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.

Source

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.

Source

A pair of legs belonging to what could be the largest bird species that ever stalked our planet have been unearthed from an outback fossil site in central Australia. Excitingly, more remains could still be laying nearby, waiting to be dug free.

Described by one paleontologist as an "extreme evolutionary experiment", Stirton's thunderbird (Dromornis stirtoni) is a patchwork of weird anatomical traits. Its oversized beak juts from an undersized skull, all perched on a body that towers 3 meters (10 feet) and weighs up to half a ton.

Just to make the animal sound even more absurd, these 8-million-year-old lumbering giants are actually related to modern day fowl, like chickens and ducks.

While the oversized 'demon ducks' are undoubtedly heavyweights, getting a precise measure on their size from jumbles of bones is easier said than done. This latest finding could take some of the guesswork out of models attempting to describe the true size ranges of Dromornis species.

For the first time remains of these massive flightless birds have been found articulated, laid out more or less how they existed inside the once living animal.

    A huge moment at #alcoota2022 with the very first articulated -Dromornis stirtoni- leg excavated from Classy Corner. Thankyou @Phoebyornis for scale! #fossilfriday @fupalaeosoc @FlindersPalaeo pic.twitter.com/mJaKvacOtg

    — Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (@MAG_NT) July 22, 2022

"What it means is that the carcass was entire when it was buried," paleontologist and curator of Earth sciences at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Adam Yates, told ScienceAlert.

"We only got the lower legs because that's as far as we dug. There's every expectation that a large part of the rest of the skeleton – if not the entire skeleton – might be lying in the next dig as we dig further into the bank that the legs come from."

The fossilized bones were discovered in Alcoota Reserve, a dense fossil site 190 km north-east of Alice Springs featuring one of the largest concentrations of terrestrial vertebrate remains in Australia. While this location has yielded thousands of fossilized specimens since excavations began there in 1986, most of them have been jumbled fragments of different species thanks to historic flood waters mixing up the remains.

So most of the Alcoota fossils have required painstaking sorting into species and reconstructions involving parts of multiple individual animals. Such composite reconstructions necessarily involve a degree of creative thinking that introduce occasional mistakes.

"Even if you get all the species right – you put the right bones with the right species all together – you're still going to have proportional errors because of course there's natural variation between individuals," explains Yates.

The new legs are an exciting find because they can provide researchers with a much more accurate idea of these animals' true proportions. It will also help paleontologists better identify more D. stirtoni bones from the other jumbled fossils at Alcoota.

    Deb's drumstick now in one piece. #FossilFriday pic.twitter.com/lrtzobn0oP

    — Sam Arman (@Samosthenurus) September 2, 2022

Flinders University paleontologist Warren Handley, Yates, and colleagues had previously compared an assortment of jumbled D. stirtoni bones discovered in the region and were able to identify a difference in size between males and females.

They took samples of the bones and identified a type of tissue called medullary bone in the smaller specimens. This is a temporary store of calcium that females draw from to shell their eggs, a feature males lack Yates explains.

Judging by the size of the newly discovered leg bones, the researchers suspect the remains belong to a female D. stirtoni, which the team have nicknamed Deb. They intend to do a histology test to confirm their suspicions.

Meanwhile, Deb's fossils are being prepared for temporary display at the museum later this year. Carefully cleaned and hardened with a plastic acetate filling any gaps, the bones will be preserved for future study.

Traces of thunderbirds have only ever been found in Australia, dating back to the late Miocene. These absurdly inflated chickens with small stubby wings lacked the specialized keeled sternum that other birds rely on for their large flight muscle attachments. They stalked dry woodlands and likely used their huge beaks to gobble up fruit and other vegetation.

Other herbivores found at Alcoota dated to the same time period include marsupials such as wallabies and ancient cow-sized wombat relatives.

These finds suggest D. stirtoni was the tall browser of this dry ecosystem, akin to today's camels – using its height to reach the vegetation beyond the grasp of its smaller fellow herbivores, Yates explains.

Back then, "it wasn't a mammal that stepped up to that role, it was a bird," says Yates.

Fossil records suggest these epic birds and their relatives existed for an incredible 25-million-year stretch of time. But at the end of the Miocene epoch Australia was drying up, perhaps too fast for D. stirtoni to adapt.

Yates notes that young thunderbird fossils are extremely rare to find, suggesting these animals did not have a fast rate of reproduction, producing possibly only one or two chicks a year. What's more, "it took an extraordinarily long time to mature for a bird. Dromornis took 15 years to reach adult size and sexual maturity."

These traits are well known for leaving animals vulnerable to changing environmental conditions.

The corner of the fossil deposit where the paleontologist found Deb also held an articulated wallaby, so Yates is keen to get back to the field next year. He is confident more of Deb is waiting to be discovered within the dirt bank, and there's an alluring possibility this site holds articulated fossils of unknown species too.

Source

1. Difficulty getting out of bed

It's perfectly normal to enjoy sleeping in or spending time in bed. However, if it has become difficult to find the motivation to get out of bed or get ready in the morning, this could be a sign of depression. Depression can make us feel fatigued and physically drained to the point where even small tasks, like getting up in the morning or showering, can feel exhausting or difficult to do.

2. Sleeping habits

The physical and mental exhaustion that comes with depression can also affect our sleeping habits. Changes in sleep can show up in a number of ways. Sometimes this means sleeping throughout the day, using sleep as a way to pass the time or preferring sleep to other daily activities.

Other times, sleep changes can create bouts of insomnia, which can make it difficult to fall asleep or stay asleep at night. Missing out on quality, restful sleep can increase our anxiety levels and intensify feelings of distress. Sometimes, this creates a cycle where our anxious thoughts keep us awake and negatively impact our sleep, which then leads to more anxious thoughts.

3. Changes in appetite

Our appetite and eating habits can also be impacted by depression. Some people may experience an increased appetite, while others have less of an appetite or may not be hungry at all. If you are noticing changes in your sleep habits, like the ones listed above, you may also notice changes in the way you eat. This is because sleep helps regulate our hunger hormones, which help to keep us from over- or undereating.

4. Persistent irritability or mood swings

Depression can cause us to experience outbursts and mood swings. One minute we're angry, the next we're crying uncontrollably, or we shut down and go numb. Changes in our mood can switch in a moment's notice. Sometimes these changes can be triggered by small or insignificant challenges, and other times they may come about completely unprovoked. If you notice a pattern of irritability or mood swings that last more than a few days, it may be linked to depression.

5. Difficulty experiencing joy or connection

When we're depressed, it can take all of the enjoyment out of the things we love and make it more difficult for us to connect to those closest to us. We may begin to lose interest in hobbies, friendships, schoolwork, social activities, sex or life in general. When we find that we are no longer enjoying or finding pleasure in the things we used to enjoy, this can be a sign of depression. We may also isolate ourselves from close friends, family members or others who care about us, which can perpetuate the symptoms of depression.

Source

The research, published in Human Computer Interaction was led by Professor Corina Sas of Lancaster University, Dr. Tom Gayler, formerly of Lancaster University and Vaiva Kalnikaité of Dovetailed Ltd. Their work explored the feasibility of 3D printed flavor-based cues for the recall of memories in old age.

Working with 12 older adults, they collected 72 memories, half involving food and half not involving food, each recalled twice. This ranged from barbecued mackerel at a golden wedding to eating strawberries in the hospital after giving birth.

For food memory, the researchers worked with the participants to create bespoke flavor-based cues for each one. The 3D printed flavor-based cues are small, gel-like, edible balls, modeling the original food, which are easier to swallow with more intense flavors, without requiring all the ingredients and preparation.

Professor Sas says that their "outcomes indicated that personalized 3D printed flavor-based cues have rich sensorial and emotional qualities supporting strong recollective retrieval, especially when they distinctively match the food in the original experience and prompt emotionally positive self-defining memories."

All the participants were able to provide rich sensory accounts when prompted by flavor- based cues, with most of the details not being present in the earlier free recall.

Remembering a Green Thai curry dinner in Cambodia, one participant said, "We went into the kitchen area, which was very basic and preparing all sorts of types of green vegetables, which I have no idea what they were, sitting on the floor. And then we would help cook them, stir fry them, and then we would help dish them up…"

But after being exposed to the 3D printed flavor-based cue of the Green Thai curry, the participant gave a more detailed memory of "the chopping noises of cutting up the vegetables, me sitting on the floor cross legged with my friend, chatting together. And then when we went out, put stuff on the tables, the rest of the group coming out and we sit on long tables outside, the front of the school, so it's outside in the open air to eat."

A striking outcome was the large number of memories cued by flavors that were recalled with strong feelings of being brought back in time.

One participant said, "The roast beef and horseradish cue took me back 25 years in one bound . . .I could place myself at the table in the room . . .I ate that, and that actually provoked out of all the memories, quite a strong reaction actually. Just suddenly I was back."

Interestingly, the mere act of eating the cue was seen as a bodily re-enactment of the original event: "It just kind of triggers a few more sensations.

Perhaps when you're tasting it, you imagine yourself there."

The researchers say their research has particular relevance for dementia. Participants talked about the importance of food memories based on their own experiences of caring for the loved ones.

One participant whose mother has Alzheimer's said that "as soon as she smelled and tasted the food, she would say something like, 'Oh, this is like old fashioned food. This takes me back'. She felt that it was something that she had had a long time ago."

Another participant suggested a scrapbook of food memories to trigger recollections of past events in people with dementia.

Professor Sas says that "the 3D printed flavors cued recollective retrieval, eliciting sensorially rich and strong positive emotional experiences that participants deeply enjoyed."

Dr. Gayler says that "working alongside people to create flavor-based cues highlighted how powerful but under used this connection is. Our design approach helped bridge this gap and showed the potential for future applications to create rich, multi-sensory memory aides."

Dr. Vaiva Kalnikaitė says that they "finally have technology that can help re-construct memories using the flavor and scent of different foods in very compact shapes. These are the strongest cues to help us remember."

Source

Ill. Niklas Elmehed © Nobel Prize Outreach
Carolyn R. Bertozzi

Prize share: 1/3

Ill. Niklas Elmehed © Nobel Prize Outreach
Morten Meldal

Prize share: 1/3

Ill. Niklas Elmehed © Nobel Prize Outreach
K. Barry Sharpless

Prize share: 1/3

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2022 was awarded jointly to Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless "for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry"

Source

In the late 1980s and 1990s, parents in Singapore began noticing a worrying change in their children. On the whole, people's lives in the small, tropical nation were improving hugely at the time. Access to education, in particular, was transforming a generation and opening the gates to prosperity. But there was a less positive trend, too: more and more children were becoming short-sighted.

Nobody was able to stop this national eyesight crisis. Rates of short-sightedness – also known as near-sightedness or myopia – continued to rise and rise. Today, Singapore has a myopia rate of around 80% in young adults, and has been called "the myopia capital of the world".

"We've been dealing with [this] issue for 20 years, so we're almost numb to it," says Audrey Chia, an associate professor and senior consultant at the Singapore National Eye Center (SNEC). "Almost everybody in Singapore is myopic now."

What happened in Singapore now appears to be happening all over the world. Countries with seemingly completely different lifestyles are unified by a startling phenomenon: rocketing rates of short-sightedness.

In the United States, about 40% of adults are short-sighted, up from 25% in 1971. Rates have similarly soared in the UK. But their situation pales in comparison with that of teens and young adults in South Korea, Taiwan and mainland China, whose prevalence rates are between 84% and 97%. If current trends continue, half the world's population will be short-sighted by 2050. And the problem seems to be spreading at a faster rate than ever.

