Everything CDC wants you to know about monkeypox and the current risk level

Oxfam International has a new report out today that highlights the rapidly widening gap between the few ultra-rich and the world’s poorest. The report, titled “Profiting from Pain,” found that during the first two years of the pandemic, a new billionaire was minted every 30 hours, with a total of 573 of the world’s richest becoming billionaires during that time frame.

On the flip side, in 2022, Oxfam expects a million people to fall into extreme poverty every 33 hours—nearly the same rate a new billionaire is minted. The astonishing rate that people the world over are set to fall into extreme poverty—263 million people in 2022 alone—is due to the rapidly rising costs of living, including everything from the cost of energy to the cost of food. While the billionaires who control these assets will profit even more, hundreds of millions could be priced out of staying alive, Oxfam warns.

Announcing the release of the report, Gabriela Bucher, executive director of Oxfam International, said:

 Billionaires’ fortunes have not increased because they are now smarter or working harder. Workers are working harder, for less pay and in worse conditions. The super-rich have rigged the system with impunity for decades and they are now reaping the benefits. They have seized a shocking amount of the world’s wealth as a result of privatization and monopolies, gutting regulation and workers’ rights while stashing their cash in tax havens—all with the complicity of governments.

 Meanwhile, millions of others are skipping meals, turning off the heating, falling behind on bills and wondering what they can possibly do next to survive. Across East Africa, one person is likely dying every minute from hunger. This grotesque inequality is breaking the bonds that hold us together as humanity. It is divisive, corrosive and dangerous. This is inequality that literally kills.

Other shocking findings: The world’s 2,668 billionaires own $12.7 trillion of the planet’s wealth, with the world’s 10 richest men owning more than the poorest 3.1 billion people on earth.

Oxfam is urging governments to introduce a one-off tax on billionaires’ pandemic profits to help average people pay for the rapidly rising cost of food and energy. The organization is also calling on governments to create an annual wealth tax that would see millionaires taxed on 2% of their total wealth per year and billionaires taxed on 5% of their total wealth per year.

Oxfam says such a tax would generate $2.52 trillion per year, which could provide universal health care and sufficient social protections for every resident of low- and lower-middle-income nations.

You can read Oxfam International’s full “Profiting from pain” report here.

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"Our study suggests that people at high risk of ventricular arrhythmias, such as those with an ICD, should check daily pollution levels," said study author Dr. Alessia Zanni, now working at Maggiore Hospital, Bologna and previously at Piacenza Hospital, Italy. "When particular matter (PM) 2.5 and PM 10 concentrations are high (above 35 μg/m3 and 50 μg/m3, respectively), it would be sensible to stay indoors as much as possible and wear an N95 mask outside, particularly in areas of heavy traffic. An air purifier can be used at home."

Outdoor air pollution kills an estimated 4.2 million people every year, according to the World Health Organization. Nearly one in five cardiovascular disease deaths are due to dirty air, which was ranked the fourth highest risk factor for mortality after high blood pressure, tobacco use and poor diet.

This study investigated the relationship between air pollution and ventricular arrhythmias in Piacenza, Northern Italy. The European Environment Agency graded the city 307 worst out of 323 cities for annual mean PM2.5 concentrations in 2019 and 2020, with a figure of 20.8 μg/m.

"We had observed that emergency room visits for arrhythmias in patients with ICDs tended to cluster on days with particularly high air pollution," noted Dr. Zanni. "We therefore decided to compare the concentration of air pollutants on days when patients had an arrhythmia versus pollution levels on days without an arrhythmia."

The study included 146 consecutive patients who received an ICD between January 2013 and December 2017. Of those, 93 received an ICD because of heart failure after a heart attack while 53 had a genetic or inflammatory heart condition. Just over half (79 patients) had never experienced a ventricular arrhythmia, and 67 patients had previously had a ventricular arrhythmia.

Data on ventricular arrhythmias (ventricular tachycardia and ventricular fibrillation) were collected remotely from the ICD until study completion at the end of 2017. The researchers also recorded the therapy delivered by the device. This included antitachycardia pacing for ventricular tachycardia (fast heartbeat), which delivers electrical impulses to the heart muscle to restore a normal heart rate and rhythm. The second therapy was an electric shock to reset the heartbeat during ventricular fibrillation.

Daily levels of PM10, PM2.5, carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and ozone (O3) were obtained from Regional Environmental Protection Agency (ARPA) monitoring stations. Patients were assigned exposures based on their home address. The researchers analyzed the association between pollutant concentrations and the occurrence of ventricular arrhythmias.

A total of 440 ventricular arrhythmias were recorded during the study period, of which 322 were treated with antitachycardia pacing and 118 were treated with a shock. The researchers found a significant association between PM2.5 levels and ventricular arrhythmias treated with shocks, corresponding to a 1.5% increased risk for each 1 μg/m3 rise in PM2.5. They also found that when PM2.5 concentrations were elevated by 1 μg/m3 for an entire week, compared to average levels, there was a 2.4% higher likelihood of ventricular arrhythmias regardless of the temperature. When PM10 was 1 μg/m3 above average for a week there was a 2.1% raised risk of arrhythmias.

Dr. Zanni said: "Particulate matter may cause acute inflammation of the heart muscle which could act as a trigger for cardiac arrhythmias. As these toxic particles are emitted from power plants, industries and cars, green projects are needed to protect health, on top of the actions individuals can take to protect themselves."

She concluded: "These data confirm that environmental pollution is not only a climate emergency but also a public health problem. The study suggests that the survival of patients with heart disease is affected not only by pharmacological therapies and advances in cardiology but also by the air that they breathe. This battle can be won by an alliance between scientific societies and politicians to protect not only the environment but also the health of the human population."

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"This study adds to the body of evidence that a more cautious approach to alcohol consumption is needed," said study author Dr. Bethany Wong of St. Vincent's University Hospital, Dublin, Ireland. "To minimize the risk of alcohol causing harm to the heart, if you don't drink, don't start. If you do drink, limit your weekly consumption to less than one bottle of wine or less than three-and-a-half 500 ml cans of 4.5% beer."

According to the World Health Organization, the European Union is the heaviest-drinking region in the world. While it is well recognized that long-term heavy alcohol use can cause a type of heart failure called alcoholic cardiomyopathy, evidence from Asian populations suggests that lower amounts may also be detrimental. "As there are genetic and environmental differences between Asian and European populations this study investigated if there was a similar relationship between alcohol and cardiac changes in Europeans at risk of heart failure or with pre-heart failure," said Dr. Wong. "The mainstay of treatment for this group is management of risk factors such as alcohol, so knowledge about safe levels is crucial."

This was a secondary analysis of the STOP-HF trial. The study included 744 adults over 40 years of age either at risk of developing heart failure due to risk factors (e.g. high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity) or with pre-heart failure (risk factors and heart abnormalities but no symptoms). The average age was 66.5 years and 53% were women. The study excluded former drinkers and heart failure patients with symptoms (e.g. shortness of breath, tiredness, reduced ability to exercise, swollen ankles). Heart function was measured with echocardiography at baseline and follow up.

