Putting together the Webb telescope’s mid-infrared eyes

In 1687, Sir Isaac laid down the laws of motion in Principia Mathematica- laws which have still held true over 300 years later. In the law of conservation of momentum, he noted that the momentum of a system would always remain constant, which means that when an object moves, it has to push against something else. However, in a new study, researchers have found that this so-called “fundamental” law, may not be universally true, and could differ at least in curved space.

By conducting experiments, scientists from the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US discovered that the opposite is true- that when bodies exist in curved space, they can move without pushing against anything.

In the peer-reviewed study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team created a robot that was kept confined to a spherical surface with what they described as "unprecedented levels of isolation from its environment".

This was done to ensure that only the effects of the sphere would be in action.

Lead researcher Zeb Rocklin said: "We let our shape-changing object move on the simplest curved space, a sphere, to systematically study the motion in curved space.

When bodies exist in curved space, they can move without pushing against anything

(Image: Georgia Tech/ PNAS)

"We learned that the predicted effect, which was so counterintuitive it was dismissed by some physicists, indeed occurred: as the robot changed its shape, it inched forward around the sphere in a way that could not be attributed to environmental interactions."

While a significant breakthrough, the effects observed in this sphere were extremely small, meaning that it likely won’t lead to perpetual motion machines.

However, this study on the effects created by a curved space could prove to be of crucial value in the field of precise robotics, similar to the time scientists discovered that gravity shifts the frequency of satellite communications.

Experimental realisation of a swimmer on a sphere

(Image: Georgia Tech)

But this study ties into Einstein’s research that showed that space itself is curved, which lead the team to believe that "ultimately, the principles of how a space's curvature can be harnessed for locomotion may allow spacecraft to navigate the highly curved space around a black hole".

The experiment itself proved to be a challenge, as they had to examine an object in a sphere without exchanging momentum with its environment.

To achieve this, the team allowed for a number of motors to drive on curved tracks in a system that attached to a rotating shaft, ensuring that the motors were always operating in a sphere.

In 1687, Sir Isaac laid down the laws of motion in Principia Mathematica

(Image: Pictures From History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

In order to minimise friction, the shaft was supported by air bearing, and was even calibrated with the Earth’s gravity to further minimise any residual forces.

The researchers discovered that as these robots moved, gravity and friction did exert force on them, but they seem to have combined with the curvature effects "to produce a strange dynamic with properties neither could induce on their own".

They said: "The research provides an important demonstration of how curved spaces can be attained and how it fundamentally challenges physical laws and intuition designed for flat space.”

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Exactly how they formed and evolved is unclear, but we do know – because the edges of continents thousands of miles apart match up – that, at one time long ago, Earth's landmass was concentrated in one big supercontinent.

Since that's not what the planet looks like today, something must have triggered that supercontinent to break apart. Now, we have new evidence to suggest that giant meteorite impacts played a significant role.

The smoking gun consists of crystals of the mineral zircon, excavated from a craton in Western Australia, a piece of Earth's crust that has remained stable for over a billion years.

Known as the Pilbara Craton, it is the best-preserved chunk of crust on the planet… and the zircon crystals within it contain evidence of ancient meteorite impacts before the continents broke apart.

"Studying the composition of oxygen isotopes in these zircon crystals revealed a 'top-down' process starting with the melting of rocks near the surface and progressing deeper, consistent with the geological effect of giant meteorite impacts," explained geologist Tim Johnson of Curtin University in Australia.

"Our research provides the first solid evidence that the processes that ultimately formed the continents began with giant meteorite impacts, similar to those responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs, but which occurred billions of years earlier."

The work was conducted on 26 rock samples containing fragments of zircon, dating between 3.6 and 2.9 billion years old.

The research team carefully analyzed isotopes of oxygen; specifically, the ratios of oxygen-18 and oxygen-16, which have 10 and 8 neutrons, respectively. These ratios are used in paleogeology to determine the formation temperature of the rock in which the isotopes are found.

Based on these ratios, the team was able to distinguish three distinct and fundamental stages in the formation and evolution of the Pilbara Craton.

The first stage is the formation of a large proportion of zircons consistent with partial melting of the crust. This partial melting, the researchers show, was likely the result of bombardment by meteorites, which heated the planetary crust on impact.

The oldest cluster of these zircons, according to the team's interpretation, was the result of a single giant impact that led to the formation of the craton.

The second stage was a period of reworking and stabilization of the crustal nucleus, followed by the third stage – a period of melting and granite formation. This stabilized nucleus would then, much later, evolve to become today's continents, as did the cratons found on other continents around the world.

However, many meteorites have pelted Earth in eons past, in numbers much higher than the number of continents. It's only the largest impacts that could generate enough heat to create the cratons, which appear to be twice as thick as their surrounding lithosphere.

These findings are consistent with previously proposed models for the formation of cratons around the world – but constitute, the researchers said, the strongest evidence yet for the theory.

However, it's just one craton, out of around 35 known. To make the evidence even stronger still, the team will need to compare their results with more samples from other cratons, to see if their model is consistent globally.

"Data related to other areas of ancient continental crust on Earth appears to show patterns similar to those recognized in Western Australia," Johnson said. "We would like to test our findings on these ancient rocks to see if, as we suspect, our model is more widely applicable."

The research has been published in Nature.

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Google may soon be facing its second antitrust lawsuit filed by the US Department of Justice. According to Bloomberg, the DOJ is gearing up to sue the tech giant as soon as September after a year of looking into whether it's been using its dominant position to illegally control the digital ad market. The Justice Department's lawyers have reportedly been conducting another round of interviews to glean additional information that could help make their case stronger. These new interviews are expected to build on previous ones conducted much earlier on in the investigation.

The Justice Department first filed an antitrust lawsuit against the company back in 2020, accusing it of having an unfair monopoly over search and search-related advertising. For that particular case, the agency argued that forcing Android phone manufacturers to set Google as the default search engine prevents rivals from gaining traction and ensures that the company will earn an enormous amount of money from search-related advertising.

In the same year, Texas filed a multi-state lawsuit against Google, with the state's Attorney General accusing the company of using its "monopolistic power to control" ad pricing. The company's ad practices are under scrutiny not just in the US but in other parts of the world: The European Commission also opened a probe to look into whether Google limits rival services' access to user data for ad purposes last year. As a concession to the EU's concerns, Reuters reported in June that Google may let rival ad platforms run ads on YouTube.

While the DOJ has yet to officially file its case, Google spokesperson Peter Schottenfels defended the company's ad business in a statement to Bloomberg, which says: "Our advertising technologies help websites and apps fund their content, and enable small businesses to reach customers around the world. The enormous competition in online advertising has made online ads more relevant, reduced ad tech fees, and expanded options for publishers and advertisers."

All products recommended by Engadget are selected by our editorial team, independent of our parent company. Some of our stories include affiliate links. If you buy something through one of these links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

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A feline dubbed the "world's biggest cat" has grown so much that it can stand as tall as a two-year-old child.

Yulia Minina, from Russia, left the internet stunned when she posted pictures and videos of her beloved pet, Kefir the Main Coon, earlier this year, with people mistaking it for a dog.

Despite being known for its large size and thick double coat of long hair, Main Coons are affectionate gentle giants that are people-oriented.

In recent post on Yulia's Instagram, the cat lover shows how her "gentle giant" gets along with her two-year-old daughter.

The ginormous cat seemed nearly as tall as the child

(Image: @yuliyamnn/Instagram)

"Sweet couple - Kefir and Anechka. These two are never bored," she wrote.

Little Anechka is seen cutting snacks for Kefir in the kitchen.

The hungry moggy stands alongside Anechka, patiently waiting for his little master to feed him the food.

The inseparable pair love spending their time together in the house. When Anechka is watching cartoons on the sofa, Kefir stays close to her and lies on the top of the couch.

Yulia said people always mistake her cat as a dog because of the size

(Image: @yuliyamnn/Instagram)

The video melted hearts with many viewers commenting on the big cat's special bond with humans.

"Perfect friendship, how adorable!" one expressed and a second penned: "Kefir as tall as Anechka. You can tell that they are a couple."

Others were amazed by Kefir's size as one said: "Oh my God I thought it was a dog!"

"Giant gentle! Kefir is so big!" another wrote while a third asked how Yulia managed to keep the house "fur-free".

She replied: "I use a robot vacuum cleaner...non-stop!"

The cat is a gentle giant to Yulia and her daughter, Anechka

(Image: @yuliyamnn/Instagram)

She previously said she treated Kefir like her second child, adding: "He not only grew up big in appearance, he is also very smart and always behaves calmly.

"The look is generally like that of a person, and Kefir has a formidable appearance, but he is a very affectionate and modest child."

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In a statement on Wednesday, Britain's Health Security Agency said it had detected polio viruses derived from the oral polio vaccine in sewage water from eight boroughs of London, but had not identified any cases.

Its analysis of the virus samples suggested "transmission has gone beyond a close network of a few individuals" but that it had not found anyone infected with the virus. According to the World Health Organization, only one in 200 polio infections leads to paralysis; most people don't show any symptoms.

