A majority of adults cited inflation (83%), violence and crime (75%), the current political climate (66%), and the racial climate (62%) as significant sources of stress.

The nationwide survey, fielded by The Harris Poll on behalf of APA, revealed that 70% of adults reported they do not think people in the government care about them, and 64% said they felt their rights are under attack. Further, nearly half of adults (45%) said they do not feel protected by the laws in the United States. More than a third (38%) said the state of the nation has made them consider moving to a different country.

More than three-quarters of adults (76%) said that the future of our nation is a significant source of stress in their lives, while 68% said this is the lowest point in our nation's history that they can remember.

Various disparities in stressors emerged among population subgroups. For example, 72% of the members of the LGBTQIA+ community reported feeling as if their rights are under attack, which is a higher proportion than non-LGBTQIA+ adults (64%). Younger adult women (ages 18 to 34) were more likely to report that most days their stress is completely overwhelming, in comparison with older women (62% vs. 48% 35-44; 27% 45-64; 9% 65+) and men ages 35 or older (62% vs. 48% 35-44; 21% 45-64; 8% 65+). Seventy-five percent of Black adults said that the racial climate in the U.S. is a significant source of stress, while 70% of Latino/a adults, 69% of Asian adults and 56% of white adults reported the same.

Furthermore, Latinas were most likely to cite significant sources of stress related to violence among racial/ethnic groups, including violence and crime (89% Latinas; 80% Black women; 79% Asian women; 77% Latinos; 75% Black men; 73% white women; 72% white men; 70% Asian men), mass shootings (89% Latinas; 78% Latinos; 77% Black women; 77% Asian women; 73% white women; 71% Black men; 67% Asian men; 66% white men) and gun violence (87% Latinas; 83% Black women; 77% Asian women; 76% Latinos; 75% Black men; 69% white women; 68% white men; 63% Asian men).

"It's clear that the impacts of uncontrollable stressors are profound for most Americans, but psychological science shows us that there are effective ways to talk about and cope with this type of stress," said Arthur C. Evans Jr., Ph.D., APA's chief executive officer. "Focusing on accomplishing goals that are in our control can help prevent our minds from getting overwhelmed by the many uncertainties in life. From using our breathing to slow racing thoughts, to intentionally limiting our social media consumption, or exercising our right to vote, action can be extremely empowering."

Adults reported that stress has had an impact on their health; 76% of adults reported they had experienced at least one symptom in the last month as a result of stress—such as headache (38%), fatigue (35%), feeling nervous or anxious (34%) and feeling depressed or sad (33%). Seven in 10 adults (72%) experienced additional symptoms in the last month, including feeling overwhelmed (33%), experiencing changes in sleeping habits (32%), and/or worrying constantly (30%).

"With so many people suffering health effects from these unrelenting external stressors, it's important that all health care providers understand the research and offer their patients evidence-based techniques to reduce the effects of extreme stress and build their resilience," said Evans.

More information on the survey findings and how to handle stress related to uncertainty is available at www.stressinamerica.org. APA psychologists are available for media interviews to discuss these findings and provide science-based recommendations on how to address the ongoing mental health crisis in America.

Methodology

The 2022 Stress in America™ survey was conducted online within the United States by The Harris Poll on behalf of the APA between Aug. 18 and Sept. 2, 2022, among 3,192 adults age 18+ who reside in the U.S. Interviews were conducted in English and Spanish.

Data are weighted where necessary to reflect their proportions in the population based on the 2021 Current Population Survey (CPS) by the U.S. Census Bureau. Weighting variables included age by gender, race/ethnicity, education, region, household income and time spent online. Latino/a adults were also weighted for acculturation, taking into account respondents' household language as well as their ability to read and speak in English and Spanish. Country of origin (U.S./non-U.S.) was also included for Latino/a and Asian subgroups. Weighting variables for Gen Z adults (ages 18 to 25) included education, age by gender, race/ethnicity, region, household income and size of household, based on the 2021 CPS.

Propensity score weighting was used to adjust for respondents' propensity to be online. A propensity score allows researchers to adjust for attitudinal and behavioral differences between those who are online versus those who are not, those who join online panels versus those who do not, and those who responded to this survey versus those who did not.

Respondents for this survey were selected from among those who have agreed to participate in Harris's surveys. The sampling precision of Harris online polls is measured by using a Bayesian credible interval. For this study, the sample data is accurate to within + 2.9 percentage points using a 95% confidence level. This credible interval will be wider among subsets of the surveyed population of interest.

All sample surveys and polls, whether or not they use probability sampling, are subject to other multiple sources of error, which are most often not possible to quantify or estimate, including but not limited to coverage error, error associated with nonresponse, error associated with question wording and response options, and post-survey weighting and adjustments.

Source

Neuroscientist Dr. Edwin Lim and neuropsychologist Dr. Heather Francis, both Society for Mental Health Research Fellows, together with psychologist Professor Richard Stevenson, have published a paper on the findings of the study in the journal Frontiers in Nutrition.

"Western-style diets high in fat, sugar and processed foods were already known to increase the risk of depression, but this is the first time a biological link involving the kynurenine pathway has been established," Lim says.

"In this study, we tested participants' urine for several biological markers, including KA and inflammation, and compared them with how healthy their diet was and the severity of depression symptoms.

"People from the group eating an unhealthy diet had lower levels of KA and more severe symptoms of depression. This indicates that KA may help to protect us against depression."

The human body has a number of ways of producing important molecules and metabolites necessary to keep it functioning.

One of these important molecules is tryptophan—an essential amino acid that the body can't make itself, that is found in foods like dairy products, poultry, bananas, oats, nuts and seeds.

What is KA and why is it important?

Our bodies break down tryptophan into metabolites that are used to regulate behavior, protect the brain, and control inflammation, which is linked to diseases including some cancers, heart disease, stroke and dementia.

When tryptophan is broken down, it can produce either serotonin and melatonin—important for our mood and sleep—or it can be processed by the kynurenine pathway, which creates KA and other important metabolites linked to neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease.

Lim says this is the first time anyone has been able to show that Western-style diet has an effect on the way that tryptophan is metabolized in otherwise healthy young people.

"Previously, it was believed that changes to tryptophan metabolism were driven by inflammation, despite there not being conclusive clinical evidence for this," he says.

"Our study also shows that urine analysis may be a useful alternative to blood tests in collecting valuable biological information on the way our bodies process tryptophan.

"This can be a big advantage in that it's not only simpler—it's less invasive, which is important for vulnerable people such as children and older adults."

Dr. Heather Francis, senior lecturer in Clinical Neuropsychology in the School of Psychological Sciences at Macquarie University, says it's too early to say whether targeting KA might be an option one day for treating depression, in a similar way that we increase serotonin using antidepressants.

"There is, however, a clear relationship between an increased risk of depression and eating an unhealthy diet that is high in fat, sugar and processed foods, giving us all the incentive to eat more fresh vegetables and fruit," she says.

As with most metabolites, the level of KA in the body is important. Too little is associated with depression, but too much has been linked to schizophrenia.

There is clearly a sweet spot, but scientists do not yet know what it is, or what other aspects—like an individual's genetic make-up—might have an influence.

Factors like physical activity are also at play, as people who report getting regular exercise do tend to also have healthy levels of KA.

Source

Toyota was a hybrid pioneer with the Prius but struggles to leap to electric

The outbreak began on September 15. A 24-year-old man, suffering from a high fever and convulsions, was admitted to Mubende Regional Referral Hospital in Uganda. He had bleeding in his eyes and had been passing blood-stained vomit and diarrhea. The man died on September 19. The next day, laboratory tests confirmed the worst fears of those caring for him: Ebola was back.

And this outbreak is different. Ebola is a disease of multitudes. For the most common species of the virus, successful vaccines have already been developed. But for others, no vaccine exists. To the dismay of health officials in Uganda, the version of the virus found in the body at Mubende was from the Sudan species, for which there is no vaccine.

Other Ebola deaths have also been reported in the region. Six people from the man’s family, three adults and three children, also died between September 11 and 15. The Uganda Ministry of Health dispatched a rapid response team to the affected villages in Mubende district to do a verbal autopsy—collecting information on the likely cause of death from local people. The risk of infection from conducting a physical autopsy would be too high.

By October 16, the Ministry of Health had reported 60 confirmed cases of Ebola, having registered 11 new cases in the previous two weeks. In total, 24 deaths have been confirmed, including four among health workers, along with 24 recoveries. 

That as many people have died as have recovered is striking, but not surprising. Ebola is a rare but highly dangerous viral disease that kills roughly 50 percent of people who fall ill with it. Fruit bats are thought to be the natural host of the virus, but it can also infect primates, rodents, and humans, spreading via the bodily fluids of infected animals or people, both alive and dead.

Ebola has flared up intermittently in Africa for more than 40 years, most notably during an outbreak between 2013 and 2016 that infected 28,000 people and took more than 11,000 lives. During that outbreak, experimental vaccines against the most common form of the virus—the Zaire species—could be tested. They worked well, and have since been approved and used to protect people. But developing vaccines for rare viruses like Ebola is always a game of cat and mouse. The Sudan virus behind the current outbreak has caused only a handful of human cases over the past two decades. Work to develop vaccines to target this virus is underway, but none have been fully tested, let alone finished.

Using a Zaire vaccine against the Sudan virus isn’t an option, says Pontiano Kaleebu, director of the Uganda Virus Research Institute. “This has already been proven in the laboratory. The neutralizing antibodies do not respond,” he says. This means two things: that surveillance and physical control measures are currently the only tools available for limiting the virus’s spread, and that a working vaccine needs to be found as quickly as possible.

The candidate that’s farthest along is the single-dose ChAd3 Ebola Sudan vaccine, which is being developed by the Sabin Vaccine Institute, a nonprofit based in Washington, DC. By working with the World Health Organization (WHO), the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, and other organizations, the institute is planning to run a clinical trial in the current outbreak to see how well the vaccine works.

But there are only 100 doses available. With limited supply, health officials plan to give doses of the vaccine to immediate contacts of confirmed Ebola cases. Scientists then hope to use these contacts as potential candidates in the vaccine’s clinical trial—though the exact testing protocol they will use is still being worked out.

Kaleebu says they are hoping for accelerated production from the Sabin Vaccine Institute now that more doses are needed. But even if the number of vaccines used in the trial is small, they will still provide useful data, says Bruce Kirenga, a senior respiratory physician at Makerere University College of Health Sciences on the outskirts of Kampala.

“Trials use power calculation,” Kirenga says, referring to sums that allow researchers to work out the minimum number of people you need to involve to see whether a vaccine or medicine has an effect. A well-designed trial in an emergency situation in need of a drastic change of course—such as whether a vaccine stops someone from getting or dying from a severe disease like Ebola—doesn’t necessarily need to involve lots of people.

Doses of another candidate vaccine, designed to protect against both the Zaire and Sudan forms of the virus and developed by the University of Oxford, are also being sent to help in the outbreak. But the WHO has said that vaccine trials won’t start for another couple of weeks, meaning that for now, Ugandan authorities are relying on non-pharmaceutical interventions.

Contact tracing is being used to follow people who have been close to known cases, with more than 1,500 contacts having been traced as of October 16. Over a third of these are no longer being followed, having been traced for 21 days without developing symptoms.

New cases are also being picked up outside of the contacts being traced, says Daniel Kyabayinze, director of public health at Uganda’s Ministry of Health. “It’s a good sign of optimal surveillance,” he says. But it is also a sign that the limits of the outbreak are still uncertain.

