Colorized scanning electron micrograph of a cell infected with the Omicron strain of SARS-CoV-2 virus particles (purple), isolated from a patient sample. Credit: NIAID

Detailed analysis of eight patients published.

Findings from a small study of eight patients suggest that COVID-19 rebound is likely not caused by impaired immune responses. The study, led by scientists at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), was published on October 6 in Clinical Infectious Diseases. It aimed to define the clinical course and the immunologic and virologic characteristics of COVID-19 rebound in patients who have taken nirmatrelvir/ritonavir (Paxlovid), an antiviral therapeutic developed by Pfizer, Inc.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), COVID-19 rebound is characterized by a recurrence of COVID-19 symptoms and/or a new positive viral test after having tested negative. The findings, according to the study’s authors, do not corroborate the idea that a five-day Paxlovid course is too brief for the body to mount a potent defense against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

The goal of the research was to better understand how SARS-CoV-2 affects white blood cells. Participants were selected from adults enrolled in an ongoing COVID-19 study at the NIH Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and other local hospitals. As part of the study, participants provided blood and other samples as well as access to their COVID-19 medical records.

Six participants (three men and three women with a median age of 42 years) who took Paxlovid within four days of initial symptom onset and then experienced recurrent symptoms were included in the study to evaluate COVID-19 rebound. Two participants (a 54-year-old man and a 35-year-old woman) experienced recurrent symptoms and did not take Paxlovid. Finally, a control group included six people who had COVID-19 but did not experience symptom rebound. All participants were previously vaccinated and boosted against COVID-19, and none developed severe disease requiring hospitalization during acute infection or rebound. Investigators collected data on each participant’s clinical course and performed laboratory tests on blood and nasal swab samples.

Researchers found no evidence of genetic mutations that would indicate participants who experienced COVID-19 rebound were infected with a strain of SARS-CoV-2 that was resistant to Paxlovid. Additionally, they found no evidence of delayed development of antibodies in participants experiencing rebound after taking Paxlovid. In fact, investigators detected robust SARS-CoV-2 T-cell responses in rebound patients. Overall, the level of T-cell responses was greater in rebound patients than in patients with early acute COVID-19 who did not experience rebound. Infectious SARS-CoV-2 was detected by viral culture in one out of eight rebound participants.

According to the authors, the findings indicate that rebound symptoms could be partially driven by the robust cellular immune response to residual viral RNA throughout the respiratory tract, rather than an impaired immune response allowing viral replication. Larger, more detailed epidemiologic studies are needed to further understand the clinical importance and epidemiologic consequences of COVID-19 rebound, the authors write. The authors note that the current data support the need for isolation in symptomatic rebound persons and the need to evaluate, in a clinical trial, longer courses of Paxlovid in immunocompromised individuals where the immune response may be ineffective.

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Cartilage degenerates for various reasons, Dr. Sanchez-Sotelo says. People may be born with abnormally shaped bones or a tendency toward weaker cartilage. Obesity, overuse or injuries from accidents also can damage joints and cartilage.

"When cartilage degenerates, the body forms bone spurs," Dr. Sanchez-Sotelo says. "This is a reaction to the main underlying problem, cartilage degeneration. Bone spurs can hit each other and become painful. Many patients get obsessed with bone spurs, but just taking them out won't cure the problem, except in very rare circumstances."

Loss of articular cartilage is the essence of what is called osteoarthritis, a common joint disorder. Dr. Sanchez-Sotelo says most of his osteoarthritis patients are in their 60s when they go to see a health care professional with symptoms—achy and painful joints, stiffness, and loss of movement—that developed over time.

Dr. Sanchez-Sotelo says you can take steps when you are younger to protect your joints as you age. Having strong muscles around the joints can help take the load off the joints. However, people who exercise at high levels in sports, like football and bodybuilding, have higher risks of developing arthritis.

"You have to exercise within reason," Dr. Sanchez-Sotelo says. "Find that point where your muscles are healthy, flexible, strong and will protect the joints, but don't overdo it."

Maintaining a healthy weight is important, as obesity is hard on the joints. Glucosamine and chondroitin are popular supplements for joint pain, but lack convincing evidence that they work, Dr. Sanchez-Sotelo says.

He offers these suggestions for managing arthritic pain:

• Modify your activities. If you have an arthritic hip or knee, instead of running—which results in the pounding of the joints—maybe you can try bicycling.

• Take the load off the joints with gait aids. Using a cane can help lighten the load on your hip, knee and ankle joints, and decrease the pain. A knee brace—worn outside the clothes—shifts the load to the healthier side of the knee joint.

• If the pain persists, you may want to consider over-the-counter medications, like acetaminophen and ibuprofen. However, be aware of the side effects, such as ulcers, kidney or heart issues. In general, narcotics should not be used for osteoarthritis.

• If the pain continues, you also may consider injections with medications, such as cortisone or toradol, which, when injected into the joint, can help relieve pain. Again, these medications have side effects, so be sure to speak with your health care professional.

• Hyaluronic acid, which also is injected, uses components similar to those of the joint lubricating fluid to try to replenish it. It has been more successful with the knee joint than hip and shoulder joints.

• Some injections, marketed as regenerative medicine, include stem cells and platelet-rich plasma. At this point, many consider their use as experimental since there is no firm evidence about their efficacy.

"In the past, older people just accepted joint pain," Dr. Sanchez-Sotelo says. "Now people are living longer and want to remain active as they age. We are not all destined for joint replacement. There are some people in their 80s and 90s who have great joints."

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Brett Kagan, who led the study published Wednesday in the journal Neuron, told AFP his findings open the door to a new type of research in which neurons could one day be used as biological information processors, complementing digital computers.

"What machines can't do is learn things very quickly -- if you need a machine learning algorithm to learn something, it requires thousands of data samples," he explained.

"But if you ask a human, or train a dog, a dog can learn a trick in two or three tries."

Neurons are the building blocks of intelligence in all animals, from flies to humans.

Kagan, the chief scientific officer at Melbourne-based Cortical labs, set out to answer the question of whether there is a way to harness neurons' inherent intelligence.

To perform their experiment, Kagan and colleagues took mice cells from embryonic brains, and derived human neurons from adult stem cells.

They then grew them on top of microelectrode arrays that could read their activity and stimulate them. The experiments involved a cluster of around 800,000 neurons, roughly the size of a bumblebee brain.

In the "game," a signal was sent from the left or right of the array to indicate where the ball was located, and "DishBrain," as the researchers called it, fired back signals to move the paddle, in a simplified, opponent-free version of Pong.

- 'Sentient, but not conscious' -

One of the major hurdles was figuring out how to "teach" the neurons.

In the past, it has been proposed to give them a shot of the "feel good" hormone dopamine to reward a correct action -- but that was very difficult to achieve in practice in a time-sensitive way.

Instead, the team relied on a theory called the "free energy principle" that was coined by the paper's senior author Karl Friston more than a decade ago, which says cells are hardwired to minimize unpredictability in their environments.

When the neurons succeeded in making the paddle hit the ball, they received a "predictable" electrical signal corresponding to success. But when they missed, they were sent a randomized, or "unpredictable" electrical signal.

"The only thing that the neurons could do is actually get better at trying to hit the ball to keep their world controllable and predictable," said Kagan.

The team believes DishBrain is sentient -- which they defined as being able to sense and respond to sensory information in a dynamic way -- but drew the line at calling it "conscious," which implies awareness of being.

DishBrain even tried out another task -- the dinosaur game that appears in Google Chrome when no internet connection is found, and the preliminary results were encouraging, said Kagan.

For their next steps, the team plans to test how DishBrain's intelligence is affected by medicines and alcohol -- though Kagan himself is most excited by the future possibilities of biological computers based on this foundational discovery.

"This is robustly conducted, interesting neuroscience," said Tara Spires-Jones of the Centre for Discovery Brain Science at the University of Edinburgh, who was not involved in the study.

"Don't worry, while these dishes of neurons can change their responses based on stimulation, they are not SciFi style intelligence in a dish, these are simple (albeit interesting and scientifically important) circuit responses," she added.

© 2022 AFP

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Researchers studying the aftermath of a gargantuan black hole collision may have  confirmed a gravitational phenomenon predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago.

According to new research published today (Oct. 12) in the journal Nature(opens in new tab), the phenomenon — which is known as precession and is similar to the wobbling motion sometimes seen in a spinning top — occurred when two ancient black holes crashed together and merged into one. As the two massive objects swirled closer together, they released enormous ripples through the fabric of space-time known as gravitational waves, which surged outward across the cosmos, carrying energy and angular momentum away from the merging black holes.

Scientists first detected these waves emanating from the black holes in 2020, using the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the U.S. and Virgo gravitational wave sensors in Italy. Now, after years of studying the wave patterns, researchers have confirmed that one of the black holes was rotating madly, to a degree never seen before.

The spinning black hole was twisting and turning 10 billion times faster than any previously observed black hole, which distorted space and time so much that it caused both black holes to wobble — or precess — in their orbits.

Researchers have observed precession in everything from spindle tops to dying star systems, but never in objects as enormous as binary black hole systems, in which the two cosmic vacuum cleaners orbit around a common center. However, Einstein's theory of general relativity predicted more than 100 years ago that precession should occur in objects as large as binary black holes. Now, the study authors say, this rare phenomenon has been observed in nature for the first time.

"We've always thought that binary black holes can do this," lead study author Mark Hannam, director of the Gravity Exploration Institute at Cardiff University in the U.K., said in a statement. "We have been hoping to spot an example ever since the first gravitational wave detections. We had to wait for five years and over 80 separate detections, but finally we have one!"

The black holes in question were many times more massive than the sun, with the larger of the two estimated at about 40 solar masses. Researchers first caught wind of the binary pair in 2020, when LIGO and Virgo detected a blast of gravitational waves released by the supposed collision of the two black holes. The team dubbed this collision GW200129, for the date of its discovery (Jan. 29, 2020). 

Since then, other scientists have pored over that initial gravitational wave data, uncovering ever odder secrets about this epic collision. (Though because scientists only have gravitational waves to go on and no direct observations, they can't pinpoint the black holes' precise location). 

For instance, in May 2022, a team of researchers calculated that the merger between the two black holes was both massive and lopsided, according to Live Science’s sister site Space.com, with gravitational waves blasting out of the collision in one direction while the newly merged black hole was likely "kicked" out of its home galaxy at more than 3 million mph  (4.8 million km/h) in the opposite direction.

This new research in Nature suggests that the two black holes had a chaotic relationship before their violent merger. As the two gargantuan objects tugged at each other in an ever-closer orbit, they began to wobble like tipsy tops, precessing several times every second. According to the study authors, this precessing effect is estimated to be 10 billion times faster than any other ever measured.

These findings vindicate Einstein, who predicted that such effects were possible in some of the universe's largets objects. But the results also raise the question as to whether wibbly wobbly black hole mergers like this one are as rare as once thought.

"The larger black hole in this binary, which was about 40 times more massive than the Sun, was spinning almost as fast as physically possible," said study co-author Charlie Hoy, a researcher at Cardiff University at the time of the study, and now at the University of Portsmouth in the U.K. "Our current models of how binaries form suggest this one was extremely rare, maybe a one in a thousand event. Or it could be a sign that our models need to change."

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Several schools dotted throughout the city have suspended in-person classes as the fear of infection spread grows, according to parents and social media posts. At least five districts have closed entertainment venues, including cinemas, bars and gyms, in an effort to stamp out transmission, according to statements issued by Covid prevention offices.

Authorities said Sunday there’s no citywide school shutdown after speculation rippled through social media that the measure would be rolled out. But the creeping suspensions, as well as a ramp up in other restrictions like the lockdown of neighborhoods and individual residential compounds have left Shanghai’s 25 million residents on edge.

As well as schools, venues like gyms and bars have shut in the Shanghai districts of Changning, Putuo, Jiading, Yangpu, and Qingpu. Shanghai Disney Resort said on Saturday that some facilities have been shut and performances canceled to follow the Covid control requirements.

