NTSB wants alcohol detection systems installed in all new cars in US

World’s oldest heart preserved in 380 million-year-old armored fish

On Sept. 19, more than 20,000 bachelor’s and master’s students began their fall semester at ETH Zurich. The number of bachelor’s students has declined by almost 7%, from 3,319 in 2021 to 3,100 this year, but the university does not see a trend emerging.

In an e-mail discussion with EE Times Europe, Marianne Lucien, International Communications Officer at ETH Zurich, said, “The number of first-semester students has declined because many of them opted to start their studies earlier — rather than take a gap year — during the coronavirus pandemic. Now that travel opportunities have opened up, students are taking a gap year prior to entering university studies. We expect a significant increase again over the next few years.”

In Einstein’s footsteps

For the fall semester, ETH Zurich reported that natural sciences and engineering continue to be “highly popular” among new bachelor’s students. The mechanical engineering and computer science programs once again ranked highest with 529 (+2%) and 424 (–1%) new students, respectively.

Declines in enrollment are seen in architecture (–5%), civil engineering (–23%), and, contrary to social trends, in fields like health and sustainability (–15% overall). Looking at the raw figures, Lucien said, “It’s surprising to us as well, and we will further investigate this trend to better understand the reasons behind it.”

There is, however, a return to fundamental science knowledge. Physics has indeed experienced a year-over-year increase of about 12%, with 276 new students, and chemistry has increased by almost 25%, with 66 new students.

“We believe that in these uncertain times, students tend to choose programs that provide a solid foundation for a great variety of work areas,” said Lucien. “This is especially given for fundamental areas in science and engineering.”

Albert Einstein, an inspiration for ETH Zurich students? Possibly.

Albert Einstein started studying at ETH Zurich, which was then called the Zurich Polytechnic, in October 1896. He studied there for four years, focusing on physics and mathematics but also taking courses in literature and history.

In the Department of Physics at ETH Zürich, Albert Einstein (1879–1955) is immortalized in this bust by Hermann Hubacher. (Source: ETH Zürich)

Einstein returned to ETH Zurich in 1912 as a professor of theoretical physics and established the basis of his theory of relativity. The original documents from this period are kept in the university archives.

“Today’s physics is inconceivable without Einstein,” Lavinia Heisenberg, a professor at ETH’s Institute for Theoretical Physics, wrote in the ETH Community Magazine celebrating the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s Nobel Prize in Physics. “The general theory of relativity is central to our understanding of the world and of the cosmos.”

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"The muscles we use to breathe atrophy, just like the rest of our muscles tend to do as we get older," explains researcher Daniel Craighead, an integrative physiologist at the University of Colorado Boulder. To test what happens when these muscles are given a good workout, he and his colleagues recruited healthy volunteers ages 18 to 82 to try a daily five-minute technique using a resistance-breathing training device called PowerBreathe. The hand-held machine — one of several on the market — looks like an inhaler. When people breathe into it, the device provides resistance, making it harder to inhale.

How it works

"We found that doing 30 breaths per day for six weeks lowers systolic blood pressure by about 9 millimeters of mercury," Craighead says. And those reductions are about what could be expected with conventional aerobic exercise, he says — such as walking, running or cycling.

A normal blood pressure reading is less than about 120/80 mmHg, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. These days, some health care professionals diagnose patients with high blood pressure if their average reading is consistently 130/80 mmHg or higher, the CDC notes.

The impact of a sustained 9 mmHg reduction in systolic blood pressure (the first number in the ratio) is significant, says Michael Joyner, a physician at the Mayo Clinic who studies how the nervous system regulates blood pressure. "That's the type of reduction you see with a blood pressure drug," Joyner says. Research has shown many common blood pressure medications lead to about a 9 mmHg reduction. The reductions are higher when people combine multiple medications, but a 10 mmHg reduction correlates with a 35% drop in the risk of stroke and a 25% drop in the risk of heart disease.

The training helps prevent high blood pressure too

"I think it's promising," Joyner says about the prospects of integrating strength training for the respiratory muscles into preventive care. It could be beneficial for people who are unable to do traditional aerobic exercise, he says, and the simplicity is appealing, too, given people can easily use the device at home.

"Taking a deep, resisted, breath offers a new and unconventional way to generate the benefits of exercise and physical activity," Joyner concluded in an editorial that was published alongside a prior study in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

So, how exactly does breath training lower blood pressure? Craighead points to the role of endothelial cells, which line our blood vessels and promote the production of nitric oxide — a key compound that protects the heart. Nitric oxide helps widen our blood vessels, promoting good blood flow, which prevents the buildup of plaque in arteries. "What we found was that six weeks of IMST [inspiratory-muscle strength training] will increase endothelial function by about 45%," Craighead explains.

Good for all ages, and could help athletes' endurance

It has long been known that deep diaphragmatic breathing — often used during meditation or mindfulness practices — can help lower blood pressure too. Muscle training with the PowerBreathe device works in a similar way, engaging the breathing muscles and promoting the production of nitric oxide. The particular helpfulness of the IMST device, Craighead says, is that it requires less time to get the benefit because the small machine adds the resistance that gives the muscles a good workout. His research is funded by the National Institutes of Health.

The new study builds on the prior study and adds to the evidence that IMST — which is essentially strength training for the respiratory muscles — is beneficial for adults of all ages. "We were surprised to see how ubiquitously effective IMST is at lowering blood pressure," Craighead says. Before the results came in, he'd suspected that young, healthy adults might not benefit as much. "But we saw robust effects," he says, pointing to a significant decline in blood pressure for participants of all ages. He says the finding suggests IMST could help healthy young people prevent heart disease and the rise in blood pressure that tends to occur with aging.

There may also be benefits for elite cyclists, runners and other endurance athletes, he says, citing data that six weeks of IMST increased aerobic exercise tolerance by 12% in middle-aged and older adults.

"So we suspect that IMST consisting of only 30 breaths per day would be very helpful in endurance exercise events," Craighead says. It's a technique that athletes could add to their training regimens. Craighead, whose personal marathon best is 2 hours, 21 minutes, says he has incorporated IMST as part of his own training.

The technique is not intended to replace exercise, he cautions, or to replace medication for people whose blood pressure is so elevated that they're at high risk of having a heart attack or stroke. Instead, Craighead says, "it would be a good additive intervention for people who are doing other healthy lifestyle approaches already."

This is the way Theresa D. Hernandez, 61, sees the breathing exercises. She lives in Boulder, has a family history of high blood pressure and participated in the Colorado research. When the study began, she had blood pressure readings near the threshold at which doctors recommend medications.

"It was a surprise that something as simple could be so profound in terms of its impact," says Hernandez of the six weeks of breathing exercises. "It took my blood pressure to under the threshold so that I would not need to take medication," she says.

Her blood pressure dropped significantly, and she says she plans to stick with it — five minutes every day.

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 What could be more universal and obvious than this flowing?

And yet things are somewhat more complicated than this. Reality is often very different from what it seems. The Earth appears to be flat but is in fact spherical. The Sun seems to revolve in the sky when it is really we who are spinning. Neither is the structure of time what it seems to be: it is different from this uniform, universal flowing.

So, what is the real structure of time? Well, it’s complicated. Some think that time is like space: the past, present and future are all equally real locations.

Some, like Rovelli, think time emerges directly from the laws of thermodynamics and quantum mechanics. Physicists and philosophers may have different approaches to the structure of time, but what unites them is a rejection of the notion that that there is a ‘now’, a present moment, that moves from the past toward the future. If that is true, and time does not really move, we are left with a question: why does it seem to pass? We would never mistake a frozen river for a running one, so, if nothing flows and everything abides, why does it feel as if time is rushing by?

Perhaps it’s just an illusion. Our senses tell us that time is passing, but we are perceiving something that isn’t really there. To see an illusion is to see a way the world could be, but isn’t: the Earth looks flat when it is actually round; optical illusions can make identical lines appear to be different lengths.

These illusions present real possibilities – it’s easy to find places in the world where you could experience something flat that wasn’t an illusion, or experience one line that really was longer than another. But if Rovelli and others are right, there is nowhere you could go to truly experience the flowing time that Heraclitus talked about. It is not a real possibility. Just as the world is not set up for someone to hallucinate a square circle, the world is not set up for the illusion of time passing. So if the flow of time is not an illusion, what is it?

Thinking a thought is not like watching an ice cream melt, or a chameleon change colour

Some philosophers say that time seems to pass due to the way we perceive change. They argue that moving objects appear ‘dynamic’, and that we mistake this dynamism for time passing. To see what they mean, imagine watching a movie where each frame was shown for two full seconds. You would see a series of static scenes with people and objects in slightly different positions. First Jackie Chan’s fist is here, then there, then it is in contact with someone’s face. Although it would be clear that each image shows the actor in a slightly different position, you would not see him moving. Now, imagine seeing those frames at the speed they would be played in a cinema: 24 frames per second. Suddenly, the sense that you are looking at a series of static scenes disappears, and you can’t see where one frame ends and the next begins. Chan’s fist is no longer simply there, then there, then there; he now appears to be punching someone. You are looking at the very same series of static frames in both the slow case and the fast case. But the flowing ‘dynamism’ you see in a cinema is a quality added by your perceptual system.

What does this have to do with time seeming to pass? Our perceptual systems do not just add a dynamic look to things we see in movies, but also to the things we see in the real world. Change in the world appears to flow smoothly because our perceptual systems transform moving objects in the same way they do static frames of Jackie Chan: they superimpose a dynamism on to them that they do not possess. Because we fail to recognise that this is a product of our minds rather than a feature of reality, we have come to believe that the world is dynamic, and that time really flows. That’s one theory, anyway.

But what about those moments when we are not perceiving change? The room you are currently in might be entirely still, yet time seems to continually flow. In such cases, we might be tempted to say that time still passes – that the world seems dynamic – because we continue to experience our thoughts changing just like we experience objects changing in the world. However, though thoughts rush through our heads from the moment we wake up to the moment we sleep, we don’t experience individual thoughts changing in the same way that we perceive changes in objects. Thinking a thought is not like watching an ice cream melt, or a chameleon change colour. As an experiment, try to think a single thought – make sure you don’t accidentally think two thoughts. Keep it in your mind, and observe whether it changes. I suspect that you found this exercise difficult. Thoughts jump around, and it is hard to know where one ends and the next begins. The experience of thinking is nothing like seeing objects change. Our inner thoughts don’t explain why time still seems to pass even when we are not perceiving differences in the world. Appealing to our perceptions of change to explain the feeling of flowing time might not be such a promising approach after all. Something else is going on here.

The arguments above – that flowing time is an illusion or a result of how we experience changing objects – appeal to our perception of the world to explain why time seems to pass. We see, smell, hear or feel things moving and changing, but perhaps the feeling of time passing is not related to our experience of sensing the world. We also feel pain in our bodies; feel emotions, intuitions and yearnings. The important word here is ‘feel’. In these cases, we are not perceiving the outside world. These non-perceptual experiences include the feeling of doing things, of making changes in the world: we feel ourselves walking and running, opening doors and tapping screens, talking and listening. I think time passing is a result of how we experience the changes that we make in our daily lives.

