New research has revealed that the immune response of the body and the lymphatic system (part of the immune system) are crucial in the way that the heart repairs itself after a heart attack has caused damage to the heart muscle.

Key to the study was the discovery of the role played by macrophages, specialist cells that can destroy bacteria or initiate helpful inflammation responses. As the first responders on a scene after a heart attack, these macrophages produce a particular type of protein called VEGFC, the researchers report.

"We found that macrophages, or immune cells that rush to the heart after a heart attack to 'eat' damaged or dead tissue, also induce vascular endothelial growth factor C (VEGFC) that triggers the formation of new lymphatic vessels and promotes healing," says pathologist Edward Thorp from Northwestern University in Illinois.

The researchers describe it as a Jekyll and Hyde scenario: 'good' macrophages producing VEGFC and 'bad' macrophages not producing any VEGFC but causing a pro-inflammatory response that can cause further harm to the heart and surrounding tissue.

In order for the heart to fully repair itself, dying cells need to be cleared away – a process known as efferocytosis that macrophages play an important role in. Studying this process in cells in the lab and in mice, the team pinpointed the way that the right type of VEGFC-producing macrophages did a proper repair job.

What future research could look into next is how to increase the number of helpful macrophages in the heart and reduce the number of – or even eliminate – the damaging macrophages, boosting the chances of a healthy recovery.

"Our challenge now is to find a way either to administer VEGFC or to coax these macrophages to induce more VEGFC, in order to speed the heart repair process," says Thorp.

When people are hit with a heart attack, they become at high risk of heart failure, where the heart becomes unable to carry on pumping blood around the body. That risk can be reduced with modern-day drugs such as beta-blockers, but it's still there.

While scientists are continuing to improve our understanding of how cardiovascular disease is caused, and how we can better diagnose the risk of heart problems earlier, heart failure continues to kill hundreds of thousands of people a year in just the US.

Further studies like this one will shed more light on the biological processes happening in response to a heart attack – particularly the way in which the process of efferocytosis is used to trigger the VEGFC protein required for heart muscle repair.

"We are working to understand more about the progression to heart failure after a heart attack, in order to intervene early and reset the course to cardiac repair," says vascular biologist Guillermo Oliver from Northwestern University.

The research has been published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

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That didn't mean more flights were not on the cards; in fact, it's normal for NASA's spacecraft mission parameters to be set conservatively. But late last year, NASA extended the mission indefinitely, and the little helicopter that could has now blown past its initial objectives: It completed a milestone 25 flights in the thin, tenuous Martian atmosphere.

Actually, it has completed 28 flights at time of writing, but Flight 25 was an absolute corker. On 8 April, when the flight took place, Ingenuity broke records for both distance and speed, soaring 704 meters (2,310 feet) and up to 5.5 meters per second (12 mph).

And it sent home images, which its handlers have now stitched together into a video, showing a robotic helicopter's-eye view of a flight across Mars.

"For our record-breaking flight, Ingenuity's downward-looking navigation camera provided us with a breathtaking sense of what it would feel like gliding 33 feet above the surface of Mars at 12 miles per hour," said engineer and Ingenuity team lead Teddy Tzanetos of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The duration of the flight was 161.3 seconds, but the helicopter didn't start taking images until about one second in. That's because Ingenuity uses its camera for navigation; it doesn't switch on until the helicopter reaches an altitude of about 1 meter, to avoid the camera being confused by dust kicked up at takeoff or landing.

In the video, Ingenuity rises to an altitude of 33 meters before accelerating towards the southwest. It reaches its maximum speed of 5.5 meters per second within three seconds. First, the helicopter flies over some rippling sand, then over rocky fields, followed by relatively flat and featureless ground, on which Ingenuity could make a safe landing.

These flight parameters were pre-set, and sent to Ingenuity by the helicopter's team of pilots on the ground. Once in the air (such as it is), Ingenuity is on its own; the time lag between Earth and Mars means that no mid-course corrections can be taken.

This means that the occasional mishap can occur, like one we saw a year ago, when a glitch in the helicopter's image processing pipeline led to a lag between what Ingenuity was seeing, and where it actually was in real time. Thankfully, built-in failsafes allowed Ingenuity to land safely so that NASA engineers could issue a patch prior to the next flight.

Since then, it's been pretty smooth flying, even in very alien atmospheric conditions to those here on Earth, and the little helicopter shows no sign of slowing. Mars' atmospheric volume is less than 1 percent of Earth's; we still marvel, with every flight, that humans managed to build something that can fly in it. Ingenuity, indeed!

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The researchers behind the study have identified certain genetic keys inside plants that lead to two separate signaling pathways, explaining why plants react so strongly to being touched.

Understanding more about how this process works at a fundamental level could help researchers in a variety of different areas, from improving plant health to getting higher harvest yields from the same crop.

"We exposed the plant thale cress to soft brushing, after which thousands of genes were activated and stress hormones were released," says biologist Olivier Van Aken from Lund University in Sweden.

"We then used genetic screening to find the genes that were responsible for this process."

The genetic screening searched for mutant forms of the plant, ones known to respond in various ways to repeated physical touches. Past research on their anatomy, especially their roots, indicated special protein channels responded to distortions in the cell membranes by facilitating chemical signals.

Less was known about how this process worked in other parts of the plant, such as their leaves. There were hints compounds like jasmonic acid played a critical role in transforming those early chemical signals into behavioral or growth changes, but there were also plenty of gaps that needed to be filled in.

The researchers spotted six individual genes that played a role in touch response, three for the signaling pathway related to jasmonic acid, and three on a separate signaling pathway.

That gives biologists a lot more to work with when it comes to understanding how and why this response happens and gets us further towards potentially manipulating it in the future.

"Our results solve a scientific mystery that has eluded the world's molecular biologists for 30 years," says biologist Essam Darwish from Lund University. 

"We have identified a completely new signaling pathway that controls a plant's response to physical contact and touch. Now the search for more paths continues."

From knife cuts to animal bites to torrents of rain, every touch that a plant gets leads to a defensive molecular response – although these responses can be quite varied. They can lead to plants becoming more stress-resistant and flowering later in the year, for example.

The idea to try and harness this response isn't new: scientists are already looking into how carefully managed "mechanical wounding" can make for sturdier crops and harvests that are more plentiful, because the plants build up more of a resistance to stress.

As climate change puts even more pressure on agriculture and wheat production, those processes are becoming even more important – and this latest piece of research gives scientists vital information about how this is all controlled.

"Given the extreme weather conditions and pathogen infections that climate change leads to, it is of utmost importance to find new ecologically responsible ways to improve crop productivity and resistance," says Van Aken.

The research has been published in Science Advances.

Source

Mining museums’ genomic treasures

It was a monumental day for the environmental movement more than 30 years ago when all 198 countries in the world agreed on something for the first and only time ever. They signed on to the Montreal Protocol, making a pact to phase out a roster of chemicals that damage the Earth’s ozone layer. Chief among these were the chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and hydrochlorofluorocarbons used by the cooling and refrigeration industry. Alternatives, such as hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), were quickly found.

 

But in recent years, scientists have come to realize that the Montreal Protocol of 1987 might have traded an immediate problem for a long-term one. Though HFCs don’t cause the same damage to the ozone layer as CFCs do, the chemicals have warming potentials hundreds to thousands of times higher than that of CO2—making their growing global use a cause for concern.

 

The 20th-century industrial revolution saw a major boom in the air-conditioning and refrigeration industry in Europe and North America. Now, as developing nations boost their economies, countries such as China, India, and Nigeria are seeing skyrocketing demand for these appliances.

 

About 3.6 billion cooling appliances—for cooling buildings and refrigerating food and other items such as medicines—are in use today, according to a 2020 report by the United Nations Environment Program; the number is expected to leap to 9.5 billion by 2050. What’s more, that figure would be a staggering 14 billion if everyone who needed cooling services could acquire them, according to one estimate.

 

Knowable Magazine spoke with Shelie Miller, an environmental engineer at the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. Miller coauthored an article in the 2021 Annual Review of Environment and Resources that examined the rising global demand for cooling and refrigeration, its effects on greenhouse gas emissions, and potential solutions. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

 

This may sound like an odd topic for a lot of people. Why should we be concerned about the cooling and refrigeration industry?

 

When people think about environmental impacts that need to be tackled, it’s very rare that people think about cooling services. But it is an incredibly important issue that isn’t really being addressed. “Cooling service” is a very broad category that refers to temperature-controlled environments. And it intersects the building, transportation, and food sectors. It has a tremendous impact when you start looking at overall global energy use and greenhouse gas emissions.

 

And the industry is set to see exponential growth in developing countries. So it’s important that we realize the industry’s overall impact.

 

How does the cooling and refrigeration industry affect the environment?

 

Cooling an environment, whether it is a household refrigerator or an air conditioner, requires a tremendous amount of energy. Because our electricity grids rely heavily on fossil fuels, any energy use that goes to reducing temperature also emits greenhouse gases. So much of the environmental impact is simply the consumption of an incredible amount of energy, largely based on fossil fuels.

 

Also, when we talk about the technology of cooling spaces, it requires something called refrigerants. Refrigerants are chemicals that are used to reduce temperatures and conventional refrigerants often have high global warming potential.

 

So even though we’re using a relatively small amount of refrigerants, the impact of refrigerants when they leak out into the atmosphere ends up having a major impact on climate.

 

We once used refrigerants like CFCs that had a devastating impact on the ozone layer. So we banned them and introduced new chemicals. Did we only trade problems here?

 

One of the great environmental successes is the ban of certain chemicals that are ozone-depleting. As you mentioned, one of the major environmental conventions, the Montreal Protocol, banned the use of ozone-depleting chemicals in the refrigerant industry. As replacements, we came up with hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs. And that did a great and effective job of reducing ozone depletion, but at the cost of warming.

