News: General News

Can Super-Fast Battery Charging Fix the Electric Car?

Wed, 09 Feb 2022 19:58:08 +0000

The dominant trend in EV batteries is that bigger is better. Maybe with speedier charging, automakers could do more with less.

Issam Mudawar, a professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, has been solving heat-related emergencies for 37 years. They often follow a pattern. Anyone who dreams up a supercomputer, or new avionics for a fighter jet, will eventually face the same problem: Fancy electronics, packed with trillions of transistors, generate tremendous amounts of heat. So the dreamers come to Mudawar, the guy who studies thermal management for a living. “It always seems that cooling is the last thing people think about,” he says.

A couple of years ago, Mudawar was approached by Ford with a more humble problem: a charging cable. Like other automakers, Ford is in a race to deliver electric vehicles that power up quickly. But there’s a problem with moving electrons faster: It brings the heat. If the goal is to charge up your electrical vehicle in, say, five minutes, that extra current meeting resistance means temperature-related problems inside the battery and out. The cord, in particular, becomes a superheated bottleneck.

Mudawar has been solving a problem that doesn’t really exist yet. The US Department of Energy has defined so-called “extreme” fast charging as adding 200 miles of range within 10 minutes. This is reachable with existing charging stations and cables, the capabilities of which batteries have yet to max out, in part because of their own heating concerns. Mudawar’s work meanwhile anticipates a future when filling up a car with electrons can perhaps even rival the convenience of the gas pump.

Recently, the trend in electric vehicles is that bigger is better. Automakers now target 400 miles of range as an antidote to “range anxiety,” while at the same time they are electrifying staples of American roads—Chevy Silverados, Ford F-150s, Hummers. Massive cars plus massive range requirements mean totally giant batteries. Unsurprisingly, this comes with a trade-off: Charging up those big batteries takes extra time. The fastest option might be getting a full charge in 30 or 40 minutes from state-of-the-art highway chargers, which account for about 5 percent of EV fill-ups, according to the DOE. Mostly, though, these cars are designed for drivers who can plug in at home and let that massive battery charge up all night.

Combining the two is difficult, explains Ahmad Pesaran, an energy storage expert at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. A phrase like “five-minute charging” means something very different if you’re charging a 200-kilowatt-hour battery, like the one found in a Hummer, versus the 40-kwH battery in a Nissan Leaf. Those big batteries need far more energy, and they have structural barriers that make charging itself hard to do quickly. That will likely require new chargers and battery strategies, fancy new cables, maybe even upgrades to the transmission lines that power the chargers so they can handle a massive spike in demand. “I question the wisdom of why we need to have 500-mile range in an electric car and also want fast charging in five minutes,” he says. “Where do you want to go? How many times do you need to do that?” But, he adds, it might just be inevitable.

Currently, most cars can’t take advantage of the most powerful charging stations we already have, says Chao-Yang Wang, a battery researcher at Penn State University. The reasons are found mostly within the battery itself, most notably a phenomenon called lithium plating. When batteries charge up, lithium ions nestle inside an anode made of graphite. In an effort to pack more energy into batteries, this material has been engineered to be pretty thick, so it can hold more ions. But this becomes an obstacle for charging. As the current gets more intense, those ions can’t get inside the thick anode material fast enough. So instead they build up on its surface as lithium metal—they plate. And once that happens, there’s no going back. The battery gradually loses access to those ions, and so loses its ability to charge up fully.

A variety of labs and startups have developed potential solutions to that problem, including changing the anode to silicon or lithium metal, instead of graphite. Wang’s solution, which was published last year in Nature Energy, is to add more heat to the equation. A thin strip of nickel foil inside the battery quickly cooks the battery up 60 degrees Celsius—a temperature at which the lithium ions move more quickly to find their seats in the anode. This allows a higher current to flow into the battery without causing plating, shaving off valuable minutes from charging.

Wang envisions 10-minute charging of a battery that’s between 40 and 50 kW. That’s in line with the DOE’s extreme charging definition—plenty of energy to get 200 miles of range in an efficient car, though about half the energy stored inside a top-of-the-line Tesla, or a quarter of the battery power of the upcoming Silverado. And to Eric Rountree, head of business development for EC Power, a company commercializing Wang’s technology, that’s not a bad thing. “One of the concerns we have is that where the current EV landscape is headed is antithetical to where we should go,” he says. “We want better utilization of renewable energy.” That means cars that put less strain on the grid, and that use fewer natural resources in their batteries.

Elsewhere in the world, shorter-range vehicles are already popular, even without fast charging. He points to the example of China, where miniature EVs powered by smaller batteries are regularly best sellers, and automakers like Tesla have made strides investing in iron phosphate batteries that pack somewhat less energy but require fewer scarce materials like cobalt and nickel than the most range-optimized designs.

In the US, there may also be an audience for lower-range vehicles, especially with fast-charging in the picture. “People in apartments don't have chargers in their home,” says Pesaran of NREL. “They’d definitely like to have a station that gets them charged up in five or 10 minutes.” You take your EV somewhere convenient—the converted gas station around the corner from your house, or on the way to work, and fill it up with electrons.

Jessika Trancik, a professor studying energy systems at MIT, says range will likely remain of interest to EV buyers. Whatever kinds of fast-charging technologies are developed, it will take time to build them out. The important thing is to be strategic about where they’re installed. “One of the reasons you don’t want to install currently available fast chargers everywhere is the cost,” she says. She says faster charging shouldn’t mean stinting on investment in slower charging that’s available to all—like street-side chargers for apartment dwellers. That’s good for widening access to EVs, and it’s likely good for the grid too.

Pesaran suspects that automakers will keep pushing for more extreme charging speeds—more range in less time—given the way electric car range and charging capabilities are being marketed to overcome skeptical buyers. Which is why Mudawar’s heat-tolerant charging cable may matter. His lab approached the overheating problem with what’s known as “two-phase cooling.” Typical systems rely on liquid flowing through an insulating layer that picks up heat from the charging cable. His design is similar, except that it incorporates boiling—just a little of it, at the meeting point between the coolant and the cable. These tiny little bubbles, which are allowed to recondense rather than being released as steam, translate into enormous levels of cooling, allowing the cable to handle roughly five times the current of a state-of-the-art Tesla Supercharger.

But it’s still a prototype confined to a lab station, and to a study that was published in the International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer last year. Mudawar hasn’t tested the cable’s current-carrying abilities on cars yet—the batteries aren’t ready for that type of current yet. One issue is the heat imbalance such an immense charging capability creates. Fast-charging a big car battery will generate lots of heat within minutes. But it will use that energy to power the motor at a much slower pace—over hours or potentially days—generating far less heat. So is it worth putting a bunch of new cooling components on a car just for that five to 10 minutes of charging? Already, most of the weight of a battery pack is not battery cells, but rather the packaging, electronics, and cooling equipment.

There are other possible solutions, Mudawar points out. Some people are exploring the idea of injecting coolant into the vehicle during charging, chilling the battery pack while it charges without adding weight to the car. But that will require a rethink of how cars are designed. That, along with everything from the batteries to cables, plugs, and transmission lines will need to be rethought. It all needs to hold up to the heat, notes Mudawar, who recently announced a new center at Purdue for thermal management of fast charging. “The technologies of today will not be capable of tackling those new requirements,” he says. In other words, don’t save the cooling problem for last.

Can Super-Fast Battery Charging Fix the Electric Car?

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Scientists taught a cockatoo named Figaro to combine tools and “golf” for reward

Wed, 09 Feb 2022 19:52:41 +0000

New findings could shed light on how humans evolved ability to design and use tools.

Figaro the cockatoo displays his "primate level" combination tool-using skills by playing a cockatoo version of "golf," and choosing the correct hole for a cashew reward. Two other cockatoos figured out different tool-using techniques to achieve the same result. (Goffin Lab)

Several years ago, we introduced Ars readers to Figaro, a precocious male Goffin's cockatoo kept in captivity and cared for by scientists in the "Goffin lab" at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna. Figaro showed a surprising ability to manipulate single tools to maneuver a tasty nut out of a box. Other cockatoos who repeatedly watched Figaro's performance were also able to do so. Now, Figaro and his cockatoo cronies are back, having learned how to combine tools—in this case, a stick and a ball—to play a rudimentary form of "golf," according to a new paper published in the journal Scientific Reports.

As Ars' Science Editor John Timmer explained in 2012, tool use was once thought to be one of the defining features of humans, but examples of it were eventually observed in primates and other mammals. Then birds were observed using tools in the wild, although this behavior was limited to corvids (crows and jays). Parrots, by contrast, have mostly been noted for their linguistic skills, and there has only been limited evidence that they use anything resembling a tool in the wild. Primarily, they seem to use external objects to position nuts while feeding.

Then along came Figaro. Figaro was playing with a stone one day in the Goffin Lab at the University of Vienna's Department of Cognitive Biology, led by Alice Auersperg. He accidentally dropped the stone behind a metal divider.

The wily bird couldn't retrieve it using just his claw, so he found a piece of bamboo and tried to use it to push the stone to within reach. He failed, but the researchers were sufficiently intrigued that they decided to test Figaro by placing a delicious nut on the other side of the metal screen.

Scientists taught Figaro and two of his fellow cockatoos to "golf," revealing their ability to combine tools.

Goffin Lab

A stick retrieved from the floor was too short to retrieve the nut, so Figaro splintered off a longer piece of wood from the enclosure's wooden base. This time, he succeeded in pulling the nut close enough that he could use his beak to grab it. In subsequent trials, Figaro used different types of tools—modifying some of them—to successfully retrieve the nut.

The researchers concluded that tool use is within the cognitive capacity of this species, even though the birds have never been observed using tools in the wild. They argued that although we tend to think of tool use as a distinctive mental capacity, it might be more accurate to consider it as a possible outcome of having some minimum level of what the researchers call "physical intelligence." Goffin’s cockatoos don't normally exercise this capacity, but under the right circumstances, it can be uncovered.

Two years later, the same team was back with fresh insights: other male cockatoos who watched Figaro's innovative use of tools to retrieve a nut began to catch on and exhibit similar behavior. They didn't exactly mimic Figaro's approach—he tended to rake the food closer, while the others used the stick as a lever to flick the food to the edge of the cage—but they definitely began to obtain the treat.

Sometimes the birds would lose a tool, leaving it out of reach inside the cage. In that case, they'd reach for another tool but wouldn't use it to retrieve the food—instead, they'd retrieve the first tool, then use that to get the food. One individual went three layers deep into this sort of recursion.

Basic apparatuses used in the new study: (A) Pre-experience apparatus with two insertion tubes; (B) Test Apparatus with frontal grid, lateral slits, and the central insertion hole.

A.J. Osuna-Mascaro et al., 2022

In subsequent experiments, one of the other males spontaneously started making tools by pulling splinters off the block of wood after just a few sessions. The third only needed to see Figaro perform a single tool manufacturing demo before he also picked up the habit. The results suggested that learning tool creation is much easier than learning tool use, at least once the utility of a tool had been demonstrated.

This was followed by a 2020 study comparing the captive-bred cockatoos' problem-solving abilities with those of wild birds caught in Tanimbar. The birds were presented with a series of 20 different tasks they could choose to complete in exchange for a nut reward. While the wild birds were less likely to participate in the tasks, those that did were able to solve the problems at the same rate as the captive birds.

Other experiments have shown that the cockatoos are capable of a measure of self-control and delaying gratification. This is evidenced by their ability to resist the temptation to eat a pecan nut for as long as 80 seconds in exchange for a tastier cashew reward, in a bird-centric version of the famous Stanford Marshmallow experiment.

Distinctive techniques and use of the tongue during insertions for the three study subjects: (A) Figaro, (B) Fini, and (C) Pipin.

A.J. Osuna-Mascaro et al., 2022

The Goffin Lab scientists next decided to see if Figaro the Very Good Bird and his fellow cockatoos could "level up" their problem-solving and tool-using skills. The ability to use compound tools (like a stick and a rock) is the essence of human recreational games like hockey, cricket, baseball, and golf.

So the latest version of the experiment essentially created a cockatoo version of "golf." This time, the birds had to manipulate a small ball through a hole in the closed box and then use a stick to push the ball to one side of the box. This triggered a trapdoor mechanism, releasing a yummy cashew nut as a reward. Completing the task required combining tools (the ball and the stick)—a cognitive ability mostly observed in primates to date.

Figaro and two other cockatoos successfully solved the problem, thereby demonstrating their capacity for tool innovation. “One of the most amazing aspects of the process was to observe how these animals each invented their own individual technique in how to grip the stick and hit the ball, sometimes with astonishing dexterity," said co-author Antonio Osuna-Mascaró of the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna. "One of the birds operated the stick while holding it between the mandibles, one between the beak tip and tongue, and one with his claw, similar to a primate.”

Co-author Antonio Jose Osuna Mascaro with two of the Goffin's cockatoos used in the new study.

University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna/Zenger

The Goffin Lab's research efforts are part of a wider interdisciplinary project that aims to compare the innovation and problem-solving skills of cockatoos with human children. How the cockatoos are using spatial relationships with regard to tool innovation is of particular interest, hopefully yielding insight into the evolution of technology.

“Although children are very good at using tools and technology in their lives (think spoons and iPads), our research has shown that young children often find it hard to invent novel solutions to problems involving tool use," said co-author Sarah Beck of the University of Birmingham. "In fact, children under eight can really struggle to solve problems that cockatoos can master. So while this study is the first to show that cockatoos can coordinate tools to solve a problem, it also feeds into our ongoing work with children. Tempting as it might be [to speculate], it’s not simply a question of who is the cleverest: children or cockatoos. Instead, comparing such different species helps us understand how humans and some other species develop impressive technological skills.”

DOI: Scientific Reports, 2022. 10.1038/s41598-022-05529-9 (About DOIs).

Listing image by Goffin Lab

Scientists taught a cockatoo named Figaro to combine tools and “golf” for reward

Five seconds, 59 megajoules: A new record for tokamak fusion

Wed, 09 Feb 2022 19:46:48 +0000

The Joint European Torus takes a major step in preparing for work at ITER.

The interior of JET, configured as a scale model for ITER, overlaid with an image of a plasma present in the tokamak during experiments.

EUROfusion

On Wednesday, the EUROfusion consortium announced that the Joint European Torus (JET), located near Oxford in the UK, had set a new record for released energy. Over the course of a five-second "pulse," 59 megajoules of energy were released, double the previous record for tokamak fusion set at JET in 1997.

Despite the impressive numbers, the results are still well short of the break-even point where the fusion energy released would match the energy input required to trigger the fusion. Still, the work provides an important validation of the approach being taken at the next major fusion project, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER.

Two ways to fuse

Fusion takes place when atomic nuclei are brought close enough together that they merge, creating a heavier element. It's the process that powers stars, and it could produce vast amounts of energy from small amounts of hydrogen isotopes if we could reproduce the temperatures and pressures found in stars here on Earth. So far, we've taken two main approaches to the process.

In the first, many high-powered lasers deliver an extremely intense burst of energy that crushes and heats a small pellet of hydrogen isotopes, producing a short burst of fusion. This is the approach taken at the National Ignition Facility, which has put up some impressive results in terms of the amount of energy produced. But the released energy comes in an extremely short burst, after which the lasers need to be re-cycled and the target needs to be replaced. By the time the system is ready to create another burst of fusion, all the heat generated by the first has dissipated. It's not clear how to create the sort of sustained release of energy that will be needed for something like a power plant.

The alternative approach involves creating a high-energy hydrogen plasma and then using intense magnetic fields to contain and compress it. This is generally done in a toroidal structure called a tokamak, an approach developed in the Soviet Union (though there are alternative structures). While it doesn't produce the same sort of burst of fusion, a tokamak contains a lot more fuel and has the potential to sustain fusion reactions for long enough to extract useful energy.

