More than just a classroom squabble, it's a reflection of how maps can shape how we view and understand the world.

Last year, a group of researchers revealed their reimagined version of the planet in a double-sided map. It's round, not unlike Earth, but also flat like a pancake – in an attempt to give us a less distorted view of the world.

"We're proposing a radically different kind of map," said Princeton University astrophysicist J. Richard Gott, who designed the new spread with mathematician Robert Vanderbrei and physicist David Goldberg from Drexel University in Philadelphia.

The trio set out to make a flat map with the least error possible after creating a system to score existing maps on how lopsided or skewed they are, and how much areas and distances on the maps were bent out of shape.

The double-sided disk map. (Gott, Vanderbei & Goldberg)

"We believe it is the most accurate flat map of Earth yet," the researchers wrote when they published their methods on preprint website arXiv ahead of peer-review.

"Any flat map of the sphere cannot be perfect, but ours does much better than previous maps at minimizing the errors in local shapes, areas, bending, lopsidedness, distances, and boundary cuts," Gott told ScienceAlert; he actually bettered his last effort in the process.

With satellite technology, airborne lasers, and big data mash-ups, scientists today are well-equipped to map all sorts of things, from forests breathing carbon and continents on the move to how humans have wreaked havoc on Earth.

But they are still grappling with how to turn our Christmas bauble of a planet into a flat map. Because as much as we'd like maps to help us visualize the way things are, they also distort the world immensely.

It's mathematically impossible to represent the surface of a sphere as a flat map without some form of distortion, so map makers have to swing a few mathematical tricks to faithfully represent some Earthly features while sacrificing others.

Some world maps are designed to preserve the shape of countries (called Lambert Conformal Conic projections), whereas other maps – those globes that bulge at the equator – preserve area; these are Mollweide projections.

Overlaying hundreds of maps at a time shows just how distorted the world gets when map makers try to flatten out the globe, as data scientist Michael Freeman, from the University of Washington Information School, reveals in this interactive visualization:

Fun interactive tool by @mf_viz allows us to overlay hundreds of map projections at a time. A great visual way of understanding the distortion of maps. Areas along the equator stay much the same of course. Source: https://t.co/8VpoQPaU7j pic.twitter.com/jPeCnOOkEG

— Simon Kuestenmacher (@simongerman600) February 16, 2021

From the maps we have already, the best all-rounder is a compromise. Known as the Winkel Tripel projection, and used by National Geographic for its world maps, it minimizes distortion to area, direction, and distance.

Although, it's still not perfect, because the Pacific Ocean is cut between Japan and California, making it look far wider than it really is. 

More recently, American architect Buckminster Fuller and Japanese artist and architect Hajime Narukawa both tried unfolding the world in different ways. Others are just having fun fanning out Earth like an orange peel.

But this "radically different" map, a two-sided flat disk, was created using an entirely different approach.

"We are essentially squashing the globe, as if we had run over it with a steamroller," Gott told ScienceAlert. 

It gives a more accurate representation of the world than existing flat maps, the researchers say – by their own score.

"Our map is actually more like the globe than other flat maps," Gott says. "To see all of the globe, you have to rotate it; to see all of our new map, you simply have to flip it over."

The Northern and Southern Hemispheres can be placed on either side, with the equator around the edge, as you can see above.

"This is a map you can hold in your hand," said Gott, who reckons people might like to print it out on plastic or cardboard, which could be appealing to any avid hiker or city sightseer who knows all too well that paper maps expanded to arm's length never quite fold back together the same way.

"We have continuity over the equator," Gott went on to explain. "Africa and South America are draped over the edge, like a sheet over a clothesline, but they're continuous."

This means distances across oceans or across poles are both accurate and easy to measure, the researchers said, so it could be a useful tool for teaching kids about the world.

Even with its improvements, there are still some distortions with this disk map, just not as big as with other projections. Areas at the edges are 1.57 times larger than at the center, and distances can be out by around a fifth. 

"No regular one-sided flat map can do that," Gott said.

Who knows if it will become a classroom sensation, or end up filed away in a box like your old CD collection? But at the very least this map puts a new spin on the term 'flat-Earther'.

A version of this article was originally published in February 2021.

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The cephalopod, belonging to the vampyropod or octopodiform superorder, pushes back the age of the group by about 82 million years.

This challenges our understanding that octopuses evolved from a Triassic ancestor. Fascinatingly, it has not eight, but 10 arms, showing that, somewhere in that time, these animals have lost two working tentacles.

"This is the first and only known vampyropod to possess 10 functional appendages," says paleontologist Christopher Whalen of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) and Yale University.

The newly discovered beastie has been named Syllipsimopodi bideni, in honor of President Joseph Biden, who at the time of the discovery was newly inaugurated with plans to combat climate change (although it does sound like they're calling him an old vampire with too many arms).

Our understanding of vampyropod evolutionary history is patchy at best. Octopuses and vampire squids – so named for their oft blood-red color, and cloak-like webbing – are soft and squishy creatures with no bones, only an internal shell of chitin, and such tissues do not often survive the ages the way teeth and bones do.

However, in some types of exceptional fossil formations, known as Lagerstättes, soft tissue is occasionally preserved.

This is where Whalen and his coauthor, AMNH paleontologist Neil Landman, found Syllipsimopodi: in fossil recovered from a Lagerstätte in Montana, known as Bear Gulch.

That small impression of a soft body, preserved untouched for hundreds of millions of years, shows that the history of today's animals was a complex and fascinating saga.

The Syllipsimopodi fossil, in the Royal Ontario Museum. (Christopher Whalen)

Syllipsimopodi fossilThe Syllipsimopodi fossil, in the Royal Ontario Museum. (Christopher Whalen)

"Our findings suggest that the earliest vampyropods, at least superficially, resembled squids that are living today," Whalen says.

"Syllipsimopodi bideni also challenges the predominant arguments for vampyropod origins and offers a new model for the evolution of internally-shelled cephalopods."

There had been hints that vampyropod lineages may have been older than the previous oldest known specimen, dated to around 240 million years ago.

The molecular clock of the lineage – the mutation rate of biomolecules in DNA, which can be used to determine the evolutionary history of an organism – suggested that vampyropods originated sometime between 350-330 million years ago.

Whalen and Landman's discovery corroborates these estimates, further adding that 10-armed Syllipsimopodi is the earliest known diverging vampyropod from the group's common ancestor. These 10 arms, all with suckers, suggest that this common ancestor also had 10 arms.

"The arm count is one of the defining characteristics separating the 10-armed squid and cuttlefish line (Decabrachia) from the eight armed octopus and vampire squid line (Vampyropoda)," Whalen explains.

"We have long understood that octopuses achieve the eight arm count through elimination of the two filaments of vampire squid, and that these filaments are vestigial arms. 

"However, all previously reported fossil vampyropods preserving the appendages only have eight arms, so this fossil is arguably the first confirmation of the idea that all cephalopods ancestrally possessed 10 arms."

Based on the incredible fossil, the researchers were able to determine that two of Syllipsimopodi's arms were longer than the others; it's possible that these were used to capture prey, while the shorter ones could have been used to hold and manipulate it.

The animal's body was also torpedo-shaped, like modern squids, and it had fins that seem like they would have been big enough to help Syllipsimopodi swim and stabilize.

In another anatomical similarity to squids (as well as vampire squids), the Syllipsimopodi fossil showed evidence of an internal shell structure called a gladius. Octopuses don't have this structure; it's been reduced to bar-shaped structures called stylets.

These characteristics have helped the researchers determine where Syllipsimopodi may have fit into its ecosystems.

"Syllipsimopodi may have filled a niche more similar to extant squids, a midlevel aquatic predator," Landman says.

"It is not inconceivable that it might have used its sucker-laden arms to pry small ammonoids out of their shells or ventured more inshore to prey on brachiopods, bivalves, or other shelled marine animals."

The research has been published in Nature Communications.

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In 2020, the Covid pandemic slowed down just about everything—save for deforestation of the Amazon. That year, Brazil lost almost 15 square miles of vegetation per day, equal to 24 trees every second. That’s largely thanks to ranchers and farmers, who clear-cut the forest and burn the detritus to make way for crops and cattle. The burns can also ignite peat, concentrated organic matter in the soil that releases extraordinary amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. The Amazon is transforming from an enormous sink where CO2 is sequestered into a source of the planet-heating gas.

“The Amazon now is in an emergency situation,” says Luciana Vanni Gatti, who studies the rainforest at Brazil’s National Institute of Space Research. “Deforestation is increasing year by year: 2020 was worse than 2019, 2021 was worse than 2020, and we are sure 2022 will be worse yet.”

