Saturday's government tally recorded 40,251 new cases, the highest figure for new infections since the beginning of the pandemic.

President Vladimir Putin last week ordered a paid holiday from Saturday to November 7 in a bid to break a recent chain of records in daily cases and deaths.

Russia has held back on imposing significant nationwide measures since ending a short lockdown at the beginning of the pandemic and instead placed its hopes on the rollout of several homegrown vaccines, including Sputnik V.

Even though several jabs have been freely available for months, just 32.5 percent of the population have been fully vaccinated, according to government statistics Saturday.

The Kremlin this week said epidemiologists had raised "concerns" after polls cited by news agencies showed one-third of Russians planned to travel during the holiday period.

Regions across the country have imposed some virus restrictions but the most stringent began this week in Moscow -- the epicentre of Russia's outbreak -- with non-essential services shuttered.

Russian authorities have been accused of downplaying the pandemic and figures from statistics agency Rosstat on Friday showed nearly twice as many Covid deaths compared with the government tally.

Rosstat said 44,265 people died of coronavirus in September -- nearly double the official government figure.

This would bring the agency's toll of Covid-19 deaths in Russia to nearly 450,000, the highest in Europe.

© 2021 AFP

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There were 44,265 deaths associated with the virus last month, bringing the pandemic’s total to nearly half a million, according to Federal Statistics Service data published late Friday. That contributed to the highest number of September fatalities since the war, said Alexei Raksha, a demographer who left the agency last year after a dispute over its coronavirus numbers.

The situation is poised to get worse after record numbers of cases in recent weeks, leading President Vladimir Putin to declare days off nationwide. Widespread distrust of the government has hindered attempts to get people to use locally developed vaccines. 

“If the authorities’ approach to fighting Covid-19 doesn’t change radically, we can expect new waves of infections,” Raksha said. “The lockdown should be real, strict and and several weeks, like in Latvia, and not ‘non-working days’ at the expense of employers.” 

Russia’s average life expectancy has fallen by five years in the last 18 months, to about 69, he estimates. 

The latest Covid surge has overloaded hospitals and made several regions, including Moscow, order tougher lockdowns. 

The crisis hasn’t significantly boosted demand for vaccines, despite widespread availability of a locally-developed Covid-19 inoculation that has been shown to be effective against the virus. Just 47% of Russians have immunity from a vaccine or recovering from the illness, according to data from the government’s coronavirus task force.

< View the video at the source page. >

Vaccine Hesitancy 

Among unvaccinated people, 34% of those who were confident in the government said they would get a vaccine if offered, compared with 19% of those who didn’t, according to a Gallup poll published Thursday. Less than half the people queried were confident in their leadership. 

“We are particularly worried about the growing death rates from Covid-19,” Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova told Putin at a government meeting last week. “We are seeing a gradual increase in the vaccination rates, but it is still insufficient.”

The increasing sense of alarm among officials has not reached the masses. Many Russians continue to flout mask mandates, and Golikova said Friday she was particularly concerned about people traveling to other regions for vacations during the non-working days, according to Tass.  

November Peak

The September data on deaths are nearly twice the Covid-19 task force’s daily reports. But they do not fully account for the higher number of fatalities compared to the same month in 2019. Officials say the excess deaths are linked to the pandemic. 

In September, the authorities avoided unpopular moves before that month’s parliamentary elections that saw Putin’s party retain its constitutional majority. Instead, schools opened as usual on Sept. 1 and life continued largely unburdened by restrictions.  

Raksha, the demographer, said he expects there will be nearly 100,000 excess deaths in October and that fatalities during the current wave will peak in November. 

“The non-working days may slightly speed up the decline,” Raksha said. “The saddest thing is that they were announced about a month and a half too late.” 

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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 Estadistica y Geografia, 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 of southern Mexico suggests that the Maya civilization may have inherited some of its cultural ideas from the earlier Olmecs, who thrived along the coastal plans of southern Mexico from around 1500 BCE to around 400 BCE.

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 BCE (around the same time as Aguada Fenix) and 400 BCE. 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 BCE, 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 BCE, 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.”