Myopia has risen dramatically among children in China to reach 76%-90% among older school children. "It has been an extremely steep rise," says Chia.

At first glance, the idea of a short-sighted world may not seem like a major problem. After all, when someone struggles to see things at a distance, we have a proven fix: glasses. But researchers warn that myopia is not a benign quirk. It is one of the leading causes of vision impairment and blindness, for example.

And in children, where it may take some time to spot the problem and correct it, it can hurt their ability to learn in school and enjoy daily life – and set them up for future eye health problems.

A classroom in China, where short-sightedness has been on the rise among children and teens (Credit: Getty Images)

To make matters worse, while the typical age for a child to develop myopia is between eight and 12 years old, children are becoming myopic at a younger age. The earlier a child develops myopia, the more likely it is that they will have severe myopia in adulthood that can ultimately threaten their eyesight, by causing problems related to different parts of the eye such as glaucoma, retinal detachment, cataracts, and myopic maculopathy.

What explains this global eyesight crisis?

Genetics play only a small part. While a family history of myopia raises the risk of a child developing it, a purely genetic case of myopia is rare, says Neema Ghorbani-Mojarrad, a lecturer at the University of Bradford in the UK and a registered optometrist.

Instead, lifestyle factors are thought to be more significant, in particular, a lack of time outdoors, and focusing on close objects for an extended period through an activity like reading. These factors help explain why one otherwise thoroughly positive trend in children's lives has unintentionally worsened the spread of myopia: education.

Of course, education in itself – in the sense of discovering the world, and empowering oneself through knowledge and skills – does not cause poor eye health. In fact, education is associated with many positive, measureable health effects. But the way children obtain an education in the modern world, with the emphasis on long hours spent in classrooms, appears to be consistently hurting their eye health.

"Education has been shown to cause short-sightedness," says Ghorbani-Mojarrad, referring to education as measured by school years. "We don't know what it is about education – we suspect it is reading and spending more time indoors. Every year of education completed increases the expected amount of short-sightedness."

The education paradox

Ghorbani-Mojarrad and his colleagues studied the effect of education, as measured by school years, on myopia, by investigating the impact of the UK's raising of the school leaving age from 15 to 16, in the 1970s. "There's literally a bump in the chart for the extra year of school. Now that the leaving age is 18 in the UK, I wonder whether we will find the same thing again," he says.

To understand this surprising link, it helps to parse how myopia develops in the first place. Most newborn babies begin life long-sighted. Within the first year of life, the eyes naturally develop and the long-sightedness reduces to the point of their vision becoming almost perfect. However, in some cases the eyes do not stop growing and short-sightedness develops. The eyeball is too elongated to be able to make out objects at a distance without the help of a corrective measure such as glasses.

"Everyone has a finite amount of retina, and if the eye continues to grow, it's like trying to scrape the same amount of butter on a larger piece of bread," says Ghorbani-Mojarrad. "The retina becomes really thin and is more prone to tearing."

It appears that being indoors may worsen this problem, perhaps because of the way indoor lighting differs from natural light.

My father's generation spent a lot of time outdoors. But then urbanisation came to Singapore and there was a great push for academic excellence. It drove all the children indoors - Audrey Chia

In Singapore, which has undertaken some of the longest-running research on childhood myopia, experts have reached a similar conclusion.

"My father's generation spent a lot of time outdoors fishing and things," says Chia. "But then urbanisation came to Singapore and there was a great push for academic excellence. Parents wanted their kids to get into the best school and go to university. It drove all the children indoors for more reading, because reading was supposed to be good for you."

The paradox is, of course, that reading is good for children – measurably so. Literacy, and schooling more generally, is crucial for children's wellbeing, and missing out on them can cause lasting damage.

But pursuit of educational excellence to the exclusion of other aspects of life, such as spending time outside, can be detrimental to eye health, says Nathan Congdon, professor of global eye health at the Centre for Public Health at Queen’s University Belfast.

He points out that countries like Japan, Korea, Vietnam, China, Hong Kong and Singapore that have very high rates of myopia: "They've also got huge educational success. It is a complicated cultural phenomenon."

In China, trials have been conducted in classrooms that mimic learning in the outdoors. Children and teachers in a 2017 study by Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center, where Congdon also works, preferred the bright classrooms that resemble a glasshouse, as compared with a traditional classroom. However in summer and on sunny days, the light intensity was at the "practical upper limit for routine use". The bright classroom is also twice as expensive to build as a regular classroom, partly because cooling mechanisms are required.

This complex problem – myopia as a bad side effect of an otherwise positive trend – also shows up in another area: income levels.

Like education, a higher income is generally associated with greater wellbeing in children – but not when it comes to eye health. Instead, myopia is associated with higher socioeconomic status.

As Congdon explains: "The richer we get, the better we are at protecting our children from ever going outdoors, because they've got more things to do. They've got to play the piano and learn saxophone and watch TV, and so forth."

The literacy effect

In low- and middle-income countries, myopia rates still tend to be lower – Bangladesh and India for example report rates of about 20-30% in adults – but this is changing. In Africa, for example, myopia used to be comparatively uncommon, but over the past ten years the prevalence of childhood myopia has been rising fast. In addition, lower-income countries may lack the resources to diagnose and correct short-sightedness in children, with a massive impact on their lives and education. Some communities in Africa have reported having no access to spectacles at all, and very little access to eye care. Being unable to see properly means children can't follow what their teacher writes on the board, and may also find it hard to participate in other routine school activities.

As literacy rates improve in those countries – an otherwise welcome development – that problem could grow, unless there is a big effort to also provide eye tests and glasses, experts warn.

"We can expect myopia rates to continue to climb because countries like India are getting more kids into school," says Congdon. "And if kids are spending more time in school, they're spending more time reading and less time outdoors."

School time in itself is, however, not necessarily the root of the problem, as the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns have shown. It is staying indoors that appears to be. During the lockdowns, schools shut down all over the world – but children's eye health became even worse. Typically, they stayed inside during the lockdowns, and spent hours staring at screens, either following classes or watching TV, as other forms of learning and entertainment disappeared.

Singaporean children play by the harbour in the early 1960s. As the country became wealthier, children began spending more and more time indoors

(Credit: Getty Images)

In Brief: Can you prevent short-sightedness in children?

Short-sightedness rates in children and young people are soaring around the world, with some countries reporting rates of more than 80% or even 90%. The causes are complex, and researchers are still investigating a range of different factors. But one known factor is too much time spent indoors – whereas time spent outdoors, in natural light, is thought to benefit eye health. If you have any specific concerns over your child's eyesight, it is important to ask your health care provider for advice.

Lockdown vision

Because of the legacy of the lockdowns, Chia's biggest concern at the moment is for children aged between four and six. "We're worried that due to Covid-19, children were spending even more time indoors and that rates have gone up," says Chia. "We're waiting for our data to find out."

Data from China already shows that the lockdowns did in fact deal a blow to young children's eye health. One study compared myopia rates among children, measured by annual screenings. Before the pandemic, in the years from 2015-19, the highest myopia rate measured among six-year-old children was 5.7%. In June 2020, after 5 months of home confinement, researchers measured children's eyesight in that age group and found that the rate that shot up to 21.5%, says David C. Musch, one of the study's co-authors and a professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences, and epidemiology, at the University of Michigan.

Researchers have referred to this effect as "quarantine myopia" – basically, lockdown-induced short-sightedness.

Due to pandemic lockdowns, myopia is also becoming a concern in countries that were not much troubled by it before. This can be particularly noticeable in countries where children generally roamed outdoors before the pandemic – but found themselves suddenly confined.

"In countries with outdoor lifestyles, there may be a dramatic increase in myopia rates due to pandemic lockdowns," says Chia. "In countries like Singapore, where we don't go outdoors much, the change caused by the pandemic may not be as big."

Protecting children's eyesight

Faced with these facts, many parents may be wondering what they can do to protect their child's eyesight. And since eye health if a global issue, many countries have made it a priority, too. China, for example, is pursuing a slew of different strategies, warning that widespread near-sightedness could cause labour shortages in a slew of industries.

"A majority of the interventions that exist to stop short-sightedness getting worse were developed or tested in China," says Ghorbani-Mojarrad.

The results have been mixed. Eye exercises, which were previously recommended as a low-cost health strategy, were found to be insufficient in preventing myopia in the long-term. China has limited children's video gaming to a set amount of time per week – but this was largely directed at concerns over the perceived negative influence of gaming, rather than screen time itself. As for the potential link between screen time and myopia, the evidence is not conclusive.

    If your child really likes screentime, just sit them outside while they do it

   – Neema Ghorbani-Mojarrad

"There are many different types of screens and so many variables, so it is difficult to get accurate risk data," says Ghorbani-Mojarrad. "As a parent, it's probably worth being cautious about screens particularly because the evidence shows that it might be a factor. If your child really likes screentime, just sit them outside while they do it."

Other solutions hinge on technological advances. Singapore's myopia strategy, for example, includes special contact lenses or glasses. Its researchers have found no evidence to suggest that treatments such as oral supplements, eye exercises, eye relax machines, acupressure or magnetic therapy, are effective. Simple eye drops, however, may help.

A new red-light therapy may also hold promise. "The machine emits a red light into a child's eye for a few minutes a day for five days a week. It has been shown to slow the amount of short-sightedness developing. But we do not fully understand why," Ghorbani-Mojarrad says.

Ultimately, the right treatment depends on the child, experts say. If parents are worried, they should speak to an optometrist.

But for now, some of the most powerful solutions – be it to manage or prevent myopia – are surprisingly simple.

A girl plays in a conservatory in Singapore. Natural light and outdoor play can benefit children's eye health and general wellbeing

(Credit: Getty Images)

Healthy lives, healthy eyes

In many parts of the world, providing an ordinary pair of glasses can be life-changing. Congdon has been working in China since the early 1980s, together with ORBIS International, a charity that has provided low-cost glasses to 2.5 million children in China and India. He undertook the first trial to find out whether glasses would improve educational outcomes. His study of 20,000 children in Guangdong, China found that the impact of giving a $4 (£3.70) pair of glasses outstripped the impact of parental education or family income.

"It means that a simple, low-cost intervention can reverse a lot of the disadvantages that a kid might come into the world having vis-a-vis their parent's education or a low family income. We found this exciting," adds Congdon.

The most effective, evidence-based prevention strategy is also surprisingly low-tech, and applies to all countries regardless of their wealth or resources: more time outdoors.

Researchers are still investigating exactly why being outdoors, and being in natural light, helps prevent myopia – but for now, their perhaps most important conclusion is that it does. The challenge is to ensure that children make use of this natural boost.

In Singapore, outdoors time at preschools was doubled to one hour as part of the broader national myopia-fighting strategy. Exams for the youngest students have been scrapped, to reduce the time spent doing homework.

"We want to increase outdoor time for older students, but the curriculum is quite packed," says Chia. "We're a small island, so some schools don't have the room for the kids to go out and they're not close to a park or anything." While many uncertainties remain about myopia, she is encouraged by the progress made during decades of research: "Three years ago, we did not know how important sunlight is."

Ultimately, a child's eyesight is part of their general wellbeing, she says: "We don't just want the focus to be on the eyes: it's about the whole body and good mental health. We want our kids to lead healthy lives."

