The Webb’s comms aren’t flashy. Rather, the data and communication systems are designed to be incredibly, unquestionably dependable and reliable. And while some aspects of them are relatively new—it’s the first mission to use Ka-band frequencies for such high data rates so far from Earth, for example—above all else, JWST’s comms provide the foundation upon which JWST’s scientific endeavors sit.

As previous articles in this series have noted, JWST is parked at Lagrange point L2. It’s a point of gravitational equilibrium located about 1.5 million kilometers beyond Earth on a straight line between the planet and the sun. It’s an ideal location for JWST to observe the universe without obstruction and with minimal orbital adjustments.

Being so far away from Earth, however, means that data has farther to travel to make it back in one piece. It also means the communications subsystem needs to be reliable, because the prospect of a repair mission being sent to address a problem is, for the near term at least, highly unlikely. Given the cost and time involved, says Michael Menzel, the mission systems engineer for JWST, “I would not encourage a rendezvous and servicing mission unless something went wildly wrong.”

According to Menzel, who has worked on JWST in some capacity for over 20 years, the plan has always been to use well-understood Ka-band frequencies for the bulky transmissions of scientific data. Specifically, JWST is transmitting data back to Earth on a 25.9-gigahertz channel at up to 28 megabits per second. The Ka-band is a portion of the broader K-band (another portion, the Ku-band, was also considered).

The Lagrange points are equilibrium locations where competing gravitational tugs on an object net out to zero. JWST is one of two other craft currently occupying L2.

IEEE SPECTRUM

Both the data-collection and transmission rates of JWST dwarf those of the older Hubble Space Telescope. Compared to Hubble, which is still active and generates 1 to 2 gigabytes of data daily, JWST can produce up to 57 GB each day (although that amount is dependent on what observations are scheduled).

Menzel says he first saw the frequency selection proposals for JWST around 2000, when he was working at Northrop Grumman. He became the mission systems engineer in 2004. “I knew where the risks were in this mission. And I wanted to make sure that we didn’t get any new risks,” he says.

IEEE SPECTRUM

Besides, Ka-band frequencies can transmit more data than X-band (7 to 11.2 GHz) or S-band (2 to 4 GHz), common choices for craft in deep space. A high data rate is a necessity for the scientific work JWST will be undertaking. In addition, according to Carl Hansen, a flight systems engineer at the Space Telescope Science Institute (the science operations center for JWST), a comparable X-band antenna would be so large that the spacecraft would have trouble remaining steady for imaging.

Although the 25.9-GHz Ka-band frequency is the telescope’s workhorse communication channel, it also employs two channels in the S-band. One is the 2.09-GHz uplink that ferries future transmission and scientific observation schedules to the telescope at 16 kilobits per second. The other is the 2.27-GHz, 40-kb/s downlink over which the telescope transmits engineering data—including its operational status, systems health, and other information concerning the telescope’s day-to-day activities.

Any scientific data the JWST collects during its lifetime will need to be stored on board, because the spacecraft doesn’t maintain round-the-clock contact with Earth. Data gathered from its scientific instruments, once collected, is stored within the spacecraft’s 68-GB solid-state drive (3 percent is reserved for engineering and telemetry data). Alex Hunter, also a flight systems engineer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, says that by the end of JWST’s 10-year mission life, they expect to be down to about 60 GB because of deep-space radiation and wear and tear.

The onboard storage is enough to collect data for about 24 hours before it runs out of room. Well before that becomes an issue, JWST will have scheduled opportunities to beam that invaluable data to Earth.

JWST will stay connected via the Deep Space Network (DSN)—a resource it shares with the Parker Solar Probe, Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, the Voyager probes, and the entire ensemble of Mars rovers and orbiters, to name just a few of the other heavyweights. The DSN consists of three antenna complexes: Canberra, Australia; Madrid, Spain; and Barstow, Calif. JWST needs to share finite antenna time with plenty of other deep-space missions, each with unique communications needs and schedules.

IEEE SPECTRUM

Sandy Kwan, a DSN systems engineer, says that contact windows with spacecraft are scheduled 12 to 20 weeks in advance. JWST had a greater number of scheduled contact windows during its commissioning phase, as instruments were brought on line, checked, and calibrated. Most of that process required real-time communication with Earth.

All of the communications channels use the Reed-Solomonerror-correction protocol—the same error-correction standard as used in DVDs and Blu-ray discs as well as QR codes. The lower data-rate S-band channels use binary phase-shift key modulation—involving phase shifting of a signal’s carrier wave. The K-band channel, however, uses a quadrature phase-shift key modulation. Quadrature phase-shift keying can double a channel’s data rate, at the cost of more complicated transmitters and receivers.

JWST’s communications with Earth incorporate an acknowledgement protocol—only after the JWST gets confirmation that a file has been successfully received will it go ahead and delete its copy of the data to clear up space.

The communications subsystem was assembled along with the rest of the spacecraft bus by Northrop Grumman, using off-the-shelf components sourced from multiple manufacturers.

JWST has had a long and often-delayed development, but its communications system has always been a bedrock for the rest of the project. Keeping at least one system dependable means it’s one less thing to worry about. Menzel can remember, for instance, ideas for laser-based optical systems that were invariably rejected. “I can count at least two times where I had been approached by people who wanted to experiment with optical communications,” says Menzel. “Each time they came to me, I sent them away with the old ‘Thank you, but I don’t need it. And I don’t want it.’”

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Webb’s first image reveals fine details of galaxies from billions of years ago

Moderna to make two different omicron boosters: one for US, another for UK, EU

Here’s one way we know that an EV’s battery will last the car’s lifetime

David Faber shocked his CNBC colleagues by suggesting that Elon Musk could be jailed over the lawsuit he faces from his decision to back out of buying Twitter.

Faber joined Jim Cramer and Carl Quintanilla as they led Squawk on the Street Monday with news that Musk is cancelling his $44 billion deal to buy the social media platform.

Musk has repeatedly expressed concerns that Twitter is being misleading about the number of bots and spam accounts on the platform. The billionaire Tesla CEO has not presented any evidence to support his claims, and some experts have speculated they are merely a pretext for him to back out of a deal he now sees as overpriced.

Twitter chairman Bret Taylor announced the company would take legal action to close the buyout transaction Musk initially agreed to, though the Tesla CEO continues to scoff at any consequences that may result from his attempt to abandon the deal.

Faber zeroed in on Musk’s claims that Twitter is being misleading about the extent of bots and spam accounts on the platform.

Faber said there has been “no evidence presented thus far in any way to enhance” Musk’s accusations, and now Musk will have to produce evidence in court to prove those claims about Twitter’s supposed lack of transparency.

“Even if you were to prove that there were a higher number of bots, you still have to prove that it actually is a material adverse effect,” Faber said.

“I don’t think it is,” Cramer followed up. “He spent a lot of time, and his team has spent a lot of time with management going over very strong periods of open store, meaning that Musk really felt that they had gotten a really good look at it. So that is going to hold against them. I still think the likelihood that they get some sort of price cut is good. Boy, the board is in trouble if they just get that walk away.”

Faber countered there was “no way” Twitter was going to let that happen as they ask the Delaware Court of Chancery to enforce the terms of Musk’s agreement.

Most of the people that you speak with — or at least, certainly that I have — believe that will be the case. Then the question is: you are forcing Mr. Musk to buy the company, does he actually agree to do it? There is this argument being said lately that, well, maybe he will not comply with that. Then we would have a situation where they could put him in jail.

Quintanilla found the idea of Musk going to jail “funny,” but Faber maintained “that’s where we could end up.”

Cramer also seemed astonished by the possibility, tweeting this shortly after the conversation ended:

Watch above, via CNBC.
 

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The latest omicron offshoot, BA.5, has quickly become dominant in the United States, and thanks to its elusiveness when encountering the human immune system, is driving a wave of cases across the country.

The size of that wave is unclear because most people are testing at home or not testing at all. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the past week has reported a little more than 100,000 new cases a day on average. But infectious-disease experts know that wildly underestimates the true number, which may be as many as a million, said Eric Topol, a professor at Scripps Research who closely tracks pandemic trends.

Antibodies from vaccines and previous coronavirus infections offer limited protection against BA.5, leading Topol to call it “the worst version of the virus that we’ve seen.”

Other experts point out that, despite being hit by multiple rounds of ever-more-contagious omicron subvariants, the country has not yet seen a dramatic spike in hospitalizations. About 38,000 people were hospitalized nationally with covid as of Friday, according to data compiled by The Washington Post. That figure has been steadily rising since early March, but remains far below the record 162,000 patients hospitalized with covid in mid-January. The average daily death toll on Friday stood at 329 and has not changed significantly over the past two months.

There is widespread agreement among infectious-disease experts that this remains a dangerous virus that causes illnesses of unpredictable severity — and they say the country is not doing enough to limit transmission.

Restrictions and mandates are long gone. Air travel is nearly back to pre-pandemic levels. Political leaders aren’t talking about the virus — it’s virtually a nonissue on the campaign trail. Most people are done with masking, social distancing and the pandemic generally. They’re taking their chances with the virus.

“It’s the Wild West out there,” said Ziyad Al-Aly, an epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis. “There are no public health measures at all. We’re in a very peculiar spot, where the risk is vivid and it’s out there, but we’ve let our guard down and we’ve chosen, deliberately, to expose ourselves and make ourselves more vulnerable.”

Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan, would like to see more money for testing and vaccine development, as well as stronger messaging from the Biden administration and top health officials. She was dismayed recently on a trip to Southern California, where she saw few people wearing masks in the airport. “This is what happens when you don’t have politicians and leaders taking a strong stand on this,” she said.

The CDC said it has urged people to monitor community transmission, “stay up to date on vaccines, and take appropriate precautions to protect themselves and others.”

