On the left, the full Hubble image. On the right, different images of the gravitationally lensed object.

NASA, ESA, STScI, Wenlei Chen, Patrick Kelly

 

Over the last few decades, we've gotten much better at observing supernovae as they're happening. Orbiting telescopes can now pick up the high-energy photons emitted and figure out their source, allowing other telescopes to make rapid observations. And some automated survey telescopes have imaged the same parts of the sky night after night, allowing image analysis software to recognize new sources of light.

 

But sometimes, luck still plays a role. So it is with a Hubble image from 2010, where the image happened to also capture a supernova. But, because of gravitational lensing, the single event showed up at three different locations within Hubble's field of view. Thanks to the quirks of how this lensing works, all three of the locations captured different times after the star's explosion, allowing researchers to piece together the time course following the supernova, even though it had been observed over a decade earlier.

I’ll need that in triplicate

The new work is based on a search of the Hubble archives for old images that happen to capture transient events: something that's present in some images of a location but not others. In this case, the researchers were searching specifically for events that had been gravitationally lensed. These occur when a massive foreground object distorts space in a way that creates a lensing effect, bending the path of light originating behind the lens from Earth's perspective.

 

Because gravitational lenses are nowhere near as carefully structured as the ones we manufacture, they'll often create odd distortions of background objects, or in many cases, magnify them in multiple locations. That's what seems to have happened here, as there are three distinct images of a transient event within Hubble's field of view. Other images of that region indicate that the site coincides with a galaxy; an analysis of the light from that galaxy suggests a redshift indicating that we're looking at it as it was over 11 billion years ago.

 

Given its relative brightness, sudden appearance, and location within a galaxy, it's most likely that this event is a supernova. And, at that distance, many of the high-energy photons produced in a supernova have been red-shifted down to the visible area of the spectrum, allowing them to be imaged by Hubble.

 

To understand more about the background supernova, the team worked out how the lens was operating. It was created by a galaxy cluster called Abell 370, and mapping the mass of that cluster allowed them to estimate the properties of the lens it created. The resulting lens model indicated that there were actually four images of the galaxy, but one wasn't magnified enough to be visible; the three that were visible were magnified by factors of four, six, and eight.

 

But the model further indicated that the lensing also influenced the timing of the light's arrival. Gravitational lenses force light to take paths between the source and observer with different lengths. And, since light moves at a fixed speed, those different lengths mean that the light takes a different amount of time to get here. Under circumstances we're familiar with, this is an imperceptibly small difference. But on cosmic scales, it makes a dramatic difference.

 

Again, using the lensing model, the researchers estimated the likely delays. Compared to the earliest image, the second earliest had a delay of 2.4 days, and the third a delay of 7.7 days, with an uncertainty of about a day on all estimates. In other words, a single image of the region produced what was essentially a time course of a few days.

What was that?

By checking that Hubble data against different classes of supernovae that we've imaged in the modern Universe, it was likely to be produced by the explosion of either a red or blue supergiant star. And the detailed properties of the event were a much better fit to a red supergiant, one that was roughly 500 times the size of the Sun at the time of its explosion.

 

The intensity of the light at different wavelengths provides an indication of the explosion's temperature. And the earliest image indicates that it was roughly 100,000 Kelvin, which suggests we were looking at it just six hours after it exploded. The latest lensed image shows that the debris had already cooled to 10,000 K over the eight days between the two different images.

 

Obviously, there are more recent and closer supernovae that we can study in far more detail if we want to understand the processes that drive a massive star's explosion. If we're able to find more of these lensed supernovae in the distant past, however, we'll be able to infer things about the population of stars that were present much earlier in the Universe's history. At the moment, however, this is only the second one we've found. The authors of the paper describing it make an effort to draw some inferences, but it's clear those will have a higher uncertainty.

 

So, in many ways, this doesn't help us make major advances in understanding the Universe. But as an example of the strange consequences of the forces that govern the Universe's behavior, it's a pretty impressive one.

 

Nature, 2022. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05252-5  (About DOIs).

 

Single Hubble image captured supernova at three different times

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said new chief executive Elon Musk was "not above the law".

Separately, Mr Musk reportedly told employees that bankruptcy is not out of the question for Twitter.

The firm has been in disarray since Mr Musk started firing thousands of employees last week.

The ability for users to buy verified status as part of a new subscription has raised concerns that the platform could be swamped with fake accounts.

On Thursday, chief privacy officer Damien Kieran and chief compliance officer Marianne Fogarty resigned according to reports, and the company's chief security officer Lea Kissner also quit.

The departures may increase the risk of Twitter violating regulatory orders. The firm was fined $150m (£119m) in May for selling users' data, and had to agree to new privacy rules.

"We are tracking recent developments at Twitter with deep concern," Douglas Farrar, the FTC's director of public affairs, said.

"No chief executive or company is above the law, and companies must follow our consent decrees."

Mr Farrer said the FTC had "new tools to ensure compliance, and we are prepared to use them".

Twitter paid the fine in May to settle allegations it had illegally used users' data to help sell targeted ads.

In addition to the fine, it had to agree to new rules, and put in place a beefed-up privacy and security programme - overseen by the executives reported to have quit.

Since taking charge, Mr Musk has fired former chief executive Parag Agrawal and other top management, and the company's advertising and marketing chiefs have also left, adding to concerns that Twitter does not have enough people in place to oversee that it remains compliant with regulations.

Money concerns

In addition, some big advertisers have been spooked by the direction Mr Musk is taking the social media firm.

Twitter makes most of its money through advertising, but some large advertisers have paused spending while they take stock of the changes that Mr Musk is bringing in.

On Thursday, Chipotle Mexican Grill said it had pulled back its paid and owned content on Twitter "while we gain a better understanding on the direction of the platform under its new leadership".

It joined other brands, including car firms General Motors, Volkswagen, and Audi, drugs giant Pfizer, and food manufacturer General Mills, which owns brands including Cheerios and Lucky Charms.

Some brands are said to be concerned that Mr Musk will relax content moderation rules and reverse permanent Twitter bans given to controversial figures, including former US president Donald Trump.

Mr Musk reportedly told employees during a company meeting he was not certain about the future financial performance of the company, and that bankruptcy was not out of the question.

Twitter was approached for comment. The New York Times reported its communications team was deeply affected by redundancies.

Source

SAN FRANCISCO — Two weeks after buying Twitter, Elon Musk painted an increasingly bleak financial picture for the company and outlined changes in a meeting with staff on Thursday and in his first companywide emails, amid an exodus of executives including the officials who oversaw content moderation and security.

At the meeting on Thursday, Mr. Musk warned employees that Twitter did not have the necessary cash to survive, said seven people familiar with the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The social media company was running a negative cash flow of several billion dollars, Mr. Musk added, without specifying if that was an annual figure. He mentioned bankruptcy.

Mr. Musk added that he had recently sold Tesla stock to “save” Twitter. He has sold nearly $4 billion in Tesla shares recently, according to regulatory filings this week.

Even so, Mr. Musk said Twitter remained over-staffed after mass layoffs of half of the company’s 7,500 employees last week. Remaining workers needed to be more “hard core,” Mr. Musk said.

His statements echoed messages he shared in two emails sent to workers late on Wednesday. In those notes, Mr. Musk said “the economic picture ahead is dire.” He added that he planned to end Twitter’s remote work policy and wanted employees to renew their focus on generating revenue and fighting spam.

Twitter was too heavily dependent on advertising and vulnerable to pullbacks in brand spending, he added, and will need to bolster the revenue it gets from subscriptions. In another note to employees, he wrote that “the absolute top priority is finding and suspending any verified bots/trolls/spam.”

Mr. Musk has roiled Twitter since taking over the company in the technology industry’s largest-ever leveraged buyout last month. The billionaire, who also runs the electric-car maker Tesla and the rocket company SpaceX, is under pressure to make the deal work, having paid $44 billion for Twitter.

But Twitter had lost money for eight of the past 10 years and its revenue growth has not been as robust as competitors. Mr. Musk also loaded the company with $13 billion in debt for the buyout, and it is now on the hook to pay $1 billion in interest payments annually. Mr. Musk has previously said the company is losing $4 million a day.

Twitter, whose communication department has been laid off, did not respond to a request for comment. Bloomberg earlier reported Mr. Musk’s emails.

On Thursday, more Twitter executives resigned. They included Kathleen Pacini, a human resources leader; Yoel Roth, the head of trust and safety; and Robin Wheeler, an advertising executive, according to four people familiar with the matter. There was confusion about some executives, including when Ms. Wheeler wrote in an internal company message on Thursday afternoon, which was viewed by The Times: “I’m still here. This is really hard right now.”

That followed the resignations of three top Twitter executives responsible for security, privacy and compliance on Wednesday, according to two people familiar with the matter and internal documents seen by The New York Times.

The departing security executives were Lea Kissner, the chief information security officer; Damien Kieran, the chief privacy officer; and Marianne Fogarty, the chief compliance officer. They resigned a day before a deadline for Twitter to submit a compliance report to the Federal Trade Commission, which is overseeing privacy practices at the company as part of a 2011 settlement.

Twitter has typically reviewed its products for privacy problems before rolling them out to users, to avoid additional fines from the F.T.C. and remain in compliance with the settlement. But because of a rapid pace of product development under Mr. Musk, engineers could be forced to “self-certify” so that their projects meet privacy requirements, one employee wrote in an internal message seen by The Times.

“Elon has shown that he cares only about recouping the losses he’s incurring as a result of failing to get out of his binding obligation to buy Twitter,” the employee wrote. The changes to Twitter’s F.T.C. reviews could result in heavy fines and put people working for the company at risk, the person warned.

“This will put huge amount of personal, professional and legal risk onto engineers: I anticipate that all of you will be pressured by management into pushing out changes that will likely lead to major incidents,” the employee wrote.

“We are tracking recent developments at Twitter with deep concern,” Douglas Farrar, a spokesman for the F.T.C., said in a statement. “No C.E.O. or company is above the law, and companies must follow our consent decrees. Our revised consent order gives us new tools to ensure compliance, and we are prepared to use them.”

In an email to employees on Thursday afternoon, Mr. Musk wrote, “I cannot emphasize enough that Twitter will do whatever it takes to adhere to both the letter and the spirit of the F.T.C. consent decree.”

Twitter earns about 90 percent of its revenue from advertisers, some of whom have shied away from the platform in recent days because of uncertainties over Mr. Musk’s commitment to removing toxic content from Twitter. He has responded by threatening a “thermonuclear name & shame” of advertisers who choose to halt their spending.

Mr. Musk has also raced to find new subscription revenue. One of his first projects was to revamp a subscription service, Twitter Blue. He raised the price to $8 a month and said subscribers would receive a verification check mark, which Twitter has typically given to prominent users like celebrities and politicians.

In one of his emails to staff on Wednesday, Mr. Musk said subscriptions should eventually account for about half the company’s revenue. “Without significant subscription revenue, there is a good chance Twitter will not survive the upcoming economic downturn,” he wrote.

Mr. Musk also told employees that they must return to the office on Thursday and work from there for a minimum of 40 hours a week. Twitter’s work force had been remote since early in the pandemic, and in recent years, its employees have been allowed to choose where they want to live rather than remaining in cities where the company has offices.

At some of Mr. Musk’s other companies, including Tesla and SpaceX, he has also said employees must go into the office to work 40 hours a week.

On Twitter’s Slack during Mr. Musk’s meeting with employees on Thursday, people discussed the merits of resigning or being laid off. “Don’t resign, be fired,” one worker wrote in a companywide channel, in a message viewed by The Times.

“Resignation is cheap and easy for the employer,” the employee wrote. “If you have a better plan lined up, go for it. If you are intimidated into considering resignation, don’t.”

David McCabe contributed reporting from Washington.

Source

My dear mother-in-law died a year ago, and despite her best-laid plans to get her affairs in order before she passed, she didn't quite manage it.

That means I'm constantly on the phone these days with everyone from the IRS to attorneys to CPAs. And because everything bad happens at once, I'm also on the line with doctors for various family members, including our beloved one-eyed cat.

