Already, the neighbouring countries are suffering from extreme, record-breaking heat that's causing people to die, melting pavement, sparking fires and crashing the electricity grid.

Last month, northwest and central India saw its highest temperatures since the country began keeping records 122 years ago, according to the Indian Meteorological Department. New Delhi had seven consecutive days over 40 C in April. 

It's so hot in Pakistan that the country went from winter to summer this year without the spring season for the first time in decades. Some parts of the country are expected to hit as high as 50 C later this week. 

Chandni Singh is a climate change researcher at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements in Bangalore and one of the lead authors of this year's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. She recently experienced the scorching heat first-hand when she visited her family in New Delhi.

Here is part of her conversation with As It Happens guest host Helen Mann. 

Dr. Singh, you spent a week in Delhi when temperatures were in the mid-40s. What did it feel like for you to live under that heat?

As you can imagine, temperatures of 45 C and 46 C are really absolutely excruciating. I ended up having to be out in the hot sun from around noon to 3 p.m. and was just completely exhausted by the end of it, not only that day, but the next day as well.

But of course, I always think of people who don't have the ability to cool their homes or go back out of the sun really because of the livelihoods they are in. So I at least had the respite of a cool home and plenty of water, while many people don't have that.

Young people cool off using a jet of water leaking from a supply pipeline on a hot summer afternoon in Islamabad, Pakistan, on April 30. (Farooq Naeem/AFP/Getty Images)

Can you describe for us what it feels like to be in 45 C, 46 C heat?

While you're in it, I think it's just very hot. But for me personally, it's after the heat. 

So when it's cooled down in the evening, there's just immense fatigue that you feel, and almost you feel as if you've been dried out in a certain way. And no matter how much water you drink, you just continue to feel really dry and desiccated.

And you felt that into the next day, you said.

It actually took me two days to come back to normal. And this was when it was just four hours of exposure and a lot of water along the way. I was drinking water. I had my head covered to avoid direct sun on me. I had dark glasses. So, you know, in spite of all that, I was feeling this fatigue.

Chandni Singh is a climate change researcher at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements and a lead author of the 2022 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. (Submitted by Chandni Singh)

You mentioned that you're especially concerned about people who are unable to afford things like air conditioning or even to have shelter. Do they have any options to try and cope with all of this?

A lot of our low-income settlements actually have tin roofs which trap a lot of heat and don't cool down fast in the nights. Most of our informal settlements actually don't have any kind of air conditioners, and instead we have something called coolers, which use water really to cool indoor indoor spaces. But that, too, requires electricity, and electricity is costly.

So most people are actually using just electric fans, people who are extremely poor. Or just a lot of people actually sleep outdoors in the night on rooftops because it's cooler to be outside the house rather than inside.

Canada, as you know, is one of the world's biggest CO2 emitters. What do you want Canadians to know and what would you like to see a country like ours to do?

This is a really important question and something that I feel very deeply about. We know that countries like India and Pakistan, of course, that are witnessing and experiencing this heat wave are going to see increasing temperatures in the future. We also know that there are limits to adapt to this kind of extreme heat. And that is why we really need to look back at what is causing this, and really start mitigating more deeply ... our CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions.

This is where many people say: "What is India doing about its mitigation strategy?" And I have always argued that while India has a role to play, it is really the big historical emitters that also have a very significant role to play around just moving towards a greener and a more sustainable trajectory.

So countries like the U.S.A., China, the U.K., [and] Canada as well, have to also be part of the solution of mitigation so that countries that are really at the front line of climate change, like India and Pakistan, don't continue to see this kind of debilitating heat.

Motorists cover their faces with cloth while travelling on a hot summer day in Amritsar, India, on May 1. (Narinder Nanu/AFP/Getty Images)

You [told CNN] that this heat wave is "testing the limits of human survivability." In India, what does the future look like if temperatures remain where they are now?

Unfortunately, the future of India, if we look at the IPCC reports — where I was a lead author; I was part of this chapter on Asia — if you look at the projections for the Indian subcontinent, they're actually quite dreadful. 

We've got not only dry heat like the kind we're seeing now, but by 2050 we've got extreme humid heat, which is even worse than dry heat because you don't sweat and cool down.

If you look at the risk profile for a country like India around heat, it's going to become really bad by 2050, and in many places, cross the limits of survivability by 2100.

So the argument is clear that we really need to mitigate now and mitigate faster rather than wait for the future, that is really going to lead to a lot of deaths and loss of labour and productivity.

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New research, based on an analysis of dozens of archaeological sites in the United States and Australia, suggested that oysters were sustainably farmed on a massive scale by Indigenous groups. The mollusks were an abundant source of food despite being harvested intensively.

The authors of the study, which published Tuesday in the scientific journal Nature Communications, said these sites were a “forgotten resource” that could inform the future management of oyster beds.

“The fact that there are so many oysters at archaeological sites in so many different regions is an important lesson,” said study author Leslie Reeder-Myers, an assistant professor of anthropology at Temple University in Philadelphia, in a statement.

“These systems have a ton of potential and huge quantities of oysters can be sustainably harvested over long time periods if the ecosystem is healthy,” said Reeder-Myers, who is also director of Temple’s anthropology laboratory.

The amount of oysters consumed in some places was staggering, the study found.

A massive shell mound at the Crystal River site in Florida is shown.

Victor Thompson/National Museum of Natural History

The researchers documented middens – essentially trash piles – that contained billions of shells. The largest total for a single site was an island called Mound Key in Estero Bay on Florida’s Gulf Coast.

Mound Key contained the shells of some 18.6 billion oysters harvested by the region’s Calusa tribe, the study estimated. About 200 miles (322 kilometers) north in Cedar Key, Florida, a site known as Shell Mound features the remains of an estimated 2.1 billion oysters.

Oyster shells discarded more than 1,000 years ago have been found at this eroding archaeological site on Maryland's Eastern Shore

The research, led by the University of Bristol, also shows heatwaves are projected to get hotter in future as climate change worsens.

The western North America heatwave last summer was record-breaking with an all-time Canadian high of 49.6 °C in Lytton, British Columbia, on June 29, an increase of 4.6 °C from the previous peak.

The new findings, published today in Science Advances, uncovered five other heatwaves around the world which were even more severe, but went largely underreported.

Lead author, climate scientist Dr. Vikki Thompson at the University of Bristol, said: "The recent heatwave in Canada and the United States shocked the world. Yet we show there have been some even greater extremes in the last few decades. Using climate models, we also find extreme heat events are likely to increase in magnitude over the coming century—at the same rate as the local average temperature."

Heatwaves are one of the most devastating extreme weather events. The western North America heatwave was the most deadly weather event ever in Canada, resulting in hundreds of fatalities. The associated raging wildfires also led to extensive infrastructure damage and loss of crops.

But the study, which calculated how extreme heatwaves were relative to the local temperature, showed the top three hottest-ever in the respective regions were in Southeast Asia in April 1998, which hit 32.8 °C, Brazil in November 1985, peaking at 36.5 °C, and Southern U.S. in July 1980, when temperatures rose to 38.4 °C.

