This Observatory Will Help Reveal the Shape of the Universe

No deaths, ~80 percent drop in hospitalization compared to the placebo group.

Pfizer’s anti-COVID drug still looks effective after further analysis

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) on Tuesday verified the record, reported in the Siberian town of Verkhoyansk on 20 June last year.

The temperature was 18C higher than the area's average daily maximum for June.

The WMO, a UN agency, said the extreme heat was "more befitting the Mediterranean than the Arctic".

It is the first time the agency has included the Arctic Circle in its archive of extreme weather reports.

The WMO said the 38C temperature was measured at a meteorological station during "an exceptional and prolonged Siberian heatwave".

Last year's extreme heat in the region contributed to the spread of wildfires, which swept across the forests and peatlands of northern Russia releasing record amounts of carbon.

While relatively common in summer months, high temperatures and strong winds made the fires unusually severe.

The high temperatures across Siberia led to "massive sea ice loss" and played a major role in 2020 being one of the three warmest years on record, the WMO said.

The WMO said its verification of the Verkhoyansk record highlighted how temperatures were increasing in a climatically important region of the world.

"This new Arctic record is one of a series of observations reported to the WMO Archive of Weather and Climate Extremes that sound the alarm bells about our changing climate," said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas.

The agency said it had added the Arctic Circle to its World Weather and Climate Extremes archive under a new category for high temperatures in the region.

The Arctic is one of the fastest warming regions in the world, heating at more than twice the global average, the WMO said.

Warming in the Arctic is leading to the thawing of once permanently frozen permafrost below ground.

This is alarming scientists because as permafrost thaws, carbon dioxide and methane previously locked up below ground is released.

These greenhouse gases can cause further warming, and further thawing of the permafrost, in a vicious cycle known as positive feedback.

The higher temperatures also cause land ice in the Arctic to melt at a faster rate, leading to greater run-off into the ocean where it contributes to sea-level rise.

Human activity is contributing to a rise in world temperatures, and climate change now threatens every aspect of human life.

Left unchecked, humans and nature will experience catastrophic warming, with worsening droughts, greater sea level rise and mass extinction of species.

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Amazon has explained why a vital Amazon Web Services (AWS) region, US-East-1, experienced what the company describes as a "service disruption" for about seven hours on Dec. 7.

The problems with US-East-1 affected many people's ability to connect to streaming platforms like Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon Prime Video; games like Valorant, League of Legends, and PUBG; apps like Tinder, Venmo, and Coinbase; and many other services that rely on AWS.

The sheer popularity of those services makes it relatively easy to tell when AWS is having problems—just try to stream a video, play a game, or use a mobile app connected to the nigh-ubiquitous platform. But it can be much more difficult to figure out why AWS is down.

Here's what Amazon says caused US-East-1's woes:

"At 7:30 AM PST, an automated activity to scale capacity of one of the AWS services hosted in the main AWS network triggered an unexpected behavior from a large number of clients inside the internal network. This resulted in a large surge of connection activity that overwhelmed the networking devices between the internal network and the main AWS network, resulting in delays for communication between these networks. These delays increased latency and errors for services communicating between these networks, resulting in even more connection attempts and retries. This led to persistent congestion and performance issues on the devices connecting the two networks."

The company also says that congestion "immediately impacted the availability of real-time monitoring data for our internal operations teams, which impaired their ability to find the source of congestion and resolve it," as well as their ability to explain the issue to AWS customers.

AWS is a sprawling platform that offers a broad range of products used by many companies to serve a variety of purposes. It's a wonder that it doesn't experience major outages more often—and that it was able to recover from this particular disruption as quickly as it did.

However, the incident still highlights the inherent risk associated with so many companies relying on AWS, especially since the nature of the network means that problems with the platform can hinder efforts to solve problems with the platform. (And that's when a single region's involved!)

Amazon even acknowledges that relying too much on just one AWS region can be a problem:

"Our Support Contact Center also relies on the internal AWS network, so the ability to create support cases was impacted from 7:33 AM until 2:25 PM PST. We have been working on several enhancements to our Support Services to ensure we can more reliably and quickly communicate with customers during operational issues. We expect to release a new version of our Service Health Dashboard early next year that will make it easier to understand service impact and a new support system architecture that actively runs across multiple AWS regions to ensure we do not have delays in communicating with customers."

