It’s estimated that 80% of diseases can be linked back to an imbalance in gut bacteria—a condition called dysbiosis. When the gut is unbalanced, the wrong types of bacteria multiply and crowd out beneficial species. The result is inflammation, which can damage other parts of your body. That’s not what you want. Let’s look at some ways to heal your gut and keep it healthy.

Identify Food Sensitivities

Many people have unique sensitivities to food. Yet food sensitivities are distinct from food allergies. Food allergies are caused by an overactive immune response to a particular protein in a food and are often genetic. Food sensitivities are caused by an intolerance to food due to a lack of enzymes your body needs to digest that food. For example, lactose intolerance causes digestive issues when you consume dairy products. It’s caused by low levels of the enzyme lactase, which breaks down lactose in dairy foods.

To improve your digestive health, identify foods that trigger symptoms and cut them out of your diet. You can do this by keeping a food journal. Write down everything you eat, and how you feel after eating each food and look for patterns. Do some foods cause digestive upset, brain fog, fatigue, anxiety, or other symptoms? Take note of that. Another approach is to do an elimination diet. This is where you cut out all the foods that could trigger symptoms and add them back in one at a time to see if each triggers symptoms.

Be aware that certain types of foods are more likely to trigger symptoms. For example, sugar alcohols are a common culprit. These sweeteners in some sugar-free candies, beverages, and other products are poorly digested and may cause gas, bloating, and stomach cramps. They often end in -ol, for example, maltitol, xylitol, erythritol, mannitol, and sorbitol.

Add More Fermented Foods to Your Diet

Fermented foods, such as kimchi and sauerkraut, are an abundant source of probiotic microorganisms that help maintain a healthy balance in your gut. Fermented foods have been around for thousands of years, and used for food and medicine throughout history and people still enjoy them today. You can buy these foods or make fermented foods at home to seed your gut with gut-friendly bacteria to create a healthier gut balance. Examples of fermented foods include:

• Sauerkraut (fermented cabbage)
• Kimchi (spicy pickled vegetables)
• Kefir (a yogurt-like drink made from milk)
• Tempeh (fermented soybeans)
• Miso (a soybean paste used in soups and sauces)
• Yogurt
• Fermented vegetables

Even a few spoonfuls of fermented foods daily can help restore intestinal balance.

Consume More Prebiotic Foods

The term “prebiotic” refers to a food that contains non-digestible fiber that promotes the growth of beneficial bacteria in your gut. These bacteria help maintain intestinal health and regulate the portion of your immune system that lies in your gut.

Prebiotics are foods that contain fiber and promote the growth of good bacteria in your gut and are abundant in fiber-rich foods like plants, fruits, and vegetables. Studies show that prebiotics help promote gut health.

Prebiotics help stimulate the growth of healthy bacteria, which is crucial for maintaining good digestive health. Not all foods are equal when it comes to prebiotic activity–some are better than others. Here’s a list of some of the best sources:

• Bananas
• Oatmeal
• Garlic
• Onions
• Artichokes
• Asparagus

Be cautious about adding prebiotic foods to your diet if you have irritable bowel syndrome. (IBS) Some studies show that prebiotics may worsen symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). In one study, researchers found that participants who consumed prebiotics for 3 weeks had increased abdominal pain and bloating compared with those who didn’t consume anything during that period.

Find Better Ways to Manage Stress

Stress is a natural part of life, but that doesn’t mean you have to let it run your life (or your gut).

When you feel stressed, your body releases cortisol and other hormones that can trigger inflammation and disrupt the gut barrier and gut microbiome. The American Heart Association estimates that stress is responsible for one in every seven deaths in America! To help manage stress and reduce your risk of heart disease and other health problems, try these tips:

• Get enough sleep—this is important because lack of sleep increases cortisol levels in the body.
• Exercise regularly—exercise helps release endorphins into the brain and improves mood.
• Meditate—you can meditate anywhere (even while walking).
• Write in a gratitude journal
• Talk about what’s bothering you—if there’s something stressing you, talk about it with someone close to you (or even a stranger). Sometimes just voicing the problem out loud can help you feel better!

Stress affects every aspect of functioning and is also a gut disrupter. Make sure you have a way to manage it that works for you.

Check Your Medications

Sometimes, medications are necessary for managing your health. However, they can also disrupt your gut ecosystem.

Antibiotics kill both bad and good bacteria in the gut, which may affect how well you absorb nutrients from food. This can lead to nutritional deficiencies and poor overall health. In addition, some medications can cause stomach upset or diarrhea,

which can also be detrimental to health and well-being.

One study found that more than 1,000 medications disrupt the gut microbiome. These include medications that people commonly take, including statins (used to treat elevated cholesterol), non-steroidal anti-inflammatory medications (NSAIDs), proton pump inhibitors (used to treat acid reflux), and others.

If you’re concerned about the effect of your medications on your overall health and gut health, discuss these concerns with your doctor or pharmacist.

The Bottom Line

Gut health is an important factor in overall well-being and happiness. Luckily, there are plenty of ways to improve your gut health through diet and lifestyle changes. However, if digestive symptoms persist, see your healthcare provider.

Source: SciTechDaily

https://scitechdaily.com/5-ways-to-heal-gut-health-naturally/

So, should I work out for longer once a week or a little bit each day?

It’s a conundrum that many health-conscious people face, and a new study from Edith Cowan University (ECU) has a solution. This recent study reveals a little bit of daily activity might well be the most beneficial approach, at least for muscular strength. Fortunately, it also implies that you don’t need to put in a ton of effort every day.

In a four-week training study conducted in partnership with Niigata University and Nishi Kyushu University in Japan, three participant groups each performed an arm resistance exercise while improvements in muscle strength and thickness were measured and compared.

The workout included doing “maximal voluntary eccentric bicep contractions” on a machine that gauges the strength of your muscles throughout each muscle contraction you would do in a gym. An eccentric contraction is when the muscle lengthens; in the case of a bicep curl, this would be similar to lowering a large dumbbell.

Edith Cowan University Exercise and Sports Science Professor Ken Nosaka. Credit: Edith Cowan University

 

One group performed six contractions a day, five days a week (6×5 group), whereas the other crammed all 30 on one day, once a week (30×1 group). Both groups performed 30 contractions every week. Another group did just six contractions once a week.

After four weeks, the group doing 30 contractions per day did not show any improvement in muscular strength, although muscle thickness (a sign of increasing muscle size) grew by 5.8%. The muscles’ strength and thickness did not change in the group doing six contractions once each week. However, the 6×5 group saw comparable gains in muscle thickness to the 30×1 group and substantial increases in muscular strength of more than 10%.

Frequency, not volume

Importantly, the increase in muscle strength of the 6×5 group was similar to the group in a previous study that performed only one three-second maximal eccentric contraction per day for five days a week for four weeks.

ECU Exercise and Sports Science Professor Ken Nosaka said these studies continue to suggest very manageable amounts of exercise done regularly can have a real effect on people’s strength.

“People think they have to do a lengthy session of resistance training in the gym, but that’s not the case,” he said. “Just lowering a heavy dumbbell slowly once or six times a day is enough.”

Professor Nosaka said while the study required participants to exert maximum effort, early findings from current, ongoing research indicated similar results could be achieved without needing to push as hard as possible.

“We only used the bicep curl exercise in this study, but we believe this would be the case for other muscles also, at least to some extent,” he said.

“Muscle strength is important to our health. This could help prevent a decrease in muscle mass and strength with aging. A decrease in muscle mass is a cause of many chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, some cancers, dementia, plus musculoskeletal problems such as osteoporosis.”

Rest up

It is not yet known precisely why the body responds better to resistance exercises with eccentric contractions in smaller doses rather than bigger loads less frequently.

Professor Nosaka said it may relate to how often the brain is asked to make a muscle perform in a particular manner.

However, he stressed it was also important to include rest in an exercise regimen.

“In this study, the 6×5 group had two days off per week,” he said.

“Muscle adaptions occur when we are resting; if someone was able to somehow train 24 hours a day, there would actually be no improvement at all.

“Muscles need rest to improve their strength and their muscle mass, but muscles appear to like to be stimulated more frequently.”

He also highlighted if someone was unable to exercise for a period, there was no value in trying to “make up” for it with a longer session later.

“If someone’s sick and can’t exercise for a week, that’s fine, but it is better to just return to a regular exercise routine when you’re feeling better,” he said.

Clarifying advice

Current Australian Government guidelines already indicate adults should try to be active every day and perform 2.5-5 hours of moderate physical activity per week.

Professor Nosaka said there needed to be more emphasis on the importance of making exercise a daily activity, rather than hitting a weekly minute goal.

“If you’re just going to the gym once a week, it’s not as effective as doing a bit of exercise every day at home,” he said.

“This research, together with our previous study, suggests the importance of accumulating a small amount of exercise a week, then just spending hours exercising once a week.

“We need to know that every muscle contraction counts, and it’s how regularly you perform them that counts.”