Due to these endless calls, it seems like every day I'm dealing with one of the deepest circles of hell, the automated phone menu. You know what I mean -- you call a number for help and you're thrown into an endless loop of recorded messages that don't assist you at all. I can't even tell you how much time I've wasted stuck in this never-never land lately. Generally, the stress is already high for these calls -- no one ever looks forward to calling the IRS, or a doctor. Being stuck in a phone menu reminds me of a state fair funhouse where you think you've found the way out but just keep slamming into walls, over and over again.

Some phones, like Google's Pixel series, help you avoid these menus or even wait on hold for you, but there's clearly room to improve these menus for everyone. Here's how automated phone lines could make life easier for their callers.

We need a universal way to get to a live human

Maybe the most important thing: There needs to be a universally accepted way to reach a living, speaking human who actually can help. So many times, I listen carefully to all of the options and none of them fit my situation. I usually just start yelling "AGENT!" or "REPRESENTATIVE!" Sometimes I try "OPERATOR" because I'm old like that. I'm pretty sure I've tried yelling "PERSON!" or "HUMAN!" at least once.

I try pressing zero a lot, and sometimes that works to get me a real live person. But other times, the automated phone menu just plods forward, repeating useless options, giving me no way to even consider having a problem that's not on its list. When that rare gem of a phone menu actually says, "press X to speak to an agent," I just about kiss the ground.

'Menu options have changed'

Don't tell me to "please listen carefully, because our menu options may have changed." I'm listening carefully anyway. I don't care if the menu options have changed. Every automated phone message says this, and I wonder when those options actually did last change... three years ago? Companies are vastly overestimating how many people have memorized their phone options. Will anyone be completely shaken if it's now "press 2 to renew your prescription" instead of "press 3"?  

Yes, I know about your website

Automatic phone menus love to play recorded messages telling you to go to their website instead of calling. I'm Gen X, so even though I grew up making telephone calls, I'm perfectly capable of doing a lot of things online, from ordering pizzas to making hair appointments. I assure you, I do realize that in 2022, any company has a website. I have almost certainly visited said website. I am calling because there is literally no way that website can help me. I've tried. My situation is weird and unique to me, and there's just no way the programmer of your website could have seen it coming. Sitting there while a calm recorded voice reprimands me for not using the website just turns my frustration level up to 11.

No, my call is not important to you

I've sat on automated phone menus for more than an hour before. It's no fun. But what makes it worse is the blaring background music, especially if it's the same three Christmas carols over and over. And even worse than repetitive, loud music is the kind of automated phone menu that just keeps repeating the same bland boilerplate message every 60 seconds. "Your call is very important to us..." I might've believed that the first few times, but by the 35th time I can only assume that everything in the world, including TV reruns, the football game last night, and where the receptionist is having lunch today, is much more important to you than my call.

Useful things phone menus could do to be better

Tell me the wait time

Let's please have automated phone menus that tell you how long the expected wait is, thank you. Even though the IRS always tells me it'll be an hour-plus, at least that's something. Now I know I'll likely have to shift this drudgery to another day, or that I should plug in my cell phone and put it on speaker while I wait and wait.

Let me control or silence the music

Once and only once, I reached an automated phone menu that told me how to shut off the recorded music if I preferred to wait in silence. It gave me an option! Freedom from endless yacht rock or bland classical music! I felt like I'd just busted out of the Bastille.

Call me back

Sometimes a phone menu says, "If you prefer not to wait, press X and leave your number, and we will call you back." YES. This gives me my day back, and allows me to cross one thing off my list temporarily. I'll happily get back to my real job, and shove the IRS or whoever to the back of my brain. Ball's in their court now! Of course, companies that promise this, need to actually follow up and call me back.

Suggest a better time to call

Most automated phone menus seem to be written by someone who's never had to call one. But occasionally, I'll reach a phone menu that will actually tell me something useful, like "we are at our busiest on Mondays between 9 a.m. and noon ET." That helps me make a decision about when to call back.

Give me your email address

We've already established that your website can rarely help me. But you know what might? An email address, where I can spell out the specifics of my problem, and you can read and forward it to the right department. Even if the email address is impersonal, just help@whatever, or claims@whatever... when I'm desperately stuck in an endless loop, anything that helps me feel like I'm making progress is a boon. Of course, only do this if you're paying someone to actually read and respond to emails.

I know I'll be stuck calling giant organizations for the foreseeable future. There's no way around it in 2022. Automated phone menus are much-hated, but also probably necessary.

But can't someone dig into these universal problems and make these systems better? I just want to speak to a human.

Source

Musk is participating in an all-hands meeting with Twitter employees, a source told Reuters.

Twitter did not immediately reply to an emailed request for comment from Reuters.

Also Thursday, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission said it was watching Twitter with “deep concern” after the social media platform’s top privacy and compliance officers quit, potentially putting it at risk of violating regulatory orders.

The company’s chief security officer Lea Kissner on Thursday in a tweet said that she quit. Chief Privacy Officer Damien Kieran and Chief Compliance Officer Marianne Fogarty have also resigned, according to an internal message seen by Reuters.

The departures come after the platform’s new owner, billionaire Elon Musk, moved swiftly to clean house after taking over Twitter for $44 billion on Oct. 27. He announced plans to cut half its workforce last week, promised to stop fake accounts and is charging $8 a month for the Twitter Blue service that will include a blue check verification.

“We are tracking recent developments at Twitter with deep concern,” Douglas Farrar, the FTC’s director of public affairs, told Reuters.

“No CEO or company is above the law, and companies must follow our consent decrees. Our revised consent order gives us new tools to ensure compliance, and we are prepared to use them,” Farrar said.

In May, Twitter agreed to pay $150 million to settle allegations by the FTC it misused private information, like phone numbers, to target advertising to users after telling them the information was collected only for security reasons.

An attorney on Twitter’s privacy team reported the executive departures in a note seen by Reuters and posted to Twitter’s Slack messaging system on Thursday.

In the note, the attorney mentioned hearing Twitter’s legal chief Alex Spiro say that Musk was willing to take a “huge amount of risk” with Twitter. “Elon puts rockets into space, he’s not afraid of the FTC,” the attorney quoted Spiro as saying.

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment on the FTC warning, the note from the attorney or the departures. Spiro did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Since taking charge, Musk has fired former Chief Executive Parag Agrawal and other top management, and the company’s advertising and marketing chiefs left soon afterwards, adding to concerns that Twitter does not have enough people in place to monitor that it remains compliant with regulations.

The takeover has also sparked concerns that Musk, who has often waded into political debates, could face pressure from countries trying to control online speech.

It prompted U.S. President Joe Biden to say on Wednesday that Musk’s “cooperation and/or technical relationships with other countries is worthy of being looked at.”

Source

•     New boss wants subscriptions to account for half of revenue

New Twitter Inc. owner Elon Musk emailed his workers for the first time late Wednesday to prepare them for “difficult times ahead” and ban remote work unless he personally approved it.

Musk said there was “no way to sugarcoat the message” about the economic outlook and how it will affect an advertising-dependent company like Twitter, according to the email reviewed by Bloomberg News. The new rules, which kick in immediately, will expect employees to be in the office for at least 40 hours per week, he added.

Twitter has been under Musk’s leadership for close to two weeks, in which time he has dismissed roughly half its workforce and most of its executive suite. The new boss has upped the price for the Twitter Blue subscription to $8 and attached user verification to it. Musk told workers in the email that he wants to see subscriptions account for half of Twitter’s revenue.

Prior to Musk’s arrival, Twitter had established a permanent work-from-anywhere arrangement for its workers, many of whom had initially been pushed into remote work by the pandemic. It was one of the first topics in an all-hands call Musk held with Twitter staff after announcing the deal to buy the company earlier in the year. He said then that he’s against remote work and would only grant exceptions on a case-by-case basis, as he’s doing now.

He has also eliminated “days of rest” from Twitter staff calendars, Bloomberg News reported this month, which was a monthly, companywide day off introduced during the pandemic period. Its expiration gave another sign of Musk’s impatience with Twitter’s existing work culture.

“The road ahead is arduous and will require intense work to succeed,” Musk wrote in his missive to employees. In a separate email, he added that “over the next few days, the absolute top priority is finding and suspending any verified bots/trolls/spam.”

Source

For the first time, octopuses have been spotted throwing things — at each other.

Octopuses are known for their solitary nature, but in Jervis Bay, Australia, the gloomy octopus (Octopus tetricus) lives at very high densities. A team of cephalopod researchers decided to film the creatures with underwater cameras to see whether — and how — they interact.

Once the researchers pulled the cameras out of the water, they sat down to watch more than 20 hours of footage. “I call it octopus TV,” laughs co-author David Scheel, a behavioural ecologist at Alaska Pacific University in Anchorage. One behaviour stood out: instances in which the eight-limbed creatures gathered shells, silt or algae with their arms — and then hurled them away, propelling them with water jetted from their siphon. And although some of the time it seemed that they were just throwing away debris or food leftovers, it did sometimes appear that they were throwing things at each other.

The team found clues that the octopuses were deliberately targeting one another. Throws that made contact with another octopus were relatively strong and often occurred when the thrower was displaying a uniform dark or medium body colour. Another clue: sometimes the octopuses on the receiving end ducked. Throws that made octo-contact were also more likely to be accomplished with a specific set of arms, and the projectile was more likely to be silt.

A gloomy octopus throws silt at another octopus as it approaches. For hitting fellow octopuses, silt is the projectile of choice.Credit: P. Godfrey-Smith et al./PLOS ONE (CC BY 4.0)

“We weren’t able to try and assess what the reasons might be,” Scheel cautions. But throwing, he says, “might help these animals deal with the fact that there are so many octopuses around”. In other words, it is probably social.

Tamar Gutnick, an octopus neurobiologist at the University of Naples Federico II in Italy, says the work opens a new door for inquiries into the social lives of these famously clever animals. “The environment for these specific octopuses is such that they have this interaction between individuals,” she says. “It’s communication, in a way.”

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-03592-w

Source

In a new step for Crispr, scientists have used the gene-editing tool to make personalized modifications to cancer patients’ immune cells to supercharge them against their tumors. In a small study published today in the journal Nature, a US team showed that the approach was feasible and safe, but was successful only in a handful of patients.

Cancer arises when cells acquire genetic mutations and divide uncontrollably. Every cancer is driven by a unique set of mutations, and each person has immune cells with receptors that can recognize these mutations and differentiate cancer cells from normal ones. But patients don’t often have enough immune cells with these receptors in order to mount an effective response against their cancer. In this Phase 1 trial, researchers identified each patient’s receptors, inserted them into immune cells lacking them, and grew more of these modified cells. Then, the bolstered immune cells were unleashed into each patient’s bloodstream to attack their tumor.

“What we’re trying to do is really harness every patient’s tumor-specific mutations,” says Stefanie Mandl, chief scientific officer at Pact Pharma and an author on the study. The company worked with experts from the University of California, Los Angeles, the California Institute of Technology, and the nonprofit Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle to design the personalized therapies.

The researchers began by separating T cells from the blood of 16 patients with solid tumors, including colon, breast, or lung cancer. (T cells are the immune system component with these receptors.) For each patient, they identified dozens of receptors capable of binding to cancer cells taken from their own tumors. The team chose up to three receptors for each patient, and using Crispr, added the genes for these receptors to the person’s T cells in the lab.

Scientists grew more of the edited cells, enough to constitute what they hoped would be a therapeutic dose. Then they infused the edited cells back into each of the volunteers, who had all previously been treated with several rounds of chemotherapy. The edited T cells traveled to the tumors and infiltrated them.

In six of the patients, the experimental therapy froze the growth of the tumors. In the other 11 people, their cancer advanced. Two had side effects related to the edited T cell therapy—one had fevers and chills, and the other one experienced confusion. Everyone in the trial had expected side effects from the chemotherapy.

Mandl suspects the response to the therapy was limited because the patients’ cancers were already very advanced by the time they enrolled in the trial. Also, later tests revealed that some of the receptors the team chose could find the tumor, but didn’t have potent anticancer effects.

Bruce Levine, a professor of cancer gene therapy at the University of Pennsylvania, says the ability to rapidly identify patients’ unique cancer receptors and generate tailored treatments using them is impressive. But the challenge will be in picking the right ones that actually kill cancer cells. “The fact that you can get those T cells into a tumor is one thing. But if they get there and don’t do anything, that’s disappointing,” he says.