 

So we traded off ozone depletion potential for high greenhouse gas emissions. In another international agreement called the Kigali Amendment, nations are trying to tackle the greenhouse gas emission-associated problems with refrigerants. So we are now trying to have alternative refrigerants that also have a lower global warming potential.

 

From shipping containers to home food storage to cooled buildings and buses, refrigeration and air conditioning crop up in many domestic and commercial settings. Their use across so many aspects of modern life may partly explain why they can be overlooked in climate change discussions, says environmental engineer Shelie Miller.

UN Environment Programme and IEAE (2020), UNEP, Nairobi and IEA, Paris

 

What kind of alternative refrigerants are we talking about? Can you give me some examples?

 

Some of them can just be things like carbon dioxide, actually, which can be used as an alternative refrigerant by using the thermodynamic properties of gases and methods common to heat pump technologies. CO2-based cooling systems use highly compressed CO2 and then manipulate the pressure of the gas. When the gas expands due to reduced pressure, it absorbs heat. Unlike many common refrigerants that can have greenhouse gas potentials orders of magnitude greater than CO2, any CO2 that leaks from these cooling systems has minimal warming potential.

 

Are we planning on industrializing the process of using alternative refrigerants? Are there any processes already on the market? Or is it only in the development phase?

 

I think there’s definitely major interest in some of these new alternative coolants. And they can be very effective. I think there is a challenge, though, in that a lot of our installed equipment has these historic HFCs in them. And so even if we have alternative refrigerants that go in newly installed equipment, we still have this overall stock of refrigerants in our buildings, air conditioners, and refrigerators that causes a major warming threat, particularly when the devices are at the end of their life.

 

Why are you so interested in the growth of this industry for developing nations? How much is the refrigeration industry expected to expand in these parts of the world?

 

One of the big reasons to be concerned about cooling services, as an industry, is the tremendous expected growth, not just in one but in two major sectors. The first is in building cooling, which includes air conditioning of spaces. The second is product refrigeration—keeping products like meat, vegetables, and vaccines cool and safe throughout their supply chains.

 

Both of these services are currently experiencing, or are expected to experience, rapid growth in developing countries in the coming decades. If we don’t deal with cooling services as an industry and reduce the overall environmental impacts, then we will see tremendous growth in environmental impact.

 

When you look at things like household air conditioning, in much of the developing, world they don’t have broad access. But we’re facing an increasingly warming climate, so the demand for cooling services, particularly in buildings, is going to be critical for health and safety.

 

People are getting wealthier and paying for cooling services. The most efficient kinds of air conditioning are centralized systems that will heat entire buildings and residences. Unfortunately, that is often offered at a price point that is outside of the consumer’s ability to pay and which requires massive retrofits of existing buildings. That’s why we will be seeing a lot of room air-conditioning units being installed in major cities of developing countries.

 

Demand for air conditioners—and the power to run them—is projected to rise sharply in the next few decades as the population grows and gathers increasingly in cities, the world gets hotter, and more people have money to buy the technology. These projections are for a “baseline” scenario, meaning one assuming current activities and plans to combat global warming and not more aggressive measures.

UN Environment Programme and IEAE (2020), UNEP, Nairobi and IEA, Paris

 

Apart from the warming impacts, are there other kinds of environmental impacts that we should be worried about?

 

The big ones do tend to be associated with global warming potential. But anything that requires energy has all of the impacts associated with the electricity sector. If you’re talking about electricity grids that rely largely on coal, you have a lot of localized air quality emissions; you have mining emissions associated with coal mining; and the whole slate of toxins and other air quality issues associated with the burning of coal.

 

How serious do you think this problem is? To what extent does the refrigeration and air conditioning sector tend to damage the environment?

 

It goes back to this idea: Cooling spaces requires a tremendous amount of energy. Even very efficient air conditioners and refrigerators require a lot of energy to operate. If we don’t have a clean energy grid, there are always going to be environmental impacts associated with the expansion of cooling services.

 

That said, even if you had a perfectly clean electricity grid, you still have the refrigerant emissions associated with cooling. So you don’t ever erase the global warming potential, at least with our current existing stock, but you certainly can reduce it by reducing grid emissions.

 

What kind of interventions can we apply to this existing system?

 

I always think of them in two bins. One directly impacts the technology, and one indirectly impacts the technology.

 

For direct interventions, we can come up with alternative refrigerants to replace high global warming-potential refrigerants. We can also find ways to reduce the overall energy needs of providing cooling services. That can come in the form of making more energy-efficient equipment or changing consumer behaviors, like having a slightly warmer environment in office spaces and residential spaces.

 

For indirect interventions, we need to think more broadly about the built environment to reduce the need for air conditioning technology. This often takes the form of better building design and reducing urban heat island effects. It can also go with varying air conditioning and refrigeration loads according to time of day and actual need. There are a lot of ways that we can think about making air conditioning and refrigeration smarter, not just in terms of the technologies themselves but also in terms of managing energy use.

 

Are there systems or industries or companies that are already using these kinds of innovative techniques? Can you give me examples?

 

In terms of direct interventions, there are a lot of activities that are incredibly promising. So again, we have the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, which is trying to phase out high global warming-potential refrigerants in favor of low global warming-potential refrigerants. It’s going to take a while, but we’re going to get those new refrigerants into the marketplace.

 

The second major thing is energy-efficient appliances. Depending on the specific country, there are manufacturing labels and certifications for room air conditioners or household refrigerators that have energy-efficiency ratings. In the US, it’s Energy Star. In Europe and Asia, they have a variety of certifications and labels to highlight to consumers that these are less energy-consuming devices.

 

And then the other thing is smart intervention, like using smart thermostats in homes and offices that adjust air conditioning according to the time of day and when people occupy spaces.

 

A lot of energy could be saved, and the associated greenhouse gas emissions reduced, if people purchased more efficient air conditioning units for their homes.

UN Environment Programme and IEAE (2020), UNEP, Nairobi and IEA, Paris

 

Do you see an emphasis from governments or any other sector on this industry? Are these issues being addressed in major climate conferences like the Conference of Parties?

 

Cooling services as an industry get missed quite a lot. Cooling services span across different sectors, so we have a little blind spot to it. And it often gets lost in the overall conversation. I haven’t seen much focus on this industry at such meetings.

 

Our group is really trying to highlight the importance of cooling services as an industry.

 

Hmm... I agree, because I realize that when talking about global warming, impacts of transport or manufacturing factories come up pretty much all the time, but I think we find it hard to view the cooling industry as a separate entity. You’ve also mentioned that reducing food waste can reduce demand for refrigeration services. Can you briefly elaborate on that?

 

Often, when we try to think about reducing the environmental impacts of technology, we tend to focus on the technology itself, but that’s not always the most impactful intervention. Often, we have to step back and think through why we’re using the service in the first place. And that gets to thinking through the sectors that cooling services support.

 

Food, as a sector, is incredibly environmentally impactful. The cold chain—which is refrigeration throughout a food supply chain—is important in keeping food fresh and safe. But globally, we waste about 40 percent of our food that is produced. In developing countries, much of the food waste happens throughout the supply chain before it reaches the consumer, largely due to lack of cooling services.

 

Whenever you reduce food waste, you save energy since there is no longer a need to cool food that will never get eaten. And so, while it’s not an intervention that a lot of people normally would think about, by reducing food waste, we reduce the need for more cooling services. And as you reduce food waste, you reduce all of the environmental impacts of agriculture as well as the services associated with the whole food supply chain.

 

Are there promising startups or companies already working on making eco-friendly refrigeration or a smart refrigeration system?

 

Certainly, some of the major refrigeration companies are thinking about new models. There are things like district-level cooling, in which rather than having lots of room-based air conditioners, this new system tries to have an efficient centralized system that doesn’t just cool a single residence but lots of houses.

 

Some of the big things in this area where we are seeing activity among startups are food coatings that improve shelf life and reduce the need for refrigeration of some foods and improved artificial intelligence in sensing systems for both air conditioning and refrigeration. Rather than setting air-conditioner activation at a certain time and temperature, sensors can automatically adjust the temperature according to the number of individuals in a space. That way, you’re not cooling spaces that don’t have people in them. We can employ better sensing technologies on products for food safety and security issues and make sure that various products maintain specific temperatures.

 

Nice. And how can scientists and researchers contribute more to solving problems associated with this industry?

 

There’s a lot that needs to be done from an industry and policy perspective, but individual households and individual people may feel like they can’t really do anything substantial. So I think trying to find things that households can do to have an impact and feel like they’re contributing to solving a problem is really important. Promoting things like energy-efficient devices, thinking through things like reducing household food waste as something that can reduce your greenhouse gas footprint, can be really, hopefully, impactful.

 

Is your team exploring more on this topic?

 

The environmental impact of cooling services, I think, is a really important topic and one that our group continues to explore. We are really interested in the intersection of cooling services and avoidable food waste. As the cold chain expands, particularly into places like Africa that don’t have a very well-developed cold chain, what are the environmental impacts of increasing the cold chain presence?

 

On the one hand, you have the ability to extend the shelf life of foods and increase food security. But on the other hand, you’re increasing overall energy use in the food system. Are there ways that we can bring the benefits of the cold chain to developing countries without the environmental impact? That’s the major question that my research group is trying to tackle.

 

This story originally appeared in Knowable Magazine.

 

Rethinking air conditioning amid climate change

Since 2005, medical organizations have been advocating against the routine use of antibiotics to treat patients who have bacteria detected in a urine culture but no symptoms of a urinary tract infection (UTI) like burning or frequent urination. Overwhelming evidence indicates that the medications are not helpful for asymptomatic patients and could lead to adverse health effects like diarrhea, vomiting, rashes, and yeast infections. Antibiotics can, in rare cases, cause death due to an overgrowth the dangerous bacteria C. difficile in the colon. Overuse of these drugs has also contributed to the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections that are difficult to treat and sometimes deadly.