Right now, the most powerful tokamak on the planet is JET, which holds the record for highest output: 22 megajoules, set during an experimental run in 1997. In recent years, JET has been used as a testbed for the technologies and materials that will go into ITER, a much larger tokamak that is expected to finally reach break-even and pave the way for the first demonstration fusion power plant.

As such, successes at JET provide important indications that ITER is likely to achieve the milestones expected of it.

World records

While it's possible to run sustained reactions in tokamaks, JET isn't large enough to reach this sort of stable state. Instead, it is being operated in five-second pulses in which it creates conditions where fusion can start and then ramps back down again. This setup allows researchers to test materials for the tokamak and different configurations of its magnets to determine how they affect this pulse of fusion. Since the design is largely similar to that of ITER, these pulses can give real-world data to validate the models we have of what will happen inside ITER once it is switched on.

And that's why this energy milestone is important. Set up to reflect the design of ITER, and with the mix of deuterium and tritium fuel that will be used there, JET made the largest sustained fusion reaction yet.

"The record—and more importantly, the things we’ve learned about fusion under these conditions and how it fully confirms our predictions—shows that we are on the right path to a future world of fusion energy," said Tony Donné, the program manager at EUROfusion, which runs JET. "If we can maintain fusion for five seconds, we can do it for five minutes and then five hours as we scale up our operations in future machines."

After years of delays, ITER is now expected to begin experimental runs in 2025. Unlike JET, ITER is expected to go well past the break-even point and host self-sustaining fusion reactions in which the energy produced remains above the energy needed to control the reaction.

Five seconds, 59 megajoules: A new record for tokamak fusion

A geomagnetic storm may have destroyed up to 40 SpaceX Starlink satellites

Wed, 09 Feb 2022 19:44:42 +0000

Elon Musk's SpaceX Starlink has published an update regarding the satellites launched earlier this month. The update notes that the company may lose up to 40 Starlink satellites.

According to Starlink, the cluster of satellites launched on February 3 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida met with a geomagnetic storm that increased the drag. This increased drag meant that as much as 40 satellites will not make it to orbit and will burn out in the atmosphere.

Unfortunately, the satellites deployed on Thursday were significantly impacted by a geomagnetic storm on Friday. These storms cause the atmosphere to warm and atmospheric density at our low deployment altitudes to increase. In fact, onboard GPS suggests the escalation speed and severity of the storm caused atmospheric drag to increase up to 50 percent higher than during previous launches.

The company notes that it is monitoring the satellites and has altered the trajectory so they will "fly edge-on (like a sheet of paper) to minimize drag". Furthermore, the team at Starlink is working closely with the Space Force’s 18th Space Control Squadron and LeoLabs to track the satellites using ground radar.

At the same time, the company noted that the deorbit procedure will pose zero collision risk to other satellites in orbit and to the people on the ground as it expects the debris to burn out upon atmospheric reentry.

Preliminary analysis show the increased drag at the low altitudes prevented the satellites from leaving safe-mode to begin orbit raising maneuvers, and up to 40 of the satellites will reenter or already have reentered the Earth’s atmosphere. The deorbiting satellites pose zero collision risk with other satellites and by design demise upon atmospheric reentry—meaning no orbital debris is created and no satellite parts hit the ground.

The news comes as astronomers across the globe protest against the Starlink network. According to a recent study, Starlink satellites are leaving streaks across the deep space images captured by astronomers and can block scientists from identifying dangerous asteroids. The International Astronomical Union has founded a “Centre for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky from Satellite Constellation Interference” to protest against the influx of Starlink satellites.

A geomagnetic storm may have destroyed up to 40 SpaceX Starlink satellites

New spinal implant gets paralyzed people up and walking

Tue, 08 Feb 2022 20:28:45 +0000

Software modeling and feedback key to a computer-controlled stride.

Two formerly paralyzed individuals go for a stroll in Lausanne, Switzerland.

EPFL

Spinal cord injuries are life-altering, as they prevent the transmission of nerve impulses past the point of injury. That means no sensory inputs make it to the brain, and no signals from the brain make it to the muscles normally controlled by the brain. But improvements in our understanding of neurobiology have raised the hope that we can eventually restore some control over paralyzed limbs.

Some of these efforts focus purely on nerve cells, attempting to get them to grow through the damage at the site of injury and restore a functional spinal cord. Others attempt to use electronics to bypass the injury entirely. Today, there was very good news for the electronics-focused effort: researchers have designed a spinal implant that can control the leg muscles of paralyzed individuals, allowing them to walk with assistance within hours of the implant being activated.

Skipping the brain

Much of the spinal cord is composed of long extensions made by nerve cells, termed axons. These axons allow nerve impulses to travel long distances, which is necessary for information to travel back and forth to the brain. Sensory inputs, like pain in your elbow or tickling of your feet, ride axons up the spinal cord into the brain. The brain in turn sends signals back down the spinal cord, controlling your breathing or moving your arms.

Injuries to the spinal cord can physically sever these axons, disrupting this communication. Cells have the ability to regrow axons in many cases, but in the spine, heavy scar tissue develops that blocks this process, meaning lost communication may never be restored. In some cases, the injury is partial, and the remaining function can be re-trained to work with the function that's left. But in other cases, the damage is severe enough that very little nerve function is retained, and paralysis is permanent.

Or at least permanent in the absence of medical intervention. Many researchers are working to find ways to limit or eliminate the scar tissue and induce regrowth of the severed axons. But this new research doesn't involve any of this.

An alternative to this type of biological repair is what you might consider an electronic bypass. In its most sophisticated form, this would involve an implant that registers neural activity, located either in the brain or in the spinal cord closer to the brain than the injury. This is then paired with some sort of hardware—potentially another implant—on the far side of the injury that stimulates the nerves based on the information read by the other implant.

A less sophisticated version of this is to simply have pre-programmed behaviors you want to control, such as the leg movements involved in walking. That is the approach used here. But, as will become very clear, "less sophisticated" leaves a whole lot of space for some very sophisticated work.

A model spine

To control walking, the axons that bring nerve signals to the leg muscles have to exit the spine; decades of research have identified the specific bundles of nerve fibers in the lower spine where the axons make their exit. Different bundles ennervate different muscle groups, allowing the potential for fairly precise control. But so far, that potential has been unrealized.

The team started by looking in detail at these bundles in 27 different individuals (some of them cadavers, the rest CT or MRI scans) and found that there's a fair amount of variability in the details of the spine's structure, although the size of the nerve bundles doesn't change much. But the researchers were able to use this data to build a model of the spine and virtually experiment with electrode location and size in order to see which nerve bundles they would stimulate. This eventually led to the design of an implant with 16 individual electrodes that should allow control over which nerve bundles were activated.

At this point, the three volunteers for this trial, each of whom had lost use of their legs, got involved. They were placed in an MRI tube to monitor neural activity while their legs were moved. The movement caused their leg muscles to send signals back to the spine regarding their altered tension, setting off activity in the nerve bundle that enervated the muscle. Reading this activity using the MRI allowed the researchers to figure out which nerve bundles were associated with specific muscles.

Using the mix of anatomical and activity data that resulted, the researchers built a computer model for each of the three individuals. They then used this model to control the stimulation of the leg muscles, testing out different potential motions while the subjects were lying down and then fine-tuning the model based on any unwanted movements that resulted. Overall, this process took about an hour.

The results were pretty astonishing. Prior to activating the implant, none of the three participants could initiate any sort of muscle activity when attempting to take a step. The same day that the model was trained, all of them could take steps on a treadmill if they were supported. The model was able to generate the right series of currents to stimulate the leg muscles appropriately.

Out for a walk and more

With three days of fine-tuning, the participants were able to walk around a room if given sufficient support. Eventually, they were able to stand unaided and walk supported only by a walker—their legs were controlled via an implant in their abdomen, which responded to triggers on the handles of the walker. One was even able to go up stairs.

Separate programs were also developed that allowed them to ride recumbent bicycles or to paddle a kayak.

One striking thing is that two of them actually regained the ability to exert a bit of voluntary muscle control in their formerly paralyzed limbs. Apparently, a bit of weak connectivity was still present but unable to provide a signal strong enough to trigger muscle activity. With extended activity, those weak connections were gradually strengthened, providing a complete pathway from brain to muscle.

Obviously, this is a pretty intensive medical intervention. But most people with spinal damage face years of intensive therapy in any case—and it often makes a minimal difference. In this case, the implant offered same-day progress and an end point of independent mobility. While the implant didn't restore a normal stride, it was flexible enough to handle multiple motions, allowing the participants to engage in a number of activities that require coordinated muscle action in the lower body.

The research team is clearly thinking that this is a potentially general solution, since they discuss that they'll likely need additional electrode arrangements to serve the full diversity of human anatomy. They also mention the possibility of personalizing the electrode arrangement based on imaging, which they suspect would allow better control over muscle activity. And some potential improvements could be gained from updating the model in response to performance.

So, this is definitely a technology that's going to be worth watching over the coming years. The work was part of a clinical trial, so we'll likely see more news soon.

Nature Medicine, 2022. DOI: 10.1038/s41591-021-01663-5 (About DOIs).

New spinal implant gets paralyzed people up and walking

Firm planning 100,000 satellites claims it will “clean space” by capturing debris

Tue, 08 Feb 2022 20:26:30 +0000

E-Space claims its satellites will "capture debris... to prevent further collisions."

Greg Wyler in February 2019 when he was at OneWeb.

Getty Images | Washington Post

A company led by satellite-industry veteran Greg Wyler says it plans to launch about 100,000 small communication satellites into low Earth orbit. The company, E-Space, yesterday announced that it received a $50 million investment and that it will launch its first test satellites next month, with "mass production... slated for 2023."

E-Space said it has "filings in hand for potentially over 100,000 secure communication satellites," but there are suggestions that the company wants to launch over 300,000 satellites. Prime Movers Lab, which led the $50 million investment round, said that E-Space's network will have "up to hundreds of thousands of secure communication satellites" and described the devices as "micro-satellites."

E-Space said its platform will "help governments and large companies build space-based applications in a capital-light manner" for uses "ranging from secure communications to managing remote infrastructure." E-Space says its satellites will use a peer-to-peer communication model, and the company's website describes the plan as a "multi-application cloud server in space... powered by E-Space's rapidly scalable optical 5G mesh network."

E-Space's announcement said the $50 million investment fully funds a "'Beta 1' launch of its first test satellites in March 2022 as well as its second 'Beta 2' launch later this year." E-Space "is composed of two independent entities" based in France and the US. Wyler, E-Space's founder and chairman, previously founded OneWeb and O3b Networks. OneWeb exited bankruptcy in November 2020 and is launching broadband satellites, but Wyler is no longer involved with the company.

Satellites “designed to clean space”

E-Space claims its satellites will help solve the growing space debris problem by "capturing" debris the satellites collide with—although one expert told Ars that the system is unlikely to capture any large space debris.

The company's announcement said its satellites will be "designed to minimize the debris from objects they hit and capture debris they contact to prevent further collisions." The satellites have smaller cross-sections than those in other constellations, making them "much less vulnerable to collision," E-Space said.

"Like oysters in the river that filter the river and clean it, our satellites are the first to be designed to clean space," Wyler told the Financial Times in an article published yesterday. "The more satellites we have, the cleaner space will be."

Wyler also told the FT that E-Space satellites "will be designed to 'crumple' rather than break apart when struck," the report said. "They will also 'entrain' any debris they encounter and automatically deorbit when a certain amount has been collected." E-Space's announcement said its plan calls for satellites that are "designed to fail into a high-drag configuration where they passively, and quickly, deorbit" and "fully demise upon re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere."

Design is apparently in the early stages, and it's unclear which capabilities will be included in the first test satellites that E-Space plans to launch.

Satellites unlikely to capture large debris

E-Space's claim that it will clean space in the process of adding 100,000 or more satellites into orbit will likely invite skepticism, at least until the company provides details on its technology. Brian Weeden, who researches space debris and is director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, told Ars that while his only knowledge of E-Space's plans is what the company has announced publicly, he thinks it is unlikely that the satellites would be able to capture debris of any significant size.

"While I appreciate [Wyler's] concern about orbital debris, I suspect that their 'cleaning' will be limited to collecting some of the very small pieces of debris that are floating around space. Probably stuff less than a millimeter in size, as trying to grab anything bigger could pose a threat to the satellite. That's helpful, but only in addressing a very small part of the orbital debris problem," Weeden told us.

E-Space told Ars that "each satellite's cross-sectional area will be below 0.1 square meters" but didn't provide details on the debris-capturing capability.

Besides debris and collisions, there have been problems for astronomers from the expanding number of satellites, particularly from SpaceX's Starlink broadband service. Astronomers have observed growing numbers of Starlink satellite tracks on images from the Zwicky Transient Facility at Caltech's Palomar Observatory. SpaceX has permission to launch nearly 12,000 satellites and is seeking a license to launch an additional 30,000.

100,000 satellites—or 327,000?

While 100,000 was the number of satellites given in yesterday's announcement, there are indications that the amount could ultimately be a few hundred thousand. Wyler was previously reported to be part of a 327,000-satellite plan from Rwanda, and E-Space appears to be related to that project. "E-

Space has all the licenses needed to be able to deliver the service on multiple frequencies," Wyler is quoted as saying to the Financial Times. "They had been acquired through Rwanda, which last year applied to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in Geneva to license more than 300,000 satellites. The Rwandan government was an original investor in OneWeb."

When asked if the constellation will be closer to 100,000 or 327,000 satellites, E-Space told Ars that it "has filed for a variety of constellations within its mesh network. We have a large capacity but will only build what is prudent to meet the market need."

"With E-Space, we've now reached the 'iPhone stage' of SATCOM—a cost and form factor that will allow for true ubiquitous SATCOM access across the developing and developed world," Prime Movers Lab Partner Anton Brevde wrote. "The company is still in stealth mode so we, unfortunately, can't go into the many scientific and engineering developments that were required to bring about this change but, suffice to say, it is a true step-function improvement over what exists today."

According to SpaceNews, "it is unclear what capabilities E-Space plans to test on the satellites it plans to deploy this year."

"I don't know how close we'll get to the full objective of that at these early stages," Wyler said, according to the SpaceNews article. Wyler also said that E-Space is funded through "early to mid next year, but I suspect we will have [another funding round] well before that, just based upon the level of interest.'"

As for whether the new satellite maker will file an application to the Federal Communications Commission in the US, E-Space told us that it "will be working with regulators around the world to bring our service to their markets... E-Space's requests to the ITU have all been granted, but we will continue to work closely with relevant bodies to access space fairly and responsibly."

Firm planning 100,000 satellites claims it will “clean space” by capturing debris

Today is Safer Internet Day, do your part to work "Together for a better internet"

Tue, 08 Feb 2022 15:39:10 +0000

While the world of the Internet can sometimes be a scary place, there is a day, in February, every year, that promotes a safer and altogether friendlier environment online.

That day is Safer Internet Day (SID) under the European Strategy for Better Internet for Children.

Now in its nineteenth year, there are events planned around the globe that will celebrate what is great about the Internet and the online communities that exist. The theme for the day this year is once again "Together for a better internet". In addition, 2022 has been designated the European Year of Youth, and as such, today will be used to highlight the following:

"the importance of ensuring that the largest possible number of children and young people are adequately prepared to handle digital technologies responsibly, respectfully, critically, and creatively. Only then can they experience the digital world as a place of knowledge, culture, and opportunities."

Aside from the focus on keeping the youngest users safe online, today also highlights how you as a user of any age can and should protect yourself online with 2-step verification where possible, as with our coverage from earlier today in which Google saw a 50% decrease in compromised accounts.

