Amazon invested in electric vehicle maker Rivian in 2019 as part of a plan to go green. During the first quarter, it saw nothing but red.

In its earnings report on Thursday, Amazon took a $7.6 billion loss on its stake in Rivian. Shares of the EV manufacturer plummeted by more than 50% in the first three months of 2022, reversing course from the fourth quarter, when the company held its stock market debut and saw its value skyrocket.

While Amazon has big ambitions for Rivian, signing an agreement for the production of 100,000 delivery vehicles by 2030, current market conditions are rough. Rivian said last month that the company expects to produce just 25,000 electric trucks and SUVs this year, half of the number forecast to investors last year as part of its IPO roadshow.

Like most manufacturers, Rivian is battling through supply chain constraints and internal production snags. But Rivian was valued at $86 billion after its IPO pop, making the stock particularly vulnerable to a major pullback.

The Nasdaq Composite dropped 9.1% in the first quarter, its worst period since the first quarter of 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic was beginning. The riskiest bets took the biggest hits as investors rotated into assets considered safer in a period of rising inflation and interest rates.

Rivian’s drop has continued into the second quarter, with the stock plummetting another 36%. It’s now more than 80% off its high from November.

On Wednesday, Ford took a $5.4 billion loss on its 12% stake in Rivian. Amazon has a roughly 18% stake, according to FactSet, investing a total of more than $1.3 billion into the company.

Amazon’s markdown is particularly large, but it’s not the only tech company that’s taking a beating on its equity investments.

Earlier this week, Alphabet recorded a $1.07 billion loss on its investments “given market volatility.” Alphabet’s investment arms have backed companies including UiPath, Freshworks, Lyft and Duolingo, which have all gotten caught up in the market swoon.

Microsoft said this week that its first--quarter profit took a $174 million hit in part due to “mark-to-market losses on our equity portfolio.” And last week Snap said it had a $92 million unrealized loss “on investment that became public in H2 2021.”

CNBC

Surgeons at Southmead Hospital in Bristol are implementing a tiny deep brain stimulation (DBS) device into the skull. It overrides the abnormal brain-cell firing patterns caused by Parkinson’s.

Twenty-five Parkinson’s disease patients have been selected for the trial at North Bristol NHS Trust that will finish next year. If the trial is successful, it will be possible to treat more Parkinson’s patients more easily.

The trial’s first patient Tony Howells, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s nine years ago, said the impact was “amazing.”

“Before the operation I went for a walk on Boxing Day with my wife and I got 200 yards (182m) from the actual car,” he tells South West News Service. “I had to turn around and go back because I just couldn’t walk. Then after the operation, which was 12 months later, I went on Boxing Day again and we went for 2.5 miles (4km) and we could’ve went further. It was amazing.”

Parkinson’s disease leads to parts of the brain becoming progressively damaged over years and currently has no cure. Symptoms include involuntary tremoring, slow movement, loss of automatic movement and stiff and inflexible muscles.

Most people develop symptoms when they are over 50, but around 5% of sufferers first experience symptoms when they are under 40. Traditional operations for Parkinson’s involve implanting a fairly large battery into the chest with wires that run under the skin through to the top of the head.

The new DBS system, the smallest that has ever been created, involves a tiny battery system for the device that is implanted into the skull. The device delivers electrical impulses directly to targeted areas deep within the brain. To do this, electric probes are put through the skull into the subthalamic nuclei (an area deep in the centre of the brain that is critical in regulating movement).

It takes just three hours to carry out the new operation, about half the time it used to with the larger battery.

“We are delighted with how this first case went in the operating theatre and with how the patient’s symptoms have been improved over the last year,” says Dr. Alan Whone, a Consultant Neurologist at North Bristol NHS Trust, who is leading the trial. “We are hopeful that if these findings hold-up, we will have a significant technical advance by which to improve Parkinson’s care across the world.”

Meanwhile, much to his delight, Howells says he is now able to play golf again and says DBS is “a great way to give somebody their life back.”

He adds: “You can’t understand how frustrating [Parkinson’s] is until it happens to you. The most difficult thing to accept is the decline in daily activities like tying-up shoelaces, taking three or four minutes instead of seconds. It affects your every day life no end”.

Source

SpaceX sends four astronauts into orbit for the second time in a month

In 2011, Lindy Elkins-Tanton and a couple of colleagues wrote a paper exploring ideas about how tiny would-be planets called planetesimals might have formed billions of years ago, and speculated about whether their remnants might still orbit in the asteroid belt. Afterward, officials at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, approached her. “Would you like to propose a mission to test your hypothesis?” they asked. “My response was, ‘What?’ because it had never occurred to me to do that,” she says. But 11 years later, her work has led to a new asteroid-bound spacecraft that is headed to the launchpad.

Elkins-Tanton, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University in Phoenix, now leads NASA’s new Psyche mission—named after both the probe and the asteroid, which was itself named after the Greek goddess of the soul. The probe will visit the asteroid to study what it’s made of and figure out how it formed, looking for clues about how the solar system’s rocky planets themselves may have assembled. Engineers finished up their tests on the Psyche spacecraft at JPL this week and are shipping it by truck and plane to Cape Canaveral, Florida, where it will arrive on Friday. There, the team will fit it and its solar panels atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket and prepare it for launch, scheduled for August 1.

Building operations for the craft have been underway for over a year in the High Bay 1 clean room within JPL’s Spacecraft Assembly Facility, where Elkins-Tanton and her team have been tweaking and testing its instruments, including subjecting the spacecraft to rigorous electromagnetic, thermal-vacuum, vibration, shock, and acoustic testing to make sure it can withstand the vigorous shaking involved in the launch. The room is designed to ensure no dust or fingerprints disturb the functioning of the sensitive instruments and that no contaminants from Earth end up being transported to other worlds. Just to enter the room, one has to don a sterile “bunny suit,” which includes hair and shoe coverings, a smock, and gloves, then walk across sticky floor mats that trap loose dirt and through a phone booth-sized room with air jets that blow away any additional particles that might be hiding on clothing.

The probe is boxy, and about the size of a car, topped by a big saucer-shaped high-gain antenna, which will be used to send and receive signals from home. When WIRED visited the clean room in April, those tests were still in progress. A handful of stanchions and a sign that read “Psyche: Journey to a Metal World” kept visitors at a distance from the black and gray craft, where a technician was working on a tube-like transceiver on the bottom. Holes could be seen along the sides, where two arrays—each made of four solar panels—will later be attached. Most of Psyche will be flown within an environmentally controlled container on a direct flight to Cape Canaveral aboard a bulbous C-17 transport aircraft, but these sets of solar panels will be shipped separately and will rejoin the spacecraft closer to launch.

Psyche, the asteroid, makes a unique target. It’s a 140-mile-wide, potato-shaped object mostly made of metals, rather than rock and ice, circling the sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. “It’s the largest metallic asteroid in the solar system. It’s been studied extensively from Earth, but we don’t know how it was born and evolved to its current state,” says Juan Sanchez, an astronomer at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, who researches Psyche but is not involved in the mission.

That composition means Psyche might not simply be a world with a unique combination of metals—it might be part of the core of a baby planet, left behind after massive impacts with other asteroids smashed up its outer layers during the solar system’s tumultuous early eons. In fact, if Psyche is a planetesimal’s core, it might resemble the metallic innards of the rocky planets that exist today. “It would be cool to see a core. We can’t go to Earth’s core—outside science fiction—so this is our chance to study what is inside these objects,” says Vishnu Reddy, an astronomer at the University of Arizona in Tucson who has worked with other asteroid missions, but not Psyche.

