Camerer will be followed on November 2 by Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, Bren Professor of Biology and Biological Engineering, speaking on “The Dance of Life: How Do We Become Ourselves?” Claire Bucholz, assistant professor of geology, will give 2023’s first lecture on January 18 with “When Earth Breathed Deeply,” in which she will discuss how our planet’s atmospheric oxygen levels have increased by many orders of magnitude over time, profoundly affecting biological and chemical cycles on Earth’s surface.

Watson Lectures are always free and open to the public, and they can be viewed via live stream on caltech.edu/watson or on Caltech's YouTube channel. This season’s talks will also be presented in person at Beckman Auditorium on Caltech’s Pasadena campus.

The Watson Lecture Series began in 1922. Caltech physicist Earnest C. Watson became one of the first presenters when he stood in front of a packed lecture hall to deliver his famed “liquid-air” demonstration. The professor would open a bottle of air that had been cooled to more than 300 degrees Fahrenheit below freezing, and the contents would appear to “boil” out of the bottle and engulf Watson in white fumes.

The evocative demo grew into series of public talks called the Friday Evening Demonstration Lectures, which kept members of the community up to date on the latest in science by repeating for them the physics demonstrations done for first- and second-year Caltech students. The first lectures took place in 201 East Bridge, now known as the Feynman Lecture Hall, but in 1964 were relocated to Beckman Auditorium. In 1972, two years after Watson’s death, the Institute recognized him by renaming the series in his honor.  

The Watson series has always been focused on benefiting the public through education and outreach. The October 12 press release announcing the first-ever demonstration eight days later, read: “Realizing the general public’s interest in the Institute and in the results of science, the Institute has decided to invite the public to attend these lectures. Modern points of view will be emphasized and some of the great epoch-making experiments will be reproduced.” So many people showed up in the early years that lectures often had to be repeated in the same evening to accommodate the crowds.

Early speakers in the series also included Charles Galton Darwin, a visiting professor and grandson of Charles Darwin, whose topic was gyrostats; Arnold Sommerfeld, a distinguished physicist from the University of Munich, who offered a lecture demonstration on oscillations and resonance phenomena; and Caltech’s own Arnold Beckman, then an assistant professor of chemistry, who frequently presented about ionic theory and atmospheric gases.  

Watson doing his liquid air demo.

Over time, the Watson lectures ventured into fields of scientific research beyond physics. Linus Pauling, the late Nobel laureate and Caltech professor of chemistry, spoke on the nature of chemical bonds. Harry Bateman, the late Caltech professor of mathematics, physics, and aeronautics, gave a presentation about the humorous side of mathematics. And, in more recent years, the Watson Lecture Series has featured such Caltech luminaries as Kip S. Thorne, the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus; Ken Farley, the W.M. Keck Foundation Professor of Geochemistry and Mars 2020 project scientist; and Dianne Newman, the Gordon M. Binder/Amgen Professor of Biology and Geobiology.

For more information, please visit events.caltech.edu. No advance registration is required for the Watson Lectures, but you may sign up for event reminders here.

A playlist of the recent Watson lectures available to watch on YouTube can be found here. The Caltech Archives collection contains video recordings of Watsons dating back to the 1980s and audio recordings dating back to the 1970s.

Questions? Contact the Caltech Ticket Office via email at events@caltech.edu or leave a message at (626) 395-4652. Please allow 48 hours for a response. No reservations are necessary to attend.

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Professor George Braitberg, Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of Melbourne and Austin Health, wrote that the impact of a disaster could be determined by three factors:

•     the hazard itself (an extreme event that can be natural or man-made);

•     the vulnerability of the affected people; and

•     the capacity or measures that can be taken to reduce or cope with the potential negative consequences.

"Seen through a disaster medicine lens, we are approaching a 'perfect storm,'" wrote Professor Braitberg.

"We have a complex hazard that is affecting a fatigued community with lowered resilience, without agreement on a comprehensive set of measures that can be taken to mitigate the impact."

There is currently no declaration of a climate emergency at the federal level of government in Australia. As such, there is no agreed definition of the problem, and therefore no clear roadmap to dealing with emergencies.

"We need systems in place that address the core problem and assist in managing the related disaster events," wrote Professor Braitberg.

"We should stop blaming 'nature' or construe them as 'acts of god' so that we can prepare accountable, proactive preventive approaches to reduce their impact.

"Attributing disasters to nature provides a convenient rationalization for individuals whose role is to develop policy and the strategic and instrumental measures needed to reduce the risk, hazard and vulnerability impact and improve community resilience."

Professor Braitberg warned that the Australian community was "tired."

"Since December 2019, Australia has faced continuous challenges to community resilience," he wrote.

"The 2019–2020 bushfires burned over 17 million hectares across the country, which was the largest area in a single recorded fire season for eastern Australia. Tragically, 34 people died, and the losses of $1.9 billion in insurance claims exceeded the Black Saturday fires of 2009.

"To 12 September 2022, Australia has reported 10,112,229 confirmed cases of COVID-19, with 14,421 deaths.

"It would be fair to say that our community and health care worker resilience to withstand further disasters is challenged; a consideration that is important when we consider our capacity to respond to, and recover from, climate change-driven disasters over the next decades.

"Climate change is real, and the scale of disasters will increase. Our efforts to prepare and respond must be evidence-based. We must focus on community support and recovery, establishing targeted programs for vulnerable population which provide sustainable financial security and social connectedness," he concluded.

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This dramatic increase in diagnoses has clear links to the COVID-19 pandemic's beginnings in the early months of 2020. But a glimmer of hope cuts through the darkness depression can bring: 80% of those who seek treatment experience an improvement in their symptoms within four to six weeks.

As promising as treatment can be, roughly two-thirds of those experiencing depression symptoms do not seek help. To encourage all members of the Case Western Reserve University community to take inventory of their own mental health, and to promote more informed conversation on the topic, The Daily sat down with two experts from University Health and Counseling Services (UHCS). Naomi Drakeford, Ph.D., associate director for diversity, equity and inclusion, and Hillary Jones, associate director of counseling services and a licensed professional clinical counselor with supervision designation, gave insight on depression symptoms so those potentially unaware of their diagnosis can, after treatment, experience life to the fullest.

Follow along to learn what Drakeford and Jones consider five of the most common misconceptions about depression—and what you need to know.

1. Depression is more than just sadness

A depressed mood is the most common symptom of depression—you might be feeling down and tearful, and it may be difficult to get out of bed. However, it is also very common for an individual suffering from depression to appear high functioning and still perform daily tasks, but it takes more energy—and events and hobbies may not offer the same enjoyment they once did.

Normally, an individual may be able to get through their work day and then go to the gym, make dinner, meet with friends. Someone experiencing depression, however, may get through their work day and feel like they just can't do one more thing. Or, they may muster up the energy to go to that dinner with friends, but they just can't seem to have a good time like they usually do.

2. Depression can cause one to isolate

A symptom that can show up often in students is withdrawal or isolation. For students who are extroverted and very social, this symptom is easier to recognize. But, for those who might not be as outgoing, or who identify as introverted, this is sometimes a harder piece to identify. Something that can help expose this symptom is to ask yourself: What is my alone time doing for me? Is it actually recharging me or is it draining?

3. It might be more than just fatigue

Often depression can show up as fatigue and folks don't know to recognize this as a symptom. They will head to the doctor's office to get their thyroid checked, or assume they are just not getting enough sleep when, in reality, they might be experiencing depression. Combine this fatigue with difficulty concentrating and difficulty making decisions, and life gets to be just too overwhelming.

For example, an individual may make decisions all day at work or work hard to focus in class, and then finally get home—only to decide what to have for dinner. Decisional fatigue caused by depression can mean that this person is so exhausted from their day that they skip dinner because they couldn't make one more decision.

4. Depression is physical, not just mental

As mentioned earlier, depression can cause fatigue and difficulty concentrating. There can also be changes to sleep and appetite. For some people, depression can cause insomnia while others may sleep 10 to 12 hours a day and still feel tired. And, those suffering from depression may experience an increase or a decrease in appetite.

Depression can also manifest in a slowness, either cognitive or physical—walking more slowly, feeling as if you are weighed down or moving through water. Some people even describe it as if they have weights on their feet.

5. Depression exists on a spectrum

When discussing major depressive disorder, the clinical term for depression, it is important to recognize that individuals can experience it as mild, moderate or severe. Though someone may not be experiencing severe symptoms, this doesn't mean that those symptoms are not worth addressing. And, an individual's experience of depression can fluctuate on this spectrum—making it even more important to address mild symptoms as soon as they arise.

Depression, as with almost anything, can be experienced very individually. One person's manifestation of depression may be completely different from another's. Layers of identities, experiences and cultural pieces affect not only an individual's depression symptoms but also how they communicate those symptoms.

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The study, which appears in the Oct. 10, 2022, issue of JAMA Network Open, raises concerns about how reluctance to accurately report health status and adherence to masking, social distancing, and other public health measures could potentially lengthen the current COVID-19 pandemic or promote the spread of other infectious diseases in the future, according to Angela Fagerlin, Ph.D., senior author of the study and chair of the Department of Population Health Sciences at U of U Health.

"COVID-19 safety measures can certainly be burdensome, but they work," says Andrea Gurmankin Levy, Ph.D., a professor of social sciences at Middlesex Community College in Connecticut. As co-lead author of the study, she worked in collaboration with Fagerlin and other scientists at U of U Heath as well as researchers elsewhere in the United States.

"When people are dishonest about their COVID-19 status or what precautions they are taking, it can increase the spread of disease in their community." Levy says. "For some people, particularly before we had COVID vaccines, that can mean death."

The researchers decided to assess how truthful Americans were being about their COVID-19 disease status and/or compliance with COVID-19 preventive measures after they noticed several media stories about people who were dishonest about their vaccination status, Fagerlin says.

In the survey, conducted in December 2021, more than 1,700 people from across the country were asked to reveal whether they had ever misrepresented their COVID-19 status, vaccination status, or told others that they were following public health measures when they actually weren't. The sample size is far larger and asked about a broader range of behaviors than previous studies on this topic, according to Fagerlin, who is also a research scientist at the Veteran Affairs Salt Lake City Healthcare System.

Screening questions allowed the health service researchers and psychologists who designed the study to evenly divide the participants: one-third who had had COVID-19, one-third who had not had COVID-19 and were vaccinated, and one-third who had not had COVID-19 and were unvaccinated.

Based on a list of nine behaviors, 721 respondents (42%) reported that they had misrepresented COVID-19 status or failed to follow public health recommendations. Some of the most common incidents were:

•     Breaking quarantine rules

•     Telling someone they were with, or were about to see, that they were taking more COVID-19 precautions than they actually were

•     Not mentioning that they might have had, or knew that they had, COVID-19 when entering a doctor's office

•     Telling someone they were vaccinated when they weren't

•     Saying they weren't vaccinated when they actually were

All age groups younger than 60 years and those who had a greater distrust of science were more likely to engage in misrepresentation and/or misrepresentation than others. About 60% of respondents said that they had sought a doctor's advice for COVID-19 prevention or treatment.

However, the researchers found no association between COVID-19 misrepresentation and political beliefs, political party affiliation, or religion.