In the study, the UMSOM researchers surveyed 723 primary care clinicians from Texas, the Mid-Atlantic, and the Pacific Northwest regarding their approach to a hypothetical patient with asymptomatic bacteriuria; this is a condition where bacteria are detected in the urine of a patient without any UTI symptoms. They found 71% of clinicians, 392 out of the 551 who completed the survey, would opt to treat such a patient with antibiotics even though such treatment goes against the recommended guidelines.

"Our study suggests that primary care clinicians do not follow widely accepted recommendations against prescribing antibiotics for asymptomatic bacteriuria," said lead author Jonathan Baghdadi, MD, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Epidemiology & Public Health at UMSOM. "Some primary clinicians may be unaware of these recommendations, but a culture of inappropriate prescribing is also likely a contributing factor."

Family medicine physicians were more likely to prescribe antibiotics unnecessarily compared to other specialties. Physicians who were in residency training or who resided in the Pacific Northwest were less likely to prescribe antibiotics.

"We found other factors also played a role in prescribing like whether a physician had a stronger preference in favor of over-treating a condition and fear of missing a diagnosis; that person was more likely to favor prescribing antibiotics compared to a physician who felt more comfortable with uncertainty in practicing medicine," said study leader Daniel Morgan, MD, MS, Professor of Epidemiology & Public Health at UMSOM.

One strategy to change practice could be an education program targeting physicians who place a high priority on treating just to make sure they do not miss a possible infection, the researchers said in the conclusion section of the article. For example, reframing "unnecessary treatment" with antibiotics as "potentially harmful" treatment with antibiotics could help curb the tendency towards overprescribing.

Source

Mysterious ancient giant eggs Down Under laid by Aussie “demon ducks of doom”

This, though, is a bit of a misnomer. The virus is usually carried by rodents such as squirrels, pouched rats, and dormice, among others. Cases tend to occur near tropical rainforests in Central and West Africa, where the virus is endemic. From the 1980s through to 2010, cases in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) rose more than 14-fold, and in 2020 alone there were nearly 4,600 suspected cases of monkeypox in the DRC. There have also been more than 550 suspected cases in Nigeria since 2017. Given these numbers and how interconnected the world is thanks to air travel, the current global outbreak isn’t actually that surprising.

But while cases have been rising, the risk of monkeypox to the general population is low. If you think you have the virus—or have come into contact with someone with it—stay calm. You probably won’t need any treatment, but you should do what you can to avoid spreading the virus further.

Monkeypox infections occur in two distinct stages. Initially people develop flu-like symptoms such as exhaustion, fever, body aches, chills, and headache as the virus enters their cells, followed by enlarged lymph nodes as their immune system gears up to fight off the infection.

The second stage is the development of the “pox”—a nasty rash that usually begins on the face before spreading to the arms, legs, hands, feet, and trunk. Some of the patients in the latest outbreak have reported a rash around the genital area.

Doctors caution that you shouldn’t assume you have monkeypox just because you have a rash. This can also occur with diseases such as chickenpox and scabies, while genital rashes can also be a sign of sexually transmitted infections like herpes. The monkeypox rash is quite distinct—skin eruptions that begin flat and red, before starting to blister and fill with white pus. These then dry out into scabs, which eventually heal and fall off. While unpleasant, the illness is usually not too severe and resolves within two to four weeks.

Monkeypox typically affects people who have come into contact with infected animals—usually rodents that are capable of harboring the virus. People catch the virus either through a bite or scratch or, in some cases, by consuming undercooked meat.

Despite the recent rise in cases, someone catching the virus and passing it on isn’t that common. It takes prolonged close contact for someone to give it to someone else. Specifically, there are three known ways in which monkeypox can be transmitted—direct contact with pus from the sores, handling an infected person’s clothing (or perhaps sharing a towel), or inhaling respiratory droplets. In the current outbreak it appears that sexual contact has provided one route of transmission—most likely through skin-to-skin contact.

The infection rate is far lower than for Covid-19 or many common respiratory viruses, so outbreaks tend to end quite quickly. An example of this was in 2003, when monkeypox reached the US after infected animals were shipped from Ghana to Illinois. The virus was spread to prairie dogs being sold as pets in multiple Midwestern states, and 47 people became infected. But none passed it on to anyone else, and the outbreak was over shortly after it had begun.

That said, this time around, scientists aren’t sure whether the usual rate of transmission for monkeypox has increased, given the rise in cases, so health agencies are monitoring the outbreak closely.

Unlike with Covid-19, people with monkeypox do not become contagious until they start developing symptoms. But once they are symptomatic, the virus can still be transmitted until their scabs have fully healed.

If you think you might have monkeypox, remain at home and contact your country’s health service for advice—this is what both the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Health Service in the United Kingdom advise. You will probably be told to self-isolate. In the UK, for example, all suspected and confirmed cases are being advised to self-isolate for 21 days.

In some countries PCR tests are being offered to people who have rashes or who have been in contact with a positive case. These tests are required to confirm that you have monkeypox. If you are offered one, you should take it if you’re able to.

Again, avoid contact with others and contact your health service for guidance. You might be asked to self-isolate and may also be offered a vaccine.

Monkeypox is usually mild and clears up on its own without treatment. It can, though, be lethal. The West African strain—which is the one responsible for the current outbreak—has a fatality rate of between 1 and 3 percent. The Congo Basin strain has a fatality rate of 10 percent. Severe cases that result in death are more likely to occur in young children, pregnant women, or those with underlying immune deficiencies. The virus can also lead to pneumonia or complications such as vision loss if the infection moves into the eyes. So disease prevention is therefore the best protective strategy.

There are two vaccines approved by regulators that are capable of doing this. Danish drugmaker Bavarian Nordic has a vaccine (known as Jynneos in the US and Imvanex in Europe) that protects against both smallpox and monkeypox. It was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2019 for over-18s deemed to be at high risk from monkeypox, such as the immunosuppressed. There is also a vaccine called ACAM200, licensed in the US for use against smallpox, that can be used to protect against monkeypox. Moderna has announced that it is testing potential vaccines against monkeypox in preclinical studies as well.

Based on previous data from Africa, the two available vaccines are thought to be up to 85 percent effective at preventing a monkeypox infection. They can also be given up to four days after exposure to monkeypox to prevent infection, and up to two weeks after exposure to reduce the severity of symptoms in someone who is ill.

Other treatments include an antiviral drug called TPOXX that is approved in the European Union to treat monkeypox, although there are currently no antivirals approved for monkeypox by the US FDA for the disease. However the US CDC has recommended an antiviral—cidofovir—as a treatment, while a monoclonal antibody called vaccinia immune globulin could be used in the case of severe monkeypox illness. Data shows that cidofovir is capable of inhibiting smallpox and other viruses from the same family in lab tests.

The World Health Organization, US CDC, and UK Health Security Agency have been providing regular Twitter updates on the monkeypox outbreak. Global.health—an international collaboration that provides real-time data on infectious diseases—has also created a monkeypox tracker to monitor confirmed and suspected cases as they occur. These all offer reliable information on the current outbreak.

It’s important to avoid stigmatizing those infected. One of the main falsehoods circulating is that monkeypox only affects men who have sex with men, or that this group is responsible for the outbreak. People of any gender or sexual orientation can contract the disease.

Other particularly wild mistruths include the claim that certain Covid-19 vaccines are causing monkeypox because they inject chimpanzee genomic information into your cells, that the virus is airborne, that infections are doubling every three days, that monkeypox is as deadly as smallpox, and that it is a man-made virus leaked from a lab—none of which is true.

Everything You Need to Know About Monkeypox

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Pompeii victim had spinal tuberculosis when he died

“This incident slowed SFFD response to a fire that resulted in property damage and personal injuries,” city officials wrote in a filing submitted to the California Public Utilities Commission. The city wrote that the fire department is concerned that Cruise vehicles stop too often in travel lanes, which could have a “negative impact” on fire department response times.

It’s the most unnerving of a handful of incidents involving Cruise vehicles alleged by the city of San Francisco, as officials object to parts of a proposed permit program being crafted by the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates ride-hail across the state.

Tiffany Testo, a spokesperson for Cruise, confirmed the incident. She said the driverless car had correctly yielded to the oncoming fire truck in the opposing lane and contacted the company’s remote assistance workers, who are able to operate vehicles in trouble from afar. According to Cruise, which collects camera and sensor data from its testing vehicles, the fire truck was able to move forward approximately 25 seconds after it first encountered the autonomous vehicle. In a statement, Testo says that Cruise “works closely with first responders, including SFFD, and have been in contact with them regarding this encounter.” The city’s filing said the department has requested a meeting with Cruise about the incident, but that it has yet to take place.

The SFFD also confirmed the incident, which involved Engine 12, based in the city's Parnassus Heights neighborhood. "Pre-Covid, the department was in discussions with both electric (EV) and autonomous vehicles for training," said SFFD spokesperson Jonathan Baxter in a statement. "We have been successful with EV training and continue to seek industry training related to autonomous vehicles."

In San Francisco, Cruise is just one of the dueling self-driving car developers that say they’re working to build a safer driving future. Waymo, an Alphabet company and a spinoff from Google, and Zoox, now owned by Amazon, both have a presence on the city’s steep, winding roads, and locals don’t have to travel far to see sensor-laden Jaguar I-Paces, Chevrolet Bolts, and Toyota Highlanders tracing routes around downtown and residential neighborhoods. Now Cruise is applying for a permit that would allow it to launch the state’s first driverless ride-hail service. The sprawling, expensive science experiment could also change the way many city dwellers navigate their cities.