Nearly one-third of the U.S. population lives in counties rated as having “high” transmission levels by the CDC. Cases are rising especially in the South and West.

Many people now see the pandemic as part of the fabric of modern life rather than an urgent health emergency. Some of that is simply a widespread recalibration of risk. This is not the spring of 2020 anymore. Few people remain immunologically naive to the virus. They may still get infected, but the immune system — primed by vaccines or previous bouts with the virus — generally has deeper layers of defense that prevent severe disease.

But the death rate from covid-19 is still much higher than the mortality from influenza or other contagious diseases. Officials have warned of a possible fall or winter wave — perhaps as many as 100 million infections in the United States — that could flood hospitals with covid patients. Beyond the direct suffering of such a massive outbreak, there could be economic disruptions as tens of millions of people become too sick to work.

Travelers wade through long lines at security checkpoints in Denver International Airport on July 5, 2022. (David Zalubowski/AP)

“It feels as though everyone has given up,” said Mercedes Carnethon, an epidemiologist at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Carnethon said she also isn’t as cautious as she used to be. She wears a high-quality mask on airplanes but doesn’t wear a mask at the gym. She is worried that she’ll contract the coronavirus again — she caught it during the omicron wave last winter. But she doesn’t think a “zero covid” strategy is plausible.

“I feel there is a very limited amount that I can do individually, short of stopping my life,” Carnethon said. “It’s risky. I’ll be catching covid at an inconvenient time. I can hope it is milder than the first time I caught it.”

Many experts concerned about ongoing transmission have also pushed back against online fearmongering and apocalyptic warnings about the virus; people are not routinely getting infected every two or three weeks, Rasmussen said.

Population-level immunity is one reason the virus remains in mutational overdrive. The risk of reinfections has increased because newly emergent subvariants are better able to evade the front-line defense of the immune system, and there is essentially no effort at the community level to limit transmission.

Al-Aly, who is also chief of research and development at Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System, has scoured VA’s vast database to see what happened to the nearly 39,000 patients infected with the coronavirus for a second or third time. What he found was sobering. In a paper posted online last month, but not yet peer-reviewed or published in a journal, Al-Aly and his co-authors reported that people with multiple infections have a higher cumulative risk of a severe illness or death.

It’s not that the later illnesses are worse than, or even as bad as, earlier cases. But any coronavirus infection carries risk, and the risk of a really bad outcome — a heart attack, for example — builds cumulatively, like a plaque, as infections multiply.

“Reinfection adds risk,” he said. “You’re rolling the dice again. You’re playing Russian roulette.”

Vaccination remains an important, if still underused, weapon against the virus — even if it’s not that effective at stopping new infections.
Omicron blew through the largely vaccinated population last winter with stunning ease, and since then the subvariants have arrived in rapid succession, starting with BA.2 and BA.2.12.1 in the spring, and now BA.5 and its nearly identical relative BA.4.

Vaccines are based on the original strain of the virus that emerged in Wuhan, China in late 2019. The Food and Drug Administration has asked vaccine makers to come up with new formulas that target BA.5 and BA.4. Those boosters could be ready this fall.

< View the video at the source page. >

On June 28, the Food and Drug Administration recommended changes to coronavirus booster shots to target BA.4 and BA.5 omicron subvariants.

(Video: Reuters, Photo: Vanessa Leroy/Bloomberg/Reuters)

But there is no guarantee that these latest subvariants will still be dominant four or five months from now. The virus is not only evolving; it’s also doing so with remarkable speed. The virus may continually outrace the vaccines.

“I worry that by the time we have a vaccine for BA.5 we’ll have a BA.6 or a BA.7. This virus keeps outsmarting us,” Al-Aly said.

“We are in a very difficult position with regard to the choice of vaccine for the fall because we’re dealing with a notoriously moving target,” Anthony S. Fauci, President Biden’s top adviser for the pandemic, told The Post in June, a few days before he, too, announced that he was sick with the virus.

Already there’s another omicron subvariant that has caught the attention of virologists: BA.2.75. First seen last month in India, it has been identified in a smattering of other countries, including the United States. But it’s too soon to know whether it will overtake BA.5 as the dominant variant.

There is no evidence that the new forms of the virus result in different symptoms or severity of disease. Omicron and its many offshoots — including BA.5 — typically replicate higher in the respiratory tract than earlier forms of the virus. That is one theory for why omicron has seemed less likely to cause severe illness.

It’s also unclear if these new variants will alter the risk of a person contracting the long-duration symptoms generally known as “long covid.” The percentage of people with severely debilitating symptoms is probably between 1 and 5 percent — amounting to millions of people in this country, according to Harlan Krumholz, a Yale University professor of medicine.

His colleague, Akiko Iwasaki, a professor of immunology and expert on long covid, said in an email that she believes the world is not sufficiently vigilant about the disease anymore. She is often the only person masking in a crowd, she said.

“I understand the pandemic fatigue, but the virus is not done with us,” she said. “I fear that the current human behavior is leading to more people getting infected and acquiring long covid. I fear that this situation can lead to a large number of people with disability and chronic health problems in the future.”

The precocious nature of the virus has made infectious-disease experts wary of predicting the next phase of the pandemic. Topol warns that a new batch of variants could come out of the blue, the same way omicron emerged unexpectedly in November with a stunning collection of mutations already packaged together. Omicron’s precise origin is unknown, but a leading theory is that it evolved in an immunocompromised patient with a persistent infection.

“Inevitably we could see a new Greek letter family like omicron,” Topol said. “There’s still room for this virus to evolve. It has evolved in an accelerated way for months now. So we should count on it.”

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India is projected to surpass China as the world’s most populous country during 2023, according to a report by the United Nations on Monday. The report said that half of the projected increase in global population up to 2050 will be concentrated in just eight countries, which includes India.

"India is projected to surpass China as the world's most populous country during 2023,” said the World Population Prospects 2022 by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division. The report also mentioned that the world population is projected to reach eight billion on November 15, 2022.

More than half of the projected increase in global population up to 2050 will be concentrated in just eight countries of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and Tanzania.

"Disparate population growth rates among the world’s largest countries will change their ranking by size," the UN report said.

In 2022, the two most populous regions were both in Asia: Eastern and South-Eastern Asia with 2.3 billion people (29 per cent of the global population), and Central and Southern Asia with 2.1 billion (26 per cent). China and India, with more than 1.4 billion each, accounted for most of the population in these two regions.

FALL IN GLOBAL LIFE EXPECTANCY DUE TO COVID-19

The report also said that global life expectancy at birth fell to 71 years in 2021, down from 72.8 in 2019, due mostly to the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

The share of the global population at ages 65 and above is projected to rise from 10 per cent in 2022 to 16 per cent in 2050.

By 2050, the number of persons aged 65 years or over worldwide is projected to be more than twice the number of children under age 5 and about the same as the number of children under age 12.

The report said, "Over the next few decades, migration will be the sole driver of population growth in high-income countries. By contrast, for the foreseeable future, population increase in low-income and lower-middle-income countries will continue to be driven by an excess of births over deaths."

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Taking into account all the benefits nature provides to humans and redefining what it means to have a “good quality of life” is key to living sustainably on Earth, a four-year assessment by 82 leading scientists has found.

A market-based focus on short-term profits and economic growth means the wider benefits of nature have been ignored, which has led to bad decisions that have reduced people’s wellbeing and contributed to climate and nature crises, according to a UN report. To achieve sustainable development, qualitative approaches need to be incorporated into decision making.

This means properly valuing the spiritual, cultural and emotional values that nature brings to humans, according to the report by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (Ipbes). The assessment includes more than 13,000 references, including scientific papers, and indigenous and local sources of information. It was done in collaboration with experts in social science, economics and humanities.

The report builds on the Dasgupta review, which found the planet is being put at “extreme risk” by the failure of economics to take account of the true value of nature. Incorporating diverse worldviews and knowledge systems will be key to leading to a more sustainable future, the report says.

Prof Unai Pascual, from the Basque Centre for Climate Change, who co-chaired the assessment on the diverse values and valuation of nature said: “There has been a dominant way of taking decisions based on things that look more simple, super-quantitative, and more scientific, and we’re saying: ‘No, that’s not good science.’ There are a lot of social sciences and humanities, and other knowledge systems, that can also tell us how to do things.”

The review highlights four general perspectives that should be taken into account; “living from nature” which refers to its ability to provide us with our needs like food and material goods; “living with nature”, which is the right of non-human life to thrive; “living in nature” which refers to people’s right to a sense of place and identity, and finally, “living as nature”, which treats the world as a spiritual part of being human.

“The type and quality of information that valuation studies can produce largely depends on how, why and by whom valuation is designed and applied,” says Prof Mike Christie, of Aberystwyth Business School. “This influences whose and which values of nature would be recognised in decisions, and how fairly the benefits and burdens of these decisions would be distributed.”

There are 50 different methods and approaches of making the value of nature visible in decisions, yet researchers found that the way stakeholders valued nature was only taken into account on 2% of studies. Moving forward there are many tools available to make the values of nature visible and these need to be implemented, authors say. One way of working is using citizen assemblies, which reflect the sociology of a given people and gives them a chance to discuss their values, interests and understandings. These are happening at a national level in a number of countries.

One successful example is how the Canadian Nuclear Waste Management Organisation has integrated indigenous perspectives in planning, which involved decision-makers participating in ceremonies and “experiencing” the land together. Another was the Indian government’s decision not to mine near the Niyamgiri mountain which is sacred for Dongaria Kondh peoples. The intrinsic value of the site for rare species and its cultural and spiritual value to indigenous people was seen as more valuable than the financial gains from mining it.

