•  After taking the US electric vehicle market by storm, Tesla set its sights on tackling the competitive Chinese EV market – the world’s largest, driven by government support and incentives.

•  As of the first four months of 2022, Tesla sold the third-most electric vehicles in China and was the only foreign company to place models on the list of the country’s top 10 EV vehicles sold.

•  Regardless of the recent market and pandemic turmoil – not to mention CEO Elon Musk’s personal antics – Tesla is likely to continue expanding its reach in the Chinese EV market over the long term.

HONOLULU – It has not been a great spring for Tesla. As the American electric vehicle manufacturer’s stock led the recent market nosedive and its provocative CEO Elon Musk obsessed over his bid to buy Twitter, his beefs with the Biden administration and an allegation of misconduct by a private jet flight attendant, Tesla’s factory in Shanghai struggled to maintain production amid the city’s strict Covid lockdowns and cooling demand from a wary Chinese public.

The tumble has been a sharp reversal, if likely only a temporary one, of the company’s fortunes in China. After taking the US electric vehicle market by storm, the company had set its sights on tackling the competitive Chinese EV market, with impressive results.

Just last year, the official Global Times newspaper reported that China had become Tesla’s fastest-growing market. Sales in China were largely credited with helping the company turn its first overall profit in 2020.

“Not satisfied with dominating the US market, the company turned to China to expand its vehicle sales,” scholar Eric Harwit writes in a recent East-West Center AsiaPacific Issues paper, “Tesla Goes to China.” The paper explores Tesla’s expansion into the Chinese market over the last eight years and the various successes and struggles it has faced adapting to China’s playbook.

“The interest in China came naturally, because China’s overall vehicle market has been larger than that of the United States since 2008,” Harwit writes. China now also boasts the world’s largest EV market, driven by government financial support and consumer incentives. Notably, China’s government is aiming to have EVs make up 40 percent of all vehicle sales by 2030.

Government incentives

Since 2009, the Chinese government has offered incentives for manufacturers and consumers of electric vehicles, creating an attractive marketplace for EV producers.

One such subsidy, according to Harwit, provided taxi fleets and local government agencies with up to $8,800 for each hybrid or EV purchased, expanding to include consumers in 2010. The following year, the government made pure-electric, fuel-cell and plug-in hybrid vehicles exempt from its annual vehicle tax.

Charging stations were also set up by the state electric utility across major cities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin. By 2019, there were 1.2 million charging stations in place, with plans to build 600,000 more.

As of 2021, Harwit writes, pure-electric vehicles with a minimum driving range of 300 kilometers received a subsidy of up to $3,500, while a plug-in hybrid could receive a subsidy of about $1,300. License-plate fees, set up by China to limit the number of cars on already-congested roads, were also waived for plug-ins. And in 2015, EV buyers in Beijing were given exemptions from rules that restrict driving on city roads during rush hours.

Photo: Electrek

Chinese manufacturers given upper hand

Most of China’s leading domestic EV manufacturers are either state-owned enterprises or private companies, though the top-selling electric car– the $4,500 Wuling Hongguang Mini EV– is a joint venture between a state-owned and foreign firm. This deviates slightly from China’s conventional gas-powered car market, which has long been dominated by private joint ventures with foreign car companies such as

Volkswagen, General Motors, and Toyota.

According to data cited by Harwit, Tesla, which does not operate as a joint venture, saw its Model 3 rank as the second-best-selling electric vehicle in China in April 2021 and was the only foreign company to make the list of the country’s top 15 EV vehicles sold at the time.

“Chinese government rules mandate that new foreign EV factories need a minimum production capacity of 100,000 electric passenger cars or 5,000 electric commercial vehicles,” Harwit notes, “thereby presenting a high investment hurdle for new foreign entrants.”

Gaining trust

Tesla began selling vehicles in China in 2014 but faced several hurdles before hitting its stride. “Through 2015, vehicle delivery delays and negative perception of charging options led to poor sales,” Harwit explains. A 25 percent tariff on imported vehicles also added to the cost of the car, making it less affordable than locally sourced options. (As of this past March, the cheapest Tesla model sold for about $49,900 in China.)

Soon, Tesla installed thousands of EV chargers to address concerns. By 2016, the company reported that it had delivered 11,000 vehicles and saw over $1 billion in revenue in China – accounting for more than 15 percent of Tesla’s total annual revenue.

The following year, the car manufacturer announced that it would build a factory in Shanghai in order to increase its sales volume, ultimately establishing a facility in Shanghai’s Free Trade Zone in order to avoid finding a joint-venture partner and to better protect its intellectual property.

In 2017, Tesla announced that it had sold a 5% stake in the company to Chinese Internet giant Tencent Holdings for $1.8 billion, a move that symbolized its ongoing connection to the Chinese market. It was able to open its first “gigafactory” in Shanghai in 2019 to make batteries and cars, and by 2020 it produced 140,000 Model 3 vehicles there.

In 2021, it doubled its factory size to produce Model Y cars, leading to record sales for Tesla Shanghai and more cost-competitive vehicles. And by the end of the year, Tesla’s production in China represented roughly half of its 936,000 vehicles delivered globally.

In addition, the company began producing charging stations at its dedicated Supercharger factory in Shanghai, adding about 7,000 Supercharger stalls in China by last August. It also completed its “Silk Road” Supercharger route in June, making long-distance travel from east to west in China more accessible.

Tesla China supercharger. Photo: Teslrati

Continued growth likely

Notwithstanding all the recent economic and pandemic turmoil – not to mention Musk’s personal antics – Tesla is likely to continue expanding its reach in the Chinese EV market over the long term.

However, it may soon face another kind of challenge, Harwit writes: The Chinese government has said that it would cut subsidies on new energy vehicles by 30 percent this year, before eliminating them completely at the end of the year.

Still, provincial and municipal governments have continued to subsidize up to 30 percent of charging station installation costs.

“In addition to the prestige Chinese consumers receive by purchasing the American vehicle,” Harwit concludes, “the manufacturing capacity and supporting infrastructure Tesla has created in China should put it in good stead with both the nation’s citizenry and the Chinese government.

Republished with the permission of the East-West Center. Read the original here.

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The study, led by neuroscientist Ju-Hyun Lee of New York University (NYU) Langone, challenges the long-standing idea that the build-up of a protein called amyloid-beta between neurons is a crucial first step in Alzheimer's disease, the most common form of dementia.

Instead, it suggests that damage to neurons may take root inside cells well before amyloid plaques fully form and clump together in the brain, a finding which could provide new therapeutic possibilities.

"Our results for the first time sources neuronal damage observed in Alzheimer's disease to problems inside brain cells' lysosomes where amyloid-beta first appears," says Lee.

Although one animal study with a trio of human samples is not going to overthrow existing theories about what happens to the brain in Alzheimer's disease, the research is part of a growing body of evidence that suggests amyloid plaques are actually latecomers to the disease rather than an early trigger.

"Previously, the working hypothesis mostly attributed the damage observed in Alzheimer's disease to what came after amyloid build-up outside of brain cells, not before and from within neurons," says Lee, taking aim at the amyloid cascade hypothesis that has gripped Alzheimer's research for three decades.

That hypothesis, which has never been universally accepted and is now on trial so to speak, posits that knotted clumps of a protein called amyloid are the root cause of Alzheimer's disease. The build-up of these amyloid plaques between brain cells is thought to damage neurons, leading to memory loss and cognitive decline.

But not everyone agrees because intracellular tangles of another protein called tau are the other prime suspects in Alzheimer's disease; and the swollen, bulging arms of usually spindly neurons are also part of the picture.

In this new study, researchers traced the cellular dysfunction observed in mice bred to develop Alzheimer's disease to the brain cells' lysosomes, small sacs filled with acidic enzymes that break down and recycle waste in cells.

Imaging studies showed that as the animals' brain cells became diseased, lysosomes lost their usual acidity, became enlarged, and then fused with other waste-carrying vacuoles already swelling with fragments of amyloid proteins and other debris.

The researchers took this as a sign that the neurons' garbage disposal systems were failing, putting the cells under extreme stress.

In the most heavily damaged neurons destined for cell death, these vacuoles amassed into "large membrane blebs" forming "flower-like" rosettes around the cell nucleus. Researchers also spied almost-fully formed amyloid plaques inside some damaged neurons.

Take a look at the image below.

Flower-like formations in neurons of Alzheimer's disease mouse. (Lee et al., Nat. Neurosci., 2022)

This unique pattern, dubbed a 'poisonous flower', was also present in some brain cells in three people who had died from Alzheimer's disease, the team found.

But far more research is needed before we can say this newfound feature is a contributing factor in human Alzheimer's disease.

Past research suggests that amyloid deposits in people with Alzheimer's disease are very different from those found in animal models of the disease and that the latter are also more easily cleared from the brain.

For now, the researchers say their findings suggest that neurons containing these 'poisonous flowers' could be the "principal source" of toxic amyloid plaques, at least in animal models of Alzheimer's disease.

"This new evidence changes our fundamental understanding of how Alzheimer's disease progresses," says neurobiologist Ralph Nixon, also of NYU Langone.

"It also explains why so many experimental therapies designed to remove amyloid plaques have failed to stop disease progression because the brain cells are already crippled before the plaques fully form outside the cell," Nixon says.

Just recently, the amyloid cascade hypothesis once again came under intense scrutiny after the US Federal Drug Administration approved a new therapy for Alzheimer's disease in mid-2021 – the first in 18 years.

The drug, called aducanumab, clears out clumps of amyloid protein and the decision sparked an outcry from some Alzheimer's researchers who said the approval was premature because the jury is still out on whether reducing amyloid levels actually slows cognitive decline.

But even long before that controversial decision, researchers were questioning whether the build-up of amyloid plaques triggers Alzheimer's disease, drives its progression, or is an irrelevant by-product. This latest study just adds fuel – or a tiny twig – to that fire.

It also fits with decade-old research suggesting that amyloid clumps grow inside neurons from small fragments of ingested amyloid protein, clumps which then get expelled back into intracellular space when the cell eventually dies.

Perhaps this new research – keeping in mind it is mostly in mice – provides more granular details about where and when amyloid plaques form, pointing to faulty waste disposal processes that fail to recycle cellular gunk.

"Our research suggests that future treatments should focus on reversing the lysosomal dysfunction and rebalancing acid levels inside the brain's neurons," Nixon says.

New therapeutic approaches are certainly welcome for this wretched disease. But if there's anything we've learnt thus far about Alzheimer's, it's that researchers should tread carefully when there is such desperation among patients, their families, and even scientists themselves for new therapies.

The study was published in Nature Neuroscience.

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Global warming caused by humans, particularly through the production of electricity using fossil fuels, transport, the production of cement, or even deforestation, is responsible for the new high, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said.

May is usually the month with the highest carbon dioxide levels each year.

In May 2022, the threshold of 420 parts per million (ppm) – a unit of measurement used to quantify pollution in the atmosphere – was crossed.

In May 2021, the rate was 419 ppm, and in 2020, 417 ppm.

The measurements are taken at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii, ideally located high on a volcano, which allows it to escape the possible influence of local pollution.

(NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory, Scripps Institute of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego)

Before the Industrial Revolution, levels of CO2 held steady at around 280 ppm, a level maintained for approximately 6,000 years of human civilization that preceded industrialization, according to NOAA.

The level now is comparable to what it was between 4.1 and 4.5 million years ago, when CO2 levels were near or above 400 ppm, the agency said in a statement.

At that time, sea levels were between 5 and 25 meters higher than now, high enough to submerge many of today's major cities. Large forests also occupied parts of the Arctic, according to studies.

CO2 is a greenhouse gas that traps heat, gradually causing global warming. It remains in the atmosphere and oceans for thousands of years.