Source: SciTechDaily

https://scitechdaily.com/the-secret-to-exercise-research-shows-its-how-often-you-do-it-not-how-much/

A team of scientists headed by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and Appalachian State University employed environmental DNA (eDNA) to record the breadth of high-alpine biodiversity on the world’s tallest peak, 29,032-foot Mount Everest (8,849 m). This important project is a component of the groundbreaking 2019 National Geographic and Rolex Perpetual Planet Everest Expedition, the largest single scientific expedition to the mountain in history.

The scientists gathered eDNA from water samples over a four-week period in 10 ponds and streams between 14,763 feet (4,500 meters) and 18,044 feet (5,500 meters), publishing their results in the journal iScience. The locations comprised regions of the aeolian zone, which extends above the range of flowering plants and shrubs at the topmost reaches of the biosphere, as well as the alpine zone, which exists above the tree line and has a variety of flowering plant and shrub species.

In just 20 liters of water, scientists discovered species from 187 taxonomic orders, or 16.3%, or one sixth of all known orders in the tree of life, the family tree of biodiversity on Earth.

Tracie Seimon of WCS’s Zoological Health Program collecting eDNA sample. Credit: Anton Seimon/National Geographic

 

eDNA searches for trace amounts of genetic material left behind by organisms and wildlife and offers a more accessible, rapid, and comprehensive approach to increasing survey capacity for assessing biodiversity in aquatic environments. Samples are collected using a sealed cartridge containing a filter that captures genetic material that is later analyzed at a lab using DNA metabarcoding and other sequencing methodologies. WCS has been using eDNA for the detection of rare and threatened species from humpback whales to Swinhoe’s softshell turtle, one of the rarest species on the planet.

Although the Everest study focused on identification at the order level, the team was able to identify many organisms to the genus or species level.

For example, the team identified both rotifers and tardigrades, two tiny animal organisms that are known to occur in the harshest and most extreme environments and are considered to be among the most resilient animals known on Earth. In addition, they identified Tibetan snow cock, which are found in Sagarmatha National Park, and were surprised to find species such as domestic dogs and chickens, representing how human activities are influencing the landscape.

They also identified pine trees, which only are found far downhill from where they sampled, demonstrating how wind-blown pollen can make its way high up into these watersheds. Another organism they identified from several sites was mayflies, which are known indicator species for environmental change.

The eDNA inventory will aid future high-Himalayan biomonitoring and retrospective molecular studies to assess changes over time as climate-driven warming, glacial melt, and human-caused influences reshape this rapidly transforming world-renowned ecosystem.

Said Dr. Tracie Seimon of WCS’s Zoological Health Program, co-lead of the Everest biology field team and lead of the study: “High-alpine and aeolian environments, which have often been thought of as barren and mostly devoid of life, in fact, have abundant biodiversity. High mountain environments including Mount Everest should be recognized as a target for sustained long-term biodiversity monitoring of high-alpine taxa to complement bioclimatic monitoring and climate change impact assessments.”

Said Dr. Marisa Lim of the Wildlife Conservation Society: “We went in search of life on the roof of the world. This is what we found. However, the story does not end here. There is more to be discovered and we hope our findings help to inform future exploration.”

Said Dr. Anton Seimon, co-lead of the field study, National Geographic Explorer, and Research Assistant Professor at Appalachian State University: “A century ago, when asked, ‘Why go to Mt Everest?’, the British mountaineer George Mallory famously replied ‘Because it’s there.’ Our 2019 team had a rather different perspective: we went to Mt Everest because it is informative, it can teach us things about the world we live in.”

By providing this open-source dataset to the research community, the authors hope to contribute to the continued efforts to build up molecular resources to study and track the shifts in biodiversity of Earth’s highest mountain.

Source: SciTechDaily

https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-solve-mount-everest-wildlife-mysteries-through-the-use-of-edna/

Queen Elizabeth II led a low-tech life—but knighted plenty of sci-tech figures

Polio declared a disaster emergency in New York after more poliovirus found

Flamingos living in the Atacama Desert's salt flats have seen their numbers decline thanks to water-intensive lithium mining.

The gorgeous pink flamingos that inhabit one of Chile’s most unique habitats are declining—and demand for electric cars may be partly to blame.

In recent years, populations of the birds living in the salt flats of the Atacama Desert have been on the decline, as global demand for lithium drains the region’s water supply. Here’s how lithium mining is putting these birds at risk.

Source

The team at the Francis Crick Institute in London showed that rather than causing damage, air pollution was waking up old damaged cells.

One of the world's leading experts, Prof Charles Swanton, said the breakthrough marked a "new era".

And it may now be possible to develop drugs that stop cancers forming.

The findings could explain how hundreds of cancer-causing substances act on the body.

The classical view of cancer starts with a healthy cell. It acquires more and more mutations in its genetic code, or DNA, until it reaches a tipping point. Then it becomes a cancer and grows uncontrollably.

But there are problems with this idea: cancerous mutations are found in seemingly healthy tissue, and many substances known to cause cancer - including air pollution - don't seem to damage people's DNA.

So what is going on?

The researchers have produced evidence of a different idea. The damage is already there in our cell's DNA, picked up as we grow and age, but something needs to pull the trigger that actually makes it cancerous.

The discovery came from exploring why non-smokers get lung cancer. The overwhelming majority of lung cancers are caused by smoking but still, one in 10 cases in the UK is down to air pollution.

The Crick scientists focused on a form of pollution called particulate matter 2.5 (known as PM2.5), which is far smaller than the diameter of a human hair.

Through a series of detailed human and animal experiments they showed:

•  Places with higher levels of air pollution had more lung cancers not caused by smoking

•  Breathing in PM2.5 leads to the release of a chemical alarm - interleukin-1-beta - in the lungs

•  This causes inflammation and activates cells in the lungs to help repair any damage

•  But around one in every 600,000 cells in the lungs of a 50-year-old already contains potentially cancerous mutations

•  These are acquired as we age but appear completely healthy until they are activated by the chemical alarm and become cancerous

Crucially, the researchers were able to stop cancers forming in mice exposed to air pollution by using a drug that blocks the alarm signal.
The results are a double breakthrough, both for understanding the impact of air pollution and the fundamentals of how we get cancer.

Dr Emilia Lim, one of the Crick researchers, said people who had never smoked but developed lung cancer often had no idea why.

"To give them some clues about how this might work is really, really important," she said.

"It's super-important - 99% of people in the world live in places where air pollution exceeds the WHO guidelines so it really impacts all of us."

The findings could lead to a rethink in how cancers form

Rethinking cancer

But the results also showed mutations alone are not always enough to cause cancer. It can need an extra element.

Prof Swanton said this was the most exciting finding his lab had come across, as it "actually rethinks our understanding of how tumours are initiated". He said it would lead to a "new era" of molecular cancer prevention.

The idea of taking a cancer-blocking pill if you live in a heavily polluted area is not completely fanciful.

Doctors have already trialled an interleukin-1-beta drug in cardiovascular disease and found, by complete accident, they cut the risk of lung cancer.

The latest findings are being presented to scientists at a conference of the European Society for Medical Oncology.

Speaking to the BBC from the conference, Prof Swanton said: "Pollution is a lovely example, but there are going to be 200 other examples of this over the next 10 years."

And he said we needed to rethink how even smoking causes cancer - is it just the known DNA damage caused by the chemicals in tobacco or is the smoke causing inflammation, too?

Curiously, the idea that mutated DNA is not enough and cancers need another trigger to grow was first proposed by scientist Isaac Berenblum in 1947.

"Philosophically, it's fascinating. These incredible biologists have done this work 75 years ago and it's largely been ignored," said Dr Lim.

Michelle Mitchell, chief executive of Cancer Research UK, stressed that "smoking remains the biggest cause of lung cancer".

But she added: "Science, which takes years of painstaking work, is changing our thinking around how cancer develops. We now have a much better understanding of the driving forces behind lung cancer."

Source

Reptiles had one heck of a coming-out party just over 250 million years ago during the end of the Permian period and the start of the Triassic.

Their rates of evolution and diversity began exploding, leading to a dizzying variety of abilities, body plans, and traits. This helped to firmly establish both their extinct lineages and those that still exist today as one of the most successful and diverse animal groups the world has ever seen. For the longest time, scientists explained this flourish by reptile competition being wiped out by two of the biggest mass extinction events in the history of the planet. These occurred around 261 and 252 million years ago.

This explanation has been rewritten by a new Harvard-led study that reconstructed how the bodies of ancient reptiles changed and compared it to the effects of millions of years of climate change.

Harvard paleontologist Stephanie Pierce’s lab shows that the morphological evolution and diversification seen in early reptiles started years before these mass extinction events. Moreover, they were directly driven by what caused the mass extinction events in the first place — rising global temperatures due to climate change.

