Monkeypox outbreak spurs WHO to consider declaring international emergency

For decades, scientists have attempted to mimic the path that stem cells follow in order to form, for example, organs in embryos. However, despite extensive efforts, getting cells to properly develop in the lab has been very difficult. But they may have overlooked an important step and maybe missing another type of stem cells, suggests a new study from the University of Copenhagen.

"Very simply put, a number of recent studies have attempted make a gut from stem cells in a dish. We have found a new way to do this, a way which follows different aspects of what happens in the embryo. Here, we found a new route that the embryo uses, and we describe the intermediate stage that different types of stem cells could use to make the gut and other organs," says Ph.D. student at Martin Proks, one of the primary authors of the study from Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Stem Cell Medicine at the University of Copenhagen (reNEW).

The researchers looked at so-called pluripotent stem cells and endoderm extra-embryonic stem cells. Extra-embryonic endoderm cells are a new stem cell line that the same research team described a couple of years back. They contribute to the gut organs by being important support cells that provide membranes, nourishment for the membranes and more.

Group Leader and Professor Joshua Brickman at reNEW explains, "We have identified an alternative route that so-called extra-embryonic cells can use to make intestinal organs in the embryo. We then took our extra-embryonic endoderm stem cells and developed them into intestinal organ-like structures in the dish.

"But until the very recent past, people assumed these cells helped the embryo to develop and then they're gone. That they do not have anything to do with your body. So in this paper, we discovered that if we steer these support cells through this new alternative route, they would actually form organoid structures," says Joshua Brickman on the findings, which were published in Nature Cell Biology.

Might improve laboratory grown cells

The researchers identified all the potential cells that were candidates to form organs associated with the digestive tract, such as liver, pancreas, lung, and intestine, based on labeling them with a genetic marker. This big data is hard to analyze and required innovative new approaches to analysis that were developed in collaboration with physical scientists at the Niels Bohr Institute.

"We then identified the genes being used in these cells. To facilitate this work, we developed a new computational tool to compare clusters of cells and used this both to compare cells within our own dataset and examine others," explains Associate Professor Ala Trusina at the Niels Bohr Instute.

In order to ask whether the alternative route could develop organ cell types in the lab, the researchers set about using a different type of stem cells. These stem cells, which were described earlier in the article, originate from a different part of the embryo than pluripotent stem cells, and they resemble the starting point for the second or alternative route of organ formation.

"We then used these stem cells to generate intestinal organ-like structures in a dish. The findings suggest that both routes could work. Using the alternative route might help laboratory grown cells form functional cells and treat and study disease," says Michaela Rothova, one of the other principle authors on the study.

It could prove an important discovery, as scientists for long have been trying to crack the code on how to develop stem cells into the correct cells needed for a specific treatment, or to test drugs or model a disease.

"We haven't quite gotten there in terms of function, and we have problems maturing these cells. So perhaps we can solve some of these problems by trying this alternative route or by combining the alternative route with the traditional route," concludes Joshua Brickman at reNEW.

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Lead author Grace Molino, a Ph.D. student at William & Mary's Virginia Institute of Marine Science, says, "The numbers are striking. Baywide, we expect more than 600 square miles of inundated land in the Chesapeake region by 2100." That is four times the area that has converted to marshland in the Bay region since historical observations began in the 1840s, and more than 75% will be rural—mainly forests, forested wetlands, and farm fields.

Joining Molino on the study, which appears in the latest issue of Limnology and Oceanography Letters, are VIMS professor Dr. Matt Kirwan and U.S. Geological Survey researchers Joel Carr of the Eastern Ecological Science Center and Neil Ganju of the Woods Hole Science Center.

"As far as I know, this is the first projection of inundated land in the Bay area, and one of the few and most high-resolution predictions in the U.S." says Kirwan. "Our analysis shows that marsh migration is constrained more by natural topography than by human development."

The authors stress that their findings apply not just to the mid-Atlantic region, as similar land-use patterns occur all along the U.S. coastline. "Our data suggests that rural coasts will bear the brunt of sea-level rise nationwide," says Kirwan.

The team's study paints the Chesapeake region and North American coastal plain as global outliers in terms of saltmarsh resilience to sea-level rise, with the more urbanized coasts of Europe and Asia more likely to experience "coastal squeeze." This is the loss of coastal wetlands as rising saltwater floods and erodes their seaward edge while natural or human barriers block their landward migration.

Says Kirwan, "Despite a perception that urban centers will block marsh migration, our predictions suggest that the most vulnerable land in the Chesapeake Bay remains largely undeveloped, even in what are typically thought of as urban watersheds."

"We found that developed lands generally occupy less than 10% of predicted migration areas within individual watersheds, even under our high scenarios of sea-level rise," adds Molino, "despite more extensive development in the watershed overall."

For example, the Elizabeth River is one of the most highly developed watersheds in the Chesapeake Bay and the U.S., with its three branches cutting through the metropolitan areas of Norfolk and Portsmouth in southeast Virginia. Yet developed surfaces occupy only 16% of the potential marsh-migration area under 1 meter of sea-level rise, compared to 31% of developed land across the entire watershed.

The Elizabeth River is one of the most highly developed watersheds in the Chesapeake Bay and U.S.; yet developed surfaces occupy only 16% of the potential marsh-migration area under 1 meter of sea-level rise. Credit: David Malmquist/VIMS

The Bay's other major urban areas—Hampton, Virginia; Annapolis, Maryland; and Baltimore, Maryland—lie in more elevated watersheds with only small areas of potential marsh migration.

The good news from the study is that the abundance of low-lying forests and farmland in the Chesapeake Bay area and North America more generally will largely preclude coastal squeeze expected to curtail saltmarsh area in other, more urbanized regions of the world's coast.

The challenge for North American landowners and governments will be to equitably manage the conversion of what is now mostly privately owned, income-producing rural uplands into coastal wetland habitats whose value lies mainly in providing publicly valued ecosystem services such as flood protection and the nurture of fish and bird populations.

Analysis

The team began their analysis by using more than 200,000 GIS data points to map the present-day boundary between forest and marsh around the Bay. They then recorded the height of each point relative to sea level using an extremely detailed elevation model from the U.S. Geological Survey. Their next step was to use these data points to calculate a median "threshold elevation" for each of 81 watersheds surrounding Chesapeake Bay.