The study used the Irish definition of one standard drink (i.e. one unit), which is 10 grams of alcohol. Participants were categorized according to their weekly alcohol intake: 1) none; 2) low (less than seven units; up to one 750 ml bottle of 12.5% wine or three-and-a-half 500 ml cans of 4.5% beer); 3) moderate (7–14 units; up to two bottles of 12.5% wine or seven 500 mL cans of 4.5% beer); 4) high (above 14 units; more than two bottles of 12.5% wine or seven 500 ml cans of 4.5% beer).

The researchers analyzed the association between alcohol use and heart health over a median of 5.4 years. The results were reported separately for the at-risk and pre-heart failure groups. In the at-risk group, worsening heart health was defined as progression to pre-heart failure or to symptomatic heart failure. For the pre-heart failure group, worsening heart health was defined as deterioration in the squeezing or relaxation functions of the heart or progression to symptomatic heart failure. The analyses were adjusted for factors that can affect heart structure including age, gender, obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, and vascular disease.

A total of 201 (27%) patients reported no alcohol usage, while 356 (48%) were low users and 187 (25%) had moderate or high intake. Compared to the low intake group, those with moderate or high use were younger, more likely to be male, and had a higher body mass index.

In the pre-heart failure group, compared with no alcohol use, moderate or high intake was associated with a 4.5-fold increased risk of worsening heart health. The relationship was also observed when moderate and high levels were analyzed separately. In the at-risk group, there was no association between moderate or high alcohol use with progression to pre-heart failure or to symptomatic heart failure. No protective associations were found for low alcohol intake.

Dr. Wong said: "Our study suggests that drinking more than 70 g of alcohol per week is associated with worsening pre-heart failure or progression to symptomatic heart failure in Europeans. We did not observe any benefits of low alcohol usage. Our results indicate that countries should advocate lower limits of safe alcohol intake in pre-heart failure patients. In Ireland, for example, those at risk of heart failure or with pre-heart failure are advised to restrict weekly alcohol intake to 11 units for women and 17 units for men. This limit for men is more than twice the amount we found to be safe. More research is needed in Caucasian populations to align results and reduce the mixed messages that clinicians, patients and the public are currently getting."

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Now, a new Yale-led study has uncovered a previously unknown process by which some NSAIDs affect the body. The finding may explain why similar NSAIDs produce a range of clinical outcomes and could inform how the drugs are used in the future.

The study was published May 23 in the journal Immunity.

Until now, the anti-inflammatory effects of NSAIDs were believed to arise solely through the inhibition of certain enzymes. But this mechanism does not account for many clinical outcomes that vary across the family of drugs. For example, some NSAIDs prevent heart disease while others cause it, some NSAIDs have been linked to decreased incidence of colorectal cancer, and various NSAIDs can have a wide range of effects on asthma.

Now, using cell cultures and mice, Yale researchers have uncovered a distinct mechanism by which a subset of NSAIDs reduce inflammation. And that mechanism may help explain some of these curious effects.

The research showed that only some NSAIDs—including indomethacin, which is used to treat arthritis and gout, and ibuprofen—also activate a protein called nuclear factor erythroid 2-related factor 2, or NRF2, which, among its many actions, triggers anti-inflammatory processes in the body.

"It's interesting and exciting that NSAIDs have a different mode of action than what was known previously," said Anna Eisenstein, an instructor at the Yale School of Medicine and lead author of the study. "And because people use NSAIDs so frequently, it's important we know what they're doing in the body."

The research team can't say for sure that NSAIDs' unexpected effects are due to NRF2—that will require more research. "But I think these findings are suggestive of that," Eisenstein said.

Eisenstein is now looking into some of the drugs' dermatological effects—causing rashes, exacerbating hives, and worsening allergies—and whether they are mediated by NRF2.

This discovery still needs to be confirmed in humans, the researchers note. But if it is, the findings could have impacts on how inflammation is treated and how NSAIDs are used.

For instance, several clinical trials are evaluating whether NRF2-activating drugs are effective in treating inflammatory diseases like Alzheimer's disease, asthma, and various cancers; this research could inform the potential and limitations of those drugs. Additionally, NSAIDs might be more effectively prescribed going forward, with NRF2-activating NSAIDs and non-NRF2-activating NSAIDs applied to the diseases they're most likely to treat.
The findings may also point to entirely new applications for NSAIDs, said Eisenstein.

NRF2 controls a large number of genes involved in a wide range of processes, including metabolism, immune response, and inflammation. And the protein has been implicated in aging, longevity, and cellular stress reduction.

Eisenstein says "that NRF2 does so much suggests that NSAIDs might have other effects, whether beneficial or adverse, that we haven't yet looked for."

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The drug candidate, called CF33-hNIS (aka Vaxinia), is what's called an oncolytic virus, a genetically modified virus designed to selectively infect and kill cancer cells while sparing healthy ones.

In the case of CF33-hNIS, the modified pox virus works by entering cells and duplicating itself. Eventually, the infected cell bursts, releasing thousands of new virus particles that act as antigens, stimulating the immune system to attack nearby cancer cells.

Previous research in animal models has shown the drug can harness the immune system in this way to hunt and destroy cancer cells, but up until now no testing has been done in humans.

That's just changed, with co-developers of the drug – the City of Hope cancer care and research center in Los Angeles, and Australia-based biotech company Imugene – now announcing that the first clinical trial in human patients is underway.

"Our previous research demonstrated that oncolytic viruses can stimulate the immune system to respond to and kill cancer, as well as stimulate the immune system to be more responsive to other immunotherapies," says City of Hope oncologist and principal investigator Daneng Li.

"We believe CF33-hNIS has the potential to improve outcomes for our patients."

Unlocking that potential will first depend on showing that CF33-hNIS is safe for people to take, with the first phase of the trial focusing on the safety and tolerability of the drug.

The intervention is expected to enroll 100 participants in total, each being an adult patient with metastatic or advanced solid tumors who has previously tried at least two prior lines of standard treatment.

Once enrolled in the trial, these individuals will receive low doses of the experimental treatment via direct injection or intravenously.

If early results are successful and CF33-hNIS is deemed safe and well tolerated, additional tests will investigate how the drug pairs with pembrolizumab, an existing antibody treatment already used in cancer immunotherapy.

The version of the virus now being clinically trialed produces human sodium iodide symporter (hNIS), a protein that enables researchers to image and monitor viral replication, as well as allowing an additional way to damage the cancer cells by adding radioactive iodine.

Before efficacy is determined, however, researchers will first be looking to see how well the drug is handled by patients, recording the frequency and severity of any adverse effects, and also investigating how well participants fare as low doses are escalated.

Secondary measures – including assessments of how effectively CF33-hNIS shrinks treated tumors – will be analyzed later on down the track, but with the trial expected to take two years across multiple anticipated clinical sites, it will likely be some time before we know the results in detail.

Which doesn't mean we can't get excited about the broad potential here; just that we should keep our expectations in check, because promising results in pre-clinical experiments don't necessarily guarantee similarly successful results in subsequent research involving human patients.

If the drug does turn out to be safe and well-tolerated, we could be looking at a powerful new tool for fighting tumors, described as a "game-changer because of how potent it is and because of its ability to recruit and activate immune cells," according to surgical oncologist Susanne Warner, who previously led a team studying the effects of CF33 on tumors in mice.

"Our oncolytic virus trains the immune system to target a specific cancer cell," she said in 2020.

