IMOLA, ITALY—After a break of 50 years, Ferrari is returning to top-level endurance racing with a new hybrid prototype race car. It's called the 499P, and in 2023 Ferrari will campaign a pair of cars in the World Endurance Championship, a series with the 24 Hours of Le Mans as its crown jewel.

 

As I've written before, 2023 is going to be an exciting time for fans of prototype racing. After the cubic megabucks-era of LMP1h collapsed under the weight of unsustainable budgets, the top class of the World Endurance Championship has spent a few years in the doldrums as Toyota faced minimal opposition from much smaller teams. But the Automobile Club de l'Ouest (which runs the Le Mans race) has a new ruleset now, called LMH (Le Mans Hypercar), designed to attract the interest of automakers by keeping costs sane—€30 million versus the €80-200 million that LMP1h cost—and, with less reliance on aerodynamic downforce, allowing for a closer visual link to their road-going products.

 

And so far, it's working. Toyota was first to LMH with its GR010, followed by boutique manufacturer Glickenhaus, then this year saw Peugeot ease its way back into to endurance racing with its new 9X8—still not sporting a rear wing—ahead of a full campaign in 2023. But none of those brands have quite the same magic as Ferrari. Even though it last won Le Mans outright in 1965, it still has more of those overall wins (nine) than Toyota (five) and Peugeot (three) combined, trailing just Audi (13) and Porsche (19).

 

The fact that the new ruleset has brought Ferrari back to the sport means it should be considered a success already, though the Formula 1 cost cap might have played a part as the company found itself with resources it could no longer employ towards that championship.

Sorry, but this is about to get complicated

Now, it wouldn't really be sportscar racing if it wasn't needlessly complicated, and so in addition to LMH, there's another new ruleset for hybrid prototype endurance race cars written for the International Motor Sports Association's championship here in North America called LMDh.

 

LMDh is more technically proscriptive; each automaker is required to use one of four approved carbon fiber chassis or spines as their starting point, and the gearbox, electric motor, and battery are all spec components. But like LMH, there's much less reliance on aerodynamic downforce and so the cars can look more like the ones you might find in a showroom. It too has worked, with new cars racing in 2023 from Porsche, BMW, Acura, and Cadillac. Audi's planned return has been shelved in favor of a Formula 1 program, but Lamborghini will arrive in 2024.

 

Two competing sets of sportscar regulations usually works out badly for everyone, but happily in this case the ACO and IMSA are allowing both LMH and LMDh cars to enter their races, with performance balancing to ensure as level a playing field as possible.

The 499P: Meet Ferrari’s beautiful new Le Mans hybrid prototype

It’s not the first time Android devices have received these alerts, says Marc Stogaitis, the project lead for the Android Earthquake Alerts System. But because the Bay Area is so densely populated, the alert hit enough phones that the larger public took notice. Earthquakes have historically come without warning, catching people off guard and leaving them with no advance notice to drop and take cover. Alerts like this aim to take some of the unpredictability out of earthquakes—even if by just a few seconds.

“One of the things we’re trying to do is build an earthquake early warning industry,” says Robert de Groot, who is part of the ShakeAlert operations team, a project under the United States Geological Survey that detects the first signs of earthquakes. “We’re doing things that we haven’t really ever thought of.”

The tech does not predict earthquakes—no one can do that, and the USGS also says it does not think it will learn to predict earthquakes “within the foreseeable future.” But it does detect them earlier than people usually feel them. And experts hope someday the alerts can be sent out even quicker, giving people more time to get out of harm’s way.

Time to roll

Tuesday’s Android alert was powered by data from ShakeAlert, which detects when an earthquake begins on the West Coast and provides the information to state government agencies and third parties. And Google has taken steps to make that information more readily available in those precious seconds. First, the company rolled the alert into its own system, sending push notifications to people with Android phones who are in the area of an earthquake without them having to download a separate app.

Here’s how it works: When an earthquake occurs, it sends softer seismic waves, known as P waves, through the ground. Not everyone in the earthquake’s area will feel these, but a network of 1,300 USGS sensors do. When four sensors are simultaneously triggered, they send an alert to a data processing center. If that data meets the right criteria, the ShakeAlert system determines that stronger S waves, the kind that can cause damage and hurt people, could be on the way. It’s then that warning systems, like Google’s, an app called MyShake, or government agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Agency and transit systems, will interpret the data and send out alerts.

There are limitations. Those S waves move quickly; the closer a person is to the earthquake, the less likely they are to get an alert before they feel the shaking. The USGS sensors are expensive and strategically placed on the West Coast. (There will be a total of 1,675 by 2025, says de Groot.) Also, the quickly compiled magnitude measurements are only preliminary; Tuesday’s Android alert warned of a 4.8-magnitude quake approaching, but the measurement was later adjusted to 5.1.

Google has also turned individual phones into miniature earthquake sensors. All smartphones have accelerometers that can pick up signals of an earthquake. If triggered, the phone sends the message to a detection server, along with rough location data, like the city a device is in. The server then pieces together where the earthquake is happening from data collected on multiple phones and beams out the relevant alerts.

Stogaitis says phones only pick up the waves when plugged in and locked. That helps to avoid confusion from phones jostling around in bags and pockets. The long-term goal is to send signals with even more speed. “We’re looking at trying to make the time from which [an earthquake begins] and the time that we detect it and send an alert as fast as possible,” says Stogaitis.

Equipping phones to pick up signals is a cheaper and quicker solution than planting larger sensors 10 feet underground in other earthquake-prone areas. But it’s one that requires people and their phones to be present closer to the quakes, de Groot says, and that’s not always the case. Still, all of these sensors—underground and in your pocket—do provide novel and unprecedented warnings and crucial seconds to drop and cover, something people must do as quickly as possible. People typically don’t feel an earthquake until it’s already happening, says de Groot. “You’re now in a situation, you’re now in the middle of it. But doing something before shaking arrives is something that’s relatively new. So we’re really looking at the best way to [get people] to do that.”

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Google, and Meta to make their platforms more open and interoperable in 2023. That could bring major changes to what people can do with their devices and apps, in a new reminder that Europe has regulated tech companies much more actively than the US.

“We expect the consequences to be significant,” says Gerard de Graaf, a veteran EU official who helped pass the DMA early this year. Last month, he became director of a new EU office in San Francisco, established in part to explain the law’s consequences to Big Tech companies. De Graaf says they will be forced to break open their walled gardens.

“If you have an iPhone, you should be able to download apps not just from the App Store but from other app stores or from the Internet,” de Graaf says in a conference room with emerald-green accents at the Irish consulate in San Francisco, where the EU’s office is initially located. The DMA requires dominant platforms to let in smaller competitors and could also compel Meta’s WhatsApp to receive messages from competing apps like Signal or Telegram, or prevent Amazon, Apple, and Google from preferencing their own apps and services.

Although the DMA takes force next week, tech platforms don’t have to comply immediately. The EU first must decide which companies are large and entrenched enough to be classified as “gatekeepers” subject to the toughest rules. De Graaf expects that about a dozen companies will be in that group, to be announced in the spring. Those gatekeepers will then have six months to come into compliance.

De Graaf has predicted a wave of lawsuits challenging Europe’s new rules for Big Tech but says he is in California to help make clear to Silicon Valley giants that the rules have changed. The EU has previously levied big fines against Google, Apple, and others through antitrust investigations, a mechanism that put the burden of proof on bureaucrats, he says. Under DMA, the onus is on the business to fall in line. “The key message is that negotiations are over, we’re in a compliance situation,” de Graaf says. “You may not like it, but that’s the way it is.”

Like the EU’s digital privacy law, GDPR, the DMA is expected to lead to changes in how tech platforms serve people beyond the EU’s 400 million Internet users, because some details of compliance will be more easily implemented globally.

Tech companies will also soon have to grapple with a second sweeping EU law, the Digital Services Act, which requires risk assessments of some algorithms and disclosures about automated decision-making and could force social apps like TikTok to open their data to outside scrutiny. The law is also to be implemented in stages, with the largest online platforms expected to have to comply in mid-2024. The EU is also considering passing specific rules for artificial intelligence, which could ban some use cases of the technology.

De Graaf argues that tougher rules for tech giants are needed not only to help protect people and other businesses from unfair practices, but to allow society to receive the full benefits of technology. He has been critical of a nonbinding AI Bill of Rights recently released by the White House, saying that a lack of firm regulation can undermine the public’s confidence in technology. “If our citizens lose trust in AI because they believe it discriminates against them and leads to outcomes that are harmful to their lives,” he says, “they are going to shun AI, and it will never be successful.”

The EU’s new office opened after recent moves by the bloc and the US to collaborate more on tech policy. De Graaf says both sides are interested in finding ways to address chip shortages and the ways authoritarian governments can leverage technology and the Internet.

He’s also planning a trip to Sacramento to meet California state lawmakers who he says have been trailblazers in standing up to Big Tech. They passed a bill last month requiring strict default privacy settings for children and controls on how companies use data they collect about kids. The US Congress has passed relatively little legislation affecting the tech industry in recent years, aside from the $52 billion CHIPS and Science Act in support of semiconductor production in July.

Marlena Wisniak, who leads work on tech at civil liberties group the European Center for Not for Profit Law, takes the EU’s new presence in the tech industry’s backyard as new proof it is serious about shaping tech policy globally. She says de Graaf should use some of that power to benefit people reliant on Big Tech platforms outside the US and EU, who are rarely represented in tech diplomacy.

Wisniak also hopes the EU’s digital emissaries can avoid falling into traps that have derailed the plans of some previous newcomers to Silicon Valley, a place with many more executives, entrepreneurs, and investors than policy experts. “I hope that EU policymakers don’t get dazzled by the tech hype,” she says. “The tech bro narrative is real.”

