintain a dozen fully functional remote-controlled robots, which are typically used for area inspection and bomb disposal. However, as the Dallas PD demonstrated in 2016, they are also excellent platforms for bombing. Bomb disposal units are often equipped with empty shotgun shells, which are used to violently disrupt the internal workings of an explosive device, although nothing prevents police from using live rounds when necessary, the Oakland Police Department recently admitted to that city’s Civil Oversight Board.

While San Francisco has never explicitly allowed robots to take human lives, lethal autonomous weapons (LAWs) are becoming increasingly common in modern warfare. Anti-personnel mines, one of the earliest iterations of automated weapons, have been banned since 1997 (but tell that to the mines already in the ground) and fully automated defense systems such as shipboard Phalanx systems have been deployed since the 1970s. Autonomous attack systems such as UAVs and combat drones have been deployed for years, but have always required a human in the loop to take responsibility for actually firing the weapons. Now the SFPD — the same department that regularly costs the city six-figure settlements for its excessive use of force and obstructs investigations into its affinity with baton beatings — wants to wield that same life-or-death power over San Francisco’s civilians.

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The study appears online in the journal Nature Communications.

Prostate cancer is notorious for eventually developing resistance to standard treatments that block or reduce testosterone, which fuels growth of these tumors. And like many solid tumors, prostate cancer also has proven stubbornly resistant to newer immunotherapies, which are intended to take the brakes off the immune system's T cells to get them fighting cancerous invaders. Immunotherapies—most commonly, immune checkpoint inhibitors—can be extremely effective but only in certain cancers, such as melanoma.

"We need to develop better therapies for prostate cancer patients, because most of these tumors develop resistance to hormone-based therapies doctors rely on to treat these cancers," said senior author Nupam P. Mahajan, Ph.D., a professor of surgery.

"Immunotherapy is the newest and most promising type of therapeutic for cancer right now, but even so, immune checkpoint inhibitors have failed to do much against most solid tumors, including prostate cancer. This study was surprising because we found that this drug activates anti-cancer T cells in a novel way, and it also increases the T cells' ability to penetrate the tumor. This could lead to a more effective strategy for patients whose cancers are hard to treat."

The drug, called (R)-9b, is a small molecule that blocks an oncogene, a gene that drives cancer. The researchers initially attributed the drug's success in mouse studies to its ability to reduce or eliminate androgen receptors in the prostate cancer cells. These receptors bind to testosterone and use the hormone to fuel tumor growth. The drug's ability to eliminate the androgen receptor differs from standard drugs that reduce the amount of testosterone in the body, and other drugs that block the androgen receptor's function as a transcription regulator.

But because the new drug was so effective, Mahajan and his colleagues suspected something more was going on. The drug blocks a gene called ACK1. The researchers developed a strain of mice that totally lacked this gene in order to study what happens when it's missing. At first, the researchers were baffled by these mice. Mice missing an entire gene often have obvious problems. But these mice seemed fine. And when the researchers looked for tumor growth, they found very little. It was difficult to model cancer in these animals.

"In most of these mice, when we introduced cancer cells as we typically do, there was no trace of a tumor," said Mahajan, also a research member of Siteman Cancer Center at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine. "In the few that did develop tumors, the tumors were small compared to those of wild-type mice. This was the first clue that something important was happening in mice missing this gene. We found that they were able to mount a robust immune response against the cancer cells."

When different mice—mice with this gene—were implanted with human prostate tumors and given the drug that blocks this gene, it had the same effect: taking the brakes off the immune system and producing increased levels of certain types of T cells known to attack cancer. The drug also increased signaling molecules that allow the T cells to penetrate the tumor and kill cancer cells more effectively. The tumors in these (R)-9b treated mice were much smaller than those of mice in control groups.

Given the drug's success in tumor penetration, the researchers investigated whether adding immune checkpoint inhibitors to treatment with the drug would be even more effective, taking the brakes off T cells in more than one way at the same time—but there was no such improvement.

"Surprisingly, we found that the immune checkpoint inhibitor is activating ACK1, the very pathway we are shutting down with this drug compound," Mahajan said. "It's possible immune checkpoint inhibitors don't work well in these tumors because they are turning on ACK1, which suppresses the immune response. Similar to prostate cancer, the ACK1 pathway activation also could be employed by other cancers that do not respond to checkpoint inhibitors. However, these cancers could respond to (R)-9b, so we would like to investigate this drug in other solid tumors as well."

Mahajan said the drug spurs multiple responses because of the nature of the gene it blocks. Many genes have several roles in the body, and ACK1's roles in expression of the androgen receptor and in reigning in the immune system make it an appealing target for cancer therapy, especially against solid tumors with a hormonal growth component, such as prostate and breast cancers.

