A winding coil of global temperatures spanning 1880 to 2021 is practically a maelstrom of menace.

The animation is based on data from NASA's GISS Surface Temperature Analysis and was designed by climate scientist Ed Hawkins, who is known for putting together the original climate stripes.

The GISTEMP climate spiral 1880-2021. (NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio)

Hawkins, who works at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, is interested in organizing climate data in ways that are easily understood and remembered by the public.

In 2016, his first 'climate spiral' went viral online. The way the animation represented our current climate crisis was beautifully simple and terrifyingly stark. It was even used in the opening ceremony of the Rio Olympics.

Now, the spiral is back, and after just five years, its gaping mouth is wider than ever.

With each month of each year that rolls by on this circular calendar, a revolving line of global temperature surface data is logged.

As the years begin to stack up, the line of data creates a sort of slinky-like shape. Come mid-nineteenth century, however, the line starts to spread outwards, creating more of a tornado.

By the turn of the century, the belt is pushing outwards with alarming velocity. Between 2016 and 2021, it crosses the yellow boundary that represents one degree of warming several times.

In July of 2021, the Northern Hemisphere experienced the world's hottest month ever recorded. You can see it at roughly six o'clock on the climate spiral.

The recording is unprecedented for now, but it will no doubt have company soon enough. The last nine years are all among the hottest 10 on record. Not even a global pandemic seems to slow our trajectory down.

Turned on its side, the whirlpool of data looks ready to swallow the future right up.

Lateral view of the climate spiral. (NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio)

The spiral can be found online at NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio.

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New research by the British Computer Society (BCS) has found girls are outnumbered six to one by boys in computer science classes across the UK.

However, once young women choose computing, on average they outperform their male counterparts, according to the study.

BCS's report titled "Landscape Review: Computing Qualifications in the UK" draws on publicly available data covering the five-year period from 2016/17 to 2020/21. It covers England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales as the home nations sought to shift their computing education curricula.

In all UK nations, computer science subjects appear to be the least popular among sciences. The continuing problem with the male-female balance is reflected in all geographies. This can be in excess of 10:1 in some cases, but more regularly between five and six to one.

Getting qualified teachers remains a problem, despite the success of the National Centre for Computing Education, a Department for Education-funded institution addressing this need in England, which is supporting more than 30,000 teachers.

Participation in computer science in Scotland has been falling steadily over recent years but increased in 2021, possibly down to the growing popularity of new digitally focused areas.

Dame Muffy Calder, chair of BCS's School Curriculum and Assessment Committee, said: "Computing education and skills need to be highly valued and promoted by leaders in government, education and industry too, as a route to shape the future."

The Glasgow University professor of computer science said all UK nations had a longstanding problem with the male-female balance in both academic and vocational computing.

"While male:female ratios of 2:1 were not untypical of the older Information and Communications Technology (ICT) curricula, the move to a more computing-focused approach has seen the imbalance grow: most regularly to around the 5-6:1 level.

"This matters because teams that develop, say, the use of AI in medicine, or algorithms that affect our financial lives or employment chances need to be diverse to ensure outcomes are fair and relevant to everyone in society.

"There may be lessons to be learned from some of the vocational qualifications in computing where a small number of topics show a better gender balance or from the introduction of 'broader church' academic Digital Technology qualifications in Wales and Northern Ireland."

BCS recommends the four UK nations should establish a task force to "examine and report on access and participation in Computer Science qualifications of learners across key demographics, with the aim of learning from what works and disseminating best practice."

In 2021, figures from UK university admissions service UCAS show computer science has seen a steady rise in popularity over the last decade.

The final release of university and college-level application and acceptance figures for the 2020 cycle demonstrate the growing interest in the subject. Acceptance on courses rose by almost a half from 20,420 in 2011 to 30,090 in 2020. ®

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“The pressure wave from asteroids or comets striking the surface at tens of kilometers per second could transform that graphite into diamonds,” says Kevin Cannon, a geologist at the Colorado School of Mines, who presented his latest findings at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston last Thursday. “You could have a significant amount of diamonds near the surface.”

It turns out that Mercury isn’t just a hot hunk of rock closely orbiting the sun; it’s a complex world. Cannon’s and others’ findings reveal new details about its unique geological history, including the likely presence of plenty of bling.

The diminutive planet is smaller than two of the moons in our solar system (Titan and Ganymede), and it’s known for its short years and long days, orbiting the sun every 88 Earth days and rotating every 59. Daytime temperatures reach 800 degrees Fahrenheit—second only to Venus—while Mercury’s lack of an atmosphere means nighttime temperatures plunge to -290 Fahrenheit. But these mind-boggling stats aren’t what set it apart, geologically speaking: It’s the planet’s abundant carbon (in the form of graphite) and the extreme pummeling it received from asteroids some 4 billion years ago. During a violent, destructive period called the Late Heavy Bombardment, Mercury took maybe twice as much battering as the moon did—and our lunar neighbor is completely pockmarked with craters.

Like many other worlds in our solar system, including our own, the young Mercury was covered with oceans of magma, which later cooled and hardened. But unlike elsewhere, a layer of graphite floated atop all that molten rock. In his work in progress, Cannon modeled the effects of frequent impacts on the upper 12 miles of Mercury’s crust over billions of years. The graphite could have been more than 300 feet thick, and the asteroids’ impact pressure would have been enough to turn 30 to 60 percent of it into what he calls “shock diamonds.”

That adds up to a lot of space gems: maybe 16 quadrillion tons of them, he estimates, although the diamonds are likely to be minuscule, scattered, and buried.

Evidence from other research also supports that conclusion. Some meteorites, like the rock fragments known as Almahata Sitta that fell on the Nubian desert of northern Sudan in 2008, contained tiny diamonds, possibly produced by the shock of collisions between asteroids. And planetary scientists like Laura Lark, a researcher at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, believe they’ve seen dark spots of graphite on the surface of Mercury in images taken by cameras aboard NASA’s Messenger spacecraft, which orbited and mapped the planet between 2011 and 2015. The false-color maps made from those images—the most detailed currently available—show areas of ancient “low-reflectance material,” thought to be graphite.

“We used these large basins as natural samples of Mercury’s outer layers,” says Lark, who studied the 450-mile-wide Rembrandt basin, among others. (A basin is basically a very large crater.) “If the low-reflectance material in these basins are darkened by graphite, which is what we think, then the layers I’m seeing are thick. It’s more carbon than I’d expect from a magma ocean,” she says. That could mean Mercury was particularly carbon-rich from the start, she argues. Lark also presented new research from herself and colleagues at the LPSC conference last week.

As Mercury was forming, elements joined together mostly as metals or rocks. The metals sank and eventually built the planet’s core, with the rocks solidifying on top. On many planets, most of the carbon ends up becoming part of the metallic core in the mantle above it. But Mercury seems to have ended up with lots of carbon embedded in the rind of the planet, rather than lower down, Lark says. By contrast, on Earth diamonds only arise from carbon deep underground, under intense pressure.

Temperature and commuting issues aside, space miners probably won’t want to head to Mercury anytime soon, despite the copious carbon that allowed crystal creation. That’s because the diamonds are probably impure. “You’ll end up with a messy mixture of graphite, diamond, and maybe some other phases as well, so you won’t have nice, beautiful crystals that you could polish up and put on a ring,” Cannon says.

New research on the asteroids that smashed into the young Mercury could resolve another mystery, too: why the planet has an abnormally large core despite its small size. Some scientists believe its core would make more sense if the planet used to be much bigger and then withstood a giant impact that flung bits of it throughout the solar system. Currently, Mercury is an eighteenth the mass of Earth. “I calculate that the proto-Mercury could have been between 0.3 and 0.8 Earth masses. This is consistent with simulations” that always produce bigger versions of Mercury than the one we currently have, says Camille Cartier, a planetary scientist at the University of Lorraine in France, who also presented new work at the conference.

Based on her models, she argues that as Mercury and the rest of the solar system were still coming together, about 10 or 20 million years after the planets formed, a huge object could have slammed into Mercury, blowing most of its upper layers into space. Some of those chunks of rocks later ended up on Venus, Earth, and the inner asteroid belt. A few later returned to Earth as meteorites. 

The next spacecraft to call on Mercury could shed more light on its turbulent past and whether it’s hoarding diamonds today. The European and Japanese space agencies’ joint BepiColombo mission launched in 2018, and its pair of orbiters will finally arrive in 2025. It will bring higher-resolution cameras that probe at longer wavelengths, allowing scientists to look for more direct signs of diamonds on the enigmatic planet.

Cannon wonders if more distant planets may also harbor diamonds—shock diamonds at the surface and others formed through pressure deep underground. “It’s exciting to think about exoplanets that might have even more carbon,” he says. “You could have a sandwich structure of diamonds, graphite, and more diamonds.”

Mercury Could Be Littered With Diamonds

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End-of-season Arctic multiyear sea ice – the ice that persists over several years – was roughly 50 centimeters (1.6 feet) thinner in 2021 than it was in 2019, the figures show, a drop of around 16 percent in just three years. It's being replaced by less permanent seasonal sea ice that melts completely every summer.

Over the past 18 years, Arctic Ocean winter sea ice has lost one-third of its volume – a staggering figure that may have been underestimated in the past, says the research. It's the first study to use years of satellite data to estimate both ice thickness and the depth of snow on top.

"Arctic snow depth, sea ice thickness and volume are three very challenging measurements to obtain," says polar scientist Ron Kwok, from the University of Washington.

"The key takeaway for me is the remarkable loss of Arctic winter sea ice volume – one-third of the winter ice volume lost over just 18 years – that accompanied a widely reported loss of old, thick Arctic sea ice and decline in end-of-summer ice extent."

The data comes from the ICESat-2 and radar CryoSat-2 satellites orbiting Earth.

What makes the study important is the way it combines the LiDAR technology of ICESat-2, which was launched three years ago, and the radar technology of CryoSat-2. While LiDAR uses laser pulses and radar uses radio waves, they're both detecting objects (in this case snow and ice) based on the reflections being bounced back at them.

Without this data, judging ice thickness is tricky, because of the way that snow can weigh ice down and change how it floats in the ocean. By using climate records to estimate snow depth in the past, scientists have been overestimating sea ice thickness by up to 20 percent or 20 centimeters (0.7 feet), the study suggests.

Multiyear ice is known to be thicker and therefore more resistant to melting than seasonal ice – you can think of it as sort of a reservoir for the Arctic.

As it becomes depleted and gets replaced by seasonal ice, the overall thickness and volume of Arctic sea ice is expected to quickly decrease as well.

"We weren't really expecting to see this decline, for the ice to be this much thinner in just three short years," says polar scientist Sahra Kacimi, from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.

Combining previous records from the older ICESat satellite to look back 18 years, the researchers estimate that around 6,000 cubic kilometers (1,439 cubic miles) of winter ice volume has been lost across that time span.

That the last three years has seen a sharp drop is also concerning. Less ice means massive disruption for ecosystems. It could eventually alter the pivotal ocean currents we all rely on, and most likely also accelerate the climate change that's happening all around us.

Reducing our fossil fuel emissions is the only way we can stop this and we can all still play a more powerful role than we probably realize. Even our perceptions can make a difference.

