SpaceX successfully launches its first Falcon Heavy in 40 months

The Maryland Lottery said the 41-year-old Montgomery County man placed a Racetrax bet at the Laurel Exxon in Laurel using the numbers 7-9-11-3 in Superfecta configuration.

The bet earned the man a $50,988 prize.

The same player previously visited Maryland Lottery headquarters to collect a $60,564.20 Racetrax jackpot in January.

The man said he often plays Bonus Match 5 and will occasionally buy Powerball and Mega Millions tickets, but Racetrax is his favorite.

"It's the fun of watching the horses run," he told lottery officials.

The winner said his latest prize will go toward making a down payment on a house in Gaithersburg.

Source

For about as long as I’ve been alive, there have been no sihek on the island of Guam.

The sihek, or the Guam kingfisher, is a beautiful blue-gold songbird that’s been extirpated in the wild since the 1980s. Like most of Guam’s native birds – 10 out of 12 native species – the sihek rapidly declined after the introduction of the invasive brown tree snake brought to the island after the second world war as a stowaway on military ships.

It is hard to articulate the trauma that is the absence of birdsong.

It’s even harder to describe the feeling that accompanied the recent announcement by the US Fish and Wildlife Service of its proposal to release some of the roughly 140 sihek now being bred in captivity in zoos across the country, not on Guam, but on Palmyra Atoll instead.

Palmyra Atoll is a set of remote islands roughly 1,000 miles (1.609km) south of Hawaii, and over 3,500 miles east of Guam. Palmyra has no permanent human population and is administered by the service alongside other third parties, including the Nature Conservancy. The theory is that because there are no brown tree snakes on Palmyra, the birds will have a fighting chance. On one hand, the people of Guam are elated that the sihek may soon fly free. On the other, we’re grief-stricken because Palmyra is not the bird’s home. Its home is Guam. Its home is here with us.

While the federal government’s laudable hope is that the successful release of the sihek in Palmyra will pave the way for their eventual

repatriation in Guam, we have our doubts. First, the government has made precious little progress in eradicating the brown tree snake population in Guam. Incredibly, what counts as the most successful suppression protocol to date is dropping dead mice (which have been laced with acetaminophen) from the sky. Second, the US notoriously underestimates climate change as a determining factor in this equation.

The US navy has been authorized to injure or otherwise distrub up to 150 humpback whale mother-calf pairs a year as part of their naval operations near Guam. Illustration: Kate Nolan/The Guardian

Although more empirical studies linking climate change and invasive species at the landscape level are needed, it is clear that climate change facilitates the spread of invasive species and creates new opportunities for them to become more invasive. Certain extreme weather events such as tropical cyclones, which are predicted to intensify in coming years, will only exacerbate the matter.

Guam is incredibly vulnerable. Our coral reefs are under severe stress, as the ocean grows warmer and more acidic. In fact, bleaching caused by rising sea surface temperatures has killed a third of our reefs. Our freshwater supplies are likewise at risk, not only from drought and increased demand but also from saltwater intrusion due to sea level rise – which is happening faster in this part of the world than in others.

The island is on path to becoming even hotter, with the number of hot days (over 32C) expected to increase to 257 days out of the year.

Conversely, the number of cool nights (below 23C) is expected to decrease (from an average of 40 a year in 1950) to an average of zero a year.

If climate change is the god of death, it is a merciless one and it is coming for everything, even the cool respite of night.

Then again, in Guam, the god of death is being outdone by the god of war.

As I write this, the US military – in the name of national security and as part of its broader strategy of containing China’s rising influence in the region – is dramatically expanding its footprint on the island. As part of that expansion, it is constructing a firing range complex on the northern end of the island, which involves the destruction of hundreds of acres of limestone forest. The razing of these forests will endanger not only the sihek but other species as well, including the Marianas crow, the Marianas fruit bat and the Marianas eight-spot butterfly.

And that’s only on land.

At sea, the military is moving forward with plans to engage in nine types of advanced warfare activities over an area of 501,873 square nautical miles (1.7m square kilometres) – a surface size equivalent to California, Oregon, Washington, New York and New Jersey combined. These activities – which will include the use of explosives and active sonar – pose a serious threat to sea turtles and several species of dolphins and whales.

The navy has secured permission to “take” – that is, to injure or otherwise disturb a marine mammal in the wild – 29,000 whales and 37,000 dolphins each year. To take but one example, the navy has been authorized to “take” up to 150 humpback whale mother-calf pairs a year: that is, 75 mothers and 75 calves.

This is despite there being a well-known nursery in the waters off of Saipan, an island just north of Guam, where humpback whale calves are reared during this sensitive stage of life.

So you see, it is not only birdsong being lost but now whale song too.

When I was asked to write a reflection on what I’m most worried about losing in the face of climate change, I hesitated. Sometimes, it’s hard to face the truth.

The truth is we’ve lost so much already. The truth is we’re buckling beneath the pressure of three threats at once: climate change, invasive species and military expansion. The truth is that the three have formed an unholy trinity that now threatens to smash our small but ancient civilization and thereby rob the world of the gift of our difference.

Of course we’re not taking any of this lying down. Like other Indigenous communities around the world, we’re resisting. We’re telling the truth. We’re fighting for a different future.

A future where birds fly free. A future where whale calves have no trouble hearing their moms. A future full of song.

    Julian Aguon is the author of No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies and a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer prize for commentary

Source

On a recent weekend in Salem, Massachusetts, I wandered into the Salem Witch Board Museum.

The site of America’s infamous witch trials in 1692, Salem is now a commercialized ode to occultism: It is home to dozens of witchcraft shops, ghost tours, and “haunted” abodes.

Inside the museum, the history of a fascinating business is on display.

The walls and glass cases of the small gallery are lined with “talking boards” or “witch boards” — devices that supposedly allow people to communicate with spirits.

A selection of talking boards at the Salem Witch Board Museum in Salem, Massachusetts (Juliet Bennett-Rylah)

They work like so:

1.     The board is labeled with the alphabet, numbers (0-9), and the words “yes,” “no,” and some variation of “goodbye.”
2.     A player asks the board a question.
3.     An indicator mysteriously moves across the board, spelling out an answer.

You might know these devices as Ouija boards. But Ouija is a brand, like Kleenex or Tupperware. And at one point in time, it was a multimillion-dollar business.

“Think of Coke and Pepsi. Coke is probably number one, Pepsi is number two. There is no number two for the Ouija board,” the museum’s owner, John Kozik, told The Hustle.

When Kozik points out other brands in the collection, guests often assume they won’t work as well because they’re not “official,” as though ghosts harbor a brand-name preference.

This is the story of how, thanks to the combined forces of spiritualism and capitalism, Ouija became the go-to for communing with the dead.

How spiritualism became a business model

Spiritualism — the belief that the living can communicate with the dead — was already popular in Europe when it ignited across the US in the mid-19th century.

America’s obsession with spiritualism can largely be traced to the Fox sisters of Hydesville, New York, who interpreted messages from spirits that rapped on furniture and walls.

But for aspiring mediums without knocking spirits at their behest, there were other communication devices, like the talking board.

Two women using an early talking board in the 1890s (Talking Board Historical Society)

At first, talking boards were something people made themselves.

An 1886 article described how easy the “new scheme for mysterious communication” was to construct: You just needed a board marked with letters and numbers, and a planchette (French for “little plank”) to point to them.

Users would place their fingers on the planchette, and spirits would channel through them to point it to the desired letter.  

Among these early talking board enthusiasts was Charles Kennard, a fertilizer entrepreneur in Chestertown, Maryland. He didn’t seek answers from the great beyond so much as profit.

“He was one of those guys who’s always into seven to ten businesses, always looking for some cool opportunity,” Robert Murch, the president of The Talking Board Historical Society (and one of the nation’s foremost experts on Ouija boards) told The Hustle.

Kennard partnered with an undertaker and woodworker named E.C. Reiche to make and sell a dozen or so boards. Kennard suggested they go into business together, but Reiche failed to see a profit in something people could make themselves.

Kennard saw potential and kept at it.

After his fertilizer business dried up due to competition and drought in 1889, he moved to Baltimore to start anew. There, he met patent attorney Elijah Bond.

Call me Ouija

Bond was into Kennard’s business idea — and it didn’t hurt that Bond’s sister-in-law, Helen Peters, was a medium (someone who claims they can communicate with the dead).

In letters Murch uncovered, Kennard wrote of a seance Peters held in April 1890, during which he claimed they asked the board what it wanted to be called. It spelled “O-U-I-J-A,” then told the group it meant “good luck.”

Early pioneers of the Ouija board: Charles Kennard (top left), E.C. Reiche (top right), Elijah Bond (bottom left), and Helen Peters (bottom right)

(Talking Board Historical Society)

Ouija wasn’t a word in any language. Murch speculates it may have been a misspelling of Ouida, the sobriquet of Maria Louise Ramé, a writer Peters admired, but, whatever the case, it stuck.

Kennard incorporated The Kennard Novelty Company on Oct. 30, 1890, with investors Col. Washington Bowie, John F. Green, Harry Welles Rusk, and William H.A. Maupin.

Their mission? Selling as many Ouija boards as possible.

‘Proven at the patent office’

Bond’s role was to trademark the word “Ouija” and patent the board. Per Murch’s research, the patent office had rejected similar devices because their creators couldn’t prove they were summoning ghosts.

So, Bond brought Peters along. The pair were shuffled from clerk to clerk until they reached the office’s chief.

“The [chief clerk] walks in and says, ‘Look, I don’t know you and you don’t know me. But if that contraption can spell my name, you’ve got your patent,’” Murch said.

With Peters and Bond at the board, it revealed his name, letter by letter. The supposedly shaken clerk gave Bond his patent — and it gave Kennard a new tagline for the Ouija board in advertisements: “proven at the patent office.”

The original patent for the Ouija board, filed in 1891 (Google Patents)

By 1892, Ouija was so popular that the Kennard Novelty Company built additional factories in NYC, London, and Chicago, and a second in Baltimore. The boards sold for $1 (~$33 today) — a bargain for metaphysical messages.

The company’s leadership, however, had less staying power.

• Reiche, the undertaker, surfaced and asked for his cut of the profits, which Murch speculates left “a bad taste” in people’s mouths about Kennard.

• Kennard and Maupin cashed out in 1892, while Bond, who turned out to be terrible at business, departed after a disastrous attempt to oversee the UK factory.

Sans Kennard, Col. Washington Bowie renamed the company the Ouija Novelty Company, and enlisted William Fuld, his friend and a varnisher at the company, to manufacture the boards with his brother, Isaac.

The brothers did so until 1901, when Ouija, for reasons unknown, signed an exclusive agreement with William Fuld.

Big business

In 1918, Fuld built a three-story factory in Baltimore for $100k ($1.9m), purportedly because the Ouija board told him to “prepare for big business.”

Soon, the Ouija board was everywhere:

•     It was a popular dating game among couples, as depicted in Norman Rockwell’s cover for a 1920 edition of The Saturday Evening Post.

•     Songs, like “Weegee Weegee Tell Me Do,” “Ouija Mine,” and “Ouija Board” told of its powers.  

•     Bachelorette parties used it to predict guests’ romantic fates.

Left: The Ouija board graced the cover of the Saturday Evening Post in 1920; Right: A 1920s ad offering the Ouija for $1; Bottom: Ouija boards packed in a storefront window(Talking Board Historical Society)

With this newfound success, many competitors popped up.

Other manufacturers — including Kennard, Bond, and Fuld’s ousted brother — tried to cash in on the trend. But Fuld vanquished them all with lawsuits and pricing tactics (he undercut cheaper boards by manufacturing a discount “Mystifying Oracle” board).

Unfortunately, Fuld’s factory also killed him.

In 1927, he fell off the roof while supervising a flagpole installation and a broken rib punctured his heart. On his deathbed, he asked his children to never sell the Ouija board.

They honored his wish until there were no heirs who wanted to run the business. Then, in 1966, the Fuld family sold Ouija to Parker Brothers.

The Ouija goes corporate

Parker Brothers founder George Parker made his first game, Banking, in 1883 at age 16. It involved borrowing money from a central bank to see if you could make more.

By 1966, Parker Brothers was a flourishing company headquartered, like Kozik’s museum, in Salem — with games including Risk, Sorry, and Clue.

According to a 1986 interview with then-president Robert B.M. Barton, Parker Brothers paid a staggering ~$975k ($8.9m) for Ouija. It was the most expensive acquisition the company had ever made — it’d paid just $500 ($10.8k) for Monopoly in 1935 — but it paid off.

“I think I made the money back in two years,” Barton said at the time.

Consumers snapping up Ouija boards in the 1960s (Talking Board Historical Society)

Randolph Parker Barton, George Parker’s grandson and the company’s then-VP, said that when it acquired the patents, Ouija was selling ~400k boards per year, but had so many back orders, Parker Brothers wasn’t sure it could keep up.

In 1967 alone, Parker Brothers sold 2m boards, outselling every single one of its other 134 games — even Monopoly.

Though the Ouija board was a smash success, Parker Brothers lacked the finances to keep pace with the booming games business. In late ’67, the company was sold to General Mills.

General Mills had already purchased Play-Doh maker Rainbow Crafts, Inc. and Easy-Bake oven maker Kenner, which merged with Parker Brothers after the acquisition.

Tonka acquired Kenner Parker in 1987 in a deal worth $627m ($1.6B today), then sold to Hasbro for $516m ($1.1B) in 1991.

Hasbro retains the Ouija patent and trademark to this day, and occasionally licenses it to other companies:

•     Winning Moves makes a classic version that harkens back to the ’80s and ’90s

•     Bioworld Merch, which manufactures licensed apparel and accessories, sells blankets

•     Spirit Halloween sells Ouija-themed merchandise, including party decor, mugs, and candles

The Ouija brand is in full capitalism mode at the Spirit store — it’s on everything from socks to blankets (Spirit Halloween)

Hasbro also produced two horror films, Ouija (2014) and Ouija 2: Origin of Evil (2016), both commercially successful. The first film took in a global box office of $103.6m against a budget of $5m-$8m, despite its mostly negative reviews.

Which raises the question: How did Ouija go from a spiritual tool to a flirty dating game to something scary?

Blame The Exorcist

In 1973’s The Exorcist, 12-year-old Regan tells her mother she uses a Ouija board to talk to a spirit called Captain Howdy shortly before she’s possessed by a demon. Interestingly, Ouija sales went up 15% that year.

Sinister Ouija stories weren’t unheard of before The Exorcist, in both real life and pop culture. In the 1960 film 13 Ghosts, a levitating planchette warns of impending doom. In 1930, a New York woman convinced a friend to murder her romantic rival, claiming a spirit had ordered the deed.

The Exorcist’s greatest contribution to what Murch and Kozik call “Ouijastitions” is perhaps the idea that something bad could reach out if you used the board alone. 

The Ouija Board made a prominent appearance in the 1973 film, The Exorcist (Warner Bros. Pictures)

It’s repeated in Kevin Tenney’s Witchboard (1986), in which Whitesnake video vixen Tawny Kitaen is ensnared by a malevolent spirit after playing alone; both Ouija films; and countless other media — over time cultivating a deep fear and demonic connotations.  

And in 2008, when Hasbro released a pink Ouija marketed to young girls and sold exclusively at Toys R Us, some called for a boycott on Toys R Us.

Hasbro made a pink Monopoly as well. Kozik, who has the pink Ouija in his museum, asks what’s more evil: chatting with ghosts, or bankrupting all your friends.

