Europe is seriously considering a major investment in space-based solar power

While your chance of getting struck by lightning is low, it's important to know how to stay safe during a thunderstorm. Globally, about 24,000 people each year are killed by lightning and another 240,000 are injured.

Most people are familiar with basic thunderstorm safety, such as avoiding standing under trees or near a window, and not speaking on a corded phone (mobile phones are safe).

But did you know you should avoid taking a shower, a bath, or washing the dishes during a thunderstorm?

To understand why, you first need to know a bit about how thunderstorms and lightning work.

Two basic elements cause a thunderstorm to thrive: moisture and rising warm air, which of course go hand in hand with summertime. The high temperatures and humidity create large amounts of moist air that rises into the atmosphere, where it can form into a thunderstorm.

Clouds contain millions of water and ice droplets and the interaction of these is what leads to lightning generation. The rising water drops collide with the falling ice drops, passing them a negative charge and leaving themselves with a positive charge.

In a thunderstorm, clouds act as enormous Van de Graaff generators, separating the positive and negative charges to create massive charge separations inside the clouds.

As thunderclouds move over the Earth, they generate an opposite charge in the ground, and this is what attracts a lighting strike towards the ground. The thunderstorm wants to balance its charges, and it does this by discharging between positive and negative regions.

The path of this discharge is usually the one of least resistance, so things that are more conductive (like metal) are more likely to be struck during a storm.

The most useful advice for a thunderstorm is: When thunder roars, go indoors. However, this does not mean you are completely safe from the storm. There are some activities inside that can be almost as risky as staying outside in the storm.

Path of least resistance

Unless you're sitting in a bath outside or showering in the rain, you're incredibly unlikely to be struck by lightning. But if lightning strikes your house, the electricity would follow the path of least resistance to the ground.

Things such as metal wires or water in your pipes provide a convenient conductive path for the electricity to follow to the ground.

The shower provides both of those things (water and metal), making it an ideal path for the electricity to take.

It could turn that nice relaxing shower into something much less relaxing. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention strongly encourage people to avoid all water-based activities during a thunderstorm – even the washing up – to reduce your risk of a strike.

There are other risks to look out for during a thunderstorm. One that may not seem obvious is leaning on a concrete wall. While concrete itself isn't that conductive, if it has been reinforced with metal beams (called "rebar"), these can provide a conductive path for the lightning.

Also avoid using anything plugged into an electrical outlet (computers, TVs, washing machines, dishwashers) as all of these can provide pathways for the lightning strike to take.

As a rule of thumb, if you can hear thunder in the distance, then you're close enough to the storm to have lightning reach you, even if there is no rain.
Lightning strikes can happen as far as ten miles away from the parent storm.

Typically, half an hour after hearing that final thunderclap is a safe time to venture back into the shower. Thunderstorms usually like to save a big one for the end, and you don't want to end up part of the fireworks!

James Rawlings, Physics Lecturer, Nottingham Trent University.

Source

The world’s smallest and most endangered sea turtles have hatched in Louisiana for the first known time in more than 75 years, officials said Wednesday. 🐢 “There was some high-fiving going on,” one scientist said after hatchling tracks were found.

Crews monitoring the Chandeleur Islands to help design a restoration project found tracks of females going to and from nests and of hatchlings leaving a nest.

Aug 17, 2022NEW ORLEANS — The world’s smallest and most endangered sea turtles have hatched in Louisiana’s wilds for the first known time in more than 75 years, officials said Wednesday.“Louisiana was largely written off as a nesting spot for sea turtles decades ago, but this determination demonstrates why barrier island restoration is so important,” Chip Kline, chairman of the Louisiana Coastal Restoration and Protection Authority, said in a news release.

Crews monitoring the Chandeleur Islands — a chain 50 miles (80 kilometers) east of New Orleans — to help design a restoration project found tracks of females going to and from nests and of hatchlings leaving a nest.The first tracks were found by a crew surveying birds “before the sea turtle nesting season really kicked off,” said Matthew Weigel, coastal resources scientist manager for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.

Source

Astronaut Nicole Aunapu Mann, of the Wailacki of the Round Valley Indian Tribes, will be mission commander - responsible for all phases of flight.

She will go to the International Space Station on 29 September, Nasa says.

"It's very exciting," she told newspaper Indian Country Today.

"I think it's important that we communicate this to our community, so that other Native kids... realise that some of those barriers that used to be there are really starting to get broken down," she added.

Ms Mann says that in her allocated 3.3 lb (1.4kg) for personal items she will take "a dreamcatcher that my mother gave me when I was very young".

According to the Indigenous Foundation, dreamcatchers symbolise unity and provide protection.

Ms Mann will be with three colleagues on the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft as part of the Crew-5 mission.

She could also go to the Moon. In 2020 she was selected to be in a pool of astronauts eligible for Nasa's Artemis programme that will send humans to the Moon.

Ms Mann, originally from California, studied mechanical engineering at Stanford university.

She become a colonel in the Marine Corps, flying various fighter aircrafts. She has been deployed twice on aircraft carriers supporting combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and was awarded six medals for her service to the US military.

This expedition will be Mann's first spaceflight since she became an astronaut in 2013, Nasa confirms.

She is one of eight members of the 21st Nasa astronaut class, formed for space station operations and potential future assignments to the Moon and Mars.

She will be joined by astronaut and pilot Josh Cassada, astronaut Koichi Wakata from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, and Russian cosmonaut Anna Kikina.

The Crew-5 Mission will be manned by four astronauts from three nations

This is the fifth rotational mission to the International Space Station where the team will conduct 250 scientific experiments which Nasa says will help benefit life on Earth and prepare for human exploration beyond the planet.

In 2002, John Herrington, an enrolled member of the Chickasaw Nation, was the first Native American man to fly into space. He carried the Nation's flag and a traditional flute on his 13-day voyage.

Source

Faced by the threat of the climate emergency, some people recycle more, or turn down the central heating thermostat a notch. Daniel Rayneau-Kirkhope and Arianna Casiraghi drew a 600-mile wide GPS bicycle across Europe. While accompanied by their dog.

The couple gave up their jobs as physics researchers to undertake the 4,500-mile cycle trip through seven countries, a route painstakingly planned to plot the outline of a giant bicycle over the continent.

Speaking to the Guardian from Switzerland, en route back to their home in Piedmont, north Italy, the Anglo-Italian pair said their hope had been to draw attention to the scale of climate breakdown and persuade people to think about using bikes instead of cars for shorter trips.

The journey has won them three somewhat niche world records: the largest GPS drawing ever made, the biggest such image drawn only by cycling, and – perhaps unsurprisingly – the biggest bicycle ever drawn.

While the actual cycling took about four months overall, it has been a much longer quest. Beginning in the summer of 2019, they had to stop because Casiraghi, 40, suffered a knee injury. A return to the route that November had to be halted because it was too cold to camp. A plan to finish it in March 2020 was then scuppered by Covid.

“Being able to see it on the map is mainly a relief,” said Casiraghi. “We had so many obstacles. When we started this time we were thinking – what can go wrong this time? We felt we had let people down by not completing it, and our life felt kind of stuck. So we’re very happy.”

Rayneau-Kirkhope, 35, built the bikes for the trip himself. One of them has a cargo section at the front, in which their Italian water dog, Zola, could travel with them.

“She liked the cargo bike – she jumps in and out happily, and makes it plain when she wants to walk,” he said. “We tried to go on small roads where possible, or off road, also so Zola could walk a bit.”

Plotting a perfect bicycle across France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands was not easy, with Casiraghi’s initial attempt to place the drawing on a map taking them directly through Charles de Gaulle airport outside Paris.

Luckily, the image is so big that taking detours of a few miles to find quieter roads barely showed. It was drawn virtually, in a continuous line, with the GPS only switched off going to and from campsites and on one forced 30-mile detour after a ferry across the Rhine turned out to not be operating.
The eventual virtual drawing is massive – the couple estimate it is about 600 miles across – and very obviously a bike.

