Photos and video posted to Facebook by Brisbane North Snake Catchers and Relocation shows rescuers responding to a report of a snake trapped in a beer can in Brighton, Queensland.

The rescuers arrived to find the venomous red-bellied black snake's head was stuck inside a can of Victoria Bitter, a popular brand of beer.

The rescuers used tools to cut through the can and free the snake. They discovered the snake had likely not been in search of a stiff drink -- there was a dead frog inside the can. The state of the frog's decay indicted the snake had likely been trapped in the can for a few days, the rescuers said.

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One after another, four of our best-known billionaires laid waste to the image of benevolent saviors carefully cultivated by their class.

It is a commendable sacrifice on their part, because billionaires, remember, exist at our collective pleasure. If enough of us decided to, we could enact labor, tax, antitrust and regulatory policies to make it hard for anyone to amass that much wealth while so many beg for scraps. It is not only the vast political power of billionaires that keeps us keeping them around, it’s also the popular embrace of certain myths — about the generosity, the genius, the renegade spirit, the above-it-ness of billionaires, to name a few.

As of this writing, Elon Musk is running Twitter into the ground, with much of the company’s staff fired or quitting, outages spiking and everyone on my timeline hurrying to tell the app the things they have been meaning to say before it departs for app heaven (or hell?).

In tweeting through one of the most extraordinary corporate meltdowns in history, Mr. Musk has been performing a vital public service: shredding the myth of the billionaire genius.

His particular pretension of benevolence is that his uncontainable genius can solve any challenge. Now he is lavishing his mind and time on electronic money, now on colonizing Mars, now on electric cars and solar panels, now on saving Thai soccer players trapped in a cave, now on liberating speech from its liberal oppressors.

Mr. Musk’s genius pose has long been undermined by his actual record, which is defined by claiming credit for what others have built and is shot through with complaints of discrimination, mismanagement and fraud.

But it wasn’t until Mr. Musk took over Twitter that his claim of infinitely transferable genius truly fell apart. That what Mr. Musk has called the global town square can be eviscerated in a time period somewhere between a Scaramucci and a Truss makes one wonder if we should be more skeptical of all the other billionaire geniuses with ideas for our schools, public health systems and politics.

For example, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, who this week was doing his part to undermine another pretension of billionaire benevolence: the generosity pose.

On Monday, he made a big splash when CNN released an interview in which he announced that he was giving the great bulk of his more than $120 billion fortune away, with a focus on fighting climate change and promoting unity.

That sure sounds impressive, but his gesture wasn’t about generosity any more than Herschel Walker’s Senate candidacy in Georgia is for the children. After all, the money Mr. Bezos is now so magnanimously distributing was made through his dehumanizing labor practices, his tax avoidance, his influence peddling, his monopolistic power and other tactics that make him a cause of the problems of modern American life rather than a swashbuckling solution.

It’s too soon to tell if Mr. Bezos’s philanthropy will help others, but what’s certain is that it will help Mr. Bezos a lot. Mega-philanthropists of his ilk tend to give through foundations, which they establish in ways that save them an immense amount in taxes, sometimes merely by moving the money from one of their own accounts to another. Giving will also burnish Mr. Bezos’s reputation, in that way preserving and protecting his opportunity to earn yet more money — and to do more social damage.

And it will increase his already gigantic power over public life. For plutocrats like Mr. Bezos, that may be the biggest payoff of all. Their wealth is so vast that by distributing even a small fraction of it, they skew the public agenda toward the kind of social change they can stomach — the kind that doesn’t threaten them or their class. Shortly before his big announcement, Mr. Bezos gave Dolly Parton a $100 million “Courage and Civility Award” to spend on her chosen causes. Ms. Parton is indeed courageous and civil, but so are the workers fighting to unionize Amazon facilities, and I don’t see anyone offering them nine-digit thank-you bonuses.

But once again, instead of the usual critics having to make this case, this week Mr. Bezos took the wheel. Just minutes after his philanthropy announcement on CNN, news broke that Amazon would be laying off thousands of workers, reminding everyone of what was really going on.

At first glance, the two stories might seem like matter and antimatter, or at least two opposite realities. But they are the same story: The system that treats human beings as disposable commodities upholds and reproduces itself by sprinkling some fairy dust and hoping that we will forget the injustice that paid for it.

Then, of course, there was Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced crypto kingpin whose spectacular downfall, along with that of FTX, the company he founded, caused $32 billion to disappear, much of it belonging to hundreds of thousands of regular people.

Mr. Bankman-Fried embodies another pretension of plutocratic benevolence: that of the renegade, the people’s billionaire. Like many others, he hawked cryptocurrency as a fight against the establishment, against the big banks, against the powers that be, man. He has said his work was motivated by the ideals of effective altruism, a trendy school of thought that encourages people to go out and make as big a heap of money as they can so that they can use it to heal the world. But, as he admitted in an interview this week with Kelsey Piper of Vox, Mr. Bankman-Fried’s claims about the ethical nature of his pursuit were an example of “this dumb game we woke Westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.”

Finally, of course, this week there was Donald Trump (because let’s face it, there’s always Donald Trump), who has incarnated the most dangerous billionaire pretension of all: that of the hero who in all the world is the only one who can save us. He gamed the system so effectively that only he knows how to un-game it; he manipulated politicians so much that only he knows how to drain the swamp; he amassed so much money that only he is above corruption.

On Tuesday night he addressed a crowded room at Mar-a-Lago and, as expected, announced that he was going to run for president again. He said the usual things that politicians are supposed to say, about how he was doing it for America’s benefit. But this time it was no longer possible to imagine that even he believed it. After all, only a week had passed since America had voted in the midterm elections and rejected most of the high-profile candidates he endorsed — in the process, even Republican commentators agree, rejecting him. He dragged the party down so far that it did not regain the Senate and only barely regained the House.

Fearing even more disastrous outcomes, trusted advisers and allies encouraged him not to run again, or at least to delay his announcement. But they were wasting their time. Standing up there onstage, so low-energy that even Jeb Bush’s son felt compelled to comment, Mr. Trump took in the applause but offered no new ideas or directions. It was a variant of the performance that the others had been putting on, but with one crucial difference: Unlike Mr. Musk and Mr. Bezos and Mr. Bankman-Fried, who strain to show us how public-spirited they are, Mr. Trump could hardly be bothered to care.

It was a particularly unsubtle reminder that billionaires are not our saviors. They are our mistake.

The post This Week, Billionaires Made a Strong Case for Abolishing Themselves appeared first on New York Times.

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As FTX Group was crumbling in mid-November, Elon Musk stumbled across a topical post about cryptocurrencies. “As I’ve said before, don’t bet the farm on crypto!” the tweet read, suggesting entrepreneurs instead create “true value” by focusing on their “fellow human beings.” Musk agreed. “Exactly,” he tweeted in response.

Like many Twitter users, Musk’s preferred mode on the site is that of reply guy. His responses to random Tesla stans and conspiracy theorists draw substantial engagement, given the size of his following (118 million and counting). In this case, Musk was actually replying to himself. The source of the crypto wisdom was an account called Musk University, which promises to “Expand and Protect the Light of Consciousness” by posting things that Musk has said.

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Scientists may have just found a major new clue that could help solve the frustrating and ongoing mystery of the migraine.

Using ultra-high-resolution MRI, researchers found that perivascular spaces – fluid-filled spaces around the brain's blood vessels – are unusually enlarged in patients who experience both chronic and episodic migraine.

Although the link to or role in migraine is yet to be established, the finding could represent an as-yet unexplored avenue for future research.

The discovery was presented at the 108th Scientific Assembly and Annual Meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.

"In people with chronic migraine and episodic migraine without aura, there are significant changes in the perivascular spaces of a brain region called the centrum semiovale," says medical scientist Wilson Xu of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

"These changes have never been reported before."

Migraine, let's not mince words, is hell to live with. Although the excruciating headache aspect of it is well known, migraine can also cause vertigo, visual impairment (known as aura), photosensitivity, and nausea to the point of vomiting. It's unknown what causes migraine, there's no cure, and in many cases, the condition is unresponsive to treatment.

The condition affects an estimated 10 percent of the global population. So finding a cause and more effective management strategies would improve the lives of millions.

Xu and his colleagues were curious about the perivascular spaces in the centrum semiovale, the central region of brain white matter directly below the cerebral cortex. The function of these spaces is not completely understood; they do play a role in fluid movement drainage, and their enlargement can be a symptom of a larger problem.

"Perivascular spaces are part of a fluid clearance system in the brain," Xu says. "Studying how they contribute to migraine could help us better understand the complexities of how migraines occur."

He and his colleagues recruited 20 patients between the ages of 25 and 60 with migraine: 10 who experience chronic migraine without aura, and 10 who experience episodic migraine. In addition, 5 healthy patients who don't experience migraines were included as a control group.