Its warming effect is already causing dramatic consequences, noted NOAA, including the multiplication of heat waves, droughts, fires, or floods.

"Carbon dioxide is at levels our species has never experienced before – this is not new," said Pieter Tans, a scientist with the Global Monitoring Laboratory.

"We have known about this for half a century, and have failed to do anything meaningful about it. What's it going to take for us to wake up?"

© Agence France-Presse

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The frenetic pace of gear releases means it is inevitable that WIRED cannot get to all of them in a timely fashion. But if they are important, rest assured, we will catch up eventually. Yes, some may take a little longer to materialize than others, however, at 50 years late, this review is, I admit, pushing loyal readers’ patience. Yet, as this is an appraisal of such an iconic EV, none other than NASA’s Lunar Roving Vehicle, or LRV (more popularly known as the moon buggy), I hope you’ll forgive the tardiness. 

The astronomical delay is simply due to the fact that Charles Duke, one of only six humans ever to ride in the LRV on the lunar surface, is an understandably hard man to pin down. WIRED has finally fortunate enough to catch up with the 86-year-old former astronaut and Lunar Module pilot to get a full debrief on how this unique electric ride performed on the Apollo 16 mission in April 1972.

Astronaut Charles Duke Jr, Apollo 16 lunar module pilot, salutes the US flag at the Descartes landing site during the mission's first extravehicular activity on the moon, on April 21, 1972.

Photograph: NASA/Underwood Archives/Getty Images

Built by Boeing and General Motors for the last three missions of the Apollo program, the moon buggy is fantastically lightweight compared to modern electric vehicles, clocking in at just 460 pounds (210 kg) Earth weight (this translates to 77 pounds, or 35 kg, once on the moon). It can carry a max payload of 1,080 pounds (490 kg), including two astronauts, equipment, and lunar samples.

Of course, these days we’re used to modern electric cars delivering impressive top speeds, but back in the 1970s the lunar buggy was designed to max out at just 8 mph traversing the moon's rugged surface. But it did achieve a heady 11.2 mph on its last mission, Apollo 17, at the end of 1972.

Full range from the two 36-volt silver-zinc potassium hydroxide non-rechargeable batteries with a charge capacity of 121 amp hours each (a total of 242 Ah) is just 57 miles (92 km). That's the same as driving from San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge to the city of San Jose. Once these batteries are flat, though, the buggy becomes useless.

Also, at a final cost of $38 million for the four lunar rovers that were built for Apollo missions 15, 16, and 17 (the additional rover was used for spare parts), the buggy's total bill comes to a thumping $262.8 million in today's money. This makes the LRV the definitive wallet-shattering single-use purchase, vehicle or otherwise.

Some context would be useful here. For the same money you could treat yourself to 6,655 Tesla Model 3s and still have spare change. Or you could you go wild with 1,051 Founders Series Tesla Roadsters (if they ever materialize) just like Elon Musk's personal one he shot into space. And, what's more, they would be rechargeable.

But here's the thing: neither of these electric cars, nor any others you'll find on the highway, are capable of ferrying two astronauts, scientific equipment, and lunar soil and rock samples for around 78 hours straight some 238,900 miles from Earth in near vacuum at one-sixth of our gravity. The moon buggy can. And let's remember it went from a blank sheet of paper to NASA delivery in just 17 and a half months while the space suits alone took 60 months. So let's not quibble over a few million.

Far from the land of smooth tarmac, NASA knew the moon buggy would have to deal with terrain covered with dead volcanoes, impact craters, and lava flows. Indeed, so uneven is the moon's surface, NASA cautioned its Apollo astronauts not to go above 10 mph in the buggy, otherwise it estimated they'd be off the ground 35 percent of the time. So the EV had to be maneuverable in the extreme to ensure the safety of its occupants.

Lunar Module Pilot James B. Irwin next to the Lunar Roving Vehicle on the moon, during a period of extravehicular activity on NASA's Apollo 15 lunar landing mission, 1971.

Photograph: Space Frontiers/Getty Images

As a result, the LRV was designed to negotiate, from a standing start, step-like obstacles 1-foot high with both front wheels in contact. It can also cross, again from a standing start, 28-inch crevasses, even if both front wheels rest across the crevasse. Indeed, a fully loaded buggy can climb and descend slopes as steep as 25 degrees, while its parking brake will hold the LRV on slopes up to 35 degrees.

“It bounced a lot more than I expected,” Charles Duke says. “It was real springy. ”

As for the official 8 mph maximum speed, it seems Duke tested this to the limit. “It felt a lot faster than that,” he says. “The speedometer had a hard stop at 17 kilometer per hour (10.5 mph). But a lot of times coming down a mountain we were pegged out, so I don't know how fast we were going. But it was at least 17. And as it was bouncing down hills, you never felt like it was going to roll.”

Belying its slender aluminum-alloy-tubing chassis, the remarkably strong moon buggy could actually carry over twice its own weight. The workhorse Ford F-150, in comparison, can carry only about half to two-thirds its heft. Some 14 inches of chassis ground clearance when the LRV is fully loaded and 17 inches when unloaded also helped crossing the rocky terrain.

Photograph: NASA

Surprisingly, when it came to navigating that landscape, neither NASA, Boeing, nor GM thought it necessary to supply a backup to the buggy's heading, bearing, distance, and range indicators on the electric vehicle's central panel. As an early form of space satnav, the astronauts had to use this data in conjunction with their Omega Speedmaster’s stopwatch function to keep on schedule.

“The map had direction and distance and time. And so you drive 10 minutes and you stop and look for Plum crater to be there, you know?” Duke says. “And so you got your first stop, and then you've got 40 minutes here. So I found the stopwatch the best thing, because it was precise and you could read it easy, and it kept us on track.”

But what if the worst happened and the LRV broke down completely?

“Well, you had to abandon it. But there was no doubt about which direction to go because you'd follow the car tracks all the way back to the lunar module,” Duke says. “John [Young, commander] and I had practiced several times in the centrifuge at one-sixth gravity how far we could walk back. We felt like 8 kilometers was our maximum. But the moon is not level floor. It's up and down and dusty, and a kilometer walk back would have been tough. Fortunately, the car was so reliable we didn't have any failures at all.”

One of the most important and difficult problems to solve in the development of the LRV was the wheels, mainly because of what they had to run on. The moon's surface is covered by a layer of debris called the lunar regolith. The bulk of the regolith, which has a thickness varying between 5 and 10 meters, is a mixture of very fine gray soil, dust, and rock fragments with a density of about 1.5 grams per cubic centimeter. When you consider that pure water has a density of 1 gram per cubic centimeter, it becomes clear why special tires were needed.

Photograph: NASA

However, many people are unaware that the inspiration for the buggy's lunar wheel actually came from a design thought up by Thomas Rickett in England in 1857. Rickett, who at the time was building locomotive wheels, wanted to fashion a small transport called a steam carriage, and in doing so he came up with the idea of the “metal elastic tire” made from a mesh.

NASA saw the promise in this novel solution, deeming it just the thing needed to let the LRV scoot across the moon's super-fine surface without getting bogged down. There was just one issue: Rickett had left no instructions on how to make the mesh. Eventually, GM engineers decided to use 84-micron-diameter tungsten-coated wire (about the width of a human hair). But no machines existed to make the mesh, so NASA employed the services of a basket weaver. It took this person eight hours to make, or weave, one tire. 

“The wire tire had a little steel band inside that gave it a lot more bounciness, so you didn't squash the tire. It would hit something and just bounce,” Duke says. This band is an inner frame or “bump” stop, preventing excessive deflection of the mesh under high-impact conditions. The wheel wire mesh also has a metal chevron tread covering 50 percent of the surface contact area for traction. 

Each wheel of the LRV has its own electric motor and can be uncoupled from the traction drive system allowing it to “free wheel.” The front and rear steering assemblies are also mechanically independent of each other. This means the astronauts could steer with either set of wheels as well as all four. So, in the event of a steering malfunction, one set of wheels could be disconnected mechanically, allowing the mission to continue using the active steering system.

As it turns out, this particular function came in handy. “One time, one of the steerings went out, so John just disabled it,” Duke says. “And we drove with just the front steering. However, an hour later we turned it back on and it started working again.”

One last vital part of the wheel assembly were the mud guards. “We had fenders to keep the dust down. I don't remember whether I pulled off the right rear fender accidentally or John did, but we didn't worry about replacing it,” Duke says. “That was a big mistake because the rooster tail was raining dust down on us. Our suits were just getting covered with it.”

Photograph: NASA

“With the charge we had we didn't even come close to running out of power. Even after driving it 25 kilometers,” Duke says. “In fact, we left the car with the batteries powered up so NASA could move the TV and watch us lift off.”

Far from hanging up his space suit, Duke is consulting on one of the tenders for the new NASA LRV. The main bugbear on his buggy was simply that getting in and out was hard, despite the vehicle having no doors. “You couldn't just turn your rear in toward the seat and sit down and get your legs in,” he says. “So we devised a way to reach over and grab hold of the rover, do a couple of bounces and jump up and pull yourself over and land on the seat.” Now he's committed to fixing this obvious issue next time around. “I want it to be as easy to operate and as easy to get in and out of as possible.”

Speaking to Duke it is obvious he retains great fondness for the moon buggy, even 50 years on. “The technology was state of the art. It was a beautiful machine, and it revolutionized lunar exploration,” he says. “We just really enjoyed our time in it.”

They certainly did, even going as far as to race the buggy. "We had a grand prix." Duke says. "I set the camera about 50 meters away, and John drove off about 200 meters, turned around and did a loop. We did about five. That took about 10 minutes, with rooster tails everywhere and me shouting, ‘Hey, he's off the ground!’”

WIRED asked Duke for his score for the LRV based on our rating system. His answer was an immediate and unequivocal “10.” Now, loyal readers will know we hardly ever award full marks. Yet despite the cost, the fact it couldn't recharge, and the limited range, we are not about to start arguing with a decorated former astronaut, US Air Force officer, and test pilot. So 10 it is.

One final question: As the crew bounced over craters and hooned down lunar mountains, was Duke aware at the time that they were driving, and ultimately leaving behind, the world's most fantastically expensive electric car ever created? "Oh yeah, no question. I say to everybody, if you want a multimillion-dollar car with a dead battery, I can tell you where to go get it. You'll just need a spare battery.”

$38,000,000 at NASA - The Apollo Lunar Roving Vehicle

Review: NASA 1972 Moon Buggy

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Saturday morning, aerospace company Blue Origin is slated to conduct its fifth tourist flight, sending a crew of six to the edge of space and back out of West Texas. Once again, it’s a flight without any major celebrities on board, as the company transitions into making these quick jaunts to space relatively routine.

The flight, called NS-21, comes just two months after Blue Origin’s last tourist trip on March 31st. That mission sent up five paying customers and one company employee — the first time no big names flew. The Blue Origin employee was actually a last-minute replacement for comedian and actor Pete Davidson, who was originally slated to fly but had to drop out due to scheduling issues when the mission was delayed. Prior to that flight, Blue Origin made a point to have at least one celebrity on board its flights, including GMA anchor Michael Strahan, Star Trek star William Shatner, legendary aviator Wally Funk, and, famously, the company’s founder, Jeff Bezos.

There are no household names on this flight, but there are a few notable flyers on this trip. Evan Dick, an engineer and investor, is becoming Blue Origin’s first repeat flyer, having already flown to space on the company’s third crewed mission. And Katya Echazarreta, a STEM communicator and YouTube host, will become the first Mexican-born woman to fly to space. Her seat on the flight is sponsored by Space for Humanity, a nonprofit that aims to expand “access to space for all of humanity” by funding tickets on Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic flights for those who might not otherwise be able to afford them.

