VFTS 243 is a binary system of a large, hot blue star and a black hole orbiting each other, as seen in this animation.

Astronomers have found an especially sneaky black hole

After insinuating that it planned to leave the International Space Station partnership after 2024, Russia’s state space corporation Roscosmos has told NASA that it intends to remain in the program until at least 2028, according to a report in Reuters. Roscosmos plans to stay involved with the ISS until it gets a new Russian space station up and running, with 2028 as the target date.

Roscosmos caused turmoil yesterday when its newly appointed director, Yuri Borisov, told Russian President Vladimir Putin that a decision had been made to leave the ISS partnership after 2024. However, the statement was vague and did not specify when after 2024 Roscosmos planned to leave, only saying that Russia hoped to transition focus to a new space station it was developing called the Russian Orbital Service Station (ROSS). Additionally, one NASA official claimed that the agency hadn’t had “any official word” from Roscosmos, while NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement the agency had “not been made aware of decisions from any of the partners” on the ISS.

However, it seems that Roscosmos officials had at least some communication with NASA on Tuesday, informing the US space agency that it planned to stay involved in the ISS until its ROSS station was up in 2028, according to Reuters. “We’re not getting any indication at any working level that anything’s changed,” Kathy Lueders, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations, told Reuters on Wednesday. NASA did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Verge.

NASA and Roscosmos are the two biggest partners on the International Space Station, and both entities are tasked with operating the vehicle and maintaining a continuous human presence on the ISS while in orbit. However, growing tensions between the United States and Russia over the latter’s invasion of Ukraine have prompted concern about the future of the ISS partnership. Borisov’s predecessor, Dmitry Rogozin, made plenty of threats about Roscosmos pulling out of the ISS agreement, while NASA has continuously assured the public that it is business as usual on the station.

Rogozin was known for making outlandish threats, though, and Borisov is a relatively new player at Roscosmos, so it was unclear how seriously his statement should be taken. But on Tuesday, Roscosmos published an interview with Vladimir Solovyov, the flight director of the Russian portion of the ISS, who gave more details on the plans for ROSS, according to a tweet thread of the story. He noted that ROSS will be built in two phases, with the first beginning in 2028, and that he believed it was necessary to continue operating the Russian portion of the ISS until that time so that there wouldn’t be a gap in crewed missions to orbit. Rogozin had also said there would need to be an overlap between the ISS and the new Russian space station.

So there’s no need to panic quite yet about the space station’s future. NASA still plans to operate the vehicle until 2030, and it appears that Roscosmos will be on board for most of that time.

Russia reportedly tells NASA it’s staying with the International Space Station until at least 2028

More than 2,000 people dead from extreme heat and wildfires raging in Portugal and Spain. High temperature records shattered from England to Japan. Overnights that fail to cool.

Brutal heat waves are quickly becoming the hallmark of the summer of 2022.

And even as climate change continues to crank up the temperature, scientists are working fast to understand the limits of humans’ resilience to heat extremes. Recent research suggests that heat stress tolerance in people may be lower than previously thought. If true, millions more people could be at risk of succumbing to dangerous temperatures sooner than expected.

“Bodies are capable of acclimating over a period of time” to temperature changes, says Vivek Shandas, an environmental planning and climate adaptation researcher at Portland State University in Oregon. Over geologic time, there have been many climate shifts that humans have weathered, Shandas says. “[But] we’re in a time when these shifts are happening much more quickly.”

Just halfway through 2022, heat waves have already ravaged many countries. The heat arrived early in southern Asia: In March, Wardha, India, saw a high of 45° Celsius (113° Fahrenheit); in Nawabshah, Pakistan, recorded temperatures rose to 49.5° C (121.1° F).

Extreme heat alerts blared across Europe beginning in June and continuing through July, the rising temperatures exacerbating drought and sparking wildfires. The United Kingdom shattered its hottest-ever record July 19 when temperatures reached 40.3° C in the English village of Coningsby. The heat fueled fires in France, forcing thousands to evacuate from their homes.

And the litany goes on: June brought Japan its worst heat wave since record-keeping began in 1875, leading to the country’s highest-ever recorded temperature of 40.2° C. China’s coastal megacities, from Shanghai to Chengdu, were hammered by heat waves in July as temperatures in the region also rose above 40° C. And in the United States, a series of heat waves gripped the Midwest, the South and the West in June and July. Temperatures soared to 42° C in North Platte, Neb., and to 45.6° C in Phoenix.

The current global rate of warming on Earth is unprecedented (SN: 7/24/19). And scientists have long predicted that human-caused climate change will increase the occurrence of heat waves. Globally, humans’ exposure to extreme heat tripled from 1983 to 2016, particularly in South Asia.

The heat already is taking an increasing toll on human health. It can cause heat cramps, heat exhaustion and heat stroke, which is often fatal.

Dehydration can lead to kidney and heart disease. Extreme heat can even change how we behave, increasing aggression and decreasing our ability to focus (SN: 8/18/21).

Hot zones

On July 13, multiple heat waves seared much of Europe, Asia and North Africa, smashing temperature records. China’s Shanghai Xujiahui Observatory recorded its highest-ever temperature of 40.9° C in almost 150 years of record-keeping. Tunis, Tunisia, reached a 40-year record of 48° C. And the scorching heat fueled fires in Portugal, Spain and France.

Surface air temperature in the Eastern Hemisphere on July 13, 2022

Joshua Stevens/NASA Earth Observatory
Source: GEOS-5 data from the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office/NASA GSFC, VIIRS day-night band data from the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership.

Staying cool

The human body has various ways to shed excess heat and keep the core of the body at an optimal temperature of about 37° C (98.6° F). The heart pumps faster, speeding up blood flow that carries heat to the skin (SN: 4/3/18). Air passing over the skin can wick away some of that heat. Evaporative cooling — sweating — also helps.

But there’s a limit to how much heat humans can endure. In 2010, scientists estimated that theoretical heat stress limit to be at a “wet bulb” temperature of 35° C. Wet bulb temperatures depend on a combination of humidity and “dry bulb” air temperature measured by a thermometer. Those variables mean a place could hit a wet bulb temperature of 35° C in different ways — for instance, if the air is that temperature and there’s 100 percent humidity, or if the air temperature is 46° C and there’s 50 percent humidity. The difference is due to evaporative cooling.

When water evaporates from the skin or another surface, it steals away energy in the form of heat, briefly cooling that surface. That means that in drier regions, the wet bulb temperature — where that ephemeral cooling effect happens readily — will be lower than the actual air temperature. In humid regions, however, wet and dry bulb temperatures are similar, because the air is so moist it’s difficult for sweat to evaporate quickly.

So when thinking about heat stress on the body, scientists use wet bulb temperatures because they are a measure of how much cooling through evaporation is possible in a given climate, says Daniel Vecellio, a climate scientist at Penn State.

“Both hot/dry and warm/humid environments can be equally dangerous,” Vecellio says — and this is where the body’s different cooling strategies come into play. In hot, dry areas, where the outside temperature may be much hotter than skin temperature, human bodies rely entirely on sweating to cool down, he says. In warm, humid areas, where the air temperature may actually be cooler than skin temperatures (but the humidity makes it seem warmer than it is), the body can’t sweat as efficiently. Instead, the cooler air passing over the skin can draw away the heat.

How hot is too hot?

Given the complexity of the body’s cooling system, and the diversity of human bodies, there isn’t really a one-size-fits-all threshold temperature for heat stress for everybody. “No one’s body runs at 100 percent efficiency,” Vecellio says. Different body sizes, the ability to sweat, age and acclimation to a regional climate all have a role.

Still, for the last decade, that theoretical wet bulb 35° C number has been considered to be the point beyond which humans can no longer regulate their bodies’ temperatures. But recent laboratory-based research by Vecellio and his colleagues suggests that a general, real-world threshold for human heat stress is much lower, even for young and healthy adults.

The researchers tracked heat stress in two dozen subjects ranging in age from 18 to 34, under a variety of controlled climates. In the series of experiments, the team varied humidity and temperature conditions within an environmental chamber, sometimes holding temperature constant while varying the humidity, and sometimes vice versa.

The subjects exerted themselves within the chamber just enough to simulate minimal outdoor activity, walking on a treadmill or pedaling slowly on a bike with no resistance. During these experiments, which lasted for 1.5 to two hours, the researchers measured the subjects’ skin temperatures using wireless probes and assessed their core temperatures using a small telemetry pill that the subjects swallowed.

In warm and humid conditions, the subjects in the study were unable to tolerate heat stress at wet bulb temperatures closer to 30° or 31° C, the team estimates. In hot and dry conditions, that wet bulb temperature was even lower, ranging from 25° to 28° C, the researchers reported in the February Journal of Applied Physiology. For context, in a very dry environment at about 10 percent humidity, a wet bulb temperature of 25° C would correspond to an air temperature of about 50° C (122° F).

These results suggest that there is much more work to be done to understand what humans can endure under real-world heat and humidity conditions, but that the threshold may be much lower than thought, Vecellio says. The 2010 study’s theoretical finding of 35° C may still be “the upper limit,” he adds. “We’re showing the floor.”

And that’s for young, healthy adults doing minimal activity. Thresholds for heat stress are expected to be lower for outdoor workers required to exert themselves, or for the elderly or children. Assessing laboratory limits for more at-risk people is the subject of ongoing work for Vecellio and his colleagues.

A worker wipes away sweat in Toulouse, France, on July 13. An intense heat wave swept across Europe in mid-July, engulfing Spain, Portugal, France, England and other countries.VALENTINE CHAPUIS/AFP via Getty Images

If the human body’s tolerance for heat stress is generally lower than scientists have realized, that could mean millions more people will be at risk from the deadliest heat sooner than scientists have realized. As of 2020, there were few reports of wet bulb temperatures around the world reaching 35° C, but climate simulations project that limit could be regularly exceeded in parts of South Asia and the Middle East by the middle of the century.

Some of the deadliest heat waves in the last two decades were at lower wet bulb temperatures: Neither the 2003 European heat wave, which caused an estimated 30,000 deaths, nor the 2010 Russian heat wave, which killed over 55,000 people, exceeded wet bulb temperatures of 28° C.

Protecting people

How best to inform the public about heat risk is “the part that I find to be tricky,” says Shandas, who wasn’t involved in Vecellio’s research. Shandas developed the scientific protocol for the National Integrated Heat Health Information System’s Urban Heat Island mapping campaign in the United States.

It’s very useful to have this physiological data from a controlled, precise study, Shandas says, because it allows us to better understand the science behind humans’ heat stress tolerance. But physiological and environmental variability still make it difficult to know how best to apply these findings to public health messaging, such as extreme heat warnings, he says. “There are so many microconsiderations that show up when we’re talking about a body’s ability to manage [its] internal temperature.”

One of those considerations is the ability of the body to quickly acclimate to a temperature extreme. Regions that aren’t used to extreme heat may experience greater mortality, even at lower temperatures, simply because people there aren’t used to the heat. The 2021 heat wave in the Pacific Northwest wasn’t just extremely hot — it was extremely hot for that part of the world at that time of year, which makes it more difficult for the body to adapt, Shandas says (SN: 6/29/21).

Heat that arrives unusually early and right on the heels of a cool period can also be more deadly, says Larry Kalkstein, a climatologist at the University of Miami and the chief heat science advisor for the Washington, D.C.–based nonprofit Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center. “Often early season heat waves in May and June are more dangerous than those in August and September.”

Rising heat

In the 1960s, the average time between the earliest and latest heat waves that might occur in a year was just about 22 days. By the 2010s, the average heat wave season had lengthened to almost 70 days.

E. Otwell
Source: NOAA, EPA

One way to improve communities’ resilience to the heat may be to treat heat waves like other natural disasters — including give them names and severity rankings (SN: 8/14/20). As developed by an international coalition known as the Extreme Heat Resilience Alliance, those rankings form the basis for a new type of heat wave warning that explicitly considers the factors that impact heat stress, such as wet bulb temperature and acclimation, rather than just temperature extremes.

The rankings also consider factors such as cloud cover, wind and how hot the temperatures are overnight. “If it’s relatively cool overnight, there’s not as much negative health outcome,” says Kalkstein, who created the system. But overnight temperatures aren’t getting as low as they used to in many places. In the United States, for example, the average minimum temperatures at nighttime are now about 0.8° C warmer than they were during the first half of the 20th century, according to the country’s Fourth National Climate Assessment, released in 2018 (SN: 11/28/18).

By naming heat waves like hurricanes, officials hope to increase citizens’ awareness of the dangers of extreme heat. Heat wave rankings could also help cities tailor their interventions to the severity of the event. Six cities are currently testing the system’s effectiveness: four in the United States and in Athens, Greece, and Seville, Spain. On July 24, with temperatures heading toward 42° C, Seville became the first city in the world to officially name a heat wave, sounding the alarm for Heat Wave Zoe.

As 2022 continues to smash temperature records around the globe, such warnings may come not a moment too soon.

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Stealthy communication just got more secure, thanks to quantum entanglement.

Quantum physics provides a way to share secret information that’s mathematically proven to be safe from the prying eyes of spies. But until now, demonstrations of the technique, called quantum key distribution, rested on an assumption: The devices used to create and measure quantum particles have to be known to be flawless. Hidden defects could allow a stealthy snoop to penetrate the security unnoticed.

