The relationship between personality authenticity (the ability to be oneself) and the ability to forgive under various stress levels has been researched by Russian scientists. They discovered that those who experience chronic stress are more likely to forgive, but those who experience everyday stress are less likely to do so. Authenticity is promoted by the ability to forgive. Life coaching programs could take advantage of the study’s findings, which were published in the journal Clinical Psychology and Special Education.

Authenticity, or the ability “to be oneself” aids individuals in overcoming a variety of difficulties in life. The ability to forgive—overcoming feelings of offense by the person who inflicted damage or challenging life circumstances—also contributes to psychological well-being. Despite the significance of these phenomena for personality psychology research, little is known about how they are related. In contrast to the scarcity of studies on its connections to other positive personality phenomena, the capacity to forgive is just now being studied in Russian personality psychology.

No studies have looked at stress levels, forgivingness as a moral virtue, or genuineness. Professor Sofya Nartova-Bochaver of the Higher School of Economics (HSE) Faculty of Social Sciences collaborated with Violetta Park to investigate how stress affects one’s ability for forgiveness and authenticity. 140 young men and women between the ages of 16 and 40 were questioned by the researchers to determine the associations.

When it came to the amount of stress they were going through, the respondents belonged to various cohorts. They included the relatively affluent (students from a teacher training institution residing in Moscow), the cohort dealing with chronic stress brought on by a serious trauma with permanent effects (patients of a rehabilitation center with severe spinal injuries), and students from one of Moscow’s international classical universities who experienced everyday stress. In the study, standardized questionnaires were used.

According to the research, those who experience chronic stress exhibit the most authenticity. The results for patients who are generally well-off are average, whereas the results for the group who experienced daily stress were the lowest. The ability to forgive follows the same pattern.

Researchers explain the high inclination to forgive among representatives of the chronic stress cohort by the post-traumatic growth effect. Despite the fact that these people face very severe life conditions—they depend physically on other people; their normal bodily sensations have changed, and many capabilities have been lost—they are more likely to discover their real purpose in life and the most important values. They feel “more like themselves” and are able to disregard the multiple misfortunes and imperfections in life by means of forgiveness in order to move on.

Representatives of the “relatively well-off” cohort adapt easily to themselves and the world, have moderately high authenticity and a readiness to forgive other people, themselves, and the circumstances that life presents them with. The lowest ability to forgive and the lowest level of authenticity was seen in the everyday stress cohort. Likely due to the “invisibility” and “unimportance” of everyday troubles, these people are unaware of their everyday stress until their reaction to it peaks. This is why people who believe that they deal with routine pressure well are in fact exhausted and become too demanding to themselves and others.

The researchers also looked into how authenticity correlates with the ability to forgive depending on stress levels. These phenomena are generally positively correlated: people who tend to show mercy and forgive others or under unfavorable life conditions are more likely to feel the authenticity of their own personality; however, the strength of this correlation varies depending on stress.

In the chronic stress cohort, authenticity has almost no correlation with the ability to forgive; rather, it appears that they develop in parallel. For the relatively well-off and those under everyday stress, the forgiveness of oneself has become the most important condition to experience authenticity, but only in the everyday stress cohort have researchers detected a high importance of forgiving life circumstances and events. The more developed the ability to forgive oneself and life circumstances is, along with a greater readiness to forget about vengeance or restore justice, the truer, more real-life people live.

The scholars concluded that an ability to forgive really contributes to feeling authenticity, but at different levels of stress and under different types of stress the factors that cause it may change.

Sofya Nartova-Bochaver, Leading Research Fellow, School of Psychology states, “In rapidly changing, highly ambiguous conditions, it is extremely important to have a wide range of life skills and personality qualities, among which the ability to forgive is undoubtedly essential.”

Reference: “Authenticity and Dispositional Forgiveness at Different Stress Levels: A Preliminary Study” by Nartova-Bochaver S.K. and Park V.V., 13 March 2022, Clinical Psychology and Special Education.

DOI: 10.17759/cpse.2022110107

The study was funded by the Russian Science Foundation.

Source

While plastic litter on the beach is easy to spot, microplastics and 'forever chemicals' have leached far and wide without our barely noticing.

Both forms of pollution are now so ubiquitous in the environment, they are falling with the rain. But while the potential threat of microplastics is a regular point of discussion, some researchers argue the spread of other persistent synthetic compounds is comparatively overlooked.

A team of scientists in Europe are now worried we have crossed a critical line. They argue the presence of forever chemicals in our hydrosphere at values that exceed key guidelines means we have entered an unsafe operating space from which there is practically no return.

The warning comes on the heels of another cautionary paper, which argues the world has breached the safe planetary limit for synthetic chemicals.

Similar to microplastics, the potential health effects of long-lasting per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are still largely unknown.

While some types of PFAS are linked to potentially hazardous effects, like cancer, rigorous research is lagging behind and government safety thresholds in the United States are largely unenforced.

Researchers in Europe are concerned that if some forever chemicals do turn out to have toxic effects in the future, it will be too late.

A global analysis of PFAS levels over the past ten years has found PFAS levels in rainwater "often greatly exceed" US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) advisory levels, They also often exceed Denmark guidelines (which, after the US, is the most strict, globally).

The contamination is consistent even in remote areas like the Tibetan Plateau, where researchers found some chemicals exceed EPA guidelines by 14-fold.

"Based on the latest US guidelines for PFOA in drinking water, rainwater everywhere would be judged unsafe to drink," says environmental chemist Ian Cousins from Stockholm University in Sweden.

"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."

In Sweden, for instance, a national mapping of PFAS revealed nearly half of municipal drinking waters exceeded safety levels.

Nor is it just water that's impacted. PFAS are also leeching into soils, and this ground contamination regularly exceeds guideline values in Europe.

In fact, industry players in the Netherlands found it so difficult to meet past safety standards, the Dutch government simply relaxed its guidelines.

Meanwhile, in the US, PFAS guidelines are becoming stricter as scientists learn more about what these chemicals do to human health.

Just this year, the US EPA recently lowered its safety threshold for some types of PFAS because they turned out to be more dangerous than regulators thought.

In 2020, the Environmental Working Group, a government watchdog, warned that there were unsafe levels of PFAS in a lot of drinking water in the US.

This group, however, has a history of overstating the health impacts of certain chemicals, and, at the time, EWG's safety levels for PFAS in drinking water were much lower than the EPA's guidelines.

Not anymore. In 2020, the EPA health advisory for two classes of chemical, known as PFOA and PFOS, was 70 parts per trillion. Now, it's far, far lower, specifically 0.004 parts per trillion for PFOA and 0.02 parts per trillion for PFOS.

At these new, barely detectable levels, about half the US population would be exposed to potentially harmful chemicals based on EWG research.

"There has been an astounding decline in guideline values for PFAS in drinking water in the last 20 years," says Cousins.

"The drinking water guideline value for one well-known PFAS substance that is possibly carcinogenic has apparently declined by 37.5 million times in the US."

That's not a good sign. It suggests regulators have been overlooking or underappreciating the risks associated with some types of long-lasting manufactured chemicals, produced by the military and contained in products like Teflon, Scotchguard and foam.

"Irrespective of whether or not one agrees with our conclusion that the planetary boundary for PFAS is exceeded, it is nevertheless highly problematic that everywhere on Earth where humans reside recently proposed health advisories cannot be achieved without large investment in advanced cleanup technology," the authors conclude.

"Indeed, although PFOS and PFOA were phased out by one of the major manufacturers (3M) 20 years ago, it will take decades before levels in land-based water and precipitation approach low picogram per liter levels."

The recent analysis only considered four types of PFAS, which means these results are probably the tip of the iceberg. Hundreds of other persistent chemicals are also leaching into the environment at the same time, and most of their risks are unknown.

Federal regulations are simply not keeping pace with the scale of the problem.

The study was published in Environmental Science & Technology.

Source

Sir Nick Clegg, the former deputy prime minister turned president of global affairs at Facebook’s parent company, is making a partial return to Britain as he splits his time between King’s Cross and Silicon Valley.

It comes despite the Liberal Democrat having lambasted the country’s “un-British” decision to leave the European Union, predicting a post-Brexit UK would be “economically insecure”.

Sir Nick joins executives including Adam Mosseri, the globetrotting head of Instagram whose previous remote office locations include Hawaii and Cape Cod, as well as Alex Schulz, Meta’s chief of marketing.

While on the surface it may seem the lure of London – and Meta’s state-of-the-art offices – is stronger than Californian sunshine, recent retreats point to deeper turmoil inside Meta. Some suggest it lies in the current visions of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and his increasing unwillingness to be challenged.

On a staff call in June the chief executive reacted sharply when an employee asked if Meta Days, extra holidays introduced during the pandemic, would continue.

“Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here,” retorted the 38-year-old.

Reaction was mixed: a post on Workplace, the company’s internal noticeboard, reportedly quipped: “Who hired them?”

Meta is at pains to say its itinerant executives are merely visiting other countries, inferring their hearts and minds remain firmly rooted at its Menlo Park headquarters in California. While that may be true for some of the current crop, a slew of departures over the last couple of years raises the question of whether Zuckerberg is becoming increasingly isolated.

Earlier this year, Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s long-term chief technical officer, was superseded by Andrew “Boz” Bosworth as Meta’s chief technology officer. Bosworth’s latest public pronouncement was to declare that he was taking a month off work: “I tell my team often to take the time they need, as I think that has been a major key to my longevity in this industry.”

Meanwhile, Antonio Lucio, Schulz’s predecessor as marketing chief and a veteran of Hewlett Packard, walked out of Facebook to become a diversity consultant in mid-2020, saying the move would mark the “twilight” of his career.