If you want to take part in the day's activities, you can explore the news and feedback from many of the countries taking part as well as partners. You can even submit your own ideas for activities or events throughout the day. Although it might be a bit late to plan a SID event given the fact that everything kicks off today, you can still get involved by promoting the campaign.

Like last year and the years before it, stakeholders are once again called to action for creating a safer and better internet, especially for its youngest users:

In order to face the societal challenges posed by digitalisation today and tomorrow, we must ensure that the largest possible number of children and young people are adequately prepared to handle digital technologies responsibly, respectfully, critically and creatively. Only then can they experience the digital world as a place of knowledge, culture and opportunities.

You can visit the Safer Internet Day website, Facebook or Twitter profiles for the latest news throughout the day, and follow the #SID2022 and #SaferInternetDay hashtags to find out more.

Source & Image: Safer Internet Day (press release)

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The crippling expectation of 24/7 digital availability

Tue, 08 Feb 2022 15:08:28 +0000

You sent a text – but it’s been an hour, and your friend hasn’t replied to your message yet. Why are you so angry about it?

t’s been an hour, and your phone hasn’t pinged as you expected.

You sent off a text, expecting a quick reply, but you’re still waiting. With each minute that passes, you get increasingly irked and resentful. How hard is it to take two seconds and say you’ll respond later? you think. Then, the longer you wait, you start to worry. What if your friend is cross with you, and your message wasn’t welcome? What if you’ve somehow misinterpreted your relationship with them? What if they’re hurt?

While some people mind much less about how quickly a friend responds, many people ride an emotional roller coaster when a message isn’t immediately answered, whether a direct text or a social-media DM. It’s driven by the effect of 24/7 ‘digital availability’, a socially ingrained expectation that a recipient is constantly around and should immediately shoot back a reply.

Why do some people get so upset, especially in an age where many people are taking digital detoxes for mental-health breaks, and others are busy juggling life tasks?

People still communicate in different ways; some are constantly attached to their phones, while others want to disengage from them for chunks of time. But tensions over reply times may also come down to social norms – or the lack thereof. New developments in digital technology have outpaced the formulation of mutually agreed new communication paradigms, so when a text is sent, we're not all responding according to the same ‘rules’.

A 24-hour burden

The rise of rapid-fire communication technology has bred the expectation of people being always on and constantly available. And we very much are: data from one 2021 survey showed that 30% of Americans say they are ‘almost constantly’ online, especially in the pandemic era.

“It’s a combo of mobile being ubiquitous – most people have mobile phones [with] all the platforms of communication, and therefore are capable of responding right away – and that norms are currently changing,” says Jeff Hancock, professor of communication at Stanford University, and director of its Social Media Lab.

Technology has far outpaced our ability to develop norms and expectations – Coye Cheshire

Simply, there are more ways to get in touch with people than ever, and the pressure to respond has become increasingly normalised, since those platforms of communication are tucked in our pockets, wherever we go. We seemingly always can reply, so we ‘should’.

Plus, the apps and social media platforms on our phones have ingrained 24/7 communication into our daily lives – which is especially the case with the rise of remote work. Speedy responses have become a paradigm in the workplace, since a delay in writing back to the boss reflects poorly on you. So, whether it’s having to respond work messages on Slack, or posting a photo on Instagram and seeing the likes roll in instantly, “we’ve been conditioned into immediate returns”, says Michael Stefanone, professor of communication at the University of Buffalo, US, who specialises in social networks.

A nagging feeling

There are many reasons message-senders can get easily annoyed when their phone doesn’t sound with a rapid reply. Our phones give us an illusion of proximity; a friend in another continent feels only a simple text away. Yet senders don't know what's going on with the person at the other end of their message.

So, when a text goes unanswered, “some people get really upset, because they’re projecting their own anxieties” onto the situation, says Hancock. “If I text you and expected a response yesterday, and you don’t respond, I don’t have a lot of information – so I use my imagination. Like, ‘maybe he’s mad at me’; ‘maybe he’s dead’. We don’t have any context.”

This can push a sender’s anxiety into overdrive, increasing feelings of bitterness, thinking recipients have their phones on them all day, anyway – why can’t they just respond with a busy now, talk later, if they were happy to see your name pop up on their screen? These negative feelings can amplify when sending something light – think a joke or a meme – which can “seem like a very small act” to the sender, says Coye Cheshire, professor of social psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. It’s easy to expect a quick reply to these inconsequential messages – a haha or simple emoji – since a recipient doesn’t need to invest much into the response.

If you're a quick replier, remember you may be projecting your own 'notification norms' onto other people, who see communication standards differently (Credit: Getty Images)

Part of what can exacerbate these nagging, uncomfortable feelings is that there’s no widely agreed-upon etiquette for behaviour in a world of 24/7 digital availability; we don’t have a universally accepted consensus on how long people can take to reply to a message before it becomes ‘rude’. This is because technology has “far outpaced our ability to develop norms and expectations”, says Cheshire.

He adds that the emergence of new forms of interaction that swap face-to-face verbal communication with nonverbal written cues which have to be deciphered and contextualised with our own imaginations can add to confusion and anxiety. This phenomenon, which has emerged in past 25 years with the rise of the internet, has only become worse with the rise of smartphones in the past decade.

‘Notification norms’

These new challenges can compound differences in communication habits that have existed among people for a long time. For instance, pre-internet, some people would return phone calls or letters promptly, while others would take their time – disparities that might evoke similar frustration to the way we feel about a delayed reply to a message today.

Still, some people get more worked up than others. Why?

It’s possible some people simply naturally expect a snappy reply because of their nature. Hancock calls these “individual differences in need for communication responses”, with some people wanting faster responses generally. He adds there are also "situational differences”, in which some texts are particularly important for the sender, and drive the feeling of urgency.

But according to Cheshire, the way different people react to delayed replies may once again come back to those discrepancies in social norms around modern communication. In many other areas of our lives, we have clearly defined “notification norms” – whom you decide to tell what, and when – that are regarded as ‘correct’. For instance, when you share big news with someone, a prompt congratulations is generally in order; a delayed response may come off as rude.

In a 24/7 digital world, however, not everyone may agree on who you should contact, why and how prompt a response should be. None of these notification norms are formalised or set in stone. “They’re not written down anywhere,” says Cheshire. “For email, you don’t log in and the Terms of Service is, ‘you will respond to all emails in 24 hours’.”

For email, you don’t log in and the Terms of Service is, ‘you will respond to all emails in 24 hours’ – Coye Cheshire

So, it’s possible a person who gets particularly annoyed by a non-response may be projecting their own norms or rules onto others – even acting as if their standards are universal – despite the recipient governing themselves differently.

“I think projection is a huge factor in this, especially because they don't have other context to go on,” says Hancock. “This is part of that over-attribution effect when we are online – I don't know what's going on with you, so I project what's going on with me onto you and your situation.”

Can we just let it go?

In the end, is there anything you can do? Maybe yes, maybe no.

If you’re getting angry about a slow reply, it may help to internalise why you’re beginning to work yourself up, remembering you’re projecting your own situation and subsequent anxieties on the recipient, when you don’t actually have concrete information. And remember: the standards you set for what’s an ‘acceptable’ response time are yours, not a universal edict.

Regardless, feeling that urgency – and the nagging feelings that arise from it – may just be life in the 24/7 connected world.

This may especially be because those social norms that put everyone on the same page about communication remain a moving target, according to Cheshire. But the fact that people are talking more about these feelings could help move that needle; norms, adds Cheshire, come from “open discussions”. That’s especially the case now, he says – and people are talking more about what paradigms should be. So, if you have a friend whose communication patterns are driving you crazy – whether as sender or recipient – perhaps an honest chat might be in order.

In the meantime, if you find your blood boiling the next time someone leaves your message unanswered, the best solution may be to just put down the phone for a while – being connected 24/7 is stressful enough already.

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Moderna’s omicron booster was only as good as current vaccine in monkey study

Tue, 08 Feb 2022 07:50:36 +0000

Boosting with an omicron-specific vaccine didn't offer more protection against omicron.

In a small group of monkeys, an omicron-specific version of Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine did not protect against the omicron variant better than Moderna's current, highly effective booster. This finding casts doubt on whether a switch to variant-specific doses is necessary.

The study was led by researchers at the National Institutes of Health and posted on a preprint server last Friday. The study has not been peer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal. It also has all the limitations of an animal study and only involved eight monkeys. The study's findings will have to be verified in human trials, which are currently underway.

Still, there's good reason to think the finding will hold up. As the authors of the study note, this isn't Moderna's first variant-specific booster. The company had previously developed a booster against the concerning variant beta. As with the omicron-specific booster, the beta-booster didn't outperform the original vaccine at protecting primates from beta. And that finding later held up in human trials.

"The nonhuman primate (NHP) model has... been largely predictive for what has been observed in humans in terms of protective efficacy," the authors write.

Moreover, the finding falls in line with the concept of "original antigenic sin" (aka antigenic imprinting). This idea suggests that, when the immune system is presented with a pathogen similar to one it has fought before, the encounter will activate the immune memory from the prior interaction. In other words, a response to an omicron-specific vaccine will build off the responses to prior versions of SARS-CoV-2 encountered.

That's exactly what the vaccine researchers saw in their new monkey study. After researchers gave all eight monkeys two standard doses of Moderna's vaccine, the humans boosted four of the simians with the current booster and the other four with an omicron-specific booster. Both boosters activated certain immune cells—called memory B cells—that were cross-reactive, meaning the cells targeted both the old version of SARS-CoV-2 and omicron. More specifically, regardless of which booster a monkey received, 70 percent to 80 percent of their memory B cells were dual-specific to the old virus and omicron. And, while the current booster also spurred responses that were specific only to the old virus, the omicron booster didn't seem to spur any omicron-specific B cell responses.

Equally good

Otherwise, boosting the monkeys with either of the vaccines led to the same strong increase in neutralizing antibodies against omicron. And, when the vaccinated and boosted monkeys were challenged with an omicron infection, both boosters protected the primates equally well from disease in their lower airways.

"Therefore, an Omicron boost may not provide greater immunity or protection compared to a boost with the current [Moderna] vaccine," the researchers concluded.

To be clear, that's not necessarily bad; the current boosters are providing strong protection against omicron. The latest real-world data reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that boosters are 82 percent effective at preventing the need for urgent or emergency care from COVID-19 and 90 percent effective at preventing hospitalization from COVID-19. People who are vaccinated and boosted are five times less likely to get COVID-19 amid the omicron wave than unvaccinated people.

Still, Moderna is currently running a clinical trial on an omicron-specific booster dose to try to top those numbers. The company has said it expects it could distribute the booster later this year, possibly as a dose for the autumn in preparation for a cold-weather case surge. Vaccine maker Pfizer and partner BioNTech are also working on an omicron-specific vaccine that has entered clinical trials.

Whether or not the new monkey data will end up derailing those plans is unclear. The authors suggest that, if the findings do hold up in humans, there would be no need or advantage to switching to an omicron-specific booster for now. And even if omicron continues to be the dominant variant circulating, the authors argue that they would need further data to recommend replacing the current vaccine with an omicron-specific shot, particularly for currently unvaccinated children and infants. Data in mice, for instance, suggests that an omicron-specific vaccine may not provide the same cross-reactive protection against other variants. If that holds up in humans, a combination vaccine that targets multiple variants at once may be in order. Overall, a variant-specific booster may only be needed if a future variant evolves that can dodge current cross-reactive responses, the authors argue.

Correction: This story was updated to correct the likelihood of an omicron infection in people vaccinated and boosted compared with unvaccinated people. They are five times less likely, not 14.

Moderna’s omicron booster was only as good as current vaccine in monkey study

The Riveting—and Murky—Quest to Hack the Meditating Brain

Mon, 07 Feb 2022 17:13:00 +0000

New research is poised to give us a new shortcut into the state of mindful meditation. But is this really a good thing?

Richard Powers’ Bewilderment was the most moving and prescient novel I read last year. In the book, an astrobiologist grapples with compounding losses: the death of his wife and the unraveling of his son, Robin; and the environmental degradation and mass extinction that envelops the planet. Before his demise, Robin begins an innovative treatment called Decoded Neurofeedback in which he enters an fMRI machine and learns how to mirror a brain state of his deceased mother—recorded when she was a research subject for the therapy. Through channeling her brain waves, Robin arrives at a place of radical acceptance and even appreciation in the face of crisis. At one point he’s described by the lead researcher of the Decoded Neurofeedback program as a “junior Buddha.”

This new treatment is a plot device in the novel, but it’s not entirely a product of the imagination. Our understanding of brain patterns has increased exponentially in the last decade. Researchers have been able to accurately decode the content of dreams by teaching machines to predict visual imagery based on brain function. Another study found that fMRI machines could confirm whether students had understood concepts based on neural alignment with their teacher. And by examining the brain patterns of patients with major depression, researchers were able to design a computer-based tool to reduce negative negative attention bias, which resulted in a 40 percent decrease in depression symptoms versus a placebo. This window into the brain is one that scientists are already reaching through and tinkering with.

And now, neuroscience has found a way to give definition to the brain of meditators and illustrate how meditation changes the brain over time. We can see how neural patterns shift as the brain rewires during meditation and certain neural circuits come online with more regularity. The Buddhist brain has been hacked. And though this may open up the practice of meditation and its benefits to more people, there are also some serious questions about whether something vital is lost in reducing meditation to a series of brain patterns.

Much of what scientists have found so far isn’t so surprising, but it does confirm long-held associations about what parts of the brain fire up during meditation. One meta-analysis of 110 studies showed the imprint mindfulness can have on the brain, such as increased activation in areas associated with focused problem-solving, self-regulation, self-control. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have been able to teach machines how to recognize meditative states in humans through measurements of brain patterns. We are not far from a reality in which researchers could teach people how to mirror a mindful brain state through a process similar to Powers’ Decoded Neurofeedback.

It’s not hard to see why this would be a valuable practice. Through meditative decoding, practitioners could be steered towards more fruitful brain states in the same way that depressed patients are now being steered away from negative ones. Just as observing game-tape can help athletes analyze the moves they make in physical space and tailor their training accordingly, watching mental states during meditation can help therapists, researchers, and teachers analyze the moves practitioners make in mental space, and tailor their clients’ training accordingly.

But this begs the question: By reducing mindfulness to a brain state defined by brain patterns, are we missing the larger point of the practice of meditation?

Some traditionalists have decried the secular divorce of mindfulness from its spiritual underpinnings in Buddhism and other eastern practices. Secular meditation has been called the “thin version” of mindfulness—a packaging that may make it more palatable, yet less impactful. After all, Buddhist training does not occur in the relative vacuum of a laboratory setting, but in the relative richness of lived experience, and is in turn meant to translate into what happens in our day-to-day lives. In Bewilderment, when Robin can no longer receive the Decoded Neurofeedback treatment, he regresses right back to his unraveling.

Harvard neuroscientist Sara Lazar was one of the first researchers to document structural changes in the brain due to meditation. Since Phinneas Gage first met the business end of a tamping iron, it has been understood that one’s mind is directly impacted by the physical make-up of the brain. Yet Lazar’s research revealed the reverse: One’s brain can be directly impacted by the mind and the way one chooses to direct one’s attention. For the first time, researchers could correlate the self-reported reduced stress and anxiety of meditators with a shrunken amygdala, underscoring the fact that shifting our mental state can have a physical impact on our brain state.

But when asked about the possibility of using neurofeedback to mimic meditative states, Lazar told The Daily Beast she was cautious about the idea of a mindfulness hack.

“People want a quick fix—for the gadgets or the drugs to do all the work for us,” Lazar said. “In some circumstances they can help a person get a feel for what an advanced state is like, though neither the machines nor the drugs accurately mimic the real thing.” Her point is that mindfulness is an enduring practice, whereas a machine- or drug-induced brain state is reliant upon that intervention.