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As seen here, the Pillars of Creation appear otherworldly in mid-infrared light. NASA’S James Webb Space Telescope has captured an incredible scene that is large and lofty – and appears lit by flickering lanterns. A “ghost” haunts the crag in the lower left, a gargoyle-like shape snarls toward the middle of the frame, and a dark horse’s head charges out of the edge of the second pillar. The creepiest of all? Newly formed stars take on the appearance of protruding, bloodshot eyes. And in the background, dust dances like heavy, ancient curtains being pulled shut. Here, there is no raven to whisper, “Nevermore,” to harken to the classic Edgar Allan Poe poem.

Instead, dust in Webb’s image is like the dawn. It is an essential ingredient for star formation. Though cloaked, these pillars are bursting with activity. Newly forming stars hide within these dark gray chambers, and others, like red rubies, have jumped into view. Over time, Webb’s mid-infrared image will allow researchers to deeply explore the gas and dust in this region, and more precisely model how stars form over millions of years.

Compare NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope mid-infrared light image of the Pillars of Creation to its near-infrared light image in this short video tour. Thousands of stars have formed in this region, but interstellar dust cloaks the scene in mid-infrared light, which is why most of the stars appear to be missing. A quick dissolve to the near-infrared image proves they are still there, of course. While mid-infrared light specializes in detailing where dust is – and these pillars are flush with dust and gas – many stars in this region aren’t dusty enough to appear at these wavelengths. Instead, mid-infrared light reveals which of the young stars still have their dusty “cloaks.” These are the crimson orbs toward the fringes of the pillars. In contrast, the blue stars that dot the scene are aging, which means they have already shed most of their layers of gas and dust. How vast is this landscape? This bright red star and its dusty shroud are larger than the size of our entire solar system.

Haunting Portrait: NASA’s Webb Reveals Dust, Structure in Pillars of Creation

This image does not depict soot-tinged fingers reaching out. Nor is it an ethereal landscape of time-forgotten tombs. These pillars, densely filled with gas and dust, enshroud stars that are slowly forming over many millennia. This eerie, extremely dusty view of the Pillars of Creation was captured in mid-infrared light by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. It reveals a creepy new view of a familiar landscape.

Why does mid-infrared light set such a somber, chilling mood in Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) image? Interstellar dust cloaks the scene. And while mid-infrared light specializes in detailing where dust is, the stars aren’t bright enough at these wavelengths to appear. Instead, these looming, leaden-hued pillars of gas and dust gleam at their edges, only hinting at the activity within.

In this region, thousands and thousands of stars have formed. This is made explicitly clear when examining Webb’s recent Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) image (see image below). However, in MIRI’s view, the majority of the stars appear missing. Why?

Many newly formed stars are no longer surrounded by enough dust to be detected in mid-infrared light. Instead, MIRI observes young stars that have not yet cast off their dusty “cloaks.” These are the crimson orbs toward the fringes of the pillars. In contrast, the blue stars that dot the scene are aging. This means that they have already shed most of their layers of gas and dust.

The Pillars of Creation are set off in a kaleidoscope of color in NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s near-infrared-light view. The pillars look like arches and spires rising out of a desert landscape, but are filled with semi-transparent gas and dust, and ever-changing. This is a region where young stars are forming – or have barely burst from their dusty cocoons as they continue to form. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Anton M. Koekemoer (STScI), Alyssa Pagan (STScI).

 

Mid-infrared light is particularly well suited for observing gas and dust in intricate detail. This is also unmistakable throughout the background. The darkest shades of gray are the densest areas of dust. The red region toward the top, which forms an uncanny V, like an owl with outstretched wings, is where the dust is diffuse and cooler. Notice that no background galaxies make an appearance – the interstellar medium in the densest part of the Milky Way’s disk is too swollen with gas and dust to allow their distant light to penetrate.

How vast is this landscape? Trace the topmost pillar, landing on the bright red star jutting out of its lower edge like a broomstick. This star and its dusty shroud are larger than the size of our entire solar system.

This scene was first captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in 1995 and revisited in 2014, but many other observatories, like NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, have also gazed deeply at the Pillars of Creation. Astronomers gain new information with every observation. Through their ongoing research, they build a deeper understanding of this star-forming region. Each wavelength of light and advanced instrument delivers far more precise counts of the gas, dust, and stars, which inform researchers’ models of how stars form. As a result of the new MIRI image, astronomers now have higher resolution data in mid-infrared light than ever before, and will analyze its far more precise dust measurements to create a more complete three-dimensional landscape of this distant region.

The Pillars of Creation is set within the vast Eagle Nebula, which is located around 6,500 light-years away from Earth.

The James Webb Space Telescope is the most powerful space telescope ever constructed and the world’s premier space science observatory. It will solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).

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Now an ethnobotanist at Addis Ababa University, Zemede conducts field research in northern Ethiopia. The dominant grains grown there are different from those in the region of his youth—his family grew sorghum and maize, while the northerners prefer barley and wheat, better suited to their mountainous highlands—but the principle is the same: “We’ll plant the things that go together and are compatible with each other,” Zemede says. “Our farmers are good at mirroring nature.”

Ethiopia is one of the few places in the world where farmers still grow maslins, the general term for different varieties and species of grain that are sown in the same field, or intercropped. Maslins sustained humans for millennia, possibly predating the rise of agriculture more than 10,000 years ago. These grain mixtures tend to be more resilient to pests and drought, and to lend more complex flavors to breads, beer, and booze.

Worldwide, maslins fell out of favor long ago, replaced nearly everywhere by sprawling, single-grain monoculture—but a small and passionate group of scientists, including Zemede, is hoping to change that. A paper published last week in Agronomy for Sustainable Development makes the case for farmers around the world to revive maslins for tastier bread, healthier crops, and more sustainable agriculture. The question is, why is it taking so long?

“We call it the Masluminati, a global conspiracy that no one is talking about,” jokes Alex McAlvay, lead author of the new paper and a botanist at the New York Botanical Garden’s Institute of Economic Botany. He’s kidding, of course, but while farmers and botanists the world over are familiar with companion planting and agroforestry (such as growing coffee in the shade of other trees), maslins, says McAlvay, have “flown under the radar for some reason.” He only learned of them when visiting Ethiopia on an unrelated project; overhearing farmers talk about planting teff, sorghum, and other grains together piqued his curiosity and, says McAlvay, “I went down the rabbit hole.”

The fact that maslins are grown today only in Ethiopia and pockets of Georgia, Eritrea, and a handful of other countries belies how widespread they once were. There is solid archaeological evidence that growing maslins goes back at least 3,000 years, and possibly much earlier. Wild wheats such as einkorn grow naturally beside wild varieties of oats, barley, and rye grasses, and may have been foraged before the advent of agriculture. But finding the first maslins is particularly tricky.

“Maslins are difficult to detect,” says Claire Malleson, an archaeobotanist at the American University of Beirut. Malleson was not involved in the new paper but has studied intercropping in ancient Egypt. To find evidence of early maslins, Malleson and her peers sift through millennia-old middens—essentially garbage dumps—and whatever was left behind in hearths and granaries, where different grains may have been mixed together long after harvest, making it almost impossible to piece together how the crops were actually grown.

“I think they were probably used all over the place, either specifically or because that’s just how things grow,” she says. “Obviously now in farming it’s all very carefully harvested, but in the past it was all scattered everywhere.”

While extensive archaeological documentation of maslins may be lacking, echoes of their global prevalence can be found in language. Nearly every farming region on the planet had its own lexicon for growing mixed grains, from weedy, almost indestructible ryes to millets, wheats, and barleys.

In Medieval England, farmers grew a mix of oats and barley that they called dredge, or dredge corn, to feed their livestock. In France, peasants ground the traditional maslin of wheat and rye into flour for pain de méteil, or bread of mixed grains, now considered a gourmet loaf. In many places, maslins were such a part of life that the local word for them became shorthand for anything that was a mixture. In Ukraine and neighboring countries, the historic word for maslins—surjik or surzhyk—now means any local dialect that mixes in Russian, Moldovan, or other surrounding languages. In Turkish, mahlut, once the word for mixed grains, now means impure, a hint about what led to the downfall of maslins.

Frits Heinrich, a food historian and archaeobotanist at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, says that starting in the early 18th century—and accelerating from the 19th century onward—a combination of technological innovations in crop production and processing, and the rise of scientific agriculture, including improved breeding, shoved maslins aside. The food industry, increasingly mechanized, preferred a uniform grain that would produce a uniform product, whether it was wheat for your bread or barley for your beer. Monocultures were both easier to harvest and process mechanically and less likely to vary in taste or how they perfomed. “Maslins, with the variability of their characteristics, were deemed less suitable,” said Heinrich via email.

The decline of maslins only gathered momentum from there. Twentieth-century innovations, such as the widespread availability of artificial nitrogen for fertilizer, led to exponential growth in single-grain crop yields. And so most of the world abandoned maslins.

Today, Ethiopian farmers are feeling the pressure to grow modern monoculture crops, thanks in part to a national push to become an agricultural powerhouse. “If you export grains, you want them to be uniform,” says McAlvay. “The global market wants a certain type of wheat for their Wonder Bread. A mixture of three varieties of wheat and four varieties of barley with some other things thrown in really doesn’t make the cut.”

Tesfanesh Feseha, a master’s student in botany who served as a field translator during McAlvay’s interviews with more than 100 farmers, says that with the national embrace of monocultures, new farmers aren’t learning the art of cultivating grain mixtures. “Young farmers didn’t even know the mixtures we were looking for,” she says.

Zemede, who collaborates with McAlvay but was not directly involved in the new paper, remains optimistic. “[The push for] modernization is strong. It comes with technology and attractive things … but it could be temporary,” he says. From a farmer’s perspective, he understands the appeal of a lucrative offer to grow a specific grain but believes that “the scientific community should offer better.”

To that end, through his research and countless conversations with farmers, Zemede is promoting the maslin tradition in his homeland. Together with McAlvay, and like-minded colleagues in Georgia and on small, experimental farms in Poland, Finland, and elsewhere, he hopes to inspire wider appreciation of maslins, from the people sowing the fields to the urbanites purchasing an artisanal loaf of mixed-grain bread.