Elkins-Tanton is pretty sure Psyche is made up of an alloy of metals like iron and nickel, the same elements found in the cores of the inner planets, including Earth. It also likely holds tiny amounts of copper, and more lucrative metals like platinum, that might one day interest space mining companies.

The plan is to steer the Psyche craft into orbit around the asteroid in January 2026 and keep it there for at least 21 months, letting it map the object, snap photos, and probe its inner structure remotely. While orbiting, the spacecraft will employ its magnetometer, developed by scientists at the Technical University of Denmark and MIT, to measure whether the asteroid retains a relic magnetic field, which would count as evidence of it being a baby planet’s core. The craft also comes with imagers made by the San Diego-based company Malin Space Science Systems. Pictures taken by the spacecraft will be piped down to Earth via the Deep Space Network, an international system of giant antennas managed by JPL. Because of the distance between Earth and the asteroid belt, they won’t arrive in real time, but they’ll be released to the public within 30 minutes of their arrival. “We’re not going to edit them. We’re not going to censor them. Everyone in the world can be looking at them and wondering what they are at the same time because space missions are for everyone,” Elkins-Tanton says.

The spacecraft also comes with a gamma-ray and neutron detection instrument made at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. That will allow scientists to determine how much iron, nickel, and other elements can be seen on the asteroid’s surface. Finally, the radio telecom system can also be used to make gravity measurements. Since metal is twice as dense as rock, those can be used to determine whether Psyche is indeed a mostly metal world or there’s more rock mixed in than previously thought.

For the body of the Psyche spacecraft, on which all the instruments are mounted, NASA partnered with Maxar Technologies, based in Westminster, Colorado, marking the company’s first time working on a deep space mission and reducing costs by adapting an off-the-shelf communication satellite chassis. The company also built the big, cross-shaped solar arrays, which, when unfurled in space, will make the spacecraft extend the length of a tennis court. While those solar panels will collect 20 kilowatts of energy from the sun near the Earth, that will drop to around 2 kilowatts when the spacecraft reaches Psyche.

The spacecraft also includes a technology demonstration of something called Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC). While all deep-space missions past the moon, including Psyche, rely on radio waves to communicate, it’s possible to encode more information with lasers—a first step toward improving communications for future missions to Mars, and even enabling video streaming.

Psyche is the latest in a series of close-up comet and asteroid investigators tasked with expanding our understanding of the materials that helped form the solar system. The European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft flew by the metallic asteroid Lutetia before its lander successfully alighted on a comet in 2014, but Psyche will be the object of more focused study. NASA’s Dawn spacecraft traveled to Vesta, the largest asteroid in the solar system, and the dwarf planet Ceres in the asteroid belt in 2015, while Japan’s Hayabusa2 and NASA’s OSIRIS-REx visited carbon-dominated near-Earth asteroids Ryugu and Bennu in 2018 and took samples of each. (The former has already delivered a sample back to Earth.) Last year NASA also launched Lucy, a probe that will fly by the Trojan asteroids, which are gravitationally trapped in the same orbit around the sun as Jupiter.

But for now, NASA’s main task is getting Psyche to Florida and then unpacking it and readying it for launch. Once Psyche arrives at Cape Canaveral, the team will work for three months setting up ground support equipment, running tests to make sure everything shipped properly, and finalizing the hardware, says Henry Stone, the Psyche program manager at JPL. They will also test the telecom system for sending commands and receiving data via the Deep Space Network. With so much work culminating at once, Stone says he is both excited and anxious. “This is the point of the project where all the nerves are coming,” he says.

Elkins-Tanton feels they’ve tested everything they can in a clean room—now the real test will happen in space. “I’ve spent years feeling nervous about the instruments, and now I’m really confident about them,” she says. “I’m not even very worried about the launch. I’m more worried about surprises we don’t anticipate. It’s a very complicated system.”

NASA's Psyche Spacecraft Heads to Cape Canaveral

(May require free registration to view)

Conservation efforts for the shoe included careful reshaping and freeze-drying.

Secrets of the Ice

 

Sometime between 200 and 500 CE, someone crossing a high mountain pass in Norway discarded a shoe. More than 1,500 years later, an unusually warm summer melted centuries of accumulated snow and ice, revealing the ancient shoe—and an assortment of other objects left behind by ancient and medieval travelers on the snowy mountain trails. Archaeologists with the Secrets of the Ice project recovered the shoe in 2019, finished conserving it in 2021, and recently published a report about the site and the finds.

 

The report “is for internal archiving only and [is] not published,” Secrets of the Ice co-director Lars Holger Pilø told Ars in an email. “In addition, it is in Norwegian.”

 

But Pilø and his colleagues recently shared some highlights via the project’s social media and in a conversation with Ars.

High-altitude high fashion

The shoe isn’t what you’d expect to find in a high mountain pass. It looks more like a sandal than a hiking boot, with its decorative cutouts and an open, lace-up top that barely reaches the ankle. Far to the south and east, in the Roman Empire, it would have been fashionable footwear; conservator Vegard Vike at the Museum of Culture and History in Oslo, Norway, matched it to a type popular in Roman cities during the 400s and 500s CE (also known as the Iron Age in most of Europe).

 

“The similarity to footwear within the Roman Empire is striking,” Pilø told Ars in an email. “It tells us that the people living in these geographically remote mountains had a connection to the continent. Roman imports have been found in South Norway previously (especially weapons), but the shoe tells us that ideas and fashion traveled as well.”

 

This particular piece of Roman fashion traveled to a mountain pass called Horse Ice Patch, 2,000 meters above sea level in the mountains of Western Norway—far beyond the boundaries of the Roman Empire even at its peak, but apparently not beyond Rome’s influence. Pilø and his colleagues used the shoe and centuries’ worth of other lost or abandoned items to trace the trails that traders and farmers once trekked through the cold, inhospitable landscape to reach markets or seasonal grazing pastures.

 

Today, if you just look around Horse Ice Patch, it’s almost impossible to spot the ancient and medieval trails that once converged there. But a closer look reveals objects that still mark the routes people walked long ago.

 

Near the Iron Age shoe and along the trails in and out of the pass, Pilø and his colleagues found a 2,000-year-old arrowhead made of reindeer antler and etched with a pair of zigzag lines. They’ve also recovered horse manure dating back to the Viking Age (about 800 to 1100 CE), as well as a horseshoe and a horse leg bone from the late Middle Ages. It’s clear that people used the pass for centuries.

 

“The high mountain passes went out of use mainly because better roads were built in the lowlands from the mid-19th century,” Pilø told Ars.

 

Before that, trails like the ones that converge at Horse Ice Patch were the only way a farmer in a valley like Skjåk could reach a port town on the Sognefjord, Norway’s longest and deepest fjord. The narrow, uneven trails had to be traversed on foot, leading pack horses; the terrain was too rough and steep for riding, let alone the comforts of sledges or carts.

Clues on ice

Pilø and his colleagues at Secrets of the Ice have spent the last 15 years mapping the network of routes across and through the mountains. They’ve had some help from hundreds of stone cairns that people in the past built as trail markers, but many of those ancient and medieval cairns are now gone, or the trails themselves are so long-neglected (and so rough to begin with) that it can be hard to see where the trail goes, even when you’re standing next to a cairn.

 

And, Pilø told Ars, “The cairns are difficult to place in time, as they do not contain material that can be dated by radiocarbon. So we date them by their association with the route. It is also likely that the large, well-built cairns (or 'trail markers' is perhaps a better word) are the most recent.”

 

For the most part, Pilø and his colleagues have traced and dated the trails by finding the objects ancient travelers dropped or threw away. At other sites in the mountains, those objects have included a surprising number of shoes, some dating back 3,000 years to the Bronze Age.