Meanwhile, it's promising that the newer ICESat-2 satellite, launched in 2018, is working as intended, and we're getting more data back about Arctic ice levels than ever before – even if it makes for grim reading.

"Current models predict that by the mid-century we can expect ice-free summers in the Arctic, when the older ice, thick enough to survive the melt season, is gone," says Kacimi.

The research has been published in Geophysical Research Letters.

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Recent research has shown dogs can recognize the unique smell of their own odor, sort of like looking in an 'olfactory mirror', and in 2021, a study found they might also have some awareness of their body as an obstacle.

Body awareness is the ability to think of your body as an explicit object in relation to other objects around you. It's considered one of the fundamental building blocks of self-representation.

In human children, this type of self-awareness has historically been tested by having a toddler hand over a blanket they are currently sitting on. If the kid can figure out that they have to get up and remove their body as an obstacle, they are henceforth declared 'body-aware'.

Usually, it takes infants until they are about 18 months or a year before they have the mental capacity to figure this out.

Adapting this test for canines, researchers have attempted to see whether these animals also possess such a level of body awareness.

Previously, a small study found that dogs have some idea of their body size and how that impacts their navigation in the world, but the 2021 paper is the first research to show recognition of the body as an obstacle in general.

The researchers found 32 dogs of various breeds and sizes who met the testing requirements, which involved the pets picking up a toy and bringing it to their owner. The catch was that the toy was connected to a mat on which the dogs were sitting. 

In other words, to bring the toy to their owner, the dog first needed to get off the mat.

These results were then compared to what happens when the toy is unattached to anything at all or when the toy is connected to the ground.

"This way, when the dogs tried to pick the target up, this was again impossible, however, dogs did not feel a parallel lifting force under their feet," the authors write.

Without this tug beneath them, the dogs did not step off the mat as quickly. They rightly realized their position wasn't the problem.

But when the dog did feel a tug on the mat below them, they were much quicker to step off and pick up the toy after. Still, it wasn't just this one sensation that was tipping the dogs off.

Even when the toy was connected to the ground and a researcher tugged the dogs' feet using a rope, the pets didn't jump off the mat as quickly. This suggests dogs can understand when a tug is made from their own efforts and when a tug is made that is not related to the challenge at hand.

In short, the pets in the study were able to differentiate between 'My body is the obstacle' and simply 'There is an obstacle.' They also know how to instinctively move their bodies to overcome barriers to success.

"We argue that dogs' response in the main test can be explained based on their body awareness and the understanding of the consequences of their own actions," the authors wrote.

Far more research will be needed to understand the continuum of self-awareness that exists in the animal kingdom, and not only in dogs. Very little research has been done on the awareness animals have of their body as an obstacle.

Elephants are one of the only other animals that have gone through similar 'body as an obstacle' tests. During one such study, researchers found Asian elephants stepped off the mat much quicker when doing so was necessary for their success in a task.

The results are similar to what has now been shown in dogs, but elephants can also recognize themselves in a mirror, unlike canines.

The mirror test is based on visual appearance, but the 'body as an obstacle' test is about one's own actions and the physical properties of our bodies as an extension of that. Elephants have both these types of self-recognition figured out. Dogs, it seems, may only have one. 

"Although dogs did not pass the mirror mark test, we now have evidence that they can pass the body as an obstacle test," the researchers conclude.

"Our results support self-representation as an array of more or less connected cognitive skills, and the presence or lack of a particular building block may vary according to the species."

The study has been published in Scientific Reports.

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Tens of millions of people across the country face restrictions, including the entire Jilin province and technology hub Shenzhen, as authorities report record numbers of cases.

Toyota, Volkswagen and Apple supplier Foxconn are among the firms affected.

The lockdowns have raised concerns that crucial supply chains may be disrupted.

China on Tuesday reported a record high of more than 5,000 cases, most of it in Jilin.

All 24 million residents of the north-eastern province were placed under quarantine orders on Monday. It is the first time China has restricted an entire province since the Wuhan and Hebei lockdown at the beginning of the pandemic.

Jilin residents have been banned from moving around, and anyone wanting to leave the province must apply for police permission.

It came a day after a five-day lockdown was placed on the 12.5 million residents of the southern city of Shenzhen, with all buses and subway services suspended.

On Tuesday authorities in Langfang city which borders the capital Beijing, as well as Dongguan in the southern province of Guangdong, also imposed immediate lockdowns.

Businesses in many of the affected regions have been told to close or have their employees work from home, unless they supplied essential services like food, utilities or other necessities.

Foxconn, which manufactures iPhones for Apple, stopped its operations in Shenzhen on Monday, saying the date of resumption would "be advised by the local government".

But it has several production sites in China and told the BBC it had "adjusted the production line to minimise the potential impact". Its plant in Zhengzhou - the world's largest iPhone factory - remains open, as the city was not hit by the restrictions.

Toyota, which shut its factory in Changchun city in Jilin province, did not give a timeline for when business would resume. The Japanese carmaker told the BBC that the move was made to consider the "impact of supplier operation", and the "safety and security of employees and related parties".

German carmaker Volkswagen also shuttered operations in Changchun, saying production of Volkswagen and Audi cars and their components was "affected", but that it hoped to reopen its factory on Thursday.

On Tuesday the Shanghai Composite lost 5% and the Hang Seng index, where several Chinese technology giants are listed, fell more than 6%.

Analysts believe that firms would be able to manage the disruptions. "Such lockdowns have happened before, and [cities] have re-opened within a short period of time once the number of Covid cases were within control," Yeang Cheng Ling, senior investment strategist at Singapore's DBS Bank, told the BBC.

UBS analyst Grace Chen said Shenzhen was not a "major" production site for suppliers, but it would be worrying if the lockdowns extended to Shanghai and surrounding areas as the region is a key manufacturing hub for notebooks, servers and smart devices.

It feels like China has gone backwards. Two years backwards. To the early days of the outbreak that first emerged here.

Drastic measures are being imposed - again - on a large scale, to try to contain the virus. An entire province has been sealed off.

The lockdown of Jilin is similar in so many ways to Hubei in early 2020; the area of China where it all began.

Shenzhen, the globally important tech hub (where your iPad was most likely made) is also a city in lockdown.

Shanghai - where I am writing this - home to 24 million people, is a nervous place. All schools are closed, children are learning online, increasingly people are working from home.

Some compounds where people live are enforcing strict rules on who can come in. Deliveries are being sprayed with disinfectant again at the gates.

China has seen relatively fewer cases of Covid due to its strict zero-Covid policy, where it resorts to rapid lockdowns, mass testing and travel restrictions whenever clusters have emerged.

However the rapid transmissibility of the Omicron variant has made sticking to that approach increasingly challenging.

Since the start of the year, China has reported more domestically transmitted cases than in the entire 2021.

Top Chinese infectious disease expert Zhang Wenhong has called the recent outbreaks "the most difficult period in the last two years of battling Covid" and that they were still in "the early stage of an exponential rise", in an online post widely circulated on social media.

But he added that while it was necessary for China to maintain its zero Covid strategy to control the outbreaks for now, "this does not necessarily mean we will continue implementing the strategy of lockdowns and mass testing forever".

It's all part of the ongoing effort to maintain/retain/regain China's "dynamic zero-Covid" strategy - a goal that has been boosted by the mass roll-out of China's homemade vaccines, and that has been helped hugely by effectively shutting China's borders.

But now that goal is being significantly undermined by the Omicron variant.

Source

Fourth shot “is necessary” Pfizer CEO says as experts monitor BA.2

The National Health Commission reported 1,337 locally transmitted cases in the latest 24-hour period, including 895 in the industrial province of Jilin. A government notice said that police permission would be required for people to leave the area or travel from one city to another.

The hard-hit province sent 7,000 reservists to help with the response, from keeping order and registering people at testing centers to using drones to carry out aerial spraying and disinfection, state broadcaster CCTV reported.

Hundreds of cases were reported in other provinces and cities along China’s east coast and inland as well. Beijing, which had six news cases, and Shanghai, with 41, locked down residential and office buildings where infected people had been found.

While mainland China’s numbers are small compared to many other countries, and even the semi-autonomous city of Hong Kong, they are the highest since COVID-19 killed thousands in the central city of Wuhan in early 2020. No deaths have been reported in the latest outbreaks.

Hong Kong on Monday reported 26,908 new cases and 249 deaths in its latest 24-hour period. The city counts its cases differently than the mainland, combining both rapid antigen tests and PCR test results.

The city’s leader, Carrie Lam, said authorities would not tighten pandemic restrictions for now. “I have to consider whether the public, whether the people would accept further measures,” she said at a press briefing.

Mainland China has seen relatively few infections since the initial Wuhan outbreak as the government has held fast to its zero-tolerance strategy, which is focused on stopping transmission of the coronavirus by relying on strict lockdowns and mandatory quarantines for anyone who has come into contact with a positive case.

The government has indicated it will continue to stick to its strategy of stopping transmission for the time being.

Officials on Sunday locked down the southern city of Shenzhen, which has 17.5 million people and is a major tech and finance hub that borders Hong Kong. That followed the lockdown of Changchun, home to 9 million people in Jilin province, starting last Friday.

On Monday, Zhang Wenhong, a prominent infectious disease expert at a hospital affiliated with Shanghai’s Fudan University noted in an essay for China’s business outlet Caixin, that the numbers for the mainland were still in the beginning stages of an “exponential rise.”

China’s vast passenger rail network said it would cut service significantly, and both China Railway and airlines said they would offer free refunds to people who had already bought tickets. Shanghai suspended bus service to other cities and provinces.

Shanghai has recorded 713 cases in March, of which 632 are asymptomatic cases. China counts positive and asymptomatic cases separately in its national numbers. Schools in China’s largest city have switched to remote learning.

In Beijing, several buildings were sealed off over the weekend. Residents said they were willing to follow the zero-tolerance policies despite any personal impact.

“I think only when the epidemic is totally wiped out can we ease up,” said Tong Xin, 38, a shop owner in the Silk Market, a tourist-oriented mall in the Chinese capital.

Much of the current outbreak across Chinese cities is being driven by the variant commonly known as “stealth omicron,” or the B.A.2 lineage of the omicron variant, Zhang noted. Early research suggests it spreads faster than the original omicron, which itself spread faster than the original virus and other variants.

“But if our country opens up quickly now, it will cause a large number of infections in people in a short period of time,” Zhang wrote Monday. “No matter how low the death rate is, it will still cause a run on medical resources and a short term shock to social life, causing irreparable harm to families and society.”

“Every day when I go to work, I worry that if our office building will suddenly be locked down then I won’t be able to get home, so I have bought a sleeping bag and stored some fast food in the office in advance, just in case,” said Yimeng Li, a Shanghai resident.

While mainland China’s numbers are small compared to many other countries, and even the semi-autonomous city of Hong Kong, they are the highest since COVID-19 killed thousands in the central city of Wuhan in early 2020. No deaths have been reported in the latest outbreaks.

Hong Kong on Monday reported 26,908 new cases and 249 deaths in its latest 24-hour period. The city counts its cases differently than the mainland, combining both rapid antigen tests and PCR test results.