Mahajan has worked with Washington University's Office of Technology Management/Tech Transfer to file patents on the use of this drug in cancer treatment. His team is gathering data to apply for permission from the Food and Drug Administration to test the drug in a clinical trial for patients with prostate cancer.

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Creamy-colored and just a couple of centimeters long, the cotton bollworm doesn’t look like much. But around the world, this highly mobile moth has farmers breaking out in a sweat. Females can lay hundreds of eggs at a time, which hatch into voracious caterpillars. They feast not just on cotton, but soybeans, tomatoes, sweetcorn, peppers, and many other crops, devouring flowers, reproductive tissues, fruits, and kernels. A harvest can be quickly decimated.

Every year, insects like the cotton bollworm destroy more than 20 percent of the world’s crops. Farmers fight back by using pesticides, but some are harmful to our health, and many damage surrounding ecosystems. Clearly, more environmentally friendly approaches to pest control are needed, and there’s one solution that could be about to hit the big time: targeting these pests’ sex drives. 

Female insects can attract partners in complete darkness without any audible signal, and over hundreds of meters—sometimes over a kilometer—using sex pheromones. Males track the smell of these chemical signals and mate with the females they’re led to, who then lay eggs that hatch into hungry larvae. It’s an incredible chemical power—and one that can be exploited.

“We can apply artificial pheromone compounds into the field, which will be released everywhere in the air and cover the original signal from the real female,” says Hong-Lei Wang, a researcher in the pheromone group at Lund University in Sweden. This blanket cover of the sex scent makes it harder for males to find females and mate, he explains, and so the insect population falls, meaning fewer pests in the area to cause crop damage.

Farmers have been using artificial pheromones this way for decades—but up until now, costs have limited how widely they’re used. Creating artificial pheromones has been pretty expensive, so it’s only made economic sense to use them to protect high-value crops, such as fruits. But now Wang and his colleagues have uncovered a way to affordably and sustainably produce pheromones that attract pests that eat cheaper crops, such as cabbage and beans, opening the door for pheromone-based pest control to be used more widely. 

In a paper published in Nature Sustainability, the group showed how to make significant amounts of two important moth pheromones from an oilseed plant. They then demonstrated that the artificial pheromones worked well in mass trapping experiments as well as in disrupting the mating of the cotton bollworm.

“The first thing was to work out the pathways for pheromone production in the insects,” says Christer Löfstedt, coauthor of the study and professor of functional zoology at Lund. This was done by looking at the insects’ genes to find the ones that control production of the desired sex pheromone. Then the group introduced these genes into a different biological platform—which in this study was the oilseed crop, though yeast would also work—so that it would make the sex pheromone at scale. Finally, the compound was isolated and purified to get it ready for testing in the field.

For the experiment, the new plant-derived pheromones were tested in the field using pheromone dispensers, with their effectiveness being compared against conventional synthetic pheromones. Both versions were equally effective in trapping insects and disrupting their mating, shown as a decline of the insects’ male population over time. This proved the plant-derived pheromone to be a viable alternative to the artificial pheromones traditionally used.

Proving that this way of producing pheromones works, and that they’re effective, has taken almost a decade. “We are now looking at scaling up the process and introducing them in the market,” says Löfstedt. This research also opens the door to using sex disruption to protect other commodity crops from pests. “It should be possible to use the pheromones also in sugarcane and soybean production,” says Löfstedt.

The beauty with pheromones is that they don’t kill insects, but instead just influence their behavior. This makes them more environmentally friendly than pesticides, which often wipe out many species that aren’t the target, explains Srinivasan Ramasamy, a lead entomologist at the nonprofit World Vegetable Center. Pesticides are commonly found in soil, air, water, and on non-target organisms in our ecosystems. They can harm plants and animals, ranging from beneficial soil microorganisms and insects—such as bees, pollinators, spiders, and mites—to plants, fish, birds, and other wildlife. 

Insects also distinguish whether a pheromone signal is from their own species, meaning you can target the life cycle of specific pests while leaving other insects unaffected. “Specificity is a very clear feature of the pheromones system,” says Wang. 

It’s not only good news for a lot of bugs out there, but also farmers and consumers. Insect pheromones are not toxic to humans, which is a real benefit for agricultural workers. “It has been demonstrated that conventional insecticides have a negative impact on, for instance, the fertility of farm workers,” explains Löfstedt. Some pesticides target bodily systems in insects that share physiological similarities with those in humans, such as neurotransmitters. “When you are exposed to the pesticides, they can impact your physiology,” says Ramasamy.

And importantly, insects don’t evolve resistance to their own communication signals, says Löfstedt, whereas they do to pesticides. Repeated use of a pesticide family commonly leads to insects adapting and no longer responding to those same chemicals, meaning higher and higher doses are needed to have an effect—with dire environmental consequences.

