Sodium Batteries May Power Your New Electric Car

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SES showed off a promising new cell targeted for mass production in a few years.

Lithium-metal “hybrid” battery promises lighter, longer-range EVs by 2025

Studying popular concepts of mindfulness, the researchers found most laypeople are confusing the practice with passive acceptance of problem—a misconception scientists say ignores the important work of engaging with them.

Originating in Buddhist religious practice, much of the mindfulness movement's popularity grew from clinical research affirming its potential for reducing stress and related health disorders.

"Scientific understanding of mindfulness goes beyond mere stress-relief and requires a willingness to engage with stressors," said Igor Grossmann, corresponding author of the project and a professor of social psychology at Waterloo. "It is, in fact, the engagement with stressors that ultimately results in stress relief. More specifically, mindfulness includes two main dimensions: awareness and acceptance."

Grossmann and colleagues compared critics' claims to popular interpretations of mindfulness to evaluate how people understand and apply the concept in their daily lives. They found that in practice, most people conflate acceptance with passivity or avoidance.

The research team conducted an extensive empirical project that examined the meaning of mindfulness in three parts: analyses of the semantic meaning of the term mindfulness in the English language, meta-analysis of the results from a widely used mindfulness measure, and empirical tests of association with markers of wisdom and effective emotion regulation.

"While we found that people seem to conceptually understand that mindfulness involves engagement, the general public is not walking the talk.

Our results suggest that laypeople may understand what awareness is, but the next step of acceptance may not be well understood—limiting potential for engaging with problems," said Ellen Choi, lead author on the paper and an assistant professor of organizational behavior at Ryerson University.

Using social media as a topical example, Grossmann says that with algorithms curating increasingly hateful content, the ability to be mindful of others' perspectives has never been more critical. "Mindfulness might not provide an easy answer to the divisiveness that surrounds us, but an accurate understanding that includes the practice of acceptance may herald the re-emergence of sincere discussion and authentic connection."

The paper, "What do people mean when they talk about mindfulness?," authored by Grossmann, Choi, Norman Farb of the University of Toronto, University of Guelph's Ekaterina Pogrebtsova and Jamie Gruman, was recently published in the journal Clinical Psychology Review.

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An aerial survey in southern Mexico discovered a host of ceremonial sites that could date as far back as 1100 BC.

 

An airborne lidar survey recently revealed hundreds of long-lost Maya and Olmec ceremonial sites in southern Mexico. The 32,800-square-mile area was surveyed by the Mexican Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geográfia, which made the data public. When University of Arizona archaeologist Takeshi Inomata and his colleagues examined the area, which spans the Olmec heartland along the Bay of Campeche and the western Maya Lowlands just north of the Guatemalan border, they identified the outlines of 478 ceremonial sites that had been mostly hidden beneath vegetation or were simply too large to recognize from the ground.

 

“It was unthinkable to study an area this large until a few years ago,” said Inomata. “Publicly available lidar is transforming archaeology.”

 

Over the last several years, lidar surveys have revealed tens of thousands of irrigation channels, causeways, and fortresses across Maya territory, which now spans the borders of Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize. Infrared beams can penetrate dense foliage to measure the height of the ground, which often reveals features like long-abandoned canals or plazas. The results have shown that Maya civilization was more extensive, and more densely populated, than we previously realized.

 

The recent survey suggests that the Maya civilization may have inherited some of its cultural ideas from the earlier Olmecs, who thrived along the coastal plains of southern Mexico from around 1500 BC to around 400 BC.

Cosmological Construction

 

The oldest known Maya monument is also the largest; 3,000 years ago, people built a 1.4-kilometer-long earthen platform at the heart of a ceremonial center called Aguada Fenix, near what is now Mexico’s border with Guatemala. And the 478 newly rediscovered sites that dot the surrounding region share the same basic features and layout as Aguada Fenix, just on a smaller scale. They’re built around rectangular plazas, lined with rows of earthen platforms, where large groups of people would once have gathered for rituals.

 

Inomata and his colleagues say the sites were probably built in the centuries between 1100 BC (around the same time as Aguada Fenix) and 400 BC. Their construction was likely the work of diverse groups of people who shared some common cultural ideas, like how to build a ceremonial center and the importance of certain dates. At most of the sites, where the terrain allowed, those platform-lined gathering spaces are aligned to point at the spot on the horizon where the sun rises on certain days of the year.

 

“This means they were representing cosmological ideas through these ceremonial spaces,” said Inomata. “In this space, people gathered according to this ceremonial calendar.” The dates vary, but they all seem linked to May 10, the date when the sun passes directly overhead, marking the start of the rainy season and the time for planting maize. Many of the 478 ceremonial sites point to sunrise on dates exactly 40, 80, or 100 days before that date.

 

City plans built around calendars or cosmology were key features of several Mesoamerican civilizations, including both the Maya and the Olmec.

 

Ideas That Link Civilizations

 

The oldest known Olmec site is a ceremonial complex at San Lorenzo in Mexico’s Tabasco state, which enjoyed a 300-year heyday from about 1400 to 1100 BC, making it a few centuries older than the Maya site at Aguada Fenix. Until recently, archaeologists believed the two sites were very different, but while poring over the recent lidar survey, Inomata and his colleagues noticed something that everyone else had missed: a rectangular plaza lined on two sides with earthen platforms, like the ones at Aguada Fenix and the hundreds of other sites revealed by the lidar. No one had been able to see it from the ground before.

 

“This tells us that San Lorenzo is important for the beginning of some of these ideas that were later used by the Maya,” said Inomata. If the Olmec were building ritual centers with rectangular, platform-lined plazas pointed at sunrise on important days at least 300 years before the Maya did so, then the Maya may have inherited those concepts (and probably their religious underpinnings) from the Olmec.

 

But other evidence suggests that the Maya may not have borrowed everything from the Olmec.

Drastically Different Social Structures?

 

At San Lorenzo, sculptures depict the Olmec rulers who directed the construction of the monument. But at Aguada Fenix, there’s no sign of that kind of social hierarchy—which is strange, as later Maya elites were anything but modest about their public works projects. That leads Inomata and his colleagues to speculate that the earliest Maya monuments may have been built by a more cooperative, egalitarian effort.

 

Around 1100 BC, the Maya people were just beginning to adopt agriculture and settle in permanent villages. Hunting and gathering typically doesn’t lend itself well to wealth disparities and the hierarchies of social and political power that come with them. “We think that people were still somehow mobile, because they had just begun to use ceramics and lived in ephemeral structures on the ground level. People were in transition to more settled lifeways, and many of those areas probably didn’t have much hierarchical organization,” said Inomata. “But still, they could make this kind of very well-organized center.”

 

Of course, absence of evidence isn’t necessarily evidence of absence, and it’s possible that the earliest Maya rulers simply weren’t depicted on the walls of Aguada Fenix. Inomata and his colleagues will need to excavate and study the newly revealed sites in more detail to come closer to solving the mystery.

 

“Continuing to excavate the sites to find these answers will take much longer and will involve many other scholars,” said Inomata. “There are still lots of unanswered questions.”

Lidar Uncovers Hundreds of Lost Maya and Olmec Ruins

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Drop an ice cube into a glass of water. You can probably picture the way it starts to melt. You also know that no matter what shape it takes, you’ll never see it melt into something like a snowflake, composed everywhere of sharp edges and fine cusps.

 

Mathematicians model this melting process with equations. The equations work well, but it has taken 130 years to prove that they conform to obvious facts about reality. In a paper posted in March, Alessio Figalli and Joaquim Serra of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich and Xavier Ros-Oton of the University of Barcelona have established that the equations really do match intuition. Snowflakes in the model may not be impossible, but they are extremely rare and entirely fleeting.

 

“These results open a new perspective on the field,” said Maria Colombo of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne. “There was no such deep and precise understanding of this phenomenon previously.”

 

The question of how ice melts in water is called the Stefan problem, named after the physicist Josef Stefan, who posed it in 1889. It is the most important example of a “free boundary” problem, where mathematicians consider how a process like the diffusion of heat makes a boundary move. In this case, the boundary is between ice and water.

 

For many years, mathematicians have tried to understand the complicated models of these evolving boundaries. To make progress, the new work draws inspiration from previous studies on a different type of physical system: soap films. It builds on them to prove that along the evolving boundary between ice and water, sharp spots like cusps or edges rarely form, and even when they do they immediately disappear.

 

These sharp spots are called singularities, and, it turns out, they are as ephemeral in the free boundaries of mathematics as they are in the physical world.

 

Melting Hourglasses

 

Consider, again, an ice cube in a glass of water. The two substances are made of the same water molecules, but the water is in two different phases: solid and liquid. A boundary exists where the two phases meet. But as heat from the water transfers into the ice, the ice melts and the boundary moves. Eventually, the ice—and the boundary along with it—disappear.

 

Intuition might tell us that this melting boundary always remains smooth. After all, you do not cut yourself on sharp edges when you pull a piece of ice from a glass of water. But with a little imagination, it is easy to conceive of scenarios where sharp spots emerge.

 

Take a piece of ice in the shape of an hourglass and submerge it. As the ice melts, the waist of the hourglass becomes thinner and thinner until the liquid eats all the way through. At the moment this happens, what was once a smooth waist becomes two pointy cusps, or singularities.

 

“This is one of those problems that naturally exhibits singularities,” said Giuseppe Mingione of the University of Parma. “It’s the physical reality that tells you that."

 

Yet reality also tells us that the singularities are controlled. We know that cusps should not last long, because the warm water should rapidly melt them down. Perhaps if you started with a huge ice block built entirely out of hourglasses, a snowflake might form. But it still wouldn’t last more than an instant.

 

In 1889 Stefan subjected the problem to mathematical scrutiny, spelling out two equations that describe melting ice. One describes the diffusion of heat from the warm water into the cool ice, which shrinks the ice while causing the region of water to expand. A second equation tracks the changing interface between ice and water as the melting process proceeds. (In fact, the equations can also describe the situation where the ice is so cold that it causes the surrounding water to freeze—but in the present work, the researchers ignore that possibility.)

