With a success rate as low as 0.2 percent, freeze drying of cells still has a long way to go before becoming a standard cloning and storage strategy, but it's a really exciting step.

"Maintaining biodiversity is an essential task, but storing germ cells as genetic resources using liquid nitrogen is difficult, expensive, and easily disrupted during disasters," researchers, led by Sayaka Wakayama from the University of Yamanashi in Japan, write in their new paper.

"Here, we show that freeze-dried somatic cells can produce healthy, fertile clones, suggesting that this technique may be important for the establishment of alternative, cheaper, and safer liquid nitrogen-free biobanking solutions."

Freeze drying is a gentle, albeit intense process. Imagine freezing something in several stages until it reaches about -80 degrees Celsius (-112 degrees Fahrenheit), before placing it in a vacuum chamber at high pressure.

The process turns water into ice without large ice crystals puncturing the cell walls, while the pressure turns the water from a solid straight to a gas, which is then sucked out of the product. This happens multiple times until the item is light and crunchy, but still has the majority of its structure intact.

Freeze drying is mostly used in the food industry where it keeps nutrients and flavors intact. It's also used for pharmaceutical products, and even sometimes taxidermy.

Once the freeze-dried item has arrived at its destination, it can then be rehydrated, keeping many properties the same. This is a pretty simple process, and has been happening successfully for decades. But doing this to cells to then use in reproduction is a whole other kettle of fish.

So far, this same team of researchers has experimented with storing freeze-dried sperm in a desk drawer (with no temperature control) for over a year, and on the International Space Station for over 5 years. Both produced viable offspring, although the success percentage was in the teens.

"Freeze drying could be the best way to preserve genetic resources for a long period in a safe, low-cost, and location-independent manner," the researchers write in their paper.

"However, to date, the only cells that have produced offspring after freeze drying are mature spermatozoa. Collecting spermatozoa from infertile males and oocytes/embryos from fertile females is difficult."

When cloning animals, you need a non-reproductive cell (called a somatic cell) with all of the animal's DNA. This nucleus package filled with DNA can then be inserted into an egg cell, and with a bit of messing around, you can start the process of growing a baby.

Cloning isn't the easiest way to store genetic material for the future, but it does allow you to have the entire genetic material of an animal, as opposed to just the half found in reproductive cells.

Currently, somatic and reproductive cells – for biobanks or other purposes – can be stored in liquid nitrogen, which can be quickly raised in temperature to bring the cells back to life.

But the researchers wanted to see how freeze drying stacked up, so they used mouse somatic cells (in this case fibroblasts and cumulus cells), freeze dried and kept at -30 degrees Celsius (-22 degrees F) for up to nine months.

The cells did die and there was some significant DNA damage, but the team managed to extract the rest of the genetic information and place it into new cells, which became early embryo cell lines.

These cell lines then had their nuclear information extracted and inserted into a new embryo, which was able to create cloned mice. So yes, this is not a perfect process. Every step going right – from rehydration, to cell line establishment, to actually growing the cloned mice – only happened 0.2 percent of the time. This places the method at even lower odds of success than the cloning of the sheep Dolly, who only had a 0.4 percent chance of existing.

Some mice also were not proper clones, carrying epigenetic abnormalities due to the DNA damage. In one interesting case, the cell line lost its Y chromosome and went from male to female, so there's plenty more research to be done to finetune this process.

With all that said, if the success rate is eventually improved, being able to clone animals using such degraded cells and DNA would be a boon in other areas too. Over time even the best stored DNA degrades; if we're to have any luck in cloning extinct animals, we'll need to get better at cloning from incomplete or degraded DNA.

This is worlds away from where we are now, but the future is looking interesting.

The research has been published in Nature Communications.

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Scientists stressed they need more data before they can say for sure whether, and why, COVID might get worse the second, third, or fourth time around. But with more and more people getting reinfected as the pandemic lurches toward its fourth year, the study hints at some of the possible long-term risks.

To get a handle on the health impact of reinfection, re-reinfection and even re-re-reinfection, three researchers—Ziyad Al-Aly from the Washington University School of Medicine plus Benjamin Bowe and Yan Xie, both from the V.A. St. Louis Health Care System—scrutinized the health records of 5.7 million American veterans.

Some 260,000 had caught COVID just once, and 40,000 had been reinfected at least one more time. The control group included 5.4 million people who never got COVID at all. Al-Aly, Bowe and Xie tracked health outcomes over a six-month period and came to a startling conclusion. “We show that, compared to people with first infection, reinfection contributes additional risks,” they wrote in their study, which hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet but is under consideration for publication in Nature.

Every time you catch COVID, your chance of getting really sick with something—likely COVID-related—seems to go up, Al-Aly, Bowe and Xie found. The risk of cardiovascular disorders, problems with blood-clotting, diabetes, fatigue, gastrointestinal and kidney disorders, mental health problems, musculoskeletal disorders and neurologic damage all increase with reinfection—this despite the antibodies that should result from repeat infections.

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All of the conditions are directly associated with COVID or have been shown to get worse with COVID. “The constellation of findings show that reinfection adds non-trivial risks,” the researchers warned.

This risk could become a bigger deal as more people get reinfected. Globally, the death rate from COVID is going down, thanks in large part to growing population-wide immunity from past infection and vaccines.

But at the same time, non-fatal reinfections are piling up. Around half a billion people all over the world have caught COVID more than once, according to Al-Aly, Bowe and Xie’s study, citing data from the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. Many more reinfections, including “breakthrough” infections in the fully vaccinated, are likely as new variants and subvariants of COVID evolve to partially evade our antibodies.

The exact increase in risk from reinfection depends on the particular disorder in question—and whether you’ve been vaccinated and boosted. Broadly speaking, however, the likelihood of heart and clotting problems, fatigue and lung damage roughly doubles each time you catch COVID, Al-Aly, Bowe and Xie found.

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Ali Mokdad, a professor of health metrics sciences at the University of Washington Institute for Health, offered one important caveat: time. “In general, one would expect that COVID will do more damage with a longer infection,” he told The Daily Beast. A short-lasting COVID infection followed by another short case of COVID should be less damaging than, say, back-to-back long illnesses.

The longer your infections drag on, the greater the stress on your organs. “These are two blows instead of one,” Mokdad said.

But it’s possible the worsening outcomes resulting from reinfection have little or nothing to do with the cumulative stress of successive long illnesses. According to Peter Hotez, an expert in vaccine development at Baylor College, the escalating risk could result from a poorly-understood phenomenon called “immune enhancement.”

A virus undergoes immune enhancement when a person’s immune system, after initial exposure to the pathogen, backfires during reinfection. Someone suffering immune enhancement with regards to a particular disease is likely to get sicker and sicker each time they’re exposed.

Immune enhancement could explain Al-Aly, Bow and Xie’s observation of escalating risk from COVID reinfection. “If the observation is true,” Hotez stressed. But it’s possible the observation is inaccurate. Hotez said he’s “not convinced that reinfection is actually more severe.”

Anthony Alberg, a University of South Carolina epidemiologist, told The Daily Beast he, too, is somewhat skeptical. Just how much more risk you might accumulate with each case of COVID is really hard to predict. And Al-Aly, Bow and Xie’s study is too cursory to totally settle the uncertainty all on its own.

The main problem, Alberg explained, is tied to a classic logical dilemma: causation versus correlation. Just because veterans got sicker with each COVID infection doesn’t necessarily mean COVID is definitely to blame, he pointed out. The vets in the study who came down with COVID more than once maybe tended to belong to groups with overall worse health outcomes whether or not they caught COVID twice, thrice or never.

“Compared with veterans who were infected once with SARS-CoV-2, those who were infected two times or more were more likely to be older [or] Black people, reside in long-term care, be immunocompromised, have anxiety, depression and dementia and to have had cerebrovascular disease, cardiovascular disease diabetes and lung disease,” Alberg said.

COVID, in other words, might be beside the point. It’s possible the worsening outcomes in Al-Aly, Bow and Xie’s study are due to the fact that the reinfected patients “were on average older and with much poorer health status than those with one infection,” Alberg said, “not because of having been infected more than once.”

Untangling causation and correlation in a study of this scale could be tricky. “More evidence [is] needed on this topic before definitive conclusions can be reached,” Alberg said.

In the meantime, it should be easy for us to mitigate the potential risk. Anyone who comes down with COVID a second time shouldn’t hesitate to take a course of paxlovid or some other antiviral drug that’s approved for the disease. “We should continue to focus on making sure people are aware of the benefits of early treatment,” Jeffrey Klausner, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, told The Daily Beast.

Better yet, we could focus on developing “strategies for reinfection prevention,” Al-Aly, Bow and Xie wrote.

The top priority, of course, should be vaccinating the unvaccinated. Even the best COVID vaccines aren’t 100-percent effective at preventing infection or reinfection—and they’re getting somewhat worse as SARS-CoV-2 evolves for greater immune-escape.

But even with cleverer viral mutations, the jabs are still pretty effective. You can’t get sicker and sicker with reinfection… if you never get infected in the first place.

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The pill is said to break down up to 70% of alcohol after 60 minutes. This means that if someone drinks 50ml of 40% spirits, which contains 20ml of pure alcohol, as little as 6ml of the alcohol will enter the bloodstream. This is the same as the person only drinking 15ml of spirits.

This reduction in the amount of alcohol absorbed by the body is mirrored by a reduction in the short-term effects of alcohol, such as euphoria and reduced anxiety.

The company that makes this supplement recommends that two pills are taken one to 12 hours before drinking alcohol.

The probiotic supplement contains two gut-friendly bacteria—Bacillus subtilis and Bacillus coagulans—produced from fermented rice bran. These bacteria naturally break down alcohol into water and carbon dioxide. An acid-resistant capsule protects the bacteria from the stomach's natural acids so they can reach the intestine where most alcohol is absorbed into the bloodstream.

What the science says

The pill is aimed at those who do not want a hangover after drinking the day before. But can these pills really prevent a hangover?

A hangover is mainly due to the dehydrating effects of alcohol, which can give a headache. The direct effect of alcohol on the stomach can also cause a sore stomach and nausea. If less alcohol is taken into the body, the risks of being dehydrated are less. But since the pills only work after alcohol has passed through the stomach to the intestine, they will not stop alcohol's effect on the stomach.

The evidence for Myrkl is based on a single published research study. Twenty-four healthy young white adults were asked to take either two Myrkl pills or dummy pills (placebo) each day for seven days. They were then given a small amount of alcohol (between 50 and 90ml of spirits) based on their weight. Their blood alcohol level was tested for the next two hours.

The researchers found that within the first 60 minutes, the amount of alcohol in the blood was 70% lower in those who received Myrkl compared with the dummy pill.

Although this study was well designed, including randomly allocating people to the Myrkl or dummy pill groups, several problems make the results weaker. First, the researchers only reported results from 14 of the 24 people because ten had lower blood alcohol levels at the start.

Second, results varied between different people, which reduces the accuracy of the study. And third, the researchers tested seven days of treatment before a single drink of alcohol, but the company recommend only two pills one to 12 hours before drinking any amount.

The study also leaves many unanswered questions. Does the pill work in people who are not young, healthy and white? Does it work in people with gut or liver disease? Are there differences in the effect of the pill between men and women? What happens when food and alcohol are taken together? Do medications change the action of the pills?

It is already known that friendly gut bacteria are changed by long-term illnesses and lifestyle (smoking, regular alcohol consumption and diet). It is also known that alcohol is absorbed differently according to weight, sex, physical activity and food consumption. These factors may reduce or increase the effect of the friendly bacteria in the Myrkl pills.

Probiotics are safe and widely available. They can be bought as yoghurts, drinks or pills from many supermarkets and health food shops. The two bacteria in the Myrkl pills are also likely to be safe for most people. Yet probiotics given to people with illnesses can upset the natural balance of healthy gut bacteria causing infection or gut symptoms.

