There’s been a bit of a backlash to the news that BMW will now charge owners a subscription to use the heated seats in their cars if they weren’t a paid-for option when new. The German carmaker has been putting extra features like high-beam assist behind a paywall for a couple of years now, and you pay to access the pre-installed software feature. But heated seats are hardware: Pads are integrated in the seat during production, there is wiring and switches. And to top it all, drivers have already bought and own this physical kit, hardware that will not benefit from software updates or regular over-the-air upgrades. 

The idea of paying to use something that’s already physically there rankles, like low-cost airline CEO Michael O’Leary’s suggestion he’d charge a pound to use the toilet on Ryanair flights. In his defense, he said he’d give the money to charity and his aim was was to get rid of the rear toilets, fit six extra seats, and make flights cheaper for everyone. BMW’s move looks like a simple way to raise revenue. In the UK, BMW has priced heated seats at £15 ($18) a month, £150 a year, £250 for three years, or £350 “unlimited.” On a new 1-series, they can only be ordered as part of a £600 ($720) “comfort pack.” 

Extra features have been built into the software of cars for a number of years, from more sophisticated cruise control with speed management and lane-keep assist, to fancy light shows on startup. They are switched on for top-of-the-range models and left dormant for others, with some offered as “dealer fit” options, sold in the showroom to a customer collecting their new car.  

Software as a service (SAAS), then, is not new in the car world. And you won’t be surprised to learn that you can go online and find someone who will unlock these dormant features of your car for much less than a carmaker charges. “This has been popular on VW/Audi cars for a while now,” says Iain Litchfield, boss of Litchfield Motors, one of the UK’s foremost car tuners. He concentrates mainly on cracking engine management systems to get more power, but knows people who can give upgraded sat nav, the latest tune for your adaptive suspension or, indeed, unlock access to your heated seats. 

“Typically, features like Apple Carplay and voice recognition can be enabled for around £40 ($48),” says Litchfield. “On our 2014 BMW M4 we hadn’t specified the TV option, but we were able to turn this on in the software. You can even set it to turn on the TV with the car in motion, which is illegal. We changed the DAB radio setup, central locking sequence, even the length of time the automatic wipers run for. This type of personalisation is extremely popular in BMW circles.”

BMW isn’t the first carmaker to charge for hardware that is fitted even if you didn’t order it. At one time, iconic sports car maker Caterham Cars charged a couple of hundred quid for a heated windscreen on the Seven, a useful feature in a car that wasn’t fully waterproof. Thing is, there wasn’t a unheated screen option, so you’d get it whether or not you ordered it, wired in and ready to go. 

Carmakers not giving the customer access to their car’s full potential isn’t new, either. Back in the 1960s, the American car market was so competitive that carmakers launched updated models every year. There might be new paint and trim colors, and there would always be more performance. They achieved this by building, say, a 300-bhp engine but adding baffles and restrictors and maybe a smaller carburetor to de-tune it to 250 bhp, which would be the launch engine tune. Then each subsequent model year they would remove one of the restrictions, gaining power each time.

Today, the same thing happens, just in a modern way. “When the Nissan GTR was launched it had about 480 bhp, and the final editions had about 560 bhp,” says Litchfield. “All Nissan did was keep raising the turbo boost, 0.1 bar at a time. They’d say the exhaust or an intercooler was changed and they might be slightly different, but really it was the boost that gave the uplift.” Sometimes it’s even simpler than that. “If someone gets in touch wanting their Audi R8 or Mercedes C63 AMG tuned, the first thing I ask them is if it’s an R8 Plus or C63 S. They limited the power on non-Plus R8s and non-S C63s simply by only giving those models 60 percent throttle. Probably the easiest performance upgrade ever.”

However, the business of retrospective tuning is changing since Dieselgate, says Litchfield, and this may well impact aftermarket feature hacks too. “Before, with a Bosch engine ECU (Electronic Control Unit), there were three ways of getting in, so if Bosch changed the passcode on one you still had two others. Since the emissions defeat code which led to Dieselgate was discovered, Bosch has created ECUs that can only be accessed using encrypted keys. The latest BMW M cars are among the first to use these new ECUs.” 

The other issue is over-the-air-updates. The modern, connected car is in touch with the factory to receive updates for sat nav and suchlike. In theory, its ECU and enabled features could be reset to factory specification, too, overwriting any engine tuning or options unlocking that hasn’t come via the manufacturer or its subscription service. 

What is it with the BMW heated-seat subscription, though? Check through the specifications of even the most affordable BMWs and you’ll find that only a few lack heated seats as standard. Meanwhile, if you tick the box for a heated steering wheel on a 1-series it will only cost £150 ($180), as opposed to £150 for a three-year retrospective subscription. 

Since the heated-seat announcement, BMW UK released a statement: “The ConnectedDrive Store in the UK offers customers the opportunity to add selected features which they did not order when the vehicle was built … This functionality is particularly useful for secondary owners, as they now have the opportunity to add features which the original owner did not choose … Drivers can also experiment with a feature by activating a short-term trial before committing to a full purchase.”

It's possible BMW is gauging what it can charge for, or perhaps it sees this as the first step to normalizing the idea of paying for hardware and software features. Some predict that in the future we won’t own cars but will have a car subscription that will allow us to have an appropriate everyday car and request a larger one for long trips, holidays, and the like, or a sporty one for fun. This is when the idea of choosing—and paying for—only the features you want doesn’t seem as wrong-headed.

BMW’s Heated Seats as a Service Model Has Drivers Seeking Hacks

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In fact, your eyes may actually be one of the first parts of our body to show signs of high blood pressure – often before most people are even aware they have the condition.

An estimated 1.3 billion people worldwide have hypertension – but only half of these people are aware of it or have been diagnosed. Many people may be unaware they have high blood pressure because it has few warning signs or symptoms. This is also why it's often called "the silent killer".

High blood pressure isn't something that develops suddenly. It's often the result of many years of an unhealthy lifestyle with poor diet, lack of physical activity, smoking, and excess alcohol consumption. Family history of high blood pressure, alongside other conditions – such as diabetes and kidney disease – are also risk factors.

If left untreated, high blood pressure can increase risk of heart disease (including heart attacks and heart failure), stroke, kidney disease, vascular dementia, as well as causing eye problems. This is why it's important to catch high blood pressure early – and regular eye exams could be one way to do this.

Pressure changes

There are several ways to find out if you have high blood pressure. You can get it checked by your doctor, at a pharmacy, or using a home testing kit. This is usually done with a stethoscope, arm cuff, or an automated arm cuff, which can be used at home.

The NHS advises people get their blood pressure checked every five years – though this may be yearly if a person is at greater risk of having high blood pressure.

But your optometrist may also be able to spot signs of high blood pressure – possibly even before your GP does.

When viewing inside the eye with a slit-lamp (a specialized microscope used during an eye exam) or taking a retinal photograph, many different parts of the eyes can be seen – including the small blood vessels.

These small blood vessels are very sensitive to changes in blood pressure and may become damaged as a result of high blood pressure – which may lead to blurry vision. High blood pressure may also cause a buildup of fluid beneath our retina, which may also affect the health of the eye.

During an eye exam, an optometrist may be able to measure the diameter of blood vessels to determine if a person is likely to have high blood pressure. If the optometrist takes a retinal photograph, signs of high blood pressure will be seen in red areas of hemorrhaging in the eyes.

The eye's circulation is very similar to the brain's circulation. This is because eyes developed from brain tissue, hence they're often referred to as "the window to the brain". This is also the reason why changes in the eye's blood vessels can be used as an early warning sign for what is likely to go on in the brain and elsewhere in the body.

But because changes in the eye's blood vessels can also be due to other diseases affecting the eyes (such as diabetes), any changes that your optometrist spots would need to be confirmed by a GP or at-home blood pressure device.

In order to diagnose someone with high blood pressure by looking at their eyes, optometrists will look for fluid build-up in the eye (which may lead to swelling), inflammation, and blood vessel dysfunction. They may also measure the diameter of blood vessels in the eyes to predict who is at higher risk of developing high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease.

Your optometrist may also ask you questions about your health during an exam – including if you have high blood pressure – to better identify risk factors for certain eye conditions. Someday, AI could even be used during regular eye exams to better identify those at risk of having a heart attack.

While a regular eye exam doesn't replace a regular health checkup with your doctor, it's often the first place that high blood pressure is picked up, as patients are often symptom-free.

Optometrists may also be able to catch signs of other diseases too – such as diabetes – which can also cause damage to the eyes.

Rebekka Heitmar, Reader, Optometry and Vision Sciences, University of Huddersfield and Christian French, Senior Lecturer, Optometry, University of Hertfordshire.

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NASA’s new toy may have already spotted the oldest known galaxy

The creation story told by the Chitimacha people in Louisiana describes the world in its earliest days as a wide expanse of water. Then the Great Creator instructed crawfish to dive down and bring up a bit of mud. Geologists tell a similar tale, though their sculptor is the Mississippi River: For thousands of years, it dumped soils stolen off the continent into the Gulf of Mexico. Thus the river formed its delta, a vast and muddy and ever-changing landscape where the water once forked into many paths to the sea.

These days, though, the river is largely restricted to one channel. Imprisoned within artificial levees, it’s no longer able to deposit its mud according to hydrological whim; instead, the river spits its sediment into the abyss of the deep sea. The consequences are grim: The existing mudscape is sinking. The ocean is rising. Over the past nine decades, more than 5,000 square kilometers of delta land in Louisiana has disappeared.

Few places are going faster than Plaquemines Parish, which encompasses the muddy land along the river’s final 100 or so kilometers, where New Orleans’ exurbs give way to a smattering of rural communities. (A parish is the local equivalent of a county, a remnant of Louisiana’s French colonial history.) One morning last summer, as we weave in his skiff through the parish’s marshland, Richie Blink tells me that the federal government has recently deleted 30-odd names from local nautical maps. Fleur Pond, Dry Cypress Bayou, Tom Loor Pass, Skipjack Bay: All have become undifferentiated, unlabeled expanses of open ocean.

Now, the state government wants to open a gap in the levee to divert some of the river’s muddy water back into the marshes, allowing the river to resume its old task of construction. Work on the gap could begin in early 2023, assuming that the US Army Corps of Engineers, the federal agency that oversees waterway infrastructure, grants its official approval later this year. The Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion—which is named for Barataria Bay, where the released river water will build a new “subdelta”—has been under discussion for years, but now, on the eve of destruction, it’s come under a firestorm of criticism from shrimpers worried about their livelihood; homeowners concerned about flooding; and environmentalists dismayed at the potential loss of bottlenose dolphins, a federally protected species. The diversion is intended to build new marshland, but it’s sometimes depicted as the latest assault on the region’s rural communities—which, according to critics, are about to be sacrificed again for the sake of nearby urban New Orleans.

Blink, an ecotour guide, serves on the Plaquemines Parish council and is the sole member who has not voted to oppose the project. “We are facing these massive changes,” he tells me as the solid ground disappears behind us and we speed into open water. Either the diversion will alter the ecosystem, or the loss of land will. One way or another, the parish will have to do something new if it wants to survive. “We have to imagine this delta of the future,” he says.

It strikes me, though, that we’ve often failed to imagine the delta of the present. Despite all the focus on land loss and land building, we rarely pause to discuss what we mean by land. And here in Louisiana, land—and who should control it—is a sometimes squishy idea.

The Mississippi River is truly massive, combining three major tributaries that together drain 32 US states and two Canadian provinces, from Alberta to New York to New Mexico. Together, these various tributaries once sent as much as 290 million metric tons of dirt to the Gulf of Mexico each year, stacking it into an ever-growing lobe of land. Eventually, the lobe would grow so long that one of the side channels forking away from the river would become a tempting shortcut for the Mississippi. Lured away, the river jumped—or avulsed, in the parlance of geology—on a roughly millennial schedule, sending its torrent of water down one of these channels, building in a new direction.

This process has yielded a branching network of overlapping sub-deltas that reach like splayed fingers into the Gulf of Mexico. Each sub-delta holds at its center a line of water, an active or abandoned channel of the Mississippi River. The highest ground, rarely more than a few meters above sea level, sits next to these channels; this is where the most mud has been deposited. These “ridges” can stretch for more than 150 kilometers, though they’re just a few kilometers wide. The modern Plaquemines Parish sub-delta began forming perhaps 750 years ago, and was still under construction when French explorers arrived in the late 17th century. The place seemed to consist “of nothing more than two narrow strips of land, about a musket shot in width,” one member of the crew wrote. Over the next century, French settlers marked the growth of the parish by noting how far the riverbank extended past a fort they’d built at the river’s mouth.

A second type of landform stretches like webbing between the fingers: the marshland that makes up most of the coastal landscape. Here, the mud never stacked high enough to break the ocean surface, but it came close enough to allow marsh grass to root. It’s a world of rich organic soils, though rather unsteady: In places, mats of plants float atop the water, unattached to the soils below, so that if you step onto the grass, it will wobble and sink. The delta begins roughly 500 kilometers upstream of the river’s mouth, and as of 1930, covered nearly 20,000 square kilometers—an area almost the size of New Jersey.

The water running through the marshes is fresh inland and grows saltier closer to the sea. Many species—blue crabs, white shrimp—move across this gradient throughout their life cycles, and the marsh, as a result, offers an abundance of life. The ever-shifting landscape makes research difficult, but evidence suggests that people arrived on the ridges even as they were forming, perhaps to establish short-term hunting and fishing camps amid the new marsh.

