In late August, Erin Alexander, 57, sat in the parking lot of a Target store in Fairfield, Calif., and wept. Her sister-in-law had recently died, and Ms. Alexander was having a hard day.

A barista working at the Starbucks inside the Target was too. The espresso machine had broken down and she was clearly stressed. Ms. Alexander — who’d stopped crying and gone inside for some caffeine — smiled, ordered an iced green tea, and told her to hang in there. After picking up her order, she noticed a message on the cup: “Erin,” the barista had scrawled next to a heart, “your soul is golden.”

“I’m not sure I even necessarily know what ‘your soul is golden’ means,” said Ms. Alexander, who laughed and cried while recalling the incident.

But the warmth of that small and unexpected gesture, from a stranger who had no inkling of what she was going through, moved her deeply.

“Of course, I was still really sad,” Ms. Alexander said. “But that little thing made the rest of my day.”

New findings, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in August, corroborate just how powerful experiences like Ms. Alexander’s can be.

Researchers found that people who perform a random act of kindness tend to underestimate how much the recipient will appreciate it. And they believe that miscalculation could hold many of us back from doing nice things for others more often.

“We have this negativity bias when it comes to social connection. We just don’t think the positive impact of our behaviors is as positive as it is,” said Marisa Franco, a psychologist and author of “Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make — and Keep — Friends,” who did not work on the recent research.

“With a study like this, I hope it will inspire more people to actually commit random acts of kindness,” she said.

Underestimating the power of small gestures

The recent study comprised eight small experiments that varied in design and participants. In one, for example, graduate students were asked to perform thoughtful acts of their own choosing, like giving a classmate a ride home from campus, baking cookies or buying someone a cup of coffee.

In another, researchers recruited 84 participants on two cold weekends at the ice skating rink at Maggie Daley Park in Chicago. They were given a hot chocolate from the snack kiosk and were told they could keep it or give it to a stranger as a deliberate act of kindness. The 75 participants who gave away their hot chocolate were asked to guess how “big” the act of kindness would feel to the recipient on a scale from 0 (very small) to 10 (very large), and to predict how the recipient would rate their mood (ranging from much more negative than normal to much more positive than normal) upon receiving the drink. The recipients were then asked to report how they actually felt using the same scales.

In that experiment — and across all others — the people doing the kind thing consistently underestimated how much it was actually appreciated, said one of the study’s authors, Amit Kumar, an assistant professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Texas, Austin.

“We believe these miscalibrated expectations matter for behavior,” he said. “Not knowing one’s positive impact can stand in the way of people engaging in these sorts of acts of kindness in daily life.”

Another experiment in the study was devised to help researchers better understand this tendency to underestimate the power of our own kind acts. In it, Dr. Kumar and his team recruited 200 participants in Maggie Daley Park. A control group of 50 participants received a cupcake simply for participating in the study and rated their mood. Another 50 people who did not receive a cupcake rated how they thought the receivers would feel after getting a cupcake.

A third group of 50 people were told they could give a cupcake away to strangers, and were asked to rate their own mood as well as how they believed the recipients would feel. Once again, the researchers found that those who got a cupcake as a result of a random act of kindness felt better than the person on the giving end thought they would.

Also, people who got a cupcake because of an act of kindness rated themselves higher on a happiness scale than those who got one simply for participating in the study, suggesting they got an emotional boost from the gesture, in addition to the cupcake itself.

“People tend to think that what they are giving is kind of little, maybe it’s relatively inconsequential,” Dr. Kumar said. “But recipients are less likely to think along those lines. They consider the gesture to be significantly more meaningful because they are also thinking about the fact that someone did something nice for them.”

How to show others you care

The notion that kindness can boost well-being is hardly new. Studies have shown that prosocial behavior — basically, voluntarily helping others — can help lower people’s daily stress levels, and that simple acts of connection, like texting a friend, mean more than many of us realize. But researchers who study kindness and friendship say they hope the new findings strengthen the scientific case for making these types of gestures more often.

“I have found that kindness can be a really hard sell,” said Tara Cousineau, a clinical psychologist, meditation teacher and author of “The Kindness Cure: How The Science of Compassion Can Heal Your Heart and Your World.” “People desire kindness yet often feel inconvenienced by the thought of being kind.”

Stress can also keep people from being kind to others, she said, as can the “little judgy voice” in people’s heads that causes them to question whether their gesture or gift will be misinterpreted, or whether it will make the recipient feel pressured to pay it back.

“When the kindness impulse arises,” Dr. Cousineau said, “we totally overthink it.”

But an act of kindness is unlikely to backfire, she said, and in some instances it can beget even more kindness. Jennifer Oldham, 36, who lost her 9-year-old daughter, Hallie, in July after a tree fell on the car she was in during a storm, recently created a Facebook group — Keeping Kindness for Hallie — that encourages participants to engage in random acts of kindness. People have bought groceries and baby formula for others in Hallie’s honor. They’ve donated school supplies and given hydrangeas to strangers.

“No small act goes unnoticed,” Ms. Oldham said. “It will help your own heart, maybe even more than the recipients.”

Sometimes, it is something much sillier. When Kimberly Britt, president of Phoenix College in Arizona, left for a week of vacation in July, her vice president of student affairs hid 60 rubber chickens in her office.

“She did it so I wouldn’t find them all immediately, and it did take me a while,” she said. “But it was meant to bring a smile to my day when I returned.”
It did, and has since inspired Dr. Britt to begin a random acts of kindness challenge on campus. They have recorded 200 acts of kindness so far: a teacher who went above and beyond to spend time with a student who was struggling emotionally, a staff member who brought food to the office, another who made coffee for all of their colleagues.

If you are not already in the habit of performing random kind acts — or if it does not come naturally to you — Dr. Franco said to start by thinking about what you like to do.

“It’s not about you being like, ‘Oh man, now I have to learn how to bake cookies in order to be nice,’” she said. “It’s about: What skills and talents do you already have? And how can you turn that into an offering for other people?”

Source

Responding to the news, Amazon spokesperson Erika Howard said:

“Out of an abundance of caution, following a small number of isolated incidents with onsite solar systems owned and operated by third parties, Amazon proactively powered off our onsite solar installations in North America, and took immediate steps to re-inspect each installation by a leading solar technical expert firm.”

While having teething problems with new technologies is fine, Amazon decided to exclude what had happened from its 2021 sustainability report that was published last month. Instead, it said that solar rooftops would be powering 115 fulfilment centres around the world by the end of 2021, up from 90 in mid-2021.

The spokesperson confirmed to CNBC that Amazon has completed its inspections of the solar rooftops and that they were being powered back on. She also said that Amazon now has a team of experts that construct, operate, and maintain solar panels to ensure a higher level of safety. Previously, the company was using third-party vendors.

Amazon has said that it’s trying to become a net-zero company by 2040. That’s ten years earlier than the Paris Climate Agreement. Through The Climate Pledge, it’s also trying to help other businesses achieve net-zero status too.

Source: CNBC

Amazon's solar panels have been going up in flames and the company forgot to mention it

June 29, 2022, was the shortest day ever on record, at 1.59 milliseconds less than 24 hours. You probably didn’t notice, since 1.59 milliseconds goes by pretty fast, but it raises some interesting theoretical questions, like: Since it fell on a Wednesday, should you subtract those missing 1.59 milliseconds from your workday or from your sleep? And: Could Earth’s days get even shorter?

That may sound like a wild idea, but there’s a reason to think it could happen: climate change. Burning fossil fuels adds carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, which melts glaciers—and how that affects the Earth’s motion might have some bearing on the length of a day. I’ll take you through it step by step.

What Is a Day?

First, let’s go over some basics about how we determine what a “day” is. We’ll start with the sun. For the sake of this calculation, we can assume that the sun just stays in place. Of course, this isn't actually true—in fact, the sun orbits the center of the galaxy. But this motion has no measurable effect on the length of a day.

The Earth has two motions that change the length of a day. First, the planet orbits the sun, with one orbit taking a year. Second, it rotates around an axis passing from its north pole to the south pole. Each rotation takes about a day. The Earth's rotational axis isn't exactly perpendicular to the orbital plane. Instead, it's tilted about 23.4 degrees.

There are several definitions of “day”—probably more than you realize. There is, of course, the common sense of day versus night, in which day means the part of the solar cycle when your location on the Earth faces the sun and it is light outside. Using that definition, it's fairly obvious that the length of a day isn't constant—surely you have noticed that daylight is shorter in the winter and longer in the summer. This difference is caused by the tilt of the Earth's axis. During the summer, the northern hemisphere is tilted toward the sun. This means that the sun rises higher in the sky and takes a longer path from sunrise to sunset, so there is more daylight time. For the northern hemisphere, the reverse happens in the winter. (The seasons are the opposite in the southern hemisphere.)

But this isn't the kind of day we want to talk about. There are two other definitions we can use. One is the time from noon on one day to noon on the next—defining “noon” as when the sun is at its highest point in the sky. This is called a solar day, and it has a value of 24 hours, or 86,400 seconds.

Does that mean it takes the Earth 24 hours to make a complete rotation? Actually, no. The Earth makes one rotation in 23 hours, 56 minutes and about 4 seconds. This shorter time frame is called a stellar day. You could define it as the time it takes a star you observe in the sky to get back to the same apparent position from your vantage point on Earth. Why is this different than a solar day? It's because the Earth is both rotating on its axis and orbiting the sun at the same time.

Let's consider an example with an imaginary planet. In this solar system, the planet completes one orbit around its sun in 8.6 solar days, instead of 365 days, as the Earth does. (I'm using a shorter year because it magnifies the difference between solar and stellar days, so you can see it more easily.)

Here is an animation showing the difference between solar and stellar days for this planet. The arrow shows when a certain spot on the planet points at a distant star (which would be way outside the frame) or at its sun. The instant when it points at the sun is when the sun would be at the highest point in the sky for an observer on that spot.

Notice that for a stellar day, the planet does indeed make one complete revolution—with a time of 0.648 “time units.” (I also made up imaginary units of time for this example.) However, at this point in the motion, the sun isn't back to the same spot in the planet's sky, because during that stellar day the planet moved. It takes 0.726 “time units” before the arrow points back to the sun. So, in this case, the solar day is a little bit longer than a stellar day, just like on Earth.

Is it possible for the solar day to be shorter than the stellar day? Yup. If the planet rotates in a direction opposite to its orbital rotation, then this backward rotation will get the sun back to the highest point sooner. Here's what that looks like:

However, because of the way solar systems form, planets usually rotate in the same direction as their orbital motion. In our solar system, only Venus rotates backward. (OK, Uranus rotates on its side—I’m not sure if that counts as backward.) But still, the point is that a solar day is different than a stellar day.

Changes in a Solar Day

For our make-believe planet, the length of each solar day was the same as the previous solar day. On Earth, this isn't true. The difference is that our imaginary planet had a circular orbit, and the Earth's orbit isn't perfectly circular—it's close, but not exact.

Here's what the imaginary planet would look like with an elliptical orbit. Note: I'm not showing the rotation of the planet on its axis. Instead, I have a red vector arrow to represent the planet's velocity—the longer the arrow, the faster the planet is moving.

Notice that when the planet gets closer to the sun, it speeds up. Then it slows down when it gets farther away. There are a couple of ways to explain this phenomenon, but I'm going to use the idea of angular momentum.

To be honest, the math needed to fully understand angular momentum can get a little ugly. So, instead, I'm just going to explain this with a nice demonstration.

Imagine that you are sitting in one of those office chairs that can swivel around. You give yourself a spin by pushing on the floor with your foot. After that, you lift your feet off the ground and spin like your life depends on it. You feel like you are the ruler of the world in your spinning chair, so you hold out your arms like Leo Dicaprio on the bow of the Titanic. Then you start to feel dizzy, so you pull your arms in. Guess what happens?

When you pull your arms in, you increase your rotational speed. But your angular momentum doesn’t change. In this example, the angular momentum (L) is a product of your rotational velocity (ω) and something called the moment of inertia (I).

OK, a couple of comments. First, physicists use the nonobvious letter L for angular momentum because there are only so many letters to choose from and “a” was already being used for acceleration. That means we can write the angular momentum as:

Illustration: Rhett Allain

Also, the term “moment of inertia” isn't very descriptive, and it can be the most difficult part to understand. It's a quantity that depends not only on the mass of an object but also on how that mass is distributed around the axis of rotation.