Kozik’s museum also contains numerous boards mailed in by people hoping to rid themselves of a cursed artifact. One, Kozik told The Hustle, came packed in five pounds of salt.

But… does it work?

Ah, yes. The eternal question.

Remember the Fox sisters, who sparked the spiritualism movement in the US back in the mid-1800s? In 1888, one of them admitted — then recanted — that it had all been a hoax, but the spiritualism movement persisted without her.

To this day, there are many who believe that the Ouija board allows us to pierce the veil and seek advice from what lies beyond, or those who are so afraid of summoning a demon that they refuse to be near one.

The Ouija board remains mysterious to this day (Getty Images)

A more scientific explanation is the ideomotor effect, small movements we make without intending to or realizing we’re making them.

It could explain how Peters conjured a name similar to a writer she loved, or how Bond spelled out the name of a patent employee he — a patent attorney — perhaps already knew.

We’ll let you decide.

But one thing’s for sure: It turned into a pretty damn good business.

Source

The most prevailing myth is that Tokyo is still the same place as it was during its bubble hay-days in the 80s: The world’s most expensive city where everyone live in futuristic shoebox-sized pods that cost more than a mansion in the US.

What a lot of people must think Japanese apartments look like

Another myth I constantly hear is that Tokyo is a concrete jungle that is packed with massive skyscrapers.

Thanks to the researchers at the Greater London Authority Housing and Land Commission (link to their research paper HERE), I can now put these myths to rest once and for all:

Myth #1: Housing in Tokyo is Exorbitantly Expensive

Sure, rents in Tokyo are by no means cheap, especially compared to other cities in Japan. However, you got to take Tokyo for what it is: The world’s richest and most populous city (source here).

With that said, Tokyo is cheaper than most metropolises around the world:

Source: Rentcafe Global Housing Index (2017)

As the graph from 2017 shows, Tokyo is substantially cheaper than New York, London & Paris. The differences in rents have only widen since then as rents have risen much faster in those cities. On top of that, the Japanese yen has been dropping substantially this year which makes the gap wider than ever.

A common counter-argument is that salaries in those cities are higher and hence, people spend a similar percentage of their income on rent. However, Tokyoites allocate around 30% of their income on rent, while 40-50% is the norm in London, Paris, and New York City (source).

The main reason for this is that Tokyo builds so much more housing than those cities:

The GLA Housing and Land Authority (2019)

Since 1968, Tokyo’s housing stock has grown nearly 300%. By contrast, the other three cities have converged, although the underlying growth rates vary, with London’s housing stock having grown only by 36% since 1971, New York’s by 19% since 1970 and Paris’s by 32% since 1968.

*The reason why Tokyo’s housing stock has grown so rapidly in comparison to similarly sized cities can be found here.

Myth #2: People in Tokyo live in shoebox-sized apartments

The second most common myth I hear is that people Tokyo live in shoebox sized apartments. In fact, the average person in Tokyo have the same amount of floor-area as Parisians and Londoners:

On the graph above, average floor area per person has been calculated by dividing average floor area per occupied dwelling by average household size. By this measure, Paris and Tokyo have similar amounts of space per person as London, at 31 sqm, 32 sqm, and 33sqm per person respectively. Only in New York does people have more space with an average of 43 sqm in floor area. However, New Yorkers also pay far more in rent per square-meter.

Even more striking is that more people in Tokyo live in detached houses compared to apartments (30%) than in New York (16.3%) and Paris (12.3%).

Myth #3: Tokyo is a concrete jungle cramped with massive skyscrapers

Tokyo is definitely a packed city with a lot of concrete towers, but its often lower and less dense than people think. In fact, the tallest building in Tokyo is only 255 meters (not even in the top 100 of world’s tallest buildings).

Toranomon Hills (255m) in Toranomon, Tokyo

In fact, Tokyo is much lower than both New York and Paris:

Perhaps even more shocking is that Tokyo is less dense than New York and Paris. Again, only Greater London is less dense than Tokyo:

Below you can see a 3D visualization of population density with London top left, New York top right, Paris bottom left, and Tokyo bottom right:

As you can see, Tokyo is dense but not especially tall, whereas especially New York and Paris are incredibly tall and dense in the city center and very flat outside.

Conclusion

I hope this article have given some more clarity about housing in Tokyo. It’s not the capital of overpriced shoebox sized dwellings that you might have thought; but instead a very livable and affordable city.

As an investor, properties in Tokyo has underperformed compared to its peers, but even this is about to change. Prices are rising steadily here compared to its peers, especially now when we’re seeing property prices decreasing in London, New York and Paris while they are still going up in Tokyo.

At the end of the day, Tokyo is cheaper and more livable than New York, Paris and London, which is attracting a lot of people and investors. I am convinced that livability will be more and more important for a continued increase in real-estate prices, which is likely why we’ve seen more and more people and investors getting attracted to the city.

Source

New research has shown for the first time that energy release may be the molecular mechanism through which our internal clocks control energy balance. These findings have broad implications from dieting to sleep loss and more.

Health benefits come from eating during the daytime, demonstrating a potential link to energy release.

In a recent analysis, a researcher at the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT revealed that one of the founding narratives of the Green Revolution, a movement to modernize agriculture through technology that began more than 50 years ago, was untrue.

The Green Revolution is frequently credited for tripling the production of staple crops while only requiring 30% additional cultivated land in the second half of the 20th century. This accomplishment was largely made possible by the use of technology, such as the breeding of higher-yielding plant varieties and the use of pesticides and fertilizers.

Policy thinkers paved the way for the Green Revolution, and Nobel Prize-winning economist Ted Schultz described the tale of Maya Kaqchikel farmers cultivating onions and other crops in the delta of a tiny river and the surrounding hills in Panajachel, Guatemala, in his 1964 book, Transforming Traditional Agriculture. He supported his worldwide vision of technology-centered agricultural growth with this narrative of a technologically-stagnant rural village completely integrated into a market economy. This village served as a well-established example of a much larger trend in global agriculture for Schultz.

According to a recent analysis, the Green Revolution narrative was based on a misinterpretation of a case study in Guatemala. Credit: Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT / Manon Koningstein

 

This story, Jacob van Etten, Principal Scientist and Director of the Digital Inclusion research program at the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, said, became the narrative basis of the Green Revolution, along with the population growth and food security aspects from Norman Borlaug, who also helped to develop the dwarf strain of wheat that dramatically increased crop yields.

Van Etten said that by revisiting the history and context of the 1930s, it became clear that Schultz had “got the story wrong” and that new narratives about the Green Revolution should reserve a much more important place for institutional change in agricultural development.

In his paper, Revisiting the adequacy of the economic policy narrative underpinning the Green Revolution, published in the journal Agriculture and Human Values, van Etten showed that Schultz deliberately tried to hide that the village’s Mayan farmers were not challenged in technological terms and were able to reach relatively high economic returns.

“I hadn’t expected this… What I thought I would find would be that the story only represents one kind of experience in agriculture, but actually, it’s not even about this village, it’s a story about Schultz’s version of the village that influenced the world,” van Etten said, “and it’s a wrong story.”

The researcher explained that Schultz presented a distorted narrative that painted a picture of a population held back by a lack of access to modern varieties and fertilizers.

“What limited farms in that village wasn’t technology, it was access to land, to markets, to credit,” van Etten said, adding that Schultz’s parable ignored ethnic tensions dominating market exchange, the main barrier for agricultural development.

Lessons for the Future of Agricultural Research

In the paper, van Etten explained that Schultz told his own story rather than the narrative-as-lived of the farmers he portrayed and as a result, the Panajachel story neglected the institutional and ethnic reasons behind the farmers’ struggles harnessing technological change.

The reason why it matters, van Etten said, is that these founding myths continue to influence how researchers and the general public perceive the Green Revolution.

“It helps to look back at history and look at the Green Revolution as a broad process of change that was not only about crop seeds and fertilizers,” he said, adding that for example, historian Kapil Subramanian found in a 2015 study that the Green Revolution’s impact on productivity in India did not only rely on improved varieties.

There were also major infrastructural investments in rural electricity to power irrigation pumps, as well as strong government management of markets for inputs, credit and food grains.

According to van Etten, agricultural development is not just about technology but about a mix of things, in which markets and other institutions play the most important part.

“Our founding myth might be wrong, but if it gained influence, it was because of human choices,” van Etten said, “These choices become enshrined in the way we run research organizations, but we can take a new course in defining the goals of where we should go next.”

In addition, van Etten said that much of the work of CGIAR is already correcting old technology-centric thinking.

“We take a critical look at the delivery of new technologies, gender, and inequality aspects, and look beyond technologies to policies and institutions,” van Etten said, “Being aware of our own history helps to remove blinkers.”

Another lesson was that in Panajachel, far from stagnation, there was a traditional knowledge base that was innovative in its own way.

“A lot of innovation was happening… The local varieties are not just the result of 10,000 years of slow work and in Panajachel, farmers got seeds from all over the place and tried them on their farms,” van Etten said.

As agricultural research moves into a new phase, van Etten said, it’s important to give farmers and their communities more agency to mix new technological solutions with their local knowledge.

“Agricultural research can tap into local inventiveness and amplify it and Schultz was wrong in painting farmers as helpless and stagnant,” van Etten said.

“But Shultz was right in claiming that agricultural research is a good public investment and it can further accelerate farmer innovation, as we need all hands on deck to deal with current challenges, such as climate change.”

Source

New fear and exposure therapy research provides fundamental “Newtonian physics” to behavioral health treatment – leading the way for better, personalized treatments.

To help patients face and get past their distressing and impairing fears, clinicians often turn to exposure therapy as a leading treatment option. However, in as many as 50% of patients, the fears can return.

Groundbreaking behavioral health models were presented in a study by University of Colorado researchers that was recently published in the journal Computational Psychiatry. Boosted by an AB Nexus grant, the study revealed that fears are likely to linger because fear memories outlast competing safety memories gained in exposure therapy.

In the following Q&A, Joel Stoddard, MD, associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, explains where our fears come from and how the new research and mathematical modeling will help strengthen exposure therapy, based on the individual patient’s experience. He also explains how the research was made possible by strong collaboration across two University of Colorado campuses with Sarah Kennedy, PhD, and Sam Paskewitz, PhD, at CU Anschutz and Matt Jones, PhD, at CU Boulder.

Fear is a person’s whole-body response to a threat. There are different disorders of the threat response, including PTSD, anxiety disorders, panic disorders, and phobias. Exposure therapy is a very effective psychiatric intervention, which can be further enhanced with new insights from modeling and mathematics.

As a clinician and researcher, how do you define fear?

Fear is a person’s whole-body response to a threat.

You’re walking in the forest, and you see a snake. Your body responds, “this is dangerous!” Your whole mind-body response to the snake is typically a fear response. So, you’re going to have the response you’ve come to label as fear, a mixed state of feelings, thoughts, behaviors, and physiologic changes. Everyone experiences fear a bit differently based on how they integrate the component responses.

It’s your whole response to the threatening situation, not just how you feel about it. Classically your body gets ready to deal with the threat with a “freeze, flight, or fight” response.

The freeze: “Don’t notice me, please.” Flight: “I’m going to run away while I still can.” And fight, our last resort.

It is natural to have a fear response if you stumble upon a snake on a hike. However, an extreme, overwhelming fear of snakes is a specific phobia called ophidiophobia.

A snake on a hike seems like an innate response. What about learned or conditioned fears?

So that’s the next step. When we’re talking about fear, we’re talking about basically a type of threat response. Things that are threatening to you are things that are going to harm you.

There’s a bunch of stuff in the world that may evoke a fear response where we don’t exactly know why it does. Some people are afraid of snakes even though they were never harmed by one. That’s called an unconditioned fear.

Conditioned fears are different in that they are learned. For example, a car accident is a huge, life-threatening event. A lot of times, folks will learn to fear certain things that were not scary before the car accident. Like the steering wheel. Steering wheels don’t typically hurt people. But our car accident victim was focused on the wheel at the time of the accident. And so now whenever they see a steering wheel, they have a significant life-or-death response. Steering wheels are now part of a new threat memory. The reaction to steering wheels is a conditioned fear response.

There are various disorders of the threat response, including PTSD, anxiety disorders, panic disorders, and phobias.

So taking conditioned fears into account, what are the different kinds of fear that you see in your work?

First off, let’s be clear here and differentiate different disorders of the threat response:

• Post-traumatic stress (PTSD). When you have one event, you have a distressing and impairing reaction to the experience of trauma including fear of things you learned to fear during that traumatic event. This can be like the car accident example I mentioned, or post-traumatic fear responses experienced by soldiers in conflict zones.
• Anxiety disorders. Anxiety disorders are a fear response to a threat you haven’t encountered yet or to an anticipated threat. “I didn’t do well on that test,” for example.
• Panic disorders. That’s like having a severe fear reaction out of the blue. To many, this can feel like a heart attack.
• Phobias: Simply put, these are extreme fear responses.

Broadly, those exemplify different types of disorders where people have problems with their fear responses. Panic: fear response without the threat. Anxiety: fear response to an anticipated threat. Post-traumatic stress: response to a threat memory.

Being irrationally afraid of heights is a common phobia, known as acrophobia.

What is exposure therapy, and historically has it been the best treatment option for fear?

Exposure therapy is a very efficacious, highly evidence-based intervention that came out of mid-20th-century psychiatry.

Let’s say you are afraid of heights. There’s this ladder, and you’ve got to climb it in order to fix something. But you’re paralyzed by your fear. You just can’t get up that ladder. It’s just too scary for you to do that.

In general, the therapy is placing yourself in a situation to do what you’re afraid of while being in a safe environment. You learn that you’re safe, then carry forward that learned safety memory. The safety memory competes with the threat association to heights.

Our work has much broader implications to just exposure therapy. Exposures are actually a technique which are an active ingredient in many therapies that target a threat association.

In PTSD, for example, indicated therapies can include trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy, narrative therapy, or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. These are all very different kinds of therapies that in looking under the hood, one finds that they have some sort of exposure element to target the threat association. They bring the individual closer to their feared threat memory, but they also empower the individual and provide safety memories that compete with the threat memories through different ways.

Why did you and your team decide to research improving exposure therapy?

It really was a serendipitous, chocolate-meets-peanut butter moment. I was recruited to CU Anschutz to learn different mathematical models of the mind and how we can apply them to treatment.

Exposure therapy is generally super effective, but for 50% of people it’s not as effective and for many it is not long-lasting. That’s because their fears can come back over time. Without an enduring safety memory, a patient’s memories are tenacious and lead to recurrent fear responses. A fear response can come back if the person gets threatened again or maybe finds themselves triggered in a different context. Sometimes their symptoms are milder. Unfortunately, full-blown symptoms can return.

My colleagues and I were in Matt Jones’s office chatting. Matt is a prolific genius of rigorously mapping psychological processes to math. He and Sam Paskewitz had been working on how stimuli compete to trigger memories. I had already studied the brain basis of threat/safety memory competition in humans. Lightbulbs were going off. So, when I heard about their new experiment, I immediately asked them to apply it to threat learning. We later asked Sarah Kennedy for help because she had a deep understanding of how fear learning theory may be applied to therapy and is a leading behavioral experimental therapeutics expert on campus. It was just all here at CU. The next year the AB Nexus solidified our partnership.

