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After trundling around the Jezero crater for 550 Martian days, NASA’s Perseverance rover has amassed nearly half its planned rock collection—including some containing organic molecules, a possible sign that life could have thrived there more than 3 billion years ago. These are compounds that contain carbon, and often hydrogen or oxygen, which are likely crucial to life forming.

“We have discovered rocks that were deposited in a potentially habitable environment in that lake, and we have been seeking potential biosignatures,” which may have been produced by life, said Ken Farley, the Perseverance project scientist at Caltech, speaking today at a press conference at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. In fact, the Perseverance team picked the crater as the rover’s landing spot for that reason. It appears to be the site of an ancient river delta—a convenient location for microorganisms to have emerged and evolved long ago, and a shot at finally answering the question “Are we alone in the cosmos?” 

Still, Farley emphasizes, organic molecules might have been produced by other means—it’s possible to make them through abiotic natural processes too. But Percy, as the rover is sometimes called, can’t conclusively determine their origin on its own. That’s why NASA and the European Space Agency are planning a sample return mission to pick up a variety of rocks from the region and ship them back to Earth in the early 2030s.

The Perseverance team expects the rover to have a long lifespan, like its predecessor, Curiosity, which is still running. (Perseverance is actually NASA’s fifth rover to be deployed to the Red Planet.) Their preferred plan is to have Perseverance deliver the team’s favorite rock samples to a new lander equipped with a small rocket, which will launch the samples to an orbiter, which will then fly them to Earth. If the mission goes as planned, the team will launch the orbiter and lander from Earth to Mars in 2027 and 2028, respectively. The spacecraft loaded with rock samples will transport them to the western Utah desert in 2033. 

NASA has a backup plan, too. In case something happens to Percy over the next few years, the rover will also cache some samples in a safe, flat place where they can be retrieved easily. Because there’s hardly any weather on the planet, and few major marsquakes that could harm the samples, the cache should remain untouched until the lander comes. That mission will also include two helicopters—built like the Ingenuity craft that’s already aiding Perseverance’s mission—which could be used to retrieve samples.

Mars is completely unlivable today. Because the planet has very little of its atmosphere left, it’s a cold and arid wasteland, highly exposed to space radiation. But scientists believe that billions of years ago, it could’ve been a far more hospitable place, when it was more temperate and home to flowing liquid water. That makes it the closest world to Earth that could have once been inhabited—even if only by microbes.

Perseverance’s travels have revealed that Jezero is a geologically rich crater, with igneous and sedimentary rocks scattered about it. Not only did the crater likely hold a lake and river delta long ago, but before that, it was the site of volcanic activity. Scientists use Percy to collect samples by wheeling to a compelling spot—identified by its SHERLOC and WATSON cameras—then drilling into a rock and storing samples in a sturdy test-tube-like container in its belly. Scientists have used the rover to successfully fill 12 tubes so far, plus some control samples. It holds a total of 43 tubes.

While Farley and his colleagues are excited about Perseverance’s discovery of organic molecules on Mars, it’s not the first rover to do so. Nine years ago, Curiosity came across organic matter in some rock powder samples. But Percy’s current location, in a rocky outcrop called Wildcat Ridge, seems more promising in terms of those materials being signs of life. It has a larger concentration of organics, including sulfate minerals, and the location seems more likely to be one that could have supported biology.

The Perseverance team has also acquired evidence about the crater’s past from a sample at another outcrop, dubbed Skinner Ridge, revealing that some rocks indeed came from far away, likely transported by the ancient river before settling in the lake bed.

“I think it’s safe to say these are two of the most important samples we’ll collect on this mission, and we’re all very excited about what we’ve found,” said David Shuster of UC Berkeley, who is the mission’s return-sample scientist, at today’s press conference. “Both of these have high scientific value for the next generation of scientists when they’re returned to Earth.”

NASA’s Perseverance Rover Digs Up Organic Molecules on Mars

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The explosive US monkeypox epidemic, now four months old, appears to be slowing down—although new cases, and serious complications, are still arising. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced this week that two men in Colorado and Washington, DC, developed grave neurological problems that left them using walkers. Health authorities in California say a man there died as a result of monkeypox infection, and Texas experts are evaluating the death of a man in that state as well.

With 22,774 cases, the US has racked up almost two-fifths of the world’s total. Nevertheless, a recent CDC assessment says the epidemic’s “rate of growth is slowing.” In July, it took only eight days for the US case count to double; it takes approximately 25 days for the same to happen now. That the epidemic may be slowing is unquestionably good news. But there’s a catch: No one is quite sure why.

The drop in cases is almost certainly due in part to people changing their behavior. In a recent survey of gay and bisexual men, who are at most risk of infection, half said they had reduced their number of partners or types of sexual encounters. It may also be due to protection from the monkeypox vaccine, though that effort has rolled out slowly and a recent preprint (which is not yet peer-reviewed) questions the vaccine’s effectiveness. Or the decline could simply be due to the virus burning itself out as it exhausts the number of people likely to be exposed to it—a remote possibility, but one that researchers have to consider.

Discovering which scenario is correct is important because that knowledge could help predict what happens next. Behavior change regarding sex—using barrier methods, abstaining—is difficult to sustain long-term, because pleasure is a powerful motivator. For evidence, look at how we’ve never stopped syphilis from circulating despite centuries of trying. (Or, for that matter, never stopped unwanted pregnancies from occurring.) Because behavior change can lapse, protection via vaccines would likely be more durable—but only if they are successfully administered to the people who most need them, and only if they create lasting immunity. Not understanding the reasons for the decline makes it difficult to determine where the most effort, and the most money, should be spent: in campaigns for vaccination, for behavior change, or both.

Researchers say it’s far too early to know. “We’re always trying to make these calls very, very early in the game,” says Anne Rimoin, an epidemiologist and professor at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. “But the truth is, there’s still a lot that has to play out before we can make that kind of assessment. We’re in the to-be-determined phase.”

Part of the problem is that, despite these months of global emergency response, monkeypox remains an under-researched disease. Though it was endemic in several African countries for years before it broke worldwide in May, few researchers in rich countries considered it a priority. Until now, most epidemiological knowledge was gathered in rural communities where the main route of infection was from animals to humans, not from person to person. “The big problem with monkeypox is that all the data we have are from central and western Africa,” says Andrew Lover, an epidemiologist and assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst School of Public Health and Health Sciences. “We just really have no idea of what monkeypox looks like in a dense urban environment.”

Add to that: There’s little past experience with the vaccine, known as Jynneos in the US, being used against this disease. It was only approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2019, primarily for the prevention of smallpox in case that virus—eradicated from circulation by an earlier vaccine, but retained in two labs—was ever used as a biological weapon. Jynneos underwent human safety studies but was never tested for efficacy against monkeypox in people; those estimates are based on animal work. It has never been available commercially in the US, but was instead held in the National Strategic Stockpile as a safer alternative to that older smallpox vaccine, which can cause dangerous reactions in people with damaged immune systems. It was released to health departments only on the rare occasions when an infected traveler accidentally carried the virus into the US.

As a result, “we have no estimate of vaccine efficacy, given the modes of transmission that we are dealing with, which are very different than the modes of transmission that we traditionally see,” Rimoin says.

Now, of course, Jynneos is being administered everywhere, but it’s too early to draw conclusions about how much immunity those shots are creating. The vaccination campaign has been uneven: At first, there was so much demand in big coastal cities that men lined up for hours, online appointment dashboards filled up in minutes, and to stretch supplies, clinics held back on the second doses that lock in immunity. In response, the White House proposed a dose-splitting strategy that increased availability, though at the cost of requiring a different injection technique that some health care workers were unfamiliar with. Now, clinics in cities that were swamped by the first wave, such as New York, are posting thousands of new appointments regularly and are able to give second doses.

In some areas, in fact, there may be an oversupply. “Our demand has gone down significantly,” says Philip Huang, a physician and director of the Dallas County, Texas Health and Human Services Department. “We have empty appointments every day. We’re giving second doses.”

Health departments based their appointment offerings and vaccine allocation requests on their sense of how many men who have sex with men live in their communities, so those open appointments suggest that everyone who is eligible for protection may not be receiving it. They may not know they are at risk, they may fear the stigma of stepping forward, or they may not be aware the vaccine is available because overworked health departments do not have the time or personnel to craft precise messages to hard-to-reach groups. “We are still in an active public health emergency, a pandemic response, and our health department staffs are tired,” says Lori Tremmel Freeman, CEO of the National Association of County and City Health Officials.

And in a White House briefing this morning, federal health officials acknowledged those departments are strapped for cash to create their campaigns, in some cases moving money from HIV and STD programs to pay for vaccination workers and push out education. “Our local jurisdictions have received no resources specific for monkeypox,” CDC director Rochelle Walensky said. “It speaks to the need for supplemental funds.”

From here, a few different things could happen. People could accept the vaccine and either abstain from sex and skin-to-skin contact or practice safe sex rigorously, cases continue to decline, and the virus runs out of hosts. In another, vaccination doesn’t reach everyone who needs it or isn’t efficacious enough to protect them, and people miss sex and skin contact enough to let their protective behaviors slip. Then case numbers rise again as monkeypox settles in to being a sex-adjacent infection, as common—and potentially as dangerous—as gonorrhea or syphilis can be.

There’s a third scenario, though, and some researchers eyeing the downward trend in cases worry that it might already be happening. In this one, monkeypox appears to vanish but actually sticks around. It moves into groups in which it is less detectable—women, for instance, in whom lesions might be internal and thus harder to see—or it finds a new host in animals. Overall, it percolates at low enough levels to sustain itself. And then it bursts out again.

Andrew Noymer, an epidemiologist, demographer, and associate professor at the University of California, Irvine, describes this as “hyper-low endemicity.” This happened with smallpox, he points out. Accounts from before eradication describe what looks like a seasonal pattern, but even in the low months, transmission did not actually stop. It happens with influenza, which appears to vanish during warm weather as the case burden swaps from one hemisphere to the other. But work over decades has shown that some infections do occur in summer months.