The city’s leader, Carrie Lam, said authorities would not tighten pandemic restrictions for now. “I have to consider whether the public, whether the people would accept further measures,” she said at a press briefing.

Mainland China has seen relatively few infections since the initial Wuhan outbreak as the government has held fast to its zero-tolerance strategy, which is focused on stopping transmission of the coronavirus by relying on strict lockdowns and mandatory quarantines for anyone who has come into contact with a positive case.

The government has indicated it will continue to stick to its strategy of stopping transmission for the time being.

Officials on Sunday locked down the southern city of Shenzhen, which has 17.5 million people and is a major tech and finance hub that borders Hong Kong. That followed the lockdown of Changchun, home to 9 million people in Jilin province, starting last Friday.

On Monday, Zhang Wenhong, a prominent infectious disease expert at a hospital affiliated with Shanghai’s Fudan University noted in an essay for China’s business outlet Caixin, that the numbers for the mainland were still in the beginning stages of an “exponential rise.”

China’s vast passenger rail network said it would cut service significantly, and both China Railway and airlines said they would offer free refunds to people who had already bought tickets. Shanghai suspended bus service to other cities and provinces.

Shanghai has recorded 713 cases in March, of which 632 are asymptomatic cases. China counts positive and asymptomatic cases separately in its national numbers. Schools in China’s largest city have switched to remote learning.

In Beijing, several buildings were sealed off over the weekend. Residents said they were willing to follow the zero-tolerance policies despite any personal impact.

“I think only when the epidemic is totally wiped out can we ease up,” said Tong Xin, 38, a shop owner in the Silk Market, a tourist-oriented mall in the Chinese capital.

Much of the current outbreak across Chinese cities is being driven by the variant commonly known as “stealth omicron,” or the B.A.2 lineage of the omicron variant, Zhang noted. Early research suggests it spreads faster than the original omicron, which itself spread faster than the original virus and other variants.

“But if our country opens up quickly now, it will cause a large number of infections in people in a short period of time,” Zhang wrote Monday. “No matter how low the death rate is, it will still cause a run on medical resources and a short term shock to social life, causing irreparable harm to families and society.”

Source

Also: China locks down province of 24m as new Covid infections rise.

Ford will soon start selling and shipping some Ford Explorers without the chips that power rear air conditioning and heating controls, according to a report from Automotive News. The automaker will instead ship the missing semiconductors to dealers within one year, which they will then install in customers’ vehicles after purchase.

Ford spokesperson Said Deep told The Verge that heating and air condition will still be controllable from the front seats, and that customers who choose to purchase a vehicle without the rear controls will receive a price reduction. According to Deep, Ford is doing this as a way to bring new Explorers to customers faster, and that the change is only temporary.

The automaker originally had plans to ship partially-built, undrivable vehicles to dealers last year, but now, the unchipped vehicles will be both driveable and sellable. As pointed out by Automotive News, Ford’s decision comes as an attempt to move the partially-built vehicles crowding its factory lots. Last month, hundreds of new Ford Broncos were spotted sitting idly in the snow-covered lots near Ford’s Michigan Assembly Plant, all of which await chip-related installations.

Like many other companies, Ford has been grappling with the constraints introduced by the chip shortage. After the lack of semiconductors forced Ford to scale back production of its popular F-150 last year (and once again earlier this month), it started giving customers the option to purchase the pickup without automatic start-stop, the feature that turns a vehicle’s engine off when it comes to a complete stop. Ford gave affected owners a $50 credit in return.

Other automakers have also had to make sacrifices due to the chip shortage, with GM dropping wireless charging, HD radios, and a fuel management module that made some pickup trucks operate more efficiently. Meanwhile, Tesla sold some cars without USB ports and made them installable at a later date. Luxury cars haven’t been exempt from the shortage either, as Cadillac nixed its hands-free driving feature in its 2022 Escalade, while BMW began shipping some cars without touchscreens.

Update March 13th 1:45PM ET: Updated to clarify that the affected vehicles are Ford Explorers and that they’ll be missing rear HVAC controls. Also updated to include some additional context surrounding Ford’s removal of the F-150’s start-stop feature due to the chip shortage, and information from a Ford spokesperson.

Ford to ship and sell Explorer SUVs with missing chips

A nationwide surge in cases has seen authorities close schools in Shanghai and lock down several northeastern cities, as almost 19 provinces battle clusters of the Omicron and Delta variants.

The city of Jilin has been partially locked down, with hundreds of neighbourhoods sealed up, an official announced Sunday, while Yanji, an urban area of nearly 700,000 bordering North Korea, was fully closed off.

China, where the virus was first detected in late 2019, has maintained a strict 'zero-COVID' policy enforced by swift lockdowns, travel restrictions and mass testing when clusters have emerged.

But the latest flare-up, driven by the highly transmissible Omicron variant and a spike in asymptomatic cases, is challenging that approach.

Zhang Yan, an official with the Jilin provincial health commission, admitted Sunday that local authorities' virus response so far had been lacking.

"The emergency response mechanism in some areas is not robust enough, there is insufficient understanding of the characteristics of the Omicron variant... and judgment has been inaccurate," he said at a government press briefing.

Residents of Jilin have completed six rounds of mass testing, local officials said. On Sunday the city reported over 500 cases of the Omicron variant.

The neighbouring city of Changchun—an industrial base of nine million people—was locked down Friday.

The smaller cities of Siping and Dunhua, both in Jilin province, were locked down Thursday and Friday, according to official announcements.

The mayor of Jilin and the head of the Changchun health commission were dismissed from their jobs Saturday, state media reported, in a sign of the political imperative placed on local authorities to squash virus clusters.

COVID-zero?

But fatigue with the strict approach has been showing in China, with officials increasingly urging softer and more targeted measures to contain the virus, while economists warn that tough clampdowns are hurting the economy.

As cases have climbed since late February, the response in different parts of the country has been generally softer and more targeted compared to December, when the city of Xi'an and its 13 million people were locked down for two weeks.

In China's biggest city Shanghai, authorities have increasingly moved to temporarily lock down individual schools, businesses, restaurants and malls over close-contact fears rather than mass quarantines.

Long lines have been seen outside hospitals in the city as people rush to obtain a negative COVID test.

As cases rise, the country's National Health Commission announced Friday that they would introduce the use of rapid antigen tests.

The kits will now be available online or at pharmacies for clinics and ordinary citizens to buy for "self-testing", the health commission said.

Although nucleic acid tests will continue to be the main method of testing, the move suggests China may be anticipating that official efforts will not be able to contain the virus.

Last week, a top Chinese scientist said the country should aim to co-exist with the virus, like other nations, where Omicron has spread like wildfire.

But the government has also made clear that mass lockdowns remain an option.

Chinese Vice Premier Sun Chunlan, who frequently telegraphs top-level thinking on the pandemic response, on Saturday urged regions to quickly pounce on and clear outbreaks.

Source

[Seize 5,840 illegally imported graphics cards] Recently, when Meilin Customs and Huanggang Customs conducted a joint inspection of a company's goods declared for import from Huanggang Port, it was found that 3 of the graphics card labels were covered by other labels. , it was found that the specifications and models displayed on the actual labels that were covered did not match the declared specifications and models, so the batch of graphics cards was sampled and submitted for inspection in accordance with the law. After identification, the actual specifications and models of 5,840 graphics cards did not match the declaration, and the value of the goods exceeded 20 million.

While the images show it pretty clearly is an XFX QICK card, Chinese website MyDrivers speculates that the card in picture is an international version of the XFX SPEEDSTER QICK Radeon RX 6700 XT. This second image really shows the scale of the capture as there appear to be piles of boxes filled with GPUs.

The official website for XFX China has also been closed temporarily which is a little suspect and might be indicating that it may be directly involved. Though, MyDrivers says that XFX China did not respond to the story. However, according a MyDrivers report from 2020, XFX was allegedly involved in the illegal selling of many AMD Radeon RX 500 series, and RX 5000 series GPUs, directly to mining farms.

You can watch the Weibo video embedded below (but turn down the volume first).

< Please watch the video at the source page. >

Source: Chinese Customs (Weibo) via MyDrivers

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About a third of Americans say they don't look forward to these twice-yearly time changes. An overwhelming 63 percent to 16 percent majority would like to eliminate them completely.

But the effects go beyond simple inconvenience. Researchers are discovering that "springing ahead" each March is connected with serious negative health effects.

I'm a professor of neurology and pediatrics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, and the director of our sleep division. In a 2020 commentary for the journal JAMA Neurology, my co-authors and I reviewed the evidence linking the annual transition to daylight saving time to increased strokes, heart attacks, and teen sleep deprivation.

Based on an extensive body of research, my colleagues and I believe that the science establishing these links is strong and that the evidence makes a good case for adopting permanent standard time nationwide – as I testified at a recent Congressional hearing.

Missing sleep, worse health

"Falling back" – going from daylight saving time to standard time each November by turning the clocks back one hour – is relatively benign. While some people may feel thrown off balance and need a few weeks to recover, research hasn't linked it to serious impacts on health.

Springing forward is harder on the body, however. This is because our clock time is moved an hour later; in other words, it feels like 7 am even though our clocks say it is 8 am. So it's a permanent shift to later morning light for almost eight months – not just for the day of the change or a few weeks afterward.

This is particularly notable because morning light is valuable for helping to set the body's natural rhythms: It wakes us up and improves alertness.

Although the exact reasons are not yet known, this may be due to light's effects on increasing levels of cortisol, a hormone that modulates the stress response, or the effect of light on the amygdala, a part of the brain involved in emotions.

In contrast, exposure to light later into the evening delays the brain's release of melatonin, the hormone that promotes drowsiness. This can interfere with sleep and cause us to sleep less overall, and the effect can last even after most people adjust to losing an hour of sleep at the start of daylight saving time.

Because puberty also causes melatonin to be released later at night, meaning that teenagers have a delay in the natural signal that helps them fall asleep, adolescents are particularly susceptible to sleep problems from the extended evening light of daylight saving time. This shift in melatonin during puberty lasts into our 20s.

Adolescents also may be chronically sleep deprived due to school, sports, and social activity schedules. For instance, many children start school around 8 am or earlier. This means that during daylight saving time, many young people get up and travel to school in pitch darkness.

The "western edge" effect

Geography can also make a difference in how daylight saving time affects people. One study showed that people living on the western edge of a time zone, who get light later in the morning and light later in the evening, got less sleep than their counterparts on the eastern edge of a time zone.

This study found that western edge residents had higher rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and breast cancer, as well as lower per capita income and higher health care costs.

Other research has found that rates of certain other cancers are higher on the western edge of a time zone.

Scientists believe that these health problems may result from a combination of chronic sleep deprivation and "circadian misalignment".

Circadian misalignment refers to a mismatch in timing between our biological rhythms and the outside world. In other words, the timing of daily work, school, or sleep routines is based on the clock, rather than on the sun's rise and set.

A brief history of daylight saving time

Congress instituted daylight saving time during World War I and again during World War II, and once again during the energy crisis of the early 1970s.

The idea was that having extra light later into the afternoon would save energy by decreasing the need for electric lighting. This idea has since been proved largely inaccurate, as heating needs may increase in the morning in the winter, while air conditioning needs can also increase in the late afternoon in the summer.

