"Ten cases of cholera have been recorded in the province" of Sulaimaniyah, said Sabah Hawrami, district health chief in the autonomous Kurdistan region.

Another 56 suspected cases from the same province are being analysed by a central laboratory in the capital Baghdad—the only one able to provide the diagnosis.

The health ministry said one case had been registered in Kirkuk province, neighbouring Sulaimaniyah, while two were recorded in the southern province of Muthanna.

No deaths have yet been registered.

"Around 4,000 cases of diarrhoea and vomiting have been recorded in Sulaimaniyah hospitals" in the past six days, Hawrami told a press conference.
The provincial capital of Sulaimaniyah counts around one million people.

"Cholera is a terrible illness but can be easily treated. We can save lives in a matter of hours," he added.

The country's last broad outbreak "dates back to 2015", health ministry spokesman Seif al-Badr told AFP.

The central provinces of Baghdad and Babil to its south were the worst affected during that outbreak, with hundreds ill.

The last registered cholera cases in Sulaimaniyah province were in 2012.

Cholera is an acute diarrhoeal disease that is treatable with antibiotics and hydration but can kill within hours without medical attention.

It is caused by a germ that is typically transmitted by poor sanitation. People become infected when they swallow food or water carrying the bug.

According to the World Health Organization, researchers estimate that annually there are between 1.3 million and four million cases of cholera worldwide, leading to between 21,000 and 143,000 deaths.

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Mitochondria and the origin of eukaryotes

New photovoltaic tech inches closer to practicality

Long COVID 20-50% less likely after omicron than delta in vaccinated people

Ribbeck cares about spit because she’s trying to deconstruct how glycans, tiny sugar molecules hidden inside mucus, work to keep a particular organism healthy. Scientists already know that mucus is important in maintaining human health and supporting the microbiome. The glycans’ job, according to Ribbeck and others’ work, is critical. They specialize in managing microorganisms that can be beneficial—assisting in food digestion, regulating immunity, and protecting against germs—but that can be harmful if they outcompete one another or become virulent, potentially leading to infection. Like microscopic conductors, glycans ensure that each section of the microbial orchestra is playing in harmony.

In a study published this month in Nature Chemical Biology, Ribbeck and her collaborators showed how glycans keep a fungus called Candida albicans (C. albicans) from becoming problematic. The line between friend and foe is nebulously drawn in the case of C. albicans. The fungus is polymorphic, meaning it can take on different shapes: a rounded, yeast-like structure (generally considered normal) can turn into a filamented, thread-like shape associated with virulence. While the fungus can contribute to immunity, it can also lead to yeast infections or, even more seriously, a systemic infection of the bloodstream.

Sing Sing Way, a physician-scientist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center who was not involved in this study, has researched the ways that shapeshifting Candida can be beneficial for human health. “Complex microbes like Candida have co-evolved with not just humans, but other mammalian hosts, for a long, long time,” Way says. “They’ve developed strategies where it’s good for both.” He thinks that if we understand why and how the fungi change form, we can exploit this relationship to keep them on good behavior.

Ribbeck’s group had done previous work establishing how mucus stops other microbes from becoming dangerous. In this new set of experiments, the scientists wanted to know exactly how it works in the case of C. albicans.

But first, they needed a lot of goo. “It’s surprisingly hard to collect larger volumes of mucus,” Ribbeck says. “It’s a really precious material.” The team collected three kinds of mucus using different methods: aspirating human spit (similar to the way a dentist uses a suction tube to suck saliva from under a patient’s tongue), as well as scraping the insides of pig intestines and stomachs. Then, they incubated the purified mucus with C. albicans inside a well plate—a clear rectangular dish, punctuated with 96 beehive-like holes containing small volumes of fungi.

They discovered that all three types of mucus stopped the fungi from adhering to the plate, compared to a negative control. C. albicans also appeared rounder when the mucus was present, as opposed to the elongated version associated with filamentation. This, the researchers thought, indicated that the mucus could stop the fungus from sticking to bodily surfaces or forming biofilms, which are stringy, intertwined layers of the fungi that are associated with infections.

At the same time, they tested this effect in lab mice. Ribbeck’s team made small puncture wounds on the backs of the mice, then infected them with C. albicans and treated them topically with purified mucus. This significantly reduced the number of viable fungal colonies. The mucus didn’t directly kill the fungi, but the scientists hypothesized that by decreasing its virulence, it allowed the immune system to swoop in and clear the microbes out of the wound. Ribbeck compares it to pacifying an angry kid by giving them a lollipop—instead of squelching bad behavior with force, it persuades the troublemaker to be more pliant.

Now the team knew the mucus worked, but figuring out exactly what inside of it provided these protective properties required a bit of complicated biochemistry. Specifically, they wanted to know which glycans were doing the job. The scientists used a technique called non-reductive alkaline beta elimination—stripping glycans from the mucus proteins while preserving their individual structures. With this pool of 100 or so isolated glycans, they could run mass spectrometry to identify which varieties occurred in all three types of mucus and were probably the most important microbe-wranglers.

Then it was time to generate the most promising of these individual glycans from scratch in order to see if they could stop C. albicans from going bad. That task fell to Rachel Hevey, a research associate at the University of Basel and one of the senior authors of the study. Glycans are hard to make artificially because they consist of approximately the same molecules—a bunch of hydroxyl, or oxygen-hydrogen, groups connected to a carbon backbone. Figuring out how to orient each molecule in the correct position to make each distinct glycan takes a lot of time and expertise. “It’s a bit of a puzzle,” Hevey says.

To solve this sugary puzzle, Hevey and others developed step-by-step procedures to make sure that each chemical group was correctly attached to the chain. The scientists were particularly interested in O-glycans, ones that attach to things through an oxygen molecule, as those were among the most abundant and were common among the three mucus types.

Hevey says the final glycan product is akin to a bristle on a brush. When they added them to a plate of C. albicans, the scientists found that certain O-glycans could stop the fungus from becoming virulent—all by themselves. These specific glycans, which fall under a category called core 1 and core 2 based on their unique molecular building blocks, could stop the fungi from filamenting and downregulate the expression of virulence-related genes.

For Ribbeck, figuring out that single glycans can do the job was a “gamechanger.” “Something as common as mucus has all these tools at play,” she says.

“I think it’s definitely an advance,” says David Perlin, a professor at the Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine who was not involved in the study. “Understanding how O-linked glycans, which are the main components of mucus, contribute to controlling Candida, keeping it at bay, and trying to dampen down its pathogenic properties is quite interesting.”

Ribbeck’s team now has a whole host of future directions to explore. One option is to study translation, or how to turn this knowledge into new therapies. Building drug molecules that can replace helpful missing glycans could aid in developing medications to keep microbe populations in check.

More study into how artificial glycans act in a living mouse, rather than in a petri dish, would be important for future therapeutic work, says Way: “We would also then be interested to know if these types of things impact [C. albicans’] friendliness.”

Another direction involves understanding the role mucus and glycans play as conductors of the entire microbiome, helping C. albicans and its neighbors peacefully coexist. The scientists also found that a lack of mucus can disrupt this coexistence and introduce intense competition. In a way, the glycans protect C. albicans from getting overrun by other microbes—such as the bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa—ultimately throwing a person’s microbiome out of balance. “It’s like putting your kids in separate rooms,” Ribbeck says. “They don’t team up anymore.”

