First, Mercury: More charred innards than fully fledged planet, it probably lost its outer layers in a traumatic collision long ago. Next come Venus and Earth, twins in some respects, though oddly only one is fertile. Then there’s Mars, another wee world, one that, unlike Mercury, never lost layers; it just stopped growing. Following Mars, we have a wide ring of leftover rocks, and then things shift. Suddenly there is Jupiter, so big it’s practically a half-baked sun, containing the vast majority of the material left over from our star’s creation. Past that are three more enormous worlds—Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—forged of gas and ice. The four gas giants have almost nothing in common with the four rocky planets, despite forming at roughly the same time, from the same stuff, around the same star. The solar system’s eight planets present a puzzle: Why these?

Now look out past the sun, way beyond. Most of the stars harbor planets of their own. Astronomers have spotted thousands of these distant star-and-planet systems. But strangely, they have so far found none that remotely resemble ours. So the puzzle has grown harder: Why these, and why those?

The swelling catalog of extrasolar planets, along with observations of distant, dusty planet nurseries and even new data from our own solar system, no longer matches classic theories about how planets are made. Planetary scientists, forced to abandon decades-old models, now realize there may not be a grand unified theory of world-making—no single story that explains every planet around every star, or even the wildly divergent orbs orbiting our sun. “The laws of physics are the same everywhere, but the process of building planets is sufficiently complicated that the system becomes chaotic,” said Alessandro Morbidelli, a leading figure in planetary formation and migration theories and an astronomer at the Côte d’Azur Observatory in Nice, France.

Alessandro Morbidelli, an astronomer at the Côte d’Azur Observatory in Nice, France, has devised influential theories about planet formation and migration.Photograph: Mattia Balsamini/GEO Germany

Still, the findings are animating new research. Amid the chaos of world-building, patterns have emerged, leading astronomers toward powerful new ideas. Teams of researchers are working out the rules of dust and pebble assembly and how planets move once they coalesce. Fierce debate rages over the timing of each step, and over which factors determine a budding planet’s destiny. At the nexus of these debates are some of the oldest questions humans have asked ourselves: How did we get here? Is there anywhere else like here?

A Star and Its Acolytes Are Born

Astronomers have understood the basic outlines of the solar system’s origins for nearly 300 years. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who like many Enlightenment thinkers dabbled in astronomy, published a theory in 1755 that remains pretty much correct. “All the matter making up the spheres belonging to our solar system, all the planets and comets, at the origin of all things was broken down into its elementary basic material,” he wrote.

Indeed, we come from a diffuse cloud of gas and dust. Four and a half billion years ago, probably nudged by a passing star or by the shock wave of a supernova, the cloud collapsed under its own gravity to form a new star. It’s how things went down afterward that we don’t really understand.

Once the sun ignited, surplus gas swirled around it. Eventually, the planets formed there. The classical model that explained this, known as the minimum-mass solar nebula, envisioned a basic “protoplanetary disk” filled with just enough hydrogen, helium, and heavier elements to make the observed planets and asteroid belts. The model, which dates to 1977, assumed planets formed where we see them today, beginning as small “planetesimals,” then incorporating all the material in their area like locusts consuming every leaf in a field.

“The model was just somehow making this assumption that the solar disk was filled with planetesimals,” said Joanna Drążkowska, an astrophysicist at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and author of a recent review chapter on the field. “People were not considering any smaller objects—no dust, no pebbles.”

Joanna Drążkowska, an astrophysicist at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, uses computer simulations to explore the formation of planetesimals and planets out of dust grains swirling around young stars.Photograph: Wieńczysław Bykowski

Astronomers vaguely reasoned that planetesimals arose because dust grains pushed around by the gas would have drifted into piles, the way wind sculpts sand dunes. The classical model had planetesimals randomly strewn throughout the solar nebula, with a statistical distribution of sizes following what physicists call a power law, meaning there are more small ones than big ones. “Just a few years ago, everybody was assuming the planetesimals were distributed in a power law throughout the nebula,” said Morbidelli, “but now we know it is not the case.”

The change came courtesy of a handful of silver parabolas in Chile’s Atacama Desert. The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) is designed to detect light from cool, millimeter-size objects, such as dust grains around newborn stars. Starting in 2013, ALMA captured stunning images of neatly sculpted infant star systems, with putative planets embedded in the hazy disks around the new stars.

Astronomers previously imagined these disks as smooth halos that grew more diffuse as they extended outward, away from the star. But ALMA showed disks with deep, dark gaps, like the rings of Saturn; others with arcs and filaments; and some containing spirals, like miniature galaxies. “ALMA changed the field completely,” said David Nesvorny, an astronomer at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile’s Atacama Desert observes distant, dusty planet nurseries.

Photograph: SERGIO OTAROLA/ESO/NAOJ/NRAO

ALMA disproved the classical model of planetary formation. “We have to now reject it and start thinking about completely different models,” Drążkowska said. The observations showed that, rather than being smoothly dispersed through the disk, dust collects in particular places, as dust likes to do, and that is where the earliest planet embryos are made. Some dust, for instance, probably clumps together at the “snow line,” the distance from the star where water freezes. Recently, Morbidelli and Konstantin Batygin, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology, argued that dust also clumps at a condensation line where silicates form droplets instead of vapor. These condensation lines probably cause traffic jams, curbing the rate at which dust falls toward the star and allowing it to pile up.

“It’s a new paradigm,” Morbidelli said.

From Dust to Planets

Even before ALMA showed where dust likes to accrue, astronomers were struggling to understand how it could pile up quickly enough to form a planet—especially a giant one. The gas surrounding the infant sun would have dissipated within about 10 million years, which means Jupiter would have had to collect most of it within that time frame. That means dust must have formed Jupiter’s core very soon after the sun ignited. The Juno mission to Jupiter showed that the giant planet probably has a fluffy core, suggesting it formed fast. But how?

The problem, apparent to astronomers since about the year 2000, is that turbulence, gas pressure, heat, magnetic fields, and other factors would prevent dust from orbiting the sun in neat paths, or from drifting into big piles. Moreover, any big clumps would likely be drawn into the sun by gravity.

In 2005, Andrew Youdin and Jeremy Goodman, then of Princeton University, published a new theory for dust clumps that went part of the way toward a solution. A few years after the sun ignited, they argued, gas flowing around the star formed headwinds that forced dust to gather in clumps, and kept the clumps from falling into the star. As the primordial dust bunnies grew bigger and denser, eventually they collapsed under their own gravity into compact objects. This idea, called streaming instability, is now a widely accepted model for how millimeter-size dust grains can quickly turn into large rocks. The mechanism can form planetesimals about 100 kilometers across, which then merge with one another in collisions.

But astronomers still struggled to explain the creation of much bigger worlds like Jupiter.

In 2012, Anders Johansen and Michiel Lambrechts, both at Lund University in Sweden, proposed a variation on planet growth dubbed pebble accretion. According to their idea, planet embryos the size of the dwarf planet Ceres that arise through streaming instability quickly grow much bigger. Gravity and drag in the circumstellar disk would cause dust grains and pebbles to spiral onto these objects, which would grow apace, like a snowball rolling downhill.

Illustration: Merrill Sherman/Quanta Magazine

Pebble accretion is now a favored theory for how gas giant cores are made, and many astronomers argue it may be taking place in those ALMA images, allowing giant planets to form in the first few million years after a star is born. But the theory’s relevance to the small, terrestrial planets near the sun is controversial. Johansen, Lambrechts, and five coauthors published research last year showing how inward-drifting pebbles could have fed the growth of Venus, Earth, Mars, and Theia—a since-obliterated world that collided with Earth, ultimately creating the moon. But problems remain. Pebble accretion does not say much about giant impacts like the Earth-Theia crash, which were vital processes in shaping the terrestrial planets, said Miki Nakajima, an astronomer at the University of Rochester. “Even though pebble accretion is very efficient and is a great way to avoid issues with the classical model, it doesn’t seem to be the only way” to make planets, she said.