Solid tumors have also proven more difficult to treat with T cells than liquid tumors, or blood cancers, which include leukemia, lymphoma, and myeloma. Therapies that use traditional genetic engineering (rather than Crispr) to modify patients’ T cells have been approved for blood cancers, but they don’t work well on solid tumors.

“As soon as the cancer gets complicated and develops its own architecture and a microenvironment and all sorts of defense mechanisms, then it becomes harder for the immune system to tackle it,” says Waseem Qasim, professor of cell and gene therapy at the Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health at University College London.

While the results of the study were limited, researchers hope to find a way to use Crispr against cancer, because the disease demands new treatments. Chemotherapy and radiation are effective for many patients, but they kill healthy cells as well as cancerous ones. Tailored therapies may offer a way to selectively target a patient’s unique set of cancer mutations and kill only those cells. Plus, some patients don’t respond to traditional therapies, or their cancer comes back later.

But it’s still early days for Crispr cancer research. In a study at the University of Pennsylvania that Levine coauthored, three patients—two with blood cancer and the third with bone cancer—were treated with their own Crispr-edited T cells. Investigators had removed three genes from those cells to make them better at battling cancer. A preliminary study showed that the edited cells migrated to the tumor and survived after infusion, but the Penn team hasn’t published findings on how the patients fared after the treatment.

Meanwhile, Qasim’s team in London has treated six children who were seriously ill with leukemia, using Crispr-edited T cells from donors. Four of the six went into remission after a month, which allowed them to receive a stem cell transplant, according to a study published recently in the journal Science. Of those four, two remain in remission nine months and 18 months after treatment, respectively, while two relapsed following their stem cell transplant.

While there’s still much to learn about how to improve these treatments, researchers like Qasim hope that new technologies like Crispr will ultimately yield a better match between therapy and patient. “There’s no one-size-fits-all treatment for cancer,” says Qasim. “What these kinds of studies hope to demonstrate is that each tumor is different. It’s a guided missile type of treatment, rather than a big blast approach.”

This Personalized Crispr Therapy Is Designed to Attack Tumors

(May require free registration to view)

the bottle held a thin broth, light brown, with some uncertain chunks of dark matter bobbing on top—a soup, maybe, but one that you’d never want to eat. Once it was poured into a white plastic tray, the chunks resolved into insects. Here were butterflies and moths, the delicate patterns of their wings dimmed after a week or two in ethanol. Here were beetles and bumblebees and lots of burly-looking flies, all heaped together, plus a bevy of large wasps, their stripes and stingers still bright.

Michael Sharkey took out a pair of thin forceps and began examining his catch. It included anything small and winged that lived in the meadows and forests around his house, high in the Colorado Rockies, and that had suffered the misfortune, in the previous two weeks, of flying into the tent-shaped malaise trap he had erected in front of his home and we had emptied earlier that morning.

Though Sharkey is a hymenopterist, an expert on the insect order that includes wasps, he ignored the obvious stripes and stingers. He ignored, in fact, all of the creatures the average person might recognize as wasps—or even recognize at all. Instead, he began pulling little brown specks out of the soup, peering at them through a pair of specialized glasses with a magnifying loupe of the sort a jeweler might wear. Dried off and placed under the microscope on his desk, the first speck revealed itself to be an entire, perfect insect with long, jointed antennae and delicately filigreed wings. This was a braconid wasp, part of a family of creatures that Sharkey has been studying for decades. Entomologists believe that there are tens of thousands of species of braconid sharing this planet, having all sorts of important impacts on the environments around them. But most humans have probably never heard of them, much less been aware of seeing one. Huge parts of the braconid family tree are, as the saying goes, still unknown to science.

As a taxonomist, Sharkey is part of a small group of people who can transform anonymous insects into known species. When other entomologists find specimens they think may not yet have been named, taxonomists are the specialists they call in to investigate whether this seemingly new-to-us thing is actually new to us. If it is, the taxonomist may formally welcome it into the realm of human knowledge by publicly conferring upon the species a Latin name, along with an official description of the physical characteristics that make it unique and identifiable for future observers. The process “hasn’t changed an awful lot” in the past 200 years, the British hymenopterist Gavin Broad told me—except that nowadays “we’ve got nicer pictures.”

I first encountered Sharkey’s name months before I called him up and asked if we could look at bugs together. I don’t remember precisely when, only that I gradually started to notice the name—always followed by “et al.”—in more and more places. There were long critiques of Sharkey et al. appearing in scientific journals, and then, later, there were responses to those critiques, and responses to those responses. And then there was the snark among the entomologists in my Twitter feed, some of whom called the work irresponsible or embarrassing or just wrote “Wooooooof.”

“Sharkey et al.” is shorthand for a paper that came out in the journal ZooKeys in 2021, along with a series of subsequent publications that used similar methods. That first paper wasn’t the sort of work that usually raises such a hubbub. In it, Sharkey and a group of coauthors named some new species of braconid wasp that had been caught in malaise traps in Costa Rica. But instead of identifying just a few species, they named 403. And instead of writing up detailed descriptions for each new wasp, the authors simply included a photo and a snippet of genetic code.

The technique that Sharkey and his coauthors used, called DNA barcoding, is a way of quickly sorting and differentiating species. Researchers analyze a small section of DNA at a particular site in each creature’s genome, upload that sequence into a vast database, and then use algorithms to sort the different sequences into groups. When the DNA varies from one organism to the next by more than a few percent, it’s considered a sign that their evolutionary histories have gone down separate tracks for a significant period of time, possibly dividing them into different species.

DNA barcoding is a common scientific tool these days. But some scientists said that Sharkey and his colleagues had pushed its use too far. They deemed the work “turbo taxonomy” or even, as the taxonomist Miles Zhang said, “taxonomic vandalism,” a term for labeling taxa as new without sufficient evidence for their uniqueness. These critics argued that the work could undermine the whole project of naming the natural world, of beginning to make it legible to human understanding. Zhang—who is actually Sharkey’s academic “grandson,” having studied under one of Sharkey’s former students—was so frustrated that ZooKeys continued to publish papers from Sharkey et al. that he tweeted to the journal, “I’m done with you, go find a new subject editor.”

For Sharkey and other entomologists who support his approach, this method of accelerated taxonomy is an urgently needed response to ecological calamity. Here we humans are, on a planet of astounding diversity in which truly enormous numbers of our neighbors are still mysteries to us—are, in fact, slowly revealing themselves to be more mysterious than we ever realized—and at the same time we’re pushing those other species rapidly toward oblivion. What choice is there, Sharkey asked, but to do all we can to speed up the naming process, if we are to learn what we’re losing before it’s gone?

The initial ZooKeys paper, Sharkey insisted, was just a start, a suggestion for how taxonomists can begin to tackle the enormous challenge that faces them. It wasn’t written to be provocative, he said. “But provoke it did.”

The more I learned about the debate, the more captivating I found it. In one sense, it was an esoteric argument about technical methods within a pretty obscure field—one that’s often written off, as Zhang put it, as “a weird hybrid between true science and stamp collecting.” But there was clearly a lot more at stake than a few hundred wasps. Taxonomy, for centuries, has been humanity’s way of reckoning with the great unknownness of the natural world. It’s how we have gotten acquainted with our neighbors, how we have tried to understand our place in a wildness whose true scope and complexity have always eluded our grasp. As the biodiversity crisis that our species created pushes others toward extinction, the field is struggling in ways that reveal just how much we have to lose.

the naming and ordering of living creatures is one of the most enduring human preoccupations. We’re taught to do it as children, and it’s one of the first jobs God assigns Adam in Eden: Give a name to every beast of the field and bird of the air. Aristotle’s classification of living things into ranked groups created a foundation for the regrettably world-changing belief that nature exists in a fixed hierarchy, with humans on top and the rest below, separate and endlessly exploitable. We saw chaos and nominated ourselves to create order.

Modern taxonomy began with Carl Linnaeus, an 18th-century Swedish botanist, who, at the age of 28, published Systema Naturae, a bold claim that he could organize all things animal and vegetal into a system of neat and nested hierarchies: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. (He also ranked groups of humans, a theory that laid the groundwork for using science to justify racism.) By the time Linnaeus died, his system included 12,000 organisms. Since then, the naming and ordering of creatures has been a vast collective project, undertaken by generations of scientists and laypeople. Named species, as Zhang put it, have become “the basic unit of biology,” a fixed point around which all sorts of laws and conservation strategies, not to mention centuries of scientific literature, pivot. Linnaeus’ 12,000 named species grew to today’s far more impressive (and very approximate) 2 million. But even that number, any biologist will tell you, is just a very humble start.

One problem is that scientists can’t fully agree on a single way of defining what a species is. The field of taxonomy was born when humans believed organisms to be fixed and immutable, but it must now operate in a world that we understand to be defined by mutation, variation, and constant change. (Even the author of On the Origin of Species once wrote to a friend how maddening it was trying to draw hard boundaries around organisms. “I have gnashed my teeth, cursed species, and asked what sin I had committed to be so punished,” Darwin wrote.) One common definition says that two organisms are different species if they can’t interbreed—which makes good sense until you think about, say, the climate-change-induced merging of polar bear territory with grizzly territory, resulting in pizzly bears. Or the fact that the bears share ancestry; at what point was the divergence enough to make them different species? The history of taxonomy includes a long series of battles—driven by evidence, opinion, and personal predilection—over whether groups of specimens ought to be lumped together or split apart.

But the problem of species is bigger still. Hundreds of years into the Linnaean project, scientists estimate that they have named, oh, somewhere between a fifth and a thousandth of the species on the planet. The general public tends to believe that the discovery of a new one is a momentous and rare occasion. In fact, the backlog of unclassified specimens is enormous. With most insects, especially, there is simply no keeping up. A Dutch entomologist told me about opening a large drawer full of various unnamed beetles at a museum, only to be told that the forest where they’d been collected a century earlier had long since vanished, the beetles probably gone along with it. Entomologists often say they could probably find a new-to-science species of insect in just about any given backyard, if only you gave them the time and access to experts. I’d heard this time and again, but I still wasn’t quite prepared when Sharkey examined one of the specimens from the backyard braconid soup and remarked, mildly, that he thought it was likely new to science.

Braconids are a perfect example of the staggering unknownness of the natural world. They’re part of a larger group known as parasitoid wasps, which reproduce by hijacking the life cycles of other insects. The wasps lay eggs in or on hosts such as caterpillars, ants, or beetles. Their larvae then use the hosts as food, often eating them from the inside out. In some cases, thanks to neurotoxins imparted by the parent wasp, the host is still alive—a grotesque but efficient defense against food spoilage!—during the ordeal. (The whole situation was enough to put Darwin off his society’s prevailing religion. “I cannot persuade myself,” he wrote to a friend, “that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created” such creatures as parasitoid wasps.)

Still, parasitoidism provides a pretty thrilling window into the richness of evolution. It’s thought to lead to incredible specialization, and therefore incredible diversity. Parasitoid wasps often evolve intricate ways of infiltrating the defenses of a single other species of insect, or perhaps a few—at which point the host species evolve new defenses, and the parasitoids new strategies, ad infinitum. Take the braconid wasp that parasitizes the green cloverworm, a caterpillar. The prospective host tries to escape its waspy enemies by dangling itself off branches by a safety thread, like a little bungee jumper. The braconid has evolved to subvert this strategy and slide down the thread in pursuit of the caterpillar. But that’s hardly the end of things, because there’s another parasitoid wasp, a whole other species, that lays its eggs in the first braconid’s eggs and has specialized to look for them by reeling the green cloverworm caterpillar back up. (It will lay its own eggs inside only if the first braconid has already deposited its young.) Sometimes these chains of bespoke predation, known as hyper-parasitism, go on for layer after layer, a Russian nesting doll of endlessly multiplying diversity and coevolution.

For a long time, scientists believed that the most speciose group of insects—and therefore of animals on Earth, since the vast majority of the world’s animal species are insects—were beetles. Some 400,000 species have been named, so many that the famous polymath J. B. S. Haldane, when asked by a cleric what a lifetime of studying the natural world had taught him about the God who had created it, is said to have replied, dryly, that any such divine being must have “an inordinate fondness for beetles.” But recently, some entomologists have argued that, thanks to the enormous variety beginning to emerge as we learn more about parasitoids, it’s actually wasps that are likely to be the world’s most inordinate group. They may attract less human attention than iridescent jewel beetles, but these overlooked creatures, with their disconcerting reproductive strategies, so deeply embedded in the lives of the species that surround them, may represent a dominant way of animal life on planet Earth. As Broad, the British hymenopterist, said, “What do you know about the world if you’re only looking at a few species? You don’t know anything about it.”