"Meaning if a similar cancer cell ever tries to regrow, the immune system will be ready and waiting to shut it down."

Nobody knows for sure yet if CF33-hNIS will work the same wonders in people, but if it can, it stands to become only the second FDA-approved oncolytic virus therapy for cancer, following on the heels of a drug called Talimogene laherparepvec (T-VEC), a modified version of the herpes simplex virus, which is used in the treatment of melanoma.

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It all starts with dark matter – or in this case, no dark matter. Although most cosmologists agree there's something out there called 'dark matter', causing spiral galaxies to rotate faster than they should, even dark matter doesn't answer all the questions we need it to.

So, it's not a bad idea to look at some alternative options. You know, just in case we are never able to find the stuff.

One alternative hypothesis to dark matter is called Modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) or Milgromian dynamics framework. This hypothesis – first published in 1983 by physicist Mordehai Milgrom – suggests that we don't need dark matter to fill in the Universe's gravity gaps, if we calculate the gravitational forces experienced by stars in outer galactic regions in a different manner to how Newtonian laws suggest.

To test this idea, which involves working with proportionality to the star's radius or centripetal acceleration, we need to be looking at the speeds of galaxies – specifically weird ones like ultra-diffuse galaxies.

These very faint, ugly ducklings of the galaxy world have a habit of not acting like a galaxy should. For example, some ultra diffuse galaxies seem to be made almost entirely of dark matter, whilst others are almost completely dark matter-less.

This is where AGC 114905 comes in. This ultra-diffuse dwarf galaxy around 250 million light years away had recently been looked at in detail in a paper published in 2021 investigating how fast it spins.

But this team found that the galaxy's spin was extremely slow – slow enough that not only did they not need dark matter to confirm the models, but the rotation curve of the galaxy also cast huge doubt on the MOND framework. It doesn't fit with either hypothesis.

"The very low reported rotation speed of this galaxy is inconsistent with both MOND and the standard approach with dark matter," says University of St Andrews physicist and one of the researchers of the new paper, Hongsheng Zhao.

"But only MOND is able to get around this apparent contradiction."

The new paper has 'un-debunked' the 2021 finding, suggesting that the issue isn't with MOND, but instead with the inclination of the galaxy itself.

When we look at galaxies far away in the depths of space, it can sometimes be hard to confirm which angle we're seeing. The original team found that AGC 114905 looked elliptical, suggesting that we're looking at the galaxy from an angle.

But using simulations, researchers now suggest the galaxy could appear elliptical even when it's facing us straight on. A change in the angle of the galaxy to us would also change how fast the galaxy is rotating, making all the MOND math add up after all.

"Our simulations show that the inclination of AGC 114905 might be significantly less than reported, which would mean the galaxy is actually rotating much faster than people think, in line with MOND expectations," says lead author of the new paper, physicist Indranil Banik, also from the University of St Andrews.

Now, this is still an open question. We don't know whether this new paper, or the 2021 paper is going to be crowned victorious – or at least most correct.
In the meantime, if this new finding holds, it seems that the MOND framework might live on for another day. As wild as MOND might be, with dark matter still elusive, and many other questions still to be answered, we need all the options we can get.

The research has been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

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That's when we see it from here, on our planet. But from space, the view is very different – and now we can see what that looks like, thanks to the asteroid probe Lucy, led by the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), launched in October 2021.

At the time of the recent total lunar eclipse, which could be seen on the night of 16 May across most of the Americas, Lucy was at a distance of around 100 million kilometers (65 million miles) from Earth.

"While total lunar eclipses aren't that rare – they happen every year or so – it isn't that often that you get a chance to observe them from an entirely new angle," said planetary scientist Hal Levison of SwRI.

"When the team realized Lucy had a chance to observe this lunar eclipse as a part of the instrument calibration process, everyone was incredibly excited."

Over the course of about three hours, the spacecraft took 86 1-millisecond exposures using its high-resolution, black-and-white L'LORRI instrument, which were sent back home to Earth to be stitched together into a timelapse of the first half of the eclipse.

In the resulting video, Earth and its satellite can be seen in the distance, separated from each other by a distance of about 360,000 kilometers (224,000 miles), both lit by the Sun, off-screen far to the left. The Moon is much fainter than the Sun, so scientists brightened it to make it visible. As the video progresses, the Moon winks out entirely, swallowed by Earth's shadow.

It's a magnificent demonstration of the mechanics of a total lunar eclipse, as well as the capabilities of the L'LORRI camera, which will take images of Trojan asteroids sharing the orbit of Jupiter, at a much greater distance from the Sun.

Because the instrument is designed to operate in a colder thermal environment, the work to obtain the timelapse had to be very carefully conducted – that's why only half the eclipse was imaged, to avoid overheating.

"Capturing these images really was an amazing team effort," said planetary scientist John Spencer of SwRI.

"The instrument, guidance, navigation and science operations teams all had to work together to collect these data, getting Earth and the Moon in the same frame."

The results are not just useful for calibration purposes. They offer us Earthlings a spectacularly different view of our home world and satellite, during one of the most spectacular displays the Moon gives us. And it's breathtaking.

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Below we bust some of the most common coffee myths and misconceptions, to help you become a more informed consumer of this deliciously bitter elixir.

Coffee isn't a bean. It's a seed! Technically, it's the endosperm (pit) of a special kind of berry, typically from the coffee plant. Initially, it's wrapped in a thin red fruit that's peeled off during the cleaning process. Then it's a light silvery green color until it's roasted.

That doesn't mean you can plant your beans and grow your own coffee trees. The beans we grind up and brew are not plantable anymore, due to the roasting. Even if they were, it can take years before a coffee plant is mature enough to produce the berries that contain the coffee bean. Not to mention, Coffea arabica (the most popular cultivar) grows and thrives only in a few places in the world. It's a demanding little plant with very particular climate needs—which brings us to our next point.

Coffee beans don’t grow in Europe. They grow in Central and South America, East and West Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, Asia, and Hawaii. So if you’re buying expensive imported coffee from Italy, France, or anywhere outside of these regions, you’re likely getting pretty bad coffee (unless you live in Italy or France, that is). That's because the best-tasting coffee is always roasted shortly before it's consumed. 

If your coffee beans say they're from Ethiopia, that's where they were grown. But if the bag says they're from somewhere in Europe, it likely means the coffee was roasted there, and that's bad. Roasting brings out the flavors in coffee, but those flavor compounds start to break down shortly after they're roasted. Coffee roasted outside your locale has likely sat in a shipping container or cargo plane for a long time. So when it arrives, all those flavors that make the coffee so tasty in a Parisian café have greatly degraded. 

That's why my advice is to always buy locally roasted coffee beans and grind them at home (with a burr grinder).

We often hear that darker coffee is “stronger,” meaning it contains more caffeine, and that's not strictly true. When green coffee goes into a roaster, it's literally just toasted to different levels of doneness—just like your morning toast. 

Blonde roasts are among the lightest-roasted beans, and because they don't spend as much time cooking, they actually contain more intact caffeine compounds than medium- or dark-roasted beans. Heat accelerates chemical interactions, which means it also breaks down caffeine compounds. So it stands to reason that the longer a coffee bean is roasted, the less caffeine it's going to contain when it's ground up and brewed. 