Now, three teams of researchers have demonstrated the ability to perform secure quantum communication without prior confirmation that the devices are foolproof. Called device-independent quantum key distribution, the method is based on quantum entanglement, a mysterious relationship between particles that links their properties even when separated over long distances.

In everyday communication, such as the transmission of credit card numbers over the internet, a secret code, or key, is used to garble the information, so that it can be read only by someone else with the key. But there’s a quandary: How can a distant sender and receiver share that key with one another while ensuring that no one else has intercepted it along the way?

Quantum physics provides a way to share keys by transmitting a series of quantum particles, such as particles of light called photons, and performing measurements on them. By comparing notes, the users can be sure that no one else has intercepted the key. Those secret keys, once established, can then be used to encrypt the sensitive intel (SN: 12/13/17). By comparison, standard internet security rests on a relatively shaky foundation of math problems that are difficult for today’s computers to solve, which could be vulnerable to new technology, namely quantum computers (SN: 6/29/17).

But quantum communication typically has a catch. “There cannot be any glitch that is unforeseen,” says quantum physicist Valerio Scarani of the National University of Singapore. For example, he says, imagine that your device is supposed to emit one photon but unknown to you, it emits two photons. Any such flaws would mean that the mathematical proof of security no longer holds up. A hacker could sniff out your secret key, even though the transmission seems secure.

Device-independent quantum key distribution can rule out such flaws. The method builds off of a quantum technique known as a Bell test, which involves measurements of entangled particles. Such tests can prove that quantum mechanics really does have “spooky” properties, namely nonlocality, the idea that measurements of one particle can be correlated with those of a distant particle. In 2015, researchers performed the first “loophole-free” Bell tests, which certified beyond a doubt that quantum physics’ counterintuitive nature is real (SN: 12/15/15).

“The Bell test basically acts as a guarantee,” says Jean-Daniel Bancal of CEA Saclay in France. A faulty device would fail the test, so “we can infer that the device is working properly.”

In their study, Bancal and colleagues used entangled, electrically charged strontium atoms separated by about two meters. Measurements of those ions certified that their devices were behaving properly, and the researchers generated a secret key, the team reports in the July 28 Nature.

Typically, quantum communication is meant for long-distance dispatches. (To share a secret with someone two meters away, it would be easier to simply walk across the room.) So Scarani and colleagues studied entangled rubidium atoms 400 meters apart. The setup had what it took to produce a secret key, the researchers report in the same issue of Nature. But the team didn’t follow the process all the way through: The extra distance meant that producing a key would have taken months.

In the third study, published in the July 29 Physical Review Letters, researchers wrangled entangled photons rather than atoms or ions. Physicist Wen-Zhao Liu of the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei and colleagues also demonstrated the capability to generate keys, at distances up to 220 meters. This is particularly challenging to do with photons, Liu says, because photons are often lost in the process of transmission and detection.

Loophole-free Bell tests are already no easy feat, and these techniques are even more challenging, says physicist Krister Shalm of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo. “The requirements for this experiment are so absurdly high that it’s just an impressive achievement to be able to demonstrate some of these capabilities,” says Shalm, who wrote a perspective in the same issue of Nature.

That means that the technique won’t see practical use anytime soon, says physicist Nicolas Gisin of the University of Geneva, who was not involved with the research.

Still, device-independent quantum key distribution is “a totally fascinating idea,” Gisin says. Bell tests were designed to answer a philosophical question about the nature of reality — whether quantum physics really is as weird as it seems. “To see that this now becomes a tool that enables something else,” he says, “this is the beauty.”

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When the ancient Incas wanted to archive tax and census records, they used a device made up of a number of strings called a quipu, which encoded the data in knots. Fast-forward several hundred years, and physicists are on their way to developing a far more sophisticated modern equivalent. Their “quipu” is a new phase of matter created within a quantum computer, their strings are atoms, and the knots are generated by patterns of laser pulses that effectively open up a second dimension of time.

This isn’t quite as incomprehensible as it first appears. The new phase is one of many within a family of so-called topological phases, which were first identified in the 1980s. These materials display order not on the basis of how their constituents are arranged—like the regular spacing of atoms in a crystal—but on their dynamic motions and interactions. Creating a new topological phase—that is, a new “phase of matter”—is as simple as applying novel combinations of electromagnetic fields and laser pulses to bring order or “symmetry” to the motions and states of a substance’s atoms. Such symmetries can exist in time rather than space, for example in induced repetitive motions. Time symmetries can be difficult to see directly but can be revealed mathematically by imagining the real-world material as a lower-dimensional projection from a hypothetical higher-dimensional space, similar to how a two-dimensional hologram is a lower-dimensional projection of a three-dimensional object. In the case of this newly created phase, which manifests in a strand of ions (electrically charged atoms), its symmetries can be discerned by considering it as a material that exists in higher-dimensional reality with two time dimensions.

“It is very exciting to see this unusual phase of matter realized in an actual experiment, especially because the mathematical description is based on a theoretical ‘extra’ time dimension,” says team member Philipp Dumitrescu, who was at the Flatiron Institute in New York City when the experiments were carried out. A paper describing the work was published in Nature on July 20.

Opening a portal to an extra time dimension—even just a theoretical one—sounds thrilling, but it was not the physicists’ original plan. “We were very much motivated to see what new types of phases could be created,” says study co-author Andrew Potter, a quantum physicist at the University of British Columbia. Only after envisioning their proposed new phase did the team members realize it could help protect data being processed in quantum computers from errors.

Standard classical computers encode information as strings of bits—0’s or 1’s—while the predicted power of quantum computers derives from the ability of quantum bits, or qubits, to store values of either 0 or 1, or both simultaneously (think Schrödinger’s cat, which can be both dead and alive). Most quantum computers encode information in the state of each qubit, for instance in an internal quantum property of a particle called spin, which can point up or down, corresponding to a 0 or 1, or both at the same time. But any noise—a stray magnetic field, say—could wreak havoc on a carefully prepared system by flipping spins willy-nilly and even destroying quantum effects entirely, thereby halting calculations.

Potter likens this vulnerability to conveying a message using pieces of string, with each string arranged in the shape of an individual letter and laid out on the floor. “You could read it fine until a small breeze comes along and blows a letter away,” he says. To create the more error-proof quantum material, Potter’s team looked to topological phases. In a quantum computer that exploits topology, information is not encoded locally in the state of each qubit but is woven across the material globally. “It’s like a knot that’s hard to undo—like quipu,” the Incas’ mechanism for storing census and other data, Potter says.

“Topological phases are intriguing because they offer a way to protect against errors that’s built into the material,” adds study co-author Justin Bohnet, a quantum physicist at the company Quantinuum in Broomfield, Colo., where the experiments were carried out. “This is different to traditional error-correcting protocols, where you are constantly doing measurements on a small piece of the system to check if errors are there and then going in and correcting them.”

Quantinuum’s H1 quantum processor is made up of a strand of 10 qubits—10 ytterbium ions—in a vacuum chamber, with lasers tightly controlling their positions and states. Such an “ion trap” is a standard technique used by physicists to manipulate ions. In their first attempt to create a topological phase that would be stable against errors, Potter, Dumitrescu and their colleagues sought to imbue the processor with a simple time symmetry by imparting periodic kicks to the ions—all lined up in one dimension—with regularly repeating laser pulses. “Our back-of-the-envelope calculations suggested this would protect [the quantum processor] from errors,” Potter says. This is similar to how a steady drumbeat can keep multiple dancers in rhythm.

To see if they were right, the researchers ran the program multiple times on Quantinuum’s processor and checked each time to see if the resulting quantum state of all the qubits matched their theoretical predictions. “It didn’t work at all,” Potter says with a laugh. “Totally incomprehensible stuff was coming out.” Each time, accumulating errors in the system degraded its performance within 1.5 seconds. The team soon realized that it was not enough to just add one time symmetry. In fact, rather than preventing the qubits from being affected by outside knocks and noise, the periodic laser pulses were amplifying tiny hiccups in the system, making small disruptions even worse, Potter explains.

So he and his colleagues went back to the drawing board until, at last, they struck upon an insight: if they could concoct a pattern of pulses that was somehow itself ordered (rather than random) yet did not repeat in a regular manner, they might create a more resilient topological phase. They calculated that such a “quasi-periodic” pattern could potentially induce multiple symmetries in the processor’s ytterbium qubits while avoiding the unwanted amplifications. The pattern they chose was the mathematically well-studied Fibonacci sequence, in which the next number in the sequence is the sum of the previous two. (So where a regular periodic laser pulse sequence might alternate between two frequencies from two lasers as A, B, A, B..., a pulsing Fibonacci sequence would run as A, AB, ABA, ABAAB, ABAABABA....)

Although these patterns actually emerged from a rather complex arrangement of two collections of varying laser pulses, the system, according to Potter, can be simply considered as “two lasers pulsing with two different frequencies” that ensure the pulses never temporally overlap. For the purpose of its calculations, the theoretical side of the team imagined these two independent collections of beats along two separate time lines; each collection is effectively pulsing in its own time dimension. These two time dimensions can be traced on to the surface of a torus. The quasi-periodic nature of the dual time lines becomes clear by the way they each wrap around the torus again and again “at a weird angle that never repeats on itself,” Potter says.

When the team implemented the new program with the quasi-periodic sequence, Quantinuum’s processor was indeed protected for the full length of the test: 5.5 seconds. “It doesn’t sound like a lot in seconds, but it’s a really stark difference,” Bohnet says. “It’s a clear sign the demonstration is working.”

“It’s pretty cool,” agrees Chetan Nayak, an expert on quantum computing at Microsoft Station Q at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not involved in the study. He notes that, in general, two-dimensional spatial systems offer better protection against errors than one-dimensional systems do, but they are harder and more expensive to build. The effective second time dimension created by the team sneaks round this limitation. “Their one-dimensional system acts like a higher-dimensional system in some ways but without the overhead of making a two-dimensional system,” he says. “It’s the best of both worlds, so you have your cake and you eat it, too.”

Samuli Autti, a quantum physicist at Lancaster University in England, who was also not involved with the team, describes the tests as “elegant” and “fascinating” and is particularly impressed that they involve “dynamics”—that is, the laser pulses and manipulations that stabilize the system and move its constituent qubits. Most previous efforts to topologically boost quantum computers have relied on less active control methods, making them more static and less flexible. Thus, Autti says, “Dynamics with topological protection is a major technological goal.”

The name the researchers assigned to their new topological phase of matter recognizes its potentially transformative capabilities, although it is a bit of a mouthful: emergent dynamical symmetry-protected topological phase, or EDSPT. “It’d be nice to think of a catchier name,” Potter admits.

There was another unexpected bonus of the project: the original failed test with the periodic pulse sequence revealed that the quantum computer was more error-prone than assumed. “This was a good way of stretching and testing how good Quantinuum’s processor is,” Nayak says.

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But the new Omicron subvariants are shattering that trend. BA.5 has caused more people to catch COVID for the second or third time than previous strains.

BA.5 is known for having a structure that is maximized to evade immunity and for transmitting from person-to-person more easily than other subvariants in the Omicron family.

Here's what you need to know about reinfections.

Reinfections are increasing

Emerging research shows the percentage of reinfections is rising.

Helix, which sequences COVID-19 tests to surveil variants, found out of nearly 300,000 infections since March 2021, the share that was reinfections almost doubled to 6.4% during the BA.5 wave in July from 3.6% during the BA.2 wave in May.

The Helix data shows that most reinfections in July occurred in people who had COVID-19 in 2021.

Experts expect the rate of reinfections to continue to climb for two main reasons: BA.5 is highly contagious, and the majority of the country has already contracted COVID-19 at least once.

Early in the pandemic, strains like delta weren't replaced as fast by new variants and people who had COVID-19 had some protection against reinfection for several months. But now, new strains are sweeping through the country one after the other.

Just since April, BA.2, BA.2.12.1 and now BA.5, have had turns at being the dominant strain. So Floridians who got an earlier variation of Omicron in spring could be vulnerable to reinfection from a different strain circulating this summer or fall.

Experts differ on how soon you can get reinfected

As a nation, no one knows the true magnitude of reinfections because people are testing at home or they aren't testing at all.

However, researchers feel confident chances are higher of getting COVID again if you had the virus or your most recent vaccine dose prior to 2022.

Shishi Luo, associate director of bioinformatics and infectious disease at Helix, said her data shows on average, people who are getting reinfected now were last infected about nine months ago.

So does that mean if you had COVID-19 in the last few months, you likely won't get it again this summer or fall?

That answer differs depending on who you ask.

A new study backs up the notion that a previous Omicron infection could offer some protection from BA.5., the newest strain. When analyzing COVID-19 cases recorded in Qatar between May 7 this year—when BA.4 and BA.5 first entered the country—and July 4, researchers found prior infection with Omicron was 79.7% effective at preventing BA.4 and BA.5 reinfection and 76.1% effective at preventing symptomatic reinfection.

"Basically you have a seven times greater chance of being reinfected if your previous infection was before Omicron," said Dr. Michael Daignault, an emergency physician at Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, Calif. "The immunity from a previous Omicron infection actually protects you from other Omicron sub-lineages to some extent, but nothing is 100%."

Daignault also referenced a new Danish pre-print paper released this week that shows high protection against BA.5 in people who are triple vaccinated and had a prior Omicron infection. Daignault said he had COVID-19 for the first time in June and doesn't worry about reinfection—at least for now. "I am a young healthy guy who is triple vaccinated and recently infected. I feel well protected."