Now scientists are racing to figure out if and when the Amazon might reach a dreaded tipping point, a sort of point of no return when the greatest rainforest on earth could dry out and turn into a sprawling savanna. The end result will be the loss of an irreplaceable ecosystem and major player in global climate dynamics.

A paper published today in the journal Nature Climate Change aims to provide more clarity on that tipping point, which may be rapidly approaching. While prior research used complicated modeling to predict how the decline might unfold, this new research is based on satellite data that shows 75 percent of the Amazon has become less resilient to disturbances like drought.

For a forest, one way to track resiliency is through a satellite measurement called vegetation optical depth, or VOD, which penetrates through the canopy and detects how much woody biomass there is. (Other satellite techniques just look at the tops of trees, but VOD gets a better picture of what’s hidden underneath.) These scientists also looked at a separate data set tracking changes in types of land cover—for instance, forest versus farms—which allowed them to pick out where urban areas and croplands have intruded on the rainforest. Because they had data going back to 1991, they could watch how long it took for a given plot of the Amazon to recover by growing its biomass back after a disturbance. This regrowth is resilience.

And the Amazon is losing it. The researchers broke the rainforest up into an imaginary grid, allowing them to keep track of vegetation within the cells and to correlate that with stressors like droughts or nearby land development. 

They found that the vegetation in over three-quarters of the Amazon was been losing resilience since the early 2000s—a slower rate of return to normal after disruptions. Because the researchers also had that land-cover data, they could further show that areas that receive less rainfall or are closer to human disturbances, like farmland, are losing resilience faster than wetter, unsullied land. 

The Amazon is also taking longer to recover from perturbations like weather events, which unfold over weeks or months, as well as the longer time frames of drought. “That suggests that the system is slowing down,” says climate scientist Chris Boulton of the University of Exeter, lead author of the new paper. “It's taking longer to recover from the short-term fluctuations that are perturbing it away from its happy place.” 

You wouldn’t know that from a more simplistic measurement of the Amazon, like satellite images that show only the rainforest’s land cover—where the forest is and isn’t. VOD allowed Boulton and his colleagues to parse the biomass in much finer detail, giving them a more complete picture of how the Amazon responded to extreme droughts. Not well, as it happens: Loss of resilience spikes when the landscape dries out. “There's been three one-in-100-year droughts in the Amazon fairly recently,” says Boulton. The team saw a spike in their signal during the droughts of 2005, 2010, and 2015, he continues, “which suggests that it's picking up that kind of change in resilience. But that's alongside a general increase in the approach toward a tipping point, regardless of those individual events.”

Another major threat is logging, including a kind that’s done by thinning selected trees but leaving others. But even if loggers don’t completely raze an area, they can still destabilize the forest. “What is concerning is in addition to deforestation, which is relatively easy to monitor and keep track of, we're seeing a big increase in what is called forest degradation, where biomass is extracted from the forest,” says environmental scientist Pontus Olofsson, who studies the Amazon but wasn’t involved in the new work. “So they're cutting down trees, but not to the point that the land cover is changing. So that land cover remains forest, but with fewer trees.” 

Ranchers, too, contribute to a more subtle weakening of the landscape. They may fell trees but leave a patch of forest standing. Because the animals left inside that little patch are now surrounded by barren land, they don’t dare leave their island. Even birds won’t risk trying to make the journey out of the patch. At the same time, the edges of that rainforest are now exposed to open air, and they rapidly degrade. A rainforest is supposed to be wet, but now its edges are baking in the sun. Over time, rainforest vegetation dies off, and savanna-style grasses creep inward. 

This can even happen on a smaller scale when people slice through the Amazonian biomass to build a road or electric lines—the edges of that slice will dry out, initiating that creep. “What happens in the deforested area doesn't stay in a deforested area,” says tropical ecologist Paulo Brando of UC Irvine, who studies the Amazon but wasn’t involved in this new research.

This new study found that the Amazon loses resilience when it’s butted up against human activity. Brando’s own research has found that about 17 percent of the southeast Amazon, where deforestation is particularly acute, is within 100 meters of one of these dried-out edges. That’s a huge problem, because the Amazon is an extremely sensitive hydrological machine: Trees soak up rain and release water vapor as they photosynthesize—so much water, in fact, that the Amazon generates its own rain. “Evapotranspiration is very important in the water cycle to produce precipitation,” says Gatti. ”The Amazon can put in the air a comparable amount that the Amazon River discharges to the ocean—it's a very big amount of water vapor in the atmosphere.” 

All this extra atmospheric water goes on to hydrate every other country in South America, save for Chile, where the Andes Mountains block the moisture. Losing the Amazon would parch the continent. It’s a self-reinforcing crisis: Deforestation means fewer trees, which means less moisture is sent into the atmosphere, which means less rain, which means more trees die. This evapotranspiration also cools the forest—it’s sweating, basically—so without it the Amazon not only dries out, but heats up. “You destroy the forest enough, change the climate enough, to create a vicious cycle that perpetuates itself,” says Brando. “I think there are enough elements to say that some parts of Amazon are being pushed over the edge. That is where we have most of the deforestation, most of the droughts, most of the heating happening, and most of the losses in animals.”

The dried-out husk of a rainforest also burns more easily, so it releases more carbon into the atmosphere. If the forest keeps losing water and transitions into a savanna, it will be a much drier, grassier ecosystem that is far more flammable than a rainforest. 

Scientists can’t yet say when the Amazon as a whole might reach that tipping point, as there are a galaxy of variables at play, like the rate of deforestation and how droughts might intensify. But in the rainforest’s southeast, they’re getting glimpses of what that point might look like. Here, as the forest fragments and the edges are exposed to more sun, big trees that need a lot of water are dying off. The ones that tend to survive are similar to those you’d see on a savanna—they might even lose their leaves during the dry season, unlike the evergreens of a rainforest. 

Brando notes that not all of the Amazon may reach that tipping point. “A reduction in resilience doesn't mean that there's no resilience,” he says. “These forests, especially if they are left alone, have a really high capacity to recover.” If enough tall trees remain standing, and animals are still able to move seeds and nutrients around, and large patches of vegetation remain connected, he says, “all those elements play into the resilience of the system.”

Gatti is less optimistic, as the threat of deforestation doesn’t seem to be diminishing. “It just is really a nightmare time in Brazil,” says Gatti. “A nightmare time.”

The Amazon Rainforest May Be Nearing a Point of No Return

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New simulations suggest that what we thought were loops of plasma known as coronal loops erupting out from the surface of the Sun along magnetic field lines may, at least sometimes, be wrinkles in corrugated sheets of plasma.

Astronomers have dubbed this phenomenon the "coronal veil", and suggest that further research is needed to try to understand how and why they occur.

The finding is, they say, significant. Since coronal loops were first identified clearly in the 1960s, solar scientists have been using them to understand the properties of the Sun, including its magnetic field, and the density and temperature of the solar atmosphere.

"I have spent my entire career studying coronal loops," says astrophysicist Anna Malanushenko of the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

"I never expected this. When I saw the results, my mind exploded."

Coronal loops are fascinating and beautiful: long, closed arcs of glowing plasma, sometimes associated with sunspots. But, although scientists have been analyzing them to better understand the Sun for decades, a few of their properties don't match what we might expect.

Firstly, coronal loops associated with sunspots tend to be much taller than calculations suggest they should be.

Secondly, the loops don't become less bright with height. Think of iron filings sprinkled near a bar magnet, self-arranging in loops. The bigger loops that reach farther from the magnet are thinner and more tenuous.

Iron filings along the magnetic field of a sphere magnet. (Geek3/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0)

IronFilingsMagneticFieldDiagramIron filings along the magnetic field of a sphere magnet. (Geek3/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0)

Coronal loops look like these iron loops, but if coronal loops were associated with magnetic fields, they should display similar visual expansion – higher loops are as bright as lower ones.

Malanushenko and her team conducted models of the solar corona using a software program called MURaM, which generates realistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations of the Sun. Recently, this was updated to include the solar corona, which made it an excellent tool for trying to better understand coronal loops.

Coronal loops imaged by the Transition Region And Coronal Explorer spacecraft. (NASA/LMSAL)

coronal loops front and sideCoronal loops imaged by the Transition Region And Coronal Explorer spacecraft. (NASA/LMSAL)

When the team ran their simulations, however, they found that the loops were not always discrete structures at all, but folds in optically thin sheets of plasma. Because these wrinkles are thicker and more dense, we can see them clearly.