Source

The unborn baby was in trouble. Its mother’s doctors, at a UK hospital, knew there was something wrong with the fetus’s blood, so they decided to perform an emergency C-section many weeks before the baby was due. But despite this, and subsequent blood transfusions, the baby suffered a brain hemorrhage with devastating consequences. It sadly passed away.

It wasn’t clear why the bleeding had happened. But there was a clue in the mother’s blood, where doctors had noticed some strange antibodies. Some time later, as the medics tried to find out more about them, a sample of the mother’s blood arrived at a lab in Bristol run by researchers who study blood groups.

They made a startling discovery: The woman’s blood was of an ultrarare type, which may have made her baby’s blood incompatible with her own. It’s possible that this prompted her immune system to produce antibodies against her baby’s blood—antibodies that then crossed the placenta and harmed her child, ultimately leading to its loss. It may seem implausible that such a thing could happen, but many decades ago, before doctors had a better understanding of blood groups, it was much more common.

Through studying the mother’s blood sample, along with a number of others, scientists were able to unpick exactly what made her blood different, and in the process confirmed a new set of blood grouping—the “Er” system, the 44th to be described.

You’re probably familiar with the four main blood types—A, B, O, and AB. But this isn’t the only blood classification system. There are many ways of grouping red blood cells based on differences in the sugars or proteins that coat their surface, known as antigens. The grouping systems run concurrently, so your blood can be classified in each—it might, for instance, be type O in the ABO system, positive (rather than negative) under the Rhesus system, and so on.

Thanks to differences in antigens, if someone receives incompatible blood from a donor, for example, the recipient’s immune system may detect those antigens as foreign and react against them. This can be highly dangerous, and is why donated blood needs to be a suitable match if someone is having a transfusion.

On average, one new blood classification system has been described by researchers each year during the past decade. These newer systems tend to involve blood types that are mind-bogglingly rare but, for those touched by them, just knowing that they have such blood could be lifesaving. This is the story of how scientists unraveled the mystery of the latest blood system—and why it matters.

It was back in 1982 that researchers first described an unusual antibody in a blood sample that hinted that this mystery blood type was out there. The scientists couldn’t go much further than that at the time, but they knew that the antibody was a clue pointing toward some unknown molecule or structure that prompted the person’s immune system to generate it.

In the years that followed, more people with these unusual antibodies turned up—but only now and again. Generally, these people surfaced thanks to blood tests containing the mysterious and rare antibodies. Eventually, Nicole Thornton and her colleagues at NHS Blood and Transplant in the United Kingdom decided to look into what might be behind the antibodies. “We work on rare cases,” she says. “It starts off with a patient with a problem that we’re trying to resolve.”

But so rare were the mysterious antibodies in the latest work that when the team started their investigation, they had historical blood samples from just 13 people—gathered over 40 years—to analyze. Other recently established systems have been found thanks to similarly small numbers of people. Back in 2020, Thornton and her colleagues described a new blood group called MAM-negative that at the time was confirmed in just 11 people worldwide. And some of the most recently discovered blood groups have been found in single families, she adds. Both “MAM” and “Er” are obscure references to the names of the patients whose blood samples first sparked the possibility of a new blood group discovery.

It turns out that the new, 44th grouping system, detailed in the journal Blood, is tied to a particular protein found on the surface of red blood cells.

Originally, Thornton had an inkling this protein, called Piezo1, was involved after she compared the genomes of patients in the study. She and colleagues noticed how the gene responsible for this protein varies across people with different Er blood types. Due to those genetic differences, a small number of people have alternative amino acids, or building blocks, in their Piezo1 protein. Blood cells with the more common Piezo1 protein seem foreign to their bodies’ immune systems as a result.

The team then checked to see whether antibodies reacted with lab cultures that either did or did not contain mutant versions of the Piezo1 protein, which they created using gene editing. That allowed them to confirm that variation in Piezo1 really was the driver of blood incompatibility in the people whose samples they were looking at. “It was something you couldn’t have done a few years ago,” says coauthor Ash Toye, professor of cell biology at the University of Bristol.

There are five Er antigens in total—five possible variations of Piezo1 on the surface of red blood cells that can lead to incompatibility. Two of the antigens were newly described by Thornton and her fellow researchers, and one of those was found in blood from the pregnant woman in the UK who lost her baby.

The results of the study will likely be officially ratified as defining a new blood group system later this year, at a meeting of the International Society of Blood Transfusion. The effort required to make the discovery was “massive,” says Neil Avent, honorary professor in the blood diagnostics group at the University of Plymouth, who was not involved in the work. It also revealed complexities about this rare blood—for instance, that there are multiple genetic mutations associated with it.

Across the Atlantic, a separate team of researchers had also been trying to unravel the secrets of the new Er blood group, but were beaten by the British team. “That happens in this field,” says Connie Westhoff of the New York Blood Center, who was part of the US research. “We often know that we’re racing to find the solution in several different laboratories.”

She says she and her colleagues have additional blood samples that appear to be from people with a rare Er blood group. And the research may not be over, she suggests—there are possibly more genetic mutations associated with this rare blood to uncover.

“Discovering a new blood group system is like discovering a new planet. It enlarges the landscape of our reality,” says Daniela Hermelin at the Saint Louis University School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study. It adds to our knowledge of how blood incompatibility can affect pregnant mothers and their babies, she explains. And now that cases of blood incompatibility can potentially be attributed to the Er blood group, it increases the chance that doctors can correctly diagnose such a problem and treat it—by giving the baby a blood transfusion in the womb, for example.

It will also be possible to look out for and identify patients who have this troublesome blood. For example, someone might go to a hospital for a transfusion and have a preliminary blood test that reveals the presence of some unusual antibodies. Doctors could send the blood for analysis, and it might turn out that they have the rare Er blood described in the paper. “We have our testing set up to be able to do that,” says Thornton. Rare blood might then be required for that person’s transfusion, she adds. In the future, scientists in a lab might be able to grow red blood cells that could be offered to these patients for transfusion purposes.

It’s very, very unlikely that you’d have an incompatibility with someone else’s blood due to Er antigens, says Avent. But “if you do, it’s something you want to know about.”

Scientists Have Discovered a New Set of Blood Groups

(May require free registration to view)

After an amazing run at Mars, India says its orbiter has no more fuel

If you stand on the coast of Israel and gaze out across the Mediterranean Sea, you’ll spy deep-blue, calm waters that have sustained humans for millennia. Beneath the surface, though, something odd is unfolding: A process called stratification is messing with the way the sea processes carbon dioxide.

Think of this part of the Mediterranean as a cake made of liquid, essentially. Fierce sunlight heats the top layer of water that sits on cooler, deeper layers below. Out in the open ocean, where water temperatures are lower, CO2 dissolves in saltwater—which is what allows Earth’s seas to collectively absorb a quarter of the carbon emissions that humans pump into the atmosphere. But as the eastern Mediterranean Sea heats up in the summer, it can no longer absorb that gas and instead starts releasing it.

It’s the same thing that happens in a bottle of soda that is carbonated with carbon dioxide. “You usually keep it cold, so the dissolved gasses will stay dissolved,” says Or Bialik, a geoscientist at the University of Münster in Germany. “If you leave it in your car for a while and try to open it, all the gasses are going to pop out at once, because when it warms, the capacity of the fluid to hold CO2 goes down.” Boom, fizz, you’ve got a mess on your hands. 

In the Eastern Mediterranean, this dynamic is rather more consequential for the climate than a sticky car interior, as the sea begins burping up great quantities of CO2 that the water can no longer hold. And Bialik and his colleagues have discovered that these warming, stratifying waters teem with a second carbon problem: The team recently caught aragonite crystals in sediment traps. Aragonite is a form of calcium carbonate, which oceanic creatures like snails use to build their shells. Except in the increasingly hot Eastern Mediterranean, the aragonite is forming abiotically. That’s another sign that the water is getting so warm that it’s releasing its carbon load.

In these hot, shallow, stable waters, the fluid on top doesn’t mix much with the underlying colder layers, in contrast to deeper parts of the ocean, where upwelling brings up cooler H2O. “The conditions are so extreme that we can definitely generate calcium carbonate chemically from these waters, which was kind of a shock for us,” says Bialik, who coauthored a recent paper describing the discovery in the journal Scientific Reports. (He did the research while at the University of Malta and University of Haifa.) “It's basically like a beaker that sits there for a very long time, and it's long enough to get these reactions going and start generating these crystals.”

It’s like the experiments you might have done as a kid with sugar crystals. You added a bunch of sugar to water, saturating it. Nothing happened until you dropped in a string, which allowed the sugar to precipitate into fat clusters that clung to the string. Similarly, when the Mediterranean heats up and stratifies, it’s saturated with carbonate. How exactly the aragonite reactions get going, Bialik and his colleagues can’t yet say, but they may start with nuclei like specks of dust blown off nearby land, upon which the layers of aragonite build into crystals—a very tiny version of the string in the sugar water.

It’s also worth noting that the Mediterranean Sea is one of the most microplastic-polluted water bodies in the world: In 2020, scientists reported finding 2 million particles in a single square meter of sediment that was only 5 centimeters thick. Whether aragonite crystals are forming around microplastics floating in the water column, Bialik doesn’t know. “They could probably form around any nucleation center,” says Bialik. “I suspect that microplastics may also be a possible one. But as scientists love to say, more research is needed.” 

What Bialik and his colleagues can say, though, is that as these crystals form, they release CO2. So much so, Bialik calculates, that they account for perhaps 15 percent of the gas that the Mediterranean Sea emits to the atmosphere.

As the sea warms up and loses its CO2, both from the water belching it up and from the proliferating crystals, its acidity actually goes down. This is the opposite process from the one that’s causing widespread ocean acidification: As humans spew more CO2 into the atmosphere, the oceans absorb more of it, and the ensuing chemical reaction raises acidity. Acidification makes it harder for organisms like corals and snails (which are known collectively as calcifiers), to build shells or exoskeletons out of calcium carbonate. But as the Mediterranean warms and releases its absorbed carbon back into the atmosphere, it gets more basic, reversing that acidification.

That should be great for the calcifiers, right? Not necessarily. “Many of them have specific temperature ranges in which they can build their shells—not too hot, not too cold,” says Bialik. So even if the sea is getting less acidic as it warms, that heat stresses these organisms in a different way. (Not to mention the stress of being constantly exposed to extreme levels of microplastics.)

It’s not clear whether aragonite crystals are forming in more places around the world. Scientists are already aware of “whiting events,” in which calcium carbonate precipitates in much more obvious ways, turning the waters around the Bahamas and in the Persian Gulf a milky color. In the Eastern Mediterranean, there wasn’t an obvious whiting event to clue in Bialik and his colleagues. Instead, they stumbled upon the crystals in their sediment traps.

“This is a somewhat unique area with a variety of conditions that have to happen to make this work,” says marine chemist Andrew Dickson of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who wasn’t involved in the research. “The question then is, to what degree is that environment really special, or is it common around the oceans? And I don't have a clear picture of that in my mind.”

It may be that the conditions in the eastern Mediterranean aren’t replicated in many other places, so Dickson is leaning toward the idea that this may not be particularly common. But Bialik points out that wherever it may be happening, it could be causing a climate problem: Aragonite crystal formation may mess with the water’s ability to absorb atmospheric CO2, thus interfering with how the ocean reduces levels of the planet-heating gas. 

“I won't say we fully understand this yet and fully understand what governs it—when it turns on and when it shuts down,” says Bialik. “We didn't even think this process occurs on this scale in open waters, in normal marine conditions. And so we still have a lot that we need to understand about it.”