We had to figure out a mathematical framework that explained all of that – what is observed in people and experiments. All of it with no exceptions. Once you get it mathematically expressed, it means now you have a precise theory. This is a hot topic, and people have been trying to understand how we can map this for some time mostly because the basic science is so good. Luckily, we have connections between CU Boulder and CU Anschutz, and AB Nexus, in both the modeling and clinical health aspects. So, to avoid pulling punches and honor my colleagues’ work, they frankly integrated a profound body of work into a coherent theory of treating fear, expressed in math.

What is the takeaway from your math and equations? How does it show a new model and paradigm for exposure therapy to make it more durable?

The big takeaway has been the potential for precision medicine in behavioral health, to borrow a popular phrase.

What if instead of months of exposure therapy, we could tell you within a week or two whether it is the right therapy? What if you are in exposure therapy, are very invested, but are having trouble with threat learning? We can tell you that early as well.

Mathematically, this research is analogous to Newton’s equations in physics. These are simple, elegant equations that help describe motion and force. They aren’t perfect, but they are powerfully predictive for day-to-day gross motion. You can land a person on the moon with them. More complex elaborations, like relativity and quantum physics exist for narrow problems. We actually did stress test elaborate models for therapy, but found they need a little more work.

We were successful because we built on a tremendous body of experimental and mathematical work- translating and in some places revising the Rescorla-Wagner family of equations. This is specifically for use in measuring and predicting learning processes involving threat memories. By detailing a set of equations to measure and predict how people acquire and forget both safety and threat memories, we may be able to better help individuals who have trouble with their fear responses to threat memories. That impacts on a staggering percentage of people over the lifetime and is a leading cause of disability worldwide, accounting for all diseases.

Already, supported directly by the AB Nexus, we have preliminary evidence that we can use this family of equations to predict how well patients will respond to treatment by how much they learn in their treatment sessions.

Let’s say you’re in your therapist’s office: You’re associating your therapist and that office with safety. It’s really those safety signals that are helping you prevent that threat response. And so, as soon as you’re out of your therapist’s office, if you don’t learn to generalize those safety memories your fear response can return. Unfortunately, experiments and models suggest that safety memories are less stable than threat memories.

Because the equations summarize all of our theory in compact form, it’s easy to see how things precisely relate. It’s an exciting future for behavioral health research. There are actually numerous implications for practice and predicting individual responses for those who brave reading the paper. It’s the beginning of an exciting new program of research to test a theory integrating over 50 years of work in threat learning to patient care.

Source

Here’s a spooky conundrum: Is a spore alive or dead?

Gürol Süel, a biologist at the University of California, San Diego, wouldn’t blame you if you voted for dead: “There’s nothing to detect: no heartbeat, no gene expression. There’s nothing going on,” he says.

But a spore might actually just be dormant—in a deep state of suspended animation meant to outlast inhospitable conditions that can persist for millions of years, until the day the spore “wakes up,” zombie-like, ready to grow. For years, the questions of how spores know when to reanimate, and how they actually do it, have been open ones. A new paper in Science by Süel’s group has helped fill in those blanks—and the answer could have ramifications for everything from the search for life on other planets to methods of fighting dangerous spores, such as those that cause foodborne illness.

Spores are typically single cells with tightly packed innards that can create new organisms. While many plants produce them to spread their seeds, bacteria can also form spores during periods of extreme temperatures, dryness, or nutrient deficiency. The spore cell then essentially hibernates its way through tough times.

Süel’s group was intrigued by the concept of a “mostly dead” cell reviving when the surrounding environment becomes more conducive to survival. “It was clear how spores come back to life if you dump a bunch of good stuff on them,” like large quantities of nutrients, says Süel. Likewise, when the environment is extremely hostile (for example, if no water is available), spores will simply not germinate. But most environments, the team realized, are not so black and white. For instance, “good” signals, like the presence of the nutrient L-alanine, might appear intermittently, then vanish. Would a slumbering spore be able to sense and process such a subtle hint?

Getting an accurate read on its surroundings is important for the spore, because it would be a waste to expend the energy needed to wake up and germinate in an unfriendly environment. That could stymie successful growth, or even lead to death. “You need to come back to life with nice timing, because otherwise you throw away your nice dormancy,” says Kaito Kikuchi, a previous student in Süel’s laboratory and a study coauthor. “You want to make sure you’re throwing away your protections when, and only when, the environment is good enough.”

First, the scientists needed to identify which biological processes the spores could use while they were still hibernating. These processes could not use ATP (adenosine triphosphate, or cellular energy) or rely on cellular metabolism (for example, breaking down sugars), since those mechanisms are shut down during dormancy.

But, the researchers hypothesized, there was an alternative method: The spores might be able to sense small cumulative changes in their environment, until enough signals build up to trigger a sort of wake-up alarm. The mechanism that would induce these changes would be the movement of ions out of the cell—specifically, potassium ions.

These movements can be triggered by positive environmental signals, like the presence of nutrients. When the ions travel out of the cell thanks to passive transport, they generate a difference in potassium concentration inside versus outside the cell. This concentration difference allows the spore to store potential energy. Over time, as the spore continues to sense more positive signals, more ions would move out of the cell. This would also create a corresponding drop in potassium levels, as the ions exit. Eventually, the potassium content in the spore would lower to a certain threshold, signaling that it is safe for the cell to wake up. That would trigger reanimation and germination. 

In other words, says Süel, the spore essentially acts similar to a capacitor, or a device that holds electrical energy. “A capacitor is basically an insulator separating the concentration gradient of charges,” he says. “You can really store a lot of energy in this way, because the cell’s membrane is very thin.”

If this concept sounds familiar, that might be because nature has already used it in another branch of biology: This is similar to how a brain neuron fires. Sodium ions stream into the neuron, causing the cell to become positively charged. Once the charge threshold is reached, an action potential is triggered and the neuron discharges. Potassium ions then stream out of the cell, bringing it back to its resting state.

To test their hypotheses, the scientists developed a mathematical model based on equations that describe how neurons fire—then adapted them to predict how the movement of potassium ions could trigger spore germination. To clarify the role these ions play, the scientists modeled a spore strain that lacked a critical unit in the potassium importer that transports ions into the cell. If germination is triggered by potassium dropping below a certain threshold, they theorized, spores with a broken import pump would bloom faster, because they would have fewer of those ions.

That idea worked in a mathematical model, but they wanted to test it in real life. So the scientists genetically engineered spores of the bacteria Bacillus subtilis so that the pump would not work. Then, they applied a timed dose of the nutrient L-alanine to them and monitored their germination. Forty-two percent of the mutated spores bloomed, compared with only 5 percent of normal ones that were used as a control. “We see that if you knock out the pump, and they don’t have enough potassium inside the spore, they are much more trigger happy and germinate,” Kikuchi says—proving their prediction correct.

Next, the scientists wanted to measure how each dose of nutrients changed the electrochemical potential inside the spore. Their mathematical model had predicted that each dose would increase a spore’s negative electrochemical potential in a step-like pattern. If each dose given to the real spores led to a predictable step up, that would support the team’s hypothesis that the cell uses its electrochemical potential to measure the friendliness of its environment, as a cue for when it’s safe to reanimate.

To visualize this with the Bacillus subtilis spores, the scientists mixed a positively charged fluorescent dye into the liquid surrounding them. The dye stuck to the spores, and the more negatively charged they became, the more dye would attach. So by measuring the spores’ fluorescence, the scientists could quantify how negatively charged each one was. When this fluorescence was graphed over time, a step-like pattern emerged that corresponded to each dose of nutrients—once again proving the prediction correct.

“This work has real potential to give us a whole new handle—specifics—on how germination proceeds,” says Peter Setlow, a spore scientist at the University of Connecticut who was not involved in the study. And that has some real-word use cases, he says, because spores can also be “causative agents for all kinds of nasties.” For example, certain bacterial spores can bury themselves in food, causing major illness when ingested. Germinating spores are much easier to get rid of than dormant ones, because they have shed their protections against chemicals and extreme temperatures. As a result, figuring out how spores wake up may provide insights into how to kill them if needed, Setlow says.

Better understanding of spore dormancy could very well provide insights into new creatures that may seem dead but are not—like potential lifeforms on other planets. In a place like Mars, where the environment is dusty and seemingly barren, sources of life would most likely resemble spores—hidden somewhere cozy, waiting for signals to come back to life. “We’re not going to find a green man walking around,” says Süel. “If anything left is still somewhat alive, it’s probably going to be something like a spore that can survive the hostile environment that Mars has been for the past few millions of years.”

Agata Zupanska, a space plant biologist at the Search for Extraterrestrial Life (SETI) Institute who was not involved in the study, agrees. “I would expect that martian bacteria, if they were there, would likely evolve a similar mechanism,” she says. “Dormancy is good. Evolutionarily, it is very successful.”

She calls spores “a fascinating solution to surviving bad environmental conditions—you have a choice: You can either die or become dormant.” This work, she says, answers the question of “how something with no molecular and energetic tools can monitor the environment and respond to persistently good conditions.”

Before scientists search for spores on Mars, there’s still a lot to do on Earth. Süel wants to keep studying how ions affect major processes in the spore. He thinks that while many biologists focus on gene expression or cell metabolism, something more passive, like the energy generated from ion gradients, could lead to surprising new discoveries. “If we can understand extremely dormant cells on our planet, maybe it’ll give us a better understanding of what to expect” when searching for life in the rest of the universe, Süel says.

The Spooky Science of How Undead Spores Reanimate

(May require free registration to view)

The world’s most powerful rocket finally returns after a 3-year absence

Born in 2018 courtesy of “startup factory” accelerator Entrepreneur First, the company has set its sights on changing the production of petrochemical-derived and fermented materials—chief among them: plastic—by leveraging biological components. In other words, if FabricNano has its way, companies producing plastic would ditch oil and use proteins instead.

“Big chemical companies, some of which are our clients, want to make bio-based plastics at cost parity with things like PET plastic,” explains Grant Aarons, the company’s cofounder and CEO. “And if you’re using a bio-based plastic, it’s more biodegradable.”

The process for creating products and materials by harnessing enzymes (proteins with the ability to accelerate chemical reactions) is well known: The ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup that infests US foodstuffs is made by mixing cornstarch with a trio of proteins. “It looks like an assembly line: like, you’re just taking your input chemical, your feedstock. You’re putting it into the enzyme, handing it off to the next one, and making an ultimate product,” says FabricNano vice president for operations Eliza Eddison. “We can’t help but see it like Henry Ford’s assembly line.”

But when it comes to producing more sophisticated materials such as plastic, biomanufacturing falls short. Most of the proteins used to trigger these reactions are destroyed or degraded in the process, making it too expensive to make stuff at scale. It is by addressing that issue that FabricNano hopes to jump-start the industry and make it competitive. The secret, Aarons says, was finding the right kind of support to bind the proteins to. “If you put them physically on to a surface, you change the geometry of the protein,” he explains. “So it changes and it doesn’t work anymore.”

FabricNano’s idea was to bind proteins to strands of lab-made DNA, a material that had never been seriously experimented with in the industry. The team—which at the time still comprised cofounder Ferdinando Randisi, who had studied DNA theoretical biophysics at the University of Oxford—found that, indeed, when bound to a DNA scaffolding, the proteins did not get damaged, allowing them to keep working for much longer, making biomanufacturing cheaper.

“The proteins are not hurt when they sit on the DNA,” Aarons says. The company managed to bring down the cost of DNA production significantly—yet it eventually realized that relying on DNA would always be too expensive for industrial-scale production. Eventually, however, FabricNano found a way to parlay the intuition underpinning its DNA-based work into a method that has the same benefits, but does not require using DNA.

“We were able to move away from DNA and still retain this innovation in this benefit,” Aarons says. “It’s the same principle, but with a different support.” How exactly this system works FabricNano will not say, as the relevant patent registrations have not been finalized yet. But chemical, pharmaceutical, and engineering companies—including chemical giant Sumitomo Chemical America—have already started partnering with FabricNano. “We envision operating effectively at an industrial scale within three years,” Eddison says.

The Push to Scale Plant-Based Plastics

(May require free registration to view)

•     Workers at an iPhone assembly plant walked away from the factory in central China after Covid outbreaks led to a lockdown.

•     On Sunday afternoon, the company told Reuters in an emailed statement that workers were allowed to leave if they chose to.

After enduring days of lock-in at Foxconn’s vast facility in central China with 200,000 other workers, Yuan finally climbed the fences on Saturday night and escaped the complex, joining others fleeing what they feared was a widening Covid outbreak.

He walked through the night, keeping to a northerly route, towards his hometown of Hebi, every step taking him farther away from iPhone maker Foxconn’s Zhengzhou plant, the Taiwan-based group’s largest in mainland China.

“There were so many people on the road,” Yuan told Reuters on Monday, declining to give his full name because of the matter’s sensitivity.

Since mid-October, Foxconn has been wrestling with a Covid-19 outbreak at its facility in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan province in central China. Workers were locked in to stop the spread of the coronavirus to the outside world. Foxconn has repeatedly refrained from disclosing the caseload.

“We were shut in on Oct. 14, and we had to do endless PCR tests, and after about 10 days, we had to wear N95 masks and were given traditional Chinese medicine,” said Yuan.

Whenever a positive or suspected case was found at a production line, there would be a public broadcast, but work would continue, he told Reuters.

“People would be called away in the middle of work, and if they don’t show up the next day, that would mean they had been taken away,” Yuan said.

Around 20,000 workers had been put in quarantine on-site, Yuan had heard, but he could not be sure how many were infected, as management did not publicize that information.

China typically isolates vast numbers of people considered close or even potential contacts of an infected person.

The world’s second-largest economy continues to wage war on Covid with disruptive lockdowns, mass testing and quarantines while many other countries have chosen to live with the disease.

For companies with massive manufacturing campuses like Foxconn, that has meant keeping thousands of workers on-site in so-called “closed-loop” systems to keep their production lines running.

“Food for tens of thousands was merely left outside (of the quarantine buildings at the plant),” said a worker surnamed Li, 21.

Li, who is still at the plant, said she was planning to quit.

In a statement on Monday, Apple supplier Foxconn said that reports that 20,000 staff had been diagnosed with Covid were false.

On Sunday afternoon, the company told Reuters in an emailed statement that workers were allowed to leave if they chose to.

Foxconn did not immediately respond to a Reuters request on Monday for further comment.

‘Never go back’

Disruptions from China’s zero-COVID policies to commerce and industry have widened in October as cases escalated. Apart from the Foxconn lockdown, the Shanghai Disney Resort was shut from Monday to comply with counter-epidemic requirements, with visitors still inside.

For Yuan, matters came to a head when he heard that a housing complex for workers near his plant had been cordoned off by security on Friday, and that the plant itself was to go under a curfew the next day.

In a panic, Yuan decided to leave the next day, joining streams of other escaping workers. It was not immediately clear if a curfew was eventually imposed.

By Sunday morning, Yuan had hiked to the banks of the Yellow River, the northern boundary of Zhengzhou, where he was stopped 50 km (30 miles) short of Hebi by authorities from the city of Xinxiang on the other side.

“I’ll never go back to Foxconn,” said Yuan, who has since been transported to Hebi and put under quarantine.

“Zhengzhou has put a chill in my heart.”

Source

The Skansen Aquarium in Stockholm said in a Facebook post that the cobra, named Sir Vas, or Sir Hiss, before being rebranded Houdini due to its Oct. 22 escape from its terrarium through a light fixture, was found to have returned to its terrarium Sunday after over a week of evading capture.