And Fidji Simo, a 36-year-old female executive heading up the core Facebook app, left last year to run grocery delivery app Instacart. She told CNBC at the time that Zuckerberg had been “incredibly supportive” of her departure, adding: “Obviously sad that we couldn’t find something that aligned at Facebook, but also incredibly supportive of me taking on this role.”

Her departure sent ripples through the world of Big Tech, not least because of an anecdote doing the rounds about the background to her decision. The leadership of Instagram was said to be up for grabs, and Simo was summoned to Zuckerberg to describe her vision for growing the product. She didn’t get the job.

© Provided by The Telegraph

Adam Mosseri, chief of Instagram - Heathcliff O'Malley

Deprived of the natural next career step, Simo began looking outside Facebook; a board seat at Instacart followed by the offer of the chief executive’s chair won.

This increasing disconnect at Meta’s highest level comes as Zuckerberg’s ideas to keep his company at the top of the social media pile begin to look increasingly unsteady.

Facebook insiders hold mixed views on the executive flight, both through the medium of pink slips and through self-directed corporate postings to far flung locations.

According to one source, Sir Nick’s promotion in February to president of global affairs displayed that Zuckerberg’s trust in him had reached an all-time high: “it's pretty important that a figure like him has good connections in Europe.”

Good as those connections may be, what Meta needs is good ideas and they are in visibly short supply.

The metaverse – Facebook’s idea that the future of human interaction involves attending work meetings from your kitchen table while wearing a virtual reality headset – may have seemed like a natural extension of pandemic-driven remote working policies in 2021 when first announced. Current corporate interest in the metaverse concept is already waning, however, and the product is yet to launch.

Zuckerberg’s company is sensitive to comparisons between the metaverse concept and Second Life, a mid-2000s internet-based multiplayer game memorably dubbed “Sadville” by technology website The Register. Sadville was the metaverse of its day: corporations such as Coca-Cola and IBM set up virtual offices within the game, convinced they had found the future of commerce. Fifteen years later, few remember Sadville.

Meta’s latest financial results, meanwhile, indicate a brain drain at the top is beginning to make the company wobble: it posted its first ever revenue decline in July’s quarterly results. That slowing growth prompted Zuckerberg to start mulling Facebook’s first ever bond sale of up to $10bn (£8.2bn), reported Bloomberg.

Meanwhile, rivals are snapping at Meta’s heels as its chief ponders a future of virtual avatars. Chinese-owned TikTok’s rate of growth – fuelled by an exodus of users from Instagram – is the cited reason behind Mosseri relocating to London. An exodus of Instagram users to TikTok alarmed management at the photo sharing app to the point of attempting to switch tact to focus on video.

Yet Instagram boss Mosseri was forced into a partial retreat after earning the wrath of the Kardashians and influencer royalty, who complained it was becoming too video-centric.

However, the bigger question is why the changes were made at all. The media and ad industries still have raw memories of Facebook’s illusory “pivot to video” in the late 2010s, a pivot that turned out to be built on fake statistics from the site about the market impact of video advertising on its website.

Zuckerberg himself has become increasingly reliant on Sir Nick. But the question remains over whether he can live up to the task of keeping Meta in the black – and the walls from closing in on Zuckerberg.

Source

In the 1570s, when King Philip II of Spain sent emissaries to survey the flora and fauna of villages in central and southern Spain, he wasn’t thinking about ecological networks or extinction. He just wanted to know exactly what he owned. So, he asked at least two people in each village to describe the land, flora, and fauna of their territory to his surveyors. Now, 450 years later, a team of ecologists says the resulting answers to that survey have value as ecological surveys, taken before the word “ecology” entered the lexicon.

“I think it’s brilliant,” said Ana Rodrigues, a conservation biologist at the Center of Functional and Evolutionary Ecology in France who was not part of the research. “The survey was a historical document and now it becomes ecological data.”

The new work was done by Duarte Viana, an ecologist at the Doñana Biological Station (part of Spain’s National Research Council), and his colleagues.

They used the answers to the king’s questionnaires and transcriptions from historians to create a list of plants, animals, and their respective ecological niches, providing an environmental snapshot of Castile, a large kingdom that was in modern-day central and southern Spain, from nearly 500 years ago. In their work, published recently in Ecology, they found various animals that lived and roamed across central Spain are now restricted to the north of Spain, whereas some plants that are abundant in the country now weren’t around in the 16th century.

Other similar inventories based on historical documents do exist, Viana says. For instance, researchers in 2018 gathered ecological information from 400 years ago using a 17th century natural history text from Scotland, but that text was also a science text, Viana explains, making his team’s work—using a document that was not an obvious work of science—unique.

Viana’s team chose to analyze questionnaires from 1574, 1575, and 1578. King Philip II had villagers in the kingdom answer questions about plants and animals, how people made a living, available natural resources such as wood, and social organization, including the number of households in a given village.

The locals, who may not have been literate, likely told their responses to the surveyors, who wrote them down in old Castilian. Then, early 20th century historians translated these responses into modern Spanish. Viana and his team mostly used these transcriptions to make sense of the old documents.

The researchers focused their inventory on flora and fauna deemed important to be able to re-create 16th century habitats, such ase the Cantabrian brown bear, Iberian wolf, and the holm oak tree (Quercus ilex or Quercus rotundifolia), which are all considered national species in Spain. The team’s focus also included natural resources important in 16th century Spain, such as animals the villagers could hunt or fish and ones that had medicinal uses, such as leeches. They also considered dangerous species such as wolves and bears. In all, the team collected 7309 records of 75 wild plants, 89 wild animals, and 60 domesticated plants and animals.

They found that in the 16th century, the Cantabrian brown bear and Iberian wolf both used to live in central Spain, which has a different climate and habitat than their present-day habitat of northern Spain. The European eel (Anguilla anguilla) was distributed across all of Spain’s principal bodies of water, but construction projects in these bodies of water meant eels today have been trapped and confined to only Spain’s estuaries.

But other findings served to reinforce present-day knowledge. For example, some species thought to be native to Spain, such as freshwater crayfish, didn’t seem to be present in the 16th century, which is consistent with the fact that some species were only introduced in Spain much later.

Knowing the ecological history of different species could shape how conservationists approach their efforts, Viana said. The European eel, for example, is categorized as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species, whereas the Cantabrian brown bear is classified as vulnerable, so scientists may be able to use its historical whereabouts to increase protections.

Some animals never made it to modern day. Only two villages, for instance, reported seeing the zebro, an ancient wild “donkey horse” that had stripes similar to today’s zebras but gray hair reminiscent of donkeys and horses. When the team compared the mentions of zebros—which is also where modern day zebras get their name—in the 16th century questionnaires with mentions in historical documents from the 18th century, they realized the animal wasn’t mentioned in the later documents likely because it was going through its extinction at the time. “It was a live story of the extinction of that species,” Viana said.

María Portuondo, a retired historian of science at John Hopkins University who was not involved in the study, cautions that it’s hard to verify the authenticity of the responses in the questionnaires given the many steps to translation. Not only were the original responses translated before being written down, a Spanish overlord—a mayor, governor, or parish priest—likely also edited them, she said. And 20th century historians likely edited the responses yet again, as they translated and published more digestible versions of the answers of the questionnaire. “The Spanish translators, in their effort to make it intelligible in Spanish, might have translated the name as a wolf when it meant a panther,” Portuondo explained.

Viana acknowledges that even with the translations, it was “really difficult” in some cases to understand what the villagers were referring to, especially when they used region-specific names. To counter this, the researchers went through lists of synonyms and vernacular names of species to identify the plant or animal being referenced.

Portuondo says other historians who might hope to use the ecology inventory might run into similar issues. “So, let’s say you’ve never seen a mongoose, and somebody described it to you as a ‘ferret, but a little bigger.’ You’d get the picture,” Portuondo explained. “The challenge is that for modern-day biologists, it does matter whether the actual animal around 450 years ago was a ferret or a mongoose. That’s the challenge of using 450-year-old questionnaires!”

For Rodrigues, who specializes in conservation of biodiversity at large scales, this new study’s compilation of species offers a starting point from which she can study ecosystems over time. She added that this study can provide an idea of how nature actually was and not how we might have assumed it was in the 16th century.

This is the hope of the investigators behind the data set, that the inventory can help give scientists a broader picture of where species existed. By doing this study, Viana and his team were able to paint a picture of individual species in the past, but they hope, with time, to also get a sense of how different species coexisted. And perhaps, with better conservation efforts, some of those past relationships could be resurrected. “We can only imagine how the interaction between the major [animals] in the Iberian Peninsula could have been in the past. Will we witness it again?” Viana said.

Source

The research, published today in Nature Climate Change, shows changing water circulation in the Southern Ocean may be compromising the stability of the East Antarctic ice sheet. The ice sheet, about the size of the United States, is the largest in the world.

The changes in water circulation are caused by shifts in wind patterns, and linked to factors including climate change. The resulting warmer waters and sea-level rise may damage marine life and threaten human coastal settlements.

Our findings underscore the urgency of limiting global warming to below 1.5 ℃, to avert the most catastrophic climate harms.

Ice sheets and climate change

Ice sheets comprise glacial ice that has accumulated from precipitation over land. Where the sheets extend from the land and float on the ocean, they are known as ice shelves.

It's well known that the West Antarctic ice sheet is melting and contributing to sea-level rise. But until now, far less was known about its counterpart in the east.

Our research focused offshore on a region known as the Aurora Subglacial Basin in the Indian Ocean. This area of frozen sea ice forms part of the East Antarctic ice sheet.