Dark roasted coffee has stronger, bolder flavors, but it doesn't contain more caffeine. You might see dark-roast coffee labeled as French roast or Espresso roast, but that just means the beans are likely roasted twice to get a richer, toastier flavor. 

A mini myth bust: There is no such thing as an espresso bean. Coffee for espresso is just regular old coffee that's ground very fine. Espresso roast is a marketing term.

Some coffee aficionados turn their noses up at Starbucks coffee because of its typically toasty and smoky flavors, but that's not the result of Starbucks mishandling its beans. It's a billion-dollar corporation, and as with all fast-food joints, the goals of a giant coffee roaster are a little different from those of your local roaster. 

Starbucks coffee can taste “burnt” because the default roasts it ships to every one of its stores are typically on the darker side. There's nothing inherently low quality or less than about dark roasts. A dark roast can be every bit as good (or every bit as bad) as a blonde or medium roast. For Starbucks, a dark roast is just an easier way to maintain a consistent flavor profile in every Starbucks location. Just like with a McDonald's, the goal isn't delivering haute cuisine but a product that tastes the same no matter where you buy it.

That said, Starbucks (and other mass-produced coffee) falls prey to the same issues that make buying roasted coffee from another country a bad idea. Because it makes coffee beans on such a large scale, you never know how long they've sat on a shelf or how far away they were roasted. (But hey, given that coffee is often a lesser ingredient in Starbucks drinks, you may not care.)

Tip: If you want good, flavorful coffee for home, find a local café that roasts its own beans. I guarantee there's one within 100 miles of you, and they're going to produce coffee that tastes much better than anything a mass producer can make. 

Decaf coffee is unfairly maligned. It's often associated with lower-quality flavor and coffee drinkers who aren't “real” coffee fans. Both of these things are false. That's just plain-old gatekeeping. 

There are plenty of reasons to drink decaf coffee. You may have a caffeine sensitivity, or you may just enjoy the taste of espresso after a meal without having to pay for it by tossing and turning in bed all night. 

There are a few different ways coffee is decaffeinated, but the Swiss water process produces, in our opinion, the best decaf coffee. Using this process, the unroasted green coffee beans are washed in such a way that much of the caffeine content is extracted prior to roasting. The roasting lowers the content further. Extracting the caffeine in this gentler way preserves the flavors of the coffee bean. The carbon dioxide process is also good.

Other methods of decaffeination typically involve chemical solvents that can affect the flavor of the coffee. So next time you're shopping for decaf, be sure to check the bag and see which decaffeination process it uses. It should say “water processed” or something similar. This directory site may also help you find good decaf brands.

5 Myths and Misconceptions About Coffee

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Boeing’s Starliner coming in for docking, as seen from the International Space Station Image: NASA TV

This evening, Boeing’s new passenger spacecraft, the CST-100 Starliner, successfully docked itself to the International Space Station — demonstrating that the vehicle can potentially bring humans to the ISS in the future. It’s a crucial capability that Starliner has finally validated in space after years of delays and failures.

Starliner is in the midst of a key test flight for NASA called OFT-2, for Orbital Flight Test-2. The capsule, developed by Boeing for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, was made to transport NASA’s astronauts to and from the space station. But before anyone climbs on board, NASA tasked Boeing with conducting an uncrewed flight demonstration of Starliner to show that the capsule can hit all of the major milestones it’ll need to hit when it is carrying passengers.

Boeing has struggled to showcase Starliner’s ability until now. This mission is called OFT-2 since it’s technically a do-over of a mission that Boeing attempted back in 2019, called OFT. During that flight, Starliner launched to space as planned, but a software glitch prevented the capsule from getting in the right orbit it needed to reach to rendezvous with the ISS. Boeing had to bring the vehicle home early, and the company never demonstrated Starliner’s ability to dock with the ISS.

Now, roughly two and a half years later, Starliner has finally shown what it was designed to do. Using a series of sensors, the capsule autonomously guided itself onto an open docking port on the space station. “Boeing Starliner spacecraft completes its historic first docking to the International Space Station opening a new avenue of access for crews to the orbiting laboratory,” Steve Siceloff, a communications representative for Boeing, said during the livestream of the docking. Docking occurred a little over an hour behind schedule, due to some issues with Starliner’s graphics and docking ring, which were resolved ahead of the docking.

Starliner docked with the International Space Station Image: NASA TV

There was some concern about Starliner’s ability to dock with the space station after Boeing revealed some issues with the capsule’s thrusters yesterday. At 6:54PM ET, Starliner successfully launched to space on top of an Atlas V rocket, built and operated by the United Launch Alliance. Once Starliner separated from the Atlas V, it had to fire its own thrusters to insert itself into the proper orbit for reaching the space station. However, after that maneuver took place, Boeing and NASA revealed that two of the 12 thrusters Starliner uses for the procedure failed and cut off too early. The capsule’s flight control system was able to kick in and rerouted to a working thruster, which helped get Starliner into a stable orbit.

Ultimately, NASA and Boeing claimed that the issue should not impact the rest of Starliner’s mission. “There’s really no need to resolve them,” Steve Stich, NASA’s program manager for the Commercial Crew Program, said in a press conference after the flight. “But I know what the teams will do, and what we always do is we’ll go look at the data, try to understand what happened.” Today, Boeing revealed that a drop in chamber pressure had caused the early cutoff of the thruster, but that system behaved normally during follow-up burns of the thrusters. And with redundancies on the spacecraft, the issue “does not pose a risk to the rest of the flight test,” according to Boeing.

Boeing also noted today that the Starliner team is investigating some weird behavior of a “thermal cooling loop” but said that temperatures are stable on the spacecraft.

Now, with Starliner docked to the space station, it’ll stick around for the next four to five days. Tomorrow morning, the astronauts already on board the ISS will open the hatch to the vehicle and retrieve some cargo that’s packed inside. Also inside Starliner is a mannequin called Rosie the Rocketeer, simulating what it would be like for a human to ride inside the vehicle.

After its brief stay on the ISS, Starliner will detach from the ISS and distance itself from the station for its return home. The capsule will use its thrusters to take itself out of orbit and put it on course for Earth. The two thrusters that failed are the same kind used for this deorbit maneuver, but NASA and Boeing did not seem concerned. “We’ll just have to see if we can recover the thrusters,” Stich said. He also noted that the working thrusters could be used and that Boeing has the option to use a different set of thrusters to perform the task if needed. “So there’s plenty of redundancy in the spacecraft.”

For now, the Starliner team is celebrating their big milestone. “Today marks a great milestone towards providing additional commercial access to low Earth orbit, sustaining the ISS and enabling NASA’s goal of returning humans to the Moon and eventually to Mars,” NASA astronaut Bob Hines, currently on board the space station, said after the docking. “Great accomplishments in human spaceflight are long remembered by history. Today will be no different.”

Boeing’s Starliner successfully docks to the International Space Station for the first time

Yet it has remained an open question whether mindfulness interventions, like meditation, can alter the brain's structure. Some research using the well-known eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course suggested so. However, that study was limited in scope and technology, and perhaps skewed by elective participant pools.

In new research, a team from the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, led by Richard J. Davidson, found no evidence of structural brain changes with short-term mindfulness training.