Figuring out how to keep a vast array of microorganisms in a friendly state will take quite a bit of work. But according to Ribbeck, harnessing the powers of this sugary slime may be a potent peacekeeping strategy. “Over millions of years, mucus has evolved strategies to keep those pathogens in check,” she said. “And—this is important—it doesn’t kill them. It tames them.”

How the Sugars In Spit Tame the Body’s Unruly Fungi

(May require free registration to view)

Behold the Magnetar, nature’s ultimate superweapon

Driving the news: 81% of U.S. adults say they believe in God — down 6 points from 2017.

• Belief in God dropped the most among young adults, liberals and Democrats, with these groups showing a drop of 10 or more percentage points compared to an average of polls from 2013 to 2017, Gallup found.

More than 90% of Americans believed in God between 1944 and 2011.

• Conservatives and married adults experienced little change in beliefs, and other subgroups, including education level and ages, experienced but a modest decline.

By the numbers: 62% of liberals, 68% of young adults and 72% of Democrats say they believe in God. These groups experienced the largest declines in beliefs, Gallup notes.

• Belief in God is highest among political conservatives, with 94% saying they believe in God, and Republicans, with 92% saying so.

Between the lines: While the percentage of Americans who believe in God is down over the last five years — and down even more when compared to the last several decades — a majority of Americans still believe in God, Gallup found.

Go deeper... America is losing its religion

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No one knows, however, when humans will create an intelligent or sentient AI, said John Basl, associate professor of philosophy at Northeastern's College of Social Sciences and Humanities, whose research focuses on the ethics of emerging technologies such as AI and synthetic biology.

"When you hear Google talk, they talk as if this is just right around the corner or definitely within our lifetimes," Basl said. "And they are very cavalier about it."

Maybe that is why a recent Washington Post story has made such a big splash. In the story, Google engineer Blake Lemoine says that the company's artificially intelligent chatbot generator, LaMDA, with whom he had numerous deep conversations, might be sentient. It reminds him of a 7- or 8-year-old child, Blake told the Washington Post.

However, Basl believes the evidence mentioned in the Washington Post article is not enough to conclude that LaMDA is sentient.

"Reactions like 'We have created sentient AI,' I think, are extremely overblown," Basl said.

The evidence seems to be grounded in LaMDA's linguistic abilities and the things it talks about, Basl said. However, LaMDA, a language model, was designed specifically to talk, and the optimization function used to train it to process language and converse incentivizes its algorithm to produce this linguistic evidence.

"It is not like we went to an alien planet and a thing that we never gave any incentives to start communicating with us [began talking thoughtfully]," Basl said.

The fact that this language model can trick a human into thinking that it is sentient speaks to its complexity, but it would need to have some other capacities beyond what it is optimized for to show sentience, Basl said.

There are different definitions of sentience. Sentient is defined as being able to perceive or feel things and is often compared to sapient.

Basl believes that sentient AI would be minimally conscious. It could be aware of the experience it is having, have positive or negative attitudes like feeling pain or wanting to not feel pain, and have desires.

"We see that kind of range of capacities in the animal world," he said.

For example, Basl said his dog doesn't prefer the world to be one way rather than the other in any deep sense, but she clearly prefers her biscuits to kibble.

"That seems to track some inner mental life," Basl said. "[But] she is not feeling terror about climate change."

It is unclear from the Washington Post story, why Lemoine compares LaMDA to a child. He might mean that the language model is as intelligent as a small child or that it has the capacity to suffer or desire like a small child, Basl said.

"Those can be diverse things. We could create a thinking AI that doesn't have any feelings, and we can create a feeling AI that is not really great at thinking," Basl said.

Most researchers in the AI community, which consists of machine learning specialists, artificial intelligence specialists, philosophers, ethicists of technology and cognitive scientists, are already thinking about these far future issues and worry about the thinking part, according to Basl.

"If we create an AI that is super smart, it might end up killing us all," he said.

However, Lemoine's concern is not about that, but rather about an obligation to treat rapidly changing AI capabilities differently.

"I am, in some broad sense, sympathetic to that kind of worry. We are not being very careful about that [being] possible," Basl said. "We don't think enough about the moral things regarding AI, like, what might we owe to a sentient AI?"

He thinks humans are very likely to mistreat a sentient AI because they probably won't recognize that they have done so, believing that it is artificial and does not care.

"We are just not very attuned to those things," Basl said.

There is no good model to know when an AI has achieved sentience. What if Google's LaMDA does not have the ability to express its sentience convincingly because it can only speak via a chat window instead of something else?

"It's not like we can do brain scans to see if it is similar to us," he said.

Another train of thought is that sentient AI might be impossible in general because of the physical limitations of the universe or limited understanding of consciousness.

Currently, none of the companies working on AI, including the big players like Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple and governmental agencies, have an explicit aim of creating sentient AI, Basl said. Some organizations are interested in developing AGI, or artificial general intelligence, a theoretical form of AI where a machine, intelligent like a human, would have the abilities to solve a wide range of problems, learn, and plan for the future, according to IBM.

"I think the real lesson from this is that we don't have the infrastructure we need, even if this person is wrong," said Basl, referring to Lemoine.

An infrastructure around AI issues could be built on transparency, information sharing with governmental and/or public agencies, and regulation of research. Basl advocates for one interdisciplinary committee that would help build such infrastructure and the second one that would oversee the technologists working on AI and evaluate research proposals and outcomes.

"The evidence problem is really hard," Basl said. "We don't have a good theory of consciousness and we don't have good access to the evidence for consciousness. And then we also don't have the infrastructure. Those are the key things."

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Yet like so much in science, the evidence is limited to what can be studied close to home. Far from research institutions of affluent countries, the consequences of sedentary living haven't been scrutinized in as much detail, leaving open the possibility that low and middle income populations might have a different experience.

Now, a study by an international team of researchers involving more than 100,000 individuals across 21 countries has revealed people in poorer parts of the world suffer even worse effects from long days perched in one position.

While greater amounts of sitting were associated with an increased risk of mortality and cardiovascular disease in all of the populations studied, the relationship was more pronounced in low income nations like Bangladesh, India, and Zimbabwe.

Sitting for six to eight hours a day – be it at work, in a car, or in front of the television at night before heading off to bed – increases the relative risk of heart disease and premature death by around 12 to 13 percent, compared to people who sit less than four hours per day.

Bump that time up to eight hours or more, and the relative risk lurches to an astonishing 20 percent.

When the data are separated into different economic categories, sitting for more than eight hours a day in low-income and lower-middle-income countries risks a jump in death and heart disease of just under 30 percent (again, relative to sitting four hours or less).

On one hand, the study shows just how widespread the problem of reduced physical activity is. But a more serious implication is the role poverty plays in determining the ultimate impact every extra hour of sitting has on the body.

It's hard to say based on the results alone why the discrepancy exists.

"The difference in the association might be partly explained by the different domains and patterns of sitting behaviors across different income levels," the researchers suggest in their published report.

"That is, television viewing time is more common among people with lower socioeconomic positions and showed a stronger association with outcomes compared with other sitting behaviors perhaps owing to coincident poor nutrition habits and prolonged and uninterrupted sedentary patterns."

