The final countdown begins for NASA’s hulking new rocket

In addition to the Artemis I Moon mission being carried out by NASA, SpaceX plans to launch more Starlink satellites and Blue Origin will be using its New Shepard craft to launch some payloads for NASA.

Monday, August 29

From 12:33 p.m. UTC, NASA will be looking to launch its Space Launch System as part of the Artemis I mission. Artemis I is just the first of many missions in the Artemis programme to return to the lunar surface and build a space station that’ll orbit the Moon. The Artemis I mission is a more modest mission compared to what’s planned. The Orion spacecraft will be sent to travel past the Moon and be placed in a retrograde orbit. It will be carrying dummies wearing the Orion spacesuits.

The dummies will be fitted with sensors to measure things such as acceleration, vibration, and radiation levels to ensure the safety of future astronauts. The rocket will also carry 10 CubeSats: NEA Scout, BioSentinel, Lunar IceCube, LunaH-Map, CuSP, EQUULEUS OMOTENASHI LunIR, Team Miles, and ArgoMoon. They will be deployed after the craft has reached orbit and begin a trans-lunar injection.

The mission is scheduled to run until October 10 at 2:42 p.m. UTC where the Orion spacecraft is to land in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego. The completion of this mission will open up the path to later, much more exciting Artemis missions such as Artemis II where astronauts will perform a lunar flyby and Artemis III where astronauts will finally return to the surface. Unfortunately, we have to wait until at least 2024 and 2025 respectively for those missions.

Wednesday, August 31

We have two launches today. At 5:40 a.m. UTC, SpaceX will launch 46 Starlink satellites with a Falcon 9 rocket. These satellites are designated as Starlink Group 3-4. By adding to the Starlink constellation, SpaceX can increase the service area of the satellites.

While Starlink was previously envisioned to beam internet down to a satellite dish, T-Mobile customers will get a coverage boost from Starlink thanks to a deal struck between the two companies. If you’re interested in watching this launch, just head over to SpaceX’s website and there should be a stream on the day.

The second launch of the day is Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket. This mission, NS-23, is set to take off from Texas at 1:30 p.m. UTC. Unusually, this mission won’t be taking up any private astronauts. Instead, it will be carrying 36 science and research payloads to space, 18 of which are funded by NASA’s Flight Opportunities programme. There will also be thousands of postcards attached to the exterior of the New Shepard booster, where they will get exposure to space. The postcards are sourced from Club for the Future. This mission should be streamed on the Blue Origin website.

Recap

The first launch last week was of a Kuaizhou-1A rocket carrying the Chuanxin-16 satellite from China. The satellite reached its orbit successfully and will be used for science experiments.

The second launch was also from China, this time a Long March-2D carried the Beijing-3B satellite to space where it will be used for Earth observation tasks.

Finally, SpaceX launched 54 Starlink satellites from Florida.

Check back next week for footage of the Artemis I mission, if it takes off!

TWIRL 80: NASA's return to the Moon begins this week with Artemis I

Castle Lane, Castle Arcade, Castle Place and Castle Buildings.

Each pay tribute to the site of not one, but three Belfast castles, and archaeologists believe their foundations and artefacts could still lie below the surface.

Part of the area is the former British Homes Stores (BHS) site, which is now to be converted into a complex of leisure and retail units.

It will be called The Keep, a nod by developers to a past which was first referenced in 1262.

'Strategic base'

Then it was an Anglo-Norman castle, believed to consist of an earthen mound, similar to mottes that remain visible in townlands such as Dundonald.
It was a "critical part of the medieval Norman settlement of Belfast", striding the Farset River, which we now know as High Street, archaeologist Ruairí Ó Baoill told BBC News NI.

However, the site was destroyed in the 1300s, as power shifted to the Gaelic lords in Ireland, such as the Clandeboye O'Neills.

The O'Neills in turn built a new castle, a "strategic base", Mr Ó Baoill explained.

"We know there was a castle there because there are references to it being attacked in the 1400s and the 1500s in both Irish and English histories and it's actually shown in two maps," he said.

Medieval burials have also been documented in Cornmarket, an area which is now home to shops, cafes and buskers.

According to Queen's University academic Dr Colm Donnelly, the O'Neill castle would have looked like a tower house, "a small building, maybe four storeys high", with rooms stacked on top of one another, connected by a spiral staircase.

Similar stone towers from this period have survived, such as Audley's Castle and Kilclief Castle, close to Strangford.

"They were abandoned by and large in the 17th century, but they survive in the Irish landscape," Dr Donnelly said.

The Clandeboye O'Neill building is believed to have resembled tower houses such as the 15th century Kilclief Castle, near Strangford

"They're really well constructed, but they're not immune from the forces of nature, such as frost getting into the walls."

This second Belfast castle was also replaced, but not entirely.

"At the end of the 16th century the Gaelic lords went into revolt and they were defeated by the forces of Queen Elizabeth I, one of whom was Arthur Chichester," Mr Ó Baoill said.

"He was given land all over the place, including the town of Belfast."

A report by the plantation commissioners in 1611 gives an account of shops being built in the new Chichester town, with 120,000 bricks being used by masons.

Among the writings is a reference to the old "decayed" castle, the O'Neill building, part of which was retained and linked to the new Chichester castle via a staircase.

The third castle survived for a century, but burnt down in 1708, killing four people, including three sisters of the 4th Earl of Donegall.

It can be seen in a map of Belfast in 1685, however, along with the city's walls, which were ground-made ramparts that partly enclosed the town.
"It was smack in the centre of Belfast, around Cornmarket and Castle Arcade," Mr Ó Baoill said.

"Underground are the remains of at least two castles side by side, and possibly the Anglo-Norman one as well, but it's really frustrating because you can't see them."

"Underground they're safe," he added.

Due to the risk of flooding in Belfast, Mr Ó Baoill said archaeologists believed few of the city centre's buildings have deep basements, meaning there is a possibility that "substantial archaeological remains" exist across the area.

The castles, off modern Castle Place, were built at a site of strategic importance, according to Ruairí Ó Baoill

Historian Dr Jim O'Neill agreed and explained a shallow trench he once excavated in Waring Street revealed centuries of buildings had been layered on top of each other, indicating that the castles' remains could exist mere metres underground.

He said it is believed the medieval tower house contained masonry vaulting.

"If you had a limitless budget and luck on your side, you should find this large brick structure with a masonry core, which would be astounding," he detailed.

"It would be astonishing to find that and then, of course, associated with that the remains of domestic life from that time."

'Heightened archaeological potential'

The planned redevelopment of the BHS site has been limited to "areas of previous ground disturbance", the Department for Communities told BBC News NI, with the need for an archaeological assessment "likely to be minimal or avoided entirely".

It added, however, the area was recognised as having a "heightened archaeological potential within the historic core of Belfast".

The department's Historic Environment Division (HED), which advises on the potential archaeological impact on planning decisions, highlighted the history of the location to Belfast City Council, which approved the project.

The council said the planning conditions "ensure appropriate mitigation of any archaeological impacts of development".

Dr O'Neill said the castles had always been of great interest to archaeologists and that local experts would like to excavate in the wider area.

"There's always that possibility, that frisson of excitement that we might get gold in terms of the archaeology of Belfast," he said.

Ruairí Ó Baoill added there remained a "massive interest" from Belfast people, too, in the city's history as more resources are made available to tell its story online.

"It's frustrating you can't see it [the castle], but just because you can't see it, it doesn't mean it isn't there," he said.

"There are hundreds of years of history back to the Anglo-Normans in the city centre, there's thousands of years in the hills around Belfast.

"We have a really really interesting past, a much longer past than sometimes people believe."

Source

Slicing through an onion damages cells, causing enzymes and other substances that are normally kept apart to spill out and react together. In standard onions the result is a sulphur-containing chemical called syn-propanethial-S-oxide, which resembles tear gas. This forms an irritating acid when it comes into contact with water in your eyes.

Some research groups have created onions that are genetically modified to lack an enzyme that leads to syn-propanethial-S-oxide, but these have not yet made it to market.

The tearless onions – Sunions – now in shops were created by repeatedly cross-breeding milder varieties containing lower levels of pyruvate. This substance is a by-product of the same reaction that forms syn-propanethial-S-oxide and also has a good measure of pungency.

Source

Millennia ago, Aristotle asserted that nature abhors a vacuum, reasoning that objects would fly through truly empty space at impossible speeds. In 1277, the French bishop Etienne Tempier shot back, declaring that God could do anything, even create a vacuum.

Then a mere scientist pulled it off. Otto von Guericke invented a pump to suck the air from within a hollow copper sphere, establishing perhaps the first high-quality vacuum on Earth. In a theatrical demonstration in 1654, he showed that not even two teams of horses straining to rip apart the watermelon-size ball could overcome the suction of nothing.

Since then, the vacuum has become a bedrock concept in physics, the foundation of any theory of something. Von Guericke’s vacuum was an absence of air. The electromagnetic vacuum is the absence of a medium that can slow down light. And a gravitational vacuum lacks any matter or energy capable of bending space. In each case the specific variety of nothing depends on what sort of something physicists intend to describe. “Sometimes, it’s the way we define a theory,” said Patrick Draper, a theoretical physicist at the University of Illinois.

As modern physicists have grappled with more sophisticated candidates for the ultimate theory of nature, they have encountered a growing multitude of types of nothing. Each has its own behavior, as if it’s a different phase of a substance. Increasingly, it seems that the key to understanding the origin and fate of the universe may be a careful accounting of these proliferating varieties of absence.

A 1672 book about the vacuum by the German scientist Otto von Guericke depicts a demonstration he gave for Emperor Ferdinand III, in which teams of horses tried unsuccessfully to pull apart the halves of a vacuum-filled copper sphere.Illustration: Royal Astronomical Society/Science Source

“We’re learning there’s a lot more to learn about nothing than we thought,” said Isabel Garcia Garcia, a particle physicist at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in California. “How much more are we missing?”

So far, such studies have led to a dramatic conclusion: Our universe may sit on a platform of shoddy construction, a “metastable” vacuum that is doomed—in the distant future—to transform into another sort of nothing, destroying everything in the process.

Quantum Nothingness

Nothing started to seem like something in the 20th century, as physicists came to view reality as a collection of fields: objects that fill space with a value at each point (the electric field, for instance, tells you how much force an electron will feel in different places). In classical physics, a field’s value can be zero everywhere so that it has no influence and contains no energy. “Classically, the vacuum is boring,” said Daniel Harlow, a theoretical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Nothing is happening.”

But physicists learned that the universe’s fields are quantum, not classical, which means they are inherently uncertain. You’ll never catch a quantum field with exactly zero energy. Harlow likens a quantum field to an array of pendulums—one at each point in space—whose angles represent the field’s values. Each pendulum hangs nearly straight down but jitters back and forth.

Left alone, a quantum field will stay in its minimum-energy configuration, known as its “true vacuum” or “ground state.” (Elementary particles are ripples in these fields.) “When we talk about the vacuum of a system, we have in mind in some loose way the preferred state of the system,” said Garcia Garcia.

Most of the quantum fields that fill our universe have one, and only one, preferred state, in which they’ll remain for eternity. Most, but not all.

True and False Vacuums

In the 1970s, physicists came to appreciate the significance of a different class of quantum fields whose values prefer not to be zero, even on average. Such a “scalar field” is like a collection of pendulums all hovering at, say, a 10-degree angle. This configuration can be the ground state: The pendulums prefer that angle and are stable.

In 2012, experimentalists at the Large Hadron Collider proved that a scalar field known as the Higgs field permeates the universe. At first, in the hot, early universe, its pendulums pointed down. But as the cosmos cooled, the Higgs field changed state, much as water can freeze into ice, and its pendulums all rose to the same angle. (This nonzero Higgs value is what gives many elementary particles the property known as mass.)

With scalar fields around, the stability of the vacuum is not necessarily absolute. A field’s pendulums might have multiple semi-stable angles and a proclivity for switching from one configuration to another. Theorists aren’t certain whether the Higgs field, for instance, has found its absolute favorite configuration—the true vacuum. Some have argued that the field’s current state, despite having persisted for 13.8 billion years, is only temporarily stable, or “metastable.”

If so, the good times won’t last forever. In the 1980s, the physicists Sidney Coleman and Frank De Luccia described how a false vacuum of a scalar field could “decay.” At any moment, if enough pendulums in some location jitter their way into a more favorable angle, they’ll drag their neighbors to meet them, and a bubble of true vacuum will fly outward at nearly light speed. It will rewrite physics as it goes, busting up the atoms and molecules in its path. (Don’t panic. Even if our vacuum is only metastable, given its staying power so far, it will probably last for billions of years more.)

In the potential mutability of the Higgs field, physicists identified the first of a practically infinite number of ways that nothingness could kill us all.

More Problems, More Vacuums

As physicists have attempted to fit nature’s confirmed laws into a larger set (filling in giant gaps in our understanding in the process), they have cooked up candidate theories of nature with additional fields and other ingredients.

When fields pile up, they interact, influencing each other’s pendulums and establishing new mutual configurations in which they like to get stuck.

Physicists visualize these vacuums as valleys in a rolling “energy landscape.” Different pendulum angles correspond to different amounts of energy, or altitudes in the energy landscape, and a field seeks to lower its energy just as a stone seeks to roll downhill. The deepest valley is the ground state, but the stone could come to rest—for a time, anyway—in a higher valley.

A couple of decades ago, the landscape exploded in scale. The physicists Joseph Polchinski and Raphael Bousso were studying certain aspects of string theory, the leading mathematical framework for describing gravity’s quantum side. String theory works only if the universe has some 10 dimensions, with the extra ones curled up into shapes too tiny to detect. Polchinski and Bousso calculated in 2000 that such extra dimensions could fold up in a tremendous number of ways. Each way of folding would form a distinct vacuum with its own physical laws.