The Mediterranean Sea Is So Hot, It’s Forming Carbonate Crystals

(May require free registration to view)

Along with the results from a related study, published in JAMA Neurology, the researchers also found that walking more, accumulating up to roughly 10,000 steps a day, was linked to a reduction in the occurrence of cardiovascular disease (including heart disease, stroke and heart failure), 13 types of cancer and dementia.

Both studies involved about 78,500 participants, all middle age and older, who wore a device on their wrist to measure physical activity and whose health was monitored for a median of seven years. Taking 10,000 steps a day (roughly four to five miles, depending on a person’s stride) has become a common health and fitness goal.

The new studies, however, found that health benefits also can be achieved by taking fewer steps. For instance, walking about 9,800 steps a day was found to lower risk of dementia by about 50 percent, but dementia risk was cut by 25 percent for those who walked as few as 3,800 steps daily.

Also, walking at a faster pace, or upping the intensity by power walking, for example, was found to have health benefits, too, with intensity amplifying the results. Walking at a faster pace was linked to a lower risk for dementia, heart disease, cancer and early death, beyond the benefit accrued for the number of daily steps.

Source

How to optimize the pursuit of well-being and happiness is a question researchers have tried to tackle from a range of angles.

The social effects of the pandemic led many people to focus more closely on their mental health and buffer against threats to well-being – in short, to pursue happiness.

As a social scientist, I study the intersection of ethical behavior and well-being. Last year, my colleagues and I decided to explore ways that people could increase their sense of well-being and decrease the increasingly common feelings of anxiety and depression that arose during the pandemic.

Given the recent popular movement towards ideals of self-care and focusing inward, we wanted to further investigate the best way to increase one's happiness and mental health.

We compared people who chose to treat themselves by spending money, or time, or some form of resources on their own happiness (anything from painting their nails, to watching their favorite movie), versus those who treated others (again, anything from opening the door for someone at the grocery store, to donating goods to charity).

In both cases, people largely did simple, low- to no-cost acts on a daily basis.

Committing to kindness

What we found was surprising: for people who didn't consistently enact behaviors outside of their normal routine, kind acts had no effect on their well-being.

However, for those who fully engaged in the study by consistently enacting behaviors outside of their normal routine, acts of kindness had bigger boosts to their well-being and mental health compared to those who treated themselves.

Not only that, but for those who fully engaged in their kind acts, those acts were associated with reductions in both anxiety and depression.

Our study joins a long line of research findings that concur. Why does research find these effects? Some have found that spending our energy on other people (particularly those less fortunate) makes our own troubles seem less pressing.

Others have noted that treating others often means spending time with them, building and reinforcing relationships – and we know that strong social relationships are one key to happiness.

Relatedly, when other people are present, we tend to smile much more – essentially experiencing positive emotions more frequently.

Research has also suggested that leading a meaningful life is a significant predictor of feeling good. It is likely that spending your limited resources and energies on other people can help boost this sense of meaning, making life more fulfilling and worthy of living.

In contrast, spending – whether time, money or effort – on yourself doesn't seem to have the same benefits.

Predictors of happiness

We are now conducting a follow-up study, trying to better understand if all of the kind acts people may engage in are equal predictors of happiness, or whether there are particular characteristics of certain acts that may make them more helpful in increasing positive feelings.

Interestingly, we have found that as long as you don't do the same act over and over (for example, baking cookies for your neighbor every day), you are sure to gain benefit from your kindness.

However, there were three factors that make certain acts particularly beneficial to happiness.

•     First, doing something outside of your normal routine – for example, driving your neighbor to his doctor's appointment – affects your happiness more than routine acts, such as helping your spouse with the dishes.

•     Second, changing the kind acts that you do is important. For example, one day you might help a co-worker finish their tasks, while another day you might choose to spend time helping your niece learn to play soccer. So, variety is key.

•     Third, happiness is boosted when you receive positive feedback about the kind act that you did. Knowing how you have helped someone or receiving gratitude and appreciation for your act amplifies your positive feelings.

Trying to increase your happiness and mental health doesn't have to be hard, time-consuming, or expensive. In fact, it can be done in the span of 60 seconds without much effort or money at all – just consider holding open a door for a stranger or giving your colleague a compliment.

Although engaging in kind acts isn't a universal remedy for emotional needs, these little acts of kindness can all add up to the old adage: in helping others, you really can help yourself.

Source

Neutrinos are so lightweight that for a long time, physicists thought the particles had no mass at all. Two researchers won the 2015 Nobel Prize in physics for proving they did. But the neutrino’s mass is tiny. Each one has less than a millionth of the mass of an electron. Neutrinos also have no electric charge, adding to their stealth.

As a result, neutrinos are very difficult to detect and study. To net neutrinos, researchers build huge detectors. Sensors in the machines spot the few, far-between flashes of light caused by rare neutrino interactions with nearby matter.

Despite being the introverts of the particle world, neutrinos are important for understanding the universe. Neutrinos are flung out by stellar explosions and flaring galaxies called blazars. Studying such neutrinos helps scientists better understand such high-energy phenomena. Neutrinos may also help solve one of the biggest questions in the universe: Why is the cosmos made up mostly of matter and not antimatter?

Source

Three scientists who laid the groundwork for the understanding of the odd "entangling" behavior of quantum particles have received the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics.

French physicist Alain Aspect, Austria's Anton Zeilinger and American John Clauser were honored for their experiments exploring the nature of entangled quantum particles.

Defying the logic of our everyday reality, such particles behave like a single unit even when they are far away from each other. Engineers are currently working on harnessing this odd behavior in a range of revolutionary technologies, including quantum computing and quantum cryptography, a supposedly unbreakable technique of secure information coding.

The beginning of quantum theory dates back to the great physicists of the early 20th century, including Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr. But the generation represented by the three new Nobel Prize laureates bridged the gap between theory and practical experiments and applications.

"Quantum information science is a vibrant and rapidly developing field. It has a broad range of potential implications in areas such as secure information transfer, quantum computing and sensing technology," Eva Olsson, a member of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said in a news conference on Tuesday(Oct.4). "This year's Nobel Prize in Physics honors the groundbreaking work and science of the central figures who took up the challenges and tackled them in laboratories."

One of the most mature applications of quantum technology is quantum cryptography, which takes advantage of the fact that changes made to one particle in an entangled system affect the other. Encryption keys to secret messages can therefore be encoded into the quantum states of such particles. These keys can be exchanged between the parties in the communication process securely, because any interception of the secret keys by a third party would inherently change the particles' quantum state and render the keys invalid.

Quantum key distribution via satellites was first demonstrated by China in 2016 as part of its Quantum Experiments at Space Scale project. Countries all over the world have since begun developing similar technologies.

Perhaps the most high-profile application of entangled quantum particles is in the nascent field of quantum computing. Quantum computers encode information into the quantum states of particles, which can lead to giant leaps in the speed of information processing.

Scientists believe that, once up and running, quantum computers will accelerate drug research, material science and lead to improvements in climate change modeling and weather forecasting, among other benefits.

"It has become increasingly clear that a new kind of quantum technology is emerging," Anders Irbäck, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said in a statement. "We can see that the laureates' work with entangled states is of great importance, even beyond the fundamental questions about the interpretation of quantum mechanics."

"This prize demonstrates the fundamental beauty of physics," Penelope Lewis, the chief publishing officer of the American Institute of Physics' publishing department, commented in a statement. "With their pioneering experiments in quantum entanglement, Aspect, Clauser, and Zeilinger brought quantum mechanics out of its philosophical beginnings — dating back nearly a century — and into the present day. Their experiments laid the groundwork for incredible advances in quantum computing and cryptography, technologies with the potential to transform the modern world."

Source

Here is the full list of winners:

2022:  American physicist John Clauser, French physicist Alain Aspect and Austrian physicist Anton Zeilinger each shared the 2022 prize "for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science,” according to the Nobel Prize organization.  Their work demonstrated that what Einstein so famously dubbed "spooky action at a distance" is real and laid the groundwork for early quantum computers.

2021: The 2021 Nobel prize went to three scientists whose work alerted the world to the dangers of climate change.  The prize was awarded for "for groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of complex physical systems." Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann shared one-half of the prize "for the physical modeling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming" while Giorgio Parisi won the other half "for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales."

2020:  The Nobel Prize in Physics 2020 was divided amongst a trio of black hole researchers. One half of the award went to Roger Penrose, "for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity", while Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez jointly shared the other half "for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy"

2019: Canadian-American James Peebles of Princeton University received one-half of the Nobel "for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said. The other half of the prize was awarded jointly to Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, "for the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star," the Academy said. Mayor is a professor at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, and Queloz is at both the University of Geneva and the University of Cambridge in the U.K.

Together, the trio won the Nobel "for contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earth’s place in the cosmos," the Academy said.

2018: Arthur Ashkin was awarded one half of the prize, and the other half was awarded jointly to Donna Strickland and Gérard Mourou, "for groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics." This was the first time in 55 years that a woman was part of the Nobel Prize in physics.

2017: Half of the 9 million Swedish krona ($1.1 million) award went to Rainer Weiss of MIT. The other half was shared jointly to Barry Barish and Kip Thorne of Caltech. The prize honored the trio's "decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves," according to Nobelprize.org. The three scientists were integral in the first detection of the ripples in space-time called gravitational waves. The waves in this case came from the collision of two black holes 1.3 billion years ago.

2016: One half was awarded to David J. Thouless, of the University of Washington, Seattle, and the other half to F. Duncan M. Haldane, Princeton University, and J. Michael Kosterlitz, Brown University, Providence. Their theoretical discoveries opened the door to a weird world where matter can take on strange states. According to the Nobel Foundation: "Thanks to their pioneering work, the hunt is now on for new and exotic phases of matter. Many people are hopeful of future applications in both materials science and electronics."

2015: Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald for showing the metamorphosis of neutrinos, which revealed that the subatomic particles have mass and opened up a new realm in particle physics.

2014: Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura for their invention of an energy-efficient light source: blue light-emitting diodes (LEDs).

2013: Peter Higgs of the United Kingdom and François Englert of Belgium, two of the scientists who predicted the existence of the Higgs boson nearly 50 years ago.

2012: French physicist Serge Haroche and American physicist David Wineland, for their pioneering research in quantum optics.

2011: One half awarded to Saul Perlmutter, the other half jointly to Brian P. Schmidt and Adam G. Riess, "for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae."

2010: Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, "for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene."

2009: Charles K. Kao, "for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication," and Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith, "for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit – the CCD sensor."

2008: Yoichiro Nambu, "for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics," and Makoto Kobayashi, Toshihide Maskawa, "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature."

2007: Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg, "for the discovery of Giant Magnetoresistance"

2006: John C. Mather and George F. Smoot, "for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation."

2005: Roy J. Glauber, "for his contribution to the quantum theory of optical coherence," and John L. Hall and Theodor W. Hänsch, "for their contributions to the development of laser-based precision spectroscopy, including the optical frequency comb technique."

2004: David J. Gross, H. David Politzer and Frank Wilczek, "for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction."

2003: Alexei A. Abrikosov, Vitaly L. Ginzburg and Anthony J. Leggett, "for pioneering contributions to the theory of superconductors and superfluids."

2002: Raymond Davis Jr. and Masatoshi Koshiba, "for pioneering contributions to astrophysics, in particular for the detection of cosmic neutrinos," and Riccardo Giacconi, "for pioneering contributions to astrophysics, which have led to the discovery of cosmic X-ray sources."

