Now researchers have directly traced how some of this burnt biomass contributed to the largest stratospheric warming in three decades and also messed with the Antarctic ozone hole.

Combining satellite data with surface-based observations of aerosol behavior in computer models, University of Exeter statistician Lilly Damany‑Pearce and colleagues were able to detect the smoke as it floated high into our planet's atmosphere.

The fires consumed over 5.8 million hectares of life and were of such intense fury they formed their own weather systems, including smoke-infused thunderstorms (pyrocumulonimbus) that lasted for days on end.

As the researchers explain, these systems and their vortices pumped the smoke into remarkably high altitudes, with the Sun's rays heating the dark particles and causing them to rise further, in a process called self-lofting.

The first vortex, detected on 31 December 2019, reached an altitude of 16 kilometers (nearly 10 miles). Then another plume from 12 January 2020 was eventually detected up to 35 km into the sky – well into the stratosphere – and persisted for up to 2 months.

"Over the period of a month, the aerosol plume drifted across the South Pacific and was clearly detected in the stratosphere by [NASA instrument] CALIOP as well as surface-based lidars and sun-photometers operating from the southern tip of South America," the team writes in their paper.

During this time there was an abrupt global mean temperature spike in the stratosphere of 0.7 °C (1.8° F).

Anomalous temperatures persisted for four months, and the researchers' climate modeling demonstrated the temperatures could not be explained without the injected 0.81 teragrams of smoke particles the satellites detected in the stratosphere.

This was the largest temperature spike in Earth's stratosphere since the eruption of Pinatubo volcano in 1991, Damany‑Pearce and team note.

While the planet's surface cooled by about half a degree Celsius thanks to diffuse clouds of particles blocking sunlight, the absorption of infra-red radiation by particles in the stratosphere actually caused that layer of the atmosphere to warm significantly.

Aerosols from volcanoes released into the atmosphere from eruptions like this are also well known to deplete the ozone layer, and recent studies have shown particulates from wildfires can do this too.

Chemical reactions that take place on the surface of smoke particles use up ozone molecules. So the researchers mapped the vertical distribution of ozone in the southern hemisphere in 2020 and found more evidence of this smoke-induced ozone depletion.

The smoke particles wound up increasing the duration of the ozone hole over Antarctica and disrupted the Antarctic polar vortex, which usually begins to break down towards the end of spring.

"Ozone depletion serves to increase the strength of the polar vortex, via reduced stratospheric heating and thermal wind balance, providing a positive feedback that appears to delay the breakdown of the polar vortex," Damany‑Pearce and colleagues explain in their paper.

"This, in turn, contributed to the prolonged ozone hole that was observed in 2020."

The Antarctic ozone hole reached near record levels in 2020 and now we know why. The new research revealed how these smoke-induced changes then also impacted temperatures by strengthening the polar vortex. This led to the unusually cool Southern Hemisphere spring of 2020.

Meanwhile, closer to Earth's surface, more of the problematic smoke particles floated over the ocean and fell into the sea, spurring plankton into a feeding and reproductive frenzy that created a suffocating bloom of these microorganisms larger than the smoke's continent of origin.

Almost three years and several massive fires later, it's more concerning than ever to see what staggeringly large, varied and far-reaching ramifications massive plumes of wildfire smoke can have.

This research was published in Science Advances.

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This policy will likely yield significant benefits on a number of key priorities for the American people, from environmental justice to cancer breakthroughs, and from game-changing clean energy technologies to protecting civil liberties in an automated world.

For years, President Biden has been committed to delivering policy based on the best available science, and to working to ensure the American people have access to the findings of that research. “Right now, you work for years to come up with a significant breakthrough, and if you do, you get to publish a paper in one of the top journals,” said then-Vice President Biden in remarks to the American Association for Cancer Research in 2016. “For anyone to get access to that publication, they have to pay hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars to subscribe to a single journal. And here’s the kicker — the journal owns the data for a year. The taxpayers fund $5 billion a year in cancer research every year, but once it’s published, nearly all of that taxpayer-funded research sits behind walls. Tell me how this is moving the process along more rapidly.” The new public access guidance was developed with the input of multiple federal agencies over the course of this year, to enable progress on a number of Biden-Harris Administration priorities.

“When research is widely available to other researchers and the public, it can save lives, provide policymakers with the tools to make critical decisions, and drive more equitable outcomes across every sector of society,” said Dr. Alondra Nelson, head of OSTP. “The American people fund tens of billions of dollars of cutting-edge research annually. There should be no delay or barrier between the American public and the returns on their investments in research.”

This policy update builds on the Biden-Harris Administration’s broader efforts to broaden the potential of the American innovation ecosystem by leveling the playing field for all American innovators, which can help ensure that the U.S. remains a world leader in science and technology. This policy guidance will end the current optional embargo that allows scientific publishers to put taxpayer-funded research behind a subscription-based paywall – which may block access for innovators for whom the paywall is a barrier, even barring scientists and their academic institutions from access to their own research findings. In addition, agencies will develop plans to improve transparency, including clearly disclosing authorship, funding, affiliations, and the development status of federally funded research – and will coordinate with OSTP to help ensure equitable delivery of federally funded research results and data.

Advocates, researchers, academic libraries, Congressional leaders, and others have long called for greater public access to federally funded research results. This policy update reflects extensive public engagement with stakeholders across the research publication ecosystem on ways to strengthen equitable access to federally funded research results. OSTP’s consultations have included large and small science and academic publishers, for-profit and not-for-profit organizations, libraries and universities, scholarly societies, and members of the general public.

In the short-term, agencies will work with OSTP to update their public access and data sharing plans by mid-2023. OSTP expects all agencies to have updated public access policies fully implemented by the end of 2025. This timeline gives agencies, researchers, publishers, and scholarly societies some flexibility on when to adapt to the new policies. Over the long term, OSTP will continue to coordinate with federal agencies to ensure that government public access policies adapt to new technologies and emerging needs.

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REM sleep—named for the rapid eye movements associated with it—has been known since the 1950s to be the phase of sleep when dreams occur. But the purpose of the eye movements has remained a matter of much mystery and debate.

"We showed that these eye movements aren't random. They're coordinated with what's happening in the virtual dream world of the mouse," said Massimo Scanziani, Ph.D., senior author on the study, which appears in the Aug. 25, 2022, issue of Science.

"This work gives us a glimpse into the ongoing cognitive processes in the sleeping brain and at the same time solves a puzzle that's triggered the curiosity of scientists for decades," he said.

Connecting eye movement with dream direction

In the second half of the 20th century, some experts hypothesized that these REM movements may be following scenes in the dream world, but there was little way to test it, and the experiments that could be done (noting a dreamers' eye direction and then waking them up to ask where they were looking in the dream) provided contradictory results. Many researchers wrote off REM movements as random actions, perhaps to keep the eyelids lubricated.

Given much more advanced technology, Scanziani, along with UCSF postdoctoral researcher Yuta Senzai, Ph.D., were able to look at "head direction" cells in the brains of mice, who also experience REM sleep. These cells act something like a compass, and their activity shows researchers which direction the mouse perceives itself as heading.

The team simultaneously recorded data from these cells about the mouse's heading directions while monitoring its eye movements. Comparing them, they found that the direction of eye movements and of the mouse's internal compass were precisely aligned during REM sleep, just as they do when the mouse is awake and moving around.

A perfectly harmonious fake world

Scanziani is interested in the "generative brain," meaning the ability to make up objects and scenarios.

"One of our strengths as humans is this capacity to combine our real-world experiences with other things that don't exist at the present moment and may never exist," he said. "This generative ability of our brain is the basis of our creativity."

It's difficult to study this type of brain function, however; it requires looking into the brain while it's developing new experiences and ideas in the absence sensory input. Dreaming provides just that opportunity.

In a dream, Scanziani noted, you can combine familiar things with the impossible. He described a recurrent dream he had as a young diver, in which he was able to breathe under water. Invariably, he woke up to find it wasn't true. "But in the dream, you believe it's real because there aren't sensory inputs to bring you back to reality," said Scanziani. "It's a perfectly harmonious fake world."

Scanziani's team found that the same parts of the brain—and there are many of them—coordinate during both dreaming and wakefulness, lending credence to the idea that dreams are a way of integrating information gathered throughout the day.

How those brain regions work together to produce this generative ability is the mystery that Scanziani plans to continue trying to unravel.

"It's important to understand how the brain updates itself based on accumulated experiences," he said. "Understanding the mechanisms that allow us to coordinate so many distinct parts of the brain during sleep will give us insight into how those experiences become part of our individual models of what the world is and how it works."

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Samsung has announced that it has finished work on a prototype toilet with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as part of the latter’s Reinvent the Toilet Challenge, It’s not the first toilet project that Bill Gates has been involved with. Seven years ago, he invested in a machine that converts waste to water and electricity.

The prototype is designed for household-use and uses heat-treatment and bioprocessing to kill pathogens in human waste. These processes “make the release effluent and solids safe for the environment.” As water scarcity is an issue in some places, the toilet treats the water so that it can be used again. According to Samsung, the solid waste is dehydrated, dried, and combusted into ashes while urine is treated through a biological purification process.

