In a study of the game's effects, 47 adults aged between 60 and 79 years were split into two groups: one playing the musical rhythm game (called Rhythmicity) and one playing a normal word search game, for 20 minutes a day, 5 days a week for 8 weeks.

The difference between the two groups was clear: as players progressed in Rhythmicity, the ways it targeted visual perception and selective attention had a knock-on effect on short-term memory, as tested through a face recognition exercise.

"As hypothesized, only the rhythm training group exhibited improved short-term memory on a face recognition task, thereby providing important evidence that musical rhythm training can benefit performance on a non-musical task," write the researchers in their published paper.

Rhythmicity was developed with drummer Mickey Hart, once of the Grateful Dead, and used visual clues to train participants to play a rhythm on a tablet. The tempo, complexity, and precision required were all tweaked as players progressed.

Part of what makes the game special is that it can adapt itself to the person playing it, changing the difficulty level to push the player to improve without making it so hard that it's going to spoil the gaming experience.

The post-training analysis was done via electroencephalography (EEG) during a recognition task involving unknown faces. Rhythmicity players were better at identifying faces after the eight-week course, and the EEG readings showed increased activity in the superior parietal lobule – the brain region linked to sight reading music and short-term visual memory.

Analyzing brain activity while playing a game in the lab. (UCSF)

"That memory improved at all was amazing," says neuroscientist Theodore Zanto from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).

"There is a very strong memory training component to this, and it generalized to other forms of memory."

The researchers behind the study have been busy in this field since 2013 when they developed a game called NeuroRacer – a game that's been shown able to significantly improve diminished mental faculties and improve sustained attention and working memory in older adults after just four weeks.

That was followed by a game called Body-Brain Trainer, which a recent study has found is able to improve blood pressure, balance, and attention in elderly people. In that case, heart rate data was constantly being fed back to the software so the game could adapt to participants' fitness levels.

Another game, the virtual reality Labyrinth which engages users in spacial wayfinding, has demonstrated that it can improve long-term memory in older adults after four weeks of training.

A decline in cognitive control often comes with getting older, but these games are evidence that there are ways to maintain our mental sharpness.

"These games all have the same underlying adaptive algorithms and approach, but they are using very, very different types of activity. And in all of them we show that you can improve cognitive abilities in this population," says neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley from UCSF.

The research has been published in PNAS.

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Rocket Report: Falcon Heavy launch on tap; South Korea seeks Russia alternative

Boston Dynamics *really* does not want you to add weapons to its robots

Scientists have discovered what turns off the molecular alarm system that plays a critical role in our immune response.

The antibacterial superhero MR1 (MHC class I-related molecule) is a protein found in every cell of the human body that functions as a molecular alarm system, alerting powerful cells of our immune system, our white blood cells, when cancer or bacterial infection is present.

While prior groundbreaking research revealed the cellular machinery that MR1 depends on to activate, nothing was understood about how the MR1 alarm is “turned off” until now.

The research, co-led by Dr. Hamish McWilliam of the University of Melbourne and Professor Jose Villadangos of the Doherty Institute and the Bio21 Institute, was published in the Journal of Cell Biology and shows the essential molecular mechanism that controls MR1 expression.

“What we found is that there are proteins – called AP2 (adaptor protein 2) – inside our cells that bind to MR1, and drag it inside the cells,” Dr. McWilliam explains.

“Once inside, MR1 can no longer signal to white blood cells anymore, which effectively turns off the immune response.”

In their experiments, the research team found that by deleting AP2 in cells or mutating MR1, they could regulate MR1’s activation which in turn stimulates or inhibits the presence of white blood cells.

Dr. McWilliam says this is an exciting discovery as it unlocks a fundamental understanding of the biology of MR1 and contributes to global efforts to design immune-boosting treatments.

“By understanding how to turn off MR1, we might be able to block or increase immune response, to harness it and control immunity to pathogens or tumors,” Dr. McWilliam says.

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Physical activity provides numerous health benefits. However, physical activity affects boys and girls differently. A recent study analyzed the connection between children’s physical activity and body fat.

“We looked at the connection between objectively measured physical activity and the proportion of body fat in girls and boys,” says Silje Steinsbekk, a professor at NTNU’s (the Norwegian University of Science and Technology) Department of Psychology.

Rather than weight and height, the researchers assessed individuals’ body composition. They addressed questions such as: does greater physical activity result in a reduced proportion of body fat over time? Or is it possible that people who accumulate more body fat over time become less physically active?

The children were checked every two years by the researchers from the age of six to fourteen. They discovered that the degree of exercise had varied effects on the sexes.

“In girls, we found no connection between their physical activity and amount of body fat. Increased physical activity didn’t lead to less body fat in the girls, and body fat had no effect on changes in their physical activity,” says Tonje Zahl-Thanem, a former research fellow and first author of the article.

However, it’s different for boys. Their level of body fat impacts how active they are.

More body fat in boys results in less physical activity

“Increased body fat in boys led to less physical activity two years later, when they were 8, 10, and 12 years old,” says Zahl-Thanem.

With one exception, increased physical activity had no effect on changes in body fat.

“We found that boys who are more physically active when they’re 12 years old have a lower proportion of body fat when they’re 14. This wasn’t the case at an earlier developmental stage,” Steinsbekk says.

Several possible reasons for differences between the sexes

The study did not investigate the reasons for these differences, but the researchers point out that large bodies are heavier and require more exertion when exercising, which may explain why boys whose body fat increases become less active over time. But why isn’t this the case for girls?

“Here we can only speculate, but boys are generally more physically active than girls, so when boys reduce their activity level, the physical impact is greater,” Steinsbekk says.

We also know that children with large bodies are less satisfied with their bodies, and body dissatisfaction is associated with less physical activity in boys, but not in girls.

“Boys’ physical activity is probably even more competitively oriented than girls’, and more body fat makes it more difficult to succeed. Both of these conditions can help explain why increased body fat leads to less physical activity in boys, but not girls,” says Lars Wichstrøm, a professor in NTNU’s Department of Psychology and also co-author of the study.

It could also be that girls are more likely to maintain physical activity when their proportion of body fat increases because more attention is paid to girls’ bodies and appearance.

Body fat affects sedentary activity in boys

The researchers also examined the link between inactivity or a sedentary lifestyle and body fat. In the same way that they objectively measured physical activity, they also measured how long the participants were sedentary during the day.

“The results show that boys who had an increase in the proportion of body fat had a corresponding increase in sedentary activity two years later. This carried through all the age groups studied, from the age of 6 through age 14.

In other words, boys whose proportion of body fat increases become more sedentary.

For the girls, however, there was no link here either. The percentage of body fat did not affect their level of inactivity over time, and they did not become less active by gaining more body fat.

“In sum, we found a link between physical activity, sedentary lifestyle, and fat percentage in boys, but not in girls,” Steinsbekk says.

Trondheim Early Secure Study

The researchers used figures from the Trondheim Early Secure Study (TESS). They followed almost 1000 children at two-year intervals from when they were 4 years old. The participants are now 18 years old, and the eighth survey is underway.

In this study, the research group used data at five different times, when the participants were 6, 8, 10, 12, and 14 years old. The Trondheim Early Secure Study has provided data for a number of studies on children’s development and health.

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As we age, molecular damage accumulates and contributes to the development of aging-related frailty and serious diseases. These molecular processes are more intense in some people than in others, resulting in a condition commonly referred to as accelerated aging.

Fortunately, it is possible to detect the increased pace of aging before its disastrous consequences manifest by using digital models of aging (aging clocks). These models can also be used to derive anti-aging therapies at individual and population levels.

Research confirms: Psychological issues can accelerate your pace of aging. Credit: Fedor Galkin

 

According to the latest article published in the journal Aging-US, any anti-aging therapy needs to focus on one’s mental health as much as one’s physical health. An international collaboration led by Deep Longevity with US and Chinese scientists has measured the effects of being lonely, feeling unhappy, or having restless sleep on the pace of aging and discovered it to be substantial.

A new aging clock trained and verified with blood and biometric data of 11,914 Chinese adults is featured in the scientific paper. This is the first aging clock to be trained exclusively on a Chinese cohort of such volume.

AI to connect psychological and biological aging. Credit: Fedor Galkin

 

Aging acceleration was detected in people with a history of stroke, liver and lung diseases, smokers, and most intriguingly, people in a vulnerable mental state. In fact, feeling unhappy, hopeless, and lonely was demonstrated to increase one’s biological age more than smoking. Living in a rural area (due to the low availability of medical services) and being single are two additional factors associated with an accelerated aging process.

Therefore, the authors of the paper conclude that the psychological aspect of aging should not be overlooked either in research or in practical anti-aging applications. According to Manuel Faria from Stanford University:

“Mental and psychosocial states are some of the most robust predictors of health outcomes — and quality of life — yet they have largely been omitted from modern healthcare.”

Alex Zhavoronkov, the CEO of Insilico Medicine, points out that the study provides a course of action to “slow down or even reverse psychological aging on a national scale.”

Earlier this year, Deep Longevity released FuturSelf.AI, an AI-guided mental health web service, that is based on a preceding publication in the journal Aging-US. The service offers a free psychological assessment that is processed by an artificial intelligence algorithm and provides a thorough report on a user’s psychological age as well as current and future mental well-being. Deepankar Nayak, the CEO of Deep longevity affirms,

“FuturSelf.AI, in combination with the study of older Chinese adults, positions Deep Longevity at the forefront of biogerontological research.”

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The COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, George Floyd’s murder, and a contentious US presidential election made 2020 a very stressful year. According to recent studies, these crises may have affected young adults’ social development at a critical moment in their lives.

