A recent study published in Heart Rhythm, the official journal of the Heart Rhythm Society, the Cardiac Electrophysiology Society, and the Pediatric & Congenital Electrophysiology Society, by Elsevier, found that playing electronic games can trigger cardiac arrhythmias in susceptible children whose predisposition may have been previously unrecognized. The researchers discovered a rare yet distinct pattern in children who lose consciousness while playing electronic (video) games.

“Video games may represent a serious risk to some children with arrhythmic conditions; they might be lethal in patients with predisposing, but often previously unrecognized arrhythmic conditions,” explained lead investigator Claire M. Lawley, MBBS, Ph.D., The Heart Centre for Children, Sydney Children’s Hospitals Network, Sydney, Australia. “Children who suddenly lose consciousness while electronic gaming should be assessed by a heart specialist as this could be the first sign of a serious heart problem.”

Electronic video games may not always be a safe alternative to sports for children who have a condition in which dangerous fast heart rhythms are a risk. Credit: Heart Rhythm

 

The researchers conducted a systematic review of the literature and launched a multi-site worldwide outreach campaign to identify examples of children who had a sudden loss of consciousness while playing video games. The most common trigger in the 22 instances they discovered was multiplayer war gaming. Some of the children died as a result of cardiac arrest. The children continue to be at risk as a result of subsequent diagnoses of various cardiac rhythm disorders. The most common underlying causes were catecholaminergic polymorphic ventricular tachycardia (CPVT) and congenital long QT syndrome (LQTS) types 1 and 2.

There was a high prevalence of potentially relevant genetic variations (63%) among the patients, which has important implications for their families. In some instances, the investigation of a child who lost consciousness while playing video games resulted in the diagnosis of several family members with a serious familial heart rhythm problem.

“Families and healthcare teams should think about safety precautions around electronic gaming in children who have a condition where dangerous fast heart rhythms are a risk,” noted Dr. Lawley.

The investigators attributed adrenergic stimulation related to the emotionally charged electronic gaming environment as the pathophysiological basis for this phenomenon. Electronic gaming is not always the “safe alternative” to competitive sports it is often considered. At the time of the cardiac incidents, many of the patients were in excited states, having just won or lost games, or were engaging in conflict with companions.

“We already know that some children have heart conditions that can put them at risk when playing competitive sports, but we were shocked to discover that some patients were having life-threatening blackouts during video gaming,” added co-investigator Christian Turner, MBBS, The Heart Centre for Children, Sydney Children’s Hospitals Network, Sydney, Australia. “Video gaming was something I previously thought would be an alternative ‘safe activity.’ This is a really important discovery. We need to ensure everyone knows how important it is to get checked out when someone has had a blacking out episode in these circumstances.”

The study notes that while this phenomenon is not a common occurrence, it is becoming more prevalent. “Having looked after children with heart rhythm problems for more than 25 years, I was staggered to see how widespread this emerging presentation is, and to find that a number of children had even died from it. All of the collaborators are keen to publicize this phenomenon so our colleagues across the globe can recognize it and protect these children and their families,” noted co-investigator of the study, Jonathan Skinner, MBChB, MD, also from Sydney.

As an accompanying editorial Daniel Sohinki, MD, MSc, Department of Cardiology, Augusta University, Augusta, GA, USA, and coauthors pointed out that, “exertion should be understood to encompass activities outside of traditional competitive athletics. Appropriate counseling regarding the risks of intense video gameplay should be targeted in children with a pro-arrhythmic cardiac diagnosis, and in any child with a history of exertional syncope of undetermined etiology. Further, any future screening programs aimed at identifying athletes at risk for malignant arrhythmias should encompass athletes being considered for participation in eSports.”

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Antibiotics were long thought to be a miracle cure for bacterial infections. However, many pathogens have evolved to withstand antibiotics over time and thus the quest for new drugs is becoming more urgent. Researchers from the University of Basel were part of an international team that used computational analysis to identify a new antibiotic and deciphered its mode of action. Their research is an important step in the creation of new, powerful drugs.

The WHO refers to the steadily increasing number of bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics as a “silent pandemic.” The situation is made worse by the fact that there haven’t been many new drugs introduced to the market in recent decades. Even now, not all infections can be properly treated, and patients still run the risk of harm from routine interventions.

New active substances are urgently required to stop the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. A significant finding has recently been made by a team headed by researchers from Northeastern University in Boston and Professor Sebastian Hiller from the University of Basel’s Biozentrum. The results of this research, which was a component of the National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) “AntiResist” project, have recently been published in Nature Microbiology.

Tough opponents

The researchers discovered the new antibiotic Dynobactin by a computational screening approach. This compound kills Gram-negative bacteria, which include many dangerous and resistant pathogens. “The search for antibiotics against this group of bacteria is far from trivial,” says Hiller. “They are well protected by their double membrane and therefore offer little opportunity for attack. And in the millions of years of their evolution, the bacteria have found numerous ways to render antibiotics harmless.”

Only last year, Hiller’s team deciphered the mode of action of the recently discovered peptide antibiotic Darobactin. The knowledge gained was integrated into the screening process for new compounds. The researchers made use of the fact that many bacteria produce antibiotic peptides to fight each other. And that these peptides, in contrast to natural substances, are encoded in the bacterial genome.

Fatal effect

“The genes for such peptide antibiotics share a characteristic feature,” explains co-first author Dr. Seyed M. Modaresi. “According to this feature, the computer systematically screened the entire genome of those bacteria that produce such peptides. That’s how we identified Dynobactin.” In their study, the authors have demonstrated that this new compound is extremely effective. Mice with life-threatening sepsis caused by resistant bacteria survived the severe infection through the administration of Dynobactin.

By combining different methods, the researchers have been able to resolve the structure as well as the mechanism of action of Dynobactin. This peptide blocks the bacterial membrane protein BamA, which plays an important role in the formation and maintenance of the outer-protective bacterial envelope. “Dynobactin sticks in BamA from the outside like a plug and prevents it from doing its job. So, the bacteria die,” says Modaresi. “Although Dynobactin has hardly any chemical similarities with the already known Darobactin, nevertheless it has the same target on the bacterial surface. This, we didn’t expect at the beginning.”

A boost for antibiotics research

On the molecular level, however, the scientists have discovered that Dynobactin interacts differently with BamA than Darobactin. By combining certain chemical features of the two, potential drugs could be further improved and optimized. This is an important step on the way to an effective drug. “The computer-based screening will give a new boost to the identification of urgently needed antibiotics,” says Hiller. “In the future, we want to broaden our search and investigate more peptides in terms of their suitability as antimicrobial drugs.”

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Back pain is a common condition with numerous causes, including poor posture, overexertion, constant stress at work or at home, lack of exercise, and poor posture. For a considerable number of patients, the symptoms are chronic, meaning they last a long period or reoccur repeatedly. However, port and exercise therapy, when done properly, can provide alleviation.

Physiotherapy, as well as strength and stability exercises, are common treatment options. But how can the treatment be as effective as possible?  Which method reduces pain the most effectively? A recent meta-analysis published in the Journal of Pain by Goethe University Frankfurt revealed new insights.

The researchers began with data from 58 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) involving over 10,000 individuals suffering from chronic low back pain throughout the globe. The relevant data from the original manuscripts were first filtered out and then analyzed in groups. When analyzing this data, the researchers looked at whether and how conventional forms of therapy and individualized treatment varied in terms of outcome. “Individualized” refers to some kind of personal coaching where therapists precisely target the needs and potentials of each patient and collaborate with them to choose the course of their treatment.

People who sit a lot and do not exercise often develop back pain. Credit: Markus Bernards for Goethe University Frankfurt

 

According to the research, individualized therapy for chronic back pain had a much greater impact than conventional exercise therapies. The success rate for pain alleviation was 38% more than with conventional therapy.

“The higher effort required for individual treatment is worthwhile because patients benefit to an extent that is clinically important,” says lead author Dr. Johannes Fleckenstein from the Institute of Sport Sciences at Goethe University Frankfurt.

However, the study went even further. The research team in Frankfurt compared a third group of treatment methods alongside the standard and individualized ones. In this group, individualized training sessions were combined with cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). This procedure – a type of talk therapy – is based on the assumption that negative thoughts and behaviors surrounding pain tend to exacerbate it. Through CBT, pain patients learn to change the way they handle it.

They stop being afraid to move or are taught tactics for coping with pain. This makes them realize that they are by no means helpless. But what does psychotherapeutic support through CBT actually contribute to the success of the treatment?