More information about what caused the disruption to US-East-1, how Amazon's responding to the issue, and which services were affected can be found in the company's summary.

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Why F1’s switch from 13-inch to 18-inch tires is important

The 22-year-old student at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay —Agrawal's alma mater—has already been recruited by Google to become one of the thousands of IIT graduates at major American tech companies.

"When I heard about Parag, I was so happy," she said. "One IITian is also CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai. So this is my (stepping) stone now."

Twitter's Agrawal is the youngest chief executive in the S&P 500 at just 37.

Like Google-parent Alphabet's 49-year-old CEO Sundar Pichai, he left India after his IIT degree to pursue a postgrad in the United States before working at several American companies.

Other Indians at the highest corporate tech echelons include IBM's Arvind Krishna and Palo Alto Networks' Nikesh Arora—both IIT alumni—along with Satya Nadella of Microsoft and Shantanu Narayen at Adobe.

Executives and experts say that beyond the South Asian nation's sheer size, the phenomenon is due to multiple push-pull factors and skillsets including a culture of problem-solving, the English language, and relentless hard work.

The IIT network was established in 1950 by India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who envisaged a pool of highly trained science and engineering graduates to help build the country.

IIT graduate and Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla believes that after growing up with multiple communities, customs and languages, Indians have the ability to "navigate complex situations".

"Educational competition in India and societal chaos helps hone their skills in addition to the rigorous technical education at the IITs," the billionaire venture capitalist told AFP.

'Creme de la creme'

Silicon Valley demands technical expertise, managing diverse communities, and entrepreneurship in the face of uncertainty from its top executives.

"In innovation, you have to be able to break the rules, you're fearless. And... you can't survive a day in India without having to break one rule or the other or dealing with incompetent bureaucracy or corruption," said Indian-American academic Vivek Wadhwa.

"Those skills are very useful when you're innovating in Silicon Valley, because you have to constantly challenge authority."

And they are valuable: ride-hailing giant Uber this month offered IIT Bombay students first-year packages of $274,000 for jobs in the United States.

Shivani Nandgaonkar wants to follow in the footsteps of IIT grads who have gone on to become CEOs at some of the world's biggest tech firms.

The contest for such prizes begins early in a country of more than 1.3 billion people with a longstanding focus on education.

The IITs are seen as India's top universities, and more than one million pupils apply each year for just 16,000 places.

For one-and-a-half years, Nandgaonkar studied up to 14 hours a day, seven days a week. Some other students started preparations at just 14 or 15, she added.

"Imagine having an entrance which is 10x more difficult than MIT and Harvard. That's what the IITs are," Wadhwa said. "So it's the creme de la creme of the country."

India's biggest export?

The IIT network was established in 1950 by the country's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who envisaged a pool of highly trained science and engineering graduates to help build India after the end of British rule in 1947.

But the supply of engineers was not matched by sufficient domestic demand, so graduates looked further afield, particularly in the United States where there was hunger for highly skilled workers as the digital revolution took off.

The admissions process for IITs is highly competitive.

"In the '60s '70s, and '80s, even into the '90s, Indian industry was not yet at the advanced (stages) and... a lot of those who wanted to do cutting-edge technology felt the need to go abroad," IIT Bombay Deputy Director S. Sudarshan said.

Agrawal, Pichai and Nadella spent a decade or more working their way through the ranks of their respective companies, building up insider knowledge while gaining the trust of the firms' American founders.

And for years, more than half the applicants for US H1-B skilled immigrant visas have been from India, and mostly from the tech sector.

In contrast, engineers from even more populous China had the option of finding jobs at home or returning after completing their US postgrads as their domestic economy boomed, said Johns Hopkins University professor Devesh Kapur, an IIT graduate himself.

The phenomenon may wane in time as India's own tech sector thrives, offering the country's best and brightest minds greater domestic opportunities, but for Nandgaonkar, becoming a tech boss like Agrawal or Pichai is not a far-fetched idea.

"Why not?" she said, "Dream big!"