The possibility of performing no bodily or mental action whatsoever is never an option

When you reach for your coffee cup or stand up from your desk, you have a sense that you are causing your body to move. In a similar way, you experience yourself as the author of most of the bodily movements that you make. You can also experience yourself performing mental actions: you can deliberately shift your attention away from these words to the sound of the traffic outside or consciously try to remember the last place you saw your house keys. The sense that we are causing our bodily or mental actions can be thought of as a unique type of change experience. However, this kind of change is not one we perceive out there in the world (like watching Jackie Chan punch someone or hearing a plane fly through the air). It’s a kind of change we feel ourselves causing.

When you move your body, you feel yourself making changes in the world around you; when you refocus your thoughts, you experience yourself changing the landscape of your mind. We could call this ‘agentive change’ – change that an agent (like you, for example) experiences themselves as causing – and it is pervasive in a way that perceptual experiences of change in our external environment are not. As long as you are awake, you won’t stop thinking, meaning that the feeling of making mental changes persists (even in a sensory deprivation tank).

Tied up with our sense that we are the cause of our actions is the feeling that we can stop doing whatever it is we are doing and start doing something different. If you wanted, you could close this browser tab right now and get up from where you are sitting. But, though we can change our behaviour, the possibility of performing no bodily or mental action whatsoever is never an option. As long as you are awake, you will never feel as if you can stop causing change. Jean-Paul Sartre declared that mankind was ‘condemned to be free’; similarly, we find ourselves at every waking moment condemned to act. Of course, we stop acting when we fall asleep but, as any insomniac will tell you, sleep is something you must wait for, not something you do. You can hasten sleep’s arrival, but you cannot switch yourself off like a laptop.

I believe that this leads us to mistake the feeling of doing – moving, thinking, focusing – for the feeling of time passing. We experience ourselves as perpetually, helplessly active. This is likely a product of our neurophysiology. Brains don’t stop: information is continually being received, recalled, processed and responded to, so it is not surprising that we always find ourselves doing something. But we are not consciously aware of this fact. In fact, consciousness does not provide any explanation as to why we find ourselves in such a state. We are driven to keep making changes. And it is here that we make a mistake. Rather than blaming our neurophysiology for the feeling that we must constantly act, we blame the world outside: we mistakenly think that some outside force (like a flowing river of time) is responsible for the ever-present feeling that we are being ‘pushed along’.

We are condemned to act. It is not, as Heraclitus imagined, that ‘everything flows and nothing abides.’ Instead, the feeling of being swept along is the result of our brains’ constant churning. We mistake our own momentum for that of the world. Time does not flow. We do.

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When the first stars and galaxies formed, they didn’t just illuminate the cosmos. These bright structures also fundamentally changed the chemistry of the universe.

During that time, the hydrogen gas that makes up most of the material in the space between galaxies today became electrically charged. That epoch of reionization, as it’s called, was “one of the last major changes in the universe,” says Brant Robertson, who leads the Computational Astrophysics Research Group at the University of California, Santa Cruz. It was the dawn of the universe as we know it.

But scientists haven’t been able to observe in detail what occurred during the epoch of reionization—until now. NASA’s newly active James Webb Space Telescope offers eyes that can pierce the veil on this formative time. Astrophysicists like Robertson are already poring over JWST data looking for answers to fundamental questions about that electric cosmic dawn, and what it can tell us about the dynamics that shape the universe today.

What happened after the big bang?

The epoch of reionization wasn’t the first time that the universe was filled with electricity. Right after the big bang, the cosmos were dark and hot; there were no stars, galaxies, and planets. Instead, electrons and protons roamed free, as it was too steamy for them to pair up.

But as the universe cooled down, the protons began to capture the electrons to form the first atoms—hydrogen, specifically—in a period called “recombination,” explains Anne Hutter, a postdoctoral researcher at the Cosmic Dawn Center, a research collaboration between the University of Copenhagen and the National Space Institute at the Technical University of Denmark. That process neutralized the charged material.

Any material held in the universe was spread out relatively evenly at that time, and there was very little structure. But there were small fluctuations in density, and over billions of years, the changes drew early atoms together to eventually form stars. The gravity of early stars drew more gases, particles, and other components to coalesce into more stars and then galaxies.

Once the beginnings of galaxies lit up, the cosmic dark age, as astrophysicists call it, was over. These stellar bodies were especially bright, Robertson says: They were more massive than our sun and burned hot, shining in the ultraviolet spectrum.

“Ultraviolet light, if it’s energetic enough, can actually ionize hydrogen,” Robertson says. All it takes is a single, especially energetic particle of light, called a photon, to strip away the electron on a hydrogen atom and leave it with a positive electrical charge.

As the galaxies started coming together, they would first ionize the regions around them, leaving bubbles of charged hydrogen gas across the universe.

As the light-emitting clusters grew, more stars formed to make them even brighter and full of photons. Additional new galaxies began to develop, too. As they became luminous, the ionized bubbles began to overlap. That allowed a photon from one galaxy to “travel a much larger distance because it didn’t run into a hydrogen atom as it crossed through this network,” Robertson explains.

At that point, the rest of the intergalactic medium in the universe—even in regions far from galaxies—quickly becomes ionized. That’s when the epoch of reionization ended and the universe as we know it began.

“This was the last time whole properties of the universe were changed,” Robertson says. “It also was the first time that galaxies actually had an impact beyond their local region.”

The James Webb Space Telescope’s hunt for ionized clues

With all of the hydrogen between galaxies charged the universe entered a new phase of formation. This ionization had a ripple effect on galaxy formation: Any star-studded structures that formed after the cosmic dawn were likely affected.

“If you ionize a gas, you also heat it up,” explains Hutter. Remember, high temperatures it difficult for material to coalesce and form new stars and planets—and can even destroy gases that are already present. As a result, small galaxies forming in an ionized region might have trouble gaining enough gas to make more stars. “That really has an impact on how many stars the galaxies are forming,” Hutter says. “It affects their entire history.”

Although scientists have a sense of the broad strokes of the story of reionization, some big questions remain. For instance, while they know roughly that the epoch ended about a billion years after the big bang, they’re not quite sure when reionization—and therefore the first galaxy formation—began.

That’s where JWST comes in. The new space telescope is designed to be able to search out the oldest bits of the universe that are invisible to human eyes, and gather data on the first glimmers of starlight that ionized the intergalactic medium. Astronomers largely detect celestial objects by the radiation they emit. The ones farther away from us tend to appear in the infrared, as the distance distorts their wavelengths to be longer. With the universe expanding, the light can take billions of years to reach JWST’s detectors.

That, in a nutshell, is how scientists are using JWST to peer at the first galaxies in the process of ionizing the universe. While older tools like the Hubble Space Telescope could spot the occasional early galaxy, the new space observatory can gather finer details to place the groups of stars in time.

“Now, we can very precisely work out how many galaxies were around, you know, 900 million years after the big bang, 800, 700, 600, all the way back to 300 million years after the big bang,” Robertson says. Using that information, astrophysicists can calculate how many ionizing photons were around at each age, and how the particles might have affected their surroundings.

Painting a picture of the cosmic dawn isn’t just about understanding the large-scale structure in the universe: It also explains when the elements that made us, like carbon and oxygen, became available as they formed inside the first stars. “[The question] really is,” Hutter says, “where do we come from?”

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The Schwinger Effect

The Schwinger Effect was named after Julian Schiwnger, who, in 1951, gave a complete theoretical description of a prediction in quantum electrodynamics (QED). The effect was first proposed in 1931 by Fritz Sauter, who predicted that electron-positron pairs could be spontaneously created in electric fields, resulting in the electric field’s decay. This is perhaps more appropriately thought of as vacuum decay within an electric field, creating something out of nothing, while also obeying the laws of conservation. Werner Heisenberg and Hans Heinrich Euler made important contributions to the study of the effect in 1936.

Source: Wikipedia

The Schwinger Effect is possible because electrons and positrons are each other’s antiparticle, so the pairing is a “particle-antiparticle” pairing, sharing properties but differing in electric charge. Energy is conserved as the electric field loses energy when the pairing is formed, at a rate of 2mec2, where me is the electron’s rest mass, and c is the speed of light. The electron-positron pair has a neutral charge. Electrons and positrons also have opposite velocities and spins, the effect of which is to conserve linear and angular momentum. Electrons and positrons are created near rest, and then speed away from the other within the electric field.

Although the Schwinger effect was predicted as early as 1931, this nearly century old idea took so much time to prove, because, until this year, it was thought that it would take extremely strong electric-field strengths to produce it.

Something Out of Nothing

Then, in January this year, scientists from the National Graphene Institute, led by Andre Geim, observed an analog process between electrons and holes at a Dirac point of graphene and its superlattices. This observation was built upon by Alexey Berdyugin, and other researchers from the institute and other organisations.

Berdyugin and his fellow researchers were studying valence electrons’ conductivity using graphene. Graphene is an allotrope of carbon, and is composed of one layer of atoms arrayed in a two-dimensional honeycomb lattice nanostructure. Graphene proved to be critical to achieving the Schwinger effect, because it limited the paths that elementary particles could take, which would, the scientists hoped, lead to a uniform flow of electrons.

They started off from the knowledge that, typically, electrons contributing to electrical conduction in a metal occupy high energy levels approaching the Fermi level. In order to get electrons occupying lower bands to flow with the other electrons, it was supposed that you would need to create very large electric fields. However, Berdyugin and his fellow collaborators found that it was possible to achieve this using what they refer to as “small, experimentally accessible fields”, the kinds of fields accessible in a simple lab.

The scientists experienced something they weren’t expecting to see, something which the University of Manchester’s press release (the National Graphene Institute is part of the university) described as having no analogies in particle physics and astrophysics”. The stimulated vacuum was filled with electrons, which were then accelerated to the maximum allowable velocity, within graphene, or 1/300 of the speed of light. It is then that the “impossible happened”. The University of Manchester describes how:

“electrons seemed to become superluminous, providing an electric current higher than allowed by general rules of quantum condensed matter physics. The origin of this effect was explained as spontaneous generation of additional charge carriers (holes).”

The theoretical description of this process was different to Schwinger’s description for empty space, but the researchers showed that their electron-hole plasma process was perfectly analogous to that of Schwinger’s particle-antiparticle description. In other words, with “small, experimentally accessible fields”, it was possible to prove the Schwinger effect, making this result widely replicable.

Initially, the team thought that what they were witnessing was a new type of superconductivity, but the strangeness of the phenomena told them that what they were looking at belonged to the world of astrophysics and participle physics: the Schiwnger effect. What adds to the excitement about this is the accidental nature of the discovery and the novel connections between different disciplines. The decision to test the limits of the electric fields without burning out the team’s instruments, allowed them to make a unique and important and easily replicable discovery. Instead of smoking coming out their instruments, they found evidence for the Schwinger effect.

The low-energy nature of the experiment is such that a true electron-positron pairing was not created, but it did allow for an analogous proof through the use of plasma holes. Given the right amount of energy, it really is possible to create material particles out of nothing.

