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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Combo COVID booster is the way to go this fall, Moderna data suggests

A VR simulation showing what a Palaeolithic plaquette looks like under the flickering light of a fire. Several horses are engraved on this plaquette. As the firelight moves different horses are illuminated, giving a sense of dynamism to the art. (Izzy Wisher, CC-BY 4.0)

Stone Age people may have gathered at night to watch animated “fireside art”

Some prior evidence, mostly with animals, has suggested that restricting eating to certain windows of time during the day might help people lose weight. The idea was that eating only during such periods would coincide with important parts of the circadian rhythm resulting in higher metabolic activity burning more calories. But other studies have shown no such benefit. In this new effort, the combined team from China and the U.S. conducted the longest and largest study done to date on the topic: a year-long study of such a diet that involved the cooperation of 139 obese volunteers who agreed to go on a reduced calorie diet for one year. A randomized number of the volunteers were also asked to limit their eating to the hours of 8am to 4pm. The calorie restrictions were divided by gender; women were to eat between 1200 and 1500 kcal per day, and men 1500 to 1800 kcal per day. All of the volunteers were monitored throughout the study to measure body weight and other weight loss attributes such as a decreasing waistline. Each was also tested to ensure they were suffering no negative health effects.

At the end of the year, the researchers found that while the volunteers in the eating-window did lose more weight on average than the other group, it was not statistically large enough to be meaningful. They also found that restricting eating to a time-window did not make any difference in weight loss attributes such as smaller waistlines. They suggest their study shows that time-restricted diets do not help people lose more weight than they would have otherwise.

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It's been several decades since ecologists realized that graphing the diet-size relationship of terrestrial mammals yields a U-shaped curve when aligning those mammals on a plant-to-protein gradient. As illustrated by that curve, the plant-eating herbivores on the far left and meat-eating carnivores on the far right tend to reach sizes much larger than those of the all-consuming omnivores and the invertebrate-feasting invertivores in the middle.

To date, though, virtually no research had looked for the pattern beyond mammals or the modern day. In a new study, researchers from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and institutions on four continents have concluded that the pattern actually dates back to deep time and applies to land-dwelling birds, reptiles and even saltwater fishes.

But the study also suggests that human-related extinctions of the largest herbivores and carnivores are disrupting what appears to be a fundamental feature of past and present ecosystems, with potentially unpredictable consequences.

"We're not sure what's going to happen, because this hasn't happened before," said Will Gearty, a postdoctoral researcher at Nebraska and co-author of the study, published April 21 in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution. "But because the systems have been in what seems to be a very steady state for a very long time, it's concerning what might happen when they leave that state."

Size up, size down

The evolutionary and ecological histories of animal species can be told in part through the intertwined influences of diet and size, Gearty said. A species' diet determines its energy consumption, which in turn drives growth and ultimately helps dictate its size. Yet that size can also limit the quality and quantity of food available to a species, even as it sets thresholds for the quality and quantity needed to survive.

"You can be as big as your food will allow you to be," Gearty said. "At the same time, you're often as big as you need to be to catch and process your food. So there's an evolutionary interplay there."

Because the plant-based diet of herbivores is relatively poor in nutrition, they often grow massive for the sake of covering more ground to forage more food—and accommodating long, complex digestive tracts that extract maximum nutrients from it. Carnivores, meanwhile, must grow large enough to both keep up with and take down those herbivores. Though the buffet-style menu of omnivores usually keeps their stomachs full, their high energy demands generally leave them focusing on nuts, insects and other small, energy-dense foods. And while invertivores enjoy mostly protein-rich prey, the diminutive nature of that prey, combined with stiff competition from many other invertivores, relegates them to the smallest sizes of all.

The ultimate result: a U-shaped distribution of both average and maximum body sizes in mammals. To analyze the generalizability of that pattern in the modern day, the team compiled body-size data for a huge number of surviving species: 5,033 mammals, 8,991 birds, 7,356 reptiles and 2,795 fishes.

Though the pattern was absent in marine mammals and seabirds, probably due to the unique demands of living in water, it did emerge in the other vertebrate groups—reptiles, saltwater fishes and land-based birds—examined by the team. The pattern even held across various biomes—forests vs. grasslands vs. deserts, for instance, or the tropical Atlantic Ocean vs. the temperate North Pacific—when analyzing land mammals, land birds and saltwater fishes.

"Showing that this exists across all these different groups does suggest that it is something fundamental about how vertebrates acquire energy, how they interact with one another, and how they coexist," said co-author Kate Lyons, assistant professor of biological sciences at Nebraska. "We don't know whether it's necessary—there might be other ways of organizing vertebrate communities with respect to body size and diet—but it certainly is sufficient."

A figure illustrating the U-shaped relationship between diet and size (or mass, in kilograms) among land-based mammals. The gray portions of the bars represent species currently under the threat of extinction, with the white portions accounting for species that have already gone extinct. Credit: Nature Ecology and Evolution

But the researchers were also interested in learning how long the U-curve may have endured. So they analyzed fossil records from 5,427 mammal species, some of which date as far back as the Early Cretaceous Period of 145 million to 100 million years ago. Lyons and colleagues originally collected the fossil data as part of a 2018 study on the extinction of large mammals at the hands of humans and their recent ancestors.

"To my knowledge, this is the most extensive investigation of the evolution of body size and especially diet in mammals over time," Gearty said.

It revealed that the U-curve stretches back at least 66 million years, when non-avian dinosaurs had just been wiped out but mammals had yet to diversify into the dominant animal class that they are today.

"It is really interesting, and really striking," Gearty said, "to see that this relationship persists even when you have other dominant animals around.

"We suspect that it's actually existed since the inception of mammals as a group."

The shape of things to come

Having catalogued the present and past of the U-curve, Gearty, Lyons and their colleagues turned to its future, or potential lack thereof. The median sizes of herbivores and omnivores have plummeted roughly 100-fold since the emergence of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens over the past few hundred thousand years, the team reported, with the size of carnivores dropping by about 10 times in that same span. As a result, the U-curve that has persisted for so long has begun to noticeably flatten, Gearty said.