Many experts, however, believe reinfection risk varies by individual. In some parts of the country, cases are being reported of reinfections in as early as one month.

Some of Florida's seniors may find themselves in that situation, said Dr. Mary Jo Trepka, an infectious disease epidemiologist with Florida International University.

"Your chances of reinfection can depend on whether you have been vaccinated and are up to date on your booster, what your previous infection was like and how far away it was, since immune defenses tend to wane over time," she said. "It also could depend on your age and underlying health conditions."

Trepka said even with immunity from a recent infection, the circumstances play a role in whether you catch COVID again. "If you have a fleeting encounter with someone outdoors, you would be exposed to a smaller viral load than if you are living with someone infected who has a higher viral load."
Symptoms may differ each time

Doctors see evidence that symptoms tend to be milder and shorter if you get COVID-19 a second or third time, but it's hard to firmly say that this will be the case for everyone. You may still run a fever and experience exhaustion, a sore throat, brain fog and other symptoms.

Dr. O'Neill J. Pyke, chief medical officer at Jackson North Medical Center, said he contracted the original strain of COVID-19 in 2020. He could barely breathe, lost 20 pounds and missed 45 days of work.

Pyke caught another case of COVID-19 last month. By now he had been vaccinated and had a booster shot seven months earlier. This time he had a horrible headache and fatigue.

"It was just a bad three days," he said. After six days, he was able to go back to work.

In looking at Jackson's COVID hospitalizations, Pyke says it is possible that people who are highly vulnerable to the virus and got really sick during an earlier infection may experience severe symptoms during reinfection. It also is possible, he said, that someone healthy, vaccinated and recently infected could have symptoms so mild they don't know they have COVID unless they are tested for work or other reasons.

Reinfections come with risk

Experts still don't have the full picture of what kind of health risks come from having COVID over and over, but a new study aims to offer some insight.
Ziyad Al-Aly, a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University and chief of research and development at the VA St. Louis Health Care System, used the health records of 5.7 million American veterans to gauge reinfection risk. He discovered that every time you contract COVID, your chance of getting really sick with something such as clotting or lung damage seems to go up. The risks remained whether or not people were fully vaccinated.

"It is also possible that the first infection may have weakened some organ systems and made people more vulnerable to health risks when they get a second or a third infection," Al-Aly told WebMD.

The results of his research were published online June 17 as a pre-print study, which means it has not yet been peer-reviewed.

How to prevent reinfection

COVID fatigue has set in, masks are off and crowds are gathering indoors again, just as BA.5 has come along and is highly contagious.
Getting vaccinated or boosted is a good way to keep your immunity levels high and ward off severe disease. You only need to wait a few weeks after an infection to get a shot, the CDC says.

Dr. Cory Harow, an emergency physician at West Boca Medical Center, says staying up to date with shots "really does make a difference, especially in people who are older."

"With more COVID in the community, more and more people are becoming ill enough to require admission to a hospital," he said.

Harow said if you have an upcoming event or travel and want to avoid reinfection, even if you have had Omicron, wear a mask in crowded places and make sure to get boosted. "If you want to lower your chances, it's something to consider."

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GUILDFORD, United Kingdom — Studies continue to show that cocoa flavanols can lower blood pressure and arterial stiffness just like the best blood pressure medications. However, scientists have had some concern that consuming cocoa when your blood pressure is normal or low could lower it even further. Now, a new study finds there’s nothing to worry about! Researchers in Australia say cocoa only lowers blood pressure when it’s abnormally high.

The new study notes that previous experiments have only looked at cocoa’s beneficial impact on the heart under tightly controlled conditions. This has made it unclear as to whether cocoa also lowers blood pressure in already healthy people. For people who love chocolate, this doesn’t mean you should run out to the store and buy a case of Hershey bars. Chocolate that contains higher levels of cocoa will be the most beneficial — but don’t forget that chocolate treats can also contain high levels of sugar and fat. Any thoughts of using cocoa for lowering blood pressure should be discussed with your doctor first.

A team from the University of Surrey says their study is one of the first to look at cocoa consumption and its impact on the heart in a real-world scenario.

“High blood pressure and arterial stiffness increases a person’s risk of heart disease and strokes, so it is crucial that we investigate innovative ways to treat such conditions,” says Christian Heiss, a professor of cardiovascular medicine, in a university release.

“Before we even consider introducing cocoa into clinical practices, we need to test if the results previously reported in laboratory settings safely translate into real-world settings, with people going about their everyday lives.”

Your gut loves metabolizing chocolate

In their study, 11 healthy people consumed six cocoa flavanol capsules or six placebo capsules on alternate days for a week. Each participant received an upper arm blood pressure monitor and a finger clip measuring pulse wave velocity (PWV) — which gauges a patient’s arterial stiffness.

The group took these readings every 30 minutes after consuming cocoa or the brown sugar placebos for three hours. They continued to monitor their blood pressure and pulse wave velocity hourly for another nine hours after that.

Results show that consuming cocoa only led to lower blood pressure and arterial stiffness in participants where those readings were already high. There was no effect when blood pressure was low in the morning.

Moreover, the study was also the first to find an additional peak in cocoa’s beneficial effect eight hours after consumption. The team believes this second peak in the readings likely has a connection to how bacteria in the gut metabolizes cocoa flavanols.

“The positive impact cocoa flavanols have on our cardiovascular system, in particular, blood vessel function and blood pressure, is undeniable. Doctors often fear that some blood pressure tablets can decrease the blood pressure too much on some days,” Prof. Heiss concludes.

“What we have found indicates that cocoa flavanols only decrease blood pressure if it is elevated. Working with participants’ personal health technologies showed us how variable blood pressure and arterial stiffness can be from day to day and shows the role of personal health monitors in developing and implementing effective personalized care.”

The study is published in the journal Frontiers in Nutrition.

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Avocados contain high amounts of fiber, potassium, magnesium, folate, vitamin C and vitamin K. The fruit is a known source of healthy, unsaturated fats and a great replacement for certain fat-containing foods like butter, cheese or processed meats.

A study recently published in the Journal of the American Heart Association found that:

•  People who ate at least one avocado each week had a 16% lower risk of cardiovascular disease and a 21% lower risk of coronary heart disease, compared to those who never or rarely ate avocados.

•  Replacing half a serving daily of margarine, butter, egg, yogurt, cheese or processed meats such as bacon with the same amount of avocado was associated with a 16% to 22% lower risk of cardiovascular disease events.

A 2015 study published in the Journal of American Heart Association found that eating one avocado a day as part of a moderate-fat diet resulted in lower "bad" LDL cholesterol.

"Although avocados are not a total solution to improving heart health, research shows substantial benefits to adding them to your diet," said Mayra L. Estrella, Ph.D., M.P.H., a member of the American Heart Association's Council on Lifestyle and Cardiometabolic Health and an assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology, Human Genetics, and Environmental Sciences at the University of Texas Health Science Center School of Public Health in Houston. "However, everything in moderation because avocados are not calorie-free. A medium avocado averages about 240 calories and 24 grams of fat, according to the California Avocado Commission. Yet, they are a source of healthy fat that can be eaten in place of "bad" saturated fat in a typical diet. And of course, if you're eating them in guacamole or another types of dip, you'll want to be careful not to indulge in too many chips, as well."

The research on avocados aligns with the American Heart Association's guidance to follow the Mediterranean diet—a dietary pattern focused on fruits, vegetables, grains, beans, fish and other healthy foods and plant-based fats such as olive, canola, sesame and other non-tropical oils.

The American Heart Association website has a number of heart-healthy recipes using avocados.

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But what is closure? And should it really be the goal for individuals seeking relief or healing, even in these traumatic times of global pandemic, war in Ukraine and mass shootings in the U.S.?

Closure is an elusive concept. There is no agreed-upon definition for what closure means or how one is supposed to find it. Although there are numerous interpretations of closure, it usually relates to some type of ending to a difficult experience.

As a grief expert and author of "Closure: The Rush to End Grief and What It Costs Us," I have learned that the language of closure can often create confusion and false hope for those experiencing loss. Individuals who are grieving feel more supported when they are allowed time to learn to live with their loss and not pushed to find closure.

Why did closure become popular?

Closure is entrenched in popular culture not because it is a well-defined, understood concept that people need, but rather because the idea of closure can be used to sell products, services and even political agendas.

The funeral industry started using closure as an important selling point after it was criticized harshly in the 1960s for charging too much for funerals. To justify their high prices, funeral homes began claiming that their services helped with grief too. Closure eventually became a neat package to explain those services.

In the 1990s, death penalty advocates used the concept of closure to reshape their political discourse. Arguing that the death penalty would bring closure for victims' family members was an attempt to appeal to a broader audience. However, research continues to show that executions do not bring closure.

Still today, journalists, politicians, businesses and other professionals use the rhetoric of closure to appeal to people's emotions related to trauma and loss.

So what is the problem with closure?

It is not the mere presence of closure as a concept that is a problem. The concern comes when people believe closure must be found in order to move forward.

Closure represents a set of expectations for responding after bad things happen. If people believe they need closure in order to heal but cannot find it, they may feel something is wrong with them. Because so many others may tell those grieving they need closure, they often feel a pressure to either end grief or hide it. This pressure can lead to further isolation.

Privately, many people may resent the idea of closure because they do not want to forget their loved ones or have their grief minimized. I hear this frustration from people I interview.

Closure frequently becomes a one-word description of what individuals are supposed to find at the end of the grieving process. The concept of closure taps into a desire to have things ordered and simple, but experiences with grief and loss are often longer-term and complex.

If not closure, then what?

As a grief researcher and public speaker, I engage with many different groups of people seeking help in their grief journeys or looking for ways to better support others. I've listened to hundreds of people who share their experiences with loss. And I learn time and again that people do not need closure to heal.

They can carry grief and joy together. They can carry grief as part of their love for many years. As part of my research, I interviewed a woman I will call Christina.

Just before her 16th birthday, Christina's mom and four siblings were killed in a car accident. Over 30 years later, Christina said that people continue to expect her to just "be over it" and to find closure. But she does not want to forget her mother and siblings. She is not seeking closure to their deaths. She has a lot of joy in her life, including her children and grandchildren. But her mom and siblings who died are also part of who she is.

Both privately—and as a community—individuals can learn to live with loss. The types of loss and trauma people experience vary greatly. There is not just one way to grieve, and there is no time schedule. Furthermore, the history of any community contains a range of experiences and emotions, which might include collective trauma from events such as mass shootings, natural disasters or war. The complexity of loss reflects the complexity of relationships and experiences in life.

Rather than expecting yourself and others to find closure, I would suggest creating space to grieve and to remember trauma or loss as needed. Here are a few suggestions to get started:

•  Know people can carry complicated emotions together. Embrace a full range of emotions. The goal does not need to be "being happy" all the time for you or others.

•  Improve listening skills and know you can help others without trying to fix them. Be present and acknowledge loss through listening.

•  Realize that people vary greatly in their experiences with loss and the way they grieve. Don't compare people's grief and loss.

•  Bear witness to pain and trauma of others in order to acknowledge their loss.

•  Provide individual and community-level opportunities for remembering. Give yourself and others freedom to carry memories.

Healing does not mean rushing to forget and silencing those who hurt. I believe that by providing space and time to grieve, communities and families can honor lives lost, acknowledge trauma and learn what pain people continue to carry.

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The dawn calm was torn asunder as the United States Army detonated a plutonium implosion device known as the Gadget – the world's very first test of a nuclear bomb, known as the Trinity test. This moment would change warfare forever.

The energy release, equivalent to 21 kilotons of TNT, vaporized the 30-meter test tower (98 ft) and miles of copper wires connecting it to recording equipment. The resulting fireball fused the tower and copper with the asphalt and desert sand below into green glass – a new mineral called trinitite.

Decades later, scientists discovered a secret hidden in a piece of that trinitite – a rare form of matter known as a quasicrystal, once thought to be impossible.

"Quasicrystals are formed in extreme environments that rarely exist on Earth," geophysicist Terry Wallace of Los Alamos National Laboratory explained last year.

"They require a traumatic event with extreme shock, temperature, and pressure. We don't typically see that, except in something as dramatic as a nuclear explosion."

Most crystals, from the humble table salt to the toughest diamonds, obey the same rule: their atoms are arranged in a lattice structure that repeats in three-dimensional space. Quasicrystals break this rule – the pattern in which their atoms are arranged does not repeat.

When the concept first emerged in the scientific world in 1984, this was thought to be impossible: crystals were either ordered or disordered, with no in-between. Then they were actually found, both created in laboratory settings and in the wild – deep inside meteorites, forged by thermodynamic shock from events like a hypervelocity impact.

Knowing that extreme conditions are required to produce quasicrystals, a team of scientists led by geologist Luca Bindi of the University of Florence in Italy decided to take a closer look at trinitite.

But not the green stuff. Although they're uncommon, we have seen enough quasicrystals to know that they tend to incorporate metals, so the team went looking for a much rarer form of the mineral – red trinitite, given its hue by the vaporized copper wires incorporated therein.

Using techniques such as scanning electron microscopy and X-ray diffraction, they analyzed six small samples of red trinitite. Finally, they got a hit in one of the samples – a tiny, 20-sided grain of silicon, copper, calcium and iron, with a five-fold rotational symmetry impossible in conventional crystals – an "unintended consequence" of warmongering.