On October 12, the Ministry of Health announced that a man had died of Ebola in a hospital in Kampala, having traveled to the capital from his local village. Three days later, two districts—Mubende and Kassanda—entered a three-week lockdown to try to stop the virus spreading. Bars, nightclubs, and places of worship have been closed, and only cargo trucks are allowed to enter or leave the districts.

With the risk of infection so high, trained teams are also being dispatched to bury the dead. And, at the same time, they are helping with the contact tracing—taking the details of all people the deceased could have had contact with. The Ministry of Health is also training health workers to handle Ebola cases, and communities are mobilizing volunteers and those who have previously worked in Ebola case management to take part in control efforts.

Neighboring countries have also stepped up their vigilance. Common border points between Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are both surveilling the virus and isolating known contacts. In Uganda, border health control teams are managing any emergency cases of Ebola among travelers. It’s a challenge. “The tests we have don’t work for the two viruses,” says Otim Patrick Ramadan, health emergency officer at the WHO Regional Office for Africa. Two monoclonal antibody treatments—which enlist the immune system to fight against diseases—recommended for treating the Zaire virus also don’t work against the Sudan virus, he says.

Despite the hard task Uganda faces, the WHO has expressed optimism about its ability to tackle the outbreak. “Thanks to its expertise, action has been taken quickly to detect the virus, and we can bank on this knowledge to halt the spread of infections,” Matshidiso Moeti, the WHO regional director for Africa, said on October 6. “Uganda is no stranger to effective Ebola control.”

If Covid-19 was a big reminder of the threat of emerging infectious diseases, then Ebola is a quieter but equally dire warning. To a degree, the world got lucky with the pandemic: If something as transmissible as SARS-CoV-2 and as deadly as Ebola emerged in the future, the resulting outbreak would change the course of history.

To prepare for the worst case scenario, lessons must be learned from this outbreak—and where it came from. Ebola and Covid-19 are both diseases that jumped to humans because humanity continues to encroach on wild areas of the planet. “People are going to look for food, or they are mining, or it’s leisure activities,” says Otim. “As the frequency in interaction between humans and animals increases, we pick up these viruses from them.”

Updated 10-18-2022 11:00 am ET: The discussion around the number of cases, fatalities, and recoveries in the current outbreak was updated for clarity, with a calculation of the case fatality rate in the current outbreak (previously corrected) being removed. 

Ebola Is Back—and Vaccines Don’t Work Against It

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The study, published in the Journal of Affective Disorders, is based on survey data from Brazil. It chimes with previous research that found higher rates of depression among those who do not eat meat. However, the new study indicates that this link exists independent of nutritional intake.

It may seem straightforward to look at an association between a diet and specific health problems and assume that the former is causing the latter via some form of nutritional deficiency.

However, the new analysis took into account a wide range of nutritional factors, including total calorie intake, protein intake, micronutrient intake, and the level of food processing. This suggests that the higher rates of depression among vegetarians are not caused by the nutritional content of their diet.

So what might explain the link between vegetarianism and depression? Is there some non-nutritional mechanism that makes the former cause the latter? Or is the relationship down to something else entirely?

There are multiple possible reasons why there is a link between vegetarianism and depression.

 

First, it is possible that being depressed causes people to be more likely to become vegetarian rather than the other way around. The symptoms of depression can include rumination on negative thoughts, as well as feelings of guilt.

Assuming that depressed and non-depressed people are equally likely to encounter the upsetting truth of slaughterhouses and factory farming, it is possible that depressed people are more likely to ruminate on those thoughts, and more likely to feel guilty for their part in creating the demand.

The depressed vegetarian, in this case, is not necessarily wrong to think this way. While depression is sometimes characterized as having unrealistically negative perceptions, there is evidence to suggest that people with mild to moderate depression have more realistic judgments about the outcome of uncertain events and more realistic perceptions of their own roles and abilities.

In this case, there really is cruel treatment of animals in meat production. And this really is caused by consumer demand for cheap meat.

Sometimes in factory farming, animals really are treated cruelly.

 

Second, it is possible that adhering to a vegetarian diet causes depression for reasons other than nutrition. Even if there is no “happy nutrient” lacking in a vegetarian diet, it could be the case that forgoing meat causes depression through other means.

For example, adopting a vegetarian diet might affect one’s relationship with others and involvement in social activities. In fact, it is sometimes associated with teasing or other forms of social ostracism.

Notably, the new study is based on survey data collected in Brazil, a country famous for its meat-heavy diet. Some survey data has pointed to a sharp increase in vegetarianism in Brazil in recent years, going from 8% in 2012 to 16% in 2018. However, the recent paper surveyed over 14,000 Brazilians and found just 82 vegetarians – scarcely more than half a percent.

One has to wonder if the same link between vegetarianism and depression would be observed in India or other countries where vegetarianism is more of a social norm. More importantly, as the rate of vegetarianism increases in the UK and other developed countries, will we see the relationship disappear over time?

Finally, it is possible that neither vegetarianism nor depression causes the other, but both are associated with some third factor. This could be any number of characteristics or experiences that are associated with both vegetarianism and depression.

For example, women are more likely than men to be vegetarian, and also more likely to experience depression. However, the Brazilian study took sex into account, ruling out this particular third variable.

Not examined

One variable that was not examined, but is plausibly linked to both vegetarianism and depression, is exposure to violent images of the meat industry. Preventing cruelty to animals is the most commonly cited reason vegetarians give for avoiding meat.

Documentaries like Dominion and Earthlings that depict the cruelty in the meat industry cannot readily be described as feel-good films. One can easily imagine that a person who consumes this kind of media would become both vegetarian and, especially when most people choose to look the other way, depressed.

There are several possible reasons for the link between vegetarianism and depression. This new study suggests that vegetarian nutrition is not the cause of depression.

Instead, the vegetarian social experience may contribute to depression, depression may cause an increased likelihood of becoming vegetarian, or both vegetarianism and depression may be caused by a third variable, such as exposure to violent meat industry imagery.

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As we enter our third pandemic holiday season, some doctors are fearing a seasonal surge in Covid. In Europe — which many experts consider a bellwether for Covid cases in the U.S. — cases are starting to mount, prompting the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and the World Health Organization to warn that a new wave of infections could be starting.

“This is the holiday that everyone’s going to come back together again,” said Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco. With a bit of advanced planning, he said, family gatherings can be safe this year, and resemble something like pre-pandemic times. “We have the tools for a normal life,” he said. “We just have to use them.”

Here’s what to keep in mind as you map out your family’s plans for the holidays.

Plan around the highest-risk member of your family

Individual risk tolerance may vary among your family members, but in general, plan around the person at your gathering who is highest-risk. That means taking more precautions if you have a family member who is older than 60, on immunosuppressant medications, received a transplant, or is a cancer patient, said Dr. Michelle Prickett, pulmonary and critical care specialist at Northwestern Medicine.

“It requires everyone who’s going to these gatherings to buy into the idea that we’re going to do the best to protect each other,” said Dr. Adam Ratner, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at N.Y.U. Langone.

You should talk with your family members ahead of time before gathering and figure out your game plan. Ask if people are up-to-date on their vaccinations, and encourage people to take additional precautions if a high-risk family member is attending, which could include limiting the amount of people you invite to Thanksgiving dinner or investing in a few heat lamps so that you can move the meal outside. “This is something you can manage,” Dr. Prickett said. “But you can’t put your head in the sand.”

Get the new booster

“The biggest way to protect yourself and others is to stay on top of your shots,” said Dr. Joseph Khabbaza, a pulmonary medicine doctor at Cleveland Clinic. The new bivalent booster is a critical tool for warding off infection — although many people are not even aware that it is available. You can find the new booster at pharmacies and health centers across the country, and anyone 5 and older can currently receive it. (You can get your booster at the same time as your flu shot.)

Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, has urged people to get the new booster by Halloween, so that it kicks in before Thanksgiving gatherings. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends the shot for people who are at least two months out from their last infection or vaccination, but many doctors say you should wait at least three months — even if you’re trying to maximize protection before a family gathering. If you get a new shot too soon after recovering from Covid, “your antibodies are just going to chomp up that booster,” and it won’t necessarily raise your level of protection, Dr. Chin-Hong said.

Pay attention to your symptoms

In the days leading up to a family event — and especially the morning of — watch out for Covid symptoms: sore throat, congestion, coughing, fatigue, headaches and muscle pain. People infected with BA.5, the dominant variant of Covid, are less likely to report losing their sense of taste and smell, but those are also crucial symptoms to watch for.

The dominant variant currently has a shorter incubation period — which means if you go to a packed bar on a Friday night and don’t have symptoms by Monday, it’s unlikely you have the virus, Dr. Chin-Hong said. If you still don’t have symptoms by Wednesday, you’re probably in the clear, he said, although you should take a test to confirm.

However, it is still possible to have an asymptomatic case of Covid — and as more people build up immunity to the virus through vaccination and prior infection, asymptomatic, or very mild, cases will be more common, said Dr. Céline Gounder, an infectious disease specialist and senior fellow and editor at large for public health at Kaiser Health News. Even if you do not have symptoms, you can still spread the virus, she said, which makes it important to test right before gathering with a vulnerable person.

“If you’re going to sit down with Grandma for Thanksgiving dinner, I would test immediately before,” she said.

If you do feel sick, stay home — even if you’re negative on a rapid test. “Anyone who isn’t feeling well should stay home,” Dr. Ratner said, “because the tests aren’t perfect.”

Test wisely

The question isn’t whether or not to test before a family gathering; it’s when to test, and how many times.

Experts differ on the exact timing and combination of tests you should take, but for the most accurate measure of whether or not you’re contagious before an event, take an at-home rapid test right before. “You can just have a little testing party outside, where everyone says, ‘OK, now we’re good, we’re negative, we can go in and see Mom,’” said Stuart Ray, an infectious diseases specialist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. You should also take a rapid test the day before, he advised.

“Rapid tests are very good, but they’re not perfect,” Dr. Prickett said. P.C.R. tests are more sensitive, but it can take several days to get the results back, she said, and so a five-day-old snapshot of your infection status won’t be helpful in determining if you’re contagious at the moment. If you can get a quick-turnaround P.C.R., that can boost your confidence that you’re negative; if not, take at least two rapid tests, 12 to 24 hours apart. (If you have had Covid in the last two to three months, though, P.C.R.s can stay positive beyond the point at which you’re contagious, Dr. Ratner said, so you should rely on rapid tests.)

And think about if the test makes sense to you, Dr. Ratner said. If you’ve been masking and limiting your contact and do not have symptoms, a negative test seems logical. If you wake up with a scratchy throat and have interacted with someone who tested positive, though, take another test the following day, and consider staying home even if the tests are negative, depending on how risky you deem yourself to be.

Consider a ‘mini quarantine’

You might want to minimize your exposure in the week before heading home for the holidays, Dr. Prickett said. That means wearing a mask in public indoor spaces and also limiting the time you spend around crowds — like timing trips to the grocery store for when it isn’t super packed, she said.

This is especially important if you live in an area with high levels of Covid cases. You want to check case counts like a weather report, Dr. Chin-Hong said — and keep in mind that these offer an incomplete picture, since rates of testing have plummeted.

Of course, total isolation isn’t feasible for many people. But the level of risk you encounter in a workplace, for example, where you can potentially wear a mask and may interact only with a set group of people, is likely lower than in environments like a restaurant or bar, Dr. Ray said.