 

According to Pilø, most of the shoes, including the Roman-era one from Horse Ice Patch, wore out during the trip, and people simply tossed them to the side of the trail and carried on with a fresh pair. In other words, even in a seemingly remote mountain pass that just skirts the edge of a glacier, people have been littering for centuries. But at least here, the old saying holds true: one person’s trash is another person’s archaeological evidence.

 

“You have this vast wilderness with no traces of humans, but then you realize it’s actually brimming with clues,” Secrets of the Ice co-director Espen Finstad told ScienceNorway. “It gives the landscape an entirely new story, another context than just an item you found in the ice.”

 

Archaeologists have found hundreds of cairns like this one in Norway's mountains, marking ancient routes to and from the passes.

 

This is Horse Ice Patch; the branch and leaves in the foreground are from grazing pastures in the valley below, probably carried through the pass as fodder for horses or other livestock.

 

A hiker found the remains of the ancient shoe melting out of the ice in 2019 after an unusually warm summer and alerted archaeologists.

 

The remains of the shoe, mid-conservation.

 

Conservation efforts for the shoe included careful reshaping and freeze-drying.

 

Conservator Vegard Vike made a replica of the shoe. This is what it looks like when it's unlaced and not wrapped around a foot.

 

The original shoe would probably have had animal hair on the outside, which would have helped it grip the snow better.

 

This shelter once offered travelers in the pass a break from the wind and snow.

 

This arrowhead, made of reindeer antler and probably also used to hunt reindeer, radiocarbon-dates to 2,000-3,000 years ago. One barb has broken off.

From farm to fjord

From farming settlements in the inland valley of Skjåk, a trail winds its way south and up toward Horse Ice Patch, eventually climbing from the valley floor to a windswept pass 2,000 meters above sea level. The trail forks at the pass; one route leads west through the mountains before descending to Sognefjord on the coast. Along this western route, Pilø and his colleagues found the stone foundation of a shelter that would once have been topped with wooden beams covered in hides to block the wind and snow.

 

“At the fjord, the travelers from Innlandet would have been able to acquire salt, barley, and dried fish in exchange for outfield products such as reindeer antler and pelts and probably also farm produce such as butter,” explained Pilø.

 

Meanwhile, the second route out of Horse Ice Patch leads east to the site of a 16^th-century summer farm called Neto. Along this route, all of the artifacts found so far date to the late Middle Ages or early Renaissance—no earlier. That tells archaeologists that people probably weren’t using the eastern route before the start of Neto Summer Farm. (At the time, most farmers kept a permanent, "main" farm in a place like Skjåk, along with at least one "summer farm" at a higher altitude.)

 

“The basic idea was to move the farm animals to pastures in the mountains during summer so that the grass on the meadows of the main farm could be harvested and stored for winter fodder," Pilø told Ars. "It appears that leaf fodder was cut at the summer farms as well—we have found such leaf fodder melting out of the ice both at the Lendbreen Ice Patch and the Horse Ice Patch pass.”

Cold feet? No worries

The Iron Age shoe is a remarkable find, but 2,000 meters above sea level in the cold, rugged landscape of Norway’s mountains, it looks completely out of place.

 

However, Pilø says we should give ancient people more credit.

 

“In its current state, with just the rawhide preserved and the hair gone, it certainly looks like something we would not have used during glacier crossings today,” he told Ars. But the rawhide (untanned leather, which is usually stiff and strong) material of the shoe would originally have been covered with animal hair.

 

Pilø and his colleagues have found much older shoes, dating back 3,300 years, at other sites. These shoes were made with the hair on the outside of the shoe, probably with traction on the snow and ice in mind. To help keep feet warm and dry, the shoe's former owner probably stuffed the shoe with grass or fabric or wore the shoe over fabric foot wrappings. A 5,300-year-old hunter now known as Ötzi, whose mummified remains were recovered from a glacier in the Italian Alps, wore grass stuffing inside his shoes. And Pilø and his colleagues found several scraps of woven fabric not far from their discarded shoe in Norway.

 

“Obviously, they cannot compare to modern hiking boots, but they were considered functional enough and used for thousands of years,” Pilø told Ars. And in case you’re wondering, it’s a European men’s size 43, according to Vike, who made a leather replica of the shoe and tried it on. “With wool wrappings/socks, it would probably fit a size 42,” Vike said in a tweet.

 

Melting ice in a Norwegian alpine pass reveals a 1,500-year-old shoe

China’s space agency plans to send a spacecraft to slam into an asteroid, knocking it into a new — and hopefully safer — orbit. The prospective new mission will launch within the next four years, and was announced on Sunday by Wu Yanhua, deputy director of the China National Space Administration, according to Global Times, a state-run news outlet.

The country hasn’t yet determined which asteroid to target. The mission was announced as one part of a larger new planetary defense effort, which will seek to catalog and monitor near-Earth asteroids, especially those that might pose a threat to our planet. The effort would include a new warning system as well. Eventually, the plan is to identify an asteroid that might threaten Earth, and send a spacecraft to crash into it, changing its orbit in the process. But it is still very early days, and the overall project has not been formally approved yet — it is “being reviewed for approval,” Global Times reports.

The idea does appear to have been circulating for a while. Back in January, a white paper published by Chinese officials mentioned plans to study a planetary defense system, and last October, the country hosted a planetary defense conference, Andrew Jones reported for Space News. The planetary defense project would also set up software to simulate asteroid impacts, and would run rehearsals of what to do in the event of a potential impact. (NASA and the European Space Agency have held similar simulations.)

NASA has its own asteroid-redirecting mission, which took off in November. But the agency isn’t targeting any potentially threatening space rocks just yet. NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) is aiming for the tiny moonlet of an asteroid called Didymos. It will try to knock the space rock, called Dimorphos, off-course on September 26, 2022. Data from that impact could help inform future planetary defense efforts — just in case they are ever needed in the future.

Small space rocks hit our planet every day, raining down as meteorites and dust. It’s the bigger rocks that space agencies like CNSA and NASA are more worried about. Efforts to catalog near-earth objects have already found and tracked the vast majority of large (bigger than 1 km) asteroids in our vicinity. But smaller asteroids could still be catastrophic — and efforts to identify and track those chunks of rock are still ongoing. That’s why China, the US, and many other nations are interested in planetary defense — everyone wants to know not only what’s coming, but how to stop it when it does.

China announces plans for a new asteroid-deflecting mission

First all-private mission to the space station will finally come home

A male orb-weaving spider catapults off a female after mating. Survival could mean another chance to fertilize her eggs.

A male orb-weaving spider catapults off a female after mating. Survival could mean another chance to fertilize her eggs.

These male spiders adopted an unusual strategy to survive sexual cannibalism

The outspoken Tesla CEO, the world’s wealthiest person, has said he wants to buy Twitter because he thinks it’s not living up to its potential as a platform for “free speech.” He says it needs to be transformed as a private company in order to build trust with users and do better at serving what he calls the “societal imperative” of free speech.

A USC study published this month in Psychological Science found participants underestimated the role of habit in their behaviors—including their coffee consumption.

"People may consume coffee out of habit—for example, you may automatically follow a coffee drinking routine when you wake up or go on your morning commute, regardless of how tired you are," said study author Asaf Mazar, a doctoral candidate in psychology at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

That automatic triggering of behavior, versus conscious intentions, is what makes a behavior a habit, explained Mazar.

"Much of what we do every day is habitual, but we are reluctant to acknowledge our habits and instead chalk our behaviors up to our mood and our intentions," said study author Wendy Wood, USC Provost Professor of psychology and business.

To investigate just how much people underestimate the influence of habits, Mazar and Wood asked study participants what drives their coffee consumption. The respondents said fatigue was about twice as important as habit in prompting their coffee drinking.

