Hackers have obtained data from the Ecuadorian Embassy in Moscow, revealing a trove of documents and emails as well as discussions regarding NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The more than 53 gigabytes of data, provided to the journalism collective DDoSecrets by hackers claiming affiliation with Anonymous, contains over 71,000 files, including scans of passports and personal information from visa applications.

The hack, which DDoSecrets is declining to make public given the personally identifiable information contained within, also includes expulsion orders regarding Ecuadorian citizens in Russia and roughly 30,607 emails ranging from 2018 to March of this year.

Files in the data cache, however, appear to date back much further. Numerous documents from 2013 detail discussions between Ecuador and Russia over the fate of Snowden, who famously that year leaked top-secret information regarding the surveillance activities of the NSA after fleeing to Hong Kong.

“Anonymous’ first venture into the world of diplomacy gives us a glimpse inside the day-to-day operations of an embassy and an inside look at the interactions between the two countries, as viewed through the unique lens of the embassy staff,” DDoSecrets co-founder Emma Best told the Daily Dot.

While reportedly in transit to South America, Snowden’s passport was revoked by the U.S. government, leaving him stranded in the Moscow airport. He would later be granted asylum and permanent residency.

In one such document dated June 24, 2013, Galo Galarza, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Human Mobility, can be seen requesting approval for Snowden’s safe passage to Ecuador from Sergey Lavrov, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation.

Snowden’s passport had been revoked by the U.S. a day earlier.

A translation of the document, which is written in Spanish, further shows Galarza requesting that Lavrov “take the necessary measures to establish coordination so that the transfer of citizen Edward Snowden… is carried out with the due guarantees of security and integrity…”

Ecuador goes on to label such actions as required given its decision to “grant international protection” for Snowden.

In a response that same day, Russia acknowledged receiving the request but demanded further clarification on Ecuador’s legal standing.

“The Department of Latin America of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, once the content of the same is known, has requested to clarify what Ecuador refers to when it indicates its decision to grant ‘international protection’ since, according to the jurists of the Russian Foreign Ministry, in international law there is no such category,” a translation states.

While it is unclear what further communications were held, Snowden’s continued presence in Russia shows Ecuador’s request was ultimately fruitless. The Daily Dot reached out to the Ecuadorian Embassy in Moscow for comment but did not receive a reply.

Ecuador had previously been willing to accept Snowden, according to reports. However, it left him in limbo by publicly saying they would only consider his asylum case if he made it to Ecuador, but that he could not travel to Ecuador without a valid U.S. passport, which had already been revoked.
These emails, however, reveal Ecuador at least made backchannel efforts to get Snowden to the country.

During the time of the negotiations, Ecuador was also providing shelter to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in its embassy in London. The Guardian would report in late June 2013 that Ecuador declared invalid a temporary travel document given to Snowden by the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. The travel document had reportedly come at the behest of Assange. Ecuadorian diplomats would cite in leaked discussions frustration over the WikiLeaks founder’s actions, arguing that his efforts to sidestep the government’s work regarding Snowden made it appear as if he was “running the show.”
It is believed Ecuador helped play a role in shuffling Snowden from Hong Kong to Russia.

The hacked data surfaced amid the ongoing war in Ukraine, which has led to an unprecedented hacktivism campaign against private and public entities in Russia. In just the first 10 weeks of the war, DDoSecrets published more than 10 million such documents provided by hackers.

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Volvo’s commercial trucking division is testing hydrogen fuel cell semi trucks in the hopes of getting ahead of the maturing technology. With fuel cells built by CellCentric, a joint venture between Volvo and Daimler Truck Automotive Group, Volvo claims its trucks are capable of 1,000 kilometers of range (about 621 miles) and can be refueled in under 15 minutes.

Volvo Trucks has been “developing this technology for some years now,” said company president Roger Alm in a statement this week. Hydrogen fuel cells will be suitable for long-distance hauling and could work in countries with limited battery charging infrastructure, Alm said. The company started building battery-electric trucks in 2018, but they still aren’t widely in service in the US. Now with hydrogen fuel cell trucks, Alm says he expects growth in the supply of clean hydrogen in the next couple of years.

Volvo claims refueling its hydrogen-powered truck takes less than 15 minutes. Image: Volvo

Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles and battery electric vehicles (BEV) are similar in that they are both propelled by an electric motor, but the former generates its electricity from the compressed hydrogen it carries, while the latter stores electricity generated from the area power grid. Both technologies are emissions-free “at the tailpipe,” meaning that they do not emit any carbon in motion. But there can be significant emissions released depending on the method of transporting hydrogen gas to stations, while BEVs are as clean as the power grid it relies on — which can vary from green sources like solar or dirty sources like coal.

A hurdle for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles continues to be the scarce availability of refueling stations. Currently, there are less than 60 stations operational in the US, and all of them are in California. And according to the California Fuel Cell Partnership website, the number of hydrogen fuel stations will increase to just over 100 locations by mid-2023.

The most viable use case for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles is commercial trucking. With Volvo’s new truck, the company joins automakers like Toyota, which spearhead the tech in commercial and passenger application, and also GM, which is working with Navistar on a 500-plus miles semi and is also using the tech to build mobile power stations.

Volvo’s commercial truck group is testing out hydrogen fuel cell semis

The cause of the ruckus is the sun’s magnetic field. Generated by the churning of particles in the core, it originates as a series of orderly north-to-south lines. But different latitudes on the molten star rotate at different rates—36 days at the poles, and only 25 days at the equator. Very quickly, those lines stretch and tangle, forming magnetic knots that can puncture the surface and trap matter beneath them. From afar, the resulting patches appear dark. They’re known as sunspots. Typically, the trapped matter cools, condenses into plasma clouds, and falls back to the surface in a fiery coronal rain. Sometimes, though, the knots untangle spontaneously, violently. The sunspot turns into the muzzle of a gun: Photons flare in every direction, and a slug of magnetized plasma fires outward like a bullet.

The sun has played this game of Russian roulette with the solar system for billions of years, sometimes shooting off several coronal mass ejections in a day. Most come nowhere near Earth. It would take centuries of human observation before someone could stare down the barrel while it happened. At 11:18 am on September 1, 1859, Richard Carrington, a 33-year-old brewery owner and amateur astronomer, was in his private observatory, sketching sunspots—an important but mundane act of record-keeping. That moment, the spots erupted into a blinding beam of light. Carrington sprinted off in search of a witness. When he returned, a minute later, the image had already gone back to normal. Carrington spent that afternoon trying to make sense of the aberration. Had his lens caught a stray reflection? Had an undiscovered comet or planet passed between his telescope and the star? While he stewed, a plasma bomb silently barreled toward Earth at several million miles per hour.

ILLUSTRATION: MARK PERNICE

When a coronal mass ejection comes your way, what matters most is the bullet’s magnetic orientation. If it has the same polarity as Earth’s protective magnetic field, you’ve gotten lucky: The two will repel, like a pair of bar magnets placed north-to-north or south-to-south. But if the polarities oppose, they will smash together. That’s what happened on September 2, the day after Carrington saw the blinding beam.

Electrical current raced through the sky over the western hemisphere. A typical bolt of lightning registers 30,000 amperes. This geomagnetic storm registered in the millions. As the clock struck midnight in New York City, the sky turned scarlet, shot through with plumes of yellow and orange. Fearful crowds gathered in the streets. Over the continental divide, a bright-white midnight aurora roused a group of Rocky Mountain laborers; they assumed morning had arrived and began to cook breakfast. In Washington, DC, sparks leaped from a telegraph operator’s forehead to his switchboard as his equipment suddenly magnetized. Vast sections of the nascent telegraph system overheated and shut down.

The Carrington Event, as it’s known today, is considered a once-in-a-century geomagnetic storm—but it took just six decades for another comparable blast to reach Earth. In May 1921, train-control arrays in the American Northeast and telephone stations in Sweden caught fire. In 1989, a moderate storm, just one-tenth the strength of the 1921 event, left Quebec in the dark for nine hours after overloading the regional grid. In each of these cases, the damage was directly proportional to humanity’s reliance on advanced technology—more grounded electronics, more risk.

When another big one heads our way, as it could at any time, existing imaging technology will offer one or two days’ notice. But we won’t understand the true threat level until the cloud reaches the Deep Space Climate Observatory, a satellite about a million miles from Earth. It has instruments that analyze the speed and polarity of incoming solar particles. If a cloud’s magnetic orientation is dangerous, this $340 million piece of equipment will buy humanity—with its 7.2 billion cell phones, 1.5 billion automobiles, and 28,000 commercial aircraft—at most one hour of warning before impact.

ILLUSTRATION: MARK PERNICE

Activity on the solar surface follows a cycle of roughly 11 years. At the beginning of each cycle, clusters of sunspots form at the middle latitudes of both solar hemispheres. These clusters grow and migrate toward the equator. Around the time they’re most active, known as solar maximum, the sun’s magnetic field flips polarity. The sunspots wane, and solar minimum comes. Then it happens all over again. “I don’t know why it took 160 years of cataloging data to realize that,” says Scott McIntosh, a blunt-speaking Scottish astrophysicist who serves as deputy director of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research. “It hits you right in the fucking face.”

Today, in the 25th solar cycle since regular record-­keeping began, scientists don’t have much to show beyond that migration pattern. They don’t fully understand why the poles flip. They cannot explain why some sunspot cycles are as short as nine years while others last 14. They cannot reliably predict how many sunspots will form or where coronal mass ejections will occur. What is clear is that a big one can happen in any kind of cycle: In the summer of 2012, during the historically quiet Cycle 24, two mammoth coronal mass ejections narrowly missed Earth. Still, a more active cycle increases the chances of that near miss becoming a direct hit.

Without a guiding theory of solar dynamics, scientists tend to take a statistical approach, relying on strong correlations and after-the-fact rationales to make their predictions. One of the more influential models, which offers respectable predictive power, uses the magnetic strength of the sun’s polar regions as a proxy for the vigor of the following cycle. In 2019, a dozen scientists empaneled by NASA predicted that the current solar cycle will peak with 115 sunspots in July 2025—well below the historical average of 179.

McIntosh, who was not invited to join the NASA panel, calls this “made-up physics.” He believes the old-school models are concerned with the wrong thing—sunspots, rather than the processes that create them. “The magnetic cycle is what you should be trying to model, not the derivative of it,” he says. “You have to explain why sunspots magically appear at 30 degrees latitude.”

McIntosh’s attempt to do that goes back to 2002, when, at the behest of a postdoctoral mentor, he began plotting tiny ultraviolet concentrations on the solar surface, known as brightpoints. “I think my boss knew what I would find if I let a full cycle pass,” he recalls. “By 2011, I was like, holy fuck.” He found that brightpoints originate at higher latitudes than sunspots do but follow the same path to the equator. To him, this implied that sunspots and brightpoints are twin effects of the same underlying phenomenon, one not found in astrophysics textbooks.

His grand unified theory, developed over a decade, goes something like this: Every 11 years, when the sun’s polarity flips, a magnetic band forms near each pole, wrapped around the circumference of the star. These bands exist for a couple of decades, slowly migrating toward the equator, where they meet in mutual destruction. At any given time, there are usually two oppositely charged bands in each hemisphere. They counteract each other, which promotes relative calm at the surface. But magnetic bands don’t all live to be the same age. Some reach what McIntosh calls “the terminator” with unusual speed. When this happens, the younger bands are left alone for a few years, without the moderating influence of the older bands, and they have a chance to raise hell.

McIntosh and his colleague Mausumi Dikpati believe that terminator timing is the key to forecasting sunspots—and, by extension, coronal mass ejections. The faster one set of bands dies out, the more dramatic the next cycle will be.

The most recent terminator, their data suggests, happened on December 13, 2021. In the days that followed, magnetic activity near the sun’s equator dissipated (signaling the death of one set of bands) while the number of sunspots at midlatitude rapidly doubled (signaling the solo reign of the remaining bands). Because this terminator arrived slightly sooner than expected, McIntosh predicts above-average activity for the current solar cycle, peaking at around 190 sunspots.

