Close your eyes and breathe normally,” the therapist said. Here I was – a doctor trained in the western school of rational inquiry, empirical evidence and, dare I say it, snobbish cynicism – being hypnotised. But I’d lived with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) for as long as I could remember, with abdominal cramps bringing regular discomfort and occasional agony. Medications and dietary changes had done absolutely nothing.

I was aware of the growing evidence for hypnotherapy’s effectiveness for various painful conditions, but when I sat down on the hypnotherapist’s couch and closed my eyes for the first time, it felt more like a prayer of desperation than a reasoned treatment decision.

Through words of suggestion, my hypnotherapist gently guided my attention across my body for about 10 minutes. I felt as though I was selectively shining a torch on sensations I never pay any attention to: the heaviness of my feet, the sound of my breathing. He then pulled my attention down to my sore, cramping abdomen and used imagery to change the way I saw my pain.

“Picture your intestines as though they are a river,” he said. “Now, it might seem like a fast stream of rocky rapids, but instead imagine it as the gentle Thames, with languidly moving punts gently drifting downstream.” Over the following weeks, I could still feel painful sensations during flare-ups, but the pleasant imagery I was now associating with IBS was beginning to change my experience of it. It was as though I could take a step back and look at my own pain as an observer.

My hypnotherapist treats many clients for phobias, and I wondered whether a similar process was at work with my pain. I used to visualise it like a threatening-looking spider. But now, instead of fleeing into another room or trying to thwack it with a newspaper, I could gently pick it up and rehome it in the garden. After a few weeks of practising self-hypnosis, the pain began to wane, and after a couple of months it completely stopped. To this day, no IBS symptoms have returned.

This experience began to rock the foundation of my belief that pain is an accurate measure of injury. On the surface, this seems to make sense, but if we look more closely it’s clear that the relationship between pain and injury is not at all linear. Severe tissue damage can occur without pain: we have all heard stories of soldiers in the heat of battle completely anaesthetised to their missing limb. Pain can also occur without any injury – even without any tissue, as seen in the surprisingly common phenomenon of phantom limb pain in amputees. And all of us have some sense that the same injury is more painful when your mood is low, or if the harm is caused by another person in a threatening situation.

If pain were a reflex, a simple signalling system from the body to the brain, then we should always and only feel pain when our tissue is damaged, with the pain directly proportional to the extent of injury. Pain only begins to make sense when you understand a fundamental, revolutionary truth that modern pain science is revealing: pain is a protector, not a detector. Pain is an executive decision made by our brain outside our conscious control, to tell our conscious mind that we are in danger and to motivate us to protect our body. Where another more important survival priority trumps this – take the soldier on the battlefield fighting for their life – the brain might decide not to create pain at all, or to delay it to a later time.

In most cases of short-term – or “acute” – pain, hurt is usually an accurate indicator of harm. You shut your laptop on your thumb and it hurts; you slam it in a car door and it hurts more. But the link between hurt and harm begins to wane the longer pain persists. At least a fifth of most populations today live with persistent – also called chronic – pain. Persistent pain ruins millions of lives, but it was only recognised as a disease in its own right in 2019 and is often glossed over at medical schools.

In many cases of persistent pain the initial injury has long since healed. Through a mechanism called central sensitisation, the brain has become overprotective and pain becomes “wired” in. I am not for one minute saying that persistent pain is “all in your head” – an issue of incorrect thoughts. Rather it is neurological, as real as epilepsy.

But how could this help us deal with pain? It comes down to a simple formula: to rewire your brain out of long-term pain, you need to persistently provide it with evidence of safety and reduce evidence of threat. It’s a matter of gradually calming down an overprotective brain, letting it know that the body is safe.

To my surprise, I found hypnotherapy a useful vehicle for this, but there are many other evidence-based ways to make the brain feel safer in its body. One example is movement – from exercise to knitting – that provides your brain with data that your body is strong and safe.

And new technology could also help us find our way out of pain. A virtual reality (VR) interactive snowscape helps burns sufferers manage their notoriously painful wound care. A team in France has combined one of the world’s oldest therapies – hypnosis – with one of our newest technologies – VR – to give children recovering from surgery the opportunity to experience hypnotherapy in a relaxing VR environment of their choice, from a tropical beach to a mountaintop. Children given a 20-minute “hypnoVR” session within 72 hours of surgery required half the amount of post-operative morphine compared with those who received standard care. It will be fascinating to see whether VR can also help the brain rewire itself out of persistent pain.