To think about this another way, it would be pretty cool if there were a Steph Curry-brand “Three Point Feedback Machine” that one could wear to rain down shots from beyond the arc. It would probably help one get a sense for what that feels like. But after removing the machine, one would return to a mere mortal shooting range. To arrive at an advanced state requires learning how to scale all the intermediary states step by step. There is no shortcut to mastery, whether for scoring threes or entering a new state of mind.

“Ultimately, for mindfulness to do its thing, we have to apply it to everyday life, to see with our own eyes when we think, say, or do something unskillful and then endeavor to learn from that and change our behavior going forward,” said Lazar. “There is no machine or drug that can help us do that, we need to do that ourselves.”

Andrew Olendzki, a Buddhist scholar and the director of mindfulness studies at Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass., told The Daily Beast that from the Buddhist perspective, the question of reduction isn’t an issue. Science and mindfulness are not mutually exclusive but mutually informative.

“The Buddhist view is that mind and brain are interdependent and co-arising,” said Olendzki. “Neither is the primary cause of the other, but they arise together.” Mapping out this co-arising can help us further understand the human condition, so long as we don’t place a primacy on the physical realm.

“I would like to see the scientific tradition embrace the subjective dimension of human experience without feeling the need to diminish it by ‘reducing’ it,” Olendzki explained. “I would like to see the brain systems of mindfulness identified more precisely, if only to help people learn to access and develop the capacity to be mindful.”

Science, Buddhism, and secular mindfulness can certainly be allies in this pursuit, so long as we recognize that in the age-old quest for contentment a quick fix is never the answer. Buddhists have been hacking the mind for a couple millennia now, and any dedicated practitioner will tell you it is an ongoing process. Science can help us understand this process, but to make progress on the path one must walk the walk, and a glimpse of the peak is no substitute for the satisfaction that comes from the strenuous effort, sore legs, and unbeatable view.

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The oldest hominin fossil ever found in the Levant

Sun, 06 Feb 2022 18:24:41 +0000

The fossil hints that early members of our genus expanded out of Africa in waves.

When the first members of our species ventured out of Africa, they walked into a world that earlier hominins, such as Homo erectus, had first explored a million years earlier. According to a recent study of a 1.5 million-year-old vertebra, those earlier hominins may have expanded beyond Africa in several waves—each following different environments and equipped for different ways of life.

Taking a second look

Anthropologists found a single vertebra from the lower back of a hominin child who died 1.5 million years ago. Mixed with the fossilized bones of hippos, mammoths, giraffes, saber-toothed tigers, and warthogs, the bone had sat among the remains of Pleistocene fauna since the 1966 excavation that unearthed it. But when University of Tulsa anthropologist Miriam Belmaker, a co-author on the recent study, looked through the animal fossils as part of another recent study (an effort to narrow down the age of the site), she recognized the vertebra as belonging to a member of our genus, Homo.

And the fact that the pieces of the vertebra hadn’t all fused together into a single hard, bony piece meant that it came from a child who hadn’t yet finished growing and maturing. They were probably somewhere between 6 and 11 years old when they died.

This child had lived during an important moment for human evolution. Between 1.9 and 1.1 million years ago, some of the earliest members of our genus began to expand into Europe and Asia for the first time. Our species repeated a similar journey out of Africa about a million years later, but much earlier hominins did it first.

The owner of the 'Ubeidya vertebra almost certainly didn’t think of her life in those terms. The venture out of Africa wasn’t a deliberate march into the unknown, just a gradual expansion into a little bit of new territory each season. In what’s now the Jordan Valley, these early hominins lived in a warm, humid woodland. They shared the landscape with classic Pleistocene species like mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, and giant buffalo, along with animals like baboons, hippos, jaguars, and warthogs. To prepare their food, they used a style of stone tools that archaeologists call Acheulean.

Other styles

Farther north, at Dmanisi Cave in what’s now Georgia, other hominins lived in a drier, open grassland and used a type of stone tool technology now known as Olduwan. The fact that groups of hominins in different parts of Eurasia used different collections of tools, according to some paleoanthropologists, suggests that hominins left Africa in several separate waves. Each wave brought different cultural adaptations—including stone tools—with them.

However, Bar-Ilan University anthropologist Alon Barash and his colleagues say the vertebra suggests those waves of migrants may have been not just different cultural groups, but members of more than one hominin species, each even more different from the other than we were from the Neanderthals or Denisovans. That’s because, based on what the 'Ubeidya vertebra suggests about the size and growth rate of its former owner, the child seems to have developed at a different pace than the hominins at Dmanisi.

If you want to draw conclusions about a long-dead person’s stature, a single vertebra isn’t much to go on. Most of the time, anthropologists use the long bones of the arm and leg for height estimates. But when the only bone you have is a lumbar vertebra, you consult the applicable set of tables and formulas, and you make do with an estimate.

Barash and his colleagues estimated that the child at 'Ubeidya probably stood about 155 centimeters tall. That’s the average height for a 13-year-old boy or a 12.5-year-old girl in the modern US. If the child was between 6 and 11 years old when they died, as the unfused parts of the vertebra suggest, then they were pretty tall for their age. As an adult, this person probably would have stood somewhere around 198 centimeters tall—about 20 centimeters taller than the average American today.

That means that not only did the hominins living in the Jordan Valley 1.5 million years ago use different tools to survive in a different environment than those at Dmanisi, but the two groups were very different in size. It might be reasonable to call them different species.

At this height, the child at 'Ubeidya must have been one of what Barash and his colleagues call the large-bodied hominins: something like Homo erectus, which had evolved modern human limb proportions and stature by around 2 million years ago. It’s hard to say exactly which species 'Ubeidya belonged to, however.

Where to split

In part, that’s because it’s just a single vertebra. But it’s also because anthropologists don’t always agree about where, or even whether, to draw lines between species like Homo erectus, Homo ergaster, and Homo antecessor, for instance. In fact, it’s likely that the distinction matters much more to modern anthropologists than it would have to hominins living during the Pleistocene. Evolutionary change is gradual, after all. The individuals we lump into categories like Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and Homo heidelbergensis are actually just arbitrary points on an evolutionary continuum—they’re clearly different from each other, but it’s hard to say exactly where one stops and the other begins.

But if 'Ubeidya was something toward the larger, Homo erectus end of that continuum, then the hominins who lived 1.7 million years ago at Dmanisi, in what’s now Georgia, were closer to the smaller end. The Dmanisi hominins were much shorter as adults than the child at 'Ubeidya, and their bones show a mixture of relatively recently evolved traits and much more old-fashioned ones. It’s likely that the Dmanisi hominins are something in between what we know as Homo erectus and an older, smaller member of our genus like Homo habilis (which lived between 2.4 and 1.4 million years ago).

In other words, the Dmanisi hominins, with their Olduwan tools, may have been part of a wave of expansion that reached as far as modern Georgia by about 1.7 million years ago. And the 'Ubeidya hominin may have been part of a later wave, involving a different group of hominins, that reached the modern Levant by 1.5 million years ago. That version of the story could tell us something interesting about why and how the first hominins ventured beyond Africa.

Push and pull

Paleoanthropologists spend a lot of time debating why groups of hominins first ventured into places like 'Ubeidya, Georgia, and eventually China and Indonesia. In its simplest form, the debate boils down to push vs. pull: did a changing climate make the hominin homeland suddenly less hospitable, forcing groups to seek more livable environments? Or did climate change just open up new swaths of inviting territory?

If Barash and his colleagues are right, the 'Ubeidya vertebra may reveal a more complicated story.

Different groups of hominins, adapted both physically and culturally to different environments, may have left Africa at different times, and along different routes, in pursuit of their own, very different ideas of what a welcoming environment looked like. For the Dmanisi group, that may have meant arid grassland, while for 'Ubeidya and their family, it may have meant warm, humid forest.

Overall, that more complicated version of the story lines up well with what we’ve learned in recent years about the whole arc of human evolution. More than one species of Australopithecine took their first bipedal steps in Eastern and Southern Africa, while more than one hominin wandered around Europe and Asia at the same time, often interbreeding. And when the earliest members of our genus, the first human explorers, ventured out into the world, none of them did it alone.

Scientific Reports, 2022 DOI: 10.1038/s41559-021-01581-2 (About DOIs).

The oldest hominin fossil ever found in the Levant

Great balls of fire: A monk named Gervase saw ball lightning way back in 1195

Sat, 05 Feb 2022 21:30:31 +0000

Gervase of Canterbury described a "fiery globe" falling toward the Thames.

On October 21, 1638, people were congregating at a church at Widecombe-in-the-Moor, in Devon, England, when a severe thunderstorm broke out. Witnesses described an 8-foot ball of fire hurtling through the church, tossing large stones from the walls to the ground, smashing pews and windows, and filling the church with smoke and the pungent odor of sulfur. Four people died and many more were injured in what has been widely recognized as the earliest known account of ball lightning in England—until now.

A British historian and a retired physicist have found an even earlier credible account of ball lightning in the writings of a 12th-century Benedictine monk, Gervase of Christ Church Cathedral Priory in Canterbury. According to a recent paper published in the journal Weather, Gervase of Canterbury recorded in his Chronicle a "marvelous sign" that "descended near London" on June 7, 1195. The sign was a "fiery globe" emerging from below a dark and dense cloud, and it predates the Widecombe-in-the-Moor account by nearly 450 years.

“Ball lightning is a rare weather event that is still not understood today," said co-author Brian Tanner of Durham University (emeritus). “Gervase’s description of a white substance coming out of the dark cloud, falling as a spinning fiery sphere and then having some horizontal motion is very similar to historic and contemporary descriptions of ball lightning. If Gervase is describing ball lightning, as we believe, then this would be the earliest account of this happening in England that has so far been discovered.”

Chronicle of Gervase of Canterbury where the medieval monk describes ball lightning—the earliest known description of ball lightning in England. Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.4.11, p.324." data-ratio="84.38" srcset="https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/ball-light2.jpg 2x" src="https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/ball-light2-640x922.jpg">

Enlarge / Extract from the Chronicle of Gervase of Canterbury where the medieval monk describes ball lightning—the earliest known description of ball lightning in England. Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.4.11, p.324.

The Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge

As we've previously reported, ordinary lightning occurs due to the ionization and dissociation of molecules in the air (a process with the awesome name "dielectric breakdown"), which occurs during a static electric discharge between clouds and the ground. Ball lightning is much rarer, to the point where some have even postulated that it's actually a hallucination rather than a real weather phenomenon. As the name suggests, ball lightning appears as a spherical or spheroidal ball of light, between one centimeter and one meter in size and variously colored as purple, green, white, or orange. Just like normal lightning, ball lightning seems to occur primarily during thunderstorms. Ball lightning can persist for a few seconds, and the spheres travel horizontally close to ground level.

Tanner and Gasper were scouring medieval archives for reports of celestial phenomena when they came across Gervase of Canterbury's Chronicle. Much of the monk's writing concerned the priory's day-to-day operations—including a detailed account of rebuilding the cathedral's choir after a fire in 1174—as well as disputes with neighboring houses and an Archbishop of Canterbury. But Gervase was also fascinated by natural phenomena like eclipses, floods, famines, earthquakes—and ball lightning.

Here is the full account, translated from the Latin:

On the 7th of the ides of June [1195], around the sixth hour, a marvellous sign descended near London. For the densest and darkest cloud appeared in the air growing strongly with the sun shining brightly all around. In the middle of this, growing from an uncovered opening, like the opening of a mill, I know not what [was the] white colour [that] ran out. That, growing into a spherical shape under the black cloud, remained suspended between the Thames and the lodgings of the bishop of Norwich. From there a sort of fiery globe threw itself down into the river; with a spinning motion it dropped time and again below the walls of the previously mentioned bishop’s household.

Cumulonimbus clouds over Chandler, Arizona, USA, in 2018, showing the inverted pyramid with the dark cloud beneath.

Mircea Goia

But just how credible was the monk's account, given that it was clearly based on a second-hand report? The evidence points to a sober, careful, and reliable chronicler.

"He reported dates and times of solar eclipses remarkably accurately and comprehensively," the authors wrote. The same was true with lunar eclipses. "These are all the more impressive when considering that observation of partial eclipses was visually challenging in medieval times. In a detailed account of the partial eclipse of 13 September 1178, Gervase accurately describes the turning of the horns of the partly obscured solar disc to point downwards, as well as the changing colours close to maximum eclipse."

Gervase's description of the ball lightning, written when the monk would have been around 50, likewise stands up to close scrutiny, per the authors. For instance, the "sixth hour" would have been near noon, statistically the most likely time for ball lightning to occur. His description of the dark cloud forming corresponds to the dark clouds that can form at the apex of a cumulonimbus incus cloud's inverted pyramid shape. And his descriptions of a white substance coming out of the dark cloud, the lateral motion, and the fireball dropping down to the Thames are consistent with other historical and modern accounts of ball lightning.

Much of what we know about ball lightning's characteristics comes from historical accounts recorded through the centuries. While there are some reports from antiquity that bear some resemblance to ball lightning, these could also be descriptions of lightning bolts, per Tanner and his co-author, Giles Gasper, a historian at Durham University. The two cite a 6th-century description of ball lightning found in History of the Franks by Gregory of Tours as the earliest convincing description of ball lighting. Churchgoers en route to matins in January of 583 saw a great ball of fire fall from the sky—bright enough to make it seem like high noon—before the fireball disappeared behind a cloud.

Gregory of Tours interpreted the ball lightning as a portent of the death of King Chilperic's son. The good folk of Widecombe-in-the-Moor attributed the ball lighting that destroyed their church to an act of the devil. Some especially righteous sorts blamed the incident on two people who were playing cards in the pews during the sermon, thereby angering God.

Georg Wilhelm Richmann of St Petersburg, Russia was killed by ball lightning on August 6, 1753. Engraving by Louis Figuier (circa 1780).

Universal History Archive/Getty Images

By the mid-18th century, lightning had become a question of science, albeit with occasional unfortunate consequences. In 1753, a Russian scientist named Georg Wilhelm Richmann attempted to reproduce Benjamin Franklin's famous kite experiment. A glowing ball of charge traveled down the string, jumped to his forehead, and killed him instantly. Nikola Tesla purportedly produced small artificial lightning balls in his laboratory, but he largely considered them a curiosity. Centuries later, scientists still puzzle over the phenomenon, despite several laboratory experiments that have produced effects visually similar to ball lightning.

Ball lightning is such a rare occurrence that no scientists have ever observed it in the field while they had equipment to measure its properties—at least until 2012. Then, a team of Chinese researchers were measuring the properties of ordinary lightning when they serendipitously happened to catch ball lightning with both their high-speed cameras and their spectrographs. They found that the chemical composition of the event matched that of soil. This strongly supported the hypothesis (proposed nearly fifteen years ago) that ball lightning is basically a dirt clod dislodged and heated to incandescence by a cloud-to-ground lightning strike.

DOI: Weather, 2022. 10.1002/wea.4144 (About DOIs).

Great balls of fire: A monk named Gervase saw ball lightning way back in 1195

New research could be the first step to hydrogen power, day and night

Sat, 05 Feb 2022 04:52:52 +0000

A new molecule could be the key to getting hydrogen whenever it's needed.

There’s a disconnect between when people want to use electricity and when solar tends to produce it. Most often, people use power during the evening or the early morning, when the Sun isn’t yet up.

“There is a mismatch between solar irradiation arriving on Earth and the time when you actually need the energy,” Carsten Streb, a researcher at Elm University, told Ars. “Typically, the energy demand—at least in Germany—is highest in the morning and the evening. Everyone switches on their appliances. But obviously, irradiation is strongest at mid-day.”