While other studies have looked at how stressors affect social development over the course of a lifetime, this study emphasizes the significance of early adulthood and how it may be influenced by external events.

“If everything goes well, young adults select into social networks, initiate friendships and romantic relationships, and find their occupational niche,” says lead author Dr. Bühler of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. “Our findings, however, show that external stressors and environmental variations may set young adults on a less fortunate path.”

Researchers compared the social development of 415 young adults in 2020 to that of 465 young adults in 2019. Participants, ages 18 to 35, submitted updates on several factors influencing their development over the course of eight months.

While the group examined in 2019 reported slightly increased levels of social support and inclusion over time, the participants in the 2020 study reported declining levels of intimacy and relationship satisfaction with time. Even if the changes weren’t drastic, Dr. Bühler points out that even minor changes may have lasting consequences.

“Environmental conditions and contexts are critical for development because they provide the opportunities that people need to grow in a healthy way,” says Dr. Bühler. “In the case of 2020, the average young person may have had fewer of these opportunities, causing fear and anxiety while potentially hindering their development.”

It’s also important to remember that these disruptive events are not limited to national or global crises. The study’s participants were based in northern California, where they grappled with wildfires throughout the region.

Researchers noticed a great deal of variation in the effect of these stressors on individual participants and Dr. Bühler highlights this as an important area of future study. Examining the coping mechanisms of those less affected, she says, could lead to more effective resources and support for young adults.

When asked if researchers were surprised by any of the findings, Dr. Bühler cites one aspect of social functioning which did not appear to be affected by the stressors of 2020: loneliness.

“Irrespective of whether young adults were exposed to collective stressors or not,” she says, “the degree and development of their loneliness were similar.”

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Context

Why does this story matter?

China had originally perceived such an idea in the 1970's. The ASO-S is their first dedicated observatory with sophisticated equipment to be sent off into space.

What makes it all the more interesting is that the observatory would be in orbit during the peak of the solar cycle in 2024-2025.

ASO-S might provide crucial information as it can scan multiple wavelengths of light simultaneously.

Mission
 

ASO-S is specially designed to study eruptions from the Sun

ASO-S, also nicknamed Kuafu-1, is uniquely equipped to survey an important region of Sun called middle corona, the center of solar storms. To this date, this area hasn't been completely visualized in the ultraviolet spectrum.

On top of that, the primary objective of this mission is to provide insights into the fundamental phenomena governing the powerful eruptions emerging from the Sun's dynamic magnetic field.

Mergers

Collaborations with other solar observatories can be expected

The Chinese physicists permit open-access to ASO-S data during the initial six months of the mission.

The coronagraphs of ASO-S and European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter are identical. The two observatories, from their different locations, would produce complementary observations of the Sun.

The first authentic measurements on the 'directivity' of solar flares can be obtained by combining the X-ray data from these two observatories.

Information

ASO-S can forecast weather in space

China's ASO-S will join other solar missions which are already in progress in space. "These are very exciting times for solar physicists in China and around the world," says Eduard Kontar, astrophysicist and a member of the mission's science committee.

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More than a few eyebrows were raised at the weekend when it was reported a staggering 433 people won the jackpot of a government-backed lottery in the Philippines – sharing in 236 million pesos (about US$4 million).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this has led to calls for an enquiry into how this seemingly "near-impossible" outcome could have arisen.

However, a basic understanding of probability and human psychology helps explain why this outcome isn't as implausible as you might think.

How the lottery works

Each person to purchase a lottery ticket picks six numbers between 1 and 55. The winning jackpot sequence is drawn at random. A ticket wins the jackpot if the six numbers on it are the same as the six numbers drawn.

Each ticket therefore has:

•     a six in 55 chance of getting the first number drawn, multiplied by

•     a five in 54 chance of getting the second, multiplied by

•     a four in 53 chance of getting the third, multiplied by

•     a three in 52 chance of getting the fourth. multiplied by

•     a two in 51 chance of getting the fifth, multiplied by

•     a one in 50 chance of getting the last.

Together, this means any given ticket has a 1 in 28,989,675 chance of winning the jackpot. So how is it possible for 433 tickets to have done this?

What are the chances?

Without knowing how many tickets were actually sold, we can't know the exact probability of getting 433 winning tickets.

One widely circulated estimate this week assumed there were around 10 million ticket sales, and claimed the chances were as little as "one out of one followed by 1,224 zeros" – a truly absurd number. This is smaller than the chances of flipping a typical coin 2,800 times in a row and seeing tails every time.

However, this estimate ignores substantial empirical evidence about human behavior and psychology. It naively assumes each person purchasing a ticket has an equal chance of selecting each of the 28,989,675 possible number combinations.

Across the world, it has been clearly observed that some combinations are vastly more popular than others.

This is why some experts often advocate using a random number generator when cashing a ticket. While it won't increase your chance of matching the winning values, it may reduce your chance of having to share any winnings with multiple other gamblers if you do.

More psychology than probability

A closer look at the winning numbers - 9, 18, 27, 36, 45 and 54 - may give some clue as to a possible explanation. Those of you who paid attention when learning your nine times table will recognize a clear pattern in the apparently randomly drawn numbers.

It's likely this pattern is what has appealed to people, and why more people will have chosen this particular sequence of numbers. Rather than providing a smoking gun to suggest impropriety, this pattern may indeed explain the high number of winning tickets.

A similarly unusual spike of winners was observed in the United Kingdom in 2018, when five of the six numbers were multiples of seven. In 2020, a streak of consecutive numbers (5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10) produced multiple jackpot winners in South Africa.

Also, you have to remember that the winning sequence is the Philippines lotto is no less likely to be drawn than any other sequence of numbers. The chances of 9, 18, 27, 36, 45 and 54 being drawn are exactly the same as, say, 1, 18, 19, 28, 30 and 46.

Yet many people would (wrongly) perceive the latter sequence to be more likely to occur at random.

In general, humans have been shown to be surprisingly poor judges of what a string of truly random numbers would look like. In fact, they have even been outsmarted at simple probabilistic pattern-matching by the humble pigeon.

In one study, participants were more than twice as likely to select an odd number than an even number when asked to think of a random number, suggesting that some numbers may "feel" more random than others, despite the obvious absurdity of this.

Could foul play be involved?

The fact that 433 winning tickets were sold is far from convincing evidence of any wrongdoing. It would be interesting to know how many people bought this same pattern of numbers in previous weeks, or which other combinations also attract several hundred ticket sales.

Based on anecdotal evidence from other lotteries, this number may not at all be unusual.

We also need to consider the many thousands of similar lotteries drawn around the world each year, almost all of which receive no international press. While such outcomes are highly improbable for any given draw, the huge number of total lotteries means it's actually quite likely at least one of them will produce a remarkable outcome by chance alone.

There are often accusations when remarkable lottery results are announced, perhaps most infamously when FC Barcelona legend Xavi was announced the winner of a private lottery shortly after moving to Qatar.

But overall it is highly plausible the only real statistical anomaly at play here is how so many people's perception of randomness drew them to the same number pattern. That said, I won't be rushing to buy a lottery ticket any time soon.

Stephen Woodcock, Associate Professor of Mathematical Sciences, University of Technology Sydney

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

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The UN health agency issued an alert this week warning that four cough and cold remedies manufactured by Maiden Pharmaceuticals in northern Haryana state could cause acute kidney injuries.

Laboratory testing had found unacceptable levels of potentially life-threatening contaminants, the WHO said, adding that the products may have been distributed beyond the West African country.

India's health ministry said late Thursday it had been informed of the WHO's findings last month and was awaiting the results of its own lab tests of the four drugs.

It added that the company was not licensed to distribute the four products in India and had only manufactured and exported them to The Gambia.

"It is a usual practice that the importing country tests these imported products on quality parameters, and satisfies itself as to the quality of the products," the ministry statement said.

Maiden Pharmaceuticals did not respond to AFP requests for comment after the WHO's health alert.

The company has caught the attention of Indian regulators several times.

The Food and Drug Administration issued notices to the firm four times this year for "substandard" product manufacturing based on batch tests, according to the agency's website.

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Inside a Berlin neuroscience lab one day last year, Subject 1 sat on a chair with their arms up and their bare toes pointed down. Hiding behind them, with full access to the soles of their feet, was Subject 2, waiting with fingers curled. At a moment of their choosing, Subject 2 was instructed to take the open shot: Tickle the hell out of their partner.

In order to capture the moment, a high-speed GoPro was pointed at Subject 1’s face and body. Another at their feet. A microphone hung nearby. As planned, Subject 1 couldn’t help but laugh. The fact that they couldn’t help it is what has drawn Michael Brecht, leader of the research group from Humboldt University, to the neuroscience of tickling and play. It’s funny, but it’s also deeply mysterious—and understudied. “It’s been a bit of a stepchild of scientific investigation,” Brecht says. After all, brain and behavior research typically skew toward gloom, topics like depression, pain, and fear. “But,” he says, “I think there are also more deep prejudices against play—it's something for children.”

The prevailing wisdom holds that laughter is a social behavior among certain mammals. It’s a way of disarming others, easing social tensions, and bonding. Chimps do it. Dogs and dolphins too. Rats are the usual subjects in tickling studies. If you flip ’em over and go to town on their bellies, they’ll squeak at a pitch more than twice as high as the limit of human ears. But there are plenty of lingering mysteries about tickling, whether among rats or people. The biggest one of all: why we can’t tickle ourselves.

“If you read the ancient Greeks, Aristotle was wondering about ticklishness. Also Socrates, Galileo Galilei, and Francis Bacon,” says Konstantina Kilteni, a cognitive neuroscientist who studies touch and tickling at Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet, and who is not involved in Brecht’s work. We don’t know why touch can be ticklish, nor what happens in the brain. We don’t know why some people—or some body parts—are more ticklish than others. “These questions are very old,” she continues, “and after almost 2,000 years, we still really don’t have the answer.”