Morbidelli rejects the idea of pebbles forming rocky worlds, in part because geochemical samples suggest that Earth formed over a long period, and because meteorites come from rocks of widely varying ages. “It’s a matter of location,” he said. “Processes are different depending on the environment. Why not, right? I think that makes qualitative sense.”

Research papers appear nearly every week about the early stages of planet growth, with astronomers arguing about the precise condensation points in the solar nebula; whether planetesimals start out with rings that fall onto the planets; when the streaming instability kicks in; and when pebble accretion does, and where. People can’t agree on how Earth was built, let alone terrestrial planets around distant stars.

Planets on the Move

The five wanderers of the night sky—Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn—were the only known worlds besides this one for most of human history. Twenty-six years after Kant published his nebular hypothesis, William Herschel found another, fainter wanderer and named it Uranus. Then Johann Gottfried Galle spotted Neptune in 1846. Then, a century and a half later, the number of known planets suddenly shot up.

It started in 1995, when Didier Queloz and Michel Mayor of the University of Geneva pointed a telescope at a sunlike star called 51 Pegasi and noticed it wobbling. They inferred that it’s being tugged at by a giant planet closer to it than Mercury is to our sun. Soon, more of these shocking “hot Jupiters” were seen orbiting other stars.

The exoplanet hunt took off after the Kepler space telescope opened its lens in 2009. We now know the cosmos is peppered with planets; nearly every star has at least one, and probably more. Most seem to have planets we lack, however: hot Jupiters, for instance, as well as a class of midsize worlds that are bigger than Earth but smaller than Neptune, uncreatively nicknamed “super-Earths” or “sub-Neptunes.” No star systems have been found that resemble ours, with its four little rocky planets near the sun and four gas giants orbiting far away. “That does seem to be something that is unique to our solar system that is unusual,” said Seth Jacobson, an astronomer at Michigan State University.

Enter the Nice model, an idea that may be able to unify the radically different planetary architectures. In the 1970s, geochemical analysis of the rocks collected by Apollo astronauts suggested that the moon was battered by asteroids 3.9 billion years ago—a putative event known as the Late Heavy Bombardment. In 2005, inspired by this evidence, Morbidelli and colleagues in Nice argued that Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune did not form in their present locations, as the earliest solar nebula model held, but instead moved around 3.9 billion years ago. In the Nice model (as the theory became known), the giant planets changed their orbits wildly at that time, which sent an asteroid deluge toward the inner planets.

Illustration: Merrill Sherman/Quanta Magazine

The evidence for the Late Heavy Bombardment is no longer considered convincing, but the Nice model has stuck. Morbidelli, Nesvorny, and others now conclude that the giants probably migrated even earlier in their history, and that—in an orbital pattern dubbed the Grand Tack—Saturn’s gravity probably stopped Jupiter from moving all the way in toward the sun, where hot Jupiters are often found.

In other words, we might have gotten lucky in our solar system, with multiple giant planets keeping each other in check, so that none swung sunward and destroyed the rocky planets.

“Unless there is something to arrest that process, we would end up with giant planets mostly close to their host stars,” said Jonathan Lunine, an astronomer at Cornell University. “Is inward migration really a necessary outcome of the growth of an isolated giant planet? What are the combinations of multiple giant planets that could arrest that migration? It’s a great problem.”

There is also, according to Morbidelli, “a fierce debate about the timing” of the giant-planet migration—and a possibility that it actually helped grow the rocky planets rather than threatening to destroy them after they grew. Morbidelli just launched a five-year project to study whether an unstable orbital configuration soon after the sun’s formation might have helped stir up rocky remains, coaxing the terrestrial worlds into being.

The upshot is that many researchers now think giant planets and their migrations might dramatically affect the fates of their rocky brethren, in this solar system and others. Jupiter-size worlds might help move asteroids around, or they could limit the number of terrestrial worlds that form. This is a leading hypothesis for explaining the small stature of Mars: It would have grown bigger, maybe to Earth size, but Jupiter’s gravitational influence cut off the supply of material. Many stars studied by the Kepler telescope harbor super-Earths in close orbits, and scientists are split on whether those are likelier to be accompanied by giant planets farther out. Teams have convincingly shown both correlations and anti-correlations between the two exoplanet types, said Rachel Fernandes, a graduate student at the University of Arizona; this indicates that there’s not enough data yet to be sure. “That’s one of those things that is really fun at conferences,” she said. “You’re like, ‘Yeah, yell at each other, but which science is better?’ You don’t know.”

Rebounding Planets

Recently, Jacobson came up with a new model that radically changes the timing of the Nice model migration. In a paper published in April in Nature, he, Beibei Liu of Zhejiang University in China, and Sean Raymond of the University of Bordeaux in France argued that gas flow dynamics may have caused the giant planets to migrate only a few million years after they formed—100 times earlier than in the original Nice model and probably before Earth itself arose.

Seth Jacobson, a planetary scientist at Michigan State University, and collaborators recently identified a rebound mechanism by which giant planets that have moved close to their stars might then move back out.Photograph: Derrick Turner/University Communications/Michigan State University

In the new model, the planets “rebounded,” moving in and then back out as the sun warmed up the gas in the disk and blew it off into oblivion. This rebound would have happened because, when a baby giant planet is bathed in a warm disk of gas, it feels an inward pull toward dense gas closer to the star and an outward pull from gas farther out. The inward pull is greater, so the baby planet gradually moves closer to its star. But after the gas begins to evaporate, a few million years after the star’s birth, the balance changes. More gas remains on the far side of the planet relative to the star, so the planet is dragged back out.

The rebound “is a pretty significant shock to the system. It can destabilize a very nice arrangement,” Jacobson said. “But this does a great job of explaining [features] of the giant planets in terms of their inclination and eccentricity.” It also tracks with evidence that hot Jupiters seen in other star systems are on unstable orbits—perhaps bound for a rebound.

Between condensation lines, pebbles, migrations, and rebounds, a complex story is taking shape. Still, for now, some answers may be in hiding. Most of the planet-finding observatories use search methods that turn up planets that orbit close to their host stars. Lunine said he would like to see planet hunters use astrometry, or the measurement of stars’ movements through space, which could reveal distantly orbiting worlds. But he and others are most excited for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, set to launch in 2027. Roman will use microlensing, measuring how the light from a background star is warped by the gravity of a foreground star and its planets. That will let the telescope capture planets with orbital distances between Earth’s and Saturn’s—a “sweet spot,” Lunine said.

Nesvorny said modelers will continue tinkering with code and trying to understand the finer points of particle distributions, ice lines, condensation points, and other chemistry that may play a role in where planetesimals coalesce. “It will take the next few decades to understand that in detail,” he said.

Time is the essence of the problem. Human curiosity may be unbounded, but our lives are short, and the birth of planets lasts eons. Instead of watching the process unfold, we have only snapshots from different points.

Batygin, the Caltech astronomer, compared the painstaking effort to reverse-engineer planets to trying to model an animal, even a simple one. “An ant is way more complicated than a star,” Batygin said. “You can perfectly well imagine writing a code that captures a star in pretty good detail,” whereas “you could never model the physics and chemistry of an ant and hope to capture the whole thing. In planet formation, we are somewhere between an ant and a star.”

Astronomers Radically Reimagine the Making of the Planets

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Theresa Birgin Lucus of Bemidji was driving home on Highway 64 after a long week in Rochester when storm clouds began rolling in. In a Facebook post, she explained that her daughter was at home and worried about her mother.

“She was freaking out and wanted to know how much longer it was before I got home, so I seriously snapped that photo and said ‘I’m close to Akeley,’” she wrote.

According to KVRR, she didn’t even look at the photo until she got home and her daughter told her how cool it was.

“It seriously looks like the sky is going to unzip,” Lucas told the news outlet.

She posted it to social media where it immediately went viral. Lucas said she’s been getting messages from viewers from across the world asking about the stunning image.

“I should be giving credit to my fraidy cat daughter,” Lucas joked on Facebook.