Dr. Vikki Thompson, from the university's Cabot Institute for the Environment, said: "The western North America heatwave will be remembered because of its widespread devastation. However, the study exposes several greater meteorological extremes in recent decades, some of which went largely under the radar likely due to their occurrence in more deprived countries. It is important to assess the severity of heatwaves in terms of local temperature variability because both humans and the natural eco-system will adapt to this, so in regions where there is less variation, a smaller absolute extreme may have more harmful effects."

The team of scientists also used sophisticated climate model projections to anticipate heatwave trends in the rest of this century. The modeling indicated levels of heatwave intensity are set to rise in line with increasing global temperatures.

Although the highest local temperatures do not necessarily cause the biggest impacts, they are often related. Improving understanding of climate extremes and where they have occurred can help prioritize measures to help tackle this in the most vulnerable regions.

Co-author Professor Dann Mitchell, Professor in Climate Sciences at the University of Bristol, said: "Climate change is one of the greatest global health problems of our time, and we have showed that many heatwaves outside of the developed world have gone largely unnoticed. The country-level burden of heat on mortality can be in the thousands of deaths, and countries which experience temperatures outside their normal range are the most susceptible to these shocks."

In recognition of the dangerous consequences of climate change and a clear commitment to help tackle this, in 2019 the University of Bristol became the first UK university to declare a climate emergency.

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Switching to wind and solar energy are listed as the two highest-impact shifts. But a little lower down there’s an odd one: “shift to balanced, sustainable healthy diets.” If that phrasing strikes you as mealymouthed, that’s because it is. An earlier version of the report included a recommendation that people switch to plant-based diets, according to a report from Reuters. But this advice was watered down in the negotiations after lobbying from the US, Brazil, and other countries with large meat industries. In the executive summary, plant-based diets are relegated to a single mention: a footnote on page 43.

But you can’t talk about food’s climate impact without talking about meat. Food production accounts for around 26 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions, and the biggest chunk of that comes from livestock. The highest emissions come from ruminants like cattle and sheep because of the way they belch up methane as they digest food. Per gram of protein, beef has eight times the greenhouse gas emissions of chicken and 25 times that of tofu. The impact on land is huge, too. Almost 80 percent of all agricultural land is used as pasture or to grow crops for animal food, and the expansion of pasture for beef drives 41 percent of annual tropical deforestation.

Yet it turns out putting even a modest dent in our rapacious desire for beef could have big environmental benefits. Swapping just a fifth of our beef consumption for a mycoprotein like Quorn could dramatically slow the pace of future deforestation. A new study in the journal Nature modeled what would happen if people swapped out beef or other ruminant meat in their diet for mycoprotein—or continued on our current trajectory. In a world where demand for beef kept going up, deforestation rates would more than double. But if people swapped 20 percent of their beef for mycoprotein, deforestation rates by 2050 would be half what they would be if beef consumption continued to rise as projected.

“Part of the solution to this problem could be existing biotechnology,” says Florian Humpenöder, a researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and the lead author of the Nature paper. Other scientific studies have advocated for much bigger reductions in meat-eating. The EAT-Lancet Commission, for example, recommends that people eat no more than 98 grams of red meat (pork, beef, or lamb) per week—a little less than a single quarter pounder. The average American eats almost seven times that amount of beef alone.

For Humpenöder, a 20 percent reduction in beef consumption seemed like a more realistic goal. “Reaching a substitution share of 20 percent by 2050 sounds somewhat achievable to me. Or at least not super-optimistic,” he says. He also ran two other scenarios in which mycoprotein replaced 50 and 80 percent of beef consumption by 2050. In these two scenarios, deforestation and associated emissions were even lower. Each of these shifts roughly halved the projected deforestation rate, but the biggest gain was from the relatively small substitution of 20 percent of beef with mycoprotein.

The study highlights how even a relatively small reduction in beef consumption can pay big environmental dividends, says Michael Clark, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford. The challenge is getting policymakers and individuals to translate this research into action. “We’re still in a place where diets are high-impact,” he says. Although consumption of beef is slowly declining in countries like the UK, the shift toward more sustainable diets isn’t happening anywhere close to quickly enough. Clark hopes messaging that targets meat reduction—rather than asking the public to give up meat altogether—might convince people to switch to more sustainable diets. “It’s about communicating in a way that isn’t offputting,” he says.

You Don’t Have to Quit Meat to Save the Planet—Just Eat Less

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This time, can Boeing’s Starliner finally shine?

Face coverings filter out particles, helping decrease the transmission of respiratory diseases. And as COVID-19 community levels shift, masks will still be needed in some settings. But previous studies haven't provided clear guidance on how valved respirators impact the spread of exhaled particles.

Either the sample size has been very low—in one instance, only a couple of people wore one brand of valved mask—or they have been performed under idealistic wearing conditions. So, Christopher Cappa and Jessica Hazard wanted to know what would happen if 10 volunteers spoke while wearing different mask types, including two different valved respirators. Cappa and Hazard also asked the volunteers to wear the coverings as they would in the real world.

The participants read a passage aloud with and without face coverings, including one unvalved and two valved N95 respirators, as well as a surgical mask. The unvalved N95 respirator kept 98% of respiratory particles from being emitted, but the valved N95s were variable—one provided almost no benefit, while the other's performance was generally on par with that of a surgical mask. Surprisingly, some participants emitted more particles when wearing the ineffective valved N95 compared to when they weren't wearing a facial covering. The researchers attributed this finding to sloughed facial skin cells or debris, or a greater speaking intensity when wearing facial coverings. Based on their data, the researchers recommend that valved masks be avoided in favor of masks that are more efficient at filtering out respiratory particles when the goal is to protect public health.

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Bad sleep also affects people's mood and behavior, whether they are young infants or older adults. So how much sleep does our brain need to operate properly in the long term? Our new research study, published in Nature Aging, provides an answer.

Sleep is an important component of maintaining normal brain functioning. The brain reorganizes and recharges itself during sleep. As well as removing toxic waste byproducts and boosting our immune system, sleep is also key for "memory consolidation," during which new memory segments based on our experiences are transferred into long-term memory.

An optimal quantity and quality of sleep enables us to have more energy and better well-being. It also allows us to develop our creativity and thinking.

When looking at babies three to 12 months of age, researchers have noted that better sleep is associated with better behavioral outcomes in the first year of life, such as being able to adapt to new situations or regulating emotions efficiently.

These are important early building blocks for cognition, including "cognitive flexibility" (our ability to shift perspective easily), and are linked to well-being in later life.

Sleep regularity seems to be linked to the brain's "default mode network" (DMN), which involves regions that are active when we are awake but not engaged in a specific task, such as resting while our mind wanders. This network includes areas that are important for cognitive function, such as the posterior cingulate cortex (which deactivates during cognitive tasks), parietal lobes (which process sensory information) and the frontal cortex (involved in planning and complex cognition).

There are signs that, in adolescents and young adults, poor sleep may be associated with changes in connectivity within this network. This is important as our brains are still in development into late adolescence and early young adulthood.

