The tiny pieces of mostly invisible plastic have already been found almost everywhere else on Earth, from the deepest oceans to the highest mountains as well as in the air, soil and food chain.

A Dutch study published in the Environment International journal on Thursday examined blood samples from 22 anonymous, healthy volunteers and found microplastics in nearly 80 percent of them.

Half of the blood samples showed traces of PET plastic, widely used to make drink bottles, while more than a third had polystyrene, used for disposable food containers and many other products.

"This is the first time we have actually been able to detect and quantify" such microplastics in human blood, said Dick Vethaak, an ecotoxicologist at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

"This is proof that we have plastics in our body—and we shouldn't," he told AFP, calling for further research to investigate how it could be impacting health.

"Where is it going in your body? Can it be eliminated? Excreted? Or is it retained in certain organs, accumulating maybe, or is it even able to pass the blood-brain barrier?"

The study said the microplastics could have entered the body by many routes: via air, water or food, but also in products such as particular toothpastes, lip glosses and tattoo ink.

"It is scientifically plausible that plastic particles may be transported to organs via the bloodstream," the study added.

Vethaak also said there could be other kinds of microplastics in blood his study did not pick up—for example, it could not detect particles larger than the diameter of the needle used to take the sample.

The study was funded by the Netherlands Organization for Health Research and Development as well as Common Seas, a UK-based group aimed at reducing plastic pollution.

Alice Horton, anthropogenic contaminants scientist at Britain's National Oceanography Center, said the study "unequivocally" proved there was microplastics in blood.

"This study contributes to the evidence that plastic particles have not just pervaded throughout the environment, but are pervading our bodies too," she told the Science Media Center.

Fay Couceiro, reader in biogeochemistry and environmental pollution at the University of Portsmouth, said that despite the small sample size and lack of data on the exposure level of participants, she felt the study was "robust and will stand up to scrutiny".

She also called for further research.

"After all blood links all the organs of our body and if plastic is there, it could be anywhere in us."

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Seduced by visions of verdant hills and fertile ground, in the late 10th century waves of Norse migrants set sail in hopes of an easier life abroad. At its peak, the colony's population numbered in the thousands, spread out across three major settlements.

And then it ended. No word of hardship. No record of struggle. By the middle of the 15th century, the Norse experiment in Greenland was a bust.

New research suggests we might have had it all wrong about the prime cause of the collapse, shifting the focus from extreme cold to extreme drought.

Historians have speculated that the cause of the colony's collapse could have been anything from sudden violence at the hands of an invading culture to a gradual decline in birth rates, to hardship brought on by a changing climate.

There's little doubt that a variety of factors were at work, but the consensus has tended to see one as critical – an enduring drop in temperatures referred to as the Little Ice Age.

It's an idea a team of researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and University at Buffalo in the US has now found wanting in evidence.

Pointing instead to records of temperature and precipitation buried in the sediment of a site near the remains of an ancient Norse farmstead, the team suggests it was a stark decline in summer rains that made living in Greenland increasingly unviable.

The very name of Greenland itself is a misnomer, intentionally crafted by the founder of the island's Viking colonies Erik 'the Red' Thorvaldsson as propaganda to draw willing settlers in from afar.

Still, those who did come quickly grew accustomed to the long icy winters and extreme remoteness, finding riches in the form of walrus skins and ivory to trade with those back home for dried fruits and timber.

Survival depended on inherited knowledge of raising meager crops and livestock under extreme conditions, while supplementing it with food from the ocean.

As difficult as a Viking life in Greenland sounds, from its establishment in 985 CE the population prospered and expanded over the course of several generations, before disappearing from historical records sometime in the mid-1400s.

The period of settlement also happens to be a period in history that spans the start of a regional cooling in the North Atlantic, leading some historians to suspect that the colony's establishment was only possible thanks to the relative warmth before this cooling period set in.

However, the evidence for this has been rather tenuous, based on ice core data from elevated sites more than 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) away from the nearest Viking colony of the time. What's more, there's good reason to think life was just as cold around the 10th century as it was in the 15th.

"Before this study, there was no data from the actual site of the Viking settlements. And that's a problem," says UMass Amherst geoscientist Raymond Bradley.

Bradley's team instead went to the site of one of the largest farms in the colony's Eastern Settlement, and spent three years digging samples of material from a nearby lakebed.

This muck sandwich of sediment, bacteria, and decaying plant matter told a 2,000-year-long story of stable temperatures and increasingly dwindling rainfall.

"What we discovered is that, while the temperature barely changed over the course of the Norse settlement of southern Greenland, it became steadily drier over time," says lead author and geoscientist Boyang Zhao, also from UMass Amherst and now at Brown University.

When life is already teetering on the brink, every year of drought is one more nail in the coffin.

Potential breakdowns in social ties, a tendency to have smaller families, and even a drop in the value of walrus tusks with growing trade for elephant ivory from elsewhere may have made tough times of drought that much harder to endure. Social collapse is a complicated business, after all.

But when you're living in a land that isn't as green as promised, even the hardiest Vikings would find years of drought just too much to bare.

This research was published in Science Advances.

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In 2016, Yasser Elabd noticed a $40,000 payment to a client in Africa that didn’t smell right. The payment came from Microsoft’s business investment fund — money meant for closing deals and opening up new lines of business. But the customer named in the request wasn’t a customer at all, at least not according to the internal client list. He was a former Microsoft employee who had been terminated for poor performance, and he’d left the company so recently that its rules would have barred him from approval.

It was suspicious, more like a bribe than a proper business request — but when he pushed for more details, other managers started to push back. Eventually, the payment was stopped, but there were no broader consequences, and few seemed interested in digging deeper. He came to believe his colleagues were far more comfortable with this kind of payment than he was.

In the two years that followed, Elabd says he did everything in his power to stamp out these quiet bribes — a fight that made him a pariah among his colleagues and eventually cost him his job. But looking back, he believes Microsoft wasn’t interested in stopping the payouts, preferring to let phony contracts slip through and accept the associated cash.

“THEY’RE PROMOTING THE BAD PEOPLE. IF YOU’RE DOING THE RIGHT THING, THEY WON’T PROMOTE YOU.”

Elabd went public with his experiences in an essay published Friday by the whistleblower platform Lioness, alleging widespread bribery through Microsoft’s foreign contract business. Elabd estimates that more than $200 million each year is spent on bribes and kickbacks linked to the company, often in countries like Ghana, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. For the regions he worked in, he believes more than half of the salespeople and managers took part. If true, it’s a stunning look at the ongoing corruption associated with international tech contracting — and Microsoft’s ongoing struggles to contain it.

As director of emerging markets for the Middle East and Africa, Elabd saw many different versions of the problem. Sometimes, as in the African case, they were suspicious requests from the business investment fund. In another instance, he saw a contractor for the Saudi interior ministry receive a $13 million discount on its software — but the discount never made it back to the end customer. In another case, Qatar’s ministry of education was paying $9.5 million a year for Office and Windows licenses that were never installed. One way or another, money would end up leaking out of the contracting process, most likely split between the government, the subcontractor, and any Microsoft employees in on the deal.

This kind of corporate bribery is a widespread problem internationally, particularly in countries where the government is the primary customer and mid-level bureaucrats see bribes as part of the cost of doing business. The World Economic Forum estimates that more than $1 trillion is lost to bribes globally each year. It’s harder to estimate the portion involving the scam described by Elabd, where international companies pay off local decision-makers to secure their business or drum up sham deals just to loot the treasury. The cost is typically borne by the country’s taxpayers — often in nations with little money to spare — and diverted to the bureaucrats and subcontractors instead of the people it’s meant to help. But no small part of the money is sent to parent companies as part of the ruse, giving them an unfortunate incentive to turn a blind eye.

IN 2019, MICROSOFT PAID $25 MILLION TO SETTLE CLAIMS OF FOREIGN BRIBERY

It’s a challenge for any multinational company — but Elabd’s experience at Microsoft made him think the company had given up fighting it. “It’s going on at all levels,” he said in an interview with The Verge. “All the executives are aware of it, and they’re promoting the bad people. If you’re doing the right thing, they won’t promote you.”

Reached for comment, Microsoft emphasized its commitment to ethical practices, pointing to the “standards of business” training all employees are required to take, including specific coaching on how to report bribery incidents like the ones described by Elabd.

“We are committed to doing business in a responsible way and always encourage anyone to report anything they see that may violate the law, our policies, or our ethical standards,” said Becky Lenaburg, a VP at Microsoft and deputy general counsel for compliance and ethics. “We believe we’ve previously investigated these allegations, which are many years old, and addressed them. We cooperated with government agencies to resolve any concerns.”