“If people see the image, the message we want to put across is: please do remember that you probably have a bicycle somewhere, and it would be nice if you could use it a little bit more, rather than a car, for short journeys,” said Casiraghi, who met her husband when they were both doing PhDs in Nottingham. “At least think about using a bike – it’s enjoyable, and it’s great – cheaper and healthier.”

Source

•  “The driest July since 1885, the hottest temperatures on record, and the River Thames reaching its lowest level since 2005 have led to a drop in reservoir levels in the Thames Valley and London,” Thames Water says.

•  The announcement of the hosepipe ban comes at a time when many water companies are facing criticism related to leaks from their pipes.

•  Thames Water says it has 440 teams focused on locating and fixing more than 1,100 leaks per week.

LONDON — Britain’s Thames Water said Wednesday that a Temporary Use Ban covering London and the Thames Valley would begin next week, citing “unprecedented weather conditions.”

The ban is set to come into effect from Aug. 24. “Domestic customers should not use hosepipes for cleaning cars, watering gardens or allotments, filling paddling pools and swimming pools and cleaning windows,” the utility said.

Explaining its decision, the company — one of several in England and Wales to have announced water usage limits in recent weeks — said extreme temperatures and this summer’s heatwave had resulted in the highest demand for water in more than 25 years.

“The driest July since 1885, the hottest temperatures on record, and the River Thames reaching its lowest level since 2005 have led to a drop in reservoir levels in the Thames Valley and London,” it said.

The TUB does not apply to businesses, although Thames Water said it was asking those within its area “to be mindful of the drought and to use water wisely.”

This could involve companies switching off water features on their premises and not washing their vehicles, it suggested.

“Implementing a Temporary Use Ban for our customers has been a very difficult decision to make and one which we have not taken lightly,” Sarah Bentley, the Thames Water CEO, said.

“After months of below average rainfall and the recent extreme temperatures in July and August, water resources in our region are depleted,” Bentley added.

The announcement of the ban comes at a time when many water companies are facing criticism related to leaks from their pipes. For its part, Thames Water said it had teams focused on locating and fixing more than 1,100 leaks per week.

When it comes to enforcement of the ban, the firm said it hoped and expected customers to continue using water wisely.

“If we become aware of customers ignoring the restrictions, we’ll contact them to make sure they’re aware of the rules and how to use water responsibly and wisely,” it added.

“There are criminal offences for those that repeatedly ignore requests to comply with the ban.”

Heat and drought

Last month saw temperatures in the U.K. surge, with highs of over 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) recorded for the first time ever.

On Aug. 12, the U.K.’s Environment Agency announced that parts of England had moved into drought status.

“In drought affected areas the public and businesses should be very mindful of the pressures on water resources and should use water wisely,” authorities said.

They added that government expected water firms “to act to reduce leakage and fix leaking pipes as quickly as possible and take wider action alongside government policy.”

The U.K. is not alone when it comes to drought-related issues. On July 18, the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre published a report looking at drought in Europe.

“The severe drought affecting several regions of Europe since the beginning of the year continues expanding and worsening,” it said.

“Dry conditions are related to a wide and persistent lack of precipitation combined with early heatwaves in May and June.”

In an interview with CNBC earlier this week, Bill Hare, CEO and senior scientist at research non-profit Climate Analytics, explained how the current conditions were having wide-ranging effects.

“On the water supply, it’s clear that in the U.K. and other parts of Europe, we’re seeing already very significant water stress that’s beginning to affect … ordinary urban residents, not just farmers,” he said.

“We’re seeing the lack of availability for cooling water for thermal, nuclear or coal power stations, which is causing curtailment of power,” Hare, who was speaking to CNBC’s Joumanna Bercetche, said.

“This is a problem we’re seeing all over the world,” he added. “We’re seeing, also, issues for example in Germany, now in the Danube region, with low water flow, meaning you can’t carry cargo anymore.”

This was in turn, “having big implications not just for the transport of energy, but for agriculture, all manner of industrial commodities and so on.”

Source

For 25% of people who develop back pain, it can become persistent, disabling and distressing. It can affect a person's ability to participate in activities of daily living, physical activity and work. Activities such as sitting, standing, bending and lifting frequently aggravate back pain.

There is a common belief that "good" posture is important to protect the spine from damage, as well as prevent and treat back pain. Good posture is commonly defined as sitting "upright," standing "tall and aligned," and lifting with a squat technique and "straight back."

Conversely, "slump" sitting, "slouch" standing and lifting with a "round back" or stooped posture are frequently warned against. This view is widely held by people with and without back pain, as well as clinicians in both occupational health and primary care settings.

Surprisingly, there is a lack of evidence for a strong relationship between "good" posture and back pain. Perceptions of "good" posture originate from a combination of social desirability and unfounded presumptions.

Systematic reviews (studies looking at a number of studies in one area) have found ergonomic interventions for workers, and advice for manual workers on the best posture for lifting, have not reduced work-related back pain.

Sitting and standing posture

Our group has conducted several studies exploring the relationship between spine posture and back pain. We investigated whether "slump" sitting or "non-neutral" standing postures (overarching or slouching the back, for example), in a large population of adolescents, were associated with, or predicted future back pain. We found little support for this view.

These findings are consistent with systematic reviews that have found no consistent differences in sitting or standing posture between adult populations with and without back pain.

People adopt a range of different spine postures, and no single posture protects a person from back pain. People with both slumped and upright postures can experience back pain.

Lifting posture

Globally accepted occupational health practices about "good" or safe back postures during lifting also lack evidence. Our systematic review found no evidence lifting with a round-back posture is associated with or predictive of back pain.

Our recent lab study found people without back pain, employed in manual work for more than five years, were more likely to lift with a more stooped, round-back posture.

In comparison, manual workers with back pain tended to adopt more of a squat lift with a straighter back.

In other words, people with back pain tend to follow "good" posture advice, but people who don't lift in the "good" way don't have more back pain.

In a small study, as people with disabling back pain recovered, they became less protective and generally moved away from the "good" posture advice.

If not posture—what else?

There is no evidence for a single "good posture" to prevent or reduce back pain. People's spines come in all shapes and sizes, so posture is highly individual. Movement is important for back health, so learning to vary and adopt different postures that are comfortable is likely to be more helpful than rigidly adhering to a specific "good" posture.

While back pain can be intense and distressing, for most people (90%) back pain is not associated with identifiable tissue damage or pathology. Back pain can be like a sprain related to awkward, sudden, heavy or unaccustomed loads on our back, but can also occur like a bad headache where there is no injury.

Importantly, people are more vulnerable to back pain when their health is compromised, such as if someone is:

•  feeling stressed

•  experiencing low mood

•  tired or fatigued

•  sleeping poorly

•  being less active.

Back pain is more likely to persist if a person:

•  becomes overly worried and fearful about their back pain

•  overprotects their back and avoids movement, physical activity, work and social engagement.

What can people do about back pain?

In a small group (1-5%), back pain can be caused by pathology including a fracture, malignancy, infection or nerve compression (the latter is associated with leg pain, and a loss of muscle power and sensation). In these cases, seek medical care.

For most people (90%), back pain is associated with sensitisation of the back structures, but not identifiable tissue damage.

In this situation, too much focus on maintaining "good" posture can be a distraction from other factors known to be important for spine health.

These include:

•  moving and relaxing your back

•  engaging in regular physical activity of your preference

•  building confidence and keeping fit and strong for usual daily tasks

•  maintaining healthy sleep habits and body weight

•  caring for your general physical and mental health.

Sometimes this requires some support and coaching with a skilled clinician.

So if you are sitting or standing, find comfortable, relaxed postures and vary them. If you are lifting, the current evidence suggests it's OK to lift naturally—even with a round back. But make sure you are fit and strong enough for the task, and care for your overall health.

Source

Also:  ‘Good’ posture doesn’t prevent back pain, and ‘bad’ posture doesn’t cause it.

The Yangtze River - Asia's longest waterway - is now at record low levels. In some stretches, there has been less than half the usual rainfall.