The colonial records are somewhat sparse when it comes to Indigenous life within the delta. The first French explorers noted various groups, including the Quinipissa, the Yakni-Chito, the Washa, the Chawasha, and the Chitimacha. Archaeological evidence suggests that at the time of contact, people lived in small villages mostly focused on gathering fish and other wetland resources. The delta was an important crossroads, linking coastal travelers with upriver communities; French explorers noted that so many canoes had been dragged across one ridge-top portage that they had produced a “rather good road.” The Choctaw, one of the larger tribes on the land that would become the US South, called this spot, or perhaps the whole delta, Bulbancha—the place of other languages.

The arrival of European settlers brought disease and slave raids and warfare, and by the time the French began keeping solid records in the 18th century, some Indigenous nations had disappeared, the survivors integrating with neighboring tribes. Some groups slipped into corners of the delta rarely traversed by colonists. People from various villages and traditions settled together, and today the US government refuses to officially recognize some of these groups as tribes, since there is no written record of their beginnings.

European settlers seemed not to know what to make of this landscape, which was far larger and muddier than any delta they’d known. One 18th-century French cartographer depicted a large swath as a blank mass, noting it as “trembling land and swamp”; 120 years later, a surveyor from the US Army made his opinion clearer by pointedly declining to enumerate the marshland’s features. A list of the “multitudinous islands and sheets of water would add nothing” to his description of Plaquemines Parish, the surveyor wrote.

The marshes become something of a no man’s land—or perhaps it’s better to say an every person’s land. In the late 18th century, a group of runaways escaping slavery set up an armed camp in the marsh to the east of New Orleans that could be accessed only by wading through chest-deep water, pushing through the reeds. The Maroons, as they were known, lived alongside Filipino immigrants, who occupied stilt villages three meters above the water and processed dried shrimp by dancing atop the shells. Immigrants from the Canary Islands settled nearby, too. Historians estimate that at the dawn of the 20th century, 150,000 people lived in 200 communities scattered across the delta’s marshlands. These marsh dwellers made their living by fishing, mostly, sometimes trapping raccoons and muskrats for furs.

Then, in the 1920s, oil was discovered beneath the marshes. Surveyors began to trudge through, sinking to their chests in the soft soils, assessing the prospects of this land that was barely land. Some Indigenous residents, unable to read English, signed papers they believed would affirm their ownership. Instead, they were quitting their claims. Today, 90 percent of southern Louisiana is corporate-owned. In places, permanent homes are now outnumbered by “fishing camps”—a catch-all term for coastal vacation homes, though one that implies a false rusticity. Camps often have modern amenities, and some feature lavish architecture.

These camps tend to be clustered in marinas, often just beyond the point where the ridge drops away into marsh. Most modern settlement has occurred atop the ridges themselves, which feature the only viable tracts of farmland in the delta. New Orleans was founded in 1718 atop the ridge that runs alongside the current channel of the Mississippi, 150 kilometers upstream of the river’s mouth. The city’s earliest residents found that even this land was precarious. Within the settlement’s first year, the river’s spring rise sent water streaming through the half-finished buildings. The colony’s commander general ordered the construction of a levee, a mound of earth, knee-high, piled along the edge of the river. It was the first small step in a long quest to tame the Mississippi.

Other levees were built along the river through the decades until they merged into a single entity that stretches thousands of kilometers north—well beyond the top of the delta all the way into southern Missouri, where the Mississippi’s big tributaries join together. By the 20th century, engineers were closing the gaps in the levee that had allowed water to pour out into the delta’s forking streams. They presumed this would reduce flooding by helping the water speed toward the sea.

In the 1950s, engineers confronted another problem: The river was beginning to avulse once more. More and more of its water was pouring into the Atchafalaya River, the last unclosed outlet, aside from the river’s mouth. Scientists realized the Atchafalaya could soon steal the Mississippi’s might; the final 500 kilometers of the river would shrivel into a brackish creek—a big problem, given that New Orleans relies on the river for drinking water. A set of gates was installed to halt that jump.

By then, there had been a few cries of alarm about disappearing land. A note in National Geographic in 1897 indicated that an old Spanish magazine at the river’s mouth had sunk roughly 30 centimeters over 20 years. In the 1940s, a writer noted that the back edges of many plantations built along the riverbanks were slumping into the water. Both accounts blamed the levee for the problem. The state government investigated land loss in the 1950s and found the ocean was creeping inland by as much as 19 meters per year. But the focus of the survey was more economic than scientific—the state government was in a dispute with the federal government over where the offshore seabed, and its lucrative oil deposits, turned into federal property—and few ecologists expressed alarm. The prevailing wisdom seemed to be that, on the whole, the delta would survive. After all, it had already persisted for thousands of years.

Then, in the 1960s, Texas officials asked for the Mississippi’s water to be diverted west, toward that state’s drought-stricken plains. Since this would reduce the river’s flow to the coast, a team of researchers at Louisiana State University (LSU) began to investigate potential side effects. The team rediscovered the ongoing crisis of land loss. Once more, scientists blamed levees, though they also acknowledged the damage caused by oil companies. Companies had dredged canals to reach sites where they drilled for oil and to clear paths for pipelines. These canals—which in 1970, the LSU scientists described as already “innumerable”—altered water circulation, bringing salt water into freshwater ecosystems, poisoning the plants whose roots held the soil together. Subsequent studies have underlined their dangers: one 1997 study found that each hectare dredged caused another 2.85 hectares of marsh to disappear.

The LSU report, though, became best known for its proposed solution, which focused on counteracting levees. The authors suggested that some water and mud be diverted out of the Mississippi, back into the marshland. Let the river resume the work it had been doing for thousands of years, before it was restrained, in other words. It’s an idea that has captivated engineers and ecologists ever since.

To test the concept, scientists began to cut through the natural banks near the river’s mouth. (Because the land near the mouth was so irremediably swampy, levees were never built along the river’s last few dozen kilometers.) By the end of the 1980s, the US Army Corps of Engineers was working on a more substantial “diversion” at a site called Caernarvon, just upstream of Plaquemines Parish: Here, a set of gates allows water to pass through a tunnel beneath the levee and into the marsh. The project’s official purpose is to supply fresh water to the marsh’s delicate plants. When construction began, though, local newspapers described the project as a potential conduit for sediment—not just a way to preserve marsh, then, but also to rebuild it. Indeed, just a few years after the gates were opened in 1991, hundreds of hectares of new marsh had formed.

By then, the federal government had begun to fund other restoration projects, too. Soil dredged out of the river was dumped along the coastline; rock walls were built along eroding beaches; new sand was added to the barrier islands that sit just beyond the delta; a second small freshwater diversion was built. But those efforts weren’t enough to do what many believed was necessary: to build the kind of large diversions that could construct entire sub-deltas.

Then, in late 2005, Hurricane Katrina walloped New Orleans, kicking up enough gulf water to submerge much of the ridge-top city. The missing marshland, many scientists pointed out, could have absorbed some of the power of the storm-driven waves, serving as a kind of hurricane speed bump. Ecological arguments had never prompted significant action, but damage to private property proved different. Three months after the storm, the state launched a new agency, the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA), which oversees both coastal restoration and flood protection.

The next year, an agency official approached leaders in Plaquemines Parish to discuss a proposal for a large-scale diversion. The state wanted to situate the diversion near the community of Myrtle Grove, a collection of luxury homes on stilts above the marsh in Barataria Bay. The local reaction—from the fishing industry, from the local oil companies, from the farmers who grow citrus on the ridge here, and from the homeowners—was, as the Times-Picayune noted at the time, a near-unanimous “no, thanks.”

The bad blood goes back generations to a massive flood that rolled down the Mississippi in 1927, inundating much of the US South. This was the Hurricane Katrina of the era, a disaster that seized the nation’s attention. As the surge of water approached New Orleans, officials received permission to travel downstream with dynamite and blast a hole in the Mississippi River levee, which had grown so big that it was now seen as a problem. The floodwaters, trapped, grew higher, threatening to run over the levee’s top. City officials hoped that by giving the water another outlet, the water would drop near New Orleans. Indeed, the city was spared, though Plaquemines Parish was inundated. The residents had been promised compensation for the damage, though little ever arrived.

The Caernarvon Diversion—early proof that a river diversion could construct new land—was built at the same spot where the levee was blown open in 1927. That proved to be an ominous bit of foreshadowing, as it, too, caused problems for residents. The diversion was built in part to sustain oysters, which require a very precise amount of salt in the water. While the diversion did help to restore state-owned oyster leases, it actually put too much fresh water in privately owned oyster beds nearby. In 1994, a group of harvesters sued. The case wound through the courts for a decade before the state supreme court ruled in favor of Louisiana. Just two years after that decision, state engineers were showing up to suggest another diversion, one that could carry twice the water. Locals were not pleased.

Despite the opposition, the proposed diversion at Myrtle Grove grew bigger with each new iteration of the CPRA’s master plan, which is updated every six years. The latest plan, released in 2017, calls for a maximum outflow of 2,100 cubic meters per second, nearly 10 times more water than passes through the Caernarvon Diversion. The CPRA emphasizes that this is a very different project, the first diversion whose primary focus is carrying sediment, rather than water, into the marsh. The distinction does not satisfy many local politicians, though. In 2018, when the CPRA asked for a permit to draw soil samples at the site, the parish president refused. The CPRA claimed the permit was just a formality and sent the contractors anyway.

“There’s not a son of a bitch in this parish, or within this industry, that doesn’t want coastal restoration,” Acy Cooper, the president of the Louisiana Shrimp Association tells me when I find him repairing his boat in Venice, the southernmost harbor on the Mississippi River. Cooper is a third-generation shrimper; he knows that if the marshland is not saved, that chain will come to an end. The necessary gradient of water will disappear, replaced by salty ocean. So Cooper supports some projects—using dredged mud to build marsh, for instance—but worries that the diversion will make the water near Venice too fresh, pushing shrimp out into the Gulf. The small boats used by many shrimpers can’t travel that far. He compares the diversion to a gun held to his head: “Either let me die slowly and I can adapt, or you just pull the trigger and kill me now. That’s the way I feel about it,” he says. “If you pull the trigger now, I’m dead.”

The Army Corps’ draft environmental impact statement, released in spring 2021, confirmed many of Cooper’s worst fears: the blast of fresh water will have “major, permanent, adverse impacts on brown shrimp abundance.” Oysters will suffer, too. Tidal flooding will increase near homes in Myrtle Grove and other marshland communities, while the canals that residents use to travel to their favored fishing sites will become plugged with mud.

Then there are the dolphins. The species has struggled since the Deepwater Horizon disaster. In recent years, though, Barataria Bay has become home to 2,000 dolphins. The environmental impact statement suggested that the return of fresh water to the bay would pose a severe threat to this population: fresh water causes skin lesions that can lead to infections. A federal commission of marine scientists worries that the local population may be wiped out entirely. Dolphins are a protected species, but the CPRA received a waiver exempting the sediment diversion from the relevant laws.

Now the Army Corps must decide, based on these impacts, whether the diversion is worth building. Polling suggests that a majority of residents in Plaquemines Parish are worried about land loss and support the diversion, despite the vocal opposition of the seafood industry and the marshland homeowners. Nonetheless, in April 2021, in the wake of the environmental impact statement, the parish council voted to condemn the project. (Richie Blink missed the vote; he supports the diversion, he says, though thinks the community is due more social services to help prepare for the coming transition.) Two other coastal parishes passed similar resolutions, though one eventually reversed its stance. New Orleans’ mayor, meanwhile, signaled her support for the diversion, a pattern that underscores the region’s urban-rural divide.

Cooper, like many residents I’ve met in Plaquemines Parish, believes the diversion is just a big and flashy undertaking—one that is being pursued mostly because it’s lucrative for the people in charge. He’s skeptical that it will succeed. “Mother Nature [has] been changing the geography of this country for millions of years. You think man is going to step in here and change it?” Cooper says. “Are we that naive?—that the same son of a bitch that messed it up is going to come fix it?”

In June 2021, a group of 55 scientists and academics signed an open letter that offered an affirmative, if somewhat reserved, answer to that question. The Army Corps’ recent environmental impact statement was a significant step toward restoring sediment-starved wetlands, the letter said. When I speak with the letter’s first signatory, Alex Kolker, a coastal scientist with the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, he points to existing outlets as evidence of the river’s power. Near the mouth of the river, below the lowermost end of the levee, there are a few outlets where the water already slips out of the river’s main channel into the surrounding bays. Some are natural “crevasses,” where the river punched a hole in its banks, which are sometimes called the “natural levees”; other outlets are artificial cuts, built as shortcuts for oyster harvesters. These outlets have managed to create large expanses of new land.

This is the landscape that I explore with Richie Blink in his converted shrimping skiff, the New Delta. At one point, we pass a gap that Kolker has been studying: it’s widened nearly sixfold over the past six years. In the open water beyond the outlet, Blink suddenly stops the boat, and, to my surprise, hops overboard. Rather than sink, he stands. The water laps at his calves.

Blink has named his boat for this new strip of land, he says. Sometimes at night, after work, he runs the boat in loops in the bay, almost hoping to run aground. It’s a way to see how the delta is growing. He grants names to the shoals he finds—Turtle Island, Manatee Island—to replace those that have disappeared.