While not all types of sitting are the same, the researchers did find evidence backing claims that exercise has a strong mitigating effect on mortality and prevalence of cardiovascular disease.

Astonishingly the study authors found that sitting and inactivity accounted for only a slightly smaller percentage of deaths than smoking.

"For those sitting more than four hours a day, replacing a half hour of sitting with exercise reduced the risk by 2 percent," says Simon Fraser University health scientist Scott Lear.

"There's a real opportunity here for people to increase their activity and reduce their chances of early death and heart disease."

As persuasive as the message to move out of that chair might be, research on variations in physical activity across socioeconomic groups suggests we might not all have it so easy.

Although a complicated topic, studies suggest subtle differences in access to suitable areas for physical activity, opportunities to manage time and access to exercise, and motivation to prioritize, say, a walk over a bus ride, could mean leaving the chair is more of a challenge when money is tight.

What is abundantly clear is our lives provide less opportunity to get up and move around than ever, with total sitting time leaping by just under an hour per day among US adults over the past ten years.

No matter where we live, it's an hour we can't afford to lose.

This research was published in JAMA Cardiology.

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An isolated population of polar bears has been discovered in southeast Greenland1, which is free of sea ice for most of the year. Polar bears (Ursus maritimus) typically need sea ice to survive, so the discovery is raising hopes that some members of the species might survive the loss of ice caused by climate change.

Researchers identified the genetically distinct sub-population living in the fjords of southeast Greenland, which is surrounded by mountains and an ice sheet to the west, and ocean to the east. Because this region is so far south, sea-ice coverage lasts for only around 100 days each year.

Polar bears need access to Arctic sea ice to hunt for seals. So, with sea ice in the region diminishing because of global heating, the animals are expected to near extinction by the end of this century.

But the isolated sub-population has found a way to hunt without sea ice. The group, consisting of 27 adult females, has adapted to hunting on the ice that has calved off glaciers — called glacial mélange. The research team used genetic analysis to learn that this population has been isolated from other polar bear populations along Greenland’s east coast for at least 200 years.

Tracking data from tagged bears confirm that they don’t move far. For instance, when members of the group ventured out of the fjords, the ice platforms on which they sat sometimes got caught in the rapid current that travels down the east coast of Greenland. Whenever this happened, “they would get trapped in that current ripping down the coast and they would actually jump off”, swim ashore and walk back home, says lead author Kristin Laidre, an animal ecologist at the University of Washington in Seattle.

The existence of this small population in conditions of low sea-ice cover suggests there is a chance the species can survive, even as sea ice retreats farther north each year. “This small, genetically distinct group of bears could shed light on how polar bears as a species might persist in an ice-free Arctic,” Laidre says.

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Astronomers reveal the most detailed map of the asteroid Psyche yet

"Genetic testing for potentially lethal variants is more accessible than ever before and this document focuses on which athletes should be tested and when," said author Dr. Michael Papadakis of St George's, University of London, UK. "Sportspeople should be counseled on the potential outcomes prior to genetic testing since it could mean exclusion or restricted play."

In most cases, clinical evaluation will dictate the need for preventive therapy such as a defibrillator and the advice on exercise and participation in competitive sports. Dr. Papadakis explained, "Even if a genetic abnormality is found, recommendations on treatment and return to play usually depend on how severe the disease is clinically. Is it causing symptoms such as fainting? Is the heart excessively weak or thick? Can we see many irregularities of the heart rhythm (arrhythmias) and do they get worse during exercise? If the answer is 'yes' to any of these questions, then play is likely to be curtailed in some way."

One example is an inherited condition called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), where the heart muscle is abnormally thick, that can cause sudden cardiac death in athletes. Dr. Papadakis noted, "We used to be very conservative but now our advice is more liberal. Athletes with HCM should undergo comprehensive clinical evaluation to assess their risk of sudden cardiac death and then be offered an exercise prescription. Genetic testing in this condition does not impact management in most cases. Asymptomatic athletes judged to be at low risk can potentially participate in competitive sports after an informed discussion with their doctor. Others at higher risk may be restricted to moderate intensity exercise. The exercise prescription should be as specific as possible and outline how often, for how long, at what intensity, and which exercise or sport is safe."

In some cases, however, genetic testing can dictate management. One example is long QT syndrome (LQTS), which is an inherited electrical fault of the heart. Identification of different genetic subtypes (LQT 1-3) can inform the risk of arrhythmias, identify potential triggers to be avoided, and help to target medical therapies and plan exercise advice. Dr. Papadakis said, "For instance, sudden immersion in cold water is more likely to cause life-threatening arrhythmias in LQT type 1 rather than types 2 or 3, so one should be more cautious with swimmers who have the type 1 genetic subtype than runners."

The only situation where genetic testing alone may result in exclusion from play is a heart muscle condition called arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy (ARVC). "Even if an athlete has no clinical evidence of the disease but has the gene for the condition, he or she should abstain from high intensity and competitive sport," said Dr. Papadakis.2 "This is because studies show that people with the gene who exercise at a high level tend to develop the disease earlier in life and tend to develop more severe disease which can cause a life-threatening arrhythmia during sport."

Pre-test genetic counseling should be performed to discuss the implications for athletes and their family. As an example, an athlete's mother is clinically diagnosed with ARVC and has the causal gene, the athlete is then screened and all clinical tests are normal. The athlete has two choices: 1) clinical monitoring, probably annually, to check for signs of disease; or 2) genetic testing.

"The athlete needs to know that if the test is positive that may signal the end of his or her career, even if there is no clinical evidence of disease," said Dr. Papadakis. "On the other hand, if genetic testing is refused the condition may get worse. Post-test counseling is critical given the potential psychosocial, financial and mental health implications, particularly if the athlete is excluded from play."

For child athletes, genetic counseling in an expert pediatric center with assistance from a child mental health specialist may be needed. Dr. Papadakis pointed out, "The psychological impact of a positive genetic test result may be significant for the child, especially if this leads to sports exclusion even in the absence of clinical disease such as in ARVC."

In children with a clinical diagnosis of an inherited condition, genetic testing may confirm the diagnosis and in some cases help predict the risk of sudden death during sports. For example, having the gene for an electrical fault of the heart called catecholaminergic polymorphic ventricular tachycardia (CPVT) may lead to advice for preventive therapies, such as beta blockers, and dictate decisions about exercise.

"This is important as CPVT predisposes to arrhythmias during exercise and can cause sudden death at a very young age," said Dr. Papadakis. "In contrast, the timing of genetic testing in children with a family history of HCM is controversial since in the absence of clinical signs it rarely causes sudden death in childhood."

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Participants in the research who took probiotic supplements in addition to antidepressants showed a greater improvement in their depressive symptoms than those who took a placebo, over the course of a 31-day period.

The researchers also noticed changes caused by the probiotics in the intestinal flora of those who took them: an increase in lactic acid-producing bacteria. However, a follow-up after four weeks showed that the levels of these bacteria decreased again over that time.

"It may be that four weeks of treatment is not long enough and that it takes longer for the new composition of the intestinal flora to stabilize," says psychiatrist Anna-Chiara Schaub from the University of Basel in Switzerland.