Mask up while you travel

While your risk may change slightly depending on which mode of transportation you take, Dr. Gounder didn’t recommend prioritizing one form of travel over another. But whether you’re taking a plane, bus or train, make sure to wear a mask.

Even if you’re the only person on a plane or train wearing one, a high-quality mask can still protect you, doctors said. “It’s way, way better than nothing,” Dr. Ratner said, “and way, way worse than if everyone was masked.” He recommends people use an N95, KN95 or KF94 mask, and that they keep it on for the entire trip, or take it off for as short a time as possible. You might want to fill up on a big meal before your journey, so you don’t have to take off your mask to eat.

“If you really wear it carefully, if you cinch it down, it’s very unlikely that this virus is going to make it through this mask,” Dr. Ray said.

Ventilate your space

If you can’t hold your event outside, you can still increase air circulation and reduce the risk of trapping and transmitting the virus in a tight indoor space. Even cracking open the windows can improve air flow. You can also purchase portable air purifiers with HEPA filters. These devices can be expensive, but they can effectively capture some virus particles in the air.

Experts acknowledged that these precautions can be exhausting, but stressed that advance planning can help us protect each other over the holidays.

“I do not think it’s going to be like this forever,” Dr. Ratner said. “But we’re still in this.”

Source

ANSWER: Back pain is extremely common, so you and your husband are not alone. About 80% of adults in the U.S. will experience low back pain at some point. Your back is made up of 30 bones stacked in a column surrounded by muscles and ligaments. Nearly every movement you make involves your back in some manner. This constant movement and support mean that your back is susceptible to strain and stress.

Not all back pain is the same, though, and symptoms can vary widely. Occasionally, a person with back pain can pinpoint the exact time it started, like when attempting to lift a heavy object or after a fall. More commonly, no specific trigger or event led to the pain.

Here are the most common causes and descriptions of back pain:

• Muscle or ligament strains: Muscle or ligament strains are usually caused by a single event, such as using poor body mechanics to lift a heavy object. Strains feel like a sudden stabbing, localized pain. This pain worsens when you contract the muscle or twist. Redness, swelling and bruising can occur. The pain can be intense. Occasionally, people state that they have "thrown out" their backs. In most cases, they have a muscle or ligament strain.

• Osteoarthritis: Low back pain often is caused by osteoarthritis, the most common type of arthritis. Arthritis can lead to a narrowing of the space around the spinal cord or nerve roots, a condition called spinal stenosis. It occurs most often in the low back and neck. When this occurs in the low back, the most common symptoms are pain in both legs, tingling, numbness and sometimes muscle weakness.

• Bulging disk: Disks act as cushions between the bones, or vertebrae, in your spine. The material inside a disk can bulge and press on a nerve. This is called a bulging disk. Pain from a bulging disk usually occurs in the low back and radiates into the hips, buttocks or legs. It often is worse with activity and feels better when resting.

• Herniated disk: A herniated disk results when a tear in the tough outer layer of a disk allows some of the inner disk material to protrude outward. Herniated disks also are called ruptured disks or slipped disks. But compared with a bulging disk, a herniated disk is more likely to cause pain because it protrudes farther and is more likely to irritate nerve roots. Depending on where the herniated disk is, it can result in pain, numbness or weakness in one or both legs. These symptoms usually affect only one side of the body.

•  Sciatica: Sciatica is named after the sciatic nerve, which is the largest nerve in your body. It most commonly occurs when a herniated disk, bone spur or spinal stenosis compresses part of the nerve. Sciatica is a sharp, shooting pain that runs from your low back down the side or back of your leg. Typically, sciatica affects only one side of your body.

• Degenerative disk disease: As you age, the disks between your vertebrae begin to shrink and lose their softer qualities. This narrows the space between the vertebrae and can make your spine less flexible. Degenerative disk disease does not always cause symptoms. If it does, symptoms vary widely in nature and severity. Generally, pain comes and goes over a long time. It may feel better when you change positions or walk, and worsen when you sit, bend or twist.

When to schedule an appointment

Most low back pain—even when severe—goes away on its own in six to eight weeks with self-care, such as resting from heavy lifting, applying heat or ice, using over-the-counter pain medications, and stretching. Physical therapy can provide tremendous relief from back and limb pain, and oftentimes people do not need more treatment.

Talk with your health care professional if you have a history of cancer, or if your pain:

•     Is constant or intense, especially at night or when you lie down.
•     Spreads down one or both legs.
•     Causes weakness, numbness or tingling in one or both legs.
•     Occurs with a fever, swelling or redness on your back.
•     Occurs with unintended weight loss.
•     Occurs with new bowel or bladder control problems.

Also, if your back pain occurs after a fall or another injury, you should seek medical attention.

Source

Patient Barbara Krupar, a 65-year-old Ohio retiree, learned this firsthand.

Krupar made an appointment with her ophthalmologist after experiencing disturbing vision changes.

Dr. Nicole Bajic detected possible early warning signs of a stroke. She advised Krupar to go to the emergency room immediately to have her head and neck imaged.

At the hospital, the ER physician discovered that the carotid artery in her neck was 85% blocked, putting Krupar at imminent risk of suffering a stroke. The eye exam may have saved her life.

Exams can give view to some serious health conditions a person may be experiencing, including heart disease, diabetes, cancer, high blood pressure, multiple sclerosis, autoimmune diseases, sexually transmitted diseases and Alzheimer's.

These serious ailments can be detected in the eye because its blood vessels and nerves are reflective of the state of the rest of the body, according to the American Academy of Ophthalmology.

"Barbara's experience really highlights the importance of getting an annual eye exam," said Bajic, an ophthalmologist at the Cleveland Clinic and clinical spokeswoman for the American Academy of Ophthalmology.

"The best care is preventative care," Bajic said in an academy news release. "It's like getting your teeth examined every year. You want to see if something else is brewing."

The academy also offered advice for maintaining healthy vision and overall good health.

A heart-healthy diet full of leafy greens and colorful fruits is good for the eyes, the academy said. Foods rich in vitamins C and E, zinc, lutein, zeaxanthin and omega-3 fatty acids can lower risk of certain eye diseases, including macular degeneration, cataracts and dry eye.

Getting regular exercise can protect eye health, as well. The American Heart Association recommends 30 minutes of exercise a day.

Know your family history, including whether family members had macular degeneration and glaucoma. Share that information with your ophthalmologist.

Don't skip routine eye exams. Have a comprehensive eye examination by age 40 even if your vision seems fine. After age 65, get an exam every year or two.

The American Academy of Ophthalmology's EyeCare America program matches volunteer ophthalmologists with eligible patients in need of eye care across the United States.

Some seniors may be eligible for a free eye exam. They can visit EyeCare America online to check eligibility.

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She was 10 years old and died in her sleep, according to the account. Prior posts shared that she had been diagnosed with cancerous tumors.

Eclipse gained attention in 2015 when she began to take the bus alone. Her owner, Jeff Young, says the two of them would regularly take the bus to visit their local Belltown Dog Park. One day, he was still smoking a cigarette when the bus arrived — so, she boarded without him.

Within weeks, the black lab-bullmastiff mix was a consistent commuter in her signature red harness. Bus drivers recognized her and she knew her stop by looking out the window, her fellow passengers told Seattle's KOMO News in 2015.

While fans marveled at Eclipse's ability, Young spoke about her habit with what could be taken as nonchalance, or perhaps confidence in his dog.

"We get separated. She gets on the bus without me, and I catch up with her at the dog park," he told KOMO News. "It's not hard to get on. She gets on in front of her house and she gets off at the dog park, three or four stops later."

King County Metro, the area transit service, embraced its iconic passenger, even making a music video in 2015:

King County Metro paid tribute to the dog on its Twitter page, posting an image of her and the note, "Eclipse was a super sweet, world-famous, bus riding dog and true Seattle icon. You brought joy and happiness to everyone and showed us all that good dogs belong on the bus."

    Eclipse was a super sweet, world-famous, bus riding dog and true Seattle icon.

    You brought joy and happiness to everyone and showed us all that good dogs belong on the bus. pic.twitter.com/YhSFjNGU05

    — King County Metro 🚏 🚌🚎⛴🚐 (@KingCountyMetro) October 14, 2022

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Physicists don’t think the truth should be “out there.” They want nature to come naturally, make sense, fit in or have a good reason not to.

Unnaturalness is a problem.

The poster child for unnatural is gravity. It has never played well with others; it’s absurdly weak compared with the other movers and shakers of the cosmos—electromagnetism and nuclear forces. A tiny magnet can lift a large metal spoon off the ground against the pull of gravity of the entire Earth. No one knows why. (Gravity even speaks a different language—generally smooth geometry—as opposed to the buzzing quantum probability-speak native to other forces.)

Natural means to be expected, explainable by, duh, natural causes. My hair turned white because I’m old. That’s natural. If it turned bright pink of its own accord (a good look for me, I think), that would be highly unnatural, and I’d feel compelled to root around (so to speak) for a cause.

These days, physicists are being forced to confront the “unnaturalness problem” big time, because it’s been 10 years since the Higgs boson was discovered, and despite global-scale efforts using massive machines and master minds, the beast still stubbornly resists naturalization. Like gravity, the Higgs is weirdly wimpy. No one knows why.

The tried-and-true cure for unnaturalness has been finding a hidden player that explains the problem away. Say your seesaw refuses to balance; one side always pops up with no apparent cause. Then some clever theorists predict that there’s an invisible boulder weighing one side down. Their calculations are so accurate that experimenters know just where to look. Eventually, they confirm the rock’s existence.

Collective sighs of relief. Cheers and applause. Nobel prizes.

To be natural—to be clear—the new thing has to balance perfectly; no twiddling of any dials (or fine-tuning, as physicists call it). Not like naturalizing new citizens so they assimilate with the natives or “naturalizing” flower bulbs to settle into new conditions. Naturalness in physics means no intervention. It means exact to a gazillion decimal points, wholly of its own accord.

Despite the need for such precision, this fix has worked so well so often in physics, it’s hard to imagine it won’t keep happening. Find the hidden finger on the scale and symmetry returns, harmony’s restored, inconvenient truths vanish. As a bonus, physics evolves, broadens, embraces new stuff.

The Higgs raised high hopes for a repeat. But there’s been no second coming. No boulders have turned up.

To get a sense of what went wrong, I called on a physicist who himself is somewhat unnatural—a “deviant by default,” he calls himself. Not just because he’s Black, or went to a Bronx high school with a 60 percent drop-out rate, or because he plays jazz sax, is highly influenced by hip hop, and collaborates with the likes of Jaron Lanier (they’re both founding scientists of the Universal Hip Hop Museum). He’s also unusual because he’s multilingual within physics itself, able to converse with sometimes hostile camps, such as string theory and loop quantum gravity.

 
It’s a little hard to think of Stephon Alexander as an outsider. He runs his own eponymous lab at Brown, where his group explores the origin and structure of the universe, dark matter, the reasons matter exists at all. The Simons Foundation—which prides itself on furthering “breakthrough” science—recently awarded a million-dollar grant to support his work. He was president of the National Society of Black Physicists and wrote two well-received books: Fear of a Black Universe: An Outsider’s Guide to the Future of Physics and The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe.

Currently, Stephon’s very excited about the Higgs. “I remember as a student thinking this was a contraption,” he says, “a theoretical trick that you put in to make something work and then boom!” The newly revealed Higgs was exactly as predicted. Also entirely unacceptable. Its mass is unnaturally small compared to particles that should be of similar scales.

