In a study published this month in Communications Biology, researchers from Osaka University have revealed that the meaning of what a person is imagining can be determined from their brain wave pattern, even if the image differs from what the person is looking at.

When we see images in real life, whether we are talking to a friend, watching a movie, or watching a beautiful sunset, our brains take in this visual information in a way that can be detected by a technique called electrocorticogram, which detects patterns of electrical activity in the brain. These patterns are not set in stone, however; they can be changed by what we are paying attention to or imagining at the time.

"Attention is known to modulate neural representations of perceived images," says lead author of the study Ryohei Fukuma. "However, we didn't know whether imagining a different image could also change these representations."

To test this, the researchers developed a new technology by working with patients with epilepsy who already had electrodes implanted in their brains to record and display electrocorticogram readouts of images that they were imagining. The patients were shown an image of the real-time readout and instructed to mentally picture a different image representing a "landscape," "human face," or "word" (for example, thinking of a human face while looking at various types of images) to control the readout.

A total of 32 images, shown from left to right for one for every two images, were displayed for 250 ms each during each attempt to display the image of the target meaning. The images underlined in red are those that corresponded correctly to the target meaning. Credit: Communications Biology (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s42003-022-03137-x

"The results clarified the relationship between brain activities when people look at images versus when they imagine them," explains Takufumi Yanagisawa, senior author. "The electrocorticogram readouts of the imagined images were distinct from those provoked by the actual images viewed by the patients. They could also be modified to be even more distinct when the patients received real-time feedback."

The time needed to generate a very clear distinction between the imagined image and the viewed image was different for imagining a "word" and a "landscape," which could have something to do with the different parts of the brain involved in imagining these two concepts.

"Our findings suggest that a readout image controlled by the subject's imagery can be inferred by an observer using this technology," says Fukuma.

During the experiment, the subjects were instructed to imagine an image of target meaning (human face, landscape, or word). The subjects attempted to display the image of the target meaning on the monitor by visually imagining it. Credit: Ryohei Fukuma et al.

Given the accuracy with which this new technology displays images that exist within the subject's mind, a similar approach could be used to develop a communication device for severely paralyzed patients, such as those with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Similar devices already used by some patients with this condition rely on motor control, which degenerates more quickly than visual cortical activity, so an imagery-based device could be highly valuable.

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Weather stations in Antarctica shattered records Friday as the region neared autumn. The two-mile high (3,234 meters) Concordia station was at 10 degrees (-12.2 degrees Celsius),which is about 70 degrees warmer than average, while the even higher Vostok station hit a shade above 0 degrees (-17.7 degrees Celsius), beating its all-time record by about 27 degrees (15 degrees Celsius), according to a tweet from extreme weather record tracker Maximiliano Herrera.

The coastal Terra Nova Base was far above freezing at 44.6 degrees (7 degrees Celsius).

It caught officials at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, by surprise because they were paying attention to the Arctic where it was 50 degrees warmer than average and areas around the North Pole were nearing or at the melting point, which is really unusual for mid-March, said center ice scientist Walt Meier.

"They are opposite seasons. You don't see the north and the south (poles) both melting at the same time," Meier told The Associated Press Friday evening. "It's definitely an unusual occurrence."

"It's pretty stunning," Meier added.

"Wow. I have never seen anything like this in the Antarctic," said University of Colorado ice scientist Ted Scambos, who returned recently from an expedition to the continent.

"Not a good sign when you see that sort of thing happen," said University of Wisconsin meteorologist Matthew Lazzara.

Lazzara monitors temperatures at East Antarctica's Dome C-ii and logged 14 degrees (-10 degrees Celsius) Friday, where the normal is -45 degrees (-43 degrees Celsius): "That's a temperature that you should see in January, not March. January is summer there.

That's dramatic."

Both Lazzara and Meier said what happened in Antarctica is probably just a random weather event and not a sign of climate change. But if it happens again or repeatedly then it might be something to worry about and part of global warming, they said.

The Antarctic warm spell was first reported by The Washington Post.

The Antarctic continent as a whole on Friday was about 8.6 degrees (4.8 degrees Celsius) warmer than a baseline temperature between 1979 and 2000, according to the University of Maine's Climate Reanalyzer, based on U.S. National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration weather models. That 8-degree heating over an already warmed-up average is unusual, think of it as if the entire United States was 8 degrees hotter than normal, Meier said.

At the same time, on Friday the Arctic as a whole was 6 degrees (3.3 degrees) warmer than the 1979 to 2000 average.

By comparison, the world as a whole was only 1.1 degrees (0.6 degrees Celsius) above the 1979 to 2000 average. Globally the 1979 to 2000 average is about half a degree (.3 degrees Celsius) warmer than the 20th century average.

What makes the Antarctic warming really weird is that the southern continent—except for its vulnerable peninsula which is warming quickly and losing ice rapidly—has not been warming much, especially when compared to the rest of the globe, Meier said.

Antarctica did set a record for the lowest summer sea ice—records go back to 1979—with it shrinking to 741,000 square miles (1.9 million square kilometers) in late February, the snow and ice data center reported.

What likely happened was "a big atmospheric river" pumped in warm and moist air from the Pacific southward, Meier said.

And in the Arctic, which has been warming two to three times faster than the rest of the globe and is considered vulnerable to climate change, warm Atlantic air was coming north off the coast of Greenland.

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“This event is completely unprecedented and upended our expectations about the Antarctic climate system,” said Jonathan Wille, a researcher studying polar meteorology at Université Grenoble Alpes in France, in an email.

“Antarctic climatology has been rewritten,” tweeted Stefano Di Battista, a researcher who has published studies on Antarctic temperatures. He added that such temperature anomalies would have been considered “impossible” and “unthinkable” before they actually occurred.

Parts of eastern Antarctica have seen temperatures hover 70 degrees (40 Celsius) above normal for three days and counting, Wille said. He likened the event to the June heat wave in the Pacific Northwest, which scientists concluded would have been “virtually impossible” without human-caused climate change.

What is considered “warm” over the frozen, barren confines of eastern Antarctica is, of course, relative. Instead of temperatures being minus-50 or minus-60 degrees (minus-45 or minus-51 Celsius), they’ve been closer to zero or 10 degrees (minus-18 Celsius or minus-12 Celsius) — but that’s a massive heat wave by Antarctic standards.

The average high temperature in Vostok — at the center of the eastern ice sheet — is around minus-63 (minus-53 Celsius) in March. But on Friday, the temperature leaped to zero (minus-17.7 Celsius), the warmest it’s been there during March since record keeping began 65 years ago. It broke the previous monthly record by a staggering 27 degrees (15 Celsius).

“In about 65 record years in Vostok, between March and October, values above -30°C were never observed,” wrote Di Battista in an email.

Vostok, a Russian meteorological observatory, is about 808 miles southeast of the South Pole and sits 11,444 feet above sea level. It’s famous for holding the lowest temperature ever observed on Earth: minus-128.6 degrees (minus-89.2 Celsius), set on July 21, 1983.

Temperatures running at least 50 degrees (32 Celsius) above normal have expanded over vast portions of eastern Antarctica from the Adélie Coast through much of the eastern ice sheet’s interior. Some computer model simulations and observations suggest temperatures may have even climbed up to 90 degrees (50 Celsius) above normal in a few areas.

Eastern Antarctica’s Concordia research station, operated by France and Italy and about 350 miles from Vostok, climbed to 10 degrees (minus-12.2 Celsius), its highest temperature on record for any month of the year. Average high temperatures in March are around minus-56 (minus-48.7 Celsius).

At a nearby weather station, the temperature reached 13.6 degrees (minus-10.2 Celsius) about 67 degrees (37 Celsius) above average, according to University of Wisconsin Antarctic researchers Linda Keller and Matt Lazzara.

Keller and Lazzara said in an email that such a high temperature is particularly noteworthy since March marks the beginning of autumn in Antarctica, rather than January, when there is more sunlight. At this time of year, Antarctica is losing about 25 minutes of sunlight each day.

Wille said the warm conditions over Antarctica were spurred by an extreme atmospheric river, or a narrow corridor of water vapor in the sky, on its east coast. According to computer models, the atmospheric river made landfall on Tuesday between the Dumont d’Urville and Casey Stations and dropped an intense amount of rainfall, potentially causing a significant melt event in the area.

The moisture from the storm diffused and spread over the interior of the continent. However, a strong blocking high pressure system or “heat dome,” moved in over east Antarctica, preventing the moisture from escaping. The heat dome was exceptionally intense, five standard deviations above normal.

The excessive moisture from the atmospheric river was able to retain large amounts of heat, while the liquid-rich clouds radiated the heat down to the surface — known as downward long-wave radiation.

Wille explained warm air is often transported over the Antarctic interior this way but not to this extent or intensity. “[T]his is not something we’ve seen before,” he said. “This moisture is the reason why the temperatures have gotten just so high.”

Models show the atmospheric river will exit the continent around Saturday, but the moisture will take longer to dissipate. Abnormally high temperatures in the region could last through the weekend.

The abnormally high temperatures have caused some melting in the region according to models, which is unusual as this part of Antarctica doesn’t experience much melt often. This one melt event won’t affect the stability of the glaciers in that area though.