The team ruled out patients with cognitive impairment, claustrophobia, brain tumor, or who had previously had brain surgery. Then, they conducted MRI scans using an ultra-high-field MRI with a 7-tesla magnet. Most hospital scanners only have magnets up to 3 tesla.

"To our knowledge, this is [the] first study using ultra-high-resolution MRI to study microvascular changes in the brain due to migraine, particularly in perivascular spaces," Xu explains.

"Because 7T MRI is able to create images of the brain with much higher resolution and better quality than other MRI types, it can be used to demonstrate much smaller changes that happen in brain tissue after a migraine."

The scans revealed that the perivascular spaces in the centrum semiovale of patients with migraine were significantly enlarged compared to the control group.

Researchers also found a difference in the distribution of a type of lesion known as white matter hyperintensities in migraine patients. These are caused by tiny patches of dead or partially dead tissue starved by a curtailed blood flow, and they're pretty normal.

There was no difference in the frequency of these lesions between the migraine patients and the control patients, but the severity of deep lesions in migraine sufferers was higher.

This suggests, the researchers believe, that the enlargement of perivascular spaces could lead to future development of more white matter lesions.

Although the nature of the link between enlarged perivascular spaces and migraine is unclear, the results suggest that migraine comes with a problem with the brain's plumbing – the glymphatic system responsible for waste clearance in the brain and nervous system. It utilizes perivascular channels for transport.

More work is needed to explore this correlation, but even identifying it is promising.

"The results of our study could help inspire future, larger-scale studies to continue investigating how changes in the brain's microscopic vessels and blood supply contribute to different migraine types," Xu says.

"Eventually, this could help us develop new, personalized ways to diagnose and treat migraine."

The research has been presented at the 108th Scientific Assembly and Annual Meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.

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Videos show hundreds of workers marching, with some confronted by people in hazmat suits and riot police.

Those livestreaming the protests said workers were beaten by police. Videos also showed clashes.

Manufacturer Foxconn said it would work with staff and local government to prevent further violence.

In its statement, the firm said some workers had doubts about pay but that the firm would fulfil pay based on contracts.

It also described as "patently untrue" rumours that new recruits were being asked to share dormitories with workers who were Covid-positive.

Dormitories were disinfected and checked by local officials before new people moved in, Foxconn said.

Last month, rising Covid cases saw the site locked down, prompting some workers to break out and go home. The company then recruited new workers with the promise of generous bonuses.

Footage shared on a livestreaming site showed workers shouting: "Defend our rights! Defend our rights!"

Other workers were seen smashing surveillance cameras and windows with sticks.

"They changed the contract so that we could not get the subsidy as they had promised. They quarantine us but don't provide food," said one Foxconn worker during his live stream.

"If they do not address our needs, we will keep fighting."

He also claimed to have seen a man "severely injured" after a beating from police.

One employee who recently started working at the Zhengzhou plant also told the BBC workers were protesting because Foxconn had "changed the contract they promised".

He said some newly recruited workers feared getting Covid from staff who had been there during the earlier outbreak.

"Those workers who are protesting are wanting to get a subsidy and return home," the staff member said.

There was a heavy police deployment to the plant on Wednesday morning, he said. Other livestreamed videos also showed crowds of armed police at the site.

Another newly recruited employee told the BBC he visited the protest scene on Wednesday where he saw "one man with blood over his head lying on the ground".

"I didn't know the exact reason why people are protesting but they are mixing us new workers with old workers who were [Covid] positive," he told the BBC.

Foxconn, a Taiwanese firm, is Apple's main subcontractor and its Zhengzhou plant assembles more iPhones than anywhere else in the world.

In late October many workers fled the plant amid rising Covid cases and allegations of poor treatment of staff.

Their escape was captured on social media as they rode lorries back to their hometowns elsewhere in the central Chinese province.

The firm has since enacted so-called closed loop operations at the plant - keeping it isolated from the wider city of Zhengzhou because of a Covid outbreak there.

Earlier this month Apple said it expected lower shipments of iPhone 14 models because of the disruption to production in Zhengzhou.

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Danish scientists concoct fat-free whipped cream out of lactic acid bacteria

The Orion spacecraft approaches the Moon on Monday.

NASA

 

So far, NASA's ambitious Artemis I mission seems to be going swimmingly. The Orion spacecraft has performed a number of propulsive burns, flying smoothly past the Moon, and will now test out its capabilities in deep space.

 

On Monday evening, after flying around the Moon, the spacecraft returned images of the flyby back to Earth via the Deep Space Network. While no humans are on board Orion during this test flight, they will be during its next mission. The views of the Moon from human spacecraft—the first in more than half a century—were brilliant.

 

"Today was a terrific day," said Howard Hu, program manager for the Orion spacecraft, speaking about the spacecraft's performance and its images. "This is a dream for many of us who work at NASA. We were like kids in a candy store."

The rocket rides

On Monday during a news conference in Houston, the Artemis I mission manager, Mike Sarafin, also provided an update on the performance of the Space Launch System rocket. "The results were eye-watering," Sarafin said.

 

All of the separation events, including the solid rocket boosters and first and second stages, were nominal. Every performance metric in terms of thrust and accuracy was either on target or within less than 0.3 percent of what was predicted, Sarafin said. In terms of dropping off the Orion spacecraft in its desired payload, the rocket was off by just three miles, a remarkably small error.

 

Sarafin acknowledged that the extreme thrust of the Space Launch System rocket caused some damage to the mobile launch tower that supports the rocket during fueling and countdown operations. There was damage at the base of the launch stand where the boosters produce thrust and breakage of some pneumatic lines that carry gases to the vehicle. The violent shaking from the launch also broke the tower's access elevator and blew its doors off.

 

While some of this damage was greater than expected, Sarafin said all of the problems were fixable. "It will be ready for the Artemis II mission," he said of the launch tower.

Moving outward

So far Orion has exceeded expectations in space. The solar panels on its service module, which was provided by the European Space Agency, have provided 22 percent more power than expected, Hu said. All of the spacecraft thrusters, from its large main engine down to its small reaction control system, have performed as intended. A visual inspection of the vehicle, from cameras mounted on its solar arrays, found no concerns from micrometeoroid debris or other issues.

 

The spacecraft's next big move will come on Friday, when its main engine will burn for a little more than a minute to place it into a distant retrograde orbit around the Moon, taking it far out into deep space to test the ability of Orion to maintain a constant interior temperature and stress other systems. Then the vehicle will fly by the Moon again on December 5 before burning its engines for home.

 

The December 5 flyby should produce even better imagery, since, during Monday's flyby, the vehicle's closest approach was on the far side of the Moon, which was in darkness at the time. The upcoming flyby will be in daylight, near the Apollo landing sites, which may be imaged by the vehicle's camera.

 

NASA plans to return Orion to Earth in the middle of the day on December 11, splashing down off the coast of Southern California. Sarafin said he and other senior officials working on Artemis I would remain nervous until then, even though everything has gone well so far.

 

"For me, there’s relief that we’re underway," he said. "But there’s a heightened sense of awareness. We’re on day six of a 26-day mission. I will rest well after splashdown and recovery is complete."

 

NASA’s new rocket blows the doors off its mobile launch tower

The Nobel Sustainability Trust Foundation (NST), a Zurich-based foundation led by Dr Michael Nobel and established by four members of the Nobel family, convened its second annual summit in Paris, France, at Palais Brogniart on November 22. Summit proceedings, focused this year on “Energy and Water”, were broadcast worldwide over social media.

The keynote speaker was British scientist Professor Stanley Whittingham, director of the Institute for Materials Research at the State University of New York at Binghamton. Whittingham was awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry alongside Akira Yoshino (Japan) and John B Goodenough (USA) “for the development of lithium-ion batteries.”

A principal purpose of this year’s summit, the initial one having been held in Bergen, Norway, in 2021, was the presentation by the Board of Directors of the Nobel Sustainability Trust Foundation of the Medal for Outstanding Contribution in Sustainability.

The two recipients, from Asia and North America, respectively, were Dr. Bruno Wu of Beijing, China, founder of the World Carbon Neutrality Council, and Mr. Collin O´Mara of Reston, Virginia, USA, president and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation.

NST Medal Award winner Dr Bruno Wu. Image: Supplied

The NST Directors also awarded a Special Recognition Letter to the Government of the People’s Republic of China for outstanding contributions to advancing carbon neutrality.

The Nobel Sustainability Trust Foundation, founded by the then-chairman of the Swedish Nobel family Gustaf Nobel and family members Michael, Philip and Peter under the name of “The Nobel Charity Trust” in 2007, was given its present name in 2011 to more accurately represent its role and activities.

Its board of trustees today includes five members of the Nobel family. The NST logo and The Sustainability Award are trademarked in the EU and worldwide. The NST is independent of the Nobel Foundation that awards the Nobel prizes established by Alfred Nobel. It reflects the wishes of the five Nobel family members currently serving as trustees to have a new prize associated with the Nobel name devoted to sustainable development.