However, the simulation also revealed that coronal loops can exist on their own, too. This suggests that the solar corona is a much more complex environment than we knew.

"This study reminds us as scientists that we must always question our assumptions and that sometimes our intuition can work against us," Malanushenko says.

In addition to the coronal veils, the team's simulations also capture the entire life cycle of a solar flare, and produced three-dimensional datasets of the solar atmosphere that can be used to conduct synthetic observations of the plasma and magnetic field. This can be used to probe the loops and veils in more detail.

That's because understanding these structures from real solar observations can be tricky. When you're looking at a loop from the side, the shape of its loop can't be seen; but, when viewing from the front, you can't see how wide the loop is, if it's more like a thread or ribbon of plasma.

While veils resolve the properties of coronal loops that didn't quite fit, there are some questions that remain unanswered. For example, how and why these structures form, and what makes them wrinkle. It's also unclear how many of them might be real coronal loops. Synthetic observations might provide some answers.

That's going to require designing new observational methods and analytical techniques, but the results so far could have implications for other areas of plasma physics, especially if there are structures in the fluid that are difficult, if not impossible, to see.

"This study demonstrates that the way we currently interpret the observations of the Sun may not be adequate for us to truly understand the physics of our star," Malanushenko says.

"This is an entirely new paradigm of understanding the Sun's atmosphere."

The research has been published in The Astrophysical Journal.

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On 6 January 2022, astronomers at the Mount Lemmon Observatory in Arizona discovered an asteroid roughly 70-meters (230 ft) across. Based on their initial observations, it appeared this object – called '2022 AE1' – could potentially hit Earth on its next pass, on 4 July 2023.

Since any uncertainties in an asteroid's orbit are highest in the hours just after its discovery, astronomers at several different observatories scrambled to make follow-up observations – which usually rule out any future impacts.

However, based on the first seven nights of observations, the chance of impact appeared to increase. Asteroid 2022 AE1 was flagged for a potential future impact by the Asteroid Orbit Determination (AstOD), an automated system astronomers around the world use to assess the asteroid risk.

Furthermore, the asteroid was given one of the highest rankings on the Palermo Scale, a ranking which astronomers use to categories and prioritize impact risks. Both ESA and NASA published the information on their Near Earth Object (NEO) information portal websites, allowing anyone – such as interested amateur astronomers – to take a look.

Even more worry-inducing was the following week, where no observations could be made because the full Moon blocked out any views of this asteroid from Earth.

But thankfully, when the asteroid was able to be tracked again, the accumulating data on the asteroid's path revealed the chance of impact was dramatically decreasing over time. It has since been confirmed that 2022 AE1 will not impact Earth any time in the foreseeable future.

"In my almost ten years at ESA I've never seen such a risky object," said Marco Micheli, astronomer at ESA's Near-Earth Object Coordination Centre (NEOCC).

"It was a thrill to track 2022 AE1 and refine its trajectory until we had enough data to say for certain, this asteroid will not strike."

So, exactly how were astronomers able to rule out a threat that initially seemed so certain?

The very first observation of an asteroid is just one data point, a single dot of light in the sky. At this point, it's not clear what it is or where it's going. Micheli explained that a second observation is needed to reveal an object in motion, and at least three are needed to determine an orbit – where it is going and how fast it is moving.

Further observations refine the orbit a little more, reducing uncertainties until astronomers can be sure of where it won't go: primarily to Earth.

To help make these determinations, astronomers use computer simulations to calculate the future orbital path of the asteroid, and input randomly chosen initial positions and velocities that fall within the margin of error of the observations so far. By creating a large number of simulations, astronomers can calculate the probability that any particular path will actually hit Earth.

For example, if 1 million different possible orbits are simulated and just one of those leads to an impact, that means the odds of the asteroid hitting Earth are a million to one.

ESA has access to a global network of asteroid observing telescopes pillars. (ESA)

What usually happens is that with more observations and more data, the hazard zone narrows and the corridor of the asteroid's future path moves away from Earth, dropping the risk percentage.

And with the network of observatories around the world that are focused on planetary defense – i.e., searching the skies for incoming asteroids and comets – multiple observations and quickly rule out any space rocks that aren't a threat.

In the case of 2022 AE1, observations after the full Moon had waned provided the data needed to show that the risk level calculated from early observations was wrong. With more data the risk level crashed – getting close to zero – and with that, the team moved on.

"The data was clear, confirmed the next morning by our counterparts at NASA – asteroid 2022 AE1 poses no impact risk," said Laura Faggioli, near-Earth object dynamicist in the NEOCC who computed the orbit of 2022 AE1 throughout the observation period.

"Had 2022 AE1's path remained uncertain we would have used any means possible to keep watching it with the biggest telescopes we have. As it was removed from our risk list, we didn't need to follow it anymore – time to move onto the next."

ESA said some keen observers will continue to monitor the asteroid, confirming the projections; we now know that in early July 2023, asteroid 2022 AE1 will fly by Earth at a distance of about ten million kilometers (+/- one million km) – more than 20 times the distance of the Moon.

So, although the odds of any one particular asteroid ever impacting Earth are quite low, it is still likely that one day our planet will be hit by an asteroid or experience a large airburst event like the Chelyabinsk meteor in 2013.

At the current calculated rate of impacts, astronomers expect about one large asteroid to impact Earth every 100 million years or so. For that reason, both professional and amateur astronomers continue to scan the skies.

This article was originally published by Universe Today. Read the original article.

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From the bizarre creatures in the depths of the oceans to the bacteria inside our bodies, all life on Earth consists of cells. But we have only a very rough idea of how even the simplest of those cells function.

Now, as described recently in Cell, a team at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and their colleagues have created the most complete computer simulation ever of a living cell. With this digital model, biologists can burst through nature’s constraints and accelerate their exploration of how the most basic unit of life ticks—and what would happen if it ticked differently.

“Imagine being able from one simulation … to recover results that would take many, many experiments to do,” said the senior author, Zaida (Zan) Luthey-Schulten, who led the group conducting the simulations at the University of Illinois. Using the model, she and her colleagues have already made surprising discoveries about the physiology and reproductive cycle of their modeled cell, and the simulation continues to serve as an idea generator for further experiments.

“This is the first time we can have a really careful computational look into a metabolism of a whole complex system—not just a biochemical reaction or a very artificial system but an entire living cell,” said Kate Adamala, a synthetic biologist and assistant professor at the University of Minnesota who was not involved in the study. For years, scientists have tried to model entire cells and predict their biology accurately, but they’ve fallen short because most cells are too complex. “It’s hard to build a model if you don’t know what Lego bricks go into it,” Adamala said.

But the cell that the Illinois group is working with is so simple, with far fewer genes than any other cell, that its physiology is more easily plumbed, making it an ideal platform for a model.

The cell in question is a lab-made “minimal cell” that teeters on the line between life and nonlife, carrying a limited number of genes, most of them necessary for survival. By replicating the known biochemical processes happening inside this very basic cell and tracking all the nutrients, waste, gene products, and other molecules moving through it in three dimensions, the simulation brings scientists closer to understanding how the simplest life form sustains itself and reveals some of the bare-bones requirements of life.

The findings are a stepping-stone to building models of natural cells that are more complex and significant. If scientists can eventually build an equally detailed simulation of the common intestinal bacterium Escherichia coli, for instance, “that would be an absolute game changer, because all of our biomanufacturing runs on E. coli,” Adamala said.

The minimal cell the team modeled, JCVI-syn3A, is an updated version of one developed by synthetic biologists at the J. Craig Venter Institute and presented in Science in 2016. Its genome is designed after that of the very simple bacterium Mycoplasmas mycoides, but stripped of genes that the project’s scientists systematically determined were not essential for life. JCVI-syn3A gets by with a mere 493 genes, roughly half the number of its bacterial inspiration and only about one-eighth as many as E. coli has.

Though simple, the cell is still enigmatic. For example, no one knows what 94 of those genes do except that the cell dies without them. Their presence suggests that there may be “living tasks or functions essential for life that … science is oblivious to,” said John Glass, a coauthor of the new study, leader of the synthetic biology group at the Venter Institute, and part of the team that developed the minimal cell in 2016. With modeling, the researchers hope they can quickly start to unveil some of these mysteries.

To build the new model, the team at the University of Illinois took an abundance of findings from various fields and wove them together. They used flash-frozen, thin-sliced images of the minimal cell to position its organic machinery precisely. A massive protein analysis helped them sprinkle all the right known proteins inside, and a detailed analysis of the cell membrane’s chemical composition, provided by their coauthors at the Dresden University of Technology in Germany, helped them place molecules correctly on the outside. A thorough map of the cell’s biochemistry provided a rulebook for the interactions of the molecules.

