Even the Webb telescope’s engineering test images manage to wow

Volkswagen starts building the first of six battery gigafactories

An “erratic” pedestrian attacked a Waymo autonomous vehicle late Tuesday evening in Tempe, Arizona, smashing the windshield and injuring the safety driver, the company said. It was the latest incident of people in Arizona attacking Waymo vehicles — and occasionally their safety drivers — as the company ramps up its commercial service in the state.

According to the company, a Waymo vehicle was traveling down the street in autonomous mode at 3AM on July 5th when a pedestrian ran out in front of it. The safety driver saw the pedestrian and switched the vehicle into manual mode, bringing it to a full stop before the person leaped onto the hood. The person, whom Waymo spokesperson Nick Smith described as “erratic” then punctured the windshield, injuring the driver.

Police soon apprehended the suspect, and the Waymo driver was transported to a nearby medical facility for treatment — though Smith says the driver was “not seriously harmed.” The company is “in communication with local law enforcement” about the incident, Smith added.

A video of the damaged Waymo vehicle, one of the company’s electric Jaguar I-Pace vehicles, was posted on Twitter a few hours after the incident took place.

(A police report of the incident was not immediately made available to confirm Waymo’s version of events.)

Waymo operates a commercial ride-hailing service using both fully driverless vehicles (no safety driver behind the wheel) and vehicles with drivers in Phoenix and the surrounding towns, including Tempe. But while local elected officials and business leaders have welcomed the company with open arms, some residents are less than enthused about sharing the road with Waymo’s robot vehicles.

The company’s vehicles have been subject to a variety of attacks in the past few years, including people threatening or physically attacking them with guns, knives, and rocks. In 2018, The Arizona Republic reported that police in Chandler, one of the towns where Waymo operates, have logged at least two dozen incidents.

Some drivers have tried running Waymo’s vehicles off the road. A man drove up alongside one of the company’s minivans and threatened the safety driver with a piece of PVC pipe, according to The New York Times.

An incident in 2017 when a self-driving Uber vehicle struck and killed a pedestrian in Tempe seems to have sparked some of the violent backlash. One man cited the Uber incident when questioned by police after waving a .22-caliber pistol at a Waymo car. (Never mind the fact that Waymo was not involved in the fatal crash.)

Waymo has said that the attacks are few and far between and that the vast majority of its vehicles are able to drive thousands of miles every day without incident.

Waymo autonomous vehicle attacked by an ‘erratic’ pedestrian in Arizona

Patients have more choices now. And surgeons with specialized training and expertise in prostate cancer surgery have a wider range of techniques and technology to work with than ever before. They can tailor a type of surgery specifically to the patient, while also increasing the odds of an easy recovery with minimal side effects and complications.

First, it's important to know that prostate cancer is common—it is, in fact, the second leading cause of cancer death for men in the United States. But for many, the cancer grows so slowly that doctors may recommend a program of monitoring the cancer rather than rushing to treat it. This is especially true for older men who are likely to die from something other than their prostate disease, especially if they have other conditions.

This is the case for about 20 to 30% of patients who come to Yale Medicine for prostate cancer care, says Isaac Kim, MD, Ph.D., MBA, professor and chair of the Department of Urology at Yale School of Medicine, noting that these patients can be monitored, with no urgent need for immediate treatment. "The rest should probably have surgery or radiation," he says.

And for many patients who need treatment, the idea of surgery brings worry. "Patients come to my office concerned about the potential side effects of surgery—they are afraid they will become incontinent or have erectile dysfunction," says Dr. Kim, who has performed more than 2,100 robotic prostate cancer surgeries. "But outcomes from prostate surgery can be much better than you think if you intervene early, especially with the current robotic technology."

We spoke more with Dr. Kim and Yale Medicine urologist Preston Sprenkle, MD. Below, they share their knowledge about the latest innovations in prostate cancer surgery.

Ask your prostate surgeon the right questions

The choice of prostate cancer treatment depends on such factors as age and general health, as well as a patient's risk categorization determined by their Gleason score. The Gleason score, a way of estimating how likely the cancer is to spread, is determined based on a biopsy sample. Gleason risk groups range from low/very low to intermediate (broken out to favorable or unfavorable) to high/very high.

First, you need as much information as possible about your prostate cancer. Yale Medicine has an Active Surveillance Program that uses advanced imaging and real-time ultrasound to monitor and biopsy suspicious lesions. Many patients in the program who have a low-grade form of prostate cancer never need surgery, Dr. Sprenkle says.

For men who do need surgery, there are at least three questions they should be sure to ask the surgeon, he adds. The first is which surgical approach is going to provide the best control of the cancer? The second is which approach will have the fewest side effects? The third is which approach tends to have the swiftest recovery, the quickest hospital stay, and fastest return to function?

It's important to keep in mind that different surgeons may have different opinions on the best surgery in a given situation, and they won't all have the same levels of experience with some operations. For that reason, Dr. Sprenkle encourages patients to ask questions about the surgeon's comfort level with a recommended surgery and the number of times they have performed it.

He also suggests asking them about the outcomes with that surgery in their practice, including the rates of continence and erectile dysfunction after the surgery. "You're looking to understand what, in the surgeon's mind, are the factors that contribute to their success rates."

Most prostate surgeries are now done robotically

In the U.S., about 95% of prostate surgeries are performed robotically, with the surgeon sitting apart from the patient at a control console, watching progress on a high-definition monitor while controlling the robot remotely. The robot translates the surgeon's hand movements into precise micro-movements, making it easy for them to manipulate a tiny camera and surgical instruments with greater range of motion than they could with their hands.

Robotic procedures are done with the patient under general anesthesia and take two hours or more to complete. The possibility of side effects is a concern with any type of prostatectomy—even with the aid of a robot—the main ones being an inability to control urine after surgery, and difficulty having or maintaining an erection. There are several different types of robotic surgeries, and each one comes with its own set of benefits.

Single-port robotic surgery: One tiny incision

Dr. Kim estimates that about 50% of men who have a robotic prostatectomy at Yale are eligible for a single-port robotic surgery, which essentially turns the removal of the prostate into an outpatient procedure. In addition to allowing patients to go home the same day, the surgery is associated with less pain, fewer wound complications, and minimal scarring. Yale New Haven Hospital has the only single-port robot in Connecticut.

The surgeon performs the single-port surgery using the da Vinci Robotic System, which is the only surgical robot approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to perform various types of procedures. The newest generation da Vinci robot has a single robotic arm. By comparison, the previous generation da Vinci robot, which is still used for many other types of prostatectomies, has four arms—and requires five buttonhole-sized incisions compared to the single 4- to 5-inch incision used for an open surgery.

The key difference with the single-robot arm is that it can work in a smaller cavity in the abdomen (called the extraperitoneal space), rather than in a larger cavity (called the peritoneal space), which contains the bowel and other organs. "When you have four arms involved you need a much bigger space, because the footprint of the robot is large," Dr. Kim says. "Whenever you are occupying the space in which the bowel sits, there is a higher rate of potential complications."

Working in the extraperitoneal space, "the impact to the body is significantly less—and so is the pain—and patients go home the same day." Another benefit is that there is no need to set the patient up in what is known as "steep trendelenburg positioning," with their legs in the air and head down at a 30- to 45-degree angle, which can be a major source of stress for patients under anesthesia, and is associated with congestion and respiratory problems during surgery. During the single-port surgery, "they can essentially stay flat on the table," says Dr. Kim.

Retzius-sparing surgery has a good record of continence recovery

Dr. Sprenkle says he's had success with an approach called retzius-sparing prostatectomy, which is associated with better earlier continence rates compared to other prostate-removing surgeries. The term "continence rate" refers to the ability to control your bladder and bowel to the extent that there is either no leakage or it is minor enough to allow you to live normally, wearing a pad.

"This can get to personal preference," Dr. Sprenkle says. With the retzius-sparing surgery, multiple studies have shown that a much higher percentage of men have a faster recovery of continence than they would with the multiple-incision robotic surgery or with the single-port surgery. "A much higher percentage of men are 'completely continent' when the catheter comes out," he says.

The surgery uses a robot, but approaches the prostate from below the bladder rather than from above it. The surgeon works through the peritoneum—the tissue that lines the abdominal wall and covers most of the organs in the abdomen—and spares the "space of retzius," which leaves the bladder and surrounding structures—including the vessels and nerves associated with urinary continence—in a more "natural" anatomic location.

Prostate cancer surgery should be individualized to each patient

Not every prostate cancer can be treated with a single-port approach or retzius-sparing surgery, but there are other choices. "We have a large and expanding repertoire of treatment options that allow us to personalize treatment to each patient's needs," says Dr. Sprenkle.

The potential options include several different surgical approaches and robots, as well as the alternative of radiation therapy, which uses high-energy rays or particles to kill cancer cells, delivered in precisely targeted external beam treatments or an implanted radioactive seed. For small tumors, another approach is focal therapy, a term for noninvasive techniques for eliminating the tumors while leaving the prostate gland itself intact.

The best candidates for single-port surgery are men whose cancer is classified as "favorable intermediate risk," Dr. Sprenkle says. He wouldn't recommend it for men with unfavorable intermediate or high-risk cancer, because the approach doesn't provide easy access for pelvic lymph node dissection to assess whether the cancer has spread.

Using the previous generation robot and making five small incisions might be better for those patients, he says. It's also true that not every medical center has a single-arm robot and not every surgeon is trained to do a single-port prostatectomy, which is difficult to perform.

Some simply favor other approaches, Dr. Sprenkle says.

Ultimate outcomes are similar regardless of the surgical approach

In general, while each approach has its advantages, all have been shown to have similar outcomes, adds Dr. Sprenkle. "There are no significant differences in outcomes for patients between the open surgery and robotic ones. There is less blood loss on average with robotic surgery, and in the hands of a good surgeon, continence and sexual preservation is the same," he says, adding that while it varies from patient to patient, average recovery time is six weeks. "And cancer control is the same. Put another way: It's better to focus on finding the right surgeon rather than the approach or type of surgery."

As far as what that means for patients deciding on which surgery they should get, Dr. Sprenkle says that it's important to take time to think about all of your options.

"And ask a lot of questions," he says.

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Iron acts as a key to numerous metabolic functions within our bodies. But iron deficiency remains as one of the top global health risks recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO).

Iron deficiency has become the most prevalent micronutrient disorder worldwide, and COVID may be worsening the problem.

Iron is hard to get

The type of iron we mine is different from the "free-form" iron that can be used biologically. Free-form iron has a propensity to jump between two chemical states, allowing it to bind to various molecules, and participate in all sorts of essential reactions within our bodies.

But we see a different story again during food digestion. Inside our upper small intestine where iron is most effectively absorbed, free-form iron tends to bind to oxygen, other minerals and food components. This often results in rock-like, insoluble clumps (which are like the ones we mine!). These are too big to pass through or between our cells.

This means that even when we consume enough iron, typically only ~15–35% of it is absorbed. It also means iron availability can be improved, or inhibited depending on how we eat it or what we eat it with.

For example, heme iron from animal flesh has a cage-like structure, which carries the iron in a soluble form that prevents it from clumping during absorption. In many Western countries, heme iron only accounts for 10% of the iron eaten, but two thirds of the total iron absorbed.

Iron is often better absorbed when taken with foods such as citrus, alliums and meat.

Credit: Illustrator: Ren Guo, Author provided

More of us are at risk of deficiency

Getting sufficient iron sounds like simple math: we want to add enough to our dietary intake to make up for the iron being lost from the body, such as through feces, skin shedding, menstruation (for women) and sweat. But the two sides of the equation can change depending on who and where we are throughout our lifetime.

Generally, iron deficiency occurs when our body's stores of iron are depleted from not having consumed or absorbed enough iron to meet our needs.