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Karen Lips has never forgotten the silence. It was the early 1990s; she was finishing her PhD in tropical biology, and had come back to a research site in Costa Rica, a protected reserve high up in the mountains, after a short break. On her previous visit, the air had been full of the sounds of the frog species she was studying. Now, inexplicably, almost all the frogs were gone.

She was mystified and alarmed, but she arranged to move her research sites further south in Central America, into the mountains of Panama and eventually as far south as the border with Colombia. Wherever she and her colleagues went, though, they found a wave of death preceding them. “By the time we got there,” she recalls, “it was already too late.”

What Lips was seeing as a graduate student—she is now a tropical ecologist and a professor of biology at the University of Maryland College Park—was the arrival in the Americas of a fungal pandemic that had been sweeping the globe. Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, a virulent spore-forming pathogen generally known as Bd, originated in Asia and probably spread for decades before its damage began to be noticed in the 1980s. Since then, scientists estimate, 90 amphibian species have been made extinct by the fungus, and more than 400 were severely harmed by it, losing up to 90 percent of their populations. Altogether, more than 6 percent of all amphibian species in the world were decimated or destroyed, a catastrophe that one research group has called “the greatest loss of biodiversity attributable to a disease.”

Over the years, Lips and other scientists were able to document what happened to the ecosystems that lost those frogs and other amphibian species: surges in populations of insects (which the frogs would have eaten) and drops in populations of snakes (which would have eaten the frogs). But what looked to ecologists like profound environmental disruption was invisible to most of society, because it occurred far from human habitation, in locations where surveillance is patchy and expensive.

Now, though, there’s evidence that the damage caused by Bd has rippled into the human world.

In the journal Environmental Research Letters, Lips and several other researchers report that the devastation of frog species in Costa Rica and Panama caused an unforeseen surge in human malaria cases lasting eight years after the pathogen arrived—likely because, with no tadpoles to eat their larvae, mosquito populations boomed. It’s the first published evidence that the worldwide amphibian die-off has had implications for people.

“This paper is a wake-up call,” says John Vandermeer, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Michigan, who was not involved in the study. “It makes the point that the problem is not just that we're losing biodiversity, and biodiversity is wonderful and pretty and beautiful. It’s that the loss of biodiversity does have secondary consequences on human welfare—in this particular case, human health.”

Though Bd swept through Central America from the 1980s to the 2000s, the analysis that demonstrated its effect on human health could be accomplished only recently, says Michael Springborn, the paper’s lead author and a professor and environmental and resource economist at UC Davis. “The data existed, but it wasn’t easily obtainable,” he says. Over the years, though, county-level disease records were digitized at the ministries of health in Costa Rica and Panama, providing an opportunity to combine that epidemiology in a particular statistical model with satellite images and ecological surveys revealing land characteristics and precipitation, as well as with data on amphibian declines.

“We always thought if we could link [the die-off] to people, more people would care,” Lips says. “We were pretty sure we could quantify changes in bugs, or frogs, or the water quality, or fish or crabs or shrimp. But making that connection to people was so difficult, because the effect was so diffuse, and it happened across such a large area.”

But precisely because Bd swept through Central America in a specific pattern, from northwest to southeast—“a wave that hit county after county over time,” Springborn says—it created a natural experiment that allowed the researchers to look granularly at Costa Rica and Panama before and after the fungal wave arrived. In the health records, they could distinguish that malaria rates were flat in counties (called cantons or distritos) before the Bd fungus tore through, then began to rise afterward. At the peak of the disease surge, six years from the arrival of Bd in an area, malaria cases rose five-fold.

And then they began to fall off again, beginning about eight years after the lethal fungus arrived. Researchers aren’t sure why, because most amphibian populations haven’t bounced back from the fungal onslaught. Though some populations appear to be developing resistance, most have not recovered their density or diversity. Since the fungus lingers in the environment, they remain at risk.

There’s a missing piece in the researchers’ analysis, which is that there is no contemporaneous data to prove that mosquito populations surged in a way that promoted malaria. The surveys they needed—of mosquito density during and after Bd’s arrival, in the 81 counties in Costa Rica and 55 in Panama—simply don’t exist. That makes it difficult for them to determine why malaria fell off again, particularly since frog populations haven’t revived. Springborn theorizes it might be due to human intervention, like governments or organizations noticing the malaria spike and spraying insecticides or distributing bed nets. Or it might be that ecosystems recovered even though the frogs did not, with other predator species taking advantage of the emptied niche to keep mosquito counts down.

But the fact that malaria rates came back down again doesn’t invalidate the findings’ importance. “For the most part, Bd has been a story of the consequences for amphibians, basically: Isn't it too bad to lose this charismatic group of organisms?” says James P. Collins, an evolutionary ecologist and professor at Arizona State University. (Collins has some connection to this research; he oversaw a grant that the National Science Foundation made to Lips in the 1990s.) “It’s been an embedded assumption that reducing the world’s biodiversity is bound to be harmful. Connecting the dots to real implications for humans is a nice piece of evidence for understanding the consequences.”

It’s important to have that evidence, because a second fungal wave is coming: a related pathogen called Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans, Bsal for short, that is lethal to salamanders and newts. Like the frogs and related amphibians decimated by Bd, salamanders are crucial members of wild ecosystems—and it happens that North America harbors about 50 percent of the world’s species, making them pillars of biodiversity for US woodlands and wildlife.

It’s been shown over years that Bd’s emergence was not due solely to natural forces. Instead, its spread across the world was turbocharged by international trade, as wild amphibians hitchhiked in cargo, and captured wildlife were sold legally or illegally into the enormous global market for exotic pets. International conventions on trading some species of wildlife were instituted in the 2000s in hopes of controlling the fungus, but genomic analyses published a decade later showed new strains circulating the world, indicating that fresh imports were occurring despite the bans. That’s relevant to the future of Bsal as well. To slow down that second fungus, the US Fish and Wildlife Service made it illegal in 2016 to import 201 species of salamanders. But experts have argued for years that federal resources for intercepting and inspecting even legally traded animals are inadequate.

The new evidence that Bd imperiled human health, combined with years of proof that it destroyed wildlife globally, might be enough to prompt further regulations to slow Bsal’s advance while it might yet be controlled. At the least, it serves as a warning of how difficult it can be to predict pandemics ahead of time—and how hard it can be to put the brakes on once they’re underway.

The Fungus That Killed Frogs—and Led to a Surge in Malaria

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What killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous Period? It has long been the topic of scientific debate, and many researchers have set out to determine what caused the five mass extinction events that reshaped life on planet Earth in a geological instant. Some experts believe that comets or asteroids that crashed into Earth were the most likely agents of mass destruction. Other scientists argue that immense volcanic eruptions were the primary cause of the extinction events. A new Dartmouth-led study published on September 12 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) reports that volcanic activity appears to have been the key driver of mass extinctions.

These new findings provide the most compelling quantitative evidence to date that the link between major volcanic eruptions and wholesale species turnover is not just coincidental. 

According to the researchers, four of the five mass extinctions are contemporaneous with a type of volcanic outpouring called a flood basalt. These eruptions flood vast areas—even an entire continent—with lava in a mere million years. In a geological time scale, that is just the blink of an eye. They leave behind massive fingerprints as evidence—extensive regions of step-like, igneous rock (solidified from the erupted lava) that geologists call “large igneous provinces.”

To count as “large,” a large igneous province must contain at least 100,000 cubic kilometers of magma. (One cubic kilometer is equal to 264 billion gallons or the volume of 400,000 Olympic swimming pools.) For context, the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens involved less than one cubic kilometer of magma. According to the researchers, most of the volcanoes represented in the study erupted on the order of a million times more lava than that.

The research team drew on three well-established datasets on geologic time scale, paleobiology, and large igneous provinces to examine the temporal connection between mass extinction and large igneous provinces.

“The large step-like areas of igneous rock from these big volcanic eruptions seem to line up in time with mass extinctions and other significant climatic and environmental events,” says lead author Theodore Green ’21, who conducted this research as part of the Senior Fellowship program at Dartmouth and is now a graduate student at Princeton.

“Our results make it hard to ignore the role of volcanism in extinction.”

— Brenhin Keller, Assistant Professor of Earth Sciences at Dartmouth

In fact, a series of eruptions in present-day Siberia triggered the most destructive of the mass extinctions about 252 million years ago, releasing an immense pulse of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and nearly choking off all life. Bearing witness is the Siberian Traps, a large region of volcanic rock roughly the size of Australia.

Volcanic eruptions also rocked the Indian subcontinent around the time of the great dinosaur die-off, forming what is known today as the Deccan plateau. This, much like the asteroid strike, would have had far-reaching global effects, blanketing the atmosphere in dust and toxic fumes, suffocating dinosaurs and other life in addition to altering the climate on long time scales.

On the other hand, the investigators say, the theories in favor of annihilation by asteroid impact hinge upon the Chicxulub impactor, a space rock that crash-landed into Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula around the same time that the dinosaurs went extinct.

The Mount Fagradalsfjall volcano, near Iceland’s capital of Reykjavík, erupted for six months in 2021, and also again in August. Credit: Photo by Mokslo Sriuba/CC BY-SA 4.0

 

“All other theories that attempted to explain what killed the dinosaurs, including volcanism, got steamrolled when the Chicxulub impact crater was discovered,” says co-author Brenhin Keller, an assistant professor of earth sciences at Dartmouth. But there’s very little evidence of similar impact events that coincide with the other mass extinctions despite decades of exploration, he points out.

At Dartmouth, Green set out to find a way to quantify the apparent link between eruptions and extinctions and test whether the coincidence was just chance or whether there was evidence of a causal relationship between the two. Working with Keller and co-author Paul Renne, professor-in-residence of earth and planetary science at the University of California, Berkeley and director of the Berkeley Geochronology Center, Green recruited the supercomputers at the Dartmouth Discovery Cluster to crunch the numbers.

The scientists compared the best available estimates of flood basalt eruptions with periods of drastic species kill-off in the geological timescale, including but not limited to the five mass extinctions. To prove that the timing was more than a random chance, they examined whether the eruptions would line up just as well with a randomly generated pattern and repeated the exercise with 100 million such patterns. They discovered that the agreement with extinction periods was far greater than random chance.

“While it is difficult to determine if a particular volcanic outburst caused one particular mass extinction, our results make it hard to ignore the role of volcanism in extinction,” says Keller. If a causal link were to be found between volcanic flood basalts and mass extinctions, scientists expect that larger eruptions would entail more severe extinctions, but such a correlation has not been observed.

Examples of flood basalt volcanism can be seen in what are known as Grande Ronde flows exposed in Joseph Canyon on the Oregon-Washington border. Credit: Brenhin Keller

 

Rather than considering the absolute magnitude of eruptions, the team of researchers ordered the volcanic events by the rate at which they spewed lava. They found that the volcanic events with the highest eruptive rates did indeed cause the most destruction, producing more severe extinctions up to the mass extinctions.

“Our results indicate that in all likelihood there would have been a mass extinction at the Cretaceous tertiary boundary of some significant magnitude, regardless of whether there was an impact or not, which can be shown more quantitatively now,” says Renne. “The fact that there was an impact undoubtedly made things worse.”