But even if the technique were scaled up, there will be limits to how it can be used. Cooperation between neighboring farmers is also key, as mating disruption works best if large areas are treated. Female pests may mate outside the fields, and travel later and lay eggs. “It’s usually not very successful to treat a home garden with pheromones,” says Löfstedt. 

There’s regulation to overcome too. The fact that it’s a genetically modified (GMO) technology could prove a major roadblock and also drive up costs, Ramasamy warns. “In most countries, the production of GMOs may not be very expensive, but the regulatory dossier they have to undergo needs a lot of investment,” he says. In fact, stringent rules on using GMOs in Europe could mean the continent misses out on these products, Löfstedt says.

Finally, there are biological limits to how widely pheromones can be used as well—they’re not an option for all pests. “Not all insects have sex pheromones,” Löfstedt explains, and some that do produce complex compounds that are not straightforward to bioengineer. In some cases, the sex pheromone is made up of two or three compounds. “Then you need to have two or three genetically modified plants to be produced and put under the regulatory mechanism,” Ramasamy says.

The reality is that for agriculture to be sustainable, it may need to involve a mix of pest control techniques—such as botanical pesticides made from fungi or viruses and pest-resistant plant varieties, used together with engineered pheromones. But for now the pest control competition is fierce: Pesticides are easily available, easy to apply, take care of multiple insects, and are relatively cheap. “If we go with five different components in an integrated pest-management program, then the farmers are going to say, ‘No, sorry,’” says Ramasamy. The key will be to find a sustainable solution that also keeps things simple, he suggests.

Löfstedt is adamant, though, that plant-grown pheromones can be a big part of pest control in the future. “It’s green chemistry, driven by solar energy,” he says—yet another plus point. If we want to be sustainable and protect wildlife, crops, and human health, then we need to find pest control methods like this that can realistically be scaled up so that pesticide use falls—and make sure it happens. It’s up to us to “use biological knowledge, and the different control methods, in a biologically sensible way.”

To Ditch Pesticides, Scientists Are Hacking Insects’ Sex Signals

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The word “processed” has become something of a slur.

Say “processed food” and most of us picture unhealthy, cheap junk. Fresh food straight from the garden or the field is good. Once we’ve put it through a processing plant or a laboratory, we’ve removed its halo qualities and added a bunch of bad ones. That means meat substitutes are no better than junk food.

But this perspective is short-sighted. We’re not going to feed billions a nutritious diet sustainably without food processing. The growing backlash against processing is one that neither people nor the planet can afford.

The benefits of processed food

Processed food is more than Coca-Cola, Dairy Milk chocolate, and ready meals. Most plant and animal products go through some form of processing to convert them into something that we can—and want to—eat. We mill grain into flour to make bread. We butcher and debone animals to get meat. We pasteurize milk.

Processed foods have brought us countless benefits, many of which we quickly forget. Iodized salt is just one example; iodine deficiencies used to be common across the world, leading to increased risks of stillbirths and miscarriages, significant reductions in IQ, and reduced cognitive development. Most of the world now consumes salt with iodine added, and many countries have eliminated this deficiency. By adding nutrients to food, we’ve been able to address a number of other micronutrient deficiencies.

We’ve been able to preserve food and increase its shelf life, reducing food waste. We’ve reduced the spread of food-borne diseases. Those with food allergies and intolerances can now eat a balanced diet. We don’t need to spend the day preparing food—this has been particularly important for the educational and career development of women. Last but not least: taste. Our shelves are now lined with great-tasting foods.

Of course, when people talk about “processed” food they’re often talking about ultra-processed food (UPF). These snacks and prepared meals are designed to have a longer shelf life and be more convenient and palatable. Corporations work hard to find the “Goldilocks” flavor profile we can’t resist by adding sugar and fat to make food as tasty as possible. Many describe these finely tuned combinations as addictive.

It’s true that increased consumption of ultra-processed food has been linked to poor health outcomes. It has been associated with lower consumption of essential nutrients, such as vitamins C, D, and B12. The more of these foods we eat, the more likely we are to be overweight or obese. This puts us at higher risk of health conditions like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and cancer. Ultra-processed foods are easy to overconsume.

The problem with most UPFs is that they are higher in calories, sugar, and fat. And they’re lower in protein and fiber, the nutrients that keep us full.

But this isn’t inherent to food processing itself. What matters is what corporations add to our food. They can create healthier foods if they want to—or if we demand it.

The growing backlash against meat substitutes

One area where I see the biggest backlash against processing is with meat substitutes.

These products try to emulate the experience of meat and include plant proteins such as soy-based sausages; Impossible and Beyond Meat burgers; proteins made from fermentation, such as Quorn, and lab-grown meat.