"This will ensure a high level of protection from paralysis and help reduce further spread," the agency said. Most people across Britain are vaccinated against polio in childhood. It said the risk to the wider population was low.

The agency said it was working closely with health authorities in the U.S. and Israel and WHO to investigate the links between polio viruses detected in those two countries.

"We know the areas in London where the poliovirus is being transmitted have some of the lowest vaccination rates," said Dr. Vanessa Saliba, a consultant epidemiologist at the U.K. Health Security Agency. "This is why the virus is spreading in these communities and puts those residents not fully vaccinated at greater risk."

Polio is a disease often spread in water that mostly affects children under 5. It has mostly been wiped out from developed countries, but outbreaks remain in Pakistan, Afghanistan and parts of Africa. Initial symptoms include fever, fatigue, headache, vomiting, and muscle stiffness. Among people paralyzed by the disease, death can occur in up to 10% of cases when their breathing muscles become paralyzed.

In rare cases, the live virus contained in the oral polio vaccine used in the global effort to eradicate the disease can mutate into new forms potent enough to trigger new outbreaks. The vaccination booster effort in London will use injected polio vaccines that do not carry that risk.

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A common explanation among avid coffee drinkers is that we drink coffee to wake ourselves up and alleviate fatigue.

But that story doesn't completely hold up. After all, the amount of caffeine in a cup of coffee can vary wildly. Even when ordering the same type of coffee from the same coffee shop, caffeine levels can double from one drink to the next. And yet, we coffee drinkers don't seem to notice.

So what else might be driving us in our quest for that morning brew?

That's one question we set out to answer in our recent research. The answer has far-reaching implications for the way we approach major societal challenges such as diet and climate change.

As behavioral scientists, we've learned that people often repeat everyday behaviors out of habit. If you regularly drink coffee, you likely do so automatically as part of your habitual routine—not just out of tiredness.

But habit just doesn't feel like a good explanation—it's unsatisfying to say that we do something just because it's what we're used to doing. Instead, we concoct more compelling explanations, like saying we drink coffee to ease our morning fog.

This reluctance means that we fail to recognize many habits, even as they permeate our daily lives.

Unpacking what lies behind habits

To test whether people underestimate the role that habit plays in their life, we asked more than 100 coffee drinkers what they think drives their coffee consumption. They estimated that tiredness was about twice as important as habit in driving them to drink coffee. To benchmark these assumptions against reality, we then tracked these people's coffee drinking and fatigue over the course of one week.

The actual results starkly diverged from our research participants' explanations. Yes, they were somewhat more likely to drink coffee when tired—as would be expected—but we found that habit was an equally strong influence. In other words, people wildly overestimated the role of tiredness and underestimated the role of habit. Habits, it seems, aren't considered much of an explanation.

We then replicated this finding in a second study with a behavior that people might consider a "bad" habit—failing to help in response to a stranger's request. People still overlooked habit and assumed that their reluctance to proffer help was due to their mood at the time.

The gap between the actual and perceived role of habit in our lives matters. And this gap is key to understanding why people often struggle to change repeated behaviors. If you believe that you drink coffee because you are tired, then you might try to reduce coffee drinking by going to bed early. But ultimately you'd be barking up the wrong tree—your habit would still be there in the morning.

Habits are formed in specific environments that provide a cue, or trigger, for the behavior.

Why habits are surprisingly difficult to change

The reason that habits can be so difficult to overcome is that they are not fully under our control. Of course, most of us can control a single instance of a habit, such as by refusing a cup of coffee this time or taking the time to offer directions to a lost tourist. We exert willpower and just push through. But consistently reining in a habit is fiendishly difficult.

To illustrate, imagine you had to avoid saying words that contain the letter "I" for the next five seconds. Pretty simple, right? But now imagine if you had to maintain this rule for a whole week. We habitually use many words that contain "I." Suddenly, the required 24/7 monitoring turns this simple task into a far more onerous one.

We make a similar error when we try to control unwanted habits and form new, desirable ones. Most of us can achieve this in the short run—think about your enthusiasm when starting a new diet or workout regimen. But we inevitably get distracted, tired or just plain busy. When that happens, your old habit is still there to guide your behavior, and you end up back where you started. And if you fail to recognize the role of habit, then you'll keep overlooking better strategies that effectively target habits.

The flip side is also true: We don't recognize the benefits of our good habits. One study found that on days when people strongly intended to exercise, those with weak and strong exercise habits got similar amounts of physical activity. On days when intentions were weaker, however, those with strong habits were more active. Thus, strong habits keep behavior on track even as intentions ebb and flow.

It's not just willpower

American culture is partly responsible for the tendency to overlook habits. Compared with residents of other developed nations, Americans are more likely to say that they control their success in life.

Accordingly, when asked what stops them from making healthy lifestyle changes, Americans commonly cite a lack of willpower. Granted, willpower is useful in the short term, as we muster the motivation to, for example, sign up for a gym membership or start a diet.

But research shows that, surprisingly, people who are more successful at achieving long-term goals exert—if anything—less willpower in their day-to-day lives. This makes sense: As explained above, over time, willpower fades and habits prevail.

If the answer isn't willpower, then what is the key to controlling habits?

Changing habits begins with the environments that support them. Research shows that leveraging the cues that trigger habits in the first place can be incredibly effective. For example, reducing the visibility of cigarette packs in stores has curbed cigarette purchases.

Another path to habit change involves friction: in other words, making it difficult to act on undesirable habits and easy to act on desirable ones. For example, one study found that recycling increased after recycle bins were placed right next to trash cans—which people were already using—versus just 12 feet away.

Effectively changing behavior starts with recognizing that a great deal of behavior is habitual. Habits keep us repeating unwanted behaviors but also desirable ones, even if just enjoying a good-tasting morning brew.

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The idea that our brains are shrinking is not one we like to consider. For more than four decades, experts have mostly ignored the hypothesis put forward time and time again by a close-knit group of paleontologists.

Now, the brain shrinkage hypothesis is being put to the test once more, with a team from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (NLV) saying it doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

The debate really kicked off last year when a paper by paleoanthropologist Jeremy DeSilva and his colleagues, based on a comparison of human fossils to evolutionary patterns in ant colonies, popularized the idea that the human brain had shrunk in volume by about four ping pong balls.

What's more, they claimed this happened just 3,000 years ago.

That's really recent compared to other theories. Some scientists have said human brains started shrinking sometime after the last ice age, which ended about 11,700 years ago.

DeSilva's paper positioned the loss in brain size right around the time that complex human societies arose.

As such, it was suggested a smaller brain developed because information could now be stored in writing or distributed among others in a community.
Our brains, in other words, didn't become dumber; they grew more efficient.

The appealing theory gained worldwide attention, but not everyone was convinced. And the team from UNLV now claims to have uprooted the whole idea.

"We re-examined the dataset from DeSilva et al. and found that human brain size has not changed in 30,000 years, and probably not in 300,000 years," says UNLV anthropologist Brian Villmoare.

"In fact, based on this dataset, we can identify no reduction in brain size in modern humans over any time period since the origins of our species."

The findings are based on a new analysis of fossilized skulls, put together by Villmoare and his colleagues, which differs from the DeSilva paper in several important ways.

Of all 987 skulls analyzed by DeSilva and colleagues, only 23 actually come from the timeframe that is critical to their brain shrinkage hypothesis. The dataset in the new study is much narrower to avoid skewing the results. It focuses on modern humans from the last 300,000 years only.

That's because researchers at UNLV are not convinced all nearly 10 million years of early human history is relevant to an event that supposedly occurred 3,000 years ago.

Even in the last 300,000 years, most of the human fossils included in the UNLV analysis were dated within the last 10 percent of the time series. Older fossils are simply harder to find.

To compensate for this unbalanced comparison, researchers honed in on human cranium fossils from the last 30,000 years specifically, which created a more normal distribution.

Using DeSilva's same methods on the newly honed dataset, researchers found no significant change point in human cranium size at or near 3,000 years ago.

"Overall, our conclusion is that, given a dataset more appropriate to the research question, human brain size has been remarkably stable over the last 300 [thousand years]," Villmoare and colleagues write.

"Thus, hypotheses of recent change are not supported by the evidence."

DeSilva and colleagues have not yet responded to the recent criticism, but there's little doubt they will have something to say. In 2021, the authors said they hoped others would put their hypothesis to the test.

They certainly got what they wished for.

The new study was published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.

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While it has since returned, it once again highlights our dependence on technology service providers and shows how reliant many people are on a single operator for daily functions.

There are few things we completely rely upon in our modern lives, but for many people, Google is one.

Its brief disappearance from the internet felt, for many, like an almost-apocalyptic moment – underscoring how deeply 'googling' has been integrated into our lives.

As I wrote when the cloud computing firm Fastly had an outage last year, "It's disconcerting when the sites we rely on suddenly become inaccessible, and even more so when it happens on such a vast scale".

What happened?

We don't know yet. Google has so far not commented publicly on the outage.

According to Downdetector there was a significant spike in outage reports for Google earlier today. The news wire Reuters reported:

"There were more than 40,000 incidents of people reporting issues with the world's largest search engine, according to Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources including user-submitted errors on its platform".