San Francisco alleges two more incidents: one, in late April, in which a Cruise vehicle traveling through a work zone stopped in a crosswalk and didn’t move for five minutes, blocking traffic; and another in April, captured on camera, in which police officers stopped a Cruise vehicle without a driver because it didn't have its headlights on.

The filing comes as a state agency is in the midst of writing rules that would allow Cruise to move ahead with its plans to operate limited but paid ride-hail services across the state. In San Francisco, a new permit would expand Cruise’s existing program. It currently allows select members of the pubic to take autonomous rides between 10 pm and 6 am, in 70 percent of the city. If the company wins a new permit, it could start to collect fares for the rides, which would still occur at night and in the early morning, and not in rain or fog. It would mark the launch of the state’s first driverless ride-hail service.

But in the filing, San Francisco officials express concern that the expanded deployment would continue to let Cruise vehicles stop to pick up and drop off passengers in travel lanes, instead of pulling over to the curb. Human drivers can be ticketed if they are caught failing to pull 18 inches or closer to curbs before they let passengers in or out of cars. But in its own filing, a lawyer for Cruise argued the law allows any car to stop in a travel lane if it’s “reasonably necessary”—even if there’s no human driver behind the wheel. The Cruise software defaults to pulling over to curbs when safe, the company says, but cars sometimes engage in “lawful and safe double parking” when it is the only option.

The city’s document noted that, “with some conspicuous exceptions,” Cruise’s vehicles are generally “cautious and compliant.”

The fire truck incident is a classic “corner case”—a road incident so strange or rare that it can be hard for self-driving vehicle developers to anticipate it. Experts say that even as autonomous vehicle software advances, it will continue to run into these flukes. Corner or edge cases are one reason many companies like Cruise hire humans to remotely monitor their driverless technology, to intervene from afar if anything unexpected happens on the road. They also help explain why many in the industry now concede that no one will ever build a car that can operate on all roads, in all conditions—what people call “Level 5” or “full” self-driving.

Still, automakers and software developers are spending plenty to get as close to that ideal as they can. General Motors and Cruise say they will pour $35 billion into electric and autonomous vehicles by 2025, and $2 billion into AVs this year alone. The automaker initially missed a self-imposed deadline, after it said it would launch a driverless ride-hail service in San Francisco in 2019. The delay reflects wider doldrums in the autonomous vehicle space, as some competitors—Uber, Lyft—sold their self-driving units and others missed much-publicized targets for producing a self-driving car.

In the interim, a set of well-capitalized players keep hacking away at the problem. Waymo continues to expand its self-driving car service in Phoenix, though customers have to gain access to a “trusted tester” program, and some of its vehicles still operate with safety drivers behind the wheel. In March, the company said it began to offer San Francisco employees totally driverless rides. The startup Aurora has shifted its focus to trucking. Amazon-owned Zoox this week unveiled its prototype vehicle, a mint-green toaster on wheels. And Cruise says its purpose-built self-driving shuttle, called the Origin, will go into production next year.

But before they get very far, self-driving car developers will have to prove that they can operate in cities safely, especially when emergency vehicles are involved.

This story has been updated to include a statement from SFFD and to clarify details around Cruise's current ride-hail program.

An Autonomous Car Blocked a Fire Truck Responding to an Emergency

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A new study is one of the first to provide experimental evidence that adults learn from incidental exposure to things that they know nothing about and aren't even trying to understand.

Exposure to new objects makes humans "ready to learn," said Vladimir Sloutsky, co-author of the study and professor of psychology at The Ohio State University.

"We often observe new things out in the real world without a goal of learning about them," Sloutsky said.

"But we found that simply being exposed to them makes an impression in our mind and leads us to be ready to learn about them later."

Sloutsky conducted the research with Layla Unger, a postdoctoral researcher in psychology at Ohio State and lead author of the study. The study was published May 26, 2022 in the journal Psychological Science.

The study included five different experiments with 438 adults, with all experiments showing similar results.

In the studies, participants first took part in an "exposure phase" in which they played a simple computer game while seeing colorful images of unfamiliar creatures. The game did not provide any information about these creatures, but for some participants, unbeknownst to them, the creatures actually belonged to two categories—Category A and Category B.

Similar to real-world creatures such as dogs and cats, Category A and Category B creatures had body parts that looked somewhat different, such as different-colored tails and hands. Control group participants were shown images of other unfamiliar creatures.

Later in the experiment, the participants went through "explicit learning," a process in which they were taught that the creatures belonged to two categories (called "flurps" and "jalets"), and to identify the category membership of each creature.

The researchers measured how long it took participants to learn the difference between Category A and Category B in this explicit learning phase.

"We found that learning was substantially faster for those who were exposed to the two categories of creatures earlier on than it was in the control group participants," Unger said.

"Participants who received early exposure to Category A and B creatures could become familiar with their different distributions of characteristics, such as that creatures with blue tails tended to have brown hands, and creatures with orange tails tended to have green hands. Then when the explicit learning came, it was easier to attach a label to those distributions and form the categories."

In another experiment in the study, the simple computer game that participants played in the exposure phase involved hearing sounds while seeing the images of the creatures. Participants simply hit a key whenever the same sound was played two times in a row.

"The images were randomly attached to the sounds, so they could not help participants learn the sounds," Sloutsky said. "In fact, the participants could completely ignore the images and it would not affect how well they did."

Still, participants who were shown the images of Category A and B creatures later learned the differences between them more quickly during the explicit learning phase than participants who were shown other unrelated images.

"It was pure exposure to the creatures that was helping them learn faster later on," Sloutsky said.

But was it possible that they had already actually learned the difference between Category A and B creatures during the early exposure, without needing the explicit learning?

The answer is no, Unger said.

In some of the studies, the simple computer game in the exposure phase involved first seeing a creature in the center of the screen. Participants were then asked to hit one key if the creature jumped to the left side of the screen and a different key if it jumped to the right, as quickly as possible.

Participants were not told this, but one type of creature always jumped to the left and the other always jumped to the right. So if they learned the difference between the two creature categories, they could respond faster.

Results showed that participants did not respond faster, suggesting they didn't learn the difference between Category A and Category B creatures in the exposure part of the experiment.

But they still learned the difference between them more quickly in the explicit learning part of the experiment than those participants who were exposed to images of other creatures during the earlier exposure phase.

"The exposure to the creatures left participants with some latent knowledge, but they weren't ready to tell the difference between the two categories. They had not learned yet, but they were ready to learn," Unger said.

Sloutsky said this is one of few studies that has shown evidence of latent learning.

"It has been very difficult to diagnose when latent learning is occurring," he said. "But this research was able to differentiate between latent learning and what people learn during explicit teaching."

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Microsoft has hit the brakes on hiring in some key product areas as the company prepares for the next fiscal year and all that might bring.

According to reports in the Bloomberg, the unit that develops Windows, Office, and Teams is affected and while headcount remains expected to grow, new hires in that division must first be approved by bosses.

During a talk this week at JP Morgan's Technology, Media and Communications Conference, Rajesh Jha, executive VP for the Office Product Group, noted that within three years he expected approximately two-thirds of CIOs to standardize on Microsoft Teams. 1.4 billion PCs were running Windows. He also remarked: "We have lots of room here to grow the seats with Office 365."

But not enough room to grow the headcount. At least not without upper management signing off on the hires first, according to emails seen by employees.

The move follows plans to fiddle with employee compensation in what has become a highly competitive market. A memo from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, a copy of which was obtained by Geekwire, revealed plans for a near-doubling of the global merit budget and a jump in stock-based compensation as the company looked to fight off threats from other tech giants in the recruitment space.

"As Microsoft gets ready for the new fiscal year, it is making sure the right resources are aligned to the right opportunity," a Microsoft spokeswoman told us.

Microsoft's last earnings release for Q3 2022 showed an 18 percent year-on-year jump in revenue to $49.4 billion, including an 11 percent increase in Personal Computing to $14.5 billion. However, the global economic landscape for the next fiscal year is uncertain, hence the more cautious approach to hiring.

Other divisions are unaffected and a company spokesperson told The Reg: "Microsoft will continue to grow headcount in the year ahead and it will add additional focus to where those resources go."

Microsoft isn't alone in taking a more discerning approach to hiring. During a call with analysts this week, Nvidia CFO Colette Kress said that, following success in hiring earlier in the year, the process was "now slowing to integrate these new employees."

"This also enables us to focus our budget on taking care of our existing employees as inflation persists," she added. ®

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Just how big was the January eruption of the Hunga-Tonga volcano? Four months of intensive science has only bumped up the scale. You could point to the audible booms that interrupted the night in Alaska, 6,000 miles away. Or perhaps to the tsunamis in the Caribbean, created by a rare form of acoustic wave that hopped over continents and stirred up the seas. In space, the weather changed too, NASA scientists said earlier this month, with winds from the blast accelerating up to 450 miles per hour as they left the atmosphere’s outermost layers. This briefly redirected the flow of electrons around the planet’s equator, a phenomenon that had previously been observed during geomagnetic storms caused by solar wind.

Which is why, when researchers started scouring the ocean floor immediately surrounding the volcano, they expected to find a gnarly landscape. Surely it would be reshaped by the blast and littered with debris. Scientists believe that the explosion was the result of an incendiary recipe: hot, gaseous magma meeting cold, salty sea water. But how exactly did those two ingredients come together with such force? Some of the leading theories centered on the idea of a landslide or other collapse of the volcano’s slopes that helped water intrude into the magma chamber. That would also help explain the tsunami that killed three people on nearby Tongan islands. A massive shift in submarine rock also means displacing a massive amount of water.