As the digital cell grew and divided, thousands of simulated biochemical reactions occurred, revealing how every molecule behaved and changed over time.

The simulations mirrored many measurements of living JCVI-syn3A cells in culture. But they also predicted characteristics of the cells that hadn’t yet been noticed in the lab, such as how the cell portions out its energy budget and how quickly its messenger RNA molecules degrade, a fact that critically affects researchers’ understanding of how the cell regulates genes.

Some of the most surprising discoveries concerned the speedy growth and division of JCVI-syn3A cells. The simulation showed that to divide as rapidly as it does, the cell needs an enzyme called a transaldolase—but none seems to be present. Either the cell has evolved a metabolic pathway that makes the enzyme unnecessary, or “we are left with the possibility that there is such an enzyme but that it does not look like an ordinary transaldolase,” Glass said.

He and his team are planning experiments to search for this mystery molecule while also continuing to test some of the model’s other predictions. They have already confirmed, for example, that they can shorten the time between cell divisions simply by adding genes for two nonessential enzymes.

Not all of the simulation’s data agreed with experimental data—and the model has important gaps, such as the unknown functions of 94 of the genes. What’s more, the model is a fundamentally biochemical one, but “to fully understand the cell, we need to sort of model all of the forces and interactions of every atom or molecule of the cell,” Glass said.

He is discussing a potential collaboration with Roseanna Zia, an associate professor of chemical engineering at Stanford University, to build biophysical models of JCVI-syn3A that would examine how physics drives interactions inside the cells.

Though every model has its shortcomings, “what they’re doing in this study is so difficult and it’s so ambitious,” said Elizabeth Strychalski, who heads the cellular engineering group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and coauthored the 2016 minimal-cell paper.  “It’s almost like we’re limited more by what we can imagine than by what we can do.”

With a complete enough model, the researchers should be able to get creative: They can see what happens if they prune biochemical pathways, drop in extra molecules, or set the simulation in a different environment. The results should give more insights into which processes cells need to survive—and which they don’t. They might even offer glimpses into what the very first cells required billions of years ago.

Luthey-Schulten and her team hope to soon use the model to probe deeper questions about the minimum principles of life. For now, though, they are sifting through the data that the model has already provided. “Just the achievement of being able to put this minimal cell onto a computer, bring it to life, and start interrogating it is exciting enough,” Luthey-Schulten said.

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Not much bigger than the continental US and 40 times further from the Sun compared to Earth, it would be so easy to assume that Pluto would be a lifeless and cold place. However, the principal investigator for this mission concept, Dr. Carly Howett, told Forbes that evidence of activity was found on Pluto.

A mission concept study to orbit Pluto and explore the Kuiper belt had been initiated through planetary mission Persephone, which would take around 30+ years and require $3 Billion. The National Academics that will publish its Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey (which lists the missions NASA should plan for) is currently considering this paper.  

In its target timeline, this planetary mission intends to launch on NASA’s SLS rocket by 2031, have a flyby of Jupiter by 2032, flyby a Kuiper Belt Objects (KBO) by 2050, and arrive at Pluto by 2058. Then, the Pluto-system tour will commence until 2061. After that, it could journey for KBO encounter in 2069 in an extended mission. 

This mission aims to look into the internal structures of Pluto and Charon and for evidence of the existence of a subsurface ocean on Pluto. It also intends to look at the evolution of surfaces and atmospheres in the Pluto system and of the KBO population. The orbiter would have 11 scientific instruments onboard.

Why the need to return

Not much bigger than the continental US and 40 times further from the Sun compared to Earth, it would be so easy to assume that Pluto would be a lifeless and cold place. However, the principal investigator for this mission concept, Dr. Carly Howett, told Forbes that evidence of activity was found on Pluto. And to make things more interesting, the New Horizon Mission found that Pluto is geologically active.    

Spacecraft data from NASA’s New Horizon, which had an encounter with the Pluto system in 2015 and a flyby a cold classical KBO in 2019, led to exciting discoveries and eventually to more questions. The images captured through the New Horizons showed vigorous surface geology and convecting ice sheets filling Sputnik Planitia (SP), an ancient basin. 

As one possible explanation for the formation of these SP requires a subsurface ocean, a question was raised on whether or not there would be a subsurface ocean in Pluto despite its distance from the Sun. Determining such existence is the primary driver for the Persephone mission, as the existence of a subsurface ocean has valuable astrobiological implications in the solar system.      

30+ Years of Mission 

The New Horizon reached Pluto in 9.5 years, but Persephone could take more than 27 years. Dr. Howett told Forbes that to get to Pluto slow enough for an orbit would require a long cruise. However, if you go faster, the more you will have to break. The latter requires more fuel which also means more cost.     

Now, why does it have to orbit the system? As emphasized, one of the big question marks that drives this mission is the possible existence of liquid water on Pluto despite its distance from the Sun. According to Dr. Howett, this question could not be sufficiently answered by a single flyby. This requires an orbit. There would be a need to understand the gravity signature, which could only be done by orbiting the system and observing how it pulls on the spacecraft.

Planetary Mission Persephone Requires $3 Billion for a 27-Year Journey Back to Pluto

The US Space Force plans to start patrolling the area around the Moon

Some drugs appear to strengthen the body’s immune defenses against infections, while others can actually weaken the immune system. For example, morphine appears to suppress key immune cells and increase infection risk (especially after cancer surgery). Moreover, antipyretics — pain relief medications like acetaminophen (also known as paracetamol), ibuprofen, aspirin — also show a tendency to “reduce desirable immune responses when taken for vaccination.”

On the other hand, however, the study also finds Aspirin may offer therapeutic value as an affordable, accessible supplemental option for the treatment of tuberculosis. Moreover, study authors report the anti-inflammatory medicine indomethacin may impede viral COVID-19 replication. Further large-scale studies are required to confirm these initial findings.

“One of the problems is that widely used medicines –such as paracetamol, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs like ibuprofen, and corticosteroids such as prednisone – have been around for decades and in the past we didn’t tend to consider their impacts on the immune system because it has been an under-recognized area,” concludes study co-author Professor Ric Day from UNSW and St Vincent’s Hospital, in a statement. “From community use to hospital and acute care, these classes of pain and fever medications are among the most popular drugs worldwide but we need to consider the significant impact these can have on our immune system and our response to infectious diseases, including COVID-19.”

‘Most important research I have been involved in’

Interestingly, this project all started as an investigation into solely acetaminophen during the pandemic. Many people hoarded the pain reliever during the early days and weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We decided to study painkillers and fever medications generally and were amazed by what we found,” says lead study author Dr. Christina Abdel-Shaheed. “In 14 years of studying pain, this is the most important research I have been involved in.”

All in all, the research team says this work is only the beginning. “Rigorous” clinical trials are the next logical step in terms of better understanding the complex relationships between pain medications and immune responses to infections.

“Our review shows some of the common pain and fever medications may work with the immune system to fight infection, whereas others work against it and increase the risk of contracting or responding badly to infectious diseases,” Dr Abdel-Shaheed explains.

“Taking paracetamol or ibuprofen before or immediately after vaccination – for example for COVID-19 – to try to prevent mild fever or headache is not recommended, because this could reduce the body’s desirable immune response to the vaccine. For chickenpox, use of ibuprofen is not recommended as it might increase the risk of secondary bacterial skin infections.”

How pain relievers can be ‘repurposed’ when it comes to infectious diseases

According to Dr. Justin Beardsley, infectious disease specialist at Westmead Hospital and researcher with Sydney Institute for Infectious Diseases, this project’s findings regarding morphine specifically are of particular importance. “Morphine – one of the most commonly used opioid analgesics in post-surgical and critical care – suppresses key innate immunity cells, thereby increasing the risk of infection,” he explains. “This is particularly the case with cancer patients, who are already vulnerable to COVID-19.

“Efforts are needed to achieve adequate analgesia whilst avoiding immune-suppression in the immediate postoperative period caused by opioids such as morphine — both for people undergoing cancer surgery as well as for the immunocompromised generally,” Beardsley adds.

On a more positive note, Professor Andrew McLachlan, dean of pharmacy at the University of Sydney, says this new work opens the door for countless potential ways to “repurpose” pain meds to help with infectious disease treatments.

“With the urgent need for new treatments for COVID-19 and the declining efficacy of some antimicrobial agents due to resistance, now more than ever we need medicines which can maintain or enhance the efficacy of anti-infective drug treatments,” he adds. “The results of this review suggest that commonly used medicines for pain and fever should be further explored as inexpensive and effective adjunctive treatments which influence immune and inflammation pathways for people undergoing treatment for infection.”