“This event happened in a location that doesn’t often have melt. Obviously, this doesn’t mean that from now on we’re worried that melting will happen,” Wille said. “It’s more of like, ‘Oh, that is weird, that could happen more in the future and then this could be bad.’”

Wille said it’s difficult to attribute this one event to climate change at the moment, but he does think rising temperatures helped prime conditions for such an event. Climate change is “loading the dice” for more situations like this, he said.

Wille and his colleagues are studying how climate change will affect the circulation patterns around Antarctica and whether atmospheric rivers will become more common or more intense.

“We do believe they will become more intense because it just simple physics … but the details, we’re still trying to figure that out. It would be very difficult to say that there’s not a climate change fingerprint on an event like this,” he said.

Keller and Lazzara suggested more study is needed on the climate change connection.

“[W]e can’t tell whether this is going to be a new trend or is just an oddity that occurs occasionally on a most fascinating continent,” they wrote.

Temperatures are known to vary wildly over Antarctica, and massive swings are common. Contrasting with this warm spell over eastern Antarctica, the South Pole observed just observed its coldest April to September period on record last year, with an average temperature of minus-78 degrees (minus-61 Celsius).

But shortly after that historic bout of cold, the sea ice extent surrounding the continent shrunk to its smallest extent just last month.

Amid all of the variability in Antarctica, fingerprints of human-caused climate change are still evident. Its western ice sheet is losing mass while western parts of the continent and the peninsula are among the fastest-warming regions on Earth.

Warm ocean temperatures threaten to destabilize Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier, a slab the size of Florida that contributes about 4 percent of annual global sea level rise.

Temperature differences from normal over the Arctic and Antarctic in recent days.

The historically high temperatures in Antarctica follow a pulse of exceptional warmth on the planet’s opposite end. On Wednesday, temperatures near the North Pole catapulted 50 degrees above normal, close to the melting point.

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Long before Earth had its first budding cells of primordial ooze, it was awash with a churning organic soup that sat on the brink of something profound.

That thin line between complex chemistry and the evolution of life represents a pivotal moment in the emergence of biology. Unfortunately, for all of its importance, we know very few details about exactly how it happened.

An experiment conducted by the scientists from the University of Tokyo has now reinforced the view that RNA's unique talents have what it takes to explain how life bubbled forth billions of years ago, backing up what's known as the 'RNA world' hypothesis.

But the research also shows that it might not have happened exactly as we thought.

Their work shows how a molecule that remains crucial to the survival and reproduction of every living thing today can inch its way towards an evolving system if it works as a team.

"We found that the single RNA species evolved into a complex replication system: a replicator network comprising five types of RNAs with diverse interactions, supporting the plausibility of a long-envisioned evolutionary transition scenario," says evolutionary biologist Ryo Mizuuchi.

Stripped to its barest essentials, life is made up of molecules that can make imperfect copies of themselves, churning out a virtually limitless population of variants which might (or might not) hold it together long enough to make copies themselves.

The search for life's origin has in effect been a hunt for candidates that can carry out this replication task without a supporting cast of highly specialized organic materials, such as DNA or proteins, to assist.

RNA has long been a frontrunner in this search. It's ubiquitous throughout the biosphere today, could have been present on ancient Earth as a result of non-biological processes, can preserve a large amount of information, and act as a dynamic physical unit.

This means it could potentially make structures that can physically build new molecules that can in turn build new structures. If this process is imperfect, some of the 'replicator' structures will do the job faster or more efficiently than others, becoming the dominant form of RNA ... at least, until something even better comes along.

As alluring as this idea is, we've known for decades that self-constructed units of individual RNA molecules are just too simple and too unstable for such a scenario. Even its deoxygenated sibling, DNA, lacks the grit to hold itself together long enough for natural selection to get off to a flying start.

That doesn't mean multiple strands acting as a team couldn't perform the job instead. Having a handful of different replicative units acting on a population level just might solve this information problem easily.

Various replicators have been designed around RNA, DNA, and even proteins to show how this might feasibly work, with researchers going to lengths to build in functionality that allows the molecule structures to cooperate and make copies at a suitable rate.

While they can sustain replication, until now none have become more complex over time, leaving open the question of whether RNA is capable of evolving.

Mizuuchi's team have cracked the right design of RNA molecules to create individual replicator molecules that can operate collectively to not only preserve information and change over time, but to do so in such a way that the solution becomes more complex over successive generations.

Their experiment used cloned lengths of RNA in water droplets suspended in oil which underwent more than a hundred rounds of replication, with each round being tested and analyzed.

"Honestly, we initially doubted that such diverse RNAs could evolve and coexist," says Mizuuchi.

"In evolutionary biology, the 'competitive exclusion principle' states that more than one species cannot coexist if they are competing for the same resources. This means that the molecules must establish a way to use different resources one after another for sustained diversification. They are just molecules, so we wondered if it were possible for nonliving chemical species to spontaneously develop such innovation."

The proof-of-concept demonstrates this is possible, so long as the RNA don't compete with one another for resources, but rely on one another in a sort of host-parasite manner. If even one RNA replicator is removed, the others go extinct.

While we can be more confident that an 'RNA world' scenario is plausible, it falls short of showing this is how life bloomed on Earth billions of years ago. For that we'd need diverse bodies of evidence, from geology to astrophysics, to build a convincing case.

Nonetheless, it's a solid step forward in our search for chemical models of evolution that are capable of transforming primordial goop into a dazzling array of biodiversity that continues to become more complex to this very day.

This research was published in Nature Communications.

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Staying active during a global pandemic has been quite difficult, especially when many people have been afraid to even go outside. Some have taken to exercising at home, and yet in a normal world, spontaneous outings are important health factors that we tend to underestimate. 

When most of us think of mental-boosting activities, we imagine deliberate and strenuous exercise, like a jog, a bike, or a swim, but it seems that just visiting a variety of different locations is associated with a higher sense of wellbeing in people with depression or anxiety.

A study published last year by researchers at the University Psychiatric Clinics in Basel, Switzerland found the more varied locations people visit, the better they feel about their emotional and psychological wellbeing – even if their mental health symptoms are still there.

The study was conducted before the pandemic hit and it looked at 106 patients with mental health issues, including affective disorders, anxiety disorders, mood disorders, personality disorders, and obsessive-compulsive disorders. Some were inpatients at hospitals and others were outpatients, living at home but seeking regular care at medical institutions.

For a week, these patients carried an extra phone around with them to track their movements with GPS. They also completed several surveys on their subjective wellbeing, their psychological flexibility, and their mental health symptoms.

Comparing GPS maps to the results of these surveys, the authors found greater movement in space and time appeared to coincide with a greater sense of wellbeing, even though the symptoms of mental health issues remained largely the same. 

Outpatients spent nearly a third of their day at home but understandably showed considerably greater movement than inpatients, who spent most of their time within the hospital.

As expected, those patients with phobias or anxieties about leaving safe spaces were strongly linked to much lower mobility and a much smaller activity area. Yet no other symptoms of mental health issues appeared to have the same effect on a patient's daily movements.

In contrast, higher levels of emotional wellbeing and, to a lesser extent, psychological flexibility were consistently associated with more movement and a greater variety of movement.

"Our results suggest that activity alone is not enough to reduce symptoms of mental disorders, but can at least improve subjective wellbeing," explained clinical and health psychologist Andrew Gloster from the University of Basel.

The findings add to a limited body of research on the effects of everyday activities among those with mental health issues. In fact, this is one of the first studies to use GPS tracking as a measure of spontaneous movement. 

Obviously, in the real world, such data could be seen as a breach of patient privacy, but in a study setting, it allows researchers to examine the effects of simple activities that often go overlooked. 

Physical activity has been shown to substantially improve wellbeing and mental health, but most research on this topic has so far focused on deliberate exercise. I's unclear how spontaneous movement in daily life impacts patients who are seeking mental health treatment.

In 2020, a small study of 67 participants found everyday activities, like walking to the tram stop or climbing a flight of stairs, made people feel more alert and energetic.

Further magnetic resonance imaging of participants' brains showed those who felt more energetic after movement had a larger volume of gray brain matter in the subgenual cingulate cortex – a part of the brain associated with emotional regulation.

Figuring out how to apply this knowledge to prevent and treat mental health issues is a whole other matter, but simple movements might be a harmless place to start.

"Currently, we are experiencing strong restrictions of public life and social contacts, which may adversely affect our well-being," said neuroscientist Heike Tost in November 2020. 

"To feel better, it may help to more often climb stairs." 

Merely getting outside may also play a contributing role. Physical activity in nature as a kid has been tied to better mental health outcomes as an adult, and doctors in some places of the world have begun 'prescribing' time in nature as a boost for mental and physical health.

The 2021 GPS study is small and limited, but the findings suggest movement may be a predictor of how well patients with mental health issues are coping overall.

"The results point to the fact that patterns of movement (e.g., distance, number of destinations, variability of destinations, etc.) may serve as a marker of functioning and wellbeing," the authors of the study concluded.

Far more research needs to be done to confirm and expand on these findings, but the authors suggest using GPS could be a non-intrusive way to better examine simple, daily activity and its effect on mental health and wellbeing.

The study was published in BMC Psychiatry.