Disruption in this network may therefore have knock-on effects on cognition, such as interfering with concentration and memory-based processing, as well as more advanced cognitive processing.

Alterations in sleep patterns, including difficulty falling and staying asleep, are significant characteristics of the aging process. These sleep disturbances are highly plausible candidate contributors to cognitive decline and psychiatric disorders in older people.

Getting the right amount

Our study aimed to better understand the link between sleep, cognition and well-being. We found that both insufficient and excessive sleep contributed to impaired cognitive performance of a middle-aged to old population of nearly 500,000 adults from the UK BioBank. However, we did not study children and adolescents, and since their brains are in development, they may have a different requirement for optimal sleep duration.

Our key finding was that seven hours of sleep per night was optimal, with more or less than that bringing fewer benefits for cognition and mental health. In fact, we found that people who slept that amount performed—on average—better on cognitive tests (including on processing speed, visual attention and memory) than those who slept less or more. Individuals also need seven hours of sleep consistently, without too much fluctuation in duration.

That said, we all respond slightly differently to a lack of sleep. We discovered that the relationship between sleep duration, cognition and mental health was mediated by genetics and brain structure. We noted that the brain regions that are the most affected by sleep deprivation include the hippocampus, well known for it's role in learning and memory, and areas of the frontal cortex, involved in top-down control of emotion.

But although sleep may affect our brains, it could also work the other way around. It might be that age-related shrinkage of brain regions involved in the regulation of sleep and wakefulness contribute to sleep problems in later life. It may, for example, decrease the production and secretion of melatonin, a hormone that helps control the sleep cycle, in older adults. This finding seems to support other evidence suggesting there is a link between sleep duration and the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease and dementia.

While seven hours of sleep is optimal for protecting against dementia, our study suggests that getting enough sleep can also help alleviate the symptoms of dementia by protecting memory. This highlights the importance of monitoring sleep duration in older patients with psychiatric disorders and dementia in order to improve their cognitive functioning, mental health and well-being.

So what can we do to improve our sleep for optimal cognition and well-being in our daily lives?

A good start is ensuring that the temperature and ventilation in your bedroom is good—it should be cool and airy. You should also avoid too much alcohol and watching thrillers or other exciting content before going to bed. Ideally, you should be in a calm and relaxed state when you are trying to fall asleep. Thinking about something pleasant and relaxing, such as the last time you were on the beach, works for many people.

Technological solutions such as apps or wearable devices can also be beneficial for mental health as well as for tracking sleep and ensuring consistency of sleep duration.

To enjoy life and to function optimally in everyday life, you may therefore want to monitor your own sleep patterns to ensure that you are getting seven hours of sleep on a regular basis.

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New University of Otago, Christchurch research has identified, for the first time, exactly how much extra vitamin C humans need to ingest, relative to their body weight, to maximize their immune health.

The study, co-authored by Associate Professor Anitra Carr from the University's Department of Pathology and Biomedical Science, has found that for every 10 kilograms of excess weight a person carries, their body needs an extra 10 milligrams of Vitamin C daily, which will help to optimize their immune health.

"Previous studies have already linked higher body weight with lower vitamin C levels," says lead author Associate Professor Carr. "But this is the first study to estimate how much extra daily vitamin C is actually needed for people, relative to their body weight, to help maximize their health."

Published in the international journal Nutrients, and co-authored with two researchers from the U.S. and Denmark, the study combined results from two earlier major international studies.

Associate Professor Carr says its novel findings have important implications for public health internationally—particularly in light of the current COVID-19 pandemic—as vitamin C is an important immune-support nutrient and vital in helping the body protect itself from severe viral illnesses.

Although no studies have been carried out as yet specific to dietary intake for COVID-19, Associate Professor Carr suggests these findings could potentially help heavier people better protect themselves from such illnesses.

"We know obesity is a risk factor for getting COVID-19 and that obese patients are more likely to struggle to fight it off once infected. We also know that vitamin C is essential for good immune function and works by helping white blood cells fight infection. The results from this study therefore suggest that increasing your vitamin C intake if overweight might be a sensible response.

"Pneumonia is a major complication of COVID-19 and patients with pneumonia are known to be low in vitamin C. International research shows that vitamin C decreases the likelihood of people getting pneumonia and decreases the severity of it, so finding the right levels of vitamin C to take if you are overweight may help to better support your immune system," says Associate Professor Carr.

The study determined how much vitamin C is required for people of higher body weight compared to a starting base weight of a 60 kilogram person consuming the average New Zealand dietary vitamin C intake of 110 milligrams per day, which most people achieve from a balanced diet. In other words, someone weighing 90 kilograms would need to take an extra 30 milligrams of vitamin C to achieve the optimal goal of 140mg/day; while someone weighing 120 kilograms would need at least an extra 40 milligrams of vitamin C daily to achieve the optimal 150mg/day.

Associate Professor Carr says the easiest way to increase daily vitamin C intake is by upping the consumption of vitamin C-rich foods such as fruits and vegetables or by taking a vitamin C supplement.

"The old saying of 'an apple a day keeps the doctor away' is actually useful advice here. An average-sized apple contains 10 milligrams of vitamin C, so if you weigh 70 to 80 kilograms, achieving the optimal amount of vitamin C your body needs could be as easy as eating an extra apple or two to give your body the extra 10 to 20 milligrams of daily vitamin C it needs. If you weigh more than this, then perhaps an orange, which contains 70 milligrams of vitamin C, or a kiwifruit with 100 milligrams, may be the easiest solution."

However, she says for those who dislike eating fruit, have restricted diets such as people with diabetes, or struggle to access fresh fruit and vegetables due to financial barriers, taking a vitamin C supplement is a great alternative.

"There are a large variety of vitamin C supplements available over-the-counter, most are relatively cheap, safe to use and easily accessible from a local supermarket, pharmacy or online.

My advice for those who choose to get their vitamin C from a multivitamin, is to check the exact amounts of vitamin C per tablet, as some multivitamin formulations may only contain it in very low doses," says Associate Professor Carr.

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Cardiovascular disease is a group of conditions that can arise from a lack of physical activity, poor diet, or certain disorders. Scientists have known that the development of these conditions begins with changes in vascular endothelial cells—the cells that line the body's blood vessels. But why and how changes in endothelial cell function occur is not entirely clear.

New research led at the University of Strathclyde's Vascular Imaging Centre has shown that these cells use a sophisticated system to communicate with each other. Failures in this communication system may be the first step in the development of cardiovascular disease.

The endothelium is the thin inner layer of cells in blood vessels and it regulates blood flow, blood pressure, blood clotting, inflammation and response to disease. It continually processes the vast amounts of information held in the composition of blood, and chemicals in the area around each blood vessel to keep the cardiovascular system working properly.

The Strathclyde study has discovered that there are clusters of cells in the endothelium that are specialized to particular functions and they operate in cliques. Between cliques, numerous interlinked connections act to convey information and there is a high density of connections to protect the system against communication failures. The system bypasses neighboring cells by using short-cuts to transmit information quickly over distance.