"This quasicrystal is magnificent in its complexity - but nobody can yet tell us why it was formed in this way," Wallace explained in 2021 when the team's research was published.

"But someday, a scientist or engineer is going to figure that out and the scales will be lifted from our eyes and we will have a thermodynamic explanation for its creation. Then, I hope, we can use that knowledge to better understand nuclear explosions and ultimately lead to a more complete picture of what a nuclear test represents."

This discovery represents the oldest known anthropogenic quasicrystal, and it suggests that there may be other natural pathways for the formation of quasicrystals. For example, the fulgurites of molten sand forged by lightning strikes, and material from meteor impact sites, could both be a source of quasicrystals in the wild.

The research could also help us better understand illicit nuclear tests, with the eventual aim of curbing the proliferation of nuclear armaments, the researchers said. Studying the minerals forged at other nuclear testing sites could uncover more quasicrystals, the thermodynamic properties of which could be a tool for nuclear forensics.

"Understanding other countries' nuclear weapons requires that we have a clear understanding of their nuclear testing programs," Wallace said.

"We typically analyze radioactive debris and gases to understand how the weapons were built or what materials they contained, but those signatures decay. A quasicrystal that is formed at the site of a nuclear blast can potentially tell us new types of information - and they'll exist forever."

The research has been published in PNAS.

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While there's still no 'smoking gun', it seems there is a mountain of circumstantial evidence that would be very statistically unlikely to exist without the Wuhan markets at the epicenter of the outbreak.

According to a 2021 World Health Organisation (WHO) mission report, a total of 174 people caught SARS-CoV-2 in the very early days of the outbreak in December 2019. Locations of where 155 of those people lived and worked were able to be extracted from the report.

In their study published in Science, the international team of researchers found that the majority of these 155 people lived near the west bank of the Yangtze River, where the Wuhan markets are located. There was a high density of cases surrounding the market.

When comparing the infected group to the general population of the same age living in Wuhan, the researchers found that infected people lived significantly closer to the Wuhan market than one would expect from random chance alone.

Around 66 percent of people hospitalized with COVID-19 before January 2020 had direct exposure to the Wuhan markets.

But interestingly, people hospitalized for COVID-19 who didn't have any direct contact with the markets tended to live closer to the markets than those who did have direct contact with the markets.

If the markets were the source of infection, one might expect people living close by to be at greater risk than those living further out in the city. Those living far away would be more likely to catch COVID-19 only if they happened to visit the markets or worked there, and that's exactly what the data suggest.

"The observation that a substantial proportion of early cases had no known epidemiological link had previously been used as an argument against a Huanan market epicenter of the pandemic," the researchers say.

"However, this group of cases resided significantly closer to the market than those who worked there, indicating that they had been exposed to the virus at, or near, the Huanan market."

(Worobey et al./Science/CC BY)

The Wuhan market had a range of live exotic animals on sale around the time of the first COVID-19 cases in humans.

While none of the animals were tested for SARS-CoV-2 at the time, the Chinese authorities did take 585 environmental samples from surfaces in the market in January 2020.

The international research team mapped out exactly where in the Wuhan market the positive SARS-CoV-2 samples were taken and overlaid that with the locations where people were infected.

Their spatial analysis found that positive surface samples concentrated in the southwest corner of the market, the same area where vendors were selling live mammals that can carry coronaviruses, including raccoon dogs, hog badgers, and red foxes.

"Five of the SARS-CoV-2-positive environmental samples were taken from a single stall selling live mammals in late 2019," the researchers say.

"All eight COVID-19 cases detected prior to 20 December were from the western side of the market, where mammal species were also sold."

Positive samples were taken from cages, carts, and freezers that were associated with the live mammal trade.

"These are the most compelling and most detailed studies of what happened in Wuhan in the earliest stages of what would become the COVID-19 pandemic," says Stephen Goldstein, a geneticist at the University of Utah and co-author of the study.

"We have convincingly shown that the wild animal sales at the Huanan Market in Wuhan are implicated in the first human cases of the disease."

(Worobey et al./Science/CC BY)

With 572 million SARS-CoV-2 infections worldwide and over six million deaths, there's a strong desire by governments to pinpoint exactly how the virus first took hold.

The WHO has conducted investigations in China over the past few years, but its results have been inconclusive due to a lack of data.

The leading hypothesis, accepted by most scientists, is that SARS-CoV-2 was introduced to humans by wild animals sold at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in December 2019.

But another theory – that the virus accidentally escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology that had been studying bat coronaviruses – has percolated away online, leading President Joe Biden to commission a report on the origins of COVID-19 by the National Intelligence Council.

The report, released in October last year, found that COVID-19 was not developed as a biological weapon and was probably not genetically engineered.

This study was published in Science.

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Research findings suggest that video games could be a useful tool for training in perceptual decision-making.

Superior sensorimotor decision-making skills and enhanced activity in key regions of the brain are shown in frequent video game players as compared to non-players. This is according to a recent study published in Neuroimage: Reports by Georgia State University researchers.

According to the authors, who used functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) in the research, the findings suggest that video games could be a useful tool for training in perceptual decision-making.

“Video games are played by the overwhelming majority of our youth more than three hours every week, but the beneficial effects on decision-making abilities and the brain are not exactly known,” said lead researcher Mukesh Dhamala, associate professor in Georgia State’s Department of Physics and Astronomy and the university’s Neuroscience Institute.

“Our work provides some answers on that,” Dhamala said. “Video game playing can effectively be used for training — for example, decision-making efficiency training and therapeutic interventions — once the relevant brain networks are identified.”

Dhamala was the adviser for Tim Jordan, the lead author of the paper, who offered a personal example of how such research could inform the use of video games for training the brain.

Jordan, who received a Ph.D. in physics and astronomy from Georgia State in 2021, had weak vision in one eye as a child. As part of a research study when he was about 5 years old, he was asked to cover his good eye and play video games as a way to strengthen the vision in the weak one. Jordan credits video game training with helping him go from legally blind in one eye to building strong capacity for visual processing, allowing him to eventually play lacrosse and paintball. He is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

The Georgia State research project involved 47 college-age participants, with 28 categorized as regular video game players and 19 as non-players.

The subjects laid inside an FMRI machine with a mirror that allowed them to see a cue immediately followed by a display of moving dots. Participants were asked to press a button in their right or left hand to indicate the direction the dots were moving, or resist pressing either button if there was no directional movement.

According to the research findings, people that play video games were faster and more accurate with their responses.

Analysis of the resulting FMRI brain scans found that the differences were correlated with enhanced activity in certain parts of the brain.

“These results indicate that video game playing potentially enhances several of the subprocesses for sensation, perception, and mapping to action to improve decision-making skills,” the authors wrote. “These findings begin to illuminate how video game playing alters the brain in order to improve task performance and their potential implications for increasing task-specific activity.”

There was no trade-off between speed and accuracy of response — the researchers point out that the video game players were better on both measures.

“This lack of speed-accuracy trade-off would indicate video game playing as a good candidate for cognitive training as it pertains to decision-making,” the authors wrote.

Reference: “Video Game Players Have Improved Decision-Making Abilities and Enhanced Brain Activities” by Timothy Jordan and Mukesh Dhamala, 22 June 2022, Neuroimage: Reports.
 

DOI: 10.1016/j.ynirp.2022.100112

Research Shows Video Game Players Have Enhanced Brain Activity and Superior Decision-Making Skills

One week later, astronomers find a galaxy even deeper back in time

Early in the pandemic, vaccination or a bout with Covid-19 seemed to ward off the risk of another infection. But now, new viral variants are increasingly able to dodge that hard-earned protection. Keeping track of those variants and how they escape immune protection is an exhausting game, one that scientists would like to squelch with a new type of vaccine the virus hasn’t managed to out-evolve.

Scientists have tried several routes to attack the problem. The narrowest starts with the existing Covid mRNA vaccines and seeks to create updated boosters that target the virus’s most recent variants, an effort that drugmakers Moderna and Pfizer are attempting with Omicron’s progeny. The broadest, most ambitious route is to invent a vaccine that would target the entire coronavirus family, including the merbecoviruses that cause MERS, the embecoviruses responsible for ordinary colds, and the sarbecovirus subgenus that gave rise to both Covid and the original SARS virus that broke out in 2002.

But there’s a middle path: a vaccine that would attack just the sarbecoviruses, meaning the Covid virus and all of its future offspring, as well as any new SARS-CoV siblings that might appear in the future. This pipeline already has several candidates; some have been tested in primates or in mice, and one is undergoing a small clinical trial for people. All exploit commonalities shared by sarbecoviruses that could be used to combat their entire lineage.

“If you have a way to target these parts that are very conserved, you might have a way of targeting all of these sarbecoviruses,” says Alex Cohen, a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech who is developing this kind of vaccine. Ideally, he adds, this encompassing protection could be achieved with “one type of vaccination, or one type of immunization.”

Here’s a look at some of the candidates that are being developed.

Mosaic Nanoparticle Vaccines

Cohen works in Pamela Bjorkman’s laboratory in Caltech’s department of biology and biological engineering, which recently published a paper in Science on their candidate, showing that it demonstrated protection in monkeys and mice against multiple sarbecovirus strains. Theirs is a mosaic nanoparticle-based vaccine, which means it is built on a tiny, cage-like protein ball.

Their idea is to train the immune system to attack a target that many sarbecoviruses have in common. The Caltech lab chose a part of Covid’s famous spike protein called a receptor binding domain (RBD), which helps the virus enter and infect a host cell. RBDs are often evolutionarily conserved among different sarbecoviruses, meaning that although some regions of the binding site may mutate as new variants emerge, others stay the same. (As a hypothetical example, the Delta and Omicron variants would have similar RBDs, but a few differences as well.) This similarity creates an opportunity: If you can encourage the body to generate the antibodies that target those shared regions, they can protect against many different variants instead of just one.

Bjorkman’s team came up with this plan by studying antibodies from patients who were previously infected with Covid and analyzing where those antibodies would bind on the spike protein’s RBD. Bjorkman pulls out a model of the spike protein that is about the size of her head (in other words: very not to scale). “Early on, there were all these potent neutralizing antibodies that people isolated from infected people, and they blocked receptor binding,” she says, pointing to a region at the tips of the RBD. “But as variants came, they no longer worked.”

Her team realized that those early antibodies that had once seemed so powerful would bind to the outermost region of the RBD. These sites were effective targets for attacking the earliest versions of the virus. But those areas mutated over time. Once they did, it was harder for the antibodies to grab on to them and neutralize the virus.

Other rarer antibodies, however, could bind to a harder-to-reach area that was not as easily mutated. Bjorkman points to a part of the RBD that is closer to the middle of the spike protein than the tips, indicating where those special antibodies bind. “These are the antibodies we really want, because the RBDs should stay conserved among the sarbecoviruses and among any variant that could ever arise of SARS-CoV-2,” she says. The task for their vaccine would be to prompt the immune system to create antibodies that could latch on to those shared sites.

The team’s first step was to turn their nanoparticle into a kind of template that would train the immune system to make those antibodies. They dunked a protein nanoparticle shell into a mixture of eight different RBDs, which stuck to its surface—kind of like coating a sticky candy apple with different nuts. Because “there’s no reason for them to go to any particular place,” Bjorkman says, the end product was a nanoparticle with a random assortment of different RBDs on its surface. (Hence the “mosaic” in “mosaic nanoparticle vaccine.”)

The mosaic nanoparticle vaccine has eight different receptor binding domains (RBDs), shown in different colors on the surface of the nanoparticle. Antibodies, shown in green, bind to the conserved regions on the RBDs. 

Illustration: Marta Murphy/Caltech

When injected into an animal, the B cells in the animal’s immune system, which are in charge of producing protective antibodies, would start to make ones that attack these binding sites. Should the animal later encounter the actual version of the virus, its antibodies would know to glom onto these sites, stopping the virus from entering cells.

You might think this eight-RBD approach would result in antibodies that are designed to target only eight different kinds of binding sites. But the researchers took advantage of a quirk in the shape of the antibodies: They are two-armed and shaped like the letter Y. Instead of binding with one arm to a region specific to one RBD type, they can be designed to bind with both arms to conserved regions of two adjacent sites. That means that instead of gumming up only eight specific sarbecoviruses RBDs, they can theoretically attach to any with those conserved regions.

First the scientists tested their vaccine in mice, which were split into groups of six. Two of those groups were immunized with the mosaic nanoparticle, then each group was exposed to either Covid’s Beta variant or SARS-CoV-1, the first SARS virus from 2002. All 12 of the vaccinated mice survived. In contrast, most of the unvaccinated mice exposed to either virus lost weight and died.

Next, the team ran a similar experiment with macaque monkeys, divided into groups of four. Two of the groups were immunized by being injected three times with the mosaic nanoparticle. Then, about a month after the third dose, the animals were exposed to either Covid’s Delta variant or the original SARS virus. None of the vaccinated monkeys became infected with either sarbecovirus type, although three out of four monkeys in the Delta control group showed infection, and all the monkeys in the SARS control group did.