Analysis of the data revealed the following: When an individualized approach and CBT were combined, the success rate in terms of pain relief was an impressive 84 percent higher than with standard treatment. The combined therapy, also called multimodal therapy, thus led to the best result by far.

Fleckenstein sees in the study “an urgent appeal to public health policy” to promote combined therapies both in terms of patient care and remuneration. “Compared to other countries, such as the USA, we are in a relatively good position in Germany.

For example, we issue fewer prescriptions for strong narcotic drugs such as opiates. But the number of unnecessary X-rays, which, by the way, can also contribute to pain chronicity, and inaccurate surgical indications are still very high.”

This is also due, according to Fleckenstein, to economic incentives, that is, the relatively high remuneration for such interventions. The situation is different for organizations working in the area of pain therapy, he says. Although these are not unprofitable, they are not a cash cow for investors either. In his view, it is important here to improve the economic conditions. After all, pain therapy saves a lot of money in the long run as far as health economics are concerned, whereas tablets and operations rarely lead to medium and long-term pain relief.

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According to recent research, playing sounds to individuals as they sleep might help them forget certain memories. Researchers from the University of York made this early finding, which might eventually be refined into methods to help in reducing intrusive and traumatic memories, according to the study’s authors.

Previous research indicated that playing “sound cues” during sleeping can be used to reinforce certain memories. This latest study offers the first strong evidence that the approach may also be used to help individuals forget. 

The first author of the study, Dr. Bardur Joensen, a former Ph.D. student at the Department of Psychology, University of York, said: “Although still highly experimental at this stage, the results of our study raise the possibility that we can both increase and decrease the ability to recall specific memories by playing sound cues when an individual is asleep.

“People who have experienced trauma can suffer a wide range of distressing symptoms due to their memories of those events. Though still a long way off, our discovery could potentially pave the way to new techniques for weakening those memories that could be used alongside existing therapies.”

29 individuals were taught connections between overlapping word pairs for the research. They were instructed, for instance, to memorize the word pairings “hammer – office” and “hammer – Cardi B.”

The individuals then spent the next night in the sleep lab at the University of York. When participants entered stage three sleep, generally known as deep or slow-wave sleep, the study team gently played the word denoting the object (i.e. hammer) while analyzing their brainwaves.

According to earlier studies, memorizing a pair of words and listening to a sound connected with that pair while participants slept helped them remember the phrases when they woke up the next morning. This time, they discovered an increase in memory for one pair but a reduction in memory for the other pair when the word pairs overlapped. This suggests that playing related sounds while you sleep might cause selective forgetfulness.

According to the researchers, sleep played a crucial role in the effects they observed in their study.

Senior author of the study, Dr. Aidan Horner from the Department of Psychology at the University of York, said: “The relationship between sleep and memory is fascinating. We know that sleep is critical for memory processing, and our memories are typically better following a period of sleep. The exact mechanisms at play remain unclear, but during sleep, it seems that important connections are strengthened and unimportant ones are discarded.

“This research raises the possibility that this process could be manipulated so that sleep could be used to help weaken painful memories.

“The next steps for our research team are to establish how these cues cause forgetting, so that we can turn the effect on and off, and whether we can use the same technique to weaken existing real-world memories.”

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India is up. China is down. Very few US students studied abroad during the first year of the pandemic.

Those three points, in a nutshell, represent key findings from recent data released jointly on November 14, 2022, by the US Department of State and the Institute of International Education.

The “Open Doors Report on International Educational Exchange” is published each year at the start of International Education Week. It provides detailed insights regarding study abroad and international students.

This year’s report shows a 91% decline in the total number of US students who studied abroad during the 2020-2021 academic year. The pandemic also led colleges to develop more online global learning opportunities.

In fact, 62% of colleges offered virtual internships with multinational companies, collaborative online coursework with students abroad and other experiences.

While virtual learning cannot replace the immersive experiences of study abroad, it can expand access to other cultures and international perspectives for greater numbers of students. For this reason, technology is likely to continue to serve as a key part of international education programming.

While the Covid-19 pandemic contributed to a 45.6% decline in new international students in 2020, the latest data, covering the 2021-2022 academic year, indicates that the total number of international students in the US – 948,519 – has started to recover.

This can be seen in a 3.8% increase over the 914,095 international students in the U.S. in 2020. Still, the number is well below the nearly 1.1 million international students reported in 2018. Much of the recent growth is driven by an increase in the number of new international students – 261,961 – which is up 80% over the 145,528 from 2020 but still 2.14% below the 267,712 from 2019.

Students from China and India comprise more than half – 52% – of all international students. That isn’t anything new, but what is noteworthy is that during the 2021-2022 academic year, Chinese student enrollment fell 9% and the number of Indian students increased by 19% over the prior year.

This has big implications for international diversity at US colleges. This is because Chinese students tend to enroll in a range of majors, while most Indian students – 66.4% – study in just a handful of programs: engineering, math and computer science.

Souring relations with China

Over the past decade, US colleges enrolled more students from China than from any other country. While the onset of the global pandemic effectively halted travel between China and the US. due to flight restrictions and widespread lockdowns, the decline in Chinese enrollment began years earlier.

Contributing factors include Chinese parents’ concerns for their children’s safety in the US, development of China’s own world-class universities and souring relations between the two countries, which has spilled over into the higher education sector.

Many Chinese students are opting to stay home rather than study in the US. Photo: AFP / Wang Zhao

In fact, in 2019, China’s Ministry of Education warned students against studying in the US due to the risk of encountering visa problems.

China and India each have around 1.4 billion people, but by 2023 the United Nations predicts that India will overtake China as the world’s most populous country. This continued growth will further strain India’s higher education system, leading to more students pursuing advanced degrees abroad.

At the same time, poor job prospects at home are driving many Indian students to pursue academic and career pathways that lead away from India. This is especially true in high-paying, high-growth fields like computers and information technology.

Other contributing factors to the increase from India include a change in tone on the part of the US government. The Biden administration is working to reestablish the US as a welcoming destination for international students by enacting reversals of Trump-era immigration policies.

Those policies caused uncertainty and fear among international students. The Biden administration has also prioritized the processing of student visas in India.

Looking forward

The Institute of International Education also released data from a Fall 2022 Snapshot Survey, which includes responses from more than 600 US colleges and universities. The findings point to a 7% increase in new international students enrolled.

While the US Department of State continues to prioritize student visas in India by adding more staff and streamlining the process, Chinese visa approvals are trending lower than in years past, although it’s difficult to pinpoint a single factor as to why.

A further decline in Chinese students presents major challenges for the US, its colleges and the communities in which they are based.

This is because in addition to the US$32 billion that international students collectively contribute to the US economy, the friendships and cultural insights that they develop while studying at local colleges serve to promote US foreign policy in the form of positive relations between the US and other countries.

As the number of US college students is projected to decline across much of the country, college recruiters will increase outreach to international students in order to fill empty seats. However, whether international student recruitment alone can fill those empty seats is yet to be seen.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Ninety percent of the counties in the US suffered a weather disaster between 2011 and 2021, according to a new report.

Some endured as many as 12 federally declared disasters over those 11 years. More than 300 million people – 93% of the population – live in these counties.

Rebuild by Design, which published the report, is a non-profit that researches ways to prepare for and adapt to climate change. It was started by the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, the catastrophic storm that slammed the eastern US just over 10 years ago, causing $62.5bn in damage.

Researchers had access to data from contractors who work closely with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), allowing them to analyze disasters and payouts down to the county level. They also looked at who is most vulnerable and compared how long people in different places are left without power after extreme weather.

California, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Iowa and Tennessee had the most disasters, at least 20 each, including severe storms, wildfire, flooding and landslides. But Louisiana, New York, New Jersey, North Dakota and Vermont received the most disaster funding per person.

Amy Chester, managing director of Rebuild by Design and co-author of the report, said she was surprised to see some states getting more money to rebuild than others. That is partly because cost of living differs among states. So does the monetary value of what gets damaged or destroyed.

“Disaster funding is oftentimes skewed toward communities that are more affluent and have the most resources,” said Robert Bullard, an environmental and climate justice professor at Texas Southern University, who was not part of the team that wrote the report.

Bullard wrote a book, The Wrong Complexion for Protection in 2012 with another environmental and climate justice expert, Beverly Wright, about how federal responses to disasters often exclude black communities.

The new report seems to support that. People who are most vulnerable to the effects of extreme weather events are not receiving much of the money, the report said. Those areas of the country also endure the longest electric outages.