“We are suggesting that we have two major factors at play — not just this open ecological opportunity that has always been thought by several scientists — but also something that nobody had previously come up with, which is that climate change actually directly triggered the adaptive response of reptiles to help build this vast array of new body plans and the explosion of groups that we see in the Triassic,” said Tiago R. Simões, lead author on the study and a postdoctoral fellow in the Pierce lab.

“Basically, [rising global temperatures] triggered all these different morphological experiments — some that worked quite well and survived for millions of years up to this day, and some others that basically vanished a few million years later,” Simões added.

In the paper, which was published recently in the journal Science Advances, the researchers lay out the vast anatomical changes that took place in many reptile groups, including the forerunners of crocodiles and dinosaurs, in direct response to major climate shifts concentrated between 260 to 230 million years ago.

The study provides a close look at how a large group of organisms evolve because of climate change, which is especially pertinent today as global temperatures continually rise. In fact, the rate of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere today is about nine times what it was during the timeframe that culminated in the biggest climate change-driven mass extinction of all time 252 million years ago: the Permian-Triassic mass extinction.

“Major shifts in global temperature can have dramatic and varying impacts on biodiversity,” said  Stephanie E. Pierce. She is the Thomas D. Cabot Associate Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and curator of vertebrate paleontology in the Museum of Comparative Zoology. “Here we show that rising temperatures during the Permian-Triassic led to the extinction of many animals, including many of the ancestors of mammals, but also sparked the explosive evolution of others, especially the reptiles that went on to dominate the Triassic period.”

The study involved nearly eight years of data collection and took a heavy dose of camerawork, CT scanning, and loads of passport stamps as Simões traveled to more than 20 countries and more than 50 different museums to take scans and snapshots of more than 1,000 reptilian fossils.

With all the information, the scientists created an expansive dataset that was analyzed with state-of-the-art statistical methods to construct a diagram called an evolutionary time tree. Time trees reveal how early reptiles were related to each other, when their lineages first originated, and how fast they were evolving. Then they combined it with global temperature data from millions of years ago.

Diversification of reptile body plans began about 30 million years before the Permian-Triassic extinction, making it obvious that these changes weren’t triggered by the event as previously thought. Although the extinction events did help put them in high gear.

The dataset also showed that rises in global temperatures, which began at about 270 million years ago and lasted until at least 240 million years ago, were followed by rapid body changes in most reptile lineages. For example, some of the larger cold-blooded animals evolved to become smaller so they could cool down easier; others evolved to live in water for that same effect. The latter group included some of the most bizarre forms of reptiles that would go on to become extinct including a tiny chameleon-like creature with a bird-like skull and beak, a giant, long-necked marine reptile once thought to be the Loch Ness monster, and a gliding reptile resembling a gecko with wings. It also includes the ancestors of reptiles that still exist today such as turtles and crocodiles.

Smaller reptiles, which gave rise to the first lizards and tuataras, went on a different path than their larger reptile brethren. Their evolutionary rates slowed down and stabilized in response to the rising temperatures. The investigators believe it was because the small-bodied reptiles were already better adapted to the rising heat since they can more easily release heat from their bodies compared to larger reptiles when temperatures got hot very quickly all-around Earth.

The scientists say they are planning to expand on this work by investigating the impact of environmental catastrophes on the evolution of organisms with abundant modern diversity, such as the major groups of lizards and snakes.

For more on this research, see Researchers Discover That Global Warming Spawned the Age of Reptiles.

Source: SciTechDaily

https://scitechdaily.com/evolution-and-diversity-of-reptiles-driven-by-60-million-years-of-climate-change/

The massive star cluster NGC 346, located in the Small Magellanic Cloud, has long intrigued astronomers with its unusual shape. Now researchers using two separate methods have determined that this shape is partly due to stars and gas spiraling into the center of this cluster in a river-like motion. The red spiral superimposed on NGC 346 traces the movement of stars and gas toward the center. Scientists say this spiraling motion is the most efficient way to feed star formation from the outside toward the center of the cluster. Credit: NASA, ESA, Andi James (STScI)

Stars are the machines that sculpt the universe, yet researchers still don’t fully know how they form. Scientists turned to the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, to understand the frenzied “baby boom” of star birth that occurred early in the universe’s history. This nearby galaxy has a simpler chemical composition than the Milky Way, which makes it similar to the galaxies found in the younger universe, when heavier elements were less abundant. As a result, it can serve as a proxy for the early universe.

 

Two separate research studies – the first with the Hubble Space Telescope, and the second with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope – recently arrived at the same conclusion. Using different techniques, the independent teams discovered young stars spiraling into the center of a massive star cluster called NGC 346 in the Small Magellanic Cloud. This river-like motion of gas and stars is an efficient way to fuel star birth, astrophysicists say. The teams’ results demonstrate that the process of star formation in the Small Magellanic Cloud is similar to that in our own Milky Way.

 

The massive star cluster NGC 346, located in the Small Magellanic Cloud, has long intrigued astronomers with its unusual shape. Now researchers using two separate methods have determined that this shape is partly due to stars and gas spiraling into the center of this cluster in a river-like motion. Credit: NASA, ESA, Andi James (STScI)

NASA’s Hubble Finds Spiraling Stars, Providing Window into Early Universe

Spirals are prevalent in nature — from the whirlpool of a hurricane, to pinwheel-shaped protoplanetary disks around newborn stars, to the vast realms of spiral galaxies across our universe.

 

Now astronomers are bemused to discover young stars that are spiraling into the center of a massive cluster of stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.

 

The outer arm of the spiral in this massive, oddly shaped stellar nursery called NGC 346 may be feeding star formation in a river-like motion of gas and stars. Scientists say that this is an efficient way to fuel star birth.

 

The Small Magellanic Cloud has a simpler chemical composition than the Milky Way. This makes it similar to the galaxies found in the younger universe when heavier elements were more scarce. Because of this, the stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud burn hotter and therefore run out of their fuel faster than in our Milky Way.

 

Even though it can serve as a proxy for the early universe, the Small Magellanic Cloud is also one of our closest galactic neighbors, at just 200,000 light-years away.

 

Discovering how stars form in the Small Magellanic Cloud offers a new twist on how a firestorm of star birth may have occurred early in the universe’s history, when it was undergoing a “baby boom” about 2 to 3 billion years after the big bang (the universe is now 13.8 billion years old).

 

According to the new findings, the process of star formation there is similar to that in our own Milky Way.

 

NGC 346 boasts the mass of 50,000 Suns, despite being only 150 light-years in diameter. Its intriguing shape and rapid star-formation rate have baffled astronomers. It required the combined power of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) to unravel the behavior of this mysterious-looking stellar nesting ground.

 

“Stars are the machines that sculpt the universe. We would not have life without stars, and yet we don’t fully understand how they form,” explained study leader Elena Sabbi of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. “We have several models that make predictions, and some of these predictions are contradictory. We want to determine what is regulating the process of star formation, because these are the laws that we need to also understand what we see in the early universe.”

 

Scientists determined the motion of the stars in NGC 346 in two different ways. Using Hubble, Sabbi and her team measured the changes in the stars’ positions over 11 years. The stars in this region are moving at an average velocity of 2,000 miles per hour, resulting in a movement of 200 million miles in 11 years. This is about twice the distance between the Sun and the Earth.

 

However, this cluster is relatively far away, inside a neighboring galaxy. This means the amount of observed motion from our vantage point is very small and therefore difficult to measure. These extraordinarily precise observations were possible only because of Hubble’s outstanding resolution and high sensitivity. Additionally, Hubble’s three-decade-long history of observations provides a baseline for astronomers to follow minute celestial motions over time.

 

The second team, led by Peter Zeidler of AURA/STScI for the European Space Agency (ESA), used the ground-based VLT’s Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument to measure radial velocity, which determines whether an object is approaching or receding from an observer.

 

“What was really amazing is that we used two completely different methods with different facilities and basically came to the same conclusion, independent of each other,” said Zeidler. “With Hubble, you can see the stars, but with MUSE we can also see the gas motion in the third dimension, and it confirms the theory that everything is spiraling inwards.”

But why a spiral?

“A spiral is really the good, natural way to feed star formation from the outside toward the center of the cluster,” explained Zeidler. “It’s the most efficient way that stars and gas fueling more star formation can move towards the center.”

 

Half of the Hubble data for this study of NGC 346 is archival, with the first observations taken 11 years ago. These observations were recently repeated to trace the motion of the stars over time. Given the telescope’s longevity, more than 32 years of astronomical data are now contained in the Hubble data archive, which can power unprecedented, long-term studies.

 

“The Hubble archive is really a gold mine,” said Sabbi. “There are so many interesting star-forming regions that Hubble has observed over the years. Given that Hubble is performing so well, we can actually repeat these observations. This can really advance our understanding of star formation.”

 

Source: SciTechDaily

https://scitechdaily.com/nasas-hubble-space-telescope-finds-window-into-early-universe/

Recent research reveals that a substance produced by gut microorganisms can cause scarring and blood vessel damage in scleroderma patients.