Another pro-daylight saving argument has been that crime rates drop with more light at the end of the day. While this has been proved true, the change is very small, and the health effects appear to outweigh the lower rates of crime.

After World War II, it was left to state governments to set the start and end dates for daylight saving time. Because this created many railroad scheduling and safety problems, however, Congress passed the Uniform Time Act in 1966. This law set the nationwide dates of daylight saving time from the last Sunday in April until the last Sunday in October.

In 2007, Congress amended the Uniform Time Act to expand daylight saving time from the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November, dates that remain in effect today.

The law allows states and territories to opt out of daylight saving time, however. Arizona and Hawaii are on permanent standard time, along with Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, and American Samoa. Now, many other states are considering whether to stop falling back and springing ahead.

The question then becomes: Should they pick permanent daylight saving time or permanent standard time?

The strong case for permanent standard time

Americans are split on whether they prefer permanent daylight saving time or permanent standard time. However, my colleagues and I believe that the health-related science for establishing permanent standard time is strong.

Standard time most closely approximates natural light, with the sun directly overhead at or near noon. In contrast, during daylight saving time from March until November, the natural light is shifted unnaturally by one hour later.

Based on abundant evidence that daylight saving time is unnatural and unhealthy, I believe we should abolish daylight saving time and adopt permanent standard time.The Conversation

Beth Ann Malow, Professor of Neurology and Pediatrics, Vanderbilt University.

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Also: Doctors want daylight saving time abolished. Here's why, and what you can do about it.

When Isak Munda uploaded his first YouTube video in March 2020, he was desperate. A nationwide lockdown imposed to curb Covid had brought India - and the construction industry that employed him - to a halt. It left workers like him, who earned a daily wage, struggling for a living.

Until inspiration struck.

His children were watching a cartoon on YouTube when Mr Munda overheard an advertisement on how people could earn money from the platform by uploading videos.

Why not try it, he thought to himself - he didn't have anything to lose. So, he scoured YouTube videos for tips and began with simple food videos.

In his first video, Mr Munda sits with a full plate of food - rice, dal, greens, a tomato and a chili - which he finishes in silence after greeting viewers. It didn't take off like he had hoped.

"For about a week, no-one watched my video. I was disheartened," he says.

He decided to give it another shot - he returned to YouTube for help and found that many creators also promoted their videos on other social platforms.

"I opened an account on Facebook and shared my videos there. This time, it worked - 10, 12 people watched my videos."

Soon, he had his first viral video in which he relishes basi pakhala, a fermented rice dish popular in Orissa.

"It got me over 20,000 subscribers in a few days. People from all over the world - the US, Brazil, Mongolia - watched it," he recalls.

It's all the encouragement he needed.

Two years on, Mr Munda's channel - Isak Munda Eating - has more than 800,000 subscribers and his videos have been watched more than a 100 million times. Mr Munda himself is now visibly comfortable in front of the camera as he hosts village "chicken parties" and forages for mushrooms with his family.

Last year, he was praised by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his monthly radio show for "blending culture and cuisine" to become an "internet sensation".

The lockdown cost millions of migrant workers their jobs

"I was over the moon, and my subscriptions went up,"an ecstatic Mr Munda says.

Conquering YouTube through YouTube

Mr Munda's videos fall into the "mukbang" genre of YouTube videos - people eat huge amounts of food, sometimes speaking to their viewers as they do it.

The trend started around 2010 in South Korea and Japan, and then spread around the world. Millions subscribe to popular mukbang channels, including MaddyEats from India.

The genre's fans say they like playing mukbang videos in the background while they eat, especially if they are eating alone - they say it makes them feel less lonely.

But Mr Munda didn't know any of this when he began posting. He just went through different categories of videos before settling on food, which he knew he could cook with his wife's help.

"I thought viewers would be interested in seeing what our lives look like through food," he says.

And YouTube was his teacher - it's where he researched what camera to buy, how to shoot and edit videos, and even the recipes for the dishes he wanted to film himself eating. He withdrew 3,000 rupees ($39; £30) from his savings - a hefty sum for him - and purchased a smart phone to make videos. He paid the full amount in instalments.

He didn't finish school and knew little English. But he taught himself to use email, and social media to spread the word about his channel. He also learnt to use Google translate to add subtitles to his videos.

And he has got better.

The first video is just him eating his lunch, filmed in a single take. "Hello, friends," he says in Hindi. "I'm about to eat what you see on this plate". After explaining what it is, he relishes his meal.

But by February 2022 the videos are different. He doesn't shoot every meal or every day - instead he chooses special occasions, such as a village party.

Indians from everywhere comment on his videos, comparing the food he is eating to what's cooked in their homes.

Many admire how he shared his life with no artifice. "Their community feasting looks like so much fun," writes one viewer, and another says, "He actually knows the value of food and how to respect it".

Over time, Mr Munda's repertoire has expanded. From home-cooked close to his heart, he's moved on to taking requests from his followers to cook and eat different dishes. The northern Indian staple, aloo parathas, or potato-stuffed flatbreads, and the Indian take on chow mein, have made an appearance.

Mr Munda's wife and children often feature in his videos

Food challenges are also a part of the menu - in a rice eating challenge, he cooked the rice over a fire in the ground and then enjoyed it with his family.

"We still eat simple food everyday," he says, although they can afford to eat meat more frequently now.

A future for his children

When he worked as a daily wage labourer, Mr Munda earned around 250 rupees a day, for 18 to 20 days of work in a month. This was barely enough for a comfortable living for a family of six, and his parents.

As his channel grew popular, Mr Munda's income jumped to around 300,000 rupees a month.

But when views go down, so does his income. He is now earning 60,000-70,000 rupees a month.

Still, with the money he's earned so far, Mr Munda has built a two-storied concrete house where his old ramshackle hut once stood. He says he's spent around 200,000 rupees on it.

He has saved money for his children's education, bought a second-hand car, and a laptop on which he edits videos.

He has also become a local celebrity, and often throws lavish parties for the villagers, complete with chicken dishes.

Mr Munda's next goal: enrol his children in an English-medium school in the nearest town.

"I want to give them the best possible education. If I could do this with my limited education, I am sure they will do much better if they study higher."

You can watch BBC Hindi's video on Isak Munda here.

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From the outside, the museum on Palatine Hill looked like just another of Rome's elegant palazzi, its entrance graced with statues of Roman soldiers and decorative urns.

Inside, however, it was clear that this wasn't your run-of-the-mill Roman mansion. Hundreds of culinary tools were displayed in glass cabinets: bulky 19th-Century pasta machines, 220-year-old Italian bowls once used by Italian monks and well-worn steel pots designed for making osso bucco, the classic northern Italian veal recipe. What at first looked like medieval plates of armour were in fact metal tray moulds up to 500 years old. Some were for baking, others for making chocolate or ice cream.

The Museo della Cucina displays instruments used for haute cuisine, pastries, chocolate, ice cream and baking (Credit: Ronan O’Connell)

Other displays held books. I stopped in front of one illustration to look at lumps of meat cooked over an open flame on a 16th-Century rotisserie; in the picture next to it, Italian men sat at a banquet table, eating. These sketches decorate the cover of one of the oldest cookbooks displayed in the museum, Il Trinciante, written in 1593 by Vincenzo Cervio. The author was a trinciante, or carver, for Italian Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. Cervio's 74-chapter opus reveals how to precisely cut fish, pies, fruits and vegetables and, above all, meat and fowl like pork, chicken, turkey, pheasant and peacock. Detailed drawings specify Cervio's preferred carving points to ensure juicy and flavourful cuts.

Il Trinciante is one of 120 cookbooks at the Museo della Cucina, a museum opening in May 2022 that will be the city's first focusing on the history of food and cooking. Since the first mass-printed cookbook was published almost 550 years ago, many Italian recipes have been all but lost, hibernating in old texts hidden in repositories, said the museum's director, Matteo Ghirighini. The Museo della Cucina aims to rectify that. Its collection is based on that of Italian chef Rosso Boscolo and includes many of the oldest and rarest cookbooks in existence – including some originally meant only for popes. Boscolo's Tuscan cooking school Campus Etoile Academy, meanwhile, will help the museum grow rare ingredients and perfect neglected recipes once reserved only for royalty.

When I got a sneak peek at the museum in November 2021, it was preparing for its launch. I came across it by accident. Rome is so awash with extraordinary sites that it's easy to overlook monumental churches and remains of 2,000-year-old palaces, let alone a yet-to-open cooking museum.

But already the Museo della Cucina had been included on Google Maps. And as I used my phone's GPS, I noticed its listing. What initially piqued my interest was its remarkable location. The museum is wedged between two of Rome's most important historic sites – the 2,600-year-old stadium Circus Maximus, and Palatine Hill, where Rome was founded and which is cloaked in the remains of ancient palaces and temples.

The Museo della Cucina is tucked between the Circus Maximus and Palatine Hill (Credit: Ronan O’Connell)

As it turns out, the museum isn't just on the Palatine but on the specific location where Romulus and Remus, the legendary founders of Rome, were breastfed by the Roman wolf goddess Lupa more than 2,700 years ago. Myth has it that Romulus later established Rome on the same spot.

It is fitting the museum sits on such a historic location, said Ghirighini. "Cooking as a way of reading contemporary history has often been underrated," he said. "Cooking is a product of its time and it can tell us a lot about customs, ways of thinking, specific economic and political situations. So, a cookbook is often much more than it seems."

These sentiments were shared by Laila Tentoni, president of Italy's renowned Casa Artusi centre for gastronomy in Forlimpopoli, northern Italy. She said Italy's food revealed an enormous amount about the country's passions. And cookbooks, in turn, had greatly shaped the history and direction of Italian cuisine.

The museum displays the oldest mass-printed cookbook, Platina’s On Honourable Pleasure and Health (Credit: Museo della Cucina)

Casa Artusi is dedicated to one of the country's most revered cookbook authors, Pellegrino Artusi. Tentoni said Artusi's 1891 book, Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well, aimed to demystify Italian cuisine that had previously been reserved for the country's elite.

"Artusi was like the first food blogger," Tentoni said. "Artusi suggests to be simple, to use local, seasonal and quality products. Always you must choose the finest ingredients as your raw materials, for these will make you shine, Artusi wrote."

I admired a rare first edition of Artusi's influential text on the second floor of the Museo della Cucina. While Artusi's cookbook is not as vibrantly illustrated as some others, it makes up for that with his colourful writing style. "Many people will read this recipe and cry out: 'Oh what a ridiculous pasta!'," he wrote about his curious Lentin Spaghetti, in an English language version of his publication I read online. Made from ground walnuts, breadcrumbs, confectioner's sugar and allspice – also known as Jamaican pepper or pimento – this sweet spaghetti was unfailingly popular with children, Artusi said.

Some of Artusi's recipes have since fallen out of favour – such as his recipe for eel pie. Not only is that long, slender fish difficult to prepare and cook – so much so that Japan has many specialist eel chefs – but Artusi's recipe pairs it with raisins, rosewater and almond milk.