It’s possible, Noymer argues, that this could happen for monkeypox as well. “Instead of hundreds of cases a day, nationwide, there could be a handful of cases a day,” he says. “Very low levels of disease can just go unnoticed. Monkeypox could just percolate through the same networks, causing mild cases until it starts becoming less mild again.”

The problem, as almost all researchers agree right now, is that it’s too soon to tell. There is not enough history to predict monkeypox’s trajectory, and not enough data to model its behavior with precision. The immediate future becomes a gamble, in which we bet that we can improve our knowledge and containment before the virus reveals what it’s capable of.

Monkeypox Cases in the US Are Falling. No One Knows Why

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In December 2004, plant scientist Cathie Martin went to the greenhouse to check on her tomatoes. The tiny fruits, about the size of gumdrops, were still green. These miniature tomatoes, a variety widely used in research labs, normally become red upon ripening. But when Martin came back after Christmas, they were starting to turn purple—just as she’d hoped.

Martin and her colleagues at the John Innes Centre in the UK were aiming to make a tomato high in anthocyanin, an antioxidant-rich pigment found in blackberries and blueberries. The team engineered the jewel tone by adding two genes from the snapdragon flower, which act like a switch to turn on the production of anthocyanins. Over the years, Martin and her team have crossed their purple tomatoes with other breeds to make them bigger—and tastier—than the micro variety they initially grew.

Now, the United States Department of Agriculture has decided that their purple tomato can be grown and cultivated in the US. On September 7, the agency issued a statement saying the tomato is “unlikely to pose an increased plant pest risk compared to other cultivated tomatoes” and is not subject to regulation. (This is the main criteria the agency uses to determine whether crops made using biotechnology should be regulated.) Norfolk Plant Sciences, a company cofounded by Martin, plans to roll out a purple cherry tomato in a handful of test markets in 2023. The biotech firm is also working on purple tomato juice, sun-dried tomatoes, and beefsteak tomatoes, and plans to sell seeds for backyard gardeners. “We hope people will eventually grow their own,” says Martin.

Martin’s purple tomato isn’t the first genetically modified fruit to be approved in the US. It’s not even the first genetically modified tomato—that designation goes to the Flavr Savr, introduced back in 1994 as the first genetically modified crop commercialized for human consumption. The Flavr Savr was created to have a longer shelf life than conventionally bred tomatoes. But because of its high production and distribution costs, it was pulled from the market just a few years later. The industry instead turned toward more profitable engineered crops, such as corn and soy, designed with the grower or producer in mind: to resist pests, tolerate herbicides, or produce higher yields.

The purple tomato may mark a turning point for genetically modified foods in the US: Its engineered trait is meant to entice the shopper, not the farmer—specifically one interested in potential health benefits. “This is a trait that is mainly for the consumer,” says Bárbara Blanco-Ulate, a fruit biologist and professor at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in developing the purple tomato. “People want food that is more nutritious and exciting.”

While purple-skinned tomatoes have been developed through conventional breeding, they don’t accumulate high levels of anthocyanins in the flesh. There’s evidence from other researchers that these compounds may help prevent cancer, reduce inflammation, and protect against type 2 diabetes. And in a 2008 study, Martin and her team found that mice that were predisposed to developing cancer lived 30 percent longer on a diet supplemented with purple tomatoes than mice on a regular diet supplemented with normal red tomatoes. (Of course, animal studies don’t always translate to humans, and there are many lifestyle and genetic factors that may affect a person’s cancer risk.)

About a half-cup of purple tomatoes has as many anthocyanins as the same amount of blueberries, according to Martin. The average American consumes around 12.5 milligrams of these antioxidants per day, and Norfolk Plant Sciences estimates that a half-cup serving of its purple tomatoes contains 250 milligrams of anthocyanins.

In addition to producing more of this compound, the snapdragon genes seem to have another beneficial effect: The tomatoes don’t soften and spoil as quickly as others. In a 2013 study, Martin and her colleagues found that the purple tomatoes had a shelf life twice as long as the regular red variety, in part because they are slower to ripen at later stages.

Other purple produce is popping up in grocery stores everywhere: There are purple potatoes, purple cauliflower, purple carrots, and purple yams. But these vegetables are produced using conventional breeding, in which parent plants with certain attributes are crossed to create a desirable combination. The purple tomato, on the other hand, is considered a genetically-modified organism (GMO) because it’s made with recombinant DNA technology, in which genes from another organism are added.

It’s not yet clear whether these characteristics will be enough to win over consumers who are wary of GMOs. Since their introduction in the 1990s, extensive research has shown that genetically modified foods are just as safe to eat as their non-GMO counterparts. Still, a poll conducted in October 2019 by the Pew Research Center found that about half of US adults are concerned about the health effects of genetically modified foods, while 41 percent say they have a neutral effect on health and 7 percent say they are better for health than other foods.

Blanco-Ulate thinks many of the initial fears about “Frankenfoods”—a nickname coined in the 1990s—have subsided, and that younger generations may be more open to trying genetically modified foods that promise benefits. “If the trait—in this case, a purple tomato that is high in antioxidants—is more important than the fact that it’s a GMO, I think people will eat it,” she says.

A genetically engineered purple tomato could be rolled out in select US markets starting in 2023.

Photograph: Norfolk Plant Sciences

Nathan Pumplin, president and CEO of Norfolk Healthy Produce, the US arm of Norfolk Plant Sciences that will commercialize the product, is very aware that a large segment of consumers may reject the purple tomato. But he’s hoping to connect with those who are more open to eating them. He says the company plans to first introduce their purple tomato at farmers markets. “It’s a place where growers get to directly interact with consumers, and consumers can ask: ‘What is this new vegetable? How was it grown? Where did it come from?’ We really want to have those intimate conversations with consumers early on,” he says.

Like other genetically engineered foods, the purple tomato will be subject to federal labeling requirements by the USDA, which went into effect at the beginning of the year. Food manufacturers, importers, and retailers are now required to label these foods as “bioengineered” or “derived from bioengineering.”

Cost may also be a factor that sways shoppers. In 2016, the US green-lit a genetically engineered pink pineapple that's sweeter and juicier than the traditional yellow version. It produces lower levels of an enzyme that converts the pink pigment lycopene to the yellow pigment beta carotene. The pink pineapple debuted at $49 and can now be found for as low as $10, which is still more than double the price of a regular yellow one.

Pumplin didn’t say exactly how much the purple tomato would cost, only that it would initially have a “premium price.” He hopes that as supply and demand grow, the company will be able to offer it more affordably.

Fred Gould, codirector of the Genetic Engineering and Society Center of North Carolina State University, says it will be up to consumers to decide just how valuable a purple tomato is. After all, they can get anthocyanins from other sources—berries, eggplant, and cabbage, for instance.

What’s more, it’s not known how much anthocyanin is needed to reap potential health benefits. These compounds are not considered essential nutrients, and there is no established daily intake for anthocyanin. “There is some uncertainty in what they’re doing. Is this fruit actually healthier for you? Maybe it is, but it would be really interesting to see the data,” he says. “I think this is a good opportunity for people to start discussing what kind of evidence they would like to see to be convinced that these tomatoes are healthier.”

A GMO Purple Tomato Is Coming to Grocery Aisles. Will the US Bite?

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Device passively registers temperature, switches from heating to cooling

A study undertaken by the University of Sydney and the University of Southern Denmark described 10,000 steps as the ‘sweet spot’ for better health outcomes, leading to a lowered risk of disease and death from dementia, heart disease and cancer.

However, the researchers found the intensity of steps taken was just as important as the number of steps.

The work, which is the first to objectively track step count in relation to health outcomes, is published in JAMA Internal Medicine and JAMA Neurology.
Wearable activity trackers were used to monitor the number and pace of steps taken by 78,500 adults over a period of seven days, for a minimum of three days. The activity tracking included a weekend day and also monitored participants’ sleep periods.

The researchers analysed data from the UK Biobank and linked up step count data from people aged 40 to 79 years with health outcome data seven years later by combining health records from several data sources, including inpatient hospital data, primary care records, and cancer and death registries

Achieving 10,000 steps a day was associated with a lowered risk of dementia, heart disease, cancer and death.

For every 2,000 steps taken daily, the researchers found that the risk of premature death, risk of cardiovascular disease and cancer incidence, was lowered incrementally by around 10%, up to ten thousand steps.

A higher number of steps per day was also associated with a lower risk of dementia, with the risk reduced by 50 percent if the 9800 steps were taken. At lower step counts, the risk was also reduced.

‘For less active individuals, our study also demonstrates that as low as 3 800 steps a day can cut the risk of dementia by 25 percent,’ said co-lead author Associate Professor Borja del Pozo Cruz from the University of Southern Denmark.

However, a faster stepping pace, such as a power walk, showed benefits beyond the number of steps achieved for all outcomes in dementia, heart disease, cancer and death.

‘The take-home message here is that for protective health benefits, people could not only ideally aim for 10,000 steps a day but also aim to walk faster,’ said co-lead author Dr Matthew Ahmadi from the University of Sydney.

Because step count is easily understood and widely used by the public to track activity levels, the researchers hope that this research will not only help people to think about the pace of their steps but will also help policymakers design effective public health programmes to help prevent chronic disease.

This comes after a UK expert consensus statement advised that people with osteoporosis should be encouraged to exercise more to strengthen bones, improve posture and reduce falls risk.

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Sometime in the 2010s a Sulphur-crested Cockatoo living in a sleepy suburb of Sydney, Australia, had a breakthrough. This bird, likely a large, dominant male, somehow figured out how to use its powerful beak to grip, pry and flip open the lids of garbage bins to look for food inside. The innovation soon sparked a trend that spread throughout the cockatoo population. Other birds from different suburbs devised their own styles of bin opening, which spread to become local subcultures: Cockatoos from different areas open bins in distinct ways. One neighborhood’s birds might use their beak to grip a bin’s handle, for instance, whereas another’s use their beak with one of their feet to grip the rim of its lid. Now new research illustrates how—by raiding garbage bins and trashing Sydney-area streets in the process—the cockatoos may have started an arms race with humans desperate to keep their neighborhoods clean.

