New research finds that the popular dietary supplement nicotinamide riboside could increase the risk of serious disease, including developing cancer.

University of Missouri researchers made the discovery while using bioluminescent imaging technology to study how nicotinamide riboside supplements work inside the body.

Commercial dietary supplements like nicotinamide riboside (NR), a form of vitamin B3, were linked to benefits related to cardiovascular, metabolic, and neurological health in previous studies. However, new research from the University of Missouri (MU) has found NR could actually increase the risk of serious disease, including developing cancer.

Supplements containing nicotinamide riboside are often marketed as NAD+ boosters claimed benefits including increased energy, anti-aging/longevity/healthy aging, improved cellular energy metabolism and repair, increased vitality, and improved heart health.

Scientists discovered that high levels of NR could not only increase someone’s risk of developing triple-negative breast cancer, but also could cause the cancer to metastasize or spread to the brain. The international team of researchers was led by Elena Goun, an associate professor of chemistry at MU and the corresponding author on the study. She said that once the cancer reaches the brain, the results are deadly because no viable treatment options exist at this time.

 

“Some people take them [vitamins and supplements] because they automatically assume that vitamins and supplements only have positive health benefits, but very little is known about how they actually work,” Goun said. “Because of this lack of knowledge, we were inspired to study the basic questions surrounding how vitamins and supplements work in the body.”

 

Following the death of her 59-year-old father only three months after being diagnosed with colon cancer, Goun was moved by her father’s passing to pursue a better scientific understanding of cancer metabolism, or the energy through which cancer spreads in the body. Since NR is a known supplement for helping increase levels of cellular energy, and cancer cells feed off of that energy with their increased metabolism, Goun wanted to investigate NR’s role in the development and spread of cancer.

 

Elena Goun. Credit: University of Missouri

 

“Our work is especially important given the wide commercial availability and a large number of ongoing human clinical trials where NR is used to mitigate the side effects of cancer therapy in patients,” Goun said.

 

The researchers used this technology to compare and examine how much NR levels were present in cancer cells, T cells, and healthy tissues.

 

“While NR is already being widely used in people and is being investigated in so many ongoing clinical trials for additional applications, much of how NR works is a black box — it’s not understood,” Goun said. “So that inspired us to come up with this novel imaging technique based on ultrasensitive bioluminescent imaging that allows quantification of NR levels in real time in a non-invasive manner. The presence of NR is shown with light, and the brighter the light is, the more NR is present.”

 

Goun said the findings of the study emphasize the importance of having careful investigations of potential side effects for supplements like NR prior to their use in people who may have different types of health conditions. In the future, Goun would like to provide information that could potentially lead to the development of certain inhibitors to help make cancer therapies like chemotherapy more effective in treating cancer. The key to this approach, Goun said, is to look at it from a personalized medicine standpoint.

 

“Not all cancers are the same in every person, especially from the standpoint of metabolic signatures,” Goun said. “Often times cancers can even change their metabolism before or after chemotherapy.”

 

Source

Research shows that there are differences between perceptions and reality when it comes to many dieters eating habits. People trying to lose weight tended to overestimate how healthy their diet was, and their self-perceptions of how much their diet improved during the study were often inaccurate.

• According to a new study, adults who were making lifestyle changes to lose weight tended to overestimate how healthy their diet was.
• Additionally, self-perceptions of how much their diet improved over the course of the 12- month study were often inaccurate – most thought they improved the quality of their diet, yet there actually was very little change based on researchers’ assessment.
• Future research focused on perceptions vs. reality about nutrition may lead to healthier eating patterns.

Most adults seeking to lose weight overestimated the healthiness of their diet, according to a small research study. This is the finding of preliminary research that was presented at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2022. The meeting, held in person in Chicago and virtually is a premier global exchange of the latest scientific advancements, research, and evidence-based clinical practice updates in cardiovascular science.

“We found that while people generally know that fruits and vegetables are healthy, there may be a disconnect between what researchers and health care professionals consider to be a healthy and balanced diet compared to what the public thinks is a healthy and balanced diet,” said study author Jessica Cheng, Ph.D., a postdoctoral research fellow in epidemiology at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and in general internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, both in Boston. This research was conducted while Dr. Cheng was a predoctoral fellow/Ph.D. candidate in the department of epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), nearly half of adults in the U.S. try to lose weight each year, with a majority attempting to eat more fruits, vegetables, and salads. Healthy eating is essential for heart and general health, as well as longevity.

Dietary guidance from the American Heart Association issued in 2021 advises adults to eat a variety of fruits and vegetables; opt for whole grains rather than refined grains; choose healthy protein sources; substitute nonfat and low-fat dairy products for full-fat versions; choose lean cuts of meat (for those who eat meat); use liquid plant oils instead of tropical oils and animal fats; choose minimally processed over ultra-processed foods; minimize foods and beverages with added sugar; choose foods with little or no added salt; and limit or avoid alcohol.

Researchers evaluated the diets of 116 adults aged 35–58 years old in the greater Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, area who were trying to lose weight. Study participants met one-on-one with a dietitian to discuss their nutrition and then tracked everything they ate and drank every day for one year on the Fitbit app. They also weighed themselves daily and wore a Fitbit device to track their physical activity.

“We found that while people generally know that fruits and vegetables are healthy, there may be a disconnect between what researchers and health care professionals consider to be a healthy and balanced diet compared to what the public thinks is a healthy and balanced diet.”

— Jessica Cheng, Ph.D.

Researchers calculated a Healthy Eating Index (HEI) score at the beginning and end of the study based on the types of foods that participants reported eating. Participants were asked to complete a 24-hour food recall for two days at each time point. The HEI is a measure for assessing how closely a dietary pattern aligns with the U.S. government’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans. A score of 0 to 100 is possible, with a higher score indicating a healthier diet. The score is based on the frequency of eating various dietary components such fruits, vegetables, whole and refined grains, meat and seafood, sodium, fats, and sugars.

Participants self-scored their beginning and ending diet quality to determine their perceived scores. Their scores were also on a 0-100 scale based on the components of the HEI. The self-assessment of their beginning diet was a “look back” as they scored both their starting and ending diets at the end of the study. The difference in their starting and ending score was their perceived diet change. A difference of 6 points or less between the researchers’ HEI score and the participant’s perceived score was considered “good agreement.”

At the end of the study, about 1 in 4 participants’ scores had good agreement between their perceived diet score and the researcher-assessed score. The remaining 3 out of 4 participants’ scores had poor agreement, and most reported a perceived score that was higher than the HEI score assigned by researchers. The average perceived score was 67.6, and the average HEI score was 56.4.

In judging the change in diet score over 12 months, only 1 in 10 participants had good agreement between their self-assessed change compared to the change in the researchers’ HEI score. At the end of the study, participants improved their diet quality by about one point based on the researcher-assessed score. However, participants’ self-estimate was a perceived 18-point improvement.

“People attempting to lose weight or health professionals who are helping people with weight loss or nutrition-related goals should be aware that there is likely more room for improvement in the diet than may be expected,” said Cheng. She suggests providing concrete information on what areas of their diet can be improved and how to go about making healthy, sustainable nutrition changes.

“Future studies should examine the effects of helping people close the gap between their perceptions and objective diet quality measurements,” she said.

“Overestimating the perceived healthiness of food intake could lead to weight gain, frustrations over not meeting personal weight loss goals or lower likelihood of adopting healthier eating habits,” said Deepika Laddu, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the College of Applied Health Sciences at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and chair of the American Heart Association’s Council on Lifestyle Behavioral Change for Improving Health Factors. “While misperception of diet intake is common among dieters, these findings provide additional support for behavioral counselling interventions that include more frequent contacts with health care professionals, such as dieticians or health coaches, to address the gaps in perception and support long-lasting, realistic healthy eating behaviors.”

Among the study’s limitations are that participants were mostly female (79%) and the majority reported white race (84%), so the findings may not apply in the same ways to other populations. In addition, the researchers assessed diet quality perceptions only at the end of the study. Assessments throughout the study may have helped to answer questions, such as whether perception became more realistic over the course of the study or whether a person’s perception of their diet helps or hinders them from making dietary changes.

Source

A new study found that increased consumption of ultra-processed foods was associated with more than 10% of all-cause premature, preventable deaths in Brazil in 2019. This is especially alarming, because Brazilians consume far less of these products than countries with high incomes.