How this basin will respond to climate change is one of the largest uncertainties in projections of sea-level rise this century. If the basin melted fully, global sea levels would rise by 5.1 meters.

Much of the basin is below sea level, making it particularly sensitive to ocean melting. That's because deep seawater requires lower temperatures to freeze than shallower seawater.

(NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio)

Above: A map of Antarctica seen from above, revealing the extent of the ice sheet.

What we found

We examined 90 years of oceanographic observations off the Aurora Subglacial Basin. We found unequivocal ocean warming at a rate of up to 2 ℃ to 3 ℃ since the earlier half of the 20th century. This equates to 0.1 ℃ to 0.4 ℃ per decade.

The warming trend has tripled since the 1990s, reaching a rate of 0.3 ℃ to 0.9 ℃ each decade.

So how is this warming linked to climate change? The answer relates to a belt of strong westerly winds over the Southern Ocean. Since the 1960s, these winds have been moving south towards Antarctica during years when the Southern Annular Mode, a climate driver, is in a positive phase.

The phenomenon has been partly attributed to increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. As a result, westerly winds are moving closer to Antarctica in summer, bringing warm water with them.

The East Antarctic ice sheet was once thought to be relatively stable and sheltered from warming oceans. That's in part because it's surrounded by very cold water known as "dense shelf water".

Part of our research focused on the Vanderford Glacier in East Antarctica. There, we observed the warm water replacing the colder dense shelf water.
The movement of warm waters towards East Antarctica is expected to worsen throughout the 21st century, further threatening the ice sheet's stability.

Why this matters to marine life

Previous work on the effects of climate change in the East Antarctic has generally assumed that warming first occurs in the ocean's surface layers. Our findings – that deeper water is warming first – suggests a need to re-think potential impacts on marine life.

Robust assessment work is required, including investment in monitoring and modeling that can link physical change to complex ecosystem responses. This should include the possible effects of very rapid change, known as tipping points, that may mean the ocean changes far more rapidly than marine life can adapt.

East Antarctic marine ecosystems are likely to be highly vulnerable to warming waters. Antarctic krill, for example, breed by sinking eggs to deep ocean depths. Warming of deeper waters may affect the development of eggs and larvae. This in turn would affect krill populations and dependent predators such as penguins, seals, and whales.

Limiting global warming below 1.5 ℃

We hope our results will inspire global efforts to limit global warming below 1.5 ℃. To achieve this, global greenhouse gas emissions need to fall by around 43 percent by 2030 and to near zero by 2050.

Warming above 1.5 ℃ greatly increases the risk of destabilizing the Antarctic ice sheet, leading to substantial sea-level rise.

But staying below 1.5 ℃ would keep sea-level rise to no more than an additional 0.5 meters by 2100. This would enable greater opportunities for people and ecosystems to adapt.

Source

How do we know this?

The research team tracked the driving records of more than 9,200 people who visited an emergency department for fainting (known in medical terms as syncope).

In the year following their emergency department visit, 9.2% of people with syncope were involved as a driver in a car crash. Among people who visited the emergency department for other reasons, 10.1% crashed in the following year. About 8.2% of drivers in the general public are involved in a crash per year.

Researchers concluded that, under current restrictions that prevent driving only for those with the highest risk of another faint, the risk of crashing a car was not higher in the year after syncope.

What about the first few weeks after a fainting spell?

Syncope patients did not exhibit increased crash risk during the first 30 days following their emergency department visit.

What does it all mean?

Syncope prompts about 1.3 million emergency department visits in the U.S. each year. The evidence shows there's no need to impose additional driving restrictions on people who have recently fainted. Doing so could unnecessarily harm them socially and financially.

However, fainting can sometimes be a sign of a serious medical issue such as a heart rhythm problem. Doctors can help identify serious medical problems and can provide patients with guidance on the risk of recurrence and on driving safety.

Source

Why? The flu season in Southern Hemisphere countries like Australia can often predict the potential for a similar experience in Northern Hemisphere countries.

"We watch all of the Southern Hemisphere countries very closely, hoping that we get some sort of insight, but it's not perfect by any means," Dr. Alicia Fry, chief of the Epidemiology and Prevention Branch of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told NBC News.

Australia's flu season had a big impact on children.

Children ages 5 to 9 had the highest flu rates, while those aged 4 and younger and teenagers were also hit hard.

"There are a lot of young kids who have not had flu at all over the past couple of years," Dr. James Cutrell, an infectious disease expert at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, told NBC News. "That's going to make them more susceptible to get it and then to spread it to other people."

Not only were the young the most vulnerable, but also Australia's flu season kicked off early.

"The earlier it starts, the worse it tends to be," Dr. Robert Citronberg, executive medical director of infectious disease and prevention for Advocate Aurora Health in Illinois, told NBC News.

That's because an early season can also be one that continues for more months, having more time to infect people. Between 9 million and 41 million Americans get the flu each year, according to the CDC. As many as 52,000 people die.

Though public health officials have warned since 2020 about the challenges of a bad flu season paired with the COVID-19 pandemic, that hasn't happened yet.

Cutrell said it isn't time to panic, but "it is time for people to prepare."

That includes flu shots, which in the United States will protect against four strains of flu, two each from influenza A and B. Immunity has waned these past two years with little flu circulating, NBC News reported.

Those vaccines should arrive at U.S. pharmacies and doctors' offices soon. Fry said the CDC recommends getting the shots in September or October. Flu shots can reduce the risk of flu severity and death.

"Flu is not completely preventable by the vaccine, but it's controllable," Citronberg said. "If we get a significantly fewer number of people getting vaccinated this year for flu, then it could really impact how many cases we have and the severity of those cases."

Then, "we're going to have our hands full," Citronberg noted.

Young children and pregnant women in their third trimesters should get their shots earliest.

"It's a good idea to get the vaccine before they deliver so that the baby gets some of the antibodies that Mom develops and the baby's protected," Fry said.

Babies can't get their own flu shots until they are 6 months old.

COVID-19 booster shots will also be important because protection against one viral infection can help protect against the other, Citronberg said.

"Once you have lung inflammation, you're more susceptible to other infections or pathogens," Citronberg explained.

Source

One of the world's most prominent and mission–critical uses of the blockchain - The Australian Securities Exchange's (ASX) project to replace its CHESS core trading systems with a distributed ledger – has struck further trouble.

As The Register has previously noted, the project commenced in 2017 but saw its go-live date pushed back from 2021 to April 2023, before the ASX warned that deadline would likely be missed.

Yesterday the bourse revealed "we do not expect that the go-live date for new CHESS could be before late 2024."

A statement [PDF] attributed the delay to analysis that revealed "more development is required than previously anticipated to meet ASX's scalability and resilience requirements for the application. This is contributing to delays to the delivery of the remaining technical components of the application."

The ASX has worked with an outfit called Digital Asset – a purveyor of the smart-contract language DAML – on the project.

The statement reveals that Digital Asset's work will be independently reviewed by Accenture, and "The review will also identify necessary actions for ASX to communicate a revised timetable to finish the project."

An update [PDF] sent to ASX stakeholders indicates that the organization's leadership believes "a fresh set of eyes" is needed to reassess the project.
That opinion comes from Helen Lofthouse, who started work as CEO and managing director at the ASX on August 1.

The stakeholder letter also reveals that project testing planned for September 2022 has been postponed.

The Register understands that the current version of CHESS is a COBOL application running on hardware powered by Intel's defunct Itanium architecture.

The planned version of CHESS uses the VMware Blockchain – a choice The Register understands was made because it's a fine distributed ledger and because the company's expertise in packaging and publishing applications made it ideal for the application's architecture of market participants being able to run their own CHESS nodes. The Register understands that Virtzilla's wares are not the source of the CHESS replacement's problems.

The ASX's 2017 decision to adopt blockchain was seen as a bold bet on the technology, and one that advocates hoped could provide a proof of concept that distributed ledgers could perform at scale in a very sensitive role.

With no go-live day in sight, and the project seemingly in considerable trouble, it may have become a cautionary tale. ®

Source

Beginning in the 1970s cosmologists started to uncover the structure of the universe writ large. They already knew that galaxies occasionally clump together into clusters, but over even larger distances, spanning 100 million light-years and more, they found superclusters. And in between those superclusters they saw something even more unexpected: vast regions devoid of galaxies, great and immense dark hollows. The first of these cosmic voids that cosmologists discovered was 65 million light-years across. No theoretical work had predicted their existence, and for years cosmologists thought they were creating patterns with their imaginations.

We now realize that the largest structures in the universe are not superclusters or any other agglomeration of matter. They are the voids: the negative spaces, the intergalactic Saharas.

I was introduced to voids by my mentor Ben Wandelt while I was in grad school. He was fascinated by them; they appeared too empty to be explained by standard cosmology. My graduate advisor, Paul Ricker, and I worked with Wandelt on this problem for a while. But like most cosmologists, even though I knew about the voids, I didn’t think much of them. I favored galaxies and clusters. Voids were nothing, after all.

 You could stretch 25 Milky Ways side-by-side in the gap between us and the nearest galaxy.

But after I got my Ph.D. I moved to Paris to join Wandelt for a postdoc position. Voids began to grow on me. I remember vividly the reactions we would get when we presented our preliminary work. Curiosity and interest, for sure, but also skepticism—not just the healthy skepticism needed for fruitful scientific progress, but the acidic scorn used to put junior scientists and their wayward ideas in their proper place. One time a prominent cosmologist—a senior, tenured professor—walked up to me in the hallway after I gave a talk at a conference, said simply “This will never work,” and turned around and walked away.