Cockatoos are a type of parrot, and like crows, they are known to have a formidable bird brain. “[Parrots] are pretty cognitively flexible in terms of their problem-solving,” says Elizabeth Hobson, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Cincinnati, who was not involved in the new study. “They can learn from others, and they can innovate.”

This learning ability was highlighted in a 2021 paper that first documented the cockatoos opening bins in the suburbs of Sydney and nearby Wollongong, Australia. “We described [the behavior] in detail,” says Barbara Klump, a behavioral ecologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany and lead author of both studies. With the new study, published today in Current Biology, Klump and her colleagues decided to focus on the human side of the story after witnessing residents trying to protect their bins. “I was amazed by how many different methods of protection there were,” she says.

The researchers ranked these methods by how much they involved altering the bin itself: A low-effort solution, such as a rubber snake on top, was given a rank of 2, whereas a heavy rock was classified as 3. And a high-effort, high-investment method, such as an attached weight, received a rank of 5. Klump and her team then mapped out the garbage bins and statistically analyzed their spatial network to show that, like the cockatoos, humans living closer together tended to share similar strategies. This result was backed up by resident surveys from 2019 and 2020, where 60 percent of the majority of respondents who picked up their method socially did so from neighbors. Despite the potential to seek help from across Australia or even the world, thanks to the Internet, the Sydneysiders seemed to primarily look locally for solutions. “It’s really interesting that [the researchers] are seeing that,” Hobson says. It suggests the residents may be picking up defensive strategies passively rather than actively seeking help, she adds.

The new study also provides evidence of a potential “innovation arms race” between humans and the cockatoos, in which a behavioral change in one of the species leads to a new, socially learned response by the other, which itself prompts a response, and so on. The most common reason for changing a protection method that residents reported on the survey was that the cockatoos had worked out how to defeat their original strategy—for example, one cockatoo was caught on video nudging a brick off the top of a bin before confidently opening it, which the bird had presumably done many times before. Scientists have suspected for some time that such interspecies innovation arms races existed, but no one had really looked for one before, the researchers say. “I think [this study] is the first time that anyone has laid out what they would expect if [an innovation arms race] is occurring and tried to show it,” says Lucy Aplin, a behavioral ecologist at the Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior and senior author of both studies. “We have indirect evidence that there’s an innovation arms race happening.”

To confirm an arms race raging in Greater Sydney, the researchers will need to go back to the birds. Now that they know cockatoos can defeat at least one human defense, they need a bird’s-eye view of an escalating back and forth. “We need to do more work to show how the birds are learning to defeat those measures,” Aplin says, “and whether they can also continue to respond ... as the humans increase the effectiveness” of their own strategies.

Luckily, the Sydney-area community will likely welcome further work on this feathery face-off. “Everyone has an opinion on [the cockatoos],” Klump says. “The survey is actually running again this year, I think it's now the fourth year, and I'm always amazed how willing people are to still fill it in. I’m super grateful.”

Though these cockatoos’ charisma is undeniable, their clever behavior causes real harm: it costs time and money to clean trash from the streets, and it’s understandably annoying to have personal waste scattered around for all to see. In addition to testing for an innovation arms race and demonstrating how dynamic animal cultures can be, the research also has implications for how humans coexist with their animal neighbors. “This study is an illustration of how we need to consider animal behavior,” Aplin says. “If we respond to these nuisance behaviors, then we need to think carefully about how we respond.”

It’s an open question whether the human-cockatoo conflict will ever end, but for now, the struggle has one clear winner: science.

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When the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids of Giza around 4,500 years ago, the Nile River had an arm — one that has long since vanished — with high water levels that helped laborers ship materials to their construction site, a new study finds.

The discovery builds on previous archaeological and historical findings that the Nile had an extra arm flowing by the pyramids. But now, by analyzing ancient pollen samples taken from earthen cores, it's clear that "the former waterscapes and higher river levels" gave the Giza Pyramid's builders a leg up, a team of researchers wrote in a paper published Aug. 29 in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The research sheds light on how the pyramids — royal tombs for the pharaohs Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure — rose to monumental heights. Their towering stature was achieved, in large part, thanks to the Nile's now-defunct Khufu branch, which "remained at a high-water level during the reigns of Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure, facilitating the transportation of construction materials to the Giza Pyramid Complex," the team wrote in their paper.

Researchers have known for decades that the long-gone Khufu branch extended up to the Giza plateau in ancient times, but the new project aimed to find exactly how the water levels had changed over the past 8,000 years.

To reconstruct the Nile's past, in May 2019 the team drilled five cores into the Giza floodplain. The researchers measured the amount of pollen found in different parts of the cores to determine how pollen levels had changed over time. Time periods when water was plentiful should have more pollen than periods that were arid, the study authors wrote.

The pollen analysis revealed that at the time the ancient Egyptians built the Giza pyramids, water was plentiful enough that the Khufu branch would have flowed near the Giza pyramids. "It was a natural canal in the time of the fourth dynasty [when the pyramids were built]," study lead author Hader Sheisha, a physical geographer at Aix-Marseille University in France, told Live Science in an email.

Sheisha noted that the water level was important for pyramid construction. "It would be very difficult if not impossible to build the pyramids without the Khufu branch and without it having a good level, which provides enough accommodation space for the boats carrying such heavy blocks of stone," she said. When exactly the branch went extinct is not certain, but the research shows that by 2,400 years ago the water level of the branch was very low.

The finds fit well with previous archaeological finds, which revealed a harbor close to the pyramids, as well as ancient papyri records that detailed workers bringing limestone to Giza via boat, the team noted in their paper.

Live Science contacted several experts not involved with the research to get their thoughts. Most were unable to comment at press time, but one who did, Judith Bunbury, a geo-archaeologist at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, praised the research.

"The paper is an exciting contribution to our understanding of the dialogue between humans and their environment in Egypt within the context of changing climate," Bunbury told Live Science in an email.

Originally published on Live Science.

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The latest briefing document on COVID variants from the U.K. Health Security Agency (UKHSA) noted that during the week beginning August 14, BA.4.6 accounted for 3.3% of samples in the U.K. It has since grown to make up around 9% of sequenced cases.

Similarly, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, BA.4.6 now accounts for more than 9% of recent cases across the U.S. The variant has also been identified in several other countries around the world.

So what do we know about BA.4.6, and should we be worried? Let's take a look at the information we have so far.

BA.4.6 is a descendant of the BA.4 variant of omicron. BA.4 was first detected in January 2022 in South Africa and has since spread around the world alongside the BA.5 variant.

It is not entirely clear how BA.4.6 has emerged, but it's possible it could be a recombinant variant. Recombination happens when two different variants of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) infect the same person, at the same time.

While BA.4.6 will be similar to BA.4 in many ways, it carries a mutation to the spike protein, a protein on the surface of the virus which allows it to enter our cells. This mutation, R346T, has been seen in other variants and is associated with immune evasion, meaning it helps the virus to escape antibodies acquired from vaccination and prior infection.

Severity, infectiousness and immune evasion

Fortunately, omicron infections generally cause less serious illness, and we've seen fewer deaths with omicron than with earlier variants. We would expect this to apply to BA.4.6 too. Indeed, there have been no reports yet that this variant is causing more severe symptoms.

But we also know that omicron subvariants tend to be more transmissible than previous variants. BA.4.6 appears to be even better at evading the immune system than BA.5, the currently dominant variant. Although this information is based on a preprint (a study that is yet to be peer-reviewed), other emerging data supports this.

We’re still learning about how BA.4.6 might respond to COVID vaccines. Credit: BaLL LunLa/Shutterstock

According to the UKHSA's briefing, early estimates suggest BA.4.6 has a 6.55% relative fitness advantage over BA.5 in England. This indicates that BA.4.6 replicates more quickly in the early stages of infection and has a higher growth rate than BA.5.

The relative fitness advantage of BA.4.6 is considerably smaller than that of BA.5 over BA.2, which was 45% to 55%.

The University of Oxford has reported that people who had received three doses of Pfizer's original COVID vaccine produce fewer antibodies in response to BA.4.6 than to BA.4 or BA.5. This is worrying because it suggests that COVID vaccines might be less effective against BA.4.6.

The capacity of BA.4.6 to evade immunity may however be addressed to a degree by the new bivalent boosters, which target omicron specifically, alongside the original strain of SARS-CoV-2. Time will tell.

Meanwhile, one preprint study shows that BA.4.6 evades protection from Evusheld, an antibody therapy designed to protect people who are immunocompromised and don't respond as well to COVID vaccines.

Vaccination is key

The emergence of BA.4.6 and other new variants is concerning. It shows the virus is still very much with us, and is mutating to find new ways to overcome our immune response from vaccination and previous infections.

We know people who have had COVID previously can contract the virus again, and this has been particularly true of omicron. In some cases, subsequent episodes can be worse.

But vaccination continues to offer good protection against severe disease, and is still the best weapon we have to fight COVID. The recent approval of bivalent boosters is good news. Beyond this, developing multivalent coronavirus vaccines that target multiple variants could provide even more durable protection.

A recent study showed that a multivalent coronavirus vaccine administered through the nose elicited a strong immune response against the original strain of SARS-CoV-2, as well as two variants of concern, in mouse models.

Close monitoring of new variants including BA.4.6 is pressing, as they could lead to the next wave of COVID pandemic. For the public, it will pay to stay cautious, and comply with any public health measures in place to prevent the spread of what remains a very contagious virus.

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Shortly thereafter, an armed man entered a branch of Bankmed in Lebanon's mountain city of Aley and attempted to retrieve his trapped savings, the advocacy group Depositors Outcry and a security source told Reuters.

The security source said the man had been able to retrieve a portion of his money before he handed himself over to security forces and was detained.

Bankmed declined to comment while BLOM Bank confirmed in a statement that the hostage situation had ended but did not give further details.

Security forces were not immediately available for comment on both incidents.