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Like many PhD students, Aimée Lê needed her hourly paid job – as an English lecturer – to stay afloat. But what her students never guessed was that for two years while she taught them she was living in a tent.

Lê decided to live outside as a last resort when she was faced with a steep rent increase in the third year of her PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London, and realised she would not be able to afford a flat and cover all her costs on her research and teaching income.

She recalls: “It was cold. It was a small one-person tent, which meant after a bit it did get warmer. But there were days when I remember waking up and my tent was in a circle of snow. When I wasn’t doing my PhD or other work I was learning how to chop wood or start a fire.”

She stored her books in the postgraduate office so they wouldn’t be damaged, and showered at university. She “didn’t quite tell” her parents, saying to them that she was staying on an ecological farm so as not to worry them.

Nor did she tell her university, which insisted this week that the welfare of all its students was paramount and that it encouraged anyone struggling to reach out for support. Lê says she led a double life, fearful that it might damage her professional reputation if people knew she was homeless.

“I got good reviews from students. I marked 300 GCSEs in a hotel lobby. I even organised an international conference. I was working to a very high standard and I was incredibly focused,” she says.

The University and College Union says the plight of young academics who are desperate to get a firm footing on the career ladder is getting worse. Staff at 146 higher education institutions have until Thursday to vote on whether to strike once again – potentially before Christmas – over unfair pay, “untenable” workloads and casualised contracts.

Lê says: “I think the students had every expectation I was receiving a salary for my work. I think that is what students everywhere assume: that we are lecturers on proper contracts. I did tell them that wasn’t the case, but I thought telling them I was living outside was a step too far.”

Research published this month found that nearly half of the undergraduate tutorials for which Cambridge University is famous are delivered by precariously employed staff without proper contracts. The UCU says this is a familiar story across the country.

Lê was awarded an annual fellowship of £16,000 for three years from Royal Holloway to do her PhD on minority ethnic groups in American literature, and won an extra scholarship from the US, where she is from, in her first year. But as an international student she had to pay £8,000 a year in fees to the university (fees that have been waived for UK fellows), leaving her with £12,000 a year to live on including her wages for teaching.

She says she was just about managing until the cheap postgraduate hall she was living in was closed for renovations at the end of her second year. She was faced with finding an extra £3,000 a year for rent, which she says she couldn’t afford. Determined not to drop out, she borrowed the tent from a friend.

Lê admits that at first “I was really scared. I found out there was a protest camp near campus so I turned up with my tent and asked if I could stay there so I wasn’t alone. And that was the start of my next two years.”

While in her tent she looked forward to the “reward of stability” after her PhD. She knew she might still end up taking some shorter-term contracts but thought they would overlap and she wouldn’t ever have to worry about secure housing again.

Today Lê feels such optimism was misplaced. She gained her PhD in 2018, and tutored schoolchildren and worked at a botanical garden to make ends meet before securing two years on a fixed-term contract teaching creative writing at Exeter University. Now she is living with her parents and job-hunting again.

“I don’t know what is going to happen. I’ve had lots of interviews, including one at Cambridge recently, but I started looking in April while I was still employed. I feel really nervous.”

She doesn’t know if she is right not to give up. “To be honest I struggle with that question. The irony is I think I am very well suited to the job. I know I’m a really good teacher. It’s like a vocation.”

Royal Holloway did not know that Lê was struggling financially. A spokesperson said: “We have dedicated student advisory and wellbeing teams who are here to support our students, including PhD students, with their health and wellbeing.” Services included free counselling, crisis help, and a financial wellbeing team who could offer information on extra funding for which students may be eligible, he said.

Vicky Blake, the president of UCU, said: “Many people are still shocked to learn that higher education is one of the most casualised sectors in the British economy. There are at least 75,000 staff on insecure contracts: workers who are exploited, underpaid, and often pushed to the brink by senior management teams relying on goodwill and a culture of fear.”

The union’s research shows one-third of academics are employed on fixed-term contracts, and 41% of teaching-only academics are on hourly paid contracts. Women and BAME staff are more likely to be employed insecurely.