A pre-drinking pill to prevent the hangover the next day would be of benefit to some people. However, with all the unanswered questions around Myrkl, the best cure for a hangover remains drinking less alcohol the day before.

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This "clock" is made up of about 20,000 neurons in the hypothalamus, the area near the center of the brain that coordinates your body's unconscious functions, like breathing and blood pressure. Humans aren't the only beings that have an internal clock system: All vertebrates—or mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish—have biological clocks, as do plants, fungi and bacteria. Biological clocks are why cats are most active at dawn and dusk, and why flowers bloom at certain times of day.

Circadian rhythms are also essential to health and well-being. They govern your body's physical, mental and behavioral changes over each 24-hour cycle in response to environmental cues like light and food. They're why more heart attacks and strokes occur early in the morning. They're also why mice that are missing their biological clocks age faster and have shorter lifespans, and people with a mutation in their circadian clock genes have abnormal sleep patterns. Chronic misalignment of your circadian rhythm with external cues, as seen in night-shift workers, can lead to a wide range of physical and mental disorders, including obesity, Type 2 diabetes, cancer and cardiovascular diseases.

In short, there is ample evidence that your biological clock is critical to your health. And chronobiologists like me are studying how the day-night cycle affects your body to better understand how you can modify your behaviors to use your internal clock to your advantage.

How biological rhythms affect your health

Your biological clock affects your health by regulating your sleep-wake cycles and fluctuations in blood pressure and body temperature.

It does this primarily by syncing your endocrine system to environmental light-dark cycles so that certain hormones are released in certain amounts at certain times of day.

The pineal grand in your brain, for example, produces melatonin, a hormone that helps regulate sleep in response to darkness. Doctors advise reducing exposure to artificial blue light from electronic devices before bedtime because it can disrupt melatonin secretion and sleep quality.

Your circadian rhythm also affects your metabolism. Among other things, sleep helps you regulate leptin, a hormone that controls appetite. Your leptin levels fluctuate throughout the day according to a rhythm set by your circadian clock. Insufficient or irregular sleep can disrupt leptin production, which can make us hungrier and lead to weight gain.

In recent years, researchers have discovered even more ways your circadian clock can affect your health. For example, there is now research suggesting that eating at set times of day, or time-restricted feeding, can prevent obesity and metabolic diseases. Depression and other mood disorders may also be linked to dysfunctional circadian control that lead to changes in how your genes are expressed.

The time of day when you take your medicine can also affect how well it works and how severe any side effects might be. Likewise, your biological clock is a potential target for cancer chemotherapies and anti-obesity treatments.

And finally, even your personality might be shaped by whether your internal clock make you a "morning person" or a "night person."

Your body has an internal clock that helps keep it in working order.

Getting the most out of exercise

Circadian clocks also provide a potential answer to when is the best time of day to maximize the benefits of physical exercise.

To study this, my colleagues and I collected blood and tissue samples from the brains, hearts, muscles, livers and fat of mice that exercised either before breakfast in the early morning or after dinner in the late evening. We used a tool called a mass spectrometer to detect approximately 600 to 900 molecules each organ produced. These metabolites served as real-time snapshots of how the mice responded to exercise at specific times of day.

We stitched these snapshots together to create a map of how exercise in the morning versus evening affected each of the mice's different organ systems—what we called an atlas of exercise metabolism.

Using this atlas, we saw that time of day affects how each organ uses energy during exercise. For instance, we found that early morning exercise reduced blood glucose levels more than late evening exercise. Exercise in the late evening, however, allowed the mice to benefit from energy they stored from their meals and increased their endurance.

Of course, mice and humans have many differences along with their similarities. For one, mice are more active at night than during the day. Still, we believe that our findings could help researchers better understand how exercise affects your health and, if timed appropriately, can be optimized based on time of day to meet your personal health goals.

Getting along with your biological clock

I believe that the field of chronobiology is growing, and we will produce even more research providing practical applications and insights into health and well-being in the future.

In my own work, for example, a better understanding of how exercising at different times of day affects your body could help tailor exercise plans to maximize specific benefits for patients with obesity, Type 2 diabetes and other diseases.

There is still much to learn about how your circadian clock works. But in the meantime, there are some tried and true ways people can synchronize their internal clocks for better health. These include regular exposure to sunlight to trigger the endocrine system to produce vitamin D, staying active during the day so you fall asleep more easily at night and avoiding caffeine and reducing your exposure to artificial light before bedtime.

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Typically highly educated, and with salaries well above average population levels, politicians are one important elite group. They are often accused of being too unlike those they represent, and slow to make policies that would improve the welfare of everyday people. In a recent study we investigated differences in mortality between politicians and the public and found that politicians generally live longer than the populations they represent.

Our analysis is the most comprehensive so far, based on data from 11 high-income countries: Australia, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Switzerland, the UK and the US. Previously, similar studies tracking long-term trends in health inequalities have focused on just a few countries, such as Sweden and the Netherlands.

Our study was based on more than 57,000 politicians, using historical data that in some cases dated back two centuries. To measure the inequalities, we matched each politician according to their country, age and gender to mortality data for the general public. Then, we compared the number of politicians who died each year with the number expected based on population mortality rates. We also calculated the difference in remaining life expectancy at the age of 45 (which is when, on average, politicians first get elected to office) between politicians and the public.

For nearly all countries, politicians had similar mortality to the general population in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But throughout the second half of the 20th century, lifespans of politicians grew more rapidly, meaning that in all countries we studied they lived longer than the general population.

The graph above shows the most recent estimates of life expectancy for politicians and the public. While life expectancy varies across countries, there is much less variation in the life expectancy of politicians. In most countries, politicians' remaining life expectancy at the age of 45 is around 40 years. The general public's life expectancy across countries is lower and more varied (ranging from 34.5 years in the US to 37.8 years in Australia). Currently, politicians can expect to live between three and seven years longer than the public.

Over much of the 20th century, the remaining life expectancy of 45-year-old politicians across all countries with available data increased by an average of 14.6 years. For the general population across the same countries, the average increase was 10.2 years.

Remaining life expectancy of 45-year-old politicians and the general populations in 11 countries. Author provided

Why politicians might be living longer

While gaps in income and wealth may partly explain these trends, they do not appear to be the only factor. Income inequality (measured by the share of overall income belonging to the richest in society) began to rise in the 1980s. In contrast, differences in life expectancy between politicians and the public began to widen as early as the 1940s.

Politicians' survival advantage may be due to a variety of factors, including differences in standards of healthcare and lifestyle factors such as smoking and diet. Cigarettes were widely popular in the first half of the 20th century and smoking was prevalent across all sections of society by the 1950s. This is no longer the case. Public health measures, starting with bans on tobacco advertising, mean smoking rates have fallen, especially among more advantaged professional groups, such as politicians.

It is also possible that the introduction of new campaigning methods (including television broadcasting and social media) changed the type of person who became a politician.

Women tend to live longer than men generally, but in most countries, data on female politicians were available only after 1960. We found that trends in life expectancy gaps between politicians and the general public were similar for women and men.

In many countries, the public expects transparency and disclosure about politicians' earnings. The other advantages they have, such as longer life expectancy, have been much less appreciated. Our study focused only on politicians in high-income, democratic countries where data were readily available. Conducting more analysis, particularly of low and middle-income countries, could improve our understanding of global health inequality trends and help find solutions.

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In a study conducted in Columbus, researchers found that neighborhoods with more dogs had lower rates of homicide, robbery and, to a lesser extent, aggravated assaults compared to areas with fewer dogs, at least when residents also had high levels of trust in each other.

The results suggest that people walking their dogs puts more "eyes on the street," which can discourage crime, said Nicolo Pinchak, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in sociology at The Ohio State University.

"People walking their dogs are essentially patrolling their neighborhoods," Pinchak said. "They see when things are not right, and when there are suspect outsiders in the area. It can be a crime deterrent."

The study was published recently in the journal Social Forces.

Sociologists have long theorized that a combination of mutual trust and local surveillance among residents of a neighborhood can deter criminals, said study co-author Christopher Browning, a professor of sociology at Ohio State.

But there hasn't been a good measure of how residents provide surveillance of neighborhood streets. "We thought that dog walking probably captures that pretty well, which is one reason why we decided to do this study," Browning said.

For the study, researchers looked at crime statistics from 2014 to 2016 for 595 census block groups—the equivalent of neighborhoods—in the Columbus area.

They obtained survey data from a marketing firm that asked Columbus residents in 2013 if they had a dog in their household.

Finally, they used data from the Adolescent Health and Development in Context study (which Browning runs) to measure trust in individual neighborhoods. As part of that study, residents were asked to rate how much they agreed that "people on the streets can be trusted" in their neighborhoods.

Research has shown that trust among neighbors is an important part of deterring crime, because it suggests residents will help each other when facing a threat and have a sense of "collective efficacy" that they can have a positive impact on their area, Pinchak said.

Results of this study showed, as expected, that neighborhoods with high levels of trust had lower levels of homicide, robbery and aggravated assaults when compared to neighborhoods with low levels of trust.

But among high-trust neighborhoods, those with high concentrations of dogs showed an additional drop in crime compared to those with low concentrations of dogs.

Among the high-trust neighborhoods, neighborhoods high in dog concentration had about two-thirds the robbery rates of those low in dog concentration and about half the homicide rates, the study found.

It really has to do with the dog walking, Pinchak said.

"Trust doesn't help neighborhoods as much if you don't have people out there on the streets noticing what is going on. That's what dog walking does," Pinchak said. And that's why dogs have a crime-fighting advantage over cats and other pets that don't need walking.

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

Results showed that the trust and dog-walking combination helped reduce street crimes: those crimes like homicides and robberies that tend to occur in public locations, including streets and sidewalks.

The study found that more dogs in a neighborhood was also related to fewer property crimes, like burglaries, irrespective of how much residents trust each other, Pinchak said.

That's because barking and visible dogs can keep criminals away from buildings where the dogs are found—and neighborhood trust and surveillance is not needed as a factor, as it is in street crimes.

The protective effect of dogs and trust was found even when a wide range of other factors related to crime was taken into account, including the proportion of young males in the neighborhood, residential instability and socioeconomic status.

Overall, the results suggest that it is beneficial to have a lot of trust in your neighbors to prevent crime—particularly if you add a lot of dogs and dog walkers.

"There has already been a lot of research that shows dogs are good for the health and well-being of their human companions," Pinchak said.

"Our study adds another reason why dogs are good for us."

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Their town, Lismore, was caught in the catastrophic floods that submerged southern Queensland and northern New South Wales in February and March. Those floods have become the most costly in the nation's history, according to the Insurance Council of Australia.

The latest flooding to hit Australia came at the weekend when Sydney was hit with torrential rain. Thousands were told to evacuate their homes and roads were cut by deep water.

Back in February, perched on a hill the Sprogis family home was safe, but the couple were worried about their downtown physiotherapy business. It was purposely located on the second floor but even that was not enough.

From the water-height charts they could tell the office was going to be inundated, but it was too late to save anything, the authorities had already issued an evacuation order.

Karl Sprogis thought his second floor office might escape the flooding

"We could have put things up higher at that time, had we known, but we didn't," says Mr Sprogis, who had been at his practice the night before.

"I even left my new laptop on the office desk, thinking, well, [the water has] never been in here before so it won't come in."

By the following day, his practice was 1.8m underwater, files, records and equipment all damaged or lost.

The Sprogis physiotherapy practice was badly damaged

Meanwhile in New South Wales in Gibberagee, children's book author Candy Lawrence watched as 2,000 copies of her books were sucked into the deluge.

Ms Lawrence had been carefully watching government flood warnings and gathering supplies, anticipating that nearby roads would be cut off, as often happened when the area flooded.

But, like Mr Sprogis, she was not expecting water to sweep through her property and that of her neighbours, some of whom had to scramble onto their roof to escape the fast-rising floodwaters.

"I feel like the world is pretty much ending, so why bother educating children?," she says, referencing her destroyed book collection and the terrifying new weather patterns.