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Omicron weakens vaccine protection, but boosters revive defenses, early data finds

The report, Life and work experiences of Australians with chronic conditions, looks at how people with chronic conditions aged 15–64 were faring prior to 2020, providing baseline information for further research. It also takes an in-depth look at factors that were associated with poor health among mature working-age Australians (aged 45–64) living with chronic conditions.

"About 47% of Australians are estimated to have at least one chronic health condition, such as arthritis, asthma, cancer, cardiovascular diseases, and mental and behavioral conditions," said AIHW spokesperson Katherine Faulks.

Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics National Health Survey show that in 2017–18, working-age Australians (15–64 years) living with chronic conditions when compared to those without chronic conditions were:

• less likely to be employed either full-time or part-time, 71% compared with 80%

• more likely to receive a government pension or allowance, 18% compared with 7%

• more likely to live outside major city areas, 29% compared with 23%.

"More than a quarter (26%) of 45- to 64-year-olds with chronic conditions self-assessed their health as poor, compared to 16% of those aged 15–44," Ms. Faulks said.

"Among mature working-age Australians with chronic conditions, individual-based measures of socioeconomic position such as family composition of household, home ownership, and education were found to be important factors in their likelihood of reporting poor self-assessed health.

"Mature working-age Australians with chronic conditions were more likely to report poor health if they had any of the following characteristics: three or more types of chronic conditions; any activity limitations or a disability; were male; were renters; were living alone; had no tertiary qualifications."

The pandemic has affected the lives of all Australians but many people with chronic conditions have faced some particular challenges. For example, people with chronic conditions are at greater risk of severe illness from COVID-19 than those without chronic conditions.

As Australians with chronic conditions are more likely to live on their own, many may have been at increased risk of experiencing social isolation and loneliness when lockdowns and other measures which limited social interaction were in place. More research is needed to understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on labor force participation among mature working-age people with chronic conditions.

Future research into the experiences of working-age Australians with chronic conditions could also look at specific groups, such as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people with chronic conditions.

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Some 14,000 Italian researchers quit the country between 2009 and 2015, according to Italy's national statistics agency Istat—a trend explained in large part by a lack of investment.

"Italy is not a welcoming country for researchers, whether Italian or foreign," Parisi said in October after being awarded the Nobel prize for his work on the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems.

"Research is underfunded and the situation has worsened over the past 10-15 years."

Government funding fell from 9.9 billion euros ($11.2 billion) in 2007 to 8.3 billion in 2015—the latest figures available—while in 2019, research spending in the eurozone's third largest economy was significantly below the EU average.

As well as Parisi, Italy has produced some top scientists in recent decades, notably Carlo Rubbia, the CERN physicist who won a Nobel in 1984, and neuroembryologist Rita Levi-Montalcini, who won in 1986.

But commentators note that research budgets were slashed after the 2008 financial crisis, while Italy's notorious bureaucracy also plays a role in sending young talent abroad.

"In Italy, unfortunately, there are big obstacles to getting a university job," said Eleonora D'Elia, a 35-year-old biologist from Rome, who has been teaching for the past four years at Imperial College London.

She cited "a lack of funding, and jobs available, the contacts needed and a highly complex system based on the number of articles published".

Like a vegetable garden

The scale of the problem was confirmed by Roberto Antonelli, head of the prestigious Lincean Academy in Rome, who told AFP there had been "an enormous reduction in funds for universities and Italian research facilities".

This was accompanied by "a reduction in the quality of positions available for young people compared to other countries".

The number of professors and of long-term contracts at universities has fallen from 60,882 in 2009 to 48,878 in 2016—a drop of almost 20 percent.

In London, d'Elia told AFP, there is "more support in terms of salary and research budget", whereas in Italy, where she hopes one day to return to be with her family and friends, she "would have to constantly fight to get that".

The Italian government has vowed to use some of the massive post-pandemic recovery funds it expects to receive from the European Union between now and 2026 to help boost home-grown research.

Research Minister Cristina Messa in October promised six billion euros in funding for 60 projects.

'Like a vegetable garden'

Antonelli welcomed the funds, but warned: "The problem is the continuity of funding... what will happen after 2026?"