Akin to a bathtub ring, the threshold elevation integrates the mix of tidal range and salinity that has advanced the marsh-migration front to its current height and lateral position within each watershed segment. These threshold elevations vary by a factor of 5 across the 81 watersheds, from 0.2 to 1.05 meters (0.65-3.4 feet). The boundary extends farthest inland in low-lying watersheds bordered by salty waters with a high tidal range. Regular inundation by saltwater is the main factor that converts farmlands and forests into saltmarsh.

Using the same high-resolution USGS map, the team then added increments of sea-level rise out to 2100 based on projections by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—including low (0.5 m or 1.6 feet), intermediate (1 m or 3.3 ft), and high (2.5 m or 8.2 ft) scenarios. They then measured the area of land within each watershed that would be flooded under each sea-level-rise scenario, and determined whether it is currently covered by forest, forested wetlands, turf grass, farm fields, or developed surfaces such as roads, parking lots, and buildings.

As expected, these "potential marsh migration areas" will increase over the coming decades and with the magnitude of sea-level rise, from 405 square miles by 2100 under their low scenario to 1,447 square miles under their high scenario.

What was unexpected within the increasingly developed Chesapeake Bay watershed is that the marsh-migration areas are dominated by upland and wetland forests, not urban or suburban land.

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"We found that plants control their respiration in a way we did not expect, they control how much of the carbon from photosynthesis they keep to build biomass by using a metabolic channel," University of Western Australia plant biochemist Harvey Millar told ScienceAlert.

"This happens right as the step before they decide to burn a compound called pyruvate to make and release CO2 back to the atmosphere."

If you think back to high-school biology, you might remember that during photosynthesis, plants make sugar or sucrose. The plant typically makes an excess of sucrose; some is stored, some is degraded. This is called the citric acid (or tricarboxylic acid) cycle, and it's equally important for life.

As part of this cycle, sucrose, which has twelve carbon atoms, is broken down into glucose with six carbons. Then glucose is broken into pyruvate, which has three carbons. Using pyruvate for energy produces carbon as a waste product, so it's at this point where the 'decision' is made in the plant.

"Pyruvate is the last point for a decision," Millar told ScienceAlert.

"You can burn it and release CO2, or you can use it to build phospholipids, stored plant oils, amino acids and other things you need to make biomass."

The discovery came about while working on a classic plant model organism called thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana). The researchers, led by University of Western Australia plant molecular scientist Xuyen Le, labeled pyruvate with C13 (a carbon isotope) to track where it was being shifted during the citric acid cycle, and found that pyruvate from different sources was being used differently.

This means the plant can actually track the source of the pyruvate and act accordingly, choosing to either release it, or hold on to it for other purposes.
"We found that a transporter on mitochondria directs pyruvate to respiration to release CO2, but pyruvate made in other ways is kept by plant cells to build biomass – if the transporter is blocked, plants then use pyruvate from other pathways for respiration," Le said.

"Imported pyruvate was the preferred source for citrate production."

This ability to make decisions, the team suggests, breaks the normal rules of biochemistry, where typically, every reaction is a competition and the processes don't control where the product goes.

"Metabolic channeling breaks these rules by revealing reactions that don't behave like this, but are set decisions in metabolic processes that are shielded from other reactions," says Millar.

"This is not the first metabolic channel to ever be found, but they are relatively rare, and this is the first evidence of one governing this process in respiration."

Although plants are wonderful stores of CO2 – forests alone store around 400 gigatonnes of carbon – not every molecule of CO2 that is taken up by plants is then kept. Around half of the carbon dioxide that plants take up is released back into the atmosphere.

Being able to get plants to store a little more carbon dioxide in this process could be a fascinating way to help our climate change woes.

"As we consider building and breeding plants for the future – we shouldn't just be thinking about how they can be good food and food for our health, but also if they can be good carbon storers for the health of the atmosphere that we all depend on," Millar told ScienceAlert.

Such futureproofing is yet to come, as the researchers have only just discovered this biochemical process to behind with. But if we can hijack the way plants make decisions about carbon storage, it could be one piece of the bigger climate change mitigation puzzle.

The research has been published in Nature Plants.

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We’ve driven GM and Lockheed Martin’s new Lunar Vehicle

Study authors warn that the growing rate of multiple chronic health conditions (multimorbidity) among older Americans represents a real health threat to the nation. If it continues, this trend will almost certainly place increased strain on the well-being of older adults, medical infrastructures, and federal insurance systems. On a related note, the amount of Americans over 65 is projected to increase by an astounding 50 percent by 2050.

Researchers note that this isn’t the first study to indicate greater health deterioration among today’s older adults. Moving forward, they would like to see their findings help inform new policies addressing this nationwide issue.

“Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, we were beginning to see declines in life expectancy among middle-aged Americans, a reversal of more than a century long trend,” says Steven Haas, associate professor of sociology and demography at Penn State, in a statement. “Furthermore, the past 30 years has seen population health in the U.S. fall behind that in other high-income countries, and our findings suggest that the U.S. is likely to continue to fall further behind our peers.”

Study authors analyzed data on adults aged 51 years and older originally collected by the Health and Retirement Study, which is a a nationally representative survey of aging Americans. Multimorbidity was measured by looking out for nine chronic conditions: heart disease, hypertension, stroke, diabetes, arthritis, lung disease, cancer (excluding skin cancer), high depressive symptoms, and cognitive impairment. Variations in the specific conditions driving generational differences in multimorbidity were also investigated.

Baby Boomers have worse health than Great Depression-era Americans

Ultimately, researchers concluded that more recently born generations of older adults are more likely to live with more chronic conditions, and develop those issues earlier in life.

“For example, when comparing those born between 1948-65 – referred to as Baby Boomers — to those born during the later years of the Great Depression (between 1931 and 1941) at similar ages,” Prof. Haas adds, “Baby Boomers exhibited a greater number of chronic health conditions. Baby Boomers also reported two or more chronic health conditions at younger ages.”

Notably, sociodemographic factors also appeared to affect the risk of multimorbidity among all generations. Examples include race and ethnicity, whether the person was born in the U.S., childhood socioeconomic situations, and childhood health.