This can happen when people restrict their diets, such as for religious, social or medical reasons. Some people also have a tough time keeping up when their iron needs increase, such as pregnant women and growing children.

But iron deficiency can also happen when the body has enough iron, but can't effectively transport it into cells. This is common in those with both acute and chronic infections, heart and autoimmune conditions, and cancers. In these cases, the underlying disease needs to be treated first, rather than improving iron intake.

The table below summarizes some common causes of iron deficiency. Sometimes multiple causes may occur simultaneously—for example, for many elite athletes (35% of women and 11% of men), iron deficiency results from reduced absorption due to inflammation, on top of increased loss through sweat and breakdown of blood cells.

COVID hasn't helped

The ongoing COVID epidemic has also introduced multiple risk factors for iron deficiency.

We know severe infection with SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID) may change the way some people metabolize iron, leading to lower iron levels up to two months after infection. This contributes to symptoms commonly reported after infection, such as fatigue and lethargy.

Recovery from the pandemic itself has also exacerbated food supply issues, as well as the rising global income inequality.

This means more people face barriers to food security—and the nutrient-dense foods that help boost our iron intake like red meat or leafy greens may be unavailable or unaffordable for them.

Before you pick up a pill

It may be tempting to pick up one of the many widely available iron supplements to attempt to boost your intake. However, we have to keep in mind that conventional iron supplementation is associated with some negative side effects.

These include damage to our gut lining, nausea, diarrhea and constipation. Iron supplementation has also been linked to changes in the gut microbiome, a critical determinant of health.

The WHO has recommended two other approaches: diet diversification and food fortification.

Diet diversification is exactly as it sounds: having a diet with a variety of wholefoods such as fruits and vegetables, grains and legumes, meat, dairy, and nuts and seeds.

This approach not only ensures sufficient levels of iron are found in the foods we eat, but also that they come with different forms or "vehicles" to improve absorption. This approach works even with plant-based foods.

Before resorting to pills and supplements, try diversifying or fortifying the iron in your diet.

Shutterstock

Food fortification, where iron is added to processed foods, is also a fairly safe yet accessible option due to its lower dose. In Australia, iron is commonly fortified in products such as bread, cereals and ready-to-drink mixes.

It can be challenging to get the iron into our body and where it's needed. But before turning to supplements, we must remind ourselves that food sources should always be first-in-line. In cases of diagnosed deficiencies, your healthcare professional will provide you with further information where supplements are necessary.

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We know stuff like the optimal time of day to exercise, how often you should exercise, and what kind of intensity you should aim for.

Many of these are just recommendations, of course, but they're based on aggregated data recorded from thousands of participants, showing what appears to work best for most people – and from lots of different perspectives too.

For instance, they can tell us interesting and useful factoids, such as how much exercise is needed to offset sitting down all day, or how best to keep weight off, and how even just one, single workout can deliver health benefits.

All of these studies have insights we can learn from and try to apply to our own lives. But if you're like most people, one of the biggest problems about exercise is simply finding time to actually do it during the week.

On that front, scientists also have some news. And it's good news.

In a new international study, researchers analyzed public health data for over 350,000 people in the US collected through the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) between 1997 and 2013.

Combing through the data, the team – led by first author Mauricio dos Santos, an exercise physiology researcher from the Federal University of São Paulo in Brazil – had a single question they wanted to explore.

Put simply, provided you're doing enough exercise to meet the recommended levels of physical activity each week, does it matter if you do the exercise in just one or two sessions (aka 'weekend warriors'), or is it better to spread the physical activity out in three or more regular sessions during the week?

Currently, the World Health Organization (WHO) 2020 guidelines on physical activity and sedentary behavior stipulate that adults should do 150–300 minutes of moderate intensity physical activity each week, or 75–150 minutes of vigorous intensity exercise each week (or some equivalent combination thereof).

While studies have previously looked at the health benefits of being a 'weekend warrior', it's remained unclear how doing only one or two sessions of exercise a week compares to doing more frequent sessions of physical activity, specifically in terms of reducing risk of mortality.

Thanks to dos Santos and co., we now have a clearer answer.

After comparing people in the cohort who undertook the recommended level of moderate to vigorous physical activity (MVPA) each week, the researchers found very little difference between weekend warriors and the participants who exercised more regularly, in terms of reduced mortality risk from all causes, or specifically from cancer or cardiovascular disease.

"We found that weekend warrior and regularly active participants had similar all-cause and cause-specific mortality, suggesting that when performing the same amount of physical activity, spreading it over more days or concentrating it into fewer days may not influence mortality outcomes," the study authors write in their paper.

The most important takeaway – rather than worrying about how often or when you should be exercising – is making sure you do try to hit the recommended levels of activity each week, because that's when the beneficial of effects of exercise can most clearly be seen.

Over the course of 10.4 years (the median length of time which participants were involved in the survey), almost 22,000 people involved in the NHIS passed away. Among all participants, however, the statistical likelihood of dying from various causes was generally significantly lower if they did the recommended levels of physical activity.

"The findings of this large prospective cohort study suggest that individuals who engage in active patterns of physical activity, whether weekend warrior or regularly active, experience lower all-cause and cause-specific mortality rates than inactive individuals," the team explains.

"Compared with physically inactive participants, hazard ratios for all-cause mortality were 0.92 for weekend warrior and 0.85 for regularly active participants; findings for cause-specific mortality were similar."

The researchers note some limitations of their analysis, including that the primary survey data came from self-reported questionnaires, which are prone to including a certain level of error compared to more objective measurements.

On the plus side, the findings here involve a huge cohort observed over a long period, which can give us a considerable amount of confidence in the statistics reported.

Ultimately, the results confirm a lot of what we already know: Exercise is good for you, and for many of us, doing enough of it can help us to live longer.

What's more, that's true even if you're time-poor, as long as you can make time on the weekends to fit in a good workout or two.

"For people with fewer opportunities for daily or regular physical activity during their work week, these findings are important," the researchers explain.

The findings are reported in JAMA Internal Medicine.

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Florida once again has giant calamitous snails that spew parasitic brain worms

The computer modeling made it plain: If people continued to overextract finite resources, pollute on a massive scale, and balloon the human population in an unsustainable way, civilization could collapse within a century. It sounds like that modeling could have been done last week, what with climate change, water shortages, and microplastics corrupting every corner of the Earth. But in fact it dropped in the 1972 book The Limits to Growth, published by the Club of Rome, an international organization of intellectuals founded in 1968. 

The book sold millions of copies and was translated into at least 30 languages, attracting a storm of controversy. It was, after all, very early computer modeling—completed on a punch-card machine at MIT—and a highly simplified simulation of complex global systems. And it was making rather grand and consequential predictions. (As the old quip goes: All models are wrong, but some are useful.) That model spit out scenarios in which humanity either got more sustainable and equitable, and thus flourished, or continued letting capitalists plunder the planet and our civilization to death.

“What came from the simulations is that most of the cases—but not all, and it's important to say not all—the evolution of a number of variables like population, production, pollution, was showing that around the mid-21st century, we would have a scenario of collapse of human civilization,” says Carlos Alvarez Pereira, vice president of the Club of Rome and co-editor of the new retrospective book Limits and Beyond: 50 Years on From The Limits to Growth, What Did We Learn and What’s Next? “The whole thing was framed into doomsday prophecy. We didn't succeed in bringing the message that it was not about that. It was really about: We have the capacity to choose. We have, as humanity, the capacity to decide what kind of future we want.” 

To mark the book’s 50 year anniversary, WIRED sat down with Alvarez Pereira to talk about how that future is shaping up, what’s changed in the half-century since Limits, and how humanity might correct course. The conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity. 

WIRED: For folks who aren't familiar with the original report, can you give a background?

Carlos Alvarez Pereira: It was an attempt to open the space of possibilities for the future of humanity. In the ’60s and early ’70s, the fundamental question was: Is it possible to expand the concept of human development we had at the time to the whole planet, without negative consequences? 

Limits to Growth was, I think, a serious and rigorous attempt to use the best, not only knowledge, but also computer tools, which at the time were quite primitive, to simulate a number of scenarios for the future, to inquire on this big question. In some scenarios it was conceivable to find a balance between human well-being or human development, and the finiteness of resources on Earth. 

WIRED: Let’s take two of the report’s extreme scenarios. What factors produce collapse, and which produce a more sustainable future where we avoid collapse? Is it bringing down pollution? Is it bringing down consumption? 

CAP: The main variables are a set of five: population, food production, industrial production, natural resources, and pollution. What produces collapse in most of the scenarios is the combination—it's not all only one thing. In the case of fossil fuels, it's both the consumption of the reserves of fossil fuels and the pollution. 

What could lead to a more sustainable scenario, or a scenario of balance? Fundamentally, it is about equity, managing the resources in an equitable way, knowing in advance that they're limited. Realizing that it's not higher and higher consumption which makes us live in a good way, have a healthy life and well-being. It's the quality of our relationships with other humans, with nature, that makes possible the scenarios in which you can decouple well-being and the growth of consumption.

We have incredible capacities to develop new technologies, but the point is that we don't use them under the assumption that they should reduce the ecological footprint. This is not a criteria of design. And let's remember that ecological footprints are extremely unequal. Typically, the average footprint in the US is 20 to 40 times the average footprint in Africa. 

WIRED: Right, there's this notion that first and foremost the problem we have is population growth. But that ignores the fact that the United States alone is responsible for a quarter of historical emissions. It's not so much the fact that we have more people, it's that we have unsustainable lifestyles. 

CAP: We already have an ecological footprint that is far too high compared to what the Earth can carry. It's a matter, in my view, of considering that well-being comes with relationships, not necessarily a high degree of material consumption. It's a matter of considering that we can dramatically reduce the ecological footprint of the so-called rich countries. I know that it sounds weird, because we are so used to associating well-being with material consumption. Saying this is like, “Oh, we are proposing going back to the Middle Ages.” No, not at all. 

WIRED: I think you could safely characterize the reaction to Limits to Growth as an uproar. Did that come from scientists or capitalists or politicians? Or maybe all of the above? What were the main points of contention?

CAP: We have to be in a good balance with the planet where we live. And that part of the message was completely lost, very rapidly. Jimmy Carter, when he was president, was listening to this kind of approach. And then of course, the political mood changed a lot with the rise of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Reagan himself has a discourse in which he says, literally, there are no limits to growth. So from a political point of view, there was a complete denial of what the book was saying.

What creates a little bit of frustration is that in the scientific domain, there was not enough controversy, because somehow the book was discarded by many. Not by everybody. By many, it was discarded as a doomsday prophecy. And for sure, we were not successful among economists at the time. 

WIRED: Presumably economists weren't too fond of it because growth is inherent to capitalism. And unchecked growth really, a kind of maniacal, ecologically-destructive growth at all costs that's built into the system.

CAP: What the system has done, as a mechanism to continue with growth at all costs, is actually to burn the future. And the future is the least renewable resource. There is no way that we can reuse the time we had when we started this conversation. And by building up a system which is more debt-driven—where we keep consumption going, but by creating more and more debt—what we're actually doing is burning or stealing the time of people in the future. Because their time will be devoted to repaying the debt.

WIRED: It seems obvious that we’ll eventually run out of finite resources. But there was even pushback against that idea when the report came out. Where does that insistence come from? 

CAP: The paradox is that capitalism is also based on the notion of scarcity. Our system is organized around the idea that resources are scarce, then we have to pay for them, and people in the value chain will profit from this idea of scarcity. Conventional capitalism is saying that while these resources might be finite, we will find others: Don't worry, technology will save us. So that we continue in the same way. 

WIRED: 50 years on from the original report, are we on the right course as a species?