He said research must be measured in percentage of GDP, which ranges from "the highest such as in Finland, Japan and South Korea, to the lowest among developed countries such as Italy, which do not invest comparable funds when compared to neighbours such as Germany or France".

Italy spent just 1.45 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) on research in 2019, below the EU average of 2.19 percent and Germany's 3.17 percent, according to data from European agency Eurostat.

Parisi has also emphasised the importance of a long-term view.

"Research is like a vegetable garden, if you think you can water it every fortnight, things will go wrong," he said.

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It looks a lot like a hot version of the innermost planet in our Solar System.

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A cubic meter of asteroid dust may have as much as 20 liters of water.

Asteroid-sample return shows water on its rocks’ surface

The team calls the social distancing rule an “arbitrary measurement” of safety in the absence of masks. It could have been set anywhere between three to 10 feet, depending on the risk tolerance of the local public health authority putting out the mandate.

Infected individuals spread the virus through coughing, speaking, and even breathing. People expel larger droplets that eventually settle on surfaces or break into smaller aerosols that may float through the air. The study used computer modelling to quantify how these infectious particles travel. Results show coughs vary widely when it comes to expelling particles.

“I remember hearing lots about how COVID-19 was spreading via door handles in early 2020, and I thought to myself if that were the case, then the virus must leave an infected person and land on the surface or disperse in the air through fluid mechanical processes,” says lead author Professor Epaminondas Mastorakos in a university release.

No masks lead to an unknown dynamic when coughing

Scientists say the findings in the Physics of Fluids underline the continued importance of vaccination, ventilation, and masks heading into winter.

Early in the pandemic, health experts focused on hand washing and surface cleaning. However, Cambridge engineers note it’s been clear for nearly two years that COVID spreads through airborne transmission. They have developed various programs to investigate how the virus behaves in different environments.

“One part of the way that this disease spreads is virology: how much virus you have in your body, how many viral particles you expel when you speak or cough,” adds first author Dr. Shrey Trivedi. “But another part of it is fluid mechanics: what happens to the droplets once they’re expelled, which is where we come in. As fluid mechanics specialists, we’re like the bridge from virology of the emitter to the virology of the receiver and we can help with risk assessment.”

Simulations showed how much of the virus would reach another person in the same room from a cough containing 1,000 droplets. The researchers found there isn’t a sharp cut-off once the droplets spread beyond two meters.

When a person coughs and isn’t wearing a mask, most of the larger droplets will fall on nearby surfaces, but smaller droplets suspended in the air can quickly and easily spread well beyond the six-foot mark. How far and how quickly these aerosols spread will depend on the quality of ventilation in a room. In addition to the variables surrounding mask-wearing and ventilation, there’s also a high degree of variability.

“Each time we cough, we may emit a different amount of liquid, so if a person is infected with COVID-19, they could be emitting lots of virus particles or very few, and because of the turbulence they spread differently for every cough,” Trivedi continues.

The 6-foot rule may only be good for COVID messaging

The team’s calculations took into account turbulent flow and detailed descriptions of droplet motion and evaporation.

“Even if I expel the same number of droplets every time I cough, because the flow is turbulent, there are fluctuations,” Mastorakos says. “If I’m coughing, fluctuations in velocity, temperature and humidity mean that the amount someone gets at the two-meter mark can be very different each time.”

The six-foot rule is an effective and easy-to-remember message for the public. However, the study finds it isn’t a mark of safety given the large number of variables associated with an airborne virus. Vaccination, ventilation, and masks – while not 100 percent effective – are vital for containing the pandemic.

“We’re all desperate to see the back of this pandemic, but we strongly recommend that people keep wearing masks in indoor spaces such as offices, classrooms and shops,” Mastorakos concludes. “There’s no good reason to expose yourself to this risk as long as the virus is with us.”

The researchers are carrying out similar simulations for spaces such as lecture rooms to assess the risk as people spend more time indoors. The World Health Organization recommends a distance of at least three feet (one meter) from others — even if they don’t appear to be sick. WHO also advises people to avoid crowds and close contact and to wear a properly fitted mask in poorly ventilated rooms.

South West News Service writer Mark Waghorn contributed to this report.

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An international group of researchers reconstructed the recent history of ocean warming at the gateway to the Arctic Ocean in a region called the Fram Strait, between Greenland and Svalbard.