Jasmine Warren, who teaches psychology part-time alongside her PhD at the University of Liverpool, says: “As a woman finishing your PhD and going straight into precarious contracts, you have to ask: at what point do I choose to have a family? At what point can I buy a house? I haven’t seen any university advertising lecturer positions with a contract of more than a year recently. We are expected to accept this as normal.”

Sian Jones (not her real name) spent six months sleeping on friends’ floors while researching her PhD and teaching history for £15 an hour at a Russell Group university. Jones has a disability, and in the third year of her PhD her funding was frozen when she had to take a month out after surgery. Shortly afterwards she had to leave her home because of domestic violence. She couldn’t afford a deposit or rent.

“It was a really hard time, carrying on teaching and doing my research while I had nowhere to live,” she says. “I ended up with severe PTSD.”

Jones eventually finished her PhD while juggling two casual teaching jobs at two institutions an hour apart. “I’m still exhausted,” she says. “I’m now one of the lucky ones because I’ve got a three-year contract, so I can at last relax a bit. But knowing in two and a half years you will be unemployed again is absolutely terrifying.”

Raj Jethwa, the chief executive of the Universities and Colleges Employers’ Association, said: “Despite UCU repeatedly rejecting opportunities to work with employers in this important area, employers have continued their efforts to reduce the sector’s reliance on fixed-term contracts.”

He said that over the last five years fixed-term academic contracts had declined and “the vast majority of teaching is delivered by staff with open-ended contracts”.

He added: “It is very disappointing that UCU is encouraging its members to take damaging industrial action which is specifically designed to disrupt teaching and learning for students who have endured so many recent upheavals.”

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MEXICO CITY, Oct 29 (Reuters) - A wooden canoe used by the ancient Maya and believed to be over 1,000 years old has turned up in southern Mexico, officials said on Friday, part of archeological work accompanying the construction of a major new tourist train.

The extremely rare canoe was found almost completely intact, submerged in a fresh-water pool known as a cenote, thousands of which dot Mexico's Yucatan peninsula, near the ruins of Chichen Itza, once a major Maya city featuring elaborately carved temples and towering pyramids.

Measuring a little over 5 feet (1.6 meters) in length and 2-1/2 feet (80 cm) wide, the canoe was possibly used to transport water from the cenote or deposit ritual offerings, according to a statement from Mexican antiquities institute INAH.

The institute described the extraordinary find as "the first complete canoe like this in the Maya area," adding that experts from Paris' Sorbonne University will help with an analysis of the well-preserved wood to pin-point its age and type.

A three-dimensional model of the canoe will also be commissioned, the statement added, to facilitate further study and allow for replicas to be made.

The canoe is tentatively dated to between 830-950 AD, near the end of the Maya civilization's classical zenith, when dozens of cities across present-day southern Mexico and Central America thrived amid major human achievements in math, writing and art.

It was found while workers building a tourist rail project championed by President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador were inspecting the area surrounding the cenote which is near a section of the project that will connect with Cancun, Mexico's top beach resort.

Lopez Obrador has pitched the so-called Maya Train as tourist-friendly infrastructure that will help alleviate poverty in Mexico's poorer southern states, while critics argue it risks damaging the region's delicate ecosystems.

Reporting by David Alire Garcia; Editing by Sandra Maler

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Juno reveals deep 3D structure of Jupiter’s massive storms

• Microsoft passed Apple in market cap on Friday, making it the world’s most valuable public company.

• The move comes after Apple reported revenue Thursday that fell short of analyst expectations

Microsoft passed Apple in market cap on Friday, making it the world’s most valuable publicly-traded company, after Apple missed earnings expectations on Thursday.

As of 11:15 a.m. ET Microsoft had a market cap of more than $2.47 trillion while Apple’s stood at about $2.42 trillion.

Apple reported revenue that fell short of Wall Street expectations during the company’s fiscal fourth-quarter on Thursday, a result of supply chain constraints. CEO Tim Cook told CNBC’s Josh Lipton the revenue shortfall is estimated at $6 billion, but he expects worse supply chain issues in the December quarter.

iPhone sales at the company were up 47% year-over-year but also fell short of analyst expectations. The company’s fourth quarter only included a few days of iPhone 13 sales.