Part of the trouble is that it’s hard to collect objective measures of how humans respond to tickling and correlate them with perceived ticklishness. That’s why Brecht’s group lured 12 people into a study that—albeit with a small sample size—was designed to observe the phenomenon with non-Aristotelian toys like GoPros and mics. The footage his team collected would help them unpack what happens when people get tickled, and what changes when they tickle themselves. Writing in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B in September, the team reports observations on reaction times, laughter, and breathing, and for the first time in a human study, they show that tickling oneself while being tickled suppresses ticklishness. “It’s rare. Studies typically don’t do that,” says Kilteni. “It really contributes to the state of the art.”

Tickling, says Brecht, is “a very strange kind of touch and reaction to touch.” He is fascinated by how fundamental these complex behaviors are. In a 1897 paper called “The Psychology of Tickling, Laughing, and the Comic,” the authors noted that all people generally have the same ticklish spots. Feet rank the highest. Armpits, necks, and chins follow. We instinctively tickle and play as kids, and though some of that predilection toward play fades with age, we always understand this mysterious language. Brecht believes it’s a form of social signaling in the context of play fighting: “You signal with your giggles that it’s okay to touch, when normally would be inappropriate to touch.” (Your laugh-signals can even come before the touch. Think of a kid about to get tickled by a parent: “They giggle like hell before you actually get there.”)

In the new study’s first phase, each subject had their moment in front of the GoPros and microphone. Previous studies have established that tickling is mood-dependent—anxiety and unfamiliarity suppress it like a wet blanket. Since participants would have to take turns tickling each other, Brecht’s team made sure each pair knew each other beforehand and felt comfortable—but each person was still surprised by the actual tickling attack. The tickler always hid behind their partner, while watching a videoscreen that fed them randomized sequences of body parts to touch. Neck, armpit, lateral trunk, plantar foot, crown of the head—each spot got five quick tickles.

The first observation: a person’s facial expressions and breathing changed about 300 milliseconds into a tickle. (The write-up describes the poetry caught on GoPro footage: The ticklee’s cheeks raised, the corner of their lips pulled outward, “the occurrence of which in combination signals a joyous smile.”)

Then, at about 500 milliseconds, came the vocalization—surprisingly late. (A normal vocal reaction time to being touched is about 320 milliseconds.) The team suspects that laughs take longer because they require more complicated emotional processing.

The subjects also rated how ticklish each touch was. The crown of the head is not usually ticklish, so it served as a control for what happens when you tickle someone in a not-responsive spot. Volunteers laughed audibly after about 70 percent of touches, and the more intensely they felt the tickle, the louder and higher pitched they laughed. In fact, the sound of their laughter was the measure that best correlated with their subjective ratings of how intense each tickle had felt.

In the next phase of the experiment, the ticklers did the same thing, while their partners simultaneously tickled themselves—either in the same spot on the opposite side of the body, just beside it, or in a hovering pretend-tickle that never actually touched the skin.

As expected, self-tickling was uneventful. But the team noticed something weird: Self-tickling made the other person’s tickle less intense. On average, the occurrence of ticklee giggling dropped by 25 percent, and was delayed to almost 700 milliseconds when self-tickling the same side. “It was a surprise to us,” Brecht says. “But it’s very clear in the data.”

Why might this be? It goes back to the question of why we can’t tickle ourselves. The leading theory holds that tickling provokes laughter thanks to a prediction error by the brain. An unpredictable touch confuses it, sending it into a mini frenzy. Self-touch is always predictable … so, no frenzy.

But Brecht thinks it’s not really about prediction. Instead, he suggests that as a person touches themselves, the brain sends out a body-wide message that inhibits touch sensitivity. “We think what is happening is the brain has a trick to know: As soon as you touch yourself, don’t listen,” he says. If it didn’t, he argues, we’d all be constantly tickling ourselves every time we scratched an armpit or touched our toes.

This makes sense, says Sophie Scott, a cognitive neuroscientist from University College London not involved in the work, because our brains learn to turn down sensory perceptions when our actions are contributing to them. “Sitting right now, I’m generating a lot of physical sensations in my body just by my movement. And that’s much less important to me to know about than whether somebody else came in the room and touched me,” she says. In fact, she continues, the same dimming effect happens with hearing. When you speak, the parts of your brain that listen to other people talking are suppressed. (That’s why, she says, “People are very bad at judging how loud they’re speaking.”) So if the brain is inhibiting reactions to touch while self-tickling, it would also be inhibiting reactions to being tickled by someone else.

Kilteni notes that it’s still unclear what exactly is playing out in the nervous system when a person is being tickled—including by themselves. And it will be tough to know for sure without recording muscle contractions, or expanding the study beyond 12 people, or even standardizing the tickling process with robots or machines. Still, she’s impressed by the data Brecht’s team managed to collect. For example, it’s valuable to know that tickle intensity tracks best with the sound of laughter—Kilteni now plans to incorporate giggle recordings and video into her own work.

Lab-based tickle sessions contribute more to science than just much-needed levity and technical write-up gems like “Ticklees were told to act as naturally as possible”: They also demystify understudied sides of emotional processing. “People say we don’t really express emotion very intensively in the voice, that it is the face’s job to express emotion,” says Scott. She couldn’t disagree more: Voices express words, mood, identity, health, age, sex, gender, geographical origins, and socioeconomic status—they’re just harder to study than faces.

Scott adds that touch has also been undervalued. Compassion and affection are expressed much more clearly through touch than through faces or words. “If you are with a friend and they are really upset, you could say, ‘I feel really sorry for you,’ or you could hug them,” she says. “That touch, that kind of soothing is, I suspect, really important.”

Brecht’s team plans to continue unpacking the neuroscience of playfulness with future studies. Experts have theorized that your level of ticklishness reflects how playful you believe you are. While this seems true for other animals—a rat that’s very ticklish is also more playful—it’s more debatable among humans. “My wife is more ticklish,” Brecht says. “But I am quite playful!”

Neuroscientists Unravel the Mystery of Why You Can’t Tickle Yourself

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Oct. 6 (UPI) -- A Utah man who found a message in a bottle while vacationing in the Caribbean is trying to track down the note's elusive authors.

Clint Buffington, a message in a bottle aficionado who has found more than 100 messages in bottles while searching near various bodies of water, said he found a bottle during a February trip to the Caribbean.

"It says, 'The finder of this message will be visited by good luck,'" Buffington told KGW-TV. "It's just signed from Becky in Washington, D.C. and Jim in Portland, Ore."

Buffington, who operates the Message in a Bottle Hunter blog, said the message included an email address, but he never received a response from the account.

He is now attempting to find Becky and Jim via social media.

"The message was sent from a boat off Jacksonville, Florida in 2018," Buffington wrote in a Facebook post. "Do you know Becky from Washington, D.C.? Or Jim from Portland, Oregon? I want to let them know about the good luck I've had since opening their bottle!"

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The 2022 Physics Noble Prize is misunderstood even by the Noble prize committee itself. What the work of John Clauser, Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger has shown, building on John Bell’s ideas, isn’t that quantum mechanics cannot be replaced by a deterministic, hidden variables theory. What it has shown is that quantum mechanics, as well as all of physics, is non-local. “Spooky action at a distance”, what Einstein had found disturbing about quantum mechanics, is real and emerging technologies depend on it, argues Tim Maudlin.

The presentation of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics to John Clauser, Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger is a bittersweet moment for those of us who work in the foundations of physics. It is mostly bittersweet because John Bell, whose brilliant theoretical work provided in impetus and basis for the experimental work done by the laureates, did not live long enough to receive this same recognition for his achievement.

Bell died unexpectedly of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1990 at the age of 62. His seminal work was done in 1963, so this has been a long time coming. Bell’s work has rightly been characterized as the spark that fueled the “second quantum revolution”, arising from the appreciation of the potential technological usefulness of entanglement in quantum systems. But the primary focus of Bell’s work in 1963 was the related question of locality. Unfortunately, many news accounts of the implications of Bell’s work and the experiments based on it—including the press release from the Nobel committee itself—have not correctly recounted the situation. So the announcement is also bittersweet because it mischaracterizes what Bell did.

Einstein’s main complaint about quantum theory was not the indeterminism. It was rather what he called “spooky action-at-a-distance”.

Is the Problem Indeterminacy or Spooky Action at a Distance?

Albert Einstein did not like the orthodox, so-called “Copenhagen” understanding of quantum theory. His most oft-repeated and quotable complaint is that according to Copenhagen “God plays dice with the universe”, i.e. the fundamental physical laws are indeterministic and probabilistic rather than deterministic (as Newton’s and Maxwell’s were). But Einstein’s main complaint about quantum theory was not the indeterminism. It was rather what he called “spooky action-at-a-distance”. These two issues are related: in the Copenhagen approach (which postulates both that the mathematical wavefunction used to describe a system provides a complete physical description and that it suddenly “collapses” when a measurement is done) it is not just that the collapse is random and unpredictable, but that it has physical effects instantaneously far away from where the collapse occurred. For example, when a dot forms on a screen, indicating that a particle was “found” there, the wavefunction of the particle everywhere else in the universe is instantly reduced to zero. Einstein objected to this sudden universal physical change, not least because it would have to be produced faster than light.

His objections began in the 1920’s, when the “new quantum theory” was formulated.

Einstein’s spooky action-at-a-distance amounted to the claim that what Alice does to her particle in her lab can have an instantaneous physical effect on the state of Bob’s particle in his lab, arbitrarily far away.