 

“The important thing is to understand where the two phases decide to switch from one to the other,” said Colombo.

 

It took almost 100 years until, in the 1970s, mathematicians proved that these equations have a solid foundation. Given some starting conditions—a description of the initial temperature of the water and the initial shape of the ice—it’s possible to run the model indefinitely to describe exactly how the temperature (or a closely related quantity called the cumulative temperature) changes with time.

 

But they found nothing to preclude the model from arriving at scenarios that are improbably weird. The equations might describe an ice-water boundary that forms into a forest of cusps, for example, or a sharp snowflake that stays perfectly still. In other words, they couldn’t rule out the possibility that the model might output nonsense. The Stefan problem became a problem of showing that the singularities in these situations are actually well controlled.

 

Otherwise, it would mean that the ice melting model was a spectacular failure—one that had fooled generations of mathematicians into believing it was more solid than it is.

 

Soapy Inspiration

 

In the decade before mathematicians began to understand the ice melting equations, they made tremendous progress on the mathematics of soap films.

 

If you dip two wire rings in a soapy solution and then separate them, a soap film forms between them. Surface tension will pull the film as taut as possible, forming it into a shape called a catenoid—a kind of caved-in cylinder. This shape forms because it bridges the two rings with the least amount of surface area, making it an example of what mathematicians call a minimal surface.

 

Soap films are modeled by their own unique set of equations. By the 1960s, mathematicians had made progress in understanding them, but they didn’t know how weird their solutions could be. Just as in the Stefan problem, the solutions might be unacceptably strange, describing soap films with countless singularities that are nothing like the smooth films we expect.

 

In 1961 and 1962, Ennio De Giorgi, Wendell Fleming, and others invented an elegant process for determining whether the situation with singularities was as bad as feared.

 

Suppose you have a solution to the soap film equations that describes the shape of the film between two boundary surfaces, like the set of two rings. Focus in on an arbitrary point on the film’s surface. What does the geometry near this point look like? Before we know anything about it, it could have any kind of feature imaginable—anything from a sharp cusp to a smooth hill. Mathematicians devised a method for zooming in on the point, as though they had a microscope with infinite power. They proved that as you zoom in, all you see is a flat plane.

 

“Always. That’s it,” said Ros-Oton.

 

This flatness implied that the geometry near that point could not be singular. If the point were located on a cusp, mathematicians would see something more like a wedge, not a plane. And since they chose the point randomly, they could conclude that all points on the film must look like a smooth plane when you peer at them up close. Their work established that the entire film must be smooth—unplagued by singularities.

 

Mathematicians wanted to use the same methods to deal with the Stefan problem, but they soon realized that with ice, things were not as simple. Unlike soap films, which always look smooth, melting ice really does exhibit singularities. While a soap film stays put, the line between ice and water is always in motion. This posed an additional challenge that another mathematician would tackle later.

 

From Films to Ice

 

In 1977, Luis Caffarelli reinvented a mathematical magnifying glass for the Stefan problem. Rather than zooming in on a soap film, he figured out how to zoom in on the boundary between ice and water.

 

“This was his great intuition,” said Mingione. “He was able to transport these methods from the minimal surface theory of de Giorgi to this more general setting.”

 

When mathematicians zoomed in on solutions to the soap film equations, they saw only flatness. But when Caffarelli zoomed in on the frozen boundary between ice and water, he sometimes saw something totally different: frozen spots surrounded almost entirely by warmer water. These points corresponded to icy cusps—singularities—which become stranded by the retreat of the melting boundary.

 

Caffarelli proved singularities exist in the mathematics of melting ice. He also devised a way of estimating how many there are. At the exact spot of an icy singularity, the temperature is always zero degrees Celsius, because the singularity is made out of ice. That is a simple fact. But remarkably, Caffarelli found that as you move away from the singularity, the temperature increases in a clear pattern: If you move one unit in distance away from a singularity and into the water, the temperature rises by approximately one unit of temperature. If you move two units away, the temperature rises by approximately four.

 

This is called a parabolic relationship, because if you graph temperature as a function of distance, you get approximately the shape of a parabola. But because space is three-dimensional, you can graph the temperature in three different directions leading away from the singularity, not just one. The temperature therefore looks like a three-dimensional parabola, a shape called a paraboloid.

 

Altogether, Caffarelli’s insight provided a clear way of sizing up singularities along the ice-water boundary. Singularities are defined as points where the temperature is zero degrees Celsius and paraboloids describe the temperature at and around the singularity. Therefore, anywhere the paraboloid equals zero you have a singularity.

 

So how many places are there where a paraboloid can equal zero? Imagine a paraboloid composed of a sequence of parabolas stacked side by side. Paraboloids like these can take a minimum value—a value of zero—along an entire line. This means that each of the singularities Caffarelli observed could actually be the size of a line, an infinitely thin icy edge, rather than just a single icy point. And since many lines can be put together to form a surface, his work left open the possibility that a set of singularities could fill the entire boundary surface. If this was true, it would mean that the singularities in the Stefan problem were completely out of control.

 

“It would be a disaster for the model. Complete chaos,” said Figalli, who won the Fields Medal, math’s highest honor, in 2018.

 

However, Caffarelli’s result was only a worst-case scenario. It established the maximum size of the potential singularities, but it said nothing about how often singularities actually occur in the equations, or how long they last. By 2019, Figalli, Ros-Oton, and Serra had figured out a remarkable way to find out more.

 

Imperfect Patterns

 

To solve the Stefan problem, Figalli, Ros-Oton, and Serra needed to prove that singularities that crop up in the equations are controlled: There aren’t a lot of them, and they don’t last long. To do that they needed a comprehensive understanding of all the different types of singularities that could possibly form.

 

Caffarelli had made progress on understanding how singularities develop as ice melts, but there was a feature of the process he didn’t know how to address. He recognized that the water temperature around a singularity follows a paraboloid ­­pattern. He also recognized that it doesn’t quite follow this pattern exactly—there’s a small deviation between a perfect paraboloid and the actual way the water temperature looks.

 

Figalli, Ros-Oton and Serra shifted the microscope onto this deviation from the paraboloid pattern. When they zoomed in on this small imperfection—a whisper of coolness waving off of the boundary—they discovered that it had its own kinds of patterns which gave rise to different types of singularities.

 

 

“They go beyond the parabolic scaling,” said Sandro Salsa of the Polytechnic University of Milan. “Which is amazing.”

 

They were able to show that all of these new types of singularities disappeared rapidly—just as they do in nature—except for two that were particularly enigmatic. Their last challenge was to prove that these two types also vanish as soon as they appear, foreclosing the possibility that anything like a snowflake might endure.

 

Vanishing Cusps

 

The first type of singularity had come up before, in 2000. A mathematician named Frederick Almgren had investigated it in an intimidating 1,000-page paper about soap films, which was only published by his wife, Jean Taylor—another expert on soap films—after he died.

 

While mathematicians had shown that soap films are always smooth in three dimensions, Almgren proved that in four dimensions, a new kind of “branching” singularity can appear, making the soap films sharp in strange ways. These singularities are profoundly abstract and impossible to visualize neatly. Yet Figalli, Ros-Oton, and Serra realized that very similar singularities form along the melting boundary between ice and water.

 

“The connection is a bit mysterious,” Serra said. “Sometimes in mathematics, things develop in unexpected ways.”

 

They used Almgren’s work to show that the ice around one of these branching singularities must have a conical pattern that looks the same as you keep zooming in. And unlike the paraboloid pattern for the temperature, which implies that a singularity might exist along a whole line, a conical pattern can only have a sharp singularity at a single point. Using this fact, they showed that these singularities are isolated in space and time. As soon as they form, they are gone.

 

The second kind of singularity was even more mysterious. To get a sense of it, imagine submerging a thin sheet of ice into water. It will shrink and shrink and suddenly disappear all at once. But just before that moment, it will form a sheetlike singularity, a two-dimensional wall as sharp as a razor.

 

At certain points, the researchers managed to zoom in to find an analogous scenario: two fronts of ice collapsing toward the point as if it were situated inside a thin sheet of ice. These points were not exactly singularities, but locations where a singularity was about to form. The question was whether the two fronts near these points collapsed at the same time. If that happened, a sheetlike singularity would form for only one perfect moment before it vanished. In the end, they proved this is in fact how the scenario plays out in the equations.

 

“This somehow confirms the intuition,” said Daniela De Silva of Barnard College.

 

Having shown that the exotic branching and sheetlike singularities were both rare, the researchers could make the general statement that all singularities for the Stefan problem are rare.

 

“If you choose randomly a time, then the probability of seeing a singular point is zero,” Ros-Oton said.

 

The mathematicians say that the technical details of the work will take time to digest. But they are confident that the results will lay the groundwork for advances on numerous other problems. The Stefan problem is a foundational example for an entire subfield of math where boundaries move. But as for the Stefan problem itself, and the mathematics of how ice cubes melt in water?

 

“This is closed,” Salsa said.

Mathematicians Finally Prove That Melting Ice Stays Smooth

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They hope their discovery will stop IBS being wrongly labelled as an emotional state or "all in the mind".

The team studied more than 50,000 individuals with IBS, comparing their DNA with that of healthy people.

The results are published in the journal Nature Genetics.

IBS is thought to affect about one in 10 people and can cause distressing abdominal pain, bloating and bouts of constipation, diarrhoea or both.

With no defining test, diagnosis comes after ruling out other causes.

Women are slightly more affected than men, and the usual age for patients to seek advice is between 20 and 40.

Prof Miles Parkes, a consultant gastroenterologist at Cambridge's Addenbrookes Hospital who led the gene research, says IBS is still poorly understood, even by some doctors, and may be incorrectly categorised as psychosomatic because of the overlap with anxiety and stress.

He and his team say they have identified at least six distinct genetic differences that might, at least partly, explain this link between the gut and the mind.