The discovery that string theory allows nearly countless vacuums jibed with another discovery from nearly two decades earlier.

Cosmologists in the early 1980s developed a hypothesis known as cosmic inflation that has become the leading theory of the universe’s birth. The theory holds that the universe began with a quick burst of exponential expansion, which handily explains the universe’s smoothness and hugeness. But inflation’s successes come at a price.

The researchers found that once cosmic inflation started, it would continue. Most of the vacuum would violently explode outward forever. Only finite regions of space would stop inflating, becoming bubbles of relative stability separated from each other by inflating space in between. Inflationary cosmologists believe we call one of these bubbles home.

A Multiverse of Vacuums

To some, the notion that we live in a multiverse—an endless landscape of vacuum bubbles—is disturbing. It makes the nature of any one vacuum (such as ours) seem random and unpredictable, curbing our ability to understand our universe. Polchinski, who died in 2018, told the physicist and author Sabine Hossenfelder that discovering string theory’s landscape of vacuums initially made him so miserable it led him to seek therapy. If string theory predicts every imaginable variety of nothing, has it predicted anything?

To others, the plethora of vacuums is not a problem; “in fact, it’s a virtue,” said Andrei Linde, a prominent cosmologist at Stanford University and one of the developers of cosmic inflation. That’s because the multiverse potentially solves a great mystery: the ultra-low energy of our particular vacuum.

When theorists naively estimate the collective jittering of all the universe’s quantum fields, the energy is huge—enough to rapidly accelerate the expansion of space and, in short order, rip the cosmos apart. But the observed acceleration of space is extremely mild in comparison, suggesting that much of the collective jittering cancels out and our vacuum has an extraordinarily low positive value for its energy.

In a solitary universe, the tiny energy of the one and only vacuum looks like a profound puzzle. But in a multiverse, it’s just dumb luck. If different bubbles of space have different energies and expand at different rates, galaxies and planets will form only in the most lethargic bubbles. Our calm vacuum, then, is no more mysterious than the Goldilocks orbit of our planet: We find ourselves here because most everywhere else is inhospitable to life.

Love it or hate it, the multiverse hypothesis as currently understood has a problem. Despite string theory’s seemingly infinite menu of vacuums, so far no one has found a specific folding of tiny extra dimensions that corresponds to a vacuum like ours, with its barely positive energy. String theory seems to yield negative-energy vacuums much more easily.

Perhaps string theory is untrue, or the flaw could lie with researchers’ immature understanding of it. Physicists may not have hit on the right way to handle positive vacuum energy within string theory. “That’s perfectly possible,” said Nathan Seiberg, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. “This is a hot topic.”

Or our vacuum could just be inherently sketchy. “The prevailing view is that positively energized space is not stable,” Seiberg said. “It could decay to something else, so that could be one of the reasons why it is so hard to understand the physics of it.”

These researchers suspect that our vacuum is not one of reality’s preferred states, and that it will someday jitter itself into a deeper, more stable valley. In doing so, our vacuum could lose the field that generates electrons or pick up a new palette of particles. The tightly folded dimensions could come unfurled. Or the vacuum could even give up on existence entirely.

“That’s another one of the options,” Harlow said. “A true nothing.”

The End of the Vacuum

The physicist Edward Witten first discovered the “bubble of nothing” in 1982. While studying a vacuum with one extra dimension curled up into a tiny circle at each point, he found that quantum jitters inevitably jiggled the extra dimension, sometimes shrinking the circle to a point. As the dimension vanished into nothingness, Witten found, it took everything else with it. The instability would spawn a rapidly expanding bubble with no interior, its mirrorlike surface marking the end of space-time itself.

This instability of tiny dimensions has long plagued string theory, and various ingredients have been devised to stiffen them. In December, Garcia Garcia, together with Draper and Benjamin Lillard of Illinois, calculated the lifetime of a vacuum with a single extra curled-up dimension. They considered various stabilizing bells and whistles, but they found that most mechanisms failed to stop the bubbles. Their conclusions aligned with Witten’s: When the size of the extra dimension fell below a certain threshold, the vacuum collapsed at once. A similar calculation—one extended to more sophisticated models—could rule out vacuums in string theory with dimensions below that size.

With a large enough hidden dimension, however, the vacuum could survive for many billions of years. This means that theories producing bubbles of nothing could plausibly match our universe. If so, Aristotle may have been more right than he knew. Nature may not be a big fan of the vacuum. In the extremely long run, it may prefer nothing at all.

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

Source

A basic fact of geometry, known for millennia, is that you can draw a line through any two points in the plane. Any more points, and you’re out of luck: It’s not likely that a single line will pass through all of them. But you can pass a circle through any three points, and a conic section (an ellipse, parabola or hyperbola) through any five.

More generally, mathematicians want to know when you can draw a curve through arbitrarily many points in arbitrarily many dimensions. It’s a fundamental question — known as the interpolation problem — about algebraic curves, one of the most central objects in mathematics. “This is really about just understanding what curves are,” said Ravi Vakil, a mathematician at Stanford University.

But curves that live in higher dimensions, despite having been studied with state-of-the-art tools for hundreds of years, are tricky beasts. In two-dimensional space, a curve can be cut out by a single equation: A line might be written as y = 3x − 7, a circle by x2 + y2 = 1. In spaces of three or more dimensions, however, a curve gets much more complicated, and it is often defined by so many equations in so many variables that you cannot possibly hope to fully understand its geometry. As a result, a curve’s most basic properties can be exceedingly difficult to grasp — including the seemingly simple notion of whether it passes through some collection of points in space.

For centuries, mathematicians have been proving cases of the interpolation problem: Can you, for instance, put a curve with certain specified properties through 16 points in three-dimensional space, or a billion points in five-dimensional space? That work has not only allowed them to answer important questions in algebraic geometry, but also helped inspire developments in cryptography, digital storage and other areas well beyond pure mathematics.
Still, Vakil said, it’s not enough to understand interpolation for most curves. Mathematicians want to know it for all of them.

Now, in a proof posted online earlier this year, two young mathematicians at Brown University, Eric Larson and Isabel Vogt, have finally dealt the problem its final blow, solving it completely and systematically. The paper marks the culmination of nearly a decade of work, during which they gradually chipped away at the question, solved important related problems about what curves look like and how they behave — and also got married.

“It’s really a remarkable story,” said Sam Payne, a mathematician at the University of Texas, Austin, “for [people] that young and that early in their mathematical development to latch on to such a deep, hard problem, and then to be so persistent.”

Embedding Curves

The solution to the interpolation problem builds on work that dates back to the 19th century — work that answers an even more basic question. What algebraic curves are out there at all?

A curve is a one-dimensional object that sits in a higher-dimensional space. While it’s not usually clear how to describe a curve using specific equations, mathematicians can characterize it based on certain numerical properties instead. The first of these is the dimension of the space that the curve lives in.

The second is the degree of the curve, which is the number of times it intersects with a hyperplane — a subspace whose dimension is one less than that of the space. For instance, a circle in the two-dimensional plane has degree 2, because when it’s sliced with a one-dimensional line, the line generally hits it at two points. Meanwhile, the degree of a curve embedded in 20-dimensional space is the number of times it intersects with a 19-dimensional hyperplane. You can think of the degree as a kind of measure of how twisted up the curve is.

The third number that mathematicians use to describe a curve is called its genus. Because a curve is a one-dimensional object that is defined in terms of complex numbers, each of its points can also be written as a pair of real numbers, rather than one complex number. This means that from a topological point of view, a curve actually looks like a two-dimensional surface — and that surface can have holes. (A typical example is the surface of a doughnut.) A curve’s genus, then, is how many holes it has.

Before mathematicians could even start to contemplate what curves of a given genus and degree might look like, they needed to figure out when such curves could exist in the first place. Even that turned out to be a big challenge.

In the 1870s, the mathematicians Alexander von Brill and Max Noether (father of the famous mathematician Emmy Noether) formulated a prediction using only three properties: the genus (g), or number of holes it has; the degree (d), or its twistiness; and the number of dimensions (r) that the curve lives in. They conjectured that you can embed a curve of a given genus in a space of a given number of dimensions if and only if the degree of that curve is sufficiently large — that is, if the curve is sufficiently floppy. They wrote out a precise inequality in terms of g, d and r, and argued that only if that inequality held would a curve of your choosing be possible.

But their argument fell short of an actual proof. That wouldn’t come for more than a century, when in 1980 Phillip Griffiths and Joe Harris used modern techniques in algebraic geometry to show that the Brill-Noether theorem was indeed true. (Since then, mathematicians have produced around half a dozen different proofs of the theorem and have developed a rich theory around it.)

The result finally made it possible for mathematicians to return to the interpolation problem — that is, figuring out how many random points in r-dimensional space a curve of genus g and degree d could pass through. (Here, the curve is said to be “general,” meaning that it doesn’t get embedded in space in a special way.) Based on Brill and Noether’s work, they had an educated guess about what the answer to that question should be. As with the Brill-Noether theorem, it came in the form of a particular inequality that the curve’s parameters needed to satisfy — this time written not just in terms of g, d and r, but also in terms of n, the number of points.

But unlike in the Brill-Noether theorem, there were clear exceptions to this rule, cases where the geometry of a curve restricted how many points it would otherwise have been expected to pass through. “That’s already an indication that this is a hard theorem, this is a deep theorem, this requires a lot of work,” Payne said.

That’s the problem that Larson and Vogt got interested in. They were inspired in part by Harris, who was one of their professors when they were undergraduate students together at Harvard University, where they met in 2011. Harris later became Larson’s doctoral adviser and Vogt’s co-adviser when, as graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, they started working on interpolation in earnest.

Breaking the Problem

Larson began his involvement with the interpolation problem while he was working on another major question in algebraic geometry known as the maximal rank conjecture. When, as a graduate student, he set his sights on this conjecture — which had been open for more than a century — it seemed like “a really dumb idea, because this conjecture was like a graveyard,” Vakil said. “He was trying to chase something which people much older than him had failed at over a long period of time.”

But Larson kept at it, and in 2017, he presented a full proof that established him as a rising star in the field.

The key to that proof involved working out various cases of the interpolation problem. That was because a big part of Larson’s approach to the maximal rank conjecture (which is also about algebraic curves) was to break a curve of interest into multiple curves, study their properties, then glue them back together in just the right way. And to glue those simpler curves together, he had to make each of them pass through the same group of points — which in turn meant proving an interpolation problem. “Interpolation gives you a machine for building these [more complicated] curves,” Larson said.

Vogt was already working on interpolation. In the first paper she wrote in graduate school, she proved all cases of interpolation (including all exceptions) in three-dimensional space; the following year, she teamed up with Larson to solve the problem in four-dimensional space as well. While the couple has since collaborated on other projects, “this is how we got started working together,” Vogt said. That same year — which was also the year Larson posted his proof of maximal rank — they got married. Since then, they’ve often found themselves discussing ideas after dinner, working through problems on the chalkboards they have in their home.

The interpolation problem asks if a certain type of curve can pass through a given collection of random points. To prove it, the duo would have to show that the curve could wiggle in space in a particular way. Consider, for instance, three points on a line. If you move one point slightly away from the line but keep the other two points fixed, you can’t shift the line in any way that would allow it to pass through the new configuration of points. Trying to hit all three would force the line to bend, so that it would no longer be a line. And so a line can interpolate through two points but not three.

The mathematicians wanted to figure out something similar for more complicated curves in higher-dimensional spaces — to shift them at certain points, and study how they moved.

To do so, they needed to look at a structure called the normal bundle of the curve, which essentially controls how the curve can wiggle around. The interpolation question could then be rewritten as a problem about computing properties of the normal bundle of a curve.

But these get prohibitively difficult to study for the more complicated curves that Larson and Vogt were concerned with. So they used a similar strategy to the one Larson used in the proof of the maximal rank conjecture. Given a curve, they broke it into pieces — but delicately, just so. “They took the problem, and they broke it, but in just the right way so they could see exactly what was going on,” Vakil said.

Take a simple example. Say you have a hyperbola in the plane, a single curve that looks like a pair of mirror-image arcs facing away from each other. You can “deform” this curve until it breaks into two simpler curves, in this case a pair of lines that cross each other in an X shape. Some aspects of the geometry of the hyperbola are still reflected in the geometry of those lines. But since the lines are simpler, they’re easier to work with, and it’s easier to analyze their normal bundles.

That said, you can’t simply look at the normal bundles of the individual lines and immediately translate that to an understanding of the normal bundle of the hyperbola. That’s because at the point where the two lines meet, the normal bundle misbehaves, in a sense. Instead, mathematicians have to study the normal bundle with certain modifications.

Of course, Larson and Vogt weren’t looking at hyperbolas and lines, but at much more intricate situations. They would start by splitting a complex curve into two pieces: a line and a simpler (but still complicated) curve that met that line at either one or two points. They would then break the more complicated curve into two, and repeat the process again, and again, and again, until they reduced everything to truly simple “base” curves, “the sort of thing that you can work out with your bare hands,” Vogt said. Throughout that process, they had to keep track of the normal bundles of the pieces — and all the modifications to those normal bundles that piled up — to prove what they needed to prove about the original normal bundle.

But these ways of breaking the curves up weren’t enough. They didn’t work for all the kinds of curves covered by the Brill-Noether theorem.
Larson and Vogt had to introduce a new method for breaking their curves up — a method that didn’t involve one of the pieces being a line. Figuring that out was a challenge, not only because it simply might not do what they wanted it to at a given step in their argument, but also because they had to watch out for the exceptions where the interpolation statement didn’t hold true. “Your argument has to be sufficiently complicated, because you can’t ever [end up with] an exception” as your base case, Vogt said. “That would be really bad.”