Using the chemical signatures found in marine microorganisms, the researchers found that the Arctic Ocean began warming rapidly at the beginning of the last century as warmer and saltier waters flowed in from the Atlantic – a phenomenon called Atlantification – and that this change likely preceeded the warming documented by modern instrumental measurements. Since 1900, the ocean temperature has risen by approximately 2 degrees Celsius, while sea ice has retreated and salinity has increased.

The results, reported in the journal Science Advances, provide the first historical perspective on Atlantification of the Arctic Ocean and reveal a connection with the North Atlantic that is much stronger than previously thought. The connection is capable of shaping Arctic climate variability, which could have important implications for sea-ice retreat and global sea-level rise as the polar ice sheets continue to melt.

All of the world’s oceans are warming due to climate change, but the Arctic Ocean, the smallest and shallowest of the world’s oceans, is warming fastest of all.

“The rate of warming in the Arctic is more than double the global average, due to feedback mechanisms,” said co-lead author Dr Francesco Muschitiello from Cambridge’s Department of Geography. “Based on satellite measurements, we know that the Arctic Ocean has been steadily warming, in particular over the past 20 years, but we wanted to place the recent warming into a longer context.”

Atlantification is one of the causes of warming in the Arctic, however instrumental records capable of monitoring this process, such as satellites, only go back about 40 years.

As the Arctic Ocean gets warmer, it causes the ice in the polar region to melt, which in turn affects global sea levels. As the ice melts, it exposes more of the ocean’s surface to the sun, releasing heat and raising air temperatures. As the Arctic continues to warm, it will melt the permafrost, which stores huge amounts of methane, a far more damaging greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

The researchers used geochemical and ecological data from ocean sediments to reconstruct the change in water column properties over the past 800 years. They precisely dated sediments using a combination of methods and looked for diagnostic signs of Atlantification, like change in temperature and salinity.

 “When we looked at the whole 800-year timescale, our temperature and salinity records look pretty constant,” said co-lead author Dr Tesi Tommaso from the Institute of Polar Sciences of the National Research Council in Bologna. “But all of a sudden at the start of the 20th century, you get this marked change in temperature and salinity – it really sticks out.”

“The reason for this rapid Atlantification of at the gate of the Arctic Ocean is intriguing,” said Muschitiello. “We compared our results with the ocean circulation at lower latitudes and found there is a strong correlation with the slowdown of dense water formation in the Labrador Sea. In a future warming scenario, the deep circulation in this subpolar region is expected to further decrease because of the thawing of the Greenland ice sheet. Our results imply that we might expect further Arctic Atlantification in the future because of climate change.”

The researchers say that their results also expose a possible flaw in climate models, because they do not reproduce this early Atlantification at the beginning of the last century.

“Climate simulations generally do not reproduce this kind of warming in the Arctic Ocean, meaning there’s an incomplete understanding of the mechanisms driving Atlantification,” said Tommaso. “We rely on these simulations to project future climate change, but the lack of any signs of an early warming in the Arctic Ocean is a missing piece of the puzzle.” 

Francesco Muschitiello is a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.

Reference:

Tesi Tommaso et al. ‘Rapid Atlantification along the Fram Strait at the beginning of the 20th century.’ Science Advances (2021). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abj2946

The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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The raw statistics show death rates in England for people aged 10 to 59, listing vaccination status separately.

Counterintuitively, these statistics show that the death rates for the vaccinated in this age grouping were greater than for the unvaccinated. These numbers have since been heavily promoted and highlighted on social media by anti-vaccine advocates, who use them to argue that vaccination increases the risk of death.

The claim is strange, though, because we know from efficacy and effectiveness studies that COVID-19 vaccines offer strong protection against severe disease. For example, the efficiency and effectiveness of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine has been shown to be well over 90% in this regard in the most recent studies.

Vaccine efficacy of 90% means that you have a 90% reduced risk compared to an otherwise similar unvaccinated person, based on controlled randomized trials, while vaccine effectiveness refers to real-world outcomes. On either measure, vaccines work very well indeed. So what's going on here?