Water swept through the home of Candy Lawrence

Like thousands of others caught in the disaster, Mr Sprogis and Ms Lawrence would have liked more warning. So why wasn't there a better system, which could alert them in real-time if their properties were in danger?

Juliette Murphy, a water resources engineer specialising in hydrology and flooding asked this question after watching her friend's house in Brisbane flood over the roof peak in 2011. The question came up again after she moved to Calgary, Canada, and witnessed a similarly devastating flood in 2013.

Ms Murphy knew that during the Brisbane and Calgary floods, hydrology forecasts had predicted where rivers would peak at certain bridges, but she realised it wasn't enough.

"If you aren't a hydraulic engineer [who is able] to translate that flood height into an impact to properties - your personal property, your car - it can be very challenging," she says.

Ms Murphy also notes that static flood maps - including those that chart one-in-100-year floods - are also expensive, and can take days, or weeks, to produce. This makes them more suited to development planning and infrastructure design applications, rather than emergency planning and management.

"I was thinking, there has to be something more," says Ms Murphy.

FloodMapp co-founders Ryan Prosser and Juliette Murphy

She began dedicating her evenings and weekends to looking for a solution, which eventually led her to co-found FloodMapp with web developer, Ryan Prosser.

With a significant research and development investment, FloodMapp was launched in 2018.

FloodMapp's technology can rapidly forecast water levels to map floods before they happen.

It does this by ingesting huge amounts of historical data (including things like rainfall and ground saturation levels) and uses artificial intelligence to accurately model the way water will behave.

The software also uses information about land features and river systems to work out how a flood will affect different areas. The company claims its models can run 100,000 times faster than traditional techniques.

An added benefit is that the resulting models can refresh hourly using real-time river sensor data and rainfall forecasts.

The technology is not available to individuals, instead it is being integrated into services offered by government agencies in Australia and the US, to better understand floods before, during and after they happen.

Researchers at the University of Melbourne's Department of Infrastructure Engineering are taking a similar approach, understanding that speed is key for emergency planning.

Making flood warnings more specific is part of the challenge

Like Ms Murphy, flood modeller turned researcher, Dr Wenyan Wu, is looking at ways to simulate flood levels over time, at speed, using machine learning techniques. Importantly, this is being done Dr Wu says without compromising accuracy and without costing the earth.

The availability of accurate real-time data that can be interpreted at a property-specific level is a huge part of the challenge, but being able to disseminate meaningful data to the public is also key.

As Dr Wu says, "If people's collective comprehension [of flood risk] doesn't improve, you will not actually improve the situation."

Even the concept of a one-in-100-year flood is widely misunderstood. (It means a flood event has a one in 100 chance of happening in any given year, as opposed to there only being one major flood every 100 years.)

That's where companies like the Australian-based Early Warning Network (EWN) come in. EWN sends opt-in SMS (text messages), email, landline and app push alerts to residents and businesses in at-risk areas, typically via insurers, councils and other government agencies who have signed up to their services.

Flood alerts are primarily based on data collected and distributed by Australia's Bureau of Meteorology.

Michael Bath says people can "tune-out" repetitive flood warnings

However, as operations manager Michael Bath explains, EWN has a 24/7 team of human severe weather forecasters (all of whom have an understanding of threats from their experience as storm chasers). This team assess the warnings, eliminate duplication, and send geo-targeted alerts, using custom-made software.

This ensures people receive clear and localised information.

"If you've ever had automated warnings from weather agencies before, [you'll know] they can be very repetitive," says Mr Bath. "If you automatically send that to residents, they just get really annoyed with it and tune out."

Mr Bath, Dr Wu and Ms Murphy all agree that ultimately governments need to adopt these systems and technologies, and make planning decisions about whether future development should be permitted on floodplains and whether buy-back schemes are warranted in high-risk areas.

However, in many cases, moving entire communities or renovating properties at scale using flood-resistant materials is not practical in the immediate future, given these measures require significant funding and political will.

"We need something today, right now, because we are living on floodplains, and emergency warnings and alerts fill a critical role to improve safety, to save lives and prevent damage," says Ms Murphy. "We have to work together to build a safer future."

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Physics meets paleontology: The hotly debated mechanics of pterosaur flight

The same process is also right at the beginning of everything we eat. Plants use sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide to grow, and then humans either eat those plants directly or after they have become part of an animal, mushroom, or anything else we like to munch on. All of the energy that ends up in our bodies starts with sunlight captured by plants through photosynthesis. There’s just a tiny hitch in this system—plants are actually pretty bad at turning sunlight into growth. By some estimates, plants convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into new biomass at an efficiency as low as 1 percent.

Robert Jinkerson, a professor at the University of California, Riverside, looked at the lackluster efficiency of photosynthesis and saw an engineering problem. If we can squeeze more energy out of every square inch of sunlight, then we can reduce the overall amount of land we need to grow food. “Our ultimate goal is to transform the way that we think about how to produce crops and agriculture,” says Jinkerson. “If we can be more efficient with the area needed to produce the food needed for humanity, then we can turn agricultural lands back to natural lands.”

One way to do that might be to grow crops in the dark using electricity provided by solar panels, which are many times more efficient than plants at turning sunlight into energy. In a new scientific paper published in the journal Nature Food, Jinkerson and his colleagues describe using solar panels to power a process called electrocatalysis, which creates a liquid that algae, yeast, and plants can use to grow instead of sunlight.

The researchers used solar panels to run a machine that converts carbon dioxide, electricity, and water into acetate—a molecule that can be diluted in water and used to feed plants. They then fed this mixture to algae, yeast, mushrooms, and a selection of commonly grown plants, including cowpea, tomato, canola, and rice. The algae and yeast both grew pretty efficiently on the acetate mixture, which isn’t exactly surprising, as scientists already know that these species can eat acetate. What was more surprising was that the crop plants also consumed the acetate and grew, even though they were growing in complete darkness.

But before you shut away your tomato plants in a cupboard, a word of warning. Jinkerson and his colleagues only knew that the plants were eating the acetate because they dissolved them after they’d grown for a little while and analyzed them to see whether they contained any carbon molecules from acetate. But giving the plants enough acetate to grow on ended up proving toxic to them—so although plants can technically grow on acetate, they don’t exactly thrive on it.

This means that we’re a long way from being able to grow any common commercial crops in the dark. But this technology could be of interest for vertical farms, which already run up huge electricity bills on LED lights that power photosynthesis for their plants. Jinkerson thinks that if researchers can find a way to grow tomato plants that really thrive on acetate, it could be a much more energy-efficient way for vertical farms to divert electricity to acetate production instead of lighting.

But even if we could bring more tomato plants indoors, that wouldn’t necessarily free up much land to return to nature. The majority of agricultural land is used for pasture to graze animals or to grow feed for animals. A lot of the remaining land is used to grow commodity crops, such as wheat, soy, or corn, with only a relatively small amount of land used to grow fruits and vegetables. These commodity crops are extremely cheap to grow outside, so investing lots of time and money to grow them indoors doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Growing plants in the dark might be useful in places where energy and space are scarce—like on a spaceflight to Mars—but it’s not suitable for most crops on Earth. (Jinkerson’s project was also one of the winners of the first phase of NASA’s Deep Space Food Challenge. For the next phase, the team will build a prototype food-growing device to share with the space agency.)

There are already lots of ways that we can use cropland more efficiently, points out Elizabete Carmo-Silva, a professor of crop physiology at Lancaster University in the UK. Reducing food waste, eating less meat, and burning fewer crops for biofuels all help us get more edible calories out of every hectare of land. And we shouldn’t write photosynthesis off yet, either.

“We have nothing else that provides oxygen and food at basically very little cost to us,” says Carmo-Silva. She’s currently working on a project to increase the photosynthetic efficiency of cowpea—an important crop in Africa and Asia. “If we really want to tackle the challenge of food security and have food security everywhere in the world, we need to address it with multiple solutions,” she says. Her team is exploring whether it’s possible to use breeding or gene-editing to make versions of cowpea that are 20 percent more efficient when it comes to photosynthesis.

Finding ways to improve photosynthesis rather than bypassing it altogether might end up having a bigger impact on the world, says Amanda Cavanagh, a plant scientist at the University of Essex in the UK. “For things like soybean or maize or wheat, our inefficient photosynthesis is likely still to be our best bet for realizing gains in those crops.”

But Jinkerson’s work also raises some tricky questions about the kinds of food people will accept. Much of the work on improving photosynthesis involves gene-editing plants, which is still a controversial technology in parts of the world—particularly in the EU. Which is more natural: a gene-edited plant, or one that has never seen a ray of sunlight? And if one day we manage to grow tomatoes in the darkness, Cavanagh says, would they still be as tasty as those grown in the open air? If Jinkerson’s prototype food-growing device works as planned, NASA astronauts might be the first to have an answer.

Scientists Are Trying to Grow Crops in the Dark

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How the Yurok Tribe is bringing back the California Condor

To help speed this process as individuals, we've got to do everything we can to cut down our use of fossil fuels. But many people aren't aware of the most effective ways to do this. Thankfully, the latest report by the UN climate change panel IPCC devotes a chapter to all the ways in which changes in people's behavior can accelerate the transition to net zero.

The chapter includes an analysis of 60 individual actions which can help fight climate change, building on research led by Diana Ivanova at the University of Leeds – and to which I contributed.

We grouped these actions into three areas: avoiding consumption, shifting consumption and improving consumption (making it more efficient). The charts below, produced for the IPCC report, show what we found.

What to avoid

By far the most effective things to avoid involve transport. Living without a car reduces greenhouse gas emissions by an average of 2 tonnes of CO2 emissions per person per year, while avoiding a single long distance return flight cuts emissions by an average of 1.9 tonnes. That's equivalent to driving a typical EU car more than 16,000 km from Hamburg, Germany to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and back.

(Max Callaghan, Author provided)

Since the vast majority of the world's population do not fly at all – and of those who do, only a small percentage fly frequently – fliers can make very substantial reductions to their carbon footprints with each flight they avoid.

What to shift

But living sustainably is not just about giving things up. Large reductions in emissions can be achieved by shifting to a different way of doing things. Because driving is so polluting, for example, shifting to public transport, walking or cycling can make an enormous change, with added benefits for your personal health and local air pollution levels.

(Max Callaghan, Author provided)

Likewise, because of the high emissions associated with meat and dairy – particularly those produced by farming sheep and cows – shifting towards more sustainable diets can substantially reduce your carbon footprint. A totally vegan diet is the most effective way to do this, but sizeable savings can be made simply by switching from beef and lamb to pork and chicken.

What to improve

Finally, the things we do already could be made more efficient by improving carbon efficiency at home: for example by using insulation and heat pumps, or producing your own renewable energy by installing solar panels.

(Max Callaghan, Author provided)

Switching from a combustion car to an electric one – ideally a battery EV, which generates much larger reductions in emissions than hybrid or fuel cell EVs – will make your car journeys more efficient. Plus, its effect on emissions will increase as time goes by and the amount of electricity generated by renewables grows.

In the race to net zero, every tonne of CO2 really does count. If more of us take even a few of these suggestions into account, we're collectively more likely to be able to achieve the ambitious goals set out in the Paris climate agreement. Of course, these changes will need to be backed by major political action on sustainability at the same time.

If we're to use less fossil fuel energy, the use of fossil fuels needs to be either restricted or made more expensive. The social consequences of this need to be carefully managed so that carbon pricing schemes can benefit people on lower incomes: which can happen if revenues are redistributed to take the financial burden off poorer households.

But there's a whole lot more that governments could do to help people to live more sustainably, such as providing better, safer public transport and "active travel" infrastructure (such as bike lanes and pedestrian zones) so that people have alternatives to driving and flying.

There's no avoiding the fact that if political solutions are to address climate change with the urgency our global situation requires, these solutions will limit the extent to which we can indulge in carbon-intensive behaviours. More than anything, we must vote into power those prepared to make such tough decisions for the sake of our planet's future.