In recent years, as entomologists around the world have tried to quantify the alarming arthropod decline that’s widely known as “the insect apocalypse,” they’ve had to contend with this “Linnaean shortfall”—the fact that humans have so little preexisting knowledge of the other organisms with which we share our planet, much less how they’re faring in the face of unprecedented global change. (There’s also, if you want to get nerdy about it, the “Prestonian shortfall,” which refers to the shortage of baseline data about how abundant animals really were in the past, and the “Wallacean shortfall,” or all that we don’t know about how species have moved in space, and the “Darwinian shortfall,” what we don’t understand about the way species have changed over time.) And there is the taxonomic shortfall: the knowledge we’re missing out on because there aren’t enough people or resources to help us meet the neighbors before they vanish.

like a lot of future natural scientists, sharkey grew up—in his case, outside of Toronto—as the kind of kid who loved collecting bugs and salamanders in jars. Later, his work as a taxonomist sent him on professional collecting trips, chasing insects to the far reaches of Canada or Colombia. Just as often, though, it took him to arguably more obscure places: dusty monographs, old books, and the filing cabinets of distant museums. (As in many fields, taxonomy is shadowed by a persistent colonialism; specimens regularly end up half a world away from the forests or fields in which new scientists might be examining their living descendants.)

In biology, the scientific name of an organism is formally attached to a particular specimen, what’s known as a holotype. Should you have questions, for example, about what sort of bear chased you through the wilderness, you may wish to visit the preserved head of Mammal #100181 in the American Museum of Natural History, the official holotype of Ursus arctos alascensis, the Alaska brown bear. (Museums also hold paratypes, specimens of the same species collected alongside the holotype, which are equally handy for validation, though vested with less symbolic meaning.) Type specimens are particularly valuable to insect taxonomists, who often compare very subtle differences—the details of a moth’s antennae or a beetle’s spiny genitalia, for example—to tell species apart or find out if they’ve already been named.

In the years when Sharkey was working on his PhD, a project to name and describe 100 species of braconid, he visited some 10 museums across North America and Europe just to examine long-dead wasps. In Berlin, in the 1980s, he passed through a checkpoint from West to East day after day on his way to inspect some key specimens. The guards would raise their eyebrows at his microscope in its big cylindrical metal case but then let him through. In the end, investigating, naming, and describing those 100 species took seven years.

The work was slow and tedious, and there were always doubters who questioned the point of it all: first Sharkey’s father, who insisted that the pure sciences were frivolous and that his son should go into medicine or law, and later the head of Sharkey’s undergraduate entomology department, whose face fell when he discovered that his student was interested in studies on ecology and evolution, not agriculture and economics. But Sharkey relished the job. He loved how it felt to find patterns within chaos, teasing out and learning to recognize the subtle physical differences that distinguished one genus or species from another. He loved being able to walk through a forest or grassland and identify the key players in tiny dramas, to observe the complex ways in which insects’ lives interacted with each other. And then there was that feeling of discovery, the thrill of the new, of doing his part to expand the world of human awareness, however slightly. Naming a new species, he thought, felt a little like summiting a mountain or discovering the wreck of a Spanish galleon. Even if it was a tiny wasp.

But that was then. As genetic technology became cheaper and more accessible, Sharkey decided to revisit his old work to see how the distinctions he’d made based on an animal’s morphology—those subtle physical details—compared to the differences evident in its DNA.

The results shocked him. The work hadn’t just been slow; much of it seemed to be wrong. According to the genetics, some of the animals he’d diagnosed as one species were best understood as four or five; others, which he’d named as multiple species, were only one. It seemed that as much as half of his work was, at best, misleading. “The morphological work I was doing was just garbage,” Sharkey said. “I thought, my God! I’ve wasted 20 years of my life, or at least my professional life.”

The DNA barcoding technique that Sharkey used was pioneered by the Canadian biologist Paul Hebert, who proposed the idea in 2003 after looking at barcodes in a grocery store. How could we track so many flavors of Pop-Tarts and pasta sauces, he wondered, but not the living things with which we share the planet? Hebert later founded a major institution, the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics at the University of Guelph, which has championed the technique and built a database of genetic barcodes and the organisms they key to, in order to help speed identification. This system algorithmically lumps together sequences whose genetic relationships are particularly close. These sequences are assigned the same barcode index number, or BIN.

Since Hebert developed the technique, the use of DNA barcoding has expanded in dramatic and creative ways. You can, for example, test the DNA present in snow or river water or soil, or even in the stomachs or excrement of animals, and thereby “see” the many organisms that have passed invisibly through the landscape or digestive tract. Often, though, the DNA reveals only more secrets: These ecosystems can be full of mystery creatures whose genetic data is not yet associated with any name at all. Not all are necessarily “new” to science; in some cases they may have been named and filed away in a museum but never really studied again, and the link between their name and their DNA has not been made. The taxonomist Roderic Page once dubbed these unnamed species “dark taxa.” Some other scientists soon adopted the term to refer to a bigger darkness—the enormous category of all undefined life. As with dark matter or dark energy, here is a force that humans generally don’t see or understand but that has a profound effect on how our natural cosmos works.

When the taxonomist Rudolf Meier and a group of coauthors analyzed more than 200,000 insects caught in malaise traps in eight countries, in habitats ranging from tropical rain forests to temperate meadows, they found that the insect families that dominate the natural world—the hyperdiverse ones full of species whose interactions (such as pollination or predation or decomposition) with other organisms play key roles in ecosystems—are also the families that are among the least known. Meier called this “the neglect index.” The same phenomenon, he told me, extends to lots of other key groups, from microbes to fungi to ringed worms, that quietly help keep the world running despite not having much in the way of names. “From a biomass point of view, from a species diversity point of view, a lot of the taxa that have received most of our attention are not important,” he said. “But all the taxa that we have been neglecting are important.”

The other big surprise of barcoding was how often it revealed that even the knowledge we thought we had was, in fact, incomplete or flawed. Sharkey’s experience of watching the genetics contradict his morphological analysis is becoming a common one. In the past 15 years, scientists have split what they thought was a single giraffe species into four, the orca whale into at least three, the well-known and long-studied Astraptes fulgerator butterfly into 10. Often, a discovery of genetic difference kicked off a closer look at animals’ survival and reproductive strategies, at their morphology and how they interacted with their ecosystems, which in turn revealed meaningful differences that had gone unnoticed or unappreciated. I talked to Guilherme Oliveira, a researcher in Brazil, who barcoded an Amazonian ecosystem and found hundreds more plant species than anyone had expected—a profusion of biodiversity that scientists had previously failed to see.

Parasitoid wasp species are proving equally full of hidden diversity. Where entomologists once saw one or two generalist species—organisms capable of parasitizing a variety of different hosts—DNA barcoding will sometimes reveal a dozen specialists, which are much more narrowly adapted. This is not just reclassification for its own sake. Specialists are particularly vulnerable to extinction, and the particulars of who eats whom can matter a great deal in ecosystems—including those that humans depend on most. On farms, when introduced pests, freed from the constraints of their natural predators, destroy vital crops, suddenly it’s a race to identify the right parasitoid defender to stave off failure or famine. The wasps are air-dropped like tiny paratroopers into crisis zones.

in his office in Colorado, Sharkey showed me old monographs and morphological keys meant to guide people in identifying various parasitoid wasps. He lamented how “useless” they were. Some of the written descriptions seemed like they wouldn’t be much easier to follow than a genetic code; many specimens didn’t key out to a species, or keyed out to the wrong one, because the keys included only the small subset of species that had been discovered at the time and no information on the much wider world that really existed.

When he first learned that his morphological work had been so mistaken, Sharkey told me, he felt depressed and demoralized. But then he became an evangelist. The slower road, he said, continued to make more sense for well-studied groups associated with long scientific literatures. But a hugely speciose and mostly unknown group like the braconids, he insisted, was different. What was the point in making morphological keys if they didn’t work very well and hardly anyone looked at them? The sheer scope of the unknown demanded triage. Better to barcode quickly now and do the in-depth descriptions later, if there was ever time.

The approach made sense to some scientists. There are groups that are so large and so cryptic, and in so much danger from the ongoing collapse in biodiversity, that it’s “not logistically feasible to do the taxonomy the old way,” Scott Miller, the curator of Lepidoptera for the National Museum of Natural History, told me. “In order to meet the challenges at hand, we have to move faster.” Dan Janzen, the renowned entomologist who provided the Costa Rican braconids in the original ZooKeys paper (on which he and his wife, the tropical ecologist Winnie Hallwachs, are coauthors), believes that as barcoding becomes cheaper and more accessible, it will help democratize the process of gathering information about the world’s biodiversity—and encourage more people to have a stake in protecting it. This is the power of naming, he said. Names help us relate to a species, see it, notice it, care about it. “Bioalfabetización,” he calls the process in Spanish: the development of biological literacy.

But others warn that taxonomy can’t afford to sacrifice precision for speed, and that it needs to respond to technological advances by incorporating more types of information, not fewer. Some of the arguments are about accessibility: How can the field become more democratic if you need access to a sequencing lab to identify a bug in your own backyard? Other objections are technical. The mitochondrial gene that’s usually used in barcoding, called cytochrome oxidase 1, or CO1, is not necessarily the best option for analyzing the genetic differences between species, especially as technology has expanded to allow for cheaper analysis of a fuller genetic picture. CO1 isn’t directly related to reproduction, and it doesn’t work well for all groups of animals. (Fungi, for example, or oak gall wasps, which Zhang studies—if you look just at CO1, he says, you miss the entire diversity of this megadiverse group.)

Meier agrees that taxonomy needs to be sped up dramatically if it is to take on the great unknowns of the natural world, let alone keep up with the speed at which nature is being destroyed. But he believes the future lies in integrating barcoding with a variety of other advanced technologies, including robotics and machine learning, which can perform rapid analysis of images and discern species based on subtle differences that humans struggle to see.

Meier and Sharkey have gone back and forth in journal articles over whether Sharkey’s method unfairly equates BINs, which are changeable categories whose boundaries can shift as new data is added, with species, which are meant to be stable reflections of separate evolutionary histories (despite being muddled by differences across geographic ranges, niches, and populations). When Meier performed his own analysis, which ran some of the same data through different algorithms, it sorted the wasps into a slightly different configuration of species than the algorithm Sharkey had used. The technology had improved, but a version of the old lumping-splitting debate was still there. The boundaries between species still shifted depending on who, or what, was drawing them.

The act of taxonomizing species captures humans at our most confident: Here we are, making grand pronouncements about what other creatures are, about who they are, naming them just like Adam before the Fall. Yet our desire to name nature has always run up against the grand abundance and wild complexity of the world we actually live in. In one telling, the story of our quest to understand the biodiversity around us is one of ever-expanding knowledge. In another, it’s a tale of ever-expanding ignorance, of learning just how much we don’t yet understand. While both morphology and genetics can tell us a lot about how other creatures survive on Earth, there will always be parts of other organisms’ lives that matter very much to them but are hidden from us. Many insects, for example, can see spectra of light that we can’t, and so look quite different to each other than they do to us. Plants use complicated chemical signals to communicate with each other, as well as with their predators and benefactors. Many animals, from birds to frogs to Belding’s ground squirrels, differentiate themselves by smells or calls more than by looks, and scientists are increasingly turning to these differences to try to tell them apart. The goal shouldn’t be to file other organisms into our own human systems, Miller said, but to try to “look closely at these organisms and think of it from the way they think about themselves.”

This means trying to recognize, and minimize, the extent to which we’re limited by our own biases, which include our tendency to privilege the visual over the olfactory or aural, the diurnal over the nocturnal, the big over the little, and animals with relatable faces over those without. The scientist Robert May, who helped pioneer the field of theoretical ecology, has characterized our ignorance of species without features and lives “akin to our own” as “a remarkable testament to humanity’s narcissism.” In Naming Nature, a book about the history of taxonomy, the science journalist Carol Kaesuk Yoon takes a more generous view: “There is nothing harder to see,” she writes, “than one’s own frame of reference.”