2001: Eric A. Cornell, Wolfgang Ketterle and Carl E. Wieman, "for the achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute gases of alkali atoms, and for early fundamental studies of the properties of the condensates."

2000: Zhores I. Alferov and Herbert Kroemer, "for developing semiconductor heterostructures used in high-speed- and opto-electronics," and Jack S. Kilby "for his part in the invention of the integrated circuit."

1999: Gerardus 't Hooft and Martinus J.G. Veltman, "for elucidating the quantum structure of electroweak interactions in physics."

1998: Robert B. Laughlin, Horst L. Störmer and Daniel C. Tsui, "for their discovery of a new form of quantum fluid with fractionally charged excitations."

1997: Steven Chu, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William D. Phillips, "for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light."

1996: David M. Lee, Douglas D. Osheroff and Robert C. Richardson, "for their discovery of superfluidity in helium-3."

1995: Martin L. Perl, "for the discovery of the tau lepton," and Frederick Reines, "for the detection of the neutrino."

1994: Bertram N. Brockhouse, "for the development of neutron spectroscopy," and Clifford G. Shull, "for the development of the neutron diffraction technique."

1993: Russell A. Hulse and Joseph H. Taylor Jr., "for the discovery of a new type of pulsar, a discovery that has opened up new possibilities for the study of gravitation."

1992: Georges Charpak, "for his invention and development of particle detectors, in particular the multiwire proportional chamber."

1991: Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, "for discovering that methods developed for studying order phenomena in simple systems can be generalized to more complex forms of matter, in particular to liquid crystals and polymers."

1990: Jerome I. Friedman, Henry W. Kendall and Richard E. Taylor, "for their pioneering investigations concerning deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons, which have been of essential importance for the development of the quark model in particle physics."

1989: Norman F. Ramsey, "for the invention of the separated oscillatory fields method and its use in the hydrogen maser and other atomic clocks," and Hans G. Dehmelt and Wolfgang Paul, "for the development of the ion trap technique."

1988: Leon M. Lederman, Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger, "for the neutrino beam method and the demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino."

1987: J. Georg Bednorz and K. Alexander Müller, "for their important break-through in the discovery of superconductivity in ceramic materials."

1986: Ernst Ruska, "for his fundamental work in electron optics, and for the design of the first electron microscope," and Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer, "for their design of the scanning tunneling microscope."

1985: Klaus von Klitzing, "for the discovery of the quantized Hall effect".

1984: Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer, "for their decisive contributions to the large project, which led to the discovery of the field particles W and Z, communicators of weak interaction."

1983: Subramanyan Chandrasekhar, "for his theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars," and William Alfred Fowler, "for his theoretical and experimental studies of the nuclear reactions of importance in the formation of the chemical elements in the universe."

1982: Kenneth G. Wilson, "for his theory for critical phenomena in connection with phase transitions."

1981: Nicolaas Bloembergen and Arthur Leonard Schawlow, "for their contribution to the development of laser spectroscopy," and Kai M. Siegbahn, "for his contribution to the development of high-resolution electron spectroscopy."

1980: James Watson Cronin and Val Logsdon Fitch, "for the discovery of violations of fundamental symmetry principles in the decay of neutral K-mesons."

1979: Sheldon Lee Glashow, Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg, "for their contributions to the theory of the unified weak and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles, including, inter alia, the prediction of the weak neutral current."

1978: Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa, "for his basic inventions and discoveries in the area of low-temperature physics," and Arno Allan Penzias, Robert Woodrow Wilson "for their discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation."

1977: Philip Warren Anderson, Sir Nevill Francis Mott and John Hasbrouck van Vleck, "for their fundamental theoretical investigations of the electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems."

1976: Burton Richter and Samuel Chao Chung Ting, "for their pioneering work in the discovery of a heavy elementary particle of a new kind."

1975: Aage Niels Bohr, Ben Roy Mottelson and Leo James Rainwater, "for the discovery of the connection between collective motion and particle motion in atomic nuclei and the development of the theory of the structure of the atomic nucleus based on this connection."

1974: Sir Martin Ryle and Antony Hewish, "for their pioneering research in radio astrophysics: Ryle for his observations and inventions, in particular of the aperture synthesis technique, and Hewish for his decisive role in the discovery of pulsars."

1973: Leo Esaki and Ivar Giaever, for "for their experimental discoveries regarding tunneling phenomena in semiconductors and superconductors, respectively," and Brian David Josephson, "for his theoretical predictions of the properties of a supercurrent through a tunnel barrier, in particular those phenomena which are generally known as the Josephson effects."

1972: John Bardeen, Leon Neil Cooper, John Robert Schrieffer, "for their jointly developed theory of superconductivity, usually called the BCS-theory."

1971: Dennis Gabor, "for his invention and development of the holographic method."

1970: Hannes Olof Gösta Alfvén, "for fundamental work and discoveries in magnetohydro- dynamics with fruitful applications in different parts of plasma physics," and Louis Eugène Félix Néel, "for fundamental work and discoveries concerning antiferromagnetism and ferrimagnetism which have led to important applications in solid state physics."

1969: Murray Gell-Mann, "for his contributions and discoveries concerning the classification of elementary particles and their interactions."

1968: Luis Walter Alvarez, "for his decisive contributions to elementary particle physics, in particular the discovery of a large number of resonance states, made possible through his development of the technique of using hydrogen bubble chamber and data analysis."

1967: Hans Albrecht Bethe, "for his contributions to the theory of nuclear reactions, especially his discoveries concerning the energy production in stars."

1966: Alfred Kastler, "for the discovery and development of optical methods for studying Hertzian resonances in atoms."

1965: Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, Julian Schwinger and Richard P. Feynman, "for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles."

1964: Charles Hard Townes, "for fundamental work in the field of quantum electronics, which has led to the construction of oscillators and amplifiers based on the maser-laser principle," and Nicolay Gennadiyevich Basov and Aleksandr Mikhailovich Prokhorov, "for fundamental work in the field of quantum electronics, which has led to the construction of oscillators and amplifiers based on the maser-laser principle."

1963: Eugene Paul Wigner, "for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles," and Maria Goeppert-Mayer and J. Hans D. Jensen, "for their discoveries concerning nuclear shell structure."

1962: Lev Davidovich Landau, "for his pioneering theories for condensed matter, especially liquid helium."

1961: Robert Hofstadter, "for his pioneering studies of electron scattering in atomic nuclei and for his thereby achieved discoveries concerning the structure of the nucleons," and Rudolf Ludwig Mössbauer, "for his researches concerning the resonance absorption of gamma radiation and his discovery in this connection of the effect which bears his name."

1960: Donald Arthur Glaser, "for the invention of the bubble chamber."

1959: Emilio Gino Segrè and Owen Chamberlain, "for their discovery of the antiproton."

1958: Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov, Il´ja Mikhailovich Frank and Igor Yevgenyevich Tamm, "for the discovery and the interpretation of the Cherenkov effect."

1957: Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao (T.D.) Lee, "for their penetrating investigation of the so-called parity laws which has led to important discoveries regarding the elementary particles."

1956: William Bradford Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain, "for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect."

1955: Willis Eugene Lamb, "for his discoveries concerning the fine structure of the hydrogen spectrum," and Polykarp Kusch, "for his precision determination of the magnetic moment of the electron."

1954: Max Born, "for his fundamental research in quantum mechanics, especially for his statistical interpretation of the wavefunction," and Walther Bothe, "for the coincidence method and his discoveries made therewith."

1953: Frits (Frederik) Zernike, "for his demonstration of the phase contrast method, especially for his invention of the phase contrast microscope."

1952: Felix Bloch and Edward Mills Purcell, "for their development of new methods for nuclear magnetic precision measurements and discoveries in connection therewith."

1951: Sir John Douglas Cockcroft and Ernest Thomas Sinton Walton, "for their pioneer work on the transmutation of atomic nuclei by artificially accelerated atomic particles."

1950: Cecil Frank Powell, "for his development of the photographic method of studying nuclear processes and his discoveries regarding mesons made with this method."

1949: Hideki Yukawa, "for his prediction of the existence of mesons on the basis of theoretical work on nuclear forces."

1948: Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett, "for his development of the Wilson cloud chamber method, and his discoveries therewith in the fields of nuclear physics and cosmic radiation."

1947: Sir Edward Victor Appleton, "for his investigations of the physics of the upper atmosphere especially for the discovery of the so-called Appleton layer."

1946: Percy Williams Bridgman, "for the invention of an apparatus to produce extremely high pressures, and for the discoveries he made therewith in the field of high pressure physics."

1945: Wolfgang Pauli, "for the discovery of the Exclusion Principle, also called the Pauli Principle."

1944: Isidor Isaac Rabi, "for his resonance method for recording the magnetic properties of atomic nuclei."

1943: Otto Stern, "for his contribution to the development of the molecular ray method and his discovery of the magnetic moment of the proton."

1940-1942: No Prizes awarded.

1939: Ernest Orlando Lawrence, "for the invention and development of the cyclotron and for results obtained with it, especially with regard to artificial radioactive elements."

1938: Enrico Fermi, "for his demonstrations of the existence of new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation, and for his related discovery of nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons."

1937: Clinton Joseph Davisson and George Paget Thomson, "for their experimental discovery of the diffraction of electrons by crystals."

1936: Victor Franz Hess, "for his discovery of cosmic radiation," and Carl David Anderson, "for his discovery of the positron."

1935: James Chadwick, "for the discovery of the neutron."

1934: No Prize awarded

1933: Erwin Schrödinger and Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, "for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory."

1932: Werner Karl Heisenberg, "for the creation of quantum mechanics, the application of which has, inter alia, led to the discovery of the allotropic forms of hydrogen."

1931: No Prize awarded

1930: Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, "for his work on the scattering of light and for the discovery of the effect named after him"

1929: Prince Louis-Victor Pierre Raymond de Broglie, "for his discovery of the wave nature of electrons."

1928: Owen Willans Richardson, "for his work on the thermionic phenomenon and especially for the discovery of the law named after him."

1927: Arthur Holly Compton, "for his discovery of the effect named after him," and Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, "for his method of making the paths of electrically charged particles visible by condensation of vapor."

1926: Jean Baptiste Perrin, "for his work on the discontinuous structure of matter, and especially for his discovery of sedimentation equilibrium."

1925: James Franck and Gustav Ludwig Hertz, "for their discovery of the laws governing the impact of an electron upon an atom."

1924: Karl Manne Georg Siegbahn, "for his discoveries and research in the field of X-ray spectroscopy."

1923: Robert Andrews Millikan, "for his work on the elementary charge of electricity and on the photoelectric effect."

1922: Niels Henrik David Bohr, "for his services in the investigation of the structure of atoms and of the radiation emanating from them."

1921: Albert Einstein, "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect."

1920: Charles Edouard Guillaume, "in recognition of the service he has rendered to precision measurements in Physics by his discovery of anomalies in nickel steel alloys."

1919: Johannes Stark, "for his discovery of the Doppler effect in canal rays and the splitting of spectral lines in electric fields."

1918: Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck, "in recognition of the services he rendered to the advancement of Physics by his discovery of energy quanta."

1917: Charles Glover Barkla, "for his discovery of the characteristic Röntgen radiation of the elements."

1916: No Prize awarded.

1915: Sir William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg, "for their services in the analysis of crystal structure by means of X-rays."

1914: Max von Laue, "for his discovery of the diffraction of X-rays by crystals."