The most common conditions seen in adults with multimorbidity (across all generations) were arthritis and hypertension. Additionally, some collected evidence suggests both high depressive symptoms and diabetes contributed to the observed generational multimorbidity risk differences.
Study authors say there are multiple potential explanations for these findings.

“Later-born generations have had access to more advanced modern medicine for a greater period of their lives, therefore we may expect them to enjoy better health than those born to prior generations,” concludes Nicholas Bishop, assistant professor at Texas State University. “Though this is partially true, advanced medical treatments may enable individuals to live with multiple chronic conditions that once would have proven fatal, potentially increasing the likelihood that any one person experiences multimorbidity.”

Prof. Bishops adds that today’s older adults have had “greater exposure” to health risk factors such as obesity. Also, health issues are more likely to be diagnosed in older adults nowadays thanks to improvements in medical technology.

The study is published in The Journals of Gerontology.

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The current study is the result of an international effort in which DZNE collaborated with Helmholtz Zentrum München, Technion Institute in Israel and Radbourg University in the Netherlands. The challenge faced by the researchers was to identify commonalities in the data from different patients. This is because in COVID-19, as in many other diseases, the recovery process can vary greatly from person to person, as evidenced, for example, by how symptoms develop over time and how long hospitalization lasts.

"This makes it difficult to identify generalizable cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying the disease. However, such insights are relevant for understanding the nature of the disease and the body's response—and thus for deciding on the optimal treatment," says bioinformatician and genome researcher Dr. Amit Frishberg, first author of the current publication. "Therefore, to analyze the data, we used a novel method that we recently developed. Our computational approach is designed to discover common patterns in the variety of findings from different patients that may not be obvious."

Blood analyses

COVID-19 can affect multiple organs. However, the disease is known to be significantly shaped by the immune response. "This response is reflected in the blood because that is where the white blood cells circulate," Frishberg says. "These cells are essential components of the immune system. Therefore, our study focused on the blood of patients."

In total, the researchers studied blood samples from 139 adults, their ages ranged from 21 to 86 years, and most were male. The data came from three different cohorts. All patients had received treatment in an intensive care unit (ICU) including ventilation: 105 recovered to the point that were eventually discharged from the ICU, while 34 died. From most of the individuals studied here, there were multiple blood samples, usually collected during a period of approximately three weeks after admission to the ICU. Also, self-reported health status three months after ICU admission (and subsequent discharge) was available for some patients.

A common thread

The analysis revealed that the recovery process is associated with a gradual reduction in the number of so-called neutrophils. They are the most common white blood cells and within the arsenal of the immune system, they act as one of the first defense lines against pathogens. "We found that patients with severe COVID-19 have a high number of mature, that is, fully developed neutrophils in their blood, whose counts decrease during the recovery process. The readings of other white blood cells also change as they return to normal levels, with some of them falling while others rise. However, these changes are less pronounced than in neutrophils," Frishberg says.

"Also, we see that in ICU patients, an increase in mature neutrophils over a prolonged period of time is very likely to result in a fatal outcome. This is possibly because the steady increase is associated with an overshooting and therefore harmful immune response.The number of these cells in the blood could therefore serve as a biomarker and be more significant for predictions of disease development than other biomarkers currently being discussed."

The researchers detected further changes in the course of recovery that affect molecular signaling pathways and regulatory mechanisms of the immune system. "What is remarkable about our findings is that recovery followed the same biological pattern in all patients, despite individual differences in the time course of the disease. There is, so to speak, a common thread. In our data, we have found no evidence that the recovery process after severe COVID-19 may follow different trajectories," Frishberg says.

Aligning transcriptomes

For their analysis, the scientists relied primarily on blood transcriptomes. These data sets reflect gene activity of all blood cells at a given time. Typically, more than 10,000 different genes are registered. "Blood transcriptomes provide a very detailed picture of what's happing immunologically," says Prof. Joachim Schultze, Director of Systems Medicine at DZNE and a professor at the University of Bonn, who was also involved in the current study. "The analysis of this very complex data requires computational techniques. This is where our new approach came in."

The method applied by the researchers relies on a computational algorithm that arranges all transcriptomes from different patients in a shared sequence. "This is based on similarities and on the assumption that all recovered patients ultimately follow the same recovery trajectory. The idea is that each transcriptome is a snapshot of the disease state that evolves into to the next snapshot. Similar to how many individual frames ultimately make up a movie," Schultze says.

From this ranking of individual, experimentally acquired transcriptomes, a model is computed that reflects the continuous course of the recovery process. In this, the biological dynamics over time are characterized by a parameter calculated by the algorithm. "Since the recovery process can vary individually, the same immunological situation may occur at different times in different patients, for example, with respect to symptoms onset.

Chronological time is therefore not an appropriate measure to capture the development of the recovery process on a biological scale," Schultze explains. "Thus, our approach is based on computing a parameter, which is called pseudotime and which is assigned to each patient sample. In this, low pseudotime represents a severe disease state or an initial state of recovery, while high pseudotime indicates an advanced state of recovery."

An approach for better treatment

From this model, the researchers were able to derive their findings on the decrease in neutrophils and changes in regulatory mechanisms, all of which were not evident from the raw data. In addition, having access to data from different cohorts allowed them to validate their findings and check whether the assumptions their model was based on, were in fact consistent with the experimental findings.

"Our study shows how to extract insights from complex data by using algorithms and modeling. We believe that it is a powerful approach with a potential for broad applications. Many diseases are characterized by heterogeneous and patient-specific recovery trajectories. In light of this, our analysis method may also be useful for research on diseases other than COVID-19," Schultze notes.

"The bottom line is that our study presents a novel approach to assess disease recovery status in ICU patients based on blood transcriptomes. In practice, this may contribute to more targeted and thus more effective treatment of COVID-19. Considering this, it might be worthwhile to evaluate to what extent such examinations can be implemented in clinical routine."

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A world-first study from the University of South Australia could make this a reality as new genetic research shows a direct link between dementia and a lack of vitamin D.

Investigating the association between vitamin D, neuroimaging features, and the risk of dementia and stroke, the study found:

•  low levels of vitamin D were associated with lower brain volumes and an increased risk of dementia and stroke

•  genetic analyses supported a causal effect of vitamin D deficiency and dementia.