"Some individuals may think if they fib about their COVID-19 status once or twice, it's not a big deal," Fagerlin says. "But if, as our study suggests, nearly half of us are doing it, that's a significant problem that contributes to prolonging the pandemic."

Among the reasons respondents gave for misrepresentation were:

•     I didn't think COVID-19 was real, or it was no big deal

•     It's no one else's business

•     I didn't feel sick

•     I was following the advice of a celebrity or other public figure

•     I couldn't miss work to stay home

Among the study's limitations, the researchers could not determine if respondents honestly answered survey questions, opening the possibility that their findings underestimated how commonly people misrepresented their health status.

"This study goes a long way toward showing us what concerns people have about the public health measures implemented in response to the pandemic and how likely they are to be honest in the face of a global crisis," says Alistair Thorpe, Ph.D., co-first author and a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Population Health Sciences at U of U Health. "Knowing that will help us better prepare for the next wave of worldwide illness."

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Does humanity finally understand the Universe?

The formation of cosmic structure, on both large scales and small scales, is highly dependent on how dark matter and normal matter interact. Despite the indirect evidence for dark matter, we’d love to be able to detect it directly, which is something that can only happen if there’s a non-zero cross-section between normal matter and dark matter. There’s no evidence for that, nor for a changing relative abundance between dark and normal matter. (Credit: Illustris Collaboraiton/Illustris Simulation)

We’ve identified the particles, forces, and interactions underpinning reality.

On the right, the gauge bosons, which mediate the three fundamental quantum forces of our Universe, are illustrated. There is only one photon to mediate the electromagnetic force, there are three bosons mediating the weak force, and eight mediating the strong force. This suggests that the Standard Model is a combination of three groups: U(1), SU(2), and SU(3). (Credit: Daniel Domingues/CERN)

Our cosmic history — past, present, and future — was finally determined.

Artist’s logarithmic scale conception of the observable universe. The Solar System gives way to the Milky Way, which gives way to nearby galaxies which then give way to the large-scale structure and the hot, dense plasma of the Big Bang at the outskirts. Each line-of-sight that we can observe contains all of these epochs, but the quest for the most distant observed object will not be complete until we’ve mapped out the entire Universe. (Credit: Pablo Carlos Budassi)

However, numerous puzzles remain, including these five.

In the far future, it’s conceivable that all of the matter and energy presently contained within our expanding Universe will wind up in a single location owing to a reversal of the expansion. If this occurs, our Universe’s fate is that we’ll end in a Big Crunch: the opposite of the Big Bang. This, fortunately or unfortunately, dependent on your perspective, is not supported by any of the evidence we possess. (Credit: geralt/Pixabay)

1.) How did the Universe begin?

From a pre-existing state, inflation predicts that a series of universes will be spawned as inflation continues, with each one being completely disconnected from every other one, separated by more inflating space. One of these “bubbles,” where inflation ended, gave birth to our Universe some 13.8 billion years ago, where our entire visible Universe is just a tiny portion of that bubble’s volume. Each individual bubble is disconnected from all of the others, and each place where inflation ends gives rise to its own hot Big Bang. (Credit: Nicolle Rager Fuller)

Cosmic inflation set up and preceded the hot Big Bang.

Our entire cosmic history is theoretically well-understood, but only qualitatively. It’s by observationally confirming and revealing various stages in our Universe’s past that must have occurred, like when the first stars and galaxies formed, and how the Universe expanded over time, that we can truly come to understand our cosmos. The relic signatures imprinted on our Universe from an inflationary state before the hot Big Bang give us a unique way to test our cosmic history, but even this framework has fundamental limitations. (Credit: Nicole Rager Fuller/National Science Foundation)

The supporting observational evidence, however, leaves much undetermined.

The fluctuations in the CMB are based on primordial fluctuations produced by inflation. In particular, the ‘flat part’ on large scales (at left) have no explanation without inflation. The flat line represents the seeds from which the peak-and-valley pattern will emerge over the first 380,000 years of the Universe, and is just a few percent lower on the right (small-scale) side than the (large-scale) left side. (Credit: NASA/WMAP science team)

What “type” of inflation occurred? What preceded and/or caused inflation?

The quantum fluctuations that occur during inflation get stretched across the Universe and when inflation ends, they become density fluctuations. This leads, over time, to the large-scale structure in the Universe today, as well as the fluctuations in temperature observed in the CMB. New predictions like these are essential for demonstrating the validity of a proposed fine-tuning mechanism, and to test (and potentially rule out) alternatives.

(Credit: E. Siegel; ESA/Planck and the DOE/NASA/NSF Interagency Task Force on CMB research)

Providing answers requires new, unprecedented data.

The contribution of gravitational waves left over from inflation to the B-mode polarization of the Cosmic Microwave background has a known shape, but its amplitude is dependent on the specific model of inflation. These B-modes from gravitational waves from inflation have not yet been observed, but detecting them would help us tremendously in pinning down precisely what type of inflation occurred. (Credit: Planck Science Team)

2.) What explains neutrino mass?

This diagram displays the structure of the standard model (in a way that displays the key relationships and patterns more completely, and less misleadingly, than in the more familiar image based on a 4×4 square of particles). In particular, this diagram depicts all of the particles in the Standard Model (including their letter names, masses, spins, handedness, charges, and interactions with the gauge bosons: i.e., with the strong and electroweak forces). It also depicts the role of the Higgs boson, and the structure of electroweak symmetry breaking, indicating how the Higgs vacuum expectation value breaks electroweak symmetry, and how the properties of the remaining particles change as a consequence. Neutrino masses remain unexplained. (Credit: Latham Boyle and Mardus/Wikimedia Commons)

Neutrinos were originally massless within the Standard Model.

The neutrino is an intriguing and interesting particle. This infographic lays out some of the neutrino’s basic stats alongside fun facts.

(Credit: Diana Brandonisio/DOE/Fermilab)

Observations indicate non-zero masses: neutrinos oscillate while interacting with matter.

Vacuum oscillation probabilities for electron (black), muon (blue) and tau (red) neutrinos for a chosen set of mixing parameters. An accurate measurement of the mixing probabilities over different length baselines can help us understand the physics behind neutrino oscillations, and could reveal the existence of any other types of particles that couple to the three known species of neutrino. (Credit: Strait/Wikimedia Commons)

Are neutrinos Dirac or Majorana particles? Are there heavy, sterile neutrino species?

A neutrino event, identifiable by the rings of Cerenkov radiation that show up along the photomultiplier tubes lining the detector walls, showcase the successful methodology of neutrino astronomy and leveraging the use of Cherenkov radiation. This image shows multiple events, and is part of the suite of experiments paving our way to a greater understanding of neutrinos. (Credit: Super-Kamiokande Collaboration)

Their nature could break the Standard Model.

This cutaway illustration shows the path of neutrinos in the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. A proton beam is produced in Fermilab’s accelerator complex (improved by the PIP-II project). The beam hits a target, producing a neutrino beam that travels through a particle detector at Fermilab, then through 800 miles (1,300 km) of earth, and finally reaches the far detectors at Sanford Underground Research Facility. (Credit: DOE/Fermilab)

3.) Why is our Universe matter-dominated?

The colliding galaxy cluster “El Gordo,” the largest one known in the observable Universe, showing the same evidence of dark matter and normal matter as other colliding clusters. There is practically no room for antimatter in this or at the interface of any known galaxies or galaxy clusters, severely constraining its possible presence in our Universe. (Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Jee (Univ. of California, Davis), J. Hughes (Rutgers Univ.), F. Menanteau (Rutgers Univ. & Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), C. Sifon (Leiden Obs.), R. Mandelbum (Carnegie Mellon Univ.), L. Barrientos (Univ. Catolica de Chile), and K. Ng (Univ. of California, Davis))

More matter than antimatter permeates the Universe.

Through the examination of colliding galaxy clusters, we can constrain the presence of antimatter from the emissions at the interfaces between them. In all cases, there is less than 1-part-in-100,000 antimatter in these galaxies, consistent with its creation from supermassive black holes and other high-energy sources. There is no evidence for cosmically abundant antimatter. (Credit: G. Steigman, JCAP, 2008)

However, known physics cannot explain the observed matter-antimatter asymmetry.

The Big Bang produces matter, antimatter, and radiation, with slightly more matter being created at some point, leading to our Universe today. How that asymmetry came about, or arose from where there was no asymmetry to start, is still an open question, but we can be confident that the excess of up-and-down quarks over their antimatter counterparts is what enabled protons and neutrons to form in the early Universe in the first place. (Credit: E. Siegel/Beyond the Galaxy)

Fundamental symmetry violations — and LHCb experiments — could explain baryogenesis.

Parity, or mirror-symmetry, is one of the three fundamental symmetries in the Universe, along with time-reversal and charge-conjugation symmetry. If particles spin in one direction and decay along a particular axis, then flipping them in the mirror should mean they can spin in the opposite direction and decay along the same axis. This was observed not to be the case for the weak decays, which are the only interactions known to violate charge-conjugation (C) symmetry, parity (P) symmetry, and the combination (CP) of those two symmetries as well. (Credit: E. Siegel/Beyond the Galaxy)

4.) What is dark matter?

A spiral galaxy like the Milky Way rotates as shown at right, not at left, indicating the presence of dark matter. Not only all galaxies, but clusters of galaxies and even the large-scale cosmic web all require dark matter to be cold and gravitating from very early times in the Universe. (Credit: Ingo Berg/Wikimedia Commons; Acknowledgement: E. Siegel)

It clumps and gravitates, but passes through atoms and light.

The X-ray (pink) and overall matter (blue) maps of various colliding galaxy clusters show a clear separation between normal matter and gravitational effects, some of the strongest evidence for dark matter. The X-rays come in two varieties, soft (lower-energy) and hard (higher-energy), where galaxy collisions can create temperatures exceeding several hundreds of thousands of degrees. (Credit: NASA, ESA, D. Harvey (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland; University of Edinburgh, UK), R. Massey (Durham University, UK), T. Kitching (University College London, UK), and A. Taylor and E. Tittley (University of Edinburgh, UK))

Its indirect evidence is overwhelming; direct searches remain fruitless.

Hall B of LNGS with XENON installations, with the detector installed inside the large water shield. If there’s any non-zero cross section between dark matter and normal matter, not only will an experiment like this have a chance at detecting dark matter directly, but there’s a chance that dark matter will eventually interact with your human body.

(Credit: Roberto Corrieri and Patrick De Perio/INFN)

Its effects are understood, not its underlying cause.

The dark matter structures which form in the Universe (left) and the visible galactic structures that result (right) are shown from top-down in a cold, warm, and hot dark matter Universe. From the observations we have, at least 98%+ of the dark matter must be either cold or warm; hot is ruled out. Observations of many different aspects of the Universe on a variety of different scales all point, indirectly, to the existence of dark matter. (Credit: ITP, University of Zurich)

5.) What is dark energy?

The expected fates of the Universe (top three illustrations) all correspond to a Universe where the matter and energy combined fight against the initial expansion rate. In our observed Universe, a cosmic acceleration is caused by some type of dark energy, which is hitherto unexplained. If your expansion rate continues to drop, as in the first three scenarios, you can eventually catch up to anything. But if your Universe contains dark energy, that’s no longer the case. (Credit: E. Siegel/Beyond the Galaxy)

The Universe’s expansion is accelerating.