CAP: No, if you look at the reality. And no, in particular, if you look only at what governments and corporations do, if you look at what the decision makers decide, and the systems of governance we have, whether national or global. We're not better in terms of pollution, because we have climate warming, an existential issue. We're not better in terms of biodiversity. We are not in terms of inequality. So there are plenty of reasons to say no.

But there are also good reasons for optimism of the will. And those reasons are possibly less obvious, less evident, less in the headlines in the media and elsewhere. We definitely think there is an ongoing cultural change often hidden in plain sight. Many are experimenting, often at the community level, trying to find their own pathways towards that balance of well-being within a healthy biosphere. A change that brings hope to me is the change in the status of women, the increasing roles of women. And I would say that if you look at what’s happening with the younger generations, there is a big change as well. 

So politically, at the level of corporations, at the official level, things are going pretty much in the wrong direction. Culturally, below the line, my bet is that a lot of things are happening in the good direction. The human revolution is already happening—it's just that we don't see it. And maybe it's good that we don't see it yet, until the very moment where it makes a lot of things shift.

The Infamous 1972 Report That Warned of Civilization's Collapse

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Indian Scientists Develop Rapidly Charging Sodium-Ion Based Batteries And Supercapacitors Using Nano-Materials

This new technology has been developed by a company called Polar Night Energy (PNE) and with the help of Vatajankoski, an energy utility firm based in Western Finland, it is now operational in the country in the town of Kankaanpää.

The image above shows a silo which is not for storing grains but instead stores the sand that will be used to derive clean electricity.

In an interview with the BBC, Pekka Passi, the managing director of the Vatajankoski power plant said:

It's really simple, but we liked the idea of trying something new, to be the first in the world to do something like this. It's a bit crazy, if you wish, but I think it's going to be a success.

The basic idea is that sand is a very good retainer of heat, losing very little of it, and this heat energy is extracted. Interestingly, the sand in this sand battery is actually warmed up using wasted or extra heat from other sources, like wind or solar power generators. PNE says that sand can retain around 500°C worth of heat for several months. Overall, the heat storage has 100 kW of heating power and 8 MWh of energy capacity.

Also it is economically viable since sand is quite inexpensive. The PNE sand battery also recycles and reuses wasted sand that is utilized in Vatajankoski's own servers.

Source and images: PNE via BBC

Battery power from mere "sand"? Finland's Polar Night Energy says absolutely yes

Researchers seem to stumble across an electrolyte for a sodium battery

Calculating the positive impact of electric car adoption

In two experiments, participants focused on their own selfless values, with most related to benefiting others. This action caused brain activity and feelings linked to personal power, which made the participants less hostile toward disliked people and worldviews.

"Selfless values can be like life vests that buoy a kind of higher power and resilience, freeing us from worry and defensiveness," said Ian McGregor, professor of personality and social psychology at the University of Waterloo and the study's lead author. "Focusing on a greater good beyond themselves had the paradoxical effect of making participants' psychologically stronger and more reasonable."

In both experiments the authors first reminded all participants about stressful topics—such as relationship problems and moral violations—that have typically made participants upset and defensively hostile in past research. They then gave the participants a few minutes to describe how their life goals reflected their highest values. In one of the experiments, 197 participants wore electroencephalographic (EEG) headsets that measured patterns of brain activity related to power and enthusiasm. In the second experiment, 490 participants rated how determined and enthusiastic they felt.

Focusing on selfless values in their lives heightened the EEG and feeling measures of personal power, which in turn reduced harsh judgments. Importantly, these effects occurred only among participants who also reported being persistently engaged in the pursuit of purpose and meaning in their lives.

"These results help makes sense of why and for whom devotion to selfless values can sustain tenacious resolve, even in seemingly hopeless circumstances," McGregor said.

These results build on previous research by McGregor and collaborators showing that devotion to virtue predicts wise reasoning and respect for others' perspectives in conflicts. They also complement another line of their research showing that hate between groups can activate the same motivational system to bolster feelings of personal power and meaning in life.

"Together, the present and previous research suggests that devotion to virtue may be an under-appreciated antidote to hostility and hate in the real world. Virtue and hate are alternative levers for activating personal power and meaning in life. If you have one, you feel less need for the other," McGregor said.

The new study appears in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

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For millennia, many animals and plants have coped with occasional climate changes by moving into new areas. But humans’ relatively recent burning of fossil fuels is pushing global temperatures upward at an exceptionally rapid rate, placing many species on what a new book by science journalist Benjamin von Brackel notes has been called an “escalator to extinction”—and raising the question of whether migration can save them this time. It is estimated that land-dwelling animals are now moving toward the poles at a rate of an average of about 17 kilometers (more than 10 miles) per decade and that the front line of ocean dwellers is now doing so at a rate of 72 kilometers (45 miles) per decade. Some plant and animal species—such as the Edith’s checkerspot butterfly and the Scots pine—are shifting to higher, cooler elevations in the mountains as well. What happens when they all run out of places to flee the heat?

is book Nowhere Left to Go: How Climate Change Is Driving Species to the Ends of the Earth (The Experiment Publishing) came out on July 5. In it, von Brackel examines this question and others that have arisen from the massive migrations spurred by global warming. The book discusses the research into how ecosystems might change as old species leave and new ones arrive, as well as the substantial implications for human societies.

Scientific American spoke with von Brackel about what science is telling us we can expect from having so many species on the move and how we might help some persist in the face of climate change.

[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]

Where did the idea for this book come from?

It was a couple of years ago, when I had been reading a study on ocean acidification, and there was this passing mention that cod are moving hundreds of kilometers north in the North Sea. I had to read the sentence twice. I thought, “Okay, wow, if the cod is doing this, maybe other fish species are doing this, too, and maybe other land-dwelling creatures also—and maybe all species on Earth.” In my mind’s eye I saw some kind of living tsunami rolling over the planet and confronting human societies. I thought, “Okay, wow, this could be huge.” When I found out that this is actually happening—and except for the scientists dealing with this, nobody knows about the extent of this phenomenon—I thought, “Okay, well, I have to immerse myself in it.”

What happens to species that can’t move anymore?

The species that are not able to move and to conquer new places, they have a high risk of becoming extinct—that’s it. Right now many species can move poleward. In latitudes like Europe or North America, species are expanding, so they can have new ranges. But the problem is in the tropics. There you have tropical mountains, where we now see the first species becoming extinct because they are at some point at the summit, so they can’t move anywhere. It’s a dead end.

The book talks about how insects and animals moving into new areas can bring health threats to humans. What are some of those potential threats?

I think it's one of the issues we should be most concerned about in terms of species range shifts. Let’s take the Asian tiger mosquito [which can spread pathogens, including the dengue viruses and West Nile virus]. This insect is already conquering much of the U.S. and Europe. They initially came from Asia via international shipping to the U.S. in, I think, the 1980s—and then, afterward, to Italy in the 1990s. It was funny, because, two weeks ago, I was in Italy, and I wondered, “What are all these little mosquitoes biting me all the time?” Then I took a close look and I saw the zebralike white stripes on it. They actually were Asian tiger mosquitoes and, oh my God, I clobbered so many of them.

What are the possible economic impacts of these mass migrations?

There are already a lot. For example, in Germany, the two most important tree species for timber production are the Scots pine and European spruce, and their ranges are both retracting because of climate change. So they retract up the mountains, and they retract to Scandinavia. This has huge impacts, because models say that by the year 2100, 20 to 60 percent of the forest land will only be suitable for Mediterranean oak forest types—and they have much lower economic output.

Are there species that might leave a cultural loss as they move away?

Probably the people most affected by species shifts are Indigenous people, and that’s because they live close to nature, and many of them depend on specific animals or plants. Many of them have circled their whole culture around just one species—like the Inupiat in Alaska, who hunt bowhead whales. Bowhead whales now migrate much farther north. That’s a big problem for the Inupiat. Everything is changing, and they can’t easily adapt by choosing another species as their main species.

Is there a similar situation with the disappearing kelp forests in Japan? That was another example you mention in the book that seems like a big shift, considering how central kelp and the fish species found in kelp forests are to Japanese culture and cuisine.

The kelp forests, on one hand, are so important for the Japanese as a food resource but also culturally. They do everything to protect them, but in the end, they can’t stop this process. Maybe one good thing is that the species that follow the kelp forests are corals, so they have new coral reefs emerge. I find that kind of magical.

That was actually something that I took away as a glimmer of hope: some of the most at-risk species are moving, so maybe they won’t go extinct.

I think this is the main message in the book: that species are able to respond to climate change. So this is a positive thing. In the last 2.6 million years of the ice age, there were many times that species had to respond to climate warming and climate cooling. And the interesting thing is that every time there were not many species that did go extinct. So they managed to do this. And this is a very hopeful thing.

What is different about today?

The thing that’s different today is us. First of all, we have occupied so many places on Earth—about half the surface of Earth—with agricultural land and cities. And we also crisscrossed the land with streets and canals. That makes it very hard for many species to move to respond to climate change.

How can we help species adapt to this very drastic change in climate?

So the most important and most obvious thing is to curb emissions. Without stopping climate change and curbing emissions fast enough, species don’t have a chance. But on the way to do this, we can do a lot of other things. In general, we have to give species the room to respond to climate change and to create enough conservation areas where they can thrive and to connect them with enough wildlife corridors—and that’s starting to happen already. Some scientists recommend protecting about 30 percent of Earth’s surface and some even more—around 50 percent. In fact, at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference, coming up in autumn, nations are about to decide on [how much land to protect]. So this is a real possibility, and I think this will be an important first step. But afterward, one has to see, “Okay, where are the conservation areas built?” and “Will this be implemented?”

Can individual people help by, for example, not growing lawns?

I think everybody who has a garden can help species to create a stepping-stone so that they can move to higher latitudes. And yeah, as you said, a lawn isn’t very helpful. Here in Berlin, I see many gardens that are even paved or full of gravel—and that’s also not very helpful. What you can do is to have a hedge instead of a fence, to have fruit trees and berry bushes where bumblebees or honeybees can thrive or have little branch piles so birds and rodents can hide. You can do a lot with the garden.

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A shapeshifting robotic microswarm may one day act as a toothbrush, rinse, and dental floss in one.

The technology, developed by a multidisciplinary team at the University of Pennsylvania, is poised to offer a new and automated way to perform the mundane but critical daily tasks of brushing and flossing. It’s a system that could be particularly valuable for those who lack the manual dexterity to clean their teeth effectively themselves.

The building blocks of these microrobots are iron oxide nanoparticles that have both catalytic and magnetic activity. Using a magnetic field, researchers could direct their motion and configuration to form either bristlelike structures that sweep away dental plaque from the broad surfaces of teeth, or elongated strings that can slip between teeth like a length of floss. In both instances, a catalytic reaction drives the nanoparticles to produce antimicrobials that kill harmful oral bacteria on site.

Experiments using this system on mock and real human teeth showed that the robotic assemblies can conform to a variety of shapes to nearly eliminate the sticky biofilms that lead to cavities and gum disease. The Penn team shared their findings establishing a proof-of-concept for the robotic system in the journal ACS Nano.

“Routine oral care is cumbersome and can pose challenges for many people, especially those who have hard time cleaning their teeth” says Hyun (Michel) Koo, a professor in the Department of Orthodontics and divisions of Community Oral Health and Pediatric Dentistry in Penn’s School of Dental Medicine and co-corresponding author on the study. “You have to brush your teeth, then floss your teeth, then rinse your mouth; it’s a manual, multistep process. The big innovation here is that the robotics system can do all three in a single, hands-free, automated way.”

“Nanoparticles can be shaped and controlled with magnetic fields in surprising ways,” says Edward Steager, a senior research investigator in Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science and co-corresponding author. “We form bristles that can extend, sweep, and even transfer back and forth across a space, much like flossing. The way it works is similar to how a robotic arm might reach out and clean a surface. The system can be programmed to do the nanoparticle assembly and motion control automatically.”