Downdetector also reported people had experienced problems accessing Google Maps, while The Guardian reported problems with Gmail and Google images, too.

The outage affected a wide range of Google sites, with internet monitoring website ThousandEyes reporting over a thousand servers being impacted.
Despite the scale of the incident, it seems to have only lasted for around 30-40 minutes before services started to return to normal.

Not an isolated occurrence

Google, like all technology providers, is vulnerable to a wide range of potential service failures.

This is not the first Google outage – other outages occurred in 2020 (including a very large one in December reportedly caused by lack of capacity in their authentication systems).

But outages such as these, however brief, do underscore how dependent we have become on "googling" for many aspects of life.

It's not all bad news

Although any outage at Google becomes major news around the world, today's incident was short-lived – as were all previous cases.

Google certainly has the capacity and capability to act swiftly to resolve service problems when they do occur.

And, as many people noted, you can still search online even when Google is down – you might just have to use a different search provider, such as Bing or DuckDuckGo.

It would seem that even when an almost unthinkable outage occurs, our capacity to search for cat photos will not be impacted.

Paul Haskell-Dowland, Professor of Cyber Security Practice, Edith Cowan University.

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Opinion  I've been preaching the gospel of the Linux desktop for more years than some of you have been alive. However, unless you argue that the Linux desktop includes Android smartphones and ChromeOS laptops, there will be no year of the Linux desktop.…

But there should be. For example, as GitLab recently revealed in its onboarding document for employees, staffers can run macOS, and they can run Linux on their desktops. But Windows? Forget about it!

Why? GitLab explained: "Due to Microsoft Windows' dominance in desktop operating systems, Windows is the platform most targeted by spyware, viruses, and ransomware."

Indeed it is. But Windows' security mess has never been just because Windows is more popular. I'd argue Windows is insecure by design.

Today's Windows is still built on a standalone PC operating system foundation. It was never, ever meant to work in a networked world. So, security holes that existed back in the day of Windows for Workgroups, 1991, are still with us today in 2022 and Windows 11.

Most of these problems come down to Windows having Interprocess Communications (IPCs) that move information from one program to another, which have no security in their design. Windows and its applications rely on these procedures to get work done. Over the years, they've included Dynamic Link Libraries (DLLs), Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) Control Extension (OCXs), and ActiveX. No matter what they're called, they do the same work, and they do it with no regard for security.

Adding insult to injury, Microsoft's data formats can hold programming macros. That's why Microsoft Office formats are commonly used to transmit malware. Microsoft finally bought a clue that they should block Office from running macros by default. I mean, this has only been a major security hole since Melissa wreaked havoc on the Windows world in 1999.

But guess what? Showing that Microsoft still doesn't know how to fix this fundamental security problem, the team in Redmond HQ have rolled back the Office macro block. Why? Because people use those IPCs to get work done. Given a choice between security and having applications work as expected, Microsoft often chooses the insecure status quo.

Making matters worse, another problem with Windows' single-user ancestry is that the default Windows user all too often must run as the all-powerful PC administrator. This means, of course, that when malware does break in – and it will – it gets to foul up everything and anything on a user's PC.

Not all versions of Microsoft are equally awful. As GitLab points out, "Windows Home Edition is notoriously hard to secure."

Now, you might ask, but what business uses Windows Home for work? Cheap ones do. And, if your people are working from home with their own PCs, as so many are these days, they are almost certainly not running Windows 10 Pro or Windows 10 Enterprise E5. And, even if your business is reimbursing your remote staffers, what do you think they'll buy? As GitLab knows to its sorrow, they'll typically be purchasing a laptop preloaded with Windows Home Edition.

So, instead, GitLab demands that its employees use either macOS or a Dell Linux laptop. As a long-time fan of Dell's XPS 13 developer Linux laptops, that works for me. Now, you don't have to run Ubuntu, which is the default Dell XPS 13 operating system, as Dell also supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Workstation – also a fine desktop operating system. Or you could opt for Arch Linux, or FreeBSD, or what-have-you, so long as it's actively updated and supported.

But, I'm sorry to say, GitLab won't support you with your Linux desktop. You'll need to do that yourself. Darn it.

I and many other Linux users can do that, but not everyone can. I understand why GitLab does it this way. Supporting end users is expensive. I'm sure most of their users work with Macs.

But, let's say you haven't decided to go with Macs, which are, after all, expensive. Let's say you're still using Windows. That's a safe bet. But if you really want security and stability, Linux is your best choice. So take a look at what you're paying for Windows licenses, support, and your often futile attempts to secure it. Then, look at what it would cost to use a business-supported Linux distribution such as RHEL Workstation, Canonical Ubuntu Desktop for the Enterprise, or SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED).

Chances are it will be cheaper to go with Linux. And no matter how the numbers work out, I can guarantee you it will be far more secure. ®

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Microsoft looks like the latest company to get on the layoff train as a new report by BusinessInsider says that the Modern Life Experiences (MLX) team has been let go. While Microsoft did not comment on the news, there appears to be some decent evidence which points towards the incident being true indeed.

Erynn Hesler, Product design lead and manager for consumer products at Microsoft, took to LinkedIn to offer her support to colleagues who "faced hard news" earlier today.

Although Hesler notes the MLX team was small, probably compared to the total workforce of Microsoft as a whole that is, the BusinessInsider report says that it was around 200 strong according to an employee, and since the entire division is apparently being slashed, potentially everyone of them could be impacted by the decision.

The report adds that Microsoft has offered them 60 days or two months time to find another suitable position at the company or take severance.

The Modern Life Experiences or MLX was a division created by Microsoft back in 2016-17 for researching and developing customer-focused projects.

This is an area where Microsoft has generally struggled and has only tasted success in some of its projects like the Xbox consoles and the Surface products. However the news indicates that the Redmond company is potentially giving up on the consumer side of things or feels it does not require such a department.

Source: BusinessInsider

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Microsoft is telling staff across the entire business to cast a more watchful eye over expenses in the face of economic uncertainty.

Some business travel, external training sessions, and company get-togethers are all falling under the gaze of Redmond's accountants.

In one recent instance recounted by a loquacious yet unidentified source, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft managers personally paid the bill to feed and water staff at a company picnic, something the multibillion-dollar-profit business would have covered itself before.

Last month during an earnings call to discuss Microsoft's financials for its Q4 ended 30 June, chief financial officer Amy Hood said: "We will continue to invest in future growth while maintaining intense focus on operational excellence and execution discipline."

Also in July, Hood reportedly told staff at a company meeting to think twice before submitting expenses.

We have asked Microsoft to comment.

Microsoft revenues grew 12 percent year-on-year to $51.9 billion in Q4, the slowest growth rate for two years, with some of the PC and consumer-facing units posting single-digit gains and Intelligent Cloud up 26 percent, itself a relative slowdown.

CEO Satya Nadella said it was still seeing a "pretty strong demand signal," adding: "Going into the pandemic, we saw demand increase because of the constraints the pandemic put on corporations and the increased consumer activity.

"Coming out of the pandemic, we are seeing actually a lot of constraints in the economy and the only resource, as I said in my remarks, that can help drive productivity while keeping costs down is digital tech."

Despite this, Microsoft recently closed unfilled job vacancies in the cloud and security divisions with the company saying it was making sure the "right resources are aligned to the right opportunity" and insisting it will "continue to grow headcount in the year ahead."

This follows a slowdown in hiring in the Windows, Office, and Teams units, and after Microsoft laid off less than 1 percent of its 180,000 workforce as part of annual trimming.

Others in the industry are acting cautiously too. Apple, Cisco, Intel, Google, and others are also putting recruitment on ice in parts of the business. Chip vendors are starting to issue words of warning about an oncoming slowdown, including Nvidia and Micron, and storage giant Seagate revealed recently it is lowering production. ®

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The novel Langya henipavirus (LayV) was found in 35 patients in the Shandong and Henan provinces. Many had symptoms such as fever, fatigue and a cough.

They are thought to have contracted the virus from animals. There is no evidence so far LayV can transmit among humans.

Researchers detected the virus predominantly in shrews.

The discovery was highlighted in a letter written by researchers from China, Singapore and Australia and published in the New England Journal of Medicine this month.

One of the researchers, Wang Linfa from the Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, told China's state-run Global Times that the cases of LayV found so far have not been fatal or very serious, so there is "no need to panic".

However, Mr Wang said, there is still a need to be alert as many viruses that exist in nature have unpredictable results when they infect humans.

The scientists said LayV was found in 27% of shrews tested, suggesting the mole-like mammals may be "natural reservoirs" for the virus. About 5% of dogs and 2% of goats also tested positive for it.

Taiwan's Center for Disease Control said on Sunday it was paying "close attention" to the development of LayV.

LayV is a type of henipavirus, a category of zoonotic viruses which can jump from animals to humans.

Zoonotic viruses are very common but have attracted more attention since the start of the Covid pandemic.

The US Center for Disease Control and Prevention said scientists estimate that three out of every four new or emerging infectious diseases in people come from animals.