If you hold your arms outstretched from your body, you have two masses that are far from the axis of rotation (which runs through the center of your body). When you pull your arms in close, the center’s distance to these masses decreases, which causes your moment of inertia to also decrease. With a decrease in the moment of inertia, the only way your angular momentum can remain constant is if your angular velocity increases. It is possible to have a change in angular momentum—such as when you push with your foot on the floor to start the chair’s spin. But once your foot is off the ground, your angular momentum is constant.

What does this have to do with a solar day for a planet orbiting a star? As the planet moves closer to the star, its moment of inertia decreases, just like when you pull your arms close to your body while sitting on that spinning chair. The angular momentum of this system has a constant value, so this decrease in the moment of inertia means that the planet has to move faster.

Here’s a model of that imaginary rotating planet with a non-circular orbit. Every time the sun gets back to the same position in the sky, I'm going to draw a line to the sun, so you can see when the solar day happens.

When the planet moves closer to the sun, it travels at a higher speed. This means that as it rotates on its own axis, it travels through a greater angle, such that it must rotate an extra amount to get the sun back to the same position. As a result, the solar days will be longer when the planet is closer to the sun.

Just for fun, here is a plot of the length of the solar day during three years, or three orbits:

Illustration: Rhett Allain

For the Earth's orbit, the difference in the length of a day isn't quite as noticeable. The variation in the solar day is about 7.9 seconds longer or shorter, depending on where the Earth is in its orbit.

The Stellar Day Can Also Change

OK, so due to the change in the planet’s orbital motion, the solar day isn't constant. But the actual rotation rate of the Earth can also change—which means the stellar day is not constant either.

There are actually three ways to change the rotational speed of the Earth (and thus the length of a stellar day), and they all have to do with angular momentum. The first way is to exert a torque on it. Think back to the example of the spinning office chair. When you put your foot on the floor and push, your foot twists the chair, providing a torque. The magnitude of a torque depends both on how hard you push and how far the force is from the rotation point. (We call that distance a “torque arm.”) A longer torque arm means you get a larger torque. That's why door handles are as far away from the hinges as possible—so that you can apply a greater torque with a smaller force.

A torque changes the angular momentum of an object. Your foot on the floor made the chair go from zero angular momentum (or not rotating) to some nonzero value. You could also use your foot to stop the chair from spinning. In both of these cases, the torque causes a change in angular momentum. If the Earth has a change in angular momentum, that could mean a change in angular velocity, which in turn would change the length of a stellar day.

Is there ever a torque on the Earth? Yes. The most noticeable torque on the Earth comes from the moon. There is a gravitational interaction between parts of the moon and parts of the Earth, since both bodies have mass. If both had uniform mass distribution, the net force from the gravitational interaction would create a total torque of zero.

However, neither are perfectly even. They have parts with more mass and parts with less mass. This means that as the moon moves around the Earth, it produces a nonzero torque and decreases its angular momentum. Over time, the angular momentum of the Earth will keep decreasing until only one side of the planet ever faces the moon—just like only one side of the moon faces the Earth. This will at some point make the length of a stellar day about 28 days long. (Don't worry, it won't happen anytime soon.)

Another way to change the length of a stellar day is with a transfer of angular momentum. Imagine that you are an astronaut on a space walk, and for some reason you are holding a spinning bicycle wheel. Now you use your hand to slow down the rotation of the wheel. With this decrease in angular velocity of the wheel, the angular momentum of the system consisting of the astronaut (you) and the wheel would also decrease.

But wait! You are in space and there isn't a torque to go along with that decrease in angular momentum. So, you know what happens? You start spinning as the wheel slows down. With the increase in the rotational speed of the person, the total angular momentum stays constant. This is what we mean by "transfer of angular momentum"—in a sense, the angular momentum from the bicycle wheel is transferred into the angular momentum of you, the spinning astronaut.

The Earth is sort of like an astronaut with a spinning wheel. It has two parts that can rotate with different speeds—the crust (the hard part that you live on) and the outer core, which is made of liquid iron-nickel metals. With this geology, it's possible that there could be a differential rotation between the core and the crust. Any changes to the rotation of the liquid core would produce a corresponding change in the rotation of the crust. Since we measure a stellar day based on the rotation of the crust, this transfer of angular momentum would change the length of a day.

The final way to change the length of a stellar day is to change the moment of inertia for a spinning Earth. This is like what happens when a spinning ice skater pulls their arms in closer to their body. With the arms tucked in, their moment of inertia will decrease. However, with zero torque on the system, a decrease in the moment of inertia would mean an increase in the angular velocity.

The Earth, of course, doesn't have arms to pull in closer to its surface. However, it does have glaciers, which are usually in mountains. When a mountain glacier melts, the resulting water doesn't just sit on the mountain. It flows downhill closer to the surface of the Earth—which is a bit like an ice skater pulling in their arms. And as you know, melting glaciers can be a consequence of climate change.

Let’s see what effect that might have on the length of a day.

Estimating the Change Due to Glaciers

Because there are many factors that contribute to the angular velocity of the Earth, it's difficult to fully account for all the factors that go into making the “shortest day ever.”

So I’m going to look at the impact of just one thing—the melting of glaciers. Let's start with the Earth rotating once every 86,400 seconds, which is one solar day, and assume that there are glaciers with frozen ice at the top of some mountains. I need to estimate the moment of inertia of the Earth (IE) with glaciers of mass mg at the tops of mountains—a distance of rg1 from the axis of rotation. Then I need to find the moment of inertia when the water from the melted glaciers is at a shorter distance of rg2—the distance of this water from the axis of rotation when it is at sea level.

Notice that this value of r is the distance from the glacier to the axis of rotation (an imaginary line running from the north to the south pole). If a glacier was at the equator, this r value would be the radius of the Earth plus the height of the mountain. However, if you move to higher latitudes, the r value is less than the radius of the Earth. Maybe this diagram will help:

Illustration: Rhett Allain

If I know the mass of the glaciers, along with the initial and final distances, then the conservation of angular momentum equation would look like this:

Illustration: Rhett Allain

Yes, that looks bad, but don't worry. The important thing is that if I estimate some stuff, I can calculate a value for the final angular velocity.

First, although there is an equation for the moment of inertia for a uniform solid sphere, the Earth is neither uniform nor completely solid. For this exercise, I’ll estimate the moment of inertia for the Earth as ⅖MR2 (where M and R are the mass and radius of the Earth) and then add a correction factor, which should be good enough.

The mass of the melting glaciers is a bit more complicated. According to this paper, there are around 215,000 glaciers on the Earth with a total volume of about 159 x 103 cubic kilometers. Of course, if we know the volume, then we can get the mass using an ice density of 917 kilograms per cubic meter.

There's one other thing to consider: Melting glaciers at the north and south poles (and in the Arctic region) wouldn't really affect the moment of inertia. Since they are already very close to the axis of rotation, their water melting and moving closer to the center of the Earth won't change their r values. In effect, only about 10.3 percent of this estimated glacier volume would contribute significantly to a change in the moment of inertia.

But just for fun, let's say all of this ice is at a latitude of 45 degrees (that's midway between the equator and the poles), at a height of 5,000 meters above sea level. With all of that, I have the following calculations. (You can see all the details in this Python code.)

Illustration: Rhett Allain

There you have it: Melting these glaciers would make the day shorter by 0.67 microseconds, or 6.67 x 10-7 seconds. That's not a big difference, but it is a difference. And while losing a tiny fraction of a second in the length of a day is insignificant next to the environmental devastation caused by melting glaciers, I hope that it doesn't happen.

Could Climate Change Alter the Length of the Day?

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Reporter Jason Howland explains in this Mayo Clinic Minute.

If you stare at a computer monitor or cellphone too long and then experience temporary blurry vision, it's likely because the moisture layer on the front surface of your eye is getting dry.

"If that tear film is not smooth and even, and of the right quality and quantity, vision does tend to be compromised. So, people may notice that they have clear vision one moment, they blink, and it gets blurred. They blink again, and it gets clear," says Dr. Muriel Schornack, a Mayo Clinic optometrist.

Blinking spreads important tears over the front surface of the eye.

"Whenever we're doing anything that requires distinct attention to visual detail, our blink rate goes down," says Dr. Schornack.
Instead of a normal blink rate of every five to seven seconds, you might only blink every 15 to 20 seconds when looking at a screen.

"Blinking is huge. It's hugely important. It can go a long way toward keeping us more comfortable. It's obviously inexpensive, and it's readily available," says Dr. Schornack.

Next time you find yourself staring at a screen, try the 20-20-20 rule. "Every 20 minutes, look at something 20 feet away, blink 20 times for 20 seconds," she says.

Using over-the-counter eye drops periodically throughout the day also can help.

Source

It's the kind of calculation many Americans will face as booster shots that target currently circulating omicron strains become available to a population with widely varying risks and levels of immunity.

Here are some things to know:

HOW ARE THE NEW BOOSTERS DIFFERENT?

They're combination or "bivalent" shots that contain half the original vaccine that's been used since December 2020 and half protection against today's dominant omicron versions, BA.4 and BA.5. It's the first update to COVID-19 vaccines ever cleared by the Food and Drug Administration.

WHO'S ELIGIBLE?

Updated shots made by Pfizer and its partner BioNTech are authorized for anyone 12 and older, and rival Moderna's version is for adults. They're to be used as a booster for anyone who's already had their primary vaccination series—using shots from any U.S.-cleared company—and regardless of how many boosters they've already gotten.

IF I JUST GOT ONE OF THE ORIGINAL BOOSTERS, SHOULD I GET THE NEW KIND RIGHT AWAY?

No. The FDA set the minimum wait time at two months. But advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it's better to wait longer. Some advise at least three months, another said someone who's not at high risk might wait as long as six months.

"If you wait a little more time, you get a better immunologic response," said CDC adviser Dr. Sarah Long of Drexel University.

That's because someone who recently got a booster already has more virus-fighting antibodies in their bloodstream. Antibodies gradually wane over time, and another shot too soon won't offer much extra benefit, explained Wherry, who wasn't involved with the government's decision-making.

WHAT IF I RECENTLY RECOVERED FROM COVID-19?

It's still important to get vaccinated even if you've already been infected—but timing matters here, too.

The CDC has long told people to defer vaccination until they've recovered but also that people may consider waiting for three months after recovering to get a vaccination. And several CDC advisers say waiting the three months is important, both for potentially more benefit from the shot and to reduce chances of a rare side effect, heart inflammation, that sometimes affects teen boys and young men.

HOW MUCH BENEFIT WILL THE NEW BOOSTERS OFFER?

That's not clear, because tests of this exact recipe have only just begun in people.

The FDA cleared the new boosters based in large part on human studies of a similarly tweaked vaccine that's just been recommended by regulators in Europe. Those tweaked shots target an earlier omicron strain, BA.1, that circulated last winter, and studies found they revved up people's virus-fighting antibodies.

With that earlier omicron version now replaced by BA.4 and BA.5, the FDA ordered an additional tweak to the shots—and tests in mice showed they spark an equally good immune response.

There's no way to know if antibodies produced by an omicron-matched booster might last longer than a few months. But a booster also is supposed to strengthen immune system memory, adding to protection against serious illness from the ever-mutating virus.

HOW DO WE KNOW THEY'RE SAFE?

The basic ingredients used in both omicron-targeting updated vaccines are the same. Testing by Pfizer and Moderna of their BA.1-targeted versions proved safe in human studies and CDC's advisers concluded the additional small recipe change should be no different.

Flu vaccines are updated every year without human trials.

CAN I GET A NEW COVID-19 BOOSTER AND A FLU SHOT AT THE SAME TIME?

Yes, one in each arm.

WHAT IF I WANT TO WAIT?

People at high risk from COVID-19 are encouraged to get the new booster when they're due. After all, BA.5 still is spreading widely and hospitalization rates in older adults have increased since spring.

Most Americans eligible for an updated booster have gone at least six months since their last shot, according to the CDC—plenty of time that another shot should trigger a good immune response.

But the original formula still offers good protection against severe illness and death, especially after that all-important first booster. So it's not uncommon for younger and healthier people to time boosters to take advantage of a shot's temporary jump in protection against even a mild infection, like Wherry did.

A healthy 51-year-old, Wherry said he postponed the second booster recommended for his age for seven months, until late summer—just before an international trip that he knew would increase his risk from unmasked crowds.