The results showed:

• Overall, heritability of IBS (how much your genes influence the likelihood of developing a particular condition) is quite low

• Six genetic differences were more common in people with IBS than in controls

• Most of these have roles in the brain, and possibly the nerves which supply the gut, rather than the gut itself

• The same genetic make-up that puts people at increased risk of IBS also increases the risk for common mood and anxiety disorders such as anxiety, depression, and neuroticism, as well as insomnia

That doesn't mean anxiety causes IBS symptoms or vice versa, says Prof Parkes.

"Our study shows these conditions have shared genetic origins, with the affected genes possibly leading to physical changes in brain or nerve cells that in turn cause symptoms in the brain and symptoms in the gut."

The discovery might ultimately help with developing better tests and treatments for IBS.

< Watch the video at the source page. >

Laura Tebbs, who is 34 and from Cambridge, has experience living with IBS symptoms and anxiety and depression.

"I've had bouts of depression and anxiety for a decade so I know what it is like to live with that, but my IBS began after I caught Covid this January.

"It's hard for some people to understand, but IBS really is quite a challenging thing to live with.

"I was in constant pain every time I ate. And I'd get really bloated. It was so bad that I couldn't wear any of my normal trousers or jeans. I just lived in leggings instead.

"I was tired and moody and couldn't do things that I would normally enjoy, like going out for a meal with mates."

Laura says she was "fobbed off" by some healthcare professionals who, she says, dismissed her condition and recommended laxatives for one of her symptoms - constipation.

She is now under Prof Parkes's care and has found ways to better manage her condition.

"It's much better now, and if I do have a flare-up there I things I can do to change it."

IBS tips

Medication may be needed, but there are some other things that can help too.

To ease bloating, cramps and wind, consider:

• Eat oats, such as porridge

• Fresh ingredients, rather than lots of processed, fatty or spicy foods, is good but don't overdo it with the fruit and beans because they can cause diarrhoea and bloating

• Cauliflower, cabbage, sprouts and onions can be tricky for some people to digest too

• You could try probiotics or low lactose or lactose-free dairy products for a month and see if they help

• Don't delay or skip meals

• Avoid lots of alcohol, caffeine or fizzy drinks, but do drink plenty of water to keep your poo nicely soft (rather than too runny or hard)

• Take time over meals - don't eat too quickly

For constipation:

• Drink plenty of water to make poo softer

• Eat fibre - linseeds, for example, helped Laura

For diarrhoea:

• Consider cutting back a bit on fibre if you are eating lots of it

• Chewing lots of sugar-free gum containing sorbitol is another "no-no" - it can have a laxative effect

• Make sure you are drinking enough fluid to replace what you are losing and avoid dehydration

Source: NHS

Source

The oral COVID-19 drug is the second to produce promising trial results.

Pfizer says its antiviral pill can cut 89% of COVID hospitalizations and deaths

For more than a year, residents living in a remote border town have been China’s foot soldiers in the battle against the coronavirus, enduring lockdown after lockdown to shield the rest of the country from contagion.

Mothers in Ruili, a jewelry-trading center on China’s border with Myanmar, post despairingly about their toddlers being numb to regular swab tests—one said her 2-year-old has gotten 100 in his lifetime. Others post about spending months on end in isolation, despite test after test coming back negative. Some restaurants have been closed for more than half a year.

As the Delta variant puts China through one of its biggest Covid-19 outbreaks since it first closed off Wuhan in early 2020, new lockdowns and other strict controls are rippling across the country. Infections have been spreading to more provinces, though nationwide reported case numbers remain below 100 a day so far.

With public-health experts signaling that restrictions may continue through most of 2022, people in various corners of the country are beginning to express fatigue with China’s “zero-Covid” strategy.

On Sunday, tens of thousands were locked inside Shanghai Disneyland. Crowds lined up for swab tests as fireworks erupted in the background before being allowed to leave, after one visitor tested positive.

Efforts to protect the nation’s capital from the virus have reached new heights ahead of a gathering of more than 300 top Communist Party officials in Beijing next week. Hundreds of people on a high-speed train from Shanghai to Beijing were evacuated last Thursday and sent into quarantine after a train attendant was identified as a close contact of a confirmed case.

Two Beijing schools closed Monday after a teacher at one and a student at another tested positive. A video circulating online showed the principal of one school telling parents to bring pillows and blankets as their children had to await test results in the school overnight. One parent could accompany each child in the mandatory two-week quarantine to follow, the principal said.

On Sunday, tens of thousands of people were locked inside Shanghai Disneyland after one visitor tested positive for Covid-19.
PHOTO: CHINATOPIX/ASSOCIATED PRESS

In a domino effect, more than a dozen other schools also closed after finding that staff members had gotten booster shots at the same vaccination site as the teacher who tested positive.

Some residents in Beijing have reported being sent to centralized quarantine or being locked in their homes—with sensors outside their doors—after a contact-tracing app identified them as having been to the same location as confirmed cases, even for masked visits that lasted just minutes.

On Monday, the Commerce Ministry urged households and vendors to stock up on necessities ahead of winter, which many interpreted as an effort to prepare the public for more lockdowns. The ministry later urged people not to overthink the announcement.

People shopped in a Beijing supermarket after the Commerce Ministry urged households and vendors to stock up on necessities ahead of winter.
PHOTO: WU HONG/SHUTTERSTOCK

Since stunning the world with its decision to close off Wuhan in January nearly two years ago, China is continuing to use lockdowns—along with mass testing and mandatory quarantine—to block the virus anywhere it might pop up, even as other countries—such as Australia and Singapore—that had held on to strict controls open up.

In terms of numbers, China has done remarkably better in the pandemic than most countries, with some 110,000 confirmed cases and fewer than 5,000 deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, compared with more than 46 million cases in the U.S. and nearly 750,000 deaths.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping hasn’t left China since January 2020, sticking to virtual appearances at global summits like the Group of 20 meeting in Rome. Mr. Xi addressed the ongoing climate summit in Scotland with a written statement.

Chinese President Xi Jinping addressed the Group of 20 meeting in Rome via video link on Oct. 31.
PHOTO: THOMAS PETER/REUTERS

China has adopted stricter control measures than practically any other country, said Xuefei Ren, a sociologist at Michigan State University. She said a system like China’s, built around control with both local and nationwide surveillance mechanisms, can be very effective in a crisis, as evidenced by the relatively low level of public grumbling and continued compliance with controls.

However, she said, the human impact of a tightly controlled border shouldn’t be discounted.

“With a closed door to the country, people-to-people exchanges have been disrupted. The loss is immeasurable,” said Dr. Ren, who hasn’t seen her father in China in two years.

Officials haven’t given any indication that restrictions will loosen soon, with several key dates looming, including the Winter Olympics in Beijing in February and the 20th Party Congress next fall, when Mr. Xi is expected to secure a third term as China’s leader.

Zhong Nanshan, China’s top respiratory-disease expert, has defended the country’s zero-Covid strategy, saying it is still less costly than reintroducing restrictions each time outbreaks occur.

< Watch the video at the source page. >

Tens of thousands of tourists and staff were tested at Shanghai Disneyland on Sunday, according to state media, after a person who had recently visited the park tested positive for Covid. Photo: Chinatopix/Associated Press

“Some countries decided to fully open up despite still having a few infections,” only to start tightening again when infections picked up, Dr. Zhong said in an interview with CGTN, the international arm of China’s state broadcaster, this week. “This flip-flopping approach is actually more costly. The psychological impact on citizens and society is also greater.”

Dr. Zhong said while he expects China to reach herd immunity in the first half of 2022, Chinese travel overseas likely won’t return to normal before the end of next year.

“China is doing very well maintaining ‘Covid zero’ for now,” said Ben Cowling, head of the epidemiology and biostatistics division at the University of Hong Kong’s School of Public Health. “But controlling Delta outbreaks come with costs as well as benefits.”

Joerg Wuttke, the president of the European Chamber of Commerce in China, said China’s restrictions are making it more difficult for foreign companies to plan for the future.

“The longer the isolation lasts, the more it will impact China—especially on the high tech side,” said Mr. Wuttke, who is based in Beijing. He said business travelers and specialists are increasingly reluctant to come to China given the difficulties of traveling back and forth, including what is effectively three weeks in quarantine.

Masked passengers outside Beijing Railway Station on Oct. 29.
PHOTO: ROMAN PILIPEY/SHUTTERSTOCK

In Ruili, officials have said four lockdowns since September last year and other strict controls are a way to prevent the virus from seeping in from Myanmar.

Ruili has reported fewer than 300 locally transmitted cases so far this year but there have been more than 700 cases among returnees from abroad since July, mostly from Myanmar, data from Yunnan’s provincial health commission showed.

Earlier this year, the Communist Party fired the city’s former party chief for “severe negligence” of his duty in Covid-19 control.

In a post last week on the Twitter -like platform Weibo, a college student said her parents have been jobless after Ruili shut down a jewelry-trading market along the border. “With no income, no subsidies of any form, my parents still need to pay for my younger brother’s schooling. Countless families in R are like this,” reads the post, which received more than 120,000 likes. The R reference appeared to be an attempt to avoid censorship of posts related to the Ruili restrictions.

One Ruili resident complained online of being unable to leave after 21 days in a makeshift quarantine center despite all Covid-19 tests coming back negative. Another said he has spent about half the year in quarantine, while spending the other half in fear and despair. He said he has received nearly 100 Covid-19 tests over the past year.

“I wonder how long I can hang on,” he said.

At a news conference last week, Vice Mayor Yang Mou acknowledged locals were experiencing severe hardships, but said the measures were necessary.

“As long as the number of cases isn’t reduced to zero, there are still spillover risks,” he said.

—Zhao Yueling contributed to this article.

Write to Liyan Qi at liyan.qi@wsj.com and Natasha Khan at natasha.khan@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications

A mother in Ruili, China, said her 2-year-old had gotten 100 throat swab tests. An earlier version of this article incorrectly suggested they were nasal swabs. (Corrected on Nov. 4)

Copyright ©2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the November 5, 2021, print edition as 'New Lockdowns Ripple Across China.'

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Previous work has already identified a stretch of DNA on chromosome 3 which doubled the risk of adults under 65 of dying from COVID. However, scientists did not know how this genetic signal worked to increase the risk, nor the exact genetic change that was responsible.