Dozens of old cooking utensils are displayed at the Museo della Cucina (Credit: Ronan O’Connell)

Having long ago forgotten my high school Italian, I was unable to decipher the open pages of the library's books. But Ghirighini told me I could eventually read each one in English once the museum's comprehensive website is completed. "Basically, you have access to a full virtual, illustrated, guided tour through five centuries of gastronomy," he said.

From among that trove he singled out several texts I should examine. In addition to Artusi's classic, there was the first cookbook ever mass printed, On Honourable Pleasure and Health, by Italian author Bartolomeo Platina in 1474. That text, which focused on the preparation of single meals rather than decadent banquets, earned a huge following in Italy before its popularity saw it translated into French and German.

A similarly important cookbook, Ghirighini said, was The Opera of Bartolomeo Scappi from 1570. That was written by and named after the revered Scappi, the private chef of Pope Pius V. This cookbook, which brims with sketches of meals being prepared in grand kitchens, was extraordinary because, for the first time, it gave the Italian public access to recipes previously untasted outside of the Vatican.

The Opera of Bartolomeo Scappi, published in 1570, was written by the private chef of Pope Pius V (Credit: Museo della Cucina)

In particular, Scappi wrote of how Pope Pius IV was a fan of frog. Not just any frog, mind you, but those from the city of Bologna, which were especially plump and delicious. For the Pope, Scappi would remove the frogs' surprisingly large livers, coat them in egg, flour and milk and then fry them into crispy fritters. That was a snack.

The remainder of this amphibian was prepared as a heartier meal for His Holiness. Scappi would discard the head and the tips of the frog's feet, and fry what was left only in flour. Then he'd soak it in verjuice sauce made from unripened grapes, which was once a popular ingredient among Italian chefs but has largely been superseded by vinegar.

Because French cuisine had significant influences on northern Italian gastronomy – due to sharing both a border and mutual admiration for each other's continent-leading culinary prowess – the museum also displays many of France's finest cookbooks, written by the likes of Marie-Antoine Careme, Francois Massialot and Urbane Francois Dubois.

"The books in the museum contain the first printed recipes of all the most iconic dishes of the gastronomic culture of [Italy and France], from tomato sauce to supplì (rice croquettes) and panettone, from macarons to meringues," Ghirighini said.

As the owner of a sweet tooth, my mouth watered as I admired evocative drawings of towering cakes in Careme's book Le Patissier Royal Parisien. He pioneered a grandiose approach to cooking that leaned on spectacle as much as technique. From pastry, sugar and marzipan, Careme created giant replicas of famous buildings.

The museum exhibits an array of pudding moulds dating back to the 1700s (Credit: Ronan O’Connell)

Aside from books and artefacts, Ghirighini said the museum plans to bring historical dishes alive with tastings, such as the first-ever recipe for Italian tomato sauce, from the late 1600s. Taken from Antonio Latini's 1692 cookbook, this recipe has more in common with spicy salsa than the mild tomato sauce of the modern day thanks to its generous helping of fresh chillies.

There will also be on-site banquets featuring ancient recipes from the museum's cookbooks, some of which have been dormant for generations, although Ghirighini did not yet want to reveal yet what they may be.

"A cookbook and food museum in Rome is absolutely something new," said Flaminia Belloni, a Rome tour guide for 20 years. "It's a good chance to learn how the food and the cooking traditions were a real part of the lifestyle and state of mind for all Italians."

Ghirighini hopes others will agree. After all, few feats could be more difficult than attempting to crystallise, within one building, more than 500 years of Italian cooking – and doing justice to one of the most globally renowned, and fascinating, aspects of Italian culture.

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Just as there are von Neumann machines and von Neumann algebras, there are von Neumann anecdotes. Here’s a well-worn favorite. Late in the 1940s, years after he left Hungary for the United States and became a lionized mathematician, John von Neumann met a group of Rand Corporation scientists who wanted to use a computer he’d helped design. They had a particular problem to solve, and it was—as they explained using blackboards and graphs—beyond the capacity of von Neumann’s computer at the moment. But perhaps the computer might be modified to address it? For two hours, von Neumann listened to the scientists, his head in his hands, his face impassive. Then he declared, “Gentlemen, you do not need the computer. I have the answer,” helped them through his thinking, and concluded: “Let’s go to lunch.”

Most anecdotes about von Neumann abide by this three-act structure: a question that baffles the best minds; their sweaty, pointless deliberations; von Neumann’s swift, soaring leap to the solution. (Sometimes, as in the Rand Corporation tale, the question itself goes undescribed. Its sole attribute of importance is its impenetrability.) For any biographer of von Neumann, these anecdotes are irresistible, because they serve several purposes so well. Most obviously, they are instant lessons on how much more brilliant von Neumann was than his colleagues—on the inscrutable speed and clarity of his brain. And how useful they are for many of us, untrained in the sciences, to glimpse his genius through this anecdotal shorthand; left to follow his work in quantum mechanics, mathematical logic, or game theory, we’d drown. But the anecdotes also carry a hidden charge. They lull us into believing that if von Neumann, the magus of logic, was so effortlessly and consummately right about these scientific problems, perhaps he was similarly right in his hyperrational treatment of the great projects of his time: the Cold War, nuclear escalation, market economics. Add to that mix the development of the computer—in which, too, von Neumann played a vital role—and the twentieth century shows itself as a distinctively von Neumannian enterprise.

The Rand Corporation story pops up in Ananyo Bhattacharya’s The Man From the Future, a lucid and rewarding new biography of von Neumann that otherwise visibly quivers from the noble effort to not use too many von Neumann anecdotes. Truth to tell, Bhattacharya, a physics scholar turned science writer, is less biographer than cartographer. The book doesn’t reveal many new details of von Neumann’s life and character, and our hero himself vanishes for pages at a time. Instead, Bhattacharya composes a rich intellectual map of von Neumann’s pursuits, shading in their histories and evolutions, and tracing the routes and connections between them. He recruits every ounce of your attention: Quantum physics, nuclear bomb-making, and computer architecture are all gnarly subjects. But through his narrative, we attend the raucous birth of these disciplines, with von Neumann hovering like a fussy midwife.

In his introduction, Bhattacharya argues that von Neumann invented his future—our present. “His views and ideas,” he writes, “inform how we think about who we are as a species, our social and economic interactions … and the machines that could elevate us to unimaginable heights or destroy us completely. Look around you and you will see Johnny’s fingerprints everywhere.” If that smells mildly of overkill—of the modern publisher’s tic of bigging up biographical figures into a burning, all-pervading modern relevance—it’s only because von Neumann wasn’t always an original thinker, and because, in his grandest undertakings, he featured as one among a constellation of other bright stars. But undeniably, von Neumann’s devotion to mathematical rationality was emblematic of, and even fed, the new American faith that cold, theoretical logic could be applied to nearly every province of human activity. Even happiness, as von Neumann once wrote to the physicist Stanislaw Ulam, “is an eminently empirical proposition.” He was referring to his own divorce.

Looking back, von Neumann’s rise to scientific eminence seems as fluent and foreordained as his resolution of thorny problems. His early career met no hiccups: He wasn’t raised in poverty, as Srinivasa Ramanujan was; he failed no exams, as Einstein did; he came down with no immobilizing disease, as Stephen Hawking did. Even as a boy, von Neumann had a blistering-fast mind and an adhesive memory. By some accounts, he could multiply two eight-digit numbers in his head by the time he was six, and he absorbed a 45-volume history of the world so thoroughly that, decades later, he’d quote whole entries word for word in the midst of arguments. He was born into a Jewish family in Hungary in 1903—among the best of all possible times to be a Hungarian Jew, although mere decades before the worst of all possible times to be a Hungarian Jew. The Budapest of von Neumann’s childhood, the fin of a buoyant siècle, was a cosmopolitan idyll in which Jews were able to prosper, and the von Neumanns could afford tutors, country homes, and private libraries. They could also send their bright little son to Budapest’s most elite “gymnasium,” a high school that Eugene Wigner, a Nobel-winning physicist a year senior to von Neumann, thought was the best in Hungary, if not the whole world.

These gymnasiums turned other wealthy Jewish boys into towering scientists as well. Leo Szilard came up with the idea of a nuclear chain reaction while crossing a London street in 1933. Edward Teller figured out how to make a hydrogen bomb. Theodore von Kármán refined the principles of aerodynamics and co-founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Von Kármán aside, the rest all worked on the Manhattan Project, sorting out the science with such liquid ease and conversing with one another in such unfamiliar accents that their colleagues called them “Martians.” Even among these intellects, von Neumann’s was esteemed as special. Someone once asked Wigner: Why did Hungary turn out so many geniuses during his generation? Wigner claimed he didn’t understand the question. He knew only one Hungarian genius, he said: von Neumann.

His early energies were drawn to the liveliest mathematical debate of his day, about the essence of the field itself. By the early 1900s, so many barnacles had clung to the keel of mathematics—so many paradoxes, and theories that were true but unprovable, and strange new geometries—that the vessel itself seemed in danger of sinking. One group of Europeans, led by the German theorist David Hilbert, wanted to salvage mathematics—to define it afresh with rigorous logic so that one axiom followed tidily from others, anomalies dissolved, and everything felt complete, consistent, and shipshape once again. “If mathematical thinking is defective,” Hilbert once wondered, “where are we to find truth and certitude?”

The doubt must have felt profound, existential. In parallel, physicists were struggling to reconcile Newtonian laws with quantum theory, and biologists to figure out how Mendelian inheritance fit with Darwinian selection, so the whole venture of human knowledge was suddenly quaking underfoot. Von Neumann, studying for degrees in two different universities at once, naturally plumped for logic—for the view that mathematics had to be smooth and consistent. His first major paper, published in 1925, set about refurbishing set theory along clean, logical lines. It was complex, elegant work—a senior mathematician understood just enough of it to compare von Neumann to Newton—and it continues to be foundational in set theory today. But if anyone hoped that the paper would light the road toward final proof that all of mathematics was similarly watertight and consistent, they were soon deflated by Kurt Gödel’s theorems of incompleteness, which showed that some assertions could never be proved or disproved using mathematical tools. Von Neumann, armored in self-confidence, learned from it and took it in his stride. It never did to take anything as immovably certain, he wrote later: “I know myself how humiliatingly easily my own views regarding the absolute mathematical truth changed during this episode.”

To the sharp, sure quality of his analytical thought, von Neumann added a capacity to marry and advance the concepts of others. Show him an idea, an assistant once recalled to an earlier biographer named Norman Macrae, and “he was in a short while five blocks ahead of you.” In the 1920s, too, von Neumann wrestled into sync two competing approaches to quantum mechanics, the emerging, probabilistic science of how energy and matter acted at the subatomic level. One physicist, Werner Heisenberg, cast the properties of particles as numbers in rectangular arrays called matrices, to better calculate their behavior; another, Erwin Schrödinger, treated particles as traveling energy and drafted a wave function instead, claiming he was “repelled” by Heisenberg’s method. Von Neumann, who saw the underlying mathematics better than almost anyone, showed how wave and matrix mechanics were essentially the same, and how one could be expressed in the other’s language.