While most people in developed countries do not think much about the toilet, there are around 3.6 billion people that don’t have access to these facilities. Around half a million kids under five die each year due to diarrheal diseases stemming from limited access to clean water and hygiene.

To help countries get this product into the homes of more people, Samsung is planning to offer royalty-free licences of patents related to this project to developing countries. This sharing of information will take place during the commercialization stage. Once the design is more efficient, Samsung and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will find industry partners to help bring the product to market.

Bill Gates and Samsung have developed a toilet with an incinerator

If you head southwest out of London, you might enter Teddington, a suburb with tree-lined avenues that sits on the banks of the river Thames. Here, in this innocuous neighborhood, you’ll find one of the United Kingdom’s more unusual security programs: the National Timing Centre (NTC), a government-led laboratory that is working to create a new, more resilient way for the country to measure time.

For decades, the UK, like almost every other country, has relied on global navigation satellite systems—signals from satellites orbiting in space—to tell the time accurately. These GNSS signals provide the foundation for mobile networks, energy grids, and the internet. They’re the source of the time on your smartphone, your laptop, and pretty much any other smart device that plays a part in your life. But there are growing fears that GNSS could be disrupted or fail—and with huge implications. A five-day disruption would cost the British economy an estimated £5.2 billion ($6.15 billion).

In 2017, an independent report commissioned by the British government declared that ignorance of the importance of precise time measurement, and the role of GNSS in providing it, was “especially acute.” It added that the vulnerability of the system, to both natural and intentional interference, was “poorly understood,” before recommending that the country take steps to increase the resilience of its accurate timing.

“Our dependency on time, an invisible utility, is rapidly increasing across our digital infrastructure,” says Leon Lobo, head of the NTC program. And yet despite this, the UK’s time is provided through a vulnerable system, he explains. This is why, in 2020, the NTC was set up.

Exactly how your phone and, say, a departures board in a train station both show you the same time might not be something you’ve thought about before—but here’s how this is achieved. GNSS signals are delivered through a constellation of satellites, with each satellite broadcasting coded messages stating which satellite it is, its location in space, and a stable time stamp that it generates on board through multiple atomic clocks, the gold standard of time measurement. These measure time by counting the oscillations of certain atoms, whose vibrations are highly consistent and stable, meaning that clocks relying on them barely drift. (NASA’s atomic clock, for example, will stay precise to the second for more than 10 million years.)

When a signal is received by a GNSS receiver, thousands of kilometers below, on earth, it’s able to calculate the distance to the satellite that sent it by measuring the time delay between the signal’s transmission and its receipt, because radio signals travel at a known speed. Provided the receiver is able to receive a signal from at least four satellites, it can calculate not only its position to meter-level accuracy but also the local time to fractions of a microsecond.

And because this data can be picked up by any device with a small chip-sized receiver, including a mobile phone or an in-car navigation system, GNSS is low-cost, beyond initially launching the satellites. More accurate systems can be deployed locally but, speaking generally, GNSS is able to deliver atomic clock accuracy on a global scale without the need for actual local atomic clocks. For this reason, it’s used by billions of people daily and is the backbone of a vast range of services that require accurate time or positioning, including emergency responders, aviation, and precision agriculture.

“Using GNSS is the least costly way of securing accurate time, because it’s free and you can do it absolutely anywhere,” says Gavin Schrock, a specialist in geomatics engineering. “If you want to set up a computer network in the middle of nowhere, you can quickly and easily secure precise time with GNSS.”

The time derived from GNSS can also be used to synchronize devices and systems across entire networks, allowing time to be kept much more consistently and accurately than with most local measures. Battery-powered, plug-in, and mechanical clocks will all drift from the true local time—and from each other—because of their individual physical properties, changes in temperature, and sometimes magnetic interference. Typical clocks can drift by more than an hour a year.

So instead, companies and services receive GNSS time, feed it into a local master clock, and then disseminate this downstream. Fixed and mobile telecommunications companies do this to provide time alignment between base stations. The energy grids that power our devices also rely on GNSS for time synchronization—measurements of power values across the grid must be continuously taken and time-stamped to optimize the flow of power through the network, which is only possible if the clocks agree. The financial services industry also relies on GNSS time-stamping to place all of its interactions in chronological order, for regulatory oversight.

According to the US Department of Homeland Security, the incapacitation or destruction of any one of the communications, energy, or financial sectors would have a “debilitating effect” on national economic security and on public health and safety. Given the interdependence of modern networks, GNSS is a single point of failure that could have implications across various other services and applications. It is a hidden reliance that touches almost every aspect of industrialized society.

Yet there has been little consideration about what happens when GNSS fails. With satellites, there’s the possibility of geomagnetic storms and space debris, which could stop their signal or even disable them entirely. “There are quite a wide range of reasons why GNSS signals might be unavailable, and this can create significant harm,” says Ulrich Kohn, a telecommunications expert.

Because the signals satellites send are weak, all GNSS-enabled services are also susceptible to jamming, where the signal becomes lost among interference. The range and scale of this problem is growing as jamming equipment becomes more available. Anyone from criminals looking to evade electronic-tag monitoring to van drivers looking to conceal unauthorized stops might consider using a jammer.

Cheap trucker jammers are available for less than $100, but because they’re manufactured so poorly, they’re more disruptive than they’re designed to be. In 2009, on board the British vessel Galatea—a boat responsible for, among other things, maintaining the country’s lighthouses—a jammer with less than one-thousandth of the power of a mobile phone caused the vessel’s electronic charts to show false positions, leading the autopilot to steer the ship quietly off course.

Another growing concern is spoofing, where false signals are sent to the receiver from a ground station, resulting in misleading information being passed into systems. As with jamming, there’s a risk that spoofing can be used by hackers and rogue nation-states, but it’s more dangerous because it’s harder to detect a false signal than one that’s lost.

Since the 2014 annexation of Crimea, Russia has reportedly been blocking the GNSS signals beamed down to Ukraine, cutting the country off from position, navigation, and time services. Then, in 2017, 20 vessels in the Black Sea reported that their GNSS signals had been spoofed to indicate they were more than 32 kilometers inland, prompting reports that Russia was testing a new type of electronic warfare.

“The risk [of GNSS outages] is bigger now, because of the geopolitical situation, which gives certain national actors a certain interest in disturbing GNSS,” Kohn explains. “So, if you have a critical application—meaning critical in the sense of national interest—I am doubtful that only relying on GNSS is a good answer.”

The NTC’s solution for the UK is to set up an independent service that can serve as an alternative. The system comprises a network of atomic clocks housed at four secure facilities across the country, including Teddington. These will generate a perfectly stable pulse, precisely a second long. This service will be known as Resilient Enhanced Time Scale Infrastructure (RETSI), and it’ll be available even if one of the sites fails. “The route to creating resilience is through diversity, each with different failure modes, rather than relying on one solution,” Lobo says.

From RETSI, the NTC will directly administer a local time that is just as accurate as the time currently delivered by GNSS. It’ll be disseminated to key services through radio signals, satellite constellations, and fiber cables.

And because of its better reliability, the expectation is that RETSI will be “the source or heartbeat of a system of systems, or the core of the onion as it were,” Lobo says. Organizations that rely on resilient timing—banks, telecommunications companies, defense companies, as well as those that serve them—may switch to this system, but it’ll also accelerate innovation in new technologies, enabling companies to deliver new products and services. For instance, precise and robust timekeeping will be the foundation for technologies like smart grids, smart cities, and connected autonomous vehicles of the future.

“You have a good internet, and you can put distributed applications on it. You have a good timing network, and you can put distributed timing applications on top of it,” says Schrock. “When you have a good backbone like this, it allows companies to better serve their customers.”

None of this is to say that what the NTC is doing is wholly unique, because there are other places in the world with comparable mesh networks of atomic clocks. Mostly, though, these exist at a local or even laboratory scale where GNSS isn’t reliable enough. For instance, Japan relies on a network of synchronized time centers because of the risk of earthquakes. There are similar networks in China, the US, and other countries, but those are “rarely promoted outside of the precise timing community and industry,” Schrock says.

The hope is that RETSI will launch in 2024, with basic free access available over the internet and the most highly assured, extreme accuracy offered over fiber cable. With the growing demand for increasingly precise time across various industries, Lobo believes that this could be the beginning of a major change in how we understand precision timing.

“We see time in the future as a true utility,” he says. “Like power, water, and gas, it’ll be available at a wall, so you can use it with full trust and confidence, for all your applications.”

Satellites Keep the World’s Clocks on Time. What if They Fail?

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The moon’s about to become a busy place. Following the Artemis 1 launch scheduled for next week, on subsequent missions NASA and its partners will send astronauts to explore the surface and assemble a station in lunar orbit. China’s and Russia’s space agencies plan to survey the moon’s water ice and build a shared research station. And companies like Astrobotic and Moon Express seek to send landers, experiments, and eventually cargo for paying customers.