What’s significant is that in the experiment with monkeys, neither the original SARS nor Delta RBDs were included on the mosaic nanoparticle. To the team, this indicated that the antibodies generated after the inoculation targeted viral versions that the vaccine had not explicitly been designed to immunize against—and that it was useful against an array of sarbecoviruses. “The animals elicited a pretty consistent response where their antibodies were pretty much cross-reactive to every coronavirus we tested against, including those that were not present on the particle,” Cohen says.

Other Nanoparticle Contenders

These findings add the mosaic nanoparticle to a running list of RBD—or more broadly, spike protein-based—vaccines that have been created by different academic groups around the world. One candidate being developed by scientists at the University of Washington has been tested in mice, and another is currently in Phase 1 clinical trials at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. Another vaccine poised to enter human clinical trials is being developed by biologist Kevin Saunders and colleagues at the Duke Human Vaccine Institute, who published a paper describing their work in Nature in June 2021, and circulated an additional preprint in January 2022.

Like Bjorkman’s group, Saunders’ had noticed that the antibodies that were protective against multiple strains of sarbecoviruses targeted the innermost end of the RBD—and that these antibodies, among others, could be generated through immunization with their nanoparticle. But unlike the eight-RBD mosaic nanoparticle from the Caltech team, this version relies on just one RBD type from the original Covid virus. The nanoparticle is different too; it is based on a ferritin (a protein that stores iron) shell derived from Helicobacter pylori bacteria. (Saunders points out that ferritin nanoparticles are already used in flu vaccines, making it a “nanoparticle platform with some clinical experience.”)

In their 2021 paper, they also tested on monkeys. They found that in macaques, their vaccine generated antibodies that could protect against the original Covid virus. Then in the 2022 preprint, which has not yet been published or peer-reviewed, the scientists challenged more immunized macaques with the Beta and Delta Covid variants. They split the monkeys into several groups of five. One immunized group and one unvaccinated control group were exposed to the Beta variant, while another immunized group and control group were exposed to Delta. The immunized monkeys showed little to no detectable levels of virus—indicating that the vaccine protected them against infection—while most control monkeys did.

Even though the researchers only used a RBD from one version of Covid, their vaccine generated a robust polyclonal response—meaning it created multiple antibody types, rather than just one. To Saunders, this is part of the approach’s charm: Creating many antibody types is beneficial, he says, because one that is extremely effective against a certain variant might not be as effective against another. Or vice versa: A previously weak antibody could better neutralize a newer variant. “Some of those antibodies are going to be great at responding to Omicron, some will be great at responding to Alpha, some will be great at responding to Delta,” he says. And some, ideally, will be great at responding to variants that don’t even exist yet.

Jumpstarting the Vaccine

David Martinez, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who was a coauthor on several RBD-nanoparticle papers, has studied whether these kinds of vaccines can be boosted by an adjuvant: a substance that “jumpstarts” the immune system and is delivered along with the vaccine. “If you were asleep in bed, your alarm went off, you didn’t get up, and someone threw an ice-cold bucket of water on you—that’s what an adjuvant can do to the immune system,” he says.

Adjuvants can be made from lipids, salts, or other kinds of oils. One kind even contains oil from a shark. They are often used in vaccines; the first mRNA Covid vaccines, for example, used lipid nanoparticles as their adjuvant.

In the January preprint with Saunders’ lab, the team tested their RBD nanoparticle vaccine with three different kinds of adjuvants. They found that in comparison to the standalone vaccine, those with any of the three adjuvants produced higher concentrations of antibodies.

One particular adjuvant, called 3M-052-AF, produced the highest number of antibodies that cross-neutralized different sarbecovirus strains. While its exact recipe is proprietary, the adjuvant contains something called a TLR7/8 agonist: small molecules that stimulate immune cells to activate an immune response. These types of molecules can “essentially talk to the immune system and hyperactivate the immune system to counteract whatever external insult it’s seeing,” Martinez says.

Trapping Coronaviruses

Scientists are also exploring other nano-based methods for variant-proof vaccination. One of these, called a “nanotrap,” was originally described in Matter in June 2021 as a treatment for those who have already been infected rather than as a vaccine. A nanotrap is a mechanism to get rid of Covid viruses through phagocytosis, meaning that a macrophage or other immune cell eats it. Nanotraps work a little like bait—they essentially trick the body into chomping up the invading virus.

The idea could work on a variety of viruses, but bioengineer Jun Huang from the University of Chicago and his team created one that is specific to sarbecoviruses because it has a polymeric nanoparticle shell studded with ACE2 receptors, which are the receptors on human cells that the Covid virus binds to. Because of the high density of ACE2 receptors on the nanotrap’s surface, Covid viruses are attracted to it and get stuck. But here’s where the trap comes in: Sprinkled amid the ACE2 receptors are ligands, little molecules that can bind to a cell receptor and, in this case, induce phagocytosis. The body’s macrophages recognize the ligand and eat up the rest of the virus-flecked nanotrap, thus getting rid of the virus. “We first catch the virus, and then clear the virus,” Huang says.

Now, Huang is curious about how these nanotraps can be leveraged as vaccine candidates. When the macrophages swoop in, they not only eat viruses but can stimulate the rest of the immune system to start creating antibodies against them. Creating a nanotrap with ACE2 receptors would kickstart the immune system into making antibodies that fight Covid-like viruses. “Then we can basically tackle all the variants,” Huang says. “If the virus loses the ability to bind to ACE2, then it cannot infect cells.”

Next Steps

Huang’s nanotrap version is the least tested of all these candidates—he has applied for a patent and demonstrated successful infection clearance in human lung tissue taken from donated organs, but not yet in animals infected with Covid. The others have demonstrated efficacy in Covid animal models, but entering human clinical trials could take another year or two. The vaccine developed by Saunders and colleagues is projected to go into human clinical trials in 2023; the same for the one at the University of Washington. Bjorkman’s group estimates that clinical trials would start in 2024. (“I wish it could be earlier, but there is regulatory stuff we have to go through,” she says.)

A representative for Walter Reed said they were not able to give information about their Phase 1 clinical trial, pending the release of a study.

In the meantime, researchers are already thinking ahead to the next pandemic and how these candidates might be expanded to target even more coronavirus types. “We’ve been working to really expand our vaccine so that it’s effective against MERS coronaviruses as well,” says Saunders, noting that MERS has around a 30 percent mortality rate—a “high mortality rate for a respiratory virus.”

But given the time it will take to carry out human testing, their future utility may come from fighting sarbecoviruses we haven’t even imagined yet. Cohen is optimistic that the lessons learned from these experiments can be helpful in dealing with future zoonotic infections, meaning ones that cross from other animals to humans, as the Covid virus spilled over from bats. “It’s not really far-fetched to think that there will be more animal spillovers in the future,” he says. “So having something that targets this entire category of viruses might be useful for preventing, or at least mitigating, any future outbreaks.”

These Vaccines Will Take Aim at Covid—and Its Entire SARS Lineage

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This is what happens when a mouse trips out: It becomes more curious about other mice and more likely to socialize with them for long periods of time. It becomes less likely to glug massive amounts of alcohol. It wriggles, quavering, like a wet dog shaking off rain. And its head twitches, rapidly, side to side. 

Because a mouse on LSD cannot tell you that colors seem brighter or the walls are melting or a guitar solo somehow sounds purple, these head twitches are of tremendous importance to chemist Jason Wallach. “If you want to know if a compound is likely to cause a psychedelic effect in humans,” says Wallach, speaking from his tiny office in the Discovery Center at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, “you look to the mice, to that twitching.” 

These twitch tests—and countless others—are part of Wallach’s mind-bending new mandate, sparked by a late-2019 meeting with the heads of a company called Compass Pathways. The UK-based biotech firm was eyeing the possibilities of developing psychedelic drugs for use in mental health therapies. Its core product was psilocybin, the psychoactive compound in magic mushrooms. But it needed new chemicals, engineered to deliver consistent, optimized, and potentially radical results. And that meant new chemists. By August 2020, Compass had inked a two-year, $500,000 “sponsored research agreement” with Wallach and the university. The Discovery Center was born.

A few years in, with continued support from the company, Wallach has cooked up scores of novel psychedelics, mailed them off to partner labs for testing on those mice, and then waited—and hoped—for the telltale twitch results. The chemist, 36 and pale, face framed by a rough red beard and rectangular glasses, can hem and haw a bit when it comes to specifics: “Compass doesn’t want me to give out numbers. I’ll say we’ve made a lot.” It’s in the neighborhood of 150 new drugs, all of which can potentially be patented and sold by Compass.

We are, as you have probably read, in the throes of a “psychedelic renaissance.” Compelling clinical work conducted at New York University, Imperial College, Johns Hopkins, and elsewhere showed that long-outlawed drugs such as N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT), LSD, and psilocybin have terrific potential for treating everything from addiction to Alzheimer’s to end-of-life anxiety. Pharmaceutical companies have taken note. In 2020 the fledgling psychedelic industry was predicted to balloon to $6.9 billion by 2027—a year later, that estimate increased to over $10 billion. In September 2020, Compass became the first company of its kind to trade on a major stock exchange, debuting on the Nasdaq at an estimated value of more than $1 billion.

So far, none of these companies has brought a psychedelic drug to market, but the thinking is that, through what the clinical literature calls a—“mystical-type experience”—a psychedelic trip that produces feelings of joy, peace, interconnectedness, and transcendence—patients can confront the root causes of various mental maladies. “I don’t want to use the word cure, but psychedelics can offer long-term healing,” says Florian Brand, the cofounder and CEO of a Berlin-based biotech incubator called Atai Life Sciences, which invested in Compass Pathways. “We have put a lot of money into actually exploring this hypothesis.”

At the Discovery Center, Wallach leads a team of about 15 students, researchers, and technicians. “One thing we do,” he says, “is create new compounds that differ just a bit from classical psychedelics, like psilocybin or LSD.” Slight tweaks in the molecular structure can drastically alter the intensity and character of the psychedelic journey. This ability to fine-tune the contours of a trip—to engineer new modes of experience—is Wallach’s passion.

Jason Wallach is charged with creating new psychedelics, engineered to deliver consistent, optimized, and potentially radical results.

Photograph: Tonje Thilesen

For years, his lab work seemed utterly niche, bordering on verboten. Mentors discouraged him. There was no money in psychedelics, they said. There were reputational risks. After all, many of these drugs have been ruled by the US Drug Enforcement Administration as possessing “no currently accepted medical use.” Since the US government declared most psychedelics illegal in 1970, such research had typically been the domain of so-called clandestine chemists, who worked in backyard sheds and underground bunkers, mass-producing trippy new compounds while evading law enforcement. 

Wallach wasn’t discouraged. The work felt about as close as one could get, professionally, to pure chemistry, he says—research animated almost entirely by personal curiosity: “What happens if you put a bromine here? What if you move it over there?”

New investment is shaking up those ideals, as firms like Compass rush to capitalize on the results of that curiosity. A few years ago, Wallach was conducting experiments and coauthoring articles for relatively esoteric journals of neuropharmacology. Now his once quiet lab, with its beakers and burners and reports on twitchy mice, is helping usher in a new era of Big Neuropharma—and not everyone in the world of psychedelia is thrilled about it. Compass has come to embody the potential (and looming threat) of “psychedelic capitalism.” And Wallach is one of its most prized assets. The young chemist is all in. But the financial stakes, and the ideological fault lines emerging as psychedelics go corporate, produce new stresses. “In the long run, this research is valuable,” he says, before giving his head a shake. “But on a day-to-day basis? It does nothing but raise my blood pressure.”

Wallach’s lifelong, incurable obsession with psychoactives kicked in when he was a kid in the ’90s. It was the Just Say No era, complete with egg-in-the-frying-pan, “This is your brain on drugs” public service announcements. The messages didn’t have the intended effect on Wallach. In fourth grade, when other kids were devouring Goosebumps and Judy Blume paperbacks, he discovered a book in the school library outlining the dangers of various drugs. “Something drew me to it,” he recalls, “that a small amount of powder or material could cause a really strong change in someone’s experience.”

Years later, Wallach had his own psychedelic experiences, and although he demurs on the details, they proved life-altering. “I pretty much dedicated every waking hour almost for the past 15 years to studying them,” he says. “They had a profound impact on how I wanted to spend my life.”

With few sanctioned pathways for making a living studying psychedelics, Wallach enrolled at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where he studied psychology as a portal to the mysteries of the human psyche. Wallach was especially curious about consciousness: Where do thoughts come from? What’s the difference between the brain and the mind? How do we perceive things such as taste and sound and color? How do we perceive … anything at all? Not long into his first year of undergrad, Wallach realized that psychology was “a little less empirical” than he had hoped. He switched majors to study cellular and molecular biology.

Wallach’s once quiet lab is helping usher in a new era of Big Neuropharma.

Photograph: Tonje Thilesen

Wallach began conducting research in synthetic organic chemistry—building compounds that occur in nature. He examined cannabinoids, the psychoactive compounds in cannabis. A voracious reader of textbooks, he noticed Amazon’s recommendation algorithm pushing two curious titles: PiHKAL and TiHKAL. These chunky reference books from the ’90s were written by Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin—a psychopharmacologist best known for synthesizing MDMA, also known as ecstasy—and his wife, Ann. They contain detailed accounts of various psychoactive compounds, based on firsthand trials conducted by the Shulgins and a close cadre of fellow travelers.