Officials said they do not believe the snake left the building during its time on the loose and was repeatedly spotted by searchers, but they were never able to catch up to the evasive serpent.

The aquarium said the terrarium has now been secured and Houdini will return to public display Monday.

Source

Also:  Escaped king cobra crawls back to Swedish terrarium.

China is the last major economy wedded to a zero-COVID policy, with authorities brandishing snap lockdowns, mass testing and lengthy quarantines in an effort to stamp out emerging outbreaks.

But new variants have tested local officials' ability to snuff out flare-ups faster than they can spread, causing much of the country to live under an ever-changing mosaic of COVID curbs.

Visitors to Shanghai Disney Resort are not allowed to leave "until on-site testing returns a negative result", the city government said in an online notice on Monday.

It added that those who had visited the park since Thursday must obtain three negative COVID tests over three successive days and "avoid participating in group activities".

The announcement came after Disney said it was "temporarily closing with immediate effect... in accordance with disease control requirements".

The sprawling 390-hectare (960 acres) theme park and resort includes Shanghai Disneyland, Disneytown and Wishing Star Park. The resort had previously said that it was operating at reduced capacity due to COVID restrictions.

"We will notify guests as soon as we have a confirmed date to resume operations," Disney said.

China reported 2,699 local COVID infections on Monday, including 10 asymptomatic cases in Shanghai, according to the National Health Commission.

The eastern megacity—a major hub for the world's second-largest economy—seethed under a months-long lockdown earlier this year marked by sporadic food shortages and isolated protests.

Source

The Taiwanese tech giant's plant in Zhengzhou has been hit by a mass outbreak, with the company saying it is testing employees daily and keeping them in a closed loop.

Videos circulating on social media over the weekend appeared to show Foxconn employees fleeing the company's campus in Zhengzhou and returning to their hometowns on foot, in a bid to avoid COVID travel restrictions.

In one of the videos, people lift suitcases as they climb up a hillside, while another shows people sitting with their luggage by the side of a road as a person in a hazmat suit sprays what appears to be disinfectant at them.

Local governments in the area surrounding the city issued notices asking Foxconn workers to register with authorities if they returned home and to complete several days of quarantine upon arrival.

The Taiwanese firm said it was "cooperating with the government to organize personnel and vehicles" for employees who want to leave.

Foxconn has said it faces a "protracted battle" to stamp out the COVID-19 outbreak, but has not said how many of the more than 200,000 staff are affected or in isolation.

Henan province, where Zhengzhou is located, officially reported just 42 new COVID infections on Monday.

Foxconn has been accused of forcing employees who are unwell to work and not providing medical treatment or timely meals throughout the outbreak.

And China Labor Watch, a New York-based NGO, has also accused the firm of hiding the number of COVID-19 infections among its employees and forcing sick people to continue working, citing an internal message to staff as well as workers at the factory.

Foxconn on Sunday insisted that it "is making every effort" to ensure its employees are being looked after.

China is the last major economy committed to a zero-COVID strategy, persisting with snap lockdowns, mass testing and lengthy quarantines in a bid to keep infections down.

But fast-spreading virus variants have challenged that approach, with outbreaks hitting industries hard in recent months, as virus restrictions disrupt factories and curb consumer spending.

Source

Now let’s rewind. You’re on the vacation of a lifetime in Kenya, traversing the savanna on safari, with the tour guide pointing out elephants to your right and lions to your left. From the corner of your eye, you notice a rhino trailing the vehicle. Suddenly, it sprints toward you, and the tour guide is yelling to the driver to hit the gas. With your adrenaline spiking, you think, “This is how I am going to die.” Years later, when you walk into a florist’s shop, the sweet floral scent makes you shudder.

“Your brain is essentially associating the smell with positive or negative” feelings, said Hao Li, a postdoctoral researcher at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California. Those feelings aren’t just linked to the memory; they are part of it: The brain assigns an emotional “valence” to information as it encodes it, locking in experiences as good or bad memories.

And now we know how the brain does it. As Li and his team reported recently in Nature, the difference between memories that conjure up a smile and those that elicit a shudder is established by a small peptide molecule known as neurotensin. They found that as the brain judges new experiences in the moment, neurons adjust their release of neurotensin, and that shift sends the incoming information down different neural pathways to be encoded as either positive or negative memories.

The discovery suggests that in its creation of memories, the brain may be biased toward remembering things fearfully—an evolutionary quirk that may have helped keep our ancestors cautious.

The findings “give us significant insights into how we deal with conflicting emotions,” said Tomás Ryan, a neuroscientist at Trinity College Dublin who was not involved in the study. It “has really challenged my own thinking in how far we can push a molecular understanding of brain circuitry.”

It also opens opportunities to probe the biological underpinnings of anxiety, addiction, and other neuropsychiatric conditions that may sometimes arise when breakdowns in the mechanism lead to “too much negative processing,” Li said. In theory, targeting the mechanism through novel drugs could be an avenue to treatment.

“This is really an extraordinary study” that will have a profound impact on psychiatric concepts about fear and anxiety, said Wen Li, an associate professor at Florida State University who studies the biology of anxiety disorders and was not involved in the study.

Dangerous Berries

Neuroscientists are still far from understanding exactly how our brains encode and remember memories—or forget them, for that matter. Valence assignment is nonetheless seen as an essential part of the process for forming emotionally charged memories.

The ability of the brain to record environmental cues and experiences as good or bad memories is critical for survival. If eating a berry makes us very sick, we instinctively avoid that berry and anything that looks like it thereafter. If eating a berry brings delicious satisfaction, we may seek out more. “To be able to question whether to approach or to avoid a stimulus or an object, you have to know whether the thing is good or bad,” Hao Li said.

Memories that link disparate ideas—like “berry” and “sickness” or “enjoyment”—are called associative memories, and they are often emotionally charged. They form in a tiny almond-shaped region of the brain called the amygdala. Though traditionally known as the brain’s “fear center,” the amygdala responds to pleasure and other emotions as well.

One part of the amygdala, the basolateral complex, associates stimuli in the environment with positive or negative outcomes. But it was not clear how it does that until a few years ago, when a group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology led by the neuroscientist Kay Tye discovered something remarkable happening in the basolateral amygdala of mice, which they reported in Nature in 2015 and in Neuron in 2016.

Tye and her team peered into the basolateral amygdala of mice learning to associate a sound with either sugar water or a mild electric shock and found that, in each case, connections to a different group of neurons strengthened. When the researchers later played the sound for the mice, the neurons that had been strengthened by the learned reward or punishment became more active, demonstrating their involvement in the associated memory.

But Tye’s team couldn’t tell what was steering the information toward the right group of neurons. What acted as the switch operator?

Dopamine, a neurotransmitter known to be important in reward and punishment learning, was the obvious answer. But a 2019 study showed that although this “feel-good” molecule could encode emotion in memories, it couldn’t assign the emotion a positive or negative value.

So the team began looking at the genes expressed in the two areas where positive and negative memories were forming, and the results turned their attention to neuropeptides, small multifunctional proteins that can slowly and steadily strengthen synaptic connections between neurons. They found that one set of amygdala neurons had more receptors for neurotensin than the other.

This finding was encouraging because earlier work had shown that neurotensin, a meager molecule just 13 amino acids long, is involved in the processing of reward and punishment, including the fear response. Tye’s team set out to learn what would happen if they changed the amount of neurotensin in the brains of mice.

Tiny Molecule With a Big Personality

What followed were years of surgically and genetically manipulating mouse neurons and recording the behaviors that resulted. “By the time I finished my PhD, I had done at least 1,000 surgeries,” said Praneeth Namburi, an author on both of the papers and the leader of the 2015 one.

During that time, Tye moved her growing lab across the country from MIT to the Salk Institute. Namburi stayed at MIT—he now studies how dancers and athletes represent emotions in their movements—and Hao Li joined Tye’s lab as a postdoc, picking up Namburi’s notes. The project was stalled further by the pandemic, but Hao Li kept it going by requesting essential-personnel status and basically moving into the lab, sometimes even sleeping there. “I don’t know how he stayed so motivated,” Tye said.

So what do these results suggest would happen if your valence-assignment system broke down—while an angry rhino was charging you, for example? “You would just only slightly care,” Tye said. Your indifference in the moment would be recorded in the memory. And if you found yourself in a similar situation later in life, your memory would not inspire you to try urgently to escape, she added.

However, the likelihood that an entire brain circuit would shut down is low, said Jeffrey Tasker, a professor in the brain institute at Tulane University. It’s more probable that mutations or other problems would simply prevent the mechanism from working well, instead of reversing the valence. “I would be hard-pressed to see a situation where somebody would mistake a charging tiger as a love approach,” he said.

Hao Li agree and note that the brain likely has fallback mechanisms that would kick in to reinforce rewards and punishments even if the primary valence system failed. This would be an interesting question to pursue in future work, he said.

One way to study defects in the valence system, Tasker noted, might be to examine the very rare people who don’t report feeling fear, even in situations routinely judged as terrifying. Various uncommon conditions and injuries can have this effect, such as Urbach-Wiethe syndrome, which can cause calcium deposits to form in the amygdala, dampening the fear response.

The Brain Is a Pessimist

The findings are “pretty big in terms of advancing our understanding and thinking of the fear circuit and the role of the amygdala,” Wen Li said. We are learning more about chemicals like neurotensin that are less well known than dopamine but play critical roles in the brain, she said.

The work points toward the possibility that the brain is pessimistic by default, Hao Li said. The brain has to make and release neurotensin to learn about rewards; learning about punishments takes less work.

Further evidence of this bias comes from the reaction of the mice when they were first put into learning situations. Before they knew whether the new associations would be positive or negative, the release of neurotensin from their thalamic neurons decreased. The researchers speculate that new stimuli are assigned a more negative valence automatically until their context is more certain and can redeem them.

“You’re more responsive to negative experiences versus positive experiences,” Hao Li said. If you almost get hit by a car, you’ll probably remember that for a very long time, but if you eat something delicious, that memory is likely to fade in a few days.

Ryan is more wary of extending such interpretations to humans. “We’re dealing with laboratory mice who are brought up in very, very impoverished environments and have very particular genetic backgrounds,” he said.

Still, he said it would be interesting to determine in future experiments whether fear is the actual default state of the human brain—and if that varies for different species, or even for individuals with different life experiences and stress levels.

The findings are also a great example of how integrated the brain is, Wen Li said: The amygdala needs the thalamus, and the thalamus likely needs signals from elsewhere. It would be interesting to know which neurons in the brain are feeding signals to the thalamus.

A recent study published in Nature Communications found that a single fear memory can be encoded in more than one region of the brain. Which circuits are involved probably depends on the memory. For example, neurotensin is probably less crucial for encoding memories that don’t have much emotion attached to them, such as the “declarative” memories that form when you learn vocabulary.

For Tasker, the clear-cut relationship that Tye’s study found between a single molecule, a function, and a behavior was very impressive. “It’s rare to find a one-to-one relationship between a signal and a behavior, or a circuit and a function,” Tasker said.

Neuropsychiatric Targets

The crispness of the roles of neurotensin and the thalamic neurons in assigning valence might make them ideal targets for drugs aimed at treating neuropsychiatric disorders. In theory, if you can fix the valence assignment, you might be able to treat the disease, Hao Li said.

It’s not clear whether therapeutic drugs targeting neurotensin could change the valence of an already formed memory. But that’s the hope, Namburi said.

Pharmacologically, this won’t be easy. “Peptides are notoriously difficult to work with,” Tasker said, because they don’t cross the blood-brain barrier that insulates the brain against foreign materials and fluctuations in blood chemistry. But it’s not impossible, and the field is very much headed toward developing targeted drugs, he said.

Our understanding of how the brain assigns valence still has important gaps. It’s not clear, for example, which receptors the neurotensin is binding to in amygdala neurons to flip the valence switch. “That will bother me until it is filled,” Tye said.

Too much is also still unknown about how problematic valence assignments may drive anxiety, addiction, or depression, said Hao Li, who was recently appointed as an assistant professor at Northwestern University and is planning to explore some of these questions further in his new lab. Beyond neurotensin, there are many other neuropeptides in the brain that are potential targets for interventions, Hao Li said. We just don’t know what they all do. He’s also curious to know how the brain would react to a more ambiguous situation in which it wasn’t clear whether the experience was good or bad.

These questions linger in Hao Li’s brain long after he packs up and goes home for the night. Now that he knows which network of chatty cells in his brain drives the emotions he feels, he jokes with friends about his brain pumping out neurotensin or holding it back in response to every bit of good or bad news.

“It’s clear that this is biology, it happens to everyone,” he said. That “makes me feel better when I’m in a bad mood.”

This Brain Molecule Decides Which Memories Are Happy—or Terrible

(May require free registration to view)

For the first time, a new study has used zinc isotope analysis to determine the position of Neanderthals in the food chain. The findings suggest that they were in fact carnivores.

Were Neanderthals carnivores? According to scientists, the debate is still ongoing. Although some investigations of the dental tartar of individuals from the Iberian Peninsula seem to indicate that Neanderthals were major consumers of plants, other studies carried out at sites outside Iberia appear to suggest that they consumed almost nothing but meat. Now, using new analytical techniques on a molar belonging to an individual of this species, researchers[1] have shown that the Neanderthals at the Gabasa site in Spain appear to have been carnivores.

Led by a CNRS researcher, the study was published on October 17th in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Excavation work at the Gabasa site, Spain Credit: © Lourdes Montes

 

Until now, to determine an individual’s position in the food chain, scientists have generally had to extract proteins and analyze the nitrogen isotopes present in the bone collagen. However, this technique can usually only be used in temperate environments, and only rarely does it work on samples over 50,000 years old. When these conditions are not met, nitrogen isotope analysis is very complex, or even impossible. This was the case for the molar from the Gabasa site analyzed in this study.

Given these constraints, Klevia Jaouen, a CNRS researcher, and her colleagues decided to analyze the zinc isotope ratios present in the tooth enamel, a mineral that is resistant to all forms of degradation. This is the first time this technique has been used to attempt to identify a Neanderthal’s diet. The lower the proportions of zinc isotopes in the bones, the more likely they are to belong to a carnivore. The analysis was also carried out on the bones of animals from the same time period and geographical area, including herbivores like rabbits and chamois, and carnivores such as lynxes and wolves.

According to the results, the Neanderthal to whom this tooth from the Gabasa site belonged was most likely a carnivore who did not consume the blood of their prey.

Broken bones found at the site, together with isotopic data, suggest that this individual also ate the bone marrow of their prey, without consuming the bones. Additionally, other chemical tracers show that they were weaned before the age of two. Analyses also reveal that this Neanderthal probably died in the same place they had lived in as a child.

Compared to previous techniques, this new zinc isotope analysis method makes it easier to distinguish between omnivores and carnivores. The scientists hope to repeat the experiment on individuals from other sites to confirm their conclusions. They would especially like to test a specimen from the Payre site in south-east France, where new research is underway.

Notes

1. In France, the work involved scientists from the    Geosciences Environment Toulouse Laboratory (CNRS/CNES/IRD/UT3 Paul Sabatier), and the Geology Laboratory of Lyon: Earth, Planets, Environment (CNRS/UCBL1), together with teams from the University of Zaragoza, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, the Max
   Planck Institute for Chemistry, Mainz, and the Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz.

Source

Detrimental impacts on climate, land use, freshwater resources, and biodiversity would result from increasing agriculture and fisheries production to meet consumer demand. In their article, the authors argue for shifting the focus of marine aquaculture down the food chain to algae. This could potentially supply the growing demand for nutritious food in addition to reducing the current food system’s ecological footprint.