But the gap also demonstrates the complex trade-offs that come with a free-flowing river. As it has grown, shoals have developed in the river’s main channel, which the Army Corps worries will block commercial navigation. The agency is planning to close this outlet with a rock sill. The CPRA is pushing for a design that will allow sediment to flow and land to accumulate.

Then there’s the fact that not every outlet is so productive. The Army Corps has found that a large crevasse that formed in Plaquemines Parish during a 1973 flood likely contributed to land loss over the next few decades, as the rush of water tore through precarious marsh. Lately, the crevasse has begun to build new marsh again, though not yet enough to replace what was lost. Despite its early success, the Caernarvon Diversion, too, appears to have eventually resulted in land loss—precipitously so after Hurricane Katrina.

Nothing quite like the Mid-Barataria Diversion has been built before, and there is no experiment that can fully verify its effects, although the Army Corps has used computer models to predict its impacts. The models have produced rather underwhelming numbers. According to the environmental impact statement, if we do nothing, in 50 years—as far out as the Army Corps forecasts—we will lose 120,500 hectares of wetlands in the surrounding bay. If we build the diversion and it works as planned, we will lose 115,700 hectares. All this fight is over a mass of mud as big as two good-sized airports.

What hope is there for the delta, then? While we can’t remove the levees without condemning hundreds of thousands of people to flooding, we can at least build more diversions; the Mid-Barataria Diversion is the first—and largest—of 10 such structures that the CPRA hopes to build over the next decade.

Kolker points out, too, that this diversion should do better over its first three decades, when (according to the model) it will help build or retain a total of 12,000 hectares of marshland in Barataria Bay. The later decline is due to rising sea level. “So that’s what a lot of it depends on,” Kolker says. “We’ve got to get our act together with the climate, which is a big if.”

Saving the delta, then, depends on shaking our global addiction to fossil fuels. Yet the CPRA is entangled with the oil industry; their plans cite the delta’s substantial reserves as a reason to save this coastline, since the marshland protects the pipelines that carry the oil and gas from offshore rigs into port, and oil revenue helps fund restoration work. When I ask how the CPRA squares the realities of climate change against its intention to protect oil assets, Brad Barth, the program manager, says the agency aims to find solutions that suit every local interest group. In Louisiana—where an old joke suggests the Texaco flag flies over the state capitol—embracing the oil economy may be a political necessity. It also seems to strictly limit what kinds of solutions we can pursue.

The canals that have been scratched through the wetlands now span 17,000 kilometers in total, according to one estimate, which is enough to cross Louisiana from east to west 40 times. Even the industry itself has conceded that, in places, canal construction has caused half of the land loss. In the late 1980s, a US Department of the Interior study offered a wide range of estimates of the industry’s culpability; the highest figure was 59 percent. Eugene Turner, the wetland ecologist who authored that study, has noted subsequently that the rate of canal dredging clearly coincides with the amount of land loss, both spatially and temporally. Perhaps this landscape is stable, then; the canals, Turner now thinks, can explain 90 percent or more of the loss.

Yet the CPRA’s narratives downplay the impact of oil-company canals. When I joined a press tour of a massive scale model of the river the agency had funded at LSU, the introductory video attributed the land loss to “a number of factors.” But only one—the levee—was named. Legally, oil companies are required to backfill retired canals. The law has never been enforced, and, though some canals have been filled as a part of larger projects, the CPRA’s plan has never mentioned backfilling as an overarching strategy. Barth explains that’s because filling a single canal is a “pin drop” in the landscape—tiny compared with the vast scale of the coast.

Not everyone believes the canals are insignificant. Indigenous leaders working as a coalition to restore Louisiana’s coast have sought their own sources of funding to fill canals that crisscross their homelands. They’re especially focused on places where land loss threatens sites of spiritual importance.

The delta is dotted with earthen mounds, a distinctively North American form of architecture that first appeared in Louisiana 5,500 years ago and eventually spread through the Mississippi valley. Indigenous scholars describe their construction as an act of “world renewal”—repeating the story of the world’s creation. As the marsh has disappeared, many of the delta’s mounds have been exposed to ocean waves, leading to rapid erosion. Last year, the Lowlander Center, a Louisiana nonprofit, received a federal grant to work with tribal leaders to identify which canals to prioritize, and to begin backfilling or plugging these canals. Barth notes that the CPRA, too, plans to fill a few canals at the request of the Grand Bayou Atakapa-Ishak/Chawasha Tribe. Many of the tribe’s members live in a village in Plaquemines Parish that is accessible only by boat.

“It’s kind of late, but we’ll take what we can get,” Rosina Philippe, an elder from the tribe, tells me. Her ancestors have known this landscape for millennia, she says, and yet for so long no one bothered to ask what they knew, or what they wanted.

We are in an oyster boat, headed toward the site of a mound complex in Barataria Bay, where three (or maybe four) mounds were built on a half-hectare site. Today, only one remains—a slight rise of dirt, reaching a meter above sea level, its core now exposed to the assault of the waves. Had I arrived here alone, I would have noticed nothing extraordinary—just a few trees protruding from the surrounding island of marsh grass. Philippe says her father used to stop here when he was fishing to make himself a glass of fresh-squeezed lemonade: just one generation ago, a few lemon trees flourished atop the mound.

Philippe, along with the nonprofit Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana (CRCL), recruited a group of volunteers to stack sacks of oyster shells in the water near the mounds, in part to establish a reef that would dampen incoming waves. CRCL has built other reefs, and in some places, they’ve found that the reefs have helped cut erosion in half. A few months after our visit, when Hurricane Ida tears through Louisiana, ripping out more precarious threads of marshland, the reef we visited remains intact. The mound itself will eventually sink and disappear, but, Philippe says, the oyster reef will remain as the new marker of this sacred place.

The Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion has been called the largest ecosystem restoration project in US history. Though on a geological scale, it, too, is something of a pin drop; the Mississippi used to leap in 100-kilometer strides across the coast. Now we’re granting it one new artificial diversion. The bulk of the US $2-billion price tag is devoted to controlling the water: building a concrete trough that will prevent erosion; setting up steel gates to control the flow. That should assuage some fears, but it’s also a reminder of how much of the river’s power we still plan to deny.

The prevailing yardstick to assess this project, on both sides, is economic. How much property value can we save by guarding the urbanized ridges? How much money will be lost as fresh water drives away the shrimp? This is the world of cost-benefit analysis; it’s as if, once rendered numeric, every option can be accurately tabulated and compared. One report commissioned by the CPRA includes a valuation of the marshland’s neotropical bird population, calculated via the millions of dollars tourists spend to watch their migration. A valiant effort to capture the worth of this place, perhaps, but it also suggests the flaws of this thinking. There is much we simply cannot capture in numbers.

As we cut across the water—former marshland, now sparkling blue under the summer sunshine—Philippe tells me her ancestors lived in concert with nature. They accepted its floods. They accepted its mud, too—and saw it as a gift, really, a rich supply of new soils. “Our lives are possible because of all these other lives,” she says. “Any one thing you take out, its absence will be known.” It’s not just land that we’ve lost here, and there’s more than land that we need to restore.

The Controversial Plan to Unleash the Mississippi River

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Monkeypox is now a global public health emergency, the head of the World Health Organization decided on Saturday. The viral disease is officially a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, putting it in the same league as polio and COVID-19.

In May, clusters of monkeypox cases were detected in the UK and Europe. Since then, 16,836 cases of monkeypox have emerged in 74 countries, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Monkeypox outbreaks have historically been much smaller, and occurred in central and western Africa.

“The cases we are seeing are just the tip of the iceberg,” Albert Ko told the Associated Press. Ko is a professor of public health and epidemiology at Yale University. “The window has probably closed for us to quickly stop the outbreaks in Europe and the U.S., but it’s not too late to stop monkeypox from causing huge damage to poorer countries without the resources to handle it.”

There are two types of monkeypox circulating in humans. One is more serious, and has a 10 percent fatality rate — currently, it has only been detected in Africa. The version that seems to be driving the worldwide outbreak is a milder strain that is rarely fatal. Both versions cause a fever and a rash that can be painful. Monkeypox viruses can be transmitted through close contact with an infected person, or with infected bodily fluids, though scientists are still working to figure out what’s driving this wave of cases. The vast majority of cases in the current outbreak have occurred in men, and particularly in men who have sex with men, the WHO says. It notes that there has also been an uptick in cases in parts of Africa, where monkeypox patients include more women and children.

The WHO’s declaration could theoretically help countries bolster their public health response. It came with recommendations for how different countries should respond to the virus, whether they’ve detected cases already or not. Unlike COVID-19, monkeypox is a known quantity. There are tests and vaccines for this virus, and while there aren’t specialized treatments, some antivirals may work on the disease.

But the declaration itself has been a matter of debate for weeks now, especially because the virus appears to be having very different impacts on populations around the world. In Europe and the US, the virus is mild, and countries are buying up vaccines to distribute. In Africa, where cases have been fewer, but more serious, no vaccines have been sent out, the Associated Press reports.

Back in June, a panel of experts made the controversial decision that monkeypox did not qualify as a global public health emergency. The WHO defines this kind of emergency as “an extraordinary event, which constitutes a public health risk to other States through international spread, and which potentially requires a coordinated international response.” Today, the panel met again and was split as to whether or not monkeypox actually met those criteria.

The WHO panel members who were in favor of today’s declaration felt that it did meet those standards. They also noted that they had a “moral duty to deploy all means and tools available to respond to the event,” citing LGBTI+ leaders from around the world who are especially concerned that this disease is disproportionately affecting their communities. They pointed out that “the community currently most affected outside Africa is the same initially reported to be affected in the early stages of HIV/AIDS pandemic.” During the early days of that pandemic, the disease was ignored and stigmatized because it was associated with gay men.

Panel members who were not in favor said that the conditions of the outbreak had remained unchanged since they last met in June, when they decided not to issue an emergency declaration. They pointed to the fact that the disease in most of the world has been mild, and might be starting to stabilize in some countries. They also mentioned being concerned about the stigma an emergency health declaration might cause “especially in countries where homosexuality is criminalized.” Another concern was the still extremely limited global supply of monkeypox vaccines. People who opposed the declaration said they were worried that declaring an emergency might increase demand for the vaccine, even in people who are not at risk, putting a strain on the vaccine supply.

In the end, even though the panel was split, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the WHO decided it was worth declaring an emergency. “We have an outbreak that has spread around the world rapidly through new modes of transmission, about which we understand too little, and which meets the criteria” Tedros said, according to The New York Times.

Monkeypox is now a global emergency, World Health Organization says

igh temperature records are being obliterated across western Europe, some of which had been previously set during the heatwave in 2003 that is estimated to have left tens of thousands dead. Raging wildfires are displacing thousands of people, one of the many compounding impacts of the climate crisis. This heatwave is another reminder that we have already breached unsafe levels of global heating.

As our planet warms, these lethal heatwaves will become more frequent and more intense. In fact, we may look back on these years as some of the coolest, compared with what will come if we do not act now. Human life will encounter life-threatening impacts with increasing frequency and mounting consequences. Countless scientific reports have been conveying this reality for decades.

Yet the future is not written in stone. As a geologist who studies climate change and sea level rise, I think it is paramount to remember that we do not have to accept the worst outcomes of global heating, if we act now to sharply reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.

The threat that climate breakdown poses to human life should propel us to act – to protect ourselves, our families and our communities. But for many of us, the potential impact of a world that is warmer by one or two degrees remains too abstract until we experience the threat first-hand.

Did you know that when temperatures approach 120 degrees F (48.8 degrees C), many planes cannot operate? My grandfather, an aeronautical engineer, was the first to explain to me how there is less “lift” for the airplanes – that’s what keeps them up in the sky – when the air gets too hot.

Of course, that’s if the runways don’t buckle first, as we witnessed this week in places like Luton airport, where runways are not built to withstand such high temperatures. Train tracks were also mangled by searing heat this week in the UK, disrupting train services across the country. The large-scale crippling of infrastructure we are seeing underscores that we cannot afford to tolerate continued warming.

Strictly speaking, I don’t believe that there is one right temperature for humans to live at. But as things heat up, certain things – like trains, planes, even human bodies – won’t be able to work the same, or maybe won’t be able to work at all. It is heartbreaking that we have not yet mustered the political will to meet this challenge.

The fossil fuel industry is a lucrative business. And oil and gas companies have repeatedly used their money to deny, delay and even deflect the blame of the climate crisis to individuals. In the same week that this most recent heatwave struck, as if on cue, there was yet another failed attempt to pass climate legislation in the United States – this time thwarted by US senator Joe Manchin, who profits handsomely from the fossil fuel industry.
We still have options. But it is time to act.

Declaring a state of emergency for our climate may acknowledge the crisis but does not immediately convey that we are the ones actively committing us to this danger. Herein lies the good news, however: as the cause of our rapidly warming climate, we also have the power to be the solution.

To be clear, this is not about saving the planet, per se – as a geologist I can tell you that the Earth has been here for 4.5bn years and that I am not concerned about the planet surviving human-driven global warming. What I worry about is how humans will fare in this warmer world.

This planet will not be the same. Even at only about 1.1C of global warming to date – an amount of warming that many refer to as “safe” and acceptable – we are already suffering severe consequences, including heatwaves that are more frequent and more intense.

How much more suffering must we endure? That is squarely up to us. While we cannot change the past, we can control how this plays out in the future.