A version of this article was first published in April 2021.

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The tech giant had engaged in "false, misleading or deceptive conduct" by knowingly hosting the ads for bogus cryptocurrencies, a regulator said.

The US company could face financial and other penalties.

Meta is yet to comment but has previously said it is committed to keeping scammers off its platforms.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) says the ads in question used Facebook's algorithms to target susceptible users and featured bogus quotes by Australian celebrities.

Identities used without permission included former New South Wales Premier Mike Baird, prominent TV host David Koch and millionaire entrepreneur Dick Smith.

"The essence of our case is that Meta is responsible for these ads that it publishes on its platform," ACCC chairman Rod Sims said in a statement on Friday.

The legal action, filed in the Federal Court of Australia, alleges Meta did this knowingly and failed to prevent the scams even after objections were raised by celebrities.

"In one shocking instance, we are aware of a consumer who lost more than A$650,000 (£360,000; $480,000) due to one of these scams being falsely advertised as an investment opportunity on Facebook. This is disgraceful," Mr Sims said.

Last month, Australian billionaire Andrew Forrest launched a criminal case against Meta over fake ads that used his image.

While Dr Forrest accuses the tech giant of breaking anti-money laundering laws, the ACCC's case is about alleged breaches of consumer law or a separate regulatory act.

Meta - which also owns Instagram and Whatsapp - made $115bn in global advertising revenue in 2021.

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Also: Meta sued for allowing fraudulent crypto ads.

At this point in 2021, technology was eating the world and stock markets.

Right now … ehhh, not so much.

A Nasdaq index of about 100 tech stocks has dropped 14 percent from the end of December, significantly more than the declines for collections of U.S. stocks that are not as tech heavy. Tech superstars including Facebook, Alibaba and Tesla have slipped down the ranks of the world’s most valuable companies.

More governments are trying to control how tech companies operate. Some tech investors and observers are beginning to ask if a decade-long boom in start-ups is losing steam, and for real this time. Cryptocurrencies should be having their moment but instead are falling in price. Initial public offerings are mostly on hiatus.

At multiple points in the past decade, many people (including me) have asked if the tech bubble is over, and they’ve been mostly wrong. I’m not going to predict the future but instead try to assess this moment for technology. Some odd things are happening.

Right now, a bit of faith in the ever-upward march of technology seems to have evaporated. It’s not exactly a bursting bubble. It’s more like a (perhaps temporary) shortage of belief in the great magic of technology.

So what is going on?

Look, the world is mobilizing to stop the invasion in Ukraine, the coronavirus pandemic is continuing into its third year and governments are trying to tamp down climbing consumer prices. Those forces and other unsettling events are making investors consider more carefully where they put their money, and in some cases tech companies, start-ups or Bitcoin don’t feel like good bets anymore.

Prior tech freakouts, including during the early months of the pandemic, proved temporary and this one could, too. But again, something does feel different this time. Maybe.

Every other day, some tech company whispers that its sales won’t grow to infinity, and its stock price falls into a crater. Zoom Video Communications, one of the tech companies that proved essential earlier in the pandemic with a soaring share price to match, has now fallen back to its February 2020 stock price.

That is a potent symbol. People with money are saying no right now to buying stock on the hopes of blockbuster sales years into the future. That’s a root cause, too, for a loss of faith in recently public companies including the stock trading app Robinhood, the upstart electric vehicle company Rivian and the Chinese on-demand ride start-up Didi.

Dan Ives, a tech investment analyst with the firm Wedbush Securities, told me that he believed the world’s digital transformation was just getting started and that technology companies would continue to grow larger and stronger.

But he said that investors were rethinking the ability of some young companies to keep growing at the rate they did a year or two ago. In some corners, Ives said, “the froth has clearly come off the tech market.”

Waning optimism is hitting young tech companies that are just getting started. The prices investors are paying for start-ups at early stages of development hit a peak in the second half of 2021, according to a recent financial presentation from the start-up investment firm Redpoint Ventures.

Dan Primack, a journalist at Axios, said two months ago that the “go-go era is history” for tech start-ups and other types of young companies.

Primack knows that similar predictions have been off base repeatedly, but he cited evidence that investors were no longer throwing cash at anyone who says the word “innovation.” Being reckless or even financially irrational has paid off for investors in start-ups for a long time, and Primack’s point was that the riches were no longer as great as they used to be.

Again, all this could prove a blip, and tech could continue to add both wealth and importance. I also know that not many of you are shedding tears over cratered stock prices for Facebook and Netflix. Fair. A blind faith in technology isn’t great for us, but the belief in technology has also been beneficial.

That optimism in technology has given companies the cash and freedom to bring us zippy laptops, Doritos delivered in 15 minutes and more options to work away from an office. If and when the tech party becomes less lavish, the changes that we’ve taken as a given may disappear, in ways that may be both potentially disruptive and healthy. We’ll see.

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BARCELONA, Spain — Is simply living near green leaves and grass enough to make you healthier? A new study reveals children who visit or live near green spaces suffer from less cellular stress that can cause harmful aging and disease.

A team from the Barcelona Institute for Global Health add that exposure to vegetation alone, not physical exercise, likely makes the difference. Scientists found that children exposed to green spaces had lower levels of oxidative stress.

What is oxidative stress?

Oxygen is an essential ingredient for many of the chemical reactions which keep the human body ticking. However, these oxidation processes can generate harmful substances which the body cannot always neutralize quickly.

More specifically, oxidative stress develops when there is an imbalance between the number of harmful oxygen-containing molecules (free radicals) and antioxidants in the body. The permanent damage free radicals can trigger includes accelerated aging and the development of illnesses like cancer or Alzheimer’s disease.

Now, the team in Spain believes green spaces could help limit the damage it causes to children. These benefits could also help kids tackle respiratory illnesses and allergies.

“The short- and long-term health effects of excess oxidative stress are unknown, so we need to conduct further research and support city and public-health strategies that favor greenness,” study author Dr. Garcia-Aymerich at ISGlobal says in a media release.

The researchers analyzed 323 healthy children between eight and 11 years-old from five primary schools in Asti, a small city in northwestern Italy. Their parents filled out a questionnaire revealing how often their children engaged in physical exercise. Study authors then calculated each kid’s level of oxidative stress by measuring the concentration of compounds in their urine.

Researchers also used the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) to figure out how much greenery kids had around their home and school. Results show children with more exposure to vegetation had lower levels of oxidative stress.

What makes nature so beneficial to health?

Several biological mechanisms could explain why green spaces have this effect on a child’s ability to withstand oxidative stress.

“Increased exposure to these areas may contribute to children’s immune development by bringing them into contact with organisms that tend to colonize natural environments,” Dr. Judith Garcia-Aymerich says.

Spending time in green spaces could also expose kids to more sunlight and increase their vitamin D levels. Studies show vitamin D acts like an antioxidant which prevents the negative effects of oxidative stress and inflammation. Last but not least, having more green spaces and plants could also improve the air quality in urban areas where kids live and play.

The team notes, however, that they did not find any evidence that physical exercise contributes to the benefits of green spaces. Dr. Garcia-Aymerich says that even though children often play more outdoors when they have green spaces in their community, the benefits coming from nature don’t require kids to actually be more physical. Essentially, just stopping to smell the roses will improve your health as a child.

The findings are published in the journal Environmental Research.

South West News Service writer Tom Campbell contributed to this report.

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More than a decade after the last space shuttle took flight, NASA’s almost ready to launch a rocket once again. The Space Launch System, the most powerful rocket ever built, is designed to bring the Artemis missions to the moon, starting with Artemis I this spring. But before the big show, engineers have to conduct a battery of tests, putting the fully stacked SLS rocket on the launchpad and running a “wet dress rehearsal” that includes a practice countdown.

NASA engineers plan for the rocket to make its debut on Thursday at 5 pm Eastern time. It will then roll out of the Vehicle Assembly Building and be ferried to Launch Complex 39B at Kennedy Space Center on Florida’s east coast. Engineers and technicians will run a series of prelaunch tests through April 3, and if SLS passes, NASA can set the launch date for the Artemis I mission. But with increasing scrutiny of cost overruns and delays, and with so much effort and funding invested in the Artemis moon program—a test run and staging ground for eventually sending astronauts to Mars—there’s a lot riding on that rocket.

“This is a very exciting time. It’s going to be a wonderful sight when we see that amazing Artemis vehicle cross the threshold of the VAB and we see it outside of that building for the very first time. I think it will be breathtaking and something really special,” said Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, Artemis launch director at Kennedy Space Center, at a press conference on Monday. NASA has already completed some tests, including of the ground and communication systems and of the countdown sequencing. “All of this is leading up to our readiness to roll,” she said.

For the Artemis I mission, the combined SLS rocket and Orion capsule spacecraft stand 322 feet tall—taller even than the Statue of Liberty. NASA employed multiple contractors for the rocket’s construction. It includes a pair of white, shuttle-derived solid rocket boosters, which Northrop Grumman upgraded for SLS. Boeing built the huge orange core stage rocket, equipped with engines made by Aerojet Rocketdyne. The European Space Agency is a partner on the Artemis program, and, contracting with Airbus, it built service modules for Orion. Subsequent Artemis missions will use even larger core stages and have the capacity to carry a 46-ton payload, including Orion and its crew, to the moon or Mars.