Charles Greene. Credit: Charles Greene, CC BY 4.0

 

Microalgae could provide high amounts of nutritional protein and essential amino acids, in addition to other micronutrients, such as vitamins and antioxidants. Moreover, a marine microalgae-based aquaculture industry would not require arable land and freshwater, or pollute freshwater and marine ecosystems through fertilizer runoff. The article does not address the potential for a new algae-based aquaculture industry to be culturally responsive, how large-scale microalgae production would affect local foodways, or how algae tastes.

According to the authors, “The financial headwinds faced by a new marine microalgae-based aquaculture industry will be stiff because it must challenge incumbent industries for market share before its technologies are completely mature and it can achieve the full benefits of scale. Financial investments and market incentives provided by state and federal governments can help reduce this green premium until the playing field is level. The future role of algae-based solutions in achieving global food security and environmental sustainability will depend on the actions taken by governments today.”

Greene adds, “Agriculture provides the backbone of today’s global food production system; however, its potential to meet the world’s nutritional demands by 2050 is limited. Marine microalgae can help fill the projected nutritional gap while simultaneously improving overall environmental sustainability and ocean health.”

Interview with Associate Director for Research and Strategic Planning Dr. Charles H. Greene

What first drew you to study microalgae and sustainability?

About a dozen years ago, I came to the conclusion that too many Earth scientists were focusing only on the impacts of climate change and not looking for solutions to the problem. A colleague of mine, Dr. Mark Huntley, invited me to join his team investigating the potential of marine microalgae in the production of biofuels. Over time, our thinking evolved, and we realized that marine microalgae have tremendous potential for addressing the global challenges of food and water security, climate change, and many other aspects of environmental sustainability.

What are the key findings you collected in your paper?

By taking an integrated, circular economy approach to cultivating marine microalgae, we can close the gap in human nutrition projected for 2050 and simultaneously reduce many of the negative impacts our current food production system has on climate and the global environment.

What most surprised or interested you about your findings?

We always knew that the high productivity of marine microalgae could help us reduce the carbon and land footprints of agriculture. However, what came as an unexpected surprise was just how much protein could potentially be produced from such a small footprint of non-arable, coastal land in the Global South. The implications of our results for sustainable development are profound.

What are the next steps for research on this topic?

As green venture capitalist John Doerr emphasizes in his recent book*, it’s all about speed and scale. Our window of time to solve these global challenges is narrow, and the solutions are on a scale that our policymakers have difficulty even imagining, let alone investing in. The future of algae-based solutions in achieving global food security and environmental sustainability will depend on the actions taken by the investment community and governments today.

*Speed & Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now

Source

This article was first published by Vanity Fair jointly with ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.

Toy Reid has always had a gift for languages – a gift that would carry him far from what he calls his “very blue-collar” roots in Greenville, South Carolina. In high school, Spanish came easily. At nearby Furman University, where he became the first person in his family to attend college, he studied Japanese.

Then, “clueless but curious,” as he puts it, he channeled his fascination with the Dalai Lama into a master’s degree in East Asian philosophy and religion at Harvard. Along the way, he picked up Khmer, the national language of Cambodia, and achieved fluency in Chinese.

But it was his career as a China specialist for the Rand Corporation and as a political officer in East Asia for the US State Department that taught him how to interpret a notoriously opaque language: the “party speak” practiced by Chinese Communist officials.

Party speak is “its own lexicon,” explains Reid, now 44 years old. Even a native Mandarin speaker “can’t really follow it,” he says. “It’s not meant to be easily understood. It’s almost like a secret language of Chinese officialdom. When they’re talking about anything potentially embarrassing, they speak of it in innuendo and hushed tones, and there’s a certain acceptable way to allude to something.”

For 15 months, Reid lent this unusual skill to a nine-person team dedicated to investigating the mystery of Covid-19’s origins. Commissioned by Senator Richard Burr, Republican of North Carolina, the team examined voluminous evidence, most of it open-source but some classified, and weighed the major credible theories for how the novel coronavirus first made the leap to humans.

An interim report, released on Thursday by the minority oversight staff of the US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP), concludes that the Covid-19 pandemic was “more likely than not, the result of a research-related incident.”

As part of his investigation, Reid took an approach that was artful in its simplicity. Working out of the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington and a family home in Florida, he used a virtual private network, or VPN, to access dispatches archived on the website of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

These dispatches remain on the internet, but their meaning can’t be unlocked by just anyone. Using his hard-earned expertise, Reid believes he unearthed secrets that were hiding in plain sight.

From the time the Chinese city of Wuhan was identified as ground zero for the Covid-19 pandemic, a contingent of scientists suspected that the virus could have leaked from one of the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s complex of laboratories. The WIV is, after all, the venue for some of China’s riskiest coronavirus research.

Scientists there have mixed components of different coronaviruses and created new strains, in an effort to predict the risks of human infection and to develop vaccines and treatments. Critics argue that creating viruses that don’t exist in nature runs the risk of unleashing them.

The WIV has two campuses and performed coronavirus research on both. Its older Xiaohongshan campus is just eight miles from the crowded seafood market where Covid-19 first burst into public view. Its newer Zhengdian campus, about 18 miles to the south, is home to the institute’s most prestigious laboratory, a biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) facility, designed to enable safe research on the world’s most lethal pathogens.

The WIV triumphantly announced its completion in February 2015, and it was cleared to begin full research by early 2018.

Like many scientific institutes in China, the WIV is state-run and funded. The research carried out there must advance the goals of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). As one way to ensure compliance, the CCP operates 16 party branches inside the WIV, where members including scientists meet regularly and demonstrate their loyalty.

Week after week, scientists from those branches chronicled their party-building exploits in reports uploaded to the WIV’s website. These dispatches, intended for watchful higher-ups, generally consist of upbeat recitations of recruitment efforts and meeting summaries that emphasize the fulfillment of Beijing’s political goals. “The headlines and initial paragraphs seem completely innocuous,” Reid says. “If you didn’t take a close look, you’d probably think there’s nothing in here.”

But much like imperfect propaganda, the dispatches hold glimmers of real life: tension among colleagues, abuse from bosses, reprimands from party superiors. The grievances are often couched in a narrative of heroism — a focus on problems overcome and challenges met against daunting odds.

As Reid burrowed into the party branch dispatches, he became riveted by the unfolding picture. They described intense pressure to produce scientific breakthroughs that would elevate China’s standing on the world stage, despite a dire lack of essential resources. Even at the BSL-4 lab, they repeatedly lamented the problem of “the three ‘nos’: no equipment and technology standards, no design and construction teams and no experience operating or maintaining” a lab of this caliber.

Security guard checks arrivals at the gate of Wuhan Institute of Virology. Photo: AFP / Koki Kataoka / The Yomiuri Shimbun

And then, in the fall of 2019, the dispatches took a darker turn. They referenced inhumane working conditions and “hidden safety dangers.” On November 12 of that year, a dispatch by party branch members at the BSL-4 laboratory appeared to reference a biosecurity breach.

Once you have opened the stored test tubes, it is just as if having opened Pandora’s Box. These viruses come without a shadow and leave without a trace. Although [we have] various preventive and protective measures, it is nevertheless necessary for lab personnel to operate very cautiously to avoid operational errors that give rise to dangers. Every time this has happened, the members of the Zhengdian Lab [BSL4] Party Branch have always run to the frontline, and they have taken real action to mobilize and motivate other research personnel.

Reid studied the words intently. Was this a reference to past accidents? An admission of an ongoing crisis? A general recognition of hazardous practices? Or all of the above? Reading between the lines, Reid concluded, “They are almost saying they know Beijing is about to come down and scream at them.”

And that, in fact, is exactly what happened next, according to a meeting summary uploaded nine days later.

The dozens of pages of WIV dispatches that Reid unearthed, particularly those from November 2019, helped shape the conclusion of the interim report. Working out of a small, windowless room in the Hart building that they nicknamed “the Bat Cave,” the researchers cross-referenced Reid’s analysis with myriad clues, from procurement notices and patent filings to records of ongoing scientific experiments at the WIV. As their investigation grew, so did a timeline that unfolded across the walls like a giant checkerboard.

Given advance access to hundreds of pages of the Senate researchers’ findings and analysis, Vanity Fair, in partnership with ProPublica, spent five months investigating their underlying evidence. We analyzed WIV documents, consulted with experts in CCP communications, asked biocontainment experts to help analyze documents and reviewed with independent scientists the possible evidence that certain vaccine research may have begun far earlier than acknowledged.

We also traced the hazards that arose as the WIV built a lab to research the world’s most dangerous pathogens. Taken together, our reporting provides critical context that is not included in the pared-down 35-page interim report. It offers the most detailed picture to date of the months leading up to the Covid-19 outbreak, including new details on the intense pressure the lab faced to produce breakthrough research, its struggles to grapple with mounting safety issues and a previously unreported series of references to a mysterious incident shortly before the virus began infecting its first victims.

The Senate HELP minority committee did not release a detailed 236-page analysis that Reid drafted as a companion report. Nor did the interim report provide context for the documents he unearthed. These omissions came as hundreds of pages were whittled down to 35 in the days before the report was released. Although some members of the Senate team reviewed a small number of classified documents, the interim report relied only on publicly available material.

A spokesperson for the Senate HELP minority committee told Vanity Fair and ProPublica: “What has been included in the interim report are the facts the Committee has determined are ready for, and worthy of, publication at this time. The Committee’s bipartisan oversight investigation is still ongoing, and what is worthy of inclusion will find its way into the final report.”

Vanity Fair and ProPublica downloaded more than 500 documents from the WIV website, including party branch dispatches from 2017 to the present. To assess Reid’s interpretation, we sent key documents to experts on CCP communications. They told us that the WIV dispatches did indeed signal that the institute faced an acute safety emergency in November 2019; that officials at the highest levels of the Chinese government weighed in; and that urgent action was taken in an effort to address ongoing safety issues.

The documents do not make clear who was responsible for the crisis, which laboratory it affected specifically or what the exact nature of the biosafety emergency was.

The interim report also raises questions about how quickly vaccines were developed in China by some teams, including one led by a military virologist named Zhou Yusen. The report called it “unusual” that two military Covid-19 vaccine development teams were able to reach early milestones even faster than the major drug companies that were part of the US government’s Operation Warp Speed program.

Vanity Fair and ProPublica spoke to experts who said that the timeline of Zhou’s vaccine development seemed unrealistic, if not impossible. Two of the three experts said it strongly suggested that his team must have had access to the genomic sequence of the virus no later than in November 2019, weeks before China’s official recognition that the virus was circulating.

A medical worker shows China’s Sinovac Biotech Covid-19 vaccine at a public health center in Jakarta, on January 15, 2021.

Photo: Aditya Irawan / NurPhoto via AFP

The authors of the interim report do not claim to have definitively solved the mystery of Covid-19’s origin. “The lack of transparency from government and public health officials in the [People’s Republic of China] with respect to the origins of SARS-CoV-2 prevents reaching a more definitive conclusion,” the report says, adding that its conclusion could change if more independently verifiable information becomes available.

Throughout the pandemic, the WIV has largely remained a black box, owing to the Chinese government’s refusal to cooperate with international probes. By mining the WIV’s own records, Toy Reid and Senate researchers unearthed new clues that support the interim report’s assessment that a lab accident was “most likely” responsible for the pandemic.

In response to detailed questions, a Chinese Embassy spokesperson, Liu Pengyu, dismissed allegations of a lab leak and said that an international team convened by the World Health Organization concluded that “the allegation of lab leaking is extremely unlikely. The conclusion should be respected…. From the very beginning, China has taken a scientific, professional, serious and responsible attitude in origins tracing.”

Some American politicians and journalists “distort facts and truth,” Liu said, adding that the United States should “stop using the epidemic for political manipulation and blame games.”

‘Open the aperture of your mind’

More than two years after the Covid-19 pandemic’s onset, the question of its origin has remained a scientific whodunit for the ages. Did the virus come from a caged infected animal, languishing in the warren of stalls at a Wuhan wholesale market?

Or did it come from the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology, where China’s top coronavirus researchers, some partly funded by the US government, were splicing together coronavirus strains to gauge how they might become most infectious to humans?

A bitter battle has ensued between a group of virologists who assert their research points to a market origin and an alternate group of academics and online sleuths who argue there’s been an attempted cover-up of a more likely lab origin. Four months ago, the World Health Organization’s Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens revised an earlier conclusion and said that both scenarios remain on the table due to insufficient evidence – and require further investigation.

In June 2021, with efforts to learn the truth at a virtual standstill, Burr drafted Dr Robert Kadlec, the former Health and Human Services assistant secretary for preparedness and response under President Donald Trump, to assemble a team to examine the leading hypotheses. Burr, the ranking member of the Senate HELP committee, is retiring at year’s end. A spokesperson for Burr declined to make him available for an interview.

In the foreword of the interim report, Burr wrote, “My ultimate goal with this report is to provide a clearer picture of what we know, so far, about the origins of SARS-CoV-2 so that we can continue to work together to be better prepared to respond to future public health threats.”

Burr has served in the US Congress for 28 years, first as a congressman and then, since 2005, as a senator. By today’s standards, he is a moderate Republican, having voted to convict Trump in the January 6 impeachment. Long known for his work on biodefense issues, he helped lead the passage of the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act in 2006 and also worked to speed up the FDA’s approval of drugs for rare diseases.

The pandemic also immersed him in a scandal, as ProPublica has previously reported. In February 2020, after receiving Senate intelligence committee briefings on the health threat of Covid-19, he sold up to $1.7 million in stock holdings before the market tanked, sparking a Justice Department investigation into insider trading.

Burr said he relied on public news reports to guide his decision to sell stocks. He stepped aside as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee after the FBI seized his cellphone. In January 2021, the DOJ closed its investigation without charging him.

The Senate HELP committee paid the salaries of seven researchers, but paid for little more, so Kadlec cobbled together the best team he could.

From the State Department, he borrowed a veterinary epidemiologist as well as Reid, whom he’d met just weeks earlier through a mutual friend who was a Dalai Lama aficionado. At the time, Reid was detailed to the office of Senator Marco Rubio to work on China policy issues. Kadlec also leaned on scientific advisers with expertise in virology, epidemiology and biodefense.

Kadlec, a former Air Force officer who worked with Burr years earlier on bioterrorism issues, has served under both Republican and Democratic presidents. In 2003, he deployed to Iraq for the Department of Defense and played a critical role in debunking the false claims that trailers there doubled as mobile bioweapons labs. That experience, he says, equipped him to navigate the murky world of“dual-use research,” where civilian scientific work sometimes has a clandestine military purpose.

In February 2020, in his role at HHS, Kadlec allowed sick Americans on a cruise ship to return to the United States. Angry that the move added to the domestic Covid-19 case count, Trump threatened to fire him. And when Rick Bright, a senior HHS official turned whistleblower, accusing the Trump administration of politicizing the pandemic response, he also alleged that Kadlec had demoted him in retaliation and used federal funds to bestow contracts on favored drugmakers.

The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis investigated. While it did not issue formal findings against Kadlec, it noted in a press release that an HHS division under Kadlec’s control awarded a lucrative contract to a drugmaker, despite regulators’ warnings about its troubled manufacturing plants. Calling the experience “very hurtful,” Kadlec says, “I got slimed in the press.” He adds, “I still carry that with me today.”