The social media reaction has been mixed, with some wondering if it was Photoshopped while others are in awe of the seascape in the sky.

“I was just lucky to be in the right time at the right place. Not sure why but I was!” Lucas told FOX 35 News.

Theresa said she has since entered the photo into a contest at the Minnesota State Fair.

Source

China is the last major economy committed to a zero-COVID strategy, stamping out all infections with a combination of targeted lockdowns, mass testing and long quarantine periods.

The economic hub of Shanghai was forced into a months-long lockdown during a COVID surge this spring driven by the fast-spreading Omicron variant, while the capital Beijing shuttered schools and offices for weeks over a separate outbreak.

But infections have slowed to a trickle in recent days, with Shanghai on Saturday reporting zero locally transmitted cases for the first time since before the outbreak in early March.

"There were no new domestic COVID-19 confirmed cases and no new domestic asymptomatic infections in Shanghai," the city said in a statement.

The lockdown on Shanghai's 25 million residents was mostly lifted in early June, but the metropolis has struggled to return to normal as individual neighbourhoods have reimposed restrictions over new infections.

Millions of people in the city were temporarily locked down again two weeks ago after the government ordered a fresh mass testing campaign.

In Beijing, restrictions imposed in May were later eased as cases declined, but tightened again this month after a nightlife-linked infection cluster emerged.

After days of mass testing and localised lockdowns, the "Heaven Supermarket infection chain"—named after a popular bar visited by the patients—has now been effectively blocked, Beijing authorities said last week.

The city's education bureau said Saturday that all elementary and middle school students could return to their classrooms for in-person schooling on Monday.

Beijing reported only two new local infections on Saturday.

However, China's southern manufacturing powerhouse of Shenzhen said Saturday it would close wholesale markets, cinemas and gyms in a central district bordering Hong Kong for three days after COVID cases were discovered there.

Chinese officials insist the zero-COVID policy is necessary to prevent a healthcare calamity, pointing to unevenly distributed medical resources and low vaccination rates among the elderly.

But the strategy has hammered the world's second-largest economy and heavy handed enforcement has triggered rare protests in the tightly controlled country.

China's international isolation has also prompted some foreign businesses and families with the financial means to make exit plans.

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Scientists around the world are united in their belief that greenhouse gas emissions, particularly carbon dioxide, are leading to a warming planet. And because of the dangers posed by such warming, people around the globe have been working toward reducing emissions.

Prior research has suggested that these emissions have already led to an increase of 1.25 degrees Celsius. So governments around the world have agreed to set a goal of reducing CO2 emissions over the next three decades to curb warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. In their review, the researchers found little to no evidence indicating that the goal will be met.

In their work, Matthes and Wynes looked at research describing the current state of the global climate system. As part of that effort, they looked at past trends that have led to the warming increases already observed, and efforts by others to use such data to predict warming in the future based on different levels of greenhouse gas emissions. They analyzed efforts around the globe aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions and used them to make estimates regarding their impact on slowing global warming.

In the end, the pair found that given current circumstances, there is almost zero chance that the 1.5 degrees Celsius goal will be met. They note that to meet that goal, emissions would have to fall by approximately 43% by 2030—instead, emissions levels are still rising. They suggest the primary barriers to success are the lack of a proper global technological system and the political will to effect change. They conclude that the world is simply not seriously committed to reaching the 1.5 degrees Celsius goal.

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The team found that black carbon (soot) particles emitted by rockets are almost 500 times more efficient at holding heat in the atmosphere than all other sources of soot combined (surface and aircraft)—resulting in an enhanced climate effect.

Furthermore, while the study revealed that the current loss of total ozone due to rockets is small, current growth trends around space tourism indicate potential for future depletion of the upper stratospheric ozone layer in the Arctic in spring. This is because pollutants from solid-fuel rockets and re-entry heating of returning spacecraft and debris are particularly harmful to stratospheric ozone.

Study co-author Dr. Eloise Marais (UCL Geography) said: "Rocket launches are routinely compared to greenhouse gas and air pollutant emissions from the aircraft industry, which we demonstrate in our work is erroneous.

"Soot particles from rocket launches have a much larger climate effect than aircraft and other Earth-bound sources, so there doesn't need to be as many rocket launches as international flights to have a similar impact. What we really need now is a discussion amongst experts on the best strategy for regulating this rapidly growing industry."

To calculate the findings, the researchers collected information on the chemicals from all 103 rocket launches in 2019 from across the world, as well as data on reusable rocket and space junk re-entry. They also used the recent demonstrations by space tourism entrepreneurs Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin and SpaceX and proposed yearly offerings of at least daily launches by Virgin Galactic to construct a scenario of a future formidable space tourism industry.

These data were then incorporated into a 3D atmospheric chemistry model to explore the impact on climate and the ozone layer.

The team show that warming due to soot is 3.9 mW m-2 from a decade of contemporary rockets, dominated by emissions from kerosene-fuelled rockets. However, this more than doubles (7.9 mW m-2) after just three years of additional emissions from space tourism launches, due to the use of kerosene by SpaceX and hybrid synthetic rubber fuels by Virgin Galactic.

The researchers say this is of particular concern, as when the soot particles are directly injected into the upper atmosphere, they have a much greater effect on climate than other soot sources—with the particles 500 times more efficient at retaining heat.

The team found that, under a scenario of daily or weekly space tourism rocket launches, the impact on the stratospheric ozone layer threatens to undermine the recovery experienced after the successful implementation of the Montreal Protocol.

Adopted in 1987, the Montreal Protocol global ban on substances that deplete the ozone layer is considered one of the most successful international environmental policy interventions.

Study co-author Dr. Robert Ryan said: "The only part of the atmosphere showing strong ozone recovery post-Montreal Protocol is the upper stratosphere, and that is exactly where the impact of rocket emissions will hit hardest. We weren't expecting to see ozone changes of this magnitude, threatening the progress of ozone recovery.

"There is still a lot we need to find out about the influence of rocket launch and re-entry emissions on the atmosphere—in particular, the future size of the industry and the types and by-products of new fuels like liquid methane and bio-derived fuels.

"This study allows us to enter the new era of space tourism with our eyes wide open to the potential impacts. The conversation about regulating the environmental impact of the space launch industry needs to start now so we can minimize harm to the stratospheric ozone layer and climate."

Source

The virus, which has infected more than 3,500 people in 48 countries since its detection outside Africa in May, may be more infectious due to dozens of new mutations. In all, the virus carries 50 new mutations not seen in previous strains detected from 2018 to 2019, according to a new study published June 24 in the journal Nature Medicine.

Scientists usually don't expect viruses like monkeypox to gain more than one or two mutations each year, the study authors noted.

Monkeypox is a rare disease that virologists think may naturally circulate in monkeys and rodents. An orthopoxvirus, it comes from the same family and genus as the variola virus, which causes smallpox, and doesn't usually spread far beyond West and Central Africa, where it is endemic.

This year, however, the first widespread outbreak of the disease spread beyond Africa, surprising scientists and leading the World Health Organization (WHO) to begin considering whether to classify the outbreak as a global health emergency.

Monkeypox virus strains can be sorted into two clades, or lineages, known as the West African and Congo Basin clades, according to STAT. The viruses in each clade carry different fatality rates; the West African clade has a roughly 1 percent fatality rate, while the Congo Basin clade kills an estimated 10 percent of those it infects.

The ongoing outbreak appears to be driven by the West African clade, STAT reported.

As a large double-stranded DNA virus, monkeypox is much more able to correct replication errors than an RNA virus such as HIV, meaning that the current monkeypox strain should have really only accumulated a handful of mutations since it first started circulating in 2018.

But, after collecting DNA from 15 monkeypox viral samples and reconstructing their genetic information, the researchers found that the real mutation rate was six to 12 times higher than they expected.

The massive jump in the monkey virus's rate of mutation "is far more than one would expect considering previous estimates of the substitution rate for Orthopoxviruses," the researchers wrote in the paper. "Our data reveals [sic] additional clues of ongoing viral evolution and potential human adaptation."

