News: General News

In Alaska, Beavers Are Engineering a New Tundra

Sat, 26 Feb 2022 19:32:37 +0000

Once nonexistent in the northwest part of the state, beavers are both benefiting from and changing a warming landscape.

This story originally appeared on High Country News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Cyrus Harris hopped on a snowmobile one day in early January and zoomed up a peninsula near Kotzebue, Alaska, to break trail for his sled dogs. “The first beaver dam I’m running into is about three miles from town,” he said. “Nearby that one is another one, about five miles out is another one, and that’s just one little area.” Harris (Inupiaq) was born in 1957 and spent his childhood across Kotzebue Sound in Sisualik. “Beavers were really just unheard-of,” he said. “It’s crazy the amount of beaver coming in, they’re just raiding the whole area.”

Beavers—once seldom seen in northwest Alaska—started appearing more frequently in the ’80s and ’90s. Pastor Lance Kramer (Inupiaq) traps beavers today, mostly for making fur hats. He recently asked an elder about the area’s first sightings. “They saw this thing on the tundra, and it looked like a wolverine, but it was a really long beaver,” Kramer said. “[It] had walked so far on the tundra to get up this way that it wore out the bottom of its tail.”

Now the animals—and their ponds, dams, and lodges—are everywhere. Using satellite images of the Kotzebue area, scientists found that the number of beaver dams surged from two in 2002 to 98 in 2019, a 5,000 percent jump. And it’s not just Kotzebue: Beaver ponds doubled regionally since 2000, with 12,000 in northwestern Alaska now. Beavers, dubbed “ecosystem engineers” because of how they flood their surroundings, are transforming the tundra.

North America’s largest rodent is moving north partly because of climate change: As the tundra grows warmer and greener, it also becomes more inviting to beavers, which need shrubs for food, dams, and lodges. Their proliferation is also linked to a population rebound: Beaver trapping, popular for centuries, has tapered off, and the animals are thriving.

Beavers were recently cited as a “new disturbance” in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 2021 Arctic Report Card, a yearly report that tracks changes in the region. That’s because they are damming rivers and creating deeper, warmer ponds that open up new types of aquatic habitat. “The key question to ask, wherever you’re standing in the Arctic, is, ‘How long will it be until beavers get there?’” said Ken Tape, an ecologist studying beaver expansion at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. “Because when they get there, it’ll never be the same again.”

Harris worries that beavers swimming in the reservoir that supplies Kotzebue’s drinking water could overwhelm the community water treatment plant. Beavers (and other animals) carry the giardia parasite, which they excrete into the environment, and water contaminated with their feces can cause intestinal infections. Harris and others used to drink directly from rivers on their hunting and fishing trips, but today they’re having second thoughts. “If our water quality gets damaged, where do we go from there?” Harris said.

Selawik, about 80 miles to the east, is a beaver hotspot, too, and some are upset that the animals are blocking hunting access by boat. “Elders said to start getting rid of the beavers, but nobody listened, and now it’s overpopulated,” said Ralph Ramoth Jr. (Inupiaq), a subsistence hunter who also works for the local airport and his town’s road, water, and sewer department. Lodges up to 15 feet tall make navigating sloughs to hunt moose on the periphery challenging. “You can’t even go some places now with a boat because it’s dammed up,” Ramoth said. Sometimes he tries to chip away at beavers’ handiwork, with little success. “If you tear up part of a dam or a beaver igloo, they’ll come right back and fix it up again,” he said. “They’re just busy beavers.”

Hunters like Ramoth regard beavers as pests, and Harris wants to see beaver population-control efforts. But others argue that the beavers aren’t necessarily creating a better or worse tundra—just a different one. Kramer considers them a blessing for habitat diversity. “They’ve enhanced our land in an incredible way when they do come up,” Kramer said. “They make lakes and ponds and bigger sloughs, which makes for more moose, ducks, waterfowl, and muskrat.”

Scientists will continue to monitor beaver activity and its possible environmental impacts. One major question remains unanswered: Are beavers accelerating climate change in the region? The pools of water that their dams create are warmer than the surrounding soil, and that could thaw permafrost and release carbon and methane greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. “Beavers are maybe a player,” said Christina Schädel, a professor who studies permafrost at Northern Arizona University. “How big, we don’t know. But it’s absolutely worth investigating.”

In Alaska, Beavers Are Engineering a New Tundra

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Do birds have language? It depends on how you define it

Sat, 26 Feb 2022 19:30:09 +0000

Scientists find some parallels with human speech in cheeps and trills of birdsong.

In our quest to find what makes humans unique, we often compare ourselves with our closest relatives: the great apes. But when it comes to understanding the quintessential human capacity for language, scientists are finding that the most tantalizing clues lie farther afield.

Human language is made possible by an impressive aptitude for vocal learning. Infants hear sounds and words, form memories of them, and later try to produce those sounds, improving as they grow up. Most animals cannot learn to imitate sounds at all. Though nonhuman primates can learn how to use innate vocalizations in new ways, they don’t show a similar ability to learn new calls. Interestingly, a small number of more distant mammal species, including dolphins and bats, do have this capacity. But among the scattering of nonhuman vocal learners across the branches of the bush of life, the most impressive are birds—hands (wings?) down.

Parrots, songbirds, and hummingbirds all learn new vocalizations. The calls and songs of some species in these groups appear to have even more in common with human language, such as conveying information intentionally and using simple forms of some of the elements of human language such as phonology, semantics, and syntax. And the similarities run deeper, including analogous brain structures that are not shared by species without vocal learning.

These parallels have motivated an explosion of research in recent decades, says ethologist Julia Hyland Bruno of Columbia University, who studies social aspects of song learning in zebra finches. “Lots of people have made analogies between language and birdsong,” she says.

Hyland Bruno studies zebra finches because they are more social than most migratory birds—they like to travel in small bands that occasionally gather into larger groups. “I’m interested in how it is that they learn their culturally transmitted vocalizations in these groups,” says Hyland Bruno, coauthor of a paper in the 2021 Annual Review of Linguistics comparing birdsong learning and culture with human language.

Both birdsong and language are passed culturally to later generations through vocal learning. Geographically distant populations of the same bird species can make small tweaks to their songs over time, eventually resulting in a new dialect—a process similar in some ways to how humans develop different accents, dialects, and languages.

With all these similarities in mind, it’s reasonable to ask if birds themselves have language. It may come down to how you define it.

“I wouldn’t say they have language in the way linguistic experts define it,” says neuroscientist Erich Jarvis of the Rockefeller University in New York City and a coauthor of Hyland Bruno’s paper on birdsong and language. But for scientists like Jarvis who study the neurobiology of vocal communication in birds, “I would say they have a remnant or a rudimentary form of what we might call spoken language.

“It’s like the word ‘love.’ You ask lots of people what does it mean, and you’re going to get a lot of different meanings. Which means that it’s partly a mystery.”

There are multiple components to spoken language, Jarvis says, and some are shared by more species than others. A fairly common component is auditory learning, like a dog figuring out how to respond to the spoken command “sit.” The vocal learning that humans and some birds do is one of the most specialized components, but all of them are shared to some degree by other animals, he says.

The grammar of bird calls

One key element of human language is semantics, the connection of words with meanings. Scientists had long thought that unlike our words, animal vocalizations were involuntary, reflecting the emotional state of the animal without conveying any other information. But over the last four decades, numerous studies have shown that various animals have distinct calls with specific meanings.

Many bird species use different alarm calls for different predators. Japanese tits, which nest in tree cavities, have one call that causes their chicks to crouch down to avoid being pulled out of the nest by crows, and another call for tree snakes that sends the chicks jumping out of the nest entirely. Siberian jays vary their calls depending on whether a predatory hawk is seen perching, looking for prey, or actively attacking—and each call elicits a different response from other nearby jays. And black-capped chickadees change the number of “dees” in their characteristic call to indicate the relative size and threat of predators.

Two recent studies suggest that the order of some birds’ vocalizations may impact their meaning. Though the idea is still controversial, this could represent a rudimentary form of the rules governing the order and combination of words and elements in human language known as syntax, as illustrated by the classic “dog bites man” vs. “man bites dog” example.

In addition to alert calls, many bird species use recruitment calls that summon other members of their species. Both Japanese tits and southern pied babblers appear to combine alert calls with recruitment calls to create a sort of call to arms, gathering their compatriots into a mob to harass and chase off a predator. When the birds hear this call, they approach the caller while scanning for danger.

The order of combined calls matters to Japanese tits, which may mean they have a rudimentary form of the ordering rules of human language known as syntax.

ASO FUJITA/amanaimagesRF | Getty

Scientists led by ethologist Toshitaka Suzuki of Kyoto University discovered that the order of the combined calls matters to the Japanese tits. When Suzuki’s team played a recorded “alert+recruitment” combo to wild tits, it elicited a much stronger mobbing response than an artificially reversed “recruitment+alert” call. This could simply be explained by the birds responding to the combined alert+recruitment call as its own signal without recognizing the parts of the combination, but the scientists came up with a clever way to test this question.

Willow tits have their own distinct recruitment calls, which Japanese tits also understand and respond to in the wild. When Suzuki’s team combined the willow tit recruitment call with the Japanese tit alert call, the Japanese tits responded with the same combined scanning and approaching behavior—but only if the calls were in the correct alert+recruitment order.

“These results demonstrate a new parallel between animal communication systems and human language,” Suzuki and colleagues wrote in Current Biology in 2017.

But it’s a matter of interpretation whether the call combinations of the tits and babblers is really relevant to discussions of human language, which involves more complex sequences, says behavioral neuroscientist Adam Fishbein of the University of California, San Diego.

“If they were doing something more like language, you would get a whole bunch of different combinations of things,” Fishbein says. “It’s such a restricted system within the birds.”

Sounding it out

Fishbein’s own research with zebra finch song suggests that syntax may not be as important to birds as it is to humans. “I feel like people have been trying to impose this human way of thinking about communication on what the birds are doing,” he says.

Birdsong can be very complex and tends to have typical sequences and patterns of notes, syllables, and motifs. So birds’ singing may be a closer analog to human language than the tits’ alert and recruitment calls. To the human ear, parts of birdsong are reminiscent of word syllables, so it’s easy to assume the order of those parts is important to the message. But, perhaps surprisingly, we know very little about how birdsong sequences are perceived by the avian ear. Fishbein’s research suggests that what birds hear when they listen to birdsong may be very different from what humans hear.

Male zebra finches all learn a single common song, which you can hear repeated over and over on this recording in what is known as a song bout. Though they all share the same short song, there are subtle variations between renditions of the song, which could provide another dimension of information that scientists have yet to decode.

For his graduate work at the University of Maryland, Fishbein studied zebra finches that had been trained to press a button when they heard a change in sounds played to them. When the birds correctly identified a change, pressing the button got them a food reward. If they guessed wrong, the lights in their enclosure went off briefly. Fishbein tested what differences the birds are actually able to decipher, helping scientists understand what aspects of birdsong are important to the birds.

In one test, Fishbein and his colleagues played the finches’ standard song over and over at regular intervals before slipping in a version of the song with artificially reordered syllables. This change is easy for humans to hear, but the birds were surprisingly bad at identifying the shuffled sequence.

The birds performed much better at another test Fishbein gave them. Within each song syllable, there are higher-frequency details called “temporal fine structure” that may be something like what humans perceive as timbre or tone quality. When the scientists messed with the song’s fine structure by playing one of the syllables backward, the finches were “exceedingly” good at catching it.

“It’s a dimension of sound that they’re much better at hearing than we are,” Fishbein says. “So they may be tapped into this level of the sound that we’re not tapping into when we just casually listen to birdsong.”

Our understanding of what birds hear and what matters to them is limited by what we hear, and as with a lot of scientific research, the statistical analyses used—in this case to parse birdsong, says linguist Juan Uriagereka, who worked with Fishbein at the University of Maryland. “Ten years ago, we didn’t even know what the units that they were combining were,” he says. “And of course, what we think are the units, it’s our guess, right?”

Though male zebra finches all learn the same single song, scientists have found that there is variation in temporal fine structure among renditions of the standard song, hinting that the birds have a much richer communication system than we suspected. “It could be that most of the meaning is packed into the individual elements,” Fishbein says, “and how they’re arranged may not matter as much for conveying meaning.”

To find out what aspect of a zebra finch’s song matters to the birds, scientists tweaked a recorded song to see if the birds would notice. A spectrogram of the natural song is shown on the top row. When the scientists shuffled syllables as shown in the middle row, the birds didn’t react. But when the scientists reversed one of the syllables in the song, as shown in the bottom row, the birds were very good at catching it.

Knowable Magazine | Adapted From A.R. Fishbein et al / Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 2019

Mean what you say

Even if some birds share rudimentary aspects of human language, we still know very little about what’s actually going on in their minds. Most animal communication research has focused on describing signals and behavior, which on the surface can look a lot like human behavior. Determining if the underlying cognitive processes driving the behavior are also similar is much more challenging.

At the heart of this question is intentionality. Are animals merely reacting to their environment, or do they intend to convey information to one another? For example, upon discovering food, a bird may make a characteristic call that attracts other birds to the food. Was the call the equivalent of “Yay! Food!”—unintentionally attracting other birds? Or, was it more like, “Hey guys, come check out the food I found!”?

Signs of intentionality have been shown in many animals. Ground squirrels, Siamese fighting fish, chickens, and even fruit flies change their signals depending on who is around to receive them, an indication that they have some voluntary control over those signals. Other animals seem to intentionally “show” others something, like a dog who looks back and forth between a human and a bag of treats or a hidden toy, perhaps even adding a bark to get the human’s attention first. Ravens also appear to show objects to other ravens by holding them in their beak—usually only if the other bird is paying attention.

Some of the best recent evidence for intentional communication in birds comes from observations of wild Arabian babblers at the Shezaf Nature Reserve in Israel. A team led by ethologist Yitzchak Ben-Mocha recorded adult babblers coaxing fledglings to move to a new shelter. Adults call and wave their wings in front of fledglings and then move toward the shelter. If a youngster doesn’t follow immediately or stops along the way, the adult comes back and does the song and dance again and again until the fledgling complies.

Scientists call such signals first-order intentional communication. Some researchers argue that a more relevant precursor to language like ours is second-order intentional communication. This involves the signaler knowing something about the receiver’s mind, such as the bird who found food knowing another bird was unaware of the food and calling to intentionally inform the ignorant bird. As you may have guessed, this sort of mental attribution is a hard behavior to test.

Other scientists are taking a different tack to try to understand what underlies such communication by comparing the brain structures that enable vocal learning in songbirds and humans.

Arabian babblers show that their communication has meaning and intent in this video where an adult is attempting to coax a juvenile bird to a new shelter by calling and flapping its wings. The adult signals to the juvenile before heading toward the shelter, checks to see if the young bird is following and then doubles back to repeat the signal.

Y. Ben Mocha et al / Royal Society Proceedings B 2019

Deeper connections

Despite humans and birds being only very distantly related—their last common ancestor lived more than 300 million years ago—they have remarkably similar brain circuitry for vocal learning. Nonhuman primates, our closest relatives, lack a specialized circuit for imitating sounds, leading scientists to conclude that this ability did not come from a common ancestor. It must have evolved independently in birds—an example of what is known as evolutionary convergence.

“There is this assumption that species more closely related to us are going to be most like us. And that is true for many traits,” says the Rockefeller’s Jarvis. “But it’s not true for every trait.”

Jarvis studies the evolution of language by looking at the brains of songbirds. Animals that make only innate sounds control the musculature that creates those sounds through a circuit in the brain stem, an area near the spinal cord that regulates automatic functions like breathing and heartbeat. “What has happened is humans and songbirds have evolved this new forebrain circuit for learned sounds that has taken control of the brain stem circuit for innate sounds,” Jarvis says.

His theory for how similar vocal-learning circuits evolved multiple times in distant species is that they were built from an adjacent circuit that controls the learning of some movements. “The spoken-language brain circuit in humans and the song-learning circuit in birds,” Jarvis argues, “evolved by a whole duplication of the surrounding motor pathway.”

How an entire brain circuit could be duplicated is unclear, he says, but it could be similar to how genes sometimes are duplicated and then co-opted for other purposes. However they evolved, vocal-learning birds and humans have these rare analogous brain circuits that enable them to learn and imitate sound. This suggests that behavioral scientists who’ve been trying to learn about human language by studying how distantly related birds such as zebra finches communicate are on to something.

“I think we humans tend to overestimate how different we are,” Jarvis says. Even he has observed zebra finches singing in the lab or a starling singing in a tree and thought that it just seemed so different from what humans do. “And then a year later, we’re making a discovery about the connectivity of the circuit, or the mechanism of how it’s producing the sounds, and it’s so much like humans.”

Do birds have language? It depends on how you define it

Fed Up With Google, Conspiracy Theorists Turn to DuckDuckGo

Sat, 26 Feb 2022 14:40:02 +0000

The embrace by some conservative influencers and conspiracy theorists is part of a broader effort to shift people away from Big Tech.

< Read the "Comments from social media about the search engine DuckDuckGo." at the source page. >

On an episode of Joe Rogan’s popular podcast last year, he turned to a topic that has gripped right-wing communities and other Americans who feel skeptical about the pandemic: search engines.

“If I wanted to find specific cases about people who died from vaccine-related injuries, I had to go to DuckDuckGo,” Mr. Rogan said, referring to the small privacy-focused search engine. “I wasn’t finding them on Google.”

Praise for DuckDuckGo has become a popular refrain during the pandemic among right-wing social media influencers and conspiracy theorists who question Covid-19 vaccines and push discredited coronavirus treatments. Some have posted screenshots showing that DuckDuckGo appears to surface more links favorable to their views than Google does.

In addition to Mr. Rogan, who has recently been at the center of an outcry about misinformation on his podcast, the search engine has received ringing endorsements from some of the world’s most-downloaded conservative podcasters, including Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino.

“Google is actively suppressing search results that don’t acquiesce to traditional viewpoints of the left,” Mr. Shapiro claimed last March. “I recommend you install DuckDuckGo on your computer, rather than Google, to combat all this.”

The endorsements underscore how right-wing Americans and conspiracy theorists are shifting their online activity in response to greater moderation from tech giants like Google. They have increasingly embraced fledgling and sometimes fringe platforms like the chat app Telegram, the video streamer Rumble and even search engines like DuckDuckGo, seeking conditions that seem more favorable to their conspiracy theories and falsehoods.

That attention has put search engines in a difficult position, fielding queries from a growing set of Americans who seem increasingly gripped by conspiracy theories. They must now try to deliver relevant results for obscure search terms and avoid surfacing possible misinformation, all while steering clear of censorship claims.

DuckDuckGo, which has about 3 percent of the United States search market, holds little direct control over the links in its search results because they are generated by the search engine algorithm provided by Bing, which Microsoft owns. And all search engine algorithms are considered black boxes because the companies that create them do not completely disclose what informs their decisions.

In a statement, DuckDuckGo said it condemned “acts of disinformation” and said the company’s internal surveys showed that its users had a wide mix of political orientations. The company said it was also studying ways to limit the spread of false and misleading information.

For a glimpse at what conspiracy theorists encounter when they search online, The New York Times reviewed the top 20 search results on Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo for more than 30 conspiracy theories and right-wing topics. Search results can change over time and vary among users, but the comparisons provide a snapshot of what a single user might have seen on a typical day in mid-February.

For many terms, Bing and DuckDuckGo surfaced more untrustworthy websites than Google did, when results were compared with website ratings from the Global Disinformation Index, NewsGuard and research published in the journal Science. (While DuckDuckGo relies on Bing’s algorithm, their search results can differ.)

Search results on Google also included some untrustworthy websites, but they tended to be less common and lower on the search page.

The Times then reviewed a selection of those terms to check whether the content on the linked pages advanced the conspiracy theory or not. Those comparisons often showed even sharper differences between Google and its competitors.

Those findings matched results from two recent studies, which concluded that Bing’s algorithm surfaced content more supportive of conspiracy theories than Google did.

Differences among search engines in The Times’s analysis were clearest when the terms were specific. For instance, searching for “Satanist Democrats,” a theory that Democrats worship Satan or perform satanic rituals, surfaced several links advancing the conspiracy theory. But searching for more established claims, like the “QAnon” movement or terms unrelated to conspiracies, surfaced more trustworthy results from all search engines.

Explore some of the searches using the drop-down below.

The role of search engines has grown as online conspiracy theorists have placed more value on what they call “doing your research,” which involves digging for content online to deepen conspiracy theories rather than relying on mainstream news outlets or government sources.

“Research, research, research,” a Telegram user wrote in a channel devoted to fighting vaccine mandates. “Stay AWAY from Google searches, only use DuckDuckGo.”

When people hunt for new information online, they tend to hold those findings in higher regard, said Ronald E. Robertson, a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford Internet Observatory who has studied search engines.

“It’s a lot more convincing to look up information, find it and feel that sense of discovery about it,” he said. “You don’t really feel like someone’s telling you what the truth is, like you might on social media.”

DuckDuckGo said it “regularly” flagged problematic search terms with Bing so they could be addressed. After The Times shared some data on search results for numerous terms spread by conspiracy theorists, several of the search results changed entirely, shifting to favor more trustworthy sources.

“Finding the right balance between delivering authoritative results that match the intent of a search query and protecting users from being misled is a very challenging problem,” Bing said in a statement, adding: “We won’t always get that balance just right, but that’s our goal.”

Kamyl Bazbaz, the vice president of communications for DuckDuckGo, said that its results were often similar to Google’s and that most search terms reviewed by The Times received nearly no traffic.

While Google tended to surface links from trustworthy news sources more often, Mr. Bazbaz said adding a few more keywords to any given search usually surfaced the misleading information on Google anyway.

“If you’re looking for this stuff, no matter where you’re searching for it, you can find it,” he said.

Other research has also found that Bing’s algorithm surfaces less trustworthy information than Google does when searching for conspiracy theories. One study last year showed that slightly fewer than half of all results on Bing and DuckDuckGo for six popular conspiracy theories mentioned or promoted the ideas. Google fared better, with about a quarter of links mentioning the ideas but nearly none supporting them. Yahoo fared worse than Bing and DuckDuckGo, and the Russian search engine Yandex fared worst among the group.