With the updated boosters now rolling out, he plans to evaluate in four or five months—when presumably his antibody level starts waning and he's planning holiday gatherings, whether he'd benefit from another shot.

Source

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted emergency use authorisation on 31 August to covid-19 vaccines that target two different coronavirus variants. These updated “bivalent” vaccine boosters from Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech target both the original strain of the virus and the highly contagious BA.4 and BA.5 omicron subvariants.

People who have had their initial covid-19 vaccine doses or have received their most recent booster at least two months ago will now be eligible for Pfizer/BioNTech’s new booster if they are 12 years or older and Moderna’s updated booster if they are 18 years or older. A press release from Moderna said the company’s boosters should be available in the coming days at vaccination sites across the US; Pfizer/BioNTech announced that they will begin shipping their boosters as directed by the US government

“The updated boosters are expected to provide increased protection against the currently circulating omicron variants,” said Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, during a press conference on 31 August. “Ongoing studies will provide insight into the specific level of robustness of the protection.”

Currently, there is no data on the safety and effectiveness of these boosters in humans. Rather, the FDA made its decision based on data from animal studies, which found that the new vaccines provoked an immune response. The agency also used safety data from previous covid-19 vaccines, including a bivalent one approved for use in the UK, but not in the US, that is designed to target the BA.1 omicron subvariant. This vaccine is very similar to those targeting BA.4 and BA.5, said FDA commissioner Robert Califf in a press conference. The main difference is that the updated boosters contain genetic material for producing antibodies against BA.4 and BA.5 rather than BA.1, he said.

Both Marks and Califf said the approval without data from human trials is similar to how the FDA approves annual flu shots.

“We are pretty confident that what we have is very similar to what we have done in the past with influenza strain change where we don’t have clinical studies,” said Marks.

The FDA chose to authorise the BA.4 and BA.5 bivalent vaccines rather than the BA.1 version because these subvariants account for virtually all new cases in the US. “This gives us a [booster] that is most up to date,” said Marks.

The FDA will no longer authorise the use of the original covid-19 vaccines as a booster for people who are 12 years and older. However, it will still be used as the first and second dose for people who haven’t had both these jabs and will be available as a booster for those under the age of 12.

“The more updated you are on the vaccine, the greater the chance you will be protected,” said Califf. “We have to be a step ahead or at least try to be a step ahead [of covid-19].”

Source

Not every scoop of ice cream can be described as “fateful.” But a batch of ice cream Erasto Mpemba made as a teenager in Tanzania in 1963 made waves in physics that are still being felt nearly 60 years later. That’s because it appeared to be proof of a strange and counterintuitive idea: that a hot liquid may freeze faster than a cold one.

Homemade ice cream was a popular snack when he was a student at Magamba Secondary School, Mpemba wrote in a journal article published in 1969.

“The boys at the school do this by boiling milk, mixing it with sugar and putting it into the freezing chamber in the refrigerator, after it has first cooled nearly to room temperature,” he explained. But competition for the freezer was intense. One afternoon, he and another boy took two different shortcuts as they jockeyed for space. Mpemba’s classmate mixed his milk with sugar and poured it straight into an ice tray without boiling it at all. Not to be outdone, Mpemba boiled his milk—but skipped the step of letting it cool so he could snag the last ice tray. An hour and a half later, “my tray of milk had frozen into ice-cream while his was still only a thick liquid,” Mpemba wrote.

A few years later, Mpemba asked his high school science teacher why this might be—why hot milk would freeze faster than cold milk, going against Newton’s law of cooling. The teacher’s response was, “All I can say is that that is Mpemba’s physics and not the universal physics.” The incident became a running joke in the classroom. Whenever Mpemba got a math problem wrong, the teacher and his classmates would call it “Mpemba’s mathematics.”

Determined to find an explanation, Mpemba repeated the experiment with hot and cold water. And when physicist Denis Osborne visited his high school, he asked him about the incident as well. Intrigued, Osborne invited Mpemba to visit what is now the University of Dar es Salaam and discuss the issue further, then set up the related research that was eventually published. The article helped a principle that Aristotle, René Descartes, and Sir Francis Bacon had all observed over the centuries become known as the Mpemba effect.

Mpemba and Osborne’s claims created decades of controversy within the physics world, since they challenged fundamental theories about how matter behaves. Many researchers tried to recreate their results, with limited success. In 2016, physicist Henry Burridge of Imperial College London and mathematician Paul Linden of the University of Cambridge published a sweeping review of many of the studies that had attempted to confirm the phenomenon, reporting “sadly” that they were not able to find any proof of a Mpemba effect. Worse, they concluded, all of those studies—including Mpemba’s original experiment—could have been easily skewed by tiny experimental factors such as the setup of equipment insulation or placement of thermometers.

Cooling and chaos

Starting in 2017, a new contingent of studies finally turned the corner on confirming Mpemba’s observation, suggesting that the explanation lies in the mysterious mechanics of chaos. And, it turns out, water itself may have been a major obstacle in proving the larger theory. It behaves differently than most other substances, especially as it changes states between solid, liquid, and gas, so scientists on the Mpemba effect case looked to remove water from the equation altogether.

In an abstract experiment meant to zero in on the forces at work, physicist John Bechhoefer and his colleagues heated microscopic glass beads (meant to stand in for water molecules) with lasers and looked at the speed of cooling. They found that not only did some hot beads cool more quickly than their cold counterparts, but sometimes they did so exponentially faster. “The simplicity of the study is part of its beauty,” theoretical physicist Marija Vucelja told Science News. “It’s one of these very simple setups, and it already is rich enough to show this effect.”

Not long after that, another group of physicists published a follow-up article suggesting a more abstract framework for understanding the Mpemba effect, which involved modeling the random dynamics of particles. The results suggest that the key to the Mpemba mystery is a dose of chaos. In particular, a liquid moving quickly from hot to cold is said to be “out of equilibrium,” meaning that it is a system that does not follow the linear rules we (or Newton) might expect it to.

“We all have this naive picture that says temperature should change monotonically,” study author Oren Raz told Quanta magazine (meaning that we might assume a liquid that is cooling keeps going steadily in one direction without making significant reversals). “You start at a high temperature, then a medium temperature, and go to a low temperature.” But in a system out of equilibrium, “you can have strange shortcuts,” Raz said.

Various publications offered evocative metaphors to explain those shortcuts: Science News compared a hot liquid cooling under the Mpemba effect to “how a hiker might arrive at a destination more quickly by starting farther away, if that starting point allows the hiker to avoid an arduous climb over a mountain.” Alternatively, Physics Today suggested it is a bit like someone using stepping stones to cross a river, writing, “If you have the right starting energy, you can jump straight from the first to the third without ever landing on the second.” Since a hot liquid is more out of equilibrium than a cold one, it might have just the right energy to hop over stones.

Another word for that is kurtosis, a statistical term that refers to the deviation from an average, which appears to play an important role in Mpemba effect-related behavior. The temperature of a fluid generally refers to the average speed of its molecules—but every fluid will have outlier molecules behaving much differently than the others. In cases where the Mpemba effect occurs, these outliers seem to play an outsize role, Antonio Lasanta, a physicist who has published several papers confirming the phenomenon, told Cosmos. By taking into account kurtosis in experiments related to this kind of cooling and heating, “we can make analytical calculations to know how and when the Mpemba effect will occur,” Lasanta said. It’s certainly a step toward unraveling the Mpemba mystery, though there’s plenty left to figure out about when the effect shows up and how strong it is when it does.

Erasto Mpemba grew up to work as a game officer in Tanzania’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism and died around 2020, his ice cream having been vindicated. Though there’s still a lot we don’t know about the effect that bears his name, it seems that it is “Mpemba’s physics” after all.

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"The data presented in this report are clear – we continue to see more compelling scientific evidence that climate change has global impacts and shows no sign of slowing," said Rick Spinrad, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The rise in greenhouse gas levels comes despite an easing of fossil fuel emissions the previous year as much of the global economy slowed sharply due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The US agency said that the concentration of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere stood at 414.7 parts per million in 2021, 2.3 parts higher than in 2020.
The level is "the highest in at least the last million years based on paleoclimatic records," the annual State of the Climate report found.

The planet's sea levels rose for the 10th straight year, reaching a new record of 3.8 inches (97 millimeters) above the average in 1993 when satellite measurements began.

Last year was among the six warmest on record since the mid-19th century, with the last seven years all the seven hottest years on record, it said.

The number of tropical storms were also well above average last year including Typhoon Rai, which killed nearly 400 people in the Philippines in December, and Ida, which swept the Caribbean before becoming the second strongest hurricane to hit Louisiana after Katrina.

© Agence France-Presse

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A long, brutal heatwave is expected to grip California at least through the holiday weekend, stressing the power grid. Officials are begging residents to conserve electricity in an effort to prevent outages.

The state is now in its second day of a “Flex Alert” issued by the state’s power grid operator, the California Independent System Operator (CAISO). Under the Flex Alert, Californians are urged to voluntarily curb their electricity use between 4PM and 9PM. That’s the time of day when the grid is under the most pressure because it’s when power demand typically rises as people come home from work, and there’s less solar energy available as the sun sets.

Cutting down on energy use during those hours can help stabilize the grid, CAISO says, hopefully preempting rotating blackouts. Charging electric vehicles and using major appliances like washing machines should be done before 4PM, CAISO advises. It also asks residents to precool their homes to as low as 72 degrees Fahrenheit before that time, and then adjust their thermostats to 78 degrees or higher (health permitting) between 4PM to 9PM.

Heatwaves are notorious for stressing out power grids because the high temperatures push people to blast their air conditioning. Temperatures are expected to reach up to 20 degrees higher than normal across much of the Golden State with triple-digit heat through Tuesday, September 6th. Sunday and Monday will likely see the greatest strain on the grid, according to the governor’s office. Daily temperature records have already started to fall in different cities and are expected to keep dropping.

In California, heat spells also prime the landscape for more severe drought and wildfires — which can cut into power supplies if there’s less available hydropower or if utilities have to cut power to keep their equipment from sparking a blaze. This summer, California was forecast to lose half of the hydroelectricity it normally generates due to drought. The state is also in a jam because the current heatwave sprawls across much of the western US, limiting how much help California can get in the form of excess power from its neighbors. And the state has already faced rolling outages triggered by wildfire risk.

The length of this heatwave is also unprecedented, a press release from the governor’s office said. That places prolonged stress on the grid and exacerbates health risks. The lack of respite over a long period of time makes it harder for people to recover from the strain heat places on the heart and lungs. Heat already kills more people in the US than any other weather-related disaster.

“This is just the latest reminder of how real the climate crisis is, and how it is impacting the everyday lives of Californians,” Governor Gavin Newsom said in a press release yesterday. California legislators just passed a slew of climate bills on Wednesday aimed at cutting the state’s planet-heating pollution down to net zero by 2045.

Newsom declared a State of Emergency on August 31st in response to the heat. That declaration triggers temporary measures to ramp up electricity generation and reduce power demand. For instance, ships berthed at California ports won’t necessarily be required to plug into onshore power — which they’d normally do to reduce air pollution from the vessels’ diesel engines.

California’s power grid is struggling to cope with extreme heat

Sand is both abundant and rare. Earth has vast deserts of the stuff, of course, but not the kind that’s in such high demand that sand mafias are killing for it. That special variety is a critical component of the concrete used in buildings and infrastructure, the production of which has skyrocketed exponentially over the last few decades. That has come at a significant climate cost: The industry now accounts for 8 percent of global carbon emissions.

Sand is also at the center of a strange climate story. Climate change is destroying Greenland’s ice sheet, producing an extraordinary amount of meltwater. (Even if we somehow totally stopped emissions today, Greenland’s melting could still contribute nearly a foot of sea-level rise.) And in a twist of fate, that meltwater is loaded with the right kind of sand for concrete production, which causes more warming and more melting. Great plumes of glacial sediment are swirling along the coast, actually adding land along the edges of the island. Even though Greenland is only three times the size of Texas, its ice sheet is the source of 8 percent of suspended river sediments flowing into the oceans. 