The United Nations had previously warned the world will see more of such diseases with increased exploitation of wildlife and climate change.

Some zoonotic viruses can be potentially fatal to humans. These include the Nipah virus which has periodic outbreaks among animals and humans in Asia, and the Hendra virus which was first detected in horses in Australia.

Other related henipaviruses have also been found in shrews, as well as bats and rodents.

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As the sun tucked itself beneath the horizon, all was still on Michigan’s White River. Kandace Griffin, a fisheries and wildlife doctoral student at Michigan State University, sat on her gently bobbing research boat, listening to the evening chorus of frog croaks and red-winged blackbird songs. Every so often, a series of sharp taps emitted from a small speaker broke through the natural sounds, signaling that a sea lamprey—part of an experimental group she’d tagged earlier—was weaving through the depths below.

Griffin is part of a decades-long effort between the US and Canadian governments, researchers, and fisheries to control populations of the sea lamprey, an invasive species in the Great Lakes region. While the Great Lakes are home to four species of native lamprey, the sea lamprey slithered in from the Atlantic Ocean more than a hundred years ago, and promptly began annihilating native fish populations. 

Earlier that morning, at a Great Lakes Fishery Commission lab, Griffin had pulled nine sea lampreys from a large aquarium where, suckered onto the tank walls, they unknowingly awaited surgery. The lampreys took some expertise to handle—once out of the water, they lashed chaotically until anesthetic relaxed them into “wet noodles”—but Griffin had practiced her operations on more docile subjects first. “I did a lot of banana surgeries,” she said with a smile, as she masterfully implanted the sea lampreys with Tic Tac-sized acoustic telemetry trackers and quickly closed up the sutures.

Sea lamprey mouths with rings of teeth are clearly visible when they are suctioning onto tanks at Hammond Bay Biological Station, Michigan.

 Photograph: Michael Tessler

For most people, the sight of a sea lamprey can be queasy-making. The animal’s yellow-brown, mottled skin and its snaking swimming style makes it look like an eel, with one dramatic difference: It is vampiric. Its fearsome, jawless mouth—a suction cup with rings of pointed teeth and a toothy tongue in the center—resembles something out of a schlocky horror movie. This mouth latches, leech-like, onto unsuspecting fish and slurps up their blood, causing severe wounds or death.

By the mid-20th century, the sea lampreys’ gruesome diets had made them regional villains. “Probably the most bloodthirsty of all the fish found in the Great Lakes and on the Atlantic coast is a round-mouthed creature that looks like a two-foot piece of garden hose which was left out in the yard all winter,” a Michigan newspaper noted in 1955. This revilement has endured. In the 2014 sci-fi horror film Blood Lake: Attack of the Killer Lampreys, a lakeside town in Michigan is plagued by human-hungry lampreys that burst from cadaver chests, kill the coroner, enter the municipal water system, and murder the mayor as he sits on the toilet. The end of the movie gestures to the sea lampreys’ pernicious ability to survive: When the town recovers from the massacre, one lingering lamprey attacks a cleanup crew member.

The lampreys’ insidious image has been used against them. “Nobody likes sea lampreys,” Marc Gaden, deputy executive secretary for the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, says. “They don’t look like bunnies or puppies. You don’t have to make a case for getting rid of them.”

Michigan State University has several labs dedicated to the study and control of lampreys, which make for idiosyncratic subjects. Lamprey skeletons are constructed of cartilage rather than bone, and they can regenerate fully functional spinal cords even after they’ve been sliced in half. They possess an incredible olfactory power, capable of detecting scents at extremely low concentrations—the equivalent of being able to locate a few grains of salt in an Olympic-size swimming pool, according to Anne Scott, an MSU professor. Native populations live in salt water, then swim to inland tributaries to breed and die, like a parasitic salmon. Lamprey species have lived on Earth for hundreds of millions of years; they predate dinosaurs and have survived at least four mass extinctions.

These unique adaptive talents have earned the sea lamprey a grudging admiration from the conservationists tasked with wiping them out. “There’s no denying the destruction that an invasive species can cause the environment,” Griffin says. “But you have to have respect for an animal that has persisted for so long.”

Sometime in the 19th century, Petromyzon marinus first wriggled its way from the North Atlantic into Lake Ontario. On its southeastern edge, Niagara Falls’ rushing 3,100-foot span provided a natural barrier that blocked the species from further westward expansion, but the deepening of the man-made Welland Canal offered an alternative access route. Once in the larger Great Lakes, sea lampreys encountered a buffet of trout, sturgeon, whitefish, walleye, catfish, and other native aquatic species. The lampreys proceeded to latch onto, bore into, and suck out the blood and bodily fluids of millions of fish—wounding and killing multitudes. There were few, if any, predators to discourage their spread.

As the problem worsened, humans began to feel their presence. By the mid-1940s, approximately four in five commercially caught fish in the northern parts of Lakes Huron and Michigan were too wounded by lampreys to sell. In Michigan’s section of Lake Michigan alone, lake trout catches totaled 6.5 million pounds in 1944, but less than five years later, only 11,000 pounds were caught in the entirety of the lake. Hit hard by the lampreys, as well as by overfishing and pollution, regional fisheries lost tens of millions of dollars each year through the 1960s. In 1949, commercial fishers testified to Congress that their industry was “doomed.” Fishers and residents alike recoiled at the blood-slurping parasite. “People thought they were like horrible creatures from the bottom of the earth,” a woman whose family owned a sport-fishing resort near Duluth recounted in Great Lakes Sea Lamprey: The 70 Year War on a Biological Invader. 

In the early days of the invasion, wildlife managers and local residents fought the sea lamprey with everything they could think of. From dip nets to spears, few weapons went untested. Conservationists built basic metal barriers to block migrating adults from reaching their spawning grounds and zapped larvae with newly invented electrofishing gear. At one dam, operators built a booby trap out of a metal ramp that guided lampreys over the dam’s edge and into a bucket of oil. A conservation officer named Marvin Norton led pitchfork-armed sporting clubs on excursions to hunt and spear the lampreys. Each effort failed. “I suspect that the lamprey will be with us like fleas on a dog from now on,” said Gerald Cooper of the Michigan Department of Conservation in 1954.

At what is currently the US Geological Survey’s Hammond Bay Biological Station, scientists toiled to find a chemical solution. In 1956, they finally lucked out with the 5,209th formula they tested: 3-trifluoromethyl-4-nitrophenol, or TFM. To the researchers’ excitement, TFM could annihilate lamprey larvae while sparing most native biota. Two years later, this novel lampricide was pumped into Michigan’s Mosquito River.

Within 20 years, TFM proved a formidable weapon. It was especially effective when coupled with the abundant dams in the region, which blocked off more than half of the sea lampreys’ potential spawning habitat. By 1978 the number of spawning sea lampreys in Lake Superior had dropped 92 percent. In the Great Lakes overall, the lamprey population has plummeted from 2 million at its peak in the 1950s to a few hundred thousand today.

The population continues to be kept within limits by this double-punch of dams and lampricides. But these techniques are increasingly at risk of failure. One potential threat to containment is that the dams that corral lampreys into a manageable area are falling into disrepair. This isn’t unique to the Great Lakes—most of the country’s approximately 90,000 dams are more than half a century old. In 2020, heavy rains in Michigan caused dam breakages, leading to the evacuation of 11,000 residents and $245 million in damages. Due to cost as well as ecological damage, it’s unlikely that the US will continue to invest in this aging infrastructure; instead, as dams crumble, they tend to be removed altogether.

Lampricides are not a perfect conservation tool, either. They may not even be sustainable. At a cost of $3 million a year, the method isn’t cheap, and there are only two suppliers of TFM in the world, making stores uniquely vulnerable. As with most pesticides, there is a risk that the lamprey could evolve resistance. More immediately, though, lampricides are harmful to some animals, including juvenile lake sturgeon, as well as the Great Lakes’ four native lamprey species, which lack the ability to detoxify the chemical. “It really is a phenomenally good tool,” Gaden says. “But if there is an alternative to a pesticide, we’d like to use it.”

Many conservationists, including Griffin, see complete eradication as an ideal but unreachable goal. So far this year, lampricides have helped eliminate more than 5 million sea lampreys from the Great Lakes, according to a count on the Great Lakes Fishery Commission website. But a single gravid female can contain up to 120,000 eggs, of which several thousand offspring typically survive to adulthood. Such high fecundity means that control measures with even a 98 percent success rate leave enough lampreys to reestablish a robust new generation. Every year, then, humans wage the same war. “They’re wily. They’re slippery,” Gaden says. “They’ll find a way.”

Lampreys overcoming human hurdles, however, is exactly what a different group of scientists across the ocean are hoping for.

In Western Europe, the sea lamprey has none of the easy abundance of its cousins in the Great Lakes. Instead, the species is in distress; it is listed as anything from near threatened to critically endangered, having been hammered by poor water quality, damming, rising temperatures, habitat loss, and likely overconsumption. For lamprey populations in Spain and Portugal, just 20 percent of historically suitable habitat remains. “They are animals that are in danger,” says Philippe Janvier, an emeritus paleontologist with the Museum National de l’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. “Maybe soon we’ll just have the fossils.”