The research taps into something that scientists already know: that the gut and the mix of bacteria in it can play an important role in our mental health.

The team also looked at another previously explored link, between depression and how we process the emotions that we encounter in other people.

In people with depression, certain brain regions handle this processing differently, and it's often measured by looking at responses to facial expressions. This study took the same approach, using fMRI scans to see how participants reacted to neutral or fearful faces.

It turns out that the probiotics had an impact here too: for those who took the course of 'good' bacteria, the normally awry brain processes normalized.

While the reasons for why this happens aren't entirely understood, the initial signs are positive that the treatment affects multiple facets of depression.

"Although the microbiome-gut-brain axis has been the subject of research for a number of years, the exact mechanisms are yet to be fully clarified," says Schaub.

The health benefits of probiotics are hardly clear-cut, and research continues into whether they might also do more harm than good. Based on this small sample though, it seems as though they do have at least some potential when it comes to treating those with depression.

That said, the team behind the study is keen to emphasize that the probiotics wouldn't work as a treatment on their own, without the antidepressants – and more research is going to be needed to look at the effects of certain kinds of live bacteria on much larger numbers of people.

Currently, around two-thirds of those prescribed with antidepressants don't show a significant long-term response to them. It's possible that in the search for more tailored and effective treatments, probiotics could have an important function we haven't yet found.

"With additional knowledge of the specific effect of certain bacteria, it may be possible to optimize the selection of bacteria and to use the best mix in order to support treatment for depression," says Schuab.

The research has been published in Translational Psychiatry.

Source

Nasa’s Perseverance rover typically beams back evocative images of bleak dusty landscapes, red-hued sandstorms and Martian rock samples. So its operators were surprised to receive an image on Monday of a shiny silver object resembling a discarded crisp packet wedged between two rocks.
The object, the Nasa team concluded, is a piece of debris discarded by the robotic craft during its touchdown in February 2021.

“My team has spotted something unexpected: It’s a piece of a thermal blanket that they think may have come from my descent stage, the rocket-powered jet pack that set me down on landing day back in 2021,” the Perseverance Twitter account reported.

“That shiny bit of foil is part of a thermal blanket – a material used to control temperatures. It’s a surprise finding this here: My descent stage crashed about 2 km away. Did this piece land here after that, or was it blown here by the wind?”

The image has reignited concerns that space exploration risks contaminating the pristine Martian and lunar environments. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 created an obligation under international law to avoid the harmful contamination of outer space, the moon and other celestial bodies, but some argue that the law is not detailed enough to ensure protection.

However, in the case of the Perseverance litter, Prof Andrew Coates, a space scientist at UCL’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory, said: “The good news is that everything is sterilised before it goes to Mars, and the space radiation environment helps during the nine-month trip to Mars as does the harsh surface environment.”

“As it is so difficult to land on Mars because of the thin atmosphere, landers always have associated landing system hardware which also lands on the surface – parachutes, back shells, and landing systems – like the sky crane for Perseverance and Curiosity, airbags and retro rocket systems for earlier missions,” he added. “These ‘fly off into the sunset’ from the landing site and ultimately crash, but the contamination risk is very low.”

Avoiding contamination is crucial for missions like Perseverance, which is hunting for signs of ancient life in Mars’ Jezero crater. Scientists believe that more than 3.5bn years ago, the area was flooded with water and was home to an ancient river delta. Conceivably, microbial life could have survived in Jezero during this wetter period and so the car-sized rover is collecting soil samples to return to Earth that scientists can assess for signs of ancient life.

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A temporary lockdown will also be imposed on residential complexes where a Covid case is detected in the week leading up to the weekend testing, Zhao Dandan, an official with the Shanghai Municipal Health Commission, said at a briefing Wednesday. The lockdown will be lifted once everyone in the compound has been tested, he said.

In an effort to detect cases early and break transmission chains, the city’s residents will need to take nucleic acid tests at least once a week until the end of July, with workers at supermarkets, barbers, drugstores, shopping malls and restaurants required to undergo daily testing. Delivery workers need to take both a nucleic acid and rapid antigen tests every day. Staff at banks, gas companies and industrial entities should also do an antigen test every day.

The latest policy measure in China’s financial hub, which emerged from a bruising two-month lockdown earlier this month, shows the government’s increasing reliance on frequent mass testing to stick to its Covid Zero stance in the face of the hyper-infectious omicron variant. Tens of thousands of lab testing booths are being set up across large cities to allow frequent swabbing to help uncover infection chains early and avert economically-crushing lockdowns. The country reported just 80 local cases nationwide on Wednesday.

Officials are betting the cost of testing and the small-scale disruption to daily life -- tests can take just minutes -- will be far less than the hit of shutting down cities. Shanghai’s lockdown came after a sluggish initial response to its outbreak and roiled global supply chains as companies like Tesla Inc. halted or delayed production for weeks.

But for residents, frequent mass testing means living with the constant threat of being ensnared in a building-specific lockdown should even one positive case be detected. That’s likely to further weigh on consumer spending and risks putting the government’s full-year economic growth target of around 5.5% further out of reach.

It will be more difficult for the service industry to stage a comeback, as “the amount of time that people could’ve spent on consumption -- especially on weekends -- is now all wasted on queuing,” said Ding Shuang, chief economist for Greater China and North Asia at Standard Chartered Plc.

While neither frequent testing nor lockdowns are ideal, weekly tests to snuff out cases are still “much better” as it can help Shanghai avert the kind of curbs imposed in April and May and smooth production for manufacturers, he said.

With mass testing becoming more frequent, China last month ordered all provinces to lower their test prices by June 10. Shanghai pays 3.5 yuan (52 cents) per person for PCR mass testing, meaning the city may spend as much as 613 million yuan for all of its 25 million residents to go through the planned regimen of weekly tests through the end of July.

The testing plan underscores China’s divergence from the rest of the world, which is largely living with the virus, and shows authorities’ unease with Covid’s intractable community spread despite repeated testing and harsh restrictions. Shanghai reported two new cases outside of government quarantine facilities on Wednesday and sent scores of close contacts to isolate to prevent further spread.

Staunch testing advocate Michael Mina, a former Harvard epidemiologist who was an early proponent of using inexpensive at-home tests to screen populations, says China’s system is going too far. While the approach could temporarily wipe out the virus in the country, it also means the population is cut off from the pathogen, making them more vulnerable once they are exposed, he said.

Beijing has also seen another virus cluster emerging from a bar just days after the virus’s community spread was declared to have been curbed. The bar cluster has led to more than 200 cases and triggered fresh rounds of mass testing in parts of the city.

The capital reported 18 cases for Wednesday, down from 63 on Tuesday. It announced 13 local cases up to 3 p.m. on Thursday, with all infections detected in quarantine. Officials said they will test some groups more frequently, including deliverymen and employees of schools and hospitals.
(Updates to add details from Beijing in final paragraph.)

Source

I fell in love with the brain as an undergraduate student and pursued a career in neuroscience, but for years I had largely ignored this structure, since it appeared to be involved "only" in processing of bodily sensations. In my mind, that meant it was not as fascinating as areas implicated in emotion or higher cognitive function.

However, over the past decade, during my training in mindfulness-based interventions and dance movement therapy, I've come to realize that a well-functioning and developed somatosensory cortex may help us experience the world and ourselves more deeply and completely. It may enrich our emotional experience and improve our mental health.