“When disasters hit … funding doesn’t get to the places of greatest need,” Bullard said.

Another reason for the unevenness of funds could be that heatwaves are excluded from federal disaster law and don’t trigger government aid. If they did, states in the south-west like Arizona and Nevada might rank higher on spending per person.

Rob Jackson, a climate scientist at Stanford University, said the report was prepared by policy advocates, not scientists, and oversteps in attributing every weather disaster to climate change.

Climate change has turbocharged the climate and made some hurricanes stronger and disaster more frequent, Jackson, said, adding: “I don’t think it’s appropriate to call every disaster we’ve experienced in the last 40 years a climate disaster.”

Jackson said the collection could still have value: “I do think there is a service to highlighting that weather disasters affect essentially all Americans now, no matter where we live.”

The annual costs of disasters has soared, Jackson said, to more than $100bn in 2020. The National Centers for Environmental Information tallied more than $150bn for 2021.

The federal government provided counties $91bn to recover after extreme events over the 11 years, the researchers found. That only includes spending from two programs run by Fema and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, not individual assistance or insurance payouts from the agency. Nor does it include help from other agencies like the Small Business Administration or the US army corps of engineers.

Chester said that if all these federal disaster relief programs were included, the total would be far higher. The National Centers for Environmental Information estimate more than $1tn was spent on weather and climate events between 2011 and 2021.

The report recommends the federal government shift to preventing disasters rather than waiting for events to happen. It cites the National Institute of Building Sciences which says that every dollar invested in mitigating natural disaster by building levees or doing prescribed burns saves the country $6.

“The key takeaway for us is that our government continues to invest in places that have already suffered instead of investing in the areas with the highest social and physical vulnerability,” Chester said.

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This is one of a short series of pieces – Between two worlds – reflecting on ways climate breakdown will affect different parts of the world

As a young girl, I used to check the weather by looking out of my fifth-floor flat window. We lived in a congested neighbourhood in Cairo, and some days were what I called “orange-coloured weather”, when sandstorms fogged the streets below.

On those days, I knew there was no way I could go to school. I had asthma and needed to avoid attacks that could leave me breathless and in desperate need of an inhaler. I always wondered: was I the only one skipping school that day to protect my lungs?

It was only when I moved to Dubai a decade later that I began to understand how a changing climate could affect my life.

I woke up to another sandstorm recently. This time from my ninth-floor flat in the west side of Dubai. The foggy blur from my window was familiar, but this time I didn’t hesitate to walk out of my front door to meet my friend.

Asthma is quite prevalent in Egypt, affecting roughly 8% of children and 6% of adults, according to the Egyptian health ministry. In the United Arab Emirates (UAE), rates are between 2.8% and 8%.

The Middle East has always been hit by dust and sandstorms and is considered one of the dustiest regions in the world. The frequency of these storms is said to be increasing, causing financial losses of $13bn annually, according to the World Bank.

Polluted air and duststorms can have severe public health impacts, causing respiratory diseases in addition to environmental damage. But, if the whole region is victim to these storms, is it more bearable in certain cities than in others?

A heavy sandstorm in Dubai. Photograph: Ali Haider/EPA

I have moved back and forth between these two cities, and they are different in many aspects. Greater Cairo is home to more than 25 million people, making it the most populated city in the Middle East. The country has been suffering from air pollution for decades, exacerbated by transport exhaust and industrial waste. Every year, two million people seek medical treatment for respiratory health problems, according to the Egyptian health ministry.

Just a three-hour flight away is Dubai, accommodating 3.5 million people. Being one of the fastest-growing economies has given the UAE’s government more opportunities to invest in building cleaner infrastructures. However, the air is still polluted as the PM2.5 concentration in Dubai is 116 times the air quality value advised by the WHO.

The difference is in the resources. Cairo wants to fix it. Egypt is hosting Cop27, the UN climate conference, and is making efforts to decrease the frequency of duststorms. But social media in the country has reported a series of trees being cut down in eastern neighbourhoods of Cairo, something that the former environment minister has confirmed and said was vital to prevent “issues” with underground cables and pipes.

Sometimes it seems that duststorms are out of control as they hit the Middle East region where many parts of it are desert. In the UAE, authorities usually advise against driving during sandstorms. But how will people move around, given that the prediction is that there will be more and more of these storms, with hotter summers by 2050, according to a 2017 report by Emirates Wildlife Society? This is expected to affect outdoor workers and increase health risks.

In Cairo, authorities also issue alerts to those with respiratory diseases, elderly people and children during duststorms to avoid leaving their homes.

Both countries are destined to face this inevitable condition from time to time, but it’s hard to compare the infrastructure available to a developing nation with the resources offered to a wealthy oil-rich Gulf state.

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The most recent battle in a long history of battles in Oxford has been triggered by the low traffic neighbourhood scheme, a network of barriers and cameras being built in my area as part of efforts to reduce the air pollution linked to the deaths of one in 17 people who live in the city.

These measures are not extreme. Each household will receive 100 days of exemptions to the traffic gates per person. The traffic planters leave the vast majority of roads unaffected. Yet these gentle restrictions have led to mass meetings full of howls of rage and harrumphing. The rate of vandalism of bollards and planter barriers is so high that cameras will have to be installed. Not a week goes by without someone expressing their frustration over traffic calming measures as un-calmly as possible.

A road is closed in Oxford to limit air pollution. Low traffic neighbourhood schemes aim to reduce motor traffic on residential streets.

Photograph: Geoffrey Swaine/Rex/Shutterstock

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world in Delhi, where I spend half my year, an entirely different type of catastrophe is unfolding before our eyes. Forty years ago, the population was 6 million. Now, beneath the influx of refugees fleeing internal conflict, deforestation and the slow death of centuries of village life in rural India, it is growing so fast that by 2030 it is forecast to be the world’s most populous city, with almost 40 million residents.

As a child, I can remember being able to look down the street on which we lived. Now, owing to vehicle emissions, brushfire burning and construction dust, visibility is 100 metres on a good day. Back then you could put down a book and, when you picked it up hours later, it would not be covered in a layer of dirt.

A 40C (104F) day used to be the cause of public comment; now this conversation is saved for when the temperature hits 50C. I can remember rich people exercising in parks without being out of breath after 10 minutes. The true measure of wealth in Delhi is now measured in how little you have to go outdoors. And all of this has happened within 20 years.

I live part of the year in Oxford and part in Delhi, running a consultancy that builds relationships between businesses in India and Britain, and also working with street children. In the UK, I am an avatar of the coming Asian century, a Sunakian first-generation immigrant success story.

In India, my British accent means I must know what I am doing. There, I can see the results of two centuries of nonexistent economic growth under British rule. In Britain, I can enjoy what those riches built. And so these are the two worlds I travel between. One of comfort, of arguments about numberplate-recognition cameras, floral vandalism, fury that a trip to John Lewis may become 20 minutes longer. In the other, a subcontinent facing food riots.

In the face of climate catastrophe, the greatest privilege is that of time. Britain has had about four centuries as a colonial power. It has had more than 200 years of industrialisation, 75 years of peace, and in excess of 30 where it has known the scale of the climate problem ahead. A country with some of the world’s most innovative businesses and recent advances in nuclear, solar, wind and hydroelectric technology has nothing to fear. What was centuries of colonial exploitation for, if it wasn’t to build Britain’s riches for this very moment?

But the attitude of wealthy western countries to the climate crisis seems to involve more heart-rending and soup-throwing than action. Over the past 40 years, the residents of Britain and the western world have outsourced their carbon-intensive industries to China. What they do not seem to want to do is the difficult, practical work of building decarbonised economies that benefit working people and create jobs.

The problem is compounded by the fact the UK also has the luxury of time in another sense: the climate crisis is hitting India faster and harder, and I see it every time I am there. It is one of the bitterest ironies of global heating that it will exacerbate existing inequalities. G20 countries are responsible for more than three-quarters of global emissions. But Pakistan, which has recently suffered catastrophic flooding that has put a third of the country under water, is responsible for less than 1%. The effects of the climate emergency will be felt least in northern Europe, the home of the Industrial Revolution and the birthplace of the modern world and its reliance on carbon emissions.

Villagers collecting drinking water from an almost dried-up well Samba district, about 25 miles from Jammu, one of the most drought-affected cities in India.