It was among the last pieces of work he would complete in Europe. In 1933, he accepted a lifetime professorship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, that unending summer camp for geniuses who were requested to do nothing but think around one another. Von Neumann and his family had converted to Roman Catholicism in 1928, but that would hardly have mattered to the Nazis. As a speculative exercise, the reader may wonder what would have become of the American century if the war had never happened, and if there had been no westward stream of scientists who feared their futures in Europe, and who were outrageously prolific because, as von Neumann said, of “a feeling of extreme insecurity … and the necessity to produce the unusual or face extinction.” But there was something especially fortuitous about the match made between the United States and von Neumann—a man who fell in love with the country as soon as he set foot on its soil, and whose powers of calculation and synthesis were exactly what American science needed for its monumental new schemes, schemes that promised, in von Neumann’s favored phrase, to “jiggle the planet.”

One of the finest aspects of Bhattachar­ya’s book is his delineation of how the nuclear bomb and the modern computer flowered in parallel, and how von Neumann buzzed between the two, cross-pollinating and nurturing until one now seems inconceivable without the other. His own contributions were, as was often the case, nimble and inventive answers to questions that others had slogged through. He perfected the calculations showing that big bombs wreak more ruin when they explode at an optimum altitude, rather than on the ground—a result that, to his chagrin, newspapers understood as “a miss [being] better than a hit.” At Los Alamos, working on the bomb, von Neumann devised an ingenious arrangement of wedge-shaped explosives that could implode in such synchronicity that the shock waves set off a core of plutonium—the mechanism in the bomb that eventually flattened Nagasaki. He liked being at Los Alamos, not so much to revel in the sere beauty of the New Mexican landscape—for he was, after all, the man who once wore a business suit on a mule ride up a mountain—but because he was in the thick of heated, urgent science. For their part, his colleagues treated him like a human computer. Whenever they heard that von Neumann was returning to Los Alamos, an unnamed source told Macrae, “they would set up all of their advanced mathematical problems like ducks in a shooting gallery. Then he would arrive and systematically topple them over.”

For his own sums, which ramified as these projects grew more complicated, von Neumann relied heavily on both punch card machines and the first electromechanical computers—to the point that whenever other scientists visited a computer installation, it was already running a shock wave problem for von Neumann. The progress of the computer was sweetly timed, occurring just at the moment when it was called upon to handle nuclear bomb calculations and not just estimate artillery trajectories.

Much of this activity happened at the University of Pennsylvania, which offered von Neumann one of his numerous consultancies. In 1945, riding a train to Los Alamos, he drafted a report laying down the logical design for a “stored-program” computer—a computer that holds both data and the instructions on how to act upon the data, the sort of computer that had first taken shape in Alan Turing’s broad theoretical vision. In the years after the war, this document was invaluable. It guided the engineering of several new computers, including one at the Institute for Advanced Study—where, as Bhattacharya shows in a small, firm act of historical restitution, Klára Dán, von Neumann’s second wife, worked as one of the chief programmers. But von Neumann’s report also incensed some colleagues, who thought he’d merely rendered their concepts into print—and worse, profited from them through other consulting contracts. In any case, posterity has had the last word. That model of the computer, which prefigured the devices we employ today, is still called von Neumann architecture.

After the war, a strange feat of transmutation took place. The cool, logical precepts driving the computers that engendered the bomb were turned into the basis for a kind of amoral thinking about the use of the bomb itself—a calculus that could discount the lives of civilians in the quest for nuclear supremacy. Other scientists, such as Robert Oppenheimer and Leo Szilard, had misgivings about this.

Von Neumann, though, was enthusiastic about the arms race—about bigger and bolder bombs, certainly, but also about the strategies of deterrence and first strike. “It will not be sufficient to know that the enemy has only fifty possible tricks and that you can counter every one of them,” he wrote in a paper titled “Defense in Atomic War” in 1955, “but you must also invent some system of being able to counter them practically at the instant they occur.” Pouncing first might even be pragmatic, for after all, as von Neumann believed: “With the Russians, it is not a question of whether but when.”

Bhattacharya devotes perhaps a few too many pages to the circuit of Rand analysts, military officials, and government committees all studying nuclear war; the bureaucracy of plotting mass killings is unsurprisingly dull. But this was von Neumann’s postwar life, and he enjoyed it—not just because it made him feel important to be sought out by generals and to hear, as a friend once said, the “thump of helicopters on his lawn,” but also because he was sure of the virtues of pursuing war against the Soviet Union. In Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick mashed up several German and Mitteleuropean scientists to create his titular, near-mad scientist, and while von Neumann wasn’t a primary inspiration, he’s in there somewhere—in Strangelove’s expositions on computers and tape-memory banks, in his quicksilver doomsday calculations, in his gamed-out scenarios of nuclear attack. “Deterrence,” Strangelove says, “is the art of producing in the mind of the enemy the fear to attack”—a line of dialogue shining with the von Neumannian certainty that logic can regulate the instincts and foibles of humans.

That certainty was also at the heart of Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, a text that von Neumann wrote jointly with the economist Oskar Morgenstern. (Incredibly, the book came together in the mid-1940s, even as von Neumann was shuttling between bomb labs and computer facilities.) Game theory, faithful to its name, treats every human context as a game—a self-contained situation in which your sly rival must lose for you to win, and in which the nature of these losses and wins can be always summed up in precise numbers. Morgenstern and von Neumann offered mathematical blueprints for victory, or at least for the least bruising of defeats. These weren’t just to be consulted by a pair of prisoners in separate cells, wondering whether to rat each other out—the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the classic thought experiment, framed in 1950 by Princeton mathematician Albert W. Tucker, that introduces game theory to students even today. For von Neumann, game theory was an affirmation of humans as rational actors who weigh utility and risk in a world that is perpetually zero-sum, and who can make optimal decisions—optimal, that is, for themselves—about bombing other countries or buying new cars.

When von Neumann framed (if only theoretically) the consumer as rational, he helped endorse the free market itself as a rational, self-correcting, self-optimizing place. But the real world and its various markets are bigger and more intricate than the models of game theory, of course: No one has perfect information or consistent beliefs, no one acts in the realm of unalloyed reason. One game theorist, Ariel Rubinstein, called his field “a collection of fables”—very useful for detached analysis, but useless to reach conclusions about “what to do tomorrow, or how to reach an agreement between the West and Iran.” Von Neumann implicitly wanted, however, to apply game theory to the full-blown war with the Soviet Union that he thought was imminent—and game theory recommended a surprise, preemptive attack by the United States. “If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today?” he said in 1950. “If you say today at 5 o’clock, I say why not one o’clock?”

It’s hard to know if von Neumann truly believed that—and truly believed, more generally, that life and society are best organized by mathematical logic. He was fond of provocation, and his proposal of a lunchtime nuke over Moscow may have been made for sheer effect. But he also seemed to conduct his own affairs on the basis of pure mind. In his work, Macrae tells us, von Neumann never had strokes of irrational intuition, the kind that result in startling new ideas; his friend Einstein had many, and von Neumann envied them. With people, he was gregarious and charming, but “he tended to be oblivious to the emotional needs of those around him,” his daughter, Marina, said to Bhattachar­ya. (Marina was two when her parents divorced; her father agreed to let her live with him only after she turned 12, when she was “approaching the age of reason.”)

Von Neumann’s colleagues joked that he was a visitor from some species with an advanced intellect, and that he’d merely studied humans in enough detail to imitate them to perfection. The jibe hinted at an image of a man somehow displaced in space and time. Bhattacharya locates that space and time in the future—the future as seen from the 1940s, certainly, but also the future as seen from 2022. One of von Neumann’s last essays, titled “Can We Survive Technology?” and published in 1955, discusses the adverse effects of climatic shifts; other papers dwelled on artificial intelligence, technological singularities, and self-replicating automata, the obsessions of our coming decades. Von Neumann isn’t done with us yet.

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The child, Easton Sinnamon, is the first person to receive a heart transplant along with implantation of thymus tissue from the same donor, according to a statement from Duke University, where the procedure was performed.

Because the thymus plays an important role in immune system function – in particular, teaching the body to recognize its own cells and tissues versus foreign invaders – it's possible that this combination transplant could allow the child's body to accept the new heart as part of itself instead of treating it as a foreign organ.

"We thought, if we did a thymus and heart transplant on Easton, there's a potential that taking that from the same donor will allow that transplanted heart to be recognized as self," Dr. Joseph Turek, Duke's chief of pediatric cardiac surgery, said in a media briefing on Monday (March 7).

Much more research is needed to see if this combination transplant allows Easton to live without immunosuppressive drugs – which are typically necessary in transplant patients to stop the body from rejecting the organ — as well as whether it could work for other transplant recipients.

If the approach proves successful, it could potentially "be applied to all solid organs down the road," Turek said.

Related: How long can organs stay outside the body before being transplanted? 

Easton was born with a heart defect and underwent open heart surgery at just 5 days old, according to Duke University.

But the surgery wasn't enough to fix the problem, and Easton's doctors determined he would need a heart transplant to survive. 

Then, doctors discovered that Easton also had a thymus condition that meant he would need transplanted thymus tissue.

Serendipitously, researchers at Duke had been studying this very combination – a heart and thymus transplant – in animal models.

With special approval from the Food and Drug Administration, Easton's doctors performed his heart transplant on Aug. 6, 2021, when he was 6 months old; and two weeks later, they implanted thymus tissue from the same donor that had been cultured in a laboratory.

Tests taken 172 days after the transplant show that the thymus tissue is working to produce immune cells known as T-cells in Easton's body, according to Duke University.

Although Easton is currently taking immunosuppressive drugs to prevent organ rejection, his doctors will attempt to taper him off the drugs in the next few months to see if his body treats the new organ as "self."

Usually, transplant recipients must take immunosuppressive drugs their entire lives to prevent organ rejection. But long-term use of the drugs can be toxic, particularly to the kidneys, Turek said. And even with the drugs, the organs may eventually be rejected, with the typical donated heart lasting around 10 to 15 years, according to Duke University.

Easton's case "could truly change the way that transplants are done in the future," Turek said.

Still, even if the procedure works for Easton, there are additional challenges in applying the technique to people with a functioning thymus, NBC News reported.

"The main issue is we have to try to figure out how to do this in a patient that has a very competent immune system, where you'll have a native thymus competing with the donor thymus tissue," Turek said, according to NBC News. 

Easton continues to do well and recently turned 1 year old. "We not only were able to be given the gift to have our son back, but we were also able to give the gift of this possibility with the thymus, to help expand this for other children that are going through the same thing," Easton's mother, Kaitlyn Sinnamon, said in the briefing.

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Delta-omicron recombinant virus no reason for panic, health experts say

Using a group of 30 healthy adults who were anesthetized for three hours, and a group of 30 healthy adults who weren't as a control measure, a 2021 study reveals some insights into how the brain drags itself back into consciousness.

It turns out that the brain switches back on one section at a time, rather than all at once – and abstract problem-solving capabilities, as handled by the prefrontal cortex, are the functions that come back online the quickest. Other brain areas, including those managing reaction time and attention, take longer.

"Although initially surprising, it makes sense in evolutionary terms that higher cognition needs to recover early," said anesthesiologist Max Kelz, from the University of Pennsylvania.

"If, for example, someone was waking up to a threat, structures like the prefrontal cortex would be important for categorizing the situation and generating an action plan."