Still, most people – including doctors – have an outdated idea of what pain is and why it exists, although public outreach is slowly changing that. Understanding how pain really works is the first step to truly managing it.

• Monty Lyman is a doctor and the author of The Painful Truth

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Across a five-year model, scientists found that when rich countries gave away 46 percent of their COVID-19 vaccine supply to low and middle-income countries (LMICs), it not only reduced the death rate in those countries but also reduced the risk of new virus strains appearing.

In addition, the sharing of vaccines also limited the number of waves of the pandemic, according to the modeling.

Right now, high-income countries (HICs) have access to most of the available vaccine supply, and are looking to prioritize getting their own populations vaccinated – but as the Delta and Omicron variants have shown, no-one is safe until everyone is safe.

"Our results show that vaccine inequity provides only limited and short-term benefits to HICs," the researchers write in their paper.

"Sharper disparities in vaccine allocation between HICs and LMICs lead to earlier and larger outbreaks of new waves. Equitable vaccine allocation strategies, in contrast, substantially curb the spread of new strains."

The researchers looked at data including the global movement of people, vaccine efficacy, and viral evolutionary dynamics to see how different vaccine distribution patterns would work – including examining scenarios where vaccines were hoarded compared against when they were shared.

While HICs initially see a positive trend from hoarding – in terms of reducing the prevalence of COVID-19 infections and the cumulative mortality rate – the delay in vaccinations in other countries simply prolongs the pandemic.

As well as leading to more deaths in LMICs, this means more time for reinfection, a greater possibility of future waves, and more time for the SARS-CoV-2 virus to develop new strains and reinfect already vaccinated populations.

High-income countries can't protect themselves from those problems crossing their borders, even with a highly vaccinated population. In the end, not sharing vaccines ends up costing more in terms of fighting infections and keeping people healthy.

"Many researchers and public health experts have warned of the negative consequences of global vaccine inequity," the researchers explain. "Pandemics know no borders, and the public health and economic costs of inequitable vaccine allocation will be borne by all countries in the end."

If people need even more convincing, we've already seen from studies carried out with influenza spread that when vaccines are shared between countries, everybody involved benefits from reduced infection rates.

By the end of 2021, 31 different vaccines had been approved by at least one country worldwide, with some 9 billion doses administered (that's around 116 doses for every 100 people on the planet). It's been shown that a strong vaccine response to COVID-19 is possible – but it has to apply everywhere.

Inevitably there is some educated guesswork in modeling like this – it's hard to predict how quickly countries will get people vaccinated, or how stable the supply of drugs will be – but the figures are clear that recovering from the pandemic needs to be a global, cooperative effort from this point on.

"Vaccine donations by high income countries could protect both high income and low income countries," the researchers conclude.

The research has been published in Nature Human Behaviour.

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Named 2020 XL5, this chunk of rock is only the second object of its type ever to have been conclusively identified. Its discovery suggests that perhaps Earth trojans may be more common than we knew, and offers new insights into these mysterious rocks.

Like the first trojan, astronomers predict that 2020 XL5 will hang around for at least 4,000 years before zipping off to parts elsewhere.

"The discovery of a second Earth trojan asteroid may enhance our knowledge of the dynamics of this elusive population," scientists write in a new paper. "By comparing the orbital nature of the two Earth trojans known so far, we can better understand the mechanisms that allow for their transient stability."

Trojan asteroids are asteroids (also known as minor planets) that share the orbital path of larger planetary bodies in the Solar System. They can be found in two gravitationally stable regions leading and trailing the planet, known as Lagrange points.

These are pockets where the gravitational pulls of the planet and the Sun balance perfectly with the centripetal force of any small body in that region to basically hold it in place.

Each two-body system has five Lagrange points, as seen in the diagram below. There are five between Earth and the Moon; and another five between Earth and the Sun. The Lagrange points where trojans can be found are leading L4 and trailing L5 regions.

Lagrange points. (NASA/WMAP Science Team)

Trojans are well known in the Solar System. Jupiter, naturally, has the most, with well over 11,000 documented, but we've found them hanging out with other planets too. Neptune has 32, Mars has nine, and Uranus has one.

Earth's other trojan, named 2010 TK7, is a chunk of rock around 300 meters (984 feet) across, hanging about the Earth-leading L4 Lagrangian in an oscillating tadpole-shaped orbit known as libration. It's not a permanent fixture, though; eventually, in around 15,000 years, gravitational interactions will kick it out of its current orbit.