A clear victor in the modeling wars could emerge later this year. But McIntosh is already thinking ahead to the next thing—tools that can detect where a sunspot will emerge and how likely it is to burst. He yearns for a set of satellites orbiting the sun—a few at the poles and a few around the equator, like the ones used to forecast terrestrial weather. The price tag for such an early-­warning system would be modest, he argues: eight craft at roughly $30 million each. But will anyone fund it? “I think until Cycle 25 goes bananas,” he says, “nobody’s going to give a shit.”

When the next solar storm approaches Earth and the deep-space satellite provides its warning—maybe an hour in advance, or maybe 15 minutes, if the storm is fast-moving—alarms will sound on crewed spacecraft. Astronauts will proceed to cramped modules lined with hydrogen-rich materials like polyethylene, which will prevent their DNA from being shredded by protons in the plasma. They may float inside for hours or days, depending on how long the storm endures.

The plasma will begin to flood Earth’s ionosphere, and the electron bombardment will cause high-frequency radio to go dark. GPS signals, which are transmitted via radio waves, will fade with it. Cell phone reception zones will shrink; your location bubble on Google Maps will expand. As the atmosphere heats up, it will swell, and satellites will drag, veer off course, and risk collision with each other and space debris. Some will fall out of orbit entirely. Most new satellites are equipped to endure some solar radiation, but in a strong enough storm, even the fanciest circuit board can fry. When navigation and communication systems fail, the commercial airline fleet—about 10,000 planes in the sky at any given time—will attempt a simultaneous grounding. Pilots will eyeball themselves into a flight pattern while air traffic controllers use light signals to guide the planes in. Those living near military installations may see government aircraft scrambling overhead; when radar systems jam, nuclear defense protocols activate.

Through a weird and nonintuitive property of electromagnetism, the electricity coursing through the atmosphere will begin to induce currents at Earth’s surface. As those currents race through the crust, they will seek the path of least resistance. In regions with resistive rock (in the US, especially the Pacific Northwest, Great Lakes, and Eastern Seaboard), the most convenient route is upward, through the electrical grid.

The weakest points in the grid are its intermediaries—machines called transformers, which take low-voltage current from a power plant, convert it to a higher voltage for cheap and efficient transport, and convert it back down again so that it can be piped safely to your wall outlets. The largest transformers, numbering around 2,000 in the United States, are firmly anchored into the ground, using Earth’s crust as a sink for excess voltage. But during a geomagnetic storm, that sink becomes a source. Most transformers are only built to handle alternating current, so storm-induced direct current can cause them to overheat, melt, and even ignite. As one might expect, old transformers are at higher risk of failure. The average American transformer is 40 years old, pushed beyond its intended lifespan.

Modeling how the grid would fail during another Carrington-class storm is no easy task. The features of individual transformers—age, configuration, location—are typically considered trade secrets. Metatech, an engineering firm frequently contracted by the US government, offers one of the more dire estimates. It finds that a severe storm, on par with events in 1859 or 1921, could destroy 365 high-voltage transformers across the country—about one-fifth of those in operation. States along the East Coast could see transformer failure rates ranging from 24 percent (Maine) to 97 percent (New Hampshire). Grid failure on this scale would leave at least 130 million people in the dark. But the exact number of fried transformers may matter less than their location. In 2014, The Wall Street Journal reported findings from an unreleased Federal Energy Regulatory Commission report on grid security: If just nine transformers were to blow out in the wrong places, it found, the country could experience coast-to-coast outages for months.

Prolonged national grid failure is new territory for humankind. Documents from an assortment of government agencies and private organizations paint a dismal picture of what that would look like in the United States. Homes and offices will lose heating and cooling; water pressure in showers and faucets will drop. Subway trains will stop mid-voyage; city traffic will creep along unassisted by stoplights. Oil production will grind to a halt, and so will shipping and transportation. The blessing of modern logistics, which allows grocery stores to stock only a few days’ worth of goods, will become a curse. Pantries will thin out within a few days. The biggest killer, though, will be water. Fifteen percent of treatment facilities in the country serve 75 percent of the population—and they rely on energy-intensive pumping systems. These pumps not only distribute clean water but also remove the disease- and chemical-tainted sludge constantly oozing into sewage facilities. Without power, these waste systems could overflow, contaminating remaining surface water.

As the outage goes on, health care facilities will grow overwhelmed. Sterile supplies will run low, and caseloads will soar. When backup batteries and generators fail or run out of power, perishable medications like insulin will spoil. Heavy medical hardware—dialysis machines, imaging devices, ventilators—will cease to function, and hospital wards will resemble field clinics. With death tolls mounting and morgues losing refrigeration, municipalities will face grave decisions about how to safely handle bodies.

This is roughly the point in the worst-case scenario when the meltdowns at nuclear power plants begin. These facilities require many megawatts of electricity to cool their reactor cores and spent fuel rods. Today, most American plants run their backup systems on diesel. Koroush Shirvan, a nuclear safety expert at MIT, warns that many reactors could run into trouble if outages last longer than a few weeks.

ILLUSTRATION: MARK PERNICE

If you thumb through enough government reports on geomagnetic storms, you’ll find that one name comes up almost every time: John G. Kappenman. He has published 50 scientific papers, spoken before Congress and NATO, and advised half a dozen federal agencies and commissions. The soft-spoken utility veteran is the man behind the cataclysmic Meta­tech projections, and he is either a visionary or an alarmist, depending on whom you ask. Kappenman spent the first two decades of his career climbing the ladder at Minnesota Power, learning the ins and outs of the utility industry. In 1998, he joined Metatech, where he advised governments and energy companies on space weather and grid resilience.

His end-of-days predictions first gained national traction in 2010, setting off such alarm that the Department of Homeland Security enlisted JASON, an elite scientific advisory group, to pull together a counter-study. “We are not convinced that Kappenman’s worst-case scenario is possible,” the authors concluded in their 2011 report. Notably, however, JASON did not challenge Kappenman’s work on its merits, nor did the group offer a competing model. Rather, its objections were rooted in the fact that Metatech’s models are proprietary, and utility industry secrecy makes it hard to run national grid simulations. Still, the authors echoed Kappenman’s essential conclusion: The US grid is dramatically underprepared for a major storm, and operators should take immediate action to harden their transformers.

The good news is that a technical fix already exists. Mitigating this threat could be as simple as outfitting vulnerable transformers with capacitors, relatively inexpensive devices that block the flow of direct current. During the 1989 storm in Quebec, the grid fell offline and stopped conducting electricity before the current could inflict widespread damage. One close call was enough, though. In the years after, Canada spent more than $1 billion on reliability upgrades, including capacitors for its most vulnerable transformers. “To cover the entirety of the US, you’re probably in the ballpark of a few billion dollars,” Kappenman says. “If you spread that cost out, it would equal a postage stamp per year per customer.” A 2020 study by the Foundation for Resilient Societies arrived at a similar figure for comprehensive grid hardening: about $500 million a year for 10 years.

To date, however, American utility companies haven’t widely deployed current-blocking devices to the live grid. “They’ve only done things, like moving to higher and higher operating voltages”—for cheaper transmission—“that greatly magnify their vulnerability to these storms,” Kappenman tells me.

Tom Berger, former director of the US government’s Space Weather Prediction Center, also expressed doubts about grid operators. “When I talk to them, they tell me they understand space weather, and they’re ready,” he says. But Berger’s confidence waned after the February 2021 collapse of the Texas power grid, which killed hundreds of people, left millions of homes and businesses without heat, and caused about $200 billion in damage. That crisis was brought on by nothing more exotic than a big cold snap. “We heard the same thing,” Berger says. “‘We understand winter; it’s no problem.’”

I reached out to 12 of the country’s largest utility companies, requesting information on specific steps taken to mitigate damage from a major geomagnetic event. American Electric Power, the country’s largest transmission network, was the only company to share concrete measures, which it says include regularly upgrading hardware, redirecting current during a storm, and quickly replacing equipment after an event. Two other companies, Consolidated Edison and Exelon, claim to have outfitted their systems with geomagnetic monitoring sensors and be instructing their operators in unspecified “procedures.” Florida Power & Light declined to meaningfully comment, citing security risks. The other eight did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

At this point, curious minds may wonder whether utility companies are even required to plan for geomagnetic storms. The answer is complicated, in a uniquely American way. In 2005, when George W. Bush, a former oil executive, occupied the Oval Office, Congress passed the Energy Policy Act, which included a grab bag of giveaways to the oil and gas industry. It rescinded much of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s authority to regulate the utility industry. Reliability standards are now developed and enforced by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation—a trade association that represents the interests of those same companies.

Some find the NERC reliability standards laughable. (Two interviewees audibly laughed when asked about them.) Kappenman objected to the first set of standards, proposed in 2015, on the grounds that they were too lenient—they didn’t require utilities to prepare for a storm on par with 1859 or 1921. Berger took issue too, but for a different reason: The standards made no mention of storm duration. The ground-based effects of the Carrington Event lasted four or five consecutive days; a transformer built to withstand 10 seconds of current is very different from one ready for 120 hours.

Under pressure from the federal government, NERC enacted stricter standards in 2019. In a lengthy written statement, Rachel Sherrard, a spokeswoman for the group, emphasized that American utilities are now expected to deal with an event twice as strong as the 1989 Quebec storm. (Comparison with an old storm like Carrington, she noted, “is challenging because high-fidelity historical measurement data is not available.”) Though the new standards require utilities to fix vulnerabilities in their systems, the companies themselves determine the right approach—and the timeline.

If the utilities remain unmotivated, humanity’s ability to withstand a major geomagnetic storm will depend largely on our ability to replace damaged transformers. A 2020 investigation by the US Department of Commerce found that the nation imported more than 80 percent of its large transformers and their components. Under normal supply and demand conditions, lead times for these structures can reach two years. “People outside the industry don’t understand how difficult these things are to manufacture,” Kappenman says. Insiders know not to buy a transformer unless the factory that made it is at least 10 years old. “It takes that long to work out the kinks,” he says. In a time of solar crisis, foreign governments—even geopolitical allies—may throttle exports of vital electrical equipment, Kappenman notes. Some spare-part programs have cropped up over the past decade that allow participants to pool resources in various disaster scenarios. The size and location of these spares, however, are unknown to federal authorities—because the industry won’t tell them.

One day regulators may manage to map the electrical grid, even stormproof it (provided a big one doesn’t wipe it out first). Engineers may launch a satellite array that gives us days to batten down the hatches. Governments may figure out a way to stand up emergency transformers in a pinch. And there the sun will be—the inconceivable, inextinguishable furnace at the center of our solar system that destroys as indiscriminately as it creates. Life on this little mote depends entirely on the mercy of a cosmic nuclear power with an itchy trigger finger. No human triumph will ever change that. (But we should still buy the capacitors. Soon, please.)

Here Comes the Sun—to End Civilization

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Having rolled the fully stacked mega-rocket, with the Orion crew capsule on top, out to the launchpad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the SLS team began running through a practice countdown called the “wet dress rehearsal test.” While previous attempts in April foundered thanks to problems with faulty valves, hydrogen leaks, and launch tower fans, the team has addressed those issues and completely loaded the rocket’s propellant tanks. They went through nearly the entire countdown procedure, stopping at T-29 seconds at 7:37 pm Eastern time. That may be enough to finish preparing the SLS and Orion for launch day.

“It was a long day for the team, but it was a very successful day, and it accomplished a majority of the objectives that we had not completed in the prior wet dress,” said Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, the Artemis launch director, at NASA’s press conference this morning.

While the team indeed met most of those objectives, they didn’t quite follow the planned script. The launch controllers encountered a few technical problems, including a new leak of liquid hydrogen—supercooled down to a frigid -423 degrees Fahrenheit—in the line that connects to the rocket’s core stage. If this were launch day, such a leak would usually trigger the launch computer to hold the countdown. After failing to stanch the flow, the team decided to trick the computer into not seeing the leak warnings, so they could press ahead with the practice countdown. They made it farther than ever before, but they didn’t quite make it to the planned T-9.3 seconds mark, where, had they continued, the core stage’s RS-25 engines would fire up.