While matter (both normal and dark) and radiation become less dense as the Universe expands owing to its increasing volume, dark energy, and also the field energy during inflation, is a form of energy inherent to space itself. As new space gets created in the expanding Universe, the dark energy density remains constant. Note that individual quanta of radiation are not destroyed, but simply dilute and redshift to progressively lower energies, stretching to longer wavelengths and lower energies as space expands.

(Credit: E. Siegel/Beyond the Galaxy)

Its properties indicate a constant, positive spatial energy density.

The far distant fates of the Universe offer a number of possibilities, but if dark energy is truly a constant, as the data indicates, it will continue to follow the red curve, leading to the long-term scenario frequently described here: of the eventual heat death of the Universe. If dark energy evolves with time, a Big Rip or a Big Crunch are still admissible. (Credit: NASA/CXC/M. Weiss)

To advance, understanding the quantum vacuum is mandatory.

As illustrated here, particle-antiparticle pairs normally pop out of the quantum vacuum as a consequences of Heisenberg uncertainty. In the presence of a strong enough electric field, however, these pairs can be ripped apart in opposite directions, causing them to be unable to reannihilate and forcing them to become real: at the expense of energy from the underlying electric field. We do not understand why the zero-point energy of space has the non-zero value that it does. (Credit: Derek B. Leinweber)

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So it may be no surprise to learn many children have been affected by anxiety during the pandemic, especially while under lockdown.

Our research shows some families were particularly vulnerable. Those who experienced financial strain, poor quality housing, loneliness, pre-existing mental health problems, and couple conflict reported worse child and parent mental health over time.

Families and children who have struggled during the pandemic may need additional support in settling back into "COVID-normal" life.

So what are the signs of anxiety to look for in a child, and how can you best support a child experiencing anxiety?

How to recognize child anxiety

Signs vary from child to child, and by age, but may include:

•     avoiding situations or activities that were previously achievable (for example, refusing to go to a once beloved dance or sport activity)

•     changes in emotion regulation (for example, an increase in anger or irritability)

•     regressions such as wetting, nail biting, and/or clingy behavior

•     physical symptoms such as headaches, tummy aches, and/or fatigue

•     disruptions to everyday living, such as poor concentration, sleep, and/or appetite.

Clinically, we would consider:

•     the frequency of each behavior (how often you notice it)

•     the severity (how disruptive or impactful it has been), and

•     the length of time you have noticed the symptoms.

Many young people have an anxious day in response to a change or transition, such as starting at a new school. But fewer would experience concerns consistently for more than two weeks.

Treatment for child anxiety

Start a conversation: parents may be afraid that talking about their child's feelings will make the situation worse, but this is rarely the case. Talking about feelings usually helps children let them go. Talking also helps children regulate their emotions.

If your child is struggling and you're worried they're experiencing signs of anxiety, it's worth talking to a professional to get them early support.

In Australia, there are three pathways.

First, you can speak to your GP to organize a referral for your child to see a private psychologist. Your GP may write your child a mental health care plan, which provides up to ten rebated sessions per year. In other words, a portion of the psychologist fees would be covered by Medicare.

Second, you can speak to your child's early education or school teacher to access assessment and support.

Third, when symptoms are severe, you can contact your local child and adolescent mental health service for advice and possibly treatment. (Click the name of your state or territory to find out what's available in your area: Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia, Western Australia, Northern territory, Queensland, Tasmania, Australian Capital Territory).

The pandemic has placed strain on health services, and there are often long wait-lists to see psychologists and other specialists.

While you're waiting, we recommend having a look at evidence-based online support, and making sure the basics for symptom relief are in place.

•     Online support for kids can be found at:

•     BRAVE (a program for children 8–17 years experiencing anxiety)

•     Youth moodgym (an interactive self-help book to prevent and manage symptoms of depression and anxiety)

•     BITE BACK (a program to increase well-being and prevent depression and anxiety for adolescents aged 13–16 years).

Online support for parents can be found at:

•     Tuning in to Kids (parenting program focused on the emotional connection between parents/carers and their children, from toddlers to teens)

•     Partners in Parenting (a program designed to help you raise your teenager 12–17 years to prevent depression and anxiety)

•     Circle Of Security Parenting (a program to improve the development of children by strengthening the parent-child attachment, 0–12 years)

•     Triple P—Positive Parenting Program (programs to educate parents to prevent and treat behavioral and emotional problems).

Basic symptom relief for anxiety

There are lots of things you can try to help relieve your child's anxiety.

1. Make sure they're getting enough sleep and daily physical activity

Guidelines show children aged 5–17 years need between nine and 11 hours of sleep and at least an hour of exercise per day.

2. Ensure they're eating well

Research shows links between some foods and mental health, so make sure your child has a variety of fresh vegetables, fruit, legumes, and protein every day.

3. Help your child connect with friends

Social connections are important for healthy child development, improving well-being and decreasing symptoms of anxiety and depression. Supporting your child to remain connected and engaged with peers is critical.

4. A slow, gradual return to the situations your child fears

Lockdowns may have made it hard for some children to return to the busy, bustling and potentially overwhelming environments such as school or a stimulating extracurricular activity. If a child is struggling, it helps to plan for gradual return at a slow, controlled rate.

Parents and caregivers are important people in kids' lives, even when kids become teens. Being available to listen without judgment (and without trying to problem-solve) can help your child process their feelings, and build trust in their own ability to cope.

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With 5G broadband networks still being rolled out worldwide, the US and China are racing for supremacy in next-generation 6G, with significant implications for future warfighting.

An August report by the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) notes that China is following a centralized command model in applying 6G technology to military purposes. On the other side, the US is relying more on enabling lower levels of command and operators to take the initiative to make critical decisions.

The IISS report says that 6G technology may play a key role in China’s hypersonic weapons program, including in solving the current communication blackout at hypersonic speeds.

In January, South China Morning Post reported that Chinese researchers had developed a 6G laser device that can penetrate the signal-blocking plasma layer on the surface of missiles in hypersonic flight. The report also noted that the breakthrough has other military applications, such as detecting stealth aircraft or high-speed space communications.

Apart from 6G’s potential application in China’s hypersonic weapons program, the report mentions that the technology can improve space-based surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities, turbocharge data processing and enable more devices to be connected across multiple frequencies.

It also says that integrating AI and machine learning across 6G applications can allow the military to leverage big data to improve decision-making, defense mobilization, and command and control. 6G could also provide virtual and extended reality training for military personnel.

Asia Times has reported that China’s fighter pilot training has been criticized as heavily scripted and dependent on ground control, which prevents pilots from taking the initiative or making decisions on the fly to adapt to rapidly changing battlefield conditions. However, 6G technology could significantly improve China’s fighter pilot training, providing more realistic and unpredictable scenarios that accurately mirror real-life combat situations.

6G applications could improve China’s fighter pilot training. Photo: eng.chinamil.com.cn

While the IISS report mentions that China’s military approach to 6G mirrors that of the US, it notes that the US has a more human-centric approach, viewing it as an enabling technology for operators and lower levels of command to cope with battlefield uncertainty and take the initiative in decision-making.

It also says that the US aims to leverage 6G to organize data between itself and its allies to increase processing speed.

The IISS report also mentions that the US views 6G as a leapfrog technology that will help it maintain its military edge, emphasizing at-scale prototyping and experimentation for its development, alongside collaboration with industry leaders, other government agencies and international partners.

In this regard, the US-South Korea partnership on critical and emerging technologies such as 6G could be significant. According to IDTechEX, South Korea’s flagship tech firm, Samsung, has ten times more 5G-related patents than the next ten patentors combined and is likewise investing heavily in 6G and the leading-edge chips that will drive the technology.

The contrast between China’s centralized but rigid and the US’s hands-off but less coherent approaches to developing 6G technology for military purposes also extends to their research bases. The IISS report notes that China’s state-centric approach to developing 6G enables it to channel all its resources under direct government control to influence and manipulate global standards-setting.

The report notes that this statist approach has helped China to build its telecoms industry from being a negligible player in the 1980s to a position of advantage in 5G telecoms, providing a solid base for 6G technology and undercutting competitor costs by as much as 30%. However, the report notes that China faces significant constraints in developing 6G technology, such as reliance on foreign inputs, US sanctions and export controls.

In contrast, the IISS states that the US has not prioritized the development of next-generation telecom networks to the extent of China, notably in developing 5G infrastructure and services.

Although the IISS report mentions the long-term erosion of the US telecoms industry, it also highlights the US strength in innovation and that US firms are well-positioned in 6G-enabling technologies such as software and semiconductors. It also mentions that the US is adopting a state-centric approach in developing critical strategic technologies to regain its lost momentum, potentially taking note of China’s advantages with this approach.

In the US context, a state-led method involves establishing partnerships with allies and partner nations to accelerate technology development to leverage US strengths and exclude China.

The report also cautions against a global network infrastructure standards conflict resulting from the diverging interests of China and the US, alongside the rollout of next-generation telecoms technology to third-party markets.

Asia Times has previously reported that China is gradually catching up with US leadership in establishing technological standards while noting that politicizing them risks fragmenting global standards and disrupting trade and innovation.

Besides China and the US, the EU, Japan and others are implementing international standards, meaning a US or China standards monopoly will be difficult, if not implausible.

The China-US race for 6G supremacy cuts across various fields ranging from defense and security, economics, politics and even society.

US and China are locked in a race for technological supremacy that will define the course of the 21st century. Image: Facebook / PIME Asia News

But even as the rival superpowers seek to leverage 6G for a new military edge, the decisive factor may be which of the two can provide 6G technology as a global public good, cementing its legitimacy as a global technology leader.

Just as the US dollar became the de facto currency for international trade and cemented US dominance in the global financial system, widespread adaptation of either Chinese or US 6G technology may establish either superpower as the center of the technology-driven Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Alternatively, the ongoing race for 6G and technology standards conflict could result in a bifurcated global internet with China controlling one side and the US the other.

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The Neanderthals have won a Nobel prize. Well, almost. Even if most people haven’t heard of Svante Pääbo, the Swedish geneticist whose work on ancient genomes and human evolution has landed him with 2022’s award for physiology or medicine, or the exact science behind palaeogenomics and ancient DNA, they certainly have heard of Neanderthals.

Honouring his contribution to building this incredibly vibrant field of palaeogenomics, the award is much deserved: you need vision, persistence and pioneering methods to recover and sequence immensely old, fragile genetic material. But it’s also a recognition of the astonishing revelations about our deep history that have come from palaeogenomics, which holds many untapped secrets about who we are today, including settling the long-debated question of whether Neanderthals and Homo sapiens ever encountered each other and, let’s say, “warmed up” those icy tundra nights (the answer is yes, many times).