For decades, the somatosensory cortex was considered to only be responsible for processing sensory information from various body parts. However, recently it became apparent that this structure is also involved in various stages of emotion processing, including recognizing, generating and regulating emotions.

Moreover, structural and functional changes in the somatosensory cortex have been found in individuals diagnosed with depression, anxiety and psychotic disorders. These studies suggest that the somatosensory cortex may be a treatment target for certain mental health problems, as well as for preventive measures. Some researchers have even suggested neuromodulation of the somatosensory cortex with transcranial magnetic stimulation or deep brain stimulation.

However, before we decide to use an invasive technology, we may want to consider mindfulness-based interventions, dance movement therapy or other body-centered approaches to psychotherapy. These methods use the entire body to enhance sensory, breath and movement awareness. Those factors can enhance overall self-awareness, which contributes to improvement of mental health through potential reorganization of the somatosensory cortex.

Functional significance of the somatosensory cortex

One of the amazing qualities of the somatosensory cortex is its pronounced plasticity—the ability to reorganize and enlarge with practice (or atrophy without practice). This plasticity is critical when we consider mindfulness-based interventions and dance movement therapy because, as mentioned above, through working directly with the body sensations and movement, we can modify the somatosensory cortex.

Another important aspect is its numerous connections with other areas of the brain. In other words, the somatosensory cortex has a power to affect other brain regions, which in turn affect other regions, and so on. The brain is heavily interconnected and none of its parts acts in isolation.

The somatosensory cortex receives information from the entire body, such that the left part of the cortex processes information from the right side of the body and vice versa. However, the proportion of the cortex devoted to a particular part of the body depends on its functional importance rather than its physical size.

For example, a large proportion of the somatosensory cortex is devoted to our hands, and so just moving and feeling our hands might be an interesting option for dance therapy for those with restricted mobility.

The somatosensory cortex mediates exteroception (touch, pressure, temperature, pain, etc.), proprioception (postural and movement information) and interoception (sensations inside the body, often related to the physiological body states, such as hunger and thirst), although its role in the interoceptive awareness is only partial.

The somatosensory cortex and emotion

A scent, a song or an image can suddenly bring a deeply buried and forgotten event to mind. Similarly, feeling a texture—like cashmere—against our skin, or moving our body in a certain way (such as doing a backbend, or rocking back and forth) can do the same and more. It can bring repressed memories to the surface, provoke emotional reactions, and create state shifts. This is one of the superpowers of mindfulness-based interventions and dance movement therapy.

This response is mediated via the somatosensory cortex, just like emotional and cognitive reactions to a song are mediated via the auditory cortex, and reactions to scents are mediated via the olfactory cortex. Nevertheless, if the information stopped flowing at a purely sensory level (what we feel, hear, see, taste and smell), then a significant portion of the emotional and cognitive consequences would be lost.

Dance/movement therapists and body-centered practitioners have known about this connection between posture/movement and emotion/cognition since the inception of the field. Neuroscientists have now delineated—still roughly—the implicated neural networks. For example, research shows a relationship between developing our sensory sensitivity and emotion regulation.

Some evidence comes from studies of meditation and mindfulness-based interventions, which often involve the practice of body scans (paying attention to parts of the body and bodily sensations in a gradual sequence, for example from feet to head) and/or returning to bodily sensations as anchors in meditation.

Overall, the studies show that people who train in body scans and/or develop sensory awareness of the breath (feeling the breath traveling through the nostrils, throat, etc.) are less reactive and more resilient. This effect is mediated, at least partly, through the somatosensory cortex.

Clinical implications

Given the emerging role of the somatosensory cortex in emotion and cognitive processing, it is not surprising that alterations in the structure and function of this brain region have been found in several mental health problems, including depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.

For example, reductions in the cortical thickness and the gray matter volume of the somatosensory cortex have been observed in individuals with major depressive disorder (especially those with early onset) and in the bipolar disorder. In schizophrenia, lower levels of activity in the somatosensory cortex have been observed, especially in unmedicated patients.

Activating the somatosensory cortex may help us connect to our bodies, develop our sensitivity, sensuality and capacity to feel pleasure. That is how moving mindfully, dancing consciously and meditating with the whole body may help people regulate their emotions and connect with themselves and the world more deeply and meaningfully.

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In its weekly assessment of the pandemic issued on Thursday, the U.N. health agency said there were 8,700 COVID-19 deaths last week, with a 21% jump in the Americas and a 17% increase in the Western Pacific.

WHO said coronavirus cases continued to fall, with about 3.2 million new cases reported last week, extending a decline in COVID-19 infections since the peak in January. Still, there were significant spikes of infection in some regions, with the Middle East and Southeast Asia reporting increases of 58% and 33% respectively.

"Because many countries have reduced surveillance and testing, we know this number is under-reported," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said earlier this week. He said there was "no acceptable level of deaths from COVID-19," given that the global community now has the vaccines, medicines and diagnostics to stop the virus.

While many rich countries in Europe and North America have mostly dropped their virus restrictions, China's extreme COVID-19 policies have meant more mass testing, quarantines and sequestering of anyone who was in contact with a case.

Residents wear masks as they go about their day, Thursday, June 16, 2022, in Beijing. Authorities are trying to contain a new outbreak of COVID linked to a nightclub with mass COVID test and closure of restaurants and entertainment centers in the Chinese capital. Credit: AP Photo/Ng Han Guan

China's capital put school back online this week in one of its major districts amid a new COVID-19 outbreak linked to a nightclub. Residents in Beijing are still undergoing regular testing—mostly every other day—and must wear masks and swipe a mobile phone app to enter public places and facilitate case tracing.

China has maintained its "zero-COVID" policy despite considerable economic costs and an assertion from the head of the World Health Organization that the policy isn't sustainable.

This week, U.S. officials moved a step closer to authorizing coronavirus vaccines for the youngest children, after the Food and Drug Administration's vaccine advisers gave a thumbs-up to vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech for children under 5.

The outside experts voted unanimously that the benefits of the shots outweigh any risks for children under 5—that's roughly 18 million youngsters. They are the last age group in the U.S. without access to COVID-19 vaccines, and many parents have been anxious to protect their little children.
If all the regulatory steps are cleared, shots should be available next week.

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More than 200 miles away from the Fellowship’s base in Oregon House, Calif., the religious sect, which believes a higher consciousness can be achieved by embracing fine arts and culture, has also gained a foothold inside a business unit at Google.

Even in Google’s freewheeling office culture, which encourages employees to speak their own minds and pursue their own projects, the Fellowship’s presence in the business unit was unusual. As many as 12 Fellowship members and close relatives worked for the Google Developer Studio, or GDS, which produces videos showcasing the company’s technologies, according to a lawsuit filed by Kevin Lloyd, a 34-year-old former Google video producer.
Many others staffed company events, working registration desks, taking photographs, playing music, providing massages and serving wine. For these events, Google regularly bought wine from an Oregon House winery owned by a member of the Fellowship, according to the lawsuit.

Mr. Lloyd claimed he was fired last year because he complained about the influence of the religious sect. His suit also names Advanced Systems Group, or ASG, the company that sent Mr. Lloyd to Google as a contractor. Most of the Google Developer Studio joined the team through ASG as contractors, including many members of the Fellowship.