I didn’t mind the criticism because I knew something they didn’t. Cosmic voids are cosmology at its purest. They are simple. The complications of star formation and black holes don’t impact them because they don’t have any stars or black holes. They are basically big fossils from the earliest days of the universe and their shapes encode the evolution of the universe as a whole. If you want to understand some of the biggest puzzles in physical science, such as dark energy, you don’t want to look where the matter is, but where it isn’t.

Our most distant spacecraft, Voyager 1, has been traveling for over four decades and is now about 14.5 billion miles away from home. It is well and truly outside the boundaries of the solar system, and the average density within that space is a mere 10-15 grams per cubic centimeter. If that seems empty, just wait.

As we zoom out, we meet scattered stars, some of them associating with each other in clumps, others drifting alone. We see faint sketches of the great spiral arms of our galaxy, twisting pinwheels of gas and blue-bright stars, our own solar system tucked into a single spur of a much vaster arch. Our entire Milky Way galaxy is roughly 100,000 light-years across—a great, complicated metropolis of a few hundred billion stars. It has an average density of roughly 10-22 grams per cubic centimeter.

Beyond the warm confines of our galaxy sit the empty depths of intergalactic space, home to the occasional dwarf galaxy and the random flows of far-flung gas streams. The nearest major galaxy to our own, Andromeda, is 2.5 million light-years away. You could stretch 25 Milky Ways side-by-side in the gap between us.

COSMIC WEB: As matter clumped into filaments and formed galaxies, it left vast empty regions: the voids. This sequence of three images shows structure in cosmic gas in a volume about 300 million light-years on a side, at 1 billion years after the Big Bang (left), 3 billion years (middle), and today (today). It was generated by the Millennium Simulation Project, a massive computer simulation in the mid-2000s.

Image by Volker Springel / Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Garching.

Some galaxies lead solitary lives, and others assemble into groups and clusters of increasing size. As we continue to zoom out, entire galaxies, each one home to hundreds of billions of stars, appear as tiny motes of light adrift in an unlit ocean. The universe begins to look like a vast web, a network of long strings and tremendous walls, and between them the voids. We have a name for the nearby assortment of large-scale structures: Laniakea, the Hawaiian word for “bountiful heaven.” A knotted, twisted tangle of vines made of galaxies stretches for over 100 million light-years. At these distances the average density of matter approaches 10-29 grams per cubic centimeter.

And in those cavernous gaps between the structures, we find: almost nothing. There the density plunges to perhaps 10–30 grams per cubic centimeter. That is, to be sure, not entirely empty. Voids do contain a few dim, dwarf galaxies. Molecules of cold hydrogen and helium float among them, some blown out of their home galaxies, the rest left over from the Big Bang.

The nearest void to our Milky Way galaxy is the appropriately named Local Void, bordering our section of the universe and continuing on for almost 200 million light-years. The aptly named Giant Void is eight times wider. Voids comprise a tiny fraction of the mass in the cosmos, yet completely dominate its volume.

A cosmos that generates large-scale structures must, by its very nature, also produce the voids. The culprit is gravity: simple, persistent gravity.
 Once cosmologists realized this story of creation, they realized they must turn the tables.

Billions of years ago, when the entire volume of our observable universe, 90 billion-plus light-years across, was crammed into a volume smaller than an atom, the exotic high-temperature plasma that filled our cosmos was relatively uniform. There were no significant density contrasts, and really nothing significant at all. Cosmologists believe that at this time, our universe underwent a sudden, rapid expansion known as inflation. It enlarged microscopic quantum fluctuations into the seeds of all we see today.

From then, gravity worked in the shadows. Regions of ever-so-slightly higher density had a little more gravitational pull than their neighbors, which encouraged more material to flow into those dense pockets. With even more material, the gravitational pull grew stronger, building on itself in a feedback loop. Over hundreds of millions of years, it gave rise to stars, galaxies, clusters, and the majesty of the cosmic web.

But in a universe where the rich get richer, the poor must get poorer. As matter flowed into the dense regions that would light up with stars and activity, the cosmic voids, seeded in those very same humble epochs, grew to their present all-encompassing size.

Once cosmologists realized this story of creation and confirmed it with observations, they realized they must turn the tables.

The large-scale structure was not a question, but an answer. By measuring it, they could solve some of their other puzzles. The shape of the cosmic web is sensitive to the amount of regular and dark matter, the abundance of neutrinos, the presence of dark energy, and so on. So cosmologists sampled hundreds of thousands, then millions, of galaxies throughout the universe to map the large-scale structure in an attempt to quantify the basic ingredients of the cosmos.

Those surveys focused on what astronomers knew best: the bright objects. The cosmic voids were forgotten.

Those galaxy surveys have revealed ever-more precise estimates of the amount of dark matter in the universe. They have also provided independent evidence for the existence of dark energy, the mysterious substance that is driving the accelerated expansion of the universe.

But it hasn’t been easy. Galaxies and clusters are messy, complicated structures. The primordial density fluctuations have been swamped by generations of stars, supernovae, stellar winds, cosmic rays, magnetic fields, and all the wonderful astrophysics that makes life so interesting.

Teasing pristine, primordial cosmological information out of something as complicated as a galaxy or a cluster is next to impossible. Take a simple cosmological test developed by Charles Alcock and Bohdan Paczyński in 1979. If you scattered perfect spheres throughout the universe, from our point of view the spheres would appear to be elongated along our line of sight toward them—a slight stretch induced by the expansion of the universe. If you could measure that stretch as a function of distance, you could reconstruct the expansion history of the universe with incredible precision.

Clusters of galaxies are, for the most part, relatively spherical. They formed long ago and have since settled into equilibrium, balancing the motions of their own gas and galaxies against their gravitational pull. But trying to apply the Alcock-Paczyński test leads to failure. The motions of individual galaxies are hundreds of times larger than the effect of cosmological expansion, completely swamping it and rendering clusters useless.

 Cosmic voids are the largest and most ancient time capsules known to science.

But what of the voids? An individual void is anything but round; it occupies a random amount of volume in a wide variety of shapes. But we live in an isotropic universe: Our cosmos looks roughly the same, on average, no matter what direction we look. If we were to take a collection of voids, they should have random orientations, and if we were to find enough of them and stack them one on top of another, they should average out to form a sphere. If I give you enough scraps of randomly shaped paper and you stack them on top of each other, eventually you would build something round. Could the average void be good enough to teach us something about the universe?

This was what I worked on with Wandelt. It would consume three years of my research life. As more researchers and graduate students joined our team, I hit the road, living out of my backpack for weeks at a time, hopping from seminar to seminar and conference to conference, spreading what we were learning about cosmic voids and what they could teach us about the universe.

We learned that voids are amazingly simple. Unlike their cousins, the dense structures of the cosmos, they live relatively uncomplicated lives. They simply appear in the early universe and grow. When they do occasionally merge, it’s a brief affair: A wall of galaxies between two voids thins out, and two voids become one. Because of their simplicity, they remained relatively uncontaminated by astrophysical processes and the movements of individual galaxies. Within a couple years, we were able to realize the dream of Alcock and Paczyński, applying their test to real voids found in galaxy surveys and using the result to provide an independent measurement of the amount of dark matter and dark energy in the universe.

Because voids don’t change much through their lives, they retain a memory of the young universe. If you want to know what our universe was like billions of years ago, you can’t look into a galaxy or cluster—too much has changed. But a void? A void today is pretty much the same as a void billions of years ago. Voids are the largest and most ancient time capsules known to science.

When I say that voids are empty, I mean specifically that they are empty of matter. But that emptiness makes them full of something else: dark energy. Cosmologists aren’t sure what dark energy is; all we know is that it’s been causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate for the past 5 billion years. We believe that dark energy is somehow related to the vacuum of spacetime, a component of all the quantum fields that suffuse reality.

If you take a box and empty it of all the matter, you’re left with vacuum and the quantum vacuum fields that live in it. On a grander scale, the cosmic voids are brimming with quantum fields, including dark energy. You’ll never feel the effects of dark energy inside a solar system because the density of all the matter is more than enough to overwhelm the slight, subtle effects of dark energy. But out in the voids? It’s nothing but dark energy. Indeed, the cosmic voids are the places in our universe where the expansion is accelerating. It’s not happening in galaxies or clusters, but in the emptiness between them.
The lesson is clear: If you want to understand how dark energy works, you have to dive into the darkness.

Thanks to the dogged determination of my collaborators and other void-enthusiasts, voids have come out of the shadows. Every major upcoming galaxy survey now includes void science in their repertoire. Cosmologists are learning how to use voids to understand dark energy and dark matter, search for exotic fifth forces, dig into the conditions of the early cosmos, and more. Most recently, voids have provided the most powerful measurement of dark energy within the local universe, using simple analysis techniques developed by a handful of people, compared against the massive resources employed by giant collaborations to try to get the same information out of the bright structures.

No, we haven’t yet solved all the mysteries of the cosmos. But the answers to those questions are certainly waiting for us in the void.

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Previous research shows that conspiracy theories are frequently associated with poor health choices, decreased well-being, and the worsening of social relationships. Moreover, conspiracy beliefs may also harm society by decreasing public support for policy aimed at addressing genuine problems such as climate change, and the pandemic, and inducing violence and extremism in some cases. Yet, so many people believe in conspiracy theories, perhaps yourself included (?)

In a recent study published in Current Opinion In Psychology, Jan-Willem van Prooijen at Maastricht University, tries to provide an answer to this paradox: If conspiracy theories are mostly harmful, why then, do so many people still endorse them?