In 1935, together with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, Einstein made the issue even more obvious and acute by discussing an experimental set-up using a pair of particles (rather than just one) prepared in a special sort of quantum state called an entangled state. According to the theory, these particles could be separated to an arbitrary distance from one another (one sent to Alice and the other to Bob) and separately experimented on. Einstein’s spooky action-at-a-distance amounted to the claim that what Alice does to her particle in her lab can have an instantaneous physical effect on the state of Bob’s particle in his lab, arbitrarily far away. What they argued was that the Copenhagen understanding of quantum theory—in which the wavefunction provides a complete physical description of the system—requires such spooky action-at-a-distance. Why?

Two entagled particles: For Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen, "spooky action at a distance" was not acceptable.

Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen (EPR) constructed a wavefunction such that, although the outcome of a position measurement made by Alice cannot be predicted and so would be regarded as the outcome of an indeterministic and random process, it can be predicted with certainly by Bob on the basis of the outcome of his own observation of the position of his particle. According to Copenhagen, Bob can be in this position to make better predictions than Alice (from the original wavefunction) because his experiment has the effect of collapsing the wavefunction of the pair of particles and therefore, because they are entangled, changing the physical state of Alice’s. And since Bob (but not Alice) knows how the collapse occurred, he can make better predictions than she can.

EPR observed that this postulation of collapse, and its attendant spooky action, was completely unnecessary. It was only forced on the Copenhagen view because they insisted on the completeness of the wavefunction. Much more reasonable, they argued, is to assume that the outcomes of both Alice’s and Bob’s experiments are determined by the local situation in their own labs, and all Bob is doing by his experiment is finding out about Alice’s particle, not changing the physical state of Alice’s particle. But to pursue this sort of account, one has to concede that the wavefunction does not provide a complete description of the system, which the Copenhagenists were unwilling to do.

This is how things stood for over two decades: EPR argued that to save locality and avoid spooky action-at-a-distance one had to postulate that a quantum system has physical characteristics (such as, for example, the exact position of a particle) that are not recorded or reflected in its wavefunction. These additional postulated physical characteristics came to be known as “hidden variables” (although, as Bell pointed out, it is a very misleading name since the additional variables better not be “hidden” if they are to help solve the problem).

Bell proved that even a deterministic "hidden variables" theory cannot save locality and replicate all the quantum predictions. Therefore no local theory, of any sort, can return the quantum predictions.

Deterministic Quantum Mechanics and Non-Locality

A critical event in our story occurs in 1952 when David Bohm, deeply influenced by discussions with Einstein, publishes a paper laying out an interpretation of quantum theory “in terms of hidden variables”, i.e. a theory that explicitly postulates the incompleteness of the wavefunction. The idea had already been discovered by Louis De Broglie in 1927, but he abandoned the theory for some time. The theory (sometimes called “De Broglie/Bohm theory” or “pilot wave theory” or “Bohmian Mechanics”) is deterministic, and so denies that God plays dice. And it is a “hidden variables” theory that makes the same predictions as the standard Copenhagen quantum theory. The article caught the attention of John Bell, who immediately appreciated what Bohm had accomplished. But the theory was also manifestly and undeniably non-local: it directly postulated spooky action-at-a-distance in its dynamics. In Bohm’s theory, Bob’s experiment can indeed physically effect (and not just provide information about) the goings-on in Alice’s distant lab. So the theory was of no interest to Einstein, as it did not eliminate the non-locality.

It occurred to Bell to ask whether the achievement of Bohm’s theory—the determinism and general physical clarity of the theory—could somehow be retained but the non-locality eliminated. In 1963, on sabbatical, he had the time to look into the question and he discovered an astonishing fact. Bell considered experiments similar to—but also crucially different from—the ones EPR had discussed. He could do this also due to Bohm’s help: Bohm, in his textbook on quantum theory, had reconfigured the EPR set-up to deal with a particle’s spin rather than its position or momentum, as EPR had. Since the spins of particles can be measured in any direction, that immediately suggests a whole universe of experimental possibilities. When Alice and Bob set their spin-measuring apparatuses in the same direction, they always get opposite results: one particle will be deflected up and the other down (although quantum theory does not predict which will go up and which down). So once again, when Bob sees the outcome in his lab, he can make better predictions about what Alice will see than Alice can. But if the two directions of the measuring devices are offset from each other, these perfect correlations slowly degrade.

Bell took a close look at exactly how they degrade and discovered an amazing thing: the full set of quantum mechanical predictions for these sorts of experiments cannot be reproduced by any local theory. The EPR correlations, of course, could be recovered by a local theory: it just had to be a deterministic and hence a “hidden variables” theory. But Bell proved that even a deterministic hidden variables theory cannot save locality and replicate all the quantum predictions. Therefore no local theory, of any sort, can return the quantum predictions. In other words, if quantum theory is predictively accurate in these cases, then locality is a lost cause. One must accept what Einstein called "spooky action-at-a-distance": what is done in one place makes a difference to how things happen in a location and time so far away that even light could not reach there in time.

The theoretical work by Bell and his successors yields only a conditional conclusion: if Bell’s inequality is violated in the lab, then nature itself must be non-local.

Bell’s theorem and the 2022 Noble Prize

Bell’s mathematical result was extended and refined in various ways. Clauser, Michael Horne, Abner Shimony and Richard Holt relaxed Bell’s assumption of perfect correlations and derived the CHSH inequalities, a generalization of the original Bell inequality. No local physics can robustly produce violations of the CHSH inequality for experiments done far apart. Later, Daniel Greenburger, Michael Horne and Zeilinger derived the GHZ example, which involves three entangled particles rather than two. Again, no local theory can reproduce the quantum predictions for experiments done on the triple, and the relevant predictions are not statistical in nature: they are absolute.

The theoretical work by Bell and his successors yields only a conditional conclusion: if Bell’s inequality or the CHSH inequality is violated in the lab, then nature itself must be non-local. Quantum mechanics predicts such violations, but for many physicists that was just a good reason to expect the quantum-mechanical predictions to fail. Non-locality seemed too strange to accept, as it was for Einstein. But the final arbitration of the question had to be left to the experimentalists, some of whom have just received the Nobel prize for their work.

Unfortunately, much of this history has been garbled in the public discussion of Bell’s work and its experimental tests. The Noble prize committee itself gets it wrong in its press release.

The first tests were carried out by Clauser and Stuart Freedman in 1972. They appeared to support the quantum-mechanical predictions, but those loath to give up locality seized upon various experimental “loopholes”. One required improving detector efficiencies and another demanded that Alice and Bob have the settings of their apparatuses change so rapidly that information about how they are set could not be sent from one to the other even using signals that travel at the speed of light. Via the subsequent experimental efforts of Aspect and Zeilinger and others, these loopholes have been successively closed, and there is no serious doubt that the quantum-mechanical predictions are accurate.

Further, it has been shown that the quantum-mechanical states that allow for violations of Bell’s inequality are exactly the entangled states, so proving the physical reality of non-locality suggests that entanglement is an exploitable physical resource in a quantum system. This realization inspired people working in quantum computation and quantum communication and quantum cryptography to investigate how entangled states might be used for practical purposes. And that set off the second quantum revolution.

What Bell’s theoretical work and the subsequent experimental work of Clauser, Aspect and Zeilinger proved was non-locality. Ultimately, they proved Einstein wrong in his suspicions against spooky action-at-a-distance.

Unfortunately, much of this history has been garbled in the public discussion of Bell’s work and its experimental tests. The Noble prize committee itself gets it wrong in its press release,

"John Clauser developed John Bell’s ideas, leading to a practical experiment. When he took the measurements, they supported quantum mechanics by clearly violating a Bell inequality. This means that quantum mechanics cannot be replaced by a theory that uses hidden variables."

But that statement is flatly false. Indeed, it was a theory that uses hidden variables—Bohmian mechanics—that inspired Bell to find his inequalities, and that theory makes the correct prediction that the inequalities will be violated. The most well-known and highly developed “hidden variables” theory is that of Bohm, and Bell not only did not refute it, he was one of its most vocal proponents. In “On the Impossible Pilot Wave”—Bell’s wonderful paper expositing the theory—he writes

Why is the pilot wave picture ignored in textbooks? Should it not be taught, not as the only way, but as an antidote to the prevailing complacency? To show that vagueness, subjectivity, and indeterminism are not forced on us by experimental facts, but by deliberate theoretical choice?

If one rightly wonders how such an encomium for a “hidden variables” theory could be written by the man who “disproved hidden variables”, the simple answer is that it wasn’t. What Bell’s theoretical work and the subsequent experimental work of Clauser, Aspect and Zeilinger proved was non-locality, not no-hidden-variables. Ultimately, they proved Einstein wrong in his suspicions against spooky action-at-a-distance. And that, surely, deserves the highest honors one can bestow.

The long gap between Bell’s proof—and its experimental tests—and the recognition of the accomplishment is regrettable. We should all be very pleased that that recognition has finally arrived. But the delay was in large part due to persistent misunderstandings and even dismissal of Bell’s work by people who had not put in the effort needed to understand it. May the presentation of the Nobel prize mark the end of these mischaracterizations, so the sweet may triumph over the bitter.

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Scientists at the University of Aberdeen, U.K., and Hasselt University, Belgium, studied air pollution nanoparticles, called black carbon—or soot particles—to see whether these can reach the fetus.

The findings published in The Lancet Planetary Health show that the newborn baby and its placenta are exposed to air pollution black carbon nanoparticles proportionally to the mother's exposure.

These nanoparticles also cross the placenta into the fetus in the womb as early as the first trimester of pregnancy and get into its developing organs, including its liver, lungs, and brain.