For research communities, the prize also feels like a recognition of the relevance of work on palaeogenomics, human origin and archaeology more broadly – and its continuing importance. Research in the 21st century on our hominin relations, including Neanderthals, is an entirely interdisciplinary, collaborative endeavour. All kinds of material analyses take place, in all sorts of ways. We use photogrammetry or lasers to record entire caves in 3D; trace how stone tools were moved across the land; examine microlayers within ancient hearths; even pick out the starches preserved in grot between ancient teeth. And the advent of the ability to retrieve palaeogenomics from extraordinarily old contexts was nothing short of revolutionary. Today, DNA can be extracted not only from bones, but even from cave sediments: the dust of long vanished lives, waiting for millennia to be found. It has made it possible to assess individual Neanderthals’ genetic profiles, and has opened windows into previously invisible population histories and interactions.

More than a decade on from the first big findings, today there is a huge community of palaeogenomics researchers, in large part thanks to Pääbo, with many having trained with him. Among the younger generations at the front end of the sampling, processing and analytical work – who may be the first to make and recognise key new discoveries – many are women. They include Mateja Hajdinjak of the Crick Institute whose work has identified complex patterns of interbreeding among Neanderthals and the earliest Homo sapiens in Europe, and Samantha Brown from the University of Tübingen, whose meticulous work on unidentifiable bone scraps found the only known first-generation hybrid, a girl whose mother was Neanderthal and father Denisovan (closely related hominins from eastern Eurasia). Alongside wielding scientific clout, they are overturning outdated ideas that the “hard sciences” of statistics and white coats (or, in palaeogenomics, full-body protection) are male domains.

As an incredibly fast-moving field, palaeogenomics has achieved an enormous amount in a relatively short space of time. Innovative approaches are constantly being developed, and it must be admitted, even for those of us working in human origins, that keeping up with new methods and jargon can be challenging. The rapidity of advances, especially in competitive academic contexts, has also led to a number of ethical issues. While many are being tackled, the direction of some research may soon force the field to lay out official standards and draw ethical red lines when, for example, reconstructing the brains of Neanderthals using genetic engineering.

Ultimately, while decoding ancient hominin genomes has allowed us to identify which inherited genes we have today – hence the physiology or medicine element of the Nobel prize – the recognition of Pääbo’s work seems more about much deeper themes, resonating with something of a Neanderthal zeitgeist. Since the discovery of their fossils more than 165 years ago, science has been engaged in dethroning Homo sapiens, demoting us from special creations to something still marvellous but not entirely unique.

Palaeogenomics bolstered this vision of an Earth that hosted many sorts of human, at least five of which were still walking around just 40,000 years ago; translate that figure to a generational scale, and you’d see a chain of just 2,000 people linking hands. Ancient DNA has confirmed that we are both embedded within a rich history of hominin diversity, and that we still embody that history ourselves. Alongside the genetic material we acquired “sideways” through interbreeding with Neanderthals and other species, a recent study found that less than 10% of our genome is distinctive to Homo sapiens, evolved uniquely in us.

Most strikingly, popular understanding has shifted too. While some still drag out “Neanderthal” as a slur, it now seems somewhat abstracted from general public views. The archaeological evidence for Neanderthals’ complex, sophisticated minds, with genetic revelations of how close we really are to them, has transformed opinion on who they were, and what that means for us. The knowledge that the very stuff of Neanderthals is still present today – in each human heart, thumping with fear or joy – has forged a new emotional connection not just to them, but to all our other hominin relations. It also underlines the fact that they, and we, have always been part of a planetary web of life.

The most profound legacy of Pääbo’s establishment of palaeogenomics is, or should be, humility. Because it turns out that many of the earliest Homo sapiens populations entering Eurasia eventually shared the same fate as the Neanderthals they met and mingled with. Their lineages vanished, culturally but also genetically, leaving behind no descendants among living humans. Perhaps the greatest inheritance they left us is understanding that our story is not one of predestined, exceptional success, but a blend of serendipity and coincidence; and that being the last hominin standing is not necessarily something to be proud of.

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The trial’s primary analysis found that colonoscopy only cut colon cancer risk by roughly a fifth, far below past estimates of the test’s efficacy, and didn’t provide any significant reduction in colon cancer mortality. Gastroenterologists, including Bretthauer, reacted to the trial’s results with a mixture of shock, disappointment, and even some mild disbelief.

“This is a landmark study. It’s the first randomized trial showing outcomes of exposing people to colonoscopy screening versus no colonoscopy. And I think we were all expecting colonoscopy to do better,” said Samir Gupta, a gastroenterologist at the University of California, San Diego and the VA who didn’t work on the trial. And, he said, it raises an uncomfortable question for doctors. “Maybe colonoscopy isn’t as good as we always thought it is.”

He stressed that the study does not invalidate colonoscopies as a useful screening tool. Colonoscopies are still a good test, Gupta said, but it may be time to reevaluate their standing as the gold standard of colon cancer screens. “This study provides clear data,” he said, “that it’s not as simple as saying, ‘Colonoscopy is the most sensitive test, and therefore it is the best.’ It still prevented cancers.”

Colonoscopies search for pre-cancerous polyps, known as adenomas, by inserting a camera up the rectum. If the endoscopist discovers a suspicious polyp, then it’s promptly removed, thus nipping the cancer before it spreads. Past research always showed that colonoscopy could put a huge dent, on the order of 70%, in the incidence and mortality from colon cancer.

But none of those studies were large randomized trials, the ultimate experiment in clinical research. So Bretthauer, of the University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, and several colleagues started one a decade ago, recruiting more than 80,000 people aged 55 to 64 in Poland, Norway, and Sweden to test if colonoscopy was truly as good as they all believed. Roughly 28,000 of the participants were randomly selected to receive an invitation to get a colonoscopy, and the rest went about their usual care, which did not include regular colonoscopy screening.

The researchers then kept track of colonoscopies, colon cancer diagnoses, colon cancer deaths, and deaths from any cause. After 10 years, the researchers found that the participants who were invited to colonoscopy had an 18% reduction in colon cancer risk but were no less likely to die from colon cancer than those who were never invited to screening. Of the participants who were invited to colonoscopy, only 42% actually did one. The team published their findings in the New England Journal of Medicine on Sunday.

The results are incongruent with some past investigations in other colon cancer screens. “We know from other screening tests that we can reduce cancer mortality by more than this,” said Jason Dominitz, the executive director of the national gastroenterology and hepatology program at the VA who wrote an accompanying editorial in NEJM and didn’t work on the trial. Sigmoidoscopy, which only examines a smaller portion of the colon, has been shown to reduce colon cancer mortality in randomized studies, Dominitz pointed out. “Colonoscopy is sigmoidoscopy and more, so you’d think it can’t be less effective than sigmoidoscopy,” he said.

But nuances abound in interpreting the data, Dominitz said. For one, a minority of participants who were invited to colonoscopy actually showed up for one. That may have diluted the observed benefits of colonoscopy in the study. Cancer treatment has also progressed over the last couple of decades, too, and the study only had 10 years of follow-up thus far, both of which would make it harder to see a mortality benefit from the screen. “They’re doing a 15-year follow, and I would expect to see a significant reduction in cancer mortality in the long term,” Dominitz said. “Time will tell.”

Even if cancer therapy has progressed to the point where a 15-year follow-up fails to eke out a mortality reduction, UCSD’s Gupta pointed out that preventing cancer nonetheless can have a great benefit. The study still showed that colonoscopies reduced cancer incidence, which also means a reduction in surgeries, chemotherapies, immunotherapies, and other bad times. “The process of being treated is awful,” Gupta said. “If you ask patients if you’d rather be treated or prevented, a lot would say prevented.”

A secondary analysis also offers another silver lining, Gupta said. When the investigators compared just the 42% of participants in the invited group who actually showed up for a colonoscopy to the control group, they saw about a 30% reduction in colon cancer risk and a 50% reduction in colon cancer death. “That adds to a bunch of observational study data that suggests exposing people to colonoscopy can reduce risk of developing and dying of colon cancer,” Gupta said.

But the secondary analysis isn’t as robust as the primary or intention-to-treat analysis. “The intention-to-treat analysis is the premium methodology, the analysis you put all your trust in,” Oslo’s Bretthauer said. That’s led him to consider that he and everyone else in the colon cancer field may have been wrong about how useful colonoscopy truly is.

“It’s not the magic bullet we thought it was,” he said. “I think we may have oversold colonoscopy. If you look at what the gastroenterology societies say, and I’m one myself so these are my people, we talked about 70, 80, or even 90% reduction in colon cancer if everyone went for colonoscopy. That’s not what these data show.”

Rather, he said, colonoscopy screening’s true benefit may lie somewhere in between the primary and secondary analyses in his study. “You may reduce your risk of getting colorectal cancer by 20 to 30% if you get a colonoscopy,” Bretthauer said. That brings it more in line with the other main colorectal cancer tests, which analyze feces for signs of cancer, either abnormal DNA or blood, and can be taken at home.

That raises an important point for policymakers, Bretthauer added. Colonoscopy is more expensive, more time-intensive, and more unpleasant in preparation for patients. Many European countries balked at putting public health dollars towards a large, expensive program, he said, when the fecal testing was cheaper, easier, and had greater uptake in certain studies. “Now, the European approach makes much more sense. It’s not only cheaper, but maybe equally effective,” Bretthauer said.

That, too, is being put to the test. Gupta, Dominitz, and others are working on large randomized trials that pit colonoscopy against fecal screens.

This study may not change the calculus very much for any individual patient, though, Gupta said. In the end, which colon cancer screening you decide to go with is a matter of personal preference. “The first message is that screening saves lives and prevents cancer. If we could have a chance to start everyone at age 45, I’d like that. Second is you have many options,” he said. “Someone who says, ‘I’m way too busy, can’t take 2 days off of work for a colonoscopy.’ OK, we have stool-based options.”

But for someone who just wants to be screened once every 10 years rather than every 1 or 2 and wants the most sensitive test, Gupta said, then colonoscopy is still king.

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Monday, October 10

The first launch this week will be a Soyuz 2.1b carrying a GLONASS-K navigation satellite for the Russian space agency Roscosmos. The GLONASS-K satellite is the third generation of the GLONASS satellites and offers similar functionality to GPS and Galileo. This upgrade comes with an increased lifespan of 10-12 years and includes KOSPAS-SARSAT international search-and-rescue instruments. The launch will take place at 2:52 a.m. UTC from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome.

The second and final launch on Monday is an RS1 rocket being launched by ABL Space Systems. It will be launching on its first test flight with two CubeSat payloads for OMNITEQ. The satellites are called VariSat 1A and 1B and are test satellites for OMNITEQ’s Orbital Test Range Constellation. While SpaceX works on reusable rockets, ABL Space Systems has focused on being able to get a launch off the ground at short notice. The RS1 rocket doesn’t require fixed infrastructure and can be launched at one week’s notice. This mission will take off from Kodiak, Alaska, at 10:00 p.m. UTC.

Wednesday, October 12

On Wednesday, Russia is expected to launch a Proton M rocket carrying the AngoSat 2 comms satellite for Angola. The satellite will replace AngoSat 1 which unexpectedly failed after launch. It’s not clear what time this mission will be taking off, but it’ll launch from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Thursday, October 13

The final launch of the week is expected to be a SpaceX Falcon 9 carrying a Hotbird 13F television broadcasting satellite that will broadcast to Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. The mission is due to take off at 3:25 a.m. from Cape Canaveral in Florida and will be streaming on SpaceX’s website.