Eventually they found a way to do this. “It’s technically extremely difficult. It’s a very, very demanding construction argument,” Harris said. “Frankly, I think it requires somebody with the exceptional skills of Larson and Vogt to carry it out.”

As a graduate student in 2017, the mathematician Eric Larson solved the maximal rank conjecture, a major open problem about algebraic curves.
Lori Nascimento

At the same time, they developed methods for dealing with all the modifications to the normal bundle that piled up over the course of that argument. “It’s an amazing feat, keeping track of all these data, and being able to carry it through,” said Gavril Farkas, a mathematician at the Humboldt University of Berlin.

“Eric is really good at this thing,” Vogt said. Izzet Coskun, a mathematician at the University of Illinois who frequently collaborates with Larson and Vogt, agreed. “Eric is a little bit scary,” he said. “Most of us, we see a set of 12 inequalities, we give up and our eyes glaze over … but he doesn’t give up. There’s nothing too complicated for him.”

Ultimately, Larson and Vogt proved that curves will always interpolate through the expected number of points, with the exception of four special cases. They provided geometric reasons for why those four types of curves interpolate through an unexpected number of points. With that, they’d completed the problem once and for all.

“They make the arguments seem very natural. Like, it seems very unsurprising,” said Dave Jensen, a mathematician at the University of Kentucky. “Which is odd, because this is a result that other people tried to prove and were unable to.”

“It’s sheer perseverance. It’s more than that. It’s brilliant, actually, to be able to finish it,” Farkas said. “It’s quite something to see.”

A Family Legacy

While this proof might mark the end of one narrative thread, the story is far from over — from both a mathematical and a personal standpoint.

There’s no lack of questions you can ask about curves. And Larson and Vogt’s work provides a recipe of sorts for getting ahold of these central but elusive mathematical objects. “I think that a lot of the classical problems now are more approachable,” Coskun said. “Things that we would have thought there’s no way that you can even start to think about that … now you can ask.”

Meanwhile, Larson’s younger sister, Hannah Larson, is also a mathematician — currently a Clay fellow after earning her doctorate from Stanford University this spring — working on related questions about algebraic curves and Brill-Noether theory. “She is a machine,” said Vakil, who was her doctoral adviser. “She can do anything.”

She recently developed a new proof of the Brill-Noether theorem that Vakil called state-of-the-art. And she’s also been working, both independently and in collaboration with her brother and Vogt, on proving an analogue of the Brill-Noether theorem for certain special curves. “They’re a really impressive family,” Jensen said.

“It’s so fun to have something that we can do together like this,” Hannah Larson said of working with her brother and sister-in-law.

Like her brother, Hannah was inspired to study the material as an undergraduate, after taking a class taught by Harris. But she also credits Eric and Isabel for some of her interest in the subject as well. “When you hang out with somebody and you see how much fun they’re having doing math, or a particular kind of math, it made me want to try it too,” she said.

“What’s really neat [is that] they get along ridiculously well,” Vakil said. “People should not get along as well as the three of them get along.”

They’re now continuing to forge ahead in illuminating what different kinds of curves look like, how they behave, and what that might mean for other mathematical problems. “So this story is not yet complete in any way,” Hannah Larson said.

Source

This story originally appeared on Yale Environment 360 and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

On a recent summer morning near Camden, New Jersey, two divers from the US Environmental Protection Agency hovered over a patch of sediment 10 feet below the surface of the Delaware River. With less than two feet of visibility in the churning estuary, they were transplanting a species crucial to the ecosystem: Vallisneria americana, or wild celery grass. One diver held a GoPro camera and a flashlight, capturing a shaky clip of the thin, ribbon-like blades bending with the current.

Watching the divers’ bubbles surface from the EPA’s boat was Anthony Lara, experiential programs supervisor at the Center for Aquatic Sciences at Adventure Aquarium in Camden, who had nurtured these plants for months in tanks, from winter buds to mature grasses some 24 inches long.

“It’s a little nerve-racking,” he said of releasing the grasses into the wild, where they could get nudged out by a competing plant or eaten by a duck. “But that’s life.”

This was the first planting of a new restoration project led by Upstream Alliance, a nonprofit focused on public access, clean water, and coastal resilience in the Delaware, Hudson, and Chesapeake watersheds. In collaboration with the Center for Aquatic Sciences, and with support from the EPA’s Mid-Atlantic team and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, the alliance is working to repopulate areas of the estuary with wild celery grass, a plant vital to freshwater ecosystems. It’s among the new, natural restoration projects focused on bolstering plants and wildlife to improve water quality in the Delaware River, which provides drinking water for some 15 million people.

Such initiatives are taking place across the United States, where, 50 years after passage of the Clean Water Act, urban waterways are continuing their comeback, showing increasing signs of life. And yet ecosystems still struggle, and waters are often inaccessible to the communities that live around them. Increasingly, scientists, nonprofits, academic institutions, and state agencies are focusing on organisms like bivalves (such as oysters and mussels) and aquatic plants to help nature restore fragile ecosystems, improve water quality, and increase resilience.

Bivalves and aquatic vegetation improve water clarity by grounding suspended particles, allowing more light to penetrate deeper. They also have exceptional capacity to cycle nutrients—both by absorbing them as food and by making them more available to other organisms. Thriving underwater plant meadows act as carbon sinks and provide food and habitat for scores of small fish, crabs, and other bottom-dwellers. Healthy bivalve beds create structure that acts as a foundation for benthic habitat and holds sediment in place.

“Why not take the functional advantage of plants and animals that are naturally resilient and rebuild them?” says Danielle Kreeger, science director at the Partnership for the Delaware Estuary, which is spearheading a freshwater mussel hatchery in southwest Philadelphia. “Then you get erosion control, water quality benefits, fish and wildlife habitat, as well as better access for people.”

One hundred miles north of Philadelphia, the Billion Oyster Project has been restoring the bivalves in New York Harbor since 2010, engaging more than 10,000 volunteers and 6,000 students in the project. Oyster nurseries are being installed in Belfast Lough in Northern Ireland, where until recently they were believed to have been extinct for a century. And a hatchery 30 miles west of Chicago has dispersed 25,000 mussels into area waterways, boosting the populations of common freshwater mussel species.

Underwater vegetation restoration projects have been underway in the Chesapeake Bay and Tampa Bay for years, and more recently in California where seagrass species are in sharp decline. (Morro Bay, for example, has lost more than 90 percent of its eelgrass beds in the last 15 years.) The California Ocean Protection Council’s 2020 Strategic Plan to Protect California’s Coast and Ocean aims to preserve the mere 15,000 acres of known seagrass beds and cultivate 1,000 more acres by 2025.

Scientists stress that these projects must be implemented alongside strategies to continue curbing contaminants, mainly excess nutrients from sewage and fertilizers, flowing into our waterways—still the most critical step in improving water quality. After several decades of aquatic vegetation plantings in the Chesapeake Bay, for example, scientists say that the modest increase of plants is largely due to nature restoring itself following a reduction in nutrient pollution.

And any human intervention in a complex ecosystem raises a host of compelling concerns, such as how to ensure sufficient genetic diversity and monitor competition for food and resources. Scientists say that, in many cases, they’re learning as they go.

Still, in areas where the natural environment is improving, bringing back bivalves and aquatic plants can create a lasting foundation for entire ecosystems. And restoration initiatives are an active form of stewardship that connects people to their waterways, helping them understand the ecosystems we depend on for our survival.

Until five years ago, the extent of wild celery grass beds in the Delaware estuary was a bit of a mystery. Many scientists didn’t think the water quality was suitable, and since the estuary contains a lot of sediment and roils with the tides, the plants weren’t visible in aerial imagery.

But in 2017, EPA researchers started surveying by boat to detect submerged vegetation and were surprised to find the plant thriving in parts of a 27-mile stretch of the Delaware River from Palmyra, New Jersey, past Camden and Philadelphia, to Chester, Pennsylvania. That’s the only section of the river designated by the Delaware River Basin Commission as unsafe for “primary contact recreation”—activities like jet skiing, kayaking, and swimming.

The discovery of healthy grass beds was exciting, says the EPA Mid-Atlantic region’s senior watershed coordinator Kelly Somers, because the plant is an indicator of water quality. The EPA’s research, accessible via online maps, has been especially helpful for the Upstream Alliance’s restoration work, says founder and president Don Baugh, because most of the research on wild celery grass is from other places—primarily the Chesapeake Bay. The restoration of wild celery and other aquatic plant species has been underway there for more than 30 years.

Among the Chesapeake’s experts is Mike Naylor, aquatic biologist for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, who, back in the 1990s, was pulling National Archives images of the Chesapeake Bay to find out what bay grass beds looked like in the 1930s and ’50s. When combined with similar research by the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, he found that at least 200,000 acres of underwater vegetation flourished in the bay in those decades, dropping to about 38,000 by 1984.

When I talked to Naylor in mid-July, he had just been out with volunteers from the ShoreRivers group harvesting redhead grass (Potamogeton perfoliatus)—enough to fill the back bed of a pickup truck, which will yield a couple gallons of seeds for replanting, he says.

In recent years, scientists on the Chesapeake Bay have switched from transplanting adult plants to direct seeding, which is far less resource-intensive and laborious. “You can spread tens of acres of seeds in one day with just three people,” Naylor says.

More efficient techniques combined with site selection informed by accumulated data on plants’ requirements could significantly boost the success of restoration efforts. Still, scientists agree that the modest increases in seagrass growth over the last 30 years are mainly due to natural repopulation following improvements in water quality.

“In the Chesapeake Bay, the thing that has led to wide-scale [aquatic vegetation] recoveries is nutrient load reductions,” says Cassie Gurbisz, assistant professor in the environmental studies program at St. Mary’s College in Maryland.

Excess nutrients—mainly nitrogen and phosphorus from sewage and agricultural runoff—are among the biggest detriments to water quality. And it’s a problem that bivalves can help address. The Billion Oyster Project, which has restored oysters at 15 reef sites, is working to determine how oysters affect—and are affected by—water quality. The project’s goal is to restore 1 billion oysters to New York Harbor by 2035.

A 2017 pilot project in the Bronx River Estuary studied the cleaning capabilities of the marine ribbed mussel. Researchers estimated that 337,000 adult ribbed mussels floating in the estuary could sequester 138 pounds of nitrogen in their tissues and shells in six months. As it eats, a single mussel can filter up to 20 gallons per day, remove excess nitrogen both by assimilating it into their shells and tissues and burying it in the sediment as waste. Because they’re especially sensitive to poor water quality, freshwater mussel species are among the most endangered groups of animals.

“In some watersheds, the reasons why they went away are still there, and so they’re not really yet restorable,” says Kreeger of the Partnership for the Delaware Estuary, which has been researching freshwater mussels in the region for 15 years. The reasons include habitat destruction caused by dredging or filling, sedimentation or siltation from runoff, and climate change factors like warming water and increased stormwater runoff.

“In many areas, water quality has come back enough and habitat is stable enough that you can rebuild,” says Kreeger. The partnership’s proposed hatchery and education center would have the capacity to propagate 500,000 native mussels each year.

Kreeger says the hatchery team is working on biosecurity and genetics preservation plans to address the concern that releasing large numbers of hatchery-raised mussels could dilute genetic diversity and introduce diseases in the wild.

“Propagation or restoration projects should maintain the current genetic makeup and diversity and should not disrupt the natural and evolutionary processes,” says Kentaro Inoue, research biologist at the Daniel P. Haerther Center for Conservation and Research at Shedd Aquarium in Chicago. He’s working with the Urban Stream Research Center’s hatchery—which has released about 25,000 mussels into Chicago-area waterways—to analyze DNA samples from restoration sites.

The key issue is that many propagated animals have exactly the same maternal genetics. (The first 24,000 juveniles released by the hatchery were the progeny of just four mother mussels.) The center is working to mitigate some of these concerns by tagging their mussels so as not to propagate animals with the same genetics in a subsequent season. Even still, “We need to conduct more post-release monitoring after releasing hatchery-reared juveniles into the wild,” says Inoue.

Despite these concerns, scientists say bringing back bivalve and aquatic vegetation communities is an important tool to continue improving water quality. Says Kreeger, “We’re restoring nature’s ability to keep itself clean.”

How Scientists Are Cleaning Up Rivers Using Grasses and Oysters

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More research is needed to see if the effect lasts and whether it works in a larger study. Many who took a dummy drug instead of psilocybin also succeeded in drinking less, likely because all study participants were highly motivated and received talk therapy.

Psilocybin, found in several species of mushrooms, can cause hours of vivid hallucinations. Indigenous people have used it in healing rituals and scientists are exploring whether it can ease depression or help longtime smokers quit. It's illegal in the U.S., though Oregon and several cities have decriminalized it. Starting next year, Oregon will allow its supervised use by licensed facilitators.

The new research, published Wednesday in JAMA Psychiatry, is "the first modern, rigorous, controlled trial" of whether it can also help people struggling with alcohol, said Fred Barrett, a Johns Hopkins University neuroscientist who wasn't involved in the study.

In the study, 93 patients took a capsule containing psilocybin or a dummy medicine, lay on a couch, their eyes covered, and listened to recorded music through headphones. They received two such sessions, one month apart, and 12 sessions of talk therapy.

Mary Beth Orr holds an embroidery panel from her "stitch journal" as she poses for a photo in her home, Tuesday, Aug. 23, 2022 in Burien, Wash., south of Seattle. Orr used to have five or six drinks every evening and more on weekends before she enrolled in a study in 2018 to see if the compound in psychedelic mushrooms could help heavy drinkers cut back or quit entirely. She stopped drinking entirely for two years, and now has an occasional glass of wine, and credits psilocybin for her progress.