Even as they argued with each other, the taxonomists I spoke to each described their work as an exercise in humility, of trying their best before a daunting unknown, and learning, over and over, how much they don’t know. It can be a painful job, as a group of them wrote, “documenting this monumental historical loss of biodiversity and, in some cases, grimly identifying and naming new species already extinct or destined thusly.” Even the fiercest arguments about methods and goals boil down to this: We live in a world of diversity that exceeds the grasp of our knowledge, but not our ability to destroy it.

Before I left Colorado, Sharkey opened a new box of vials that had recently arrived via the barcoding lab in Canada: more braconid wasps, this time from a large, and largely unknown, subfamily called Doryctinae. They had also been collected in Costa Rica and were now waiting to be named, in a new paper that would use a minimalist method similar to the one that had caused so much furor.

Sharkey poured the first one out of its vial, and it splashed onto a sheet of paper, tiny and anonymous. And then he put the wasp under the microscope.

Let us know what you think about this article.

The Big Fight Over 403 Very Small Wasps

(May require free registration to view)

China ditches expendable rocket plan for its Moon program

The United Launch Alliance Atlas V payload fairing containing the Joint Polar Satellite System-2 (JPSS-2) at Vandenberg Space Force Base ahead of launch.

Image: NASA

Why NASA is launching a new polar satellite

Ancient wisdom: Oldest full sentence in first alphabet is about head lice

Some people believe that common dietary supplements – fish oil, garlic, cinnamon, turmeric, plant sterols and red yeast rice – will lower their “bad” cholesterol. “Bad” cholesterol, known in the medical community as low-density lipoproteins or LDL, can cause the buildup of fatty deposits in the arteries. The fatty deposits can block the flow of oxygen and blood that the heart needs to work and the blockage can lead to a heart attack or stroke.

 For this study, which was presented at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2022 and simultaneously published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, researchers compared the impact of these particular supplements to the impact of a low dose of a statin – a cholesterol-lowering medication – or a placebo, which does nothing.

Researchers made this comparison in a randomized, single-blind clinical trial that involved 190 adults with no prior history of cardiovascular disease. Study participants were ages 40 to 75, and different groups got a low-dose statin called rosuvastatin, a placebo, fish oil, cinnamon, garlic, turmeric, plant sterols or red yeast rice for 28 days.

The statin had the greatest impact and significantly lowered LDL compared with the supplements and placebo.

 The average LDL reduction after 28 days on a statin was nearly 40%. The statin also had the added benefit on total cholesterol, which dropped on average by 24%, and on blood triglycerides, which dropped 19%.

None of the people who took the supplements saw any significant decrease in LDL cholesterol, total cholesterol or blood triglycerides, and their results were similar to those of people who took a placebo. While there were similar adverse events in all the groups, there were a numerically higher number of problems among those who took the plant sterols or red yeast rice.

“We designed this study because many of us have had the same experience of trying to recommend evidence-based therapies that reduce cardiovascular risks to patients and then having them say ‘no thanks, I’ll just try this supplement,’ ” said study co-author Dr. Karol Watson, professor of medicine/cardiology and co-director, UCLA Program in Preventive Cardiology. “We wanted to design a very rigid, randomized, controlled trial study to prove what we already knew and show it in a rigorous way.”

 Dr. Steven Nissen, a cardiologist and researcher at the Cleveland Clinic and a co-author on the study, said that patients often don’t know that dietary supplements aren’t tested in clinical trials. He calls these supplements “21st century snake oil.”

In the United States, the Dietary Supplement and Health Education Act of 1994 sharply limited the US Food and Drug Administration’s ability to regulate supplements. Unlike pharmaceutical products that have to be proven safe and effective for their intended use before a company can market them, the FDA doesn’t have to approve dietary supplements before they can be sold. It is only after they are on the market and are proven to be unsafe that the FDA can step in to regulate them.

“Patients believe studies have been done and that they are as effective as statins and can save them because they’re natural, but natural doesn’t mean safe and it doesn’t mean they’re effective,” Nissen said.

 The study was funded via an unrestricted grant from AstraZeneca, which makes rosuvastatin. The company did not have any input on the methodology, data analysis and discussion of the clinical implications, according to the study.

The researchers acknowledged some limitations, including the study’s small sample size, and that its 28-study period might not capture the effect of supplements when used for a longer duration.

In a statement on Sunday, the Council for Responsible Nutrition, a trade association for the dietary supplement industry, said “supplements are not intended to replace medications or other medical treatments.”

“Dietary supplements are not intended to be quick fixes and their effects may not be revealed during the course of a study that only spans four weeks,” Andrea Wong, the group’s senior vice president for scientific and regulatory affairs, said in a statement.

Dr. James Cireddu, an invasive cardiologist University Hospitals Harrington Heart & Vascular Institute Cleveland, Ohio, said the work is going to be helpful.

“They did a nice job collecting data and looking at the outcomes,” said Cireddu, who did not work on the study. “It will probably resonate with patients. I get asked about supplements all the time. I think this does a nice job of providing evidence.”

 Dr. Amit Khera, chair of the AHA Scientific Sessions programming committee, did not work on the research, but said he thought this was an important study to include in the presentations this year.

“I take care of patients every day with these exact questions. Patients always ask about the supplements in lieu of or in addition to statins,” said Khera, who is a professor and director of preventive cardiology at UT Southwestern Medical Center. “I think if you have high quality evidence and a well done study it is really critical to help inform patients about the value, or in this case the lack of value, for some of these supplements for cholesterol lowering.”

Statins have been around for more than 30 years and they’ve been studied in over 170,000 people, he said. Consistently, studies show that statins lower risk.

 “The good news, we know statins work,” Khera said. “That does not mean they’re perfect. That doesn’t mean everyone needs one, but for those at higher risk, we know they work and that’s well proven. If you’re going to do something different you have to make sure it works.”

With supplements, he said he often sees misinformation online.

“I think that people are always looking for something ‘natural’ but you know there’s a lot of issues with that terminology and most important we should ask do they work? That’s what this study does,” Khera adds. “It’s important to ask, are you taking something that is proven, and if you’re doing that and it’s not, is that in lieu of proven treatment. It’s a real concern.”

Source

That's why this video shared on Twitter by Deepak Prabhu is a glowing example of how interactive teachers should be in explaining a tough subject to a school child. In the clip, the teacher can be seen explaining refraction with the popular experiment involving glass and white oil.

"He is a real teacher and not the ones who just want to shine speaking English," read the caption.

Take a look:

    He is a real hardcore teacher and not the ones who just want to shine speaking English. pic.twitter.com/BMj2zAIEog

    — Deepak Prabhu (@ragiing_bull) November 8, 2022

The video has garnered over 70k views and tons of reactions. Netizens lauded the young teacher for making the subject so simple for the students. Many expressed that they would have had a better understanding of the subject if they had got a patient teacher.

 Great teacher.

We had one such professor in engg., Late Dr. M.U. Deshpande, who taught Control Systems, a very dry subject. His lectures however always had 100% attendance as he explained CS with real life examples. His question papers were also never bookish.

    Respect. 🙏🙏

    — Maneesh Mohnot 🇮🇳 (@winsplit) November 8, 2022

    our schools need more teachers like this

    — Sameer (@BesuraTaansane) November 8, 2022

    He is a very good teacher. 👌🏻👌🏻

 The teacher's training curriculum needs to include such methodology which can be easy for kids to grasp and therefore understand better.

    — TheAmazedStar🇮🇳❤️ (@StarAmazed) November 9, 2022

    So nicely explained. We need more teachers like him

    — Minakshi Choudhury (@MinakshiChoud17) November 8, 2022

 Very impressed! It's heartwarming to see not only his grip on the subject but the commitment to ensure that his students understand.

That's the stuff good teachers are made of. 👏👏👏

    — kadaparoots (@tranquilmallard) November 9, 2022

What do you think of this video?

Source

Trendy mindfulness practices are as effective as medication at alleviating anxiety, a study has found.

People who meditated every day and did yoga once a week saw their anxious thoughts and feelings ease by almost a third after six weeks.

In the first head-to-head comparison, a second group given Lexapro — which works by boosting ‘happy hormone’ levels in the brain — saw similar results.

It is the latest evidence that mindfulness – once written off as a fad – can have significant positive impacts on physical health.

Mindfulness is thought to lower levels of the hormone cortisol — nature’s built-in alarm system — in turn reducing inflammation in the body.

There are also no side effects, unlike Lexapro which can cause drowsiness, insomnia and impotence or other sexual problems after prolonged use.

Dr Elizabeth Hoge, a psychiatry professor at Georgetown University in Washington DC and first author of the latest study said: ‘A big advantage of mindfulness meditation is that it doesn’t require a clinical degree to train someone to become a mindfulness facilitator.

‘Additionally, sessions can be done outside of a medical setting, such as at a school or community center.’

It comes after a leading panel of doctors recommended all Americans over the age of eight are screened for anxiety — even if they do not have symptoms — amid fears the Covid pandemic has left millions suffering in silence.

In the latest study, 102 patients completed a comprehensive mindfulness program and 106 took the popular antidepressant Lexapro. After two months, people in both groups saw anxiety severity plummet about 30 per cent (file image)

Lexapro works by boosting ‘happy hormone’ levels in the brain

What is mindfulness?

Think of it as fitness for your mind.

Meditation calms the body, thus reducing blood pressure, stress levels and improving all over mood.

The objective of practicing mind-body activities is to use your thoughts to positively impact your body’s physical responses to the outside world.

The practices are part of an overarching wellness trend that has been touted by celebrities and tech giants for years.

These activities include….

Mindfulness

The process of focusing one’s breath and focus on a particular thought, object or activity to foster a stable emotional state.

Mindfulness is the ability to be fully present and aware of one’s surroundings.

 A common technique is to silently focus on each of the senses in turn.

Pilates and yoga

They involve breathwork and coordinated, concentrated movement.

Both low-impact exercises, they improve strength, flexibility and posture.

In yoga, you adopt positions and hold them, or flow into a different position.

Pilates sees people adopting positions and then working their core muscles by moving their arms or legs.

Qigong, tai chi

Martial arts which promotes physical fitness as well as mental discipline.

Qigong and tai chi are traditional self-healing exercises originating from ancient China.

They feature coordinated movements focused on body posture, deep breathing and mental focus.

Qigong can include movement or simply sitting or standing mediation.

Tai chi, on the other hand, involves complex and choreographed movements that match one’s breath.

Researchers at Georgetown recruited more than 200 patients from three cities.

Participants either a starter dose of Lexapro or follow a widely used mindfulness program that includes two and a half hours of classes weekly, 45 minutes of daily practice at home, as well as a day-long retreat weekend class around week five or six.

After two months, anxiety symptoms as measured on a severity scale declined by about 30 per cent in both groups and continued to decrease during the subsequent four months.

The study was published Wednesday in the journal JAMA Psychiatry

The eight-week program that some of the participants adhered to was called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), which dates back to the 1970s and entails mindfulness meditation, body scanning and simple yoga postures.

Mindfulness has become a broad term that encompasses a range of activities meant to bolster a person’s emotional health, including meditation, yoga, tai chi and other low-impact marital arts, and breathing exercises.

The objective of practicing mind-body activities is to identify and remedy poor behavior patterns as well as regulate emotions, decrease stress, temper anxiety, and alleviate symptoms of depression.

Anxiety is intense, excessive, and persistent worry and fear about everyday situations. It often leads to a rapid heart rate, fast breathing, sweating, and feeling exhausted.

Over 40 million US adults, about 19 per cent, live with an anxiety disorder, making it the most common mental health problem in the country.

When engaging in mindfulness exercises, people are advised to pay attention to any intrusive thoughts that come in and bat them away, refocusing energy on the breath and the body, according to Dr Hoge.

Rather than dwell on those intrusive thoughts, ‘you say, “I’m having this thought, let that go for now,’’’ Dr Hoge said.

With practice, ‘It changes the relationship people have with their own thoughts when not meditating.’