Passionate meat eaters and vegans don’t always see eye to eye, but they do often agree that natural is best. Vegans push back against meat substitutes because they’d rather people go straight to natural plant foods like peas, beans, and lentils. Meat eaters push back on these products for their artificiality, calling them “Frankenfood.” 

Headlines critical of these foods go something like this: “People have told you that meat substitutes are super healthy, but they’re lying to you.” 

So are meat substitutes better for your health or are they part of an elaborate con?

Well, “healthy” compared to what?

Are they better than meat equivalents? Are you better off going for an Impossible or Beyond Meat burger than a beefburger? Or a soy-based sausage over a pork one? Possibly.

I crunched the numbers on the nutritional profile of meat substitute products and compared them to meat. (You can find a graph of this comparison here.) To their credit, meat substitutes tend to be lower in calories and saturated fat and higher in fiber. To their detriment, some are lower in protein, and importantly, often contain lower-quality protein, meaning they contain less of the essential amino acids that we need.

When it comes to sodium, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. Substitute burgers tend to be comparable to beef. Substitute sausages look bad, but they contain less salt than their pork equivalents.

Many substitute products are now fortified with Vitamin B12, iron, and calcium. The Impossible burger actually has more Vitamin B12 and iron than beef. Many plant-based milks are fortified too. (I compared the nutrition of dairy and plant-based milks here.)

On balance, they’re probably a bit better for our health than their meat equivalents.

Are they better than whole, plant-based foods? Less likely, but possible, depending on the nutrients you’re trying to optimize for. They are higher in protein and have micronutrients added that plants don’t have much of, such as Vitamin B12. But they are also higher in saturated fat and salt.

However, this showdown between natural plant foods and meat substitutes is kind of beside the point. People who want a whole, plant-based diet aren’t the target for these products. If people want to switch to plant proteins such as peas and lentils, great. But this group is a minority. What meat substitutes offer is an easy swap for people who want “meat-like” meals. Many want an experience similar to meat: Substitutes try to give them this without killing animals—and without the high environmental cost of farming meat.

To have a chance of meeting our global climate targets, ending deforestation, and protecting the world’s wildlife, we need to eat much less meat. Both plant foods and meat substitutes have a much lower carbon footprint, use much less land, and cause less water pollution than meat. The environmental toll can be 10 to 100 times lower than that of beef or lamb.

Meat substitutes are our best shot at feeding the world without destroying it. The backlash to these products is counterproductive. And the blanket dismissal of such foods as “ultra-processed” isn’t helping. Most are defined as ultra-processed based on the methods used to produce them. But if we list the reasons UPFs are bad for our health, meat substitutes have almost none of those qualities. As shown above, they are generally not high in calories—most are lower than meat. They have less saturated fat, almost no added sugars, and are higher in fiber.

What they do have are additives. Impossible Foods adds them to give its burgers a juicy, meat-like texture. Many companies add binding agents and preservatives to extend their products’ shelf lives. People get freaked out by lists of ingredients they don’t recognize. But the notion that how pronounceable something is can determine whether we should eat it is not scientifically sound. You can probably pronounce “lead” and “mercury,” but I don’t recommend seasoning your dinner with them.

This is still an area that needs more research, but I’ve seen little good evidence that additives or sweeteners consumed within regulatory guidelines have negative health impacts.

We shouldn’t be eating them all the time, but as part of a diverse diet, there is little to suggest meat substitutes are bad for our health. In fact, some can be a nutritional plus.

Food processing could alleviate malnutrition for billions

Meat substitutes are mostly targeted at wealthy consumers. But the implications of a backlash to processed food are just as harmful for people with less money—if not more so.

More food processing, not less, could improve health and nutrition in developing countries.

Billions of people in the world suffer from “hidden hunger”—they don’t get enough of the micronutrients that are necessary for good health. The preferred way to address this would be for them to eat a more diverse diet.

That’s a nice pipe dream, but it’s decades away. These billions can’t afford a healthy, balanced diet even if they spend all of their income on food. The goal is to make sure their incomes rise, but this will take time.

What are we going to do in the meantime? Accept that billions are left malnourished and billions of children will never reach their potential?

We could solve this problem quickly and cheaply with more food processing. Simply add micronutrients to staple foods. Micronutrient fortification—the addition of key vitamins and minerals to foods such as flour, salt, bread, and cereals—is incredibly cost-effective. It can cost mere cents or a few dollars per person per year. To move from a diet that meets an individual’s energy needs—eating cheap staples that are high in calories—to a nutritionally complete or healthy diet will cost someone at least a few dollars per day. Micronutrient fortification would cost just a few dollars per person per year.

This is also true of meat and dairy products. In richer countries, we consume a lot of meat, and most people could easily cut back. Poorer countries eat very little meat, if any. Without nutritious alternatives, eating more animal products might actually be good for health. The problem is that meat is expensive—economically as well as environmentally. It’s hard to get cheap meat without sacrificing welfare and environmental standards. So we face a dilemma: Increasing meat consumption for those with lower incomes would improve nutrition but result in a larger environmental footprint.