In Kashmir, where I used to go for holidays as a child, the climate crisis has transformed the region from alpine wonderland to sectarian oven, with midsummer temperatures of 40C. Back then I remember coming to the capital, Srinagar, to marvel at the crystal clear waters of Dal Lake and its houseboats. Now, excessive dumping has meant visitors marvel at the colours and rapid growth of competing runaway algal blooms. Tourists who ask if they can go for a swim get looks of utter incredulity.

The dream of every Kashmiri businessperson I know used to be that it would become the home of ski resorts of global renown, attracting millions every year. Now glacial retreat, highly variable, often nonexistent, snowfall and winter temperatures above 10C have put those dreams on hold. The apple harvest, which supplies a vast proportion of the region’s agricultural income, has become late and variable with frequent failures. A growing body of research links higher temperatures to increased political violence. Kashmiris ponder, with their typical gallows humour, how much worse the situation can get.

And so the big cities – Delhi, Srinigar, Islamabad – are flooded with the results: young men with nothing to do, from small failed farms, divorced from their villages and culture. Underpaid, sucked into lives of crime, they are the perfect fodder for extremist organisations. A third of India’s population is under 18; two-thirds is rural. In a subcontinent where young, frustrated, futureless men are the currency of political violence – and where the most important political number is the price of onions and its effect on household food availability – India has an endless supply.

A man covering his face as a heatwave engulfs the outskirts of Delhi, India, in May, when temperatures exceeded 43C.

Meanwhile northern Europe, at least at first, will have its warmest autumns on record. Several thousand fewer people will die from the cold, tourism will boom, and there will be increased potential for crops that were previously considered unsuitable for Britain’s climate.

Britain is not in terminal decline, as it often seems to want to believe. Its history, its sense of self and its value to the world did not end in 1945. Britain did not grow rich from refused planning applications. The country houses, the dreaming spires, the suburban villas, the delightful misunderstandings over cream teas, the very riches of Britain did not create themselves. They were the product of centuries of relentless investment and innovation, of constant progress, of annoyed neighbours, of hisses and sneers, of tearing up the settled, mottled fabric and building something new.

The 21st century is a giant knotted intersectional problem of intergenerational justice, interracial justice, international justice. Britain risks sacrificing its future and that of billions worldwide if it does not act now, when it has time and while the government can still effect change.

If not, it will soon have much larger problems than traffic gates, planters and numberplate recognition cameras. It will face something that no amount of money can forestall, that cannot be run from, that cannot be bargained away or shouted down.

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Musk reportedly sent his ultimatum by email to employees this morning: Twitter employees have until tomorrow at 5 PM ET to sign a pledge to stay at Twitter or leave the company with three months of severance pay. In his email, Musk wrote that employees who choose to stay “will need to be extremely hardcore” in the near future.

“This will mean working long hours at high intensity,” Musk added. “Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.” Musk’s ultimatum is also tied to the new requirement for Twitter employees to spend a minimum of 40 hours per week at one of Twitter’s offices.

Twitter laid off half of its workforce earlier this month, though it was later reported that the company had been asking “dozens” of fired employees to come back. Earlier this week, it was also reported that Twitter had also fired 80% of its contractor employees with no notice. That represents around 4,400 people in total who were working on content moderation and other core infrastructure services.

Elon Musk’s ultimatum for employees remaining at Twitter will probably push many of them to leave. It’s hard to imagine how the platform can stick around in the long run after losing so many employees in such a short amount of time. It’s not been a month since Elon Musk took over Twitter, but the work environment for those who remain seems to have changed for the worst.

All this drama doesn’t seem to derail Elon Musk’s plans for Twitter so far. After the company stopped its rollout of the new Twitter Blue subscription last week, Musk tweeted that the new plan is to relaunch “Blue Verified” on November 29th and “make sure that it is rock solid.”

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Key Facts

• Testifying in Delaware’s Chancery Court, Musk was defending his $55 billion Tesla compensation amid allegations from shareholders that he didn't dedicate his whole attention to the company and that he helped set easily attainable performance targets.

• Ira Ehrenpreis, a former Tesla board member, testified Monday the package was designed to keep Musk “engaged” and to keep the billionaire the “head of Tesla for a long time.”

• But Musk’s head has turned this year, with Musk taking over Twitter and spending “morning til’ night” reworking the platform to his whims.

• “I frankly don't want to be CEO of any company,” Musk said Wednesday, a head-scratching assertion given his oversight of three highly influential companies.

Big Number

$4.3 billion. That’s how much the final tranche of Musk’s Tesla compensation package was worth as of Tuesday’s close.

Forbes Valuation

We estimate Musk to be worth $196 billion, by far the largest fortune in the world. About two-thirds of his net worth is tied to Tesla stock and options.

Crucial Quote

“Comedy is legal,” Musk said while cross-examined about his 2021 assertion that CEO is a “made-up title” and he prefers to go by “technoking” instead. The comedy quip is an allusion to his viral tweet, “Comedy is now legal on Twitter,” last month following the completion of his takeover.
Surprising Fact

The judge presiding over this case, Kathaleen McCormick, is the same judge who oversaw Twitter’s lawsuit against Musk looking to push through his $44 billion acquisition of the social media firm. That case ultimately never went to trial after Musk agreed last month to close the deal at the original agreement of $54.20 per share.

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• Prior studies have identified psychological stress as a potential causative factor for IBS using animal models, but most models rely on exposure to physical stress instead of psychological stress or show structural changes in the gut that are often absent in IBS.

• A recent study used repeated exposure to psychological stress to induce IBS-like symptoms in mice by observing another mouse as it experienced defeat in an aggressive encounter.

• The mice exposed to psychological stress showed altered gut motility and increased abdominal pain sensitivity without structural damage to the gut, suggesting its suitability as an animal model for stress-induced IBS.

Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a functional gastrointestinal disorder that does not have a physical cause and affects around 11% of the global population.

Currently, there is a dearth of animal models that accurately recapitulate the features of this disorder observed in humans.

A recent study published in Frontiers of Neuroscience shows that mice subjected to psychological stress showed IBS-like symptoms without causing inflammation or structural changes in the gut.

The study’s author Akiyoshi Saitoh, Ph.D., a professor at Tokyo University of Science, told Medical News Today:

 “IBS is a disease whose pathophysiology has not been elucidated due to the lack of useful animal models for research, and no fundamental treatment has been established. In this study, we found that ‘chronic vicarious social defeat stress model mice’ subjected to repetitive mental stress alone showed diarrhea-type IBS-like symptoms of increased bowel hypermobility and increased visceral pain-related behaviors, even though there were no histological abnormalities in the intestines.”

Dr. Saitoh added that no animal model has ever shown diarrheal IBS-like symptoms due to mental stress alone.

“This mouse model is expected to play an important role in elucidating the pathophysiology and developing therapeutic agents as an IBS model animal,” Dr. Saitoh said.

What are the symptoms of IBS?

IBS is a chronic gastrointestinal disorder characterized by co-occurring symptoms, such as abdominal pain or discomfort, and disturbances in bowel movements, including constipation and diarrhea.

Depending on the prevalence of symptoms of diarrhea, constipation, or both, IBS can be categorized into four main subtypes:

•     IBS with diarrhea (IBS-D)

•     IBS with constipation (IBS-C)

•     undefined IBS (IBS-U)

•     IBS-mixed (IBS-M)

IBS-mixed is characterized by symptoms of both constipation and diarrhea, whereas the symptoms associated with IBS-U tend to vary.

Despite the uncomfortable symptoms, individuals with IBS do not show signs of structural damage to the digestive tract, such as ulcers.

Some of the potential mechanisms contributing to these symptoms include altered gut motility and heightened pain sensitivity of internal organs.

Animal models explore the link between IBS and stress

Several lines of evidence suggest that gut and brain health are intertwined.

Consistent with this, studies suggest that the dysregulation of the gut-brain axis, involving bidirectional communication between the brain and the intestine, may also contribute to the development of IBS.

Psychological stress plays a role in the development of IBS and may exacerbate its symptoms. In addition, people with IBS also often have co-occurring psychiatric conditions, such as depression and anxiety.

Scientists have used animal models exposed to stress to study the effects of IBS. But these models either rely on physical stress or are associated with structural changes in the intestine. In contrast, stress experienced by humans often only involves an emotional component.

Chronic social defeat stress (cSDS) is a model of depression which involves subjecting rodents to repeated instances of defeat during aggressive encounters with a larger, dominant conspecific (i.e., member of the same species).

After experiencing repeated bouts of social defeat, rodents show depression-like symptoms, including social withdrawal and reduced ability to experience pleasure. However, rodents subjected to chronic social defeat experience both physical and emotional stress during an aggressive encounter with another animal.