In a study published in Nature Genetics, a team lead by Professors James Davies and Jim Hughes at the University of Oxford’s MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine used cutting edge technology to work out which gene was causing the effect, and how it was doing so.

Study co-lead Jim Hughes, Professor of Gene Regulation, said: ‘The reason this has proved so difficult to work out, is that the previously identified genetic signal affects the “dark matter” of the genome. We found that the increased risk is not because of a difference in gene coding for a protein, but because of a difference in the DNA that makes a switch to turn a gene on. It’s much harder to detect the gene which is affected by this kind of indirect switch effect.’

The team trained an artificial intelligence algorithm to analyse huge quantities of genetic data from hundreds of types of cells from all parts of the body, to show that the genetic signal is likely to affect cells in the lung. Then using a highly accurate technique they had only just developed, the researchers could zoom down on the DNA at the genetic signal. This examines the way that the billions of DNA letters fold up to fit inside a cell to pinpoint the specific gene that was being controlled by the sequence causing the greater risk of developing severe COVID-19.

Dr Damien Downes, who led the laboratory work from the Hughes research group, said: ‘Surprisingly, as several other genes were suspected, the data showed that a relatively unstudied gene called LZTFL1 causes the effect.’

The researchers found that the higher risk version of the gene probably prevents the cells lining airways and the lungs from responding to the virus properly. But importantly it doesn’t affect the immune system, so the researchers expect people carrying this version of the gene to respond normally to vaccines.

The researchers are also hopeful that drugs and other therapies could target the pathway preventing the lung lining from transforming to less specialised cells, raising the possibility of new treatments customized for those most likely to develop severe symptoms.

Study co-lead Professor James Davies, who worked as an NHS Consultant in Intensive Care Medicine during the pandemic and is an Associate Professor of Genomics at Oxford University’s Radcliffe Department of Medicine, said: ‘The genetic factor we have found explains why some people get very seriously ill after coronavirus infection. It shows that the way in which the lung responds to the infection is critical. This is important because most treatments have focussed on changing the way in which the immune system reacts to the virus.’

Sixty percent of people with South Asian ancestry carried this higher-risk version of the gene compared to 15 percent of those with European ancestry – explaining in part the higher death rates and hospitalisations in the former group. The study also found that 2 percent of people with Afro-Caribbean ancestry carried the higher risk genotype, meaning that this genetic factor does not completely explain the higher death rates reported for black and minority ethnic communities.

Professor Davies explained: ‘The higher risk DNA code is found more commonly in some black and minority ethnic communities but not in others. Socioeconomic factors are also likely to be important in explaining why some communities have been particularly badly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

‘Although we cannot change our genetics, our results show that the people with the higher risk gene are likely to particularly benefit from vaccination. Since the genetic signal affects the lung rather than the immune system it means that the increased risk should be cancelled out by the vaccine.’

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New astronomy roadmap calls for huge, broad-spectrum space telescope

OSLO, Norway — There’s been much fanfare surrounding the Mediterranean diet in recent years, which typically consists of fruit and vegetables, whole grains, nuts, olive oil, and fish. Now new research offers some alarming warnings. Switching from an ordinary “Western” diet to a traditional Mediterranean diet may triple one’s intake of environmental contaminants, the stunning new report reveals.

Many studies have hailed it as a healthy alternative to typical diets (high in saturated fat from red meat and dairy), making it highly popular with health-conscious individuals. In a surprising twist, however, authors of this new report say fruit, vegetables, and whole grains are the source of most of these toxins when they come from traditional farming techniques. Meanwhile, fish contains many fewer contaminants.

The international team says the Mediterranean diet could weaken the human immune system, fertility, and even stunt the growth and development of children. The study, led by scientists at the University of Oslo, looked at British students who follow the diet. They conclude that farming everything in a Mediterranean diet organically slashes the intake of these contaminants by 90 percent.

Researchers tested participants’ urine and investigated which contaminants were present in the foods they ate. Project Manager Carlo Leifert, a visiting professor at Oslo, says that several of the environmental contaminants discovered may affect hormones in the body.

“Many of the synthetic pesticides detected in both food and urine samples in this study are confirmed or suspected endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDC). The 10 times higher pesticide exposure from conventional foods may therefore provide a mechanistic explanation for the lower incidence of overweight/obesity, metabolic syndrome and cancer associated with high levels of organic food consumption in epidemiological/cohort studies,” Leifert explains in a university release.

Are all these toxins coming from the food?

The researchers say it is too early for health officials to start recommending against the Mediterranean diet. They note that the study of 27 British students was small and more research is necessary to confirm the results.

“This study provides clear evidence that both our diet and the way we produce food may affect the level of exposure to synthetic chemical pesticides and ultimately our health,” adds Chris Seal, a professor from Newcastle University.

A person’s intake of environmental contaminants also comes from other things such as skin creams and even the air we breathe in. The study did not account for these factors, although the researchers say it is unlikely to have affected the results.

“One of the difficulties of assessing the public health impacts of dietary exposure to pesticides is that once pesticides are widely used in food production everybody gets exposed. This study demonstrated the potential of using organic food consumers as a ‘low pesticide exposure control group’ to investigate the effect currently used and newly released pesticides on public health,” explains Dr. Leonidas Rempelos.

Fan of Mediterranean diet? Go organic.

Study participants ate “ordinary” British foods for a week before the study began and had to log what they ate. The team then took urine samples from each person before sending them off to a farm in Crete for two weeks. When they arrived, researchers split the group into two groups, one who ate food cultivated normally and the other eating organic produce. They had urine samples taken again before returning to the U.K. and their normal diets for another week.

“There is growing evidence from observational studies that the health benefits of increasing fruit, vegetables and whole grain consumption are partially diminished by the higher pesticide exposure associated with these foods. Our study demonstrates that consumption of organic foods allows consumers to change to a healthier diet, without an increased intake of pesticides,” concludes Professor Per Ole Iversen from the University of Oslo.

The findings appear in the American Journal of Critical Nutrition.

South West News Service writer Gwyn Wright contributed to this report.

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Danzico had been swept up in the global craze for trading digital currencies during the pandemic, and very quickly it had grown into an obsession.

"I would have these sleepless nights where I'd be tossing and turning, trying to get these charts out of my head," said the Barcelona-based designer and visual journalist. "I thought I was losing my mind."

Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ethereum are notorious for their volatility, and the 39-year-old saw "years worth of money won and lost in a very short amount of time".

His emotions went on a similar rollercoaster, not helped by the fact that he was speculating in the depths of a Covid-19 lockdown. His wife noticed him becoming anxious and angry.

Danzico declines to specify the damage the experiment did to his finances—suffice to say that "for our bank account, it was bad".

Reflecting months later during a trip home to the United States, the cheerful American mostly feels relieved that he nipped his addiction in the bud fairly quickly.

But as cryptocurrencies have grown from being a niche interest to a more mainstream one, Danzico says experiences much darker than his own are unfolding worldwide.

"We're talking tens of millions of people who are trading cryptocurrencies," he said.

"If one small fraction of those people are becoming hooked, we're talking about a burgeoning potential mental health crisis on a scale that I don't think that the world has ever seen."

Danzico is grateful that he nipped his crypto addiction in the bud, but warns that many people are having much more damaging experiences.

The darkness of crypto Twitter

Danzico points out that you need look no further than Twitter, where crypto enthusiasts congregate, for a sense of the mental health consequences of the tokens' chronic instability.

Tweets by "people discussing deep depression, really extreme thoughts of isolation and suicide" often accompany plunges in value.

In September, a Czech man's tale of his disastrous attempt to get rich from crypto—taking on spiraling debts as he attempted to claw back his losses—went viral on Twitter.

Depressed and homeless, he was too ashamed to ask for help. "When I called my mom I just said it's all ok, I have (a) good job, place to sleep etc. In reality I was starving," wrote the user named Jirka, who has since started rebuilding his life.

Disturbed by his own experience and others described online, Danzico began researching crypto addiction, writing up his findings in an article for crypto news site Cointelegraph.

He found just one small-scale study into crypto addiction in Turkey, and a few therapists offering professional help, from Thailand to the US.

Experts regard the phenomenon as a form of gambling addiction, noting similarities with Wall Street traders whose investments have spun out of control.

Castle Craig, a Scottish rehab clinic, describes crypto addiction as a "modern day epidemic".

The problem is more common in men, the clinic notes on its website, "but this might just be because women trade cryptocurrencies less than men".

Danzico, a designer and visual artist, used projections to capture how crypto trading was taking over his life.

Art as therapy

For Danzico, it's "alarming" that more specialised help isn't available. Part of the problem, he suspects, is that people don't realise quite how mainstream crypto speculation has become.

Trading platform Crypto.com estimated in July that 221 million people were now trading worldwide. That figure had more than doubled in six months as millions began dabbling while stuck at home during the pandemic.

It was only after Danzico began trading himself that he began noticing signs that fellow traders were everywhere.

A neighbor would whoop every time ethereum spiked; he'd see young men in the street fretting over a crypto chart on a phone screen.

Danzico kicked his own habit by pouring his obsession into photography, using a light projector to superimpose images of crypto logos and charts onto the world around him.

Finding a way to express how all-consuming trading had become "somehow allowed me to move past it", he said.

He is now, with self-confessed irony, selling digital versions of the images as NFTs—non-fungible tokens, for which he is paid in ethereum.

Danzico still has some crypto assets, and believes that decentralised finance has a bright future. But he wants society to face up to what he regards as "an enormous mental health crisis".

"You have kids who are literally becoming millionaires in their parents' basements and then losing it all before they run up for dinner," he said.

"What we can do is begin talking about this."

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Lots of sulfuric volatiles in saliva correlated with kids' dislike of these veggies

For many people, nothing is less tantalizing than a big plate of steamed cruciferous vegetables at dinner. Yes, it's supposed to be good for us, but that bitter taste is just too overpowering and unpleasant. This is especially true for young children, as any frustrated parent can attest. But an aversion to broccoli, cauliflower, and similar foods is not just people being finicky; some genetics are at play. And according to a recent paper in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, a person's oral microbiome may also be an important factor.