The country now has to figure out whether exploiting that valuable, abundant resource on a wider scale would be environmentally, socially, and economically tenable. “It is quite controversial—we're saying Greenland can benefit from climate change,” says Mette Bendixen, a geographer at McGill University in Canada, who’s studying the idea. “Contrary to most of the other parts of the Arctic coast, Greenland is not eroding. It's in fact growing bigger, because the ice sheet is melting. So you can think of the ice sheet as a tap that pours out not only water, but also all the sediment.”

Greenland is actually growing as an island, thanks to all that sediment.

Photograph: Nicolaj Krog Larsen

That sediment is special, indeed. Desert sand from, say, the Sahara is no good for making concrete because it’s too rounded and uniform. Over millennia, winds push those grains around, polishing them. If you make concrete out of such sand, “it's almost like building with marbles,” says Bendixen. “You want particles that are more angular in shape, not rounded. And that type of material is exactly what you get from rivers, for example, or material that has been deposited by glaciers.”

As Greenland’s ice sheet—which covers 700,000 square miles and is up to 10,000 feet thick—rubs against the land, it grinds up sediment, including sand, fine silt, and larger chunks of gravel. And as the ice melts, torrents of water carry all that debris to the sea, while the pounding of the rivers themselves further erodes the landscape. Compared to the thousands of years that sand spends rolling around the Sahara and becoming rounded, the particles coming off Greenland are fresher. They’re more angular and more diversely shaped. Instead of acting like marbles, they fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, which is good for concrete.

Photograph: Nicolaj Krog Larsen

Greenland already harvests its sand for local, small-scale concrete production, since importing sand would be prohibitively expensive. This is limited to domestic companies, who have to win non-exclusive permits after passing environmental review by the government’s scientific advisers. They can also apply to export the sand, but that requires additional licensing. “We are basically also open for sand extraction aiming at export, but then it will be treated like any other mining activity,” says Kim Zinck-Jørgensen, of the Greenland government’s Mineral Licence and Safety Authority. “And for that you'll have a much greater setup with regulations and also environmental impact assessments, social impact assessments.” 

Currently, dredging boats suck up sediment along the coast and filter out the sand, which is then brought back onshore. But if Greenland decides to scale up sand extraction for export, that would mean big ships would have to haul the stuff away to international ports. “It's important to stress that if you extract whatever natural resource, there will be environmental consequences,” says Bendixen. “But really, here the environmental consequences can be super broad.”

For one, those big ships will also be bringing in ballast, or the water they’ve collected from elsewhere and stored in their hulls for balance. If that ballast is released off the coast of Greenland, it may introduce invasive species. And, of course, dredging coastal sediments would further endanger underwater native creatures—and on land, increased mining operations might scare away the game that Inuit hunters rely on. (Greenland’s population is about 90 percent indigenous Inuit. The Greenland branch of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, an NGO representing Inuit peoples, declined to comment for this story.) 

Interestingly, though, last month Bendixen and her colleagues published a survey of Greenlanders about their opinions on sand extraction. They found that 84 percent of adult residents are in favor of it, and three-quarters want it to be a national project. “It turns out that the vast majority of Greenlanders think that it should be primarily a Greenlandic enterprise,” says Rasmus Leander Nielsen, a political scientist at the University of Greenland, who did the survey with Bendixen. “Maybe you could have some smaller-scale, Greenlandic-led companies that could start off. And then eventually, when the business case is more favorable, then we could go into a larger export.”

About that business case: While the global demand for sand has gone wild, the economics of exported Greenland sand aren’t yet clear. A company would have to pay to run the local operations and foot the shipping costs to get the resource off the island. Those will be considerable, since sand is heavy and takes up a lot of room in a ship. 

The Greenland government recently worked with a consultancy that did an assessment, finding that exporting the sand to Europe isn’t economically feasible at the moment. “Whether it's feasible to export it further on to the Middle East, I don't know,” says Thomas Lauridsen, chief adviser to Greenland’s Ministry of Mineral Resources and Justice. “But we will then be in competition with European companies that will dredge sand in Europe or closer to the customer.” 

Lauridsen adds that it’s up to the private sector to determine whether selling Greenland’s sand is cost-effective or not. And that export cost calculus may change in the future. “By 2100, the demand for sand is going to rise 300 percent, and the price 400 percent,” says Bendixen. “So we don't have to look that much farther into the future to start seeing a different calculation here in terms of whether it's worthwhile.”

Yes, a world with more sand harvesting for making more concrete would also mean more carbon emissions, more warming, and more melting of Greenland’s ice sheet. But, Bendixen says, all that glacial sand need not go exclusively toward concrete. Coastal communities are increasingly clamoring for sand to hold back rising seas, a fortification known as beach nourishment. “Just think of the irony in using the sand for beach nourishment to mitigate sea-level rise,” says Bendixen, “which is caused by—to a large extent—the melting of the Greenland ice sheet!” 

Greenland’s Melting Glaciers Spew a Complicated Treasure: Sand

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On a grassy plateau overlooking a valley in central China, two officials stood by as a small, thin rocket blasted off from the rear of a pickup truck. The rocket, carrying a payload of silver iodide rods intended to initiate rainfall, was headed for the clouds above Zigui county in Hubei province. It was just another round of artillery fire in China’s war against its current drought—the worst on record in the country.

Using chemicals to artificially cause the release of rain from clouds is called cloud seeding. Besides the rockets, Chinese authorities have also sent large drones into the skies above Sichuan province, another central region of the country. The aircraft have been shooting silver iodide flares into the atmosphere, also in the hope of prompting precipitation.

This frenzy of activity is China’s response to a drought that has turned lakes into dust bowls and sent citizens in some areas scrambling underground to escape temperatures of 40 degrees Celsius and above. Evaporating rivers have also caused a drop in hydropower generation at dams, leading to electricity shortages.

China is clearly trying to fight back against this crippling drought. But the country’s water scarcity problems run deep. And it’s not clear yet how effective its attempts to redress the situation are going to be.

“If you go and seed a cloud and then you observe how much rain or snow you get, you don’t know how much you would have gotten if you hadn’t seeded it,” says Adele Igel, head of the cloud physics group at the University of California, Davis, noting how difficult it is for scientists to know if cloud seeding actually works.

She points to a 2019 review in which the authors found that certain forms of cloud seeding could increase precipitation by up to 20 percent when targeted at wintertime clouds in mountain areas. “The idea with silver iodide is that it helps to form new ice crystals or snowflakes in the cloud,” Igel explains. These additional snowflakes should then grow and fall more readily as precipitation. However, there is no consensus over whether cloud seeding works during the summer, when there is little or no ice in clouds, she adds.

Plus, you need clouds to be there in the first place. During extreme heat events they may be scarce because there is less water on the ground to evaporate into the atmosphere above. At best, cloud seeding is going to be “marginally effective” as a drought-mitigation measure, Igel says.

But that’s not the only thing China is doing to combat drought, though most of its other interventions are longer-term in nature. Take the South-to-North Water Diversion Project, a colossal engineering effort to build canals and tunnels that will ferry water from the south of China to the north. The estimated total cost is $62 billion, and an $8.9 billion tunnel to Beijing was announced just last month.

There’s just one problem. The current drought is hitting China’s central and southern areas, where water is supposed to be more reliably available, rather than the more frequently drought-affected north.

“You could actually exacerbate the drought situation,” says Gabriel Collins at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy in Texas, arguing that excessive future water transfers could lead to two large swathes of the country becoming prone to seasonal water shortages, rather than just one.

He adds that while other technologies, such as desalination, might seem tempting, they are enormously expensive and would likely be restricted to heavily industrialized coastal areas where demand makes them economically viable.

Collins recently coauthored an article on China’s longstanding water-scarcity issues with Gopal Reddy, founder of Ready for Climate, an environmental research organization. “The structural problem is, to me, far scarier than this season’s drought,” says Reddy, who notes that China has limited usable groundwater reserves—which can sometimes be tapped to alleviate drought—and that these are already overexploited, particularly in the north of the country.

Groundwater reserves are “the lender of last resort,” says Nathan Forsythe at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom, because they take the longest to replenish once depleted. They’re dependent on rainwater filtering down deep into the earth—most rain simply evaporates or washes away.

But filling reserves is, in principle, a good way to plan ahead for drought. China has huge capability in this area and could be building reservoirs to hold more rainwater on farms, or planting vegetation that is good at retaining moisture. For thousands of years, small-scale farmers in China have been using ponds to hold water in place, according to reports. Expanding the use of such interventions could help too.

One of the most serious effects of this year’s drought is its impact on crops. Photos have already emerged of sun-scorched fields full of dead fruit and vegetables. But China more or less leads the world in attempts to develop drought-resistant crops, argues Rebecca Nadin at the Overseas Development Institute, a global affairs think tank. This may soon extend to the genetic engineering of wheat and rice. China also recently approved the use of drought-resistant soy seeds marketed by Argentinian firm Bioceres.

All of these interventions may go some way toward improving China’s chances in the battle against drought. But the threat of ever-drier conditions, driven by climate change, looms large, says Aiguo Dai of the State University of New York at Albany. It’s possible that some areas of China, particularly those in the north, might see more precipitation in the coming years. But if the overall trend leads to hotter and drier conditions in places unable to adapt quickly to water scarcity, things will get very difficult.

Forsythe notes that the most immediate thing any country can do in response to drought is to curtail demand and ensure that water is not being wasted. But in a country of 1.4 billion people, where factories toil night and day to produce products that are shipped around the world, there are clearly limits to how much those brakes can be pumped. The recent, relatively brief electricity shortages caused by a lack of hydroelectric power alone are estimated to have left around 1 million electric vehicles and 400,000 charging stations short of energy, for instance.

Water scarcity is becoming a problem that all of us will face, to some degree. But Chinese authorities must be acutely aware of just how much drought threatens the country’s ambitions. The “greatest risk” to China’s preeminence as the leading superpower of this century is probably its “environmental vulnerabilities,” says Forsythe. “Stewarding their natural capital would certainly be in their interest.”

To Fight Severe Drought, China Is Turning to Technology

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— Shakespeare

A few years ago, Silicon Valley was buzzing with the reverberations of Marc Andreessen’s epic essay, It’s Time To Build.

In case you haven’t read it, It’s a formidable pep talk, a call to arms for builders, and an exhortation to take stock of the forces standing in the way of builders.

These obstacles are, mostly, institutional — too many people have seats at too many tables, each with the power to block, none with the authority to approve.

We are currently discovering the disastrous consequences of this system — Peter Thiel has talked about it for decades, and Tyler Cowen called it “The Great Stagnation.”

Something’s off

It does seem like something is wrong when the past feels like some wondrous foreign land. We built the Golden Gate Bridge in only four years. Then, to celebrate, we built an artificial island in just two. That’s less time than it now takes us to decide that a laundromat isn’t a historic building and that, fine, you can build some apartments over it.

70 years after building the Golden Gate Bridge, we completed the Eastern Span Renovation of the Bay Bridge. It took 3 times as long and cost 13 times as much(!), adjusted for inflation. How did bridges become 13 times as expensive in 70 years?

A few years ago, I asked my grandmother how the world had changed in her lifetime. She told me:

“- I remember how happy I was when we got running water! I must have been 15.
– Wait, 15? How did you go to the restroom before then?
– Well, it was less of a restroom and more like a wooden shack in the garden, with a hole in the ground.”

She then told me of when she got her first fridge, her first TV, her first dishwasher, her first microwave. I asked her, perhaps with the smug complacency characteristic of our generation, what she thought of the tech revolution. Isn’t it cool that we can see each other on FaceTime despite standing 8,000 miles apart?

“It’s fine,” she said. “But it’s no running water.”

A lot can happen in 30 years

Inventions that took place from 1900 to 1930 include the plane, the automobile, the washing machine, the radio, the television, frozen food, penicillin, plastic(!)

That’s in 30 years. Hell, no household in the country had access to electricity in 1900. In 1930, more than two thirds did.

30 years ago was 1990. What’s happened since then? The Internet and smartphones, mostly. And still we complain things are changing too fast. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying these things are unimportant. They’re huge. But they’re no running water.

How did we get there?

It’s tempting to explain the slowing pace of innovation by our having already picked all the low-hanging fruits. Former head of the US patent office Charles Duell agreed: “Everything that can be invented has been invented,” he yelled from a hole in the mud in 1899.

It’s a funny coincidence that the field where we’re seeing the most innovation happens to be the one we regulated least, and that the fields that got worse are the most regulated ones.

What’s the most important change that happened in the world of atoms in the last 30 years? Uber may be near the top the list — it has changed how we move in cities.