In Portugal, Spain, and France, sea lampreys, far from being reviled, are a cultural treasure. To ancient European elites, sea lamprey was a delicacy, with a scallop-like texture and an earthy taste. Julius Caesar rewarded his men with lampreys at banquets to celebrate victories. In ancient Rome they were a symbol of ostentation that could fetch 20 gold coins for 100 fish. Legend has it that in 1135, King Henry I lethally overdosed from a “surfeit of lampreys.” The festive tradition of eating lamprey has continued until today, though it is hampered by the lampreys’ vanishing numbers; Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee earlier this year was the first to not serve lamprey pie. For her 2012 Diamond Jubilee, lampreys were already scarce enough in Europe that the queen’s were sourced from the Great Lakes. (The high mercury levels of the US fish prevent their import to Europe for broader consumption.)

Pedro Almeida, a lamprey conservationist at the Universidade de Évora in Portugal, is looking for tools to grow lamprey populations rather than suppress them. Ironically, the eradication work of researchers across the pond helps his mission. Each group of researchers endeavors to know lamprey biology more precisely in order to control, or to grow, their respective populations in the Great Lakes and in Western Europe. “We need to look at conservation and control as two sides of the same coin,” says Margaret Docker, a lamprey biologist at the University of Manitoba.

Knowing the intimate workings of lampreys helps researchers develop tools to exploit their biology. A lot of lamprey research, for instance, is dedicated to their show-stealing sniffers, which follow minuscule quantities of pheromones to spawning waters. (“They’re pretty much one big nostril,” Docker says.) Scott and another lamprey specialist at MSU are trying to make a key sex pheromone undetectable to the lampreys in an effort to disrupt their reproduction.

Griffin’s experiment in the White River, also targeting the lamprey’s nose, tested a chemical barrier called “alarm cue”—a milky extract of dead lampreys that live lampreys avoid—to manipulate the lampreys’ movements. In lab settings, the extract makes lampreys thrash and even leap into the air to flee. By pumping the alarm cue into the river, Griffin hopes to be able to direct lampreys away from spawning habitats, coerce them into narrow stretches of river, or push them into traps.

Researchers are also trying to manipulate the lamprey’s infamous mouth. Other MSU researchers working at the Hammond Bay Biological Station are testing a gridwork of copper wires that, when a lamprey latches on, maps its mouth shape and suctioning patterns. Using machine-learning algorithms based on those patterns, scientists hope to create a device that can identify lampreys by their suckers. They envision a selective fish passage that recognizes and then blocks, traps, or kills lampreys while allowing all other fish to be shuttled upstream—perhaps with a modified version of the evocatively named salmon cannon.

Down the line, gene editing could open a new avenue for messing with lampreys’ sex lives. CRISPR-Cas9, for example, could genetically sterilize males or cheaply boost the number of lampreys of either sex, making the population too lopsided for effective mating. This technology has promise, though there are a few hurdles. To properly assess the potential impact of genetic alterations, researchers will need access to a reliable supply of lamprey embryos—which, being small and fragile, are costly to collect from local rivers. In order to deploy high-tech genomic weaponry, scientists will first have to accomplish something that no one has yet been able to do: complete the animal’s complex and migration-driven life cycle in the lab.

In Michigan’s Ocqueoc River, Nick Johnson, Hammond Bay’s acting director, stood thigh-deep in the clear water and pointed to the pebble- and mussel-shell-littered bottom. At first it was not obvious what he was gesturing toward, but after a moment a pair of lampreys, engaged in an intimate act, came into view.

Johnson reached his hand down and picked up the mottled golden-brown female, plump with tiny sesame-seed-like eggs. Surprisingly, she didn’t retreat; breeding marks the final chapter in a lamprey’s life cycle, so she had lost either the instinct or the energy to flee. Johnson gently pushed her underbelly, easily exposing her brood.

There was a magic in witnessing this lamprey, a graceful and well-adapted animal, completing her years on earth with one last act. The species has wreaked economic and ecological havoc in the Great Lakes for decades, but up close, tending to their nests, the interlocked lampreys looked gentle and serene.

Earlier that day, in the nearby Pigeon River, Johnson had demonstrated how the lamprey’s notorious blood-lusting mouth might be less villainous than we imagine. He reached into a trap in the rippling waters and pulled a large lamprey out, then placed it on his bare hand. The fish latched on with a suction, not a bite, its toothy mouth pulling with a force roughly equivalent to a vacuum cleaner. Some people have likened the prickly feeling on the skin to getting a tattoo; others, including one of the authors of this story, received a mark like a braces-lined hickey.

Like this, in its preferred riverine breeding habitat, it is harder to see the species as entirely bad. Where humans encounter an animal shapes our relationship to it. This conundrum is not limited to the sea lamprey. A variety of organisms—from sheep to pythons, carnivorous plants and parakeets—exist as both invaders and imperiled, cast in human eyes as villains or victims, depending on who you’re talking to and where you are in the world.

Climate change will undoubtedly confound efforts to conserve or conquer the sea lamprey. In the Great Lakes, some evidence suggests that warmer waters will speed up lamprey life cycles, making the use of lampricide more frequent and more costly. Lampreys might become bigger, capable of laying more eggs. Extreme storms could increase dam failures, opening up new habitats. And rising temperatures might encourage pesticide resistance while coaxing the species northward, into Lake Superior, which has thus far avoided an all-out infestation.

In southwestern Europe, climate change may have the opposite effect. Warming is expected to increase the occurrence of 100-year droughts that could dry out critical lamprey spawning runs. The supply of fish that feed juvenile lampreys could dwindle. Lampreys may already be abandoning the Iberian peninsula for warming Scandinavian and Icelandic watersheds.

Ultimately, humans on both sides of the Atlantic will continue their push and pull with the sea lampreys. “There’s no unaltered square inch on the planet,” Michael Wagner, a fish ecologist at MSU, says. “Maintenance is what we’re in for the rest of our lives.”

John Hume, one of the researchers in Michigan, accepts this paradox more easily than others. In Scotland, Hume’s home country, sea lampreys are the rarest of all native lamprey species, having been spotted in just a few dozen rivers. Though his current work largely aims to eradicate them from the Great Lakes, Hume enjoys every aspect of the lamprey. They are fascinating models of ancient evolution; they are formidable invaders; they are culinary treats. Wherever in the world he happens to be, looking at a lamprey recalls to him the childlike wonder he felt while flipping over rocks and logs to discover what’s hidden underneath. “When I see a lamprey in the river,” Hume says, “it just feels right.”

The Double Life of an American Lake Monster

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Google has apologised for a software update issue that caused a major international outage on Tuesday.

A spokesperson for the company said the team had “worked quickly” to address the fault and services were back running as normal.

“We’re aware of a software update issue that occurred late this afternoon Pacific Time and briefly affected availability of Google search and Maps,” they said.

“We apologise for the inconvenience. We worked to quickly address the issue and our services are now back online.”

The outage was quickly reported by technology platforms.

The realtime online platform Downdetector reported users had registered problems with Google explorer, the world’s dominant search engine from 2.12am BST (9.12pm EST, 11.12AM AEST.

As of 11.38AM, there had been 4,113 confirmed reports of Google outages.

User reports indicate Google is having problems since 9:12 PM EDT. https://t.co/MK35emuk7T RT if you're also having problems #Googledown

 — Downdetector (@downdetector) August 9, 2022

Users said sister platforms Gmail, Google maps and Google images were also experiencing problems. Both rely on Google’s search engine to operate.

Hi Amanda. The Google Workspace Status dashboard (https://t.co/hWKKeG70F3) doesn't show any outages. Could you tell us more about what seems to be happening with your Gmail address? We'd be happy to help.

 — Gmail (@gmail) August 9, 2022

Network intelligence company ThousandEyes Inc reported Google outages were affecting at least 1,338 servers globally across more than 40 countries including the United States, Australia, South Africa, Kenya, Israel, parts of South America, Europe and Asia including China and Japan.

The first outage reported on ThousandEyes lasted approximately 34 minutes before a second blip hit at around 12pm. It affected a smaller amount of servers and took around seven minutes to resolve.

Users attempting to use the search engine were met with a 502 or 500 error.

“The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request,” one error page read.

“Please try again in 30 seconds.”

Users took to Twitter to express their confusion, reverting to alternate search engines including Bing and DuckDuckGo to surf the web.

Never experienced a Google search outage before… 🤯 pic.twitter.com/5hksKw7hJp

 — Rachael Piotrowski (@RachaelPiotPR) August 9, 2022

Google doesn’t release exact traffic numbers however it is the most visited website on the net, receiving more than 80 billion visits per month.

Google is experiencing an outage so I am literally on bing dot com.

 — Jesslyn 🇮🇩 (@jtannady) August 9, 2022

Source

Per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a large family of human-made chemicals that don’t occur in nature. They are known as ‘forever chemicals’ because they don’t break down in the environment.

They have non-stick or stain repellent properties so can be found in household items like food packaging, electronics, cosmetics and cookware.