Newer and more esoteric conspiracy theories are far more likely to return misleading results because of the so-called data void. Conspiracy theorists tend to publish content about new ideas long before mainstream sources, dominating search results as the terms begin spreading online. Other topics never grab the attention of mainstream sources, giving the conspiracy theorists a long-term presence in search results.

Search engines have long been criticized for failing to address data voids. That criticism increased during the 2016 presidential election, when the spread of misleading and false news stories caused growing alarm among misinformation watchdogs. Around the same time, Google users noticed that a search for “did the Holocaust happen” surfaced a white supremacist website as its top result. Google tweaked its algorithm in response, now weighing a website’s reliability to a greater extent, alongside the content’s relevance to the search term.

Since 2021, Google has also automatically added warning boxes stating that “results are changing quickly” for terms that gain sudden popularity.

That warning appeared after Dr. Robert Malone, an infectious-disease researcher, appeared on “The Joe Rogan Experience” late last year. In that interview, Dr. Malone raised the discredited idea of mass formation psychosis, which describes a kind of groupthink mentality that supposedly persuaded the public to support pandemic countermeasures.

After a guest on Joe Rogan’s podcast referred to mass formation psychosis, Google added a warning about search results for that term.

Credit...Louis Grasse/Icon Sportswire, via Getty Images

After the show, interest in the search term exploded, and the warning label appeared on Google’s results. Dr. Malone’s fans quickly claimed Google had targeted the term and removed links or edited the search results.

In a statement, Google said, “There is no merit to the suggestion that search results were manually edited.” But the company added that its algorithm would automatically adjust itself in some cases, shifting to rank trustworthy links higher than more relevant ones.

To combat data voids, search engines have also peppered their search results with information boxes surfacing more trustworthy information, like news carousels showing articles from trusted media sources higher in the search results. DuckDuckGo said it was working with researchers at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy to study how to mitigate disinformation through information boxes and “instant answers,” which the company already uses to augment results from Bing’s search algorithm.

Daniel Bush, a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford Internet Observatory, warned that the automated nature of search engines meant that conspiracy theorists would continue to prey on data voids to promote misleading information online.

“The data void is the key problem at the core of this technology, and there’s no algorithm that can fix it,” said Mr. Bush, who analyzed search results in 2019 and showed misinformation was more prevalent on Bing than on Google. “The more automated things become, the more vulnerable we are.”

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Webb Telescope reaches major milestone: All its light is in one place

Sat, 26 Feb 2022 03:40:20 +0000

A single dot means we're nearly halfway through focusing the telescope.

NASA/STSci

Today, NASA shared an image indicating that it had successfully completed the image alignment stage of commissioning the James Webb Space Telescope. The Webb's primary mirror is composed of 18 individual segments, and, as of today's update, all of those segments are aligned so that a single star shows up as a single object. While there are still several more focusing steps required, the path to commissioning the telescope keeps getting shorter.

Immediately after launch, the focus was on unfolding all the pieces of the telescope that had to be held in a compact configuration to fit inside the launch vehicle. This process included reorienting and extending the primary mirror, lowering the secondary mirror into place, and stretching out the multi-layered sunscreen that helps keep the imaging hardware cold.

To the surprise and delight of many people, that all went incredibly smoothly. Since then, the focus has shifted to... well, focus. The Webb's primary mirror consists of 18 separate mirrors in a hexagonal array, each of which can be controlled separately. Initially, when the mirror was first unfolded, these produced 18 individual smears scattered across the secondary mirror.

Earlier this month, however, tweaks to the mirrors created a hexagonal array of smears that replicated the arrangement of the primary mirror segments. Today's announcement saw the segments shifted so that each of the smears was partly focused and moved to the center of the secondary mirror. The result? The star that's being imaged for this process is now a single dot at the center of the telescope's field of view.

NASA isn't done just yet, however. Although all the images are in the same place, they're simply superimposed there. The ultimate goal is to have the segments behave as a single mirror, which requires more careful focusing. To do so, engineers will image the spectra of the light, looking for slight shifts of the image locations at different wavelengths. From that, it's possible to figure out which way the mirrors must be shifted to fine-tune the mirror segments.

Webb Telescope reaches major milestone: All its light is in one place

Air Pollution May Keep Insects From Stopping to Smell the Flowers

Fri, 25 Feb 2022 20:08:22 +0000

Researchers ran an outdoor experiment to see if diesel exhaust and ozone would interfere with pollinators’ search for floral scents.

In a field of winter wheat, researchers at the University of Reading's Sonning farm in the UK had planted an unusual fumigation system: eight 8-meter octagons surrounding clusters of black mustard plants. Each eight-sided “ring” would pump out either ozone, diesel exhaust, a combination of the two, or nothing. The researchers' goal was to test whether these common air pollutants would have an effect on the insects attracted to the mustard plants’ flowers.

Nearby, field researchers trained in pollinator observation stood as still as possible, diligently recording the number of visiting insects. The results of this study, published in January in the journal Environmental Pollution, found that those figures were dramatically lower in the rings emitting contaminants, compared to the control ring, which didn’t expel any.

The researchers did two separate counts. The first one counted the overall number of any kind of pollinator that flew into the rings and landed on at least one flower. Compared to the control ring, the number of visitors declined by 69 percent for diesel alone, 62 percent for ozone alone, and by 70 percent for a combination of both. The second metric counted visits by four distinct species—bees, moths, butterflies, and hoverflies—and took into account how many flowers each individual insect landed on. Compared to the control, the number of flower landings decreased by 89 percent for diesel, 83 percent for ozone, and 90 percent for both.

“Our results suggest that air pollution is another potential stressor to add to the growing pressures on pollinators”—a list that already includes disease, habitat loss, and pesticides, says lead author James Ryalls, a research fellow studying the chemical ecology of plant-insect interactions. This is not only bad news for the pollinators, who might not be able to forage effectively amidst air pollution, it’s bad news for plants that depend on insects to propagate. It looks pretty bad for humans too: If insects can’t pollinate crops, then it’s possible we may lose essential products in the food supply.

The reason for the drop-off in insect visitors, the researchers think, has to do with the pollutants interfering with the scent of the flowers. Previous laboratory and modeling studies conducted by members of Ryalls’ team and others demonstrated that both diesel exhaust and ozone pollution can interact with, and break down, odor molecules released by flowers.

Insects, including bees and butterflies, smell using their antennae, which are covered in olfactory receptors that detect odor compounds. Their sense of smell is keen—much more sensitive than that of humans. When a flower releases chemical compounds in a plume, or a chemical column, insects use that as a map to find it. If one or more of the odor compounds are altered by reacting with diesel or ozone, then the ratio and concentration of compounds in the plume changes. The map becomes distorted, and the insect no longer associates that plume with the flower.

Photograph: Kevin White/SAGES UAV/University of Reading

So-called “good ozone” high in the atmosphere shields us from ultraviolet rays, but ground-level ozone is different. It’s a pollutant emitted by cars, power plants, and refineries. Ground-level ozone is regulated in the US by the Environmental Protection Agency; it can cause deleterious human health effects like heart and respiratory problems, and pollination disruption is one of the factors the agency considers when setting standards for safe levels. A 2020 EPA report cites one laboratory experiment in which, in the presence of elevated ozone, bumblebees were less able to orient themselves toward floral scent cues. “The collective evidence supports ‘a likely to be causal relationship’ between ozone exposure and alteration of plant-insect signaling,” the report concludes.

Seventy parts per billion is considered a safe concentration of ozone, and 53 ppb is considered safe for nitrogen dioxide, per EPA standards. Within Ryalls’ experimental rings, the concentration of ozone was approximately 35 ppb, and the concentration of nitrogen dioxide, a component of diesel exhaust, was approximately 21 ppb. The levels used in the experiment are equal to about half the concentration of ozone and diesel exhaust next to one of London’s busiest roads, according to Ryalls. “Moderate levels of common air pollutants can reduce the rates at which free-living insects find and pollinate flowers,” he says of his study’s conclusions. “The reductions we observed under field conditions were more severe than we anticipated from previous laboratory studies and modeling.”

Although some crops are wind-pollinated, others depend entirely on insects. “If we were to lose all pollinating insects tomorrow, we would no longer be able to produce cocoa beans, Brazil nuts, and some fruits, for which pollination is essential for reproduction,” says Ryalls—these include apples, cranberries, and melons. Crops like blueberries, cherries, and almonds are almost entirely dependent on honey bees for pollination.

“There could also be wider ramifications,” he continues. “For example, pheromones are airborne odors produced by one insect to attract a mate of the same species, and, if pheromone communication is disrupted in a similar way, it could result in insects struggling to find mates, which could have ramifications for insect biodiversity.” In fact, a PhD project at the University of Reading is currently exploring how air pollution affects insect pheromones.

“The impact of diesel exhaust and ozone on insect pollinators and the overall service of pollination is poorly understood,” says Jaret Daniels, an associate professor of insect conservation and curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History, who was not involved with the study. But, he adds, it’s reasonable to surmise that pollution of all kinds—whether it’s from light, noise, or chemicals—affects pollinators in some ways.

Disrupting pollination, a “keystone service” for ecosystems and agriculture, with fossil-fuel-related emissions has the potential to affect climate resilience and food security in the future, according to Daniels. Studies like this are “particularly critical with a growing global population, and particularly important for a growing urban environment where pollution may be particularly elevated,” he says.

Mark Carroll, a research entomologist at the USDA’s Carl Hayden Bee Research Center, agrees that this study adds to the body of literature on air pollution and pollinators, but he says the bigger picture needs to be better understood. For example, he wonders whether the insects were indeed thwarted because they couldn’t properly smell the flowers. Instead, he suggests, maybe they were simply repelled by the pollution because it smelled bad to them.

Ryalls says their experiment controlled for this possibility by placing bright-yellow pan traps within each ring. (Pollinators are especially attracted to the color yellow.) Pan traps, which are used to reduce insect populations, usually contain either a sticky substance or drowning liquid, such as water or oil. In this case, the researchers used them to measure how many insects flew into each ring in the absence of floral cues. They found roughly the same number of captured pollinators in traps in each, leading them to conclude that the pollutants do not seem to affect general pollinator activity within each area or their physiological ability to fly into the ring. In other words, the rings and their pollutants didn’t seem to scare the insects away altogether—it just reduced their odds of actually alighting on flowers.

The Sonning farm experimental design essentially simulated a field next to a busy roadway, and Daniels and Carroll both say it would be good for future studies to try replicating these findings in different kinds of locations. “How this plays out when pollutants are constantly present on a widespread scale, such as in a smog-filled valley, should be of considerable interest,” Carroll says.

Ryalls says his team plans to do wider-scale tests, as well as “laboratory studies to pinpoint specific mechanisms of why some species or groups of insects are more affected than others.” But so far, he says, his work is already another data point showing the hazards of industrial emissions. “The negative effects of air pollutants on pollinators, even at relatively low levels, simply adds to the plethora of reasons why we should be transitioning away from fossil fuel consumption as fast as possible,” he says.

Air Pollution May Keep Insects From Stopping to Smell the Flowers

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Australia's Standoff Against Google and Facebook Worked—Sort Of

Fri, 25 Feb 2022 20:06:18 +0000

A year after Australia forced tech giants to pay news outlets for the content they display, other countries want to follow suit.

Over Zoom, Australia’s communications minister, Paul Fletcher, has the air of a man in the middle of a victory speech. He credits his team and the country’s competition regulator for succeeding where others had failed: forcing tech giants to pay for news. “There were a lot of people saying you can't really succeed in taking on the global digital giants,” he says, sitting beneath strip lighting in his Sydney constituency office. But Fletcher and Australia’s federal treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, persevered. In 2020, when the Australian government asked the competition regulator to develop a law that would force tech giants to pay for the news that appears on their feeds, Fletcher was aware of the stories others used as warnings. When Germany’s biggest news publisher, Axel Springer, tried to block Google from running snippets of its articles in 2014, it backtracked after just two weeks once traffic plunged. When Spain tried to force Google to pay for news in 2014, the search giant just left—blocking Google News in the country for seven years.

Google threatened Australia with even more drastic action. In January 2021, the tech giant suggested Australians could lose access to its entire search engine if Fletcher and Frydenberg’s “news media bargaining code,” which would force platforms to pay news publishers for links, came into force. Facebook also lobbied hard against the code, arguing that news makes up less than 4 percent of the content people see in their news feed. On February 17, Australians woke up to discover that all news links had been wiped off the platform, leaving the Facebook pages of the country’s biggest media companies completely blank. Traffic to news websites sank 13 percent, illustrating exactly what the government said it was worried about. Facebook’s actions “confirm for all Australians [the] immense market power of these media digital giants,” Frydenberg said at the time.

Still, the government did not back down. According to Fletcher, the code was Australia’s answer to a problem that was first and foremost about competition. The argument was simple—Australia’s news industry should be compensated for helping Google and Facebook attract eyeballs. “What we're trying to do is replicate the ordinary commercial dealings that would occur in a market where there wasn't a huge imbalance of bargaining power,” he says.

But others suspect the code was really an attempt to subsidize the media industry, which was suffering from intense online competition for advertising. Out of every 100 Australian dollars spent on advertising in 2019, AD$53 ($38) went to Google, AD$28 to Facebook, and AD$19 to all other websites including media outlets, according to Australia’s competition watchdog. If this was the reason for the code, Bloomberg editors described it as a misdiagnosis in an op-ed. “Journalism’s business model wasn’t broken by digital platforms,” they said, “[the internet] offered consumers a wealth of free news and opinion and gave advertisers options and audiences that traditional publishers haven’t been able to match.”

Australians experienced this standoff through their Facebook feeds. For eight days, the site featured no news. Then, at 1 am on February 26, 2021, news content started to reappear, reversing users’ feeds to how they always looked. But behind the scenes, tech’s relationship with the media had permanently shifted.

Google and Facebook did not leave; they paid up, striking deals with news organizations to pay for the content they display on their sites for the first time. The code was formally approved on March 2, 2021, writing into law that tech platforms had to negotiate a price to pay news publishers for their content. If they didn’t, an arbiter would step in not only to force the platforms to pay but also to set the price. One year after the media code was introduced, Google has 19 content deals with news organizations and Facebook has 11, according to Fletcher.

Now countries around the world are looking at Australia’s code as a blueprint of how to subsidize the news and stop the spread of “news deserts”—communities that no longer have a local newspaper. Canada is expected to propose its own version in March. Media associations in both the US and New Zealand are calling for similar policies. Reports suggest the UK culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, is also planning to require platforms to strike cash-for-content deals.

The international interest has prompted fierce debate about how well Australia’s code works.

“We know it works, we can see the evidence,” says Fletcher. He points to how the deals are funding journalism in rural areas. Broadcaster The ABC said its deals with Facebook and Google enabled it to hire 50 regional journalists. Google, however, disagrees. It has accused the media code of stifling media diversity by giving media giants a better deal than smaller publishers. “The primary benefactors of such a code would be a small number of incumbent media providers,” Google said in a submission to the US Copyright Office, which is currently reviewing its own media laws.

Australia might have created the blueprint for forcing Big Tech to pay for news, but it hasn’t actually applied it. Only tech companies that are named, or “designated,” under the code by Australia’s treasurer can be forced into the arbitration process with news organizations. But no tech site has ever been designated. Instead, Google and Facebook have been rushing to strike deals with news organizations in private, to avoid the arbitration process, which could end up being more costly. For now, the law functions more like a “loaded gun” to force these companies to make a deal, says Bernard Keane, politics editor at news website Crikey. “I wouldn't call it a threat,” says Fletcher. “What I call it is a mechanism to very strongly encourage commercial negotiation.”

Allowing Google and Facebook to strike these deals behind closed doors means their terms are opaque. The deals are structured as if media outlets are being paid for contributions to products such as Google News Showcase or Facebook's News tab. “The reality is no one's really using those products,” says a source who negotiated on behalf of an Australian publisher, but asked not be named. “They're a mechanism to enable these payments to happen in such a way that doesn't fundamentally affect their business model or create a precedent that applies to other parts of the world.”

The source added these deals can cover around 50 percent of total editorial costs. But there is huge variety in how much outlets are being paid. The Conversation, an outlet publishing academic articles, says its Google deal pays for “one or maybe two” journalist salaries. When WIRED asked News Corp how much its deals were worth, the company pointed to remarks made by CEO Robert Thomson in November that said its tech platform deals contribute more than $100 million in annual revenue.

The criticism of Australia’s system focuses on its lack of transparency, which means that media companies cannot compare notes on the deals they are offered and there is a lack of clarity on which outlets are entitled to negotiate.

Misha Ketchell, editor at The Conversation Media Group, says he’s happy with the deal he struck with Google. But when the outlet approached Facebook for a deal, the platform refused to negotiate, even though The Conversation says it fits the criteria set out in the code. “I think Facebook made a decision about the minimum number of deals they could do to stop the government from designating them under the code,” he says. The Conversation is yet to try collective bargaining, he adds, which gives smaller outlets the option to band together and provides more negotiating weight with the platforms.

The Conversation is not the only publisher that tech companies have rejected. While public broadcaster ABC has deals with Google and Facebook, another publicly funded broadcaster, SBS, does not. Google’s accusation that the code favors incumbent media businesses is being used against it by critics who say Google and Facebook are giving those same media organizations preferential treatment in the deals they are handing out. “There's no reason why the code as it currently works in Australia can't benefit all media companies,” says James Chessell, managing director of publishing at Nine, one of Australia's biggest media groups. “I think it's up to the platforms, though, to ensure that that happens.”

Concerns about the code’s flaws are leaking into Canada, where Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party is drafting its own Australia-style legislation. “We're locking down the incumbent publishers, and we're locking down Google and Facebook's dominance as opposed to countering the dominance that exists on both sides,” says Dwayne Winseck, journalism professor at Canada’s Carleton University. He also believes Australia’s code is unambitious compared to the scale of the problems facing the news industry. In Canada, revenue fell by more than CA$3 billion between 2011 and 2020, according to News Media Canada, an association that represents more than 500 Canadian publishers.

Yet Canada’s news industry is willing to overlook these limitations because it considers the cash as a lifeline, according to Paul Deegan, president and chief executive of News Media Canada. “What we keep saying to every politician we meet is that given the economic circumstance we're facing, we have a great need for speed,” he says. They are running out of time to save some of the media landscape, he explains—40 newspapers have closed permanently since the start of the pandemic. “We've got a number of titles and even chains of titles that are quite literally teetering on the brink.”

Deegan agrees the code isn’t perfect. This is not a magic bullet, he says, “this is a badly needed Band-Aid.”

Peter Grant, a retired lawyer who drafted a memorandum on behalf of News Media Canada about how to make Australian’s code work in Canada, suggests only minor changes to the template would be necessary. He, too, believes this is not the one-stop solution that will save journalism. “It's not the be all and end all,” he says. “It’s one major component of a general strategy to support journalism.”

Maybe it was only ever possible for a country like Australia—where ex-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull described News Corp as the country’s “most powerful political actor''—to have acted as the world’s guinea pig in the effort to redirect tech profits to the media.

But even critics of the code suggest it could be a useful starting point. Emily Bell, director of Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, says she is concerned by the code’s lack of transparency, but concedes that Facebook and Google have paid more to publishers in Australia than they do under their philanthropic donations elsewhere. “What we do know is that some legislation is better than none.”

Australia's Standoff Against Google and Facebook Worked—Sort Of

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This 5,300-year-old skull shows evidence of the earliest known ear surgery

Fri, 25 Feb 2022 02:13:03 +0000

Archaeologists also found a flint blade that may have been used as a cauterizing tool.

Lateral view of a skull found at the El Pendón site in Spain, showing signs of a primitive form of ear surgery.

ÑFotógrafos Photography Study

Archaeologists have excavated a 5,300-year-old skull from a Spanish tomb and determined that seven cut marks near the left ear canal are strong evidence of a primitive surgical procedure to treat an inner ear infection. That makes this the earliest known example of ear surgery yet found, according to the authors of a recent paper published in the journal Scientific Reports. The Spanish team also identified a flint blade that may have been used as a cauterizing tool.

The excavation site is located in the Dolmen of El Pendón in Burgos, Spain, and consists of the remains of a megalithic monument dating back to the 4th century BCE, i.e., the late Neolithic period. The ruins include an ossuary holding the bones of nearly 100 people, and archaeologists have been excavating those remains since 2016.

In July 2018, the team recovered the skull that is the subject of this latest study. The skull was lying on its right side, facing the entrance of the burial chamber, and while most of the cranium was intact, no teeth remained. The missing teeth, plus the loss in bone density and fully ossified thyroid cartilage, indicated that this was the skull of an elderly woman aged 65 or older.

The skull was excavated at the El Pendón site in Reinoso, Burgos, Spain in 2018.

S. Diaz-Navarro et al., 2022

Evidence of perforations were found on both sides of the skull near the mastoid bones (located just behind the ear). The authors suggested that these perforations were the result of two surgical interventions, one on each ear, by someone with rudimentary anatomical knowledge. There was more bone remodeling on the right ear, indicting that the first surgery was performed to treat what was likely a life-threatening condition, given the risks associated with such a procedure during this period.

The woman survived the first procedure and endured a second surgery on the left ear sometime after. The authors were unable to determine whether the procedures were done back-to-back or whether months or even years passed between them. Regardless, "It is thus the earliest documented evidence of a surgery on both temporal bones and therefore, most likely, the first known radical mastoidectomy in the history of humankind," they wrote.

This was a fairly common surgical procedure to treat acute ear infections by the 17th century, per the authors, and skulls showing evidence of a mastoidectomy have been found in Croatia (11th century), Italy (18th and 19th centuries), and Copenhagen (19th or early 20th century). Perhaps the oldest type of skull surgery is cranial trepanation—the drilling of a hole in the head—which has been well-documented along the Iberian Peninsula. Five skulls recovered from a site close to the Dolmen of El Pendón showed evidence of trepanation, and the individuals apparently survived those procedures, despite the lack of antibiotics and a high risk of complications.

Set of cut marks identified on the left temporal bone of the skull. Insets: enlarged images of the cut marks in the left ear, next to the mastoid.

S. Diaz-Navarro et al., 2022

What condition might have prompted such an intervention? The authors ruled out a cholesteatoma—an injury to the temporal bone that can cause hearing loss, vertigo, and other complications—even though this is one of the most well-documented diseases in pathological studies of ancient skulls. But cholesteatoma tends to erode the bony wall (scutum) separating the ear canal from the mastoid, and the scutum was intact on both sides of the woman's skull. The authors also ruled out a bone tumor or malignant external otitis (a fast-spreading infection of the ear canal and temporal bone).