One option to handle this mismatch is to use solar power to produce hydrogen, which can then be used at a later time. But keeping the hydrogen around for later use can be a challenge. As Streb told Ars, “One of the big problems we’re seeing with hydrogen is the storage.”

In theory, you could de-link the production of hydrogen with the light from the Sun using solar panels to charge a battery that powers an electrolyzer when the hydrogen is needed, but that has its own issues. “With every energy conversion step, you have losses. That process, while feasible, is not efficient,” he said.

Soak up the Sun

However, Streb and a multidisciplinary team of researchers have produced a novel molecule that could be used to allow hydrogen to be made from solar energy on demand—even when it's dark. They developed a photosensitizer–polyoxometalate dyad that absorbs light and stores charge and then can use that charge to produce hydrogen when triggered to do so.

In short, you shine a light on the solution containing the molecule and wait for it to charge—Streb noted that the solution goes from clear to a dark, inky blue in the presence of light. When you want to trigger the hydrogen release, you just add an acid, like the sulphuric acid Streb and his team used.

The hydrogen that's released can then be used for power. Streb said that previous work in this area has produced compounds that can hold electrons for short periods of time, sometimes just fractions of a second. The one he and his team made, however, can store them for hours or even days—the half-life is around 40 hours.

In theory, this molecule could be used almost like a liquid fuel to produce hydrogen at any time of day for a hydrogen-powered vehicle, he said. He did note, however, that the research does not cover how to recycle the molecule. The molecule can be charged and discharged multiple times, but there is some level of degradation that occurs with it. Streb noted that this is a problem that other, similar research is experiencing as well.

“In all fairness, it’s not unexpected. These are light-sensitive compounds that we are using. Typically, when you shine a lot of light on them, they tend to break apart,” he said. “This is something we are working on right now.”

It's still too early to say how useful this molecule could be, however. Beyond questions about recyclability, ruthenium—an element used in the molecule—is quite expensive. All the same, the research is an interesting way around some of the technical problems that hydrogen fuel faces.

Nature Chemistry, 2022. DOI: 1038/s41557-021-00850-8 (About DOIs)

New research could be the first step to hydrogen power, day and night

Controversy erupts over Aussie museum’s identification of HMS Endeavour wreck

Fri, 04 Feb 2022 19:28:48 +0000

"Based on archival and archaeological evidence, I'm convinced it's the Endeavour."

Painting by Samuel Atkins of the HMS Endeavour off the coast of New Holland during Cook's voyage of discovery (1768-1771).

Public domain

The HMS Endeavour is famous for being sailed by Capt. James Cook to the South Pacific for a scientific expedition in the late 18th century. But the Endeavour (by then renamed the Lord Sandwich) met its demise in the Atlantic, when it was one of 13 ships the British deliberately sank (or "scuttled") in a Rhode Island harbor during the American Revolution.

Now, the Australian National Maritime Museum has announced that its researchers have confirmed that a shipwreck proposed as a likely candidate in 2018 is indeed the remains of the HMS Endeavour. However, the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project (RIMAP)—the museum's research partner in the project—promptly released a statement calling the announcement premature. RIMAP insists that more evidence is needed and that its own final report is still forthcoming.

The HMS Endeavour holds special relevance for the scientific community because Cook's first voyage (1768-1771) was, in part, a mission to observe and record the 1769 transit of Venus across the Sun. The observation was part of a combined global effort to determine the distance of the Earth from the Sun. Those observations proved less conclusive than had been hoped, but during the rest of the voyage, Cook was able to map the coastland of New Zealand before sailing west to the southeastern coast of Australia—the first record of Europeans on the continent's Eastern coastline.

But back to the Atlantic. As Ars' Kiona Smith reported, archaeologists and divers in 1993 consulted 18th-century maps and logs for information about the locations of the wrecks of the Endeavour (now the Lord Sandwich) and the other ships scuttled with it. Then the researchers took to the water with side-scan sonar to find the remains.

Kiona continued:

It was painstaking work, especially in the early years before GPS technology was available to help with precise mapping. Every possible shipwreck that turned up in the sonar images had to be checked by divers, a process archaeologists call "ground-truthing." Some of those sites turned out to be modern vessels, lumpy geological formations, piles of abandoned commercial fishing tackle, and even Navy training torpedoes...

By 2016, RIMAP's volunteers, operating on grants and private donations, had located 10 of the 13 wrecks, almost exactly where historical charts said they should be. And the search had gotten a boost from the 1998 discovery of a 200-year-old paper trail linking the troop transport Lord Sandwich to its former life as HMS Endeavour.

But which of those wrecks was the Endeavour? One candidate was found just 500 meters off the coast of Rhode Island, 14 meters below the surface and buried in nearly 250 years' worth of sediment and silt. RIMAP's team concluded in 2018 that this was likely the wreck of the Endeavour, although the researchers emphasized that they needed to accumulate more evidence to support their conclusions.

A digital remodeling of the ship, which was scuttled in 1778.

Australian National Maritime Museum

That's because only about 15 percent of the ship survives. Any parts of the hull that weren't quickly buried by silt have long since decomposed in the water. Initially, all that appeared to be left were the piles of ballast (heavy stones placed in the bottom of a ship's hold to help keep it stable when empty) visible on the harbor bottom. But archaeologists have since found ceramic teapots, glass bottles, lead pieces from pumps, and bits of rope encased in concrete-like substances produced by corroding metal, all buried beneath the harbor's silt amid the waterlogged timbers.

The Australian National Maritime Museum held a press conference to announce its conclusion. The museum said its researchers matched structural details and the shape of the remains to those on original plans of the Endeavour—including the size of the timbers and the scuttling holes in the keel. The remains are also European-built, the museum said.

"The last pieces of the puzzle had to be confirmed before I felt able to make this call," Kevin Sumption, director of the museum, said. "Based on archival and archaeological evidence, I'm convinced it's the Endeavour."

RIMAP executive director DK Abbass issued the following statement soon afterward:

The Australian National Maritime Museum (ANMM) report that the Endeavour has been identified is premature. The Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project (RIMAP) is now and always has been the lead organization for the study in Newport harbor. The ANMM announcement today is a breach of the contract between RIMAP and the ANMM for the conduct of this research and how its results are to be shared with the public. What we see on the shipwreck site under study is consistent with what might be expected of the Endeavour, but there has been no indisputable data found to prove the site is that iconic vessel, and there are many unanswered questions that could overturn such an identification. When the study is done, RIMAP will post the legitimate report on its website at: www.rimap.org. Meanwhile, RIMAP recognizes the connection between Australian citizens of British descent and the Endeavour, but RIMAP's conclusions will be driven by proper scientific process and not Australian emotions or politics.

"We are very open to conversations with Dr. Abbass if she disagrees with our findings, their findings," Kieran Hosty, the ANMM's manager of maritime archeology, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). He added that he believed their contract with RIMAP had ended in November, although he could not be sure.

Controversy erupts over Aussie museum’s identification of HMS Endeavour wreck

U.S. Authorities Charge 6 Indian Call Centers Scamming Thousands of Americans

Fri, 04 Feb 2022 17:03:41 +0000

A number of India-based call centers and their directors have been indicted for their alleged role in placing tens of millions of scam calls aimed at defrauding thousands of American consumers.

The indictment charged Manu Chawla, Sushil Sachdeva, Nitin Kumar Wadwani, Swarndeep Singh, Dinesh Manohar Sachdev, Gaje Singh Rathore, Sanket Modi, Rajiv Solanki and their respective call centers for conspiring with previously indicted VoIP provider E Sampark and its director, Guarav Gupta, to forward the calls to U.S. citizens.

"Criminal India-based call centers defraud U.S. residents, including the elderly, by misleading victims over the telephone utilizing scams such as Social Security and IRS impersonation as well as loan fraud," the U.S. Justice Department said in a release.

According to the November 2020 indictment issued against E Sampark and Gupta, the calls from India-based phone scammers led to reported losses of over $20 million from May 2015 to June 2020, with the company maintaining roughly 60 servers in the U.S. state of Florida for this purpose and which contained over 130,000 recordings of scam calls.

The scheme involved the callers posing as Internal Revenue Service (IRS) employees to dupe the victims into transferring money, threatening them with arrest and fines should they fail to pay back taxes. The illegally amassed funds were then laundered through an overseas fraud network.

As part of the Social Security scam, the fraudsters purported to be federal agents in an attempt to mislead victims into believing that their Social Security numbers (SSN) were involved in crimes and once again applied intimidation tactics to trick them into sending cash.

Lastly, the callers also masqueraded as people working for lending institutions and informed the affected parties that they were eligible for fictitious loans, only to direct them to "pay upfront fees to demonstrate their ability to repay the loan" in exchange for nothing.

"Scam robocalls cause emotional and financial devastation to victims, particularly our vulnerable and elderly populations," said U.S. Attorney Kurt Erskine in a statement. "These India-based call centers allegedly scared their victims and stole their money, including some victims' entire life savings."

Source

A simple mathematical model can account for lizard’s green-and-black pattern

Thu, 03 Feb 2022 20:47:18 +0000

Tried-and-true Ising model can describe how scales color-switch as the lizard ages.

The patterns of the ocellated lizard are predictable by a mathematical model for phase transitions.

UNIGE / Michel Milinkovitch

Zebras and tigers have stripes, cheetahs and leopards have spots, and the ocellated lizard (Timon lepidus) boasts a labyrinthine pattern of black-and-green chains of scales. Now researchers from the University of Geneva in Switzerland have demonstrated with a simple mathematical equation the lizard's complex patterns, according to a recent paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

“These labyrinthine patterns, which provide ocellated lizards with an optimal camouflage, have been selected in the course of evolution," said co-author Michel Milinkovitch, a theoretical physicist at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. "These patterns are generated by a complex system, that yet can be simplified as a single equation, where what matters is not the precise location of the green and black scales, but the general appearance of the final patterns."

As we've reported previously, a common popular (though hotly debated) hypothesis for the formation of these kinds of animal patterns was proposed by Alan Turing in 1952, which is why they are sometimes referred to as "Turing patterns." Turing's seminal paper focused on chemicals known as morphogens. His proposed mechanism involved the interaction between an activator chemical that expresses a unique characteristic (like a tiger's stripe) and an inhibitor chemical that periodically kicks in to shut down the activator's expression. The key is that the inhibitor diffuses at a faster rate than the activator, creating periodic patterning.

Color pattern ontogeny in ocellated lizards as modeled using cellular automata.

L. Manukyan et al., Nature 2017

The case of the ocellated lizard is particularly tricky, since the individual scales change from one color to the other as the animal ages (green to black, black to green), producing the final labyrinthine pattern of the adults. Previously, Milinkovitch and his colleagues had modeled this gradual color-switching process using cellular automata, a computer system invented by John von Neumann and Stanislaw Ulam in the 1940s in which cells on a grid evolve in accordance with defined rules.

The group's computer simulations using cellular automata yielded patterns that closely resembled those seen in real-world lizards. However, the model was complicated, with 14 parameters. Milinkovitch et al. thought they could find a simpler model employing just two parameters: interactions between neighboring particles and the strength of an external magnetic field. That's the essence of the so-called Ising model.

Imagine a two-dimensional lattice, or grid. Each point on the lattice has a particle at that point with a property called "spin," and it can only be in one of two states: "spin up" or "spin down." Ideally, spins all like to be aligned with each other. They don't care if they're pointing up or down, so long as they're all pointing the same way. So over time, and under the right conditions, the spins will order themselves into that perfectly ordered arrangement. Applying a magnetic field can speed up the process by causing all the spins to flip to up or down, depending on the orientation of the field.

The Ising model of antiferromagnetism accurately recreates the way an ocellated lizard’s scales change color over time.

The Ising model starts out in that perfectly ordered state ("infinite order"), but then a new variable is introduced: temperature. We now gradually start to heat up the Ising lattice. The spins start to jiggle (because now they have more energy), and some of them start to change states (from up to down, or down to up). As the temperature gets higher, they jiggle faster and faster, until all the original order is gone because the spins are jiggling far too much. Now we have "infinite disorder"—a kind of chaos, in the physics/mathematical sense.

Now imagine that you track this gradual heating process, taking occasional snapshots at random points and noting how the arrangement of spins changes at each of those points.

Early on, you'll find almost all "spin ups" with a few clumps of "spin downs." Then there will be more and more clumping as you raise the temperature, because of this aforementioned preference for the spins to be aligned in the same direction as their nearest neighbors. You'll soon start to see more small spin-down domains of various sizes in a big sea of spin-ups. You'll know when you reach the critical point—the moment of the actual transition between phases, when the system is perfectly balanced between one phase and the other—because you will have clumps of all sizes.

“The elegance of the Lenz-Ising model is that it describes these dynamics using a single equation with only two parameters: the energy of the aligned or misaligned neighbors, and the energy of an external magnetic field that tends to push all particles toward the +1 or -1 state,” said co-author Szabolcs Zakany, a theoretical physicist at the University of Geneva in Switzerland.

Applying the Ising model to the ocellated lizard's color-switching scales. Note the order in regions (i)-(v) and disorder at points (vi)-(viii).

S. Zakany et al., PRL 2022

So how does that apply to the ocellated lizard? The team switched from the typical square lattice of the classic Ising model to a hexagonal lattice that better reflected the structure of the lizard's skin scales. Per APS Physics:

Milinkovitch and colleagues found that the antiferromagnetic Ising model accurately recreated the time evolution of these lizards’ scale colors, the labyrinthine nature of their final patterns, and the predominant balance of green and black scales. In their model, the scales’ tendency to avoid being the same color as too many of their neighbors was analogous to the interaction between spins in an antiferromagnet, while an external forcing analogous to a magnetic field generated a slight preference for black over green scales.

Every individual lizard will have different locations of its green and black scales, but all of the patterns will have a similar labyrinthine appearance. The team hopes to extend their application of the Ising model to color patterning in other species. Another possible future study would involve linking the microscopic interactions among cells, the flipping probabilities of the mesoscopic skin scales, and the macroscopic skin color patterns.

DOI: Physical Review Letters, 2022. 10.1103/PhysRevLett.128.048102 (About DOIs).

A simple mathematical model can account for lizard’s green-and-black pattern

Earth's Water Was in The Solar System Before Earth Itself, Meteorite Reveals

Thu, 03 Feb 2022 17:22:45 +0000

We don't know how life emerged on Earth, but one thing is certain: life as we know it on our planet wouldn't exist without the water that wraps around the surface, runs in rivulets, and falls from the sky.

Our planet is the only one known to have life, and the only one on which liquid water can be found in abundance (moons are another story). There are giant question marks over where and how it came from, but new research suggests that it was here in the Solar System before Earth even formed.

According to a team led by geochemist Jérôme Aléon of the French National Museum of Natural History, isotopes of water in a meteorite from the birth of the Solar System match isotopes of water found on Earth today.

"The initial isotopic composition of water in the Solar System is of paramount importance to understanding the origin of water on planetary bodies but remains unknown, despite numerous studies," the researchers write in their paper.

"Here we use the isotopic composition of hydrogen in calcium-aluminium-rich inclusions (CAIs) from primitive meteorites, the oldest Solar System rocks, to establish the hydrogen isotopic composition of water at the onset of Solar System formation."

Certain types of meteorites can act as time capsules from the birth of the Solar System. A star is born from a cloud of gas and dust that collapses under its own gravity, known as the collapse of the protostellar envelope.

Meanwhile, material in the cloud around it flattens into a disk that feeds into the growing, spinning star. Once it has finished growing, what's left of that cloud forms everything else in that star's system – planets, asteroids, comets, and so forth.

Many of these things are even older than Earth; radiometric dating suggests Earth formed 4.54 billion years ago. And, by sheer luck, some of these rocks land right here on our doorsteps.