 

In 1931, a chemist named Arthur L. Fox accidentally released the powdered form of phenylthiocarbamide (PTC) in his lab. He didn't notice anything unusual, but his lab mate sensed a bitter taste. Subsequent experiments confirmed that this variation existed in the broader population and that not being able to taste bitterness was a recessive genetic trait. For instance, about 25 percent of the population can't taste propylthiouracil (PROP), a chemical that is similar to the bitter compounds found in cabbage, raw broccoli, coffee, tonic water, and dark beers. That population is, like Fox, essentially "taste blind."

 

There are 25 "bitterness" genes known thus far; different bitter foods act through different receptors, and people can be high or low responders for one but not another. Many scientists think that those who can sense bitterness are probably responding to compounds called glucosinolates, present in most cruciferous vegetables, like broccoli, Brussels sprouts, and cauliflower. Those glucosinolates are responsible for much of the nutritional benefits of those veggies, but they also break down into pungent compounds that can negatively trigger many people's bitter taste receptors. (I happen to dislike all three, as well as raw tomatoes, and I refuse to feel bad about that.)

 

However, no one gene could ever be responsible for whether we love or hate specific foods. So many different compounds are related to flavor and aroma, not to mention texture (mouth feel), and all of them might contribute to how much we savor or loathe a food. And now we can add our oral microbiomes to the mix. While there is also a genetic component to one's individual microbiome, according to Damian Frank, co-author of this latest study, that makeup can change over the course of one's life. So environment plays a role as well.

 

This latest study builds on the results of a 2018 study involving raw cabbage, which found significant variability in the production of sulfurous volatile compounds in saliva between individuals. Saliva keeps our mouths moist, fights germs and bad breath, and helps us chew and swallow food. And past studies have provided evidence that saliva plays an important role when it comes to flavor release in foods and hence our perception of enjoyment.

 

Broccoli and its cruciferous cousins can produce an enzyme called S-methyl-cysteine-sulfoxide (SMCSO) when plant tissues are damaged—a kind of defense mechanism. Past studies have shown that some people's saliva contains high levels of a particular bacteria that can produce these sulfuric enzymes, and this in turn could affect how people experience the flavors of cruciferous vegetables, among other foods. "This molecule has been basically ignored for a long time, because it's just not as exciting," said Frank.

Frank and his colleagues recruited 98 pairs of children (between the ages of 6 and and parents and had them chew on a bit of wax paper to produce saliva for analysis—a task that proved challenging for many. In the end, 35 pairs of the total 98 were able to produce enough saliva for this phase of the experiment, although all participated in the ranking stages. These samples were then exposed to raw cauliflower powder and analyzed with proton-transfer reaction mass spectrometry to measure individual differences in the production of sulfur volatile compounds in real time.

 

Next, the team presented all 98 participating parent/child pairs with "sniff pens" containing various pure odor compounds diluted in propylene glycol, and asked them to rate the odors in terms of pleasantness and intensity. Children used an age-appropriate adapted version of the "self-assessment manikin" to graphically record their rankings on a scale of 1 (frowning) to 5 (smiling). Adults used a different 9-point scale. The researchers employed the same scales for the next stage of the study, which involved taste testing samples of both raw and steamed broccoli and cauliflower.

Gas chromatography

Frank et al. also used gas chromatography to identify the primary odor-active volatiles present in both raw and steamed broccoli and cauliflower to see if the cooking process changed those profiles, augmented by a panel of trained experts. Dimethyl trisulfide (DMTS) was the most potent volatile in both raw and steamed vegetables, producing "rotten, sulfurous, and putrid" odors. Not surprisingly, all the participants disliked this volatile—it's also a "potent volatile component of decomposing flesh," per the authors.

 

Other volatiles added notes of mustard or wood; radish and pungent earth; green, grassy notes; mushroom or fungus; and floral or violet notes, depending on the vegetable. "In general, steaming was associated with a reduction in overall odor intensity in both vegetables, and no evidence of any unique heat-generated odor compounds in either cauliflower of broccoli was found," the authors wrote.

 

As with the 2018 study, there were large individual differences in the level of sulfur volatile production among the participants. Children whose saliva produced especially high levels of sulfuric volatile compounds disliked the raw broccoli and cauliflower the most. This correlation was not found for the adults in the study, which the authors suggest might explain why some adults eventually learn to tolerate the flavor as they age.

 

In addition, "There was a significant relationship between children and parents in the amount of sulfur produced, which we're supposing is due to similar oral microbiomes," said Frank. The authors emphasize that, while intriguing, this is a speculative finding, since the team did not analyze which types of bacteria and how many of each type were present in the saliva samples. However, "Other research groups have found significant relationships between the salivary microbiome of parents and children, especially mothers and children," they wrote.

 

DOI: Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, 2021. 10.1021/acs.jafc.1c03889 (About DOIs).

Hate broccoli and cauliflower? Your microbiome might be partially to blame

For a subset of these patients, it doesn't have to be that way.

A huge amount of research in recent years has demonstrated that type 2 diabetes can be reversed in the body, with a range of dieting methods and other kinds of lifestyle interventions sending the disease into remission.

It is, however, quite hard to know for sure how many people are able to successfully pull off such a reversal. After all, hundreds of millions of people around the world are currently diabetic, but millions of them aren't even aware they have the condition.

Against such a backdrop – and outside of scientific experiments specifically measuring type 2 diabetes remission – it's difficult to say how many people might develop the condition before going on to successfully reverse it.

Nonetheless, a new study from Scotland suggests the phenomenon might be more common than we realized, even without things like scientific interventions and invasive procedures such as bariatric surgery.

"We have been able to show, for the first time, that one in 20 people in Scotland with type 2 diabetes achieves remission," says clinical diabetes researcher Mireille Captieux from the University of Edinburgh.

"This is higher than expected and indicates a need for updated guidelines to support clinicians in recognizing and supporting these individuals."

In their study, Captieux and her co-authors assessed a national Scottish diabetes registry, containing data for over 99.5 percent of people with a diagnosis of the condition in the country.

They identified 162,316 individuals over the age of 30 with type 2 diabetes on the basis of HbA1c (glycated hemoglobin) readings in the diabetic range.

From this cohort, during the study window (the calendar year of 2019), a total of 7,710 people went into remission on the basis of their HbA1c reading dropping below the diabetic range of 48 mmol/mol (6.5 percent), representing approximately 4.8 percent of the group.

Individuals who were more likely to go into remission were older, had lost weight since their diagnosis, had no history of glucose lowering therapy or bariatric surgery, and generally had healthier blood readings at the time of their diagnosis.

"Our prevalence estimates suggest that a reasonably large proportion of people achieve remission of type 2 diabetes in routine clinical care outside trial or bariatric surgery settings," the researchers write in their paper.

"The immediate implications for practice are that these people should be recognized and coded appropriately so they can be given adequate support and followed up to ensure continued care consistent with diabetes management guidelines. It is important to recognize that remission of diabetes may not be permanent."

Beyond helping us to support people who appear to successfully reverse their type 2 diabetes on their own, the findings could go some way to helping researchers and health workers identify which patients might be most likely to achieve and maintain remission.

It's as yet unclear how these results from Scotland might apply to communities elsewhere, but one thing's for sure.

With estimates predicting that today's population of roughly 460 million diabetics worldwide will expand to some 700 million people by 2045, we need plenty more insights on how to turn this disease around, and soon.

The findings are reported in PLOS Medicine.

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After two spontaneous shutdowns in two days, NASA has kept hardware offline.

Instruments on Hubble in safe mode; NASA trying to understand why

To hunt for alien life, human scientists build bigger and more sensitive arrays in the hopes of picking up a radio transmission from a faraway world. It turns out that Larinioides sclopetarius, also known as the bridge spider or gray cross spider, uses a similar trick. Instead of hunting for E.T., the spider can tune in to its surroundings and hear across great distances by treating its round, orb-shaped web like a comparatively giant acoustic array, according to new research. 

The bridge spider uses its web as an engineered “external ear” up to 10,000 times the size of its body, according to a preprint study posted to bioRxiv on October 18. The discovery, which has not yet been peer reviewed, challenges many assumptions that scientists have held for years about how spiders and potentially other arthropods navigate and interact with the world around them. 

“Evolutionarily speaking, spiders are just weird animals,” Jessica Petko, a Pennsylvania State University York biologist who didn’t work on the new study, writes in an email to The Scientist. “While it has been long known that spiders sense sound vibration with sensory hairs on their legs, this paper is the first to show that orb weaving spiders can amplify this sound by building specialized web structures.” 

Spiders—both orb-weavers and others—are perfectly capable of hearing at closer distances without their webs thanks to the tiny hairs and organs on their legs that sense vibrations as air flows past. But the majority of spider biologists assumed that they could only hear sounds in their immediate vicinity, senior study author and Cornell University neurobiologist Ronald Hoy tells The Scientist. 

Lead study author and Binghamton University mechanical engineer Ronald Miles had demonstrated that spider silk is sensitive to airflow across a wide range of frequencies in a 2017 study published in PNAS. Armed with the knowledge that strands of silk and the hairs on a spider’s legs could vibrate to the same frequencies of noise, Miles and his colleagues aimed to determine whether vibrations in one could be transmitted to the other. 

First, the researchers had to ensure that the spiders were actually hearing through their webs and not directly through those sensory hairs. To do so, the scientists brought spiders into the lab and waited while they wove new webs on wooden frames. Once the spiders’ handiwork was complete, the scientists perturbed the web using a carefully-engineered and directed sound stimulus that hit the web but not the spider sitting in the center. 

“That is one of the hardest parts: showing that they don’t have a little hidden ear on them that’s picking it up,” Miles tells The Scientist. “To do that, we created a sound source in the air that would propagate sound over a very short distance.” 

Once they heard the signal, the spiders responded by crouching, flattening out, or otherwise giving a startled response, the study authors explain. Because the web is so much larger than the spider, the paper suggests this mechanism allows the spider to hear noises it would otherwise miss, such as birds or crickets from over ten meters away. 