“I DON’T WANT YOU TO BE A BLOCKER,” HIS MANAGER TOLD HIM

Microsoft has struggled with foreign bribery in the past. A senior executive at Hungary was found to have inflated margins as part of a bribery scheme between 2013 and 2015, according to a Justice Department investigation. A separate SEC case alleged that more than $440,000 in marketing funds were diverted to gifts for employees of the Saudi government. Microsoft settled both cases in 2019, paying a combined $25 million to investigating agencies.

In an open letter to employees after the settlement, Microsoft president Brad Smith described the behavior as “completely unacceptable” and emphasized the need for robust internal oversight. “As a company, we need to keep working on improving the systems that help us prevent bad conduct,” Smith wrote. “We hope and expect that if you see something that seems inconsistent with our policies or our values, you’ll bring it to our attention so that little problems don’t become larger.”

But Elabd’s essay tells a different story. He says he escalated the issue and successfully stopped the initial Nigeria request — but the broader problems went unaddressed. Soon, a manager connected to the request called him in for a heated conversation.

“I don’t want you to be a blocker,” he recalls the manager telling him. If he uncovered anything suspicious, the manager said, “You have to turn your head and leave it as is.”

“COMPANIES CAN’T BURY THEIR HEAD IN THE SAND”

In the months that followed, Elabd found himself left off of deals. Travel requests that used to be approved were suddenly blocked. When he refused a performance improvement plan, he lost the job and left Microsoft for good in August 2018.

In the years since, he’s tracked reports of bribery coming from Qatar, Cameroon, and South Africa, all involving Microsoft and its subcontractors. He even brought the reports to the Securities and Exchange Commission, hoping they would take action — but he says he’s seen little action from the agency. (The SEC did not respond to a request for comment by press time.)

This type of bribery is illegal under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act — but prosecutions tend to rely on more than a single incident. Leah Moushey, a senior associate at Miller & Chevalier who focuses on FCPA cases, says prosecutions often focus on a company’s internal efforts to stop corruption. “They’re going to look at whether the compliance program is well designed, implemented in good faith, and if there’s evidence to support that it works,” Moushey says.

But while a good process can excuse a few bad cases, evidence of a bad process can bring more severe punishment, a particularly serious threat given the Justice Department’s recent focus on repeat corporate offenders. “Companies can’t bury their head in the sand if an issue comes up,” says Moushey. “You can be held to account if you’re consciously disregarding red flags that are popping up in your organization.”

It’s hard to say where Microsoft falls on this spectrum. The company has blocked payments and terminated employees in many of the cases cited by Elabd, and when they haven’t, it’s often because investigations failed to turn up evidence of wrongdoing. But for Elabd, the risk of losing a sales job isn’t enough to fight the broader culture of corruption.

“They never took any legal action against these employees, even while they know they are stealing the company’s money and the governments’ money,” he says. “The hidden message to employees is ‘do whatever you want, make as much money as you can, and the worst that can happen is you’ll get fired.’”

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This is why boa constrictors can breathe while squeezing the life out of prey

"People often have opportunities to provide others with constructive feedback that could be immediately helpful, whether that's letting someone know of a typo in their presentation before a client presentation, or telling a job candidate about a stained shirt before an interview," said lead author Nicole Abi-Esber, a doctoral candidate at Harvard Business School. "Overall, our research found that people consistently underestimate others' desire for feedback, which can have harmful results for would-be feedback recipients."

Constructive feedback is instrumental for aiding learning and performance, and research has shown that people commonly report wanting this type of feedback, according to the researchers. However, despite wanting constructive feedback themselves, people often avoid giving it to others. In a pilot study conducted by the researchers, only 2.6% of participants informed a tester of a visible smudge on his or her face (e.g., chocolate, lipstick or red marker) during a survey.

The research was published in APA's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Previous research suggests that people avoid giving feedback for fear of negative outcomes, such as the other person's becoming embarrassed or upset. Abi-Esber and her colleagues theorized there might be another reason people withhold feedback: They simply do not fully recognize the potential of their input to improve others' outcomes, leading them to underestimate others' desire for such feedback.

To test their theory, the researchers conducted a series of five experiments involving 1,984 participants to measure how much people underestimate others' desire for constructive feedback. In one, participants were presented with 10 hypothetical awkward social situations at work, where they could either give or receive constructive feedback. In another experiment, participants were asked to recall a situation where they could either have given or received constructive feedback. In the final experiment, participants were paired, with one practicing a speech for a competition and the other assigned to listen and provide feedback.

Across all five experiments, people in a position to give feedback consistently underestimated potential receivers' desire for it. The more consequential the feedback (e.g., telling someone they need to improve their presentation skills), the more likely participants were to underestimate the other's need for feedback and the less likely they were to offer it. The gap was smaller in more everyday, less consequential scenarios, such as when the other person had food on their face or a rip in their pants.

The researchers were surprised to find that the simple intervention of perspective taking could increase the likelihood someone would recognize the need for and provide feedback. Simply asking people to quickly reflect, "If you were this person, would you want feedback?" helped participants recognize the value of feedback to the other person and helped close the giver-receiver gap.

"Even if you feel hesitant to give feedback, we recommend that you give it," said Abi-Esber. "Take a second and imagine you're in the other person's shoes and ask yourself if you would want feedback if you were them. Most likely you would, and this realization can help empower you to give them feedback."

"Feedback is key to personal growth and improvement, and it can fix problems that are otherwise costly to the recipient," said co-author Francesca Gino, Ph.D., also of Harvard Business School. "The next time you hear someone mispronounce a word, see a stain on their shirt or notice a typo on their slide, we urge you to point it out to them—they probably want feedback more than you think."

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The results show that all three ADAs studied (domperidone, metopimazine, and metoclopramide) were associated with an increased risk, especially in the first days of use, but the highest increase was found for metopimazine and metoclopramide. The researchers suggest that the potential action of ADAs on blood flow to the brain could explain this higher risk.

Like antipsychotics, ADAs are antidopaminergic drugs—they work by blocking dopamine activity in the brain. Antipsychotics have been associated with an increased risk of ischaemic stroke, but whether this risk could extend to other antidopaminergics including ADAs is not known.

To address this gap, a team of researchers in France from Inserm and Bordeaux University (Bordeaux Population Health Centre) and Bordeaux CHU, set out to estimate the risk of ischaemic stroke associated with ADA use in a real world setting.

They identified 2,612 patients from the nationwide French reimbursement healthcare system database (SNDS) with a first ischaemic stroke between 2012 and 2016 and at least one reimbursement for domperidone, metopimazine or metoclopramide in the 70 days before their stroke. Patients had an average age of 72 years and 34% were men.

They compared frequencies of these ADA reimbursements between a risk period (days -14 to -1 before stroke) and three matched reference periods (days -70 to -57, -56 to -43, and -42 to -29 before stroke).

Patients with stroke were then matched by age, sex, and stroke risk factors to a healthy control group of 21,859 randomly selected people who also received an ADA in the same time period.

Among patients with stroke, 1,250 received an ADA at least once in the risk period and 1,060 in the reference periods. Among the control group, 5,128 and 13,165 received an ADA at least once in the risk and reference periods, respectively.

After taking account of potentially influential factors, the researchers found that new users of ADA could be at a 3-fold increased risk of stroke shortly after treatment started.

Further analyses by age, sex, and history of dementia showed similar results, with men at highest (a 3.59-fold increased) risk.

The risk appeared to increase for all ADAs, the highest increase being found for metopimazine (a 3.62-fold increase) and metoclopramide (a 3.53-fold increase), both of which are drugs that cross the blood-brain barrier.

This is an observational study, and as such, can't establish cause, and the researchers point to some limitations that are inherent in database studies, such as a lack of information on prescribed daily dose or duration of ADAs and ischaemic stroke subtypes.

Nevertheless, they say their results show that the risk of ischaemic stroke appears to be associated with ADA use.

And although further causal inference research is needed to confirm this association in other settings, they suggest that "the higher risk found for drugs crossing the blood-brain barrier suggests a potential central effect, possibly through an action on cerebral blood flow."

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What they discovered could have some strange consequences for communication between future Martians.

The findings suggest that trying to talk in Mars' atmosphere might produce a weird effect, since higher-pitched sound seems to travel faster than bass notes. Not that we'd try, since Mars' atmosphere is unbreathable, but it's certainly fun to think about!

From a science perspective, the findings, announced at the 53rd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference by planetary scientist Baptiste Chide of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, reveal high temperature fluctuations at the surface of Mars that warrant further investigation.