The authors concluded that the most likely condition was acute otitis media, aka an inner ear infection, which had spread to the underlying bone, specifically the mastoid bone (mastoiditis). The condition would have been easy enough to diagnose, since the infection causes visible swelling and redness as fluid and mucus build up inside the ear. If an inner ear infection spread to the mastoid bone, the bone's honeycomb-like structure would have also filled with fluid and mucus. Untreated, this would have led to hearing loss and possibly meningitis. Mastoiditis resulting from an inner ear infection was one of the leading causes of death in children prior to the wide availability of antibiotics (and it is mercifully a rare condition today).

A modern mastoidectomy involves removing the cells in the mastoid bone's hollow air-filled spaces. In a radical mastoidectomy, the surgeon will first make a cut behind the ear and then use a bone drill to open access to the middle ear cavity. Then the surgeon will remove any infected mastoid bone or tissue, stitch up the cut, and bandage the wound. Per the authors, their late Neolithic ear surgeon would have followed a similar (albeit much cruder) procedure, removing the affected bone to drain the middle ear and then connecting the mastoid bone with the tympanic cavity surrounding the bone of the inner ear.

Selection of flint lithic tools from the El Pendón ossuary: blades, geometric microliths, and arrowheads.

S. Diaz-Navarro et al., 2022

The procedure would not have been pleasant. "The intervention itself would have consisted of a progressive circular and abrasive drilling causing unbearable pain under normal conditions," the authors wrote. "Thus, in order to carry out this surgery, the affected individual had to be either strongly restrained by other community members, or previously administered some psychotropic substance with the purpose of relieving pain or losing consciousness." Certain plants common to the region during that period had natural analgesic and antibiotic properties, and evidence of opium use was previously found in two skeletons excavated from a site in Barcelona.

Although cut marks were clearly visible on the skull's left ear, the authors couldn't decisively identify what type of tool was used to remove the bone tissue. They only posited that it was likely "a sharp instrument with a circular movement." (There were no visible cut marks on the right ear due to bone remodeling.) The archaeologists recovered a set of stone tools from the site and conducted trace analyses on them.

The researchers identified one flint blade, about 31 mm long and 7 mm wide, that was likely used for butchering, since it had come into contact with bone material. The blade also showed signs of being subjected to heating (without exceeding 300-350° C). The authors suggested that the flint blade may have been used as a cauterizing tool for the healing part of the procedure. They cited prior studies demonstrating the use of stone tools heated with fire to cauterize wounds and perform trepanations in primitive villages in the Canary Islands.

DOI: Scientific Reports, 2022. 10.1038/s41598-022-06223-6 (About DOIs).

This 5,300-year-old skull shows evidence of the earliest known ear surgery

New fast radio burst found in area that shouldn’t have any sources

Fri, 25 Feb 2022 02:09:25 +0000

Source narrowed down to a cluster where the stars are too old for bursts.

Artist's conception of a high-energy burst coming off the surface of a magnetar.

Goddard Space Flight Center

Fast radio bursts were an enigma when they were first spotted. At first, each FRB followed the same pattern: a huge surge of energy in radio wavelengths that lasted less than a second—and then the burst was gone, never to repeat. We initially suspected FRBs might be hardware glitches in our detectors, but over time, the bursts' recurrence convinced us that they were real.

Since then, we've identified sources of repeated bursts and associated the FRBs with a source that produces energy outside the radio range. This ultimately helped us point the finger at a single source: magnetars, or neutron stars that have extremely intense magnetic fields.

Now, reality has gone and thrown a monkey wrench in that nice and simple explanation. A new repeating source of FRBs has been identified, and it resides in a location where we wouldn't expect to find any magnetars. This doesn't mean that the source isn't from a magnetar, but we have to resort to some unusual explanations for its formation.

Spinning neutrons

A magnetar is a form of neutron star, which is what's left after the collapse of a star that is massive enough to generate a supernova but not massive enough to form a black hole. As that remnant is compressed into a soup of neutrons, the matter of a neutron star shrinks until it's only about 20 kilometers across. That compact object inherits all the rotational energy of its parent star, causing it to spin at a rapid rate, often furthered by the addition of matter falling in from its environment.

In many cases, this rapid rotation results in pulsars, neutron stars that have sources of radiation that appear to blink rapidly in time with the star's rotation. In some others, the neutron star ends up with an intense magnetic field, making it a magnetar. A magnetar's intense magnetic field lines are whipped around by its rotation, often creating high-energy interactions with its environment.

But these high-energy phenomena don't tend to last long, at least in astronomical terms. All of these energetic interactions with the environment cause the neutron star to shed energy, slowing its rotation and reducing the intensity of any light it produces. For example, magnetars are thought to typically have life spans on the order of only 10,000 years before fading into a quieter existence.

In addition, the supernova that form magnetars occur in relatively young stars, typically only a few million years old.

This combination—an early stellar death and a short magnetar life span—means we only expect to see magnetars in areas with an abundance of young stars. Older star populations should have seen magnetars form and fade out billions of years earlier.

Where was that from?

The new work, done by a large international team, involved following up on the discovery of another repeating FRB source, called FRB 20200120E. To identify where FRB 20200120E was located, the team turned to the resolving power of the European Very Long Baseline Interferometry Network, which can use as many as 22 telescopes scattered throughout the world. The team managed to get enough of those telescopes pointed at the repeating source to image five individual FRBs.

The way reconstructing data from these different telescopes work, a single burst will not get us a precise location. Instead, a range of possible locations can be identified. By combining the locations that are consistent with each of these bursts, the researchers were able to provide a likely location for the FRB source.

That source turned out to be a globular cluster of stars in the nearby galaxy M81. Based on the remaining uncertainty regarding the location of FRB 20200120E and the frequency of globular clusters within M81, the research team estimates that the chances of FRB 20200120E not being in this globular cluster is only about 1 in 10,000.

Searching that location did not reveal a persistent source of radio signals. No high-energy sources, based on searches using X-ray and gamma-ray telescopes, turned up either. So, there's not an obvious high-energy object there.

What’s old is new again?

This location is odd. Globular clusters are most notable for consisting of populations of old stars. There are unlikely to have been any neutron-star-forming supernovae in them for billions of years. So that should probably rule the presence of a magnetar out, right?

Not entirely. A handful of mechanisms could produce a magnetar either without a supernova or long after one took place. These mechanisms mostly rely on a nearby companion star. If the companion is a normal star, it can feed matter into a white dwarf star until the dwarf collapses into a neutron star. Or various combinations of white dwarfs and neutron stars can merge, also producing a neutron star. Finally, we know that a normal companion can "spin up" a previously quiet neutron star by feeding it matter.

Any of these processes could potentially produce a magnetar within a population of old stars. Which process—if any of them—has actually taken place at FRB 20200120E may be difficult to sort out, given the apparent absence of any nonburst activity from the site.

In any case, the finding suggests that, should magnetars be the source of all FRBs, then we might expect to see them in a much broader range of environments than would have been predicted prior to this discovery. And we might not want to rule out consideration of nonmagnetar sources just yet.

Nature, 2022. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-04354-w (About DOIs).

New fast radio burst found in area that shouldn’t have any sources

X-rays help unlock secrets of King Tut’s iron dagger, made from a meteorite

Thu, 24 Feb 2022 00:12:49 +0000

It was forged at low temperatures and may have been a wedding gift to Tut's father.

The burial mask of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen recovered from the boy king's tomb.

Hannes Magerstaedt/Getty Images

Among the many items recovered from King Tut's tomb was a dagger made of iron, which is a material that was rarely used during Egypt's 18th dynasty. That iron likely came from a meteorite, and a recent paper published in the journal Meteorites and Planetary Science sheds further light on precisely how that iron dagger was forged, as well as how it came into Tut's possession.

Tutankhamen was the son of Akhenaten and ascended to the throne when he was just 8 or 9 years old. He wasn't considered an especially important pharaoh in the grand scheme of things, but the treasures that were recovered from his tomb in the 1920s are what led to his fame. Those treasures included the famous gold burial mask (pictured above), a solid gold coffin, thrones, archery bows, trumpets, a lotus chalice, and various pieces of furniture.

These became part of a global touring exhibition, which received worldwide press coverage during the 1960s and 1970s in particular. The mummy even inspired a couple of songs: Steve Martin's hit "King Tut" (which debuted on Saturday Night Live in 1978) and the lesser-known "Dead Egyptian Blues," by the late folk rock singer Michael Peter Smith (which contains the immortal line, "Your sarcophagus is glowing, but your esophagus is showing").

Photograph of Tutankhamen's iron dagger taken at the time of discovery.

Harry Burton

CT scans of Tut's mummified remains in 2005 revealed that the young king had a deformed left foot and likely used a cane (several canes were found in the tomb). He also had a partially cleft hard palate and perhaps a mild case of scoliosis. The Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities and National Geographic commissioned a facial reconstruction of the boy king, which was ultimately cast in silicone. How he died remains a mystery: malarial infection, a nasty fall, and sickle cell anemia have all been proposed as possible cause of death. (Murder by blunt force trauma to the head was ruled out by the CT scan.)

Among the more than 5,000 artifacts recovered from Tut's tomb were 19 objects made of iron, including the dagger with its golden hilt, a miniature headrest, an amulet, and a set of blades that may have been used for the "opening of the mouth" ceremony (performed so that the deceased could eat and drink in the afterlife).

There were also metallic beads and other precious stones strung across the mummy's waist and neck. Scientists analyzed one of the beads in 2013 and found that its microstructure and composition were very similar to that of an iron meteorite. The iron was likely worked into small thin sheets before being fashioned into beads. Archaeologists believe the use of iron was a means of indicating high status during this period in Egypt.

As for the dagger, its high nickel content led scientists to believe the iron for its blade likely came from a meteorite. This was confirmed in 2016, when the blade was subjected to X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (a nondestructive testing method) to analyze its composition. The blade turns out to be mostly iron, with 11 percent nickel and 0.6 percent cobalt—a composition that is indeed comparable to that of iron meteorites. By contrast, the nickel content of artifacts made from terrestrial iron ore is never higher than 4 percent.

The iron dagger of King Tutankhamen with its gold sheath. The full length of the dagger is 13.5 inches (34.2 cm).

D. Comelli et al., 2016

However, that 2016 study didn't address the type of meteorite that supplied the iron or how the dagger might have been made. There is no archaeological evidence of iron smelting in Egypt until the 6th century BCE, and the earliest known example of Egyptian use of metallic iron dates to around 3400 BCE—before Egypt became a single state ruled by a pharaoh around 3000 BC. Options for the dagger's manufacture include cold working, which involves cutting and polishing an iron meteorite; hot working, in which the iron is melted at high temperature and subsequently cast; or low-temperature heating and subsequent forging.

The dagger's origin is also an open question. Unlike the other iron artifacts found in Tut's tomb, which were crudely fashioned, the dagger had been expertly made. There is written evidence of a foreign origin in diplomatic correspondence written in Akkadian from the Egyptian royal archives known as the Amarna letters (in the form of tablets). The letters mention a list of gifts sent to Amenhotep III by the king of Mitanni on the occasional of the former's marriage to a princess of Mitanni. The list includes a dagger with a blade of iron and a gold hilt with inlays of lapis lazuli.

Nickel, sulfur, and chlorine elemental distribution maps of one side of King Tut's dagger, analyzed with portable XRF spectroscopy.

T. Matsui, 2022

It's those questions that co-author Takafumi Matsui and his colleagues at the Chiba Institute of Technology in Japan hoped to answer, with the help of the Grand Egyptian Museum's conservation center. They visited the Cairo Museum in February 2020.

Matsui et al. took a high-resolution optical image of the dagger. They also used a portable scanning X-ray fluorescence instrument to measure the elemental abundances of the dagger, the gold hilt, and the gold sheath, as well as surveying how the elements were distributed across the blade. This revealed concentrations of iron, nickel, and cobalt (as measured in the 2016 study), as well as manganese. There were also several blackened spots on the blade, which contained sulfur, chlorine, calcium, and zinc.

It was the distribution of the elements on the blade that proved most interesting. They showed a distinct cross-hatched texture known as a "Widmanstätten pattern" (named after the Australian mineralogist Count Alois von Beckh Widmanstätten) that is typical of an octahedrite, the largest group of iron meteorites. This was confirmed when they compared the pattern on the dagger with that of a Japanese meteorite of the same type. The small black patches of iron sulfide are also found as inclusions in octahedrites.

The gold hilt of King Tut's iron dagger (upper panel) and the associated gold sheath (lower panel).

T. Matsui et al., 2022

According to the authors, the low amount of sulfur in the black patches and the Widmanstätten pattern comprised strong evidence that King Tut's dagger was forged at a relatively low heat of less than 950° C (1,724° F).

As for where the dagger came from, the Amarna letters offered a strong clue that it was a wedding gift to Amenhotep III by the king of Mitanni. This was bolstered by the fact that team found the gemstones in the gold hilt had been attached with lime plaster. Although lime plaster was commonly used in Mitanni at the time, Egyptians preferred to use gypsum plaster.

DOI: Meteorites and Planetary Science, 2022. 10.1111/maps.13787 (About DOIs).

X-rays help unlock secrets of King Tut’s iron dagger, made from a meteorite

This Plastic Dot Sniffs Out Infections Doctors Can’t See

Wed, 23 Feb 2022 19:34:36 +0000

Keeping wounds covered can help them stay clean. But if bacteria grow beneath the bandages, things can get dangerous.

Life, at all scales, leaves behind chemical fingerprints. Some are scents we can pick up with our noses: Jasmine petals lend their sweet aldehydes; an upstairs neighbor leaves his noxious amines in the stairwell. “But there are also gasses that we can't smell, because they're just that basic kind of background,” says Andrew Mills, a professor of chemistry at Queen's University Belfast, United Kingdom. “Things basically undergoing life, turning oxygen into carbon dioxide.”

Mills specializes in detecting volatile chemicals, from stinky sulfides to odorless CO2. His lab has focused on sensing gasses as signatures of strange life in undesirable places: Think contaminated ground beef and—more recently—infected wounds. In a study published last month in the journal Chemical Communications, Mills unveiled a simple CO2 detector that can be inserted into dressings for chronic wounds. It changes color when it senses rising concentrations of the gas, a tell-tale sign of dangerous infections.

Chronic wounds take months to heal, and are common among people with diabetes or bed sores. Over 6 million people in the United States deal with chronic wounds, in what amounts to a roughly $15 billion industry. “When these things get infected, they get infected really fast. Within 24 hours, 48 hours, it can be to such a state that you've got to be hospitalized,” says Mills. Infections can set healing back by months, he continues. “So there's a lot of anxiety. There's a lot of intensive care necessary to keep these chronic wounds in good condition so that they can gradually, hopefully, heal.”

But it can be hard to tell when an infection is brewing, says Edgar Goluch, a chemical engineer at Northeastern University and founder of QSM Diagnostics, which develops tools for fast diagnosis of bacterial infections. “Some of the wound treatment specialists I've worked with leave the dressing on for one to two weeks before they’re changed,” Goluch says. “So you really don't know what's going on underneath. And having a way to gather that information without affecting the wound is really valuable.”

The inner layers of bandages for chronic wounds are often cloth, so you can’t see through them. That dressing is then shrouded in a watertight film meant to prevent infection. Both are typically changed every three days, to minimize exposure and doctor’s visits. All of these things make it hard to gauge how well a wound is healing—or not. So Mills' team set out to create a workaround. Their sensor wouldn’t see through the bandage. It would sniff through it.

As Mills began his project, he was struck by the parallels between food packaging and wound dressing. Think of a pack of ground meat. To keep it fresh, a manufacturer will seal it in a controlled, microbe-free atmosphere, and the food is meant to stay wrapped until it’s time to cook it.

His lab had previously created little indicators to detect whether the air inside a food package had changed; the sensors would change color if the wrapper’s seal had burst during transport. They also built sensors to monitor for the chemicals that bubble off when food spoils—“when bugs get in there and cause mayhem,” says Mills.

Dressings for chronic wounds are meant to be equally watertight and antiseptic. “They're deliberately sealable. It's not like a Band-Aid,” Mills says. “And it's an opportunity.”

For all the germy chemicals they could choose to sniff with a sensor, the team picked an odorless one: CO2. The concentration of CO2 in air is about 0.04 percent, or 400 parts per million. Your breath has about 100 times more thanks to your cellular respiration, or how your cells break down sugars and oxygen to make energy and CO2. For the same reason, bacterial colonies create little zones of abnormally high CO2, too. This makes the molecule a signal of thriving life.

For their indicators, Mills’ team 3D-printed Skittle-sized plastic dots that could be stuck under the clear plastic of a patient’s dressing. Each dot is a color-changing sensor containing an indicator dye called Xylenol Blue, which is linked to a couple of water molecules. Under normal conditions, the indicator stays blue. But as CO2 levels around the patient’s skin rise, small amounts dissolve into the plastic. The water molecules become more acidic as the carbon reaches them. “The indicator trips,” says Mills, snapping his fingers. The blue dot turns green, then yellow, as it senses more and more carbon dioxide.

Illustration: Andrew Mills

The team tested their sensors on skin taken from pigs, a standard prototype tissue for studying open injuries, which had been scored with small incisions to simulate a sore. They inoculated each with the drug-resistant Pseudomonas bacteria. They covered each sample in a cloth bandage, then placed the sensor under a plastic dressing before sealing the whole thing. Then, they waited.

All six samples triggered the sensor, and how quickly they did it depended on how much bacteria the researchers had planted inside. The samples with the highest load (roughly 100 million cells per gram) were noticeable right away. But even the lowest loads (only 1,000 cells per gram) tripped the sensor in under 18 hours, once the bacteria had time to proliferate.

Scientists consider between 100,000 and 1 million cells per gram to be an important threshold for bacteria in wounds: Below that limit, they’re not likely to cause a problem; above it, the infection becomes dangerous. Healing slows. The microbe population skyrockets and eventually forms a biofilm, little “villages” that antibiotics can’t penetrate. Biofilm enzymes degrade fat and skin. “These biofilms are devils because, in order to destroy a biofilm, you actually have to scrape it off,” says Mills.

Based on the tissue samples, these sensors can detect an infection hours before a biofilm sets in—by the time populations reach that 1 million mark, the indicator would have turned green. Hours may not seem like a lot of lead time, but it’s far better than the standard three days between dressing changes. “All hell can break loose” in a few hours, much less three days, Mills says. And people may not feel that something is wrong on their own until it’s too late, he adds, because those with chronic wounds from diabetes or bed sores also deal with nerve damage or insensitivity.

The threshold of 1 million cells per gram is only moderately sensitive, but it still beats current methods, says Gayle Gordillo, chief of plastic surgery and director of wound services at Indiana University School of Medicine. Right now, clinics must pull a bacterial sample from wound tissue and wait for cultures to grow in a lab. That takes about a day at the very least. (And some biofilms will stubbornly refuse to grow in lab cultures, causing false negatives.) “I tell people, we have 19th century microbiology tools. And biofilms are a 21st century problem,” Gordillo says. The new sensor, she says, is “quicker, so it's great.”

Gordillo does note that most—if not all—chronic wounds contain biofilms. So she imagines the sensors would be most useful on wounds that have already been thoroughly cleaned and now need to be monitored as they heal. “It's sort of like an alarm,” she says. “It's going to tell you when infection sets back in.

Goluch says that since CO2 is so fundamental to life, it’s a powerful indicator for picking up infections of any type. But he notes that it’s very common, and that a live human patient will also be emitting it from their cells, so the sensor will have to be tuned to avoid false positives.

Mills already has some ideas for how doctors and patients might use these devices. For example, most people deal with chronic wounds as outpatients, traveling to the doctor once or twice a week just to check for infections. Mills says that an infection sensor can cut the frequency of those visits, and Goluch agrees that keeping the dressing on longer would also reduce the risk of exposing the wound to bacteria.

“Another area where this would be really valuable is to be able to quantify how well a drug is working for treating infection,” Goluch says, either in a doctor’s office, or as a research tool for clinical trials. “It's promising enough that either these researchers or another set should take it to the next step.”

Mills’ team is now hoping to partner with companies that already sell wound dressings to test the idea in human clinical trials. They are also working to tack on additional sensors to sniff for other chemicals like sulfides or nitrogen-containing amines, which indicate particular kinds of infections.

There’s still a long way to go before the sensors are ready for medical use, but Mills is proud that their simple design has worked so far. "Sometimes it's the simple ideas that are really groundbreaking,” he says. “And I think we've got one here."

This Plastic Dot Sniffs Out Infections Doctors Can’t See

The True Story of the Viral False Teeth That Fooled The World

Wed, 23 Feb 2022 19:31:07 +0000

Paul Bishop vomited his dentures into a Spanish trash bin 11 years ago. Then a DNA analysis seemingly returned them to his home in the UK. The truth, it turns out, is even weirder.

PAUL BISHOP'S ODYSSEY started—like all great mysteries—with the arrival of an unsolicited package. The thick envelope bearing a Spanish postmark immediately struck Bishop as odd. The 63-year-old civil servant from Greater Manchester wasn’t expecting any mail from Spain. He didn’t even know anyone in Spain. And he certainly wasn’t expecting what he found inside the package: A complete top set of false teeth. His own teeth, in fact. Teeth he had last seen 11 years ago on a boozy holiday to Spain. Teeth with a story to tell.

Within hours, Bishop was a viral news sensation. He gave interviews to his local BBC news program, then national radio and TV stations. By February 10—the day after he received the package—Bishop’s story was everywhere. For a few days, the internet hummed with the story of Paul Bishop and his marauding teeth.

Here’s what happened—according to Bishop. Eleven years ago he was on a holiday in Spain celebrating a friend’s 50th birthday. One night, after a full day of drinking, he attempted to down what was left of his pint of cider. It did not go to plan. “I washed it down in one but could feel it coming back up,” Bishop told the Manchester Evening News. Bishop vomited the contents of his stomach—and his top set of dentures—into a bin. That was the last time Bishop saw his teeth, until he received the mysterious package.

A letter accompanying the teeth described how they had ended up on Bishop’s doormat. First, the dentures were found by Spanish waste collectors, who sent them to the Centro Nacional de Biotecnología (CNB)—one of Spain’s largest public research bodies. After years in storage, the dentures were discovered by a junior technician, who swabbed them for DNA. The technician looked up the DNA in a database and found a match: Señor Paul Bishop. Cross-referencing those records with the British Council in Altea led to Bishop’s address in Greater Manchester.