The whole accretion process usually heats and squeezes those primordial materials into forms that erase traces of its origins. This has made analysis of its water content a challenge.

Yet there are occasional rock samples that make it to Earth's surface that display few signs of overbaking, providing researchers with a prime opportunity.

The Efremovka meteorite, found in Kazakhstan in 1962, has elements that have been dated back to 4.57 billion years ago. It was this meteorite, and its ancient inclusions rich in calcium and aluminium, that Aléon and colleagues analyzed, using a new technique developed just for this purpose.

To measure the water content of the meteorite, they used focused ion beam imaging to identify and probe all the minerals in their sample,

comparing the results with eight terrestrial reference materials with a wide range of water content. Then, they examined the ratio of the isotopes of hydrogen in the meteorite.

These ratios, fascinatingly, can be used to identify the signature of water. Isotopes are variants of an element with different numbers of neutrons; deuterium – also known as heavy hydrogen – has one proton and one neutron. Protium, or light hydrogen, has one proton and no neutrons.

Because hydrogen is one of the components of water, the ratio of these two isotopes in rocks can tell us about the water that rock was exposed to. For example, protium is the dominant hydrogen isotope here on Earth. On Mars, deuterium is the dominant isotope, which tells us that something might be stripping the lighter protium.

The minerals and ratios in the Efremovka meteorite revealed that, in the first 200,000 years of our Solar System's history, before the planetesimals (that's planet seeds) formed, two large gas reservoirs existed. One of these reservoirs contained the solar gas from which the matter in the Solar System ended up condensing.

The other, the team found, was rich in water. This water probably came from a massive influx of interstellar material that fell in towards the inner Solar System at the time of the protostellar envelope collapse.

And, fascinatingly, that water is very similar to Earth's water in its isotopic composition. This suggests that water was present in the early Solar System from its very inception – before Earth was even a twinkle in the protoplanetary disk.

"The ubiquitous hydrogen isotopic composition observed in large, early-formed telluric planetesimals … was reached in the first few 100,000 years of the Solar System owing to a massive influx of interstellar matter infalling directly in the inner Solar System, rather than being produced in a more evolved protoplanetary disk," the researchers write.

The research has been published in Nature Astronomy.

Source

There's a Bunch of Bacteria Having 'Sex' in Your Gut, And It's Wilder Than We Thought

Thu, 03 Feb 2022 17:20:18 +0000

The human gut is the host of a rampant microscopic orgy. To survive, the microbes in our digestive tract are having 'sex' with each other on a regular basis, all in the name of swapping secrets on how to survive deadly doses of antibiotics.

A team of researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and University of California Riverside has now learned just how far this bacterial bump-and-grind goes, finding exchanges that go beyond what we knew previously.

Bacteria, of course, don't have genitals, but technically 'sex' in biology refers to any process that exchanges genetic material.

By forming a 'temporary union' with another bacterium in our gut, a microbe can therefore transfer its genes to another – it doesn't even have to be the same species.

All the microbe has to do is stick out a tube, called a pilus, and attach itself to another cell, shooting off a transferable package of DNA called a mobile genetic element when it's ready.

The discovery of bacterial sex was made over 70 years ago, when scientists realized this horizontal gene transfer was how microbes were sharing resistance genes for certain antibiotics, thereby spreading antibiotic resistance.

More recently, it's become clear that bacterial sex doesn't just occur when microbes are under attack. It happens all the time, and it's probably part of what keeps our microbiome fit and healthy.

New research has now identified what genes bacteria are actually sharing when they do this.

The study was conducted among a phylum of gut microbes, called Bacteroidetes, which comprise up to 80 percent of the human microbiome and are important digesters.

"The big, long molecules from sweet potatoes, beans, whole grains, and vegetables would pass through our bodies entirely without these bacteria," explains microbiologist Patrick Degnan from the University of California Riverside.

"They break those down so we can get energy from them."

To colonize the human gut and help us break down carbohydrates, however, these microbes must compete for limited resources in the large intestine. Such resources include vitamin B12 and other related compounds, which help fuel the bacteria's metabolism and synthesis of proteins.

Most microbes in the gut don't have the ability to synthesize these crucial compounds on their own, which means they have to soak up what they can from their environment.

For this to be effective, it pays to have genes for an efficient vitamin B12 transport system at the ready.

In both petri dishes and in living mouse models, researchers have now identified B12 transporters that are shared via bacterial sex.

"We're excited about this study because it shows that this process isn't only for antibiotic resistance," says Degnan.

"The horizontal gene exchange among microbes is likely used for anything that increases their ability to survive, including sharing [genes for the transport of] vitamin B12."

When two gut microbes were placed on a dish in the lab, researchers noticed the bacterium that couldn't synthesize B12 transport systems connected up with the bacterium that could. Once the sex pilus bridged the gap between the two, the 'receiving' bacterium could unpack its precious cargo.

After the experiment, researchers examined the genome of the receiving bacterium, which was still alive, and found it had incorporated an extra band of DNA from the donor.

Among living mice, something similar appears to happen. When researchers administered two forms of Bacteroidetes to a mouse – one that possessed the genes for transferring B12, and another that didn't – they found the genes of the former had 'jumped' to the latter after five to nine days.

"It's as if two humans had sex, and now they both have red hair," says Degnan.

Interestingly, the authors note that a secondary round of gene transfer, between Bacteroidetes of the same species, occurred slightly faster than the first round, which was between two different species.

The findings suggest there may be a slight 'species barrier' when it comes to bacterial sex. Although, that barrier is nothing like what we see with mammals, where a species can only reproduce with another of its kind.

Bacteria, it seems, aren't nearly so picky about their partners, and our stomachs are very grateful for their promiscuity.

The study was published in Cell Reports.

Source

World-First Experiment That Infected People With Coronavirus Shares Early Results

Thu, 03 Feb 2022 17:17:19 +0000

Scientists deliberately infected young, healthy volunteers with SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 – and now, they've shared their first results from that experiment.

The new study, published Tuesday (Feb. 1) in Springer Nature's preprint database, In Review, has not yet been peer-reviewed, but it could provide insight into how mild COVID-19 unfolds, from the moment of exposure to the point that the virus is eliminated from the body.

For the study, the researchers recruited 34 healthy volunteers ages 18 to 30; none of the participants had ever been infected with SARS-CoV-2 or received a COVID-19 vaccine, according to a statement. All participants tested negative for antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 at the start of the study, the researchers noted in their report.

After this screening process, each volunteer received a low dose of SARS-CoV-2 via drops delivered up the nose. These drops contained roughly the same amount of virus found in a single droplet of nasal fluid from a person infected with the novel coronavirus at the point when they're most infectious, the statement notes.

The version of SARS-CoV-2 used in the study predated the Alpha variant (or B.1.1.7, first detected in September 2020), but it differed from the original version of the virus in that it carried a mutation called D614G. This mutation affects the spike protein, which the virus uses to infect cells, and is thought to increase the virus's transmissibility.

After being exposed to the virus, 18 of the volunteers became infected, and of those, 16 developed mild to moderate symptoms, such as sore throat, headache, muscle and joint aches, fatigue and fever. Roughly a third (or 13) of the infected participants lost their sense of smell; for 10 of these people, their senses of smell returned to normal within three months, but the final three still experienced deficits at that point.

Thankfully, "there were no severe symptoms or clinical concerns in our challenge infection model of healthy young adult participants," the trial's chief investigator, Dr. Christopher Chiu, an infectious-diseases physician and immunologist in the Department of Infectious Disease and the Institute of Infection at Imperial College London, said in the statement.

For this reason, the study's results are most representative of mild infections rather than severe ones, he said.

In the 18 infected participants, the average incubation period – the time period from initial exposure to first detection of the virus via tests – was 42 hours, the team reported. The researchers took swab samples from the participants' throats and noses twice a day and calculated the amount of viable, or infectious, virus present using PCR tests and laboratory assays.

They found that the amount of virus in the participants quickly increased following the incubation period. The virus could be detected in the throat first, about 40 hours after exposure, and then the nose, about 58 hours after exposure.

On average, the participants' viral loads peaked five days after their initial exposure. Viral levels in the throat generally remained lower than those in the nose and also peaked sooner, the team reported. Notably, all of the infected participants showed similar viral loads, regardless of their symptoms, according to The Guardian.

Lateral flow tests – a type of rapid COVID-19 test — reliably detected the virus throughout the course of infection but were slightly less sensitive at the start and end of infection, when viral loads are relatively low.

In other words, the tests were less likely to detect the virus at low levels, meaning there was a greater likelihood of "false negative" results at those times.

"We found that overall, lateral flow tests correlate very well with the presence of infectious virus" as confirmed by laboratory tests, Chiu said in the statement.

"Even though in the first day or two they may be less sensitive, if you use them correctly and repeatedly, and act on them if they read positive, this will have a major impact on interrupting viral spread."

Looking forward, the team plans to investigate why some participants did not become infected with SARS-CoV-2, while others did; they also plan to run a similar challenge trial with the delta variant. (They did not note if they also plan to pursue a trial using Omicron.)

"While there are differences in transmissibility due to the emergence of variants, such as Delta and Omicron, fundamentally, this is the same disease, and the same factors will be responsible for protection against it," Chiu said.

"From the point of view of virus transmission related to the very high viral loads, we are likely if anything to be underestimating infectivity because we were using an older strain of the virus," he said.

"With a newer strain, there might be differences in terms of size of response, but ultimately, we expect our study to be fundamentally representative of this kind of infection."

Source

‘Live With the Virus’? For Australians, It’s Taken Some Getting Used To.

Thu, 03 Feb 2022 14:52:29 +0000

Australia once stamped out every Covid outbreak. Now it’s done with all that. The policy U-turn, and the soaring case numbers, caught many off guard.

MELBOURNE, Australia — Nearly 95 percent of adults are vaccinated. The coronavirus is now milder. It’s the heart of summer, after a long year and a half of snap lockdowns and closed borders.

Australia, the government says, is ready to “live with the virus,” ready for the authorities to get out of people’s lives and let them make their own health decisions. Hit the pub, enjoy life, spend some money.

But many Australians, it seems, weren’t ready.

When one state announced that it was ending intensive contact tracing, a Facebook group popped up so people could do their own. After Australia’s prime minister declared lockdowns a thing of the past, so many residents of its two biggest cities stayed inside anyway as Omicron spiked that it was labeled a “shadow lockdown.” And even as the country’s borders opened for the first time since March 2020, this travel-loving nation mostly stayed put.

“That shift from ‘Covid is the worst thing imaginable’ to suddenly ‘it’s OK, we just open the floodgates now,’ I think that caused a lot of insecurity in people,” said Simon Benson, a doctor in Melbourne who has been inundated with calls from patients unsure what to do after testing positive.

A paramedic in Melbourne. The city spent 262 days in lockdown.

Credit...William West/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Perhaps more than any other country, Australia in recent weeks has gone through a dizzying U-turn in its approach to the pandemic. For 18 months, it snuffed out every Covid outbreak, often through considerable public sacrifice. Then, late last year, the government declared itself done with all that: Australia would now “stare down” Omicron and “not go back.”

Suddenly, a nation that once imposed lockdowns over handfuls of cases was dealing with half a million active infections. Deaths, while still few by American or British standards, reached record highs. Australians accustomed to following official guidance and taking collective action to blunt a dangerous virus felt whiplash. And as case numbers started to fall, anxiety bled into resignation.

The country went from “lockdowns when you can’t even have another person visit your house to full pubs, clubs, ‘don’t worry about it,’” said Peter Collignon, a physician and professor of microbiology at the Australian National University.

Australia has taken a plunge that other countries in the Asia-Pacific region have been unready to emulate.

When Omicron started to circulate, many paused or rolled back promised reopenings. Japan reversed a decision to start letting in some students and businesspeople, South Korea suspended quarantine exemptions for incoming travelers, and Thailand halted a newly launched program to bring back tourists.

But Australia stuck to its plan, relaxing mask mandates and other restrictions and reopening its borders to international students and other visa holders. With a federal election looming and many Australians having endured hundreds of days of strict lockdown, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the country had to “move from a culture of mandates to a culture of responsibility.”

The deserted Sydney Opera House during a lockdown last year.

Credit...Anna Maria Antoinette D'Addario for The New York Times

The key to reclaiming Australia’s suspended freedoms, Mr. Morrison said, was its vaccination campaign. But Omicron upended the widespread, if unrealistic, belief that high vaccination rates would end the threat of large-scale outbreaks, said Nancy Baxter, the head of the University of Melbourne’s school of population and global health.

“That was the narrative: ‘We’re all going to get vaccinated, and then we’re going to be able to party like it’s 2019,’” she said.

Instead, case numbers surged to previously unimaginable heights. The Omicron tide peaked at 150,000 new daily cases on Jan. 13. Before this wave, the country had never reached 3,000 cases in a day. And last Friday, Australia had its deadliest day of the pandemic, reporting 98 deaths.

The speed with which the variant spread left the authorities little time to acclimatize the population to the idea of widespread infection.

“It was kind of a ‘hope for the best and plan for the best’ approach,” Professor Baxter said. “So I think there’s a lot of resentment now about vaccines not being enough — whereas they would never have been enough.”

This week, Mr. Morrison conceded that the authorities had raised people’s expectations for a summer rebirth too high.

Commuters in Sydney last year. Before Omicron, many Australians believed that high vaccination rates would allow normal life to resume.

Credit...Matthew Abbott for The New York Times

“I think we were too optimistic, perhaps, and we could have communicated more clearly about the risks and challenges that we still faced,” he said.

To some in Australia, the abrupt shift looked like a political decision after months in which the pandemic response was nonpartisan and led by scientific experts, with clear lines of communication from the authorities to residents.

It’s unclear how the reopening will affect the election, which must be held by May. But Mr. Morrison, a conservative who first took office in 2018, is trailing in polls and has faced criticism as virus response systems have buckled under Omicron.

The country’s testing program, designed to quickly trace and contain small outbreaks, was quickly overwhelmed, with residents lining up outside centers overnight and some samples ruined because they sat around too long. Rapid antigen tests were also in short supply, which led retailers to charge more and prompted an investigation into allegations of price-gouging.

With caseloads skyrocketing, labor shortages became acute, hitting supply chains and leaving supermarket shelves bare. The situation was so dire that the government briefly considered letting juveniles drive forklifts.

Hospitals canceled elective surgeries and urged patients not to go to emergency rooms unless absolutely necessary. Deaths in nursing homes spiked, making up a third of all coronavirus-related fatalities in January.

Lining up for vaccines in Sydney last year.

Credit...Matthew Abbott for The New York Times

In the face of these problems, some states reimposed mild restrictions in early January, closing nightclubs and reintroducing density limits. Western Australia, the only state still trying to suppress the virus, has delayed reopening its borders to the rest of the country.

Still, the worst of this Omicron wave may be over. Hospitalization rates have stabilized, and the health care system has avoided collapse. Death rates remain among the lowest for wealthy nations.

“If we want to compare ourselves to how the rest of the world has gone, we’re doing really well,” said Ian Mackay, a virologist at the University of Queensland.

But that’s not a standard all Australians are happy using, after having given up so much for so long to keep hospitalizations and deaths as close to zero as possible. “And I’m not sure I am either,” Professor Mackay said.

In Melbourne, where residents endured a total of 262 days of lockdown, able to leave home only to buy food or exercise, the whiplash has been particularly severe.

“We’ve been told it’s important to do everything we can to stop the spread, and now suddenly we’re being told we don’t have to,” said one resident, Laura Brennan, 26. “It’s a bit of a roller coaster.”

A Covid testing clinic at Sydney’s international airport in December. Borders have reopened, but most Australians are staying put.

Credit...Jenny Evans/Getty Images

Ms. Brennan said she was so mentally exhausted that she had no energy for fear or panic as infections soared. While she still follows government restrictions, she said, she’s trying to live a normal life, going out with friends and taking a vacation in Tasmania.