The speed of sound is not a universal constant. It can change, depending on the density and temperature of the medium through which it travels; the denser the medium, the faster it goes.

That's why sound travels about 343 meters (1,125 feet) per second in our atmosphere at 20 degrees Celsius, but also at 1,480 meters per second in water, and at 5,100 meters per second in steel.

Mars' atmosphere is a lot more tenuous than Earth's, around 0.020 kg/m3, compared to about 1.2 kg/m3 for Earth. That alone means that sound would propagate differently on the red planet.

But the layer of the atmosphere just above the surface, known as the Planetary Boundary Layer, has added complications: During the day, the warming of the surface generates convective updrafts that create strong turbulence.

Conventional instruments for testing surface thermal gradients are highly accurate, but can suffer from various interference effects. Fortunately, Perseverance has something unique: microphones that can allow us to hear the sounds of Mars, and a laser that can trigger a perfectly timed noise.

The SuperCam microphone was included to record acoustic pressure fluctuations from the rover's laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy instrument as it ablates rock and soil samples at the Martian surface.

This came with an excellent benefit, as it turns out. Chide and his team measured the time between the laser firing and the sound reaching the SuperCam microphone at 2.1 meters altitude, to measure the speed of sound at the surface.

"The speed of sound retrieved by this technique is computed over the entire acoustic propagation path, which goes from the ground to the height of the microphone," the researchers write in their conference paper.

"Therefore, at any given wavelength it is convoluted by the variations of temperature and wind speed and direction along this path."

The results back up predictions made using what we know of the Martian atmosphere, confirming that sounds propagate through the atmosphere near the surface at roughly 240 meters per second.

However, the quirk of Mars' shifting soundscape is something completely out of the blue, with conditions on Mars leading to a quirk not seen anywhere else.

"Due to the unique properties of the carbon dioxide molecules at low pressure, Mars is the only terrestrial-planet atmosphere in the Solar System experiencing a change in speed of sound right in the middle of the audible bandwidth (20 Hertz to 20,000 Hertz)," the researchers write.

At frequencies above 240 Hertz, the collision-activated vibrational modes of carbon dioxide molecules do not have enough time to relax, or return to their original state. The result of this is that sound travels more than 10 meters per second faster at higher frequencies than it does at low ones.

This could lead to what the researchers call a "unique listening experience" on Mars, with higher-pitched sounds arriving sooner to the listener than lower ones.

Given that any human astronauts traveling to Mars anytime soon will need to be wearing pressurized spacesuits with comms equipment, or living in pressurized habitat modules, this is unlikely to pose an immediate problem – but it could be a fun concept for science-fiction writers to tinker with.

Because the speed of sound changes due to temperature fluctuations, the team was also able to use the microphone to measure large and rapid temperature changes on the Martian surface that other sensors had not been able to detect. This data can help fill in some of the blanks on Mars' rapidly changing planetary boundary layer.

The team plans to continue using SuperCam microphone data to observe how things like daily and seasonal variations might affect the speed of sound on Mars. They also plan to compare acoustic temperature readings to readings from other instruments to try to figure out the large fluctuations.

You can read the conference paper on the conference website.

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Almost three-quarters of all U.S. counties reported more deaths than births last year, a development largely caused by the pandemic, which contributed to a dramatic slowing in the nation’s overall population growth, according to data released Thursday by the Census Bureau.

Low fertility rates, which have persisted since the end of the Great Recession, and the nation’s continuing demographic shift toward an older population also combined to create the smallest population increase in 100 years, said Kenneth M. Johnson, a sociology professor and demographer at the University of New Hampshire. He said he expected the data to show a natural decrease but was surprised at its scale. Natural decrease occurs when a population records more deaths than births.

“I think one of the most important findings is the fact that almost 2,300 counties had more deaths than births in them. That’s unheard of in American history,” Johnson said.

He said the coronavirus’s impact, along with longer-term trends that limited population growth, had created “a perfect storm,” and that one would have to go back at least to the 1918 flu pandemic to find anything like it.

The data also offered statistical backing to widespread anecdotal evidence suggesting that millions of Americans moved out of the nation’s largest cities, including the District, during the pandemic. Whether for safety from infectious disease or convenience during shutdowns, millions traded cities for suburbs or larger suburbs for smaller ones. Many migrated farther into rural counties or resettled to second homes in vacation areas, such as the Catskill Mountains or the Delmarva Peninsula.

Two of the nation’s largest cities, Los Angeles and New York City, suffered the sharpest losses as a result of internal migration. Los Angeles County lost 179,757 people in net domestic migration, while New York County lost 113,642.

California, Oregon and Mississippi had the most counties negatively affected by international migration losses, while Alaska, Louisiana and Illinois had the most counties affected by losses caused by domestic migration within the United States.

Of course, the outflows from some states meant gains in others. Arizona’s Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, received the most people (46,866) from other areas of the United States.

“I’m very surprised by this because I didn’t think it was going to be as dramatic, the domestic migration piece of it,” said William H. Frey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who analyzed the data and its impact on the Washington region. “It may be a blip, and I think it is, but it’s certainly noteworthy. I think that’s the bigger demographic pattern here.”

Frey said that although outward domestic migration from these and other major cities had been underway for many years, its effect had been masked by increases in foreign immigrants, but those numbers also slowed during the pandemic.

The data released Thursday covered 3,143 counties, along with 384 metropolitan statistical areas and 543 smaller locales known as micropolitan statistical areas. The period covered by the data — July 2020 to July 2021 — also coincided with some of the peak rates of the coronavirus′s spread, as reflected in reported cases.

In that time, more than 73 percent of all U.S. counties experienced a natural population decrease, compared with 55 percent of all counties in 2020 and 45 percent in 2019, the Census Bureau found. In four states — Delaware, Maine, New Hampshire and Rhode Island — the natural population decrease occurred in every county.

The nation’s capital recorded a loss of 20,043 people, driven mostly by domestic migration, while its metropolitan area lost more than 29,000 people, Frey said. Montgomery County experienced a loss of 6,416 people, Prince George’s County reported a decline of 10,295, and Fairfax County’s population declined by 8,752. Prince William County added 1,734 people, Frey found.

He also noted the huge turnaround in immigration, tracing a peak influx of more than 47,000 reported in July 2015 to only 12,600 last year.

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Wilhite after winning a Webby Lifetime Achievement award. Photo by Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images for The Webby Awards

Stephen Wilhite, one of the lead inventors of the GIF, died last week from COVID at the age of 74, according to his wife, Kathaleen, who spoke to The Verge. He was surrounded by family when he passed. His obituary page notes that “even with all his accomplishments, he remained a very humble, kind, and good man.”

Stephen Wilhite worked on GIF, or Graphics Interchange Format, which is now used for reactions, messages, and jokes, while employed at CompuServe in the 1980s. He retired around the early 2000s and spent his time traveling, camping, and building model trains in his basement.

Although GIFs are synonymous with animated internet memes these days, that wasn’t the reason Wilhite created the format. CompuServe introduced them in the late 1980s as a way to distribute “high-quality, high-resolution graphics” in color at a time when internet speeds were glacial compared to what they are today. “He invented GIF all by himself — he actually did that at home and brought it into work after he perfected it,” Kathaleen said. “He would figure out everything privately in his head and then go to town programming it on the computer.”

If you want to go more in-depth into the history of the GIF, the Daily Dot has a good explainer of how the format became an internet phenomenon.

While there have been long-standing debates about the correct pronunciation of the image format, Wilhite was very clear on how he intended for it to be said. In 2013, he told The New York Times, “The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations. They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story.”

He reiterated that stance while accepting a Webby Lifetime Achievement Award for the invention of the GIF later that month, using an animation to give his acceptance speech. (You can watch the whole clip of him receiving the award here.) “After 25 years, they finally honored that achievement that he did,” Kathaleen said, adding that creating the GIF was the thing he was most proud of.

Several messages from former colleagues on his obituary page said that Stephen also made other important contributions during his time at CompuServe, describing a hard worker who had a major influence on the company’s success.

After Stephen retired, the couple traveled together. Kathaleen said that one of the most memorable trips was their honeymoon when they visited the Grand Canyon. “I had never seen it before, and he wanted to show it to me,” she said fondly. The couple also went camping “all the time,” she said.

While at home, he liked to work on his model train set. “When we had the house built, we actually had a whole section in the basement for his train room. He always did the designs and electric work for the layout,” said Kathaleen.

In the Times interview, Wilhite said that one of his favorite GIFs is the dancing baby meme, which went viral before “memes” and “going viral” were widely used terms. So here’s to you, Mr. Wilhite. Thanks for creating the image format that made downloading color images over dial-up bearable before it turned into one of the internet’s own languages.