The findings reveal that the endothelial communication network design is similar to the communication operations of the internet and it is effective for local blood vessel control and global efficiency in determining overall cardiovascular activity. The design is robust, so that communication systems to control cardiovascular activity will not fail even when there is extensive damage.

The findings also indicate that changes in the organization of communication, rather than behavior and function of individual cells, may underlie disease.

The researchers addressed the nature of the communication network by using single-cell calcium ion imaging across thousands of endothelial cells in intact blood vessels and applying mathematical network (graph) theory. The study, conducted with the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Professor John McCarron, of Strathclyde Institute of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences, says that "cells in the endothelium are a major target for the control of cardiovascular disease and are often treated as being a uniform population of cells. Our findings show the cells are not uniform but specialized to particular types of function."

"There is a well-organized, rapid and robust communication system that shares information so that coordinated responses occur. The communication system offers new targets for therapy development and insights into why developing treatments has proven so difficult."

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Nityesh Bhatt and Punit Saurabh of the Nirma University in Ahmedabad, Gujarat and Ritesh Kumar Verma of the Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, India, have reviewed the state of the art in the rapidly developing nation of India. They have taken a holistic approach to examine the eco-system surrounding Indian start-ups but also consider the different components of the ecosystem, including the policy framework, the educational environment, financial support from domestic and international funds, and support organizations such as incubators and accelerators.

Indian tech start-ups have been nudged onwards and upwards by demographic, psychographic, and geographic factors while positive macro and micro environmental forces have resulted in a strengthening of the Indian tech ecosystem making it one of the top three countries in the world in this realm. The researchers point out that there has been substantial and beneficial growth in seed funding driven by the growth of incubators, accelerators, angel networks, and venture capitalists in India. They also describe the mergers and acquisitions scene in India as being positive.

Nevertheless, there are still issues to be overcome. The review has allowed the team to identify bottlenecks in the processes that take place within the start-up ecosystem. This in turn has allowed them to make policy suggestions that might widen those bottlenecks and allow a greater flow of information and innovation and so boost the start-ups within the ecosystem to allow them to serve their putative customers and clients more effectively and sooner, rather than later. Policy changes that recognize the nature of the digital age must be made so that archaic laws are not stymieing advancement. Simultaneously, stakeholders must also be vigilant and play their role in sustaining hard-fought momentum. "Change in the societal mindset for start-ups will be a great catalyst," the team concludes.

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In a study comparing 46 severe COVID-19 patients with 460 matched controls, researchers found the mental impacts of severe COVID-19 six months later can be the equivalent to aging 20 years – going from 50 to 70 years old – or losing 10 IQ points.

The specific mental changes were also distinct to those seen in early dementia or general aging.

"Cognitive impairment is common to a wide range of neurological disorders, including dementia, and even routine aging, but the patterns we saw – the cognitive 'fingerprint' of COVID-19 – was distinct from all of these," says neuroscientist David Menon from the University of Cambridge in the UK, who was senior author of the study.

The new paper doesn't set out to alarm the many of us who've already had COVID, but instead investigate more closely how serious the cognitive changes are following severe cases of the infection, so we can begin to understand how to mitigate them. 

"Tens of thousands of people have been through intensive care with COVID-19 in England alone and many more will have been very sick, but not admitted to hospital," says lead researcher and cognitive scientist Adam Hampshire from Imperial College London.

"This means there are a large number of people out there still experiencing problems with cognition many months later. We urgently need to look at what can be done to help these people."

The experiment involved 46 people who'd gone to Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge as a result of COVID-19 between March and July 2020. Sixteen of them were put on mechanical ventilation during their stay.

An average of six months after their infection, researchers supervised them using a testing tool called Cognitron to see how they were doing in areas such as memory, attention, reasoning, as well as anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The researchers didn't have test results from before these individuals fell ill with COVID to compare to. Instead they did the next best thing, and compared their results against a matched control group of 460 people.

These results were then mapped to see how far they deviated from expected scores for their age and demographic, based on 66,008 members of the general public.

The results showed that those who'd survived severe COVID were less accurate and had slower response times than the general public.

The magnitude of cognitive loss was similar to the effects of aging between 50 and 70 years of age – and equivalent to losing 10 IQ points.

Accuracy in verbal analogy tasks – where people are asked to find similarities between words – was most impacted. This mirrors anecdotal reports that suggest people post-infection are struggling to find the right word, and feeling like their brain is in slow motion.

Interestingly, even though patients reported varying levels of fatigue and depression, the severity of the initial infection, rather than the survivor's current mental health, could best predict the cognitive outcome, the team found.

"These results indicate that although both fatigue and mental health are prominent chronic [consequences] of COVID-19, their severity is likely to be somewhat independent from the observed cognitive deficits," the researchers write in their paper.

The somewhat good news is that, upon follow up, there were some signs of recovery – but it was gradual at best. 

"We followed some patients up as late as ten months after their acute infection, so were able to see a very slow improvement," says Menon.

"While this was not statistically significant, it is at least heading in the right direction, but it is very possible that some of these individuals will never fully recover."

This study only looked at the more extreme end of hospitalized patients, but there are plenty of other studies showing that even 'mild' cases can cause similar cognitive impacts.

What's still not fully understood is why and how the SARS-CoV-2 virus causes this cognitive decline.   

Previous research has shown that during severe COVID, the brain decreases glucose consumption in the frontoparietal network, which is involved in attention, problem solving, and working memory. It's also known that the virus can directly affect the brain. 

But the researchers suggest the likely culprit isn't direct infection, but a combination of factors: including reduced oxygen or blood supply to the brain; clotting of vessels; and microscopic bleeds.

There's also mounting evidence that the body's own immune and inflammatory response may be having a significant impact on the brain.

"Future work will be focused on mapping these cognitive deficits to underlying neural pathologies and inflammatory biomarkers, and to longitudinally track recovery into the chronic phase," the researchers write.

Until then, take comfort in the fact that if you're still feeling slow and foggy months after recovering from COVID-19, you are most certainly not alone.

The research has been published in eClinical Medicine.

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Russia is reviewing what "forced labor" means for prisoners now that the country is facing a serious shortage of people with IT skills.

Waging war on another country and the sanctions that have followed means skilled workers are leaving Russia in droves and local businesses need to find replacements. With vacancies for IT positions numbering the high tens of thousands, Russian prisoners are now being viewed as a new source of potential talent.

As KrebsonSecurity reports, late last month the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service announced it was considering using prisoners for remote IT work at commercial Russian companies. According to Alexander Khabarov, deputy head of Russia’s penitentiary service, the idea was proposed by a number of businessmen in Russia eager to find the staff they needed.

There's thought to be around 95,000 jobs requiring IT skills in Russia that can't be filled. The reason? IT specialists are fleeing the country, with the Russian Association for Electronic Communications (RAEC) estimating up to 100,000 are leaving for new overseas positions in destinations including the US, Germany, Georgia, Cyprus, and Canada.

Russia isn't short of prisoners, with the BBC reporting that the country has a prison population of 874,161. How many of those possess IT skills is unknown, but if 1 in 10 do, there's a chance to fill many of the vacant roles and likely some very happy prisoners as a side effect. Businesses will also be happy when you consider Russian prisoners sentenced to forced labor only earn around $281 a month.