2020 XL5 is very similar. It, too, librates around L4, and will only hang around temporarily, with new observations revealing its orbit in much finer detail. But it's a lot bigger than its companion.

New observations using the Southern Astrophysical Research Telescope (SOAR) have allowed astronomers to discern that its diameter is 1,180 meters (3,871 feet). We also now know what type of asteroid it is.

"SOAR's data allowed us to make a first photometric analysis of the object, revealing that 2020 XL5 is likely a C-type asteroid, with a size larger than one kilometer," says astronomer Toni Santana-Ros of the University of Alicante in Spain.

C-type (carbonaceous) asteroids are darker in hue because they're rich in carbon. They're also the most numerous asteroids in the Solar System; more than 75 percent of all Solar System asteroids could be carbonaceous. They're among the oldest objects in the Solar System, with a composition similar to that of the Sun itself.

This makes C-type asteroids an attractive target for studying the early Solar System and the formation of the planets, and Earth trojans potentially even more so. We currently have several space observatories "parked" in Earth-Sun Lagrange points; having a C-type asteroid hanging about nearby within reach would be an excellent opportunity.

2020 XL5 might not be it, however. Its orbit takes it nearly as far out as Mars, and crosses Venus' orbital path. But it could show us how to search for other Earth trojans.

Any object orbiting the Lagrangians would be moving around a lot, leaving a very large patch of sky to scour looking for relatively small objects; having two Earth trojans to study will give astronomers a bigger toolkit for calculating those orbits.

In turn, that could help us find a population of potentially hundreds of Earth trojans, lurking out there in the dark.

"If we are able to discover more Earth trojans, and if some of them can have orbits with lower inclinations, they might become cheaper to reach than our Moon," says astronomer Cesar Briceño of the National Science Foundation's NOIRLab.

"So they might become ideal bases for an advanced exploration of the Solar System, or they could even be a source of resources."

The team's research has been published in Nature Communications.

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BERKELEY, Calif. — People often accuse others of living in the past, but it turns out everyone is — by exactly 15 seconds! Researchers from the University of California-Berkeley have discovered that the human brain shows you images from 15 seconds in the past, instead of trying to update your vision in real-time.

Just like a social media feed, the brain is constantly uploading new and rich visual stimuli. However, to keep everything that our eyes are taking in every second of every day in order, the study finds the brain actually presents us with an image from 15 seconds earlier.

The findings provide new insights into what scientists call the mind’s “continuity field,” a function of perception where the brain merges with what our eyes see to provide a sense of stability. Without it, study authors say the world would actually appear like a blurry jumble in your eyes.

“If our brains were always updating in real time, the world would be a jittery place with constant fluctuations in shadow, light and movement, and we’d feel like we were hallucinating all the time,” explains study senior author David Whitney, a UC Berkeley professor of psychology, neuroscience, and vision science, in a university release.

“Our brain is like a time machine. It keeps sending us back in time. It’s like we have an app that consolidates our visual input every 15 seconds into one impression so we can handle everyday life,” adds study lead author Mauro Manassi, an assistant professor of psychology at Scotland’s University of Aberdeen and former postdoctoral fellow in Whitney’s lab at UC Berkeley.

Our brains always return to an older image

Researchers studied this time-traveling effect of the brain by examining the mechanisms of “change blindness.” This is when people fail to notice subtle changes which take place over time, like when a TV show switches out an actor for their stunt double.

The team recruited nearly 100 people to view close-up images of faces which changed according to their ages and gender. The time-lapse videos lasted for just 30 seconds and only included a person’s eyes, brows, nose mouth, chin, and cheeks — not their head or facial hair.

When researchers asked each participant to identify the faces they saw in the video, the group almost always picked a frame that was halfway through the time-lapse aging video.

“One could say our brain is procrastinating,” Whitney says. “It’s too much work to constantly update images, so it sticks to the past because the past is a good predictor of the present. We recycle information from the past because it’s faster, more efficient and less work.”

Living in the past is not always a good thing

Although this visual “lag” generally has a positive impact on how people perceive the world around them, not seeing things in real-time can have its drawbacks as well.

“The delay is great for preventing us from feeling bombarded by visual input in everyday life, but it can also result in life-or-death consequences when surgical precision is needed,” Manassi explains. “For example, radiologists screen for tumors and surgeons need to be able to see what is in front of them in real time; if their brains are biased to what they saw less than a minute ago, they might miss something.”