Well, closer inspection of the ONS report reveals that over the period of the study, from January to September 2021, the age-adjusted risk of death involving COVID-19 was 32 times greater among unvaccinated people compared to fully vaccinated people. But hold on! How can we square this with the data from the table listing death rates of those aged 10 to 59 by vaccination status?

For the answer we turn to a classic statistical artifact known as Simpson's Paradox, which seems to pop up and create misleading conclusions all over the place.

It is a consequence of the way that data is presented.

Essentially, Simpson's Paradox can arise when observing a feature of a broad, widely drawn group, where there is an uneven distribution of the population within this group, for example by age or vaccination status. Ignorance of the implications of Simpson's Paradox can generate misleading conclusions, which can be, and in this case are, very dangerous.

The paradox in these particular ONS statistics arises specifically because death rates increase dramatically with age, so that at the very top end of this age band, for example, mortality rates are about 80 times as high as at the very bottom end. A similar pattern is observed between vaccination rates and age. For example, in the 10 to 59 data set more than half of those vaccinated are over the age of 40.

Those who are in the upper ranges of the wide 10 to 59 age band are, therefore, both more likely to have been vaccinated and also more likely to die if infected with COVID-19 or for any other reason, and vice versa. Age is acting, in the terminology of statistics, as a confounding variable, being positively related to both vaccination rates and death rates.

Put another way, you are more likely to die in a given period if you are older and you are also more likely to be vaccinated if you are older. It is age that is driving up death rates not the vaccinations. Without the vaccinations, deaths would be hugely greater from COVID-19.

So what if we divide the 10 to 59 group into smaller age groups? If we break down the band into narrower age ranges, such as 10 to 19, 20 to 29, 30 to 39, 40 to 49, and 50 to 59, we find that the counter-intuitive headline finding immediately disappears. In each age band, the death rates of the vaccinated are vastly lower than those of the unvaccinated. This also applies in the higher age bands—60 to 69, 70 to 79, and 80 plus.

Basically, unvaccinated people are much younger on average, and therefore less likely to die.

Yet there are those out there who are more than happy to use these statistics to mislead. The consequence is that many who would otherwise choose to be vaccinated might refuse to do so.

In truth, the age-adjusted risk of deaths involving coronavirus (COVID-19) over the first nine months of this year was in fact 32 times greater in the unvaccinated than the fully vaccinated.

This is a hugely important statistic, and we must not let statistical manipulation be used to obscure this critical information. The lives of countless people really do depend on us exposing this truth.

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Webb will launch on a European-built Ariane 5 rocket no earlier than Dec. 22.

James Webb Space Telescope cleared for late December launch

Prior research has shown that other galaxies have features called feathers—long gas filaments with barbs that look from Earth like feathers. But because it is very difficult to study the Milky Way galaxy from an Earth perspective, no such features have been seen, until now.

In their work, the researchers were studying concentrations of carbon monoxide gas in data from the APEX telescope in San Pedro de Atacama, Chile. They noticed concentrations that had not been seen before, and after taking a closer look, discovered that it was part of a large gas formation that extended from near the center of the galaxy outward, connecting two of the arms that give the galaxy its distinctive look.

The researchers named the formation the Gangotri wave—an homage to the massive glacier whose melting gives rise to the Ganges River. In India, the Milky Way galaxy is known as Akasha Ganga. The newly discovered feather spans approximately 5.6764e+16 to 1.22989e+17 kilometers in reaching between the two arms and is approximately 1.6083242e+17 kilometers from the rotational center of the galaxy. They have also estimated its mass to be approximately equal to nine million suns. Prior to the new discovery, all of the gas tendrils found in the Milky Way have aligned with the spiral arms.

The researchers found that the Gangotri wave has another unique and interesting feature in that it is not as straight as expected. Instead, it zig-zags back and forth along its length in a pattern similar to a sine wave. The researchers were not able to explain the strange phenomenon but note that some force must be at play—a force that is likely to be the focus of many upcoming research efforts. The team plans to continue their study of gases in the Milky Way, this time actively looking for new feathers.

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With sea ice melting, the king of the Arctic may be changing its diet.

The dramatic spectacle played out in Norway's Svalbard archipelago on August 21, 2020—in summer, the sea ice retreats and takes with it the seals that make up the polar bear's main source of food.