Recap

The first launch last week was an Atlas V carrying the SES-20 and SES-21 satellites. They will provide television broadcasting services.

Next, SpaceX launched the Crew-5 mission carrying four astronauts to the International Space Station.

On the same day, SpaceX launched another Falcon 9 but carrying 52 Starlink satellites instead.

A day after the crew launched, they disembarked from the Crew Dragon and entered the ISS.

On Friday, Rocket Lab launched an Electron rocket carrying the Argos-4 satellite, which will help to learn more about Earth's ecosystems.

Also on Friday, a Long March 11 launched from a sea platform in the Yellow Sea carrying two CentiSpace-1 satellites which will be used for satellite navigation augmentation.

Saturday saw the launch of a Falcon 9 carrying the Intelsat Galaxy 33 and Galaxy 34 satellites, which will be used for communications.

Finally, a Long March 2D was launched carrying the Advanced Space-based Solar Observatory which will observe the Sun.

That’s all we have for you this week, check back next week!

TWIRL 86: ABL Space Systems set for RS1 maiden flight

A vision of a future Moon settlement assembled from semi-buried inflatable habitats. Sited beside the lunar poles in regions of near-perpetual solar illumination, mirrors positioned above each habitat would reflect sunlight into greenhouses within the doughnut-shaped habitats. Credit: Pneumocell

This artist’s concept depicts a vision of a future Moon settlement assembled from semi-buried inflatable habitats. They would be located near the lunar poles in regions of near-perpetual solar illumination. Mirrors positioned above each habitat would reflect sunlight into greenhouses within the doughnut-shaped habitats.

Pneumocell in Austria, an inflatable structures specialist, performed a system study of an inflatable lunar habitat, based on prefabricated ultralight structures.

Once inflated, these habitats would be buried under 4-5 m (13-16 feet) of lunar regolith for protection from radiation and micrometeorites. A truss holding a mirror membrane would be erected above each habitat. It would be designed to rotate to follow the Sun throughout the sky. Sunlight from the mirror would be directed down through an artificial crater, from which another cone-shaped mirror reflects it into the surrounding greenhouse.

The study was supported through the Discovery element of ESA’s Basic Activities. It came about after Pneumocell submitted their idea to the Agency’s Open Space Innovation Platform, OSIP, seeking out promising ideas for space research from all possible sources.

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In Becky Chambers' 2019 novella "To Be Taught, If Fortunate," a massive solar storm wipes out Earth's internet, leaving a group of astronauts stranded in space with no way to phone home. It's a terrifying prospect, but could a solar storm knock out the internet in real life? And if so, how likely is that to happen?

Yes, it could happen, but it would take a giant solar storm, Mathew Owens, a solar physicist at the University of Reading in the U.K., told Live Science. "You would really need some huge event to do that, which is not impossible," Owens said. "But I would think that knocking out power grids is more likely."

In fact, this phenomenon has already happened on a small scale.

Solar storms, also known as space weather, occur when the sun releases an intense burst of electromagnetic radiation. This disturbance throws off waves of energy that travel outward, impacting other bodies in the solar system, including Earth. When the wayward electromagnetic waves interact with Earth's own magnetic field, they have a couple of effects.

The first is that they cause electric currents to flow in Earth's upper atmosphere, heating the air "just like how your electric blanket works," Owens said.

These geomagnetic storms can create beautiful auroras to appear over polar regions, but they can also disrupt radio signals and GPS. What's more, as the atmosphere heats, it puffs up like a marshmallow, adding extra drag to satellites in low Earth orbit and knocking smaller pieces of space junk off course.

Space weather's other impact is more terrestrial. As powerful electric currents flow through our planet's upper atmosphere, they induce powerful currents that flow through the crust as well. This can interfere with electrical conductors sitting on top of the crust, such as power grids — the network of transmission lines that carry electricity from generating stations to homes and buildings. The result is localized power outages that can be difficult to fix; one such event struck Quebec on March 13, 1989, resulting in a 12-hour blackout, according to NASA (opens in new tab). More recently, a solar flare knocked out 40 Starlink satellites when SpaceX failed to check the space weather forecast, Live Science previously reported.

Luckily, taking out a few Starlink satellites isn't enough to mess up global internet access. In order to take down the internet entirely, a solar storm would need to interfere with the ultra-long fiber optic cables that stretch beneath the oceans and link continents. Every 30 to 90 miles (50 to 145 kilometers), these cables are equipped with repeaters that help boost their signal as it travels. While the cables themselves aren't vulnerable to geomagnetic storms, the repeaters are. And if one repeater goes out, it could be enough to take down the entire cable, and if enough cables went offline, it could cause an "internet apocalypse," Live Science previously reported.

A global internet blackout would be potentially catastrophic — it would disrupt everything from the supply chain to the medical system to the stock market to individual people's basic ability to work and communicate.

There are a few ways to protect the internet against the next mega solar storm. The first is to shore up power grids, satellites and undersea cables against being overloaded by the influx of current, including failsafes to strategically shut off grids during the solar storm surge.

The second, less expensive way is to work out a better method of predicting solar storms in the long term.

Can we predict solar storms?

Solar storms are also notoriously tricky to predict. In part, they can be "very difficult to pin down," Owens said. "Because while space weather has been going on for thousands of years, the technology that is affected by it has only been around for a few decades."

Current technology can predict solar storms up to two days before they strike Earth based on the activity of sunspots, black patches on the sun's surface that indicate areas of high plasma activity. But scientists cannot track solar storms the way they follow hurricanes. Instead, they turn to other clues, such as where the sun is in its current solar cycle. NASA and the European Space Agency are currently researching ways to make such forecasts using a combination of historical data and more recent observations.

The sun goes through approximately 11-year cycles of higher or lower activity, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (opens in new tab), and its next peak of activity, known as the solar maximum, should be around 2025. However, recent solar maximums have been relatively mild, leading scientists to suspect that our sun may be in a prolonged period of lower activity. "The sun has been fairly quiet since the 90s," said Owens. The last worldwide geomagnetic storm (at least on record) is the so-called "Carrington Event" of 1859, during which auroras were observed as far south as Cuba and Honolulu, Hawaii. Had the internet existed during this event, there's a chance it would have been seriously disrupted.

Hopefully, scientists will be able to find a way to predict or minimize the impact of the next Carrington Event before we find ourselves in an internet-less future… although, considering the terrible depths of social media, maybe there are worse fates.

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More than half (55%) of remote employees are highly anxious about their finances, according to a recent survey conducted by MetLife, which interviewed 1,000 full-time workers. That’s more than fully in-person or hybrid employees, 46% of whom feel similarly.

For remote workers, the stress is becoming too much to handle. A slight majority (53%) predicted they’ll be at a financial “breaking point” soon. Only 41% of hybrid and in-person workers say the same.

Part of the issue is benefit selection, when employees are deciding headache-inducing things like how much to contribute to their 401(k) plan and what health insurance plan has the best deductible. MetLife found that remote workers spend more time stressing about their benefits than their on-site or hybrid peers.

That might be because they’re dealing with enrollment by themselves, without someone to talk to in person who can explain what such benefits mean. Such conversations could be more confusing over Zoom or Slack. Many noted to MetLife that if they understood the whole enrollment process they’d feel more financially secure.

“During open enrollment, employees have to make decisions on a wide range of benefits, yet on average, people spend 17 or 18 minutes going through open enrollment,” Mona Zielke, senior operations and claim executive at Voya told Fortune in February, pointing out that people usually take more time deciding what show to watch.

But they're also worried about what will happen to them if the economy takes a turn for the worst. Rumblings of economic instability and continuous layoffs have sparked concerns that remote workers will be on the chopping block: 78% of workers in the U.S. fear that remote workers are more likely to lose their jobs if a recession comes, according to GoodHire’s second annual “State of Remote Work” report.

Their concerns about being out of sight, out of mind aren’t coming from nowhere in a workplace where proximity bias still exists; six in 10 managers told Beautiful.AI that they’ll lay off remote workers first in a recession. But it’s worth noting that while layoffs are playing out at big tech companies, job openings are still high, and despite the headlines, there aren’t major signs of mass layoffs coming soon.

If a recession does, hit remote workers will all be in different ships depending on what industry they work in. But even so, many remote employees have the skills that are often in high demand these days, making it slightly easier to find themselves back on their feet if their fears of layoffs are true.

“They have those digital skills as often because that’s what enables them to do their jobs remotely," Layla O’Kane, senior economist at Lightcast told Fortune. "And they often have to work harder in communication and collaboration because they are working remotely.”

Even so, whether it’s benefit selection or anxieties about impending layoffs, remote workers are squirming a bit on their couches.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com[.]

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The definitive research on the topic remains a 2018 paper by psychologists at the University of North Carolina and Harvard Business School.

They identified that there are two types of humblebragger and that the most annoying kind is the complain-bragger. They say things like, “I never have time for myself because my friends want to see me all the time.”

Only marginally less annoying is the humblebragger who deploys false modesty, such as: “I don’t understand why I keep getting hit on”.

Both kinds of humblebragger are seen as less likeable and competent than more straightforward self-promoters, and the key reason is that their complaints and modesty come over as totally fake.

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Already known as being important for properly controlling our movements, it now appears that this brain region also has a key role to play when it comes to remembering positive and negative emotional experiences.

These types of emotional experiences are particularly well remembered by the brain, not least because it helps the survival of our species to be able to remember times when we were in danger and times when we prospered.

The amygdala and hippocampus are the brain regions thought to be most responsible for consolidating these emotional memories, but as the cerebellum is already linked to fear conditioning, the researchers behind the latest study wanted to see if it had a part to play in logging emotional memories too.

"The aim of the present study was to investigate whether the cerebellum and cerebellar–cerebral connections are involved in the phenomenon of superior episodic memory for emotionally arousing visual information," write the researchers in their published paper.

Through brain scans of 1,418 individuals taken through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans as they viewed emotional – some positive, some negative – and neutral images, the team was able to establish that the cerebellum was indeed involved.

The participants in the study remembered positive and negative images much better than the neutral ones, and this enhanced storage capability was linked to times when the cerebellum was more active.

What's more, the researchers also observed a greater level of communication between the cerebellum and the cerebrum, the largest part of the brain. The cerebellum was receiving information from the anterior cingulate cortex (a region key to perceiving and evaluating feelings); it was also relaying information to the amygdala and the hippocampus.

The cerebellum (activation in red) connects with different areas of the cerebrum (activations in green) to enhance the storage of emotional information.

(MCN/University of Basel)

"These results indicate that the cerebellum is an integral component of a network that is responsible for the improved storage of emotional information," says neuroscientist Dominique de Quervain from the University of Basel in Switzerland.

As with any new findings about the neural circuitry inside our heads, these findings could be helpful in showing us how to repair that circuitry when something goes wrong – when memories aren't stored correctly, or if they are perhaps imprinted all too clearly on our minds.

When painful or fearful experiences are too easily brought to mind, for example, that can lead to mental health issues. Rather than acting for our benefit, it actually has a negative impact, and this is something that the new research could eventually be useful with.

"These findings expand knowledge on the role of the cerebellum in complex cognitive and emotional processes and may be relevant for the understanding of psychiatric disorders with aberrant emotional circuitry, such as post-traumatic stress disorder or autism spectrum disorder," write the researchers.