The discovery that the bridge spider uses its web as an external auditory sensor is fascinating, University of California, Davis, arachnologist Lisa Chamberland, who didn’t work on the study, tells The Scientist, because it’s such a drastic departure from what scientists previously assumed about a spider’s hearing. 

“I think this opens up doors for some exciting research,” Chamberland says, adding that she hopes scientists will start “looking at the evolution of sound systems across spiders.” 

Plenty of questions remain not only about why the spiders started using their webs as comparatively giant acoustic arrays, but what purpose it serves. 

“While I am sure the authors had fun doing this research, it is not a trivial finding,” University of Cincinnati biological sciences professor George Uetz, who studies spider sensation but didn’t work on the new paper, tells The Scientist in an email. “I think it will have a large impact on arachnology and beyond. For example, people have often speculated that spiders might use airborne vibration from prey activity to determine an optimal web location, and this is an ecological question worth exploring.” Another question, he adds, is how differences in webs among species “could impact both the process of sensing and function in prey capture and communication, which is an important evolutionary question.” Finally, there’s more to learn about how spiders “tune” their webs to specific stimuli. 

The researchers speculate that spiders may increase their hearing range to help dodge predators or track prey, but the spiders in this experiment primarily responded to the noise stimuli with apparent alarm and confusion. Down the road, the study authors say they hope others in the field will pick up where they left off by studying whether the noises given off by, for example, a hungry bird or a tasty insect elicit different behaviors. A further open question is whether other species of spider, orb-weaver and otherwise, use the same giant-ear trick. For example, Uetz wonders whether the wolf spiders that he studies, which don’t spin webs, could use other objects like leaves as external ears to help them detect predatory birds. 

“It will be interesting to find out whether other web building spiders (like the ones that make messy cobwebs) use webs for a similar purpose or if this evolutionary marvel is restricted to orb weavers,” Petko writes. 

However, Hoy and Miles suggest that external-ear behavior may not be restricted at all—they speculate that they’ve scratched the surface of a whole world of spider and insect sensation that could change our understanding of bioacoustics at a philosophical level. 

“Most [biologists] assume that insects can sense sound only when it’s really near,” Hoy says. The study demonstrates, he says, “that it’s time to look again at animals that are hairy. A simple hair is a perfectly legitimate sound system because it’s sensing flow.”

Source

To say that Steiner’s path to a Ph.D. in physics was not a traditional one would be an understatement. As a young man, Steiner fled the chaos of his birthplace of Vienna as World War II ended and eventually made his way to the United States. Steiner says, “I knew physics was my true passion by the time I graduated high school. But after the war, my uncle and my mother advised me to take up medicine because it would be a better choice in these turbulent after-war years.” 

Although he excelled at and loved physics, Steiner followed his family’s advice. He says, “my uncle was a physician, an ear, nose and throat specialist, and he had taught in the United States for a while. He taught plastic surgery — showing people how to make noses smaller or how to straighten them out. My family’s advice was that medicine was the best path for me. So I reconciled myself, ‘they are older and wiser,’ and I followed their advice.”

Steiner went on to earn a medical doctorate in 1955 from the University of Vienna and soon after his graduation he made his way to Washington, D.C. where he finished his initial training in internal medicine. He next began a traineeship in hematology at Tufts University under Dr. William Damashek, who the American Society of Hematology describes as “the preeminent American clinical hematologist of his time.” The traineeship included a three-year training in biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and he earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry there in 1967. 

Steiner moved to Rhode Island when he was offered a position as a hematologist in the newly established Program in Medicine at Brown University (now the Warren Alpert Medical School).  In 1968 he was appointed Assistant Professor of Medicine working primarily in research and was made full Professor of Medicine in 1978. In 1985 Steiner was appointed head of the hematology section of the medical school, a position he held until 1994.

When approaching retirement, an associate of his was made chief of hematology at the University of North Carolina, Greenville and he asked Steiner to join him to establish a research program in hematology which he directed until 2000 when he retired from medicine and returned to Rhode Island.

But Steiner’s passion for physics never left him. He says, “Even when I was in medical school I went at times to lectures by a renowned physicist Walter Thirring. His lectures always fascinated me. I was captivated by quantum physics and wished I could go into more detail in this.”

Unfortunately, at that time Steiner was unable to delve into the mysteries of quantum physics the way he would have liked, “you cannot do medicine halfway” he says, “you really have to dedicate your life to it.”

But throughout a long career in medicine, Steiner says he never stopped thinking about physics, “physics was always a part of me,” he says, “and when I retired from medicine and I was approaching age 70, I decided to enter the world of physics.” Steiner started taking physics classes at MIT, but soon found the demands of commuting to Boston overwhelming so he decided to transfer to the program in physics at Brown University where he had spent a good part of his academic life.

Steiner enrolled at Brown as a special student in 2000 and began taking undergraduate courses. He found Brown Physics a welcoming environment for a late-in-life learner. Steiner says, “I introduced myself to the teachers and told them ‘I am an older student’ and they said they were delighted to have me in class.” Though many years his junior, Steiner says his fellow students liked him and treated him well.

Steiner did not consciously set out to earn a third doctoral degree when he began his studies at Brown. “Originally I just wanted to take classes, doing something that helped my mind and was interesting to me.” But by the Spring of 2007 Steiner had completed enough classes to be admitted to the graduate school as a Ph.D. degree candidate in Physics. “It took a long time because I only took one or two classes every semester,” says Steiner, “but eventually, I had completed all requirements to enter graduate school.” Steiner says he had some “serious medical issues” that delayed his progress.

After admission to the Ph.D. program, Steiner continued his coursework at the graduate level and set out to look for a dissertation adviser. Initially, Steiner considered nuclear physics, but thought it might take him away from his family, so he approached Brad Marston who is a condensed matter theorist who also works on climate science. Marston says he did not work on nuclear theory, “so I gave Manfred a project that was the closest to high energy physics that I did, which was bosonization.” Marston recalls initially being skeptical when approached by a septuagenarian student about serving as a dissertation advisor, “to be honest, I was skeptical because people do not usually do physics, especially theoretical physics, at an advanced age. But in a moment of weakness, I agreed and said ‘yes.’ I knew his story, and I was very sympathetic to his desire to fulfill his lifelong dream of becoming a physicist.” Steiner commenced working on his dissertation with Marston advising, throughout the process, Steiner says he made many new friends, “especially the faculty that served on his dissertation committee. “I highly respect my committee,” he says.

Steiner set to work on a very difficult problem. Marston explains, “the universe is divided into two types of particles: fermions and bosons.”

Particles have an angular momentum, or “spin.” Particles with half-integer spins are fermions and particles with whole integer spins are bosons.

While this might seem like a small difference, it has enormous consequences. Marston continues, “electrons are fermions and photons are bosons. But there are certain circumstances under which you can characterize a fermion as a boson, that is what is known as bosonization, and there are certain advantages to doing that.”  “Usually,” Marston says, “people do this for one-dimensional problems, but for years I had been working with people like the late Tony Houghton trying to extend this to higher dimensions, such as two dimensional or three-dimensional metals.”  Marston says, “we had some success with this, but also discovered some limitations, so I gave Manfred the job of trying to move beyond those limitations.

That was a challenging project. I did not give Manfred an easy project.” Marston and Steiner are currently working together to publish some of the results of his dissertation. 

Valles says he considers Steiner an inspirational figure, “I remember meeting Manfred in the hallway when he was taking undergraduate classes. He was unabashed about wanting to do physics and having wanted to do it all his life. His excitement about physics as someone who had such a stellar career in another field felt really affirming.” Valles characterizes working with Steiner as “really pleasurable,” and adds, “the theory that he was doing involves techniques that are incredibly advanced and challenging to master.” Of his dissertation, Valles says Steiner, “did an amazing job describing the march of physics in the context of bosonization. He believes in the human mind’s capacity to advance and create knowledge. Seeing him do it was incredibly inspiring, enabling, and empowering to me as a physicist.”

Having successfully defended his thesis and completed all requirements for a Ph.D. in physics, Steiner is ecstatic, “it feels really good,” he says, “I am really on top of the world.” Despite his other accomplishments, Steiner says, “this Ph.D. is the one that I most cherish because it’s the one that I was striving for my whole life.”

But even with two Ph.D.’s, an M.D. and a distinguished career in medicine behind him, Steiner is not prepared to rest on his laurels. He is currently reworking part of his dissertation for publication and plans to continue his theoretical physics work. “Even though I am old, I would like to continue with physics. And even after writing and publishing this paper, I want to continue my research.”  Keeping going is consistent with Steiner’s approach to life, and he believes he still has more to offer. Steiner says, “I always tried to keep my brain sharp. Physics certainly helped me do that.”

Steiner admits he sometimes wonders how his life might have gone differently if he had not heeded his mother and uncle’s advice as a young man, “I do sometimes wonder how things might have gone differently,” he says. “I do not really regret it now. It was a good life and I made many great friends. It felt very good, particularly after I got my Ph.D. and worked in academic medicine. But physics always lurked in the background.”

When asked what those approaching retirement age should do Steiner says, “it is up to them. I could not imagine spending my life playing golf all the time. I wanted to do something that keeps my mind active. But it is a matter of whatever you want to do. If you have a dream, follow it.

Sometimes that dream may never have been verbalized, it may be buried in the subconscious.  It is important not to waste your older days. There is a lot of brainpower in older people and I think it can be of enormous benefit to younger generations. Older people have experience and many times history repeats itself.” As for young people choosing between following a passion and taking a more conventional path in life Steiner says, “I think young people should follow their dreams whatever they are, they will always regret it if they do not follow their dreams.”

By Pete Bilderback

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For hundreds of years, natives of Samoa have been using the leaves of the matalafi tree to treat a wide variety of inflammation related ailments, including injuries, wounds and elephantiasis. It was not until recently that modern science took notice and began to look at the leaves, as well. One of the team members, Molimau-Samasoni, took a serious look at the plant as part of her Ph.D. research over a decade ago. Since that time, she and her team have subjected the plant to chemical genomic analysis and found that it is an iron chelator, which means it binds easily to iron.