Lebanon's banks have locked most depositors out of their savings since a financial crisis took hold three years ago, leaving much of the population unable to pay for basic needs, and the government has so far failed to address the crisis.

Wednesday's incidents come roughly a month after a man in mid-August held up another Beirut commercial bank to withdraw his own funds to treat his sick father.

Around 11:00 am on Wednesday, a woman later identified by her mother as Sali Hafiz, and carrying what appeared to be a gun, entered BLOM Bank in Beirut's Sodeco neighbourhood and demanded access to her funds, a security source told Reuters.

Hafiz later told local news channel Al Jadeed TV the gun was a toy, and that she was seeking to retrieve money to finance the treatment of her sister who has cancer.

"I have nothing more to lose, I got to the end of the road. I went to the branch manager two days ago and said my sister is dying, she doesn't have time," she said, adding that the amount that she had been offered was inadequate.

"I got to a point where I was going to sell my kidney so that my sister could receive treatment," she said. Hafiz said she left with $13,000, most of it in cash dollars.

A source at the Depositors Outcry association told Reuters that the group took responsibility for the incident.

Hafiz's mother Hiam told a local Lebanese television station that the money was crucial for the survival of her daughter.

"All we have is this money in the bank. My daughter was forced to take this money - it's her right, it's in her account - to treat her sister," she said.

Reuters was unable to immediately contact Hafiz.

The security services did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the legal implications of the incident.

After the previous hostage incident in August, the accused perpetrator was arrested but then later released without charge after the bank dropped its lawsuit.

Reporting by Timour Azhari and Issam Abdallah; Writing by Maya Gebeily Editing by Tomasz Janowski, Frank Jack Daniel, Alexandra Hudson

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Europe’s summer of drought has been impossible to ignore. Rivers dried up, exposing the skeletons of warships and ancient buildings. Images captured by satellite show swathes of the continent’s normally verdant fields turned to parched dust bowls.

The hot, dry conditions have also wreaked havoc on Europe’s agriculture. Most of the continent’s water-starved fields will produce lower than expected yields this summer. For some crops the difference is stark: Soybean yields are 15 percent below their five-year average while sunflower yields are 12 percent down. With agricultural supply chains already stretched because of the war in Ukraine, the vulnerabilities in Europe’s food system are looking extremely exposed.

In response, some European politicians are starting to rethink the European Union’s long-standing opposition to genetically modified (GMO) and gene-edited crops. In July, an Italian member of the European Parliament called for a loosening of the rules that restrict crop varieties created using new gene-editing techniques like CRISPR from being grown and sold within the EU. “New agricultural biotechnology can provide experimentation for more drought- and pest-resistant plants,” member Antonio Tajani said in a meeting at the European Parliament. Other Italian politicians have joined him in calling for similar changes to gene-editing regulations. In northern Italy, the drought is so severe that rice fields are drying up and farmers are facing much lower harvests than normal.

If European droughts are here to stay, farmers might need new crop varieties that can withstand long, dry summers. Until recently, scientists who wanted to create more drought-resistant crops would have two main options: conventional breeding, or genetic modification. Genetically modified crops are made by inserting genetic material from another organism into the DNA of a plant—usually a gene that makes the crop resistant to insects or herbicides. The EU’s strict rules on GMOs mean that only two such crops have ever been approved there, and only one—a bug-resistant corn—is grown within EU borders. In the United States, by contrast, nearly 90 percent of soybean and corn fields are GMO. Gene editing is a separate and more recent technique, and involves directly editing the genome of an organism rather than inserting genes from a different species. It was expected to avoid GMO regulations, but in 2018 the European Court of Justice ruled that gene-edited crops should be subject to the same regulations as GMOs.

Now there are signs that the EU’s position might be about to change. The European Commission is responsible for creating new legislation in the EU, and in April 2021 published a study outlining its desire to loosen regulations on gene-edited crops. “The commission realized that the European Court of Justice decision was not science-based. It was legally based but it wasn’t science-based,” says Cathie Martin, a professor of plant science at the John Innes Centre in the UK. The European Commission’s study concluded that the EU’s existing GMO rules aren’t suitable for regulating crops made using gene editing. It also said that gene-edited crops could help the EU meet its goals for sustainability and food security.

A change in policy could also have an impact on the EU’s agricultural emissions. Agriculture is responsible for around 10 percent of the EU’s emissions, but one study from the US-based think tank the Breakthrough Institute found that the EU’s adoption of GMO crops such as those grown in the US could lead to a reduction in emissions equivalent to 7.5 percent of the total agricultural emissions of Europe. This mainly comes from the fact that GMO crops tend to have higher yields than conventional varieties. Most of those emissions reductions would come from land outside the EU that didn’t need to be converted to agriculture, explains Emma Kovak, lead author of the study. “Because crop yields in the EU are higher than the global average, further increasing crop yields in the EU allows production expansion elsewhere in the world to slow,” she explains.

There are some big caveats, however. Firstly, even if the European Commission does get its way, new regulations will apply only to gene-edited crops and not the kind of GMOs widely grown in the US. Secondly, two of the most widely grown crops in the EU are wheat and barley, and there aren’t gene-edited versions of those crops that are ready to be put straight in the ground.

In other words, any emissions reductions from a change in gene-editing regulations wouldn’t come quickly. But more drought-tolerant crops might not be too far away. Kovak points out that drought-tolerant wheat has already been approved in Argentina, although that too is a GMO crop. If the EU and its 450 million inhabitants do become a new market for gene-edited crops, however, that might be an incentive for agricultural firms to produce new drought-resistant varieties of European staples.

If gene-edited crops do become deregulated in the EU, then it’s likely that the first to come to market will be fruits and vegetables rather than big commodity crops, as many of these already have GMO versions and manufacturers might be unwilling to create new gene-edited varieties for just the European market. Big agricultural companies have tended to avoid modifying lower-value foods such as fruit and vegetables because of the large costs associated with developing new GMO varieties—but gene editing is much cheaper. In the US, a CRISPR-edited mushroom was the first gene-edited food to be approved for sale. In the UK, Martin is doing her first field trials on tomatoes that have been gene edited to contain a precursor to vitamin D. These trials were possible only because the country recently eased regulations around field trials of gene-edited crops, as part of a post-Brexit breakaway from EU-era regulations.

Legislation to deregulate gene-edited crops in the EU may have a much tougher path ahead. The European Commission’s study has been staunchly opposed by groups such as Greenpeace and Slow Food, an organization that promotes local and traditional cooking within the EU. If a change in regulation is to pass, the commission will have to convince the European Council, and then legislation will be put to a vote in the European Parliament. In a bloc with such strong food traditions, it’s likely there will be a lot of resistance to new rules for gene-edited crops.

But Petra Jorasch, a spokesperson for Euroseeds, a group representing European seed companies, says that gene-editing technology could actually help preserve local varieties. Gene editing might mean that the Riesling grape could be made to be resistant to a certain fungi, for example, while still retaining all the other qualities of a Riesling. “If you could use those technologies to improve the fungi resistance in a wine, you would have the same crop with this added resistance and less fungicide use,” she says.

Kovak says that the best way to convince voters and legislators might be to emphasize that increasing crop yields in the EU would make it easier for the region to become more food secure and thus less vulnerable to fluctuations in food prices. And because gene editing is cheaper, consumers might also have more direct experience with edited crops in the form of nutritionally enhanced fruits and vegetables, like Martin’s tomatoes. “It opens the door to more improvements of produce,” Kovak says.

Europe’s Drought Might Force Acceptance of Gene-Edited Crops

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Tiny robots made of “galinstan” can run faster than a (scaled down) cheetah

Researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital say their study adds to the growing body of research suggesting that having food shortly before bed is bad for the brain. Symptoms of depression and anxiety rise by 26 and 16 percent respectively after evening meals, their data shows.

The study could help explain why shift-workers and long-distance travelers are prone to neurological diseases, including dementia. The lifestyle disrupts the circadian rhythm, also known as the body clock.

“Our findings provide evidence for the timing of food intake as a novel strategy to potentially minimize mood vulnerability in individuals experiencing circadian misalignment,” says lead author Frank A. J. L. Scheer, Director of the Medical Chronobiology Program in the Brigham’s Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders, in a statement. “They include people engaged in shift work, experiencing jet lag or suffering from circadian rhythm disorders.”

One-in-five people work irregular hours in this 24/7 society. They are needed in hospitals, factories and other essential jobs, including transportation.

Nighttime shift work can send gray matter out of kilter with daily behaviors such as sleeping, waking, fasting and eating, increasing the risk of depression and anxiety by up to 40 percent.

“Shift workers – as well as individuals experiencing circadian disruption, including jet lag – may benefit from our meal timing intervention,” says co-lead author Dr. Sarah Chellappa, now at Cologne University. “Our findings open the door for a novel sleep/circadian behavioral strategy that might also benefit individuals experiencing mental health disorders.

‘Timing of food intake matters for our mood’

The authors investigated how meal timing affected the moods of 19 participants — 12 men and seven women. Volunteers underwent a protocol in dim light for four 28-hour “days” to invert behavioral cycles by 12 hours, causing circadian misalignment. A Daytime and Nighttime Meal Control Group had meals according to the cycle, resulting in eating both during the night and day which is typical among shift workers. Conversely, a Daytime-Only Meal Intervention Group had meals on a 24-hour cycle, eating only during the day. Depression and anxiety levels were measured every hour.

During simulated night shifts, depression and anxiety rose significantly when they also ate late. In contrast, there were no changes when meals were taken during the day — even though they were working at night.

“Meal timing is emerging as an important aspect of nutrition that may influence physical health,” says Chellapa. “But the causal role of the timing of food intake on mental health remains to be tested. Future studies are required to establish if changes in meal timing can help individuals experiencing depressive and anxiety/anxiety-related disorders.”

Adds Scherr: “Future studies in shift workers and clinical populations are required to firmly establish if changes in meal timing can prevent their increased mood vulnerability. Until then, our study brings a new ‘player’ to the table – the timing of food intake matters for our mood.”