Social media users lamented the never-ending cycle of shutdowns and reopenings that’s a feature of China’s Covid Zero policy. Others speculated whether they may face another lockdown just months after a two-month ordeal that saw many in Shanghai struggle to access food and medical care.

The tightening comes as Shanghai reported 38 new infections, all of which were found in its quarantine system. While small by international standards, the flareup is occurring just days before China’s once-in-five-years Party Congress, when President Xi Jinping is expected to secure a precedent-breaking third term in power.

Xi has made Covid Zero a cornerstone of his leadership, despite its growing social and economic cost, and China’s propaganda machine has ramped up its defense of the policy this week in a sign there’ll be no shift toward living with the virus any time soon.

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The brain's ability to adapt and rewire itself throughout life continues to surprise neuroscientists. Researchers have found a way to restore sight in adult mice with a form of congenital blindness, in spite of the rodents' relative maturity.

The mice were modeling a rare human disorder of the eye's retina, called leber congenital amaurosis (LCA), which often causes blindness or severe visual impairment at birth.

This inherited condition seems to be caused by a mutation in any one of dozens of genes associated with the retina and its light-sensing abilities.

Researchers have been working on treatments that could restore damaged or dysfunctional photoreceptors in this part of the eye for several decades. Some strategies include retinal implants, gene editing interventions, and drug treatments.

These emerging therapies all boost vision with varying levels of success, but synthetic compounds that target the retina look particularly promising for those with mutations that involve rod photoreceptors.

Rods are the photoreceptors at the back of the eye that sense dim light. These specialized neurons utilize a series of biochemical reactions to convert sensory light into electrical signals for the rest of the brain to 'read'.

As light-sensitive pigments in retinal rods absorb low levels of light, they convert the molecule 11-cis retinal into all-trans-retinal, which in turn generates an impulse that travels down the optic nerve to the brain.

Previous studies on children with LCA have shown that synthetic retinoid treatments can help compensate for some vision loss when injected straight into the eye. But how these treatments impact adults with the condition is not as well understood.

"Although some progress has been made, it still remains unclear the extent to which adult visual circuits can be restored to a fully functional state at the level of the visual cortex upon correction of the retinal defect," the researchers write.

Traditionally, it's been thought that the brain's visual system is formed and strengthened during certain developmental windows in early life. If the eye isn't being exercised during these critical periods, then visual networks in the brain may never be wired properly for sight, leading to lifelong deficits in vision.

But a mammal's potential for vision may not be so rigidly wired; it could be far more plastic than assumed.

To explore this idea, researchers administered a synthetic retinoid for seven days to adult rodents born with retinal degeneration.

The treatment was ultimately successful at partially restoring the animals' light sensitivity and their typical light-orienting behaviors for 27 days.

Nine days after treatment, far more neurons in the visual cortex were being activated by the optic nerve.

This suggests the central visual pathway that carries information from the eye to the visual cortex can be significantly restored by retinoid treatment, even in adult mice.

"Frankly, we were blown away by how much the treatment rescued brain circuits involved in vision," says neurobiologist Sunil Gandhi from the University of California, Irvine.

"Seeing involves more than intact and functioning retinae. It starts in the eye, which sends signals throughout the brain. It's in the central circuits of the brain where visual perception actually arises."

The study was only conducted among mice, but the discovery has neuroscientists thinking that the critical window for the human visual system may also be larger than once assumed.

In other words, a lack of vision in childhood does not necessarily mean sight can never be recovered in adulthood.

"Immediately after the treatment, the signals coming from the opposite-side eye, which is the dominant pathway in the mouse, activated two times more neurons in the brain," says Ghandi.

"What was even more mind-blowing was that the signals coming from the same-side eye pathway activated five-fold more neurons in the brain after the treatment and this impressive effect was long-lasting."

Further research on animal models is needed. But perhaps one day, neuroscientists can test whether similar benefits could be triggered in older humans with some versions of LCA.

"The fact that this treatment works so well in the central visual pathway in adulthood supports a new concept, which is that there is latent potential for vision that is just waiting to be triggered," Ghandi explains.

The study was published in Current Biology.

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Poor Sleep

Poor sleep quality and chronic sleep deprivation can disastrously affect your physical and neurological well-being. Several studies have shown that middle-aged persons who get six or fewer hours of sleep per night are 30% more likely to suffer from dementia (Bryant, 2021). Likewise, scientists have linked inadequate sleep to a laundry list of health issues, including high blood pressure, heart disease, depression, and anxiety. If living a long, healthful life is your priority, don’t skip out on a good night’s rest.

Not Exercising

The benefits of cardiovascular and strength training are challenging to ignore. Yet millions worldwide continue living largely sedentary lifestyles that are slowly killing them. A lack of exercise can increase the likelihood of heart disease, obesity, and type 2 diabetes (CDC, 2022). Cardiovascular activities like cycling, jogging, and swimming can go a long way in preventing such diseases. Resistance training exercises like weightlifting are essential, too. Recent studies have shown that an hour of strength training per week can lead to a 15% risk reduction in all-cause mortality (Momma et al., 2022). Resistance training can also help you mitigate the risk of serious injury, especially in your senior years. Exercise is a cornerstone of healthy living and remaining injury-free in your later years, so remember to stay active.

Neglecting Sun Protection

There is nothing wrong with enjoying a little sun during the year’s warmer seasons. Sun exposure is critical for regulating several bodily functions, including circadian rhythms, energy levels, and vitamin D absorption. With that said, too much of anything is harmful, and the results can be deadly in the case of sun exposure.

One of the most common causes of squamous cell and melanoma skin cancers is overexposure to UV radiation from the sun. In Canada alone, around 80,000 people are diagnosed each year with skin cancer, and a whopping eighty to ninety percent of those cases are linked to UV exposure (Sander et al., 2020).

The solution is simple: sunscreen. Studies have shown that routine sunscreen use can significantly decrease cancer rates among most age demographics (Sander et al., 2020). A sunscreen with broad-spectrum protection and an SPF of at least thirty will keep your skin healthy, youthful, and cancer-free.

Vaping

The last item on the list might seem obvious, but vaping rates continue to rise yearly. Since 2011, the global number of e-cigarette users has soared from 7 million to 41 million in 2018 (SingleCare, 2022). Although not as dangerous as cigarettes, research has shown an increased risk of chronic lung disease and asthma among frequent vape users (Blaha, 2022). The vaping industry is also less regulated than traditional tobacco products leading to the use of chemicals with unknown risks in the production process.

Lastly, vaping does not help reduce nicotine addiction. If anything, nicotine use has soared amongst younger demographics since the introduction of e-cigarette products into the mainstream. In a 2021 U.S. National Youth Tobacco Survey, over two million middle and high school students reported frequent e-cigarette use (Blaha, 2022). Traditional cessation methods, including nicotine replacement therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy, are far healthier options than vaping.

Final Thoughts

If you struggle with any of the abovementioned habits, remember to be patient with yourself. Breaking habits takes time, but with enough consistency, you’ll be able to put these nasty habits behind you and live a healthier and more fulfilling lifestyle.

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This Sentinel-2 image has been processed in true color, using the shortwave infrared channel to highlight the new flow of lava. The northernmost island of the Aeolian archipelago, located just off the northern tip of Sicily, Stromboli’s volcano has been erupting almost continuously for the past 90 years. Credit: Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2022), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

Early on Sunday morning, a volcano on the Italian island of Stromboli erupted, releasing huge plumes of smoke and a lava flow pouring into the sea. Less than five hours after the eruption, the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission captured this satellite image of the aftermath.

The eruption caused the partial collapse of the crater terrace. This was followed by major flows of lava stretching to the sea and immense plumes of smoke rising several hundred meters above the volcano. Italian civil protection authorities raised the alert from yellow to orange as the ‘situation of enhanced volcano imbalance persists.’

This Sentinel-2 image (above) has been processed in true color, using the shortwave infrared channel to highlight the new flow of lava. Sentinel-2 is based on a constellation of two identical satellites, each carrying an innovative wide swath high-resolution multispectral imager with 13 spectral bands for monitoring changes in Earth’s land and vegetation.

Stromboli is an island in the Tyrrhenian Sea, off the north coast of Sicily. It contains Mount Stromboli, one of the four active volcanoes in Italy.

 

The northernmost island of the Aeolian archipelago, located just off the northern tip of Sicily, Stromboli’s volcano has been erupting almost continuously for the past 90 years.

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Citizen scientists have furnished unique perspectives of the recent close flyby of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa by NASA’s Juno spacecraft. By processing raw images from JunoCam, the spacecraft’s public-engagement camera, members of the general public have created deep-space portraits of the Jovian moon that are not only spectacular, but also worthy of further scientific investigation.

“Starting with our flyby of Earth back in 2013, Juno citizen scientists have been invaluable in processing the numerous images we get with Juno,” said Scott Bolton. He is the Juno principal investigator from the Southwest Research Center in San Antonio. “During each flyby of Jupiter, and now its moons, their work provides a perspective that draws upon both science and art. They are a crucial part of our team, leading the way by using our images for new discoveries. These latest images from Europa do just that, pointing us to surface features that reveal details on how Europa works and what might be lurking both on top of the ice and below.”

This view of the Jovian moon Europa was created by processing an image JunoCam captured during Juno’s close flyby on September 29, 2022. Credit: Image data: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS, Image processing by Björn Jónsson CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

 

JunoCam snapped four photos during its September 29 flyby of Europa. Here’s a detailed look:

Europa Up Close

JunoCam took its closest image (above) at an altitude of 945 miles (1,521 kilometers). At the time it was soaring over a region of the moon called Annwn Regio. In the image, terrain next to the day-night boundary is revealed to be rugged, covered with pits and troughs. A multitude of bright and dark ridges and bands stretch across a fractured surface, revealing the tectonic stresses that the moon has endured over millennia. The circular dark feature in the lower right is known as Callanish Crater.

JunoCam images such as these help fill in gaps in the maps from images obtained by NASA’s Voyager and Galileo missions. The image was processed by citizen scientist Björn Jónsson to enhance the color and contrast. The resolution is about 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) per pixel.

This pair of images, one that is minimally processed (left) and one that is enhanced (right), shows the same portion of Europa as captured by the Juno spacecraft’s JunoCam during the mission’s September 29 close flyby. Credit: Image data: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS, Image processing by Navaneeth Krishnan S © CC BY

Science Meets Art

JunoCam images processed by citizen scientists frequently straddle the worlds of science and art. In the image (above) at right, processed by Navaneeth Krishnan, the enhanced color contrast causes larger surface features to stand out more than in the lightly processed version of the image (left). An example of the results can be seen in the lower right of the enhanced image, where notable shadows are cast by the pits and a small block. Small-scale texturing of the surface in the image needs to be carefully examined to distinguish between actual features and artifacts from processing, but the image draws us deeper into Europa’s alien landscape.

“Juno’s citizen scientists are part of a global united effort, which leads to both fresh perspectives and new insights,” said Candy Hansen. She is lead co-investigator for the JunoCam camera at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona. “Many times, citizen scientists will skip over the potential scientific applications of an image entirely, and focus on how Juno inspires their imagination or artistic sense, and we welcome their creativity.”

This highly stylized view of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa was created by reprocessing an image captured by JunoCam during the mission’s close flyby on September 29, 2022. Credit: Image data: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS, Image processing by Kevin M. Gill / Fernando Garcia Navarro CC BY 2.0

Fall Colors

Citizen scientist Fernando Garcia Navarro applied his artistic talents to create this highly stylized image (above). He downloaded and processed an image that fellow citizen scientist Kevin M. Gill had previously worked on, producing a psychedelic rendering he has titled “Fall Colors of Europa.”

The processed image calls to mind NASA’s poster celebrating Juno’s 2021 five-year anniversary of its orbital insertion at Jupiter.