Now, Uber is an app that lets people drive people in their cars. Think of how controversial that was, and ask yourself why we’re not seeing anything above that water line, when even this barely made it.

Finally, I find it rich to call things like the Model T, Apollo 11, or nuclear energy “low-hanging fruits.” What must we then call the kick scooters we could barely put on our sidewalks?

As Marc Andreessen remarks, in every case, the culprit is regulation.

Building has become illegal in the US, whether it’s housing, drugs, universities, or mask factories. The economy is like a car driven by two people — one with their foot on the gas, the other on the brakes. Silicon Valley has a bias for pushing harder on the gas. But it’s becoming clear that we won’t go much further if we don’t get our foot off the brakes.

Too many seats at the table

In Why Nations Fail, Daren Acemoglu draws a distinction between inclusive and extractive institutions, proposing that over the long run, inclusive institutions — those giving a voice to the most constituents — will lead to the most growth.

Inclusivity is fine, but our current situation makes me wonder if we got too much of a good thing. There is always a loser to any change — even when it’s an otherwise overwhelming net positive. As Joel Mokyr points out in The Lever of Riches:

 Invention is something of a hostile act, a dislocation of existing
 schemes, a way of disturbing comfortable bourgeois routines.
 Technological progress requires above all tolerance toward the
 unfamiliar and the eccentric.

This problem of “too many seats at the table” is pervasive: you actually have to ask for your competitors’ permissions before you can open anything, from a hospital to an ice cream shop. We’ve never had so few rights over our own property, and so many over that of others.

There can be no innovation if the status quo gets a say: creation cannot need a permit to destroy.

The dictatorship of the articulate

But I don’t think our institutional woes stem only from politics — there’s a deeper cultural issue at play, and everybody should wonder to what extent they contribute to the problem.

Everywhere I look, I see the rise of talkocracy — others have called it the dictatorship of the articulate. Talkers standing in the way of builders; offering we ponder, analyze, investigate, research, dissect, agonize endlessly over plans before we lay a single brick.

I for one like Michael Bloomberg’s approach better:

 While our competitors are still sucking their thumbs trying to make
 the design perfect, we’ve already gone through five rounds of testing.
 By the time our rivals are ready to begin development, we are on
 version No. 10. It gets back to planning versus acting. We act from
 day one; others plan how to plan—for months.

One of my favorite of Uber’s former cultural values was “Let Builders Build.” Some argued it had become “weaponized,” with people invoking it any time they just wanted to do things — as if it was a perverse and extreme side effect, instead of the whole point.

I don’t mean this only as an attack on the timorous — this is about all of us. Fear of change is part of human nature, and we need to fight it deliberately if we want to get anything done.

This endless pondering introduces years and years of unnecessary delays. But worse: it kills the will to build. There is nothing builders hate more than endless meetings with people who can’t even spell “CPU.”

You know you’ve lost when they’ve internalized the conservative voices, which can now stop them without even having to try. It’s when your intern has a neat idea for something he could hack together in a few hours — but then thinks, what’s the point?

What we can do about it

There are a couple of solutions. First, fewer people should be in the room, when there is a room at all. We need to re-create the environment of permissionless innovation that enabled the rise of the modern world, and without which no progress is possible

Second, those who do get a seat at the table need to understand this dynamic, and appreciate the fragility of new ideas before they fight them. Anybody with decision power should think of proposals on an abstract level — instead of wondering what’s wrong with them, they should think in terms of upside and downside, like investors. What’s the worst that can happen if it fails? What’s the best that can happen if it succeeds?

And when we’ve failed at surrounding the table with fewer and wiser voices, we need to be okay ruffling some feathers — we must “move fast and break hearts.”

This is going to be uncomfortable for everybody, and it should be. We should not take for granted the era of unprecedented progress we’ve enjoyed since the Industrial Revolution. History shows that such progress is unnatural, and typically dies quickly. It’s up to us not to let it.

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Standing desks—and even biking desks—are a response to a growing body of studies showing that a sedentary lifestyle creates many health risks. Regular physical activity appears to confer a degree of protection from various problems, both physical and mental, and many results indicate that this doesn't have to be Olympic-level training. Simply walking around the apartment a few times a day appears to help.

Now, a team of researchers has looked at the opposite question: Are all forms of inactivity equal? The answer is probably not. While the details depend on the health issues involved, there's likely to be some good news for people reading this, in that computer use appears to be somewhat protective against dementia.

Get off your chair

The physical risks associated with inactivity generally involve lower cardiovascular health, either directly or via obesity. Even a small amount of physical activity appears capable of limiting these impacts, although increased exercise generally seems to be even better (details vary depending on the study and the exact risk being examined).

But exercise also seems to improve mental health. It can be an effective therapy for depression and other disorders and appears to help stave off some of the unfortunate impacts of aging. "Exercise and physical activity have shown promise in reducing rates of cognitive decline, structural brain atrophy, and dementia risk in older adults," the authors write, citing the work done in other studies.

One of the oddities of some of the studies noted in the new one is that several of them used hours watching the television as a stand-in for the amount of time spent inactive. While that may have been true a few decades back, we've since greatly diversified our inactivity, with computers and mobile devices offering new ways of feeling like you're doing something without the need to do anything.

So, the researchers decided to look into this in more detail and tackle some related questions. Their study design separated computer use and TV viewing, and it looked at how each influenced the onset of mental problems associated with aging. It also examined whether physical activity could influence the association between sedentary behavior and aging-associated problems.

To do so, the researchers took advantage of the UK Biobank, a large database that combines anonymized demographics and health outcomes for hundreds of thousands of UK citizens. For this work, the team excluded people under 60 years old and focused the work on about 75,000 people who had filled in detailed information about their level of activity and leisure pursuits.

Not good, but better

Before we get into the results, a small reminder: The work focused on the influence of sedentary behavior on mental issues. Physical health issues weren't examined—it's possible for something that looks relatively good in this analysis to be an overall negative once physical issues are factored in.

That out of the way, what did they see? With age and gender controlled for, time spent watching TV was associated with an increased risk of dementia (a hazard ratio of 1.3, meaning they were 1.3 times more likely to be diagnosed with indications of dementia). Physical activity lowered the risks very slightly. By contrast, computer use lowered the risk by quite a bit more, dropping the hazard ratio to 0.8.

The same trend held when the researchers divided the group into thirds and compared high, medium, and low TV viewing and computer use. Controlling for additional factors like diet, alcohol use, and obesity didn't change the outcome, either.

Although the impact of physical activity was minor, the researchers tested whether it might offset some of the problems associated with high TV viewing or low computer use. High levels of exercise appear to have a somewhat protective effect, but it's a minor one.

Mental reserve

Overall, the results suggest that we need to separate how we think about the problems associated with sedentary activity. In terms of physical health, any type of inactivity may be roughly equivalent. But regarding mental issues, how you spend your inactivity matters—some means of being a couch potato involve passive consumption, and others involve a greater degree of mental activity.

In this sense, the results fit neatly into a large body of research that indicates that remaining mentally active can provide a degree of protection from dementia. Things like reading and playing vocabulary games appear to generally reduce dementia risk, and the benefits seem to build up even if the reading happens when people are relatively young. So, there's some reason not to be surprised by this general outcome.

That said, there are still a fair number of reasons for caution. Among other potential issues, the researchers note that activity levels were only checked at one point in the participants' history and were self-reported, which tends to be less accurate. It's also important to recognize that computer time will include a vast range of activities, some significantly more involved than others, so still some work to do here. But the next time someone yells at you for wasting time reading Ars, you can tell them you're protecting your mental health.

Source: ArsTechnica

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/08/using-a-computer-may-be-a-somewhat-better-form-of-being-sedentary/

A faulty sensor may have scrubbed the launch of NASA’s massive SLS rocket

In April 2021, a widely anticipated paper in the field of psychedelics dropped. The study, a small trial run at Imperial College London and published in The New England Journal of Medicine, investigated the use of psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, to treat depression. Led by Robin Carhart-Harris, who now directs the Neuroscape Psychedelics Division at the University of California, San Francisco, the research compared psilocybin with a standard antidepressant. The findings were somewhat lackluster: it found that the psychedelic was only marginally better than traditional treatments at relieving depression.

Back in 2017, Rosalind Watts, an author on that paper and a former clinical lead for the trial at Imperial, had given a TEDx talk on the power of psilocybin to treat depression, prompted by the time she had spent working on the study. In the talk, she shared her belief that psilocybin could “revolutionize mental health care.” But in February of this year, Watts published a Medium piece in which she expressed regret at her initial unbridled enthusiasm. “I can’t help but feel as if I unknowingly contributed to a simplistic and potentially dangerous narrative around psychedelics; a narrative I’m trying to correct,” she wrote.

“I just reflected on how I myself had got caught up in the black and white of like, ‘This is wonderful,’” she says today. “Now having been through that trial … I’m much more neutral and agnostic.”

We’re firmly in the midst of a psychedelic renaissance, with substances long regarded simply as recreational drugs—such as psilocybin, LSD, and MDMA—being reappraised as potential treatments for a number of mental health conditions. At the same time, legislation and stigma surrounding psychedelics has slowly begun to loosen in recent years, and it increasingly looks like it might shake loose altogether. “Now all of a sudden, within the past year or so, the pendulum has swung all the other way,” says David Yaden, an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine who studies the subjective effects of psychedelics.

But Yaden thinks the field is in danger of overcorrecting. In a new opinion piece published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Yaden—with his coauthors Roland Griffiths and James Potash, two experts in psychedelics and psychiatry, respectively—argues that if we don’t tread carefully, psychedelic research could end up back where it started: treated with deep suspicion, if not completely outlawed. “I don’t want to be a wet blanket,” Yaden says. “I think there’s a real reason for excitement. But I think it’s a really important message to get out.” 

To trace psychedelics’ potential future, Yaden, Griffiths, and Potash looked to a model called the Gartner Hype Cycle, which can be used to characterize the trend cycle of new technologies, like virtual reality or 4D printing. The pattern has gone something like this: Forbidden for decades, psychedelics began to reemerge in recent years out of fringe underground communities and into labs as potential revolutionary treatments for mental illnesses. Then in 2018, the US Food and Drug Administration granted psilocybin “breakthrough therapy” status for depression, which gives a treatment the fastest possible route to approval. The media leapt at it and startups sprung up, followed by obsessive patenting of psychedelic compounds.

But what began as a welcome glimmer of hope for new ways to treat mental illness (which psychedelics irrefutably are, even if trial results so far have been modest) has morphed into actual misinformation, Yaden argues. Claims began to crop up ranging from the unsubstantiated to the outlandish: that psychedelics can “cure” mental illness, solve massive social problems, and create a “psychedelic utopia.” We’re in the midst of what Yaden and his coauthors call the psychedelic hype bubble. And they argue that scientists should be the ones to burst it.

Psychedelic research, for all its promise, is still at the embryonic stage. Trials so far have been small, and while results such as those from Imperial suggest that certain substances could be useful, findings don’t support any claims of these drugs being able to cure mental health conditions.

The more time she has spent working with patients, the more Watts has come to believe that the drugs themselves are not the key; the real value lies, she says, in the therapeutic experience—the “assisted therapy” part of psychedelic-assisted therapy. This is where a person sits with a guide for hours after having taken a psychedelic, in what should be a safe and compassionate context, with the space to untangle deeply buried feelings and trauma. The effects of the psychedelic help to create this space.

“The drug was a catalyst to the therapeutic process, not the therapeutic process itself,” she wrote in her Medium piece when describing her involvement in the Imperial trial. Afterward, participants received aftercare, known as “integration,” in which they process everything that happened during the trip. Therefore, new startups offering psychedelic treatment without the assisted therapy component could stand to actually do harm, Watts worries. “Some people will have this big burst of openness, and they won’t have the support to deal with it,” she says. Plus, the actual therapeutic effect of these drugs in these scenarios could end up being pretty muted. “There will be lots of companies, I think, who have invested in the drug without therapeutic support, who will find that their results are very, very disappointing for their shareholders.” When you see a headline extolling the virtues of “resetting your brain,” what’s missing is the “visceral, sometimes hellish experience” of actually doing that, Watts says.