Credit...Will Matsuda/The New York Times

The suit, which Mr. Lloyd filed in August in California Superior Court, accuses Google and ASG of violating a California employment law that protects workers against discrimination. It is in the discovery stage.

The New York Times corroborated many of the lawsuit’s claims through interviews with eight current and former employees of the Google business unit and examinations of publicly available information and other documents. These included a membership roster for the Fellowship of Friends, Google spreadsheets detailing event budgets and photos taken at these events.

“We have longstanding employee and supplier policies in place to prevent discrimination and conflicts of interest, and we take those seriously,” a Google spokeswoman, Courtenay Mencini, said in a statement. “It’s against the law to ask for the religious affiliations of those who work for us or for our suppliers, but we’ll of course thoroughly look into these allegations for any irregularities or improper contracting practices. If we find evidence of policy violations, we will take action.”

Dave Van Hoy, ASG’s president, said in a statement that his company believed in “the principles of openness, inclusivity and equality for people of all races, religions, gender identification and above all nondiscrimination.”

“We continue to deny the plaintiff’s baseless allegations and expect to vindicate ourselves in court soon,” he added.

Founded in 1970 by Robert Earl Burton, a former San Francisco Bay Area schoolteacher, the Fellowship of Friends describes itself as an organization “available to anyone interested in pursuing the spiritual work of awakening.” It claims 1,500 members across the globe, with about 500 to 600 in and around its compound in Oregon House. Members are typically required to give 10 percent of their monthly earnings to the organization.

Mr. Burton based his teachings on the Fourth Way, a philosophy developed in the early 20th century by a Greek Armenian philosopher and one of his students. They believed that while most people moved through life in a state of “waking sleep,” a higher consciousness was possible. Drawing on what he described as visits from angelic incarnations of historical figures like Leonardo da Vinci, Johann Sebastian Bach and Walt Whitman, Mr. Burton taught that true consciousness could be achieved by embracing the fine arts.

Inside the organization’s Northern California compound, called Apollo, the Fellowship staged operas, plays and ballets; ran a critically acclaimed winery; and collected art from across the world, including more than $11 million in Chinese antiques.

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“They believe that to achieve enlightenment you should surround yourself with so-called higher impressions — what Robert Burton believed to be the finest things in life,” said Jennings Brown, a journalist who recently produced a podcast about the Fellowship called “Revelations.” Mr. Burton described Apollo as the seed of a new civilization that would emerge after a global apocalypse.

The Fellowship came under fire in 1984 when a former member filed a $2.75 million lawsuit claiming that young men who joined the organization “had been forcefully and unlawfully sexually seduced by Burton.” In 1996, another former member filed a suit that accused Mr. Burton of sexual misconduct with him while he was minor. Both suits were settled out of court.

The same year, the Fellowship sold its collection of Chinese antiques at auction. In 2015, after its chief winemaker left the organization, its winery ceased production. The Fellowship’s president, Greg Holman, declined to comment for this article.

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The Google Developer Studio is run by Peter Lubbers, a longtime member of the Fellowship of Friends. A July 2019 Fellowship directory, obtained by The Times, lists him as a member. Former members confirm that he joined the Fellowship after moving to the United States from the Netherlands.

At Google, he is a director, a role that is usually a rung below vice president in Google management and usually receives annual compensation in the high six figures or low seven figures.

Previously, Mr. Lubbers worked for the staffing company Kelly Services. M. Catherine Jones, Mr. Lloyd’s lawyer, won a similar suit against Kelly Services in 2008 on behalf of Lynn Noyes, who claimed that the company had failed to promote her because she was not a member of the Fellowship. A California court awarded Ms. Noyes $6.5 million in damages.

Ms. Noyes said in an interview that Mr. Lubbers was among a large contingent of Fellowship members from the Netherlands who worked for the company in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

At Kelly Services, Mr. Lubbers worked as a software developer before a stint at Oracle, the Silicon Valley software giant, according to his LinkedIn profile, which was recently deleted. He joined Google in 2012, initially working on a team that promoted Google technology to outside software developers. In 2014, he helped create G.D.S., which produced videos promoting Google developer tools.

Kelly Services declined to comment on the lawsuit.

Under Mr. Lubbers, the group brought in several other members of the Fellowship, including a video producer named Gabe Pannell. A 2015 photo posted to the internet by Mr. Pannell’s father shows Mr. Lubbers and Mr. Pannell with Mr. Burton, who is known as “The Teacher” or “Our Beloved Teacher” within the Fellowship. A caption on the photo, which was also recently deleted, calls Mr. Pannell a “new student.”

Echoing claims made in the lawsuit, Erik Johansen, a senior video producer who has worked for the Google Developer Studio since 2015 through ASG, said the team’s leadership abused the hiring system that brought workers in as contractors.

“They were able to further their own aims very rapidly because they could hire people with far less scrutiny and a far less rigorous on-boarding process than if these people were brought on as full-time employees,” he said. “It meant that no one was looking very closely when all these people were brought on from the foothills of the Sierras.”

Mr. Lloyd said that after applying for his job he had interviewed with Mr. Pannell twice, and that he had reported directly to Mr. Pannell when he joined a 25-person Bay Area video production team inside GDS in 2017. He soon noticed that nearly half this team, including Mr. Lubbers and Mr. Pannell, came from Oregon House.

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Google paid to have a state-of-the-art sound system installed in the Oregon House home of one Fellowship member who worked for the team as a sound designer, according to the suit. Mr. Lubbers disputed this claim in a phone interview, saying the equipment was old and would have been thrown out if the team had not sent it to the home.

The sound designer’s daughter also worked for the team as a set designer. Additional Fellowship members and their relatives were hired to staff Google events, including a photographer, a masseuse, Mr. Lubbers’s wife and his son, who worked as a DJ at company parties.

The company frequently served wine from Grant Marie, a winery in Oregon House run by a Fellowship member who previously managed the Fellowship’s winery, according to the suit and a person familiar with the matter, who declined to be identified for fear of reprisal.

“My personal religious beliefs are a deeply held private matter,” Mr. Lubbers said. “In all my years in tech, they have never played a role in hiring. I have always performed my role by bringing in the right talent for the situation — bringing in the right vendors for the jobs.”

He said ASG, not Google, hired contractors for the GDS team, adding that it was fine for him to “encourage people to apply for those roles.” And he said that in recent years, the team has grown to more than 250 people, including part-time employees.

Mr. Pannell said in a phone interview that the team brought in workers from “a circle of trusted friends and families with extremely qualified backgrounds,” including graduates of the University of California, Berkeley.

In 2017 and 2018, according to the suit, Mr. Pannell attended video shoots intoxicated and occasionally threw things at the presenter when he was unhappy with a performance. Mr. Pannell said that he did not remember the incidents and that they did not sound like something he would do. He also acknowledged that he’d had problems with alcohol and had sought help.

After seven months at Google, Mr. Pannell was made a full-time employee, according to the suit. He was later promoted to senior producer and then executive producer, according to his LinkedIn profile, which has also been deleted.