Now the team will review the data they’ve collected and, in a few days, they will make a decision about whether to go through the whole countdown test a fifth time or whether they have enough information to finally push ahead with the pivotal Artemis 1 launch later this summer.

The launch of the SLS rocket will be just one part of a suite of back-to-the-moon events that kick off this summer. As soon as this Saturday, NASA plans to launch Capstone, a tiny cubesat satellite that will travel the orbital path intended for the Lunar Gateway space station, which is expected to be a staging point for astronauts traveling between Earth and the moon.

The next feasible launch window for Artemis 1 opens between July 26 and August 10, followed by another launch window about two weeks later. That uncrewed mission will fly a loop around the moon while deploying small spacecraft for secondary missions and technology demonstrations.

Four other Artemis missions are planned, with more potential ones in the works. Following Artemis 1, the second mission will involve a crewed lunar flyby, and if the current schedule holds, in 2025, the long-awaited third mission will finally bring NASA astronauts back to the moon’s surface after 50 years since the Apollo program. Subsequent Artemis missions will build up the Lunar Gateway.

At today’s press conference, members of the team said they feel confident about the rocket’s systems now that they have met their most important milestones. “The team demonstrated tremendous discipline, perseverance, and fortitude,” said Mike Sarafin, the Artemis mission manager. “Artemis 1 paves the way forward to the moon and firmly establishes Orion and SLS as our transportation system for crew and cargo for the Artemis program, and yesterday put us on path for Artemis 1.”

NASA’s Giant SLS Rocket Is One Step Closer to Launch

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But Northwestern Medicine scientists say for non-pregnant, otherwise healthy Americans, vitamins are a waste of money because there isn't enough evidence they help prevent cardiovascular disease or cancer.

"Patients ask all the time, 'What supplements should I be taking?' They're wasting money and focus thinking there has to be a magic set of pills that will keep them healthy when we should all be following the evidence-based practices of eating healthy and exercising," said Dr. Jeffrey Linder, chief of general internal medicine in the department of medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Linder and fellow Northwestern Medicine scientists wrote an editorial that will be published June 21 in JAMA that supports new recommendations from the United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), an independent panel of national experts that frequently makes evidence-based recommendations about clinical preventive services.

Based on a systematic review of 84 studies, the USPSTF's new guidelines state there was "insufficient evidence" that taking multivitamins, paired supplements or single supplements can help prevent cardiovascular disease and cancer in otherwise healthy, non-pregnant adults.

"The task force is not saying 'don't take multivitamins,' but there's this idea that if these were really good for you, we'd know by now," Linder said.

The task force is specifically recommending against taking beta-carotene supplements because of a possible increased risk of lung cancer, and is recommending against taking vitamin E supplements because it has no net benefit in reducing mortality, cardiovascular disease or cancer.

"The harm is that talking with patients about supplements during the very limited time we get to see them, we're missing out on counseling about how to really reduce cardiovascular risks, like through exercise or smoking cessation," Linder said.

More than half of Americans take vitamins. Why?

More than half of U.S. adults take dietary supplements, and use of supplements is projected to increase, Linder and his colleagues wrote in the JAMA editorial.

Eating fruits and vegetables is associated with decreased cardiovascular disease and cancer risk, they said, so it is reasonable to think key vitamins and minerals could be extracted from fruits and vegetables, packaged into a pill, and save people the trouble and expense of maintaining a balanced diet.

But, they explain, whole fruits and vegetables contain a mixture of vitamins, phytochemicals, fiber and other nutrients that probably act synergistically to deliver health benefits. Micronutrients in isolation may act differently in the body than when naturally packaged with a host of other dietary components.

Linder noted individuals who have a vitamin deficiency can still benefit from taking dietary supplements, such as calcium and vitamin D, which have been shown to prevent fractures and maybe falls in older adults.

New guidelines do not apply to pregnant people

The new USPSTF guidelines do not apply to people who are pregnant or trying to get pregnant, said JAMA editorial co-author Dr. Natalie Cameron, an instructor of general internal medicine at Feinberg.

"Pregnant individuals should keep in mind that these guidelines don't apply to them," said Cameron, who also is a Northwestern Medicine physician.

"Certain vitamins, such as folic acid, are essential for pregnant women to support healthy fetal development. The most common way to meet these needs is to take a prenatal vitamin. More data is needed to understand how specific vitamin supplementation may modify risk of adverse pregnancy outcomes and cardiovascular complications during pregnancy."

Additionally, recent research from Northwestern has found most women in the U.S. have poor heart health prior to becoming pregnant. Cameron said that, in addition to discussing vitamin supplementation, working with patients to optimize cardiovascular health prior to pregnancy is an important component of prenatal care.

Eating healthy, exercising is 'easier said than done'

Dr. Jenny Jia, a co-author of the JAMA editorial who studies the prevention of chronic diseases in low-income families through lifestyle interventions, said healthy eating can be a challenge when the U.S. industrialized food system does not prioritize health.

"To adopt a healthy diet and exercise more, that's easier said than done, especially among lower-income Americans," said Jia, an instructor of general internal medicine at Feinberg and a Northwestern Medicine physician. "Healthy food is expensive, and people don't always have the means to find environments to exercise—maybe it's unsafe outdoors or they can't afford a facility. So, what can we do to try to make it easier and help support healthier decisions?"

Over the past few years, Jia has been working with charitable food pantries and banks that supply free groceries to people who are in need to try to help clients pick healthier choices from the food pantries as well as educate those who donate to provide healthier options or money.

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While it has only been tested on mice so far, if it works the same in humans it could potentially be a life-saving treatment for people who have suffered a heart attack.

The technique uses a synthetic messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA). mRNA creates a 'blueprint' of DNA sequences that the body then uses to build the proteins that form and regulate our cells. By tweaking the mRNA, scientists can deliver different instructions for different biological processes.

Here, the edited instructions promote the replication of heart muscle cells (cardiomyocytes) via two so-called mutated transcription factors, Stemin and YAP5SA.

The difference made by the mRNA treatment after four weeks. (The Journal of Cardiovascular Aging)

"No one has been able to do this to this extent and we think it could become a possible treatment for humans," says biologist Robert Schwartz, from the University of Houston in Texas.

Less than 1 percent of adult cardiac muscle cells can regenerate – the cardiomyocytes we have when we die are mostly the same ones we've had since the first month of life – and that means heart attacks and heart disease can leave the heart in a permanently fragile state.

In experiments in both tissue culture dishes and in living mice, Stemin was shown to turn on stem cell-like properties in the cardiomyocytes, while YAP5SA promoted organ growth and replication. The process has been described as a "game-changer" by the team.

The in vivo study involving living mice affected by damaged hearts showed myocyte nuclei replicating by at least 15-fold in the 24 hours after the injections of the mutated transcription factors, Stemin and YAP5SA.

"When both transcription factors were injected into infarcted adult mouse hearts, the results were stunning," says Schwartz.

"The lab found cardiac myocytes multiplied quickly within a day, while hearts over the next month were repaired to near normal cardiac pumping function with little scarring."

The synthetic mRNA added to the cells disappeared in a few days, just as the mRNA produced in our bodies does, the researchers report. This gives the new technique an advantage over gene therapy processes that cannot be easily stopped or removed once they're underway.

It still remains to be seen whether the approach can be translated successfully into humans – and many more years of research will be required to get this into a working treatment – but the team behind the research is confident.

Work continues to understand more about heart disease and heart injury, and how the body responds in its aftermath. Studying cardiovascular health remains a priority for scientists, with heart disease currently the leading cause of death in the US (accounting for around a quarter of all deaths).

"This is a huge study in heart regeneration especially given the smart strategy of using mRNA to deliver Stemin and YAP5SA," says biologist Siyu Xiao, from the University of Houston.

The research has been published in here and here in the Journal of Cardiovascular Aging.

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Last week, NASA revealed that one of JWST’s primary mirror segments, shown here, was damaged by a larger than expected micrometeoroid. Image: NASA

On June 8th, NASA revealed that its new powerful space observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope, is now sporting a small dimple in one of its primary mirrors after getting pelted by a larger-than-expected micrometeoroid out in deep space. The news came as a bit of a shock since the impact happened just five months into the telescope’s space tenure — but such strikes are simply an inevitable aspect of space travel, and more thwacks are certainly on their way.

Despite what its name implies, space isn’t exactly empty. Within our Solar System, tiny bits of space dust are zooming through the regions between our planets at whopping speeds that can reach up to tens of thousands of miles per hour. These micrometeoroids, no larger than a grain of sand, are often little pieces of asteroids or comets that have broken away and are now orbiting around the Sun. And they’re everywhere. A rough estimate of small meteoroids in the inner Solar System puts their combined total mass at about 55 trillion tons (if they were all combined into one rock, it’d be about the size of a small island).

That means that if you send a spacecraft into deep space, your hardware is certain to get hit by one of these little bits of space rock at some point. Knowing this, spacecraft engineers will construct their vehicles with certain protections to shield against micrometeoroid strikes. They’ll often incorporate something called Whipple shielding, a special multi-layer barrier. If the shield is hit by a micrometeoroid, the particle will pass through the first layer and fragment even further, so the second layer is hit by even smaller particles. Such shielding is usually used around sensitive components of spacecraft for extra protection.

But with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, it’s trickier. The telescope’s gold-coated mirrors must be exposed to the space environment in order to properly gather light from the distant Universe. And while these mirrors were built to withstand some impacts, they are more or less sitting ducks for larger micrometeoroid strikes, like the one that hit JWST in May. Though the micrometeoroid was still smaller than a grain of sand, it was larger than what NASA anticipated — enough to cause damage to one of the mirrors.

Spacecraft operators model the micrometeoroid population out in space to get a better understanding of how often a spacecraft might get hit in any given part of the Solar System — and what size particles might be thwacking their hardware. But even then, it’s not a foolproof system. “It’s all probability,” David Malaspina, an astrophysicist at the University of Colorado focusing on cosmic dust impacts on spacecraft, tells The Verge. “You can only say, ‘I have this chance of getting hit by this sized particle.’ But whether or not you ever do, that’s up to chance.”

Examples of different types of Whipple shielding Image: NASA

Micrometeoroids have a wide range of origin stories. They can be the leftover products of high-speed collisions in space, which pulverize space rocks into minuscule pieces. Asteroids and comets also get bombarded over time by space particles and photons from the Sun, causing tiny pieces to break off. An asteroid can also get too close to a large planet like Jupiter, where the strong gravitational pull wrenches off pieces of the rock. Or an object can get too close to the Sun and get too hot, causing the rock to expand and break apart into pieces. There are even interstellar micrometeoroids that are just passing through our Solar System from more distant cosmic neighborhoods.

How fast these particles move depends on what region of space they’re in and the path they take around our star, averaging about 45,000 miles per hour, or 20 kilometers a second. Whether or not they’ll run into your spacecraft also depends on where your vehicle lives in space and how fast it’s moving. For instance, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is the closest human-made object to the Sun at the moment, moving at a top speed of more than 400,000 miles per hour. “It gets down to the 4-yard line, compared to Earth being all the way at one end zone,” says Malaspina, who has focused on studying micrometeoroid impacts on Parker Solar Probe. It’s also moving through the densest part of a region called the zodiacal cloud, a thick disk of space particles that permeates our Solar System. So the Parker Solar Probe is getting sandblasted more frequently than JWST— and it’s hitting these particles at incredibly high speeds than the telescope would get hit.

The Parker Solar Probe is giving us a better understanding of micrometeoroids around the Sun, but we have a pretty good understanding of the population around Earth, too. Whenever a micrometeoroid hits the upper atmosphere around our planet, it burns up and creates meteoric smoke — fine smoke particles that can be measured. The amount of this smoke can tell us how much dust is hitting Earth over time. Additionally, there have been experiments on the International Space Station, where materials have been mounted on the outside of the orbiting lab to see how often they’re bombarded.