Scientists have previously shown that rodents witnessing another animal of the same species subjected to cSDS also show depressive-like symptoms.

This model, known as chronic vicarious social defeat stress (cVSDS), can help isolate the effects of emotional stress while eliminating the potential effects of physical stress associated with direct social defeat stress.

How emotional stress impacts gastrointestinal function

In the present study, scientists in Japan examined the potential of the cVSDS model to serve as a model for IBS.

The study consisted of adolescent mice ages 5 to 6 weeks old that were subjected to either cSDS or cVSDS for 10 minutes per day for 10 days.

On the day following the completion of the 10-day social stress exposure, animals subjected to both cVSDS and cSDS showed elevated levels of the stress hormone corticosterone, suggesting an increase in stress levels.

IBS is also associated with abnormal intestinal peristalsis, which describes the rhythmic contractions of intestinal muscles that facilitate food movement through the gut.

On the day after the completion of social stress exposure, the animals exposed to cVSDS, but not cSDS, also showed increased intestinal peristalsis than control mice that were not exposed to social stress.

These changes in intestinal motility in the animals exposed to emotional stress due to cVSDS were accompanied by an increase in IBS with diarrhea(IBS-D)-like symptoms, including an increase in the frequency of defecation, stool weight, and stool water content.

Using capsaicin to understand IBS-related abdominal pain

To examine the impact of cVSDS on abdominal pain sensitivity, the researchers administered a solution of capsaicin, the active ingredient in chili peppers, via the intrarectal route to stimulate the abdominal pain pathways.

An increase in abdominal licking, jumping, and squashing or flattening of the stomach against the floor are common signs of increased pain sensitivity in internal organs in mice.

The mice exposed to cVSDS showed increased levels of abdominal licking after 10 days, even in the absence of capsaicin administration.

Moreover, administering capsaicin to mice exposed to cVSDS increased jumping and squashing behaviors, suggesting heightened abdominal pain sensitivity. These symptoms and altered gut motility persisted until at least 30 days after the 10-day stress exposure.

Although emotional stress due to cVSDS increased gut motility, the animals did not show increased gut permeability or elevation of markers of structural damage or inflammation in the small and large intestines.

These results suggest that cVSDS-induced emotional stress was sufficient to cause IBS-like symptoms that persisted for at least a month without causing inflammation or structural changes in the intestine.

“IBS is known as a Disorder of gut-brain interaction (DGBI), the precise etiology of which has not been determined,” Dr. Kara Margolis, associate director for clinical and translational Research at the New York University Pain Research Center, told MNT.

“Animal models that encompass features of both IBS and anxiety [and] mood disorders are thus valuable for the study of the underlying mechanisms that affect both conditions as well as exploring their connections.”

Dr. Saitoh said the new mouse model resembles the clinical features of IBS and is expected to elucidate the mechanism of stress-induced IBS pathogenesis through the correlation between the central nervous system (CNS) and the gut.

“Currently, we are discovering the causative brain regions that trigger the onset of the disease,” Dr. Saitoh said.

“Furthermore, this model will enable the development of innovative drugs with proven efficacy, and candidate drugs are already being identified.”

Effects of traditional herbal medicine to treat IBS

The researchers also examined the effectiveness of a traditional herbal medicine used in Japan called keishikashakuyakuto to normalize intestinal motility in mice exposed to cVSDS.

Keishikashakuyakuto contains cinnamon bark, peony root, jujube, glycyrrhiza, and ginger root and has been used for treating irritable bowel syndrome.

The researchers found that treating the mice with IBS-like symptoms with keishikashakuyakuto 2 days after the final exposure to cVSDS reduced intestinal motility.

This further suggests that cVSDS could serve as a model for studying IBS, but further studies in humans are still needed.

“The model mimics some cases of IBS where pathological changes due to inflammation or changes in intestinal permeability are not present,” Dr. Margolis noted.

“The extreme heterogeneity of IBS, however, makes it so that the features in this model may mimic some phenotypes in some IBS patients but not in others (a limitation of most models).”

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• Evidence is mixed about the health benefits of intermittent fasting.

• New research from a diverse study found that intermittent fasting is associated with a higher prevalence of eating disorder behavior and psychopathology, particularly among young women.

• Some people can practice intermittent fasting if they keep certain safety tips in mind.

Intermittent fasting (IF) is a popular diet trend among health and fitness enthusiasts, which involves not eating during planned intervals of time.

While intermittent fasting may offer some health benefits, researchers are still working to understand the full impact of this eating pattern.

A recent study published in Eating Behaviors looked at the practice of intermittent fasting among adolescents and young adults in Canada.

The researchers found an association between intermittent fasting and the behaviors and psychopathology of eating disorders and other dangerous behaviors among some members of this age demographic.

The results indicate a need for more research into the potential risks of intermittent fasting.

Benefits and drawbacks of intermittent fasting

Intermittent fasting can take on a few different forms.

A typical example of IF is fasting for 2 non-consecutive days in the week.

Another method would be to only eat during certain times of the day. For example, the 16/8 method involves fasting for 16 hours and eating during only an 8-hour window.

Blanca Garcia, RDN, a Los Angeles-based registered dietitian nutritionist and nutrition specialist with the Measurement Instrument Database for Social Sciences (MIDSS), not involved in the study, noted the potential benefits of eating within certain time frames to Medical News Today:

“With proper guidance from a registered dietitian, a client can be guided into choosing well-balanced foods within the method of 16:8; I like this method because it’s basically eating three meals within a workday. A chronic dieter may skip meals or avoid many good foods.”

Some evidence suggests that intermittent fasting can contribute to weight loss and provide certain health benefits.

Intermittent fasting may help to improve insulin sensitivity and heart health. It may also aid in preventing disorders like Alzheimer’s disease and cancer.

However, there are potential drawbacks to intermittent fasting.

For instance, intermittent fasting may increase the risk of hypoglycemia and could induce muscle wasting if someone isn’t getting enough protein.

For certain people and groups like young children and older adults, fasting could be dangerous and should be avoided.

In addition, many aspects of the possible drawbacks of intermittent fasting still haven’t been studied.

Disordered eating and intermittent fasting

For the present study, researchers examined the relationship between intermittent fasting and eating disorders among adolescents and young adults.

This study gathered data from the Canadian Study of Adolescent Health Behaviors.

Researchers included 2,762 adolescents and young adults in their analysis, including women, men, and transgender or gender non-conforming individuals recruited via social media.

Researchers found that intermittent fasting was highly popular in this age demographic.

Study author Kyle T. Ganson, Ph.D., MSW, assistant professor and Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work with the University of Toronto, Canada, explained to MNT:

“IF [Intermittent fasting] was highly common among the sample, including 48% of women, 38% of men, and 52% of transgender/gender non-conforming participants, and participants fasted for, on average, 100 days in the past 12 months.”

Researchers used an eating disorder examination questionnaire to examine behaviors and psychopathology. They wanted to see how these attitudes and patterns were similar to those of people with eating disorders.

The questionnaire looked at participants’ dietary restraints and concerns about weight, shape, and eating. They also looked at eating disorder behaviors, like binge eating, compulsive exercise, and laxative use.

“Among all groups (men, women, and transgender individuals), any engagement in intermittent fasting (IF) in the past 12 months was associated with greater eating disorder attitudes and behaviors,” Ganson explained.

“Additionally, among women, in particular, IF was associated with all eating disorder behaviors, including binge eating, vomiting, laxative use, and compulsive exercise, while among men, IF was associated with compulsive exercising.”

The findings indicate a need for further research into the potentially harmful effects of intermittent fasting, particularly among young people.

Study limitations and continued research

While the new research provides insight into some potential dangers of intermittent fasting, it did have several limitations.

First, the study cannot determine whether intermittent fasting causes eating disorders or the other way around.

In addition, the data collection methods relied heavily on participants’ self-reporting, which can lead to potential errors. And while the sample was diverse, there is still the potential for selection bias based on the methods used.

There was also the possibility for participants to interpret the survey questions differently, increasing the risk of response bias. Finally, the questions may not have captured all eating disorder cognition and behaviors.

All these limitations indicate the need for further research into this area.

Despite these challenges, healthcare professionals can still glean insight. Ganson noted a few clinical implications of the research:

“The data from this study indicates that IF may be problematic and associated with severe and harmful eating disorder attitudes and behaviors. Healthcare professionals need to be aware of these potentially correlated behaviors, as well as understand contemporary dietary trends like IF that are commonly discussed among young people, particularly on social media. Thus, more comprehensive assessments need to be conducted among young people related to dietary practices and proper guidance [given] when necessary.”