A variety of methods were used to measure what was happening in the brain, including electroencephalography (EEG) scans and cognitive tests before and after going under. These tests measured reaction speed, memory recall, and other skills.

Analyzing the EEG readings, the researchers noted that the frontal regions of the brain – where functions including problem-solving, memory, and motor control are located – became particularly active as the brain began to recover.

A comparison with the control group showed that it took about three hours for those who had been anesthetized to recover fully.

The team also followed up with the group participants about their sleep schedules in the days after the experiment. The experience didn't appear to negatively affect sleeping patterns in those who had been anesthetized.

"This suggests that the healthy human brain is resilient, even with a prolonged exposure to deep anesthesia," said anesthesiologist Michael Avidan, from Washington University.

"Clinically, this implies that some of the disorders of cognition that we often see for days or even weeks during recovery from anesthesia and surgery – such as delirium – might be attributable to factors other than lingering effects of anesthetic drugs on the brain."

A lot of surgical procedures simply wouldn't be possible without anesthesia, an effective and controlled way of turning off consciousness in the brain – something that can happen involuntarily in the case of a coma.

Despite their widespread use, we don't really understand how anesthetics work in precise detail, even if we have figured out how to use them safely. There are plenty of ideas about how the brain deals with these drugs, but no concrete evidence as yet.

The recent findings can not only help with treatments and patient care – after major operations involving anesthesia, for example – but also in giving scientists a better understanding of the brain and how it responds to disruption.

"How the brain recovers from states of unconsciousness is important clinically but also gives us insight into the neural basis of consciousness itself," said anesthesiologist George Mashour, from the University of Michigan.

The research was published in eLife.

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Some clues could be found amongst indigenous people who live in the Amazon rainforest. In a new study, two of these tribes have turned out to have some of the lowest rates of dementia in the world.

One of the suggestions prompted by such a discovery is the idea that there might be something in our post-industrial life that brings on higher rates of these brain disorders. While it doesn't mean we should all take up hunting and gathering, it's a consideration for those studying dementia and its impact.

Two groups from the Bolivian Amazon were studied: the Tsimane and the Moseten people. Dementia rates among older people were found to be around just 1 percent, compared with 11 percent of those 65 and older in the United States.

"Something about the pre-industrial subsistence lifestyle appears to protect older Tsimane and Moseten from dementia," says psychologist Margaret Gatz, from the University of Southern California (USC).

The assessments of dementia were made with a combination of computed tomography (CT) scans, cognitive evaluations, and questionnaires tailored for the culture they were being targeted at.

While dementia rates were relatively low, a less severe form known as 'mild cognitive impairment' (MCI) was about as prevalent as it is in high-income countries like the US: around 8 percent of Tsimane people and 10 percent of Moseten people over the age of 60 were found to be showing signs of it.

The next avenue of enquiry for researchers is to look more precisely into what's causing the disparity. Previous research in other parts of the world has dementia prevalence ranging from 0.5 percent to 20 percent in indigenous older adults.

There's obviously a huge amount of difference between a post-industrial lifestyle and that of an indigenous Amazonian tribe – in terms of lifestyle, diet, exercise, sanitation, medication and more – but it's difficult to pick out individual risk factors from the pile.

What's more, some indigenous groups have adopted more contemporary lifestyles than others: the Moseten people are less isolated than the Tsimane group, for example, living closer to towns and schools, with better access to clean water.

"What we do know is the sedentary, urban, industrial life is quite novel when compared with how our ancestors lived for more than 99 percent of humanity's existence," says anthropologist Benjamin Trumble, from Arizona State University.

Even though there's still a lot we don't know, our understanding of dementia is improving. Previous studies have shown that both physical inactivity and increased air pollution can play a role, for example, and they might be involved here.

One clue that might be offered by the new research is the unusual calcifications or hardening of the brain arteries found in those participants with dementia or MCI. Scientists are still trying to understand how blood flow and dementia might be linked.

Then there's heart disease and a possible association with brain aging. The Tsimane people, for example, are known to have particularly healthy hearts in old age compared with the rest of the population.

"We're in a race for solutions to the growing prevalence of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias," says anthropologist Hillard Kaplan, from Chapman University in California.

"Looking at these diverse populations augments and accelerates our understanding of these diseases and generates new insights."

The research has been published in Alzheimer's & Dementia.

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The procedure raised hopes that advances in cross-species organ donation could one day solve the chronic shortage of human organs available for donation, and the team behind the operation say they are "optimistic" about its future success.

David Bennett, 57, had received his transplant on January 7 and passed away March 8, the University of Maryland Medical System said in a statement.

"There was no obvious cause identified at the time of his death," a hospital spokesman told AFP, adding that physicians were carrying out a review that would be published in a scientific journal.

Muhammad Mohiuddin, director of the university's cardiac xenotransplantation program, did however say in a video statement that Bennett was having "infectious episodes."

"We were having difficulty maintaining a balance between his immunosuppression and controlling his infection," he said.

Bennett's condition began deteriorating several days ago. After it became clear that he would not recover, he was given compassionate palliative care. He was able to communicate with his family during his final hours, a hospital statement said.

Following surgery, the transplanted heart had performed very well for several weeks without any signs of rejection, the hospital added.

Bennett was able to spend time with family, participated in physical therapy, watched the Super Bowl and spoke often about wanting to go home to see his dog Lucky.

"He proved to be a brave and noble patient who fought all the way to the end. We extend our sincerest condolences to his family," said Bartley Griffith, the surgeon who led the procedure.

Bennett came to the hospital in the eastern US state of Maryland in October 2021.

He was bed-ridden and placed on an emergency life support machine. He had been deemed ineligible for human transplant – a decision that is often taken when the recipient has very poor underlying health.

Mohiuddin said that the team had "gained invaluable insights" from the experience, adding: "We remain optimistic and plan on continuing our work in future clinical trials."

Reporting in US media also revealed Bennett was convicted of stabbing a man several times in 1988, leaving the victim paralyzed and wheelchair bound before he died in 2005.

Medical ethicists hold that a person's past criminal history should have no bearing on their future treatment.
Human organ shortage

About 110,000 Americans are currently waiting for an organ transplant, and more than 6,000 patients die each year before getting one, according to official figures.

To meet demand, doctors have long been interested in so-called xenotransplantation, or cross-species organ donation, with experiments tracing back to the 17th century.

Early research focused on harvesting organs from primates – for example, a baboon heart was transplanted into a newborn known as "Baby Fae" in 1984, but she survived only 20 days.

More recently, attention has turned toward pigs. Today, pig heart valves are widely used in humans, and pig skin is grafted on human burn victims.

Pigs make for ideal donors because their organ size is similar to that of humans, they grow rapidly and have large litters. They are also already raised as a food source, so there is less controversy surrounding their organs' use compared to primates'.

Bennett's donor pig belonged to a herd that had undergone genetic editing procedures.

Three genes that would have led to rejection of pig organs by humans were "knocked out," as was a gene that would have led to excessive growth of pig heart tissue.

Six human genes responsible for human acceptance were inserted into the genome, for a total of 10 unique gene edits.

The editing was performed by Virginia-based biotech firm Revivicor, which also supplied the animals used in three recent pig-to-human kidney transplants.

But while those procedures were carried out on brain dead recipients as proof-of-concept experiments, the surgery on Bennett was the first to actually help a patient who went on to live after the procedure.

© Agence France-Presse

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If Congress’ sweeping new spending bill is signed, it would finally provide full funding to some major NASA projects that have been underfunded over the last few years. Notably, NASA’s program to develop a new human lunar lander would be fully funded as the president’s budget requested, as will a program to develop new commercial space stations in low Earth orbit.

Overall, NASA would receive $24.041 billion for 2022 in this new bill, which will fund the US government for fiscal year 2022. NASA’s portion is roughly $800 million less than the $24.8 billion that President Joe Biden’s budget request called for in May of 2021. However, NASA would still see a slight bump from its total funding for fiscal year 2021, which sat at $23.27 billion.

Though Congress’s plan would not fully meet the president’s budget request, there are a few projects that House and Senate lawmakers are finally agreeing to fund in their entirety. The bill would give NASA’s human landing system the full $1.195 billion that the request asked for. Currently, NASA is developing a new human lunar lander as part of its Artemis program, an initiative to send the first woman and first person of color to the Moon. Previously, Congress showed its reluctance to give NASA the money it requested for the lander. For 2021, appropriators only provided $850 million of the requested $3.4 billion for the lander.

As a result of the cash shortfall, NASA made some changes to its Artemis plans. Originally, the space agency hoped to choose at least two commercial companies to build human lunar landers for Artemis as a way to spark competition and have redundancy. But with only a fraction of the money for the program, NASA selected only one company, SpaceX, to develop its Starship vehicle into a lander, citing the company’s low price tag as a big consideration in that decision.

Now, if NASA receives the money it requested for the landing system this year, Congress is calling on the space agency to “deliver a publicly available plan explaining how it will ensure safety, redundancy, sustainability, and competition” in the human lunar lander program, within 30 days of the bill’s signing. Congress is also asking NASA to provide a detailed list of resources it needs through 2026 to meet those goals. The wording does not explicitly say that NASA must pick a second company to develop a human lander, though an earlier version of a House appropriation bill expressed concern at the agency’s decision to pick just one company.

Another area at NASA that has been notoriously underfunded is the agency’s program to develop a successor to the International Space Station. Residing in low Earth orbit, the ISS is funded through 2024, though the Biden administration announced plans to extend operations through 2030. (It’s unclear whether Russia will hop on board with that, considering the current circumstances.) Regardless, once the space station program ends, NASA hopes to have nurtured the private space industry into developing their own commercial space stations that would take over the domain of low Earth orbit. They could provide platforms for NASA’s astronauts to visit in the post-ISS era.

However, NASA has struggled to get money for this transitional program. For 2020 and 2021, NASA requested $150 million for both fiscal years, but Congress only appropriated $15 million and then $17 million. For 2022, however, NASA requested $101.1 million for this year, and appropriators allotted the full amount in the new bill.

As for NASA’s other programs, funding is staying relatively stable. NASA’s biggest human spaceflight projects, the Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew capsule, would receive their full funding amount, with a little more than requested for SLS. Science is receiving $7.614 billion, less than the budget request but up from last year. The space agency would also receive the full $653 million it requested to work toward a Mars sample return, which would work to bring samples collected by NASA’s Perseverance rover back to Earth. Additionally, NASA’s SOFIA program, a flying observatory on a modified Boeing 747, still continues to receive funding despite calls for its cancelation.

There are shortfalls in other areas, too. But notably, even the big-budget items — including the human lunar lander and commercial space station development — can’t use all of their money just yet. The bill says that these projects and others can only receive 40 percent of the allotted amounts until NASA’s administrator submits a multi-year plan for Artemis and NASA’s Moon efforts that includes dates for major milestones, partnerships, and more, along with funding estimates to achieve these milestones. So while some NASA programs are seeing a boost in funding, there’s still more work to be done before that money can be put to use.