An artistic rendering of NASA’s Parker Solar Probe Image: NASA

While JWST lives roughly 1 million miles from Earth, that’s still relatively close by. Scientists also have an idea of what’s out there based on other missions sent to a similar orbit as JWST. And most of the stuff that hits the telescope isn’t that big of a deal. “Spacecraft get hit by little ones all the time,” Malaspina says. “By little, I mean fractions of a micron — much, much, much smaller than a human hair. And for the most part, spacecraft don’t even notice those.” In fact, JWST was already hit by small micrometeoroids four times before getting hit by the larger micrometeoroid in May.

NASA did model the micrometeoroid environment before JWST launched, but in light of the recent impact, the agency has convened a new team to refine their models and better predict what might happen to the telescope after future impacts. Current micrometeoroid modeling will try to predict things like how debris spreads through an orbit if an asteroid or comet breaks apart. That kind of debris is more dynamic, Malaspina says, making it harder to predict.

At the end of the day, though, prediction will simply give you more knowledge about when a spacecraft might get hit by a large speck of dust. One-off impacts like this are simply inevitable. JWST will continue to get blasted over time, but it was an eventuality that NASA was always prepared for. “You just have to live with the probability that you will be hit eventually by some sized dust particle, and you just do the best you can with the engineering,” says Malaspina.

Why getting hit by space dust is an unavoidable aspect of space travel

We got a leaked look at NASA’s future Moon missions—and likely delays

Picasso‘s favorite pigment may one day recycle metals from your cell phone

ANSWER: The ears are an important part of the body, and damage to the delicate structures housed there can lead to hearing loss and balance problems. Both can happen suddenly, or over time. It is common for adults to experience hearing loss and balance problems as they age.

Although you may think you are too young, hearing loss can happen at any age due to a number of factors. Nearly 1 in 4 people in the U.S. ages 20 to 69 have some degree of hearing loss. This hearing loss is commonly caused by exposure to loud sounds or noise.

Every day, people are surrounded by noise. The bustle of traffic, the hums and grinds of machinery, people talking, music and chatter from the radio, and airplanes flying overhead are all examples. Most people probably think nothing of these familiar sounds. They generally aren't loud enough to interfere with daily routines or cause ear damage. But sometimes a noise is too loud, and some sounds may cause permanent damage.

Noises are measured based on their decibel levels. A decibel is a unit of measurement used to measure how loud something is.

In general, noises that fall below 70 decibels do not harm your ears. Damage can occur when noises are above that level. The higher the decibel level, the more damage your ears experience.

Patients often ask, 'How loud is too loud?' Here's a good rule of thumb: If you have to shout to be heard by someone an arm's length away, you're being exposed to too much noise.

However, over time, all loud sounds you are exposed to regularly can affect your hearing. Since hearing loss usually happens gradually, people often don't realize how much hearing they've lost over time. Although noise-induced hearing loss usually can't be restored, the fact that you have noticed changes now allows you the opportunity to prevent further loss.

First, make an appointment to have your hearing checked. While you might start with your primary health care provider, you may be referred to an audiology center and different specialists depending on your situation. Audiologists are professionals with an advanced degree in all aspects of hearing and balance health care for patients of all ages. They often administer hearing tests. Hearing instrument specialists are trained to identify hearing loss and dispense hearing aids for adults only. You also may meet an otolaryngologist or otologist, medical doctors who are trained to manage medical or surgical problems associated with the ear.

Getting a hearing test is easy. Typically, your ears will be examined first to make sure they look healthy and that you don't have any wax blocking the ear canal. Then you will wear headphones to listen for tones at different pitches and volumes. The audiologist will determine when you hear the different tones at the softest levels. You'll also be asked to repeat words at soft and comfortable volumes, and maybe also with background noise. Then a hearing prescription or plan will be developed that may include hearing aids.

Here are some tips to improve your hearing protection and prevent further loss:

• Limit your exposure to loud noise. Take breaks from prolonged exposure to loud noise.

• Wear hearing protection when involved in loud activities. Look for devices with a good fit for your ears. All hearing protection devices are labeled with noise reduction ratings. The higher the number, the more noise reduction the device provides. Be sure to wear hearing protection the entire time you're exposed to loud sounds.

•  Consider using snug-fitting earmuffs or wearing both earmuffs and earplugs to get more noise reduction. This is helpful, especially when using loud power tools or lawn equipment. Special earmuffs also are designed for use with firearms.

•  Kids also need protection from noise. Specially designed earmuffs are available for infants and young children. Make sure you limit the volume on any personal listening devices your children may use.

•  Place pads under noisy appliances, and don't run multiple appliances at the same time.

•  Install carpeting to absorb sound.

•  Seal windows and doors to block traffic noise.

Generally, it's a good idea to have a hearing test by age 60 and then every few years after that. As you have now noticed that you have hearing loss, you may be advised to test your hearing annually or when you notice a change.—Dr. Jamie Bogle, Otolaryngology— Head and Neck Surgery, Mayo Clinic, Scottsdale, Arizona

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The biomaterials research team from UQ's Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN), led by Postdoctoral Research Fellow Amanda Kijas, has found protein in the venom of two snakes—Australia's eastern brown and scaled viper—could be used as an accelerant in the body's natural blood-clotting process.

The team is working on a gel that could be sold in pharmacies, added to first aid kits, and used by paramedics or military personnel in combat zones, to stop bleeding while a patient is taken to hospital.

The venom gel remains a liquid when stored in a cool place but solidifies at body temperature to seal the wound.

"As many as 40 percent of trauma-related deaths are the result of uncontrolled bleeding, and this figure is much higher when it comes to military personnel with serious bleeding in a combat zone," Dr. Kijas said.

"Nature has created the most elegant and sophisticated mechanisms, and we can repurpose them to save people from dying due to uncontrolled bleeding.

"The research shows there is five times less blood loss, and clots form three times more quickly when the venom gel is applied, compared to the body's natural process.

"This even includes people with hemophilia and those using blood thinners."

Dr. Kijas, who worked alongside AIBN Director Professor Alan Rowan, Emeritus Professor Martin Lavin and Ph.D. candidate Ramanathan Yegappan, said current first aid treatment using gauze products, often did not stop bleeding in an emergency.

"When a traumatic injury occurs, the complexity of the healing process overloads the body's capacity to control the bleeding," Dr. Kijas said.

"We hope this gel will accelerate the wound-healing processes needed for clotting and reducing blood flow, ultimately boosting the body's capacity to heal large wounds."

The venom gel is being tested in pre-clinical evaluations and is being scaled-up toward commercial application in collaboration with Professor Mark Midwinter from UQ's School of Biomedical Sciences.

The study is published in Advanced Health Care Materials.

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With a vast portion of the U.S. experiencing record high heat indexes, climate change is taking a toll on many other parts of the world as well, with a deadly impact on humans and animals alike.

Graeme Taylor, principal science adviser at the New Zealand Department of Conservation, recently spoke to NBC News about recent "mass die-offs" of the flightless little blue penguin, which is native to that area. According to Taylor, hundreds of the birds have washed up dead on New Zealand beaches since May.

"All the birds were at least half the normal weight, they had no fat on them at all and their muscle tissue had wasted away," Taylor said. Tests were performed on the birds to rule out disease and biotoxins, and it was determined that the birds died from starvation.

While it's not unusual for animals like the little blue penguin to die from severe weather, the fact that they're now dying this frequently, and in this high of number, is what's alarming. Taylor points out that mass deaths of this size usually happen around once a decade, not three times in six years.

"Rising temperatures lower many species survival rates due to changes that lead to less food, less successful reproduction, and interfering with the environment for native wildlife," according to the National Park Service. "Increased precipitation from climate change is contributing to more frequent and extreme weather events such as flooding. The higher frequency of flooding has detrimental effects on wildlife because they can destroy key pieces of ecosystems and habitats."

The U.S. has witnessed similar "mass die-offs" in recent months. Earlier this week it was reported that thousands of cattle died from extreme heat stress in feedlots in southwestern Kansas, according to CBS News.

"This was a true weather event — it was isolated to a specific region in southwestern Kansas," said A.J. Tarpoff, a cattle veterinarian with Kansas State University. "Yes, temperatures rose, but the more important reason why it was injurious was that we had a huge spike in humidity ... and at the same time wind speeds actually dropped substantially, which is rare for western Kansas."

Morgan Tingley, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California Los Angeles gave insight to these deaths telling ABC News that species usually adapt to severe weather in one of three ways: "They shift their distribution, change spaces or move from one place to another when the region gets too hot (either to a cooler region to higher altitudes)"

"Climate change is like this global killer," Maria Paniw, an ecologist at the Doñana Biological Station told ABC News. "In effect, it often makes all the other risks that animals face much worse."

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COVID-19 cases are increasing again in the United Kingdom, potentially signaling a future surge in infections in the United States and other countries.

A pair of new subvariants of the dominant Omicron variant—BA.4 and BA.5—appear to be driving the uptick in cases in the U.K. Worryingly, these subvariants seem to partially dodge antibodies from past infection or vaccination, making them more transmissible than other forms of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

There are also some suggestions that the new subvariants have evolved to target the lungs—unlike Omicron, which usually resulted in a less dangerous infection of the upper respiratory tract.

But there’s good news amid the bad. While cases are going up in the U.K., hospitalizations and deaths are increasing more slowly or even declining so far. “This could mean higher transmissible variants, BA.4 or 5, are in play, [and] these variants are much less severe,” Edwin Michael, an epidemiologist at the Center for Global Health Infectious Disease Research at the University of South Florida, told The Daily Beast.

The trends could change, of course, but the decrease in deaths is an encouraging sign that, 31 months into the pandemic, all that immunity we’ve built up–at the cost of half a billion infections and tens of billions of dollars’ worth of vaccines—is still mostly holding.

As far as COVID goes, things were really looking up in the U.K. until recently. COVID cases steadily declined from their recent peak of 89,000 daily new infections in mid-March. Deaths from the March wave peaked a month later at around 330 a day.

By early June cases and deaths were near their pandemic lows. Then came BA.4 and BA.5. The grandchildren of the basic Omicron variant that first appeared in the fall of 2021, BA.4 and BA.5 both feature a trio of major mutations to their spike protein, the part of the virus that helps it to grab onto and infect our cells.

Eric Bortz, a University of Alaska-Anchorage virologist and public-health expert, described BA.4 and BA.5 as “immunologically distinct sublineages.” In other words, they interact with our antibodies in surprising new ways.

The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control—the European Union’s answer to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—labeled BA.4 and BA.5 “variants of concerns” back in mid-May. Two weeks later the two new subvariants began the gradual process of overtaking older forms of Omicron in the U.K. That’s when cases began increasing again.

It doesn’t help that the U.K. like most countries—China is a big exception—has lifted almost all restrictions on schools, businesses, crowds and travel. Those restrictions helped to keep down cases, but were broadly unpopular and came at a high economic cost.

“There’s a disconnect between the actuality of how infections are happening… and how people are deciding not to take very many precautions,” John Swartzberg, a professor emeritus of infectious diseases and vaccinology at the University of California-Berkeley's School of Public Health, told The Daily Beast. He described it as “COVID fatigue… 100 percent of the world’s population must have it by now.”

The combination of a fully reopened economy and new COVID subvariants had an immediate effect. The U.K. Health Security Agency registered 62,228 new infections in the week ending June 10, a 70 percent uptick over the previous week. COVID hospitalizations grew more slowly over the same period, spiking 30 percent to 4,421.

COVID fatalities actually dropped, however—sliding 10 percent to 283. Deaths tend to lag infections by several weeks, of course, so it should come as no surprise if the death rate flattens or bumps up later this month or early next month.

But it’s possible it won’t. Yes, BA.4 and BA.5 are more transmissible, owing to that mutated spike protein. But that doesn’t mean they’re going to kill a lot of people. Despite their unusual qualities, it could be that BA.4 and BA.5 aren’t actually more dangerous than previous subvariants.