The study is published in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology.

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Whether you are a school teacher, a hospital worker, a Google programmer, a US Marines officer or even a UK politician, you’ll have been encouraged to embrace mindfulness by colleagues and supervisors. Even my smartwatch regularly reminds me to take a “mindful minute”. 

The immediate outcomes of this popular form of meditation are meant to be reduced stress and risk of burnout. But listed alongside these benefits, you’ll often find claims that mindfulness can improve your personality. When you learn to live in the moment, the proponents say, you will find hidden reserves of empathy and compassion for those around you. That’s certainly an attractive bonus for an organisation hoping to increase co-operation in its teams. 

The scientific research, however, paints a more complicated picture of mindfulness’s effects on our behaviour, with emerging evidence that it can sometimes increase people’s selfish tendencies. According to a new paper, mindfulness may be especially harmful when we have wronged other people. By quelling our feelings of guilt, it seems, the common meditation technique discourages us from making amends for our mistakes.  

“Cultivating mindfulness can distract people from their own transgressions and interpersonal obligations, occasionally relaxing one’s moral compass,” says Andrew Hafenbrack, assistant professor of management and organisation at the University of Washington, US, who led the new study. 

Such effects shouldn’t discourage us from meditating, stresses Hafenbrack, but may change when and how we choose to do it. “While some have viewed it as a panacea, mindfulness meditation is a specific practice with specific psychological effects,” he says. And we need to be a bit more… well, mindful about those effects. 

Calm and callous? 

There are many forms of mindfulness, but the most common techniques involve either focusing on your breathing or paying intense attention to the sensations in your body. There is some good evidence that these practices can help people to cope better with stress, yet a handful of studies over the past few years have shown that they can also have some unexpected and undesired effects. Last year, for example, researchers from the State University of New York showed that mindfulness can exaggerate people’s selfish tendencies. If a person is already individualist, then they become even less likely to help others after meditation. 

Hafenbrack’s new study examined whether our state of mind at the time of meditating, and our social context, might influence its effects on our behaviour.

While mindfulness can be presented as a quick fix, it's important to look at the nuance, the experts say (Credit: Getty)

In general, mindfulness seems to calm uncomfortable feelings, he says, which is incredibly useful if you feel overwhelmed by pressure at work. But many negative emotions can serve a useful purpose, particularly when it comes to moral decision making. Guilt, for example, can motivate us to apologise when we have hurt someone else, or to take reparative action that might undo some of the damage we’ve done. If mindful meditation leads us to ignore that emotion, it could therefore prevent us from righting our wrongs, suspected Hafenbrack. 

To find out, he designed a series of eight experiments involving a total sample of 1,400 people using a variety of methods. In one, the participants were asked to remember and write about a situation that had made them feel guilty. Half were then asked to practice a mindfulness exercise which directed their focus to their breathing, while others were told to allow their minds to wander freely. 

Afterwards, the participants were asked to take a questionnaire that measured their feelings of guilt. They also had to imagine that they had been given $100. Their task was to estimate how much they would be willing to donate to the person they had wronged for a birthday surprise. 

As Hafenbrack had suspected, the participants who had done the mindfulness meditation reported less remorse – and they were substantially less generous towards the person they had wronged. On average, they were willing to donate just $33.39, while those who had simply let their minds wander were willing to give $40.70 – a nearly 20% difference. 

In another experiment, Hafenbrack divided participants into three groups. Some practised mindful breathing, while others were told to let their minds wander and a third group browsed the web. The participants were then asked to write a letter of apology to a person they had wronged, which two independent judges then rated, according to whether the individual took responsibility for the actions and whether they offered to make up for the wrongdoing. (A high-quality heartfelt apology would include both elements.)

The practice had muted their feelings of guilt and, as a result, their willingness to make amends

In line with Hafenbrack’s hypothesis, the people who had practised mindfulness offered less sincere apologies than those in either of the control conditions. This again suggested that the practice had muted their feelings of guilt and, as a result, their willingness to make amends. 

The remaining experiments suggest that this is true in many different situations, including business decision making that might affect social justice. The participants in one experiment, for example, had to imagine that they were the CEO of a chemical company that dealt with hazardous materials. They were then asked to state their endorsement for a new environmental policy that would help to reduce air pollution. Participants who had just practised mindfulness were much less likely to support the reparative measure. 

The Buddha pill 

It’s important to recognise that these studies examined the effects of mindfulness exercises in very specific contexts, when guilt was salient in the participants’ minds. “We shouldn’t over-generalise and conclude that mindfulness makes you a worse person,” Hafenbrack says. 

His results might, however, encourage us to be a bit more thoughtful about when we apply it. We should think twice about using it after a disagreement with a friend or colleague, for example, particularly if you already know that you were in the wrong. “If we 'artificially' reduce our guilt by meditating it away, we may end up with worse relationships, or even fewer relationships,” he says. 

Miguel Farias, an associate professor in experimental psychology at Coventry University, UK, says that he welcomes any studies that carefully and precisely detail the effects of mindfulness. “I certainly think that we need to start looking at the nuances.” In his book The Buddha Pill, co-written with Catherine Wikholm, he describes how mindfulness interventions in the West are often presented as a “quick fix”, while ignoring much of the ethical guidance that was part of the original religious tradition – which may be important for ensuring that the practice brings about the desired changes to people’s behaviour.

Sincere apologies matter, but research suggests mindfulness may make us less likely to acknowledge our wrongdoing (Credit: Getty)

Working with Ute Kreplin at Massey University in New Zealand, Farias recently examined the available studies on meditation’s consequences for altruism and compassion, but found limited evidence for meaningful positive changes across individuals. “The effects are much weaker than had been proposed.” Like Hafenbrack, he suspects the practice can still be useful – but whether you see the desired benefits may depend on many factors, including the meditators’ personality, motivation and beliefs, he says. “Context is really important.” 

At the very least, Hafenbrack’s research suggests that casual meditators might turn to other contemplative techniques besides mindful breathing and body scans during times of interpersonal conflict. He’s examined a technique known as ‘loving-kindness meditation’, for example, which is inspired by the Buddhist practice of Metta Bhavana. The practice involves contemplating people in your life – from friends and family to acquaintances and strangers – and cultivating good wishes and feelings of warmth for them. 

In his study on guilt, Hafenbrack found that – unlike mindful breathing – loving-kindness meditation increased people’s intentions to make amends for their wrongs. “It can help people feel less bad and focus on the present moment, without having the risk of reducing the desire to repair relationships,” he says. 

Humans are complex beings with many different needs; it is only right that we should use multiple techniques to shape our emotions and behaviour. Sometimes that involves looking inwards, to ground our thinking in our bodies, and other times we need to look outwards, and remind ourselves of our essential connections to the people around us. There really is no other way to take responsibility for our behaviours and ensure that our relationships continue to flourish.

David Robson is a science writer and author based in London, UK. His latest book, The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Transform Your Life was published by Canongate (UK) and Henry Holt (USA) in early 2022. He is @d_a_robson on Twitter.

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Offshore wind development has the potential to transform the nation’s energy supply by providing clean power directly to big coastal cities. In fact, the Biden administration is pushing to develop 30 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2030—enough to power 10 million homes and reduce carbon emissions by 78 million metric tons.

But a new study might throw a wrench in those plans. It turns out that massive wind turbines may interfere with marine radar systems, making it risky for both big ships passing through shipping channels near offshore wind farms and smaller vessels navigating around them. While European and Asian nations have relied on offshore wind power for more than a decade, the big wind farms proposed off the US continental shelf are larger and spaced further apart, meaning that ships are more likely to be operating nearby. These farms are proposed along the East Coast from Massachusetts to North Carolina, as well as for a handful of locations off the California coast, according to data from the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.

A panel of experts convened by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine concluded in a report issued last week that wind turbines can create two different problems. First, their steel towers can reflect electromagnetic waves, interfering with ships’ navigational radar systems in ways that might obscure a nearby boat.

The turbine's rotating blades can also create a form of interference similar to the Doppler effect, in which sound waves shorten as a moving object approaches the observer. In this case, the spinning blades shorten and distort the radar signals sent from passing ships and can produce what’s called “blade flash” on a ship’s radar screen. These flashes can create false images that look like boats and could confuse a human radar operator on the bridge.