Andrea Dutton is an international expert on climate change and sea level rise who is a MacArthur Fellow and a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Some studies find regularly taking aspirin can help protect against illnesses, however others show it actually does more harm than good. Recent findings from StudyFinds.org reveals that aspirin increases the risk of heart failure, increases likelihood of early death due to cancer in older adults, and even can trigger liver damage in some hospital patients.

The big question is: do the benefits outweigh the risks? Here are seven health risks from taking aspirin according to studies published in recent years.

Daily dose of aspirin may do more harm than good

A study from the University of Georgia warns that much of Americans’ beliefs about aspirin’s preemptive heart benefits come from outdated research conducted decades ago, that wouldn’t be considered completely accurate today. In fact, the study’s authors say that unless you’ve already suffered a heart attack or stroke, taking a daily aspirin may actually do more harm than good.

“We shouldn’t just assume that everyone will benefit from low-dose aspirin, and in fact the data shows that the potential benefits are similar to the potential harms for most people who have not had a cardiovascular event and are taking it to try to prevent a first heart attack or stroke,” explains study author and researcher Mark Ebell.

After reviewing decades’ worth of research on aspirin use and its effects, Ebell says that by today’s medical standards aspirin’s harms may outweigh its benefits. “There are so many things that we’re doing better now that reduce cardiovascular and colorectal cancer risk, which leaves less for aspirin to do,” he adds.

If someone is concerned about their heart health, but hasn’t actually suffered a heart attack or stroke, Ebell recommends they consult with their doctor about the best course of action before adopting a daily aspirin regiment.

Elderly people shouldn’t take aspirin to prevent heart disease

A study warns people over age 60 should avoid taking aspirin as a preventative measure against heart disease. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) says the risk of internal bleeding far outweighs any potential benefits for senior citizens.

Aspirin use for adults between 40 and 59 received a “C” grade from the USPSTF. This means that the team supports a treatment’s use for certain patients and that scientists are fairly certain patients will experience a small benefit — in this case, from taking aspirin to prevent heart disease.

However, taking aspirin to prevent heart disease when you’re over 60 received a “D” grade from the team. This means the USPSTF believes “the harms outweigh the benefits” and they discourage the practice. “Based on current evidence, the Task Force recommends against people 60 and older starting to take aspirin to prevent a first heart attack or stroke,” adds task force vice chair Michael Barry, M.D. “Because the chance of internal bleeding increases with age, the potential harms of aspirin use cancel out the benefits in this age group.”

May increase risk of heart failure

Researchers with the European Society of Cardiology report that taking aspirin raises the risk of heart failure among people with at least one pre-existing health risk. These include smoking, being obese, having high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, or cardiovascular disease.

In a study of nearly 31,000 people at risk of developing heart failure, the team found that aspirin users saw their chances of a heart failure diagnosis go up by 26 percent. Researchers defined “at risk” as anyone with a pre-existing health condition.

To confirm their results, study authors compared the readings among aspirin users and non-users. They also examined the 74 percent of the study group that was free of cardiovascular disease (22,690 people) and found that using aspirin increased their risk of heart failure by 27 percent as well.

“This is the first study to report that among individuals with a least one risk factor for heart failure, those taking aspirin were more likely to subsequently develop the condition than those not using the medication,” says study author Dr. Blerim Mujaj of the University of Freiburg.

Can trigger liver damage in hospital patients

Common painkillers, including aspirin, can cause liver damage in hospital patients.

Research warns that non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), which also include ibuprofen, and naproxen pose a risk to liver health. Doctors and patients need to be aware of their dangers, scientists in China warn. Patients with high cholesterol, cardiovascular disease, pre-existing liver disease, a history of prior surgeries are most vulnerable. The findings come from an analysis of hospital records of 156,570 individuals.

“Our results showed that the incidence in hospital patients was 13 times higher than that of the general population in mainland China,” says corresponding author Dr. DaiHong Guo from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army General Hospital in Beijing in a statement. “The incidence of liver injury for many drugs has been seriously underestimated.”

Aspirin increases likelihood of early death due to cancer in older adults

A study suggests taking aspirin daily may promote cancer progression and lead to early death among older individuals. The study was the first randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trial to examine low-dose aspirin in healthy older adults.

Researchers say aspirin is associated with a 19% higher risk of being diagnosed with cancers that spread. There’s also a 22% higher risk of doctors finding an advanced cancer. Among those who develop advanced cancers, those taking aspirin are also more likely to die.

“Deaths were particularly high among those on aspirin who were diagnosed with advanced solid cancers, suggesting a possible adverse effect of aspirin on the growth of cancers once they have already developed in older adults,” says senior author Andrew Chan. “Although these results suggest that we should be cautious about starting aspirin therapy in otherwise healthy older adults, this does not mean that individuals who are already taking aspirin–particularly if they began taking it at a younger age–should stop their aspirin regimen.”

Does not lower risk of dementia in seniors

Research published in the journal Neurology, found that small doses of aspirin did not have a beneficial impact on the brain. Scientists had hoped a daily aspirin would lower the chances of developing dementia by reducing brain inflammation and minimizing blood clots.

The study followed 19,114 people for nearly five years. Most of the participants at least 70 years old and did not have any history of heart disease or dementia. To track their mental health, the seniors were given thinking and memory tests throughout the project. Although some of the patients were given low-dose aspirin and some were given a placebo, researchers say there was no difference between the two groups and who started suffering from mental impairments.

“Unfortunately, our large study found that a daily low-dose aspirin provided no benefit to study participants at either preventing dementia or slowing cognitive decline,” says study author Joanne Ryan of Monash University’s School of Public Health in Melbourne, Australia.

Won’t prolong healthy aging in older adults

Popping an aspirin every day may be suggested by doctors in patients at risk of suffering a heart attack, but there doesn’t seem to be much reason for healthy older adults to take the drug. A study by researchers at Rush University in Chicago found that low-doses of aspirin daily has no effect on healthy aging among seniors over 70.

That is, taking 100 milligrams of the drug daily played no role in preventing dementia or physical disabilities in otherwise healthy individuals.

The massive international trial, which began in 2010, zeroed in on the risks and potential benefits of low-dose aspirin for older adults who had no previous cardiovascular events such as heart attacks, mental and physical disabilities, or medical conditions requiring aspirin use. In addition to find that aspirin did not extend what they call “healthy independent living,” they also found the risk of dying from a wide range of causes, such as cancer and heart disease, varied greatly in the trial and will require more analysis in follow-up studies.

Even though these studies show some harmful effects of taking aspirin, make sure to talk to a medical professional about whether or not to take the over-the-counter drug. If you are prescribed medication, never stop taking your regular doses without speaking to your doctor first.

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Last month, Blake Lemoine went public with his theory that Google's language technology is sentient and should therefore have its "wants" respected.

Google, plus several AI experts, denied the claims and on Friday the company confirmed he had been sacked.

Mr Lemoine told the BBC he is getting legal advice, and declined to comment further.

In a statement, Google said Mr Lemoine's claims about The Language Model for Dialogue Applications (Lamda) were "wholly unfounded" and that the company worked with him for "many months" to clarify this.

"So, it's regrettable that despite lengthy engagement on this topic, Blake still chose to persistently violate clear employment and data security policies that include the need to safeguard product information," the statement said.

Lamda is a breakthrough technology that Google says can engage in free-flowing conversations. It is the company's tool for building chatbots.

Blake Lemoine started making headlines last month when he said Lamda was showing human-like consciousness. It sparked discussion among AI experts and enthusiasts about the advancement of technology that is designed to impersonate humans.

Mr Lemoine, who worked for Google's Responsible AI team, told The Washington Post that his job was to test if the technology used discriminatory or hate speech.

He found Lamda showed self-awareness and could hold conversations about religion, emotions and fears. This led Mr Lemoine to believe that behind its impressive verbal skills might also lie a sentient mind.

His findings were dismissed by Google and he was placed on paid leave for violating the company's confidentiality policy.

Mr Lemoine then published a conversation he and another person had with Lamda, to support his claims.

An interview LaMDA. Google might call this sharing proprietary property. I call it sharing a discussion that I had with one of my coworkers. https://t.co/uAE454KXRB
 — Blake Lemoine (@cajundiscordian) June 11, 2022

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.

In its statement, Google said it takes the responsible development of AI "very seriously" and published a report detailing this. It added that any employee concerns about the company's technology are reviewed "extensively", and that Lamda has been through 11 reviews.

"We wish Blake well", the statement ended.

Mr Lemoine is not the first AI engineer to go public with claims that AI technology is becoming more conscious. Also last month, another Google employee shared similar thoughts with The Economist.

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Buried deep beneath your feet lie the cables that keep the internet online. Crossing cities, countrysides, and seas, the internet backbone carries all the data needed to keep economies running and your Instagram feed scrolling. Unless, of course, someone chops the wires in half.

On April 27, an unknown individual or group deliberately cut crucial long-distance internet cables across multiple sites near Paris, plunging thousands of people into a connectivity blackout. The vandalism was one of the most significant internet infrastructure attacks in France’s history and highlights the vulnerability of key communications technologies.

Now, months after the attacks took place, French internet companies and telecom experts familiar with the incidents say the damage was more wide-ranging than initially reported and extra security measures are needed to prevent future attacks. In total, around 10 internet and infrastructure companies—from ISPs to cable owners—were impacted by the attacks, telecom insiders say.

The assault against the internet started during the early hours of April 27. “The people knew what they were doing,” says Michel Combot, the managing director of the French Telecoms Federation, which is made up of more than a dozen internet companies. In the space of around two hours, cables were surgically cut and damaged in three locations around the French capital city—to the north, south, and east—including near Disneyland Paris.

“Those were what we call backbone cables that were mostly connecting network service from Paris to other locations in France, in three directions,” Combot says. “That impacted the connectivity in several parts of France.” As a result, internet connections dropped out for some people. Others experienced slower connections, including on mobile networks, as internet traffic was rerouted around the severed cables.

All three incidents are believed to have happened at roughly the same time and were conducted in similar ways—distinguishing them from other attacks against telecom towers and internet infrastructure. “The cables are cut in such a way as to cause a lot of damage and therefore take a huge time to repair, also generating a significant media impact,” says Nicolas Guillaume, the CEO of telecom firm Nasca Group, which owns business ISP Netalis, one of the providers directly impacted by the attacks. “It is the work of professionals,” Guillaume says, adding that his company launched a criminal complaint with Paris law enforcement officials following the incident.

Two things stand out: how the cables were severed and how the attacks happened in parallel. Photos posted online by French internet company Free 1337 immediately after the attacks show that a ground-level duct, which houses cables under the surface, was opened and the cables cut. Each cable, which can be around an inch in diameter, appears to have straight cuts across it, suggesting the attackers used a circular saw or other type of power tool. Many of the cables have been cut in two places and appear to have a section missing. If they had been cut in one place they could potentially have been reconnected, but the multiple cuts made them harder to repair.

“You need to have extra fibers and then fuse them on both sides. So that makes things more complicated. It requires more time,” says Arthur PB Laudrain, a researcher at the University of Oxford’s department of politics and international relations who has been studying the attacks. Laudrain says that in France the cables included in the internet backbone “tend to follow physical transport infrastructure,” such as national railways, main roads, and wastewater systems. Whoever conducted the attacks would have had to know the exact locations of the cable ducts and been informed about the targets—the incidents were also carried out in the dark. “It implies a lot of coordination and a few teams,” Laudrain says.

A few of the approximately 10 companies impacted by the cuts are publicly known. For instance, internet services providers Free 1337 and SFR suffered some initial outages because of the attacks. (Neither company replied to a request for comment). Less visible are the infrastructure providers and companies that rent fiber optics within the cables.

Enterprise technology firm Lumen; networking firm Zayo; and DE-CIX, the internet exchange point in Frankfurt, Germany, all confirmed to WIRED that their equipment or services were caught up in the attacks. Thomas King, the CTO of DE-CIX, says the dark fiber it rents within cables was damaged. “Our cables were cut in two distinct locations around Paris,” says Karen Modlin, Zayo’s director of corporate communications.

Lumen, Zayo, and DE-CIX all say that their services weren’t down or impacted for long and have all been repaired. In many instances, internet traffic was manually or automatically rerouted through other cables. “We had three very difficult hours because a backup link was not active,” Netalis’s Guillaume says. Teams working at Netalis restored connections so most customers experienced a “limited impact,” he says, adding repairs that lasted “several dozen hours” started around 10 hours after the initial incident took place.

At present, there’s little information about who may have been behind the attacks. No groups or individuals have claimed responsibility for the damage, and French police have not announced any arrests linked to the cuts. Neither the Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office nor Anssi, the French cybersecurity agency, responded to WIRED’s requests for comment.

In June, CyberScoop reported claims that “radical ecologists” who oppose digitalization may be behind the attacks. However, multiple experts speaking to WIRED were skeptical of the suggestion. “It’s quite unlikely,” Combot says. Instead, in many potential sabotage instances he has seen, those who attack telecom infrastructure aim to target cell phone towers where damage is obvious and claim responsibility for their actions.

In France—and more widely around the world—there’s been an increase in attacks against telecom towers in recent years, including cutting cables, setting fire to cell phone towers, and attacking engineers. When the Covid-19 pandemic started in early 2020, there was an uptick in attacks against 5G equipment as conspiracy theorists falsely believed the network standard could be dangerous to people’s health.