In May scientists at the University of Texas found eating during the day instead of at nighttime could add years to your life. Experiments found it increased longevity by a third in mice. It added to evidence that having a hearty breakfast or lunch — and skipping an evening meal — is healthiest for humans.

Recent years have seen the rise of many popular diets that focus on intermittent fasting, which includes eating only during a period of six to eight hours per day.

“Our study adds to a growing body of evidence finding that strategies that optimize sleep and circadian rhythms may help promote mental health,” says Chellapa.

The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

South West News Service writer Mark Waghorn contributed to this report.

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When it comes to the biggest questions about the cosmos, physicists tend to either shy away from them or assert theories that have no real empirical backing. The Big Bang is a good example – a creation myth that physics will probably never be able to show is true. But these theories are also not simply equivalent to religious dogma, they lie in the undefined space between science and religion – not in conflict with science, but not supported by it either, argues Sabine Hossenfelder.
 
Many people have a bad start with physics in school. I did, too. Physics seemed all about magnets and atoms and balls rolling down inclined planes. I didn’t find it particularly engaging. And yet, today, I’m a physicist.

In school, we see only one side of physics, but it has another side. Physics is one of the best ways to make sense of our own existence: Does the past still exist? Do copies of us live in other universes? Can information be destroyed? Does science have limits? Those are some examples of questions that physics helps us answer.
 

That most physicists keep quiet about those big questions has another downside: it leaves the arena to those who conflate religion with science

Physicists don’t like to talk about this existential side of their research. I suspect that’s because, historically, existential questions have been the realm of religion, and scientists want to keep their distance. But keeping this distance has a downside: it also distances science from humanity. It’s probably part of the reason that scientists in general, and physicists in particular, are perceived as cold and technocratic. It seems that physicists don’t care about what the fundamental laws of nature imply for people. That most physicists keep quiet about those big questions has another downside: it leaves the arena to those who conflate religion with science.

One case where science crosses over into religion is the beginning of our universe. Physicists have put forward many theories for it: a big bang, a big bounce, a collision of higher-dimensional membranes, a gas of strings, a network, a 5-dimensional black hole, and many more – I’ve lost track. But the scientifically correct answer is, rather boringly, that we don’t know how the universe began. Indeed, there are good reasons to think we will never know. But some physicists are unwilling to accept this answer. They fill their knowledge gap with creation myths, written in the language of mathematics.

These creation myths are not wrong, so it is not unscientific to believe in them. It’s rather that we cannot tell them apart with observations – not now, and quite possibly never. My friend and colleague Tim Palmer from the University of Oxford suggested to call such ideas “ascientific”: Science can’t tell us whether they’re wrong or right. Like the hypothesis of an unobservable, omniscient God, the ideas that our universe emerged from a black hole, or a collision of higher dimensional membranes, or a network, are ascientific.
 

Believing in the existence in unobservable universes is not in conflict with science; it’s not unscientific. Rather, it’s ascientific
 

I don’t mean to say that our theory of the cosmos has already reached its endpoint. We will almost certainly improve the current one some more. For example, the new Webb telescope is gathering data that can tell us how galaxies formed. Galaxies are expected to form slowly and gradually if the hypothetical dark matter exists. The competing theory is that dark matter is absent, but gravity does not work as Einstein said it does, an idea known as modified gravity. If the latter is correct, galaxies would form much faster. The Webb telescope can help us tell apart the one hypothesis from the other.
However, galaxy formation happened some hundred thousand years after the universe was born, so the Webb telescope will not solve the riddle of its origin for us. Eventually, collecting data and refining our theories will reach a limit. After this, we will have to pick one story on grounds other than scientific evidence.

The idea that there are other universes besides our own in a big “multiverse” is another ascientific idea that has taken foothold in physics. Some of those universes contain copies of our solar system, with a human civilization like our own. Indeed, they contain copies of all of us, though those copies might be living their lives in slightly different ways. Not just in one way, but in any possible way.

Unlike in the movies, however, the universes that physicists conjecture up can’t be visited. They are entirely unobservable. It’s not just that we can’t see them with our own eyes, there is no observation that could possibly confirm their presence, not even in principle. Why, then, do physicists believe in them? Because they have equations for those other universes, and they believe that mathematics is reason enough to believe that what math describes exists.

In some cases, physics has brought up questions that we might not otherwise even have thought of

Again, believing in the existence in unobservable universes is not in conflict with science; it’s not unscientific. Rather, it’s ascientific. The same is the case for believing they do not exist. Science just doesn’t say anything about their existence, one way or the other. So, do other universes exist? We don’t know.

Once I started thinking about it, I realized that physics opens our mind to many ascientific ideas that we can neither refute nor confirm. For example, the idea that the universe as a whole can think. It’s not that we have evidence for it. But it’s compatible with all we know, and we don’t have evidence against it either. Or take the idea that one day we might be able to upload ourselves to a computer, or create a universe. I can’t tell you it’s going to happen, but it’s not in conflict with what we know about the laws of nature. It’s not unscientific to believe it. It’s just ascientific.

In some cases, physics has brought up questions that we might not otherwise even have thought of. Einstein’s theory of space and time, for example, makes it impossible to pin down any moment in time as special. For all we currently know, our experience of time as passing is an artefact of our perception, not a fundamental property of nature. Without scrutinizing the math and the evidence for it, we might not have thought of this, exactly because it contradicts our experience.

Another existential question in the realm of physics is whether information can get lost. It’s why physicists are obsessed with the black hole information loss paradox: because it seems that throwing information into a black hole might be the only way to forever destroy information. On this, the jury is still out–physicists don’t agree on the answer, but most of them (me included) currently think black holes probably quite possibly can’t be destroyed.

When we try to answer the big questions of our existence, we have three options: Science, philosophy, and physics. Of those three, physics has made the most progress in the past century, and we yet have to fully understand what it all means. Yes, physics is the subject that deals with magnets and atoms and balls rolling down inclined planes. But it’s also so much more than this.

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We all know a “Covid virgin,” or “Novid,” someone who has defied all logic in dodging the coronavirus. But beyond judicious caution, sheer luck, or a lack of friends, could the secret to these people’s immunity be found nestled in their genes? And could it hold the key to fighting the virus?

In the early days of the pandemic, a small, tight-knit community of scientists from around the world set up an international consortium, called the COVID Human Genetic Effort, whose goal was to search for a genetic explanation as to why some people were becoming severely sick with Covid while others got off with a mild case of the sniffles.

After a while, the group noticed that some people weren’t getting infected at all—despite repeated and intense exposures. The most intriguing cases were the partners of people who became really ill and ended up in intensive care. “We learned about a few spouses of those people that—despite taking care of their husband or wife, without having access to face masks—apparently did not contract infection,” says András Spaan, a clinical microbiologist at Rockefeller University in New York.

Spaan was tasked with setting up an arm of the project to investigate these seemingly immune individuals. But they had to find a good number of them first. So the team put out a paper in Nature Immunology in which they outlined their endeavor, with a discreet final line mentioning that “subjects from all over the world are welcome.”

The response, Spaan says, was overwhelming. “We literally received thousands of emails,” he says. The sheer volume rushing to sign up forced them to set up a multilingual online screening survey. So far, they’ve had about 15,000 applications from all over the world.

The theory that these people might have preexisting immunity is supported by historical examples. There are genetic mutations that confer natural immunity to HIV, norovirus, and a parasite that causes recurring malaria. Why would Covid be any different, the team rationalized? Yet in the long history of immunology, the concept of inborn resistance against infection is a fairly new and esoteric one. Only a few scientists even take an interest. “It’s such a niche field, that even within the medical and research fields, it’s a bit pooh-poohed on,” says Donald Vinh, an associate professor in the Department of Medicine at McGill University in Canada. Geneticists don’t recognize it as proper genetics, nor immunologists as proper immunology, he says. This is despite there being a clear therapeutic goal. “If you can figure out why somebody cannot get infected, well, then you can figure out how to prevent people from getting infected,” says Vinh.

But finding immune people is an increasingly tricky task. While many have volunteered, only a small minority fit the narrow criteria of probably having encountered the virus yet having no antibodies against it (which would indicate an infection). The most promising candidates are those who have defied all logic in not catching Covid despite being at high risk: health care workers constantly exposed to Covid-positive patients, or those who lived with—or even better, shared a bed with—people confirmed to be infected.

By the time the team started looking for suitable people, they were working against mass vaccination programs too. “On the one hand, a lot of people were getting vaccinated, which is great, don’t get me wrong,” says Vinh. “But those are not the people we want.” On the other hand, seeking out the unvaccinated “does invite a bit of a fringe population.” Of the thousands that flooded in after the call, about 800 to 1,000 recruits fit that tight bill.

Then the highly infectious Omicron variant arrived. “Omicron has really ruined this project, I have to be honest with you,” says Vinh. It dramatically reduced their pool of candidates. But Spaan views Omicron’s desecration in a more positive light: that some recruits survived the Omicron waves really lends support to the existence of innate resistance.

Across the Atlantic, in Dublin, Ireland, another member of the group—Cliona O’Farrelly, a professor of comparative immunology at Trinity College Dublin—set about recruiting health care workers at a hospital in Dublin. Of the cohort she managed to assemble, Omicron did throw a wrench in the works—half of the people whose DNA they had sent off to be sequenced ended up getting infected with the variant, obliviating their presumed resistance. To spread awareness of their research and find more suitable people, O’Farrelly went on the radio and expanded the call to the rest of the country. Again, enthusiasm abounded: More than 16,000 people came forward who claimed to have defied infection. “We’re now trying to deal with all of that,” she says. “I’m hoping that we’ll have one or two hundred from those, which will be unbelievably valuable.”

Now that they have a substantial cohort, the group will take a twofold approach to hunting for a genetic explanation for resistance. First, they’ll blindly run every person’s genome through a computer to see if any gene variation starts to come up frequently. At the same time, they’ll look specifically at an existing list of genes they suspect might be the culprits—genes that if different from usual would just make sense to infer resistance. An example is the gene that codes for the ACE2 receptor, a protein on the surface of cells that the virus uses to slip inside.