Case closed. Or was it? From the moment I read of Bishop’s denture adventure, something about it didn’t add up. How did Bishop’s DNA end up on a European database? Why was a national research organization swabbing items found in a bin? And who was this junior technician so determined to reunite queasy British tourists with their false teeth? Solving this mystery, it turned out, would require the help of a forensic DNA expert, three dentists, some stamp collectors, and Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Well, the Buckingham Palace press office, to be more precise. I would come to realize that nothing could stand in the way of a good yarn once the viral news machine was underway. And the tooth, I would soon find out, was not exactly what it seemed.

If there was one man who could confirm the denture’s origin story, it was the letter’s author: José Juan Sánchez Serrano. A quick Google search seemingly confirms that he works at the CNB, the same organization whose logo appears atop the letter accompanying the teeth. I had some questions about the “EuroNationals” DNA database mentioned in the letter. Perhaps Serrano knew who ran the database, or where the DNA sequences within it came from? I email him and, four hours later, he replies. “I have not written such a letter, and to my knowledge we have no access to such a database if it exists.” In fact, Serrano hadn’t worked at the CNB for years. The online profile linking to his email was out of date. So why had his name appeared at the bottom of the false teeth letter? “My guess is as good as yours,” Serrano tells me.

I wasn’t satisfied with a guess. I needed to find out where these teeth came from. And to work that out, I needed to go to the source of the story. I needed to talk to Paul Bishop.

When I get him on the phone, Bishop sounds exhausted after several days of media attention: At 7 that morning he had been on national TV talking about his teeth. Since he first emailed his local BBC news channel hours after receiving the teeth in the post, the media blitz has been nonstop. “Next thing you know, it’s going all over the world, newspapers and magazines and what have you,” says Bishop. Fortunately, Bishop already had experience dealing with the media. As the general manager of one of the UK’s oldest working men’s clubs—a type of community-run bar common in the UK— he had helped whip up some media attention to attract new members. He had even sent the Queen a letter, inviting her to see the club for herself. She had politely declined in a letter sent by an aide.

Bishop lays out some facts about the teeth story. He had given a DNA sample to Greater Manchester Police in 2007 or 2008, which might explain why his DNA was in a database. He is “pretty sure” that the teeth are his, although they no longer fit him. And he says that although he was a regular visitor to Benidorm on Spain’s eastern coast, he hasn’t been there since before the pandemic. He also sends me photos of the envelope, with franking marks showing that it had been handled at a Spanish post office on February 2, the same date printed at the top of the letter. The year the letter was sent is unidentifiable from the photos.

When I tell Bishop that Serrano hadn’t authored the letter, he has no idea who the real author might be. None of his friends at the working men’s club are the type to create such an elaborate hoax, he says. Plus, it seems like an awful lot of effort for a joke. The person would have to source some false teeth, then fabricate the letter and send it all the way from Spain. “I don’t know anyone who’s capable of pulling off a prank like that,” Bishop says.

If Serrano didn’t send the letter, then perhaps someone else at the CNB did. After all, somebody had gone to the trouble of paying 10.15 euros ($11.50) to send the teeth 860 miles from Spain to the UK, and the letter was printed on CNB letterhead with the research center’s number at the bottom. The evidence seemed to point squarely to the research center at the heart of the mystery.

Susana de Lucas, head of scientific culture at the CNB, does not agree. “We heard about the news, but as far as we know that’s not a real letter from us,” she tells me. “The CNB has not sent it, that’s not our heading, and we do not perform that kind of research and tests.” Only one journalist—a Spanish writer—had called the CNB before publishing to verify the letter’s authenticity. The headings and footer in the printed letter aren’t the same ones used in official CNB letters, de Lucas says. “I think it was someone making a joke, but I find it very hard to believe it is someone at the CNB.”

The morning after receiving de Lucas’ email, I wake up to a long WhatsApp message from Bishop. “I think this has been sent anonymously, for whatever reason, by someone who works in the lab mentioned,” he writes. He points to the CNB heading on the paper, the Spanish words in the letter, and the lack of a postcode on the envelope as evidence that the sender was from Spain. Even if the letter wasn’t genuine, Bishop claims, someone had found his teeth, swabbed them for DNA, and returned them to him from Spain.

The notion of an anonymous teeth-returning vigilante is appealing. Who hasn't been dismayed after losing a prized possession while on holiday? If there is a masked DNA-swabbing hero out there reuniting holidaymakers with their lost trinkets, then it means nothing is truly lost. Not forever, anyway.

Of course, they’d have to get the DNA in the first place. Retrieving enough DNA to identify someone from 11-year-old lost dentures is theoretically possible but extremely unlikely, says Denise Syndercombe Court, a professor of forensic genetics at King’s College London. “If you take the DNA off and preserve it in something and stick it in a freezer, then probably 11 years later you can do that,” she says. But that would mean swabbing the dentures as soon as they were lost, not years after they were discovered in a recycling bin or garbage pile. And then there’s the question of the DNA database mentioned in the letter. Syndercombe Court struggles to think of a database that could give you someone’s name—unless the analysis was done on behalf of a law enforcement agency. All this leaves her “skeptical” that Bishop was tracked down by DNA analysis at all.

Shortly after Syndercombe Court casts doubt on the DNA analysis, I finally hear back from Buckingham Palace. Bishop did invite the Queen to visit the working men’s club where he was, and still is, general manager in 2020. Perhaps the return of the dentures was all a ruse to direct the world’s gaze once again toward Ridge Hill Working Men’s Club? Several of the articles about his teeth did mention that Bishop intended to display the gnashers at the club, after all. And if the Spanish letter was a hoax, then perhaps the letter declining the invitation that Bishop says was sent on behalf of the Queen was also faked?

Buckingham Palace soon put a stop to that line of inquiry. The letter from the Queen’s deputy correspondence coordinator was real, a spokesperson confirms. Bishop was not, as far as I could tell, a serial letter hoaxer.

By this point, it was clear that the letter had yielded all the clues it had to give. To find out more. I needed to go to the item at the very heart of this mystery. It was time to grapple with the teeth.

The dentures Bishop received in the post no longer fit him at all. Bishop puts this down to his mouth—and the sizes of dentures that go into it—getting smaller over time. “My mate who’s a dental technician tells me that every three or four years, your palate shrinks so whatever teeth you’ve got will eventually not work properly,” he says. But Bishop’s old dentures aren’t just too big for his mouth, they also contain too many teeth. Twenty-four teeth, in fact: They were a full top set, minus wisdom teeth. And yet, in the video where Bishop removes his current partial dentures for a radio interview, it’s clear that his current false choppers contain only six or so teeth. Either Bishop has gained some extra teeth, or the teeth aren’t his.

Two dentists confirmed that unless Bishop has had teeth implants, then the most likely scenario is that the teeth he received in the mail belonged to someone else. A third dentist adds that something major would have had to change in Bishop’s mouth for the dentures to be impossible to cram in today. Bishop confirms on two separate occasions that he has never had implants. “They’re exactly the same [number], only slightly different with age,” he tells me. Bishop conceded that this new revelation meant that the teeth probably weren’t his after all. “It looks that way now, yeah,” he says.

With the teeth question answered, it was time to turn to the last remaining piece of evidence: the envelope. Susana de Lucas at the CNB had suggested that the stamps themselves might give a clue to the letter’s origins. The stamps in question bear the face of Juan Carlos I, the Spanish king who abdicated in 2014. These stamps—first issued in 2002—were replaced with stamps featuring the new king, Felipe VI, in 2015. So whoever sent the letter must have held on to those stamps for a long time, a poster at the stamp-collecting forum Stamp Community explains. Either that, or the letter was sent considerably earlier than 2022.

The envelope holds another tantalizing clue. The value of the stamps appears to add up to 10.15 euros. A little sleuthing into tariff cards from Correos, the Spanish postal service, reveals that the last time it cost exactly 10.15 euros to send a letter from Spain to the UK was 2018. This all hinges on the value of a single stamp, which appears to be worth 10 cents but might also be a similarly colored 50-cent stamp. Bishop sent multiple photos of the stamps, but in no photo was the value clear enough to work out the exact postage amount. What is clear, however, is that the value of stamps on the letter doesn’t match the amount it currently costs to send a letter of any weight from Spain to the UK.

THIS IS WHERE where the story of the mystery teeth leaves us. Serrano didn’t send the letter, nor did the agency it’s purported to be from. The DNA analysis it describes is unlikely to succeed, and probably couldn’t be used to track down an address. (The letter also mentions that Bishop’s address was found through the “British Council in Altea.” A British Council spokesperson confirms it has no center in Altea.) Even the date that the letter was sent is hard to pin down.

Yet, despite all this evidence casting doubt on the teeth, not a single publication running the story seems to have checked the details at its heart. Buoyed by a momentum all of their own making, Bishop’s dentures are destined to become part of viral news lore. The truth behind the teeth simply doesn’t matter enough.

Bishop is adamant that he remains clueless about the origin of the dentures. “I’m as stunned as anyone,” he says, when I lay out the evidence for the letter’s uncertain origins. “I don’t know anyone that could think of a prank that deep and that involved.”

The True Story of the Viral False Teeth That Fooled The World

An asteroid killed dinosaurs in spring—which might explain why mammals survived

Wed, 23 Feb 2022 19:28:19 +0000

New study sheds light on why species extinction was so selective after the K-Pg impact.

An international team of scientists used synchrotron radiation to image and analyze fossilized fish from the Tanis deposit in North Dakota.

Some 66 million years ago, a catastrophic event wiped out three-quarters of all plant and animal species on Earth, most notably taking down the dinosaurs. The puzzle of why so many species perished while others survived has long intrigued scientists.

A new paper published in the journal Nature concludes that one reason for this evolutionary selectivity is the timing of the impact. Based on their analysis of fossilized fish killed immediately after the impact, the authors have determined that the extinction event occurred in the spring—at least in the Northern Hemisphere—interrupting the annual reproductive cycles of many species.

As we've reported previously, the most widely accepted explanation for what triggered that catastrophic mass extinction is known as the "Alvarez hypothesis," after the late physicist Luis Alvarez and his geologist son, Walter. In 1980, they proposed that the extinction event may have been caused by a massive asteroid or comet hitting the Earth.

An errant asteroid from the asteroid belt has been deemed the most likely culprit. Last year, Harvard astronomers offered an alternative candidate: a special kind of comet originating from the Oort cloud, a field of debris at the edge of our solar system. The comet was thrown off course by Jupiter's gravity toward the Sun. But for now, an errant asteroid is the broadly accepted consensus.

Co-author Melanie During of Uppsala University excavates a paddlefish fossil in the Tanis deposit.

Jackson Leibach

The most likely impact site is a large crater first discovered by geophysicists in the late 1970s in Chicxulub, Mexico, in the Yucatan Peninsula. In 2016, a scientific drilling project led by the International Ocean Discovery Program took core samples from the crater's peak ring, confirming that the rock had been subjected to immense pressure over a period of minutes. And in 2020, a paper published in Nature Communications concluded that the impactor struck at the worst possible angle and caused maximum damage.

The impactor was sufficiently large (between 11 and 81 kilometers, or 7 to 50 miles) to melt, shock, and eject granite from deep inside the Earth, probably causing a megatsunami and ejecting vaporized rock and sulfates into the atmosphere. Geological evidence for large-scale forest fires has also been documented. Researchers have estimated that the impact would have released energy over a billion times higher than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. All of this had a devastating effect on global climate, leading to mass extinction.

But the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction event remains a puzzle for scientists because the extinctions were so selective. All the non-avian dinosaurs, pterosaurs, ammonites, and nearly all marine reptiles were wiped out, but many species of mammals, birds, crocodiles, and turtles survived. The authors of this latest paper hypothesized that perhaps the seasonal timing of the impact event affected which species perished and which survived.

An impact spherule (glass bead) from the Tanis event deposit in North Dakota.

M. During et al., 2022

One site in particular seemed of interest: a deposit in North Dakota from the so-called Tanis event. The asteroid's impact was so powerful that it rocked the continental plate, producing enormous waves in rivers and lakes that transported tons of sediment. The sediment easily engulfed the fish in those lakes and rivers, burying them alive. Meanwhile, glass beads of melted rock (impact spherules) rained down from the sky just after impact, becoming embedded in the gills of the dying fish. All of this created the Tanis deposit, which features a beautifully preserved fossilized ecosystem that existed at the time of impact.

Co-author Melanie During of Uppsala University went to the Tanis site and excavated a few precious fossilized fish specimens: specifically paddlefish and sturgeon. The samples included three lower jaw bones and teeth from paddlefish and three sturgeon pectoral fins. "It was obvious to us that we needed to analyze these bones to get valuable information about the moment of impact," she said.

The scientists took X-ray scans of the samples to create 3D reconstructions and then projected the bone deposition patterns onto those virtual models. In this way, they were better able to visualize the seasonal fluctuations over the life cycle of the fish.

Three-dimensional rendering of the partial paddlefish fossil, with googly eyes added for reference.

The data also revealed that impact spherules (glass beads) were present in the paddlefish gills but didn't show up anywhere else in the skeleton, a clear indication that the glass beads in the gills and the arrival of the powerful sediment-carrying waves occurred nearly simultaneously. This in turn "implies that the [fish] were alive and foraging during the bolide impact and the last minutes of the Cretaceous," the authors wrote.

The team took slices from the bones of all the specimens and mounted them on slides to take a closer look under a microscope. Both of these bone types (jawbones and pectoral fins) grow via the excretion of rows of osteoblasts (large cells responsible for the synthesis and mineralization of bone). The scientists recognized the telltale lines of arrested growth (LAGs) in the samples, which (much like tree rings) are key indicators of annual growth cycles over the life span of the fish. The distribution, shape, and size of the bone cells are also known to fluctuate with the seasons.

The analysis showed that all six fish stopped growing (i.e., died) while a new growth zone was forming just after a LAG had been deposited. So the fish likely died in the early stage of their most favorable growth season: the spring. “In all studied fishes, bone cell density and volumes can be traced over multiple years, and they indicate whether it was spring, summer, autumn, or winter," said co-author Dennis Voeten of Uppsala University. "We saw that both cell density and volumes were on the rise but had not yet peaked during the year of death, which implies that growth abruptly stopped."

Cut sections of bone in epoxy resin on glass balls for X-ray fluorescence analysis.

M. During et al., 2022

During et al. also conducted carbon isotope analysis to learn more about the annual feeding patterns of the fish. Food availability would have peaked between spring and autumn, and all the yummy zooplankton the fish ingested would have enriched the growing skeleton, elevating the ratios between the heavier Carbon-13 isotope and the lighter Carbon-12. This showed up in the examination of one of the paddlefish samples. “The carbon isotope signal across the growth record of this unfortunate paddlefish confirms that the feeding season had not yet climaxed—death came in spring,” said During.

Past studies have hypothesized that the K-Pg impact occurred in June, based on evidence for an anomalous freezing in Wyoming preserved in paleobotanical samples. However, according to During et al., the underlying assumptions behind those earlier studies have since been refuted. Instead, they suggest a spring impact, which set off a series of phenomena that extinguished different species on different timescales.

For example, the intense infrared radiation from the re-entry of ejecta and the resulting wildfires—not to mention acid rain—would have predominantly affected the exposed continental environments, practically ensuring immediate extinction for those species. And the spring timeframe would have been an especially sensitive stage in biological life cycles of species inhabiting the Northern Hemisphere.

Virtual thin section of a paddlefish jawbone showing the bone cell (white dots) variation over multiple years with the carbon isotope ratio. Blue = winter and low carbon 13/low bone cell density. Yellow = summer and high carbon 13/high bone density.

M. During et al., 2022

By contrast, many species in the Southern Hemisphere would have been preparing to hibernate for the winter as opposed to gearing up for their reproduction cycles. That may have contributed to the survival of those species—particularly mammals, certain amphibians, birds, and crocodiles—who were more likely to be sheltering in burrows or caves at the time of impact.

"Species with longer incubation times, such as non-avian reptiles, including pterosaurs and most dinosaurs, were arguably more vulnerable to sudden environmental perturbations than other groups (such as birds)," the authors wrote. In fact, "Southern Hemisphere ecosystems, which were struck during austral autumn, appear to have recovered up to twice as fast as Northern Hemisphere communities, which is consistent with a seasonal effect on biotic recovery."

DOI: Nature, 2022. 10.1038/s41586-022-04446-1 (About DOIs).

Listing image by Joschua Knuppe

An asteroid killed dinosaurs in spring—which might explain why mammals survived

6 in 10 ‘couldn’t cope’ without smartphone for a day; 1 in 8 suffer anxiety from low battery!

Wed, 23 Feb 2022 17:25:46 +0000

New survey reveals that more than a quarter of adults rely on smartphone for directions, while 1 in 3 have NEVER used a paper map before!

NEW YORK — Does it feel like your smartphone never leaves your hand? You’re not alone. A new survey reveals six in 10 people “couldn’t cope” with being separated from their mobile phone for more than a day.

Surprisingly, the poll of 2,000 smartphone users finds only three in 10 claim they never leave their house without their phone. When they do bring their phones along, however, most people are completely dependent on it for help.

Two in three (68%) rely on their phones to take photos, while 64 percent use it to check the time and 62 percent are constantly looking up weather forecasts. Another 13 percent confess they can’t even find their way to work without a phone showing them a map!

Speaking of traveling, 27 percent of respondents admit they’re completely reliant on their smartphone for directions. One in three add they’ve never used a printed map in their life.

Out of juice anxiety!

With all these people relying on their smartphones for everything, it’s no surprise they’re constantly looking for places to charge their dying batteries! The survey — commissioned by HMD Global, the home of Nokia phones, and conducted by OnePoll — found 55 percent of respondents believe running out of battery power is a “nightmare scenario.” One in eight people claim that a dying battery actually gives them anxiety.

“Smartphones offer so much, it’s unsurprising that we’re dependent, making the common complaints around battery life a real issue,” says Petri Hayrynen of HMD Global in a statement.

“There are other ways we can preserve our phone battery and offset that angst,” Hayrynen adds. “From using network connections selectively to muting unnecessary sounds and stopping apps from running in the background, these all help the cause and keep you switched on for longer.”

Take the car, just leave the phone!

When it comes to what’s most important to people these days, the poll finds nothing would be more upsetting than losing a smartphone. Nearly half the survey (48%) say it would be very upsetting if they lost their phone. That’s more than the number who would stress out over losing their bank card (46%), their car keys (40%), or even their wedding ring (25%)!

Overall, the average respondent checks their mobile device 20 times a day. They also spend two full hours looking at their phone screen over a 24-hour period.

Source

How a high-tech twist on a 19th-century process could clean up steel and cement making

Wed, 23 Feb 2022 03:35:10 +0000

This startup made a heat battery using old-school materials

Greenhouse gas emissions need to virtually disappear within the next few decades to avoid the worst effects of climate change, and the most difficult emissions to erase could come from industries like steel and cement set to play a big role in new, green infrastructure. Wind turbines, for example, are made mostly of steel — but, at least until now, it’s been almost unheard of to make that steel using renewable energy.

That could start to change if a startup developing a “heat battery” can successfully move from the lab to the real world. It’s what Oakland, California-based Rondo Energy aims to do with $22 million in new funding from Bill Gates’ climate investment fund, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and utility-backed investment firm Energy Impact Partners.

The heat battery is supposed to be able to supply heavy industry with extreme heat generated by renewable energy, a solution that could help clean up the pesky industrial operations that make up about a third of global greenhouse gas emissions. The company thinks its technology can cut down global emissions by 1 percent over the next decade.

Until recently, a lot of efforts to cut planet-heating carbon dioxide emissions have focused on getting the power sector to run on clean energy and then electrifying other sources of pollution like cars and buildings. But that doesn’t necessarily slash pollution that comes from making many construction materials, chemicals, and fertilizers.

Those industries have been called “hard to decarbonize” because they often rely on coal, oil, or gas to fire up kilns or furnaces to extremely high temperatures. Steelmaking, for instance, conventionally involves heating up coal to about 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. As a result of this dirty process and steel’s ubiquity in construction, the steel industry alone makes up about 8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

To change that, Rondo Energy has found a new way to use old tricks. Its battery draws on renewable energy to heat up a sort of brick that’s similar to refractory bricks already used in blast furnaces for steel.

Rondo Energy CEO John O’Donnell describes his company’s battery as a large “insulated shoebox full of brick.” Electricity heats the brick rapidly. As air passes through the array of bricks, it gets superheated — reaching about 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. That heat can be used directly or turned into high-pressure steam often used in manufacturing.

“Because it’s simple and boring, [the technology] can go to a very large scale with economics driving it and attack a big problem,” O’Donnell tells The Verge.

O’Donnell founded Rondo Energy in 2020 after starting a couple other companies that tapped solar energy to generate steam for industrial processes. Others are taking slightly different approaches to the problem. At least one company has sought to harness the sun for cement and steel by concentrating sunlight to reach extremely high temperatures. Earlier this year, Breakthrough Energy Ventures funded a company called Boston Metal that aims to decarbonize steelmaking using electrolysis. And some steel mills already use electricity — often coming from coal-fired power plants — to transform scrap steel.

On top of cutting pollution from heavy industry, Rondo Energy’s brick can also take advantage of excess renewable energy that might otherwise overwhelm the grid or go to waste. In sunny California, daytime solar energy prices can sometimes drop so low — into negative territory — that utilities lose money on it. Rondo’s batteries, however, can soak up and store the energy so that it can be used later. There’s a lot of research going into big lithium batteries that can hook up to the grid to play a similar function.

The company still has to figure out how to turn its grand plans into reality. Until now, its prototypes have just proven themselves in the laboratory. The $22 million in funding it received this month will go towards the first manufacturing lines to make the batteries at scale. Some demonstration projects will take place this year in California’s Kern County. O’Donnell didn’t share what they’ll be used for, but county planning director Lorelei Oviatt told The Bakersfield Californian that the technology could potentially be used for “everything from green steel to conventional manufacturing and cement that needs both renewable energy as well as high-temperature heat.”