Victor Correa Hespanha is also benefitting from a sponsored flight, this one from a group called the Crypto Space Agency. The group of crypto enthusiasts bill themselves as a space agency for “Crypto Nation” and are funding space-related projects by selling NFTs. The first NFT drop offered a chance to fly to space, and Hespanha was randomly selected to take the first flight. The CSA plans to buy more tickets to space for members, “seek first contact with extra-terrestrial intelligence,” and “protect the planet from catastrophic asteroid impacts.”

Also on the flight are Hamish Harding, a jet pilot and chairman of his own business jet brokerage, and Jaison Robinson, an investor, adventurer, and former contestant on the reality TV show, Survivor: Samoa. Lastly there’s Victor Vescovo, who co-founded his own private equity firm and who has dived to the deepest point in the ocean up to 12 times and summited the highest point on each of the seven continents.

The six will be flying on Blue Origin’s suborbital New Shepard rocket, which is designed to launch passengers to an altitude roughly 65 miles beyond the boundary of space. The vehicle takes off from Blue Origin’s launch facility near Van Horn, Texas, carrying customers in a capsule perched on top of the rocket. Once at a certain height, the capsule and rocket separate, and customers experience a few minutes of weightlessness while seeing the curvature of the Earth from space. Eventually, both the rocket and capsule fall back to the ground; the rocket lands upright using its engine while the capsule lands under parachutes.

This upcoming flight was originally supposed to take place on May 20th, but Blue Origin delayed the mission after finding that one of New Shepard’s backup systems “was not meeting our expectations for performance,” the company said. Now, the flight is back on for June 4th, with a launch window currently slated to open 9AM ET. If you’ve seen a New Shepard flight before, this one will look more or less the same as the rest, if all goes well. But, if you still can’t get enough of New Shepard flights, Blue Origin’s coverage starts roughly an hour before takeoff.

Watch Blue Origin launch its fifth passenger flight to the edge of space

US officials monitoring over 400 people for monkeypox; 21 cases confirmed

"Negotiating important firm costs is a fundamental, often headline-making activity with significant impact on organizations," said Federico Aime, a management professor at Oklahoma State University and one of the study's authors. "Highly Machiavellian personalities consistently excel in situations that are stressful, uncertain, unstructured and have a high degree of face-to-face interaction—all of which are commiserate with the CEO position and high-level negotiations."

The research specifically measures how CEOs higher on the Machiavellian scale (high Machs) perform at negotiating lower production costs, acquisition premiums and debt financing. To determine high Machs, Aime, along with co-authors Tessa Recendes, Aaron D. Hill and Oleg V. Petrenko, aggregated public video of 198 CEOs at S&P 500 firms from 2000 to 2011. Trained psychology professionals then evaluated the videos using an established scale for Machiavellianism.

"There is an assumption among business management researchers that markets determine costs and CEOs can't contribute much to reducing them through sheer force of personality," said Recendes. "But where CEOs aren't directly negotiating deals, they create culture and priorities within a company which managers use as directives."

To establish CEO influence over costs, the authors first ran multilevel modeling on corporate and financial data from four different data sets, finding a 32.3% CEO effect on production costs and 22.3% effect on financing costs. For acquisitions however, CEO influence is clear: their presence can be felt at every stage from selecting the acquisition targets to negotiating the final deal. With the connection between each cost and CEOs established, the researchers compared how CEOs across the Machiavellian spectrum faired in 1,354 firm years and 186 acquisitions.

"It should be no surprise that CEOs with a Machiavellian focus on bargaining pay less on acquisition premiums," Hill said. "Machiavellianism can drive CEOs to gather more bargaining information because their inherent distrust, to leverage social interactions and coalitions, and to manipulate others allow them to win."

The study found that companies with Machiavellian CEOs paid 12.11 percent lower acquisition premiums, representing approximately $157 million or 3.6% of the average deal. Companies with high Mach CEOs also paid $101.19 million less on goods sold and $35.8 million less on debt interest, representing a total of 6.6% savings on the average company's net income. The researchers explained that high Mach expectations and cultural norms filtered down to bargaining performance on production and financial costs.

"Even for the interactions they aren't directly involved in, they set the tone from the top and infuse the organization with a great deal of their traits through their agenda, initial decisions and leadership behaviors," Petrenko said.

The authors note that while high Mach CEOs seem to lower company costs, this might not outweigh the risks of the personality trait. However, the study does help explain the ubiquity of Machiavellianism in the upper echelons of business management, considering the decades-long focus on cost reduction. Adding negotiation structures and opportunity-seeking resources might offer some of the same effect, but there may also be unexplored benefits to Machiavellianism for CEOs.

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Initially developed on an iMac computer, the new modeling approach had already garnered attention for successfully recreating the unexpected eruption of Alaska's Okmok volcano in 2008. Gregg's team, based out of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, wanted to test the model's new high-performance computing upgrade, and Geist's Sierra Negra observations showed signs of an imminent eruption.

"Sierra Negra is a well-behaved volcano," said Gregg, the lead author of a new report of the successful effort. "Meaning that, before eruptions in the past, the volcano has shown all the telltale signs of an eruption that we would expect to see like groundswell, gas release and increased seismic activity. This characteristic made Sierra Negra a great test case for our upgraded model."

However, many volcanoes don't follow these neatly established patterns, the researchers said. Forecasting eruptions is one of the grand challenges in volcanology, and the development of quantitative models to help with these trickier scenarios is the focus of Gregg and her team's work.

Over the winter break of 2017-18, Gregg and her colleagues ran the Sierra Negra data through the new supercomputing-powered model. They completed the run in January 2018 and, even though it was intended as a test, it ended up providing a framework for understanding Sierra Negra's eruption cycles and evaluating the potential and timing of future eruptions—but nobody realized it yet.

"Our model forecasted that the strength of the rocks that contain Sierra Negra's magma chamber would become very unstable sometime between June 25 and July 5, and possibly result in a mechanical failure and subsequent eruption," said Gregg, who also is an NCSA faculty fellow. "We presented this conclusion at a scientific conference in March 2018. After that, we became busy with other work and did not look at our models again until Dennis texted me on June 26, asking me to confirm the date we had forecasted. Sierra Negra erupted one day after our earliest forecasted mechanical failure date. We were floored."

Though it represents an ideal scenario, the researchers said, the study shows the power of incorporating high-performance supercomputing into practical research. "The advantage of this upgraded model is its ability to constantly assimilate multidisciplinary, real-time data and process it rapidly to provide a daily forecast, similar to weather forecasting," said Yan Zhan, a former Illinois graduate student and co-author of the study. "This takes an incredible amount of computing power previously unavailable to the volcanic forecasting community."

Bringing the moving parts into place to produce a modeling program of this strength requires a highly multidisciplinary approach that Gregg's team did not have access to until working with NCSA.

"We all speak the same language when it comes to the numerical multiphysics analysis and high-performance computing needed to forecast mechanical failure—in this case of a volcanic magma chamber," said Seid Koric, the technical assistant director at NCSA, a research professor of mechanical sciences and engineering and a co-author of the study.

With Koric's expertise, the team said they hope to incorporate artificial intelligence and machine learning into the forecasting model to help make this computing power available to researchers working from standard laptop and desktop computers.

The results of the study are published in the journal Science Advances.

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NOAA's measurements of carbon dioxide (CO2) at the mountaintop observatory on Hawaii's Big Island averaged 420.99 parts per million (ppm), an increase of 1.8 ppm over 2021. Scientists at Scripps, which maintains an independent record, calculated a monthly average of 420.78 ppm.

"The science is irrefutable: humans are altering our climate in ways that our economy and our infrastructure must adapt to," said NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad, Ph.D. "We can see the impacts of climate change around us every day. The relentless increase of carbon dioxide measured at Mauna Loa is a stark reminder that we need to take urgent, serious steps to become a more Climate Ready Nation."

CO2 pollution is generated by burning fossil fuels for transportation and electrical generation, by cement manufacturing, deforestation, agriculture and many other practices. Along with other greenhouse gases, CO2 traps heat radiating from the planet's surface that would otherwise escape into space, causing the planet's atmosphere to warm steadily, which unleashes a cascade of weather impacts, including episodes of extreme heat, drought and wildfire activity, as well as heavier precipitation, flooding and tropical storm activity.

Impacts to the world's oceans from greenhouse gas pollution include increasing sea surface temperatures, rising sea levels, and an increased absorption of carbon, which makes sea water more acidic, leads to ocean deoxygenation, and makes it more difficult for some marine organisms to survive.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, CO2 levels were consistently around 280 ppm for almost 6,000 years of human civilization. Since then, humans have generated an estimated 1.5 trillion tons of CO2 pollution, much of which will continue to warm the atmosphere for thousands of years.

CO2 levels are now comparable to the Pliocene Climatic Optimum, between 4.1 and 4.5 million years ago, when they were close to, or above 400 ppm. During that time, sea levels were between 5 and 25 meters higher than today —high enough to drown many of the world's largest modern cities.

Temperatures then averaged 7 degrees Fahrenheit higher than in pre-industrial times, and studies indicate that large forests occupied today's Arctic tundra.

Mauna Loa ideally located to monitor global pollution

NOAA's observatory, situated high on the slopes of the Mauna Loa volcano, is the global benchmark location for monitoring atmospheric CO2. At an elevation of 11,141 feet above sea level, the observatory samples air undisturbed by the influence of local pollution or vegetation, and produces measurements that represent the average state of the atmosphere in the northern hemisphere.

Charles David Keeling, a scientist with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, initiated on-site measurements of CO2 at NOAA's weather station on Mauna Loa in 1958. Keeling was the first to recognize that CO2 levels in the Northern Hemisphere fell during the growing season, and rose as plants died back in the fall, and he documented these CO2 fluctuations in a record that came to be known as the Keeling Curve. He was also the first to recognize that, despite the seasonal fluctuation, CO2 levels were rising every year.

NOAA began measurements in 1974, and the two research institutions have made complementary, independent observations ever since. Keeling's son, geochemist Ralph Keeling, runs the Scripps program at Mauna Loa.

"It's depressing that we've lacked the collective will power to slow the relentless rise in CO2," said Keeling. "Fossil-fuel use may no longer be accelerating, but we are still racing at top speed towards a global catastrophe."

The Mauna Loa data, together with measurements from sampling stations around the world, are incorporated by NOAA's Global Monitoring Laboratory into the Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network, a foundational research dataset for international climate scientists and a benchmark for policymakers attempting to address the causes and impacts of climate change.

Despite decades of negotiation, the global community has been unable to significantly slow, let alone reverse, annual increases in atmospheric CO2 levels.

"Carbon dioxide is at levels our species has never experienced before—this is not new," said Pieter Tans, senior scientist with the Global Monitoring Laboratory. "We have known about this for half a century, and have failed to do anything meaningful about it. What's it going to take for us to wake up?"

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VIENNA, Austria — There’s certainly something to be said for believing in your own good health. A positive mindset promotes a healthy body. Still, new research suggests some humility can go a long way too. According to researchers, having too much self-confidence could actually be a bad thing when it comes to health.

Scientists from the University of Vienna report that older people who are over-confident about their own health don’t go to the doctor as often as they should. This can be detrimental to their health as they could be allowing medical issues to go undiagnosed.

Conversely, the study also found that the opposite holds true. People who are pessimistic about their own health tend to visit the doctor too often.

The study, conducted in collaboration with the Hertie School in Berlin, is based on data from over 80,000 Europeans ages 50 and older. Each individual’s personal level of self-confidence heavily influences their behaviors, actions, and decisions. Generally, people who overestimate their abilities often earn more money, make different investment decisions, and are more likely to be leaders.

That said, overconfidence is also linked to having a penchant for taking risks, having more accidents, drinking more alcohol, eating poorly, and insufficient sleep.