1913: Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, "for his investigations on the properties of matter at low temperatures which led, inter alia, to the production of liquid helium."

1912: Nils Gustaf Dalén, "for his invention of automatic regulators for use in conjunction with gas accumulators for illuminating lighthouses and buoys."

1911: Wilhelm Wien, "for his discoveries regarding the laws governing the radiation of heat."

1910: Johannes Diderik van der Waals, "for his work on the equation of state for gases and liquids."

1909: Guglielmo Marconi and Karl Ferdinand Braun, "in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy."

1908: Gabriel Lippmann, "for his method of reproducing colors photographically based on the phenomenon of interference."

1907: Albert Abraham Michelson, "for his optical precision instruments and the spectroscopic and metrological investigations carried out with their aid."

1906: Joseph John Thomson, "in recognition of the great merits of his theoretical and experimental investigations on the conduction of electricity by gases."

1905: Philipp Eduard Anton von Lenard, "for his work on cathode rays."

1904: Lord Rayleigh (John William Strutt), "for his investigations of the densities of the most important gases and for his discovery of argon in connection with these studies."

1903: Antoine Henri Becquerel, " "in recognition of the extraordinary services he has rendered by his discovery of spontaneous radioactivity," and Pierre Curie and Marie Curie, née Sklodowska, "in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel."

1902: Hendrik Antoon Lorentz and Pieter Zeeman, "in recognition of the extraordinary service they rendered by their researches into the influence of magnetism upon radiation phenomena."

1901: Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, "in recognition of the extraordinary services he has rendered by the discovery of the remarkable rays subsequently named after him."

Source

Ill. Niklas Elmehed © Nobel Prize Outreach
Alain Aspect

Prize share: 1/3

Ill. Niklas Elmehed © Nobel Prize Outreach
John F. Clauser

Prize share: 1/3

Ill. Niklas Elmehed © Nobel Prize Outreach
Anton Zeilinger

Prize share: 1/3

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2022 was awarded jointly to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger "for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science"

Source

A 2021 video, originally posted on Twitter, showed a pair of bees apparently unscrewing the orange lid of a Fanta to reach the sugary liquid inside.

In today's age of digital trickery, we have to be mindful that this could just be clever CGI; or, perhaps the bees really did work together, and simply toppled an already loosely perched bottle cap.

Either way, it's fun to think about whether bees would have the brains to pull off such a soda heist.

According to ViralHog, the video licensor that acquired the footage, the moment was caught in São Paulo, Brazil by a worker on their lunch break.

"I got a soda from a customer but soon the bees stole it," the person wrote in the video's caption.

The smooth skill with which these two bees appear to twist the lid off a soda bottle baffled many on the internet, with some wondering how such intelligence exists in what is obviously a very tiny brain.

    What kind of intelligence exists in such a tiny brain, how do they know it has to be twisted anti clockwise. ?
   

     — Jeffrey Marlowe (@JeffreyMarlowe) May 25, 2021

    I wouldn't have believed it if I didn't see it and I'm still not sure I believe it! 🤔
   

    — Brian B. (@brian163t) May 25, 2021

As we've learned in recent years, however, the size of an animal's noggin isn't everything.

For one thing, tiny animals have far less body mass for brain cells to govern, so, naturally, they'll need smaller brains. In addition, the complexity of connections between neurons could be more important for cognitive performance.

In 1962, a decade before winning the Nobel Prize for research on bee communication, Karl von Frisch declared bumblebees too small-brained to think, putting their ingenious nature all down to hardwired instinct.

Since then, the question of just how much a bee's brain can manage has repeatedly been tested.

Despite having a noggin the size of a grass seed, roughly 0.0002 percent the size of our own, bees have proved surprisingly intelligent in recent research.

Not only these insects learn from each other and use tools, but they can also count to zero and perform basic mathematical equations.

The question is, how would a tiny seed-sized calculator turn its problem-solving skills to something as complex as removing a cap from a soda bottle?

Clearly, von Frisch's bias for large brains is still with us today. While the zoologist admitted bees could "accomplish astonishing intellectual feats", he claimed they did so only through instinct, failing "when suddenly faced with unfamiliar tasks".

Unscrewing the cap of a sugary drink is hardly a job bees evolved to tackle in nature, so von Frisch would be skeptical. It's possible the bees just got lucky this time, detecting a sweet reward that drove them to wander somewhat blindly against a slight resistance.

On the other hand, nature could yet surprise us. In the packed bee brain, for instance, a single nerve cell can sometimes contact up to 100,000 other cells.

    This is amazing.

    I forget where I read it, but I recently saw the question posed "can cells make decisions and change their minds". 

   The article related to amoeba behavior.

    It is really profound to contemplate the origins and commonality of thought inherent in all life.

    — Hvaldimir #StandWithUkraine #GuerrillaGardener (@Hvaldimir1) May 25, 2021

In a 2017 study, bumblebees were trained to roll a ball into a goal for a reward. To score, the insects needed to copy each others' movements and learn from their mistakes, which they were able to do with startling ease.

"Such 'tool use' at one time was ascribed to humans alone, but then to primates, next to marine mammals, and later to birds," researchers wrote in 2017.

"Now we recognize that many species have the capacity to envision how a particular object might be used to achieve an end."

Even with their small circuitry of neurons, bees may well be capable of far more than we once thought. Next time you treat yourself to an outdoor lunch, you might want to keep an eye on your drink.

A version of this article was first published in May 2021.

Source

The numbers reflect a years-long trend of worsening mental health among young people that was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, experts say.

The poll of nearly 800 Californians ages 18 to 24 also found young people facing significant barriers to getting help — with nearly half of those who wanted to speak to a mental health professional saying they had been unable to do so, and many saying cost or lack of access had stopped them.

The challenges reported by the poll are “extremely concerning,” said Dr. Benjamin Maxwell, interim director of child and adolescent psychiatry at Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego, who was not involved in the survey.

“As a society we’ve underfunded mental health support for people for decades, and some of that is coming out in this survey.”

The poll reveals a generation under strain from a wide range of problems, with 86% saying the cost of housing was an extremely or very serious problem and more than three-quarters saying the same about the cost of college, lack of well-paying jobs, homelessness, drug and alcohol abuse, and the cost and availability of healthcare.

Mental health ranked just behind the cost of housing as a widespread problem for young adults, with 82% calling it an extremely or very serious problem.

When asked to pick a word that described how they felt about their generation's future, the two dominant feelings were uncertainty and worry.

“If we compare this to what we get when we talk to [older] adults, we don't see the same breadth and intensity of concern about this wide range of issues,” said pollster David Metz of the research firm Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz & Associates, which conducted the survey. “I think that says something about the burdens that young people are feeling.”

The poll was commissioned by the California Endowment, a statewide health foundation, in an effort to better understand the mental health challenges young people face. The endowment funds a variety of initiatives in California that engage in advocacy on mental health and other health-related issues.

Times reporters and editors worked with the endowment on the poll questions and vetted the methodology in advance of the survey.

The survey was conducted Sept. 9-18 using an online panel. Because such panels are not probability-based samples, pollsters can't use traditional margin of error calculations to describe the uncertainty that surrounds the results of any poll. Instead, pollsters can estimate the precision of the poll with a different statistical calculation known as a credibility interval. In this survey, that interval is roughly 5 percentage points in either direction.

This summer, the endowment helped host a two-day summit aimed at working with young people to find ways to respond to what U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy has said is an emerging mental health crisis among youth.

Young people who participated in the survey and spoke to The Times described mental health difficulties made significantly worse by isolation and loneliness during lockdowns and school closures.

Alejandra Barba, 20, grew up in a home with a family she loves but who is strictly religious and does not accept her being gay. She was 11 years old when she started harming herself after having experienced abuse.

When the pandemic hit, she was a senior in high school. Suddenly, she was forced to stay home, isolated from friends and the academics at which she excelled and that kept her motivated.

“My mental health just declined rapidly,” she said. She attempted suicide twice and spent time confined in treatment facilities. At one facility, she was one of the only young women housed with several middle-aged and elderly men. The food was inedible and there was only one bathroom, with no lock on the door, she said.

Eventually, she managed to get into intensive outpatient therapy for a year, which improved her mental health significantly.

But getting that help took far too long, she said.

“The accessibility to therapists or resources that can help is very lacking,” she said. “I feel like there’s such a misallocation of money. It’s a huge problem.”

Overall, the survey found that women and those who identified as LGBTQ were significantly less likely to report positive evaluations of their mental health. Just over half of men reported their mental health as excellent or good, compared with one-third of women.

Five percent of those surveyed identified as gay or lesbian and 17% as bisexual. Among those young adults who identified as LGBTQ, one-fifth reported their mental health as excellent or good.

Another survey participant, who is 18 and attends community college in San Diego, said the loneliness of the pandemic left her feeling extreme anxiety.

Her junior year in high school was entirely remote. She had been a strong student but found it difficult to focus online or feel motivated. Some days she spent hours scrolling through TikTok videos.

Thirty percent of survey participants said they felt social media had a negative effect on their mental health, and those who spent more time online rated their mental health less positively.

"Your junior year is where you’re supposed to be looking for colleges and figuring out the important stuff," she said. "At that time, it didn’t seem important to me."

She asked The Times not to use her name to protect her privacy.

When she returned to campus for her senior year, "it was stressful and overwhelming," she said. Her anxiety left her with stomach pains. She would vomit frequently and lost weight.

Now, as a freshman in college, she said, "my anxiety is a lot better since high school. But I’m still struggling with the symptoms."

Schools need to offer more support to young people, she said.

"I know they have counselors," she said, but "they need actual therapists at schools, like certified child therapists, to help students."

Terra Bransfield, 22, a student at Sonoma State University, said she has struggled with body image issues and disordered eating. But she feels fortunate to have a supportive family and a close circle of friends with whom she feels comfortable talking about mental health.

Her friends talk openly about their challenges with depression, anxiety and body image, and share the things they do that help — like writing in a journal.

"I know that I’m supported and loved," Bransfield said. "Oftentimes that’s the biggest thing — to know that you’re not alone."

Although a majority of survey respondents said they found it difficult to talk with others about mental health, nearly three-quarters said they had talked to friends or family about their mental health or well-being.

Just over 4 in 10 respondents had talked with a therapist or other health professional about mental health issues. And 1 in 4 said they would like to talk with a professional but had not done so.

Bransfield said she feels both uncertain and optimistic about the future. Her struggles with eating have improved, but she knows they're still part of who she is: She worries about financial security, about the need for social justice and about attacks on the rights of LGBTQ people. The impact of the loneliness she felt during the COVID-19 lockdowns has been long-lasting, she said.

But she also has big plans for her future — she'd like to open a dance studio cafe that will serve as a community gathering place.

"There is so much uncertainty, and that uncertainty can be really scary," she said. At the same time, "you can be optimistic and happy and feel good about it."

Maxwell, of Rady Children's Hospital, said that though the survey results are distressing, he also feels optimism that things can improve.

"We have good treatments," he said. "We know they work. We know what to do. We just have to get people access to those treatments."

California is moving in a positive direction when it comes to offering support, Maxwell said, citing the state's $4.7-billion effort to improve mental health for young people, which follows what Gov. Gavin Newsom has said was "decades of neglect."

The state's plan seeks to overhaul existing systems, including helping schools provide better treatment, creating virtual assessment platforms and developing suicide prevention programs.

Sarah Reyes, director of communications for the California Endowment, said the levels of worry, anxiety and depression reported by young people should be concerning to everyone.