Jan-Willem’s argument is that although conspiracy beliefs do not reduce anxiety or help with social relationships, they do stimulate a sense of meaning and purpose in a way that is psychologically rewarding.

As he goes on to suggest, there are three main ways in which believing in conspiracy theories may bring psychological benefits:

1.  Conspiracy theories can help people defend a fragile ego by exaggerating the importance of themselves and their groups;
2.  Conspiracy theories can make people feel like legitimate actors by rationalizing their beliefs and behaviors;
3.  Believing in conspiracy theories entertains people by making them active participants in an exciting tale.

In essence, conspiracy theories have the capacity to fill perceivers’ worldviews with a gratifying sense of meaning and purpose.
What we do know for sure is that the earth is flat.

See the paper here or download the PDF for free

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In 1963, the mathematician Roy Kerr found a solution to Einstein’s equations that precisely described the space-time outside what we now call a rotating black hole. (The term wouldn’t be coined for a few more years.) In the nearly six decades since his achievement, researchers have tried to show that these so-called Kerr black holes are stable. What that means, explained Jérémie Szeftel, a mathematician at Sorbonne University, “is that if I start with something that looks like a Kerr black hole and give it a little bump” — by throwing some gravitational waves at it, for instance — “what you expect, far into the future, is that everything will settle down, and it will once again look exactly like a Kerr solution.”

The opposite situation — a mathematical instability — “would have posed a deep conundrum to theoretical physicists and would have suggested the need to modify, at some fundamental level, Einstein’s theory of gravitation,” said Thibault Damour, a physicist at the Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies in France.

In a 912-page paper posted online on May 30, Szeftel, Elena Giorgi of Columbia University and Sergiu Klainerman of Princeton University have proved that slowly rotating Kerr black holes are indeed stable. The work is the product of a multiyear effort. The entire proof — consisting of the new work, an 800-page paper by Klainerman and Szeftel from 2021, plus three background papers that established various mathematical tools — totals roughly 2,100 pages in all.

The new result “does indeed constitute a milestone in the mathematical development of general relativity,” said Demetrios Christodoulou, a mathematician at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich.

Shing-Tung Yau, an emeritus professor at Harvard University who recently moved to Tsinghua University, was similarly laudatory, calling the proof “the first major breakthrough” in this area of general relativity since the early 1990s. “It is a very tough problem,” he said. He did stress, however, that the new paper has not yet undergone peer review. But he called the 2021 paper, which has been approved for publication, both “complete and exciting.”

One reason the question of stability has remained open for so long is that most explicit solutions to Einstein’s equations, such as the one found by Kerr, are stationary, Giorgi said. “These formulas apply to black holes that are just sitting there and never change; those aren’t the black holes we see in nature.” To assess stability, researchers need to subject black holes to minor disturbances and then see what happens to the solutions that describe these objects as time moves forward.

For example, imagine sound waves hitting a wineglass. Almost always, the waves shake the glass a little bit, and then the system settles down. But if someone sings loudly enough and at a pitch that exactly matches the glass’s resonant frequency, the glass could shatter. Giorgi, Klainerman and Szeftel wondered whether a similar resonance-type phenomenon could happen when a black hole is struck by gravitational waves.

They considered several possible outcomes. A gravitational wave might, for instance, cross the event horizon of a Kerr black hole and enter the interior.

The black hole’s mass and rotation could be slightly altered, but the object would still be a black hole characterized by Kerr’s equations. Or the gravitational waves could swirl around the black hole before dissipating in the same way that most sound waves dissipate after encountering a wineglass.

Or they could combine to create havoc or, as Giorgi put it, “God knows what.” The gravitational waves might congregate outside a black hole’s event horizon and concentrate their energy to such an extent that a separate singularity would form. The space-time outside the black hole would then be so severely distorted that the Kerr solution would no longer prevail. This would be a dramatic sign of instability.

The three mathematicians relied on a strategy — called proof by contradiction — that had been previously employed in related work. The argument goes roughly like this: First, the researchers assume the opposite of what they’re trying to prove, namely that the solution does not exist forever — that there is, instead, a maximum time after which the Kerr solution breaks down. They then use some “mathematical trickery,” said Giorgi — an analysis of partial differential equations, which lie at the heart of general relativity — to extend the solution beyond the purported maximum time. In other words, they show that no matter what value is chosen for the maximum time, it can always be extended. Their initial assumption is thus contradicted, implying that the conjecture itself must be true.

Klainerman emphasized that he and his colleagues have built on the work of others. “There have been four serious attempts,” he said, “and we happen to be the lucky ones.” He considers the latest paper a collective achievement, and he’d like the new contribution to be viewed as “a triumph for the whole field.”

So far, stability has only been proved for slowly rotating black holes — where the ratio of the black hole’s angular momentum to its mass is much less than 1. It has not yet been demonstrated that rapidly rotating black holes are also stable. In addition, the researchers did not determine precisely how small the ratio of angular momentum to mass has to be in order to ensure stability.

Given that only one step in their long proof rests on the assumption of low angular momentum, Klainerman said he would “not be surprised at all if, by the end of the decade, we will have a full resolution of the Kerr [stability] conjecture.”

Giorgi is not quite so sanguine. “It is true that the assumption applies to just one case, but it is a very important case.” Getting past that restriction will require quite a bit of work, she said; she is not sure who will take it on or when they might succeed.

Looming beyond this problem is a much bigger one called the final state conjecture, which basically holds that if we wait long enough, the universe will evolve into a finite number of Kerr black holes moving away from each other. The final state conjecture depends on Kerr stability and on other sub-conjectures that are extremely challenging in themselves. “We have absolutely no idea how to prove this,” Giorgi admitted. To some, that statement might sound pessimistic. Yet it also illustrates an essential truth about Kerr black holes: They are destined to command the attention of mathematicians for years, if not decades, to come.

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Photos were submitted by people from all over the world to an online project called Birds and Debris.

The scientists running the project say they see birds ensnared - or nesting - in everything from rope and fishing line to balloon ribbon and a flip-flop.
Nearly a quarter of the photographs show birds nesting or entangled in disposable face masks.

The focus of the project is on capturing the impact of waste - particularly plastic pollution - on the avian world.

Mary Caporal Prior in the US captured this image of a mallard with a mask around its neck

"Basically, if a bird builds a nest using long fibrous materials - like seaweed, branches or reeds - the chances are it will have human debris in its nest somewhere," said Dr Alex Bond from the Natural History Museum in London, and one of the researchers involved.

The project, which he and his colleagues have been running for four years, aims to draw attention to the widespread problem of plastic waste in the environment.

Pigeons nesting on a building site in Sussex make use of discarded cable ties

"When you start looking for this stuff, you'll see it everywhere," he said. "And this has really illustrated the huge geographic scope - we had reports from Japan , Australia, Sri Lanka, the UK, North America - it's truly a global issue."

In a recent study, the team looked into how many of the photos being submitted feature pandemic-related personal protective equipment (PPE). They found that it featured in almost a quarter of the photographs submitted.

Masks, like this one on a black bittern in Singapore, are the most common pandemic-related items in the photographs

"It's almost all masks," said Dr Bond. "And if you think of the different materials a surgical mask is made from - there's the elastic that we see tangled around birds' legs or we might see birds injured by trying to ingest the fabric or the hard piece of plastic that secures it over your nose.

"So we use this catch-all term of 'plastic' but it's a whole range of different polymers, and masks are a good example of that."

Many birds, like this American robin found in April 2020, are seen tangled in the elastic straps of masks

The researchers say they want to highlight the "systemic problem" that leads to so much debris ending up in the environment.

Lead researcher Justine Ammendolia from Dalhousie University in Canada told BBC News that seeing the breadth of the impact on species globally was "devastating".

"In April of 2020, the first sighting of a bird hanging from a facemask in a tree was recorded from Canada and the sightings just internationally cascaded afterwards, " she said. "It really just demonstrates the harm that humans are capable of imposing on the environment in a very short window of time across the world."

This coot in the Netherlands is difficult to spot amid all the rubbish in its nest

Changing to a bamboo toothbrush or a canvas shopping bag is not going to save the world, [because] most large-scale plastic production today is commercial and industrial," said Dr Bond.

"So it's a combination of top-down policies and bottom-up pressure for us to say 'enough is enough'."

PhD researcher Justine Ammendolia added: "For people seeing these images for the first time, it's alright to feel sad. But we need to learn from the unnecessary and often invisible suffering that some wildlife experienced during the pandemic.

"I hope people use their sadness to fuel their demand for action."

The researchers say we need to learn from the often invisible suffering of wildlife

Dr Bond likened the global action required to address plastic pollution to the Montreal Protocol that banned ozone-depleting chemicals - a treaty widely considered to be one of the most successful global agreements ever signed.

"We need the same thing with plastic pollution, and we're moving in that direction, but just very, very slowly."

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With solar arrays now operational, Lucy’s got some shimmering to do

Though the organs didn’t suddenly start working normally, some of the cellular damage brought on by loss of blood flow after death appeared to be reversed. The pigs’ hearts emitted electrical activity. Cells in their kidneys, livers, and lungs were functioning again and showed signs of repairing themselves. The discovery, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, suggests that cell death could be delayed longer than currently possible. If those processes could be slowed down, it could mean saving more organs for transplantation.

“This new system showed that not only can we slow down cellular damage, but that we can actually activate processes at the genetic level for cellular repair,” says Brendan Parent, an assistant professor of bioethics at New York University, who was not involved in the study but authored a commentary in Nature alongside it. “This might force us to reconsider what we decide is ‘dead.’”