One of Wilhite’s favorite gifs, according to a 2013 interview. Gif via The New York Times

Stephen Wilhite, creator of the GIF, has died

Today, NASA announced plans to develop a second human lunar lander for its Artemis program, the agency’s major spaceflight initiative to send humans back to the Moon. To build the vehicle, the space agency is calling on commercial space companies to propose concepts for landers that can take people to and from the Moon’s orbit and the lunar surface, with the goal of having them ready by 2026 or 2027 at the earliest.

NASA already holds a contract with commercial partner SpaceX to develop a lunar lander for Artemis, which aims to land the first woman and the first person of color on the Moon. In 2021, the space agency awarded a sole contract to SpaceX worth $2.9 billion to develop the company’s future Starship vehicle into a lander that can take humans to and from the lunar surface. As of now, both NASA and SpaceX are working toward conducting the first Artemis lunar landing as early as 2025, though that timeline is considered unlikely.

NASA had originally wanted to pick two companies to develop human lunar landers for Artemis in order to inspire competition and keep down costs. The agency was going to pick the two winners from three finalists: SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Dynetics. But the agency ultimately chose one, primarily due to budget constraints. For the year 2021, NASA had requested $3.4 billion from Congress to fund the development of Artemis lunar landers but only received $850 million, just 25 percent of what was asked. As a result, NASA went with SpaceX, in part because the company had offered the most affordable bid.

However, the decision to simply pick one company didn’t sit well with the losing finalists. Blue Origin proceeded to sue NASA in federal court over the selection, though the company ultimately lost its case. Despite the lawsuit, NASA administrator Bill Nelson expressed his desire to eventually have two lunar lander providers, with hopes that Congress would fund the initiative. And at one point, it looked as if Congress would direct NASA to make that happen. In October, the Senate Appropriation Committee introduced a bill that would direct NASA to pick a second company to develop a lunar lander for Artemis. However, the most recent budget bill that was signed for 2022 did not force NASA to do that, but it did give the space agency the full $1.195 billion it asked for to develop lunar landers.

Now, ahead of President Joe Biden’s budget request expected next week, NASA is announcing official plans to select another company’s lunar lander, as the agency had wanted to do all along. “Competition leads to better, more reliable outcomes,” Nelson said during a press conference announcing the news. “It benefits everybody. It benefits NASA. It benefits the American people.” Nelson added: “I promised competition, so here it is.” NASA now plans to put out a draft call for proposals at the end of the month, with plans to release a final call later this spring. Everyone but SpaceX will be able to compete in this new competition for a contract.

In light of this announcement, NASA says it will make some changes to SpaceX’s existing contract. NASA’s original contract with the company has SpaceX conducting an uncrewed landing on the Moon as a demonstration test before conducting the first crewed landing in the mid-2020s. That first landing, which will mark NASA’s return to the Moon with humans since the 1970s, will be called Artemis III and should receive plenty of attention. After that, SpaceX would have moved on to a new operational contract with NASA, where the space agency would buy individual flights of the Starship lander to continue going back to the Moon.

Now, NASA plans to work with SpaceX under its original contract to conduct a possible third crewed landing after Artemis III. Then after that, SpaceX and the new company that NASA picks would presumably compete for upcoming Artemis missions — that is, if the providers are ready.

A lot of this depends on buy-in from Congress, which may happen since some lawmakers indicated their desire for NASA to pick a second lunar lander. NASA would not say how much it plans to ask for in development funding, but with President Biden’s budget request scheduled for release on March 28th, the numbers should be available fairly soon. Nelson says he expects the funds to materialize. “We’re expecting to have both Congress support and that of the Biden administration, and we’re expecting to get this competition started in the fiscal year 2023 budget.”

NASA announces plans to develop second Moon lander, alongside SpaceX’s Starship

A new picture of the hot water beneath Yellowstone’s geysers

This funding covers the Moon-to-Mars Program, the SmartSat Cooperative Research Center, the Modern Manufacturing Initiative, opportunities in defense, various state-funded projects such as SA-SAT, and more.

This level of investment is unquestionably a good thing. But the great majority of it supports applied research and engineering, and commercialization of outcomes. None of the new funding goes to basic research.

In the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, India, South Korea, China, Russia, and United Arab Emirates—to name a few—basic research in space and planetary science, and science missions, are key elements in strategies to grow their sectors. In Australia, this kind of fundamental work only gets around A$2 million a year. It hasn't budged in a decade.

Why basic research is important

Applied research and engineering aims to provide practical solutions to well-defined problems by applying existing knowledge.

Basic research aims to expand knowledge. It's the most successful mechanism humans have ever invented for generating new knowledge.

Every other major spacefaring nation funds basic research in space and planetary science from the public purse. They do it for a good reason, and it's not to make planetary scientists like me happy.

It's because in space science, an unusually short thread connects basic research, applied research and engineering, commercial outcomes, and a trained workforce.

Basic research isn't an optional extra: it's a crucial catalyst for everything else.

How it works

In other nations, scientists like me come up with an idea or hypothesis. Something big and exciting about how we think our Solar System works.

To test that hypothesis, we develop a space mission with engineers from both industry and academia. Because the universe defines the problem, not a human, that team is continually presented with unique challenges, requiring completely new technical solutions.

As a happy byproduct, this process creates an environment that is almost perfectly optimized for technology breakthroughs. I learned this lesson on the very first mission I was on: the UK's Beagle 2 Mars lander.

The mission didn't succeed. We didn't get to sniff for trace methane on Mars. But the technology turned out to be a great way to detect early-onset tuberculosis.

And exploring the Solar System to make fundamental new discoveries is a great way to inspire young engineers and scientists. So you inspire your public, you get students interested in STEM careers, and in the long term you get your highly trained workforce of the future.

I see this all the time. It's one of the joys of my job.

Our space program at Curtin University is called Binar, from the Nyungar word for "fireball."

We flew our first satellite, Binar-1, last year. We'll be flying another six over the coming 18 months. Our eventual goal is a lunar orbiter.

At any one time, around 60 undergraduate engineers are involved in Binar. Last week, dozens of high school students visited us. WA government is supporting a program that will see them flying experiments on Binar spacecraft from next year. That's what inspiration looks like.

And yes, a collateral benefit is that you make planetary scientists happy. But their discoveries win you credibility and visibility on the world stage, so that's not a bad thing either.

Our work on the geophysical evolution of the dwarf planet Ceres, based on Dawn Mission data, is one example.

Funding cuts have hit home

In Australia, basic research is formally excluded from the new funding schemes (for example, the Moon-to-Mars Demonstrator Mission scheme states "STEM, scientific or research projects without a clear commercialization pathway" are ineligible activities). So no science missions.

That exclusion, and the lack of funding, means that planetary science is no longer seen as a strategic area by universities. As a result it has been one of the first areas to be cut as belts have been tightened because of COVID.

Colleagues at the Australian National University and Macquarie University have lost their jobs. In fact, our team at Curtin University is the only substantial group left in Australia.

Not a zero-sum game

The Australian model is consistent with a belief that each dollar you spend on science is a dollar less for industry. Is this the case?

NASA doesn't think so. Its model is built around basic research and science missions.

A recent NASA-commissioned study found this model was extremely successful at generating benefits for the wider economy. Over a single year, every dollar spent on the agency generated around US$3 in total US economic output. Over longer timescales the return is even higher.

Other agencies, large and small, can demonstrate a similar return on investment with science-based models. Each ₤1 the UK Space Agency invests in space science and innovation yields ₤3–4 in direct value to the space industry and additional spillover impacts of ₤6–12.

A risky experiment

No other major spacefaring nation has implemented a strategy that formally excludes basic research. It follows that Australia is engaged in a unique experiment to see whether growth of our space sector is optimized by minimizing our ability to generate new knowledge.

With hundreds of millions in new funding for civilian space, and billions for defense, our space sector can't help but grow. The question is whether that investment is efficiently generating growth. Will our taxpayers see the same return on their investment as taxpayers in those other nations if we delete science?

Overseas space agencies can point to an economic return of three to 12 times the original investment. Can our space agency do better with a model that formally excludes basic research and science missions?

I don't know the answer. Unfortunately, no one does, because there are no examples or studies to draw on.

My hunch is that this novel strategy is not optimal. Hedging our bets—learning from the strategies of other nations—wouldn't cost much.

It would mean looking again at that A$2 million of annual funding for basic research. Engaging scientists in how research programs are defined. Possibly even the odd science mission. Doesn't seem like a lot if it buys you peace of mind.