The books are, as a spokesperson for the DEA once put it, “pretty much cookbooks on how to make illegal drugs.” Wallach immediately ordered the two volumes and got cooking. He calls them “probably the most useful tools for answering some of the questions I was interested in at the time, about consciousness and the mind-brain relationship.”

Following the Shulgins’ step-by-step instructions, Wallach taught himself how to make psychedelics. During breaks from school, he threw together an ad hoc lab in the basement of his parents’ stone farmhouse in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. When his mom started complaining about the smell, he moved the whole operation to a small carriage house on the property. There, Wallach continued to synthesize psychedelics, preparing everything he could physically (and legally) manage. “To be clear,” he says, “I was very paranoid.”

Wallach fell in love with the work. While his parents may have flinched at the tart stenches—and the serious risk of their son accidentally manufacturing compounds that merit harsh penalties under the DEA’s Drug Scheduling system—they were happy to see him throw himself into something so completely. After graduating in 2008, Wallach enrolled at the University of the Sciences (which recently merged with Saint Joseph’s University) to pursue his PhD in pharmacology and toxicology. To continue studying psychoactives, when applying for grants he pretended to buy into the same antidrug hysteria he had dismissed as a skeptical schoolkid, framing his research as investigations into dangerous compounds. “The angle was, these are drugs of abuse, and we want to understand them,” he says. “Whatever you have to tell the grant agency.”

Crystallized tryptamine synthesized by Wallach in his lab at Saint Joseph University.

Photograph: Tonje Thilesen

But a little academic subterfuge was a small price to pay to nurture his obsession. When Wallach is not synthesizing psychedelics, he’s lecturing about psychedelic synthesis. When he’s not lecturing, he’s reading the latest literature. Even when he’s at home with his wife in West Philly, ostensibly watching TV, he’s still reading about pharmacology. And when he’s not doing that, he’s teaching himself math. Or electronics. Or advanced physics. He wants to keep his brain sharp. Everything feeds back into the research. He assures me that he has interests outside of the hard sciences. He collects antique snuff boxes. He compulsively chews nicotine gum, which he believes sustains his focus. He swears he even chews it while brushing his teeth. He enjoys the odd cigar, too. Save for the occasional scotch, he abstains from alcohol, which he calls ethanol. “I like the taste,” Wallach says, but he can’t suffer the more mind-dulling effects. “I hate if I even start to feel buzzed at all.” In one conversation, when I ask him how his weekend was, he tells me he spent his days off using plastic model kits to design potential molecules. He has even found himself toiling in the lab on Christmas Day.

“This is my life,” Wallach says. “There is nothing else I’d rather be doing. If I was given a billion dollars, today, the first thing I would do is build a superlab.” When Compass came calling, he finally got the golden opportunity to pursue that dream. Maybe not a full-blown, billion-dollar superlab. But a lab of his own.

In pop culture, psychedelia is a Day-Glo tapestry of mandalas, black-light inks, tie-dye, and phat pants embossed with lime-green alien heads. In their various states of synthesis and manufacture, psychoactive drugs are decidedly unkaleidoscopic: brownish, yellowish, and vaguely gross, like plaque scraped off nicotine-stained teeth. The labs where these drugs are synthesized smell as if someone were burning a Rotten Eggs Yankee Candle.

Last fall, I visited Wallach in his lab, where he was preparing some N,N-dipropyltryptamine—a legal, and extremely potent, hallucinogen. Dressed in a faded maroon polo, khakis, and chunky desert boots, Wallach sets up a reaction in a round-bottom flask while explaining that in the ’70s, scientists investigated DPT for use in psychotherapy. He flits around the lab, blasting out moisture from glassware, sealing tubes with argon gas, dissolving reagents in methanol, and advising me to keep my distance as he fiddles with substances that are, he warns, “fairly toxic.” It’s like watching a chef show off at a teppanyaki restaurant, slicing and dicing by pure reflex.

The fall semester is in session, and Wallach has returned, after the pandemic disruption, to in-class teaching. His lab—and its work for Compass—presses on. Wallach and his squad of mostly twentysomethings weave among a few different offices, testing compounds for purity, sketching out molecules in grid-lined notebooks, and preparing potentially mind-expanding substances in discreetly marked mailers to be sent for mouse-twitch tests at a partner lab at UC San Diego.

The job is to develop drugs that tickle the 5-HT2A receptor, a cellular protein involved in a range of functions—appetite, imagination, anxiety, sexual arousal. The receptor has proven crucial to understanding the neuropharmacology of the psychedelic experience induced by classical hallucinogens. LSD, mescaline, psilocybin—they all interact with 5-HT2A. (In certain circles, the phrase “5-HT2A agonist” has supplanted “psychedelic,” which still carries faint whiffs of hippie-era hedonism.) “If you’re designing a new version of a classical hallucinogen,” Wallach says, “the first thing you’re doing is looking at its interaction with that receptor.”

One of Wallach’s goals is to hack how long a psychedelic’s effect lasts. Full-dose psilocybin trips usually run in excess of six hours. Hand-me-down hippie wisdom dictates three full days for a proper LSD experience: one to prepare, one to trip, and one for reacclimating yourself to the world of waking, non-wiggly consciousness. From a clinical perspective, such epic sessions are expensive and may not be necessary. Meanwhile, drugs like DMT are acute and intense, with effects lasting only minutes (sometimes called “the businessman’s trip” because it can be enjoyed within a typical lunch hour). Finding what Compass cofounder Lars Wilde calls “the sweet spot” between the length of a trip and clinical efficacy is just one of Wallach’s many challenges. If he and his team of researchers happen upon a concoction that’s particularly potent or experientially unique—“cool” is a word that gets tossed around a lot—well, all the better.

All around the lab, the shelves are cluttered. On a fridge stocked with uncommon chemical provisions is a mission statement scrawled in black Sharpie: “Shoot 4 the stars / land on Mars.” Artwork adorns the walls—impressionist scenes painted in long globs by Wallach himself. Cabinets housing beakers and flasks are decorated with printouts of notable scientists, like a wall of saints. There’s “father of psychopharmacology” Nathan S. Kline; Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who discovered LSD; and in lab whites and a jaunty beret, smoking an enormous pipe, is Sasha Shulgin, who died in 2014 at the age of 88.

Wallach wouldn’t be working with DPT if it weren’t for Shulgin, who first synthesized the drug. In one of his trip reports, Shulgin describes smoking “many mg” of DPT and being treated to a vision of two rotating hearts, interlocking like something from a drugstore valentine. “Around the outside,” he writes, “there were sparkling jewels or crystals of light of different colors, maybe four rows deep surrounding them all around.”

Shulgin is a key influence for many in Wallach’s lab. “He was authentic and honest, both as a researcher and as a person,” says Jitka Nykodemová, a 27-year-old graduate student who moved from Prague to Philadelphia to work with Wallach. Shulgin feared that government agents might one day lay fire to his personal records, so he packed his life’s work into a few textbooks. Now, his oeuvre is available online at no cost. Wallach’s operation is more of a closed book. Slinking through the Discovery Center, snapping photos for reference, I’m cautioned against stealing away with any proprietary chemical names or structures. All of the lab’s discoveries belong to Compass, transferred via an “exclusive, royalty-bearing, worldwide license.”

All of Wallach’s discoveries belong to Compass, transferred via an “exclusive, royalty-bearing, worldwide license.”

Photograph: Tonje Thilesen

“There’s a perception of Compass as being the ogre,” says Graham Pechenik, a patent lawyer focusing on the emerging psychedelics industry. He’s talking about the company’s trajectory and its clashes with old-timers who bristle at the idea of psychedelics going corporate.

Compass started off as a nonprofit in 2015 but switched, just a year later, to a for-profit model and accepted funding from, among others, controversial venture capitalist Peter Thiel. In December 2019, Compass received a patent for a method of synthesizing psilocybin. To some competitors, the patent seemed to give the company a monopoly on a compound that humans have used for thousands of years. Peter Van der Heyden, once a clandestine chemist and now the cofounder and chief science officer of Psygen Labs, a private manufacturer of pharmaceutical-
grade psychedelics, calls the patent “unconscionable.”

“It just doesn’t jibe,” says Van der Heyden, 70, “with what a whole group of us—shall I say, people with roots in the ’60s and ’70s—have spent years of their life, and sometimes years in jail, working toward. It’s something that is supposed to be—I don’t know how else to say it—a gift to mankind.” His objections have an ideological bent. His generation framed the psychedelic experience within hippie-era values of peace, love, and smiling on one’s brother. These drugs were once seen as a tonic: a chemical rejoinder to the culture of corporate profiteering.

Compass has also applied to patent protocols for conducting psychedelic therapy, including conventions that have arguably been part of psychedelic therapy for decades, if not longer, such as soft furniture and “reassuring physical contact.” As one critic put it to me, Compass was trying to patent hugging.

A consortium of chemists and competitors recently challenged Compass’ claims in a patent review trial. Some in the industry maintain that the company’s method of synthesizing psilocybin apes techniques devised by LSD pioneer Hofmann, who filed patents on manufacturing psilocybin over half a century ago. The charge was spearheaded by Carey Turnbull, a former energy broker who founded a nonprofit watchdog group, Freedom to Operate, to fight psychedelic patent claims. (Among his personal effects at his estate in the gated hamlet of Tuxedo Park, New York: a Chanel-branded, diamond-encrusted statue of the Buddha.)

Turnbull is also the founder and CEO of Ceruvia Life Sciences, a for-profit company that’s pursuing pharmaceutical applications of psilocybin and other psychedelics. In other words, in addition to playing the role of psychedelia’s patent overreach patrol, Turnbull is Compass’ direct competitor.

In an open letter published on Freedom to Operate’s website, Turnbull claims Compass is “not making good-faith use of capitalism or pharma regulations” by attempting to establish itself as an exclusive, global supplier of psilocybin. In Turnbull’s view, Compass is laying claim to an existing invention (psilocybin, and specifically Hofmann’s synthetic formation) with an intent to “ransom it back to the human race.” Freedom to Operate recruited a platoon of scientists to examine Compass’ psilocybin and scoured the globe for vintage samples of Hofmann’s version. Their research claims that Compass’ molecule—and the method for its production—is far from novel.

Compass executives, naturally, disagree. They maintain that their patents are in place to protect their legitimate intellectual property, enabling them to bring their treatments to the greatest number of patients possible. They also insist that they aren’t claiming some monopoly on psilocybin itself—only the process for producing a particular synthetic form. In June, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board sided with Compass, ruling against Freedom to Operate’s challenge. Compass Pathways CEO George Goldsmith assures me his company is not trying to thwart anyone from gobbling a mind-expanding mushroom cap. Cofounder Wilde, likewise, swears that Compass isn’t cornering the market on hugs. Both Goldsmith and Wilde exhibit the corporate tendency to stay frustratingly on message. Ask them what they had for breakfast and they’ll tell you how excited they are to build a new future for mental health. But pressed about his company’s image, and the efforts mobilized against it, Goldsmith’s consummate professionalism slips, if only a bit. “Freedom to Operate?” he chuckles, a little anxiously, from his London office. “There’s no constraint. Operate, already.”

Wallach isn’t particularly ruffled by the swampy ethics of psychedelic capitalism. After all, it’s business as usual. The so-called “Hippie Mafia” of the ’60s and ’70s—led by superstar LSD chemists Tim Scully and Nicholas Sand—were bankrolled by the freaky scions of the Mellon robber baron dynasty. Wallach’s hero, Shulgin? He paid for his far-out chemical experiments with his day job developing insecticides and other chemicals at Dow, all while the company was mass-producing napalm for the Vietnam War.

Nor is Wallach moved by the charges leveled at Compass. “I’m definitely aware of those criticisms,” he says. “But I have no reservations.” For Wallach, corporate involvement seems preferable to the alternative, in which all decisions around the research, scheduling, and distribution of drugs fall to the government. His voice shifts a bit when he says the government, as if the term were suspended in spooky air quotes. He reserves no fondness for the DEA, which continues to impose severe penalties for the possession and manufacture of mind-expanding drugs, psychedelic renaissance notwithstanding. 

But his antipathy stems from more than the tangles of bureaucratic red tape he has to wade through to do his work. He counts at least 10 close friends who have overdosed on synthetic opioids. He keeps photos of some of them in his home office. (The government of his native Pennsylvania has identified opioid overdoses as the state’s worst public health crisis.) Wallach has seen students struggle and suffer. He rails at a system that still views drug use and addiction as moral issues, punishable to the full extent of the law, and not medical ones to be addressed, compassionately, through science—recent literature suggests that psychedelic therapies may help treat substance use disorders. “It definitely drives me,” he says, holding back tears. “I want to prevent that loss for other people. And improve people’s existence. We could have a paradise on this rock of ours floating through space.”

At the spring 2022 meeting of the American Chemistry Society, Wallach drew a standing-room-only crowd. They had come to the San Diego Convention Center to hear him expound on the structure-activity relationship of n-benzylphenethylamines, a class of synthetic hallucinogens collectively called “N-Bomb” on the street. “There were tons of young scientists lining up out in the hall,” he says, with a touch of awe.