Credit: AP Photo/Ted S. Warren

During the eight months after their first dosing session, patients taking psilocybin did better than the other group, drinking heavily on about 1 in 10 days on average vs. about 1 in 4 days for the dummy pill group. Almost half who took psilocybin stopped drinking entirely compared with 24% of the control group.

Only three conventional drugs—disulfiram, naltrexone and acamprosate—are approved to treat alcohol use disorder and there's been no new drug approvals in nearly 20 years.

While it's not known exactly how psilocybin works in the brain, researchers believe it increases connections and, at least temporarily, changes the way the brain organizes itself.

"More parts of the brain are talking to more parts of the brain," said Dr. Michael Bogenschutz, director of the NYU Langone Center for Psychedelic Medicine, who led the research.

Less is known about how enduring those new connections might be. In theory, combined with talk therapy, people might be able to break bad habits and adopt new attitudes more easily.

"There's a possibility of really shifting in a relatively permanent way the functional organization of the brain," Bogenschutz said.

Patients described life-changing insights that gave them lasting inspiration, Bogenschutz said.

Mary Beth Orr, 69, of Burien, Washington, said her psilocybin-induced hallucinations—flying over breathtaking landscapes and merging telepathically with creative people throughout history—taught her she wasn't alone.

Before enrolling in the study in 2018, Orr had five or six drinks every evening and more on weekends.

"The quantity was unacceptable and yet I couldn't stop," she said. "There was no off switch that I could access."

During her first psilocybin experience, she saw a vision of her late father, who gave her a pair of eagle eyes and said, "Go." She told the therapists monitoring her: "These eagle eyes can't see God's face, but they know where it is."

This photo provided by NYU Langone Health in August 2022 shows an example of a psilocybin capsule used in a study which helped heavy drinkers cut back or quit entirely, published Wednesday, Aug. 24, 2022, in JAMA Psychiatry. While it’s not known exactly how psilocybin works in the brain, researchers believe it increases connections and, at least temporarily, changes the way the brain organizes itself.

Credit: NYU Langone Health via AP

She stopped drinking entirely for two years, and now has an occasional glass of wine. More than the talk therapy, she credits psilocybin.

"It made alcohol irrelevant and uninteresting to me," Orr said. Now, "I am tethered to my children and my loved ones in a way that just precludes the desire to be alone with alcohol."

Patients receiving psilocybin had more headaches, nausea and anxiety than those getting the dummy drug. One person reported thoughts of suicide during a psilocybin session.

In an experiment like this, it's important that patients don't know or guess if they got the psilocybin or the dummy drug. To try to achieve this, the researchers chose a generic antihistamine with some psychoactive effects as the placebo.

Still, most patients in the study correctly guessed whether they got the psilocybin or the dummy pill.

Mary Beth Orr poses for a photo in her home, Tuesday, Aug. 23, 2022 in Burien, Wash., south of Seattle, while holding medicine bottles used to give her doses of psilocybin, the compound in psychedelic mushrooms, as part of a study to try and help heavy drinkers cut back or quit entirely. Orr used to have five or six drinks every evening and more on weekends before she enrolled in the study in 2018. She stopped drinking entirely for two years, and now has an occasional glass of wine, and credits psilocybin for her progress.

Credit: AP Photo/Ted S. Warren

Paul Mavis couldn't guess. The 61-year-old from Wilton, Connecticut, got the placebo, but still quit drinking. For one thing, the talk therapy helped, suggesting to him that his emotional life stalled at age 15 when he started drinking to feel numb.

And he described a life-changing moment during a session where he was taking the dummy drug: He imagined the death of a loved one. Suddenly, an intense, incapacitating grief overcame him.

"I was crying, which isn't typical for me. I was sweating. I was bereft," he said. "As I'm trying to reconcile this grief, like, why am I feeling this?

"Instantly, I thought, 'Drinking equals death.'" He said he hasn't had a drink since.

Dr. Mark Willenbring, former director of treatment research at the National Institute for Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, said more research is needed before psilocybin can be considered an effective addition to talk therapy. He noted that talking with a therapist helped both groups—those who got psilocybin and those who didn't—and the added benefit of psilocybin appeared to wear off over time.

"It's tantalizing, absolutely," Willenbring said. "Is more research required? Yes. Is it ready for prime time? No."

Source

Huawei Technologies, the Shenzhen-based telecommunication equipment maker, has announced a change in business strategy to focus more on the bottom line than generating revenue after its net margin declined by nearly 50% in the first half of 2022 compared to the same period last year.

Huawei’s founder, Chief Executive Ren Zhengfei, wrote in an internal memo that the tech giant would shut down or reduce its unprofitable businesses and focus more on its high-value lines in the coming few years.

Employees would get more bonuses or promotions if they could help the company boost operating profits – less so, sales – according to the memo obtained by Chinese news media.

Ren said:

The continued recession of the global economy, together with the impact of the Covid-19 epidemic, will greatly hurt people’s consumption power. We face not only pressure on supply but also a weakening market demand. Between 2023 and 2025, we must make survival our main goal. We must stay alive and live with quality. From this perspective, we need to adjust our business strategy and decide what can be done and what should be abandoned … With survival the main principle, marginal businesses will be shruken and closed. The chill will be felt by everyone.

The company said its net margin was 5% in the first six months of this year, compared with 9.8% in the same period of last year. It means Huawei’s net profit fell by 51.97% to 15.1 billion yuan for the period.

Commentators said Huawei saw declining profitability because its smartphone business had been hit by the United States’ sanctions since 2019. They said the company should downsize its e-vehicle business as its returns were less than expected.

The memo

Ren posted the memo, titled “Huawei must shift to seek for profit and cash flow from boosting revenue” on the company’s online discussion group earlier this week.

He said Huawei must stop expanding or investing blindly, have the determination to downsize and give up some national tasks, replenish cash flow to get ready for a worsening future, cut off risky and non-profitable businesses, grant bonuses to employees by their actual business results and increase inventory.

“Our respite period is 2023 and 2024. We are not sure whether we can achieve any breakthroughs these two years,” Ren said. “Therefore, everyone should now not present concepts but talk about reality, especially in business forecasting.”

“Whoever made up stories and cheated for funding will pay for the losses,” he told employees in the memo. “Only if we can stay alive, can we have a future.”

He added that some strategic businesses, such as internet-related units, might be able to go on but a lot of barely-surviving businesses had to be terminated. He said Huawei would strengthen its research and development (R&D) and modularize its products to boost competitiveness.

Huawei founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei. Photo: Huawei.

Some commentators said Huawei did not need to make the whole smart car and should focus on some core high-value modules. They said it’s the right decision for the company to focus on mobile OS, semiconductor design and emerging sectors such as smart cities and data centers but it would take time to see big results.

Since 2019, Huawei has partnered with different Chinese automakers. In the beginning, it worked with Seres, a California-based e-vehicle maker owned by the Chongqing Sokon Industry Group, to produce a sports utility vehicle (SUV) called SF5. At that time, Huawei was only slightly involved in the project by contributing its DriveOne digital power, Hi-Car panel and audio systems.

In 2020, Huawei partnered with BAIC Motor Corp, a Beijing-based automaker, and provided more components including the seat-control and driving assistance systems. It also helped Changan Automobile and lithium-battery supplier Contemporary Amperex Technology Co Ltd (CATL) produce a smart vehicle called Avatr 11.

Last year, when Huawei partnered with Seres again to produce SF7, it provided most electronic components in the car.

Chinese media pointed out that Huawei definitely wanted to focus on high-value components and let automakers finish the low-end parts but that the latter would not have enough incentive.

Rong Hui, former vice president at New Technology Research Institute of BAIC Group, has said that it was ill-advised for BAIC to rely too heavily on Huawei’s smart car modules, which cost 40,000 yuan (US$5,800) each with a profit of 15,000 yuan for Huawei while BAIC does not make a profit for its part.

A columnist who specializes in the auto sector wrote that the returns of Huawei’s auto part business were less than expected. He said if Huawei tried to share more profits with automobile makers, it would take even longer to recoup its huge investments in the sector. He said Huawei should consider downsizing its smart car business.

US sanctions bite

In May 2019, the US Commerce Department put Huawei and its 70 affiliates on its Entity List on national security grounds. It banned the sales of hardware and software involving US technology to Huawei and its subsidiaries.

Huawei then launched a huge promotion campaign in June 2019 to criticize the US and boost employees’ morale.

In a seminar called “A Coffee With Ren” in Huawei’s headquarters at that time, Ren told guests and foreign journalists that the US sanctions were indeed powerful but American customers’ trust in Huawei was even more powerful.

He said the US sanctions would not have a big impact on Huawei’s businesses, quotes that were still being used by Chinese media until early this year.

Huawei then launched its HarmonyOS, or Hongmeng in Chinese, and used inventory chips plus self-developed Kirin chipsets to maintain its smartphone output. It also boosted the output of Honor, its smartphone brand at that time.

Huawei’s new HarmonyOS will take aim at Google and Microsoft’s businesses. Image: Facebook

However, it had to dispose of its entire stake in Honor in November 2020 so that the unit could obtain US chips. In the fourth quarter of 2020, Huawei slowed its smartphone production.

In 2019, Huawei, together with Honor, was the No 1 smartphone maker in China with a market share of 26.5%, according to the industry research group Canalys.

Last year, Huawei’s market share fell to just 9.3% while Honor had a 10.4% market share, according to research group Cinno. Oppo ranked No 1 with a 20.5% market share while Vivo ranked No 2 with 18.2%. Apple and Xiaomi had 16% and 15.2% of the market, respectively.

Richard Yu, chief executive of Huawei Technologies Consumer Business Group, admitted during a public event n late May this year that Huawei’s businesses had been severely hit by the US sanctions. Yu said Huawei had been “too naive” in believing in globalization and not moving to make its own chips many years ago.

On August 12 this year, Huawei reported a 5.8% decline in overall sales to 301.6 billion yuan ($43.9 billion) for the first half of this year from a year ago.
Revenue of the company’s carrier business grew 4% to 142.7 billion yuan while that of enterprise business, which includes cloud and business services, increased 28% to 54.7 billion yuan. Revenue from devices, including sales of smartphones, dropped by 25.3% to 101.3 billion yuan.

Source

BOCA RATON, Fla. — Eating ultra-processed foods could be the cause behind many cases of anxiety and depression, a new study explains. Researchers from Florida Atlantic University’s Schmidt College of Medicine say they have found a connection between consuming too much junk food and more adverse mental health symptoms.

“Ultra-processed” is another way of saying these products are typically manufactured and ready-to-eat when they come out of their wrappers. They are generally convenient, cheap, quick to prepare, and consist of industrial formulations of oils, fats, sugars, starch, and protein isolates. Processed foods also often contain flavorings, colorings, emulsifiers, and other cosmetic additives. What they don’t contain a lot of is whole food and nutrition.

Common examples of these products include sugary drinks like soda, fast food, potato chips, candy, pastries packed with sugar, and processed meats like burgers and sausages.

Researchers say there have been previous studies that found a link between consuming ultra-processed food and depression, but few reports have examined the total number of poor mental health days people experience have eating junk food. The new study looked at a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults to see if consuming more ultra-processed food increases the number of mentally unhealthy days people have.

The team measured cases of mild depression, the number of mental unhealthy days, and the number of anxious days among 10,359 adults 18 and older who participated in the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.

Junk food leads to more ‘anxious’ days

Results reveal Americans who consumed the highest amounts of ultra-processed foods reported having significantly more “mentally unhealthy days” and “anxious days” in comparison to people who generally avoid these foods.

People who regularly eat junk food were also far less likely to have zero “mentally unhealthy days” and zero “anxious days.” The team believes their findings apply to people living throughout the United States as well as people living in other “Western” countries which share a similar diet.

“The ultra-processing of food depletes its nutritional value and also increases the number of calories, as ultra-processed foods tend to be high in added sugar, saturated fat and salt, while low in protein, fiber, vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals,” says corresponding author Eric Hecht, M.D., Ph.D., an affiliate associate professor in FAU’s Schmidt College of Medicine, in a university release.

“More than 70 percent of packaged foods in the U.S. are classified as ultra-processed food and represent about 60 percent of all calories consumed by Americans. Given the magnitude of exposure to and effects of ultra-processed food consumption, our study has significant clinical and public health implications.”

Study authors note that they used the NOVA food classification during their research. This system was recently adopted by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. NOVA examines the nature, extent, and purpose of food processing before categorizing foods and beverages into four groups: unprocessed or minimally processed foods, processed culinary ingredients, processed foods, and ultra-processed foods.

The findings appear in the journal Public Health Nutrition.

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routine of working scientist in

Quantum Initiative summer program

Denisse Córdova Carrizales spent her summer, quite literally, bringing the heat.

On a typical day Córdova Carrizales, who begins her senior year this fall, would arrive at the lab of condensed-matter physicist Julia Mundy at about 9 a.m. and don a white protective suit. The physics concentrator’s research involved working with chemical compounds heated in an oven to temperatures as high as 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit. Her job was to X-ray samples and perform electrical tests in a sealed container. If the material showed potential as a superconductor, she’d do further testing.

Córdova Carrizales was part of the first group of fellows in the Harvard Quantum Initiative’s Summer Research Program. The program, which is in its inaugural year, supported 10 undergraduate researchers from June to mid-August as they worked full-time in labs belonging to members of HQI.

The fellowship is designed for students with any level of prior research experience and provides advising and stipends to help them spend the summer in the Cambridge area. It also provides opportunities for the students to present their work and network with colleagues and peers. They work with supervising faculty and members of labs to design and pursue research projects in quantum science, including quantum information, systems, materials, and engineering.