Consumption of ultra-processed foods containing little or no whole foods in their ingredients contributed to 57,000 premature deaths in Brazil in 2019, investigators report in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) have gradually been replacing traditional foods and meals made from fresh and minimally processed ingredients in many countries. These ready-to-eat-or-heat industrial formulations, made with ingredients extracted from foods or synthesized in laboratories, are known to be unhealthy. A new research study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, published by Elsevier, has found that increased consumption of these foods was associated with more than 10% of all-cause premature, preventable deaths in Brazil in 2019. This is despite the fact that Brazilians consume far less of these products than countries with high incomes.

“Previous modeling studies have estimated the health and economic burden of critical ingredients, such as sodium, sugar, and trans fats, and specific foods or drinks, such as sugar-sweetened beverages,” explained lead investigator Eduardo A.F. Nilson, ScD, Center for Epidemiological Research in Nutrition and Health, University of São Paulo, and Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, Brazil. “To our knowledge, no study to date has estimated the potential impact of UPFs on premature deaths. Knowing the deaths attributable to the consumption of these foods and modeling how changes in dietary patterns can support more effective food policies might prevent disease and premature deaths.”

Dr. Nilson and his colleagues modeled data from nationally representative dietary surveys to estimate baseline intakes of UPFs by sex and age group. Statistical analyses were used to estimate the proportion of total deaths that were attributable to the consumption of UPFs and the impact of reducing the intake of UPFs by 10%, 20%, and 50% within those age groups, using data from 2019. 

Across all age groups and sex strata, consumption of UPFs ranged from 13% to 21% of total food intake in Brazil during the period studied. A total of 541,260 adults aged 30 to 69 died prematurely in 2019, of whom 261,061 were from preventable, non-communicable diseases. The model found that approximately 57,000 deaths that year could be attributed to the consumption of UPFs, which corresponded to 10.5% of all premature deaths and 21.8% of all deaths from preventable noncommunicable diseases in adults aged 30 to 69. The investigators suggested that in high-income countries such as the United States, Canada, the UK, and Australia, where UPFs account for more than half of total caloric intake, the estimated impact would be even higher.

Dr. Nilson noted that UPFs have steadily replaced the consumption of traditional whole foods, such as rice and beans, over time in Brazil. Reducing the consumption of UPFs and promoting healthier food choices may require multiple interventions and public health measures, such as fiscal and regulatory policies, changing food environments, strengthening the implementation of food-based dietary guidelines, and improving consumer knowledge, attitudes, and behavior. 

Reducing the consumption of UPFs by 10% to 50% could potentially prevent approximately 5,900 to 29,300 premature deaths in Brazil each year.

Examples of ultra-processed foods are frozen pizza, ready-to-eat meals, hot dogs, sausages, prepackaged soups, sodas, ice cream, and store-bought cookies, candies, doughnuts, and cakes.

 

“Consumption of UPFs is associated with many disease outcomes, such as obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, some cancers, and other diseases, and it represents a significant cause of preventable and premature deaths among Brazilian adults,” said Dr. Nilson. “Even reducing consumption of UPFs to the levels of just a decade ago would reduce associated premature deaths by 21%. Policies that disincentivize the consumption of UPFs are urgently needed.”

Having a tool to estimate the deaths attributable to the consumption of UPFs can help countries estimate the burden of dietary changes related to the industrial processing of food and design more effective food policy options to promote healthier food environments.

Examples of UPFs are prepackaged soups, sauces, ready-to-eat meals, frozen pizza, sodas, ice cream, hot dogs, sausages, and store-bought cookies, candies, cakes, and doughnuts.

Source

A new study presents a new neurocomputational model of the human brain, which might shed light on how the brain develops complex cognitive skills and advance neural artificial intelligence research. An international team of scientists from the Institut Pasteur and Sorbonne University in Paris, the CHU Sainte-Justine, Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, and the University of Montreal conducted the study.

Guillaume Dumas. Credit: Stéphane Dedelis, Chu Sainte-Justine

 

The model, which was featured on the cover of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), describes neural development over three hierarchical levels of information processing:

• the first sensorimotor level explores how the brain’s inner activity learns patterns from perception and associates them with action;
• the cognitive level examines how the brain contextually combines those patterns;
• lastly, the conscious level considers how the brain dissociates from the outside world and manipulates learned patterns (via memory) no longer accessible to perception.

The model’s emphasis on the interaction between two fundamental types of learning—Hebbian learning, associated with statistical regularity (i.e., repetition), or as neuropsychologist Donald Hebb has put it, “neurons that fire together, wire together”—and reinforcement learning, associated with reward and the dopamine neurotransmitter, provides insights into the fundamental mechanisms underlying cognition.

The model solves three tasks of increasing complexity across those levels, from visual recognition to cognitive manipulation of conscious percepts. Each time, the team introduced a new core mechanism to enable it to progress.

The results highlight two fundamental mechanisms for the multilevel development of cognitive abilities in biological neural networks:

• synaptic epigenesis, with Hebbian learning at the local scale and reinforcement learning at the global scale;
• and self-organized dynamics, through spontaneous activity and balanced excitatory/inhibitory ratio of neurons.

“Our model demonstrates how the neuro-AI convergence highlights biological mechanisms and cognitive architectures that can fuel the development of the next generation of artificial intelligence and even ultimately lead to artificial consciousness,” said team member Guillaume Dumas, an assistant professor of computational psychiatry at the University of Montreal, and a principal investigator at the CHU Sainte-Justine Research Centre.

Reaching this milestone may require integrating the social dimension of cognition, he added. The researchers are now looking at integrating biological and social dimensions at play in human cognition. The team has already pioneered the first simulation of two whole brains in interaction.

Anchoring future computational models in biological and social realities will not only continue to shed light on the core mechanisms underlying cognition, the team believes, but will also help provide a unique bridge to artificial intelligence toward the only known system with advanced social consciousness: the human brain.

Source

Men are biologically older than women, according to research from the University of Jyväskylä in Finland. Men smoke more often and have larger bodies, which helps to partially explain the observed sex difference.

Although life expectancy in the Western world increased quickly in the 20th century, women still have a higher life expectancy than males. In Finland, women typically live five more years than men do. The gender gap was largest in the 1970s when women’s life expectancy at birth was over ten years greater than men’s. However, this disparity has been rapidly closing in recent years. According to a newly released study, the difference between the sexes can also be observed in biological aging.

The research looked at possible biological differences in aging between men and women, as well as if lifestyle-related factors may account for any potential differences. These distinctions were explored in both young and old adults.

Several epigenetic clocks were utilized as biological aging measures. Epigenetic clocks allow for the study of lifespan-related variables while the subject is still alive. They estimate biological age in years based on DNA methylation levels measured in a blood sample.

“We found that men are biologically older than women of the same chronological age, and the difference is considerably larger in older participants,” says Anna Kankaanpää, a doctoral researcher at the Gerontology Research Center and the Faculty of Sport and Health Sciences.

More frequent smoking among men explained the sex gap in aging in older but not in young adult twins. In addition, men’s larger body size explained a small part of the sex gap in both age groups.

“We observed a sex difference in aging pace, which was not explained by lifestyle-related factors,” says Kankaanpää.

“In our study, we also used a quite rare study design and compared the aging pace among opposite-sex twin pairs. A similar difference was also observed among these pairs of twins. The male sibling was about one year biologically older than his female co-twin. These pairs have grown in the same environment and share half of their genes. The difference may be explained, for example, by sex differences in genetic factors and the beneficial effects of the female sex hormone estrogen on health,” Kankaanpää continues.

The results help to understand lifestyle behaviors and sex differences related to biological aging and life expectancy. The results suggest that the decline in smoking among men partly explains why the sex gap in life expectancy has narrowed in recent decades.

Source

A team led by King Abdullah University of Science & Technology (KAUST) has shown how ultrathin polymer-based ordered membranes can efficiently remove salt from brine and seawater, offering a potential alternative for current desalination systems.

“Water desalination membranes should simultaneously exhibit high water flux and high salt rejection,” says Yu Han, who led the study. Carbon nanomaterials, such as carbon nanotubes and graphene, are projected to match these requirements because of their unique surface chemistry and tendency to stack into channels with diameters less than one nanometer. However, the challenges of channel alignment and stacking prevent their large-scale use in membranes.