The preference for the natural in physics is tied to the belief in unification—the idea that fundamental physical stuff should all be part of the same big picture. “The electron has to talk to gravity, so why this huge gap?” Stephon says. “These things should know about each other. They should have a common origin.” This approach has worked before: Electricity and magnetism are now understood as facets of electromagnetism. Matter is concentrated energy. E = mc2.

The Higgs is (so far) unique. It’s a measurable shard of nothingness—“a fragment of vacuum,” as the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek described it. The Higgs field (which materializes as a Higgs particle if sufficiently tweaked) is a non-zero space-pervading something that remains after everything else is removed. It’s as empty as our void can get. Yet for “nothing,” it does quite a lot.

For one thing, it gives particles mass, some more than others. Light particles (photons of light, for example) slip right through, shrug it off without the slightest hesitation. Heavier particles get bogged down; to them, Higgs behaves like a room full of fans who won’t let you through without a selfie. More resistance equals more inertia equals more mass.

This unseen structure, current theories suggest, froze into place soon after the newborn universe emerged from a frenzied, superheated start, then settled naturally to a lower-energy state. That process destroyed the perfect sameness of hot, melted nothing, just as freezing imposes structure on water. The Higgs condensed (it’s officially a “condensate”) out of the first formless nothing like moist air condensing on a cool window.

And because it’s intrinsic to everything, the Higgs is potentially a portal connecting a tangle of other unsolved mysteries: What is the nature of dark matter? Why is there matter at all? What’s up with the accelerating expansion of the universe? Are they all part of the same cosmic puzzle?

The Higgs promised paths forward. So far, most have led nowhere.

Physics gets stuck, Stephon thinks, when it forgets—or ignores—its roots. The heroes of modern physics were master improvisers; they embraced wild imaginings as a tool. That was necessary. “Each time we get into a log jam,” wrote Richard Feynman, “it is because the methods we are using are just like the ones we have used before … A new idea is extremely difficult to think of. It takes fantastic imagination.” They found inspiration in dreams, art, philosophy. They considered the role of consciousness, respected aesthetics as well as logic. They searched for meaning beyond the math.

The battles were epic: Einstein said that if classical notions of cause and effect had to be renounced, he would rather be a cobbler or even work in a gambling casino than be a physicist. Niels Bohr called Einstein’s attitude appalling and accused him of high treason. Erwin Schrödinger famously complained: “If one has to stick to this damned quantum jumping, then I regret having ever been involved in this thing.” “How interesting,” Stephon says now, “that those inquiries were written out of the formal education when I was learning. That was the juice that led to quantum mechanics.”

As a sax player, Stephon sees a natural link between physics and jazz, which also thrives on sometimes wild improvisation, riffing, musical conversation. John Coltrane was a huge fan of Einstein’s theories; one of his last albums, Interstellar Space, was inspired and informed by general relativity. Perhaps more surprising, Stephon thinks growing up in a mecca of hip hop helped him become a physicist. “Hip hop explained to me why I work the way I do,” he says. “There are elements in the hip hop culture that are really important to science.”

A critical element was the cypher: A circle would form, and rappers would rhyme in turn, improvising verses on a shared beat. “That’s how rap music happened,” Stephon says. “This was a huge influence as a young person. Everyone’s voice is heard. It’s not about you. You are serving that thing that’s bigger than you. It’s the cypher. That’s generative to all creativity. Physicists could learn something from that.”

He held postdocs in physics departments that were re-creating something like the cypher. The difference was that only people considered “in the club” were allowed a turn. Despite even good intentions, in practice, physicists who seem “unnatural”—for example, Black people, women—are often excluded. Assumptions about what’s natural are deeply rooted, often unconscious. Once, when I was profiling one of the top physicists in the world—a woman—an editor at the fancy publication I was writing for kept changing her quotes, the way she spoke. “Physicists don’t talk like that,” the editor said. The fact that she was a physicist, presenting somewhat differently from the usual male model, didn’t seem to make a difference. Stephon sounds like the Bronx native he is.

Part of me understands. I met Stephon at an exclusive meeting of physicists at Aspen, and I was taken aback by the presence not only of Black scientists but also of women. The public face of physics is white and male; the science media rarely present counterexamples. So yes, I was surprised.

It reminded me of a time I stepped onto a diving board at a tennis club pool. “Grownups aren’t allowed up there,” a young boy told me. At first I didn’t understand. Then I looked around. Other women of my age were sitting around tables in whites drinking gin and tonics. I was “unnatural.” Often, “unnatural” translates as “not allowed,” even if nobody says so out loud.

To the extent that inclusion in science means welcoming “unnatural” voices and diverse perspectives, Stephon’s all for it. “But there are rules,” he says. Claims that physics is somehow white supremacist infuriate him, because their message is “it’s not for us.” “This is very personal and powerful for me. I don’t need people to tell me about disparities.” Claims of white supremacist science are “dangerously misinformed.”

The universe is naturally what it is. “Schrödinger’s equation is the same for everyone,” Stephon says. “It would be the same for an alien.” His 6,000-student Bronx high school didn’t offer the math that physics requires. But along with a few other students, he was given a chance to take calculus at the City College of New York. “If I’d not had that opportunity, I could not have succeeded.”

The influence of hip hop went beyond the cypher. While the public face of hip hop often conjured “gangsters and hooligans,” Stephon says, “that was not my hip hop.” Hip hop culture includes a lot of different elements, along them DJing, break dancing, graffiti, rapping. (Also gangsterism.) “But there’s a fifth element called knowledge. I was coming from a place where hip hop was about dropping science. We had a saying: Let the knowledge be born!”

While it’s hard to see Stephon as much of misfit anymore, the Higgs still sticks out. It’s 100 million billion times less massive than it should be. “We don’t like ridiculous numbers,” Stephon says. And so Stephon, along with other physicists, is wondering whether this whole naturalness thing even makes sense anymore. “One interesting thing about the Higgs is you’re not asking a question about a symmetry or the math; you’re really asking about the physics,” he says. “The Higgs is a physical thing; it actually participates in mass. It’s necessary. But the question is: What is the Higgs?”

It could be a composite of several “natural” particles; it could a member of a much larger family. It could even be ridiculous. “Imagine if naturalness was never a thing!?” Stephon says. “You create the problem and you realize the problem wasn’t there to begin with. My big dream would be that this issue of naturalness was never there. That’s my fantasy.”

The universe has already proven itself ridiculous in the extreme, mind-bending, space-time-bending, quantum foam shredding space and time to bits in our brains as well as the innards of black holes, a vacuum so overstuffed with energy it appears to be pushing galaxies apart. Yet this supremely weirdo habitat provides life support not just for us but also for fishing spiders, hairy frogs, goblin sharks. Why would we even think that the puny 3-pound bundle of neurons we carry around in our skulls could comprehend any of it?

The fact that we do, you might say, is unnatural in and of itself. Maybe the trick is to let nature take care of naturalness—and let scientists be as out there as they need to be to understand it.

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Physicists have devised a way to synchronize the ticking of two clocks through the air with extreme precision, across a record distance of 113 kilometres.

The feat is a step towards redefining the second using optical clocks — timekeepers that are 100 times more precise than the atomic clocks on which coordinated universal time (UTC) is currently based.

Metrologists hope to use optical clocks to redefine the second in 2030. But a hurdle standing in their way is the need to find a reliable way to transmit signals between optical clocks in laboratories on different continents, to compare their outputs. In practice, this will probably mean transmitting the clocks’ time through air and space, to satellites. But this is a challenge because the atmosphere interferes with signals.

A team led by Jian-Wei Pan, a physicist at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, succeeded in sending precise pulses of laser light between clocks at stations 113 kilometres apart in China’s Xinjiang province1. This is seven times the previous record of 16 kilometres.

The result, published in Nature in 5 October, is “outstanding”, says David Gozzard, an experimental physicist at the University of Western Australia in Perth. Achieving such a high level of synchronization over that distance of air represents “significant progress in being able to do this between a satellite and the ground”, he adds.

Synchronizing hyper-precise clocks in hard-to-reach places could also have advantages elsewhere in research, says Tetsuya Ido, director of the Space-Time Standards Laboratory at the Radio Research Institute in Tokyo. For instance, the clocks could be used to test the general theory of relativity, which says that time should pass more slowly in places where gravity is stronger, such as at low altitudes. Comparing the ticking of two optical clocks could even reveal subtle changes in gravitational fields caused by the movement of masses — for example by shifting tectonic plates — he says.

Next-generation clocks

Since 1967, the second has been defined by atomic clocks using caesium-33 atoms: a second is the time it takes to cycle through 9,192,631,770 oscillations of the microwave radiation the atoms absorb and emit when they switch between certain states. Today, optical clocks use the higher-frequency ‘ticking’ of elements such as strontium and ytterbium, which allows them to slice time into even finer fractions.  

However, official time can’t be generated using just one clock. Metrologists must average the output of hundreds of timepieces across the world. For caesium clocks, the time can be transmitted through microwave signals, but microwave radiation is too low-frequency to convey the high-frequency tick of optical clocks.

Sending signals through the air at optical wavelengths is not as easy as sending microwaves, because molecules in the air readily absorb the light, drastically reducing the strength of the signal. Furthermore, turbulence can send a laser beam off target. To compare optical clocks, physicists have so far relied mostly on transmitting signals through fibre-optic cables, or transporting the bulky, complex timepieces themselves, to compare them side by side. But these methods are impractical for creating the kind of global network needed to define the second.

Pan’s team succeeded by combining several minor developments, says Gozzard. To create their signal, the researchers used optical frequency combs — devices that produce extremely stable and precise pulses of laser light — and boosted their output using high-powered amplifiers, to minimize the signal lost when the pulses travelled through the air. The team also tuned and optimized receivers so that they could pick up low-powered signals and automatically track the direction of the incoming laser.

The group sent out time intervals using two wavelengths of visible light, and transmitted another through a fibre-optic link. By comparing the tiny differences between signals picked up at the receivers, the researchers showed that, when measured over hours, they could disseminate the ticking with a stability high enough to lose or gain only a second roughly every 80 billion years. The level of accuracy was on a par with that of optical clocks.

Not there yet

Although this transfer method is the most stable humanity has so far, it will need to be improved further to match the stability of the best optical clocks, says Gozzard.

Another limitation is that the experiment was done in a remote region with optimal atmospheric conditions, says Ido. “The humidity is quite low and air turbulence could be more quiet than in conventional urban areas,” he says. Future studies will need to check how well the method works in other locations.

But the experiment seems to be a good proxy for sending such signals into space, says Helen Margolis, a physicist at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, UK. The amount of turbulence expected over 113 kilometres on the ground is comparable to that on the way from the ground to a satellite, she says.

Satellite-based transmission will face a further hurdle — the clocks will be orbiting at high speed, which shifts the frequency of their signals, says Gozzard.

Pan says this is one of the challenges his team will take on next. The team previously developed technologies for a quantum-communications satellite, and is now using those to develop ways to transmit between optical clocks in geostationary orbit and on the ground.

Using optical clocks in space it would also be “possible to provide new probes for fundamental physics, such as hunting for dark matter and detecting gravitational waves”, Pan adds.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-03297-0

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This overturns previous research that suggested blood pressure-lowering medication may be more effective if taken in the evening.

Blood pressure-lowering medications are among the most widely prescribed in the U.K., with between seven and nine million people taking them to reduce their risk of developing heart and circulatory diseases.