Next, the researchers tracked the study participants over the course of one week, recording their coffee drinking and tiredness every two hours. In contrast to the participants' explanations, habit was just as strong an influence on coffee consumption as feeling tired.

"We found that the participants strongly overestimated the effect of tiredness on their coffee consumption and underestimated the effect of habit," said Mazar.

Even when participants were offered financial incentives to accurately explain why they were drinking coffee, they more frequently cited fatigue than habit.

Habits influenced behaviors in researchers' experiments

The researchers also conducted an experiment with online participants who initially recalled a negative, positive or neutral memory.

Next, they then engaged in an exercise in which they repeatedly pressed either a left-hand or right-hand key. Finally, they were asked if they would like to complete additional trials of the experiment to assist the researchers. Participants indicated their willingness to help by pressing a highly practiced or less practiced key.

Those who had earlier extensively practiced the "no" response key were more likely to decline the request for help, compared with participants who practiced the "yes" and "no" response keys equally. While participants were more likely to ascribe their willingness to help to their mood, the results demonstrated the responses had far more to do with the key-pressing habits they adopted during the experiment.

"The experiment provided causal evidence that people's explanations for their behavior favor inner states over habits, even when that behavior is driven by habit," said Wood.

Why we should pay more attention to our good and bad habits

The study authors say that the gap between the actual and perceived role of habits in our lives explains why Americans have such a hard time changing ongoing, repeated behaviors—such as maintaining a steady exercise program and a healthy diet.

Some of this is cultural, they said. When asked to list what stops them from making beneficial lifestyle changes, Americans commonly cite a lack of willpower.

"To effectively change behavior, Americans must acknowledge that much of our behavior is habitual and automatic," said Mazar. "Habits can keep us repeating unwanted behaviors, but they can also keep us on track in maintaining desirable ones, like working out or recycling."

Wood and Mazar pointed to climate change as an example of a problem where people across the world are highly motivated to change their behavior to live more sustainable lives. However, "they just don't know what to do and how to do it repeatedly," said Wood.

To better understand one piece of the sustainability puzzle, they recently conducted a survey on recycling behaviors.

"Successful recyclers had figured out how to create habits—without having to stress or think much—that made recycling easy and rewarding," Wood explained. "They put their recycling bins in the kitchen, not in the garage. They displayed signs indicating where to put the trash and how to sort it. They had these hacks."

It may sound obvious, said Wood, "but it's not what you know; it's what you do."

Source

But developments in physics suggest the non-existence of time is an open possibility, and one that we should take seriously.

How can that be, and what would it mean? It'll take a little while to explain, but don't worry: Even if time doesn't exist, our lives will go on as usual.

A crisis in physics

Physics is in crisis. For the past century or so, we have explained the Universe with two wildly successful physical theories: general relativity and quantum mechanics.

Quantum mechanics describes how things work in the incredibly tiny world of particles and particle interactions. General relativity describes the big picture of gravity and how objects move.

Both theories work extremely well in their own right, but the two are thought to conflict with one another. Though the exact nature of the conflict is controversial, scientists generally agree both theories need to be replaced with a new, more general theory.

Physicists want to produce a theory of "quantum gravity" that replaces general relativity and quantum mechanics, while capturing the extraordinary success of both. Such a theory would explain how gravity's big picture works at the miniature scale of particles.

Time in quantum gravity

It turns out that producing a theory of quantum gravity is extraordinarily difficult.

One attempt to overcome the conflict between the two theories is string theory. String theory replaces particles with strings vibrating in as many as 11 dimensions.

However, string theory faces a further difficulty. String theories provide a range of models that describe a Universe broadly like our own, and they don't really make any clear predictions that can be tested by experiments to figure out which model is the right one.

In the 1980s and 1990s, many physicists became dissatisfied with string theory and came up with a range of new mathematical approaches to quantum gravity.

One of the most prominent of these is loop quantum gravity, which proposes that the fabric of space and time is made of a network of extremely small discrete chunks, or "loops".

One of the remarkable aspects of loop quantum gravity is that it appears to eliminate time entirely.

Loop quantum gravity is not alone in abolishing time: A number of other approaches also seem to remove time as a fundamental aspect of reality.

Emergent time

So we know we need a new physical theory to explain the Universe, and that this theory might not feature time.

Suppose such a theory turns out to be correct. Would it follow that time does not exist?

It's complicated, and it depends what we mean by exist.

Theories of physics don't include any tables, chairs, or people, and yet we still accept that tables, chairs, and people exist.

Why? Because we assume that such things exist at a higher level than the level described by physics.

We say that tables, for example, "emerge" from an underlying physics of particles whizzing around the Universe.

But while we have a pretty good sense of how a table might be made out of fundamental particles, we have no idea how time might be "made out of" something more fundamental.

So unless we can come up with a good account of how time emerges, it is not clear we can simply assume time exists.

Time might not exist at any level.

Time and agency

Saying that time does not exist at any level is like saying that there are no tables at all.

Trying to get by in a world without tables might be tough, but managing in a world without time seems positively disastrous.

Our entire lives are built around time. We plan for the future, in light of what we know about the past. We hold people morally accountable for their past actions, with an eye to reprimanding them later on.

We believe ourselves to be agents (entities that can do things) in part because we can plan to act in a way that will bring about changes in the future.

But what's the point of acting to bring about a change in the future when, in a very real sense, there is no future to act for?

What's the point of punishing someone for a past action, when there is no past and so, apparently, no such action?

The discovery that time does not exist would seem to bring the entire world to a grinding halt. We would have no reason to get out of bed.

Business as usual

There is a way out of the mess.

While physics might eliminate time, it seems to leave causation intact: the sense in which one thing can bring about another.

Perhaps what physics is telling us, then, is that causation and not time is the basic feature of our Universe.

If that's right, then agency can still survive. For it is possible to reconstruct a sense of agency entirely in causal terms.

At least, that's what Kristie Miller, Jonathan Tallant, and I argue in our new book.

We suggest the discovery that time does not exist may have no direct impact on our lives, even while it propels physics into a new era.

Sam Baron, Associate professor, Australian Catholic University.

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Google is marking Earth Day with time-lapse satellite images showing melting glaciers, retreating snow cover, deforestation and coral bleaching to remind its users about humanity’s impact on the climate and environment.

The 2022 Earth Day Google doodle includes four Gifs created from satellite imagery and photographs from The Ocean Agency that will rotate throughout the day.

They show glacial retreat at the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania between December 1986 and 2020 and glacial melt in Sermersooq, Greenland, between December 2000 and 2020.

Other images show the result of a coral bleaching event on the Great Barrier Reef near Lizard Island in Australia between March 2016 and October 2017 and deforestation of the Harz forests in Elend, Germany, between December 1995 and 2020.

Climate counsellor Lesley Hughes, a professor of biology at Macquarie University in Sydney, said the images of coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef are “a very high-impact visual image” that would resonate.

“Our major natural icon, that we are stewards of, is a symbol of the impact of climate change on an extraordinarily diverse ecosystem,” Hughes said.

“Our physical and biological world is transforming before our eyes and that’s what these images are emphasising and so there’s absolutely no time to waste.”

The Great Barrier Reef went through its sixth mass bleaching event in March with aerial surveys showing almost no reefs across a 1,200km stretch escaping the heat – the first known to have occurred during a La Niña year.

Hughes said for those elsewhere, the images of glacial ice retreating would be similarly meaningful.

In New Zealand, the vast and ancient glaciers are thinning at an alarming rate.

The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa) found that between 1977 to 2014, a third of the permanent snow and ice was lost from the Southern Alps – a dramatic decline that began accelerating rapidly in the last 15 years.