The first thing everyone will see on Thursday will be the giant rocket verrry slooowwwly rolling out on a *Star Wars–*style crawler, a moving platform with tanklike treads, at a max speed of 0.8 miles per hour. Engineers will collect data while en route, checking whether the little vibrations from the crawler’s motions affect the rocket in any way. After a six-hour drive, it will arrive at the launchpad that night. Launch Complex 39B is a hallowed spot. It previously hosted 53 shuttle launches, and before that those of the Saturn V rockets, super heavy-lift vehicles that carried the Apollo spacecraft to the moon in the 1960s and ’70s.

Once SLS arrives, engineers will have about two weeks to complete their final tests. Those will include: checking interfaces between the core stage, boosters, and ground systems; a booster thrust control test; and testing radio frequency antennas that allow communication between mission control, the rocket, and Orion. Everything will culminate with what’s called the wet dress rehearsal, when engineers will fuel up the propellant tanks with super-cooled liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen and conduct a launch countdown—but stop at T-10 seconds.

“You’re basically trying to mitigate Murphy’s law,” says Moriba Jah, an aerospace engineer and space sustainability researcher at the University of Texas at Austin. “The thing about operations is that there’s always something that comes up that’s not necessarily nominal. But if you do a good job with your dress rehearsals, then you can identify where problems could arise and plans for how to take care of them in short order.” Jah is the cofounder of Privateer Space, a company that monitors space traffic and orbital debris. He previously worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a spacecraft navigator for Mars rover and orbiter missions, which required him to participate in many launches, but he’s not involved with the Artemis program. “One of the things I learned at JPL is: Excellence is not something that happens when you walk out the door for the first time. It happens because you do things over and over and over again,” he says.

NASA plans at least five lunar missions as part of the Artemis program, including launching a crew and a moon-orbiting station. But over time the agency has pushed back from a start originally planned for 2019, while SLS was originally expected to be ready before that. The budget for the program has also ballooned. At a March 1 House Science Committee hearing, NASA inspector general Paul Martin estimated that costs per mission would be much higher than the original estimates, which were around $2 billion. “We found that the first four Artemis missions will each cost $4.1 billion per launch, a price tag that strikes us as unsustainable,” he said. This is just the latest time NASA’s independent Office of Inspector General, which reports to Congress, has criticized the growing costs of the SLS program. Others, like former NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver and the agency’s first crewed spaceflight director Chris Kraft, have criticized SLS as well.

But at Monday’s press conference, Tom Whitmeyer, associate administrator for exploration systems development at NASA headquarters, made the case for why SLS benefits the national economy, pointing out that the rocket system came from scientists and technicians at every NASA research center and from 3,800 suppliers in all 50 states. “We think it’s a value to the country. It’s a strong national investment,” he said. “This rocket is not just a piece of metal—it’s a whole bunch of people throughout this country and throughout our agency.”

(It’s also not unusual for major space projects to be criticized for cost overruns and falling behind schedule, but to be publicly embraced after they launch; that happened to the James Webb Space Telescope, as well as with Hubble.)

SLS is larger than SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, which is currently the only operational super heavy-lift launch vehicle. But there are others in development, notably SpaceX’s Starship/Super Heavy and Blue Origin’s New Glenn. New Glenn isn’t as powerful as SLS or Starship, but it will be able to lift 45 metric tons of cargo to low Earth orbit. Others could join the scene within a decade, including China’s Long March 9 and Russia’s Yenisei rocket, although the future of the latter might be in doubt, thanks to blowback from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

It’s helpful to have options, which avoids giving a single space agency or company a monopoly; it also encourages innovation and cost savings, and it means there are backup rockets if something goes wrong. But while most launches over the past 60 years have involved throwaway launch vehicles, humanity should be moving toward sustainability, Jah says. And only Starship is made to be reusable. “I’m definitely allergic to expendable launch vehicles. In this day and age it should be about recycling and reusing. Having rockets that can then come back to the launchpad has been demonstrated by SpaceX, and it’s clearly the way to go,” he says.

Despite the risks involved in SLS and the intense scrutiny it has received, the NASA team is confident about the rocket as it begins its prelaunch rehearsal. “I’m not nervous at all. This is good engineering,” says John Blevins, SLS chief engineer at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. “These things NASA does are an attempt to rise above conflicts and the daily grind to build a better world and a better place. I’m thankful we have an agency and a country with that vision."

NASA Finally Rolls Out Its Massive SLS Rocket, With Much at Stake

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Largest Aztec temple was decorated with over 100 starfish

In the world's largest study on psychedelics and the brain, a team of researchers from The Neuro (Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital) and Department of Biomedical Engineering of McGill University, the Broad Institute at Harvard/MIT, SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University, and Mila—Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute have shown how drug-induced changes in subjective awareness are anatomically rooted in specific neurotransmitter receptor systems.

The researchers gathered 6,850 testimonials from people who took a range of 27 different psychedelic drugs. In a first-of-its-kind approach, they designed a machine learning strategy to extract commonly used words from the testimonials and link them with the neurotransmitter receptors that likely induced them. The interdisciplinary team could then associate the subjective experiences with brain regions where the receptor combinations are most commonly found—these turned out to be the lowest and some of the deepest layers of the brain's information processing layers.

Using thousands of gene transcription probes, the team created a 3D map of the brain receptors and the subjective experiences linked to them, across the whole brain. While psychedelic experience is known to vary widely from person to person, the large testimonial dataset allowed the team to characterize coherent states of conscious experiences with receptors and brain regions across individuals. This supports the theory that new hallucinogenic drug compounds can be designed to reliably create desired mental states.

For example, a promising effect of some psychedelics for psychiatric intervention is ego-dissolution—the feeling of being detached with the self. The study found that this feeling was most associated with the receptor serotonin 5-HT2A. However, other serotonin receptors (5-HT2C, 5-HT1A, 5-HT2B), adrenergic receptors Alpha-2A and Beta-2, as well as the D2 receptor were also linked with the feeling of ego-dissolution. A drug targeting these receptors may be able to reliably create this feeling in patients whom clinicians believe might benefit from it.

"Hallucinogenic drugs may very well turn out to be the next big thing to improve clinical care of major mental health conditions," says Professor Danilo Bzdok, the study's lead author "Our study provides a first step, a proof of principle that we may be able to build machine learning systems in the future that can accurately predict which neurotransmitter receptor combinations need to be stimulated to induce a specific state of conscious experience in a given person."

This study is published in the journal Science Advances on March 16, 2022.

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"This finding may warrant starting blood-pressure-lowering treatment including medicines earlier in patients with exaggerated blood pressure response to standing," said Paolo Palatini, M.D., lead author of the study and a professor of internal medicine at the University of Padova in Padova, Italy.

Nearly half of Americans and about 40% of people worldwide have high blood pressure, considered to be the world's leading preventable cause of death. According to the American Heart Association's 2022 heart disease statistics, people with hypertension in mid-life are five times more likely to have impaired cognitive function and twice as likely to experience reduced executive function, dementia and Alzheimer's disease.

Typically, systolic (top number) blood pressure falls slightly upon standing up. In this study, researchers assessed whether the opposite response—a significant rise in systolic blood pressure upon standing—is a risk factor for heart attack and other serious cardiovascular events.

The investigators evaluated 1,207 people who were part of the HARVEST study, a prospective study that began in Italy in 1990 and included adults ages 18-45 years old with untreated stage 1 hypertension. Stage 1 hypertension was defined as systolic blood pressure of 140-159 mm Hg and/or diastolic BP 90-100 mm Hg. None had taken blood pressure-lowering medication prior to the study, and all were initially estimated at low risk for major cardiovascular events based on their lifestyle and medical history (no diabetes, renal impairment or other cardiovascular diseases). At enrollment, participants were an average age of 33 years, 72% were men, and all were white.

At enrollment, six blood pressure measurements for each participant were taken in various physical positions, including when lying down and after standing up. The 120 participants with the highest rise (top 10%) in blood pressure upon standing averaged an 11.4 mm Hg increase; all increases in this group were greater than 6.5 mm Hg. The remaining participants averaged a 3.8 mm Hg fall in systolic blood pressure upon standing.

The researchers compared heart disease risk factors, laboratory measures and the occurrence of major cardiovascular events (heart attack, heart-related chest pain, stroke, aneurysm of the aortic artery, clogged peripheral arteries) and chronic kidney disease among participants in the two groups. In some analyses, the development of atrial fibrillation, an arrhythmia that is a major risk factor for stroke, was also noted. Results were adjusted for age, gender, parental history of heart disease, and several lifestyle factors and measurements taken during study enrollment.

During an average 17-year follow-up 105 major cardiovascular events occurred. The most common were heart attack, heart-related chest pain and stroke.

People in the group with top 10% rise in blood pressure:

• were almost twice as likely as other participants to experience a major cardiovascular event;

• did not generally have a higher risk profile for cardiovascular events during their initial evaluation (outside of the exaggerated blood pressure response to standing);

• were more likely to be smokers (32.1% vs. 19.9% in the non-rising group), yet physical activity levels were comparable, and they were not more likely to be overweight or obese, and no more likely to have a family history of cardiovascular events;

• had more favorable cholesterol levels (lower total cholesterol and higher high-density-lipoprotein cholesterol);

• had lower systolic blood pressure when lying down than the other group (140.5 mm Hg vs. 146.0 mm Hg, respectively), yet blood pressure measures were higher when taken over 24 hours.