The consortium has about 50 sequencing hubs around the world, from Poland to Brazil to Italy, where the data will be crunched. While enrollment is still ongoing, at a certain point, they will have to decide they have enough data to move deeper into their research. “That’s going to be the moment we have people with clear-cut mutations in the genes that make sense biologically,” says Spaan.

Once they come up with a list of gene candidates, it’ll then be a case of narrowing and narrowing that list down. They’ll go through the list one by one, testing each gene’s impact on defenses against Covid in cell models. That process will take between four to six months, Vinh estimates.

Another complication could arise from the global nature of the project; the cohort will be massively heterogeneous. People in Slavic countries won’t necessarily have the same genetic variation that confers resistance as people of Southeast Asian ethnicity. Again, Spaan views this diversity as a plus: “This means that we can correct for ethnic origin in our analysis,” he says. But it also means, Vinh says, that they’re not just looking for one needle in one haystack—”you’re looking for the golden needle and the silver needle and the bronze needle, and you’re looking in the factory of haystacks.”

It’s unlikely to be one gene that confers immunity, but rather an array of genetic variations coming together. “I don’t think it’ll come down to a one-liner on the Excel sheet that says, ‘This is the gene,’” says Vinh. “If it happens to be a single gene, we will be floored.”

After all this work is done, natural genetic resistance will likely turn out to be extremely rare. Still, should they find protective genes, it could help to inform future treatments. There’s good reason to think this: In the 1990s, a group of sex workers in Nairobi, Kenya, defied all logic in failing to become infected with HIV during three years of follow-up testing. It was discovered that some were carrying a genetic mutation that produces a messed-up version of the protein called the CCR5 receptor, one of the proteins that HIV uses to gain entry to a cell and make copies of itself. Having the mutation means HIV can’t latch onto cells, giving natural resistance. This then inspired maraviroc, an antiretroviral used to treat infection, as well as the most promising “cure” for HIV, where two patients received stem cell transplants from a donor carrying the mutation and became HIV free.

It’s also possible that genetics doesn’t tell the full story of those who resist infection against all odds. For some, the reason for their protection might rest instead in their immune system. During the first wave of the pandemic, Mala Maini, a professor of viral immunology at University College London, and her colleagues intensively monitored a group of health care workers who theoretically probably should have been infected with Covid, but for some reason hadn’t been. The team also looked at blood samples from a separate cohort of people, taken well before the pandemic. On closer inspection of the two groups’ samples, Maini’s team found a secret weapon lying in their blood: memory T cells—immune cells that form the second line of defense against a foreign invader. These cells, lying dormant from previous dalliances with other coronaviruses, such as the ones that cause the common cold, could be providing cross-protectivity against SARS-CoV-2, her team hypothesized in their paper in Nature in November 2021.

Other studies have supported the theory that these cross-reactive T cells exist and may explain why some people avoid infection. Maini compares the way these memory T cells might quickly attack SARS-CoV-2 to driving a car. If the car is unlike one you’ve ever driven before—a manual for a life-long automatic driver—it would take you a while to get to grips with the controls. But assume the pre-existing T cells are accustomed to automatics, and a SARS-CoV-2 encounter is like hopping into the driver’s seat of one, and you can see how they would launch a much quicker and stronger immune attack.
A previous seasonal coronavirus infection or an abortive Covid infection in the first wave—meaning an infection that failed to take hold—could create T cells that offer this preexisting immunity. But Maini points out a crucial caveat: This does not mean that you can skip the vaccine on the potential basis that you’re carrying these T cells.

More recently, Maini and her colleague Leo Swadling published another paper that looked at cells from the airways of volunteers, which were sampled and frozen before the pandemic. They figured, if the infection is getting shut down so quickly, then surely the cells responsible must be ready and waiting at the first site of infection. The cohort in the study was small—just 10 people—but six out of the 10 had cross-reactive T cells sitting in their airways.

Off the back of her research, Maini is working on a vaccine with researchers at the University of Oxford that induces these T cells specifically in the mucus membranes of the airway, and which could offer broad protection against not only SARS-CoV-2 but a variety of coronaviruses. Such a vaccine could stop the Covid virus wriggling out of the existing vaccines’ reach, because while the spike protein—the focus of current vaccines—is liable to mutate and change, T cells target bits of viruses that are highly similar across all human and animal coronaviruses.

And a mucosal vaccine could prepare these T cells in the nose and throat, the ground zero of infection, giving Covid the worst shot possible at taking root. “We’re quite optimistic that that sort of approach could provide better protection against new emerging variants, and ideally also against a new transfer of a new animal zoonotic virus,” says Maini.

As for Spaan and his team, they also have to entertain the possibility that, after the slog, genetic resistance against SARS-CoV-2 turns out to be a pipedream. “That’s our fear—that we will do all this and we will find nothing,” says Vinh. “And that’s OK. Because that’s science, right?” O’Farrelly, on the other hand, has undeterred optimism they’ll find something. “You just can’t have people die and not have the equivalent at the other end of the spectrum.”

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Because pain is subjective, it's hard for people who do not suffer headaches to appreciate the severity and the relentlessness. Plus, there's a stigma attached to headache complaints. But headaches, and migraine headaches in particular, reduce quality of life, prevent full participation in work and activities, and even alter mood. Migraine is the most common disabling brain disorder.

Headache specialists, such as internist Chantel Strachan, MD, are part of initiatives to educate more primary care physicians on headache and migraine. Strachan, who completed a fellowship in headache and facial pain, shared the basics with us.

What is a headache?

Headaches happen when an unknown mechanism activates nerves in your body that send pain signals to the brain. This mechanism is activated by a variety of factors including stress, sleep deprivation, hunger, alcohol, computer screens, and teeth grinding, to name a few.

A headache can be its own medical condition, and a headache can be a symptom of something else, including:

•  Dehydration

•  Medication side effect

•  Medication overuse

•  High blood pressure

•  Sinus congestion

•  Tumor

•  Migraine

Migraine is not the name of a type of headache. It's a neurological disease that causes recurrent, debilitating headaches and other symptoms, such as nausea and sensitivity to light and/or sound, and each episode can last for weeks.

How do I get rid of a headache?

The most common type of head pain is a tension headache, which can be caused by physical and emotional stress, anxiety, or head injury. Tension headaches are usually treatable with acetaminophen (Tylenol) or ibuprofen (Advil).

Some people need stronger medication, such as Excedrin migraine or other over-the-counter drugs with added caffeine, and sometimes prescription medication.

Many people get relief from massage, acupuncture, and eating fresh, healthier foods.

When should I see a doctor about headaches?

If a headache does not go away within three days with any of these methods, contact your doctor. It may be a sign something more than a headache is going on.

When should I go to the ER with a headache?

If a headache is not responsive to over-the-counter medications—and is so severe that it's an obstacle to any activity for a few hours—contact a doctor or go to the ER.

If you or someone around you has a headache, watch for other symptoms, such as vision changes, weakness on one side of face or body, confusion, or changes in walking.

If you notice any of these or other unusual or severe symptoms, contact a doctor immediately or go to an emergency room.

What is migraine?

Migraine is a neurological disease that causes a variety of symptoms, including headache. Migraine attacks happen when nerves in and near blood vessels are activated and send pain signals to your brain.

The cardinal symptoms of a migraine are intense throbbing headache, typically on one side of your head, and the following:

•  sensitivity to light and/or sound

•  blurry vision

•  dizziness

•  stomach upset, including nausea, vomiting, and loss of appetite

Migraine phases

Migraine has four phases. Not every person who suffers migraine experiences all four phases, and each attack can be different. Some symptoms can occur across more than one phase.

1.  Pre-monitory: Can be experienced up to seven days before head pain starts. Signs include cravings, irritability, and tiredness.
2.  Aura: About 17% of migraines include aura. The most common is visual, usually accompanied by weakness. Aura can last up to 60 minutes before head pain starts.
3. Head pain: What most people associate with migraine is the third phase, which can include nausea, vomiting, and the need to lie down. Pain lasts for at least four hours. The longer you wait to treat migraine the longer it will last.
4.  Postdrome: After the headache, symptoms can still be intense, including feelings of confusion or brain fog, similar to a hangover.

The whole migraine attack process can take weeks.

In the past decade, after more was discovered about the biochemistry of migraines, new medications have become available for treatment and prevention of migraine. Many medications are directed at reducing the amount of CGRP—calcitonin gene-related peptide—which has a role in pain in the brain and nervous system. Discuss with your doctor if these are good treatment options.

Should I go to a headache specialist or a neurologist if I suffer headaches?

If your headache doesn't warrant a trip straight to the emergency room (again, watch for unusual symptoms, such as changes in mobility), go to a primary care physician first, ideally someone who specializes in headache. A primary care physician can determine if something else is going on, such as high blood pressure, anemia, or depression. A primary care physician is trained to look at the big picture, not just focus on the headache.

Neurologists are great, and you may need one, but don't self-diagnose. Let another doctor refer you to the right specialist.

Headaches can be serious. If you are not getting the help you need, do not give up. More and more doctors are receiving training to provide support.

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According to a recent study from Oregon State University, the harmful consequences of daily, lifetime exposure to the blue light emitted by phones, computers, and home lighting become worse as people age.

The common fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, was used in the research, which was recently published in Nature Partner Journals Aging. Drosophila melanogaster is a useful model organism because it shares cellular and developmental mechanisms with humans and other animals.

A team led by Jaga Giebultowicz, a scientist at the OSU College of Science who specializes in biological clocks, studied the survival rate of flies maintained in darkness and then transferred to an environment of continual blue light from light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, at increasingly older ages.

The transitions from darkness to light happened at the ages of two, 20, 40, and 60 days, and the research focused on the impact of blue light on the mitochondria of the flies’ cells.

Mitochondria serve as a cell’s power plant, producing adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, a chemical energy source.

Flies under blue light. Credit: Oregon State University College of Science

 

In earlier research, Giebultowicz showed that prolonged exposure to blue light affected flies’ longevity, regardless of whether it shined in their eyes.