•  in some populations as much as 17% of dementia cases might be prevented by increasing everyone to normal levels of vitamin D (50 nmol/L).

Dementia is a chronic or progressive syndrome that leads to deterioration in cognitive function. About 487,500 Australians live with dementia and it is the country's second leading cause of death. Globally, more than 55 million people have dementia with 10 million new cases diagnosed every year.

Published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, the genetic study analyzed data from 294,514 participants from the U.K. Biobank, examining the impact of low levels of vitamin D (25 nmol/L) and the risk of dementia and stroke. Nonlinear Mendelian randomization (MR)—a method of using measured variation in genes to examine the causal effect of a modifiable exposure on disease—were used to test for underlying causality for neuroimaging outcomes, dementia, and stroke.

Senior investigator and Director of UniSA's Australian Center for Precision Health, Professor Elina Hyppönen, says the findings are important for the prevention of dementia and appreciating the need to abolish vitamin D deficiency.

"Vitamin D is a hormone precursor that is increasingly recognized for widespread effects, including on brain health, but until now it has been very difficult to examine what would happen if we were able to prevent vitamin D deficiency," Prof Hyppönen says.

"Our study is the first to examine the effect of very low levels of vitamin D on the risks of dementia and stroke, using robust genetic analyses among a large population.

"In some contexts, where vitamin D deficiency is relatively common, our findings have important implications for dementia risks. Indeed, in this U.K. population we observed that up to 17% of dementia cases might have been avoided by boosting vitamin D levels to be within a normal range."

The findings are incredibly significant given the high prevalence of dementia around the world.

"Dementia is a progressive and debilitating disease that can devastate individuals and families alike," Prof Hyppönen says. "If we're able to change this reality through ensuring that none of us is severely vitamin D deficient, it would also have further benefits and we could change the health and well-being for thousands."

"Most of us are likely to be ok, but for anyone who for whatever reason may not receive enough vitamin D from the sun, modifications to diet may not be enough, and supplementation may well be needed."

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Lead researcher and Ph.D. candidate at La Trobe University, Maike Foraita, said despite expressing it in different ways, dogs regulate their behavior in a similar way to young children.

"A pet dog learns to control its impulses much like a child does; it inhibits its urge to chew the furniture or bark at visitors, it can remember routines and do what its owner says," Foraita said.

"Humans do this too—we exhibit delay inhibition and motor inhibition when we wait to be handed a piece of cake rather than grabbing the whole cake with our hands."

Foraita said dogs are likely to have developed these human-like cognitive structures over tens of thousands of years living in domestic settings.
"Living with humans over the last 30,000 years, dogs have depended on behavior regulation suited to the human environment for their own survival," Foraita said.

"A dog that lashed out at its owners or stole food from their plates would not have been welcome, so, over time, they've developed cognitive functions that mirror that of humans to shore up their food and care."

Co-author, Dr. Tiffani Howell at La Trobe University, said the study highlights one of the reasons dogs have such a special relationship with humans.
"There are other animals that have similar levels of cognition to dogs, but they do not regulate their behavior in ways that best suit living with humans," Dr. Howell said.

As part of the study, focus groups were held with people who work with dogs professionally, including staff from Seeing Eye Dogs—Vision Australia, to identify behaviors that might be relevant to executive function. The research team then surveyed 741 dog owners, asking them to rate their dogs on these behaviors. The result was the Dog Executive Function Scale (DEFS), which found six components of executive functioning in dogs: behavioral flexibility, attention towards owner, motor inhibition, instruction following, delay inhibition and working memory.

Foraita said working dogs, including those on farms and assistance dogs, have the most highly developed executive function.

"Seeing Eye Dogs, for example, have to be excellent at regulating their behavior—their ability to follow instruction and inhibit urges to chase cats or play with other dogs while they're working shows highly developed executive function," Foraita said.

The study also found that dogs from breeders had higher levels of executive function than those from shelters, and that training is the key factor in the development of executive function—meaning that with the right interventions most dogs will be able to exhibit these important markers of behavior regulation.

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He invested a six-figure sum in what turned out to be a fraudulent company.

The man, who wants to remain anonymous, is warning others not to fall for the scam.

"It started just over a year ago. I noticed an ad that was endorsed by two well-known celebrities showing you could earn more money than you could earn in a bank," he said.

"I started with £250. I didn't know anything about how cryptocurrency worked, I knew it existed but I didn't know the ins and outs."

That initial investment gave a good return and the company had its own website and even assigned a personal client manager, with all dealings done over the phone, not online.

"Nothing appeared to be strange, there were no red flags flying in my mind," he said.

"Every question I asked I got answers to, so there was nothing to alert me that I was going down a very rocky road.

"It's ironic that from the very start I kept a very detailed spreadsheet of all the transactions and the tradings. I wasn't frightened at that stage. I was using money but if I lost it I could survive."

'They enticed you in'

After a few months of continued investment, by this stage about £5,000, he was invited to join the company's "retirement section".

"They were quoting unbelievable figures and when I asked about tax they said cryptocurrency is unregulated and I was thinking 'I'm not sure', but they enticed you in," he said.

"Then the gentleman - or maybe gentleman isn't the right word in this case - the man who was my client manager he went off, supposedly with Covid, and another man was assigned to me."

The man said he had access to an account and a trading platform he could log in to and see his investments and trading.

"When I checked the cryptocurrency market websites, that had nothing to do with this company, you could see where the different types of cryptocurrency were trading and that confirmed what was happening on my account," he said.

By now he had invested a six-figure sum.

He is not prepared to say exactly how much, but it was all of his savings and his pension lump sum.

The company had asked him for extra money as an insurance on his investment, but it was not supposed to be traded and he was told he could get it back at any time.

On 15 February he logged on to his account and the extra money had been traded without his permission.

It was only then he realised that the whole set-up was a scam.

'I wanted to crawl into a hole'

"Luckily there was no borrowing or selling anything or dealing with the house. It was all personal savings and pension, " he said.

"You would have gone to bed at night before all of this and had plans, thoughts and dreams about what you want to do, but this has killed all of that."

Throughout the interview with BBC News NI, the man was visibly upset, crying and it was clear the scam had a detrimental affect on him.