Black carbon is a sooty black material released into the air from internal combustion engines, coal-fired power plants, and other sources that burn fossil fuel. It is a major component of particulate matter (PM), which is an air pollutant. The mechanisms by which these very small particles (nanoparticles) cause well-known health problems are poorly understood, although in part due to the chemicals they are coated with during combustion.

Previous studies by the Hasselt University team found that black carbon nanoparticles get into the placenta, but there was no solid evidence that these particles then entered the fetus.

This latest study is the first time this has been shown to occur and the team behind the study say the findings are very worrying.

Professor Tim Nawrot said, "We know that exposure to air pollution during pregnancy and infancy has been linked with still birth, preterm birth, low weight babies and disturbed brain development, with consequences persisting throughout life."

"We show in this study that the number of black carbon particles that get into the mother are passed on proportionally to the placenta and into the baby. This means that air quality regulation should recognize this transfer during gestation and act to protect the most susceptible stages of human development."

To answer the question of whether these particles travel from the placenta to the fetus, Professor Nawrot linked up with Professor Paul Fowler whose team studies first and second trimester human fetuses.

Professor Fowler said, "We all worried that if nanoparticles were getting into the fetus, then they might be directly affecting its development in the womb.

What we have shown for the first time is that black carbon air pollution nanoparticles not only get into the first and second trimester placenta, but then also find their way into the organs of the developing fetus, including the liver and lungs.

"What is even more worrying is that these black carbon particles also get into the developing human brain. This means that it is possible for these nanoparticles to directly interact with control systems within human fetal organs and cells."

The study authors conclude that now it is known that the developing baby in the womb is directly exposed to black carbon air pollution particles, uncovering the mechanisms involved in health risks has become even more urgent.

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"Mom, Dad, I'm bored."

How many parents have heard this from children? It may make parents feel like they're failing, need to find something for the child to do or simply annoyed that children seem incapable of entertaining themselves.

Yet a little boredom for children and adults can be a good thing. It can simulate creativity and problem-solving, while giving the brain time to recharge.

Boredom basics

Why do people get bored? The feeling of boredom is when brains struggle to fill time. People may feel restless or have a lack of interest in their surroundings. Boredom is common, with over 60% of U.S. adults reporting that they feel bored at least once a week.

People's brains rarely are bored while focused on taking part in demanding tasks like work or school, or while taking part in a good conversation. When these activities are done, people experience fatigue and seek ways to entertain themselves and their brains.

Play and entertainment have been ways humans have figured out to overcome boredom. Adults read, spend time with hobbies or tell stories to avoid boredom. Before the advent of TV and mobile devices, children overcame boredom by going outside or playing with a friend or sibling.

Today, electronics capture a significant amount of people's attention. But this readily accessible medium may have swung too far in capturing people's attention. Instead of short-term relief from boredom, many people spend hours on electronics.

It's easy not to feel the passage of time while scrolling TikTok or watching YouTube videos. Quickly, an hour or two can pass without a person realizing it. For all that time spent, people don't necessarily feel refreshed. Rather, most people experience greater fatigue.

Consuming so much time on electronics lessens the amount of bored time, but also it causes a different problem. The less people experience boredom, the less equipped the brain is to deal with it.

Restoring the brain

When your brain is focused on an intense activity, it exerts a lot of energy. When you finish the activity, it returns to a default state. This is normal and the way that brains restore. The default state can be thought of as a resting state. Several interconnected brain regions are active during this time. These regions seem to act in unison as a connected network. This is referred to as the default mode network.

When people are in this state, many important things are happening in the brain. It's consolidating memories and reflecting on lessons learned. The brain plays through scenarios and applies what was learned and how it could be used in the future. People spend time thinking about themselves and others. They reminisce about the past and daydream about the future.

Developing creative solutions

The resting state also can be a creative time, and it can lead to finding creative solutions to problems that are bothering people. For example, many people claim to come up with great solutions to problems they are grappling with while in the shower. This is because their mind is free to wander while their body is engaged in a mindless task and captive to the task.

While in the shower, the person can't escape or play a game on a phone. The brain is thinking through something almost effortlessly and often coming up with solutions to problems that have been in the back of the mind.

Another example is when a person takes a nature walk. During this time, it's a safe and calming environment. Within the first five minutes, the person gradually gets used to the environment, reducing anxiety. The rest of the walk, the brain starts to rest and wander. When a new stimulus comes in, the mind identifies it but returns to a restful state. During this time, the brain is involved in creative thinking and finding interesting solutions.

Embracing boredom

Follow these tips to overcome the uncomfortable feelings of boredom:

•     Balance activities with rest.

•     It's good to have a variety of activities that you enjoy, include socializing with others and are mentally stimulating. Yet rest time is important to recharge your brain. Seek a balance between structured activities and intermittent rest time to increase your creative thinking.

•     Try something new.

•     Join a club, try a new hobby, play a game, read a book or cook a new recipe to ignite your creativity and provide a distraction from boredom.

•     Get outdoors.

•     Spending time with nature is one of the best therapeutic ways to ward off boredom. It also promotes creative thinking.

•     Embrace curiosity and kindness.

•     This will get you more involved with the people and the world around you.

•     Embrace reminiscing.

•     Reminiscing is a big part of time spent as people age. It's normal and expected. If excessive reminiscing becomes a problem, try to channel focus on current or future goals and wishes for a few minutes.

Helping kids accept boredom

It's not parents' responsibility to entertain their children every moment of the day. Kids are naturally curious and creative. Being bored helps them strengthen their creative muscles and learn to cope with feelings of boredom as they get older.

If they protest boredom, acknowledge their feelings and ask them to come up with a solution. If they struggle, offer ideas that don't include an electronic device.

Boredom can be more uncomfortable or distressing for people feeling fearful, anxious or depressed. If this is the case, they should seek professional help to work through their feelings and develop healthy coping skills.

Don't be afraid of boredom. It's a normal part of life. Try not to dismiss or dislike it. Instead, try to view is as an opportunity to restore your brain and develop create solutions to problems.

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"We've been studying some of the more technical aspects of space advertising for a while now," said the study's first author Shamil Biktimirov, a research intern at Skoltech's Engineering Center. "This time we looked at the economic side of things and, as unrealistic as it may seem, we show that space advertising based on 50 or more small satellites flying in formation could be economically viable. The key concerns are maximizing overall mission duration and a satellite's footprint area—the scope of where it can reach to project a 'pixel' that would be part of the image in the sky."

In its prior research, the team proposed the concept of a space advertising mission using a formation of miniature satellites called CubeSats, considered what orbits to put them in and how best to reassemble the formation for changing the picture displayed in the sky. In the follow-up study in Aerospace, the researchers revisit the problem of appropriate reflector size, assess mission lifetime and profitability.

"Rather than trying to determine the reflector size yielding a certain pixel magnitude, we consider the largest reflector that has actually been successfully deployed and operated on a CubeSat. Namely, a 32-square-meter solar sail," Biktimirov said. "For that reflector, we derive the land area it can cover without sacrificing too much apparent light intensity, and this is what we use in further feasibility calculations."

Reference frames used in the study. Credit: Aerospace (2022). DOI: 10.3390/aerospace9080419

As for mission lifetime, it is principally determined by the average fuel consumption for reconfiguring the formation and maintaining it in its orbit.

"In analyzing feasibility, we came up with a price map that assigns potential revenue to be captured in cities that fall into the formation's access area. The revenue estimates are derived from outdoor advertising costs, population, and factors that limit the number of people noticing the space ad: cloudiness, cold weather keeping folks indoors, and the city's demographic composition," Biktimirov added.

The model works by picking the most profitable city within reach and displaying an ad there for one minute before switching to the next one. Revenues have been calculated for space advertising missions launched in different months of the year, as the price of demonstration for a given city will vary throughout the year. It turns out that such space advertising missions are most profitable during the winter. As shown by numerical simulations, the daily space advertising revenue can reach approximately $2 million, which corresponds to a payback period of about a month. Depending on the number of reconfigurations per day, a formation can operate for several months, making this approach to space advertising feasible.

In their paper, the researchers note that some of the sky pollution concerns people have about space advertising seem unwarranted. Since the satellites have to be exposed to sunlight but at the same time are intended to be seen from the dark, demonstrations could only be performed about the time of sunrise or sunset, but not at night. Also, the technology would only make sense economically for large cities that are already exposed to permanent light pollution.

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At the same time, malnutrition is widespread in Africa—21% of the population faces food insecurity—and the continent is especially vulnerable to climate change. Warmer regions are already experiencing desertification, and areas of low agricultural productivity are susceptible to climate shocks from adverse weather, drought, flooding, and erratic rainfall. The combined effects of population growth and climate change raise a serious question for the continent: How will Africa feed its growing populace in increasingly unfriendly conditions?

In a study published in Earth's Future, Beltran-Peña and D'Odorico applied the results from agrohydrological, climate, and socioeconomic models to assess food self-sufficiency and climate vulnerability for 49 African countries under a scenario in which the global average temperature is 3°C above preindustrial levels by later this century. They found that under a 3°C warmer climate, Africa will face a severe mismatch between population size and food autonomy. By 2075, food production in Africa will be able to feed only 1.35 billion out of an estimated 3.5 billion people—a finding that already accounts for increased agricultural productivity through improved irrigation and sustainable practices.

Under this climate scenario, African nations will have to expand cropland and rely more heavily on food imports. Both approaches come with downsides: Cropland expansion carries potentially disastrous ecological ramifications, whereas reliance on imports would make Africa more susceptible to volatility in global food prices. The analysis indicated that eastern and western Africa will have the most significant import needs.