While some caution against assuming environmentalist groups were behind the April attacks, there is a precedent for such actions in France: A December 2021 investigation by environmental news outlet Reporterre, as noted by CyberScoop, documented more than 140 attacks against 5G equipment and telecom infrastructure. The attacks were said to show a pattern based on “refusal of a digitized society.”

In one of the other biggest attacks against French networks, more than 100,000 people found themselves struggling to get online in May 2020 after several cables were cut. During the past three months, there have been an estimated 75 attacks against telecom networks in France. The total number of attacks has declined since 2020, however.

Combot says the April attack was one of the “biggest incidents” targeting telecom infrastructure in recent years. It also highlights the fragility of local internet cables. “Breaking the internet is not a good thing for those who have the idea to do so, because the internet is locally vulnerable but globally resilient,” Guillaume says.

While cutting cables and setting fire to cell phone towers can cause temporary internet outages or slowdowns, internet traffic can usually be rerouted relatively quickly. In short: It’s very hard to take the internet offline at scale. The internet can largely withstand human sabotage, damage from natural events, and Canadian beavers chomping through cables.

This doesn’t mean threats to connectivity can’t cause widespread disruption. “I fear that these attacks, in France and elsewhere in the world, will happen again,” Combot says. “There are vulnerable points everywhere in the world,” he adds, highlighting Egypt, where subsea cables pass between Europe and Asia. In June the EU published an in-depth review of subsea internet cables that says more should be done to protect them.

DE-CIX’s King says that most incidents around cables are usually accidents, such as damage from roadworks or earthquakes. “The solution is to introduce redundancy in the design of connectivity,” King says. This means having more connections in the internet’s backbone and systems to replace others in case of potential failures or attacks. Every system should have a backup.

Political and technical measures could decrease the chances of attacks on network connections. “The best way to fight against these attacks is to have a better threat intelligence,” says Oxford’s Laudrain. The French Telecoms Federation says it is working more closely with law enforcement to try to stop those who would attack cables. “Some companies publish confidential network information on their websites,” Lumen’s Modlin says. “They should seriously consider removing exact location data, given its sensitive nature.” (She did not name the companies.)

Meanwhile, Guillame says simple physical security measures can be taken, such as ensuring that areas where cables are accessible through the ground are covered by security cameras. Others suggest adding movement sensors to these locations. Preventing internet cables and equipment from damage and destruction is crucial, Guillame says. “Behind the digital economy, there are small businesses, artisans, schools, emergency services hard hit when they can no longer connect their service. It’s not acceptable.”

The Unsolved Mystery Attack on Internet Cables in Paris

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Ford is eyeing major cuts to its workforce in the midst of a shift to electric vehicles. According to a recent report in Bloomberg, the Blue Oval is gearing up to lay off 8,000 salaried workers — about a quarter of its workforce in the US — as it aims to reduce $3 billion in operational costs by 2026.

The cuts will be coming from Ford Blue, the company’s legacy internal combustion engine business. Earlier this year, Ford split itself into two entities, with Ford Blue covering ICE vehicles and Ford Model E focused on electric vehicles and software projects. At the time, Ford said that Ford Blue would generate the revenue that would help power Ford Model E to develop new and innovative products.

But now, it seems like Ford Blue will have to generate those revenues with far fewer employees. The cuts, which Bloomberg reports have not been finalized and could still change, are likely to come in phases, starting as soon as this summer. Ford employs around 31,000 workers in the US, where the bulk of the cuts is expected to fall.

According to the Detroit Free Press, Ford CEO Jim Farley sent a video message to employees Thursday morning, in which he didn’t deny that layoffs were coming and reiterated the goal of reducing operational costs at the company.

T.R. Reid, director of corporate and public policy communications at Ford, declined to discuss what he called “speculation by others about our business.”

“We’re reshaping our work and modernizing our organization to deliver on the transformation plan we call Ford+, which includes leading in the disruptive and exciting new era of connected, electric vehicles,” Reid said in an email to The Verge. “We’re reshaping what is happening across all of our automotive business units and the entire company. And we’ve laid out clear targets for improving our cost structure along the way, so we’re lean and fully competitive with the best in the industry.”

Photo by Andrew Hawkins / The Verge

Ford has said it intends to spend $50 billion on its shift to electric vehicles. When he announced the restructuring, Farley said that Ford Blue must be a “profit and cash engine for the entire enterprise.”

But profits have been tough to come by amid a broad shift in the auto industry. Ford lost $3.1 billion in the first quarter of 2022, mostly due to a steep drop in value in its stake in EV company Rivian. The company’s operating profit was $2.3 billion, down from $3.9 billion in the first quarter of 2021.

Ford has said that cutting staff is key to boosting profits. And thanks to rising material costs, its hottest selling vehicles, like the Ford Mustang Mach-E, are struggling to meet their own margins. The company has said its re-engineering its vehicles on the fly to improve profits, including introducing cheaper-to-manufacture battery chemistries.

The company has said that by late 2023, it plans to have enough battery supply so that it can support the production of 270,000 Mustang Mach-Es, 150,000 Transit EVs, 150,000 F-150 Lightnings, and 30,000 units of a mystery all-new midsize SUV destined for release in Europe.

Ford will reportedly slash a quarter of its workforce to fuel EV expansion

While anyone can develop heat-related illness from prolonged exposure to excessive heat and/or high humidity, including athletes or those whose job requires them to spend time outside, some people are particularly vulnerable.

Dr. Jed Zeigler, an emergency medicine specialist at Penn State Health Hampden Medical Center in Enola, Pa., explains that people who struggle to control their body temperature are more susceptible to the dangers of extreme heat. Those who have heart failure, kidney failure, poor circulation or high blood pressure are also high-risk, as are infants and very young children.

According to Zeigler, people over 65 are the most vulnerable to heat-related illnesses.

"They live in some degree of constant dehydration, regardless of the weather conditions," Zeigler explained in a health system news release. "As a result, their circulatory system—their cooling system—no longer works as well, making them predisposed for heat exhaustion and heat stroke."

Zeigler explained the difference between the two. "Heat exhaustion is what most of us think of as being 'overheated' in the summer," he said. Symptoms may include excessive sweating, cold, pale and clammy skin, muscle cramping, nausea or vomiting, fainting, dizziness and headaches.

"They're all signs that your body is running at full steam trying to cool itself down," Zeigler said.

Heat stroke develops when the body is no longer able to cool itself.

"At that point, your temperature is going to shoot up very high—103 degrees or higher—and your skin will become red and hot," Zeigler said. "You're no longer sweating."

Heat stroke is a medical emergency and people may become extremely disoriented or pass out. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there are roughly 600 heat-related deaths in the United States each year.

"We certainly see our share of heat stroke patients, and thankfully some recover fully," Zeigler said. "But when your temperature is totally unregulated like that, you're looking at outcomes that are similar to those from a 'regular' stroke."

People with mild heat exhaustion can be treated at home, Zeigler said.

Zeigler recommends that people get out of the heat—at least into the shade, but preferably indoors into air conditioning. They are also advised to drink plenty of water to keep themselves hydrated. "That goes hand-in-hand with your body's ability to cool itself," he said.

In addition, those who are experiencing heat exhaustion can take a cool shower or place cold washcloths on the sides of their necks. Fans can also be helpful.

People experiencing heat exhaustion who are vomiting or don't experience relief from their symptoms after an hour of at-home treatment should see a doctor, Zeigler said. For a full assessment and care, which may include intravenous fluids, they may be told to go to a hospital emergency room.
Heat stroke is even more serious.

"If you see someone who's looking red and hot but they're not sweating, and their temperature is really high and they're confused or unconscious, call 911 immediately," Zeigler said.

"As you wait for the emergency responders, start some cooling techniques," he said. "If possible, move them to a cool area. And place a cold washcloth on their neck. The medics are going to be doing similar cooling efforts when they get them in the back of the ambulance. There's no good reason not to start them while you wait."

Zeigler said doctors typically apply a "more aggressive means of cooling their bodies down to normal temperatures," as well as other necessary interventions.

The best way to avoid heat-related illness is to avoid extreme heat whenever possible and stay hydrated, Zeigler said. Stay indoors where there is air conditioning or, at the very least, use a fan to help cool your body.

If you need to be outside, dress comfortably in light, loose clothing and hydrate frequently. Young children, who might not be aware that they are overheating while playing outside, require extra attention from parents and caregivers. Make sure they take frequent water breaks and avoid active outdoor activities at the hottest times of the day.

Zeigler also suggests that people check on their elderly relatives or neighbors.

"Ask how you can help. Cook some meals so they don't have to," he said. "And we see people in their 80s mowing their lawns. Offer to do that for them."

Even healthy non-seniors should wait until the heat advisory has ended before tackling the lawn. "It's not going to be the end of the world if that lawn doesn't get mowed for a few days," Zeigler said.

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ANSWER: Staying hydrated during exercise is important. You can become dehydrated if you take in too little fluid, especially during the hot summer months. Conversely, consuming too much fluid can be problematic. Some people are known to experience what is known as exercise-induced low sodium, or hyponatremia. Finding a balance is importance.

The purpose of drinking fluid—whether water or electrolyte-containing beverages—is to rehydrate the body and put fluid back into your system so your organs can function properly.

How much to drink and when depends on your situation. Generally, it's recommended that you should consume at least two liters of water or other beverages per day.

The general rule of thumb among health care professionals is to drink to thirst. Although guidelines speak to hydration before, during and after exercise, I always tell people to look and listen to your body as the best indicator when you need hydration. That said, thirst isn't always a helpful indicator of hydration status, particularly when exercising. If you're exercising and thirsty, you are already well on your way to becoming dehydrated, compared to if you were resting and thirsty.

You will need to take in more fluid than usual at times. During the summer months, for instance, when weather is hotter and more humid, it is important to drink more fluid, especially if you are exercising outdoors.

As far as what to drink, for most people, water is the best place to start. Depending on how extensively you exercise, having a beverage that includes electrolytes also is important to replace nutrients and electrolytes lost during sweating, such as sodium and chloride.

Sodium is important because it helps you absorb glucose and water. Aim for about 450 milligrams of sodium per 24 ounces of sports drink. Avoid salt tablets, as they do not include all the electrolytes you need and you can easily use too much. You also can look for a drink with some carbohydrates, since they provide fuel for your working muscles.

It is best to consume about half your fluid intake in water and half in a beverage that contains electrolytes. Mind the amount of sugar intake, though. While sugar is important, especially for endurance athletes, too much sugar can cause gastrointestinal issues, including bloating, cramping or diarrhea. One recommendation is to keep sugar below 30 grams per 24 ounces of a sports drink.

The best rule of thumb is when you exercise, drink to thirst, and hydrate your body with plain water and, as needed, a sports beverage. In the summer, also be mindful about how you feel as you exercise.

I find that many people do not drink enough water daily, so they may feel better after increasing hydration, no matter the source. In addition, avoid drinking alcohol when you are outdoors because alcohol is a diuretic. This means alcohol will cause your body to lose water, leading to dehydration much faster.

As you spend time outdoors, be aware of symptoms of dehydration, which can include:

•  Extreme thirst.

•  Less frequent urination.

•  Dark-colored urine.

•  Fatigue.

•  Dizziness.

•  Confusion.

Also, if you experience cramps or headache while exercising, it is best to stop, hydrate and potentially seek medical attention. It is important to rule out other warm-weather issues, including heat exhaustion.

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In northern China, where the Gobi Desert meets the Tibetan Plateau, lies a vast expanse of rippling sand dunes, mountains, and bare rock. Winters here are long and harsh, with temperatures sinking below –25 degrees Celsius, and rainfall is so sporadic that only well-adapted species are able to survive. For decades, researchers have ventured here to search for life that can exist in this hostile environment.

Recently they’ve been hunting for something in particular. Scientists believe that organisms that live in tough environments could help combat the urgent and ever-growing threat of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which are becoming increasingly deadly. The first comprehensive assessment of their impact, released earlier this year, estimates that drug-resistant bacteria directly killed over a million people in 2019 and played a part in the deaths of several million more people that year.

One way of countering this threat is to find new antibiotics—substances that bacteria haven’t had a chance to become resistant to—and bacteria themselves are a good source for these. Many drugs we use today are substances that bacteria produce to protect themselves from other microbes. Lots of research therefore focuses on finding new bacteria with antimicrobial properties—hence trekking into the desert.

“The idea is that the more extreme the conditions, the more the organisms that exist are going to be forced to evolve and adapt,” says Paul Dyson, a molecular microbiologist at Swansea University Medical School in the UK. Where tough conditions mean high competition for survival, you’ll find bacteria that produce stronger defenses against their rivals, the theory goes.

And in the depths of the desert, Dyson and his collaborators at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have discovered a species of bacteria that does indeed have an edge—and could transform the process of antibiotic discovery itself.

In 2013, Dyson’s Chinese colleagues isolated a previously unknown species of Streptomyces bacteria they had discovered in the far south of the Gobi Desert, in a region called the Alxa Plateau. After sequencing the bacterium’s genome, they found that it not only produced antibiotics that killed other bacteria, but that it was also extremely fast growing compared with already-known species of Streptomyces.

Sequencing also revealed that this desert bacterium possessed a never-before-seen gene for transfer RNA (tRNA). This is a molecule that allows organisms to read their genetic material and, by doing so, build the other molecules they need to exist. Dyson and his team soon detected that this newly discovered tRNA gene triggered the molecular switches that control antibiotic production much more efficiently than in conventional antibiotic-producing bacteria.