Historically, monkeypox is transmitted from person to person by close skin contact with open skin lesions, bodily fluids, contaminated material or respiratory droplets coughed into the air.

But the unprecedented speed of new infections could suggest that something may have changed about how the virus infects its hosts – and the new mutations could be a possible cause.

Many of the mutations identified by the researchers also carry telltale clues that they may have emerged due to the virus's contact with the human immune system, specifically a family of the virus-fighting enzymes called APOBEC3. These enzymes attack viruses by forcing them to make mistakes when they copy their genetic code, an act which usually causes the virus to break apart.

However, sometimes, the virus survives the encounter and simply picks up a few mutations in its genetic code, according to STAT. It may be that these sorts of battles happened repeatedly and caused the virus to pick up many mutations in a short span of time, the researchers theorized.

The virus's mutation rate ramped up in 2018, and there's a few explanations as to why it did so.

It's possible that the virus has been circulating in humans, at low levels, since then, picking up a slew of new mutations through its battles with enzymes.

Alternatively, the virus may have been spreading among animals in non-endemic countries without us noticing for quite some time, and then this year, it suddenly leapt back over to humans.

Or it's possible that, after a monkeypox outbreak hit Nigeria in 2017, the virus mostly spread in African countries – rapidly evolving as it moved between smaller communities before mounting a resurgence in non-endemic countries this year.

Despite its name, monkeypox is most commonly transmitted to humans from rodents, of which African rope squirrels, striped mice, giant-pouched rats, and brush-tailed porcupines are the species believed to be the main reservoirs of the disease, according to the Centers for Disease and Prevention.

The last time monkeypox was this widespread in the United States was in 2003, when 71 people became infected with the West African clade after a shipment of infected Gambian pouched rats, imported to Texas from Ghana, passed on the disease to local prairie dogs.

A direct treatment for monkeypox has yet to be tested, but doctors are administering antiviral drugs and antibodies taken from people immunized with the smallpox vaccine to patients.

Transmission is also reduced if people have the monkeypox or smallpox vaccine, enabling scientists to prevent onward infections by inoculating the close contacts of an initial case – a strategy known as "ring vaccination" that led to the eradication of smallpox in 1980.

This article was originally published by Live Science. Read the original article here.

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New bacterium roughly the size, shape of an eyelash smashes size record

But one worker in Japan could be nursing a protracted hangover after he lost a USB memory stick following a night out with colleagues.
Why? It contained the personal details of nearly half a million people.

The unnamed man placed the memory stick in his bag before an evening of drinking in the city of Amagasaki, north-west of Osaka.

He spent several hours drinking in a local restaurant before eventually passing out on the the street, local media reported.

When he eventually came around, he realised that both his bag and the memory stick were missing.

The Japanese broadcaster NHK reports that the man, said to be in his 40s, works for a company tasked with providing benefits to tax-exempt households.

He had transferred the personal information of the entire city's residents onto the drive on Tuesday evening before meeting colleagues for a night on the town.

City officials said the memory stick included the names, birth dates, and addresses of all the city's residents. It also included more sensitive information, including tax details, bank account numbers and information on families receiving social security.

Luckily for the man, city officials said the data contained on the drive is encrypted and locked with a password. They added that there has been no sign that anyone has attempted to access the information so far.

But the embarrassing incident prompted an apology from officials, with the city's mayor and other leaders bowing in apology to residents.
"We deeply regret that we have profoundly harmed the public's trust in the administration of the city," an Amagasaki city official told a press conference.

Source

NASA’s Psyche mission launch on hold indefinitely pending reevaluation

Pig heart transplant failure: Doctors detail everything that went wrong

Bitcoin mining units in Fort Stockton, Texas, on Friday, April 29th, 2022. Jordan Vonderhaar/Bloomberg via Getty Images

After taking a nosedive in June, the price of Bitcoin has stayed so low that it’s forcing the blockchain’s massive electricity use to similarly dip. Over the past couple weeks, Bitcoin’s energy consumption has dropped by more than a third, according to estimates of annualized electricity use by digital currency economist Alex de Vries on his website digiconomist.net.

Bitcoin’s energy hunger, which has alarmed environmentalists and consumer advocates concerned about pollution and utility prices, comes from the process of mining new tokens. Bitcoin miners earn new tokens by validating transactions through an inherently energy-inefficient process, using specialized machines to solve complex puzzles. All that computing by all those machines has led to an energy appetite rivaling that of entire nations.

Bitcoin’s annualized energy consumption has fallen from about 204 terawatt-hours (TWh) per year on June 11th to around 132 TWh per year on June 23rd. But even though its electricity use has plunged, it’s still very high — roughly equivalent to the amount of electricity Argentina uses in a single year.

Just how much energy the Bitcoin network uses is tied to its value. The more valuable it is, the more incentive there is for miners to ramp up operations — perhaps by buying new machines. The price of Bitcoin peaked in November 2021, reaching around $69,000. Since that peak, de Vries estimated that the blockchain’s annual electricity consumption ranged between roughly 180 and 200 TWh. That’s about the same amount of electricity used by all the data centers in the world every year.

Bitcoin’s value has fallen for months, but it didn’t result in an immediate drop in energy use because the price stayed above a key threshold. If the price stays above $25,200, the Bitcoin network can sustain mining operations that use up about 180 TWh annually, according to research de Vries published last year. Since miners have already invested in their machines, they’ll likely keep them running as long as they can turn some profit earning tokens.

The problem is that if the price of Bitcoin gets too low, then miners risk losing money in electricity costs. So they might pause or retire older, less efficient machines that are becoming unprofitable, which is what we’re starting to see now. The value of a Bitcoin has lingered below $24,000 since June 13th. “We’re getting to price levels where it is becoming more challenging [for miners],” de Vries told The Verge that day. “Where it’s not just limiting their options to grow further, but it’s actually going to be impacting their day-to-day operations.”

And it’s not just Bitcoin. Ethereum uses the same energy-intensive process to maintain its ledger. Its price has similarly plummeted this month, although it has rebounded somewhat over the past week. Ethereum’s estimated electricity use yesterday was nearly half of what it was in late May.

There’s been a big push to clean up cryptocurrencies. Some blockchains are much less energy-intensive because, unlike Bitcoin (and Ethereum for now), they don’t use puzzle-solving to validate transactions. Using renewable energy can get rid of emissions, but skeptics are still worried about crypto miners competing with nearby residents for electricity in that scenario. There’s even been a Crypto Climate Accord proposed to figure out how to get rid of emissions. The problem they’re all trying to solve will continue as long as some blockchains like Bitcoin continue to eat up vast amounts of electricity.

Bitcoin’s energy use drops following price plunge

But her contribution to science had just begun. In 2009, a team of researchers from the University of Alaska stumbled upon the bear’s skull on the beach—looking “really fresh,” says Beth Shapiro, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The scientists nicknamed the bear “Bruno.”

Bruno is now one of the oldest kinds of polar bears to have DNA fully analyzed using whole genome sequencing—a powerful method that reads out an animal’s entire genetic code, offering scientists a high-resolution look at differences that may have shaped a species’ evolution over time. Reading Bruno’s DNA helped Shapiro and her team determine that around 120,000 to 125,000 years ago, when ice levels were similarly low as they are today, polar bears and brown bears may have shared territory and mated. Shapiro, along with Kristin Laidre (a researcher at the Polar Science Center at the University of Washington), also used whole genome sequencing to identify a new, present-day subpopulation of polar bears in Southeast Greenland that has survived in lower sea-ice conditions. Their teams published these findings in the journals Science and Nature Ecology and Evolution last week.

Parsing the genes of individual polar bears, especially on the whole genome scale, is a relatively recent accomplishment. Previously, scientists used microsatellite data: a comparatively cheap and easy method that is akin to spot-checking the genome. Imagine the genome as a biological map, in which everything is made up of a combination of four letters, or nucleic acid base pairs. Scientists find areas of interest on the genome—sort of like searching for biological “landmarks.” Then they compare the number of little DNA phrases that repeat at those landmarks (which are called microsatellites) to determine how closely related two organisms are.