At his introductory presentation of the Paris Summit 2022, NST chairman Michael Nobel said the annual “Sustainable Development Award” will focus on applied science and recognize outstanding sustainable development projects around the world, including in the fields of new energy, new materials, water, health, agriculture, IT and artificial intelligence.

He noted that future award winners would be selected by a top jury organized by the Technical University of Munich (TUM), Germany, one of the world’s leading institutes of technology.

This year’s awards and recognition letter were presented at the Paris Summit by Bertie Ahern, co-chair of the Interaction Council of 40 Former Heads of State and Government and former prime minister of Ireland.

The NST cited the following data in support of the Recognition Letter to China:

From 2012 to 2021, China’s average annual energy consumption growth rate of 3% supported an average economic growth of 6.5%, and carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP have dropped by 34.4% compared to 2012, which is equivalent to a reduction of 3.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions. The proportion of coal consumption dropped from 65.8% in 2014 to 56% in 2021, with an average annual decline of 1.4 percentage points—the fastest decline in history.

By the end of 2021, China’s non-fossil energy accounted for 16.6% of its total energy output, while its cumulative installed capacity of new energy has reached 1.12 billion kilowatts, with hydropower, wind power, and photovoltaic power generation reaching or exceeding 300 million kilowatts, ranking first in the world.

China’s renewable energy installed capacity accounts for one-third of the world’s. More than 50% of the world’s wind power equipment and more than 85% of the world’s photovoltaic equipment components come from China. The cumulative investment in renewable energy has reached 380 billion US dollars, ranking first in the world.

China’s forest stock is also increasing. In 2021, China’s forest coverage rate will reach 24.02%, and its forest stock volume will reach 19.493 billion cubic meters, making it the country with the largest increase in forest resources in the world. China will plant 70 billion more trees in the next decade.

As of June 2022, the number of new energy vehicles in China has reached 10 million, accounting for more than half of the global market share.

In support of the award to Dr Bruno Wu, the NST said:

He is a forward-looking, global and innovative entrepreneur active in the investment and media industries, and has served as co-chairman and CEO of Sun Seven Stars Investment Group since 2009.

Dr Wu has a long-standing commitment to global sustainability, having founded the World Carbon Neutral Council in 2021 with several former heads of state, including Mr. Bertie Ahern.

The Council is dedicated to the global coordination of carbon neutral standards for ESG and green finance. In 2022, Dr. Wu co-founded the soon-to-be-operational Marine Carbon Assets Trading Platform with the High North Group in Norway.

 

GCN, a company founded by Dr Wu, is a global leader in innovative technology in the field of carbon-neutral technology. Its vision is to realize and accelerate the transformation of commercial transportation from fossil fuels to next-generation green power to achieve carbon neutrality.

NST Medal Award winner Collin O’Mara. Image: Twitter

Medal recipient Collin O’Mara, president and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, the largest wildlife conservation organization in the United States, was awarded the medal for his many years of sustained efforts in environmental and animal conservation and his contributions to watershed restoration.

The National Wildlife Federation has made significant contributions to urban development and the conservation of animals in their natural habitats, saving endangered species and forestalling climate change.

O’Mara understands the need for nature-based solutions to address climate risks and carbon sequestration. He fought for resiliency programs, bolstering coastal lands and ecosystem restoration on a large scale to protect watersheds and ensure communities are safe.

As a direct result of his advocacy, nearly US$1 billion was allocated for coastal restoration and resilience investments as well as aquatic ecosystem restoration efforts across the United States, including a historic effort to restore the Everglades in Florida.

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Today, Facebook announced new efforts to limit the spread of some of that CSAM on its platforms. Partnering with NCMEC, Facebook is building a “global platform” to prevent “sextortion” by helping “stop the spread of teens’ intimate images online.”

“We’re working with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) to build a global platform for teens who are worried intimate images they created might be shared on public online platforms without their consent,” Antigone Davis, Facebook’s VP, global head of safety, said in a blog post on Monday.

This global platform for teens will work similarly to the platform that Meta created to help adults combat “revenge porn,” Davis said, which Facebook said last year was “the first global initiative of its kind.” It lets users generate a hash to proactively stop images from being distributed on Facebook and Instagram.

According to Davis, Meta found that more than 75 percent of the child exploitative content that proliferates on its platforms at rates that outpace other social media is posted by people “with no apparent intention of harm.” Instead, the CSAM gets shared to express outrage, disgust, or “poor humor,” Davis said.

“Sharing this content violates our policies, regardless of intent,” Davis said. “We’re planning to launch a new PSA campaign that encourages people to stop and think before resharing those images online and to report them to us instead.”

She also said there would be more news about the new platform for teens in the coming weeks.

NCMEC did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment.

Meta looking into labeling “suspicious” adults

In her blog, Davis outlined several other updates that Meta made to better protect teens.

For new users under the age of 16 (or 18 in some countries), Meta will default privacy settings to stop strangers from seeing their friends list, the pages they follow, or the posts they’re tagged in. Teens will also have default settings limiting who can comment on their posts and prompting them to review posts they’re tagged in before those posts appear on their pages. For all teens already on the platforms, Meta said it would send notifications recommending they update their privacy settings.

Perhaps the greatest precaution Meta is testing now, though, is a step toward flagging adult users who are believed to be harassing teen users as “suspicious" accounts.

“A ‘suspicious’ account is one that belongs to an adult that may have recently been blocked or reported by a young person, for example,” Davis wrote.

To figure out who’s “suspicious,” Meta plans to rely on reports from teen users. When a teen user blocks an account, the teen user will also get a notification to report the account to Meta to let them know “if something makes them feel uncomfortable while using our apps.” To identify more suspicious users, Meta said it would review all blocks by teens, regardless of whether they make a report.

Any account flagged as suspicious would not be displayed in teen users’ People You May Know recommendations. Davis said that Meta is also considering whether or not it should remove the message button entirely when a “suspicious” account views a teen user’s profile.

Even this is an imperfect system, of course. The major flaw with Meta's solution here is that flagging "suspicious" users will only happen after some teens have already been harassed.

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Musk completed his $44 billion purchase of Twitter on October 27 and laid off about half of the company's 7,500 employees. He sent an ultimatum to the remaining staff last week, saying they must commit to "working long hours at high intensity" to keep their jobs; the ultimatum came with the choice of staying at the company or resigning with three months of severance.

Some sales employees who opted to stay after Musk's ultimatum were reportedly laid off shortly after. With the latest departures, Twitter was reportedly left with about 2,700 employees. Musk also laid off about 5,000 contractors and banned remote work, while warning staff of a "dire" economic outlook.

In yesterday's all-hands meeting, Musk reportedly told staff that "in terms of critical hires, I would say people who are great at writing software are the highest priority." Another Verge report last week said that "Twitter recruiters have already started reaching out to outside engineers to see if they want to join 'Twitter 2.0—an Elon company.'"

Musk seeks “anyone who actually writes software”

Musk told employees in his ultimatum email that under his ownership, Twitter will be "much more engineering-driven. Design and product management will still be very important and report to me, but those writing great code will constitute the majority of our team and have the greatest sway."

After Musk's ultimatum deadline passed, he began meeting with engineers who chose to stay. In an email to staff on Friday, Musk wrote, "Anyone who actually writes software, please report to the 10th floor at 2 pm today. Before doing so, please email a bullet point summary of what your code commits have achieved in the past ~6 months, along with up to 10 screenshots of the most salient lines of code."

The Twitter careers page wasn't listing any open jobs today. There were more than 100 job openings before Musk took over.

Musk may have to hire engineers quickly to keep Twitter systems running properly. A Washington Post report quoted a former employee as saying layoffs and other departures "have left multiple critical systems down to two, one or even zero engineers." Gutted departments include "Twitter's traffic and front end teams that route engineering requests to the correct backend services," a Verge report said. "The team that maintains Twitter's core system libraries that every engineer at the company uses is also gone."

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Researchers from Johns Hopkins Medicine investigated whether stress may increase appetite in obese and lean adults in a series of experiments using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a technique for monitoring brain activity across networks in the brain. The results showed that stress affects how the brain responds to food and that both lean and obese people respond to food cues in reward- and cognitive-control-related brain regions.

The findings of the study were recently published in the journal PLOS ONE.

Data from 29 adults—16 women and 13 men—were evaluated for the study, of whom 17 were obese and 12 were lean. Participants underwent two fMRI scans, one following a social and physiological stress test.

During both scans, participants underwent a food word reactivity test. This test involved observing how people’s brains responded to food words, such as menu items written on a blackboard. The researchers asked participants to picture each food’s appearance, smell, and taste, as well as how it would feel to consume it right then and there, in order to maximize the brain’s appetitive response. They were also asked how much they desired each dish and whether they thought they shouldn’t eat it to evaluate how they viewed food-related decision-making.