In 2019, the Yale team challenged the idea that brain death is final when they reported that they had partially revived the brains of pigs for hours after the animals had been slaughtered. For the current experiment, the researchers wanted to see if the same method, in which a blood substitute is carried into the animal’s circulatory system, could also be used to revive other organs.

“We restored some functions of cells across multiple vital organs that should have been dead without our interventions,” author Nenad Sestan, a Yale neuroscientist, told reporters on a call Tuesday. “These cells are functioning hours after they should not be, and what this tells us is that the demise of cells can be halted and their functionality restored in multiple vital organs, even one hour after death.”

Deepali Kumar, president of the American Society of Transplantation and professor of medicine at the University of Toronto, says that with further refinement, the system could one day be used to expand the pool of human organs available for donation. “There is a significant shortage of organs for transplantation, and we certainly need new technologies that can help improve the organ supply,” she says.

In the US, around 106,000 people are on the national transplant waiting list, and every day 17 people die waiting for an organ, according to the federal Health Resources and Services Administration. Despite the huge need, around 20 percent of organs are discarded every year due to poor quality. That could mean they’re too old or damaged, which can happen when organs are cut off from an oxygen-rich blood supply for too long.

The standard practice for preserving organs for transplant is static cold storage. Cooling organs quickly after removal reduces their oxygen demand and can prevent cell death, but doesn’t save every organ. There’s also growing interest in using a technique called extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO, for patients who can’t be resuscitated, in order to preserve their organs for transplantation. Typically used as life support for patients whose heart or lungs are badly damaged, an ECMO machine pumps blood outside the body to remove its carbon dioxide and add oxygen, and then returns it back to the body.

The Yale system, dubbed OrganEx, is a bit more sophisticated than current ECMO machines. Whereas ECMO is a stand-in for just the heart and lungs, OrganEx also mimics the function of the kidneys. It consists of pumps, sensors, heaters, and filters to control the flow and temperature of the blood substitute it pushes through the body. And while ECMO only slows cell death, the team’s findings suggest that OrganEx may be able to reverse some aspects of cell death. When observing the pig organs, they found gene expression patterns reflective of certain molecular and cellular repair processes.

“The notion here is to try to reestablish some sort of circulation before the organ gets irreparably damaged,” says Timothy Pruett, a transplant surgeon at the University of Minnesota Medical School who wasn’t involved in the study.

The Yale team’s secret sauce is a proprietary fluid of electrolytes, vitamins, amino acids, and other nutrients, plus a cocktail of 13 drugs that reduce cell death and cellular stress and modulate the immune and nervous systems. The researchers mixed the synthetic fluid with pig blood into a series of pumps designed to control its flow and temperature throughout the circulatory system. That special substrate, the researchers surmise, helped revive the pig organs. They also found that organs treated with their system displayed fewer signs of hemorrhage and tissue swelling than those of a group of control pigs that were treated with ECMO.

One big unknown is whether the pig organs revived by the Yale researchers would begin working normally and on their own if they were transplanted into another recipient. Kumar says the next step should be transplanting the organs into other pigs to see how well they function compared with organs preserved in the conventional way.

In their study, the authors speculate that the system might also lead to new treatments for people who have had a heart attack, if it’s capable of restoring a heart’s normal function in a living patient. The idea is still far from human testing, but if it's possible, experts say, it raises some interesting ethical choices.

Parent says a system like OrganEx could increase the likelihood of doctors being able to resuscitate patients, and he thinks researchers should explore this life-saving potential of the technology before using it to revive organs for transplant. “If this continues to demonstrate cellular recovery in unprecedented ways, it will be very important to focus on the emergency response potential first, to really determine how well the system can restore quality of life to people who, under other circumstances, we would have said died,” Parent says.

But Avir Mitra, an emergency medicine physician at Mount Sinai Health System in New York City, says decisions about resuscitating patients are often complex and come down to the wishes of patients and their families. Sometimes doctors may be able to bring people back from cardiac arrest, but their quality of life isn’t what it was before. They may never leave the hospital or walk again. They may need a feeding tube or a ventilator to breathe.

“The question is, if the outcomes are going to be really poor, should you subject them to this?” he asks. “In emergency medicine, we often say that there are fates worse than death. Just because we can bring someone back, doesn't necessarily mean that we should.”

The Pigs Died. Then Scientists Revived Their Cells

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Researchers focused on individuals classified as “prediabetic” for this study, meaning they displayed higher-than-normal blood glucose levels without actually being high enough to be diagnosed as diabetic. Dozens of earlier projects encompassing over 3,600 subjects with prediabetes were analyzed.

That analysis displayed a clear trend: People who underwent acupuncture therapy saw several key markers associated with diabetes improve. Such markers include fasting plasma glucose, two-hour plasma glucose, and glycated hemoglobin, as well as an overall greater decline in the incidence of prediabetes.

Even better, not a single studied patient reported or exhibited any adverse or negative side effects. PhD candidate and lead researcher Min Zhang believes acupuncture therapy may be a useful tool when it comes to warding off diabetes.

Diabetes is a major modern health concern, estimated to affect roughly 11 percent of the planet’s adult population. Moreover, The International Diabetes Federation calculates close to 1.3 billion people will be either diabetic or prediabetic by 2045.

“Without intervention, 93 per cent of people with prediabetes will develop Type 2 diabetes within 20 years,” Ms. Zhang says in a statement. “But unlike diabetes, prediabetes is reversible with lifestyle interventions such as improved diet and increase in exercise. But many people struggle to adhere to lifestyle changes long-term, so non-pharmacological treatments such as acupuncture could prove valuable.”

Diabetes risk is significantly linked to lifestyle factors and decisions like diet and exercise, but other considerations are also at play. This is where acupuncture may prove helpful, according to researchers. “It’s not only about blood sugar levels,” Ms. Zhang explains. “If you experience sleep problems, high blood pressure, a lot of stress, these can contribute too. So, acupuncture can help with these factors and work holistically to help people balance their life.”

When most people think of acupuncture, needles immediately come to mind. But the research team explains that the technique is so much more; such as light, electric pulses, and additional traditional Chinese medicine therapies such as moxibustion.

“This is important because diabetic people can have issues with their skin, so perhaps it may not always be ideal to be using needles,” Ms. Zhang comments. “We need to do more research into acupuncture and diabetes, because we need to find more ways to prevent prediabetes developing into type 2 diabetes.”

“Many people with prediabetes don’t have any symptoms and feel fine, but some people progress into the diabetes period no more than 6 months after their prediabetes diagnosis. In fact, prediabetes intervention is an investment rather than an expenditure,” she concludes. “So, the best time to prevent type 2 diabetes is now.”

The study is published in Holistic Nursing Practice.

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On June 9, with only a few hours’ notice, NASA held a press conference to announce a study it was commissioning on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs). The acronym is a rebranding of what are more popularly known as unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, a topic usually associated with purported extraterrestrial visitations and government conspiracy theories. The question on the public’s mind was why one of the U.S.’s premier scientific agencies was getting involved in something often considered to be at the farthest fringes of respectability.

Yet the pronouncement also fit in with the suddenly more open-minded zeitgeist regarding UAPs. Last year saw the publication of a much-anticipated report on the Department of Defense’s own investigations into the subject, following the release of first-person accounts and video from U.S. fighter pilots claiming to show encounters with strange objects in the skies. High-profile coverage in mainstream media and open congressional hearings about UAPs have kept the matter circulating in the public realm. A month after the Pentagon’s report came out, theoretical astrophysicist Avi Loeb, former chair of Harvard University’s astronomy department, announced a private initiative called the Galileo Project, which is aimed at searching for potential evidence of alien technology here on Earth.

What NASA can bring to this discussion is as yet unclear. The agency has set aside a slim $100,000 for the nine-month study—less than the typical funding it provides for exploratory studies of unconventional technologies such as space telescopes with kilometer-scale mirrors or interstellar probes propelled by giant laser beams. Helmed by the well-respected Princeton University astrophysicist David Spergel, the investigation intends to identify existing and future data sets scientists could use to advance their understanding of UAPs. Even if it uncovers little of interest, the study’s existence suggests that something the agency once avoided talking about at all costs is on the cusp of becoming an appropriate topic of inquiry.

“There’s no question you have a lot more voices in scientific and academic circles who are willing to be public and say this is a legitimate enterprise,” says Greg Eghigian, a historian at Pennsylvania State University, who is writing a book about UFO sightings.

NASA’s unexpected UAP announcement is perhaps a bit less surprising in hindsight. The agency’s current administrator, former astronaut and senator Bill Nelson, told reporters last year that he was sure U.S. pilots who reported mysterious encounters “saw something, and their radars locked onto it.” The Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Office of Naval Intelligence officials behind the Pentagon’s UAP task force had previously spoken about involving multiple branches of government in their investigations, Eghigian says. “NASA was one of the agencies mentioned,” he adds.

Yet exploring enigmatic incursions into American airspaces arguably makes more sense as a project for the military than one for a civil space agency. After all, these unidentified objects—if they exist—might be terrestrial in origin, perhaps constituting evidence of advanced Russian or Chinese aerospace technology rather than anything from beyond Earth. NASA’s study is aimed at categorizing data from Earth-observing satellites and other monitoring instruments that may have picked up some sliver of information relevant to such phenomena to see if there is anything whatsoever the agency can say about their nature. NASA already collects extensive information about the atmosphere using a suite of orbiting probes such as Terra, Suomi National Polar-Orbiting Partnership (NPP) and CloudSat, any of which may have picked up incidental data that could help identify UAPs.

“We have the tools and team who can help us improve our understanding of the unknown,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for science at NASA, in an official statement. “That’s the very definition of what science is. That’s what we do.”