Yet laws governing space exploration haven’t changed much in decades, despite rapidly increasing activity and competition. The Outer Space Treaty, a crucial agreement hashed out by negotiators from once-fledgling spacefaring nations, is now 55 years old—it was written before Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong had even set foot on the moon. That treaty stated that anyone can use space but no one owns it, and that exploration should be done to benefit all people. It also prohibited nuclear weapons in space. But it included few details, leaving it open to interpretation.

During the Trump administration, US officials drafted the Artemis Accords—rules for lunar exploration which, although developed by a single nation, could shape the future of moon outposts, colonies, and space mining. The administration announced the accords in May 2020, at a time when it wasn’t even clear whether the Artemis program would continue under a different president. But now these issues are no longer abstract: NASA engineers declared on Monday that the Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft will depart on August 29 for an uncrewed mission to orbit the moon. And the agency has already chosen some candidate landing spots for astronauts’ return to the lunar surface in 2025 or 2026—all near sites on the south pole that may harbor much-needed water ice.

The accords lay out a US-led vision for exploring the moon and beyond—their scope includes Mars, comets, and asteroids—with some guidelines for what future robotic spacecraft and astronauts should and shouldn’t do. For example, actors are supposed to use space only for peaceful purposes, share scientific data with the public, and demarcate safety zones around their lunar activities. The accords also elevate commerce to the same level as scientific exploration.

So far, 21 countries have joined the accords, including most recently France and Saudi Arabia, as well as frequent NASA partners Japan, Canada, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Notably, China and Russia have not. Nor has Germany, a key member country of the European Space Agency.

Unlike previous international agreements, the accords are not a treaty—but they could become de facto guidelines in lieu of more formal laws. “The Artemis Accords are more of a declaratory policy for the United States: ‘This is how we intend to act on the moon, and these are our principles we’re going to follow,’” says Kaitlyn Johnson, deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project at the nonprofit Center for Strategic and International Studies. “But the accords are gaining more importance as more countries sign onto them, especially big spacefaring nations.”

Dean Cheng, an expert on China’s space program at the Heritage Foundation, agrees that the accords began with the US unilaterally laying out a legal framework and then cobbling together bilateral agreements with other countries—and he points out that they are mostly close allies. “The Artemis Accords are basically a ‘coalition of the willing’—if you can still use that term without irony—of countries saying ‘We’re all interested in joining with the US, and we’re in agreement with the rules,’” Cheng says, referring to the term former President George W. Bush used to describe the international coalition that invaded Iraq.

The accords could carry more weight as more countries join, making some practices universal. Those could include space powers working together to notify each other of planned lunar missions, or to limit junk in orbit. It’s akin to the work that diplomats at the United Nations have been doing to negotiate “norms of behavior” in space.

The US government is essentially trying to persuade others of its view of the Outer Space Treaty, which predates the space industry and efforts to extract space resources, says Timiebi Aganaba, a space governance expert at Arizona State University in Phoenix. “By pushing their interpretation, and then through these bilateral arrangements, the US is trying to get other people to buttress that perspective. And then they’re going to make the argument that this is representing custom,” she says.

Chinese and Russian officials have criticized the Artemis Accords, likening them to colonialism or to a program “resembling NATO,” and they have stated that they have no intention of joining. These two countries are major players in space. Although Russia’s space program may be in some jeopardy thanks to the sanctions and partnership losses that followed its invasion of Ukraine, it has long been a space superpower. Meanwhile, the Chinese space program has grown rapidly over the past two decades, and its lunar exploration program, known as Chang’e, could be seen as a rival to Artemis. The nation’s upcoming plans for the moon include launching a sample return mission, orbiting a spacecraft, sending a rover, and then eventually building a lunar research station in cooperation with Russia. (Like Artemis, Chang’e is named after a goddess.) 

As China develops its moon missions, the country’s space program will continue doing its own thing, rather than joining the Artemis Accords, says Cheng: “China is saying, ‘We’re going to make our own rules.’” But China may adopt some best practices from the accords, he adds.

The agreements appear friendly to the private space industry. They build on the Obama administration’s Space Act of 2015 and former president Trump’s executive order in 2020, both of which sought to promote the private sector and facilitate mining on the moon and asteroids. They clarify that no nation can claim territory in space as its own, though they can dig up resources for their own use, like ice, which can be used for propellants and drinking water, and minerals, which could become the materials for 3D-printed structures.

If astronauts need to grab some lunar ice on a future Artemis mission, that won’t be a problem from a legal perspective, says Rossana Deplano, a researcher at the University of Leicester in the UK who has extensively studied the Artemis Accords’ effect on international space law. “What the Outer Space Treaty allows is using resources if it’s in support of a scientific mission. The Artemis missions are by definition scientific missions, so there is nothing unlawful for the US or other international partners taking part,” she says.

But the treaty also says that space exploration should be carried out “for the benefit of all peoples.” NASA and the European Space Agency frequently award contracts to private companies, and some of them are participating in the Artemis program. If these companies have their own designs on the moon, that could create a legal gray area. At the moment, Deplano argues, there’s nothing to stop NASA partners like SpaceX or Blue Origin from developing technologies while using government investment funds, and then reusing those technologies separately—while using the moon’s extremely limited ice and desirable landing spots for their own commercial purposes. 

That means companies from nations with advanced space programs, like the US and its partners, could get a head start toward benefiting from moon exploration. “This is essentially a privileged environment, which would allow certain portions of the world to develop much faster than others—developing the technology and know-how which would allow the commercial exploitation of those resources,” Deplano says.

Aganaba also foresees a possible legal clash over private mining in the future. The Moon Agreement of 1979, which was negotiated at the UN and signed by 18 countries, beginning with mostly Latin American and Eastern European nations, puts more stringent limits on mining, stating that “the moon and its natural resources are the common heritage of mankind.” This perspective would complicate private companies’ efforts to extract and use those resources. The US and most major spacefaring nations didn’t sign the Moon Agreement—but Aganaba points out that it has a similar number of signatories to the Artemis Accords, so it’s hard to say which will carry more weight.

Jessica West, a space security researcher at the research institute Project Ploughshares based in Waterloo, Ontario, will be watching how the Artemis Accords apply in practice when it comes to protecting the moon itself. The accords include a narrow definition of “heritage” sites to be preserved—specifically, Apollo-era landing sites, but not the lunar landscape. They also call for “sustainability” practices, which are limited to preventing more debris from accumulating in Earth orbit but not conserving space resources, West says. For example, they don’t prohibit anyone from entirely scouring a crater for ice, depriving future generations and less advanced space programs of a crucial resource, or visibly altering the appearance of the moon in the night sky. 

And the accords only apply the concept of global “benefits” to science, not to the profits a company might gain by, say, mining lunar ice. “What does it mean to have universal benefit, for things to benefit all humankind?” West asks. “That's a broad principle, but it’s not dictated in practice. Traditionally, that has meant the sharing of scientific information, but it hasn’t meant financial benefits.”

While the Artemis Accords reflect the US’s current vision for the moon, it’s unclear how future international missions will play out, or whether concerns about inequality will grow, says Johnson, of the Aerospace Security Project. “There’s always this challenge of colonialism and first mover advantage,” she says. “Right now, wealthy countries have access to the moon and they are making the rules. There’s not a lot of equity there.”

Humans Are Revisiting the Moon—and the Rules of Spacefaring

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Jung Eun Yoo, M.D., Ph.D., from Seoul National University Hospital in South Korea, and colleagues used data from the Korean National Health Insurance Service (4.5 million participants) to examine the association between the reduction, cessation, or increase of alcohol consumption and the development of alcohol-related cancers and all cancers.

The researchers found that compared with the sustainer groups at each drinking level, the increaser groups had a higher risk for alcohol-related cancers and all cancers. Those who changed from nondrinking to mild, moderate, or heavy drinking levels had a higher risk than those who did not drink. A lower risk for alcohol-related cancer was seen among those with mild drinking levels who quit drinking versus those who sustained their drinking levels.

Reducing heavy drinking levels to moderate or mild levels was associated with decreased cancer risk versus sustained heavy drinking. Compared with individuals who sustained their drinking levels, those with moderate or heavy drinking levels who quit drinking had a higher incidence of all cancer; however, this increase in risk disappeared when quitting was sustained.

"Findings of this study suggest that drinking cessation and reduction should be reinforced for the prevention of cancer," the authors write.

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A man in Italy tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, monkeypox and HIV all at once in July after having unprotected sex during a trip to Spain, becoming the first recorded patient to have these three viruses in conjunction, according to a new case report published in the Journal of Infection last week.

Monkeypox is spread through close contact with infectious material from skin lesions, objects contaminated with the virus, seminal fluids and secretions from the throat. Most of the cases recorded in the most recent wave of infection have been reported among men who had sex with men.

The patient in the case report, an Italian 36-year-old male, spent five days in Spain in June. Nine days after returning home from his trip, he developed a fever, sore throat, fatigue, headache and inflammation in his groin area. Shortly afterward, he tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 and within a day he developed a rash on his left arm. The day after, small, painful blisters appeared on his torso, lower limbs, face and rear.