Despite these potential issues, Whitney says the continuity field and its effect on perception is just an interesting example of “what it means to be human.”

“We’re not literally blind,” Manassi concludes. “It’s just that our visual system’s sluggishness to update can make us blind to immediate changes because it grabs on to our first impression and pulls us toward the past. Ultimately, though, the continuity field supports our experience of a stable world.”

The study is published in the journal Science Advances.

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Is the view by neo-Darwinists, that genetic mutations in human genes are inherently randomized, true? A study by a team of researchers from Israel and Ghana seemingly refutes this argument.

For the past century, an assumption central to Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory is that mutations are random and accidental and that natural selection favors such accidents. In an article published in the scientific peer-reviewed journal Genome Research, researchers have found the first evidence of non-random mutations in human genes.

The Malaria proof

Using a new and innovative method, the researchers - led by the University of Haifa's Prof. Adi Livnat - have managed to prove that the rate of generation of the human hemoglobin S (HbS) mutation which protects one from malaria is higher in people from Africa in contrast to people from Europe. In other words, the mutation is not random but rather exists preferentially within the population of Africa where it is more needed.

Malaria is endemic in Africa, highly common around the entire continent; the more common development of a malaria-resistant mutation specific to the region where it is most needed cannot be explained by the traditional neo-Darwinist theories.

"We hypothesize that evolution is influenced by two sources of information: external information that is natural selection, and internal information that is accumulated in the genome through the generations and impacts the origination of mutations," explained Livnat.

While the theory of evolution is widely accepted in the scientific community, the small details have been put under a microscope for quite some time. For example, there are some impressively quick adaptations of wildlife to their changing surroundings and conditions that suggest that, if natural selection were fully true, the random accidents mentioned earlier were happening at an astonishingly fast pace.

Until now, the only response to this proposed problem was Lamarckism, which claims that the physical changes in organisms which occur during their lifetimes can be passed along genetically to offspring. Since this was not proven to work, the random mutation was maintained as the prominently held belief.

Livnat, alongside lab manager Dr. Daniel Melamed, managed to develop a new record-breakingly accurate method of detecting random mutations which they applied in their research to track the development of the HbS mutation. If random, the mutation should appear relatively equally throughout both Europe and Africa.

Refuting Darwinists' random mutation belief

"Contrary to the widely accepted expectations, the results supported the nonrandom pattern," the University of Haifa announced. "The HbS mutation originated de novo not only much faster than expected from random mutation but also much faster in the population (in sub-Saharan Africans as opposed to Europeans) and in the gene (in the beta-globin as opposed to the control delta-globin gene) where it is of adaptive significance."

These results effectively contradicted the commonly-held random mutation belief held by Darwinists.

“The results suggest that complex information that is accumulated in the genome through the generations impacts mutation, and therefore mutation-specific origination rates can respond in the long-term to specific environmental pressures,” said Prof. Livnat, whose study was funded by a grant given by the  John Templeton Foundation. “Mutations may be generated nonrandomly in evolution after all, but not in the way previously conceived. We must study the internal information and how it affects mutation, as it opens the door to evolution being a far bigger process than previously conceived.”

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“I know speaking of unity can sound to some like a foolish fantasy these days,” he said in his inaugural address. “I know the forces that divide us are deep and they are real.”

Biden has, thus far, not found much success among the humans, whose divisions remain as deep as ever. But perhaps he will have better luck overseeing some interspecies diplomacy: Commander, the president’s new German shepherd puppy, must adjust to the presence of Willow, the Biden family’s new gray tabby cat, introduced to the public on Friday.

Willow, named after first lady Jill Biden’s hometown of Willow Grove, Pa., first met her future family on a campaign stop at an unnamed farm in Western Pennsylvania. The 2-year-old cat is, according to a White House statement, “settling into the White House with her favorite toys, treats, and plenty of room to smell and explore.” Will she explore a lasting friendship with a 5-month-old puppy?

The Bidens finally have a White House cat. World, meet Willow.

While the humans are fighting like, well, like cats and dogs, the pet world has achieved a notable new level of bipartisanship. On social media and in homes across the country, cats and dogs — sworn enemies with a cultural history of antipathy and bloodshed — are now snuggling up together in those fluffy doughnut-shaped beds, snoring and purring contentedly. Given the sorry state of everything these days, it feels like the famous line from “Ghostbusters,” describing signs of the apocalypse: “Human sacrifice! Dogs and cats living together — mass hysteria!”