In this, Zurbuchen sounds not unlike Loeb, the most high-profile researcher presently pursuing such inquiries. Loeb had in fact approached NASA about investigating UAPs and sent Zurbuchen a proposal last summer to use telescopes and other instruments to hunt for transient celestial events that might be relevant to the existence of unknown aircraft. He expressed annoyance upon learning that the agency had set up its own independent commission in which he wasn’t involved.

“To me, it’s really a contradiction,” Loeb says. “If there is someone pursuing the research agenda that you’re trying to study, why wouldn’t you collaborate with that person?”

Given that he is the head of the Galileo Project, which has overlapping aims, Loeb was told by NASA that it would be a conflict of interest to have him participate in the agency’s new endeavor. He eventually made peace with the issue. “What matters is the truth,” he says. “It doesn’t matter who tells it. I’m happy that I’m not alone.”

The Galileo Project has recently finished assembling its first telescope instruments on the roof of the Harvard College Observatory, which will begin capturing data in the coming weeks that might speak to the reality of UAPs (or not). Earlier this month, the collaboration held its first in-person conference, where Loeb presented the team’s initial year of progress and plans for the future. There are also 10 scientific papers in preparation from different team members regarding the workings of their telescope, which will be publicly available after they go through peer review.

Loeb is currently pulling together funding to go after the fragments of a roughly breadbox-size meteor named CNEOS 2014-01-08 that crashed off the coast of Papua New Guinea in 2014. Based on the speed at which it entered Earth’s atmosphere, a screaming 162,000 kilometers per hour, Loeb and his student Amir Siraj proposed that the space rock came from another star system (a hypothesis supported by subsequently declassified U.S. spy-satellite data). That pieces of such a small object didn’t entirely burn up suggested to Loeb and Siraj that it was made of a material tougher than iron.

“It makes me ask the question whether it was natural or artificial in origin,” Loeb says. He would like to lead an expedition to trawl the ocean floor with a magnet in an attempt to pick up pieces of what he believes could be an alien spacecraft.

That there are now multiple research projects investigating a formerly scorned subject speaks to how much the scientific landscape has shifted in recent years. “The way NASA has approached the UFO/UAP stuff over the decades, I think a generous and polite word would be ‘cautious,’” says Kate Dorsch, a historian of science at the University of Pennsylvania. The agency went to great lengths to make clear that no credible evidence exists for a linkage between UAPs and putative aliens, and even the level of funding dedicated to its new study implies that it’s not ready to do more than dip a toe in the murky waters around this matter. “$100,000 is a pittance,” Eghigian says. “I’m not sure, for a serious project, what you can do with $100,000.”

At the same time, talking about the possibility of life elsewhere in the cosmos no longer seems as outlandish or disreputable as it once was. Scientists of all stripes regularly draw up plans for probes to look for microbes on planets and moons in the solar system, and they have used their telescopes to search for chemical evidence of living ecosystems on worlds orbiting distant stars.

“I think the UAP stuff is emerging in a climate where we are already discussing life in the universe in a new way,” says Adam Frank, an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester. “Now that the ‘giggle factor’ for the scientific search for life in the universe has gone down, it’s possible this also makes it easier for people to discuss UAPs.”

Accounts of unidentified phenomena often include claims associated with extremely low standards of evidence, such as out-of-body experiences, alien abductions and crop circles, says Jacob Haqq-Misra, an astrobiologist at the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science. “When you lump all that together, I see why some scientists dismiss it all,” he adds. But focusing on eyewitness accounts from esteemed pilots convinced they saw something—accounts often backed up by sensor data—has allowed him to recognize to that there might be something concrete for scientists to investigate, even if the culprit ends up being mundane instrumentation problems.

“If you don’t care about it personally as a scientist, that’s fine.” Haqq-Misra says. “But to pretend like it’s not something interesting—that doesn’t help.”
Some might worry that NASA’s reputation could be sullied by becoming associated with a notoriously pseudoscientific subject or that nothing the agency says about this matter will ever satisfy true believers. “The danger is that NASA will not find anything, and people will be like, ‘Oh, NASA is in on the conspiracy. NASA’s not telling us what’s true,’” Frank says. But he also thinks there’s an opportunity for the study to spark a teachable moment about the process of science and how it investigates the world.

“Science only works because we have this rigorous means of evaluating our own biases,” which involves being willing to scrutinize “your claim that you know what you know,” he says.

By their very nature, UAPs point to events slightly beyond our understanding. They exist at the edges of the known, a realm that science is particularly adept at tackling. The proliferation of projects to investigate UAPs suggests that perhaps some researchers are willing to take a more relaxed attitude toward a subject that was formerly off-limits. But even increased scrutiny seems unlikely to entirely get rid of the questions surrounding them.

“Until somebody builds a perfect system that captures all data at all times at all levels of detail,” Dorsch says, “some of these UAPs are just going to evade knowing.”

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It’s not easy being ringed. A newly released image from the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, shows the Cartwheel Galaxy still reeling from a run-in with a smaller galaxy 400 million years ago.

The Cartwheel Galaxy, so called because of its bright inner ring and colorful outer ring, lies about 500 million light-years from Earth. Astronomers think it used to be a large spiral like the Milky Way, until a smaller galaxy smashed through it. In earlier observations with other telescopes, the space between the rings appeared shrouded in dust.

Now, JWST’s infrared cameras have peered through the dust and found previously unseen stars and structure (SN: 7/11/22). The new image shows sites of intense star formation throughout the galaxy that were triggered by the collision’s aftereffects. Some of those new stars are forming in spokelike patterns between the central ring and the outer ring, a process that is not well understood.

When the Hubble Space Telescope observed the Cartwheel Galaxy in visible light (left), the spokes between the galaxy’s bright rings were barely visible wisps. JWST’s infrared eyes brought them into vivid focus (right). Near-infrared light (blue, orange and yellow) traces newly forming stars; mid-infrared light (red) highlights the galaxy’s chemistry.

Left: Hubble/NASA and ESA; Right: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI and Webb ERO Production Team

Ring galaxies are rare, and galaxies with two rings are even more unusual. That strange shape means that the long-ago collision set up multiple waves of gas rippling back and forth in the galaxy left behind. It’s like if you drop a pebble in the bathtub, says JWST project scientist Klaus Pontoppidan of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. “First you get this ring, then it hits the walls of your bathtub and reflects back, and you get a more complicated structure.”

The effect probably means that the Cartwheel Galaxy has a long road to recovery ahead — and astronomers don’t know what it will look like in the end.
As for the smaller galaxy that caused all this mayhem, it didn’t stick around to get its picture taken. “It’s gone off on its merry way,” Pontoppidan says.

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The research, led by University of Exeter, analyzed data from 53,172 participants in 23 studies worldwide to examine the implications of choosing the higher or lower arm pressure.

The study, published in Hypertension, found that using the higher arm blood pressure reading reclassified 12 percent of people as having hypertension, who would have fallen below the threshold for diagnosis if the lower reading arm was used.

Although International guidelines advise checking blood pressure in both arms, the practice is currently not widely adopted in clinics.

Study lead Dr. Christopher Clark, from the University of Exeter, says that "high blood pressure is a global issue and poor management can be fatal. This study shows that failure to measure both arms and use the higher reading arm will not only result in underdiagnosis and undertreatment of high blood pressure but also under-estimation of cardiovascular risks for millions of people worldwide."

The team found that using the higher arm measurement compared to using the lower arm resulted in reclassification of 6572 (12.4%) of participants' systolic blood pressures from below to above 130 mm Hg, and 6339 (11.9%) from below to above 140 mm Hg, moving them above commonly used diagnostic thresholds for hypertension.

Dr. Clark says that "it's impossible to predict the best arm for blood pressure measurement as some people have a higher reading in their left arm compared to right and equal numbers have the opposite. Therefore, it's important to check both arms as detecting high blood pressure correctly is a vital step towards giving the right treatment to the right people."

"Our study now provides the first evidence that the higher reading arm blood pressure is the better predictor of future cardiovascular risk."

The study also revealed that higher arm blood pressure readings better predicted all-cause mortality, cardiovascular mortality, and cardiovascular events, compared to the lower arm reading. The authors stressed the importance of assessing both arms in the diagnosis and management of hypertension and cardiovascular diseases.

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That breaks down to 14.1 hours/day for preventive care, 7.2 hours/day for chronic disease care, 2.2 hours/day for acute care, and 3.2 hours/day for documentation and inbox management.

The research, conducted by the University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins University, and Imperial College London, used a simulation study to compute time per patient based on data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.

"There is this sort of disconnect between the care we've been trained to give and the constraints of a clinic workday," said Justin Porter, MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Chicago and lead author of the paper. "We have an ever-increasing set of guidelines, but clinic slots have not increased proportionately."

The study also looked at physician time as part of a team, where nurses, physician assistants, counselors and others help to deliver recommended care.

It found that team-based care reduced the time a physician needed to deliver care to 9.3 hours/day, broken into 2.0 hours/day for preventive care, 3.6 hours/day for chronic disease care, 1.1 hours/day for acute care, and 2.6 hours/day for documentation and inbox management.

"Team-based care is a movement that has been around in medicine for a while and has gathered steam more recently," said Porter. "Doctors do not give care in a vacuum. There are other extremely important members of the healthcare team that are working together and often independently to provide care for patients. This is a huge opportunity and partial solution to the time constraints currently faced in medical care."

The study is published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

Adding to the evidence

This new study joins and builds on others that have found a discrepancy between guidelines and a physician's time.