Source

The report, led by a team of behavioral ecology experts including Professor Patrick Miller and Dr. Saana Isojunno from the University's Sea Mammal Research Unit (SMRU), says cetaceans—whales, dolphins and porpoises—are faced with choosing "life over dinner" and that their responses to sounds from man-made noise such as military sonar systems are shaped by how they evolved to respond to natural predators like killer whales. While some cetaceans may be able to fight or flee from predators when they think they are under attack, underwater noise disturbance created by humans is also causing them to stop foraging and, therefore, become more vulnerable by impacting their energy budgets.

The findings were part of a project involving European colleagues, including oceanographer Dr. Frans-Peter Lam of Acoustics & Sonar at the TNO in The Netherlands; Dr. Petter Kvadsheim, Principal Scientist in Sensor and Surveillance Systems at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment; Charlotte Curé of the Joint Research Unit in Environmental Acoustics at Cerema, University Gustave Eiffel; and SMRU Ph.D. student Eilidh Siegal, as part of the 3S (Sea mammals, Sonar and Safety) team.

The S3 research team found that navy sonar caused cessation of foraging in all four species of whale they studied—beaked northern bottlenose, humpback, sperm and long-finned pilot whales—which all rely on acoustic signals to assess predation risk as well as to find food themselves.

Professor Miller, co-lead author of the report with Dr. Isojunno, said: "The fact that whales and dolphins can be negatively affected by sonar sounds came to the attention of the public due to high profile stranding events in which large numbers of whales stranded in association with military sonar activities.

"In the early-to-mid 2000s, several different research groups, including our 3S group which authored this most recent work, established novel procedures to directly study how the behavior of free-ranging whales is affected by exposure to sonar sounds."

Since 2006 the team has documented the behavioral responses of six species of cetaceans off the cost of Norway, while other species have been studied by research groups working primarily in the U.S.

He explained that data for the latest study, obtained in the Arctic waters around Norway, shows that when marine mammals tagged with temporary transmitters were played naval sonar of 1–4 kilohertz or playback killer whale sounds, the amount of time 43 whales belonging to one of the four species spent foraging for food decreased around the same rate.

Data varies between species with beaked northern bottlenose stopping foraging completely while sperm whales showed just a 50% reduction in foraging time.

Professor Miller added: "As human activities impact virtually every animal habitat on the planet, identifying species at risk from disturbance is a priority. Measuring reduction in intense feeding activities during playbacks of killer whale sounds showed a strong correlation across species close to a 1:1 line.

"In our study, matched responses of naval sonar and predatory killer whale sound playbacks indicate that whales who are both predators and prey but rely on hearing to both find food and detect dangers have not adjusted their threat response by learning to tell the difference between noise that does not represent a predation risk from that which does.

"Effectively, they are having to choose life over dinner when they hear a potential threat in the sea. This is a particular concern for Arctic cetaceans, with both killer whales and humans increasingly able to access Arctic waters due to melting sea ice. Several Arctic marine mammals use crypsis and flight to avoid falling victim to killer whales and similar responses have been reported to ice-breaker noise and airguns used in oil and gas exploration. Our findings show that these Arctic marine mammals face a looming 'double whammy' impact of increased number of real predators as well as perceived threats from increasing human noise under the sea."

Source

"Future reefs may not be the colorful ecosystems we recognize today," write marine ecologist Chris Hemingson and his James Cook University colleagues in their paper, published in Global Change Biology.

"Our findings suggest that reefs may be at a critical transition point and might be poised to become much less colorful in the coming years."

The study, which comes weeks after the Great Barrier Reef was struck by another widespread bleaching event fueled by rising carbon emissions, focused on reefs surrounding Orpheus Island, which is located in the mid-section of the largest coral reef system on Earth.

Previous coral bleaching events have profoundly changed the make-up of coral reefs in the area, with the loss of soft and branching corals a likely factor in the disappearance of brightly-colored fish, which are becoming increasingly rare, the study found.  

"As these complex corals become rarer, on future reefs impacted by climate change, fish communities may become duller," the trio of researchers writes on their group's website.

To investigate, Hemingson and colleagues looked at the diversity of colors found in communities of reef fishes and related that to the types of habitats where those fishes live.  

Whether fishes evolved bright colors to stand out and attract a mate or neutral tones to blend in and avoid predators, their coloration is naturally linked to the coral reefs they inhabit.

Fish communities in healthy parts of the reef with plentiful complex corals were compared to other areas where massive, encrusted corals dominate in the wake of major disturbances, such as heatwaves and cyclones, and degraded reefs with few corals smothered in algae.

"We found that as the cover of structurally complex corals increases on a reef, so does the diversity and range of colors present on fishes living in and around them," says Hemingson, who focused on small fishes that rarely venture far from their home patch of reef.

"But, as the cover of turf algae and dead coral rubble increases, the diversity of colors declines to a more generalized, uniform appearance."

Above: Fish communities in healthy (a) and damaged (b) parts of the reef.

(Hemingson et al., Global Change Biology, 2022)

This doesn't bode well for reef fishes in warming waters, so Hemingson and colleagues looked back at data collected annually for the past 27 years on fish communities inhabiting reefs around Orpheus Island, to see whether the trends held true over time.

We know from other previous studies that just 2 percent of the Great Barrier Reef remains untouched by the five mass coral bleaching events of the past 30 years – a truly horrific toll of human-caused, emissions-driven marine heatwaves.

The first recorded mass bleaching event of 1998 hit the reefs around Orpheus Island especially hard, damaging complex branching corals and leading to a "complete shift" in fish communities, Hemingson and colleagues found.

The most eye-catching yellow and green fishes, such as the lemon damselfish and green coral goby, have declined in abundance in the three decades since, by about two-thirds.

"Ongoing declines (exacerbated by further disturbance events) are likely to lead to a complete loss of these brightly colored species," which would effectively 'drain' the color out of fish communities, making them dull and drab, Hemingson and his coral reef compadres write.

Although the massive and encrusting boulder corals that replaced soft, branching corals are more resilient to heat impacts – literally hardening the reef to future stressors – they probably provide less protection from predators for brightly-colored fishes.

"Unfortunately, this means that the corals that are most capable of surviving the immediate impacts of climate change are unlikely to maintain the diversity of colors currently supported by coral reefs," the researchers write.

"Fish communities on future reefs are therefore likely to be a duller version of their previous configurations, even if coral cover remains high."

Hemingson acknowledges the grief that people may feel as fish species and corals are lost – an ecological grief that scientists studying coral reefs first-hand know all too well.

But as scientists have shown with gusto, grief can be a powerful motivational force that spurs people to take action, too.

"I can either give up when I feel upset, or use those emotions to motivate me and find better solutions," Emma Camp, a coral biologist at the University of Technology Sydney told Nature in 2019.

Fighting words for us all to live by.

The study was published in Global Change Biology.

Source

This is introduced by a New Zealand-based food tech company, Miruku. With their experiences in the fields of dairy or plant science, Amos Palfreyman, Ira Bing, Harjinder Singh, and Oded Shoseyov founded the company in 2020. Miruku labs and greenhouses serve as the stage in the programming of plant cells as mini-factories for the production of dairy proteins.

In contrast to its competitors that make dairy in fermentation chambers or use animal cells outside the animal to make dairy materials in cultivation chambers, the Miruku approach is characterized by breeding and engineering new plant crops that would directly produce dairy building blocks. 

What is more interesting here, according to CEO Palfreyman, is that these dairy foods from plant protein ingredients would not only be similar to actual dairy in terms of odor and taste. It will also provide equivalent nutrition. Hence, this product could serve as your dairy in baking. They would also have amino acid building blocks necessary to repair and build our bodies.

Production scaling and challenges

The CEO admitted that programming the plant to express the proteins of mammals, which maintain its function and structure, is indeed a challenge.  

The process of scaling the plant production simply involves planting the seeds (that express target proteins) in greenhouses or fields. The challenge, however, lies in engineering and breeding of the required traits. This process typically involves a tradeoff between the use of energy and levels of expression. Miruku, however, believes that this part of the scalability equation could be addressed by its use of computational biology and techno-economic analyses in order to model the maximum levels of expression.

The future of dairy proteins made from plants  

The commercial market would have to wait for two to three years more before tasting this dairy protein from plants, according to Miruku’s target. Before then, however, the company will be creating prototypes and proofs of concept.  

For the first one and a half years, the company was funded by its founders. Currently, however, it has secured seed funding amounting to $2.4 million. The investment was led by Movac. This funding will be utilized to develop partnerships, fast-track development programs, and hire more technology staff. This will capacitate the company to scale and build on for the next milestones, hopefully by 2023. Miruku may be an early-stage company but is gaining traction with the right partners close to the consumer markets. 