A maslin renaissance may be particularly helpful now, as farmers around the world struggle with soils degraded by modern monoculture, a growing population, and a changing climate.

“Small grains are supposed to be hit really hard by climate change,” says McAlvay. Maslins, he adds, have “all kinds of advantages,” including a more reliable yield, a more complete nutritional profile, and the ability to grow in marginal soils and to survive drought. The grain mixes also appear to have natural resistance to pests, from insects to fungal diseases. While a pest adapted to attack one species of grain will have a field day, no pun intended, when set loose in a monoculture crop, it won’t be able to jump from plant to plant if the individual it attacks is surrounded by other kinds of grain, McAlvay explains.

The new paper from his team, focusing on multiple sites in Ethiopia, is the first comprehensive case study of growing maslins in the modern era—and other researchers are enthusiastic about it.

“I think this is an excellent paper,” said Heinrich, who was not involved in the research. He praises it for pulling together previous research on maslins and showing their potential for meeting the challenge of feeding billions on a warming, less stable planet.

Malleson is similarly effusive. “I love this paper,” she says.

“This is about bringing power back to the farmers who understand the land and the farming and how to manage things,” says Malleson, who has family members in farming and feels close to the topic. “It brings the power back down to the ground level, literally.”

The new paper is just a first step toward nudging maslins back onto the world stage, and McAlvay and colleagues are already planning additional studies. Meanwhile, Zemede continues to encourage Ethiopian farmers to preserve the maslin tradition he learned as a boy, and he hopes more people globally embrace these grain mixtures as our ancestors once did.

“In biology, we say diversity must survive,” says Zemede. “If diversity is lost, then we will be lost.”

This Ancient Grain-Sowing Method Could Be Farming’s Future

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Nearly all participants in a new study looking at exposure to PFAS “forever chemicals” in the US state of North Carolina have multiple dangerous compounds in their blood, and most at levels that researchers say requires medical screening.

The North Carolina State University study, which is among the largest ever conducted, checked about 1,500 blood samples from people living in the Cape Fear River basin over several years. It’s the first study to conclude with researchers using newly developed physicians’ guidelines for PFAS exposure to recommend screening for cancers, kidney damage, heart disease and other health issues linked to the chemicals.

In most cases, the PFAS levels were much higher than the national median, and participants were “scared” by the results, said study co-author Jane Hoppin.

“But the key piece to remember is that blood is measuring the past,” she said. “The [physicians’ guidelines] give us some things we can do to protect our health and, as much as possible, reduce the PFAS exposure that we currently have.”

PFAS are a class of about 12,000 compounds typically used to make products resist water, stains and heat. They are linked to a range of serious health problems, and are estimated to be contaminating drinking water for over 200m people nationwide.

In the Cape Fear basin, the pollution is thought to largely stem from a Fayetteville Chemours plant that DuPont operated for decades before 2015. Airports, textile producers and other industries upstream have also discharged PFAS into the river.

The blood study has implications for which polluters are responsible and legally liable for health problems that many public health advocates and residents say stem from PFAS exposure.

Some of the compounds, like those commonly known as Nafion byproduct 2 and PFO4DA, are produced by Chemours. But “legacy” compounds that have largely been phased out of production in the US, like PFOS (perfluorooctanesulfonic acid) and PFOA (perfluorooctanoic acid), were also used by other industries near the river. Chemours has previously seized on those points: “The results showed that legacy compounds not associated with Chemours manufacturing were the compounds most prevalent in participants.”

But public health advocates say that’s misleading. Chemours emitted PFOA as recently as 2012, company and state records obtained by the Guardian show, and the chemical can stay in human blood for many years. Moreover, Chemours’ PFOA still contaminates a groundwater plume around the plant, and those chemicals can continue getting in drinking water and residents’ blood.

And though some newer generation Chemours chemicals, like those commonly called GenX, were not detected at high levels in blood serum, some newer PFAS have been found to accumulate in organs, and in some cases, science simply cannot detect them in blood, researchers say.

GenX is also highly toxic at small doses, so even if it does not stay in the body, it is dangerous, Hoppin added. She likened GenX exposure to drinking alcohol – the alcohol is quickly out of one’s body, but it still does damage to organs.

In a statement to the Guardian, Chemours said it reduced its PFAS pollution in the Cape Fear by over 99%: “We continue to operate with transparency and continue to fulfill our commitment to reduce PFAS emissions by 99%.”

However, the levels it once discharged into the river coupled with other sources were so high that even with the reduction, PFAS levels in drinking water around the Cape Fear basin still frequently exceed EPA advisory levels. And the 99% reduction only accounts for some PFAS compounds.

“Chemours is going to say what Chemours is going to say, and they’ll try to spin it,” Hoppin said.

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SAN FRANCISCO – In the wake of Mr Elon Musk buying Twitter, a tide of slurs and racist memes swelled on the platform, sparking concern that the site is entering an era of hateful speech.

Twitter has long wrestled with how to enforce content policies fairly on its platform in order to appease advertisers, users and powerful world leaders that use its service.

But as Mr Musk, a self-styled “free speech absolutist”, took over ownership of the company, some conservative officials, partisan extremists and conspiracy peddlers saw reason to celebrate the change.

“It seems like this is a group of people who think the rules magically changed as soon as he signed on the dotted line,” said Ms Katie Harbath, chief executive and founder of Anchor Change and former public policy director at Facebook.

Dr Rebekah Tromble, director of the Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics at George Washington University, said that as soon as Mr Musk took control of Twitter, online trolls began encouraging each other to push the boundaries on Twitter.

“For most of these trolls, it’s a game. But for others, including certain political influencers, saying hateful, outlandish things helps them increase their audience and make money.

“And they see this as a golden opportunity to gain even more attention,” she said.

The flood of speech underlines the difficulty Mr Musk faces in fulfilling his promise to restore people’s ability to speak freely while managing the palatability of the platform for advertisers, to whom he pledged in a letter on Thursday that Twitter would not spiral into a “free-for-all hellscape” under his leadership.

A symbolic win

Mr Musk has repeatedly opposed Twitter’s enforcement strategies, such as banning some high-profile accounts permanently.

He tweeted that Twitter will form a content-moderation council that includes “widely diverse viewpoints”. Major decisions on content and account reinstatement are on hold until the group is convened, he said.

Though Mr Musk has already fired four Twitter executives, including Ms Vijaya Gadde, who headed up a team that made decisions on permanently banning certain high-profile accounts, he has yet to make any concrete or substantial changes to Twitter’s moderation policies.

Still, on Friday, some conservative politicians and pundits saw the platform coming into his ownership as a symbolic win.

“FREEDOM OF SPEECH!!!!” posted Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, from her official Twitter account on Thursday evening, minutes after news of Mr Musk’s acquisition of Twitter broke.

She gained at least 40,492 new followers in the hours since Mr Musk took over Twitter, according to a Bloomberg analysis.

Representative Jim Jordan, a Republican of Ohio, also cheered Mr Musk’s takeover of Twitter with a post on Friday morning: “Free speech. Liberal tears.”

Other partisan accounts with records of repeatedly spreading false claims that the 2020 US presidential election was stolen tested the limits of speech under Twitter’s Mr Musk regime.

Mr Robby Starbuck, a pro-Trump activist, published a transphobic and misinformation-laden tweet on Thursday night, prefacing the post with: “Just testing the new Twitter out.”

The post collected 80,870 likes and shares on the platform.

Overnight and into Friday, racist slurs, anti-Semitic speech and offensive memes surged on the platform, with users egging each other on in far-right message boards such as The Donald, on messaging apps like Telegram and Internet forums such as 4chan.

A racist slur, lies surge

For hours on Thursday afternoon, a racist slur remained at a low volume on Twitter, with fewer than a dozen or so mentions every five minutes across the entire platform, according to data from Dataminr, a social media analysis platform.

After news broke that Mr Musk closed the deal on Twitter, there was a 1,300 per cent increase in the word appearing on the platform in various languages, including Spanish, Arabic and Portuguese.

At its peak, the word appeared 170 times every five minutes, according to the data.

Mentions of ivermectin, the deworming drug popular among those seeking alternative treatments for Covid-19 in spite of a lack of strong research to back it up, also shot up 2,900 per cent on Twitter, peaking at 358 mentions every five minutes, according to Dataminr.

And mentions of “plandemic”, a shorthand for a conspiracy in which a shadowy cabal of elites is using the coronavirus pandemic and a potential vaccine to profit and gain power, increased.

On Friday, the Anti-Defamation League’s Centre on Extremism said it identified a coordinated effort to spread antisemitic content on Twitter, “explicitly drawing inspiration from Elon Musk’s takeover”.

Over the past day, the group said, it identified over 1,200 tweets and retweets on the platform that spread anti-Semitic memes. BLOOMBERG

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Nearby, his mother watched.

"Only God knows my pain," said Viliene Enfant.

Less than an hour later, the body of her 22-year-old son lay on the floor wrapped in a white plastic bag with the date of his death scrawled on top. He joined dozens of other Haitians who have died from cholera during a rapidly spreading outbreak that is straining the resources of nonprofits and local hospitals in a country where fuel, water and other basic supplies are growing scarcer by the day.

Sweat gathered on the foreheads of staff at a Doctors Without Borders treatment center in the capital of Port-au-Prince where some 100 patients arrive every day and at least 20 have died. Families kept rushing in this week with loved ones, sometimes dragging their limp bodies into the crowded outdoors clinic where the smell of waste filled the air.

Dozens of patients sat on white buckets or lay on stretchers as IV lines ran up to bags of rehydrating fluids that gleamed in the sun. So far this month, Doctors Without Borders has treated some 1,800 patients at their four centers in Port-au-Prince.

People inside a car suffering from cholera symptoms arrive at the door of a clinic run by Doctors Without Borders for treatment in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Thursday, Oct. 27, 2022. For the first time in three years, people in Haiti have been dying of cholera, raising concerns about a potentially fast-spreading scenario and reviving memories of an epidemic that killed nearly 10,000 people a decade ago.