Others, like Lisa O’Halloran, 36, went into self-imposed lockdowns as case numbers rose, getting groceries delivered and strictly limiting time spent outside the home.

As case numbers have fallen, Ms. O’Halloran has loosened up a bit but is still cautious. “I’m trying to find the balance between not going stir-crazy and physical health risk,” she said.

In South Australia, where the contract-tracing Facebook page was started, its activity has declined. More people have gotten used to the idea of living with the virus, said Luke Anderson, a moderator of the group, which has over 190,000 members.

Setting aside issues like the lack of rapid antigen tests and supply chain snarls, he said, “life isn’t really that bad.”

“It’s taken myself quite a while to come around to that,” he added. “I think it’s taken a lot of people a while. But I think it’s the right way.”

John Yoon and Manan Luthra contributed reporting.

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For T-cells, omicron is nothing unusual

Thu, 03 Feb 2022 04:19:06 +0000

T-cell response from earlier infection or vaccination is down, but not by much.

False-color image of a T-cell (orange) latching on to a cell in preparation for killing it.

Getty Images

From the start, the omicron variant had experts worried because its version of the virus's spike protein carried mutations in many of the sites that are recognized by antibodies. This meant that antibodies generated to combat earlier variants like delta were less likely to recognize the newcomer. The fears have played out in the form of lowered immunity to omicron and the failure of some antibody-based therapies.

But all the worries were focused on the immune system's antibody response. The immune system also produces T-cells that recognize the virus, and wasn't clear how omicron affected their response. Based on two recently published papers, the answer is "not much at all," which could help explain why the vaccines continue to protect from severe disease.

Those other cells

The T-cell-based immune response works very differently from that of antibody-producing cells. It relies on the fact that all cells chop up a small fraction of the proteins they make. Specialized proteins then grab on to some of the resulting protein fragments and display them on the cell's surface. Once on the surface, they can be recognized by a receptor on the surface of T-cells.

The immune system gets rid of any T-cells that recognize proteins normally made by human cells. But when a pathogen is present, cells will start displaying some of its proteins on their surface. T-cells can recognize these proteins as foreign and trigger a number of responses. Helper T-cells make signaling molecules that rev up other immune cells, including those that make antibodies. Killer T-cells can latch on to the surface of infected cells and kill them.

T-cells are essential for the immune response; the absence of helper T-cells is what causes the immune deficiency seen in AIDS patients. But their role in fighting off SARS-CoV-2 was less clear, as protection from infection was largely correlated with levels of antibodies.

The lack of clarity was made worse by the fact that T-cells are hard to study. A simple blood sample is all we need to obtain enough antibodies to see what they stick to. T-cells can also be obtained from a blood sample, but they must be grown in culture for weeks to get a sense of what they might be responding to.

Nevertheless, two different groups have obtained T-cells from a combination of vaccinated and infected individuals and have tested the T-cells for their response to omicron.

Different studies, similar results

One of the studies was done in South Africa, where omicron was first characterized. A research team obtained T-cells from patients vaccinated using either the J&J or Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines or from unvaccinated people who previously had COVID-19. Each group had 15–20 individuals. These T-cells were then exposed to fragments of the omicron spike protein and tested to see whether the cells responded.

Overall, both helper and killer T-cell responses were reduced when they were exposed to omicron's version of the spike. But the reduction was not dramatic—roughly 70-80 percent of the original response persisted. There were a few individuals in which killer T-cell responses were completely absent, but the helper T-cells didn't seem to suffer from this issue. And many of the individuals had a strong T-cell response to omicron despite having their antibody response severely reduced.

The second study took place in Boston, where researchers again worked with people who had received either the J&J or Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines roughly eight months earlier. Again, killer T-cell responses to omicron remained high, with J&J recipients showing responses to omicron that were over 80 percent of their response to the ancestral strain for which the vaccine was designed. (Responses to the delta variant were indistinguishable from the response to the ancestral strain.) For the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, the drop-off against omicron was even smaller. Helper T-cells saw no drop-off in their response to omicron at all.

When looking at memory T-cells, which help preserve the immune response for long periods, the news was even better. For both vaccines and for both helper and killer cells, there was no drop-off with omicron. The response to omicron was indistinguishable from the response to the viral strain that the vaccine was designed against.

In for the long haul

On the simplest level, the data tells us that the pieces of the spike protein that are recognized by T-cells don't overlap much with the things that are recognized by antibodies. This means a far larger number of mutations would be needed to avoid both types of immunity. And because omicron can clearly cause infections in people with a strong T-cell response, it's not clear whether there's going to be a strong evolutionary selection for the sorts of mutations that could allow the virus to escape T-cell recognition.

These infections, however, don't tend to progress to symptoms severe enough to require hospitalization, even though the antibody response to omicron appears to be severely compromised by its many mutations. This suggests that (as is seen in other diseases) T-cells might be playing a role as backstop to the antibody response—able to limit an infection if one gets started but not able to block the infection entirely.

We'll need a lot of additional data before we learn the precise role of T cells during SARS-CoV-2 infections. But if these results turn out to be accurate, they are very good news, given that they show the T-cell response is extremely stable over time.

Nature, 2022. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04465-y, 10.1038/s41586-022-04460-3 (About DOIs).

For T-cells, omicron is nothing unusual

Could Crispr Flip the Switch on Insects' Resistance to Pesticides?

Wed, 02 Feb 2022 20:46:27 +0000

Many insects, like the mosquitoes that spread malaria, have evolved a tolerance to chemical sprays. What if we could reboot their genes?

While the Covid-19 pandemic raged across the world in 2020, another disease was quietly infecting more than 220 million people on the continent of Africa: malaria. That year, the disease led to more than 600,000 deaths, most of them children. Caused by the parasite Plasmodium, the illness is spread through the bites of infected female Anopheles mosquitoes.

Insecticide-treated bed nets and indoor spraying have long been some of the most effective strategies for combating the disease. But decades of using these chemicals has lessened their potency.

It happens like this: Insecticides kill off most of the mosquitoes in an area. But a small number may survive because something about their genetic makeup makes them unaffected by the pesticide. Mosquitoes within that small population mate with each other and pass on their genes to their offspring, breeding more resistant mosquitoes. In some cases, resistance has built up just a few years after the introduction of an insecticide. It makes fighting deadly mosquitoes a constant game of whack-a-mole.

Insecticides remain the frontline in fighting malaria, because interventions like building mosquito-resistant housing are still experimental, and the effort to develop a vaccine has taken decades. Last summer the World Health Organization recommended Mosquirix, the first anti-parasitic vaccine, for African children under age 5, but it is only 30 percent effective at preventing serious disease, and will take many years to achieve approval and distribution among individual nations.

Researchers at UC San Diego and the Tata Institute for Genetics and Society in India have developed a potential way to fight back: Using Crispr gene editing, they replaced an insecticide-resistant gene in fruit flies with the normal form of the gene and propagated the change through insects in the lab. The approach, known as a gene drive, is described in a January 12 paper in Nature Communications, and the team believes it can be translated into mosquitoes.

“This technology I think offers a solution to the conundrum we’re facing now, which is that there hasn't been a new category of insecticides developed for over 30 years,” says Ethan Bier, professor of cell and developmental biology at UC San Diego and senior author of the paper. “If you can go on using the ones you’ve got by re-sensitizing the mosquitoes to those, I think that would be an enormous benefit.”

A gene drive is a type of technology that overrules the laws of heredity to spread a trait through a population more quickly than it would happen naturally, forcing that gene into a population’s offspring. In this case, the change essentially reboots the gene pool to what it was before the insects evolved resistance to a particular pesticide.

The group’s gene drive uses a molecule called a guide RNA that directs the Crispr system to remove the undesired variant of a gene—in this case, an insecticide-resistant mutation called kdr. When one parent transmits its genetic information to their offspring, a protein called Cas9 binds to the guide RNA, cuts out the mutated gene, and replaces it with the normal variant from the other parent. The normal variant is then copied and all the offspring inherit it.

The team first tried the process on fruit flies because they have a similar maturation time as mosquitoes, plus the researchers had already built gene-editing tools specific to fruit flies for previous experiments. They started with a population of flies in which 83 percent had the resistant variant and 17 percent had the normal version. In 10 generations, their gene drive flipped that ratio so that 17 percent were resistant and 83 percent were not. Fruit flies and mosquitoes each have a life cycle of about two weeks, so it would take several months to re-sensitize an entire insect population to pesticides.

Bier’s team thinks the strategy could achieve a high degree of pest control while using far less insecticide. Other scientists working on gene drives want to use the technology to eliminate the use of pesticides altogether. One tack has been to genetically engineer the mosquitoes to kill the malaria parasite that they host. Another has focused on eradicating mosquitoes themselves: By using a gene drive to render males or females infertile, you could conceivably crash an entire population of mosquitoes.

Lab tests of gene drives have shown that it’s possible to spread a desired genetic trait through several generations. But studies have also found that resistance to gene drives can emerge because some mosquitoes don’t inherit the desired trait. In the wild, resistance is almost certain to occur, meaning that gene drives would probably still leave behind some mosquitoes that could bite humans and transmit disease.

Fredros Okumu, a parasitologist and entomologist who serves as director of science at the Ifakara Health Institute in Tanzania, says the type of gene drive tested by Bier’s team could be used as a followup to one of these other approaches by making the leftover population easier to target with pesticides. Using both types of gene drives could “counter any weaknesses of either method alone,” he says.

But insecticide resistance in the wild is complex. It can arise from dozens of genetic mutations. Okumu says that, for this strategy to work, scientists would have to know the precise genetic mutation that’s causing resistance in a population of insects. Across Africa, many Anopheles mosquitoes are resistant to a class of insecticides called pyrethroids, which includes DDT.

“A system like this would be best only in areas where certain individual gene mutations are directly linked to observable resistance features,” he says. “Still, I am personally very excited to see this.”

As history has shown, mosquitoes are not easy to control in the wild. Take the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which transmits dengue, chikungunya, yellow fever, and Zika viruses. The pest is widespread throughout the western hemisphere, ranging from the mid-Atlantic region of the United States all the way to South America. But it wasn’t always so pervasive. It arrived in the New World some 500 years ago on European slave ships that brought the insect from its native West Africa.

By the 1950s and 1960s, Aedes aegypti was virtually wiped out in Latin America after aggressive spraying of DDT. The campaigns were so successful that mosquito control efforts dwindled. But eventually, Aedes aegypti reappeared.

Bier and other scientists agree that one application of a gene drive is unlikely to work for the long term. Even if you could wipe out mosquitoes in one area, Aedes aegypti’s journey shows us that the pest can travel halfway around the world, pop up in a new place, and establish a new population. A gene drive like the one Bier’s team developed might need to be applied seasonally, especially if multiple resistant genes are present within a population or new ones arise.

“This is no silver bullet,” Bier says. “You never win when you try to play the evolutionary game with insects.” His team is now working on translating the fruit fly gene drive into lab mosquitoes.

George Annas, a professor of health law and ethics at Boston University, says any gene drive—whether it’s the traditional kill-all version or Bier’s resistance-reversing approach—will need broad public support from people living in that area before it can be tested outside a laboratory. And convincing the public to release genetically modified mosquitoes just to keep using insecticides, which come with a host of negative health and environmental effects, could be a hard sell.

“A lot of people think we shouldn’t use insecticides at all,” Annas says. “The idea of using heavy-duty genetic editing so that we can continue using insecticides isn’t going to appeal to everyone.”

Ethicists have long raised other concerns about the potential ecological effects of releasing gene drive technology into the wild, including worries about resistance boomeranging back again. Annas, who authored a code of ethics for gene drive research, wants to see researchers develop a mechanism to recall or stop a gene drive if something unexpected happens once it’s released. “I'm not saying we're going to develop a super mosquito, but that's not out of the realm of possibility,” he says. “A gene drive might make things worse and you certainly don't want to do that.”

Could Crispr Flip the Switch on Insects' Resistance to Pesticides?

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The Omicron Variant Has New Versions Already. What Comes Next?

Wed, 02 Feb 2022 20:43:17 +0000

Viruses keep evolving until they run out of hosts to infect. Worldwide, billions remain unvaccinated against Covid—which means Omicron isn’t the end.

The fast-moving Omicron variant is on the wane. More than half the states in the US appear to have passed a peak in cases, and global modeling predicts the wave will wash through most of the world by the end of March.

That poses the question: What comes next? SARS-CoV-2 has already provided a near-term answer. A subvariant of Omicron called BA.2 is rapidly supplanting the first version, known as BA.1. In an assessment published last Friday, the United Kingdom’s Health Security Agency said the incidence of BA.2 there doubled in seven days. A few days before that, the Statens Serum Institut, an arm of Denmark’s health ministry, said BA.2 already accounts for almost half of that nation’s Omicron cases.

Similarly quick turnovers have been reported in most of the countries maintaining good data, according to a rapid review published on Twitter by the Pandemic Prevention Institute, a project of the Rockefeller Foundation. Its staff found the same pattern of replacement in India, Germany, and Japan and other Asian nations, as well as the UK. As of January 30, according to the data dashboard Outbreak.info, BA.2 had been found in 57 countries and 29 US states.

From early findings, the BA.2 subvariant looks more transmissible than its already very infectious predecessor. There is not yet any clear signal that it causes more severe disease than BA.1 or improves on that variant’s ability to escape the immune protection created by vaccines. Even without enhancements, though, it's possible that BA.2 could do some damage. The original version of Omicron, in circulation since November, caused less serious illness than its predecessor Delta yet crushed health care systems in the US because its intense infectiousness produced so many cases in unvaccinated people.

In the US, 64 percent of the population is fully vaccinated and 26 percent have gotten boosters, which bolster immunity enough to improve defenses against the original Omicron. In the UK, the rates are 71 percent, with 55 percent boosted. But globally, only 52 percent of the world’s population is fully vaccinated, and in some countries, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, rates of full vaccination are still in the single digits. So the longer-term answer to “What comes next?” is likely to be “more surprises,” as the coronavirus’s restless evolution presses against the incomplete protections we have distributed patchily around the world.

BA.2 isn’t new, precisely. The South African researchers who flagged the emergence of the original Omicron identified BA.2 a week later based on differences in the mutations that made Omicron so distinct from Delta. (A nomenclature note: Scientists are generally calling BA.2 a “sublineage” or “subvariant” because the World Health Organization has not classified BA.2 as a stand-alone variant earning its own Greek letter. In that early work, the South African group also identified a BA.3.)

But while the original Omicron roared around the world right away, the second version took a while to rev up. That’s puzzling to scientists, who are waiting for more data. “From a virology perspective, it's fascinating,” says Nathan Grubaugh, a viral epidemiologist and associate professor at the Yale School of Public Health. “The differences in mutations between BA.1 and BA.2 are similar to the number of differences between Alpha and Delta. There’s a lot of distance between them. So virologists and evolutionary biologists are asking: Where did this come from? How is it so divergent?”

Among the original Omicron’s key differences from Delta, the variant that emerged in the summer of 2021, are a new ability to infect cells lining the upper airway—the nose and throat, instead of the lungs—along with some enhanced facility for escaping the antibody defenses created by vaccination or prior infection. In combination, those made Omicron much more transmissible. As Omicron BA.2 takes over, suggesting it’s more transmissible still, the question becomes whether its divergence has allowed it to get better at cell entry and replication or at immune escape.

The answer could determine what the next phase of the pandemic looks like. “If BA.2 is able to escape immune responses better than BA.1—or if it's able to escape the immune responses that so many people globally just had to BA.1—then we're likely to see a resurgence in cases,” Grubaugh says. “If BA.1 infection can protect against BA.2, then we’re likely to see just a slower decline.”