KAUST researchers have developed a membrane (pictured above) with excellent water desalination performance in forward and reverse osmosis configurations. Credit: 2022 KAUST; Anastasia Serin

 

“One way to address these limitations is through two-dimensional porous carbonaceous membranes with regular and uniformly distributed subnanometer-sized molecular transport channels,” says first author Jie Shen, a postdoc in Han’s group.

However, these membranes are typically synthesized in solution, which promotes the random growth of a disordered three-dimensional structure with poorly defined micropores.

Using chemical vapor deposition, Yu Han, Vincent Tung, Ingo Pinnau, and Lance Li, a former researcher at KAUST who is now affiliated with the University of Hong Kong, have developed a technique that helps control the growth of two-dimensional conjugated polymer frameworks into ultrathin carbon films.

Research scientist Yichen Cai and the team are now working on improving the antifouling property, mechanical strength, and long-term chemical stability of the membrane for future practical applications. Credit: 2022 KAUST; Anastasia Serin

 

The researchers deposited the monomer triethynylbenzene on atomically flat single-crystalline copper substrates in the presence of an organic base that acts as a catalyst. Triethynylbenzene bears three reactive groups that serve as anchor points for additional monomers. These groups show a 120-degree angle with respect to each other, generating organized arrays of well-defined cyclic structures that stack into subnanometer-sized rhombic hydrophobic channels.

The membrane displayed excellent water desalination performance in forward and reverse osmosis configurations, surpassing those containing advanced materials such as carbon nanotubes and graphene. It also showed strong rejection for divalent ions, as well as small charged and neutral molecules.

Postdoc Jie Shen was the first author of the paper, published in Nature Materials. Credit: 2022 KAUST; Anastasia Serin

 

The researchers discovered that the water molecules formed a three-dimensional network inside the membrane instead of moving through the membrane along vertical triangular channels as one-dimensional chains. This explains the fast water transport through the membrane. “This unexpected result revealed that the seemingly discrete vertical channels are actually interconnected by short horizontal channels that can be easily overlooked in the projected structural model,” Han says.

The team is now working on improving the antifouling property, mechanical strength, and long-term chemical stability of the membrane for future practical applications. They are also fine-tuning its surface-charge properties and channel sizes. “Our ultimate goal is to provide a versatile multifunctional platform that meets the needs of various applications, such as ion sieving, single-molecule sensing, and neural interfaces,” Han says.

Source

Solar Orbiter has detected a ‘tube’ of cooler atmospheric gases rapidly snaking its way through the Sun’s powerful magnetic field. This observation provides a fascinating new addition to the zoo of features revealed by the Solar Orbiter mission, which is led by the European Space Agency (ESA). It is especially intriguing because the snake was a precursor to a much larger eruption.

The snake was spotted on September 5, 2022, as the Solar Orbiter spacecraft was approaching the Sun for a close pass that took place on October 12. The ‘snake’ is a tube of cool plasma suspended by magnetic fields in the hotter surrounding plasma of the Sun’s atmosphere.

Plasma is a state of matter much like the more familiar solid, liquid and gas. Plasmas are so incredibly hot, that the electrons leave their atoms, making it essentially a gas of charged particles. As charged particles, they are therefore susceptible to magnetic fields. All gas in the Sun’s atmosphere is plasma because the temperature there is more than a million degrees centigrade.

The plasma in the snake is following a particularly long filament of the Sun’s magnetic field that is reaching from one side of the Sun to another.

“You’re getting plasma flowing from one side to the other but the magnetic field is really twisted. So you’re getting this change in direction because we’re looking down on a twisted structure,” says David Long, Mullard Space Science Laboratory (UCL), UK, who is heading up the investigation into the phenomenon.

The movie at the top of this page has been constructed as a time-lapse from images from the Extreme-Ultraviolet Imager (EUI( onboard Solar Orbiter. In reality, the snake took around three hours to complete its journey. However, at the distances involved in crossing the solar surface, that means the plasma must have been traveling at around 170 kilometers per second (106 miles per second) or 612,000 km per hour (380,000 miles per hour).

What makes the snake so intriguing is that it began from a solar active region that later erupted, ejecting billions of tonnes of plasma into space. This raises the possibility that the snake was a sort of precursor to this event – and Solar Orbiter caught it all in numerous instruments.

The Extreme-Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) is a suite of remote-sensing telescopes which can image the structures in the solar atmosphere from the chromosphere to the corona at high resolution. The instrument package comprises two high-resolution telescopes and a full-Sun imager. Credit: Max Planck Institute

 

For the spacecraft’s Energetic Particle Detector (EPD), the eruption was one of the most intense solar energetic particle events detected so far by the instrument.

“It’s a really nice combination of datasets that we only get from Solar Orbiter,” says David.

More intriguing still is that the plasma from this eruption, known as a coronal mass ejection, happened to sweep over NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, allowing its instruments to measure the contents of the eruption.

Being able to see an eruption take place and then sample the ejected gasses, either with its own instruments or those of another spacecraft, is one of Solar Orbiter’s principal scientific aims. It will allow a better understanding to be developed of solar activity and the way it creates ‘space weather’, which can disrupt satellites and other technology on Earth.

Solar Orbiter is a space mission of international collaboration between ESA and NASA, operated by ESA. It launched on February 9, 2020, and celebrated its 1000th day in space earlier this month.

Source

In the email, Amazon informs Drive customers that support for uploading new files will be disabled on January 31, 2023. Customers who use Amazon Drive may continue to access files uploaded prior to that date, but the option to add new files or change existing ones is no longer available after January 31, 2023.

Amazon Drive customers have until December 31, 2023 to access their files and download them to their devices. After December 31, 2023, access to Amazon Drive is cut off for all customers.

Amazon suggests that customers keep photos and videos on Amazon Drive, as these are also accessible through Amazon Photos. Unlike Drive, Photos remains an Amazon service. Customers may access all their uploaded images and photos on the Amazon Photos website or in the application.

Customers who delete media on Amazon Drive will no longer have access to these on Amazon Photos, as both access the same storage for photos and videos.

Any files that are not media files will no longer be available after December 31, 2023. Customers are asked to export files to their devices before the shutdown data to avoid losing access to their files.

Amazon suggest that Drive customers use the website to download content, but recommends that customers use the Photos Desktop app to download and save files if downloading files through the web app is not feasible because of size limitations.

The web app supports selecting multiple files and folders for downloading. All it takes is to check folders and files on Amazon Drive and activate the download button to save them to the local system.

Here is the time line for the Drive shutdown:

• October 31, 2022 -- The Amazon Drive app is removed from Google Play and the App Store.
• January 31, 2023 -- Uploads to Drive are disabled.
• December 31, 2023 -- Amazon Drive is no longer accessible.

The applications continue to work, but Amazon won't release updates for the apps anymore. Eventually, these apps will stop working; this may happen prior to the official deprecation date or even earlier.

Amazon explains that it made the decision to deprecate Amazon Drive to "more fully focus" its efforts on Amazon Photos. Customers may access the FAQ that Amazon published to gain further assistance.

Amazon Drive alternatives

As far as Amazon Drive alternatives are concerned, there are plenty free and paid services available. Popular choices include Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive, which are both free in a base version, but also services such as Dropbox, Proton Drive and plenty of other services.

Source

The company has now fired four employees after they publicly rebuked Musk on Twitter. “lol just got fired for shitposting,” Twitter software engineer Sasha Solomon tweeted(Opens in a new window) on Monday, adding: “kiss my ass elon.”

On Tuesday, another employee named Nick Morgan also reported he had been fired a day after he wrote a tweet critical of Musk's leadership.

"Your recent behavior has violated company policy," Twitter wrote to Morgan in an email notifying him about his dismissal from the company.

The firings follow a controversial tweet Musk made on Sunday about Twitter’s app suffering slowdowns. Musk blamed the problem on “poorly batched” remote procedure calls (RPC) in the app, which can allow one program to use the services of another program remotely.

“App is doing >1000 poorly batched RPCs just to render a home timeline!” Musk alleged.

However, Twitter employees were quick to respond to Musk’s original tweet by disputing the claim. Among them was Eric Frohnhoefer, a software engineer for Twitter’s Android app, who tweeted(Opens in a new window) back: “I have spent ~6yrs working on Twitter for Android and can say this is wrong.”

After a back-and-forth over the causes behind the app slowdowns, Musk fired Frohnhoefer via a tweet on Monday when a separate Twitter user chimed in to say: “with this kind of attitude, you probably don’t want this guy on your team.” Musk responded in a now-deleted tweet to say that Frohnhoefer was fired.