Hydropower reservoirs are currently down by as much as half, officials say.

At the same time, a surge in demand for air conditioning has put power companies under extreme pressure.

The two-month-long heatwave is the longest on record in China, the National Climate Centre said.

Provinces around the drought-stricken Yangtze river have turned to cloud seeding operations to combat the lack of rain, with Hubei and a number of other provinces launching rockets carrying chemicals into the sky, according to local media.

But a lack of cloud cover has stalled efforts in some areas seeking to do the same.

People swim in the intersection of the Han and Yangtze rivers during the heatwave in Wuhan, Hubei province on 10 August

Meanwhile, temperatures across Sichuan and neighbouring provinces have exceeded 40C (104 F).

As a result, government offices in Sichuan were asked to keep air conditioning levels at no lower than 26C (79 F), according to the Sichuan Daily quoted by Reuters news agency. Workers have also been asked to use staircases rather than lifts where possible.

Millions of residents have also been hit with black outs in the province.

In the city of Dazhou, home to some 5.4 million people, blackouts are lasting up to three hours, local media report.

They say factories in the province have been forced to cut production or halt work as part of emergency measures to redirect power supplies to households.

Hydropower reservoirs - of which there are many in the region - are currently down by as much as half, officials added.

Source

Rocket Lab will self-fund a mission to search for life in the clouds of Venus

She was dead tired but couldn’t sleep, couldn’t think straight, and could barely walk. The muscle pain in her arms and legs was so bad that she spent days in bed. When she did get up, she used a wheelchair. And she couldn’t focus on even the most trivial tasks, let alone work. But doctors couldn’t agree on what was wrong with 41-year-old Maya Doari.

The sac-like tissues surrounding her heart were inflamed, of that they were sure, so she was diagnosed with pericarditis. But when her left hand turned blue—on and off for months—her physicians told her “don’t try to understand,” because they no longer could.

Neither could a vocal cord specialist, who mocked her when she tried to speak, hardly able to muster a soft whisper. And when she attempted physical therapy to relearn how to walk, she experienced seizures. “I asked, ‘Don’t you think it could be connected to the Covid I had?’ They said no and sent me home, saying it’s psychological.”

But her condition was real. And it may not be as unique as it sounds.

Three months earlier, Doari—a homeopath who lives in a small village near Jerusalem—had come down with a 24-hour fever and strong bone pain. It was Covid. But after these initial symptoms passed, days later the real symptoms began. “My doctors said my case was the worst long Covid they had ever seen.”

Covid can have many lingering effects, and for now at least, long Covid is the catch-all phrase used to describe them. Over 200 symptoms have been gathered under this umbrella term, ranging from the common—tiredness, fever, and “brain fog,” or difficulty thinking—to the more striking, like Doari’s seizures and speech problems. The exact prevalence of long Covid is debated, but millions around the world have reported having lasting symptoms.

Yet today, a year after her long Covid symptoms arrived, Doari says they are “98 percent gone,” a turnaround tied to new research that may have uncovered a promising long-Covid treatment.

It’s called hyperbaric oxygen therapy, and in July Israeli researchers published a study—which Doari participated in—that showed using this technique to deliver massive amounts of oxygen to the body appears to alleviate many of Covid’s cognitive and physical after-effects.

Hyperbaric oxygen therapy has been around for decades and typically entails getting into a hard-shell, pressurized tube where the air pressure is up to three times that of our atmosphere, and then breathing in concentrated oxygen. Originally intended to treat the bends, a dangerous condition that can result from deep-sea diving or high-altitude mountaineering, it’s now used to promote healing in cancer patients and burn victims and is even used by athletes eager for a performance boost or people looking to remove plastic surgery scars.

Breathing in concentrated oxygen under pressure raises the amount of it that dissolves in the blood, meaning that more oxygen gets delivered throughout the body’s tissues. This can then boost the power of the immune system and stimulate the release of stem cells and substances called growth factors, which help tissues heal.

The Israeli trial entailed 40 daily sessions—five sessions a week for two months—with long-Covid patients donning oxygen masks and breathing 100 percent oxygen at twice the atmospheric pressure exerted at sea level for 90 minutes, with five-minute breaks every 20 minutes.

Or at least, this is what half the participants did. The other half experienced a sham procedure that exactly resembled this—getting in the chamber, putting on the mask, and so on—but didn’t actually get the treatment. The study was double-blinded, meaning neither the participants nor the researchers involved knew who was getting the real thing.

The results suggested a clear effect. Compared to those in the placebo group, individuals receiving the treatment reported improved energy levels, sleep, and cognitive function, and decreased depression. Likewise, the extent to which pain interfered with their life dropped. “It felt like I was suffocating,” recalls Rafi Akav, a 44-year-old marketing manager who volunteered for the study. He now says his sleep, mental focus, and energy have all returned. “That treatment saved me.”

These findings build on those that have come before. In November 2020, British researchers published the first evaluation of hyperbaric oxygen therapy for long Covid, which suggested people’s symptoms could improve in just 10 sessions (that British study included only 10 patients but showed improvements in fatigue and cognitive function; the Israeli study was bigger, though still small, featuring 73 patients across its treatment and control groups).

The reason for the therapy’s effects is more complex than some people think, suggests Shai Efrati, a professor at the Sackler School of Medicine at Tel Aviv University and founder of the Sagol Center for Hyperbaric Medicine and Research, the world’s largest hyperbaric treatment facility.

According to his earlier research, the therapy isn’t just effective because it floods tissues with lots of oxygen. Inhaling massive amounts of oxygen and then breathing normal amounts afterward also fools the body into thinking it’s being deprived of oxygen—a phenomenon known as the hyperoxic-hypoxic paradox. When we think we’re being oxygen-starved, a metabolic change occurs—designed to counter the damage generated when oxygen is deprived. The response triggers a regenerative cascade of events, but without the harmful side effects of real deprivation.

“We trick the body,” says Efrati. “It’s not magic, it’s a repair mechanism. And it doesn’t happen in one day. It takes five days a week to make it last,” he says.

Exactly how long improvements in long Covid patients last hasn’t been confirmed; the study followed up with participants for three weeks. But in previous hyperbaric studies—in which Efrati found the therapy could regrow telomeres (parts of people’s chromosomes that shorten with age) and improve cognition in adults aged 64 and over—he says the results held for more than two years. (Efrati is 52 but claims his cellular age is closer to 30 after having undergone hyperbaric therapy for roughly 15 years.)

But while Efrati and his colleagues have shown that long-Covid symptoms appear to improve with the therapy, a lot of questions remain. With its 73 participants, Efrati’s study is limited—more research is needed to see how widely effective the therapy could be across different groups.

Then there’s the variety of long Covid. Depending who you ask, there seem to be as many definitions of the condition as there are symptoms associated with it, a problem in itself, say researchers. The mechanisms behind these symptoms are still being figured out, so whether all of them can be influenced by hyperbarics is unknown, as exactly what the therapy is resolving in patients hasn’t yet been confirmed. Efrati hypothesizes it could be tissue damage in the brain.

And even if hyperbaric oxygen therapy is broadly effective, will the treatment scale to become widely available, and will people be able to afford it? Efrati’s form of the therapy—which involves sitting up in a pressurized room rather than lying down in a chamber—is limited to a handful of clinics in Israel, Dubai, and Florida and costs tens of thousands of dollars.

Efrati acknowledges the price barrier but attributes it to the stage of the innovation, comparing oxygen therapy to cell phones: “In the beginning, they were expensive and huge, and now it’s cheap and everyone has one. Why? Because it works, and the same thing will happen here.”

Others aren’t yet convinced. “It’s a very small study, and the results aren’t stellar, so it could be a false-positive finding,” says Frances Williams, a professor of genomic epidemiology at King’s College London who specializes in studying chronic pain syndromes. “There have been multiple studies of hyperbaric oxygen for all sorts of diseases—like venous ulcer and stroke—but overall it has not really had overwhelmingly positive results in any of them. So I remain rather skeptical.”