Credit: AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa

Across Haiti, many patients are dying because say they're unable to reach a hospital in time, health officials say. A spike in gang violence has made it unsafe for people to leave their communities and a lack of fuel has shut down public transportation, gas stations and other key businesses including water supply companies.

Enfant sat next to her son's body as she recalled how Joliva told her he was feeling sick earlier this week. She had already warned him and her two other sons not to bathe or wash clothes in the sewage-contaminated waters that ran through a nearby ravine in their neighborhood—the only source of water for hundreds in that area.

Enfant insisted that her sons buy water to wash clothes and add chlorine if they were going to drink it. As Joliva grew sicker, Enfant tried to care for him on her own.

A girl suffering from cholera symptoms is helped by her father upon arrival at a clinic run by Doctors Without Borders in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Thursday, Oct. 27, 2022. For the first time in three years, people in Haiti have been dying of cholera, raising concerns about a potentially fast-spreading scenario and reviving memories of an epidemic that killed nearly 10,000 people a decade ago.

Credit: AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa

"I told him, 'Honey, you need to drink the tea,'" she recalled. "He said again, 'I feel weak.' He also said, 'I am not able to stand up.'"

Cholera is a bacteria that sickens people who swallow contaminated food or water, and it can cause severe vomiting and diarrhea, in some cases leading to death.

Haiti's first major brush with cholera occurred more than a decade ago when U.N. peacekeepers introduced the bacteria into the country's biggest river via sewage runoff at their base. Nearly 10,000 people died and thousands of others were sickened.

The cases eventually dwindled to the point where the World Health Organization was expected to declare Haiti cholera-free this year.

But on Oct. 2, Haitian officials announced that cholera had returned.

At least 40 deaths and 1,700 suspected cases have been reported, but officials believe the numbers are much higher, especially in crowded and unsanitary slums and government shelters where thousands of Haitians live.

A youth suffering cholera symptoms is helped upon arrival at a clinic run by Doctors Without Borders in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Thursday, Oct. 27, 2022. For the first time in three years, people in Haiti have been dying of cholera, raising concerns about a potentially fast-spreading scenario and reviving memories of an epidemic that killed nearly 10,000 people a decade ago.

Credit: AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa

Worsening the situation is a lack of fuel and water that began to dwindle last month when one of Haiti's most powerful gangs surrounded a key fuel terminal and demanded the resignation of Prime Minister Ariel Henry. Gas stations and businesses including water companies have closed, forcing an increasing number of people to rely on untreated water.

Shela Jeune, a 21-year-old hot dog vendor whose 2-year-old son has cholera, said she buys small bags of water for her family but doesn't know if it's treated. She carried him to the hospital where he remains on IV fluids.

"Everything I give him to eat, he just throws it up," she said.

Jeune was among dozens of mothers seeking treatment for their children on a recent morning.

Lauriol Chantal, 43, recounted a similar story. Her 15-year-old son would vomit as soon as he finished eating, prompting her to rush him to the treatment center.

Medical personnel attend patients with cholera symptoms at a clinic run by Doctors Without Borders in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Thursday, Oct. 27, 2022. For the first time in three years, people in Haiti have been dying of cholera, raising concerns about a potentially fast-spreading scenario and reviving memories of an epidemic that killed nearly 10,000 people a decade ago.

Credit: AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa

While at the center, her son, Alexandro François, told her he felt hot.

"He said to me ... 'Mama, could you take me outside to wash me or pour water over my head?'" she said.

She obliged, but suddenly, he collapsed in her arms. The staff ran over to help.

Children younger than age 14 make up half of cholera cases in Haiti, according to UNICEF, with officials warning that growing cases of severe malnutrition also make children more vulnerable to illness.

Haiti's poverty also has worsened the situation.

"When you are unable to get safe drinking water by tap in your own home, when you don't have soap or water purifying tablets and you have no access to health services, you may not survive cholera or other waterborne diseases," said Bruno Maes, Haiti's UNICEF representative.

Perpety Juste, a 62-year-old grandmother, said one of her three grandchildren became ill this week as she fretted about how their situation might have led to her sickness.

A girl whith cholera symptoms is helped by her mother during her treatment at a clinic run by Doctors Without Borders in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Thursday, Oct. 27, 2022. For the first time in three years, people in Haiti have been dying of cholera, raising concerns about a potentially fast-spreading scenario and reviving memories of an epidemic that killed nearly 10,000 people a decade ago.

Credit: AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa

"We spent a lot of days without food, I cannot lie," she said. "Nobody in my house has a job."

Juste, who lives with her husband, five children and three grandchildren, said she used to work as a house cleaner until the homeowners fled Haiti.

The increasing demand for help is squeezing Doctors Without Borders and others as they struggle to care for patients with limited fuel.

"It's a nightmare for the population, and also for us," said Jean-Marc Biquet, a project coordinator with the organization. "We have two more weeks of fuel."

Life is paralyzed for many Haitians, including Enfant, as she mourned her son's death. She wants to bury him in her southern coastal hometown of Les Cayes, but cannot afford the 55,000 gourdes ($430) it would cost to transport his body.

Enfant then fell quiet and gazed into the distance as she continued to sit next to her son's body—too stunned, she said, to stand up.

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“You have to understand that for her, depression is not sadness so much as it is emptiness,” explained Mr. Zuckerman, 68, who is a freelance writer and editor in Minneapolis. When his wife’s depression was at its worst, she remained in bed, with the blinds drawn, for months. She stopped showering and hardly spoke.

“This is a woman who had been so active, who had run our family. She was a mom, she worked, all of that stuff, and then she fell into this depression that was so deep,” said Mr. Zuckerman, who wrote a book — “Unglued: A Bipolar Love Story” — about loving a spouse in the grips of mental illness.

Millions of Americans are in relationships with partners who are prone to depression. An estimated 21 million adults in the United States have experienced at least one major depressive episode, while in parts of the country up to 10 percent of people have seasonal affective disorder, or SAD, a syndrome that tends to kick in during the fall and winter as the daylight hours grow shorter.

When helping your partner weather a battle with depression, experts say there are ways to be supportive while also caring for yourself.

Learn more about depression.

Familiarizing yourself with some of the physical and emotional markers of depression may help you identify if your partner is simply in a bad mood, burned out or is living with depression. Common signs include loss of interest in regular activities, changes in appetite or sleep or unexplained physical symptoms, such as headaches or back pain that tend to last for at least two weeks, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.

Learning more about what depression is and how it affects people may also help you protect yourself emotionally, respond with more empathy and avoid taking your partner’s behaviors personally.

“If one partner doesn’t understand that their partner is suffering from depression, they may mistake things like a loss of interest in romance or sex as a personal rejection,” explained Xavier Amador, a clinical psychologist and co-author of “When Someone You Love Is Depressed.”

Cultivate curiosity about your partner’s experience.

When your partner is in pain, you may feel an urge to dive right in and tell them what you think is happening. But try to lead by asking questions, Dr. Amador said. Ask your partner how they are feeling. Tell them you’d like to understand more about what they’re going through.

If your partner is defensive, Dr. Amador recommends a strategy known as “reflective listening.” For instance, if you ask your loved one how they are feeling and they tell you they are fine and there is nothing wrong, you respond with something along the lines of: “What you’re telling me is that there’s nothing wrong, is that correct? Can I tell you what I’ve noticed?” Dr. Amador explained.

If you make an effort to lead with questions rather than rushing to share your opinion, your partner is more likely to feel heard and valued, not judged, he said.

Acknowledge your own limitations.

To help a loved one get diagnosis and treatment, you can call potential providers and set up appointments, or compile a list of clinicians for them to contact. But experts say it is also important to remember that you cannot force anyone to get help, and that pushing too hard can backfire.

“It’s a balancing act,” said Lily Brown, director at the Center for the Treatment and Study of Anxiety with the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. “Of course, you want to make yourself available to talk and to suggest how they can get help, but if you’re doing too much driving the boat, the person who is struggling with depression actually can start to feel a little more helpless and a little more hopeless.”

She added that partners who put too much care-taking responsibility on themselves are also often overcome with feelings of guilt and shame when they are unable to fix the problem.

You shouldn’t have to be your partner’s sole support, especially in situations where they may be in danger. Keep in mind that depression can increase the risk of self-harm and suicidal thoughts — and the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline offers resources to find help for a loved one in crisis.

Prioritize your own mental health.

Romantic partners can affect each other’s health and health-related behaviors in ways good and bad, and Dr. Amador noted there is some research to suggest that depressive symptoms can be, in a way, contagious.

“If you’re living with somebody who is depressed and feeling helpless — and oftentimes doesn’t want to get help — then you can start to feel depressed and helpless,” Dr. Amador explained.

It is imperative that you support your own mental health, both Dr. Amador and Dr. Brown emphasized. If you are experiencing symptoms of depression, reach out to a health care provider for evaluation. But even if you are not, you may find it helpful to see a therapist or to join a peer-led support group.

Mr. Zuckerman is a volunteer facilitator of a National Alliance on Mental Illness, or NAMI, support group for families and partners of people with mental health conditions. And it has helped him connect with a community of people who understand what he is going through. Every other week, Mr. Zuckerman and 10 to 15 or so other partners discuss coping skills; help each other process feelings of grief or guilt; and offer a safe space to share their challenges and successes.

Make time for things you enjoy.

In addition to connecting with a therapist or support group as needed, it is also important to find other ways to prioritize self-care. It does not have to be time-consuming or complicated, Dr. Brown said. Simply getting out of the house for a bit and making time for the activities you enjoy can help protect your own emotional well being when your partner is struggling.

Spend time outside in nature, get involved in some form of advocacy or move your body. Research has shown, for instance, that jogging for 15 minutes a day, or doing less strenuous exercise like walking or gardening for an hour, may have a protective effect against depression.