Engaging safely in intermittent fasting

People in some groups should not engage in intermittent fasting, such as those who are immunocompromised or people with certain hormonal imbalances.

The results from this study indicate the potential dangers of intermittent fasting among young adults and adolescents.

Still, some people may engage in intermittent fasting safely by understanding the facts and gathering careful insight from professionals. It’s also important to understand that everyone has different needs and risks.

If you’re interested in trying intermittent fasting, Garcia recommended the following tips to stay healthy:

• Meet with a registered dietitian who can teach you about good food choices.

• Choose a method that gives you nutrition daily.

• Avoid bingeing on high calorie foods and fast foods, but rather, incorporate what you like in small doses daily. (e.g., if you like cookies, 1 or 2 cookies a day is OK).

Non-study author and registered dietician Anastasia Gialouris, CDN, a certified dietitian nutritionist in Brooklyn, New York, offered a few safety considerations to keep in mind:

 “Those who choose to give intermittent fasting a try should still aim to consume adequate balanced meals during their limited eating window, full of whole, minimally processed foods, to ensure they get enough nutrients into their bodies. Secondly, since hunger and low energy are two of the main side effects of intermittent fasting, it is vital to listen to your body. If you are fasting and you reach a point of extreme weakness [or] dizziness, then please eat something, even if it is just a small nutritious snack to get you by.”

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For those of us tending libraries of digitized and born-digital books, we know that they need constant maintenance—reprocessing, reformatting, re-invigorating or they will not be readable or read. Fortunately this is what libraries do (if they are not sued to stop it). Publishers try to introduce new ideas into the public sphere. Libraries acquire these and keep them alive for generations to come.

And, to serve users with print disabilities, we have to keep up with the ever-improving tools they use.

Mega-publishers are saying electronic books do not wear out, but this is not true at all. The Internet Archive processes and reprocesses the books it has digitized as new optical character recognition technologies come around, as new text understanding technologies open new analysis, as formats change from djvu to daisy to epub1 to epub2 to epub3 to pdf-a and on and on. This takes thousands of computer-months and programmer-years to do this work. This is what libraries have signed up for—our long-term custodial roles.

Also, the digital media they reside on changes, too—from Digital Linear Tape to PATA hard drives to SATA hard drives to SSDs. If we do not actively tend our digital books they become unreadable very quickly.

Then there is cataloging and metadata. If we do not keep up with the ever-changing expectations of digital learners, then our books will not be found. This is ongoing and expensive.

Our paper books have lasted hundreds of years on our shelves and are still readable. Without active maintenance, we will be lucky if our digital books last a decade.

Also, how we use books and periodicals, in the decades after they are published, change from how they were originally intended. We are seeing researchers use books and periodicals in machine learning investigations to find trends that were never easy in a one-by-one world, or in the silos of the publisher databases. Preparing these books for this type of analysis is time consuming and now threatened by publisher’s lawsuits.

If we want future access to our digital heritage we need to make some structural changes:  changes to institution and publisher behaviors as well as supportive funding, laws, and enforcement.

The first step is to recognize preservation and access to our digital heritage is a big job and one worth doing.  Then, find ways that institutions– educational, government, non-profit, and philanthropic– could make preservation a part of our daily responsibility.

Long live books.

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Charlotte Lockhart, the founder of Four Day Week, the organization behind the pilot program, says company leaders usually have a visceral reaction when they hear the idea of cutting hours without cutting pay. Something like, "That'll never work in my business. That'll never work in my industry. That'll never work in my country. That'll never work in the world."

Fortunately, she found 73 companies to give it a shot. They include financial firms, recruiters, consultants, health care companies and even a fish and chip shop (this is Britain, after all). And while the data on the study hasn't been released yet, the anecdotal feedback from these firms appears to be positive. Fully 86% said they will likely continue the four-day workweek policy. The same pay for less time at work? Sign us up!

Reframing the workplace

From the moment the five-day week was adopted as the industry standard, about a century ago, we've been talking about spending less time at work. John Maynard Keynes declared in the early 1930s that technological advancement would bring the work week down to 15 hours within a century. A U.S. Senate subcommittee doubled down on this in 1965, predicting we'd only be working 14 hours by the year 2000.

But, over the last few years, the idea of shortening the work week has been given new impetus by the pandemic, which threw workplaces into disarray. That created a unique opening for reformers like Charlotte Lockhart. "The opportunity we have here is to completely reframe the workplace," she says.

To get companies on board, she is using the holy grail of increased productivity as a lure. That's a particularly tantalizing enticement for companies in the UK, where productivity has languished for more than a decade, and where, she says, workers are on average productive for just three hours a day.

"There is clear evidence around the world that if you reduce work time, you increase productivity," she says, pointing to findings from studies done in Iceland, New Zealand, the UK, Belgium and Japan.

The data produced by these studies tends to be a little squishy: There are not a lot of hard numbers in them that allow readers to gauge productivity gains or losses in material terms. But managers and workers have generally reported being equally or more productive in a shortened week. They reported improved health and general wellbeing, as well as reduced stress and burnout. One big finding was that people who work fewer hours in the week tend to get more sleep, which almost everyone in the scientific community agrees is key to productivity.

Laura Giurge, a professor of behavioral science who studies wellbeing at the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics, says happier, better rested workers are likely to be more productive, and less likely to burn out or churn out. And a shortened week can drive productivity in other ways.

"It forces people to prioritize better and really focus on completing their core work," she says. "It is almost like a removal of bullshit tasks or tasks that seem important but aren't."

She notes that companies often waste resources by keeping employees idle between meetings and tasks. "These idle hours not only fragment employees' attention — and therefore productivity — but can also cost companies up to $100 billion a year in lost wages," she says.

A shorter week can also go a long way to dealing with one of the biggest impairments to corporate productivity: employees taking time off to go to the doctor or recover from an illness. Giurge quotes research done in the U.S. estimating that 5 to 8% of annual health care costs are associated with and may be attributable to workplace stressors such as long hours.

And in Britain?

"We know that one in four of our workforce in the UK are not working productively because they have a workplace or mental health issue," Charlotte Lockhart says. "The UK loses nearly 8 million worker days from workplace stress and overwork a year. So that's about $43 billion lost from the economy because I've taken a sick day."

Less is more

Esme Terry of the Digital Futures at Work Research Center in the UK is in full agreement that, for most people, long work days and weeks impair productivity. But she's not entirely convinced that a four-day work week is the way to go. For one thing, there's some disagreement over what a four-day week actually means.

"There are multiple different models that are termed a four-day week," she points out. "For example, some organizations have condensed hours, so the number of working hours isn't actually reduced. They're condensed into fewer days with extended hours during those days." That's a model that could increase stress and burnout, rather than reduce it.

There's also some question about how a four-day work week could fit the overall workforce because of the difference in the way people work in different types of jobs, Terry says. She points to the difference between knowledge work and physical labor as an example.

"The work week for one of those employees is very different to the other employee in terms of their productivity," she says. "Knowledge work at, say, an advertising agency where your employer has you around five days a week, nine to five, because they're going to have meetings and they're paying you to be in that space so that they can use you, doesn't necessarily mean that you're being productive while you're in that space. Whereas if you're a delivery driver for Amazon, every moment that you're working, you are being productive."

She also notes that, paradoxically, while a four-day work week does free up time for workers, it's also a constraint, one that might not work for a lot of people.

"Workers have different preferences; different ways of working," she says. "Some people like to have prescribed hours; very set hours. They know exactly what they're doing when they're doing it, and they find that productive. Other people like to be able to work when they feel they're most productive. and that might not be in core working hours."

One size doesn't fit all

Her caution was reflected in a small and very random poll conducted by NPR on the streets of London recently. All the British workers we spoke to said they liked the idea of more time off, but they all expressed doubts that the four-day week model would fit easily with their sectors. They also raised the question of whether a week with fewer working hours would benefit the kind of workers who make up an increasingly large part of the British workforce.

"You're talking about differences between the knowledge economy and the platform and gig economies," Terry says. "Work is precarious, and generally people lack security and are self-employed in most instances. They're tied to a company but technically work for themselves." Given that the corporate trend is generally in the direction of companies hiring workers on more exploitative terms, rather than less, fewer hours for the same pay seems like a tough sell.