Bortz sketched out one possibility, that BA.4 and BA.5 are “immune-evasive enough to infect, but generally not evasive enough to counteract acquired immunity from vaccines and/or prior infection.”

Of course, immunity varies from community to community, country to country. The U.K.’s 67 million people have, for their part, built up pretty serious immunity over the past two-and-a-half years.

Tens of millions of U.K. residents have natural antibodies from past infection. 87 percent of the population is fully vaccinated. 68 percent is boosted. All those antibodies might not prevent breakthrough infections, but they do tend to prevent serious breakthrough infections.

How bad the current surge in cases gets depends to a great extent on the durability of those antibodies. Immunity, whether from past infection or vaccines, tends to wane over time. But how fast it wanes, and to what effect, is unpredictable.

It’s possible widespread immunity holds and the swelling BA.4 and BA.5 wave in the U.K. crests in a few weeks without making a whole lot more people sick—or killing them. That’s the best-case scenario given the lack of political will, and public support, for a new round of restrictions. “If higher cases would not lead to significant disease or deaths, then we may be able to live with this virus,” Michael said.

The worst-case scenario is that BA.4 and BA.5 prove more capable of evading our antibodies than experts currently anticipate. Keep an eye on the hospitalization stats. If COVID hospitalizations start increasing in proportion to the growth in cases, it’s a sign the new sublineages are dodging our hard-won immunity.

In that case, a big spike in deaths is sure to follow.

That could be a big red flag for the Americas. COVID variants tend to travel from east to west, globally. New variants and subvariants tend to appear in the United States a few weeks after becoming dominant in the U.K. At present, BA.4 and BA.5 account for just a fifth of new cases in the U.S. Expect that proportion to increase.

The problem for Americans is that they’re much less protected than Britons. Yes, Americans have a lot of antibodies from past infection, but they’re also a lot less likely to be vaccinated—and even less likely to be boosted. Just 67 percent of Americans are fully vaxxed. A little over a third of the U.S. population has gotten a booster.

So if BA.4 and BA.5 end up causing a surge in deaths in the U.K., they’re likely to inflict an even greater death toll on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. “We’re sort of in this zone now, betwixt and between,” Swartzberg said. “It’s unclear which way things are going to go.”

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A few weeks ago my house had a septic-tank emergency, which is as awful as it sounds. As unspeakable things began to burble up from my shower drain, I did what any smartphone-dependent person would: I frantically Googled something along the lines of poop coming from shower drain bad what to do. I was met with a slew of cookie-cutter websites, most of which appeared hastily generated and were choked with enough repetitive buzzwords as to be barely readable. Virtually everything I found was unhelpful, so we did the old-fashioned thing and called a professional. The emergency came and went, but I kept thinking about those middling search results—how they typified a zombified internet wasteland.

Like many, I use Google to answer most of the mundane questions that pop up in my day-to-day life. And yet that first page of search results feels like it’s been surfacing fewer satisfying answers lately. I’m not alone; the frustration has become a persistent meme: that Google Search, what many consider an indispensable tool of modern life, is dead or dying. For the past few years, across various forums and social-media platforms, people have been claiming in viral posts that Google’s flagship product is broken. Search google dying on Twitter or Reddit and you can see people grousing about it going back to the mid 2010s. Lately, though, the criticisms have grown louder.

In February, an engineer named Dmitri Brereton wrote a blog post about Google’s search-engine decay, rounding up leading theories for why the product’s “results have gone to shit.” The post quickly shot to the top of tech forums such as Hacker News and was widely shared on Twitter and even prompted a PR response from Google’s Search liaison, Danny Sullivan, refuting one of Brereton’s claims. “You said in the post that quotes don’t give exact matches. They really do. Honest,” Sullivan wrote in a series of tweets.

Brereton’s most intriguing argument for the demise of Google Search was that savvy users of the platform no longer type instinctive keywords into the search bar and hit enter. The best Googlers—the ones looking for actionable or niche information, product reviews, and interesting discussions—know a cheat code to bypass the sea of corporate search results clogging the top third of the screen. “Most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust,” Brereton argued, therefore “we resort to using Google, and appending the word ‘reddit’ to the end of our queries.” Brereton cited Google Trends data that show that people are searching the word reddit on Google more than ever before.

Instead of scrolling through long posts littered with pop-up ads and paragraphs of barely coherent SEO chum to get to a review or a recipe, clever searchers got lively threads with testimonials from real people debating and interacting with one another. Most who use the Reddit hack are doing so for practical reasons, but it’s also a small act of protest—a way to stick it to the Search Engine Optimization and Online Ad Industrial Complex and to attempt to access a part of the internet that feels freer and more human.

Google has built wildly successful mobile operating systems, mapped the world, changed how we email and store photos, and tried, with varying success, to build cars that drive themselves. This story, for example, was researched, in part, through countless Google Search queries and some Google Chrome browsing, written in a Google Doc, and filed to my editor via Gmail. Along the way, the company has collected an unfathomable amount of data on billions of people (frequently unbeknownst to them)—but Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is still primarily an advertising business. In 2020, the company made $147 billion in revenue off ads alone, which is roughly 80 percent of its total revenue. Most of the tech company’s products—Maps, Gmail—are Trojan horses for a gargantuan personalized-advertising business, and Search is the one that started it all. It is the modern template for what the technology critic Shoshana Zuboff termed “surveillance capitalism.”

The internet has grown exponentially and Google has expanded with it, helping usher in some of the web’s greediest, most extractive tendencies. But scale is not always a blessing for technology products. Are we wringing our hands over nothing, or is Google a victim of its own success, rendering its flagship product—Search—less useful?

One can’t really overstate the way that Google Search, when it rolled out in 1997, changed how people used the internet. Before Google came out with its goal to crawl the entire web and organize the world’s information, search engines were moderately useful at best. And yet, in the early days, there was much more search competition than there is now; Yahoo, Altavista, and Lycos were popular online destinations. But Google’s “PageRank” ranking algorithm helped crack the problem. The algorithm counted and indexed the number and quality of links that pointed to a given website. Rather than use a simple keyword match, PageRank figured that the best results would be websites that were linked to by many other high-quality websites. The algorithm worked, and the Google of the late 1990s seemed almost magical: You typed in what you were looking for, and what you got back felt not just relevant but intuitive. The machine understood.

Most people don’t need a history lesson to know that Google has changed; they feel it. Try searching for a product on your smartphone and you’ll see that what was once a small teal bar featuring one “sponsored link” is now a hard-to-decipher, multi-scroll slog, filled with paid-product carousels; multiple paid-link ads; the dreaded, algorithmically generated “People also ask” box; another paid carousel; a sponsored “buying guide”; and a Maps widget showing stores selling products near your location. Once you’ve scrolled through that, multiple screen lengths below, you’ll find the unpaid search results. Like much of the internet in 2022, it feels monetized to death, soulless, and exhausting.

 I cover Google for a living so I am obviously aware how the results page has evolved over the years. Today, I was searching for “hearing aids” for my dad on my phone and I was stunned by the number of ads, and non-link results.

It’s pretty stunning pic.twitter.com/jZZzDWRzdO

 — Daisuke Wakabayashi (@daiwaka) March 13, 2022

There are all kinds of theories for those ever-intrusive ads. One is that the cost-per-click rates that Google charges advertisers are down, because of competition from Facebook and Amazon (Google is rolling out larger commerce-search ad widgets in response this year) as well as a slowdown in paid-search-result spending. Another issue may stem from cookie-tracking changes that Google is implementing in response to privacy laws such as Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation and the California Consumer Privacy Act. For the past two years, Google has been planning to remove third-party cookies from its Chrome browser. And though Google Search won’t be affected by the cookie ban, the glut of search ads might be an attempt to recoup some of the money that Google stands to lose in the changes to Chrome. If so, this is an example of fixing one problem while creating another. But when I suggested this to Google, the company was unequivocal, arguing that “there is no connection” between Chrome’s plans to phase out support for third-party cookies and Search ads. The company also said that the number of ads it shows in search results “has been capped for several years, and we have not made any changes.” Google claims that, “on average over the past four years, 80 percent of searches on Google haven’t had any ads at the top of search results.”

Any hunt for answers about Google’s Search algorithms will lead you into the world of SEO experts like Marie Haynes. Haynes is a consultant who has been studying Google’s algorithms obsessively since 2008. Part of her job is to keep up with every small change made by the company’s engineers and public communication by Google’s Search-team blog. Companies that can divine the whims of Google’s constantly updated algorithms are rewarded with coveted page real estate. Ranking high means more attention, which theoretically means more money. When Google announced in October 2020 that it would begin rolling out “passage indexing”—a new way for the company to pull out and rank discrete passages from websites—Haynes tried to figure out how it would change what people ultimately see when they query. Rather than reverse engineer posts to sound like bot-written babble, she and her team attempt to balance maintaining a page’s integrity while also appealing to the algorithm. And though Google provides SEO insiders with frequent updates, the company’s Search algorithms are a black box (a trade secret that it doesn’t want to give to competitors or to spammers who will use it to manipulate the product), which means that knowing what kind of information Google will privilege takes a lot of educated guesswork and trial and error.

Haynes agrees that ads’ presence on Search is worse than ever and the company’s decision to prioritize its own products and features over organic results is frustrating. But she argues that Google’s flagship product has actually gotten better and much more complex over time. That complexity, she suggests, might be why searching feels different right now. “We’re in this transition phase,” she told me, noting that the company has made significant advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning to decipher user queries. Those technical changes have caused it to move away from the PageRank paradigm. But those efforts, she suggested, are in their infancy and perhaps still working out their kinks. In May 2021, Google announced MUM (short for Multitask Unified Model), a natural-language-processing technology for Search that is 1,000 times more powerful than its predecessor.

“The AI attempts to understand not just what the searcher is typing, but what the searcher is trying to get at,” Haynes told me. “It’s trying to understand the content inside pages and inside queries, and that will change the type of result people get.” Google’s focus on searcher intent could mean that when people type in keywords, they’re not getting as many direct word matches. Instead, Google is trying to scan the query, make meaning from it, and surface pages that it thinks match that meaning. Despite being a bit sci-fi and creepy, the shift might feel like a loss of agency for searchers. Search used to feel like a tool that you controlled, but Google may start to behave more like, well, a person—a concierge that has its own ideas and processes. The problematic effects of increased AI inference over time are easy to imagine (while I was writing this article, a Google researcher went viral claiming he’d been placed on administrative leave after notifying the company that one of its AI chatbots—powered by different technology—had become sentient, though the company disagrees). Google could use such technology to continue to lead people away from their intended searches and toward its own products and paid ads with greater frequency. Or, less deviously, it could simply gently algorithmically nudge people in unexpected directions. Imagine all the life decisions that you make in a given year based on information you process after Googling. This means that the stakes of Google’s AI interpreting a searcher’s intent are high.

But some of Google’s lifeless results are made by humans. Zach Verbit knows what it’s like to serve at the pleasure of Google’s Search algorithms. After college, Verbit took a freelance-writing gig with the HOTH, a marketing company that specializes in search-engine optimization. Verbit’s “soul crushing” job at the HOTH was to write blog posts that would help clients’ sites rank highly. He spent hours composing listicles with titles like “10 Things to Do When Your Air-Conditioning Stopped Working.” Verbit wrote posts that “sounded robotic or like they were written by somebody who’d just discovered language.” He had to write up to 10 posts a day on subjects he knew nothing about. Quickly, he started repurposing old posts for other clients’ blogs. “Those posts that sound like an AI wrote them? Sometimes they’re from real people trying to jam in as many keywords as possible,” Verbit told me.