Crucially, the heat battery also provides an alternative to two controversial solutions for tackling the industrial emissions problem. Hydrogen fuel and technologies that capture carbon dioxide from smokestacks have so far gotten the most attention for their potential to clean up heavy industry. But they’ve faced a lot of pushback from skeptics worried that they might distract from efforts to turn away from fossil fuels. Most hydrogen today is made using gas, although it can also be made using renewable energy. Carbon capture technologies, meanwhile, allow polluting facilities to continue burning fossil fuels and still claim that they’re going green by drawing down CO2 — even if other pollutants remain.

Carbon capture and hydrogen also need to prove that they can be deployed at scale. They’re currently very expensive and still need a lot more investment in R&D and infrastructure, including a new network of pipelines to move hydrogen and captured carbon. Rondo’s technology is relatively simpler and cheaper to roll out, according to O’Donnell, in part because it builds on older, established techniques.

“It’s cheaper because it’s boring,” O’Donnell says. “If you want to go fast, make it boring; use stuff that you can count on.”

Rondo’s heat battery does face a similar challenge to other battery technologies: becoming scrap at the end of its life cycle. The entire system has a lifespan of 50 years, although O’Donnell says many of its individual components can last for decades longer and be recycled or disposed of like similar materials already used in steelmaking.

How a high-tech twist on a 19th-century process could clean up steel and cement making

The Nocturnals

Wed, 23 Feb 2022 00:09:57 +0000

While most people are fast asleep, some ultra-introverts are going about their lives, reveling in the quiet and solitude. They challenge a core assumption of psychology: that all humans need social connection.

Imagine it’s nighttime. You slip under the covers and turn out the light. Maybe you hear cars honking in the street, or voices from the other side of your apartment wall, or your partner snoring beside you; maybe it’s quiet. It might even feel like the whole world is drifting off with you.

But out in that dark night, while most people are fast asleep, there’s a whole world of people who are wide awake. They go to work, drive around, run errands at 24-hour stores. In this parallel universe, there are rarely crowds, nor traffic, nor lines; no awkward shuffling around other shoppers in the grocery aisle, no run-ins with neighbors or cacophony of email notifications. As the sun rises, these nocturnal people settle down to sleep.

They don’t all want to live this way. Some of them have to; they have sleep disorders, or night-shift jobs. But some of them want this very much—enough to seek out those night shifts, to train themselves to wake in the dark. They do this because of the isolation, not in spite of it. I talked to people who painted me a magical picture of their nighttime world: of exquisite, profound solitude; of relief; of escape.

According to most psychologists, humans are inherently social creatures; contact with others isn’t just a want—it’s a need. Deprived of it, people’s physical and mental health tends to decline. But the nocturnal people I spoke with feel they don’t need much interaction at all. “I’ve tried to hold down day jobs, but I couldn’t handle waking up early, rushing to work, and most of all just … being around people all the time,” Chris Hengen, a 26-year-old nighttime security guard living in Spokane Valley, Washington, told me via email. (He didn’t feel comfortable talking on the phone.) “I don’t have any ill will towards people, it’s just exhausting to me.” John Young, a 41-year-old network engineer living in Hammonton, New Jersey, told me he’s “more than happy” living a fairly solitary life. Young has worked night shifts on and off since the late 1990s; he prefers the peace of night, but that preference is sometimes mistaken for social anxiety or depression. In fact, he told me, he’s an introvert and this is just how he likes things. And many others I spoke with had similar reasoning.

I could understand why people might wonder, though, whether a near-total retreat from daytime society would be motivated by more than just introversion. When does a desire for solitude cross into something unhealthy? If we take the nocturnals at their word—that they simply like living this way—they complicate one of our core assumptions about human psychology: that all people have the same fundamental needs.

Max Mikulecky for The Atlantic

Social interaction among ancient humans looked very different than it does today. Until about 12,000 years ago, connections were mostly limited to relatively small extended-family groups for hunting and gathering. When agricultural practices developed, larger populations began to settle down together—but interactions with strangers were still fairly limited. Those communities, though, grew larger and more complex over time. That growth exploded in the industrial revolution, as large numbers of people flooded into cities to work in factories, coming into closer contact than ever.

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In his book Bowling Alone, the political scientist Robert Putnam argued that this urban boom initially spurred a flourishing of connection. But, in his view, the late 1960s and early ’70s saw those bonds begin to break down, as urban sprawl and new technologies led people to spend more time alone, watching television or driving. In 2017, once and future U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warned of a dangerous “loneliness epidemic.” As he wrote in the Harvard Business Review, “During my years caring for patients, the most common pathology I saw was not heart disease or diabetes; it was loneliness.” In recent years, commentators have implicated loneliness in a wide swath of society’s ailments, including steep suicide rates and the opioid crisis. Twenty-first-century American culture is now often associated with profound isolation.

At the same time, much of modern life still entails being around other people whether you like it or not. From a young age, kids shuffle into schools, where they spend all day with their peers. The people I spoke with told me they’d always resisted this forced socialization. Daniel Herman, who lives in Orland Park, Illinois, and has been working a night-shift machining job since the late ’80s, told me he always wanted to be alone as a kid, though he didn’t understand why he felt that way. After high school, he started drinking more and more often; in social situations, he felt like it allowed him to interact like everyone else. But he didn’t like feeling so dependent on alcohol. “While other people are drinking and actually getting drunk,” he told me, he was “getting normal.” (Now he’s sober; he told me that living nocturnally makes it easier not to drink, because he doesn’t need to in order to power through social interactions.)

Growing up grants some freedom to pursue solitude (at the very least, you can live alone if you want to and can afford it), but adult life typically involves coming face to face with other humans—waiting in line at the bank, running into people in the park, trading pleasantries with the person across the counter. For many it also leads to workplaces where you’re expected to be “on” all the time: chatting with your cubicle neighbor, making small talk while you microwave lunch, speaking in meetings.

Roxana Alexandru, a life coach for introverts, felt stretched thin by her old office job. “I hid away from people in meeting rooms,” she told me. “It was the worst thing ever, sitting next to people and hearing them talk all day long.” Now she works remotely, and she regularly rises at 4 a.m. to work and enjoy the quiet before her kids wake up, around 6. Though it leaves her exhausted, she says she needs to take advantage of a sliver of time when those around her are asleep, when she can breathe and focus; after she helps her kids with their morning routine, she takes a two- or three-hour nap to try to make up for it. (“I love my kids so much, but I don’t think kids are meant for this type of personality,” she told me. “I would not change it … but it is a challenge.”)

You might think modern life would make it easier to be alone. The internet lets you do many jobs and accomplish many tasks from a distance, and social media can allow you some limited form of connection without actually having to endure a crowded bus or a lengthy conversation. But those same technological conveniences can also start encroaching on the feeling of true solitude. “It’s repulsive to be so in touch, and feel like you’re literally in a crowd even if you’re alone in a room,” Anneli Rufus, the author of Party of One: The Loners’ Manifesto, told me. (She doesn’t keep a nocturnal schedule, though she used to fantasize about doing so.) Although the online world never truly quiets, nighttime can still feel calmer—most people in your time zone are asleep, not posting or responding or expecting communication. Even if it’s not totally logical, living nocturnally can feel like an act of rebellion against the practice of being perennially in touch. Like a modern-day equivalent of “shuffling off into the woods and building a cabin,” Rufus told me, you’re making a statement, even if it’s mostly symbolic: “No one else is here.”

Many of the people I spoke with had felt trapped in contemporary life—depressed, on edge, and guilty for feeling that way in the first place. But then, each came to the realization: It doesn’t need to be this way. There’s already a time when the noise and chaos of society falls away. They just need to be awake for it.

Max Mikulecky for The Atlantic

Being awake for it, though, is not always easy. Ideal sleep hours vary from person to person, but most people naturally follow a similar circadian rhythm and wake during daylight. Messing with that internal clock can wreak havoc on your health: Circadian-rhythm disruptions are associated with increased risk of Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, gastrointestinal disorders, and cancer. Some people I spoke with told me they sometimes have trouble falling asleep and have had to intentionally train themselves for nocturnal living: They have to be disciplined about getting good sleep in the daytime, using blackout curtains or white-noise machines and putting all their devices on silent. But it may still be hard on their bodies.

Nocturnal people have to deal with logistical obstacles, too. Finding 24-hour businesses can feel like a jackpot—multiple people described the relief of walking through an empty grocery store—but when they close down or cut hours, it’s a blow. And some places, including most doctors’ offices, are never open at night except for emergencies; that means nocturnal people typically have no choice but to go in the middle of their sleeping hours.

Some find the inconveniences and health risks to be acceptable trade-offs for a lifestyle that they say has made them immeasurably happier. “There’s a sense of timelessness,” I heard from one woman who asked not to be named, not wanting to insult people she’d spent time with before going nocturnal. “It feels like you’re in a free-floating abyss.” The night gives you freedom—from expectations, from obligations, and from distractions. It allows you to just be. “The daytime forces all these identity possibilities on you,” Rufus told me. “The nighttime, with its silence and its darkness and its solitude, helps you settle more into who you really are.”

But I didn’t know how to square these comments with the abundant research suggesting that humans are naturally social beings. The neocortex, a part of the brain that is essential for strong social skills, is much larger in humans than other primates, which many researchers believe is a natural response to our society’s social complexity. Neuroscientists have shown that our brains process social rejection and physical pain in similar ways. The researcher Matthew Lieberman has found that the neural networks involved in reading others’ emotions are active almost constantly when we’re awake. “This is what our brains were wired for: reaching out to and interacting with others,” he writes in his book, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect. And social isolation has profound effects on the body, down to the molecular level.

Given all of that, some psychologists I spoke with were skeptical that a highly isolated nocturnal life would be healthy in most cases.

They stressed that it’s impossible to make judgments from afar, but Lee Anna Clark, a professor at Notre Dame University who studies personality pathology, gave me a general framework for how experts think about whether a behavior is maladaptive. Broadly speaking, they consider two separate factors, she told me: whether it works for the person engaging in the behavior, and whether it’s harming anyone else. Being this isolated could be adaptive for certain people—but there are plenty of ways it could go wrong.

There’s already been some controversy in the psychological community about whether intense introversion should qualify as a disorder. The American Psychiatric Association has considered adding introversion to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Pathologizing introversion sounds absurd—until you start considering the extreme end of the spectrum. Colin DeYoung, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota, didn’t comment on the DSM debate—but he did explain that the clinical version of introversion is known as “detachment,” characterized partly by low sensitivity to reward. That means disconnection from social relationships, but also from “energetic or upbeat positive emotions like joy or excitement,” he told me. Clark said something similar.

“There is a connection between social interaction and pleasure,” she said. “So people who live their life alone without others, they may not be unhappy. But they also may not experience the full spectrum of pleasure.” And they might not even realize it.

Max Mikulecky for The Atlantic

I spoke with seven people who have kept some variation of a nocturnal schedule. Some of them occasionally saw friends or talked to people on the phone, though they said they could handle only a small amount of socializing before needing alone time again. A few were married to non-nocturnal people; Herman, for instance, sees his wife when their schedules happen to overlap, but much of his time at home is spent by himself, watching sports on TV or exercising on his stationary bike while she sleeps. (She’s introverted too, he told me, and their marriage works well because they can function well independently.)

Others were real loners, living alone and keeping largely to themselves. Alec Maltz, a 38-year-old in Los Angeles who lived nocturnally for years, told me he thought he could likely go “indefinitely” without seeing people. (He’s had to switch back to working in the day more recently, “and it’s taken its toll on me. It’s too busy in the daytime and much too bright,” he told me via email.) Some people told me they had lost touch with old friends, and didn’t regret it. One even said he’d forsaken potential romantic relationships in favor of living nocturnally. Everyone I talked with felt deeply grateful for the night’s reprieve.

It is tough for some of the daytime people in their introverts’ orbits. Young said his family has regular get-togethers, but he only attends them sometimes, and leaves early when he does. Alexandru’s husband, Willem, told me he’s had to get used to the fact that they won’t always share all parts of their life. When she goes to sleep at 8 or 9 p.m. so she can wake up at 4, “that means that we don’t go to bed together … That’s something that doesn’t feel nice,” he said. Or “you wake up and your partner’s not there.” But for the most part, they said their family members seemed to understand that their introverted loved ones had different needs, and wanted them to be happy. Willem told me that his wife has taught him to be more reflective and comfortable with silence, and he doesn’t think partners need to share every aspect of their lives.

The nocturnal people I spoke with didn’t see their disposition as optional, and self-acceptance gave them great comfort. “I can’t try to fight it anymore,” Herman told me. “I don’t try to force myself to do things I don’t want to do.” Research suggests, though, that personality traits aren’t necessarily fixed in stone. When introverts are prodded to act like extroverts—say, by pretending they’re more talkative and assertive, or interacting with strangers—they tend to report feeling positive emotions afterward. I asked some of these nocturnal people: Might you ultimately be better off if you pushed yourself to socialize more? Most of them felt skeptical that they’d be happier, and some had tried and felt exhausted by their forced interactions. But some of them said they couldn’t be sure, or admitted that, on occasion, they’ve felt it might be nice to have some company. Maltz said he was interested in having a romantic partner, someone who “wants to do their own thing alone in the same room.” Herman told me he’s sometimes enjoyed talking to co-workers.

Still, Sanna Balsari-Palsule, a researcher at the Centre for Social and Behaviour Change at Ashoka University in Haryana, India, told me that we should be careful not to infer too much from studies that push introverts to interact. They show mood boosts after people engage with others for relatively short periods of time; it’s not at all clear that introverts would be happier in the long run if they started acting extroverted forever. And some researchers theorize that people benefit from behaving in accordance with their personality traits.

In fact, Balsari-Palsule guessed that isolated nocturnal people could be high-functioning. “If they are able to get the equivalent of what we see as social interaction from other forms, whether that be using social media … or even just watching films where you feel like you’re interacting with people in a way,” she told me, “I don’t think that necessarily translates into being maladaptive.”

If they are happy, that raises some serious questions about the amount of social interaction humans inherently need, or whether humans have universal psychological needs at all. For decades, many psychologists have believed that all people share certain basic needs, with variation in degree. In Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs,” first described in 1943, the only needs more essential than “social” ones are those related to physical survival and security. And in more recent years, researchers have proposed updated versions; the Basic Psychological Needs Theory, for example, asserts that we have an innate need for “relatedness”—the feeling that you matter to other people.

But in trying to draw connections between people and cultures—to describe what we all share, despite our myriad differences—researchers may be papering over variation in even these most elemental traits. Some social needs are probably universal up to a certain age; babies need connection to their caregivers, to have eye contact and touch and warmth. But for adults, needs may be less definitive. “I think there are some people so unusually low in that need that for them it basically doesn’t exist,” DeYoung, the University of Minnesota psychologist, told me. “We should take seriously the possibility that there are people who really don’t need social connection.” Psychologists may be missing those people altogether: If they remain in solitude—if they’re not even awake at the same hours as the rest of us—we might not notice they’re there.

Max Mikulecky for The Atlantic

Though the impulse to find some universal traits is well intentioned, it may also be hubristic. We can only know our own internal experience, after all, but we still want to project that experience onto others, to feel that their minds reflect our own. Of course, sometimes there are good reasons for deeming other people’s behavior “abnormal,” and asking them to change. The question is where the line is—when another person’s way of living or thinking can be invalidated, and by whom, using what measurements.

The answers people give to that question are inevitably shaped by invisible biases. In the U.S., a solitary nocturnal life might seem more mind-boggling than it would in other countries. On the one hand, it’s an individualistic culture, seemingly primed for people who want to build the life that works for them. On the other, it’s well documented that America is a particularly extrovert-centric nation. The historian Warren Susman called it a “culture of personality,” which glorifies being bold and being seen. From the time Carl Jung described the term extraversion in a popular 1921 book, it became linked in the U.S. to “self-improvement, independence and the go-getting American dream,” according to Fay Bound Alberti, a historian of emotions and the author of A Biography of Loneliness. Introversion, meanwhile, was associated with “loneliness.”

None of this means that social connection isn’t important. But perhaps we shouldn’t be so sure that connection means the same thing to everyone, or that there is any one way to live a fulfilling life. The past decade or so has seen a growing acceptance of different identities, including a flourishing neurodiversity movement. Traditionally, that’s been focused on neurological differences—but some have argued it should encompass variations in the mind, as well as the brain. Most people probably wouldn’t think to champion nocturnal people under the same banner, or in the same spirit. But maybe we should.

The pandemic, too, may be shifting how we think of individual psychological needs. It’s never been more clear that people can work well on very different schedules. Balsari-Palsule believes that workplaces can play a huge role in dictating whether introverts feel pressured to act extroverted. Now they could pave the way for greater acceptance of nocturnal people, and for introverts at large.

The night owls I spoke with are banking on it. When I asked them what they want from the future, many of them described a similar vision—one of even deeper isolation, further from the clamor and unrest of other people. Young, the network engineer, told me that he’s “looking to maybe become more introverted … thinking of moving into a tiny home in the middle of nowhere.”

And Herman, the machinist who has lived nocturnally for more than 30 years, dreams of a time when he can quit his night shift, his one remaining tie to society. “I can see just living in a tiny little ranch somewhere—somewhere in Montana with nobody around. There’s my dream retirement,” he told me. “Peace and quiet and dark.”

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An Optical Spy Trick Can Turn Any Shiny Object Into a Bug

Tue, 22 Feb 2022 20:45:48 +0000

Anything from a metallic Rubik’s cube to an aluminum trash can inside a room could give away your private conversations.

The most paranoid among us already know the checklist to avoid modern audio eavesdropping: Sweep your home or office for bugs. Put your phone in a Faraday bag—or a fridge. Consider even stripping internal microphones from your devices. Now one group of researchers offers a surprising addition to that list: Remove every lightweight, metallic object from the room that's visible from a window.

At the Black Hat Asia hacker conference in Singapore this May, researchers from Israel's Ben Gurion University of the Negev plan to present a new surveillance technique designed to allow anyone with off-the-shelf equipment to eavesdrop on conversations if they can merely find a line of sight through a window to any of a wide variety of reflective objects in a given room. By pointing an optical sensor attached to a telescope at one of those shiny objects—the researchers tested their technique with everything from an aluminum trash can to a metallic Rubik's cube—they could detect visible vibrations on an object's surface that allowed them to derive sounds and thus listen to speech inside the room. Unlike older experiments that similarly watched for minute vibrations to remotely listen in on a target, this new technique let researchers pick up lower-volume conversations, works with a far greater range of objects, and enables real-time snooping rather than after-the-fact reconstruction of a room's audio.

"We can recover speech from lightweight, shiny objects placed in proximity to an individual who is speaking by analyzing the light reflected from them," says Ben Nassi, the Ben Gurion professor who carried out the research along with Ras Swissa, Boris Zadov, and Yuval Elovici. "And the beauty of it is that we can do it in real time, which for espionage allows you to act on the information revealed in the content of the conversation."

The researchers' trick takes advantage of the fact that sound waves from speech create changes in air pressure that can imperceptibly vibrate objects in a room. In their experimental setup, they attached a photodiode, a sensor that converts light into voltage, to a telescope; the longer-range its lenses and the more light they allow to hit the sensor, the better. That photodiode was then connected to an analog-to-digital converter and a standard PC, which translated the sensor’s voltage output to data that represents the real-time fluctuations of the light reflecting from whatever object the telescope points at. The researchers could then correlate those tiny light changes to the object's vibration in a room where someone is speaking, allowing them to reconstruct the nearby person's speech.

The researchers showed that in some cases, using a high-end analog-to-digital converter, they could recover audible speech with their technique when a speaker is about 10 inches from a shiny metallic Rubik’s cube and speaking at 75 decibels, the volume of a loud conversation. With a powerful enough telescope, their method worked from a range of as much as 115 feet. Aside from the Rubik’s cube, they tested the trick with half a dozen objects: a silvery bird figurine, a small polished metal trash can, a less-shiny aluminum ice-coffee can, an aluminum smartphone standard, and even thin metal venetian blinds.

The recovered sound was clearest when using objects like the smartphone stand or trash can, and least clear with the venetian blinds—but still audible to make out every word in some cases. Nassi points out that the ability to capture sounds from window coverings is particularly ironic. "This is an object designed to increase privacy in a room," Nassi says. "However, if you're close enough to the venetian blinds, they can be exploited as diaphragms, and we can recover sound from them."

The Ben Gurion researchers named their technique the Little Seal Bug in an homage to a notorious Cold War espionage incident known as the Great Seal Bug: In 1945, the USSR gave a gift of a wooden seal placard displaying the US coat of arms to the embassy in Moscow, which was discovered years later to contain an RFID spy bug that was undetectable to bug sweepers of that time. Nassi suggests that the Little Seal Bug technique could similarly work when a spy sends a seemingly innocuous gift of a metallic trophy or figurine to someone, which the eavesdropper can then exploit as an ultra-stealthy listening device. But Nassi argues it's just as likely that a target has a suitable lightweight shiny object on their desk already, in view of a window and any optical snooper.

Nassi's team isn't the first to suggest that long-range, optical spying can pick up vocal conversations. In 2014, a team of MIT, Adobe, and Microsoft researchers created what they called the Visual Microphone, showing it was possible to analyze a video of a houseplant's leaves or an empty potato chip bag inside a room to similarly detect vibrations and reconstruct sound. But Nassi says his researchers' work can pick up lower-volume sounds and requires far less processing than the video analysis used by the Visual Microphone team. The Ben Gurion team found that using a photodiode was more effective and more efficient than using a camera, allowing easier long-range listening with a new range of objects and offering real-time results.

"This definitely takes a step toward something that’s more useful for espionage," says Abe Davis, one of the former MIT researchers who worked on the Visual Microphone and is now at Cornell. He says he has always suspected that using a different sort of camera, purpose-built for this sort of optical eavesdropping, would advance the technique. "It’s like we invented the shotgun, and this work is like, ‘We improve on the shotgun, we give you a rifle,'" Davis says.

It's still far from clear how practical the method will be in a real-world setting, says Thomas Ristenpart, another Cornell computer scientist who has long studied side-channel attacks—techniques like the Little Seal Bug that can extract secrets from unexpected side effects of communications. He points out that even the 75-decibel words the Israeli researchers detected in their tests would be relatively loud, and background noise from an air conditioner, music, or other speakers in the room might interfere with the technique. "But as a proof of concept, it's still interesting," Ristenpart says.