In that vein, the team has projected a greater than 50% chance that multiple large- and medium-sized mammals—including the tiger and Javan rhinoceros, both of which count humans as their only predators—will go extinct within the next 200 years. Those predicted extinctions would only exacerbate the disruption of the U-curve, the researchers said, especially to the extent that the loss of large herbivores could trigger or accelerate the loss of the large carnivores that prey on them.

"It's certainly possible that as we take some of these animals off the top (of the U-curve), and as we collapse some of these ranges of body sizes, that we're altering the way the energy is divvied up," Gearty said. "That could perhaps have fundamental repercussions for the environment and ecosystem as a whole."

It's also possible, the researchers concluded, that the forthcoming decline in mammal body sizes could outpace even the unprecedented drop observed over the past few hundred thousand years.

"You keep seeing, in ecological literature, people speculating about how ecosystems are less stable now, and less resilient, and more prone to collapse," Lyons said. "I think this is just another line of evidence suggesting that that may indeed be the case in the future."

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There's another side to moroidin, though; in addition to causing pain, the compound binds to cells' cytoskeletons, preventing them from dividing, which makes moroidin a promising candidate for chemotherapy drugs.

Harvesting enough of the chemical to study has proven difficult, for obvious reasons. Now, in a paper published April 19 in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Weng, who is also an associate professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and former postdoc Roland Kersten, now an assistant professor at the University of Michigan College of Pharmacy, present the first published method to biosynthesize moroidin within the tissues of harmless plants such as tobacco, facilitating research on the compound's utility for cancer treatments.

Taking a leaf out of plants' book to create peptides

Moroidin is a bicyclic peptide—a type of molecule made up of building blocks called amino acids and circularized to contain two connected rings. For synthetic chemists, moroidin has proved nearly impossible to synthesize due to its complex chemical structure. Weng and Kersten wanted to dig deeper into what methods the plants were using to create this molecule.

In plant cells, cyclic peptides are made from specific precursor proteins synthesized by the ribosome, the macromolecular machine that produces proteins by translating messenger RNAs. After leaving the ribosome, these precursor proteins are further processed by other enzymes in the cell to give rise to the final cyclic peptides. In 2018, Weng and Kersten had elucidated the biosynthetic mechanism of another type of plant peptides called lyciumins, first found in the goji berry plant, which gave them some insight into how post-translational modifications might play a role in creating different types of plant peptide chemistry. "We learned a lot about the principal elements of this system by studying lyciumins," said Weng.

When they began to look into how moroidin was synthesized, the researchers found a few other plants, such as Kerria japonica and Celosia argentea, also produce peptides with similar chemistry to moroidin. "That really gave us the very critical insight that this is a new class of peptides," Weng said.

Weng and Kersten previously learned that the BURP domain, which is part of the precursor proteins for lyciumins and several other plant cyclic peptides, catalyzes key reactions involved in the peptide ring formation. They found that the BURP domain was present in the precursor proteins for moroidins in Kerria japonica, and seemed to be essential for creating the two-ring structure of the molecules. The BURP domain creates ring chemistry when in the presence of copper, and when the researchers incubated the moroidin precursor protein with copper chloride in the lab together with other downstream proteolytic enzymes, they were able to create moroidin-like peptides.

With this information, they were able to produce a variety of moroidin analogs in tobacco plants by transgenically expressing the moroidin precursor gene of Kerria japonica and varying the core motif sequence corresponding to moroidin peptides. "We show that you can produce the same moroidin chemistry in a different host plant," Weng said. "Tobacco itself is easier to be farmed on a large scale, and we also think in the future we can derive a plant cell line from the existing tobacco cell lines that we put in the moroidin precursor peptide, then we can use the cell line to produce the molecule, which really enables us to scale up for medicine production."

Future use of moroidin

Moroidin's anti-cancer property is due, at least in part, to the compound's unique structure that allows it to bind to a protein called tubulin. Tubulin forms a skeletal system for living cells, and provides the means by which cells separate their chromosomes as they prepare to divide. Currently, two existing anti-cancer drugs, vincristine and paclitaxel, work by binding tubulin. These two compounds are derived from plants as well (the Madagascar periwinkle and Pacific yew tree, respectively).

In their new work, Weng and Kersten synthesized a moroidin analog called celogentin C. They tested its anti-cancer activity against a human lung cancer cell line, and found that the compound was toxic to the cancer cells. Their new study also suggests potentially new anti-cancer mechanisms specific to this lung cancer cell line in addition to tubulin inhibition.

In the past, researchers have run into issues when trying to create effective drugs from peptides. "There are two major challenges for peptides as medicine," Weng said. "For one thing they are not very stable in vivo, and for another they are not very bioavailable and don't readily pass the membrane of a cell."

But cyclic peptides like moroidin and its analogs are a bit different. "These peptides essentially evolve to be drug-like," Weng said. "In the case of the Australian stinging tree, the peptides are present because the plants want to deter any animals that want to eat the leaves. So over millions of years of evolution these plants eventually figured out a way to construct these specific cyclic peptides that are stable, bioavailable and can get to the animal that is trying to eat the plants."

It's likely that the painful reaction that occurs when moroidin enters the body through a sting from the tree would not be an issue in traditional methods of administering chemotherapy. "The pain is really caused if you get injections of the compound into the skin," Weng said. "If you take it orally or intravenously, your body will most likely not sense the pain."

Somewhat counterintuitively, the compound could also be used as a pain reliever. "If something causes pain, you can sometimes use that as an anti-pain medicine," Weng said. "You could essentially exhaust the pain receptors, or if you alter the structure a little bit, you could turn an agonist into an antagonist and potentially block the pain."

On a more fundamental level, moroidin could help researchers study pain receptors. "We don't know exactly why being stung by the stinging tree produces that enormous amount of pain, and there may be additional pain receptors people haven't identified," Weng said. "Being able to synthesize moroidin provides a chemical probe that allows us to study this unknown pain perception in humans."