NASA’s human Moon lander program finally gets full funding in new budget bill

Endurance shipwreck has finally been found in pristine condition

In a historic first, the team returned results in time to recommend a treatment that was used to attack a living patient’s breast cancer.Photograph: Getty Images

In 2018, Alana Welm found herself in an exciting, yet burdensome, position. The University of Utah breast cancer research lab where she leads joint projects with her husband, Bryan Welm, had created lab-grown versions of real tumors isolated from living cancer patients. Each cancer had been translated into two kinds of biological models: xenografts, made by implanting tissue into mice, and organoids, miniature clumps of tissue grown in plastic dishes.

Each simulated cancer was a way to test which of about 45 drugs, some experimental and others approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, might perform best for the real patient. During testing on one patient’s organoids, the researchers isolated a drug that effectively killed its cancer cells. That was the exciting bit. The burden: Welm had no right to do anything about it. She couldn’t tell the patient or her doctor. “We were just doing this for research,” says Welm.

This particular drug had already earned FDA approval to be used against breast cancer, but it wasn’t approved for this patient’s type of cancer. So Welm dialed up her university’s Institutional Review Board, an ethics oversight group.“We called them and said: We found this, we really think we need to let them know,” Welm recalls. The board agreed; the team could bring the patient’s physician into the loop. “That really was an eye-opener,” Welm says. “Wow, we can actually make a difference!”

Yet by the time Welm reached the physician, it was too late. The patient passed away shortly after. “It was heartbreaking,” she says. But it was also motivating: The Welms’ team doubled down on efforts to refine their methods and turn their research into a clinical tool.

Last month, writing in Nature Cancer, the team reported the next step. After creating a “bank” of xenografts and organoids from real patient tumors, they validated, for the first time, that these accurately capture how such diverse and dangerous cancers respond to drugs in humans. And in another first, the team returned results in time to recommend a treatment that was used to attack a living patient’s breast cancer.

This is a big deal, particularly for the people battling the kinds of cancer this lab studies—the most lethal forms, which tend to recur and metastasize. “Having cancer in the breast doesn't kill anyone,” Welm says. “It's because it spreads to the brain and the lungs and the liver and the bones.” Although these cancers remain incurable, there are drugs that can fight them, for example by stopping cancer cells from replicating, thereby slowing tumor growth. But it’s impractical—and toxic—to blow through all of them. (Stacking treatments can also breed drug resistance.)

One option is to sequence the genome of the cancer tissue to find which gene mutations are causing the problem. But that doesn’t guarantee that there’s a drug that targets cells with that mutation. A 2017 study reported that tumor genetics revealed a recommended treatment in fewer than 10 percent of 769 patients. In a 2018 clinical trial for people with metastatic breast cancer, 46 percent of participants had tumors with mutations that are targeted by a drug—but none saw any benefit from being matched with drugs on that basis.

The Welms’ approach, called functional precision medicine, posits that you can find answers by growing organoids and xenografts as tools for trial-and-error drug testing. Both are like “avatars,” says Elgene Lim, a medical oncologist with the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney, Australia. “Having the confidence that your avatar is truly an accurate avatar could potentially cut down the billions of dollars spent on drug development barking up the wrong tree only because your model is wrong.”

The Welms’ team isn’t the only group betting on this idea. The London startup Vivan Therapeutics is trying a similar idea by screening drugs on genetically modified fruit flies. Companies like SEngine, Certis, and Champions Oncology have offered organoids or xenografts for cancer. And other labs have created collections of breast cancer tissue, and monitored drug response over the span of a week. The Welms’ team wanted to zero in on the most lethal versions of the disease—and to study the avatars for months.

They also took the dual approach of using xenografts and organoids because they provide different glimpses into what’s happening in the body. Organoid tests can—quickly and in parallel—find out which drugs disarm the cancer. The mouse tests can predict metastasis and whether a drug slows recurrence. Xenografts offer more comprehensive information, but organoids are easier to scale, faster, and more humane.

Since 2007, the Welms have partnered with hospital physicians at the Huntsman Cancer Institute and have built a bank of cells, taken from 40 patients. Then they grew organoids and created xenografts. They stowed the prepared tissue away in a lab freezer set to minus-320 degrees Fahrenheit. (They also stowed the biological details of each online for any researcher to study.)

Next, to prove that their models actually represented a patient’s cancer, they compared the organoids and the xenografts to each other and to the real tumor: Were the same genes active? Did they grow as quickly? Did they respond the same way to drugs? Yes, yes, and yes. The team felt confident that they had built high-fidelity avatars. “Now,” asks Welm, “can we actually use it to help?”

Their frozen bank contained tissue from a 43-year-old who had been diagnosed in 2018 and started a course of surgery, chemo, and radiation. But her cancer came back a year later, and in her liver, too. A genomic test of the cancer came up empty: There weren’t any drugs built to fight tumors with these genetic mutations. So, in 2019, the team began testing different FDA-approved compounds against organoids and xenografts grown from the woman’s tissue. One called eribulin stood out. It killed the cancerous organoids. The mice went into remission and survived long enough to be put down for old age.

Welm brought the team’s result to the patient’s physician, who started her on eribulin. After the 2018 attempt to advise treatment didn’t pan out, Welm was nervous. “I just remember the physician coming by. And they showed us the scans” of areas where the cancer had previously spread, she says. “Before, there were all these liver [metastases], and her abdomen was filled with fluid. And then—there's nothing. I remember looking at the scans with my mouth open, like: Really?”

The patient went into complete remission for nearly five months. But about eight months after she started eribulin treatment, the cancer returned and she passed away.

This is often true for the extremely aggressive cancers Welm studies. But she is encouraged by two key oncological metrics from this patient’s treatment: “progression-free survival” (how long a drug keeps cancer from spreading) and “time to next systemic therapy” (how long until another drug is needed). Both numbers usually go down with each subsequent round of treatment. In this case, they went up. The patient’s previous chemotherapy had stopped the cancer from growing for 41 days. The eribulin gave the patient 138 days before the cancer returned, and 197 days before she needed a new kind of treatment.

It’s important to note that this is a proof-of-concept study, and it represents only one person. Still, says Lim, “it's certainly brought us one step closer to making these avatars more potentially useful to the clinical world.”

Specifically, it shows that organoids are a reliable alternative to testing on mouse xenografts, which can be slow and expensive. That process can take up to a year, and it doesn’t always work. “Patients who have late-stage disease don't have that time,” Lim says. Organoids are faster to scale up, since they don’t require animals. Welm is shooting to run these tests in about 12 weeks, start to finish. With organoids, says Lim, “the sky's your limit. You can test as many drugs as you want.”

Still, there are other caveats. Whenever scientists study cancer outside the human, an immune system is missing. Welm uses immune-compromised mice, and organoids grow without immune challenge. For the time being, that makes these models incompatible with testing immunotherapies, or drugs that rally the natural immune system to combat cancer, Lim and Welm agree.

But that limitation is fading too, says Tony Letai, a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. Researchers are learning to culture organoids in blood, or in tandem with immune cells. “The writing's on the wall that it ultimately will be possible,” says Letai, who is also president of the Society for Functional Precision Medicine. Just 20 years ago, growing real tumors in the lab was a crapshoot—they didn’t reliably emulate the patient’s. Today, not only are they accurate matches, but scientists can keep cultures alive for months, they have dozens of more potent drugs to screen, and they can analyze the biology of individual cells with mind-boggling accuracy. “This type of approach is, I think, the future of finding cancer patients the right drugs,” Letai says.

The University of Utah team has begun enrolling patients in a related clinical trial, in which they will match people to drugs based on the organoid versions of their tumors. The trial includes a survey for physicians as well—Welm hopes to find out whether doctors would actually trust the tool. “It looks very promising, but we don't know till we know,” she says.

Welm remembers that even in 2019, when her team was awed by the medical scans showing the patient's improvement after receiving eribulin, they knew the likely outcome. “We have a guarded enthusiasm, just because we know that we need better therapies,” she says. “We have a lot of questions that we still need to answer.”

To Test Cancer Drugs, These Scientists Grew ‘Avatars’ of Tumors

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First, a structure called a corona forms around the outside of the event horizon. Then, powerful jets of plasma launch from the poles, punching material from the corona out into interstellar space at speeds close to that of light in a vacuum.

The finding – likened to the rhythmic pounding of a 'heartbeat' – resolves a long open question in black hole science.

"It sounds logical, but there has been a debate for twenty years about whether the corona and the jet were simply the same thing," explains astrophysicist Mariano Méndez of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

"Now we see that they arise one after the other and that the jet follows from the corona."

The black hole in question makes up part of GRS 1915+105, located about 36,000 light-years away from the Sun. It's what we call a microquasar – a stellar mass black hole locked in a close binary system with another object and feeding off it; in the case of GRS 1915+105, this is a normal star.

Because the two objects are so close together, the black hole strips material from the star; this material forms a disk around the black hole that gradually feeds into it.

It's the same thing we see on a larger scale in quasars, which are galactic nuclei that contain an active supermassive black hole millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun.

The black hole GRS 1915+105 is just 12 times the mass of the Sun, hence microquasar; even so, it's the one of the most massive stellar mass black holes known in the Milky Way.

This process generates a lot of light from the heating of the disk and the complicated environment around the black hole. One light-generating structure is the corona, between the inner edge of the accretion disk and the event horizon.

This is a region of scorchingly hot electrons thought to be powered by the black hole's magnetic field, acting like a synchrotron to accelerate the electrons to such high energies that they shine brightly in X-ray wavelengths.

Then there are jets. These are thought to consist of material accelerated along magnetic field lines outside the black hole's event horizon to the polar regions, where they are launched into space at speed, emitting light in radio wavelengths.

This is what scientists think, anyway. The space around black holes is so extreme that it's difficult to get a handle on the processes that take place.

Méndez and his colleagues wanted to learn more about how the jets are accelerated and launched. They collected X-ray and radio data on the microquasar collected between 1996 and 2012, and studied it carefully for clues.

Their final sample consisted of 410 simultaneous X-ray and radio observations of GRS 1915+105. This meant that they could observe changes in both kinds of light at the same time. They found that when X-ray light is strong, radio is weak, and vice versa; and that the jets are strongest when the corona is at its smallest.

This suggests that energy that powers the microquasar system can be directed either to the X-ray corona, or the relativistic jet. Added to models of the fluctuations in light from the system, the researchers concluded that, at least in GRS 1915+105, it seems that the corona turns into the jet.

"It was quite a challenge to demonstrate this sequential nature," Méndez said. "We had to compare data of years with that of seconds, and of very high energies with very low ones."

Next for the team will be to try and explain some oddities their observations revealed. The X-ray corona is brighter, they found, than can be accounted for by temperature alone. This means something else might be at play. The team thinks that the magnetic field could be responsible.

The differential rotation of the black hole and accretion disk can cause magnetic fields to become tangled and chaotic. When the magnetic field is chaotic, the team speculates, the corona heats up; when it snaps back into order, material can escape, and thus the jets are launched.

And this process should scale with black hole mass, too, which could help us understand the way massive quasars behave.

"In principle," the researchers write, "the same channeling of energy to the jet and the corona should happen in supermassive black holes, and should therefore apply to the full range of black hole masses in the fundamental plane of black hole activity."

The research has been published in Nature Astronomy.

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