Self-confidence even impacts going to the dentist regularly

Of course, how we perceive our own health plays a big role in daily decisions as well. Deciding whether or not to visit the doctor for a checkup, for example. This new research finds that individuals who overestimate their health visit their doctors 17 percent less often than others who more accurately perceive their health. A similar trend was found regarding dental visits.

Interestingly, no such relationship was seen for hospital visits. Self-perceptions of health had no effect on the number and duration of hospital stays. Researchers speculate this is because hospital visits are more regulated and serious.

Meanwhile, older adults underestimating their own health visited their doctors 21 percent more frequently. Study authors explain this type of behavior offers both pros and cons. On one hand, visiting a doctor often will eventually add up and become pricey. On the other hand, paying close attention to one’s wellbeing isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

All in all, the team notes it is very difficult for any outsider to truly assess if a physician visit is “justified.” No one can answer that question but the patient.
The data used for this project was originally collected as part of the SHARE study (Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe) between 2006-2013. Each subject was asked to evaluate their own health. For example, subjects were asked if they have trouble getting up from chairs after sitting for long periods. Next, participants were asked to physically get up from a chair as a test. The research was structured this way to accurately ascertain if each subject had been overestimating, underestimating, or correctly assessing their health. Additional memory and mobility related misjudgments were also considered by researchers.

Most people correctly assessed their health (79%), with another 11 percent overestimating and 10 percent underestimating.

These fascinating findings actually build on an earlier study that showed individual health perceptions often differ depending on age, nationality, and education. Older people tend to overestimate their health more than younger adults. Regional differences were noted as well: Residents of Southern Europe have a habit of overestimating their health, while people in Central and Eastern Europe often underestimate their health. Better educated people usually correctly assess their health as well.

The study is published in The Journal of the Economics of Ageing.

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Blankets of thick gritty haze and ominous orange skies since early April have sent thousands to hospitals and resulted in at least four deaths in Iraq and in Syria.

The apocalyptic scenes have affected everyone. Hospitals in Syria have been on standby for residents unable to breathe. Iraq forced schools and offices to close in some provinces, and on 16 May declared a state of emergency. In the Gulf states, flights were halted in Kuwait, and both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates issued dust storm alerts.

“The increasing frequency of dust storms means more problems, more loss of life and property, and more destruction,” said Nasim Hossein Hamzeh, a researcher specialising in dust projects at the Air and Climate Technology Company in Iran.

Dust and sand storms are an atmospheric phenomenon, representing one of the most severe, if underrated, natural hazards in dry regions. In the Middle East, they frequently cover arid and semi-arid land, typically in late spring and summer. This year has been especially severe, experts say. They have come far earlier than normal, and are spreading across a much wider area.

Heavy dust storm advances towards the shore in Kuwait City on 23 May. Photograph: Noufal Ibrahim/EPA

“It is very concerning. Dust storms do not just impact one country or specific location in the world and can have far-reaching consequences globally,” said Muge Akpinar-Elci, dean of the school of public health at the University of Nevada.

Dust particles can travel thousands of kilometres. All that is needed to trigger a storm is wind, a source of dust where there is little to no vegetation, and dry conditions. One of the most common routes in the region is when strong north-westerly winds, known as shamal, push cold air through the dry and sandy soil areas of Iraq, picking up dust between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and carrying it along to the Arabian peninsula. This year, the storms stretched to Saudi Arabia over other Gulf states, as well as cloaking parts of Jordan.

Northern Iraq has been particularly exposed, witnessing a sandstorm nearly every week since March. In May, Issa al-Fayyad, the director general of the technical department for the Ministry of Environment, said the country faced an average of 272 dust storms a year. He predicts that it will grow to 300 days of dust a year by 2050, and warns that climate change is the key factor in the increase.

Mohammed Mahmoud, the director of the climate and water programme at the Middle East Institute, warns, similarly, that the once rare occurrence will only be more frequent as the climate crisis increases aridity and warms the already dry region, while altering weather patterns to create more storms.

“Just look to the sky. If the visual of dark orange apocalyptic skies isn’t enough, it’s the net impact of these multiple dust storms happening in rapid order,” he said.

Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, has been in dust storms for more than 35 days in the first four months of 2022, while the highest number of days with dust storms in the past four years was 48 days in 2019, according to the Royal Commission for Riyadh City.

For Manna Alwadei at the department of environmental health at the Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University in Saudi Arabia, “this year could be one of the worst for Saudi Arabia, as they occur more frequently than before”.

Sign up to Down to Earth, our exclusive weekly newsletter from our top climate crisis correspondents.

The consequences are relentless. Alwadei’s own father was hospitalised due to asthma exacerbated by the storms. Impacts range from respiratory illness to reducing crop yields to lowering property values to steering foreign workers away from polluted places. According to the United Nations, dust storms cost the region’s economy $13bn (£10.3bn) a year.

Given that storms can carry harmful pollutants, exposure to sandstorms can cause a myriad of health problems. A series of storms in May sent at least 5,000 people in Iraq to the hospital with breathing issues, and led to the death of one, the health ministry spokesperson Seif al-Badr said. Three others had died in the eastern Syrian province of Deir ez-Zor, the Associated Press reported.

“The impact of dust storms exceeds regional and continental boundaries,” said Akpinar. “So this is not somebody else’s problem, this is everyone’s problem.”

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The amount of money flowing into cryptocurrency scams continues to skyrocket.

The US Federal Trade Commission today said it estimates(Opens in a new window) consumers lost over $1 billion to the scams between January 2021 and March 2022.

The estimate is based on fraud reports the FTC received from 46,000 victims. The numbers are a huge increase from the six-month period between October 2020 and March 2021, when the agency logged(Opens in a new window) $80 million in cryptocurrency-related losses from 7,000 victims.

(Image: FTC)

The fraud reports suggest “cryptocurrency is quickly becoming the payment of choice for many scammers, with about one out of every four dollars reported lost to fraud paid in cryptocurrency,” the FTC wrote(Opens in a new window) in a blog post.

Victims are also losing a sizable chunk of money. The median reported loss among the individuals was $2,600. “The top cryptocurrencies people said they used to pay scammers were Bitcoin (70%), Tether (10%), and Ether (9%),” the FTC added.

The increase in scams involving cryptocurrencies occurred as Bitcoin saw its value soar to a high of $64,000 in 2021. The FTC also notes cryptocurrency transfers usually can’t be reversed, giving fraudsters another reason to exploit the technology.

(Image: FTC)

Most of the money, at $575 million, was lost to scams about bogus cryptocurrency investment opportunities designed to trick users into handing over their funds. Another $185 million was lost to romance scams, involving fake online dating profiles manipulating victims into investing in dubious cryptocurrency schemes. “The median individual reported crypto loss to romance scammers is an astounding $10,000,” the FTC added.

The news is an important reminder to be on the lookout for scams on the internet, particularly social media. “Nearly half the people who reported losing crypto to a scam since 2021 said it started with an ad, post, or message on a social media platform,” the US regulator added. “The top platforms identified in these reports were Instagram (32%), Facebook (26%), WhatsApp (9%), and Telegram (7%).”

To stay safe, it’s best to avoid investment opportunities or dating profiles that seem too good to be true. You can also check out our guide for more tips.

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We all make personality judgments based on a stranger’s facial cues. For example, if she or he is trustworthy, despite the limited evidence of the validity of our judgments.

Researchers Dongyu Zhang and Hongfei Lin at the Dalian University of Technology, along with David I. Perret at the University of St Andrew’s were interested in understanding how head posture (level, up, or down) affects cross-cultural perception of cooperativeness. In other words, does the perception of cooperativeness vary based on variations in posture?

To do so, they photographed 48 students from the University of St Andrews with their heads in three different poses: neutral, up, and down. Then a total of 146 Chinese and American participants were recruited for 3 different experiments, where they were then all asked to rate for perceived cooperativeness.

In rating and ranking tasks the authors found that a neutral posture was perceived as most cooperative compared with head-up and head-down postures. Both rotating the head up and rotating it down produced similar decreases in the perception of cooperativeness. As a result, individuals having negative-related traits with upward and downward head postures might be perceived as less cooperative compared to individuals with a neutral head
position.

These 3 experiments carried out also suggest that Chinese participants may be more sensitive than US participants to perceptions of cooperativeness. As the authors suggest: “a possible explanation may be that Asians have a greater tendency to live in collective societies and are perhaps more likely to emphasize group dynamics rather than individual prowess”

What is also interesting is the fact that turning the head down just slightly makes the face appear more cooperative to both Chinese and American observers. One reason may be that the sight of a head down is associated with the nodding, indicating agreement, attention, interest, support, and friendliness.

See the paper here or download the PDF →

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There was no such thing as a ‘Viking’ in the medieval period. Use of the term emerged in the 19th century. The word wicing occurred in Old English and víkingr in Old Icelandic, but were used very differently, to mean something like ‘pirate’. Academics nod to this when we assert that ‘viking’ was a job description rather than an ethnicity, but we don’t always take on board the full implications of this distinction. In Old Icelandic víkingr could be applied to any pirate regardless of where they came from or when, or what language they spoke; they might be Estonians or Saracens, for example. It is also noteworthy that it is almost never used to describe the people who we today call ‘Vikings’. Many of the men labelled ‘Vikings’ in textbooks and popular histories were warriors led by kings on military expeditions with clear political objectives, such as the Great Heathen Army that fought Alfred the Great or the Norwegian force that accompanied Harald Hardrada to his death at Stamford Bridge in 1066. Calling such people ‘Vikings’ would be like calling 18th century British, French or Dutch naval officers ‘pirates’ simply because they wore vaguely similar hats and sailed vaguely similar ships to Blackbeard.

The word ‘Viking’ seems to have entered modern English in the early 19th century, when medieval Icelandic literature was beginning to be translated into major European languages. Initially it was used in the original medieval sense, but by the 1860s it was starting to be used to describe all early medieval warriors from Scandinavia. The final development, the ‘ethnicisation’ of the word that allows the use of terms such as ‘Viking farms’, ‘Viking towns’ and ‘Viking women and children’, is much more recent and has gradually crept up since the Second World War. This is insidious; by linking military prowess and savagery to an entire ethnic group, it encourages its appropriation by racial supremacists.
 
No such thing

The issue with the term is not merely semantic. This conception of ‘the Vikings’ seriously distorts our understanding of European history. We have tended to group almost all Scandinavian activity between the 790s and the mid-11th century together under the ‘Viking’ label, creating a distinct ‘Viking Age’ and an imagined ‘Viking’ culture and identity. The evidence, however, does not support this analysis.

First, the Scandinavian homelands were extremely varied in environment, social structure and history. Denmark is flat and fertile, its islands cleared, by the year 800, of predators for millennia. It had a complex settlement pattern that was at least as sophisticated as anything found in England. Danish soldiers and settlers coming into ninth-century eastern England found landscape and settlement patterns very like those with which they were familiar and people who shared very similar economic and social structures. They were not savage barbarians penetrating a more civilised realm. The Danish lands had the greatest capacity to sustain population in Scandinavia and it is likely that the majority of Scandinavians lived in Denmark in this period. Norway, whose western fjords provide the stereotypical backdrop to the ‘Vikings’, was a relative backwater with a tiny population and was most important as a route, the ‘North Way’, to the Arctic regions and the luxury goods, such as furs and walrus ivory, that they provided.
 
Heathens

The surviving textual sources for the period all come from outside Scandinavia, but some fairly consistent patterns emerge. In the late eighth and the ninth century Irish, English and Frankish chronicles generally refer to Scandinavian aggressors as ‘heathens’ and this, rather than any ethnic identity, seems to have been what struck the victims of these attacks as significant. The 793 raid on Lindisfarne, often said to herald the ‘Viking Age’, is described in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle thus: ‘The ravages of heathen men miserably destroyed God’s church on Lindisfarne with plunder and slaughter.’ In the following year the Annals of Ulster recorded ‘the devastation of all the islands of Britain by the gentiles’.