In the future, the researchers hope to create analogs of moroidin to study, and hopefully create an optimal version for use in cancer therapy. "We want to generate a library of moroidin-like peptides," Weng said. "We've done this for lyciumins, and since the initial moroidins are anti-tubulin molecules, we can use this system to find an improved version that binds to tubulin even tighter and contains other pharmacological properties making it suitable to be used as a therapeutic.

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The UK government has confirmed planned revisions to the Highway Code to accommodate self-driving vehicles, including allowing drivers to watch TV while an AI takes the wheel.

In a moment history may judge as legislative hubris, the Department for Transport (DfT) said the modifications would include "allowing drivers to view content that is not related to driving on built-in display screens, while the self-driving vehicle is in control."

However, somewhat counterintuitively, the Department added it would "still be illegal to use mobile phones in self-driving mode, given the greater risk they pose in distracting drivers as shown in research."

The government said the proposed adjustments to the Highway Code would clarify drivers' responsibilities in self-driving vehicles.

"The changes to the code will help ensure the first wave of technology will be used safely, explaining clearly that while travelling in self-driving mode, motorists must be ready to resume control in a timely way if they are prompted to – such as when they approach motorway exits," the department said.

Self-driving vehicles, it added, could create around 38,000 new, high-skilled jobs within Britain's industry that would be worth £41.7 billion by 2035.

Meanwhile, the DfT said it is developing a full legal framework for self-driving vehicles to enable the safer and greener movement of people and goods in the UK. The department will also work with industry, regulators, and safety organizations to ensure drivers can access information, including online, to help them use vehicles safely.

While large parts of the M20 have become a lorry park owing to a combination of computer glitches, lack of border staff, and Brexit red tape, the government has launched the new proposals under the heading "Britain moves closer to a self-driving revolution".

Transport minister Trudy Harrison said: "This is a major milestone in our safe introduction of self-driving vehicles, which will revolutionise the way we travel, making our future journeys greener, safer and more reliable."

Meanwhile, the actual arrival of self-driving cars on the UK roads seems further off following statements from electric vehicle messiah Elon Musk. Despite predicting five years ago that fully self-driving cars were just around the corner, they remain stuck in the garage.

In a recent TED interview, the Tesla CEO explained that full self-driving had been "particularly hard to solve," comparing progress to a logarithmic curve that approaches – but never quite reaches – the line.

"There are just so many false dawns with self-driving, where you think you think you've got a handle on the problem, and then, nope, it turns out you just hit a ceiling," he said.

"In retrospect, [it] seems obvious, but in order to solve full self-driving properly, you actually just have to solve real-world AI."

Musk went on to explain that road networks were designed to work with a "biological neural net" – more commonly known as a human brain, the product of hundreds of millions of years of evolution.

"In order to make [full self-driving] work with computers, you basically need to solve real-world AI and vision," he said.

Musk then told the TED interviewer he is "confident" that Tesla will solve the problem this year, at least to the extent that self-driving cars will cause fewer accidents than the average person. Whether that is acceptable enough for their introduction is another debate.

So if Musk's track record is anything to go by, UK drivers may have to wait years before they can enjoy the season climax of Bridgerton while jammed in a narrow Cornish lane after passing a hand-written sign saying "do not follow your satnav!" at the turn-off.®

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Under the plans, New Space India Limited – the commercial arm of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), will begin launches of OneWeb satellites later this year. The missions are expected to launch from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota later this year. OneWeb already has 428 satellites in orbit which represent 66% of the planned total. The launches from India will help it build on this.

Commenting on the plans, Sunil Bharti Mittal, OneWeb Executive Chairman, said:

“This is yet another historic day for collaboration in space, thanks to the shared ambition and vision of New Space India and OneWeb. This most recent agreement on launch plans adds considerable momentum to the development of OneWeb’s network, as we work together across the space industry toward our common goal of connecting communities globally.”

OneWeb previously announced that it had partnered up with SpaceX to deliver its satellites into orbit. With New Space India Limited on board too, OneWeb will have more choices about how to launch satellites. It could also save the company money as India is known for being able to launch rockets on a budget.

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During the day-long shuttle ride from the coastal state capital of Adelaide to the start of South Australia's Mawson Trail, we debated where the bush stopped and the outback began. But there was no doubt we were fully immersed in it when we arrived in the rust-coloured dust of Blinman, an ex-copper mining town where our group of seven friends increased the population by 20%.

We were beginning a 900km, two-week mountain-bike ride through some of Australia's most epic prehistoric sites – the remains of an ancient seabed that 20th-Century explorer and geologist Douglas Mawson called "one great outdoor museum" due to the magnitude of easily accessible sedimentary rock and fossil exposure sites. (The trail has been named in his honour.)

As we left town and pedalled into the crumpled peaks and plunging gorges of Ikara – Flinders Ranges National Park – a classic example of what happens when two tectonic plates decide to butt heads over fault lines – the striking kaleidoscopic mountains looked familiar. Their bands of mauve ribbed with orange quartzite ridges have been widely captured by photographers; the iridescent dawn and pink dusk glows have been worshiped on the canvasses of renowned artists like Hans Heysen. And the way these ranges buckled and lifted has been immortalised in the creation stories of the traditional custodians of this land – the Adnyamathanha people – for tens of thousands of years.

Beyond that, we didn't have the foggiest idea what we would stumble across within our first day's 67km slog.

The Flinders have been called “one great outdoor museum” (Credit: Piter Lenk/Alamy Stock Photo)

As it turns out, the 800 square kms of the Flinders Ranges tell an unparalleled tale about the dawn of life, according to world-leading palaeontologists – one that forced scientists to rethink Earth's geologic time scale.

An inkling was under our noses from the get-go on every Mawson Trail signpost: the illustration of a trio of creatures that resembled a feather, a slice of citrus fruit and the shed exoskeleton of a woodlouse. These are the best-guess recreations of what life looked like 550 million years ago – soft-bodied languid blobs (ranging in size from millimetres to more than a metre) known as Ediacaran Biota, named after the ancient hills in the Flinders Ranges, where their encrusted imprints were found.