A research team from a nearby Polish scientific station watched it happen and caught for the first time on camera a polar bear hunting a reindeer.

The video shows a young female chasing a male reindeer into the icy waters, catching and drowning it, then pulling it on shore and making a meal of it.

"The whole situation was so amazing that it was like watching a documentary," said Izabela Kulaszewicz, a biologist at the University of Gdansk.

"You could almost hear the voice of a narrator in the background saying that you absolutely have to watch this event because we will most likely never see anything like it again," she told AFP.

Down to 'modern media' ?

The scene was so unusual that she co-wrote Polar Biology with two other researchers.

In it, they argued that the incident was one of a series of observations that suggest polar bears are increasingly preying on terrestrial animals to make up for their limited access to seals.

In Svalbard, just over 1,000 kilometres (620 miles) from the North Pole, some 300 sedentary polar bears live alongside around 20,000 reindeer.

In Svalbard, just over 1,000 kilometres (620 miles) from the North Pole and where signposts warn of the danger of polar bears, some 300 sedentary bears live alongside around 20,000 reindeer.

According to the article's authors, there are indications that polar bears have been hunting reindeer more frequently in recent decades.

They say that two factors are at play: the retreating sea ice is stranding the bears on land for longer periods, and the number of reindeer has been steadily rising on Svalbard since a 1925 hunting ban.

Eating reindeer is therefore a matter of both necessity and opportunity for the furry white beast, they suggest.

However, other experts caution against reading too much into the incident.

"If polar bears were killing reindeer back in the 1950s and 60s, it would have been very rare to have been seen, as there were few people, few bears, and few reindeer" in Svalbard at the time, said Andrew Derocher, a professor at the University of Alberta.

"Now, with modern media, everyone has a camera, social media and the 'news' spreads fast," he added.

Opportunistic hunters

While high-fat, high-calorie ringed and bearded seals make up their main diet, polar bears are also known to feed on eggs, birds, rodents and even dolphins.

Weighing between 70 and 90 kilos (155 and 200 pounds) as adults, reindeer would be a good complement for the bears during the lean summer period, which has grown longer due to global warming.

Key facts about the polar bear, apex predator of the Arctic.

Two days after the Polish researchers filmed their video, the same polar bear was observed devouring another reindeer carcass.

"Reindeer can be important, at least for some polar bears when they have to stay on land for extended periods," said Norwegian expert Jon Aars, co-author of the article.

Experts note, however, that the new diet would not make a difference in bolstering the animal's population size.

"While an occasional successful predation attempt on reindeer may be good in the short-term for an individual bear or two (and the media), I think there is little significance at the population level for either polar bears or reindeer," said professor Ian Stirling, of the Canadian Wildlife Service.

Polar bears are strong swimmers—their Latin name is Ursus maritimus—but they can't keep up with reindeer on long distances on land.

Elsewhere in the Arctic, caribou—as North American reindeer are known—are not as vulnerable as their Svalbard cousins, whose wariness seems to have dissipated since the hunting ban.

Caribou "are also larger animals and have co-evolved with land predators, namely wolves, wolverines, and barren ground grizzlies, making them more challenging prey," said Geoff York, of conservation organisation Polar Bears International.

The future looks especially ominous for Svalbard's polar bears.

"There's not enough ice to sustain a polar bear population," Derocher said.

"I suspect that given the trend, the Barents Sea polar bear population—which includes Svalbard—is one that will disappear this century."

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Aspirin has a complicated medical history. While some studies find regularly taking aspirin can help protect against illnesses like COVID-19 and cancer, others show it actually does more harm than good.

“This is the first study to report that among individuals with a least one risk factor for heart failure, those taking aspirin were more likely to subsequently develop the condition than those not using the medication,” says study author Dr. Blerim Mujaj of the University of Freiburg in a media release. “While the findings require confirmation, they do indicate that the potential link between aspirin and heart failure needs to be clarified.”

Older adults at high risk from aspirin use

In a study of nearly 31,000 people at risk of developing heart failure, the team found that aspirin users saw their chances of a heart failure diagnosis go up by 26 percent. Researchers defined “at risk” as anyone with a pre-existing health condition.