The previous two or three centuries had witnessed what seemed to be the unstoppable growth of Christendom, both East and West. This had been interpreted as part of God’s plan and its apparent reversal caused consternation among the ecclesiastical writers who have provided us with the record. As Alcuin of York wrote: ‘Never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan people, nor was it thought that such an inroad from the sea could be made.’

From the surviving evidence from Britain and Ireland it is, at first, quite hard to distinguish opportunistic raiding, to which the term ‘Viking’ might have been applied by contemporaries, from political action. The attack on Lindisfarne is often presented as an opportunistic raid, but in fact the force that executed it remained in Northumbria over the winter and was defeated in a pitch battle the following year, some of their ships having been destroyed by a storm.

The Carolingian sources clearly distinguish diplomatic and military interaction between the Franks and the Danish kings from seaborne raids, over which the latter had little or no control. The Royal Frankish Annals record Charlemagne establishing a fleet and coastal defences against pirates in 800, for example. But by the later ninth century most of the recorded action in the British Isles seems to be political and led by kings looking to conquer territory.

The decades around 900 see polities established by Scandinavian dynasties in Britain and Normandy and the adoption of Christianity by their leaders at least. Contemporary sources cease to describe the attackers as ‘heathens’ and tend to name leaders and refer to armies by their place of residence, whether that be East Anglia or Dublin.

In about 903, shortly after the contested start of Edward the Elder’s reign, for example, the Chronicle tells us that his cousin and rival Æthelwold ‘induced the army among the East Angles to break the peace and they harried over all Mercia until ... they crossed the Thames’. Eventually they were pursued home and their king, Eohric, was killed. East Anglia was, at this date, part of the Danelaw. This group’s forebears had come to Britain from Scandinavia in 865 and they had been settled in East Anglia for more than 20 years, so it is likely that Eohric and most of his warriors had been born and brought up in England as Christians.

The ‘Viking’ dynasty that ruled Dublin and contested rule of Northumbria with the descendants of Alfred in the tenth century were descended from men who had left Scandinavia in the middle of the ninth century. On the maternal side most of them probably had local ancestors. They had very little in common in behaviour, genetics or belief systems with the raiders of the 790s. Indeed one of their greatest kings, Óláfr Cúarán, who had at times been king in Northumbria as well as Dublin, retired to the monastery of Iona in 980. At least one of his granddaughters was a nun.
 
Age old

What is usually seen as the final phase of the ‘Viking Age’, from the 990s to the 1070s, saw military and diplomatic relations between Christian kings in both the West and in Scandinavia. By this date Denmark at least had become part of Latin Christendom. Characterising a ruler like Cnut as a ‘Viking’ is nonsensical. He attended the imperial coronation of Conrad II in Rome in 1027 and founded and endowed churches across both his English and Danish realms. Similarly, Harald Hardrada, often termed ‘the last of the Vikings’, was the brother of a saint and spent much of his career in Byzantium. His invasion of England in 1066 was a political action in which he was supported by factions within the kingdom he was invading. Eleventh-century Scandinavian kings such as Cnut and Harald had far more in common with their successors in the 12th and 13th century than they had with eighth- and ninth-century heathen raiders.

Sporadic seaborne raiding on Britain and Ireland by small groups unconnected to any political or military action continued into the 12th century. Indeed, activity of this sort, classic ‘Viking’ behaviour, is perhaps more characteristic of this later period than it is of what we might consider the ‘Viking Age’ proper. These raiders originated from the Scandinavian diaspora in the Scottish islands. Hebrideans, and even Orcadians, like the infamous Sveinn Ásleifarson, plagued the coast of Ireland and western Britain for a century after the Norman Conquest; it was only the English invasion of Ireland that put an end to it. The Western Isles in particular had little capacity for supporting anything beyond subsistence farming and predation on rich lands was the key to local chieftains maintaining their position at home.
 
Goodbye!

The construct of the ‘Vikings’ conflates and blurs the distinction between eighth- and 12th-century pirates. Tenth-century kings based in Dublin and Christian rulers such as Cnut, all of whom lived in very different societies, had different belief systems and political and economic objectives. Each of these contexts needs to be dealt with on its own terms and not within a 19th-century construct that has more than a hint of racist essentialism to it. It is high time that historians, both academic and popular, ditched the Vikings as an outmoded and dangerous way of thinking. The Vikings never existed; it is time to put this unhealthy fantasy to bed.
 
Alex Woolf is a senior lecturer in History at the University of St Andrews.

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Self-driving company Cruise has received a permit from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) to charge for fully driverless rides, a milestone that the company claims makes it “the first and only company to operate a commercial, driverless ride-hail service in a major U.S. city.” Cruise has been testing free driverless rides for the public in San Francisco since February, and now, it will be able to offer paid fares.

For this paid service, the GM and Honda-backed Cruise will be able to operate its 30 all-electric vehicles at night from 10PM to 6AM in “select streets” in San Francisco, and the vehicles won’t be able to go faster than 30 miles per hour, according to the draft resolution (pdf). Cruise will also only be able to offer the rides if weather conditions don’t include “heavy rain, heavy fog, heavy smoke, hail, sleet, or snow,” per a CPUC press release. The company will begin offering its paid rides “gradually” in the city, Cruise COO Gil West says in a blog post.

Cruise’s driverless robotaxi service has been a long time coming. At one point, the company had a goal to launch it in 2019, and it first began testing driverless cars in San Francisco in 2020. But Cruise isn’t the only company building fully driverless robotaxi services. Google spinoff Waymo, for example, is testing driverless rides in San Francisco and offers its Waymo One autonomous vehicle service in Arizona. And Argo AI, which is backed by Ford and Volkswagen, just announced that it’s testing fully driverless vehicles in Miami, Florida, and Austin, Texas.

Cruise can finally start charging for fully driverless robotaxis

We often think of mathematical ability as being uniquely human, but in fact, scientists have found that many animal species—including lions, chimpanzees, birds, bees, ants, and fish—seem to possess at least a rudimentary counting ability or number sense. Crows can understand the concept of zero. And a study published in April found that both stingrays and cichlids can take this rudimentary "numerosity" to the next level, performing simple addition and subtraction for a small number of objects (in the range of 1 to 5).

 

The latter study's conclusion doesn't surprise cognitive psychologist Brian Butterworth, an emeritus professor at University College London and author of a new book, Can Fish Count? What Animals Reveal About our Uniquely Mathematical Minds.

 

"There are lots of animals that can do addition and subtraction," Butterworth told Ars. "Bees can. Bees can represent zero as well. So it's not surprising to me that stingrays and cichlids can do it." His book explores how the ability to process mathematical information and extract numerical data from their environment is critical to an animal's ability to survive and thrive. In fact, there might just be an innate understanding of math at its most basic level that was passed down the evolutionary chain from our most distant common ancestors.

 

Butterworth's interest in the number sense of animals has its roots in his early work as a psycholinguist in the 1980s. When he met an Italian psychologist named Carlo Semenza at a conference, he became intrigued by human disorders in language, like aphasia, and mathematical cognitive disorders, particularly dyscalculia. Christian Agrillo, one of Semenza's students who came to work with Butterworth, was an expert on fish and gave a talk on his research demonstrating that some small fish have numerical abilities. Butterworth was fascinated and eventually developed a parallel research program focusing on the numerical abilities of fish. "And once you get into fish, there's all sorts of other animals that grab your interest," he said.

 

Butterworth is still studying the genetics and neuroscience underlying number sense in fish, with plans to conduct brain imaging studies later this year. And just how does one go about peeking inside a fish's brain as it counts? "First of all, you need to insert a [biofluorescent] gene, where when neurons connect, when synapses connect, they light up," said Butterworth. "Then you have to have a fish whose head is transparent—a larval version of the fish. That way you can see what’s going on in the fish’s brain using a microscope, while it is choosing the size of the tank with more objects in it."

 

Ars sat down with Butterworth to learn more.

 

Stingrays (left) and cichlids (right) can perform simple additions and subtractions in the number range up to five.

Vera Schlüssel/University of Bonn

 

Ars Technica: What are we talking about when we talk about so-called "numerosity"? You're very careful in your book to emphasize that this isn't like advanced logic and reasoning.

 

Brian Butterworth: We're talking about the number of things in a set. It's very simple. It has nothing to do with reasoning [or] logical mathematical intelligence. This is information that will be in the environment. The fish has to have some mechanism for extracting this numerical information from the environment. A set can be a shoal. It's quite complicated because fish in shoals move around. So the fish has to be quite cunning in how it assesses the numerosity of a shoal. We're not quite sure how they do it yet, but when we start looking into their brains, we might get a clearer picture.

 

Ars Technica: One of the most famous cases of animals that could supposedly count was a horse named Clever Hans in the early 20th century. But it turned out Hans wasn't actually counting; he was reading the behavioral cues of his handler. So how do you know whether animals are really counting? 

 

Brian Butterworth: Clever Hans was clearly a very clever horse, but he was not necessarily mathematically clever. He wasn't properly tested for his mathematical abilities. The example of Clever Hans meant that subsequent scientists—particularly the German ethologist Otto Koehler before the Second World War—designed their experiments to ensure there was no Clever Hans effect.

 

For example, the animal could not see the experimenter. Koehler was very clear that had to be the case. You have to make sure that the animal is responding to numerical information in the environment and not something else. Take dots. The more dots of the same size there are, the more of that color there is in the environment. So you have to control for that. If you've got three dots of one size and then four dots of another size, the four dots must be smaller dots than the three dots.

 

My colleagues at the University of Padua have done additional studies with fish. We've had these little fish sitting around in the middle of a tank. On either side, they can see two potential shoals to join, but they can only see one fish at a time in each of the shoals. They can look at the left side of the tank, and they can see one, two, three fish swimming around there. So they have to add them up: one plus one plus one. Then they see four fish on the other side of the tank. Again, they can only see one at a time. So they have to come to a conclusion about the number of fish on the other side. Then they have to do something [akin to] an analytical operation—namely, deciding which side has more, i.e., the usual greater than/less than sign that you find in early arithmetic in schools.

 

Koehler thought that in the wild, animals did not count. They could learn to count in the lab, but in the wild, they didn't. More recently, Hans Davis, a Canadian scientist, suggested that animals can count in the wild, but they only do it as a last resort when everything else is not easy for them.

 

Wilhelm von Osten and Clever Hans.

Public domain

 

But studies involving very extensive controls with both monkeys and birds show that they really are responding to the number of things in the display. Elizabeth Brannon at the University of Pennsylvania has shown that when animals in the lab are given a choice between responding to the shape or the amount (number) of objects, they actually respond better to the number than they do to these other dimensions. So I don't think Hans Davis is quite right, that it's only as a last resort. I think it just depends upon where the most salient information in the environment is for that particular task.

 

Ars Technica: A 2008 study showed that roundworms navigate by detecting differences in salt levels in the soil—essentially taking a differential and using that to navigate. They're not really taking a differential in the same way that a human would do calculus, but it seems they're doing something similar.

 

Brian Butterworth: Many creatures migrate for different reasons. It might be just an hour's migration to find a food source and then come back to their home. Some migrate a long way, like homing pigeons, for example. The bar-tailed godwit flies from Alaska to New Zealand and back again in a year. So how do they do this migration?

 

We know that they have to have some kind of compass, perhaps a sky compass. They can also use the Earth's magnetic field to help locate their latitude. A sky compass helps you locate your longitude, but it's really quite complicated because you're not flying in a straight line. You have to do what sailors call "dead reckoning." So every time you turn left and go so far, you have to make a note of that. And then you turn right and you have to make another adjustment to your mental map. They have to have a mental map. They have to do all this dead reckoning, or what scientists call "path integration," in order to know where they are on their map and therefore how they can get back home.