The scientists ran the numbers for asteroids as well. The coincidence of impacts with periods of species turnover was significantly weaker, and dramatically worsened when the Chicxulub impactor was not considered. This suggests that other smaller known impactors did not cause significant extinctions.

According to Green, the eruption rate of the Deccan Traps in India suggests that the stage was set for widespread extinction even without the asteroid. The impact was the double whammy that loudly sounded the death knell for the dinosaurs, he adds.

Flood basalt eruptions aren’t common in the geologic record, says Green. The last one of comparable but significantly smaller scale happened about 16 million years ago in the Pacific Northwest.

“While the total amount of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere in modern climate change is still very much smaller than the amount emitted by a large igneous province, thankfully,” says Keller, “we’re emitting it very fast, which is reason to be concerned.” Green says that carbon dioxide emissions are uncomfortably similar to the rate of the environmentally impactful flood basalts they studied. This places climate change in the framework of historical periods of environmental catastrophe, he says.

Source: SciTechDaily

https://scitechdaily.com/what-really-killed-dinosaurs-and-other-life-on-earth-maybe-not-an-asteroid-strike/

The Big Bang should have made cracks in spacetime—why haven’t we found them?

First, pause and take a deep breath.

When we breathe in, our lungs fill with air containing oxygen, which is distributed to our red blood cells for transportation throughout our bodies. To function, our bodies need a lot of oxygen, and healthy people have at least 95% oxygen saturation all the time.

Conditions like asthma or COVID-19 make it harder for bodies to absorb oxygen from the lungs. This results in oxygen saturation percentages that drop to 90% or below, an indication that medical attention is needed. 

In a clinic, doctors use pulse oximeters to monitor oxygen saturation. Pulse oximeters are those clips you put over your fingertip or ear. However, monitoring oxygen saturation at home multiple times a day has potential benefits. For example, it could help patients keep an eye on COVID symptoms.

In a proof-of-principle study, researchers from the University of Washington (UW) and the University of California San Diego (UCSD) have shown that smartphones are capable of detecting blood oxygen saturation levels down to 70%. This is the lowest value that pulse oximeters should be able to measure, as recommended by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

The technique involves participants placing their finger over the camera and flash of a smartphone, which uses a deep-learning algorithm to decipher the blood oxygen levels. In testing, the team delivered a controlled mixture of nitrogen and oxygen to six subjects to artificially bring their blood oxygen levels down. 80% of the time, the smartphone correctly predicted whether the subject had low blood oxygen levels.

The team will publish these results today (September 19) in the journal npj Digital Medicine.

One way to measure oxygen saturation is to use pulse oximeters — those little clips you put over your fingertip (some shown here in gray and blue). In a proof-of-principle study, University of Washington and University of California San Diego researchers have shown that smartphones are capable of detecting blood oxygen saturation levels in a comparable range to the standalone clips. The technique involves having participants place their finger over the camera and flash of a smartphone. Credit: Dennis Wise/University of Washington

 

“Other smartphone apps that do this were developed by asking people to hold their breath. But people get very uncomfortable and have to breathe after a minute or so, and that’s before their blood-oxygen levels have gone down far enough to represent the full range of clinically relevant data,” said Jason Hoffman. He is the co-lead author and a UW doctoral student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. “With our test, we’re able to gather 15 minutes of data from each subject. Our data shows that smartphones could work well right in the critical threshold range.”

Another benefit of measuring blood oxygen levels on a smartphone is that almost everyone has one these days.

“This way you could have multiple measurements with your own device at either no cost or low cost,” said co-author Dr. Matthew Thompson, professor of family medicine at the UW School of Medicine. “In an ideal world, this information could be seamlessly transmitted to a doctor’s office. This would be really beneficial for telemedicine appointments or for triage nurses to be able to quickly determine whether patients need to go to the emergency department or if they can continue to rest at home and make an appointment with their primary care provider later.”

The researchers recruited six participants ranging in age from 20 to 34. Three identified as female and three identified as male. One participant identified as being African American, while the rest identified as being Caucasian.

To gather data to train and test the algorithm, the team had each participant wear a standard pulse oximeter on one finger and then place another finger on the same hand over a smartphone’s camera and flash. Each participant had this same setup on both hands simultaneously.

“The camera is recording a video: Every time your heart beats, fresh blood flows through the part illuminated by the flash,” said senior author Edward Wang, who started this project as a UW doctoral student studying electrical and computer engineering and is now an assistant professor at UC San Diego’s Design Lab and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

“The camera records how much that blood absorbs the light from the flash in each of the three color channels it measures: red, green and blue,” said Wang, who also directs the UC San Diego DigiHealth Lab. “Then we can feed those intensity measurements into our deep-learning model.”

Each participant breathed in a controlled mixture of oxygen and nitrogen to slowly reduce oxygen levels. The process took about 15 minutes. For all six participants, the team acquired more than 10,000 blood oxygen level readings between 61% and 100%.

The scientists used data from four of the participants to train a deep learning algorithm to pull out the blood oxygen levels. They used the remainder of the data to validate the method and then test it to see how well it performed on new subjects.

“Smartphone light can get scattered by all these other components in your finger, which means there’s a lot of noise in the data that we’re looking at,” said co-lead author Varun Viswanath, a UW alumnus who is now a doctoral student advised by Wang at UC San Diego. “Deep learning is a really helpful technique here because it can see these really complex and nuanced features and helps you find patterns that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to see.”

The team hopes to continue this research by testing the algorithm on more people.

“One of our subjects had thick calluses on their fingers, which made it harder for our algorithm to accurately determine their blood oxygen levels,” Hoffman said. “If we were to expand this study to more subjects, we would likely see more people with calluses and more people with different skin tones. Then we could potentially have an algorithm with enough complexity to be able to better model all these differences.”

But, the scientists said, this is a good first step toward developing biomedical devices that are aided by machine learning.

“It’s so important to do a study like this,” Wang said. “Traditional medical devices go through rigorous testing. But computer science research is still just starting to dig its teeth into using machine learning for biomedical device development and we’re all still learning. By forcing ourselves to be rigorous, we’re forcing ourselves to learn how to do things right.”

Source: SciTechDaily

https://scitechdaily.com/smartphones-could-help-people-measure-blood-oxygen-levels-at-home-in-a-flash/

Pediatric drug side effects account for approximately 10% of pediatric hospitalizations, with nearly 50% of those being life-threatening. There is currently little evidence despite the need to learn more about these drugs and the negative effects they can have on children.

Although clinical trials continue to be the gold standard for detecting adverse drug events (ADEs) in adults, they raise ethical and methodological concerns when used in pediatric populations. Understanding the possible effects of various drug treatments at distinct periods of childhood presents problems that are significantly exacerbated by the rapidly changing biological and physiological developments.

Researchers at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center created a novel algorithm that identified nearly 20,000 ADEs signals (information on a new or known side effect that may be brought on by a specific drug) throughout the seven pediatric development stages and made them freely accessible. This process is assisted by a novel approach that permits neighboring development stages to enhance signal detection power, allowing it to overcome data limitations within individual stages.

This use of predictive modeling on real-world data may help in addressing a major hole in healthcare research concerning the understudied pediatric population.

DBMI associate professor Nicholas Tatonetti and Nick Giangreco, a recent Systems Biology Ph.D. graduate at Columbia University, recently published their findings in a study published in the journal Med.

“For many reasons, children have historically not been included in clinical trials,” Tatonetti said. “There are many ethical issues around including children in trials, and there are several limitations when children are included that make it difficult to assess the effectiveness and safety of drugs.”

Because of these factors, few drugs are specifically approved for use in children, though once drugs are approved for adults, physicians can prescribe them “off-label” to children.

“Since drugs are not studied and approved in children directly, physicians must rely on guidelines for adults,” he added. “Essentially treating children as if they were simply small adults is oftentimes an incorrect assumption. This study is an attempt to elucidate systematically what the potential side effects are when drugs are used off label in children.”

The study goes beyond simply differentiating side effects in children from those in adults. It focuses on ADEs across seven developmental stages, starting at term neonatal and going through late adolescence, and it is powered by sharing information from neighboring developmental stages. For example, the development of infants and toddlers is close enough that there will be more shared characteristics than there would be for infants and those in early or late adolescence.

“Previously, children were essentially grouped together,” Tatonetti said. “There were only a few studies that just focused on children, and they basically focused on people 18 and under or 21 and under in one group. The innovation here is using known developmental stages and our newly introduced DGAMs (disproportionality generalized additive models) to improve power and enable that analysis.”

Tatonetti stressed that these signals are not validated and are primarily meant for researchers. Parents should consult with their pediatricians on specific drug side effects.

Giangreco, currently a Quantitative Translational Scientist at Regeneron, noted one of several side effects that were identified by this model.

“One we corroborated that the FDA had found was that montelukast, an asthma drug, was found to elicit psychiatric side effects,” he said. “We saw that in our database as well, but we were able to pinpoint certain developmental stages where the risk was more significant, especially the second year of life.”

The study also integrates pediatric enzyme expression data and found that pharmacogenes with dynamic childhood expression are associated with pediatric ADEs.

“This was a biologically-inspired modeling strategy,” Giangreco said. “We used what we knew about biological processes occurring during childhood and formed the modeling strategy. These safety signals came from this prior knowledge of the biological processes that are happening. Our data-driven approach really tried to capture what we thought were the important biologically and physiologically dynamic processes that happen during childhood and use that to tease apart observations across the development stages.”

The model was used on a database of 264,453 pediatric reports in the FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS). The output of the study is available via KidSIDES, a free and publicly available database of pediatric drug safety signals for the research community, as well as the Pediatric Drug Safety portal (PDSportal), which will facilitate the evaluation of drug safety signals across childhood growth and development.

“The primary intention is for other researchers to use it, to follow up on signals they may observe,” Tatonetti said. “If they are experts on a particular drug usage, or particular disease domain and have observed these types of effects, they could follow up on them and be reassured, or could look at what the other evidence is for that effect as we aggregate it together. Clinicians can use it as a gut check. Maybe they saw an effect, or they are wondering if others are seeing this effect, and they can check the PDSPortal to see if others are seeing this effect or to prompt them to write another case report to the FDA.”

Source: SciTechDaily

https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-identify-numerous-new-side-effects-of-pediatric-drugs/

• First established by Isaac Newton, classical mechanics is a foundational field of physics.
• Recognizing the proper number of variables is key to solving its problems.
• Researchers have tested the ability of an "AI physicist" to accomplish this. At first, their result appeared promising; but on closer review, it is clearly a failure.

Can a computer algorithm discover something new about physics? It’s a fascinating question. A new research paper on the topic inspired the sensational headline “An AI may have just invented ‘alternative’ physics.”

The term “alternative physics” sounds a lot like “alternative facts,” but let’s investigate anyway. How does this computer program’s performance compare with that of an actual physicist? Or even that of an average student?

Newtonian mechanics

Isaac Newton was a peerless genius. The English polymath not only unified the studies of motion and gravity but invented the mathematical language with which to describe them. The concepts of classical mechanics brought into being by Newton underlie most of the physics invented since then. His concepts were subsequently reformulated in new mathematical language in the 18th century by the exceptional continental physicists Joseph-Louis Lagrange and Leonhard Euler.