All of the participants were over the age of 40 and free of heart failure at the start of the experiment. The team recorded each person’s use of aspirin, separating them into two groups — users and non-users. Researchers followed up with the participants (who had an average age of 67) over a five-year period and after a person’s first fatal or non-fatal heart failure incident requiring hospitalization.

After accounting for influential factors like gender, weight, age, alcohol use, the use of medications, and various measures of health, the team concluded that aspirin independently contributes to increasing heart failure risk by more than a quarter among people with pre-existing health issues. Overall, 7,698 participants were taking aspirin and 1,330 developed heart failure over the next 5.3 years.

Even healthy people face dangers

To confirm their results, study authors compared the readings among aspirin users and non-users. They also examined the 74 percent of the study group that was free of cardiovascular disease (22,690 people) and found that using aspirin increased their risk of heart failure by 27 percent as well.

“This was the first large study to investigate the relationship between aspirin use and incident heart failure in individuals with and without heart disease and at least one risk factor. Aspirin is commonly used – in our study one in four participants were taking the medication. In this population, aspirin use was associated with incident heart failure, independent of other risk factors,” Dr. Mujaj concludes.

“Large multinational randomized trials in adults at risk for heart failure are needed to verify these results. Until then, our observations suggest that aspirin should be prescribed with caution in those with heart failure or with risk factors for the condition.”

The findings appear in the journal ESC Heart Failure.

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It is one of three strategies the company is working to address the new threat, including a higher dose of its existing vaccine, Moderna said.

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The semicolon is a profound public mystery; the only punctuation mark that regularly unites readers and writers in deep-seated repugnance. Time to celebrate then — this week researchers at Lancaster University announced that semicolon use is becoming rarer in British fiction, falling in use by 25% over the last 30 years.

In 2017, author Ben Blatt discovered that semicolon use dropped by about 70% from 1800 to 2000. The ghosts of several authors are now rejoicing.

Writers like George Orwell, who called semicolons “an unnecessary stop”. Or Edgar Allan Poe, who preferred the dash. Or Kurt Vonnegut, who famously advised against their use, saying “All they do is show you’ve been to college.” The symbol is facing the same melancholy fate as the dodo, the dinosaur, and the Soviet Union. Extinction.

When the semicolon first appeared in the work of the Renaissance scholar and printer Aldus Pius Manutius, in a book describing a climb to the summit of Mount Etna, it was a hybrid between a comma and a colon. Its function was to prolong a pause, or to create a more unmistakable separation between clauses in a sentence.

Nothing has changed; semicolons are exactly what Manutius invented them to be in 1494. Their decline in fiction, and the suspicion that surrounds their use in everyday communication, tells us a story about the times we live in.

Lancaster’s linguists believe that the end of the semicolon, along with shrinking sentence lengths in novels, is a reflection of a society addicted to social media. The shift, commented Justin Tora of the University of Galway, is part of a “more realistic way” of writing for the modern age.

They may be right. The semicolon is an element of language that communicates stops, pauses, reflections, and cigarette breaks within a sentence. It connects loose ends with disparate ideas; the semicolon lets you have it both ways. Today having it both ways is considered little more than hypocrisy, not an exercise in artistry. The digital world churns; Twitter is not an arena known for reflection. Semicolons, then, are snottily elitist and shadily indirect.

Like many fading species, the semicolon has been usurped by a more violent, adaptable rival. “We live,” says Cecelia Watson author of Semicolon, “in the Era of the Dash.” It’s an accurate observation. The dash is brutal, unsympathetic, slashing, and impossible to be confused about — it takes you, frictionlessly, to the point. The dash invites no ambiguity and wastes no time. The punctuational equivalent of tearing a heart from a chest.

To read back those writers who put the semicolon to best use, like Jane Austen, or Virginia Woolf, is to enter a world where time is abundant. The OED describes the semicolon as “indicating a pause… more pronounced than that indicated by a comma.” The pronounced pause is where the real beauty of a semicolon lies. You can feel it in one of Woolf’s greatest sentences, as she describes Clarissa Dalloway hearing Big Ben: “First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable.”

Put a dash where the semicolon is there and a whole moment in time and feeling would evaporate. The loss of such moments is what the end of the semicolon signals.

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