This hype, and the worry of falling into what Wallach calls “the trap of being a celebrity scientist,” doesn’t follow him back to the lab. He has plenty to take care of, as Big Neuropharma’s patent land grab ramps up and data piles high on his desk. Sitting in his office in West Philly, he shows me a graph on his computer. It’s recent head-twitch data, charting how mice responded to various doses of a new drug, the chemical composition of which he cannot legally disclose. The curve slopes gently upward before accelerating steeply, peaking, and driving back down, like the arc of a roller coaster. The line tops out at a dose of 10 mg/kg, or “mig per kig,” as chemists pronounce it. I ask Wallach if that’s any good. His eyes widen a bit, like he’s practically dying to tell me something. “It’s a good response,” he says. He plucks a sandy-brown glomp of nicotine gum from between his back molars, nests it back in its blister pack, and nods as he trails off, “Very potent …  yeah … yeah ...”

Maybe, someday soon, that new drug, whatever it is, will be given to human subjects in a Compass-sponsored clinical trial. It may upend pharmacology. Or psychology. It could spark the next revolution in psychedelia. And Wallach can toast his success, with a cigar and a single glass of scotch, as he earns his place among the psychopharmacological saints. Until then, it’s charts and graphs and fastidious inventories of structure-activity relationships on reams of graph paper; it’s inspirational quotes stuck on fridges full of heady chemical analogs, and funky smells, and the head-twitching tempos of tripped-out mice.

The High-Stakes Race to Engineer New Psychedelic Drugs

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Reaffirming his predecessor’s statements, Borisov stated that Russia took the call to withdraw from the International Space Station after 2024. He implied the withdrawal was primarily due to the heightened tensions with the West.

“The decision to leave the station after 2024 has been made”

To fulfill its obligations, Russian cosmonauts will remain aboard the ISS for at least the next two and a half years. Incidentally, NASA and Roscosmos had recently signed an agreement to swap seats on flights to the ISS starting in September.

Russia has confirmed it will abide by the contractual agreements. Accordingly, NASA astronauts (and cargo) will be able to travel to the ISS onboard Russia’s Soyuz flights. On the other hand, Russian cosmonauts will travel on SpaceX Crew Dragon missions.

According to previous agreements between NASA and Roscosmos, at least one American and one Russian have to always be on board the ISS to ensure the orbiting outpost runs smoothly. Both the countries operate on opposite ends of the outpost, which has been continuously occupied since November 2000.

Russia is no stranger to maintaining its own space station. The country had Mir, a low-orbit space station launched by USSR. The outpost operated from 1986 to 2001. Building an entirely new one is certainly a very costly endeavor. It is not clear if Russia could prioritize building a space station, especially after sinking a lot of capital to fund its invasion of Ukraine.

Source: Associated Press

Russia confirms it is leaving ISS to build successor to permanent space outpost Mir

Anya Topiwala, PhD, of the University of Oxford in England, and her study co-authors linked moderate drinking — about four standard drinks a week in the United States — to higher brain iron levels in multiple basal ganglia regions.

The researcher analyzed 21,000 people in the U.K. Biobank cohort and found that more brain iron was “associated with poorer scores on tests of executive function, fluid intelligence, and reaction speed,” the researchers reported in PLoS Medicine.

The researchers had three main reasons to do this study, they wrote.

— Growing evidence of moderate alcohol consumption negatively affecting the brain

— Possibility that accumulation of iron in the brain could be the reason; higher brain iron has been described in Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other neurodegenerative condition

— The researchers knew of no studies investigating whether brain iron levels differ by level of alcohol consumption.

“This is the first study, to our knowledge, demonstrating higher brain iron in moderate drinkers,” Topiwala told MedPage Today. “The findings offer a potential pathway through which alcohol can cause cognitive decline.

“Establishing the pathway is important as it may offer clues as to ways we can intervene to reduce the harm,” she said. “For iron, we actually have medicines — iron chelators — that could reduce levels.”

Henry Kranzler, MD, of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, told MedPage that today, the “findings, though, are largely limited to the basal ganglia, collections of brain cells that are involved in motor control, executive functions, and emotions.”

Kranzler was not involved in the research.

Source

Researchers said this is the first study assessing whether the health risks linked to the condition known as metabolic syndrome, which affects about one-third of Americans, may be diminished by green tea's anti-inflammatory benefits in the gut.

"There is much evidence that greater consumption of green tea is associated with good levels of cholesterol, glucose and triglycerides, but no studies have linked its benefits at the gut to those health factors," said Richard Bruno, senior study author and professor of human nutrition at The Ohio State University.

The team conducted the clinical trial in 40 individuals as a follow-up to a 2019 study published in The Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry that associated lower obesity and fewer health risks in mice that consumed green tea supplements with improvements to gut health.

In the new study, green tea extract also lowered blood sugar, or glucose, and decreased gut inflammation and permeability in healthy people—an unexpected finding.

"What this tells us is that within one month we're able to lower blood glucose in both people with metabolic syndrome and healthy people, and the lowering of blood glucose appears to be related to decreasing leaky gut and decreasing gut inflammation—regardless of health status," Bruno said.

Articles on the glucose results and lowered gut permeability and inflammation were published recently in Current Developments in Nutrition.

People with metabolic syndrome are diagnosed with at least three of five factors that increase the risk for heart disease, diabetes and other health problems—excess belly fat, high blood pressure, low HDL (good) cholesterol, and high levels of fasting blood glucose and triglycerides, a type of fat in the blood.

The tricky thing about these risk factors that constitute metabolic syndrome is that they are often only slightly altered and do not yet require drug management, but still impose great risk to health, Bruno said.

"Most physicians will initially recommend weight loss and exercise. Unfortunately, we know most persons can't comply with lifestyle modifications for various reasons," he said. "Our work is aiming to give people a new food-based tool to help manage their risk for metabolic syndrome or to reverse metabolic syndrome."

Forty participants—21 with metabolic syndrome and 19 healthy adults—consumed gummy confections containing green tea extract rich in anti-inflammatory compounds called catechins for 28 days. The daily dose equaled five cups of green tea. In the randomized double-blind crossover trial, all participants spent another 28 days taking a placebo, with a month off of any supplement between the treatments.

Researchers confirmed that participants, as advised, followed a diet low in polyphenols—naturally occurring antioxidants in fruits, vegetables, teas and spices—during the placebo and green tea extract confection phases of the study so any results could be attributed to the effects of green tea alone.

Results showed that fasting blood glucose levels for all participants were significantly lower after taking green tea extract compared to levels after taking the placebo. Decreased gut inflammation due to the green tea treatment in all participants was established through an analysis that showed a reduction in pro-inflammatory proteins in fecal samples. Using a technique to assess sugar ratios in urine samples, researchers also found that with green tea, participants' small intestine permeability favorably decreased.

Gut permeability, or leaky gut, enables intestinal bacteria and related toxic compounds to enter the bloodstream, stimulating low-grade chronic inflammation.

"That absorption of gut-derived products is thought to be an initiating factor for obesity and insulin resistance, which are central to all cardiometabolic disorders," Bruno said. "If we can improve gut integrity and reduce leaky gut, the thought is we'll be able to not only alleviate low-grade inflammation that initiates cardiometabolic disorders, but potentially reverse them."

"We did not attempt to cure metabolic syndrome with a one-month study," he said. "But based on what we know about the causal factors behind metabolic syndrome, there is potential for green tea to be acting at least in part at the gut level to alleviate the risk for either developing it or reversing it if you already have metabolic syndrome."

Bruno's lab is completing further analyses of microbial communities in the guts of study participants and levels of bacteria-related toxins in their blood.

Source

New hypothesis emerges to explain mysterious hepatitis cases in kids

An international trial—known as CAPP2—involved almost 1000 patients with Lynch syndrome from around the world, and revealed that a regular dose of resistant starch, also known as fermentable fiber, taken for an average of two years, did not affect cancers in the bowel but did reduce cancers in other parts of the body by more than half. This effect was particularly pronounced for upper gastrointestinal cancers including esophageal, gastric, biliary tract, pancreatic and duodenum cancers.

The astonishing effect was seen to last for 10 years after stopping taking the supplement.

The study, led by experts at the Universities of Newcastle and Leeds and published today in Cancer Prevention Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, is a planned double blind 10 year follow-up, supplemented with comprehensive national cancer registry data for up to 20 years in 369 of the participants.

Previous research, published as part of the same trial, revealed that aspirin reduced cancer of the large bowel by 50%.

"We found that resistant starch reduces a range of cancers by over 60%. The effect was most obvious in the upper part of the gut," explained Professor John Mathers, professor of Human Nutrition at Newcastle University. "This is important as cancers of the upper GI tract are difficult to diagnose and often are not caught early on.

"Resistant starch can be taken as a powder supplement and is found naturally in peas, beans, oats and other starchy foods. The dose used in the trial is equivalent to eating a daily banana; before they become too ripe and soft, the starch in bananas resists breakdown and reaches the bowel where it can change the type of bacteria that live there.

"Resistant starch is a type of carbohydrate that isn't digested in your small intestine; instead it ferments in your large intestine, feeding beneficial gut bacteria—it acts, in effect, like dietary fiber in your digestive system. This type of starch has several health benefits and fewer calories than regular starch. We think that resistant starch may reduce cancer development by changing the bacterial metabolism of bile acids and to reduce those types of bile acids that can damage our DNA and eventually cause cancer. However, this needs further research."

Professor Sir John Burn, from Newcastle University and Newcastle Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, who ran the trial with Professor Mathers, said, "When we started the studies over 20 years ago, we thought that people with a genetic predisposition to colon cancer could help us to test whether we could reduce the risk of cancer with either aspirin or resistant starch.

"Patients with Lynch syndrome are high-risk as they are more likely to develop cancers, so finding that aspirin can reduce the risk of large bowel cancers, and resistant starch [can reduce the risk of] other cancers by half is vitally important.

"Based on our trial, NICE now recommend aspirin for people at high genetic risk of cancer; the benefits are clear—aspirin and resistant starch work."
Long term study

Between 1999 and 2005, nearly 1000 participants began either taking resistant starch in a powder form every day for two years, or aspirin or a placebo.
At the end of the treatment stage, there was no overall difference between those who had taken resistant starch or aspirin and those who had not. However, the research team anticipated a longer-term effect and designed the study for further follow-up.

In the period of follow-up, there were just 5 new cases of upper GI cancers among the 463 participants who had taken the resistant starch compared with 21 among the 455 who were on the placebo.

The team are now leading the international trial, CaPP3, with more than 1,800 people with Lynch syndrome enrolled to look at whether smaller, safer doses of aspirin can be used to help reduce the cancer risk.

Source

Climate change is turning up the heat on lakes

If you have a habit of perusing satellite imagery of the world’s oceans—and who doesn’t, really?—you might get lucky and spot long, thin clouds, like white slashes across the sea. In some regions, like off the West Coast of the United States, the slashes might crisscross, creating huge hash marks. That’s a peculiar phenomenon known as a ship track.

As cargo ships chug along, flinging sulfur into the atmosphere, they actually trace their routes for satellites to see. That’s because those pollutants rise into low-level clouds and plump them up by acting as nuclei that attract water vapor, which also brightens the clouds. Counterintuitively, these pollution-derived tracks actually have a cooling effect on the climate, since brighter clouds bounce more of the sun’s energy back into space.

The Pacific Ocean off of California is particularly hash-marked because there’s a lot of shipping along that coast, and ideal atmospheric conditions for the tracks to form. Well, at least it used to be. In 2020, an International Maritime Organization (IMO) regulation took effect, which severely limited the amount of sulfur ships are allowed to spew. Shipping companies switched to low-sulfur fuel, which improved air quality, especially around busy ports. But in doing so, they reduced the number of ship tracks—which means fewer brightened clouds, and thus more warming.

In the map at right, you can see ship tracks highlighted in purple.

Illustration: Yuan et al.

Writing Friday in the journal Science Advances, researchers described how they used a new machine-learning technique to quantify the clouds better than ever before, showing how the sulfur regulation cut the amount of ship tracks over major shipping lanes in half. That, in turn, has had a moderate warming effect on those regions.

“The big finding is the regulation in 2020, put forward by the IMO, has reduced the global ship-track numbers to the lowest point on the record,” says Tianle Yuan, a climate scientist at NASA and the University of Maryland, who led the research. (Yes, reduced economic activity during the pandemic lockdowns may have had a small influence too. But ship-track activity has remained low even as cargo traffic has picked back up.) “We’ve had similar but smaller-scale, strict regulations before, and we can also see that impact,” he continues. “But there, the effect is not global.”

In Europe and North America, for instance, officials had already sectioned off what are known as emission control areas, or ECAs, which established local versions of the standards set by the 2020 global rule. “The number of tracks within the ECAs, within the control zones, reduced dramatically, to the point of almost disappearing,” Yuan says. “But outside of it, actually we saw some increase because the shipping routes had shifted.”

The satellite imagery caught ships doing something sneaky. Outside of control zones, where the vessels weren’t bound by sulfur regulations, they burned regular old fuel. Then once inside an ECA, their operators could switch to low-sulfur fuel, coming in line with the pollution rules. (Sulfur is a normal component of a fossil fuel, and it takes extra processing to remove it. Because low-sulfur fuel is more expensive, it’s more cost-effective for ship operators to spend as much time outside of ECAs as possible, burning the old stuff.)

“Our technique can help to validate whether a ship is using clean fuel or not,” says Yuan, “because we can observe indirectly how much pollution they're putting into the air.”

Illustration: Yuan et al.