And “socialize, socialize, socialize — whatever that looks like for you,” Dr. Amador recommended. “It is really important to get that social support and release.” You may encourage your partner to join you in your efforts to get out and exercise or connect with others, but keep in mind that loss of interest in normal activities or hobbies is a symptom of depression.

Mr. Zuckerman’s wife — who has given her husband her blessing to share their story, but only without disclosing her name — has been stable for three years, and said things between the couple are “great.” They go to movies, concerts and dance performances together. They cook, spend time with their grandchildren and attend synagogue.

But Mr. Zuckerman also continues to remind himself that it is not selfish for him to prioritize self-care.

“We fundamentally love our partners and our spouses, and at a gut level, we know it’s an illness. We know you can’t blame somebody for being sick,” Mr. Zuckerman said. “Yet what we go through as a result of it can be overwhelming.”

If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.

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Even though you may not realize it, each time you recall a memory—such as your first time riding a bike or walking into your high school prom—your brain changes the memory ever so slightly. It’s almost like adding an Instagram filter, with details being filled in and information being updated or lost with each recall.

“We’re inadvertently applying filters to our past experiences,” says Steve Ramirez (CAS’10), a Boston University (BU) neuroscientist. Even though a filtered memory is different from the original, for the most part, you can tell what that basic picture is, he says.

“Memory is less of a video recording of the past, and more reconstructive,” says Ramirez, a BU College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences. It is both a blessing and a curse that memory is malleable in nature. If we remember false details, it is bad. However, especially for memories of something scary or traumatic, it’s good that our brains have the natural ability to mold and update memories to make them less potent.

What if it’s possible to use the malleable nature of our memories to our advantage, as a way to cure mental health disorders like depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)? Ramirez and his research team are actively pursuing this goal. And after years of studying memory in mice, they’ve found not only where the brain stores positive and negative memories, but also how to turn the volume down on negative memories by artificially stimulating other, happier ones.

“Our million-dollar idea is, what if a solution for some of these mental disorders already exists in the brain? And what if memory is one way of getting there?” Ramirez asks. In two new scientific papers, he and his team demonstrate the power of our emotional memories and how our experiences—and the way we process them—leave actual physical footprints on the brain.

Mapping Positive and Negative Memories

One of the most important steps toward using memory to treat memory-related disorders is understanding where positive and negative memories exist in the brain, and how to distinguish between the two. Memories are stored in all different areas across the brain, and the individual memories themselves exist as networks of cells called engrams. Ramirez’s lab is particularly interested in the networks of memories located in the brain’s hippocampus, a cashew-shaped structure that stores sensory and emotional information important for forming and retrieving memories.

In a new paper published in Nature Communications Biology, Ramirez, lead author Monika Shpokayte (MED’26), and a team of BU neuroscientists mapped out the key molecular and genetic differences between positive and negative memories. They found that the two are actually strikingly distinct on multiple levels. It turns out that emotional memories, like a positive or negative memory, are physically distinct from other types of brain cells—and distinct from each other.

“That’s pretty wild because it suggests that these positive and negative memories have their own separate real estate in the brain,” says Ramirez, who’s also a member of BU’s Center for Systems Neuroscience.

The study authors found that positive and negative memory cells are different from each other in almost every way—they are mostly stored in different regions of the hippocampus, they communicate with other cells using different types of pathways, and the molecular machinery in both types of cells seems to be distinct.

“So, there’s [potentially] a molecular basis for differentiating between positive and negative memories in the brain,” Ramirez says. “We now have a bunch of markers that we know differentiate positive from negative in the hippocampus.”

Seeing and labeling positive and negative memories is only possible with the use of an advanced neuroscience tool, called optogenetics. This is a way to trick brain cell receptors to respond to light—researchers shine a harmless laser light into the brain to turn on cells that have been given a receptor that responds to light. They can also color-code positive and negative memories by inserting a fluorescent protein that is stimulated by light, so that positive memory cell networks glow green, for example, and negative cell networks glow red or blue.

In this image, the red cells are a fear memory. After artificially activating another, more pleasant memory, those red cells turned into the blue cells, which represent the altered, less powerful fear memory. This demonstrates that the original memory has been altered by their memory manipulation technique, according to lead study author Stephanie Grella. Credit: Photo by Stephanie Grella

Rewiring Bad Memories

Before the researchers label a memory in a mouse, they first have to make the memory. To do this, they expose the rodents to a universally good or unpleasant experience—a positive experience could be nibbling on some tasty cheese or socializing with other mice; a negative experience could be receiving a mild but surprising electrical shock to the feet. Once a new memory is formed, the scientists can find the network of cells that hold on to that experience, and have them glow a certain color.

Once they can see the memory, researchers can use laser light to artificially activate those memory cells—and, as Ramirez’s team has also discovered, rewrite the negative memories. In a paper published in Nature Communications, they found that artificial activation of a positive experience permanently rewrote a negative experience, dialing the emotional intensity of the bad memory down.

The researchers had the mice recall a negative experience, and during the fear memory recall, they artificially reactivated a group of positive memory cells. The competing positive memory, according to the paper, updated the fear memory, reducing the fear response at the time and long after the memory was activated. The study builds on previous work from Ramirez’s lab that found it’s possible to artificially manipulate past memories.

Activating a positive memory was the most powerful way to update a negative memory, but the team also found it’s not the only way. Instead of targeting just positive memory cells, they also tried activating a neutral memory—some standard, boring experience for an animal—and then tried activating the whole hippocampus, finding that both were effective.

“If you stimulate a lot of cells not necessarily tied to any type of memory, that can cause enough interference to disrupt the fear memory,” says Stephanie Grella, lead author and a former postdoctoral fellow in the Ramirez Lab who recently started the Memory & Neuromodulatory Mechanisms Lab at Loyola University.

Even though artificially activating memories is not possible to do in humans, the findings could still translate to clinical settings, Grella says. “Because you can ask the person, ‘Can you remember something negative, can you remember something positive?’” she says—questions you can’t ask a mouse.

She suggests that it could be possible to override the impacts of a negative memory, one that has affected a person’s mental state, by having a person recall the bad memory, and correctly timing a vivid recall of a positive one in a therapeutic setting.

“We know that memories are malleable,” Grella says. “??One of the things that we found in this paper was that the timing of the stimulation was really critical.”

The Quest for Game Changers

For other, more intensive types of treatment for severe depression and PTSD, Grella suggests that it could eventually be possible to stimulate large swaths of the hippocampus with tools like transcranial magnetic stimulation or deep brain stimulation—an invasive procedure—to help people overcome these memory-related disorders. Ramirez points out that more and more neuroscientists have started to embrace experimental treatments involving psychedelics and illicit drugs. For example, a 2021 study found that controlled doses of MDMA helped relieve some severe PTSD symptoms.

“The theme here is using some aspects of reward and positivity to rewrite the negative components of our past,” Ramirez says. “It’s analogous to what we’re doing in rodents, except in humans—we artificially activated positive memories in rodents, and in humans, what they did was give them small doses of MDMA to see if that could be enough to rewrite some of the traumatic components of that experience.” These types of experiments point to the importance of continuing to explore the clinical and beneficial methods of memory manipulation, but it’s important to note that these experiments were done under close medical supervision and shouldn’t be attempted at home.

For now, Ramirez is excited to see how this work can further push the boundaries in neuroscience, and hopes to see researchers experiment with even more out-of-the-box ideas that can transform medicine in the future: “We want game changers, right?” he says. “We want things that are going to be way more effective than the currently available treatment options.

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The escalating US-China technology rivalry and global chip shortage make Taiwan’s role as a leading global supplier of semiconductors strategically and economically important to both powers.

The question is what will happen to global chip production in the event of a cross-Strait military conflict. Covid-19 lockdowns have already disrupted global semiconductor supplies.

Since global semiconductor production capacity is highly concentrated in Asia, including in Taiwan, South Korea and China, a cross-Strait military conflict will crimp the global production of semiconductors. In a military confrontation, China might impose an embargo on Taiwan’s exports of critical technologies.

Taiwan is home to several of the world’s largest semiconductor foundries. Together they represent more than 63% of the global market share. The world is heavily dependent on the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which produces more than 90% of the world’s most advanced semiconductors, including 5-nanometer chips.

Supply disruptions will directly impact Apple — TMSC’s largest customer — Nvidia, Qualcomm and AMD. It will also disrupt leading US technology companies specialized in computer processors and chipsets that power modern devices, from consumer electronics and medical equipment to artificial intelligence and military technologies.

With supplies from Taiwan crimped in the event of a cross-Strait conflict, companies may have to look to South Korea for replacement chips. Samsung is the world’s second-largest semiconductor foundry by revenue, accounting for approximately 17% of the global market — a 35% smaller share than TSMC.

South Korea’s Samsung is caught in the middle of the US-China tech war. Image: AFP

But the production capacity of South Korean foundries is unlikely to meet global demand and Seoul could be drawn into the conflict should the United States get involved.

Chinese foundries produce around 8% of the world’s semiconductors. But even if Chinese companies maintain their semiconductor production in a cross-Strait conflict, the chips they can mass produce are mainly 28-nanometer and 14-nanometer chips. These are less sophisticated and powerful than the 7-nanometer and 5-nanometer made by TSMC and Samsung.

While there were reports in August 2022 that China’s Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) had made a great leap in successfully developing 7-nanometer chips, the company’s mass production capacity remains unknown.

Indeed, the global semiconductor supply chain is complex and involves different stages of manufacturing demanding high-, medium- and low-skilled inputs. Any disruption will have knock-on effects on upstream and downstream industries.

Southeast Asian countries are also involved in semiconductor manufacturing. Malaysia packages and tests newly made semiconductors, accounting for 13% of the global market share. Singapore operates fabrication plants for US-based Micron and GlobalFoundries and several assembly and testing facilities for Taiwanese companies.