Disrupting oral care technology

“The design of the toothbrush has remained relatively unchanged for millennia,” says Koo.

While adding electric motors elevated the basic “bristle-on-a-stick” format, the fundamental concept has remained the same. “It’s a technology that has not been disrupted in decades.”

Several years ago, Penn researchers within the Center for Innovation & Precision Dentistry (CiPD), of which Koo is a co-director, took steps toward a major disruption, using this microrobotics system.

Their innovation arose from a bit of serendipity. Research groups in both Penn Dental Medicine and Penn Engineering were interested in iron oxide nanoparticles but for very different reasons. Koo’s group was intrigued by the catalytic activity of the nanoparticles. They can activate hydrogen peroxide to release free radicals that can kill tooth decay-causing bacteria and degrade dental plaque biofilms.

Meanwhile Steager and engineering colleagues, including Dean Vijay Kumar and Professor Kathleen Stebe, co-director of CiPD, were exploring these nanoparticles as building blocks of magnetically controlled microrobots.

With support from Penn Health Tech and the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, the Penn collaborators married the two applications in the current work, constructing a platform to electromagnetically control the microrobots, enabling them to adopt different configurations and release antimicrobials on site to effectively treat and clean teeth.

An infographic explains the magnetic and catalytic properties of the iron oxide nanoparticles and their assembly into bristle and floss-like forms. (Image: Melissa Pappas/Penn Engineering)

“It doesn’t matter if you have straight teeth or misaligned teeth, it will adapt to different surfaces,” says Koo. “The system can adjust to all the nooks and crannies in the oral cavity.”

The researchers optimized the motions of the microrobots on a small slab of toothlike material. Next, they tested the microrobots’ performance adjusting to the complex topography of the tooth surface, interdental surfaces, and the gumline, using 3D-printed tooth models based on scans of human teeth from the dental clinic. Finally, they trialed the microrobots on real human teeth that were mounted in such a way as to mimic the position of teeth in the oral cavity.

On these various surfaces, the researchers found that the microrobotics system could effectively eliminate biofilms, clearing them of all detectable pathogens. The iron oxide nanoparticles have been FDA approved for other uses, and tests of the bristle formations on an animal model showed that they did not harm the gum tissue.

Indeed, the system is fully programmable; the team’s roboticists and engineers used variations in the magnetic field to precisely tune the motions of the microrobots as well as control bristle stiffness and length. The researchers found that the tips of the bristles could be made firm enough to remove biofilms but soft enough to avoid damage to the gums.

The customizable nature of the system, the researchers say, could make it gentle enough for clinical use, but also personalized, able to adapt to the unique topographies of a patient’s oral cavity.

To advance this innovation to the clinic, the Penn team is continuing to optimize the robots’ motions and considering different means of delivering the microrobots through mouth-fitting devices.

They’re eager to see their device help people in the clinic.

“We have this technology that’s as or more effective as brushing and flossing your teeth but doesn’t require manual dexterity,” says Koo.

“We’d love to see this helping the geriatric population and people with disabilities. We believe it will disrupt current modalities and majorly advance oral health care.”

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Outpatient management was associated with fewer than 1 serious adverse effect per 100 patients in the week after their discharge.

Outpatient management was shown to be safe across a wide range of patients and was done in up to 90% of antibiotic-treated patients across all study sites. Compared to hospitalization, outpatient management was not associated with any more subsequent appendectomies and patients missed fewer workdays.

This study is a continuing analysis of findings from the Comparison of Outcomes of Antibiotic Drugs and Appendectomy (CODA) trial, which found that antibiotic treatment was non-inferior to urgent appendectomy. Following the trial, the American College of Surgeons stated that high-quality evidence indicated that most patients can be treated with antibiotics.

The researchers examined data from 726 people with imaging-confirmed appendicitis who were treated with antibiotics at 25 hospitals between May 1, 2016 and February 28, 2020

Outpatient management of appendicitis is safe for many people and could decrease healthcare use and costs.

The study was published in JAMA Network Open.

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The cognitive overload caused by all that information was degrading performance and raising the risk of crashes, the researchers determined. Pilots were forced to do too many things at once, with too many bells and whistles demanding their attention. Over the next decade, the Army overhauled its Apache fleet, redesigning cockpits to help operators maintain focus.

Cognitive psychologist David Strayer was among those called in to help the Army with its Apache problem. Since then, he has watched as civilian cars and trucks have filled up to an even greater extent with the same sorts of digital interfaces that trained pilots with honed reflexes found so overwhelming — touch screens, interactive maps, nested menus, not to mention ubiquitous smartphones. In his lab at the University of Utah, he's been documenting the deadly consequences.

“We are instrumenting the car in a way that is overloading the driver just like we were overloading the helicopter pilots,” said Strayer, director of the university's Center for the Prevention of Distracted Driving.

“Everything we know from pilots being overloaded we can apply to motor vehicles,” Strayer said. But rather than apply it, makers of smartphones and automobiles largely have ignored the research, persistently adding popular but deadly diversions. “They’ve created a candy store of distraction. And we are killing people.”

To be sure, new automotive technology also includes innovative safety features such as lane-departure warning and blind spot detection.

Yet, despite these and other crash-prevention systems, the highway death count continues to rise.

After decades of falling fatality rates, U.S. roads have become markedly more dangerous in recent years. In 2021, motor vehicle crashes killed nearly 43,000 people. That's up from about 33,000 in 2012, and a 16-year high.

Theories about why range from bigger vehicles — mammoth SUVs and pickup trucks on steroids — to aggression caused by COVID-era trauma. But no one in the safety field doubts that distracted driving is a main ingredient.

Reported fatalities due to distracted driving have remained flat for the last 10 years, 3,000 to 4,000 a year. But there is good reason to consider those figures a major undercount, as they rely on people admitting they were distracted, or a police officer or someone else witnessing a driver with phone in hand before a crash.

"It's against people's self-interest to say, 'I was on the cellphone' or 'I was using the infotainment system'" after a crash, "because there can be serious consequences," said Cathy Chase, who heads Advocates for Highway & Auto Safety.

"I don't think we're getting an accurate picture of what's happening on the roads," she said.

Other measures point to a much higher toll. In early 2020, the National Safety Council said cellphones were involved in more than a quarter of crashes. A poll by Nationwide Insurance shows its agents believe 50% of all crashes involved distracted driving. And safety experts say the problem has only grown worse since the start of the pandemic.

Pretending that the toll is only a few thousand people a year makes it more difficult to change policies that could improve safety, Mark Rosekind said. He ran the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration during the Obama administration and is now chief safety innovation officer at driverless car company Zoox.

“People will use those low numbers as a way to minimize this, that it’s not a big problem,” he said.

Most people know distracted driving is bad — 98% of those polled told Advocates for Highway & Auto Safety they are extremely or very concerned about it as a safety issue. But most do it anyway. More than 63% of polled drivers said they use their cellphones while driving. That increased to 73% of people who use their cars for work.

State Farm in April released survey statistics even more disturbing. More than half of respondents said they "always" or "often" read or send text messages while driving, 43% said they watched cellphone videos always or often while driving, and more than a third said they always or often drove while engaged in a video chat.

Elene Bratton’s 5-year-old son Jamie died in a car crash back in 2002 caused by a driver distracted while using a cellphone. She thought the mounting deaths would lead to serious action by lawmakers and safety regulators but instead has watched the problem grow much worse. "We act like there's nothing to be done with car crashes like this, like we all have to deal with it," said Bratton, who runs a website, jamiesjoy.org, in part to raise money to help push policy changes.

How do the companies behind all those distracting screens and apps — the automakers and smartphone manufacturers — view their responsibility for the problem and their role in solving it?

It's hard to say. The Times asked the five top-selling carmakers in the U.S. — General Motors, Ford, Toyota, Stellantis and Honda — to provide an executive to speak about what they’re doing to help prevent distracted driving. All declined, offering instead to make written public relations material available. Apple and Samsung, the two leading smartphone makers, also declined interview requests.

When companies do talk about distracted driving, they tend to frame it as a problem with cellphones. Their solution: Integrate the same functionality and more into dashboard interfaces and voice-recognition systems.

Apple executive Emily Schubert, in a flashy video internet presentation in June, announced major new features for the company's CarPlay infotainment system. Apple declined to make Schubert or any other executive available for an interview, but in an email a spokesperson called CarPlay "the smarter, safer way to use iPhone in the car." What makes it safer, and to what degree? No details were provided.

The company did note it provides Driving Focus mode on its phones, which, if engaged by the customer, keeps the phone silent and doesn’t allow notifications to come through. An Advocates for Highway & Auto Safety poll showed 70% of respondents had never used such a feature.

A Honda spokesperson said by email that “the biggest thing we can do to reduce distraction is to reduce the likelihood of a driver looking at their mobile phone while driving" by putting more focus on infotainment systems, through which the company is making “an attempt to minimize distraction while satisfying the driver’s ease of use and access to desired information.”

Honda offered few details and declined an interview about the subject. The company did say it’s working with researchers at Ohio State University on the infotainment interface. The professors involved declined to offer details as well, saying their work for Honda is proprietary.

One problem with relying on infotainment systems to improve safety is that they don't work very well. "Infotainment systems remain the most problematic area" for new car customers, auto market research firm J.D. Power wrote in its latest new-car quality report. Customers complain about frequent problems with connectivity, Bluetooth syncing, touch screens and built-in voice recognition.

The ability to control features such as air conditioning and music playlists via voice commands theoretically improves safety by letting drivers keep their eyes on the road. But with the technology still a work in progress, scientists are learning it can be just as dangerous as fiddling with a smartphone.

In a 2019 paper, Strayer's team reported that completing tasks using voice commands took much longer than other kinds of interaction with smartphones and infotainment systems. The extra time significantly increased the driver's cognitive load. Believing that verbal communication doesn’t interfere with driving shows a “naive understanding of how language works,” Strayer said. Brain scans show that “language uses a lot more of the parts of the brain than driving does."

State laws that ban holding a cellphone or texting while driving give the impression that the danger stops there. But what the Apache research showed, and decades of subsequent research on automobile distraction has confirmed, is that the distracted driving problem is more than mere distraction. The problem is asking the brain to do too many things at once. The technical term is cognitive overload, which includes distraction and multitasking and sensory input from a variety of sources.

As part of its 2019 study, Strayer's team assembled data on driver use of infotainment systems in more than two dozen cars. Drivers were fitted with sensors attached to the head and the chest, and data on driver heart and brain activity were collected to assess distraction and cognitive load.

Although some systems were more distracting than others, all hampered the driver's ability to safely pay attention to the task of maneuvering a two-ton vehicle on public roads, the study found.

Meanwhile, building the distractions into the car has the effect of sanctioning its use in the eyes of drivers. Thomas Goeltz, a Minnesota man whose 22-year-old pregnant daughter, Megan, was killed by a distracted driver in 2016, said that although people know talking or texting on the phone while driving is dangerous, the options offered on a car’s dashboard offer a false basis for complacency. “People think, it came with the car, it must be safe,” he said.

In a glancing acknowledgment of their shortcomings, NHTSA in 2015 issued guidelines on infotainment systems that recommend they be designed so a driver’s attention is not distracted for more than two seconds out of six.

The guidelines are voluntary, however. Strayer said that many of the actions tested in his research require drivers to take their eyes off the road for 12 seconds or more.

Any company hoping to do something about driver distraction must grapple with the majority of U.S. drivers who refuse to stop scrolling and swiping behind the wheel. For now, smartphone companies, auto companies, app makers, advertisers, retailers — just about the whole consumer information ecosystem — are happy to fill the demand. Consulting firm McKinsey projects in-car advertising, entertainment and consumer data sales will generate $11 billion in annual revenue by 2030.