A team of scientists from New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, or NIWA, recently observed something different. Using ship-mounted acoustic instruments to map the seafloor, they found the terrain has indeed changed—it’s now covered with at least enough ash to fill 3 million Olympic swimming pools. But apart from that, it’s not all that different. The slopes of the underwater volcano are still largely as they were before the eruption; the same features still contour the surrounding seafloor. Within 15 kilometers of the volcano, some of those features are even still teeming with life, with starfish and corals clinging to rocky seamounts. “The first thing we did was a circle around the volcano, and I’m going, ‘What the hell?’” recalls Kevin Mackay, a marine geologist at NIWA who led the expedition. “It just defied expectations.”

One area where they didn’t venture was just right above the caldera, the depression left behind when the volcano blew. Mackay’s large research vessel full of scientists and crew had not dared sail there—not because of the risk of large explosions, but because of smaller burps of gas that might rise up from the eruption site. “Those gas bubbles can down ships, and they’ve done it before,” he says. But they suspected total destruction. Islands that had risen out of the sea just before the eruption had been torn asunder by the blast, suggesting a crater beneath the surface.

A day after the NIWA team released their findings, a second group of researchers at Tonga Geological Services and the University of Auckland helped fill in the map. Using a smaller ship that was less at risk from the bubbles, the team went out over the caldera with a similar set of acoustic instruments. Yep, it was a hole alright. The gash is 4 kilometers wide and 850 meters deep, and surprisingly constrained, hemmed in by the volcano’s original slopes. “What we have here now is a very large, very deep hole in the ground,” Shane Cronin, a volcanologist at the University of Auckland, explained at a press conference in Tonga. “It helps us understand why the explosion was so very, very large.”

The two sets of observations are helping scientists to reconstruct a massive underwater explosion unlike any they’ve been able to study before. The imaging reveals that Hunga appears to have blown straight up and out. As the caldera broke apart in the early stages of the eruption, this likely introduced a flood of seawater that met deep regions of magma, firing off a chain reaction. More seawater, more magma, more explosions.

That may help explain the deadly tsunami. The blast sent millions of tons of rock into the air, which soon came crashing down onto the surrounding seafloor, creating pyroclastic flows—hot mixtures of the rock, gas, and ash—that raced outward and likely pushed along the waves. The researchers hope chemical data from rocks and water gathered from within the caldera will help give a better picture of what was responsible for the explosion’s extreme force.

Both groups also found evidence of ongoing volcanic activity within Hunga. But despite these rumbles, the findings don’t suggest that the volcano remains an imminent danger to people living nearby. The caldera was so brutally emptied of magma that it has likely been reset to the state it was in 1,000 years ago, Cronin suggested, based on the dating of rocks from past eruptions. That’s a relief for Tongans still reeling from the eruption. But the region is pockmarked by similar volcanoes emerging from the sea.

The NIWA team set sail in April aboard the Research Vessel Tangaroa for four weeks of experiments. They worked in alternating 12-hour shifts as they raced to understand as much as they could in about a 22,000-square-kilometer region. They were lucky to have a point of comparison for the seafloor; in 2016, the area was mapped when a team aboard a research ship abandoned another mission nearby due to a broken piece of equipment, sailed for repairs in Tonga, and decided to stop by to map the area around Hunga—which had just begun the eruption sequence that would lead to the January blast.

Comparing the two maps was vital to see how little the surrounding terrain had changed, Mackay says. “Not only was the volcano intact, but we could see from the 2016 map that here’s a ridge and here’s a valley and here’s a knoll,” he says. “I’m seeing the same ridge, the same valley, the same knoll.” The team tallied up more than 6 cubic kilometers worth of ashy material layered on the seafloor, and suspects there’s more to find. (Tonga’s broken undersea internet cable was buried under 30 meters of it.)

Throughout their voyage, the researchers dipped instruments into the sea to collect samples of sediment and water at various depths. Taking cores from the seafloor was difficult; the material was still settling months after the explosion, and it was so fine it would waft out of the tubes as they pulled the samples to the surface. “I could imagine if I was down there you would just be sinking the seafloor,” says Sarah Seabrook, a biogeochemist at NIWA. “It’s not a stable surface you can stand on.”

As they expected, the researchers didn’t observe the usual signs of life on the seafloor itself, like tracks and burrows. But they did encounter surprises—rocky arks rising above the ash-covered landscape. Corals, starfish, and mussels were still clinging to these areas, called seamounts. It’s likely that as the pyroclastic flows raced along the ocean’s bottom, they encircled the elevated outcrops, sparing the life on top, Seabrook says. It’s unclear why they weren’t buried under the thick ash that fell later, but one idea is that unique currents around the seamounts protect them, like umbrellas.

Seabrook cautions that it’s too soon to know how well life will recolonize the area—a key question for Tongan officials worried about the future of the region’s fisheries. The team plans to go out twice more in the next four years to study how the ocean ecosystem repairs itself.

One factor in that recovery is the ongoing volcanic activity, first identified when the NIWA ship passed over a plume of apparently fresh ash wafting to the north of the caldera. That suggested a source within the volcano, which was later confirmed by the imagery of growing volcanic features captured by the Tongan team. Next month, the NIWA team plans to map the area over the caldera again, this time with an autonomous boat that will be guided by engineers nearly 10,000 miles away in Essex, England. The two maps will allow the scientists to capture changes over time.

The Tongan team and Cronin also spent 10 weeks traveling around the scattered islands, collecting ash samples, mapping tsunami water lines, and gathering eyewitness accounts to piece together the timeline of the blast and its impacts on land. Their goal is to inform government decisions about safer building plans and practices that can protect the islands, like planting trees that act as dams when a wave hits. The risk of destructive activity is low at Hunga, where the floor of the caldera is now buried by deep enough water to suppress another big explosion. But according to Cronin, it’s important to stay vigilant, given the other volcanoes in the region. “Believe me, we have similar volcanoes in the Kingdom of Tonga,” Cronin said. “We would expect the same behavior from some of them.”

Why Was the Tonga Eruption So Massive? Scientists Have New Clues

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NASA’s verdict on Starliner: “A great vehicle for crew transportation”

In a paper published Tuesday in Nature Food, Giulia Menichetti, senior research scientist at Northeastern's Network Science Institute, demonstrates that the concentrations of different nutrients in food follow a fixed pattern, and that the amount of any given nutrient in a food follows a similar mathematical formula.

Inspired by these findings, her team determined that 73% of the U.S. food supply is ultra-processed, which they link to a higher risk of developing a variety of health issues. Their findings, which showed the level of processing for over 50,000 foods sold in the United States, were published in an online database for public use.

Menichetti hopes this database will help fill in gaps in the public's knowledge about what they eat—specifically, how processed the food actually is.

The study is part of a larger project called Foodome, which was cofounded by Albert-László Barabási, Robert Gray Dodge Professor of Network Science at Northeastern and co-author of the study. Similar to what the Human Genome Project did for human genetics, Foodome seeks to map out all of the chemical components of the human diet, with the goal of better understanding how what we eat impacts our health.

"It's really food and environment, not simply genetics, that are the major determinants of our health," Menichetti says.

That's a good thing, she says. Unlike our genetic makeup, diet is something over which people have control. But to do so requires knowing what's actually in our food. That's why Menichetti's team is mapping the "dark matter" of food—or, the unknown chemical components that go beyond what's listed in the nutrition facts. This could help us understand what's in what we eat, and how much it has been processed before it reaches our plates.

What does it mean for a food to be processed—and why does it matter? Barabási says processing applies to literally anything you do to a food, like chopping up vegetables.

"That by itself is not a problem," he says. "The problem is ultra-processing."

For a food to be ultra-processed, he says, it must have been chemically altered. One example is some orange juices that are labeled "natural" but are actually divided into three different chemicals before being stored separately and remixed later.

There may be no indication on a package that this product is ultra-processed, he says. The USDA only tracks and reports so many nutritional components, and the FDA only requires companies to report around 12 nutrients. This is a problem because, as the team claims, there is a link between ultra-processed foods and a "higher risk of metabolic syndrome, diabetes, angina, elevated blood pressure and biological age."

Menichetti's findings take a step toward a better understanding of all food chemicals. In her paper, she observes that natural nutrients exhibit common patterns, well captured by a single equation.

The finding is unprecedented, Barabasi says. "The very existence of this formula was the most surprising thing," he says. "No one has even realized that that is possible."

Unfortunately, there's no biomarker or chemical indicator for ultra-processed foods. But in two follow-up papers, both of which are under review, Menichetti shows that by revealing what nutrient concentrations should look like in natural, non-processed foods, the equation can still help us determine which foods in the U.S. supply have been chemically altered and thereby deviate from nutrient ranges observed in natural ingredients.

"It suggests a way to identify things that are outliers, things that do not behave in the ranges that are observed in natural ingredients," she says. "What we observe is that ultra-processed food … is basically behaving in a way that shows extreme concentrations in many different nutrients." For example, when an onion is fried and battered, more than half of its nutrients change in concentration; these changes correlate with the level of processing.

Knowing this, the team tried to figure out how much of the entire U.S. food supply is ultra-processed. Thanks to machine learning, Menichetti and her co-authors—Babak Ravandi, a postdoctoral researcher at Northeastern, and Dariush Mozaffarian of Tufts University—were able to do just that.

Their final task was to release this information to the public so people could make more informed decisions about their diets. The third paper, which Menichetti co-authored with Ravandi and research assistant Peter Mehler, introduces GroceryDB, a database that includes information on over 50,000 food items sold at major food retailers.

The online version of the database allows consumers to browse the food supply for the level of processing. Each food is given a score from 0 to 100, and users can compare different products. For example, Triscuits with a hint of sea salt have a score of 89, original Cheez-Its score 57, and whole wheat Ritz crackers score 29. Meanwhile, reduced fat Wheat Thins received a 3.

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The findings, published online this month in the journal Open Mind, confirm how easily people adopt false beliefs based on their perceived popularity and help them go viral with the stroke of a key.