“The novel aspect of this new study is showing that chronic exposure to blue light can impair energy-producing pathways even in cells that are not specialized in sensing light,” Giebultowicz said. “We determined that specific reactions in mitochondria were dramatically reduced by blue light, while other reactions were decreased by age independent of blue light. You can think of it as blue light exposure adding insult to injury in aging flies.”

Yujuan Song, Jun Yang, David Hendrix, and Matthew Robinson from the OSU College of Science, as well as Alexander Law and Doris Kretzschmar from Oregon Health & Science University, worked with Giebultowicz on the study, which was partly funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Natural light is important for a person’s circadian rhythm, which is a 24-hour cycle of physiological activities that influence one’s eating and sleeping habits and include hormone production, brain wave activity, and cell regeneration.

But according to Giebultowicz, there is research that suggests that greater exposure to artificial light may be a risk factor for sleep and circadian disorders. Humans are also exposed to growing levels of blue light due to the widespread use of LED lights and device displays, which emit a high fraction of blue light.

“This technology, LED lighting, even in most developed countries, has not been used long enough to know its effects across the human lifespan,” she said. “There are increasing concerns that extended exposure to artificial light, especially blue-enriched LED light, may be detrimental to human health. While the full effects of blue light exposure across the lifespan are not yet known in humans, accelerated aging observed in short-lived model organisms should alert us to the potential of cellular damage by this stressor.”

In the meantime, there are a few things people can do to help themselves that don’t involve sitting for hours in darkness, the researchers say. Eyeglasses with amber lenses will filter out the blue light and protect your retinas. And phones, laptops, and other devices can be set to block blue emissions.

“Our previous work demonstrated that daily lifelong exposure to blue light, but not other visible wavelengths, has damaging effects on the brain, motor abilities, and lifespan of the model organism,” Giebultowicz said. “Now we’re reporting that the damaging effects of blue light on the flies are strongly age-dependent – the same length of exposure to the same intensity of light decreases lifespan and increases neurodegeneration more significantly in old flies than in young ones.”

In the earlier research, flies subjected to daily cycles of 12 hours in light and 12 hours in darkness had shorter lives compared to flies kept in total darkness or those kept in light with the blue wavelengths filtered out.

The flies exposed to blue light showed damage to their retinal cells and brain neurons and had impaired locomotion – the flies’ ability to climb the walls of their enclosures, a common behavior, was diminished.

Some of the flies in the experiment were mutants that didn’t develop eyes, and even those eyeless flies displayed impairment, suggesting flies didn’t have to see the light to be harmed by it.

Source: SciTechDaily

https://scitechdaily.com/be-careful-of-blue-light-damage-increases-with-age/

You will have to make certain changes. However, instead of cutting down on eating and dealing with the mental woes of dieting, you can lose weight by increasing your activity, changing the times you eat, or even using certain tricks to boost your metabolism. Using these tricks together can result in significant weight loss. Here are 8 proven ways to lose weight without going on a diet.

1. Do Cardio In The Morning Before Eating

Cardiovascular exercise such as running, cycling, or stair climbing can do wonders for burning calories and reducing your body fat. And while those who avoid dieting probably don’t want to start rigorous exercise routines, you can get amazing results by doing short cardio workouts before eating.

A study from the British Journal of Nutrition found that those who did cardio in the morning in a fasted state (i.e. before eating) burned a whopping 20 percent more fat than those who ate a meal beforehand. This is because when your body is in a fasted state, it burns fat for energy instead of carbs. As such, working out for just 20 minutes each morning can work wonders.

2. Get More Sleep

Even if you’re not a fan of reducing your calorie intake or increasing your physical activity, you can often lose a few extra pounds simply by working on your sleep schedule. Sleeping less can make you feel more fatigued throughout the day, but it can also cause you to gain more fat.

A 2010 study in the Annals of Internal Medicine journal found that just three extra hours of sleep resulted in subjects burning 400 calories a night. In addition to that, subjects who got 8.5 hours of sleep per night lost 60% less muscle than those who got 5.5 hours of sleep per night, and extra sleep helped boost their metabolisms.

3. Drink More Water

Another proven way to lose weight that doesn’t involve going on a strict diet is to simply drink more water. Some people worry about drinking more water as the extra water weight can raise the number on the scales. However, this weight gain is only temporary and you’ll ultimately burn a lot more fat.

What’s more, a 2013 study in the Journal of Clinical and Diagnostic Research found that girls who drank 500ml of water before each meal lost more weight and reduced their body mass index without any other dietary changes. As such, you should try drinking half a liter of water before each meal to boost your metabolism and reduce your hunger.

4. Get More Protein

Increasing your protein intake is one of the best ways to boost your metabolism and lose more weight. A 2008 study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that protein increases feelings of fullness, reduces your hunger, and naturally helps you eat fewer calories. It’s also great for building muscle, which will result in more fat loss.

Fortunately, you don’t have to change your entire diet to get more protein. Many people see positive effects simply by drinking a couple of protein shakes each day. However, you might want to enhance your results by eating a high-protein breakfast to kickstart your metabolism and make yourself feel more full.

5. Try Intermittent Fasting

Dieting isn’t the only way to burn extra fat. Interestingly, you can consume a lot of calories each day yet still manage to lose weight as long as you only eat your daily meals within a short window. This is known as intermittent fasting and many athletes swear by it.

Intermittent fasting generally involves getting all your daily meals within an 8-hour window and fasting for the remaining 16 hours before eating again. When your body is in a fasted state, it’ll turn to fat stores for energy, resulting in you lowering your fat mass and ultimately losing weight. However, you’ll still need to avoid overeating during the eating window.

6. Avoid Stress And Anxiety

Daily stress and high anxiety levels can be incredibly counterproductive for those who want to lose weight. Stress and anxiety elevate your cortisol levels, which induces hunger and cravings for comfort food. This can quickly result in you overeating if you’re not careful.

Fortunately, there are various natural ways to manage your stress and anxiety levels. Exercising is a great way to reduce stress while also losing weight. Ensuring that you get more than 8 hours of sleep each night will also help significantly. You should also avoid daily stressors. For instance, if you find your daily commute to work stressful, try walking or cycling instead.

7. Lift Weights Regularly

If you’re not a fan of dieting, one of the best ways to keep your body in check is by resistance training. Training with heavy weights not only helps you burn calories but can also help you build extra muscle. For every extra pound of muscle you gain, your body will burn more calories even when it’s resting.

It also has other benefits. For instance, when you lift weights, more of the food you eat will go to repairing and rebuilding your body, meaning you can gain muscle while losing fat. In many cases, those who lift weights even find that they can eat more than they usually would while still maintaining or even losing weight.

8. Boost Your Vitamin D Levels

While various vitamins and minerals help to keep your body in check and potentially boost weight loss, vitamin D is arguably the most important. Many people suffer from vitamin D deficiencies, which can often result in metabolic syndrome, depression, and anxiety, all of which will contribute to weight gain.

It’s also surprisingly easy to boost your vitamin D levels. Spending 30 minutes in the sun each day can help naturally increase your vitamin D levels. Certain drinks, such as fortified orange juice, are also high in vitamin D. You can also take vitamin D supplements to keep your vitamin D levels high.

Conclusion

While the fastest and most effective way to lose weight is to combine a healthy diet with a good exercise routine, you can try these effective options that don’t involve going on a diet. Whether you’d rather intermittently fast each day, drink more water, or simply sleep more, all of these things can contribute to weight loss.

Of course, for the best results, you should try as many of these tips as possible in conjunction. Soon enough, you’ll notice that you find it much easier to lose weight. With that said, keep in mind that you’ll likely still gain weight if you’re overeating.

Source: SciTechDaily

https://scitechdaily.com/8-proven-ways-to-lose-weight-without-dieting/

Astronomers have revealed the first photograph of an exoplanet taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The image shows the bright blob of a world seven times heavier than Jupiter that orbits a star nearly 400 light-years away. The groundbreaking result is the latest in a slew of early exoplanet findings from the telescope, and a test of technologies that will enable direct imaging of Earth-like planets by future space telescopes.

“It’s exhilarating,” said Aarynn Carter, an astronomer at UC Santa Cruz and part of the team that processed the image. “The result is, honestly, excellent.”

The JWST, a telescope decades in the making that launched in December 2021 and now floats a million miles from Earth, became fully operational this summer. It has observed distant galaxies at the dawn of the universe and taken exquisite views of Jupiter, among other early results. Astronomers say the telescope is performing 10 times better than expected at observing exoplanets.

The new image, described in an accompanying paper posted online August 31, comes from a team led by the astrophysicist Sasha Hinkley at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom. The researchers pointed the JWST at the fast-spinning star HIP 65426, where a planet was known to exist; the Spectro-Polarimetric High-Contrast Exoplanet Research instrument (SPHERE) on the Very Large Telescope in Chile first photographed the planet in 2017. Hinkley’s team sought to test and characterize JWST’s ability to see the planet, called HIP 65426 b.

Astronomers have directly imaged about two dozen exoplanets, but the JWST will greatly expand the capability by wielding its 6.5-meter-wide hexagonal mirror, outclassing any ground-based observatory. “It is a moment of promise,” said Bruce Macintosh, an astrophysicist and the incoming director of the University of California Observatories.

Hot Young Giant

To photograph HIP 65426 b, the JWST blocked the light of its host star using a small mask known as a coronagraph. This revealed the orbiting planet, which is thousands of times fainter, like “a firefly around a searchlight,” said Hinkley.

HIP 65426 b orbits about 100 times farther from its star than Earth does the sun, taking 630 years to complete an orbit. This distance means it’s easier to see the planet against the glare of the star; that, coupled with the planet’s extreme heat and thus brightness—it has a scorching temperature of about 900 degrees Celsius, a fever left over from its formation just 14 million years ago—makes it a prime target for direct imaging. “It has a temperature similar to a candle flame,” said Beth Biller, an astronomer at the University of Edinburgh who co-led the team.