The Ediacaran Biota feature on every Mawson Trail signpost (Credit: Tracey Croke)

Soon enough, we were all roasting under soaring mercury while being knocked about by endless parched rocky creeks; we could smell the whiffs of perished wild animals rotting in peace. It was mindboggling to imagine that this semi-arid, rock-littered landscape, now several hundred kilometres from the crashing waves of the ocean, was once lapped by a shallow, warm sea.

Granted, this wasn't exactly yesterday: it happened after the glaciation of "Snowball Earth" had warmed and melted, sparking a biological eruption known as the Cambrian Explosion – a relatively short time period (15 to 25 million years) that was in full swing by around 521 million years ago. It was when many major animal groups alive today burst into existence, including vertebrates – and even a species that would eventually learn to ride bikes over mountains.

We came to a collective red-faced stop to take a break and check our bearings where the Mawson route confusingly criss-crosses with several walking trails, and briefly merges with the (drivable) Brachina Gorge Geological Trail. A lone ghostly gum tree stitched the raw craggy top to an intense cobalt sky.

The sedimentary layers of Brachina Gorge have their own tale to tell (Credit: Robert Wyatt/Alamy Stock Photo)

I slowly scanned the sedimentary layers of the gorge. If you know how to read it, this repository of the planet's evolution is one of the world's best exposure sites, according to Mary Droser, professor of geology at University of California Riverside.

"The Flinders Ranges encompasses a huge swath of time that incorporates all of the really wacky environmental things that were going on, from Snowball Earth to global warming," said Droser. "We can see a 350-million-year window of time from a microbial world through to through to the early history of animals."

This is because the shunting, subsiding and eroding activity of the Flinders left corridors through layers of time – revealing evidence of critical eras and events.

One such chapter in Earth's story was recorded in the western ranges of the Flinders in 1946, when geologist Reg Sprigg was looking for mineral deposits in the low Ediacaran Hills. Sprigg, a keen palaeontologist who studied under Mawson, turned over some of the flaggy sandstone slabs and found an entire community of fossilised imprints, which included five new genera and species. "He knew the age of the rocks, which were older than the Cambrian rocks [that] we know to have fossils with skeletons," said Droser, who is one of the world's leading researchers of Ediacaran fossils. That, she said, meant Sprigg knew these imprints were "very, very significant".

The discovery of the Ediacaran Biota, dating back 570 million years, changed our understanding of natural science (Credit: Zeytun Travel Images/Alamy Stock Photo)

Sprigg's discovery solved one of the greatest mysteries in natural science, one that had kept Charles Darwin scratching his head his entire life. When Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species in 1859, he highlighted his concern about the apparent sudden appearance of Cambrian skeletonised fossils and the challenge it presented to his theory of evolution. He wrote: "… to the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods before the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory answer." This puzzle, known as Darwin's Dilemma, flummoxed scientists for almost a century. But Sprigg found concrete evidence of the missing piece.

Some 570 to 540 million years ago, these empty shapes in the rocks were occupied by the soft-bodied Ediacaran Biota creatures that were a step up from single cell organisms and a step down from animals running around eating each other – making them the earliest known complex animal life on Earth. Never before had so many been found in one place. The discovery revolutionised our understanding of how multicellular animal life evolved.

Over the past 20 years, in a collaboration with a team led by palaeontologist Jim Gehling from the South Australian Museum, Droser has excavated an unpresented 40 "exquisitely preserved" fossiliferous beds in the ancient seafloor at Nilpena, a privately owned sheep station in the western margins of the ranges. These findings have since become part of a 600 sq km protected area – approximately the size of Singapore – called the Nilpena-Ediacara Conservation Park. Nilpena is now globally recognised as the single most important site on Earth for the Ediacaran rise of early animal life, and one of the many reasons a World Heritage bid is underway for the Flinders Ranges.

In 2004, a new, globally recognised geological era that existed between 635 and 540 million years ago was formally created and ratified by the International Union of Geological Sciences. It was named, of course, the Ediacaran.

Pedalling the Mawson Trail takes you through some of Earth’s most important geological sites (Credit: Jenny Nicholson)

More recently, another missing link in the evolutionary puzzle sent revelations through the scientific community. From studying multiple miniscule fossilised burrows found in Nilpena in 2005, Droser and evolutionary biologists had long predicted that in the same period – around 555 million years ago – a more complex creature compared to other Ediacaran Biota was on the move, contracting muscles across its body to travel. In 2020, using 3D laser scanner technology, Droser and her team were able to recreate the creature – a plump, wormy blob, the size of a grain of rice. It had a notable difference compared to other lifeforms in existence at that time: it was the first animal ever to have a front and a back, a mouth, gut and rear end – called a "bilaterian".

This meant Ikaria wariootia, as they named the blob, could possibly be the animal that ate and excreted its way on a long, transformative journey that, eventually, resulted in humans. "It's certainly the oldest bilaterian that we know of," Droser said.

"There are places that have parts of the story, and there are places with phenomenal fossils, but the Flinders has this complete packaging that is really accessible. We can go back in time and see how life unfolded. The record is unparalleled," Droser said.

Before pushing on from Brachina Gorge, we pedalled a few minutes off the mapped Mawson Trail route to see another remarkable point of interest. A bronze disc called the Golden Spike is nonchalantly nestled in the gorge's lower rib lines at Enorama Creek.

Resembling a large Olympic medal, it marks the geological starting point of the Ediacaran Age – a time when the early moments of an evolutionary process gave rise to animals, the dawn of life and the journey of humanity… all waiting to be stumbled upon by seven slightly lost and oblivious mountain bikers.

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Forget passenger cars, here’s where hydrogen make sense in transport

April 2, 2021, solar eclipse on Mars.