After adjusting for average blood pressure taken over 24 hours, an exaggerated blood pressure response to standing remained an independent predictor of adverse heart events or stroke.

"The results of the study confirmed our initial hypothesis—a pronounced increase in blood pressure from lying to standing could be prognostically important in young people with high blood pressure. We were rather surprised that even a relatively small increase in standing blood pressure (6-7 mm Hg) was predictive of major cardiac events in the long run," said Palatini.

In a subset of 630 participants who had stress hormones measured from 24-hour urine samples, the epinephrine/creatinine ratio was higher in the people with a rise in standing blood pressure compared to those whose standing blood pressure did not rise (118.4 nmol/mol vs. 77.0 nmol/mol, respectively).

"Epinephrine levels are an estimate of the global effect of stressful stimuli over the 24 hours. This suggests that those with the highest blood pressure when standing may have an increased sympathetic response [the fight-or-flight response] to stressors," said Palatini. "Overall, this causes an increase in average blood pressure."

"The findings suggest that blood pressure upon standing should be measured in order to tailor treatment for patients with high blood pressure, and potentially, a more aggressive approach to lifestyle changes and blood-pressure-lowering therapy may be considered for people with an elevated [hyperreactor] blood pressure response to standing," he said.

Results from this study may not be generalizable to people from other ethnic or racial groups since all study participants reported white race/ethnicity. In addition, there were not enough women in the sample to analyze whether the association between rising standing blood pressure and adverse heart events was different among men and women. Because of the relatively small number of major adverse cardiac events in this sample of young people, the results need to be confirmed in larger studies.

Co-authors are Lucio Mos, M.D.; Francesca Saladini, M.D.; and Marcello Rattazzi, M.D. Authors' disclosures are listed in the manuscript.

Source

The country where the virus emerged in late 2019 has largely kept subsequent outbreaks under control thanks to a combination of strict border controls, lengthy quarantines and targeted lockdowns, and has not reported any coronavirus-related deaths for over a year.

But the highly transmissible Omicron variant is posing a stern challenge to that strategy, prompting authorities to close off cities including the southern tech hub of Shenzhen, home to 17.5 million people.

The world's second-largest economy has gone from reporting under 100 daily infections just three weeks ago to more than 1,000 per day for over a week.

More than 2,400 cases were reported Thursday, according to the National Health Commission.

Speaking at a meeting of China's top leaders, Xi said the country should "continue to put people and life at the forefront, stick with scientific accuracy and dynamic-zero, and curb the spread of the epidemic as soon as possible," according to state broadcaster CCTV.

Beijing must "raise the level of scientifically accurate prevention and control and continuously optimise disease control measures", the report quoted Xi as saying.

He called to "strengthen technological key areas like vaccination, rapid testing and drug research" to make virus curbs more "targeted", CCTV said.

Xi also urged tighter virus controls at ports of entry and stressed the need to "swiftly control local clustered outbreaks".

Tens of millions of people are currently under stay at home orders across China to try and stamp out the latest outbreak.

- Flare-ups—Beijing's communist leadership has made its handling of the pandemic a matter of political capital, saying the low death rate demonstrates the strength of its governance model.

Racing to tamp down outbreaks in multiple cities, Chinese officials have also moved to free up hospital beds over fears the virus could put the health system under strain.

Northeast China's Jilin province—which has reported thousands of cases over the past week—has built eight "makeshift hospitals" and two quarantine centres to stem the surge in infections.

State news outlets this week broadcast footage of dozens of giant cranes assembling temporary medical facilities in Jilin, which has only around 23,000 hospital beds for some 24 million residents.

Authorities also said people with mild cases could isolate at central quarantine facilities, having previously sent all patients with any symptoms to specialist hospitals.

The latest flare-ups have prompted long queues to form outside mass testing sites and seen tight controls at ports, raising fears of trade disruption.

In Shanghai—China's biggest city and home to 25 million people—authorities have closed school campuses, locked down some residential compounds and launched a rigorous round of mass testing, according to state media.

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With their experiment, reported in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Social Psychological Bulletin, a research team at the University of Quebec in Montreal (Canada) recommends mindfulness meditation, such as body scan, as a viable method to reduce the likelihood of going through such crises or—in case one still arises—better cope with the situation.

In their experiment, the research team recruited 121 volunteers who were told that the study was to examine the link between focused attention and goals. Firstly, the participants were asked to identify an important and current personal goal before indicating their motivation and baseline action crisis measures. Examples for the goals included "finish my bachelor's degree" and "produce a second film."

Then, they were split into two groups. One of them would do a mindfulness body scan, a meditation exercise in which a person focuses on their sensations one body part at a time. The other group would spend their 15 minutes reading magazines. Finally, all volunteers read scenarios describing an action crisis toward their goals and completed a questionnaire designed to assess how they felt about their pursuits now.

Having confirmed that the first group performed significantly better in coping with the imagined ill-fated scenario, the researchers are hopeful that a several-week-long mindfulness training should also help people cope with "real, full-fledged action crises."

"This study provides the first evidence supporting that mindfulness is not only a predictor of action crises but might also influence how people cope with them once they occur," says the team.

"Our findings also highlight the importance of noticing—through meditation for instance—our cognitive and emotional states in goal pursuit and treat ourselves with compassion when things are not going as planned."

The researchers also point to earlier neuroimaging evidence that confirmed mindfulness training, for example, an eight-week-long mindfulness-based stress reduction program, was able to change the brain networks involved in the eradication of fear.

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These "high-damaging" Candida albicans yeast strains aren't usually a problem when they are kept in balance, but in the guts of those with IBD, the fungi appear to proliferate, triggering inflammation.

The research was focused on a form of IBD known as ulcerative colitis (UC), which is marked by inflammation and frequently ulceration of the lining in the large intestine. In this part of the gut, fungi are also highly abundant and rich in diversity.

When scientists compared the colons of 40 UC patients against 38 controls who didn't have IBD, they found C. albicans strains were over-represented in the guts of those with UC.

The more severe the case, the more likely the patient was to show a higher abundance of Candida in their colon.

To test how these strains impact inflammation, researchers turned to mouse models. In mice without colon inflammation, the yeast strains identified in humans did not proliferate. But in mice with colon inflammation, mimicking UC, the yeast did.

Looking closer, researchers realized some yeast strains were producing a potent toxin called candidalysin, which can damage immune cells, triggering further inflammation.

Even when the sickest mice were given steroids, a common prescription for UC, the "high-damaging" strains of gut fungi continued secreting toxins, which could explain why current IBD treatments often fail to resolve symptoms.

"Our findings suggest that C. albicans strains do not cause spontaneous intestinal inflammation in a host with intact immunity," says Iliyan Iliev from Weill Cornell Medicine at Cornell University in the US.

"But they do expand in the intestines when inflammation is present and can be a factor that influences response to therapy in our models and perhaps in patients."

In other words, for most people, C. albicans strains are not a problem. Even the ones that produce cell-damaging toxins can also help the immune system. In the gut of someone with UC, however, where inflammation is widespread, some of these yeast strains seem to take off, causing more harm than good.

However, it's still up for debate which comes first, the toxins or the inflammation.

"We do not know whether specific strains are acquired by specific patients during the course of disease or whether they have been always there and become a problem during episodes of active disease," says Iliev.

"Nevertheless, our findings highlight a mechanism by which commensal [that is, internal cohabitants] fungal strains can turn against their host and overdrive inflammation."

In the lab, scientists found the candidalysin toxin produced via yeast can damage specific immune cells, known as macrophages.  In turn, this can trigger a storm of cytokines, which are proteins that promote inflammation via the immune system.

In mice, toxin-producing yeast induced an expansion of T-cells and white blood cells called neutrophils, which can both drive inflammation and lead to tissue damage.

Neutrophils are often more abundant in those with active IBD, and the new results suggest their presence could be tied to a rise in fungal toxins. When researchers blocked the cytokine signaling pathway that kicks neutrophils into action in mouse models, it reduced overall colon inflammation.

This signaling pathway could thus provide drug makers a target for future IBD treatments. Direct antifungal therapies could also prove useful.

Compared to the microbiota, which is the gut's community of microbes, there is very little research out there on the fungi in our intestines, known as the mycobiota.

In fact, between 2008 and 2018, there were almost a hundred times more peer-reviewed publications on the microbiota than the mycobiota.

Recent research suggests that is an oversight. Bacteria and fungi in the gut have similar effects on the immune system, as well as nutrition; they can interact, too. Some forms of bacteria, for instance, appear to keep C. albicans in check.

While past studies have drawn a connection between the mycobiota and IBD, this is one of the first studies to dig into the mechanism behind this relationship.

The authors are now working on several follow-up studies to see how toxin-producing yeast inflames the colon and to figure out which patients will respond best to antifungal treatments.

The study was published in Nature.

Source

The research shows they may provide a direct route for immune cells to rush from the marrow into the brain in the event of damage.