Published May 20 in Science Advances, the team's study is the largest and most rigorously controlled to date. In two novel trials, over 200 healthy participants with no meditation experience or mental health concerns were given MRI exams to measure their brains prior to being randomly assigned to one of three study groups: the eight-week MBSR course, a non-mindfulness-based well-being intervention called the Health Enhancement Program, or a control group that didn't receive any type of training.

The MBSR course was taught by certified instructors and included mindfulness practices such as yoga, meditation and body awareness. The HEP course was developed as an activity that is similar to MBSR but without mindfulness training. Instead, HEP engaged participants in exercise, music therapy and nutrition practices. Both groups spent additional time in practice at home.

Following each eight-week trial, all participants were given a final MRI exam to measure changes in brain structure. Data from the two trials were pooled to create a large sample size. No significant differences in structural brain changes were detected between MBSR and either control group.

Participants were also asked to self-report on mindfulness following the study. Those in both the MBSR and HEP groups reported increased mindfulness compared with the control group, providing evidence that improvements in self-reported mindfulness may be related to benefits of any type of wellness intervention more broadly, rather than being specific to mindfulness meditation practice.

So, what about the prior study that found evidence of structural changes? Since participants in that study had sought out a course for stress reduction, they may have had more room for improvement than the healthy population studied here. In other words, according to the lead author of the new study, behavioral scientist and first author Tammi Kral, "the simple act of choosing to enroll in MBSR may be associated with increased benefit." The current study also had a much larger sample size, increasing confidence in the findings.

However, as the team writes in the new paper, "it may be that only with much longer duration of training, or training explicitly focused on a single form of practice, that structural alterations will be identified." Whereas structural brain changes are found with physical and spatial training, mindfulness training spans a variety of psychological areas like attention, compassion and emotion. This training engages a complex network of brain regions, each of which may be changing to different degrees in different people—making overall changes at the group level difficult to observe.

These surprising results ultimately underscore the importance of scrutiny for positive findings and the need for verification through replication. In addition, studies of longer-term interventions as well as ones singularly focused on meditation practices may lead to different results. "We are still in the early stages of research on the effects of meditation training on the brain and there is much to be discovered," says Davidson.

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Better wind forecasting can save American consumers millions of dollars a year on their collective utility bills, a new study finds. Wind energy costs have already plummeted thanks to more efficient turbines, but there’s still a major hurdle to overcome when it comes to renewable energy: intermittency. Unlike coal and gas-fired power plants, wind and solar farms can only churn out as much electricity as the weather will allow.

So, accurate weather forecasts are crucial for utilities to be able to plan how much wind energy they’ll have on hand on any given day. Wind energy has grown quickly to power nearly 10 percent of the US electricity mix today. The Biden administration has a goal of reaching a carbon pollution-free energy grid by 2035, and more accurate forecasts could help wind become an even bigger part of the mix.

To avoid outages, utilities are constantly trying to balance power supply with demand, and that’s where forecasts come in. If forecasts predict a windy day, utilities bank on being able to tap that energy to meet consumer demand. They’ll typically choose the most affordable source of energy, and wind is one of the cheapest in the US. (Renewables are now cheaper than fossil fuels in a majority of the world.) On the flip side, if forecasts warn of weak winds, utilities plan to procure electricity from other, potentially more expensive, energy sources.

Miscalculations are costly. If less wind energy is available than initially forecast, utilities might have to pay extra high prices to buy electricity on short notice to meet customer demand. And if more wind energy is available than initially forecast, a utility might needlessly purchase more expensive electricity from a coal-fired power plant. The costs associated with those poor weather predictions typically get passed on to customers as higher energy bills.

Thankfully, forecasting has improved with dedicated research. In 2015, the Department of Energy launched a four-year study into the atmospheric processes that affect wind power forecasts. That research informed an important weather model from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that provides hourly forecasts on wind conditions.

The model, called the High-Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR), has been updated a couple times since 2015. Consumers would have saved $384 million between 2015 and 2018 had the most updated version of the model been running the entire time, the new study finds. That shows how valuable it is to keep improving weather forecasts. To conduct the study, the researchers compared the model’s predictions to real-time observations to see how forecasts improved over time. Then, they estimated the potential cost savings for utilities and their customers.

Spread out across the US (with an estimated population of 329 million), the savings are small for each individual household. But those gains could grow as forecasting improves and more affordable wind energy comes online in the US.

Researchers are still working to make renewable energy forecasts even better. Newer versions of HRRR should be able to better predict wind ramps, which occur when wind speeds change very rapidly. The researchers say another study is underway to see how more accurate forecasts of cloud cover could also boost solar energy and trim down energy costs.

More accurate wind forecasts can save Americans millions in energy costs

The engineering team operating the Voyager 1 spacecraft — NASA’s robotic planetary explorer currently zooming through interstellar space — is trying to figure out why the spacecraft is sending back data readouts that don’t match what the vehicle is actually doing. It’s a mystery that does not seem to be putting the Voyager 1 spacecraft in any immediate jeopardy, but NASA is trying to figure it out nonetheless.

Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 has been exploring the cosmos for nearly half a century. It has a twin, Voyager 2, that was launched 16 days prior in the same year. Both spacecraft did tours of the outer Solar System, flying by planets and photographing moons before eventually traveling outside the boundary of our cosmic neighborhood. In 2012, Voyager 1 passed the heliopause — the boundary where the Sun’s solar wind ends and the interstellar medium begins. At a distance of 14.5 billion miles from Earth, Voyager 1 is the farthest human-made object in space.

But the farther Voyager 1 gets from Earth, the likelihood for weird things to happen with the spacecraft goes up. Right now, the spacecraft’s attitude articulation and control system, or AACS, is acting up. It’s the system that’s responsible for maintaining the vehicle’s orientation in space as well as pointing the probe’s high-gain antenna, which is used to send and receive signals from Earth. The AACS is still working as it should as far as the engineers can tell. But it’s returning data that doesn’t accurately describe what the system is doing, according to NASA. “For instance, the data may appear to be randomly generated, or does not reflect any possible state the AACS could be in,” NASA wrote in a press release.

Voyager 1 still seems okay in all other respects. It’s in communication with the engineering team and it’s collecting science data as it’s supposed to, NASA says. And the AACS issue hasn’t prompted the spacecraft to go into safe mode, a type of operating procedure in which the spacecraft powers down most of its instruments and only focuses on its most essential functions to stay alive.

So, basically, the team is forging ahead while trying to figure out what’s going on in the meantime. “A mystery like this is sort of par for the course at this stage of the Voyager mission,” Suzanne Dodd, project manager for Voyager 1 and 2 at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement. “The spacecraft are both almost 45 years old, which is far beyond what the mission planners anticipated. We’re also in interstellar space – a high-radiation environment that no spacecraft have flown in before.”

A fix could come in the form of a software patch. Or the Voyager 1 team may just learn to deal with it. Adapting is a way of life for the Voyager teams. The power on both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 is diminishing over time since the nuclear batteries that keep the spacecraft running are slowly decaying. The teams have already had to turn various systems off on the spacecraft — but somehow the science instruments are still running, even after all this time.

NASA engineers trying to figure out strange readings from aging interstellar spacecraft

If you are a new parent who, in a more or less sleep-deprived state, googles this question, then the answer could reassure you.