Due to the spread of the blisters that began to evolve into pustules with a depression in the middle of them, he decided to go to the emergency room of the Policlinico “G. Rodolico - San Marco” University Hospital in Catania, Italy and was transferred to the Infectious Diseases unit at the hospital.

After being admitted, the patient reported that he had unprotected sex with men during his stay in Spain. He was tested for monkeypox and tested positive for the West African variant of the virus, which has been found to be responsible for the outbreak in Spain. Even after 20 days, monkeypox tests continued to return positive, with the physicians stressing that this could mean that patient may remain contagious for several days after clinical remission.

A student makes an AIDS red ribbon during a World AIDS Day event in Beijing, December 1, 2010 (credit: JASON LEE / REUTERS)

The patient had been treated for syphilis in 2019 and suffered from bipolar disorder, according to the case report. He had been vaccinated with two doses of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine in 2021 and had contracted the virus in January 2022.

Serology tests that were conducted for viral hepatitis, herpes simplex, gonorrhea, chlamydia and lymphogranuloma venereum (LGV) after he was admitted to the hospital returned negative, but he did test positive for HIV-1 with a viral load of 234,000 copies per milliliter of blood, which is considered high. His CD4 lymphocyte (a type of white blood cell) count was still average.

The scientists stressed that due to his relatively unchanged white blood cell count, it can be assumed that the HIV infection was relatively recent. A triple combination of dolutegravir, abacavir and lamivudine (medications used to treat HIV) was initiated for HIV treatment.

The patient had been treated for syphilis in 2019 and suffered from bipolar disorder, according to the case report. He had been vaccinated with two doses of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine in 2021 and had contracted the virus in January 2022.

Serology tests that were conducted for viral hepatitis, herpes simplex, gonorrhea, chlamydia and lymphogranuloma venereum (LGV) after he was admitted to the hospital returned negative, but he did test positive for HIV-1 with a viral load of 234,000 copies per milliliter of blood, which is considered high. His CD4 lymphocyte (a type of white blood cell) count was still average.

The scientists stressed that due to his relatively unchanged white blood cell count, it can be assumed that the HIV infection was relatively recent. A triple combination of dolutegravir, abacavir and lamivudine (medications used to treat HIV) was initiated for HIV treatment.

What did the scientists have to say?

"This case highlights how monkeypox and COVID-19 symptoms may overlap, and corroborates how in case of co-infection, anamnestic collection (case history) and sexual habits are crucial to perform the correct diagnosis," wrote the physicians in the case report.

The physicians added that sexual intercourse could be the predominant form of transmission, meaning that a complete STI screening is recommended after a monkeypox diagnosis.

Additionally, as this is the only reported case of monkeypox, SARS-CoV-2 and HIV co-infection, it is unclear if this combination aggravates the patient's condition.

"Given the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and the daily increase of monkeypox cases, healthcare systems must be aware of this eventuality, promoting appropriate diagnostic tests in high-risk subjects, which are essential to containment as there is no widely available treatment or prophylaxis (protection)," wrote the physicians.

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The service, called Amazon Care, will end by Dec. 31, according to an email sent to staff by Neil Lindsay, senior vice president of Amazon Health Services.

Amazon Care was launched in 2019 for Seattle-based Amazon's Washington state employees, who served as trial users before the company made it available last year to its workers in all 50 states.

The service connects patients virtually with doctors and nurses who can provide treatment 24 hours a day. It does not have physical locations, but offers in-person services for things like vaccinations and flu testing in several cities, including Seattle and Washington, D.C.

Amazon's decision to pull the plug on Amazon Care is even more surprising given the company said in February it was planning to expand the in-person care service to include 20 additional cities. Last summer, Amazon also began offering the service to private employers nationwide.

In the email sent to staff, Lindsay wrote that Amazon listened to feedback from employers and worked to improve Amazon Care.

"However, despite these efforts, we've determined that Amazon Care isn't the right long-term solution for our enterprise customers," Lindsay wrote.
He added that Amazon Care "is not a complete enough offering for the large enterprise customers we have been targeting, and wasn't going to work long-term."

An Amazon spokesperson declined to say how many people will lose their jobs because of the shutdown of Amazon Care.

Amazon Care isn't the company's first failed health effort. The tech and retail giant was also part of a short-lived collaboration with JPMorgan and Berkshire Hathaway to improve health care costs. The three corporate giants formed an independent company called Haven to focus on improving care and manage expenses, but it dissolved last year.

Despite the setbacks, Amazon hasn't relented on its focus on healthcare. Last month, it announced plans to spend $3.9 billion to buy the primary care organization One Medical, a membership-based service that offers virtual care as well as in-person visits. As of March, One Medical had about 767,000 members and 188 medical offices in 25 markets.

Neil Saunders, managing director at GlobalData Retail, said given that Amazon is now investing in other areas of health, it is taking a more aggressive stance on exiting things that are not delivering results.

"The closure underlines how hard making inroads into the health market is," Saunders said. "It serves as a warning that even with acquisitions, Amazon's bid to shake up the sector will be incredibly difficult and possibly expensive."

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"We already know that climate change is increasing the severity and frequency of extreme weather events," said Kevin Smiley, the study's lead author and LSU Department of Sociology assistant professor. "But now researchers are able to pinpoint the extent of damage from a specific extreme weather event such as Hurricane Harvey and the resulting floods."

Fifty percent less residences impacted equates to about 50,000 fewer homes damaged and billions of dollars saved in residential damage.

"This means that we have quantified the contribution of climate change to the suffering of people who live there," said Michael Wehner, the study's co-author and senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The research, a first of its kind investigation into potential disparities between those impacted by the climate change-induced flooding, finds patterns of racial and economic disparities.

"Part of the reason why low-income neighborhoods flooded has to do with the historical development of Houston along its waterways and surrounding petrochemical corridor," Smiley said. "There's a clear climate and environmental justice story as to where these neighborhoods are located."

How do researchers study the impacts of climate change?

Climate change attribution, which ascertains the connection between climate change and extreme weather events, involves running computational models to estimate how much these changes in climate make extreme weather events, like hurricanes, more severe. Scientists can compare these estimates without climate change to what actually happened to see the difference.

"This is the first end-to-end impact attribution study of a specific weather event following on our previous studies showing a significant increase in Harvey's precipitation and the resulting flooding increase because of climate change," Wehner said.

Although popular discussion tends to center around climate change forecasts for the future, the study underscores the fact that climate change is impacting life now.

"Climate change is happening right now with real and substantial costs," Smiley said. "Three to five extra inches of rainfall from climate change can make the difference between your lawn getting soaked and your house getting flooded leaving it uninhabitable."

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Locating water and other resources is a NASA priority crucial to exploring Earth's natural satellite and other objects in the solar system and beyond.

Previous experiments inferred, then confirmed the existence of small amounts of water across the moon. However, most technologies do not distinguish among water, free hydrogen ions, and hydroxyl, as the broadband detectors used cannot distinguish between the different volatiles.

Goddard engineer Dr. Berhanu Bulcha said a type of instrument called a heterodyne spectrometer could zoom in on particular frequencies to definitively identify and locate water sources on the moon. It would need a stable, high-powered, terahertz laser, which was prototyped in collaboration with Longwave Photonics through NASA's Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program.

"This laser allows us to open a new window to study this frequency spectrum," he said. "Other missions found hydration on the moon, but that could indicate hydroxyl or water. If it's water, where did it come from? Is it indigenous to the formation of the moon, or did it arrive later by comet impacts? How much water is there? We need to answer these questions because water is critical for survival and can be used to make fuel for further exploration."

As the name implies, spectrometers detect spectra or wavelengths of light in order to reveal the chemical properties of matter that light has touched.

Most spectrometers tend to operate across broad sections of the spectrum. Heterodyne instruments dial in to very specific light frequencies such as infrared or terahertz. Hydrogen-containing compounds like water emit photons in the terahertz frequency range—2 trillion to 10 trillion cycles per second—between microwave and infrared.

Like a microscope for subtle differences within a bandwidth like terahertz, heterodyne spectrometers combine a local laser source with incoming light.

Measuring the difference between the laser source and the combined wavelength provides accurate readings between sub-bandwidths of the spectrum.

Traditional lasers generate light by exciting an electron within an atom's outer shell, which then emits a single photon as it transitions, or returns to its resting energy level. Different atoms produce different frequencies of light based on the fixed amount of energy it takes to excite one electron. However, lasers fall short in a particular portion of the spectrum between infrared and microwave known as the terahertz gap.

"The problem with existing laser technology," Dr. Bulcha said, "is that no materials have the right properties to produce a terahertz wave."

Electromagnetic oscillators like those that generate radio or microwave frequencies produce low-powered terahertz pulses by using a series of amplifiers and frequency multipliers to extend the signal into the terahertz range. However, this process consumes a lot of voltage, and the materials used to amplify and multiply the pulse have limited efficiency. This means they lose power as they approach the terahertz frequencies.