While the study was small, meaning its results shouldn’t yet be used as evidence to support broad use of hyperbaric therapy for long Covid, it was a double-blind randomized controlled trial—the gold standard for testing medical interventions. The fact that the therapy showed promise under these conditions suggests it should be investigated further, particularly as there’s so little else available to treat Covid’s lasting symptoms. “Long Covid is very troublesome, so it’s worth trying hyperbaric oxygen,” says Williams. “And there are pathological reasons why it might be helpful.”

Efrati has no doubt that the treatment’s helpfulness will be proven in time and the therapy will gain widespread acceptance as a long-Covid treatment. “We have more papers coming, and thousands of people on our waiting list,” he says. “My job is to show the research works.”

Correction: We've updated the image to include the correct HBOT system on Tuesday, August 17 at 11:58 A.M.

Is Oxygen the Answer to Long Covid?

(May require free registration to view)

Roughly 4.5 billion years ago, a primordial version of Earth covered in molten lava orbited the sun. Barely into its newfound existence, it was struck by a smaller object the size of Mars, referred to as Theia, in an explosive event. Theia was blown to pieces by the impact, while a huge chunk of Earth was sent careening into space.

The gravitational pull of the remaining bulk of our planet saw this material swirl around Earth. In a surprisingly short span of time, perhaps less than 100 years, some of that material stuck together and formed the moon.

Or at least, this is how one popular moon origin theory goes. Now, though, there’s fresh evidence to suggest that the moon was indeed created from the debris of this cosmic impact billions of years ago. The discovery of certain gases inside the moon supports the idea, and also gives us important new details on how it might have happened.

While completing her PhD at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Patrizia Will studied six lunar meteorites recovered by NASA from Antarctica in the early 2000s. In these rocks, she and her colleagues found helium and neon trapped in tiny glass beads, which were formed in volcanic eruptions on the lunar surface as magma was pulled up from the moon’s interior. These gases, known as noble gases because they are relatively unreactive, appear to have originated on Earth, and were likely inherited by the moon “during its formation,” says Will. The research was published in the journal Science Advances.

Previous work has hinted at the giant impact hypothesis. Lunar rocks show a striking similarity to Earth rocks, suggesting a common origin. Yet there are key differences: Lunar rocks have a lighter version of chlorine, for example, pointing to a dramatic event early in the history of our two worlds that separated some material.

Most scientists now agree this event was a gigantic collision. “We are pretty set on the giant impact hypothesis,” says Sujoy Mukhopadhyay, a geochemist from the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in Will’s study. “That’s still the best hypothesis on the table.”

Following the impact, a disk of material displaced by the collision—possibly a donut of vaporized rock known as a synestia, measuring thousands of degrees in temperature—may have formed around our planet. The amount of neon and helium discovered in the lunar samples supports the theory that the moon formed in this synestia, as the relative abundance of these gases suggests they came from Earth’s mantle and were blasted into space by the impact before being fused into the interior of our satellite. Had these gases instead been transported across space into the moon by solar winds, we’d expect there to be much much lower quantities present in the meteorites analyzed.

“It’s really interesting work,” says Mukhopadhyay, noting that no study has been able to find evidence for such indigenous gases in lunar rocks before. “The concentrations are very low, so it’s very hard to detect,” says Ray Burgess, a geochemist from the University of Manchester and a reviewer of Will’s study. “It’s a big step forward.”

Will and her colleagues were able to make the discovery using an advanced mass spectrometer at the Noble Gas Laboratory at ETH Zurich—an instrument that can determine what’s in a chemical substance by measuring the weight of its individual molecules. The instrument at ETH Zurich “has the highest sensitivity for studying helium and neon” in the world, says Will. The machine enabled the researchers to study the composition of the glass beads in the meteorites—separated using small tweezers under a microscope—and find the tiny traces of helium and neon trapped inside. The glass beads themselves were just millionths of a meter in size, “really tiny, tiny grains,” says Will.

The next step is to understand how Earth got its noble gases. There are two main possibilities: that they were delivered on comets and asteroids that crashed into our protoplanet, or that Earth quite literally sucked them into its atmosphere from the nebula of gas and dust that surrounded our young sun. To find out, scientists want to look for more noble gases—namely krypton and xenon—in lunar meteorites.

We find krypton and xenon in other meteorites that have crashed into our planet: pieces of asteroids that may have been the building blocks of planets like Earth. If we can also find those gases in lunar meteorites, we can compare their compositions “and see the correspondence,” says Burgess. The reason for looking at lunar meteorites, and not just rocks here on Earth, is that they offer a better record of the solar system’s early history.

If krypton and xenon found in lunar meteorites is similar to that found in meteorites from elsewhere, it would support the theory that our noble gases originated from asteroids and comets; if not, it would support the nebula idea. On the other hand, if we find no krypton or xenon, that would be an “interesting puzzle that we’d have to sort out,” Burgess adds.

Henner Busemann from ETH Zurich, a coauthor on Will’s study, says the team saw evidence of krypton and xenon in the lunar meteorite samples they looked at, but they couldn’t be sure of their results. “We cannot make the case yet,” he says. “We will try now to get better precision.”

Finding noble gases on the moon may tell us about its water content, too. If hydrogen and neon managed to survive its turbulent formation, then water could also have done so in the moon’s interior—something we have seen evidence for, as with the water frozen as ice at the moon’s poles. Such water could be an invaluable resource for future human missions. “If the moon is wetter than we thought, it adds further possibilities to finding resources that we might want to use,” says Burgess.

This might suggest that a wide variety of life-forming material can survive giant impacts early in a planet’s life. “We could produce new models about this planetary formation process in the solar system and beyond,” says Will, adding that this could be one piece of the puzzle of how life originated on Earth—and maybe other planets, too.

New Evidence Points to the Moon Once Being Part of Earth

(May require free registration to view)

Solving the rock-hard problem of nuclear waste disposal

In addition, chlorophyllin significantly reduces mortality related to IBD, weight loss, diarrhea and hidden blood in the stool, intestinal epithelial damage and infiltration of inflammatory cells. The findings are published ahead of print in the American Journal of Physiology-Gastrointestinal and Liver Physiology, and the study has been chosen as an APS select article for August.

Chronic gastrointestinal disorders such as IBD affect tens of millions of people living in the U.S. IBD has created a global health burden because of the rising cost of treating the condition. While the exact cause of IBD isn't fully understood, some contributing factors include stress and environmental, lifestyle, and dietary choices, such as high consumption of meat or fish. Chronic inflammation, abnormality in autophagy—the body's process of cleaning out damaged cells to make room for newer, healthier cells—and lysosomal stress (an abnormality in an organelle leading to inflammation) are also linked to the condition.

Current therapeutics for IBD include medications that suppress the immune system (immunosuppressants) and surgery. However, long-term use of immunosuppressive treatments could result in severe adverse effects, including opportunistic infections and even organ failure.

In this study, researchers found taking an oral chlorophyllin supplement—a compound derived from the green pigment found in plants—reduced colitis and abnormalities in the intestinal epithelia of mice. Also, consumption of green vegetables and chlorophyllin may be helpful for IBD recovery, in part through alleviation of inflammation and autolysosomal flux (a process that uses lysosome to degrade and remove toxic molecules and organelles). Green pigment found in these foods and supplements can initiate a feeding signaling to modulate autophagy in the cells, which suppresses IBD symptoms.

Researchers believe these findings could be a pathway to a less intrusive treatment for IBD. "Consuming green-colored vegetables or green pigment supplement such as chlorophyllin might help people with inflammatory bowel disease," said Xiaofeng Zheng, Ph.D., of Sichuan University and a co-author of the study.

Source

f you consider yourself reasonably intelligent and educated, you might assume that you have a fair grasp on the core ways the world works – knowledge about the familiar inventions and natural phenomena that surround us.

Now, think about the following questions: How are rainbows formed? Why can sunny days be colder than cloudy days? How does a helicopter fly? How does a toilet flush?