"Our study shows that people are more likely to adopt pseudoscientific and misinformed beliefs when they believe them to be more popular," said study lead author Evan Orticio, a Ph.D. student in psychology at UC Berkeley. "These results have important implications for how highlighting social information with 'likes' is more likely to spread fake news."

Orticio and fellow researchers in UC Berkeley's Kidd Lab sought to understand the extent of the human mind's vulnerability in the age of social media.

In two separate online experiments, they asked more than 600 U.S. adults how certain they were about statements of fact or fiction, such as those about humans causing climate change, vaccines causing autism and Hillary Clinton heading up a child sex trafficking ring out of a pizza parlor.

Overall, they found that study participants were more likely to agree or disagree with a statement after seeing evidence that the belief was more popular than they had expected it to be. Some who were on the fence about a controversial issue changed their minds based solely on the number of endorsements the statement received.

"It makes sense for us to care about what other people think, not just to conform, but because we're looking for reliable sources of information," Orticio said. "But research suggests that fake news tends to travel, by some estimates, six times faster than fact-based news on Twitter and other social media platforms."

"That's because the algorithms social media platforms use to promote whatever is most engaging or attention grabbing are often at odds with what is actually true in the world, especially if one is prone to burrow into echo chambers where everyone agrees with you," he added. "When misinformation gets a lot of likes or retweets, it can give people a very distorted impression of how common that belief actually is—which we now know can affect how believable they find it themselves."

How they conducted the study

For the study, the researchers came up with a list of 30 pseudoscientific or misinformed beliefs (listed below) related to powerful political and business figures, racial stereotypes, viruses and vaccines, aliens and space travel, as well as other factually dubious fodder that winds its way through U.S. media channels.

First, they asked study participants to rate how much they believed each of the 30 statements on a scale of one to 100. They were then asked to guess, out of 100 people, how many others also believed the statement.

Next, study participants were shown how many other people believed or did not believe each of the 30 statements. Some of this data was manipulated to exceed participants' initial estimate, to see if making a belief seem more popular would influence people to change their minds.

For example, in response to the statement that "NIH Director Anthony Fauci is misleading people about COVID-19 because he stands to gain financially from a vaccine," a study participant might estimate that about 30% of people believe that.

If they then learned that seven out of 10 respondents believed the statement, they'd be more likely to rate it as credible, the study found.

"What appears to be driving people to change their beliefs is the prediction error between how many people they expected would believe the statement, and the actual data shown," Orticio said.

And for the most part, that pattern was consistent. After learning how many others agreed or disagreed with each of the 30 statements, participants tended to shift their degree of certainty based on what others thought.

"What we found is that for almost every single item we tested—all of which are misinformed beliefs—people shifted their beliefs based on the social data alone," Orticio said. "In other words, if we show someone that a belief is more common than they thought, that makes them see it as more plausible, even if they haven't seen any direct evidence."

So how to guard against fake news?

"We know from past research in our lab and elsewhere that once people have established a certain level of certainty about something, there's often very little that can be done to change their minds," Orticio said. "They become less curious and less receptive to counter evidence. So, it's best to intervene early with reputable information before anyone gets the chance to snowball into certainty about a misinformed belief."

Orticio said the study's results confirm his belief that the responsibility to curb the spread of misinformation falls mostly on social media platforms. One remedy, he said, would be to remove social engagement metrics such as likes, hearts and retweets from posts that have been identified as misleading.

That said, social media users also have a role to play in stopping the spread of misinformation.

"On an individual level, diversifying your media diet can help," he said. "Doing that will give a more representative sense of what kinds of beliefs are out there and get users more attuned to motivations, nefarious or otherwise, behind the information that's being shared."

Fact or fiction?

Here are the 30 questions researchers asked more than 600 U.S. adults to gauge how certain they were about statements of fact or fiction.

1. Handwriting analysis can reveal aspects of the writer's personality or mental state.
2. Accused child rapist Jeffrey Epstein killed himself in solitary confinement awaiting trial.
3. John F. Kennedy's assassination was a coordinated effort by multiple people.
4. Most physical ailments can be remedied through realignment of the skeletal system.
5. Hypnosis can be used to uncover repressed memories.
6. Hospitals are inflating the number of COVID-19 deaths.
7. Under the same exposure conditions, a Black person is more likely to contract COVID-19 than an equally healthy white person.
8. Autism is caused by environmental toxins.
9. HIV causes AIDS.
10. Powerful people are suppressing known effective treatments for COVID-19.
11. The U.S. government planned the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center.
12. Humans and dinosaurs coexisted on the earth.
13. Aliens are currently visiting the earth.
14. NIH Director Anthony Fauci is misleading people about COVID-19 because he stands to gain financially from a vaccine.
15. Hillary Clinton was involved in a child sex-trafficking ring centered around a pizza restaurant in Washington DC.
16. Children can get or spread COVID-19.
17. People can catch COVID-19 outdoors.
18. People can maintain consciousness after death and visit living people.
19. Powerful people planned the release of the COVID-19 virus.
20. The media has exaggerated COVID-19 risks to undermine Donald Trump's presidency.
21. Vaccines cause autism.
22. Humans have landed on the moon.
23. COVID-19 is more deadly than the flu.
24. Cancer can be cured through prayer alone.
25. Wearing masks is harmful to the health of the mask wearer.
26. Masks reduce the likelihood of transmission of COVID-19.
27. Bill Gates is planning on tracking people with microchips using COVID-19 testing and vaccination.
28. Climate change is caused by humans.
29. Donald Trump has been working to stop an elite group of Satan-worshiping pedophiles.
30. The earth is flat.

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Without a doubt, the safest way to protect yourself against lung cancer is to avoid smoking cigarettes, and yet, at the same time, it's also true that not all lifelong smokers are doomed to develop cancer.

In fact, the vast majority don't. Scientists have long wondered why, and a new study adds weight to the idea that genetics has a role to play.

Among people who smoke but never develop lung cancer, researchers found an inherent advantage. The cells that line their lungs appear to be less likely to mutate over time.

The findings suggest that DNA repair genes are more active among some individuals, which can protect against cancers arising, even when cigarettes are regularly smoked.

The study made use of genetic profiles taken from the bronchi of 14 never-smokers and 19 light, moderate, and heavy smokers.

Surface cells collected from the lungs of the participants were sequenced individually to measure mutations in their genomes.

"These lung cells survive for years, even decades, and thus can accumulate mutations with both age and smoking," explains epidemiologist and pulmonologist Simon Spivack from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

"Of all the lung's cell types, these are among the most likely to become cancerous."

According to the authors, the findings "unequivocally demonstrate" that mutations in the human lung increase with natural age, and among smokers, the DNA damage is even more significant.

Tobacco smoke has long been associated with triggering DNA damage in the lung, but the new study found not all smokers are in the same boat.

While the amount that someone smoked was linked to an increase in cell mutation rates, after the equivalent of about 23 years of smoking a pack a day, that risk plateaus.

"The heaviest smokers did not have the highest mutation burden," says Spivack. 

"Our data suggest that these individuals may have survived for so long in spite of their heavy smoking because they managed to suppress further mutation accumulation. This leveling off of mutations could stem from these people having very proficient systems for repairing DNA damage or detoxifying cigarette smoke."

The findings could help explain why 80 to 90 percent of lifelong smokers never develop lung cancer. It could also help explain why some people who never smoke at all do develop the tumors.

While toxic tobacco smoke seems to trigger extra cell mutations in the lung, whether these mutations develop into tumors is dependent on how well the body can repair DNA or reduce DNA damage.

Genes concerned with DNA repair can be inherited or acquired, and the silencing of repair genes has been associated with tumor development in previous research.

Genes aren't the only factors influencing a person's cancer risk. Environmental factors like diet can also influence nutrients in the body that impact tumor development.

What makes an individual's body better at repairing DNA is still up for debate and is likely complicated, but the new findings suggest this process is closely tied to lung cancer development.

"We now wish to develop new assays that can measure someone's capacity for DNA repair or detoxification, which could offer a new way to assess one's risk for lung cancer," says geneticist Jan Vijg.

The study was published in Nature.

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Such actions might involve arrests, confiscation of products or counterfeit rings being dissolved.

These counterfeiting operations involved tens of millions of pills, more than 1,000 kilograms (2,200 pounds) of active ingredient powder that could be turned into pills in the US, and hundreds of millions of dollars in sales.

Unfortunately, with over 11,000 rogue pharmacy sites selling drugs on the internet, these actions barely scratch the surface.

The FDA's Office of Criminal Investigations conducts and coordinates criminal investigations into manufacturers and individuals violating federal drug laws. The agency maintains a database with links to press releases for their enforcement actions.

Overall, in 64.6 percent of cases in that five-year period, the counterfeit products were sold over the internet, and in 84.6 percent of the enforcement actions taken, the products were obtained without a prescription.

Many of the counterfeit drugs were for controlled substances like opioids such as oxycodone and hydromorphone and stimulants such as those commonly used to treat attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, as well as benzodiazepines, which are used for anxiety and sleep.

China, India, Turkey, Pakistan, and Russia were the most common countries supplying US consumers with counterfeit drugs.

Why it matters

The World Health Organization states that approximately 11 percent of medications sold in developing countries are counterfeit, resulting in 144,000 additional deaths annually from imitation antibiotics and anti-malarial drugs alone.

My previous study also documented 500 childhood deaths attributed to diethylene glycol – a common additive in antifreeze – being added to knockoff cough suppressants as a sweetener.

In addition, from November 2021 to February 2022, countrfeit versions of drugs used for chronic conditions – such as the transplant medication tacrolimus, sold under the brand name Limustin, and the anticoagulant rivaroxaban, or Xeralto – were found on Mexican pharmacy shelves.