Kadlec says the investigation of the 2003 Columbia space shuttle disaster, in which seven astronauts died, inspired his approach to the inquiry. It showed that “in complex disasters and events, there is always a political side, an engineering side, a human error side,” he says. “These things happen for a variety of reasons, so you have to open the aperture of your mind.”

In recruiting Reid, Kadlec found an analyst who would look for clues in places a typical scientist wouldn’t. “The things that I’ve been researching and translating are not really science,” Reid says. “It’s the party speaking to the world of science and trying to manage it.”

‘Complex and grave situation’

Even the authors of the relentlessly cheerful party branch dispatches and meeting summaries in the WIV archive found it hard to sugarcoat the events of November 19, 2019, Toy Reid discovered as he delved into the WIV’s archives.

Seven days after the Zhengdian party branch members wrote their memo about rushing to the front line to defend against viral dangers, fallout arrived in the form of an official visitor from Beijing. That visitor, Dr Ji Changzheng, is the technology safety and security director for the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the sprawling state agency that oversees more than 100 research institutions in China, including the WIV. His visit was billed as a senior safety-training seminar for a small high-level audience, including the WIV’s research department heads and top biosafety officials.

But the meeting, chronicled in a one-and-a-half-page summary uploaded to the WIV website on November 21, was no pro forma seminar. According to Reid, it appears to have been “out of the ordinary and event-driven” and distinct from the annual safety training, which had been held in April.

For Reid, the import of Ji’s opening remarks practically leapt off the page. Ji told the assembled group that he had come bearing “important oral remarks and written instructions” from General Secretary Xi Jinping and China’s premier, Li Keqiang, to address a “complex and grave situation.”

Though the summary’s language is characteristically vague, Ji described:

many large-scale cases of domestic and foreign safety incidents in recent years. And from the perspective of shouldering responsibility, standardizing operations, emergency planning, and inspecting hidden dangers one-by-one, [he] laid out a deep analysis, with many layers and taken from many angles, which vividly revealed the complex and grave situation currently facing [bio]security work.

The National Biosafety Laboratory in Wuhan. Photo: National Biosafety Laboratory website

The WIV’s deputy director of safety and security spoke next, summarizing “several general problems that were found over the course of the last year during safety and security investigations, and [he] pointed to the severe consequences that could result from hidden safety dangers.”

But what drew Reid’s full attention was the word Ji used to describe the important “written instructions” he was relaying from Beijing: “pishi.”

When China’s senior leaders receive written reports on a worrying or important issue, they will write instructions in the margins, known as pishi, to be carried out swiftly by lower-level officials.

As Reid interpreted it, the pishi that Ji arrived with that day appeared to have come directly from Xi, arguably China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong. To Reid, it suggested that Xi himself had been briefed on an ongoing crisis at the WIV.

Is it possible that Ji meant to invoke the authority of China’s supreme leader in a general way? As Reid acknowledges, “When Chinese officials want to be taken seriously by whoever their audience is, they invoke more senior officials.” To assess whether Ji had simply been dropping Xi’s name, as a way to underscore the importance of his message, Reid researched nine of Ji’s visits to different facilities prior to the pandemic. All were characterized as annual or routine. None mentioned a pishi. “There wasn’t this bandying about of Xi,” Reid says.

Further, when Chinese officials are invoking a higher authority in general terms, they will typically cite an important speech, says Reid. For example, Ji could have referenced the one Xi gave at the Chinese Academy of Sciences plenary session in May 2018. As Reid puts it, “If he just wanted to invoke the authority of Xi, the natural way to do that is to say, ‘Remember when he came to speak to all of us?’” Invoking the pishi, Reid believes, was “taking it to another level.”

Ji did not respond to questions and a request for comment that were sent to the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Neither the director general at the WIV nor the head of the WIV party committee responded to emails seeking their comment.

Vanity Fair and ProPublica examined research from Chinese academics on pishi and separately got three experts on CCP communications to review the WIV meeting summary. All agreed that it appeared to be urgent, nonroutine and related to some sort of biosafety emergency. Two also agreed that it appeared Xi himself had issued a pishi.

A former senior US intelligence official said that, while the pishi in the dispatch is not necessarily a smoking gun, he reads it as saying that “there is some issue related to lab security, which doesn’t come up very often, that needed to be seen by Xi Jinping.” He added, “Something signed off on by the General Secretary [Xi] and Premier [Li] is high priority.”

Another longtime CCP analyst said it was not possible to conclude from the document that Xi and Li had actually issued a pishi related to a specific incident, or even that they had been informed of one. Ji, in her view, might well have been invoking their names without their knowledge to underscore the importance of his message. However, she said, given the party’s preference for positive communications, the acknowledgment of a “‘complex and grave situation’ means ‘We are facing something really bad.’” She also said that the language of the summary implied that the situation in question was happening at that time.

Reading between the lines is essential to understanding what the WIV dispatches really mean. Geremie Barmé, an emeritus professor of Chinese history at the Australian National University who analyzed key documents at our request, said of CCP communications, “The style of self-protection – of rounding things out, of avoiding the truth – is a highly developed, bureaucratic art form.”

Without more evidence, it is impossible to know the details of what the assembled group knew and discussed that day. But at least one news report supports the notion that the virus may have been circulating at that time.

In March 2020, a veteran journalist with the South China Morning Post reported that she reviewed internal Chinese government data on early cases of Covid-19 that included a 55-year-old in Hubei province, where Wuhan is situated, who contracted Covid-19 on November 17, 2019.

That was just two days before Ji arrived at the WIV, bearing urgent instructions from the highest levels of China’s government.

‘Black swans and gray rhinos’

James LeDuc, a virologist and former Army officer, spent half a century studying how infectious diseases impact public health and national security. Over the course of his career, he witnessed China’s rise from a “not well-developed country” to a biotechnology superpower, he told Vanity Fair and ProPublica.

In December 1985, LeDuc, then a supervisor at the US Army medical research center, Fort Detrick, arrived at the Wuhan Institute of Virology to help work on a trial of drug efficacy for the hantavirus, a life-threatening disease transmitted by rodents. “China was emerging from the Cultural Revolution. Everyone was on bicycles,” he recalls. “I can remember giving a talk — the screen was a sheet one of us had to hold. The windows were broken out.”

Two and a half decades later, with help from French scientists and engineers, the WIV laid the cornerstone for China’s first BSL-4 laboratory. That facility, the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory, would become synonymous with the country’s lofty biotech ambitions.

“China has said repeatedly and forcefully — and they’re backing up their words with actions — that they intend to own the bio-revolution,” the biodefense expert Dr. Tara J O’Toole testified in November 2019 before a US Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities. O’Toole served as one of Kadlec’s scientific advisers for the report.

Today, China operates three BSL-4 laboratories and plans to build at least five more. (Biolabs are rated 1-4, from least to most secure, according to standards set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and international public health agencies.)

China’s progress has been fast — arguably too fast for its infrastructure to keep pace. It remains dependent on other countries for critical technology and supplies, leading to chronic procurement hurdles that party branch members refer to as the “stranglehold problem.” It has a thin bench of experts to run the most advanced laboratories. China “didn’t have the background of how to run [advanced laboratories] safely,” says LeDuc. “They were trying to do their best.”

From 2010 until his retirement in 2021, LeDuc served as director of the Galveston National Laboratory, one of eight BSL-4 facilities in the US. During that time, he went out of his way to help improve standards at the WIV. He brought several of the WIV’s scientists to Galveston for training and invited its officials to attend an international conference he hosted.

In 2016, LeDuc returned to the WIV for a scientific meeting in which he shared a new set of recommendations. The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity had urged the US government to screen proposals more intensively for what it called “gain-of-function research of concern” in which scientists manipulate dangerous pathogens to gauge their likelihood of sparking a pandemic.

LeDuc says his presentation was “not necessarily well received. Most of the folks were scientists and could care less about policy.” But he felt he had a responsibility to warn them all the same. “It’s enlightened self-interest that we are doing everything to ensure [China’s] success,” he says. “We want to make sure they have the best practices. If someone screws up, we all suffer.”

Poring through publicly available documents, Kadlec’s researchers saw that China’s top scientists had been sounding the alarm, too. “The biosafety laboratory is a double-edged sword; it can be used for the benefit of humanity but can also lead to a ‘disaster,’” warned a March 2019 article co-written by Yuan Zhiming, director of the WIV’s BSL-4 laboratory. “With increasing numbers of high-level biosafety laboratories constructed in China, it is urgent to establish and implement standardized management measures.”

That same month, the director of China’s CDC cautioned that bioengineering technologies would “also be available to the ambitious, careless, inept and outright malcontents, who may misuse them in ways that endanger our safety.” Writing in the journal Biosafety and Health, the director at the time, George Fu Gao, also urged that “modifying the genomes of animals (including humans), plants, and microbes (including pathogens) must be highly regulated.”

Meanwhile, reports of sloppy practices, hazardous conditions and inadequate oversight reverberated across China’s laboratories, according to documents unearthed by Reid and reviewed by Vanity Fair and ProPublica. A 2018 study by a municipal agency in Zhangjiajie, which canvassed 37 laboratories in the area, came to a scorching conclusion. “Our findings allow for no optimism about biosafety conditions,” the study said.

“There are many hidden safety dangers, including occupational exposure, hospital-acquired infections, environmental hazard, lack of training, those without credentials taking posts, management systems that do not operate effectively, leadership that does not place enough importance [on lab safety], deficient supervision and management by relevant health departments, etc.”

On November 7, 2018, an official with the Guangzhou Municipal Health Inspection Bureau doing laboratory biosafety inspections in the city, China’s largest manufacturing hub, identified a litany of hazards: improper use of disinfectants, substandard management of samples, personnel with inadequate training and protective gear and laboratory wastewater released directly into sewage systems.

The WIV was by no means exempt from such problems, according to reports in its own archives. In 2011 and 2018, inspections of WIV laboratories turned up lapses including improper storage of viral samples and management failings.

Then, on December 24, 2018, an incident that was impossible to conceal helped catapult lab safety to the top of China’s policy agenda. Three students at Beijing Jiaotong University burned to death after improperly stored chemicals exploded inside the school’s laboratory.

On January 21, 2019, Xi Jinping gave a speech to the CCP’s Central Party School, where budding young cadres receive their higher education. Conveying a sense of “anxious urgency,” according to The New York Times, he stressed the need to prepare for two kinds of risks: “black swans and gray rhinos.”

He was referring to two concepts popularized in bestselling books: A black swan is a rare and unpredictable event, while a gray rhino is an obvious risk that is ignored until it poses an immediate threat.

Chinese President Xi Jinping visits the Covid-19 epicenter Wuhan, Hubei province, on March 10, 2020. Photo: AFP

Xi proceeded to describe potential security problems in China’s state laboratories, leaving no doubt that he was concerned about the issue.

With Xi himself calling for action, a biosecurity bill that had been on the back burner became a top priority and later passed. In October 2019, Gao Hucheng, chairman of a National People’s Congress committee responsible for environmental protection, argued for its importance before the Congress’ standing committee.

In the fall of that year, according to declassified intelligence in a US State Department fact sheet, several researchers inside the WIV became sick “with symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and common seasonal illnesses.” The fact sheet did not say who the researchers were or how the US government learned of their illnesses.

As the Chinese government raced to overhaul biosafety regulations, scientists at the WIV faced a conflicting imperative: Beijing’s demand for scientific breakthroughs, which created pressure to perform cutting-edge experiments that could be published in prestigious journals. A party branch dispatch noted that Tong Xiao, a member of the WIV’s CCP committee, often told scientists there: “Don’t look at your work duties as pressure. Every task is an opportunity and a ladder for continuous self-improvement. Our team’s belief is that suffering losses is good fortune.”

“They’ve got this really aggressive regime breathing down their neck,” says Reid. “These guys are in a political pressure cooker.”

‘A doom loop of pressure’

In 2002, an outbreak of the SARS coronavirus that originated in China spread around the world, killing 774 people and infecting more than 8,000. At first, China tried to conceal the problem.

When that became impossible, it played down the severity, falsely claiming the epidemic was under control. Meanwhile, in two separate incidents in 2004, SARS accidentally leaked from a top laboratory in Beijing and led to mini outbreaks.

In the wake of the debacle, China committed to a long-term project not only to repair its public-health reputation but also to achieve the cutting-edge scientific prowess worthy of a true global superpower.

In 2004, French president Jacques Chirac flew to Beijing to sign a scientific cooperation agreement that would help catapult China into the big leagues. Welcomed with lavish ceremony, amid Champagne and strutting soldiers, Chirac pledged that France would sell China four mobile BSL-3 laboratories, help build a world-class BSL-4 lab and partner on essential research.

Eleven years and $44 million later, construction of the BSL-4 lab was complete. Set high above a flood plain, the four-story concrete laboratory was designed to withstand a magnitude seven earthquake. By early 2018, it had been accredited to research the world’s most dangerous pathogens, including Ebola, Marburg and Nipah viruses. Xi Jinping himself hailed it as “of vital importance to Chinese public health.”

From the outside, the WIV appeared to be a transparent hub for top-caliber international collaborations. That ethos was best embodied by a fearless scientist named Shi Zhengli. She had risen through the ranks at the WIV to become director of its Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases and deputy director of its BSL-4 lab. Fluent in French, she had trained at the BSL-4 Jean Mérieux-Inserm Laboratory in Lyon and was well known in China as “Bat Woman” for her intrepid exploration of their caves to collect samples.

“Shi Zhengli was totally aware of how to handle viruses,” Gabriel Gras, a French biosafety and biocontainment technology expert who helped train the WIV’s BSL-4 staff, told Vanity Fair and ProPublica. “She has handled these all her life.”

As the BSL-4 lab there became one of the nation’s most exalted scientific showpieces, Shi’s research grew in importance and scope. In a 2015 research paper, Shi and a University of North Carolina virologist named Ralph Baric proved that the spike protein of a novel coronavirus could be used to infect human cells.

Using mice as subjects, they spliced the spike of a novel SARS-like virus from a bat into a version of the 2003 SARS virus, creating a new infectious pathogen. The virus manipulation was completed at Baric’s BSL-3 lab in North Carolina. This gain-of-function experiment was so fraught that the authors essentially put a warning label on it, writing, “scientific review panels may deem similar studies … too risky to pursue.”

In March 2018, Shi partnered with Baric and a longtime collaborator, Peter Daszak, on a $14 million grant proposal to genetically manipulate bat coronaviruses to see how they might cause pandemics. The proposal called for possibly enhancing the viruses with something called a furin cleavage site to boost their entry into human cells. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) rejected the grant proposal for not adequately assessing the risks posed by a supercharged virus.

It is not clear whether WIV scientists continued the research on their own. Shi and Baric did not offer comment. In his response to our request for comment, Daszak did not address the DARPA grant. He said that he had not reviewed the Senate report and instead pointed to another report, which he recently co-authored that was published by the US nongovernmental organization National Academy of Sciences, that “strongly indicates” a natural origin for SARS-CoV-2.

Although Shi was most often pictured in the Chinese press in her white, pressurized oxygen suit, required for BSL-4 research, published papers show that she and the researchers she supervised did much of their work in BSL-3 and even BSL-2 facilities, which the WIV allowed prior to the pandemic.

The interim report enumerates several types of risky research conducted at the WIV at BSL-3 and BSL-2 levels. Animal experiments to test the efficacy of vaccines generated highly infectious aerosols that are “difficult to detect,” the interim report says, adding that “there were concerns about conducting this type of research in a BSL2 laboratory.”