Many industries rely on a stable supply of semiconductors, exposing them to the effects of a cross-Strait conflict. The automotive industry is still battling the global chip shortage that emerged in 2020. Over the past few years, automakers have competed with other consumer electronics providers over chips made in Asia.

Some automotive giants have already cut production, while others expect the chip crunch to last into 2024. A military conflict involving the global hub of chip production will further strain the industry, creating knock-on effects on other parts of the automotive supply chain.

The effects of a cross-Strait conflict can be mitigated by strengthening supply chain resiliency. Some countries and companies have already started diversifying and securing their semiconductor supply chains. But diversification comes with a cost.

The US CHIPS and Science Act uses federal subsidies to lure technology firms — including US, Taiwanese and South Korean companies — to invest in cutting-edge chip development and manufacturing in the United States. Companies are not allowed to build advanced chipmaking facilities in China for 10 years to receive these subsidies.

US President Joe Biden wants more advanced semiconductors produced in America. Image: Twitter

While reshoring and friend-shoring incentives may help stabilize the supply of semiconductors, the incentives push the world further away from multilateral trade toward geopolitical trade blocs. The semiconductor sector is the first to experience this shift, but it will not be the last.

A cross-Strait military conflict would be a lose-lose situation for the warring parties and the world. Given the high stakes, leaders in the United States and China should maintain continuous dialogue to communicate their interests as well as differences. The United States should refrain from acts that would provoke Beijing’s suspicion of US support for Taiwanese independence.

Maintaining the status quo is key to keeping the peace across the Strait. To that end, the United States should continue to work with allies in the region, including Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Australia, to share intelligence and militarily prepare for any future conflict.

Yvette To is a Postdoc in the Department of Public and International Affairs at the City University of Hong Kong.

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After hovering around zero growth in the late 2000s, Japan’s population has been shrinking since 2010, with the decline accelerating in recent years. Breaking its own record every year for the last 10 years, the country experienced another record population loss of 644,000 in 2020–2021.

Japan’s population is projected to shrink well into the middle of this century, dropping to an estimated 88 million in 2065 — a 30% decline in 45 years.

Japan’s rapid population shrinkage is primarily caused by persistently low fertility. Japan’s fertility rate has been declining since the mid-1970s, reaching a total fertility rate (TFR) of around 1.3 children per woman in the early 2000s. Japan’s TFR hit a low of 1.26 in 2005, but there was a modest recovery to a TFR of around 1.4 in the 2010s.

There is little out-of-wedlock childbearing in Japan. Childbirths outside of marriage have constituted around 2% of all births since the 1950s. The decline in Japan’s fertility rate is mainly due to fewer young women getting married.

While the proportion of never-married women at their peak reproductive age of 25‒34 had been stable until the mid-1970s, the proportion of single women aged 25–29 jumped from 21% in 1975 to 66% in 2020. The corresponding proportion of women aged 30–34 saw an even more dramatic jump from 8% to 39%.

Young Japanese women are increasingly reluctant to marry and have children in part due to the rapid improvement of their economic opportunities. Women’s participation in four-year college degrees began to rise rapidly in the late-1980s and reached 51% in 2020.

Japan’s demographics are graying fast. Photo: AFP / The Yomiuri Shimbun

The employment rate of young women also increased significantly. The labor participation rate of women aged 25–29 almost doubled from 45% in 1970 to 87% in 2020.

Japan’s declining marriage rate is also attributable to the persistence of traditional domestic gender roles, which place a heavy burden on women to manage housework and childcare. Japanese men’s contributions to domestic tasks remain very low and the gender imbalance in domestic labor is still notable.

The persistence of unequal gender roles at home in the face of expanding economic opportunities for women has made balancing work and family life very difficult for married women — lessening the appeal of marriage.

Out of concern about the social and economic consequences associated with prolonged low fertility and rapid population aging, the Japanese government launched a series of programs addressing low fertility (‘shoushika-taisaku’) in the mid-1990s.

The initial focus was to provide parenting assistance through increasing the provision of childcare services and advocating for a better work-life balance.

Alarmed by the slippage of fertility rates and the onset of population decline in the late 2000s, Japan’s policy efforts have become more comprehensive. Japanese governments have advocated for long-term policy assistance from birth to young adulthood.

In the 2010s, low fertility became an integral part of Japan’s overall public policy direction. Low fertility policies were incorporated into Japan’s macroeconomic policy, national land planning and regional and local development.

Despite these continuous and comprehensive efforts to increase the fertility rate, Japan’s policies have fallen short of achieving increases in fertility that would mitigate the social and economic effects of population decline and aging.

Still, Japan’s policies have halted a further slide in the fertility rate. Unlike other East Asian economies such as South Korea and Taiwan, whose TFR in 2021 dwindled to 0.81 and 1.07, respectively, Japan’s rate remained at 1.30.

A father outside the hospital meets his newborn baby wearing a face shield and his wife through the window in Satte, Saitama Prefecture on May 13, 2020. Photo: The Yomiuri Shimbun / Twitter

Japan’s experience shows how difficult it is to restore fertility to the replacement level, especially when a country has a sizable population and a persistently low birth rate.

It also seems unrealistic to counter Japan’s rapid population decline through an immediate and drastic increase in international migration by liberalizing the country’s immigration policies. The number of deaths in Japan is expected to rise in the next few decades owing to increases in the elderly population.

That means the country has no choice but to strengthen efforts to sustain and, hopefully, boost fertility. To do this, Tokyo should help women and couples balance their work and family roles to lighten the heavy social and economic costs associated with population decline.

Japan’s labor market needs to become more family-friendly, while gender roles at home must become less traditional. Even if policy efforts to make the workplace more family-friendly and the home more gender-equal fail to raise fertility and slow population decline, they will likely improve the well-being of Japanese families by improving the quality of family life.

Noriko Tsuya is Distinguished Professor at Keio University.

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Over the past two years, Indian authorities have asked Twitter to act on content such as accounts supportive of an independent Sikh state, posts alleged to have spread misinformation about protests by farmers, and tweets critical of the government's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Our rules and laws for intermediaries remain the same regardless of who owns the platforms," said Rajeev Chandrasekhar, India’s minister of state for electronics and information technology. "So, the expectation of compliance with Indian laws and rules remains."

In July, Twitter had asked an Indian court to overturn some government orders to remove content from the platform.

Chandrasekhar said India’s amended IT rules would be released on Friday or Saturday after months of consultation. He did not respond directly to a question about the banning of individuals from Twitter, such as Bollywood actress Kangana Ranaut.

Elon Musk took ownership of Twitter Inc on Friday and the self-described free speech absolutist has said his desire is to see the company have fewer limits on content that can be posted on the influential social media platform.

Ranaut, an ardent supporter of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, had her Twitter account banned for violating its rules on hateful conduct and abusive behaviour when in May last year she urged Modi to resort to gangster tactics to "tame" one of his political rivals.

The actress, who has won several top acting awards in India, shared requests from users who appealed to Musk to restore her Twitter account.

Ranaut and her team did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday. She had responded to the ban last year as white Americans trying to "enslave a brown person".

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A woman who was arrested for feeding homeless people in north-west Arizona is suing over a local ordinance that regulates food-sharing events in public parks, accusing the authorities of criminalizing kindness.

Norma Thornton, 78, became the first person arrested under Bullhead City’s ordinance in March for distributing prepared food from a van at Bullhead community park. Her lawyer said the lawsuit filed this week is part of a nationwide effort to let people feed those in need.

Criminal charges against Thornton were eventually dropped, but she is seeking an injunction to stop the city from enforcing the ordinance that took effect in May 2021.

“Bullhead City has criminalized kindness,” Thornton’s case attorney, Suranjan Sen, told Phoenix TV station KPHO. “The city council passed an ordinance that makes it a crime punishable by four months’ imprisonment to share food in public parks for charitable purposes.”

Bullhead City’s mayor, Tom Brady, said the ordinance applies only to public parks. He said churches, clubs and private properties are free to serve food to the homeless without a permit.

Thornton owned a restaurant for many years before retiring in Arizona and said she wanted to use her cooking skills to help the less fortunate.

“I have always believed that when you have plenty, you should share,” Thornton said.

According to the Mohave Valley Daily News, Thornton said she had continued to feed people in need, from private property not far from the community park.

Criminal charges were dropped “in the interest of justice” the city prosecutor, Martin Rogers, had said, according to the Mohave Valley Daily News, but Thornton later agreed to let the non-profit Institute for Justice take up a legal case.

“We are seeking an injunction,” the institute’s Sen said, the paper reported, with the aim that the authorities “cannot apply this ordinance against Norma or anybody else”.

The case claims the law infringes on Thornton’s right to carry out charitable acts.

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Rocket Report: Norway’s nuclear rocket concerns; Ariane 6 delayed again

After apparently closing the $44 billion sale of Twitter on Thursday, Musk tweeted: "the bird is freed." But within hours, European Commissioner for the Internal Market Thierry Breton retweeted Musk with a reminder: "In Europe, the bird will fly by our rules." Breton added the hashtag #DSA, referencing the incoming Digital Services Act, which lays out the rules for social media companies operating in Europe.

Breton's warning is a timely reminder that even though Musk has ideas in his head about how he wants to run Twitter, he'll still need to comply with regulation in different territories around the world. With speculation rife about what his leadership of the company will mean for the platform, it may serve as a comfort or an annoyance, depending on your perspective, that there are guardrails in place.

Europe has long been a leader in establishing regulation that brings US tech giants to heel. Only this month, Apple said it will be forced to make an iPhone with a USB-C port after the EU passed new rules on universal phone chargers. The DSA, which was passed by the European Parliament in July, will demand accountability and transparency from Twitter about decisions the company takes and paves the way for Europe to issue fines of billion of dollars if the company fails to comply.

Breton reminded Musk on Twitter on Thursday about a conversation they'd had earlier this year, tweeting a video in which Musk said he agreed with everything the EU was doing with the DSA. But Breton's tweet is also a warning to the new Twitter boss that Breton is watching closely and is ready to hold Musk accountable if it comes to that.