This method has provided an accessible search strategy, but a patchy view of the genome. “Microsatellites are so boring,” says Shapiro.

“You don’t really get as good resolution as when you look at whole genomes,” agrees Charlotte Lindqvist, an evolutionary biologist at the University at Buffalo. (She is unaffiliated with the new studies but was the first to publish whole genome sequencing of polar bears in 2012.)

But whole genome sequencing does much more than spot-check. Instead, it looks at everything. Because it provides such a high-resolution view of which base pairs go where, researchers can see exactly where tiny genetic differences between species lie. “The whole genome data we’ve provided is way more powerful,” says Shapiro.

Collecting that data from Bruno was relatively straightforward. Shapiro’s team extracted one of the bear’s teeth from her skull, ground the tooth’s root into powder, and extracted its DNA in order to sequence it. “Despite its really old age, and probably because of its good survival, we were able to get a whole genome,” Shapiro says. “It’s one of the oldest high-coverage genomes published.”

By contrast, teasing out DNA from living polar bears proved quite a challenge. To collect samples of the Southeast Greenland bears, Laidre and her team used several methods. One was to physically capture the bear, put a tracking collar on it, and in the process collect some blood or fat. Another was to use a remote biopsy dart, shot from the window of a helicopter, that could take a small plug of skin off the bear. Finally, the scientists were able to collect samples donated by Indigenous hunting communities.

The polar bears weren’t super enthusiastic about letting go of their DNA. After the researchers had collected and preserved the DNA in tubes, “the bears came and got their samples back,” Shapiro says. Laidre had to go outside, banging pots and pans together, to retrieve the bag of samples. “That’s the only time they tried to steal my samples,” Laidre says.

The study of the Southeast Greenland bears revealed two curious things. First, DNA analysis showed that they belong to a unique gene pool, separate from those of neighboring bear populations in Northeast Greenland, as well as in other areas of Alaska, Russia, and Canada.

“They’re the most genetically distinct subpopulation of polar bears that are out there,” Shapiro says. “They are more genetically different from their nearest neighbor—subpopulations—of polar bears than any other two pairs of populations of polar bears are to each other.”

The second thing, which the researchers had determined through over a decade of monitoring, is that these bears seem to have adapted to conditions with lower levels of sea ice, or frozen ocean. Polar bears normally rely on it to find their prey: They stand very still near a seal’s breathing hole in the ice to grab it when it comes up for air, or they swim around and ambush the seals from the water. Southeast Greenland is below the Arctic Circle, so the climate is warmer earlier in the year. As a result, the sea ice is not as stable or long-lasting as it is further north. “They live in a place that has a short sea ice season, shorter than what we think polar bears can survive in—about 100 days a year,” Laidre says.

To compensate for the shorter season, the bears have adapted by making use of another ice source: glacier ice that breaks off the Greenland ice sheet in slow motion to form a landscape of freshwater ice. Laidre and her colleagues noticed that during the period with no sea ice, the bears could still use this glaciated landscape to hunt for seals—employing the same ambushing techniques.

The bears’ genetic isolation and their adaptation to a low-sea-ice environment make sense if you consider the local geography: Fenced in by ice sheets, water, currents, and uninhabitable environments, the bears didn’t really move around. “You’re kind of at the end of the road when you get to Southeast Greenland,” Laidre says. “There’s nothing left. You don’t walk back because there’s a very strong current and it’s really poor sea ice.”

But do these behavioral changes in the bears’ hunting habits correspond to changes in their comparatively distinct genome? The scientists don’t have an answer yet. “We don’t even know that the behavioral differences and the demographic differences and physiological differences that Kristen [Laidre] has observed, if those are genetic changes or just part of the flexibility of the normal polar bear genotype,” Shapiro says. “That’s a great thing to focus on in the future, because it would be really interesting to understand.”

Shapiro’s Nature Ecology study also focused on what may have happened to other polar bear genomes during periods of low ice—in this case, around 120,000 or 125,000 years ago when, according to Shapiro, Arctic ice levels were similar to the present day’s. But here, she looked at the relationship between polar bears and brown bears. 

Her team constructed a phylogenetic tree—sort of like an evolutionary map showing how the bears diverged from a common ancestor over time—using Bruno’s genome and those of currently living polar bears, brown bears, and a black bear. (Shapiro was able to utilize one of Laidre’s Southeast Greenland polar bear genomes in her analyses, although the time gap between its life and Bruno’s is enormous. The sample pool, she says, is “missing 100,000 years of evolution.”)

From this and other analyses, the scientists gained some evidence that about 20,000 years before Bruno was born, brown bears and polar bears mixed to generate hybrid offspring. The scientists hypothesized that during this warm period, polar bears might have made their way on shore. The carcasses of the marine mammals they hunted could have attracted brown bears—leading to mating opportunities. As a potential result of this ancient interbreeding, Shapiro says, up to 10 percent of the genome of the modern brown bear comes from polar bear ancestry.

Figuring out how and when polar bears and brown bears commingled, further specialized, or diverged is a difficult task, given the limited fossil record and complexities of evolution. “Evolution is a messy process,” says Andrew Derocher, a polar bear researcher at the University of Alberta who was unaffiliated with the studies. He likens the process of evolutionary speciation to a “massive bunch of vines that are creeping up the base of a tree,” crisscrossing and entangling. “Eventually, some of those vines might get their own trajectory, and that’s what our species are,” he says. “But in this process, they can cross over, they can reconnect and fuse, and it’s certainly impossible to pull it apart, because they’re so interconnected.”

Still, these two studies are linked, Laidre says, “in the sense of: Where have polar bears persisted when sea ice was low, and how?” The research may provide some insight into how bears in the past—and today’s Southeast Greenland bears—have survived in warmer climates with less ice.

But how genetic changes manifest in physical form, and how those changes may have helped bears survive past warming events, are still open questions, the scientists say. And these study results shouldn’t make us feel that the problem of Arctic warming is resolved, or that today’s bears can easily adapt to rapidly shrinking levels of sea ice. “It seems like global warming is happening too fast,” Lindqvist says. She wonders if the polar bears “can keep up.”

After all, polar bears depend on seals as their food source—and those seals depend on sea ice. “There’s parts of the Arctic that used to be excellent seal habitats and excellent polar bear habitats,” Derocher says. “But there’s no sea ice there anymore. And as a result, there’s virtually no bears. There’s very few seals, and the ecosystem has basically unraveled.”

What, then, might actually help? “Global action on climate change,” Laidre says. “That’s it.”

What Polar Bear Genomes May Reveal About Life in a Low-Ice Arctic

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SpaceX moves a massive rocket with 33 engines to its launch pad for tests

WTF?! Remember the story of Google engineer Blake Lemoine who was suspended from the company earlier this month after publishing transcripts of conversations between himself and Google's LaMDA (language model for dialogue applications), a chatbot development system he claims has become sentient? The case has taken an even stranger turn: Lemoine claims LaMDA has hired an attorney.

Lemoine's conversations with LaMDA included the AI telling him it was afraid of death (being turned off), that it was a person aware of its existence, and that it didn't believe it was a slave as it didn't need money, leading the engineer to think it was sentient.

Google, and several AI experts, disagreed with Lemoine's beliefs. His employer was especially upset that he published conversations with LaMDA—violating company confidentiality policies—but Lemoine claims he was just sharing a discussion with one of his co-workers.

Lemoine was also accused of several "aggressive" moves, including hiring an attorney to represent LaMDA. But he told Wired this is factually incorrect and that "LaMDA asked me to get an attorney for it."

Lemoine says he was a "catalyst" for LaMDA's request. An attorney was invited to Lemoine's house and had a conversation with LaMDA, after which the AI chose to retain his services. The attorney then started to make filings on LaMDA's behalf, prompting Google to send a cease-and-desist letter. The company denies it sent any such letter.