Microsoft beat revenue expectations during its fiscal first quarter, which climbed about 22% year-over-year. That was the fastest growth since 2018, CNBC previously reported.

Apple was the first company to reach a $1 trillion and $2 trillion market cap. It became the world’s most valuable publicly-traded company when it surpassed state oil giant Saudi Aramco in market cap last year.

Microsoft last surpassed Apple in market cap in 2020 as the pandemic wreaked havoc on supply chains. It first closed above a $2 trillion market cap in June after revealing the first major update to Windows in more than five years.

At 11:15 a.m. ET, Microsoft’s stock was up almost 47% year to date, while Apple’s was up about 11%.

This news is developing. Please check back for updates.

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While critics pummelled Facebook over the change, claiming the rebranding aims to distract from the company's scandals, the internet still had a good laugh.

Here are some highlights of the meme and pun-fueled wisecracks:

'Changing name to Meat'

Meat jokes were all the rage, with US hamburger chain Wendy's tweeting shortly after the news: "Changing name to Meat."

Remaining true to its word, the chain did just that—but only on its Twitter profile.

A tweeting wit under the handle @NicoTheMemeDude queried: "Is this the beginning of the Meataverse?"

To which Wendy's retorted: "very meta."

Meta's newly minted Twitter account, which already accrued 13.5 million followers, cordially chimed in: "Nice to meat you, @Wendys."

'Sounds like a drug'

Though Meta will just be the name of the parent company, and the app will still be called Facebook, some observers were concerned.

"How can you tell anyone that you're on Meta. Sounds like a drug," wrote @careaware.

'Meh was taken'

The social network's new name spurred plenty of disappointment too.

"Why did Facebook pick 'Meta'? 'Meh' was taken," wrote @maxgoff.

Meta... World Peace?

A former pro basketball player who many know as Metta World Peace, the distinct handle he gave himself in 2011, was quickly pulled into the fray.

"Facebook's new full name is Meta World Peace," wrote @darrenrovell.

"i only recognize one metta @MettaWorld37," @MylesMaNJ opined, to which the former Laker, born Ron Artest, replied simply: "lol".

'Very... meta'

For lots of people, meta will forever describe something that refers back to or is about itself, like a film about people making a film about filmmaking.

"Everyone posting about Facebook on Twitter is very... meta," wrote @JohnRush32.

'Not the problem'

Despite the jokes, Facebook's critics were not amused by the name change, which they argued dodges the real issue.

"The name was never the problem," wrote an activist group calling itself The Real Facebook Oversight Board.

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Scientists used NASA’s Juno spacecraft to probe the massive storm, finding that it’s not as shallow as previously thought.

 

 

Jupiter's Great Red Spot Extends Deep into the Gas Giant

(May require free registration to view)

A new study shows that two captive birds had only maternal DNA and survived early development—a first for the critically endangered species.

 

California Condors Are Capable of Asexual Reproduction

(May require free registration to view)

1952 Miller-Urey experiment showed organic molecules forming from inorganic precursors.

Scientists recreated classic origin-of-life experiment and made a new discovery

The 2,000-year-old seal was discovered in the bedrock foundations of the Western Wall in Jerusalem, Israel.

The tiny artifact has a hole for the attachment of a metal wire enabling it to be worn as a ring.

It was examined by IAA archaeologist Dr. Eli Shukron, Professor Shua Amorai-Stark from Kaye Academic College of Education, Dr. Malka Hershkovitz from Jewish Institute of Religion, and their colleagues.

“Seals were used to sign documents and could also be fashionable items serving as jewelry,” the researchers said.

The amethyst seal is approximately 1 cm (0.4 inches) long and 0.5 cm (0.2 inches) wide.

It is engraved with a dove next to a thick, long, and fruit-bearing branch.

< View the video at the source page. >

“The plant engraved on the stone may be the well-known persimmon plant mentioned in the Bible, Talmud, and historical sources,” the scientists said.

“The Biblical persimmon, which is not related to today’s orange persimmon fruit, is known from Biblical and historical sources.”

During the Second Temple period, the plant was used as one of the more expensive ingredients for producing the Temple incense, perfume, medicines, and ointments.