"When I found out in February that it was all gone, I just wanted to crawl into a hole," he said.

"Home-wise, it has destroyed home life because I was dealing with all this by myself, my wife didn't know what was happening."

He contacted the company to complain and they referred him to a client support group, which was also part of this sophisticated and detailed scam.

He also started to contact everyone, from the police to the Financial Conduct Authority to Trading Standards.

Damien Doherty, chief inspector of the Northern Ireland Trading Standards Service, said scams such as this were not uncommon.

"We're very well aware of how these scams operate. They're very slick," he said.

"As we've heard in this case they have account managers, they have complaint managers, they have escalation procedures.

"Everything about it would make you believe you're dealing with a legitimate company.

"The sums of money involved and the devastation that this has caused to this man's life and his family is heartbreaking .

amien Doherty from Trading Standards says scams are often sophisticated

"It's a real emerging trend and the sums of money huge and they really have the potential to ruin people's lives and in this case we're trying to raise awareness and let people know that this is a scam that is prominent, that anyone could fall for it."

Retirement plans for the victim of this scam have had to be shelved and despite the obvious toll it has taken, he really wants to warn others not to fall prey to this scam.

"You're sleeping, waking and thinking about it. It has taken over my whole life," he said.

"Trying to get a resolution, to get even some of the money back would be the icing on the cake, but it has been completely devastating.

"You can't think about plans because you've nothing to plan with. It has basically put a stop on my life."

For more information on scams and how to avoid them, visit https://www.nidirect.gov.uk/articles/scams

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BA.4, BA.5 rise in Europe; officials sound alarm of COVID-19 surge to come

Most drivers have been here

Toyota to offer a lithium-ion home battery system your car can charge

Years after finding it, archeologists enter chamber under a Peruvian temple

The mission's third data set, which will be released to eagerly waiting astronomers around the world at 1000 GMT, "revolutionises our understanding of the galaxy," the European Space Agency (ESA) said.

"It's the Swiss Army knife of astrophysics -- there is not a single astronomer who does not use its data, directly or indirectly," said Francois Mignard, a member of the Gaia team.

Some of the map's new insights are close to home, such as a catalogue of more than 156,000 asteroids in our Solar System "whose orbits the instrument has calculated with incomparable precision," Mignard said.

But Gaia also sees beyond the Milky Way, spotting 2.9 million other galaxies as well as 1.9 million quasars -- the stunningly bright hearts of galaxies powered by supermassive black holes.

The Gaia spacecraft is nestled in a strategically positioned orbit 1.5 million kilometres (937,000 miles) from Earth, where it has been watching the skies since it was launched by the ESA in 2013.

- 'Beautiful melting pot of stars' -

"Gaia scans the sky and picks up everything it sees," said astronomer Misha Haywood of the Paris Observatory.

But it can still only detect around one percent of the stars in the Milky Way, which is about 100,000 light years across.

The probe is equipped with two telescopes as well as a billion-pixel camera, which captures images sharp enough to gauge the diameter of a human hair at a distance of 1,000 kilometres (620 miles).

It also has a range of other instruments that allow it to not just map the stars, but measure their movements, chemical compositions and ages.

"It provides a global observation of the positions of anything that moves in the sky, for the first time," Haywood said, adding that before Gaia "we had a really restricted view of the galaxy".

It also reveals the huge array of differences between stars.

"Our galaxy is a beautiful melting pot of stars," said Gaia member Alejandra Recio-Blanco.

"This diversity is extremely important, because it tells us the story of our galaxy's formation," he said.

"It also clearly shows that our Sun, and we, all belong to an ever-changing system, formed thanks to the assembly of stars and gas of different origins."

Surprise starquakes

The observation of "starquakes", massive vibrations that change the shape of the distant stars, was "one of the most surprising discoveries coming out of the new data", the ESA said.

Gaia was not built to observe starquakes but still detected the strange phenomenon on thousands of stars, including some that should not have any -- at least according to our current understanding of the universe.

"Gaia is opening a gold mine for 'asteroseismology' of massive stars," said Gaia member Conny Aerts.

Around 50 scientific papers were published alongside the new data, with many more expected in the coming years. Gaia's observations have fuelled thousands of studies since its first dataset was released in 2016.

The second dataset in 2018 allowed astronomers to show that the Milky Way merged with another galaxy in a violent collision around 10 billion years ago.
The torrent of raw data is combed through by a team of 450 European scientists and software engineers using six supercomputers as well as "human-driven algorithms" as part of the Data Processing and Analysis Consortium, Mignard said.

"Without this processing group, there is no mission," he added, because every day Gaia produces 700 million star positions and 150 million photometric measurements.

It took the team five years to deliver the latest data, which was observed from 2014 to 2017.

"We can't wait for the astronomy community to dive into our new data to find out even more about our galaxy and its surroundings than we could've imagined," ESA's Gaia project scientist Timo Prusti said.

The final data set will be released in 2030, after Gaia finishes its mission surveying the skies in 2025.

© 2022 AFP

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Viewed from space, Earth may have looked like a giant snowball during the global ice ages of the Cryogenian period. In the geosciences, this hypothesis that the oceans were completely frozen over has become established as the Snowball Earth theory. But it's still not clear how sponges, which are found in the fossil record, were able to survive in the very cold Snowball Earth climate. To explain that, some scientists have proposed the alternative theory of an ice-free equatorial waterbelt.

Life in spite of oceans that were probably icebound

Working with colleagues from the University of Vienna, researchers at KIT used global climate models and an idealized energy balance model to investigate Cryogenian climatic conditions. They expected to find a waterbelt in their simulation scenarios and wanted to investigate the conditions under which it would remain stable. "We were surprised to find that this state wasn't stable in the models," says Christoph Braun from KIT's Institute of Meteorology and Climate Research—Department Troposphere Research (IMK-TRO). This means life during the Cryogenian was probably subject to the harsh evolutionary conditions of globally icebound oceans.

The study resulted in new insights into the role played by clouds. "Clouds reflect radiation, and that's important for the stability of a waterbelt. This strong influence was unknown until now," says Braun, a Ph.D. student and lead author of the study. With the cloud reflectivity mechanism proposed in the paper, the results of previous studies could be reinterpreted and possibly combined to yield a more coherent picture.