But if meat substitutes become cheaper, we have the opportunity to make low-cost, high-quality protein available for everyone. People will be able to improve their nutrition long before they can afford to buy more meat. What’s even more promising is that consumers in low- and middle-income countries seem to be more accepting of meat alternatives. We don’t have a lot of data on these markets, but large surveys across China, India, and the US suggest that Chinese and Indian consumers would be much more likely to buy plant-based substitutes and lab-grown meat than Americans.

I’m all for a predominantly whole-food diet. But used in the right way and in moderation, processed foods could be a big boon for global nutrition. Stigma against them hinders such efforts, so rather than shunning food processing, we should embrace it in the appropriate contexts.

It’s not the process; it’s what we add that matters

I’m not here to defend ultra-processed foods or big food corporations. They’ve hijacked our food system in many ways and have created a plethora of health problems. But we need to stop throwing all processed foods into one group. 

The problem is not the process itself; it’s what we add and how we do it. We can use processing to enhance nutrition or hinder it. We can embrace it where it adds value and boycott it where it doesn’t.

The backlash against food processing is a luxury that the world can’t afford to embrace. It’s not good for people or the planet. Nutritionally sound processed foods are one of many tools that will help nourish billions without destroying the environment.

The World Needs Processed Food

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No sign of the expected lake bed where Perseverance rover landed

We now know why black hole jets make high-energy radiation

The long, tangled journey of a European rover to Mars takes another twist

Americans remain resistant to the lure of EVs, which are still unaffordable

FAST-GROWING, DROUGHT-TOLERANT TREES are slowly spreading across grasslands on every continent except Antarctica. Given how desperate we are to reduce carbon in the atmosphere, millions of new saplings sprouting each year might seem like a good thing. But in reality, their spread across vulnerable grasslands and shrublands is upending ecosystems and livelihoods. As these areas transform into woodland, wildlife disappears, water supplies dwindle, and soil health suffers. The risk of catastrophic wildfire also skyrockets.

In a new study published in the Journal of Applied Ecology, researchers have shown how woodland expansion also takes an economic toll. American ranchers often depend on tree-free rangelands to raise their livestock. Between 1990 and 2019, landowners in the Western US lost out on nearly $5 billion worth of forage—the plants that cattle or sheep eat—because of the growth of new trees. The amount of forage lost over those three decades equates to 332 million tons, or enough hay bales to circle the globe 22 times.

“Grasslands are the most imperiled and least protected terrestrial ecosystem,” says Rheinhardt Scholtz, a global change biologist and affiliate researcher with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Also called steppes, pampas, or plains, our planet’s grasslands have dwindled drastically. According to Scholtz, less than 10 percent are still intact, as most have been plowed under for crops or bulldozed for human development. One of the most dire threats facing the grasslands that remain is woody encroachment. “It’s a slow and silent killer,” Scholtz says. 

Historically, tree expansion onto grasslands was checked by regular fires, which relegated woody species to wet or rocky places. But as European settlers suppressed fires and planted thousands of trees to provide windbreaks for their homes and livestock, trees proliferated. When trees invade grasslands, they outcompete native grasses and wildflowers by stealing the lion’s share of sunlight and water. Birds, often used as a bellwether for ecosystem health, are sounding the alarm: North America’s grassland bird populations have declined more than 50 percent since 1970, a 2019 study in Science found. 

According to University of Montana researcher Scott Morford, who led the study on rangeland forage loss, tree cover has increased by 50 percent across the western half of the US over the past 30 years, with tree cover expanding steadily year on year. In total, close to 150,000 km2 of once tree-free grasslands have been converted into woodland. “That means we’ve already lost an area the size of Iowa to trees,” says Morford, who emphasizes that an additional 200,000 km2 of tree-free rangelands—an area larger than the state of Nebraska—are “under immediate threat” because they are close to seed sources.

To figure out the amount of lost forage production due to woodland expansion, Morford and his team used satellite images in combination with meteorological data, topography, and information about soils and on-the-ground vegetation to estimate the change in herbaceous biomass (that is, non-woody plants, like grasses) in relation to tree cover over time. “Our computer models allow us to turn up or turn down the tree cover like a knob on your stereo to see how production is impacted,” explains Morford.

After quantifying the change in herbaceous plants annually, researchers then determined the “yield gap” each year for every county in the 17 states that contain shrubland or grassland habitat. This gap is the difference between the actual herbaceous production (after trees had moved in) and potential herbaceous production (as if the trees had never moved in). Using pasture rental rates collected by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), the researchers then converted that lost material into dollars and found that the value of the yield gap has ratcheted up and up. In 2000, close to $100 million worth of forage was being lost each year; by 2010, that figure had surpassed $200 million a year; and by 2019 it was over $300 million. This puts the total losses for the 1990–2019 period at close to $5 billion, with the cumulative loss accelerating upward. 