The research also suggested steps to address the grim forecast. Increasing the proportion of plant-based foods consumed and improving water storage—particularly in arid regions—can help mitigate growing food insecurity, for example. In addition, halving current food loss and waste rates could bolster domestic food production and feed an additional 130 million people. Nevertheless, the researchers note, these solutions will not eliminate projected food deficits on the continent.

The second of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals is to end hunger and malnutrition. This research suggests this goal may not be feasible in Africa under the current emissions and warming paradigm.

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Movies have been made about famous bank robbers like Bonnie and Clyde, JohnDillinger and Butch Cassidy. There is even a new movie that just came out about Gilbert Galvan, Canada's most prolific bank robber who robbed 59 banks in five years.

It might surprise you—as it did me—to learn that the number of bank robberies is the lowest it's been in half a century.

That's what I discovered while researching a book about the shift to a cashless economy. With people using less cash, I had expected fewer bank robberies. But I was startled to see that the downward trend started well before the cashless economy started springing up in the 2000s.

'Bling Ring' and the 'Ninja'

Movies often depict bank robbery as precision plots planned by smart crooks. However, this doesn't match reality. Most bank robberies are committed by people simply walking in and demanding money from a teller.

In 2021, about 85% of bank crime was committed at the tellers' counter. The vast majority of thieves either passed a note to the cashier or made a verbal demand. Very few incidents involved burglary, when a thief enters the bank during nonbusiness hours, or larceny, when money is stolen with no direct confrontation with employees.

Over half of all cases involve a weapon being brandished or a threat to use one. This results in many bank robberies becoming traumatic and dangerous events for employees and customers in the bank. Since 1999, 15 people have been killed in bank robberies, 94 were injured and 62 were taken hostage.

Law enforcement perpetuates the mystique of bank robbery by giving many robbers interesting nicknames, as you can see from the FBI website devoted just to them.

For example, the FBI is offering US$2,000 for information leading to the arrest of the "Bling Ring Bandit," who stole an undisclosed sum from a bank in Albuquerque, New Mexico, while wearing a large gold-colored ring on his right little finger. My favorite is the "Ninja Bank Robber," who was covered in black from head to toe during his April 2022 robbery.

Because there are different types of bank robberies, there are a variety of prison sentences for those caught. Robbers using force or violence get a maximum sentence of 20 years. Hurt someone while robbing a bank and the maximum sentence increases to 25 years. Kill someone and face death or life imprisonment.

Robbers who don't use weapons face less time. Robbing a bank of more than $1,000 without using force is a sentence of up to 10 years. Stealing less than $1,000 without force has a maximum sentence of only one year.

Bank heists are going out of style

The FBI has been tracking bank robberies and other crime in the U.S. since the 1930s. Unfortunately, early data was based only on voluntary reports from police chiefs of very large cities. Moreover, early data was not standardized when multiple offenses were committed, like bank robbers who stole a getaway car.

This resulted in very low figures, like 1948 having only 53 bank robberies. Higher-quality bank robbery data began around 1970, when the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports reported just over 2,000.

The number of U.S. bank robberies peaked in 1991 when 9,388 where committed. The number has declined pretty much ever since. By 2021, it was just 1,724 after hitting a 51-year low of 1,500 in 2020.

A less lucrative career path

One potential reason for the downward trend could be that punishments have increased, thus acting as a deterrent and convincing would-be bank robbers to find another line of work. This reason doesn't hold up, however, as the data shows judges are giving shorter, not longer, sentences. A 2021 analysis found the typical bank robber, most of whom used guns, was sent to prison for fewer than seven years. A mid-1980s study put the median sentence at 10 years if a gun wasn't used, and 15 if a gun was involved.

Another explanation could be that there are fewer banks to rob. After peaking at over 85,000 in 2009, the number of bank branches in the U.S. has declined to a little over 72,000.

A more compelling reason for me is that robbing banks has become far less lucrative—after adjusting for inflation, anyway. The typical robber made away with about $5,200 in the late 1960s. That's over $38,000 in 2019 dollars. But in 2019, the average was just $4,200. As a 2007 U.K. study on the topic noted, "The return on an average bank robbery is, frankly, rubbish."

As it turns out, cyber heists are much more lucrative, with even fewer penalties. A government report showed that in 2016, convicted credit card offenders took in over $60,000 on average and were given a prison sentence of just a little over two years.

Willie Sutton was an infamous U.S. bank robber during the 1920s and 1930s. When asked why he robbed banks, Sutton supposedly replied, "Because that's where the money is." While in Sutton's time that may have been true, it may not be the case today.

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Key Takeaways

• The microscopic world behaves very unlike the world we see around us.

• The idea of quantum entanglement came at a time when the world’s greatest minds debated if the world’s tiniest particles are governed by chance.

• The 2022 Nobel Prize in physics was just awarded for the experimental test of Bell’s Inequality, showing that there is an uncertainty built into the Universe.

This is the first of a four-article series on how quantum entanglement is changing technology and how we understand the Universe around us. 

Physics is not just a quest to predict how things work. It’s an attempt to understand the true nature of reality. For thousands of years, the world’s physicists and astronomers tried to understand how things behaved. At the beginning of the 1900s, scientists were trying to apply these rules to very small particles, such as electrons or photons.

To their surprise, the rules that governed the motion of a planet or a cannonball did not work on these small scales. At microscopic scales, reality operated in very different ways.  

These particles are governed by uncertainty. For example, if you measure an electron’s position precisely, you lose information on its momentum.

Electrons can go from one space to another without occupying any space in between. And most befuddling: Particles can have many properties at once until they are measured. Somehow, it’s the act of measurement that forces the particle to choose a value.

Today, we’ll explore one facet of quantum mechanics: what happens when two (or more) particles are entangled. By doing so, we’ll embark on a quest to understand the true nature of reality.

What are entangled particles?

Entangled particles share a bond. Wherever one is in the Universe, the other will have related properties when measured. Several properties can be entangled: spin, momentum, position, or any of a host of other observables. For example, if one entangled photon is measured to be spin up, its pair would be spin down. In essence, they share the same quantum state. 

There are several ways to create entangled particles. For example, you can have a particle with zero spin decay into two daughter particles. Because spin must be conserved, one will have spin up while the other has spin down.

Quantum shapes

To understand the mystery of quantum entanglement, let’s do a thought experiment where shapes behave like subatomic particles and can be entangled.  

In this example, our shapes can be perfectly round (a circle), be squashed into an oval, or become completely flattened into a straight line. They can also have color, somewhere on the spectrum between red and purple.

Let’s say our shapes become entangled. We send one of these entangled quantum objects to Alice and another to Bob. No one in the Universe, not Alice, not Bob, not us, knows at this point what the color or shape is.

When Alice receives her object, she runs a test to determine the color of her object and discovers that it is green. The wave function that defines the object’s color collapses, and it “decides” to be green. Since both of our shapes share a quantum state, when Bob measures his shape, it also must be green. This happens instantaneously, as if the objects can somehow communicate with a message that travels faster than the speed of light. This is true no matter where Alice and Bob are in the Universe.

This might not be too strange. After all, perhaps those objects decided to be green when they were last in contact but just didn’t tell anyone about it.

But what if Bob instead measures shape? When Alice and Bob randomly choose whether to measure shape or color, repeat their experiment over and over, and then share their results, we begin to see that something odd is going on. The fact that there is a random choice between two (or more) measurements is an important point, and we’ll come back to this later on.

Einstein vs. Bohr

Now let’s go back to the state of physics at the beginning of the 1900s, when the greatest minds in science were trying to form the framework of quantum physics. In 1905, with his explanation of the photoelectric effect, Einstein proposed that light, which was so far thought of as a wave, could also be described as a particle. In 1924, De Broglie extended this idea – if a wave of light could act as a particle – perhaps particles could act as waves. In 1926, Schrödinger then came up with a mathematical formula to write the wave function – how properties of a wave, like position, can actually be described as a range of positions. That same year, Born extended this to show that these wave functions illustrate the probability of position of a particle. This means that the particle has no definite position until it is observed. At this point, the wave function “collapses” as the particle picks one value to settle on.

The next year, in 1927, Heisenberg came up with his famous Uncertainty Principle. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that there are certain combinations of variables that are intertwined. For example, the position and momentum of a particle are connected. The more carefully you measure the particle’s position, the less you know its momentum, and vice versa. This is something built into quantum physics and doesn’t depend on the quality of your instrumentation.  

When many of these great minds met in 1927 in Brussels, Bohr dropped a bombshell on the physics community. He presented a new idea, which combined many of these facets of physics. If the position of a particle can be described as a wave, and if this wave could be described as probability of position, combining this with Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle led to the conclusion that the properties of particles are not predetermined, but rather ruled by chance. This uncertainty is fundamental in the fabric of the Universe.

Einstein did not like this idea, and he made that known at the conference. Thus began a lifelong debate between Einstein and Bohr on the true nature of reality.

“God does not play dice with the universe.” – Einstein protested.

To which Bohr replied, “Stop telling God what to do.”

In 1933, Einstein, along with his colleagues Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, published the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) paradox. Using our shape analogy above, the basic idea was that if you have two shapes that are “entangled” (although they did not use this term), by measuring one, you can know the properties of the other without ever observing it. These shapes can’t communicate faster than the speed of light (that would violate relativity, they argued). Instead, they must have some sort of “hidden variable” – a characteristic that they decided on when they became entangled. This was hidden from the rest of the world until one of them was observed.  

Who’s right, and how strange is our Universe, really?

With their EPR paradox, Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen inadvertently introduced the idea of quantum entanglement into the world. This idea was later named and expounded upon by Schrödinger.