Prior research has shown that such materials can be useful when iron disregulation occurs due to inflammation. Additional testing of the plant involved applied metabolomics, immunology, biochemistry and knowledge of the people who have been using it for many years in Samoa. These initial studies not only shed more light on the substances present in the tree leaves, but also showed that the plant very likely would be useful as an anti-inflammatory therapeutic. To find out if that was the case, the researchers tested it in the lab with a variety of mammalian immune cells. After discovering that material in the plant leaves reduced inflation, they compared its efficacy against one of the most popular drugs used to treat inflammation—ibuprofen. They found that the leaves were equally effective in treating inflammation.

The researchers suggest more work is required to further isolate the chemicals in the leaves that reduce inflammation and to make sure that their use does not result in unintended negative side effects. Of particular interest is determining whether the chemicals in the leaves can be mass produced in a factory, and if so, whether the resulting therapeutic has fewer side effects than ibuprofen.

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Merck’s Antiviral Could Be Just What Covid Was Waiting For

Ten days ago, a New York judge revealed the full prosecution filings in a multi-state antitrust lawsuit against Google – one of many against the company, and of many more against the ad tech giants.

There's too much to digest in a handful of days, and early headlines have concentrated on the claims that Google and Facebook colluded in a cabal to deflect legislation, bypass privacy technology, and share the spoils. There are lots of specific allegations about other misdeeds; this is just the hors d'oeuvre.

Are these just allegations concocted by whistleblowers, and competitors tired of losing in a fair fight? The court will decide, but there is no shortage of claims that match real-world experience. Take AMP, a protocol that Google promoted as a way to speed up mobile content delivery and improve user experience. Free to use for everyone, it required some JS code from Google and a few rules to follow; in return you got a free CDN optimised for your mobile content. As a bonus, because your content was faster and Google prioritises speed, AMP content got pushed up the search rankings.

Look at the press around the launch of AMP in the mid 2010s, and that's the message you'll get. Most caveats were about the extra work for developers in following the rules.

Skip forward a year or so and people had noticed that AMP wasn't actually faster, and that by effectively hosting all third-party content within google.com it was short-circuiting the internet. And the court filing has claimed that AMP's primary purpose was indeed to create huge amounts of data for Google's internal use, while denying that data to other services. If true: insider trading, consumer capture, and competitor freeze-out.

Some of our own experiences back that claim. Developers, CIOs, advertisers, content providers felt they were had. Some of the press felt they were had. How much should any of us trust Google now when it claims innocence?

Looking through the lawsuit, the scope and shamelessness of Google's greed would appear to be stark. Project Bernanke, for example, is claimed to take data from publishers' ad servers to boost Google's own services. Project NERA, to create a "not owned but operated" walled garden for users if they used any Google service. "Project Jedi" was allegedly meant to freeze out independent ad exchanges by using insider knowledge, and in "Jedi Blue", Google is alleged to have conspired with Facebook to parcel out the goodies between themselves.

There are other charges in the 173-page unredacted filing, which you can and should read here [PDF]. If the allegations are true, the breadth and depth and sheer focused intent of Google's abuse of its position would be unique. The perversion of the ad market would be intense.

If you're a publisher, your content is like a portfolio of shares you give to a financial institution to handle by judicious trading on the Stock Exchange, with advertisers choosing to buy through their own banks. Only with Google, the financial institutions and the stock exchanges are either owned by the same cartel, or they're shut out of the market. This is hugely illegal in finance, for obvious reasons.

How much does this matter? "Online advertising promotes journalism," except journalism is dying. The money's gone. Where's it gone? Does Google have all the money? It takes up to 42 per cent of the cut from ad money that goes through it, alleges the filing, 42 per cent that can't be spent on content providers like journalists.

Without journalism, you get guaranteed corruption – fine for big companies that are keen to keep their dealings away from the public, and politicians and criminals who can entrench themselves in power and wealth, no questions asked. The big tech platforms don't care about journalism, they care about traffic, so fake news tastes just as good and if the funding comes from dark money, so much the better – they get to keep more of the ad revenue.

As one developer said on Twitter – having read the filing – either Google is screwed or society is. It's hard to argue with that. It's hard to argue that Facebook doesn't have its own equally damning and equally perilous culpabilities.

The deal we struck with Google for all that nice free stuff, the affordable mobile phone ecosystem, the entertaining videos etc. has proved a deal with the devil, and the other devils who infest the seven layers of Hell's own protocol stack. The damage is in plain sight, and these wide-ranging allegations are before the courts, and the decision isn't whether to do anything but what.

Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated like finance, aviation, medicine, and power. The giants who've cheated us must be broken up to their smallest viable constituent parts, and their future interactions be through a framework of radical accountability.

It's them or us, and it has to be us. ®

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The study, led by Professor Yuming Guo and Dr. Shanshan Li, from Planetary Health at Monash University and published in The Lancet Regional Health—Americas journal, for the first time quantifies the risk and attributable burden for hospitalizations of renal diseases related to ambient temperature using daily hospital admission data from 1816 cities in Brazil.

The study comes as the world focuses on the impact of climate change at the COP26 conference in Glasgow from 31 October.

In 2017, a landmark article in The Lancet declared renal diseases a global public health concern, estimating that almost 2.6 million deaths were attributable to impaired kidney function that year. Importantly the incidence of death from kidney disease had risen 26.6 percent compared to a decade previously, an increase that this study may indicate was, in part, caused by climate change.

The study looked at a total of 2,726,886 hospitalizations for renal diseases recorded during the study period. According to Professor Guo, for every 1°C increase in daily mean temperature, there is an almost 1 percent increase in renal disease, with those most impacted being women, children under 4 years of age and those 80+ years of age.

The associations between temperature and renal diseases were largest on the day of the exposure to extreme temperatures but remained for 1–2 days post-exposure.

In the paper the authors—who are also from the University of Sao Paulo—argue that the study "provides robust evidence that more policies should be developed to prevent heat-related hospitalisations and mitigate climate change."

"In the context of global warming, more strategies and policies should be developed to prevent heat-related hospitalizations."

The authors advise interventions should be urgently incorporated into government policy on climate change, including particularly targeting specific individuals, including females, children, adolescents, and the elderly, as they are more vulnerable to heat with regard to renal diseases.

"Moreover, attention should be paid to low- and middle-income countries like Brazil, where reliable heat warning systems and preventive measures are still in need," Professor Guo added.

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Spiders are much smarter than you think

Many countries are currently experiencing a resurgence of SARS-CoV-2 infections despite hitherto successful vaccination campaigns. This may be due to the greater infectiousness of the Delta (B.1.617.2) variant of SARS-CoV-2, and to waning immunity of vaccines administered months earlier. In the face of the current resurgence, several countries are planning to administer a third booster dose of mRNA COVID-19 vaccine.

This study suggests that a third vaccine dose is effective in reducing severe COVID-19-related outcomes compared to individuals who have received two vaccine doses at least 5 months ago. It is the first to estimate the effectiveness of a third dose of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine—BNT162b2 specifically—against severe outcomes with adjustment for various possible confounders, including comorbidities and behavioral factors. The study's large size also allows a more precise assessment of the vaccine's effectiveness across different time periods, different subpopulations (by sex, age and number of comorbidities), and different severe outcomes (which are rarer and thus require greater sample size). A recent clinical trial conducted by BioNTech included a smaller sample size and did not estimate the third-dose's effects for more severe outcomes.

The study took place from July 30, 2021 through Sept 23, 2021, coinciding with Israel's fourth wave of coronavirus infection and illness, during which the Delta (B.1.617.2) variant was the dominant strain in the country for new infections (with very few exceptions).

Researchers reviewed data from 728,321 individuals aged 12 or above who had received the third dose of the BNT162b2 vaccine. These individuals were carefully matched 1:1 with 728,321 individuals who had received only two shots of the BNT162b2 vaccine at least five months prior. The matching was based on an extensive set of demographic, geographic and health-related attributes associated with risk of infection, risk of severe disease, health status and health seeking behavior. Individuals were assigned to each group dynamically based on their changing vaccination status (198,476 individuals moved from the unvaccinated cohort into the vaccinated cohort during the study). Multiple analyses were conducted to ensure that the estimated vaccine effectiveness was robust to potential biases. The study included a total of over 12,000,000 person-days of follow-up.

The results show that, compared with individuals who received only two doses five months prior, individuals who received three doses of the vaccine (7 days or more after the third dose) had 93% lower risk of COVID-19-related hospitalization, 92% lower risk of severe COVID-19 disease, and 81% lower risk of COVID-19-related death. Vaccine effectiveness was found to be similar for different sexes, age groups (ages 40-69 and 70+) and number of comorbidities.

The study also included a population-level analysis which found that infection rates began to drop for each age group 7-10 days after that age group became eligible for the third dose.

"These results show convincingly that the third dose of the vaccine is highly effective against severe COVID-19-related outcomes in different age groups and population subgroups, one week after the third dose. These data should facilitate informed policy decision-making," said Prof. Ran Balicer, senior author of the study, Director of the Clalit Research Institute and Chief Innovation Officer for Clalit.

Prof. Ben Reis, Director of the Predictive Medicine Group at the Boston Children's Hospital Computational Health Informatics Program and Harvard Medical School, said that "to date, one of the main drivers of vaccine hesitancy has been a lack of information regarding the effectiveness of the vaccine. This careful epidemiological study provides reliable information on third-dose vaccine effectiveness, which we hope will be helpful to those who have not yet decided about vaccination with a third dose."

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Kuwait broke the record for the hottest day ever in 2016 at 53.6, and its 10-day rolling average this summer was equally sweltering. Flash floods occurred in Jeddah, and more recently Mecca, while across Saudi Arabia average temperatures have increased by 2%, and the maximum temperatures by 2.5%, all just since the 1980s. In Qatar, the country with the highest per capita carbon emissions in the world and the biggest producer of liquid gas, the outdoors is already being air conditioned.