Farmers often use yield gaps to estimate crop productivity, but this is the first time such figures have been determined for ranchers raising livestock on rangelands. “If there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that financial losses are something we don’t like. Linking the loss in rangeland productivity to financial losses—to me, that’s the silver bullet for conserving grasslands,” says Scholtz, who was not involved in the study. 

Barb Cooksley, a rancher in the Sand Hills of Nebraska, sets a personal goal to lop at least 1,000 trees each year to keep her family’s patch of prairie thriving. Most are small seedlings that are invading her pastures. A study released earlier this year, coauthored by Scholtz, identifies the Sand Hills as the most intact prairie left on Earth, and one of just seven remaining large grassland ecosystems. “This place is not supposed to have trees,” says Cooksley, who has a master’s degree in range ecology.

In the past, if a rancher like Cooksley wanted to know how much grass her land produced, she would have to go out with scissors to clip all of the plants growing in a plot, dry them, weigh them, and then extrapolate that across hundreds or thousands of acres. But now the new yield gap data is available online for anyone to use. Cooksley checked out the gap in Custer County, Nebraska, where her family ranches and says the numbers are “truly scary.” Landowners in her county have lost out on $6.2 million worth of forage since 1990, with the graph showing steep declines in rangeland production beginning in 2007—a signal that grasslands are in trouble. 

“From a producer’s perspective, you want to tackle woodland expansion before you start seeing herbaceous production drop off. If you wait until you have 10, 20, or 30 percent tree cover, you’re seeing big impacts on forage production, and tree removal becomes very expensive,” says Morford.

Cooksley says online mapping apps and historical aerial imagery are great outreach tools so “landowners can see what’s happening to their ground” and take action to halt woody encroachment. These tools make it more efficient and cost-effective for ranchers or land managers to pinpoint where to cut trees, use prescribed fire, or spray pesticide on seedlings to combat woody expansion on their grasslands. 

Doug Spencer, the Kansas state grazing specialist for the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, says yield gap information will help “tell the story” of how trees are impacting rangelands that are home to livestock. For instance, Kansas lost nearly the same amount of forage to woody encroachment in 2019 as the state’s entire annual alfalfa supply—the most important type of hay harvested to feed cattle, grown on about 2,630 km2 of fields in the state. This fact was met with “shock and awe,” says Spencer, when he shared the numbers at a recent presentation. He hopes the data will provide support for why and where the USDA and its partners invest conservation funding. “This yield gap data can better inform us what’s at risk and where we can defend our core grasslands.”

Woody encroachment is also threatening the viability of ranchers further west in the sagebrush biome, an arid landscape dominated by shrubs, grasses, and wildflowers that covers an area larger than Ukraine across 11 Western states. According to a preprint released earlier this year, tree coverage has increased sixfold in sagebrush country over the past 150 years. “Wherever we have thick juniper, we’ve got very little grass. There’s nothing underneath but bare soil,” says Bruce Peterson, a rancher near Sheridan, Montana. Peterson has worked with a collaborative group called the Southwest Montana Sagebrush Partnership that has used historical satellite imagery and remote sensing technology to target tree-removal efforts. The partnership has restored nearly 40,000 acres of grazing land in Montana.

Similar technology is also being used to evaluate the effectiveness of projects that tackle woodland expansion. A recent study in the Journal of Environmental Management measured the change in herbaceous plants after tree-removal efforts on pastures in Oregon, Nebraska, and Kansas, showing mostly positive results. “These next-generation technologies unify neighbors around dealing with shared problems,” says Caleb Roberts, a research ecologist with the United States Geological Survey in Arkansas who led the study.

Back in the Sand Hills, Cooksley and her husband are making a succession plan to pass on the ranch to their family. Part of that plan includes continuing her legacy of controlling woody encroachment. If she sees a seedling sprouting on her daily drives around the ranch, Cooksley always stops to cut it down, and she makes sure her children and husband keep a pair of loppers handy in their trucks too. She also hires contractors with machines to cut bigger trees each year and sees the value in using prescribed burns or herbicide treatments to keep trees at bay. “We have a continuous battle ahead of us,” she says.

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Finding high-quality detection canines is hard enough—and the pandemic only dug a deeper hole.

THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC played a key role in the global supply chain logjam of the past 18 months that has disrupted commerce and fueled a cost-of-living crisis around the world. And it seems no pipeline has escaped its impact. After years of trying to raise awareness about a shortage of dogs with the necessary genetic, physical, and emotional attributes to work as bomb-detection canines in the United States, experts say that pandemic-related turmoil has further complicated the situation.