“The experiments showed that obese and lean adults differ somewhat in their brain responses, with obese adults showing less activation of cognitive control regions to food words, especially to high-calorie foods, like for example, grilled cheese,” says lead researcher Susan Carnell, Ph.D., associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

The study also showed that stress impacts brain responses to food. For example, obese individuals showed greater activation of the orbitofrontal cortex, a brain reward region, after the stress test. “We also found evidence for links between the subjective stress experienced and brain responses in both groups. For example, lean individuals who reported higher stress following the test showed lower activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a key brain area for cognitive control,” says Carnell.

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Researchers have learned new information on how Antarctica’s subsurface ice formation contributes to the circulation of cold, dense water that sinks to the ocean floor, an important aspect of global water circulation. 

A team from Hokkaido University’s Institute of Low Temperature Science, Arctic Research Center, and Faculty of Fisheries Science, in collaboration with researchers from Japan’s National Institute of Polar Research and Aerospace Exploration Agency, produced the findings, which were published in the journal Science Advances.

Kay I. Ohshima of the research group. Credit: Hokkaido University

 

The seas surrounding Antarctica, where a significant quantity of sea ice is created, are critical to world ocean water circulation, connecting the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. When sea ice forms, it rejects salt, resulting in dense, cold water that sinks to the seafloor.

The majority of the deep ocean floor known as the global abyss is flooded by this water, known as Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW), which is the coldest and densest water mass in the global circulation. Understanding the mechanism of AABW development and how global warming will influence the formation is crucial since global ocean circulation impacts the global climate.

The cold, dense water formed around Antarctica sinks to the seabed, driving global ocean circulation. Credit: Kay I. Oshima

 

“We found surprising new results about the form of sea ice growth in a key AABW production site, close to Cape Darnley in Antarctica, with potentially wide implications for other areas,” says Kay Ohshima of the Hokkaido team. He explains that satellite monitoring and data from moored sensors in the ocean revealed the importance of underwater ice called Frazil ice in producing dense cold water. This ice forms beneath the surface when water is cooled to below its freezing point by the cooling effect of the strong wind and turbulent conditions. The cooling can occur to surprising depths of 80 meters or more.

Around the coast of Cape Darnley, frazil ice forms efficiently under the sea surface particularly due to the strong wind and resulting heat loss. When Frazil ice forms, it generates cold, dense water which sinks to the seabed forming Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW). Credit: Kay I. Ohshima et al., Science Advances, October 19, 2022

 

Their key significance is that they involve an area where water is cooled by strong wind from severely cold Antarctica, especially in open water areas within the pack ice called polynyas.

“It is important to learn that such a major process is occurring underwater, revealing an aspect of the circulation system that has been at least partially obscured from view,” Kay says.

The researchers also suggest that the frazil ice could incorporate the sediment at the sea bottom and release it as the ice melts. This may yield a new understanding of the circulation of nutrients that fertilize plankton to influence the general biological productivity of Antarctic waters.

“Our next step is to incorporate these new processes into understanding of Southern Ocean biogeochemistry and carbon circulation, which will require significant new fieldwork and research,” Kay concludes.

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According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), approximately one in five adults will develop long-term effects from COVID-19. Difficulty thinking or concentrating, sleep problems, headache, lightheadedness, change in smell or taste, pins-and-needles sensation, and depression or anxiety are all neurological symptoms associated with long COVID. However, research studies have found that COVID-19 may be associated with changes to the heart, lungs, or other organs even in asymptomatic patients.

As more people become infected and recover from COVID-19, research has begun to emerge, focusing on the lasting consequences of the disease. These are known as post-COVID conditions, which are also known by a myriad of names including long COVID, long-haul COVID, post-acute COVID-19, post-acute sequelae of SARS CoV-2 infection (PASC), long-term effects of COVID, and chronic COVID.

For this study, researchers used susceptibility-weighted imaging to analyze the effects that COVID-19 has on the brain. Magnetic susceptibility denotes how much certain materials, such as blood, iron, and calcium, will become magnetized in an applied magnetic field. This ability aids in the detection and monitoring of a host of neurologic conditions including microbleeds, vascular malformations, brain tumors, and stroke.

“Group-level studies have not previously focused on COVID-19 changes in magnetic susceptibility of the brain despite several case reports signaling such abnormalities,” said study co-author Sapna S. Mishra, a Ph.D. candidate at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi. “Our study highlights this new aspect of the neurological effects of COVID-19 and reports significant abnormalities in COVID survivors.”

The researchers analyzed the susceptibility-weighted imaging data of 46 COVID-recovered patients and 30 healthy controls. Imaging was done within six months of recovery. Among patients with long COVID, the most commonly reported symptoms were fatigue, trouble sleeping, lack of attention, and memory issues.

“Changes in susceptibility values of brain regions may be indicative of local compositional changes,” Mishra said. “Susceptibilities may reflect the presence of abnormal quantities of paramagnetic compounds, whereas lower susceptibility could be caused by abnormalities like calcification or lack of paramagnetic molecules containing iron.”

MRI results showed that patients who recovered from COVID-19 had significantly higher susceptibility values in the frontal lobe and brain stem compared to healthy controls. The clusters obtained in the frontal lobe primarily show differences in the white matter.

“These brain regions are linked with fatigue, insomnia, anxiety, depression, headaches, and cognitive problems,” Mishra said.

Portions of the left orbital-inferior frontal gyrus (a key region for language comprehension and production) and right orbital-inferior frontal gyrus (associated with various cognitive functions including attention, motor inhibition, and imagery, as well as social cognitive processes) and the adjacent white matter areas made up the frontal lobe clusters.

The researchers also found a significant difference in the right ventral diencephalon region of the brain stem. This region is associated with many crucial bodily functions, including coordinating with the endocrine system to release hormones, relaying sensory and motor signals to the cerebral cortex and regulating circadian rhythms (the sleep-wake cycle).

“This study points to serious long-term complications that may be caused by the coronavirus, even months after recovery from the infection,” Mishra said. “The present findings are from the small temporal window. However, the longitudinal time points across a couple of years will elucidate if there exists any permanent change.”

The researchers are conducting a longitudinal study on the same patient cohort to determine whether these brain abnormalities persist over a longer time frame.

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According to a recent study by researchers from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine published in Obesity Science & Practice, eating a plant-based diet decreases inflammatory dietary advanced glycation end-products (AGEs) by 79%, compared to a 15% reduction for a diet that contains meat and dairy products. An average weight reduction of 14 pounds and better insulin sensitivity was linked to the drop in AGEs.

“Simply swapping fatty meat and dairy products for a low-fat plant-based diet led to a significant decrease in advanced glycation end-products—inflammatory compounds found to a greater degree in animal products than plants,” says lead study author Hana Kahleova, MD, Ph.D., director of clinical research at the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. “The decrease in AGEs was also associated with weight loss and improved insulin sensitivity.”

AGEs are compounds formed in the bloodstream when proteins or fats combine with glucose. AGEs cause inflammation and oxidative stress, which may contribute to chronic diseases including type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

AGEs may be ingested through food, and animal products contain more AGEs than plant foods. AGEs are created during normal metabolism as well, but at a faster rate when a person has metabolic syndrome — high blood sugar, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and insulin resistance.

For 16 weeks, 244 overweight individuals were randomly allocated to either an intervention group that ate a low-fat plant-based diet or a control group that made no dietary adjustments.

At the beginning and end of the study, body composition was measured and insulin sensitivity was assessed. Dietary AGEs were calculated based on self-reported dietary intake records. A dietary AGEs database was used to estimate dietary AGEs intake.

Dietary AGEs decreased by 79% in the plant-based group, compared to 15% in the control group. About 55% of the reduction of the dietary AGEs in the plant-based group was attributable to the reduction in meat intake, 26% to decreased dairy intake, and 15% to decreased consumption of added fats. The reduction in white meat consumption made the biggest difference in dietary AGEs coming from meat (59%), followed by processed meat (27%).

Body weight decreased by about 14 pounds (6.4 kg) in the plant-based group, compared with about 1 pound (0.5 kg) in the control group, largely due to a reduction in fat mass, notably visceral fat. Insulin sensitivity improved in the intervention group.

The authors say that these findings support prior observations of the favorable effects of low-AGEs diets on weight, body fat, and insulin resistance.

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Overall, 62 percent claim the winter holiday season is their busiest time of year in their lives. The biggest contributors to a lack of sleep during the holidays include cooking and preparing meals (36%), shopping stress (34%), financial stress (34%), and having family over (30%). Seven in 10 will force themselves to stay up later in the evenings in order to tackle the tasks they couldn’t finish during the day — including wrapping gifts (37%) and cooking or preparing meals (28%).

Over half the poll (58%) find themselves waking up earlier in the mornings for the same reasons.

Commissioned by Mattress Firm and conducted by OnePoll, the study found the most sleepless nights of the holiday season are Christmas Eve (43%), New Year’s Eve (38%), Christmas Day (35%), Thanksgiving (26%), and Black Friday (17%).