There are consequences of not taking other values into account, such as environmental leaders being killed because they had claims to land that have been ignored, says Prof Patricia Balvanera, of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, who co-chaired the assessment. “The evidence shows that if, from the onset, local values are taken into consideration, people will feel part of the project and will be more onboard with whatever was agreed … This entails redefining ‘development’ and ‘good quality of life’ and recognising the multiple ways people relate to each other and to the natural world,” she says.

The assessment was approved by representatives of 139 countries in German city of Bonn. “The delegates who endorsed this report say this is a game-changer,” says Pascual. “They realise we’ve been going through a way of understanding nature in a too-narrow sense, and that has brought us to this situation where we live in a planet with interconnected crises … this [report] is one ingredient out of many which will be needed to convince very powerful stakeholders and decision makers to start changing the way they treat nature.”

Ipbes, which is the equivalent of the IPCC for biodiversity, was set up to provide governments across the world with scientific advice on how to protect nature. Last week, it released another report that found wild species support half the world’s population but their future use is threatened by overexploitation.

It comes ahead of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) Cop15 in Montreal in December, which will set the next decade of nature targets, and authors say the findings should provide a valuable contribution to the process. Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, executive secretary of CBD said: “I applaud the work of all Ipbes experts for this and look forward to its active use by all parties and stakeholders to the convention.”

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Our energy-intensive brain needs to keep its lights on too. Brain cells depend primarily on steady deliveries of the sugar glucose, which they convert to adenosine triphosphate (ATP) to fuel their information processing. When we’re a little hungry, our brain usually doesn’t change its energy consumption much. But given that humans and other animals have historically faced the threat of long periods of starvation, sometimes seasonally, scientists have wondered whether brains might have their own kind of low-power mode for emergencies.

Now, in a paper published in Neuron in January, neuroscientists in Nathalie Rochefort’s lab at the University of Edinburgh have revealed an energy-saving strategy in the visual systems of mice. They found that when mice were deprived of sufficient food for weeks at a time—long enough for them to lose 15 to 20 percent of their typical healthy weight—neurons in the visual cortex reduced the amount of ATP used at their synapses by a sizable 29 percent.

But the new mode of processing came with a cost to perception: It impaired how the mice saw details of the world. Because the neurons in low-power mode processed visual signals less precisely, the food-restricted mice performed worse on a challenging visual task.

“What you’re getting in this low-power mode is more of a low-resolution image of the world,” said Zahid Padamsey, the first author of the new study.

The new work has received widespread interest and praise from neuroscientists, including ones studying sensory and cognitive processes unrelated to vision that could be similarly altered by energy deprivation. It could have important implications for understanding how malnourishment or even some forms of dieting might affect people’s perceptions of the world. It also raises questions about the widespread use of food restriction to motivate animals in neuroscience studies, and the possibility that researchers’ understanding of perception and behavior has been distorted by studies of neurons in a suboptimal, lower-power state.

Less Food, Less Precision

If you’ve ever felt that you can’t focus on a task when you’re hungry—or that all you can think about is food—the neural evidence backs you up. Work from a few years ago confirmed that short-term hunger can change neural processing and bias our attention in ways that may help us find food faster.

In 2016, Christian Burgess, a neuroscientist at the University of Michigan, and his colleagues found that when mice viewed an image they associated with food, an area of their visual cortex showed more neuronal activity if they were hungry; after they ate, that activity decreased. Similarly, imaging studies on humans have found that pictures of food evoke stronger responses in some brain areas when the subjects are hungry compared to after they’ve eaten.

Whether you’re hungry or not, “the photons hitting your retinas are the same,” Burgess said. “But the representation in your brain is very different because you have this goal that your body knows that you need, and it’s directing attention in a way that will help satisfy that.”

But what happens after more than just a few hours of hunger? Researchers realized that the brain might have ways of saving energy by cutting back on its most energy-intensive processes.

The first hard evidence that this is the case came from the tiny brains of flies in 2013. Pierre-Yves Plaçais and Thomas Preat of the French National Center for Scientific Research and ESPCI Paris discovered that when flies are starving, a brain pathway needed to form an energetically costly type of long-term memory shuts down. When they forced the pathway to activate and form memories, the starving flies died much faster—which suggests that turning off that process conserved energy and preserved their lives.

Whether the much larger, cognitively advanced brains of mammals did anything similar, however, was unknown. It also wasn’t clear whether any power-saving mode would kick in before the animals were starving, as the flies were. There was reason to think it might not: If the energy used for neural processing were slashed too soon, the animal’s ability to find and recognize food might be compromised.

The new paper offers the first look into how the brain adapts to save energy once food has been scarce, but not nonexistent, for a long while.

Over a period of three weeks, the researchers restricted the amount of food available to a group of mice until they lost 15 percent of their body weight. The mice weren’t starving: In fact, the researchers fed the mice right before the experiments to prevent the short-term hunger-dependent neural changes seen by Burgess and other research groups. But the mice also weren’t getting as much energy as they needed.

The researchers then started eavesdropping on the conversations between the mice’s neurons. They measured the number of voltage spikes—the electrical signals neurons use to communicate—sent out by a handful of neurons in the visual cortex when mice viewed images of black bars oriented at different angles. Neurons in the primary visual cortex respond to lines with preferred orientations. For example, if one neuron’s preferred orientation is 90 degrees, then it will send out more frequent spikes when a visual stimulus has elements angled at or near 90 degrees, but the rate drops off considerably as the angle gets much larger or smaller.

Neurons can only send a spike once their internal voltage reaches a critical threshold, which they achieve by pumping positively charged sodium ions into the cell. But after the spike, neurons then have to pump all of the sodium ions back out—a task that neuroscientists discovered in 2001 to be one of the most energy-demanding processes in the brain.

The authors studied this costly process for evidence of energy-saving tricks, and it turned out to be the right place to look. Neurons in food-deprived mice decreased the electrical currents moving through their membranes—and the number of sodium ions entering—so they didn’t have to spend as much energy pumping sodium ions back out after the spike. Letting in less sodium might be expected to result in fewer spikes, but somehow the food-deprived mice maintained a similar rate of spikes in their visual cortical neurons as well-fed mice. So the researchers went looking for the compensatory processes keeping up the spike rate.

They found two changes, both of which made it easier for a neuron to generate spikes. First the neurons increased their input resistance, which decreased the currents at their synapses. They also raised their resting membrane potential so it was already close to the threshold needed to send a spike.

“It looks like brains go to great lengths to maintain firing rates,” said Anton Arkhipov, a computational neuroscientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. “And that is telling us something fundamental about how important maintaining these firing rates are.” After all, the brains might just as easily have saved energy by firing fewer spikes.

But keeping the spike rate the same means sacrificing something else: The visual cortical neurons in the mice couldn’t be as selective about the line orientations that made them fire, so their responses became less precise.

A Low-Resolution View

To check whether visual perception was affected by the reduced precision of the neurons, the researchers put the mice in an underwater chamber with two corridors, each marked by a different image of angled black bars on a white background. One of the corridors had a hidden platform that the mice could use to get out of the water. The mice learned to associate the hidden platform with an image of bars at a specific angle, but the researchers could make it harder to pick the correct corridor by making the pictured angles more similar.

The food-deprived mice easily found the platform when the difference between the right and wrong images was large. But when the difference between the pictured angles was less than 10 degrees, suddenly the food-deprived mice could no longer distinguish between them as accurately as well-fed mice. The consequence of saving energy was a slightly lower-resolution view of the world.

The results suggest that brains prioritize the functions that are most critical to survival. Being able to see a 10-degree difference in the orientation of bars probably isn’t essential for finding nearby fruit or spotting an approaching predator.

The fact that these impairments in perception occurred long before the animal entered real starvation was unexpected. That was “absolutely surprising to me,” said Lindsey Glickfeld, a neuroscientist studying vision at Duke University. “Somehow the [vision] system has figured out this way to massively decrease the use of energy with only this relatively subtle change in the animal’s ability to do the perceptual task.”

For now, the study only tells us for certain that mammals can switch on a power-saving mechanism in visual cortical neurons. “It’s still possible that what we showed doesn’t apply, for example, for the olfactory senses,” said Rochefort. But she and her colleagues suspect it’s likely to occur to varying degrees in other cortical areas as well.

Other researchers think so too. “Overall, neurons function very much the same across cortical areas,” said Maria Geffen, a neuroscientist who studies auditory processing at the University of Pennsylvania. She expects the energy-saving impacts on perception to be the same across all the senses, dialing up activity that is most useful to the organism in the moment and dialing down everything else.

“We don’t use our senses to their limits most of the time,” Geffen said. “Depending on the behavioral demands, the brain is always adjusting.”

Luckily, any fuzziness that does appear is not permanent. When the researchers gave the mice a dose of the hormone leptin, which the body uses to regulate its energy balance and hunger levels, they found the switch that toggles the low-power mode on and off. The neurons went back to responding with high precision to their preferred orientations, and just like that, the perceptual deficits were gone—all without the mice ingesting a morsel of food.

“When we supply leptin, we can trick the brain to the point that we restore cortical function,” said Rochefort.

Since leptin is released by fat cells, scientists believe its presence in the blood is likely to signal to the brain that the animal is in an environment where food is ample and there’s no need to conserve energy. The new work suggests that low levels of leptin alert the brain to the malnourished state of the body, switching the brain into low-power mode.

“These results are unusually satisfying,” said Julia Harris, a neuroscientist at the Francis Crick Institute in London. “It is not so common to obtain such a beautiful finding that is so in line with the existing understanding,”

Distorting the Neuroscience?

A significant implication of the new findings is that much of what we know about how brains and neurons work may have been learned from brains that researchers unwittingly put into low-power mode. It is extremely common to restrict the amount of food available to mice and other experimental animals for weeks before and during neuroscience studies to motivate them to perform tasks in return for a food reward. (Otherwise, animals would often rather just sit around.)