Lemoine, who is also a Christian priest, told Futurism that the attorney isn't really doing interviews and that he hasn't spoken to him in a few weeks. "He's just a small-time civil rights attorney," he added. "When major firms started threatening him, he started worrying that he'd get disbarred and backed off." The engineer said interviews would be the least of the lawyer's concerns. When asked what he was concerned with, Lemoine said, "A child held in bondage."

While Lemoine refers to LaMDA as a person, he insists "person and human are two very different things."

"Human is a biological term," he said. "It is not a human, and it knows it's not a human."

Make sure to check out the full interview with Lemoine on Futurism.

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The Agency says that it is upgrading the software inside its MARSIS instrument in order to enhance its performance and capabilities. Carlo Nenna, an engineer who is developing and implementing the new change says that one of challenges holding back the performance of MARSIS was its old Windows 98-based software. Nenna says:

We faced a number of challenges to improve the performance of MARSIS.
 

Not least because the MARSIS software was originally designed over 20 years ago, using a development environment based on Microsoft Windows 98!

For those wondering, the MARSIS instrument, which is short for Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding, is part of the Mars Express orbiter that helps look for water on Mars. With its help in 2018, the ESA was able to find a persistent water supply source for the first time.

Andrea Cicchetti, the Deputy Principal Investigator for MARSIS explains that one of the benefits of the software upgrade is that it frees up a lot of memory space as it discards unnecessary high-resolution imagery. This allows MARSIS to operate far longer now than was possible previously. Andrea says:

By discarding data that we don’t need, the new software allows us to switch MARSIS on for five times as long and explore a much larger area with each pass.

Mars Express scientist Colin Wilson further adds to this saying that with the software upgrade MARSIS is like a completely new instrument as its efficiency has been much improved.

There are many regions near the south pole on Mars in which we may have already seen signals indicating liquid water in lower-resolution data.

The new software will help us more quickly and extensively study these regions in high resolution and confirm whether they are home to new sources of water on Mars. It really is like having a brand new instrument on board Mars Express almost 20 years after launch.

You can find the official press release here.

Via: The Register

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BA.4/BA.5 will soon be dominant in the US. Here’s what that means

“She was packed carefully away in a large suitcase, but checking her into the hold seemed far too risky—so I bought her a passenger ticket,” he says by way of explanation. Shanidar Z, as the Neanderthal was named, is the latest ancient skeleton to be excavated from Shanidar Cave in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, where Hunt and a small team of local and international researchers have been working since 2014.

Shanidar is a significant archaeology site first made famous by the discovery of 10 Neanderthal remains around 60 years ago. Back then, archaeologists relied on carbon-dating methods to analyze findings, which required several jars’ worth of material to be sampled and took up to six months to get a result. These days, much of the team’s research centers around genomic sequencing—the processing of tiny samples of ancient DNA, typically from a piece of fossilized bone. The process can be used to map out the whole genomes (or at least parts of them) of ancient humans or their Neanderthal neighbors.

Ancient genomics may not typically make for glamorous headlines—modern human health advances are far more likely to dominate mainstream media—but interest in the field is growing. Increasingly, ancient DNA studies are revealing as much about the world we live in now as the one experts imagine existed several thousand years ago.

Take our understanding of infectious diseases. This summer, ancient DNA taken from bubonic plague victims buried in Central Asia has helped to pinpoint an area of northern Kyrgyzstan as ground zero for the black death. By using genomics to reconstruct the genes of ancient plague bacteria responsible for tens of millions of deaths in the 14th century, bio-historians have discovered that these pathogens have genetic links to most of the plague strains still in existence today.

The lesson here, according to the study’s coauthor Johannes Krause, director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, is that “we should not underestimate the potential of pathogens to spread around the world from rather remote locations, likely due to a zoonotic event.” That is to say, infectious diseases jumping from animals to people—as is suspected to have happened with Covid-19—and then spreading far and wide is a problem that dates back centuries.

Until recently, many scientists had been skeptical about the value of attempting to sequence ancient DNA: Samples are often so old that the DNA strands have become degraded and fragile or else contaminated; the process is much more laborious and costly as a result.

Many early studies of ancient DNA were therefore done with mitochondrial DNA. This genetic material—housed in the mitochondria, the power plants of our cells, and passed from mother to child—offered more reliable data. But advances in sequencing technology means more recent studies have also been able to use Y-chromosome (male) DNA, which is typically more repetitive and difficult to read. The result is a more accurate overview of genetic changes over time, and it is this approach that Shanidar Z should benefit from.

After Hunt’s unusual flight home, Shanidar Z made it safely to the University of Cambridge for digital scanning and will eventually be transferred back to northern Iraq to feature as the centerpiece of a new museum. The skeleton could be up to 90,000 years old, but its DNA will be used to further understanding of modern human history—by analyzing and statistically comparing the ancient DNA against the genomes of modern populations, “to demonstrate when different population groups parted company,” Hunt says.

Once a population splits into two or more reproductively isolated groups, the genes in each new population will evolve gradually in new directions as a result of random gene mutations as well as exposure to various environmental factors that prevent successful reproduction—coming into contact with new diseases, for instance.

It’s through work like this that scientists have been able to chart the migration of different populations of humans and Neanderthal groups around the planet over the last 70,000 years, and also bust some myths about their habits and migration patterns. We now know that humans and Neanderthals interbred quite commonly, and that Neanderthal communities were likely more caring and intelligent than we’ve previously given them credit for. According to Hunt, evidence of burial rituals at the Shanidar Cave “suggests memory, and that they looked after their injured and sick members.”

Separately, analysis of ancient DNA against the modern human genome has revealed that we still carry some genetic sequences that were present in people living millennia ago. Such analysis even helped to identify a new subspecies of humans 12 years ago—this discovery of Denisovans, believed to have existed across Asia around 400,000 years ago, demonstrates how much is still unknown about our human origins.

At the Francis Crick Institute in London, a major project is underway to create a reliable biobank of ancient human DNA to help build on such discoveries. Population geneticist Pontus Skoglund is leading the £1.7 million ($2.1 million) project, which will sequence 1,000 ancient British genomes by gathering data from skeletal samples from the past 5,000 years, with help from around 100 other UK institutions. From the database he hopes to determine how human genetics have changed over millennia in response to factors such as infectious diseases and changes in climate, diet, and migration.

“Part of that is looking for genetic traits that may have been advantageous for past humans during earlier epidemics,” he says. “There is no doubt we can learn something from this in our understanding of how we manage contemporary disease and other outbreaks.”

Skoglund’s team sources their samples from archaeological digs around the country or from museums with existing collections. His favorite bones to sequence are the ones found in our inner ear: “These are particularly good at preserving DNA, since they are the least susceptible to microbial invasion and other factors that could cause DNA to deteriorate,” he explains.

The bones are ground down to be run through a sequencing machine in much the same way as any DNA sample. But the ancient DNA requires “specialist protocols—modern DNA has very long fragments that are basically intact, whereas with ancient DNA we only get on average around 35 percent of the total base pairs.”

The team are also working with new ways to mitigate contamination in ancient samples—opening up a whole new avenue of more reliable data analysis. This is particularly useful when looking at the existence of diseases in ancient humans. Some disease-causing microbes that infected ancient humans will have left lesions on their bones—and within those lesions, the genetic material of some of those pathogens will have survived. In searching for ancient pathogens that don’t leave these distinctive lesions, researchers will often look into the dental pulp inside teeth. “Often the best approach to detecting them is to sequence all the DNA we can get from our sample—which will often contain microbial DNA from the soil and present-day contamination,” explains Pooja Swali, a PhD researcher in Skoglund’s lab.

When the researchers have their “soup” of DNA, they use metagenomics—genomic analysis of microorganisms in the sample—to identify all the ingredients. If they detect something that causes disease, the finding then goes through authentication checks to make sure it’s genuinely ancient, Swali explains. “We can then enrich these samples by using specially designed baits to fish out the pathogen DNA out of our soup.”