It’s a relationship so stereotypically fraught that it birthed its own idioms: getting along like, fighting like. Cartoons of the 20th century doubled down on the acrimony (“No, not that! Not ‘Happy Birthday!’”), exemplified in Garfield’s annoyance at Odie, or Snoopy’s disdain for the “stupid cat” who lived next door, seen only by the clawed “SLASH!” it would deliver, taking a chunk out of Snoopy’s doghouse. Even when the two species were forced to get along, as in Nickelodeon’s titular CatDog, they didn’t.

Back when dogs and cats mostly roamed outdoors and had to compete for food, their relationship was more adversarial, reports the Guardian. “Evolution has not provided either species with any capacity to communicate with one another, so close-combat fighting is more or less inevitable when neither is prepared to run,” writes John Bradshaw. The phrase “fighting like cats and dogs” is “something of an anachronism,” though: If pets are socialized properly, they’ll live harmoniously.

So how is that going at the White House? There were, understandably, questions about how well-equipped the Bidens would be to handle this new arrival. Commander has new-puppy energy to burn off. And he replaces Major, their German shepherd who — after a few “biting incidents” — was rehomed because he lacked the temperament to handle life in the White House.

A cat and dog’s successful relationship depends on how they’re introduced, says Fanna Easter, a Dallas-area dog behavior consultant.

“The one thing I would not recommend is turning them both loose in a room and letting them work it out,” says Easter, because it can do lasting damage to the relationship if one or both animals get scared or aggressive. Instead, she recommends a slow approach, with plenty of bribes: Make the dog think, “Oh, my gosh. Every time I see the kitty, it makes delicious treats like string cheese rain from the sky. So this kitty makes good things happen.” (Vice versa for the cat, but with fish for a treat, she advises.) The cat should have places it can retreat to if the dog’s energy becomes overwhelming. “In the White House, there’s plenty of room to run,” says Easter.

The vast majority of presidents have owned dogs — breeds ranging from George Washington’s hounds (names: Drunkard, Tipsy, Sweet Lips, among others) to FDR’s German shepherd (also named Major!) to President Obama’s hypoallergenic Portuguese water dogs, Bo and Sunny. But only about a dozen cats have lived in the White House. The majority of cat-owning presidents were Democrats or liberals — but most of the cat owners also owned dogs. Maybe presidents are categorically more likely to be Dog People.

“Presidential candidates would generally, on average, match the profile of a dog person,” says Samuel Gosling, a psychology professor at the University of Texas who has studied the personalities of dog and cat lovers. “Just the task of what it takes to be president. You have to be extroverted, and that tends to be dog people.”

Dog people vs. cat people is another one of those binaries that sets people up for a fight, perhaps because the animals’ traits align with other parts of our personalities that put us in opposition. In his study of dog and cat people and their personas, Gosling thinks that dog people may lean slightly conservative, while cat people lean liberal.

“Dog people, they tend to be higher on the big five personality traits of extroversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness,” says Gosling. “Whereas people who see themselves as cat people tend to score higher on the personality traits of neuroticism and openness to new ideas.” Openness, he says, is the trait that correlates most strongly with political orientation.

Having one of each, then, might be seen as the ultimate bipartisan move — especially for a politician.

“I don’t know if there’s a subconscious desire to appeal across the aisle,” says Andrew Hager, historian of the online Presidential Pet Museum. Reflecting on Clinton, the second Bush and now Biden, “All three of those people at least initially came in on the idea that, you know, ‘I can unite people.’”

Bush’s Scottish terriers, Barney and Miss Beazley, have been photographed licking India, his black cat. But Clinton didn’t have much luck with diplomacy on the pet front: His cat, Socks, and his Labrador retriever, Buddy, famously hated each other.

“I did better with the Arabs, the Palestinians and the Israelis than I’ve done with Socks and Buddy,” Clinton told CNN in a 2001 interview.