In Tehran, air pollution kills 4,000 people each year, while in the south-west province of Khuzestan citizens blocked roads and burned tyres to protest against droughts caused by a combination of mismanagement, western sanctions and killer heat. In the United Arab Emirates it is estimated that the climate crisis costs £6bn a year in higher health costs. The salinity of the Gulf, caused by proliferating desalination plants, has increased by 20%, with all the likely impact on marine life and biodiversity.

Smog obscures the view from the Saad Abad mountain north of the Iranian capital, Tehran. Photograph: Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images

And it is, of course, going to get much worse, as temperatures, humidity and waters rise. The Middle East is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world. By the end of the century, if the more dire predictions prove true, Mecca may not be habitable, making the summer Haj a pilgrimage of peril, even catastrophe. Large tracts of the Middle East will resemble the desert in Ethiopia’s Afar, a vast expanse with no permanent human settlement pressed against the Red Sea. The gleaming Gulf coastal cities by the end of the century could find themselves inundated as waters rise. It is not quite Apocalypse Now, but Apocalypse Foreseeably Soon.

Jim Krane, an energy research analyst at Rice University Baker Institute in Houston, said: “It is a really tough issue because the interests of the ruling elites run contrary to the interests of citizens. The ruling elites are all dependent on oil rents for the survival of their regimes. They need the oil business to stay alive for them to stay in power. Their system is based on continued oil rent, but ultimately, the citizens’ long-term interests are with a liveable climate”.

Why the world is getting hotter and how you can help – video explainer

Zeina Khalil Hajj, a founder of Greenpeace in the Middle East, says that the region is under a double squeeze. “As demand for energy changes, a region that has been fundamentally reliant on fossil fuel, oil and carbon for its economic survival cannot continue with this dependence. There will be no market for their oil. But as its climate changes, it has an extra duty to shift for its own survival. Extreme weather is changing the lives of the people at a daily level. There is no choice, but to go green.”

The west’s insatiable demand for fossil fuel has allowed this region to build car-dependent cities, full of shiny air-conditioned skyscrapers and malls. Now it has to find a way to avoid its self-destruction; this has to be, in Thomas Friedman’s phrase, the Middle East’s Promethean moment.

In truth, the region has been told for at least a decade that it needs to make the transition out of oil. The precise point oil demand will peak has been contested, and depends on a myriad of assumptions about regulation, technology and consumer behaviour. But many people say demand will peak in about 2040, and then decline.

Pigeons take cover under the shade of trees on the seafront of Kuwait City in July 2021, as the Gulf state recorded extreme summer temperatures. Photograph: Yasser Al-Zayyat/AFP/Getty Images

But the International Energy Association’s report Net Zero by 2050, by contrast, proposed oil demand fall from 88m barrels a day (mb/d) in 2020, to 72 mb/d in 2030 and to 24 mb/d in 2050, a fall of almost 75% between 2020 and 2050. It argued that the Gulf has all three elements needed to switch to renewables: capital, sun and large tracts of vacant land.

Until recently there were few signs that the petro-states, including Iran, felt the need to get out of fossil fuels at that kind of pace.

Asked to comment on the IEA report, including its call for a cessation of new oil investments, the Saudi energy minister, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, famously described it as a sequel to La La Land. “If I had to be concerned with IEA projections,” Abdulaziz said in Abu Dhabi during a public forum at the 24th World Energy Congress in 2019, “I probably [would] be [on] Prozac all the time.”

The Qatari energy minister, Saad al-Kaabi, said cutting off oil and gas production would cause damaging supply crunches, and laughed at “the euphoria around energy transition”. Opec’s own projections suggest oil demand will rise in absolute terms through to 2045, and oil’s share of world wide energy demand will fall only from 30% to 28%. Hardly a green revolution.

And looking at the current energy crunch, spiralling price of oil and predicted demand for oil this year, the case for a fast transition is harder to make than a year ago.

The Gulf States are still highly reliant on oil and gas exports, which remain more than 70% of total goods exports in Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Oman, and on oil revenues, which exceed 70% of total government revenues in Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain. In Vision 2030, published in 2016, the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, promised to turn the country into a diversified industrial power house. The reality is very different. The World Bank shows Saudi Arabia is still 75% dependent on oil exports for its budget.

A billboard in Riyadh advertising the 2019 Aramaco IPO, the biggest public listing ever. Photograph: Fayez Nureldine/AFP/Getty Images

Aramco, the Saudi company with the largest carbon footprint in the world, is not trying to diversify at the rate of Shell or BP. Indeed, it has just announced an investment to increase crude capacity from 12m barrels a day to 13m barrels by 2027.

Hajj says it may require a rapid psychological shift away from consumerism. “The Gulf is not even close to that kind of conversation. If you see the lifestyle in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, it is based on endless consumption. My fear is that we are so far away from it both in terms of policy and willingness”.

Iran is now the seventh-largest carbon emitter per capita, the UAE the second largest and Saudi Arabia the 13th.

Of course, the Gulf rulers at events such as Cop26 can fend off some criticism by arguing that the Gulf region is not itself collectively one of the great emitters, either now or historically. The region is responsible for only 4.7 % of worldwide carbon emissions, dwarfed by the pollution from Europe, America and China. The oil that the Middle East exports is logged against the carbon emissions of the users, not the producers.

2050: what happens if we ignore the climate crisis – video explainer

Yet the region’s leaders now appear to be responding to pressure to act not only from the west, but their own population. The goose has finally realised the golden egg – oil – is turning brown. Frank Wouters, director of the EU-GCC Clean Energy Network, says that although even a year ago preaching about the green deal was not exactly rewarding (“It felt a bit like going to the butcher shop and telling them you want to become a vegetarian”), attitudes are changing.

The Gulf’s self-proclaimed first mover, the UAE, was the first country in the region to ratify the Paris agreement and is now the least dependent on oil for government revenues. Last week it announced a “net zero initiative by 2050” to be begun with $163bn (£118bn) of investments and a new minister for climate change and the environment, Mariam Almheiri. The announcement came after the UAE ordered an 80-day brainstorming session in every government department from June. It was the first petro-state to embrace net zero in domestic consumption.

The plan is still in its infancy, and some of it is ill defined, but the direction is clear. It has promised to be 50% reliant on renewables and nuclear for its electricity by 2050. The Abu Dhabi national oil company has said it will source 100% of its grid power from nuclear and solar. Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum solar park is expected to be the largest lowest-cost single-site solar park in the world, with a planned production capacity of up to 5000MW. The price of solar coming out of the Middle East is also incredibly low.

The Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum solar park, south of Dubai. Photograph: AP

Gulf states are deeply competitive, so a flurry of news is emerging. Qatar has appointed a climate minister; Bahrain is targeting net zero by 2050; Kuwait has a new emissions plan.

Saudi Arabia, which rarely likes to be outdone by the UAE, had already said it would increase its share of renewables in electricity generation from a trivial 0.3% to 50% by 2030, as well as plant 10bn trees in the coming decades. At the weekend the world’s largest oil producer staged an unprecedented Middle East Green Initiative Summit in Riyadh, an event that attracted broadly approving speeches from Prince Charles and John Kerry. It promised it would reach net zero carbon emissions within its borders by 2060, less ambitious than the request by Prince Charles to reach the target by 2050 with clear baselines. It also said it would reduce carbon emissions by 278m tonnes a year by 2030, more than double its previous target.

Senior Saudis say they have been maestros at summits, websites and visions, but true credibility stems from turning PR concepts such as a circular carbon economy into a reality. Many in the west are sceptical. Fossil fuels shipped abroad are not on the Saudi’s carbon ledger, owing to UN accounting rules, and the promised internal reduction in emissions is dependent on a heavy bet that unproven blue hydrogen and carbon capture technology will work. Greenpeace Middle East suggested the summit was a fraud to please the US, as the Saudis’ plan included increasing oil production. Others say at least Saudi has felt the need to join – rather than stall – the climate debate.

One reason the Gulf monarchies have been able to be so slow in weaning themselves off the commodity that made them rich is that the wealth has been used to numb public opinion. Citizens have been bought off through a mixture of no taxes, along with water, petrol and energy subsidies. The dynamic is different in Lebanon, Iraq and to a lesser extent Iran. But that is changing, and small green civil society groups are starting to emerge, such as Kesk, Nature Iraq and Greenpeace Middle East.

The issue, according to Israel’s leftist vegan environment minister Tamar Zandberg, could transform some of the frozen inter-state politics of the Middle East for the better. Zandberg, who is working to get her own government to adopt net zero, says countries in the region have been very good at looking at the past. Climate change makes it essential they instead talk about a shared future. “We share the same problems, the same sun, the same lack of water, and the same collapse of our ecosystem. We need to share the solutions.”

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But millions of years ago, fire regularly ravaged the continent. That’s the conclusion of new research that found evidence of regular fires about 75 million years ago.

Published in the journal Polar Research, the research draws on fossilized charcoal from James Ross Island off the continent’s northeastern tip.

During the Cretaceous period, when dinosaurs roamed the planet, Antarctica was covered by a temperate rainforest with a diverse set of plants and trees including conifers and angiosperms, a category that covers about 300,000 species of flowering plants.

Tiny fragments of fossilized charcoal unearthed on James Ross Island provides evidence that those plants burned in wildfires. Electron microscopes revealed the burned wood belonged to ancient conifers called Araucariaceae.

The discovery adds more evidence to the theory that Antarctica — both its islands and the main continent — was no stranger to wildfire.

At the time, the continent now known as Antarctica was part of Gondwana, a supercontinent in the Southern Hemisphere that began breaking up into today’s more recognizable continents about 170 million years ago.

Although regular blazes were the norm for other parts of the world during the Cretaceous Period, the study suggests the entirety of Antarctica was anything but immune to the warm era’s wildfires.

The Cretaceous is a “well-known global ‘high fire’ period,” they write. “The natural forest fire — caused by lightning strikes, fireballs, sparks and volcanic activity — was a regular phenomenon throughout geological time,” including in a continent that is known for its iciness today.

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