Max Callaghan, Postdoctoral Researcher in Climate Change, University of Leeds.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Source

On October 9, 2009, a 2-ton rocket smashed into the moon traveling at 9,000 kilometers per hour. As it exploded in a shower of dust and heated the lunar surface to hundreds of degrees Celsius, the jet-black crater into which it plummeted, called Cabeus, briefly filled with light for the first time in billions of years.

The crash was no accident. NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission aimed to see what would be kicked up from the lunar shadows by the impact. A spacecraft trailing the rocket flew through the dust plume to sample it, while NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter observed from afar. The results of the experiment were astonishing: Scientists detected 155 kilograms of water vapor mixed into the dust plume. They had, for the first time, found water on the moon. “It was absolutely definitive,” said Anthony Colaprete of NASA’s Ames Research Center, the principal investigator of LCROSS.

The moon isn’t an obvious reservoir of water. “It’s really weird when you stop to think about it,” said Mark Robinson, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University. Its lack of atmosphere and extreme temperatures should cause any water to almost instantly evaporate. Yet about 25 years ago, spacecraft began to detect signatures of hydrogen around the moon’s poles, hinting that water might be trapped there as ice. LCROSS proved this theory. Scientists now think there’s not just a bit of water ice on the moon; there are 6 trillion kilograms of it.

Most of this ice resides in peculiar features at the moon’s poles called permanently shadowed regions (PSRs). These are craters like Cabeus into which the sun can’t reach, because of the geometry of the moon’s orbit. “They’re in permanent darkness,” said Valentin Bickel, a planetary scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany.

PSRs are of immense interest to scientists. Inside, temperatures can drop below minus 170 degrees Celsius. “Some PSRs are colder than the surface of Pluto,” said Parvathy Prem, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland. This means ice on or below the lunar surface in PSRs won’t necessarily melt; instead it might have survived there for billions of years. Studying the ice’s chemical composition should reveal how it was delivered to the moon, in turn illuminating the origin of water on Earth, or indeed any rocky world around any star. It could also be a resource for future human activities on the moon.

Thousands of permanently shadowed regions, shown in orange, lie in the vicinity of the moon’s north pole (left) and south pole.Illustration: Lunar QuickMap

Studies so far have provided a tantalizing glimpse at best. But that’s about to change. Next year, robotic vehicles will enter the bewildering icy depths of PSRs for the first time, revealing what the interiors of these shadowed craters look like. By the decade’s end, NASA plans to send humans to explore in person.

On the eve of this new era of moon landings, a slew of fresh studies of PSRs have revealed that these shadowed regions are even stranger than scientists imagined. What will we find lurking in the shadows?

“I don’t know what we’re going to see,” said Robinson, the lead scientist for next year’s robotic mission. “That’s the coolest thing.”

Water, Water, Everywhere

Speculation about PSRs dates back to 1952, when the American chemist Harold Urey first hypothesized their existence on the moon. “Near its poles there may be depressions on which the sun never shines,” he wrote. He observed that, whereas Earth orbits the sun with its rotational axis tilted by 23.5 degrees, the moon orbits at a mere 1.5-degree tilt. This means the sun’s rays strike its poles nearly horizontally, and the rims of polar craters will block light from directly reaching their depths. However, Urey believed that any ice in these sunless locations would have been “rapidly lost” because of the moon’s lack of atmosphere.

Then in 1961, the geophysicist Kenneth Watson of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory theorized that ice could persist inside PSRs. Nightside temperatures on the moon were known to plunge to minus 150 degrees Celsius; Watson and two colleagues argued that this meant ice would get trapped in the coldest places, despite the exposure to space. “There should still be detectable amounts of ice in the permanently shaded areas of the moon,” they wrote.

Scientists debated the possibility of ice in PSRs until the early 1990s, when radar instruments detected signs of ice at the poles of Mercury, which was also thought to have permanently shadowed craters. In 1994, using a radar instrument on NASA’s Clementine spacecraft, scientists detected an enhanced signal over the moon’s south pole that was consistent with the presence of water ice. The hunt was on.

In 1999, Jean-Luc Margot at Cornell University and colleagues pinpointed PSRs on the moon that could contain ice. They used a radar dish in the Mojave Desert in California to make topographic maps of the lunar poles. “We simulated the direction of sunlight and used our topographic maps to identify regions that were permanently shadowed,” Margot said.

They located just a handful of PSRs, but subsequent studies have identified thousands. The largest measure tens of kilometers across inside giant craters, such as Shackleton crater at the lunar south pole, which is twice as deep as the Grand Canyon. The smallest span mere centimeters. At the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference held in Houston in March, Caitlin Ahrens, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, presented research suggesting that some PSRs may grow and shrink slightly as temperatures on the moon fluctuate. “These are very dynamic cold regions,” Ahrens said in an interview. “They are not stagnant.”

New research indicates that some craters also contain double-shadowed regions, or “shadows within shadows,” said Patrick O’Brien, a graduate student at the University of Arizona, who presented evidence for the idea in Houston. While PSRs don’t experience direct sunlight, most receive some reflected light bouncing off the crater’s rim, and this can melt ice. Double-shadowed regions are secondary craters inside PSRs that don’t get reflected light. “Temperatures can be even colder than the permanent shadows,” said O’Brien; they reach as low as minus 250 degrees Celsius.

Icy Secrets

The double-shadowed regions are cold enough to freeze more exotic ices, like carbon dioxide and nitrogen, should any exist there. Scientists say the chemical composition of these and of the water ice inside PSRs could reveal how water got to the moon—and, more importantly, to Earth, and to rocky worlds in general. “Water is essential to life as we know it,” said Margaret Landis, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. The question is, she said, “When and how did the conditions favorable for life on Earth form?” Whereas Earth’s past has been scrambled by geological processes, the moon is a museum of the solar system’s history; its ice is thought to have remained mostly untouched since its arrival.

There are three predominant theories about how water got to the moon. The first is that it arrived via asteroid or comet impacts. In this scenario, when the solar system formed, water molecules in the hot inner solar system were vaporized and blown away by the solar wind; only water in the frigid outskirts could condense and accumulate into icy bodies. These bodies subsequently bombarded the inner solar system, including the moon, delivering water. The second theory is that volcanic eruptions on the moon sometime in its middle age formed a thin, temporary lunar atmosphere that engendered ice formation at the poles. Or solar wind could have transported hydrogen to the moon that mixed with oxygen to form ice.

In February, a re-analysis of the LCROSS plume published in Nature Communications indicated that the ice in Cabeus crater is most likely of cometary origin. Analyzing the amount of nitrogen, sulfur and carbon frozen into the ice along with water, Kathleen Mandt of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and colleagues found that “the best explanation was comets,” said Mandt. “The nitrogen-to-carbon ratio was way beyond what was reasonable for volcanoes to have delivered.”

If the moon’s ice was delivered exclusively by comets, the same might have been true for Earth. That could mean rocky worlds must experience such impacts to accumulate the water necessary for life to flourish. However, Landis says it’s too early to say whether Mandt’s research holds true for all ice on the moon. “The community needs more time to digest it,” she said.

If some lunar ice is determined to be of volcanic origin, this would suggest worlds hold an innate ability to generate water from their interiors rather than relying on impacts. “It might be not all solar systems have lots of comets or asteroids,” said Landis, “but solar systems that form rocky planets might have this ability to have [volcanic] eruptions rear up water.”

Aside from looking for exotic ice in PSRs, scientists also want to measure the water ice’s proportion of deuterium, a heavier isotope of hydrogen. Substantial deuterium is more consistent with what’s found in comets (although rates vary), whereas less of it would point to solar wind. A volcanic origin would fall somewhere in the middle. Other elements will be informative, too; for instance, ice originating from volcanoes should contain abundant sulfur drawn up from the lunar interior, said Paul Hayne, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Into the Abyss

No previous foray to the moon has ventured into its permanent shadows; the Apollo landings took place near the moon’s equator at a time when knowledge of PSRs was in its infancy. In 2019, China’s Chang’e-4 lander and rover touched down at the south pole, but it did not target PSRs.

In 2017, however, President Trump signed a directive to NASA to return humans to the moon, an initiative later named Artemis. Ahead of the first crewed Artemis landings in the mid-2020s, which may include the first sorties into the moon’s permanently shadowed craters, NASA is paying commercial companies to conduct initial robotic exploration.

Illustration: Merrill Sherman/Quanta Magazine/NASA

Houston-based Intuitive Machines will be the first of these companies to explore a PSR, albeit briefly. Their Nova-C lander, scheduled to launch by the end of this year on a SpaceX rocket, will touch down on a ridge near Shackleton crater, a possible target for subsequent human exploration. The lander will then deploy a suitcase-size vehicle called the Micro-Nova Hopper. Intuitive Machines revealed details of the excursion at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference: The Hopper will use thrusters to jump across the lunar surface, up to hundreds of meters at a time; in three hops, it will reach the edge of the 100-meter-wide Marston crater, which contains a PSR. Then the Hopper will fire itself above Marston and descend into the pitch-black depths.

The lander has cameras and lights, but it’s unclear what it will see. Sheets of surface ice are possible, said Robinson, the mission’s lead scientist, but he says it’s more likely that the vehicle’s lights will reflect off ice crystals mixed in with the lunar soil. Or if there’s minimal ice on the surface, it may not definitively show up in images at all. Whatever the case, the view will be historic.

The Hopper’s dip into Marston will last no more than 45 minutes, and the scientific return will be limited—the primary goal is simply to demonstrate that the hopping approach works. But we won’t have long to wait for a more thorough dive into the lunar abyss.

Drilling Down

This summer, the inaugural launch of NASA’s new Space Launch System rocket (which will propel Artemis missions to the moon) will carry several small spacecraft that will study PSRs from lunar orbit. A Korean orbiter launching in August, meanwhile, will carry ShadowCam, a purpose-built NASA instrument designed to image PSRs.

The defining moment in robotic PSR exploration, however, will come in late 2023, when a golf cart-size rover called VIPER (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover) will head to the moon on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. Upon exiting its landing vehicle, VIPER will drive into three of the moon’s permanently shadowed regions and drill into the ground.

Operating for up to 10 hours at a time before exiting to recharge its solar-powered batteries, the rover will drill up to a meter deep for subsurface ice, or dig into any exposed ice on the surface. “If there’s a block of ice we’re going to know right away, because of how hard it is to get through,” said Kris Zacny of Honeybee Robotics in Colorado, which designed the drill. The team expects to perform up to 50 drilling sessions.

Engineers tested a model of the VIPER rover at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, in 2020.Photograph: Bridget Caswell/Alcyon Technical Services/NASA

VIPER will “revolutionize” our knowledge of these regions, said Landis. It will use spectrometers to analyze any ice that’s found, revealing the ratio of deuterium to hydrogen and looking for hints of carbon dioxide or nitrogen. VIPER may provide conclusive insight into where the moon’s ice comes from, and the general conditions under which ice might be found on rocky bodies. “We will have a quantum leap in our understanding,” said Colaprete, VIPER’s project scientist.

Drops to Drink

The scientific advances will come on the coattails of a different project. If ice is accessible on or near the surface in PSRs, NASA hopes that astronauts could use it as either drinking water or fuel. NASA is currently planning for the first crewed Artemis landing in 2025 to touch down near a PSR so that the astronauts can see for themselves how viable such an idea might be.

“This is not the Apollo program; we’re planning to stay there for a whole month,” said Jim Green, NASA’s former chief scientist. He added, “The concept of acquiring materials and having habitats on the moon is viable.”

Various proposals for how to extract and utilize water ice are under development, said Kevin Cannon, a space resource expert at Colorado School of Mines. “People are looking at mechanical systems like diggers, backhoes and excavators,” he said. Concentrated sunlight or an oven would then be used to extract the water from the excavated lunar soil. Another idea is to “skip the excavation step and just directly heat the ground in some kind of tent,” Cannon said.