Many top Google hits will refer you to an old study which concludes that infant crying normally peaks at around the age of six weeks, after which it decreases markedly and stabilizes at a low level after three months.

Typically referred to as the "cry curve," parents might expect their infants to cry radically less after the initial peak. However, a new study from Denmark, challenges this "cry curve" pattern, by pooling data from parents in 17 different countries.

"We've created two mathematical models that reasonably represent the available data. Neither of them show that the duration of crying falls so markedly after five weeks, which is what is otherwise seen in the graphs that are presented to parents. The available data shows that crying is still a significant part of many infants' repertoire after six months," says Christine Parsons, who is an associate professor at the Department of Clinical Medicine at Aarhus University.

Widely used cry curve

The researchers behind the study have compiled data from 57 research articles from all over the world, in which parents have registered how much their infants cry every day.

The normal pattern of crying, the "cry curve" which parents are presently often referred to, is based on an American study from 1962, which only focuses on the first twelve weeks of a child's life.

"It's a graph that new parents are often presented with. If you google 'infant crying' you'll see lots of images of this particular graph. Therefore, we thought it would be interesting to model all the available data to see what type of pattern best represents the data, and test if this is consistent with the original 'cry curve,'" says Arnault-Quentin Vermillet, the first author of the article.

Important tool for clinicians

Crying is one of the first forms of communication used by infants to get their parents' attention. The infant's cognitive and emotional development is stimulated when parents react to the child's signals appropriately.

New parents often seek help from the healthcare system if they are worried that their child is crying too much.

According to Christine Parsons, it is therefore important that both healthcare professionals and parents have a correct and precise understanding of normal patterns of crying for infants.

"For clinicians in particular, it's important because their job is to help, support and reconcile the expectations of any worried parents. It's important that clinicians have up-to-date data on what is normal for infant crying, so that they can best support new parents. When parents consider their child to cry excessively, this can be associated with negative consequences for both parent and child," she explains.

Cry patterns vary a lot

A widely-used definition for excessive crying, or colic, is when a baby cries for more than 3 hours per day, more than 3 days over a week. In the first 6 weeks after birth, colic has been estimated as affecting between 17 and 25% of infants.

The researchers at Aarhus University have drawn up two new models for the infant cry pattern. One of them shows infant crying peaks after four weeks. The other shows that infants cry a lot and at a stable level during the first weeks, after which the level falls.

However, neither model indicates a steep decline, as otherwise appears to be the case from the "original cry pattern".

According to Christine Parsons, another noteworthy finding in the study is how different crying patterns are among babies– both within and across national borders.

As an example, she mentions that the limited available data indicates children from non-Western countries such as India, Mexico and South Korea, cry less than children from English-speaking countries such as the United States, Great Britain and Canada.

The research was published in Child Development.

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An atmospheric glow, albeit sometimes in invisible wavelengths, has been spotted at every planet except Mercury, and even some moons of Jupiter... and even a comet. But Mars is where it gets interesting. The red planet is famous for its lost global magnetic field, an ingredient that plays a crucial role in the formation of aurora elsewhere.

But that doesn't mean Mars is totally magnetism-free. Regions of localized magnetic fields sprout from some regions of the crust, particularly in the southern hemisphere. New analysis has confirmed that these small, local magnetic fields interact with the solar wind in interesting ways to produce Mars's discrete (or structured) ultraviolet auroras.

"We have the first detailed study looking at how solar wind conditions affect auroras on Mars," said physicist and astronomer Zachary Girazian of the University of Iowa.

"Our main finding is that inside the strong crustal field region, the aurora occurrence rate depends mostly on the orientation of the solar wind magnetic field, while outside the strong crustal field region, the occurrence rate depends mostly on the solar wind dynamic pressure."

Here on Earth, we have a pretty good handle of how auroras – borealis and australis – happen. They appear when particles from the solar wind collide with Earth's magnetosphere, and are then accelerated along the lines of the magnetic field to high latitudes, where they rain down into the upper atmosphere.

There, they interact with atmospheric particles to produce the shimmering lights that dance across the sky.

Evidence suggests that the phenomena form in similar ways on other bodies. For instance, Jupiter's powerful, permanent auroras are also facilitated by the enormous planet's complex magnetic field.

But Mars's global magnetic field decayed fairly early on in the planet's history, leaving behind only patches of magnetism preserved in magnetized minerals in the crust. Ultraviolet images of Mars at night have revealed that auroras tend to form near these crustal magnetic fields, which makes sense if magnetic field lines are required for particle acceleration.

Girazian and his team's work also takes into account the solar wind conditions. They analyzed data from the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft, which has been collecting ultraviolet images of the red planet since 2014. It's also equipped with an instrument called the Solar Wind Ion Analyzer, which, unsurprisingly, analyzes the solar wind.

They compared data on the dynamic pressure of the solar wind, as well as the strength and angle of the interplanetary magnetic field, with ultraviolet data on the Martian auroras. They found that, outside the crustal magnetic field regions, the dynamic pressure of the solar wind plays a significant role in the detection frequency of auroras.

However, the pressure of the solar wind seems to play little role in the brightness of said auroras. This suggests that space weather events, such as coronal mass ejections, where masses of charged particles are ejected from the Sun and are associated with higher solar wind pressure, may trigger Martian auroras.

Inside the crustal magnetic field regions, the orientation of the magnetic field and the solar wind seems to play a significant role in the formation of auroras on Mars. At certain orientations, the solar wind seems to be favorable to the magnetic reconnection events or particle acceleration required to produce the ultraviolet glow.

These results, the researchers said, reveal new information on how interactions with the solar wind can generate auroras on a planet stripped of its global magnetic field. This information can be used to help better understand the formation of discrete auroras on very different worlds.

"Now is a very fruitful and exciting time for researching aurora at Mars," Girazian said.

"The database of discrete aurora observations we have from MAVEN is the first of its kind, allowing us to understand basic features of the aurora for the first time."

The research has been published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics.

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Today’s the day when Boeing’s Starliner takes to the skies. Probably

Researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital conducted the study in 24 healthy, older adults to evaluate whether a high-dose or a low-dose melatonin supplement could improve sleep. The team found that the higher dose had a significant impact, increasing total sleep time compared to placebo by more than 15 minutes for nighttime sleep and by half an hour for daytime sleep. Results are published in the Journal of Pineal Research.

"Sleep deficiency becomes more common as people age, and, given the drawbacks to many prescription sleep aids, many older adults report taking melatonin," said senior author Charles Czeisler, chief of the Brigham's Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders. "But we've had little evidence on the effects of melatonin on the sleep health of older adults. Our study provides new evidence and insight, and points to the importance of considering dosage and timing when it comes to the effects of supplements like melatonin, especially in older people."

The body naturally produces the hormone melatonin, which helps regulate a person's sleep-wake cycle with night and day. Melatonin levels peak at night. But among older people, levels of the hormone are often lower. Exogenous melatonin is sold over the counter and can be taken before bedtime as a dietary supplement, usually in the form of a pill or capsule.

To rigorously evaluate the effects of melatonin supplements, the study's authors focused on healthy, older adults with no history of major sleep complaints. All potential participants were screened for sleep disorders. The study included 24 participants (13 women, 11 men) between the ages of 55 and 78.