Clinical trial

This new randomized-controlled trial of more than 21,000 patients with high blood pressure found that protection against heart attack, stroke or circulatory diseases is not affected by whether blood pressure drugs are taken in the morning or evening.

Participants in the trial were taking at least one medication to lower their blood pressure. Half were asked to take their medication in the evening and the other half were asked to take it in the morning.

After following those on trial for five years, it was found that there was no difference in the number of people who had a heart attack, stroke or circulatory diseases—362 in the morning group versus 390 in the evening.

The research was carried out by teams from Universities of Edinburgh, Dundee, Glasgow and Oxford, Imperial College London, and Queen Mary University of London.

The study has been published in The Lancet.

"The main message from the study is that there is no optimal time to take blood pressure tablets to achieve a better outcome, so patients should take their tablets at the time that suits them best," says Professor David Webb, Christison Chair of Therapeutics and Clinical Pharmacology and author on the study.

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Russia is set to build a new university campus on the Chinese tropical island of Hainan, which will focus on science and technology research and studies.

The campus forms part of Russia's existing national research university called the Moscow Power Engineering Institute (MPEI). The public university was founded in 1930 and offers training in the fields of power engineering, electric engineering, radio engineering, electronics, information technologies, and management.

As the South China Morning Post (Opens in a new window)reports, the Hainan province has been trying to bolster its education sector by providing a greater range of foreign institutions. A deal was apparently struck with MPEI in March to build a campus on China's largest and most populous island. The fact late former Chinese Premier Li Peng is an alumni of MPEI (1948-55) and is known as "the most famous graduate of MPEI," no doubt helped the deal get a green light with the Chinese government.

The new campus will be created by the China Academy of Building Research (CABR), which aims to produce a design that "combines the tropical ecosystem of the island and the rational temperament of the Russian university." It's unclear when the design will be finished and the subsequent construction will start, however.

The biggest obstacle facing the MPEI campus in Hainan is likely going to be its limited capability to teach or research any advanced technology.

Russia is all but cut off from the Western world through sanctions due to its war with Ukraine. China, meanwhile, is facing an increasing number of export controls making it all but impossible to access the equipment required for the latest manufacturing technologies.

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Law enforcement in France, Latvia and Spain have arrested 31 suspects believed to be part a group that used software to steal vehicles without using the physical key fob.

According to the EU Agency for Criminal Justice Cooperation (Eurojust), the suspects built or used software that duplicated certain models' ignition keys and which was promoted online as an automotive diagnostic tool.

"The criminals targeted keyless vehicles from two French car manufacturers. A fraudulent tool – marketed as an automotive diagnostic solution, was used to replace the original software of the vehicles, allowing the doors to be opened and the ignition to be started without the actual key fob," said Europol.

"The perpetrators of the scam kept updating and adapting their software, to counteract the measures implemented by companies to reinforce the security of their vehicles," Eurojust noted.

On October 10, the 31 suspects were arrested in France, including the managers of the firm that allegedly built the software. Authorities searched 22 locations in France, Spain, and Latvia. They also seized €100 million, 12 bank accounts, real estate, three luxury cars and the website domain.

The French Gendarmerie's Cybercrime Centre (C3N) opened the case at Eurojust in September 2022 while Europol says it supported the investigation since March 2022.  

Neither agency has named the two French car manufacturers. Eurojust was unable to provide further information about the hacks or affected car manufacturers, and ZDNet has asked Europol for more information.

The hack does sound different to more recent relay attacks where thieves capture the radio signal between the key fob and the vehicle. UK law enforcement warned of a spike in keyless car theft last year. Authorities said to prevent relay attacks, luxury car owners should store their key fobs in metal tins or protective pouches.

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With a few notable exceptions—such as during the 1918 influenza pandemic, World War II and the HIV crisis—life expectancy in the U.S. has had gradual upward trajectory over the past century. But that progress has steeply reversed in the past two years as COVID and other tragedies have cut millions of lives short.

U.S. life expectancy fell by a total of 2.7 years between 2019 and 2021 to 76.1 years—the lowest it has been since 1996, according to provisional data recently released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). The drop was 3.1 years for male individuals and 2.3 years for female ones. Non-Hispanic Native American and Alaska Native peoples saw the biggest decline—a staggering 6.6 years. But every racial and ethnic group suffered: life expectancy decreased by 4.2 years in the Hispanic population, by four years in the non-Hispanic Black population, by 2.4 years in the non-Hispanic white population and by 2.1 years in the non-Hispanic Asian population.

Credit: Amanda Montañez; Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

“Basically, all the gains between 1996 and 2019 are as if they never happened,” says Elizabeth Arias, director of the U.S. life table program at the NCHS and co-author of a report on the new data.

COVID deaths drove much of the decline as the country grappled with the world’s worst pandemic in a century. But unintentional injuries—largely driven by drug overdoses—also played a significant role, the data show. Increases in deaths from heart disease, chronic liver disease and suicide also contributed.

“This isn’t supposed to happen,” says Philip Cohen, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, who studies demographic trends and inequality. “I think it’s a wake-up call for us ... that we can’t put public health on autopilot; that we don’t have this invisible hand of development just raising living standards over time.”

The drop in life expectancy would have been even more stark if it had not been partially offset by declines in influenza and pneumonia deaths, which were likely reduced by pandemic-related precautions such as masking and social distancing.

Arias and her colleagues calculated life expectancy using a technique called a period life table. This involved the researchers imagining a group of 100,000 hypothetical infants and applying the death rates observed for the real population in 2021 for each year of those infants’ lives. The result is not the life expectancy for a cohort of actual babies born in 2021 but rather a snapshot of how life expectancy rates would apply to various age groups at a specific point in time, Arias says.

Credit: Amanda Montañez; Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

The data show that in 2021 the Native American and Alaska Native populations had the lowest life expectancy of any race or ethnicity: 65.2 years. This is equivalent to the life expectancy of the total U.S. population in 1944, Arias and her colleagues wrote. Indigenous peoples, who already had high rates of chronic disease and poor health care access before the pandemic, were disproportionately impacted by COVID.

These outcomes have their roots in colonialist U.S. government policies, says Crystal Lee, an assistant professor at the University of New Mexico’s College of Population Health and CEO of the nonprofit organization United Natives, as well as a health services company called Indigenous Health. “There have just been so many policies that have been harmful to Native Americans throughout all these years,” says Lee, who is Diné and from the Navajo Nation. Native American tribes are officially recognized as sovereign. But they are also still designated as “domestic dependent nations,” meaning they are subject to the U.S. federal government. The government provides funding for education, housing and health care—the latter through the Indian Health Service—but all of these have long been underfunded, according to Lee. “We don’t have the resources or the infrastructure or even adequate medical staffing,” she says.

When the pandemic hit, Lee and her nonprofit organization helped distribute supplies such as masks and cleaning products to the Navajo Nation and the Apache Nations, she says. She also started Indigenous Health to help provide quarantine housing for Native American people exposed to COVID. Many of them had overcrowded housing—or no housing at all—to go back to, and some were struggling with addiction, she says.

Mourners from the Navajo Nation at a funeral for a person who died of COVID in May 2020. The Navajo Nation and other tribes were hit especially hard by the pandemic, and Native American and Alaska Native peoples have suffered the biggest drop in life expectancy of any group from 2019 to 2021.

Credit: Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

The second-biggest contributor to the life expectancy decline of the total U.S. population was unintentional injuries, of which a large fraction were opioid and other drug overdoses. Such deaths, as well as those related to alcohol and suicide—sometimes called “deaths of despair”—have spiked in the years leading up to and during the pandemic. Drug overdose deaths reached more than 100,000 annually during the 12 months ending in April 2021. Opioid overdoses were initially concentrated among the white population, but they have now become more common in the Indigenous, Hispanic and Black populations as well.

Cohen says COVID may have exacerbated the opioid crisis because people who lost family members and jobs turned to drugs and may have been less able to access treatment. “One crisis doesn’t wait for another” to finish, he says.

Credit: Amanda Montañez; Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Native American and Alaska Native individuals, along with Hispanic and Black people, suffered disproportionately high death rates during the pandemic’s first year because many worked in essential jobs with a high COVID exposure risk. But the group with the second-largest drop in life expectancy from 2020 to 2021 was the non-Hispanic white population. Almost half of the total loss of life expectancy of the white population occurred in the pandemic’s second year, Arias says. Lower vaccination rates and more resistance to masking and other precautions among the U.S.’s white population (compared with other races or ethnicities) is one possible explanation. White Americans are more likely to have voted for Donald Trump, and areas that voted for Trump have had higher rates of COVID deaths since the fall of 2020. Additionally, COVID took longer to reach rural parts of the country, which are more likely to have a largely white population.

The gender gap in life expectancy also widened. Historically, women have lived longer than men across every race and ethnicity. The gap between male and female life expectancy had been narrowing in the past decade, however. Women were living 4.8 years longer than men in 2010, but the pandemic erased some of that narrowing, and the gap widened to 5.9 years in 2021. Men are more likely than women to die of COVID, studies have shown. In addition, unintentional injury deaths (largely overdoses)—which have increased—are more common among men.

Despite being the richest country in the world, the U.S. has one of the lowest life expectancies of any developed country. And it has seen one of the largest declines in life expectancy among such countries during the pandemic, according to World Bank data. Part of this likely stems from a high rate of socioeconomic inequality.

“One of the things that affected me the most—even though I’m used to seeing these numbers ... was the fact that there’s such large disparities in life expectancy in the U.S.,” Arias says. The Native American population has a life expectancy comparable to that of some of poorest countries in Africa, she notes. “It’s kind of amazing, when you sit back and think about it, that we have in this country a population that has the same life expectancy as a really poor developing country.”

Addressing these gaps in life expectancy would require the U.S. to overhaul its health care system and make it work for everyone, many experts say. For Native Americans in particular, that means public awareness, allyship and accountability. “We need to hold the U.S. government accountable by honoring the existent treaties,” Lee says. She believes there also needs to be more awareness about Native American people, who she says have become invisible. People need to know, she says, “that we’re still here in the United States, and we’re still existent.”

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The study also found that how fast you walk is as important as how much you walk.

Walking 9800 steps every day was linked to a 50% lower dementia risk. 

The research tracked 78,500 participants using wearable trackers, making them the largest study to systematically track step count in connection to health outcomes. The studies were published in the journals JAMA Internal Medicine and JAMA Neurology.

Researchers from the University of Sydney in Australia and the University of Southern Denmark discovered that walking 10,000 steps per day reduces the risk of dementia, heart disease, cancer, and mortality. A power walk, however, demonstrated advantages above and beyond the number of steps completed.

“The take-home message here is that for protective health benefits people could not only ideally aim for 10,000 steps a day but also aim to walk faster,” said co-lead author Dr. Matthew Ahmadi, Research Fellow at the University of Sydney’s Charles Perkins Centre and Faculty of Medicine and Health.

‘For less active individuals, our study also demonstrates that as low as 3,800 steps a day can cut the risk of dementia by 25 percent,” said co-lead author Associate Professor Borja del Pozo Cruz from the University of Southern Denmark and senior researcher in health at the University of Cadiz.