Confirmation that there is indeed accessible ice on the moon could come by the start of next year, with the first images from inside a permanently shadowed lunar crater. By the end of 2023 we may know for sure how it got there.

“There are so many fundamental things we don’t yet understand,” said Prem. “We really are at the beginning.”

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

Secrets of the Moon’s Permanent Shadows Are Coming to Light

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Last week, I missed a real-life meeting because I hadn’t set a reminder on my smartphone, leaving someone I’d never met before alone in a café. But on the same day, I remembered the name of the actor who played Will Smith’s aunt in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air in 1991 (Janet Hubert). Memory is weird, unpredictable and, neuroscientifically, not yet entirely understood. When memory lapses like mine happen (which they do, a lot), it feels both easy and logical to blame the technology we’ve so recently adopted. Does having more memory in our pockets mean there’s less in our heads? Am I losing my ability to remember things – from appointments to what I was about to do next – because I expect my phone to do it for me? Before smartphones, our heads would have held a cache of phone numbers and our memories would contain a cognitive map, built up over time, which would allow us to navigate – for smartphone users, that is no longer true.

Our brains and our smartphones form a complex web of interactions: the smartphonification of life has been rising since the mid 2000s, but was accelerated by the pandemic, as was internet use in general. Prolonged periods of stress, isolation and exhaustion – common themes since March 2020 – are well known for their impact on memory. Of those surveyed by memory researcher Catherine Loveday in 2021, 80% felt that their memories were worse than before the pandemic. We are – still – shattered, not just by Covid-19, but also by the miserable national and global news cycle. Many of us self-soothe with distractions like social media. Meanwhile, endless scrolling can, at times, create its own distress, and phone notifications and self interrupting to check for them, also seem to affect what, how and if we remember.

So what happens when we outsource part of our memory to an external device? Does it enable us to squeeze more and more out of life, because we aren’t as reliant on our fallible brains to cue things up for us? Are we so reliant on smartphones that they will ultimately change how our memories work (sometimes called digital amnesia)? Or do we just occasionally miss stuff when we don’t remember the reminders?

Endless scrolling can, at times, create its own distress, and phone notifications seem to affect what we remember

Neuroscientists are divided. Chris Bird is professor of cognitive neuroscience in the School of Psychology at the University of Sussex and runs research by the Episodic Memory Group. “We have always offloaded things into external devices, like writing down notes, and that’s enabled us to have more complex lives,” he says. “I don’t have a problem with using external devices to augment our thought processes or memory processes. We’re doing it more, but that frees up time to concentrate, focus on and remember other things.” He thinks that the kind of things we use our phones to remember are, for most human brains, difficult to remember. “I take a photo of my parking ticket so I know when it runs out, because it’s an arbitrary thing to remember. Our brains aren’t evolved to remember highly specific, one-off things. Before we had devices, you would have to make a quite an effort to remember the time you needed to be back at your car.”

Professor Oliver Hardt, who studies the neurobiology of memory and forgetting at McGill University in Montreal, is much more cautious.

“Once you stop using your memory it will get worse, which makes you use your devices even more,” he says. “We use them for everything. If you go to a website for a recipe, you press a button and it sends the ingredient list to your smartphone. It’s very convenient, but convenience has a price. It’s good for you to do certain things in your head.”

Hardt is not keen on our reliance on GPS. “We can predict that prolonged use of GPS likely will reduce grey matter density in the hippocampus. Reduced grey matter density in this brain area goes along with a variety of symptoms, such as increased risk for depression and other psychopathologies, but also certain forms of dementia. GPS-based navigational systems don’t require you to form a complex geographic map. Instead, they just tell you orientations, like ‘Turn left at next light.’ These are very simple behavioural responses (here: turn left) at a certain stimulus (here: traffic light). These kinds of spatial behaviours do not engage the hippocampus very much, unlike those spatial strategies that require the knowledge of a geographic map, in which you can locate any point, coming from any direction and which requires [cognitively] complex computations. When exploring the spatial capacities of people who have been using GPS for a very long time, they show impairments in spatial memory abilities that require the hippocampus. Map reading is hard and that’s why we give it away to devices so easily. But hard things are good for you, because they engage cognitive processes and brain structures that have other effects on your general cognitive functioning.”

Map reading is hard and that’s why we give it away to devices so easily. But hard things are good for you

Hardt doesn’t have data yet, but believes, “the cost of this might be an enormous increase in dementia. The less you use that mind of yours, the less you use the systems that are responsible for complicated things like episodic memories, or cognitive flexibility, the more likely it is to develop dementia. There are studies showing that, for example, it is really hard to get dementia when you are a university professor, and the reason is not that these people are smarter – it’s that until old age, they are habitually engaged in tasks that are very mentally demanding.” (Other scientists disagree – Daniel Schacter, a Harvard psychologist who wrote the seminal Seven Sins Of Memory: How The Mind Forgets and Remembers, thinks effects from things like GPS are “task specific”, only.)

While smartphones can obviously open up whole new vistas of knowledge, they can also drag us away from the present moment, like it’s a beautiful day, unexperienced because you’re head down, WhatsApping a meal or a conversation. When we’re not attending to an experience, we are less likely to recall it properly, and fewer recalled experiences could even limit our capacity to have new ideas and being creative. As the renowned neuroscientist and memory researcher Wendy Suzuki recently put it on the Huberman Lab neuroscience podcast, “If we can’t remember what we’ve done, the information we’ve learned and the events of our lives, it changes us… [The part of the brain which remembers] really defines our personal histories. It defines who we are.”

Catherine Price, science writer and author of How to Break Up With Your Phone, concurs. “What we pay attention to in the moment adds up to our life,” she says. “Our brains cannot multitask. We think we can. But any moment where multitasking seems successful, it’s because one of those tasks was not cognitively demanding, like you can fold laundry and listen to the radio. If you’re paying attention to your phone, you’re not paying attention to anything else. That might seem like a throwaway observation, but it’s actually deeply profound. Because you will only remember the things you pay attention to. If you’re not paying attention, you’re literally not going to have a memory of it to remember.”

If you’re not paying attention, you’re literally not going to have a memory of it to remember

The Cambridge neuroscientist Barbara Sahakian has evidence of this, too. “In an experiment in 2010, three different groups had to complete a reading task,” she says. “One group got instant messaging before it started, one got instant messaging during the task, and one got no instant messaging, and then there was a comprehension test. What they found was that the people getting instant messages couldn’t remember what they just read.”

Price is much more worried about what being perpetually distracted by our phones – termed “continual partial attention” by the tech expert Linda Stone – does to our memories than using their simpler functions. “I’m not getting distracted by my address book,” she says.

And she doesn’t believe smartphones free us up to do more. “Let’s be real with ourselves: how many of us are using the time afforded us by our banking app to write poetry? We just passively consume crap on Instagram.” Price is from Philadelphia. “What would have happened if Benjamin Franklin had had Twitter? Would he have been on Twitter all the time? Would he have made his inventions and breakthroughs?

“I became really interested in whether the constant distractions caused by our devices might be impacting our ability to actually not just accumulate memories to begin with, but transfer them into long-term storage in a way that might impede our ability to think deep and interesting thoughts,” she says. “One of the things that impedes our brain’s ability to transfer memories from short- to long-term storage is distraction. If you get distracted in the middle of it” – by a notification, or by the overwhelming urge to pick up your phone – “you’re not actually going to have the physical changes take place that are required to store that memory.”

It’s impossible to know for sure, because no one measured our level of intellectual creativity before smartphones took off, but Price thinks smartphone over-use could be harming our ability to be insightful. “An insight is being able to connect two disparate things in your mind. But in order to have an insight and be creative, you have to have a lot of raw material in your brain, like you couldn’t cook a recipe if you didn’t have any ingredients: you can’t have an insight if you don’t have the material in your brain, which really is long term memories.” (Her theory was backed by the 92-year-old Nobel prize-winning neuroscientist and biochemist Eric Kandel, who has studied how distraction affects memory – Price bumped into him on a train and grilled him about her idea. “I’ve got a selfie of me with a giant grin and Eric looking a bit confused.”) Psychologist professor Larry Rosen, co-author (with neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley) of The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World, also agrees: “Constant distractions make it difficult to encode information in memory.”

You can’t have an insight if you don’t have the material in your brain

Smartphones are, of course, made to hijack our attention. “The apps that make money by taking our attention are designed to interrupt us,” says Price. “I think of notifications as interruptions because that’s what they’re doing.”

For Oliver Hardt, phones exploit our biology. “A human is a very vulnerable animal and the only reason we are not extinct is that we have a superior brain: to avoid predation and find food, we have had to be really good at being attentive to our environment. Our attention can shift rapidly around and when it does, everything else that was being attended to stops, which is why we can’t multitask. When we focus on something, it’s a survival mechanism: you’re in the savannah or the jungle and you hear a branch cracking, you give your total attention to that – which is useful, it causes a short stress reaction, a slight arousal, and activates the sympathetic nervous system. It optimises your cognitive abilities and sets the body up for fighting or flighting.” But it’s much less useful now. “Now, 30,000 years later, we’re here with that exact brain” and every phone notification we hear is a twig snapping in the forest, “simulating what was important to what we were: a frightened little animal.”

Smartphone use can even change the brain, according to the ongoing ABCD study which is tracking over 10,000 American children through to adulthood. “It started by examining 10-year-olds both with paper and pencil measures and an MRI, and one of their most interesting early results was that there was a relationship between tech use and cortical thinning,” says Larry Rosen, who studies social media, technology and the brain. “Young children who use more tech had a thinner cortex, which is supposed to happen at an older age.”

Cortical thinning is a normal part of growing up and then ageing, and in much later life can be associated with degenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, as well as migraines.

Obviously, the smartphone genie is out of the bottle and has run over the hills and far away. We need our smartphones to access offices, attend events, pay for travel and to function as tickets, passes and credit cards, as well as for emails, calls and messages. It’s very hard not to have one. If we’re worried about what they – or the apps on them – might be doing to our memories, what should we do?

Rosen discusses a number of tactics in his book. “My favourites are tech breaks,” he says, “where you start by doing whatever on your devices for one minute and then set an alarm for 15 minutes time. Silence your phone and place it upside down, but within your view as a stimulus to tell your brain that you will have another one-minute tech break after the 15-minute alarm. Continue until you adapt to 15 minutes focus time and then increase to 20. If you can get to 60 minutes of focus time with short tech breaks before and after, that’s a success.”

“If you think your memory and focus have got worse and you’re blaming things like your age, your job, or your kids, that might be true, but it’s also very likely due to the way you’re interacting with your devices,” says Price, who founded Screen/Life Balance to help people manage their phone use. As a science writer, she’s “very much into randomly controlled trials, but with phones, it’s actually more of a qualitative question about personally how it’s impacting you. And it’s really easy to do your own experiment and see if it makes a difference. It’s great to have scientific evidence. But we can also intuitively know: if you practice keeping your phone away more and you notice that you feel calmer and you’re remembering more, then you’ve answered your own question.”

Source

Next to a chair: C-H-A-I-R

By the couch: S-O-F-A

And near the Amazon Fire Stick remote: T-V

Not even Booger escaped identification. Next to the family’s tabby, the McNabbs found another series of the now-familiar block letters, this time spelling out C-A-T.

The culprit: their toddler. Isla’s colorful subtitles led her parents to have her IQ tested in May when she was approaching 2½, the McNabbs told The Washington Post. By the end of the month, they got the results: Isla had scored in the top 1 percent of the population. Her performance qualified her for membership in Mensa, an organization of people who score in the top 2 percent on IQ tests.

That makes her the youngest Mensa member in the country, American Mensa spokesperson Charles Brown told The Post in an email. In 2019, Brown, while speaking about a Texas 2-year-old who became a member of the organization, said the boy was one of three members younger than 4 and one of 56 younger than 6.