During the monthlong study period, participants lived in individual study rooms with no windows, clocks, or other indications of time of day. Participants followed a forced desynchrony protocol—instead of experiencing 24-hour cycles of days and nights, they were on schedules of 20-hour cycles to disentangle the effects of rest-activity from the circadian clock. This allowed the sleep to be scheduled both at night and during the day, but with a similar duration of waking before each sleep. Participants were randomly assigned to receive two weeks of a placebo pill and two weeks of either a low (0.3 mg) or high (5 mg) dose of melatonin 30 minutes before bedtime. Researchers used polysomnography to record brain waves, eye movement, muscle tone, and other key sleep metrics.

The team found that the low dose of melatonin did not lead to a statistically significant change in overall sleep time and that the changes that were seen were when sleep was scheduled during the biological day. Participants taking the 5 mg dose had a significant increase in total sleep time and sleep efficiency regardless of whether sleep was scheduled during the day or night.

The authors note that their study will need to be replicated in larger trials and with other doses of melatonin to determine whether a dose between 0.3 and 5 mg may work as well. The study did not include participants who had a significant sleep disorder and the study's findings may not be applicable to people who do.

"It's exciting to see evidence that melatonin may have an impact on sleep at night for older adults because we know that so many older people have trouble sleeping," said lead author Jeanne Duffy of the Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders. "But before taking a dietary supplement, it's important for people to talk to their primary care physician and get a referral to a sleep specialist to rule out an undiagnosed sleep disorder."

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The findings raise some troubling questions about the role of AI in medical diagnosis, assessment, and treatment: could racial bias be unintentionally applied by computer software when studying images like these?

Having trained their AI using hundreds of thousands of existing X-ray images labeled with details of the patient's race, an international team of health researchers from the US, Canada, and Taiwan tested their system on X-ray images that the computer software hadn't seen before (and had no additional information about).

The AI could predict the reported racial identity of the patient on these images with surprising accuracy, even when the scans were taken from people of the same age and the same sex. The system hit levels of 90 percent with some groups of images.

"We aimed to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the ability of AI to recognize a patient's racial identity from medical images," write the researchers in their published paper.

"We show that standard AI deep learning models can be trained to predict race from medical images with high performance across multiple imaging modalities, which was sustained under external validation conditions."

The research echoes the results of a previous study that found artificial intelligence scans of X-ray images were more likely to miss signs of illness in Black people. To stop that from happening, scientists need to understand why it's occurring in the first place.

By its very nature, AI mimics human thinking to quickly spot patterns in data. Yet this also means it can unwittingly succumb to the same kinds of biases. Worse still, their complexity makes it hard to untangle the prejudices we've woven into them.

Right now the scientists aren't sure why the AI system is so good at identifying race from images that don't contain such information, at least not on the surface. Even when limited information is provided, by removing clues on bone density for instance or focussing on a small part of the body, the models still performed surprisingly well at guessing the race reported in the file.

It's possible that the system is finding signs of melanin, the pigment that gives skin its color, that are as yet unknown to science.

"Our finding that AI can accurately predict self-reported race, even from corrupted, cropped, and noised medical images, often when clinical experts cannot, creates an enormous risk for all model deployments in medical imaging," write the researchers.

The research adds to a growing pile of evidence that AI systems can often reflect the biases and prejudices of human beings, whether that's racism, sexism, or something else. Skewed training data can lead to skewed results, making them much less useful.

That needs to be balanced against the powerful potential of artificial intelligence to get through much more data much more quickly than humans can, everywhere from disease detection techniques to climate change models.

There remain a lot of unanswered questions from the study, but for now it's important to be aware of the potential for racial bias to show up in artificial intelligence systems – especially if we're going to hand more responsibility over to them in the future.

"We need to take a pause," research scientist and physician Leo Anthony Celi from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology told the Boston Globe.
"We cannot rush bringing the algorithms to hospitals and clinics until we're sure they're not making racist decisions or sexist decisions."

The research has been published in The Lancet Digital Health.

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The European Space Agency's (ESA) Solar Orbiter entered the close encounter, known as perihelion, on 26 March, coming in at a distance of around 48 million kilometers (30 million miles), inside the orbit of Mercury.

At that proximity, temperatures reached around 500 degrees Celsius (930 degrees Fahrenheit). Future perihelions are expected to get even closer and hotter.

As it swooped around its orbit, the spacecraft saw the Sun as we have never seen it before – including a fascinating, mysterious feature nicknamed a 'hedgehog', and detailed views of the usually hidden solar poles.

These new observations, taken with Solar Orbiter's 10 scientific instruments working together for the first time, should provide a wealth of data for teasing out the behavior of the Sun, including its wild magnetic fields, and the sometimes chaotic weather it blasts out into interplanetary space.

We already saw a spectacular, high-resolution image from the spacecraft as it made its close approach. Now ESA has released video of the encounter, for a solar probe's-eye view of our magnificent star.

Solar Orbiter is set to make a huge difference to solar science, not least because it can show us parts of the Sun we can't usually see. For example, because of Earth's vantage point in orbit around the sun's equator, its poles are extremely difficult to study; only a spacecraft orbiting above and below the Sun can see those regions.

The polar regions are thought to be extremely important regions for the solar magnetic fields that play such a huge role in solar activity. However, because the poles are so hard to see, we don't know what happens to the magnetic fields there. With its suite of instruments, Solar Orbiter offers unprecedented insight into these enigmatic regions.

Its view of the solar south pole on March 30 revealed a region seething with looping magnetic field lines arcing away from the Sun.

The solar 'hedgehog' is another fascination. It, too, was captured on 30 March, and solar physicists are yet to figure out exactly what it is, and how it formed. It consists of a relatively small region about 25,000 kilometers across, imaged in extreme ultraviolet to reveal the activity therein.

And what activity: hot and less hot spikes of solar gas are sticking out in all directions in the solar corona, or atmosphere, like solar bedhead.

"The images are really breathtaking," says solar physicist David Berghmans of the Royal Observatory of Belgium.

"Even if Solar Obiter stopped taking data tomorrow, I would be busy for years trying to figure all this stuff out."

Solar Orbiter's main objective is to help scientists understand the effect the Sun has on the entire heliosphere, or the sphere of solar influence defined by the solar wind, whose boundary lays out beyond the orbit of Pluto. That solar wind blows particles and magnetic fields out into interplanetary space, tangling with the planets with tangible effects.

The closer Solar Orbiter approaches the Sun, the better it will be able to sample how the solar wind blows. As it drew near perihelion, on 21 March, it detected an outflow of energetic particles, and even from this distance, the detection was revealing. The more energetic particles arrived first, followed by the less energetic ones. This suggested that the particles were not produced near Solar Orbiter's position, but close to the surface of the Sun.

Other instruments picked up solar events that could have produced the particles, accelerating them out into space, including a solar flare and coronal mass ejection, not dissimilar to a CME observed by the spacecraft on 10 March, seen below.

The Sun is currently quite active, which means the spacecraft is going to be beaming home absolute bucketloads of valuable data on solar activity. It has at least 14 more perihelions scheduled before 2030, in which it will swoop as close as 40 million kilometers from the Sun, using Venus flybys to boost its speed as it whirls around.