The research has been published in PNAS.

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The giant tree, whose top juts out high above the canopy in the Iratapuru River Nature Reserve in northern Brazil, is an angelim vermelho (scientific name: Dinizia excelsa) measuring 88.5 meters (290 feet) tall and 9.9 meters (32 feet) around – the biggest ever identified in the Amazon, scientists say.

Researchers first spotted the enormous tree in satellite images in 2019 as part of a 3D mapping project.

A team of academics, environmentalists, and local guides mounted an expedition to try to reach it later that year.

But after a 10-day trek through difficult terrain, exhausted, low on supplies, and with a team member falling ill, they had to turn back.

Three more expeditions to the reserve's remote Jari Valley region, which sits at the border between the states of Amapa and Para, reached several other gigantic trees, including the tallest Brazil nut tree ever recorded in the Amazon – 66 meters.

(Imazon/Ideflor/AFP)

But the enormous angelim vermelho remained elusive until the September 12-25 expedition, when researchers traveled 250 kilometers (155 miles) by boat up rivers with treacherous rapids, plus another 20 kilometers on foot across mountainous jungle terrain to reach it.

One person on the 19-member expedition was bitten by what the team doctor believes was a poisonous spider.

But it was worth it, says forest engineer Diego Armando Silva of Amapa Federal University, who helped organize the trip.

"It was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. Just divine," Silva, 33, told AFP.

"You're in the middle of this forest where humankind has never set foot before, with absolutely exuberant nature."

After camping under the massive tree, the group collected leaves, soil, and other samples, which will now be analyzed to study questions including how old the tree is – at least 400 to 600 years, Silva estimates – why the region has so many giant trees, and how much carbon they store.

The tree measures 88.5 meters (290 feet) tall and 9.9 meters (32 feet) around.

(Imazon/Ideflor/AFP)

Around half of the weight of the region's giant trees is carbon absorbed from the atmosphere – fundamental in helping curb climate change, says Silva.

But despite its remoteness, the region's giants are under threat.

Angelim vermelho wood is prized by loggers, and the Iratapuru reserve is being invaded by illegal gold miners infamous for bringing ecological destruction, says Jakeline Pereira of environmental group Imazon, which helped organize the expedition.

"We were so thrilled to make this find," says Pereira.

"It's super important at a time when the Amazon is facing such frightening levels of deforestation."

Over the past three years, average annual deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has increased 75 percent from the previous decade.

© Agence France-Presse

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Researchers have identified a pair of enzymes in wax worm saliva that naturally break down a common form of plastic within a few hours at room temperature.

Polyethylene is among the most widely used plastics in the world, having uses in everything from food containers to shopping bags. Unfortunately, its robustness also makes it a stubbornly persistent pollutant – the polymer needs to be treated with high temperatures to kickstart the degradation process.

Wax worm saliva contains the only enzymes we know of that can work on untreated polyethylene, which makes these naturally occurring proteins potentially rather useful for recycling.

Federica Bertocchini, a molecular biologist and amateur beekeeper, accidentally discovered wax worms have a talent for degrading plastic a few years ago.

"At the end of the season, usually beekeepers put some empty beehives in a storage room, to put them back in the field in the spring," Bertocchini recently told AFP.

"One year I did that, and I found my stored honeycombs plagued with wax worms."

She cleaned the honeycomb and put all the wax worms in a plastic bag. When she came back a short time later, she found the bag "riddled with holes".

Wax worms (Galleria mellonella) are larvae that eventually transform into short-lived wax moths. In the larval stage, the worms make themselves right at home in bee hives where they feed on wax and pollen.

After this chance discovery, Bertocchini and her team at Madrid's Margarita Salas Center for Biological Studies set to work analyzing the wax worm saliva, publishing their findings in Nature Communications.

The researchers used two methods: gel permeation chromatography, which separates molecules based on their size, and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, which identifies fragments of molecules based on their mass-charge ratio.

They confirmed that the saliva did in fact break the long hydrocarbon chains found in polyethylene into small, oxidized chains.

They then used proteomic analyses to identify "a handful of enzymes" in the saliva, two of which were shown to oxidize polyethylene, the researchers write.

The researchers named these enzymes 'Demetra' and 'Ceres', after the ancient Greek and Roman goddesses of agriculture, respectively.

"To the best of our knowledge, these polyethyleneases are the first enzymes capable of producing such modifications on a polyethylene film working at room temperature and in a very short time," the researchers write.

As these two enzymes overcome "the first and most difficult step in the degradation process", they add, the process could represent an "alternative paradigm" for waste management.

Although it's early days in investigations, these enzymes could potentially be mixed with water and poured over plastic in a waste management facility, Bertocchini told AFP. They could be used in remote locations where waste facilities are not available, or even in individual homes.

As promising as their saliva is, wax worms aren't the only organisms known to degrade plastic.

A 2021 study showed that microbes and bacteria in the oceans and the soil were evolving to eat plastic.

In 2016, researchers reported a bacterium at a Japanese waste site that could break down polyethylene terephthalate, also known as PET or polyester. This later inspired scientists to create an enzyme that could quickly break down plastic drink bottles.

Around 400 million metric tons of plastic waste are generated every year worldwide, of which around 30 percent is in the form of polyethylene. Of the 7 billion tons generated by the world to date, only 10 percent has been recycled, leaving the world with a considerable legacy of waste.

Reducing consumption and reusing materials will undoubtedly limit the impact plastic waste has on the environment, but having a toolkit for cleaning up our mess could help us get on top of our plastic waste problem.

The new study was published in Nature Communications.

Source

The Sphinx, in the Cairngorms, which is historically the longest-lasting patch of snow in the UK, has melted.

Snow expert Iain Cameron reported on Friday that the famous patch had disappeared in the last 24 hours.

It is the fourth time it has gone in the last six years, having only melted nine times in the past 300 years. Mr Cameron said climate change was a likely factor.

The Sphinx, on remote Braeriach, a 1,296m (4,252ft) Munro, has melted away more frequently in the last 18 years.

According to records, it previously melted fully in 1933, 1959, 1996, 2003, 2006, 2017, 2018, 2021 and now 2022.

Before 1933, it is thought to have last melted completely in the 1700s.

A picture taken on Friday shows the Sphinx snow patch is gone

Mr Cameron tweeted: "So there we have it. It is confirmed that Scotland is snow-free yet again.

"The last patch, the Sphinx, disappeared sometime in the last 24 hours. "

He added: "I'm not a climatologist (nor even an academic), but it's a pretty obvious direction of travel.

"The future for semi-permanent snows in Scotland looks bleak."

Another wonderfully atmospheric day at Garbh Choire Mòr to check whether the last patch of snow in Scotland survived the recent deluges. Amazingly, the Sphinx continues to hang on for dear life. pic.twitter.com/VHEo4DDJNt
    — Iain Cameron (@theiaincameron) October 2, 2022

Just six days ago he had made the climb to check on the patch and described it as "hanging on for dear life."

Mr Cameron, based in Stirling, has been studying snow patches in Scotland for 25 years and is author of the book The Vanishing Ice, which he describes as a "lament" to snow and ice that lingers high in Scotland's hills.

He worked alongside the late Dr Adam Watson, a biologist dubbed Mr Cairngorms because of his many years studying the mountains.

Some of Dr Watson's research on the Sphinx drew on information handed down by generations of people who worked and visited the Cairngorms.

Garbh Choire Mor is usually described as Scotland's snowiest corrie but it is now snow-free

The Scottish Mountaineering Club began noting the fortunes of the patch in the 1840s and more recently scientists and ecologists have gathered information.

Separately from Mr Cameron's research, a report commissioned by Cairngorms National Park Authority and published in July 2020 said declining snow cover, and fewer days when it snowed had been observed on Cairngorm mountain since the winter of 1983-84.

Researchers also noted a trend for increasingly warmer weather since the 1960s, and suggested that by the 2080s there would be some years with very little or no snow at all on Cairngorm.

The Sphinx lies in Garbh Choire Mor, a hollow known as a corrie formed by ice or a glacier during the last ice age.

Garbh Choire Mor is described as Scotland's snowiest corrie because of the amount of snow it can hold even through summer months.

The Sphinx is the name of a climbing route near the snow patch.

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In September, chess world champion Magnus Carlsen accused a younger grandmaster, Hans Niemann, of cheating after losing a game to him in the 2022 Sinquefield Cup. After weeks of speculation, a Chess.com investigation found that Niemann had likely cheated over 100 times in online chess, lending greater credence to Carlsen’s accusation.

While this particular case has captivated the public because of Carlsen’s involvement, as well as rumors about how Niemann might have gained the upper hand, many top players fear that it’s easy to cheat and get away with it.

“There is a great deal of paranoia,” grandmaster Jon Tisdall said in a recent conversation with me on the Second Captains podcast. “And this is the word that the top players use about it. My general view is that all of them suspect some of their colleagues—not necessarily the same ones, and not necessarily for the same things.” This paranoia poses an existential threat to the professional game of chess and must be addressed with changes to how cheating is detected, reported, and investigated by organizers and the governing bodies of chess.

How exactly would someone cheat during a chess game? While there is speculation about the possible use of high-tech gadgets such as this one, or the use of a small vibrating device as was alleged in the case of Borislav Ivanov (who was suspected of hiding a device in his shoe), the most common form of cheating in tournaments is much less glamorous: the use of cell phones in bathrooms. Such was the case of Igors Rausis, who was caught in the 2019 Strasbourg Open Chess tournament when a photograph of him in the bathroom on his cell phone, analyzing his game, leaked. While Rausis admitted to cheating and subsequently announced his retirement from professional chess, FIDE, the international governing body of chess, revoked his grandmaster title and banned him from playing FIDE-rated events for six years.

In another well-known case, several members of the French national team were caught in a complex scheme during the 2010 Chess Olympiad. One player followed a broadcast of the games from a remote location and analyzed them on a computer. He then texted the best moves to the team’s captain, who was present in the playing hall. The team captain then communicated the moves to the player at the board using a convoluted visual code.

Since 2006, when the cheating scandal known as “toiletgate” rocked the chess world, FIDE has used statistician Kenneth Regan’s model to analyze chess games and make determinations about cheating in situations where there is no concrete evidence.

Regan’s model determines the likelihood of cheating by analyzing the moves in a player’s game compared to the expected performance based on their rating. It is not designed to flag anyone who may be cheating, only to catch those who almost certainly have cheated. Such determinations are much easier to make with weaker players. Recently, Regan told ChessBase that there is no reason whatsoever to suspect Hans Niemann of cheating—a verdict now in doubt, given the Chess.com report.

The core issue is that FIDE’s system for handling cheating allegations has as its North Star the idea that a false positive—a case where an innocent player is wrongly accused—should be avoided at all costs because the potential damage to a player’s reputation is severe. FIDE, using Regan’s model, requires certainty of the upper bounds of 99 percent to find a player guilty. In addition, a player who is found to have made a baseless accusation of cheating could have their case sent to the Ethics and Disciplinary Committee, which has at its disposal a wide range of punishments, from warnings to being banned from play altogether. This explains Carlsen’s restrained statements about Niemann: “There is more that I would like to say. Unfortunately, at this time I am limited in what I can say without explicit permission from Niemann to speak openly.”