In early 2017, the collaboration with the French fizzled and Gras, the last French expert there, departed. The French had served as designers and contractors but never became partners. “I think the French did not really have a strong interest in working with Wuhan,” in part due to diverging research interests, Gras said. He added that Yuan Zhiming, the BSL-4 director, “was not an easy person. He can put pressure on people.” Yuan did not respond to emails seeking comment.

Long before the lab began its riskiest work, there were alarming signs of trouble ahead. In 2016, during severe flooding, the waters rose so high that nearby streets were impassable, and researchers had to hike through a forested area to reach the laboratory and ensure its safety, Zhengdian lab party branch members recounted in a WIV dispatch that Toy Reid unearthed.

The decision to build the walls out of stainless steel caused a considerable challenge. Stainless steel is “very vulnerable to corrosion” from disinfectants, Bob Hawley, the former chief of safety and radiation protection at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease, told Vanity Fair and ProPublica. Hawley is an expert adviser to the interim report.

Even in 2016, Chinese technicians were already struggling with how to properly disinfect laboratory surfaces and other items, according to emails obtained in a FOIA lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch. That July Yuan emailed a US National Institutes of Health staffer, whom he’d met the previous year, under the subject line “ask for help.” He wrote that he was seeking “some suggestion for the choice of disinfectants” used in the BSL-4 laboratory. “I am sorry to disturb you and I really hope you could give us some suggestion,” he wrote.

As LeDuc observed, “They were looking for expertise wherever they could find it.”

Yuan himself identified the shortage of expertise as one of many problems that imperiled safe operations in China’s laboratories. In the September 2019 issue of the Journal of Biosafety and Security, he described a threadbare system where maintenance costs were “generally neglected” and “several high-level BSLs have insufficient operational funds for routine yet vital processes. Due to the limited resources, some BSL-3 laboratories run on extremely minimal operational costs or in some cases none at all.”

Gerald Parker, associate dean for Global One Health at Texas A&M University’s School of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences and an expert adviser to the interim report, told Vanity Fair and ProPublica that he found Yuan’s revelations “jaw-dropping.”

The combination of biosafety problems and limited maintenance funds is “a recipe for disaster,” he said. “You further couple that with an authoritarian regime where you could be penalized for reporting safety issues. You are in a doom loop of pressure to produce, and if something goes wrong you may not be incentivized to report.”

As the Zhengdian lab party branch members noted in their dispatch of November 12, 2019, which the interim report includes: “In the laboratory, they often need to work for four consecutive hours, even extending to six hours. During this time, they cannot eat, drink or relieve themselves. This is an extreme test of a person’s will and physical endurance.”

A four- to six-hour shift in a positive pressure suit would be “unusually lengthy,” said Hawley, given the stress of dehydration, lack of mobility and noise from oxygen that is so loud it requires hearing protection. “Usually, it’s only a couple of hours at the maximum.”

Larry Kerr, a virologist who recently retired as HHS’s director of the Office of Pandemics and Emerging Threats and who served as an expert adviser to the Senate report, told Vanity Fair and ProPublica, “My gut feeling is that the WIV was not ready to go hot when they turned everything on [at the BSL-4] and started doing experiments in early 2018.” He added: “Even the WIV’s people are saying, ‘We don’t have the resources and capabilities to keep this up and running.’ It’s like, holy crap, if you are working in a lab like that, I don’t understand why people don’t shut it down.”

But the showpiece laboratory remained as busy as ever. As Reid said of the WIV dispatches he analyzed, “The feel you get from all these documents is: It’s just ‘produce, produce, produce,’ like an actor preparing to take the stage before they’re ready.”

The CCP’s version of ‘cover your ass’

By the fall of 2019, trouble was brewing at the WIV, according to documents turned up by Toy Reid.

On September 11, 2019, the CCP’s No. 15 Inspection Patrol Group arrived at the Beijing headquarters of the WIV’s parent organization, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), to conduct a two-month political inspection. The inspection was part of a larger, routine sweep of 37 state organizations. According to the inspection team’s leader, its purpose was to sniff out any “violations of political discipline, party organizational discipline, [financial] ethics discipline, discipline with regard to the masses, work discipline, and discipline in one’s personal life.” They were also on the lookout for instances of insufficient loyalty to the CCP’s mission.

The Beijing inspectors identified more than a dozen “principal problems” at CAS, among them a “‘persistent gap’ between Xi Jinping’s important instructions on pursuing ‘leapfrog development in science and technology’ and CAS’s implementation of Xi’s instructions.” In short: not enough progress, despite all the pressure.

A week earlier, on September 3, more than 50 managers and staffers at the WIV had met to discuss a looming internal audit that would evaluate political discipline, according to a party branch dispatch. The scientists and their overseers were facing scrutiny at every level.

A trail of evidence from that fall appears to show the WIV trying to address a crisis. “That’s when you start to see emergency response activity,” says Larry Kerr, the former director of the HHS pandemic office.

It began within 24 hours of the start of the CAS 1919 inspection. On September 12 between 2 and 3 a.m., the interim report says, the WIV took down its Wildlife-Borne Viral Pathogen Database, which contained more than 15,000 samples from bats. The database had been a resource for researchers globally. A password-protected section only accessible to WIV personnel contained unpublished sequences of bat beta-coronaviruses — the family of coronaviruses to which SARS-CoV-2 belongs. Public access to the database has not yet been restored.

The Senate researchers analyzed a trail of procurements and patent applications, which, the interim report notes, suggest that “the WIV struggled to maintain key biosafety capabilities at its high-containment BSL3 and BSL4 laboratories.” On December 11, a team of WIV researchers submitted a patent application in China for a device to filter and contain hazardous gases inside a biological chamber, like the ones it used to transport infected animals. The application, which Vanity Fair and ProPublica reviewed, noted that defective air hoses on animal carriers can lead to “multi-stage” risks when airborne pathogens are involved, and warned that a “stable high-efficiency filtering device” and corrosion-resistant frame were “urgently needed.”

This file photo taken on March 30, 2020 shows workers wearing protective suits walking next to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, in China’s central Hubei province, after travel restrictions into the city were eased following more than two months of lockdown due to the Covid-19 coronavirus outbreak.

Photo: Hector Retamal / AFP

The following year, in November 2020, the WIV applied for a patent for a new disinfectant compound that it argued would reduce “the corrosion effect to metal, especially stainless steel material,” the interim report says.

The patent application, which listed seven inventors, including Yuan Zhiming, vividly describes concerns related to its prior disinfectant:

 Long-term use will lead to corrosion of metal components such as stainless steel, thereby reducing the protection of … facilities and equipment. It can not only shorten its service life and cause economic losses, but also lead to the escape of highly pathogenic microorganisms into the external environment of the laboratory, resulting in loss of life and property and serious social problems.

In the words of one China analyst who serves as an adviser to Western companies, when Chinese officials “describe the solution to a problem, that’s how you find out what went wrong.”

Vanity Fair and ProPublica analyzed the WIV website and found that there may have been an after-the-fact attempt to reframe the events of November 2019. On November 11, the WIV appeared to republish the entire section of its website containing institutional and party branch news.

Every dispatch from prior dates, even those from several years earlier, contains underlying data that indicate it was changed on that day.

While this could have resulted from routine site maintenance, it raises another possibility: that WIV officials removed or revised documents in an effort to insulate themselves from blame ahead of the Nov. 19 visit from Ji Changzheng, the CAS biosecurity official.

The first dispatch to be posted after November 11 was the one from the Zhengdian lab party branch enumerating how its members had rushed to the front lines every time there had been a biocontainment lapse. The dispatch was dated November 12, but the underlying data suggest the file was actually uploaded on November 19, the day of Ji’s urgent visit.

Matthew Pottinger, who researches China-related issues at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and was President Trump’s deputy national security adviser, told Vanity Fair and ProPublica, “This is the CCP’s version of ‘cover your ass.’”

‘Scientifically, technically not possible’

As Senate researchers explored the question of when the outbreak began, they and their scientific advisers examined the surprisingly fast vaccine development by several Chinese research teams.

The work of one military vaccinologist caught their attention: Zhou Yusen, director of the State Key Laboratory of Pathogen and Biosecurity at the Academy of Military Medical Sciences Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, in Beijing. Zhou had spent years working to develop vaccines for pathogens including SARS and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), a novel coronavirus first identified in Saudi Arabia in 2012. A 2016 report by the WIV featured Zhou as a key partner on its MERS vaccine research. And in November 2019, he collaborated on a paper with a team of WIV scientists that included Shi Zhengli.

On February 24, 2020, Zhou became the first researcher in the world to apply for a patent for a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine. His proposed vaccine worked by reproducing a part of the virus’s spike protein known as the receptor binding domain. In order to start vaccine development, researchers would have needed the entire SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequence, the interim report says.

Shi Zhengli has said that her lab was the first to sequence the virus and completed that work on the morning of Jan. 2, 2020. That sequence is the one Zhou said he worked with in his Chinese patent application, which Vanity Fair and ProPublica reviewed.

According to the interim report, there are limits to how fast a vaccine can be developed. In particular, it said that “animal studies are designed to last a specific length of time and cannot be curtailed without compromising the resulting data.”

In his patent application and in subsequently published papers, Zhou documented a robust research and development process that included both adapting the virus to wild-type mice and infecting genetically modified ones with humanized lungs.

Vanity Fair and ProPublica consulted two independent experts and one expert adviser to the interim report to get their assessment of when Zhou’s research was likely to have begun. Two of the three said that he had to have started no later than November 2019, in order to complete the mouse research spelled out in his patent and subsequent papers.

Larry Kerr, who advised on the interim report, called the timeline laid out in Zhou’s patent and research papers “scientifically, technically not possible.” He added, “I don’t think any molecular biology lab in the world, no matter how sophisticated, could pull that off.”

Rick Bright, the former HHS official who helped oversee vaccine development for the US government, told Vanity Fair and ProPublica that even a four-month timetable would be “aggressive,” especially when the virus in question is new. “Things aren’t usually that perfect,” he said.

Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, told us the timetable was very fast but “feasible for a group with substantial existing expertise and ongoing work” on developing similar SARS-related coronavirus vaccines, but only if “everything went right.”

Zhou and his colleagues described their Covid-19 vaccine research in a preprint posted on May 2, 2020. When it was published in a peer-reviewed journal three months later, Reid found, Zhou was listed as “deceased.” The circumstances of his death have not been disclosed.

Battle lines

In the early hours of January 1, 2020, Wuhan officials closed the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market after identifying it as the site of the world’s first cluster of SARS-CoV-2 infections. Animals for sale were carted away, stalls were sanitized and an epidemiology team spent days collecting environmental samples.

 The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market sits closed in Wuhan in central China’s Hubei province, pictured on January 21, 2020. Photo: VOA

How did the virus arrive in Wuhan, a metropolis of 11 million people hundreds of miles north of China’s teeming bat caves? It was such an unlikely place for a coronavirus outbreak that WIV scientists had in the past used Wuhan residents as a control group when screening people in the countryside of Yunnan Province for exposure to bat-borne viruses. The assumption was that urbanites in Wuhan would have little contact with bats.

To many scientists, the answer was clear: The wildlife trade in China had brought live animals, an obvious source of disease, into dangerously close proximity to people. Years earlier, something similar had happened with SARS, which spilled over into multiple different markets that sold live animals across Guangdong Province over the course of months.

But the interim report also highlights questions that soon arose regarding the market theory. If the wildlife trade was the culprit, where was the trail of infected animals? And where was the animal host?

The question of where Covid-19 came from has never been a purely scientific one. From the start, in both China and the US, it has been politicized almost beyond recognition.

In April 2020, Trump declared at a press conference that Covid-19 — or “kung flu,” as he soon began calling it — had come from a lab in China. When pressed on the evidence for this claim, he declared: “I can’t tell you that. I’m not allowed to tell you that.”

As a conspiratorial rabble trained its sights on the WIV generally, and Shi Zhengli specifically, Western scientists rushed to their defense. “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin,” read a statement signed by 27 scientists and published by the Lancet medical journal on February 19, 2020. It would later emerge that one of the scientists who’d signed that statement had sought to conceal his own role in orchestrating it and creating the impression of a consensus, as Vanity Fair has reported previously. That scientist didn’t address this issue when he replied to our request for comment for this article.

By then, however, the battle lines had been drawn. If you backed the lab-leak theory, you were with Trump. If you believed in science, you supported the natural-origin theory generally and the market-spillover theory in particular.

On February 25, 2022, a team of researchers from China’s CDC published a preprint revealing that of the 457 swabs taken from 18 species of animals in the market, none contained any evidence of the virus. Rather, the virus was found in 73 swabs taken from around the market’s environment, all linked to human infections. And although some seafood and vegetable vendors in the market tested positive, no vendors from animal stalls did.

The next day, a team of scientists including Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona, published a preprint identifying the Huanan market as the “unambiguous epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic.” Using mapping software, they analyzed the locations of 155 of the earliest known cases reported by the Chinese authorities to the World Health Organization and found them to be centered on the market. A companion analysis led by Jonathan Pekar, a bioinformatics graduate student at the University of California San Diego, said there had been not one but “at least two” spillover events at the market.

The Worobey paper described its findings as “dispositive evidence” for a market origin. The New York Times catapulted the preprints to international attention. When the peer-reviewed version was published in Science in July, the “dispositive evidence” language was gone. In a detailed response to our request for comment, Worobey said that the removal of those words was the authors’ editorial choice and that the language in Science was “no less definitive” than the preprint: “It was replaced with similar language: ‘our analyses indicate that the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 occurred through the live wildlife trade in China.’”

By contrast, the interim Senate report concludes that “the hypothesis of a natural zoonotic origin no longer deserves the benefit of the doubt or the presumption of accuracy.” The available evidence doesn’t fit the patterns of previous outbreaks, including outbreaks of SARS in 2003 and avian influenza in 2013, it states.

Those outbreaks saw many independent spillover events in multiple locations, and those viruses “exhibited much greater genetic diversity than early SARS-CoV-2 strains.” And within six months of the first known case of SARS, the report says, Chinese health officials found evidence of the virus in palm civets and raccoon dogs.

The interim report also points out that, “almost three years after the Covid-19 pandemic began, there is still no evidence of an animal infected with SARS-CoV-2, or a closely related virus, before the first publicly reported human Covid-19 cases in Wuhan in December 2019.”

Worobey said, “Our two recent papers establish that a natural zoonotic origin is the only plausible scenario for the origin of the pandemic.” Before this story ran, Worobey posted his comments to us, as well as additional ones, on Twitter, so they would not be “ignored or filtered,” and stated he had not been given sufficient time to respond.

While the China CDC found no evidence of the virus in animals in the market, Pekar told Vanity Fair and ProPublica that the removal of animals from the market by the start of 2020 made it difficult to “actually sample the correct animals for SARS-CoV-2.”

The Senate’s interim report is no likelier than the Worobey and Pekar studies to close the book on the origins debate, nor does it attempt to. If anything, it seems destined to escalate the battle just as Republicans in Congress hope to retake the majority in the midterm elections. They aim to haul Dr. Anthony Fauci, the outgoing director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, into Benghazi-style hearings.

The dispute over Covid-19’s origins, fought in the halls of Congress and on the web pages of scientific preprints, has become more toxic and divisive as time has passed. On Twitter, what should be scientific debate has devolved into a mosh pit of poop emojis and middle school insults. It is unclear what is driving the animus, but political advantage, egos, scientific reputations and research dollars all hang in the balance.