The gut microbiome modulates immunity, and changes in it have a role in autoimmune disorders like scleroderma. Researchers did not know how changes in the intestinal microbiome contribute to the fibrosis and vascular damage seen in scleroderma until recently.

Researchers from Michigan Medicine explored how a compound called trimethylamine N-oxide, or TMAO, produced by the gut microbiome may alter cellular processes in scleroderma, causing fibrosis, inflammation, and vascular damage.

TMAO is generated in the liver when the stomach metabolizes nutrients like choline and carnitine, which are abundant in a meat-rich Western diet. According to findings published in iScience, the TMAO can reprogram cells to become scar-forming myofibroblasts, resulting in fibrosis and vascular damage. Furthermore, FMO3, the enzyme responsible for the production of TMAO, is elevated in scleroderma patients.

“We have uncovered a novel mechanism linking the Western diet, the gut microbiome, and some of the devastating effects of scleroderma,” said John Varga, M.D., senior author of the paper and chief of the Division of Rheumatology at the University of Michigan Health. “We will next examine whether drugs or food products like virgin olive oil, can be used to block the formation of this compound in the gut to treat fibrosis.”

Source: SciTechDaily

https://scitechdaily.com/western-diets-can-cause-scarring-and-blood-vessel-damage-in-scleroderma/

How do you know if you might be one of these people? Here are seven telltale iron deficiency symptoms to look out for.

1. Constant Tiredness

Excessive tiredness is one of the first iron deficiency symptoms to appear. The fatigue can come in both physical and mental forms, with breathlessness, a lack of energy, and ‘brain fog’ all common variations. Of course, there can be many other reasons for fatigue, but if you have no major sleep problems and no other underlying illness, then a lack of iron is one of the more likely explanations.

2. Restless Legs

Restless legs syndrome is the uncomfortable condition where you feel an irresistible urge to move your legs, most often while lying in bed. It can feel like a crawling sensation in the thigh and calf muscles, which has been memorably described as a ‘nausea of the legs’. Although the precise cause of restless legs isn’t known, it’s suspected that an iron deficiency is one factor, as it can reduce the amount of oxygen reaching your muscles as you lie in an otherwise relaxed state.

3. Palpitations

If you feel your heart is beating unusually quickly or with an irregular rhythm, especially when you’ve not been involved in any strenuous activity, then an iron deficiency is a potential cause. However, if these palpitations are a regular occurrence, then arranging a doctor’s appointment is wise to rule out anything more serious.

4. Skin Pallor

A mild lack of oxygen in the blood can cause pale skin, especially around the lower eyelids. The effect is easiest to see in people with naturally lighter complexions, but if there’s a marked difference in skin tone across different parts of your face, it’s another piece of evidence that your iron levels may be too low.

5. Hair Loss

Low iron levels can interfere with the health of hair follicles, preventing them from efficiently replacing the hair that naturally falls out every day. With lower replacement levels, the overall effect will be a thinner head of hair which can develop into noticeable hair loss over a longer period.

6. Strange Food Cravings

Almost any nutritional deficiency can lead to food cravings as your body tries to encourage a more balanced diet. However, with iron deficiency, you may start to crave inedible substances such as soil or metal, which is a clear sign that your nutritional needs aren’t being met.

7. Frequent Minor Illnesses

Lastly, iron plays an important role in a healthy immune system, and if your levels are low you’ll likely start to pick up all kinds of minor bugs and infections. If you seem to suffer from every ailment that goes around, then booking a checkup with your doctor is a good idea – you may be able to solve the problem with a simple diet change.

All of these individual symptoms can have multiple causes, but if you recognize several signs then an iron deficiency should be your first line of inquiry. Increasing your consumption of iron-rich foods such as red meat, dark leafy greens, eggs, seeds, and nuts can alleviate mild deficiencies surprisingly quickly. However, if dietary changes have no effect, then speak to your doctor to arrange a thorough investigation into the potential causes of your symptoms.

Source: SciTechDaily

https://scitechdaily.com/7-common-symptoms-of-iron-deficiency/

Frank Drake, a leading figure in planetary astronomy and astrobiology who inspired the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, died Friday, September 2, at the age of 92. “Frank essentially pioneered the field of SETI as a scientific endeavor by being the first to actually conduct a SETI experiment,” says Bill Diamond, president of the nonprofit SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.

Drake was born in Chicago in 1930. He studied engineering physics at Cornell University and then served as an electronics officer on a Navy cruiser for three years. Afterward, he earned his PhD in astronomy at Harvard.

His SETI quest began in 1960, when he was working for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at its telescopes in Green Bank, West Virginia. Unbeknownst to him, in 1959 a pair of physicists had published a research paper speculating about how far radio signals sent by extraterrestrial civilizations might travel and still be detectable by a receiver on Earth. “It turns out the distance is light-years,” says Seth Shostak, senior astronomer for the SETI Institute, a nonprofit research organization focused on the origins of, and the search for, alien life. “Maybe the sky is filled with signals, but we’ve just never looked for them.” 

Drake had already begun leading an effort to do just that. In 1960, he secured approval from the NRAO for Project Ozma (named after the princess in The Wizard of Oz), the first attempt to systematically hunt for alien signals. For a few hours every day, he pointed the facility’s 85-foot radio telescope at Tau Ceti and a handful of other nearby star systems, searching for bumps or wiggles above the background noise that might be signs of an intentional broadcast. He tuned in to a particular range of frequencies, notably one near the 21-centimeter emission line of hydrogen. This is normally a quiet part of the radio spectrum—most worlds would have few emissions in that range—so one could use it as a natural “hailing frequency.” But aside from one false alarm that was probably due to an aircraft, he and his colleagues heard only static.

Although the Green Bank experiment didn’t spot any alien messages, it showed how one could look for them, so the National Academy of Sciences approached Drake to help organize a conference about SETI there. That pivotal 1961 meeting brought together an influential and eclectic group of scientists, including the chemist Melvin Calvin (who was notified of his Nobel Prize win at the meeting), a dolphin intelligence researcher, the authors of the 1959 paper, and a young Carl Sagan, who would become a frequent collaborator with Drake.

At that conference, Drake began developing a seminal formula that later became known as the Drake Equation. Still in frequent use in various forms today, that formula tries to reach a ballpark figure for the number of alien societies that could exist within our galaxy and that might be trying to message us. Its variables include the birth rate of stars, the abundance of planets orbiting them, the fraction of those that are habitable rocky worlds, the portion of those on which life could develop, the fraction of alien civilizations that might transmit signals that can be detected, and the estimated lifetime of those civilizations.

While the variables about stars and planets can be constrained with some precision, no one really knows how long intelligent civilizations typically last. (After all, we have only earthling civilizations to extrapolate from. Although some have flourished for millennia, humans are just babies, cosmically speaking—and they’ve already threatened their very existence with nuclear war and climate change and still don’t know how to deflect killer asteroids.) “Most of the important terms of the equation are unknown. You could say, ‘The equation is useless,’ but that’s not true, because it is a good way to organize your ignorance,” Shostak says. It shows that questions about intelligent life and our efforts to listen for it need to bring together other fields, too, including astrophysics, geology, biology, and sociology.

Scientists ultimately built the field of astrobiology on the groundwork of that equation, Diamond argues. It showed how they could approach the search for alien life itself—not just scanning for its telltale radio broadcasts—from a variety of angles, including investigating the emergence of complexity and the development of intelligence and consciousness, studying evolution and the biochemical origins of lifeforms, and understanding the challenges of interstellar communications.

Drake’s efforts to make contact with other worlds didn’t stop when Project Ozma ended. Since the invention of broadcast radio, earthlings have accidentally sent signals into the heavens, via shows and songs. But these signals scatter in different directions and might not be detectable from afar. So in 1974, while serving as the director of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, Drake used the radio telescope to broadcast the first interstellar message deliberately sent from Earth. With 1,679 binary bits representing ones and zeros, he used frequency pulses to send a message in the direction of the star cluster M13, which included pictograms of a DNA double helix, a diagram of the solar system, and pictures of a human being and Arecibo. (His daughter Nadia Drake, a science journalist, later covered the telescope’s 50th anniversary for WIRED.)

He also participated in two efforts to send tangible messages into space. In the early 1970s, Drake, Sagan, and others designed the small metal plaques carried aboard NASA’s Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft, which depicted a pair of humans and Earth’s location in the Milky Way. They also collaborated on the Voyager Golden Records project. The two spacecraft each carry a metal record containing sounds, images, and music from Earth, as well as a player and instructions—should aliens find them one day. Today, all of these crafts continue to fly billions of miles beyond the solar system, carrying Drake’s messages with them.

In the 1960s and ’70s, Drake played a major role in driving astrobiology—then called exobiology—into becoming a systematic field of study of the origins and evolution of life on alien worlds. “Everyone was just beginning to muse on the role of liquid water. Could there be another liquid solvent—ammonia, chlorine—at an atmospheric pressure different than on Earth?” recalls Bill Nye, CEO of the nonprofit Planetary Society, which was cofounded by Sagan in 1980. “You could make an argument that all astrobiology speculation is a formal or informal form of the Drake Equation.”