That switch in Omicron’s preferred site of attack from deep in the lungs to high up in the airway—which made it easier for infected people to cough germs onto others—gave it a transmission advantage over Delta. It also may have reduced the occurrence of devastating illness that marked the earliest waves of the pandemic by keeping the virus from invading the lungs and other organs. Data published last week by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that, even though case numbers and hospitalizations soared during the Omicron wave, health care metrics that indicate severe illness—such as the number of days patients stayed in hospitals and whether they were admitted to an ICU—actually decreased.

But whether Covid is now intrinsically a more mild disease or has been rendered that way by the blunting effect of immunity from vaccination or infection can’t yet be determined. The emergence of Omicron BA.1 and BA.2 were detected by genomic studies, but it’s too soon to have results from the kind of lab assays and population studies that will help untangle whether SARS-CoV-2 is becoming less virulent as it settles into endemicity. Many virologists are skeptical. “I can’t think of a virus in history that has evolved to mildness,” says Rick Bright, a virologist and former director of the US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority. “Evolution favors transmissibility.”

Bright, who now leads the Rockefeller prevention initiative, argues the US has been missing opportunities to build tools that could detect the emergence of variants more quickly. Before Omicron arrived, the CDC switched away from studying most breakthrough infections, choosing to analyze only ones that sent people to the hospital or killed them. The Rockefeller team thinks the mild infections that the agency no longer prioritizes could hold crucial information. “That is the primordial soup, where the virus is evolving and mutating,” Bright says.

“We have to invest in sequencing the mild cases, and when we do that, we're going to light up that battlefield where this virus is changing and evolving,” he adds. “We can wait for these dangerous variants to smack us in the face, or we can look at the evolution under the surface of this virus and predict where the virus will go.”

Some of the first indications that Omicron and then BA.2 emerged in the US came from wastewater sampling, which is an inexpensive and relatively low-tech surveillance scheme compared to testing patients and reporting their results to information systems governed by state authorities and federal privacy laws. The shock of the newest variants’ arrival could be enough to drive adoption of additional data sources to flag them: passively collected mobility info, at-home rapid-test results, immunity surveys over zip codes or census tracts.

All the red flags in the world, though, won’t stop new variants from arriving. SARS-CoV-2 can’t be chased from the planet—it has found a home in multiple animal species—but we can deny it the chance to adapt to human immune systems. Protection could be conferred by prior infection, though this is not guaranteed: Omicron caused reinfections in people who had already contracted Delta and breakthrough infections in people who had taken the vaccines. And developing immunity through infection alone risks an unpredictable illness and recovery, or long Covid, or the whole-body inflammatory attack in children known as MIS-C.

The simpler answer is to distribute full courses of vaccines, including boosters, as widely as possible. “The best way to prevent more, more-dangerous, or more-transmissible variants from emerging is to stop unconstrained spread, and that requires many integrated public-health interventions, including, crucially, vaccine equity,” Aris Katzourakis, a professor of evolution and genomics at the University of Oxford, wrote in Nature last week.

Vaccine equity has consistently been where the world’s pandemic response stumbles and stops. Researchers say—and have said so often that they now sound despairing—that pandemic control can never succeed until vaccine access improves. Worldwide, more than 3 billion people have received no vaccine at all.

“There is no reason at all why the next variant—which will happen, because of the billions of people in whom billions of virus particles are replicating right now—by sheer chance, could be way more sinister than Omicron,” says Madhukar Pai, the Canada research chair in epidemiology and global health at McGill University. “There is no reason at all, from everything we've seen with this virus, to hope that the next variant will not emerge, or that Omicron will be a mass immunizing event that will see us to the end of the pandemic.”

The interplay between vaccines and new variants is visible in a preprint that Grubaugh posted online last week, containing the results of a study by Yale and University of Nebraska researchers of 37,877 PCR-positive Covid tests performed as Omicron was moving into Connecticut. The research, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, shows that two vaccine doses created some defense against Delta, forcing the positive test rate down by almost half compared to people who were unvaccinated. Adding boosters reduced the positive rate by 83 percent. But among the people who became infected with Omicron, significant protection didn’t kick in until after they received boosters—and even then, half of the participants still registered positive on their Covid tests.

The funny thing about that finding was that Grubaugh predicted it—last month, in a paper in the journal Cell written with Sarah Cobey, an associate professor at the University of Chicago. The authors envisioned that the next successful variant would leapfrog over its predecessors by combining increased transmissibility, the advantage Delta possessed, with greater facility for immune escape, the trick deployed by earlier variants. The catch: They thought a newer, more nimble variant would emerge from Delta—and not, as Omicron did, from a distant branch of the virus’s evolutionary tree.

Grubaugh acknowledges that this constitutes a lesson about the need to think through all the possibilities. “We lacked the imagination to see that there's some unknown reservoir floating around, in which this virus evolved in such a divergent way,” he says. It’s a useful reminder that as Omicron 1 and 2 and 3 gnaw at the outer edges of how transmissible a virus can become, SARS-CoV-2 can still retain the capacity to surprise.

The Omicron Variant Has New Versions Already. What Comes Next?

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Fear is contagious — and people actually feel it more in a crowd

Wed, 02 Feb 2022 14:28:49 +0000

PASADENA, Calif. — Fear really is contagious, and scientists say having more people around you for support won’t help. So much for “strength in numbers.”

Researchers from the California Institute of Technology used a haunted house experience with 17 rooms containing various spooky threats during their experiment. They found people were actually more scared when the group walking through the house was larger. The team also found that their fear built up and increased as people moved from room to room.

Scientists say when faced with fear, people are more likely to have a heightened physical response when other people are around. This “phasic effect” involves rapid changes the body experiences as it responds to an event and is more likely to happen when other people are dealing with the same thing.

So, if a friend is shaking with fear and reacts to traumatic triggers, the study finds even the calmest person may also be startled by that trigger.

The study invited participants to go through the haunted house either alone or in a group and asked them to wear physiological-monitoring wristbands. During the 30-minute experience, they encountered situations that mimicked the threat of suffocation, an oncoming speeding car, and a volley of shots from a firing squad.

Results showed a positive association between the number of friends in a group and tonic arousal — which reflects the body’s overall physical response to stress or emotion. On average, the more friends that participants had with them while touring the haunted house, the higher their physical response. Other findings revealed that participants with an initially strong response to the first room of the haunted house showed increased responses as they visited other rooms.

‘Your body picks up’ on a scared friend’s signals

“There are a lot of factors that influence how human bodies respond to threat,” says Dr. Sarah Tashjian in a media release. “We found that friend-related emotional contagion, threat predictability, and subjective feelings of fear were all relevant for the body mounting a response.”

“We interpreted this to reflect fear contagion—if your friends are around, your body picks up on their signals and has a higher level of arousal even in the absence of specific scares or startles,” Tashjian adds. “In the lab, it is difficult to study the effects of groups on physiology.”

“If your body is more cued-in to the threatening event, you also psychologically feel more fear,” the study author continues.

“From a results perspective, this study is distinct because we measure multiple aspects of skin conductance, including slow responding, rapid responding, frequency of responses, and level of responses,” Tashjian explains. “Most studies use just one of these measures, which limits our understanding of how dynamic the sympathetic nervous system is and how different factors exert different influences on biology.”

“We show that friends increase overall arousal, that unexpected scares produce more responses and higher levels of responses in the body than predictable scares, and that more frequent responses from the body manifest as feeling more afraid,” the researcher concludes. “And we show all of this using an intensive, immersive, live-action threat environment.”

The research is published in the journal Psychological Science.

South West News Service writer Joe Morgan contributed to this report.

Source

What It’ll Take to Get Electric Planes off the Ground

Tue, 01 Feb 2022 18:53:36 +0000

The lithium-ion battery is good for moving cars short distances, but aviation requires longer-lasting power. Maybe we need to try other elements.

A few years ago, while driving on a stretch of interstate between Pittsburgh and San Francisco, Venkat Viswanathan began to feel a little existential. His trip was going smoothly—almost too smoothly, he thought. He would hum along for a few hundred miles at a time, stopping briefly for meals or to take in the early summer scenery. It was the classic Great American road trip. And it was hardly remarkable at all that he was doing it in an electric car.

Viswanathan, a scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, is an expert in high-energy-density batteries—designs that are meant to pack a lot of juice into not a lot of space. At times, this involves chemistry that can feel almost fanciful; the unobtanium of battery tech. But after that summer being propelled cross-country by a totally obtainable battery, he began to consider a different application for his work. “I was like, ‘Wait, what am I doing with all these new batteries I’m inventing?’” Viswanathan recalls. “Who is going to need them?” There was another way to travel coast-to-coast, he realized, one that batteries were far from decarbonizing: flight.

Over the past few years, the battery industry has largely focused on cars, yielding steady, incremental improvements to a particular scientific approach. This involves lithium ions that move between a cathode composed of a few metal oxides—including nickel, cobalt, manganese, and iron—and an anode made of graphite. This classic recipe has gotten pretty good. Recently, lithium-ion batteries have pushed the range of passenger cars past 400 miles—about as good as many combustion engines, and enough to overcome the “range anxiety” that might make some drivers reluctant to go electric. But as they approach the theoretical limit of how much energy they can store, lithium-ion batteries remain well short of what’s required for most aircraft.

The aviation industry has been grappling with this problem for a while. The industry contributes about 2 percent of global carbon emissions—a relatively small figure, but one that is poised to grow sharply as more of the world takes to the skies. (Only about one in 10 people take a flight each year, and a 2018 study estimated that 1 percent of the world’s population is responsible for half of aviation emissions.) If those planes are going to go electric, Viswanathan believes, batteries will need a radical rethink. Even regional jets meant for relatively short hops require batteries that are light but sufficiently powerful. They need enough power for takeoff, then enough energy to safely cruise over long distances. It’s possible that it will never be practical—and that greener aviation will require other approaches, like hydrogen or synthetic jet fuel.

Or by rethinking some battery fundamentals. Last week, along with other battery and aviation experts, Viswanathan published in Nature what he considers a “wake-up call” to the industry to invest in basic science beyond moving around lithium ions. In particular, the authors advocate for new cathodes involving more exotic materials, some of which produce what are known as conversion reactions, which move more electrons and can potentially pack more energy. It’s stuff that people haven’t really considered since the 1970s, when cobalt started to win out. The US Department of Energy project has set a goal of building a battery that can hold 500 watt-hours of energy per kilogram. Viswanathan and his coauthors think that for a workhorse of the skies, like the Boeing 737, we’ll need to double that, and we’ll need new chemistries to get us there. “We’re trying to move the goalpost,” he says.

The lithium-ion battery is a chemical love story. Lithium ions and electrons, once separated from each other by a charge, always seek to be reunited. The wandering of these electrons across a battery cell is what generates a current. But in that sense, lithium is limited because it has only one electron to give up. In theory, more electrons moving around would mean more energy, which is something other elements can potentially offer. Try iodine, maybe, or sulfur or fluorine, and you can get more electrons buzzing.

But there’s a wrinkle in this plan. A beautiful thing about current batteries is that lithium ions can move back and forth without causing a fuss. They’re caught and released by the cathode—a process called insertion—but once inside of it, the ions don’t react with the other materials and reorganize the atomic arrangements. For some other elements, that’s not the case. “We have new materials that weren’t there to begin with,” says Esther Takeuchi, a battery scientist at SUNY Stony Brook. Hence the term “conversion reaction.” These chemical reactions are complicated, and they result in electrochemical changes, as well as changes in volume. But perhaps the biggest problem is then getting these types of batteries to recharge. Once you’ve changed what’s inside a battery, it can be difficult to return to the materials that were there before.

For the kinds of batteries Takeuchi works on, recharging isn’t typically necessary. Her specialty is packing lots of energy into small spaces, like medical devices, that need to last a long time on a single charge—a lifetime even, because a recharge or battery swap might require surgery. One of her older designs, involving vanadium, is ubiquitous today in pacemakers. But since then her team has studied how conversion chemistries, like fluorinated carbon (referred to as CFx) or iodine, might work even better.

For planes, the same principle of space- and weight-saving applies to staying aloft over long distances. But a battery that has only a single life won’t work for a plane that needs to recharge with every leg. In the lab, researchers have had some success in reversing those conversion reactions, but only to face other problems. One of the contenders that’s furthest along is the lithium-sulfur battery—a highly desirable chemistry because of how cheap and plentiful sulfur is. The issue is that unwanted reactions can occur between the sulfur at the anode and in the electrolyte. This can create chemical buildup that means the battery loses its ability to recharge over time. Sometimes, those reactions form a pesky thing called a dendrite—a vein of material in the electrolyte that gradually extends and may eventually connect the anode and the cathode, causing a short-circuit—and a fire.

While conversion reactions involve a lot of novel chemistry, Takeuchi points out that they do not totally ditch the path batteries have taken so far. Any new cathode chemistries will also depend on the success of nearer-term improvements to battery capacity, such as new anodes made of materials other than graphite.

One of those is lithium metal. While graphite was a good choice because of its stability, lithium metal has some improved electrochemical properties, and it simply takes up less space than conventional designs. Richard Wang, CEO of Cuberg, a lithium-metal battery startup recently acquired by Northvolt, a Swedish battery manufacturer, says its design gets a 70 percent boost in energy density. Wang decided to focus his startup on the aviation industry because it would place higher value on energy density improvements. The company’s idea is to power relatively small aircraft; they have partnered with startups that want to make vertical liftoff vehicles that can operate over a short range.

It’s possible those lithium metal anodes could be paired with more experimental cathode chemistries to power larger aircraft, but the path is uncertain, Wang says. It’s a classic pickle: Plane makers want certainty that big-leap technologies will work out, while the battery startups (and their potential funders) need assurances that their experiments will eventually have a use. The truth is that plane makers may find it less useful to electrify bigger planes, he says. They might decide to stop with batteries that handle short regional routes. For longer routes where existing batteries are less practical, there might instead be hybrid approaches, where a gas engine takes over between takeoff and landing, or greener jet fuels, or perhaps hydrogen, if the infrastructure gets sorted out along with a green way to produce it. No one is sure just yet where to place their bets.

George Bye, the founder of Bye Aerospace, calls that the “white space” of electric plane innovation. He draws a solid line of progress for lithium-ion batteries that power small electric aircraft, like the two- and four-seat training planes his company builds, and after that a dashed line of lithium-metal and other almost-there innovations, like solid-state batteries, that will stretch out the capacity and distance that electric aircraft can fly. Then, after that—who knows? White space. His own company has explored lithium-sulfur for larger aircraft, but found it not quite ready for prime time. “It’s a little bit behind,” he says; one partner working on the technology recently went bankrupt.

One silver lining, Bye says, is that the weight and balance benefit of replacing a complicated jet engine with an electric battery means the plane can be designed to move more efficiently through the air. That helps extend the range and passenger capacity. “It’s not apples to apples, as some people like to say,” he says. The company is also working toward FAA certification on its training aircraft, so that it can begin delivering the hundreds of orders it has received from flight schools and airlines. Among the challenges is proving that the plane can handle fire risks—a matter not just of chemistry, but the structural design of the battery packs—and still pull an emergency landing even if a battery blows.

Large electric planes with radically new batteries may be decades away. But Takeuchi maintains that there is “room for optimism” for battery-powered jets. “Sometimes people ask if this is even possible in our wildest dreams,” she says. “And when we look at the materials and we look at the numbers, we say, ‘Yeah, it is.’” She and her coauthors point out that the future of aviation was initially electric. In 1884, the first round-trip flight by an aerial vehicle—the airship *La France—*flew by the power of a massive zinc-chlorine battery. Nearly a century and a half later, she thinks electric is ready for a comeback.

What It’ll Take to Get Electric Planes off the Ground

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