This 40-second solar eclipse seen from the surface of Mars is sublime

Not quite Le Mans: 24-hour race won by molecule that traveled 1 micron

Although white wine consumption did not influence levels of visceral fat, our study did show that drinking white wine in moderation might offer its own unique health benefit for older adults: denser bones. We found higher bone mineral density among older adults who drank white wine in moderation in our study. And we did not find this same link between beer or red wine consumption and bone mineral density.

Our study relied on a large-scale longitudinal database called the U.K. Biobank. We assessed 1,869 white adults ranging in age from 40 to 79 years who reported demographic, alcohol, dietary and lifestyle factors via a touchscreen questionnaire. Next, we collected height, weight and blood samples from each participant and obtained body composition information using a direct measure of body composition called dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry. Then, we used a statistical program to examine the relationships among the types of alcoholic beverages and body composition.

Why it matters

Aging is often accompanied by an increase in the problematic fat that can lead to heightened cardiovascular disease risk as well as by a reduction in bone mineral density. This has important health implications given that nearly 75% of adults in the U.S. are considered overweight or obese. Having higher levels of body fat has been consistently linked to an increased risk for acquiring many different diseases, including cardiovascular disease, certain types of cancer, and a higher risk of death. And it's worth noting that national medical care costs associated with treating obesity-related diseases total more than US$260.6 billion annually.

Considering these trends, it is vital for researchers like us to examine all the potential contributors to weight gain so that we can determine how to combat the problem. Alcohol has long been considered one possible driving factor for the obesity epidemic. Yet the public often hears conflicting information about the potential risks and benefits of alcohol. Therefore, we hoped to help untangle some of these factors through our research.

What still isn't known

There are many biological and environmental factors that contribute to being overweight or obese. Alcohol consumption may be one factor, although there are other studies that have not found clear links between weight gain and alcohol consumption.

One reason for the inconsistencies in the literature could stem from the fact that much of the previous research has traditionally treated alcohol as a single entity rather than separately measuring the effects of beer, cider, red wine, white wine, Champagne and spirits. Yet, even when broken down in this way, the research yields mixed messages.

For example, one study has suggested that drinking more beer contributes to a higher waist-to-hip ratio, while another study concluded that, after one month of drinking moderate levels of beer, healthy adults did not experience any significant weight gain.

As a result, we've aimed to further tease out the unique risks and benefits that are associated with each alcohol type. Our next steps will be to examine how diet—including alcohol consumption—could influence diseases of the brain and cognition in older adults with mild cognitive impairment.

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Earlier this month, the FBI arrested 36-year-old Arian Taherzadeh and 40-year-old Haider Ali for allegedly impersonating officers from the part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement that handles national security and customs investigation, known as Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). The alleged scheme, which lasted more than two years, was elaborate and would have been expensive to pull off.

According to the FBI’s 17-page arrest affidavit, Taherzadeh and Ali used their pretend HSI affiliations to ingratiate themselves with real federal agents, including uniformed officers from the US Secret Service and special agents from its presidential protective details, as well as other personnel from agencies like the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.

Attorneys for Ali and Taherzadeh have characterized the case against their clients as “preposterous” and pushing “the wild conspiracy theories.” Meanwhile, the judge overseeing the case, Magistrate Judge Michael Harvey, last week refused the Justice Department’s request to keep the two suspects in jail and downplayed the events, saying there was no evidence that classified information was compromised. Harvey added that “there is no evidence of foreign ties in this case.” But counterintelligence experts say there’s plenty of reason to suspect that the two men weren’t operating on their own—even as the defendants’ alleged behavior was so brazen and bizarre that it seems hard to imagine they were the vanguard of a sophisticated plot.

Most of all, though, the case underscores vulnerabilities to foreign influence in the shadowy and sprawling law enforcement community in Washington, DC, where 17 national intelligence agencies; dozens of private, local, state, and federal police departments; and hundreds of military contractor firms all mix amid an environment that prizes personal ambition and professional networking.

According to court filings, Taherzadeh and Ali’s alleged scheme was uncovered in March when a US postal inspector, investigating an alleged nearby assault on a mail carrier, interviewed the two men who identified themselves as part of a made-up DHS unit they called the US Special Police Investigation Unit. After the postal inspector alerted DHS, the FBI took up the case. But their investigation, according to prosecutors, was still unfolding when the Secret Service, investigating its own personnel’s alleged involvement with the two men, blundered by contacting Taherzadeh, tipping him off. This led the FBI to quickly arrest the men.

As new details have emerged, the case has only grown stranger. The pair had allegedly all but taken control of the luxury apartment building where they apparently lived, known as Crossing DC. Investigators claim the two men had befriended the building’s security personnel, knew the master access codes for the building’s entries and elevators, flashed their badges to other residents, and amassed lists of their fellow occupants, some of whom were federal law enforcement agents.

Investigators say Taherzadeh and Ali had even been handing out “free” apartments to real federal agents; Taherzadeh allegedly told one uniformed Secret Service officer that he could live rent-free in a three-bedroom apartment in the building—a rent valued at $48,000 per year in court documents—because they had “extra rooms” as part of one of their operations. Another witness, who worked with DHS’s Homeland Security Investigations, reported seeing in Taherzadeh’s apartment “a significant amount of law enforcement paraphernalia, including SWAT vests, a large safe, computers, a high-powered telescope, and internal surveillance cameras.” Others claimed that Taherzadeh had numerous weapons and regularly carried a Glock 19 pistol and that he gifted federal officers all manner of items, including a drone and a TV. At one point, he allegedly offered to purchase a $2,000 assault rifle for a Secret Service agent who worked on Jill Biden’s protective detail.

At another point, the men allegedly tried to recruit a third individual to join their “DHS task force.” Prosecutors claim they shot the recruit with an Airsoft rifle to “evaluate their pain tolerance.” They also allegedly assigned the individual to conduct research on someone who worked with the Department of Defense and intelligence community.

The FBI investigation was barely two weeks old when the Secret Service accidentally tipped off the suspects and spurred their quick arrests. According to court records, searches of the suspects’ apartments and vehicles yielded firearms, law enforcement training manuals, computers, and boxes of police paraphernalia, from patches to tactical vests, along with documents pointing to false names and other fake identities.