NASA’s groovy celebration of Juno’s five-year anniversary of its orbital insertion at Jupiter. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

More Groovy Details About the Flyby

With a relative velocity of about 14.7 miles per second (23.6 kilometers per second) or 53,000 mph (85,000 km/h), the Juno spacecraft only had a few minutes to collect data and images during its close flyby of Europa. As planned, the gravitational pull of the moon altered Juno’s trajectory, decreasing the time it takes to orbit Jupiter from 43 to 38 days. The close approach also marks the second encounter with a Galilean moon during Juno’s extended mission. The mission explored Ganymede in June 2021. It is scheduled to make close flybys of Io, the third-largest of the four Galilean moons, in 2023 and 2024. Io is the most volcanically active body in the solar system, with hundreds of volcanoes, some erupting enormous lava fountains dozens of miles high.

Juno’s observations of Europa’s geology will not only add to our understanding of Europa, but also complement future NASA missions to the Jovian moon. NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, set to launch in 2024, will study the moon’s atmosphere, surface, and interior, with a primary science goal to determine whether there are places below Europa’s surface that could support life.

More About the Mission

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a division of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, California, manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott J. Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Juno is part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program, which is managed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Lockheed Martin Space in Denver built and operates the spacecraft.

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Physics papers authored by women are significantly under-cited compared to those authored by men, according to an analysis of over one million papers in 35 physics journals, presented in Nature Physics. The findings may inform effective strategies for tackling gender disparities in citation practices.

Citation numbers are routinely used by academic hiring committees and funding bodies to measure the research output and impact of a particular physicist. As women are underrepresented in physics and can face bias and discrimination, this bias may be reflected in citation practices, which can negatively affect the recognition of their work.

Dani S. Bassett and colleagues analysed the gender of first and last authors cited in approximately 1.07 million papers published between 1995 and 2020 in 35 physics journals. Author gender was inferred from their forename. The authors emphasize that this method of gender selection is not always accurate and does not consider trans and non-binary gender identities, however, it can be argued that those who cite a particular work also infer the gender from the forename and are influenced by the perceived gender of the author. Papers that had a first and last author who was a man were found to be cited more often than expected, whilst those with a first and/or last author who was a woman were cited less often than expected with an overall gender citation gap of roughly 4.23%. The citation imbalance in favour of man-authored papers was highest within papers written by men, within general physics papers and when citations reference work whose content or authors are less familiar to the citing authors.

The authors conclude that their findings suggest that there is a bias that favours the citation of articles by physicists who are men over those who are women. The authors go on to propose concrete actions that could help address this citation inequity. At the individual level, they point to tools for assessing the citation diversity statistics of a paper and the inclusion of a Citation Diversity Statement. On a journal level, publishing more papers authored by women might lead to more gender balanced reference lists.

doi:10.1038/s41567-022-01770-1

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In an excerpt of his new book Boldly Go published exclusively by Variety, the former Star Trek star reveals that while he thought his trip would bring him catharsis and connection, instead he was filled with "overwhelming sadness".

"Everything I had thought was wrong. Everything I had expected to see was wrong," Shatner writes in the Variety excerpt.

"The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness.

"Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna . . . things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral."

His words have since gone viral – and they're a poignant example of the so-called 'overview effect' at play: the impact that going to space and seeing Earth from afar as one, whole, fragile system has on a person. And Shatner certainly isn't the first person to experience it.

In his 2015 book The Orbital Perspective, retired NASA astronaut Ron Garan explained he'd also been filled with sadness during a 'Windshield Wiper' maneuver that sent him in an arc over the International Space Station back in 2008.

"As I approached the top of this arc, it was as if time stood still, and I was flooded with both emotion and awareness," Garan wrote.

"But as I looked down at the Earth – this stunning, fragile oasis, this island that has been given to us, and that has protected all life from the harshness of space – a sadness came over me, and I was hit in the gut with an undeniable, sobering contradiction."

The Earth photographed from the Moon during the Apollo 11 mission, 20 July 1969. (NASA/JSC)

His sadness centered on the inequality on Earth, and the millions of people without access to clean water or food security.

"In spite of the overwhelming beauty of this scene, serious inequity exists on the apparent paradise we have been given," he explained.

Edgar Mitchell, the sixth person to walk on the Moon, famously echoed a similar sentiment after his time in space.

"From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, 'Look at that, you son of a b*tch," he said.

In a 2020 interview with The Irish Times, former astronaut Chris Hadfield also told Róisín Ingle that his 4,000 hours in space had given him unparalleled perspective on the planet and "the eternity of time".

"The current major threat isn't asteroids or solar flares. It's us," said Hadfield.

"Our population has been so successful, and we are modifying the environment so significantly, that we are changing the chemistry of the atmosphere so it doesn't let the Sun's energy get back out to space so we are warming the planet measurably."

The term 'overview effect' was first coined by author Frank White in 1987. In addition to the perspective it offers astronauts, it also provides them with a desire to take better care of our home planet.

"Anyone living in a space settlement… will always have an overview. They will see things that we know, but that we don't experience, which is that the Earth is one system," says White in a video called 'Overview' produced by Planetary Collective.

"We're all part of that system, and there is a certain unity and coherence to it all."

< View the video at the source page. >

But the upside of the 'overview effect' is that with the sense of profound sadness also comes hope: the realization that we are all one and the planet is incredibly resilient, having survived solar flares, asteroid strikes, and even a massive impact that spawned our Moon.

In 2018, a survey of 39 astronauts and cosmonauts found that their perceptions of Earth were measurably changed following visits to space.

"The Earth was viewed as a beautiful, fragile object to be treasured," psychiatrist Nick Kanas who led the research wrote in his 2020 paper.

"Changes in this perception significantly correlated with a statement that suggested that the respondents became involved in environmental causes after returning home."

This line from #DontLookUp perfectly encapsulates what is special about Earth, and why we should fight for it. Evolution of intelligent life requires a planet that's continuously habitable for 3 or 4 billion years. That such a planet exists is a miracle.https://t.co/8sWqpXcg2n pic.twitter.com/VsarHgCFCr

— David Ho (@_david_ho_) December 26, 2021

Researchers on Earth are now working hard to try to find a way to recreate the 'overview effect' for those of us who will likely never go to space.

The hope is that in giving the world a broader perspective, we just might find a way to come together to protect the one, small home we have in the vastness of space.

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"The difference in insect damage between the modern era and the fossilized record is striking," says University of Maine paleoecologist Lauren Azevedo-Schmidt who led the study.

To look at plant-insect interactions over time, Azevedo-Schmidt and colleagues compared the leaves of modern-era plants sampled from three forests to fossil assemblages of leaf imprints from as far back as the Late Cretaceous period, nearly 67 million years ago.

Quantifying the type and frequency of insect-inflected damage, they found a sharp increase in insect herbivory in recent times, with insects piercing, sucking, hole-punching, and skeletonizing plant leaves.

"We find that despite insect declines, insect damage to plants is elevated in the modern era compared with other time periods represented in the fossil record," Azevedo-Schmidt and colleagues write.

Plants have evolved to quietly dominate life on Earth, with land plants now representing a weighty 80 percent of global biomass. Teensy insects, though small in size, are unmatched in species richness. Both have evidently found ways to adapt to environmental change over millennia, despite being highly sensitive to temperature.

But there is a limit to what they can endure. Some research has suggested insect numbers are declining, at least in some parts of the world. Climate change is also prompting plants to blossom earlier and grow faster, lengthening the pollen season. Not to mention sickening rates of human-caused habitat and biodiversity loss.

The study from Azevedo-Schmidt and colleagues found that leaves carbon-dated from 1955 to present had twice the average amount of insect damage than in any of the 64 fossil assemblages dating back tens of millions of years.

Modern (left) and fossil (right) Platanus occidentalis leaves, highlighting similarities between leaf specimens and recorded insect herbivory. (Lauren Azevedo-Schmidt)

Leaves were collected from two forests in the northeastern United States (one cool, moist forest, and a second, warm, coastal forest) and a third forest in tropical Costa Rica – a biodiversity hotspot dripping with life.

Fossil data was compiled from published datasets spanning latitudes and climates, and stretching from 66.8 million years ago through the Pleistocene to roughly 2 million years ago, before early humans migrated out of Africa.

"We propose that the comparatively rapid warming trends of the [modern] era may be responsible for its higher herbivory frequencies, such that rapid warming benefits insects in the arms race against their food source: plants," Azevedo-Schmidt and colleagues write.

The increased insect herbivory could have unknown consequences for plants and forest communities, the researchers warn.

Of course, the fossil record only captures a sliver of life and snapshot in time, though the researchers did take steps to account for how leaves are preserved. They sampled modern-day leaves from sediment, to mimic fossil outcrops, comparing insect damage on those buried leaves to that of leaf litter and leaf compression fossils.

"A long-term perspective is required to understand these ancient organisms and their longstanding ecological associations, as well as pinpoint where future collecting efforts should focus," the researchers write.

What's clear already is that something has shifted in the seven decades since 1955, the briefest of windows compared to the geological eras that unfolded before we humans started reshaping the biosphere.

Past research, also from the US, for instance, has found markedly more insect damage on herbarium specimens from the early 2000s compared to those collected a decade earlier, a pattern linked to rising temperatures.

It could be that insect feeding is intensifying or that insect populations are locally increasing in the forests studied – which, in the current study, were situated within the grounds of research stations, surrounded by roads, housing developments and farming.

"Perhaps urbanization has created insect biodiversity hot spots within research forests," Azevedo-Schmidt and colleagues write.

A fast-warming climate – which is influencing insect life-cycles and feeding habits, and pushing their range of habitats poleward – and the introduction of invasive species are other big factors that could be driving increased insect herbivory.

At the same time, agriculture is decimating insects and research suggests plants may have to start battling each other to attract pollinators. The situation is dire and human fingerprints are all over the problem.

"This research suggests that the strength of human influence on plant-insect interactions is not controlled by climate change alone but, rather, the way in which humans interact with the terrestrial landscape," they conclude.

The study was published in PNAS.

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General Motors is creating a new energy business to sell batteries, charging equipment, solar panels, and software to residential and commercial customers in a broad-based effort to create a range of accessories that can help sell its lineup of electric vehicles.

The new division, GM Energy, is also a direct shot at Tesla as a major player in renewable energy generation and storage. GM has said it intends to eventually overtake Elon Musk’s company in vehicles sales — and now it wants to challenge it on the energy front as well.

Travis Hester, GM’s chief EV officer, said the company is making a serious grab for a piece of what is potentially a $120-150 billion market for energy generation and storage products. The aim is to make GM’s brand synonymous with not just electric vehicles, but a whole host of products and services in orbit around EVs and their rechargeable lithium-ion batteries.

Hester said that GM has noticed Elon Musk’s moves in this market and sees an opportunity for itself. Tesla’s energy business has been steadily growing for several years, with revenues reaching $866 million in the second quarter of 2022. In addition to Tesla, there are a host of smaller, less recognizable firms that sell these products, like Generac, which sells backup power generators, and Fluence Energy, an energy storage company.

“They don’t have a vehicle,” Hester said of those smaller companies, in an interview with The Verge. “And frankly, they don’t have the dealer network that we have.”

Presently, GM has four EVs on the market: the Chevy Bolt EV and EUV; the GMC Hummer EV; and the Cadillac Lyriq. Within the next two years, it will release the Chevy Silverado EV, Blazer EV, and Equinox EV, as well as a Hummer SUV and another electric Cadillac. GM has said it aims to sell one million electric vehicles by 2025, Hester said. And each of those customers is also a potential customer of GM Energy.

< View the three (3) images at the source page. >

“At that moment, that electrification moment, they have to decide how they’re going to run that vehicle,” he said. “They have to decide are they going to buy a standard charger for their home? Is it going to be a bi-directional charger? Do they want to add stationary storage as a fixed box? Do they want to do solar? And they can go as far into that ecosystem or as little as possible depending on their individual needs.”