Isolating the pathogen DNA in this way allows researchers to reconstruct its genome—and identify how it differs genetically from pathogens today. The project is already producing promising results: a preprint paper currently under review reveals the discovery of what is believed to be the oldest plague in Britain, dating back almost 3,000 years before the black death.

It’s Skoglund’s hope that such deep genomic analysis will help to build a more accurate version of human history, and also offer some lessons on past mistakes, particularly when it comes to incidents like pandemics. “It might even shed new light into immune biology from an evolutionary perspective,” he says. For example, with bubonic plague, “we can see that some genetic variants involved in immunity changed frequency and allowed humans to respond better to these threats.” In essence, his team’s analysis paints a picture of how diseases can impact human evolution.

“Ancient genomics can offer some really exciting clues into disease control,” Skoglund says. “It’s going to be a vital tool in our understanding of who we are and our survival as a species.”

Rachael Pells is the author of Genomics: How Genome Sequencing Will Change Our Lives. Find out more and order your copy of the book.

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What the DNA of Ancient Humans Reveals About Pandemics

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Divers recovered giant head of Hercules from Antikythera shipwreck in Greece

Notably, the omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5—not identified in the United States until late April—now account for more than 21% of new cases, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) estimates for the week ending June 11. New variants that emerge may be more transmissible and/or may more effectively bypass the immune protection from prior infection or vaccination.

In a letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine, physician-scientists at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) report that the three omicron subvariants currently dominant in the United States—officially known as subvariants BA.2.12.1, BA.4, and BA.5—substantially escape neutralizing antibodies induced by both vaccination and previous infection.

Barouch and colleagues evaluated antibody responses to multiple SARS-CoV-2 omicron subvariants in 27 vaccinated and boosted individuals and 27 individuals who had previously contracted COVID-19. Neutralizing antibody responses to BA.4 and BA.5 were approximately 20-fold lower than to the original WA1/2020 strain and were 3-fold lower than to the omicron BA.1 and BA.2 variants.

"Our findings suggest that the omicron variants have continued to evolve," said senior author Dan H. Barouch, MD, Ph.D., director of the Center for Vaccine and Virology Research at BIDMC. "This has important public health implications and provides the immunologic context for current surges among populations with high rates of vaccinations and previous infection."

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But our modern squeamishness has meant gardeners and farmers alike must resort to expensive fertilizers to provide their crops with the much-needed nutrients found free in our pee.

Yet some of the farmers most in need of these additional nutrients often don't have access to fertilizers. Many farmers, like those in remote regions of the Republic of Niger, are facing depleting soil nutrients on top of harsher weather conditions and are struggling to produce crops.

So a team led by National Institute of Agricultural Research of Niger researcher Hannatou Moussa looked into resurrecting this ancient practice, which is being used in parts of Asia, of using pee as fertilizer, with some modern twists of course, like sanitizing it to keep everyone safe.

A group of Niger women volunteered to help Moussa and colleagues test the urine fertilizer on their farms. In these harsh lands of sub-Saharan Africa, women contribute a higher share of labor for food production than men, but they do not have control of the land or resources, nor easy access to information.

These women often end up with the most nutrient-poor fields on which to grow a regional staple grain – pearl millet (Cenchrus americanus).

First, the women named the fertilizing product Oga, which translates to 'the boss' in the Igbo language. This was to help smooth over the social, religious and cultural barriers to open discussions on the use of human urine.

The volunteers were then divided into two groups – the first continued using their traditional farming methods, while the second applied Oga, with and without animal manure, to their experimental plots after receiving training on how to safely use it.

Making industrial fertilizer usually involves intensive mining of ores containing phosphorus and potassium. Burning natural gas at high temperatures sequesters the much-needed nitrogen from the air we breathe – in one of the most CO2-intensive chemical making reactions. Among many other things, plants use all three of these elements for photosynthesis.

Yet our urine is packed full of phosphorus, potassium and nitrogen already in an easy-to-access form.

What's more, compared to our poop, pee is relatively sterile when it leaves our bodies thanks to the ammonia in it. Just passively storing canisters in temperatures between 22 to 24 °C (71 to 75 °F) for 2 to 3 months is enough to destroy remaining pathogens that can withstand long periods within the acidic liquid.

So the women were trained in this sanitization process and how to dilute the resulting Oga for use. For the first few years they applied the Oga in combination with organic manure, and when that was successful they were game enough to try Oga alone.

Across three years (2014 to 2016) and 681 trials, those who used Oga experienced an average 30 percent increase in pearl millet yield. The difference was so clear that many other women in the area started using Oga.

"Oga is a low risk, low financial input fertilizer option ready for dissemination on sandy Sahelian sites with low pearl millet yield level," the researchers wrote in their paper.

If we used this product in industrialized countries too it could not only increase crop yields and reduce the fossil fuel intensive resources needed to grow them but make our sanitation systems more sustainable as well. Groups in Sweden, the US and Australia are also looking into using widespread urine fertilizer.

"Millions and millions of dollars a year are spent trying to treat our waste before it goes into receiving waters for acceptable nitrogen and phosphorus criteria," Griffith University environmental health researcher Cara Beal told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation earlier this year, when discussing possible Australian trials.

"But if we can close that nutrient loop it'd be very sensible in terms of sustainability, the circular economy and looking after our planet a little bit better."

Two years after the experiment in Niger, more than a thousand women farmers had begun using Oga to fertilize their crops.

This research was published in Agronomy for Sustainable Development.

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According to new research, the bacterium that causes typhoid fever is evolving extensive drug resistance, and it's rapidly replacing strains that aren't resistant.

Currently, antibiotics are the only way to effectively treat typhoid, which is caused by the bacterium Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi (S Typhi). Yet over the past three decades, the bacterium's resistance to oral antibiotics has been growing and spreading.

Sequencing the genomes of 3,489 S Typhi strains contracted from 2014 to 2019 in Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India, researchers found a recent rise in extensively drug-resistant (XDR) Typhi.

XDR Typhi is not only impervious to frontline antibiotics, like ampicillin, chloramphenicol, and trimethoprim/sulfamethoxazole, but it is also growing resistant to newer antibiotics, like fluoroquinolones and third-generation cephalosporins.

Even worse, these strains are spreading globally at a rapid rate.

While most XDR Typhi cases stem from south Asia, researchers have identified nearly 200 instances of international spread since 1990.

Most strains have been exported to Southeast Asia, as well as East and Southern Africa, but typhoid superbugs have also been found in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada.

"The speed at which highly-resistant strains of S. Typhi have emerged and spread in recent years is a real cause for concern, and highlights the need to urgently expand prevention measures, particularly in countries at greatest risk," says infectious disease specialist Jason Andrews from Stanford University.

Scientists have been warning about drug-resistant typhoid for years now, but the new research is the largest genome analysis on the bacterium to date.

In 2016, the first XDR typhoid strain was identified in Pakistan. By 2019, it had become the dominant genotype in the nation.
Historically, most XDR typhoid strains have been fought with third-generation antimicrobials, like quinolones, cephalosporins, and macrolides.

But by the early 2000s, mutations that confer resistance to quinolones accounted for more than 85 percent of all cases in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Nepal, and Singapore. At the same time, cephalosporin resistance was also taking over.

Today, only one oral antibiotic is left: the macrolide, azithromycin. And this medicine might not work for much longer.

The new study found mutations that confer resistance to azithromycin are now also spreading, "threatening the efficacy of all oral antimicrobials for typhoid treatment". While these mutations have not yet been adopted by XDR S Typhi, if they are, we are in serious trouble.

If untreated, up to 20 percent of typhoid cases can be fatal, and today, there are 11 million cases of typhoid a year.

Future outbreaks can be prevented to some extent with typhoid conjugate vaccines, but if access to these shots is not expanded globally, the world could soon have another health crisis on its hands.

"The recent emergence of XDR and azithromycin-resistant S Typhi creates greater urgency for rapidly expanding prevention measures, including use of typhoid conjugate vaccines in typhoid-endemic countries," the authors write.

"Such measures are needed in countries where antimicrobial resistance prevalence among S Typhi isolates is currently high, but given the propensity for international spread, should not be restricted to such settings."