Newton’s mechanics requires an analysis of the directional forces acting upon massive bodies. If you took an introductory high school or college physics class, you have seen these problems: boxes on inclined planes, pulleys, and carts. You draw arrows going in various directions and try to balance forces. It works nicely for small problems. As the problems become more complex, this method continues to work, but it becomes brutally tedious.

With Lagrange’s formulation, if two aspects of the nature of the system can be defined, the problem can be solved using only calculus. (Yes, “only” calculus: Crunching derivatives is much easier than solving extremely complex free-body diagrams where the arrows change at every position.)
The first thing to understand is the energy of the system, namely, the (kinetic) energy of movement and the (potential) energy stored by the configuration of the system. The second crucial thing is to choose proper coordinates, or variables, for the motion of the system.

Imagine a simple pendulum, like that in an old-fashioned clock. The pendulum bob has a kinetic energy from its swinging motion and a potential energy due to its position (height) within the gravitational field. The position of the pendulum can be described by a single variable: its angle relative to vertical. Lagrange’s solution for the pendulum’s motion can then be computed with relative ease.

Solving more complex problems in mechanics requires discovering the proper number of variables that can describe the system. In simple cases this is easy; in moderately complex cases, it is a student-level exercise. In extremely complex systems, it may be a professional’s work or impossible. This is where the AI “physicist” comes in.

AI physicist is beat by undergraduates

The computer was set to analyze the problem of a pendulum hanging on another pendulum. This problem requires two variables — the angle of each pendulum to the vertical — or four variables if a Cartesian (xy) coordinate system is used. If both pendulum bobs are hung from springs instead of rigid rods, the two variable spring lengths are added to get six variables in the Cartesian system.

The computer was asked to determine the number of variables needed to calculate the above problems. How did the AI physicist do? Not great. For the rigid pendulum on a pendulum, it gave two answers: ~7 and ~4-5. (The correct answer is 4 variables.) Similarly, it calculated ~8 and ~5-6 for the double-spring pendulum. (The correct answer is 6 variables.) The researchers praise the smaller estimates as being near the true answers.

But after digging into the details in the paper’s supplementary materials, however, the result begins to unravel. The computer didn’t actually calculate 4 variables and 6 variables. Its best calculations were 4.71 and 5.34. Neither of those answers even rounds to the correct answer. The four-variable problem is an intermediate undergraduate physics problem, while the six-variable problem is a more advanced undergraduate problem. In other words, an average undergraduate physics student is significantly better than the AI physicist at grasping these problems.

AI physicist is not ready for tenure

The researchers go on to ask the program to analyze complicated systems that not only have an unknown number of variables, but for which it is unclear whether classical mechanics can describe the systems at all. Examples include a lava lamp and fire. The AI does an acceptable job at predicting small changes in these systems. It also calculates the number of required variables (7.89 and 24.70, respectively). Correct answers to these problems would be “new physics,” in some sense, but there is no way of knowing if the AI is correct.

Using AI to analyze unknown systems is a neat idea, but the AI currently cannot get the easy answers right. Thus, we have no reason to believe it’s getting the hard ones right.

Source

Punishment, puppies, and science: Bringing dog training to heel

Fire ant rafts form because of the Cheerios effect, study concludes

“You’re looking at the most endangered fish in North America,” Zane Olsen, the manager of the Ouray National Fish Hatchery, tells me as he points to a deep open-topped water tank. Inside are dozens of juvenile bonytail, the rarest of four endangered native Colorado River fish species and one Olsen and his colleagues are trying to bring back from the brink of extinction. 

When I arrived at the hatchery one clear morning in May, Olsen was already soggy. Fish eggs mottled his pink polo shirt, and the tall, rangy fellow didn’t seem to have a moment to stand still. The hatchery essentially functions as a fertility clinic for fish, and this was the one day a year that it spawns the razorback sucker, another endangered fish that makes up the bulk of the hatchery work. (The Colorado pikeminnow and the humpback chub, the other two endangered Colorado River basin fish, are raised elsewhere.) Three days earlier, hatchery workers had injected the razorback with hormones to ripen their eggs, and now the team had a short window for capturing them. I’d come to help with the spawning and to learn more about how the endangered fish are faring after more than two decades of drought in the West.

Found nowhere else in the world, the native razorback has occupied the waterways of the Colorado River basin for at least 3 million years, one reason Olsen says they’re called the dinosaurs of the Colorado. Known as “detritivores,” the bottom-feeding fish were once an important part of the river’s food chain because they nosh on dead plant and animal matter that might otherwise build up and cause disease and return essential nutrients to the ecosystem. The fish have adapted to the harsh monsoon-to-drought cycles of the desert rivers that flood with melted mountain snowpack in the spring and are parched in the late summer. Razorback suckers can grow up to three feet long, weigh 80 pounds, and live for 50 or 60 years. But such geriatric monster fish are rare in the wild today.

The native fish have not fared so well over the past century since humans began trying to make the western desert bloom by damming the Colorado and its tributaries, a watershed that was once one of the most biologically diverse in North America. “They’re a bellwether for the health of the entire river ecosystem, from Wyoming to the Gulf of California,” says Taylor McKinnon, a senior public lands advocate at the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity.

The past two years have been especially brutal, as the winter runoff has dwindled and the worst drought in the West in at least 1,200 years has pushed the Colorado River toward catastrophic ecological collapse. The plight of the razorback and the other endangered native Colorado River basin fish, says McKinnon, are “a concrete, real-world example of how climate change magnifies a whole slate of existing threats to endangered fish.”

The US Fish and Wildlife Service first listed the razorback as endangered in 1991, and the species would be extinct in the Upper Basin but for the hatchery program, which was established in 1996 as part of the Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program and is funded by the US Fish and Wildlife Service. The program has been successful enough that last year, FWS proposed downlisting the razorback from “endangered” to merely “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act. But the extreme mega-drought of the past two years makes that proposal seem wildly optimistic.

“We’ve had a series of dry years,” says Bart Miller, the healthy rivers director for Western Resource Advocates that is a partner in the recovery program. “There’s less water in the rivers, and that’s having an impact on fish,” he says. “Lower flows mean higher temperatures” that benefit invasive species, while the lower water levels can leave the fish stranded when their habitat gets fragmented into pools.

The level of water stored in Colorado basin reservoirs has plunged precipitously during the past 20 years, and even more dramatically in the past two. At 27 percent capacity, Lake Mead, behind Hoover Dam, is so low that human remains are resurfacing from the bottom. Lake Powell, created by the Glen Canyon Dam in 1963, has dropped 165 feet since its creation and is at 25 percent capacity. If it falls another 43 feet, the turbines in the dam will cease to function, and about 5 million people, including members of the Navajo Nation, will have to find another source of electricity.

To protect these reservoirs, the seven states that rely on the river to supply 40 million people with water are scrambling to find a way to voluntarily cut consumption by as much as 30 percent to head off the crisis. But this summer, water managers and state officials failed to come to any sort of agreement on how to make those cuts, and the US Bureau of Reclamation, which controls the dams, is now poised to impose what promise to be painful federal water mandates on the states. There are so many competing interests—agriculture, real estate development and golf courses, hydropower companies, Native American tribes who’ve been robbed of water rights for a century—all claiming a share of the ever-shrinking river. Even the motorboat lobby, houseboat aficionados, and Jet Ski enthusiasts (collectively known as “Powellheadz”) have organized to demand that the Bureau refill Lake Powell to bring back marinas recently shuttered because of low water levels. Meanwhile, environmentalists are pushing to kill off “Lake Foul” for good by (metaphorically) blowing up the hated Glen Canyon Dam, as the writer Edward Abbey proposed in his memorable 1975 novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang.

Which brings me back to those ancient fish lazing about in the tanks and ponds of the Ouray hatchery. Because of their protected status, the chunky tuba-lipped fish are supposed to have some rights to the Colorado River water too. “These fish exist nowhere else in the world,” says Matthew Breen, the native aquatics project leader for the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources’ Northeastern Regional Office. “That’s something worth preserving, right?” 

But as with Lake Powell, their future does not look especially bright, despite the best efforts of the hatchery workers who were trying to coax some eggs out of a couple of tanks full of ripened razorback suckers.

The Ouray National Fish Hatchery is a small facility at the northern end of the Ouray National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Utah, a 16-mile stretch along the Green River designated as a sanctuary for migrating birds in 1960. The Green River is the Colorado’s largest tributary, and in the refuge, its muddy waters ripple through a lovely riparian space full of cottonwood galleries, mule deer, elk, migrating birds, endangered fish, and a species of endangered hookless cactus. It’s a critical habitat for the razorback, and in some ways, the fate of refuge seems nearly as precarious as that of the imperiled fish sheltered there. This modest Eden nested between the Uinta and Wasatch mountains is completely surrounded by the major oil and gas fields of Utah’s Uinta Basin, which local environmentalists have dubbed “Mordor” in reference to the hellscape of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

Oil companies have been trying for years to tap the oil and gas reserves underneath the refuge, where surface rights are owned by the Fish and Wildlife Service but the mineral rights underground are still controlled by a collection of private interests and the state of Utah. In 2013, Thurston Energy applied to drill two test wells mere feet from the fish hatchery. Fish and Wildlife Service employees sounded the alarm about potential threats to the endangered fish through groundwater contamination and the possibility of oil spills in the Green River, not to mention the health of the hatchery workers who’d be exposed to the emissions.

“As you can understand, a fish hatchery is only as good as its water source,” reads one 2013 report obtained by the Center for Biological Diversity through a public records request. “Contamination of the water supply to Ouray NFH could cause a complete loss of the facility and require a complete relocation of the entire operation. The Recovery Program estimates that the replacement cost of the facility alone is $10 million … estimates do not include the high recovery value of the fish housed at the facility, the loss of genetic material, or the protracted length to achieve recovery if these recovery resources were lost. Because the Ouray NFH contains resources that are priceless, rare, require long-term work, and are critical to recovery, special risk management must be considered … Overall, it may be impossible to adequately protect the Ouray NFH under the current proposed action and location of the proposed oil wells.”

A year later, oil prices plunged and the proposal languished. But in 2019, the Trump administration approved Thurston’s proposal to drill two wells inside the refuge, though farther away from the hatchery. Last fall, the state of Utah issued final permits. “Most of the oil and gas wells are located away from the river floodplain,” a US Fish and Wildlife Service spokesperson explains via email. “While the potential for spills can pose a risk, they have been rare.”

The entrance to the refuge is on State Route 88, directly across from a couple of oil pumpjacks, which cloaked what should have been a pristine area with a faintly industrial stink. Happily, when I entered the fish hatchery, a nondescript, low-slung concrete building, it smelled more like fish than petroleum products. Olsen provided a quick tour—quick because most of the work took place in one large room full of fish tanks. Curling pictures of fish and yellowing newspaper clippings adorned bulletin boards in the lobby, which was the extent of the visitor center. The main room had a high warehouse ceiling crisscrossed with PVC and other water pipes and a network of metal grates along the floor for drainage. A sign over a walk-in fridge declared “fish food storage.”