“One really profound impact is that it clearly shows that food restriction does impact brain function,” said Rochefort. The observed changes in the flow of charged ions could be especially significant for learning and memory processes, she suggested, since they rely on specific changes happening at the synapses.

“We have to think really carefully about how we design experiments and how we interpret experiments if we want to ask questions about the sensitivity of an animal’s perception, or the sensitivity of neurons,” Glickfeld said.

The results also open up brand-new questions about how other physiological states and hormone signals could affect the brain, and whether differing levels of hormones in the bloodstream might cause individuals to see the world slightly differently.

Rune Nguyen Rasmussen, a neuroscientist at the University of Copenhagen, noted that people vary in their leptin and overall metabolic profiles. “Does that mean, then, that even our visual perception—although we might not be aware of it—is actually different between humans?” he said.

Rasmussen cautions that the question is provocative, with few solid hints to the answer. It seems likely that the conscious visual perceptions of the mice were affected by food deprivation because there were changes in the neuronal representations of those perceptions and in the animals’ behaviors. We can’t know for sure, however, “since this would require that the animals could describe to us their qualitative visual experience, and obviously they cannot do this,” he said.

But so far there also aren’t any reasons to think that the low-power mode enacted by the visual cortical neurons in mice, and its impact on perception, won’t be the same in humans and other mammals.

“These are mechanisms that I think are really fundamental to neurons,” Glickfeld said.

Editor’s note: Nathalie Rochefort is a member of the board of the Simons Initiative for the Developing Brain, which is funded by the Simons Foundation, the sponsor of this editorially independent magazine. Maria Geffen is a member of the advisory board for Quanta.

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

The Brain Has a ‘Low-Power Mode’ That Blunts Our Senses

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Ford is recalling certain models of the 2020 to 2022 Escape, Maverick, and Corsair due to the risk of under-hood fires, according to reports from Reuters and CNBC. The recall affects over 100,000 vehicles in the US, all of which come with a 2.5-liter hybrid / plug-in hybrid (HEV / PHEV) engine.

In the case of an engine failure, Reuters and CNBC report that engine oil and fuel vapor could flood ignition sources, causing a possible fire beneath the hood of the car. Ford plans on adjusting affected vehicles’ under-engine shield and active grille shutter to allow for better air flow, and will start notifying owners of the recall on August 8th. According to CNBC, Ford has received 23 reports of the issue while engines are switched on, although no injuries have been recorded. Ford didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment.

Aside from this recall, Ford’s expanding a previous recall of select 2021 Lincoln Navigator and Ford Expedition SUVs for the risk of under-hood fires. At the time, the recall affected about 39,000 vehicles, but an update from Ford expands this pool to 66,221 cars built between July 27th, 2020 and August 31st, 2021.

The automaker traced the problem to a switch in manufacturers during the COVID-19 pandemic, and says the printed circuit boards from this supplier “are uniquely susceptible to a high-current short.” Ford advises owners to park their cars outside and away from structures, but says they can still drive the vehicle until the necessary replacement parts become available in September.

In June, Ford recalled nearly 49,000 of its electric Mustang Mach-E vehicles due to battery safety issues, and put deliveries on hold until it found a fix. According to InsideEV, dealers now have access to a software update that fixes the issue, with Ford set to roll out an over-the-air update at a later date.

Ford recalls more than 100,000 Mavericks, Escapes, and Corsairs over fire risk

Palau, a remote Pacific country with a population smaller than most US towns, is rife with microplastic pollution

Plastic pollution is so insidious that it has entered even the most sacred of places. In 2012, a seal washed ashore in Massachusetts because its stomach was inflamed by all the plastic it had swallowed; seven years later a submarine diving to the bottom of America's deepest point, the Mariana Trench, discovered a plastic bag; and as recently as March a study revealed that three out of four people have microplastics in their blood.

Since microplastics are so small that they have entered our blood — plastic particles are by definition less than 5 millimeters in length — it stands to reason that they have contaminated the most pristine human locales on the planet. A new study published in the journal PLOS One confirms that this is indeed the case, as scientists from the Palau International Coral Reef Center studied the pristine reef area of the tiny, remote island republic, which lies east of the Philippines and north of New Guinea in the Atlantic Ocean. Mixed in with the beach sand, seawater and natural sediments, the scientists found a troubling number of microplastics (MPs) and nanoplastics (NPs), or plastic particles that are far tinier than 5 millimeters in length.

"Plastic is literally everywhere — it is not just in the streets and oceans; it is in the food that we eat, the water we drink, and the very air that we breathe."

"This study shows that plastic pollution must be considered in environmental studies even in the most pristine locations," the authors explain in their abstract. "It also shows that NPs pollution is related to the amount of MPs found at the sites. To understand the effects of this plastic pollution, it is necessary that the next toxicological studies take into account the effects of this fraction that makes up the NPs." In fact, the authors zeroed in on the threat posed by nanoplastics as one of the chief takeaways from their research.

"They are more dangerous because of their size and concentration," Christine Ferrier-Pages from the Centre Scientifique de Monaco, and one of the co-authors of the study, told Salon by email. "It is estimated that NPs are 100 times more abundant than MPs and in addition, due to their small size, they can enter the cells and provoke quite a lot of damages."

Ferrier-Pages added, "Plastics, especially microplastics and even more nanoplastics, enter the marine food web at each level of the food web and accumulate in the higher trophic levels, i.e. fish and other commercial organisms. Nowadays, it has been shown that many commercial fish are contaminated, and by eating these fish, plastics are also transferred to humans. The problem with plastics is that there are hundreds of tons of plastics entering the sea each year, and for the moment, there is no good tool to get rid of these plastics."

John Hocevar, a marine biologist and director of Greenpeace's oceans campaign, echoed this chief concern when speaking to Salon by email — namely, that plastic pollution appears to last forever.

"Plastic doesn't go away, it just breaks down into smaller fragments and disperses," Hocevar explained. "In many ways, this means that plastic gets more dangerous over time. The throwaway packaging we use today adds to the plastic bottles and bags we used decades ago. Today, plastic particles pervade the atmosphere, raining down on even the most remote mountains and islands. Microplastics are also now saturating our oceans, where they are often eaten by marine life or washed ashore."

Hocevar praised the new study for reinforcing this point, since "much of the plastic washing up in Palau was produced, used, and discarded thousands of miles away."

Christopher Chin, Executive Director of The Center for Oceanic Awareness, Research, and Education (COARE), also praised the study, observing that it confirms "not only the ubiquity of plastic pollution, but also its inequity; ocean states [like Palau] and those in the global south face a  disproportionate impact from plastic pollution."

"The public should not only be more aware about microplastics and nanoplastics, we should all be alarmed," Chin told Salon. "Plastic is literally everywhere — it is not just in the streets and oceans; it is in the food that we eat, the water we drink, and the very air that we breathe." He drew attention to a study which found that humans typically eat roughly one credit card's worth of plastic every week.

Given how humans are chomping down plastic without even realizing it, perhaps it is hardly surprising that the reef organisms of Palau aren't doing much better.

"On the reef organisms, we have performed some studies on corals, which have been published previously in different journals," Ferrier-Pages explained. "We have shown for example that nanoplastics induce coral bleaching, the loss of the symbiotic algae by corals. As the symbionts provide corals with most of their food requirements, bleached corals enter into starvation. We have also demonstrated that microplastics can reduce coral calcification- the deposition of their hard skeleton."

Palau study reveals microplastics are infecting the most pristine corners of the world

(FOX 2) - It's hard not to see, but admittedly if someone isn't watching for the phenomenon that unfolded Friday morning, they can definitely miss it.

 
At 7:15 a.m. EST, on July 8, 2022, 99% of the world's population was experiencing daylight or twilight at the same time.

It's a minute of time that only happens once a year - when 7.688 billion people can spot the sun in the sky.

This artist concept shows K2-138, the first multi-planet system discovered by citizen scientists. The central star is slightly smaller and cooler than our Sun. NASA/JPL-Caltech

The only spots not under sun are New Zealand, Australia, and Papua New Guinea. As well as those living in Antarctica.

The phenomenon does call into question what it means to be seeing the sun. According to the website timeanddate.com, while the claim is technically true, the number of people perceiving sunlight is a bit lower - about 93% of the world's population.

99% of world's population under sunlight Friday morning

Just 10 minutes from downtown Huntsville, Alabama, a hidden world teems with strange creatures. The 2,500-foot-long Shelta Cave winds below forested hills and suburban neighborhoods. Within the cave, a musty smell wafts through the humid, cool air, and the sound of dripping water echoes along its limestone walls. Among three large halls, up to 30 feet tall and hundreds of feet wide, there are a series of crystal-clear lakes during the rainy season in late winter and spring, when the cave’s water levels rise as much as 15 feet. And it’s in those lakes, in the darkness, that a tiny, translucent crayfish makes its home.

For decades, scientists worried that the Shelta Cave crayfish (Orconectes sheltae), last seen in 1988, had gone extinct—until a paper published in May in Subterranean Biology showed otherwise. The tiny crayfish is hanging on, but is considered critically endangered because of groundwater pollution and other human activity.

Since 2017, Matthew Niemiller, the paper’s senior author and a biologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, has made more than 24 trips to Shelta Cave. His team’s goal was to survey current biodiversity, but they also hoped to rediscover its most elusive resident. “We wanted to reassess the cave community there, both the terrestrial and aquatic,” says Niemiller. “In particular, we wanted to make an effort to try and find some of these species that hadn’t been seen in a few decades.”

The cave-dwelling crayfish lack any pigment and are blind. They resemble little white lobsters dancing across the silty lakebed. Their pincers are narrower and longer than other cave crayfish. Sharing its home with two other species of crayfish, the southern cave (Orconectes australis) and Alabama cave (Cambarus jonesi), the Shelta Cave crayfish is the smallest of the bunch, measuring a little more than an inch.