All this has created a problem: an anti-cheat detection system that may be rife with false negatives and unreported cases. “Personally, I take [the finding from Regan’s model] with a grain of salt,” Canadian grandmaster Eric Hansen said recently on his Youtube channel Chess Brah. “ I think most of the high-level cheating or cheating that could involve high-level players would bypass his model, because his model has to be conservative, understandably.”

Grandmaster Fabiano Caruana, in a recent episode of his new podcast C-Squared, also said he would take Regan’s analysis with a large grain of salt. “The reason why is not because I have any insight into his algorithm or his methods, but because I know of a case of—a very high profile case—where with absolute certainty I can say that someone was cheating in an important event,” Caruana said, “And the person was investigated and was also exonerated based on Regan’s analysis. And I am certain that there was cheating. There is no doubt in my mind that this person was cheating and they got away with it.”

So why did Regan’s model find that Niemann hadn’t cheated, while Chess.com’s did? First, the specific examples of cheating found in the Chess.com report happened in games played on Chess.com’s website and not in over-the-board tournaments, which are held in person. The report explicitly states that it did not find conclusive evidence of cheating in Niemann’s over-the-board play. Regan’s model, on the other hand, is being applied only to over-the-board chess games and is calibrated to operate as a fail-safe mechanism to catch exclusively the most egregious cases.

Plus, online chess sites have a higher volume of games played weekly than over-the-board chess games have in all of recorded history. The resulting data from online games is vast and varied enough to validate inferences that Regan told me he would stop short of making in over-the-board slow chess. For example, the Chess.com model determines the playing tendencies of a particular player, which can be used as a baseline for making a determination about deviations in the quality or style of play.  Regan’s model, however, uses a single baseline from a player of a given rating. 

Not every part of online cheat detection applies to in-person chess. But some factors of Chess.com’s method—such as the practice of reviewing time usage when compared to the difficulty of the moves on the board—map perfectly to the over-the-board format. Such a determination can be made only by other humans comparing the data with the games and drawing conclusions based on their expertise, taking into consideration factors such as clock times and whether the playing style matches the player’s profile. This is what you might call the “secret sauce” of Chess.com’s anti-cheat detection system. While their internal monitoring system may flag lots of players for further investigation, a team of human grandmasters reviewing the play cuts down severely on the number of false positives that are ultimately flagged in their model, and this approach should also be implemented for over-the-board games that are flagged for review.

Given the very ugly feud now playing out in headlines around the world, there is clearly a crisis in the confidence of the current system and a lack of faith in the determinations made by Regan’s model.

Much to their credit, groups like the St. Louis Chess Club are playing a leadership role in prevention. The St. Louis club added measures at the US Chess Championship such as metal detecting wands, radio frequency scanners, and even scanners that check for silicon devices. In addition to that, they have implemented a 30-minute delay on their broadcast.

However, what’s lacking is leadership on how to restore credibility to FIDE’s probabilistic assessment of events and players’ performance over time. FIDE already tracks some statistics in each player’s profile. Given the data already available, it should not be too difficult to increase transparency by adding more information to this existing dashboard—specifically, performance variance versus computer moves, database moves, or player performance variance measured against peers. FIDE could even update its Fair Play review protocols to provide for an automatic review once certain probabilistic thresholds are met, and publish quarterly findings in the aggregate to increase transparency into the process. This would ensure that a very personal and ugly feud like the one playing out in headlines right now would be less likely to happen again.

Players may feel slighted when their play is automatically flagged for review. However, if the process were transparent and credible, being automatically flagged because someone had outperformed their expected playing strength on several metrics would turn into a badge of honor.

Paranoia Threatens to Upend Professional Chess

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At Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport, labor shortages continue to fuel unprecedented chaos that began in the spring, prompting many travelers and aviation insiders to wonder what has happened to an airport long considered one of the most efficient and highly regarded in Europe -- if not the world.

The beleaguered airport -- the world's third busiest for international passenger numbers in 2021 -- has continued to cut flight capacity, infuriating airlines such as KLM, the national carrier of the Netherlands whose hub is at Schiphol. The latest round of cuts asked airlines to implement reductions up to 22% for the winter season -- a "hopeless situation, lacking any perspective," KLM said in a release.

KLM added that the situation is "damaging our reputation among passengers who are keen and willing to travel after the extended Covid crisis." The airline estimates it has incurred more than 100 million euros (about $96 million) in damages as a result.

Over the summer, several airlines, including Air Malta, TUI and Transavia, opted to shift flights from Schiphol to other airports, according to Simple Flying.
Many have placed blame on mismanagement, and on September 15, Dick Benschop, president and CEO of Royal Schiphol Group, announced his resignation. Benschop will remain in place until a successor is found.

Benschop was a keynote speaker at the World Aviation Festival in Amsterdam, a conference attended by about 5,000 aviation industry professionals, where Schiphol's struggles were a common topic of conversation.

Dutch flag carrier KLM said the problems at Schiphol were hurting its reputation.

Artur Widak/NurPhoto/Getty Images

In different presentations across two days, Benschop openly acknowledged Schiphol's "severe operational issues driven by staff shortages." He said management is committed to fixing the problems by providing a "reliable and predictable" passenger experience, improving job conditions and worker pay and working with airlines to build back capacity.

But he also hinted that the challenges aren't over -- a disheartening prospect for passengers with upcoming flights during the fall school break across the Netherlands.

"Those conditions, those labor market constraints, will not disappear overnight," he said. "That's what we are dealing with and how we are dealing with it. And of course for everybody involved, it's extremely hard work. If you let customers down, and there are moments that that really happened, it's extremely frustrating. It's painful. But we will get through it."

During the course of the conference, Schiphol was hit with yet another hurdle when the Dutch parliament announced that it seeks to further limit the airport's yearly maximum number of flight moments from 500,000 to 440,000 to reduce emissions and noise pollution.

Benschop called the potential reduction a "very risky approach." It would hit KLM, Schiphol's largest user, especially hard, as the airline would have to drop about 30 routes to meet the new limits, according to Dutch media outlets including Financieele Dagblad and NL Times. In a statement, KLM said it wants to discuss alternate solutions, such as fleet renewal, with the government.

'Race-to-the-bottom' strategy

Schiphol's CEO Dick Benschop has announced his resignation amid the problems.
Evert Elzinga/ANP/AFP/Getty Images

Staff shortages, which have hammered the entire aviation sector in the wake of the pandemic, have been especially problematic at Schiphol. The challenge became painfully obvious starting on April 23 -- the first day of spring holidays in the Netherlands -- when KLM ground crew went on strike, causing enormous disruption.

The chaos continued throughout the summer, as shortages for security workers caused massive security lines. The issue was partly eased thanks to a 5.25 euros hourly bonus the airport implemented for security workers during the travel high season, according to Joost van Doesburg, Schiphol campaign leader for FNV, the union representing about 40% of Schiphol's employees.

The bonus, however, didn't apply to airport cleaners, who decided to strike in late June, according to Dutch agency ANP.

After the bonus was scrapped following the summer season -- a decision questioned by many aviation and labor insiders -- many workers, predictably, left in search of higher-paying jobs. As a result, the queues have surged again at Schiphol, especially on weekends.

Joost, who described current conditions at Schiphol as "a crazy mess," condemned such cost-cutting measures as part of a "race-to-the-bottom" management mindset that has underpinned many of Schiphol's woes. What's needed, he said, is more established worker schedules, less outsourcing of airport operations, and, of course, better worker wages.

"If you're now working at a supermarket, you can make much more money than being a security employee at Schiphol Airport," Joost said. "They probably now need to come back with what we saw on emergency measures, but also make sure they do everything they can to implement sustainable... structural changes to improve jobs at Schiphol Airport."

Passengers, meanwhile, remain baffled and frustrated by the ongoing problems.

Schiphol Airport is one of the world's busiest airports for international passenger traffic.
Arthur Van Der Kooij/ANP/AFP/Getty Images

"It's insane [that] this hasn't been resolved," said Fadi Bizri, a venture capital and technology consultant who spent hours in check-in, security and passport check lines at Schiphol on both ends of a recent business trip from his home of Beirut.

Bizri, who had to sprint to his gate to arrive 10 minutes before departure (the flight was eventually delayed), counts himself as one of the "lucky ones" who didn't miss his flight. "I checked in my luggage so I had only a backpack so I could run like crazy," he said. "I don't know how you do it with kids, or people who are elderly who have physical constraints."

Bizri and many other passengers have taken to social media to vent their frustrations, documenting the hectic situation alongside such hashtags as #SchipholChaos and other, more scathing monikers. Writer Heleen van Royen struck a creative note with a recent Tweet entitled "Schiphol: The Movie," showing photos of long lines in and outside the airport that she snapped en route to a vacation.

Even Schiphol employees themselves have been caught up in the mess as travelers. In a presentation about Schiphol's data optimization strategy at the World Aviation Festival, Tor Bøe-Lillegraven, chief data officer at Royal Schiphol Group, showed a photo of the zigzagging lines outside the airport, saying that he, too, endured a four-hour wait with his family on their way to a vacation.

But the problems go beyond long security lines. The staff shortage has impacted other airport operations, including baggage handling and passenger disembarkation. It all creates a ripple effect that can mean additional flight delays and a negative passenger experience, further eroding the airport's traditionally strong reputation.

In a September 30 release, the airport said it's actively working to improve its employment conditions, including better wages, more consistent worker schedules, and recruiting more staff. A media spokesperson for Schiphol denied CNN Travel's requests for an interview, citing "other priorities this week" in an email.

What can passengers do?

Many passengers have had to stand in line for hours to make their flight from Schiphol.
Ramon van Flymen/ANP/AFP/Getty Images

Some travelers like Bizri, who have recently experienced Schiphol's chaos, advise prospective passengers to avoid it altogether. Instead, they recommend flying out of alternate airports, including Rotterdam The Hague or Brussels Airport in neighboring Belgium, or traveling by train.

But those who can't avoid Schiphol can try a few strategies that might minimize their hassles. The airport's home page is a good start: It indicates whether to expect a normal or busy travel day and provides estimated wait times based on specific flight information, and notes that passengers are "welcome at the airport" four hours before departure.

For on-the-ground updates and passenger feedback, the Facebook group Schiphol live in English provides up-to-date intel about wait times, delays and other issues among more than 8,300 members.

A few overall trends that have emerged in the group: Fridays through Mondays are generally the most crowded days at the airport, with queues continuing to build later in the day. Many group members also suggest bringing snacks and drinks in case of a long wait (airport staff sometimes provide stroopwafels to queuing passengers, but not always). Not checking bags is also recommended.

Schiphol has also implemented a plan to compensate passengers for missed flights and other expenses caused by long lines. Some travelers recommend that once arriving at the airport, passengers should snap a selfie that documents the time in case such proof is needed for a compensation claim.

Finally, priority status doesn't always guarantee smooth(er) sailing at Schiphol. Some travelers have reported that the priority line isn't always open, and many airline lounges have been packed to capacity as of late, limiting day passes for purchase.