With a modest budget of about $640,000 in 2022, according to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the hatchery is fairly low-tech; only three full-time employees work there, so it relies on volunteers to help with the spawning. Today, with promises of burgers on the grill and fresh watermelon for lunch, Olsen has roped in the facility maintenance man Trenton Thompson; Bruce Haines, a retired former Fish and Wildlife Service staffer; and a couple of guys who’ve come down from the trout hatchery at Jones Hole to assist the permanent staff.

A handful of workers in waterproof boots joked with each other over the low roar of water pumps churning a dozen or so fish tanks that looked like smaller versions of above-ground swimming pools. But they took the work seriously. When photographer Russel Daniels, who’d come with me, inquired whether Olsen had ever eaten one of the fish, he and his colleagues recoiled with genuine horror. “That’s a $10,000 plate,” an unsmiling Olsen informed him, citing the steep fines and possible jail time for harming the rare fish.

After my tour, I don a big yellow rubber apron and join the huddle around one of the big fish tanks for a tutorial on fish spawning. Thompson’s facility maintenance title vastly understates the scope of his duties. I watch as he expertly extracts a female fish, which is about two feet long, from a water tank and holds it for Olsen, who explains that the fish are equipped with PIT tags—short for passive integrated transponder—that track them after they are released into the wild and help ensure that the spawning involves the right genetic mix. (No ichthyological intermarriage here!) He waves a wand over the fish to log the data from the PIT tag before drying the fish off with a towel he throws over his shoulder like a chef. It’s important to keep the females dry, he explains, because razorback sperm, which they’ll mix with the harvested eggs, is activated by water and will live for only 60 seconds once it gets wet.

Thompson cradles the big fish as Olsen gently massages its soft white belly and sends a stream of eggs squirting out into a plastic Ziploc bag that Haines holds awkwardly under its tail. The process is not unlike milking a cow. Thompson plops the fish into a different tank and pulls out another victim, and I get to take over the belly rubs.

Olsen asks if I want to hold one of the aquatic dinosaurs myself. Of course, I do! Spawning endangered razorbacks might be one of the coolest things I’ve ever done. But the stakes seem high. I imagine the headline: “Reporter drops, kills rare fish.” Luckily, when I reach into the tank and pull her out by the tail, the razorback flops only a little. I carefully cover her eyes to calm her while Thompson rubs his hand along her underside. I try to explain to her that the misery will be short and that it’s for a good cause. She has some heft to her and seems like a hearty soul for a rare fish. She doesn’t protest, soon gives up her eggs, and I return my charge to her little pool.

After adding sperm to the bag and giving the mix a tannic acid wash to prevent clumping and fungus growth, workers take the fertilized eggs to a special isolation room designed to keep out parasites and bacteria and transfer them to special jars for incubation. With luck, nine days later at least 10,000 fry will appear. In the wild, they would feed on zooplankton, but here they will subsist on brine shrimp from the Great Salt Lake for about two years, graduating from the tanks to half-acre-long rubber-lined ponds.

Holding a million gallons of filtered water, the ponds are covered with ropes and netting to help keep out the cormorants, osprey, and other shorebirds that view the fish-rich ponds as an “all-you-can-eat Chuck-A-Rama,” says Thompson, who occasionally has to deploy a rifle loaded with M-80 fireworks to scare off the predators. After about two years, once the fish reach 24 inches long, they’re released into the wild. About 80 percent will make it to the river, Olsen says.

What he doesn’t say is that the fish struggle once they’ve been released, and few of them will reach their natural lifespan of 40 or 50 years. Breen says the last native population of elder fish started to disappear in the early 2000s. In the past few years, however, wildlife experts have started to see some adult razorbacks in the river that had been released from captivity in 2014 and 2015, a hopeful sign. And recently, according to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, they’ve seen the “first confirmed wild-recruited razorback sucker in the Upper Basin since the 1990s.”

“Without the hatchery,” Breen says, “none of it would have been possible.”

The Ouray hatchery is just one part of the Upper Colorado Endangered Fish Recovery Program, a collaborative effort created in 1988 by water users, electric companies, state and federal agencies, Native American tribes, and conservation groups to try to recover the four endangered fish species that once were plentiful in the Colorado River. Essentially the very same entities that had endangered the fish in the first place came together with protectors to try to save them. This wasn’t solely an exercise in benevolent conservation. The program was specifically created to head off lawsuits under the Endangered Species Act, which required states to consider things like fish habitat when green-lighting projects that would drain more water from the river basin. Nonetheless, the cooperative program is a sea change from decades past, when many of these same agencies were actively trying to kill off some of the native fish in the interests of economic development.

Some of the same agencies now involved in the endangered fish recovery program are partly responsible for hastening their demise. In 1962, the US Bureau of Reclamation completed the construction of the Flaming Gorge dam on the Green River, about 75 miles north of the Ouray refuge. Promoters had promised the dam would provide immense economic benefits to the region, not just by providing water for irrigation and development, but by creating a massive reservoir stocked with non-native trout to attract visitors who liked sport fishing.

Even then, western water managers knew that such artificial lakes would fill up quickly with trash fish like carp that not only devoured all the native fish but also the prized rainbow trout. So state agencies in Utah and Wyoming decided to give the farm-raised trout a head start by spreading the poison rotenone over nearly 445 miles of the Green River before the dam was closed. In just three days, 450 tons of fish were killed. Dead fish were found as far away as Dinosaur National Monument, where state officials had promised the fish would not be affected. The episode was such a scandal that then-interior secretary Stewart Udall sent a letter to the chair of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists apologizing for the disaster; he promised nothing like that would happen again.

And yet, what fish the poison didn’t kill, the dam did. The water released from Flaming Gorge was too cold for the razorback to thrive, and the change in water flow destroyed the natural side channels and wetlands of the Green River, where the native fish historically spawn and hide out from predators until they’re old enough to survive in the deep river water. Thanks to the recovery program, the Bureau of Reclamation has tried to time water releases from Flaming Gorge to mimic the natural flows of the river and give the razorback larvae a fighting chance. And more recently, scientists have been working with the bureau to create new wetlands on the Green specifically for fish habitat, which has proven moderately successful.

Still, new threats to the fish from the climate-change-driven drought are significant—though not always obvious. Historically, most of the funding for the fish recovery program has come from the sale of hydropower at the very dams that endanger the fish in the first place. But thanks to the drought and low water levels, the hydropower system on the river has been producing about 40 percent less electricity this year. As a result, the US Bureau of Reclamation has had to cover the fish recovery program’s deficit. 

Meanwhile, demand for water continues to grow in the West, along with the population in states like Utah that are dependent on the Colorado River. Utah—which uses more water per capita than any southwestern state and has the lowest water rates—has refused to impose measures adopted in other basin states to cut down on wasteful water use, such as mandating the use of water-efficient plumbing fixtures in new construction or raising water rates to encourage conservation. Much of the water used in Utah isn’t even metered, a basic requirement for figuring out how much is getting used by whom and how much can be cut.

To keep those Glen Canyon turbines spinning, Lake Powell needs more water. But without big cuts in consumption, the obvious solution for filling the reservoir is stealing the water from somewhere else in the system. Flaming Gorge reservoir on the Green River, which also happens to be the habitat for the razorback suckers raised at the hatchery, is one of the few reservoirs in the basin that is anywhere near capacity, and thus a ripe target for state agencies looking to avoid other, painful cuts to water consumption.

The Bureau of Reclamation announced earlier this year that it would release 500,000 acre-feet of water from Flaming Gorge to try to stabilize the reservoirs downstream. In the short term, Breen says, those releases should be good for the endangered fish, as they’re timed to benefit the razorback sucker’s reproductive cycle. But it is ultimately robbing Peter to pay Paul. The Green River water flows have already fallen 20 percent since 2000, and the Colorado River Basin has been oversubscribed for decades, with states claiming rights to more water than remains in the river. Its major reservoirs have been drained as the winter snowpack has diminished. It was a record 107 degrees Fahrenheit in Salt Lake City this week. 

“The system is approaching a tipping point, and without action we cannot protect the system and the millions of Americans who rely on this critical resource,” M. Camille Calimlim Touton, commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, said during a news conference in August. “Protecting the system means protecting the people of the American West.”

Meanwhile, the biggest ongoing threat to the Colorado’s endangered fish is other, non-native fish. Only 12 fish are native to the Upper Colorado River Basin, Breen says. But now more than 50 species compete in the rivers. Many that were intentionally introduced to promote sport fishing are highly predatory in a way the razorback and others have not evolved to survive.

“Warmer, low flows also benefit invasive fish species like smallmouth bass, exacerbating the problems posed by that species,” a Fish and Wildlife Service spokesperson told me in an email. “These non-native, smallmouth bass spawn and hatch in summer, as do the Colorado pikeminnow, and grow at a much faster rate than native fishes.” 

The recovery program spends more than $2 million a year trying to eliminate the non-native fish from the Green River and elsewhere in the system—a move that is not always popular with local anglers who like to fish for the bass. “For the record: I love smallmouth bass,” says Breen. “I grew up fishing for smallmouth bass in the Midwest. But that’s where they’re supposed to be. Bass are very predacious, and they’re not supposed to be in that river.”

The smallmouth bass invasion had been somewhat contained to the upper Colorado watershed, but this summer, as the river has dried up, the reservoir in Lake Powell is allowing warm water to flow through the Glen Canyon dam, and with it, the smallmouth bass. Much to the dismay of conservationists and wildlife managers, the bass are now starting to gain a foothold in Grand Canyon, the last pristine habitat for the humpback chub, another native Colorado River fish whose status had been downgraded by the Fish and Wildlife Service from endangered to threatened. The arrival of the bass could undo all that progress.

That’s one reason McKinnon is skeptical that fish like the razorback raised in a hatchery are sufficiently recovered to come off the endangered species list. “The program has proven to be an excellent exercise in feeding non-native bass,” he says, “but not creating the self-sustaining populations that recovery requires.” He says a massive public investment has been made in the hatchery program, but “those fish still aren’t able to successfully reproduce in the wild. They’re able to spawn, but the juvenile fish are consumed by non-native fish.”

In March, Breen coauthored a paper in Fisheries, a journal of the American Fisheries Society, arguing that what the Colorado’s endangered fish really need to thrive is simply more water in the river, with natural flows unimpeded by dams and other artificial obstructions. “Unless we prioritize conservation of riverine ecosystems, native species populations will likely continue to decline as flows are further reduced by climate change and human water use,” the authors conclude.

More water is the obvious solution but also improbable. Real estate developers committed to lawns and golf courses, alfalfa farmers, and big California cities are unlikely to be willing to sacrifice water to save some big, ugly fish no one wants to eat. Only one major tributary still has the natural water flow required to sustain the endangered native fish, and that’s the White River, which meets the Green not far from the Ouray hatchery. But water companies have long had their eyes on the White for a dam to fuel more development in Colorado.