Next, ask yourself: could you give a detailed response to any or all these questions? Or do you have only the vaguest gist of what’s happening in each case?

If you are like many of the participants in psychological studies, you may have initially expected to perform very well. However, when they are asked to offer a nuanced answer to each question, most people are completely stumped – just as you may be, too.

This bias is known as an “illusion of knowledge”. You may think that these specific examples are trivial – they’re the kinds of questions, after all, that an inquisitive child might ask you, where the worst consequence may be a red face in front of your family. But illusions of knowledge can afflict our judgement in many domains. In the workplace, for example, it can lead us to overclaim our knowledge in an interview, overlook the contributions of our colleagues and take on jobs we may be wholly unable to perform.

Many of us go through life completely oblivious to this intellectual arrogance and its consequences. The good news is that some psychologists suggest there may be some disarmingly simple ways to avoid this pervasive thinking trap.

Passive observation can increase people’s confidence in their abilities to perform complex life-or-death tasks, such as landing a plane (Credit: Getty Images)

Unknown unknowns

The illusion of knowledge – also called the “illusion of explanatory depth” – first came to light in 2002. In a series of studies, Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil at Yale University first provided participants with example explanations of scientific phenomena and technological mechanisms, which were scored on a scale of 1 (very vague) to 7 (very thorough). This ensured all participants were on the same page when it came to judging what comprised a “vague” or “thorough” understanding of a topic.

Next came the test. When presented with further science and tech questions, the participants had to rate how well they thought they would be able to answer each one, using that same scale, before writing out their explanation in as much detail as possible.

Rozenblit and Keil found that the participants’ initial appraisals of their understanding were often dramatically optimistic. They assumed they could write paragraphs on the subject, but often failed to offer more than the barest gist of an answer – and afterwards, many expressed surprise at how little they knew.

The researchers suspected that the overconfidence arose from the participants’ ability to visualise the concepts in question; it’s not hard to picture the flight of a helicopter, for example, and the ease with which that mental film came to mind led the participants to feel more confident about explaining the mechanics of its movements.

Since this seminal paper, psychologists have unveiled illusions of knowledge in many different contexts. For example, Matthew Fisher, an assistant professor in marketing at Southern Methodist University, Texas, has found that many university graduates vastly overestimate their grasp of their college major, once they have left their studies.

Much like the first experiment, the participants were asked to rate their understanding of different concepts before providing a detailed explanation of what they meant. This time, however, the questions came from the subject they had studied years before. (A physics graduate might have attempted to explain the laws of thermodynamics, for example.) Thanks to the natural attrition of their memories, the participants seemed to have forgotten many of the important details, but they hadn’t noticed how much knowledge they had lost – leading them to be overconfident in their initial predictions. When judging their understanding, they assumed that they knew just as much as when they were completely steeped in their subject.

Many of us overestimate how much we can learn by observing others – resulting in an ‘illusion of skill acquisition’

Further research has shown that having online resources at our fingertips may feed our overconfidence, as we mistake the wealth of knowledge on the internet for our own memories. Fisher asked one group of participants to answer questions – such as “how does a zipper work?” – with the aid of a search engine, while another group were simply asked to rate their understanding of the topic without using any additional sources. Afterwards, both groups went through the original test of the illusion of knowledge for four additional questions – such as “how do tornadoes form?” and “why are cloudy nights warmer?”. He found that the people who had used the internet in their initial question demonstrated greater overconfidence in the subsequent task.

The illusion of skill acquisition

Perhaps most seriously, many of us overestimate how much we can learn by observing others – resulting in an “illusion of skill acquisition”.

Michael Kardas, a post-doctoral fellow in management and marketing at Northwestern University, US, asked participants to watch repeated videos of various skills, such as throwing darts or doing the moonwalk dance, up to 20 times. They then had to estimate their abilities, before trying the task for themselves. Most participants assumed that simply observing the film clips would have helped them to learn the skills. And the more they watched the films, the greater their initial confidence.

The reality, however, was distinctly disappointing. “People thought they’d score a greater number of points if they watched the video 20 times compared to if they’d watched it once,” says Kardas. “But their actual performance did not show any evidence of learning.”

Quite astonishingly, passive observation can even increase people’s confidence in their abilities to perform complex life-or-death tasks, such as landing a plane. Kayla Jordan, a PhD student at the University of Waikato, New Zealand, who led this study, was directly inspired by Kardas’s research. “We wanted to test the limits of the phenomenon – whether it could apply for really expert skills.” She points out that piloting requires hundreds of hours of training and a deep understanding of physics, meteorology and engineering, which people are unable to pick up through a short video.

The participants were first told to “imagine you are on a small commuter plane. Due to an emergency, the pilot is incapacitated, and you are the only person left to land the plane”. Half were then shown a four-minute video of a pilot landing a plane, while the rest did not see the clip.

Crucially, the film did not even show what the pilot’s hands were doing during the procedure – it could not have been of any instructional use. Many of the people who had seen the clip, however, became much more optimistic about their capacity to safely land a plane themselves. “They were about 30% more confident, relative to people who didn’t watch that video,” says Jordan.

Overconfidence about your knowledge can seep into the workplace, even making people arrogant (Credit: Getty Images)

Real-life dilemmas

These illusions of knowledge can have important consequences. Overconfidence in your knowledge may mean that you prepare less for an interview or presentation, for example, leaving you embarrassed when you are pressed to demonstrate your expertise.

Overconfidence may be a particular problem when you are aiming for promotion. When observing people from afar, you might assume you know what the job takes, and that you have already absorbed the necessary skills. Once you have started the job, however, you may discover that there was much more to the role than met the eye.

It may also lead us to undervalue our colleagues. In much the same way we mistake Googled knowledge for our own, we may not realise how much we are relying on the skills and abilities of the people around us. “When seeing others’ skills and knowledge base – people can sometimes mistake that as an extension of what they know themselves,” says Jordan.

If we start to claim our colleagues’ knowledge as our own, we may be less likely to remember and show gratitude for their contributions – a form of arrogance that is a common bugbear in the office. Overestimating our knowledge, and forgetting the support we have received from others, could also create serious problems when we attempt to go it alone with a solo project.

What can people do to avoid these traps? One solution is simple: test yourself. If you are appraising your capacity to perform an unfamiliar task, for instance, don’t just rely on a vague, gist-like idea of what it would involve. Instead, take a bit more time to think carefully through the steps that you would have to take to achieve the goal. You may find that there are huge gaps in your knowledge that you need to fill before you put yourself forward.

Even better, you might approach an expert and ask them what they are doing – a conversation that should check any arrogant assumptions you might be carrying.

Given the potential of technological crutches to inflate confidence in your knowledge, you could also check your online habits. Fisher suggests that you briefly pause and try your hardest to remember a fact before resorting to an internet search. By consciously recognising your mental blank, you may begin to form a more realistic appraisal of your memory and its limits. “It requires a willingness to be stumped,” he says. “You have to feel your ignorance, which can be uncomfortable.”

The aim, with all of this, is to cultivate a little more humility – one of the classic “intellectual virtues” celebrated by philosophers. By recognising our illusions of knowledge and admitting the limits of our understanding, we may all sidestep some unfortunate thinking traps to enjoy wiser thinking and decision making.

Source

More than half of the species whose feces were analyzed had evidence of plastic in them, according to researchers looking into how much plastic small mammals in England and Wales were exposed to.

Researchers from the University of Sussex, the Mammal Society, and the University of Exeter claim in a study that was published in Science of the Total Environment that the concentrations of plastic excreted were equal to those found in human studies.

Fiona Mathews, Professor of Environmental Biology at the University of Sussex, states, “Much is known about the impact of plastic on aquatic ecosystems, but very little is known about the same with terrestrial systems. By analysing the droppings of some of our most widespread small mammals, we’ve been able to provide a glimpse of the potential impact plastic is having on our wildlife – and the most commonly found plastics leaking into our environment.”