GM Energy will be comprised of three units: Ultium Home, Ultium Commercial, and Ultium Charge 360, which is the company’s EV charging program. The division will sell a range of products to residential and commercial customers, including bi-directional charging equipment, vehicle-to- home (V2H) and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) equipment, stationary storage, solar products, software applications, cloud management tools, microgrid solutions, and hydrogen fuel cells.

GM Energy will also be in the virtual power plant business. Many EVs with high-capacity batteries are being marketed for their ability to serve as backup power in the event of a blackout. (Hester notes that the Chevy Silverado EV, with its 200kWh battery pack, can power an average sized home for 21 days.) EVs can also feed power back into the grid during times of peak demand. GM Energy will be the entity that sells that power back to the utilities during times of high-energy consumption.

GM has previously partnered with PG&E in California around the idea of “vehicle-to-grid” technology. The idea is to use bi-directional charging equipment to push and pull energy from electric vehicles at any given time. In essence, it treats high-capacity batteries as not only tools to power EVs but backup storage cells for the electrical grid. GM is also working with Con Edison, Graniterock, and New Hampshire Electric Cooperative on similar projects.

For solar energy, GM is teaming up with San Jose-based SunPower to sell solar panels and home energy storage products to residential customers. SunPower and other partners will supply the solar panels and perform the installations, with GM developing the complimentary software.

Over time, as GM’s battery factories come online and production of its Ultium-branded battery systems ramps up, the company intends on swapping in its own battery cells and storage units, Hester said. The automaker is also planning on manufacturing its own line of backup power generators using its Hydrotec-branded hydrogen fuel cells.

“We’re going to start with an array of lithium-ion cells from different partners that we already have,” he said. “And then as we get further into the Ultium rollout of our vehicles and all of our cell plants, we will pull in Ultium cells and we will do more manufacturing of our own.”

(Ultium is the name of GM’s electric vehicle battery and powertrain technology. Last year, the company said the Ultium Charge 360 network would be the name given to GM’s own vehicle apps and software with a variety of third-party charging services, such as Blink, ChargePoint, EVgo, Flo, Greenlots, and SemaConnect.)

Unlike Tesla or Volkswagen, GM does not have its own branded EV charging network yet — though it’s hoping to get there eventually. Owners of GM’s electric vehicles must instead rely on a patchwork of third-party chargers, each with their own software and membership requirements. The company is in the process of building a network of coast-to-coast Ultium 360-branded chargers at trucks stops in partnership with EVgo.

But much like its approach to EVs, the dates for the launch of these new products are still a ways off in the future. GM is still testing its V2H service in partnership with PG&E with a small sample of residential customers in California, and plans on expanding it to more homes in early 2023. And its solar products won’t be available until 2024.

GM has been under pressure in recent years to accelerate the rollout of its EVs, and no doubt it will face similar pressure for its new energy products. That said, the automaker resisted calls from Wall Street to spinoff its EV business as a separate unit, arguing that plug-in power is GM’s future.

“It’s not a business unit,” Hester said. “It is our business as we go forward.”

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In Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1983), laughter is no laughing matter. Set in 1327, the story follows William of Baskerville as he investigates a series of mysterious deaths at a Benedictine monastery, high in the Italian Alps. Quite by chance, he comes across the manuscript of a Greek comedy in one of the victims’ desks. Remembering that the blind librarian, Jorge of Burgos, had argued with the dead man about humour only a few days before, he realises that this might be a clue and suspects that Jorge is hiding something. To test this, he strikes up a discussion about laughter. A bitter disagreement soon arises. Whereas William maintains that laughter is good for the soul, Jorge denounces it as an ‘unnatural’ affront to humanity and an incitement to blasphemy, which he justifies with reference to the Bible. But it soon becomes apparent that his hatred of laughter – and one of the victims – has been inspired by a quite different book. A lost book.

By the early 14th century there were plenty of treatises that touched on the question of laughter. But none was more tantalising, or elusive, than Aristotle’s Poetics. As its title suggests, it had been intended as an enquiry into poetry. Most of the first book is devoted to a discussion of tragedy. But, along the way, Aristotle gives a quick definition of comedy, too. Like tragedy, he argues, comedy is a representation of real life. Where it differs is that its subjects are ‘inferior people’: not so base as to be villainous, but ‘disgraceful’ enough to be ‘laughable’. This leads him to reflect further on laughter itself.

Elsewhere, he had already noted that laughter is unique to man and aims at giving pleasure. Here, he adds that what makes us laugh at something is ‘some error or disgrace which is neither painful nor life-threatening; as, for example, a comic mask is ugly and distorted, but does not cause pain’.

As definitions go, this is pretty thin. Although Aristotle makes it clear that laughter is a form of disdain, distinct from mockery, he does not explain what sorts of errors and disgrace make a person ridiculous, what sort of pleasure laughter confers, whether any other dramatic devices are needed to elicit a chuckle, or if any other types of laughter are possible. He probably intended to answer these in another part of his treatise. At various points, he promises that there is more to come; some later authorities (Diogenes Laertius, Boethius, etc.) indicate that, in its original form, the Poetics contained at least two books. But at some point in late antiquity the second was lost.

For more than 1,000 years scarcely a trace of the lost treatise remained in the Latin West, beyond a handful of second-hand remarks. In 1839, however, a manuscript was found in the Bibliothèque nationale de France which looked like a summary of the missing text. Since then, this has been used as the basis for a possible reconstruction. But the manuscript is so garbled that some scholars doubt its authenticity and feel that Aristotle’s full philosophy of laughter may be gone forever.

Aristotle, 17th-century German engraving. Bridgeman Images.

In The Name of the Rose, however, Eco imagines that by some miracle, a single copy has survived in the monastery library. As William of Baskerville guesses, it presents laughter ‘as a force for good’, which, far from leading us into error, can actually help us to reach the Truth. But Jorge is horrified.

Although he rejects this argument utterly, he is afraid that, if the book’s existence were to be revealed, somebody, inspired by Aristotle’s authority, would turn laughter into a weapon and overthrow all that is holy. When one of the monks takes an interest in it, Jorge kills him by smearing its pages with arsenic. Then, when William exposes the crime, Jorge destroys it (and himself) by eating the deadly leaves and burning the library to the ground.

It is a gripping tale. But insofar as the history of laughter is concerned, the loss of the second book is even more intriguing than any fictional account of its survival.

 
Serious enquiry

For a long time, the first book of the Poetics attracted little attention in the Latin West. Although Herman the German produced a Latin translation of Averroes’ paraphrase in 1256 and William of Moerbeke translated the treatise itself a little under two decades later, it was almost completely ignored. Aside from a few brief allusions to Herman’s paraphrase, it had little impact on intellectual life – and even less on laughter.  

With the publication of Giorgio Valla’s Latin translation in 1498, however, all that changed. There was an explosion of interest in Aristotle’s treatise and within a matter of decades it had inspired a whole new way of thinking about mirth. As Quentin Skinner has pointed out, laughter became the subject of serious enquiry for the first time and a number of prominent humanists – including Baldassare Castiglione and Juan Luis Vives – devoted themselves to exploring its causes and implications. By the end of the 16th century Aristotle’s Poetics had also inspired a burgeoning medical interest in laughter. And, in time, philosophers such as René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza even began to question ‘the place of laughter among the emotions’.

Like Aristotle, everyone agreed that laughter was unique to man and that it was accompanied by a feeling of pleasure. In Il Cortegiano, for example, Castiglione noted that laughter is ‘nearly always the sign of a certain inward hilarity of the spirit, which is naturally attracted to pleasure and desirous of rest and recreation’, while in De Anima et Vita, Vives noted that ‘from happiness and delight laughter is born’. Following the first book of the Poetics, however, they also recognised that it entailed disdain and had as its object the base, the disgraceful and the ugly. As Castiglione put it: ‘The source of the ridiculous is to be found in a kind of deformity; for we laugh only at things that contain some elements of incongruity and seem disagreeable though they are not really so.’ Similarly, Joubert argued that we find risible anything which seems ‘ugly, deformed, dishonest, indecent, nefarious and inappropriate’.

Merry Company, by Judith Leyster, c.1629. Previous spread, left: Yonker Ramp and His Sweetheart, by Frans Hals, 1623Merry Company, by Judith Leyster, c.1629. Previous spread, left: Yonker Ramp and His Sweetheart, by Frans Hals, 1623. Bridgeman Images.

But in the absence of any further guidance the second book of the Poetics might have provided, many ‘philosophers of laughter’ found that if they wanted to develop these ideas any further they would have to fill in the gaps left by Aristotle’s extant definition. Some could be dealt with simply enough and without doing too much violence to the spirit of the original. Aristotle’s reticence about the exact meaning of ‘errors’, for example, was easily resolved. Since he had insisted that the objects of laughter should not be truly wicked, but merely ‘disgraceful’, Castiglione inferred that one such error might be ‘affectation’, a failure to observe a certain moderation in one’s behaviour. This could manifest itself in many ways, but was most commonly associated with avarice, vanity, or even hypocrisy – as comic characters like Shakespeare’s Malvolio and Molière’s Tartuffe testify.

So, too, Aristotle’s silence on the dramatic devices needed to elicit laughter was readily filled. Building on a suggestion made by Cicero in the De oratore, many writers came to stress the importance of surprise. The physician Girolamo Fracastoro – today best known for giving syphilis its name – contended that: ‘The things that generally move us to laughter must have a certain novelty about them’ and must appear ‘suddenly’ and ‘unexpectedly’. So, too, in The Elements of Law, Thomas Hobbes argued that: ‘Whatsoever it be that moveth Laughter, it must be new and unexpected.’

 
Guilty pleasures

But other issues thrown up by Aristotle’s definition were less fortuitously resolved. Of these, the most serious was the question of pleasure. However obvious it might have been that laughter was a source of joy, the fact that it also seemed to involve disdain caused some puzzlement. After all, how could one feel happy and disdainful at the same time? That some thought ‘disdain’ too mild a term for the reaction evoked by ‘disgrace’ only made the problem more acute. For some, burning with moral zeal, contempt was a better word. As Robert Burton argued in the Anatomy of Melancholy, when we laugh, we ‘contemne others, condemne the world of folly’. Others, like Sir Thomas Browne, even preferred to speak of scorn or hatred. Either way, it seemed light years away from happiness.

One possible solution was proposed by Hobbes. Although in The Elements of Law he granted that it was possible merely to laugh at the absurdity of the world when we encounter something contemptible, he found it more convincing to believe that we experience joy only when comparing ourselves favourably with others. In other words, when we laugh we must have recognised some contemptible fault in another person and, in doing so, derived some pleasurable sense of superiority. But it was hardly the sort of thing one could imagine Aristotle endorsing with any enthusiasm.

The Jolly Drinker, by Judith Leyster, 1629. Bridgeman Images.

A more satisfactory approach might be to ask whether laughter always needed to be so disdainful. As the Cretan cleric Paolo Beni noted in his commentary, ‘comedy non uncommonly depicts good men … and represents them with praise’. Perhaps there were other, less judgemental, types of laughter that Aristotle had simply not mentioned? What about the laughter of children, for example? Or how we laugh when something nonsensical happens? Or when our expectations are confounded? But this cut little ice with Aristotelian purists. For Nicander Jossius, the very idea was absurd. Since Aristotle had only mentioned disdainful laughter, he argued, anything that was not disdainful was obviously not real laughter. Philip Sidney took this a step further. In his view, pleasure was just incidental; the only thing that provoked true laughter was scorn.

As Skinner has pointed out, part of the reason for this grim pig-headedness was that it fitted with how such writers viewed the broader purpose of laughter. Despite Aristotle’s insistence on joy in the Rhetoric, his definition of laughter in the Poetics was so sketchily drawn that many felt justified in conflating it with Horace’s suggestion that comedy should teach people how to be good. By laughing disdainfully at ‘inferior’ characters, the argument went, we not only feel superior to them, but also feel contemptuous of the vices they represent. So if you wanted to be good, you had to laugh at the bad, regardless of whether you took any real pleasure in it.  