From the other side of the terahertz gap, optical lasers pump energy into a gas to generate photons. However, high-powered, terahertz-band lasers are large, power hungry, and not suitable for space exploration purposes where mass and power are limited, particularly hand-held or Small Satellite applications. The power of the pulse also drops as optical lasers push towards the terahertz bandwidths.

To fill that gap, Dr. Bulcha's team is developing quantum cascade lasers that produce photons from each electron transition event by taking advantage of some unique, quantum-scale physics of materials layered just a few atoms thick.

In these materials, a laser emits photons in a specific frequency determined by the thickness of alternating layers of semiconductors rather than the elements in the material. In quantum physics, the thin layers increase the chance that a photon can then tunnel through to the next layer instead of bouncing off the barrier. Once there, it excites additional photons. Using a generator material with 80 to 100 layers, totaling less than 10 to 15 microns thick, the team's source creates a cascade of terahertz-energy photons.

This cascade consumes less voltage to generate a stable, high-powered light. One drawback of this technology is its beam spreads out in a large angle, dissipating quickly over short distances. Using innovative technology supported by Goddard's Internal Research and Development (IRAD) funding, Dr. Bulcha and his team integrated the laser on a waveguide with a thin optical antenna to tighten the beam. The integrated laser and waveguide unit reduces this dissipation by 50% in a package smaller than a quarter.

He hopes to continue the work to make a flight-ready laser for NASA's Artemis program.

The laser's low size and power consumption allow it to fit in a 1U CubeSat, about the size of a teapot, along with the spectrometer hardware, processor, and power supply. It could also power a handheld device for use by future explorers on the moon, Mars, and beyond.

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As reported by Reuters, Twitter CEO Parag Agarwal noted in an all-hands meeting that employee attrition is now at 18.3%. This notably higher than the rate prior Elon Musk's offer. At that time, employee attrition was between 14-16%, which is in line with the industry average in Twitter's space.

In terms of responding to an attendee question of how the firm would be dealing with the high departure rate of employees, Agrawal stated that Twitter would need to "narrow our focus" proportionate to the headcount. The executive did not dive into details about how this could be done at this time.

With regards to the claims made by Mudge, Agrawal called them "foundationally, technically, and historically inaccurate". Additionally, Twitter's General Counsel Sean Edgett mentioned that the firm had already reached out to various "global agencies" prior to the exposé in order to assure them that Twitter had never lied to any regulator or even its own board.

Finally, in terms of product development, Twitter's general manager Jay Sullivan explained that the company is working on a new initiative to give users more control over what they want to see in their feed.

Twitter has been in hot water for the past few weeks now, and it remains to be seen how, and if, the company will emerge from these challenges.

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The search giant decided to pull the apps after speaking to law enforcement agencies on the matter. In the coming weeks, it will be introducing more guidelines to ensure that any personal loan apps that do get onto the Play Store have to follow more stringent guidelines. Too many personal loans apps in the country have been offering loans with dangerously high fees and lenders have been taking extreme measure to get the money back.

The update from Google is just the latest episode of the matter. In May, it was reported that personal loan apps would need to be submitted with additional proof of eligibility requirements, including a copy of their licence with the Reserve Bank of India.

It’s unclear what will happen to existing loans made to customers. TechCrunch reports that when Google last removed personal loan apps, it told the companies to give customers at least 60 days to repay what they owe, something similar could be in place this time too.

Source: TechCrunch

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Yearning princesses locked away in castles, heroic knights, hawkish Vikings — fragments of medieval European stories have permeated nearly every aspect of contemporary culture, from Taylor Swift songs to Shrek. But how many stories haven’t survived to the modern day? A recent study published in Science found that nearly one-third of Medieval tales and over 90% of original manuscripts have been lost forever.

The study, titled “Forgotten books: The application of unseen species models to the survival of culture,” examined medieval European manuscripts written in English, French, Dutch, German, Irish, and Icelandic. Instead of focusing on all medieval manuscripts, many of which are religious texts, the study focused on narrative and chivalric fiction — tales that include sagas of courtly love and stories about King Arthur’s round table. These stories were mainly circulated through manuscripts made from parchment until paper became more common in Europe around 1450.

The study was published by a large team of scholars whose areas of study range from literature to history and biostatistics. The team includes Mike Kestemont, Elisabeth de Bruijn, and Remco Sleiderink of the University of Antwerp in Belgium, Folgert Karsdorp of the KNAW Meertens Institute in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, Matthew Driscoll of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, and others.

The diverse team took a relatively novel approach to their research: Instead of using methods traditionally used for studying history, the team used a method used in ecology, called the “unseen species model.” This model was developed by biostatistician Anne Chao of the National Tsing Hua University in Hsin-Chu, Taiwan, one of the study’s authors.

The unseen species model is used in ecology to determine how many species go undetected during a survey. This is a pervasive problem in ecology because it is nearly impossible for scientists to observe every single species in a given area. (This problem of “unseen entities” extends to other fields too. For example, astronomers can’t be sure that they accounted for every star, linguists can’t know that they heard every word in a language, and computer scientists can’t know that they found every bug in a program.)

In order to use the model, the researchers had to categorize the Medieval narratives and manuscripts as living things. Each individual story was treated like a species, and each manuscript containing the story was treated like a sighting of that species.

This heatmap shows the locations of libraries and archives where manuscripts are held. The types of manuscripts are categorized by language: Dutch, English, German, and French. (courtesy Science)

Although there is still little quantitative research into the existence of medieval manuscripts, this study did not mark the first time scientific methods have been applied to historical record keeping. A 2007 study examined printed books also using an unseen species model, but two previous studies examining Medieval manuscripts with scientific methods were met with sharp criticism “because the figures obtained did not fit with other historical evidence,” according to the recently published study. The study’s authors went on to explain that conventional approaches rely on mentions of lost works in places like library catalogs, “but many lost works will not have been mentioned.”

There were many ways in which those missing manuscripts were lost: Some were destroyed in events like library fires, but others were lost when the parchment they were written on was repurposed. For example, fragments of manuscripts were used to bind books and wrap meat. Tailors also used them as measuring tapes. They were also used as material for a bishop’s miter.

Some manuscripts were destroyed when they were repurposed. In this example, the parchment from a manuscript was used to reinforce a bishop’s miter.
Fragment of Strengleikar repurposed to stiffen a bishop’s miter, AM 666 b 4to (courtesy Arnamagnæan Manuscript Collection, Copenhagen, Denmark)

Ultimately, the report found that 799 literary tales out of an original 1,170 are still around today. It also found that those stories were written down in a total of 40,614 manuscripts, but only 3,648 of those have survived.

But the study went beyond a general European inquiry, examining which countries’ manuscripts had the highest and lowest survival rates. Germany, Ireland, and Iceland had the highest rates.

In ecology, the species that exist on an island — like Ireland or Iceland — have high species richness and evenness. “A parallel emerges with some of the cultural diversity profiles for island regions reconstructed here: If land-isolated areas preserve biological heritage more effectively, then the same might hold true for cultural heritage,” the study reads.

And the report attributed these results to a previously overlooked factor: the evenness in which manuscripts were distributed. For example, even though France had a vast tradition of medieval literature, since it was not as abundantly produced, a single library fire could render a story extinct.

The country with the lowest manuscript survival rate was England. “French-speaking Normans conquered England in 1066, which may have led to greater neglect and recycling of manuscripts written in English,” reads an article about the study published on Science News.

Kestemont told Hyperallergic that applying the unseen species model is a general method that can be used in other disciplines as well, like social history.

“How much has been lost exactly is a question that has been fascinating me since I was an undergrad,” the researcher said. “Is what we still have nowadays in any way representative of the wealth of books and stories that once existed? I always assumed that we’d never be able to answer this question. Through the unexpected application of a method from ecology, however, we are suddenly able to at least begin to answer this question.”

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In the fight against online misinformation, falsehoods have key advantages: They crop up fast and spread at the speed of electrons, and there is a lag period before fact checkers can debunk them.

So researchers at Google, the University of Cambridge and the University of Bristol tested a different approach that tries to undermine misinformation before people see it. They call it “pre-bunking.”

The researchers found that psychologically “inoculating” internet users against lies and conspiracy theories — by pre-emptively showing them videos about the tactics behind misinformation — made people more skeptical of falsehoods afterward, according to an academic paper published in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday. But effective educational tools still may not be enough to reach people with hardened political beliefs, the researchers found.

Since Russia spread disinformation on Facebook during the 2016 election, major technology companies have struggled to balance concerns about censorship with fighting online lies and conspiracy theories. Despite an array of attempts by the companies to address the problem, it is still largely up to users to differentiate between fact and fiction.

The strategies and tools being deployed during the midterm vote in the United States this year by Facebook, TikTok and other companies often resemble tactics developed to deal with misinformation in past elections: partnerships with fact-checking groups, warning labels, portals with vetted explainers as well as post removal and user bans.

Social media platforms have made attempts to pre-bunk before, though those efforts have done little to slow the spread of false information. Most have also not been as detailed — or as entertaining — as the videos used in the studies by the researchers.