“It helped me feel more confident about doing research,” rising senior Denisse Córdova Carrizales said of the summer program.
Rose Lincoln/Harvard Staff Photograher

The program offers the fellows a glimpse at the real-world lives of research scientists — and it’s not always as exciting as some might think. Córdova Carrizales says her process is repetitive and often nothing comes from the experiments, but it forces her to continually rethink and tweak what she’s doing. Fascinated, challenged, and “borderline addicted” to the work, she described the summer experience as giving her some technical expertise and a confidence boost as a scientist.

“This summer in general has made me realize that I really do enjoy research and do want to go on,” Córdova Carrizales said. “It helped me feel more confident about doing research. I’ve gotten to lead my own project. It has all made me feel very capable.”

“The program is about students getting the opportunity to work in a quantum lab just as a regular member of the lab, as if they were a graduate student or a postdoc,” said John Doyle, Henry B. Silsbee Professor of Physics, who co-directs HQI. “Having undergraduate students do actual work in a lab is crucial to their education and their professional development. What we’ve been able to do is provide a very easy on-ramp for our students to have this experience.”

HQI launched in 2018 with the aim of expanding research, development, and education in a rapidly expanding field that is key to future innovations and major technological advancement.

Creation of the undergraduate research program was largely spearheaded by Mundy, an HQI member and assistant professor of physics and applied physics. A Harvard College alumna, she knows firsthand the power of such experiences for undergraduates, especially in areas that build on prior lab work. Those experiences, she said, were critical in shaping her career as a researcher in quantum materials.

“The summer between junior and senior year was completely pivotal for me,” Mundy said. “It wasn’t the first research experience I had, but it was a really special one because it’s right when you’re thinking about going to grad school and what [line of research to focus on]. It’s really exciting to see a new generation of undergraduates have the same experiences.”

Students in this year’s program are working on a range of projects, from optimizing quantum technology to decoding errors in quantum computers to building lasers that can more easily cut materials such as graphene. Córdova Carrizales, for example, designed a project looking for a new family of materials that could lead to superconductors that can operate at higher temperatures. It’s a Holy Grail in condensed-matter physics because of the door they would open to long-term, sustainable electric energy.

Andrew Winnicki, a rising senior from Quincy House studying physics and math, is part of the Doyle lab. He is using a laser array to control a molecule that one day could be used as a qubit in quantum computers.

“It’s unpredictable and exciting, because sometimes the experiment will throw something at us that we need to figure out how to deal with,” Winnicki said. “I’ve added many new techniques to my experimental tool kit, like different laser and optics setups, or skills such as designing electronics and machining hardware that will go inside of the vacuum chambers. It’s all been a big part of my growth as a scientist.”

Mincheol Park — an international student from South Korea who has a joint concentration in chemistry, physics, and math — is working on the theoretical side of quantum science. The rising junior is trying to produce a protocol to implement error-correcting codes for quantum processors that exist today.

He’s valued the mentorship working full-time in the lab of physicist Mikhail Lukin. Park said he’s learned a lot from graduate students in the lab about how to prioritize work and what to do when something isn’t working. It also helps to hear about their career paths.

“It’s really good that I am able to learn this kind of lifestyle this early after my second year of college,” Park said.

The HQI undergraduate fellowship hosts a series of lunches for the fellows to network with other fellows and learn about each other’s work, as well as unwind and bond over their shared summer experience. There is also a poster session where the students present their work to the larger HQI community.

“It was an unexpected community this summer,” said Cassia Lee, a rising junior in Eliot House concentrating in chemistry and physics. “It’s easy to focus on your work and be in your own bubble, but it was really good to take a step back and see what everyone is doing.”

Standing at the poster session amid the different projects and diverse group of students, Doyle reflected on another of the key points of the fellowship: students pushing themselves to their limits and beyond.

“Generally, students are able to rise to whatever level of capabilities they have,” Doyle said. “In the lab, there is no upper limit. They can go as far as they want.”

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What3words is an app and web-based service that provides a geographic reference for every 3-meter-by-3-meter square on Earth using three random words. If your brain operates more naturally in the Imperial measurement system, 3 meters is about 9.8 feet. So, you could think of them as approximately 10-foot-by-10-foot squares, which is about the size of a small home office or bedroom. As an example, there’s a square in the middle of the Rochester Institute of Technology Tigers Turf Field coded to brilliance.bronze.inputs.

This new approach to geocoding is quite useful for several reasons. First, it’s more precise than regular street addresses. In addition, three words are easier for humans to remember and communicate to one another than, say, detailed latitude and longitude measurements. Because of this, the system is well suited for emergency services. With these advantages, some car manufacturers are even starting to integrate what3words into their navigation systems.

Every 10-foot-by-10-foot square on the planet can be labeled with its own unique three-word label. Credit: Courtesy what3words

Ordered triples

Here’s how three random words in English or any other language can identify such precise locations across the entire planet. The key concept is ordered triples.

Start with the basic assumption that the Earth is a sphere, recognizing that this is an approximate truth, and that its radius is approximately 3,959 miles (6,371 kilometers). To compute the surface area of the Earth, use the formula 4πr2. With r = 3,959 (6,371), this works out to approximately 197 million square miles (510 million square kilometers). Remember: What3words is using 3-meter-by-3-meter squares, each of which contains 9 square meters of surface area. Therefore, working in the metric system, Earth’s surface area is equivalent to 510 trillion square meters. Dividing 510 trillion by 9 reveals that uniquely identifying each square on Earth requires around 57 trillion ordered triples of three random words.

An ordered triple is just a list of three things in which the order matters. So “brilliance.bronze.inputs” would be considered a different ordered triple than “bronze.brilliance.inputs.” In fact, in the what3words system, bronze.brilliance.inputs is in fact on a mountain in Alaska, not in the middle of the RIT Tigers Turf Field, like brilliance.bronze.inputs.

Finding out how many words are used in a language and whether there are enough ordered triples to map the entire world are the next steps. According to some scholars, there are more than a million English words. However, many of them are very rare. Yet even using only common English words, there are still plenty to go around. Many word lists are available online.

The developers at what3words came up with a list of 40,000 English words. (The what3words system works in 50 different languages with independently assigned words.) The next question is determining how many ordered triples of three random words can be made from a list of 40,000 words. If you allow repeats, as what3words does, it is quite straightforward: there would be 40,000 possibilities for the first word, 40,000 possibilities for the second word, and 40,000 possibilities for the third word. The number of possible ordered triples would therefore be 40,000 times 40,000 times 40,000, which is 64 trillion. That provides plenty of “three random word” triples to cover the globe. The excess combinations also allow them to eliminate offensive words and words that would be easily confused for one another.

Passwords you can actually remember

While the power of three random words is being used to map the Earth, the U.K. National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) is also championing their use as passwords. Password selection and related security analysis are more complicated than attaching three words to small squares of the globe. However, a similar calculation is illuminating. If you string together an ordered triple of words – such as brilliancebronzeinputs – you get a nice long password that a human should be able to remember far more easily than a random string of letters, numbers, and special characters designed to meet a set of complexity rules.

If you increase your word list beyond 40,000, you’ll get even more possible passwords. Using the “Corncob list” of 58,000 English words, you could generate more than 195 trillion “three random word”-style passwords.

It’s important to note that there are numerous trade-offs among the different approaches to password selection and complexity rules. So, while “three random words” doesn’t give you a fail-safe for password security, the complexity of language does provide some incredible power in this realm as well.
Written by Mary Lynn Reed, Professor of Mathematics, Rochester Institute of Technology.

This article was first published in The Conversation.

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Cataracts are the result of a buildup of broken protein fragments within the eye lens. This buildup and clumping together of protein fragments severely reduce the transmission of light to the retina—making things appear blurry or misty. It is the cause of around 43% of all blindness.

Surgery to remove the clouded lens and replace it with an artificial one has so far been the only treatment available for cataracts. About 10 million cataract operations are performed each year, globally. The procedure can be life-changing, but who would not want to avoid surgery if a less-invasive treatment was available? This is where sterol eye drops come into the picture. (Sterols are fat-like substances that occur in nature.)

My colleagues and I recently conducted a study in mice that showed promising and dramatic effects on cataracts after we applied a sterol compound to their eyes. When the compound was applied to one eye of 26 mice with cataracts, we found that 61% of the treated lenses showed an improvement in their refractive index gradient. This gradient is a measure of optical density and a vital component of image quality. The opacity of the lenses was reduced in 46% of the mice, as well.

However, the effects were not universal, suggesting that the same remedy may not apply to all cataracts (there are several types).

The compound we used had been tested before, but not for optics. Yet the optical quality of the lens is fundamental to light traveling unimpeded to the retina and hence to maintaining vision.

Investigations using this sterol compound reported in 2015 improved transparency in mouse lenses, and partially restored protein solubility both in the lenses of living mice and in human lenses in a dish.

But a subsequent study in 2019 could not find evidence that this compound reverses protein buildup in rat and human samples, nor that it reverses the opacities in rat lenses with cataracts. However, the sterol compound had not been tested on whole, intact human lenses. And most importantly, the effect of this compound on the optical property of the refractive index (that is, the optical quality of the lens) had not been measured.

Measuring optical quality

I have spent years developing and applying methods of measuring the optical quality of the lens, and have been measuring lens optics for over a decade using the most advanced system in the world, the SPring-8 synchrotron in Japan—a particle accelerator that produces powerful X-rays, allowing measurements to be taken with the highest accuracy yet on optical properties of the eye.

This technology has allowed my colleagues and me to accurately characterize the refractive index gradient in transparent lenses as well as those that have cataracts—something that could not be conducted using a visible light source.

The refractive index gradient is important for image quality because it provides improved focusing capacity. Cataracts disrupt this gradient because of the protein buildup. The application of X-ray measurements has been key to our latest findings. In addition, when we measure optical properties, we do this on whole lenses with the protein distributions left undisturbed in the lens.

The link between a lens's optical function and the protein solubility and propensity to clump needs to be studied further. This is important for addressing whether it is possible to reverse the process of cataract formation and restore transparency to a clouded lens.

Scientists have long believed that a buildup of the major structural proteins of a cataract—the crystallins—is irreversible. So any possible treatment for a cataract could, at best, halt or slow its progression.

If this is not true and protein aggregation is reversible, then it opens up a wealth of treatment possibilities. Not only can cataracts be prevented by avoiding certain known causes, such as poor nutrition, smoking and certain drugs, such as steroids, it may be possible to use drugs that prevent further progression. Other drugs may even be able to reverse the process of cataract formation and restore clarity to a lens that has become clouded.

Further research needs to include investigations of all proteins in the lens: the major structural proteins of the lens (the crystallins and the water channel proteins) in tandem with studies of optical function.

We are currently looking at the optics of the lens from all aspects, from early developmental stages to adulthood, and looking at how these results map on to changes in proteins.

A great deal more research may be needed, but what our recent research findings have shown is that non-surgical treatment for cataracts is possible—and may be closer than we think.

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As my tenure as CEO of Natural Hazards Research Australia came to an end in June this year, I can now look back over the achievements of the various research centres with a degree of nostalgia and pride.

I see how the emergency management and response sector has changed from where it was almost 20 years ago. I can see some of the critical science and technology changes pioneered by the research centres and the policy and practice changes that resulted.

This means the community is so much safer and resilient to the inevitable impacts of natural hazards as a result. However, it’s important to note future impacts have not been eliminated, particularly with the increasing frequency and severity of natural hazard events because of climate change, and we still have more to do as a nation.

I am a physicist by training, with a strong focus on nuclear and solid-state physics; I had spent 13 years in Telstra moving from failure analysis of electronics, through opto-electronics and photonics to online services, AI and software engineering.

I transitioned into research strategy and management at the Telstra Research Laboratories, where I was involved in innovation and the management of Telstra’s external R&D investments, including in Cooperative Research Centres (CRCs). The step for me to be part of a CRC was natural in some ways, as I had been involved in many CRCs, but this was in a totally foreign topic area.

When I first started in the emergency management sector in February 2004 as Research Director of the newly formed Bushfire CRC, I was greeted by whole new cohort of people dedicated to public service and keeping our communities safe. That has not changed over the past 18 and a half years – individuals have come and gone but the ethos and belief are still here no matter who is undertaking the role and that’s why it has been a great sector to have been involved with.

Since then, the various research centres I have been involved with and led – the Bushfire CRC, the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC and most recently Natural Hazards Research Australia – have provided new knowledge, systems and thought leadership to the sector.

 “If the events of 2019–2020 – the bushfires from Queensland through NSW and Victoria and South Australia, the multiple flood events of 2021–2022, and the heatwaves in Europe – tell us anything, then we are in for a very difficult time in the coming decades as result of the impacts of climate change.”

In looking back over nearly 19 years in the emergency sector, what have we collectively learnt and adopted, and how is the community safer?

A particular highlight has been at least 250 new PhD-qualified researchers who have benefited from the knowledge networks and funding from the various centres now employed in the sector. In addition, we have developed better warning systems, modelling and prediction capabilities that have demonstrably saved lives.

We better understand the role that fire and flood play on our ecosystems, we understand how communities view risk and how to build better in at-risk areas, we have learnt how to value some of the intangible aspects of our lives. We better understand our volunteers, how we can ensure that our response capability can be maintained and enhanced through better recruitment, retention and reward systems. The list goes on, with around 400 individual projects completed in this time, some involving one person and many multi-person and multi-organisations.

At the end of summer 2004 when I started in the sector, the country was coming out of horrendous years for bushfires with various inquiries under way following the fires that burnt into Canberra, New South Wales and north-east Victoria. Little did we then know that things would get much worse.

What we had in place then was a disjointed and ageing research sector feeding the emergency services and competing for scarce resources. The Bushfire CRC was established to help to bring together a national research capability for bushfire, in a country acknowledged as one of the most fire-prone in the world.