 
The laughter paradox

Whether the second book of the Poetics would have forestalled this line of thought had it survived is moot. We just can’t know. But what is certain is that, in its absence, the emphasis on disdain led laughter into paradox. By the mid-17th century it dawned on moralists that, if laughter was used to make men good, it might inadvertently end up trashing society in the process. One possibility was that the contempt it expressed could cause fights, as Hobbes argued, thus undermining the laws of nature; or its boisterous carping would become so extreme that it might itself become the sort of immoderate (and uncivilised) artifice its exponents had set out to mock in the first place. Either way, it stood to threaten the morality it was supposed to cultivate. Put another way, the loss of Poetics II risked causing precisely the sort of spiritual crisis that Jorge of Burgos wanted to avoid by destroying it. There is perhaps some irony in this. But for those who had put their hopes in Aristotle, it certainly wasn’t a laughing matter either.

Alexander Lee is a fellow in the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick. His latest book, Machiavelli: His Life and Times, is now available in paperback.

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A siren goes off at 7pm every evening in Vadgaon village in Sangli district, an indication to all residents to switch off their TV sets and mobile phones.

The two instruments of "addiction" can be switched on when the village council sounds the siren again at 8.30pm.

"We decided at the village meeting on 14 August - the eve of India's Independence Day - that we needed to stop this addiction," Vijay Mohite, president of the village council, told BBC Hindi. "From the next day, all television sets and mobiles were shut down when the siren went off."

Vadgaon has a population of about 3,000 people, made up largely of farmers and sugar mill workers.

Mr Mohite said children had become dependent on TV and mobile phones for online classes during the Covid-19 pandemic. As educational institutions reopened this year, children returned to regular classes in schools and colleges.

"But they returned [from class] to either play on their mobile phones or sit and watch television," he said, adding that many adults were also spending too much time on their devices and not talking to each other.

Vandana Mohite (not related to Vijay Mohite) said she was finding it difficult to supervise her two children "because they would be focused completely on playing with the phone or watching TV".

"Since this new norm began, it is far easier for my husband to return home from work and help them study and I can peacefully do my work in the kitchen," she added.

Many in the village were reluctant to agree to a digital detox every evening

But it was not easy for the village council to get everyone to agree with the idea of a digital detox.

Mr Mohite said initially, when the council discussed the issue and a proposal was taken to the villagers, men scoffed at the idea.

The council then gathered the village women, who were open enough to admit that they could get drawn into watching a lot of TV serials and agreed that the entire village should shut down television and mobiles for a few hours.

Another meeting of the council was held and it was decided that a siren would be installed above the village temple.

The decision was not easy to implement. As the siren went off, council staff and groups of villagers had to go around, urging people to switch off their TVs and mobile phones.

"[Now], the decision has finally been implemented fully across the village," Mr Mohite says.

But, does briefly switching off your TV and phone help?

It can, says Dr Manoj Kumar Sharma, professor of clinical psychology at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (Nimhans).

"Covid has increased preference for online activities or time spent on online activities," he says.

Experts say it is important to ensure children have adequate leisure activities offline

A study conducted by Dr Sharma and his colleagues among 682 adults (495 female and 187 male) between July and December 2020, showed that "problematic internet use" was a rapidly emerging phenomenon among adolescents and young adults. It is one of the most critical challenges that has emerged from increased internet usage.

"The risk for problematic usage increases with excessive non-productive usage of the internet, which can cause psychological stress," the study found. "It has the potential to harm many aspects of adolescent life."

Adolescents predisposed to psychological stress or those experiencing stress were likely to use the internet in its many forms to escape temporarily from unpleasant emotional states, it added. This could lead to them skipping in-person social interactions, social get-togethers, family interactions and extracurricular events to gradually become isolated.

Conscious digital fasting as a family to engage in quality-based activities is a cornerstone for decreasing dependence on online activities, Dr Sharma says.

"You need to talk to children and ensure they have physical or offline leisure activities as well as adequate sleep and food intake," he says.

Dilip Mohite, a sugarcane farmer who has three school-going sons, says he can see the difference the decision has made.

"The children were just not concentrating on their studies before," he says. "Now, there is normal conversation [at home, even] among the adults."

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Glowing red skies and bitter ash-laden air are increasingly common across much of the US as the warming climate fuels vast wildfires. For years now, researchers have understood that wildfire smoke, and the noxious gases and soot particles it carries, isn’t merely an unpleasant experience that forces people to shut windows and herd children indoors. It’s a significant health hazard that not only triggers asthma and breathing problems, but can harm immune systems for years.

But new research is revealing that the threat is more complex than previously known—and also more dangerous, if that’s possible. The churning convection in those enormous plumes can scoop up pathogens from disturbed soil and charred vegetation and carry them long distances from the fire lines. Many of those microbes are still living, and potentially capable of causing infections. Among them, researchers are most worried about fungi, which cause slow-growing internal infections that are difficult to diagnose and treat, and can be disabling and even deadly. That includes the fungal infection valley fever, which lurks in dry Western soils, causes a serious illness resembling pneumonia, and is spreading north as the climate warms.

Thanks to drones carrying sampling equipment, there is already evidence that smoke plumes are packed with viable bacteria and fungi. One early study has linked a major 2017 California fire with increasing numbers of fungal infections in hospital patients up to 200 miles away. Now several research projects are attempting to precisely identify the microbial contents of smoke and to correlate infection records with maps of the directions in which smoke drifts during fire seasons.

“We have found ample bacterial and fungal pathogens that do pose a significant risk, particularly to our immunocompromised patients: cancer chemotherapy patients, people on medications that knock down their immune system because of autoimmune disease,” says George R. Thompson, a physician and professor at the University of California, Davis, School of Medicine who specializes in invasive fungal infections. But proving the link to any one patient’s illness can be challenging, he points out: “These smoke plumes often will go over multiple states. If you’re 500 or 600 miles away from a fire, even if you see an increase in a particular infection, a lot of people will not make that association.”

Two years ago, Thompson cowrote a perspective piece in Science that made the case for “bioaerosols” in smoke as a human health hazard. His coauthor Leda Kobziar, a wildland fire ecologist and associate professor at the University of Idaho, builds and flies the drones that dive into smoke plumes to harvest whatever microbial matter they contain, a discipline that she has dubbed “pyroaerobiology.” She has demonstrated that smoke not only contains a dense array of viable bacteria and fungi that can be transported long distances, but also that the types of microbes differ according to the fire’s location, rate of combustion, and fuel—underbrush in a prescribed fire, versus building materials and plastics in one that’s out of control.

“We’re really just at the forefront of understanding this mechanism that has probably been influencing microbial dispersal and diversity of life for as long as we’ve had fires—so, many hundreds of millions of years,” Kobziar says.

Researchers already knew that fires create infectious risks for crews on the front lines of fighting them. In August, a team from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the California Department of Public Health, among others, reported that seven crew members who battled a 2021 wildfire developed coughs and chest pain and had trouble breathing. Three of them were confirmed by lab tests to have valley fever infections. (Among the other four, two could not be tracked down and two had negative tests—though the CDC says those tests can be inconclusive.)

In 2017, other CDC and California state researchers identified 10 firefighters from a state prison crew who also caught valley fever, some with serious enough cases to develop respiratory failure and meningitis. In both episodes, the firefighters were either enveloped in dust and smoke or doing earthmoving—digging ditches and firebreaks; they told the two sets of investigators that they weren’t given any respiratory protection. So their infections might have come from spores inhaled in smoke or from dust and dirt containing fungi that were kicked up by their digging.

But proximity to dust and dirt probably can’t explain the surge in invasive fungal infections—mold, valley fever, and aspergillosis, from a fungus that thrives in decaying vegetation—that researchers from federal agencies and the University of California, San Francisco documented in everyday people who were admitted to 22 California hospitals following that fire in 2017. It also can’t explain puzzling increases in infections that occur in the same season as fires, according to Naomi Hauser, an infectious disease physician and assistant professor of medicine at UC Davis. “During wildfire season, we get patients admitted to the hospital with unusual infections that they shouldn’t really be at risk of,” she says. They’re especially noticeable in burn patients, whose injuries heighten their vulnerability to whatever infections are blowing through.

Hauser has set up a monitoring project that places air-sampling equipment on the trucks and equipment of regional firefighting departments, and also around the Davis campus and in Sacramento. By comparing the microbes the devices capture, she may be able to narrow down whether similar exposures occur both at the front lines of fires and in cities bathed in smoke—or whether fungal infections in residents arise from local sources instead.

Meanwhile, a $1.2 million project based at the University of Florida, run by a team that includes wildfire expert Kobziar and Jason Smith, a University of Florida associate professor who studies forest fungi, is teasing out the contents of smoke and trying to predict the microbial risks it may pose. In one arm of the study, epidemiologists will map plumes from California wildfires between 2017 and 2020 and overlay them with digitized medical records from the California arm of the Kaiser Permanente health system. (Because it operates both hospitals and clinics—and also has a research division and a medical school—Kaiser is able to collect data about its millions of members in a way that is unusual in the patchwork US health care system. Its comprehensive records of visits, diagnoses, and treatments are a rich resource for researchers.)

About 180,000 Kaiser patients are diagnosed with some form of fungal infection every year, says Stephen Van Den Eeden, a senior epidemiologist in Kaiser’s research division. Most of those infections are likely to be minor everyday skin problems, or the invasive infections expected in severely immunocompromised people. But some of the records may reveal fungal infections that can plausibly be associated with smoke plumes wafting over the places where those patients live. If the layers line up—smoke direction, residence, and diagnosis—that will trigger further inquiries about how far fungal spores might have been transported, and which underlying conditions made people most vulnerable. “Every study leads to 10 others,” Van Den Eeden says. “But the basic thing is, do we see any signal at all that represents an association?”

At a minimum, confirming a fungal hazard from wildfires could lead to recommendations that vulnerable people take extra protective measures on smoky days. But it also could contribute valuable evidence to two separate lines of scientific inquiry. One is the ongoing research into how particulates in smoke—minuscule particles known as PM 2.5, or less than 2.5 microns across—affect the immune system. Particles that small can penetrate deep into airways, and researchers at Stanford University’s Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy and Asthma Research have found that they affect the functioning of the immune system, reducing the production of T cells that help the body defend against allergens and pathogens. It’s possible that fungi could hitchhike into the lungs on those particles, or that immune system impairment gives those fungi a head start when they begin to reproduce.

Fungal research could also enhance wildfire control. Fire managers including Kobziar support using prescribed burns to clear out deadwood and underbrush that would otherwise become a wildfire’s fuel. Prescribed burns don’t just swap one fire (and smoke plume) for another; because they’re set in chosen spots and controlled, they’re fundamentally different fire types. “The conditions under which we ignite fires are more conducive to complete combustion, which means that the pollutant products are minimized in relation to how much fuel is consumed,” Kobziar says. “And the conditions are also prescribed so that the smoke does not remain in highly populated areas for extended amounts of time.”

Prescribed burns are controversial though—and with the West in what seems like a permanent drought, some politicians and resource managers consider them too risky. If it could be shown that they’re less conducive to spreading fungi, that would be a factor in their favor—and potentially make them a tool for knocking back a health threat we’re just beginning to understand.

Wildfire Smoke May Carry Deadly Fungi Long Distances

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Two weeks ago, NASA smashed a spacecraft into a small asteroid called Dimorphos, which orbits a larger rock, Didymos. The mission is formally named the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, but you might know it by its acronym: DART. (In case you missed it, here is an epic video taken by the spacecraft before the collision.)

We’ve already explained why NASA did this: to see if a collision could successfully divert an asteroid headed for Earth. (Don't worry, this was just a test. Dimorphos doesn't have a trajectory that would present any danger to us.) But we haven’t yet explained how they did it.