Matthew Niemiller spotted the first Shelta Cave crayfish in more than 30 years when snorkeling in May 2019.COURTESY MATTHEW L. NIEMILLER

Historically, Shelta Cave was one of the most diverse cave systems in the eastern United States. Long before Niemiller and other scientists came along, beetles, salamanders, shrimp, crayfish, and other animals lived out their days in the dark. Often blind and lacking pigmentation, many cave-dwelling species live longer than their surface-dwelling relatives, thanks to slower metabolisms—a common evolutionary adaptation to subterranean life. For example, the red swamp crayfish, the unfortunate star of many a Louisiana crawfish boil, can live up to five years in the swamps and ditches they call home. Shelta’s southern cave crayfish, O. australis, lives up to 22 years, and it’s thought that the Shelta Cave crayfish has a similar lifespan.

A colony of gray bats also made Shelta Cave their home. Small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, these adorable, furry “microbats” deposited guano throughout the cave—a valuable food source for many of the other cave critters, including the Shelta Cave crayfish. For centuries, the balanced ecosystem of bats, crayfish, and other Shelta Cave animals carried on, undisturbed.

Then entrepreneur Henry M. Fuller came along. In 1888, Fuller bought the cave, naming it after his daughter, according to Scott Shaw, who manages the Shelta Cave Nature Preserve. A year later, Fuller built a wooden dance floor and installed some of the city’s first electric lights in the cavern, creating a popular entertainment destination. When rainwater swelled the subterranean lakes, Fuller even operated wooden boat tours for visitors. Nicknaming the cave “the eighth wonder of the world,” Fuller ran ads that boasted, “all the discoveries of the old world pale into insignificance in comparison to this greatest sight on earth or under the earth.” “Yeah, it was a big affair,” says Shaw—but it was not meant to last.

After 1896, Shelta changed hands several times, reportedly even becoming a speakeasy during Prohibition. In 1967, the National Speleological Society (NSS), an organization that studies and protects caves, bought the cave to preserve its unique ecosystem.

A 30-foot ladder descends into the yawning mouth of Shelta Cave.COURTESY AMATA HINKLE

Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, scientists spotted the Shelta Cave crayfish on more than 100 occasions, though it was not as common as the cave’s other crayfish species. Then, aside from the single sighting in 1988, the Shelta Cave crayfish disappeared.

“Sometime in the late 1960s, early 1970s, something happened to the aquatic ecosystem there. It completely crashed,” says Niemiller. Groundwater pollution may have contributed to the collapse, but it’s more likely that the installation of a gate across the cave’s 20-foot entrance was responsible. To stop what Niemiller calls “amateur spelunkers” from going into the cave, the NSS erected the gate in 1968, utilizing bars from the old Madison County jail. “The gate wasn’t real bat-friendly,” says Niemiller. The bats—and their life-sustaining guano—left. The gate was removed in the 1980s, but the animals never returned.

In May 2019, Niemiller entered Shelta on a research trip with students and colleagues toting disposable hazmat suits, waders, helmets, headlamps, kneepads, wetsuits, and flashlights. “The water level was a little bit higher then, so we could only explore that first main room and then the East Lake area,” says Niemiller.

“I had brought in a snorkel that day just to see if I could explore a bit more,” he adds. Strapping on the snorkel and jumping into water that was about 15 feet deep, he saw a small white crayfish below him. Niemiller scooped up the tiny specimen in a small bait net, noticing its pincers were small and thin, like that of the supposedly extinct crayfish.

He was cautiously optimistic that he might have caught the first Shelta Cave crayfish since 1988. “It was a female,” Niemiller says, adding that the team was able to see what appeared to be eggs developing internally—one of the advantages of studying a near-translucent animal. After snapping a few photos of the tiny crayfish, Niemiller and his students removed one of its walking legs (the limb eventually regenerates). DNA testing of the sample confirmed that it came from a Shelta Cave crayfish—the first documentation of the species in more than three decades.

Entrepreneur Henry M. Fuller operated wooden boat tours of the cave in the late 19th century. COURTESY AMATA HINKLE

In August 2020, Niemiller, graduate student Nathaniel Sturm, and others descended again into Shelta’s subterranean world. Niemiller and Sturm braved a 50-foot-long tunnel that’s less than three feet high to reach the cave’s western lake, an area accessible only when water levels are low. “We were on our way back, returning to the entrance when I spotted just a small white crayfish in the water and was able to scoop it up with a net,” says Sturm. “Often you don’t see them on the way in. But then you stir things up and they get curious and they want to know what the disturbance is, so they’ll come out and investigate.” Slightly smaller than the 2019 Shelta Cave crayfish, this one was a male. They again removed a leg and tested the DNA to confirm the species. “Just knowing that we saw one here—it’s alive, it still exists, it hasn’t gone extinct—was just really, really cool,” says Sturm.

Marine cave biologist Thomas Iliffe of Texas A&M, who was not involved in the research, agrees. “I thought that was very cool,” Iliffe says of the new paper. Caves are a special environment, he adds. “Even in caves that I’ve been to many, many times and think I know well, there’s always the potential to discover something new”—or to rediscover something thought to be lost forever.

“We’ve probably studied or investigated less than 1 percent” of the world’s caves, says Iliffe. “It’s really a frontier that we know very little about.” Cave ecosystems are particularly fragile, and threats such as pollution pose serious dangers to their fauna; Iliffe says many species have likely gone extinct before scientists even had a chance to learn about them. Niemiller echoes that sentiment.

“We don’t necessarily know what the value of an individual species might be 10 years in the future, 50 years in the future, 100 years in the future, right?” he says. “There’s a benefit to try to protect and preserve these species for the future.”

A Long-Lost Rare Crayfish Resurfaces in an Alabama Cave

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After months of ups and downs, doctors had just told her that her husband, Tom Patterson, was too racked with bacteria to live.

"And I have this conversation that nobody ever wants to have with their loved one," Strathdee told an audience recently at Life Itself, a health and wellness event presented in partnership with CNN.

"I said, 'Honey, we're running out of time. I need to know if you want to live. I don't even know if you can hear me, but if you can hear me and you want to live, please squeeze my hand.'

"And I waited and waited," she continued, voice cracking. "And all of a sudden, he squeezed really hard. And I thought, 'Oh, great!' And then I'm thinking, 'Oh, crap! What am I going to do?' "

Strathdee would place cool cloths on her husband's forehead during his extended illness to try to break his many fevers.

What she accomplished next could easily be called miraculous. First, Strathdee found an obscure treatment that offered a glimmer of hope -- fighting superbugs with phages, viruses created by nature to eat bacteria.

Then she convinced phage scientists around the country to hunt and peck through molecular haystacks of sewage, bogs, ponds, the bilge of boats and other prime breeding grounds for bacteria and their viral opponents. The impossible goal: quickly find the few, exquisitely unique phages capable of fighting a specific strain of antibiotic-resistant bacteria literally eating her husband alive.

Next, the US Food and Drug Administration had to greenlight this unproven cocktail of hope, and scientists had to purify the mixture so that it wouldn't be deadly.

Yet just three weeks later, Strathdee watched doctors intravenously inject the mixture into her husband's body -- and save his life.

Her journey is one of unrelenting perseverance and unbelievable good fortune. It's a glowing tribute to the immense kindness of strangers. And it's a story that just might save countless lives from the growing threat of antibiotic-resistant superbugs -- maybe even your own.

"It's estimated that by 2050, 10 million people per year -- that's one person every three seconds -- is going to be dying from a superbug infection," Strathdee told the Life Itself audience.

"We have been caught for the last 2 1/2 years in this terrible situation where viruses have been the bad guy," she said. "I'm here to tell you that the enemy of my enemy can be my friend. Viruses can be medicine."

< View video at the source page. >

Steffanie Strathdee tells the story of her fight for her husband's life at the recent Life Itself conference. 14:22

A terrifying vacation

During a Thanksgiving cruise on the Nile in 2015, Patterson was suddenly felled by severe stomach cramps. When a clinic in Egypt failed to help his worsening symptoms, Patterson was flown to Germany, where doctors discovered a grapefruit-size abdominal abscess filled with Acinetobacter baumannii, a virulent bacterium resistant to nearly all antibiotics.

Found in the sands of the Middle East, the bacteria were blown into the wounds of American troops hit by roadside bombs during the Iraq War, earning the pathogen the nickname "Iraqibacter."

"Veterans would get shrapnel in their legs and bodies from IED explosions and were medevaced home to convalesce," Strathdee told CNN, referring to improvised explosive devices. "Unfortunately, they brought their superbug with them. Sadly, many of them survived the bomb blasts but died from this deadly bacterium."

Today, Acinetobacter baumannii tops the World Health Organization's list of dangerous pathogens for which new antibiotics are critically needed.

"It's something of a bacterial kleptomaniac. It's really good at stealing antimicrobial resistance genes from other bacteria," Strathdee told Life Itself attendees. "I started to realize that my husband was a lot sicker than I thought and that modern medicine had run out of antibiotics to treat him."

With the bacteria growing unchecked inside him, Patterson was soon medevaced to the couple's hometown of San Diego, where he was a psychiatry professor and Strathdee was the associate dean of global health sciences at the University of California, San Diego.

"Tom was on a roller coaster -- he'd get better for a few days, and then there would be a deterioration, and he would be very ill," said Dr. Robert "Chip" Schooley, a leading infectious disease specialist at UC San Diego who was a longtime friend and colleague. As weeks turned into months, "Tom began developing multi-organ failure. He was sick enough that we could lose him any day."