At that time, we had little understanding of how social sciences and humanities could inform the way communities behave in the face of the growing threat. Social sciences were just starting to be applied in the USA as a discipline in fire and the CRC followed suit.

 “The work of the CRC however showed that the biggest predictor of survival of houses was the presence of people to extinguish small spot fires”

At that point we didn’t have an understanding of how people had died in bushfires over the years; yet this was needed to critically understand what was then known as the Prepare, Stay and Defend, or Leave Early Policy.

Some of the early work of the Bushfire CRC filled this gap and helped to underpin the findings of the 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission, which had been seriously considering recommendations that would have seen mandatory evacuations as the common approach, potentially leading to the loss of thousands of homes to future fires.

The work of the CRC however showed that the biggest predictor of survival of houses was the presence of people to extinguish small spot fires; it also showed, validated or updated the advice around bushfire survival for homes and those caught in vehicles.

The 2009 Victorian Bushfires, known as Black Saturday, were watershed events for the nation. At that time, the country did not have a computerised prediction system in place to inform the community of where the fires would be; the system still relied on manual calculations.

A core outcome of the CRC was having prediction systems embedded in control centres, providing more accurate data for the emergency services and community. Alongside this, the work of the social scientists helped to craft the way in which messages were delivered, particularly taking into account the rise of social media. It was important that the psychology of how the messages were presented, the language used and the positioning of text were understood. Over the years, this has contributed to the National Warnings System now in place in Australia, which is credited with saving many lives.

Over the period of the various research centres in which I have been involved, we have seen increasing capability in computing, remote sensing and communications, which has enabled the sector to embrace satellite, airborne, drone and other data, enabling better decisions. In particular, the understanding of the flammability, load and structure of fuels and the impact of fires on the environment and on our built assets has greatly improved over the past 10 years. This new information enables better preparation for, response to and recovery from major natural hazard events.

This new data has enabled researchers in Australia to better understand the dynamics of extreme fire behaviour, identifying landscape-scale phenomena not appreciated before. This has led to a better understanding of the interaction between high-intensity fires, terrain and the atmosphere, and to be able to understand how these fires can create their own weather, and under what conditions. This new understanding has now been transferred to the Bureau of Meteorology, which can issue ‘red flag’ warnings for potential pyrocumulonimbus (fire-generated thunderstorms or PyroCB) development. These PyroCB have the capacity to create massive wind events over a fire, putting firefighters in great danger.

 “Understanding of the flammability, load and structure of fuels and the impact of fires on the environment and on our built assets has greatly improved over the past 10 years.”

In the north of Australia, the hazard scape is very different, and the CRCs and centres have been investing in Indigenous-led research to understand the disaster resilience of remote and regional communities.

The centres were also involved alongside other instrumental public-benefit research centres such as the Tropical Savannahs CRC and the Desert Knowledge CRC in the development of the science underpinning the fire abatement projects now common across the north of Australia, which are reducing Australia’s carbon emissions, and creating revenue for First Nations communities to undertake culturally important land-management, in turn leading to better biodiversity and social outcomes.

This Northern Australia project investment over the best part of 25 years has only been possible because of the national CRC program and its ability to invest in long-term projects. It has spanned multiple CRCs with different focus areas but has built the required networks to build a new industry in the north.

In effect, the strength of the national research centres I have been involved with has been the ability to bring together end-users and researchers in multi-disciplinary teams to address national-scale problems.

From my viewpoint, it has been a great and instrumental period for research into natural hazards in Australia, albeit somewhat relentless at times.

However, having now secured ongoing research funding for the sector from 2003 to 2031, it was well worth all the effort and has been possible because the sector is lucky to have had, and continues to have, many great people within the centres, agencies, departments and other research organisations, who have worked to ensure the right research has been done to yield tangible changes to the ways we protect communities.

All of this has saved lives and helped the environment. We are often critical of our leaders at times of disasters, but we all should also be thankful for their focus, investment and commitment to learning and driving science-informed policy and practice, which have saved lives, assets, environments and our economy many times over what the research cost.

This is not the end – we have a lot more to do. If the events of 2019–2020 – the bushfires from Queensland through NSW and Victoria and South Australia, the multiple flood events of 2021–2022, and the heatwaves in Europe – tell us anything, then we are in for a very difficult time in the coming decades as result of the impacts of climate change.

The way of life we have enjoyed in Australia is at risk.

Where we live and play, where and how we build our towns and critical infrastructure, how we look after our environment will all need to change.

This will impact on national, state and local governments, and of course the communities they serve. What is clear is that we do not have all the knowledge and science we need to meet this challenge yet, but we do have a plan and a centre that now has the mandate to address this – Natural Hazards Research Australia. It can and will continue to build those multi-disciplinary networks we need to address the wicked problems we face as a nation.

Originally published by Cosmos as Australia’s way of life is at risk – natural hazards research has a mandate to address this[.]

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The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is one of the most ambitious undertakings in particle physics. For nearly $5 billion, scientists were able to build a ring of superconducting magnets chilled to temperatures colder than space that they can use to accelerate subatomic particles to speeds nearing that of light itself.

But nature does the job even better. For over a century, physicists have been flabbergasted by the existence of cosmic rays, which are charged particles—mostly protons—from outer space that bombard the Earth, thousands per square meter every second. Cosmic rays can reach our planet with speeds driven by over a peta-electron volt, or PeV, of energy. (That’s a quadrillion electron volts—a hundred times higher than what can be achieved with the LHC.) And though there’s no shortage of cosmic rays to study, scientists have mostly been in the dark about exactly what can push particles to such extreme speeds.

Earlier this month, a new paper in Physical Review Letters shed some light on this mystery. By combining data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope with observations from nine other experiments, a team of five scientists has conclusively identified a supernova remnant as a source of PeV protons. Discovering these cosmic ray “factories”—called PeVatrons by the scientists who study them—will eventually help them characterize the environmental conditions that propel these particles and the role they play in the evolution of the cosmos.

“Identification of these PeVatrons will be a first step toward understanding the more energetic universe,” says University of Wisconsin-Madison astrophysicist Ke Fang, who led the discovery. So far, only a couple of potential PeVatrons have been tracked down in the Milky Way: the supermassive black hole at our galactic center, and a star-forming region that resides on the outskirts. In theory, supernova remnants—the gas and dust left by the explosive deaths of stars—should also be able to generate PeV protons, Fang says. But until now, there was no observational evidence to back that up.

“When massive stars explode, they produce these shock waves that propagate into the interstellar medium,” says Matthew Kerr, a physicist at the US Naval Research Laboratory and coauthor of the study. It’s theorized that protons get trapped in the magnetic field of supernova remnants, cycling around in the vicinity of the shock waves and getting boosted with each lap—“almost like surfing,” Kerr says—until they gain enough energy to escape. “But we can’t actually go there and put a particle detector in the supernova remnant to figure out if that’s true or not,” he says.

And though plenty of PeV protons fall to Earth, scientists have no way to tell which direction—much less what source—these particles come from. That’s because cosmic rays zigzag through the universe, bouncing off matter like ping-pong balls and gyrating through magnetic fields, making it impossible to trace them back to their origins. But with this supernova remnant, scientists noticed the bright glow of gamma rays that, unlike charged particles, travel in straight lines from their birthplace to Earth. That was a clue: If PeV protons were present, they might be interacting with the interstellar gas and producing unstable particles called pions, which quickly decay into gamma rays—the highest energy light there is, with wavelengths too small to be seen by the human eye.

Gamma rays from this supernova remnant have been seen by telescopes since 2007, but exceptionally energetic light wasn’t detected until 2020, when it was picked up by the HAWC Observatory in Mexico, piquing the interest of scientists hunting for galactic PeVatrons. When gamma rays reach our atmosphere, they can produce showers of charged particles that can be measured by telescopes on the ground. With data from HAWC, scientists were able to work backward and determine that these showers came from gamma rays emanating from the supernova remnant. But they were unable to say whether the light was generated by protons or speedy electrons—which can also radiate gamma rays, as well as lower-energy x-rays and radio waves.

To prove that PeV protons were the culprits, Fang’s research team compiled data across a broad range of energies and wavelengths that had been collected by 10 different observatories over the past decade. Then they turned to computer simulations. By tweaking different values, like the strength of the magnetic field or the density of the gas cloud, the researchers tried to reproduce the conditions necessary to account for all the different wavelengths of light they had observed. No matter what they adjusted, electrons couldn’t be the only source. Their simulations would only match the highest energy data if they included PeV protons as an additional source of light.

“We were able to exclude that this emission is dominantly produced by electrons because the spectrum we got out just wouldn’t match the observations,” says Henrike Fleischhack, an astronomer at the Catholic University of America who had first attempted this analysis two years ago with just the HAWC data set. Doing a multiwavelength analysis was key, Fleischhack says, because it allowed them to show, for example, that increasing the number of electrons at one wavelength led to a mismatch between data and simulation at another wavelength—meaning the only way to explain the full spectrum of light was with the presence of PeV protons.

“The result required a very careful attention to the energy budget,” says David Saltzberg, an astrophysicist at the University of California Los Angeles who was not involved in the work. “What this really shows is that you need many experiments, and many observatories, to answer the big questions.”

Looking ahead, Fang is hopeful that more supernova remnant PeVatrons will be found, which will help them figure out if this discovery is unique, or if all stellar corpses have the ability to accelerate particles to such speeds. “This could be the tip of the iceberg,” she says. Up-and-coming instruments like the Cherenkov Telescope Array, a gamma-ray observatory with over 100 telescopes being erected in Chile and Spain, may even be able to locate PeVatrons beyond our own galaxy.

Saltzberg also believes that next-generation experiments should be able to see neutrinos (tiny, neutral particles that can also result when pions decay) arriving from supernova remnants. Detecting these with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, which hunts for their traces at the South Pole, would be even more of a smoking gun proving that these sites are PeVatrons because it would indicate the presence of pions. And Fang agrees: “It’ll be fantastic if telescopes like IceCube can see neutrinos directly from the sources because neutrinos are clean probes of proton interactions—they cannot be made by electrons.”

Ultimately, finding the PeVatrons of our universe is crucial for gleaning just how the relics of stellar death pave the way for new stars to be born—and how the highest-energy particles help fuel this cosmic cycle. Cosmic rays influence pressure and temperature, drive galactic winds, and ionize molecules in star-fertile regions like supernova remnants. Some of those stars may go on to form their own planets or one day explode into supernovas themselves, commencing the process all over again.

“Studying cosmic rays is almost as important to understanding the origins of life as studying exoplanets, or anything else,” Kerr says. “It’s all an energetic system that’s very complicated. And we’re just now coming to understand it.”

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When Artemis I blasts off into the early morning sky over Florida, it may launch a new era of lunar science and exploration with it.

The NASA mission, scheduled to launch in the next two weeks, is the first of three planned flights aimed at landing humans on the moon for the first time since 1972. No astronauts will fly on the upcoming mission. But the flight marks the first test of the technology — the rocket, the spacesuits, the watery return to Earth — that will ultimately take people, including the first woman and the first astronaut of color, to the lunar surface.

The test includes the first flight of NASA’s Space Launch System, or SLS, and its Orion spacecraft, a rocket and crew capsule that have been decades in the making. These craft have been delayed, blown through their budgets and been threatened with cancellation more than once. Even within the spaceflight community, a lot of people feared they would never fly.

To see a human-capable moon rocket finally on the launchpad is “pretty astonishing,” says Casey Dreier, a Seattle-based space policy expert at the Planetary Society. “This is a reality that most of us alive on Earth today have never experienced.”

And if the Artemis program works, opportunities for science will follow.

“Because humans have to come back, alive, you have a huge opportunity to bring samples back with you,” Dreier says. Sending human astronauts may be a wedge to open the door for pure learning.

The launch

Artemis I is slated to lift off on August 29 at 8:33 a.m. EDT. The SLS rocket will lift Orion into space, where the crew capsule will separate from the rocket and continue to an orbit around the moon. After circling the moon for about two weeks, Orion will slingshot back to Earth and splash down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego. The whole mission will last about 42 days.

Orion will stay in space longer than any other human-rated spacecraft has without docking to another spaceship, like the International Space Station. At its closest approach, the spacecraft will fly about 100 kilometers above the lunar surface. It will also go up to 64,000 kilometers past the moon, farther from Earth than any spacecraft built for humans. The previous record, set by Apollo 13 in 1970, was 16,000 kilometers beyond the far side of the moon.

Lunar liaison

The Orion spacecraft’s outbound trajectory (green) will take it about 100 kilometers from the moon’s surface (1) before looping around and going into lunar orbit (2). After about two weeks circling the moon (gray), the capsule will leave lunar orbit (3) and start its return trip to Earth (blue). On its way back, the spacecraft will fire its engine, buzz the moon one more time (4) and then coast back to Earth for a watery landing.

NASA

The main goal of the mission is to prove that everything works. That includes Orion’s heat shield, which will need to protect astronauts as the capsule comes screaming through Earth’s atmosphere at 40,000 kilometers per hour and heats up to more than 2700° Celsius on its return trip. It also includes the procedure for retrieving the capsule and its crew and cargo after splashdown.

Even though it has no astronauts, the mission won’t be flying empty. Just beneath the Orion capsule are 10 CubeSats, small, simple spacecraft each about the size of a shoebox. After Orion separates from the SLS rocket, those CubeSats will go their separate ways to study the moon, the radiation environment in space and the effects of that radiation on organisms like yeast. One CubeSat will unfurl a solar sail and take off to explore a near-Earth asteroid (SN: 8/26/11).