“That's out of 50,000 members,” Brown told WFAA.

< Watch the video at the source page. >

As for Isla, her father, Jason McNabb, 43, said there were a few times during the first years of his daughter’s life that the hair on the back of his neck stood up — what he called “creepy moments” that made him think something exceptional was happening.

But they became more than fleeting moments and gut feelings around the time she turned 2 in November. Isla had an affinity for the alphabet and had been sounding out letters on her own. So her mom and dad — an auditor and a dentist, respectively — got her a tablet as a birthday gift. After writing down some letters, Jason demonstrated for Isla how to sound them out. Wondering whether she could piece those letters together, he wrote the word “red.”

“She sounded it out and said, ‘Red,’ ” Jason said.

The McNabbs tried “blue,” followed by “yellow” and then “purple.” Isla got them all. Then her mom thought of one she was sure would stump her daughter: “orange.”

“There’s no way,” Amanda, 38, told The Post, recalling what she was thinking at the time.

Isla got orange, too.

“Everything we threw at her, it just seemed like she picked it up right away,” Jason said. “It was incredible.”

After that, the McNabbs kept teaching her new words. Almost always, she could phonetically sound out the letters until she was able to read the word. Her parents began keeping a list. When they started, Isla’s vocabulary was around 100 words. It quickly grew to 200. They stopped counting at 500.

“Now she can just read,” Amanda said.

At a doctor’s appointment in the past couple of months, the McNabbs told the pediatrician that Isla could read. The doctor assumed they meant that she’d memorized stories her parents had told her repeatedly. Jason and Amanda then directed Isla to a poster in the doctor’s office about the danger of leaving babies alone on an exam table. Isla read every word.

“Oh! She can read,” the pediatrician said.

Isla’s learning wasn’t limited to reading, which most children begin to do around 6 or 7. She started counting and then abruptly began doing it backward. She can do simple math, including subtraction. One day, Amanda kept Isla occupied by giving her some crayons and an empty Amazon box. She noticed Isla had written M-O-M — or a solid approximation, given her lack of motor skills. Reading had evolved into writing.

Amanda researched psychologists who administered IQ tests and found one in Lexington, a little more than an hour’s drive from their home. He told her that he normally didn’t test children younger than 4. But, intrigued by her claims, he made an exception. Isla’s results on the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales, which were reviewed by The Post, rate her as “superior” or “very superior” in all categories.

She ranked in the 99th percentile.

Although she’s intelligent, Isla is also a normal toddler. She likes “Bluey,” an Australian cartoon about a blue heeler cattle dog, and “Blippi,” a children’s show on YouTube, which her father described as a “modern-day Pee-wee Herman.” Last month, she started going to preschool and has become obsessed with making friends and with her teacher, Miss Abigail. She also enjoys doing jigsaw puzzles and playing outside.

“Normal kid stuff,” her mother said, adding that Isla is, of course, a fan of reading and the library.

A couple of Isla’s favorite books: the Pete the Cat series and “Chicka Chicka Boom Boom,” which teaches children the alphabet. It does so by telling a story about a coconut tree that collapses after all 26 letters climb it.

Isla re-creates the book’s climax by stuffing her block letters into Booger’s cat tree and then knocking it over to make the letters scatter, her parents said. “We do that multiple times a day,” Amanda added with the exasperated tone and gaze unique to the parents of toddlers.

< Watch the video at the source page. >

Her parents are, well, tired. Initially worried that Isla wasn’t sleeping enough, the psychologist who tested her informed the McNabbs that it’s normal for highly intelligent children to sleep less. They were relieved their daughter was healthy but not excited about the prospect of her continuing to rouse them at 4 a.m.

“That’s kind of disheartening for us,” her mother said.

Amanda said she’s sure of one thing. While she was eager to get her daughter tested and excited about the results, she will not be following suit. “I tell people that I'm not going to get tested,” she said.

“I can’t have her knowing that she’s smarter than me.”

Source

A man has died and thousands of people have been told to evacuate their homes amid torrential rain and flash flooding in Australia's largest city, Sydney.

Roads have been cut off, with 18 evacuation orders in western Sydney alone and warnings of more to come.

"This is a life-threatening emergency situation," Stephanie Cooke, emergency services minister for the state of New South Wales, said.
The area was hit by flash flooding in March, killing 20 people.

"We are now facing dangers on multiple fronts - flash flooding, riverine flooding and coastal erosion," Ms Cooke told a media briefing.
Her warning came as the Bureau of Meteorology said up to 350mm of rain had hit certain areas, risking flooding along the Nepean River.
Sydney's main dam had also started to spill overnight - a further concern for the authorities.

Ms Cooke said this was a "rapidly evolving situation" and warned that people should be "prepared to evacuate at short notice".

There had been 83 flood rescues by emergency services in the past 24 hours alone, she said.

"It unfortunately shows that people aren't necessarily heeding the advice that we continue to put out multiple times a day in relation to this flooding event," Ms Cooke said.

"I'm respectfully asking people to avoid non-essential travel at this time."

Her warnings come as an unnamed man was killed after falling out of a kayak on the Parramatta River in western Sydney. Emergency officials attempted to revive the man after he was spotted struggling in the water by a member of the public, but he died at the scene.

Experts say the flooding emergency has been worsened by climate change and a La Niña weather phenomenon. A La Niña develops when strong winds blow the warm surface waters of the Pacific away from South America and towards Indonesia. In their place, colder waters come up to the surface.

In Australia, a La Niña increases the likelihood of rain, cyclones and cooler daytime temperatures.

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How many calories will the Tour de France winner burn?

The London-based trader’s workplace uses a software system that automatically tracks his activity. Every detail of Joshua’s work computer has been optimised for monitoring: from its screen timeout fixed to the shortest setting, making it easier for his boss to check if he’s idle; to a specially designed instant-chat tool that must be used for any communication with colleagues. He works from home under the presumption that his boss can see every login, keystroke and flick of the touchpad.

Joshua, whose surname is being withheld for job-security concerns, says he’s so used to being tracked, he often forgets about it.

“Investment banking in general operates under paranoia: the data we have is so sensitive that a disgruntled employee could do real damage.” Although he’s never explicitly been told he’s monitored, Joshua explains it’s a given in his industry; UK regulatory law requires financial firms to have a compliance monitoring programme. In the US, financial institutions are mandated to keep a record of all work-related communications.

For Joshua, it creates a workplace culture where any misstep can be spotted – and punished – thanks to monitoring technology. “You have to assume that everything you write is being read by management,” he explains. “It’s fine until the day you get caught off-guard and faced with the sack for saying something that’s deemed inappropriate.”

Employee monitoring has existed for a while in various guises, from timekeeping on factory floors to the collection of worker data in heavily regulated industries, such as finance. However, surveillance software, often clandestine in nature, has begun to creep further into white-collar jobs amid the pandemic – and it’s spread to sectors that traditionally haven’t required the scrupulous tracking of workers.
Now, as remote and hybrid working patterns are increasingly becoming the norm, employers are seeking to manage output and teams through monitoring software in response. While this can help enable out-of-office collaboration, in some cases, such surveillance tools can also be implemented through the paranoia that workers won’t do their job away from the boss’s gaze. But if employees tend to dislike being surveilled, could that erode their trust and morale? Or is it not necessarily the technology, and rather how it’s being implemented, that’s the issue?

In some industries, surveillance has always been woven into corporate culture – in others, it's a new, unwelcome surprise (Credit: Getty Images)

The rise of employee monitoring

In some instances, workers have been tracked in their jobs for decades. From surveillance on shop floors to monitoring in call centres, some bosses have long relied upon technology to help monitor employees – whether it’s for security or performance-related reasons.

Scott Walker, managing director of UK human-resourcing provider XpertHR, says employees in these types of industries tend to have greater acceptance of monitoring, in that its value to the business has been long established. “In certain workplaces like call centres, monitoring is used for coaching purposes. In other industries that require legal compliance, data collection makes sense.”

However, the pandemic has triggered a widespread surge in employee monitoring. As teams began working from home, some bosses leveraged surveillance software to keep tabs on productivity. A December 2021 survey of more than 2,209 workers in the UK showed that 60% believed they had been subject to some form of surveillance and monitoring at their current or most recent job, compared to 53% in 2020.

Such monitoring tools have only grown in prevalence – even as large swaths of the workforce have returned to the office on a full- or part-time basis. According to consulting firm Gartner, the number of medium-to-large US employers that use monitoring tools has doubled to 60% since March 2020.

It’s fine until the day you get caught off-guard and faced with the sack for saying something that’s deemed inappropriate – Joshua

Brian Kropp, Gartner’s group vice-president and chief of HR research, says that figure is set to hit 70% within two years. “Originally, companies were concerned with everyone working from home: ‘Will they work or just sit around and watch TV?’. Tracking tools were introduced to monitor productivity.”

Much of this surveillance software has since been installed on work computers, with or without employee knowledge. Dubbed by some as ‘bossware’, various programs can log keystrokes, take screenshots and surreptitiously activate employees’ webcams while working from home. Often, this technology runs undetected, meaning workers can be unaware that their boss is effectively spying on them.

And as remote work has flourished, so too has the surveillance. For example, employees at investment banks have complained that return-to-office policies are being covertly enforced through their card swipes and attendance data.

Monitoring has even extended to sectors that don’t necessarily have a history of employee tracking. Kate works at a California-based design and marketing communications agency. When employees first began working remotely, her computer was installed with a tracking device. She was told the software was a means of tracking her hours. But as well as login times, it monitors her browser tabs; periodically, it also captures screenshots sent to her company for review.

Kate, whose surname is also being withheld, says the software impacts her taking breaks. “I’m not sure how taking screenshots of me creating graphics is essential to my work – having the software actually slows down my computer,” she explains. “It makes me nervous to even watch a five-minute video during my lunch, in fear someone sees a screenshot of YouTube and it’s a cause for firing.”

The longer-term implications

The rapid rise of employee monitoring has – perhaps expectedly – chipped away at employee-employer relationships.

As surveillance has ticked up, so too has worker mistrust: according to a recent survey of 2,000 remote and hybrid US employees, 59% reported feeling stress or anxiety about their employer surveying their online activity; top factors include constantly wondering whether they’re being watched, feeling pressure to work longer hours and having to take fewer breaks during the day. Nearly half said surveillance was a violation of trust.

Kropp says the concealed nature of monitoring is what can be most damaging to employee trust. “Generally speaking, workers aren’t super excited about the idea of surveillance. But you can waylay concern by being honest and transparent about why you’re doing it, and how data is being used. It’s when the company hasn’t communicated it, and workers find out they’re being monitored second-hand, that it becomes a bigger problem. Employees wonder why they’re being watched and tend to start believing their employer is ‘out to get them’.”

"It makes me nervous to even watch a five-minute video during my lunch, in fear someone sees a screenshot of YouTube and it’s a cause for firing" – Kate

(Credit: Getty Images)

Given that more and more firms now have some form of monitoring, however, it’s going to become increasingly difficult for workers to pick companies that don’t have some form of employee surveillance – even amid the hiring crisis and battle for talent.

For example, the remote tools workers use are increasingly being integrated with monitoring technology. “We likely won’t have separate technology to monitor or track employees in the future,” says Kropp. “Rather, it’ll become more embedded in what we do and how we work: the tools we use to do our job are the ones that will track us.”

Plus, some companies are even implementing the very software they’ve used to track productivity to monitor worker burnout and wellbeing, says Kropp. “The data collection is essentially the same. It’s still looking for all sorts of things: keystroke, facial expressions and interpreting what they mean, just from the standpoint of whether someone is overworking and an attrition risk.”

Some experts believe the growing ubiquity of worker monitoring, alongside sentiments of employee distress, could imply a downward spiral in workplace culture. “Even more than a culture of fear, it can create a culture of mistrust,” adds Kropp. “This lack of trust makes everything more difficult for the organisation to get work done.” However, it’s not necessarily the technology that’s the problem, but rather how it’s implemented.