In 1984, Thomas Pierson founded the SETI Institute in an effort to gain funding for and to support SETI research by astronomer Jill Tarter and others. Drake later served as president of the institute, a role he held until 2010. The institute launched a number of groundbreaking projects, including the Allen Telescope Array—42 antennas devoted solely to the SETI search—and the LaserSETI project, which scans the night sky for flashes of light that aren’t coming from astrophysical sources. (Their collaborators, the Berkeley SETI Research Center, ran one of the most well-known searches for extraterrestrial signals: SETI@home, a project that until 2020 let people devote their home computers’ downtime to crunching SETI data.)

In 2006, Drake became the inaugural director of the Carl Sagan Center, which supports more than 75 scientists advancing SETI work and studying astrobiology, and he served on the SETI Institute’s board of trustees into his seventies. Diamond and Shostak, who frequently worked with Drake there, described him as quiet, gracious, observant, and very intelligent. “He was a very humble gentleman for somebody who’s had such an impact on science and astrobiology. He was just a lovely human being,” Diamond says.

In recent years, scientists have begun fleshing out the Drake Equation and measuring its terms more precisely. For example, astronomers now better understand the lives of stars. Thanks to research with NASA’s Kepler telescope, they know that planets are more ubiquitous than previously thought, including ones in the “habitable zone” where it’s neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water.

Researchers are also exploring the equation in new ways. “The Drake Equation is iconic for describing and illustrating the search for signs of life by way of civilized aliens that have radio communication tools. I took his equation and recast it in the search for signs of life, not by intelligent aliens but by perhaps bacteria giving off a gas that accumulates in the atmosphere of a planet,” says Sara Seager, an astronomer at MIT working on multiple exoplanet-searching projects. Seager worked on a team that explored whether phosphine on Venus could be a sign of life. Other biosignature efforts include NASA’s Perseverance Rover, which is tasked with looking for traces of past microbial life on Mars, and planned future missions to Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Separate teams have also looked for technological signatures of alien civilizations, like smog on distant planets.

New space telescopes will surely help too, like the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which launched in 2018 and will find thousands of new worlds, and the James Webb Space Telescope, which could be used to scope out water vapor in planets’ atmospheres and potential signs of life on the worlds below.

But the most important part of Drake’s legacy, says Nye, is that people now frequently ask big and profound questions about humanity’s place in the universe. “Where did we come from? Are we alone in the cosmos?” Nye says. “All this speculation was because of Frank Drake. The guy changed the world.”

The Legendary Frank Drake Shaped the Search for Alien Life

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FCC to fight space debris by requiring satellite disposal in 5 years or less

Rocket Report: SLS launch targeted for late September, unique view of Falcon 9

During a late summer heat wave in California, golden hour becomes danger hour. In the offices of the California Independent System Operator, which manages the state’s grid, things get tense. Their mission is to keep the electrons going where they’re supposed to go—otherwise, it’s rolling blackouts for millions.

That risk arises from a brief, but important, mismatch between supply and demand. A growing share of the state’s energy is derived from solar panels, which made up about a fifth of its supply last year. But as the sun goes down and those panels stop receiving photons, demand for electricity keeps soaring. People get home from work and plug in their EVs, then flick on the air conditioning to clear out the afternoon stuffiness. Maybe they make dinner and run the dishwasher. Meanwhile, back at work, the lights in the office are probably still humming.

These were the concerns during this week’s heat emergency, when dozens of cities broke all-time temperature records and energy demand soared. But this time around, the California ISO had some extra juice to work with: a relatively new fleet of grid-scale batteries. They are designed to hold their power for about four hours—just long enough to cover the evening gap. At peak output, about 6 percent of the energy supply comes from these discharging batteries, up from 0.1 percent in 2017, according to an analysis by BloombergNEF. Capacity nearly doubled in the past year. Just after 6 pm on Tuesday, batteries surpassed the output of the state’s last remaining nuclear plant, peaking at just under 3,000 megawatts.

There was also a second push, this one on the demand side. At around 5:45 pm, the phones of millions of Californians buzzed as a solid block of text arrived, imploring them to delay all those evening rituals to save energy. Apparently, they did. In the next 20 minutes, more than 2,000 megawatts of demand disappeared from the grid, according to Anne Gonzales, a California ISO spokesperson. It happened so quickly that many energy pundits were stunned. “I was pleasantly surprised to see how everyone came together,” says Ryan Hanna, an energy researcher at the University of California, San Diego.

Altogether, Hanna says, both battery use and text alerts are relatively “marginal” inputs in keeping supply and demand in balance, given this week’s record-setting peak demand: 52,000 megawatts. In the evening hours, the state still relies on natural gas to top off the electricity supply, as well as imports from other states. (For comparison, gas peaked at nearly 27,000 megawatts.) But in a crisis like this, “the margins are everything,” he adds. While utilities in a few Bay Area communities went ahead with rotating outages on Tuesday, affecting about 50,000 customers—the result of what California ISO later called a miscommunication—that was far fewer than expected. On Wednesday and Thursday, despite coming close to Tuesday’s demand record, blackouts were again avoided.

It’s been a relatively slow ramp-up for large-scale battery deployment. Efforts to overhaul the grid and create more storage began a decade ago but have trailed renewable energy generation, like wind and solar farms, in terms of actual installations. In part, that’s because batteries are a regulatory puzzle. Some tricky math goes into figuring out the right incentives for a power source that stores, rather than produces, energy. Plus, while solar panels and wind turbines are now ubiquitous, grid operators have less experience deploying batteries at scale, so technical uncertainties remain. The state’s largest battery, a 1,600-MW-hour facility housed at a natural gas plant in Moss Landing, spent nearly a year largely offline due to issues managing the temperatures of the vast stacks of lithium-ion batteries.

There are other kinks to be worked out. Earlier this week, some batteries began discharging sooner than expected when the price battery operators are paid for their energy exceeded a state-mandated cap. (These operators can include local utilities, or independent companies.) With no upside to holding on to their electrons longer, the batteries started discharging their loads well before the grid was on high alert. The analysis on whether that was the right move “is still to come,” says Dan Kammen, an energy expert at the University of California, Berkeley. But it’s likely to spark discussions about the right way to incentivize battery operations—and potentially redesign the software that controls their operations to be more flexible in extreme situations.

Over the past two years, the difference in battery usage in the early evenings has been stark—an increase of more than 10 times at peak usage in 2022 compared to 2020. State plans call for an increase to 41 gigawatts of energy storage by 2045, up from about 3 gigawatts today.

And that’s a good thing, Kammen points out, because in some ways, California got lucky for most of this heat wave. While it’s been brutally hot, it hasn’t been blustery. High winds risk power line problems that spark fires, so utilities may shut off power preemptively to avoid trouble. Worse yet, if fires do spark, they can force other parts of the system to shut down or create smoke that obscures the sun and reduces solar output. (That happened at the tail end of the heatwave on Thursday night due to fires in Southern California, forcing officials to begin calls for demand reduction earlier in the day.) The mostly calm conditions this week meant grid operators had the luxury of using most of the tools at their disposal. And it meant that hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses supplied their own electricity, thanks to rooftop solar, reducing strain on the grid. Rooftop solar provided as much as 8,000 megawatts during Tuesday’s peak.

Ideally, future heat waves won’t be such nail-biters. It’s not ideal to ask people to change their behavior on the fly to conserve energy, Hanna notes, and it can be difficult to count on them to do the right thing. Energy planners would love to incorporate good behavior that’s prompted by something like a text alert into their predictive models—even moderate assumptions of goodwill are immensely useful for managing extreme conditions. But people don’t always respond to calls to conserve. During past heat waves, alerts have been ignored, or seem to have shifted the load from residences to workplaces, where people can charge up their cars or stay cool without racking up a steeper electricity bill at home.

There’s plenty more the state could be doing to fortify the grid, Kammen says. California is still a long way from tapping the full potential of more distributed forms of energy storage, including batteries inside homes or even inside electric cars. It could also be doing more to bolster supplies in seasons when energy demand is lower. Demand in the late summer is twice the typical load on a temperate spring day, he points out, which means the state could be storing extra energy produced earlier in the year, such as by pumping water into reservoirs that can be tapped months later or by using renewable energy to produce hydrogen fuel. “Surviving this is going to send a clear message to regulators that we need to invest more in renewables plus storage,” Kammen says.

California’s Heat Wave Is a Big Moment for Batteries

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It happened at 3:15 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 3, on Interstate 76 in Brighton, Colorado, northeast of Denver, according to the Brighton Police Department.

The suspect’s silver Dodge SUV not only had visor strobe lights, but sported stripes similar to those on unmarked patrol cars in some states, photos show.