Twitter said this month that it would try to “enable healthy civic conversation” during the midterm elections in part by reviving pop-up warnings, which it used during the 2020 election. Warnings, written in multiple languages, will appear as prompts placed atop users’ feeds and in searches for certain topics.

The new paper details seven experiments with almost 30,000 total participants. The researchers bought YouTube ad space to show users in the United States 90-second animated videos aiming to teach them about propaganda tropes and manipulation techniques. A million adults watched one of the ads for 30 seconds or longer.

The users were taught about tactics such as scapegoating and deliberate incoherence, or the use of conflicting explanations to assert that something is true, so that they could spot lies. Researchers tested some participants within 24 hours of seeing a pre-bunk video and found a 5 percent increase in their ability to recognize misinformation techniques.

One video opens with a mournful piano tune and a little girl grasping a teddy bear, as a narrator says, “What happens next will make you tear up.” Then the narrator explains that emotional content compels people to pay more attention than they otherwise would, and that fear-mongering and appeals to outrage are keys to spreading moral and political ideas on social media.

The video offers examples, such as headlines that describe a “horrific” accident instead of a “serious” one, before reminding viewers that if something they see makes them angry, “someone may be pulling your strings.”

Beth Goldberg, one of the paper’s authors and the head of research and development at Jigsaw, a technology incubator within Google, said in an interview that pre-bunking leaned into people’s innate desire to not be duped.

“This is one of the few misinformation interventions that I’ve seen at least that has worked not just across the conspiratorial spectrum but across the political spectrum,” Ms. Goldberg said.

Jigsaw will start a pre-bunking ad campaign on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok at the end of August for users in Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, meant to head off fear-mongering about Ukrainian refugees who entered those countries after Russia invaded Ukraine. It will be done in concert with local fact checkers, academics and disinformation experts.

The researchers don’t have plans for similar pre-bunking videos ahead of the midterm elections in the United States, but they are hoping other tech companies and civil groups will use their research as a template for addressing misinformation.

However, pre-bunking is not a silver bullet. The tactic was not effective on people with extreme views, such as white supremacists, Ms. Goldberg said. She added that elections were tricky to pre-bunk because people had such entrenched beliefs. The effects of pre-bunking last for only between a few days and a month.

Groups focused on information literacy and fact-checking have employed various pre-bunking strategies, such as a misinformation-identifying curriculum delivered over two weeks of texts, or lists of bullet points with tips such as “identify the author” and “check your biases.” Online games with names like Cranky Uncle, Harmony Square, Troll Factory and Go Viral try to build players’ cognitive resistance to bot armies, emotional manipulation, science denial and vaccine falsehoods.

A study conducted in 2020 by researchers at the University of Cambridge and at Uppsala University in Sweden found that people who played the online game Bad News learned to recognize common misinformation strategies across cultures. Players in the simulation were tasked with amassing as many followers as possible and maintaining credibility while they spread fake news.

The researchers wrote that pre-bunking worked like medical immunization: “Pre-emptively warning and exposing people to weakened doses of misinformation can cultivate ‘mental antibodies’ against fake news.”

Tech companies, academics and nongovernmental organizations fighting misinformation have the disadvantage of never knowing what lie will spread next. But Prof. Stephan Lewandowsky from the University of Bristol, a co-author of Wednesday’s paper, said propaganda and lies were predictable, nearly always created from the same playbook.

“Fact checkers can only rebut a fraction of the falsehoods circulating online,” Mr. Lewandowsky said in a statement. “We need to teach people to recognize the misinformation playbook, so they understand when they are being misled.”

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The maker of popular tax software platform TurboTax is facing a major legal battle with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over claims it misled customers.

Parent company Intuit is facing an FTC lawsuit over false advertising concerning its "free" platform, which the body claims has become less available in recent years.

If ruled against the company, the suit could allow millions of "free" TurboTax users to claim for losses or damages.

'Free' TurboTax

The FTC claims that Intuit is running a "bait-and-switch" operation for free TurboTax users, luring them in with the promise of a free service. However, after the user has gone through the lengthy process of entering all their personal information into the platform, TurboTax then demands a fee to file the return.

The FTC says that many users affected in this way simply pay the fee to get the process finished, with two-thirds of users who filed with TurboTax in 2020 were ineligible for the platform's free tier.

The suit follows several months of wrangling between the FTC and Intuit, and comes shortly after the company agreed to pay out $141 million to settle a separate lawsuit brought by several US states over exactly the same accusation.

Intuit had said that the settlement of this case, "affords the public all of the material relief the FTC seeks to obtain through this action," but the FTC continued to press its case, ruling that "the public interest warrants further litigation."

The FTC filed its case against Intuit back in March 2022, noting that, "the commission is asking a federal court to put an immediate halt to Intuit advertising and has also authorized the filing of an administrative complaint alleging that the company's practices are illegal."

A preliminary date of March 27, 2023 has now be set for a hearing - just a few days ahead of the traditional April 15 deadline for US citizens to file individual income tax returns, one of the busiest times for TurboTax users (although the upcoming 2023 deadline will be Tuesday April 18).

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The discovery that polio has partially paralyzed a young man in a New York suburb feels wearying, yet shocking. Wearying, because it’s the third highly infectious virus to make a surprise landfall in the US in three years, after monkeypox and SARS-CoV-2. And shocking because, for decades, polio hasn’t spread in rich nations, where sanitation, vaccination, and solid public health funding are presumed to keep populations safe. Transmission was eliminated in the US in 1979, all of the Americas in 1994, and the UK in 2003. And yet there it was, in the wastewater of the county where the young man lives and a neighboring one, in New York City, and also in London.

Of course, polio exists in other parts of the world. A global campaign to eradicate it has been laboring on that exhausting task since 1988. Last year, poliovirus caused paralysis—which can’t be treated or cured—in two countries where it has never been contained, and another 21 where it has rebounded.

Disease experts, though, were not surprised to see it reappear in Western nations. For years they’ve watched as protection against the disease was undermined by funding cuts, vaccine hesitancy, forgetfulness—and the wily nature of the virus. “This should be a wake-up call to people,” says Heidi Larson, a professor and founder of the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “We have been saying that until we can get this fully eradicated, we are all at risk.”

Public health experts consider this an emergency, because polio paralysis cases represent the tip of an immunological iceberg: For every person paralyzed, at least several hundred more have likely carried asymptomatic infections, providing a refuge for the virus to replicate and transmit itself. That takes time. Wastewater findings show that polio has been circulating possibly since February in London, and for at least several months in New York.

This feeling of urgency is why London health authorities have offered booster doses of vaccine to any kids 9 years or younger, and why their counterparts in New York City—where 40 percent of kids in some zip codes are not vaccinated—have urged parents to bring children in for shots. “The number one way to prevent paralytic polio is to get vaccinated against the poliovirus, and the vaccine is over 99 percent effective at preventing paralysis,” says Daniel Pastula, a physician and associate professor at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus who studies neuro-invasive diseases. “If you are unvaccinated, or your children are unvaccinated against polio, and poliovirus is circulating in your community, you are at risk for developing paralytic polio.”

To understand how polio ended up in these cities, it helps to review a little history. Two histories, in fact: one for the polio vaccine, and one for how it’s been deployed to chase the disease from the world.

Start with the vaccine formula—or formulas, actually, because there are two. They were born from a ferocious mid-20th century rivalry between scientists Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin. Salk’s formula, the first to be approved, is injected; it uses an inactivated version of the virus, and protects against developing disease, but does not stop viral transmission. Sabin’s formula, which came a few years later, used an artificially-weakened live virus. It does block transmission, and—because it is a liquid that gets squirted into a child’s mouth—it is cheaper to make and easier to distribute, since it doesn’t require trained healthcare workers or careful disposal of needles. Those qualities made the Sabin oral version, known as OPV, the bulwark of polio control, and eventually the main weapon in the global eradication campaign.

The oral vaccine had a unique benefit. Wild-type polio is actually a gut virus: It locks onto receptors in the intestinal lining and replicates there before migrating to the nerve cells that control muscles. But because it’s in the gut, it also passes out of the body in feces and then spreads to other people in contaminated water. The Sabin vaccine takes advantage of that process: The vaccine virus replicates in a child, gets pooped out, and spreads its protection to unvaccinated neighbors.

Yet that benefit concealed a tragic flaw. Once out of every several million doses, the weakened virus reverted to the neurovirulence of the wild type, destroying those motor neurons and causing polio paralysis. That mutation would also make a child who harbored the reverted virus a potential source of infection, rather than protection. That risk is what caused rich nations to abandon the oral version: In 1996, when wild polio was no longer occurring in the US, the oral vaccine caused about 10 cases of polio paralysis in children. The US switched to the injectable formula, known as IPV, in 2000, and the UK followed in 2004.