“Because of the breakneck pace of the investigation, there are many facts that we still do not know,” the DC US Attorney’s Office argued in court, “but the facts that we do know about the Defendants—that they lied about their identities for years, stored a cache of weapons and surveillance equipment in their apartments, compromised law enforcement agents in sensitive positions, and tried to cover up their crimes—leave no doubt that their release poses a public safety risk.”

The nation’s capital is no stranger to espionage cases, possible terror plots, and national security investigations. When I was editor of Washingtonian magazine, one of our interns discovered—after the FBI sealed off his apartment—that he’d been renting from one of the Russian spies who inspired The Americans. Many in Republican circles came to know Maria Butina, the gun rights activist who tried to infiltrate the National Rifle Association before being arrested, charged with being an unregistered Russian agent, imprisoned, and deported. Then there was the couple, respected long-time State Department employees, who were arrested in 2009 and charged with having spied for the Cuban government for decades, including long after the fall of Communism. There was also the eccentric German fabulist who pretended for years to be an Iraqi general and hosted well-known dinner parties for officials in the Georgetown house he shared with his elderly wife—a scheme that only unraveled after he was charged in her murder.

Even against a backdrop of such oddities—and while there are regularly cases across the country of wanna-be cops impersonating officers or agents—the scale, duration, and apparent expense of the Taherzadeh and Ali case puzzles.

The FBI has sole jurisdiction in the United States over counterintelligence cases, which are typically among the most complex—and slowest—agents investigate. Such cases, in fact, rarely end with criminal charges and a public trial. They often unfold over years and can rely on classified tools like powerful FISA warrants that are specifically designed for such work, with a focus on how agents can neutralize a foreign intelligence asset without attracting public notice. The FBI followed the Russian “illegals” case for the better part of a decade before finally moving to arrest the spies.

The investigation into Taherzadeh and Ali was in its earliest stages when the accidental tip forced agents to act—haste that apparently means the government wasn’t able to understand the scope of their activity.

“This case was clearly taken down prematurely—the public probably doesn’t realize how much this case wasn’t ready for prime time,” says a former prosecutor who focused on such cases and asked to speak anonymously because he wasn’t authorized by his current employer to comment publicly. “It seems like the federal government doesn’t have a theory of the case.”

In court, the government showed evidence that Ali had visas for travel to Iran and had “made claims to witnesses that he had connections to the ISI, which is the Pakistani intelligence service.” Prosecutor Joshua Rothstein also told the court the pair “created a potential national security risk.” Both Iran and Pakistan have notably unfriendly intelligence agencies, so the news raised even more questions in DC about the men’s possible motives.

“It’s just so odd in general,” says Holden Triplett, a former FBI agent who previously served as the National Security Council’s director for counterintelligence. “It has all the hallmarks of a state-sponsored organization. It’s not clear who they’re working for.”

If they’re working for anyone at all. The Iranian government does not appear to have commented on the prosecution’s implication of its involvement. A spokesperson for the Pakistani embassy told The New York Times in a statement that Ali’s alleged claims of ties to Pakistani intelligence are “totally fallacious.”

At this point, though, intelligence experts are considering any possibilities. While Pakistan is purportedly a US ally, its ISI is widely seen as corrupt and infiltrated by Islamic extremists. Multiple knowledgeable former officials I spoke with speculated that the agency might have been trying—albeit clumsily—to reestablish and recenter its Washington ties in the wake of the US pullout of Afghanistan. “If the Pakistanis did this, it would be in line with how they operate; if it’s Iran it would appear an escalation,” one source said.

As for Iran, there is at least one example of the country attempting to carry out operations inside the US capital itself. In 2011, the Justice Department broke up a plot by the Iranian Quds Force’s IRGC unit to assassinate the Saudi ambassador, apparently while he ate at a fancy Georgetown restaurant, Café Milano. That bizarre plot focused on a DEA informant and a down-on-his-luck, Texas used-car salesman named Manssor Arabsiar. US intelligence doubted the plot was real until Arbabsiar met with a senior Quds Force leader and got the apparent green light for the attack.

That plot, which was disrupted when Arbabsiar was lured back to the US and arrested, dramatically changed the US intelligence community’s assessment of Iran’s capabilities and intent—an assassination on US soil had long been thought to be a red line the Iranian regime wouldn’t cross. And it helped drive the Obama administration’s efforts to strike a nuclear deal that would stop the country from developing a workable device.

One former senior official I interviewed who had worked at three intelligence agencies in his career, and who also requested anonymity because he wasn’t authorized by his employer to speak publicly, speculated that if Taherzadeh and Ali were part of an Iranian plot—and no evidence so far suggests they are—it may have been one of several avenues and schemes launched in the wake of the the audacious US assassination of Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani in early 2020.

“We’ve seen intelligence agencies do ham-handed and stupid stuff. It could have fallen into the category of a just not-well-thought-though case,” the former senior official says. “If you’re Iran, and you're upset about Soleimani, you’re going to pull a lot of levers. Maybe they said, ‘It can’t hurt to move this forward.’”

Indeed, as the Arbabsiar case illustrates, the oddity of Taherzadeh and Ali’s alleged actions doesn’t necessarily shed light on whether they were acting on their own or as part of an intelligence operation. “Agencies are not perfect, and different parts of an agency have different levels of competence,” Triplett says.

But the former prosecutor says the sheer weirdness of the case makes him question any foreign connection. He says that many foreign-influence and intelligence cases involve comparatively small amounts of money; the largess of the suspects, while seeming to indicate access to substantial resources, may very well point to the opposite conclusion.

“This is a ton of money. This doesn’t strike me as quiet and surreptitious—this is quite loud,” the prosecutor says. “When you look at some of these similar cases, that's not how this stuff is done at all. There’s a real sloppiness here.”

Regardless of the outcome, experts agree this case illustrates how unprepared most government officials and law enforcement personnel in the nation’s capital are to confront a possible counterintelligence operation—even though the FBI estimates that there are more than 100 foreign intelligence agencies operating in the United States, from allies and adversaries alike.