Key points:

• Every 2,000 steps lowered the risk of premature death incrementally by 8 to 11 percent, up to approximately 10,000 steps a day.
• Similar associations were seen for cardiovascular disease and cancer incidence.
• A higher number of steps per day was associated with a lower risk of all-cause dementia
• 9,800 steps was the optimal dose linked to a lower risk of dementia by 50 percent, however, the risk was reduced by 25 percent at as low as 3,800 steps a day
• Stepping intensity or a faster pace showed beneficial associations for all outcomes (dementia, heart disease, cancer, and death) over and above total daily steps.

“Step count is easily understood and widely used by the public to track activity levels thanks to the growing popularity of fitness trackers and apps, but rarely do people think about the pace of their steps,” said senior author Emmanuel Stamatakis, Professor of Physical Activity, Lifestyle and Population Health at the University of Sydney.

“Findings from these studies could inform the first formal step-based physical activity guidelines and help develop effective public health programs aimed at preventing chronic disease.”

How was the study conducted?

The research used UK Biobank data to connect step count data from 78,500 UK participants aged 40 to 79 years with health outcomes 7 years later. Over the course of seven days (minimum 3 days, including a weekend day and monitoring during sleep periods), participants wore wrist accelerometers to track their physical activity.

Through a number of data sources and registries, such as inpatient hospital records, primary care records, and cancer and death registries, this information was connected with the participants’ health records with ethical approval.

Only individuals who had no history of dementia, cancer, or cardiovascular disease at the beginning of the trial and had remained healthy for the first two years were evaluated at the end. Statistical adjustments were also applied to account for confounders such as the fact that those who walk more steps generally move quicker.

The researchers note that the studies are observational, meaning they cannot show direct cause and effect, however, note the strong and consistent associations seen across both studies at the population level.

“The size and scope of these studies using wrist-worn trackers make it the most robust evidence to date suggesting that 10,000 steps a day is the sweet spot for health benefits and walking faster is associated with additional benefits,” said Dr. Matthew Ahmadi.

“Going forward more research with longer-term use of trackers will shed more light on the health benefits associated with certain levels and intensity of daily stepping.”

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Psychedelic compounds found in ‘magic mushrooms’ are increasingly being recognized for their potential to treat important mental health conditions. These include depression, anxiety, compulsive disorders, and addiction.

However, very little is known about how these compounds evolved and what role they play in the natural world.

To address that knowledge gap, scientists from the University of Plymouth are conducting a first-of-its-kind research study using advanced genetic methods and behavioral experiments to address previously untested hypotheses about the origin of psychedelic compounds in fungi.

This includes exploring whether such traits have evolved as a form of defense against fungus-feeding invertebrates, or whether the fungi produce compounds that manipulate insect behavior for their own advantage.

Psilocybin, commonly found in so-called ‘magic mushrooms,’ will be a particular focus for the project. In chemical terms, psilocybin is very similar to serotonin, which is a neurotransmitter involved in the sending of information between nerve cells in animals.

After sampling psychedelic and non-psychedelic fungi, the investigators are using next-generation DNA sequencing to test whether or not there is a diverse animal community feeding on psychedelic fungi.

They are also using laboratory tests to investigate fungal-insect interactions, and whether the fungi undergo genetic changes during attack and development. They will also investigate the effect of psilocybin on the growth of soil bacteria.

The research will also involve using cutting-edge gene editing technology to try and create mutant fungi that cannot synthesize psilocybin. It is hoped this will help researchers better understand the role of a wide range of fungal compounds in the future.

The study is being led by a team of experienced scientists in molecular ecology, animal-plant interactions, and fungal biology in the University’s School of Biological and Marine Sciences. Driving the study are Post-Doctoral Research Fellow Dr. Kirsty Matthews Nicholass, and Research Assistant Ms. Ilona Flis.

The researchers have sampled psychedelic and non-psychedelic fungi from the wild to explore a range of currently untested hypotheses. Credit: University of Plymouth

 

Dr. Jon Ellis, Lecturer in Conservation Genetics, is supervising the study. He said: “In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in psychedelic compounds from a human health perspective. However, almost nothing is known about the evolution of these compounds in nature and why fungi should contain neurotransmitter-like compounds is unresolved.

“The hypotheses that have been suggested for their evolution have never been formally tested, and that is what makes our project so ambitious and novel. It could also in future lead to exciting future discoveries, as the development of novel compounds that could be used as fungicides, pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and antibiotics is likely to arise from ‘blue-sky’ research investigating fungal defense.”

Dr. Kirsty Matthews Nicholass said: “Within Psilocybe alone, there are close to 150 hallucinogenic species distributed across all continents except Antarctica. Yet, the fungal species in which these ‘magic’ compounds occur are not always closely related. This raises interesting questions regarding the ecological pressures that may be acting to maintain the biosynthesis pathway for psilocybin.”

The research is being funded by the Leverhulme Trust and builds on the University’s long-running expertise in novel elements of conservation genetics.

Researchers involved in this project have previously explored the genetic diversity among UK pollinators, the feeding preferences of slugs and snails, and developed an early warning system for plant disease.

Dr. Jon Ellis talks about the history of research into psychedelic compounds in nature

“Fungi generally receive less attention overall than animals and plants, partly because they are less apparent, people interact with them less and they can be hard to study. Historically, there have also been legal barriers which meant certain research has not previously been possible. Saying that, there were some very interesting studies in the 1940s and 50s into the use of LSD as a psychotherapeutic treatment for alcoholism and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Around that time, people also became interested in fungi from an anthropological perspective.

“One couple, the Wassons, went to Mexico and witnessed the ritual use of fungi for the first time in religious ceremonies. Articles they published brought public attention to psychoactive mushrooms. Around this time, there were also other charismatic individuals, such as Timothy Leary, who advocated the use of LSD more widely by the general public. In the 1960s, psychedelic compounds really came to widespread public attention and that ultimately led to governments introducing new laws to restrict their use.

“For some time, that also restricted the fundamental research that could be carried out. More recently, people have returned to that initial research and found that compounds such as psilocybin can have psychotherapeutic benefits. However, that has not addressed their evolution in nature, which is what makes the research we are doing so exciting.

“I hope our project can change the public perception of magic mushrooms. But beyond that, asking questions about the biological world is a fundamental part of our human nature and this project fits into a long narrative of research asking questions about biodiversity and its evolution.”

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According to a recent rodent study, even tiny amounts of alcohol may cause epigenomic and transcriptomic changes in brain circuitry in a region that is essential for the development of addiction.

The pathways that are involved in setting the brain up for addiction, according to researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago, are also linked to the highs that come with drinking, such as euphoria and anxiolysis, a state of relaxed but awake sedation.

Subhash Pandey, director of the UIC Center for Research in Alcohol Epigenetics. Credit: Joshua Clark/University of Illinois Chicago

 

“This suggests that when the brain experiences the anti-anxiety effects of alcohol and the mood lift — the relaxation and the buzz — it is also being primed for alcohol use disorder,” said the study’s senior author Subhash Pandey, the Joseph A. Flaherty endowed professor of psychiatry and director of the Center for Alcohol Research in Epigenetics in the UIC College of Medicine.

Pandey states that while the research does not, for instance, imply that one drink results in addiction in individuals, it does provide some insights into why certain people are more susceptible to alcohol use disorder.

“We’re seeing that dependent behaviors may not always be from long-term, high-quantity habits but a result of rapid epigenetic changes in the brain, which we show in this study may start happening even at low doses,” said Pandey, who is also a senior research career scientist at the Jesse Brown Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

A paper published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry details Pandey’s experiments, which studied rats under control and alcohol exposure conditions.

In the experiments, rodents were exposed to low concentrations of alcohol, and researchers watched as they navigated a maze. After that, the researchers used RNA sequencing to examine brain tissue samples they had obtained after euthanasia and searched for patterns in gene expression.

When the samples were analyzed, the researchers discovered that a gene known as hypoxia inducible factor 3 alpha subunit, or Hif3a for short, was connected to behaviors such as how long rats remained in parts of the maze with enclosed (high anxiety) or open arms (low anxiety).

Alcohol increased Hif3a expression, even after low doses of exposure, and reduced anxiety. And, while many effects of alcohol are different among males and females, there was no difference between the two in this study.

“We saw that low doses, what we consider ‘social drinking,’ changes the gene expression in the amygdala, a brain region that regulates anxiety. In other words, it creates an epigenetic pathway for addiction,” Pandey said.

Pandey and his colleagues also set up additional experiments in which they blocked the gene in the amygdala of rats with or without alcohol exposure to validate its role in mediating anxiety. When Hif3a was blocked, anxiety was increased in control rats, mimicking withdrawal from chronic alcohol exposure. On the other hand, this also prevented the anti-anxiety effects of alcohol.

The researchers showed why, too. Hif3a’s chromatin — bundles of DNA and RNA — are loosely bundled, meaning the genes are easily accessible for transcription changes.

One thing the study does not suggest, however, is what level of alcohol exposure was safe for rodents. Instead, Pandey said, it’s important to know that low doses created priming for addiction. For people, he thinks the takeaway is simple — don’t assume social drinking or even “pandemic drinking” is without risk.

“Alcohol use disorder is complex and challenging to overcome. The information we learned from this study helps us to understand better what is happening in the brain and, one day, may be leveraged to develop better treatments and pharmaceuticals,” Pandey said.

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Now, a new study describes a strategy to overcome these limitations based on several insights. The research was led by scientists from the Perlmutter Cancer Center at NYU Langone Health.

First, the investigation team recognized that certain targeted drugs called “covalent inhibitors” form stable attachments with the disease-related proteins they target inside cancer cells. They also knew that once inside cells, proteins are naturally broken down and presented as small pieces (peptides) on cell surfaces by major histocompatibility complex (MHC) molecules. Once bound to MHC, peptides are recognized as foreign by the immune “surveillance” system if they are sufficiently different from the body’s naturally occurring proteins.

Mutated KRAS-driven lung cancer cells (purple) in a genetically engineered mouse model of lung cancer. Credit: NCI/University of Utah

 

Although tumor cells usually develop ways to escape immune surveillance, the researchers reasoned that a cancer-related peptide target tightly bound to its covalent inhibitor could act as an MHC-displayed “flag” that could be recognized by immune proteins called antibodies. The team then engineered such antibodies and joined them with another antibody known to “recruit” T lymphocytes, the “killer cells” of the immune system, to form “bi-specific” antibodies that destroyed tumor cells.

“Even when genetic and other changes frustrate targeted therapies, they often still attach to their target proteins in cancer cells, and this attachment can be used to label those cells for immunotherapy attack,” says co-corresponding study author Shohei Koide, PhD. “Further, our system, conceptually, has the potential to increase the efficacy of any cancer drug when attached to the drug’s disease-related target where the combination can be displayed by MHCs.” Koide is a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology and a member of Perlmutter Cancer Center at NYU Langone.

Published online today (October 17) in Cancer Discovery, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, the new study tested the researchers’ approach on two FDA-approved, targeted drugs, sotorasib, and osimertinib. Recently approved based on a study co-led by NYU Langone researchers, sotorasib works by attaching to an altered form of the protein KRAS called p.G12C, in which a glycine building block has been mistakenly replaced by a cysteine in its structure. This change causes the KRAS protein switch to become “stuck in the on mode” and signal for abnormal growth. Sotarasib effectively blocks this activated signal to start, but cancer cells rapidly become resistant.