“The ... vehicle initially attempted to stop an off-duty law enforcement officer driving their personal car by activating red and blue lights,” Brighton police said in a news release.

The mystery vehicle then pulled in front of the off-duty officer and forced him to the side of the road. “The suspect, wearing a ‘security’ shirt, exited his vehicle and approached the officer while displaying a silver badge in his hand,” officials said.

Details of their conversation were not revealed, but it ended with the suspect being arrested and taken to the Adams County Jail, officials said. “Charges including impersonating a peace officer,” officials said.

The identities of the suspect and police officer were not revealed.

Detectives suspect other drivers may have fallen for the ruse, and are asking anyone who recognizes the vehicle to call Brighton police or the Adams County Sheriff’s Office.

“As a reminder, law enforcement vehicles come in many different sizes and shapes,” Bright police officials said. “If you ever have a question about an unmarked vehicle pulling you over, please put your hazard (lights) on, continue at a safe speed, and call 9-1-1 to confirm the identity of the vehicle.”

The police department’s Facebook post about the incident has gotten hundreds of reactions and comments, some calling the incident “scary.” Others called it “a picture of perfect karma.”

“With thousands of cars at the road, he decided to stop an off duty officer! That’s just God at work!” one commenter wrote.

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DOJ attorney Kenneth Dintzer didn't disclose how much Google spends to be the default search engine on most browsers and all US mobile phones, but described the payments as "enormous numbers."

"Google invests billions in defaults, knowing people won't change them," Dintzer told Judge Amit Mehta during a hearing in Washington that marked the first major face-off in the case and drew top DOJ antitrust officials and Nebraska's attorney general among the spectators. "They are buying default exclusivity because defaults matter a lot."

Google's contracts form the basis of the DOJ's landmark antitrust lawsuit, which alleges the company has sought to maintain its online search monopoly in violation of antitrust laws. State attorneys general are pursuing a parallel antitrust suit against the search giant, also pending before Mehta.

A trial isn't expected to start formally until next year, but Thursday's hearing was the first substantive one in the case—a daylong tutorial where each side laid out its views on Google's business.

The Google antitrust suit, filed in the waning days of the Trump administration, was the federal government's first major effort to rein in the power of the tech giants, which continues under President Joe Biden. The White House Thursday hosted a roundtable with experts to explore the harm major tech platforms can wreak on the economy and children's health.

Google's attorney John Schmidtlein said the DOJ and states misunderstand the market and focus too narrowly on smaller search engine rivals like Microsoft Corp.'s Bing and DuckDuckGo. Instead, Google faces competition from dozens of other companies, he said, including ByteDance Ltd.'s TikTok, Meta Platforms Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Grubhub Inc. and additional sites sites where consumers go to search for information.

"You don't have to go to Google to shop on Amazon. You don't have to go to Google to buy plane tickets on Expedia," he said. "The fact that Google doesn't face the same competition on every query doesn't mean the company doesn't face tough competition."

Having fresh data on user search queries is key to a search engine's success, lawyers for DOJ, the states and Google all agreed. Google controls the most popular browser, Chrome, and the second-most popular mobile operating system, Android.

In his presentation, DOJ's Dintzer focused on the mechanics of Google's search engine and how its default contracts have hemmed in potential rivals. On mobile, Google contracts with Apple, smartphone makers like Samsung and Motorola Solutions Inc., most browsers and the three US telecom carriers—AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and T-Mobile US Inc.—to ensure its search engine is set as the default and comes preinstalled on new phones, Dintzer said. Microsoft's search engine, Bing, is the default on the company's Edge browser and Amazon's Fire tablets, he said.

Google's contracts make it the "gateway" by which most people find websites on the internet, which has allowed it to prevent rivals from gaining the scale that would be needed to challenge its search engine, Dintzer said.

"Default exclusivity allows Google to systemically deny rivals' data," he said.

Google's Schmidtlein said the company has contracted with Apple and browsers like Mozilla since the early 2000s. DOJ and the states haven't explained why those deals are now problems, he said. The revenue-sharing deals that Google offers to browsers are essential to companies like Mozilla Corp., he said, because they offer their products to users for free.

"The reason they partner with Google isn't because they had to; it's because they want to," Schmidtlein said. The company "had extraordinary success and was doing something incredibly valuable. Competition on the merits is not unlawful."

The case is US v. Google, 20-cv-3010, US District Court, District of Columbia (Washington).

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When they examined decades-old blood samples from 14 NASA astronauts who flew Space Shuttle missions between 1998 and 2001, researchers found that samples from all 14 astronauts showed mutations in their DNA.

While these mutations are likely low enough not to represent a serious threat to the astronauts' long term health, the research underlines the importance of regular health screenings for astronauts, especially as they embark on longer missions to the Moon and beyond in coming years.

The specific mutations, as identified in a new study published in the journal Nature Communications Biology, were marked by a high proportion of blood cells that came from a single clone, a phenomenon called clonal hematopoiesis.

Mutations like this can be caused by exposure to excess ultraviolet radiation, and other forms of radiation including chemotherapy.

In this case, researchers are suspicious that the mutations may have been the result of space radiation.

"Astronauts work in an extreme environment where many factors can result in somatic mutations, most importantly space radiation, which means there is a risk that these mutations could develop into clonal hematopoiesis," said lead author David Goukassian, professor of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, in a statement.

The topic of astronaut health is more pertinent than ever before. Just last year, NASA proposed to change the radiation limits its astronauts can be exposed to to protect their health.

In short, the agency is trying to allow younger astronauts to be exposed to relatively higher amounts of radiation than older astronauts, and eliminating the differences in limits between men and women.

The blood samples for this latest study were collected from 12 male and two female astronauts ten days before their flight and on the day of their landing. The samples were then cryogenically stored at -112 degrees Fahrenheit for around two decades.

The mutations observed in the blood samples resemble the kind of somatic mutations we see in older individuals — which is interesting on its own, considering the median age of the astronauts was only 42.

"Although the clonal hematopoiesis we observed was of a relatively small size, the fact that we observed these mutations was surprising given the relatively young age and health of these astronauts," Goukassian said.

"The presence of these mutations does not necessarily mean that the astronauts will develop cardiovascular disease or cancer," he added, "but there is the risk that, over time, this could happen through ongoing and prolonged exposure to the extreme environment of deep space."

Therefore, Goukassian and his team are recommending that NASA should regularly screen astronauts for these kinds of mutations.

Scientists have long speculated about the numerous health risks astronauts face when spending extended periods of time in outer space — and the more we discover, the better we can ensure their safety in the long run.

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The Covid-19 messenger RNA vaccines are getting an update. The new booster shots rolling out across the US and Europe this week are specifically tailored to currently circulating Omicron variants. Health officials think these will provide better protection against newer versions of SARS-CoV-2 than earlier shots, which were designed to target the virus that was first detected in late 2019.

Since its emergence, the coronavirus has been constantly changing. These mutations have allowed it to spread more easily and to better evade the immune system response provoked by the original vaccines and boosters. Although Omicron and its subvariants are the most transmissible yet, our vaccines have remained the same.

“Basically, we’re trying to catch up with a virus that keeps evolving,” says Ross McKinney, chief scientific officer at the Association of American Medical Colleges. “And although we cannot predict the future, the hope is that the next variant will be an offshoot of BA.4 or BA.5. So having antibodies that protect you against that will be useful.”

Both BA.4 and BA.5 are subvariants of Omicron. As of September 3, BA.5 accounted for an estimated 88.6 percent of all Covid-19 cases in the US, while BA.4 comprised 2.8 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A new descendant of BA.4, known as BA.4.6, now represents about 8.4 percent of cases.

Made separately by Moderna and Pfizer, the new US formulations target the ancestral strain of the virus as well as BA.4 and BA.5. Called bivalent vaccines, they contain two pieces of messenger RNA that instruct cells in the body to make the distinctive “spike” protein of the original virus strain and of those two subvariants. The spike proteins of BA.4 and BA.5 are identical, but dozens of mutations in this protein have made it easier for them to slip past disease-fighting antibodies created by previous vaccines or infections, allowing them to get into human cells.

“Over time, the virus has progressively evolved, so it looks less and less like the virus that started in the human population,” says Robert Schooley, professor of infectious diseases at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine. “If our vaccines continue to look like the older variants, we’ll be stimulating the human immune system to recognize those variants, but not the new ones.”

On August 31, the Food and Drug Administration granted emergency authorization for both Moderna’s and Pfizer-BioNTech’s variant-specific boosters. Shortly after, the CDC endorsed the shots for US residents. Meanwhile, the European Medicines Agency and the UK’s health regulator have approved a bivalent version that targets the original virus and BA.1, the Omicron variant that became dominant last winter.

Currently, anyone 12 and older can receive a new bivalent booster if they’ve had an older booster or their primary vaccine series. (That means two doses of the Moderna, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, or Novavax vaccines, or one dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.) The CDC recommends getting the new booster at least two months after a previous vaccine dose. People who have recently had Covid-19 can delay their booster dose by three months from the onset of their symptoms, according to the CDC.