The company is the first molecular farming dairy startup in the Asia Pacific region, according to Palfreyman. Similar companies are Nobell Foods which is also engaged in molecular dairy farming, and Notco, Climax Foods, and Perfect Day, which focus on animal-free technology.

Miruku introduces dairy proteins made from plants

Her idea, which sounds like a Magneto superpower, is one of 17 projects that received funding last month from NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC), a program that invests in high-risk, high-reward proposals. Each phase 1 project, like D’Onghia’s radiation concept, received $175,000 apiece for a nine-month study, while the five proposals that advanced to phase 2 were each awarded $600,000 for a two-year period. Within a couple of decades, a few of them could mature enough to be part of the next generation of space missions. “Their job is really to change the future,” says Ron Turner, a senior science adviser for the NIAC program and an analyst at the nonprofit company Analytic Services, Inc. “We are here looking for innovative ideas that might somehow change the way space and aeronautics are done.”

Scientists like D’Onghia are exploring far-out ideas, but they also must demonstrate their feasibility and benefits, Turner says. Funding from the program helps people study each aspect of their proposal in more detail to see what exactly needs to be done to make it a reality. The proposals need not be targeted toward NASA; for example, one of the projects funded in the most recent round is a concept for defending Earth against a killer asteroid on a collision course with our planet. Others include sending a space balloon to Venus, and creating a foldable space station.

D’Onghia’s magnetic field project emerged from coffee shop conversations a few years ago with Paolo Desiati, her physicist colleague at the University of Wisconsin. They wanted to attack a futuristic health problem: As a spacecraft heads toward Mars, it will be bombarded with charged particles from the sun, and cosmic rays that can come from much farther away. Over an approximately nine-month trip, astronauts will be exposed to a significant amount of radiation, causing cellular damage and increasing their risk of cancer. Even if astronauts don’t linger on the Red Planet and promptly make the return trip home, their exposure will put them over the career-long radiation limit NASA recommends. “Until we solve this, we’re not going to Mars,” D’Onghia says.

They came up with a concept called CREW HaT, short for “Cosmic Radiation Extended Warding using the Halbach Torus,” a device made of magnetic coils with superconducting tapes that could be installed on a spacecraft’s exterior. Their design includes eight angled panels arranged in a circle, each with magnets in them, to ward off at least half the cosmic rays that hit with energies up to 1 billion electron-volts. (That’s actually not much energy, but the health risks accumulate over time.) The magnetic field the panels create would change the trajectories of incoming charged particles so they don’t hit the bodies of the passengers inside. The CREW HaT, which is a form of active shielding, would be combined with passive shielding—building spacecraft from materials designed to absorb some radiation.

Their goal is to design a version that’s not too heavy and doesn’t use too much power, so that it could be launched with a spacecraft like NASA’s Orion or SpaceX’s Starship and switched on outside the Earth’s protective magnetosphere. Before they can build a prototype, their next steps include extending their calculations to include higher-energy cosmic rays, to see whether the tech could be used to divert them without increasing the weight of the apparatus too much. “This is the challenge. Previous concepts turned out to be extremely heavy and not realistic, but they laid the road to new ideas,” Desiati says.

Graphic depiction of the CREW HaT concept.Illustration: Elena D’Onghia

Another newly funded NIAC concept envisions a last-minute defense against a planet-killing asteroid or comet heading straight for Earth. Scientists believe they’ve detected at least 90 percent of near-Earth asteroids half a mile across or larger, which could be big enough to wipe out humanity. Yet it’s still possible—though unlikely—that such a large object could elude detection systems until it’s found with only a short warning time, like the comet in the movie Don’t Look Up. When an object is that close, nudging it aside with something like NASA’s DART spacecraft is no longer an option. “This is a bad day. And you cannot deflect this object with any reasonable mass that humanity has access to. Unless you can arrange to get the moon in front of it,” jokes Philip Lubin, an astrophysicist at UC Santa Barbara, who leads the project.

Lubin’s “PI Terminal Defense for Humanity” concept involves launching a huge rocket, like SpaceX’s Starship or NASA’s Space Launch System, which would deploy a series of rodlike “penetrator interceptors” to strike the asteroid and blow it up in multiple waves, ultimately pulverizing it. The modified rocket needs either numerous interceptors with explosives or fewer interceptors with nuclear warheads, Lubin says, “because you need a crapload of energy—that’s a scientific term—to take this thing apart.” (The rocket itself doesn’t need to fly that fast, since all the speed and momentum comes from the asteroid.) If the plan works, the space rock would get broken up into bits small enough to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, rather than causing regional or even global devastation. “What would’ve killed millions of people is now a light and sound show,” Lubin says.

As he and his colleagues move forward with the project, Lubin plans to work on the penetrator design and use supercomputers to simulate the effects of those interceptor impacts on an asteroid at a speed of 50,000 miles per hour.

Graphic depiction of PI Terminal Defense for Humanity.

Illustration: Phillip Lubin

Another NIAC award went to a proposed space balloon mission to Venus, Earth’s neighbor. Compared to Mars, Venus has been somewhat neglected, although last year NASA announced two upcoming Venus missions: DAVINCI+ and VERITAS. “Those missions right now don’t have an astrobiology focus, no search for habitability or signs of life,” says Sara Seager, a MIT astronomer. Her project aims to rectify that.

Venus is plagued by a runaway greenhouse effect. The world’s surface is 800 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to melt lead. No lander lasts long, and it’s unlikely life could arise on the ground. But tiny lifeforms could exist in the cooler atmosphere, Seager says. In 2020, scientists published a study saying they had detected phosphine in the planet’s atmosphere, and that it could be a possible sign of life. The study was hotly debated, and other researchers have put forward alternate theories for what could be generating phosphine, but it did renew interest in the planet.

Seager’s idea involves sending an orbiter that deploys an inflatable probe, which looks like a hot-air balloon with no opening. While that’s not the only Venus balloon concept out there, what they do next with it is new. At around 30 miles above the surface, a canister hanging from the balloon would scoop up some cloud particles, including some liquid and solid material—and potentially any little alien microbes that are up there, which Seager says might be as small as 0.2 microns. But since it would be extremely tough to design an instrument with a microscope that could examine the contents of the canister in flight, she proposes returning the sample to Earth. (This is also the plan for Mars rock samples, and for those from asteroids like Ryugu and Bennu.) Her design calls for the sample to be slotted in a small rocket, which would ascend and rendezvous with the orbiter, which would carry it home. “This search for signs of life on Venus has been around for a long time, and now the stars are aligned to start taking it seriously,” she says.

With their NIAC funding, Seager and her colleagues now aim to nail down some of the details, including exactly how big the balloon, sample container, and rocket have to be.

The latest batch of NIAC-supported concepts include other far-out ideas too, like a body-scanning device that can then create bespoke spacesuits, and a relatively quiet propulsion system for an aircraft that can vertically take off and land. After phase 1 runs its course, some researchers will make so much progress that NIAC will further fund them with a phase 2 award, giving them more time to develop prototypes or work with other organizations or companies that can do so. Projects that advanced to the second round this time include a concept for a kilometer-long space station that could fit inside a single rocket and unfold around the moon.

While most NIAC concepts might take decades before scientists and engineers iron out the details, some quickly make the transition from drawing board to space mission applications, Turner says. Chris Walker, a University of Arizona astronomer, designed an inflatable space antenna through NIAC, and then soon cofounded the startup company Freefall Aerospace to further develop the technology. A small version of the original concept, called CatSat, is now slated for launch this summer. A different NIAC project led to a technology demonstration called Mars Cube One (MarCO), twin communications-relay CubeSats built by scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory that launched in 2018 with the Mars InSight mission.

D’Onghia and Desiati were thrilled that NASA officials listened to them and took their work on magnetic fields seriously. In the alternative worlds of sci-fi, someone always invents some kind of shield against various types of space radiation, Desiati points out. “Elena and I are very excited to be part of a process that might actually end up producing a real space shield,” he says. “It’s science fiction becoming reality, which is kind of mind-blowing.”

NASA Bets on an Asteroid Killer, a Venusian Balloon, and More New Tech

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The findings come from a review of medical marijuana card holders in the United States. A growing number of states now allow the use and sale of medical marijuana to help alleviate the symptoms of conditions including epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, and the side-effects from chemotherapy.

“There have been many claims about the benefits of medical marijuana for treating pain, insomnia, anxiety and depression, without sound scientific evidence to support them,” says Professor Jodi Gilman in a media release.