But now researchers at the University of Stockholm have found them in rainwater in most locations on the planet - including Antarctica. There is no safe space to escape them.

Rainwater everywhere is unsafe to drink

Safe guideline levels for some of these forever chemicals have dropped dramatically over the last two decades due to new insights into their toxicity.

“There has been an astounding decline in guideline values for PFAS in drinking water in the last 20 years,” says Ian Cousins, lead author of the study and professor at the Department of Environmental Science, Stockholm University.

For one well-known substance, the “cancer-causing perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA)”, water guideline values have declined by 37.5 million times in the US.

Based on the latest US guidelines for PFOA in drinking water, rainwater everywhere would be judged unsafe to drink.

- Ian Cousins -

Lead author of the study

“Based on the latest US guidelines for PFOA in drinking water, rainwater everywhere would be judged unsafe to drink,” he says.

"Although in the industrial world we don’t often drink rainwater, many people around the world expect it to be safe to drink and it supplies many of our drinking water sources.”

What risk do ‘forever chemicals’ pose to our health?

The health risks of being exposed to these substances have been researched widely. Scientists say that they could be linked to fertility problems, increased risk of cancer and developmental delays in children.

But others say that no cause and effect can be proven between these chemicals and poor health.

Though we don't usually drink rainwater it does feed the water sources we rely on.  Pixabay

Despite this, and as a result of this new research, some are calling for tighter restrictions on PFAS.

“It cannot be that some few benefit economically while polluting the drinking water for millions of others, and causing serious health problems,” says Dr Jane Muncke, managing director of the Food Packing Foundation in Zurich who wasn’t involved in the study.

“The vast amounts that it will cost to reduce PFAS in drinking water to levels that are safe, based on current scientific understanding, need to be paid by the industry producing and using these toxic chemicals.”

The time to act, she says, is now.

Source

Tiredness is subjective; what's normal for one person won't be for the next. Many people see their general practitioners (GPs) reporting tiredness (a recent study in Ireland found that it was present in 25% of patients).

As a GP, my first question to someone who feels tired is: "how well can you function?"

If tiredness is interfering with your everyday life and your ability to do what you like to do, it should be explored further.

Some common causes of persistent tiredness

Poor sleep is an obvious and very common cause of tiredness. Often patients tell me "Oh, lack of sleep is not the cause, I sleep fine, possibly too much!" But on questioning they admit they don't wake up feeling refreshed.

That's a bit of a giveaway because it means their sleep quality is poor, even if the quantity seems enough. They could be suffering from sleep apnea, where breathing stops and starts while a person is asleep. Apnea can lead to serious long-term health problems, so it's worth investigating.

Alcohol can also wreak havoc on a person's sleep quality and they wake feeling unrefreshed.

Another common cause of tiredness is depression—and don't forget, someone can be depressed without feeling they have low mood. For example, they may feel irritable or frustrated, or struggle to concentrate. This is concerning, because such patients may fly under the radar and not realize this is actually depression. Unexplained tiredness may be the predominant symptom of depression, with other symptoms only coming to light with careful questioning.

Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) is a serious long-term illness that, among other symptoms, causes people to feel extreme fatigue—well beyond the range of "normal" tiredness. It can begin with patients noticing a degree or type of tiredness different from their past experience, and can be difficult to diagnose in the early stages.

There are other potential causes of tiredness—problems such as low iron, thyroid disease, diabetes, kidney disease, heart disease and many more. Treatment for these can alleviate the tiredness too.

Tiredness also accompanies many illnesses, but should not persist after recovery.

The take-home message is this: if tiredness is interfering with your life, there are many possible causes and it's worth speaking to a GP about it.

What does 'interfering with life' actually look like?

Screening tools for a concerning level of tiredness include the Epworth Sleepiness Scale and the STOP-BANG score. You can do both tests at home and take the results to your GP.

But even if you have normal scores, your tiredness is worth investigating if you:

•  feel too tired to exercise (this can be a vicious cycle because regular exercise can actually give you more energy—however, it can be risky for people with ME/CFS to exercise, so caution is required for these patients)

•  feel too tired to go out, see friends or do activities you once enjoyed

•  hit the alarm snooze button a lot because you don't wake feeling refreshed

•  doze off in front of the TV regularly

•  spend the whole day wishing you could go back to bed.

If, along with tiredness, you also have any of the following "red flags," it is vital you see a GP sooner rather than later: unexplained weight loss, shortness of breath, recurrent fevers, bleeding from your bowels or gums, swollen and sore joints, or other new symptoms concerning you.

I sometimes get asked if wanting an afternoon nap is a red flag. That's a tricky one; a late afternoon energy slump is pretty normal physiologically (we have whole cultures built around the idea of a siesta, and I often wish Australia was more open to the idea!).

And, of course, many of us lead busy lives and are subject to crushing expectations around work, study and parenting. Tiredness may not always be sign of a physical health problem, but rather that the balance between work and rest is not right.

OK, I'm starting to realize my tiredness might be a problem. What now?

Talk to your doctor. What happens next depends on the individual and unique factors at play.

Some people need investigating immediately if possible serious underlying causes are suspected.

However, there are often obvious ways to address lifestyle factors, and we'd start there. Is alcohol or caffeine interfering with your sleep? Do you have good sleep hygiene habits? Is your exercise level appropriate and your diet not too high in sugar?

After we've tackled lifestyle factors, we can look at whether to investigate for health conditions that might be contributing to the tiredness.

What about post-COVID fatigue?

As I have written before, fatigue is about more than feeling just tired: "Tiredness can get better with enough rest, while fatigue persists even if someone is sleeping and resting more than ever."

If you're especially concerned about fatigue after recovering from COVID and are worried about long COVID, definitely talk to a doctor.

The factors at play are complex and unique to the individual, so a good doctor can help you work out when tiredness has crossed over into true fatigue.
 

Source

More than 40,000 users, including in New York City and Denver, Colorado, reported disruptions when trying to use Google's services, particularly the maps and search engine.

After around two hours, reports of the outage began tapering, but a small number of users continued to report trouble accessing Google's cloud and calendar functions, according to Downdetector.

"We're aware of a software update issue that occurred late this afternoon Pacific Time and briefly affected availability of Google Search and Maps, and we apologize for the inconvenience," a Google spokesperson said.

"We worked to quickly address the issue and our services are now back online."

On Twitter, some users posted screenshots of the 500 error message they received while trying to use Google, which said the server had "encountered an error and could not complete your request."

Source

A Twitter account that claims to monitor local police chatter on the radio has stated that multiple people have been injured:

 Large Electrical Explosion/No fire
 10410 Bunge Ave/Google Plant
 Responding: E41, M3 Extra squad M6
 Lifenet on air-standby
 Multiple people injured, several burn patients
 - One has a lower torso injury
 - An other has burns to face left arm and thigh
 

— Council Bluffs Scanner (@CBScanner) August 8, 2022

According to local news site Omaha World-Herald, two people were transported to Nebraska Medical Center by ambulance, while another with critical injuries was flown by helicopter.

Local fire authorities are still looking into the issue, although Jim Wood, the assistant chief of the Council Bluffs Fire Department, has told the publication that it “was definitely some sort of electrical issue.”

Downdetector registered a surge in outages for Google services around the time of this event, with over 30,000 user reports. The Google services impacted include Search, Maps, and YouTube. That said, the affected services appear to have been restored now.

Google is yet to release a statement on the matter and whether the disruptions were related to this explosive incident.

Source: Omaha World-Herald via TechRadar

Source

Temperatures in the country have been extremely high during summer, with the country experiencing wildfires throughout July.

July was France's driest month in more than 60 years, according to the national weather service Meteo-France.

The dry weather is forecast to continue over the next few weeks.

This sign is warning people of the risks of fire

The small amount of rain has badly impacted food crops, with farmers warning that there might be less food available.

According to France's Agriculture Ministry, the amount of corn crop the country produces could drop by 19%.

This is a big concern for the French government, as if there is less food for people to eat, the price of food might go up as a result.

This river is very low because of a lack of rainfall

The French government has now set up a crisis team to try to manage the water shortage.

Trucks are now transporting water to the towns that are most in need and 93 regions in France have been asked to use less water to help the situation.

Source

Jumping spiders may experience something like REM sleep

The Democrats’ new climate bill, which was passed by the US Senate on Sunday, has been described as “transformative” and “game-changing.” But perhaps the most apt word is “shocking”—in a good way, for once. According to analysis after analysis, it’s become clear that this is what the United States needs to make good on promises to fight climate change. For climate scientists long accustomed to shouting into the wind—or at least their Twitter feeds—it’s something to celebrate. “We’re so pumped about this bill,” says Morgan Rote, director of US climate at the Environmental Defense Fund.

In a bill as sprawling as this one, compromises will always be necessary. Provisions for new oil and gas leases are the obvious doozy, slotted in to appease Senator Joe Manchin (D- West Virginia). So are potential compromises on environmental permitting, which include ample deference to oil and gas pipelines. But perhaps nothing is as confusing—or as potentially far-reaching and long-lasting—as the bill’s generous incentives for “clean” hydrogen. If this bill allows more fossil fuel development, it’s with the tacit hope that the industry is facing an inevitable decline. The theory is that it’ll kick the bucket anyway as demand for oil and gas withers, outmoded and outcompeted by cleaner sources of energy. Hydrogen? It’s here to stay.