More recently the summer of 2017-2018 brought temperatures 3C warmer than average across New Zealand, shrinking some glaciers so much they all but disappeared.

Elsewhere artefacts long-entombed in the Italian Alps are being revealed as the ice melts, leading to the discovery of equipment left behind by soldiers camped out on the peaks during the first world war and a 5,300-year-old crime scene when the mummified body of Ötzi was found by hikers.

What has been a boon for archaeologists is also a symptom of the catastrophic threat caused by climate change. Forni, one of Italy’s largest valley glaciers, has retreated 800 metres within the past 30 years and 1.2 miles (2km) over the past century.

The images contrast with the positive note struck with the animation published for Earth Day 2021, which the company said was designed to “encourage everyone to find one small act they can do to restore our Earth”.

Hughes said the confronting images published in 2022 may be a response to the IPCC26 report and were important for raising awareness.

“I think when you’re sitting in a middle-class environment and it’s a nice day and the sun’s come up or has gone down, it’s easy to become complacent about the larger forces at work in our climate system and the impacts those forces have,” Hughes said.

“So reminding people that just because it’s a nice day, climate change hasn’t gone away is really important.”

Alphabet, the company which operates the Google search engine, claims to have been carbon neutral since 2007 and plans to operate all its data centres entirely on renewable energy by 2030.

The company used 15.5 terawatt hours of electricity in 2020, mostly to power its data centres. It also slashed the waste generated from its operations by 40% to 28,864 tonnes but increased its water consumption.

Its figures for 2021 have not been made available yet but the company says it has compensated for its emissions by buying enough renewable energy and offsets to cover its consumption.

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Doctors and scientists have developed an artificial intelligence tool that can accurately predict how likely tumours are to grow back in cancer patients after they have undergone treatment.

The breakthrough, described as “exciting” by clinical oncologists, could revolutionise the surveillance of patients. While treatment advances in recent years have boosted survival chances, there remains a risk that the disease might come back.

Monitoring patients after treatment is vital to ensuring any cancer recurrence is acted on urgently. Currently, however, doctors tend to have to rely on traditional methods, including ones focused on the original amount and spread of cancer, to predict how a patient might fare in future.

Now a world-first study by the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, the Institute of Cancer Research, London, and Imperial College London has identified a model using machine-learning – a type of AI – that can predict the risk of cancer coming back, and do it better than existing methods.

“This is an important step forward in being able to use AI to understand which patients are at highest risk of cancer recurrence, and to detect this relapse sooner so that re-treatment can be more effective,” said Dr Richard Lee, a consultant physician in respiratory medicine and early diagnosis at the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust.

Lee, the chief investigator of the OCTAPUS-AI study, told the Guardian it could prove vital in not only improving outcomes for cancer patients, but alleviating their fears, with relapse “a key source of anxiety” for many. “We hope to push boundaries to improve the care of cancer patients, to help them live longer, and reduce the impact the disease has on their lives.”

The AI tool may lead to recurrence being detected earlier in patients deemed at high risk, ensuring they receive treatment more urgently, but it could also result in fewer unnecessary follow-up scans and hospital visits for those deemed low risk.

“Reducing the number of scans needed in this setting can be helpful, and also reduce radiation exposure, hospital visits, and make more efficient use of valuable NHS resources,” Lee said.

In the retrospective study, doctors, scientists and researchers developed a machine learning model to determine whether it could accurately identify non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients at risk of recurrence following radiotherapy. Machine learning is a form of AI that enables software to automatically predict outcomes.

Lung cancer is the leading worldwide cause of cancer death and accounts for just over a fifth (21%) of cancer deaths in the UK. NSCLC makes up nearly five sixths (85%) of lung cancer cases and, when caught early, the disease is often curable. However, over a third (36%) of NSCLC patients experience recurrence in the UK.

The researchers used clinical data from 657 NSCLC patients treated at five UK hospitals to feed their model – and added in data on various prognostic factors to better predict a patient’s chance of recurrence.

These included the patient’s age, gender, BMI, smoking status, the intensity of radiotherapy, and their tumour’s characteristics.

Researchers then used the AI model to categorise patients into low and high risk of recurrence, how long a period they might experience before a recurrence, and overall survival two years post treatment.

The tool was found to be more accurate in predicting outcomes than traditional methods. The results of the study, supported by the Royal Marsden Cancer Charity and the National Institute for Health Research, were published in The Lancet’s eBioMedicine journal.

“Right now, there is no set framework for the surveillance of non-small cell lung cancer patients following radiotherapy treatment in the UK,” said study lead Dr Sumeet Hindocha, a clinical oncology specialist registrar at the Royal Marsden and Imperial College London. “This means there is variation in the type and frequency of follow-up that patients receive … Using AI with healthcare data may be the answer.

“As this type of data can be accessed easily, this methodology could be replicated across different health systems.”

The study is “an exciting first step” towards rolling out a tool nationally and internationally to guide the post-treatment surveillance of cancer patients, Hindocha added.

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Analysis of thousands of tumours has unveiled a treasure trove of clues about the causes of cancer, representing a significant step towards the personalisation of treatment.

Researchers say that for the first time it is possible to detect patterns – called mutational signatures – in the DNA of cancers.

These provide clues including about whether a patient has had past exposure to environmental causes of cancer such as smoking or UV light, for example.

This is important as these signatures allow doctors to look at each patient’s tumour and match it to specific treatments and medications.

However, these patterns can be detected only through analysis of the vast amounts of data unearthed by whole genome sequencing – identifying the genetic makeup of a cell.

The principal author of the study, Serena Nik-Zainal, is a professor of genomic medicine and bioinformatics at the University of Cambridge and an honorary consultant in clinical genetics at Cambridge University hospitals.

She said: “It’s like looking at a very busy beach with thousands of footprints in the sand. To the untrained eye, the footprints appear to be random and meaningless.

“But if you are able to study them closely, you can learn a lot about what’s been going on, distinguish between animal and human prints, whether it’s an adult or child, what direction they’re travelling in, etc.

“It’s the same thing with the mutational signatures.

The use of whole genome sequencing can identify which ‘footprints’ are relevant/important and reveal what’s happened through the development of the cancer.”

Researchers analysed the complete genetic makeup or whole genome sequences (WGS) of more than 12,000 NHS cancer patients.

They were able to spot 58 new mutational signatures, suggesting that there are additional causes of cancer that are not yet fully understood.

Nik-Zainal said: “The reason it is important to identify mutational signatures is because they are like fingerprints at a crime scene – they help to pinpoint cancer culprits.

“Some mutational signatures have clinical or treatment implications – they can highlight abnormalities that may be targeted with specific drugs or may indicate a potential ‘achilles heel’ in individual cancers.”

Dr Andrea Degasperi, research associate at the University of Cambridge and first author, said: “Whole genome sequencing gives us a total picture of all the mutations that have contributed to each person’s cancer.

“With thousands of mutations per cancer, we have unprecedented power to look for commonalities and differences across NHS patients, and in doing so we uncovered 58 new mutational signatures and broadened our knowledge of cancer.”

The findings are being incorporated into the NHS as researchers and clinicians now have the use of a digital tool called FitMS that will help them identify the mutational signature and potentially inform cancer management more effectively.

This research was supported by Cancer Research UK and published in the journal Science.

The genomic data was provided by the 100,000 Genomes Project, an England-wide clinical research programme to sequence 100,000 whole genomes from about 85,000 patients affected by rare disease or cancer.

Michelle Mitchell, chief executive of Cancer Research UK, said: “This study shows how powerful whole genome sequencing tests can be in giving clues into how the cancer may have developed, how it will behave and what treatment options would work best.”

Prof Matthew Brown, the chief scientific officer of Genomics England, said: “Mutational signatures are an example of using the full potential of WGS.