© Photo by Megan Cottone/Photo by Megan Cottone

Megan Cottone's cat, Chlea, and dog, Chloe, do everything together, including snuggling. (Photo by Megan Cottone)

Are we a nation of Dog People or Cat People? Judging by social media, a little of both. In the early ’00s, the Internet was made of cats — LOLcats, Grumpy Cat, keyboard cat, Nyan Cat, Lil Bub. Then came We Rate Dogs, doggos, doge, Doug the Pug, Boo the Pomeranian (RIP), and Tika, the Italian greyhound that is a self-proclaimed “model and gay icon.” Noting the shift in 2018, The Outline’s Owen Phillips thought the change was “likely a byproduct of the shifting demographics of the Internet” from being used by “a segment of society that more easily identified with cats” (introverts, loners) to the general public, where preferences tilt slightly toward dog ownership.

But lately, our collective attention has been bouncing back and forth between Noodle, the bones or no bones oracle, and the saga of the three chonky cats who are obsessed with a blender box.

“It sounds almost like the way our political parties tend to rise and fall in fortune. You know, we don’t seem like a very consistent people politically, like to go from Barack Obama to Donald Trump to Joe Biden,” says Hager. “For a while, the dog people are superior and then, you know, people get kind of burned out on dog content and somebody shows up with a fresh cat idea. … The Internet is probably as cyclical as the rest of our culture.”

Many people, Gosling found, don’t consider themselves just dog people or cat people — they’re both. Like Megan Cottone. She’s the owner of Chloe, an 8-year-old beagle, and Chlea, a 9-month-old kitten. They are the best of friends.

“They’re just inseparable, says Cottone, 27. “They take lots of naps together. They play together, they are always in the same room around the house. Whatever I go out and do, they both come with me.”

To be fair, this is because Chlea could be described as a very dog-like kitten. She walks on a leash. She goes for hikes near their Seattle home. This, Cottone realizes, makes her an exceptional cat. Nevertheless, “I’ve never really experienced what people talk about when they say cats and dogs don’t get along,” she says.

The same goes for Cynthia Bennett, also 27, who lives in Longmont. Colo., with her 7-year-old dog, Henry, and her 4-year-old cat, Baloo, both rescues. The pair are Internet-famous: An Instagram account of their snuggles and adventures has more than 2 million followers, and managing it — along with a website that sells merch and promotes an associated nonprofit — is Bennett’s full-time job.

When she watches her pets, she sees an obvious lesson for the humans.

“They completely look different and they’re supposed to hate each other,” says Bennett. “They see past each other’s differences.”

She often hears from people whose dogs and cats enjoy similar affection.

“Henry and Baloo are definitely really unique, but that relationship is definitely obtainable,” says Bennett.

Research backs this up. A 2018 study evaluated an unscientific sample of dog and cat owners in the United Kingdom, United States and a few other countries to measure their perceptions of the relationship between cats and dogs living in the same household, and found that many “owners believed that their cat and dog were comfortable in each other’s presence and showed amicability in their relationship.”

Another finding: “Typically, the cat appeared to be the main controller in determining amicability in the cat-dog relationship.” The study did not explore whether this held true for human counterparts, but the knowing nods from cat people nationwide would indicate it does.

So, if the Bidens want to ensure bilateral agreement in their household, there’s one thing they need to know. The real Commander is Willow.

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Surprise eruptions are Earth’s overlooked threat

Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine gets full FDA approval

"The space industry will contribute more to China's growth as a whole."

A new video of Tianwen-1 flying above Mars is pretty epic

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By now, there's plenty of evidence that Mars had a watery past, and more data is coming in all the time. But that evidence doesn't necessarily give us a complete picture of Mars' past. Was the red planet covered in watery oceans, or was most of the water trapped as ice, with erratic seasonal melting?

This week, two researchers at Caltech—Ellen Leask and Bethany Ehlmann—helped provide a clearer picture of Mars' past by figuring out the likely behavior of the last liquid water on Mars and determining when it stopped flowing. Their secret was tracing salt deposits on the Martian surface.

Follow the salt

There are many different salts we've detected on the Martian surface, but the ones of interest here are chlorides (which probably include the sodium chloride of table salt). These are especially informative because they are the salts most readily soluble in water. So if there's any water around, these chloride salts would be dissolved in it. Any deposits of these salts currently present on the surface of Mars, then, were put there as the last water in that region of the planet dried out.

Fortunately, detecting chlorides from orbit is not very challenging. They have a distinct spectral signature that is only shared by a couple of other chemicals (including diamonds) that are unlikely to be found in significant amounts on Mars' surface. So, armed with data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the researchers mapped the presence of chloride deposits across the entire Martian surface.