Graduate Emily Thrift, Professor Fiona Mathews, Dr. Frazer Coomber, and the Mammal Society, together with Dr. Adam Porter and Prof. Tamara Galloway of the University of Exeter, wrote the paper. It identifies plastic polymers in four of the seven species for which they obtained fecal samples. The brown rat, field vole, wood mouse, and European hedgehog were all discovered to be plastic positive.

Researchers discovered that plastic ingestion was occurring across locations and across different dietary habits, from herbivores, insectivores, and omnivores, contrary to their expectations that samples from urban areas would have higher plastic concentrations and samples from herbivorous species would have lower plastic concentrations.

Emily Thrift, a graduate of the University of Sussex, says “It’s very worrying that the traces of plastic were so widely distributed across locations and species of different dietary habits. This suggests that plastics could be seeping into all areas of our environment in different ways. We’re also concerned that the European hedgehog and field vole are both species suffering declines in numbers in the UK.”

Using equipment at the Greenpeace labs at the University of Exeter, the team analyzed 261 fecal samples, with 16.5% containing plastic. The most common types identified were polyester, polyethylene (widely used in single-use packaging), and polynorbornene (used mainly in the rubber industry).

Polyester accounted for 27% of the fragments identified and was found in all the plastic positive species, except the wood mouse. Widely used in textiles and the fashion industry, the paper explains that microfibres can enter the wastewater system through household washing and subsequently end up on the land through the use of sewage sludge as fertilizer.

Over a quarter of the plastics found in the study were also ‘biodegradable’ or bioplastics. The authors warn that while these types of plastics may degrade faster than polymers, they can still be ingested by small mammals and further research is needed to investigate their true biological impacts.

The authors believe that the microplastics found in the study are likely to have entered species’ guts as a result of the consumption of contaminated prey or through direct ingestion. With ingestion, researchers believe species could be mistaking plastics for food or chewing macroplastics used as nesting material or to escape entanglement.

The potential impact of plastics on the food chain is another issue the authors are concerned about, and urging further study into.

Prof. Fiona Mathews adds, “We really need to get a deeper understanding of the implications of plastic ingestion on land mammals – and the potential impacts this has on their conservation status. In our study, droppings from European hedgehogs carried the highest quantity of plastic polymers. As a species, they are already in decline in the UK for reasons that are largely unknown, and they are classified as Vulnerable to Extinction on the IUCN-compliant regional Red List.”

He continues, “European hedgehogs consume earthworms and previous studies have found these to contain microplastics. So we really need further research to establish the scale and route of exposure more precisely, and to assess prevalence in predatory species that consume small mammals, so that we can take adequate steps to try to protect our declining wildlife from plastics.”

Andy Bool, CEO of the Mammal Society states, “The Mammal Society is proud to have helped and part-funded this research as it represents an important step into the study of the impact of plastics on terrestrial mammals. With a number of small mammal species experiencing worrying declines in numbers it highlights one of the challenges they face. We can all make a difference to help protect them from this threat by reducing the amount of single-use plastic we use and reusing and recycling what we do use properly.”

Dr. Adam Porter, NERC Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Exeter says, “In the UK, plastic pollution can often seem like a problem somewhere else when most images are of polluted shorelines of tropical landscapes, or charismatic organisms like turtles or sea lions. This study brings the focus home, into our lands and in some of our much-beloved mammal species. Further, it demonstrates that the amount of plastic waste we produce is having an impact. We must change our relationship with plastic altogether; moving away from disposable items and moving towards replacing plastic for better alternatives and establishing truly circular economies.”

Reference: “Ingestion of plastics by terrestrial small mammals” by Emily Thrift, Adam Porter, Tamara S. Galloway, Frazer G. Coomber and Fiona Mathews, 24 June 2022, Science of The Total Environment.

DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2022.156679

The study was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council, The Mammal Society, the University’s Fund for Animal Welfare (UFAW), and the Jubilee Trust.

Source

"More than one in every two people who were infected with omicron didn't know they had it," said Susan Cheng, MD, MPH, director of the Institute for Research on Healthy Aging in the Department of Cardiology at the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai and corresponding author of the study.

"Awareness will be key for allowing us to move beyond this pandemic."

Prior studies have estimated that at least 25% and possibly as many as 80% of people infected with SARS-CoV-2 may not experience symptoms.

Compared to other SARS-CoV-2 variants, the omicron variant is associated with generally less severe symptoms that may include fatigue, cough, headache, sore throat or a runny nose.

"Our study findings add to evidence that undiagnosed infections can increase transmission of the virus," said Sandy Y. Joung, MHDS, an investigator at Cedars-Sinai and first author of the study. "A low level of infection awareness has likely contributed to the fast spread of omicron."

As part of research into the effects of COVID-19 and the impact of vaccines, the investigators began collecting blood samples from healthcare workers more than two years ago. In the fall of 2021, just before the start of the omicron variant surge, the investigators were able to expand enrollment to include patients, thanks to study infrastructure and biospecimen processing support provided by Sapient Bioanalytics.

Of the healthcare workers and patients who have participated in the research, investigators identified 2,479 people who had contributed blood samples just prior to or after the start of the omicron surge. The investigators identified 210 people who likely were infected with the omicron variant based on newly positive levels of antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 in their blood.

Next, the investigators invited study participants to provide health status updates through surveys and interviews. Only 44% of study participants with newly positive SARS-CoV-2 antibodies had awareness of being infected with the virus. The majority (56%) were unaware of any recent COVID-19 infection. Of the study participants who were unaware, only 10% reported having any recent symptoms that they attributed to a common cold or other type of infection.

More studies involving larger numbers of people from diverse ethnicities and communities are needed to learn what specific factors are associated with a lack of infection awareness, according to the investigators.

"We hope people will read these findings and think, 'I was just at a gathering where someone tested positive,' or, 'I just started to feel a little under the weather. Maybe I should get a quick test.' The better we understand our own risks, the better we will be at protecting the health of the public as well as ourselves," said Cheng, the Erika J. Glazer Chair in Women's Cardiovascular Health and Population Science at Cedars-Sinai.

Cheng and colleagues are also studying patterns and predictors of reinfections and their potential to offer long-lasting immunity to SARS-CoV-2. In addition to raising awareness, this information could help people manage their individual risk.

Source

Black holes, wormholes, entanglement, Einstein, mysterious islands and new science that sees how the inside of a black hole is secretly on the outside.

Black holes have been a big problem in physics. For decades, scientists have been mystified about what happens to stuff that falls into a black hole.
The quandary is called the black hole information paradox, and it has stopped physics in its tracks.

But in recent years, scientists have made a breakthrough that may finally solve the puzzle and begin to show how black holes really work.

To understand the paradox, we have to go back to Stephen Hawking’s big idea—all the way back to 1974.

Hawking realized that black holes evaporate.

Just like a puddle of water out in the sun, a black hole will slowly shrink, particle by particle, until nothing is left at all.

His discovery originated in quantum physics, which shows us that empty space isn’t actually empty. Instead, pairs of so-called virtual particles continuously arise out of the vacuum.

These pairs usually stay together, except for the unlucky few that arise on either side of a black hole’s boundary, called its event horizon. In that case, one member of the pair can get trapped within the horizon while the other carries energy away.

Eventually, this escaping energy shrivels the black hole down to nothing.

The only problem with this scenario is that if black holes can be destroyed, then so can all the information about what fell into them.

That seems to break a fundamental law of physics, which says that information can never be destroyed. What gives?

For nearly 50 years physicists were stumped by this problem. But in the past few years a unique solution has revealed itself: wormholes.

Wormholes are theoretical bridges in spacetime that connect two distant spots through a shortcut. Wormholes sound like something out of a science fiction movie, but they are real predictions of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

Recently, a new breakthrough on black holes happened when scientists considered the possibility that the inside of a black hole could be connected to the inside of another black hole via a wormhole.

Such a connection would be rare. But it’s theoretically possible. And according to the rules of quantum physics, everything that can happen does happen.
A particle doesn’t simply travel along one particular path from point A to point B. It takes all of them simultaneously—wild but true!