That his hastily researched posts appeared high in search results left him dispirited. He quit the job after a year, describing the industry of search-gaming as a house of cards. His time in the SEO mines signaled to him the decline of Google Search, arguably the simplest, most effective, and most revolutionary product of the modern internet. “The more I did the job, the more I realized that Google Search is completely useless now,” he said. HOTH’s CEO, Marc Hardgrove disputed the notion that its client blog posts were “over-optimized” for SEO purposes and that the company discourages jargony posts as they don’t rank as high. “Overusing keywords and creating un-compelling content would be detrimental to our success as an SEO company, he wrote in an email. “That’s why The HOTH does not require, or even encourage, the writers we work with to overuse keywords into their blog posts to help with optimization.”

Google is still useful for many, but the harder question is why its results feel more sterile than they did five years ago. Haynes’s theory is that this is the result of Google trying to crack down on misinformation and low-quality content—especially around consequential search topics. In 2017, the company started talking publicly about a Search initiative called EAT, which stands for “expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.” The company has rolled out numerous quality rater guidelines, which help judge content to determine authenticity. One such effort, titled Your Money or Your Life, applies rigorous standards to any pages that show up when users search for medical or financial information.

“Take crypto,” Haynes explained. “It’s an area with a lot of fraud, so unless a site has a big presence around the web and Google gets the sense they’re known for expertise on that topic, it’ll be difficult to get them to rank.” What this means, though, is that Google’s results on any topic deemed sensitive enough will likely be from established sources. Medical queries are far more likely to return WebMD or Mayo Clinic pages, instead of personal testimonials. This, Haynes said, is especially challenging for people looking for homeopathic or alternative-medicine remedies.

There’s a strange irony to all of this. For years, researchers, technologists, politicians, and journalists have agonized and cautioned against the wildness of the internet and its penchant for amplifying conspiracy theories, divisive subject matter, and flat-out false information. Many people, myself included, have argued for platforms to surface quality, authoritative information above all else, even at the expense of profit. And it’s possible that Google has, in some sense, listened (albeit after far too much inaction) and, maybe, partly succeeded in showing higher-quality results in a number of contentious categories. But instead of ushering in an era of perfect information, the changes might be behind the complainers’ sense that Google Search has stopped delivering interesting results. In theory, we crave authoritative information, but authoritative information can be dry and boring. It reads more like a government form or a textbook than a novel. The internet that many people know and love is the opposite—it is messy, chaotic, unpredictable. It is exhausting, unending, and always a little bit dangerous. It is profoundly human.

But it’s worth remembering what that humanity looked like inside search results. Rand Fishkin, the founder of the software company SparkToro, who has been writing and thinking about search since 2004, believes that Google has gotten better at not amplifying conspiracy theories and hate speech, but that it took the company far too long. “I don’t know if you searched for holocaust information between 2000 and 2008, but deniers routinely showed up in the top results,” he told me. The same was true for Sandy Hook hoaxers—in fact, campaigns from the Sandy Hook families to fight the conspiracy theories led to some of the search engine’s changes. “Whenever somebody says, ‘Hey, Google doesn’t feel as human anymore,’ all I can say is that I bet they don’t want a return to that,” Fishkin said.

Google Search might be worse now because, like much of the internet, it has matured and has been ruthlessly commercialized. In an attempt to avoid regulation and be corporate-friendly, parts of it might be less wild. But some of what feels dead or dying about Google might be our own nostalgia for a smaller, less mature internet. Sullivan, the Search liaison, understands this longing for the past, but told me that what feels like a Google change is also the search engine responding to the evolution of the web. “Some of that blog-style content has migrated over time to closed forums or social media. Sometimes the blog post we’re hoping to find isn’t there.” Sullivan believes that some of the recent frustrations with Google Search actually reflect just how good it’s become. “We search for things today we didn’t imagine we could search for 15 years ago and we believe we’ll find exactly what we want,” he said. “Our expectations have continued to grow. So we demand more of the tool.” It’s an interesting, albeit convenient, response.

Google has rewired us, transforming the way that we evaluate, process, access, and even conceive of information. “I can’t live without that stuff as my brain is now conditioned to remember only snippets for Google to fill in,” one Reddit user wrote while discussing Brereton’s “Google Is Dying” post.

Similarly, Google users shape Search. “The younger generation searches really differently than I do,” Haynes told me. “They basically speak to Google like it’s a person, whereas I do keyword searching, which is old-school.” But these quirks, tics, and varying behaviors are just data for the search giant. When younger generations intuitively start talking to Google like it’s a person, the tool starts to anticipate that and begins to behave like one (this is part of the reason behind the rise of humanized AI voice assistants).

Fishkin argues that Google Search—and many of Google’s other products—would be better with some competition and that Search’s quality improved the most from 1998 to 2007, which he attributes to the company’s need to compete for market share. “Since then,” he said, “Google’s biggest search innovation has been to put more Google products up front in results.” He argues that this strategy has actually led to a slew of underwhelming Google products. “Are Google Flights or Google Weather or Google’s stocks widget better than competitors? No, but nobody can really compete thanks to the Search monopoly.”

“Is Google Search dying?” is a frivolous question. We care about Search’s fate on a practical level—it is still a primary way to tap into the internet’s promise of unlimited information on demand. But I think we also care on an existential level—because Google’s first product is a placeholder to explore our hopes and fears about technology’s place in our life. We yearn for more convenience, more innovation, more possibility. But when we get it, often we can only see what we’ve lost in the process. That loss is real and deeply felt. It’s like losing a piece of our humanity. Search, because of its utility, is even more fraught.

Most people don’t want their information mediated by bloated, monopolistic, surveilling tech companies, but they also don’t want to go all the way back to a time before them. What we really want is something in between. The evolution of Google Search is unsettling because it seems to suggest that, on the internet we’ve built, there’s very little room for equilibrium or compromise.

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A new study of patients with primary progressive aphasia (PPA) shows that patients who have difficulty producing complex words due to brain injury will compensate for this by stringing together a series of simple words that convey the same idea.

The researchers also found a similar tradeoff between the complexity of words chosen and syntactic complexity (how words are structured to convey meaning) in healthy volunteers—suggesting a basic property of language production is maintaining a balance between the complexity of words and syntax.

The team, which includes investigators from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

During language production, speakers turn complex thoughts into a linear sequence of words, choosing both the words themselves and the syntactic structure of phrases that determine the order and relationship of the words.

PPA is a condition caused by the gradual degeneration of brain cells, leading to lesions in the brain that affect the patient's ability to communicate. Depending on the primary site of the lesion, some PPA patients have trouble accessing words, while others have trouble processing grammar.

Clinical observations of PPA patients have suggested that patients who have trouble accessing words may produce long descriptions of their thoughts, while patients who have trouble processing grammar may choose more precise words.

For example, if a patient has difficulty saying, "a sailboat," they might produce an utterance that has a more complex syntax but simpler words such as, "the thing that is moved by the wind on the water."

But these observations had not been confirmed through research or identified in healthy volunteers.

To address these challenges, the researchers first developed a new frequency-based method for characterizing the syntactic complexity of utterances in naturalistic speech.

They then tested whether lexical and syntactic complexity, as measured by the frequency of their use, trade off in a large sample of PPA individuals asked to describe a picture of a family at a picnic. (Image description is a common diagnostic tool for PPA).

Finally, the team tested the generalizability of this syntax-lexicon tradeoff in a large sample of healthy speakers taking part in the same picture description task.

Unlike PPA patients, healthy individuals can shift between the use of complex syntactic or complex lexical items, perhaps depending on what is more accessible in the moment or what might facilitate comprehension.

The results showed that if a sentence is syntactically complex, it likely incorporates simple words. On the other hand, if a sentence contains more complex words—such as words that are not commonly used—its syntax is more likely to be simple.

"By gaining insight from patients with PPA, this research reveals a basic property in language production—i.e. the maintenance of a balance between the complexity of words and syntax," says Neguine Rezaii, MD, a physician-investigator in the Frontotemporal Disorders Unit in the Department of Neurology at Mass General and the lead author of the study. "This work also emphasizes the central role of communication by showing that the brain seems to be equipped with various strategies that PPA patients can use to get across their meaning."

"Future work is needed to elucidate the mechanism that drives this tradeoff," adds Edward Gibson, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT and the senior author of the study. "One possibility is that there might not be enough capacity to construct a sentence by using both syntactically and semantically complex items."

In the meantime, this novel metric developed by the team to measure syntax complexity can now be applied in further studies in the clinical setting to see if it may provide a more accurate description of language deficits in patients neuropsychiatric disorders.

"We are moving beyond simplistic descriptions of patients' difficulties with communication such as 'fluent' or 'non-fluent' aphasia," concludes Brad Dickerson, MD, professor in the Department of Neurology at Harvard and Director of the Mass General Frontotemporal Disorders Unit. "This work highlights the importance of quantifying the ways patients use words and sentences to communicate thoughts. We plan to harness these methods to evaluate emerging treatments for patients with PPA with the ultimate goal of helping them communicate better for longer."

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Climate change impacts everyone. But unfortunately, it impacts some more than others. Rising oceans, for example, are flooding island nations. And those with limited incomes are finding it harder to survive extreme weather events, including heat waves. In this new study, the researchers found evidence that climate change and the pollution behind it harm children more than adults. They note that because their bodies are smaller and still growing, as are their minds, they are more susceptible to environmental conditions, particularly pollutants and heat.

To better understand how pollution and climate change are impacting children, the researchers studied research papers from a host of sources that described the impacts that pollution and climate change can have on them. They found what they describe as direct harm, such as damaged lungs and reduction in intellectual abilities. And they note that today's children will also have to face changes to the climate that have not yet occurred.

In their paper, the researchers note that mothers breathing polluted air during pregnancy impacts children before they are even born. Prior studies have shown it can lead to low birth weights, early births and also stillbirths. Some research has also shown a link to inflammation later on in life. And sadly, some research has shown that chemicals in the air and other types of pollution can cause birth defects, including problems with brain development.

The researchers also found that climate change is resulting in the production of less nutritious food, and less food in general for people in some parts of the world. They also found climate change is making the world a more dangerous place for children to grow up in—more hurricanes, typhoons, tornadoes, heat waves and floods make it more difficult for children to survive to adulthood. Climate change is also expected to lead to more wars and other types of trauma, such as abuse from adults as tensions at home rise, and increases in the incidence of diseases. They suggest that some entities, such as those caring for children, may need to alter their practices to more adequately address the health problems of children now and in the future.

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"This was an observational study and does not imply causal relationships," said study author Dr. Ida Stødle of the University of Oslo, Norway. "However, the findings raise awareness about the correlations between chronic illnesses which affect large numbers of people. This knowledge may help efforts to prevent these diseases."

Non‐communicable diseases are becoming increasingly common as populations age and there is growing evidence that they are connected. Gum disease, also called periodontitis, affects up to half of all adults worldwide. This study examined whether severe periodontitis was more frequent in individuals with diabetes or a prior heart attack.

The analysis included 4,933 randomly selected participants of the community-based Trøndelag Health Study (HUNT Study). Participants completed questionnaires on sociodemographic and lifestyle factors, medications, and diseases such as type 2 diabetes and myocardial infarction. A clinical assessment of teeth and soft tissues was performed, plus a dental radiological examination. Weight, height, blood pressure, and serum levels of cholesterol and glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c) were measured.

Dr. Stødle explained: "The presence of diabetes was assessed from self-reported questionnaires and may include a broad spectrum of severity, from poorly controlled to well controlled. For this reason we also examined the relationship between gum disease and HbA1c, which indicates average blood sugar levels over the last two to three months. Patients with diabetes are at higher risk of diabetic complications when their HbA1c levels are 48mmol/mol or above."

The average age of participants was 52 years and 56% were women. A total of 147 (3.0%) participants reported a prior heart attack, 224 (4.5%) stated they had diabetes, 165 (3.3%) had elevated HbA1c (48mmol/mol or above), and 866 (17.6%) had severe periodontitis.

The researchers analyzed whether diabetes, elevated HbA1c, and prior heart attack predicted the likelihood of having severe gum disease. The analyses were adjusted for age, smoking, serum cholesterol, waist circumference and physical activity. The investigators found significant associations between diabetes, elevated HbA1c, prior heart attack and severe gum disease with odds ratios of 1.4, 1.5 and 1.7, respectively.