Previously, scientists had thought immune cells were transported via the bloodstream from other parts of the body to deal with brain inflammation following a stroke, injury, or brain disorder.

This discovery suggests these cells have had a shortcut all along.

The tiny tunnels were uncovered when a team of researchers set out to learn whether immune cells delivered to the brain following a stroke or meningitis originated from the skull, or the larger of the two bones in the shin – the tibia.

The specific immune cells they followed were neutrophils, the "first responders" of the immune squad. When something goes awry, these are among the first cells the body sends to the site to help mitigate whatever is causing the inflammation.

The team developed a technique to tag cells with fluorescent membrane dyes that act as cell trackers. They treated these cells with the dyes, and injected them into bone marrow sites in mice. Red-tagged cells were injected into the skull, and green-tagged cells into the tibia.

Once the cells had settled in, the researchers induced several models of acute inflammation, including stroke and chemically induced meningoencephalitis.

They found that the skull contributed significantly more neutrophils to the brain in the event of stroke and meningitis than the tibia. But that raised a new question – how were the neutrophils being delivered?

"We started examining the skull very carefully, looking at it from all angles, trying to figure out how neutrophils are getting to the brain," said Matthias Nahrendorf of Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

"Unexpectedly, we discovered tiny channels that connected the marrow directly with the outer lining of the brain."

Using organ-bath microscopy – which uses a chamber full of solution to maintain the integrity of the isolated tissue while it is being examined – the team imaged the inner surface of a mouse's skull. There, they found microscopic vascular channels directly connecting the skull marrow with the dura, the protective membrane that encases the brain.

Normally, red blood cells flow through these channels from the interior of the skull to the bone marrow; but, in the case of stroke, they were mobilized to transport neutrophils in the opposite direction, from the marrow to the brain.

This was in mice, though. To find out if humans have something similar, the researchers obtained pieces of human skull from surgery and conducted detailed imaging.

They noticed channels there as well; five times larger in diameter than the channels in the mouse skulls, in both the inner and outer layers of bone.

Since the original discovery of these tiny tunnels, researchers have studied them more closely in mice, confirming in 2021 that the connection they form to bone marrow means the blood cells taking the trip aren't derived from the bloodstream, but are indeed produced directly from nearby marrow, making them highly localized and specific.

It's an amazing discovery, because inflammation plays a role in many brain disorders, and this could help scientists understand so much more about the mechanisms at play. It could also help understand conditions such as multiple sclerosis, wherein the immune system attacks the brain.

The original discovery was published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

A version of this article was first published in August 2018.

Source

At least one person died in the coastal city of Soma and dozens more were injured in the quake, local news agency Kyodo reported, as authorities said emergency departments in affected areas received numerous calls to respond to emergencies.

A tsunami advisory had warned of waves of up to one meter (three feet) for the Fukushima and Miyagi regions, but it was lifted hours later, with the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) saying waves of 30 centimeters (less than a foot) had been measured in the city of Ishinomaki in Miyagi.

The undersea quake, which caused temporary power cuts to more than two million households, hit at 11:36 pm (1436 GMT) off Fukushima at a depth of 60 kilometers (37 miles), the JMA said, originally reporting a magnitude of 7.3.

It came just days after Japan marked the 11th anniversary of a massive quake that triggered a deadly tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe.

Images showed usually bright cityscapes plunged into darkness, while video footage on social media showed a train in the capital Tokyo rocking violently and rattling gaming machines at an arcade in Fukushima.

Authorities said they were working to assess damage from the quake, as officials warned of potentially powerful aftershocks.

"Calls have been inundating police and ambulances in Fukushima and Miyagi," government spokesman Hirokazu Matsuno told reporters. "We're doing our best to assess the extent of the damage."

"Major aftershocks often happen a couple of days after the first quake, so please stay away from any collapsed buildings... and other high-risk places."

Japan's nuclear authority said no abnormalities were detected at the Fukushima plant that went into meltdown in 2011 when the tsunami hit.

Pumps for cooling pools storing spent fuel at separate plants in Fukushima and Onagawa, in Miyagi, temporarily stopped operating at some reactors but were being quickly restored, the country's nuclear watchdog said.

TV footage showed some structural damage in the northeast, including the collapse of a stone wall of Aoba castle in Sendai city.

A Shinkansen bullet train derailed north of Fukushima city, train company JR East said, but there were no immediate reports of injuries.

An official in the emergency department of the local government of Ishinomaki told AFP he had been woken by "extremely violent shaking".

"I heard the ground rumbling. Rather than feeling scared, I immediately remembered the Great East Japan Earthquake," he said, referring to the 2011 disaster.

Multiple smaller jolts hit the region in the hours immediately after the quake.

    宮城県と福島県で震度6強https://t.co/CO3JmvpVcx#nhk_video pic.twitter.com/JqHSHpWg7C
    — NHKニュース (@nhk_news) March 16, 2022

Take action to protect yourself

More than two million households were left without power in the eastern Kanto region, including 700,000 in Tokyo, electricity provider TEPCO said.

But the power company had resolved blackouts in its service area by around 4:00 am (1900 GMT), Kyodo reported.

In the northeast, 156,000 households lost power, regional energy company Tohoku Electric Power said.

Evacuation orders were issued in some northeastern towns, NHK reported, with Rifu town in Miyagi opening shelters in its official buildings.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida told reporters the government was gathering information on the situation.

"Please pay attention to informatio

n on the earthquake, stay away from the coast and take action to protect yourself," he said.

    震度5強を観測した宮城県白石市で16日午後11時半ごろに撮影された映像です。棚などが大きく左右に揺れおよそ10秒後には停電して真っ暗になっています。
    撮影した男性は「恐怖を感じました。地震から2時間半がたってもまだ停電が続いています」と話していました。https://t.co/Bpb0eeqlQB#nhk_video pic.twitter.com/jhyk3tLgRk
    — NHKニュース (@nhk_news) March 16, 2022

Japan sits on the Pacific "Ring of Fire", an arc of intense seismic activity that stretches through Southeast Asia and across the Pacific basin.

The country is regularly hit by quakes, and has strict construction regulations intended to ensure buildings can withstand strong tremors, but it remains haunted by the memory of the 2011 catastrophe.

A minute's silence was held last Friday, the anniversary of the disaster, to remember the some 18,500 people left dead or missing, most in the tsunami.

Around the stricken Fukushima plant, extensive decontamination has been carried out, and this year five former residents of Futaba, the region's last uninhabited town, returned to live there on a trial basis.

Around 12 percent of Fukushima was once declared unsafe, but no-go zones now cover just 2.4 percent of the prefecture, although populations in many towns remain far lower than before.

© Agence France-Presse

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Although her likeness is new – it debuted last month in an exhibit about ancient people at Västernorrlands Museum – researchers have known about this woman's existence for nearly a century.

During the construction of a road in the hamlet of Lagmansören in 1923, workers found her skeletal remains buried next to the remains of a child, likely a 7-year-old boy.

"With our eyes and perhaps in all times, you tend to think that this is a mother and son," said Oscar Nilsson, the Sweden-based forensic artist who spent 350 hours creating the lifelike model.

"They could be. Or they could be siblings: sister and brother. They could be relatives, or they could just be tribe friends. We don't know, because the DNA was not that well preserved to establish this relationship."

But as Nilsson molded the woman's posture and sculpted her face, he pretended that she was near her son who was scampering ahead of her.

"She's looking with the mother's eyes – both with love and a bit of discipline," Nilsson told Live Science. This stern but tender gaze looks as if she's on the cusp of calling out to the boy, telling him to be careful.

The Neolithic woman and youngster were interred in a cist grave, a burial built with long, flat stones in the shape of a coffin. The woman died in her late 20s or early 30s, and at 4 feet, 11 inches (150 centimeters) in height, "she was not a very tall person," even for the Neolithic period, Nilsson said.

The Neolithic woman's skull. It was scanned and 3D printed for the reconstruction. (Oscar Nilsson )

The woman's remains didn't show any signs of malnutrition, injury or diseases, although it's possible that she died of an illness that didn't leave a mark on her remains, Nilsson said. "She seems to have had a good life," he said.

She ate land-based food, an examination of the isotopes (different versions of elements) in her teeth revealed, which was odd given that her grave was found near a fish-filled river near the coast, he said.

When Nilsson received the commission to reconstruct the woman two years ago, he scanned her skull and made a copy of it with a plastic 3D printer.

As with other reconstructions he's created, including those of an ancient Wari queen from what is now Peru and a Stone Age man whose head was found on a spike, Nilsson had to take into account the ancient individual's sex, age, weight and ethnicity – factors that can influence the person's facial tissue thickness and general appearance. But because the woman's DNA was too degraded, he wasn't sure about her genetic background, hair or eye color. 

So Nilsson took an educated guess about her appearance. There were three large migration waves into ancient Scandinavia: During the first, hunter-gatherers with dark skin who tended to have blue eyes arrived between 12,000 and 10,000 years ago; the second wave included pale-skinned, dark-haired and brown-eyed farmers from further south who moved north about 5,000 to 4,000 years ago, when this woman was alive; and the third wave included the Yamnaya (also spelled Yamna) culture from modern-day Ukraine, who were a bit darker-skinned than the farmers and brought the art of metal making with them when they arrived about 3,500 years ago, making them the first Bronze Age culture in the region, Nilsson said.