Olga Cannistraro, a 52-year-old who participated in a previous study with Dr Hoge, said the program has helped her considerably: ‘It gave me the tools to spy on myself. Once you have awareness of an anxious reaction, then you can make a choice for how to deal with it.

It’s not like a magic cure, but it was a life-long kind of training. Instead of my anxiety progressing, it went in the other direction and I’m very grateful for that.’

A mounting body of scientific research points to the mental and physical benefits of mindfulness practice.

A metaanalysis from 2014 reviewed 47 trials involving meditation among 3,515 people. The practice was associated with ‘moderate evidence’ of lowered stress, anxiety and depression in eight weeks.

Mindfulness has also shown to be effective in lowering blood pressure. A recent study conducted by Brown University researchers concluded that people with elevated BP who followed a mindfulness program for six months saw a drop of nearly six points in their systolic blood pressure – the top number in a blood reading.

People in the control group who received the normal cours of care consisting of a home blood pressure monitor, blood pressure education material, and access to a physician saw a decline of just 1.4 points.

Source

What the image of the Milky Way’s black hole really shows

When the respiratory virus season begins, it’s usually quite predictable. Patients start being admitted to hospitals with influenza or respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) around October in the northern hemisphere. Thousands of people get ill, and many die, but the odd extreme year aside, health systems across Europe and North America aren’t typically at risk of being overwhelmed.

But the pandemic has derailed this predictability. It has added another virus to the seasonal mix, and flu and RSV are returning this year with a vengeance. A “twin” or even “tripledemic” could be on the way, with all three viruses hitting at once, illnesses soaring, and health systems creaking under the pressure. Already there are signs this is happening.

Many hospitals in the US are at capacity, caring for large numbers of children infected with RSV and other viruses, many more than would be expected at this time of year. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) doesn’t track RSV cases, hospitalizations, and deaths as it does for flu, but hospitals across the country have been reporting peak levels typically observed in December and January. Nearly one in five PCR tests for RSV came back positive in the week ending October 29, with this rate having doubled over the course of a month. Generally speaking, the higher the proportion of tests that come back positive, the more common a virus is in the wider community. In the three years before the pandemic, an average of just 3 percent of tests came back positive in October.

This is a hangover from the pandemic. Over the past two years, RSV and flu were kept down thanks to the protective measures people took against the coronavirus: mask wearing, hand washing, and isolating. Between the beginning of the pandemic and March 2021, the weekly positivity rate for RSV tests remained below 1 percent, according to the CDC—down where it was in pre-pandemic times.

In July of this year, health specialists warned in The Lancet that the benefits of these pandemic precautions could end up having a negative effect this winter season. Reducing exposure to common endemic viruses such as RSV and flu, experts argued, risked creating an “immunity gap” in people either born during the pandemic or who hadn’t previously built up sufficient immunity against these viruses.

That prediction now appears to be coming true, as children are catching these viruses for the first time, without having built up any prior immunity, and falling badly ill. “We’re seeing kids at older ages getting RSV that would have previously got it at a younger age,” says Rachel Baker, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Brown University in Rhode Island, who was a coauthor of the Lancet comment piece. “That’s putting some pressure on hospitals.”

RSV typically causes mild cold-like symptoms, but infections can be dangerous for infants. Their tiny lungs and muscles cannot muster the strength to cough up or sneeze out the mucus in their airways. Deaths are rare, but the virus can kill. Adults with weaker immune systems are vulnerable too, such as those with underlying health conditions or who are very old. Unlike for Covid-19 and flu, there are currently no approved RSV vaccines (Pfizer has one in trials, given to pregnant people to protect infants, that may become available next year).

Flu hospitalizations have also been higher than usual for this time of year—13,000 adults and children have been hospitalized in the US so far, and 730 people have died. “We’re seeing the highest influenza hospitalization rates going back a decade,” José Romero, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said on November 4. And a similar picture is emerging across Europe. The United Kingdom’s Health Security Agency said in late October that hospital admissions for respiratory diseases are rising, and they’re climbing fastest in children under 5.

The fact that the southern hemisphere is coming off a pretty bad winter season—Australia experienced its worst flu season in five years—is another signal that the northern hemisphere is in for a rough one. Flu viruses that circulate during the southern hemisphere winter often end up infecting people in the north six months later, so more illness in Australia suggests this winter’s flu in the US and Europe will be particularly virulent. “For many healthy adults this will predominantly be an inconvenience, but for vulnerable groups this could be a concern,” says Neil Mabbott, professor of immunopathology at the University of Edinburgh in the UK.

This winter will be the first time that these three respiratory viruses can circulate completely freely, meaning there is a real prospect of things getting worse. But SARS-CoV-2, because of its ability to mutate, is a wildcard when trying to guess exactly what will happen. “It’s like a dream and a nightmare for someone doing prediction,” says Mary Krauland, a research assistant professor who models SARS-CoV-2 and influenza outbreaks at the University of Pittsburgh.

Because there are no plans to reintroduce control measures, Krauland says it is quite possible that SARS-CoV-2 infections will surge again this winter, ratcheting up pressure on health services. It is unclear whether that surge would collide with the influenza and RSV peaks. “You can imagine many scenarios, but it’s very difficult to pin down which one is the most likely,” she says. At the moment, most Covid cases are caused by lineages of the Omicron variant that seem to cause milder disease than earlier forms of the virus but which are able to dodge immunity from vaccines and previous infections. These variants and subvariants also compete with each other for human hosts. Should a new, more infectious variant emerge and outcompete the others, Krauland says, infections could rise sharply again. Hospitals could then feel the effects, because as infections accumulate, the number of hospitalizations and deaths also increase.

For the health system, two or three simultaneous epidemics is a worrying scenario, but so too is the prospect of contracting more than one virus at the same time. Scientists are not sure how the viruses interact, but there is evidence that simultaneously catching SARS-CoV-2 and influenza increases the risk of severe illness and death. In a study of nearly 7,000 hospitalized patients with Covid-19, researchers in the UK found that 227 patients had also tested positive for the flu, and they were more likely to require ventilation.

But how the influenza and RSV viruses interact and influence the course of disease is not clear: There have been few studies investigating this, with conflicting results, says Pablo Murcia, professor of integrative virology at the University of Glasgow. This is due to various confounding factors that muddy the water in coinfections, such as a patient’s preexisting conditions or their immunological status, the strains of viruses involved, or the time that’s elapsed between the first and second viral infection.

Catching both viruses at the same time is a troubling possibility. In a lab experiment, Murcia and his team deliberately infected human lung cells with both viruses and found that they fused together to form a palm-tree-shaped hybrid virus—with RSV forming the trunk and influenza the leaves—which could infect new cells even in the presence of flu antibodies, in essence using its new form to bypass existing flu immunity. Their findings were published in the journal Nature Microbiology in October. But it’s not known whether hybrid viruses form in people, and if they do, whether they cause disease, says Murcia.

Krauland expects that few people will contract multiple viruses at once, provided they stay at home as soon as they notice any symptoms of infection, even if mild. “The three are kind of competing for hosts at this point,” she says, and if they are, this could lead to all three viral waves being flattened. But whether this will happen—and if so, if it will keep hospitals from buckling under the pressure—we probably won’t know until spring.

Brace Yourself for a Triple Wave of Seasonal Viruses

(May require free registration to view)

Nov. 8 (UPI) -- A professional archer from Denmark broke a Guinness World Record by shooting seven arrows in a row through a tiny keyhole.

Lars Anderson, who posts his archery stunts to his YouTube page, took on the Guinness World Record for most consecutive arrows shot in a row through a keyhole in Lyngby.

Anderson successfully shot the arrows through a keyhole that Guinness mandated could be no more than 10 millimeters -- about .39 inch -- wide.

Anderson said he used arrows without feathers for the attempt because feathers would have become caught in the hole.

Source

Redditor discovers legendary 1956 computer in grandparents’ basement

On Monday, the Energy Information Agency released its annual figures for how the US generated electrical power during 2021. The year saw lots of changes as the country moved out of the pandemic, with coal, wind, and solar power all seeing large jumps compared to the previous year. Meanwhile, widespread drought conditions in the west caused a significant drop in hydroelectric production.

 

Longer term, the big stories are the two renewables, wind and solar. Wind only started outproducing hydro three years ago but has now developed a commanding lead. And solar has gone from a rounding error to 4 percent of annual production over the last decade and is poised for explosive growth.

Living fossils

2021 marks the first increase in annual coal use since the Obama administration. Megawatts generated via coal were up by 16 percent compared to the year prior and accounted for a bit under 22 percent of the total electricity produced. But this is likely to be a temporary change. No new coal plants are planned in the US, and the past decade has seen both the number of operating coal plants drop by half, and coal go from powering 44 percent of US electricity production to only 22 percent.

 

In the same period, natural gas has gone from supplying a quarter of US electricity to just under 40 percent, with the number of megawatts produced using gas rising by over half. It saw a small decrease over the past year (roughly 3 percent), something that's happened two other times during the past decade.

 

The future of gas in the US is difficult to predict. In many parts of the country, it's now undercut by both wind and solar, although it still outperforms coal and nuclear. And exports of liquified natural gas to Europe had already grown dramatically over the last five years—before the war in Ukraine increased the profits to be earned there. Still, it's unlikely that gas will see anything close to the plunge that coal has experienced.

 

In addition to these major generating sources, the US has a smattering of things powered by diesel and other petroleum products. Combined, all of these carbon-emitting sources accounted for just over 60 percent of the US's electricity in 2021, up about 3 percent from the previous year, primarily driven by the greater use of coal. But a decade ago, carbon-emitting sources delivered over 68 percent of the country's electricity. That drop has been driven by the growth of renewable sources.

Stuck in idle

Nuclear power has been in an odd stasis for the past decade. A decade ago, it produced about 19 percent of the country's electricity. In 2021, it produced about 19 percent of the country's electricity. This is despite the fact that the total number of nuclear plants has dropped by 17 percent over the intervening 10 years. The difference comes in part because the closed plants were generally on the small side, and a large new reactor was completed at an existing plant.

 

Nuclear remains the largest single source of electricity free of carbon emissions in the US, and the Biden administration is using subsidies to try to keep it that way. Still, the combination of wind, solar, and hydro now produces roughly the same amount of power as nuclear in 2021.

 

It would already have been eclipsed if it hadn't been for the drop in hydro production. The number of hydroelectric plants is virtually unchanged since 2011, but its electricity production was down considerably since last year—it's only been lower once over the last decade. There's a lot of inter-annual variability in hydro production, so a 12 percent year-over-year drop is not unusual. But a lot of reservoirs in the western US have been reaching critically low levels due to ongoing droughts, so it's not clear whether we can expect a rebound in hydro production anytime soon.

US renewable growth puts them on par with nuclear

But debates about quantum mechanics—be they on chat forums, in the media or in science fiction—can often get muddled thanks to a number of persistent myths and misconceptions. Here are four.

1. A cat can be dead and alive

Erwin Schrödinger could probably never have predicted that his thought experiment, Schrödinger's cat, would attain internet meme status in the 21st century.

It suggests that an unlucky feline stuck in a box with a kill switch triggered by a random quantum event—radioactive decay, for example—could be alive and dead at the same time, as long as we don't open the box to check.

We've long known that quantum particles can be in two states—for example in two locations—at the same time. We call this a superposition.

Scientists have been able to show this in the famous double-slit experiment, where a single quantum particle, such as a photon or electron, can go through two different slits in a wall simultaneously. How do we know that?

In quantum physics, each particle's state is also a wave. But when we send a stream of photons—one by one—through the slits, it creates a pattern of two waves interfering with each other on a screen behind the slit. As each photon didn't have any other photons to interfere with when it went through the slits, it means it must simultaneously have gone through both slits—interfering with itself (image below).

For this to work, however, the states (waves) in the superposition of the particle going through both slits need to be "coherent"—having a well defined relationship with each other.

These superposition experiments can be done with objects of ever increasing size and complexity. One famous experiment by Anton Zeilinger in 1999 demonstrated quantum superposition with large molecules of Carbon-60 known as "buckyballs".

So what does this mean for our poor cat? Is it really both alive and dead as long as we don't open the box? Obviously, a cat is nothing like an individual photon in a controlled lab environment, it is much bigger and more complex. Any coherence that the trillions upon trillions of atoms that make up the cat might have with each other is extremely shortlived.