Dr. Stødle said: "The results show that patients with diabetes were 40% more likely to have severe gum disease than those without diabetes. Participants with high HbA1c were 50% more likely to have severe gum disease than those with HbA1c levels below 48mmol/mol. Finally, heart attack survivors were 70% more likely to have severe gum disease than participants who had never experienced a heart attack."

She concluded: "This study builds on previous evidence suggesting that people with gum disease are at greater risk of having a heart attack and developing diabetes, and also that those with diabetes are at greater risk of getting gum disease. Taken together, the findings indicate that maintaining oral health could also benefit general health."

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Suddenly, major flu outbreaks are occurring across the country, catching many off guard.

Flu vaccinations aim to protect against four influenza viruses that cause disease in humans (two subtypes from influenza A and two from influenza B).

But vaccine-mediated protection varies each year depending on how well the vaccine matches the disease-causing influenza viruses that are circulating at a given time. Vaccine effectiveness—a real-world measure based on the proportion of vaccinated people who still develop the flu—ranges from 16% to 60%.

However, it's still important to get your flu shot. If you've been vaccinated and still get the flu, you're less likely to get as sick.

Why it's difficult to predict which subtypes will dominate

Of the four types of influenza viruses that exist in nature, two cause significant disease in humans: influenza A and influenza B.

The 2022 influenza vaccine is quadrivalent (targets four distinct viruses): two influenza A viruses (subtypes H3N2 and H1N1) and two influenza B viruses from distinct lineages.

Within each flu A subtype further genetic variation can arise, with mutations (known as genetic drift) generating many viral variants that are classified into "clades" and sub-clades.

H3N2 is particularly good at generating lots of diversity in this way. So predicting exactly which H3N2 virus to target in the vaccine is especially difficult.

A key challenge for flu vaccines is the decision for which virus to target has to be made months ahead of time. The the H3N2 virus in the Australian flu vaccine (A/Darwin/9/2021) was chosen in September 2021 to enable the vaccine to be manufactured and distributed in time for the 2022 winter.

There is no guarantee a different H3N2 virus that isn't so well targeted by the vaccine won't arrive in the country in the months leading into winter and start causing disease.

Another factor that has made predicting which H3N2 virus to target in the vaccine uniquely difficult for 2022 is the lack of data on which viruses were dominant in the preceding flu seasons, both in Australia and on the other side of the Equator.

With travel restrictions easing towards the end of 2021, flu cases did start to reappear during the northern hemisphere 2021–22 winter. But the lack of flu cases during the preceding seasons (due to COVID) meant the data used to predict which viruses to target was inadequate.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) analyzed data from more than 3,000 children and found a vaccine effectiveness of just 16% protection from mild to moderate disease from H3N2. Protection from more severe disease was just 14%.

We don't know which subtypes will circulate in Australia

Data about flu vaccine effectiveness in the southern hemisphere 2022 winter isn't yet available, and it's unclear how protective the current vaccine is against the currently circulating disease-causing subtypes.

While H3N2 viruses appears to be driving some disease now, other flu viruses may become more prevalent later in the season.

The flu vaccine is a quadrivalent vaccine, so in addition to influenza A H3N2, it will protect against another influenza A subtype (H1N1) and two distinct lineages of influenza B virus. These viruses don't change as rapidly as H3N2, so it's more likely the vaccine will give better protection against these other influenza viruses.

Even if vaccine protection against H3N2 is lower than usual this year, the vaccine could make the difference between recovering at home versus ending up in hospital.

So who should get a flu shot and when?

The flu vaccine offers the highest level of protection in the first three to four months months after vaccination. The season generally peaks between June and September—although this year we have seen a much earlier than usual start to the flu season. It's unclear whether this early start will mean a longer flu season or an early finish. So it's not too late to get vaccinated.

Flu vaccines are recommended for everyone aged six months and over, but are particularly important for people who are more at risk of complications from influenza, including:

•  Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people aged six months and over

•  children aged six months to five years

•  pregnant women

•  people aged 65 years or over

•  people aged six months or over who have medical conditions that mean they have a higher risk of getting serious disease.

What if you still get the flu?

If you develop flu symptoms, isolate and see your GP for an influenza PCR test to determine whether you are indeed infected with influenza, particularly if you're in the higher-risk groups.

Specific antivirals for influenza can help, if given early. To ensure rapid access to particularly vulnerable aged-care residents, aged-care facilities are being stocked with the flu antiviral drug Tamiflu.

In New South Wales, free drive-through clinics now offer testing for influenza, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID. Other states and territories may follow.

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The evidence presented today at the Royal College of Psychiatrists International Congress has been shared with the government, which is currently developing a new Tobacco Control Plan for publication later this year.

The Congress will also be given new data on the numbers of smokers with mental health conditions. Rates of smoking are much higher among people with mental health conditions than those without, and among England's 6 million smokers there are an estimated:

•  230,000 smokers with severe mental illness (e.g., schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder)

•  1.6 million with depression and anxiety

These analyses are timely as the government is currently considering recommendations by the Khan Review for the forthcoming Tobacco Control Plan to deliver its Smokefree 2030 ambition. The independent review by Javed Khan was commissioned by the Secretary of State to help the government to identify the most impactful interventions to reduce the uptake of smoking, and support people to stop smoking, for good. One of Khan's 15 recommendations was that action is needed to tackle the issue of smoking and mental health.

One of the authors of the new report Professor Marcus Munafo Professor of Biological Psychology at the University of Bristol, said: "There is no longer any doubt that smoking is bad for mental health and this needs to be a priority in the forthcoming Tobacco Control Plan. Those working with people with mental health conditions need to understand and address the vicious cycle of bidirectional effects, whereby having symptoms of mental illness causes individuals to smoke more and to be more likely to become addicted. At the same time, smoking also increases the risk of subsequent mental illness and exacerbates mental health symptoms. Lower rates of smoking will improve overall levels of good mental health as well as physical health."

Alongside the report a joint publication by Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) and the Royal College of Psychiatrists' Public Mental Health Implementation Centre sets out how a public mental health approach to smoking can be taken to address smoking and reduce poor mental health.

The NHS has pledged to put support in place for smokers on mental health wards and those accessing support in the community, but this is largely confined to those with severe mental illness.

Dr. Adrian James, president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists said: "Smoking addiction is not a trivial matter; it causes serious harm to both body and mind. Smokers with mental health conditions can quit with the right support from healthcare professionals. It's our duty as psychiatrists to offer them the help they need to succeed."

Joanne Hart, former smoker who has recovered from depression said: "Stopping smoking changed my life for the better, both physically and mentally. It is shocking to learn that smoking could have been one of the reasons for my depression. As a smoker I knew I was damaging my health but when times were tough it was easy to think that it was helping mentally—everyone should know the opposite is true."

Deborah Arnott, chief executive, ASH, said: "The Khan Review is called 'Making Smoking Obsolete'—this cannot be achieved if we ignore the more than a million smokers with mental health conditions. While the NHS has started to roll out support to quit for those with severe mental illness there is little provision for those with common mental health conditions like depression and anxiety—a plan is needed."

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You might have noticed skincare companies claiming their products can protect you from the effects of blue light. If you hadn't thought about blue light before, you'd be forgiven for worrying about whether you should be concerned.

First you need to understand what blue light is.

Visible light accounts for 50% of the sunlight spectrum and, as the name suggests, it's the only part of light that can be detected by the human eye. The blue band of this visible spectrum has a particularly high energy level.

The longer the wavelength, the less energy it transmits. Blue light has very short, high energy waves.

Blue light is all around you. The sun emits blue light. So do fluorescent and incandescent light bulbs, mobile phones, computer screens and flat screen televisions.

What are the risks?

There is mounting evidence that blue light can have a harmful effect on the skin and eyes and disrupt the circadian rhythm (your internal clock). Typically, studies investigating the impact of sun radiation on the skin have focused on ultraviolet radiation, particularly UVB, which is responsible for sunburn. The most frequently reported effect of blue light exposure is a significant increase in reactive oxygen species (ROS), highly reactive chemicals formed from oxygen. Too much ROS can damage your DNA and key enzymes such as those responsible for DNA repair, increasing your risk of cancer.

Our research showed blue light can induce pigmentation (tanning) across skin types. While many people consider a deep tan a desirable trait, it is a marker of skin damage and ROS. Others researchers found skin tans from visible light (which includes blue light) had darker pigmentation that lasted longer compared to ultraviolet radiation exposure. Our studies also showed blue light can activate genes associated with inflammation and photoaging (skin damage). Several studies have proved typical sunscreens do not prevent blue and visible light damage.

While blue light appears to be less potent than ultraviolet radiation, this may be accounted for by the relatively larger amounts of blue light that reach the Earth. UVR accounts for around 5% of solar radiation in the U.K. at midday in the summer. Blue light makes up around three times more at 15%.

There are some beneficial effects of blue light. It has been used to treat skin conditions including eczema, it is widely used in photodynamic therapy, which is used to treat a range of skins conditions, from acne to cancer, and it boosts wound healing. But the harmful effects of blue light are likely to outweigh the positives for healthy people.

Blue light can damage the skin but it's less clear which sources of blue light are harmful to humans. The blue light from screens is responsible for a fraction of the blue light doses we get. Research has shown screens from devices can increase ROS production. However, a study by German skincare manufacturer Biersdorf found that an entire week's worth exposure to blue light from a screen at a distance of 30cm is equivalent to just one minute of midday summer sun in Hamburg, Germany. Another study found blue light from screens were 100–1,000 times less intense than blue light from the sun. It also failed to trigger melasma, which causes patches of skin discoloration, in patients who have the condition. It's true we are spending more time in front of screens than ever before but while screens may cause some damage, it's insignificant compared with sun exposure.

Blue light skincare

The cosmetics industry has started developing a wide range of skincare products that brands claim prevent blue light damage. However, there is no regulated or standardized test to assess a product's ability to prevent blue light damage. Companies do carry out scientific tests on these products. But they can use any number of assessments in their work. This is very different from the regulations around sunscreen that claim to contain Sun protection factor (SPF).. SPF testing is closely regulated by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). All products that claim to contain an SPF undergo an identical testing regime.

The lack of regulation for blue light claims makes it impossible for consumers to make informed choices about the level of protection offered and differences between products. This lack of regulation is unlikely to be dangerous for consumers, but the benefit from the products may be limited. Given the evidence around blue light emitted by screens, it's worth applying skepticism to any claims that a product is needed to prevent damage from your computer screen or phone.

Traditional photoprotection products (such as sunscreens) don't typically protect you from blue light damage. It's encouraging the skincare industry is trying to address this need. But it is crucial that governments take the next step in the process and develop industry-wide, standardized testing. In the meantime, it is important to remember to limit any exposure to the sun. The use of sunscreens (or any product containing an SPF rating) have been proven to prevent skin cancer and photoaging, and products advertising blue light protection may give an additional benefit.

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A new analysis of the Chassigny meteorite, which fell to Earth in 1815, suggests that the way Mars obtained its volatile gasses – such as carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and noble gasses – contradicts our current models about how planets form.

Planets are born, according to current models, from leftover star stuff. Stars form from a nebular cloud of dust and gas when a dense clump of material collapses under gravity. Spinning, it spools in more material from the cloud around it to grow.

This material forms a disk, whirling around the new star. Within that disk, dust and gas begin to clump together in a process that grows a baby planet. We've seen other baby planetary systems forming in this way, and evidence in our own Solar System suggests it formed the same way, around 4.6 billion years ago.

But how and when certain elements were incorporated into the planets has been tricky to piece together.

According to current models, volatile gasses are taken up by a molten, forming planet from the solar nebula. Because the planet is so hot and mushy at this stage, these volatiles are slurped into the global magma ocean that is the forming planet, before later being partially outgassed into the atmosphere as the mantle cools.

Later, more volatiles are delivered via meteorite bombardment – volatiles bound up in carbonaceous meteorites (called chondrites) are released when these meteorites break apart on introduction to the planet.