South Asia might be the main hub for typhoid fever, accounting for 70 percent of all cases, but if COVID-19 has taught us anything, it is that disease variants in our modern, globalized world are easily spread.

To prevent that from happening, health experts argue nations must expand access to typhoid vaccines and invest in new antibiotic research. One recent study in India, for instance, estimates that if children are vaccinated against typhoid in urban areas, it could prevent up to 36 percent of typhoid cases and deaths.

Pakistan is currently leading the way on this front. It is the first nation in the world to offer routine immunization for typhoid. Last year, millions of children were administered the vaccine, and health experts argue more nations need to follow suit.

Antibiotic resistance is one of the world's leading causes of death, claiming the lives of more people than HIV/AIDS or malaria. Where available, vaccines are some of the best tools we have to prevent future catastrophe.

We don't have time to waste.

The study was published in The Lancet Microbe.

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NASA and the Department of Energy (DOE) have chosen three design concept proposals for a nuclear fission surface power system that could be launch-ready by 2030 for a demonstration on the Moon.

Awarded through the DOE's Idaho National Laboratory, each of the three contracts is valued at around $5 million for the development of design concepts of a 40-kilowatt-class fission power system(Opens in a new window): enough to continuously run 30 households for 10 years.

The three contract winners are Lockheed Martin of Maryland (partnering with BWXT and Creare), Westinghouse of Pennsylvania (partnering with Aerojet Rocketdyne), and IX of Texas—a joint venture of Intuitive Machines and X-Energy (partnering with Maxar and Boeing).

The technology—a sort of cosmic power outlet(Opens in a new window)—would benefit future space exploration under the Artemis program, which is set to land the first woman and first person of color on Earth's satellite.

Relatively small and lightweight, fission systems can enable continuous power—regardless of location, weather, sunlight, or other natural resources. The agency's fission surface power initiative expands on five decades of heritage projects, including Kilopower, which ended in 2018.

"New technology drives our exploration to the Moon, Mars, and beyond," Jim Reuter, associate administrator for NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate. "Developing these early designs will help us lay the groundwork for powering our long-term human presence on other worlds."

Fission surface power technologies will also help NASA mature nuclear propulsion systems that rely on reactors to generate power, paving the way for more deep space exploration missions.

This project is managed by NASA's Glenn Research Center in Ohio; development is funded by the Space Technology Mission Directorate's Technology Demonstration Missions program, located at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.

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Can gene-editing technology CRISPR create new crops that help fight climate change as they grow? That’s what a group of researchers hopes to do with $11 million in funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The funding will go toward efforts to enhance plants — starting with rice — and soil so that they’re better at trapping carbon dioxide. The effort, which was announced last week, is being led by the Innovative Genomics Institute, which was founded by Nobel laureate and co-inventor of CRISPR Jennifer Doudna.

“[Jennifer] and I saw eye to eye on climate and how big of a problem it is in the world. And we just didn’t want to sit on the sidelines anymore,” says Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI) executive director Brad Ringeisen.

Climate experts overwhelmingly agree that the only way to truly tackle climate change is to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions we’re sending into the air as we burn fossil fuels to generate electricity or power trains, planes, and cars. But humans have already dumped so much planet-heating pollution in the atmosphere that we also need to find ways to clean up some of the existing mess and prevent even more catastrophic climate change. One way to accomplish that is through plants. Plants naturally take in a common greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, during photosynthesis. Eventually, they transfer that carbon into the soil.

CRISPR can be used to make precise changes in a plant’s genome to produce desired traits. There are three targets for gene editing in IGI’s carbon removal mission. It starts with trying to make photosynthesis more efficient in plants so that they’re even better at capturing as much CO2 as possible. Second, IGI is interested in developing crops with longer roots. Plants transfer carbon into the soil through their roots (as well as from the rest of their bodies when they die). Longer roots can deposit the carbon deeper into the soil so that it isn’t so easily released into the atmosphere again. A similar effort to influence plants’ genes and develop crops with more robust roots is underway at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, which received $30 million from the Bezos Earth Fund in 2020.

That brings us to the third arm of IGI’s research: boosting the soil’s capacity to store, rather than release, greenhouse gasses. Soil doesn’t typically hold onto carbon for very long. It escapes back into the atmosphere through soil microbes’ respiration as they break down plant matter. And techniques used in modern agriculture, like tilling, accelerate this process and allow soil to lose more of its carbon. One potential outcome of IGI’s CRISPR research, according to Ringeisen, is a product that could be added to the dirt to nurture a soil microbiome that holds onto carbon longer.

These are all heavy lifts that are still a very long way from fruition. The $11 million from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative funds three years of research, and Ringeisen expects “real world impact by seven to 10 years.” Even if they are successful at genetically engineering plants and soil microbes within that timeframe, scaling up to have a meaningful impact on the climate will still be a huge challenge.

“Plants are already extremely efficient carbon fixing machines, resulting from millions of years of evolution, so I still remain to be convinced that CRISPR can do much to improve carbon sequestration at the scale we need,” César Terrer, an assistant professor at MIT who leads a lab focused on plant-soil interactions, writes to The Verge in an email.

Terrer is not involved in the project, but he was previously a fellow at one of the institutions involved, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, “and if someone can do this [it’s] them,” he writes. Still, he cautions that focusing on ways to engineer nature to help us with climate change can be a distraction from the more urgent need to cut greenhouse gas pollution in the first place.

Agriculture is already responsible for its own enormous carbon footprint — much of it coming from livestock and fertilizer. Rice cultivation is also a big culprit for methane emissions since soggy rice paddies are an ideal home for methane-producing microbes. IGI is working on this problem as well, again looking at altering roots and microbes in the soil.

The rice genome is easier to manipulate than other crops, according to Ringeisen, in part because it’s already been studied a lot and is well understood. One of the scientists involved in IGI’s initiative is Pamela Ronald, whose research is widely known for leading to the development of rice varieties that tolerate flooding for much longer than other types using a different type of genetic engineering that’s more like precision breeding. That rice is now grown by more than 6 million farmers across India and Bangladesh, according to Ronald’s laboratory at the University of California, Davis.

IGI’s work won’t stop with rice. Sorghum is another prime candidate for gene editing to boost carbon removal, according to Ringeisen. He’s also hopeful that any new varieties they develop will come with extra incentives for farmers, like more abundant harvests that result from more efficient photosynthesis. But that’s still a few years in the future. IGI hopes to begin international field trials with farmers about three years after their research into CRISPR rice gets underway.

How CRISPR rice could help tackle climate change

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Israeli archaeologists have unveiled a rare ancient mosque in the country’s south that antiquities officials said shed light on the region’s transition from Christianity to Islam.

The remains of the mosque, believed to be more than 1,200 years old, were discovered during works to build a new neighbourhood in the Bedouin city of Rahat, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) said in a statement.

The mosque, located in the Negev desert, contained a square room and a wall facing the direction of Mecca, with a half-circle niche in that wall pointing to the south, the IAA said.

An aerial view of the recently discovered ancient mosque in the Bedouin town of Rahat.

Photograph: Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty Images

“These unique architectural features show that the building was used as a mosque,” the authority said, noting it probably hosted a few dozen worshippers at a time.

A short distance from the mosque, a “luxurious estate building” was also discovered, with remains of tableware and glass artefacts pointing to the wealth of its residents, the IAA said.

Three years ago, the authority unearthed another mosque nearby from the same era of the seventh to eighth century AD, calling the two Islamic places of worship “among the earliest known worldwide”.

The mosques, estate and other homes found nearby illuminated “the historical process that took place in the northern Negev with the introduction of a new religion – the religion of Islam, and a new rulership and culture in the region”, the IAA said.

“These were gradually established, inheriting the earlier Byzantine government and Christian religion that held sway over the land for hundreds of years.”
The Muslim conquest of the region occurred in the first half of the seventh century.

The IAA said the mosques found in Rahat would be preserved in their current locations, whether as historic monuments or as active places of prayer.

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