By then, it's conceivable consumer cars will be equipped with a version of the autonomous driving technology that's beginning to be deployed in robotaxis and delivery vehicles in limited areas. At that point, turning the interior of a car into an immersive infotainment bubble makes perfect sense.

What can be done in the meantime? The National Transportation Safety Board has called for a total ban on in-car device use — excluding built-in infotainment systems — while driving, except in emergencies. At least, the NTSB says, companies should restrict device use by employees.

In Europe, automakers will soon be required to install monitors to detect driver distraction in order to receive top safety scores. No such move is being publicly contemplated in the U.S.

Safety advocates say education campaigns aren't nearly enough to deal with the enormity of the problem but are one necessary component. They also call for stricter enforcement by police. Above all, they say, drivers need to be more responsible for their own safety and to keep from harming others.

Without major changes in driver behavior and public policy, uncounted tens of thousands of people will die each year, with devastating results on their families and their friends. That’s part of the cost of the infotainment culture — which, thus far, Americans have been willing to accept.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

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Vaccines are a huge achievement of modern-day science and have played a crucial role in reducing the very worst impacts of COVID. But are the vaccines we currently have able to deal with the newest COVID variants?

The current COVID vaccines are all based on the genetic building blocks, or the DNA sequence, of the original ancestral strain of SARS-CoV-2. The majority of these vaccines target the spike protein—the part of the virus that attaches to our cells to gain entry.

The vaccines work by enabling our immune cells to mount a targeted response to the spike protein, including generating antibodies known as neutralising antibodies. These stop viruses getting into our cells, and help other immune cells find and destroy any viral intruders.

But SARS-CoV-2 is a slippery customer and has been mutating with notable changes to the spike protein. That means those vaccine-induced neutralising antibodies are less effective than they once were.

Is it time for a new generation of COVID vaccines?

The idea to vaccinate against variants rather than the ancestral strain is gaining traction. This is not a new concept in vaccine development. Our annual flu shots, for example, target circulating variants.

One approach is to create what's called a "bivalent" vaccine that targets the spike protein from omicron (BA.1) as well as the ancestral strain. Moderna is currently testing this option in combined phase 2 and 3 human trials. Data yet to be peer-reviewed suggests this results in around a two-fold increase in neutralising antibodies against BA.1, compared with the original COVID vaccines.

Other Moderna trials are looking at different bivalent combinations, including vaccines that target the ancestral and beta strains, which look promising.

Pfizer has also released trial data on its booster candidate specifically tailored against BA.1. The company says this reformulation induced an immune response to BA.1 superior to that produced by its original COVID vaccine.

So should we be investing in these new vaccine candidates? The US Food and Drug Administration seems to think so, having recently approved the use of these omicron-specific shots later this year.

COVID vaccines target SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein. Credit: Kateryna Kon/Shutterstock

However, investing in and rolling out new vaccines is not cheap, and there are important questions we need to address. As we know, SARS-CoV-2 is ever mutating and changing. It was less than a year ago that the delta strain dominated around the world, and before that we had alpha and beta. So are omicron variants the right ones to be targeting? Will they still be dominant a year from now? We simply don't know.

Even with omicron strains there is variation. The BA.1 variant that these new vaccine candidates target has recently been outcompeted by BA.4 and BA.5. The BA.4 and BA.5 variants are even more resistant to neutralising antibodies, typically three- or four-fold, than BA.1. So the question is, if omicron pervades, would these omicron BA.1 vaccines work better against BA.4 and BA.5 than the original vaccines?

Data still to be peer reviewed suggests the bivalent vaccines may be a little better than the original vaccines.

However, omicron may be a poor vaccine candidate as recent data shows that omicron infection doesn't produce robust immunity and is characterised by low levels of neutralising antibodies, which need to be higher and more persistent to prevent rapid reinfection. This could go a long way to explaining why so many of us are catching COVID multiple times. If we see the same thing with our vaccine-induced immunity to omicron, omicron-specific vaccines may not be a worthwhile investment.

Other strategies

None of this means we should stop looking for long-term protective vaccines. But perhaps there's scope to focus on different strategies. Two exciting avenues are emerging.

The first is vaccines that target other parts of the viral structure that are more stable, or vaccines that target multiple parts of the virus. This might not result in a vaccine that can fully prevent infection, but may be more durable than the current vaccines.

Another avenue involves capitalising on the ability of neutralising antibodies in the nose and throat to target SARS-CoV-2 at its point of entry. These antibodies create a barrier that stops the virus getting into the body, so a vaccine that generates neutralising antibodies in the nose and throat could stop the virus in its tracks. Studies trialling nasal vaccines look promising, although these are still at early stages.

Where does this leave us now? An ideal vaccine candidate would elicit long-lived neutralising antibodies and give us life-long immunity. Instead, we've learnt that for COVID, our immune system needs boosters to top up those neutralising antibodies and bolster the numbers of memory cells that support immunity.

The last UK-wide booster campaign was in December 2021. Studies had shown that COVID vaccination followed by infection lead to months of immunity, but this was before omicron, which we now know doesn't produce robust immunity. Against omicron, many of us will have minimal neutralising antibodies left.

With the high likelihood of another variant in the autumn, alongside fears of a bad flu season, it would seem prudent to embark on an autumn booster campaign with much wider coverage than the spring campaign. This means not just targeting over 65s and others at higher risk as is currently planned, but extending eligibility to younger age groups.

Crucially we must reach those who are not fully vaccinated, so any campaign should include targeted community education. This should also happen alongside other mitigation strategies like mask-wearing to keep us safe and allow us to live with COVID.

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The paper, published in the journal Brain, was based on brain autopsies from nine people who died suddenly after contracting the virus.
Rather than detecting evidence of SARS-CoV-2 in the brain, the team found it was the people's own antibodies that attacked the cells lining the brain's blood vessels, causing inflammation and damage.

This discovery could explain why some people have lingering effects from infection including headache, fatigue, loss of taste and smell, and inability to sleep as well as "brain fog" – and may also help devise new treatments for long COVID.

NIH scientist Avindra Nath, the paper's senior author, said in a statement: "Patients often develop neurological complications with COVID-19, but the underlying pathophysiological process is not well understood."

"We had previously shown blood vessel damage and inflammation in patients' brains at autopsy, but we didn't understand the cause of the damage. I think in this paper we've gained important insight into the cascade of events."

The nine individuals, aged 24 to 73, were selected from the team's prior study because they showed evidence of blood vessel damage in their brains based on scans.

Their brains were compared to those from 10 controls, with the team examining neuroinflammation and immune responses using a technique called immunohistochemistry.

The scientists discovered that antibodies produced against COVID-19 mistakenly targeted cells that form the "blood-brain barrier" – a structure designed to keep harmful invaders out of the brain while allowing necessary substances to pass.

Damage to these cells can cause leakage of proteins, bleeding and clots, which elevates the risk of stroke.

The leaks also trigger immune cells called macrophages to rush to the site to repair damage, causing inflammation.

The team found that normal cellular processes in the areas targeted by the attack were severely disrupted, which had implications for things such as their ability to de-toxify and to regulate metabolism.

The findings offer clues about the biology at play in patients with long-term neurological symptoms, and can inform new treatments – for example, a drug that targets the build-up of antibodies on the blood-brain barrier.

"It is quite possible that this same immune response persists in long COVID patients resulting in neuronal injury," said Nath.

This would mean that a drug that dials down that immune response could help those patients, he added.

"So these findings have very important therapeutic implications."

© Agence France-Presse

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Twitter said on Tuesday that it had sued the Indian government, escalating the social media company’s fight in the country as Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeks more control over critical online posts.

Twitter’s suit, filed in the Karnataka High Court in Bangalore, challenges a recent order from the Indian government for the company to remove content and block dozens of accounts. Twitter complied with the order, which had a Monday deadline, but then sought judicial relief. A date has not been set for a judge to review Twitter’s suit.

The suit is the first legal challenge that the company has issued to push back against laws passed in 2021 that extended the Indian government’s censorship powers. The rules gave the government oversight of Twitter and other social media companies, allowing the authorities to demand that posts or accounts critical of them be hidden from Indian users. Executives at the companies can face criminal penalties if they do not comply with the demands.

The laws have been met with an outcry from Twitter and other social media platforms, which view India as an essential part of their plans for long-term growth. The companies have argued that India’s rules allow the government to broadly censor its critics, and that they erode security measures like encryption. But Indian officials have said the law is necessary to combat online misinformation.

Twitter is not seeking to overturn the laws, but it argues in its suit that the government interpreted those laws too broadly, said a person with knowledge of the filing who was not authorized to speak publicly.

The Indian government urged Twitter on Tuesday to follow the rules. “It is everyone’s responsibility to abide by the laws passed by the country’s Parliament,” Ashwini Vaishnaw, the minister of electronics and information technology, said at a news conference.

Mr. Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party have worked for several years to corral the power of the tech companies and to more strictly police what is said online, using the new information technology laws to clamp down on dissent. Twitter, for example, has been told to remove content related to complaints about civil liberties, protests, press freedoms and criticisms of the government’s handling of the pandemic. WhatsApp had been told that it would be required to make people’s private messages “traceable” to government agencies upon request.

In addition, the new rules required social media companies to employ executives based in India to ensure the companies complied with government requests to remove content and to block accounts. If those actions did not happen, the executives could be held criminally liable and could face jail terms of up to seven years.

Twitter previously criticized the government’s tactics and called on it to respect freedom of expression. The company said India’s laws were being used “arbitrarily and disproportionately” against the company and its users, many of whom are journalists, opposition politicians and nonprofit groups.

Twitter’s suit follows legal action last year by WhatsApp, the messaging app owned by Meta, against the country’s new laws. WhatsApp asked the Delhi High Court to block the enforceability of the rule dictating that it make user’s messages traceable. In regard to the WhatsApp case, the government has said that the right to privacy is not “absolute” and that it “is subject to reasonable restrictions.”

That case is pending.

Twitter sued governments in the past to defend anonymous users or to object to censorship. In 2014, the company sued the United States, claiming the government inhibited Twitter’s free speech rights by blocking the company from disclosing information about surveillance. That lawsuit was dismissed in 2020.

In 2017, Twitter sued the United States again to block the government from unmasking an anonymous account that criticized the Trump administration’s immigration policies. The government dropped its demand after Twitter filed its lawsuit.

Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, who is in the process of buying Twitter for $44 billion, has said the company should relax its content moderation policies and allow tweets to remain on the platform unless they violate local laws.

Twitter’s suit against the Indian government is part of a broadening battle between the biggest tech companies and governments around the world over who has the upper hand. Australia and the European Union have drafted or passed laws to limit the power of Google, Facebook and other companies over online speech, while other countries are trying to rein in the companies’ services to stifle dissent and quash protests.

Experts said the Indian government’s move to force Twitter to block accounts and posts amounted to censorship, at a time when the government is accused of weaponizing a loose definition of what content it finds offensive to go after critics.

In February 2021, Twitter permanently blocked more than 500 accounts and moved an unspecified number of others from view within India after the government accused them of making inflammatory remarks about Mr. Modi. Twitter said at the time that it was taking no action on the accounts of journalists, politicians and activists, saying it did not believe the orders to block them “are consistent with Indian law.”

In May 2021, the police in India raided Twitter’s offices after the company decided to label tweets by politicians from Mr. Modi’s party “manipulated media.” Those tweets attacked opposition members who had been using the platform to criticize Mr. Modi and what they called his government’s stumbling response to the pandemic.

And in recent weeks, the police in New Delhi arrested Mohammed Zubair, a co-founder of a prominent fact-checking website, for a 2018 tweet that shared an image from an old Bollywood film. The government said the image was causing communal disharmony, after a Twitter account with just a few followers and only one tweet complained about it and tagged the Delhi police. That account disappeared soon after.