For example, a degree of monitoring can actually be beneficial in managing workflows and employee morale, particularly among hybrid and remote teams. Data analytics start-up Stellate, based in San Francisco, has a fully remote team all over the world. Alongside collaboration tools, it tracks its employees’ development through coaching and mentoring software. “You have to bring teams along to the ideas and the intent behind monitoring, then align on the process,” says Sue Odio, head of people and operations at Stellate. “It’s less about the product you use and more about the intent.”

Kropp believes the next phase of hybrid work will see employers outline an ethical framework for how and when monitoring is implemented, if at all. It’s through transparent guidelines that employees will then pick the right company for them, he adds. “Some businesses might say they want maximum autonomy and flexibility for the worker, with zero monitoring and trust as the value proposition; others will be clear there is greater surveillance, and then go with salary as their value proposition.”

For now, Joshua has become accustomed to his activity being recorded. “I’ve previously had heat and motion sensors installed under my desk on the trading floor,” he says. “Now, it’s more subtle. Even working remotely, it’s pretty easy for them to know what I’m doing thanks to monitoring tools. For me, it’s not a question of fairness: it just comes with the territory.”

Source

While the initial infection was not fun, what followed was worse. Four weeks later, when Guy had recovered enough to go back to work full-time, she woke up one day with an overwhelming fatigue that just never went away. It was accompanied by a loss of mental sharpness, part of a suite of sometimes hard-to-pin-down symptoms that are often referred to as Covid-19 “brain fog,” a general term for sluggish or fuzzy thinking. “I spent most of 2021 making decisions like: Is this the day where I get a shower, or I go up and microwave myself a frozen dinner?” Guy recalls. The high-level writing required for her job was out of the question. Living with those symptoms was, in her words, “hell on earth.”

Many of these hard-to-define Covid-19 symptoms can persist over time—weeks, months, years. Now, new research in the journal Cell is shedding some light on the biological mechanisms of how Covid-19 affects the brain. Led by researchers Michelle Monje and Akiko Iwasaki, of Stanford and Yale Universities respectively, scientists determined that in mice with mild Covid-19 infections, the virus disrupted the normal activity of several brain cell populations and left behind signs of inflammation. They believe that these findings may help explain some of the cognitive disruption experienced by Covid-19 survivors and provide potential pathways for therapies.

For the past 20 years, Monje, a neuro-oncologist, had been trying to understand the neurobiology behind chemotherapy-induced cognitive symptoms—similarly known as “chemo fog.” When Covid-19 emerged as a major immune-activating virus, she worried about the potential for similar disruption. “Very quickly, as reports of cognitive impairment started to come out, it was clear that it was a very similar syndrome,” she says. “The same symptoms of impaired attention, memory, speed of information processing, dis-executive function—it really clinically looks just like the ‘chemo fog’ that people experienced and that we’d been studying.”

In September 2020, Monje reached out to Iwasaki, an immunologist. Her group had already established a mouse model of Covid-19, thanks to their Biosafety Level 3 clearance to work with the virus. A mouse model is engineered as a close stand-in for a human, and this experiment was meant to mimic the experience of a person with a mild Covid-19 infection. Using a viral vector, Iwasaki’s group introduced the human ACE2 receptor into cells in the trachea and lungs of the mice. This receptor is the point of entry for the Covid-causing virus, allowing it to bind to the cell. Then they shot a bit of virus up the mice’s noses to cause infection, controlling the amount and delivery so that the virus was limited to the respiratory system. For the mice, this infection cleared up within one week, and they did not lose weight.

Coupled with biosafety regulations and the challenges of cross-country collaboration, the security precautions required by the pandemic created some interesting work constraints. Because most virus-related work had to be done in Iwasaki’s laboratory, the Yale scientists would take advantage of overnight shipping to fly samples across the country to Monje’s Stanford laboratory where they could be analyzed. Sometimes, they would need to film experiments with a GoPro camera to make sure that everybody could see the same thing. “We made it work,” Monje says.

Once the mice had been infected with the virus, the scientists assessed the levels of cytokines in their blood and cerebrospinal fluid (the liquid surrounding the brain) at seven days and seven weeks after infection. Cytokines are markers secreted by the immune system, and they are critical in regulating inflammation. Not only were certain cytokines elevated in the cerebrospinal fluid at both time periods, but the scientists saw an increase of microglia reactivity in the subcortical white matter of the brain—the squishy white tissue rife with nerve fibers that makes up over half of the brain’s volume. That was another sign of potential trouble.

Microglia are sort of like the central nervous system’s hungry scavengers. They are immune cells that clean up the brain by chomping on dead and unwanted neural debris, among other important functions. “There’s a unique subpopulation of microglia in the white matter called axon tract microglia,” Monje says. These have a specific genetic signature, she continues, and “are exquisitely sensitive to a wide range of insults,” like inflammatory or toxic stimuli.

In response to these stimuli, microglia can become perpetually reactive. One consequence is that they can begin eating away at needed neurons or other brain cells, which further disrupts the brain’s homeostasis. In the case of Covid-19, the scientists found that this reactivity persisted even at seven weeks after infection. Monje’s team had seen similar elevation in this activity following chemotherapy and in brain samples from human patients who were infected with Covid-19. In the hippocampus (the area of the brain closely associated with memory), this overenthusiastic cleanup effort can deter the creation of new neurons, which are linked to maintaining healthy memory.

To figure out what exactly caused the microglia to become reactive, the researchers looked for the cytokines that had reached elevated levels. Specifically, Anthony Fernandez Castaneda, a postdoctoral researcher in Monje’s laboratory and a study coauthor, found CCL11—a factor that can decrease the generation of new neurons and impair learning or memory. “The elevated CCL11 result was very interesting, because it could potentially explain why some Covid survivors experience cognitive symptoms,” he says.

In a second phase of the experiment, the researchers gave shots of CCL11 to a separate group of mice. Then they examined tissue from their brains to discover where the microglia had been reactive, and where fewer new neurons had grown. That turned out to be in the hippocampus—indicating that CCL11 acted on very specific cell populations in a memory-related area of the brain.

Next, the scientists decided to investigate the effects of mild Covid-19 infection on myelinating oligodendrocytes—brain cells that generate the myelin “padding” around neurons to provide insulation for better inter-neuron communication. Previously, work done by Anna Geraghty (another postdoctoral fellow in Monje’s lab and study coauthor) had focused on how chemotherapy affects this process. Myelin loss in the mice treated with chemo was found to be directly linked with deficits in short-term memory and attention. “Even minor adjustments in those myelin can actually impact neuronal communication in quite diverse ways,” she says. “Losing that ability to adaptively respond to neuronal activity led to persistent cognitive impairments in these mice.”

Geraghty recalls staying in the lab late at night during the Christmas holiday to finish the analysis of how Covid-19 affected that padding in mouse neurons. The result: The infected mice had lost approximately one-third of their mature oligodendrocytes, and had a statistically significant drop in myelination compared to mice in a control group. The magnitude of myelin loss was almost identical to what the lab had discovered when studying mice and chemo. She excitedly texted the results to Monje. “There was just a big moment in my brain of, ‘Oh my gosh, this data is incredibly interesting,’” Geraghty recalls.

Joanna Hellmuth, a cognitive neurologist at UC San Francisco who was unaffiliated with the study, notes that the “mouse data is very compelling,” and more studies are needed to see how these results translate into treatments for human patients—like Guy or others struggling with long Covid and cognitive symptoms. Figuring out which drugs to try first, though, could benefit from understanding the biological cause of brain fog symptoms. “‘Brain fog’ is a colloquial term,” says Hellmuth—and it “kind of delegitimizes peoples’ having a neurological disorder.”

Wes Ely, a pulmonary and critical care specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center who was unaffiliated with the study, believes that such studies can lead to future therapeutic development. “This work paves the path towards both pharmacological, neuropsychological, and cognitive rehabilitative mechanisms to rebuild brain power,” he says.

For example, Monje thinks, some drug candidates that already worked in “chemo fog” animal models might be useful for treating Covid-related cognitive symptoms. She hopes to test these candidates on the Covid-19 mouse model to see if they help.

The team would also like to investigate other questions, like whether these neurological effects are different after even longer periods of time, or if they are different following a breakthrough infection after vaccination. They’d also like to compare what they’ve found in Covid-19 mouse models to neurological reactions to another famous virus—H1N1, which causes swine flu. The team had found that in a mouse model of H1N1, the drop in oligodendrocytes and increase in microglial reactivity in the subcortical white matter generally normalized by seven weeks—unlike for the Covid-infected mice. They also found that, in mice infected with either virus, CCL11 was elevated in the cerebrospinal fluid. Monje hopes to study what she calls this “prominent shared mechanism” in further detail.

While Monje and Iwasaki’s work has given researchers a better idea of how Covid might affect the brain, it may take years before there is a working treatment for patients. For Guy, the time cannot come soon enough. In 2022, she got Covid again. “I’m just praying for medicine, praying for treatment,” she says.

The Secrets of Covid ‘Brain Fog’ Are Starting to Lift

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The agency’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which collects data on the moon, spotted two craters after the “mystery rocket body” collided with the moon on March 4, NASA said recently.

It created an eastern crater about 19.5 yards in diameter and a western crater about 17.5 yards in diameter.

The agency said the double crater might indicate that the rocket had a large mass on each end of it. A rocket that has used up its fuel usually will just have its mass on the end with the motor, with the other side being an empty fuel tank.

The rocket’s origin is uncertain, but the double crater that it produced might reveal its identity, according to the release.

A rocket body hitting the moon has not created a double crater before, the release states.

The Houston Chronicle reported Thursday that no space-exploring country has claimed the rocket as their own so far.

Source

But what are the hip flexors, and why are they so important—and what happens if we let them get weak and stiff?

What are hip flexors?

Hip flexors are the powerful muscles located at the front of your hip. They include:

• the psoas major and psoas minor, which connect the femur to the spine, and

• the iliacus, which runs from the pelvis to the femur.

Hip flexors are activated when you draw your knee towards your chest. They are important for walking and running.

They're also very important in sport, as they flex the hip, and work with the quadraceps to extend your knee when you need to sprint or kick.

An athlete with an injured hip flexor will have great difficulty running or kicking.

The hip flexors also work with the glutes and other muscles of the torso to stabilize the spine—which makes them important for posture.

What happens when they're weak or stiff?

Weak hip flexors may make climbing stairs, running or even walking on a flat surface difficult or painful. It can also can cause other muscles in the area to work hard to compensate. This changes your gait (the way you walk).

Hip flexors are the muscles located at the front of your hip. Credit: Shutterstock

Tight hip flexors can make walking and standing difficult because they pull your spine down. This makes you lean forward, which puts strain on your lower back muscles (which work in opposition to keep you upright).

An imbalance between the hip flexors and the opposing muscles pulling your torso in the opposite direction can lead to lower back pain.
Tight hip flexors can reduce the range of motion of the knee. This can result in a stiff knee gait, where the knee doesn't bend as much as it should. After some time, it can lead to knee pain.

All in all, weak or tight hip flexors can cause your joints or muscles to function in an abnormal way and this can lead to injury.

How can I keep my hip flexors in good shape?

As with all muscles, hip flexors lose strength and mass through lack of exercise.

Another contributing factor is sitting for long periods, which keeps the psoas muscles relaxed in a shortened position for a long time.

This is particularly important for those of us who spend long periods seated at a work desk, and is why many health-care professionals advise taking a break from sitting or opting for a standing desk.

Hip flexors should be kept both flexible and strong.

Stretching exercises to improve flexibility of the hip flexors include:

•  lying on your side and pulling one foot to your butt, while keeping your knees close together

•  stepping forward into a lunge, going as low as you can while keeping your torso upright.

Both should cause you to feel the stretch along the front of your upper thigh.

Stretches should be held for about 30 seconds and repeated two to three times each side. They can be done daily or at least three times weekly to gradually improve flexibility.