In experiments with KRAS mutant cancer cells grown in a dish (cell cultures), the team’s HapImmuneTM antibodies recognized, recruited T cells, and led to the killing of treatment-resistant lung cancer cells, in which sotorasib attached to its target, KRAS p.G12C, and was displayed by MHCs. The team also developed bi-specific antibodies that bound to a peptide “flagged” with osimertinib, a drug that targets an altered form of epithelial growth factor receptor seen in other lung cancers, as well as prototypes that “saw” the drug ibrutinib when linked to its target, BTK, showing the technology’s “broad potential,” the researchers say.

Harnessing Display

The study revolved around the process where proteins inside human cells are broken down and replaced as a part of the normal lifecycle. Alongside this turnover runs an inspection system, in which protein fragments are delivered to a cell’s surface. T cells inspect these displayed complexes, and can notice, for instance, when a cell is displaying viral proteins, a sign that the cell is infected with a virus. The T cells then direct the killing of the virally infected cells.

The immune system can in some cases also recognize cells with cancerous changes underway inside by the proteins they display on their surfaces. However, because cancer-driving proteins arise from normal proteins, with differences between cancerous and normal fragments often minute, the system struggles to tell them apart. Even when patients develop T cells that can see these small differences, tumors respond with mechanisms designed to “exhaust” anti-tumor cells. In seeking to counter these mechanisms, the team’s central realization was that, among the proteins displayed by MHCs are fragments carrying drugs taken in by cells, which could be targeted by antibodies.

The current study also found that the team’s platform was effective against KRAS p.G12C mutant cells with different MHC types, also called human leukocyte antigen (HLA) supertypes. Usually, there is a strict pairing between MHC/HLA types and antibodies built to interact with certain T cells, which could potentially restrict the number of patients that could treated by this approach. The new study showed that the team’s antibodies recognize multiple MHC/HLA types, and so, in principle, could be deployed in 40–50 percent of the US patient population with tumors bearing KRAS p.G12C.

“Our results further show that the antibodies attach to drug molecules only when presented by MHCs on cells, and so could be used in combination with a drug,” says study co-corresponding author Benjamin G. Neel, MD, PhD, director of NYU Langone Health’s Perlmutter Cancer Center. “When used in combination with such antibodies, a given drug would only need to flag cancer cells, not fully inhibit them. This creates the possibility of using drugs at lower doses, potentially, for reducing the toxicity sometimes seen with covalent inhibitors.”

Moving forward, the research team plans to study their platform in live animal models, and using more pairs of drugs and the disease-related protein fragments they target.

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As described in a paper to be published today (October 17) in Nature Machine Intelligence, the new model, called CODE-AE, can screen novel drug compounds to accurately predict efficacy in humans. In tests, it was also able to theoretically identify personalized drugs for over 9,000 patients that could better treat their conditions. Scientists expect the technique to significantly accelerate drug discovery and precision medicine.

Accurate and robust prediction of patient-specific responses to a new chemical compound is critical to discovering safe and effective therapeutics and selecting an existing drug for a specific patient. However, it is unethical and infeasible to do early efficacy testing of a drug in humans directly. Cell or tissue models are often used as a surrogate of the human body to evaluate the therapeutic effect of a drug molecule. Unfortunately, the drug effect in a disease model often does not correlate with the drug efficacy and toxicity in human patients. This knowledge gap is a major factor in the high costs and low productivity rates of drug discovery.

An illustration of personalized drug responses. Credit: CODE-AE illustration

 

“Our new machine learning model can address the translational challenge from disease models to humans,” said Lei Xie, a professor of computer science, biology and biochemistry at the CUNY Graduate Center and Hunter College and the paper’s senior author. “CODE-AE uses biology-inspired design and takes advantage of several recent advances in machine learning. For example, one of its components uses similar techniques in Deepfake image generation.”

The new model can provide a workaround to the problem of having sufficient patient data to train a generalized machine learning model, said You Wu, a CUNY Graduate Center Ph.D. student and co-author of the paper. “Although many methods have been developed to utilize cell-line screens for predicting clinical responses, their performances are unreliable due to data incongruity and discrepancies,” Wu said. “CODE-AE can extract intrinsic biological signals masked by noise and confounding factors and effectively alleviated the data-discrepancy problem.”

As a result, CODE-AE significantly improves accuracy and robustness over state-of-the-art methods in predicting patient-specific drug responses purely from cell-line compound screens.

The research team’s next challenge in advancing the technology’s use in drug discovery is developing a way for CODE-AE to reliably predict the effect of a new drug’s concentration and metabolization in human bodies. The researchers also noted that the AI model could potentially be tweaked to accurately predict the human side effects of drugs.

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According to new research, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused a protracted shock to life expectancy levels, leading to global mortality changes unprecedented in the last 70 years.

• Most of Western Europe experienced life expectancy bouncebacks in 2021
• Scale of Eastern Europe losses akin to the mortality crisis at the break-up of the Soviet Union
• Countries with higher proportions of fully vaccinated people generally experienced smaller life expectancy deficits

COVID-19 has caused a protracted shock to life expectancy levels, leading to global mortality changes unprecedented in the last 70 years, according to research that will be published today (October 17) in the journal Nature Human Behaviour from Oxford’s Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science and the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research.

Using data from 29 countries in Europe, as well as Chile and the US, the researchers found life expectancy in 2021 remained lower than expected across all 29 countries, had pre-pandemic trends continued.

Previous global epidemics have seen fairly rapid “bounce backs” to life expectancy levels. But the scale and magnitude of COVID-19, on mortality, confounds claims it has had no more impact than a flu-like illness. Life expectancy losses during recurring flu epidemics over the second half of the 20th century have been much smaller and less widespread than those seen in the pandemic.

A clear geographical divide appeared in 2021. The researchers found most countries in Western Europe experienced life expectancy bounce-backs from the sharp losses in 2020. Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, and France saw complete bouncebacks, returning to pre-pandemic 2019 life expectancy levels. While England and Wales saw partial bounce-backs from 2020 levels in 2021. Life expectancy in Scotland and Northern Ireland, however, remained at the same depressed level as 2020. 

But Eastern Europe and the US witnessed worsening or compounded losses in life expectancy over the same period. The scale of life expectancy losses during the COVID-19 pandemic in Eastern Europe were akin to those last seen at the break-up of the Soviet Union, according to the research.

This East-West divide in life expectancy during COVID-19 generally reflects bigger losses in countries that had lower pre-pandemic life expectancy levels. Bulgaria was the worst-hit of the countries studied, with a decline in life expectancy of nearly 43 months, over two years of the pandemic. According to the paper, “Bulgaria, Chile, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, and Slovakia suffered substantially higher life expectancy deficits in 2021 compared to 2020, indicating a worsening mortality burden over the course of the pandemic.”

In addition to pre-pandemic life expectancy, there appeared to be a vaccination effect that followed the same East-West divide in Europe. Countries with higher proportions of fully vaccinated people experienced smaller life expectancy deficits. Older ages, especially those over 80 who had seen the bulk of deaths in 2020, benefitted from vaccine protection and a decline in excess mortality in 2021.

Dr. Ridhi Kashyap, a study co-author from Oxford, points out, “A notable shift between 2020 and 2021 was that the age patterns of excess mortality shifted in 2021 towards younger age groups, as vaccines began to protect the old.”

But there were “outliers,” which had surprisingly high life expectancy losses, in spite of high vaccination rates. Dr. Jonas Schöley, study co-author from the Max Planck Institute, says, “Finer-grained details of the age prioritization of vaccine roll-out and the types of vaccines used may account for some of these differences, as well as correlations between vaccine uptake and compliance with non-pharmaceutical interventions or the overall health care system capacity.”

He adds, “Countries, such as Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, and France, managed a recovery to pre-pandemic levels of life expectancy because they managed to protect both the old and the young.”

The research team voices concern, however, about the possible wider international impact of the pandemic. Another study co-author, Dr. José Manuel Aburto, maintains, “In 2020, losses in life expectancy suffered in Brazil and Mexico exceeded those experienced in the US, so it is likely these countries may have continued suffering mortality impacts in 2021 – even potentially exceeding the 43 months we estimated for Bulgaria.”

The paper concludes, “It is plausible that countries with ineffective public health responses will see a protracted health crisis induced by the pandemic with medium-term stalls in life expectancy improvements, while other regions manage a smoother recovery to return to pre-pandemic trends.”

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NASA’s Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS) has produced its first mineral maps, providing detailed images that show the composition of the surface in regions of northwest Nevada and Libya in the Sahara Desert. EMIT was launched to the ISS aboard a SpaceX Dragon Spacecraft on July 14, 2022.

Windy desert areas such as these are the sources of fine dust particles that, when lifted by wind into the atmosphere, can heat or cool the surrounding air. But researchers haven’t been able to assess whether mineral dust in the atmosphere has overall heating or cooling effects at local, regional, and global scales. EMIT’s measurements will help them to advance computer models and improve our understanding of dust’s impacts on climate.

EMIT scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) created the maps to test the accuracy of the instrument’s measurements, a crucial first step in preparing for full science operations.

Installed on the space station in July, EMIT is the first of a new class of high-fidelity imaging spectrometers that collect data from space and produce better-quality data at greater volumes than previous instruments.

“Decades ago, when I was in graduate school, it took 10 minutes to collect a single spectrum from a geological sample in the laboratory. EMIT’s imaging spectrometer measures 300,000 spectra per second, with superior quality,” said Robert Green, EMIT’s principal investigator and senior research scientist at JPL.

“The data we’re getting from EMIT will give us more insight into the heating and cooling of Earth, and the role mineral dust plays in that cycle. It’s promising to see the amount of data we’re getting from the mission in such a short time,” said Kate Calvin, NASA’s chief scientist and senior climate advisor. “EMIT is one of seven Earth science instruments on the International Space Station giving us more information about how our planet is affected by climate change.”

EMIT analyzes light reflected from Earth, measuring it at hundreds of wavelengths, from the visible to the infrared range of the spectrum. Different materials reflect light in different wavelengths. Scientists use these patterns, called spectral fingerprints, to identify surface minerals and pinpoint their locations.

NASA’s EMIT mission recently gathered mineral spectra in northwest Nevada that match what the agency’s AVIRIS instrument found in 2018, helping to confirm EMIT’s accuracy. Both instruments found areas dominated by kaolinite, a reflective clay mineral whose particles can cool the air when airborne. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/USGS

 

Mapping Minerals

The Nevada map focuses on a mountainous area about 130 miles (209 kilometers) northeast of Lake Tahoe, revealing locations dominated by kaolinite, a light-colored mineral whose particles scatter light upward and cool the air as they move through the atmosphere. The map and spectral fingerprint closely match those collected from aircraft in 2018 by the Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS), data that was verified at the time by geologists. Researchers are using this and other comparisons to confirm the accuracy of EMIT’s measurements.

The other mineral map shows substantial amounts of kaolinite as well as two iron oxides, hematite, and goethite, in a sparsely populated section of the Sahara about 500 miles (800 kilometers) south of Tripoli. Darker-colored dust particles from iron-oxide-rich areas strongly absorb energy from the Sun and heat the atmosphere, potentially affecting the climate.

Currently, there is little or no information on the composition of dust originating in parts of the Sahara. In fact, researchers have detailed mineral information of only about 5,000 soil samples from around the world, requiring that they make inferences about the composition of dust.

The image cube’s front panel is a true-color view of part of southwestern Libya observed by NASA’s EMIT mission. The side panels depict the spectral fingerprints for every point in the image, showing kaolinite, a reflective clay mineral, and goethite and hematite, iron oxides that absorb heat. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

 

EMIT will gather billions of new spectroscopic measurements across six continents, closing this gap in knowledge and advancing climate science. “With this exceptional performance, we are on track to comprehensively map the minerals of Earth’s arid regions – about 25% of the Earth’s land surface – in less than a year and achieve our climate science objectives,” Green said.