While we wait for the space agency to release their calculations showing if—and by how much—the crash nudged Dimorphos off its path, let’s dig into some of the most interesting physics aspects of this mission.

Angular Size and Velocity

I'm going to start off with a little bit of video analysis, just for fun. Is it possible to get a plot of the position of the spacecraft during its approach just by looking at the video? Yes! Here's how this works. The DART spacecraft has a camera called Draco, for Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation. This camera has an angular field of view that is 0.29 degrees. That means that if you draw a line from something in the left side of the camera’s view to the right side of the frame, you would see an angle of 0.29 degrees.

Surely you've noticed that as you get closer to an object, it looks bigger. Imagine looking at a person standing at the other end of a parking lot. Now stretch your arm out in front of you and hold out your thumb. It’s possible that your thumb will seem bigger than the person. What you are seeing is the object's angular size—because of course a thumb isn’t actually bigger than a human.

We have the following relationship between an object's angular size (θ in radians), the distance to the object (r), and the real size of the object (L).

Illustration: Rhett Allain

I can get the apparent angular size of Dimorphos from the video, and the actual size is listed here at 170 meters across. But what about the time values? The video posted by NASA runs at 25 frames per second, but it's not in "real time." Instead, it is increased by a factor of 10. That means the time between each frame is 0.4 seconds.

Now I just need to pick some frames from the impact video, measure the angular size of Dimorphos, and use that to calculate the distance. If I have a position vs. time plot, I can also find the velocity of the spacecraft. Since velocity is defined as the change in position with respect to time, the slope of this graph will indeed be the relative velocity of DART with respect to the asteroid. Here's the plot:

Illustration: Rhett Allain

Of course, this isn't the best way to measure the speed of the spacecraft—it's just fun. But you can see that I actually fit two different linear functions to the data. The green line is the best fit for all of the data. The slope of this line gives a velocity of 10.5 kilometers per second.

According to NASA, the actual impact speed was roughly 6.3 km/s, or 22,530 kilometers per hour. With that, I fit a second function to just the final part of the data (the red line). The slope of this second fit gives a velocity of 7.7 km/s. This method isn't the most accurate, but it still gives a rough idea about the final speed before the collision.

Elastic vs. Inelastic Collisions

When NASA releases its analysis, we may not only learn how much DART deflected the asteroid’s orbit, but also how much damage it did to the asteroid, and what the space rock’s surface and composition are like. Let’s go over some of the aspects of the collision that they’re studying, starting with momentum.

When DART collided with Dimorphos, it exerted some type of impact force on the asteroid. However, since forces are always an interaction between two objects, this means that the asteroid also exerted a force with the same magnitude on the spacecraft. If there are no other forces on the system (Dimorphos plus DART), then these forces will lead to a conservation of momentum.

We define momentum (p) as the product of an object's mass (m) and its velocity (v).

Illustration: Rhett Allain

If momentum is conserved, the momentum of Dimorphos plus the momentum of DART before the collision must be equal to the total momentum after the collision. The only requirement for conservation of momentum is for there to be no external forces on the system.

There are a range of different types of collisions that conserve momentum. At one end of this spectrum is an inelastic collision, in which the two objects stick together—think of a wad of clay hitting a basketball. That means that their final velocities after the collision must be the same.

At the other extreme, there is the elastic collision. For this, think of two very bouncy rubber balls colliding and flying apart afterwards. In an elastic collision, momentum and kinetic energy are both conserved. We can define the kinetic energy of an object as the following:

Illustration: Rhett Allain

That means that the sum of kinetic energy for two colliding objects has the same value after the collision as it did before the collision.

But what does this have to do with a spacecraft colliding with a giant rock? Elasticity really does matter. Let me show you an example: Suppose I have a completely inelastic collision between a spacecraft with a mass mD moving with an initial velocity v1 and an asteroid with a mass ma that starts off at rest (because it's simpler that way). After the inelastic collision, the spacecraft just totally sticks into the asteroid. The final velocity of the two objects will be v2.

Illustration: Rhett Allain

Using the conservation of momentum, I can set the initial momentum (of just the spacecraft) equal to the final momentum (of both spacecraft and asteroid) to solve for the final velocity of the two objects.

Illustration: Rhett Allain

Let's go ahead and use some numerical values from the DART impact. The spacecraft starts off with a velocity of 6 kilometers per second with a mass of 610 kilograms. The mass of Dimorphos is about 5 x 109 kg. This gives a final velocity (v2) of 0.73 millimeters per second. Yes, that's the correct value: It's tiny.

I assumed the asteroid started with zero velocity—and that's not true. However, this calculation still works for a moving target, such that 0.73 mm/s would be the change in velocity.

OK, now let's say that the spacecraft has a completely elastic collision with the target rock. This means that it won't stick to the asteroid, but instead bounce off while conserving the kinetic energy of the total system. Since both Dimorphos and DART will have different velocities after the collision, I need to include the "D" and "a" subscripts in the velocities.

Illustration: Rhett Allain

With the conservation of kinetic energy, I get two equations now:

Illustration: Rhett Allain

There are a couple of things to notice. First, after the collision DART is moving backwards, because it bounced. Since velocity is a vector, that means that it will have a negative momentum in this one-dimensional example.

Second, the kinetic energy equation deals with the square of the velocity. This means that even though DART has a negative velocity, it still has positive kinetic energy.

We just have two equations and two variables, so these equations aren't impossible to solve—but they’re also not trivial. Here's what you would get if you did the math. (If you really want all the details, I have you covered.)

Illustration: Rhett Allain

Using the values for DART and Dimorphos, this gives a final velocity of 1.46 mm/s. That's twice the recoil velocity for the inelastic collision. Since the DART spacecraft bounces back, it has a much larger change in momentum (going from positive to negative). This means that Dimorphos will also have a larger change in momentum and a larger change in velocity. It's still a tiny change—but twice something tiny is bigger than tiny.

Elastic and inelastic collisions are just the two extreme ends of the collision spectrum. Most fall somewhere in between, in that the objects don't stick together but kinetic energy is not conserved. But you can see from the calculations above that the best way to change the trajectory of an asteroid is with an elastic collision.

Looking at images of Dimorphos after the collision, it seems that there is at least some material ejected from the asteroid. Since the debris moves in the opposite direction of DART’s original motion, it appears that the spacecraft partially bounced back, showing the increase in the change in Dimorphos’ momentum. That's what you want to see if your goal is to budge a space rock. Without any ejected material, you would have something closer to an inelastic collision with a lower asteroid recoil velocity.

How Can We Measure the Result of the Impact?

As you can see from the previous example, the best-case scenario would change the velocity of the asteroid by just 1.34 millimeters per second. Measuring a velocity change this small is quite a challenge. But Dimorphos has a bonus feature—it's part of a double asteroid system. Remember, it’s orbiting its bigger partner, Didymos. That's one of the reasons NASA chose this target. The key to finding the effect of a spacecraft crashing into Dimorphos will be measuring its orbital period, or the time it takes for the object to make a complete orbit, and seeing if it has changed following the collision.

Dimorphos orbits Didymos according to the same physics that make the moon orbit the Earth. Since there is a gravitational interaction between them, Didymos pulls Dimorphos toward their common center of mass—a point much closer to the center of Didymos, because it's larger. This gravitational force would cause the two objects to eventually collide if they both started from rest. But that’s not the case. Instead, Dimorphos has a velocity that's mostly perpendicular to this gravitational force, which causes it to move in an orbit around the center of mass. It's possible (but not absolutely necessary) that this orbit is circular.

But Dimorphos also pulls on Didymos such that it also orbits the center of mass. In the case of this double asteroid, the more massive Didymos has a super small (and almost unnoticeable) orbit around the center of mass.

The two asteroids have the same orbital period. If you know what it is, and the distance between them, you can determine their masses. But there's a small trick. This orbital period actually only gives you the sum of their masses. However, if you assume Dimorphos and Didymos are made of the same stuff, then they would have the same density. Using that and their relative sizes, it's possible to determine both masses.

Here's a Python model of the orbit of these two asteroids—you can see the code here. This isn't running in real time. Dimorphos actually has an orbital period of around 11.9 hours, and no one wants to watch an animation that long.

Now for the fun part. When DART collides with Dimorphos, remember that it could have a change in velocity as large as 1.34 millimeters per second. What would that change in velocity do to the orbital motion? Let's find out with the Python model.

Here's another animation. The gray spheres are Didymos and Dimorphos before the collision. On top of that, I have another set of asteroids in yellow that show the motion after the impact of the spacecraft.

There are some interesting things to notice. First, it's clear that in this model, the orbit of Dimorphos did indeed change after the DART crash. Second, this collision caused Dimorphos to slow down and move into a slightly non-circular orbit. But what about the orbital period? The yellow version of the asteroid completes an orbit before the undisturbed asteroid, even though it starts off slightly slower. Orbital motion isn't always intuitive—this is exactly what would happen.

It might be easier to see the difference in orbital periods with a graph. Here's a plot of the horizontal position of Dimorphos as a function of time. The blue curve is the undisturbed orbit, and the red curve shows the motion after the impact with DART.

Illustration: Rhett Allain

The reason scientists are tracking the orbital period of Dimorphos is because it's really difficult to see the exact motion of the asteroid itself. It's just too small and too close to the larger (and brighter) Didymos. But don't worry, we have a trick to measure the time it takes for one complete orbit.

Imagine that you can see the light reflected from both asteroids. This would produce some level of light intensity that could be detected by a telescope on Earth. If the smaller asteroid orbits behind the larger one, you won't be able to see it from Earth. The overall intensity of light will decrease when it’s behind the bigger one, but it will increase again when it reappears. So, just by looking at the change in intensity of light, you can measure the orbital period. If it’s changed, you’ll know it was the result of the DART impact. That's just cool.

Of course the question still remains: Would this bump from a small spacecraft make enough of a difference to prevent an asteroid from crashing into the Earth? The answer, as is often the case, is that it depends. It won’t make much of a difference if the asteroid is already on final approach to Earth. But if you can impact an asteroid when it's still very far away, even the tiny change in velocity from a small nudge like this can be enough to turn a future collision with our planet into a near miss. That's exactly what we want—but we are going to need to know exactly what happens when a spacecraft collides with an asteroid. That's the whole point of the DART mission.

The Physics of Smashing a Spacecraft Into an Asteroid

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The Chernobyl disaster is one of only two nuclear energy accidents rated at seven—the maximum severity—on the International Nuclear Event Scale, the other being the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan.

View of reactor 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant from Lake Azbuchyn (Ukraine), 2019. Credit: Germán Orizaola

 

Radiation can damage the genetic material of living organisms and generate undesirable mutations. However, one of the most interesting research topics in Chernobyl is trying to detect if some species are actually adapting to live with radiation. As with other pollutants, radiation could be a very strong selective factor, favoring organisms with mechanisms that increase their survival in areas contaminated with radioactive substances.

Ironically, the Chernobyl accident occurred during a safety test. The resulting meltdown and explosions ruptured the reactor core and destroyed the reactor building. This was immediately followed by an open-air reactor core fire which lasted until May 4, 1986.

Contaminated area within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (Ukraine). Credit: ArcticCynda

Melanin protection against radiation

Our work in Chernobyl began in 2016. That year, close to the damaged nuclear reactor, we detected several Eastern tree frogs (Hyla orientalis) with an unusual black tint. The species normally has a bright green dorsal coloration, although occasional darker individuals can be found.

Melanin is responsible for the dark color of many organisms. What is less known is that this class of pigments can also reduce the negative effects of ultraviolet radiation. And its protective role can extend to ionizing radiation too, as it has been shown with fungi. Melanin absorbs and dissipates part of the radiation energy. In addition, it can scavenge and neutralize ionized molecules inside the cell, such as reactive oxygen species. These actions make it less likely that individuals exposed to radiation will go on to suffer cell damage and increase their survival chances.