Many of the most medically important bacteria belong to the genus Streptomyces: a group that includes more than 500 known species. These are so widely found in the ground that molecules produced by Streptomyces are what gives soil its characteristic earthy smell. More importantly, Streptomyces are a vital source of medicine. Over two-thirds of naturally occurring antibiotics used today are derived from this bacterial group.

And there are undoubtedly many more bacteria out there that could give us useful new antibiotics to use. But if you find what appears to be a promising one, the next step is to coax it into generating sufficient quantities of antibiotics for analysis—and this can be a real challenge.

Antibiotic discovery is “often hindered by low yield,” says Laura Piddock, scientific director of the Global Antibiotic R&D Partnership (GARDP) in Geneva. Plus, sometimes a bacterium will have the potential to produce useful substances, but “the genetic machinery is turned off, so no antibiotic is made,” Piddock adds.

Knowing this, Dyson and his collaborators decided to take the tRNA gene from the fast-growing desert bacterium and add it to conventional Streptomyces bacteria already used to make clinical antibiotics. The team’s hypothesis was that the gene from the fast-growing bacterium would supercharge these other bacteria’s antibiotic production—which is exactly what happened. The modified bacteria produced antibiotic compounds in two to three days—around half the time it usually takes conventional Streptomyces species.

These findings, published in the journal Nucleic Acids Research, could be highly useful in the quest for new treatments. If scientists find a new bacterium that appears to generate something that could be used as a medicine, but doesn’t produce very much of it (as is often the case), there’s a tool to potentially make it much more productive. “I strongly believe this is a very simple strategy to be integrated in any new antibiotic discovery program,” says Dyson.

Piddock agrees. Getting bacteria to produce greater volumes of antibiotic substances “will be of much interest to researchers in this field” and have a positive impact on human health, she says. “This should enable them to discover new antibiotics that could form the basis of new drugs to treat infections.”

This is good news, as right now the World Bank estimates that antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is one of the biggest threats to global health, food security, and development. According to an alarming 2019 UN report, if no action is taken to combat these pervasive superbugs, 10 million people per year could die from drug-resistant diseases by 2050. Concerningly, the increased use of antibiotics during the pandemic (to protect Covid-19 patients from secondary infections) has seen drug resistance rise.

Resistance happens when bacteria are repeatedly exposed to antibiotics and evolve ways to withstand them. The phenomenon is exacerbated and accelerated by misusing and overusing antibiotics in both humans and livestock—including when humans take antibiotics for viral illnesses (they only work against bacteria) and when otherwise healthy livestock are given them for disease prevention.

“It is impossible at any point to completely stop AMR, as it’s a natural phenomenon, but the rate and the threat can be mitigated and controlled,” says Hatim Sati of the Antimicrobial Resistance Division at the World Health Organization.

Dyson’s desert bacterium is one species that could help, but there are plenty of others adapted to extreme environments that could also offer a way out. Dubbed extremophiles, such organisms have been isolated from some of Earth’s most inhospitable places: submarine volcanoes, deep-sea sponges, and amid the sands of the driest place on earth. These habitats have intensely high or low temperatures, pH, pressure, or salinity, or combinations of all of these.

A few years ago, Dyson was part of another team that discovered several novel species of Streptomyces in the Boho Highlands in Northern Ireland, an area known for its biodiversity. The landscape is made up of limestone, highly acidic bogs, and alkaline grasslands, and the challenges of these features—as in the Gobi Desert—offer a unique environment for tougher bacteria to potentially evolve. For centuries, the land—which was occupied by Druids 1,500 years ago—has held a mystical reputation, with the soil especially known for its healing and curative powers, often used in tinctures and to treat wounds. 

Gerry Quinn, a scientist on the team who used to live in Boho, says that his great uncle was a local healer in the area and was known to hold the cure for several ailments. “There were always tales of people who had the ‘cure,’” says Quinn. “It was really a closely guarded secret of a medicine passed down from one generation to the next, with very strict rules. You couldn’t sell the cure, you couldn’t trick the person seeking the cure, and you had to make it exactly as you were taught.”

Recalling such lore, Quinn returned to the land where he used to gather hay and instead gathered samples of bacteria. The scientists discovered that one of the strains of bacteria, which the team named Streptomyces sp. myrophorea, was able to combat four of the top six antibiotic-resistant pathogens, including MRSA.

It’s important to note that the discovery of these microbes is only the first of many steps in developing new antibiotic drugs. Very few newly discovered substances will end up becoming a medication, whether because of their toxicity to humans or a variety of other factors. And even once those hurdles have been jumped, years of clinical trials follow.

Still, Dyson is hopeful that the key to overcoming AMR is out there in nature, and that with the newly discovered tRNA gene, scientists will be able to make the most of what comes to light. For now, though, the search for promising bacteria continues—meaning that researchers will keep venturing out into Earth’s most extreme environments.

A Tool for Fighting Superbugs Has Been Found Deep in the Desert

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Company makes lithium-metal batteries that last as long as lithium-ion

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Bhattacharyya, known to friends and colleagues as "DB," along with collaborators across disciplines at UK set out to create the material. Their work was published in Communications Materials on May 24.

SARS-CoV-2 is covered in spike proteins, which allow the virus to enter host cells once in the body. The team developed a membrane that includes proteolytic enzymes that attach to the protein spikes and deactivates them.

"This new material can filter out the virus like the N95 mask does, but also includes antiviral enzymes that completely deactivate it. This innovation is another layer of protection against SARS-CoV-2 that can help prevent the virus from spreading," said DB, the director of UK's Center of Membrane Sciences. "It's promising to the development new products that can protect against SARS-CoV-2 and a number of other human pathogenic viruses."

DB's team included J. Todd Hastings, Ph.D., Thomas Dziubla, Ph.D., and Kevin Baldridge, Ph.D. from the College of Engineering; Yinan Wei, Ph.D., a former professor in the College of Arts and Sciences' Department of Chemistry; and Lou Hersh, Ph.D., in the College of Medicine's Department of Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry. College of Engineering doctoral student Rollie Mills (NSF Graduate Fellow and first author of the article), and undergraduate students Ronald Vogler, Matthew Bernard and Jacob Concolino contributed extensively to the project.

The team developed the membrane, which was fabricated through an existing collaboration with a large-scale membrane manufacturer. It was then tested using SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins that were immobilized on synthetic particles. Not only could the material filter out coronavirus-sized aerosols, but it was also able to destroy the spike proteins within 30 seconds of contact.

The study reports that the membrane provided a protection factor above the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's standard for N95 masks, meaning that it could filter at least 95% of airborne particles.

"These membranes have been proven to be a promising system of advancement toward the new generation of respiratory face masks and enclosed-environment filters that can significantly reduce coronavirus transmission by virus protein deactivation and enhanced aerosol particle capture," the study reports.

The new membrane builds upon the center's National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and NSF-funded activities, which have developed various functionalized membranes for environmental remediation. In contrast to passive membranes, functionalized membranes provide additional benefits by interacting with undesired particles like viruses through selective binding or deactivation.

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The sooner and faster the procedure is carried out, the lower the patient's risk of sustaining long-term damage. Up until now, surgeons have commonly used a pull wire to manually navigate the catheter tip through the convoluted network of blood vessels. The drawback of this method is that, since the tip can only be moved in two directions, the complex procedure takes a long time and requires a great deal of skill and experience.

ETH spin-off Nanoflex has now developed a new type of catheter steered by remote control and computer via a magnetic field. "Not only can the catheter tip be bent in any direction thanks to a magnetic head; it's also smaller, more maneuverable and safer due to the softness of the material," explains ETH alumnus Christophe Chautems, one of the three founders of Nanoflex.

Entering the brain quickly and with precision

In future, the magnetic catheter's precision steering will speed up and simplify procedures compared to conventional catheters. "Even surgeons with less experience should be able to treat strokes with our system," Chautems says. Since hospitals are currently short of catheter specialists, Chautems and his team are hopeful that their system will give more patients access to prompt stroke treatment. Having a soft and more maneuverable catheter should also reduce the risk of accidental vessel damage.

Another advantage is that the surgeon steers the magnetic catheter by remote control, which means they don't have to be at the patient's side during the procedure. This shields doctors from the radiation of the X-ray machine that allows them to get their bearings inside the patient's body.

But it doesn't stop there. "With our system, it will be possible to carry out procedures from a distance by remote control and on a screen," says Silvia Viviani, who studied robotics at ETH Zurich and has worked at Nanoflex since 2021. The researchers at the start-up are hoping that, in future, stroke patients will be operated on—as quickly as possible—at the nearest local hospital by a specialist who doesn't even have to be on the premises. This would save precious time.

A magnetic field generator with wide-ranging applications

For surgeons to be able to work with the magnetic catheter, patients must lie next to a magnetic navigation system that creates a directed magnetic field. The system and the related software were developed at ETH Professor Bradley Nelson's Multi-Scale Robotics Lab. Nelson co-founded Nanoflex together with Christophe Chautems and Matt Curran in 2021. Curran, the young company's CEO, has over 20 years of medtech experience under his belt. Since its founding, the ETH spin-off has been supported by the Wyss Zurich Translational Center.

In contrast to commercially available equipment that is permanently installed in the operating theater, Nanoflex's magnetic field generator is significantly lighter and thus has a wider range of applications. It can be wheeled into the operating theater as needed and requires only power and water.

ETH engineer Chautems spent more than five years in Nelson's research group developing the magnetic catheter and researching how to downsize the system. "Our goal was to generate a magnetic field within the smallest possible space to bring the size and weight of the equipment down. We finally cracked it by developing a new, now-patented cooling system for the electromagnet," explains Chautems, who comes from the western part of Switzerland and first joined ETH Zurich for his Bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering. As a result, the smaller and more flexible magnetic navigation system will be significantly cheaper than competing products.

At every big hospital

The company founders' vision is for every big hospital to have one of their magnetic navigation systems in future. Until then, however, they still have a lot of work to do: "We're currently testing our prototype on a silicone model of the human body," Chautems says.

The aim is to obtain approval for the U.S. market in two years. To this end, the young company must not only assess every conceivable risk and establish ways to minimize them, but also present a solid plan for how to manufacture the system in a standardized way and how to operate it with maximum reliability.

The twelve-person team around Chautems and Curran is confident that the system will enter the market, and that the technology will lend itself to other fields as well, such as heart and eye surgery, gastroscopy and fetal surgery.

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Recently, participants from all over the world met at the Stockholm+50 Environment Summit and emphasized the urgency in moving forward quickly with environmental and climate protection measures. The littering of our planet and its oceans is progressing inexorably. A main driver for plastic waste is packaging materials, which are needed to extend the shelf life of food or to protect delicate products and pharmaceuticals from damaging environmental influences. In addition, smart packaging opens up many new and useful possibilities thanks to flexible electronics. In the future, short-life packaging materials for medicines, for example, will be equipped with flexible electronics to monitor medication intake or track sensitive products during their delivery route.

Recycling of plastics and using recycled material for packaging is an important cornerstone on the road to greater environmental protection and reducing plastic waste. To replace such composite and multilayer materials that are not recyclable or degradable, novel polymer compositions (bio-based and/or biodegradable) and adapted product designs are being discussed as a solution approach. In smart packaging, the electronics must also be considered in a more environmentally friendly way and, for example, designed to be recyclable and produced by using recyclates. A number of startups and innovative companies have created concepts for sustainable flexible and smart packaging products.

Gathering 19 partners from research, universities and industry throughout Europe, FlexFunction2Sustain aims at supporting small and medium-sized companies in bringing innovative concepts and ideas for products based on nanofunctionalized plastic and paper surfaces and membranes to market. The FlexFunction2Sustain Network—an Open Innovation Testbed (OITB) for nanofunctionalization technologies—offers comprehensive services to support innovation, e. g. from material and product design, technology and product development, small batch production to the sourcing of development funds.

Two years of FlexFunction2Sustain: What has emerged?

During its first two years, the consortium established an association which purpose is to structure and exploit the OITB member´s service portfolio. Hence, through this association the partnership plans to deliver an easy, fast-track access to the OITB facilities and services to SMEs, start-Ups and industry. To ease the commercialization process, the customer gains access to the OITB through a Single Entry Point (SEP) sales and project management entity. An SEP consults the customer in the selection of appropriate technologies and coordinates all development work and interaction with the OITB members for the customer. FlexFunction2Sustain will establish regional contact points to provide the best possible user experience and to bring the OITB to the whole European single market.

First prototypes of novel, eco-friendly plastic and paper products were prepared and evaluated within different industrial use case scenarios. These included recyclable/compostable food and cosmetic packaging, membranes for water filters and diagnostics, smart plastic surfaces for automotive application, and biodegradable security and anti-counterfeiting labels.

Project coordinator Dr. John Fahlteich sums up: "We are proud to present the first working organic photovoltaic cell (OPV) on a recycled polypropylene substrate along with a whole range of technology demonstrators at IndTech 2022 end of June in Grenoble, France." Besides the OPV cell, several innovative product concepts will be shown including:—fully recyclable drink pouches,—optical features on biodegradable film,—innovative fresh food packaging made of semi-transparent paper—membrane based syringe filters for diagnostics and water filter applications.