The same thing seems to be the case for black holes. All of the possible weird configurations of spacetime that could occur within them, including wormholes, do occur.

When physicists added wormholes to the picture, a strange thing happened: information didn’t seem to be completely destroyed anymore.
Instead the interiors of black holes seemed to contain special areas deep inside called islands.

These islands are part of the black holes but also not. In a weird way, they’re both inside and outside the black holes, as if they are part of the escaping radiation that is depleting the black holes over time.

And as they escape, the information within them escapes, too.

These new ideas are pretty confounding, even to physicists, who are discovering that the cosmos and the nature of our reality are even weirder than we could have ever imagined.

Source

De-extinction company sets its next (first?) target: The thylacine

Getting Aid

For the millions of Americans with hearing loss, a hearing aid is a life-changing but often prohibitively expensive solution. Neither covered by Medicare nor available over-the-counter, patients currently have to shell out the big bucks and get a doctor’s approval. But not anymore: the FDA says it’s creating a new class of hearing aids that can be bought without a prescription, in a final ruling issued Tuesday.

As early as this October, anyone with mild to moderate hearing loss — and the necessary cash — will be able to waltz into their local retailer and pick up a hearing aid, no exams or prescriptions required. Those with severe hearing loss that require a more advanced aid will still have to go through the normal hurdles, though, the regulator says.

Price Change

The FDA estimates that some 30 million adults in the US could benefit from the use of a hearing aid, but with the cost of entry as high as $5,000, it’s not surprising that they aren’t more ubiquitous.

That type of price tag could be knocked down by up to $2,800, according to one government estimate. In the end, though, it's tough to say how prices may change until products actually hit the market.

"It’s very hard to predict exactly what we’ll see and when," FDA medical device chief Jeffrey Shuren told the Associated Press.

Wide Open Market

Still, optimism in light of the FDA’s ruling isn’t unwarranted. Hearing aids are about to become a very large market, no longer limited to those with prescriptions but to anyone with hearing issues. More companies may enter the hearing aid space and give the current heavyweights that produce the helpful devices a run for their money — in theory, anyway.

"This could fundamentally change technology," John Hopkins audiologist Nicholas Reed told The New York Times.

"We don’t know what these companies might come up with," he added. "We may literally see new ways hearing aids work, how they look."

We'll have to wait and see if the ruling means better, cheaper hearing aids for all, or if it means an influx of predatory companies looking to make a quick buck on a gimmicky product, but we're remaining hopeful.

Source

The incident occurred along the Bruce Highway in Queensland, along the country's eastern coastline.

The footage of the snake came courtesy of a Facebook post from Sunshine Coast Snake Catchers, specialists who were called in to remove the 3.5-foot snake from the couple's camper van after it made the unscheduled appearance.

"We just had a frantic call for a couple with a forward driving caravan, who were driving along, and they had a bloody red-bellied black snake in their car!" the snake catcher says in the video. "Not in their engine bay, not in the front or the windscreen, in their car while they're driving."

The snake is seen laying in the car along the driver's side, and the snake catchers can then be seen using a special hook to remove the snake, eventually capturing it in a bag.

The snake catcher is then seen releasing the snake back into the forest.

"Yes you read that correctly, this is hands down one of the craziest jobs we have ever had!" the snake catchers wrote on Facebook. "It was a tough one to catch as well as I didn't want to have my back facing the highway and had grab the snake and lift it over the front seats without getting bitten!"

"There were a couple of close calls but hey got the job done!"

Indigenous to Australia, the red-bellied black snake is one of the most commonly found species of snake in the country, according to the Australian Museum.

The serpents are responsible for numerous bites throughout Australia every year, according to the museum.

Red-bellied black snake venom can cause "anticoagulant and myotoxic effects," including "bleeding and/or swelling at the bite site, nausea, vomiting, headache, abdominal pain" and more in extreme cases.

Despite this, the museum reiterated that very few deaths have ever been recorded from the red-bellied black snake, and that, "for its size, the red-bellied black snake is probably the least dangerous elapid snake in Australia."

While there is a risk of serious illness, most bite victims only experience mild symptoms, though officials reiterated that anyone who is bitten should seek treatment immediately.

This is not the first time that a reptile has been found in a precarious situation.

In the United States, police officers in Cibolo, Texas, were called last week when a 10-foot-long python was found under someone's car.

This snake, though, turned out to be a pet, which was soon reunited with its owners after being turned over to wildlife control.

Another escaped python, also a pet, was found in a neighbor's garden in Bozeman, Mont., having escaped the same day that her owner moved out of her home.

"We relocated her to a different enclosure for the day," the owner said. "It's one thing when your dog is missing, but when your snake -- which is longer than you are -- goes missing you wonder, what are people going to do when they see her."

Source

Diabetes is a severe and growing metabolic disorder. It already affects hundreds of thousands of people in Switzerland. A sedentary lifestyle and an excessively rich diet damage the beta cells of the pancreas, promoting the onset of this disease. If detected early enough, its progression could be reversed, but diagnostic tools that allow for early detection are lacking. A team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) in collaboration with several other scientists, including teams from the HUG, has discovered that a low level of the sugar 1,5-anhydroglucitol in the blood is a sign of a loss in functional beta cells. This molecule, easily identified by a blood test, could be used to identify the development of diabetes in people at risk, before the situation becomes irreversible. These results can be found in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.

In Switzerland, almost 500,000 people suffer from diabetes. This serious metabolic disorder is constantly increasing due to the combined effect of a lack of physical activity and an unbalanced diet. If detected early enough at the pre-diabetes stage, progression to an established diabetes can be counteracted by adopting an appropriate lifestyle. Unfortunately, one third of patients already have cardiovascular, renal or neuronal complications at the time of diagnosis, which impacts their life expectancy.

"Identifying the transition from pre-diabetes to diabetes is complex, because the status of the affected cells, which are scattered in very small quantities in the core of an organ located under the liver, the pancreas, is impossible to assess quantitatively by non-invasive investigations. We therefore opted for an alternative strategy: to find a molecule whose levels in the blood would be associated with the functional mass of these beta cells in order to indirectly detect their alteration at the pre-diabetes stage, before the appearance of any symptoms," explains Pierre Maechler, a Professor in the Department of Cell Physiology and Metabolism and in the Diabetes Center of the UNIGE Faculty of Medicine, who led this work.

A sugar that indicates the state of beta cells

Several years ago, scientists embarked on the identification of such a molecule able to detect pre-diabetes. The first step was to analyze thousands of molecules in healthy, pre-diabetic and diabetic mouse models. By combining powerful molecular biology techniques with a machine learning system (artificial intelligence), the research team was able to identify, from among thousands of molecules, the one that best reflects a loss of beta cells at the pre-diabetic stage: namely 1,5-anhydroglucitol, a small sugar, whose decrease in blood would indicate a deficit in beta cells.

Encouraged by these results obtained in mice, the research team led by Pierre Maechler proceeded to the next step: determining its relevance to humans. In collaboration with numerous scientists, including teams from the HUG, they compared the levels of 1,5-anhydroglucitol in diabetic patients with those of non-diabetics. "We were able to observe a decrease in this sugar in diabetics. This was very motivating, especially as this decline was observable regardless their symptoms, even before the onset of diabetes", indicates Cecilia Jiménez-Sánchez, postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Cell Physiology and Metabolism and first author of the study.

A potential tool for early diagnosis

"Diabetes is a complex disease in which many metabolic changes occur in parallel. It was therefore essential to test the relevance of this marker in people who suffer a sudden loss of their beta cells but in the absence of metabolic disorders," explains Pierre Maechler. "By studying the level of 1,5-anhydroglucitol in individuals whose half of the pancreas had been surgically removed, we were able to demonstrate that 1,5-anhydroglucitol is a blood indicator of the functional quantity of pancreatic beta cells."