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No one with debilitating symptoms likes to be told “it’s all in your head.” Yet, this is often what distressed patients with irritable bowel syndrome hear, implicitly or explicitly, when a medical work-up reveals no apparent explanation for their repeated bouts of abdominal pain, bloating, diarrhea or constipation.

In fact, irritable bowel syndrome, or I.B.S., is a real problem causing real symptoms, no matter how hard its sufferers may wish it gone. But unlike an infection or tumor, I.B.S. is what medicine calls a functional disorder: a condition with no identifiable cause. Patients have no visible signs of damage or disease in their digestive tracts. Rather, the prevailing theory holds that overly sensitive nerves in the patient’s gastrointestinal tract send distress signals to the brain that result in pain and malfunction.

However, as medical science progresses, experts are beginning to find physical explanations for disorders that previously had no known biological cause. For example, conditions like epilepsy, Alzheimer’s disease and migraine were once considered functional disorders, but are now known to have measurable physical or biochemical underpinnings.

And recent research has revealed at least one likely explanation for the symptoms of I.B.S.: an infection in the digestive tract that triggers a localized allergic reaction in the gut. As Dr. Marc E. Rothenberg wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine in June, “Patients with I.B.S. often report that their symptoms started at the time of a gastrointestinal infection.”

Dr. Rothenberg, who is the director of the division of allergy and immunology at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, explained in an interview that the infection can temporarily disrupt the layer of cells that normally lines the bowel. These cells form a barrier that prevents allergy-inducing proteins in foods from being absorbed. When that barrier is penetrated, people can become intolerant to foods that previously caused them no issue.

A study in mice published in the journal Nature in January showed how this might happen. After infecting the rodents’ guts with bacteria, researchers found that the microbes released toxins that initiated an allergic reaction in the intestines, sparking the immune system to create antibodies against specific dietary proteins. When those specific proteins were ingested from foods, an immune reaction caused the rodents’ stomach muscles to contract, mimicking the symptoms of I.B.S., including diarrhea and abdominal pain.

The researchers then showed that a similar immune response occurred in 12 patients with I.B.S. when common food allergens like gluten, wheat, soy or milk were injected into the rectum. Every patient with I.B.S. had a localized reaction to one or more of the allergens, but only two of eight people without I.B.S. reacted to any allergen. Unlike classic food allergies that can produce hives, swelling and other body-wide immune responses, the reaction to allergens in the study was detectable only in the colon.

In describing this intriguing research, Dr. Rothenberg noted that “a great deal remains to be elucidated.” But he added that this and other related research suggests that “common gastrointestinal ailments, such as I.B.S. and functional abdominal pain, may instead be food-induced allergic disorders.” Such findings, the researchers wrote in the January study, hint at “new possibilities for the treatment of irritable bowel syndrome and related abdominal pain disorders,” offering hope that people with I.B.S. may one day find lasting relief.

Such remedies would be a godsend for the 10 to 15 percent of adults in the United States with I.B.S. or other food sensitivities who experience gastrointestinal distress following a meal. Therapeutic possibilities include high doses of antihistamines to counter patients’ sensitivities, as well as targeted treatments that block allergic pathways, Dr. Rothenberg said. He added that there are now drugs in Phase 3 trials — the step before approval — that eliminate the immune cells, known as mast cells, that are responsible for initiating an allergic response in the gut.

How common is I.B.S.?

I.B.S. is the most frequently diagnosed gastrointestinal disorder. Although symptoms can vary from patient to patient, they commonly include cramping, abdominal pain, bloating, intestinal gas, and diarrhea or constipation, or both. The disorder affects more women than men and is most common in people under 50. The annual medical costs of the condition exceed $1 billion in the United States alone.

It’s a chronic condition that requires continual management strategies, like always knowing the location of the nearest bathroom or having to wear diapers when restroom access is limited. The emotional distress it can cause often results in depression and anxiety and may prompt others to think incorrectly that the bowel disorder is self-inflicted.

Can calming therapies help?

There is a known connection between the brain and the gut, and undue stress can certainly aggravate the symptoms of I.B.S. Cognitive behavioral therapy may benefit some patients, and many find it helpful to practice relaxation techniques like positive imagery, progressive muscle relaxation or meditation.

Yoga and other types of physical activity may also diminish symptoms of I.B.S. and improve patients’ quality of life. One clinical trial involving 102 patients found that those who engaged in vigorous physical activity three to five days a week experienced reduced physical and psychological symptoms.

Another soothing technique that can be done anywhere, anytime, to help relieve pain and stress is diaphragmatic breathing, the opposite of sucking in your gut. Instead of pushing out the chest as the lungs fill with air, the diaphragm is pushed down toward the stomach, causing the belly to rise. Practice by placing one hand above your navel to feel your abdomen rise as you inhale slowly through your nose, and then retract as you exhale through your mouth.

Which foods should be avoided if I have I.B.S.?

Patients can also minimize their symptoms by avoiding the foods or drinks that seem to trigger them. Common troublemakers include wheat and other gluten-containing foods, dairy products, citrus fruits, beans, cabbage and related gas-causing vegetables, and carbonated drinks. People may also react badly to spicy or fatty foods, coffee or alcohol.

Some patients find dramatic relief from adopting a strict FODMAP diet that eliminates all fermentable starches and sugars, then gradually adding back one food at a time to determine which ones cause symptoms and are best avoided. The FODMAP diet favorably alters the population of microbes that live in the intestines, reducing gas-producing bacteria that thrive on fermentable foods. (Details of the diet can be found at this website.)

Some evidence suggests that prebiotics or probiotics may be another therapeutic option to manipulate the bacteria that dwell in the intestinal tract, though the findings are limited. In a recent review in JAMA, Dr. Michael Camilleri, a gastroenterologist at the Mayo Clinic, reported that the probiotic Bifidobacterium longum reduced depression and improved quality of life for patients with I.B.S.

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People of color have a lower risk of developing skin cancer than people with fair skin tones, but UV exposure raises the risk for everyone.

Studies show that Black and Hispanic Americans who live in sunnier parts of the country have greater rates of melanoma and that UV radiation also correlates with other types of skin cancer in people with darker skin tones.

UV radiation also ages the skin, leading to wrinkles, spots, and changes in skin texture in people of all skin tones.

We spoke with Dawn Queen, MD, a dermatologist at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, to get the facts about skin color, skin cancer, and other effects of ultraviolet rays.

Dark skin is not sunscreen

"Dark skin does confer some degree of natural protection due to the increased melanin content in the skin," Queens says. But melanin is only protective up to an SPF of about 13, while current recommendations are to use sunscreens with an SPF of at least 30 every day and especially when outdoors.

"Depending on the skin's natural protective factor alone is not sufficient to protect you from sunburn. Although it's true that people with darker skin won't burn quite as quickly, they are still at risk for skin cancer and photoaging and should take preventative measures to minimize those risks."