Over the course of the holidays, 64 percent of people are likely to gather with their extended relatives. If they’re traveling, 55 percent are likely to lose out on quality sleep if they aren’t in their own bed.

Christmas season insomnia?

Those who celebrate Christmas especially feel the midnight oil burn: 67 percent of them are likely to stay up late on Christmas Eve with their family. Three in four (74%) claim they’re the last ones to go to bed that evening, ensuring everyone else is tucked in before them.

Over half (52%) of Christmas-celebrating parents say their kids still believe in Santa. Sixty-two percent of those kids insist on staying up late on Christmas Eve in an attempt to catch Mr. Claus in the act.

New Year’s is also a major culprit in sleep loss during the holidays. Nearly four in five (78%) of those who celebrate stay up late on New Year’s Eve. Even then, 32 percent get so exhausted, they never make it to midnight.

“There’s something about the holiday season that, while exciting and usually a time to enjoy family, is also absolutely exhausting,” says Dr. Chris Winter, a neurologist, sleep specialist, and sleep advisor at Mattress Firm, in a statement. “Having family over, shopping, budgeting — it can all stack up and make getting a sound night of sleep seem like a distant, nearly-impossible-to-reach fantasy.”

There really is a Thanksgiving hangover

The study also found the holiday season’s best nights for sleep: the nights after Thanksgiving (27%), Christmas Day (26%), and New Year’s Day (18%). For at least one in three (37%), it’s easier to sleep the night after a major holiday. However, 20 percent say it’s still a challenge.

On average, respondents need three days to pass after the holiday season before they can sleep soundly again.

Unfortunately, post-holiday recovery sleep can depend on family overstaying their welcome (45%), cleaning up after guests (45%), and financial worries (33%).

“Getting decent rest during the busy holiday season begins by first committing to a sleep routine so that no matter where you are, the ritual will help you relax and prepare for bed. It’s also helpful to pace yourself and give yourself time between holiday tasks to decompress,” suggests Dr. Winter. “Instead of taking on one task after another, you can give yourself time to relax and get better quality sleep by dividing your to-do list throughout the day.”

Survey methodology:

This random double-opt-in survey of 2,000 Americans who celebrate a winter holiday was commissioned by Mattress Firm between October 12 and October 17, 2022. It was conducted by market research company OnePoll, whose team members are members of the Market Research Society and have corporate membership to the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) and the European Society for Opinion and Marketing Research (ESOMAR).

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Restroom visitors can expect cleaner knees and tidier floors, if they happen to use a new urinal inspired by curves in nature.

The key to making a splashless urinal is ensuring that a person’s pee stream hits the porcelain at a shallow angle no matter where it is aimed, researchers report November 22 at the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics meeting in Indianapolis.  

“For a small enough angle, there is no splash,” says mechanical engineer Zhao Pan of the University of Waterloo in Canada. Pan calls the angle where splashing ceases “the critical angle.” Keeping the angle that a fluid strikes the surface at the critical angle or lower prevents the splash.

Pan and colleagues’ design — a tall, narrow urinal with a curving inner surface — employs the same geometry as a nautilus shell (SN: 4/1/05).

“There’s a smooth flow across the surface,” says Waterloo mechanical engineering student Kaveeshan Thurairajah, which prevents droplets from flying out.

In experiments involving dyed fluids sprayed into conventional urinals, the team found significant splash that, in the real world, would have ended up on a person’s legs and feet and on the floor nearby. When the researchers repeated the experiments with prototypes of the new design and inspected the surrounding surfaces, “I couldn’t find even a single droplet,” Thurairajah says.

It’s unclear whether people using the new urinals will still somehow find a way to make a mess. To tell how well the urinals work in eventual real-world tests, Pan says, “just look at the floor.”

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Orion soars around the Moon with a lonely Earth in the distance

On November 15, 2022, according to the demographers at the United Nations Population Division, the 8 billionth person on the planet was born.

That 8 billion mark is an estimate — there is no real-time census of everyone alive on Earth at every given moment, which means there’s a margin of error on either side of 8 billion. But someone will be or already is Baby 8 Billion.

He or she is most likely to be born in India, which had more than 23 million births last year — 13 million more than second-place China, which India will soon pass as the world’s most populous country. And he stands a better than even chance of being a he, since boys naturally outnumber girls at birth by a rate of about 105 to 100; in India, due to a mix of cultural preference for boys and access to sex-selective abortion, that rate is closer to 108 to 100. With an average life expectancy in India of just under 70 years today and rising, our hypothetical Baby 8 Billion stands a decent chance of being alive to witness the dawn of the 22nd century.

How many other human beings will be there with him to see the calendar turn to 2100? If you think it’s tricky to count the number of people alive today, accurately projecting global population nearly 80 years into the future is near impossible, requiring countless estimates about birth rates, death rates, and movement — “sex, death, and migration,” in the words of the demographer Jennifer Sciubba. Estimated global population in 2000 stood at 6.09 billion, which would have been a surprise to the UN demographers of 1973, who projected that it would be almost 410 million larger by the turn of the millennium — an overestimate bigger than the current population of the United States.

The best guess we have — the medium scenario, according to UN demographers — is that by 2100, global population will have leveled off at around 10.4 billion. What that number means — and whether you even believe it — says a lot about what you think about the future of the planet, about the global power structure decades from now, and even about the purpose of being human.

For those who see every additional human being as one more consuming, carbon-emitting unit on a hot and crowded planet that is already well past its carrying capacity, the idea of 8 billion people — let alone 10.4 billion — is the last mile marker on the road to a climate and environmental catastrophe. It’s an old fear that dates back to the grim prophecies of the 18th-century English cleric and economist Thomas Malthus, who wrote that “the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.”

He has thus far been proven wrong — even with a global population more than 7 billion people larger today than in Malthus’s time, life is a whole lot better and longer on average — but his influence can still be felt in certain corners of environmentalism. It’s the animating idea behind one of the most influential modern treatises on the topic: the 1968 book The Population Bomb.

But another group sees that 10.4 billion and fears we’ll never actually get there. They pay less attention to the seeming enormity of 8 billion, and more to the slowing pace of population growth, which is still increasing, but at less than 1 percent a year — its slowest rate since at least 1950. In virtually every corner of the globe, people are having fewer babies than their parents and grandparents did.

Two-thirds of humanity lives in an area where lifetime fertility is below 2.1 children per woman, the rough level a population requires to replace itself through births alone. That includes the US, where fertility has generally been below replacement level since 1971 and where population in 2021 grew at its slowest rate since the nation’s founding. It also includes China, where the nation that enforced the coercive one-child policy out of fears of overpopulation is now in a desperate struggle to turn around its rock-bottom fertility rates. Even if global population does reach 10.4 billion by 2100 or earlier, the UN projects it could actually begin to decline after. Should global fertility fall more than expected, that decline could begin sooner and appear sharper.

That would put our species on a path we’ve never walked before, outside of temporary dips from war, disease, or famine. Population worriers see an aging world of empty cradles, sapped of innovation and youthful energy, one where “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming,” as Elon Musk — who, with eight children and counting, seems to be doing his best to turn the problem around single-handedly — tweeted this year. They fear an “underpopulation bomb” with a very long fuse.

The truth is that human population is complicated, and there may be 8 billion ways to be wrong about it. Fevered fears about overpopulation ignore the fact that the carrying capacity of the Earth is not and never has been fixed. Technological advances, improved efficiency, and changing consumption patterns allow us to get more people out of the same amount of planet, a possibility Malthus, writing at a time when human population had taken tens of thousands of years to reach just 1 billion, simply couldn’t imagine.

But those who fret about underpopulation miss the fact that demographic trends for the entire planet don’t move in a single direction. Even as most rich nations face aging and eventual decline, the very young populations of sub-Saharan Africa and parts of South Asia are set for decades of booming population growth. Trends may point to the last person in Japan dying in 2500, but Nigeria is on pace to pass the US with more than 400 million people by 2055.

Just as shifting technology enables us to get more out of the planet, advances in automation and life expectancy could get more productivity out of every worker, postponing the economic drag of fewer young people. And if the world finds a way to sustainably increase migration flows from the poor but young and growing countries of the Global South to the rich but aging and eventually shrinking nations of the Global North — think of it as solving a trade deficit, but for people — we could successfully manage a global demographic imbalance that only seems likely to grow.

Population matters. If humans have become the dominant force on this planet in the age of the Anthropocene, demography will shape that force.

It will shape the number of people producing carbon emissions, the number of people who need to be fed, the number of people who come up with the innovations we may need to solve both of those challenges. It will shape the age structures of entire nations, their geopolitical clout, their economic power. Over a long enough period, it will shape what kind of future we have, and whether we have a future at all. Just as climate models give us a decent forecast of what the Earth itself will be like decades past today, demography gives us a glimpse into what humanity will look like in the future. And just as climate models are a product of both the impersonal forces of our planet and the energy and environmental policies we pursue, population is a product of both the unchangeable trends of the past and the choices nations make today around family policy, migration, and technology.