Clouds complicate our view of past climate

"With the global climate models and an idealized climate budget model, we can show the effects of cloud reflectivity and explain the underlying processes," says Braun. "But that doesn't enable us to assess how reflective clouds were in the Cryogenian, because there's considerable uncertainty about the simulation of clouds in global climate models."

The efficiency with which water droplets are converted into ice is crucial to reflectivity and depends in part on the type and amount of aerosols that can act as ice nuclei. These processes play out on scales of millimeters, while the computational grids used in the models thus far have scales on the order of more than 100 kilometers. The results show that clouds are crucial to the prediction of climate changes and to our understanding of the dynamics of glaciation over geological time. "Clouds don't just make it harder for us to see into the future, but also to look back into the past," says Braun.

Assessing habitability of planets outside the solar system

In the future, the researchers' findings could be useful in assessing whether planets outside our solar system are habitable. "This could be of interest when future observations with the James Webb Space Telescope make it possible to glimpse clouds in the atmospheres of extrasolar planets," says Braun. The KIT researchers performed their simulations with the Mistral supercomputer at the German Climate Computing Centre in Hamburg. "In our next step, we have begun to simulate clouds under Cryogenian climatic conditions using finer computational grids so that we can investigate whether and how the uncertainties involving the clouds can be reduced," says Braun.

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Many technologies that make use of quantum effects are based on exactly equal photons. Producing such photons, however, is extremely difficult. Not only do they need to have precisely the same wavelength (color), but their shape and polarization also have to match.

A team of researchers led by Richard Warburton at the University of Basel, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Bochum, has now succeeded in creating identical photons originating from different and widely-separated sources.

Single photons from quantum dots

In their experiments, the physicists used so-called quantum dots, structures in semiconductors only a few nanometers in size. In the quantum dots, electrons are trapped such that they can only take on very specific energy levels. Light is emitted on making a transition from one level to another. With the help of a laser pulse that triggers such a transition, single photons can thus be created at the push of a button.

"In recent years, other researchers have already created identical photons with different quantum dots," explains Lian Zhai, a postdoctoral researcher and first author of the study that was recently published in Nature Nanotechnology. "To do so, however, from a huge number of photons they had to pick and choose those that were most similar using optical filters." In that way, only very few usable photons remained.

Warburton and his collaborators chose a different, more ambitious approach. First, the specialists in Bochum produced extremely pure gallium arsenide from which the quantum dots were made. The natural variations between different quantum dots could thus be kept to a minimum. The physicists in Basel then used electrodes to expose two quantum dots to precisely tuned electric fields. Those fields modified the energy levels of the quantum dots, and they were adjusted in such a way that the photons emitted by the quantum dots had precisely the same wavelength.

93% identical

To demonstrate that the photons were actually indistinguishable, the researchers sent them onto a half-silvered mirror. They observed that, almost every time, the light particles either passed through the mirror as a pair or else were reflected as a pair. From that observation they could conclude that the photons were 93% identical. In other words, the photons formed twins even though they were "born" completely independently of one another.

Moreover, the researchers were able to realize an important building block of quantum computers, a so-called controlled NOT gate (or CNOT gate). Such gates can be used to implement quantum algorithms that can solve certain problems much faster than classical computers.

"Right now our yield of identical photons is still around one percent," Ph.D. student Gian Nguyen concedes. Together with his colleague Clemens Spindler he was involved in running the experiment. "We already have a rather good idea, however, how to increase that yield in the future." That would make the twin-photon method ready for potential applications in different quantum technologies.

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The unit took a heavy knock also from news that cryptocurrency lending platform Celsius Network paused withdrawals, citing volatile conditions.

World stock markets have plunged since Friday when data showed US inflation at a fresh four-decade high, increasing recession fears and sending investors running for safer assets like the dollar.

"It is not very surprising to see such a strong downturn as we have noticed an increased correlation over the last few years between traditional stocks, which have also tanked recently, and the cryptocurrency market," noted XTB chief market analyst Walid Koudmani.

The world's most popular cryptocurrency dived about 10 percent to hit $23,794 in morning London deals, striking a level last seen in December 2020.
The virtual unit has collapsed by 65 percent in value since striking a record peak $68,991.85 in November.

Investors on Monday sought safety with the US central bank seen likely to aggressively ramp up borrowing costs further to combat runaway inflation.
Bitcoin's decline accelerated after the news from Celsius Network.

"Today we are announcing that Celsius is pausing all withdrawals, swap, and transfers between accounts," the platform said in a statement.
Celsius made the move "due to extreme market conditions", it added.

The total value of customer deposits had already shrunk by more than half to under $12 billion in May compared with the end of last year.

$1 trillion market

Koudmani said further falls for bitcoin "may trigger a cascading effect of liquidations of hedging positions" taken against the cryptocurrency.

The global crypto market, comprising other virtual currencies which are tanking such as Ethereum, is worth about $1 trillion, according to crypto data aggregator CoinGecko.

That is down from a level of more than $3 trillion at its peak seven months ago, when the market rode a wave of massive investor demand amid growing acceptance from large financial institutions.

In a sign of the growing importance of cryptocurrencies, two countries, El Salvador and the Central African Republic, have taken the gamble of adopting bitcoin as legal tender—despite strong criticism from international financial institutions.

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The $118 million settlement covers about 15,500 female employees who have worked for the company in California since September 2013, the law firms Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein LLP and Altshuler Berzon LLP said in a statement released Friday night.

The company also agreed for a third party to analyze its hiring and compensation practices as part of the settlement.

In a statement to AFP, Google said that "while we strongly believe in the equity of our policies and practices, after nearly five years of litigation, both sides agreed that resolution of the matter, without any admission or findings, was in the best interest of everyone, and we're very pleased to reach this agreement."

In 2017, several former Google employees sued the company in a San Francisco court, accusing it of paying women less than men for equivalent positions and assigning women lower positions than men with similar experiences because they had previously earned smaller salaries.

According to a copy of the agreement released by the law firms, "Google denies all of the allegations in the lawsuit and maintains that it has fully complied with all applicable laws, rules and regulations at all times."