 

My analogy is maybe they’ve got something like Google Maps in their head. Google Maps is just numbers all the way down, ultimately zeros and ones. Google Maps can contain other information besides direction. You can ask it to locate gas stations and restaurants. If you're going on a long journey, you need to know where these things are.

 

In an April study, stingrays and cichlids usually swarmed to the correct solution after successful training.

Esther Schmidt

 

I'm not saying that the bar-tailed godwit has something exactly like Google Maps. But it has the kind of information that's necessary, and it could be coded numerically. Birds that traverse distances of thousands of miles not only have to have [a sense of] direction over the surface of the Earth, they also have to have a three-dimensional map because they're encountering headwinds and side winds. And they have to know the right altitude at which to fly. So they need something like a three-dimensional map, which could all be coded in numbers, just like Google Maps.

 

Ars Technica: We know that in humans, there's a certain brain region that seems to be associated with dyscalculia, or with mathematical thinking. Some of these creatures don't have the same brain structures, and yet they're still able to do this. You suggest in your book that this is indicative perhaps of something truly fundamental about this kind of numerical reasoning.

 

Brian Butterworth: For us, the key brain regions are in the neocortex, particularly part of the parietal lobes of the humans—also the parietal lobes of the monkeys. That's where they do their numerical processing as well. But there are lots of creatures that don't have a cortex at all. Birds, for example, are very good at numbers but don't have a cortex. There have been studies of bird brains, crows in particular, showing there are individual neurons that respond to particular numerosity in the bird's brain—not in the cortex but in a region called the pallium, which may be an evolutionary ancestor of the cortex. Insects are quite good at counting, and they don't have a pallium at all. Fish do, but ants and bees don't. So they have to do it a different way.

 

We know that very, very distant common ancestors of humans and the fruit fly—we're going back hundreds of millions of years here—have a mechanism for timing. Fruit flies have mechanisms for timing that seem to be built by the same genes, or at least equivalent genes. What these genes do is build the appropriate mechanism in the kind of material environment that they can build it in. There are also genes for building eyes, and they're expressed differently in different creatures. So if you've got timing genes, then I don't see why you shouldn't have number genes.

Ars Technica: There is some debate that this kind of ability not only evolved in many different species but seemed to evolve several times over, suggesting that this might just be the most efficient way to help creatures survive. You need to be able to count. There's a quantitative element that is fundamental to our survival, and it looks like nature has evolved a very similar mechanism in many different species multiple times over.

 

Brian Butterworth: We don't really know whether it's convergent evolution or whether we've inherited the same mechanism. As you point out, numerical information is very important for all sorts of creatures—for fish, finding the larger shoal; for lions, only attacking intruders if they outnumber them. Whether these mammals have separately evolved a similar mechanism to the fish for doing comparable jobs, we don't know. We need to find the genes that were involved if we are looking for inheritance of these mechanisms. And we don't know what those genes are at the moment.

 

Brian Butterworth's Can Fish Count? explores the numerical abilities of animals—and our own appetite for arithmetic.

Basic Books

 

Variations in human mathematical ability have about a 30 percent genetic component. For individuals with really bad numerical skills—those with dyscalculia—there also seems to be a significant heritable component. But it's a bit more complicated because the critical area for doing number processing in the human brain is in the parietal lobes. Humans with dyscalculia have different functioning and different structure in their parietal lobes. These are individuals who are very bad at very simple number tasks, like saying how many dots there are in a display. These people show less activation, and they show less gray matter density than controls. Those two things may go together. So other things that might affect the development of the parietal lobes also seem to lead to mathematical difficulties.

 

There are also genetic anomalies like Turner Syndrome, where females have one complete X chromosome and either no other X chromosome—they should have two—or an incomplete second X chromosome. I think every properly tested example of a Turner Syndrome female has dyscalculia. They've also got abnormalities in their parietal lobes in the presence of entirely normal cognitive processing. They can have entirely normal intelligence, memory, and so on. And yet they're very bad at just saying how many dots are on a display.

 

Ars Technica: What is the most surprising thing you learned while writing the book?

 

Brian Butterworth: I didn't know about insects like bees, ants, and spiders. For instance, some ants count their steps. An ant has to go and find food or building materials and bring it back to the nest. Most ants leave a chemical trail. So Antony Ant can use his own trail to find his way back. Other ants in that general area can use Antony's trail and maybe make it stronger. But suppose Antony can't leave a chemical trail. It's a very hot environment and very windy, so any chemical trail will disappear. How does Antony know where he’s looking for food and how he’s going to get back? He counts his steps so he knows how far he's gone by the number of steps he's counted.

 

There have been several experiments with this particular type of desert ant. That's exactly what they do. The original study discovered this by letting an ant find food in the laboratory and then modifying the length of the ant's legs. If they lengthened the legs after an ant found food, it wouldn't go back right to where it came from; it would end up further beyond the nest.

 

God knows how they calculate. The basic point of my book is that counting is really simple. Think of a tally counter. You press the lever once for each sheep you see and don't press it for the goats, for example. It’s a very cheap mechanism, just a couple of dollars on Amazon. In animal models, it requires very few virtual neurons to count the number of objects that a bee, for example, is counting when it's traversing a display.

 

The issue isn't how these tiny brains can count, because you don't need many neurons for that. What's expensive neurally is deciding what to count and being able to count different things. Humans can count almost anything, but I don't know whether ants can count anything other than their steps. We know that bees can count petals and we know that they can count landmarks. If they count four landmarks and they count four petals, is it the same representation in the bee's brain? We don't know that yet. I'm hoping someone is going to do that research.

What the simple mathematical abilities of animals can tell us about ourselves

Lu, a former NASA astronaut and executive director of the institute, led a team that developed a novel algorithm called THOR, which harnesses massive computing power to compare points of light seen in different images of the night sky, then matches them to piece together an individual asteroid’s path through the solar system. They’ve already discovered 104 asteroids with the system, according to an announcement they released on Tuesday.

While NASA, the European Space Agency, and other organizations have their own ongoing asteroid searches, all of them face the challenge of parsing telescope images with thousands or even 100,000 asteroids in them. Some of those telescopes don’t or can’t take multiple images of the same region on the same night, which makes it hard to tell if the same asteroid is appearing in multiple photos taken at different times. But THOR can make the connection between them.

“What’s magical about THOR is, it realizes that out of all those asteroids, this one in a certain image, and this one in another image four nights later, and this one seven nights later are all the same object and can be put together as the trajectory of a real asteroid,” Lu says. This makes it possible to track the object’s path as it moves, and to determine if it’s on a trajectory bound for Earth. Such a formidable task wouldn’t have been possible with older, slower computers, he adds. “This is showing the importance of computation in going forward in astronomy. What's driving this is that computation is becoming so powerful and so cheap and ubiquitous.”

Astronomers typically spy asteroids with something called a “tracklet,” a vector measured from multiple images, typically taken within an hour. These often involve an observing pattern with six or more images, which researchers can use to reconstruct the asteroid’s route. But if the data is incomplete—say, because a cloudy night obstructs the telescope’s view—then that asteroid will remain unconfirmed, or at least untrackable. But that’s where THOR, which stands for Tracklet-less Heliocentric Orbit Recovery, comes in, making it possible to ascertain the path of an asteroid that would have otherwise been missed.

While NASA benefits from telescopes and surveys dedicated to spotting potentially hazardous asteroids, other data sets abound. And THOR can use almost any of them. “THOR makes any astronomical data set a data set where you can search for asteroids. That’s one of the coolest things about the algorithm,” says Joachim Moeyens, cocreator of THOR, and an Asteroid Institute fellow and graduate student at the University of Washington. For this initial demonstration, Moeyens, Lu, and their colleagues searched billions of images taken between 2012 and 2019 from telescopes managed by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, many by a sensitive camera mounted on the Blanco 4-meter telescope in the Chilean Andes.

A mosaic of images of one of the 104 discoveries. This object would not have been discoverable by traditional means (only two tracklets, one on Sep 13 and another on Sep 30).

Photograph: B612 Asteroid Institute/University of Washington DiRAC Institute/DECam

THOR will have many of the same kinds of customers as government space agencies like NASA and the ESA, including scientists and mission planners wanting to map out their own spacecraft’s trajectories. And it will use images taken by government-funded telescopes. But it’s not a federally funded effort; its money comes entirely from private contributions from thousands of donors.

This effort by the Asteroid Institute, a program of the California-based nonprofit B612 Foundation, is part of the nonprofit’s broader vision. “B612 was founded with the goal to protect the planet from asteroid impacts. That is our primary goal, to build tools and technologies that will allow us to detect, map, and deflect asteroids,” says Danica Remy, president of B612. After all, if an asteroid’s on a collision course with Earth, it’s important to have a warning well in advance, in order to find ways to alter its course.

THOR runs on ADAM, the Asteroid Discovery Analysis and Mapping platform, an open source computational system using Google Cloud. Google supported the project by providing cloud computing and storage as well as advice on how to use its tools and systems. Eventually, ADAM will host additional algorithms and incorporate other data sets as input, Remy says.

The THOR team has shown the potential to map out the trajectories of numerous asteroids in our neighborhood, but there are few key caveats. Since their images date from a few years ago, asteroids that haven’t been reobserved lately have effectively been lost at this point, although they could be picked up again in newer images down the road, says Paul Chodas, director of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. More importantly, the THOR team’s first tranche of asteroid orbits come from the asteroid belt, circling between Mars and Jupiter, not near-Earth asteroids that have orbits that could overlap our own, like the potentially dangerous objects NASA researchers like Chodas track.

Visualizing the trajectories through the Solar System of asteroids discovered by ADAM.

Illustration: B612 Asteroid Institute/University of Washington DiRAC Institute/DECam

Chodas and Lu both see THOR as complementary to other asteroid-tracking approaches. “I think this is an interesting new capability. It adds to the toolbox of techniques for helping discover asteroids,” Chodas says. But while he applauds the Asteroid Institute’s attempts to map the small objects within the solar system, he adds, “We have been doing that for a couple decades, frankly.”

In 2005, Congress gave NASA the daunting task of finding at least 90 percent of asteroids 140 meters in diameter and larger. So far, the agency has only found around 40 percent of those objects. Astronomers at observatories like Pan-STARRS in Hawaii and the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona detect the asteroids, and then NASA researchers calculate their trajectories and collate them in a massive database. They’ve now cataloged more than 1.2 million asteroids in the solar system and about 3,800 comets. (Near-Earth icy comets, like the one that plowed into the planet at the end of the movie Don’t Look Up don’t last long, making them vastly outnumbered by asteroids, Chodas says.)

If someone eventually comes across an asteroid heading directly toward Earth, there has to be a plan for “planetary defense”—namely, changing the object’s trajectory. NASA is conducting an asteroid deflection test called DART later this year, and the Chinese space agency has a similar mission planned for later this decade. Researchers including Lu have studied other techniques, like a gravitational tractor, which involves tugging an asteroid into a slightly different orbit. NASA has also given early seed money to develop a concept that would involve sending a rocket to shoot rod-like explosives into an asteroid to pulverize it.

For now, the THOR team is upgrading the algorithm so  it can eventually efficiently track killer asteroids throughout the solar system, including the near-Earth ones, and not just those in the belt, Moeyens says. They’re also preparing for a fire hose of images from the National Science Foundation-funded Vera Rubin Observatory, an 8.4-meter telescope with a 3,200-megapixel camera being built atop a mountain in northern Chile, which will have “first light” late next year. It will amass 20 terabytes of data every night. For its part, NASA’s planetary defense plans will get a boost from the Near-Earth Object Surveyor, an infrared space telescope launching in 2026.