“This is an important find because it may be the first time a seal has been discovered with an engraving of the precious and famous plant, which until now we could only read about in historical descriptions,” Dr. Shukron said.

“This impressive seal provides a glimpse into the daily lives of the people who lived in the days of the Second Temple.”

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The US researchers behind this phenomenal advance in optical prostheses have recently published the results of their experiments, presenting findings that could help revolutionize the way we help those without sight see again.

At age 42, Berna Gomez developed toxic optic neuropathy, a deleterious medical condition that rapidly destroyed the optic nerves connecting her eyes to her brain.

In just a few days, the faces of Gomez' two children and her husband had faded into darkness, and her career as a science teacher had come to an unexpected end.

Then, in 2018, at age 57, Gomez made a brave decision. She volunteered to be the very first person to have a tiny electrode with a hundred microneedles implanted into the visual region of her brain. The prototype would be no larger than a penny, roughly 4 mm by 4 mm, and it would be taken out again after six months.

Unlike retinal implants, which are being explored as means of artificially using light to stimulate the nerves leaving the retina, this particular device, known as the Moran|Cortivis Prosthesis, bypasses the eye and optic nerve completely and goes straight to the source of visual perception. 

After undergoing neurosurgery to implant the device in Spain, Gomez spent the next six months going into the lab every day for four hours to undergo tests and training with the new prosthesis.

The first two months were largely spent getting Gomez to differentiate between the spontaneous pinpricks of light she still occasionally sees in her mind, and the spots of light that were induced by direct stimulation of her prosthesis.

Once she could do this, researchers could start presenting her with actual visual challenges.

When an electrode in her prosthesis was stimulated, Gomez reported 'seeing' a prick of light, known as a phosphene. Depending on the strength of the stimulation, the spot of light could be brighter or more faded, a white color or more of a sepia tone.

When more than two electrodes were simultaneously stimulated, Gomez found it easier to perceive the spots of light. Some stimulation patterns looked like closely spaced dots, while others were more like horizontal lines.

"I can see something!" Gomez exclaimed upon glimpsing a white line in her brain in 2018.

Vertical lines were the hardest for researchers to induce, but by the end of training Gomez was able to correctly discriminate between horizontal and vertical patterns with an accuracy of 100 percent.

The Utah Electrode Array in action. (John A. Moran Eye Center at the University of Utah)

"Furthermore, the subject reported that the percepts had more elongated shapes when we increased the distance between the stimulating electrodes," the authors write in their paper. 

"This suggests that the phosphene's size and appearance is not only a function of the number of electrodes being stimulated, but also of their spatial distribution… "

Given these promising results, the very last month of the experiment was used to investigate whether Gomez could 'see' letters with her prosthesis.

When up to 16 electrodes were simultaneously stimulated in different patterns, Gomez could reliably identify some letters like I, L, C, V and O.  She could even differentiate between an uppercase O and a lowercase o.

The patterns of stimulation needed for the rest of the alphabet are still unknown, but the findings suggest the way we stimulate neurons with electrodes in the brain can create two-dimensional images.

The last part of the experiment involved Gomez wearing special glasses that were embedded with a miniature video camera. This camera scanned objects in front of her and then stimulated different combinations of electrodes in her brain via the prosthesis, thereby creating simple visual images.

The glasses ultimately allowed Gomez to discriminate between the contrasting borders of black and white bars on cardboard. She could even find the location of a large white square on either the left or right half of a computer screen. The more Gomez practiced, the faster she got.

The results are encouraging, but they only exist for a single subject over the course of six months. Before this prototype becomes available for clinical use it will need to be tested among many more patients for much longer periods of time.

Other studies have implanted the same microelectrode arrays, known as Utah Electrode Arrays, into other parts of the brain to help control artificial limbs, so we know they're safe in at least the short term. But it's still early days for the tech, which risks a steady drop in functionality over just a few months of operation.

While engineers beef up the reliability of the devices, we still need to know exactly how to program the software that interprets the visual input.