This discovery opens up new avenues for the prevention of diabetes, particularly for people at risk. A simple blood sampling followed by an inexpensive specific test could identify a potential diabetes onset in these people, prompting actions to be taken before the situation becomes irreversible. "We still plan to test the relevance of this sugar in different types of patients and at different timescales, but it could lead to major progress in the monitoring of people at risk," concludes Pierre Maechler.

Source

Apple has told its workforce they must come into the office for at least three days a week from September to get back to "in-person collaboration."
According to an internal memo, CEO Tim Cook said being in the same room as a colleague was "essential" to Apple's culture.

In the missive sent on Monday, Steve Job's replacement said staff near HQ and surrounding offices should make sure they were at basecamp on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Team managers get to pick the third day when employees are expected in the office, according to the memo reported in the Financial Times.

Cook said: "We are excited to move forward with the pilot and believe that this revised framework will enhance our ability to work flexibly while preserving the in-person collaboration that is so essential to our culture."

He also admitted the company had "a lot to learn" and was "committed to listening, adapting and growing together in the weeks and months ahead," hinting that the mandate may be adjusted.

Some employees might be forgiven for questioning the global tech and media behemoth's listening powers.

In an open letter published in May, a group calling itself Apple Together said Apple's work-from-home (WFH) policy was motivated by fear.

"You have characterized the decision for the Hybrid Working Pilot as being about combining the 'need to commune in-person' and the value of flexible work," the letter says. "But in reality, it does not recognize flexible work and is only driven by fear. Fear of the future of work, fear of worker autonomy, fear of losing control."

In March, Cook outlined a plan to have Apple employees who had been working from home return to the office following a COVID-19-enforced WFH period. This backfired somewhat when Apple's insistance on a return to office like caused its director of machine learning Ian Goodfellow to resign and jump ship to Google.

Apple staff are not the only ones doubting the efficacy of mandatory back-to-office plans.

In June, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff told a company conference in New York that "office mandates are never going to work," according to Yahoo! Finance.

Still, Cook has on his side Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon – who has taken several opportunities to insist that his staff get back to the office full time – and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who insisted the temptation of coffee and cheese was too much for effective home working.

Apple declined to comment. ®

Source

Here is a common scenario: picture someone sitting at home, when suddenly their head starts pounding, their eyes start to itch and their heart rate rises.

They reach for their phone or laptop to quickly Google what can possibly be wrong.

It's possible that the search results could offer accurate answers about the cause of the person's symptoms. Or the search might erroneously suggest they're well on their way to an early death.

As a researcher in the virtual care domain, I'm aware that online self-diagnosis has become very common, and that technology has shifted the way health care is delivered.

Paging Dr. Google

Online health information took on a new importance during the pandemic, when using online sources to assess COVID-19 symptoms and self-triage was encouraged. However, the act of self-diagnosis online is not new.

In 2013, it was reported that more than half of Canadians polled said they used Google search to self-diagnose. In 2020, 69% of Canadians used the internet to search for health information, and 25% used online sources to track their fitness or health.

Virtual care and online self-diagnosis share some beneficial traits, such as the convenience of not having to schedule an appointment, saving travel time to the doctor's office and avoiding waiting rooms. However, the key difference between virtual care and Googling symptoms is that there is no direct communication with a physician when self-diagnosing online.

Some may choose to self-diagnose because they feel it gives them greater control over their health, while others may find it helps them better communicate symptoms to their physician. Some patients may fear misdiagnosis or medical errors.

Over time, people can get better at diagnosing using the internet. Online sources can provide information and support for a specific medical condition. They may also be useful for people with ongoing symptoms who have been unable to get a diagnosis from health-care professionals.

Using the internet to learn more about a condition after being diagnosed by a health-care provider may be useful and may decrease the stress of a diagnosis if the sites consulted are trustworthy.

However, trying to select credible sources and filter out misinformation can be an overwhelming process. Some information found online has little to no credibility. A study focusing on the spread of fake news on social media found that false information traveled faster and wider than the truth.

Risks of self-diagnosis

The risks of using online health resources include increased anxiety and fear. The term cyberchondria can be defined as someone experiencing a high amount of health anxiety from searching symptoms on the internet.

Self-misdiagnosis is also a danger, especially if doing so means not seeking treatment. For example, if a person confidently self-diagnoses their stomach pains as the stomach flu, they may hesitate to believe their doctor's diagnosis of appendicitis.

There is also a risk of becoming so certain that one's self-diagnosis is correct that it is difficult to accept a different diagnosis from a health-care professional. Misdiagnoses can even be very serious if it results in failure to detect a possible heart attack, stroke, seizure or tumor.

Further risks may include increased stress on both the patient and doctors, ineffectively taking or mixing medications and increased costs for treatments or medicines that may not be necessary.

Social media and mental health

Social media has given people a voice to share personal health-related remedies and stories. The number of active social media users in Canada has increased by 1.1 million since 2021. This raises the question of how people may be influenced by what they see online and if it may affect health choices.

In 2018, a Canadian internet use survey examined reports of the negative effects of using social media. It revealed over 12% of users reported feeling anxious or depressed, frustrated or angry, or envious of the lives of others.

Conversely, social networks have also enabled people with mental health problems to feel unity by sharing experiences and support. However, this may also have contributed to self-diagnosis (and potentially self-misdiagnosis) of mental health issues, such as anxiety and personality disorders. This can put people at physical and mental risk if it results in inappropriate treatments.

The reality is that online self-diagnosis cannot be prevented. But those consulting Dr. Google should be aware of the potential risks, confirm information found online with a health-care provider and ask health-care providers for credible online sources of information about their diagnoses.

Source

Scientists bent frickin’ laser beams to create this detailed image of a cat

An “extreme heat belt” that stretches across the center of the US is expected to emerge over the next 30 years, subjecting millions more Americans to dangerously hot days. That’s according to new research published today by the nonprofit research group First Street Foundation.

The belt is expected to extend from Texas and Louisiana all the way up to Wisconsin. Along the belt, extremely hot days could feel brutal, reaching temperatures that feel hotter than 125 degrees Fahrenheit.

About 107.6 million Americans across 1,023 counties will experience that level of extreme heat at least one day a year by 2053. That’s compared to just 8.1 million residents in 50 counties who can expect to suffer through such high temperatures in 2023, according to First Street’s analysis.

“We need to be prepared for the inevitable, that a quarter of the country will soon fall inside the Extreme Heat Belt with temperatures exceeding 125°F and the results will be dire,” Matthew Eby, founder and CEO of First Street Foundation, said in a press release.

That figure, 125 degrees, is a measure of heat and humidity called a heat index. It’s often referred to as what the temperature “feels like.” Anything 125 degrees Fahrenheit or higher falls into the National Weather Service’s highest heat index category — signaling “extreme danger” when heat stroke is “highly likely.”

Even if you don’t live within that extreme heat belt, you can expect temperatures to rise higher than what your community has experienced in the past, the research warns. “Virtually the entire country is subject to increasing perils associated with heat exposure,” the report says. That’s no surprise, of course — climate change is pushing the weather to extremes across the world.

What’s cool about this new research is that you can zoom in to see the changes that your home might have to adapt to in the future. Just plug your address into Fist Street’s “Risk Factor” search tool online. That’ll pull up information on how many more hot days the location is expected to experience in 30 years. I searched for my childhood home in Southern California and found that it might see 11 days a year with a heat index above 99 degrees Fahrenheit compared to just four days this year. (You’ll also see wildfire and flood risk when you search for an address on the Risk Factor tool.)

To figure out how much each location will bake in the future, the researchers first looked at the heat index for the seven hottest days it experienced this year. Then, using federal government datasets and other publicly available resources, it built a model to estimate how often the location would experience days that hot three decades from now.

Miami-Dade County in Florida is on track to experience the biggest increase in the frequency of its hottest days. Currently, the heat index here reaches 103 degrees Fahrenheit during the seven hottest days of the year. By 2053, more than 30 days a year would feel that hot, according to First Street’s research.

Watch out for the ‘extreme heat belt’ developing across the central US