Last week, Twitter was ordered to block tweets from Freedom House, an American nonprofit organization that mentioned India as an example of a country where press freedom was on the decline.

“It is telling how an international report about India’s press freedom rankings is responded to with censorship, rather than debate and discussion,” said Apar Gupta, the executive director of the Internet Freedom Foundation. “It is an undemocratic and authoritarian response.”

Lawyers and technology experts said Twitter and other social media companies were caught between a rock and a hard place. They are required to comply with the country’s laws, but they are also challenging them to uphold freedom of speech in the world’s largest democracy.

“I think they are fighting a losing battle, because, on the one hand, they’re taking the government to the courts, but, on the other hand, they tend to cave in,” said Salman Waris, a lawyer at TechLegis in New Delhi who specializes in international technology law.

Mujib Mashal contributed reporting.

Source

As weeds go, Arabidopsis thaliana is a rather charming specimen. On a spring day, you might see it sprouting from the cracks of a parking lot, unleashing a small riot of white flowers that give it the common name “mouse ear cress.” But its rotund leaves often bear unwelcome passengers: among them, a bacteria called Pseudomonas syringae. It sits there looking for a way into the plant, usually the stomata through which the leaf takes in water and carbon dioxide, or through a wound. That’s when things get interesting.

Typically, the first warning of the invasion comes from receptors that tell the plant cells to unleash their defenses. Among the most important is a hormone called salicylic acid (SA). It’s used not just by arabidopsis, but by many other plants, including major crops, to stave off infections. But imagine that this spring day is unusually hot. A few days into a passing heat wave, you’ll see that the plant’s leaves are growing yellow and withered. Its immune system seems to be failing.

For much of the past decade, Sheng-Yang He, a plant biologist at Duke University, has been studying why plant immune systems fail in the heat. It’s a molecular mystery that involves unpacking dozens of genes to figure out why plants can no longer produce important chemicals, like SA, when temperatures rise just a few degrees. That’s the kind of dysfunction that is expected to become vastly more common for all sorts of plants as the climate changes and heat waves become more intense and frequent. And now, in a paper published in Nature, He’s team describes how that immunity can be restored.

There is no one way that climate change will affect plants. In some cases, rising heat and CO2 levels might hasten photosynthesis, causing them to grow faster. In others, they may shrivel and die from the stress of overheating. The geography of climate change will also vary greatly, causing crippling drought in some places while other ecosystems drown. Overall, such rapid change is not good for organisms that cannot swiftly walk themselves over to new habitats, like animals can. And just as more diseases are expected to spill over into people as the range of pests and pathogens spreads in a warming world, plants too will face new or more aggressive pestilence within their native ecosystems or farmland. Last week, a separate study published by researchers at the Chinese University of Hong Kong projected global crop yields could fall 20 percent by 2050 due to the effects of climate change.

But a surprising effect of heat is that changes occur inside plant immune systems themselves. Plants lack what’s known as adaptive immunity, such as the cells found in animals that learn from meeting a new microbial foe and are ready to leap into action when they face it again. But they have a whole arsenal of other defenses at their disposal. Each chemical response, like SA production, depends on the action of many genes that translate various proteins to others. These steps work well in the plant’s normal environment, but a kink in the process due to an external factor like heat can derail the whole thing. “We’re talking about millions of years of evolution,” says He, who is also an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. “The last 150 years have dramatically changed things, and humans are responsible for it.”

He grew up in a farming community in eastern China, where he recalls the smell of pesticides hanging in the air during growing season. In elementary school, he’d join other children in the fields as part of a “pest control squad” that pried caterpillars off of cotton plants. Today in the lab, much of his work involves doing exactly the opposite: inoculating plants with disease-causing bacteria. His goal is to study the effects of turning the expression of specific plant genes up or down, looking for changes that signal the role they have in its immune response.

Much of this work has been done on the hardy arabidopsis—“the lab rat of plants,” as He puts it. There are a few things that make it the perfect test subject. One is that the humble weed’s genome is fairly short, part of the reason it was the first plant to be fully sequenced. Another is the unique way its code can be modified. For most plants, the process is painstaking. New genetic material is introduced in a petri dish, borne by bacteria that slip into the plant’s cells. Once that happens, those modified cells must be cultured and coaxed into new roots and stems. But arabidopsis offers a shortcut. Biologists need only dip the plant’s flowers into a solution filled with gene-bearing bacteria and the messages will be carried straight to the seeds, which can simply be planted. In the painstakingly slow field of botany, that’s going at warp speed.

Still, it took years to figure out what all those SA-producing genes did in perfect greenhouse conditions. Only then could He’s team start tampering with the environment to test what goes wrong. Their mission: find a gene (or genes) that control whatever step was holding up SA production when it got hot. It took 10 years to find the answer. They modified gene after gene, infecting the plants and looking at the effects. But no matter what they did, the plants still withered from disease. “You wouldn’t believe how many failed experiments we had,” He says. Major leads, such as another’s lab identification of heat-responsive genes that affect flowering and growth, ended in crushing disappointment. Generations of grad students kept the project going. “My job is mainly to be their cheerleader,” he says.

Eventually, the lab found a winner. The gene was called CBP60g, and it seemed to act as a “master switch” for a number of the steps involved in making SA. The process of taking those genetic instructions and producing a protein was being stifled by an intermediate molecular step. The key was to bypass it. The researchers could do that, they found, by introducing a new stretch of code—a “promoter” taken from a virus—that would force the plant to transcribe the CBP60g and restore the SA assembly line. There was another apparent benefit: The change seemed to also help restore less-understood disease-resistance genes that were being suppressed by heat.

He’s team has since begun testing the gene modifications on food crops like rapeseed, a close cousin of arabidopsis. Apart from the genetic similarities, it’s a good plant to work with, he says, because it grows in cool climates where the plant is more likely to be affected by rising temperatures. So far, the team has had success turning the immune response back on in the lab, but they need to do field tests. Other potential candidates include wheat, soybeans, and potatoes.

Given the ubiquity of the SA pathway, it’s not surprising that He’s genetic fix would work broadly across many plants, says Marc Nishimura, an expert in plant immunity at Colorado State University who wasn’t involved in the research. But it’s only one of many climate-sensitive immune pathways biologists need to explore. And there are variables other than heat waves that will affect plant immunity, he points out, such as increasing humidity or a sustained heat that lasts through the entire growing season. “It may not be the perfect solution for every plant, but it gives you a general idea of what goes wrong and how you can fix it,” he says. He considers it a win for using basic science to decipher plant genes.

But for any of this to work, consumers will need to accept more genetic tinkering with their food. The alternative, Nishimura says, is more crop loss and more pesticides to prevent it. “As climate change accelerates, we’re going to be under pressure to learn things in the lab and move them into the field faster,” he says. “I can’t see how we’re going to do this without more acceptance of genetically modified plants.”

Climate Change Breaks Plant Immune Systems. Can They Be Rebooted?

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June Huh often finds himself lost. Every afternoon, he takes a long walk around Princeton University, where he’s a professor in the mathematics department. On this particular day in mid-May, he’s making his way through the woods around the nearby Institute for Advanced Study — “Just so you know,” he says as he considers a fork in the path ahead, “I don’t know where we are” — pausing every so often to point out the subtle movements of wildlife hiding beneath leaves or behind trees. Among the animals he spots over the next two hours of wandering are a pair of frogs, a red-crested bird, a turtle the size of a thimble, and a quick-footed fox, each given its own quiet moment of observation.

“I’m very good at finding stuff,” he says. “That’s one of my special abilities.”

Huh, 39, has now been awarded the Fields Medal, the highest honor in mathematics, for his ability to wander through mathematical landscapes and find just the right objects — objects that he then uses to get the seemingly disparate fields of geometry and combinatorics to talk to each other in new and exciting ways. Starting in graduate school, he has solved several major problems in combinatorics, forging a circuitous route by way of other branches of math to get to the heart of each proof. Every time, finding that path is akin to a “little miracle,” Huh said.

One might say the same of his path into mathematics itself: that it was characterized by much wandering and a series of small miracles. When he was younger, Huh had no desire to be a mathematician. He was indifferent to the subject, and he dropped out of high school to become a poet. It would take a chance encounter during his university years — and many moments of feeling lost — for him to find that mathematics held what he’d been looking for all along.

That poetic detour has since proved crucial to his mathematical breakthroughs. His artistry, according to his colleagues, is evident in the way he uncovers those just-right objects at the center of his work, and in the way he seeks a deeper significance in everything he does.

“Mathematicians are a lot like artists in that really we’re looking for beauty,” said Federico Ardila-Mantilla, a mathematician at San Francisco State University and one of Huh’s collaborators. “But I think in his case, it’s really pronounced. And I just really like his taste. He makes beautiful things.”

“When I found out that he came to mathematics after poetry, I’m like, OK, this makes sense to me,” Ardila added.

Huh himself draws parallels between the artist and the mathematician. For both, he said, “it feels like you’re grabbing something that’s already there, rather than creating something in your mind.”

The Dropout

On any given day, Huh does about three hours of focused work. He might think about a math problem, or prepare to lecture a classroom of students, or schedule doctor’s appointments for his two sons. “Then I’m exhausted,” he said. “Doing something that’s valuable, meaningful, creative” — or a task that he doesn’t particularly want to do, like scheduling those appointments — “takes away a lot of your energy.”

To hear him tell it, he doesn’t usually have much control over what he decides to focus on in those three hours. For a few months in the spring of 2019, all he did was read. He felt an urge to revisit books he’d first encountered when he was younger — including Meditations by the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius and several novels by the German author Hermann Hesse — so that’s what he did. “Which means I didn’t do any work,” Huh said. “So that’s kind of a problem.” (He’s since made peace with this constraint, though. “I used to try to resist … but I finally learned to give up to those temptations.” As a consequence, “I became better and better at ignoring deadlines.”)

He finds that forcing himself to do something or defining a specific goal — even for something he enjoys — never works. It’s particularly difficult for him to move his attention from one thing to another. “I think intention and willpower … are highly overrated,” he said. “You rarely achieve anything with those things.”

This has been the case since he was young. He was born in 1983 in California, where his parents were finishing graduate school. The family then moved to Seoul, South Korea, when Huh was around 2 years old. There, his father taught statistics, his mother Russian language and literature.

School was excruciating for him. He loved to learn but couldn’t focus or absorb anything in a classroom setting. Instead, he preferred to read on his own — in elementary school, he devoured all 10 volumes of an encyclopedia about living things — and to explore a mountain near his family’s apartment. He quickly became familiar with every corner of it, but he still managed to get lost, one time even ending up in an area that was restricted due to the possible presence of land mines.

He tried his best to avoid math whenever possible. His father once tried to teach him out of a workbook, but rather than try to solve the problems, Huh would copy the solutions from the back. When his father caught on and tore those pages out, Huh went to a local bookstore and wrote down the answers there. “He gave up at that point,” Huh said.

When he was 16 years old and in the middle of his first year in high school (which lasts for three years in South Korea), he decided to drop out to write poetry. He was something of a romantic. “I could literally physically cry after listening to good music,” he said. He wrote about nature and about his own experiences. He planned to complete his masterpiece in the two years before he’d have to attend university. “So that didn’t happen,” he laughed.

He found the writing process too focused on the self — and for him, that exploration was often painful and depressing. Moreover, as he later realized, “I wanted to be someone who writes great poetry,” he said. “I didn’t want to write great poetry.” Now he sees that version of himself as almost a complete stranger.

When he entered Seoul National University in 2002, he felt adrift. He briefly flirted with the idea of being a science writer and decided to major in astronomy and physics. But he frequently skipped class, and he had to retake several courses. “I was just generally lost,” he said. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I didn’t know what I was good at.”

It turned out that he was good at math after all — something he discovered entirely by accident.