Dark skin does burn

"There's a misconception that people with darker skin tones can't burn and don't need to wear sunscreen," Queen says. "While it is true that they will burn less frequently than their lighter counterparts due to increased protective melanin in the skin, melanin is not impervious to all UV rays. Burns can and do occur."

According to a CDC survey, 32% to 38% of Hispanic adults and 9% to 13% of Black men and women experience at least one burn a year.

"Burns significantly increase the risk for skin cancers, and protecting the skin from UV rays is our best tool to prevent them before they happen," Queen says.

Melanoma survival rates are lower among people of color

Overall, skin cancers are less prevalent in Black and Hispanic people compared with lighter skinned individuals in the United States. For instance, for melanoma, age-adjusted incidence rates (per 100,000) among Hispanic and Black Americans (4.5 and 1.0) are significantly lower than among white non-Hispanic people (21.6).

"But what is crucially important to understand is that melanomas in darker-skinned populations have consistently been associated with a higher rate of metastasis and poorer outcomes," Queen says. For example, among non-white Hispanic males, the five-year survival rate of melanoma is 77.1%; it is around 78% for Black men and 86.5% in non-Hispanic white males.

"In part, this is due to the fact that skin cancers such as melanoma are often diagnosed at a later stage in these populations."

Melanomas in people of color are often hidden

The most common forms of melanoma diagnosed in Black people occur on body parts that are usually shielded from the sun: the palms, soles of the feet, under the nails, and inside the mouth.

"It is important to examine these areas to monitor for any new, changing, or growing moles," Queen says. "Or in the case of nails, changes in color or a new or growing streak of pigment that runs the length of the nail."

Watch for other types of skin cancer

Among non-melanoma skin cancers, almost 90% of basal cell carcinomas are found on the head or the neck in people of color.

"People should look for pearly growths that may bleed spontaneously," Queen says.

Another type of skin cancer—squamous cell carcinoma—can appear on any part of the body and often looks like a hard or scaly growing bump or plaque.

Get vitamin D through food or supplements

Vitamin D deficiency is an issue among everyone, but in people with dark skin, melanin absorbs the UV rays that activate vitamin D production in the skin, contributing to and worsening vitamin D deficiency.

"Vitamin D is important as it has protective effects against cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and some cancers," Queen says, "but the preferred method of vitamin D intake is through oral supplementation. It is just as effective and significantly safer than obtaining vitamin D through cutaneous absorption."

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Rocket Lab catches a 1-ton booster falling back from space

US spending money to spur domestic battery production

However, attention has a limited capacity, meaning we can only process so many things at once. This is why it's essential to be able to filter out distractions that can divert focus from the task at hand.

New research highlights the importance of daily meditation, exercise and sleep for improving executive functioning, a component of attention that helps us prioritize what we want to engage with and filter out unwanted interference.

I am currently conducting my Ph.D. research in the Klein Lab at Dalhousie University, which studies all things attention-related. This involves both fundamental research looking at how different areas of the brain contribute to how people interact with the world, and applied research developing game-like tools that measure attention in children. I recently published a review of over 70 studies looking at how different aspects of lifestyle impact attention.

Executive function

When we study attention in the lab, we break it down into a number of unique components which serve different purposes. Executive functioning is the component that kicks in when you are trying to focus in a distracting setting, like holding a conversation when your favorite TV show is on in the background, or when you are dealing with an impulse, like resisting the urge to have another potato chip.

Executive functioning is also involved in monitoring for distracting thoughts, like getting caught up in a daydream. It is affected by a number of different disorders, including attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and depression.

My review found that by implementing daily meditation, getting consistent exercise and maintaining healthy sleeping habits, you can boost the efficiency of your executive functioning. So if you want to improve your productivity and reduce your impulsivity, you may want to consider making these changes in your routine.

Meditation

Meditation is one of the best ways to improve executive functioning. Even after just five days doing 20 minutes of meditation daily, there were boosts to how well individuals could filter out distractions. There didn't appear to be a superior technique for meditation, as long as the main objective was attentional control (focusing on something specific). A common technique used to elicit attentional control in meditation is to focus on breathing while trying to let go of unwanted thoughts.

Executive functioning kicks in when you are trying to focus in a distracting setting. Credit: Pixabay/Gerd Altmann

Some studies also looked at yoga, which involves components that resemble meditation. However, yoga didn't improve executive functioning like other techniques where the main goal was attentional control, although the yogis did improve their overall response speed.

It's not clear how long these improvements to attention last after meditating, but it is clear that for anyone looking to improve their executive functioning, attention should be part of their daily routine.

Exercise

The government of Canada recommends that people over 18 get 150 minutes of exercise a week to maintain health. This also plays a significant role in executive functioning. I explored how different factors impacted executive functioning, including how often individuals were exercising, how hard were they exercising and what exercise activities were they performing.

People who reported getting six hours of physical activity per week showed improved executive functioning over sedentary individuals. Additionally, those in a high-intensity sprint program for a two-week period not only outperformed a control group in their measures of executive functioning, they also made fewer mistakes.

While standing and treadmill desks did generate improvements to other aspects of physical health after just four days, they did not get the same boost to cognition that was seen with other moderate to high-intensity exercises. This means that if you want those boosts to cognition, you need to really get your heart rate up.

Sleep

It's also important to consider how much sleep you are getting, as people often reduce their rest for work and social obligations. Although a few studies in the review did find that reduced sleep generated poorer executive functioning, the more common outcome was worse performance across the board. Reduced sleep didn't impact specific components of attention in the same way that meditation and exercise did. Instead, it made people slower to react and more prone to making mistakes.

However, most of the sleep research included in the review involved keeping people up for 24 hours. This isn't very representative of how most people experience a reduction in sleep. Future research should consider how people's sleep quality is impacting their executive functioning. This information is especially important for those who work in scenarios where lapses in attention pose a potential risk, like air traffic controllers or those who operate heavy machinery.

There are many aspects of our cognition that are out of our control. Executive functioning abilities are largely influenced by genetics. However, this review provides promising evidence that there are changes you can make to your daily routine that can provide a nice boost to your focus.

So, if you want that extra edge, start meditating, get your heart rate up and get to bed early!

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While it is known that sleep helps maintain brain functioning and flexibility in behavior in humans and animals, there has been little research into the impact of poor sleep in birds. From an evolutionary perspective, birds are particularly interesting because they are the only group of (non-mammalian) animals to show unequivocal mammal-like sleep states of alternating non-rapid eye movement (NREM) and REM sleep.

The La Trobe University researchers studied the impact of sleep deprivation in the Australian magpie, (Cracticus tibicen), a ubiquitous and conspicuous [JL1] songbird, known for their social nature, advanced cognitive abilities, and complex vocal behaviors.

The study, led by Associate Professor John Lesku and published in Nature's Scientific Reports, investigated how sleep deprivation over the full-night (12 h) or half-night (6 h) affects cognitive performance in adult Australian magpies, relative to that after a night of undisturbed sleep.

According to Dr. Lesku, prior to each treatment, the birds were trained on an associative learning task and, on the day after experimental treatment (recovery day), the birds were tested on a reversal learning task. "To glean whether sleep loss affected song output, we also conducted impromptu song recordings for three days," he said.