“If you have something that's moving toward you and you are illuminating it with a radar signal, then the signal that is returned will actually have what's called a phase shift. Essentially, it appears that you have the object coming closer,” says Jennifer Bernard, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a member of the National Academies panel that produced the report. Bernard says that phenomena does not completely block the radar image, “but it does create clutter and makes everything a little bit more washed out, because now some things are still and some things are moving. So that makes everything a little bit more difficult to interpret.”

In the report, the US Coast Guard raised concerns that the radar interference may also hamper search-and-rescue efforts for ships that get in trouble around wind farms.

“These are large machines in the ocean and will impact marine vessel radar. That's inevitable,” says Bill Melvin, chair of the panel and deputy director for research at the Georgia Tech Research Institute. “We recommended that investment should be made to study and understand the problem in more detail and also further develop the proposed mitigating solutions.”

Solutions could include upgrading older shipboard radars to modern solid state systems that can be adjusted to eliminate some of the interference from the rotating blades. Another idea is to perhaps wrap the blades or towers in material similar to the radar-absorbing carbon or graphene polymers used on stealth aircraft to dampen some, but not all, of the radar signal and prevent the distortion. The study also mentions the possibility of changing the shape of the tower or blades to present smaller targets and create less scattering of the radar signal.

These ideas might work, but the expert panel notes that there’s a lack of research in this area—while at the same time there’s a big rush to build wind farms. The same week that the report was released, the US Bureau of Ocean Energy and Management auctioned the rights to develop wind farms in six locations off New Jersey, raising a whopping $4.37 billion in lease sales. The bureau has already authorized construction of the 800-megawatt Vineyard Wind project south of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, with 62 turbines, and the 130-megawatt South Fork wind project off the eastern tip of Long Island, New York, with 12 turbines. Both are expected to begin producing energy in 2023. And about 27 miles off the coast of Virginia Beach, Virginia, Dominion Power is planning a 187-turbine wind farm that will power 660,000 homes and cost nearly $10 billion, slated to begin operation in 2026.

But not everyone is onboard. Some environmental groups along the New Jersey coast believe that the offshore wind industry is moving too fast. “We are not opposed to offshore wind if it's done responsibly and reasonably, but this industry is moving at a reckless pace,” says Cindy Zipf, director of New Jersey–based Clean Ocean Action, an advocacy group focused on coastal issues.

Zipf says that there are no plans for pilot projects that might help researchers address some of the concerns raised by the new radar interference study, as well as ongoing ones raised by the commercial fishing industry. The federally-managed waters in the Atlantic, where the proposed wind farms are located, are also home to important fisheries, including sea scallops, squid, and surf clams. Commercial fishing groups fear their boats will be forced around the turbines, some of which now stand 850 feet tall and produce 15 megawatts of power, enough for 15,000 homes when fully operating.

“We have no pilot projects to really assess what it will mean,” Zipf says. “There's just been great enthusiasm for this new industry without any real transparency into what the consequences are of this massive new industrialization of the ocean.”

Others believe that the radar interference problem can be solved before the new big offshore wind projects go online—and that these ideas need to be tested in the real world. “In order to learn more about offshore wind in the US, we need to start building offshore wind in the US,” says Erin Baker, professor of industrial engineering and operations research at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, who has studied the climate and economic benefits of wind power.

She argues that wind power is necessary if society is going to put a dent in carbon emissions and slow the disastrous effects of climate change. “We are in a climate emergency,” she says. “We've got to get started.”

Offshore Wind Turbines Could Mess With Ships’ Radar Signals

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For years, the tiny startup Kytch worked to invent and sell a device designed to fix McDonald's notoriously broken ice cream machines, only to watch the fast food Goliath crush their business like the hopes of so many would-be McFlurry customers. Now Kytch is instead seeking to serve out cold revenge—nearly a billion dollars worth of it.

Late Tuesday night, Kytch filed a long-expected legal complaint against McDonald's, accusing the company of false advertising and tortious interference in its contracts with customers. Kytch's cofounders, Melissa Nelson and Jeremy O'Sullivan, are asking for no less than $900 million in damages.

Since 2019, Kytch has sold a phone-sized gadget designed to be installed inside McDonald's ice cream machines. Those Kytch devices would intercept the ice cream machines' internal communications and send them out to a web or smartphone interface to help owners remotely monitor and troubleshoot the machines' many foibles, which are so widely acknowledged that they’ve become a full-blown meme among McDonald's customers. The two-person startup's new claims against McDonald's focus on emails the fast food giant sent to every franchisee in November 2020, instructing them to pull Kytch devices out of their ice cream machines immediately.

Those emails warned franchisees that the Kytch devices not only violated the ice cream machines’ warranties and intercepted their "confidential information" but also posed a safety threat and could lead to “serious human injury," a claim that Kytch describes as false and defamatory. Kytch also notes that McDonald's used those emails to promote a new ice cream machine, built by its longtime appliance manufacturing partner Taylor, that would offer similar features to Kytch. The Taylor devices, meanwhile, have yet to see public adoption beyond a few test installations.

Kytch cofounder Melissa Nelson says the emails didn't just result in McDonald's ice cream machines remaining broken around the world. (About one in seven of the machines in the US remained out of commission on Monday according to McBroken.com, which tracks the problem in real time.) They also kneecapped Kytch's fast-growing sales just as the startup was taking off. "They've tarnished our name. They scared off our customers and ruined our business. They were anti-competitive. They lied about a product that they said would be released," Nelson says. "McDonald's had every reason to know that Kytch was safe and didn't have any issues. It was not dangerous, like they claimed. And so we're suing them."

Before it found itself in conflict with soft-serve superpowers, Kytch had shown some early success in solving McDonald's ice cream headaches. Its internet-connected add-on gadget helped franchisees avoid problems like hours of downtime when Taylor's finicky daily pasteurization cycle failed. McDonald's restaurant owners interviewed by WIRED liked the device; one said it saved him "easily thousands of dollars a month" from lost revenue and repair fees. Kytch says that by the end of 2020 it had 500 customers and was doubling its sales every quarter—all of which evaporated when McDonald's ordered its franchisees to ditch Kytch's gadgets.

Kytch first fired back against the fast-food ice cream establishment last May, suing Taylor and its distributor TFG for theft of trade secrets. The Kytch founders argued in that lawsuit that Taylor worked with TFG and one franchise owner to stealthily obtain a Kytch device, reverse-engineer it, and attempt to copy its features.

But all along, Kytch's cofounders have hinted that they intended to use the discovery process in their lawsuit against Taylor to dig up evidence for a suit against McDonald's too. In fact, the 800 pages of internal Taylor emails and presentations that Kytch has so far obtained in discovery show that it was McDonald's, not Taylor, that at many points led the effort to study and develop a response to Kytch in 2020. In February of that year, Taylor president Jeremy Dobrowolski wrote in an email that "McDonald's is all hot and heavy about this," referring to Kytch's growing adoption. A McDonald's executive later asked for a conference call with Taylor in June of that year to discuss Kytch. When McDonald's shared with Taylor a draft of the Kytch-killing email it planned to send franchisees, a Taylor executive commented to a colleague that "I am a bit in shock they are willing to take such a strong position."

WIRED reached out to McDonald's for its response to Kytch's new lawsuit, but didn't immediately receive a response. When WIRED first approached McDonald's about its conflict with Kytch last spring, the company detailed its safety complaints in a statement: "Kytch’s software includes a remote operation function, and with this feature, we believe anyone cleaning, operating or repairing our shake machines (like restaurant crew members or maintenance technicians) could potentially be injured if the equipment is turned on remotely."

When McDonald's emails to Taylor about Kytch came to light in November in the midst of Kytch's lawsuit against the supplier, a McDonald's spokesperson responded in another statement standing by those safety concerns as the basis for its emails to franchisees. “Nothing is more important to us than food quality and safety, which is why all equipment in McDonald’s restaurants is thoroughly vetted before it’s approved for use," the statement read. "After we learned that Kytch’s unapproved device was being tested by some of our franchisees, we held a call to better understand what it was and subsequently communicated a potential safety concern to franchisees. There’s no conspiracy here."

Kytch argues, however, that the safety warnings McDonald's has leveled against the startup have never held up. In its legal complaint, Kytch points out that its devices were certified to meet Underwriter's Laboratory safety standards by the product testing firm Intertek. The complaint counters any claim that a Kytch device's remote connection to an ice cream machine could cause the machine to turn on while a staffer's hand is inside—in fact, Taylor's own manual tells anyone servicing the machine to unplug it first, and removing the door of the freezer cabinet to access the rotating barrels of the machine automatically disables its motor.