On the same day, Solomon tweeted she too been fired—a day after she criticized Musk for initiating mass layoffs at Twitter only to then complain about software quality problems.

“You don’t get to shit on our [infrastructure] if you don’t know what the fuck it does while you’re also scrambling to rehire folks you laid off,” she wrote, later adding in another tweet: “just because some dipshit doesn't understand what we built doesn't make it (or us) any less awesome.”

Source

Hearing loss has broad health impacts, but professional hearing aids are expensive and require multiple visits to otolaryngologists and audiologists for tuning. These factors lead to major barriers for many to access professional hearing aids. One estimate suggests nearly 75% of people with hearing loss in the United States do not use hearing aids.

"There's also a social stigma associated with hearing aids," says Yen-fu Cheng, the study's corresponding author and an otolaryngologist at Taipei Veterans General Hospital. "Many patients are reluctant to wear them because they don't want to appear old. So, we started exploring if there're are more accessible alternatives."

Apple came out with a feature called "Live Listen" in 2016 that allows people to use its wireless earphones, AirPods, and iPhone for sound amplification. The feature makes AirPods functionally similar to a personal sound amplification product, which is designed for people with normal hearing for certain occasions like birdwatching.

Cheng and his team wanted to investigate whether AirPods, which are widely available devices, can serve as alternative hearing aids. The team compared Airpods 2 and AirPods Pro—the model with a noise canceling feature—with a type of premium hearing aids and a basic pair of hearing aids. The premium hearing aids cost $10,000, and the basic type cost $1,500. Both models of AirPods are significantly cheaper than hearing aids, with AirPods 2 costing $129 and AirPods Pro costing $249. Notably, AirPods Pro met four out of five technology standards for hearing aids.

The team tested the four devices with 21 participants with mild to moderate hearing loss. The researchers read a short sentence, such as "the electricity bills went up recently," to participants, who were asked to repeat their words verbatim wearing the devices. They found AirPods Pro performed similarly well compared with basic hearing aids in a quiet environment and slightly inferior to premium hearing aids. AirPods 2, while having the lowest performance among the four, helped participants hear more clearly compared with wearing no hearing aids.

In a noisy environment, AirPods Pro showed comparable performance to premium hearing aids when the noises came from the lateral direction of the participant. But when the noises came from the front of the participants, both AirPods models failed to help participants hear better.

"Two reasons may account for the difference between the two scenarios," says Ying-Hui Lai, the study's co-author and a bioengineer at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University in Taipei. "It may relate to the trajectories soundwaves travel with, as well as the advanced signal processing algorithm by premium hearing aids. This finding will hopefully inspire engineers to design hearing aids and personal sound amplification products that are more sensitive in certain directions." He adds that AirPods Pro appears to perform better than AirPods 2, likely because of its noise-canceling feature.

"Globally, the wireless earphone market is growing rapidly. Some companies are interested in exploring the possibility of designing earbuds with sound amplification features. Our study proves that the idea is plausible," Lai says.

As a clinician, Cheng says persuading patients to use hearing aids is often challenging. "These wireless earbuds are of course not perfect, but they would be a good starting point for many patients who don't have access to professional hearing aids. They will see an increase in quality of life even with these earbuds." Cheng says.

Source

It is a public health triumph that human life expectancy has increased linearly since the year 1800, rising about 30 years in that span. Imagine, then, if human life expectancy were to spontaneously halve, and the degree of panic that would ensue.

Alarmingly, this precise scenario is playing out among honeybees — a species on which humans are utterly dependent for our survival, given that one-third of the human diet depends on honeybee pollination, and bees pollinate more than 100 different crops worth about $6.4 billion. The bee lifespan crisis was discovered in a new study published in the scientific journal Scientific Reports, which found that honey bees today live only half as long as their counterparts in the 1970s.

The reasons for this dramatic shift may relate to humanity's demand for honey. Beekeepers need to account for the fact that bees die periodically in the course of their hive-rearing; since the 1970s beekeepers have been forced to replace their bee colonies more frequently to stay afloat.

To understand why bees are dying younger, entomologists at the University of Maryland studied bee pupae that were collected within 24 hours of emerging from their wax cells. Those bees were raised in special conditions that included better water, which they hoped would closely mimic bees' natural conditions. Soon, however, they noticed that the median lifespan of all their bees remained half of that of bees from the 1970s, with the average bee lifespan dropping from 34.3 days to 17.7 days. This was stunning because, historically, bee lifespans in laboratories have closely mimicked their wild lifespans.

"We're isolating bees from the colony life just before they emerge as adults, so whatever is reducing their lifespan is happening before that point," Anthony Nearman, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Entomology and lead author of the study, said in a press statement.

Researchers believe that the problem could be genetic, meaning something in their DNA is giving them a shorter lifespan.

"This introduces the idea of a genetic component," Nearman continued. "If this hypothesis is right, it also points to a possible solution. If we can isolate some genetic factors, then maybe we can breed for longer-lived honey bees."

This would be a boon for beekeepers, who struggle financially when they have a high turnover in their colonies.

As the authors pointed out, their findings about declining bee lifespans are consistent with beekeepers' own observations, and offer ominous implications about the future of beehives — and by extension, the future of human food, given bees' role in pollination of crops.

"Modeled colony lifespans allowed us to estimate colony loss rates in a beekeeping operation where lost colonies are replaced annually," the study states. "Resulting loss rates were reflective of what beekeepers' experience today, which suggests the average lifespan of individual bees plays an important role in colony success."

In addition to being ecologically and economically important, bees are also among the more intellectually complex insects. A study released earlier this month in the journal Science found that bees enjoy play, which is considered to be a sign of intelligence. Bees were trained to associate rolling wooden balls with eating delicious food; then it was discovered that they would go out of their way to move the balls around even if doing so delayed receiving food, suggesting they enjoy the activity.

Yet bees, despite being intelligent, have been just as vulnerable to human-caused environmental problems as most other species. While the new study suggests that their declining lifespan may be caused by genetic rather than environmental factors, bees struggle today due to everything from climate change to the overuse of dangerous pesticides. In the latter case, a class of man-made insecticides called neonicotinoids has been linked to colony collapse disorder and plummeting bee populations. They have also had a negative impact on other kinds of wildlife, including harming bird communities, seeping into national wildlife refuges and perhaps affecting human brain development.

Source

The video was shared by Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, an ecological organization that works with orphaned elephants, according to its Instagram page. The journalist, Alvin Kaunda, was reporting for the KBC television outlet when the one of the three baby elephants hanging around him started getting a little bit playful.

In the clip, Kaunda tries to keep stoic as he speaks to the importance of being guardians to our planet and protecting vulnerable species. As he makes his very serious statements, the trunk of the baby elephant, called Kindani, starts making its way up Kaunda’s shoulder, ear, head, and eventually down to his nose and mouth.

< View the video here. >

At this point, Kaunda breaks out into peels of infectious laughter. It’s almost impossible not to join him in his squeals of happiness as the silly baby keeps playing with him.

The wildlife trust is based in Kenya, and focuses on anti-poaching activities and all other measures related to conservation, according to its official website. Not only does it work with orphaned elephants, but also with rhinos and all types of other species that are in need.

Source

Humans could face a reproductive crisis if action is not taken to tackle a drop in sperm count, researchers have warned after finding the rate of decline is accelerating.

A study published in the journal Human Reproduction Update, based on 153 estimates from men who were probably unaware of their fertility, suggests that the average sperm concentration fell from an estimated 101.2m per ml to 49.0m per ml between 1973 and 2018 – a drop of 51.6%. Total sperm counts fell by 62.3% during the same period.

Research by the same team, reported in 2017, found that sperm concentration had more than halved in the last 40 years. However, at the time a lack of data for other parts of the world meant the findings were focused on a region encompassing Europe, North America and Australia. The latest study includes more recent data from 53 countries.

Declines in sperm concentration were seen not only in the region previously studied, but in Central and South America, Africa and Asia.

Moreover, the rate of decline appears to be increasing: looking at data collected in all continents since 1972, the researchers found sperm concentrations declined by 1.16% per year. However, when they looked only at data collected since the year 2000, the decline was 2.64% per year.