'Just go with the flow'

That was the case for Ugne Lipeikaite, who frequently travels to Africa for her job, during her most recent experience at Schiphol. Lipeikaite had a 14-hour layover in Amsterdam on her way back to Santiago, Chile, where she lives, and originally planned to leave the airport to meet a friend. But, upon the advice of airport staff because of the long queues, she decided to stay.

When Lipeikaite finally cleared the "quite chaotic" four-hour security line for connecting flights, she went to a KLM lounge only to find it wasn't selling day passes. But she still managed to find a little corner of quiet: at Schiphol's airport library.

"I work with libraries, and it was very nice that they had a library so I stayed [there] most of the time," Lipeikaite said. "On a really long trip with many connections, you just learn to be calm and just go with the flow. You also just start appreciating the small things. You know, we also currently have an Ebola outbreak in Uganda, and people are really scared for their lives. ... Life doesn't end with you being uncomfortable for a couple of hours. There are much bigger things."

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Only a third of students report having a great university experience, this according to the 2022 Connected Customer Report from Salesforce, highlighting insights into the global higher education trends from over 2,600 students and staff. The third edition of this report reveals a new sense of urgency in improving how students feel about their experience. Here is the executive summary of the report and the four key high-level findings:

1. Belonging is the foundation for success. Students make it clear that their institutional experience depends heavily on their first few weeks on campus. Students who have a great onboarding experience are 35 times more likely to have a great overall university experience. Providing holistic support and communicating how their degree will pay off as soon as students arrive can help students feel that they belong and improve their overall experience.

2. Students want holistic support from application to graduation. Students also report needing more wellbeing resources (36%) and in-person events and activities (54%) to connect with their peers. Students worldwide say that social events, more than classes, help them feel like a part of the university. Students who have a great university experience were more likely to report having the support they needed to succeed academically than students who had a poor experience (78% vs. 23%).

3. Students want to be prepared for the future of work. Nearly half (47%) of students reported selecting their institution for career prospects, but only 11% felt very prepared for work. Students who feel well-prepared are four times more likely to have a great university experience. In addition, nearly half of the students surveyed (49%) plan to continue learning through a higher education institution after graduating.

4. Flexibility and diversity matter. Students who have a great experience reported having easy online access to data and resources (86% great experience vs. 49% poor experience), services available via mobile (82% vs. 61%), positive digital experiences (81% vs. 36%), access to sharing platforms (80% vs. 57%), and personalized experiences tailored to their needs (60% vs. 11%). More than half (57%) of staff anticipate that flexible learning will increase in the near future. In addition to flexibility, students rank diversity and inclusion among universities' top three values to uphold (26%). Futhermore, nearly one in five (17%) institutions said they plan to hire a chief diversity officer or its equivalent.

10 key takeaways

1. Connection and belonging go hand in hand with great experiences. When the students were asked "Overall, how much do you feel you belong at your university?" only 12% responded with the feeling of totally belonging.

Connections and belonging go hand in hand with great experiences

2. Onboarding plays a key role in overall student experience. How can institutions improve the sense of belonging for students? Survey results indicate that students who have a great onboarding experience are 35 times more likely to have a great university experience, and 63% of students who have great onboarding feel more connected to their institution. In the U.S., 44% of students report having a great onboarding experience, with Australian students (41%) also apt to say the same.

Onboarding plays a key role in overall student experience.

3. Location and career prospects draw students in. When deciding where to enroll, 56% of students selected location as an important factor, with future career prospects (47%), academic focus (36%), and social life (31%) close behind.

Location and career prospects draw students in

4. Students feeling disconnected crave more organized opportunities to socialize. The report notes, ultimately, building a foundation of belonging for students clearly betters their time in university. Students who felt they belonged were three times as likely to have a great experience. And a great experience can lead to a positive feedback loop. Of the students who are extremely likely to recommend their institution, 74% had a great experience, 99% were proud to be a student, and 73% had a great onboarding experience.

Students want help managing schools with work and life.

5. Students want help managing school with work and life. A majority of universities are hitting this mark for now, as 69% of students are satisfied with the student services and support at their institution.

Academic success is viewed as a core university value.

6. Higher education institutions meet the most important student needs, but over-index on other services. Students want more career connections from their university: 40% of students say they need their universities to offer job-specific workshops in order to build their career. They also wanted stronger links with the corporate world. Fifty-seven percent of students said that their university prepared them "very poorly," a "little," or only "moderately" for the world of work.

Universities are meeting the mark but over-indexing on some experiences

7. Demand for wellbeing resources rises. Whereas 34% of students wanted more help managing their work-life balance in 2021, 40% reported feeling the same in this year's survey.

Students want career guidance as part of lifelong learning curriculum

8. Service and social factors drive great experiences. When asked what values students expected their university to uphold, nearly a third (32%) said academic excellence, but wellbeing (26%), diversity and inclusion (26%), and trust (24%) were all named frequently as well.

Students expectations align with staff priorities.

9. Student connection and journey drive a great university experience. The survey found that nearly half (47%) of enrolling students said "future career prospects" were key in deciding what university they wanted to attend, making it the number one influencing factor.

Alumni engagement goes hybrid

10.  Academic success is viewed as a core university value. Diversity, equity, and inclusion have gone beyond a slogan to being incorporated into daily institutional life. Nearly one in five (17%) institutions said that they were planning to hire a chief diversity officer, or its equivalent. Some universities are also using student representatives to collect feedback from their peers on how to improve university inclusion efforts.

Flexible learning is seen as the future of higher education.

The State of Connected Student Report concludes by recommending that institutions can better serve these needs by prioritizing the onboarding experience, expanding support and career services, and providing resources students can access even after they graduate. To learn more about the report you can visit here.

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As colder weather sets in, public health experts are keeping a close eye on COVID-19 variants that could spell doom and gloom this winter, just like omicron did last year. Yet these nascent variants that are rapidly spreading abroad have an evil twist that omicron lacked: an ability to evade the drugs that humans have developed to fight the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

The two subvariants of particular concern are known as BQ.1 and BQ.1.1, both off-shoots of the omicron variant BA.5 (but with several key changes.) Indeed, they seem able to evade many of the tools we have to defend against it, which could trigger a wave of hospitalizations, disabling victims with long COVID or death.

Also worrying are two other strains: one called BA.2.75.2, which seems to be spreading quickly in Singapore, India and regions of Europe;  and XBB, which some research suggests is the most antibody-evasive strain tested, almost on the level of the SARS-CoV-1 virus (known then simply as "SARS") that caused an outbreak in 2003. This could make the new vaccines relatively useless (but still better than nothing.) Moreover, an outbreak caused by one of these highly drug- and antibody-resistant variants could be much worse due to many world governments performing far less testing and reduced public health surveillance compared to 2020 and 2021.

Despite some confusing remarks from President Joseph Biden, the pandemic appears far from over. The SARS-CoV-2 virus has essentially been given free rein the last several months, allowing it to mutate and evolve new ways around immunity and vaccinations. These tiny alterations are largely focused in the spike protein, the hooks surrounding the virus used to insert itself into cells and reproduce.

The difference between variants and subvariants comes down to the level of genetic changes in the virus. It appears that the adaptations necessary to evade immune detection are becoming more and more slight — and, more curiously, all the subsequent major mutations have stemmed directly from the omicron variant, which appears to be incredibly successful at reproducing already. Indeed, we may not see a major new strain any time soon because these omicron lineages are just so good at spreading, although it's difficult to predict anything with certainty.

For most of this year, an omicron subvariant called BA.5 has been largely responsible for infections, hospitalizations and death in the U.S. Together with a close relative called BA.4.6, the two subvariants make up 94 percent of cases as of October 1st, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Cao co-authored a paper, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, that seems to show previous infections by BA.5 and antibody drugs, including Evusheld and Bebtelovimab, aren't enough to stop a BQ.1 infection

But that could change in the coming weeks. BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 are both spreading extremely fast in parts of Europe. According to Cornelius Roemer, a viral evolution expert at the University of Basel, the number of BQ.1.1 infections has been doubling every week. That kind of exponential growth is sure to drive the variant to becoming dominant globally in short order.

"The degree of immune escape and evasion is amazing right now, crazy," Yunlong Richard Cao, an immunologist at Peking University in Beijing, told Nature this week. Cao co-authored a paper, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, that seems to show previous infections by BA.5 and antibody drugs, including Evusheld and Bebtelovimab, aren't enough to stop a BQ.1 infection.

"Such rapid and simultaneous emergence of multiple variants with enormous growth advantages is unprecedented," Cao and his colleagues warned in the study. "These results suggest that current herd immunity and BA.5 vaccine boosters may not provide sufficiently broad protection against infection."

Meanwhile, BA.2.75.2, an offshoot of the Centaurus omicron subvariant, also shows stark ability to evade antibodies. While it isn't a big deal in the West yet, it is seemingly spreading quickly in India. Some research from Sweden, which also isn't yet peer reviewed but is in line with Cao's research, described BA.2.75.2  as "the most neutralisation resistant variant evaluated to date."

And then there's XBB, which Cao has described as "the most antibody-evasive strain tested." It combines two different omicron lineages (BJ.1 and BM.1.1.1) to make something so good at evading immunity (either from previous infections or vaccines) that it's close to SARS-CoV-1. It "could cause significant immune escape at a scale never seen before," Cao and his colleagues wrote.

The new vaccines may still protect some against these variants, such as preventing hospitalization or death, but it may not be enough to stop an infection. How that will translate to rates of long COVID has yet to be seen, but already the debilitating condition has put millions out of work.

Not only are variants changing, so are the symptoms. Recent reports from the U.K. suggest that a sore throat is now the dominant symptom of COVID infection, rather than fever or loss of smell.

"Fever and loss of smell are really rare now — so many old people may not think they've got COVID," Professor Tim Spector, co-founder of the Covid ZOE app, told The Independent. "They'd say it's a cold and not be tested."

Whatever this winter throws at us, we're going to need all the tools at our disposal — including vaccines, masks and improved ventilation systems — to keep devastating COVID infections at bay.

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Infections across Europe — the majority of them caused by omicron subvariants that dominated the summer months — have been steadily climbing in several nations, including in the United Kingdom, France and Italy.

According to WHO data released Wednesday, cases across the European Union spiked to 1.5 million last week, up 8% from the week prior.

Hospitalizations are also up across the 27-nation bloc, with Italy reporting a 32% jump in admissions and a 21% increase in intensive care admissions for the week ending on Oct. 4.

Britain, meanwhile, reported a 45% increase in hospitalizations when compared with the week prior.

“This is to be expected as the weather gets colder and more time is spent together indoors,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of WHO, said. “Most countries no longer have measures in place to limit the spread of the virus.”

While cases are still on the decline globally, officials warned the wave brewing in Europe could suggest the United States could be next.

Several computer models are still projecting that infection numbers will continue to drop through the end of the year, but researchers have emphasized there are many variables that could trigger another, fast-spreading wave in the United States. That includes hundreds of new forms of the omicron mutation currently being tracked by scientists as well as a decrease in surveillance and testing.

Ghebreyesus said such factors make “tracking this virus like chasing shadows.”

“So we continue to call on all countries to increase surveillance, testing and sequencing, and to ensure that those most at risk are vaccinated,” he added.

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