Based on this information, Nilsson gave the woman brown hair and eyes, and light skin like the farmers'. Even so, the woman wasn't necessarily a full-time farmer; she likely participated in a mix of hunting and gathering as well as agricultural practices, he said. 

"We can't say for sure whether she was living a nomadic life, if she was living the life of the early farmers; it's impossible to say," Nilsson said. "But we have chosen to make the safest interpretation, which is she was both because, of course, there was a transition period of many hundreds of years when they left the old way of living."

Fancy furs, Stone Age style

In the reconstruction, the woman from Lagmansören is dressed head to toe in fur and leather. This is the work of Helena Gjaerum, a Sweden-based independent archaeologist who uses Stone Age techniques for tanning leather.  

Before dressing the model, Gjaerum studied the ancient climate, landscape, vegetation and animal life of Neolithic Lagmansören. Based on what she uncovered, she designed the woman's clothes out of deer, moose and elk and the shoes out of reindeer, beaver and fox.

The woman likely stuffed hay inside the shoes for padding, noted Gjaerum, who took inspiration from clothing worn by Indigenous Americans and Indigenous Siberians, as well as the leather clothing of Özti the Iceman mummy, who lived about 5,300 years ago in the Italian Alps.

Preparing the clothes entailed hours of labor. Gjaerum, who acquired real animal remains, scraped the flesh off the skins and then put them in a river – a method that helps loosen the fur from the skin. Next, she scraped off the fur and slathered on a solution made of moose brain, a fatty mixture that bonds with skin fibers. Without this mixture, the skin would stiffen and could easily rot if it got wet, she said. 

The next several steps involved massaging, boiling, stretching and smoking the skins and then finally designing the clothing.

Gjaerum's young son, who was about the same height as the Stone Age woman, served as a helpful model, Gjaerum said. She made the clothing as comfortable and practical as possible – for instance, by not putting a seam at the top of the shoulder, where water might seep in during rainy weather.

Often, modern people think of Stone Age humans as primitive, dressed in ugly, toga-like furs as in The Far Side comics. But Gjaerum challenged that perception.

"I think it would be crazy to think she'd have primitive clothes," Gjaerum told Live Science. "I wanted to make her dress like you could dress today" because you are both Homo sapiens.

Source

Today, NASA announced that it has successfully completed two further steps to align the mirrors of the Webb telescope. The resulting performance indicates that Webb will meet or exceed its design goals. "So far, we're finding that the performance is as good [as] or better than our most optimistic projections," said Lee Feinberg, the Webb optical telescope element manager.

 

The announcement was accompanied by a spectacular image that showed a sharp focus on the target star and included many in-focus galaxies in the backdrop.

Get in line

The Webb telescope's primary mirror is made up of an array of 18 individual segments that, once properly aligned, will act as a single large mirror. The initial steps of mirror alignment involved identifying the images from each segment and bringing those images together at a single point. That work was completed back in February. At this point, the light was all gathered in one place, but it wasn't necessarily taking an equal path from each segment, meaning the segments weren't acting as a single mirror.

 

Marshall Perrin, the Webb optical telescope element manager, said that the individual segments were microns away from being properly aligned. The final alignment would take the segments to a precision on the nanometer scale—"a few hundred atomic diameters is the level of precision we need here," Perrin said.

 

And we apparently have it. "We have now achieved what's called the diffraction limited alignment of the telescope," Perrin said. "The images are focused together as finely as the laws of physics allow. This is as sharp an image as you can get from a telescope this large."

 

"At no point in that process did we have any technical issues with the telescope—the biggest [surprise] is just how closely it matched the models and predictions from the ground," Perrin said. "Honestly, the team was giddy at times looking at this data."

More to come

At this point, the mirror is aligned to the telescope's primary instrument, the Near-Infrared Camera. The telescope, however, has three additional instruments, and the next few steps will see alignment with each of the remaining instruments so that the mirrors are positioned to perform well with all the hardware. In addition to NASA's ability to tweak the positioning, shape, and curvature of the segments, the secondary mirror and the instruments themselves can be shifted to ensure an alignment.

 

Final tweaking may take place after this process is complete, but after that, nothing will be left other than the ongoing calibration needed to keep everything aligned. According to NASA, the alignment process is expected to be complete by early May at the latest.

 

From there, the science can begin—Jane Rigby of Webb operations said that a full year of science observations has already been planned out. Everyone involved with Webb will admit that a few high-priority science targets that are expected to produce aesthetically beautiful images have been chosen, but nobody has said what those are yet.

 

For now, everyone is focused on the galaxies that have come into view behind the star being used for alignment. And researchers are hugely relieved that the process has gone well. As Rigby put it, "There are days on this project where, if things didn't work, we would have gone home." Instead, the whole process has gone forward smoothly.

 

Tom Zurbuchen, the administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said, "All the worries I had, they're all behind us now."

 

NASA releases first image from an in-focus Webb telescope

Absolutely bonkers experiment measures antiproton orbiting helium ion

A comprehensive analysis of the study's results, which has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine, suggests that CT offers a similar level of diagnostic accuracy, in addition to being associated with a lower risk of complications.

The research team from the University of Glasgow, who included includes Professors Colin Berry and Christian Delles alongside Honorary Professor Giles Roditi, recruited 48 patients into the trial, who underwent either invasive coronary angiography or CT coronary angiography. Collaborating with colleagues in NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde and NHS Golden Jubilee, the team followed study participants up over approximately four years, via a combination of questionnaires/surveys and remote follow-up via electronic health records.

Coronary artery disease (CAD) is common across the globe and is one of the leading causes of death in developed countries and aging populations. The disease is associated with impaired blood flow in the coronary arteries, the arteries which supply oxygen to the heart. Chest pain, shortness of breath and fatigue with activity can all be indicators of either chronic or acute disease, both of which are associated with an increased risk of heart attack, stroke and even cardiovascular death—examples of what are referred to "major adverse cardiovascular events." Symptoms of CAD are caused by deposits inside the artery walls which build up over many years.

The current standard diagnostic test for coronary artery disease is a minimally invasive procedure known as coronary angiography (or cardiac catheterization). This test shows if the coronary arteries supply a sufficient amount of blood or whether blood flow is impaired by arterial narrowing. Any narrowing detected in this manner can be treated during the procedure itself, through the use of small, inflatable balloons and extremely thin mesh tubes known as stents, which are used to prop open the newly widened blood vessels.

More than 3.5 million of these procedures are carried out in European catheterization laboratories every year, and numbers continue to increase. Approximately two million—i.e., significantly more than half—of these minimally invasive procedures do not involve immediate treatment in the cath lab. In these cases, the procedure is able to rule out narrowed or blocked coronary arteries.

The main question addressed by the DISCHARGE Trial Group was whether the low-risk, non-invasive coronary CT method can provide a safe alternative to catheterization in certain patients with suspected CAD. In order to test the effectiveness of both of these diagnostic imaging techniques in patients with stable chest pain, the project followed more than 3,500 patients for a duration of four years. Using a process known as randomization, patients were assigned by chance to either computed tomography or cardiac catheterization. If their initial evaluation ruled out obstructive coronary artery disease, participants were discharged back to their referring physician for further treatment—a step which gave the trial its name: DISCHARGE. Patients who were diagnosed as having the disease were managed in accordance with European guidelines at the time of the study.

The trial was led by Professor Dr. Marc Dewey, vice chair of the Department of Radiology on Campus Charité Mitte, and his team, and involved a total of 31 partner institutions from across 18 European countries. Discussing the study's long-term results, Prof. Dewey said: "The trial confirmed that a CT-based management is safe in patients with stable (i.e., non-acute) chest pain and suspected coronary artery disease."

Evaluation of safety was based on the incidence of major cardiovascular events over a period of up to four years. He added: "Among the patients referred for cardiac catheterization and included in this trial, the risk of major adverse cardiovascular events was found to be similar in both the CT and catheterization groups, occurring in 2.1% and 3.0% of patients, respectively. The incidence of major procedure-related complications was found to be four-times lower in patients managed with an initial CT strategy."

Professor Christian Delles, interim director of the Institute of Cardiovascular and Medical Sciences, University of Glasgow, said: "The DISCHARGE trial was only possible because of the close links between specialist clinical services and the strong research culture in hospitals within NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde and the Golden Jubilee National Hospital. The well established paths from symptoms of angina to assessment by general practitioners and specialist services provides excellent care to our patients but also offers an opportunity to conduct ground breaking research."

For their overall analysis, the DISCHARGE Trial Group also included criteria such as improvements in chest pain and quality of life over the course of the trial. By helping to reduce the large number of catheterization procedures being performed, this new strategy could also help relieve pressure on health care systems. Prof. Dewey said: "Now that CT has been standardized and quality-tested as part of the DISCHARGE trial, this method could be made more widely available as part of the routine clinical care of people with intermediate CAD risk."