That push isn’t new, exactly. The provisions, which are modeled after those that helped kickstart solar investment decades ago, build on other recent efforts, like an $8 billion investment in the Biden administration’s 2021 infrastructure bill to build Hydrogen Hubs across the country that can serve as epicenters of the fuel’s production and distribution. Those were widely derided as potential “bridges to nowhere,” without incentives that would ramp up hydrogen supply and demand. This bill has them, with production tax credits that get more generous depending on how “clean” the hydrogen is.

Energy experts often use a rainbow full of buzzwords to describe the relative virtues of these hydrogen-making processes. First there’s “gray” hydrogen, the dominant method of production today, which combines methane and water vapor through a process called “steam reforming.” In the process, waste carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere.

Next comes “blue” hydrogen, which is the same thing, except it involves capturing some of that CO2 and burying it underground. Other processes involve splitting apart water molecules using electricity, which is known as electrolysis. It’s “green” when that electricity is produced with renewable energy and pink when it’s nuclear (a potential lifeline for struggling plants). And there’s turquoise, yellow, and brown, too—but let’s not belabor the point.

The bill is agnostic when it comes to any specific method (or color code) and instead sets a sliding scale of incentives based on the lifecycle warming effects of producing the fuel. The cutoff for those benefits is set at an equivalent to the release of 4 kilograms of carbon dioxide—somewhere in the “blue” hydrogen category. Those incentives increase as the amount of CO2-equivalent emissions approaches zero, something that is only likely to be achieved using electrolysis with low-carbon electricity sources.

So how “clean” is this range of options? “Clean compared to what?” asks Arvind Ravikumar, an energy policy researcher at the University of Texas at Austin. It’s cleaner, for the most part, than burning fossil fuels directly. But it’s dirtier than a lot of other ways to produce energy, like wind and solar. And the definition of “clean” differs depending on which federal laws you consult. “Right now it’s a completely meaningless term,” says Emily Grubert, who studies sustainable energy policy at the University of Notre Dame.

Seen one way, the definition in the bill is a big improvement for US policy. Past legislation, like the infrastructure bill, only covered the process of making the hydrogen itself, ignoring one of the big reasons current “gray” and “blue” hydrogen methods are so dirty: their reliance on a natural gas system that leaks vast amounts of methane into the air. These leaks, which occur at every stage of the natural gas lifecycle—from the extraction well pads to the pipes running through suburban homes—have historically been poorly monitored and result in sharp underestimates of the fuel’s planet-warming effects.

The new hydrogen incentives pair well with new rules in the Inflation Reduction Act aimed at forcing the natural gas industry to clean up its act, says Ravikumar. The proposal includes penalties for producers that fail to plug up methane leaks. According to Ravikumar’s modeling, if the industry can drive leaks down to the numbers that avoid penalties—and crucially, be held to standards with enhanced monitoring and enforcement, which the bill also provides for—then the overall lifecycle emissions of blue hydrogen production would be well on its way to 4 kilograms. All it would take to get there is a moderately high rate of carbon capture and storage.

OK, so does that make hydrogen “clean”? Still depends. “I would consider that low-carbon today,” Ravikumar says, noting that 4 kilograms of CO2 is somewhere between a quarter and a third of the amount produced by the current “gray” hydrogen processes. The challenge is projecting into the future. “If you’re asking the same questions 30 years from now, maybe that isn’t low-carbon any longer,” he adds.

To Grubert, while specific numbers, like the 4-kilogram cutoff, may appear to offer a clear definition, it's difficult to hold companies accountable for lifecycle emissions. She prefers a definition of “clean” that’s rooted in specific production methods–ideally electrolysis, rather than natural gas. Even if the electricity powering electrolysis isn’t generated through totally clean methods now, what’s important is that it has a “plausible path” to zero emissions because the grid is getting greener every day. Relying on systems that produce natural gas offers no such path. “Investing in a bunch of infrastructure that doesn’t have a path to zero is a problem,” she says.

How this plays out will depend on how large the hydrogen economy gets. There is wide agreement that the fuel is a great tool for cleaning up parts of the economy that are the hardest to decarbonize, such as long-haul flying, which is more amenable to jet fuel than battery power, or steel production, which requires firing furnaces up to many thousands of degrees. This is what Ilissa Ocko, a senior climate scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund, calls the “no regrets” category. Ideally, that hydrogen would be produced with electrolysis. That’s expensive, but it can be worth the cost to decarbonize really tough industries.

Others have a more wide-ranging vision that would involve using hydrogen to do things like power cars or heat homes. “This is an all-of-the-above fuel,” Manchin said last year at a conference touting plans to produce “clean” (that word again) hydrogen from Appalachian natural gas. But critics argue hydrogen isn’t the most obvious candidate for those kinds of jobs. Increasingly cheap and powerful batteries and solar panels make electrifying homes and vehicles a more attractive option.

Ocko points to another problem: Even if hydrogen is produced in a clean way, it can still warm the planet. “Hydrogen is the tiniest molecule in existence,” she says—which makes it extraordinarily good at escaping from the pipes that carry it. There’s been little research or monitoring of these leaks, but a picture is emerging that shows when hydrogen gas is released into the air, it reacts with hydroxyl radicals—pairs of hydrogen and oxygen atoms—to form water vapor. That prevents the hydroxyls from doing another job: destroying methane molecules. In an ironic twist, a gas produced by destroying methane ends up letting more methane stay in the atmosphere.

Assuming a 10 percent rate of leaks—high, but a reasonable estimate—Ocko’s team found that replacing fossil fuels even with so-called green hydrogen would only cut warming by half over the next 20 years, though the benefits increase over time to an 80 percent reduction by 2100. (That’s because the effects of hydrogen in the atmosphere are short-lived, while carbon emissions last for thousands of years and accumulate.)

“This is very parallel with what we saw with natural gas,” Ocko says. In both cases, researchers have been able to track big plumes, but not all the little leaks that add up to substantial climate-warming effects. The more peripheral the uses get—like using hydrogen to heat homes or fuel up the cars—the more difficult those leaks are to monitor. “We’re very worried about that,” she says. “There’s no way to make those systems tight.” The other issue is that there are no commercial sensors available to detect such small concentrations of hydrogen, measured in parts per billion.

But those tools are coming, Ocko adds. “The key difference between the natural gas story and where we are with hydrogen is that hydrogen is in its infancy,” she says. In the IRA, the incentives to spur hydrogen production are just one tool of many in the climate arsenal, with billions more going toward electrification and overhauling the grid. The coming years will be about pushing the right uses and reining in the negative consequences. “We want to get ahead of the problem,” she adds.

How Clean is ‘Clean’ Hydrogen?

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Now, world-first genetic research from the University of South Australia shows a direct link between low levels of vitamin D and high levels of inflammation, providing an important biomarker to identify people at higher risk of or severity of chronic illnesses with an inflammatory component.

The study examined the genetic data of 294 ,970 participants in the UK Biobank, using Mendelian randomization to show the association between vitamin D and C-reactive protein levels, an indicator of inflammation.

Lead researcher, UniSA's Dr. Ang Zhou, says the findings suggest that boosting vitamin D in people with a deficiency may reduce chronic inflammation.
"Inflammation is your body's way of protecting your tissues if you've been injured or have an infection," Dr. Zhou says.

"High levels of C-reactive protein are generated by the liver in response to inflammation, so when your body is experiencing chronic inflammation, it also shows higher levels of C-reactive protein.

"This study examined vitamin D and C-reactive proteins and found a one-way relationship between low levels of vitamin D and high levels of C-reactive protein, expressed as inflammation.

"Boosting vitamin D in people with deficiencies may reduce chronic inflammation, helping them avoid a number of related diseases."

Supported by the National Health and Medical Research Council and published in the International Journal of Epidemiology the study also raises the possibility that having adequate vitamin D concentrations may mitigate complications arising from obesity and reduce the risk or severity of chronic illnesses with an inflammatory component, such as CVDs, diabetes, and autoimmune diseases.

Senior investigator and Director of UniSA's Australian Centre for Precision Health, Professor Elina Hyppönen, says these results are important and provide an explanation for some of the controversies in reported associations with vitamin D.

"We have repeatedly seen evidence for health benefits for increasing vitamin D concentrations in individuals with very low levels, while for others, there appears to be little to no benefit." Prof Hyppönen says.

"These findings highlight the importance of avoiding clinical vitamin D deficiency, and provide further evidence for the wide-ranging effects of hormonal vitamin D."

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But how much is too much?

Caffeine, a natural stimulant, can be found in a variety of foods, such as coffee beans, tea leaves, cacao beans, guarana berries and yerba maté leaves. It also can be synthetically created and added to beverages such as soda and energy drinks. Research shows that about 90% of U.S. adults consume some form of caffeine every day.