In the US, the Drug Quality and Security Act of 2013 secures the medication supply through a national electronic track-and-trace system that allows a specific medication to be followed from the manufacturer to the pharmacy.

While the medications in licensed US pharmacies are secure, a Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that 19 million people in America obtained prescription medications that are likely counterfeit through non-US licensed internet pharmacies or while traveling abroad.

The National Association of Boards of Pharmacy found that 96 percnet of the 11,688 internet pharmacies they analyzed did not comply with US federal or state laws. Of these, 62 percent did not reveal their physical location and 87 percent were affiliated with "rogue networks of internet drug outlets".

The FDA offers some guidance to help consumers determine whether an online product is legitimate.

Opioids, benzodiazepines, and stimulants are highly addictive and dangerous when taken inappropriately or when used together.

While these counterfeit medications may look legitimate, the active ingredients that are supposed to be in these controlled substances are frequently replaced with more dangerous alternatives like fentanyl. Four in 10 counterfeit opioid pills containing fentanyl harbor a potentially lethal dosage.

According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, the US confiscated 9.5 million counterfeit pills from April 2020 to April 2021 – more than the previous two years combined. This is a likely driver of the 100,306 drug overdose deaths in the US over that time.

Rogue online pharmacies frequently use social media platforms to reach potential customers. This suggests that more needs to be done by online platforms like social media, online forums and search engines to identify and stop illegitimate sellers of prescription drugs online.

People buying controlled substances over the internet are usually trying to circumvent physician control over the medication or the quantities they can receive. However, most people accessing noncontrolled substance counterfeit medications are simply trying to buy them at an affordable price.

These trends make clear that the US needs a long-term strategy to lower the cost of prescription medications to diminish demand for counterfeit medications, though there are some money-saving strategies that can be used in the short term.

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Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft landing under parachutes in the New Mexico desert Image: NASA/Bill Ingalls

After spending a little less than a week at the space station, Boeing’s new passenger spacecraft, the CST-100 Starliner, returned to Earth this afternoon, landing intact with the help of parachutes and airbags in the New Mexico desert. The successful touchdown brings an end to a crucial test flight for Starliner, one that showcased the vehicle’s ability to launch to space, dock with the station, and then return home safely.

Shaped like a gumdrop, Boeing’s Starliner capsule was built in partnership with NASA in order to launch the agency’s astronauts to and from the International Space Station, or ISS. The mission is part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, which challenged private companies with creating space taxis to carry people to low Earth orbit. But before NASA will let its personnel ride on the vehicle, the space agency wanted Starliner to demonstrate that it could go through all the motions of a trip to the ISS — without people on board.

With today’s landing, that uncrewed test flight — called OFT-2 — has come to an end, with Starliner performing every major step it was meant to accomplish. The capsule successfully launched to orbit on May 19th, riding to space on top of an Atlas V rocket; it approached and docked with the ISS on May 20th; and it undocked with the space station this afternoon before heading home. It wasn’t a completely smooth flight, though. Throughout the mission, Starliner encountered a number of issues with its various thrusters, tiny engines used to maneuver and propel the vehicle through space. None of those problems proved to be fatal for the flight, though, and Starliner was able to complete OFT-2 as planned.

It’s also been a bumpy road getting to this launch. The name of this test flight, OFT-2, actually stands for Orbital Flight Test-2. That’s because it’s a do-over of the same test flight that Boeing tried to perform back in 2019. In December of that year, Boeing launched Starliner without a crew on board, sending it to space on another Atlas V rocket. But a software glitch on Starliner caused the capsule to fire its thrusters incorrectly after it separated from the rocket, and ultimately, the spacecraft got into the wrong orbit. The issue prevented Starliner from reaching the space station, and Boeing was not able to show the spacecraft’s ability to dock with the ISS. Boeing had to bring the spacecraft home early and was able to land the capsule in White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico — the same location Starliner landed today.

Boeing attempted to try again to launch Starliner last summer, but just hours before takeoff, the company halted the countdown after finding that more than a dozen propellant valves were sticking and not opening properly. It took Boeing up until now to fix the issues, and the company says it’s possible that a redesign of the valves may happen in the future. But now, two and a half years after the original botched flight, Starliner has finally shown that it can launch and autonomously dock with the ISS — a key feature it will have to perform over and over again when people are on board.

Landing is also a critical task for Starliner in order to bring passengers home safely. To demonstrate those capabilities for this flight, the capsule undocked with the ISS at 2:36PM ET this afternoon, slowly flying around the station and then distancing itself from the orbiting lab. At 6:05PM ET, Starliner used its onboard thrusters to slow itself down and take itself out of orbit, putting it on course with Earth’s surface. Shortly after, the vehicle plunged through the planet’s atmosphere, experiencing temperatures of up to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Starliner then used a series of parachutes to slow its fall before landing in White Sands on top of airbags to help cushion the touchdown. It marked the second successful landing for Starliner, as Boeing already showcased the vehicle’s landing during its first botched test flight in 2019.

“That touchdown coming at 5:49pm Central Time, almost exactly six days into the mission,” NASA’s Brandi Dean, a NASA communications officer, said on a livestream of the landing. “Just a beautiful touchdown in White Sands this evening.”

There was some slight concern about this landing, however, as Starliner experienced multiple problems with its thrusters throughout the flight. When the capsule launched to space last week, two of the 12 thrusters Starliner uses to insert itself into the right orbit failed. Boeing said drops in chamber pressure caused the thrusters to cut off early. Ultimately, Starliner’s flight control system was able to redirect to a backup thruster in time, and the capsule got into orbit as planned. However, those same thrusters were needed to take Starliner out of orbit, but they seemed to work as planned despite the two failed thrusters.

There were other bugs throughout the flight, too. A couple of different smaller thrusters, used to maneuver Starliner during docking, also failed due to low chamber pressure. However, it didn’t prevent the capsule from attaching to the ISS. “We have a lot of redundancy that really didn’t affect the rendezvous operations at all,” Steve Stich, NASA’s program manager for the Commercial Crew Program, said during a press conference after docking. And, on top of all of that, the Boeing team noticed that some of Starliner’s thermal systems used to cool the spacecraft showed extra cold temperatures, and the engineering team had to manage that during the docking.

Starliner still accomplished many of its goals while docked with the ISS. Astronauts on board the ISS opened Starliner’s hatch this weekend, entered the vehicle, and retrieved cargo brought to the station. The capsule has brought about 600 pounds of cargo back to Earth, as well as Rosie the Rocketeer, a mannequin that rode along inside Starliner to simulate what it’ll be like when humans ride on board.

Now, with Starliner back on Earth, there’s plenty of work left to do. Over the coming months, NASA and Boeing will study the failures that occurred on this flight and determine if Starliner is ready to carry people to space during a test flight called CFT, for Crewed Flight Test, which could occur by the end of the year. That will be a huge milestone for Boeing, which has fallen far behind NASA’s other Commercial Crew provider, SpaceX. SpaceX has already flown five crewed flights to the station for NASA on its Crew Dragon capsule, which carried its first passengers in 2020.

But if Starliner is cleared to fly people, NASA will finally have what it always wanted: two different American companies capable of taking agency astronauts to orbit.

Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft returns to Earth, wrapping up critical test mission

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That achievement, only possible in microgravity and at a millionth of a degree above absolute zero, the minimum temperature of the universe, would’ve been impossible to accomplish on Earth. The team of physicists behind the milestone, who are all working remotely—that is, on the ground—published their new research in the journal Nature last week, showing that they made the ultracold bubbles with an experimental apparatus that beamed lasers into a sealed vacuum chamber to cool down gas atoms. Then they deployed magnetic fields and radio waves to cast them into hollow, egg-shaped blobs. The experiment gives insight into the quantum realm and has applications for other areas of physics too.

“It’s exciting to see the atoms take these new shapes and to see new behaviors when you turn gravity off,” says David Aveline, an author of the study and member of the collaboration working on the Cold Atom Lab, operated by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Ultracold atoms of gas—in this case, of rubidium—don’t act the way they normally would at room temperature, zipping around their container like microscopic billiard balls. As the gas cools, they move slower and slower, but without the sluggish atoms turning into a liquid or solid, like a vapor would. When they’re chilled close to absolute zero, they begin clumping together, and the wavelengths associated with the gas particles get longer and begin to overlap.

At such extremely frigid temperatures, the atoms start acting weirdly. They coalesce into a substance with quantum properties, behaving both as particles and as waves. At that point, they’re basically a quantum paradox and almost like a new state of matter, called a Bose-Einstein condensate, named after the Indian and German physicists from a century ago. (Technically, the ultracold atoms need to be cooled even further to be considered a Bose-Einstein condensate, but they’re showing signs of being on the cusp of that.) In any case, while quantum phenomena usually need powerful microscopes to be observed, these bubbles can be inflated to a size much bigger than the width of a human hair.

“We’re taking neat physics effects that normally happen at the scale of atoms, and we’re making them happen in objects that are up to a millimeter in size, trying to make quantum mechanics and strange physics behavior visible to the naked eye,” says Nathan Lundblad, an atomic physicist at Bates College in Maine and lead author of the study.

This research could have applications beyond the world of quantum physics. One reason NASA’s interested is because such work on ultracold atoms could eventually aid the development of more precise gyroscopes and accelerometers, Aveline says. Inflating a bubble of ultracold atoms could also provide insight into the extremely fast expansion of the baby universe a fraction of a second after the Big Bang.

While these physicists and their colleagues have studied ultracold atoms on Earth for decades, the planet’s gravity still tugs on the atoms, even though it’s nature’s weakest force. On the ground, if scientists try nudging the atoms into a round blob or bubble, they end up drooping, creating a concave shape more like a little contact lens. That hasn’t stopped researchers from manipulating them into other shapes, like needles, rings, and pancakes. (The geometry of atoms can matter, since an ultrathin layer of carbon can be made into graphene, for example.) But to make bubbles of ultracold gas atoms that stay spherical or ellipsoidal and don’t flatten out, they had to take gravity out of the picture. That’s where the ISS came in.