To do all this, Yuan and his colleagues first gathered satellite data, which humans manually combed for ship tracks. They then fed this data into deep learning models, training the algorithms to recognize ship tracks on their own. It’s the same idea behind training an algorithm to recognize cats: If you show it enough pictures, it’ll get the general idea of what a cat looks like. So even though no two ship tracks look the same, the models could generalize well enough to identify them around the world. (You can see the ship tracks as the model saw them in the image above.) 

The researchers could then feed the models more NASA satellite data, covering all the world’s oceans, so the algorithms could identify the ship tracks and how their numbers changed over the years. 

Illustration: Yuan et al.

As you can see in the image above, there are a number of ship-track hot spots around the world, represented in a gradient that runs from red (high) to white (medium) to blue (low). As the red smudge in the upper left shows, the Pacific Ocean near Southern California and Mexico is particularly prone to ship tracks. Whether clouds form in a given area depends on a number of factors, like the stability and moisture content of the atmosphere, how polluted the air may already be, and the amount of ship traffic. 

The dark green lines around Asia, on the other hand, are estimates of emitted sulfur dioxide—not visible ship tracks—showing busy shipping lanes. These vessels don’t produce ship tracks like they do off western North America, mainly because the air is already polluted—that is, there are already lots of particulates getting into clouds, so the extra sulfur from ships doesn’t do much. 

Notice the white blob down between 60 and 0 degrees W on the map, halfway between the tips of South America and Africa. That’s near Antarctica, where hardly any ships venture. “It turns out it's a volcano,” says Yuan. “That provided us kind of an independent check, because there you don't expect any shipping activity at all, yet it's a hot spot.” That’s because volcanoes also spew sulfur aerosols, which seed clouds, brightening them in the same way ship tracks do. 

Getting a better handle on the prevalence of ship tracks has a two-fold utility. For one, the clouds betray a ship’s emissions: A captain might lie to regulators about what kind of fuel they’re burning, but the sky above won’t. “If we can measure individual ship tracks, and we can attach that ship track to an individual ship, then we can know if a ship is emitting a lot of pollution,” says Yuan. “Then we know that probably it's not burning clean fuel.”

And two, pollution plays a large—and largely understudied—role in climate change. Ship emissions are terrible for the environment because they destroy air quality, but ricocheting some of the sun’s energy back into space is actually a benefit. Interestingly, this is also the idea behind stratospheric aerosol injection, a proposed form of geoengineering in which planes would spray sulfur to deflect sunlight. Researchers are also playing with cloud brightening techniques, in which they’d spray sea salt to brighten low-lying clouds, just like ship pollution does. 

But not all kinds of pollution deflect solar energy, as sulfur does; some trap it. Other forms, like microplastics, have loaded the atmosphere with particulates that may have both cooling and heating effects on the planet. Plane contrails seem to largely play a warming role (although one that can be ameliorated by flying at certain altitudes). And both carbon dioxide and methane basically serve as insulating blankets, warming the planet. 

These pollutants are often intermingled, so cutting one can have a complex effect. This is a paradox of climate action: By reducing air pollution, including the aerosols that deflect solar energy, one recent study estimates that humanity may be boosting warming from carbon dioxide by 15 to 50 percent. 

In fact, the influence of aerosols remains one of the most uncertain areas in climate science, says Hailong Wang, who studies these dynamics at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. “Many, many models are still struggling to get the accurate representation of those effects in order to predict future climate change,” says Wang, who wasn’t involved in the new ship-tracks paper. “At some point, if we significantly reduce those aerosol emissions, we do expect some side effects of additional warming.”

Modeling how that’ll play out, though, is difficult, in part because air pollution isn’t homogeneous around the world—it varies significantly by region, and it can change rapidly due to weather patterns, and on longer timescales due to air-quality regulations. But even though this study looked just at ship tracks, researchers can use the new data to validate climate models, Wang says—for instance, to see if they can accurately represent what happens when local aerosol pollution suddenly plummets. 

Ships switching to low-sulfur fuel isn’t going to create a huge, planet-wide drop in emissions, because it's still a fossil fuel that burns carbon. (And don’t get it wrong—the bottom line is we absolutely have to stop burning fossil fuels for the good of the climate at large.) But it offers a little preview of what a reduction in one specific type of pollution might do for warming—and how complicated solving this puzzle will be.

In the meantime, as the 2020 regulation works its magic, ship tracks will continue to fade around the world. If you get lucky and spot one in new satellite imagery, you may have found yourself an outlaw.

How Do You Know a Cargo Ship Is Polluting? It Makes Clouds

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A Long March 5B rocket with the Wentian module takes off from Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site. Photo by Hou Yu/China News Service via Getty Images

China successfully launched its second module, called Wentian, to the Tiangong space station early Sunday morning (via SpaceNews). Wentian took off aboard a Long March 5B rocket from the Wenchang Space Launch Site in Hainan, China at 2:22AM ET (2:22PM local), docking at the Tiangong space station about 13 hours later at 3:13PM ET (3:13AM local).

The Wentian module contains equipment that allows the Chinese astronauts, also known as taikonauts, to perform various scientific experiments during their time on the station. As noted by The New York Times, the additional module will also provide three extra spaces to sleep, as well as another airlock that crewmembers can use to conduct spacewalks.

In June, China sent the three-person Shenzhou 14 crew to Tiangong to prepare for Wentian’s arrival. Mengtian, the station’s third and final lab module, is set to launch on a Long March 5B in October. This will complete the Tiangong space station, forming a T-shaped structure once the final module has docked.

There are some concerns about where the massive Long March 5B rocket will end up now that it delivered Wentian, though. While most rockets safely drop their lower stages into the ocean below, this type of rocket does things differently. As SpaceNews notes, it delivers its payload by launching its entire first stage into low-Earth orbit, with no way to redirect or control its movement when it comes crashing down to Earth.

In 2020, the rocket was blamed for the metal debris that wound up in Côte d’Ivoire. It also made an uncontrolled descent into the Indian Ocean after it delivered the Tianhe core module to space last year.

China successfully launches Wentian module as space station nears completion

The impact of Earth’s geology on life is easy to see, with organisms adapting to environments as different as deserts, mountains, forests, and oceans. The full impact of life on geology, however, can be easy to miss.

A comprehensive new survey of our planet’s minerals now corrects that omission. Among its findings is evidence that about half of all mineral diversity is the direct or indirect result of living things and their byproducts. It’s a discovery that could provide valuable insights to scientists piecing together Earth’s complex geological history—and also to those searching for evidence of life beyond this world.

In a pair of papers published July 1 in American Mineralogist, researchers Robert Hazen, Shaunna Morrison, and their collaborators outline a new taxonomic system for classifying minerals, one that places importance on how minerals form, not just how they look. In so doing, their system acknowledges how Earth’s geological development and the evolution of life influence each other.

Their new taxonomy, based on an algorithmic analysis of thousands of scientific papers, recognizes more than 10,500 different types of minerals. That’s almost twice as many as the roughly 5,800 mineral “species” in the classic taxonomy of the International Mineralogical Association, which focuses strictly on a mineral’s crystalline structure and chemical makeup.

“That’s the classification system that’s been used for over 200 years, and the one that I grew up with and learned and studied and bought into,” said Hazen, a mineralogist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, DC. To him, its fixation on mineral structure alone has long seemed like a monumental shortcoming.

Back in 2008, he began digging into the literature on every species of known mineral, looking for data about how they formed. The project “was a monster to try to tackle,” said Morrison, who started working with Hazen at the Carnegie Institution in 2013. The data quickly got murky because many mineral species turned out to arise from multiple distinct processes.

Take, for example, pyrite crystals (commonly known as fool’s gold). “Pyrite forms in 21 fundamentally different ways,” Hazen said. Some pyrite crystals form when chloride-rich iron deposits heat up deep underground over millions of years. Others form in cold ocean sediments as a byproduct of bacteria that break down organic matter on the seafloor. Still others are associated with volcanic activity, groundwater seepage, or coal mines.

Three different kinds of pyrite, which can form in 21 different ways under widely divergent conditions of temperature and hydration, with and without the assistance of microbes.Photograph: Rob Lavinsky/ARKENSTONE

“Each one of those kinds of pyrite is telling us something different about our planet, its origin, about life, and how it’s changed through time,” said Hazen.

For that reason, the new papers classify minerals by “kind,” a term that Hazen and Morrison define as a combination of the mineral species with its mechanism of origin (think volcanic pyrite versus microbial pyrite). Using machine learning analysis, they scoured data from thousands of scientific papers and identified 10,556 distinct mineral kinds.

Morrison and Hazen also identified 57 processes that individually or in combination created all known minerals. These processes included various types of weathering, chemical precipitations, metamorphic transformation inside the mantle, lightning strikes, radiation, oxidation, massive impacts during Earth’s formation, and even condensations in interstellar space before the planet formed. They confirmed that the biggest single factor in mineral diversity on Earth is water, which through a variety of chemical and physical processes helps to generate more than 80 percent of minerals.

Blue-green formations of malachite form in copper deposits near the surface as they weather. But they could only arise after life raised atmospheric oxygen levels, starting about 2.5 billion years ago.Photograph: Rob Lavinsky/ARKENSTONE

But they also found that life is a key player: One-third of all mineral kinds form exclusively as parts or byproducts of living things—such as bits of bones, teeth, coral, and kidney stones (which are all rich in mineral content), or feces, wood, microbial mats, and other organic materials that over geologic time can absorb elements from their surroundings and transform into something more like rock. Thousands of minerals are shaped by life’s activity in other ways, such as germanium compounds that form in industrial coal fires. Including substances created through interactions with byproducts of life, such as the oxygen produced in photosynthesis, life’s fingerprints are on about half of all minerals.

Historically, scientists “have artificially drawn a line between what is geochemistry and what is biochemistry,” said Nita Sahai, a biomineralization specialist at the University of Akron in Ohio who was not involved in the new research. In reality, the boundary between animal, vegetable, and mineral is much more fluid. Human bodies, for example, are around 2 percent minerals by weight, most of it locked away in the calcium phosphate scaffolding that reinforces our teeth and bones.

How deeply the mineralogical is interwoven with the biological might not come as a huge surprise to earth scientists, Sahai said, but Morrison and Hazen’s new taxonomy “put a nice systematization on it and made it more accessible to a broader community.”

The new mineral taxonomy will be welcomed by some scientists. (“The old one sucked,” said Sarah Carmichael, a mineralogy researcher at Appalachian State University.) Others, like Carlos Gray Santana, a philosopher of science at the University of Utah, are standing by the IMA system, even if it doesn’t take the nature of mineral evolution into account. “That’s not a problem,” he said, because the IMA taxonomy was developed for applied purposes, like chemistry, mining, and engineering, and it still functions beautifully in those areas. “It’s good at serving our practical needs.”

Yet scientists’ needs are also changing because of activities like space exploration. One implication of Hazen and Morrison’s findings is that our watery, living planet is probably much richer in mineral diversity than other rocky bodies in the solar system. “There are many minerals that simply couldn’t form on Mars,” said Hazen. “It doesn’t have penguins pooping on clay minerals, it doesn’t have bats in caves, it doesn’t have cactuses that are decaying or things like that.”

Still, Hazen and Morrison hope that their taxonomy might one day be used to decode the geologic history of other planets or moons and to search for hints of life there, past or present. When examining a Martian crystal, for example, researchers could use the new mineralogical framework to look at features like grain size and structure defects to determine whether it could have been produced by an ancient microbe rather than by a dying sea or a meteor strike.

Hazen believes that the new taxonomy might even help with detecting life on planets around distant stars. Light from exoplanets detected by the James Webb Space Telescope and other sophisticated instruments could be analyzed to determine the chemical composition of their atmospheres; based on the measurable oxygen content, the presence or absence of water vapor, relative carbon concentrations and other data, researchers could try to predict what kinds of minerals would be likely to form from light-years away.

Timothy Lyons, a biogeochemist who is part of the astrobiology team at University of California, Riverside, thinks that might be pushing the methodology too far, since “you’re not going to go to those planets and collect minerals” to confirm the results. Nevertheless, he does see Hazen and Morrison’s taxonomy as a potentially important source of insights for studies of extraterrestrial minerals found on our moon and Mars.

“In a really zoomed-out, broad-scale way, we are understanding not just our planet but our entire solar system, and potentially solar systems beyond,” Morrison said. “That’s really incredible.”

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

Life Helps Make Almost Half of All Minerals on Earth

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Wednesday, July 27

The first and only launch of the week is the Lijian 1 rocket carrying numerous satellites. The satellites include Kongjian Xinjishu Shiyan, Lixing 2, Liangzi Weina, Guidao Daqimidu, Dianci Shuangxing A/B, and Huawan Nanyua Kexue. The mission is scheduled to launch at 4:05 a.m. UTC from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center. It’ll be a notable event because this is the first launch for the Lijian 1.

Recap

The first launch covered here is from last Sunday, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 with Starlink satellites that will beam internet to Earth. The first stage of the Falcon 9 was also recorded landing back on Earth.

Next, we had another Starlink launch.

The third launch of the week was a Long March-5B Y3 carrying the Wentian Lab Module, which will attach to the Tiangong Space Station, potentially making it more visible from Earth.

The fourth and final launch was yet another Falcon 9 taking Starlink satellites to space. SpaceX certainly had a busy week!

That’s all we have this week, check in next time.

TWIRL 75: Quiet week ahead in rocket launches following the launch of Wentian