“I think this is another signal that something is wrong with the globe and that we need to do something about it. So yes, I think it’s a crisis, that we [had] better tackle now, before it may reach a tipping point which may not be reversible,” said Prof Hagai Levine, first author of the research from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Previous studies have suggested that fertility is compromised if sperm concentration falls below about 40m per ml. While the latest estimate is above this threshold, Levine noted that this is a mean figure, suggesting the percentage of men below this threshold will have have increased.

“Such a decline clearly represents a decline in the capacity of the population to reproduce,” he said.

While the study accounted for factors including age and how long men had gone without ejaculation, and excluded men known to suffer from infertility, it has limitations, including that it did not look at other markers of sperm quality.

Allan Pacey, professor of andrology at the University of Sheffield, who was not involved in the work, praised the analysis, but said he remained on the fence over whether there is a decline.

“Counting sperm, even with the gold standard technique of [the laboratory process] haemocytometry, is really difficult,” he said. “I believe that over time we have simply got better at it because of the development of training and quality control programmes around the world. I still think this is much of what we are seeing in the data.”

However, Levine dismissed such concerns, adding that, in any case, the decline has been more pronounced in more recent years.

While it is unclear what might be behind the apparent trend, one hypothesis is that endocrine-disrupting chemicals or other environmental factors may play a role, acting on the foetus in the womb. Experts say factors such as smoking, drinking, obesity and poor diet might also play a role, and that a healthy lifestyle may help to boost sperm counts.

Tina Kold Jensen of the University of Southern Denmark said the new study recapitulated a concerning trend. “You keep on finding the same trend, no matter how many studies you include – that is a bit scary to me,” she said.

Prof Richard Sharpe, an expert in male reproductive health at the University of Edinburgh, said the new data showed that the trend appeared to be a worldwide phenomenon.

Sharpe said the decline could mean it takes longer for couples to conceive and, for many, time is not on their side as they are delaying trying to conceive until the woman is in her 30s or 40s, when her fertility is already reduced.

“The key point that needs to be made is that this is desperately bad news for couple fertility,” he said.

But, said Sharpe, “These issues are not just a problem for couples trying to have kids. They are also a huge problem for society in the next 50-odd years as less and less young people will be around to work and support the increasing bulge of elderly folk.”

Source

A Chinese rocket created more than 50 fragments of debris as it unexpectedly broke up on Nov. 12 in an orbit very close to that of SpaceX's Starlink satellites.

As the South China Morning Post(Opens in a new window) (SCMP) reports, the Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning confirmed that a Long March 6A rocket had disintegrated while in orbit, but failed to explain what had caused the failure. Ning went on to say that, "As far as we know, the relevant incident will not affect the Chinese space station or the International Space Station."

The disintegration of the rocket occurred at between 310-435 miles (500-700km) above Earth, which is notable because thousands of Starlink satellites orbit at 310 miles (500km). Cees Bassa(Opens in a new window), an astronomer at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, has confirmed at least 43 fragments from the rocket are "tumbling fast."

Although the Chinese government hasn't explained why the rocket broke up while in orbit, Bassa believes it failed shortly after releasing the Yunhai-3 ocean observation satellite it was carrying. The rocket was observed leaking fuel(Opens in a new window) during two consecutive passes over the US. Some rockets dump their fuel before de-orbiting to prevent catastrophic break-ups, but Cees believes something may have gone wrong during the dump.

Back in May, a group of Chinese researchers urged China to come up with ways to disrupt or destroy Starlink satellites. Releasing debris in the same orbit certainly holds the potential to do just that, which begs the question: was this an accident or a test?

A Chinese researcher, who asked not to be named, told SCMP that it's very unlikely the debris field was created intentionally. He pointed out there are three Chinese astronauts in space right now, and three more joining them soon.

Source

How researchers used CRISPR gene editing to send immune cells after cancer

Dustin Brown, a slight, dark-haired guy who lives in southwest Indiana, is 36, married, and a stay-at-home dad. He never expected to achieve any of those milestones: wife, toddler son, moving away from his family in Kentucky. Not even adulthood. Brown has cystic fibrosis, an inherited disorder that clogs major organs with sticky, sludgy mucus and makes them breeding grounds for infections. When he was born, newly diagnosed patients weren’t expected to survive past elementary school.

That the roughly 40,000 CF patients in the US have managed to beat that prediction is due to better treatments—just three years ago, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) fast-tracked a new drug combination to address the effects of the underlying genetic mutation—but also to hard work. Every day, Brown follows a tailored regimen of exercises, supplements, and pharmaceuticals to keep down the disease’s worst effects. That includes antibiotics: inhaled, in pills, and several times a year, through a catheter threaded up a vein into his heart. Brown calls taking care of his health “a full-time job.”

Still, he’s losing ground. The mucus in Brown’s lungs harbors Pseudomonas aeruginosa, bacteria that cause serious infections in people whose immune defenses are impaired. If that simmering occupation flares up into pneumonia, the results could be deadly, because tests by his doctors have shown that Brown’s strain of Pseudomonas is fully resistant to four antibiotics and partially resistant to two more. Brown has already tried the one remaining antibiotic the organism responds to. It triggered a life-threatening anemia.

“What are we going to do, if all these medicines run out?” he asks. “It’s scary, when you have a family and you’ve come this far. In the back of your mind, it can get you.”

The possible collapse of Brown’s treatment could be avoided, if there were another option. Right now, there are no new antibiotics that doctors can add to his regimen. In the US, antibiotic innovation has skidded to a halt. The last novel class approved by the FDA debuted in 1984.

A piece of legislation lined up for a vote in Congress, called the Pasteur Act (named both for the 19th-century microbiologist and to stand for Pioneering Antimicrobial Subscriptions to End Upsurging Resistance), could repopulate that empty landscape by guaranteeing government funds to help a small number of new antibiotics make it to market. The proposal has bipartisan support in both the House and Senate, is backed by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), was implicitly endorsed in the last White House budget, and resembles programs already implemented in other countries.

Independent analysts and drug-company personnel all say the measure is critically needed. But the Congress that reconvenes this week will be bruised from vituperative electioneering and distracted by races that remain unresolved. The body will also have to make decisions on a raft of legislative proposals that were delayed earlier in the year by hyperpartisan jostling, and will have to choose what they can accomplish before their session ends around Christmas Eve. If the Pasteur Act can’t get through by then, it will need to be reintroduced when the new Congress convenes in January. But that session will be focused on the 2024 election, and it could be hard for other issues to break through.

“If this doesn’t pass, or something like it doesn’t get implemented, then I don’t know what Plan B is,” says Joe Larsen, a vice president at Locus Biosciences Inc. who launched an Obama–era program of antibiotic investment while serving in the US government’s Biomedical Advanced Research Development Authority. “We need to re-envision the way we support antimicrobials in the US.”

That patients might run out of effective antibiotics is a jarring thought. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that antibiotic-resistant infections already kill more than 48,000 Americans each year and sicken 2.8 million. A January study in The Lancet estimated the annual global death toll at 1.27 million. Antibiotic resistance got worse during the pandemic as health care workers tried to protect Covid patients from bacterial infections, not just in individual outbreaks in hospitals but across the US.

But for more than two decades, the household-name pharmaceutical firms that used to lead the market—Eli Lilly and Company, Bristol Myers Squibb, Wyeth, and Novartis, among others—have been backing out of antibiotic production. The underlying reason: simple math. A team of economists estimated in 2016 that it costs $1.4 billion to bring any new drug to market, including a new antibiotic. Yet antibiotics aren’t taken in the volume that, say, cardiovascular drugs are, and don’t command the stratospheric prices of new cancer therapies. Once they pass FDA approval, they earn money slowly. This triggers a fatal mismatch between expenditure and earnings: By one estimate, a new antibiotic has to earn $300 million a year to break even—yet industry records show that few make even $100 million a year.

Lacking enough income to balance their expenditures, the big companies left the field to small biotechs. These new players believe in the mission, but typically don’t have income from other product lines to buoy them while they wait for sales. Since 2010, the makers of five out of 15 new antibiotics approved by the FDA have folded or sold themselves at auction because they could not outlast the lag between approval and earnings. A sixth company backed off an antibiotic in Phase 3 trials in May and laid off three-fourths of its staff. A seventh reorganized itself just last month.

“The market is broken,” says Zachary Zimmerman, cofounder and director of the small antibiotic firm Forge Therapeutics, which currently has two new antibiotics under development. “So what we need to do is take the market out of the equation.”