So, what does entanglement tell us? Do our objects have predetermined characteristics that they “agreed upon” beforehand, like shape and color (Einstein’s hidden variables)? Or are their properties determined at the instant of measurement, and somehow are shared between entangled objects, even if they are on opposite sides of the Universe (Bohr’s proposition)?

It wasn’t until decades later in 1964 when physicist John Steward Bell came up with a way to test who is right – Einstein or Bohr. This was put to the test by several experiments, the first of which just won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics.

It goes something like this. Subatomic particles can have a property we call spin. The particle isn’t really rotating in the way a macroscopic object does, but we can envision it rotating either with spin up or down. If two particles are entangled, in order to conserve angular momentum, they must have spins that are anti-aligned with one another. These entangled particles are sent to our two observers, Alice and Bob.

Alice and Bob now both measure the spin of their particle using a filter that is aligned with the axis of the particle’s spin. Whenever Alice finds spin up, Bob must find spin down, and vice versa. But Bob and Alice can choose to measure the spin at a different angle, and it’s here where things get interesting.

Let’s give Alice and Bob three choices – they can either measure their spin at 0 degrees, 120 degrees, or 240 degrees.

According to Einstein’s hidden variables, the particles have already made up their mind about whether or not they will be measured as spin up or down for each of these filters. Let’s pretend that Alice’s particle decides to be spin up for 0°, spin down for 120°, and spin down for 240° (and the opposite for Bob). We can write this as UDD for Alice, and DUU for Bob. For different combinations of measurements, Alice and Bob will find:

•     Alice measures 0°, Bob measures 0°: different spins
•     Alice measures 0°, Bob measures 120°: same spin
•     Alice measures 0°, Bob measures 240°: same spin
•     Alice measures 120°, Bob measures 0°: same spin
•     Alice measures 120°, Bob measures 120°: different spins
•     Alice measures 120°, Bob measures 240°: different spins
•     Alice measures 240°, Bob measures 0°: same spin
•     Alice measures 240°, Bob measures 120°: different spins
•     Alice measures 240°, Bob measures 240°: different spins

So 5/9 of the time, Alice and Bob make different measurements. (The other combinations of choice of spins give us mathematically the same results, except for UUU or DDD, in which case, 100% of the time the spins will be different.) So for more than half of the time, if Einstein is right, a spin measured by Alice and Bob in a random direction should be different.

But Bohr would see things differently. In this case, the direction of spin is not predetermined at each angle. Instead, the spin is determined the instant it is measured. Let’s start with the case where both Alice and Bob randomly choose to measure the spin at 0°. If Alice finds her particle to be spin up, then Bob must find his to be spin down. Same as in Einstein’s case.

But Alice and Bob can choose to measure the spin of their particle at different angles. What is the probability that Alice and Bob will measure different spins?

For example, let’s say that the particle would be measured as “spin up” at 0°. But instead, we take our measurement at an angle of 120° from the axis of spin. Since the particle is not spinning on the same axis as the filter, it has a ¼ chance of being recorded as spin down, and a ¾ chance of being recorded as spin up. Similarly, it can also be measured at an angle of 240°.

Since the direction of measurement is chosen randomly, Bob has a 2/3 chance of measuring the spin at a different angle than Alice. Let’s say he chooses 120°. He has a ¾ chance of measuring the particle to be spin down (remember, if he chose 0°, he would have a 100% chance of measuring spin down.) 2/3 times ¾ is one half. So half the time, Alice and Bob should find particles with opposite spins.

If Einstein is right, we see different measurements more than half the time. If Bohr is right, we see that these measurements are different half the time. The two predictions do not agree!

This is Bell’s Inequality, which can be tested. And it has been tested using particles in the lab to analyzing light from distant quasars.  

So, who’s right?

Time and time again, we see that measurements of entangled particles are the same half the time. So Bohr was right! There are no hidden variables. Particles have no inherent properties. Instead, they decide the moment they are measured. And their pair, potentially on the other side of the Universe, somehow knows.

There is an uncertainty in our Universe, inherent in the nature of reality.

What this all means is something we’re still trying to figure out. But knowledge of entanglement can be incredibly useful. In the next articles, we’ll explore how quantum entanglement will soon be revolutionizing the world’s technology.

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Who is ready for a fleet of cubesats flying over cities, displaying ads?

In July, an HIV-positive man became the first volunteer in a clinical trial aimed at using Crispr gene editing to snip the AIDS-causing virus out of his cells. For an hour, he was hooked up to an IV bag that pumped the experimental treatment directly into his bloodstream. The one-time infusion is designed to carry the gene-editing tools to the man’s infected cells to clear the virus.

Later this month, the volunteer will stop taking the antiretroviral drugs he’s been on to keep the virus at undetectable levels. Then, investigators will wait 12 weeks to see if the virus rebounds. If not, they’ll consider the experiment a success. “What we’re trying to do is return the cell to a near-normal state,” says Daniel Dornbusch, CEO of Excision BioTherapeutics, the San Francisco-based biotech company that’s running the trial.

The HIV virus attacks immune cells in the body called CD4 cells and hijacks their machinery to make copies of itself. But some HIV-infected cells can go dormant—sometimes for years—and not actively produce new virus copies. These so-called reservoirs are a major barrier to curing HIV.

“HIV is a tough foe to fight because it’s able to insert itself into our own DNA, and it’s also able to become silent and reactivate at different points in a person’s life,” says Jonathan Li, a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and HIV researcher at Harvard University who’s not involved with the Crispr trial. Figuring out how to target these reservoirs—and doing it without harming vital CD4 cells—has proven challenging, Li says.

While antiretroviral drugs can halt viral replication and clear the virus from the blood, they can’t reach these reservoirs, so people have to take medication every day for the rest of their lives. But Excision BioTherapeutics is hoping that Crispr will remove HIV for good.

Crispr is being used in several other studies to treat a handful of conditions that arise from genetic mutations. In those cases, scientists are using Crispr to edit peoples’ own cells. But for the HIV trial, Excision researchers are turning the gene-editing tool against the virus. The Crispr infusion contains gene-editing molecules that target two regions in the HIV genome important for viral replication. The virus can only reproduce if it’s fully intact, so Crispr disrupts that process by cutting out chunks of the genome.

In 2019, researchers at Temple University and the University of Nebraska found that using Crispr to delete those regions eliminated HIV from the genomes of rats and mice. A year later, the Temple group also showed that the approach safely removed viral DNA from macaques with SIV, the monkey version of HIV.

That was an important step toward testing the treatment in people, says Kamel Khalili, a professor of microbiology at Temple University who led the work and is a cofounder of Excision Biotherapeutics. “You don’t want to eliminate the viral genome but at the same time cause any disruption in another part of the human genome and then create another set of problems for the patients,” he says. “We had to make sure that we identified a region within HIV that did not overlap with the human genome.”

Dornbusch thinks this strategy will spare patients from serious side effects and “off-target” edits—unintentional cuts elsewhere in the genome that could cause problems such as cancer.

The regions targeted by the company’s Crispr therapy are also in a part of the genome that tends to stay the same even when HIV evolves. That’s important because the virus mutates rapidly, and the researchers don’t want a moving target.

This isn’t the first time scientists have tried to use gene editing in the hope of curing people with HIV, but other efforts have focused on a protective mutation in a gene called CCR5. In the 1990s, scientists found that people with this naturally occurring mutation didn’t get HIV when exposed to it. The mutation—known as delta 32—thwarts the virus’s ability to get inside immune cells. In 2009, California-based Sangamo Therapeutics used an older editing technology called zinc finger nucleases to add that protective mutation into patients’ T cells—an important part of the immune system. Those trials have had limited success.

In 2017, Chinese scientists combined Crispr with a bone marrow transplant in an attempt to cure a patient with HIV and leukemia. In a typical transplant, donor stem cells are transferred to a recipient to replace their cancerous blood cells. These cells go on to form new, healthy blood cells. To also address the patient’s HIV, researchers edited the donor stem cells with Crispr to disable CCR5. But after the transplant, only a small percentage of the patient’s bone marrow cells ended up with the desired edit.

Then in 2018, Chinese scientist He Jiankui used Crispr to edit the CCR5 mutation into the genomes of twin baby girls to make them resistant to HIV. Fraught with ethical violations, the experiment was widely condemned by scientists. He’s research was suspended by the Chinese government, and he served a three-year prison sentence. While the twins were born healthy, only some of their cells were successfully edited, meaning the girls might in fact not be immune to HIV.

As of 2022, two people have now been cured of HIV after receiving bone marrow transplants from donors with the CCR5. Known as the Berlin patient and the London patient, both had cancer and received transplants to treat their disease. But these transplants aren’t a viable option for most people—they’re highly risky, and donors with the delta 32 mutation are scarce. But a third person was declared cured of HIV earlier this year after she received a new type of transplant involving umbilical cord blood.

The Excision trial will eventually enroll nine participants and test three dosage amounts to determine which is most effective. Investigators will measure each person’s viral load and CD4 count before receiving the therapy and after they stop taking antiretroviral drugs. The ultimate goal is to get viral loads down to an undetectable level—that is, less than 200 copies of HIV per milliliter of blood. At this level, HIV can’t be passed on through sex.

The challenge for Excision will be getting Crispr to enough cells to bring HIV down to undetectable levels. The company is using an engineered virus to shuttle the gene-editing components to patients’ HIV-infected CD4 cells. But so far, there’s little human data on how well Crispr works when it’s delivered directly to the body. “It’s possible that you get the virus to such low levels that if a person’s immune system were intact, they might be able to keep the virus at bay such that they don’t have to take antiretroviral therapy anymore,” says Rowena Johnston, vice president and director of research for amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research.