What Terry says the workplace really needs — along with the workers who work in it — is to become more flexible. That could mean a four-day week for some workers, while others might want to stick to five days, or even extend to six or seven, but working in shorter bursts over those days. The point, she says, is that there is no one formula for increased productivity (not to mention wellbeing). To make employees truly productive, employers need to adopt a variety of workplace models.

"If employers can be less prescriptive about working hours and potentially place more trust in their employees to manage their own working time, then that's likely to have benefits," she says.

Managers trusting their workers? That wouldn't just be a reframing; more like a reimagining. But as Nicolas Bloom of Stanford University told our own Greg Rosalsky recently, we may be realizing that dream right now, thanks to the pandemic and a widespread shift to remote work that companies have been forced to embrace.

"Tons of firms I've spoken to have discovered you have to use output management to manage remote workers, which means beefing up HR systems, which means more training, more 360 reviews, performance reviews," Bloom says. "If you're an employee, that's good news for you because it means your boss, rather than saying you gotta be chained to your desk 50 hours a week at these strict times, they just say, 'Get your report done, make your sales figures, achieve your targets, and kind of manage yourself.'"

And once you're managing yourself, of course, it's you who gets to decide whether you work four hours a day for five days a week, or eight hours for three days. Or even — imagine! — no days at all.

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In the annals of unsolicited advice, few nuggets have been dispensed as widely and with less supporting evidence than this: “If you keep doing all that running, you’re going to ruin your knees.”

The latest salvo in the debate over knees and running — a systematic review of 43 previous M.R.I. studies that finds no evidence that running causes either short-term or long-term damage to knee cartilage — is unlikely to convince the opinionated ex-football star at your Thanksgiving table who swears his bum knee was caused by wind sprints. But given that nearly half of Americans are expected to develop painful knee osteoarthritis at some point during their lives, the findings do raise a nagging question: If abstaining from running won’t magically protect your knees, what will?

Feed the cartilage.

Researchers have lately begun to rethink long-held dogmas about the properties of cartilage, the smooth layer of tissue that cushions the bones of the knee and other joints and whose breakdown is the primary cause of osteoarthritis. “Since cartilage doesn’t have a blood or nerve supply, we used to think it couldn’t adapt or repair itself,” said Michaela Khan, a doctoral researcher at the University of British Columbia and the lead author of the new review on running and cartilage, which was published in the journal Sports Medicine.

But that’s not the case. Cyclic weight-bearing activities like walking and — wait for it — running squeeze the cartilage in the knee joint like a sponge, expelling waste and then drawing in a fresh supply of nutrient- and oxygen-rich fluid with each step. Instead of an inert shock-absorber doomed to get brittle and eventually fail with age, Ms. Khan said, cartilage is a living tissue that adapts and thrives with regular use. That explains why, for example, in a small study from 2010, non-runners who followed a 10-week running program saw a 1.9 percent improvement in a marker of cartilage strength and quality.

It also helps explain why swapping one form of exercise for another at the first sign of knee pain may be counterproductive. People with incipient knee problems often switch to low-impact activities like swimming and cycling because they believe it will protect their joints, said Jackie Whittaker, a physical therapist and arthritis researcher also at the University of British Columbia, “but actually what they’re doing is starving the cartilage.”

Credit...Patricia Voulgaris for The New York Times

Go short and frequent.

Still, there’s a limit to how quickly the joint can adapt to unfamiliar stresses. Jean-François Esculier, head of research for The Running Clinic and Ms. Kahn’s co-author, suggested that knee pain that persists for more than an hour after exercise, or that shows up the morning after a workout, is a sign that the joint was overloaded. That doesn’t mean you need to stop exercising, he said, but that you should adjust what you’re doing.

Consider shorter and more frequent workouts. According to Keith Baar, a physiologist at the University of California, Davis, who studies the molecular properties of cartilage and other connective tissues, the cells in cartilage respond positively to exercise for about 10 minutes. After that, you’re just accumulating more stress and damage in the tissue with no further adaptive benefits. So, if a weekly two-hour tennis marathon leaves you with aching knees, you might try swapping it out for one-hour sessions twice a week.

Beware the weekend warrior effect.

Of course, no workout takes place in a vacuum: What your knees can handle today depends on what you’ve been doing with them over the preceding weeks and months. That’s why the arrival of ski season is a source of predictable carnage for physical therapists, as enthusiastic weekend warriors hit the slopes after months of inactivity.

Dr. Whittaker suggested taking the first day on the slopes easy and being willing to cut subsequent days short when it feels like your leg muscles or joints have had enough. “It’s pacing,” she said. “It’s adapting to the capacity of your body to handle the load.”

Better yet, she strongly suggested doing some strength training to prepare your legs before putting any new stresses on them. A simple, generic program of squats and lunges can strengthen the muscles that keep the knee stable and stiffen the tendons and ligaments around the joint. For starters, aim for three sets of 10 to 15 repetitions, lifting a weight that leaves you with shaky muscles and the feeling that you could have done two or three more reps if necessary.

Stay out of the E.R.

As it turns out, the most serious long-term risk from activities like skiing isn’t the prolonged squatting. Instead, it’s traumatic knee injuries like a torn A.C.L., which in roughly half of cases will lead to osteoarthritis within five to 15 years. That’s partly because of lingering damage or instability in the joint, but also because people tend to be less active and consequently gain weight even after the knee heals. In fact, according to one study, the higher risk of knee osteoarthritis observed among former elite athletes in sports such as soccer is largely explained by a history of traumatic knee injury rather than by accumulated wear and tear.

Fortunately, the risk of acute knee injuries can be cut in half by implementing a so-called “neuromuscular” training program, said Ewa Roos, an osteoarthritis researcher at the University of Southern Denmark. Specific exercises tailored to each sport promote good movement patterns that keep your joints stable, and they can be performed either on their own for 15 minutes three times a week, or as a pre-workout warm-up.

Dr. Roos recommends the website fittoplay.org, hosted by the Oslo Sports Trauma Research Center in Norway, which offers detailed neuromuscular programs for more than 50 sports. Alpine skiing, for example, starts with exercises such as bodyweight squats, weight shifts, Bosu tucks and forward jumps, then progresses to more challenging ones.

Optimize your movement patterns.

For athletes, the benefits of such preventive programs are clear. For the average person with — for now — no knee pain, it’s more debatable. “It’s also a philosophical question,” Dr. Roos said: there’s a risk of over-medicalizing life by spending all your energy trying to prevent problems that haven’t yet happened.

But there are some relatively unobtrusive ways of tilting the odds in your favor, even if you’re currently healthy. Dr. Roos suggested focusing on high-quality movement patterns during day-to-day activities like getting up from a chair: use both feet and no hands, and keep the knee and hip aligned over the foot. Apply similar focus to climbing stairs and sitting down on the toilet; if you can’t keep the joints aligned, that’s a sign you need to strengthen your leg and hip muscles.

Don’t seek salvation in a bottle.

There’s no high-quality evidence that supplements, including glucosamine and chondroitin, make any difference, according to both Dr. Roos and Dr. Whittaker — though they don’t appear to be harmful either.

“If you’re OK paying for it, and you want to take it because you think it’s doing something to preserve your joint, not a problem,” Dr. Whittaker said. “But in addition, can you please also be doing some cyclical weight-bearing activity and so on?”

There is one intriguing possible exception. A small 2011 study by researchers at Tufts Medical Center found that cartilage quality in the knee improved after six months of taking 10 grams of collagen daily. More recently, Dr. Baar’s research on lab-grown ligaments, which, like cartilage, are primarily made of collagen, also supports the idea that consuming collagen before exercise can trigger new collagen synthesis in the body. But for now, the real-world benefits of this approach remain unproven.

To Dr. Whittaker, the most important priority remains debunking the notion that you should stop being active as soon as you notice knee pain. Staying active, strengthening the muscles around the joint and developing good movement patterns can alter, and in some cases reverse, the trajectory, she said. “A lot of people think that osteoarthritis is just a normal consequence of aging, right? It’s not inevitable. There’s a lot you can control.”

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NASA’s SLS takes off on its first flight.

NASA

NASA’s Artemis 1 mission is finally headed towards the Moon

This year’s ugly Microsoft sweater has a suggestion for you: It’s Clippy

China’s new electronically scanned array radar aims to blunt the military advantages long provided by satellite intelligence, raising proliferation concerns in Washington and other Western capitals.