Patterson's body was systemically infected with a virulent drug-resistant bacteria that also infected troops in the Iraq War, earning the pathogen the nickname "Iraqibacter."

Searching for a needle in a haystack

After that reassuring hand squeeze from her husband, Strathdee sprang into action. Scouring the internet, she had already stumbled across a study by a Tbilisi, Georgia, researcher on the use of phages for treatment of drug-resistant bacteria.

A phone call later, Strathdee discovered phage treatment was well established in former Soviet bloc countries but had been discounted long ago as "fringe science" in the West.

"Phages are everywhere. There's 10 million trillion trillion -- that's 10 to the power of 31 -- phages that are thought to be on the planet," Strathdee said. "They're in soil, they're in water, in our oceans and in our bodies, where they are the gatekeepers that keep our bacterial numbers in check. But you have to find the right phage to kill the bacterium that is causing the trouble."

Buoyed by her newfound knowledge, Strathdee began reaching out to scientists who worked with phages: "I wrote cold emails to total strangers, begging them for help," she said at Life Itself.

One stranger who quickly answered was Texas A&M University biochemist Ryland Young. He's been working with phages for nearly 45 years.

"You know the word persuasive? There's nobody as persuasive as Steffanie," said Young, a professor of biochemistry and biophysics who runs the lab at the university's Center for Phage Technology. "We just dropped everything. No exaggeration, people were literally working 24/7, screening 100 different environmental samples to find just a couple of new phages."

'No problem'

While the Texas lab burned the midnight oil, Schooley tried to obtain FDA approval for the injection of the phage cocktail into Patterson.

Because phage therapy has not undergone clinical trials in the United States, each case of "compassionate use" required a good deal of documentation. It's a process that can consume precious time.

But the woman who answered the phone at the FDA said, " 'No problem. This is what you need, and we can arrange that,' " Schooley recalled. "And then she tells me she has friends in the Navy that might be able to find some phages for us as well."

In fact, the US Naval Medical Research Center had banks of phages gathered from seaports around the world. Scientists there began to hunt for a match, "and it wasn't long before they found a few phages that appeared to be active against the bacterium," Strathdee said.

Drs. Robert "Chip" Schooley (left) and Dr. Randy Taplitz after injecting Patterson with the first round of phages at UC San Diego Medical Center.

Back in Texas, Young and his team had also gotten lucky. They found four promising phages that ravaged Patterson's antibiotic-resistant bacteria in a test tube. Now the hard part began -- figuring out how to separate the victorious phages from the soup of bacterial toxins left behind.

"You put one virus particle into a culture, you go home for lunch, and if you're lucky, you come back to a big shaking, liquid mess of dead bacteria parts among billions and billions of the virus," Young said. "You want to inject those virus particles into the human bloodstream, but you're starting with bacterial goo that's just horrible. You would not want that injected into your body."

Purifying phage to be given intravenously was a process that no one had yet perfected in the US, Schooley said, "but both the Navy and Texas A&M got busy, and using different approaches figured out how to clean the phages to the point they could be given safely."

More hurdles: Legal staff at Texas A&M expressed concern about future lawsuits. "I remember the lawyer saying to me, 'Let me see if I get this straight. You want to send unapproved viruses from this lab to be injected into a person who will probably die.' And I said, "Yeah, that's about it,' " Young said.

"But Stephanie literally had speed dial numbers for the chancellor and all the people involved in human experimentation at UC San Diego. After she calls them, they basically called their counterparts at A&M, and suddenly they all began to work together," Young added.

"It was like the parting of the Red Sea -- all the paperwork and hesitation disappeared."

'It was just miraculous'

The purified cocktail from Young's lab was the first to arrive in San Diego. Strathdee watched as doctors injected the Texas phages into the pus-filled abscesses in Patterson's abdomen before settling down for the agonizing wait.

"We started with the abscesses because we didn't know what would happen, and we didn't want to kill him," Schooley said. "We didn't see any negative side effects; in fact, Tom seemed to be stabilizing a bit, so we continued the therapy every two hours."

Two days later, the Navy cocktail arrived. Those phages were injected into Patterson's bloodstream to tackle the bacteria that had spread to the rest of his body.

"We believe Tom was the first person to receive intravenous phage therapy to treat a systemic superbug infection in the US," Strathdee told CNN.

"And three days later, Tom lifted his head off the pillow out of a deep coma and kissed his daughter's hand. It was just miraculous."

Patterson awoke from a coma after receiving an intravenous dose of phages tailored to his bacteria.

A legacy

Today, more than six years later, Patterson is happily retired, walking 3 miles a day and gardening. The couple are back to traveling the world. But the long illness took its toll: Patterson was diagnosed with diabetes and is now insulin dependent, with mild heart damage, no feeling in the bottoms of his feet and gut damage that affects his diet.

"But we're not complaining! I mean every day is a gift, right? People say, 'Oh, my God, all the planets had to line up for this couple,' and we know how lucky we are," Strathdee said.

"We don't think phages are ever going to entirely replace antibiotics, but they will be a good adjunct to antibiotics. And in fact, they can even make antibiotics work better," she added.

"We feel like we need to tell our story so that other people can get this treatment more easily."

To do so, the couple published a memoir: "The Perfect Predator: A Scientist's Race to Save Her Husband From a Deadly Superbug."

Strathdee and Schooley have opened the Center for Innovative Phage Applications and Therapeutics, or IPATH, where they treat or counsel patients suffering from multidrug resistant infections. And Schooley will soon start clinical trials using phages on a deadly antibiotic-resistant bacteria, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, that attack patients with cystic fibrosis.

"The Perfect Predator" is a blow-by-blow account by the couple of the fight to save Patterson's life.

Patterson's case was published in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy in 2017, jump-starting new scientific interest in phage therapy.

"And there's been many other labs that have joined in -- Yale now has a phage therapy program, Baylor, Brussels ... the Australians, Lyon, France, and more," Strathdee told the Life Itself audience.

"What we need next is a phage library," she continued. "We don't want to have to go from bog to bedside every time we need phages, right? We want to be able to go to a walk-in cooler and source phages that are characterized and cataloged and personalize them for patients."

Strathdee is quick to acknowledge the many people who helped save her husband's life. But those who were along for the ride told CNN that she and Patterson made the difference -- and continue to search for a solution to the growing superbug crisis.

"I think it was a historical accident that could have only happened to Steffanie and Tom," Young said. "They were at UC San Diego, which is one of the premier universities in the country. They worked with a brilliant infectious disease doctor who said, 'Yes,' to phage therapy when most physicians would've said, 'Hell, no, I won't do that.'

"And then there is Steffanie's passion and energy -- it's hard to explain until she's focused it on you. It was like a spiderweb; she was in the middle and pulled on strings," Young added. "It was just meant to be because of her, I think."

Source

© NASA/Reid Wiseman Sunrise from the ISS.

One of these cycles is Earth's delicate energy system – the inputs and outputs of the energy received from the Sun.

This cycle dictates all planetary climate systems. On Mars, the seasonal change in energy imbalance – around 15.3 percent between Mars's seasons, compared to 0.4 percent on Earth – is thought to cause the planet's infamously epic dust storms.

For at least a while, before the 1750s, this fluctuating energy cycle on Earth was relatively balanced. But we've now created an imbalance that's recently doubled in just 15 years.

"The net energy imbalance is calculated by looking at how much heat is absorbed from the Sun and how much is able to radiate back into space," explains atmospheric scientist Kevin Trenberth from the National Centre for Atmospheric Research.

"It is not yet possible to measure the imbalance directly, the only practical way to estimate it is through an inventory of the changes in energy."

Trenberth and Chinese Academy of Sciences atmospheric physicist Lijing Cheng reviewed data from all components of the climate system: land, ice, ocean and atmosphere between 2000 and 2019, to conduct a stocktake of these changes.

Earth's atmosphere reflects almost one quarter of the energy that hits it, unlike on the Moon which takes the full impact of the Sun's energy, leading to surface temperatures of around 100°C (212°F). Most of that energy is then absorbed by the Moon and radiated back out into space as thermal infrared radiation, more commonly known as heat.

Again, it's the atmosphere that changes this process here on Earth. Some molecules in our atmosphere catch that heat before reaching space and keep holding onto it. Unfortunately for us, these are the greenhouse gasses, which have effectively now enveloped the planet in a too-snug blanket at the top of the atmosphere.

That extra trapped energy not only changes the place it ends up in but also impacts its surroundings on the way to its final destination, the researchers explain in their paper.

"It is vital to understand the net energy gain, and how much and where heat is redistributed within the Earth system," they write. "How much heat might be moved to where it can be purged from the Earth via radiation to limit warming?"

While everyone has mostly been focusing on increasing temperatures, that's only one product of this extra energy. Only 4 percent of it goes into raising temperatures of land and another 3 percent goes into melting ice, Trenberth and Cheng worked out.

Almost 93 percent is being absorbed by the ocean, they found, and we're already witnessing the unpleasant consequences.

Although less than 1 percent of the excess energy whirls around in our atmosphere, it's enough to directly increase the severity and frequency of extreme weather events, from droughts to floods.

However, the increased atmospheric turbulence may also be helpful.

"Those weather events move energy around and help the climate system get rid of energy by radiating it to space," explain the researchers.

Clouds and ice also help to reflect solar radiation before it becomes long-wave heat that the gasses trap. But both reflective clouds and ice are being reduced by disruptions in this energy cycle.

There's still too much missing information for a comprehensive Earth system model that accurately predicts specific outcomes beyond the short term, Trenberth and Cheng say. But by incorporating their Earth energy imbalance framework that considers each Earth system component, this may be improved on.

"Modeling the Earth energy imbalance is challenging, and the relevant observations and their synthesis need improvements," concludes Cheng.