Analyzing these deposits gave the researchers a number of data points about the water that put them there.

For starters, you might expect that the planet's last liquid water would have gathered at the bottom of basins as they gradually dried out. But that's not the pattern seen here. Instead, many were in relatively narrow channels, and the elevation of the deposits was often higher than nearby basins. To Leask and Ehlmann, this suggested that the water had flowed into channels but dried up before reaching the basins they filled. The idea was supported by the fact that the outlet channels from these basins didn't have salt deposits present.

Another factor the researchers determined is that these deposits were relatively thin. While it's difficult to get an exact depth from orbit, in a few instances, the team could estimate where impact craters disrupted the chloride deposit. These findings consistently indicated that the salt deposits were shallow—less than three meters deep. While that still represents a lot of cycles of water flowing in and drying out, Mars clearly doesn't need the long-term water occupancy that builds thick salt deposits on Earth.

When 2 billion is “recent”

Finally, the researchers looked at the age of the salt deposits. Typically, this is done by checking the number of craters in the deposit and assuming that the craters have been made at a regular rate over the past few billion years. But most of the salt deposits occurred in narrow channels, so there aren't many large surfaces to build up a useful crater count.

Instead, the researchers mostly focused on the dates of underlying rock deposits, which provide a maximum age for the salt deposited on top of them. In one case, the team found a salt deposit that was on top of a 3.3-billion-year-old rock, which was altered by an event that was dated to two billion years ago. In another case, salt deposits were on top of volcanic deposits dated to 2.3 billion years ago.

That's much more recent than many previous estimates of when Mars went too cold and lost too much atmosphere to allow liquid water.

That said, Leask and Ehlmann don't think these deposits represent a permanent presence of water. Instead, they suggest that the water showed up in these channels due to seasonal melting of local ice deposits and may not have even entered the nearby basins in significant amounts. They also note that the region where most of the salt deposits are located overlaps with where climate models predict we would see the most precipitation when Mars had a water cycle, so there's good reason to think there should be major ice deposits in the area.

No single analysis will present a complete history of Mars' watery past. But individual findings can give us a glimpse of different eras, providing puzzle pieces that we can eventually put together to form a bigger picture.

AGU Advances, 2022. DOI: 10.1029/2021AV000534  (About DOIs).

The last of Mars’ liquid waters flowed about 2 billion years ago

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Mineralized feces chock-full of parasitic eggs indicates that it wasn’t the lower classes alone that suffered from certain infectious diseases

Reconstruction by an artist of the toilet room that stood in the garden of the Armon Hanatziv royal estate Yaniv Korman

About two years ago, while building a new visitor center in Armon Hanatziv Promenade, an outlook in Jerusalem known for its beautiful vistas, construction workers dug up remains of a fine ancient structure. After examining fragments of exquisite balustrades and elegant window frames, archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority determined that they once belonged to a palace or a luxury villa built in the mid-7th century B.C.E. “The fragments were of the finest quality ever found in Israel,” says Ya’akov Billig, who leads the excavation efforts at the Antiquities Authority. But as they dug further, the team was in for an even greater treat—a prehistoric latrine. And even more excitingly, the researchers’ newfound archaeological gem held what the ancient toilet-goers left behind: mineralized poop.

The Iron Age toilets are indeed a rare find, in part because few families had them—most individuals did their business in the bush—and in part because these usually simple structures did not survive very long. But those that stood the test of time are a trove of information about our ancestors, including their diets, health problems and potentially even their medicinal substances, says microarchaeologist Dafna Langgut of Tel Aviv University. She studies microscopic remnants the naked eye can’t see. After peering into the prehistoric poop for cues about the individuals who produced it, she came up with a curious conclusion: While the palace residents lived in a luxury villa surrounded by a lush garden, they suffered from debilitating parasitic infections that gave them stomach aches, nausea, diarrhea and other ills. Langgut’s team described their findings in the International Journal of Paleopathology, along with a theory of why these infections may have been so widespread that everyone was affected.

The waste left behind can often tell unique stories that you won’t find in ancient texts, says archaeologist Yonatan Adler, of Ariel University. “Poking through people’s garbage is a great way to learn about them,” he says. While not involved in this study, Adler has spent his share of time digging through centuries-old rubbish, including animal bones from dinners eaten eons ago. If you look into individual’s trash bags, today you can tell what they eat, what cleaning or cosmetic products they buy and what medicines they used. Likewise, primordial poop can tell can also tell scientists a lot about the individuals who produced it, which is why archaeologists were so excited about their discovery.