"Ultimately, sleep-deprived magpies were slower to attempt the reversal learning task, less likely to perform and complete the task, and those that did the test performed worse than better-rested birds." Reversal learning tasks measure how quickly and successfully animals adapt to the change of reinforcement contingencies and has been widely used in testing avian cognition.

The researchers also found that tired magpies sang longer yet fewer songs, shifted twilight singing to mid-day, and during the post-recovery day, song frequency bandwidth narrowed. This is important because individuals which produce physically demanding songs, such as trills (rapidly repeating song elements with high frequency bandwidth) receive stronger responses from both rivals and mates, and increased fitness. Magpie song serves several ecologically-relevant functions, including territorial and nest defense, food calling, and pair bonding, and is performed by the adults of both sexes.

Ph.D. candidate and lead author, Robin Johnsson said that the results of the study show that bird, like other animals, sleep is important for optimizing waking performance, when new memory traces are acquired and encoded in the brain. "During subsequent sleep, newly formed memories are stabilized and enhanced via a process of memory consolidation," he said.

"Insufficient sleep negatively affects these neurological processes leading to impaired cognition, broadly defined to include attention, motivation, visual-motor coordination, emotional stability, communication, short- and long-term memory, and executive functions related to decision making."

Dr. Lesku says, "Our results on Australian magpies are in accordance with previous research on humans in that sleep deprivation impairs cognition and alters communication. We found that magpies, a bird with advanced cognitive abilities, kept awake for an entire night have impaired motivation, attention, and behavioral flexibility. Moreover, our serendipitous recordings of songs hinted that these social birds changed their song timing and output. Thus, many aspects of cognition appear to be sleep-dependent in Australian magpies."

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Omicron subvariants BA.4, BA.5 evade protection from earlier omicron infection

The sound of a binary black hole's echoes, courtesy of MIT's Erin Kara and Kyle Keane. Animation computed by Michal Dovciak.

Listen to the X-ray echoes of a black hole as it devours a companion star

“Elephant in the room”: Clean energy’s need for unsustainable minerals

The findings indicate a severe acceleration of the global water cycle – a sign that isn't as clearly observed in direct salinity measurements from ocean buoys, which typically measure a little below the surface of the ocean. However, it's commonly predicted in climate models. 

As global temperatures increase, climate scientists expect there will be greater evaporation on the ocean surface, which will make the top layer of the sea saltier and add moisture to the atmosphere.

This, in turn, will increase rainfall in other parts of the world, diluting some bodies of water to make them even less salty.

The pattern can basically be described as "wet-gets-wetter-dry-gets-drier", and it's a real cause for concern. If the water cycle accelerates with global warming, it could have profound impacts on modern society, driving drought and water shortages, as well as greater storms and flooding. 

It might even have started speeding up snow melt, as rainfall has been increasing in polar regions.

"This higher amount of water circulating in the atmosphere could also explain the increase in rainfall that is being detected in some polar areas, where the fact that it is raining instead of snowing is speeding up the melting," explains Barcelona's Institute of Marine Sciences mathematician Estrella Olmedo.

In the far North and far South poles of our planet, there are fewer ocean buoys that directly measure surface salinity. The new satellite analysis is the first to provide a global perspective on the matter.

"Where the wind is no longer so strong, the surface water warms up, but does not exchange heat with the water below, allowing the surface to become more saline than the lower layers and enabling the effect of evaporation to be observed with satellite measurements," explains physicist Antonio Turiel from the Institut de Ciències del Mar in Spain.

"[T]his tells us that the atmosphere and the ocean interact in a stronger way than we imagined, with important consequences for the continental and polar areas."

Recent climate models predict that for every degree Celsius of warming, Earth's water cycle could intensify by up to 7 percent.

Practically, that means wet areas could grow 7 percent wetter and dry areas 7 percent drier on average.

Global satellite data now back up those predictions. In tropical and mid-latitude regions, researchers found significant differences between buoy measurements of salinity and satellite measurements of salinity.

The latter measurements more clearly showed changes in Earth's water cycle.

"Specifically, in the Pacific we have seen that surface salinity decreases more slowly than subsurface salinity and, in this same region, we have observed an increase in sea surface temperature and a decrease in the intensity of winds and the depth of the mixing layer," says Estrella Olmedo.

The authors argue that future ocean models should include satellite salinity data, as it seems to be a faithful proxy for global fluxes in evaporation and precipitation.

The only way to ensure heatwaves, droughts, and storms don't intensify in the future is to limit global warming – and there's plenty humanity can still do.

The world is already locked in to a certain amount of change. The most recent report from the International Panel on Climate Change estimates that if we can keep global warming to 2 °C, extreme weather events will be 14 percent stronger than they were at the start of the Industrial Revolution.

That's a concerning amount of change. In 2021, the United Nations warned the coming decades would likely bring a litany of catastrophic droughts. When nearly a quarter of the world is already experiencing water shortages, the consequences could be dire.

The study was published in Scientific Reports. 

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In the context of a healthy diet, antioxidants are substances found in food items which help shield biological molecules such as DNA from this potentially destructive activity. These substances include vitamins like vitamin C and vitamin E, trace elements such as selenium and zinc, and other common plant compounds such as lycopene and flavonoids.

A diet that includes a reasonable mix of fruit, nuts, vegetables, and mushrooms should contain sufficient antioxidants to guard our cellular machinery against oxidative stress. 

How does oxidation harm our bodies?

Oxidative damage occurs when an electron is stolen from an important biochemical structure, such as a base in a genetic code or the amino acids making up proteins. 

Simple changes to DNA can transform a base into something different, altering its behavior so it no longer spells out the same sequence. Changing parts of a protein might make them less likely to break down, potentially allowing them to accumulate into toxic clumps. Oxidation of the fats making up the membranes of cells can make them less flexible, shortening their lifetime or making them less adept at performing their job.

While our bodies have repair mechanisms that can account for these damaging changes, as we age the problems can pile up. Mutations get missed, aggregations of proteins build, and risks of diseases like cancer or even neurodegenerative conditions like Parkinson's increase. 

Even in best-case scenarios, oxidative stress might contribute significantly to the aging processes we all take for granted. Graying hair and wrinkles might be impossible to avoid, but may not be helped by chemical processes that sweep in and steal a few electrons here and there.

What causes oxidative stress?

Our bodies naturally produce a range of chemical products called free radicals as a consequence of typical metabolic processes. These include reactive oxygen species such as hydrogen peroxide, which is both destructive and – under some circumstances – a useful signalling molecule.

To deal with these reactive species, our bodies also produce enzymes with antioxidant properties, like superoxide dismutase. Such enzymes keep the free radicals we produce in check, either by quickly replacing lost electrons or mopping up radicals before they can cause damage.

But our environment can also be a source of free radicals. Absorbing pollutants, including cigarette smoke and toxic metals, can overwhelm our bodies' home-grown defenses and increase oxidative damage.

Do you need antioxidant supplements?