This is what the Pasteur Act would do. In its current form, it commits $6 billion over several years to construct a sort of subscription plan for developing new antibiotics. That dollar amount is the result of numerous compromises—when first introduced in 2020, the bill called for $11 billion—and it wouldn’t all be spent on drugs. The program it would create in HHS would assemble panels of experts to evaluate whether any newly proposed antibiotic addresses an unmet need. Then they would estimate a societal value for the drug, anywhere from $750 million to $3 billion. The Treasury would disburse that money in tranches over several years. In return, the government would receive doses of the drug to dispense to federally insured patients, at no charge to them.

Compare the $6 billion in funding with the more than $1 billion cost of bringing out a single drug, and it’s clear the Pasteur Act won’t go far. It could support a couple of new drugs before it would need to be reauthorized. But experts who have been pressing for a program like this say that it won’t only guarantee the success of individual products, but will also signal to public markets and private capital that antibiotic development can be a reliable investment.

“We hear loud and clear, especially from smaller drug companies, that they view this funding mechanism as extremely valuable to the sustainability not only of the individual antibiotics that they will put forth as candidates, but to the viability of their entire company,” says David Hyun, a physician and director of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ antibiotic resistance project.

There are several hurdles in the way. The first is that the returning Congress doesn’t have much time left. The second is that, to succeed, the Pasteur Act will have to be attached to a larger piece of legislation, at a moment when lots of sponsors are trying to get their pet proposals through. One vehicle might be an omnibus spending bill that reauthorizes health programs on the verge of expiring. Another may be the annual, bipartisan, usually nonpolitical National Defense Authorization Act. With 66 cosponsors from both parties, Pasteur seems like a natural fit.

Yet last week, a coalition of six academics and 11 organizations—including the liberal-leaning groups Public Citizen and Doctors for America—asked the legislators who oversee military authorization to keep the measure out of that end-of-year act. In a letter to Senators Jack Reed of Rhode Island and James Imhofe of Oklahoma—the Democratic chair and Republican ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee—the group called the Pasteur Act “a blank check to pharmaceutical manufacturers.”

That objection offers a glimpse of what might spoil the Pasteur Act while it’s on the brink of success: its cost. So many large companies have been excoriated for extortionate pricing that the prospect of giving any money to any drugmaker is risky. Yet while the small biotechs holding up the field may be in pharma, they’re not Big Pharma: many have just a few employees, are working on their first-ever product, and aren’t earning anything yet, let alone extortionate returns. “We’re hearing: It’s just too much. We’re not prepared to spend this much,” says Mary Dwight, the chief policy and advocacy officer at the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, which has taken on the Pasteur Act as a cause. “We would really like to flip that narrative, because it’s pretty clear to us that combating antimicrobial resistance is cost effective.”

According to research supported by the CDC, the US already spends $4.6 billion each year to respond to antibiotic-resistant infections. If that spending could be obviated, it would save in one year most of what the Pasteur Act would spend over several.

“If Pasteur passes, it would help not just CF patients, but the whole population,” Brown says. “We got through Covid, but if there are not more antibiotics to help treat bacterial infections, then Covid is going to look like the least of our worries. If a superbug gets out and nobody has anything to work with, then we’re all going to be in trouble.”

The $6 Billion Shot at Making New Antibiotics—Before the Old Ones Fail

(May require free registration to view)

The first cubesat to fly and operate at the Moon has successfully arrived

Second only to the South American Amazon forest, the Boreal forest is vital to ensuring the future of planet Earth, reports AFP. The forest which encircles the arctic and stretches across Canada, Scandinavia, Russia and Alaska has in recent times been weakened by forest fires, the melting of permafrost, an insect infestation, warming temperatures and drifting trees.

As per AFP experts have categorically warned that “the forest is encroaching on the tundra, and the prairies are slowly taking the place of the trees.”

With the rising temperatures “drunken trees” have become a common phenomenon; trees are tilted sideways due to the melting permafrost. Eventually, the soil will completely erode and the fauna will tumble down.

Edmonton-based researcher for the natural resources ministry warns "You have the potential for large shifts," adding that some areas might be flooded and even lose forests, which can eventually turn into bogs or swamps, and lakes.

The degradation of permafrost is behind this “buckling and sinking”, ground which for the past two years has remained frozen is thawing.

With it, bacteria are eating away at the biomass collected over thousands of years, generating carbon, and methane emissions which are then contributing to the acceleration of global warming.

Data collected by Global Forest Watch, the World Resources Institute, and the University of Maryland also revealed that extreme heat waves are five times more likely today than 150 years ago.

The higher temperatures have also brought on another problem: insect infestations, which are quickly eating away at the trees.

Fauna, already weakened by the droughts brought on by heatwaves struggle to fend off bugs that exploit the longer summers and warmer winters.

Scientists as per AFP say that for now there’s still hope for the ecosystem's continued resilience, even as they ponder whether the forest’s “tipping point”, a threshold after which emissions will be inevitable and changes to the ecosystem irreversible is approaching.

Source

The first launch of the Space Launch System rocket which is touted as the "most powerful ever designed by NASA" will happen from Florida and will take place on Wednesday at 1:04 am local time (0604 GMT). The possible launch window as per AFP is of two hours.

If needed the space agency has also kept two fallback dates: November 19 and 25.

The takeoff is scheduled for less than a week after Hurricane Nicole battered the rocket on its launch pad.

Officials are evaluating the risk of damage to a thin strip of "caulk-like material" known as RTV, which makes the rocket more aerodynamic and is located at its top. They are evaluating whether it can shake loose and create problems for the launch.

Mike Sarafin, in charge of the mission, says he's optimistic and feels "good headed into this attempt".

As per weather forecasts, the weather on the day of the launch will be mild with 90 per cent favourable conditions during the launch window. As per AFP, the launch is expected to attract a crowd of 100,000 people.

The two earlier launches were cancelled due to technical reasons; the first was related to a faulty sensor, and the second was related to a fuel leak.

(With inputs from agencies)

Source

But when Russell, a food researcher at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, looked more closely at the label, she saw that artificial sweetener replaced some of the sugar in the tomato sauce. And while she didn't want to eat sugar in her pasta dinner later, she didn't want to have artificial sweetener either.

Russell says she's worried about how safe it is to consume too many sugar alternatives. A recent study of more than 100,000 people published in the British Medical Journal showed an link between artificial sweetener and heart disease and stroke.

Previous research has also suggested that sugar substitutes alter gut microbiomes.

Russell realized that policymakers often focus on a specific aspect of a food, such as its fat, sugar, or calorie count, rather than on its sweetness or nutritional value overall.

Like Russell and her husband in Australia, many Americans are  trying to consume less sugar for health reasons. ––Purchases of foods and beverages with added sugars declined in many households, according to a 2020 study in the Journal of the Academy of Dietetics and Nutrition.

Russell had read the reports that some segments of the population were moving away from sugar-sweetened beverages, but she wanted to know about their whole diet, not just drinks. What's more, she wanted to know whether consumers were eating fewer sweet foods overall or were replacing sugar with other sweeteners.

Measuring how much sugar a food contains and how much of it is sold in various parts of the world is relatively straightforward. Measuring how sweet a food is without relying on its sugar count is much more difficult. Take tonic water – it often contains as much sugar as juice or regular soda – but the presence of bitter quinine can mask the sweetness.

Russell and her team went about their work by measuring both regular sugar and other sweeteners added to food and beverages. Their results show the per capita volume of calorie-free sweeteners in beverages increased by 36% from 2007-2018. While sugars in beverages declined by 22% in upper-income countries, it rose as much as 40% in low- and middle-income countries.

"Our food supply is getting sweeter, which is hugely concerning," Russell says. "Even if we are consuming less added sugars, the food we're consuming is still sweeter than it used to be a decade ago."

That matters, she points out, both due to ongoing concerns about the safety and benefit of many low- and no-calorie sugar alternatives and how overly sweet foods may be training future generations for a penchant for sugar.

Craving More

There is an important biological reason we crave sweet things that helped people survive in times when food wasn't readily available. Sweet foods usually have more calories in them, and the body needs calories to function. But in our modern food system, it is probably easier to name items without added sugar because most everything else has sugar or sweeteners. Vegetables have small amounts of natural sugars. And other options like fruit, milk and honey have higher amounts of natural sugars.