Mr. Lloyd brought much of this to the attention of a manager inside the team, he said. But he was repeatedly told not to pursue the matter because Mr. Lubbers was a powerful figure at Google and because Mr. Lloyd could lose his job, according to his lawsuit. He said he was fired in February 2021 and was not given a reason. Google, Mr. Lubbers and Mr. Pannell said he had been fired for performance issues.

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Ms. Jones, Mr. Lloyd’s lawyer, argued that Google’s relationship with ASG allowed members of the Fellowship to join the company without being properly vetted. “This is one of the methods the Fellowship used in the Kelly case,” she said. “They can get through the door without the normal scrutiny.”

Mr. Lloyd is seeking damages for wrongful termination, retaliation, failure to prevent discrimination and the intentional infliction of emotion distress. But he said he worries that, by doing so much business with its members, Google fed money into the Fellowship of Friends.

“Once you become aware of this, you become responsible,” Mr. Lloyd said. “You can’t look away.”

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NASA says its ready for a fourth attempt to fuel the massive SLS rocket

Ancient Roman soldier carved a phallus with a personal insult in this stone

Trillions of microorganisms line human gastrointestinal tracts, directly impacting their host's well-being. Studies have shown that when more types of bacteria are present, people tend to have a lower chance of developing chronic diseases, such as heart disease and diabetes. And beer contains compounds, such as polyphenols, as well as microorganisms from its fermentation, that could impact the variety of microbes in the human gut. A previously published "cross-over" study showed that when both men and women consumed non-alcoholic lager beer for 30 days, their gut microbiome diversity increased. Many of those same people were also in a second group that drank an alcoholic version of the beer, and it didn't have the same effect. Few other clinical trials have tested this issue, so Ana Faria and colleagues wanted to see if they would find similar results with men in a different type of study—a parallel, randomized trial design—with two separate groups of participants.

In this double-blind study, 19 healthy men were randomly divided into two groups who drank 11 fluid ounces of either alcoholic or non-alcoholic lager with dinner for 4 weeks. The researchers found that the participants' weight, body mass index and serum markers for heart health and metabolism didn't change during the study. But at the end of the 4-week period, both groups had greater bacterial diversity in their gut microbiome and higher levels of fecal alkaline phosphatase, indicating an improvement in intestinal health. The researchers suggest that these results could differ from those of the prior study because of the different designs of the trials, and because the participants were living in different communities. But based on this pilot study, the researchers say that consuming one bottle of beer, regardless of its alcohol content, may be beneficial to the gut microbiome and intestinal health of men. However, they add that because the safest level of alcohol consumption is none, non-alcoholic beer may be the more healthful choice.

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The two-month operation, which involved 76 countries, also intercepted $50 million worth of stolen funds.

The crackdown took place between March and May and focused on “social engineering scams,” a type of fraud defined by a criminal using a deceptive story to trick victims into giving away personal information that can be used for financial gain.

Such scams can include posing as a potential employer or even a romantic interest, or a so-called “romance scam.” The operation, dubbed Operation First Light 2022, included the arrest of a ring of eight suspects connected to an online marking job scam where fraudsters connected victims via social media promising jobs.

Law enforcement also raided suspects involved with business mail compromise (BEC) scams, one of the most costly forms of scams hitting the United States. In BEC fraud, hackers pose as a legitimate company employees either through a fake or stolen account to order unauthorized money transfers.

INTERPOL investigators noticed some dark trends in the sweep. Victims aided by the operation included a teenager in Singapore who had been tricked into pretending to be kidnapped and wounded so his parents paid a ransom. Other trends that investigators observed included ties between the scams and human trafficking.

INTERPOL has conducted Operation Searchlight since 2014, but this is only the second time the operation involved law enforcement outside of Southeast Asia.

“The transnational and digital nature of different types of telecom and social engineering fraud continues to present grave challenges for local police authorities, because perpetrators operate from a different country or even continent than their victims and keep updating their fraud schemes,” Duan Daqi, head of the INTERPOL National Central Bureau in Beijing, said in a press release.

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The Black Death was the first wave of a 500-year-long pandemic that would go down in history as one of the deadliest of all time. Caused by the pernicious bacterium Yersinia pestis, it left a dark shadow over the Middle Ages, wiping out large swathes of the European population.

Despite its immense impact, the origins of the disease have long thwarted researchers, who have since traced long-buried ancient genomes of Y. pestis across the continent.

This new study, which suggests the Black Death emerged in Central Eurasia, is actually just the latest in a slew of archeological and paleoecological findings that are steadily rewriting our understanding of the plague.

"Our study puts to rest one of the biggest and most fascinating questions in history and determines when and where the single most notorious and infamous killer of humans began," says University of Stirling historian Phil Slavin, who worked alongside lead author Maria Spyrou, an archaeogeneticist at the University of Tübingen, and biochemist Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

In previous work, which compared ancient genomes from the remains of people who had died of the plague in England, France, Germany and elsewhere, Spyrou and Krause had managed to trace the roots of the second plague pandemic back to a riverside town in Russia.

Other teams have also claimed they uncovered the oldest known plague victim, who died in what is now Latvia from a less transmissible, ancestral strain of Y. pestis thousands of years before the Black Death ripped around the world in the mid-14th century.

But the origins of the second plague pandemic, a grim saga beginning with the Black Death and spanning five centuries, have long been debated and efforts to pinpoint it have thus far been hampered by a prevailing Eurocentric focus, the team says.

Now, their new research pushes the likely origins of the Black Death even farther east into Central Asia, with DNA evidence from the remains of seven individuals exhumed from two cemeteries in modern-day Kyrgyzstan.

The cemeteries, located in the Chüy Valley near Lake Issyk-Kul, had actually been excavated between 1885 and 1892, and contained a cluster of burials marked by tombstones inscribed with vague details of an unknown pestilence. The timing of the local outbreak fitted with the onset of the second plague pandemic, but the exact cause of death was never confirmed.

To investigate, the team extracted DNA from the teeth of the recovered skeletons, sequenced the genetic material and compared it to modern and historical genomes of Y. pestis.

"Despite the risk of environmental contamination and no guarantee that the bacteria would have been able to be preserved, we were able to sequence [ancient] DNA taken from seven individuals," says Spyrou.

In the teeth of three out of the seven skeletons, they found traces of ancient DNA of the plague bacterium, Y. pestis, and matched these skeletons to their headstones using historic diaries of the original excavations.

"We could finally show that the epidemic mentioned on the tombstones was indeed caused by plague," says Slavin, the historian.

Two of the reconstructed ancient genomes represented a single strain, dated to the first half of the 14th century. Genomic comparisons suggested this ancestral strain gave rise to a massive expansion of diverse plague strains that branched out and spawned the pandemic.

"We found that the ancient strains from Kyrgyzstan are positioned exactly at the node of this massive diversification event," Spyrou says. "In other words, we found the Black Death's source strain and we even know its exact date."

That date is the year 1338, which was inscribed in the ancient Syriac language on the skeleton's headstones.

The headstone of one of the plague victims buried in the Chu Valley. (A.S. Leybin, August 1886)

Of course, age estimates of ancient DNA samples recovered from crumbling skeletons can vary widely and archaeological findings are never definitive, so there may well be more to this story yet, especially if more remains of plague victims are uncovered.