Until and unless there’s more water in the Colorado River basin, the future of the razorback sucker will depend a lot on the Ouray hatchery. At the end of my visit, I snapped a photo of Olsen holding up a life-size model of the Colorado pikeminnow, which grows up to six feet. He gives me some endangered fish trading cards, courtesy of the recovery program. We talk about how this messy, wet job he does is almost all that stands between an ancient fish and extinction. I suggest he’s doing the Lord’s work among the water dinosaurs. Olsen gives me a crooked smile, “It is pretty cool, isn’t it?”

This article was supported by The Water Desk, an independent journalism initiative based at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism. Aerial support provided by LightHawk.

The Colorado River Is Dying. Can Its Aquatic Dinosaurs Be Saved?

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This particular combination of 'why to reduce' and 'how to reduce' messaging can be useful for promoting good health in a population, said the team behind the 2021 study.

Too much drinking doesn't just lead to cancer, of course. Overdoing it on the booze is associated with a whole range of problems, including premature death, heart disease, digestive issues, and an increased risk of dementia.

"We found that pairing information about alcohol and cancer with a particular practical action – counting their drinks – resulted in drinkers reducing the amount of alcohol they consumed," said economist and psychologist Simone Pettigrew from The George Institute for Global Health.

For the study, three surveys were filled out: 7,995 people completed the first, 4,588 of those people completed the second three weeks later, and 2,687 people finished the final survey three weeks after that. The participants were split up into different groups and shown different advertisements and messages about drinking.

One combination stood out, compared to a control group: A TV ad linking booze and cancer, together with a suggestion to keep count of your drinks, was one of the most effective at getting people to try and cut down on alcohol intake.

It was also the only combination where people actually did significantly reduce their alcohol consumption over the six weeks.

Other approaches – like encouraging people to decide on a number of drinks and then stick to it – did prompt some of the volunteers to try and cut down, but there was a clear winner based on the people taking part in this research.

"Many people don't know that alcohol is a carcinogen," said Pettigrew. "It's important information that drinkers should have access to. But telling people alcohol causes cancer is just part of the solution – we also need to give them ways to take action to reduce their risk."

Alcohol consumption can be attributed to as many as 7 percent of premature deaths worldwide, according to the World Health Organization, and making drinkers more aware of the health risks is one way of tackling that problem.

While health agencies have also looked at ways of making booze less readily available and more expensive, ultimately personal choices will determine whether or not behavior around alcohol will shift in the long term.

In this particular study, the participants were chosen to be "broadly demographically representative of the Australian drinking public", so it's not an approach that will necessarily work elsewhere – but it seems that counting your drinks could be one option to try if you want to cut down.

"There are limited resources available for alcohol harm-reduction campaigns, so it's important to find out which messages resonate best to ensure they have the best chance of working," said Pettigrew.

The research was published in Addictive Behaviors.

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In lupus, a type of autoimmune disease, the body's natural defense system can't tell the difference between its own cells and foreign ones, so it mistakenly attacks its own tissues and organs. The attackers are molecules called autoantibodies, which turn against the body instead of protecting it from invaders, like normal antibodies do. They trigger a cascade of inflammation throughout the body, leading to joint and skin problems, pain, fatigue, and even organ damage.

Now, German researchers report that they have harnessed lupus patients’ own cells to treat this disease. The sample size was small, but the results were notable: Five people who received an infusion of supercharged immune cells are now in remission from severe lupus after receiving the experimental treatment. The results appeared on September 15 in the journal Nature Medicine. “This is as close to a cure as I can see,” says Hoang Nguyen, senior scientific program manager at the Lupus Research Alliance, who wasn’t involved in the study. “They corrected the cells that produce antibodies against the body’s own tissues.”

The approach is known as CAR-T therapy, and it has been successfully used against some notoriously hard-to-treat cancers. But researchers have been speculating about its potential to treat autoimmune diseases for several years. The therapy involves modifying a patient’s T cells, a key component of the immune system, and turning them into assassins to efficiently seek out a specific target in the body. In this case, the target is B cells—the immune cells that make antibodies in healthy people and self-attacking autoantibodies in people with lupus.

Last year, the German team showed that one woman went into remission from severe lupus after CAR-T therapy. The new paper followed four more people who got the therapy.

To make the customized treatment, doctors removed T cells from patients, then genetically engineered them in the lab to recognize a protein called CD19. This protein appears on the surface of autoantibody-producing B cells. Scientists grew more of the modified T cells in the lab until they had enough for a therapeutic dose—around 50 to 100 million, depending on the patient’s weight. The modified T cells were then infused back into the patients to seek out and destroy their faulty B cells.

After about 100 days, the patients began to make new B cells—but these ones didn’t produce harmful autoantibodies. In fact, the autoantibodies had disappeared altogether. One of the treated individuals has been free of symptoms for 17 months—the longest follow-up period so far. The others have been in remission for five to 12 months. All of the patients have been able to go off the drugs they were taking to manage their illness, including immunosuppressants.

Lupus is a lifelong disease that has no cure. It affects an estimated 1.5 million people in the United States and 5 million people worldwide, many of them young women, according to the Lupus Foundation of America. Most patients are treated with steroids to tame the inflammation. Immunosuppressant drugs are also used, but these make the body more vulnerable to infection and often have unpleasant side effects. New antibody drugs, which aim to protect the body from attacking itself, are able to help some patients but not all.

The new study suggests a possible treatment for lupus patients who don’t benefit from currently available drugs. “This impressive study adds to the growing body of evidence that CAR-T therapy may be a therapeutic option for diseases beyond cancer, including autoimmune disorders such as lupus,” Jonathan Epstein, executive vice dean and chief scientific officer of the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, wrote to WIRED via email.

In cancer patients treated with CAR-T therapy, complete remission rates are as high as 68 to 93 percent, but relapse remains common and occurs in 40 to 50 percent of patients. Cancer patients treated with CAR-T therapy can also have a severe inflammatory reaction called cytokine release syndrome. In the lupus study, patients experienced only mild side effects, including fever.

“The difference between cancer and autoimmunity is that in cancer, there are usually more cells involved,” says Georg Schett, vice president of research at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany, who was part of the study team. When engineered T cells go after so many tumor cells at once, it can over-activate the immune system and release a potentially life-threatening cytokine storm. “Whereas in autoimmunity, the number of B cells is much lower, and therefore it seems that the safety profile of CAR-T cell therapy and autoimmunity is much better than in cancer,” he says.

Schett’s team is planning a larger study called a basket trial, in which patients with different types of autoimmune conditions, such as rheumatoid arthritis and scleroderma, will be treated with CAR-T therapy. He says longer follow-up in larger clinical trials will be needed to determine whether the therapy is really a cure.

While these early results are promising, the complexity and cost of CAR-T may limit its use for the foreseeable future. Currently, CAR-T therapies for cancer cost around $400,000 for a one-time infusion. Since they’re tailored to each patient, they’re complicated to make and require special manufacturing capabilities. Because of these factors, Nguyen says she sees this therapy initially being used as a last resort for patients with severe lupus who don’t respond to other drugs. “My first thought when I saw the work was, ‘Wow, this is going to be really expensive,’” she says.

How a ‘Living Drug’ Could Treat Autoimmune Disease

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Lots of strange things about Saturn can be explained by a destroyed moon

Record monsoon flooding in Pakistan due to a confluence of factors

There’s an old joke about the fellow who has his left foot in a bucket of ice water and the right in a bucket of hot water, so that his overall temperature is average. That seems to apply to the climate during 2022’s northern summer of extremes: Overall, the planet was tied for only the fifth-warmest June-August, yet regional heat waves shattered records.

 

Global warming is undoubtedly a factor, but just how the increasing extremes that marked the summer of 2022—heat waves, droughts and floods, sometimes one on top of the other—are related can be bewildering to the public and policymakers.

 

As a climate scientist, I’ve been working on these issues for more than four decades, and my new book, “The Changing Flow of Energy Through the Climate System,” details the causes, feedbacks, and impacts. Let’s take a closer look at how climate change and natural weather patterns like La Niña influence what we’re seeing around the world today.

 

The June-August 2022 global land and ocean surface temperature was 1.6° Fahrenheit (0.89° Celsius) above the 20th-century average of 60.1° F (15.6° C). It tied with 2015 and 2017 as the fifth-warmest in the 143-year temperature record.

NOAA

 

The Northern Hemisphere’s extreme summer

Summer 2022 has indeed seemed to feature one climate-related disaster after another.

 

Record-breaking heat waves baked India and Pakistan, then monsoon flooding left about a third of Pakistan under water, affecting an estimated 33 million people. Temperatures exceeded 104° Fahrenheit (40° Celsius) for prolonged periods in many places, and even broke 122° F (50° C) in Jacobabad, Pakistan, in May.

 

A satellite image of one part of Pakistan shows how flooding turned rivers into lakes several miles wide.

European Space Agency

 

The Asian heat helped to melt some glaciers in the Himalayas, elevating rivers. At the same time, three times the normal annual rain fell in Pakistan during the weekslong monsoon. More than 1,500 people died in the flooding, an estimated 1.8 million homes were damaged or destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of livestock were lost. Food for the coming seasons will be in short supply.

 

Extreme heat in Europe led to wildfires, especially in Spain and Portugal. The drought in Spain dried up a reservoir, revealing the long-submerged “Spanish Stonehenge,” an ancient circle of megalithic stones believed to date back to around 5000 BC. Electricity generation in France plummeted, with low rivers reducing the ability to cool nuclear power towers, and German barges had difficulty finding enough water to navigate the Rhine River.

 

Spaniards fought wildfires in Spain in July 2022 that spread through dry fields and forests.

Carlos Gil Andreu / Getty

 

How global warming and La Niña fueled a summer of climate extremes

The researchers found that U.S. adults aged 65 and older who typically got up early—before 7 a.m.—then stayed active throughout the day performed better on tests of memory and thinking than their peers with less "robust" daily routines. They were also less likely to have significant depression symptoms.

he findings do not prove that an active lifestyle prevents mental decline or depression, experts said.

But based on a body of research, it's likely the relationship goes both ways, said lead author Stephen Smagula. He is an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh.

That is, older people who are depressed or have impairments in memory and thinking are more likely to have erratic sleep habits and tend to venture out into the world less. At the same time, though, setting a regular sleep schedule and keeping the body and mind active during the day are healthy habits.

"We know that activity is the pillar of health," Smagula said. If you are stuck in bed with an injury, for example, that inactivity only adds to the misery.

No one is saying seniors need to be constantly on the go. "Activity" is a broad term, Smagula said, and includes physical, mental and social stimulation. Running errands, taking a walk, playing a game with the grandkids and spending time with friends all count.

The new findings—recently published online in JAMA Psychiatry—are based on a nationally representative federal health study. It included 1,800 adults (mean age 73 years) who wore wrist monitors continuously for a week to measure how much they moved around. They also completed questionnaires that assess depression symptoms and cognition (memory and thinking abilities).

Smagula's team wanted to see whether there were typical daily activity patterns that were common among older U.S. adults, and whether those patterns were related to their cognitive and mental health.

The investigators found there were, indeed, four common activity patterns. The largest group, which included 38% of older adults, had what the researchers call an early rising/robust pattern: They got up before 7 a.m. and were active over a 15-hour period each day.