Ben Gurion's Ben Nassi argues, though, that the technique has proven to work well enough that an intelligence agency with a budget in the millions of dollars rather than mere thousands his team spent could likely hone their spy method into a practical and powerful tool. In fact, he says, they may have already. "This is something that could have been exploited many years ago—and probably was exploited for many years," says Nassi. "The things we're revealing to the public probably have already been used by clandestine agencies for a long time."

All of which means that anyone with secrets to keep would be wise to sweep their desk for shiny objects that might serve as inadvertent spy bugs. Or lower the window shades—just not the venetian blinds.

An Optical Spy Trick Can Turn Any Shiny Object Into a Bug

Online Shopping Is Reshaping Real-World Cities

Tue, 22 Feb 2022 20:39:28 +0000

The uptick of grocery delivery apps led to the rise of “dark stores”: empty warehouses right in city centers. They're changing the design—and feel—of neighborhoods.

Walk down a major street in Manhattan or Brooklyn today, and—wedged between a coffee shop and a FedEx shipping center—you might stumble across a storefront that looks, for all intents and purposes, empty. It probably has frosted glass windows, a door covered in branded stickers or QR codes, a bike rack out front, and a collapsible sign that directs you to download its mobile app to receive grocery deliveries in 10 to 15 minutes. Though employees might be racing in and out, customers aren’t allowed inside.

These ghost storefronts—often called “dark stores”—are warehouses in all but name, yet they look markedly different from the gargantuan spaces where older online grocery companies like FreshDirect store their goods. Traditional warehouses are zoned to regions outside of commercial districts, meaning they will be set apart from areas with lots of walking traffic. Dark stores are located in retail storefronts on main streets, near the heart of busy neighborhoods, but they serve only ecommerce customers. And they’ve gone from a niche phenomenon discussed largely in retail industry circles to a feature of major American cities.

The rise of dark stores directly parallels the acceleration of ecommerce as a whole, especially in the grocery industry. Online sales represented 13 percent of all grocery spending in 2021, a new high, and dark stores are designed to make the delivery process smoother.

But as they spread across the country, they also might reshape the design—and the feel—of the neighborhoods they enter.

There are two ways that a regular old storefront—a neighborhood grocery store, say—might go dark. One is based on demand: When in-person shopper numbers sag, major grocery chains might instead dedicate the space to delivery. Without customers around, grocery companies can dispatch ecommerce orders more quickly.

While some companies, like the Iowa-based grocery chain Hy-Vee, have experimented with this approach since 2019, dark stores crept into the mainstream during the pandemic. By September 2020, Whole Foods had temporarily designated five of its locations online-only; the company now has one permanent dark store, in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Other major grocery stores, like Stop & Shop and Giant Eagle, are also turning some of their public-facing storefronts into fulfillment centers for delivery.

Yet the biggest driver of the dark store boom right now is the tangle of mostly European tech startups, bearing names like Buyk, Gorillas, Jokr, and Getir, that began a blitz into the US last summer. Though these startups are focusing on New York as their point of entry, they’re increasingly jumping to cities around the country. Buyk and 1520 are now in Chicago, Jokr and Getir are in Boston, and GoPuff—the virtual delivery startup with $3.4 billion in funding—got its start in Philadelphia. Their success depends on buying real estate in the center of major neighborhoods—otherwise they’d have no shot at meeting their promise of 15-minute delivery.

At least six quick-delivery startups are now operating in New York alone, and collectively they have opened more than 110 dark stores across all five boroughs, according to an estimate that the civic design and data firm BetaNYC shared with WIRED. The dark store concept has grown so popular that more established delivery companies are testing it out too. DoorDash is now opening up its DashMart convenience stores in locations closed off to customers.

Dark stores—sprouting up in former butcher shops, convenience stores, gyms, and mattress retailers—are taking up spaces once designed to be open to the public. That shift from far-flung warehouses to accessible retail storefronts has city planners on edge. Because dark stores sit at the confusing intersection of being technically occupied, but functionally empty, they risk entrenching the worst impacts that vacant real estate can have on a community.

The fear is that dark stores, like vacant storefronts, could puncture a hole in the social landscape of a neighborhood. Vacant storefronts are bad for cities. When there are a lot of them in a tight vicinity, they mean that fewer people will walk down the street, and fewer connections between neighbors will happen. “Having people out on the street increases public safety, because more people see things that are happening,” said Noel Hidalgo, executive director of BetaNYC. “That level of social engagement makes cities safer and makes places safer.” Accordingly, neighborhoods with high numbers of vacant storefronts see increased crime rates, fire risks, and rodent activity.

Alex Bitterman, a professor of architecture and design at Alfred State College who cowrote a paper on dark stores, said that he was also paying attention to where, exactly, these dark stores are popping up. Though he hasn’t seen a rigorous statistical study yet, he said that many of the grocery stores that are “going dark”—sealing themselves off to in-store shoppers in order to become delivery hubs—“seem to disproportionately affect lower-income neighborhoods.” (This observation applies more to existing grocery stores going dark than to the quick-delivery startups moving in.)

Replacing a public-facing grocery store, especially in lower-income areas, with a delivery-only one could exacerbate problems of food access, added Bitterman. People who pay for groceries with food stamps are often unable to order groceries online, not to mention that they might not have access to a smartphone or can’t afford the delivery fee.

Plus, dark stores might also crowd out core neighborhood businesses, driving up rents on small-scale retail spaces that, say, a deli might have once occupied. Already, New York bodega owners—whose businesses are most directly threatened by quick-delivery companies—are sounding the alarm. They argue that tech companies will replace the corner stores that double as thriving community centers with impersonal apps.

In this understanding, a bodega or a corner store is not merely a place to buy coffee. “It’s the place where you can get the morning gossip,” said Hidalgo. “In the bodegas that I go into, and the delis and the grocery stores, you run into your neighbors and you have a sense of community with a person that works behind the counter.” Stores give people places to walk to, to meet up with friends, and to escape from a sudden downpour. Without them, “that level of spontaneity that happens in human contact is erased,” he said.

A final concern centers on how dark stores, with their constant delivery churn, will alter car and walking traffic in a tight cityscape. When dark stores move into a city, “all of a sudden, you don’t have people walking in and out who usually go to the store, but you have lots of bicycles, perhaps some vans and stocking vehicles, and you’ve changed the flow of traffic in a very highly pedestrian area,” said Lisa Nisenson, a city planner who works on mobility issues at the design firm WGI. A poorly placed dark store, she said, could mean that pedestrians are competing for sidewalk space with dozens of delivery drivers rushing to meet rigid delivery windows.

The ultimate impact of dark stores will depend on their size and their density in a given neighborhood. Nisenson used the example of teeth in a healthy mouth. In an otherwise bustling neighborhood, a single, small dark store—like the ones that the quick-delivery companies operate—is like a “gap tooth,” she said. “Some of that can be a little bit impactful. But if all the other teeth are healthy, sometimes you don’t even notice it.”

That starts to shift, however, when you see multiple dark stores in close proximity, or when you see larger retailers switching their storefronts to dark stores. When a bigger retailer steps into the space, “maybe what you’ll find is an entire or even half of a block face that’s all of a sudden just dark and gone,” she said. “That’s not missing teeth. That’s something more profound.”

Already, several Dutch cities, including Amsterdam, have blocked the expansion of quick-delivery services for the next year. In the US, some legislators, most prominently New York city councilwoman Gale Brewer, are making the case that using a retail storefront solely to fulfill orders is a violation of zoning law. Because dark stores are essentially mini warehouses, Brewer has argued, they should not be allowed to occupy retail storefronts. (The 15-minute grocery stores have responded that they are following local zoning laws.)

Some caveats are important. For one, quick-delivery companies are not exactly snapping up marquee retail spaces. They tend to seek out less conventional store locations: a retail space off to the side of a major shopping area, for instance, or a storefront wedged on a tiny side street. They want to be in the center of a neighborhood, but they don’t need to be highly visible.

Dark stores could also mitigate the social impacts they have on a community just by choosing locations outside of the heart of a neighborhood. Nisenson, the city planner, said that, from a strictly city-planning perspective, dark stores should be selecting areas where “there would otherwise be no demand for that space,” where the constant funnel of deliveries can’t disrupt walking traffic, and where “they’re not really pushing out anyone else.” In other words, they should be in spaces designed for small-scale warehouses, where dark stores exist as stops on a larger shipping journey. “You can get a lot of efficiency out of having a dark store on the delivery routes of the distributors,” she said.

That future might unfold on its own. Right now, the reason these companies are leasing so many retail storefronts is that rents are cheap. Jason Richter, a commercial real estate manager who has worked with quick-delivery companies, said the pandemic “created the perfect storm for these companies to take on retail locations at historical low rents.” Once rents go up again, these startups might ditch their focus on retail.

We are probably not at a point where dark stores are numerous enough to have a measurable impact on neighborhood foot traffic. The 110 dark stores that have opened in New York, for instance, represent only a tiny fraction of all commercial space in the city. And the quick-delivery grocery companies that are driving dark store demand right now may prove to be another VC-subsidized flash in the pan. These companies are already bleeding extravagant amounts of money. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that with marketing and delivery costs, the startup Fridge No More lost $78 per customer last year.

But even if particular companies like Gorillas and Getir eventually fade into the ether, dark stores are likely to be here for the long haul, and it might not be long before the implications of retail-stores-not-meant-for-people are felt on a neighborhood level. The rise of dark stores, in fact, highlights the much longer-term implications of an ecommerce-heavy world. In their race to one-up each other on delivery speeds, these companies might gobble up local institutions and meeting spots in the process.

Online Shopping Is Reshaping Real-World Cities

Why Cities Want Old Buildings Taken Down Gently

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

A growing number of US cities are adopting “deconstruction” policies that involve taking structures apart by hand in the name of sustainability.

Emily Christensen knows this sounds a little West Coast, but when she enters the old houses her company has been hired to take apart, she senses an energy. “It’s intense,” she says. “These houses have seen decades of human drama.”

Christensen and her partner, David Greenhill, started their firm, Good Wood, in 2016. Portland, Oregon, where they live, had just become the nation’s first city to require houses of a certain age to be deconstructed rather than demolished. That means that, instead of using an excavator and backhoe to crush an old building, anyone scrapping an older structure in the city must hire a deconstruction crew, which takes it apart delicately—almost surgically—by hand. Rather than a jumble of smashed wood, plaster, fixtures, insulation, concrete, and dust, deconstruction firms can extract cabinetry, masonry, windows, marble, brick, and beautiful old-growth lumber. The idea is that these materials can be sold and eventually reused locally. Christensen thinks of Good Wood, which also remills and sells the reclaimed lumber, as a kind of modern and sustainable forestry company, without the felling trees part.

Deconstruction, as Christensen has found, is a pleasant idea. Using old materials to make new things feels meaningful. It helps, too, that reclaimed wood tends to be very pretty. But a growing number of US cities think the idea makes good policy too. In the past five years, cities as disparate as Baltimore, Cleveland, Boise, and San Jose and Palo Alto in California have adopted their own deconstruction policies; San Antonio has been working on one for four years.

Deconstruction, city officials say, is a green alternative to demolition, sending up to 85 percent less material to landfills. Building materials and construction account for just under 10 percent of the world’s energy-related global carbon emissions, according to the Rocky Mountain Institute. Using salvaged materials eliminates emissions associated with making and transporting new building materials. Plus, it’s not as noisy as knocking down a house, and doesn’t spew dust or toxic materials, such as asbestos, into the air. Backers say it creates jobs even for those without high-tech skills, while highlighting the importance of sustainability. As the climate warms, “the circular economy is one promising alternative,” says Felix Heisel, an architect, assistant professor, and director of the Circular Construction Lab at Cornell University.

Good Wood illustrates Portland’s success. Over the past four years, the city has deconstructed more than 420 single-family and duplex homes that were registered as historic places or built before 1940. Good Wood has taken apart 160 of them. Today, 19 contractors are licensed to deconstruct in the city, thanks in part to a city-sponsored training. The city’s construction waste specialist, Shawn Wood, is one of the country’s leading deconstruction policy experts. He says the cost of deconstruction has gone down since the rule went into effect, though it’s hard to say by exactly how much.

But all that manual labor comes at a cost. Deconstructing a building can be more than 80 percent more expensive than demolishing it, according to a report from Portland State University, though selling some of the recovered material can offset part of the cost.

And sometimes the labor isn’t available. In 2018, Milwaukee required many of the city’s older structures to be deconstructed instead of demolished. But the rule is still on ice, through at least 2023, as officials still struggle to find local contractors who can take apart homes by hand. The delay “is in hopes of building a bigger pool of potential contractors,” says Chris Kraco, supervisor of the condemnation section at the city’s Department of Neighborhood Services. Kraco and his colleagues continue to hold training sessions that the city hopes will help foster a local deconstruction “ecosystem”—companies that can take apart structures; companies that can remove nails, strip paint, and remill the materials; companies that can store or resell the salvaged goods; and companies interested in buying them. Many places also need to update their local building codes to allow contractors to build with salvaged materials.

The complexity has prompted some cities to tackle deconstruction slowly. Pittsburgh just launched a year-long pilot project, in partnership with a local nonprofit construction materials and appliances business, to see whether taking apart old, condemned structures on city land makes financial sense there. In Ithaca, New York, Heisel and his team are helping to deconstruct a 110-year-old home, to test whether the local economy can handle a deconstruction ordinance.

San Antonio’s Office of Historic Preservation, which has spearheaded the city’s deconstruction efforts, plans to propose an ordinance to city council later this year. In the meantime, it’s helping with demonstration projects, including one on a 1930s homestead that uncovered a basement full of moonshine bottles—something that might have otherwise been crushed in a demolition. Researchers suspect the basement was used to store liquor for a nearby speakeasy during Prohibition, says Stephanie Phillips, a senior specialist at the office. The discovery tied in neatly, she says, with the office’s goals of stewardship—environmental, sure, but also cultural. “We’re able to tell a bigger story about the history of development in our city,” she says. “We want to be able to capture that instead of sending it to a landfill forever.”

Most cities, Portland included, have targeted old buildings for deconstruction. It's partly because limiting the pool of homes required to use the technique gives local deconstruction economies time to develop. But also, starting in the 1970s, builders tended to use materials that haven’t held their value, like second- or third-growth lumber, or particle board. Construction also used more glue, spray foam sealant, and other adhesives, which make it harder to take apart new buildings by hand.

At Cornell, Heisel’s lab is looking toward the future. Students and researchers there want to develop building materials that might be easily reused. Guessing how people of the future might want to use a 2- by 6-inch piece of lumber seems difficult. It would also require a better system to track what’s inside a building, for when its end comes. But building with local reuse in mind could completely reorder construction and design. Today’s waste, Heisel says, is only called that “because we are missing the tools right now to understand it as materials.”

Why Cities Want Old Buildings Taken Down Gently

A New Type of Aurora Found on Saturn Resolves a Planetary Mystery

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

The discovery of the first wind-driven aurora sheds light on a strange phenomenon playing out below Saturn’s stormy atmosphere.

Earth’s northern and southern lights—the result of a rendezvous between magnetic fields, energized particles from the Sun, and our planet’s atmospheric admixture—are wondrous spectacles. But Earth doesn’t hold a monopoly on auroras. They exist on other worlds with magnetic fields, including Saturn, whose auroral glow shimmers in the infrared and ultraviolet.

Now, as revealed by a recent study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, scientists have discovered an aurora on that ringed world that is unlike any other. Like Earth’s, Saturn’s northern lights are fueled by a shower of energized particles from the heavens. But some of its auroras only make an appearance when screaming winds shoot across the north pole—a bit like a gust of air stirring up a cosmic bonfire.

“To my knowledge, [this is the] first time an aurora driven by atmospheric winds has been detected,” says Rosie Johnson, a space physics researcher at Aberystwyth University in Wales who is not involved with the study. “It’s a really great result!”

It also happens to be a revelation that came about while scientists puzzled over a seemingly innocuous question: Why can’t we work out how long a day lasts on Saturn? As it turns out, it only took 40 years, a spacecraft with a death wish, ice volcanoes, and a telescope atop a Hawaiian mountain to find out.

Earth makes it easy to measure how long a day lasts: 24 hours. That’s because our planet is covered in readily identifiable, fixed landmarks. All an extraterrestrial viewer needs to do is tag one of those, wait for it to rotate out of sight and then return to view, and voilà: That’s how long it takes Earth to make one complete rotation on its axis.

You can’t do this for worlds where the surfaces are obfuscated by thick gaseous veils, like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Fortunately, they all have magnetic fields rooted to their geologic hearts, shields that protect their atmospheres from being stripped away by the solar wind. These magnetic fields have charged particles scooting up and down them, emitting radio pulses as they go. As planets rotate, so do their magnetic fields, which take this radio pulse signal along for the ride.

Think of these planets like radio “lighthouses”—when they make one full rotation, so does the radio beam sweeping from them. A distant observer can “see” a bright radio signal spinning around in the darkness. “You can do this for Uranus and Neptune. It’s also been done for the Earth. It works,” says James O’Donoghue, a planetary astronomer at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and coauthor of the new study.

Not so for Saturn.

Ever since the two Voyager probes took a close look at Saturn in the early 1980s, various spacecraft have tried measuring the spin of its radio lighthouse to determine the length of a Saturnian day. But every time it has been measured, the length of a day seems to change, with values ranging between 10.5 Earth hours to 10.9 Earth hours. The Cassini spacecraft, which entered Saturn’s orbit in 2004 and stayed there until 2017, learned more about this resplendent gas giant than any other mechanical visitor—but it still couldn’t work out how long a day was. “It just found more problems,” says O’Donoghue.

What did become clear during its tenure, though, was that Saturn appeared to have three different radio lighthouses. The bulk of the planet had one, but its north and south poles each possessed their own, spinning at different rates. That must have been why the length of Saturn’s day appeared to keep changing.

But why does Saturn have multiple lighthouses? “A lot of people had theories. It was one of those late-night pub discussions, you know,” says Tom Stallard, a planetary astronomer at the University of Leicester and a co-author of the new study. Some people thought it had something to do with the way the planet’s magnetic field was being generated. Others wondered if the answer was hiding within Saturn’s tempestuous atmosphere.

Resolving this riddle seemed necessary if scientists wanted to determine the length of a Saturnian day. But in 2019, planetary scientists had an epiphany while examining another of the gas giant’s features: its rings. Whenever the planet’s concealed innards twitch, convulse, and rotate, the planet’s gravity field shifts. This tugs at the icy particles within Saturn’s rings, creating fine ripples and waves. That year, scientists decoded these undulations, revealing, finally, the length of a day on Saturn: 10 hours, 33 minutes, and 38 seconds.

But the mystery of the origins of Saturn’s many radio lighthouses remained frustratingly unsolved. In the summer of 2017, with its rocket propellant almost entirely spent, Cassini was ordered to plunge into Saturn’s atmosphere so as not to risk crashing into and contaminating one of its potentially life-harboring moons. When it burned up in the Saturnian skies on September 15, 2017, the last great hope of cracking the case appeared poised to vanish with it.

Except—hope wasn’t entirely lost. During the probe’s final months, there was a very narrow window of opportunity. Stallard and his colleagues reasoned that if Saturn’s multiple radio lighthouses could be explained by something weird happening in the upper atmosphere, they would need to pick a radio lighthouse, track its behavior, and then compare that with matching observations of its atmosphere, hoping to see a sign that the two were interlocked in a strange dance. The fated-to-die probe, they thought, could provide those contemporaneous atmospheric observations on the final arc of its journey.

Now they were in a race against time.

Stallard applied for time at the Keck Observatory, a pair of 300-ton telescopes sitting atop the 13,800-foot-high peak of Hawai‘i’s Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano. By peering at Saturn’s north pole in infrared during the summer of 2017, he could track the movements of hydrogen ions in its skies, essentially permitting him to see which way the winds were blowing up there.

He didn’t have long. “Cassini was about to crash,” says Stallard. While Cassini took one last look at the north pole’s lighthouse, Stallard waited at the observatory. Between June and August, whenever Saturn could be seen as a patch of fuzzy light in Earth’s sky, he aimed Keck at its north pole and soaked up the data.

“Making measurements of the upper atmosphere is horribly hard,” he says, but everything worked out. “We got every single one of our nights with good weather, which is kind of miraculous, really.” By the time Cassini was no more in mid-September, the team had the data they were hoping for—and, after a few years of analysis, in late 2021 they found their answer to why Saturn has three radio lighthouses. “It was ridiculous,” says Stallard, but “what we saw was a very definite answer.”

Plasma, a soup of charged particles, falls from the stars and flows down to Saturn’s magnetic poles. This plasma follows the paths of field lines, invisible magnetic filaments stretching out of the poles. As it does so, radio pulses are emitted. That was already known.

But the team discovered that high-altitude, low-density winds, moving at speeds of up to 6,700 miles per hour, rush over the north pole. On either side of this prevailing wind current are two vortices, two swirls spinning in opposite directions. This twin-cell wind system itself fully rotates. The entire thing resembles a fairground ride from hell.

The mechanisms of this polar perturbation are not yet fully understood. Its effects, however, were clear to see. This powerful northern maelstrom grabs the magnetic field lines diving into the north pole, bends them out of shape, and spins them about. That means the north pole’s radio lighthouse is swiveling around differently than the one for the bulk of the planet—and it explains why, if you try to measure the length of a day on Saturn using its rotating magnetic field, you get a range of answers.

Much about Saturn’s skies remains puzzling. But in recent decades, painstaking work has begun to unravel some of its peculiar features. The identification of these vortexes “adds another piece in the puzzle,” says Zarah Brown, a planetary atmosphere researcher at the University of Arizona who was not involved with the study.

“It’s nice to have a solution,” says O’Donoghue. It’s also nice to discover that this errant radio lighthouse is accompanied by a novel type of aurora.

The fundamentals of auroral cookery are similar for many planets. Earth, for example, is bombarded by expulsions of the Sun’s magnetic field and its plasma. When this plasma falls down Earth’s magnetic field lines, they bounce off gas particles in the upper atmosphere above the north and south poles. The electrons attached to these gas particles get excited and jump up, ultimately releasing energy and creating an auroral glow.

The same thing happens on Saturn. But being so far from the Sun, it doesn’t receive much solar plasma. Instead, most of its plasma comes from icy volcanism on Enceladus, a gelid moon that erupts water-ice slush from deep crevasses around its south pole. Much of this cryovolcanic matter falls into orbit around the moon itself. Some of it drifts into space, bathes in sunlight, gets energized, and becomes a plasma. It is subsequently swept up by Saturn’s magnetic field lines, where it pings off its plentiful hydrogen and creates an auroral glow.