From the age of two, an American child is reportedly more likely to consume a sugar-sweetened product than a fruit or vegetable on any given day. It is a troubling statistic, report researchers who suggest that food preferences are established early in childhood and there is a strong link between dietary habits and the risk of developing chronic illnesses.

Links between early-life sugar consumption and adult intake are less clear. "The data are very messy, but there's no clear association between intake of sweet foods and the development of a sweet food preference," says Kelly Higgins, a dietitian at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

She is currently planning a clinical trial to see whether switching to low-calorie sweeteners will alter someone's sugar preferences long-term.

Replacing Fat and Cholesterol with Sugar

Several decades ago, as nutrition studies raised concerns about the fat and cholesterol in the modern diet, food manufacturers responded. Heeding consumer demand, they replaced saturated fats with sugars and trans-fats to be able to affix labels that said, "Low in fat and low in saturated fats" on packaging.

From a marketing standpoint, the strategy was a success. From a nutritional standpoint, however, it was a major failure. Subsequent studies showed that the health consequences of saturated fats were far less than the impact of even small amounts of trans fats.

Then there were the extra sugars, added to preserve a food's flavor and texture once fats were reduced or removed. This shift towards added sugars dovetailed with a global increase in processed food consumption. This meant that sugars were making up a larger portion of the average person's diet than ever before, says Barry Popkin, PhD, a nutrition epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Popkin has spent his career studying diet and sugar intake around the world and says sugar consumption is going up everywhere. "We really shifted to more highly processed or ultra-processed foods, and they're high in added sugars."

One of the biggest challenges of lowering amounts of added sugars in food is that we really like our food sweet. And while studies have shown that reducing the sodium in food will make a person more sensitive to salt and help them more easily reduce the amount they eat, the same doesn't happen when lowering the amount of sugar. The sweet tooth remains just as strong no matter how much sugar is reduced.

Synthetic Sugar Substitutes

People watching their waistlines have been looking for shortcuts to dieting for years. After World War II, the food industry introduced several new synthetic sugar substitutes to give health-conscious consumers the opportunity to tickle their taste buds without the added calories of sugar.

Artificial sweeteners like saccharin and aspartame, along with later additions such as sucralose and acesulfame potassium rapidly gained acceptance. More recently, sugar substitutes like stevia, monk fruit, and agave have eclipsed their first-generation counterparts in popularity. Manufacturers turned to these alternatives to meet consumer pressures for lower sugars while also keeping the sweet taste that drove sales.

"Some of our policies may have unintended consequences that may end up being worse than the problem we're trying to solve," Russell says.

Popkin says that artificial sweeteners are probably safe in moderate amounts – especially when compared to sugar itself.

Still, Russell says exposure to highly processed, overly sweetened foods shapes a person's lifelong palate. This could be setting us up for a lifetime of health issues, she says. We will benefit from a healthier, less-processed diet, she adds.

"If we consume less sugar, what are we going to replace it with," Higgins asks. "We need to understand the downstream effects."

Source

Study authors synthesized results from over a dozen studies involving brain imaging of humans, rodents, and monkeys. That data was then used to propose a new computational model explaining how our breathing influences the brain’s expectations.

“What we found is that, across many different types of tasks and animals, brain rhythms are closely tied to the rhythm of our breath. We are more sensitive to the outside world when we are breathing in, whereas the brain tunes out more when we breathe out. This also aligns with how some extreme sports use breathing, for example professional marksmen are trained to pull the trigger at the end of exhalation,” says Professor Micah Allen in a statement.

All in all, researchers say their findings strongly suggest breathing is more than something we simply perform to stay alive and supply our lungs with air.

“It suggests that the brain and breathing are closely intertwined in a way that goes far beyond survival, to actually impact our emotions, our attention, and how we process the outside world. Our model suggests there is a common mechanism in the brain which links the rhythm of breathing to these events,” comments Allen.

A more comprehensive understanding of how breathing influences our brains, and by extension, our moods, thoughts, and behaviors, may help develop new ways to address and treat mental illness.

“Difficulty breathing is associated with a very large increase in the risk for mood disorders such as anxiety and depression. We know that respiration, respiratory illness, and psychiatric disorders are closely linked. Our study raises the possibility that the next treatments for these disorders might be found in the development of new ways to realign the rhythms of the brain and body, rather than treating either in isolation,” Prof. Allen adds.

Breathing techniques spark brain activity

Calming the mind via various breathing techniques is a well established tactic across numerous traditions like yoga or meditation. Now, this latest research shows how the brain reacts to such strategies. The study also suggests there are three distinct pathways in the brain controlling the interaction between breathing and neural activity. Breathing patterns appear capable of “exciting” the mind, meaning neurons are more likely to fire during certain times of breathing.

These findings provide scientists a new target for future studies to focus on; people with respiratory or mood disorders. Prof. Allen and his team have already started working on new related projects. “We have a variety of ongoing projects that are both building on and testing various parts of the model we have proposed. PhD. Student Malthe Brændholt is conducting innovative brain imaging studies in humans, to try and understand how different kinds of emotional and visual perception are influenced by breathing in the brain,” Prof. Allen notes.

The research team is also collaborating with the Pulmonology team at Aarhus University Hospital, where they’ve developed tools in their lab used to understand whether people dealing with long-COVID may exhibit disruptions in their breath-brain alignment.

”We will be using a combination of human and animal neuro-imaging to better understand how breathing influences the brain, and also utilizing exploring how different drugs influence respiratory-brain interaction. We would also like to some day study how lifestyle factors like stress, sleep, and even things like winter swimming influence breath-brain interaction. We are very excited to continue this research,” Prof. Allen concludes.

The study is published in Psychological Review.

Source

Acetaminophen, also known as paracetamol and sold widely under the brand names Tylenol and Panadol, also increases risk-taking, according to a study from 2020 that measured changes in people's behavior when under the influence of the common over-the-counter medication.

"Acetaminophen seems to make people feel less negative emotion when they consider risky activities – they just don't feel as scared," explained neuroscientist Baldwin Way from The Ohio State University when the findings were published.

"With nearly 25 percent of the population in the US taking acetaminophen each week, reduced risk perceptions and increased risk-taking could have important effects on society."

The findings add to a growing body of research suggesting that acetaminophen's effects on pain reduction also extend to various psychological processes, lowering people's receptivity to hurt feelings, experiencing reduced empathy, and even blunting cognitive functions.

In a similar way, the research suggests people's affective ability to perceive and evaluate risks can be impaired when they take acetaminophen. While the effects might be slight, they're definitely worth noting, given acetaminophen is the most common drug ingredient in America, found in over 600 different kinds of over-the-counter and prescription medicines.

In a series of experiments involving over 500 university students as participants, Way and his team measured how a single 1,000 mg dose of acetaminophen (the recommended maximum adult single dosage) randomly assigned to participants affected their risk-taking behavior, compared against placebos randomly given to a control group.

In each of the experiments, participants had to pump up an un-inflated balloon on a computer screen, with each single pump earning imaginary money. Their instructions were to earn as much imaginary money as possible by pumping the balloon as much as possible, but to make sure not to pop the balloon, in which case they would lose the money.

The results showed that the students who took acetaminophen engaged in significantly more risk-taking during the exercise, relative to the more cautious and conservative placebo group. On the whole, those on acetaminophen pumped (and burst) their balloons more than the controls.

"If you're risk-averse, you may pump a few times and then decide to cash out because you don't want the balloon to burst and lose your money," Way said.

"But for those who are on acetaminophen, as the balloon gets bigger, we believe they have less anxiety and less negative emotion about how big the balloon is getting and the possibility of it bursting."

In addition to the balloon simulation, participants also filled out surveys during two of the experiments, rating the level of risk they perceived in various hypothetical scenarios, such as betting a day's income on a sporting event, bungee jumping off a tall bridge, or driving a car without a seatbelt.

In one of the surveys, acetaminophen consumption did appear to reduce perceived risk compared to the control group, although in another similar survey, the same effect wasn't observed.

Overall, however, based on an average of results across the various tests, the team concluded that there is a significant relationship between taking acetaminophen and choosing more risk, even if the observed effect can be slight.

That said, they acknowledge the drug's apparent effects on risk-taking behavior could also be interpreted via other kinds of psychological processes, such as reduced anxiety, perhaps.

"It may be that as the balloon increases in size, those on placebo feel increasing amounts of anxiety about a potential burst," the researchers explained.

"When the anxiety becomes too much, they end the trial. Acetaminophen may reduce this anxiety, thus leading to greater risk taking."