“The vast majority of US government and agencies are unprepared for counterintelligence,” Triplett says. “There are permissive environments in the world, and DC is definitely one of them. The number of foreign intelligence groups that are running around DC—and the US generally—is enormous. There’s all sorts of networking, influence peddling—it’s all perfect for intelligence operations.”

The fact that Secret Service, NCIS, and even DHS personnel were apparently fooled about the authenticity of Taherzadeh and Ali doesn’t actually surprise experts in the field. There’s a human tendency to accept people are who they say they are.

“Outside of the FBI and certain intelligence agencies, the average federal law enforcement agent is not trained very much on counterintelligence matters,” says the senior official. “If they are, it’s an annual mandatory training and very high-level. They’re focused on their work—not thinking about how they’re a possible target of a foreign intelligence agency. If you’re an average officer in these agencies, you’re not thinking about Iranian intelligence. Your radar is not up.”

As the senior official says, “In law enforcement and intelligence, they engage in quirky characters—informants, people with ulterior motives, even partially criminal elements. There’s often a greater tolerance—you’re really not sure who’s who. You might just say, ‘I don’t know how they roll over there at another agency—they seem legit, they have the equipment, they talk the talk.’”

The former prosecutor says that the level of personal ambition, the culture of professional networking that permeates the capital, and the secrecy required of many jobs also makes counterintelligence tricky. People who work around national security become used to vague answers about the employment or work of even close colleagues. “In DC, you just bump into people. There are so many agencies and groups, you just take people’s words for it,” the prosecutor says, adding that such ordinary mystery adds a perfect layer of cover to more underhanded schemes. “There’s a ton of foreign influence going on—some of it is fantastical and far-fetched, and some of it is just normal influence peddling.”

The former senior official, in fact, lamented that when he started reading about the case, the first thing that jumped out was the sheer stupidity and cluelessness of seemingly everyone allegedly involved—the suspects and the victims. And no matter how the case may eventually be resolved, he could already sense how the US government will respond: by requiring more counterintelligence training for national security employees. “There’s another set of mandatory training that’s going to be added to everyone,” he joked. “Everyone else is going to pay for these idiots.”

The Fake Federal Agents Case Baffling US Intelligence Experts

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Lithium costs a lot of money—so why aren’t we recycling lithium batteries?

And if the anode itself is overlooked, so is its carbon footprint. As with other battery materials, automakers rely on estimates to determine the environmental cost of graphite’s globe-spanning journey before it ends up inside a car. But a pair of recent studies suggest that those estimates are woefully out-of-date and undercounted, failing to include the energy-intensive processes required to produce modern, anode-ready graphite. Those bad estimates are undermining efforts to clean up the supply chain for electric vehicles. “The same thing kept coming up again and again,” says Robert Pell, CEO of Minviro, a consultancy that works with electric car companies on environmental assessments. “Everybody cares about the cathode, but the reality is we knew the impact of the anode was significantly underestimated.”

Electric vehicles are, by and large, greener than their gas-combusting counterparts. Plugging them in creates emissions because it taps into a dirty electricity grid, but on the whole, the grid is getting greener, and going electric is already a lot better than exploding gallon after gallon of gasoline. It’s the raw materials for the battery that are harder to decarbonize. The cathode indeed has the biggest environmental consequences—including both carbon emissions and the ecological and human rights harms of mining minerals like lithium, nickel, and cobalt. In some cases, car companies have tried to kick their dependence on cobalt and nickel by swapping them out for other metals.

But graphite shouldn’t get a pass, says Pell, an author of one of the two studies. The results illuminate the problems with how corporations measure their carbon emissions, especially the critical component of “Scope 3.” That’s usually the biggest chunk, including all the energy a company doesn’t consume directly. For an automaker, that includes the carbon emitted by the vast supply chains that produce components, including batteries, and the carbon involved in getting energy into the charging cable. But it’s tricky to take stock of. Go back deep enough into the supply chain, all the way back to the processing of raw materials, and the specifics get fuzzy, the true energy demands opaque.

This is particularly true for graphite. The second study, published earlier this year by researchers at the Technical University of Braunschweig and Volkswagen, included a litany of assumptions and caveats found in previous estimates for graphite carbon emissions. Some of the most popular references used to calculate climate impact inferred details from old manufacturing manuals and borrowed corollaries from processing other materials, like aluminum. Others simply took estimates for other carbon-based materials, and did not factor in the uniquely intensive refining steps needed to rearrange the atoms into graphite.

Pell’s research started with jotting down some back-of-the-envelope calculations. It helped to know that more than 90 percent of graphite for anodes comes from China, and the bulk of that from the northern Inner Mongolia region, where energy is cheap but depends largely on coal-fired power plants. Knowing the approximate carbon intensity of the power supply, he began mapping out the laborious steps for turning that graphite into anodes.

Graphite comes in two forms: natural and synthetic. For natural graphite, that process begins with a mined ore that is crushed and milled into flakes, then separated in liquid and dried using coal furnaces. Next comes spheronization, in which the flakes are transported to another facility and run through dozens of mills to produce a spherical shape. At that point, the graphite is good enough for a pencil. To get anode-ready, the particles are treated with chemicals to remove impurities, and then they go through a coating step that makes them more conductive and better able to hold lithium ions. This requires blasting the particles in a furnace for about 15 hours at 1,300 degrees Celsius, or nearly 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit.

Synthetic graphite involves even more blazing temperatures. It typically requires taking a carbon product, like petroleum coke left over from producing oil, and heating it up for multiple weeks at 1,000 degrees Celsius to create a more homogenous material. The next step is graphitization, which involves cranking the temperature up to 3,000 degrees Celsius (that’s 5,400 degrees Fahrenheit, by the way) for days, a process that forces randomly ordered carbon atoms to straighten themselves out into a neat hexagonal lattice. Typically, these heating steps are done in open pit furnaces that take tremendous amounts of electricity to stay hot.