Last Friday, B612 announced that it had collected $1.3 million to build its ADAM asteroid-spotting platform, and it secured a $1 million gift-matching grant from Tito’s Handmade Vodka. “Asteroids do hit the world, and at some point they will,” Lu says. “For a small amount of money, you can literally change the future of the world.”

The First Privately Funded Killer Asteroid Spotter Is Here

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Solar and wind keep getting cheaper as the field becomes smarter

Prior research has suggested that dogs can smell it when someone near them has a disease, such as cancer. Some research has also suggested that dogs might be able to do the same with COVID-19. To find out if that is indeed the case, the researchers tested the sniffing ability of multiple dogs faced with multiple sweat samples.

To test their ability to recognize COVID-19, multiple dogs were trained to sniff samples of human sweat and to sit down if they detected the virus. Training was done in ways similar to that done with dogs trained to sniff out explosives. Once they were tested, the dogs were taken to the Alfort School of Veterinary Medicine where cones had been set up with sweat samples in them.

In all the dogs sniffed sweat samples collected from 355 human volunteers. The researchers found them to be 97% accurate in identifying those people who had already tested positive by a PCR test. And they were 100% accurate in detecting COVID-19 in people who were not experiencing any symptoms.

In other tests, the dogs were found to be more accurate in identifying people with COVID-19 than antigen tests, which are the type most commonly used at home.

The researchers note that sweat samples were collected from armpits, from the back of the neck and from used face masks, demonstrating that samples can be collected from multiple body sites. They also note that it is still not known how it is that dogs are able to smell infections in people. And they point out that dogs are much faster at detecting COVID-19 than any of the tests that humans have created, providing results nearly instantly. The only drawback the team could find was the limited availability of trained dogs.

Source

TikTok videos with the hashtag “#vagusnerve” have been viewed more than 64 million times and there are nearly 70,000 posts with the hashtag on Instagram. Some of the most popular ones feature simple hacks to “tone” or “reset” the vagus nerve, in which people plunge their faces into ice water baths or lie on their backs with ice packs on their chests. There are also neck and ear massages, eye exercises and deep-breathing techniques.

Now, wellness companies have capitalized on the trend, offering products like “vagus massage oil,” vibrating bracelets and pillow mists, that claim to stimulate the nerve, but that have not been endorsed by the scientific community.

Researchers who study the vagus nerve say that stimulating it with electrodes can potentially help improve mood and alleviate symptoms in those who suffer from treatment-resistant depression, among other ailments. But are there other ways to activate the vagus nerve? Who would benefit most from doing so? And what exactly is the vagus nerve, anyway? Here’s a look at what we know so far.

What is the vagus nerve?

The term “vagus nerve” is actually shorthand for thousands of fibers. They are organized into two bundles that run from the brain stem down through each side of the neck and into the torso, branching outward to touch our internal organs, said Dr. Kevin J. Tracey, a neurosurgeon and president of the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, Northwell Health’s research center in New York.

Imagine something akin to a tree, whose limbs interact with nearly every organ system in the body. (The word “vagus” means “wandering” in Latin.)

The vagus nerve picks up information about how the organs are functioning and also sends information from the brain stem back to the body, helping to control digestion, heart rate, voice, mood and the immune system.

For those reasons, the vagus nerve — the longest of the 12 cranial nerves — is sometimes referred to as an “information superhighway.”
Dr. Tracey compared it to a trans-Atlantic cable.

“It’s not a mishmash of signals,” he said. “Every signal has a specific job.”

The vagus is the main nerve of the parasympathetic nervous system. Unlike the sympathetic nervous system, which is associated with the body’s “fight or flight” response, the parasympathetic branch helps us rest, digest and calm down.

Scientists first began examining the vagus nerve in the late 1800s to investigate whether stimulating it could be a potential treatment for epilepsy. They later discovered that a side effect of activating the nerve was an improvement in mood. Today, researchers are examining how the nerve can affect psychiatric disorders, among other conditions.

What does the research say?

Evidence indicates that stimulating the vagus nerve can help people with epilepsy, diabetes, treatment-resistant depression and post-traumatic stress disorder — as well as inflammatory autoimmune conditions like Crohn’s disease or rheumatoid arthritis. There is even some preliminary research suggesting that long Covid symptoms could originate, in part, from the virus’s effect on the vagus nerve.

“It can sound sort of magical with all the things it does,” said Eric Porges, an assistant professor in the department of clinical and health psychology at the University of Florida who studies the vagus nerve. Our understanding of the vagus nerve “continues to grow in richness and depth,” he said, but there is still much to learn about how it works.

In the early 2000s, researchers started to show that vagus nerve stimulation could help some patients who were severely depressed and had not responded to other treatments.

A wave of studies followed.

By 2005, the Food and Drug Administration had approved implantable pulse-generating devices that sent electrical signals to the vagus nerve, for use in patients with treatment-resistant depression. Similar devices have also been approved for obesity — to help control feelings of hunger and fullness — and for the treatment of epilepsy. The downside of these devices, however, is that the surgery is expensive and it can take months — and sometimes as long as a year — to have an effect.

Researchers are now recruiting patients for the largest clinical trial to date examining to what degree vagus nerve stimulation may help patients with depression who have been unable to find relief with other treatments.

The device may be especially helpful for those with bipolar depression because so few treatments exist for them, said Dr. Scott Aaronson, one of the senior psychiatrists involved in the clinical trial and the chief science officer of the Institute for Advanced Diagnostics and Therapeutics, a center within the Sheppard Pratt psychiatric hospital that aims to help people who have not improved with conventional treatments and medications.

In general, one of the problems with treating depression “is that we’ve got a lot of medications that pretty much do the same thing,” Dr. Aaronson said. And when patients do not respond to those medications, “we don’t have a lot of novel stuff.”

Implanted vagus nerve stimulation isn’t currently accessible for most people, however, because insurers have so far declined to pay for the procedure, with the exception of Medicare recipients participating in the latest clinical trial.

Dr. Tracey’s research, which uses internal vagus nerve stimulation to treat inflammation, may also have applications for psychiatric disorders like PTSD, said Dr. Andrew H. Miller, the director of the Behavioral Immunology Program at Emory University, who studies how the brain and the immune system interact, and how those interactions can contribute to stress and depression.

PTSD is characterized by increased measures of inflammation in the blood, he said, which “can influence circuits in the brain that are related to anxiety.”

In one pilot study at Emory, for example, researchers electronically stimulated the neck skin near the vagus in 16 people, eight of whom received vagus nerve stimulation treatment and eight of whom received a sham treatment. The researchers found that the stimulation treatment reduced inflammatory responses to stress and was associated with a decrease in PTSD symptoms, indicating that such stimulation may be useful for some patients, including those with elevated inflammatory biomarkers.

Meanwhile, Dr. Porges and his colleagues at the University of Florida have patented a method to adjust vagus nerve electrical stimulation based on a patient’s physiology. He is now working with the company Evren Technologies, where he is a shareholder, to develop an external medical device that uses this approach for patients with PTSD.

How do you measure vagus nerve activity?

The activity of the vagus nerve is difficult to measure directly, especially given how complex it is. But because some vagus nerve fibers connect with the heart, experts can indirectly measure cardiac vagal tone — or the way in which your nervous system regulates your heart — by looking at your heart rate variability, which are the fluctuations in the amount of time between your heartbeats, on an EKG.

An abnormal vagal tone — one in which there is very little heart rate variability — has been associated with conditions like diabetes, heart failure and hypertension.

A high variability between heart beats may signify an ideal vagal tone.

How can you improve your vagal ‘tone’ at home?

Holding your breath and submerging your face in cold water can trigger the “diving reflex,” a response that slows the heart beat and constricts blood vessels. Some people who have tried it report that it has a calming effect and can even reduce insomnia. Others wrap an ice pack in cloth and place it on their chest to relieve anxiety.

These specific exercises haven’t been sufficiently studied as methods for controlling anxiety or depression, so it is difficult to know if they work, or if they do, how well. Even so, some experts say they’re worth a shot.

“It’s certainly one of the more benign things you can do,” Dr. Aaronson said.

But Dr. Tracey urged caution, adding that it’s difficult to properly assess the risks and benefits without clinical data. “I would not advise anyone to do any intervention without checking with their physician,” he said.

“For wellness, try to maintain high vagus nerve activity through mindfulness, exercise and paced breathing,” Dr. Tracey said. “These are all very good for you.”

Source

Mysterious Hypatia stone might hold earliest evidence of Type Ia supernova

NASA just bought the rest of the space station crew flights from SpaceX

• In the statement, Microsoft outlined four key principles that it wants to abide by so that it may work openly and constructively with unions. The principles are as follows:
•  We believe in the importance of listening to our employees’ concerns.
•  We recognize that employees have a legal right to choose whether to form or join a union.
•  We are committed to creative and collaborative approaches with unions when employees wish to exercise their rights and Microsoft is presented with a specific unionization proposal.
•  Building on our global labor experiences, we are dedicated to maintaining a close relationship and shared partnership with all our employees, including those represented by a union.

While Microsoft is setting a more positive tone about unions within its ranks, the company’s President Brad Smith said that employees will never need to organise to dialogue with leaders in the company about how things could change for the better. Nevertheless, there may be those who are better suited to using unions as a vehicle to get their issues addressed and Microsoft is saying it’s OK with this too.

While it’s certainly a positive step from Microsoft and one that will get relations between it and its employees off to a good start on the union front, we will have to see how things play out in practice. Only at this point will we see how well these pledges carry over into practice.

Source

Right now, the US doesn’t have such a plan. That’s been the case since 2011, when regulators facing stiff local opposition pulled the plug on a decades-long effort to store waste underneath Yucca Mountain in Nevada, stranding $44 billion in federal funds meant for the job. Since then, the nuclear industry has done a good job of storing its waste on a temporary basis, which is part of the reason Congress has shown little interest in working out a solution for future generations. Long-term thinking isn’t their strong suit. “It’s been a complete institutional failure in the US,” Krall says.

But there’s a new type of nuclear on the block: the small modular reactor (SMR). For a long time, the US nuclear industry has been stagnating, in large part because of the tremendous costs of building massive new plants. SMRs, by contrast, are small enough to be built in a factory and then hauled elsewhere to produce power. Advocates hope this will make them more cost-effective than the big reactors of today, offering an affordable, always-on complement to less-predictable renewables like wind and solar. According to some, they should also produce less radioactive waste than their predecessors. A Department of Energy-sponsored report estimated in 2014 that the US nuclear industry would produce 94 percent less fuel waste if big, old reactors were replaced with new smaller ones.

Krall was skeptical about that last part. “SMRs are generally being marketed as a solution—that maybe you don’t need a geological repository for them,” she says. So as a postdoc at Stanford, she and two prominent nuclear experts started digging through the patents, research papers, and license applications of two dozen proposed reactor designs, none of which have been built so far. Thousands of pages of redacted documents, a few public records requests, and a vast appendix full of calculations later, Krall, who is now a scientist with Sweden’s nuclear waste company, got an answer: By many measures, the SMR designs produce not less, but potentially much more waste: more than five times the spent fuel per unit of power, and as much as 35 times for other forms of waste. The research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences earlier this week.

Startups seeking licenses to build SMR designs have disputed the findings and say they’re prepared for whatever waste is generated while the US sorts out permanent disposal. “Five times a small number is still a really small number,” says John Kotek, who leads policy and public affairs at the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry’s trade association.

But the authors say the “back-end” of the fuel cycle, which includes waste and decommissioning, should be a bigger factor in what they consider to be the precarious economics of the new reactors. “The point of this paper is to prompt a discussion,” says Allison Macfarlane, a former chair of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and a coauthor of the paper. “We can’t get to how much it is going to cost until we understand what we’re dealing with.”