“We hope to use the mutational clues seen in this study and apply them back into our patient population, with the ultimate aim of improving diagnosis and management of cancer patients.”

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Twitter's announcement on Earth Day came as it tries to fend off an unwanted takeover bid by billionaire Elon Musk, who has said he thinks people should be able to say pretty much whatever they want on the platform.

"Misleading advertisements on Twitter that contradict the scientific consensus on climate change are prohibited, in line with our inappropriate content policy," Twitter global sustainability manager Casey Junod said in a blog post.

"We believe that climate denialism shouldn't be monetized on Twitter, and that misrepresentative ads shouldn't detract from important conversations about the climate crisis."

Twitter last year introduced a Topic feature to help users find conversations about climate change, and rolled out hubs of "credible, authoritative" information on an array of high-profile topics including the science backing climate change.

"We recognize that misleading information about climate change can undermine efforts to protect the planet," Junod said.

"Now more than ever, meaningful climate action, from all of us, is critical."

As tempting as access to Musk's wealth may be, Twitter is not eager to be ruled by a billionaire known for shooting from the hip with little regard for the consequences.

The global one-to-many messaging platform is moving to prevent Musk from getting his hands on all of Twitter's outstanding shares, signaling that worries about where he would lead the company outweigh the proffered payoff.

Earlier this month Musk, the world's richest person and a controversial and frequent user of Twitter himself, made an unsolicited bid of $43 billion for the social media network, citing better freedom of speech as a motivation.

Musk advocates a hands-off approach to policing content, a thorny matter particularly in high-profile cases such as that of former US president Donald Trump, who was banned after the assault on the Capitol by his supporters as they sought to overturn the US election result last year.

But the polarizing Tesla CEO's campaign has also sparked concern among technology and free-speech experts who point to Musk's unpredictable statements and history of bullying critics, which contradict his stated aims.

Twitter's board opted to employ a "poison pill" defense, under which any acquisition of over 15 percent of the firm's stock without its OK would trigger a plan to flood the market with shares and thus make a buyout much harder.

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Talk about killjoys. While the rest of us are enjoying what’s starting to feel like a return to everyday life, some experts are warning that there’s another COVID-19 variant coming. Philadelphia has reinstituted its mask mandate. The wave of new infections in Europe will hit us soon, they say, and failing to maintain at least some of the lockdowns we’ve endured for the last two years is “denialism.” That message is echoed by the People’s CDC, a group of epidemiologists, doctors, and other people with long COVID. They argue that the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendation to focus on protecting those at the highest risk and a return to “normal” for everybody else is precisely the wrong course of action. 

But is it? 

While most countries imposed draconian restrictions, there was an exception: Sweden. Early in the pandemic, Swedish schools and offices closed briefly but then reopened. Restaurants never closed. Businesses stayed open. Kids under 16 went to school. 

That stood in contrast to the U.S. By April 2020, the CDC and the National Institutes of Health recommended far-reaching lockdowns that threw millions of Americans out of work. A kind of groupthink set in. In print and on social media, colleagues attacked experts who advocated a less draconian approach. Some received obscene emails and death threats. Within the scientific community, opposition to the dominant narrative was castigated and censored, cutting off what should have been vigorous debate and analysis.

In this intolerant atmosphere, Sweden’s “light touch,” as it is often referred to by scientists and policy makers, was deemed a disaster. “Sweden Has Become the World’s Cautionary Tale,” carped The New York Times. Reuters reported, “Sweden’s COVID Infections Among Highest in Europe, With ‘No Sign Of Decrease.’” Medical journals published equally damning reports of Sweden’s folly. 

Stockholm Solution

But Sweden seems to have been right. Countries that took the severe route to stem the virus might want to look at the evidence found in a little-known 2021 report by the Kaiser Family Foundation. The researchers found that among 11 wealthy peer nations, Sweden was the only one with no excess mortality among individuals under 75. None, zero, zip. 

That’s not to say that Sweden had no deaths from COVID. It did. But it appears to have avoided the collateral damage that lockdowns wreaked in other countries. The Kaiser study wisely looked at excess mortality, rather than the more commonly used metric of COVID deaths. This means that researchers examined mortality rates from all causes of death in the 11 countries before the pandemic and compared those rates to mortality from all causes during the pandemic. If a country averaged 1 million deaths per year before the pandemic but had 1.3 million deaths in 2020, excess mortality would be 30 percent.

There are several reasons to use excess mortality rather than COVID deaths to compare countries. The rate of COVID deaths ignores regional and national differences. For example, the desperately poor Central African Republic has a very low rate of fatalities from COVID. But that’s because it has an average life expectancy of 53. People in their 70s are3,000-fold more susceptible than children to dying of COVID, and even people in their 20s to 50s are far less likely to die than the elderly. So, it’s no surprise that the Central African Republic has a low COVID mortality rate despite its poverty and poor medical care. The U.S., by contrast, with its large elderly population (and general ill-health compared to most wealthy countries), was fertile soil for the coronavirus. 

Excess mortality is the smart, objective standard. It includes all deaths, whether from COVID, the indirect effects of COVID (such as people avoiding the hospital during a heart attack), or the side effects of lockdowns. And it gets rid of the problem of underlying differences among countries, allowing a direct comparison of their performance during COVID.

Using data from the Human Mortality Database, a joint project of the CDC and the Max Planck Institute in Germany, Kaiser compared mortality during the five years before the pandemic and mortality in 2020, the first year of the pandemic. Sweden had zero excess mortality in 2020 among people younger than 75. In other words, COVID wasn’t all that dangerous to young people. 

Even among the elderly, Sweden’s excess mortality in 2020 was lower than that in the U.S., Belgium, Switzerland, the U.K., the Netherlands, Austria, and France. Canada, Germany, and Australia had lower rates than Sweden among people over the age of 70—probably because Sweden failed to limit nursing home visits at the very beginning of the pandemic. 

The U.S., by contrast, had the highest excess mortality rate among all 11 countries in the Kaiser study. We also had a stunning number of COVID deaths—more than 1 million. Our lousy rate is probably due to multiple factors, says Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. Our underlying health is worse than most wealthy countries because of our wide wealth gap, high rates of poverty and obesity, spotty access to high-quality health care for the poor, and an aging population. 

The Kaiser results might seem surprising, but other data have confirmed them. As of February, Our World in Data, a database maintained by the University of Oxford, shows that Sweden continues to have low excess mortality, now slightly lower than Germany, which had strict lockdowns. Another study found no increased mortality in Sweden in those under 70. Most recently, a Swedish commission evaluating the country’s pandemic response determined that although it was slow to protect the elderly and others at heightened risk from COVID in the initial stages, its laissez-faire approach was broadly correct. 

This brings us to the other insight from Kaiser researchers. By looking only at 2020, before the advent of vaccines and other medical treatments, the researchers could measure the effect of lockdowns. While those who could retreat to home computers may have viewed restrictions as simply annoying disruptions, for many Americans they were devastating, as reflected in our high excess mortality rate. 

One of the most pernicious effects of lockdowns was the loss of social support, which contributed to a dramatic rise in deaths related to alcohol and drug abuse. According to a recent report in the medical journal JAMA, even before the pandemic such “deaths of despair” were already high and rising rapidly in the U.S., but not in other industrialized countries. Lockdowns sent those numbers soaring.

The U.S. response to COVID was the worst of both worlds. Shutting down businesses and closing everything from gyms to nightclubs shielded younger Americans at low risk of COVID but did little to protect the vulnerable. School closures meant chaos for kids and stymied their learning and social development. These effects are widely considered so devastating that they will linger for years to come. While the U.S. was shutting down schools to protect kids, Swedish children were safe even with school doors wide open. According to a 2021 research letter, there wasn’t a single COVID death among Swedish children, despite schools remaining open for children under 16.