And even though these drugs are very effective, Johnston says, many people would rather be completely free of the virus. A single Crispr infusion—if it works—would eliminate the need for daily pills. “People with HIV still live with a lot of stigma and internalized shame,” she says. “I think a cure is something that addresses that much better than lifelong therapy, regardless of how easy that therapy becomes.”

A Bold Effort to Cure HIV—Using Crispr

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When Tesla first started marketing its driver assists, it relied on radar, cameras, and ultrasonic sensors all working together.

After cutting radar, Tesla now dropping ultrasonic sensors from its EVs

It also triggered a monstrous tsunami with mile-high waves that scoured the ocean floor thousands of miles from the impact site on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, according to a new University of Michigan-led study that was published online on October 4 in the journal AGU Advances.

The research study presents the first global simulation of the Chicxulub impact tsunami to be published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Additionally, U-M scientists reviewed the geological record at more than 100 sites worldwide and discovered evidence that supports their models’ predictions about the tsunami’s path and power.

“This tsunami was strong enough to disturb and erode sediments in ocean basins halfway around the globe, leaving either a gap in the sedimentary records or a jumble of older sediments,” said lead author Molly Range. She conducted the modeling study for a master’s thesis under U-M physical oceanographer and study co-author Brian Arbic and U-M paleoceanographer and study co-author Ted Moore.

Energy impact

The analysis of the geological record focused on “boundary sections.” These are marine sediments deposited just before or just after the asteroid impact and the subsequent Cretaceous–Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction, which closed the Cretaceous Period.

“The distribution of the erosion and hiatuses that we observed in the uppermost Cretaceous marine sediments are consistent with our model results, which gives us more confidence in the model predictions,” said Range, who started the project as an undergraduate in Arbic’s lab in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences.

According to the study’s calculations, the initial energy in the impact tsunami was up to 30,000 times larger than the energy in the December 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake tsunami. That one is one of the largest tsunamis in the modern record and killed more than 230,000 people.

Modeled tsunami sea-surface height perturbation, in meters, four hours after the asteroid impact. This image shows results from the MOM6 model, one of two tsunami-propagation models used in the University of Michigan-led study. Credit: From Range et al. in AGU Advances, 2022

 

The researcher’s simulations show that the impact tsunami radiated mainly to the east and northeast into the North Atlantic Ocean, and to the southwest into the South Pacific Ocean through the Central American Seaway (which used to separate North America and South America).

In those basins and in some adjacent areas, underwater current speeds likely exceeded 20 centimeters per second (0.4 mph),. This velocity is powerful enough to erode fine-grained sediments on the seafloor.

In contrast, the South Atlantic, the North Pacific, the Indian Ocean, and the region that is today the Mediterranean were largely shielded from the strongest effects of the tsunami, according to the team’s simulation. In those places, the modeled current speeds were likely less than the 20 cm/sec threshold.

Geological corroboration

U-M’s Moore analyzed published records of 165 marine boundary sections for the review of the geological record. He was able to obtain usable information from 120 of them. Most of the sediments came from cores collected during scientific ocean-drilling projects.

The North Atlantic and South Pacific had the fewest locations with complete, uninterrupted K-Pg boundary sediments. In contrast, the largest number of complete K-Pg boundary sections were uncovered in the South Atlantic, the North Pacific, the Indian Ocean, and the Mediterranean.

Modeled tsunami sea-surface height perturbation, in meters, 24 hours after the asteroid impact. This image shows results from the MOM6 model, one of two tsunami-propagation models used in the University of Michigan-led study. Credit: From Range et al. in AGU Advances, 2022

 

“We found corroboration in the geological record for the predicted areas of maximal impact in the open ocean,” said Arbic. He is a professor of earth and environmental sciences and oversaw the project. “The geological evidence definitely strengthens the paper.”

Of special significance, according to the authors, are outcrops of the K-Pg boundary on the eastern shores of New Zealand’s north and south islands, which are more than 7,500 miles (12,000 kilometers) from the Yucatan impact site.

The heavily disturbed and incomplete New Zealand sediments, called olistostromal deposits, were originally thought to be the result of local tectonic activity. However, given the age of the deposits and their location directly in the modeled pathway of the Chicxulub impact tsunami, the U-M-led team of researchers suspects a different origin.

“We feel these deposits are recording the effects of the impact tsunami, and this is perhaps the most telling confirmation of the global significance of this event,” Range said.

Comparing models

The modeling portion of the study used a two-stage strategy. First, a large computer program called a hydrocode simulated the chaotic first 10 minutes of the event. This included the asteroid impact, crater formation, and initiation of the tsunami.

That work was conducted by co-author Brandon Johnson of Purdue University.

Based on the findings of previous studies, the scientists modeled an asteroid that was 8.7 miles (14 kilometers) in diameter, moving at 27,000 mph (12 kilometers per second). It struck granitic crust overlain by thick sediments and shallow ocean waters, blasting an approximately 62-mile-wide (100-kilometer-wide) crater and ejecting dense clouds of soot and dust into the atmosphere.

Maximum tsunami wave amplitude, in centimeters, following the asteroid impact 66 million years ago. Credit: From Range et al. in AGU Advances, 2022

 

Two and a half minutes after the asteroid struck, a curtain of ejected material pushed a wall of water outward from the impact site, briefly forming a 2.8-mile-high (4.5-kilometer-high) wave that subsided as the ejecta fell back to Earth.

According to the U-M simulation, 10 minutes after the projectile hit the Yucatan, and 137 miles (220 kilometers) from the point of impact, a 0.93-mile-high (1.5-kilometer-high) tsunami wave—ring-shaped and outward-propagating—began sweeping across the ocean in all directions.

At the 10-minute mark, the results of Johnson’s iSALE hydrocode simulations were entered into two tsunami-propagation models, MOM6 and MOST, to track the giant waves across the ocean. MOM6 has been used to model tsunamis in the deep ocean, and NOAA uses the MOST model operationally for tsunami forecasts at its Tsunami Warning Centers.

“The big result here is that two global models with differing formulations gave almost identical results, and the geologic data on complete and incomplete sections are consistent with those results,” said Moore, professor emeritus of earth and environmental sciences. “The models and the verification data match nicely.”

According to the team’s simulation:

• One hour after impact, the tsunami had spread outside the Gulf of Mexico and into the North Atlantic.
• Four hours after impact, the waves had passed through the Central American Seaway and into the Pacific.
• Twenty-four hours after impact, the waves had crossed most of the Pacific from the east and most of the Atlantic from the west and entered the Indian Ocean from both sides.
• By 48 hours after impact, significant tsunami waves had reached most of the world’s coastlines.

Dramatic wave heights

For the current study, the research team did not attempt to estimate the extent of coastal flooding caused by the tsunami.

However, their models indicate that open-ocean wave heights in the Gulf of Mexico would have exceeded 328 feet (100 meters), with wave heights of more than 32.8 feet (10 meters) as the tsunami approached North Atlantic coastal regions and parts of South America’s Pacific coast.

As the tsunami neared those shorelines and encountered shallow bottom waters, wave heights would have increased dramatically through a process called shoaling. Current speeds would have exceeded the 0.4 mph (20 centimeters per second) threshold for most coastal areas worldwide.

“Depending on the geometries of the coast and the advancing waves, most coastal regions would be inundated and eroded to some extent,” according to the researchers. “Any historically documented tsunamis pale in comparison with such global impact.”

The follow-up

Arbic said that a follow-up study is planned to model the extent of coastal inundation worldwide. That study will be led by Vasily Titov of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Pacific Marine Environmental Lab, who is a co-author of the AGU Advances paper.

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Super-eruptions happen when enormous magma accumulations deep in the Earth’s crust, created over millions of years, travel quickly to the surface shattering pre-existing rock, according to recent research from the University of Bristol and Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre.

An international team of scientists was able to demonstrate, using a model for crustal flow, that pre-existing plutons—bodies of intrusive rock made from solidified magma or lava—were formed over a few million years prior to four known enormous super-eruptions and that the disruption of these plutons by newly emplaced magmas occurred extremely quickly. While the magma supplying super-eruptions takes place over a prolonged period of time, the magma disrupts the crust and then erupts in just a few decades.

The research, which was recently published in the journal Nature, explains these stark differences in time intervals for magma generation and eruption by the flow of hot, solid crust in response to the ascent of the magma, which explains both the rarity of these eruptions and their enormous volume.

Professor Steve Sparks of Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences explained: “The longevity of plutonic and related volcanic systems contrasts with short timescales to assemble shallow magma chambers prior to large-magnitude eruptions of molten rock.

Crystals formed from earlier magma pulses, entrained within erupting magmas are stored at temperatures near or below the solidus for long periods prior to eruption and commonly have a very short residence in host magmas for just decades or less.”

This study casts doubt on the interpretation of prolonged storage of old crystals at temperatures high enough for some molten rocks to be present and indicates the crystals derived from previously emplaced and completely solidified plutons (granites).

Scientists have known that volcanic super-eruptions eject crystals derived from older rocks. However, before this, they were widely thought to have originated in hot environments above the melting points of rock. Previous studies that show the magma chambers for super-eruptions form very rapidly but there was no convincing explanation for this rapid process. While modeling suggested that super-volcanic eruptions would need to be preceded by very long periods of granite pluton emplacement in the upper crust, evidence for this inference was largely lacking.

Prof Sparks added: “By studying the age and character of the tiny crystals erupted with molten rock, we can help understand how such eruptions happen. The research provides an advance in understanding the geological circumstances that enable super-eruptions to take place. This will help identify volcanoes that have the potential for future super-eruptions.”

Such eruptions are very rare and Bristol scientists estimate only one of these types of eruptions occurs on earth every 20,000 years. However such eruptions are highly destructive locally and can create global-scale severe climate change that would have catastrophic consequences.

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