The debate over global population can feel like a dead end, an unending argument over too many or too few. But that’s the wrong way to look at it. We have the capacity to add more and we have the ability to make do with fewer. What we want isn’t a single, perfect number, but a world in which people have the ability and the support to have the families they desire, one where demography isn’t a destiny, but a choice.

Overpopulation: The bomb that did not go off

To understand the core of overpopulation fears, you need to read Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb. Ehrlich wasn’t a demographer — he was an entomologist by training, who co-wrote the book with his wife Anne (although only Paul appeared as the author on the cover) at the behest of Sierra Club executive director David Brower, who was deeply worried about the environmental effects of population.

But it wasn’t numbers that caused the book to sell millions of copies. It was the language, Ehrlich’s vivid ability to capture what he called in the opening scene “the feel of overpopulation,” and the clarity of his grim prophecies of what was to come as we grew and grew. “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” the first sentence goes. In the coming decade, the book goes on, “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death” — and nothing we could do would prevent that.

The Population Bomb is one of the most influential books of the 20th century. It catalyzed growing fears that we were running out of room as a species, mindlessly reproducing ourselves into oblivion like bacteria in a petri dish.

Those fears contributed to a wave of population growth measures around the globe, and with that came serious human rights abuses and atrocities. In India under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, tens of millions underwent forced sterilization in the 1970s. In China, the one-child policy introduced in 1979 prevented an estimated 400 million births. Experts like Ehrlich did not condone the very real coercion behind those efforts, but by casting population growth as an existential threat, they helped set the stage for them.

But if The Population Bomb blew up, the population bomb itself did not. There are now more than twice as many humans alive as there were when the book was published, yet hunger, poverty, and infectious disease — the coming disasters it predicted — have all largely lessened over the past several decades.

India, the central case in Ehrlich’s book, has nearly tripled its population since 1968, while largely growing richer, longer-lived, and less hungry.

Famine has hardly been eliminated from the Earth, and in Ehrlich’s partial defense, he presented possible scenarios rather than predictions in his book, even if his language sometimes tipped into apocalyptic certainty. (It’s difficult to read the line “the battle to feed all humanity is over” as anything but “the battle to feed all humanity is over.”) But what he foresaw did not come to pass.

Between 1968 and 1978, global total fertility — the average number of children a woman will have over the course of her reproductive life — dropped by one entire child, to 3.8. By 1998, it had fallen by another child, and it kept on dropping, until today it stands at 2.4 children per woman, not that much above the replacement rate of about 2.1 children.

The rate of population growth fell as well, to the roughly 1 percent it sits at today. Our total numbers kept rising, of course, and someone from 1968 would likely find our world today unimaginably crowded; Delhi, the city where Ehrlich begins his book, has grown tenfold from 3.2 million to some 32 million. But that growth has slowed to a pace that the population bomb crowd likely wouldn’t have expected, even as the world proved far better at absorbing that growth than they would have predicted.

It’s easy to look back in hindsight and see everything that Ehrlich and others raising the population alarm got wrong. But it’s also easy to imagine that if the trends of 1968 had simply continued, the battle to feed humanity really was over. In 1968, global total fertility was nearly five children per woman. Annual population growth was 2.1 percent, by some estimates the highest it had ever been in human history, and — though now I’m at risk of making my own prediction — will likely be the highest humanity will ever see. And it came at the end of nearly a decade of growth above 2 percent, after nearly 70 years in which global population had more than doubled.

To look at a global population growth chart from the vantage of 1968 is to see a hockey stick that seems to have only one direction it could possibly go: up and up and up.

What’s wrong about The Population Bomb isn’t what’s interesting about it today, as we tip over to 8 billion people. The study of population, especially when it’s done with an eye to policy, has something in common with the study of subatomic particles: The act of observation changes what we observe. “People who dismiss [Ehrlich] for his inaccurate forecasts miss the point,” Jennifer Sciubba writes in 8 Billion and Counting: How Sex, Death, and Migration Shape Our World. “Forecasts don’t predict the future — they drive investments in the present.”

The mistake Ehrlich and his fellow travelers made was their assumption that the trends of the present would continue unabated into the future.

They failed to foresee the transformative effects of the Green Revolution: the transfer of higher-yielding seeds, chemical fertilizers, and irrigation methods to the Global South, a movement that would save an estimated 1 billion people from starvation and earn its chief figure, the agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug, a Nobel Peace Prize just two years after The Population Bomb was published.

They failed to foresee that in then-poor countries like South Korea, the total fertility rate had already been plummeting during the 1960s, creating a demographic dividend — that is, a surge in economic growth that comes from declining birth and death rates that lead to a bulge of young workers with fewer dependents.

They failed to foresee that as people across the world grew richer in the decades that followed, and as their children became increasingly likely to live to adulthood, they responded almost universally by having fewer babies, whether it was Pakistan, where birth rates dropped by almost half to 3.4 children per woman from 1968 to 2020, or the US, which went from 2.5 to 1.6.

Most of all, they failed to understand that there is no such objective thing as “overpopulation” — that the Earth has no fixed carrying capacity for human life. In prehistoric times with prehistoric technology, the limit might have been 100 million people. At the dawn of the 20th century, when the world’s population was around 1.6 billion, we may have been close to our limit, until scientists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch created a means to artificially synthesize nitrogen fertilizer for crops at industrial scale in 1909-10, vastly improving agricultural productivity and creating what energy and environmental researcher Vaclav Smil called “the detonator of the population explosion.”

This is the story of humanity ever since our population began its upward swing in the 19th century: growth, whether of people or of material demands, brings us up against what appear to be limits, until we find a way to burst through and keep growing, only to repeat the process again.

To say there are side effects is putting it lightly. The explosive growth of human population has come at the direct expense of the wild animals that share our planet, not to mention the tens of billions of farmed animals that suffer to make our dinner. And climate change presents the greatest challenge of all — more people, after all, mean more carbon emissions and more warming. The fact that we’ve managed to innovate our way around what appeared to be unbreakable environmental limits in the past shouldn’t lead us to assume that we’ll always be able to do the same in the future. But while total carbon emissions have largely kept rising, albeit more slowly, global per-capita carbon emissions appear to have peaked around 2013 and have largely declined since, even as per-capita GDP has continued to increase.

This shift wasn’t inevitable — just as a mix of tools like contraception, shifting preferences, and some government policies contributed to a drastic drop in fertility and population growth, success against climate change will depend on the technologies we invent and the policy choices we make. But there’s reason to believe that just as we have largely decoupled food from population, we can do the same with carbon — especially if, as it turned out we were with population growth in 1968, we’re only at the beginning of a much more drastic decline.

Empty cradles: The underpopulation bomb

In 2015, the Chinese government did something it almost never does: It admitted it made a mistake, at least implicitly.

The ruling Communist Party announced that it was ending its historic and coercive one-child policy, allowing all married couples to have up to two children. That was how dire China’s demographic future had become.

The one-child policy had helped lead to the mother of all demographic dividends, as China’s working-age population grew from 594 million in 1980 to a little over 1 billion in 2015. China’s dependency ratio — the total young and elderly population relative to the working-age population — fell from over 68 percent in 1980 to less than 38 percent in 2015, which meant more workers for every non-working person.

More young workers who had fewer young or old dependents to care for was the fuel in China’s economic rocket engine. But no fuel burns forever, and over the past decade, hundreds of millions of Chinese have hit retirement age, with a plummeting number of young people to replace them. So the slogans went from “Having only one child is good” to “One is too few, while two are just right.”

How did the Chinese people react? Not by having more children. By 2020 China’s total fertility rate (that is, the number of expected births per woman over the course of their reproductive lifetime) had fallen to just 1.3. For the people of China, if not the government, it seems two was not just right.

So in 2021, the Chinese government tried again, turning the two-child policy into a three-child policy. That same year, fertility fell again, to 1.15, putting it among the world’s least fertile countries. The UN now projects that China’s population has peaked, while other demographers, noting the unreliability of government statistics in China, believe it has been shrinking for years. (Maybe a four-child policy will do the trick.)

If population decline can come for the first country to reach 1 billion people, it can come for anyone. And while China’s demography was skewed by the one-child policy, dozens of countries without a similarly coercive program have seen near equally drastic dropoffs in fertility, much older demographics, and population decline, either now or soon. The most recent numbers for Japan: 1.3 births per woman, and a population shrinking by 0.5 percent. For Italy: 1.2 births, and population shrinking by 0.6 percent. For Portugal: 1.4 and 0 percent growth. For Russia: 1.5 and shrinking by 0.4 percent.

The US, while long an outlier among rich nations in its relative fertility, is far from immune. Fertility has continued to decrease, especially after the 2007 global recession.