Of the potential years of life lost in the U.S., 30 percent were among Blacks and another 31 percent were among Hispanics; both rates are far higher than the demographics’ share of the population. Lockdowns were especially hard on young workers and their families. According to the Kaiser report, among those who died in 2020, people lost an average of 14 years of life in the U.S. versus eight years lost in peer countries. In other words, the young were more likely to die in the U.S. than in other countries, and many of those deaths were likely due to lockdowns rather than COVID. 

Looking to the Future

Lockdowns may not come back when the next COVID surge hits, but many public health officials say masks likely will be. Even that may not be worth the effort, at least for kids in schools. Despite headlines claiming that they work, the only two decent scientific studies of masks found minimal benefit against COVID. 

The more extensive study of the two, published last September, was used as ammunition to support school mask mandates—even though children had been excluded from the study. The study found that masks failed to prevent 90 percent of infections; only the elderly benefited modestly. Ashley Styczynski, one of the principal investigators, said “further study” was needed to know if masks provide any protection to kids.

Last month, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions voted overwhelmingly to establish an independent panel to investigate the nation’s response to the pandemic, modeled on the much-heralded 9/11 Commission. Such a COVID commission should study Sweden, even if the American medical and public health establishment continues to scoff at this Scandinavian success. Whether it was Sweden’s light touch or America’s lockdowns, no public health response could have prevented COVID deaths entirely. But the data shows that Sweden did better and suggests we’d be better off with their light touch when the next coronavirus crisis comes ashore.

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2022/04/19/what-sweden-got-right-about-covid/

Daily official updates released by the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) on Friday showed 4,631 infections had been detected in the past 24 hours.

This is the highest number registered for almost three jumps, and a jump from an average daily of around 1,300 infections recorded last week.

Health Minister Joe Phaahla told parliament earlier Friday that the rise in infections was "worrying".

"Over the last few days we have seen worrying signs of the rise in the level of COVID infections. We hope that this will not go much higher, but we are monitoring," he said.

"We hope that even if there is rise, it will not be disruptive".

More than half of the new cases reported Friday were found in the most populous province, Gauteng, where Johannesburg is situated.

Flood-hit KwaZulu-Natal province recorded the second highest number, accounting for 22 percent of the latest cases.

With a total number of laboratory-confirmed cases of more than 3,7 million, COVID has hit South Africa harder than any other country on the continent.

NICD executive director, Adrian Puren said the Omicron variant is still the dominant circulating variant.

Only one COVID death was recorded on Friday.

Early in March South Africa registered zero COVID deaths, for the first time since May 2020.

Scientists have predicted a new wave will hit the country in May as the southern hemisphere winter season starts to set in.

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NASA is supporting some seriously risky missions to the Moon—it’s about time

According to a study published in the Journal of Headache and Pain on April 12, Researchers found that most adults ages 20 to 65, including some children as young as 5-years-old, reported a headache disorder including migraines, tension headaches, sinus and other complications. 

The data comprised nearly 400 publications between 1961 through 2020 in which scientists hope to better understand the prevalence of headache disorders over an entire lifetime.

Researchers found that 52% of people around the globe have reported some form of headache while 14% reported having migraines. 

According to the Mayo Clinic, migraines can last for hours, even days and can cause nausea, vomiting and sensitivity to light and sound. 

Researchers also found that females reported having more headaches than males, averaging 53%–61% of reports, compared to 40%–48% of males. 

In a separate study published in 2021, researchers found that people who suffer migraines typically get less quality REM sleep. 

The study published in Neurology – the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology (AAN) – the King’s College London and the Guy's and St Thomas NHS Foundation authors also found that children with migraines got less total sleep time than their healthy peers but took less time to fall asleep. 

"We wanted to analyze recent research to get a clearer picture of how migraines affect people’s sleep patterns and the severity of their headaches," said author Dr. Jan Hoffmann of King’s College London and a member of the American Academy of Neurology. "That way, clinicians can better support people with migraines and deliver more effective sleep treatments."

For the meta-analysis in "Subjective Sleep Quality and Sleep Architecture in Patients With Migraine: A Meta-analysis," Hoffman and others examined 32 studies involving 10,243 participants.

The people involved answered a questionnaire to rate their own sleep quality and habits, with higher scores indicating worse sleep quality.

Fox News contributed to this story. 

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Understanding the immune response to vaccination against COVID-19 is integral to controlling the virus and reducing the number of deaths.

To find out factors affecting antibody responses following Pfizer/BioNTech COVID vaccination, Dr. Ashley Otter and colleagues at the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) measured antibody levels in blood samples taken from almost 6,000 healthcare workers from across the UK enrolled within the UK's SIREN study (SARS-CoV-2 Infection and Reinfection and EvaluatioN).

3,989 of the 5,871 participants had their first dose of the vaccine at least 21 days earlier. 1,882 had their second dose at least 14 days earlier. The participants were classified by infection history as either previously having had COVID (confirmed by a PCR test or assumed due to their antibody profile) or naïve, with no history of infection. Almost all (>99%) of those who hadn't had COVID seroconverted after vaccination, meaning they made antibodies against the virus.

Post-dose 1, those with previous infection had up to ten times higher antibody levels than naïve individuals, whilst after dose 2, those with previous infection had antibody levels more than twice as high as those who hadn't had previous infection.

When analyzing dosing intervals, it was found that longer dosing interval was associated with up antibody levels that were up to nine times higher in naïve participants (>2 and <4 weeks: 1,268.72 (1,043.25-1,542.91) and >10 weeks 11,479.73 (10,742.78-12,267.24), p=<0.0001) with a more pronounced effect observed in younger participants.

Dosing interval didn't affect antibody levels in those with previous infection. However, a longer interval between infection and vaccination was linked to higher antibody levels.

Those who had their first dose of the vaccine eight months after an infection had antibody levels seven times higher than those who were vaccinated three months after infection, with a plateau after eight months, suggesting that eight months after primary infection may be an optimum time to receive the first vaccine in those with prior infection.

However, the analysis shows that regardless of timing between infection and vaccination, all individuals mount a very high antibody response after dose 2.

In addition, female participants and those from an ethnic minority were associated with significantly higher antibody titres, whilst immunosuppression was associated with significantly lower post-vaccination antibody responses.

Dr. Otter says: "This study shows that a longer time between vaccine dose 1 and dose 2 results in higher antibody responses in naïve participants, which strongly supports the decision by JCVI and the UK government to lengthen the interval between vaccine doses.

"We've also shown that in those with previous infection, timing between exposure and vaccination plays a critical role in post-vaccination antibody responses. However, further research is needed to determine whether these higher antibody levels provide greater protection against COVID-19 disease and how this longer dosing interval may affect booster responses."

The analysis was funded by the UKHSA and the UK Department of Health and Social Care and was part of the SIREN study, the world's biggest real-word study into COVID-19 antibodies.

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The patient tested positive for COVID-19 for 505 days before their death. The previous longest known PCR confirmed case is thought to be 335 days.

The researchers, who studied the virus from nine COVID patients in London, also provide evidence that new COVID variants may arise in immunocompromised individuals and present details of one of the first occult COVID infections (cases where the patient was thought to have cleared the virus, with negative testing to show that, but is subsequently found to have had an ongoing infection).

The team, from King's College London and Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, were interested in how SARS-CoV-2 changes over time in immunocompromised individuals.

First author, Dr. Luke Blagdon Snell, of Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, says: "New variants of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, have emerged throughout the pandemic.