The second-largest group (almost 33% of participants) was similar, but those people got up a bit later, or settled in earlier at night. So their activity period was shorter, at around 13 hours per day.

It turned out those seniors were faring less well than the early rising/robust group, with a higher risk of showing mild cognitive impairment: In all, 12% did, versus about 7% of early risers.

Then there were the final two groups, accounting for 30% of all participants. Their daily routines were less regular—what Smagula described as "activity rhythm loss"—and in one group, people had later bedtimes.

Older adults in those two groups had the highest rates of mild cognitive impairment, at 18% to 21%. They were also most likely to have "clinically significant" depression scores, ranging from 7.5% to 9%—versus 3.5% in the early-rising, consistently active group.

The researchers were able to account for some other factors, like participants' age, race and education level. And daily activity patterns were still linked to cognitive and mental health.

That is still only a correlation, and not proof of cause and effect, said Dr. Ian Neel, a geriatrician at University of California, San Diego Health, who was not involved in the study.

Even so, Neel said, it's clear that older adults benefit from staying active and engaged with the world.

"Physical activity is something I prescribe to my patients all the time," Neel said.

Finding an activity you enjoy and maybe a friend who wants to join you is key, he noted. Neel also agreed that activity does not only mean exercise—but also interacting with other people and finding ways to challenge the mind.

Mental stimulation, Neel noted, is not limited to solving Sudoku puzzles. Conversations count, too.

Older adults who are sedentary should set realistic expectations, both experts said: Try walking for 10 minutes then gradually build up to 30 minutes, for example.

Setting a regular sleep schedule is also important. After retirement, Neel said, older adults should still get up early, and figure out a routine to give structure to their days.

Those things can be easier said than done. People with depression symptoms, for example, may need to start by seeing a health care provider, Neel advised.

Again, small steps are better than no steps, Smagula said.

"If you're depressed, you can't just walk out of sadness," he said. "But you can walk out the door."

Source

NEW YORK — The secret to happiness may be expressing gratitude. A survey of 2,000 Americans examining the potential connection between being thankful and contentment in life reveals that 65 percent of respondents who say they’re “very happy” on a daily basis are also more likely to “always” give thanks.

While looking at the correlation between life satisfaction and gratitude, a third of respondents say they regularly make sure to express gratitude in their everyday lives. Of those, 62 percent note they feel “very satisfied” with their lives.

Conducted by OnePoll and commissioned by Motivosity, the study also finds that, on average, respondents believe they express gratitude to others just six times a month. And they say they also receive the same amount of appreciation back. Regionally, residents in the southwest are more likely to express gratitude than anyone else in the country (75%), just barely beating respondents in the northeast (74%) and midwest (73%). Meanwhile, people in the southeast (68%), as well as west coast residents (63%), offer thanks the least.

Respondents also agree that there are proper ways to respond to being thanked. Smiling (44%) and saying “You’re welcome” both ranked as the most common nonverbal and verbal responses (51%) – although the latter ranks somehow ranks second to “My pleasure” in terms of politeness (44% vs. 52%). Lower down on the list, only one in four (25%) tend to say “It’s nothing.” In fact, 32 percent called the phrase “rude.”

Sadly, 12% say they don’t reply with anything at all.

‘Dramatic correlation between gratitude and happiness’

Interestingly, only 69 percent of the overall panel agree it’s rude not to thank someone when they do something kind for you in passing. That’s just more than the number of people who think it’s rude to stay silent when somebody sneezes (61%). Regardless, 42 percent of all respondents believe a spoken “thank you” goes a long way, since that’s the form of gratitude they prefer to receive the most. That’s followed by a written thank you note (21%) and physical rewards like gifts (17%).

“There’s a dramatic correlation between gratitude and happiness,” says Logan Mallory, vice president of marketing at Motivosity, in a statement. “When people are proactive about being grateful, it rewires their brain to look for positives instead of the negatives around them. Previous studies and these survey results tell us that if you want to experience an increase in life satisfaction, just express gratitude more often!”

Respondents say they receive the most gratitude from their spouses or partners (28%), family members (26%), and friends (24%). People at the office seem less thankful, with bosses (17%) and co-workers (15%) trailing further down the list. Perhaps it’s not surprising, on that point, that only 18 percent of employed Americans feel appreciated at work.

Even those who are “very satisfied” with their lives feel twice more recognition at home than at their jobs (46% vs. 24%). This may be partly due to respondents expecting to receive gratitude and appreciation in different ways when it comes to work versus home.

At work, a quarter would prefer receiving financial incentives – such as a promotion or raise (27%) and a bonus (26%). Others would like to be recognized with a prize or reward (23%), be acknowledged publicly or privately (23% and 20%) and have their bosses listen to their ideas (22%). Giving them time off (21%), better benefits (20%) and writing them a thank you note (19%) rounds out the list of the top actions employees want to see from their employers.

“Of course, raises and bonuses are important, but public acknowledgment has a massive impact on making people feel more engaged at work,” added Mallory. “Team members want to genuinely feel that their day-to-day efforts make a difference, and recognizing them is crucial. Feeling appreciated at work improves life quality, which also leads to positive results for businesses.”

Survey methodology:

This random double-opt-in survey of 2,000 general population Americans was commissioned by Motivosity between July 14 and July 18, 2022. It was conducted by market research company OnePoll, whose team members are members of the Market Research Society and have corporate membership to the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) and the European Society for Opinion and Marketing Research (ESOMAR).

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Longer duration of blue light exposure was associated with earlier puberty onset in the female rats, which also showed reduced levels of melatonin, increased levels of some reproductive hormones and physical changes in their ovaries. Use of blue light-emitting mobile devices has previously been linked to disrupted sleeping patterns in children but these findings suggest there could be additional risks for childhood development and future fertility.

The escalating use of blue light-emitting devices, such as tablets and smartphones, has previously been implicated in reducing sleep quality in both children and adults. This is thought to be through disruption of our body clock as blue light inhibits the evening rise in levels of the hormone, melatonin, which prepares our bodies for rest and sleep. Melatonin levels are overall higher during pre-puberty than in puberty, which is believed to play a role in delaying the start of puberty. Puberty is a complex process that involves co-ordination of several body systems and hormones.

In recent years, several studies have reported increases in early puberty onset for girls, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. The link between blue light exposure and reduced melatonin levels suggests that increased screen time, such as during the pandemic restrictions, may be playing a role in this reported increase. However, it is very difficult to assess this in children.

In this study, Dr. Aylin Kilinç Uğurlu and colleagues in Ankara, Turkey, used a rat model to investigate the effects of blue light exposure on reproductive hormone levels and the time of puberty onset. Female rats were divided into three groups of six and exposed to either a normal light cycle, 6 hours or 12 hours of blue light. The first signs of puberty occurred significantly earlier in both groups exposed to blue light, and the longer the duration of exposure, the earlier the onset of puberty. Rats exposed to blue light also had reduced melatonin levels and elevated levels of specific reproductive hormones (estradiol and luteinizing hormone), as well as physical changes in their ovarian tissue, all consistent with puberty onset. At the 12-hour exposure, rats also showed some signs of cell damage and inflammation in their ovaries.

Dr. Aylin Kilinç Uğurlu comments, "We have found that blue light exposure, sufficient to alter melatonin levels, is also able to alter reproductive hormone levels and cause earlier puberty onset in our rat model. In addition, the longer the exposure, the earlier the onset."

However, Dr. Uğurlu cautions, "As this is a rat study, we can't be sure that these findings would be replicated in children but these data suggest that blue light exposure could be considered as a risk factor for earlier puberty onset."

It is difficult to mimic blue light exposure equivalent to a child's tablet use in rats but the timepoint of puberty in rats is roughly equivalent to that of humans, if adjusted for rats' lower life expectancy. The hormonal and ovulation changes that occur during pre-puberty and puberty in female rats are also comparable to humans. So, despite the study limitations, these findings support further investigation of the potential health impacts of blue light exposure on hormone levels and puberty onset in children.

The team plans to investigate the cell damage and inflammatory effects detected after longer blue light exposure, since this could have long-term impacts on reproductive health and fertility. They will also assess whether the use of blue light minimizing "night light" mobile device features can reduce the effects observed in the rat model.

Dr. Uğurlu adds, "Although not conclusive, we would advise that the use of blue light-emitting devices should be minimized in pre-pubertal children, especially in the evening when exposure may have the most hormone-altering effects."

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Based on an analysis of the 19 presidents who served between 1897 and 2009 (from William McKinley to George W. Bush), the degree to which a commander in chief exhibited grandiose narcissistic personality traits is correlated with the duration of any wars they presided over.

With conflicts continuing to rage across the world today, the findings could be useful for politicians, analysts and military commanders in understanding how wars might play out. Before now, how the personalities of leaders influence war hasn't been fully explored.

"More narcissistic presidents tend to only exit wars if they can say they won, and they will extend wars to find a way to declare some kind of victory," says political scientist John P. Harden, from The Ohio State University.

"They want to look heroic and strong and competent – even if it means fighting the war beyond what is reasonable."

Harden used data pulled from the Correlates of War database, which tracks conflicts involving at least 1,000 deaths in battle within a one-year period – so 11 operations for the US during the study period.

This was cross-referenced with previous research that analyzed the characters of US presidents, in part through their biographers. High levels of assertiveness and excitement-seeking, and low levels of modesty, compliance and straightforwardness were used to measure narcissistic tendencies.

US chiefs who scored lower on narcissism, including McKinley and Eisenhower, tended to put the interests of the state first. Wars were pursued only as a last resort, and were ended as quickly as possible – see Eisenhower's quick exit from the Korean War, for example.

Those presidents who ranked higher for narcissism, such as Roosevelt and Nixon, were less likely to separate personal and state interests, carrying on conflicts for longer. For example, Nixon inherited the Vietnam War, and continued it for another four years.

Overall, the eight leaders who scored above average for narcissism (headed by Johnson and Roosevelt) spent an average of 613 days at war, as opposed to 136 days for the 11 presidents who were below average on narcissism (McKinley and Howard Taft scored the lowest in the test).

The relationship still holds, the study shows, even when other factors are taken into account – including the political climate in the US, the terrain the war is being fought on, the balance of power between combatants, and whether or not the president himself has prior military experience.

"What I found is that the traditional way political scientists have looked at war dynamics doesn't capture the whole story," says Harden.

"Presidents don't always look rationally at the evidence to make their wartime decisions. Many presidents have done that, but others are more interested in their own self-interest than the interest of the state."

Harden puts forward several suggestions for why narcissism might lead to presidents staying in conflicts for longer. They potentially have grander aims, and have higher expectations in terms of the end results of conflicts, for example.

They might also be overconfident in their strategies, leading to a lack of effectiveness in battle and periods of combat that go on for longer than they need to. Narcissists are also known to make mistakes when stressed, and tend not to adapt to failure as well.

Of course, there's no end to the number of influences on war – from the weather to the number of countries involved to the spirit of the troops – but the disposition of the person in charge could be a more important factor than previously thought.

"Narcissistic presidents spend more time worrying about their image than other presidents," says Harden.

"These motivations, especially their desire to protect their inflated self-image, cause them to drag out wars longer than needed."

The research has been published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution.

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