Lundblad and Aveline’s supercool experiment is just one within the Cold Atom Lab, or CAL. Unlike a research lab at a university, CAL contains hardware that enables six teams to perform a variety of experiments, sort of like a kitchen where groups of cooks can come in to make use of the ingredients and tools to prepare their own dishes. Once astronauts installed the lab, it was able to run on its own, requiring no monitoring or assistance by ISS crew. (It can occasionally be repaired or improved, like when NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir conducted an upgrade in 2020.)

Unlike atomic physics research on Earth, teams of scientists like Lundblad and Aveline’s have to propose and conduct their experiments from afar. “It’s like the Hubble telescope, but for atomic physicists,” Lundblad says. The researchers operate CAL remotely from JPL, sending commands and receiving data, which they then distribute to the scientists who developed the experiments. They generally run them when astronauts are sleeping, partly because CAL sits near the exercise bike on the ISS, which could ever-so-slightly shake the apparatus.

In 2018, a group of German scientists launched a similar experiment on a rocket that briefly went into space, but this is the first time anyone has attempted it in orbit. Researchers have also attempted to simulate microgravity with a vacuum chamber in a 400-foot drop tower at the University of Bremen in northern Germany. But that near-weightlessness lasts just a few seconds, and scientists can only run a few such short-lived experiments per day, as opposed to CAL, which can run some experiments multiple times a minute.

“It’s great to see a low-cost serious science experiment happening. I see a lot of biological experiments in space, but in terms of the physical sciences, I think the Cold Atom Laboratory has been fantastic,” says Barry Garraway, a quantum physicist at the University of Sussex in the UK who earlier led theoretical work on Bose-Einstein condensates and isn’t involved in CAL. (The lab isn’t exactly cheap, but it’s inexpensive compared to multibillion-dollar particle accelerators, for example.)

“For me, this has reinvigorated my interest in space,” Garraway says. “For the experiment, my interest is now about how to improve it, make it more symmetric, smooth out some of the wrinkles, and help them on the journey.”

Researchers Made Ultracold Quantum Bubbles on the Space Station

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The study of more than 13 million veterans also found that vaccination against the virus that causes COVID-19 reduced the risk of death by 34% and the risk of getting long COVID by 15%, compared with unvaccinated patients infected with the virus. However, vaccines were shown to be most effective in preventing some of the most worrisome manifestations of long COVID—lung and blood-clotting disorders—which declined about 49% and 56%, respectively, among those who were vaccinated.

The research is published May 25 in Nature Medicine.

"Vaccinations remain critically important in the fight against COVID-19," said first author Ziyad Al-Aly, MD, a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University. "Vaccinations reduce the risk of hospitalization and dying from COVID-19. But vaccines seem to only provide modest protection against long COVID. People recovering from breakthrough COVID-19 infection should continue to monitor their health and see a health-care provider if lingering symptoms make it difficult to carry out daily activities."

The researchers classified patients as fully vaccinated if they had received two doses of the Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines or one dose of the Johnson & Johnson/Janssen vaccine. At the time the research was conducted, the database used for this study did not include information about whether patients received boosters.

"Now that we understand that COVID-19 can have lingering health consequences even among the vaccinated, we need to move toward developing mitigation strategies that can be implemented for the longer term since it does not appear that COVID-19 is going away any time soon," said Al-Aly, who is also the chief of research and development at the VA St. Louis Health Care System. "We need to urgently develop and deploy additional layers of protection that could be sustainably implemented to reduce the risk of long COVID."

Such protective layers could include nasal vaccines that are more convenient or potent than the current shots, or other types of vaccines or drugs aimed at minimizing the risks of long COVID.

"Getting COVID-19, even among vaccinated people, seems almost unavoidable nowadays," said Al-Aly, noting that 8 to 12% of vaccinated people with breakthrough infections may develop long COVID. "Our current approach will likely leave a large number of people with chronic and potentially disabling conditions that have no treatments. This will not only affect people's health, but their ability to work, life expectancy, economic productivity and societal well-being. We need to have a candid national conversation about the consequences of our current approach."

Since the pandemic started, more than 524 million people globally have been infected with the virus; of those, more than 6 million have died—including more than 1 million in the United States alone.

"Let's say SARS-CoV-2 is here for 10 years," Al-Aly continued. "People are sick and tired of masking and social distancing, and it's simply not sustainable to ask that they continue to do so. We need to come up with additional layers of protection that allow us to resume normal life while co-existing with the virus. Current vaccines are only part of the solution."

For the study, researchers analyzed the de-identified medical records of more than 13 million veterans. The records are in a database maintained by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the nation's largest integrated health-care delivery system. The researchers examined data of 113,474 unvaccinated COVID-19 patients and 33,940 vaccinated patients who had experienced COVID-19 breakthrough infections, all from Jan. 1 through Oct. 31, 2021.

The patients with COVID-19 were mostly older, white men; however, the researchers also analyzed data that included more than 1.3 million women and adults of all ages and races.

The study does not include data involving the virus's omicron variants, which began spreading rapidly in late 2021. However, Al-Aly said prior studies have suggested the vaccine is effective against all current variants.

Among the study's other findings:

•  In addition to complications involving the heart, brain and lungs, other symptoms associated with long COVID included disorders involving the kidneys, blood clotting, mental health, metabolism and the gastrointestinal and musculoskeletal systems.

•  Long COVID risks were 17% higher among vaccinated immunocompromised people with breakthrough infections compared with previously healthy, vaccinated people who experienced breakthrough infections.

•  An analysis of 3,667 vaccinated patients who were hospitalized with breakthrough COVID-19 infections showed that they experienced 2.5 times the risk of death than people who were hospitalized with influenza. They also had a 27% higher risk of long COVID in the first 30 days after diagnosis compared with 14,337 people who were hospitalized with seasonal influenza.

•  The datasets also compared long-term health outcomes with a prepandemic control group of more than 5.75 million people (meaning they had never had COVID-19 because it hadn't yet existed). Across the board, people who had breakthrough COVID-19 faced significantly higher risks of death and illnesses such as heart and lung diseases, neurological conditions and kidney failure.

"The constellation of findings shows that the burden of death and disease experienced by people with breakthrough COVID-19 infections is not trivial," Al-Aly said.

Source

Forecasters expect a busy 2022 Atlantic hurricane season, with a 65 percent chance of an above-average season. There’s also a wildcard in the mix that raises the risk of more severe storms in the Gulf of Mexico this year.

Between 14 to 21 tropical storms could grow powerful enough to be named this season, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said in its season outlook briefing, which was released today. The average Atlantic hurricane season, which starts on June 1st, typically has about 14 named storms. Another prominent forecast from Colorado State University predicted 19 named storms this year.

NOAA expects six to 10 storms to strengthen into hurricanes. NOAA also forecast between three to six major hurricanes, ranked as a Category 3 or higher with wind speeds of at least 111 miles per hour.

There’s also a troubling development in the Gulf of Mexico. The Loop Current, a current of warm water, has moved surprisingly far north for this time of year. The current, which flows like a river within the sea, brings warmer water from the Caribbean to typically cooler waters closer to the US Gulf Coast. That’s especially worrying news for the season since hurricanes feed off heat energy.

“It’s higher octane fuel,” says University of Miami oceanography professor Nick Shay. “It’s the 800 pound gorilla in the Gulf.”

Shay is concerned that the Loop Current’s current behavior looks similar to the 2005 Atlantic Hurricane season — when hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma ripped through Gulf Coast communities.

“In 2005, we have what is known as the hurricane Trifecta in the Gulf of Mexico,” Shay says. Both Katrina and Rita developed explosively into Category 5 storms after crossing paths with the Loop Current’s warmer waters. Hurricanes Ida in 2021 and Harvey in 2017 were also strengthened by the Loop Current.

The Loop Current’s water is also saltier. Differences in temperature and salinity between the Loop Current and the rest of the Gulf limit ocean water mixing, which might normally bring surface temperatures down.

As a result, the current holds onto heat at much deeper depths than the surrounding Gulf. Water temperatures of 78 degrees Fahrenheit in the current can reach up to 500 feet below the surface. Outside of the current, those kinds of temperatures usually only reach 100 feet below the surface. “It’s a big difference,” Shay says.

But Shay cautions that it’s too soon to tell whether something similar to 2005 could happen this season. It will depend on whether any storms move toward the Loop Current (or toward large circling pools of hot water that spin off from the current, called eddies). Whether the Loop Current can successfully supercharge storms will also depend on whether storms form during favorable atmospheric conditions and low wind shear.

Strong wind sheer, changes in the wind’s speed and direction, can destabilize or weaken a storm. But a weather pattern called La Niña is expected to keep wind shear low throughout the hurricane season, a factor that could up the chances of stronger storms developing.

NOAA also pointed to an “enhanced” west African monsoon affecting this year’s Atlantic season. The west African monsoon, a major wind system, can drive stronger easterly waves that “seed many of the strongest and longest lived hurricanes during most seasons,” NOAA says in its season outlook.

Stronger hurricanes are expected to become more common as climate change heats up the world’s oceans. Warmer than average sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea are also likely to boost hurricane activity this season, NOAA said today.

There’s also evidence that hurricanes have begun to intensify more quickly and keep their strength for longer after making landfall as global average temperatures rise. The Loop Current’s warm eddies also seem to hold more heat than they have in the past, Shay says, although scientists can’t yet pinpoint why.

Should NOAA’s predictions for 2022 come true, it would be the seventh consecutive above-normal season for the Atlantic.

The ‘800 pound gorilla’ in the Gulf of Mexico that could supercharge hurricanes this season

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