You can see the effects in the declining number of children in America. In 2022, some 24.8 million are under the age of 6. That’s about the same number as in 1962, during the height of the baby boom — but that year children under 6 made up more than 13 percent of the total population, compared to a bit over 7 percent today.

At the same time, the nation is growing older, as many of those who were children in 1962 enter what we still — though perhaps for not much longer — call “retirement age.” There are more than twice as many Americans 65 and older as there are under 6 years old, making up 16 percent of the population. The total number of elderly is projected to reach 80 million by 2040 and nearly 95 million by 2060. That means more people beyond the traditional working age, and fewer younger workers to support them — the opposite of a demographic dividend. And the projections are even starker in much of Europe and East Asia, where fertility is lower and population aging is unfolding faster.

Put that all together — the emptying cradles, the aging citizenry, the dwindling growth — and you have what some call an underpopulation bomb for the 21st century. Hence the efforts of countries from Hungary to Russia to South Korea to France to Japan to, yes, China, to offer benefits, including cash, aimed at inducing their citizens to procreate more. “The lack of children, which causes an aging population, implicitly affirms that everything ends with us,” Pope Francis said last year. “Without births there is no future.”

By this point, you should know to be wary of anyone who makes future projections based primarily on present trends. But I feel confident in saying that the chance that countries with sub-replacement rates and falling fertility will suddenly reverse themselves and begin a new, lasting baby boom is about as likely as the Pope playing striker for his beloved San Lorenzo football club. There has been little sustained success from recent government efforts to encourage fertility. At most, as in Hungary — whose ultra-conservative Prime Minister Viktor Orban is dedicating 5 percent of GDP to pro-fertility policies — baby bonuses might encourage women to have babies earlier than they would otherwise, but not necessarily to have more.

Had overpopulation worriers noticed that countries like Japan and South Korea had already started their demographic transition toward lower fertility during the baby-booming 1960s, they may have been slower to predict a population bomb. But among nearly all rich and middle-income countries, there’s simply no evidence that dwindling fertility is likely to reverse in a sustainable way. The transition is largely complete.

The population bomb’s last tick

Demography is not a single story. While much of the Global North ages and eventually shrinks, in much of the Global South, population is still growing like it’s the mid-20th century.

The UN projects that sub-Saharan Africa — where total fertility rate has fallen by more than two children per woman from its 1970s-era peak, but still stands at 4.6 — could almost double its population from 1.2 billion in 2022 to nearly 2.1 billion by mid-century. In fact, more than half the increase in global population by 2050 is projected to come from eight countries: Tanzania, the Philippines, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Egypt, India, and Nigeria.

Asia will remain the planet’s most populous continent, North America and Europe most likely home to its richest (and, increasingly, oldest) citizens, but the story of human growth in the 21st century is largely the story of Africa.

How that story will go depends on an array of questions: Can fast-growing countries in sub-Saharan Africa follow the example of East Asia and make the most of their enormous demographic dividend — or do they risk squandering it, as much of Latin America did, by failing to provide education and economic opportunities? Can they do so in the face of climate change, which will hit these countries disproportionately? Can the geopolitical balance of power — which for so long has been tilted against Africa — be reset to more fairly represent a human future that will be defined in many ways by whether African countries succeed or fail with their youth? And will aging countries in the Global North in need of workers be open to allowing more migration to flow from young countries of the Global South?

That last point may be the most important of all. If aging countries on a path to shrinking can’t convince their citizens to significantly expand their families — and evidence suggests they can’t — immigration from the remaining young parts of the globe may be the best way to stave off economic and demographic decline, while also giving millions of potential migrants a fairer chance at a better life.

But that would also require international migration on a level the world has never seen before. Even in the midst of unprecedented movement, voluntary and otherwise, as of 2015 less than 4 percent of the world’s population was living outside the country where they were born. And yet that has already been enough to inspire an anti-immigration backlash in the West that shows little sign of abating anytime soon.

Aging countries of East Asia like China and Japan have little history of immigration and little interest in encouraging it, while Europe has become deeply fractured and increasingly hostile over the question of migration.

The US though, where nearly 14 percent of the country is foreign-born, has a chance to be different and, in doing so, exert more control over its demographic destiny than any other nation in the world. Unlike a baby boom — which is unlikely and would take two decades or more to yield productive workers anyway — opening up the flow of immigrants would begin to pay off quickly. People want to come — by one estimate, 42 million people in Latin America and the Caribbean say they’d migrate to the US if they could. It’s up to us to decide to let them in.

And while it’s highly unlikely that the US or other rich, aging countries will return to the days of more robust fertility, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t look to policies that can support people who do want to have more children.

The average number of children US adults report is “ideal” sits at 2.7, according to a 2018 Gallup poll. That’s a slight increase over recent years, and roughly one child over actual fertility. How reliable those survey answers are is up for debate — people may be reporting what they think is the right number, rather than their actual desires — but it does indicate the existence of some gap between the family size Americans want and the ones they feel able to have.

From enhanced child tax credits to better support for child care to regulatory changes that encourage marriage rates — which have been declining in the US even as it’s still connected to higher fertility — far more could be done to help Americans have the number of kids they want, whatever that number is. That includes flexible work options — 2021 saw an unexpected mini-baby boom in the US that researchers partially connected to the rise of remote work.

Just as there is no such objective thing as “overpopulation,” so it goes for “underpopulation.” Population is what we make of it. The demographic trends that will set the boundaries of the future — sex, death, and migration — can seem unimaginably massive, but they are the product of billions of individual decisions: who to marry, whether to have children, where to move, and who to vote for.

Not even the Chinese Communist Party could ultimately control the population of their country, but each of us has some small voice in the human map to come. We can vote for policies that support families or immigration. We can have more children — or not. Demography doesn’t make us.

We make demography.

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The Aedes aegypti mosquito is not just a nuisance—it’s a known carrier of dengue, yellow fever, chikungunya, and Zika viruses. Distinguished by the black and white stripes on its legs, the species is one of the most dangerous to humans.

In the Brazilian city of Indaiatuba, an effort is underway to eliminate these pests before they have a chance to spread illness. The weapon: more Aedes aegypti mosquitoes—but ones genetically engineered to kill their own kind. Made by British biotechnology firm Oxitec, the mosquitoes seem to be working. 

The modified mosquitoes carry a synthetic self-limiting gene that prevents female offspring from surviving. This is important, because only the females bite and transmit disease. In a new study, scientists at the company showed that their engineered insects were able to slash the local population of Aedes aegypti by up to 96 percent over 11 months in the neighborhoods where they were released. 

“This is an area with high levels of Aedes aegypti, and they periodically have outbreaks of dengue,” says Nathan Rose, head of malaria programs at Oxitec. In fact, this summer the Brazilian Ministry of Health reported that dengue fever was continuing to spread in all five regions of the country. Between January 1 and May 31, Brazil had more than 1.1 million cases—an increase of 198 percent compared to the same period in 2021. In those five months, the disease, which causes high fever, rash, and muscle and joint pain, killed 504 people.

For the study, which was conducted in 2018 and 2019, the company chose four densely populated neighborhoods with high levels of Aedes aegypti. In two, scientists released a “dose” of 100 male mosquitoes per resident per week. In the others, they cranked that up to 500.

The modified males mate with wild females, but the self-limiting gene prevents female progeny from surviving. This gene, which is lab-engineered but based on elements found in E. coli and the herpes simplex virus, causes the female offspring’s cells to produce lots of a protein called tTAV. This interferes with their cells’ ability to produce other essential proteins needed for development. As a result, the females die off before they mature and start biting. Male offspring survive, carrying a copy of the self-limiting gene that they can then pass on.

To determine just how effective these self-limiting male mosquitoes are, scientists have to gauge the local mosquito population before and after the experiment. They either lure, trap, and tally the number of adult mosquitoes in an area, or set out traps filled with water, and then count the eggs females lay in them. Then they extrapolate to get a population estimate. (The Oxitec team used the egg method.) 

This study found that during the peak mosquito season, which lasts from November to April in Brazil, treated mosquito populations were suppressed by an average of 88 percent, and in some cases up to 96 percent, compared to those in an untreated neighborhood that acted as a control. 

 

Photograph: Alexandre Carvalho/Oxitec

Interestingly, the dose of the mosquitoes didn’t seem to make a difference in how effective the method was. “There’s a limited number of female mosquitoes which are out there in the environment, and the important thing is that you maximize their chance of meeting one of these released ‘friendly’ male mosquitoes, as we call them,” Rose says. “We think as long as you have more of these friendly male mosquitoes out in the environment than the wild males, the chances are much more likely that the female will find one of the Oxitec male mosquitoes.” In fact, Rose thinks it will be possible to release even fewer mosquitoes for a similar effect. 