The “crew”

Inside the Orion capsule ride three humanoid passengers. In the commander’s seat is faux astronaut Moonikin Campos, named for Arturo Campos, a NASA engineer who played a key role in returning the Apollo 13 moon mission safely to Earth after its in-flight disaster in 1970. The “moonikin” — a mashup of moon and manikin — is based on a firefighter training rescue manikin, says NASA engineer Dustin Gohmert. Moonikin Campos will be wearing the new flight suit that was designed for the Artemis missions.

The Orion crew capsule will splash into the Pacific Ocean at the end of the first Artemis mission. In 2021, engineers at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., tested a version of the capsule (pictured) by dropping it into a water-filled basin.

NASA

The spacesuit is like a personalized spacecraft, says Gohmert, of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. It’s meant to be worn during takeoff, landing and any time there is an emergency in the cabin. The suit may look familiar to anyone who watched space shuttle launches, Gohmert says, because it does a very similar job: “It’s an orange suit that acts like a balloon that’s shaped like your body.”

The main difference is that the Orion suit, plus the accompanying helmet, seat and connection to the Orion spacecraft itself, are designed to keep a crew member alive for up to six days, the time it could take to get back to Earth if something goes wrong in deep space. Astronauts visiting the International Space Station, by contrast, were never more than a few hours from Earth.

To help make that week tolerable, each suit will be custom fit to the astronaut. “I’d like to say the word ‘comfort,’ but that’s a difficult word to use,” Gohmert says. “Nothing will be comfortable about six days in a spacesuit, no matter what you do.”

The suit and spacecraft will provide the astronauts with oxygen and scrub the astronauts’ air of carbon dioxide. The suit will also have a tube for the astronauts to eat liquid food and a way for them to collect urine and feces, although Moonikin Campos won’t test those aspects. He will be equipped with radiation sensors, while his seat will have sensors to detect acceleration and vibration throughout the mission.

On the first Artemis mission, a faux astronaut named Moonikin Campos will sit in Orion’s commander seat and test the new NASA spacesuit.

NASA

The suit, helmet and seat all take safety lessons from the space shuttle Columbia disaster, Gohmert says (SN: 9/22/2003). A junior engineer at the time, Gohmert worked on the suits the Columbia astronauts wore and saw the seven-member crew off to the launchpad. “It was a pivotal point for all of us, of course, who were there at the time,” he says. “If we didn’t take lessons from that, we wouldn’t be doing them justice.”

Moonikin Campos will be accompanied by a pair of mockup female torsos named Helga and Zohar. Their mission is to report back on space risks that are unique to female bodies, which have never been near the moon. NASA plans to send a woman on the first crewed Artemis flight, and women have different cancer risks from space radiation than men.

Two female torsos named Helga and Zohar (shown) will fly on Artemis I to measure radiation risks for female astronauts.

DLR (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

The two torsos are figures used in medicine called anthropomorphic phantoms, which are made from materials that simulate human bone, tissue and organs. “They are in principle identical twins,” said physicist Thomas Berger of the German Aerospace Center in Cologne in a briefing on August 17. But Zohar — whose name means “light” or “radiance” in Hebrew — will wear a radiation protection vest provided by the Israel Space Agency and the private company StemRad, based in Tampa, Fla.

The vest is made of a polymer designed to deflect protons that the sun releases during solar storms and has more shielding over radiation-sensitive organs like breasts and ovaries. Each phantom will also carry more than 6,000 small radiation detectors to build a 3-D picture of the dose of charged particles a female astronaut might receive on a trip to the moon and back. Comparing the radiation levels each phantom receives will help refine the vest’s design for future astronauts.

Orion will also carry two other nonhuman passengers — the British stop motion television character Shaun the sheep and Snoopy, who will serve as an indicator of zero gravity.

The past and the future

SLS and Orion have had a checkered history. The program goes back to 2004, when President George W. Bush proposed sending astronauts to the moon and then to Mars. In 2010, President Barack Obama canceled that plan, and then in 2017 President Donald Trump directed NASA to retrain its sights on the moon.

All the while, Congress continued to fund the development of the SLS rocket. Originally, SLS was supposed to cost $6 billion and fly in 2016. It has so far cost $23 billion on the eve of its launch in 2022.

“The rhetoric has flip-flopped a bunch,” Dreier says, as political leaders kept changing their vision for NASA’s direction. “But if you look at the actual programs, very little changed. … The whole time, the money was going to a moon rocket and a moon capsule.”

The next Artemis mission, Artemis II, is scheduled to launch in 2024 and take astronauts — real, live, human astronauts — around the moon but not to its surface.

Artemis III will be the moon landing mission. On August 19, NASA announced 13 candidate landing regions, all near the moon’s south pole, an intriguing spot that has never been visited by humans (SN: 11/11/18). That mission is scheduled to launch in 2025, but there are still a lot of untested elements.

Those include the actual lander, which will be built by SpaceX.

There are still a lot of things that can go wrong and a long way to go. But the Artemis I launch is an optimistic dawn for lunar science nevertheless. “The whole [human spaceflight] system has all been shifting to point at the moon,” Dreier says. “I think that’s profoundly exciting. There’s going to be really interesting lessons that happen no matter what comes out of this.”

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The research was the first to evaluate combined effects of multiple meteorological factors across all classes of mental disorders designated by the World Health Organization. These findings, published in Environment International, could inform strategies to improve patient care.

Lead author Xinlei Deng, who completed his Ph.D. in May in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at UAlbany, says, "We know that weather affects mood. But while a warm, bright day is a boost for some, others can become more easily agitated or quicker to anger. For people with mental disorders, changes in multiple weather factors can provoke symptoms that pose serious health risks."

"By examining local weather conditions together with information on emergency department visits, we found clear trends connecting high heat, humidity and sun exposure with increased emergency admissions due to mental disorders, especially among patients suffering symptoms linked to psychoactive substance use, mood disorders, stress disorders and adult behavior disorders, which can include forms of violence like pyromania. Understanding these connections can help care providers shape interventions to protect patient well-being."

The statewide analysis included two six-month study periods, focusing on the warmer months: May-October, in 2017 and 2018.

The team leveraged meteorological data from NYS Mesonet––a UAlbany-operated network of 126 weather stations in every county and borough in New York, which record atmospheric and soil conditions at 5-minute intervals. Their study looked at data on temperature, solar radiation, relative humidity, heat index and rainfall.

Emergency department visits due to mental disorders were identified using the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10). Disorders are coded by subtype, which include categories like stress-related disorders, intellectual disabilities and intentional self-harm.

Over the study periods, 547,540 emergency department visits attributed to mental disorders were recorded in New York State. To link local weather conditions and emergency department visits, the residential address of each case was geocoded and paired with the nearest Mesonet station.

Information on patient diagnoses and demographics was obtained from the New York Statewide Planning and Research Cooperative System, a mandatory hospital discharge database covering ~95% of hospitals in the state.

Results showed that the combination of high temperature, solar radiation and relative humidity posed the greatest risk of severe mental disorder symptoms. Effects were strongest in the summer transition months of September and October. Populations impacted most acutely included: males, Hispanic and African American individuals, people aged 46-65, Medicaid or Medicare subscribers, and people without insurance.

Several mental disorder classes were distinctly responsive to certain combinations of weather conditions. For example, hospitals saw increased emergency department visits due to psychoactive substance use (e.g., consuming alcohol or opioids) when solar radiation, temperature, heat index and humidity were high. Severe symptoms of mood disorders, which include depression and bipolar disorders, coincided with less sun and high heat.

"As extreme heat becomes increasingly intense and more frequent due to climate change, we can expect these changes to have adverse physiological effects on people," said Shao Lin, senior author of the study and a professor at UAlbany's School of Public Health. "Individuals with mental disorders are especially vulnerable to these changes, and our findings suggest that multiple, simultaneous weather stressors may compound health risk. Efforts to hone targeted care must take combined factors into account."

Since mental health symptoms associated with weather can take time to manifest, the team measured "lag days" –– time between the onset of a particular weather condition and the date of hospital admittance –– to account for this delay. They found that high temperature alone presented the most immediate short-term risk, while heat index increased risk over a two-week period.

Deng, now doing postdoctoral work at the National Institutes of Health, explains, "As we learn more about the ways that weather affects mental health, putting a finer point on symptom emergence timing is critical. Understanding lag effects could help hospital caregivers know when to prepare to receive a higher number of patients in the wake of prolonged weather conditions known to exacerbate certain mental disorders."

Public health agencies like the CDC could use these findings to establish early-warning systems to preempt mental health-related violence and syndromes. Proactive measures could include facilitating access to cooling centers and encouraging patients with relevant mental disorders to pay attention to heatwaves and sun exposure, and take shelter as appropriate.

"Knowing that transition months see the highest risk of severe symptoms tells us that early warning systems and related education should start in May and continue through September-October," Lin said. "Policymakers can plan preparedness efforts using health risk thresholds connected to weather factors."

"Weather and climate have profound impacts on health –– directly from severe and hazardous weather to more indirect impacts from allergens and mental health," said Jerry Brotzge, a coauthor of the paper and the New York State Mesonet's long-time program manager who was recently hired as state climatologist in his home state of Kentucky. "Recent advances in weather observations collected at high temporal and spatial scales, like those recorded by Mesonet, have the potential to revolutionize our understanding of how changes in weather cause changes in health. Once we understand these relationships better, we can respond to patients' needs more effectively."

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Which changes in the brain accompany the transition from sporadic drinking to chronic alcohol abuse? That is the question a joint research project with working groups at the University of Mannheim-Heidelberg and the University of Cologne explored. Most scientific research has examined the effects of chronic alcohol consumption on the hippocampus—the control center of our brain. Because of this, little is known about the acute neuronal interactions of critical risk factors, such as a first alcohol intoxication at an early age, explained Henrike Scholz.

"We set out to discover ethanol-dependent molecular changes. These, in turn, provide the basis for permanent cellular changes following a single acute ethanol intoxication. The effects of a single alcohol administration were examined at the molecular, cellular and behavioral levels," said Scholz. The working hypothesis was that, similar to the formation of memory after a single lesson, a single administration of ethanol would form a positive association with alcohol.

The team tested its hypothesis using research in fruit flies and mouse models and found ethanol-induced changes in two areas: mitochondrial dynamics and the balance between synapses in neurons. Mitochondria supply cells and especially nerve cells with energy. In order to optimally deliver the energy to the cells, the mitochondria move. The movement of the mitochondria was disturbed in the cells treated with ethanol. The chemical balance between certain synapses was also disturbed. These changes remained permanent and were confirmed by behavioral changes in the animals: Mice and fruit flies showed increased alcohol consumption and alcohol relapse later in life.

The morphological remodeling of neurons is a well-known basis for learning and memory. These so-called cellular plasticity mechanisms, which are central to learning and memory, are also thought to be at the core of the formation of associative memories for drug-related rewards. Therefore, some of the observed morphological changes may influence ethanol-related memory formation. Together with the migration of mitochondria in neurons, which are also important for synaptic transmission and plasticity, the researchers speculate that these ethanol-dependent cellular changes are critical for the development of addictive behaviors.

"It is remarkable that the cellular processes contributing to such complex reward behavior are conserved across species, suggesting a similar role in humans," said Scholz. "It could be a possible general cellular process essential for learning and memory."

Both of the observed mechanisms could explain observations made in mice that a single intoxication experience can increase alcohol consumption and alcohol relapse later in life. "These mechanisms may even be relevant to the observation in humans that the first alcohol intoxication at an early age is a critical risk factor for later alcohol intoxication and the development of alcohol addiction," explained Professor Scholz. "This means that identifying lasting ethanol-dependent changes is an important first step in understanding how acute drinking can turn into chronic alcohol abuse."

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It has been often been assumed, and taught in schools in Western countries, that the 'correct' ordering of numbers is from left to right (1, 2, 3, 4…) rather than right to left (10, 9, 8, 7…).

The ordering of numbers along a horizontal dimension is known as a "mental number line" and describes an important way we represent number and quantity in space.

Studies show humans prefer to position larger numbers to the right and smaller numbers to the left.

People are usually faster and more accurate at comparing numbers when larger ones are to the right and smaller ones are to the left, and people with brain damage that disrupts their spatial processing also show similar disruptions in number processing.

But so far, there has been little research testing whether the horizontal dimension is the most important one we associate with numbers. In new research published in PLOS ONE, we found that humans actually process numbers faster when they are displayed vertically – with smaller numbers at the bottom and larger numbers at the top.

Not just humans

Our associations between number and space are influenced by language and culture, but these links are not unique to humans.

Tests on three-day-old chicks show they seek smaller numbers with a leftwards bias and larger numbers with a rightwards one. Pigeons and blue jays seem to have a left-to-right or right-to-left mental number line, depending on the individual.

These findings suggest associations between space and numbers may be wired into the brains of humans and other animals.

However, while many studies have examined left-to-right and right-to-left horizontal mental number lines, few have explored whether our dominant mental number line is even horizontal at all.

How we test for these spatial-numerical associations

To test how quickly people can process numbers in different arrangements, we set up an experiment where people were shown pairs of numbers from 1 to 9 on a monitor and used a joystick to indicate where the larger number was located.

If the 6 and 8 were shown on the screen, for example, the correct answer would be 8. A participant would indicate this by moving the joystick towards the 8 as fast as possible.

To measure participant response times as accurately as possible, we used fast-refresh 120 Hertz monitors and high-performance zero-lag arcade joysticks.

What we found

When the numbers were separated both vertically and horizontally, we found only the vertical arrangement affected response time.

This suggests that, given the opportunity to use either a horizontal or vertical mental representation of numbers in space, participants only used the vertical representation.

When the larger number was above the smaller number, people responded much more quickly than in any other arrangement of numbers.

This suggests our mental number line actually goes from bottom (small numbers) to top (large numbers).

Why is this important?