‘Under the thumb of the party state’

In early February 2020, as Covid-19 was spreading beyond China, James LeDuc of the Galveston National Laboratory began fielding calls from journalists asking if SARS-CoV-2 could have originated from a lab.

He didn’t think so. Nonetheless, on February 9, he emailed his longtime colleague and mentee at the WIV, Yuan Zhiming. LeDuc encouraged Yuan to “conduct a thorough review of the laboratory activities associated with research on coronaviruses so that you are fully prepared to answer questions dealing with the origin of the virus.” He included a three-page list of “some areas where you may wish to investigate.”

Included in LeDuc’s proposed review were the following questions: “Is there any evidence to suggest a mechanical failure in biocontainment during the time in question?” “Were biological safety cabinets used and appropriately certified?” “Exhaust air filtration systems working correctly?”

The questions were apt. Two and a half months earlier, according to the interim report, procurement officials at the WIV posted a call for bids on a government website seeking a costly air incinerator. The post was dated November 19, 2019, the very day that the visiting CAS safety official arrived to address a “complex and grave” situation there.

Prior to the wider adoption of HEPA filters in the 1950s, air incinerators were used to “superheat air coming from one place and going to another, in order to render them free of any microbial agent,” said Bob Hawley, the former safety chief at the Army’s Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease. “If somehow the HEPA filter system failed, because there was a tear or breach … then your quick fix would be to bring in an air incinerator.”

LeDuc says he never heard back from Yuan.

Toy Reid, who is now in Jakarta resuming his work for the State Department, says that WIV scientists are not “free agents” who can candidly share what occurred in their laboratories. “The WIV is under the thumb of the party-state,” he says. “Just because you can’t see the political pressures they’re under doesn’t mean they’re not under them. American scientists have been slow to realize that.”

Without the cooperation of China’s government, we can’t know exactly what did or didn’t happen at the WIV, or what precise set of circumstances unleashed SARS-CoV-2. But the dispatches that Reid unearthed, when overlaid with additional evidence the Senate team compiled, point to a catastrophe in the making: political pressure to excel, inadequate resources to safeguard risky work and an effort to skirt blame once a crisis hit.

As Reid sees it, the international community must continue to demand answers. “If you just throw your hands in the air and say, ‘We’ll never know because it’s China,’ and just move on – if you take that defeatist approach to things – you can’t prepare yourself to prevent something like this from happening in the future.”

Katherine Eban reports for Vanity Fair; Jeff Kao, for ProPublica.

Source

• The fine structure constant, a number that emerges from theories of quantum mechanics, is measured in laboratory experiments to be roughly 1/137.

• This slightly coincidental number is a perennial source of excitement.

• While its meaning holds some intrigue, the greatest mystery surrounding this number is why it so fascinates physicists.

Popular science coverage of theoretical physics frequently fantasizes over the fraction 1/137. PBS Space Time mused about it for 20 minutes. NewScientist hyperbolically called it “the answer to life, the universe, and everything.” Numerologists, including religious ones, have been inspired by the number.

To be fair, science popularizers and numerologists alike are taking their cues from eccentric physicists. Various 20th century quantum theoreticians made bold guesses, claims, and rambling metaphysical speculations about 1/137. Among them are Nobel Prize winners like Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Dirac, and Richard Feynman. Who are we mere mortals to disagree with these giants?

Geniuses are sometimes wrong. Feynman was an egotist who would do anything for attention and thought that brushing his teeth was a superstition. Pauli dabbled in parapsychology, alchemy, and numerology with Carl Jung. Maybe the mysterious 1/137 — which is known as the fine structure constant — falls into this camp?

It’s not really 137

Let’s start with what the value of the fine structure constant (α) actually is. According to NIST, the best measurement of the number is 0.0072973525693 — give or take 0.0000000000011. When you take its reciprocal (1 divided by that number), the result is about 137 (specifically, 137.035999084, again according to NIST).

Thus, the numerological significance of 137 has lost some of its shimmer. The actual number is 137.04 (rounded). It’s not 137. If your grocery bill came out to be $137.04, would you shriek with excitement because it was almost 137? Probably not, yet that’s what some physicists and science popularizers are doing here. It’s also not clear what’s so exciting about 137. It is a prime number, so that’s sort of cool — but there are a lot of those (an infinite number, actually). Besides, other numbers are arguably cooler; the number 6 is probably the coolest.

α appears everywhere

The non-numerological nature of α is far more interesting. It is a natural ratio that pops up in sophisticated (and less sophisticated) models of atoms, electrons, and photons. Perhaps most interestingly, the number has no associated units, so it’s not dependent upon our arbitrary systems of measurement.

You’re already familiar with “unit-less” numbers. Pi (π), which is ~3.14 and represents the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, also has no units. It’s not 3.14 meters or 3.14 inches or 3.14 hamburgers. It’s just 3.14. α is like that. And just like π, α shows up in a variety of physics equations.

But here’s the bottom line: Like π, α is simply a fact of life, a number to be plugged into a formula to calculate an answer, like calculating light emission from an atom. The number itself comes from the need to calibrate the mathematics behind quantum mechanics to match experimental observations. In the same way that a map needs a scale factor to translate inches on the paper (or screen) to miles on the ground, mathematical physics theories need scaling numbers to match data.

Some physicists and science enthusiasts are hunting for a deeper meaning, but there isn’t one. However, to search for meaning is a fundamentally human endeavor, and weird numbers tempt us into doing just that. This may be best demonstrated by something called the Eddington Number.

The Eddington Number

Brilliant astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington famously developed a theory, founded upon multiplying the inverse of α (which he believed to be exactly 136) by 2256. He described its results in this way:

“I believe there are 15747724136275002577605653961181555468044717914527116709366231425076185631031296 protons in the Universe, and the same number of electrons.”

This physical constant was dubbed the Eddington Number, NE. According to fellow genius Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Eddington was so smart that he calculated NE by hand on paper during a voyage across the Atlantic. Later astronomers re-checked with a computer, and Eddington got it exactly right. That is to say, he got the calculation right; of course, no one knows how many protons are actually in the Universe. Whatever the true number of protons may be, it’s a good bet that it isn’t determined by multiplying arbitrarily “beautiful” numbers.

Math isn’t magic

This sort of mysticism for strange numbers is the product of attempting to ascribe meaning to mathematics, as if math itself was the underlying fundamental reality of existence. But it isn’t. True, math is extremely effective at describing the Universe, in part because much of it was literally invented to do so. Math has always had irascible champions who see it as a pure and abstract art, even though most of its historical development was motivated by the need to calculate a “good enough” answer to some important problem.

This isn’t to say that math isn’t awe-inspiring or beautiful. It absolutely can be. Mathematician Dr. Francis Su describes the spiritual experience of grasping eternal truths, like those he finds in both math and religion. But trying to find meaning behind specific numbers is a fruitless endeavor. There is no deeper meaning to 1/137, just as there is no deeper meaning to 3.14.

Source

Today is the birth anniversary of Indian nuclear physicist Homi Jehangir Bhabha who is also known as the father of the Indian nuclear program. He was born on 30 October 1909 in Bombay, Bombay Presidency, British India (now Mumbai, Maharashtra, India). His invaluable contributions to the field of science continue to inspire generations of young minds in the country.

Here are some interesting facts related to this great personality.

1.  Homi J Bhabha was the founding director and professor of physics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR).

2. Homi J Bhabha was also the founding director of the Atomic Energy Establishment, Trombay (AEET). It is now named the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in his honour.

3. TIFR and AEET were the cornerstones of Indian development of nuclear weapons and both were supervised by Bhabha as director.

4. In 1942, Bhabha was awarded the Adams Prize and Padma Bhushan in 1954.

5. In 1951 and 1953–1956, Bhabha was also nominated for the Nobel Prize for Physics.

6. Homi J Bhabha was born into a prominent wealthy Parsi family.

7. Bhabha, in January 1933, received his doctorate in nuclear physics after publishing his first scientific paper-“The Absorption of Cosmic radiation”. This very paper helped him win the Isaac Newton Studentship in 1934.

8. There was no institute in India that had the necessary facilities for original work in nuclear physics and this prompted Bhabha to send a proposal in March 1944 to the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust for establishing one.

9. Homi J Bhabha is also known for formulating a strategy of focusing on extracting power from the country’s vast thorium reserves. It is pertinent to mention here India has meager uranium reserves.

10. On 24 January 1966, Bhabha died when Air India Flight 101 crashed near Mont Blanc. The official reason for the crash-A misunderstanding between Geneva Airport and the pilot about the aircraft’s position near the mountain. However, there are assassination claims like involvement of a foreign intelligence agency to paralyse India’s nuclear program.

Source

Despite being around for more than 100 years, Ouija boards (a wooden board covered with the letters of the alphabet, the numbers 0-9, and the words "yes", "no" and "goodbye") continue to be a popular activity – especially around Halloween.

To work, all participants must place their hands on the wooden pointer (or planchette) and ask any present "spirits" to answer their questions by moving the planchette around the board to spell out their response.

While some see it as a harmless parlor game, others swear by the board's ability to communicate with those who have passed to the "other side".

But though science suggests that ghosts aren't behind the board's mysterious movements, the explanation for how they do work isn't as straightforward as you might expect.

The history of the Ouija board is a long and varied one. It may first be partially traced back to the Fox Sisters, popular mediums in the 19th century who pioneered the spiritualism movement.

One of their most frequently used methods for communicating with so-called spirits involved saying the alphabet aloud and listening for a knock in response. This allowed them to spell out words and messages, supposedly from the dead.

This method captured the public's imagination but was quickly frustrating. People wanted to be able to communicate with spirits as quickly as they were able to communicate with people using new technologies, such as the telegraph. So when the Ouija board was finally developed in 1890, it was an instant success.

But despite its early popularity, the Ouija board fell out of favor at the start of the 20th century. This was largely due to many famous mediums who used the device being publicly debunked.

Even the Society for Psychical Research moved away from spirit communication, towards other paranormal phenomena such as extra-sensory perception (the ability to send and receive information with your mind) and haunted houses.

However, interest in spiritualism and Ouija boards more generally was rapidly revived after the second world war – and continues to this day.

Ouija boards at work

But do Ouija boards work? It depends on who you ask. For those who believe in the ability to communicate with spirits, the answer would be yes. But given there's no conclusive evidence spirits exist, the answer from skeptics and scientists alike would be a firm no.

And yet we often hear stories from so-called "non-believers" who say that they have felt the planchette move over the board, spelling out words and telling them things no one else around the table could know.

So, if it isn't ghostly messages from the other side, what is it?

One possible answer is the ideomotor effect. The term ideomotor stems from ideo (an idea) and motor (muscular activity), suggesting our movements can be driven by our thoughts.

The ideomotor effect refers to movements people make that they're unaware of – referred to as a subconscious movement. So when using a Ouija board, for example, a person may subconsciously move the planchette, spelling out things only they could know.

Those around them may also contribute their own subconscious movement, which can also explain why the planchette appears to move independently.

This effect may explain a variety of other paranormal phenomena as well – including automatic writing and dowsing (a type of pseudoscience which uses a y-shaped twig or metal rods to find the location of buried objects, such as water or oil).

Another explanation, which is also linked to the ideomotor effect, is related to our sense of agency. Sense of agency refers to our subjective ability to control actions that will have an influence on external events. So for example, if you decide to lift a table up, it will cause it to move.

Experiments with Ouija boards have demonstrated that our sense of agency can be manipulated, leading us to think that an invisible third party is moving the planchette.

This is thought to be due to issues our brain faces around predicting the consequences of outcomes. When our predictions match the outcome (for example, you lift the table and the table moves), we feel that we are responsible for the action.

But if we feel the actual outcome doesn't match up with how we expected things to turn out, then our sense of agency decreases – and it's possible that, in the context of a seance, we may instead attribute this movement as coming from an external source.

A third factor to consider is emotional contagion. We know that shocking, highly emotional events can lead to witnesses nearby "catching" those emotions. This was thought to be a prevalent factor in the witch trials of Salem and Europe.

So when using a Ouija board with other people, the excitement of the highly charged environment may make it easier for us to start to empathize with those around us. This may see us pick up on their fear and anxiety, making it more likely for us to think the planchette is moving on its own.

It's possible then to see that a combination of factors – the ideomotor effect, a manipulated sense of agency, and emotional contagion – can all combine to convince people that the planchette is moving and spirits are speaking to them.

But given how difficult it is to replicate the social setting in which most people use Ouija boards in a lab, we can't say with complete certainty that these factors alone explain what actually happens when we place our fingers on the planchette and call to the spirits to share their knowledge.

As some experts note, the public's desire to communicate with the dead tends to become more popular following times of social and political upheaval.

Given the present social, economic, and political climate – including the COVID-19 pandemic, the ongoing war in Ukraine, and the cost-of-living crisis – it's entirely possible that we will see a return to the seance rooms of the Victorian era. Or at the very least, on TikTok.

Megan Kenny, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Sheffield Hallam University

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

Source

Monday, October 31

The first launch of the week is a Chinese Long March 5B rocket, taking off from Wenchang Satellite Launch Center at 7:36 a.m. UTC. This is an exciting launch because the rocket is taking the third module of the Chinese Space Station into orbit. The module is called Mengtian and include an airlock to move cargo between the interior and exterior of the space station. When Mengtian docks with the rest of the craft, it will add another 17.9 metres (59 feet) to the Chinese Space Station, which could make it easier to see from Earth.

Tuesday, November 1

The next launch of the week will be conducted by SpaceX from Florida at 1:40 p.m. UTC. The company will launch a Falcon Heavy rocket carrying a payload called TETRA 1 for the U.S. Space Force. It’s not known what the TETRA 1 MicroSat will be used for, only that it will be used to “prototype missions and tactics, techniques and procedures in and around geosynchronous Earth orbit.” This mission should be streamed on SpaceX’s launch page.

Thursday, November 3

SpaceX will also be carrying out the third launch of the week, this time from Cape Canaveral in Florida at 3:25 a.m. UTC. A Falcon 9 will launch carrying the Hotbird 13G television broadcasting satellite which will provide services in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. You’ll be able to tune in to the launch on SpaceX’s launch page.

Saturday, November 5

At 3:20 a.m. UTC, China will launch a Long March 3B/E carrying the Zhongxing communications satellite. There’s not too much information about this satellite, and it’s unlikely to be streamed live. Be sure to check the recap next week for video footage of the launch and more details about the satellite.

Sunday, November 6

The final launch of the week will be a Northrop Grumman Antares rocket, which will launch a Cygnus cargo freighter to the International Space Station. The operational cargo delivery mission is called NG-18, and the spacecraft has been called the SS Sally Ride. It’s flying as part of NASA’s commercial resupply services (CRS) contract. The rocket will take off at 10:50 a.m. from Wallops Island in Virginia. You can watch the launch live on YouTube.

Recap

The first launch last week was a Soyuz 2.1a carrying the Progress MS-21 spacecraft to resupply the International Space Station. It took off from Baikonur Cosmodrome and delivered food, fuel, and other supplies.

The next launch was a Falcon 9 carrying 53 Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit. These satellites beam internet connectivity to the Earth.

Finally, a Long March 2D launched the Shiyan 20C satellite from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center. The satellite will be used for testing new technologies such as space environment monitoring.

That's all we have this week, be sure to check back in next week.

TWIRL 89: China set to extend its space station with the Mengtian module