 Like other countries, Brazil conducts large-scale sprayings of insecticides to keep problematic mosquitoes under control. Aedes aegypti was once eradicated in much of South America after widespread use of the toxin DDT in the 1950s. But once the chemical’s harmful health and environmental effects came to light, spraying was stopped and the mosquito soon rebounded. Today, pyrethroids are commonly used for mosquito control, but mosquitos are increasingly acquiring resistance to them.  

Raul Medina, an entomologist at Texas A&M University, describes insecticides as a “hammer approach” to disease control because they affect insects other than mosquitoes and can drift to areas outside the sprayed site. High exposure to them has been shown to cause headaches, stinging eyes, dizziness, diarrhea, and respiratory problems. To him, genetically modified mosquitoes represent a more targeted option without the health or environmental risks. “The reduction they obtained is comparable to an insecticide reduction, which is really impressive,” says Medina, who wasn’t involved in the study. 

Monika Gulia-Nuss, an assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Nevada who studies mosquitoes and vector-borne diseases, is more cautious about the results. “It was a very small area in a short period of time,” she says. “It’s a step in the right direction, but it will require more work.” She would like to see a similar suppression rate across a bigger geographic area over a longer study period. 

Oxitec has conducted previous field trials showing that its technology could bring down local mosquito populations, but this is the first published study to deploy eggs rather than adult males. Previous attempts, with earlier versions of the engineered mosquito, required scientists to hatch the insects in the lab, sort them by sex, and release the males in a testing area. Now, the eggs come in a just-add-water box, which is cheaper and less labor intensive. Within days of the scientists adding water, the male mosquitoes hatch and look for mates. (Oxitec received approval to sell the product from Brazilian government regulators in 2020, and the egg boxes are now available to businesses and households.)

Medina says the box strategy could benefit poorer countries since it requires less labor to deploy. But how often the boxes would need to be replenished to curb the local mosquito population could be a hindrance to their adoption. “It still requires a lot of manual power, a lot of releases over time,” Gulia-Nuss says of Oxitec’s approach. Insecticides, by contrast, are sprayed once per season.

Male mosquitoes have short lifespans as it is—just seven to 10 days—and the self-limiting trait becomes less prevalent in each subsequent generation of males. Eventually, it fades within the gene pool. That means more releases are needed.

Photograph: Alexandre Carvalho/Oxitec

After a lengthy review process, federal authorities in the United States greenlit field trials of the Oxitec mosquitoes in 2020. Regulators concluded that they do not pose a risk to human health or the environment, and in a statement this March, the Environmental Protection Agency wrote that “the use of species-specific modified mosquitoes could reduce the use of pesticides for mosquito control.” 

Releases began in 2021 on the properties of local volunteers in the Florida Keys. But the project has received pushback from other residents, who have expressed concerns about unknown consequences, such as whether engineered mosquitoes could harm people or the ecosystem, particularly other animals that eat mosquitoes. 

In California, the state’s Department of Pesticide Regulation is currently reviewing an application from Oxitec for a pilot release there. Earlier this month, state legislators sent a letter to the department asking it to delay the release of the mosquitoes, citing concerns over “safety, environmental effects and the ability to manage and contain genetically engineered mosquitoes.” 

Medina thinks there has been more pushback in the US, where dengue and other mosquito-borne diseases aren’t common, although he says people may be more accepting of the technology if it’s shown to work in Florida and California as well as it has in Brazil. Still, there’s one big question left unanswered: whether releasing these mosquitoes actually reduces disease transmission. Oxitec hasn’t yet conducted studies on the public health impact of its mosquitoes.

And even eradicating mosquitoes in a certain area won’t necessarily eradicate the diseases they spread, because mosquitoes can always migrate. “Every time you have a complex problem, you need to expect a complex answer, and mosquito control is a perfect example of that,” Medina says.

Turns Out Fighting Mosquitoes With Mosquitoes Actually Works

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Domino’s buys 800 Chevrolet Bolt EVs as pizza delivery vehicles

The German government’s decision to purchase US-made F-35 fighter jets has the local defense industry up in arms, with contractors and others firing off that the deal will deepen dependency, undermine strategic autonomy and divert profits away from domestic arms producers.   

The EurAsian Times reported that leading German defense industry representatives have openly criticized the Olaf Scholz government’s F-35 purchase decision as inimical to the domestic defense industry, with some pillorying the lack of German involvement in the future maintenance and manufacturing of the top-tier stealth jets.

Citing the German publication Wirtschaft, the EurAsian Times report said that the Federal Association of the German Aerospace Industry (BDLI) erred in not involving the country’s defense industry in the maintenance, repair and support of the big-ticket American-made aircraft. The BDLI also criticized the purchase as encouraging dependency on the US at the cost of strategic autonomy.

“The new fighter jets or helicopters for the Bundeswehr could therefore be not maintained in Germany, but in other European countries in the network of the US Armed Forces, or by the US companies Lockheed (F-35) or Boeing (Chinook). This creates a dangerous dependency,” said BDLI President Martin Kroell, as quoted this month in a video by Crux.

He emphasized that German industry should sit at the table on an equal footing and “not leave everything to friends in the US.” However, Kroell acknowledged that the participation of German firms could increase slightly the cost of the acquisition and that the US could take advantage of this to raise prices.

Germany’s decision to purchase F-35s, made in March this year, was likely influenced by US pressure to ramp up purchases of American-made weapons amid the war in Ukraine. The acquisition decision was made even though France, Germany and Spain possibly have better fighter jets in the works via their joint Future Combat Air System (FCAS) program.

Division of labor issues, however, may push the planned 6th-generation fighter’s development further into the future, causing Germany to fall back on F-35s as a stopgap measure until the FCAS program gets up to speed.

In 2018, the Donald Trump administration identified Germany as a US ally that must increase defense spending to lessen the financial burden on America. In that spirit, the Trump administration said the F-35 was a suitable contender for Germany’s Tornado fighter replacement program.

A conceptual image of the sixth-generation FCAS fighter aircraft. Image: Handout, Illustration

Trump’s push came despite Germany’s known preference for the Eurofighter Typhoon and concerns that the F-35 was unproven in combat, carried a hefty price tag of US$85 million per jet and had unspecified mechanical issues, as reported by Express.

Germany nonetheless agreed to purchase the F-35 to replace its Tornado aircraft to maintain its nuclear-sharing strike role, with the country planning to buy 35 F-35 units, as reported by Breaking Defense this March.

Financial Times reported this month that Germany’s F-35 purchase has sparked concerns in France that Germany was cooling on or aiming to slow the FCAS project’s development timeline. In response, Germany argued that its F-35 purchase was necessary to ensure its continued role in NATO nuclear-sharing at a time Russia threatened to use nuclear weapons over its war in Ukraine.

In a bid to assuage French concerns, German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht stressed that it is essential for critical technologies to remain in Germany and Europe and that the FCAS development project will continue, as mentioned by Breaking Defense.

The FCAS program has appeared to stall for multiple reasons, including divergent strategic perspectives between France and Germany and issues over the division of labor.

Justin Bronk notes in a 2021 article for the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) that France views the FCAS project differently than Germany. He notes that France requires power projection capabilities due to its interests in North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East while at the same time maintaining a nuclear deterrent.

These requirements contrast with Germany’s pacifist political orientation, emphasis on counter-air capabilities over long-range strikes and its politically contentious nuclear-sharing agreement with NATO.

Apart from diverging strategic perspectives, division of labor issues have also stalled the FCAS project. In June, FlightGlobal reported that French Dassault and Airbus are at odds with providing the FCAS’ flight control software. Dassault insists that the software be shared among partners while Airbus is pushing for its software to be used in the project.

The report mentions that FCAS partners Germany and Spain will likely insist on full cooperation or technology access. However, the report notes that Airbus provides the flight control software for the Dassault Rafale and Eurofighter Typhoon, which are rivals in current-generation fighter sales and that Airbus is unlikely to cede any advantage in this area.

These contentious issues have resulted in unacceptably long delays in the FCAS’ development. For example, in a September 2022 article, Breaking Defense quoted an unnamed French defense expert saying the FCAS is “behind schedule not only because the German Bundestag has to vote for every defense procurement but also because the three partners are bickering over who gets to do what.”

A French Rafale fighter jet is catapulted from the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle off the eastern coast of Cyprus in the Mediterranean Sea on February 10, 2020. Photo: AFP / Mario Goldman

The report notes that these disagreements have pushed plans to deploy the FCAS to replace French Rafales and German Eurofighters from 2040 to the 2050s.

Nevertheless, France and Germany are determined to push on with the FCAS project, with both sides agreeing to iron out their differences. Financial Times reports this month that Dassault and Airbus are close to formally advancing the FCAS project into building a demonstrator jet.

The report notes that France and Germany are determined to make the FCAS project work despite delays and competing projects such as the UK-Italian and possibly Japanese Tempest project, as FCAS has significant implications for Europe’s strategic autonomy, European defense and security ties, and the European aerospace industry.

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