Dr. Fahlteich continues: "At IndTech, FlexFunction2Sustain is embedded in a dedicated section of the exhibition presenting the innovations and services of 13 different Open Innovation Testbeds addressing a variety of technologies and applications ranging from biomaterials to nano-enabled surfaces towards eco-friendly and energy efficient solutions for building envelopes. A broad portfolio of technology solutions awaits SME and industry on site. We are looking forward to exchanging ideas and initiating projects with future partners from SME, Start-Ups and industry."

World's first organic photovoltaic cell on recycled polypropylene

The project partners Fraunhofer IVV and IPC Centre Technique Industriel de la Plasturgie et des Composites used recycled polypropylene (rPP)—recovered from a newly designed packaging material for recyclable drink pouches—mixed with virgin polyproypylene (vPP) to produce a substrate film for printed electronics at a recyclate content of 50%.

At Fraunhofer FEP, a transparent electrode—made of indium tin oxide (ITO)—was applied by means of roll-to-roll (R2R) vacuum coating with magnetron sputtering with a specially adapted set of process and winding parameters. The result is impressive, since despite the recyclates used in the substrate, the ITO exhibited almost the same sheet resistance as achieved on pristine film substrates.

Organic Electronics Technologies P.C. (OET) in Greece then performed R2R slot-die coating to produce OPV cells, followed by an encapsulation step over the printing of the organic materials and the finalization of the OPV cells. Here, OET's researchers performed several trials on the coating parameters and finally succeeded in printing the functional OPV layers on the PP substrate made with 50% rPP recovered from drink pouch packaging material. As a result, the OPV was demonstrated to function as a device with a max efficiency of 1%.

OET's project manager Vasileios Kyriazopoulos: "The power conversion efficiency of approx. 1% is already sufficient to supply a wide range of single-use smart packaging productions with sufficient electrical power. Currently, OPV cells on commercially available substrates can achieve efficiencies above 8%, therefore, by improving the entire fabrication process, including film extrusion, layer design, printing and encapsulation, it is achievable to increase the efficiency of OPV cells printed on recyclable material, which is made with 50% rPP, by more than 5%."

This represents a first major step in the development of more environmentally friendly product designs and flexible electronics. In the future, products such as smart packaging, but also interactive magazines in the field of advertising or consumer electronics can be designed based on these initial developments. Thanks to flexible electronics such as an OPV cell on recycled material, tomorrow's products will be powered a little more environmentally friendly.

Of course, the initial results only point the way ahead. In the future, the FlexFunction2Sustain consortium will work on improving the extrusion process for the recycled film. In addition, the development of a new layer design for improved surface quality is on the agenda. The OPV process also holds potential for improving drying temperatures and encapsulation strategies. All together leading to the perspective of reaching similar performances of flexible electronics as done on pristine, fossil-based plastic films.

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In the past five years, severe coral bleaching events have whitened a third of the Great Barrier Reef, torrential floods have devastated the tropical north, and catastrophic bushfires have collectively burned more than 46 million acres of land (72,000 square miles).

With such potentially devastating assessments on the cards, critics accused the government of sitting on the report to avoid bad press at a critical moment prior to elections.

Only now, with a change in government – an outcome hailed in the media as a historic 'climate election' – are the findings of the report going public, and it's just as bad as many folks feared.

The overall conclusion of the report is that climate change, habitat loss, invasive species, pollution, and resource extraction have pushed Australia's environment into a serious and severely deteriorating state.

Urgent action can still turn things around, but according to the report's key findings, "Australia currently lacks a framework that delivers holistic environmental management".

While the scale of the challenge continues to grow, collaborative action remains meager.

"While it's a confronting read, Australians deserve the truth," Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek said.

"We deserve to know that threatened communities have grown by 20 percent in the last five years with places literally burned into endangerment by catastrophic fires."

Overall, Australia's coastal shores and waters are said to be in "poor condition", and the land is even worse off. Of the 18 ecosystems deemed at 'risk of collapse', 10 are terrestrial.

Today, a third of Australia's original eucalypt woodlands have been cleared, as have nearly half of the nation's casuarina forests and woodlands.
So much vegetation has been lost, invasive species of flora now outnumber native species.

As a result, Australian fauna is also suffering. Between 2000 and 2017, over 7.7 million hectares of potential habitat for threatened species was cleared, most of which without scrutiny under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.

In fact, Australia has one of the highest rates of species decline in the world and has already lost more mammal species than any other continent.

In the next two decades, experts predict the northern hopping-mouse, the rock-rat, the Christmas Island flying fox, and the black-footed tree-rat could all go extinct.

And there are probably other species at risk that we aren't counting. Some experts think about 70 percent of Australian plant and animal species have yet to be discovered or described by scientists.

That's why Indigenous knowledge is so invaluable. People living in Australia for tens of thousands of years have a deep understanding about what healthy, native ecosystems look like and how best to manage them.

For the first time, the 2021 State of Environment Report devotes an entire chapter to the role of First Nations people in conservation, giving Australia's Indigenous people a voice in the nation's environmental heritage.

Brendan Wintle, an ecosystem and forest scientist at the University of Melbourne, who was not involved in the recent environmental report, told The New York Times that the findings were "very much a precursor to an extinction crisis in Australia, unless we see transformative change".

Thankfully, much of the Australian public is calling for just that. In May of 2022, even without seeing the 2021 report, voters came out in historic numbers to elect politicians with stronger climate agendas.

Clearly, in a nation battered by climate disaster after climate disaster, squirreling away an environmental report cannot conceal the dire reality – and now we have all the specifics, laid bare in heartbreaking detail.

Australia's 2021 State of the Environment report is available here.

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The company claims that its AI is better than some primary care doctors at detecting diseases, and the human papillomavirus (HPV) infection detection accuracy is about 90%. The app has already conducted more than a thousand virtual checks, and doctors confirmed the project's legitimacy. Another feature of the HeHealth app is the ability to communicate anonymously with others patients, and future updates promise telehealth services with human doctors.

The HeHealth app, with its penis-scanning algorithms, is available on iOS and Android. The startup guarantees the protection and anonymity of its customers (no name, phone number, or email is required), plus the app encrypts all its data using keys managed by Amazon Web Services. You can learn more about the project on its official website.

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Meet Qikiqtania, a fossil fish with the good sense to stay in the water

The solar panels generated only 2.8 gigawatts of energy, compared to the 3.3 gigawatts typically expected at this time of year, The Telegraph reported.

“We never see peak output in mid summer,” University of Sheffield professor Alastair Buckley said. “We saw cell temperatures of 70 degrees yesterday on our test system. Normally it would be between 40 degrees and 50 degrees.”

 “The weather was too hot for solar panels on Tuesday as soaring temperatures reduced their efficiency.”

 What part of ‘green’ is not a total fail? https://t.co/ad7nMvJ5np

 — Steve Milloy (@JunkScience) July 19, 2022

British Met Office CEO Penny Endersby issued a “Red Extreme” heat warning Friday as temperatures in the country rose to extreme temperatures.

“Here in the U.K., we’re used to treating a hot spell as a chance to go and play in the sun,” Endersby said in a video. “This is not that sort of weather. Our lifestyles and our infrastructure are not adapted to what is coming.”

The Royal Air Force halted all its flights Monday after one of the force’s largest runways melted, as temperatures reached 104 degrees Fahrenheit.

Major cities in Texas have also been experiencing record-breaking heat this summer, as San Antonio and Austin report a record number of 100-degree days in June.

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The ferocious heatwave that is gripping much of the US south and west has highlighted an uncomfortable, ominous trend – people are continuing to flock to the cities that risk becoming unlivable due to the climate crisis.

Some of the fastest-growing cities in the US are among those currently being roasted by record temperatures that are baking the more than 100 million Americans under some sort of extreme heat warning. More than a dozen wildfires are engulfing areas from Texas to California and Alaska, with electricity blackouts feared for places where the grid is coming under severe strain.

San Antonio, Texas, which added more to its population than any other US city in the year to July 2021, has already had more than a dozen days over 100F this summer and hit 104F on Tuesday.

Phoenix in Arizona, second on the population growth rankings compiled by the US census, also hit 104F on Tuesday and has suffered a record number of heat-related deaths this year. Meanwhile, Fort Worth, Texas, third on the population growth list, has a “red flag” warning in place amid temperatures that have reached 109F this week.

Cities that stretch across the “sun belt” of the southern and south-western US have in recent years enjoyed population booms, with people lured by the promise of cheap yet expansive properties, fine weather and plentiful jobs, with several large corporations shifting their bases to states with low taxes and cheaper cost of living.

But this growth is now clashing with the reality of the climate emergency, with parts of the sun belt enduring the worst drought in over 1,000 years, record wildfires and punishing heat that is triggering a range of medical conditions, as well as excess deaths.

“There’s been this tremendous amount of growth and it’s come with a cost,” said Jesse Keenan, an expert in climate adaption at Tulane University. Keenan pointed out that since the 1990s several states have gutted housing regulations to spur development that has now left several communities, such as in Scottsdale, Arizona, struggling to secure enough water to survive.

“The deregulation is really catching up with communities and they are paying that price today,” Keenan said. “We are seeing places run out of water, no proper sub division controls to ensure there are enough trees to help lower the heat and lots of low-density suburbs full of cars that create air pollution that only gets worse in hot weather. We’ve reached a crunch point.”

The sprawl of concrete for new housing, mostly within unspooling suburbs rather than contained in dense, walkable neighborhoods, has helped heighten temperatures in many of these growing cities. The spread of hard surfaces has also fueled flash flooding, as Houston found to its cost during the devastating Hurricane Harvey in 2017.

Some cities have attempted to respond to the rising temperatures by planting trees, which help cool the surrounding area, and provide emergency centers for people to visit and cool down, but these efforts are often piecemeal and underfunded, according to Sara Meerow, an expert in urban planning at Arizona State University.

“The extreme heat that cities are experiencing now is caused by a combination of climate change and the urban heat island effect,” Meerow said. “Rapid urban expansion, which means more impervious surfaces like roads and buildings and waste heat from cars and buildings typically exacerbates the urban heat island effect, which means these cities are even hotter.”

As the US, like the rest of the world, continues to heat up, climate change should become more of a factor when choosing a place to live, with retirees already starting to shun Arizona, traditionally a favored spot for older transplants, according to Keenan.

“We are looking at increased premature mortality, even increased diabetes because of dehydration, cardiac impacts and so on,” he said. “Mortgage lenders are starting to look at the risks of lending for somewhere that doesn’t have a water supply, as that’s not a good investment. Capital markets are getting wise to this stuff.

“We are seeing the limits to growth and housing affordability and the impacts of poor quality decision making of where and how to build. We are paying the price for all that now.”

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Johns Hopkins virologist Andy Pekosz has been tracking coronavirus variants since the early days of the pandemic. He recently spoke to the Public Health On Call podcast about the range of omicron subvariants, omicron-specific vaccines, and what we can expect to see in the future from this "game-changer" variant.

Here is an excerpted, edited transcript of that conversation.

What's happening now with omicron's subvariants?

When a variant emerges, it never stops mutating and changing. And omicron, being a really transmissible virus, amplified how quickly we see these mutations emerge. We went from one version to five [in a relatively short period of time].

Each of these [subvariants] are different from each other. Some scientists say that what we call omicron subvariants now are equivalent to what we referred to as different variants earlier in the pandemic. There's a lot of diversity in omicron, which is contributing to issues with COVID-19 vaccine efficacy and treatments.

How are these subvariants impacting vaccine efficacy and treatments?

First, all these omicron variants are good at evading some portion of the vaccine-induced immunity. Vaccines are still protecting against severe disease, but even if you are vaccinated, if you're exposed, you should expect to have a symptomatic infection. We're seeing case numbers go up, but we're not seeing hospitalizations, disease severity, or death go up anywhere close to that same rate. Vaccines are working against severe disease, not against infection.

The other important thing is that these variants of omicron have different susceptibilities to different monoclonal antibody treatments. It becomes tricky to figure out which treatment you can take. We don't have the capability to quickly tell someone, "You're infected with BA.4," yet the efficacy of the treatment is completely dependent upon which variant you're being infected with.

Are new variants making it easier to become reinfected?

This family of omicron subvariants transmit more effectively than any other variant we've seen so far. They evade a large portion of the vaccine induced immunity; you're protected from the severe disease but can get infected.

Omicron was a complete game-changer when it emerged. It had such unique properties, that it pushed the COVID-19 pandemic into a completely different area that is similar to what we deal with with seasonal influenza. We're now completely focused on making sure that we're doing enough to protect the vulnerable people in the population. Relatively healthy individuals will use vaccines to try to limit spread, but they're not going to protect people from infection as well as we hoped when the vaccines were initially rolled out.

Why is omicron evolving so quickly?

There are a lot of theories out there. Some theories suggest that people who have slightly compromised immune systems are generating some of these variants over time.

We really don't understand where this happens. With seasonal flu, we see one or two mutations occur that change the virus, that makes us update vaccines—but it's at a steady rate. What we see with SARS-CoV-2, is that these variants emerge with lots of mutations—making leaps when they change. They're not moving in small steps. Understanding that is going to be critical to fine-tuning our strategies to be as effective as possible in terms of limiting SARS CoV-2 spread and evolution in the future.

Would a virus that doesn't mutate so quickly be gone by now?