This does not mean that quantum coherence is impossible in biological systems, just that it generally won't apply to big creatures such as cats or a human.

2. Simple analogies can explain entanglement

Entanglement is a quantum property which links two different particles so that if you measure one, you automatically and instantly know the state of the other—no matter how far apart they are.

Common explanations for it typically involve everyday objects from our classical macroscopic world, such as dice, cards or even pairs of odd-colored socks. For example, imagine you tell your friend you have placed a blue card in one envelope and an orange card in another. If your friend takes away and opens one of the envelopes and finds the blue card, they will know you have the orange card.

But to understand quantum mechanics, you have to imagine the two cards inside the envelopes are in a joint superposition, meaning they are both orange and blue at the same time (specifically orange/blue and blue/orange). Opening one envelope reveals one color determined at random. But opening the second still always reveals the opposite color because it is "spookily" linked to the first card.

One could force the cards to appear in a different set of colors, akin to doing another type of measurement. We could open an envelope asking the question: "Are you a green or a red card?". The answer would again be random: green or red. But crucially, if the cards were entangled, the other card would still always yield the opposite outcome when asked the same question.

Albert Einstein attempted to explain this with classical intuition, suggesting the cards could have been provided with a hidden, internal instruction set which told them in what color to appear given a certain question. He also rejected the apparent "spooky" action between the cards that seemingly allows them to instantly influence each other, which would mean communication faster than the speed of light, something forbidden by Einstein's theories.

However, Einstein's explanation was subsequently ruled out by Bell's theorem (a theoretical test created by the physicist John Stewart Bell) and experiments by 2022's Nobel laureates. The idea that measuring one entangled card changes the state of the other is not true. Quantum particles are just mysteriously correlated in ways we can't describe with everyday logic or language—they don't communicate while also containing a hidden code, as Einstein had thought. So forget about everyday objects when you think about entanglement.

3. Nature is unreal and 'non-local'

Bell's theorem is often said to prove that nature isn't "local", that an object isn't just directly influenced by its immediate surroundings. Another common interpretation is that it implies properties of quantum objects aren't "real", that they do not exist prior to measurement.

But Bell's theorem only allows us to say that quantum physics means nature isn't both real and local if we assume a few other things at the same time. These assumptions include the idea that measurements only have a single outcome (and not multiple, perhaps in parallel worlds), that cause and effect flow forward in time and that we do not live in a "clockwork universe" in which everything has been predetermined since the dawn of time.

Despite Bell's theorem, nature may well be real and local, if you allowed for breaking some other things we consider common sense, such as time moving forward. And further research will hopefully narrow down the great number of potential interpretations of quantum mechanics. However, most options on the table—for example, time flowing backwards, or the absence of free will—are at least as absurd as giving up on the concept of local reality.

4. Nobody understands quantum mechanics

A classic quote (attributed to physicist Richard Feynman, but in this form also paraphrasing Niels Bohr) surmises: "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand it."

This view is widely held in public. Quantum physics is supposedly impossible to understand, including by physicists. But from a 21st-century perspective, quantum physics is neither mathematically nor conceptually particularly difficult for scientists. We understand it extremely well, to a point where we can predict quantum phenomena with high precision, simulate highly complex quantum systems and even start to build quantum computers.

Superposition and entanglement, when explained in the language of quantum information, requires no more than high-school mathematics. Bell's theorem doesn't require any quantum physics at all. It can be derived in a few lines using probability theory and linear algebra.

Where the true difficulty lies, perhaps, is in how to reconcile quantum physics with our intuitive reality. Not having all the answers won't stop us from making further progress with quantum technology. We can simply just shut up and calculate.

Fortunately for humanity, Nobel winners Aspect, Clauser, and Zeilinger refused to shut up and kept asking why. Others like them may one day help reconcile quantum weirdness with our experience of reality.

Provided by The Conversation

Source

NASA will leave its $4.1 billion rocket outside as Nicole approaches Florida

The controversial way the firings happened - with many employees discovering they had been laid off when they were shut out of their emails - sparked anger, frustration and even lawsuits against Mr Musk.

Among those sacked were some of the firm's most senior executives.

In their place, Mr Musk has reportedly put together a small team of his own - of friends and confidantes - and entrusted them with the job of implementing his vision for Twitter.

They appear to include Sriram Krishnan, an Indian-origin software engineer and former Twitter executive who left the company last year.

Last week, Mr Krishnan, who now works at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz or a16z, tweeted that he was "helping out Mr Musk temporarily".

Since then, his name has been trending in India, where many are bitter about the unceremonious sacking of former CEO Parag Agrawal and other Indian-origin executives.

It is not immediately clear in what capacity Mr Krishnan will be joining Twitter - the BBC contacted him for comment, but he said he "can't help right now with anything Twitter-related".

Elon Musk has made clear he plans big changes at Twitter

It's also hard to say how close his association with Mr Musk is at this point, though reports have repeatedly described him as a part of his "inner circle".

In a 2021 interview with Marina Mogilko, who runs a YouTube channel called Silicon Valley Girl, Mr Krishnan said he and his wife Aarthi Ramamurthy first got to know Mr Musk when he helped with "something Twitter-related" a few years ago and that they "built a relationship through that".

The couple also met Mr Musk during a private tour of SpaceX's headquarters in California "several years ago", according to The New York Times.

But the most prominent exchange between them came in February 2021 when Mr Musk appeared in a talk show the couple hosted on Clubhouse.

Social media burst out with incredulity - the world's richest man had just showed up on an invite-only app for an exclusive - and the show began to trend heavily.

Within minutes, the chatroom quickly hit the Clubhouse limit of 5,000 concurrent listeners as Mr Musk spoke about life on Mars, the possibility of aliens and about how one of his companies had wired up a monkey's brain to "play video games with his mind".

Still processing a truly surreal evening.

A quick sample of the reactions from last night ( my favorite is of course when we were the #1 trend on Twitter with @elonmusk ). Cc @aarthir pic.twitter.com/rJPcUgaIeZ
 — Sriram Krishnan - sriramk.eth (@sriramk) February 1, 2021

The Good Time Show, which has since moved to other platforms, continues to be hugely popular in the US.

The podcast offers a glimpse into the overlapping worlds of internet culture, politics and the latest developments in Silicon Valley, where Mr Krishnan and Ms Ramamurthy are well-known figures.

Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of a16z, says that Mr Krishnan is "perhaps the only person in the world to have served in senior product positions in the three biggest social platforms of our time", according to the company website. In addition to Twitter, the 37-year-old worked at Microsoft, Yahoo, Snap and Facebook in the past.

Ms Ramamurthy, meanwhile, worked at Facebook and Netflix before starting two of her own companies.

Together, they have been described as a well-connected "tech power couple".

Chennai years

Mr Krishnan was born in the southern Indian city of Chennai in what he described as a "very traditional" middle-income household.

His life changed when he convinced his father to buy him a computer - a luxury in the late 1990s.

"It cost about 60,000-70,000 rupees [$730-840; £638-744], a large part of my father's pay check," he told Ms Mogilko in the 2021 interview. "I told him I would use it for my studies."

But he still did not have internet because a dial-up connection was expensive and unaffordable.

So he would buy coding books instead to teach himself the basics, and practise every night.

Mr Krishnan met Ms Ramamurthy online in 2002 while studying engineering at Anna University in Chennai. By then, he was already on the path to becoming a software engineer. So was Ms Ramamurthy, a student in the same college.

"A mutual friend wanted to start a coding project, so he decided to get the two nerdiest people he knew - me and Aarthi - on board," he told Ms Mogilko.

The collaboration did not survive, but his and Ms Ramamurthy's relationship did. The couple continued to chat on Yahoo messenger for a year until they finally met in person.

In the months to come, the internet continued to be the foundation of their relationship as they "idealised the myth of Silicon Valley" as the future of American endeavour, and dreamed of being there someday.

"One of our first dates was watching bit-torrent copy of a 1999 Silicon Valley film in my tiny room," Mr Krishnan said in the interview.

Their big break came a few months later when one of Mr Krishnan's blog posts on Microsoft was noticed by a company executive, who then hired the couple in 2005.

Life in America

In 2007, Mr Krishnan moved to the US and Ms Ramamurthy joined him six months later.

Mr Krishnan has said in the past that it took them a while to get used to living there, but work continued to be their solace.

After working at Microsoft, the couple moved on to other big tech companies. They got American citizenship in 2017, a moment Mr Krishnan has described in interviews as being on a par with their wedding and the birth of their first daughter.

Sriram Krishnan and Aarthi Ramamurthy run a popular podcast series

Last December, they started their career as podcasters - a decision born out of pandemic-fuelled boredom, Mr Krishnan has explained in the past.

So, they decided to get on to Clubhouse, which became popular during the pandemic, to have conversations about the tech space.

The interviews are woven with analysis and candid repartee with experts, including the likes of Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and the late fashion designer Virgil Aboh.

Twitter connection

While little is known about Mr Krishnan's ties with Mr Musk, he has been an open admirer of the billionaire in the past, describing him as an "inspirational person and an iconic founder".

He has also openly supported Mr Musk's vision for Twitter and criticised practices such as de-platforming on the microblogging website.

"Having extrajudicial internet cops that lead to enforcement on your platform is the road to dystopian authoritarianism," he wrote on Twitter last month.

There's speculation that Mr Musk might have got Mr Krishnan - a cryptocurrency expert - on board to integrate his dogecoin with Twitter.

Whether Mr Krishnan will become the next "Technoking" (Mr Musk's alternative title for CEO) of Twitter or not, interesting times lie ahead for the social platform - and Mr Krishnan could be right in the middle of it.

Source

Since Saturday, Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man and the new owner of Twitter, has embarked on a tweeting spree so voluminous that he is on a pace to post more than 750 times this month, or more than 25 times a day, according to an analysis from the digital investigations company Memetica. That would be up from about 13 times a day in April, when Mr. Musk first agreed to buy Twitter.

His recent tweets have covered an increasingly broad range of topics. Over the last four days, Mr. Musk, 51, needled the comedian Kathy Griffin and beefed with the Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey on the platform. He made masturbation jokes aimed at a rival — and much smaller — social media platform. He posted, then deleted, a tweet engaging with a quote from a white nationalist. And he defended his ownership of Twitter, including why he had laid off 50 percent of the company’s staff and why people should not impersonate others on the service.

All in all, Mr. Musk, who described himself in his Twitter profile as “Chief Twit” before later changing the description to “Twitter Complaint Hotline Operator,” has tweeted more than 105 times since Friday, mainly about Twitter, according to a tally by Memetica.

“Birds haven’t been real since 1986,” Mr. Musk tweeted on Sunday in a discussion thread about Twitter, including a meme from an absurdist conspiracy theory that posits that birds are actually robot spies. He did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Musk is under tremendous scrutiny 11 days after completing his $44 billion deal for Twitter, which was the largest leveraged buyout of a technology company in history. On Friday, he cut roughly 3,700 of the company’s 7,500 employees, saying he had no choice because Twitter was losing $4 million a day. At the same time, he has found himself embroiled in the same content debates that have plagued other social media companies, including how to give people a way to speak out without spreading misinformation and toxic speech.

Already Mr. Musk has had to delay the rollout of a subscription product that would have given people check marks on their Twitter profiles. Advertisers have paused their spending on Twitter over fears that Mr. Musk will loosen content rules on the platform. And the midterm elections are set to be a test of how a slimmed-down Twitter will perform in catching inflammatory posts and misinformation about voting and election results.

In a report that was published on Monday, researchers at the Fletcher School at Tufts University said the early signs of Mr. Musk’s Twitter “show the platform is heading in the wrong direction under his leadership — at a particularly inconvenient time for American democracy.”

The researchers said they had tracked narratives about civil war, election fraud, citizen policing of voting, and allegations of pedophilia and grooming on Twitter from July through October. “Post-Musk takeover, the quality of the conversation has decayed” as more extremists and misinformation peddlers have tested the platform’s boundaries, the researchers wrote.

Amid the hubbub, Mr. Musk’s behavior on Twitter suggests that he intends to simply post through it. And while he has always been a prolific tweeter, he has raised the level in recent days.