As a next step, the trial's method for estimating a person's clinical risk of having coronary artery disease will need to be further evaluated to determine whether it can improve referral and indication for CT in routine clinical care. Health economics are an important component in making decisions about reimbursement in health care systems. As mentioned in the discussion of the publication, further methodologically very rigorous cost-effectiveness analyses of CT and cardiac catheterization are necessary and will be conducted by the DISCHARGE Trial Group.

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Diseases caused by a combination of bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites—also known as polymicrobial infections—are challenging to treat because scientists don't fully understand how pathogens interact during infection and how these interactions impact the drugs used to treat them.

In a study published in the journal Infection and Immunity, researchers in the Molecular & Biomedical Sciences Department looked at two pathogens that often occur at similar sites, particularly in cystic fibrosis and mechanically ventilated patients: Candida albicans and Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

Candida is the fourth most common hospital-acquired pathogen, and is particularly difficult to treat. It is targeted by a number of antifungal agents, but some only slow it rather than kill it outright. Meanwhile, P. aeruginosa infects 90% of all adult cystic fibrosis patients. Combined, C. albicans and P. aeruginosa cause more serious disease in cystic fibrosis and ventilated patients.

The researchers investigated the effectiveness of an antifungal drug, fluconazole, in the test tube and during infection of the zebrafish with both pathogens. Fluconazole is known to slow fungal growth, but Candida can become tolerant to the drug and not only survive, but also develop tolerance that leads to failed therapy, and potentially death.

What the study found was promising. The results showed that P. aeruginosa works with fluconazole to eliminate drug tolerance and clear the C. albicans infection in the culture and the zebrafish.

"Polymicrobial infections are challenging to treat not only because of the lack of understanding of how invading microorganisms interact but also because we don't know how these interactions affect treatment efficacy. Our work demonstrates that polymicrobial interactions can indeed affect treatment efficacy, and most importantly, it highlights the importance of nutrient availability in the environment—such as iron in our study—and how it modulates treatment efficacy," says Siham Hattab, lead author of the study who conducted the research as part of her Ph.D. in the Department of Molecular and Biomolecular Sciences.

What's more, the bacteria also enhance the drug's ability against a second pathogenic Candida species that tends to be more resistant to the drug.

The increased effectiveness of the drug suggests to the researchers that there is still much more to learn about how current drugs work when targeting these dangerous and complex polymicrobial infections. "We are really excited to have revealed that sometimes drugs against fungal infection can work even better in a more 'real-world' situation than in the test tube. There is still a lot to learn about how pathogens interact during infection, and it will be interesting to see how the bacteria manage to work with the drugs to target Candida," says Robert Wheeler, associate professor of microbiology and senior author of the study.

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Health authorities said 400,741 cases were recorded, the country's highest daily figure since the pandemic began two years ago.

The latest spike in cases is the "last biggest challenge" facing the country, Sohn Young-rae, a senior health official, told a press briefing.

The government had anticipated caseloads in this ballpark, he said, adding that they believed they were nearing the peak of the Omicron wave.

"If we overcome this crisis we will step closer to returning to normalcy," he added.

South Korea leads the world in newly reported cases in the last seven days, according to WHO data, with 2,358,878 cases, followed by Vietnam with 1,795,380.

The vast majority of South Korea's eligible population has been vaccinated and boosted, and despite the record number of infections in the country of 52 million people, death rates remain very low.

The country has also continued to relax its social distancing rules, under pressure from small businesses and self-employed Koreans who say years-long COVID restrictions had pushed their businesses to the brink.

The country now has a 11pm curfew for businesses and a six-person limit for private gatherings.

It will lift mandatory quarantine on arrival for fully vaccinated visitors from March 21.

The government is expected to decide whether to further relax or keep the current distancing guidelines this Friday.

Seoul abandoned its vaunted "trace, test and treat" programme last month, as a dramatic surge in Omicron cases threatened to overwhelm its healthcare system.  [Note: emphasis (not in the original article) added.]

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Many clinical trials haven't been registered, with the main outcome changed in a quarter of those that have been. And many remain unpublished. All this indicates "a concerning lack of scientific and ethical standards in the field of homeopathy and a high risk for reporting bias," say the researchers.

Homeopathy was developed almost 200 years ago, based on the principle of similarity ('like cures like'). It remains a popular alternative to conventional medicine in many developed countries, despite its effectiveness being the subject of fierce debate.

The study authors wanted to find out if the published clinical trials might not represent all the scientific studies on homeopathy, but a select few reporting only positive results–a phenomenon known as 'reporting bias'.

Public clinical trial registries were set up to try and reduce this risk, and since 2008, registration and publication of clinical trial results have been regarded as an ethical, although not mandatory, obligation for researchers.

The study authors therefore set out to: find out how many registered trials assessing homeopathy remain unpublished; whether the primary outcomes of registered trials reflect those actually published; as well as the number of homeopathy trials that had been both registered and published.

They also wanted to assess the impact of any reporting bias on the pooled data analysis of homeopathy trial results, a research method designed to strengthen the evidence base.

They searched major international registries for clinical trials registered up to April 2019, and research databases to track publication of these trials up to April 2021.

They found that since 2002, nearly 38% of registered homeopathy trials remain unpublished, while over half (53%) of published randomized controlled trials haven't been registered. In all, nearly a third (30%) of randomized controlled trials published during the past 5 years haven't been registered.

They also found that homeopathy trials were more likely to be registered after they had started (retrospectively) than before they had started (prospective registration). What's more, a quarter (25%) of published primary outcomes weren't the same as those originally registered.

The study authors then assessed the potential impact on clinical practice by separately pooling the data from unregistered and registered homeopathy trials. This revealed that unregistered trials tended to report larger treatment effects.

The study authors accept that their searches covered 17 trial registries, so it's highly likely that they missed records not covered by these registries. And they pooled the data from homeopathic treatments that weren't tailored to individual needs, so the findings might not be applicable to personalized treatment.

Nevertheless, the findings "suggest a concerning lack of scientific and ethical standards in the field of homeopathy and a high risk for reporting bias," they write.

And they "also indicate that journals publishing homeopathy trials do not adhere to policies by the [International Committee of Medical Journal Editors], which demand that only registered [randomized controlled trials] should be published," they add.

The poor research practice they found "likely affects the validity of the body of evidence of homeopathic literature and may substantially overestimate the true treatment effect of homeopathic remedies," they conclude.

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The line between broken and useful traits can be hazy in biology, leaving open the possibility that what is now considered a malfunction might once have been promoted by natural selection.

We might find it tricky to think of evolution benefiting antisocial people, but nature has no problem leaving room for the occasional freeloader within otherwise cooperative species like our own. Those alternative traits that make psychopaths so despised could feasibly give them an edge in a world where competition for resources is intense.

A team of Canadian researchers explored this possibility in a study published last year in the journal Evolutionary Psychology, arguing psychopathy lacks certain hallmarks of a disorder, so should be considered more like a function operating as intended.

Their conclusion is based on an analysis of existing research containing validated measures of psychopathy together with details on the person's handedness; however, this correlation echoes outdated science from the early days of criminal psychology.

Historically, links between being left-handed and a 'sinister' personality were all but given. Early models of mental illness and sociability regarded handedness as a convenient sign of an individual's degeneracy.

Science no longer regards left-handed folk as ill-fated criminals, though the question of how handedness might pair with a litany of other physiological and psychological traits remains a common one in research.

Central to it all is the age-old question of nature versus nurture. Genetics does appear to play a role in handedness, if a rather complicated one. Cultural influences may also determine how much a person favors one hand over the other, allowing them to fit into communities that favor the right-handed.

There are also a vast mix of environmental nudges, such as stress or nutrition or exposure to pollution while in the womb, that can push a person's genetic heritage for handedness into one direction or the other.

Since the researchers in this study found no clear evidence that psychopathic subjects were less likely to be right-handed, it might be assumed that their development hasn't necessarily been affected by their environment to any significant extent.

This leaves open the possibility that whatever genes are at work are operating as evolution elected, providing (as the researchers describe it) an 'alternative life history strategy' for those who inherited them.

There are plenty of reasons to hold judgement one way or another on the entire debate. Specific to this study, just 16 studies ultimately informed the conclusion, combining data on just under 2,000 individuals, making it statistically weak.

Sample sizes aside, it's hard to limit variables in studies like these, making it impossible to exclude the possibility of confounding conditions muddying the waters.

Beyond all of this, there is the more philosophical question over what makes differences in our form and function a disease in the first place. Whole books are written (one by the author of this very article) over the changing definitions of health and illness.

Psychopathy can at once be unwanted under one set of circumstances and prized in another, without invoking models of disease. It can be both an alternative strategy to survival, helping in some social contexts before becoming a disorder in another.

Like so many things in biology, disease is a convenient box we try to wrestle a complicated system into.

Psychopathy's more clinical twin, antisocial personality disorder (APD), was officially given a place in the second edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-II) in 1968. Even after a number of revisions, APD remains in the DSM, adjusted over time with criteria that can be observed and checked more objectively.

Whether we'll continue to regard psychopathy as a disorder in the future will depend on a variety of considerations, not least the results of studies like this one.

No matter how we regard disorders like APD, psychopathy can play a role in behaviors that disrupt and destroy the wellbeing of many.

Knowing more about how it works, and how to help those with it, is an answer we could all benefit from. 

This research was published in Evolutionary Psychology.

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