Male Eastern St. Anthony’s frog (Hyla orientalis) at a location outside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (Ukraine), 2019. Credit: Germán Orizaola

The color of Chernobyl tree frogs

After detecting the first black frogs in 2016, we decided to study the role of melanin coloration in Chernobyl wildlife. Between 2017 and 2019 we examined in detail the coloration of Eastern tree frogs in different areas of northern Ukraine.

During those three years, we analyzed the dorsal skin coloration of more than 200 male frogs captured in 12 different breeding ponds. These localities were distributed along a wide gradient of radioactive contamination. They included some of the most radioactive areas on the planet, but also four sites outside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and with background radiation levels used as controls.

Our work reveals that Chernobyl tree frogs have a much darker coloration than frogs captured in control areas outside the zone. As we found out in 2016, some are pitch-black. This coloration is not related to the levels of radiation that frogs experience today and that we can measure in all individuals. The dark coloration is typical of frogs from within or near the most contaminated areas at the time of the accident.

Colouring gradient of the Eastern St. Anthony’s frog (Hyla orientalis) in northern Ukraine. Credit: Germán Orizaola/Pablo Burraco, CC BY-SA

Evolutionary responses in Chernobyl

The results of our study suggest that Chernobyl frogs could have undergone a process of rapid evolution in response to radiation. In this scenario, those frogs with darker coloration at the time of the accident, which normally represent a minority in their populations, would have been favored by the protective action of melanin.

The dark frogs would have survived the radiation better and reproduced more successfully. More than ten generations of frogs have passed since the accident and a classic, although very fast, process of natural selection may explain why these dark frogs are now the dominant type for the species within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

Glyboke Lake, Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (Ukraine), 2019. Credit: Germán Orizaola

 

The study of the Chernobyl black frogs constitutes a first step to better understanding the protective role of melanin in environments affected by radioactive contamination. In addition, it opens the doors to promising applications in fields as diverse as nuclear waste management and space exploration.

We hope the current war in Ukraine will end soon and the international scientific community will be able to return to study, together with our Ukrainian colleagues, the fascinating evolutionary and rewilding processes of Chernobyl ecosystems.

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Physicists are (temporarily) augmenting reality in order to crack the code of quantum systems.

Calculating the collective behavior of a molecule’s electrons is necessary to predict a material’s properties. Such predictions could one day help scientists create novel drugs or create materials with desirable qualities like superconductivity. The issue is that electrons may become ‘quantum mechanically’ entangled with one another, which means they can no longer be treated individually. For any system with more than a few particles, the entangled network of connections becomes outrageously difficult for even the most powerful computers to unravel directly.

Now, quantum physicists from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland and the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Quantum Physics (CCQ) in New York City have found a workaround. By adding extra “ghost” electrons in their computations that interact with the system’s actual electrons, they were able to simulate entanglement.

An infographic describing the process. Credit: Lucy Reading-Ikkanda/Simons Foundation

 

In the new approach, the behavior of the added electrons is controlled by an artificial intelligence technique called a neural network. The network makes tweaks until it finds an accurate solution that can be projected back into the real world, thereby re-creating the effects of entanglement without the accompanying computational hurdles.

The scientists recently published their work in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“You can treat the electrons as if they don’t talk to each other, as if they’re noninteracting,” says study lead author Javier Robledo Moreno, a graduate student at the CCQ and New York University. “The extra particles we’re adding are mediating the interactions between the actual ones that live in the actual physical system we’re trying to describe.”

In the new paper, the physicists demonstrate that their approach matches or outclasses competing methods in simple quantum systems.

“We applied this to simple things as a test bed, but now we are taking this to the next step and trying this on molecules and other, more realistic problems,” says study co-author and CCQ director Antoine Georges. “This is a big deal because if you have a good way of getting the wave functions of complex molecules, you can do all sorts of things, like designing drugs and materials with specific properties.”

The long-term goal, Georges says, is to enable researchers to computationally predict the properties of a material or molecule without having to synthesize and test it in a lab. They might, for instance, be able to test a slew of different molecules for a desired pharmaceutical property with just a few clicks of a mouse. “Simulating big molecules is a big deal,” Georges says.

Robledo Moreno and Georges co-authored the paper with EPFL assistant professor of physics Giuseppe Carleo and CCQ research fellow James Stokes.

The new work is an evolution of a 2017 paper in Science by Carleo and Matthias Troyer, who is currently a technical fellow at Microsoft. That paper also combined neural networks with fictitious particles, but the added particles weren’t full-blown electrons. Instead, they just had one property known as spin.

“When I was [at the CCQ] in New York, I was obsessed with the idea of finding a version of neural network that would describe the way electrons behave, and I really wanted to find a generalization of the approach we introduced back in 2017,” Carleo says. “With this new work, we have eventually found an elegant way of having hidden particles that are not spins but electrons.”

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Humans perceive color when photoreceptor cells, the so-called cones, are activated in the retina. They respond to light stimuli by converting them into electrical signals, which are then transmitted to the brain. If maximally colored colors are selected in the RGB color space, the brain reacts with gamma oscillations to different degrees (upper row). The bottom row shows colors that activate the retinal cones to the same extent and create equally strong gamma oscillations in the brain. Credit: © ESI/C. Kernberger

Red has a signaling and warning effect. How is this color specificity reflected in the brain?

Scientists at the Ernst Strüngmann Institute for Neuroscience have now investigated the question of whether red triggers brain waves more strongly than other colors.

A red traffic light makes us stop. Because of their color, we immediately spot ripe cherries on a tree. The color red is attributed a signaling and warning effect. However, is this also reflected in the brain? Researchers at the Ernst Strüngmann Institute (ESI) for Neuroscience have now investigated this question. They wanted to know whether red triggers brain waves more strongly than other colors.

The new research focuses on the early visual cortex, also known as V1. It is the largest visual area in the brain and the first to receive input from the retina. When this area is stimulated by strong and spatially homogeneous images, brain waves (oscillations) arise at a specific frequency called the gamma band (30-80 Hz). But not all images generate this effect to the same extent. The study, by Benjamin J. Stauch, Alina Peter, Isabelle Ehrlich, Zora Nolte, and ESI director Pascal Fries was published earlier this year in the journal eLife.

Brain anatomy illustration.

Color is hard to define

“Recently, a lot of research has attempted to explore which specific input drives gamma waves,” explains Benjamin J. Stauch, first author of the study. “One visual input seems to be colored surfaces. Especially if they are red. Researchers interpreted this to mean that red is evolutionarily special to the visual system because, for example, fruits are often red.”

But how can the effect of color be scientifically proven? Or refuted? After all, it is difficult to define a color objectively, and it is equally difficult to compare colors between different studies. Every computer monitor reproduces a color differently, so red on one screen is not the same as on another. Additionally, there are a variety of ways to define colors: based on a single monitor, perceptual judgments, or based on what their input does to the human retina.

Colors activate photoreceptor cells

Humans perceive color when photoreceptor cells, the so-called cones, are activated in the retina. They respond to light stimuli by converting them into electrical signals, which are then transmitted to the brain. To recognize colors, we need several types of cones. Each type is particularly receptive to a specific range of wavelengths: red (L cones), green (M cones), or blue (S cones). The brain then compares how strongly the respective cones have reacted and deduces a color impression.

It works similarly for all human beings. It would therefore be possible to define colors objectively by measuring how strongly they activate the different retinal cones. Scientific studies with macaques have shown that the early primate visual system has two color axes based on these cones: the L-M axis compares red to green, and the S – (L+M) axis is yellow to violet. “We believe that a color coordinate system based on these two axes is the right one to define colors when researchers want to explore the strength of gamma oscillations. It defines colors according to how strongly and in what way they activate the early visual system,” Benjamin J. Stauch says. Because previous work on color-related gamma oscillations has mostly been run with small samples of a few primates or human participants, but the spectra of cone activation can vary genetically from individual to individual, he and his team wanted to measure a larger sample of individuals (N = 30).

Red and green have equal effect

In doing so, Benjamin J. Stauch and his team investigated whether the color red is something special and whether this color causes stronger gamma oscillations than green of comparable color intensity (i.e., cone contrast). And a side question was: Can color-induced gamma oscillations also be detected by magnetoencephalography, a method for measuring the magnetic activities of the brain?

They conclude that the color red is not particularly strong in terms of the strength of the gamma oscillations it induces. Rather, red and green produce equally strong gamma oscillations in the early visual cortex at the same absolute L-M cone contrast. Moreover, color-induced gamma waves can be measured in human magnetoencephalography when treated carefully, so future research could follow the 3R principles for animal experiments (Reduce, Replace, Refine) by using humans rather than nonhuman primates.

Colors that activate only the S-cone (blue) generally appear to elicit only weak neuronal responses in the early visual cortex. To some extent, this is to be expected, since the S-cone is less common in the primate retina, evolutionarily older, and more sluggish.

Development of visual prostheses

The results of this study led by ESI scientists, understanding how the early human visual cortex encodes images, may one day be used to help develop visual prostheses. These prostheses may attempt to activate the visual cortex to induce vision-like perceptual effects in people with damaged retinas. However, this goal is still a long way off. Before, much more needs to be understood about the specific responses of the visual cortex to visual input.

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Fiber-enriched foods are often consumed by many individuals to promote weight loss and fend against chronic diseases like cancer and diabetes.

Consuming highly refined fiber, however, may raise the risk of liver cancer in certain people, especially those with a silent vascular deformity, according to a recent study from The University of Toledo.

The finding, which is described in a report published in the journal Gastroenterology, adds to UToledo’s expanding body of knowledge about the undervalued role that our gut plays in the origin of disease.

“We have worked for a long time on this idea that all diseases start from the gut,” said Dr. Matam Vijay-Kumar, a professor in the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology in the College of Medicine and Life Sciences and the paper’s senior author.

“This study is a notable advancement of that concept. It also provides clues that may help identify individuals at a higher risk for liver cancer and potentially enable us to lower that risk with simple dietary modifications.”

From left, Dr. Matam Vijay-Kumar, a professor in the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, and Dr. Beng San Yeoh, a postdoctoral fellow. Credit: University of Toledo

Expanding Research

Vijay-Kumar’s team published a major paper in the journal Cell in 2018 that revealed a large proportion of mice with immune system defects developed liver cancer after being given an inulin-fortified diet.

Inulin is a refined, plant-based fermentable fiber that is sold in supermarkets as a health-promoting prebiotic. Additionally, it is often found in processed foods.

Vijay-Kumar and colleagues found that around one in ten regular, otherwise healthy lab mice got liver cancer after consuming the inulin-containing diet, despite the fact that inulin promotes metabolic health in the majority of those who consume it.

“That was very surprising, given how rarely liver cancer is observed in mice,” said Vijay-Kumar, who is also director of the UToledo Microbiome Consortium. “The findings raised real questions about the potential risks of certain refined fibers, but only now do we understand why the mice were developing such aggressive cancer.”

The new study offers a clear explanation — and may have implications that go beyond laboratory animals.

A Missing Link

As the team furthered its investigation, the researchers discovered all mice that developed malignant tumors had high concentrations of bile acids in their blood caused by a previously unnoticed congenital defect called a portosystemic shunt.

Normally, blood leaving the intestines goes into the liver where it is filtered before returning to the rest of the body. When a portosystemic shunt is present, blood from the gut is detoured away from the liver and back into the body’s general blood supply.

The vascular defect also allows the liver to continuously synthesize bile acids. Those bile acids eventually spill over and enter circulation instead of going into the gut.

Blood that’s diverted away from the liver contains high levels of microbial products that can stimulate the immune system and cause inflammation.

To check that inflammation, which can be damaging to the liver, the mice react by developing a compensatory anti-inflammatory response that dampens the immune response and reduces their ability to detect and kill cancer cells.

While all mice with excess bile acids in their blood were predisposed to liver injury, only those fed inulin progressed to hepatocellular carcinoma, a deadly primary liver cancer.