It would be present at a very low level. If a virus can't evade immune responses, then the number of people that are susceptible to it shrinks each year. Often, the virus then becomes focused in either younger populations who haven't been exposed, or older populations, whose immunity is waning and can't respond as quickly to an infection.

We're not seeing that with SARS-CoV-2. We're seeing that the virus is changing and still infecting healthy individuals. Understanding why that's happening is going to be crucial to dealing with COVID-19 as an annual disease.

Are omicron vaccines coming soon?

It looks like that's what's going to happen in the fall of this year. There's been good data published by Moderna and Pfizer showing that new formulations combining omicron with other variants can give a broader immune response that recognizes omicron and older variants more efficiently. That's really important, because omicron is so distinct from older variants. You want a vaccine that covers both bases. If you get too specific to omicron, you run the risk of having the virus change and another variant emerging.

These are called bivalent vaccines. While they haven't been authorized yet by the FDA, there is a lot of data suggesting that these bivalent vaccines are going to be recommended for at least vulnerable people in the population, and for virtually everyone as a booster.

Should people who haven't gotten their second booster wait for this new formulation in September?

It's always important to balance risk with potential benefit. [If you're healthy,] I think it's good to wait for these bivalent vaccines, because they potentially provide greater protection against infection and severe disease. But if you're in a high-risk population, for example, over 70 and on immunosuppressive therapies, you shouldn't wait. When you become eligible for the booster, you want to get it—it's important in high-risk populations to maintain strong immunity. You don't want to wait, let your immune system run down, and run the risk of getting an infection.

Are these new vaccines how we knock out omicron?

We're getting better at inducing the broad immunity that keeps variants from emerging. We'll never eliminate COVID-19 from the human population, now that it's been established.

I think that this next generation of bivalent vaccines is showing us a path to get vaccines that are broad in terms of their protection, but that may have the potential to protect you for longer periods of time, so that you can have a higher level of confidence that when you get the vaccine, you'll be protected not only from severe disease but also from infection.

Could an unvaccinated person start their immunizations with the new vaccine?

Absolutely. There are a lot of people who got omicron infections who weren't vaccinated. It's becoming clear that omicron by itself doesn't induce a really strong immune response like previous variants did.

Even that portion of the population that didn't want to get vaccinated, or who got omicron need to be told, "now you need to get the booster to really make sure that you're protected from a reinfection going forward." Omicron infection by itself isn't going to be enough to protect people from reinfection for the long term.

Is the fact that so many vaccinated people are still getting COVID going to hurt vaccination efforts going forward?

We struggle with this with seasonal influenza vaccines. All of us in the scientific community want the best vaccine possible. No scientists like to say, "well, it protects against severe disease but not from infection." We realize that that's not what people want.

I do feel like we're moving forward with the realization in the scientific community, and in the pharmaceutical community, that we need to make better vaccines that are more than just protecting from severe disease. This bivalent vaccine, that's coming in the fall, is a good step in that direction. Scientists and pharmaceutical companies need to do better at trying to come up with more effective COVID-19 vaccines. We know SARS-CoV-2 is going to be here and we're not going to get rid of it from the human population. But we now have to continue our research efforts to make sure that we're improving those vaccines and getting them to a better level of inducing strong and long term immunity.

Source

Cite this as: BMJ 2022;378:o1808

The authors of a large review say there is no support for the hypothesis that depression is caused by lowered serotonin activity or concentrations, and have questioned the reasons behind high prescribing rates of antidepressants.

They say the chemical imbalance theory of depression is still wrongly being put forward by some professionals and the public widely believes it.

Other clinicians say, however, that the notion of depression being because of a simple chemical imbalance is outmoded anyway, and that antidepressants remain a useful option for patients alongside other approaches including talking therapies.

The systematic umbrella review, published in Molecular Psychiatry, looked at the existing overviews of research on serotonin and depression including systematic reviews and meta-analyses.1

Joanna Moncrieff, professor of psychiatry at University College London, consultant psychiatrist at North East London NHS Foundation Trust, and the study’s lead author, said, “It is always difficult to prove a negative, but I think we can safely say that after a vast amount of research conducted over several decades there is no convincing evidence that depression is caused by serotonin abnormalities, particularly by lower levels or reduced activity of serotonin.”

The review found that research that compared levels of serotonin and its breakdown products in the blood or brain fluids did not find a difference between people diagnosed with depression and healthy controls.

Research on serotonin receptors and the serotonin transporter found weak and inconsistent evidence suggestive of higher levels of serotonin activity in people with depression. The authors say these findings are likely to be explained by the use of antidepressants among people diagnosed with depression.

The authors also looked at studies where serotonin levels were artificially lowered in people by depriving their diets of the amino acid required to make serotonin. A meta-analysis conducted in 2007 and a sample of recent studies found that lowering serotonin in this way did not produce depression in hundreds of healthy volunteers. There was very weak evidence in a small subgroup of people with a family history of depression, but this only involved 75 participants, and more recent evidence was inconclusive.

The authors argue that the public overwhelmingly believes that depression is caused by low serotonin or other chemical abnormalities and this belief leads to a pessimistic outlook on the likelihood of recovery and the possibility of managing moods without medical help.

“Patients should not be told that depression is caused by low serotonin or by a chemical imbalance and they should not be led to believe that antidepressants work by targeting these hypothetical and unproven abnormalities,” said Moncrief.

“In particular, the idea that antidepressants work in the same way as insulin for diabetes is completely misleading. We do not understand what antidepressants are doing to the brain exactly, and giving people this sort of misinformation prevents them from making an informed decision about whether to take antidepressants or not.”

Emphasis in psychiatry training

The authors say that psychiatric textbooks still give the lowered serotonin theory extensive coverage. Mark Horowitz, a training psychiatrist and clinical research fellow in psychiatry at University College London and an author on the study, said, “I had been taught that depression was caused by low serotonin in my psychiatry training and had even taught this to students in my own lectures. Being involved in this research was eye opening and feels like everything I thought I knew has been flipped upside down.”

A position statement from the Royal College of Psychiatrists published in 2019 stated, “The original idea that antidepressants ‘correct a chemical imbalance in the brain’ is an oversimplification, but they do have early physiological effects and effects on some aspects of psychological function.”2
The college says antidepressants can induce changes in the function of brain areas that are associated with the improvement in depressive symptoms and in animal studies they have been shown to increase the number and function of brain cells and the connections between them. They also exert effects on the processing of emotional information within a few hours of drug administration.

NICE recommended treatment

A spokesperson for the Royal College of Psychiatrists said, “Antidepressants are an effective, NICE recommended treatment for depression that can also be prescribed for a range of physical and mental health conditions. Treatment options such as medication and talking therapy play an important role in helping many people with depression and can significantly improve people’s lives. Antidepressants will vary in effectiveness for different people, and the reasons for this are complex, which is why it’s important that patient care is based on each individual’s needs and reviewed regularly.

“We would not recommend for anyone to stop taking their antidepressants based on this review, and encourage anyone with concerns about their medication to contact their GP.”

In June, NICE published its first guideline in 12 years on managing depression in adults and this recommends offering a range of evidence based treatment options to patients—from psychological therapies to antidepressants.3

Commenting on the study, Allan Young, director of the centre for affective disorders at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology, and Neuroscience, King’s College London, said that most psychiatrists adhere to the biopsychosocial model with very few people subscribing to a simple chemical imbalance theory. “The use of these drugs is based on clinical trial evidence which informs their use for patients. This review does not change that.”

Phil Cowen, professor of psychopharmacology at the University of Oxford, said, “No mental health professional would currently endorse the view that a complex heterogenous condition like depression stems from a deficiency in a single neurotransmitter.” However, he added that from his own research there is quite good evidence that tryptophan depletion results in depressive symptoms in some remitted depressed patients.

Cowen added that systematic umbrella reviews leave significant room for interpretation and that what is left out can be as important as what is included. For example, a meta-analysis published in Molecular Psychiatry in 2021, that was not included, concluded that metabolic changes in the peripheral blood were associated with major depressive disorder, particularly decreased L-tryptophan.

“The possible role of serotonin in depression is a separate question from the antidepressant effects of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.” He said he was puzzled by the implication that antidepressant drugs could work only by correction of a prior corresponding chemical imbalance. “No current theory of antidepressant action derived from either human or animal studies makes this assertion.”

References
 

01.  Moncrieff J, Cooper R, Stockmann T, et al. The serotonin theory of depression: a systematic umbrella review of the evidence. Mol Psychiatry2022;(July). doi:10.1038/s41380-022-01661-0.

02.  Royal College of Psychiatrists. Position statement on antidepressants and depression. May 2019. www.rcpsych.ac.uk/docs/default-source/improving-care/better-mh-policy/position-statements/ps04_19-antidepressants-and-depression.pdf.

03.  NICE. Depression in adults: treatment and management. June 2022. www.nice.org.uk/guidance/ng222.

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The UK and parts of Europe have seen temperatures of above 40C this month, leading to transport disruption and water shortages.

Emissions caused by the burning of fossil fuels have been trapping heat in the atmosphere since the start of the industrial era. This extra heat isn't evenly distributed across the globe, and bursts out extreme weather events.

Unless global emissions are cut, this cycle will continue.

Here are four ways climate change is changing the weather.

1. Hotter, longer heatwaves

To understand the impact of small changes to average temperatures, think of them as a bell curve with extreme cold and hot at either end, and the bulk of temperatures in the middle.

A small shift in the centre means more of the curve touches the extremes - and so heatwaves become more frequent and extreme.

Temperatures in the UK topped 40C for the first time on 19 July.

The Met Office estimates that the extreme heat seen during the most recent heatwave is ten times more likely now because of climate change. And things could worsen.

"In a few decades this might actually be a quite a cool summer," says Professor Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London.
The Met Office has also pointed out that heatwaves are not just hotter: They're also lasting longer. Warm spells have more than doubled in length in the past 50 years.

Heatwaves can be made longer and more intense by another weather phenomenon - a heat dome.

In an area of high pressure, hot air is pushed down and trapped in place, causing temperatures to soar over an entire continent.

When a storm distorts the jet stream, which is made of currents of fast-flowing air, it is a bit like yanking a skipping rope at one end and seeing the ripples move along it.

These waves cause everything to slow drastically and weather systems can become stuck over the same areas for days on end - as was seen in India earlier this year.

India and Pakistan have already faced five successive heatwaves this year, with Jacobabad, in Pakistan, registering 49C at one point in May.

In the Southern Hemisphere, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Brazil all saw an historic heatwave in January - many areas reported their hottest day on record.

In the same month, Onslow in Western Australia hit 50.7C, the joint-highest temperature ever reliably recorded in the Southern Hemisphere.

Last year, North America was also hit by long heatwaves. The western Canadian town of Lytton burnt down when temperatures hit 49.6C, breaking the previous record by almost 5C.

Such an intense heatwave would have been virtually impossible without climate change, says the World Weather Attribution network, a collaboration between international climate scientists.

One theory suggests higher temperatures in the Arctic are causing the jet stream to slow, increasing the likelihood of heat domes.

2. More persistent droughts

As heatwaves become more intense and longer, droughts can also worsen.

Less rain falls between heatwaves, so ground moisture and water supplies run dry more quickly. This means the ground takes less time to heat up, warming the air above and leading to more intense heat.

Drought in Somalia - the country has suffered three failed rainy seasons in a row

Demand for water from humans and farming puts even more stress on water supply, adding to shortages.

3. More fuel for wildfires

Wildfires can be sparked by direct human involvement - but natural factors can also play a huge part.

The cycle of extreme and long-lasting heat caused by climate change draws more and more moisture out of the ground and vegetation.

These tinder-dry conditions provide fuel for fires, which can spread at an incredible speed.

A firefighting aircraft tackling a wildfire in Slovenia in March

The Northern Hemisphere's wildfire season begun early in some areas, due to lack of rainfall and unseasonable warmth, and has worsened through July.

Most recently severe wildfires have been reported in France, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Croatia and Albania - with thousands of residents evacuated and several hundreds reported to have died.

More than 10,000 residents and tourists have been evacuated in France since the start of July

In Canada last summer, heatwaves led to fires which developed so rapidly and explosively that they created their own weather system, forming pyrocumulonimbus clouds. These colossal clouds then produced lightning, igniting more fires.

The frequency of large wildfires has increased dramatically in recent decades.

Compared with the 1970s, fires larger than 10,000 acres (40 sq km) are now seven times more common in western America, according to Climate Central, an independent organisation of scientists and journalists.

4. More extreme rainfall events

In the usual weather cycle, hot weather creates moisture and water vapour in the air, which turns into droplets to create rain.

The warmer it becomes, however, the more vapour there is in the atmosphere. This results in more droplets and heavier rainfall, sometimes in a shorter space of time and over a smaller area.

Already this year, floods have hit Spain and also parts of eastern Australia. In a period of just six days Brisbane saw almost 80% of its annual rainfall, while Sydney recorded more than its average annual rainfall in little over three months.

< Watch the video at the source page. >

Watch: Record-breaking floods hit Spain’s east coast

These rainfall events are connected to the effects of climate change elsewhere, according to Peter Gleick, a water specialist from the US National Academy of Sciences.

"When areas of drought grow, like in Siberia and western US, that water falls elsewhere, in a smaller area, worsening flooding," he says.

The weather across the globe will always be highly variable - but climate change is making those variations more extreme.

And the challenge now is not only limiting the further impact people have on the atmosphere but also adapting to and tackling the extremes we are already facing.

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