"At this stage, it is mainly posturing and positioning," said internet policy expert Konstantinos Komaitis. "It looks like the fight -- if there's one -- will be about the way Elon Musk understands free speech and the way Europe affords it via the DSA."

One of the central facets of the DSA is about ensuring that what is illegal offline is also illegal online -- something Musk will have no choice but to comply with. But tension could arise with how Musk chooses to deal with content that's harmful but not illegal.

Musk has already expressed strong views on free speech, hinting that he won't take a heavy-handed approach to moderation. Whether the EU feels this approach is compliant with the DSA remains to be seen, but this will be something to keep a close eye on as the act comes into force next month.

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A new report from a coalition of international scientists is unequivocal about the severity of the environmental crisis that we're in, with 16 out of the 35 'vital signs' used to track climate change now rated as code red – that is, they're at record extremes.

The number of climate-related disasters is escalating, the report warns, with related human suffering – already at levels that are difficult to quantify and imagine – set to keep on rising rapidly as well.

We're now faced with a stark choice: make quick and meaningful changes to the way we live our lives and treat the planet, or face the very real possibility of global societal collapse further down the line.

"As we can see by the annual surges in climate disasters, we are now in the midst of a major climate crisis, with far worse to come if we keep doing things the way we've been doing them," says ecologist Christopher Wolf from Oregon State University.

"We implore our fellow scientists to join us in advocating for research-based approaches to climate and environmental decision-making."

Some of the issues that the team points towards include the increasing frequency of extreme heat events, rising global tree cover loss (with wildfires playing a major role in that), and more cases of the mosquito-borne dengue virus.

There's also the matter of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, which are now at their highest since records began: 418 parts per million.

Meanwhile, 2022 is on track to be one of the hottest years on record.

Other vital signs tracked by the researchers include surface temperature anomalies, Antarctica ice mass change, ocean acidity, and major floods in the US costing at least a billion dollars to clean up.

The report also mentions numerous climate change-related events that have occurred just this year: the worst drought in Europe in 500 years, for example; record-breaking rainfall on the east coast of Australia; a deadly heat wave in India and Pakistan; widespread dust storms in the Middle East; and a severe flood that destroyed roads in Yellowstone National Park in the US, to name a few.

"Climate change is not a standalone issue," says sustainability scientist Saleemul Huq from Independent University, Bangladesh. "It is part of a larger systemic problem of ecological overshoot where human demand is exceeding the regenerative capacity of the biosphere."

"To avoid more untold human suffering, we need to protect nature, eliminate most fossil fuel emissions and support socially just climate adaptations with a focus on low-income areas that are most vulnerable."

Experts predict a rise of 3 degrees Celsius in terms of global warming by 2100, a temperature level that the planet hasn't seen for some 3 million years. However, despite repeated warnings, many trends are still going in the wrong direction.

The researchers have put together a 35-minute documentary called The Scientist's Warning to spur more action and increase awareness. They're hoping that more and more scientists now make a stand about the urgent action that needs to be taken.

There is still hope. The researchers note an unprecedented numbers of scientists are speaking out about the climate crisis, and are calling for "massive-scale climate change mitigation and adaptation" to happen immediately for the sake of future generations.

"Look at all of these heat waves, fires, floods and massive storms," says ecologist William Ripple, from Oregon State University. "The specter of climate change is at the door and pounding hard."

The research has been published in BioScience.

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Researchers add that easy activities such as washing the car or doing laundry, which have counted as exercise in earlier research, are not enough to stave off heart problems. However, going on brisk walks for 75 minutes a week or one run for the same amount of time is enough to keep the condition at bay.

When people did more exercise overall, but the amount of moderate-to-vigorous exercise they did remained the same, there was little improvement in heart health. When activity levels doubled, there was no significant boost to heart health when the amount of moderate-to-vigorous activity someone did remained at 10 percent.

If that proportion rose by 20 percent, disease risk fell by 23 percent. When it rose by 40 percent, disease risk fell by 40 percent.

Rates of heart disease were 14 percent lower when moderate-to-vigorous physical activity accounted for 20 percent rather than 10 percent of overall physical activity, even in people who did not exercise much. This difference is equivalent to turning a daily 14-minute stroll into a brisk seven-minute walk.

Doing more vigorous work does more from the heart

The participants who did the most exercise overall — and did more tough exercise as a proportion of that — had the lowest risk of developing heart disease. It has long been known that exercise is good for heart health, but it has been unclear whether just doing more of it is enough or whether it has to be vigorous to be effective.

To find out, researchers from the universities of Cambridge and Leicester analyzed wrist accelerometer data from 88,000 people whose health information is stored in the UK Biobank. This is a large database containing information about the health of half a million British adults.

Most large existing studies have relied on questionnaire responses to work out how much exercise participants engaged in. However, physical activity levels can be difficult to recall, especially when they relate to low-intensity activities such as washing dishes or doing laundry. Without accurate records, it has not been possible to separate the effects of doing more exercise overall and doing more vigorous physical activity.

The team investigated the association between physical activity volume and intensity and cardiovascular disease incidence in 88,412 middle-aged adults who were free from heart disease. Participants wore an activity tracker on their dominant wrist for a week while they took part in the study.

The team collected data on the total amount of physical activity they did, and the authors worked out the percentage of that volume that was achieved through moderate and vigorous intensity activity. The number of cardiovascular events, including coronary artery disease and stroke, was then recorded among participants, who were followed up for 6.8 years on average.

‘Every move counts’

“Our analysis of data from UK Biobank confirms that increasing the total amount of physical activity can lower the risk of suffering a heart attack or stroke, but we also found that achieving the same overall amount of physical activity through higher intensity activity has a substantial additional benefit,” says study senior author Professor Tom Yates from the University of Leicester in a media release.

“Our findings support simple behavior-change messages that ‘every move counts’ to encourage people to increase their overall physical activity, and if possible to do so by incorporating more moderately intense activities. This could be as simple as converting a leisurely stroll into a brisk walk, but a variety of approaches should encourage and help individuals to find whatever is most practical or enjoyable for them.”

The findings are published in the European Heart Journal.

South West News Service writer Gwyn Wright contributed to this report.

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Key Facts

• According to Bloomberg, Musk will take over from Parag Agrawal, who was reportedly fired on Thursday along with other top executives.

• Musk, who also serves as the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, is yet to make an official statement about his takeover but appeared to acknowledge completion of the deal by tweeting “the bird is freed.”

• A day earlier, the billionaire updated his Twitter bio to “Chief Twit.”

• Musk, the world’s richest person, will likely stay in the role in the short term before finding a full time replacement for Agrawal, the Bloomberg report added.

• As he has previously implied, Musk also reportedly plans to undo any permanent account bans, potentially opening the door for former President Donald Trump’s return to the platform.

• At the time of publishing, Trump’s @realDonaldTrump account remains suspended

Crucial Quote

Reacting to the report that Musk may loosen some of Twitter’s restrictions and unban some accounts, former U.S. intelligence contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden tweeted: “This is going to cause controversy, but platform censorship had clearly gone too far. Content moderation should be an individual decision, not a corporate prison. Let people make their own choices—and not just on Twitter.”

Key Background

Late on Thursday, reports suggested that Musk had completed his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter after months of drama, flip-flops and the threat of a legal battle. Immediately after taking over, Musk removed several top executives including CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, Legal And Policy Head Vijaya Gadde and General Counsel Sean Edgett. According to the Washington Post, the fired executives were “hastily escorted out of the company’s San Francisco headquarters.” Musk’s takeover of Twitter and his push to turn it into a “free speech” haven has raised concerns about the return of unmoderated hate speech on the platform. Musk tried to assuage some of these concerns raised by advertisers in a statement issued on Twitter, in which he said he won’t allow the platform to become a “free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences.” The billionaire also claimed he was not trying to make more money with the Twitter acquisition but instead is trying to “help humanity” by creating a “common digital town square” for open dialogue.

Tangent

Shares of Digital World Acquisition Corp—the blank check company that has agreed to acquire former President Donald Trump’s Truth Social and take it public—slumped by nearly 4% on Thursday as Musk’s acquisition of Twitter became increasingly clear. Since the start of this year, DWAC has seen its valuation crater by nearly 70% as Truth Social has failed to gain traction and has been beset by controversies and investigations. Trump has vowed to remain on Truth Social, even if he’s invited back on Twitter. However, the allure of having a much wider reach on a larger platform may be difficult to put off once he begins his widely expected 2024 presidential campaign.

Forbes Valuation

We estimate Musk’s current net worth to be $221.5 billion, making him the richest person in the world.

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Academics from King’s College London found that hearing birds, seeing them, and having ordinary encounters with birds improved the mood of people who have depression, and of the broader population as well.

The study followed about 1,300 people throughout their everyday encounters with birds last year using a smartphone app called Urban Mind.

The people were in Britain, Europe, the United States, Australia, and China.

Using the app, study participants recorded how they were feeling, if they were stressed or happy, if they could see trees, and whether they could see or hear birds.

Average mental wellbeing scores increased when people saw or heard birds, even for people who had been previously diagnosed with depression.

“We need to create and support environments, particularly urban environments, where bird life is a constant feature. To have a healthy population of birds, you also need plants, you also need trees. We need to nurture the whole ecosystem within our cities,” King’s College London professor Andrea Mechelli said in The Guardian.

He said it was important to learn that birds have a positive effect on people with depression, since many treatments “that help so-called ‘healthy people’ don’t work for individuals with mental health issues.”

Adrian Thomas, author of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds’ Guide to Birdsong, said the report makes sense, since people generally report birdsong brings feelings of joy.

“It is embedded somewhere deep within our psyches,” he said. “It is associated with spring and renewal and good times coming…We need to address this nature crisis and ensure that nature doesn’t fall silent.”

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The bird was tagged as a hatchling in Alaska during the Northern Hemisphere summer with a tracking GPS chip and tiny solar panel that enabled an international research team to follow its first annual migration across the Pacific Ocean, Birdlife Tasmania convenor Eric Woehler said. Because the bird was so young, its gender wasn't known.