The US sources 85 to 90 percent of its detection canines from overseas, particularly from European countries like Germany and the Netherlands. Dogs receive advanced training in a number of subspecialties, including bomb and drug detection and search and rescue. But breeding, genetics, environment, and training during early life are all crucial to producing dogs with the mental and physical characteristics to protect them on the job and enable a good quality of life. 

“The canine nose is the best technology we have for locating explosives, so we need to have a very consistent and high-quality source of dogs,” says Sheila Goffe, vice president of government relations at the American Kennel Club. “We used to talk about, ‘Well, what if there’s a global crisis or geopolitical issues, we’re not going to be able to get all of these dogs we’re importing from Europe,’ and then it happened.”

In congressional testimony in March 2016, Cindy Otto, executive director of the Penn Vet Working Dog Center at the University of Pennsylvania, warned the Senate Homeland Security Committee about these risks. “By outsourcing our national security requirements, we give up control of the type of dogs, the health of the dogs, and the early training of the dogs,” she said at the time. “We also are at risk for supply interruption due to politics, disaster, or disease.”

Today, she says she sees progress toward growing the domestic supply of detection dogs in the US. Expanded federal contracts for projects at Johns Hopkins Advanced Physics Laboratory, Auburn University, Gallant Technologies, K2 Solutions, and others are aimed at developing new technologies and procedures to support a larger network for breeding domestic detection dogs. And programs like the American Kennel Club’s “Patriotic Puppy Program” are working to teach existing US breeders about the requirements and criteria for specifically focusing on detection dogs. But she adds that progress has been incremental and will take years of foundational work to bear fruit.

“I wish we were way further along, but certainly the pandemic slowed the research down, slowed all the programs down,” Otto told WIRED. “It restricted the inflow of dogs from overseas and slowed progress in this country to establish alternatives—it just beat us all up.”

Last month, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a nearly 100-page report about working dogs and the need for federal agencies to better safeguard their health and wellness. The GOA says that as of February the US federal government had approximately 5,100 working dogs, including detection dogs, across three federal agencies. Another 420 dogs “served the federal government in 24 contractor-managed programs within eight departments and two independent agencies,” the GAO report says.

The report also underscores the demands placed on detection dogs and the potential for overwork if there aren’t enough dogs available. “Working dogs might need the strength to suddenly run fast, or to leap over a tall barrier, as well as the physical stamina to stand or walk all day,” the report says. “They might need to search over rubble or in difficult environmental conditions, such as extreme heat or cold, often wearing heavy body armor. They also might spend the day detecting specific scents among thousands of others, requiring intense mental concentration. Each function requires dogs to undergo specialized training.”

As institutions emerge from pandemic restrictions, they are scrambling to make up lost time on two equally important components of the problem: developing procedures for reliably producing successful detection dogs and actually breeding and raising puppies. Auburn University focuses on the former.

“At Auburn, we were fortunate that the pandemic did not force us to stop doing research altogether, but we were affected by scheduling issues, supply chain issues, all the things that slow the pace of progress down,” says Skip Bartol, associate dean of research and graduate studies at the Auburn University College of Veterinary Medicine. “There is not yet a road map to a complete solution to domestic sourcing for detection dogs, but what we are trying to do is establish best scientific practices—everything from making sound genetic decisions about the breeding of detector canines to their development as puppies to how early environment affects their lifelong potential.”

Problems with procurement and breeding during the pandemic mean that the population of bomb dogs working in the US right now may be aging and stretched even more than usual. And the bottom line is that the US is still heavily reliant on procuring detection dogs from other countries. As the University of Pennsylvania’s Otto puts it, “It’s a combination of factors, but there is definitely still a very unmet need.”

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Thirty-two teams and more than 1 million football (soccer) fans headed to Qatar in November 2022 for the World Cup. The destination is Doha, Qatar’s fast-growing capital city, located on the coast of the Persian Gulf in the east of the country.

This natural-color image of Doha, Qatar was captured on November 13, 2022, by the Operational Land Imager-2 (OLI-2) on Landsat 9. With a population of 2.3 million people, the city sits on the eastern shore of a small peninsula on the Persian Gulf.

Development radiates outward from Doha’s historic city center along a series of ring roads. The development includes an extensive amount of artificial land built to accommodate airport and port facilities, as well as entirely human-made islands that have become hubs of residential and commercial activity, such as the pearl-shaped Pearl-Qatar.

Stadiums are among the most visible features built since 2010, when Qatar was named the host city of the 2022 FIFA World Cup. There are eight official stadiums, seven of which have been built since 2010. All of them are located within a 33-mile (54-kilometer) radius of Doha, making the 22nd World Cup the most geographically compact event since the first FIFA-organized tournament in 1930. The venues for past World Cups were spread between multiple cities that were generally hundreds to thousands of kilometers apart.