If you work at a desk for long periods, try to do some stretching in short breaks during the day.

To strengthen the hip flexors you can lie face up on the floor and do straight leg raises (one leg at a time), while keeping your arms on the floor alongside your torso.

This takes the strain off your lower back and is easier to do one at a time to start with.

Another great hip flexor exercise is called mountain climbers. For this exercise, take the push-up position and bring one leg at a time to your chest. This can be done slowly to begin with, or quickly as you gain strength and fitness.

Strong and flexible hip flexors

So, hip flexors are relatively easy to train. If you are doing any exercise at all you are likely already keeping your hip flexors strong and flexible.

If you are not exercising, the exercises mentioned earlier will give you a place to start.

Combine these with gentle stretches of other muscle groups and some aerobic exercise like walking, jogging, cycling or swimming.

Remember to start gently and gradually increase the intensity, duration and frequency of sessions.

Failure to look after your hip flexors can lead to an altered gait, posture problems, injury and back pain.

Source

A study by researchers at the German Primate Center (DPZ)—Leibniz Institute for Primate Research together with colleagues from Hannover Medical School and Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg shows that most of the therapeutic antibodies available for treatment of COVID-19 patients do not inhibit BA.2.12.1, BA.4, and BA.5 at all or only inhibit with reduced potency.

The antibody Bebtelovimab constitutes the only exception, since this antibody blocked all tested variants with high efficiency. Furthermore, the study shows that the omicron subvariants BA.2.12.1 and especially BA.4 and BA.5 are inhibited worse than their predecessors BA.1 and BA.2 by antibodies generated after vaccination or inoculation followed by infection. Thus, BA.2.12.1, BA.4, and BA.5 are immune escape variants. A pass-through infection with "old" omicron subvariants confers only limited protection against infection with "new" subvariants. The research was published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.

New SARS-CoV-2 variants emerge because of errors during viral genome replication. Thus, the virus acquires mutations that change the viral proteins, including the surface protein, spike, the central target of the antibody response. In case the mutations reduce recognition of the spike protein by antibodies, such variants become more adept at spreading among people with preexisting immunity due to vaccination or past infection.

Infection researchers at the German Primate Center specialize in the analyses of SARS-CoV-2 inhibition by antibodies. With colleagues at Hannover Medical School and Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg, they have investigated inhibition of the SARS-CoV-2 omicron subvariants BA.2.12.1, BA.4, and BA.5 by antibodies. BA.2.12.1, BA.4, and BA.5 (the spike protein of the latter two subvariants is identical) are becoming dominant in several countries and BA.5 is largely responsible for the recent uptick of cases in Germany.

The team, including Prerna Arora, Markus Hoffmann and Stefan Pöhlmann at the German Primate Center, found that out of ten therapeutic antibodies studied only two were able to at least partially inhibit BA.2.12.1, BA.4, and BA.5 and that only one antibody, Bebtelovimab (LY-CoV1404), efficiently blocked infection by all omicron subvariants.

"These results confirm a trend that we have already seen in previous studies: omicron subvariants are not appreciably inhibited by most therapeutic antibodies and the few antibodies that inhibit frequently do so in a subvariant-specific fashion. Therefore, it is important to develop new antibodies in order be prepared for future subvariants," says Prerna Arora, first author of the study.

Antibodies from unvaccinated individuals that were infected with omicron subvariants BA.1 or BA.2 in spring 2022 neutralized BA.2.12.1 with similar efficiency but were much less potent against BA.4 and BA.5. Therefore, it is likely that a previous BA.1 or BA.2 infection provides little protection against a subsequent infection with BA.4 or BA.5.

Antibodies induced by three immunizations with the mRNA vaccine of BioNTech/Pfizer blocked all omicron subvariants. However, inhibition was less efficient as compared to that measured for a virus that circulated early during the pandemic, and inhibition of BA.2.12.1, BA.4, and BA.5 was less efficient as compared to BA.1 and BA.2. Similar results were obtained for antibodies induced upon vaccination plus breakthrough infection. Although this so-called hybrid immunity conferred overall higher neutralizing activity against all variants tested, inhibition of BA.2.12.1, BA.4 and BA.5 was significantly reduced.

"BA.2.12.1 and particularly BA.4 and BA.5 are antibody evasion variants. Vaccination will still protect against severe disease induced by these variants but protection might be somewhat less efficient as that measured for previously circulating variants," says Markus Hoffmann, senior author of the study.

"Our future studies must show whether BA.2.12.1, BA.4 and BA.5 are not only less efficiently inhibited by antibodies but are also better at infecting lung cells. If this is the case, then an uptick in hospitalizations might be the consequence, although it should be stated that this has so far not been observed in South Africa, where BA.4 and BA.5 were first detected," comments Stefan Pöhlmann, who headed the study jointly with Markus Hoffmann.

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The person who Apple appointed to lecture its staff on the dangers of insider trading has admitted six counts of insider trading.

Gene Levoff was selected by Apple to be the moral voice of its managers and was the company’s former corporate secretary and director of corporate law.

Leading by example, Levoff following the highest moral standards by misappropriating material, and nonpublic information about Apple’s financial results and then executed trades involving the company’s stock.

Levoff served on Apple’s Disclosure Committee, a group that looked over company earnings reports and SEC filings before they were published. Using information he was privy to, he was allegedly able to realize profits of “approximately $227,000 on certain trades” and avoided losses of “approximately $377,000 on others,” according to the DOJ.

Levoff also disregarded the company’s quarterly “blackout periods,” even after telling others that they could not buy or sell Apple stock during that time, and the company’s insider trading policy.

Apple was so impressed with his work he was promoted to co-chairman of Apple’s Disclosure Committee, which reviewed and discussed the company’s draft quarterly and yearly earnings materials and periodic U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings.

When Apple posted strong revenue and net profit for a given financial quarter, he purchased large quantities of stock, which he later sold for a profit once the market reacted to the news. When there were lower-than-anticipated revenue and net profit, Levoff sold large quantities of Apple stock, avoiding significant losses.

He did this from February 2011 to April 2016, the release says. Apparently, Apple didn’t complain about him and the charges against Levoff were initially filed by the SEC as a civil complaint in 2019.

Even after he was charged, Levoff tried to have the case thrown out as unconstitutional claiming that no statute specifically bars insider trading. So in other words the guy who advised Apple staff on insider trading believed that such antics was their constitutional right.

Apple is not commenting on the case, or publically said that it has taken staff training steps to remind staff that it is not their constitional right to screw over shareholders.

Levoff’s sentencing is scheduled for November 10th. Apple didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.

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In human patients, the technique – in which fecal microbiota are transferred from a healthy individual to another person – is usually used to treat conditions like Clostridioides difficile infection (CDI) and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), but experts think the method could potentially be used to combat a far wider range of diseases.

Not only that, but by developing a system to deliver autologous fecal transplants (FMT) – in which the donor and the recipient are the same person – we could get around problems that can sometimes present due to incompatibility issues between donors and recipients in heterologous transplants involving two people.

But to do that, we need to collect people's stool samples when they are young and healthy, and store them for future use in a cryopreservation facility, in the event patients later need a transplant.

In other words, we should all be depositing our poo in a bank, just in case we later need to make a withdrawal. It might sound radical, but it's an entirely serious proposal, researchers say.

"Conceptually, the idea of stool banking for autologous FMT is similar to when parents bank their baby's cord blood for possible future use," says systems biologist Yang-Yu Liu from Harvard University.

"However, there is greater potential for stool banking, and we anticipate that the chance of using stool samples is much higher than for cord blood."

Furthermore, poo banking already exists, with the first, a nonprofit stool bank called OpenBiome, having opened its doors in Somerville, Massachusetts in 2012.

Since then, a number of similar facilities have opened around the world, although most appear to typically be storing stool samples for later heterologous FMTs, rather than for autologous transplants; however, the two systems aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.

"In principle, the same procedure of host screening and sample collection can be used for the purpose of rejuvenating microbiome by autologous FMT," Yang and fellow researchers write in their new paper.

"Instead of starting from scratch, the existing high-standard stool banks could be repurposed for the idea of rejuvenating the microbiome with autologous FMT."

There are many issues to face, including how to adequately store stool samples safely in long-term cryopreservation.

But if those challenges can be addressed – and people can be sold on the idea of storing their poo in a bank – we could be looking at a bold new vision for self-donated medical treatments in the future.

"Autologous FMTs have the potential to treat autoimmune diseases like asthma, multiple sclerosis, inflammatory bowel disease, diabetes, obesity, and even heart disease and aging," says co-author and epidemiologist Scott T. Weiss from Harvard University.

"We hope this paper will prompt some long-term trials of autologous FMTs to prevent disease."

The findings are reported in Trends in Molecular Medicine.

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Losing your sense of smell or having it distorted affects more than your cooking and eating habits, says Alexander Wieck Fjældstad, associate professor, MD. He was part of establishing Denmark's first clinic for smell and taste, and is the author of the study recently published in the journal Foods.

"Reduced enjoyment when eating and the social consequences of it are very important to patients and often have serious consequences for their quality of life," says Fjældstad.

The study also shows that 39% of patients with severe smell disorders have a significantly increased incidence of weight loss, which can negatively impact their health.

Getting cooking over with as fast as possible

A total of 692 people answered a questionnaire about cooking, smell, weight changes and sensory awareness for the study. 271 had lost or had a reduced sense of smell (olfactory dysfunction), 251 had a distorted sense of smell (parosmia) and 166 were part of a control group.

The study shows that patients with a distorted sense of smell differ from the control group both with regard to food preferences and the ability and desire to cook.

"The patients expressed a wish to get through cooking as quickly as possible. They don't find cooking to be as enjoyable an activity as previously, they are less interested in cooking for others, and have lost the desire to try new foods. And less variation in food habits can affect health," says Fjældstad.

Previous studies have also shown that the loss or distortion of the sense of smell can have consequences ranging from social insecurity and an increased risk of depressive symptoms to an increased risk of household accidents.

How to rediscover a sense of enjoyment

Fortunately, the recently published study explains how foods with different basic tastes, textures and mouthfeel can increase a patient's enjoyment. When a food smell released in the oral cavity is not intercepted by the smell receptors in the nose, it is possible to compensate by focusing on other sensory inputs. In other words, the other senses can enhance the experience of eating so the patient gains greater food satisfaction, a better multisensory food experience and an improved quality of life.

"The patients find cooking challenging, but the study can help because it clarifies which ingredients are unpleasant or pleasant when your sense of smell is distorted," says Fjældstad. He mentions dried fruits, chili, menthol and rapeseed oil as good food options for patients who have a distorted sense of smell and taste. When eating these foods, the mouthfeel helps provide sensory stimuli when the sense of smell fails.

Patients with a distorted sense of smell in particular should avoid coffee, mushrooms, butter, ginger, black pepper and toasted bread, as these foods generally provide significantly less pleasure. This is due to a combination of a higher incidence of distorted smell detection and the fact that some of these foods strongly stimulate the other chemical senses, which becomes unpleasant when aroma is not present.

The consequences of a distorted sense of smell on cooking and which foods actually work for patients have not previously been focused on.

A common problem

Taste is a multi-sensory process where each sense contributes with different notes that together result in a complex symphony that makes us able to identify what we are eating, assess its freshness and edibility, and in the end, provides us with a sense of enjoyment. Few people realize how important a sense of smell is until they lose it.

However, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have become even more aware of the importance of smell. Around 65% of the more than 300 million COVID-19 patients worldwide have experienced losing their sense of smell. For more than half of those patients, the loss or distortion may be long term.

"In connection with COVID-19, many people experienced losing their sense of smell or having it distorted, but actually it has always been a common problem," says Fjældstad.

Some 15% of the population has a reduced sense of smell. The problem increases with age, and is often related to many well-known diseases such as diabetes, kidney disease and several neurodegenerative diseases. About 2% of Danes suffer from a complete loss of sense of smell.

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