"You never think of young people as being worriers. That's usually left to all of us who are turning gray," she said. "So we need to stop, and we need to listen and identify so that we can help them."

Source

Sept. 30 (UPI) -- A Michigan man's 18.83-inch tall pet was awarded the Guinness World Records title of the tallest living domestic cat.

Fenrir, a Savannah cat belonging to William John Powers of Farmington Hills, was awarded the title after Guinness World Records verified the feline's impressive height.

Savannah cats are a hybrid breed resulting from the mating of a domestic cat with an African serval.

Powers said Fenrir's brother, Arcturus, was previously awarded the same title when he was officially measured at 19.05 inches in 2016, but the feline later died in a house fire. Arcturus still holds the title of tallest domestic cat ever.

Another of Powers' cats, a Maine coon named Altair, holds the Guinness World Record for longest tail on a domestic cat living. Altair's tail measures 16.07 inches long. The record for longest tail on a domestic cat ever is held by Cygnus, Altair's older brother, who died in the same fire as Arcturus in 2016. His tail was 17.58 inches long.

"For someone so obsessed with their cats to have not one, not two, but four Guinness World Records title holding animals in one lifetime is a bit surreal isn't it," Powers told Guinness officials. "It almost feels like it was something destined to happen, and then even after our disaster, the universe tried to make at least that little bit of it right again."

Source

2022: Swedish paleogeneticist Svante Paabo for his discoveries on the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution.

2021: US duo David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for discoveries on human receptors responsible for our ability to sense temperature and touch.

2020: Americans Harvey Alter and Charles Rice, together with Briton Michael Houghton, for the discovery of the Hepatitis C virus, leading to the development of sensitive blood tests and antiviral drugs.

2019: William Kaelin and Gregg Semenza of the US and Britain's Peter Ratcliffe for establishing the basis of our understanding of how cells react and adapt to different oxygen levels.

2018: Immunologists James Allison of the US and Tasuku Honjo of Japan, for figuring out how to release the immune system's brakes to allow it to attack cancer cells more efficiently.

2017: US geneticists Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael Young for their discoveries on the internal biological clock that governs the wake-sleep cycles of most living things.

2016: Yoshinori Ohsumi of Japan for his work on autophagy—a process whereby cells "eat themselves"—which when disrupted can cause Parkinson's and diabetes.

2015: William Campbell, a US citizen born in Ireland, Satoshi Omura of Japan and Tu Youyou of China for unlocking treatments for malaria and roundworm.

2014: American-born Briton John O'Keefe, Edvard I. Moser and May-Britt Moser of Norway for discovering how the brain navigates with an "inner GPS".

2013: Thomas C. Sudhof, a US citizen born in Germany, and James E. Rothman and Randy W. Schekman of the US for work on how the cell organises its transport system.

Source

Monday, October 3

On Monday, we have a familiar Starlink satellite launch. This batch is Starlink Group 4-29 and consists of 52 satellites. SpaceX will be launching the satellites atop a Falcon 9 rocket. Once the first stage has done its job of getting the rocket off the ground, it will land back down on the surface ready for reuse. By launching more of these satellites, SpaceX is improving the coverage of its satellite-based internet connectivity. The launch will be streamed, as usual, on the SpaceX website. It’s due to take off at 11:56 p.m. UTC from California.

Tuesday, October 4

Next up, we have the launch of United Launch Alliance’s (ULA) Atlas V carrying the SES 20 and SES 21 communications satellites. They will be placed in a geosynchronous orbit for SES, where they will provide C-band television and data services over the United States. The mission will launch from Florida at 9:36 p.m. UTC and will be streamed on the ULA website.

Wednesday, October 5

On Wednesday, we’ll have two launches. The first of those is a Falcon 9 carrying the Dragon 2 spacecraft, which will head to the International Space Station with four people aboard. NASA astronauts Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada will be joined by JAXA’s Koichi Wakata and Roscosmos’ Anna Kikina. The mission is scheduled to take off at 4:00 p.m. UTC and will be streamed on YouTube and likely on SpaceX’s website too. The mission will launch from Florida.

An hour later, Rocket Lab will launch an Electron rocket carrying the GAzelle (OTB 3) satellite and will be operating by General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems Group to perform experiments for customers. In typical Rocket Labs fashion, the mission has been given a fun name, this time it’s ‘It Argos Up From Here’. Argos is a reference to the Argos 4 Advanced Data Collection System, the largest payload on OTB 3. The Argos 4 A-DCS mission will collect data from thousands of sensors around the world. This mission will launch from New Zealand and will be viewable on the Rocket Lab website.

Thursday, October 6

Like Wednesday, Thursday will deliver two rocket launches. The first of these is set to take off at 11:07 p.m. from Florida. SpaceX will launch another Falcon 9 carrying the Galaxy 33 and Galaxy 34 communication satellites for Intelsat. These two satellites were built by Northrop Grumman and will provide C-ban video and television broadcasts to the United States from a geostationary orbit. You’ll be able to tune in to the launch on SpaceX’s website.

The second launch will be a Long March 2D rocket carrying the Advanced Space-based Solar Observatory (ASO-S) called Kuafu. As the name suggests, this observatory will be dedicated to solar physics. It’ll be the first time that China has launched a satellite for the study of Solar physics. The rocket will carry other payloads too including Jinzijing 3-6, Qilu 2-3, Jinzijing-Qilu, Luojia 3-01, Beiyou 1, and Tianzhi 2D. This mission will launch at 11:40 p.m. UTC, but there likely won’t be a live video feed.

Friday, October 7

The final mission of the week will see Japan launch an Epsilon rocket carrying the RAISE 3 demo satellite. Secondary payloads include QPS-SAR 3 and 4 as well as several CubeSats called MAGNARO, MITSUBA, KOSEN 2, WASEDA-SAT-ZERO, and FSI-SAT. This mission will launch at 12:47 a.m. UTC. You can check this mission profile video if you want to learn more.

Recap

The first launch we got last week was a Long March 2D carrying three Yaogan-36 satellites from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center. These will perform land surveys, monitor disasters, and assess crop yields among other things.

Next, we got footage of the DART spacecraft hitting an asteroid to try and alter its course. We mentioned the launch of this mission way back in TWIRL 40, released in November 2021.

Next, China launched a Long March 6 carrying more surveying satellites called Shiyan-16A, Shiyan-16B, and Shiyan-17. Similar to the Yaogan-36 satellites, these will perform Earth observation duties.

As mentioned at the top of the article, Hurricane Ian passed through Florida a few days ago and the ISS caught some footage of it from space.

Next, Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev, Denis Matveev and Sergey Korsakov left the ISS.

Following their departure, they speedily got back down safely to Earth.

Lastly, Firefly Aerospace launched its second Alpha rocket, which deployed some small satellites into orbit.

That’s all we’ve got this week, be sure to check in next time.

TWIRL 85: SpaceX set to take four astronauts to the ISS this week

NASA’s Artemis I launch has officially been delayed until November

The earliest stages of gum disease are treatable and reversible (gingivitis). But some people develop a chronic destructive form of gum disease, which is irreversible. This disease progresses to tooth loss.

A growing body of evidence shows that gum disease can also make people more likely to develop other serious health conditions.

Here are a few of the common health conditions linked to gum disease and how they are connected.

1. Alzheimer's disease

Several large studies and meta-analyses agree that moderate or severe gum disease is significantly associated with dementia.

For example, one study showed suffering from chronic gum disease for ten years or more was associated with a 70 percent higher risk of developing Alzheimer's than those without.

Research has also shown a link between gum disease and a sixfold decline in cognitive ability.

Initially, it was thought bacteria were directly responsible for this link. Porphyromonas gingivalis, bacteria common in chronic gum disease, was found in the brains of people who had died of Alzheimer's disease.

Toxic bacterial enzymes called gingipains were also found, which are thought to worsen gum disease by preventing the immune response from turning off and hence prolonging inflammation.

However, it's not certain whether bacteria in the brain, a modified immune response, or other factors – such as damage from systemic inflammation – explain the link.

But taking care of your oral health could be one way to reduce the risk of Alzheimer's disease.

2. Cardiovascular disease

Cardiovascular disease is also firmly associated with gum disease.

In a large study of over 1,600 people aged over 60, gum disease was linked with an almost 30 percent higher risk of a first heart attack.

This link even persisted after researchers adjusted for other conditions (such as diabetes and asthma), or lifestyle habits (such as smoking status, education, and marriage) that are known to increase a person's risk of a heart attack.

More recently, studies have also shown that systemic inflammation caused by chronic gum disease causes the body's stem cells to produce a hyper-responsive group of neutrophils (a type of early defense white blood cell).

These cells may damage the lining of arteries by damaging the cells that line the arteries – triggering the build-up of plaques.

3. Type 2 diabetes

Gum disease is a known complication of type 2 diabetes, and chronic gum disease increases the risk of developing type 2 diabetes.

The processes that link the two diseases are the focus of much research, and it's likely that inflammation caused by each condition affects the other.

For instance, type 2 diabetes raises the risk of gum disease by increasing inflammation in the gums.

Gum disease has also been shown to contribute to impaired insulin signaling and insulin resistance – which can both exacerbate type 2 diabetes.

Several clinical trials have shown an intensive dental cleaning can improve blood sugar control in diabetic patients for several months, further showing the links between the two diseases.

4. Cancers

Gum disease is also linked to a greater risk of developing many types of cancer. For instance, patients who reported having a history of gum disease were shown to have a 43 percent greater risk of esophageal cancer, and a 52 percent greater risk of stomach cancer.

Other research has also reported people with chronic gum disease had a between 14-20 percent higher risk of developing any type of cancer. The same study also showed a 54 percent higher risk of pancreatic cancer.

It's not clear why this relationship exists. Some think it has to do with inflammation, which is a factor in both gum disease and cancer.

Inflammation disrupts the environment that cells need to stay healthy and function properly and is a factor in the progression of both gum disease and tumor growth.

Improving gum health

Gum disease is preventable and reversible in the early stages.

While some risk factors for gum disease can't be changed (such as your genetics), you can change your lifestyle to reduce your overall risk.

For example, eating less sugar, avoiding tobacco and alcohol, and reducing stress can all help. It's also important to know that certain medications (such as some antidepressants and hypertension drugs) may lower saliva production, which can increase your risk of gum disease.

People taking these medicines need to take extra precautions, such as using special gels or sprays to increase saliva production or making sure to take extra care while brushing their teeth.

Of course, the most important things you can do to protect yourself from gum disease (and subsequently your overall health) are brushing twice daily with fluoride toothpaste and avoiding using mouthwash after brushing – and taking care not to rinse after brushing to allow the fluoride to remain on your teeth. Interdental cleaning at home (such as flossing) and regular dental visits will also help you keep your oral health in check.

Christine Bryson, Senior Lecturer Medical Science, Anglia Ruskin University

Source

After a breakup, you might think you're doing fine until you drive past that one street corner, or bump into a mutual friend, or hear a particular love song on the radio. No matter how much you'd like to stop thinking about that person, everything is a reminder of the relationship. Short of erasing whole chunks of your memory, á la Jim Carrey's character in the movie "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," is it possible to banish unwanted thoughts?

The short answer is: maybe. But whether it's advisable to do so in the long term is more complicated.

People's thoughts are far less focused — and under far less control — than most people imagine, said Joshua Magee, a clinical psychologist and founder of Wellness Path Therapy, who has conducted research on unwanted thoughts, images and urges in mental disorders. In one famous 1996 study in the journal Cognitive interference: Theories, methods, and findings (opens in new tab) by study author Eric Klinger, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Minnesota, participants kept track of all their thoughts over one day. On average, people reported more than 4,000 individual thoughts. And these thoughts were fleeting — lasting no more than five seconds each, on average.