Based on the evidence at hand, the researchers did find the ancestral strain resembled modern strains circulating in wild rodent populations around the nearby Tian Shan mountains, which they say suggests the Black Death emerged in the local region, rather than being introduced from elsewhere.

"This points to an origin of Black Death's ancestor in Central Asia," Krause explains.

How the Black Death spread was, and still remains, another pressing question; warfare and trade networks are thought to be some of the main contributors to the rampant advance of Y. pestis during the 14th century.

Based on further examinations of the tombstone inscriptions, burial artifacts, coin hoards and historical records, the researchers reckon the Chüy Valley was home to diverse communities that relied on trade with regions across Eurasia. Those trade routes may have carried an unwanted passenger.

"An investigation of early-to-mid-fourteenth-century [trade] connections across Asia, interpreted alongside other genomic evidence, will be important for disentangling the bacterium's westward dispersals," the study authors write.

The study findings are reported in Nature.

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A decade ago, particle physicists thrilled the world. On 4 July 2012, 6000 researchers working with the world’s biggest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, announced they had discovered the Higgs boson, a massive, fleeting particle key to their abstruse explanation of how other fundamental particles get their mass. The discovery fulfilled a 45-year-old prediction, completed a theory called the standard model, and thrust physicists into the spotlight.

Then came a long hangover. Before the 27-kilometer-long ring-shaped LHC started to take data in 2010, physicists fretted that it might produce the Higgs and nothing else, leaving no clue to what lies beyond the standard model. So far, that nightmare scenario is coming true. “It’s a bit disappointing,” allows Barry Barish, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology. “I thought we would discover supersymmetry,” the leading extension of the standard model.

It’s too early to despair, many physicists say. After 3 years of upgrades, the LHC is now powering up for the third of five planned runs, and some new particle could emerge in the billions of proton-proton collisions it will produce every second. In fact, the LHC should run for another 16 years, and with further upgrades should collect 16 times as much data as it already has. All those data could reveal subtle signs of novel particles and phenomena.

Still, some researchers say the writing is on the wall for collider physics. “If they don’t find anything, this field is dead,” says Juan Collar, a physicist at the University of Chicago who hunts dark matter in smaller experiments. John Ellis, a theorist at King’s College London, says hopes of a sudden breakthrough have given way to the prospect of a long, uncertain grind toward discovery. “It’s going to be like pulling teeth, not like teeth falling out.”

Since the 1970s, physicists have been locked in a wrestling match with the standard model. It holds that ordinary matter consists of lightweight particles called up quarks and down quarks—which bond in trios to make protons and neutrons—along with electrons and featherweight particles called electron neutrinos. Two sets of heavier particles lurk in the vacuum and can be blasted into fleeting existence in particle collisions. All interact by exchanging other particles: The photon conveys the electromagnetic force, the gluon carries the strong force that binds quarks, and the massive W and Z bosons carry the weak force.

The standard model describes everything scientists have seen at particle colliders so far. Yet it cannot be the ultimate theory of nature. It leaves out the force of gravity, and it doesn’t include mysterious, invisible dark matter, which appears to outweigh ordinary matter in the universe six to one.

The LHC was supposed to break that impasse. In its ring, protons circulating in opposite directions crash together at energies nearly seven times as high as at any previous collider, enabling the LHC to produce particles too massive to be made elsewhere. A decade ago many physicists envisioned quickly spotting marvels including new force-carrying particles or even mini–black holes. “One would drown in supersymmetric particles,” recalls Beate Heinemann, director of particle physics at the German laboratory DESY. Finding the Higgs would take longer, physicists predicted.

Instead, the Higgs appeared in a relatively speedy 3 years—in part because it is somewhat less massive than many physicists expected, about 133 times as heavy as a proton, which made it easier to produce. And 10 years after that monumental discovery, no other new particle has emerged.

That dearth has undermined two of physicists’ cherished ideas. A notion called naturalness suggested the low mass of the Higgs more or less guaranteed the existence of new particles within the LHC’s grasp. According to quantum mechanics, any particles lurking “virtually” in the vacuum will interact with real ones and affect their properties. That’s exactly how virtual Higgs bosons give other particles their mass.

That physics cuts both ways, however. The Higgs boson’s mass ought to be pulled dramatically upward by other standard model particles in the vacuum—especially the top quark, a heavier version of the up quark that weighs 184 times as much as the proton. That doesn’t happen, so theorists have reasoned that at least one other new particle with a similar mass and just the right properties—in particular, a different spin—must exist in the vacuum to “naturally” counter the effects of the top quark.

The theoretical concept known as supersymmetry would supply such particles. For every known standard model particle, it posits a heavier partner with a different spin. Lurking in the vacuum, those partners would not only keep the Higgs’s mass from running away, but would also help explain how the Higgs field, which pervades the vacuum like an unextinguishable electric field, came into being. Supersymmetric particles might even account for dark matter.

But instead of those hoped-for particles, what have emerged in the past decade are tantalizing anomalies—small discrepancies between observations and standard model predictions—that physicists will explore in the LHC’s next 3-year run. For example, in 2017, physicists working with LHCb, one of four large particle detectors fed by the LHC, found that B mesons, particles that contain a heavy bottom quark, decay more often to an electron and a positron than to a particle called a muon and an antimuon. The standard model says the two rates should be the same, and the difference might be a hint of supersymmetric partners, Ellis says.

Similarly, experiments elsewhere suggest the muon might be very slightly more magnetic than the standard model predicts (Science, 9 April 2021, p. 113). That anomaly can be explained by the existence of exotic particles called leptoquarks, which might already be hiding undetected in the LHC’s output, Ellis says.

The Higgs itself provides other avenues of exploration, as any difference between its observed and predicted properties would signal new physics. For example, in August 2020, teams of physicists working with the LHC’s two biggest detectors, ATLAS and CMS, announced that both had spotted the Higgs decaying to a muon and an antimuon. If the rate of that hard-to-see decay varies from predictions, the deviation could point to new particles hiding in the vacuum, says Marcela Carena, a theorist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

Those searches likely won’t yield dramatic “Eureka!” moments, however. “There’s a shift towards very precise measurements of subtle effects,” Heinemann says. Still, Carena says, “I very much doubt that in 20 years, I will say, ‘Oh, boy, after the Higgs discovery we learned nothing new.’”

Others are less sanguine about LHC experimenters’ chances. “They’re facing the desert and they don’t know how wide it is,” says Marvin Marshak, a physicist at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, who studies neutrinos using other facilities. Even optimists say that if the LHC finds nothing new, it will be harder to convince the governments of the world to build the next bigger, more expensive collider to keep the field going.

For now, many physicists at the LHC are just excited to get back to smashing protons. During the past 3 years, scientists have upgraded the detectors and reworked the lower energy accelerators that feed the collider. The LHC should now run at a more constant collision rate, effectively increasing the flow of data by as much as 50%, says Mike Lamont, director of accelerators and beams at CERN.

Accelerator physicists have been slowly tuning up the LHC’s beams for months, Lamont says. Only when the beams are sufficiently stable will they turn on the detectors and resume taking data. Those switches should flip on 5 July, 10 years and 1 day after the announcement of the Higgs discovery, Lamont says. “It’s good to be going into some sustained running.”

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X-ray imaging reveals why this 17th century painted yellow rose lost its luster