But just how effective the BA.4-BA.5 boosters are is still unknown. For these variant-specific boosters, the FDA has said that large clinical trials aren’t needed. Instead, vaccine makers can conduct smaller studies to ensure the new formulations generate an immune response in people—similar to what’s done for the annual flu vaccine.

Moderna and Pfizer initially tested bivalent vaccines tailored to the original virus plus BA.1. Then BA.4 and BA.5 supplanted BA.1. The FDA asked both companies to pivot to making a formulation that would target the newer variants instead.

Studies assessing the effectiveness of the BA.4 and BA.5 bivalent vaccines are still ongoing, so regulators OK’d the vaccines based on animal data, as well as trials of BA.1 bivalent vaccines. In one study of nearly 600 people, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, academic researchers showed that Moderna’s BA.1 bivalent vaccine induced higher levels of antibodies against Omicron than the original vaccines. Mouse studies from both Moderna and Pfizer on their BA.4 and BA.5 formulation also showed a stronger immune response to those variants.

Since the underlying mRNA technology of the vaccine is the same, and the original vaccines have been shown to be safe, scientists don’t expect any new issues with the latest boosters. “Part of the reason to try to get this out as quickly as possible is because we’ve got the fall season coming,” says Aubree Gordon, associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. Covid-19 infections and hospitalizations dramatically increased during the past two winters, but health officials are hoping to stem a similar surge this year. “We really want to bring down the rates of infection in people, and putting out a vaccine that generates immunity specifically to the circulating variants will help to do that,” she says.

These new boosters are probably the first annual shots of their kind. “We likely are moving toward a path with a vaccination cadence similar to that of the annual influenza vaccine, with annual, updated Covid-19 shots matched to the currently circulating strains for most of the population,” said Anthony Fauci, chief medical advisor to the president and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, at a September 6 White House briefing. However, people who are particularly vulnerable may need more frequent vaccination, he said.

It remains unclear whether future boosters should continue to target the original strain. “We’ll see if people make better responses to this new hybrid vaccine,” says Schooley. For now, he says, “this is a way of keeping something in place that we know has worked well while we look at this new vaccine and make sure that it works the way we think it will.”

Ideally, a vaccine that generates an even broader immune response, either against all coronaviruses or specifically against those in the SARS lineage, would protect against future versions of the virus. If so, regular boosters would no longer be needed. “I think that that’s totally possible,” says Gordon. “I just think it’s going to be a few years before we’re there.”

How Does a Variant-Specific Covid Booster Work?

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The SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft sit on the launchpad on September 6th, 2022. Photo by CHANDAN KHANNA / AFP via Getty Images

After repeated delays, NASA is lightly penciling in launch dates of September 23rd or 27th for its Artemis I mission. A lot of things will have to go right for either of those dates to be possible, including repairs to the rocket’s fueling system, a sign-off from the Space Force, and managing to avoid an assortment of space scheduling conflicts.

Artemis I will mark the first launch of the agency’s massive Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and will send a spacecraft called Orion out on an orbit far past the Moon. This mission will be uncrewed and serve as a test for later missions that will send astronauts back to the Moon for the first time in decades.

After a hydrogen leak foiled NASA’s third attempt to launch the mission on September 3rd, NASA decided to do repairs while staying on the launchpad. They will be replacing seals on the connection between the rocket and the fuel lines that send liquid hydrogen fuel into the rocket. Staying on the pad will let the team test the new seals in cryogenic temperatures, mimicking conditions that would take place during an actual launch.

They are currently targeting September 17th for that key cryogenic test, which only leaves a few days before that first launch window opens on the 23rd. They’ll need about four days between a successful test and a launch attempt, said Mike Bolger, the Exploration Ground Systems program manager at Kennedy Space Center, during a press conference on Thursday.

Aside from the immediate need to repair and test the seals, there are also some other major issues that may affect NASA’s ability to get Artemis I off the ground this month. One of the biggest involves a system inside the rocket called the flight termination system, which allows the rocket to be destroyed if something goes wrong during launch.

It’s a key safety system when dealing with big rockets or missiles, and for pretty obvious reasons, it needs to be working at the time of launch. The Space Force is in charge of launches within the Eastern Range, where NASA is attempting to launch the rocket. It requires that the batteries on the flight termination system be certified as in working order at the time of launch, something that can only be done at the Vehicle Assembly Building, four miles (and many hours) away from the launchpad.

NASA already got one extension on the system’s certification, allowing them a little breathing room during their earlier launch attempts, but that waiver has now passed, and they have to apply for a new extension. Ultimately, it’s up to the Space Force to make the call as to whether or not it thinks the launch can safely go forward without rolling back into the VAB.

Then there’s everything else that’s going on in space. Now that NASA has missed the late August / early September launch windows, the SLS will have to contend with other missions’ schedules. The agency chose the 23rd and the 27th to avoid conflicts with NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, which is scheduled to slam into an asteroid on September 26th. There’s also a crew scheduled to travel to the ISS in early October. If Artemis I misses these next chances to launch, whether because of delays in repairs or having to roll back into the VAB for a checkup, the next chance to launch may be later in October.

NASA eyes late September for another Artemis I launch attempt

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Scientists glean new insights into how tardigrades can survive dehydration

It’s long been a mystery why one of the most basic human experiences—feeling physical pain—fluctuates in intensity throughout the day. Since the early days of medicine, doctors and patients have noticed that many types of pain tend to get worse at night. Most research so far has tried to link mounting nighttime pain to sleep deprivation or disrupted sleep, but with limited success.

In a recently published study, scientists led by Claude Gronfier at the Lyon Neuroscience Research Centre in France have finally shed light on changing pain sensitivity, suggesting that our circadian clock strongly shapes these shifts, with a characteristic peak and trough of intensity at different times of day.

Even people who can’t dance have internal rhythms thrumming through every system in their body. Known as circadian rhythms, these biological processes tune their activity to rise and fall at precise times across the day, driven by the body’s internal clock. They influence pretty much every bodily system, exerting control over “almost all aspects of our physiology and behavior,” says Lance Kriegsfeld, a circadian biologist at the University of California, Berkeley.

The work by Gronfier and his team revealed the influence of these rhythms on pain by showing that a short, painful heat stimulus was perceived to be most painful around 3 am and least painful at approximately 3 pm. “It’s very exciting,” says Nader Ghasemlou, a pain scientist at Queens University in Kingston, Canada, who wasn’t involved in the research. “It is one of these studies that is answering questions that we’ve had for a long time.”

Uncertainties have persisted for so long because proving that anything is driven by the body’s internal clock is difficult and requires a grueling study design. Researchers must put participants in a controlled laboratory setting where they can rule out any environmental or behavioral factors that could also cause a rhythmic fluctuation. This approach is called a “constant routine protocol,” where everything is kept constant—lighting, temperature, access to food—and it’s impossible to tell what time it is. Participants must lie down in a semi-recumbent position in a dimly lit room for at least 24 hours. They’re not allowed to sleep, leave, or stand to use the bathroom. Food is given only as small snacks every hour. Participants can chat with study team members, but staff are strictly forbidden from mentioning anything related to the time. Under the protocol, nothing in the environment or the participants’ behavior is rhythmic anymore, Gronfier explains. So if the researchers spot a biological measure that has a 24-hour rhythm, that pattern “emanates from within, and precisely from the circadian timing system.”

To uncover pain’s rhythmic nature, Gronfier’s team found 12 healthy young men who agreed to undergo the protocol for 34 hours. Every two hours, the team tested their pain sensitivity using a device placed on the forearm that slowly increased in temperature by one degree Celsius until they reported pain. Participants usually stopped the device before it reached around 46 degrees Celsius (115 degrees Fahrenheit). The participants were also tested with the device set at specific temperatures (42, 44, and 46 degrees Celsius), and then asked to rate on a visual scale the level of pain they felt.

Before the team could look for rhythms in this data, they had to get a measure of each person’s body clock. While everyone’s rhythms follow a daily cycle, some are skewed earlier or later in the day—leading to “morning larks,” “night owls,” and everyone in between. The team did this by collecting hourly saliva samples to evaluate the rise of melatonin, a hormone released about two hours before someone’s normal bedtime, and then used this information to synchronize everyone’s rhythms against a single 24-hour clock. A clear cycle of pain then emerged. On average, sensitivity peaked between 3 am and 4 am on this standardized measure before reaching its lowest point about 12 hours later.

The team also showed that these rhythms were specific to painful stimuli. Participants also performed a task where the temperature slowly rose until they detected warmth, but at these non-painful thresholds, there wasn’t any rhythmic pattern to the intensity of what people felt.

“It makes so much sense, and yet it is relatively non-intuitive—because if it were so obvious, it would have been proven a long time ago,” says Beth Darnall, director of the Pain Relief Innovations Lab at Stanford University. “This is so novel, but it has so much face validity.”