Designing smaller reactors may make them easier to build, but it also creates a problem: neutron leakage. Reactors produce energy by firing neutrons at uranium atoms, causing them to split. This sends out more neutrons, which in turn find other targets and cause a chain reaction. But some of these neutrons miss. Instead, they fly out of the core, hitting other parts of the reactor that become “activated,” or radioactive. Inside SMRs, there’s less space for the neutrons to jostle around in, so more of them leak. There’s no getting around the issue. “We’re basically dealing with gravity here, the laws of physics,” Krall says. “It’s something you have to engineer your way around.” 

One fix is to encase the core in materials like steel and graphite that reflect or reduce the speed of the neutrons rattling inside. But in time, these materials are being so thoroughly bombarded with neutrons that they become radioactive themselves, and need to be replaced. In addition, some of the reactor designs include sodium or liquid metal coolants that develop their own radioactivity issues. The authors point to experimental reactors in Scotland and Tennessee, where scientists have spent decades trying to figure out how to decommission parts that have become contaminated by the cooling systems. So that was the first problem Krall’s team found: The crowded conditions inside SMRs mean more neutron leakage, but the materials needed to contain such leaks inevitably become radioactive waste.

Problem number two is the fuel. The other major workaround for neutron leakage is to use fuel that’s more highly enriched with Uranium-235—the atoms that are actually split. But the researchers estimate that even with a greater concentration of atoms to hit, these reactors will end up with higher volumes of leftover fuel, given a lower rate of “burn up.” Once spent, the fuel needs to be handled with special care. With a higher concentration of fissionable atoms in the waste, its “critical mass”—that is, the amount of material to sustain a chain reaction—declines sharply, making the waste more volatile. The result is a bigger volume of material that needs to be divvied up into smaller batches for safe-keeping.

Those varied streams of waste complicate the calculus for a permanent storage facility, which needs to be carefully designed to ensure the surrounding geology can safely sequester the material for thousands of years. “What is clearly dead-on is that you’re going to have a whole bunch of types of spent nuclear fuel, and that is going to be much more difficult to manage than having one type of fuel,” says Peter Burns, a nuclear expert at the University of Notre Dame who wasn’t involved in the research.

And Burns, for one, isn’t shocked by the magnitude of the findings, though he adds that it’s important to keep the issue in perspective. After all, SMRs are one potential solution to the climate crisis that resulted from another part of the energy industry’s failure to clean up its waste. “The back end of the coal cycle was to release all the gas to the atmosphere, and anything that didn’t fly away you put in an ash pile,” he says. “I would argue that the nuclear industry has done a fantastic job of dealing with waste, but eventually it has to be disposed of. The extent that a proliferation of SMRs will make the issue worse is real.”

Representatives for SMR builders say the calculations overestimate the amount of waste their facilities will emit, the exact size and nature of which varies by design. Diane Hughes, a spokesperson for NuScale, the reactor designer that was the subject of the paper’s most extensive analysis, says that the researchers’ assumptions lead to an overestimate of spent fuel. She adds that the company’s design, though smaller, is chemically similar to existing reactors, and doesn’t create novel kinds of waste.

Jacob DeWitte, CEO of Oklo, which hopes to build a sodium-cooled design, notes that radioactivity in the spent coolant is typically short-lived, and that the contamination issues that afflicted previous sodium-cooled reactors were specific to those designs. “This is a limited-scope analysis which is designed to point out negative comparisons,” DeWitte says. All of the companies contacted by WIRED noted that the overall volume of waste is small and can be easily stored while the US figures out a permanent solution for it.

Kotek of NEI adds that the drive to develop new reactors is also pushing the industry toward new solutions for waste, like reusing spent fuel and developing safer and cheaper methods of storage. It has also added urgency to dealing with long-term disposal, he says, noting that the Biden administration’s support for advanced nuclear power as part of its decarbonization plans has been accompanied by a push for a new office to handle waste.

One big factor that isn’t included in the analysis is the potential to recycle nuclear fuel, which could significantly reduce how much goes to waste. The authors cite concerns about other forms of waste generated by recycling processes and the failure of recycling to catch on for the current generation of US reactors, despite more success in places like France. But many SMR companies, including Oklo, have baked the idea into their business, in part to reduce operational costs and also because of the current lack of easy sources for newly enriched fuel. DeWitte says that the company also hopes to find ways to recycle other forms of non-fuel waste, like the activated steel.

And he points to ongoing work on permanent storage, funded in part by the Department of Energy. Oklo is working with another startup called Deep Isolation, which is exploring the idea of drilling boreholes deep into the ground and sending down canisters of waste. In theory, that could expand the kinds of places that could serve as repositories, since they don’t rely on finding a place with the right type of natural cavern, like Yucca Mountain.

But the pathway for making that happen—getting that method approved and then finding a place to do it—is uncertain. Macfarlane, who is now head of the University of British Columbia’s public policy school, notes that any solutions for SMR waste will run into the same pushback that Yucca Mountain did over environmental concerns. “It’s a societal problem, not a technical one,” she says. She believes both US regulators and the vendors themselves should be doing more to anticipate how waste will be handled before the reactors are approved and built to anticipate and factor in the costs. The SMR industry looks brightest to her in places that are doing a better job of figuring out long-term storage, she adds, pointing to Finland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. “The real issue is that the US doesn’t have a plan for its spent nuclear fuel,” Macfarlane says. “I’m not feeling optimistic right now.”

Smaller Reactors May Still Have a Big Nuclear Waste Problem

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For a month in a central Coventry car park, thousands of visitors wandered Air One, Urban-Air Port’s 1,700-square-meter modular popup building. In many ways it resembled any other transport hub—apart from the take-off platform which rose out of the center of its roof. While some services were up and running— including the café—the only aircraft taking off were delivery drones, though Hyundai’s Supernal eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing) vehicle was on display.

The aim wasn’t to prove that air taxis are the future of urban transport. That’s the job of companies such as Joby, Lilium and Supernal, all of which have functional test aircraft and are progressing through regulatorary certification. Instead, Urban-Air Port was demonstrating a key bit of infrastructure and also working out how to squeeze in retail space and make boarding and disembarking as hassle-free as possible. And that includes how long passengers would have to queue to get a latte. “We thought the café was going to be way too big,” Sandhu says. “But it was exactly the right size.”

Contrary to dreams of flying cars, eVTOLs won’t initially—or likely ever—land in the street in front of your house. That would disrupt traffic, be dangerous and noisy. For one, most eVTOL designs are simply too large—the Lilium Jet has a 14-meter wingspan, 2 meters wider than a standard single-lane road. Instead, to hail an “air taxi,” passengers will need to make their way to a local vertiport, which could sit atop train stations, office blocks, or even float in water.

Figuring out exactly what these buildings will require isn’t simple. Urban-Air worked with Coventry University on a virtual reality model to test the space before spending 11 weeks assembling Air One. Companies making eVTOLs, including German air-taxi startup Volocopter, have also released their own visions for what a vertiport might include, usually featuring glossy computer renders of shiny white lounges atop skyscrapers. Such designs might look futuristic, but they will likely be a logistical nightmare, with queuing, boarding, and recharging all much harder on the 70th floor than on terra firma.

Paul Hermans, an airport planner at engineering and design consultancy Arup, worked with both Urban-Air Port and Volocopter to develop vertiport designs. His starting point for a building for vehicles that aren’t yet in the air and a market that doesn’t yet exist is simple: Start with regulation. Any port for aviation will be as heavily regulated as an airport or helipad, so looking at the rules around both can help inform a vertiport’s requirements; plus, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) has released draft regulations for vertiports, so sticking to that document is a good starting place.

On the technical side, any vertiport has a few key physical requirements: a stable electric grid for fast recharging, a hangar for maintenance and a system to move vehicles into it, and enough room around the takeoff and landing pad for the aircraft to maneuver. While Urban-Air Port’s design has a moving platform to lift vehicles to the roof of the building, Hermans explains that vertiports will require less clearance than helicopters, which land a lot less vertically than most of us imagine—eVTOLs, by comparison, do, as the name suggests, actually take off vertically. “That allows you, in your vertiport design, to start to integrate them into much denser urban environments where helicopters might not be able to operate,” says Hermans.

While computer renders of vertiports often place them atop buildings, that would require passengers to have access to a lift to the top, and many building managers will not be keen on letting random members of the public inside. Tower rooftops also often house building equipment such as lift mechanisms and air conditioning ducting, leaving a relatively small footprint to place a vertiport. Sure, it might be fine for a single vehicle, but a financially viable vertiport is likely to require space for multiple vehicles.

Though some wealthy private companies may offer their staff rides in air taxis as a perk, Hermans predicts public vertiports are more likely to be sited atop lower buildings, such as car parks—and this is why Sandhu spent three weeks in a Coventry car park next to a train station. “The challenge is getting aircraft into compact, dense locations,” he says—and, crucially, as close as possible to other transport infrastructure.

There’s another reason lower vertiports have merit: They take less time to board. Urban-Air placed its OneAir port in a car park next to a train station to make it faster and easier to access. Had it been on top of a building, passengers would add extra time to their journey. On the other hand, the more centrally located vertiports are, and the lower to the ground they are, the higher the risk of crashes and noise.

That’s the physical side of vertiports. On the passenger side, it’s unclear whether security will be similar to airports or train stations—and reducing time-consuming queues and checks matters for a market that is betting on quick trips. “If you’re spending 10 minutes going through security for a flight that only lasts five minutes, that doesn’t really stack up all that well,” Hermans says.

Of course, airports aren’t just about travel—like it or not they’re about shopping too. To work out how to best make use of the space available, Urban-Air Port worked with duty free experts from Qatar Airways on the design of the retail areas. “The key thing was having brands showcase some of their products in a very small footprint,” Sandhu says.

It may seem a bit early to be fine-tuning space for lattes and retail—after all, none of the eVTOLs are yet approved by regulators, let alone in mass production. But the industry needs to start considering infrastructure before air taxis are ready to fly. “If you make an airplane, you don’t have to worry about where it’s going to go,” says Sergio Cecutta, of transport analyst firm SMG Consulting. “We don’t want to get into a catch-22 situation where there are no vehicles, so there’s no infrastructure. We need to do it at the same time.”

And getting the timing right is no easy task, with “flying car” startups consistently missing their own deadlines. Right now, even aircraft being trialed can’t go into production without regulatory approval—which puts punchy promises of air-taxi services by 2024 firmly in the hands of the US Federal Aviation Administration and the EASA.

SMG Consulting tracks vehicle development, rating Joby and Volocopter as being “highly likely” to hit that deadline; plenty of the other two-dozen rivals on its list aren’t winning quite as much confidence. SMG also tracks infrastructure readiness, but of the five companies it follows, none are expected to have a port before 2024. In short, a lot is going to happen in 2024, or nothing at all. “In 2021, people realized eVTOLS are real,” Cecutta says. “So 2022 will be us realizing we’ve got to start building stuff.”

Plus, the benefit of eVTOLs is that they can land basically anywhere—certainly anywhere a helicopter can. So rather than racing to install vertiports, operators can use existing aviation infrastructure. Lilium vice-chairman Alex Asseily says the company is already considering how its electric aircraft could cover routes in Florida with partner NetJets. That could involve, he says by way of example, a route linking West Palm Beach Airport with an existing urban heliport. “We can land at a standard heliport. The only thing you’d need to add to it would be a charger,” he says.

All the Lilium Jet really needs is a “parking spot” and a charger in order to land, suggesting that installing full vertiports for every destination may be unnecessary in the early stages. “What we’re trying to do is not be restricted, to not be forced to invest huge amounts on day one,” Asseily says. “None of this infrastructure takes a long time to build—building a slab of concrete which an aircraft can land on with a supercharger isn’t easy, but it’s quick.”

This Is What Flying Car Ports Should Look Like

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