A judge must still approve the agreement, the two law firms for the plaintiffs said.Google previously agreed in 2021 to pay $3.8 million to the US Department of Labor over accusations it had discriminated against women and Asians.

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The MBTA, which services Boston and the surrounding area, is launching a pilot program this summer in which urine detection sensors will be placed in four downtown elevators. The sensors alert transit ambassadors, who can dispatch a cleaning crew, the Boston Herald reported.

The sensors on the ceiling of an elevator have an attached fan, which allows them to suck in air and "basically smell what is present," said Meghan Collins, a program/projects manager for MBTA.

The pilot kicks off in August. Data will be collected for several months before the agency makes a decision about whether to implement the program by year's end, the newspaper said.

It's not a new concept.

Nearly a decade ago, the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority launched a pilot program that, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, triggered strobe lights, alarms and alerts to MARTA police when urine was detected in an elevator. The elevators were then inoperable until a cleaning. That program, deemed a success, was eventually expanded.

The MBTA hopes the program helps alleviate problems: Public urination is not only unsanitary but can also damage elevators, Collins said.

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The Celsius move triggered a slide across cryptocurrencies, with their value dropping below $1 trillion on Monday for the first time since January last year, dragged down by 11% fall in the largest token bitcoin .

After Celsius's announcement, Bitcoin touched an 18-month low of $23,476. No.2 token ether dropped as much as 16% to $1,177, its lowest since January 2021.

Crypto markets have dived in the past few weeks as rising interest rates and surging inflation hurt riskier assets across financial markets. The collapse in May of the terraUSD and luna tokens also shook the industry.

"It's still an uncomfortable moment, and there's some contagion risk around crypto more broadly," said Joseph Edwards, head of financial strategy at fund management firm Solrise Finance.

Celsius offers interest-bearing products to customers who deposit cryptocurrencies at its platform, and then lends out cryptocurrencies to earn a return.

In a blog post, the company said it had frozen withdrawals, as well as transfers between accounts, "to stabilise liquidity and operations while we take steps to preserve and protect assets."

"We are taking this action today to put Celsius in a better position to honour, over time, its withdrawal obligations," the New Jersey-based company said.

'GREY AREA'

The surge of interest in crypto lending led to concerns from regulators, especially in the United States, who are worried about investor protections and systemic risks from unregulated lending products.

Celsius and crypto firms that offer services similar to banks are in a "grey area" of regulations, said Matthew Nyman at CMS law firm. "They’re not subject to any clear regulation that requires disclosure" over their assets.

Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky and Celsius did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment outside U.S. business hours.

Celsius raised $750 million in funding late in November from investors, including Canada's second-largest pension fund Caisse de Dépôt et Placement du Québec. Celsius was valued at the time at $3.25 billion.

As of May 17, Celsius had $11.8 billion in assets, its website said, down by more than half from October, and had processed a total of $8.2 billion worth of loans.

Mashinsky, the CEO, was quoted in October last year saying Celsius had more than $25 billion in assets.

The company's website, which urges customers to "Earn high. Borrow low," said it offers interest rates of up to 18.6%.

Rival crypto lender Nexo said on Monday it had offered to buy Celsius' outstanding assets.

"We reached out to Celsius Sunday morning to discuss the acquisition of its collateralised loan portfolio. So far, Celsius has chosen not to engage," said Nexo co-founder Antoni Trenchev.

Celsius did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Nexo's offer.

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A rocket belonging to the up-and-coming Astra space company failed to deliver two of NASA’s weather-tracking satellites to space after its second stage engine shut down prematurely. Both satellites were lost as a result of the failure.

Astra’s Launch Vehicle 0010 (LV0010) successfully took off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 1:43PM ET, but suffered an upper stage failure about 10 minutes into its flight. The launch was part of NASA’s mission to send six TROPICS satellites into space — these small, foot-long CubeSats are supposed to help NASA keep better track of developing tropical storms. CubeSats are low-cost satellites frequently built by researchers at colleges and universities.

“The upper stage shut down early and we did not deliver the payloads to orbit,” Astra said in a statement on Twitter. “We have shared our regrets with @NASA and the payload team.” Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for NASA’s science division, acknowledged the unsuccessful launch in a thread on Twitter, but remained optimistic, noting it still “offered a great opportunity for new science and launch capabilities.”

It’s unclear if or when NASA plans on launching the remaining TROPICS satellites with Astra, or if the two that have been lost will be replaced. NASA didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment.

Astra first partnered with NASA in February to bring a set of CubeSats to space, marking its first launch out of Cape Canaveral. However, Astra lost the payload after the rocket appeared to spin out of control after launch.

So far, Astra has only had two successful orbital launches out of seven total attempts — the company reached orbit for the first time last November and successfully deployed a customer’s satellites into orbit in March. A range of issues has impacted Astra’s other launches, ranging from problems with its guidance system to engine failure.

Astra’s failed launch resulted in the loss of two NASA weather satellites

In a new study published in the journal eLife, researchers at the University of California, Irvine reveal for the first time that aspirin changes the way colorectal cancer cell populations evolve over time, making them less able to survive and proliferate.

"We asked what aspirin does to the Darwinian evolution of cells," said co-author Dominik Wodarz, professor of population health and disease prevention at the UCI Program in Public Health. "Cancer arises because cells evolve from a healthy state toward a pathogenic state where the cells divide without stopping. This happens when cells acquire a number of mutations, and these mutations are selected for. We found that aspirin affects these evolutionary processes and slows them down."

The team found that aspirin alters the birth and death rates of colorectal cancer cells. Specifically, aspirin reduces the rate of tumor cell division and increases the rate of cell death.

The researchers, including the paper's lead author Natalia Komarova, professor of mathematics, started the work suspecting that aspirin may have a role to play in colorectal cancer's evolution, wherein the forces of natural selection—or the processes that determine which individuals in a population will survive and reproduce and which will not—govern whether or not cancer cells proliferate to the point where they become harmful or lethal.

"We thought that a slowed development of cancer due to aspirin must somehow arise from a slowed evolution of the cells toward malignancy," said Komarova. "What surprised us was that this mechanism could explain the level of protection seen in the human population quite well. In other words, the predicted magnitude was consistent with the protective effect seen in the human population, in epidemiological studies."