Exploring such psychological alternative explanations for this phenomenon – as well as investigating the biological mechanisms responsible for acetaminophen's effects on people's choices in situations like this – should be addressed in future research, the team said.

While they're at it, scientists no doubt will also have future opportunities to further investigate the role and efficacy of acetaminophen in pain relief more broadly, after studies in recent years found that in many medical scenarios, the drug can be ineffective at pain relief, and sometimes is no better than a placebo, in addition to inviting other kinds of health problems.

Despite the seriousness of those findings, acetaminophen nonetheless remains one of the most used medications in the world, considered an essential medicine by the World Health Organization, and recommended by the CDC as the primary drug you should probably take to ease symptoms if you think you might have COVID.

In light of the findings about acetaminophen, we might want to rethink some of that advice, Way said.

"Perhaps someone with mild COVID-19 symptoms may not think it is as risky to leave their house and meet with people if they're taking acetaminophen," Way said.

"We really need more research on the effects of acetaminophen and other over-the-counter drugs on the choices and risks we take."

The findings were reported in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.

Source

It's not uncommon for people to lose their sense of taste and smell due to a COVID-19 infection. In others, the disease has had an even stronger impact on the nervous system, with effects ranging from lasting concentration problems to strokes. Now, researchers led by Professor Gregor Hutter from the Department of Biomedicine at the University of Basel and University Hospital of Basel have reported new insights into the development of "neuro-COVID" in the journal Nature Communications.

Specifically, the team investigated how different severities of neuro-COVID can be detected and predicted by analyzing the cerebrospinal fluid and blood plasma of affected individuals. Their findings also offer some indications of how to prevent neurological damage due to COVID-19.

The study included 40 COVID-19 patients with differing degrees of neurological symptoms. In order to identify typical changes associated with neuro-COVID, the team of researchers compared these individuals' cerebrospinal fluid and blood plasma with samples from a control group. They also measured the brain structures of test subjects and surveyed participants 13 months after their illness in order to identify any lasting symptoms.

Holes in the blood-brain barrier

Particularly in the group with the most serious neurological symptoms, the researchers identified a link with an excessive immune response. On the one hand, affected individuals showed indications of impairment of the blood-brain barrier, which the study's authors speculate was probably triggered by a "cytokine storm"—a massive release of pro-inflammatory factors in response to the virus.

On the other hand, the researchers also found antibodies that targeted parts of the body's own cells—in other words, signs of an autoimmune reaction—as a result of the excessive immune response. "We suspect that these antibodies cross the porous blood-brain barrier into the brain, where they cause damage," explains Hutter. They also identified excessive activation of the immune cells specifically responsible for the brain—the microglia.

Blood test as a long-term objective

In a further step, Hutter and his team investigated whether the severity of neurological symptoms is also perceptible in brain structures. Indeed, they found that people with serious neuro-COVID symptoms had a lower brain volume than healthy participants at specific locations in the brain and particularly at the olfactory cortex—that is, the area of the brain responsible for smell.

"We were able to link the signature of certain molecules in the blood and cerebrospinal fluid to an overwhelming immune response in the brain and reduced brain volume in certain areas, as well as neurological symptoms," says Hutter, adding that it is now important to examine these biomarkers in a greater number of participants. The aim would be to develop a blood test that can already predict serious cases, including neuro-COVID and long COVID, at the start of an infection.

Targets for preventing consequential damage

These same biomarkers point to potential targets for drugs aimed at preventing consequential damage due to a COVID-19 infection. One of the biomarkers identified in blood, the factor MCP-3, plays a key role in the excessive immune response, and Hutter believes there is the potential to inhibit this factor medicinally.

"In our study, we show how coronavirus can affect the brain," he says. "The virus triggers such a strong inflammatory response in the body that it spills over to the central nervous system. This can disrupt the cellular integrity of the brain." Accordingly, Hutter says that the primary objective must be to identify and halt the excessive immune response at an early stage.

Source

Amazon plans to lay off approximately 10,000 people in corporate and technology jobs starting as soon as this week, people with knowledge of the matter said, in what would be the largest job cuts in the company’s history.

The cuts will focus on Amazon’s devices organization, including the voice-assistant Alexa, as well as at its retail division and in human resources, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The total number of layoffs remains fluid. But if it stays around 10,000, that would represent roughly 3 percent of Amazon’s corporate employees and less than 1 percent of its global work force of more than 1.5 million, which is primarily composed of hourly workers.

Amazon’s planned retrenchment during the critical holiday shopping season — when the company typically has valued stability — shows how quickly the souring global economy has put pressure on it to trim businesses that have been overstaffed or underdelivering for years.

Amazon would also become the latest technology company to lay off workers, which only recently it had been fighting to retain. Earlier this year, the e-commerce giant more than doubled the cap on cash compensation for its tech workers, citing “a particularly competitive labor market.”

Changing business models and the precarious economy have set off layoffs across the tech industry. Elon Musk halved Twitter’s head count this month after buying the company, and last week, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, announced it was laying off 11,000 employees, about 13 percent of its work force. Lyft, Stripe, Snap and other tech firms have also laid off workers in recent months.

Brad Glasser, an Amazon spokesman, declined to comment.

The pandemic produced Amazon’s most profitable era on record, as consumers flocked to online shopping and companies to its cloud computing services. Amazon doubled its work force in two years, and funneled its winnings into expansion and experimentation to find the next big things.

But earlier this year, Amazon’s growth slowed to the lowest rate in two decades, as the bullwhip of the pandemic snapped. The company faced high costs from decisions to overinvest and rapidly expand, while changes in shopping habits and high inflation dented sales.

Amazon experienced a slight rebound in its latest quarter. But it has cautioned investors that growth could weaken again, possibly falling to its lowest pace since 2001.

The company has told Wall Street that it has tightened its belt in the past and can do so again. Last week, Amazon executives met with institutional investors, according to three people, just as its stock sank to its lowest level since the early days of the pandemic, erasing $1 trillion in value since Andy Jassy took over as chief executive last year.

Mr. Jassy, who previously ran Amazon’s lucrative cloud computing business, has been closely scrutinizing businesses to trim costs quickly. He initially pulled back on a warehouse expansion that was supercharged during the pandemic, then moved to other parts of the company.

In recent months, Amazon has also closed or pared back a smattering of initiatives, including Amazon Care, its service providing primary and urgent health care that failed to find enough customers; Scout, the cooler-size home delivery robot, that employed 400 people, according to Bloomberg; and Fabric.com, a subsidiary that sold sewing supplies for three decades.

From April through September, it reduced head count by almost 80,000 people, primarily shrinking its hourly staff through high attrition.

Amazon froze hiring in several smaller teams in September. In October, it stopped filling more than 10,000 open roles in its core retail business. Two weeks ago, it froze corporate hiring across the company, including its cloud computing division, for the next few months.

That news came so suddenly that recruiters did not receive talking points for job candidates until almost a week later, according to a copy of the talking points seen by The New York Times.

Devices and Alexa have long been seen internally as at risk for cuts. Alexa and related devices rocketed to a top company priority as Amazon raced to create the leading voice assistant, which leaders thought could succeed mobile phones as the next essential consumer interface. From 2017 to 2018, Amazon doubled staff on Alexa and Echo devices to 10,000 engineers. At one point, any engineer getting a job offer for other Amazon roles was supposed to also get an offer from Alexa.

The company has sold hundreds of millions of Alexa-enabled devices. But Amazon has said the products are often low margin and other potential revenue sources such as voice shopping have not caught on.

In 2018, Echo and Alexa lost about $5 billion, said a person with knowledge of the finances. When Amazon introduced new devices this fall in an annual event, it was notably more restrained than past years when it had featured zany products like a sticky note printer and $1,000 home robot.

Amazon’s retail business, which covers its physical and online retail business and its logistics operations, has been under strain after the surge of demand and breakneck expansion during the pandemic. The company has said it has pulled back expansion plans, and has told investors it sees uncertainty with consumers.

“We’re realistic that there’s various factors weighing on people’s wallets,” Brian Olsavsky, the finance chief, told investors last month. He said the company was unsure where spending was heading, but “we’re ready for a variety of outcomes.”

Source

[Note:  Email address or registration is required to view the article.]

The X-37B came back to Earth on November 12th at 5:22AM ET. Image: Space Force

The Space Force’s X-37B spaceplane returns to Earth after over two years in space