One of the most popular ways people consume it is through coffee. Because of that, most caffeine research centers around this drink, said Dr. Greg Marcus, associate chief of cardiology for research and a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

"The literature on the whole shows that coffee consumption is generally not a detriment to health," he said. "But I am very reluctant to recommend anyone begin drinking coffee if they aren't otherwise doing so, or to increase consumption for any health benefit."

Studies have found caffeine can do both good and harm. People who regularly drink coffee may be less likely to develop chronic illnesses, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, Parkinson's disease and some cancers. A few studies suggest they are less likely to die from heart disease and other illnesses.

According to the Food and Drug Administration, as much as 400 milligrams of caffeine a day—equal to four or five cups of coffee—is considered safe for healthy adults. An 8-ounce cup of green or black tea has 30-50 mg of caffeine. Energy drinks may contain 40-250 mg for every 8 ounces, and a 12-ounce can of caffeinated soda contains 30-40 mg.

In moderate doses—up to two 8-ounce cups of coffee—caffeine can make people less tired and more alert. Some studies suggest it can reduce appetite and lower the risk for depression. But high doses—12 cups or more—can make people feel anxious, raise blood pressure and lead to heart palpitations and trouble sleeping. For people who consume caffeine regularly, stopping consumption abruptly can lead to symptoms of withdrawal, such as headaches, fatigue and depressed mood.

Determining how much is too much can be tough. A moderate amount of caffeine for one person may feel like a high dose for someone else. That's because some people metabolize caffeine faster than others, Marcus said. Factors such as how much someone weighs and what medications they take also can play a role. The bottom line is, caffeine affects everyone differently.

"The compound is complex, and we need to recognize that not only might there be benefits and harms, but this may vary from one person to another," Marcus said.

He and his colleagues recently completed one of the few randomized studies on caffeine consumption, which he presented at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions last year. The researchers asked participants to drink—or refrain from drinking—coffee for no more than two consecutive days each for two weeks.

The findings, which are considered preliminary until the full results are published in a peer-reviewed journal, showed that people were more physically active and slept less on days they drank coffee than on days they went without. They also had more irregular heartbeats from the lower chambers of the heart but fewer episodes of abnormally rapid heartbeats from the upper chambers.

Marcus said one limitation of the study was that people were starting and stopping caffeine consumption, which could be causing an exaggerated reaction in people who were used to drinking it every day. "The effects of caffeine are attenuated when you drink it regularly," he said. "The body adapts to that caffeine level. And more regular consumption of caffeine can speed up the metabolism."

People who metabolized caffeine faster had fewer problems sleeping than those whose bodies broke it down more slowly, he said.

In his cardiology practice, Marcus tells patients who are having trouble sleeping or experiencing abnormal heart rhythms to see what role caffeine might be playing. "I generally advise that it is reasonable for patients bothered by trouble sleeping or with palpitations to experiment with their caffeine consumption. Take some time off of caffeine to see if it makes a difference." But he does not give a blanket recommendation to avoid caffeine.

Marcus doesn't distinguish between the caffeine that people get from coffee versus hot or iced tea. "There may be health differences between the two, but they haven't been studied yet," he said.

He is less flexible about the consumption of energy drinks, which typically have a higher concentration of caffeine, as well as added sweeteners or carbohydrates and no evidence they provide any health benefits. Research has found energy drinks can cause abnormal electrical activity in the heart and higher blood pressure that persists for several hours.

"In general, I would caution against the use of energy drinks," Marcus said.

There are other ways to stay alert.

"The best strategies and overall most healthy strategies to boost alertness are long-term healthy habits," such as getting a good night's sleep and exercising regularly, Marcus said. He recommends people who have trouble staying awake consult a physician to see if they have sleep apnea or another sleep disorder.

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Scientists are now especially preoccupied with intractable tensions that have emerged from different measurements of two cosmic properties: The rate at which our universe is expanding, known as the Hubble constant (Ho), and a value called sigma-8 (σ8), which describes variations in how matter clumps together across large cosmic scales.

Efforts to measure these properties in space have puzzlingly returned different values. When the Hubble constant is measured based on observations of brilliant stars that act as yardsticks in space, its speed is clocked as about 50,400 miles per hour per million light years. However, when it is measured using the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the oldest light in the universe, it is 46,200 miles per hour per million light years. Meanwhile, the value of sigma-8 is different when measured using the CMB, compared to other observational techniques.

What this means, essentially, is that there may be a potentially serious flaw in our basic understanding of the universe and the fabric of reality. In response, scientists around the world are now trying to resolve these tensions.

Indeed, the incongruities have inspired a flurry of research into possible ways to solve the problems, especially the Hubble tension, which attracts much more attention. Cosmologists are constantly imagining possible universes with variable parameters in the hope that, one day, somehow, they might stumble on a model where it all adds up.

These efforts are fueled in part by an innate human need to comprehend our surroundings, but they also represent a broader quest to finetune, or ultimately replace, ΛCDM with an even more complete portrait of the universe.

“The [Hubble] discrepancy, and maybe even the sigma-8 discrepancy, might be our first hint at looking at these cracks in the ΛCDM model,” said Arsalan Adil, a PhD student in theoretical physics at the University of California, Davis, in a call. “But having said that, it’s proven to be so resilient that I’m not sure where the solution will come from.”

Adil and his colleagues recently took a new stab at “alleviating both these tensions simultaneously” using a theoretical quantum field called quintessence, according to the team’s study, which was posted last month on the preprint site arXiv and has not been peer-reviewed. Quintessence is one explanation for dark energy, the term for the unknown force driving the expansion of the universe, and has been invoked in previous research into these tensions.

The researchers cautioned that their findings fall short as an overarching solution, but said the approach “found interesting ramifications of adding a quintessence component to the Universe,” according to the study. Adil also noted that their specific model avoids the common outcome of relieving one tension only to exacerbate the other in what his professor, the UC Davis cosmologist Nemanja Kaloper, calls a game of “cosmological Whac-A-Mole.”

“You fix one problem and another problem pops up,” Adil said. “It actually speaks to the strength of experimentalists. We have such amazing data available today. The CMB is the first light, emitted 13 billion years ago, and we can make this elaborate map of this light and from that, infer these fine details—the fingerprints of our universe. There’s many many proposals out there that fix this [Hubble] discrepancy, but then they make the sigma-8 discrepancy much worse.”

Eleonora Di Valentino, a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield who led comprehensive reviews of these tensions—and has also explored quintessence as a solution—noted that the problem arises because “all the parameters are correlated.”

“Once you modify one of them, the others change accordingly,” Di Valentino said in an email. “In most of the models, increasing [Hubble] means increasing also [sigma-8] and vice versa. For this reason it is really difficult to find a model that behaves differently.”

While Adil and his colleagues produced a lower Hubble constant and a higher sigma-8 value, offering a promising glimpse of a solution, he said the new portrait didn’t cohere with other observational data.

“This paper, as many others, attempts to solve the tensions with an alternative scenario,” Di Valentino said of the study by Adil’s team. “Unfortunately at the moment none of the hundreds of models proposed is able to really solve them” with enough accuracy to “convince people.”

She added that gravitational waves, which are ripples in spacetime, may provide another independent measurement of the Hubble constant that could shed light on this long-standing problem. This new data will help scientists assess the possible pitfalls of ΛCDM, and yield insights into other major enigmas, such as the nature of dark energy and dark matter, an unidentified substance that makes up most matter in the universe.

“I consider the ΛCDM model a fitting model of the current cosmological probes, based on completely unknown quantities, like dark matter and dark energy,” Di Valentino said. “I consider the [Hubble] and [sigma-8] tensions a first indication that the ΛCDM model is good in first approximation, but it is not the final conclusive scenario.

To that point, these tensions are just two of the many glitches that scientists have found in the ΛCDM matrix. They represent some of the discrepancies that exist on large scales, a category that also includes head-scratchers like the strange absence of the element lithium in the observable universe, compared to expectations. Scientists have also identified a number of challenges to the model on smaller scales, such as the oddly synced-up orbits of satellite galaxies that orbit larger galaxies, which clashes with predictions of messier and more varied orbits.

These enigmas can be alternately frustrating and invigorating to cosmologists, but as Adil noted, they ultimately stem from the incredible advances in observational techniques that have enabled scientists to measure elusive cosmic properties with unprecedented accuracy.

Cosmologist Tanvi Karwal, postdoc at the Center for Particle Cosmology at the University of Pennsylvania who has puzzled over the Hubble and sigma-8 tensions and developed fascinating potential solutions to them, also emphasized this point.

“If there’s anything slightly off, we can see it now,” said Karwal in a call. “I hope that’s happening with these tensions, because it would be fantastic if we’re starting to get a hint of what dark matter and dark energy really are, and how the universe really functions. Are we actually right with ΛCDM? Are we way off?”

At the same time, she cautioned against framing the tensions solely as challenges to ΛCDM, because this doesn’t capture the full picture of the quest to comprehend the universe. After all, many models of the cosmos have come and gone, and ΛCDM is just the next one up to bat.

“We should always go in with the understanding that ΛCDM was never meant to be the long-term goal,” Karwal said. “This is the logical next step. Nothing is being destroyed. This is where we want to go next.”

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