"Some of these variants transmit more easily between people, cause more severe disease, or make the vaccines less effective. One theory is that these viral variants evolve in individuals whose immune systems are weakened from illness or medical treatments like chemotherapy, who can have persistent infection with SARS-CoV-2.

"We wanted to investigate which mutations arise, and if variants evolve, in these people with persistent infection."

The study involved nine immunocompromised patients who tested positive for the virus for at least eight weeks. Infections persisted for 73 days, on average, but two patients had persistent infections for more than a year.

The patients, who were studied between March 2020 and December 2021, had weakened immune systems due to organ transplantation, HIV, cancer, or medical therapies for other illnesses.

Regular sampling and genetic analysis of the virus showed that five of the nine patients developed at least one mutation seen in variants of concern. Some individuals developed multiple mutations associated with variants of concern, such as the Alpha, Delta and Omicron variants. The virus from one individual contained 10 mutations that would arise separately in variants of concern, such as the Alpha, Gamma and Omicron variants.

Dr. Snell and colleagues said: "This provides evidence that mutations found in variants of concern do arise in immunocompromised patients and so supports the idea that new variants of the viruses may develop in immunocompromised individuals.

"It is important to note, however, that none of the individuals in our work developed new variants that became widespread variants of concern.

"Additionally, whilst this work shows variants could arise in immunocompromised individuals, whether the previous variants of concern like Alpha, Delta and Omicron arose in this manner remains unknown."

Five of the nine patients survived. Two of those five cleared SARS-CoV-2 infection without treatment, two cleared the infection after treatment with antibody therapies and antivirals, and one individual has ongoing infection. At their last follow-up in early 2022, the patient with ongoing infection had been infected for more than one year (412 days). At their last follow-up in early 2022, the patient with ongoing infection had been infected for more than one year (412 days). The person has been treated with monoclonal antibodies to try to clear their infection. If this person remains positive at their next follow-up appointment, they will likely pass the previous longest known infection of 505 days described in this report.

Dr. Gaia Nebbia, co-author, says: "Immunocompromised patients with persistent infection have poor outcomes, and new treatment strategies are urgently needed to clear their infection. This may also prevent the emergence of variants."

The researchers also report one of the first cases of an occult COVID-19 infection.

They say: "Occult infection describes someone who is thought to have cleared the virus, for instance with negative tests, but is later found to have an ongoing infection.

"This has been described with other viruses such as those that cause Ebola or hepatitis B and is different to long COVID where the virus is generally thought to be cleared from the body but symptoms persist.

"The patient was symptomatic and tested positive for COVID before recovering. They then tested negative several times before developing COVID symptoms again several months later. A PCR test was positive and genome sequencing of the virus at this point showed the infection was caused by the Alpha variant, which had by then been eliminated from the UK, suggesting the virus had been present in the body ever since the initial infection but remained undetected."

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A new study in Science by University of Toronto Assistant Professor Jonathan D. Hall and U of M Carlson School of Management Assistant Professor Joshua Madsen evaluated the effect of displaying crash death totals on highway message boards (e.g., "1669 deaths this year on Texas roads"). Versions of highway fatality messages have been displayed in at least 27 US states.

Their study focuses on Texas, where officials chose to display these messages only one week each month. The researchers compared crash data from before the campaign (Jan. 2010—July 2012) to after it started (Aug. 2012—Dec. 2017) as well as examined the weekly differences within each month during the campaign. They found:

• There were more crashes during the week with fatality messaging compared to weeks without.

• Displaying a fatality message increased the number of crashes over the 10 km (6.21 mi) following the message boards by 4.5%. This increase is comparable to raising the speed limit 3-5 mph or reducing highway troopers by 6-14%, according to previous research.

• Their findings suggest fatality messages cause an additional 2,600 crashes and 16 deaths per year in Texas, costing $377 million each year.

• The researchers suggest this "in-your-face" messaging approach weighs down drivers' "cognitive loads," temporarily impacting their ability to respond to changes in traffic conditions.

"Driving on a busy highway [and] having to navigate lane changes is more cognitively demanding than driving down a straight stretch of empty highway," said Madsen. "People have limited attention. When a driver's cognitive load is already maxed out, adding on an attention-grabbing, sobering reminder of highway deaths [can] become a dangerous distraction."

The researchers found the bigger the number in the fatality message, the more harmful the effects. The number of additional crashes each month increased as the death toll rose throughout the year, with the most additional crashes occurring in January when the message stated the annual total. They also found that crashes increased in areas where drivers experienced higher cognitive loads, such as heavy traffic or driving past multiple message boards.

"The messages also increased the number of multi-vehicle crashes, but not single-vehicle crashes," said Hall. "This is in line with drivers with increased cognitive loads making smaller errors due to distraction, like drifting out of a lane, rather than driving off the road."

However, the researchers found there was a reduction in crashes when the displayed death tolls were low and when the message appeared where the highways were less complex. Madsen says this suggests that at times the messaging was not as taxing on drivers' attention.

While the use of highway fatality messaging varies by state, Madsen says agencies should consider alternative ways to raise awareness.

"Distracted driving is dangerous driving," said Madsen. "Perhaps these campaigns can be reimagined to reach drivers in a safer way, such as when they are stopped at an intersection, so that their attention while driving remains focused on the roads."

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Google has developed a new feature that allows you to view the air quality of major cities within the US. This is likely tied to other sustainability and environmental education efforts from the company for Earth Day on April 22. 

As reported by MSPoweruser, this feature was initially released in India but has since also been rolled out in Victoria, Australia, and various cities across the US, using data from airnow.gov and PurpleAir.

“We’re always working on new ways to connect people with helpful information when they come to Google,” a Google spokesperson said. “We continue to explore ways to make authoritative information on a range of sustainability and environmental topics readily accessible and look forward to sharing more in this space soon.”

The new search feature can display the air quality of many major cities in the US. (Image credit: Google)

To use this feature you can simply type "Air quality in Washington DC" (or the name of the city you're searching for) into the search engine on your mobile, laptop, or computer, and you'll be presented with a map of the local area, alongside a US Air Quality Index (AQI) which measures air quality from a scale of 0 to 500.

This scale is also color-labeled with the usual Green = good and Red = bad, with specific areas on the map showing how the air quality can differ across the entire city. This is especially useful if you're wanting to relocate, but stay within the city area and wish to be mindful of local pollution.

We tried a few other major cities such as London and Paris and found that while metrics are provided in a graph, no map appears to clearly display the air quality in various zones of either city. It also isn't clear how many US cities are included within this feature right now, but we certainly hope that it gets rolled out on a more global scale so we can breathe easy in the knowledge that we can...well, breathe easy.

Analysis: good, but we need more

Google has a good habit of trying to include additional sustainability efforts across many of its hardware and search engine integrations. Being able to measure the air quality directly is a great asset and one that could benefit folks that live outside of the US.

Thing is, there are rival search engines that market themselves as an environmentally friendly alternative to Google, so why isn't it doing more to level the playing field? Ecosia comes to mind, with its promise that using its search engine will plant trees, using funds raised through ad revenues when you use the platform. 

Does Google do something similar? Perhaps, but I certainly can't find any trace of similar practices, and even searching for results on Google itself using the term 'Does Google plant trees' comes up with pages and pages of articles for Ecosia instead. If the tech giant was making such efforts, it would do well to shout about them more.

Thankfully there is a middle ground as Ecosia has a chrome extension that works alongside the Google web browser, though we found that our own company administration blocks this from being installed, which is likely to be a similar story across a lot of corporate devices.

Still, with Google integrating functions that allow you to check on pollution and air quality, it would be nice to see if the company was taking greater steps to improve the results given its status as one of the largest companies in the world. The environment is all of our responsibility after all, and Google certainly has more power and money to make changes than asthmatic individuals visiting a new city for the first time.

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