So, the interior of a planet should reflect the composition of the solar nebula, while its atmosphere should reflect mostly the volatile contribution of meteorites.

We can tell the difference between these two sources by looking at ratios of isotopes of noble gasses, particularly krypton.

And, because Mars formed and solidified relatively quickly in about 4 million years, compared to up to 100 million years for Earth, it's a good record for those very early stages of the planetary formation process.

"We can reconstruct the history of volatile delivery in the first few million years of the Solar System," said geochemist Sandrine Péron, formerly of the University of California Davis, now at ETH Zurich.

That is, of course, only if we can access the information we need – and this is where the Chassigny meteorite is a gift from space.

Its noble gas composition differs from that of the Martian atmosphere, suggesting that the chunk of rock broke away from the mantle (and flung into space, precipitating its arrival at Earth), and is representative of the planetary interior and thus the solar nebula.

Krypton is quite tricky to measure, however, so the precise isotope ratios have eluded measurement. However, Péron and her colleague, fellow geochemist Sujoy Mukhopadhyay of UC Davis, employed a new technique using the UC Davis Noble Gas Laboratory to perform a new, precise measurement of krypton in the Chassigny meteorite.

And this is where it got really weird. The krypton isotope ratios in the meteorite are closer to those associated with chondrites. Like, remarkably closer.
"The Martian interior composition for krypton is nearly purely chondritic, but the atmosphere is solar," Péron said. "It's very distinct."

This suggests that meteorites were delivering volatiles to Mars much earlier than scientists previously thought, before the solar nebula had been dissipated by solar radiation.

The order of events, therefore, would be that Mars acquired an atmosphere from the solar nebula after its global magma ocean cooled; otherwise, the chondritic gasses and the nebular gasses would be much more mixed than what the team observed.

However, this presents another mystery. When solar radiation did eventually burn away the remnants of the nebula, it ought to have burnt away the nebular atmosphere of Mars, too. This means that the atmospheric krypton present later must have been preserved somewhere; perhaps, the team suggested, in polar ice caps.

"However, that would require Mars to have been cold in the immediate aftermath of its accretion," Mukhopadhyay said.

"While our study clearly points to the chondritic gasses in the Martian interior, it also raises some interesting questions about the origin and composition of Mars' early atmosphere."

The team's research has been published in Science.

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Not only does the process sound terrible, there's actually quite a few things that could go wrong. For example, there's endophthalmitis – which is a bacterial infection caused by bacteria entering the hole where the needle went in.

You can also damage the eye tissue from repeated injection. Even worse, tumor cells could float through the newly made hole and spread to other areas.

With all that in mind, an international team of researchers have developed a new, potentially better system for delivering drugs to the eye without these complications.

The new technique has performed well in preclinical tests but unfortunately for our nightmares, it still involves eye needles.

"This novel improvement in drug delivery treatment can avoid problems associated with using needles to treat serious eye diseases," said one of the researchers, Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation director Ali Khademhosseini.

The scientific term for injecting the eye is 'intravitreal injection', as it places the drug into the vitreous (jelly-like fluid that fills the eyeball). It's used to treat a number of diseases, including age related macular degeneration (AMD) and diabetic eye disease.

Currently, the treatment is multiple injections of a drug called anti-VEGF into the jelly-like substance in the eye.

So instead of having to rely on multiple infection-risking injections across treatments, the team created an ultrathin microneedle that actually stays in the eye and eventually biodegrades.

The microneedle has a hydrogel 'plug' to seal up the created hole and gradually releases the drug it is coated in while inside the eye area. You can see an illustration of what this looks like below.

A graphical representation of the new design. (Lee et al., Advanced Healthcare Materials, 2022)

The researchers – who were mostly from institutions across South Korea – tested the new system in a couple of ways.

First, the team injected the microneedles into excised pigs eyes. This showed that the hole was sealed after the injection, and the drug (in this case a purple dye) spread through the eye as predicted.

Next, the team went a step further, inserting the microneedle into live pigs. The team found no leakage or inflammation at the site, and seven days later the tip of the needle was still securely lodged in place.

"It is also noteworthy that the fluorescent signal of [the model drug] rhodamine B was evident even in the deeper retinal tissues and retinal pigment epithelium at the farmost site from the tip of self-plugging microneedle," the team write in their new paper.

"These data indicate that [the model drug] from the tip of the self-plugging microneedle was successfully dispersed through the vitreous and the retina."

As usual with these kinds of experiments, there's a long way to go before you might be injected with a biodegradable self-plugging microneedle at your local optometrist. The design will need longer studies in animal models to ensure safety, and eventually undergo clinical trials to confirm if it's also safe in humans.

But for now, this is an exciting finding, and might provide a slightly less horrible solution to a very horrible problem.

The research has been published in Advanced Healthcare Materials.

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Unfortunately though, many people are lonely or socially isolated. And if the human brain really did evolve for social interaction, we should expect this to affect it significantly. Our recent study, published in Neurology, shows that social isolation is linked to changes in brain structure and cognition – the mental process of acquiring knowledge – it even carries an increased risk of dementia in older adults.

There’s already a lot of evidence in support of the social brain hypothesis. One study mapped the brain regions associated with social interaction in approximately 7,000 people. It showed that brain regions consistently involved in diverse social interactions are strongly linked to networks that support cognition, including the default mode network (which is active when we are not focusing on the outside world), the salience network (which helps us select what we pay attention to), the subcortical network (involved in memory, emotion and motivation) and the central executive network (which enables us to regulate our emotions).

We wanted to look more closely at how social isolation affects grey matter – brain regions in the outer layer of the brain, consisting of neurons. We, therefore, investigated data from nearly 500,000 people from the UK Biobank, with a mean age of 57. People were classified as socially isolated if they were living alone, had social contact less than monthly and participated in social activities less than weekly.

Our study also included neuroimaging (MRI) data from approximately 32,000 people. This showed that socially isolated people had poorer cognition, including in memory and reaction time, and lower volume of grey matter in many parts of the brain. These areas included the temporal region (which processes sounds and helps encode memory), the frontal lobe (which is involved in attention, planning and complex cognitive tasks) and the hippocampus – a key area involved in learning and memory, which is typically disrupted early in Alzheimer’s disease.

We also found a link between the lower grey matter volumes and specific genetic processes that are involved in Alzheimer’s disease.

There were follow-ups with participants 12 years later. This showed that those who were socially isolated, but not lonely, had a 26% increased risk of dementia.

Underlying processes

Social isolation needs to be examined in more detail in future studies to determine the exact mechanisms behind its profound effects on our brains. But it is clear that, if you are isolated, you may be suffering from chronic stress. This in turn has a major impact on your brain, and also on your physical health.

Another factor may be that if we don’t use certain brain areas, we lose some of their function. A study with taxi drivers showed that the more they memorised routes and addresses, the more the volume of the hippocampus increased. It is possible that if we don’t regularly engage in social discussion, for example, our use of language and other cognitive processes, such as attention and memory, will diminish.

This may affect our ability to do many complex cognitive tasks – memory and attention are crucial to complex cognitive thinking in general.

Tackling loneliness

We know that a strong set of thinking abilities throughout life, called “cognitive reserve”, can be built up through keeping your brain active. A good way to do this is by learning new things, such as another language or a musical instrument. Cognitive reserve has been shown to ameliorate the course and severity of ageing. For example, it can protect against a number of illnesses or mental health disorders, including forms of dementia, schizophrenia and depression, especially following traumatic brain injury.

Being alone can affect your memory and reaction time. Zhuravlev Andrey/Shutterstock

There are also lifestyle elements that can improve your cognition and wellbeing, which include a healthy diet and exercise. For Alzheimer’s disease, there are a few pharmacological treatments, but the efficacy of these need to be improved and side effects need to be reduced. There is hope that in the future there will be better treatments for ageing and dementia. One avenue of inquiry in this regard is exogenous ketones - an alternative energy source to glucose – which can be ingested via nutritional supplements.

But as our study shows, tackling social isolation could also help, particularly in old age. Health authorities should do more to check on who is isolated and arrange social activities to help them.

When people are not in a position to interact in person, technology may provide a substitute. However, this may be more applicable to younger generations who are familiar with using technology to communicate. But with training, it may also be effective in reducing social isolation in older adults.

Social interaction is hugely important. One study found that the size of our social group is actually associated with the volume of the orbitofrontal cortex (involved in social cognition and emotion).

But how many friends do we need? Researchers often refer to “Dunbar’s number” to describe the size of social groups, finding that we are not able to maintain more than 150 relationships and only typically manage five close relationships. However, there are some reports which suggest a lack of empirical evidence surrounding Dunbar’s number and further research into the optimal size of social groups is required.

It is hard to argue with the fact that humans are social animals and gain enjoyment from connecting with others, whatever age we are. But, as we are increasingly uncovering, it also crucial for the health of our cognition.

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• The drought threatens Italy's drinking water supply, irrigation for farming, and hydroelectric power plants for energy.

• Water levels are so low that the shipwreck of a World War II barge that sank in 1943 has resurfaced.

A historic drought affecting Italy's largest river has brought a World War II-era shipwreck to light.

The Po River runs 405 miles from the Cottian Alps to empty into the Adriatic Sea. It's currently facing its worst drought in 70 years, which has caused a decades-old sunken ship to resurface.

The Zibello, a 160-foot barge that transported wood in World War II and sank in 1943, is usually hidden beneath the Po's waters, the Associated Press reports. Now, the river's water levels are so low that the wreckage is visible to onlookers.

"It's the first time that we can see this barge," amateur cyclist Raffaele Vezzali told the AP from a park near the village of Gualtieri.

Alessio Bonin took photos of the wreckage with his drone. He told The Guardian it was a startling sight.

"In recent years you could see the bow of the boat, so we knew it was there, but to see the vessel so exposed in March, when it was essentially still winter, was very dramatic," Bonin said. "I've never seen such a drought at this time of year – our main worry used to be our river flooding, now we worry about it disappearing."

A number of factors spurred by climate change are contributing to the drought. The AP reports that Northern Italy hasn't seen rain in more than 110 days, snowfall was down 70% this year, and above-average temperatures are melting snow and glaciers on the surrounding Alps, robbing the Po basin of its water reservoirs for summer.

Meuccio Berselli, secretary general of the Po River Basin Authority, told the AP that in one riverside village called Boretto, river flow typically measures 476,000 gallons per second. Now, it's just 80,000 gallons per second.

The drought threatens drinking water supplies, irrigation for agriculture in Italy's most intensively farmed region, and hydroelectric power plants for energy production, the AP reports.

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Apple workers in Maryland on Saturday became the company's first US retail employees to unionize.

More than 100 workers in Towson, who recently formed the Coalition of Organized Retail Employees (CORE), "overwhelmingly" voted to join the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), according to the union website(Opens in a new window).

"I applaud the courage displayed by CORE members at the Apple store in Towson for achieving this historic victory," IAM International president Robert Martinez Jr. said in a statement. "They made a huge sacrifice for thousands of Apple employees across the nation who had all eyes on this election.

CORE last month wrote to CEO Tim Cook(Opens in a new window), informing him of their move to unionize—"not to go against or create conflict with our management," but "because of a deep love of our role as workers within the company and out of care for the company itself."

Approaching its 20th anniversary, the store (located about eight miles north of Baltimore) cited "gaining access to rights that we do not currently have" as a driving force for unionization.

"I ask Apple CEO Tim Cook to respect the election results and fast-track a first contract for the dedicated IAM CORE Apple employees in Towson," Martinez Jr. said. "This victory shows the growing demand for unions at Apple stores and different industries across our nation."

Apple did not immediately respond to PCMag's request for comment. A spokesperson told Reuters(Opens in a new window), however, that the firm had "nothing to add at this time."

Last month, a leaked memo suggested Apple is coaching US retail store managers on how to talk employees out of incorporating; the Communications Workers of America (CWA) recently accused the company of intimidation and interference with an Atlanta-based store's effort to form a union.

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