Aged about five months, it left southwest Alaska at the Yuko-Kuskokwim Delta on Oct. 13 and touched down 11 days later at Ansons Bay on the island of Tasmania's northeastern tip on Oct. 24, according to data from Germany's Max Plank Institute for Ornithology. The research has yet to be published or peer reviewed.

The bird started on a southwestern course toward Japan then turned southeast over Alaska's Aleutian Islands, a map published by New Zealand's Pukoro Miranda Shorebird Center shows.

The bird was again tracking southwest when it flew over or near Kiribati and New Caledonia, then past the Australian mainland before turning directly west for Tasmania, Australia's most southerly state. The satellite trail showed it covered 13,560 kilometers (8,435 miles) without stopping.

"Whether this is an accident, whether this bird got lost or whether this is part of a normal pattern of migration for the species, we still don't know," said Woehler, who is part of the research project.

Guinness World Records lists the longest recorded migration by a bird without stopping for food or rest as 12,200 km (7,580 miles) by a satellite-tagged male bar-tailed godwit flying from Alaska to New Zealand.

Bar-tailed godwits fly over Marion Bay in Australia's Tasmania state on Dec. 27, 2013. A young bar-tailed godwit appears to have set a non-stop distance record for migratory birds by flying at least 13,560 kilometers (8,435 miles) from Alaska to the Australian state of Tasmania, a bird expert said Friday, Oct. 28, 2022.

Credit: Eric Woehler via AP

That flight was recorded in 2020 as part of the same decade-old research project, which also involves China's Fudan University, New Zealand's Massey University and the Global Flyway Network.

The same bird broke its own record with a 13,000-kilometer (8,100-mile) flight on its next migration last year, researchers say. But Guinness has yet to acknowledge that feat.

Woehler said researchers did not know whether the latest bird, known by its satellite tag 234684, flew alone or as part of a flock.

"There are so few birds that have been tagged, we don't know how representative or otherwise this event is," Woehler said.

"It may be that half the birds that do the migration from Alaska come to Tasmania directly rather than through New Zealand or it might be 1%, or it might be that this is the first it's ever happened," he added.

Adult birds depart Alaska earlier than juveniles, so the tagged bird was unlikely to have followed more experienced travelers south, Woehler said.

Woehler hopes to see the bird once wet weather clears in the remote corner of Tasmania, where it will fatten up having lost half its body weight on its journey.

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The giant panda called Tuan Tuan was gifted to Taiwan by Beijing in 2008 alongside his breeding partner, Yuan Yuan.

But the 18-year-old bear has become increasingly unwell and zookeepers in Taiwan suspect he has a brain tumour.

Taiwan has called on vets from mainland China to help assess Tuan Tuan as he moves into end-of-life care.

The two pandas were donated during a period of warmer relations between the neighbours, although their names combined mean "reunion" or "unity" - probably a reference to Beijing's desire to reabsorb Taiwan one day.

Relations have since soured between China and Taiwan, which Beijing regards as a breakaway province.

It is not clear when the vets will arrive, but Taiwan officials said they were processing their visa applications.

Since their arrival, Tuan Tuan and Yuan Yuan have become huge attractions in Taiwan.

"He was small and so cute when he first got here," Heng Ling-lin, who brought her children to Taipei Zoo to sign get-well notes, told the AFP news agency.

"He was like everybody's baby," she added. "It breaks my heart now to see him like this."

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Uganda Ebola outbreak tops 100 cases, 30 deaths; cases growing in capital

Big impacts picked up by seismograph on Mars

That was a conundrum. How could something be so communicable that it ripped through more than 120 countries in two months, yet have evaded detection for so long? Within the riddle lurked a puzzle: If Omicron developed not from earlier variants but in parallel to them, where was it hiding out all that time?

Competing hypotheses jostled for consideration: It had taken shelter in a group of people who had little contact with the outside world and no involvement in sequencing programs. It had found a home in someone so immunocompromised that they could not overcome the infection, ceding the virus territory in which to replicate and change. Or, a third thought: It fell back into the animal world—not into the bats in which it first found a host, but into some new species that would provoke mutation in novel ways.

That possibility, known formally as reverse zoonosis and informally as spillback, was already a known risk. In April 2020, just a few months after the virus began spreading internationally, it migrated into mink farms in the Netherlands, triggering the deaths or preventive slaughter of millions of the animals—and a few months later it traveled back into humans.

No one has been able to say with precision which of those three hypotheses accurately explains Omicron’s arrival—and with Omicron itself spinning off variants so rapidly, the discussion dropped out of researchers’ priorities. Now a new study from a research team at the University of Minnesota is giving that debate fresh energy. Their analysis suggests that Omicron adapted to mice, where it developed its mutational array before it passed into humans.

“These Omicron mutations are evolutionary traces left by the virus during its transmission from one animal species to another,” senior author Fang Li, a professor of pharmacology and director of the university’s Center for Coronavirus Research, said in a statement. (Li declined an interview.)

In the study, published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers took a structural biology approach—studying the shapes of molecules within the virus—to examine mutations in Omicron’s spike protein, which allows it to invade cells. They found certain mutations that made the virus more efficient in binding to a particular receptor, ACE2, as it exists in the cells of mice, compared to the version of that receptor present in humans. They confirmed that work by assembling non-infectious pseudoviruses expressing the Omicron spike protein and observed their binding with cells engineered to include the mouse or human receptors. They found that Omicron had more affinity for the mouse version.

This is not the first paper to suggest that mice played a role in fostering the emergence of Omicron. Last December, researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences proposed that the results of a laser spectroscopy analysis of its mutations are inconsistent with the pace of Omicron's evolution in humans but consistent with a more rapid pace of mutation in rodents. They also identified some Omicron mutations that had previously been spotted in earlier SARS-CoV-2 strains when mice were experimentally infected for Covid lab research.

Neither that study nor the new one comes close to closing the book on Omicron’s roots, of course. “This breathes some more life back into the idea that Omicron could have come from an animal reservoir,” says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan. “I don’t think we have enough information to say it did emerge from there, but we can say that hypothesis is still on the table.”

And it underscores the fact that SARS-CoV-2 is able to bounce back and forth between wildlife and domesticated animals and the human world. Since those infections in mink more than two years ago, many more species have been found to be vulnerable. An open-access dashboard created by researchers at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna and the Wildlife Conservation Society in the US has recorded 735 identifications or infections in 31 species—almost certainly an undercount, since the underlying software scrapes data only from official sources. Among those identifications: a cat in Thailand, as well as hamsters in Hong Kong, which not only picked up some variety of SARS-CoV-2, but passed it back to their owners.

“We’ve got to be paying more attention to candidate reservoirs in the wild that might be vessels for mixing up this virus and then pose a risk for spillback transmission to humans,” says Sarah Hamer, a veterinary ecologist and professor of epidemiology at Texas A&M University. At the start of the pandemic, her research group pivoted away from work on other infections in which animals provide a bridge to humans—for instance, tickborne diseases and Chagas disease—and started looking for evidence of Covid. So far, they have documented the virus’s presence in domestic dogs and cats and captive white-tailed deer.

Pinning down whether wild animals that acquire the virus can also transmit it is a research challenge; they might be unfortunate victims but dead-end hosts. Last year, researchers from several Canadian universities and federal agencies demonstrated that North American deer mice, which live in woodlands and suburbs, can be experimentally infected with SARS-CoV-2, shed the virus, and expose other deer mice. But whether that would translate into an ongoing infectious risk—among mice or to humans—can’t be assumed from that data, says Darwyn Kobasa, the senior author, who is a research scientist heading high-containment respiratory virus studies at the Public Health Agency of Canada. In the real world, encounters between animals and humans are more difficult to trace.

“Mice are potentially prey for cats, so there could be an indirect connection, from mice through cats to people,” he says. “Or there may be something in the environment, where mice and humans come into contact with each other.”

Not everyone agrees on the role different species play in harboring the virus, let alone whether they can do so long enough for it to mutate and pose a novel threat to humans. And some scientists are changing their points of view as they accrue more data. In 2021, Missouri and New York researchers extracting viral genetic material from wastewater thought they might have identified a rodent signature in what they called “cryptic mutations” that have rarely been identified in humans. A year later, they have reinterpreted that work—and now lean more toward the possibility that immune-impaired people, who have suffered lengthy infections, might accidentally play a role in driving viral evolution.

“Many of the mutations that appear in those persistently infected patients also are the same ones that appeared in Omicron, and are similar to the ones that have appeared in the cryptic samples,” says John Dennehy, a virologist and professor of biology at Queens College of the City University of New York. “And a lot of people have looked for SARS coronavirus in mice and rats, and we’ve never really seen anything that would resemble those cryptic variants, or Omicron for that matter.”

Scientists who want to study the animals most likely to harbor the virus have few options for constructing research programs. At the moment, the most robust animal-disease surveillance programs keep track of species that anchor industries or ecosystems, like poultry, which are vulnerable to avian influenza, or elk, moose, and deer, which are subject to chronic wasting disease. Very broad surveillance for potential threats across multiple species is the dream of pandemic prevention. But it hasn’t yet received the funding—or scored the predictive hits—that researchers would like.

Hamer thinks existing programs, through which researchers are already hunting other diseases, could contribute to defining the spillback threat. They just need a little help. “There’s no shortage of wildlife biologists and field veterinarians that have the skills to safely trap, sample, and release critters. And there’s no shortage of the laboratory expertise to quickly figure out what’s got neutralizing antibodies, what’s got active viral shedding,” she says. In her own work tracking tickborne diseases, she has started taking nasal swabs of wildlife, in addition to the blood samples she already needed. “And then we bank those in the minus-80 freezer,” she says. “We’re waiting until we’ve got the resources to work them up for SARS-CoV-2.”

Where Did Omicron Come From? Maybe Its First Host Was Mice

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