Polio vaccination requires several doses to create full protection, and once that occurs, children are protected against both wild-type and vaccine-derived versions of the virus. So the international vaccination campaign continued to rely on OPV, arguing that the risk would diminish as more children received protection. That was a reasonable gamble when the effort was new and health authorities thought it would take 10 to 12 years to achieve eradication. But thanks to funding shortfalls, political and religious unrest, and the Covid pandemic—which imposed a slowdown not just on eradication activities but on all childhood vaccines—it’s now been 34 years, and the job is not done. Meanwhile, last year in 20 countries there were a total of 688 cases of paralysis of what’s called “circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus,” and only six cases of wild-type polio, in three nations.

There’s a further complexity driving the emergence of vaccine-derived virus, and that arises from a combination of its natural history and the vaccination roll-out. Poliovirus comes in three strains: types 1, 2, and 3. Originally, both vaccines contained all three. As time went on and more people gained immunity, the strains began to occur less frequently, but not at the same rate. The first to disappear was type 2, so in 2016 planners decided to take that strain out of OPV. (Because type 2 attaches to the gut more efficiently than the others, its inclusion interfered with establishing immunity to the other types, and it no longer made sense to let a strain that wasn’t circulating dominate the immune response.) In one enormous coordinated action, known as “the switch,” the eradication campaign swapped the three-strain vaccine for a bivalent one.

But removing type 2 from the formula meant that if any type 2 virus reemerged in the world—from an environmental reservoir, or from someone whose system harbored a mutated vaccine virus—there would be little defense against it. And the bet on the switch did not pay off.

“I think the best way to describe this is as an honest mistake,” says Svea Closser, a medical anthropologist and associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who studies polio eradication. “They did not expect the extent and spread, and global reach, of these type 2 outbreaks.”

Most of the vaccine-derived virus now circulating is mutated type 2. It primarily has appeared in Central Africa, where outbreaks have spread across national borders. The polioviruses found in New York and London are mutated type 2, as well. Importantly, though these two viruses are related to each other—and to vaccine-derived viruses found earlier in Israel—there is not yet any genomic evidence that they are related to African viruses. They have fewer genetic changes from the vaccine virus than the African-circulating ones do, indicating that they emerged more recently. They likely were imported from somewhere that once used OPV (as Israel did in the 2000s) or continues to.

That’s significant, and not just because these type 2 viruses may have emerged from the misplaced optimism of the switch. The generally accepted data about the incidence of polio—about one case of paralysis for every 200 infections—comes from research into type 1. Some data suggests that the numbers for type 2 are different: one case of paralysis for every 2,000 infected. Thus, if one New Yorker is paralyzed, thousands might be passing on the virus unknowingly. Add in neighborhood clusters of low vaccination rates, and the area could be more vulnerable than people understand.

“This always comes back to immunization coverage,” says John Vertefeuille, an epidemiologist and the branch chief for polio eradication at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “This area in New York, the vaccine coverage is not as high as it is in much of the US population, and the early detections in London were in places that had lower vaccine coverage than you would typically see.”

It’s hard to imagine how society stopped fearing this disease. There are living politicians and celebrities who endured polio as children: Senate leader Mitch McConnell, for instance, and singer Joni Mitchell, who also suffered a severe recurrence in 1995. The polio panics that closed schools and theaters and emptied swimming pools in the 1950s occurred within boomers’ lifetimes. “That we needed everyone vaccinated was well-accepted at one time; people lined up in the streets to get their polio vaccine and their measles-mumps-rubella,” says Howard Forman, a physician and health policy expert, and professor at Yale School of Medicine. “Over time I think people’s memories faded. I think now most people probably don’t understand what polio is.”

If there’s any upside to the emergency, it may be that it has brought polio’s persistent threat and unpredictable risks back into the consciousness of people in rich nations. For the international campaign to end the disease, that can only be good. The campaign is a shared effort of the CDC, World Health Organization, UNICEF, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and millions of volunteers from the service organization Rotary International. Since last year it has been rolling out a reworked OPV, just for type 2, that is less likely to cause mutations. Even with those sponsors, though, the campaign is chronically short of money. Fresh awareness might change that.

“The detections in London and New York have already brought increased attention to polio and VDPVs,” or vaccine-derived polioviruses, says Carol Pandak, an epidemiologist and global health expert director of Rotary’s PolioPlus program. “They also highlight the urgency of stopping both wild and vaccine-derived polio, as many more people now understand that VDPVs can cause paralysis just like the wild poliovirus. They are stark reminders that as long as polio exists anywhere, it is a threat everywhere.”

Polio Is Back in the US and UK. Here’s How That Happened

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Cheap, high capacity, and fast: New aluminum battery tech promises it all

SARS-CoV-2 has evolved an incubation time more like seasonal coronaviruses

The study, which was published on Tuesday in the journal PLoS Biology, detailed results from three trials that measured altruism in different ways. University of California, Berkeley sleep scientists first measured 23 individuals’ willingness to help both strangers and people they knew after restful and disrupted sleep. The researchers found that just one night of sleep deprivation was linked to a reduction in the participants’ desire to help others.

Next, the UC Berkeley team had 136 people self-report the duration and quality of their sleep for four days, and also answer questionnaires about their daily capacity for altruism. The people who reported worse sleep quality scored significantly lower on the helpfulness questionnaires.

Finally, the researchers obtained state-specific donation data from DonorsChoose, a public charity that raises money for classroom projects. After analyzing more than 3 million donations between 2001 and 2016, they found that people from states that observe DST gave significantly less money on average to charity the day following the switch—several dollars’ difference. The donations bounced back roughly a week later, but still remained lower than pre-DST amounts.

“It certainly is eye-grabbing, intriguing, and very creative to look at three different levels of where those effects of inadequate sleep might take place and contribute to a lack of altruistic behavior,” Edward Pace-Schott, a Harvard Medical School psychiatry researcher who was not involved in the study, told The Daily Beast. “People can relate in their own lives to that experience of not wanting to deal with things when they are tired.”

"People can relate in their own lives to that experience of not wanting to deal with things when they are tired.”

— Edward Pace-Schott

Still, Pace-Schott said the research doesn’t explain observations of extreme altruism coupled with sleep deprivation, such as people helping out others during and after natural disasters, members of the military, and new mothers. However, the study does demonstrate that even relatively small changes in a person’s sleep can affect their willingness to help others out, he added.

The study adds to the robust body of research about the negative effects of DST, which include an increase in fatal traffic accidents and heart attacks. And the switch back to standard time didn’t make up for people’s stinginess either. According to the study, this may be because people do not always sleep an extra hour when they set their clocks back an hour, whereas they almost always lose an hour of sleep when switching to DST. Still, Pace-Schott said this study alone is unlikely to move the needle on the debate.

“It's so ingrained in society and people's jobs that I think that it's going to take a lot more than this to get states to change,” he said.

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Those who constantly check the latest headlines end up with “significantly greater physical ill-being” than those who tune in less often, according to the findings. The team adds that constantly keeping on top of the latest developments can lead to a vicious cycle where people always check for more updates, rather than tuning out after a quick read.

This can start interfering with people’s personal lives, leaving them feeling powerless and distressed about global events including the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and climate change.

“Witnessing these events unfold in the news can bring about a constant state of high alert in some people, kicking their surveillance motives into overdrive and making the world seem like a dark and dangerous place,” says Bryan McLaughlin, associate professor of advertising at the College of Media and Communication at Texas Tech University, in a media release.

1 in 6 have a ‘severely problematic’ news addiction

Study authors found 16.5 percent of participants in their experiment showed signs of “severely problematic” news consumption. That meant they often became so immersed and personally invested in news stories that current events dominated their thoughts, disrupted time with family and friends, made it difficult to focus on school or work, and contributed to restlessness an inability to sleep.

“While we want people to remain engaged in the news, it is important that they have a healthier relationship with the news,” McLaughlin continues. “In most cases, treatment for addictions and compulsive behaviors centers on complete cessation of the problematic behavior, as it can be difficult to perform the behavior in moderation.”

News addicts were significantly more likely to experience poor physical and mental health than those who were less obsessed with news — even after controlling for demographics, personality traits, and overall news use.

For the study, the team looked at data from an online survey of 1,100 American adults. Researchers asked Americans about the extent to which they agreed with statements such as “I become so absorbed in the news that I forget the world around me,” “my mind is frequently occupied with thoughts about the news,” “I find it difficult to stop reading or watching the news,” and “I often do not pay attention at school or work because I am reading or watching the news.”

Respondents were also asked about how often they experienced feelings of stress and anxiety, as well as physical ailments such as fatigue, physical pain, poor concentration, and bowel problems.

Almost three-quarters (73.6%) with severe levels of problematic news consumption experienced mental ill-being “quite a bit” or “very much” compared with just eight percent of all participants overall. The study also found that more than three in five (61%) news addicts experienced physical ill-being “quite a bit” or “very much” compared with just six percent of everyone else.

Is the 24-hour news cycle fueling the problem?

“In the case of problematic news consumption, research has shown that individuals may decide to stop, or at least dramatically reduce, their news consumption if they perceive it is having adverse effects on their mental health,” the study author adds. “For example, previous research has shown that individuals who became aware of and concerned about the adverse effects that their constant attention to sensationalized coverage of COVID-19 was having on their mental health reported making the conscious decision to tune out.”