Finally, the Kytch complaint points out that the company’s cofounder Jeremy O'Sullivan wrote those points in an email to a McDonald's franchisee who later shared them with McDonald's. "McDonald's knew that its statements were false and had actual knowledge that Kytch does not create any incremental risk in Taylor's soft-serve machines," the complaint reads.

McDonald's went so far as to warn other companies, including Coca-Cola and Burger King, not to buy Kytch products, the complaint alleges. In fact, Kytch had hoped its ice cream machine hacking device would be just the first in a series of products it developed for internet-connected kitchen appliances—plans that fell apart after its revenue stream was cut off. The $900 million that the lawsuit seeks from McDonald's, in fact, represents the value the Kytch cofounders argue their company would have eventually been worth if it hadn't been sabotaged.

If safety wasn't a sincere concern for McDonald's, it remains unclear why the giant was so eager to hamstring the startup working to solve its McFlurry fiasco. Kytch has argued that Taylor was incentivized to keep its machines broken; repair and maintenance contracts across its business lines accounted for a quarter of the company's revenue stream in 2018, according to a document Taylor published at the time. But Kytch cofounders Nelson and O'Sullivan admit that doesn't explain why McDonald's would similarly seek to prevent a fix for its embarrassing—and expensive—ice cream machine failure rates.

Whatever McDonald's reasoning may be, Kytch hopes to find out the answer in the documents their lawsuit surfaces.

"We're going to continue to get discovery. And it's going to keep on tunneling into this heart of darkness," O'Sullivan says. "We knew we would get to this point, and we know we'll get to the truth. And we're just going to keep tunneling."

Ice Cream Machine Hackers Sue McDonald's for $900 Million

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A cargo ship carrying thousands of vehicles across the Atlantic Ocean has sunk, according to the company that operated the ship (via Insider). A fire broke out on the ship, Felicity Ace, on February 16th as it was traveling from Germany to the USA.

Nearly 4,000 cars from the Volkswagen Group were being transported to the USA, the company confirmed to Insider. Felicity Ace was carrying both electric and non-electric vehicles, according to the Associated Press, and reports from February indicated Porsches, Bentleys, Lamborghinis, and other luxury cars were among those on board. While it’s unclear exactly what started the blaze, captain Joao Mendes Cabecas of the port of Hortas said lithium-ion batteries in EVs aboard the ship caught fire, Reuters reported in February.

Felicity Ace operator MOL Ship Management Singapore says the ship sunk at 9AM local time around 220 nautical miles (about 253 miles) off the coast of the Azores, an archipelago in the mid-Atlantic that’s an autonomous region of Portugal. All 22 crew members were evacuated from the ship and did not need medical attention, the Portuguese Navy said when the fire first broke out.

On Friday, a salvage team was able to board the ship, and “the smoke leaving the vessel has currently stopped and is not visible,” MOL Ship Management Singapore said. The ship was being towed when it sank, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Cargo ship carrying Porsches, Lamborghinis, and Bentleys sinks in the Atlantic

Today, the newest member of a family of storm-spotting satellites will head to space, carrying high-resolution cameras that will be used in real time to track everything from hurricanes and floods to wildfires and smoke, and even space weather. The GOES-T satellite is scheduled to blast off at 4:38 pm Eastern time—weather permitting, of course—on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V 541 rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

“It’s a very all-purpose spacecraft. Basically, any kind of good or bad weather, any kind of hazardous environmental condition, the cameras on GOES-T will see them,” says Pamela Sullivan, director of the GOES-R program at the the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration, which together with NASA designed and built the new satellite. “The GOES satellites really help people every day, before, during and after a disaster.”

The new satellite will be part of a pair of eyes that spy on North America—one looking west and the other looking east. GOES-T will focus on the western continental US, Alaska, Hawaii, Mexico, some parts of Central America, and the Pacific Ocean. Its sibling, which has been orbiting since 2016, covers the eastern continental US, Canada, and Mexico.

NOAA has been maintaining this twin set of satellites (and sometimes, a triplet set) since the 1970s, retiring orbiters as they age and swapping new ones in. Once it’s in orbit, GOES-T will be renamed GOES-18, since it’s the 18th satellite in the program, and it will also be known as GOES-West, since it’s the west-looking eye. It will replace the satellite currently covering the west, which in 2018 developed a problem with its Advanced Baseline Imager, one of its most important instruments. A loop heat pipe system has been malfunctioning and not transferring enough heat from the electronics to the radiator. As a result, the heat has become a contaminant; at certain times, the infrared detectors become saturated, degrading their images.

The older satellite isn’t useless, though. After GOES-T takes its place, it will be put in “standby mode” and maintained as an on-orbit spare, Sullivan says. Thirteen previous satellites have been retired, while two more remain in orbit as backups. The new satellite also isn’t the last. Eventually, another satellite (GOES-U) will follow it, likely to replace the east-looking satellite, ensuring that the dynasty stretches into at least the mid-2030s.

GOES-T is an upgrade over its predecessors. It is the third member of the new generation of GOES spacecraft that come with improved versions of the Advanced Baseline Imager that can snap high-resolution photos of the entire western hemisphere every five minutes. It takes those images at 16 different spectral bands or “channels”—a red and a blue channel at visual wavelengths, and then 14 others that range from near-infrared to mid-infrared wavelengths. (Earlier GOES imagers only had five channels.) This allows researchers to pick their favorite channels to best map out wildfires, clouds, storms, smoke, dust, water vapor, ozone, and many other atmospheric phenomena.

While most satellites fly a few hundred miles above the ground in the relatively crowded low Earth orbit, looping the globe every two hours or so, GOES-T will ascend to 22,000 miles—about a tenth of the way to the moon. In this sparsely populated area known as geostationary orbit, spacecraft orbit as fast as the world turns, allowing them to remain positioned over the same spot on the globe. That key feature allows the GOES satellites to continuously monitor weather, which can change quickly. (GOES stands for Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites.)

“That is the number one big advantage of the GOES instruments,” says Amy Huff, an atmospheric scientist at the NOAA Center for Satellite Applications and Research. “It has really revolutionized the way we respond to fires and smoke.”

With increasingly intense and destructive blazes in the western US, like the Dixie Fire in California, the Bootleg Fire in Oregon, and the Marshall Fire in Colorado, firefighters and other emergency management officials need real-time images, Huff says. Using combinations of GOES-T’s infrared channels, Huff’s colleagues will be able to continue their work tracking a fire’s location, intensity, size, and temperature all day and night. Huff’s team’s specialty is smoke: They monitor the movement of smoke plumes and air pollution, producing maps and other resources for the aviation industry and public health officials.

Researchers will also use GOES-T to map clouds—not just the storm-generating cumulonimbus ones, but also wispy, cirrus clouds. “That’s why I’m really excited to get GOES West replaced with GOES-T. It will then be providing information over the Pacific Ocean, which is very much a data void. And since most of our weather comes from the West, that’s a problem,” says Jason Otkin, an atmospheric scientist at University of Wisconsin who frequently uses these satellites’ data. GOES-T will ultimately help improve weather forecasts across the US, he says.

Researchers and meteorologists also like to take advantage of the satellites’ other instruments, like the Geostationary Lightning Mapper, which spots flashes of light by monitoring an area with a time resolution of 500 frames per second. With GOES-T’s predecessors, lightning-watching scientists have already broken world records, says Michael Peterson, an atmospheric scientist at the Los Alamos National Lab, who frequently uses these satellite images to study the physics of lightning strikes. “We can see some rare cases where lightning can last not just one second but more than 10 seconds. It truly breaks the mold of what we think lightning can be capable of,” he says. By mapping lightning from space, he and his colleagues have also found giant flashes, some more than 450 miles long.

GOES-T and its brethren also count as space weather trackers, Sullivan says, since some of their sensors are pointed upward. The new satellite will watch for the sun to fling giant blobs of charged particles, and track their impacts if they collide with the Earth’s magnetic field—a phenomenon often called a geomagnetic storm. The spacecraft comes equipped with two sun-focused ultraviolet and x-ray sensors, while another sensor and a magnetometer monitor the number of electrons and protons and the magnetic field around the satellite. Detecting a sudden fluctuation among those could be a sign that satellites and astronauts in lower orbits are about to get hit by a solar storm.

As the GOES spacecraft beam down their images and data, NOAA makes them freely and publicly available, Huff says. “That’s exciting as well: People don’t have to go through emergency management officials; they can actually go to NOAA’s websites and look directly at the imagery themselves,” she says.