Between our own enzymes and the antioxidants we collect in our diet, our body is as well prepared for keeping a lid on oxidative stress as it can be.

Unfortunately, adding more antioxidants to the mix isn't the solution we might imagine. For one thing, providing more electron donors isn't going to necessarily rebalance electron thefts. More importantly, studies over the decades have found no sign that antioxidant supplements can reduce risks of ill health or combat aging.

If anything, evidence points in the other direction. A 2007 metastudy on randomized trials found a slight increase in mortality among groups who dosed up on antioxidant supplements.

Further research is needed to figure out why supplementary antioxidants don't seem to reduce oxidative stress in the body and what possibly can.

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That hasn’t changed. But while pursuing precision antimatter experiments, one team stumbled upon a puzzling finding. When bathed in liquid helium, hybrid atoms made from both matter and antimatter misbehave. Whereas buffeting from the stew would throw the properties of most atoms into disarray, hybrid helium atoms maintain an unlikely uniformity. The discovery was so unexpected that the research team spent years checking their work, redoing the experiment, and arguing about what might be going on. Finally convinced that their result is real, the group detailed their findings in Nature.

“It’s very exciting,” said Mikhail Lemeshko, an atomic physicist at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria who was not involved with the research. He anticipates that the result will lead to a new way to capture and scrutinize elusive forms of matter. “Their community will find more exciting possibilities to trap exotic things.”

One way to gauge the properties of atoms and their components is to tickle them with a laser and see what happens, a technique called laser spectroscopy. A laser beam with just the right energy, for instance, can briefly push an electron to a higher energy level. When it returns to its previous energy level, the electron emits light of a particular wavelength. “This is, if you want, the color of the atom,” said Masaki Hori, a physicist at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics who uses spectroscopy to study antimatter.

In an ideal world, experimentalists would see every single hydrogen atom, say, shining with the same sharp hues. An atom’s “spectral lines” reveal natural constants, such as the electron’s charge or how much lighter the electron is than the proton, with extreme precision.

But ours is a flawed world. Atoms careen about, crashing into neighboring atoms in chaotic ways. The constant jostling deforms the atoms, messing with their electrons—and therefore the host atom’s energy levels. Shine a laser at the distorted particles and each atom will respond idiosyncratically. The cohort’s crisp intrinsic colors get lost in rainbowlike smears.

Spectroscopy practitioners like Hori spend their careers fighting this “broadening” of spectral lines. For instance, they might employ thinner gases where atomic collisions will be rarer—and energy levels will stay more pristine.

That’s why a hobby project of Anna Sótér, at the time a graduate student of Hori’s, initially seemed counterintuitive.

In 2013, Sótér was working at the CERN laboratory on an antimatter experiment. The group would assemble hybrid matter-antimatter atoms by firing antiprotons into liquid helium. Antiprotons are the negatively charged twins of protons, so an antiproton could occasionally take an electron’s place orbiting a helium nucleus. The result was a small cohort of “antiprotonic helium” atoms.

Anna Sótér at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland.

Photograph: The Paul Scherrer Institute/Scanderbeg Sauer Photography

The project was designed to see if spectroscopy in a helium bath was possible at all—a proof of concept for future experiments that would use even more exotic hybrid atoms.

But Sótér was curious about how the hybrid atoms would react to different temperatures of helium. She convinced the collaboration to spend precious antimatter repeating the measurements inside increasingly chilly helium baths.

“It was a random idea from my side,” said Sótér, now a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. “People were not convinced it was worth it to waste antiprotons on it.”

Where the spectral lines of most atoms would have gone completely haywire in the increasingly dense fluid, widening perhaps a million times, the Frankenstein atoms did the opposite. As the researchers lowered the helium bath to icier temperatures, the spectral smudge narrowed. And below about 2.2 kelvins, where helium becomes a frictionless “superfluid,” they saw a line nearly as sharp as the tightest they had seen in helium gas. Despite presumably taking a battering from the dense surroundings, the hybrid matter-antimatter atoms were acting in improbable unison.

Unsure what to make of the experiment, Sótér and Hori sat on the result while they mulled over what could have gone wrong.

“We continued to argue for many years,” Hori said. “It was not so easy for me to understand why this was the case.”

In time, the researchers concluded that nothing had gone awry. The tight spectral line showed that the hybrid atoms in superfluid helium aren’t experiencing atomic collisions in the billiard-ball manner that’s typical in a gas. The question was why. After consulting with various theorists, the researchers landed on two possible reasons.

One involves the nature of the liquid surroundings. The atomic spectrum abruptly tightened when the group chilled the helium into a superfluid state, a quantum mechanical phenomenon where individual atoms lose their identity in a way that permits them to flow together without rubbing against one another. Superfluidity takes the edge off atomic collisions in general, so researchers expect foreign atoms to experience only mild broadening or even a limited amount of tightening in some cases. “Superfluid helium,” Lemeshko said, “is the softest known thing you can immerse atoms and molecules into.”

But while superfluid helium may have helped the hybrid atoms become their most isolationist selves, that alone can’t explain just how well behaved the atoms were. Another key to their conformity, the researchers believe, was their unusual structure, one brought about by their antimatter component.

In a normal atom, a tiny electron can venture far from its host atom, especially when excited by a laser. On such a loose leash, the electron can easily bump into other atoms, disturbing its atom’s intrinsic energy levels (and leading to spectral broadening).

When Sótér and her colleagues swapped zippy electrons for lumbering antiprotons, they drastically changed the atom’s dynamics. The massive antiproton is much more of a homebody, staying close to the nucleus where the outer electron can shelter it. “The electron is like a force field,” Hori said, “like a shield.”

Still, this rough theory only goes so far. The researchers still cannot explain why the spectral broadening reversed as they switched from gas to liquid to superfluid, and they have no way to calculate the degree of tightening. “You need to be predictive, otherwise it’s not a theory,” Hori said. “It’s just hand-waving.”

In the meantime, the discovery has opened up a new realm for spectroscopy.

There are limits to what experimentalists can measure using low-pressure gases, where atoms zoom around. This frantic motion creates more of the distracting broadening, which researchers combat by slowing the atoms down with lasers and electromagnetic fields.

Sticking atoms in a liquid is a simpler way of holding them relatively still, now that researchers know that getting particles wet won’t necessarily wreck their spectral lines. And antiprotons are just one species of exotic particle that can get placed in orbit around a helium nucleus.

Hori’s group has already applied the technique to fabricate and study “pionic” helium, in which an extremely short-lived “pion” particle replaces an electron. The researchers have made the first spectroscopic measurements of pionic helium, which they described in Nature in 2020. Next, Hori hopes to use the method to bring the kaon particle (a rarer relative of the pion) and the antimatter version of a proton-neutron pair to heel. Such experiments may allow the physicists to measure certain fundamental constants with unprecedented precision.

“This is a new capability that didn’t exist before,” Hori said.

Editor’s note: Natalie Wolchover contributed reporting to this article.

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

An Antimatter Experiment Shows Surprises Near Absolute Zero

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Scientists blast out Earth’s location with the hope of reaching aliens