Remarkably, 100% of the mice with high bile acids in their blood went on to develop cancer when fed inulin. None of the mice with low bile acids developed cancer when fed the same diet.

“Dietary inulin is good in subduing inflammation, but it can be subverted into causing immunosuppression, which is not good for the liver,” said Dr. Beng San Yeoh, a postdoctoral fellow and the new paper’s first author.

Dr. Bina Joe, Distinguished University Professor and chair of the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, and a co-author of the study said the high-impact publication demonstrates the pioneering research being done at UToledo.

“The role of the gut and gut bacteria in health and disease is an exciting and important area of research, and our team is providing new insights on the leading edge of this field,” she said.

Implications

Beyond the laboratory, UToledo’s research could provide insight that might help clinicians identify people who are at higher risk of liver cancer years in advance of any tumors forming.

Portosystemic shunts in humans are relatively rare — the documented incidence is only one in 30,000 people at birth. However, given that they generally cause no noticeable symptoms, the true incidence may be many times greater. Portosystemic shunting also commonly develops following liver cirrhosis.

Theorizing that high bile acid levels might serve as a viable marker for liver cancer risk, Vijay-Kumar’s team tested bile acid levels in serum samples collected between 1985 and 1988 as part of a large-scale cancer prevention study.

In the 224 men who went on to develop liver cancer, their baseline blood bile acid levels were twice as high as men who did not develop liver cancer. Statistical analysis also found individuals with the highest blood bile acid levels had a more than four-fold increase in the risk of liver cancer.

The research team also sought to examine the relationship between fiber consumption, bile acid levels, and liver cancer in humans.

While existing epidemiological studies don’t differentiate between soluble and non-soluble fiber, researchers could look at fiber consumption in concert with blood bile acids.

There are two basic types of naturally occurring dietary fiber, soluble and insoluble. Soluble fibers are fermented by gut bacteria into short-chain fatty acids. Insoluble fibers pass through the digestive system unchanged.

Intriguingly, researchers found high total fiber intake reduced the risk of liver cancer by 29% in those whose serum bile acid levels were in the lowest quartile of their sample.

However, in men whose blood bile acid levels placed them in the top quarter of the sample, high fiber intake conferred a 40% increased risk of liver cancer.

Taken together, Yeoh and Vijay-Kumar say the findings suggest both the need for regular blood bile acid level testing and a cautious approach to fiber intake in individuals who know they have higher-than-normal levels of bile acids in their blood.

“Serum bile acids can be measured by a simple blood test developed over 50 years ago. However, the test is usually only performed in some pregnant women,” Vijay-Kumar said. “Based on our findings, we believe this simple blood test should be incorporated into the screening measurements that are routinely performed to monitor health.”

And while the researchers are not arguing broadly against the health-promoting benefits of fiber, they are urging attention to what kind of fiber certain individuals eat, underscoring the importance of personalized nutrition.

“All fibers are not made equal, and all fibers are not universally beneficial for everyone. People with liver problems associated with increased bile acids should be cautious about refined, fermentable fiber,” Yeoh said. “If you have a leaky gut liver, you need to be careful of what you eat, because what you eat will be handled in a different way.”

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A: Flu—short for influenza—is an illness caused by a respiratory virus. The flu can spread rapidly through communities, as the virus is passed from person to person.

When someone with the flu coughs or sneezes, the influenza virus gets into the air, and any people who are nearby, including children, can inhale it through the nose or mouth. The virus also can be spread when people touch a contaminated hard surface, such as a door handle, and then put their hands or fingers in their nose or mouth or rub their eyes.

The flu season usually starts in the fall and can last until the end of spring. Ideally, children should get an annual flu vaccine as soon as it is available, and no later than the end of October. But if your child did not get vaccinated yet, they still should at the earliest opportunity. Children younger than 9 years of age who are being immunized for the first time, or who only had a single flu vaccine before July 1, 2022, will need two doses of the vaccine given four weeks apart.

When there is an outbreak or epidemic, usually during the winter months, the illness tends to be most frequent in preschool or school-age children. Flu viruses are known to spread quickly among college students and teens, too.

In the first few days of illness, the virus is easily transmitted to other children, parents and caregivers.

It is important for anyone 6 months and older to get the flu vaccine each year. Everyone 6 months and older should also get COVID-19 vaccines and booster doses when they are eligible. The COVID vaccine and flu vaccine can safely be given at the same time or at any time, one after the other.

Flu symptoms include:

•     A sudden fever (usually above 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit or 38 degrees Celsius)

•     Chills

•     Headache, body aches, and being a lot more tired than usual

•     Sore throat

•     Dry, hacking cough

•     Stuffy, runny nose

•     Some children may throw up (vomit) and have loose stools (diarrhea)

After the first few days of these symptoms, a sore throat, stuffy nose and continuing cough become most evident. The flu can last a week or even longer.

A child with a common cold usually has only a low-grade fever, a runny nose and only a small amount of coughing. Children with the flu—or adults, for that matter—usually feel much sicker, achier and more miserable than those with just a cold.

Everyone needs the flu vaccine each year to update their protection and reduce the risk of serious complications. It is the best way to prevent getting the flu. Safe and effective vaccines are made each year.

Both the inactivated (killed) vaccine, also called the flu shot, which is given by injection in the muscle, and the live-attenuated nasal spray vaccine can be used for influenza vaccination this season. There is no preference for a product or formulation, and any vaccine appropriate for age and health status can be used.

The vaccine teaches your body's immune system to protect you from the virus. This takes about two weeks after getting vaccinated. Getting vaccinated before the flu starts spreading will keep your family healthy so they can continue to enjoy the activities that help them thrive.

The flu vaccine is the best way to help prevent seasonal flu and its serious complications, including hospitalization and death. By getting a flu vaccine and COVID-19 vaccine, children and teens can also help prevent viruses from spreading to others who are most at risk of getting very sick and being hospitalized, including grandparents and/or those who have chronic medical conditions.

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The left hemisphere of the brain is normally responsible for sentence processing (understanding words and sentences as we listen to speech). The right hemisphere of the brain is normally responsible for processing the emotion of the voice—whether it is happy or sad, angry or calm. This study sought to answer the question "What happens when one of the hemispheres is injured at birth?"

The findings appear in PNAS the week of October 10, 2022.

The participants in this study developed normally during pregnancy. But around birth they each had a significant stroke, one that would produce debilitating outcomes in adults. In infants, a stroke is much rarer, but does happen in roughly one out of every four thousand births.

The researchers studied perinatal arterial ischemic stroke, a type of brain injury occurring around the time of birth in which blood flow to a part of the brain is cut off by a blood clot. The same type of stroke occurs much more commonly in adults. Previous studies of brain injury in infants have included several types of brain injury, but the focus in this study on a specific type of injury enabled the authors to find more consistent effects than in previous work.

"Our most important conclusion is that plasticity in the brain, specifically the ability to reorganize language to the opposite side of the brain, is definitely possible early in life," says Elissa Newport, Ph.D., director of the Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery at Georgetown Medical Center, professor in the departments of Neurology and Rehabilitation Medicine and first author of this study.

"However, this early plasticity for language is restricted to one brain region. The brain is not able to reorganize injured functions just anywhere, as more dramatic reorganization is not possible even in early life. This gives us great insights into the regions we might be able to focus on for potential breakthroughs in developing techniques for recovery in adults as well."

The investigators recruited people from across the United States who all had medium to large strokes to the cortex region of their left hemisphere around the time of birth. To assess long-term outcomes in their language abilities, participants were given language tests at 9 to 26 years of age and were compared to their close-in-age healthy siblings. They were also scanned in an MRI to reveal which brain areas were involved in sentence comprehension.

The participants and their healthy siblings all completed the language tasks almost perfectly. The major difference was that the stroke participants processed sentences on the right side of the brain while their siblings processed sentences on the left side. The stroke participants showed a very consistent pattern of language activation in the right hemisphere, regardless of the extent or location of damage from the stroke to the left hemisphere.

Only one of the 15 participants, who had the smallest stroke, did not show clear right hemisphere dominant activation.

"It is also notable that many years after their strokes, our participants are all such highly functioning adults. Some are honor students and others are working toward or have gotten their master's degrees," says Newport. "Their achievements are remarkable, especially since some of their parents had been told when they were born that their strokes would produce life-long impairments."

In future studies the researchers hope to gain a better understanding of why the left hemisphere routinely becomes dominant in healthy brains but consistently loses out to the right hemisphere when there is a significant left-hemisphere stroke. An additional question of special interest—and clinical importance—is why left hemisphere language can successfully reorganize to the right hemisphere if injuries occur very early in life but not later. Research on stroke recovery and sentence processing in adults suggests that plasticity narrows with age, something that Newport hopes to study as it could be of great benefit, and potential therapeutic interest, to adult stroke survivors.

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While these initiatives are gaining traction, India continues to face a severe challenge of rising non-communicable disease burden with the contribution of diseases such as cancer incidence increasing with time. In addition, access and affordability to cancer treatment is still an issue, especially for the lower income groups. Even when free cancer screening is available high-risk groups may not take it very well. Therefore, it is vital to better understand patient preferences, early treatment facilitators, social barriers, and enablers of cancer care in India, in addition to providing affordable and accessible healthcare.

We are aware that cancer has the ability to impact a person’s life on a physical, emotional, and financial level in a manner that few other illnesses can. Unfortunately, due to late detection, inadequate and unbalanced access to multimodality, and low affordability, India’s high incidence problem is further exacerbated, leading to a heavy mortality load. If the unpleasant reality of a fast-rising incidence of cancer is not addressed effectively and immediately, it could become a serious issue for the country.

Early detection leads to better cancer care through surgical management

Emerging economies like India have a large number of cancer patients who could benefit from advanced and effective minimally invasive care. Robotic-assisted surgery (RAS) is one such minimally invasive surgical innovation catalysing a paradigm shift in the approach to minimally invasive surgical procedures owing to its clinical benefits and becoming one of the most sophisticated precision tools. RAS research has aimed to provide better patient outcomes and care team experience at the most optimal total cost to treatment.

The transition of cancer patients from primary and secondary care to oncology hospitals may be fraught with several logistical difficulties. At a psychological level, the patients and families also go through an emotional journey. In addition, the financial impact of cancer care is a serious issue for many patients who must fund their treatment.

Today, surgical devices companies that have been effectively investing in the ecosystem for over 2 decades are already transforming the way surgeries take place for both surgeons and patients. Furthermore, advanced technologies like the RAS system can also help address the healthcare burden, with the potential of faster patient recovery, lesser chances for infection and shorter hospital stay, allowing for optimised utilisation of critical resources such as operation theatres and hospital beds, along with the surgeon’s ability to perform more procedures.

Additionally, with the potential to standardise surgical procedures and usher in a new era of growth in minimally invasive care, the industry is witnessing a greater interest in adoption of the technology among surgeons across the country.

It has also been seen that the overall cost, including pre and post-operative care associated with RAS procedures, is lower than traditional open surgery with similar or better outcomes, resulting in a substantial improvement in value for the patients. [1]

Today, the global emphasis on the management of diseases is focused on ‘patient centricity’ and better ‘patient outcomes, with significant research being done in the field of medical technology and surgical technology over the last few decades. The financial growth in the surgical market over the years is also evidence of the acceptance of research that focuses on patient outcomes and centricity.

As we move forward, cancer care would include an integrated ‘Ecosystem’ that ‘surrounds’ and supports the care teams through training, incremental technological advancements, and building clinical evidence to help bridge the current clinical gaps in delivering critical care with potentially better patient outcomes.

Such support also helps broaden a surgeon’s understanding of clinical outcomes derived from advanced treatment modalities through peer-to-peer learning. Additionally, using AI and ML in surgery will drive greater efficiency, and value and potentially reduce surgical variability, helping unlock new experiences and opportunities for providers and patients.

This will be discussed at length during the upcoming FICCI HEAL Conference.

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