The two teams arrived at different numbers for the overall climate effect of graphite, which in part reflects differing data sources. (The German team relied on direct data from graphite suppliers and factored in the overall mix of energy sources in China, while the Minviro team used published estimates for graphite processing and the Inner Mongolian energy supply, which is dirtier than the average.) But the takeaway is effectively the same: Both show that the figures companies commonly use to assess their climate impact are often vast underestimates. Minviro estimates the emissions for synthetic graphite are up to 10 times higher than standard published estimates, or eight times for natural graphite. The German team arrived at four times higher for natural graphite, compared with a popular reference. Both teams advocate for more research and data to improve the estimates.

One of the primary ways to reduce those emissions would be to invest in graphite recycling, says Felipe Cerdas, one of the TU Braunschweig researchers—taking the anode out of a dead battery and retrieving the fine graphite powder for use in new batteries. That’s often less carbon-intensive than trying to make the material from scratch. But because graphite is so abundant and cheap, the economics of recycling don’t currently make sense. Most recyclers target higher-value metals like cobalt and nickel, using recycling methods that burn the graphite away.

That’s one reason having an accurate measure of graphite’s climate effects is important, Pell says. European officials are debating new regulations that would reduce the carbon emissions of battery production and require manufacturers to include specific ratios of recycled materials in new cells. Better awareness could help inform those rules, he says, and encourage a switch toward cleaner sources.

One option would be to locate graphite processing in places where the electricity supply is greener. Vianode, a subsidiary of the Norwegian metals processing company Elkem, is building a facility to produce synthetic graphite that would use closed, energy-efficient furnaces that run on electricity from the country’s abundant hydropower. The company has seen interest from others interested in bolstering their green reputations, says Stian Madshus, Vianode’s general manager for Europe. “It doesn’t make much sense to produce the world’s cleanest battery if the graphite inside it involves 20 kilograms of CO2 equivalent,” he says. “That’s a bad story.”

But there’s catching up to do. Chinese firms have decades of experience producing anode-quality graphite, making it difficult for Western companies to compete. But the country has the power to make a difference, Pell says, noting that the Chinese government has recently pushed to distribute energy-intensive industries across the country and increase the use of clean energy. “The ability to enact change is stronger there than anywhere else,” he says.

The Surprising Climate Cost of the Humblest Battery Material

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NASA’s next decade: Build a mission to an ice giant

In the study about 1 out of 7 COVID patients continued to shed the virus' genetic remnants in their feces at least four months after their initial diagnosis, long after they've stopped shedding the virus from their respiratory tract, researchers found.

This could explain why some COVID patients develop GI symptoms like abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea, said senior researcher Dr. Ami Bhatt, an associate professor of medicine and genetics at Stanford University.

"We found that people who had cleared their respiratory infection—meaning they were no longer testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 in their respiratory tract—were continuing to shed SARS-CoV-2 RNA in their feces," Bhatt said. "And those people in particular had a high incidence of GI symptoms."

A long-term infection of the gut also might contribute to long COVID symptoms in some people, Bhatt and her colleagues theorized.

"Long COVID could be the consequence of ongoing immune reaction to SARS-CoV-2, but it also could be that we have people who have persistent infections that are hiding out in niches other than the respiratory tract, like the GI tract," Bhatt said.

For this study, the research team took advantage of an early clinical trial launched in May 2020 at Stanford to test a possible treatment for mild COVID infection.

More than 110 patients were monitored to follow the evolution of their symptoms, and regular fecal samples were collected as part of an effort to track their viral shedding.

Many other studies have focused on viral shedding in patients with severe cases of COVID, but this is the first to assess the presence of viral RNA in fecal samples collected from people with mild to moderate COVID, researchers said.

About half of the patients (49%) had COVID RNA remnants in their stool within the first week after diagnosis, researchers found.

But at four months following diagnosis, when no more COVID remained in their lungs, nearly 13% of patients continued to shed viral RNA in their feces.

About 4% still were shedding viral RNA in their feces seven months out from their initial diagnosis, researchers found.

Bhatt was quick to note that the RNA constituted genetic remnants of the coronavirus, and not actual live virus—so it's unlikely a person's poop could be contagious.

"While there have been isolated reports of people being able to isolate live SARS-CoV-2 virus from stool, I think that that's probably much less common than being able to isolate live virus from the respiratory tract," Bhatt said. "I don't think that our study suggests that there's lots of fecal-oral transmission."

But the lingering presence of COVID in the gut does suggest one potential influence for long-haul disease, she said.

"SARS-CoV-2 might be hanging out at the gut or even other tissues for a longer period of time than it sticks around in the respiratory tract, and there it can basically continue to kind of tickle our immune system and induce some of these long-term consequences," Bhatt said.

Long COVID has become such an established problem that many major medical centers have established their own long COVID clinics to try to suss out symptoms and potential treatments, said Dr. William Schaffner, medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases.

"A very substantial proportion of individuals who recover from COVID acutely nonetheless have lingering symptoms, and they can involve an array of different organ systems," Schaffner said.

"These data add to the notion that the cells in the intestine may themselves be involved with COVID viral infection, and they could potentially be contributors to some of the symptoms—abdominal pain, nausea, kind of just intestinal distress—that can be one aspect of long COVID," he said.

Bhatt said the findings also have implications for public health efforts to predict emerging COVID outbreaks by testing a community's wastewater for evidence of the virus, and Schaffner agrees.

"If, as they say, about 4% of people seven or eight months later are still excreting viral remnants in their stool, it complicates the assessment of the density of new infections in a community," Schaffner said. "It's another thing we have to take into consideration and start looking at going forward."

But Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, doesn't agree that such long-term shedding in stool should affect the accuracy of wastewater COVID surveillance.

"I don't think that these findings change the value of wastewater surveillance, as we've already seen its value in real life," Adalja said. "What's valuable about wastewater surveillance is the trend if it is increasing or decreasing, which isn't really impacted by this phenomenon."

The new study appears in the online journal Med.

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