Since the participants weren’t allowed to sleep through the night, the researchers were also able to tease out whether any rises in pain were related to sleep deprivation—the prevailing theory before the new paper. The study team reasoned that any increased pain sensitivity caused by sleep deprivation would slowly build up linearly across the night as pressure to sleep increased. This would contrast with a waxing and waning pattern driven by the circadian system, and so the researchers used mathematical modeling to see to what extent the changes in participants’ pain perception appeared to be explained by a slow increase versus a rhythmic change. The results were an impressive win for the circadian system: 80 percent of the data could be explained by the circadian drive, with just 20 percent explained by the sleep drive.

“We were surprised by that ratio. Indeed, I was thinking that we would have much more drive-by sleep,” says Gronfier. “But it doesn’t mean that sleep isn’t important, because we did our study in very good sleepers.” Repeating the study in people who are chronically sleep-deprived or have a sleep disorder, he adds, might show that the need for sleep has a much larger impact on pain for some.

It will be necessary to repeat the study in a sample of women, too. Because hormones like estrogen are known to affect circadian rhythms, it’s possible researchers won’t find the same pattern of pain rhythmicity. “We see sex differences every time we do anything with men and women,” says Debra Skene, a circadian biologist at the University of Surrey in England who wasn’t involved in the research. “But to me, I think it would be about the amplitude—or how big that curve is—I don’t think it’s going to change the time that we’re most sensitive.”

And though the study was small, with a sample of just 12 men, the rhythmic effects were so strong that researchers like Skene are confident the team uncovered a true circadian influence on pain, which can now be studied in older populations and people of different ethnicities.

In the future, Darnall hopes that studying the circadian nature of pain caused by health conditions—say cancer or shingles—will have an impact on how that pain is treated. “Circadian pathology may be a more important therapeutic target than has been appreciated before,” she says. It might be that it’s better to give pain treatments based on the body’s internal clock rather than the one on the wall. That’s just one of the things researchers like John Hogenesch, a circadian biologist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, are now pushing for.

In 2019, Hogenesch and his colleagues published a paper showing that hospital prescriptions for pain medications surged in the morning and dwindled at night. In other words, the hospital had its own 24-hour rhythm—but not one accurately reflecting the needs of its patients. “We know that pain is reported most often in the night, and despite that, the pain wasn’t really treated until the next day,” Hogenesch says. He’s hopeful the new paper from Gronfier’s lab will be read by clinicians, who may then decide to prescribe painkillers overnight. He also hopes the findings will encourage more research on the topic of pain fluctuation.

But as more work starts to trickle in, we can’t assume it will show that every type of pain reaches its apex at night. Some people with inflammatory pain conditions like migraines and arthritis report more pain in the morning, so it’s possible that variation depends on the type of tissue or bodily system involved. And of course, looking at different groups of people could reveal unique rhythms.

As for what’s causing the rise and fall of pain, scientists still aren’t sure. But there are clues. Nearly every cell in your body has its own molecular clock that listens to signals from the master pacemaker in our brain. So Zameel Cader, a neuroscientist and neurologist at the University of Oxford, and his colleagues hypothesized that the amount of pain we feel might be due to the rhythm of the cells detecting the pain. A recent preprint (an early piece of research still awaiting review by independent scientists) from his lab supports this—pain fluctuations over 24 hours in mice were shown to rely on the molecular clocks found in nerve cells activated by a painful stimulus. When they used a technique that deleted the molecular clocks in the mice’s peripheral nerve cells, the rodents’ pain levels were stable throughout the day.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway for now is that whenever pain strikes, the role of the circadian system means that what goes up must come down. On the slow roller-coaster ride of pain perception, you might be just a few hours away from relief without popping a single pill. Then again, it might be about to get worse.

Why Pain Feels Worse at Night

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Western media reported that local officials in Chengdu enforced the lockdown even as tremors hit the city from an earthquake in Sichuan that measured 6.8 on the Richter scale.

Shenzhen had closed its city center and ordered most residents to remain in place last weekend after a spurt of Covid cases. Shenzhen reported 71 new cases on Monday.

Thousands of Chinese factories are now working in a so-called closed loop, in which employees are required to sleep at their factories.

The damage will not be as great as what resulted from the month-long shutdown of Shanghai, with its 26 million people and its leading role in Chinese manufacturing, finance and transport, but nonetheless is extremely serious.

Chengdu emerged as a center of China’s aerospace and information technology industries. Its relationship to Shenzhen, the nerve center of Chinese information technology, is something like that of Austin, Texas, to Palo Alto.

Once again, we observe a bouncing-ball pattern of Covid transmission from province to province.

After the fact, statistical evidence is overwhelming that a small number of cases in a distant province – in the most recent case Xinjiang – can ignite a Covid wave in major population centers.

The twin cities of Chengdu and Chongqing, the former in Sichuan province, the latter a provincial-level municipality under the direct administration of the central government, form China’s largest population center with a combined population of 52 million. A major outbreak in the dual megalopolis would have serious consequences for China’s economy.

But, before the fact, it’s impossible to lock down the highly transmittable Omicron strain of Covid-19 fast enough to avoid further outbreaks – except by shutting down enormous swaths of China’s economy.

China’s complacency after its 2020 success in containing Covid-19 led Beijing to neglect measures that would have made the tragic Shanghai lockdown avoidable. Once the highly-contagious new Covid strains hit Shanghai in early April, China had no choice but to lock the city down, with a cost in death and suffering that still remains to be tallied.

But the disaster could have been mitigated by the mass application of better vaccines and by improvement in the AI/Big Data capacity that China applied with success in 2020.

How China’s Covid controls broke down: a quantitative inquiry

Statistical evidence is overwhelming that a small number of cases in one province can lead rapidly to a much larger outbreak in another province. The Omicron strain transmits so rapidly that China’s systems cannot contain it.

In the charts below, we disaggregate the national picture into pairs of provinces to illustrate the speed of transmission.

Shandong’s largest city, Qingdao, is 750 kilometers by road from Shanghai on the coast of the Yellow Sea. But the transmissibility of the new Covid strains is so high that a few travelers on an intercity bus might be sufficient to bring the pandemic to China’s economic capital.

By the time the authorities decided to lock down Shanghai, there probably was no other choice. Cases had begun to appear in Beijing, despite quarantine procedures for Chinese as well as international travelers to China’s capital. The Shanghai lockdown gave the government time to control the Beijing outbreak, which never exceeded a few hundred cases a week.

But now we observe the same pattern repeated between Xinjiang and Sichuan. Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi is nearly 3,000 kilometers from Chengdu, but there are 18 scheduled commercial flights a day between the two cities, as well as rail and bus connections.

The cross-correlograms below show the correlation between leads and lags of Covid cases (using a 5-day change in the case volume) between Shandong and Shanghai, and Xinjiang and Sichuan, respectively.

Econometric analysis confirms the strong predictive relationship between lagged values for Xinjiang Covid cases and current values of Sichuan cases.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that public opinion in China, especially among younger Chinese, has turned against “Zero Covid.” This contrasts markedly with public support for the government during the initial wave of the pandemic in 2020. An opinion poll conducted by the University of California San Diego in March 2020 showed strong confidence in China’s Covid policies:

Results from three of our most recent surveys – which asked respondents about their trust in the central and local governments in China, support of China’s political system, and opinions toward the United States – show remarkable growth in favorable opinions of the Chinese government, and declines in favorable opinion of the US.

The average levels of trust in both the central and local governments in China have steadily increased during the past year. On a scale of 1 to 10, the average level of trust in the central government – already high – increased from 8.23 in June 2019, to 8.65 in Feb 2020, and to 8.87 in May 2020. There was a similar upward trend for the average level of trust in municipal governments.

No credible polling data is available, but a sign of dissent came last week from a Chinese think tank, the Anbound Research Center, which titled a new report, “It’s Time for China to Adjust Its Virus Control and Prevention Policies.” According to Western news services, the report was posted on social media but deleted the following day. It gave no details of proposed changes.

It is unlikely that China will revise its Covid policy before the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party in mid-October. President Xi Jinping has staked a lot of credibility on Zero Covid, and would be reluctant in the extreme to admit error prior to his presumed re-election. After the Congress, a more rational approach is likely. This probably would include:

1. Enhanced monitoring of vital signs of a large sample of the population through smartphones and wearables (temperature, blood oxygen, pulse) to provide a more fine-grained “heat map” of Covid’s spread;
2. The use of mRNA vaccines used successfully in Hong Kong to control the spread and severity of the pandemic earlier this year; and
3. Shorter and more localized lockdowns rather than all-city shutdowns.

The chart above shows the number of mRNA vaccine doses administered in Hong Kong prior to the winter 2022 outbreak. The spike in cases was brief and rapidly controlled, in significant measure due to the superior vaccine.

Source: Asia Times

https://asiatimes.com/2022/09/how-zero-covid-failed-again-in-chengdu/