On Tuesday, GOES-T is expected to launch under the gaze of its east-looking sibling, which will help monitor conditions from space. The weather looks good so far, though if for some reason the launch can’t happen during its planned two-hour window, NASA will try again the following afternoon. The launch will be aired live on NASA TV.

A New Super-High Satellite Will Eye Weather on Earth—and in Space

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Early humans kept getting their heads knocked in

On July 17, 1963, Jack Nilles sat for hours in the corridors of the Pentagon, drinking cup after cup of sludgy coffee as he waited for a meeting that would never happen. Nilles, a rocket scientist for the US Air Force, had raced to Washington, DC, from his home in Los Angeles after being summoned at short notice the day before to deliver a briefing on the design of new reconnaissance satellites. As he sat there, he idly found himself pondering what millions of white-collar workers have thought since: I could have been more productive working from home. 

“I had to get on this damn airplane, waste a night’s sleep and a day, for a nothing meeting—and then come back,” says the now 89-year-old Nilles. The general commander at the Aerospace Corporation used CCTV to connect with the Pentagon, but Nilles had no such luxury. So he decided to do something about it.

“Ordinarily, people in LA would drive to work to an office, downtown somewhere, but what if workers didn’t need to get in their cars to go to their job?” asked Nilles. “I had helped NASA put man on the moon, so why couldn’t I do something about LA’s horrible traffic issue? I thought: Working from home could replace the need to commute.” And so he began the world’s first large-scale experiment in hybrid working.

Nilles dubbed the concept “part-time telecommuting,” which mixed remote-working days with office-based days. Thanks to the pandemic, millions of present-day employees received a crash course in the type of work he trialed—according to the Office for National Statistics, almost 30 percent of employed people in the UK alone did some kind of remote work in 2020, compared to 12.4 percent in 2019—but now that restrictions are easing, we’re navigating a practice that Nilles and his contemporaries spearheaded in the early ’70s. After almost half a century, their concept is going mainstream. A survey by Future Forum, Slack’s research consortium, found that by November 2021, the number of global knowledge workers in a hybrid arrangement grew to 56 percent, up from 46 percent in May 2021.

Giving people more choice about where they work has always unsettled big business leaders. When Nilles first proposed research into hybrid work, his bosses at The Aerospace Corporation said: “‘Forget about it—we’re engineers, we’re metal benders, we don’t deal with touchy feely stuff,’” he recalls. Not to be cowed, he told a former colleague at the University of Southern California about his idea and was offered a job as a director in interdisciplinary program development at USC, coordinating a team of academics across various disciplines to research his hybrid working concept. “Nobody knew what it meant, which was good, because I could do whatever I wanted,” he laughs.

In 1973, with a grant from the National Science Foundation, Nilles gathered a team of scholars across multiple disciplines to test whether part-time telecommuting would be effective in an actual business organization, and see what impact it had on productivity and energy. Staff at the participating national insurance company spent a few days a week working from home using the telephone, and several days going to a specially established satellite office by bus, bike, or on foot. Their work was fed into a mini computer at the end of the day, and then at night, all data was transferred to the mainframe computer downtown.

Within nine months, the results were impossible to ignore—the staff turnover rate dropped from 35 percent to zero, productivity rose by 15 percent, and the company was saving money on training costs, expenses, and sick pay. If rolled out across the US, the company estimated it could cut expenditure by more than $5 million a year.

Word spread and other academics established similar projects with national businesses. Despite the undeniable benefits, employers were always the biggest sticking point. Often companies signed up to the programs, put everything in place, and when productivity began to rise and operational costs dropped, a new CEO would pull the plug. “It was particularly the C-suite, who were brought up in the industrial age and just didn’t take to this computer stuff—fortunately, they’re dying off,” says Nilles.

But it’s going to take a lot more than the extinction of office dinosaurs to solve 2022’s hybrid working woes, which are plagued by never-ending days and casual rudeness, to the in-office Zoom obsession and toxic new cliques. Still a nebulous term, “hybrid” might mean coming into the office most days, or only coming in once a quarter. In some companies, the combination could even be determined by each individual. Everyone’s interpretation is different.

As well as grappling with the meaning of hybrid work, some businesses are reluctant to invest in adapting their business practices. According to a recent survey from the Work Foundation and the Chartered Management Institute (CMI), two-thirds of managers (65 percent) in the UK haven’t received training on how to manage remote staff. And while 79 percent of global companies intend to make moderate to extensive hybrid work changes, according to data gathered by professional services giant EY, just 40 percent have actually told their staff about those plans. Despite its shortfalls, employees are fans, with 68 percent of global knowledge workers telling Future Forum that they prefer hybrid work. As hybrid working becomes the dominant way of working, the path to success was already laid out by early adopters decades ago.

Nilles recommends proposing a management by results structure, not by process—even if your supervisor hasn’t reached this point yet. “Lay out what you’ll do when working from home and the results they can expect, so be specific about a schedule and mileposts,” advises Nilles. “You’ll soon show them you will deliver better than before, because you don’t have them breathing down your neck the whole time.”

David Fleming, who worked with Nilles on the State of California Telecommuting Program, argues that no one should expect to nail a hybrid arrangement instantly. Fleming began his career as a right of way agent, working to obtain property rights from owners for use in government or private industries. A critical part of his work was providing different training sessions for “teleworkers” and “telemanagers.” He found that the only difference between a good telemanager and a good manager was training. “After that, we brought them together to discuss the quality, quantity and timeliness of the work done at home,” says 84-year-old Fleming. “It felt radical because some managers and supervisors had never had those discussions.”

He also established a telework leadership team with an executive who, according to Fleming, “had a vision to see part-time telecommuting going beyond just a pilot, as something that would reduce the demand of high-rise buildings and mitigate environmental effects of commuting.” While that’s a tall order for most, the basic principle prevails: Hiring a dedicated hybrid working senior role could make the transition, and necessary experimentation, more effective for everyone.

There needs to be a move away from one-size-fits-all approaches and managers must plan for employees to use the space and environment in different ways. “Gregarious people who love being around others will want to interrupt everyone else and talk,” explains Fleming. “That was me—I just wanted to make up for lost time.” Don’t presume office gossip will take a hit as hybrid working increases. “We found the part-time telecommuters knew more about the gossip than people in the office full time, just because they were being more active about finding out what was going on,” says Nilles. “They were becoming professional snoopers.”

While the grapevine thrives in a hybrid working environment, there’s no guarantee that forcing everyone to spend time together is a good idea. Early on in the program, a software development company, which had employees scattered all over the world, decided to hold an annual party in Denver. “Once all these people got together face-to-face, they realized they hated each other,” says Nilles. “They just couldn’t get along and the first get-together was their last. There’s no way of guaranteeing you will like your colleagues, even if you already work with them.”

“For those that were suddenly thrust into this two years ago, the hard part is finding the magic mix—the optimum ratio of being at home and in the office,” says Nilles. He expects the number of days people spend in the office to increase and productivity to remain steady. Offices must also change accordingly. “As we’ve been saying for the past 30 years, cubicles have to go and you need the office to be somewhere to interact with each other,” he says.

Our whiplash-inducing introduction to working from home shouldn’t be seen as an impediment to future hybrid working progress. Academic Joanne Pratt, whose interest in home working was piqued with the arrival of the IBM PC in 1981, had her very own case study to prove emergency switch ups don’t spell disaster. In 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake caused the collapse of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge, making it impossible for a group of public utility employees to drive to the office.

“I thought—good grief—here’s a chance to see whether telecommuting really works,” she says. “I interviewed them before the collapse and after its repair, and over half continued to telecommute. The rest returned because they didn’t have the technology in place at home to continue, or the project finished and they moved onto something else—none stopped because it didn’t work.”

Pratt, whose cleaners vacuum around her as she conducts a Zoom call from her home in Santa Fe—“the joys of hybrid working!” she laughs—believes the approach can enrich lives. “Humans are changing all the time and this kind of flexibility enables our work to change with us,” she says. We should be measuring the quality of our lives, not just the quality of our jobs, and while hybrid working isn’t a perfect solution, it’s a flexible way to live in the future, she says.

The groundbreaking work of Nilles, Fleming, and Pratt has taken them around the world, advising governments and policymakers on embedding healthy and sustainable telecommuting models, all the while trialing it themselves. At every turn, they were met with resistance from the tops of organizations. Although they’re sad it took almost 50 years—and a pandemic—for hybrid working to catch on, they’re sanguine about the hesitancy. “Oftentimes, when we fear something and we see the other side of it, it becomes acceptable,” says Fleming. “We have to respect the fear felt by businesses and move through it slowly.”

The Original Hybrid Workers Can Teach Us How to Do It Right

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