And in an attempt to protect the field, it also seems that some criminal actions are being glossed over and going unchecked. In recent years, cases of sexual abuse during psychedelic therapy have come to light. Earlier this year, New York Magazine, in collaboration with psychedelic watchdog nonprofit Psymposia, explored sexual abuse taking place in psychedelic clinical trials in an investigative podcast called Cover Story: Power Trip. A notable example was the story of Meaghan Buisso, who in 2015 took part in a trial testing MDMA as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, as part of a clinical trial hosted by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a psychedelic research nonprofit. During this trial she was sexually assaulted.

Psychedelics induce a specific kind of vulnerability, as they are known to enhance suggestibility and sexual feelings. That means addressing the risk of sexual abuse in psychedelic research and therapy should be prioritized as highly as the risks of hype, says Neşe Devenot, a postdoctoral associate at the Institute for Research in Sensing at the University of Cincinnati and a team member of Psymposia. “Historically, some of the scientists working in the field have really dismissed, discounted, and even ostracized the people who have spoken up about risk,” she says. Psychedelic researchers themselves haven’t spoken up much about this specific risk set, and Devenot says they need to.

It’s also not just the mass media and industry that’s behind the hype—scientists themselves are guilty of promoting it, says Philip Corlett, an associate professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine. Corlett compares it to the movie Scream: The call is coming from inside the house. “Some scientists really court this type of attention and don’t take responsibility at all for how their work is portrayed in the popular press,” he says. 

Some researchers aren’t particularly receptive to criticism from fellow scientists. In April, another paper led by Robin Carhart-Harris looked at how psilocybin works to treat depression. Carhart-Harris and his coauthors posited that perhaps the effect was the result of boosting connections between different parts of the brain. But a few other academics began to pick holes in the paper. One of those was Corlett.

He and two other concerned scientists—Fred Barrett and Manoj Doss—submitted a letter to the editor to the journal, in which they pointed out some worrying red flags: outcome inconsistencies, odd omissions, statistical flimsiness—all in the scientific weeds, but important nonetheless for research to be rigorous. The letter was rejected, so they instead uploaded their response to a preprint server. (The letter has now gone through peer review and was recently published in a journal.) In response, Carhart-Harris and two other coauthors published their rebuttal to the rebuttal, in which they questioned whether the response had been fueled by the personal motivations of its authors, kicking off an even bigger firestorm of back-and-forths on social media. (So much so that Carhart-Harris has blocked Corlett on Twitter.)

Scientists’ unwillingness to accept criticism makes Corlett pessimistic about the future of psychedelic research. “Science is meant to be somewhat adversarial. It’s not meant to be presided over by a single group of people,” he says. “I’m still open and excited about the possibilities, but I think this kind of breathless rush to translation and to a conclusion is really dangerous.”

And in an ethically murky turn, for those in the field who have begun to dabble in the corporate side of psychedelics, hyping up findings has become of obvious interest. Declaring conflicts of interests is standard practice in academia, and for good reason: Would you trust a paper that declared that spending more time on Instagram makes you happy if the lead author was receiving money from Meta? But that happens on a regular basis in psychedelic research; many in the field have accepted board positions or consulting fees for the ever-expanding number of psychedelic companies. That means “it’s literally a financial incentive to hype the results,” says Yaden. Watts agrees: “I think for research to be truly solid and not hyping things, it needs to be separated out from the interests of the companies who have stuff to gain.”

Against this backdrop, it needs to be remembered that while generally safe, psychedelics are not totally risk-free. Though it happens rarely, psychedelics can trigger psychotic episodes. Yaden says it’s a matter of when—not if—a high-profile adverse event occurs during psychedelic treatment. “I think preparing people for that is also important.”

If, as Yaden and his coauthors predict, the psychedelic hype bubble does burst, backlash will follow. But alongside the smugness there will be darker repercussions, and those for whom psychedelics represent a last-ditch effort to treat severe mental illness will be some of those who stand to suffer the most. If they have extraordinarily hyped-up expectations, future rigorous studies that temper and provide a more realistic view of these substances’ capabilities are going to be disappointing, says Yaden. “They’re going to feel, I think, cheated.”

If this bubble-bursting moment does come, Yaden and his coauthors hope that the psychedelics field will settle down again, with less public and corporate interest and more time for the boring—but necessary—rigorous research. “The idea is not to squelch research,” says Yaden. “The idea is to be in it for the long run in a sustainable, responsible way.”

Is the Psychedelic Therapy Bubble About to Burst?

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It was overuse of acetaminophen that finally led to Nic Petermann’s cancer diagnosis. For months, the then 26-year-old had been contending with exhaustion, night sweats, recurring fevers, and abdominal pain so debilitating that she regularly woke up in the middle of the night to take soothing baths. Her persistent flu-like symptoms, she’d read online, were probably just the lingering effects of a Covid infection she’d had in January 2021; the pain was the odd symptom out, but an ultrasound had turned up nothing.

Come June, the pain was too much to bear—Petermann called a telehealth hotline and was immediately referred to the hospital after the staff heard how much acetaminophen she had been taking. After extensive testing, Petermann finally had an answer: All her symptoms, including those that seemed to be long Covid, were due to Stage IV Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She started chemotherapy the next day.

Today, Petermann is in remission, though she still deals with the long-term consequences of the aggressive, monthslong chemo. If she hadn’t assumed most of her symptoms were due to long Covid, she says, she may have received proper treatment and a diagnosis much earlier. “When I went to get my pain symptoms checked out, I didn’t mention the flu-like symptoms, because I just thought that was something that I would have to deal with,” she says.

Most people with Petermann’s symptoms won’t end up in her position. Long Covid is common—estimates of its prevalence vary widely, but even the most conservative studies imply that millions of people are dealing with long-lasting symptoms of their infections. Hodgkin’s lymphoma, on the other hand, is rare. But with dozens of possible symptoms, long Covid can be easily confused with countless other conditions, including cardiovascular diseases such as hypertension and diabetes, autoimmune diseases like lupus and multiple sclerosis, and cancer. Add the fact that Covid can make preexisting conditions worse, and determining whether or not someone has long Covid becomes a daunting task.

Parsing these vast sets of alternatives has become the responsibility of clinicians on the vanguard of long Covid care, from the primary care physicians whom patients first seek out to the experts who staff long Covid clinics. For each patient they must perform a careful differential diagnosis, a medical term for the process of considering every possible cause of a patient’s set of symptoms.

Accurate differential diagnosis is essential not just for getting patients care, but also for furthering medical understanding of a still-obscure condition. “We need to be cautious not to turn long Covid into a catch-all diagnosis,” says Linda Geng, codirector of the Stanford Post-Acute Covid-19 Syndrome Clinic.

In the absence of any objective tests, however, long Covid remains a “diagnosis of exclusion”—one that is made only after other reasonable possibilities have been exhausted. Recent data suggest that many patients will emerge from this process with a diagnosis not of long Covid, but of something else. A July paper in Nature that analyzed the medical records of over 2 million patients in the UK found that, while 5.4 percent of those with a previous Covid infection had at least one long Covid symptom recorded in their charts, 4.5 percent without evidence of infection also had at least one symptom.

In other words, long Covid symptoms are meaningfully common in people who have never contracted Covid—so even those who have had the illness might be experiencing persistent symptoms for unrelated reasons, says Shamil Haroon, associate clinical professor of public health at the University of Birmingham and the Nature study’s senior author. (Haroon notes that these numbers are likely vast underestimates—many doctors only write patient symptoms in the free text portion of patient charts, which the study did not examine.)

Similarly, an August paper published in The Lancet found that 21 percent of recent Covid patients in the Netherlands reported at least one symptom that worsened after their Covid infection, whereas 9 percent with no evidence of infection had similar symptoms.

These high-level statistics are borne out by the experiences of long Covid specialists. By the time someone makes it to their clinics, they’ve usually already been through testing elsewhere—typically with their primary care provider—and the most obvious alternatives have been considered and rejected. And yet many patients leave these clinics with a diagnosis they did not expect. Fernando Carnavali, site coordinator of the Center for Post-Covid Care at Mount Sinai West in New York, described the situation as “not uncommon.” Nisha Viswanathan, director of the UCLA Health Long Covid Program, estimates that a quarter of the patients she sees end up diagnosed with something other than long Covid.

This can be a matter of urgency. “You wouldn’t want to miss shortness of breath being caused by a sudden blood clot in the lungs, or chest pain being caused by a heart attack,” says Jason Maley, director of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Critical Illness and Covid-19 Survivorship Program. More often, though, differential diagnosis is a long, sometimes discouraging, process that involves interrogating multiple explanations for each symptom. Patients might come in with half a dozen or more distinct complaints. Different clusters of those complaints suggest different potential explanations, creating a combinatorial explosion of diagnostic possibilities. “The differential diagnosis is immense,” Carnavali says. “That is the challenge.”

That’s not to say it’s impossible. Doctors at specialty clinics have seen enough long Covid patients that they can identify some characteristic patterns. Michael Brode, medical director of UT Health Austin’s Post-Covid-19 Program, says that almost all of the long Covid patients he has seen start developing their symptoms within six weeks of their infection; if there’s a longer delay, he suspects something else.

Symptoms that group together can help point doctors toward what that something else might be. Most of the long Covid patients Brode sees who exhibit fatigue and the sluggish thinking known as “brain fog” are also dealing with post-exertional malaise—extreme exhaustion after physical, mental, or emotional effort. So when a man came into his clinic with the first two symptoms but not the third, Brode suspected that something else might be going on. He eventually discovered that the patient was dealing with a large, benign brain tumor.

A benign brain tumor may not seem like good news. Unlike long Covid, though, it is curable. Clinicians don’t have many tools for alleviating long Covid beyond lifestyle changes and rehabilitation exercises; while these can make an enormous difference, they don’t necessarily offer the same succor as a pill or a surgery. Even Petermann, who received a cancer diagnosis, described “the relief of actually knowing what it was and knowing there was going to be a treatment.”

Yet a long Covid diagnosis can also be a form of solace—and validation. “People often come to my clinic and are just relieved for me to explain why I think their symptoms fit with what we’ve seen with long Covid,” Maley says.

Going through a diagnostic process based on excluding other problems can be frustrating, with the patients receiving endless “normal” test results despite feeling that something is wrong. “Normal doesn’t mean everything they’re going through is normal,” Brode says he tells his patients. “It just means it’s not something else.” Patients have come to him describing symptoms so unusual that they expect he won’t believe them—an internal vibrating sensation, for example—and Brode is able to tell them that not only are their symptoms real, but he has seen them in a number of other long Covid patients.

Not all patients have access to this kind of expertise. Most US states have only a few long Covid clinics; some have none at all. Some patients don’t have a primary care doctor; as a result, long Covid clinicians have had to take on the role of filling gaps in the nation’s medical system. (Carnavali recalls one patient whom he diagnosed not with long Covid, but with uncontrolled diabetes so severe that the person needed immediate treatment.) These clinics, however, were not designed to carry the full weight of chronic illness care in a broken health care system. “This is all very much indicative of a system that had never anticipated these kinds of care needs,” Viswanathan says.

And their care also doesn’t reach patients who, like Petermann, delay testing because they’ve already chalked their symptoms up to long Covid. As doctors see more suspected long Covid cases, they will become increasingly skilled at its differential diagnosis—but patients will have to seek out that expertise.

As a UK resident, Petermann could take advantage of her country’s socialized health care system. Even so, it took many months for her to get her cancer diagnosis. If she could do it all over again, she says, she would have asked doctors about all her symptoms—not just her pain—and asked them to consider other possibilities when scans didn’t turn up anything. “If you know something’s wrong,” she says, “push for answers.”

For Some Patients, Long Covid Symptoms Mask Something Else

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A corn, wheat, or potato farmer browsing for fertilizers to improve crop yields might come across a product called Environmentally Smart Nitrogen (ESN).

The promise of ESN, which, has been made by Canadian fertilizer manufacturer Nutrien (and before that, by the company's predecessor, Agrium) since 2000, is that its "polymer membrane," which encapsulates the nitrogen—a chemical element that is necessary for plants to grow—will release that input slowly and efficiently. The implication, in part, is that this will prevent an excess of nitrogen from poisoning water and soil, which is a common occurrence in communities where a lot of industrial farming takes place. A product safety page advises that the United States Department of Agriculture's EQIP program might even provide American farmers with some funds to purchase ESN as an environmental improvement practice. (In response to a request for comment, USDA issued a statement saying that "Any controlled release agrochemical could be included in a program payment for the associated conservation practice if it has been peer-reviewed through research, supported by the Land Grant University for use, and the conservation practice criteria includes controlled release.")