Numbers affect almost every part of our lives (and our safety). Pharmacists need to correctly measure doses of medicine, engineers need to determine stresses on buildings and structures, pilots need to know their speed and altitude, and all of us need to know what button to press on an elevator.

The way we learn to use numbers, and how designers choose to display numerical information to us, can have important implications for how we make fast and accurate decisions.

In fact, in some time-critical decision-making environments, such as airplane cockpits and stock market floors, numbers are often displayed vertically.

Our findings, and another recent study, may have implications for designers seeking to help users quickly understand and use numerical information.

Modern devices enable very innovative number display options, which could help people use technology more efficiently and safely.

There are also implications for education, suggesting we should teach children using vertical bottom-to-top mental number lines as well as the familiar left-to-right ones.

Bottom-to-top appears to be how our brains are wired to be most efficient at using numbers – and that might help getting our heads around how numbers work a little easier.

Luke Greenacre, Senior lecturer in marketing, Monash University; Adrian Dyer, Associate Professor, Monash University; Jair Garcia, Researcher and analyst, Monash University, and Scarlett Howard, Lecturer, Monash University [.]

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Adobe has revealed that the insatiable appetite for content is fuelling massive growth in the global creator economy.

A new report published by the VFX and video editing software developer suggests 165 million creators have joined the worldwide creator economy in the last two years, bringing the total to 303 million.

The study also shows that, while influencers make up a small slice (15%) of all content creators, they’re raking in the big bucks. “More than half (51%) of influencers are in the top income bracket or the US equivalent of bringing in over household income of $100K+,” Adobe reported (opens in new tab).

Why create content?

In a bid to understand how creativity is changing around the world, the firm behind Photoshop and After Effects surveyed 9,000 content creators across US, UK, France, Germany, Spain, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Brazil.

Content creation remains a side hustle for the 58% of creators still in full-time employment. Money, the survey suggests, is not the single driving factor for the explosion of online content.

With 54% of respondents engaged in photography, 30% in creative writing, and 27% in painting and drawing, visual arts takes precedence in modern online space. Little wonder, then, content creators declared the desire to express themselves, have fun, and explore passions as their top motivations.
Meanwhile, 47% agreed that using or creating social content is a top necessity for mental health. Advancing social causes through content creation is also lauded.

Long-term, however, around 40% of those surveyed want to become business owners, earning money from their online content - and that takes time. Adobe says influencers typically spend 15 hours a week developing and marketing content, while content creators spend 9 hours a week on their output.

The hard work evidently pays off. On average, global creators earn around $61 per hour and influencers take home $81 per hour. It’s UK influencers who earn the most ($146.86 p/h), versus Germany ($126.61p/h) and the US ($125.43p/h). That’s a salary comparable with software engineers and lawyers.

“The growth in the number of creators in the UK and globally is exponential, demonstrating the creative empowerment people now feel to follow their ambitions and express themselves online,” said Simon Morris, Vice President of Marketing, EMEA and APAC at Adobe.

“There’s little doubt that the events of the past two years have influenced this pace of growth, signaling that the democratization of creativity is changing the where, when, how and why we create and draw inspiration. Creators have the power to shape our economy and culture, forging lucrative and successful careers.”

Today, 23% of the world now describe themselves as content creators. It’s 26% and 24% in the US and UK.

As online content creation is democratized, we’re seeing a dramatic shift not dissimilar to the disintegration of the Hollywood studio system. Mass audiences used to watch content produced by a famous minority. Now, many are as heavily invested in producing content as they are experiencing it.

And they want to make it their way.

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Most people use the default email address suffix, e.g. @example.com, that their email provider offers. You choose your email address, and thus your email service provider, for life. Few give much thought to which email service provider to use and even fewer read their ever-changing terms of service and privacy policies.

Within a few years of signing up with an email service, you’ll use your email address to log in to hundreds of servers and for your personal and business correspondence. Even if you claim to not use email; we all use our email addresses every day.

You can get a new phone number and send it to the dozen or so people and companies that you want to have your new number. In many countries, you can even keep your phone number when you decide to switch to a new mobile carrier.

This is considerably more difficult with email because of the huge number of companies and services we want to have our updated email address. It takes a lot of time and effort to change your email address and it involves the risk of losing access to some critical service. There are so many of these services in our lives that we don’t even remember who they all are anymore!

Many services won’t even let you change the email address you’ve registered with them. If you live in the European Union, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) guarantees you the right to update registered information such as your email address. The GDPR went into effect on May 2018, and many companies haven’t had the time to update their services to enable you to change your email address yet. This legal protection doesn’t extend to other regions either.

This creates an almost unique environment where businesses have complete control over their customer’s online identity and where customers can’t easily change their provider. Your email service provider knows everything you’ve purchased online, what apps and services you’ve signed up for, your interests, and your entire contact network. It gets a lot of this information through email notifications and receipts sent by other services as a convince for their customers.

This puts people at the mercy of the tech companies. It also exposes their personal data and identity to their whims of the same companies.

Imagine a free email provider who suddenly decided to start charging for their email service. Some people can’t afford to pay or don’t have access to a credit card to make the payment. Or imagine using an email address provided by your Internet Service Provider (ISP). They could abandon an unprofitable area and cut service to it. Hopefully, you’ll have another ISP to fall back on to keep your internet access. However, you would have to keep paying your old ISP who’s no longer willing to offer you services to retain access to your email address.

It’s completely within the rights of private companies to make these types of decisions. There would be negative press, of course, but the media’s attention in such matters quickly dissipates. Strong consumer protection and privacy regulations won’t help consumers in these situations.

People are locked into their email service provider because that’s how email addresses work. The current tech behemoths were partially built on the vendor lock-in that is inherent to services like email.

There isn’t a lot that regulating the email service providers could achieve to ensure people adequate freedoms and market competition. Email messages are required to go through the email server at their designated destination domain name. You can’t port your email address as you can with your phone number because the provider’s domain name is an essential part of the address and the delivery mechanism.

The only regulation I can think of that could make any impact is to require all public email service providers to offer free email forwarding services for the lifetime of the account holder. With a forwarding service, you can give your old email provider your new address and have them forward it for you. These services are often time-limited or require a subscription fee, however.

Email forwarding involves some technical challenges that ultimately lead to poorer customer experiences. Emails must travel through more servers which delays their delivery. These extra trips through different email servers strip the emails of information about the sending server which is critical to protect against spam and email forgery. It introduces more complexity to the delivery chain and reduces the chain’s security.

You can take some control over your own identity in the current email-based online ecosystem by renting a domain name and using it for your email address. That gives you the freedom to switch email providers more easily without having to change your email address. However, you still won’t own your identity as you don’t own the domain name you rent through your domain name registrar.

The only real solution is to rethink online identity and stop depending on email addresses. Email was designed in the 1960s and it was never intended to serve the identity management role it’s serving today.

There currently aren’t any widely-deployed alternatives that people can control themselves. All the alternatives for identity management are provided by and controlled through private companies. There are some discussions about self-sovereign identity solutions but these still lie far off in the future.

For now, people should stop and think carefully when choosing the @example.com part of their email address. It’s a decision you’re probably set to live with for life.

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A gooey slice of pizza. A pile of crispy French fries. Ice cream dripping down a cone on a hot summer day. When you look at any of these foods, a specialized part of your visual cortex lights up, according to a new study from MIT neuroscientists.

This newly discovered population of food-responsive neurons is located in the ventral visual stream, alongside populations that respond specifically to faces, bodies, places, and words. The unexpected finding may reflect the special significance of food in human culture, the researchers say.

“Food is central to human social interactions and cultural practices. It’s not just sustenance,” says Nancy Kanwisher, the Walter A. Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines. “Food is core to so many elements of our cultural identity, religious practice, and social interactions, and many other things that humans do.”

The findings, based on an analysis of a large public database of human brain responses to a set of 10,000 images, raise many additional questions about how and why this neural population develops. In future studies, the researchers hope to explore how people’s responses to certain foods might differ depending on their likes and dislikes, or their familiarity with certain types of food.

MIT postdoc Meenakshi Khosla is the lead author of the paper, along with MIT research scientist N. Apurva Ratan Murty. The study appears today in the journal Current Biology.

Visual categories

More than 20 years ago, while studying the ventral visual stream, the part of the brain that recognizes objects, Kanwisher discovered cortical regions that respond selectively to faces. Later, she and other scientists discovered other regions that respond selectively to places, bodies, or words. Most of those areas were discovered when researchers specifically set out to look for them. However, that hypothesis-driven approach can limit what you end up finding, Kanwisher says.

“There could be other things that we might not think to look for,” she says. “And even when we find something, how do we know that that’s actually part of the basic dominant structure of that pathway, and not something we found just because we were looking for it?”

To try to uncover the fundamental structure of the ventral visual stream, Kanwisher and Khosla decided to analyze a large, publicly available dataset of full-brain functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) responses from eight human subjects as they viewed thousands of images.

“We wanted to see when we apply a data-driven, hypothesis-free strategy, what kinds of selectivities pop up, and whether those are consistent with what had been discovered before. A second goal was to see if we could discover novel selectivities that either haven’t been hypothesized before, or that have remained hidden due to the lower spatial resolution of fMRI data,” Khosla says.

To do that, the researchers applied a mathematical method that allows them to discover neural populations that can’t be identified from traditional fMRI data. An fMRI image is made up of many voxels — three-dimensional units that represent a cube of brain tissue. Each voxel contains hundreds of thousands of neurons, and if some of those neurons belong to smaller populations that respond to one type of visual input, their responses may be drowned out by other populations within the same voxel.

The new analytical method, which Kanwisher’s lab has previously used on fMRI data from the auditory cortex, can tease out responses of neural populations within each voxel of fMRI data.

Using this approach, the researchers found four populations that corresponded to previously identified clusters that respond to faces, places, bodies, and words. “That tells us that this method works, and it tells us that the things that we found before are not just obscure properties of that pathway, but major, dominant properties,” Kanwisher says.

Intriguingly, a fifth population also emerged, and this one appeared to be selective for images of food.

“We were first quite puzzled by this because food is not a visually homogenous category,” Khosla says. “Things like apples and corn and pasta all look so unlike each other, yet we found a single population that responds similarly to all these diverse food items.”

The food-specific population, which the researchers call the ventral food component (VFC), appears to be spread across two clusters of neurons, located on either side of the FFA. The fact that the food-specific populations are spread out between other category-specific populations may help explain why they have not been seen before, the researchers say.

“We think that food selectivity had been harder to characterize before because the populations that are selective for food are intermingled with other nearby populations that have distinct responses to other stimulus attributes. The low spatial resolution of fMRI prevents us from seeing this selectivity because the responses of different neural population get mixed in a voxel,” Khosla says.

“The technique which the researchers used to identify category-sensitive cells or areas is impressive, and it recovered known category-sensitive systems, making the food category findings most impressive,” says Paul Rozin, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the study. “I can’t imagine a way for the brain to reliably identify the diversity of foods based on sensory features. That makes this all the more fascinating, and likely to clue us in about something really new.”

Food vs non-food

The researchers also used the data to train a computational model of the VFC, based on previous models Murty had developed for the brain’s face and place recognition areas. This allowed the researchers to run additional experiments and predict the responses of the VFC. In one experiment, they fed the model matched images of food and non-food items that looked very similar — for example, a banana and a yellow crescent moon.

“Those matched stimuli have very similar visual properties, but the main attribute in which they differ is edible versus inedible,” Khosla says. “We could feed those arbitrary stimuli through the predictive model and see whether it would still respond more to food than non-food, without having to collect the fMRI data.”

They could also use the computational model to analyze much larger datasets, consisting of millions of images. Those simulations helped to confirm that the VFC is highly selective for images of food.

From their analysis of the human fMRI data, the researchers found that in some subjects, the VFC responded slightly more to processed foods such as pizza than unprocessed foods like apples. In the future they hope to explore how factors such as familiarity and like or dislike of a particular food might affect individuals’ responses to that food.

They also hope to study when and how this region becomes specialized during early childhood, and what other parts of the brain it communicates with. Another question is whether this food-selective population will be seen in other animals such as monkeys, who do not attach the cultural significance to food that humans do.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Eye Institute, and the National Science Foundation through the MIT Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines.

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Moderna on Friday sued Pfizer and BioNTech, claiming that their Covid vaccine copied its groundbreaking technology.

Moderna said in a statement that Pfizer and BioNTech infringed on patents filed between 2010 and 2016 that covered its mRNA technology. Moderna, which is based in Cambridge, Mass., sued in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts and the Regional Court of Düsseldorf in Germany, where BioNTech is based.

Messenger RNA, or mRNA, is the genetic script that carries DNA instructions to each cell’s protein-making machinery and has been used in the production of coronavirus vaccines.

“We are filing these lawsuits to protect the innovative mRNA technology platform that we pioneered, invested billions of dollars in creating, and patented during the decade preceding the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Stéphane Bancel, Moderna’s chief executive. “This foundational platform, which we began building in 2010, along with our patented work on coronaviruses in 2015 and 2016, enabled us to produce a safe and highly effective Covid-19 vaccine in record time after the pandemic struck.”

Moderna, which accepted $2.5 billion in taxpayer money to develop its Covid-19 vaccine, had said in 2020 that it would not to enforce its Covid-related patents while the pandemic continues. But in March, the company said it expected that manufacturers that are not based in or producing in low- or middle-income countries to respect the company’s intellectual property.

Moderna on Friday that it was not seeking damages for activities before March 8 and that it was not seeing to remove Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccines from the market and that it was not asking for an injunction to prevent its future sale, given the need for access to coronavirus vaccines.

Jerica Pitts, a spokeswoman for Pfizer, said on Friday morning that the company had not been served with a suit and was “unable to comment at this time.”

This is a developing story.

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Scientists explore chemistry of tattoo inks amid growing safety concerns