The 10-meter-tall SLC-1 radar unveiled at this year’s Zhuhai Airshow can detect and track low-orbiting satellites and predict their paths, its manufacturer China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC) claimed at the show, the South China Morning Post reported last week.

The state-owned Chinese company also claimed that the SLC-18 high-power, low-frequency P-band radar can function around the clock in all weather conditions and has an exceptionally large search range.

With proper geographic positioning, an SLC-18 radar network can monitor all satellites traveling over a specific area and predict the arrival of others, enabling commanders on the ground to respond, the company said.

According to CETC deputy manager Sun Rui, the SLC-18 “can detect satellites from a distance and can identify and categorize them to form a radar database that can help other equipment respond accordingly… at the same time, it sends data on the satellites to the command center to assist in decision making.”

Sun noted that the US currently deploys constellations of low-orbit surveillance satellites, meaning that a detection system needs to be able to detect, identify and react quickly. He said that the use of satellite surveillance in modern warfare makes it imperative for militaries to have satellite tracking capabilities over a specific area to avoid detection, engage in deception maneuvers or jam enemy satellites.

From a proliferation perspective, the SLC-18 may be available for export, with Pakistan, Iran and North Korea as possible allied customers.

Sun suggested the system “provides relatively economical ground-based monitoring of space targets to serve friendly countries … offering situational awareness capabilities against low-orbiting satellites to balance the battlefield posture.”

Space-based reconnaissance provides tremendous advantages in military operations, including at strategic and tactical levels. Stark examples of these advantages were seen in the 1980-89 Iran-Iraq war and the ongoing Ukraine war. Asia Times has previously noted that during the Iran-Iraq war, US-supplied satellite intelligence enabled Iraq to inflict battle reverses and massive casualties on Iran.

A SpaceX satellite. Credit: SpaceX

Similarly, commercial satellites have been decisive in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. This March, The Washington Post reported that five commercial satellite imaging companies are sharing intelligence with Ukraine, with the intelligence allowing the latter to accurately target Russian forces, kill top generals and destroy fuel and ammunition stockpiles.

The use of commercial satellites for military purposes can be seen as a “grey zone” move by the US to complicate efforts to counter its long-established use of space as a sanctuary for its satellites, which are critical information nodes in US warfighting concepts and underline China’s and other US adversaries’ need for anti-satellite capabilities.

Although Russia has threatened to attack private commercial satellites supplying intelligence to Ukraine, the implications of such a move are unclear and would likely mark a significant escalation in the Ukraine war. An alternative response to destroying such satellites would be to evade them, blunting any intelligence advantage they offer while removing the risk of escalating terrestrial conflicts into outer space.

SatelliteObservation.net notes that satellites have predictable orbits, as gravity is the only force acting on them. Ground-based sensors may also only see satellites once or twice a day for a few minutes, relying on the laws of orbital mechanics to know their position at a particular time.

While satellites can maneuver to change their orbits, it is usually done with a chemical fuel that satellites carry only limited supplies, meaning they cannot maneuver all the time. Although some satellites are powered by electric rather than fuel-guzzling engines, they have much less power and take significantly more time to change orbital direction.

These limitations make satellite detection via ground tracking a viable counter-satellite capability.

In April 2020, the US Space Force announced the activation of Space Fence, an S-band ground-based sensor that can track commercial and military satellites, spent rocket boosters and debris as small as 10 centimeters in low earth or geosynchronous orbit across in an east-west surveillance direction from 1,900 miles (3,057 kilometers) out.

“Space is now recognized as a congested and contested domain… and Space Fence is the next evolution in our efforts to maintain space superiority,” said Lieutenant Colonel David Tipton, commander of the 20th Space Control Squadron, in a March 2020 article in C4ISRNET.

However, C4ISRNET notes Space Fence’s limitations, including the fact that its single radar is based in Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, making it impossible to track smaller objects continuously.  Breaking Defense notes that Space Fence needs a 10-megawatt power plant to function, puts off emissions that can be targeted by an adversary and carries a hefty US$914 million price tag.

Other drawbacks mentioned by Global Security include limited data acquisition abilities, inability to attain precision orbit parameters of detected objects, lack of 24/7 capability for electro-optical systems and high costs and complexity.

The same source notes that these challenges stem from a perceived need to search all of space, with large sensors like Space Fence offering increased sensitivity but having a narrow field of view and enlarging the area needed to be searched.

Global Security suggests the alternative need for ground-based tracking systems that are simple, accurate and limited to a specific area of space that can quickly catalog earth-orbiting objects. Satellite ground tracking technology may thus evolve toward proliferated, small and mobile systems that can be deployed at the tactical level instead of large, strategic-level systems like Space Fence.

China is not the only country to make recent advances in tactical-level ground-based satellite tracking technology. Breaking Defense reported in October that Australia-based Silentium Defense had built a “space observatory in a box,” a passive satellite-tracking radar that could fit in a shipping container alongside all necessary components such as power supplies and computers.

Anti-satellite capabilities will be crucial in any future US-China conflict. Conceptual Image: Facebook

The report said that users could deploy the system to fill coverage gaps left by existing space-tracking systems and Australia could opt to export the system to countries that now lack space-tracking capabilities. Silentium Defense’s system has reportedly been developed entirely in Australia, which means Canberra can export it to any country it chooses without US permission.

At the same time, Breaking Defense notes that Silentium’s system is limited by its reliance on external sources of FM radio waves to bounce off LEO satellites, meaning its utility may be limited in areas where those signals are few and weak.

The advent of small, mobile and affordable satellite ground-based tracking stations such as China’s SLC-18 and Silentium Defense’s passive radar may lead to the proliferation of such capabilities, blunting the future advantage of space-based satellite intelligence gathering.

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The company already runs Amazon Pharmacy, a place where people can purchase prescription medications through the Amazon online store without leaving home.

The new platform – Amazon Clinic aims to provide virtual care to people through its partnership with trusted providers and provide access to affordable care for more than 20 common health conditions, such as allergies, acne, and hair loss. It will operate in 32 states.

Based on their personal preferences, interested customers can pick a telehealth provider from the new healthcare store. Just mention your condition, fill up a short intake questionnaire and connect with the clinicians directly via a secure message-based portal. After the message-based consultation, the clinician can send a personalized treatment plan, including any necessary prescriptions, to the customer’s preferred pharmacy.

The consultation includes follow-up messages with the clinician for up to two weeks after the initial consultation.

Amazon also says that every telehealth provider available on Amazon Clinic goes through rigorous clinical quality and customer experience evaluations by its clinical leadership team.

Lastly, it points out that if the clinical team at the backend feels the virtual care isn’t the right solution for you, they will let you know about it upfront before connecting you with a provider.

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“I’m trained as a drummer, and most of my research career has been focused on the rhythmic aspects of music and how they make us move,” says first author Daniel Cameron, a neuroscientist from McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. “Music is a biological curiosity—it doesn’t reproduce us, it doesn’t feed us, and it doesn’t shelter us, so why do humans like it and why do they like to move to it?”

Cameron conducts research at the McMaster LIVELab. This unique research theater connects science with live performance. It is equipped with 3D motion capture and a Meyer sound system that can replicate various concert environments. It also features enhanced speakers that can produce extremely low frequencies, so low they were undetectable to the human ear.

For the Current Biology study, Cameron and colleagues recruited participants attending a LIVELab concert for electronic musical duo Orphx, a Canadian music duo made up of Rich Oddie and Christina Sealey. The concertgoers were equipped with motion-sensing headbands to monitor their dance moves. Additionally, they were asked to fill out survey forms before and after the event. These forms were used to ensure the sound was undetectable, measure concert enjoyment, and examine how the music felt physically.

Throughout the 45-minute concert, the researchers manipulated the very-low bass-playing speakers, turning them on and off every two minutes. They found the amount of movement was 12 percent greater when the speakers were on.

“The musicians were enthusiastic to participate because of their interest in this idea that bass can change how the music is experienced in a way that impacts movement,” says Cameron. “The study had high ecological validity, as this was a real musical and dance experience for people at a real live show.”

The feeling of vibration through touch and the interactions between the inner ear and the brain have close links to the motor system. The researchers speculate these physical processes are at work in the neurological connection between music and movement. This anatomy can pick up on low frequencies and can affect the perception of “groove,” spontaneous movement, and rhythm perception.

“Very low frequencies may also affect vestibular sensitivity, adding to people’s experience of movement. Nailing down the brain mechanisms involved will require looking the effects of low frequencies on the vestibular, tactile, and auditory pathways,” says Cameron.

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