“In this first study of patients randomized to obtain medical marijuana cards, we learned there can be negative consequences to using cannabis for medical purposes. People with pain, anxiety or depression symptoms failed to report any improvements, though those with insomnia experienced improved sleep.”

Those with anxiety or depression were most vulnerable to CUD, a discovery Prof. Gilman describes is “particularly disturbing.” The team notes that these are also the most common conditions patients seek a medical cannabis prescription to treat.



Does the medical marijuana prescription system need an overhaul?

The findings suggest the need for stronger safeguards over dispensing and tracking of patients, the MGH team says. In the U.S., medical cannabis cards require written approval of a licensed doctor who is typically not the patient’s primary care provider. They may provide authorization with only a cursory examination, no recommendations for alternative treatments, and no follow-up. In fact, the industry functions outside regulatory standards that apply to most fields of medicine.

In the trial, Prof. Gilman and colleagues recruited 269 adults from Boston interested in obtaining an MMC. Study authors split the participants into two groups, with one having access to marijuana immediately and the second having to wait — acting as a control.

Over the next 12 weeks, the risk of developing CUD nearly doubled among the people getting immediate access to medical marijuana.

By the end of the trial, doctors diagnosed one in 10 with addiction. That number rose to 20 percent among participants seeking a card for anxiety or depression.

“Our study underscores the need for better decision-making about whether to begin to use cannabis for specific medical complaints, particularly mood and anxiety disorders, which are associated with an increased risk of cannabis use disorder,” Prof. Gilman says.

“There needs to be better guidance to patients around a system that currently allows them to choose their own products, decide their own dosing, and often receive no professional follow-up care.”

The study findings are published in JAMA Network Open.

Source

A survey has highlighted the disparity in engineer salaries around the world, with US developers pocketing far more than their British equivalents.

The report, from gamified programming outfit Codingame, was culled from its community of two million developers (along with tech recruiters) and showed that the US remained the top-paying country for software engineers, with an average annual salary of $95,879.

Furthermore, more than 40 percent of developers working in the US raked in over $100k a year and 5 percent pull in more than $200k per annum, according to the report.

Close behind was Switzerland, with a $90,462 average salary, Canada was at $71,193, while UK techies trailed in fourth, with an average salary of $68,664. Still nothing to be sneezed at, but quite some way behind the US.

It could be worse. Germany came in at sixth place with $61,390. France was down at ninth with $47,617, and Spain rounded out the top 10 with an average salary of $39,459 for software engineers.

Before anyone feels too hard done by, software engineers in India, Morocco, and Tunisia were at the bottom of the table, with averages of $19,553, $18,318, and $16,796 respectively.

The survey did not take into account the cost of living in the countries featured in the league table (comparing the cost of a house in San Francisco with one in Pune would provide more context), nor did it break down the numbers into what languages paid the best. It did, however, tell us that the average it cited was the mean rather than median.

A glance at the Stack Overflow survey for 2021 shows that Clojure is a high-paying language, DynamoDB engineers are making the big bucks, while AWS is just beating Azure on salary for cloud experts.

Still, while UK coders may not be the highest salaried in the world, the average salary has comfortably broken through the £50k ($66,300) barrier and remains higher than the national average. After Switzerland, Brits also pocket the most cash compared to their European equivalents.

Is that enough to stop techies in search of a better deal jumping through the hoops set by certain companies? Well, we are in the midst of the Great Resignation after all... ®

Source

“Evolution can occur really, really rapidly”

Honda just built the world’s most advanced wind tunnel in Ohio

Imagine that while you are enjoying your morning bowl of Cheerios, a spider drops from the ceiling and plops into the milk. Years later, you still can’t get near a bowl of cereal without feeling overcome with disgust.

Researchers have now directly observed what happens inside a brain learning that kind of emotionally charged response. In a new study published in January in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team at the University of Southern California was able to visualize memories forming in the brains of laboratory fish, imaging them under the microscope as they bloomed in beautiful fluorescent greens. From earlier work, they had expected the brain to encode the memory by slightly tweaking its neural architecture. Instead, the researchers were surprised to find a major overhaul in the connections.

What they saw reinforces the view that memory is a complex phenomenon involving a hodgepodge of encoding pathways. But it further suggests that the type of memory may be critical to how the brain chooses to encode it—a conclusion that may hint at why some kinds of deeply conditioned traumatic responses are so persistent, and so hard to unlearn.

“It may be that what we’re looking at is the equivalent of a solid-state drive” in the brain, said coauthor Scott Fraser, a quantitative biologist at USC. While the brain records some types of memories in a volatile, easily erasable form, fear-ridden memories may be stored more robustly, which could help to explain why years later, some people can recall a memory as if reliving it, he said.

Memory has frequently been studied in the cortex, which covers the top of the mammalian brain, and in the hippocampus at the base. But it’s been examined less often in deeper structures such as the amygdala, the brain’s fear regulation center. The amygdala is particularly responsible for associative memories, an important class of emotionally charged memories that link disparate things—like that spider in your cereal. While this type of memory is very common, how it forms is not well understood, partly because it occurs in a relatively inaccessible area of the brain.

Fraser and his colleagues saw an opportunity to get around that anatomical limitation and learn more about associative memory formation by using zebra fish. Fish don’t have an amygdala as mammals do, but they have an analogous region called a pallium where associative memories form. The pallium is much more accessible for study, Fraser explained: While a developing mammalian brain grows by just getting bigger—“inflating like it’s a balloon”—the zebra fish brain almost turns itself inside out “like a popcorn kernel, so those deep centers are up near the surface where we can image them.” What’s more, zebra fish larvae are transparent, so the researchers could peer directly into their brains.

Neuroscientists generally agree that the brain forms memories by modifying its synapses—the tiny junctures where neurons meet. But most believe that it mainly does so by tweaking the strength of the connections, or how strongly one neuron stimulates the next, Fraser said.

So to make that process visible, Fraser and his team genetically engineered zebra fish to produce neurons with a fluorescent protein marker bound to their synapses. The marker protein, created in the lab of Don Arnold, a professor of biological sciences and biological engineering at USC, fluoresced under the dim laser light of a custom microscope. The challenge was “to be able to eavesdrop on something as it takes place,” but use as little light as possible to avoid scorching the creatures, Fraser said. The researchers could then see not only the location of individual synapses but also their strength—the brighter the light, the stronger the connection.

Quantitative biologist Scott Fraser and colleagues at USC observed memory formation in the brains of zebra fish.Courtesy of Scott Fraser

To induce a memory, Fraser and his team conditioned the zebra fish larvae to associate a light with being uncomfortably heated, much as the 19th-century Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov conditioned his dogs to salivate in expectation of a treat when they heard the sound of a bell. The zebra fish larvae learned to try to swim away whenever they saw the light. (In the experiment, the larvae’s heads were immobilized, but their tails were free to swish around as an indicator of the learned behavior.) The researchers imaged the pallium before and after the fish learned, and analyzed the changes in synapse strength and location.

Contrary to expectation, the synaptic strengths in the pallium remained about the same regardless of whether the fish learned anything. Instead, in the fish that learned, the synapses were pruned from some areas of the pallium—producing an effect “like cutting a bonsai tree,” Fraser said—and replanted in others.

Previous studies have sometimes suggested that memories can form through the addition and deletion of synapses—but this real-time and large-scale visualization of the brain suggests that this method of memory formation may be much more significant than researchers realized. Though it’s not definitive proof, “I think it provides compelling evidence” that this could be a major way the brain forms memories, said Tomás Ryan, a neuroscientist at Trinity College Dublin who was not involved with the study.

To reconcile the results of their new study with their initial expectations of memory formation, Fraser, Arnold, and their team hypothesize that the type of memory might direct how the brain chooses to encode it. These “associative events that we’ve looked at might be the strongest sort of memories,” Fraser said. For the fish they’re do-or-die, so “it’s not too surprising that you might encode these strong memories in a very strong way.”

But what’s appropriate for locking in fear-ridden memories may not be best for more mundane types of memories. When learning to pronounce somebody’s name, you probably “wouldn’t want to be yanking synapses out of your brain and adding new ones,” Fraser said.

Fraser and his team hope that this model might eventually help them examine mechanisms involved in the memories that trigger post-traumatic stress disorder, and that it might even lead to potential strategies for moderating that condition.

But it’s possible that the findings have more to do with the age of the zebra fish than with the type of memory formed, said Cliff Abraham, a professor of psychology at the University of Otago in New Zealand who was also not part of the study. “We know that there’s a lot of pruning and synaptic reorganization as a result of experience during development in different parts of the brain,” Abraham said. If the researchers look at adult zebra fish—which is harder to do because they’re less transparent and have bigger brains—they might get different results.