True Beauty

It took Huh six years to graduate. In that sixth year, he enrolled in a class taught by the famed Japanese mathematician Heisuke Hironaka, who won the Fields Medal in 1970. Hironaka was charismatic, and Huh quickly fell under his sway.

But it wasn’t just his professor’s charm that attracted Huh that first day in class. It was also the math itself. Ostensibly, the course was an introduction to algebraic geometry, the study of solutions to algebraic equations and their geometric properties. Instead, Hironaka taught his own work in an area called singularity theory, which focuses on certain types of spaces. “Basically, he lectured about what he thought about yesterday,” Huh said — a very particular problem, and proofs that weren’t necessarily correct. What began as a 200-student class quickly dwindled; a few weeks later, only five students were left, Huh among them.

For the first time, he witnessed research mathematics unfolding in real time. Hironaka’s lectures weren’t polished as in other undergraduate courses, where everything was streamlined, the answers already worked out. Huh loved the suspense of it, the act of trying to do something no one really knew how to do — and the freedom that came with not knowing, the surprises that became possible.

The typical material taught in college has been refined over the course of centuries, he said. “That’s very different from observing this raw mathematics in front of your eyes.”

Huh on the Princeton University campus.

Huh discovered that this kind of mathematics could give him what poetry could not: the ability to search for beauty outside himself, to try to grasp something external, objective and true, in a way that opened him up more than writing ever had. “You don’t think about your small self,” he said. “There’s no place for ego.” He found that unlike when he was a poet, he was never motivated by the desire for recognition. He just wanted to do math.

Hironaka, perhaps recognizing this, took him under his wing. After Huh graduated and started a master’s program at Seoul National University — where he also met Nayoung Kim, now his wife — he spent a lot of time with Hironaka. During breaks, he followed the professor back to Japan, staying with him in Tokyo and Kyoto, carrying his bags, sharing meals, and of course continuing to discuss math.

An Unexpected Discovery

Huh applied to about a dozen doctoral programs in the U.S. But because of his undistinguished undergraduate experience, he was rejected by all of them save one. In 2009, he began his studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, before transferring to the University of Michigan in 2011 to complete his doctorate.

Despite the challenges — living in a new country, spending time apart from Kim (she stayed at Seoul National University for her doctorate in mathematics) — Huh cherished his experiences in graduate school. He was able to dedicate himself wholly to math, and he relished the freedom of exploration that had drawn him to the subject in the first place.

He immediately stood out. As a beginning graduate student in Illinois, he proved a conjecture in graph theory that had been open for 40 years. In its simplest form, the problem, known as Read’s conjecture, concerned polynomials — equations like n4 + 5n3 + 6n2 + 3n + 1 — attached to graphs, which are collections of vertices (points) connected by edges (lines). In particular, let’s say you want to color the vertices of a graph so that no two adjacent vertices have the same color. Given a certain number of colors at your disposal, there are many ways to color the graph. It turns out that the total number of possibilities can be calculated using an equation called the chromatic polynomial (which is written in terms of the number of colors being used).

Mathematicians observed that the coefficients of chromatic polynomials, no matter the graph, always seem to obey certain patterns. First, they are unimodal, meaning they increase and then decrease. Take the previous example of a polynomial. The absolute values of its coefficients — 1, 5, 6, 3, 1 — form a unimodal sequence. Moreover, that sequence is also “log concave.” For any three consecutive numbers in the sequence, the square of the middle number is at least as large as the product of the terms on either side of it. (In the above polynomial, for instance, 62 ≥ 5 × 3.)

Merrill Sherman/Quanta Magazine

Still, mathematicians struggled to prove these properties. And then, seemingly out of nowhere, along came Huh.

As a master’s student, he had studied algebraic geometry and singularity theory with Hironaka. The main objects of study in that field are called algebraic varieties, which can be thought of as shapes defined by certain equations. Intriguingly, associated to certain kinds of algebraic varieties are numbers that are known to be log concave — something Huh only knew because of the serendipitous direction his studies had taken him in. Huh’s key idea was to find a way to construct an algebraic variety such that those associated numbers were precisely the coefficients of the chromatic polynomial of the graph from the original question.

His solution stunned the math community. It was at that point that the University of Michigan, having rejected his initial application, recruited him to their graduate program.

Huh’s achievement was impressive not just because he had solved Read’s conjecture when it had seemed completely intractable for so long. He had shown that something much deeper — and geometric — was lurking beneath combinatorial properties of graphs.

Mathematicians were also impressed by his demeanor. His talks at conferences were always accessible and concrete; in speaking with him, it was clear that he was thinking both deeply and broadly about the concepts he was working with. “He was ridiculously mature for a graduate student,” said Matthew Baker, a mathematician at the Georgia Institute of Technology. After Baker met him for the first time, “I was just like, who is this guy?”

According to Mircea Mustaţă, Huh’s adviser at the University of Michigan, he required almost no supervision or guidance. Unlike most graduate students, he already had a program in mind, and ideas about how to pursue it. “He was more like a colleague,” Mustaţă said. “He already had his own way of looking at things.”

Many of his collaborators note that he’s incredibly humble and down-to-earth. When he learned he’d won the Fields Medal, “it didn’t really feel that good,” Huh said. “Of course you are happy, but deep down, you’re a little bit worried that they might eventually figure out that you’re not actually that good. I am a reasonably good mathematician, but am I Fields Medal-worthy?”

Escape From Space

Graphs are actually just one type of object that can define more general structures called matroids. Consider, for example, points on a two-dimensional plane. If more than two points lie on a line in this plane, you can say that those points are “dependent.” Matroids are abstract objects that capture notions like dependence and independence in all sorts of different contexts — from graphs to vector spaces to algebraic fields.

Merrill Sherman/Quanta Magazine

Just as graphs have chromatic polynomials associated with them, there are equations called characteristic polynomials attached to matroids. It was conjectured that the polynomials for these more general objects should also have coefficients that are log concave. But the techniques Huh used to prove Read’s conjecture only worked for showing log concavity for a very narrow class of matroids, such as the matroids that arise from graphs.

With the mathematician Eric Katz, Huh broadened the class of matroids such a proof could apply to. They followed a recipe of sorts. As before, the strategy was to start with the object of interest — here, a matroid — and use it to construct an algebraic variety. From there, they could extract an object called a cohomology ring and use some of its properties to prove log concavity.

There was just one problem. Most matroids don’t have any sort of geometric foundation, which means there’s not actually an algebraic variety to associate to them. Instead, Huh, Katz and the mathematician Karim Adiprasito figured out a way to write down the right cohomology ring straight from the matroid, essentially from scratch. They then showed, using a new set of techniques, that it behaved as if it had come from an actual algebraic variety, even though it hadn’t. In doing so, they proved log concavity for all matroids, resolving the problem known as Rota’s conjecture once and for all. “It’s pretty remarkable that it works,” Baker said.

The work showed that “you don’t need space to do geometry,” Huh said. “That made me really fundamentally rethink what geometry is.” It would also guide him toward a host of other problems, where he continued to push that idea further, allowing him to develop an even broader range of methods.

But for all the specificity the work requires, building the right cohomology ring requires massive amounts of guesswork and groping around in the dark. It was an aspect of the work that Huh particularly enjoyed. “There is no guiding principle … no clearly defined goal,” he said. “You just have to make a guess.”

Huh’s work involves investigating the properties of matroids. These abstract structures can sometimes arise from geometric objects.
Caroline Gutman for Quanta Magazine

That lack of intention precisely mirrors how he functions best in his day-to-day life, too. It was as if he’d uncovered a mathematical program that perfectly fit his personality. Once again, he found that “things just happen by themselves,” Huh said.

The Heart of Things

Huh speaks slowly, pausing often and choosing his words carefully, and carries himself in a calm, peaceful manner that borders on meditative. “He doesn’t get so easily excited,” said Botong Wang, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin, Madison who has collaborated with Huh on a number of important recent results.

He proceeds just as deliberately when doing mathematics. Wang was shocked when he first witnessed it. “I have this math competition experience, that as a mathematician you have to be clever, you have to be fast,” he said. “But June is the opposite. … If you talk to him for five minutes about some calculus problem, you’d think this guy wouldn’t pass a qualifying exam. He’s very slow.” So slow, in fact, that at first Wang thought they were wasting a lot of time on easy problems they already understood. But then he realized that Huh was learning even seemingly simple concepts in a much deeper way — and in precisely the way that would later prove useful.

“June likes to do things in the right way,” said Graham Denham, a mathematician at Western University in Ontario and one of Huh’s collaborators.

For instance, Denham, Ardila and Huh had just completed a 50-page proof of a problem closely related to Rota’s conjecture when Huh said they should take some more time to find a cleaner, more appealing approach. He thought there was a nicer explanation out there, and that it was best not to rush things. “Federico and I were like, oh, OK, so we’ll just chuck that, then, shall we?” Denham said.

It took two years to craft the better argument. “It’s good we’re all tenured,” Ardila said. Ultimately, though, Ardila and Denham agreed that the extra work was worth it. Their end result “was totally different, and deeper, and [got to] the heart of things,” Ardila said.

Huh keeps a small collection of polytopes — geometric objects with flat sides.
Caroline Gutman for Quanta Magazine

This approach doesn’t just apply to Huh’s mathematical work. In 2013, he decided he wanted to learn to cook. As a total beginner, he adopted the strategy of making the same dish — a simple pasta in oil — every day until it was perfect. For six months, that’s exactly what he did. (To date, according to Kim, that’s the only dish he knows how to cook.)

Huh’s entire life is built on routine. “Almost all of my days are exactly the same,” he said. “I have a very high tolerance for repetition.” He has trouble staying asleep and usually wakes up at around 3 a.m. He then goes to the gym, has breakfast with his wife and two sons (one is 8 years old, the other just turned 1), and walks his eldest to school before heading to his Princeton office.

The office is spare, practically empty. There’s a large desk, a couch for sleeping — Huh typically takes a nap later in the morning — and a yoga mat rolled out on the floor (just for lying down, he said; he doesn’t actually know how to do yoga). No books, just a few stacks of papers neatly arranged on a shelf against one wall. In the corner is a vacuum cleaner. Huh likes repetitive, mindless activities like cleaning, dishwashing and the physical act of transcribing what he reads into a notebook.

He often works in the public library, in the children’s section, where it’s pretty noisy. “I don’t like quiet places,” he said. “It makes me sleepy.” Huh says this about many things.

He goes for a long walk after lunch each day, then returns to his office to do some more work (unless he’s already hit his three-hour quota) before heading home. He spends the rest of the evening with his family; they all go to sleep, together in one large bed, at around 9 p.m.

This preference for routine — and the tendency to get exhausted by anything that strays from it — can sometimes manifest in extreme ways. When he was completing his doctorate in Michigan, for instance, “I would cut off almost everything else,” Huh said. When he first moved to Ann Arbor, he found himself unequipped for the brutal winter. He had few belongings, and he needed a blanket. But when he looked up how to get to the local mall, he found it too logistically difficult. “It was just beyond my level of tolerance,” he said. “I did not want to waste my mental energy on figuring out how to go from here to there.” Instead, he walked to a nearby CVS drugstore, bought 10 squares of fabric and a giant stapler, and stapled the squares together to make a blanket.

Huh in Princeton’s Lewis Science Library.

He lived off frozen pizza for months at a time because he didn’t want to deal with getting groceries and cooking. He just wanted to do math. He describes that period of his life as “almost monastic.” In fact, at the time, he really only spoke with another person — Mustaţă, his adviser — once a week.

Kim recalls visiting Huh when he was still in Illinois, and “after that, I really rethought our relationship,” she said. “Should I marry him? Because he [cannot] handle real-life skills, surviving skills.”