A 2011 clinical trial revealed that people who took 600 milligrams of aspirin each day for two years had a 63% reduction in colorectal cancer occurrence in patients suffering from Lynch syndrome—an inherited condition that increases one's risk of developing certain types of cancer such as colorectal cancer. Many other studies corroborate those findings, but none until now has investigated a possible evolutionary explanation for why this happens.

"The novel part is really saying that aspirin changes the evolutionary outcome of carcinogenesis," Wodarz said. "This work is an example showing that mathematical approaches can be very useful to understand complex phenomena in cancer biology; such insights would not be possible to obtain by experimentation alone. It requires the collaboration of empirical biological work and mathematics."

Now, Komarova and the rest of the team want to find out whether aspirin has similar effects on cancers afflicting other organs in the body. "If not," she asked, "in which organs is aspirin protective, and how could we explain these differences in the ability to protect against cancer?"

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But these are not ordinary beekeepers. Some of them are patients from the nearby psychiatric hospital, participating in a two-decade project combining therapy with professional fulfillment.

The social cooperative in Leros, housed in a former barracks known as the Caserma estate, is the first of its kind in Greece, explains project manager Andreas Georgiou.

The cooperative "aims to socially and professionally integrate persons with psychosocial problems", he tells AFP.

"Through the program... they acquire self-respect and self-esteem," he says.

On the fields of the estate, patients care for the bees and cultivate their high-quality diet—lavender, oregano and other aromatic herbs.

"This is a bee's paradise," says Georgiou, an occupational therapist and president of the Dodecanese social cooperative (KOISPE), which runs the estate.

In Lepida, to the south of the port, the employees package and label the honey, and dry the herbs in dedicated rooms inside the psychiatric hospital.

The estate produce is then sold in various locations on the island.

"I love what I do here, it's a real relief for the soul," says Artemis, a patient in his 60s as he seals honey jars.

"We try to be as traditional and pure here as possible," he adds, briefly switching into salesman mode.

The Leros cooperative employs 13 salaried workers, supervised by specialist beekeepers, in addition to a team of nurses and occupational therapists from the island's psychiatric hospital.

Leros is an island with a rich history going back to antiquity, and the site of a major World War II battle that later inspired war epic "The Guns of Navarone".

Among other islands of the Dodecanese group, it was occupied by Italy for more than 30 years, giving rise to fascist-era rationalist architecture that is unique to the area.

But the island's modern image is closely associated with the local mental asylum, which was the scene of a major scandal involving the serious neglect of patients in the early 1990s.

'Immense' therapeutic gain

Georgiou says it was precisely the shock of the scandal that prompted the reforms which gave rise to the cooperative.

"The reforms launched more than 20 years ago radically changed the way patients are treated, with a view to de-institutionalizing asylums," adds Giannis Loukas, a former director of the Leros psychiatric center.

The therapeutic gain for patients is "immense", he notes.

They can also enjoy the rights of employees instead of working illegally, as was the case for a long time in Leros and elsewhere in Greece, he adds.

While some patients live in the asylum, a large number are allowed to live in flats on the island for better integration into society, Loukas adds.

Georgiou notes that a handful of people have been able to make a full rehabilitation through the cooperative. One is working as an assistant plumber in Leros, while another is working in a hotel in Rhodes, he said.

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But new research suggests that as with all things, too much good fish could also be a bad thing.

A large, long-term study of almost 500,000 people, found people who eat more fish than the equivalent of half a can of tuna a day were 22 percent more likely to contract a malignant melanoma.

"Melanoma is the fifth most common cancer in the [US] and the risk of developing melanoma over a lifetime is one in 38 for White people, one in 1,000 for Black people, and one in 167 for Hispanic people," explains Brown University dermatologist Eunyoung Cho.

It's important to note that this doesn't at all mean we should avoid eating fish. This study shows a trend, not an underlying cause, which means researchers have not directly demonstrated that eating more fish increases your risk of skin cancer. Also, even if there does prove to be a direct link, the benefits of eating fish would still likely outweigh total avoidance.

However, such a strong link within a big sample size, that makes sense in the wider context of our current environment, does beg for further investigation.

"Although the results are from a cohort study, which means they are observational and hence do not imply causation, they cannot be ignored," says University of Newcastle dietitian Clare Collins, who was not involved in the study. "The role of contaminants that may be present in some fish needs to be considered."

It is well established that toxins in our environment, including those that we know directly cause cancer like heavy metals, build up through the food chain.

For example, Mercury emitted through industrial processes like burning coal finds its way into our waterways where microbes break it down into methylmercury.

This is taken up by plankton and ends up accumulating in the tissues of the shrimp that eat those plankton, then the fish that eat the shrimp, and so on, getting more concentrated the higher up the food chain it goes. This is known as biomagnification.

"We speculate that our findings could possibly be attributed to contaminants in fish, such as polychlorinated biphenyls, dioxins, arsenic, and mercury," says Cho.

"Previous research has found that higher fish intake is associated with higher levels of these contaminants within the body and has identified associations between these contaminants and a higher risk of skin cancer." 

The researchers, led by Brown University epidemiologist Yufei Li, used data from the USA NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study, from participants recruited between 1995 and 1996. They collated this with the National Death Index and state cancer registries and found the risk of melanoma was 22 percent higher in those who ate around 43 grams of fish a day compared to those who ate the median amount (around 3 grams per day).

This link was linear, meaning the amount of tuna consumed increased the cancer incidence, and it was consistent across several demographic and lifestyle factors after also considering other risks like mole count, hair color, history of severe sunburn, and sun-related behaviors.

The intake of fish was only calculated at the start of the study though, so this may have changed over the participants' lifetime though.

These findings in no way reduce other well-established causes of skin cancer.

"It is critical that we don't confuse or cloud the prevention message," CEO of Melanoma Institute Australia Matthew Browne cautioned in a comment about the study. "The scientific evidence is clear – sun exposure is the single biggest risk factor for developing melanoma."

But as levels of these contaminants increase thanks to intensifying land use and even climate change (mercury concentrations in some waterways has been increasing as rainfall increases) this potential cause of skin cancer shouldn't be neglected. Li and colleagues call for further investigation.

This study was published in Cancer Causes & Control.

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