Photograph: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

“You get used to a lot of things when you do science,” says O’Donoghue. But Saturn’s ultraviolet and infrared auroras fueled by ice volcanism? “That’s one of the things I’ve never quite got over.”

The locations of Saturn’s auroras are dictated by where the magnetic field lines go. But as the team’s work has revealed, it’s not so straightforward at the north pole. Up there, that twin-cell tempest warps these field lines, pulling them through the upper atmosphere. Any low-hanging plasma attached to them is dragged through high-flying hydrogen gas clouds, creating plenty of new plasma-hydrogen collisions and creating another auroral glow around the north pole. Together, Saturn’s “classic”-style aurora and this wind-driven aurora combine to form a beautiful, bespoke iridescence: a halo-shaped outer ring that encircles various bright auroral patches within.

So far, Saturn’s auroral mashup is unique. But could it be found on other worlds? “With the amount of exoplanets in the universe, I’m going to say, ‘Definitely yes!’” says Johnson. There may also be hidden wind-driven auroras closer to Saturn’s shores—on Jupiter and, perhaps, even on Earth, just on smaller scales.

It’s difficult to say for now whether a wind-driven aurora does more than just look cool; if it can influence planets in a way we are yet to comprehend. “I don’t know how important it is. It’s just that, at Saturn, it’s so important that the aurora is 50 percent generated by [the wind],” says Stallard. “We should probably think about it more as a community.”

A New Type of Aurora Found on Saturn Resolves a Planetary Mystery

Can You Warm Yourself with Your Mind?

Tue, 22 Feb 2022 15:20:03 +0000

The human body generates its own heat. Some people can adjust the thermostat.

It’s been chilly in the Catskills, where our family lives. The chickens are under threat of frostbite, the dog has to be pushed outside, and our jeans are bulky from long underwear; the weather app shows negative numbers in the evenings. Cold is something we are subject to—it hurts, and all we can do is dress for it. I can’t prevent the storm that encases my car in ice any more than I can disperse the sticky air of a subway station in July.

And yet hints of another world push back against the cold. In 1981, Herbert Benson, then a physician at Harvard Medical School, travelled to the Himalayas to take the temperatures of three Buddhist monks. The monks had been living in near-solitude for nearly a decade, in small stone huts without heat or insulation at elevations of six thousand feet or higher; they’d been practicing g-tummo, a secret meditation technique, every day for several years. Benson attached disk thermometers to several parts of each monk’s body, during meditation or afterward. In a study published in the prestigious journal Nature, he reported that, while meditating, the monks could increase the temperature in their fingers and toes by up to seventeen degrees Fahrenheit. Scientists had previously documented the possibility of a person heating her own extremities using biofeedback, but those temperature increases had been slight. Here was evidence that a person could be his own furnace.

A few years later, Russ Pariseau, a documentary filmmaker who was covering Benson’s research, stood behind his camera in a prayer room in Manali, Himachal Pradesh, in India. The room was cold, about forty degrees. A group of monks wearing only undergarments sat on the floor, along with a few buckets of cool water. As Pariseau’s camera rolled, the monks dipped thin white sheets in the buckets, then draped the wet sheets around their backs and shoulders. They began g-tummo. In an e-mail, Pariseau recalled that he soon noticed “vapor rising from bodies all around.” The room began “noticeably warming up.” The event was a friendly competition among advanced students to see who could dry the greatest number of sheets—“something like a championship tournament.” On another winter night, Pariseau witnessed several monks sleeping on a stone ledge somewhere between the Himalayan and Karakoram mountains. “I was dressed in layers of down but still uncomfortably cold,” he said. The monks were wearing thin shawls of wool or cotton.

Maria Kozhevnikov, a neuroscientist at the National University of Singapore and Massachusetts General Hospital who also holds an appointment in radiology at Harvard Medical School, wasn’t that impressed by Benson’s study. The steaming sheets, she figured, were just the physics of water hitting cold air—like seeing your breath on a frigid day. And what was so special about heating up one’s digits? “It’s not unusual,” she told me. “Anyone can imagine putting their fingers into warm water and eventually the peripheral body temperature could be increased.”

Kozhevnikov wanted to know if the monks could raise their core body temperatures. That’s a harder problem: maintaining an internal temperature of 98.6 degrees is more or less a requirement of having a human body on Earth. She travelled to Nangchen town, in the Amdo region of Tibet, an area known for g-tummo practice. There, she took the core body temperatures of several monks and nuns during meditation. It was January, and even inside the house where she ran the experiment the temperature hovered between thirty-two and thirty-six degrees. Kozhevnikov taped disk thermometers to the meditators’ armpits, attaching them to a computer, which allowed her to obtain readings without being in the room with the nuns. Her skepticism changed to awe as she watched the data emerge. “It was amazing,” she said. “You see the core body temperature change.” It wasn’t just that they increased their core body temperature; aerobic exercise can do that, too. It was that the meditators gave themselves fevers. At least one monk raised his body temperature from 98.6 degrees to 100.8.

In Kozhevnikov’s report, published with some colleagues in the journal PLOS One, she explains that g-tummo involves a breathing technique called “the vase,” in which meditators contract their abdominal and pelvic muscles. They picture a flame rising from below the navel to the top of the head. I asked Kozhevnikov if she could share more about how g-tummo is done; she told me that she’d agreed to keep the practice confidential as a condition of her visit. “They visualize the spine being on fire,” she said. G-tummo meditation, she went on, is not a state of relaxation but arousal. She thinks it may increase blood flow to the brain. G-tummo is difficult, requiring years of dedication to master. As I contemplated whether it could help me cope with the cold, it occurred to me that using this sacred technique to avoid discomfort might not be in line with its origins in Buddhism, a religion in which suffering is acknowledged and accepted. Kozhevnikov thinks that it could be useful for pilots and astronauts who run the risk of losing consciousness during acceleration; for the average cold-averse person, though, she suggested sticking to the imagination. Try “visualizing your fingers in hot water, or yourself in a hot environment,” she said. It might not raise your core body temperature, but it could make you cozier.

Meditation and visualization aren’t the only ways to self-generate heat. Anger makes us hot under the collar. Romantic crushes make us sweaty. The same is true for embarrassment, and for menopause. Clearly there are mechanisms in our bodies designed to heat us up, either as a goal or a side effect, and there is a tight link between our behavior and our temperature. Most of the research seeking to understand why our cheeks start burning when we trip on the sidewalk involves the fight-or-flight response. The release of adrenaline triggered by such moments gives us a burst of survival-driven energy, and that’s accompanied by a surge of heat.

Could the process be reverse-engineered? Could we force a bout of heat-inducing anger that blunts a brutal wind chill? If you wanted to do that, you’d first need a map showing which body parts heat up in response to which kinds of thoughts. In fact, we have the technology to create such a map, courtesy of the U.S. military. Modern soldiers find people in the dark using thermal imagery, which detects heat radiated by the human body; as soon as the technology was declassified, in 1992, it became available for psychological experiments.

Emilio Gómez Milán, a research psychologist at the University of Granada, in Spain, has conducted several psycho-thermal studies. In 2018, he and some colleagues told ten psychology students that they were part of a top-secret research program, and that they needed to call a friend or relative and lie about their current whereabouts. A control group were asked to make similar phone calls, but were allowed to reveal that, in fact, they were part of an experiment. Using thermal imagery, the researchers found that the noses of seven lying students grew hotter by two degrees before the calls, while they were crafting their alibis; during the calls themselves, nose temperatures among eight students dropped by two degrees. Forehead temperature also increased during the planning stage—and then, for six of the students, increased again during the telling of the lie itself. Gómez Milán and his colleagues speculated about the warming and cooling. Perhaps the initial nose and forehead warming could be attributed to the anxiety of planning to lie, and the subsequent forehead warming to the mental workload of maintaining the ruse; after the lying was finished, anxiety lessened, along with facial temperatures. In the end, changes in nose and forehead temperature enabled the researchers to determine liars with eighty-five per cent accuracy. This “Pinocchio effect,” as Gómez Milán calls it, may be connected to hypothalamus activation, and also to the insula, a part of the brain’s reward system which is activated by emotions and involved in regulating body temperature.

In the name of psycho-thermal research, Gómez Milán has put study volunteers into tense imaginary situations. He has asked them to decide whether they’d call the police on a loved one suspected of having terrorist ties, whether to pay a ransom to free a journalist being tortured by the Taliban, and whether U.S. soldiers should stop or continue the torture of an Islamic terrorist who may have information about a forthcoming attack in Spain. In all these studies, temperatures shifted in specific ways related to emotion and calculation. “In economic dilemmas hot decisions are the emotional ones and cold decisions are the rational ones,” Gómez Milán told me. When the sympathetic nervous system prepares us to deal with an emergency—stopping the torture, for example—nose temperature decreases. As the parasympathetic system takes over and we calm down, nose temperature tends to rise. Yet the effects vary depending on whether a person is already in a state of arousal or relaxation. The effects are complicated. Passion can make a nose cold; tenderness can make it warm; mental fatigue heats the forehead and cools the nose. All this may not be very helpful as you wait for a bus on a cold night.

Enough already, you might say—there are four seasons, and you must live with them. There’s a lot of pressure to embrace the cold. The Dutch athlete Wim Hof, a.k.a. the Iceman, plunges into icy water with a tolerance that makes him just as awe-inspiring as the self-heating monks; he argues that this exposure, combined with a breathing technique that helps him withstand extreme cold, has enabled his immune system to resist serious bacterial infections. There is some evidence to support this claim. In one study, mice that have been genetically engineered to have reduced body temperatures lived longer than non-mutated mice. Some research has suggested that cold showers ward off depressive symptoms.

I prefer to model my own defense mechanisms on certain honeybees who, when faced with a dangerous giant hornet, swarm around it to create what scientists call a “hot defensive bee ball.” They beat their wings until the air heats so much that it kills the invader. The unity here is inspiring, and so is the amount of heat generated just by being together. I’m also a fan of the Arctic ground squirrel: in Alaska, these rodents, which can weigh just a pound and look like tiny-eared mice covered in lush fur, begin hibernating in late summer. In the days before they hunker down, their little mouths are stained blue from gorging on enough wild berries to double their weight; they go into their underground nests, plug up the entrances, flop their tails over their heads, and stay that way for several months, during which nearly all of their bodily reactions stop.

A few decades ago, Brian Barnes, a zoophysiologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, began trapping Arctic ground squirrels so that he could study their hibernation habits. He also started sticking thermometers into their burrows. He discovered that their body temperatures can plummet to 26.5 degrees Fahrenheit. “That turned out to be a world record,” he told me; no other warm-blooded mammal gets quite that cold. The ability is puzzling, since, like people, Arctic ground squirrels contain a lot of water. How do they survive life below the freezing point? “They’re spending half their lives at a body temperature lower than that of an ice cube, and that’s normal for them,” Barnes said. It turns out that, instead of turning to ice crystals, the water inside the squirrels becomes a supercooled liquid. The animals filter their own bloodstreams, removing particles that might help water turn into ice (dust and pollen play this role on plant surfaces); this enables their blood to keep flowing even at temperatures below freezing. “Think ice-rimmed streams,” Barnes suggested. “It’s quite spectacular.”

A southern Californian transplanted to Alaska, Barnes has spent his entire career studying animals that survive extreme cold. Hibernation isn’t sleep, he explained. Instead, it’s a state of “deep torpor.” The brain is active just enough to keep the animal’s heart and lungs operating. Torporous animals are far less responsive than sleeping ones. In the nineteen-sixties, one researcher removed several golden-mantled ground squirrels from their hibernation nests, tossed them in the air, and put them back; the animals stirred briefly during the event but returned to torpor within a day. He took the squirrels from their nests a second time and tossed them in the air again. This time, the animals only sometimes stirred, and their brain temperatures remained near forty degrees the whole time.

Having learned that the sensation posed no threat, they stayed in torpor—some through a hundred throws.

Source

Study finds 90 percent of medieval chivalric and heroic manuscripts have been lost

Tue, 22 Feb 2022 00:14:58 +0000

Researchers used ecological "unseen species" model to estimate size of medieval European lit.

An ecological model has been applied to estimate the number of lost medieval manuscripts in Europe.

Those who study human culture must grapple with what amounts to an incomplete data set, since researchers are limited to poring over the books, manuscripts, paintings, sculptures, and other artifacts that have survived to learn about a given period. We call this predicament "survivorship bias," and it can lead to underestimations of just how diverse a society might have been in terms of the cultural materials produced. Teasing out how much of a cultural domain may have been lost is a considerable challenge.

The field of ecology might be able to help. According to a new paper published in the journal Science, an international team of researchers has adapted an ecological "unseen species" model to estimate how many medieval European stories in the chivalric romance or heroic tradition survived and how much has been lost. The authors also presented their findings last week at a virtual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAA).

The team looked at medieval works in Dutch, English, French, German, Icelandic, and Irish and concluded that only about 9 percent of medieval manuscripts survived. However, losses were significantly lower in Icelandic and Irish literature, suggesting that island ecosystems might help preserve culture. In fact, the team's results were very similar to the estimates made by scholars using other data, such as references to lost works that appear in surviving manuscripts.

Lavishly illustrated German manuscript containing the Arthurian romance of Wigalois.

CC-BY University Library Leiden

"A lot of literature went missing, and we don't know what it is, but using this method we can get some idea, at least, about how much of the jigsaw puzzle is missing," said co-author Matthew Driscoll of the University of Copenhagen. For instance, Arthurian legend has survived in a very wide range of story cycles, and scholars aren't likely to have missed a similar highly popular and influential literary tradition. However, "I'm 100 percent certain that there are romances dealing with the Knights of the Round Table that have not survived," said Driscoll. "There must be. This is exactly where you think, 'Damn, we could have made a great film about that if we'd had it.'"

The field of ecology uses bias correction in statistical models that can account for so-called unseen species in a given ecosystem to determine the richness of species diversity. The model used in this study is known as the Chao1 method, developed by Anne Chao of National Tsing Hua University, another co-author on the paper.

The idea to adapt Chao's model came from co-author Folgert Karsdorp of KNAW Meertens Institute, whose research focuses on cultural evolution and looking for methods in biological evolution that might be applicable to the cultural domain. "I was looking for ways of dealing with this selection bias of estimating the cultural population," said Karsdorp, and when he came upon the Chao1 model, "We figured we might as well try it on this really hard question of lost medieval literature."

Opening of medieval Irish tale Cath Leithreach Ruibhe.

CC-BY Royal Irish Academy (Dublin)

The Chao1 model is meant to give users an accurate estimate of how many species inhabit an area, said co-author Mike Kestemont of the University of Antwerp. First, scientists collect "abundance data," counting all the animal species they can observe. The issue is that certain hard-to-observe species will be missed in that count. (Snow leopards, for instance, are notoriously difficult to spot.)

The Chao1 formula will look at those species that don't appear often in the abundance data. If you only spotted a species once, for example, it would be designated "F1." If you've spotted a species twice, it would be F2. Those numbers can then be used to calculate F0—the number of species that have been observed exactly zero times in an area. "Then you have a lower bound on the estimates of the number of species you didn't observe," said Kestemont.

But can an ecological model really be applied so readily to such a markedly different scholarly domain? "Intuitively, it's a weird thing to say that a literary work behaves like a species," Kestemont acknowledged. "In fact, this method isn't even specific to ecology." Chao1 is so general that it's been used in lots of other fields, with "species" standing in for classes of stone tools (archaeology); types of die for ancient coins (numismatics); different causes for a given disease (epidemiology); genes or alleles (genetics); and distinct vocabulary words (linguistics), to name a few.

The only surviving fragment of a German manuscript containing Wolfram von Eschenbach's Willehalm.

CC-BY Huis Bergh (’s-Heerenberg)

"It's even been used to estimate the number of stars in a galaxy or the number of bugs in a piece of software that haven't been discovered yet," said Kestemont. "The real question is 'in which conditions wouldn't we be able to apply it?'" As long as you can distinguish something akin to "species," the model works very well.

In adapting the model, Kestemont and his co-authors treated literary works as species and manuscript copies as sightings of a species. They counted works that only appeared sparsely in the historical record and then used those counts to calculate F0—in this case, the number of works that once existed but scholars have never observed. A work was considered "lost" when none of the documents that once preserved it still survived.

This approach allowed the researchers to estimate the size of the original population of works and manuscripts as well as the losses sustained across the Dutch, French, Icelandic, Irish, English, and German vernaculars. They found that there would have been 40,614 specimens (manuscripts) across all six vernaculars, of which 3,649 still survive—a 9 percent survival rate. As for literary species (works), 38 percent have survived.

The method also produced "evenness" profiles for each of the six vernaculars included in the study, an aspect the researchers believe constitutes an overlooked factor in the survival of cultural works and artifacts. "It's basically a distribution of manuscripts over works," explained co-author Katarzyna Anna Kapitan, an Old Norse philologist at the University of Oxford, the University of Copenhagen, and the University of Iceland. "If you have a literary tradition that is even, it means that all literary works have more or less equal numbers of copies of manuscripts that preserve it. If it's uneven, then you will have work that is preserved in a lot of manuscripts and then some works that are preserved in just one or two." The latter works are less likely to survive.

Recently discovered fragment of a French manuscript containing the epic story of Anseÿs de Gascogne.

CC-BY University Library Antwerp

English medieval literature had a particularly high loss rate for works and manuscripts written in Old and Middle English, with just 7 percent of manuscripts surviving, amounting to the preservation of only 38 percent of chivalric and heroic works. "It might have something do with the different cultural status of English in that period," co-author Daniel Sawyer of the University of Oxford explained, referring to the French-speaking Norman Conquest of England in 1066. "For a significant part of the Middle Ages, French was [one of] the more prestigious spoken language in England. I suspect books containing romances or heroic stories in English tended to be mid- or small-sized and less impressive and therefore more prone to being recycled."

The team also looked at heroic stories written in Anglo-Norman, a specific variety of French that emerged in England after the Norman Conquest. Adding that data to the sample of English stories increased the estimated survival rate of manuscripts. "Perhaps the French and English traditions of stories from England form one linked tradition," said Sawyer. "This might be telling us about England's close cultural connections to the continent in this period, which would make sense, given that there was a lot of interchange between England and the continent [at the time]."

In contrast, Icelandic and Irish literature showed much higher survivorship rates: 77 percent for Icelandic stories and 81 percent for Irish tales. They had similar high evenness profiles. In the case of Iceland, Kapitan explained that the printing press arrived relatively late to Iceland, a good 100 years after it was introduced in other countries. Furthermore, that printing press was owned by the bishopric, which in turn determined what could be printed for the next two centuries. The bishopric would not have been particularly interested in romances and heroic narratives, so these works survived in the form of manuscripts that regular Icelanders copied by hand.

Per Driscoll, the situation in Ireland was a bit different, since the arrival of the printing press had virtually no effect on Irish literature. Those works weren't usually printed, but as with the Icelandic tradition, they continued to circulate in hand-written manuscript form. "Both the Icelanders and the Irish are mad about storytelling, and they both have very strong traditions of telling stories," Driscoll said. "I don't think any of us were particularly surprised that there should be such similarities between the Irish and Icelandic traditions. But it's nice to see this connection in black and white. It was very reassuring to see it confirmed by a completely different approach."

Fragment of Strengleikar repurposed to stiffen a bishop's miter.

CC-BY Suzanne Reitz, Den Arnamagnæanske Samling (Copenhagen).

So where did all those lost copies of chivalric and heroic works go? Some were no doubt lost in library fires. In the case of English works, Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries would have scattered many of those libraries. According to Sawyer, however, chivalric and historic stories would have been unlikely to find a place in monastic libraries.

Older manuscripts were often recycled, perhaps to support the binding of another manuscript or an early printed book. "Not all manuscripts were large and impressive objects," Sawyer said. "It's quite possible that the surviving body of evidence is biased towards large and impressive manuscripts because those might have been more likely to be preserved. But certainly there were plenty of manuscripts that were considered surplus to requirements and were used for other purposes."

For example, there are English accounts of people wrapping meat or candles in old manuscripts that had outlived their usefulness. Some manuscripts were even used as shoe liners. One of the more colorful examples was the use of a recycled medieval manuscript to stiffen a bishop's mitre, "which unbeknownst to him, presumably was an erotic tale translated from French," said Driscoll.

The group hopes to expand this approach to study literary traditions in Spain, Italy, or other places where chivalric romances flourished. And one big challenge requiring further research remains. "I do think this research touches on the preservation of culture," said Kestemont. "Now we have estimates of the size of the loss. What we don't have is a statistical explanation of why books were lost. We don't know what drives cultural loss. We're all thinking very hard now about how we can build a statistical model that also explains why certain things survived and others did not."

DOI: Science, 2022. 10.1126/science.abl7655 (About DOIs).

Listing image by CC-BY University Library Leiden

Study finds 90 percent of medieval chivalric and heroic manuscripts have been lost

Members of our species were in Western Europe around 54,000 years ago

Tue, 22 Feb 2022 00:09:20 +0000

At least one child left behind a baby tooth to prove it.

Slimak et al. 2022

According to a recent study, a child’s tooth unearthed from an old layer of a cave floor in Southern France belonged to a member of our species. If so, the tooth is now the oldest evidence of Homo sapiens living in Europe, and its presence means that our species shared Europe (or parts of it) with Neanderthals for at least 10,000 years. But other fossils from the site suggest that the Pleistocene tale of two species was more complex than we’ve realized.

Finding the first Homo sapiens in Europe

People lived at Grotte Mandrin, a rock shelter in Southern France’s Rhone Valley, for tens of thousands of years. Until roughly 54,000 years ago, those people were Neanderthals. In the oldest layers of cave floor sediment, archaeologists unearthed a child’s molar. Based on its shape and dimensions, the tooth once belonged to a Neanderthal child, which was exactly what paleoanthropologists would expect in a layer of sediment between 79,000 and 62,000 years old.

An adult Neanderthal molar from the next layer up, dated to between 69,000 and 56,000 years old, was also not startling to anthropologist Ludovic Slimak, of Université de Toulouse Jean Jaurès, and his colleagues. But a child’s molar unearthed from the next layer—somewhere between 56,800 and 51,700 years old—was a real surprise. The tooth’s size and shape was clearly not Neanderthal; when Slimak and his colleagues compared it to other upper second molars, they found that it fit best with very early members of our own species.