Yet marry him she did, in 2014. They moved to Princeton, where they both started work at the Institute for Advanced Study. It was Kim’s first time living in the U.S., and she felt uncomfortable taking care of certain tasks in English; she had to depend on Huh to get things done. “Let’s just say, she was disappointed,” he said.

Later that year, Kim gave birth to their first son, Dan. While in labor, she caught Huh doing math.

“My wife is a much more balanced person than I am,” he said. “Life has very many facets, and math is a very, very, very tiny part of it.”
“I’m a real worker,” Kim said. “He is a thinker.”

But, she added, Huh has improved drastically since then. As the couple raised Dan, “I learned how to live a more balanced life,” Huh said.

“That was a transformative period.” He spends a lot of time with Dan — drawing with him, solving problems in intricate math workbooks that Dan creates for him, and taking him to the bookstore and other local spots. He even takes care of the logistical tasks that Kim asks him to do, albeit begrudgingly. “I still don’t like it,” he said, “but I mean, we cannot just live with stapled blankets.”

Now he’s even able to step away from mathematics. His mind no longer returns to working on problems when he’s in an idle state, and he’s able to take a break when something else requires him to.

“He’s a totally different person,” Kim said.

Heavy on Top

Regardless, some things haven’t changed. Huh can still muster only enough energy to work for a few hours each day. “Other people work one hour and just take a five-minute rest,” Kim said. “He is like, one hour do something else, and just focus for five minutes, 10 minutes.”
His search for beauty hasn’t changed either. And often he returns to questions about log concavity or similar concepts as a way to unearth that beauty.

Caroline Gutman for Quanta Magazine

For instance, he, Wang and other collaborators recently proved a fundamental problem about configurations of points, lines and planes called the Dowling-Wilson “top-heavy” conjecture. Consider a finite collection of points in the plane, where every pair of points is connected by a line. The mathematicians Paul Erdős and Nicolaas Govert de Bruijn showed that the number of lines must always be greater than or equal to the number of points (unless all the points are located on one line). Consider, for example, four points arranged at the corners of a square. Lines trace out the square and also connect opposite corners, adding up to six lines in total.

The top-heavy conjecture generalizes this idea. Instead of the plane, you’re given a set of points in some high-dimensional space. Consider all the lines that connect pairs of points, the planes spanned by sets of three points, the three-dimensional subspaces constructed from four points, and so on. Now think about a sequence built from these numbers: the number of points, the number of lines, the number of planes. Compare numbers in symmetric positions in that sequence (the first and last numbers, the second and penultimate numbers, and so on). The number corresponding to the higher-dimensional space will be at least as large — that is, the sequence is top-heavy. (This sequence is also conjectured to be log concave, but that has not yet been proved; so far, Huh and Wang have shown that the first half of the sequence is unimodal.)

Merrill Sherman/Quanta Magazine

Huh and Wang adapted ideas from Huh’s work on Rota’s conjecture, but in doing so they had to push his program further. Again, they were working with matroids, algebraic varieties and cohomology rings. But this time the algebraic varieties they had to find involved singularities, places where a space looks different when you zoom in on it than it does at other points. That made it much more complicated to build the right spaces and prove certain properties about their cohomology rings — and even more difficult to solve the case where they had to construct those rings straight from the matroids, without algebraic varieties to guide them.

During the five years they spent solving this problem, Huh also started investigating a way to complete the break from geometry. So much of his work until then involved the arduous task of building the exact cohomology that a problem required. Moreover, once that cohomology is found, mathematicians still have to prove that it satisfies certain properties, which can also take years.

Caroline Gutman for Quanta Magazine

The new theory that he developed (along with the mathematician Petter Brändén) was able to bypass those methods entirely. It allowed them to solve a problem called the strong Mason conjecture (which asks questions about the number of independent sets in matroids), and other mathematicians have already used it to re-prove Rota’s conjecture in a more straightforward way. But even more important, it opens the door to finding entirely new problems, hints at an even deeper explanation for why all these log concavity statements are true, and intersects with problems in theoretical computer science in intriguing ways that are just beginning to be explored.

Click of the Connection

For Huh, when he is working, there’s something almost subconscious going on. In fact, he usually can’t trace how or when his ideas come to him. He doesn’t have sudden flashes of insight. Instead, “at some point, you just realize, oh, I know this,” he said. Maybe last week, he didn’t understand something, but now, without any additional input, the pieces have clicked into place without his realizing it. He likens it to the way your mind can surprise you and create unexpected connections when you’re dreaming. “It’s just amazing what human minds are capable of,” he said. “And it’s nice to admit that we don’t know what’s going on.”

Perhaps this, too, speaks to the artist in him. He hopes to continue uncovering unexpected connections between different areas of math.

“He just follows the vision of this original program that he had … already as a graduate student,” Baker said. “It will be very interesting to see what the limits are.”

So far, Huh hasn’t hit them. And mathematicians are sure he’ll continue to make beautiful things.

When asked if he’d ever entertain the earlier version of his artist self and try writing poetry again, he shrugged. “Maybe. But I don’t know,” he said. “I’m very much into something else.”

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The international LHCb collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has observed three never-before-seen particles: a new kind of “pentaquark” and the first-ever pair of “tetraquarks”, which includes a new type of tetraquark. The findings, presented today at a CERN seminar, add three new exotic members to the growing list of new hadrons found at the LHC. They will help physicists better understand how quarks bind together into these composite particles.

Quarks are elementary particles and come in six flavours: up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom. They usually combine together in groups of twos and threes to form hadrons such as the protons and neutrons that make up atomic nuclei. More rarely, however, they can also combine into four-quark and five-quark particles, or “tetraquarks” and “pentaquarks”. These exotic hadrons were predicted by theorists at the same time as conventional hadrons, about six decades ago, but only relatively recently, in the past 20 years, have they been observed by LHCb and other experiments.

Most of the exotic hadrons discovered in the past two decades are tetraquarks or pentaquarks containing a charm quark and a charm antiquark, with the remaining two or three quarks being an up, down or strange quark or their antiquarks. But in the past two years, LHCb has discovered different kinds of exotic hadrons. Two years ago, the collaboration discovered a tetraquark made up of two charm quarks and two charm antiquarks, and two “open-charm” tetraquarks consisting of a charm antiquark, an up quark, a down quark and a strange antiquark. And last year it found the first-ever instance of a “double open-charm” tetraquark with two charm quarks and an up and a down antiquark. Open charm means that the particle contains a charm quark without an equivalent antiquark.

The discoveries announced today by the LHCb collaboration include new kinds of exotic hadrons. The first kind, observed in an analysis of “decays” of negatively charged B mesons, is a pentaquark made up of a charm quark and a charm antiquark and an up, a down and a strange quark. It is the first pentaquark found to contain a strange quark. The finding has a whopping statistical significance of 15 standard deviations, far beyond the 5 standard deviations that are required to claim the observation of a particle in particle physics.

The two new tetraquarks, illustrated here as single units of tightly bound quarks. One of the particles is composed of a charm quark, a strange antiquark and an up quark and a down antiquark (left), and the other is made up of a charm quark, a strange antiquark and an up antiquark and down quark (right) (Image: CERN)

The second kind is a doubly electrically charged tetraquark. It is an open-charm tetraquark composed of a charm quark, a strange antiquark, and an up quark and a down antiquark, and it was spotted together with its neutral counterpart in a joint analysis of decays of positively charged and neutral B mesons. The new tetraquarks, observed with a statistical significance of 6.5 (doubly charged particle) and 8 (neutral particle) standard deviations, represent the first time a pair of tetraquarks has been observed.

“The more analyses we perform, the more kinds of exotic hadrons we find,” says LHCb physics coordinator Niels Tuning. “We’re witnessing a period of discovery similar to the 1950s, when a ‘particle zoo’ of hadrons started being discovered and ultimately led to the quark model of conventional hadrons in the 1960s. We’re creating ‘particle zoo 2.0’.”

“Finding new kinds of tetraquarks and pentaquarks and measuring their properties will help theorists develop a unified model of exotic hadrons, the exact nature of which is largely unknown,” says LHCb spokesperson Chris Parkes. “It will also help to better understand conventional hadrons.”

While some theoretical models describe exotic hadrons as single units of tightly bound quarks, other models envisage them as pairs of standard hadrons loosely bound in a molecule-like structure. Only time and more studies of exotic hadrons will tell if these particles are one, the other or both.

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England's National Health Service (NHS) is experimenting with a new way to deliver chemotherapy drugs: drones.

NHS England has partnered with a company called Apian, which describes(Opens in a new window) itself as "a medical drone startup founded by a team of NHS doctors in training and ex-Googlers." But don't worry—England won't be swarming with drones as a result of these efforts.

"In a first of its kind trial," NHS England says(Opens in a new window), "starting on the Isle of Wight, chemo will be flown directly from the pharmacy at Portsmouth Hospitals University NHS Trust to St Mary’s Hospital, where staff will collect it before distributing it to hospital teams and patients."

(Photo: Apian)

These drone-based deliveries are supposed to be much faster than current delivery methods. NHS England says it usually takes about four hours for a car to make it from Portsmouth to St Mary's; Apian's drones are supposed to be able to make that same trip in just half an hour.

The deliveries are also said to be more eco-conscious. "Each drone delivery replaces at least two car journeys and one hovercraft or ferry journey per delivery," NHS England says, "saving carbon emissions and contributing to improving air quality for patients and the community."

Apian's drones are set to deliver the first round of chemotherapy drugs "in the coming weeks." The program will then expand from the Isle of Wight to Northumbria if the initial tests go well, NHS England says, and could eventually be used to deliver other medical supplies as well.

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The cloud of debris from Russia’s anti-satellite missile test last year continues to pose an orbital hazard to SpaceX’s Starlink system.

"SpaceX is now maneuvering more for Cosmos 1408 debris than for any other objects in space," the company told the FCC last week.

Cosmos 1408(Opens in a new window) refers to the satellite the Russian military decided to destroy in a controversial missile test last November. The resulting impact semt thousands of debris pieces spilling out across Earth’s orbit at speeds capable of destroying other satellites in orbit.

At the time, SpaceX altered the orbits of the company’s own Starlink satellites, which currently number at over 2,300. Last Friday, SpaceX provided the FCC an update on the situation via a report that covers the performance of the Starlink constellation between December and May.

According to the report(Opens in a new window), Spacex conducted 6,873 maneuvers with Starlink satellites during the six-month period. The bulk of those manuevers focused on avoiding orbital debris from the Cosmos 1408 missile test.

“In fact, over the reporting period, SpaceX satellites maneuvered over 1,700 times for Cosmos 1408 debris,” the company said. However, the onboard collision system on the Starlink satellites “was deftly able to adjust to and accommodate this significant influx of debris."

The debris from Cosmos 1408 is expected to remain an orbital hazard for years, if not decades. According(Opens in a new window) to LEO Labs, much of the debris also occupies an altitude of 300 to 800 kilometers, while Starlink satellites orbit in the same range at an altitude of about 550 kilometers.

For now, SpaceX pointed out that none of the 6,873 maneuvers it undertook with Starlink led to any collisions. In addition, the company will only initiate a satellite maneuver if the probability of collision is greater than a 1 in 100,000 chance. Nevertheless, the company is warning the FCC that more needs to be done to keep space safe.

“SpaceX reiterates that it cannot maintain a sustainable orbital environment unilaterally and without non-US-firms participating; no operator, and indeed no country, can do so,” the company’s report added. As a result, SpaceX is urging other satellite players to also submit transparency reports to the FCC.

“Only with all operators working together can we truly maintain the space environment for future operations and human space flight,” the company said.

The report also notes SpaceX de-orbited and disposed of dozens of Starlink satellites during the six-month period. The company didn’t explicitly say why, but the report says: “SpaceX has a bias towards de-orbiting and replacing satellites whenever doing so will improve service for consumers on the ground or enhance the sustainability of space.”

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