Doha, Qatar captured by the Operational Land Imager-2 (OLI-2) on Landsat 9 on November 13, 2022.

 

The venues feature an array of distinctive designs. Lusail Stadium is the largest and will hold 80,000 spectators. It features a gold exterior designed to look like traditional hand-crafted bowls from the Arab and Islamic world.

Located in a part of the city known for pearl diving and fishing, the exterior of Al Janoub Stadium, looks like the bottom of a boat. Situated near the airport, the circular Al Thumama Stadium, was built to resemble a gahfiya—the traditional woven cap worn by men and boys across the Middle East.

When the tournament is over, only Khalifa International Stadium will be used as the home of a football (soccer) team. The rest will be repurposed as hotels, community spaces, or smaller sporting facilities. One venue—Stadium 974—is made from 974 portable shipping containers and will be completely disassembled when the World Cup is over.

NASA Earth Observatory images by Joshua Stevens, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey.

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B cells have antigen receptors on their surface that allow them to identify invading pathogens such as bacteria and viruses. When a B cell receptor binds to an antigen, that is, to a foreign structure, the B cell is activated which triggers the production of antibodies. Antibodies are critical for human survival because they protect us from severe diseases from infections with pathogens such as COVID-19. Vaccines provide protection by activating antigen receptors, triggering an immune response.

An international collaboration of researchers from the University of Freiburg’s Cluster of Excellence CIBSS and Harvard Medical School in the United States has recently revealed the exact molecular structure of an IgM-type B cell receptor. Their results suggest that the B cell’s surface receptor interacts with other receptors, thus controlling signal transduction. The findings were recently published in the prestigious journal Nature.

Structure of the IgM B cell receptor of the mouse. Credit: Hao Wu/Harvard Medical School

 

Connection of Signaling Subunits with the Immunoglobulin

 

The B cell antigen receptor is made up of an antibody linked to the cell membrane as well as two smaller proteins known as Ig alpha and Ig beta. When the B cell receptor detects a pathogen, these smaller subunits transmit signals to the cell’s interior.

“Exactly how these signaling subunits are connected with the immunoglobulin was previously unknown,” says Prof. Dr. Michael Reth from the University of Freiburg’s Faculty of Biology, who has been conducting research on the receptor for over 30 years and originally discovered its signaling subunits. He is a member of the Cluster of Excellence CIBSS – Centre for Integrative Biological Signalling Studies and co-director of the Cluster of Excellence BIOSS.

“For a long time, we did not have the technical possibilities to study the exact structure of membrane proteins. Now, cryo-electron microscopy has enabled us to create a high-resolution image of the B cell receptor,” says Reth.

With cryo-electron microscopy, the sample to be studied is cooled very rapidly to minus 183 °C. This reduces the natural movement of the molecules and prevents the formation of tiny ice crystals that otherwise would destroy the protein structure. In this way, it is possible to achieve resolutions that are many times higher than with other electron microscopic methods. In their current study, the researchers achieved a resolution of 3.3 ångströms, which corresponds to the width of just a few atoms.

To do so, they combined hundreds of thousands of images of the entire receptor with those of a truncated version that lacked two flexible regions. They then used these data to calculate the complete three-dimensional structure of the B cell receptor on the computer.

A symmetrical membrane-bound antibody binds only on one side

The striking thing about the three-dimensional structure is that the symmetrical membrane-bound antibody only binds to Ig alpha and Ig beta on one side, thus forming an asymmetrical complex. This asymmetry resembles that of the T cell receptor, another important immune receptor whose structure was first elucidated in 2019. “It is astounding that both types of antigen receptor form asymmetrical complexes,” explains Reth. “This leads us to conclude that the structure now elucidated is part of a larger receptor complex and that it interacts with still other molecules on the B cell surface.”

Such larger structures, which are held together through less powerful forces, cannot yet be studied with techniques like cryo-electron microscopy. However, the newly published molecular structure provides further evidence in favor of such an interaction with other molecules: It shows that the outside of the B cell receptor contains conserved amino acids. Amino acids are described as conserved if they hardly change in the course of evolution and are therefore identical in the antigen receptors of different organisms. “The presence of conserved amino acids that are directed outward suggests that the IgM B cell receptor has further binding partners,” says Reth. “In other words, we only know part of the machine so far – and now we want to identify the other building blocks and determine how they influence the signaling effect of the receptor.”

These other building blocks could explain how the receptor is normally kept quiescent and is activated only when it binds to an antigen. “That will be one of the next important tasks in the study of adaptive immunity,” summarizes Reth. “A better understanding of B cell activation could also help us to further improve the development of vaccines or to understand the formation of lymphoma in which the B cell receptor is activated in an uncontrolled manner.”

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