The baby tooth from Grotte Mandrin, lost in the dirt of the cave floor roughly 54,500 years ago, is now the oldest evidence of our species anywhere in Europe. (Here’s hoping the Pleistocene version of the Tooth Fairy rewarded the kid well for that particular tooth.) Previously, the oldest trace of Homo sapiens on the continent was a 46,000-year-old tooth and a few bone fragments from Bacho Kiro Cave in Bulgaria, unearthed in 2020.

Why we care

We’re interested in when our species got to Europe partly because the continent is one of the last places our species colonized (which is ironic in light of much more recent human history). Humans had been living in Australia for at least 10,000 years before the Grotte Mandrin child dropped its baby tooth. By then, only the Americas remained unexplored by humans.

While our species was the first hominin to reach Australia and the Americas, we weren’t the first in Europe. That’s another reason paleoanthropologists are interested in understanding exactly when, where, and how we first arrived on the continent. Understanding how long we and Neanderthals might have coexisted could shed some light on how the two species interacted and why the Neanderthals went extinct 40,000 years ago.

At Grotte Mandrin, fossils and artifacts in the layers of cave floor sediment that piled up after about 54,000 years ago tell us that our species didn’t move in and replace the Neanderthals in one fell swoop. Instead, Homo sapiens and Neanderthals seem to have traded places at the site a couple of times before the Neanderthals finally disappeared. That suggests that several waves of Homo sapiens ventured into Europe before one finally established itself.

The timing of those turnovers, and the kinds of artifacts each group left behind, hints at how the species may have interacted, at least in one area of Southern France. And Grotte Mandrin also suggests something about how our species first found its way to Europe.

From the sea, up the river, to the steppes

Grotte Mandrin overlooks the Rhone River, which is one of the largest rivers emptying into the Mediterranean Sea. The Rhone Valley also forms a natural corridor between the Mediterranean Coast and the steppes of Northern Europe. In other words, the people who lived at Grotte Mandrin were living along a perfect route for hunter-gatherers’ slow expansion from Africa, through the Levant, and into Europe.

Once our species got a firm foothold in the Levant, it’s easy to picture groups of humans gradually expanding along the coast of the Mediterranean, where the climate was relatively hospitable and food sources were plentiful. A large river like the Rhone would have offered access to freshwater fish and mussels, birds, and game for hunting, and it may have been very tempting for Pleistocene hunter-gatherers to follow the river inland and take shelter in places like Grotte Mandrin.

It’s probably no coincidence that some of the runners-up for the oldest Homo sapiens fossils in Europe are along the coastlines and rivers of Italy, or that Bacho Kiro Cave is roughly 160 kilometers from the coast, as the Pleistocene crow flies.

“Together, these data suggest that the Mediterranean basin, from the Levantine coast to the Rhodanian corridor, appears to have played a major role during the geographic expansion of modern humans in Western Eurasia,” wrote Slimak and his colleagues.

Trading Spaces: Pleistocene edition

Lush coastlines and river valleys, like the Rhone, weren’t just tempting to Homo sapiens. The ancestors of Neanderthals probably followed similar routes on their way into Europe around 400,000 years ago. When our species showed up, some competition for food, fishing spots, and shelter was probably inevitable. But we don’t know much about how that competition played out or whether violence or peaceful co-existence was more common.

We do know, of course, that our species was eventually the only hominin left standing; no Neanderthal fossils show up after about 40,000 years ago, and the Neanderthals’ trademark Mousterian style of stone tools vanishes around the same time. We still don’t know exactly how Neanderthals went extinct, but it’s reasonable to assume it was somehow our fault. It’s easy to picture a one-act play in which Homo sapiens arrive and take over Europe from the Neanderthals in one steady 10,000-year campaign.

But Grotte Mandrin and other sites tell us that in at least a few places, the story was much more complex. At a handful of sites in the Levant, fossils reveal that Homo sapiens moved into an area only to find themselves replaced by Neanderthals a few generations later. The population turnover eventually settled out in our species’ favor at the expense of the Neanderthals, but the Neanderthals seem to have won some local, short-term victories.

At Grotte Mandrin, Slimak and his colleagues found the first Homo sapiens baby tooth in a 56,800- to 51,700-year-old sediment layer called Layer E. It’s mingled with stone tools made in a style that has been found alongside fossils of our species at sites in the Levant, dating to about the same time. It’s pretty clear that at least for a little while, Homo sapiens lived here.

However, the next layer up, called Layer D because archaeologists are nothing if not creative, is somewhere between 54,950 and 50,050 years old—and the two molars and one tooth fragment it contains are from young Neanderthals. So are the stone tools, which are the Mousterian type made almost exclusively by Neanderthals. The next layer also contains Neanderthal teeth and Mousterian tools.

Stone tools of the kind associated with our species—this time a different type called proto-Aurignacian—don’t appear again at Grotte Mandrin until a sediment layer dating to 44,100 to 41,500 years ago. After that, the Neanderthals didn’t return.

We don’t know why

At Grotte Mandrin, as in the Levant, anthropologists currently can’t know whether Homo sapiens died out or moved on, leaving a cozy-looking site vacant for Neanderthals to move into, or whether the Neanderthals themselves killed or drove away the Homo sapiens. We can’t know what happened when the tables turned several generations later, either.

However, Slimak and his colleagues say that there was probably less than a year between the end of Neanderthal occupation here, in Layer F, and the time our species moved in, in Layer E. That makes it very likely that the two species actually met and interacted at the site, or somewhere very nearby.

To date the other layers at the site, Slimak and his colleagues did statistical analysis on the radiocarbon dates from more than 70,000 animal bones (mostly horse, bison, and deer) found in the rock shelter. The age ranges for a layer produced by that analysis layer tend to overlap with the estimated ages of the next layer. That suggests that the bones’ ages are so close that it’s hard to tell them apart statistically. And that, in turn, suggests that not much time may have elapsed between our species moving out and a new group of Neanderthals moving back in.

And again, that means potential for the two species to interact. Unfortunately, there’s not enough evidence at the site to tell us what those interactions were like. But Grotte Mandrin is the first place in Europe where archaeologists have found evidence that our species may have interacted directly with Neanderthals at a specific time and place.

No cultural exchange—this is France

One thing archaeologists can conclude from the stone tools left behind over the millennia at Grotte Mandrin is that at least in this one corner of Southern France, Neanderthals and Homo sapiens weren’t swapping tools or ideas (at least not when it comes to the stone tools, which are all that has survived tens of millennia in the ground).

The Neanderthal tools buried in the cave floor layers at Grotte Mandrin are Mousterian, both before and after the first group of Homo sapiens lived there. There’s no sign that Neanderthals at the site borrowed any tool types or tool-making techniques from the Homo sapiens they met.

On the other hand, the oldest Homo sapiens tools—perhaps used by the parents or relatives of the child whose tooth Slimak and his colleagues identified in Layer E—are what’s called Neronian. Archaeologists recognize this stone tool culture based on its makers’ apparent fondness for small, very standardized projectile points. (Neronian toolmakers first chipped blades from chunks of stone, then chipped tiny points from the stone blade. The method apparently produces remarkably similar points every time.)

Neronian stone tools are very similar to other tools unearthed at sites in the Levant, where they’ve been found alongside Homo sapiens fossils. And at Grotte Mandrin, they don’t show any signs of Neanderthal influence. Much later, when our species returned to the area sometime between 44,100 and 41,500 years ago, they used tools archaeologists call proto-Aurignacian, which also don’t seem to have borrowed any inspiration from the local Neanderthals.

In its way, the lack of cultural exchange (at least in any form that we can see tens of thousands of years later) at Grotte Mandrin actually emphasizes how differently things went in each place where the two species met. At Bacho Kiro, alongside the 46,000-year-old Homo sapiens fossils, archaeologists found a bone leatherworking tool called a lissoir. The oldest known lissoir came from a 51,000-year-old Neanderthal site in France, which means humans at Bacho Kiro may have adopted a Neanderthal invention.

The moral of the Grotte Mandrin story, then, is that however our species managed to replace the Neanderthals, it wasn’t really one big, sweeping event. Instead, it was a series of local events, and no two happened in exactly the same way.

Science Advances, 2022 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abj9496 (About DOIs).

Note: Throughout this story, and others, I’ve referred to “our species” or “Homo sapiens” rather than “humans” or “modern humans.” That’s because archaeological evidence tells us that like us, Neanderthals also cared for their sick and injured, buried their dead, and made art and jewelry. They were as human as we are.

Members of our species were in Western Europe around 54,000 years ago

GM seeks US approval to deploy self-driving car without a steering wheel

Tue, 22 Feb 2022 00:06:33 +0000

NHTSA to review safety of driverless Cruise Origin before possible 2023 deployment.

The Cruise Origin.

Cruise

GM's Cruise subsidiary has petitioned the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) for permission to put the driverless Cruise Origin into commercial service. Cruise announced the filing of its petition for approval on Friday, saying the car is "a zero-emission, shared, electric vehicle that has been purposefully designed from the ground up to operate without a human driver. This means it does not rely on certain human-centered features, like a steering wheel or a sun visor, to operate safely."

Cruise said its petition, filed together with parent company GM, "demonstrates how the Origin achieves safety objectives of existing standards and helps enable future AV [autonomous vehicle] regulations." The vehicles will be manufactured at GM's "Factory ZERO" in Michigan, Cruise's announcement said. "Production is expected to begin in late 2022 in Detroit at a GM factory with vehicles delivered in 2023, Cruise said Friday," according to Reuters.

The Cruise Origin interior.

Cruise

US law allows companies to seek temporary exemptions from safety rules to deploy up to 2,500 vehicles. GM previously sought an exemption for an earlier design based on the Chevy Bolt; the NHTSA took public comment on the request for an exemption in early 2019, and GM withdrew the petition in 2020.

Cruise argued that driverless taxi service using the Origin will benefit people who cannot drive or who don't have easy access to transportation. "The Origin will help expand mobility options for seniors, people who are blind or have low vision, and other communities that have traditionally faced barriers in access to reliable transportation," the company said.

Cruise taking sign-ups in San Francisco

Three weeks ago, Cruise started taking sign-ups for people who want to take a ride in a driverless car in San Francisco. That limited deployment was authorized by California's Department of Motor Vehicles. It uses the self-driving car based on the Chevy Bolt, as the Cruise Origin hasn't been deployed yet.

Alphabet's Waymo division began providing its self-driving ride-hailing service in San Francisco in August 2021. Waymo was already offering the service in the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona. Several other companies are planning driverless cars as well.

GM is the majority owner of Cruise, which also has investments from SoftBank, Honda, Microsoft, and Walmart. Here's another view of the Cruise Origin from Friday's announcement:

The Cruise Origin.

GM seeks US approval to deploy self-driving car without a steering wheel

Gene-Edited Brain Organoids Are Unlocking the Secrets of Autism

Mon, 21 Feb 2022 18:39:51 +0000

Hundreds of genes have been linked to autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a complicated range of conditions affecting the behavior, social development, and communication of tens of millions people worldwide. But teasing out exactly what effect those genes have and how they relate to ASD has been devilishly difficult. “Nobody can study an actual human brain as it develops,” says Paola Arlotta, a professor of stem cell and regenerative biology at Harvard University. But a new approach based on growing clumps of brain cells in the lab is now yielding promising results.

Arlotta and her colleagues at Harvard and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT have been working with organoids—three-dimensional clumps of brain tissue grown from stem cells—usually just a few millimeters across. When organoids are left to grow, they start to develop different types of brain cells, and begin to organize into primitive networks that mimic some, but not all, of the architecture of the human brain.

Organoids grown from stem cells donated by people with ASD have been used to study the condition in the past. But Arlotta and her team went a step further, as they describe in a paper published recently in the journal Nature. They created genetically modified organoids of the human cerebral cortex, each with a mutation in one of three genes thought to be linked to autism.

The aim was to tease out exactly how these differences in DNA might contribute to the changes in brain structure and behavior that are the hallmarks of the condition. Arlotta and her collaborators began with a gene called CHD8, and they started to see the differences earlier than expected. “It was clear just by looking at the flask from the outside that the ‘mutant’ organoids were larger,” says Arlotta. That echoes a previous finding that some people with ASD have macrocephaly—a condition that means their brains are larger in volume.

After growing the organoids, the first stage of the analysis involved sequencing the RNA of the neurons that had grown in the organoids and comparing it to that of cells from non-modified organoids developed from the same source of stem cells. (RNA is a messenger molecule that carries the instructions from the DNA to the parts of the cell that execute those instructions.) By combining RNA sequencing with information on the types of proteins being formed by the organoids, the researchers were able to determine what types of brain cells were being developed, and the maturity of those cells.

Straight away, Arlotta and her colleagues noticed something different. The timing of cell development in the modified organoids seemed to be off compared to those with the “normal” version of the gene. “We had a eureka moment when we did the first gene and found that there were two populations of neurons that were developing with the wrong timing—too fast or slow compared to the rest of the cell,” Arlotta says.

This mixture of cells—some more mature than they should be, some less—can cause big differences in brain development as the cells attempt to “wire” together into networks later on. “The trouble with neurons being more mature is that then they are out of step,” explains Deep Adhya, a research associate at the University of Cambridge who studies autism and brain development using stem cells. “If neuron development is out of step the brain will develop differently.”

That’s one theory for the cognitive differences seen in people with autism. “There are indications that the balance between bottom-up sensory, and top-down modulation, may be shifted,” says Matthew Belmonte, who researches neurophysiology and behavior in autism at Bangalore’s Com DEALL Trust and Nottingham Trent University. In other words, some people with autism may find it difficult to filter the information coming in—which could be caused by underlying differences in brain structure like the ones Arlotta saw in the organoids.

After working on CHD8, Arlotta and her team grew two more types of organoids, this time focussing on two other genes that had been linked to the condition: ARID1B and SUV420H1. Although these genes do different things, they had what Arlotta calls a “convergent” effect on brain development—like CHD8, mutations in these genes also changed the timing of cell development in the organoids, and affected the balance between excitatory and inhibitory neurons. “A lot of genes that ultimately cause the disease may act in different ways: They converge not in terms of the genes they use, but the pathway they affect,” she says.

To complicate matters further, when Arlotta and her team changed the genetic context—put the same genetic mutations in stem cells taken from different donors—they found different effects on brain development. “The strength is modified by the context,” she says. “It’s really the entirety of the genome that matters.”

Autism is a spectrum of different and overlapping traits, and this work confirms the suspicion that its genetic causes might be a spectrum too: different genes overlapping in different ways, and interacting with the rest of an individual’s genetic profile to cause different degrees and types of changes. A broad set of genetic variants creates a narrow set of changes in brain function, and these go on to have a broad range of effects—and it’s only by exploring that convergence that we can get answers, Belmonte argues. “If you try to define things genetically, you’re really hacking at the roots, and if you look at narrowly defined phenotypes, you’re hacking at the branches,” he says.

Arlotta hopes the work with organoids will help scientists build a better picture of the processes underlying ASD, and maybe start to divide that spectrum into a smaller number of “buckets” that could inform treatments and therapies, or just help our understanding of autism more generally. The three genes this study looked at all led to changes to the balance of excitatory and inhibitory neurons, a breakthrough that might make it possible for pharmaceutical companies to develop drugs that would address this balance in severe cases. “Maybe some genes converge on one process and some on another,” Arlotta says. “But if we can boil down this super complex condition into a few types, that would be amazing for therapeutics.”

The research also proves the worth of organoids as an experimental platform, says Arlotta. She describes them as “a new venue of discovery” for studying the growth of the human brain, and says this study highlights the importance of timing as neurons grow and connect. “Development is a symphony,” Arlotta says. “It’s like going to a concert and all of a sudden the violins are off-beat relative to the other instruments. The music you get at the end is very different.”

Gene-Edited Brain Organoids Are Unlocking the Secrets of Autism

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Researchers want to create “universal donor” lungs

Sun, 20 Feb 2022 19:50:21 +0000

Changing the blood type of donated organs could shorten transplant wait times.

In a plastic-domed case at the Toronto General Hospital Research Institute, researchers gave a pair of lungs a new identity. When the lungs first arrived in the lab, they were from someone with type A blood, meaning that there were certain tiny markers, called antigens, attached to the lung tissue and blood cells. But when the lungs left the lab, those antigens were almost entirely gone. In just one hour, the researchers had effectively transformed the lungs into type O.

“This is absolutely amazing,” says Aizhou Zhang, a researcher in the Cypel Lab at the University of Toronto and first author on a paper published this week in Science Translational Medicine that describes the transformation. The experiment is an important step toward giving more people access to life-saving organ transplants. More than 100,000 people in the United States are currently waiting for organs, but often those most in need can’t get help because of one big problem: their blood type doesn’t match the organs that are available.

Zhang works in a lab run by Marcelo Cypel, lead author on the paper and a thoracic surgeon who’s spent years figuring out ways to increase the number of lungs available for transplants. One of his previous innovations was creating ex vivo lung perfusion (EVLP), that plastic-domed apparatus in which this study’s lungs got their new identity.

The device allows doctors to feed donated lungs nutrients and oxygen in a protected environment, which improves their transplant viability. Unlike organs that are put on ice after being harvested from a donor and then go straight to the operating room, lungs inside the EVLP warm up, and their metabolism restarts before they're transplanted. Doctors can then reassess the lungs’ function and use EVLP to administer drugs that improve the quality of the organ, saving slightly damaged lungs that might have been ineligible for use before. “We put the lung back to life on this machine,” says Cypel, who thought this technology could also be used to modify the organ, transforming it into one that can be received by a person of any blood type.

There are four major blood type groups: A, B, O, and AB. Think of type O as the base model. It has no antigens that attach to it. The A and B blood types each have extra antigens that attach to that core, and AB blood has both types of antigens.

For an organ transplant to work, the donor and recipient have to have compatible blood types. If someone with type O or B blood receives a donation from someone with type A blood, for example, those A antigens will trigger the recipient’s immune system to attack the transplanted organ, which is perceived as a foreign invader. This process, called rejection, can be deadly.

But because type O blood has no antigens, people with O are considered “universal donors.” Their blood and tissue won’t set off an immune response for recipients of any blood type.

Increasing the number of universal donors, Cypel hoped, would make more lungs available to more people and make the process more equitable. “Today we have a separate list of A patients, B patients, O patients, and we don’t necessarily transplant [to] the sickest one,” he says. And even if a pair of donor lungs match the person’s blood type, they might be the wrong size for them. Too small and they won’t provide enough oxygen. Too big and they won’t fit correctly into the chest.

Even worse, only about 20 percent of donor lungs are healthy enough to be used. Some are too damaged from being on prolonged ventilation, others are infected, or the donor is simply too far away for their organs to get to the patient in time. But Cypel thinks that technologies like the EVLP and blood type conversion can improve transplant rates dramatically. “Right now in North America we do about 2,500 lung transplants a year. I think we could double that number,” he says.

To test their idea, Zhang, Cypel, and their collaborators worked with Stephen Withers, a chemist at the University of British Columbia, to identify a specific set of molecular tools. Withers tested thousands of enzymes in the human gut and found two, FpGalNAc deacetylase and FpGalactosaminidase, that normally help the body create energy by digesting sugar antigens on the gut wall. Those sugars are similar to the A antigens, which means these enzymes are uniquely suited to performing a highly specific task: working like molecular editors, they track down these antigens on cells, slice them off, and leave behind that core O structure.

Using a set of donated lungs that had once belonged to a person with type A blood, Zhang and Cypel administered a small dose of those enzymes to the tissue. Then the team performed an antibody stain, which marked the remaining antigens so they could see how successful the enzymes had been. Within an hour, over 90 percent of those A antigens had been chopped away. After four hours, 97 percent were gone.

Next, the team assessed the lungs using the same parameters a transplant team would use, evaluating factors like airway pressure, blood gasses, and lung inflammation. Despite their transformation, the lungs were healthy. “To have something work so well in such a short amount of time at a dose that’s feasible—it’s absolutely mindblowing that it happened,” says Zhang.

This study is just a proof of concept, meant to show that such a feat is possible, cost-effective, and takes effect quickly enough to work in a real-life transplant scenario. But they didn’t try transplanting the tissue, and they focused their work on only the A antigen. (The team is currently looking for the right enzymes to perform that same search-and-snip function on B antigens.) One question is whether the body will immediately reject the modified lung. Another is whether those A antigens will regrow and trigger that dangerous immune response when they do.

“This research and the results reported are particularly important, since graft diseases caused by antibodies directed against the donor are among the most difficult to treat,” says Marilia Cascalho, an immunologist at the University of Michigan who was not involved with the study.

But, she adds, even if the antigens do regrow, there’s some evidence that the body will accept the organ. Already, research in kidneys suggests that the body can adjust to using organs from a different blood type if doctors suppress the recipient’s immune system before and immediately after surgery, giving the body time to adjust. “It is possible that if this treatment is followed by a slow return of the blood group antigens, that the organ will ‘adapt’ to those antibodies—a process called accommodation,” says Cascalho. She adds that being able to treat the organ would be better than weakening the immune system of an already-sick patient. “This would be a major advance in solid organ transplantation,” she says.

Before the new approach can advance to human clinical trials, the next step will be to test it on animals. The team is trying to find the right animal models and is working on experiments in mice and pigs. Cypel says they’re also considering transplanting altered lungs into someone who is brain dead but being kept alive on life support, similar to a procedure done at New York University to test the feasibility of transplanting pig organs.

Albert Rizzo, chief medical officer for the American Lung Association, says it will be hard to assess how well these modified lungs work until they’re actually transplanted into human patients. “There may be lungs that do better than others, depending on how the lungs were prior to the process,” he says. “Time is going to tell.”

Rizzo points out that a changed blood type will just be one factor that surgeons consider, alongside issues like whether the lung is the right size and whether the patient is too sick to wait for a better one to come along. “You’re weighing the benefit of getting the lung sooner against the likelihood of rejection,” he says. Surgeons want to make sure they’re getting the best lungs possible before they subject ill patients to an invasive and risky procedure.

Still, he’s hopeful that this process will make more lungs viable for transplant. “I do think this is very promising research,” he says.

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

Researchers want to create “universal donor” lungs