"Thoughts are constantly ebbing and flowing, and many of us don't notice," Magee said. In the 1996 study, one-third of these thoughts seemed to pop up totally out of nowhere. It's normal to experience thoughts that feel disturbing, Magee added. In a 1987 study (opens in new tab) conducted by Klinger and colleagues, people perceived 22% of their thoughts as strange, unacceptable or wrong — for instance, you might imagine yourself chopping off your finger while you're cooking, or dropping your baby as you carry them to their crib.

In some situations, it makes sense to suppress these unwanted thoughts. In an exam or job interview, for example, you don't want to feel distracted by the thought that you'll fail. On a flight, you probably don't want to think about the plane crashing. And there's evidence that it's possible to quash these thoughts, Magee said.

In a 2022 study in the journal PLOS Computational Biology (opens in new tab), a team of Israeli researchers showed 80 paid volunteers a series of slides displaying different nouns. Each noun was repeated on five different slides. As they viewed the slides, the participants jotted down a word they associated with each noun — for example, "road" in response to the word "car." The researchers told one group that they wouldn't get paid for words they repeated. Another group could repeat as many nouns as they wished. With this method, the researchers sought to emulate what happens when someone hears that love song on the radio and tries desperately to think of anything other than their ex beau.

The results revealed that when participants saw each noun for a second time, they took longer than the control group to come up with a new association — "tire" instead of "road," for instance — suggesting that their first response popped into their mind before they replaced it. Their responses were particularly delayed for words they rated as "strongly associated" with the cue word the first time around. However, participants got quicker each time they viewed the same slide, indicating that their association between the cue word and their first response — the thought they were trying to avoid — was weakening.

"We didn't find evidence that people can entirely avoid unwanted thoughts," study lead author Isaac Fradkin, who did the research as a psychologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told Live Science. But the results suggest that practice can help people get better at avoiding a specific thought, added Fradkin, who is now a fellow at the Max Planck University College London Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research.

Not everybody agrees that a slideshow of random words is a good way to tease out how people suppress thoughts laden with emotion, as Medical News Today (opens in new tab) reported. And other research suggests that avoiding thoughts can backfire. "When we suppress a thought, we're sending our brains a message," Magee said. This effort labels the thought as something to be feared. "In essence, we're making these thoughts more powerful by attempting to control them." A 2020 analysis in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science (opens in new tab) of 31 different studies on thought suppression found that thought suppression works — in the short term. While participants tended to succeed at thought-suppression tasks, the avoided thought popped into their head more often after the task was over.

In the end, it might make more sense to take a mindful approach to these unwanted thoughts and simply wait for them to pass rather than avoiding them — just like the thousands of other thoughts that drift through your head each day, Fradkin said. "We can allow these thoughts to just be in our minds, not sort of holding on to them too tightly and not trying to fight them."

Source

In 2018, billionaire Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sam Altman paid a startup called Nectome $10,000 to preserve his brain after he dies and, when the technology to do so becomes available, to upload his memories and consciousness to the cloud.

This prospect, which was recently popularised in Amazon Prime’s sci-fi comedy series Upload, has long been entertained by transhumanists. Although theoretically possible, it is rooted in the flawed idea that the brain is separate from the body, and can function without it.

The idea that the mind and brain are separate from each other is usually attributed to the 17th-century mathematician and philosopher René Descartes, who believed that the body is made of matter, and the mind of some other, non-physical substance.

Modern brain research rejects the distinction between the physical and the mental. Most neuroscientists agree that what we call “the mind” is made of matter. The mind is hard to define, but the consensus now is that it emerges from the complex networks of cells in the brain.

But most people still view the mind and brain as being distinct from the body. In 2016, four prominent brain researchers published an article summarising what we know about consciousness. It begins: “Being conscious means that one is having an experience … to see an image, hear a sound, think a thought or feel an emotion.”

Electronic Eden: the conceit of the sci-fi comedy Upload is that humans can transfter their minds to the cloud and enjoy a virtual afterlife.

Photograph: Liane Hentscher/Amazon Studios

It is, however, becoming increasingly clear that the mind/brain and body are intimately linked, and that the body influences our thoughts and emotions. Being conscious does not just mean having awareness of the outside world. It means being aware of one’s self within one’s surroundings. The way we experience our body is central to how we perceive our self.

Phantom limbs are a striking demonstration of the importance of the body for self-consciousness. They were described in the mid-16th century by the barber-surgeon Ambroise Paré, who reportedly amputated several hundred limbs a day during the Italian war of 1542-46.

“Verily it is a thing wondrous, strange and prodigious,” he wrote. “The patients who have many months after the cutting away of the leg grievously complained that they yet felt exceeding great pain of that leg cut off.” At that time, however, few survived the operation, so the phenomenon was seen only rarely, and dismissed as a delusion.

Advances in medicine and military technology changed this. The invention of a bullet called the Minié ball with its greater accuracy, range, and muzzle velocity, increased the number of amputations, while the introduction of anaesthetics and antiseptics improved the survival rates of soldiers who went under the knife.

And so it was that the neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell, who amputated countless arms and legs on the battlefields of the American civil war, came to see that phantom limbs are the rule rather than an exception, experienced by the vast majority of amputees.

The medical community was still sceptical of the phenomenon, however, so Mitchell initially described his observations as a short story, The Case of George Dedlow, published in the Atlantic Monthly in July 1866. The fictional titular character was a composite of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who were maimed and mutilated during the conflict. He lost all four limbs, one by one, to become “a useless torso, more like some strange larval creature than anything of human shape”, reduced to “[a] fraction of a man”.

Women may experience phantom breasts after mastectomy and there are case reports of phantom eyes, noses and teeth

Mitchell’s story was so vivid that readers took it as factual, and believed that he was a real patient being treated at Philadelphia’s South Street “Stump” hospital. Many wrote him letters of support, some tried to visit him, and some even raised money for his care. But the story played a large part in bringing the phenomenon into the realms of medical science, and Mitchell went on to become the first elected president of the American Neurological Association.

Mitchell recognised phantom limbs as a disturbance of bodily self-consciousness, in which the amputee retains awareness of the missing limb, and feels as if it is still attached to their body. In some amputees, the phantom disappears within weeks or months of amputation. In others, it persists for decades.

Phantoms do not appear only in the form of missing limbs. Women may experience phantom breasts after mastectomy; men can experience phantom erections after amputation of a cancerous penis; and there are reports of phantom eyes, noses, teeth, and even phantom haemorrhoids, bowel movements and gas after surgical removal of the rectum.

Phantom sensations occur because the brain creates a dynamic model of the body by integrating tactile and visual information with limb position signals from the muscles and tendons. This model, variously called the “body schema” or “body image”, is crucial for both the perception and control of the body. But when a limb or other body part is removed, the schema is not properly updated, and so it retains an imprint of the missing part. As a result, the individual remains conscious of the missing part – often, even more so than of their existing body parts.

Most of us could imagine few things worse than having a limb amputated. But some people want nothing more.

Take Australian Robert Vickers. “Before I was 10 years old I knew my left leg somehow didn’t belong,” Vickers told ABC Radio National in 2009, “and that my body would not be as I felt it should be until I had the leg amputated precisely halfway up the thigh.”

Vickers harboured this strange desire, and suffered in silence, for more than 30 years. It made him severely depressed, and he received psychotherapy. He was prescribed antidepressants, tranquillisers, and antipsychotics, and received electroconvulsive therapy, but to no avail. He tried, without success, to damage his leg in various ways, in order to force an amputation.

A feeling of absence: the 16th-century surgeon Ambroise Paré noted that many amputees experienced sensations in place of missing limbs.

Photograph: Robert Thom/Alamy

Then, at 41, he submerged the unwanted limb in dry ice until the pain became unbearable. His wife drove him to hospital, where he received the amputation he had wanted for so long. “I left hospital two weeks later with my desired stump, and life changed for the better from that day. In the 24 years since, I only regret not doing it sooner.”

Vickers is perhaps the best documented case of body integrity identity disorder (BIID), an extremely rare condition, of which fewer than 500 other cases have been reported to date. For most of his life, Vickers believed his experience to be unique, but others suffering from the condition describe it in similar terms.

All report a fascination with amputees, and a desire to amputate, from an early age. The desire usually becomes obsessive, to the extent that they will try self-amputation. Use of dry ice appears to be the most common method, and some have used homemade guillotines or shotguns. In another well-documented case, a 79-year-old New Yorker travelled to Mexico and paid an unqualified doctor $10,000 to amputate his leg. He died of gangrene a week later.

BIID first appeared in medical literature in a 1977 study published in the Journal of Sex Research. The authors of this study – including Greg Furth, himself a “wannabe” amputee – described the condition as a paraphilia, or an abnormal sexual behaviour, in which the stump is fetishised because it resembles a phallus, and named it “apotemnophilia”, meaning “amputation love”.

Our understanding of how the brain works will progress only when we stop observing the brain in isolation

Some BIID sufferers do indeed report a sexual aspect to their desire to amputate. But they invariably describe their experience in terms of self-identity.

One participant in Melody Gilbert’s 2003 documentary Whole says that he “finally became a person late in life” after blowing his own leg off with a shotgun. Another participant told the film-makers that “by taking the leg away, I’m actually more of a person than I was before… I’ve corrected the body that was wrong.” Vickers has stated that he felt incomplete with his left leg, and that he only became “whole” after its removal.

The condition was renamed body integrity identity disorder to reflect this. BIID is a disturbance of bodily self-consciousness with a neurological basis, as are phantom limbs. There is evidence to suggest that it occurs because the affected limb is not incorporated into the body schema as it develops in early childhood. Amputation is not offered as a treatment for BIID sufferers, but it could be argued that making it available to them would minimise their risk of self-harm.

Research into bodily awareness is leading us to rethink the nature of consciousness. Our understanding of how the brain works will progress only when we stop observing the brain in isolation, and start thinking of it as one part of a system that includes the body and its environment.

An understanding of how brain and body interact is critical for understanding the phenomena of phantom limbs and BIID. Such interactions also play a key role in mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression, and in eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa. All of these conditions cause symptoms in the body that may be accompanied by disturbances in how the brain interprets those symptoms.

Yet the links between the brain and body are still under-appreciated. Only by taking the body into consideration will we gain a better understanding of these conditions and, it is to be hoped, develop effective treatments for them.

Four legs good: researchers at Columbia University have built robots that can formulate their own body schema.

Photograph: creativemachineslab.com

The new understanding of bodily self-consciousness leads us to some surprising conclusions. If bodily awareness is the basis of self-consciousness, then it follows that bumblebees, and even robots, may possess basic consciousness.

A study published in 2020 by researchers in Germany showed that bees can accurately judge gaps between obstacles relative to their wingspan, and reorient their bodies accordingly to avoid inflight collisions. Researchers at Columbia University’s Creative Machines Lab have developed a starfish-shaped robot with an in-built body schema, which can adjust its gait after having a limb removed. The latest version of this robot creates its own body schema from experience.

If self-consciousness is based in bodily awareness, then it is unlikely that a lab-grown “mini-brain” could ever become conscious, as some ethicists have claimed. By the same token, transhumanists’ claim that we will one day gain immortality by uploading our brains to supercomputers will probably always be science fiction.

Source