And yet, according to a new report released by the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) titled Sowing a Plastic Planet, ESN and similar so-called "controlled-release" agrochemicals produced by petrochemical giants — not just Nutrien's ESN but also ICL Specialty Fertilizer's Osmocote and BASF's DuraGuard ME, for example — are anything but environmentally advantageous or sustainable. In fact, their "polymer" shells are plastics that, when paired with synthetic chemicals, could actually increase the toxic risks associated with the chemicals and overload soils with even more plastics than before. The effects are a detriment to human, animal and planetary health. (FoodPrint reached out to Nutrien, ICL and BASF for comment; none of them responded.)

A potent threat to people and the environment

The report's authors write that synthetic agricultural inputs are already "some of the most toxic substances in use today," responsible for killing off soil microorganisms, creating chemical-resistant weeds and endangering the health of the farmworkers who spray them, for starters. They've also been shown to exacerbate the effects of climate change, since applications of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer causes soil to emit the potent greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide.

Concurrently, microplastics are turning up in our water, soil, air and in human blood, tissue and waste; they emit greenhouse gases as they degrade, also kill off soil microorganisms, and can cause cancers and neurological and respiratory (among other) problems when we ingest or inhale them.

By using plastics to encapsulate chemical inputs that are applied directly to soil and crops, manufacturers are creating products that are "more dangerous, and for longer," says CIEL president Carroll Muffett. "There's a long-standing recognition of the profound human health and environmental risks of pesticides and fertilizers, and a growing recognition of the diverse impacts of the plastics lifecycle and the pervasive presence of plastic pollution. Here, these issues are converging in a way that is really stark in highlighting the risks of our fossil economy."

A toxic stew

Plastic-coated agricultural chemicals have been around since the 1960s, although companies marketing them as "planet-safe" and "sustainable" is new, and the chemical companies' own research shows these claims to be not well-substantiated, say the CIEL authors. The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that 100,000 tonnes of plastic per year are dumped into the environment from plastic-coated fertilizers alone; according to CIEL, agrochemical companies are planning to vastly expand the market for these and other encapsulated chemicals, which will let loose even vaster amounts of microplastics on the environment.

Both plastics and agricultural chemicals are harmful in their own rights. Making matters so much worse is the fact that plastics can adsorb those chemicals they encapsulate — that is, the chemicals adhere to their surfaces; plastics also "adsorb other toxins from the environment," says Muffett, to become what the UN Environment Programme calls "toxic time bombs." Muffett points out that "when the oil industry was researching oil pollution in the Gulf of Mexico in the 1960s and '70s, they kept finding microplastics with oil and other pollutants adhered to them" — an indication that the industry has been aware of this dynamic for over 50 years.

The CIEL report cites a 2019 study from Oregon State University, which found that "a common insecticide with the active ingredient en­capsulated in nanometer-sized plastic was more toxic than apply­ing the same active ingredient" on its own. Encapsula­tion, one of the OSU researchers told CIEL, "is thought to enhance toxicity and mobility, because it pre­vents the active chemical ingredient from breaking down in wa­ter, which would dilute the toxicity, and it allows the chemical to be transported further away from the point of application, enhancing potential exposure."

Meanwhile, those toxically loaded microplastics break down into even smaller nanoparticles, which accumulate in soil at a rate of 50 kilograms per hectare per year, and they remain for no one knows how long. From there, they leach into air and water, and are also taken up by plants growing in that soil — all of which are pathways for these plastics to enter the bodies of humans and wildlife. In the soil itself, microplastic pollution might interfere with nutrient cycling, negatively impact plants' rooting ability and earthworms' growth and health, and impair soil's ability to store carbon.

These encapsulated chemicals are "not only dangerous, but also unnecessary," according the CIEL authors, who write that effective, non-chemical alternatives to their use — sulfur and biochar among them — exist.

Keeping the fossil fuel industry in business

Anna Lappé, director of the Food Sovereignty Fund at Panta Rhea Foundation, which provided some support for the CIEL report, says the addition of plastics to agricultural chemicals — far from being essential to the health and productivity of food systems — "is one of the many worrisome ways the fossil fuel industry is continuing to find new markets," while environmental legislation has increasingly focused on switching from oil and gas to wind and solar power.

Plastics and many agricultural chemicals are made from fossil fuels, and Muffett connects the dots between the various industries. Oil and gas businesses, he says, "have very active agricultural chemical businesses, which [in turn] have large-scale businesses in the production of plastic resins and related polymers — these are the corporate actors often pioneering the technologies that allow this sort of encapsulation to work . . . and they have a clear vested interest in keeping plastics in these products."

Margaret Reeves, senior scientist at Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA), calls the CIEL report "a big eye-opener; even folks who study and follow the industry are surprised [by it], which is pretty alarming." She's concerned about links the report establishes between controlled-release chemicals and damage to the soil microbiome, which only increases the need for increased use of fertilizers, "creating a feedback loop," she says. She says the obvious solution to the addition of microplastics to agricultural chemicals would be to ban those chemicals outright — unlikely in the US with an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chemical office that "isn't doing what they're supposed to do," she says, "to prohibit the use of all but a miniscule number of highly hazardous pesticides. The agency could, however, and should, refuse to register the formulations of the pesticides that include microplastics; that should be an immediate request."

Nevertheless, she sees hope in legislation that was enacted in California, which banned the insecticide chlorpyrifos starting in February 2020. "There's 10,000 more [chemicals] behind it" needing to be banned, she says, including the remainder of the organophosphate pesticides, "but what happens in California is important globally . . . and that action had a big impact on the subsequent federal [EPA] decision" to ban the pesticide. (Although, EPA still permits the use of chlorpyrifos, which damages the human nervous system, for some non-food related uses.)

Muffett calls encapsulated agricultural chemicals "the very definition of a controllable source of pollution" since he says they're wholly unnecessary, and one the EU's chemicals agency has already been looking to regulate. Recognizing the challenge of getting the US to ban such chemicals outright, he believes that action by the EU and "a major market like California could dramatically transform the economics associated with producing these materials," he says, in addition to improving the environment and human health in the regions where those products are disallowed. "By raising awareness of the content of [controlled-release chemicals], we give more and more farmers the recognition of what they're using and the option to opt out, and more and more members of the public the tools to demand action and change."

Source

Now, a global research team, including scientists from Queen's University, Canada, and the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), Japan, have modeled how the different elliptical shapes affect the way these viral particles rotate within fluids, impacting how easily the virus can be transmitted. The study was published recently in Physics of Fluids.

"When coronavirus particles are inhaled, these particles move around within the passageways in the nose and lungs," said Professor Eliot Fried, who leads the Mechanics and Materials Unit at OIST. "We are interested in studying to what extent they are mobile in these environments."

The specific type of movement that the scientists modeled is known as rotational diffusivity, which determines the rate at which the particles rotate as they move through fluid (in the coronavirus' case, droplets of saliva). Particles which are smoother and more hydrodynamic encounter less drag resistance from the fluid and rotate faster. For coronavirus particles, this rotational speed affects how well the virus can attach to and infect cells.

"If the particles rotate too much, they might not spend enough time interacting with the cell to infect it, and if they rotate too little, they might not be able to interact in the necessary way," explained Prof. Fried.

In the study, the scientists modeled both prolate and oblate ellipsoids of revolution. These shapes differ from spheres (which have three axes of identical length) in just one of their axes, with prolate shapes having one longer axis, whilst oblate shapes have one shorter axis. Taken to the extreme, prolate shapes elongate into rod-like shapes, whilst oblate shapes squash into coin-like shapes. But for coronavirus particles, the differences are more subtle.

The scientists also made the model the most realistic yet, by adding the spike proteins onto the surface of the ellipsoids. Previous research from Queen's University and OIST showed that the presence of triangular-shaped spike proteins lowers the speed at which the coronavirus particles rotate, potentially increasing their ability to infect cells.

Here, the scientists modeled the spike proteins in a simpler way—with each spike protein represented by a single sphere on the surface of the ellipsoids.

"We then figured out the arrangement of the spikes on the surface of each ellipsoidal shape by assuming that they all contain the same charge," explained Dr. Vikash Chaurasia, a postdoctoral researcher in the OIST Mechanics and Materials Unit. "Spikes with identical charges repel each other and prefer to be as far from each other as possible. They therefore end up evenly distributed across the particle in a way that minimizes this repulsion."

In their model, the researchers found that the more a particle differs from a spherical shape, the slower it rotates. This could mean that the particles are better able to align and attach to cells.

The model is still simplistic, the researchers acknowledge, but it brings us one step closer to understanding the transport properties of the coronavirus and could help pin down one of the factors key to its infective success.

Source

"Suspicions that COVID-19 might trigger ME/CFS initially arose as early as during the first wave of the pandemic," says Prof. Dr. Carmen Scheibenbogen, Acting Director of Charité's Institute of Medical Immunology on Campus Virchow-Klinikum. Prof. Scheibenbogen also oversees the work of the Charité Fatigue Center, which specializes in the diagnosis of ME/CFS (myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome), a debilitating condition characterized by severe physical fatigue. The Center received its first requests from patients after SARS-CoV-2 infection as early as the summer of 2020. Since then, there has been accumulating evidence of a causal link between COVID-19 and ME/CFS, a disease which often causes severe physical impairments.

"Providing the scientific evidence to confirm these assumptions, however, is anything but a trivial task," explains Prof. Scheibenbogen. "This is partly due to the paucity of research into ME/CFS and the fact that there are no universally accepted diagnostic criteria. Thanks to an extremely thorough diagnostic process and a comprehensive comparison with patients who developed ME/CFS following non-COVID-related infections, we have now been able to show that COVID-19 can trigger ME/CFS."

As part of this study, experts from Charité's Post-COVID Network examined 42 individuals who presented at the Center with persistent, severe fatigue and impaired day-to-day functioning six months after their SARS-CoV-2 infection. Most of the study participants were unable to perform light work for more than two to four hours a day; some were unable to work and struggled to look after themselves.

Only three out of the 42 patients examined needed hospital care during their initial (acute) SARS-CoV-2 infection, but none required oxygen. 32 of the patients met the WHO classification of mild COVID-19, meaning they did not develop pneumonia, but had fairly severe symptoms including fever, cough, muscle pain and joint pain for between one and two weeks.

As all of the participants' infections occurred during the first wave of the pandemic, none of them had been vaccinated. At Charité, all of the individuals concerned were examined by an interdisciplinary team of neurologists, immunologists, rheumatologists, cardiologists, endocrinologists and pulmonologists with many years' experience in the diagnosis of ME/CFS. For comparison, the researchers then examined 19 age- and gender-matched individuals who had developed ME/CFS following a similar period of illness due to a non-COVID-related infection.

The researchers used the Canadian Consensus Criteria to establish a diagnosis of ME/CFS. "In addition to having been scientifically developed, this catalog of criteria has been proven as a reliable diagnostic tool for chronic fatigue syndrome in clinical practice," explains the study's other co-lead, Dr. Judith Bellmann-Strobl, who heads the multidisciplinary outpatient department at the Experimental and Clinical Research Center (ECRC), a facility jointly operated by Charité and the MDC.

According to the Canadian Consensus Criteria, approximately half of the post-COVID patients examined met the diagnostic criteria for ME/CFS. While the other half presented with similar symptoms, their post-exertional malaise was milder and only lasted for a few hours. In contrast, ME/CFS patients reported post-exertional malaise which persisted into the following day. Summarizing the researchers' findings, Dr. Bellman-Strobl says: "We can therefore distinguish between two groups of post-COVID patients with severely impaired physical functioning."

In addition to collating data on symptoms, the researchers also determined various laboratory parameters. They then compared these with hand grip strength, which was reduced in the majority of the participants examined. "We furthermore found that individuals with milder exertional intolerance had reduced hand grip strength if they had elevated levels of the cytokine interleukin 8. In these cases, reduced muscular strength may be caused by a persistent inflammatory response," says Prof. Scheibenbogen.