The paper is a “technical tour de force,” he added, but it’s only a piece of the puzzle of how memories form, and there are still many remaining unanswered questions, such as how long those memories and synaptic changes persist in the zebra fish.

The researchers hope to see if the findings translate to animals with larger brains and even to mammals, and to examine how these zebra fish and other animals form memories that are less emotionally laden or traumatic.

“I think everybody has thought that there’s a whole range of ways that a brain could be storing memories,” Fraser said. “The beauty of it is, I bet all of them are right. And the question’s going to be: How does it all work together?”

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

Scientists Watch a Memory Form in a Living Brain

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"Dyspnoea and extreme tiredness were more common heart attack symptoms in women, older people and patients with other conditions such as high blood pressure, diabetes, kidney disease and lung disease," said study author Dr. Paulo Medeiros of Braga Hospital, Portugal. "While our study did not show that these symptoms cause poorer outcome, they were warning signs of greater risk."

Chest pain is the hallmark presentation of myocardial infarction but other complaints such as shortness of breath, upper abdominal or neck pain, or transient loss of consciousness (blackouts) may be the reason to attend the emergency department. This study investigated which patients tend to present with atypical complaints and whether these symptoms result in the same consequences as chest pain.

The study focused on non-ST-elevation myocardial infarction (NSTEMI), a type of heart attack in which an artery supplying blood to the heart becomes partially blocked. The researchers used data from the Portuguese Registry of Acute Coronary Syndromes. The study included 4,726 patients aged 18 years and older admitted with NSTEMI between October 2010 and September 2019.

The average age of study participants was 68 years and 71% were men. Patients were divided into three groups according to their main symptom at presentation. Chest pain was the most common presenting symptom (4,313 patients; 91%), followed by dyspnoea/fatigue (332 patients; 7%) and syncope (81 patients; 2%).

Patients with dyspnoea/fatigue were significantly older than those in the other two groups, with an average age of 75 years compared with 68 years in the chest pain group and 74 years in the syncope group. Those with dyspnoea/fatigue were also more commonly women (42%) compared to patients with chest pain as the main symptom (29% women) or syncope (37% women). Compared to the other two groups, patients with dyspnoea/fatigue as their main symptom were more likely to have high blood pressure, diabetes, chronic kidney disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

The researchers compared rates of survival between the three groups at one year. At one year after the heart attack, 76% of patients in the dyspnoea/fatigue group were alive compared with 94% of the chest pain group and 92% of the syncope group. During the year after their heart attack, 76% of patients in the dyspnoea/fatigue group avoided being hospitalized for a cardiovascular reason compared with 85% of the chest pain group and 83% of the syncope group.

Dr. Medeiros said: "Patients presenting with shortness of breath or fatigue had a worse prognosis than those with chest pain. They were less likely to be alive one year after their heart attack and also less likely to stay out of hospital for heart problems during that 12-month period."

The researchers then conducted a multivariate analysis to assess whether chest pain, dyspnoea/fatigue or syncope were independent predictors of one-year survival. The analysis was adjusted for age, COPD, atrial fibrillation, left ventricular ejection fraction, major bleeding, and ventricular tachycardia. None of the symptoms emerged as independent predictors.

Dr. Medeiros explained: "Shortness of breath was more common among patients that died during the year after their heart attack.

However, when considering all of the studied variables, the type of presenting symptom was not an independent predictor of mortality, meaning that we cannot specifically state that shortness of breath was the reason for the worse outcome. Poorer survival may be due to other factors in those patients, such as reduced heart pump function."

He concluded: "This study highlights the need to consider a diagnosis of myocardial infarction even when the primary complaint is not chest pain. This may be particularly important for women and older patients where diagnosis could be delayed and result in worse outcomes. In addition to the classic heart attack symptom of chest pain, pressure, or heaviness radiating to one or both arms, the neck or jaw, people should seek urgent medical help if they experience prolonged shortness of breath."

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The latest booster shot will be made available to care home residents, people aged over 75 and the immunosuppressed.

Around five million people are expected to be offered the jab, and 600,000 are being invited to book their appointments next week, according to the NHS.

"Our phenomenal vaccination programme has saved countless lives and built a wall of defence which has allowed us to learn to live with COVID," Health and Social Care Secretary Sajid Javid said:

"Following the massive success of the rollout so far, we are now offering over-75s and the most vulnerable a spring booster dose to top up their protection against this virus."

Cases are soaring once again across Britain due to a rampant Omicron variant, with around 1 in 20 people currently infected.

Hospitalisations are once again rising, but the number of people in high-dependency care remains low.

Speaking at his Conservative Party's Spring conference, Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Saturday said: "We're getting ready for the fourth jab, because we're going to need it."

Britain has been one of the world's hardest hit countries during the pandemic, with more than 163,000 people dying after contracting the disease.

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Startling heatwaves at both of Earth’s poles are causing alarm among climate scientists, who have warned the “unprecedented” events could signal faster and abrupt climate breakdown.

Temperatures in Antarctica reached record levels at the weekend, an astonishing 40C above normal in places.

At the same time, weather stations near the north pole also showed signs of melting, with some temperatures 30C above normal, hitting levels normally attained far later in the year.

At this time of year, the Antarctic should be rapidly cooling after its summer, and the Arctic only slowly emerging from its winter, as days lengthen. For both poles to show such heating at once is unprecedented.

The rapid rise in temperatures at the poles is a warning of disruption in Earth’s climate systems. Last year, in the first chapter of a comprehensive review of climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned of unprecedented warming signals already occurring, resulting in some changes – such as polar melt – that could rapidly become “irreversible”.

The danger is twofold: heatwaves at the poles are a strong signal of the damage humanity is wreaking on the climate; and the melting could also trigger further cascading changes that will accelerate climate breakdown.

As polar sea ice melts, particularly in the Arctic, it reveals dark sea that absorbs more heat than reflective ice, warming the planet further. Much of the Antarctic ice covers land, and its melting raises sea levels.

Scientists warned that the events unfolding were “historic”, “unprecedented” and “dramatic”.

The Associated Press reported that one weather station in Antarctica beat its all time record by 15C, while another coastal station used to deep freezes at this time of year was 7C above freezing.

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Now, seven months after Kabul had fallen to the Taliban, he was at the wheel of his Honda Accord, headed north on I-95 from his home in Woodbridge, Va., toward Washington, D.C. Payenda swiped at his phone and opened the Uber app, which offered his "quest" for the weekend. For now his success was measured in hundreds of dollars rather than billions.

"If I complete 50 trips in the next two days, I receive a $95 bonus," he said as he navigated the light Friday-night traffic.

The job was his way of supporting his wife and four children after he burned through his family's savings from Afghanistan. "I feel incredibly grateful for it," said the 40-year-old. "It means I don't have to be desperate." It was also a temporary reprieve from obsessing over the ongoing tragedy in his country, which was suffering through a catastrophic drought, a pandemic, international sanctions, a collapsed economy, a famine and the resurgence of Taliban rule.

Senior U.S. officials have largely moved on from the Afghanistan war, which began 20 years earlier with high-minded promises of democracy, human rights and women's rights and ended with an American president blaming Afghans, such as a Payenda, for the mess left behind.

"So what's happened? Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country," President Joe Biden said as desperate Afghans rushed to the airport the day after Kabul fell, adding: "We gave them every tool they could need. . . . We gave them every chance to determine their own future. What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future."

Khalid Payenda looks at his Uber app as he starts his shift. (Astrid Riecken for The Washington Post)

The question of what happened and who was at fault haunted Payenda. He blamed his fellow Afghans. "We didn't have the collective will to reform, to be serious," he said. He blamed the Americans for handing the country to the Taliban and betraying the enduring values that supposedly had animated their fight. He blamed himself.

"It eats at you inside," he said. He felt trapped between his old life and dreams for Afghanistan and a new life in the United States that he had never really wanted. "Right now, I don't have any place," he said. "I don't belong here, and I don't belong there. It's a very empty feeling."

He crossed the Potomac River into D.C. On his right, monuments to America's democracy and its Founding Fathers shone against the night sky. His Honda rolled to a stop in front of the Kennedy Center, where two George Washington University students were waiting for him.

They settled into the back seat of his sedan and began talking about their day - the sudden drop in temperature, their plans for dinner, a mishap earlier that morning on the Metro train. "I dropped my phone and it slid down the entire car," one of the women was saying. "It was the worst moment of my entire life."

After a few minutes' drive, Payenda dropped the women at their apartment and quickly checked his phone.

"Four-dollar tip," he said.

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