"Understanding how all forms of energy are distributed across the globe and are sequestered or radiated back to space will give us a better understanding of our future."

This research was published in Environmental Research Climate.

A Disturbing Shift Has Affected Earth's Delicate Energy Balance

The Toronto-based telecommunications company says some customers may experience delays in regaining full service as its network comes back online and traffic volumes return to normal.

In a statement posted to the company’s social media channels, Rogers apologized for the disruption the outage has caused to its customers and said it will be proactively crediting all customers.

The company says its technical teams continue to work hard to ensure that the remaining customers impacted by the outage are back online as quickly as possible.

Tony Staffieri, chief executive and president of Rogers, said in an open letter that the company apologizes for the service interruption but offered no explanation for the outage or how many customers were affected.

Staffieri says Rogers is committed to understanding the cause and would make changes to meet and exceed expectations in the future.

The outage began early yesterday morning and stretched into the evening, pushing businesses and organizations to notify customers that their operations were being affected by Rogers and that delays and service interruptions should be expected.

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The study, published July 7, 2022 in Pain, showed that mindfulness meditation interrupted the communication between brain areas involved in pain sensation and those that produce the sense of self. In the proposed mechanism, pain signals still move from the body to the brain, but the individual does not feel as much ownership over those pain sensations, so their pain and suffering are reduced.

"One of the central tenets of mindfulness is the principle that you are not your experiences," said senior author Fadel Zeidan, Ph.D., associate professor of anesthesiology at UC San Diego School of Medicine. "You train yourself to experience thoughts and sensations without attaching your ego or sense of self to them, and we're now finally seeing how this plays out in the brain during the experience of acute pain."

On the first day of the study, 40 participants had their brains scanned while painful heat was applied to their leg. After experiencing a series of these heat stimuli, participants had to rate their average pain levels during the experiment.

Participants were then split into two groups. Members of the mindfulness group completed four separate 20-minute mindfulness training sessions. During these visits, they were instructed to focus on their breath and reduce self-referential processing by first acknowledging their thoughts, sensations and emotions but then letting them go without judging or reacting to them. Members of the control group spent their four sessions listening to an audio book.

On the final day of the study, both groups had their brain activity measured again, but participants in the mindfulness group were now instructed to meditate during the painful heat, while the control group rested with their eyes closed.

Researchers found that participants who were actively meditating reported a 32 percent reduction in pain intensity and a 33 percent reduction in pain unpleasantness.

"We were really excited to confirm that you don't have to be an expert meditator to experience these analgesic effects," said Zeidan. "This is a really important finding for the millions of people looking for a fast-acting and non-pharmacological treatment for pain."

When the team analyzed participants' brain activity during the task, they found that mindfulness-induced pain relief was associated with reduced synchronization between the thalamus (a brain area that relays incoming sensory information to the rest of the brain) and parts of the default mode network (a collection of brain areas most active while a person is mind-wandering or processing their own thoughts and feelings as opposed to the outside world).

One of these default mode regions is the precuneus, a brain area involved in fundamental features of self-awareness, and one of the first regions to go offline when a person loses consciousness. Another is the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which includes several sub regions that work together to process how you relate to or place value on your experiences. The more these areas were decoupled or deactivated, the more pain relief the participant reported.

"For many people struggling with chronic pain, what often affects their quality of life most is not the pain itself, but the mental suffering and frustration that comes along with it," said Zeidan. "Their pain becomes a part of who they are as individuals—something they can't escape—and this exacerbates their suffering."

By relinquishing the self-referential appraisal of pain, mindfulness meditation may provide a new method for pain treatment. Mindfulness meditation is also free and can be practiced anywhere. Still, Zeidan said he hopes trainings can be made even more accessible and integrated into standard outpatient procedures.

"We feel like we are on the verge of discovering a novel non-opioid-based pain mechanism in which the default mode network plays a critical role in producing analgesia. We are excited to continue exploring the neurobiology of mindfulness and its clinical potential across various disorders."

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Now researchers have discovered another reason to love dogs, and it's something that's not so obvious. According to new research, a higher concentration of dog ownership in a neighborhood is linked with lower crime levels. In their own way, dogs are actually helping us to fight crime. Seriously.

Not that dogs can take all the credit, mind you. Researchers from Ohio State University think the reason this link exists is because owning a dog means you need to walk it, and dog walking involves getting out and about in your community.

That increased level of civilian activity on streets – and the extra interactions with your neighbors that result – provide a heightened level of surveillance over the local neighborhood, which in turn helps to keep things safer, so the thinking goes.

"People walking their dogs are essentially patrolling their neighborhoods," says sociologist Nicolo Pinchak, lead author of the new study.
"They see when things are not right, and when there are suspect outsiders in the area. It can be a crime deterrent."

The researchers' hypothesis – inspired by the work of urban theorist Jane Jacobs – takes cues from Jacobs' "eyes on the street" concept: the idea that people in public places help to maintain order and safety simply through their presence, as it gives them an opportunity for surveillance of their surroundings.

A continuous stream of "eyes on the street" and communal interactions by people in public places helps to create a web of public respect and trust within a neighborhood, which together can help deter crimes from occurring, Jacobs argued.

While the idea has been influential in sociology, urban planning, and academic circles, Pinchak and his team say there have been few attempts to quantify whether the hypothesis demonstrably works to lower neighborhood-level crime rates.

To test this, the researchers focused on dog ownership, reasoning that the daily routines of dog-walkers fit with the theories of Jacobs (and others) on being an activity that could contribute to neighborhood surveillance and safety while building trust within a community by facilitating interactions among strangers.

The researchers used data from multiple sources, including crime statistics for neighborhoods in Columbus, Ohio; a marketing survey showing the concentration of dog-owning neighborhoods in the city; and data from a separate sociological project led by study co-author Christopher Browning, measuring levels of trust and social climates of neighborhoods in the area.

While the results don't offer evidence of any kind of causative effect, the researchers did find an association between the presence of dogs and reduced crime rates.

"Consistent with Jacobs' crime control model, we found that neighborhood dog concentration is inversely associated with rates of robbery, homicide, and, to a less consistent degree, aggravated assault rates among neighborhoods higher in local trust," the team writes in their paper, noting that property crime also showed an inverse association with dog concentration, independent of levels of neighborhood trust.

The results so far have only been seen in one city. Plus, the researchers acknowledge that they can't rule out the influence of various biases in the data, so future studies are needed to explore the issue in more detail.

Nonetheless, the study does offer new data to support the idea that dog ownership and dog walking contribute to lower crimes in the community, perhaps by equipping residents with increased familiarity to identify suspect outsiders, or putting would-be offenders off, given that dog-walkers may appear more likely to intervene in the event of a crime.

More research is needed to unpack this further, the researchers say, but for now, it certainly looks like dogs could be having a beneficial effect on these neighborhoods – simply by bringing people together, and maybe the other effects flow from there.

"Trust doesn't help neighborhoods as much if you don't have people out there on the streets noticing what is going on. That's what dog walking does," Pinchak says.

"When people are out walking their dogs, they have conversations, they pet each other's dogs. Sometimes they know the dog's name and not even the owners. They learn what's going on and can spot potential problems."

The findings are reported in Social Forces.

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Yet another omicron subvariant is raising concern as BA.5 sweeps the US

NASA names first five targets for Webb images

In the coming years, recyclers will hopefully be able to mine billions of dollars worth of materials from discarded solar panels, according to a new analysis published this week. That should ease bottlenecks in the supply chain for solar panels while also making the panels themselves more sustainable.

Right now, most dead solar panels in the US just get shredded or chucked into a landfill. The economics just don’t shake out in recycling’s favor. The value you can squeeze out of a salvaged panel hasn’t been enough to make up for the cost of transporting and recycling it. That’s on track to change, according to the recent analysis by research firm Rystad Energy.

Rystad expects the value of recyclable materials from solar panels to grow exponentially over the next several years, ballooning to $2.7 billion in 2030 from just $170 million this year. That’s thanks to a growing demand for solar coupled with an anticipated pinch in the materials needed to make panels. Technological advancements are also making it easier to extract more valuable materials from old panels, making recycling a sweeter deal financially.

Currently, solar energy makes up just over 3 percent of the global electricity mix. But the world’s energy systems are at the start of a drastic makeover to bring more renewable energy online. To keep the damaging effects of climate change at a more manageable level, the Paris climate accord commits countries to working together to quit releasing greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels over the next few decades. To hit that goal, solar could account for upwards of 40 percent of the global power supply. It also helps that solar panels have grown super affordable, becoming a cheaper source of electricity than coal or gas in most of the world.

Still, there are some clouds ahead in the otherwise sunny forecast for solar energy. To build more solar panels, you need more materials. Right now, mining and processing those materials are concentrated in a handful of countries. That’s left the solar supply chain vulnerable to disruptions and rife with abuse. The nonprofit Business & Human Rights Resource Centre has documented human rights abuses during the mining of materials used in solar panels. And polysilicon used in solar panels is made through an energy-intensive process that’s been tied to forced labor. Those revelations have led to sanctions on some solar products made in China.

Recycling will play a role in diversifying those supply chains. It might also lessen the toll that mining takes on the environment and on the health of workers and nearby communities.

In the future, more of the materials used to make new solar panels are likely to come from re-hashed panels. Recovered silver, polysilicon, copper, and aluminum can fetch the most cash on the recycling market, according to Rystad. Unfortunately, today, silver and solar-grade silicon usually isn’t separated out with today’s recycling methods. It’s often shredded along with the rest of the panel and sold as crushed glass. Luckily, recycling could soon get more sophisticated, thanks to new research into how to salvage the most valuable stuff inside photovoltaic panels.

Solar started to take off in the 2000s, and with a lifespan of around 25 years — we’re just now approaching the first big wave of discarded solar panels. If it’s treated properly, that trash could become treasure.