"In the ME/CFS group, however, hand grip strength was correlated with the hormone NT-proBNP, which can be released by muscle cells when oxygen supply is insufficient. This suggests that, in these individuals, muscle weakness may be caused by an impaired blood supply." According to the researchers' preliminary observations, the two groups may also be distinguishable in terms of disease progression. "In many people whose symptoms are indicative of ME/CFS but who do not meet diagnostic criteria, symptoms appear to improve over time," explains Prof. Scheibenbogen.

These new findings may help researchers to develop specific treatments for post-COVID syndrome ("Long COVID") and ME/CFS. "Our data also provide further evidence that ME/CFS is not a psychosomatic disorder but a severe physical disease which can be measured and diagnosed using objective methods," says Prof. Scheibenbogen. "Unfortunately, current treatments for ME/CFS are purely symptomatic in nature. I would therefore urge even young people to protect themselves against SARS-CoV-2 by getting vaccinated and wearing an FFP2 mask."

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“Excessive exposure to blue light from everyday devices, such as TVs, laptops, and phones, may have detrimental effects on a wide range of cells in our body, from skin and fat cells, to sensory neurons,” says Dr. Jadwiga Giebultowicz, a professor at the Department of Integrative Biology at Oregon State University, in a media release. “We are the first to show that the levels of specific metabolites – chemicals that are essential for cells to function correctly – are altered in fruit flies exposed to blue light.”

The research team experimented with fruit flies and discovered that the light from screens affected them as well. This is significant, since humans and flies have similarities on a cellular level.

“The signaling chemicals in the cells of flies and humans are the same, so the there is potential for negative effects of blue light on humans,” explains Giebultowicz. “To understand why high-energy blue light is responsible for accelerating aging in fruit flies, we compared the levels of metabolites in flies exposed to blue light for two weeks to those kept in complete darkness.”

Brain chemicals changed

The team found that the cells in fruit flies don’t function at an optimal level after exposure to blue light, which they suggest could lead to premature death. Through an examination of the cells in the flies’ brains, they discovered that the levels of one metabolite, succinate, increased, while glutamate levels dropped.

“Succinate is essential for producing the fuel for the function and growth of each cell. High levels of succinate after exposure to blue light can be compared to gas being in the pump but not getting into the car,” Giebultowicz says. “Another troubling discovery was that molecules responsible for communication between neurons, such as glutamate, are at the lower level after blue light exposure.”

Low levels of glutamate could result in a decrease in brain function, possibly causing premature aging, according to the study authors. In the world we live in now, blue light seems to be everywhere, and active at all hours of the day.

“LEDs have become the main illumination in display screens such as phones, desktops and TVs, as well as ambient lighting, so humans in advanced societies are exposed to blue light through LED lighting during most of their waking hours,” the study author explains.

Avoid blue light is an ‘anti-aging strategy’

The next step in the research is to study blue light’s effects on human cells.

“We used a fairly strong blue light on the flies – humans are exposed to less intense light, so cellular damage may be less dramatic. The results from this study suggests that future research involving human cells is needed to establish the extent to which human cells may show similar changes in metabolites involved in energy production in response to excessive exposure to blue light,” Giebultowicz concludes. “Our study suggests that avoidance of excessive blue light exposure may be a good anti-aging strategy.”

The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Aging, develops on previous research the team has conducted which shows that fruit flies living in constant darkness live longer than those with exposure to light.

South West News Service writer Alice Clifford contributed to this report.

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In times of war, factories can retool to support the needs of battle. Assembly lines change course from manufacturing car parts to machine guns, or from producing washing machines to aircraft engines.

To hear Duke University professor Xinnian Dong tell it, plants can also shift from peacetime to wartime production.

Crops and other plants are often under attack from microbes, including bacteria, viruses, and other pathogens. When a plant senses a microbial invasion, it makes profound changes in the chemical soup of proteins — the workhorse molecules of life — inside its cells.

In recent years, Dong and her research team have been piecing together just how they do it. In a new study that was recently published in the journal Cell, Dong and first author Jinlong Wang reveal the key components in plant cells that reprogram their protein-making machinery to fight disease.

Each year, around 15% of crop yield is lost to bacterial and fungal diseases, costing the global economy around $220 billion. Plants rely on their immune system to help them fight back.

Unlike animals, plants don’t have specialized immune cells that can travel through the bloodstream to the site of infection. Instead, every cell in the plant has to be able to stand and fight to defend itself, quickly shifting into battle mode.

When plants come under attack, they shift their priorities from growth to defense. This means that cells start synthesizing new proteins and suppress the production of others. Then “within two to three hours things return to normal,” Dong said.

The tens of thousands of proteins made in cells do many jobs: catalyzing reactions, recognizing foreign substances, serving as chemical messengers, and moving materials in and out. To build a specific protein, genetic instructions in the DNA packed inside the cell’s nucleus are transcribed into a messenger molecule called mRNA. This strand of mRNA then heads out into the cytoplasm, where a structure called a ribosome “reads” the message and translates it into a protein.

In a 2017 study, Dong and her team learned that when a plant is infected, certain mRNA molecules are translated into proteins faster than others. What these mRNA molecules have in common, the researchers discovered, is a region at the front end of the RNA strand with recurring letters in its genetic code, where the nucleotide bases adenine and guanine repeat themselves over and over again.

In the new study, Dong, Wang, and colleagues show how this region works with other structures inside the cell to activate “wartime” protein production.
They demonstrated that when plants detect a pathogen attack, the molecular signposts that signal the usual starting point for ribosomes to land on and read the mRNA are removed, which keeps the cell from making its typical “peacetime” proteins.

Instead, ribosomes bypass the usual starting point for translation, using the region of recurring As and Gs within the RNA molecule for docking and start reading from there instead.

“They basically take a shortcut,” Dong said.

For plants, fighting infection is a balancing act, Dong said. Allocating more resources to defense means less is available for photosynthesis and other activities in the business of life. Producing too many defense proteins can create collateral damage. For example, plants with an over-active immune system suffer stunted growth.

By understanding how plants strike this balance, Dong said, researchers hope to find new ways to engineer disease-resistant crops without compromising yield.

Dong’s research team did the bulk of their experiments in a mustard-like plant called Arabidopsis thaliana. However, similar mRNA sequences have been found in other organisms, including fruit flies, mice, and humans, so they may play a broader role in controlling protein synthesis in plants and animals alike, Dong said.

Reference: “PABP/purine-rich motif as an initiation module for cap-independent translation in pattern-triggered immunity” by Jinlong Wang, Xing Zhang, George H. Greene, Guoyong Xu and Xinnian Dong, 29 July 2022, Cell.

DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2022.06.037

This work was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (IOS-645589, IOS-2041378), National Institutes of Health (R35-GM118036-06) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

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Unlike the 'bits' of binary code behind more conventional forms of computing technology, qubits exist in a state of probability called a superposition, behaving like a flipped coin as it tumbles through the air.

Algorithms based on the way groups of quantum coins fall can make short work of some pretty complex mathematics, but only if their collective spinning isn't unwittingly blown off course by the environment.

Referred to as decoherence, this interruption to a particle's superposition is a huge hurdle for engineers designing useful quantum computers.

In theory, just about anything can exist in a quantum superposition of states, from electrons to atoms to whole molecules (or bigger). But to limit decoherence, smaller and simpler objects take the cake.

Photons make ideal qubits. Unfortunately, practical quantum computers need a lot of qubits. Thousands. Millions even. The more, the better. Not only do they all need to be spinning in superposition at once, their fates have to be shared. Or, to use the physics term, entangled.

This is where the challenge comes in.

There are relatively easy ways to entangle pairs of photons. Force an atom to emit a wave of light and then split it using a special screen, and you'll get two photons with a shared history.

While they remain in flight with their respective characteristics yet to be measured, they more or less act like that spinning coin. Eventually, one will come up heads, and the other tails.

Entangling more than two photons becomes more of a challenge.

Experiments with objects called quantum dots have managed to entangle chains of three to four photons. Not only is it unlikely to ever produce the hundreds and thousands needed for a quantum computer, the state of entanglement using this approach isn't as reliable as engineers might like.

More recent studies using atoms with large electron orbitals, called Rydberg atoms, have produced up to six entangled photons, all in an efficiently entangled form. Though the method could make for super-fast computing components, it isn't an easily scalable option either.

This newest solution could, in theory, produce any number of entangled photons, all in the ideal state.

"The trick to this experiment was that we used a single atom to emit the photons and interweave them in a very specific way," says physics doctoral student and lead author Philip Thomas.

An atom of rubidium was tickled into emitting light waves, which were channeled into a cavity shaped to reflect them back and forth in a very precise manner.

By perfectly fine-tuning the way the rubidium glowed, each photon could be entangled with the entire atom's state – meaning each photon bouncing back and forth in the cavity was entangled with a significant number of its siblings as well.

"Because the chain of photons emerged from a single atom, it could be produced in a deterministic way," says Thomas.

In this case, the team managed to entangle 12 photons in a less efficient linear cluster, and 14 in the prized Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger (GHZ) state.
"To the best of our knowledge, the 14 interconnected light particles are the largest number of entangled photons that have been generated in the laboratory so far," says Thomas.

Not only were they able to entangle so many photons, the efficiency of this method improved on past processes, with nearly one out of every two photons providing neatly entangled qubits.

Future setups will need to introduce a second atom to provide the qubits necessary for many quantum computing operations. Having entangled photons on tap could provide the foundations for technology beyond computing, occupying a central role in quantum encrypted communications.

This research was published in Nature.

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Last week, AlumaSafway, a Canadian scaffolding company, sent workers a memo demanding they accept "voluntary" overtime shifts or face termination, a hiring ban, legal action, and possible fines or jail time.

According to the Alberta Labour Relations Board (ALRB), on August 22 an anonymous letter was shared among scaffolders at a Suncor Inc. site in Alberta, Canada, that asked workers to "collectively refuse to work overtime shifts for the purpose of compelling incentives from the Employer, including improvements in compensation or working conditions.” Suncor is one of Canada's largest fossil fuel companies.

According to the board, this resulted in no workers taking on overtime shifts. Ultimately, it decided that the action was illegal under the province's labour laws, which rule out strikes that occur while a collective bargaining agreement is in force and before a vote has been taken.

"The Board finds the Employees' concerted refusal to accept overtime shifts for the purpose of compelling the Employer to agree to terms and conditions of employment, which constitutes a refusal to work, to be an illegal strike," it said in its decision. The board noted that it would file its decision with the Alberta courts, which would make it enforceable as a court order, and violating it would "result in civil or criminal penalties including contempt of court."

The union's collective bargaining agreement states that overtime is strictly voluntary, except for when there are not enough volunteers to complete a job.

After the letter encouraging employees to not work overtime was circulated, AlumaSafway scaffold workers began refusing to work overtime shifts at the Suncor site. The company filed a complaint with the labour board on August 24.

The situation went viral on the r/antiwork subreddit; a poster there, who claimed to be a worker's child, posted a letter sent by AlumaSafway to workers after the ALRB's ruling. In that letter, which is signed by two AlumaSafway managers, the company warned that it's "been patient and given your union an opportunity to convince you that this coordinated refusal constitutes an illegal strike, and that you may face consequences as a result. Obviously, this has not worked." Motherboard has not independently verified the letter; however, its contents refer to the ALRB ruling, which is hosted on the ALRB's official website. The two people who signed the letter do indeed work for AlumaSafway, according to their social media profiles and the company's website.

AlumaSafway went on to warn that violation of this order could include consequences such as "discipline or termination of employment" along with a hiring ban "for those who continue to engage in illegal activity." AlumaSafway also threatened legal action "for all damages caused by the illegal strike" which could make workers "personally liable for added production costs, penalties owing to Owner or, even the loss of the contract with our client."

In the worst case, contempt of court proceedings could open up "the possibility of fines and even potentially jail," the company's letter stated.

The letter closed with a plea from the company: “We do not want to impose any of the consequences set out above. This memo is intended to cause you to change your behaviour by impressing upon you the seriousness of this matter, including the consequences that you may suffer if the strike continues."

Sadly, there may not be much room for scaffold workers to continue their refusal to accept overtime shifts in the sweltering heat. The collective bargaining agreement that represents AlumaSafway scaffolders, negotiated by the Labourers' International Union of North America, Local 506, requires workers give up the right to strike so long as the agreement is in effect in accordance with provincial law.

The ALRB, AlumaSafway, and Local 506 all did not respond to Motherboard’s request for comment.

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These self-morphing 3D wood shapes could be future of wood manufacturing