On Friday, Mr. Musk, who has more than 114 million followers on Twitter, proposed a “thermonuclear name & shame” campaign against brands that had stopped advertising on the platform. He said that he had done everything he could to appease advertisers but that activists had worked against him to cause brands to drop out of spending on Twitter.

At the same time, the billionaire was embroiled in a fight over his plan to charge Twitter users $8 a month for a subscription service, Twitter Blue, which would give a check mark to anyone who paid. The check mark had been free for notable people whose identities had been verified by the company, including celebrities, politicians and journalists, as a way to protect against impersonation.

Critics were unhappy about Mr. Musk’s plans to monetize the check mark, saying it could lead to the spread of misinformation and fraud on the platform. In protest, some Twitter accounts that had check marks changed their display names and photographs to match Mr. Musk’s account over the weekend, a move intended to illustrate why it would be confusing if anyone could buy a check mark.

On Sunday, Mr. Musk announced that he would permanently suspend any account “engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying ‘parody.’” The billionaire, who had previously criticized Twitter when it permanently barred users, then barred Ms. Griffin, who had posed as him on the service.

Mr. Musk, who has called himself a “free speech absolutist,” is learning the basic expectation of content moderation for popular social networks, said Daphne Keller, director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center.

“His ideas have been incoherent for a while,” she said.

On Sunday night, Mr. Musk responded to a tweet featuring a quote from a white nationalist, before deleting the post and moving on to squabble with Mr. Dorsey over Birdwatch, a feature that lets community members add context to tweets that they believe are misleading. Mr. Musk, who previously lauded the feature, proposed changing the feature’s name to “Community Notes.”

“Community notes is the most boring Facebook name ever,” replied Mr. Dorsey, who owns a $1 billion stake in Mr. Musk’s Twitter.

Then on Monday, Mr. Musk suggested he might pursue civil society groups and activists who were pushing for Twitter advertiser boycotts, when he replied to a right-wing commentator that “we do” have grounds for legal action. Legal experts said the holding of boycotts for social and political goals is protected under the First Amendment.

Mr. Musk also tweeted that people should vote Republican in Tuesday’s midterm elections. “Shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties, therefore I recommend voting for a Republican Congress, given that the Presidency is Democratic,” he tweeted. He later posted that he was an independent with a “voting history of entirely Democrat until this year.”

He soon moved on. Mr. Musk’s attention became fixed on Mastodon, a Twitter competitor that has gained traction over the past 10 days. Playing off Mastodon’s name, he made several crude jokes about masturbation — then deleted those posts an hour later.

Source

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

One-third of respondents to Nature’s 2022 global graduate-student survey are lukewarm about the value of their current programme. Sixty-six per cent of the PhD and masters’ students who responded think that their degree will “substantially” or “dramatically” improve their job prospects, but the rest see little or no benefit. Less than one-third agree that they expect to find a permanent job within one year of graduating, or that their programme is leaving them well prepared to eventually find a satisfying career.

“I don’t think a PhD degree will do me much good,” says survey respondent Joshua Caley, a master’s student at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, a country where the impacts of COVID‑19 and economic uncertainty continue to cloud job prospects. Caley plans to pursue a PhD after his master’s, mainly to spend more time studying his topic — the biochemical basis of age-related disease — but he doesn’t have any expectation that an advanced degree will help him to advance his career. “I have a lot of friends and colleagues who did a PhD,” he says, “and it didn’t really help them out”.

More than 3,200 self-selected respondents from around the world took part in the questionnaire (see ‘Nature’s graduate student survey’). It was the journal’s first such survey since the start of the pandemic, and the first to include master’s as well as PhD students. The results point to widespread uncertainty about career paths and the value of advanced degrees (see ‘Career concerns’).

The survey also highlights a significant disconnect between the training that students are receiving and the realities of their future careers, says Shweta Ganapati, a policy adviser at the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada in Ottawa. “There has been a shift in the labour market, and PhD programmes have not changed sufficiently to adapt,” says Ganapati, who reviewed the results. “There’s a reason why they are not optimistic. We can fix this, but we aren’t moving fast enough.”

Nearly half (47%) of respondents say that they are dissatisfied with their level of career-pathway guidance and advice, and another 20% are neutral. As a fourth-year PhD student at Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, Erika Murce says that she is learning plenty about a career as a university researcher — writing papers, applying for grants, navigating departmental politics. “Most of my training is for academia,” she says. But there’s one big problem: Murce doesn’t want to stay in academia. “I started to see that my supervisor is constantly under pressure,” she says. “I thought, ‘I don’t think I want this kind of life.’”

‘I don’t think I want this kind of life’: Erika Murce plans to quit academia after her PhD because of the constant pressures involved.

Credit: Erika Murce Silva

Murce says that the university is gradually exposing students to other career possibilities. She says that she’ll occasionally receive a newsletter about career options or hear about a career-development seminar at a nearby institution. “In my first year, I barely saw anything like that,” she says. “Maybe there’s a shift in mentality.”

Widespread dissatisfaction with career training was also evident in a questionnaire-based study from 2021, co-authored by Ganapati and Tessy Ritchie, a chemist at the United States Military Academy at West Point in New York. That study gathered responses from 176 PhD students and recent alumni, mostly in the United States, to take a closer look at career development in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Alumni said that they were largely unaware of career options while they were in graduate school, and had few opportunities to prepare for jobs outside academia. (Ganapati and Ritchie point out that they speak for themselves, not for their institutions.)

Shifting aspirations

At a time when career training for graduate students in science remains focused mainly on university-based positions, interest in that sector seems to be fading. Less than half (48%) of respondents say that they would prefer, ultimately, to work in academia. That’s down from 56% in 2019, when Nature last surveyed PhD students. Twenty-eight per cent of respondents in 2022 say that they would most like to work in industry. Other preferred destinations include government (9%), the medical sector (8%) and non-profit institutions (7%).

Ganapati notes that about half of the alumni in her study found academic jobs, but that those included postdoctoral positions and other temporary jobs. “It’s a reality that a very small percentage of PhD graduates will end up with a tenure-track professorship,” she says. In the larger picture, she says, it’s not surprising that enthusiasm for academic careers seems to be on the decline. “Right now, the pay is bad, the work–life balance is bad and mental health is an issue,” she says. “If any of those shift, research jobs in academia will be more appealing.”

Nature’s graduate student survey

This article is the third of six linked to Nature’s global survey of graduate students. Further articles are scheduled for the weeks to follow, including explorations of master’s students’ responses; mobility issues for all participants; and students’ experience of racism and discrimination. The survey was created together with Shift Learning, a market-research company in London, and was advertised on nature.com, in Springer Nature digital products and through e-mail campaigns. It was offered in English, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, French and Portuguese. The full survey data sets are available at go.nature.com/3dyefwg.

Whatever the ultimate goal, not all graduate students are confident that their degree will help them to get there (see ‘Taking the next step’). Twenty-four per cent of respondents think that their degree will “somewhat” improve their job prospects, and 6% feel that their degree will either “barely” advance their cause or not help at all. Another 4% say that they are unsure how it will affect their career trajectory. When asked to name the biggest difficulties for graduate students in their country, 56% of respondents rank “finding a permanent job after completing my education” among the top three.

“I’m part of a generation of people who were always told by their parents or advisers that a college degree opens doors,” says survey respondent Donna McCullough, a PhD student at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. “But by the time we got to the work field, that was no longer the case.”

‘Political and highly subjective’

Colleen Limegrover, a PhD student in neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, UK, was putting the finishing touches to her degree when she responded to the survey in June 2022. She says that she learnt much about her field during her time at Cambridge, but that pandemic-related shutdowns slowed her progress and made it difficult to publish papers. “You start with rose-coloured glasses about what your programme is going to be like, and it’s hardly ever that way,” she says.

Limegrover, who worked for seven years at a biotechnology start-up in the United States before starting her PhD programme, says she originally thought that her combination of industry experience and PhD training would make it easy to find a management position at a biotech firm. But, she says, her preliminary job searches were discouraging. She found that some companies now expect candidates to have completed a postdoctoral position, and that her years of work at the bench carried surprisingly little weight.

Donna McCulloch is concerned that a PhD no longer ‘opens doors’ to a secure career.

Credit: D. K. McCullough

“How they interpret lines on a résumé is political and highly subjective,” she says. “This archaic mindset that somehow academic experience is more valuable than industry experience needs to change.” (At the time of going to press, Limegrover had just accepted an offer of an industry job in Boston, Massachusetts.)

Other respondents used the survey’s comment section (see ‘Career conversation’) to share misgivings about their training and their futures. “It is not appropriate to do a PhD in clinical-research groups like the one I am in,” wrote a doctoral student in Spain. (The comment was translated from Spanish.) “It is not the priority of supervisors who have other more important tasks as clinicians. In these cases, the student is not properly supervised and there is no correct training.”

Career conversation

Respondents used free-text comments to share their thoughts on training and future careers. Comments have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

I honestly do not know if I’ll end up working in science after my PhD. There are no guarantees. Many of my friends are tutoring high-school science. One even worked in a funeral home for a while. She had a PhD in molecular biology and several years of industry experience. So what hope do I have? — PhD student, South Africa

I thought I wanted to be a professor at a liberal-arts college, but the job market is bad for that and the pay is mostly horrendous. My goal now is to take almost any option that gets me away from the bench. — PhD student, United States

In the UK, a PhD is of little value with regard to a career. There are very few jobs in academia and these are increasingly unattractive in terms of pay and conditions. In industry or other careers, a PhD is unnecessary and would be better avoided. — PhD student, United Kingdom

All of my peers seem to be shocked at the lack of job prospects after they graduate. No one is telling them to look early and network. That’s what I did and now my life is much less stressful. — PhD student, New Zealand

I wish I’d known about the job opportunities available to me with a bachelor’s degree in hospital labs and public-health labs. I now feel like I’m simultaneously overqualified and underqualified. — PhD student, United States

As part of the last year of the master’s degree, my main concern has been finding a PhD to continue my studies. This search has had a deep impact on my mental health throughout the last months. My advice is to start looking for PhD positions as soon as possible. — Master’s student, Italy

A doctoral student in the United States opined: “The academic-research training pipeline is in trouble, but those in the positions to help haven’t realized it yet. Project scientists are leaving. Postdocs are more difficult to recruit, because more leave academia immediately after their PhD now. Who is going to be left to work in these labs? When the PhD is not seen as valuable, then it’s over — but I hope it doesn’t get to that point.”

The Nature survey suggests that lab leaders are an uncertain resource for career advice outside academia. Just over half (51%) of respondents agree that their supervisor makes time for frank discussions about careers, but only 32% say that their supervisor has useful advice for careers outside academia. Students are looking elsewhere for guidance. Fifty-eight per cent say that they have used social networks such as Twitter or LinkedIn to learn about career opportunities, and 43% say that they’ve leaned on their peers for information.

Seventy-seven per cent of respondents feel that their graduate programme is preparing them well for a possible research career. But 32% say that they are less likely to pursue such a career than when they started their programme. Ritchie suspects that the pressures of university research could put some talented people off the entire research enterprise. Students, she says, might well wonder whether they “have what it takes to compete at this level”, she says.

Marketable skills

Most graduate students feel that they are gaining at least some potentially marketable skills, especially ones that would come in handy in an academic career. Eighty-two per cent agree that they are well prepared to collect and analyse data, 76% say that they are learning to conduct experiments, and 72% that they are gaining experience in writing papers for publication in peer-reviewed journals. But relatively few say that they are being taught the necessary skills to manage people (32%), control a large budget (14%) or develop a business plan (12%).

Career training in STEM could greatly improve if universities paid more attention to the preferences and aspirations of graduate students, Ritchie says. For example, many students would like the opportunity to do a company internship as part of their training, but few get that chance.

“Incorporating feedback of students and alumni into improving the services that the university offers is going to set the stage for modernizing the PhD programme as it exists right now,” she says. Universities should develop a culture in which first-year graduate students are already thinking about their professional options and getting the chance to explore them. “If career awareness starts earlier, everybody can go through the process with the training and support that they need.”

Much of the pessimism around careers could be alleviated if students were more aware of their value and of the wide range of potential opportunities, Ganapati says. “Their prospects are good because PhD students can contribute so much to society,” she says. “We all live in knowledge economies. People who can think critically have much to offer.”

Nature 611, 413-416 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-03586-8

Source