In 2003, a Duke University study estimated it would take a primary care physician 7.4 hours/day to provide preventive care for an average-sized patient population, while a 2005 study from Mount Sinai found it would take 8.6 hours/day. A complementary study from Duke in 2005 calculated an additional 10.6 hours/day to manage the Top 10 chronic diseases. Together, that indicates a doctor would need at least 18 hours/day to provide both preventive and chronic care.

The new study went one step further by including all types of care a primary care physician provides—preventive, acute, and chronic—as well as administrative tasks, and accounted for changes to the guidelines that have occurred since the earlier studies were published. It also used a different methodology, employing real patient data from an annual national survey to calculate its results. The earlier studies used hypothetical patient populations based on the U.S. population.

"When you're dealing with real people, you have more complexity to the data. A person may have multi-morbidity, or several chronic diseases at once," said Porter. "That patient would be treated differently than a hypothetical, average patient. This leads to more comprehensive and precise calculations."
The study's data on team-based care also expanded the information available on time constraints for primary care physicians.

The researchers used the Comprehensive Primary Care Plus (CPC+) model to develop the estimates for team-based care. The model allows physicians to focus on advanced care and brings in specialized medical professionals to take over other areas. Dietitians, for instance, would handle nutritional counseling for patients with diabetes or obesity, a time-intensive task. Overall, the researchers determined that 65% of primary care services could be handled by other team members.

More time, better care

Moving to a team-care model would require systemic changes to the way Americans pay for care. Currently, payment for many counseling services depends on patients having a qualifying disease. Yet the benefits of team-based care make the effort worth it, the researchers say.

The time pressure that physicians face has real consequences for the delivery of healthcare. According to the researchers, time constraints are a key factor in physician burnout, one of the drivers pushing medical students from the field.

For patients, the researchers say, time pressure helps explain why improvements in outcomes have not kept pace with advances made in the field. It plays a role in inequities in health care, with vulnerable populations typically receiving care at overburdened clinics. It also has an impact on patient satisfaction.

"If you do surveys with patients about what frustrates them about their medical care, you'll frequently hear, 'My doctor doesn't spend time with me' or 'My doctor doesn't follow up,'" said Porter. "I think a lot of times this is interpreted as a lack of empathy, or a lack of willingness to care for a patient. But the reality—for the majority of doctors—is simply a lack of time."

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Now, a multidisciplinary team of researchers from MIT and elsewhere, led by Iddo Drori, a lecturer in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), has used a neural network model to solve university-level math problems in a few seconds at a human level.

The model also automatically explains solutions and rapidly generates new problems in university math subjects. When the researchers showed these machine-generated questions to university students, the students were unable to tell whether the questions were generated by an algorithm or a human.

This work could be used to streamline content generation for courses, which could be especially useful in large residential courses and massive open online courses (MOOCs) that have thousands of students. The system could also be used as an automated tutor that shows students the steps involved in solving undergraduate math problems.

"We think this will improve higher education," says Drori, the work's lead author who is also an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University, and who will join the faculty at Boston University this summer. "It will help students improve, and it will help teachers create new content, and it could help increase the level of difficulty in some courses. It also allows us to build a graph of questions and courses, which helps us understand the relationship between courses and their pre-requisites, not just by historically contemplating them, but based on data."

The work is a collaboration including students, researchers, and faculty at MIT, Columbia University, Harvard University, and the University of Waterloo.

The senior author is Gilbert Strang, a professor of mathematics at MIT. The research appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A "eureka" moment

Drori and his students and colleagues have been working on this project for nearly two years. They were finding that models pretrained using text only could not do better than 8 percent accuracy on high school math problems, and those using graph neural networks could ace machine learning course questions but would take a week to train.

Then Drori had what he describes as a "eureka" moment: He decided to try taking questions from undergraduate math courses offered by MIT and one from Columbia University that had never been seen before by a model, turning them into programming tasks, and applying techniques known as program synthesis and few-shot learning. Turning a question into a programming task could be as simple as rewriting the question "find the distance between two points" as "write a program that finds the difference between two points," or providing a few question-program pairs as examples.

Before feeding those programming tasks to a neural network, however, the researchers added a new step that enabled it to vastly outperform their previous attempts.

In the past, they and others who've approached this problem have used a neural network, such as GPT-3, that was pretrained on text only, meaning it was shown millions of examples of text to learn the patterns of natural language. This time, they used a neural network pretrained on text that was also "fine-tuned" on code. This network, called Codex, was produced by OpenAI. Fine-tuning is essentially another pretraining step that can improve the performance of a machine-learning model.

The pretrained model was shown millions of examples of code from online repositories. Because this model's training data included millions of natural language words as well as millions of lines of code, it learns the relationships between pieces of text and pieces of code.

Many math problems can be solved using a computational graph or tree, but it is difficult to turn a problem written in text into this type of representation, Drori explains. Because this model has learned the relationships between text and code, however, it can turn a text question into code, given just a few question-code examples, and then run the code to answer the problem.

"When you just ask a question in text, it is hard for a machine-learning model to come up with an answer, even though the answer may be in the text," he says. "This work fills in the that missing piece of using code and program synthesis."

This work is the first to solve undergraduate math problems and moves the needle from 8 percent accuracy to over 80 percent, Drori adds.

Adding context

Turning math questions into programming tasks is not always simple, Drori says. Some problems require researchers to add context so the neural network can process the question correctly. A student would pick up this context while taking the course, but a neural network doesn't have this background knowledge unless the researchers specify it.

For instance, they might need to clarify that the "network" in a question's text refers to "neural networks" rather than "communications networks." Or they might need to tell the model which programming package to use. They may also need to provide certain definitions; in a question about poker hands, they may need to tell the model that each deck contains 52 cards.

They automatically feed these programming tasks, with the included context and examples, to the pretrained and fine-tuned neural network, which outputs a program that usually produces the correct answer. It was correct for more than 80 percent of the questions.

The researchers also used their model to generate questions by giving the neural network a series of math problems on a topic and then asking it to create a new one.

"In some topics, it surprised us. For example, there were questions about quantum detection of horizontal and vertical lines, and it generated new questions about quantum detection of diagonal lines. So, it is not just generating new questions by replacing values and variables in the existing questions," Drori says.

Human-generated vs. machine-generated questions

The researchers tested the machine-generated questions by showing them to university students. The researchers gave students 10 questions from each undergraduate math course in a random order; five were created by humans and five were machine-generated.

Students were unable to tell whether the machine-generated questions were produced by an algorithm or a human, and they gave human-generated and machine-generated questions similar marks for level of difficulty and appropriateness for the course.

Drori is quick to point out that this work is not intended to replace human professors.

"Automation is now at 80 percent, but automation will never be 100 percent accurate. Every time you solve something, someone will come up with a harder question. But this work opens the field for people to start solving harder and harder questions with machine learning. We think it will have a great impact on higher education," he says.

The team is excited by the success of their approach, and have extended the work to handle math proofs, but there are some limitations they plan to tackle. Currently, the model isn't able to answer questions with a visual component and cannot solve problems that are computationally intractable due to computational complexity.

In addition to overcoming these hurdles, they are working to scale the model up to hundreds of courses. With those hundreds of courses, they will generate more data that can enhance automation and provide insights into course design and curricula.

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People near Dalgety, New South Wales, found three large pieces of debris, with the largest – a 10-foot-tall triangular structure – found planted firmly into the ground, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) reported.

The objects were scarred by scorch marks, consistent with reentry into the atmosphere, ABC reported.

Brad Tucker, an astrophysicist who inspected the debris, said in a video they were likely fragments of the trunk of a SpaceX Dragon aircraft used during the Crew-1 mission in 2020. Some of the fragments had serial numbers, Tucker said.

Scientists had known that debris from the Dragon spacecraft debris could fall in the area around early July and the debris is a "good match" for the trunk's flight path on July 8, the astronomer Jonathan McDowell tweeted.

"Having gone out there and looked at the bits myself, there is not a doubt in my mind it is space junk," Tucker told Space.com.

'I'm a farmer ... what am I going to say to NASA?'

The sheep farmer Mick Miners discovered the 10-foot-tall object in his field on July 25, he told ABC. His neighbor, Jock Wallace, had also found debris in his field the week before, and people in the area also reported hearing a loud bang on July 9, ABC reported.

Wallace first reported the finding to the local civil aviation safety authority, which told him to call NASA.

"I'm a farmer from Dalgety, what am I going to say to NASA?" Wallace told ABC.

He also said of the debris: "If it landed on your house it would make a hell of a mess."

The Australian Space Agency and New South Wales police are investigating the objects to confirm their connection to space flights, ABC reported Monday.

"Eventually SpaceX, or at least the US, will have to make a declaration about whether they want to keep it or have it returned, or not," Tucker said, according to ABC.

Scientists warn about space debris

The risk of space debris falling on a human are minuscule, and scientists can track the larger pieces of space debris from Earth to predict where they will fall.

However, scientists have been sounding the alarm on space debris, saying that the problem will only get worse as space travel intensifies.

The news comes as debris released by a Chinese Long March 5B rocket came back down to Earth uncontrolled on Saturday.

Its landing area was mostly made up of water and deserts, making the chance of it falling on inhabited areas very slim. Most of the debris burned on reentry, the China Manned Space Agency said, CNN reported.

Still, NASA has been critical of the approach, stating the debris "carry a significant risk of loss of life and property", per CNN.

It was the second time China let debris from its huge rocket fall back to earth uncontrolled.

This article was originally published by Business Insider.

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MIT scientists create color-shifting films inspired by 19th-century holography

What do we do about all the people who can’t charge an EV at home?