“However, not only does tuning out come at the expense of an individual’s access to important information for their health and safety, it also undermines the existence of an informed citizenry, which has implications for maintaining a healthy democracy. This is why a healthy relationship with news consumption is an ideal situation.”

The researchers say media literacy campaigns are necessary to help people develop a healthier relationship with the news. They also want more discussion about how “the news industry may be fueling the problem.”

“The economic pressures facing outlets, coupled with technological advances and the 24-hour news cycle have encouraged journalists to focus on selecting ‘newsworthy’ stories that will grab news consumers’ attention,” McLaughlin explains.

“However, for certain types of people, the conflict and drama that characterize newsworthy stories not only grab their attention and draw them in, but also can lead to a maladaptive relationship with the news. Thus, the results of our study emphasize that the commercial pressures that news media face are not just harmful to the goal of maintaining a healthy democracy, they also may be harmful to individuals’ health.”

The findings appear in the journal Health Communication.

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This study is the first to investigate among African Americans the association of a comprehensive set of cardiovascular health behaviors—the American Heart Association's Life's Simple 7 metrics (diet, physical activity and nicotine exposure) and physiological factors (weight, cholesterol, blood pressure and blood sugar levels) with religious beliefs and spirituality. The Life's Simple 7 metrics, established in 2010, were expanded and renamed to Life's Essential 8 in June 2022, with sleep added as the eighth component of optimal heart health.

African Americans have poorer overall cardiovascular health than non-Hispanic white people, and death from cardiovascular diseases is higher in African American adults than white adults, according to the American Heart Associations' 2017 "Cardiovascular Health in African Americans" scientific statement.

"Health professionals and researchers should acknowledge the importance of religious and spiritual influences in the lives of African Americans—who tend to be highly religious," said the study's lead author LaPrincess C. Brewer, M.D., M.P.H., a preventive cardiologist and assistant professor of medicine at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. "With religious and spiritual beliefs factored into our approaches, we may make major breakthroughs in fostering the relationship between patients and physicians and between community members and scientists to build trust and sociocultural understanding of this population."

Researchers analyzed responses gauging religiosity (strong religious feeling or belief from any religion), spirituality and the Life's Simple 7 cardiovascular health indicators from surveys and health screenings of 2,967 African American participants in the Jackson Heart Study. The Jackson Heart Study is the largest single-site, community-based investigation of cardiovascular disease among African American adults in the U.S. On average, participants were 54 years old at study enrollment, and 66% were women. The ongoing study, initiated in 1998, includes more than 5,000 adults ages 21- to 84-years-old who identify as African American and living in the tri-county area of Jackson, Mississippi.

Researchers grouped participants by religious behaviors (their self-reported levels of attending church service/bible study groups, private prayer and the use of religious beliefs or practices in adapting to difficult life situations and stressful events—called religious coping in the study); and spirituality (belief in the existence of a supreme being, deity or God).

The religious behavior questions were adapted from the Fetzer Multidimensional Measurement of Religiousness/Spirituality (religious attendance, private prayer) and Religious Coping scale (religious coping) instruments. The spirituality measures were adapted from the Daily Spiritual Experience Scale, which assesses ordinary daily experiences according to theistic spirituality (belief in the existence of a supreme being, deity or God and to feel God's presence, desire closer union with God, feel God's love) and the nontheistic spirituality (feel strength in my religion, feel deep inner peace and harmony or feel spiritually touched by creation).

Participants were then grouped according to religiousness and spirituality scores by health factors: physical activity, diet, smoking, weight, blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol levels, plus the composite score of the seven components of Life's Simple 7 to estimate cardiovascular health. Researchers estimated the odds of achieving intermediate and ideal levels of the heart-disease prevention goals based on the religiousness/spirituality scores.

The participants who reported more religious activity or having deeper levels of spiritual beliefs were more likely to meet the key measures for cardiovascular health:

 Greater frequency of attending religious services or activities was associated with a 16% increase in odds of meeting "intermediate" or "ideal" metrics for physical activity, 10% for diet, 50% for smoking, 12% for blood pressure and 15% for the composite cardiovascular health score.

 Greater reported frequency of private prayer was associated with a 12% increase in the odds of achieving intermediate or ideal metrics for diet and 24% increased odds for achieving the metric related to smoking.

 Religious coping was associated with an 18% increase in the odds of achieving intermediate and ideal levels for physical activity, 10% increased odds for healthy diet, 32% for smoking and 14% for the composite cardiovascular health score.

 Total spirituality was associated with an 11% increase in the odds of achieving intermediate and ideal levels for physical activity and 36% for smoking.
"I was slightly surprised by the findings that multiple dimensions of religiosity and spirituality were associated with improved cardiovascular health across multiple health behaviors that are extremely challenging to change, such as diet, physical activity and smoking," Brewer said.

"Our findings highlight the substantial role that culturally tailored health promotion initiatives and recommendations for lifestyle change may play in advancing health equity," she added. "The cultural relevance of interventions may increase their likelihood of influencing cardiovascular health and also the sustainability and maintenance of healthy lifestyle changes."

Brewer added, "This is especially important for socioeconomically disenfranchised communities faced with multiple challenges and stressors. Religiosity and spirituality may serve as a buffer to stress and have therapeutic purposes or support self-empowerment to practice healthy behaviors and seek preventive health services."

The religiousness/spirituality survey was conducted at one point during the Jackson Heart Study, so participants' cardiovascular health was not analyzed over time. In addition, people who had known heart disease were not included in this analysis.

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When a soil-dwelling species, Caenorhabditis elegans, was exposed to highly diluted samples of Roundup – 300 times lower than the lowest concentration recommended for consumer use – researchers found the herbicide elicited prolonged paroxysms.

In a third of the worm models, the toxic effects of Roundup and its main ingredient, glyphosate, could only be halted with drug intervention.

Researchers say their findings are "pretty dramatic" – and they come at a crucial moment for Bayer and the future of Roundup.

"It is concerning how little we understand the impact of glyphosate on the nervous system," says neuroscientist Akshay Naraine from Florida Atlantic University.

"More evidence is mounting for how prevalent exposure to glyphosate is, so this work hopefully pushes other researchers to expand on these findings and solidify where our concerns should be."

Glyphosate is the world's most commonly used herbicide. A recent federal report from the United States found traces of this weed-killer in more than 80 percent of urine samples given by children and adults.

Yet the health effects of such widespread exposure are extremely contentious.

Leaders at Monsanto and now Bayer have persistently argued that Roundup is safe and non-carcinogenic for humans. But in recent years, scientists, policymakers and the public have started to question those assertions, which tend to be based on industry-led research and not on independent scientific investigation.

Bayer is currently embroiled in several legal battles with people who say they have developed cancer from using Roundup. Recently, the United Kingdom banned a specific ingredient, POE-tallowamine, from being used in Roundup's trademarked formula after learning of its potentially toxic effects.

The United States, however, has taken no action against Roundup or its ingredients. In 2020, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) once again determined that it could find no risks to human health from the appropriate use of Roundup.

Two years later, some critics are unconvinced. Recently, a federal court ruled that this Trump-era decision had overlooked important, emerging evidence on the toxic effects of Roundup.

The EPA now has until October to reconsider its decision. At the same time, the European Union is also mulling over whether to reauthorize the use of glyphosate past 2022.

The current study among worms is worth considering, even if it is based on animal models. While much research has focused on the possible carcinogenic effects of Roundup, there may be neurotoxic effects, too.

One study previously found that the level of toxicity measured in nematode brains is highly correlated with neurotoxicity in mammals.

That's part of what makes the current findings so concerning.

When researchers in Florida tested the US version of Roundup on worms, they found it caused convulsions that went for just over a minute, nearly twice as long as the effect of glyphosate on its own.

The UK formula also caused more seizures than glyphosate on its own, suggesting there were other dangerous ingredients in Roundup interacting with other chemicals to overstimulate the animal brain.

When researchers bred worms without GABA-A receptors, they did not have seizures when exposed to glyphosate or Roundup.

This suggests that the chemicals are acting on receptors in the brain associated with movement to exacerbate seizures. Interestingly, drugs that target these receptors are common anti-epileptic treatments in humans.

"As of now, there is no information for how exposure to glyphosate and Roundup may affect humans diagnosed with epilepsy or other seizure disorders," clarifies neuroscientist Ken Dawson-Scully from Nova Southeastern University in Florida.

"Our study indicates that there is significant disruption in locomotion and should prompt further vertebrate studies."

With glyphosate use in the US projected to increase 200-fold in the future, some scientists are understandably worried by how little independent research has been done.

Very few studies have investigated the neurotoxic effects of glyphosate and Roundup exposure.

A study on buff-tailed bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) published earlier this year found that those who consumed glyphosate-laden sugar water found it harder to keep their hives warm enough to incubate larvae.

Another study published in 2018 suggested glyphosate impacted the honeybee's microbiome, which the researchers said may be contributing to colony collapse disorder.

It may not just be bees and worms that are falling prey to herbicides meant to kill weeds. We need to know more.

The study was published in Scientific Reports.

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