This first perihelion, so rich with new data and observations, is a tantalizing taste of the solar bonanza to come.

"We are so thrilled with the quality of the data from our first perihelion," says solar physicist Daniel Müller, ESA Project Scientist for Solar Orbiter.

"It's almost hard to believe that this is just the start of the mission. We are going to be very busy indeed."

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North Korea’s COVID outbreak hits over 1.7M; WHO is “deeply concerned”

In some settings, social touch may buffer against stress. Previous research has shown that massages, embraces combined with hand-holding, and embraces combined with affectionate communication can all reduce signs of stress in women. However, few studies have investigated these effects in men, nor have they explored the effects of brief embraces on their own.

To explore potential stress-reducing effects of embracing, Berretz and colleagues conducted an analysis of 76 people in romantic relationships. All participants underwent a stress-inducing test in which they were asked to keep one hand in an ice-water bath for three minutes while being observed and maintaining eye contact with a camera. Prior to this test, half of the couples were instructed to embrace, and the others did not embrace. The researchers measured various indicators of stress, including participants' salivary cortisol levels, before and after the experiment.

Statistical analysis revealed that women who embraced their partner had a lower cortisol response to the stress test than women who did not embrace their partner. However, for men, no associations were observed between embrace and stress-induced cortisol response. Other measures of stress including changes in blood pressure and emotional state did not show any associations with partner embrace.

These results suggest that a brief embrace with a romantic partner might subsequently reduce the cortisol response for women facing stressful social situations, such as school exams, job interviews, or presentations. Further research could investigate whether this benefit extends to embraces with platonic friends.

The authors also call for research into related effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Such investigations could explore whether social restrictions that reduced social touch may be associated with observed increases in stress and depression during the pandemic.

The authors add, "As a woman, hugging your romantic partner can prevent the acute stress response of your body."

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The study, using data from the MCC Collaborative Research Network, explored the association between temperature variability and mortality in 750 locations across 43 countries or regions.

Deaths as a result of temperature variability accounted for 3.4% of all deaths globally between 2000 and 2019. Asia, Australia, and New Zealand had a higher percentage excess in mortality than the global mean.

Globally, the percentage excess in mortality increased by about 4.6% per decade. The largest increase per decade occurred in Australia and New Zealand (7.3%), followed by Europe (4.4%) and Africa (3.3%).

Increased risk of death is associated with short-term temperature variability, but until now, there's been no comprehensive assessment of the temperature variability-related mortality burden worldwide.

Professor Yuming Guo, Director of the Monash Climate, Air Quality Research (CARE) Unit, said more attention should be paid to the health impacts of temperature variability.

"Climate change is a major public health concern of the 21st century. Our findings show that temperature variability has similar impacts to air pollution on global mortality," Professor Guo said.

"With temperatures becoming increasingly unstable, proactive countermeasures are necessary to protect human health against temperature variability.
"Many policies have been developed to cope with the threat of climate-related extreme events, for example, warning systems for heatwaves and air pollution. However, these policies and strategies rarely exist to cope with the adverse health impacts of temperature variability."

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Scented candles began receiving an influx of negative reviews online in 2020. Dissatisfied customers proclaimed that some of the most fragrant, most popular products from famous companies like Yankee Candle had "no smell" or even smelled bad.

This wasn't just a few bad reviews. The most popular scented candles sold on Amazon were receiving an average of 4 to 4½ stars before 2020, but over the course of that first year of the pandemic, the reviews fell by about a full star. Social media users mused about a link between these negative reviews and the loss of the sense of smell associated with COVID-19 infections.

When COVID-19 cases rose again at the end of 2021 due to the omicron variant, researchers noted another uptick in those negative "no smell" reviews.

Those negative online reviews are what Mauricio Santillana calls "breadcrumbs." As people navigate the digital world, they leave traces of what is going on in their offline lives, explains the director of the Machine Intelligence Group for the betterment of Health and the Environment (MIGHTE) in the Network Science Institute at Northeastern. Those "breadcrumbs" leave a trail for researchers like Santillana to follow as they project potential future outbreaks of COVID-19 and other diseases.

If there are anomalies in online trends—a spike in Google searches for shops that deliver chicken noodle soup, a sudden flurry of Tweets about navigating a quarantining family member, or bad reviews on scented candles—it could indicate that trouble is brewing. So Santillana is creating machine-learning models to spot the anomalies, make sense of these clues, and create an early warning system for disease outbreaks.

By adding human behavior to the mix, "we're creating an observatory of disease activity using different telescopes," says Santillana, a professor of physics and of electrical and computer engineering who recently joined Northeastern from Harvard University.

Santillana is teaming up with Alessandro Vespignani, director of the Network Science Institute and Sternberg Family Distinguished Professor at Northeastern, who leads a team of infectious-disease modelers that have been developing a set of projections about the possible futures of the COVID-19 pandemic since the crisis began.

Vespignani's models integrate details such as case counts, hospitalizations, deaths, human mobility patterns, how often humans interact, how the virus transmits and more data focused on the disease spread itself. Santillana says his research adds a different sort of thermometer by looking at digital traces of human behaviors that are a step removed from the epidemiological data.

"In a way, we're trying to bring together these two perspectives to provide a more whole picture of outbreaks like COVID-19," Santillana says.

Santillana and Vespignani have already been collaborating, combining this digital behavioral data with epidemiological data in their modeling work. In a paper published in Science Advances last year, they showed that such a harmonized early warning system could anticipate a surge in COVID-19 cases and deaths by two to three weeks. With Santillana joining the Network Science Institute, the pair will work together to further develop this early-warning system for disease outbreaks—and not just for COVID-19.

The data that Santillana gathers encompasses a vast, diverse collection of information—not just Google search trends, social media posts, and online shopping reviews or orders. He has also used anonymized smart thermometer data to identify when some sort of illness might be ticking up in a region, anonymized mobility data from smartphones that illustrates when more people might be staying home sick, as well as trends in clinician searches for certain kinds of treatments or symptoms.

Even the Google searches and social media posts encompass a wide range of data. People could be searching for more information about their symptoms or quarantine recommendations, or they could simply be trying to figure out where to buy cough syrup or soup.

An uptick in just one of these behaviors in a region might indicate that COVID-19 or another infectious disease is sweeping into a community, or it might just be that there was a new sci-fi film that came out and piqued people's curiosity about pandemics more generally. That's why Santillana says it's important for his models to take into account many different data sources. The machine learning models are also designed to figure out whether a rise in certain Google searches, for example, actually correlates with a rise in infections and hospitalizations in order to determine if it is worth considering as a harbinger of a disease outbreak.

This new type of "telescope," as Santillana termed it, will be a component of the U.S.'s new disease forecasting initiative, the Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics (CFA). Santillana is part of a team of experts advising that effort.

"In the same way that the weather forecasting systems around the world work," he explains, "the idea is to contribute different ways to look at information that is being produced in real time and design systems that will recognize when something anomalous happens."

Like weather forecasting agencies, the CFA will essentially be an early warning system, identifying when and where disease outbreaks might occur so that public-health officials can take action to prevent them from becoming devastating.

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A collision strips dark matter, starts star formation

NASA reveals launch dates for Artemis I through the first half of 2023