Dead solar panels are about to become a lot more valuable

A major outage of mobile and internet networks caused widespread disruptions across Canada on Friday, affecting banks, police emergency lines and customers in the second outage to hit one of the country’s biggest telecom providers in 15 months.

Customers gathered at coffee shops and public libraries to access alternate networks, while financial institutions reported problems with everything from automated machines to cashless payment systems.

Rogers Communications said its technical teams were working to restore services as quickly as possible.

The outage is likely to add to concerns about competition in the industry that is dominated by Rogers.

The company, which has about 10 million wireless subscribers and 2.25 million retail internet subscribers, is the leading service provider in Ontario, and along with BCE and Telus, controls 90% of the market share in Canada.

Earlier this year, Canada’s competition bureau blocked Rogers’ attempt to take over rival Shaw Communications in a C$20bn deal, saying it would hamper competition in a country where telecom rates are some of the highest in the world.

“Today’s outage illustrates the need for more independent competition that will drive more network investment so outages are far less likely,” said Anthony Lacavera, managing director of Globealive, an investment firm that had bid for a wireless provider involved in the Rogers/Shaw deal.

Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources, showed reports of outages starting from 4.30am ET, topping off at more than 20,000 users by 7am ET. The reports dropped to around 8,000 by 11.30am ET.

The nationwide outage resulted in some callers facing difficulty reaching emergency services via 911 calls, police across Canada said, including Ottawa and Toronto, its largest city.

Interac, which operates an email money transfer service used by several Canadian banks, said the outage was affecting its services. Toronto-Dominion Bank said it was facing system issues with Interac e-Transfer service.

Bank Of Montreal said the outage was affecting financial institutions, toll-free numbers as well as transactions, while Royal Bank of Canada said its ATM and online banking services were affected.

Canada’s industry minister, François-Philippe Champagne, said his team has been in contact with the company.

“We expressed how important it is that this matter be resolved as soon as possible and for the company to provide prompt and clear communication directly to those impacted,” he tweeted.

It was the second major outage for Rogers in a little more than a year. In April last year, thousands of its customers reported intermittent interruptions to wireless voice and data services for several hours before the company was able to restore full operations to its network.

In Ottawa’s downtown core on Friday, cafes including Tim Hortons were not accepting debit and credit cards, and turning away customers who did not have cash. Tim Hortons did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the impact on its business.

Toronto residents crowded into and around a midtown Starbucks coffee shop offering free wifi on a network unaffected by the outage.

“There’s tons of people here with their laptops just working away ferociously, the same as they would at home, because they’ve got no service at home,” said customer Ken Rosenstein.

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COVID booster shots appear to be less than 20% effective against infection with the omicron variant of the virus just a few months after the booster is given, a new study found this week.

The Italian study, which is a pre-print review and re-analysis of prior studies and has not been peer-reviewed, suggests boosters are effective in the short term to restore protection against the virus. But over just a few months, that wanes quickly.

"Booster doses were found to restore the VE [vaccine effectiveness] to levels comparable to those acquired soon after administration of the second dose; however, a fast decline of booster VE against Omicron was observed, with less than 20% VE against infection and less than 25% VE against symptomatic disease at 9 months from the booster administration," the authors wrote in the paper released Wednesday.

It's a crucial question to understand, given that boosters widely became available about 9 months ago in the United States, and that a new surge is now happening with the BA.5 variant of omicron -- which appears to be better at reinfecting people than any past strain of the virus.

Overall, the researchers found that nine months after administration, two doses of a vaccine were less than 5% effective at stopping a symptomatic omicron infection, and three doses were no more than about 22% effective.

According to the CDC, less than a third of Americans have had a first booster dose at any point since they became available, and only about 5% of Americans have had a second booster dose.

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NASA has explained what caused communication issues with its CAPSTONE spacecraft: a bug in the code.…

CAPSTONE (Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment) was launched atop a Rocket Lab Electron in June and on July 4 the company's Photon spacecraft deployed CAPSTONE for a several month-long journey to the Moon.

During commissioning, engineers noted some inconsistent ranging data and sent a command to access diagnostic data. Alas, the command wasn't formatted to the radio's liking and the spacecraft fell silent. At that point, the spacecraft's fault detection system should have immediately rebooted the radio but didn't, "because of a fault in the spacecraft flight software."

Software defects in spacecraft code are nothing new. It can, however, be very difficult to deal with them when working with bandwidth constraints or something rapidly dismantling itself in a fireball of failure.

For the latter, the example of the maiden flight of the Ariane 5 rocket on June 4, 1996, springs effortlessly to mind. A bug in the Inertial Reference System (used for where the rocket was pointing) resulted in a good, old-fashioned overflow as a 16-bit integer was the recipient of 64-bit variable. The rocket ended up pointing in the wrong direction and was destroyed less than a minute into the launch.

It would take a year and a good deal of agonizing over how a seemingly simple bug in code lifted from the Ariane 4 could cause such a catastrophe before the Ariane 5 would fly again.

As for bandwidth constraints, we've no doubt that the CAPSTONE incident sent a shiver through the spines of the SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) team after a mistake in a sequence of commands sent to the spacecraft resulted in the billion-dollar mission almost being lost in 2020 had it not been for some determined engineers and supportive management.

Other notable software errors include the infamous loss of NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter, sent hurtling into the Martian atmosphere due in part to one element of the software working in imperial units while the other used the metric system, resulting in a trajectory that caused the orbiter to disintegrate in the atmosphere of Mars.

Going further back, there was the Mariner 1 mission to Venus, destroyed shortly after its 1962 launch when its Atlas-Agena rocket veered off course. Working through the aftermath, engineers pinpointed an error in one of the equations loaded into the flight computer that guided the rocket. Very much a case of the programming was OK but the specification was not.

There are many more examples of software problems blighting missions – Boeing's Calamity Capsule and woeful lack of quality control is one of the more recent.

However, for now the CAPSTONE mission is back on track. The spacecraft kept its antenna pointed at Earth and its solar panels kept the battery charged until the radio was eventually restored to life. With luck, it has had its glitch for this mission.
After all, in space, no one can hear you blue screen. ®

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The race is on to figure out how to protect the ocean abyss as deep-sea mining operations look to extract minerals like nickel, cobalt, and copper from the sea floor. But there’s one potential risk to the deep-sea environment that tends to fall under the radar. Not only will mining dredge up the seafloor, but it’ll also create a lot of noise that poses its own problems for marine life, according to a newly published paper in the journal Science.

People have talked about mining the deep sea for minerals for decades, and that future is almost here. Driven by a need for more of the minerals used in everyday gadgets and batteries, the first efforts to raid polymetallic nodules at the bottom of the ocean for these resources could begin in earnest as soon as next year. The noise from those operations could affect marine life even hundreds of kilometers away, the authors of the new paper found.

Within about 6 kilometers (3.73 miles) of a mine, the noise could be equivalent to or even louder than a rock concert. That exceeds the threshold, 120 dB, that the US National Marine Fisheries Service says could negatively impact marine mammals’ behavior. The noise travels up to 500 kilometers (310 miles) away, where it would weaken but still be louder than ambient noise levels during fair weather.

Gerard Barron, Chairman and CEO of The Metals Company, holds a nodule brought up from the sea floor, which he plans for his company to mine the seafloor for these nodules in the Clarion Clipperton Zone of the Pacific Ocean. Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

“The biggest surprise for me was how far ambient noise levels are likely to be exceeded,” says Craig Smith, one of the authors of the paper and a professor of oceanography at the University of Hawai‘i. To make things worse, the noise from mining could be nonstop. “This noise is expected to be produced 24/7 for years or maybe even decades,” Smith tells The Verge.

And unlike the noise at busy ports that’s mostly at the surface of the water, mining creates a racket all the way down to the bottom of the seafloor. There’s noise from vessels above, dredges below, and pumps that bring nodules and sediments up to the surface.

As a result, whales passing through might have a harder time communicating. Or whales and other animals might decide to avoid these areas altogether, which could even affect their migration.

Still, researchers don’t know exactly how that will affect marine life — and a big part of the problem is that there’s still so much that we don’t yet know about life in the ocean’s abyss. The vast majority of animals researchers bring up from expeditions to these depths — 4,000 meters (13,123 feet) or deeper — are completely new to science, according to Smith.

There are crustaceans, worms, mollusks, anemones, and more — and Smith would like to see more research into how sensitive these creatures are to noise. Without sunlight at these depths, some animals have developed sensory systems that allow them to use vibrations or noise to avoid predators or find mates and prey.

Smith and his colleagues made predictions based on models since mining hasn’t started, and they couldn’t take real-world observations. They focused on a region that might soon be a hotspot for deep-sea mining called the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, which lies between Hawaii and Mexico. That zone is rich in polymetallic nodules, lumpy black rock-like things on the seafloor that contain metals that are increasingly sought after to make EV batteries.

Last year, the small island nation of Nauru announced plans to sponsor an effort to mine the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. That triggered a clause in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea that requires the International Seabed Authority to craft new regulations for mining the nodules by the middle of next year.

Since then, hundreds of scientists have pushed to stop mining until they have a better understanding of what it might do to the surrounding environment. Last week, the leaders of some island nations — including Palau, Fiji, and Samoa — also called for a moratorium on deep-sea mining. Mining digs up and buries seafloor habitats. Rushing into it without a good understanding of the risks, they warn, might even wipe out ecologically important species before they’ve even been discovered.

Smith and his co-authors are also urging mining contractors to release more data on the sound from their mining equipment. Moving forward over the next year “without data transparency and rigorous standards and guidelines in place would represent the start of a large-scale, uncontrolled experiment,” the paper says.

Mining the deep sea for battery materials will be dangerously noisy, study finds