The JWST’s size and sensitivity enabled it to collect more light from this planet than any previous observatory has obtained. (Its photo looks grainier than SPHERE’s only because the JWST observes longer, infrared wavelengths.) This allowed Hinkley, Biller and their team to refine the estimate of the planet’s mass, which they peg at about seven Jupiter masses, less than SPHERE’s estimate of about 10. Their results also help nail down the planet’s radius, which is 1.4 times that of Jupiter. Simple models of planetary evolution can’t easily explain this world’s combination of properties; Carter noted that the precise new data will allow scientists to test models against each other and “tighten our understanding.”

HIP 65426 b’s surface features aren’t visible in the image, but Biller said it would “probably look banded” like Jupiter, with belts caused by variations in temperature and composition, and might have spots in its atmosphere caused by storms or vortices.

The giant planet is inhospitable to life as we know it, but it represents a class of large planets that scientists are eager to learn more about. Jupiter probably played a key role in sculpting our solar system, perhaps enabling life on Earth to take hold. “It’d be nice to know if that works in other solar systems,” said Macintosh.

The Webb telescope’s Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) each captured views of the planet HIP 65426 b at multiple infrared wavelengths, providing details that astronomers could use to infer the planet’s properties. The white stars mark the location of the host star HIP 65426, which has been subtracted using coronagraphs and image processing, while the bar shapes in the two NIRCam images are artifacts of the optics, not objects in the scene.Illlustration: NASA/ESA/CSA, A Carter (UCSC), the ERS 1386 team, and A. Pagan (STScI)

Because the JWST is so much more stable than expected, scientists say it should be able to photograph smaller exoplanets than anticipated—perhaps as small as a third of Jupiter’s mass. “We could image things like Neptune and Uranus that we’ve never directly imaged before,” said Emily Rickman, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland, which operates the JWST.

Now that the JWST’s coronagraph has passed its road test, Hinkley thinks astronomers will be lining up to use it to take otherworldly photos. He expects to see “definitely dozens” by the end of the telescope’s lifetime. “I hope it’s more like hundreds.”

Peeking in Distant Skies

In addition to the exoplanet photo, Hinkley’s team will announce in the coming days that they have discovered an array of molecules in the atmosphere of a suspected brown dwarf—sometimes known as a “failed star”—orbiting a companion star. Almost 20 times heavier than Jupiter, the object has a mass just below the threshold where fusion could begin in its core.

Using an instrument on the JWST that picks apart the light’s frequencies, a process called spectroscopy, the scientists found water, methane, carbon dioxide and sodium, all revealed at an unprecedented level of detail. They also detected smokelike clouds of silica in the candidate brown dwarf’s atmosphere, something hinted at before in such objects but never established. “In my mind this is the greatest spectrum ever obtained of a substellar companion,” said Hinkley. “We’ve never seen anything like it.”

Illustration: Samuel Velasco/Quanta Magazine

The discovery follows hot on an announcement from two weeks ago, when a different team of astronomers reported that they have used the JWST to detect carbon dioxide in a giant exoplanet called WASP-39 b located 650 light-years from Earth—the first time the gas has ever been seen in an exoplanet. They also spotted a mystery molecule in the atmosphere. That same team is also studying two more giant worlds, with results expected in the coming months that will help piece together an almost complete picture of the atmospheric composition of gas giants like these. “That’s the power of James Webb,” said Jacob Bean, an astronomer at the University of Chicago and the team’s co-leader.

The observations will also build up a “chemical inventory” that will show what the JWST might detect in the skies of smaller rocky worlds more similar to Earth, said team leader Natalie Batalha, an astrophysicist at Santa Cruz. She said the team plans to “push JWST to its limits” in upcoming gas giant observations, which will tell them what they "can do on terrestrial planets.”

Other teams are conducting the first JWST observations of TRAPPIST-1, a relatively nearby red dwarf star orbited by seven Earth-sized rocky worlds. Several of these planets are in the star’s habitable zone, where conditions favoring liquid water and even life may be possible. While the JWST cannot directly image the planets, spectroscopy will help identify the gases in their atmospheres—possibly even hints of gases that could signify biological activity. “What we really want is Earths,” said Macintosh.

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

The Webb Space Telescope Snaps Its First Photo of an Exoplanet

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This should be the absolute peak of hurricane season—but it’s dead quiet out there

Matternet’s Model M2 drone delivering for the Swiss Post. Photo by Pier Marco Tacca/Getty Images

Matternet has received approval from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for its Model M2 drone delivery drone design. In a press release, Matternet explains that the Model M2 is the first non-military unmanned aircraft to achieve Type Certification by the FAA, which determines that an aircraft’s design meets regulatory standards.

The California-based Matternet has been testing its Model M2 drone over the past four years in the US as part of the FAA’s Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) program. Matternet says getting the green light from the FAA could help streamline the process of “implementing new networks and getting approvals.”

Matternet partnered with UPS in 2019 to deliver medical supplies in North Carolina, and later started delivering prescriptions in Florida. Matternet also expanded its footprint to Switzerland, where it teamed up with the Swiss Post to deliver lab samples and blood tests. The program was briefly suspended in 2019 after its drones suffered two crashes in the country, but Matternet has since announced that it’s taking over the Swiss Post’s drone delivery program starting in 2023.

In a statement, the FAA says Matternet’s Model M2 drone “meets all federal regulations for safe, reliable and controllable operations and provides a level of safety equivalent to existing airworthiness standards applicable to other categories of aircraft.” The four-rotor drone’s been approved to carry four-pound payloads and fly at an altitude of 400 feet or lower with a maximum speed of 45mph.

Matternet’s announcement comes as other tech (and retail) giants begin ramping up efforts to get their own drone delivery services off the ground. In May, Walmart said it’s going to expand its drone delivery network — which it launched last year in partnership with DroneUp — to Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Texas, Utah, and Virginia by the end of 2022. Amazon also announced plans to jumpstart its stalled drone delivery program in June, eventually bringing drone-powered deliveries to Lockeford, California and College Station, Texas. Wing, the drone company owned by Google parent Alphabet, recently launched tests in parts of Texas and started working on drones capable of carrying larger payloads.

Matternet’s delivery drone design has been approved by the FAA

It is believed that the development of bipedalism was a turning point in human evolution. However, there is disagreement over its modalities and age, notably due to the fact there are no fossilized remains. Researchers from the University of Poitiers,

the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), and its Chadian partners analyzed three limb bones from Sahelanthropus tchadensis, the earliest known representative of the human genus. The study, which was recently published in the journal Nature, supports the hypothesis that bipedalism was developed extremely early in human history, at a time still associated with the ability to move on four limbs in trees.

Collection working session between Franck Guy (left) and Guillaume Daver (right), at the PALEVOPRIM laboratory, Poitiers (CNRS/University of Poitiers). Credit: Franck Guy / PALEVOPRIM / CNRS – University of Poitiers

 

Sahelanthropus tchadensis is considered the earliest representative species of humans, dating back 7 million years. Its description goes back to 2001 when the Franco-Chadian Paleoanthropological Mission (MPFT) uncovered the bones of three people at Toros-Menalla in the Djurab Desert (Chad), including a particularly well-preserved cranium. This cranium, particularly the orientation and anterior location of the occipital foramen where the spinal column is inserted, reveals a form of locomotion on two legs, implying that it was capable of bipedalism.

In addition to the cranium, nicknamed Toumaï, and fragments of jaws and teeth that have already been published, the locality of Toros-Menalla 266 (TM 266) yielded two ulnae (forearm bone) and a femur (thigh bone). These bones were also attributed to Sahelanthropus because no other large primate was found at the site; however, it is impossible to know if they belong to the same individual as the cranium. Paleontologists from the University of Poitiers, the CNRS, the University of N’Djamena, and the National Centre of Research for Development (CNRD, Chad) recently published their complete analysis in Nature.

Left: 3D models of the postcranial material of Sahelanthropus tchadensis. From left to right: the femur, in posterior and medial view; the right and left ulnae, in anterior and lateral view. Right: Example of analysis performed to interpret the locomotor mode of Sahelanthropus tchadensis. 3D cortical thickness variation map for the femurs of (from left to right) Sahelanthropus, an extant human, a chimpanzee, and a gorilla (in posterior view). This analysis enables us to understand the variations of mechanical constraints on the femur and to interpret these constraints in terms of locomotor mode. Credit: Franck Guy / PALEVOPRIM / CNRS – University of Poitiers

 

The femur and ulnae were subjected to a battery of measurements and analyses, concerning both their external morphology and their internal structures using microtomography imaging: biometric measurements, geometric morphometrics, biomechanical indicators, etc. These data were compared to those of a relatively large sample of extant and fossil apes: chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, Miocene apes, and members of the human group (Orrorin, Ardipithecus, australopithecines, ancient Homo, Homo sapiens).

The structure of the femur indicates that Sahelanthropus was usually bipedal on the ground, but probably also in trees. According to results from the ulnae, this bipedalism coexisted in arboreal environments with a form of quadrupedalism, that is arboreal clambering enabled by firm hand grips, clearly differing from that of gorillas and chimpanzees who lean on the back of their phalanges.

The Djurab Desert, where the fossil sites that yielded the postcranial remains of Sahelanthropus tchadensis are located. Credit: MPFT, PALEVOPRIM / CNRS – University of Poitiers

 

The conclusions of this study, including the identification of habitual bipedalism, are based on the observation and comparison of more than twenty characteristics of the femur and ulnae. They are, by far, the most parsimonious interpretation of the combination of these traits. All these data reinforce the concept of very early bipedal locomotion in human history, even if at this stage other modes of locomotion were also practiced.

This work was supported by the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs, the Chadian Government, the French National Research Agency (ANR), the Nouvelle-Aquitaine Region, the CNRS, the University of Poitiers and the French representation in Chad. It is dedicated to the memory of the late Yves Coppens, precursor and inspirer of the MPFT’s work in the Djourab Desert.

Source: SciTechDaily

https://scitechdaily.com/7-million-years-old-new-secrets-of-the-oldest-representative-of-humanity-revealed/