“Once I saw the toilet seat, I knew exactly what it was,” says Billig. It was a sure sign that the palace residents were very wealthy. “The Talmud describes a rich person as someone who has a toilet close to his table,” Billig says, because if one suddenly has to go, “there’s no panic, one doesn’t have to hurry much.” The sediment accumulated below the stone seat was another tale-telling toilet sign—it was of a slightly lighter color than the surrounding soils, indicating that the content was different from your typical garden dirt.

The stone toilet seat found during the 2019 excavation at Armon Hanatziv Ya’akov Billig

When Langgut’s team collected the samples from the pit and reviewed them under the microscope, they found some remains of parasitic worms and loads of their eggs, which meant that they were thriving and procreating in the palace occupants’ intestines. Altogether, she found four different types of parasitic worm eggs: Ascaris lumbricoides (roundworm), which can produce cramps and vomiting; Trichuris trichiura (whipworm), which can make bowel movements painful, Taenia (beef and pork tapeworm), which can trigger pain and weight loss, and Enterobius vermicularis (pinworm), which causes anal itching. The palace residents certainly had many miserable moments when it came to their daily intestinal functions. Worse, in children, these infections can lead to malnutrition and stunted growth.

To make sure the parasites indeed came from residents’ stools and not from the surrounding soil, Langgut’s team sampled the areas around the pit. They found no worm eggs in the soil, confirming that they came from the suffering humans. Their excrement, which was naturally full of minerals like phosphates, served as a good preservative, so the eggs didn’t fall apart but lasted for centuries.

The findings surprised Langgut. Parasitic infections weren’t uncommon throughout human history, but typically they plagued the poor, and not so much the rich. The lower classes had poor hygiene, lived in close proximity to animals who carry many parasites, and could also acquire them from eating undercooked meat. With families living in crowded conditions and without adequate hand-washing, the parasites easily passed between individuals and from feces to drinking water. But that should not have been the case with the elite. “I was very surprised to see hundreds of eggs of parasites,” says Langgut, “because they came from the intestines of these high-status people that used to live here.” That meant that the parasites became endemic to the population, to the point that they made their way into the intestines of the rich.

Langgut has a theory of how this might have happened. Around 701 B.C.E., the Assyrian King Sennacherib laid a siege on Jerusalem, and while his army ultimately failed to take the city, they subjugated many surrounding settlements. They imposed a heavy tax on the residents in a form of the highly coveted agricultural products the area was known for, including wine and olive oil. Forced to pay the tax and grow more grapes and olive trees, the peasants had to farm the rocky, barren terrains surrounding the city. To make the soil more fertile, they began to enrich the lands with their own feces.

Human waste can indeed be a potent fertilizer, but to be used safely it must be composted for months, which helps eliminate parasites. Whether the residents didn’t have the luxury of waiting that long or simply didn’t know the nuances isn’t clear. But Langgut thinks parasite eggs from the human fertilizer spread on plants and produce, eventually allowing diseases to become endemic—and even affect the elite who had their own privies.

Langgut’s team also discovered pollen inside the sediment, concluding that the toilet was likely surrounded by a lush garden of fruit and ornamental plants. Billig adds that the team also found remains of bowls, dishes and animal bones inside the pit, revealing that the ancients “flushed” unwanted items down the drain much like we do. And some of these items may have been used to deal with the smells. “Some of the bowls could’ve been used as air fresheners,” Billig theorizes, adding that his team plans to do residue analyses to determine what the vessels once held. “If we find something like fragrant oil or deodorant, it can teach us something new.”

Adler underscores how material evidence, no matter how minuscule, can help us investigate the past. He says our window into studying the past is often very small, like cracks in a big opaque wall. “In this particular study we have a very narrow window of parasites that have been preserved,” he says. “To Dafna’s credit, she realized how lucky we are to have this information,” he adds—and used it to study the society’s health challenges.

Exactly how individuals dealt with these debilitating diseases remains to be researched. Modern medicine treats parasitic infections with antibiotics, which weren’t available at the time. But Langgut posits the residents may have had some remedies, and plans to scour the 2700 stool samples for clues. “In another cesspit from a later time, I had found evidence of chamomile and mint, which we use even today for stomach ailments,” she says. “So we will study the botanical remains and maybe see some evidence of medicinal plants.”

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