EMIT’s data also will be freely available for a wide range of investigations, including, for example, the search for strategically important minerals such as lithium and rare-earth elements. What’s more, the instrument’s technology is laying the groundwork for the future Surface Biology and Geology (SBG) satellite mission, which is part of NASA’s Earth System Observatory, a set of missions aimed at addressing climate change.

Pioneering Technology

EMIT traces its roots to imaging spectrometer technology that NASA’s Airborne Imaging Spectrometer (AIS) first demonstrated in 1982. Designed to identify minerals on Earth’s surface from a low-altitude research aircraft, the instrument delivered surprising results almost immediately. During early test flights near Cuprite, Nevada, AIS detected the unique spectral signature of buddingtonite, a mineral not seen on any previous geological maps of the area.

Paving the way for future spectrometers when it was introduced in 1986, AVIRIS – the airborne instrument that succeeded AIS – has studied geology, plant function, and alpine snowmelt, among other natural phenomena. It has also mapped chemical pollution at Superfund sites and studied oil spills, including the massive Deepwater Horizon leak in 2010. And it flew over the World Trade Center site in Manhattan following the Sept. 11 attacks, locating uncontrolled fires and mapping debris composition in the wreckage.

Over the years, as optics, detector arrays, and computing capabilities have progressed, imaging spectrometers capable of resolving smaller targets and subtler differences have flown with missions across the solar system.

A JPL-built imaging spectrometer on the Indian Space Research Organization’s Chandrayaan-1 probe measured signs of water on the Moon in 2009. NASA’s Europa Clipper, which launches in 2024, will rely on an imaging spectrometer to help scientists assess if the icy Jovian moon has conditions that could support life.

Highly advanced JPL-developed spectrometers will be part of NASA’s forthcoming Lunar Trailblazer – which will determine the form, abundance, and distribution of water on the Moon and the nature of the lunar water cycle – and on satellites to be launched by the nonprofit Carbon Mapper, aimed at spotting greenhouse gas point-sources from space.

“The technology took directions that I would never have imagined,” said Gregg Vane, the JPL researcher whose graduate studies in geology helped inspire the idea for the original imaging spectrometer. “Now with EMIT, we’re using it to look back at our own planet from space for important climate research.”

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The share prices of companies expected to be affected had already dropped, discounting previously announced sanctions and the downturn in the semiconductor cycle that was already underway.

From their 52-week highs to recent 52-week lows:

• Intel (INTC) was down 56%;
• Micron (MU) was down 50%;
• Nvidia (NVDA) was down 69% (its products having been directly targeted by the Biden administration); and
• AMD (AMD) (also directly targeted) was down 67%.

Among US semiconductor equipment companies:

• Applied Materials (AMAT) was down 57%;
• Lam Research (LRCX) was down 59%; and
• KLA (KLAC) was down 45%.

Outside the United States, ASML (ASML) of the Netherlands was down 59% from 52-week high to 52-week low. Japanese equipment makers Tokyo Electron (TYO 8035) and Screen Holdings (TYO 7735) were down 50% and 44%, respectively.

Japanese semiconductor makers Renesas (TYO 5723) and Rohm (TYO 6963) were down only 27% and 28%, but they focus on automotive and industrial semiconductors, not the artificial intelligence and high-performance computing devices that obsess the Biden administration. Their 52-week lows were last March.

SMIC (HKG 0981), China’s top IC foundry, was down 40% while TSMC (TPE 2330) was down 43% – a relatively strong performance under the circumstances.

An SMIC sign at an exhibition booth. Photo: AFP / dyc / Imaginechina

In terms of share price performance and investor returns, American companies and ASML have been hit harder than the Chinese. That might seem ironic considering the measures target China, but it is the market’s discounting mechanism at work.

US government policy is aggravating what was already shaping up to be a severe industry downturn – and friendly fire is a real problem.

On its earnings call on October 13, TSMC announced that it had decided to reduce 2022 capital spending to US$36 billion from about $40 billion due to falling global demand for semiconductors and rising costs.

Management had planned to spend $40 billion to $44 billion this year but said in July that actual spending would be at the bottom of that range. Compared with the $30 billion spent in 2021, projected growth has dropped from a maximum of 47% to 33% and is now 20%.

Mitigating factors for TSMC include a one-year authorization from the US government to continue with the expansion of its facilities in Nanjing and the possibility of a rebound in demand when China’s Covid restrictions are loosened. But TSMC CEO C C Wei also told the media that “We expect probably in 2023 the semiconductor industry will likely decline.”

At the end of September – when announcing results for its fiscal year 2022, which ended on September 1 – US memory chip maker Micron told investors that the company’s capital spending would be cut by a third, from $12 billion to about $8 billion, in the year ahead.

Construction spending should more than double, “to support demand for” the second half of the decade, “but spending on wafer fab production equipment is likely to decline by nearly 50% due to “a much slower ramp of our 1-beta DRAM and 232 layer NAND [the company’s newest and most advanced products] versus prior expectations.”

Furthermore, “To immediately address our inventory situation and reduce supply growth, we are selectively reducing utilization in both DRAM and NAND.” Reports from Micron and its South Korean and Japanese competitors indicate that memory chip production has been cut by about 30%.

Samsung’s approach to capital spending is similar to Micron’s. Its “shell first” strategy is to build clean rooms first so it can install equipment flexibly and rapidly when the time comes. On October 4, Samsung announced plans to launch a 2-nanometer foundry process (matching TSMC) by 2025 and a 1.4-nanometer process by 2027.

As the global economy weakens and US high-end decoupling from China accelerates, the outlook for semiconductor capital spending continues to deteriorate. Last March, market research organization IC Insights forecast a 23.5% increase to $190 billion in calendar 2022.

That industry capital spending figure was reduced to $185.5 billion in August but the announcements from TSMC and Micron point to a sharper decline. Handel Jones, CEO of American consulting firm International Business Strategies, estimates the figure at $160 billion, an increase of only 4% over last year’s $153.9 billion.

Source: IC Insights data from public sources

IC Insights itself qualified its August forecast, writing that “a menacing cloud of uncertainty looms on the horizon. Soaring inflation and a rapidly decelerating worldwide economy caused semiconductor manufacturers to re-evaluate their aggressive expansion plans at the midpoint of the year. Several (but not all) suppliers – particularly many leading DRAM and flash memory manufacturers – have already announced reductions in their capex budgets for this year.

“Many more suppliers have noted that capital spending cuts are expected in 2023 as the industry digests three years of robust spending and evaluates capacity needs in the face of slowing economic growth.”

When the dot.com bubble burst in 2000, semiconductor capital spending dropped 55% in two years. The Lehman Shock triggered a 57% decline, also over two years. Now, capital expenditure is dropping back from an all-time record high, suggesting a decline of similar magnitude and perhaps duration.

On October 12, The Wall Street Journal reported that US equipment makers including KLA and Lam Research have halted installation and support of equipment at China’s Yangtze Memory Technologies Co (YMTC) while assessing the new US Commerce Department rules. The share price of Japanese NAND flash memory maker Toshiba (TYO 6502), which competes with YMTC, jumped 10% on the news.

YMTC’s NAND flash memory is good enough for Apple and there is no evidence that its technology was stolen, so this can be considered an escalation of US policy from the punishment of bad actors to an all-out attempt to stifle Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing and thus roll back the development of China’s economy.

Commencing immediately, the withdrawal of American support staff will crimp Chinese semiconductor production.

In addition, a new Commerce Department regulation that “restricts the ability of US persons to support the development, or production, of ICs at certain PRC-located semiconductor fabrication ‘facilities’ without a license” is already disrupting the operations of Chinese companies.

By forcing numerous executives and engineers of Chinese extraction to choose sides, it brings decoupling down to the personal level.

Data from Tokyo Electron show the company’s total sales of semiconductor production equipment up 2.6 times in the five years to March 2022 (the company’s fiscal year ends in March). The increase was led by a 5.7x increase in China, which grew from 12% to 26% of total sales.

In the two years to March 2022 alone, sales in China increased by 2.7x. That suggests that the Chinese semiconductor industry has purchased enough equipment to see it through the next two or three years, at least.

Tokyo Electron’s performance in other regional markets was not exceptional. Sales were up 2.7x in Korea, 2.6x in the US, 2.5x in Japan, 1.8x in Europe, 1.6x in Taiwan (which started at a high level), and 2.1x in Southeast Asia and other regions.

As Japan’s largest and the world’s third-largest maker of semiconductor production equipment, with a diversified product portfolio, Tokyo Electron is representative of the industry as a whole.

Source: data from Tokyo Electron

The Chinese can no longer rely on US equipment suppliers and European and Japanese suppliers must follow US rules if their products incorporate US technology, so China will step up its import substitution campaign.

Sanctions on China have already caused large losses for American semiconductor and equipment companies, and more are probably on the way. Furthermore, in the next up-cycle, the China opportunity for foreign suppliers is likely to be much diminished.

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“With just over one degree of warming since pre-industrial times, we are already seeing more extreme weather patterns," said Elizabeth Robinson, director of the Grantham Research Institute in London.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is part of an ongoing series answering some of the most fundamental questions around climate change, the science behind it, the effects of a warming planet and how the world is addressing it.

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Scientists have been tracking precisely how much the climate has already changed due to human activity. Temperatures around the world have been inching upwards.

The average global temperature today, which tends to be compared to estimates for the pre-industrial era that kickstarted the mass burning of fossil fuels, has shot up between 0.9 and 1.2 degrees Celsius (1.6 to 2 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1850, in large part due to human activity, according to estimates in the most recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Most of that warming has happened from 1975 onwards, at a rate of 0.15 Celsius (0.27 Fahrenheit) to 0.2 Celsius (0.36 Fahrenheit) per decade.

Most people are living in areas that have heated up more than the global average, “partly that is urbanization — people move into cities, which are urban heat islands — and partly populations growing,” Robinson said. Urban areas, packed with plenty of heat-absorbing infrastructure like roads and buildings and less cooling tree cover, become “islands” of warmer weather.

Sea levels, which have swelled due to both warming, expanding oceans and the melting of ice over land, have also been jumping up more rapidly. In the twentieth century, seas were rising by about 1.4 millimeters (0.06 inches) a year, but that’s doubled to 3.6 millimeters a year (0.14 inches) in the past fifteen years, data suggests. Seas have risen by about 21 to 24 centimeters (8 to 9 inches) so far since 1880 on average, according to estimates, with the IPCC suggesting this will likely be up to 43 to 84 centimeters (17 to 33 inches) by 2100.

While the climate and global temperatures have fluctuated throughout the Earth's history, it is the rate of change that is most alarming to researchers. Fossil fuels — made up of ancient decomposing plants and animals deep in the earth — have been dug up at extraordinary rates. Scientists are now starting to pinpoint “details about rates and magnitudes and timing of changes” as well as the varying impact on regions, said Brown University climate scientist Kim Cobb.

With the planet already facing the effects of climate change, adapting to hazards is one major way humans can limit the damage. Weather-related disaster deaths are generally trending lower globally as forecasts, preparedness and resilience improves, scientists say.

"The extent to which people are harmed by an extreme weather event is strongly influenced by government policies,” Robinson said, but added that “there are limits to adaptation.”

AP Science writer Seth Borenstein contributed to this report.

Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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