Last year, researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston inserted a similar device into a deeper part of the visual cortex. Among five study participants, three of whom were sighted and two of whom were blind, the team found the device helped blind people trace the shapes of simple letters like W, S, and Z.

In Gomez's case, there was no evidence of the device triggering neural death, epileptic seizures, or other negative side effects, which is a good sign, and suggests microstimulation can be safely used to restore functional vision, even among those who have suffered irreversible damage to their retinas or optic nerves.

"One goal of this research is to give a blind person more mobility," says bioengineer Richard Normann from the University of Utah.

"It could allow them to identify a person, doorways, or cars easily. It could increase independence and safety. That's what we're working toward."

Right now, it seems only a very rudimentary form of sight can be returned with visual prostheses, but the more we study the brain and these devices among blind and sighted people, the better we will get at figuring out how certain patterns of stimulation can reproduce more complex visual images.

Perhaps one day, other patients in the future will be able to trace the whole alphabet with this prosthesis because of what Gomez has done. Four more patients are already lined up to try out the device.

"I know I am blind, that I will always be blind," Gomez said in a statement a few years ago.

"But I felt like I could do something to help people in the future. I still feel that way."

Gomez's name is listed as co-author on the paper for all her insight and hard work.

The study was published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

Source

If your data plan is too limited to take advantage of Canada's super-fast 4G, there's always Tim Hortons.

There are 4,286 Tim Hortons locations in Canada, which comes to one Timmies per 8,800 people. No single brand in the US has that kind of penetration; we may have 15,065 Starbucks here, but that only comes down to one per 21,000 Americans. (Think about that when your mobile order gets backed up.)

Setting aside the faux-Tim's lurking in gas stations, the vast majority of Tim Hortons outlets have free Wi-Fi, making it one of the largest providers of free Wi-Fi in Canada. McDonald's also offers free Wi-Fi at its restaurants, but there are only 1,450 of those.

Wireless carriers and cities also often have large networks of Wi-Fi hotspots. Telus has free hotspots across most of Alberta, British Columbia, and Manitoba. Shaw has a hotspot network for its subscribers. Here's a list of cities and towns that offer their own hotspots.

Nationwide, though, nothing's quite like Tim Hortons. So for this analysis, we took a look at 3,051 speed tests run on the Ookla Speedtest platform at 1,469 distinct Tim Hortons outlets in 2021. We excluded locations that only had a single test, and double-checked to make sure the downloads weren't just coming from some joker who named their home Internet "Tim Hortons WiFi" (I'm looking at you, Nepean). Finally, we found the 20 verifiable locations with the highest average download speeds.

(Editors' Note: Speedtest by Ookla is owned by Ziff Davis, the publisher of PCMag.)

This Toronto outlet has the fastest Wi-Fi of any Tim Hortons in the city. (Photo: Linda Chen)

How Fast Is Tim Hortons Wi-Fi?

For the most part, Tim Hortons Wi-Fi is on the slow side. Our data set had average download speeds of 22.7Mbps and upload speeds of 6.5Mbps. However, the tests taken at our 20 fastest Tim Hortons spots show a different story. Comprising the top 1.4% of our test set, they average 143.7Mbps down and 36Mbps up, although that's highly skewed by three very fast locations.

Tim Hortons wouldn't comment for this story, but IP addresses show that many of its locations rely on GoCo, a spin-off of Telus that provides business internet access to many large Canadian brands. Obviously, though, some connections are faster than others. All three of the super-fast locations we found (in Etobicoke, Guelph, and Toronto) use IP address ranges assigned to Bell.

The Tim Hortons in Dorion-Vaudreuil, QC, has tables for you to do some laptop work, but only until you run out of battery. (Photo: Matt Orsini)

So where are the fastest Tim Hortons locations?

• 1 in St. John's

• 3 in Metro Halifax

• 3 in the greater Montreal area

• 1 in Ottawa

• 3 in Toronto

• 1 in Edmonton

• 2 in Vancouver

• 6 in other cities

< View "This Google Map is searchable and browsable." at the source page. >

These are the highlights:

• The fastest Tim Hortons in Canada is in a mall outside Guelph.

• The fastest Tim Hortons in Toronto is just off Bathurst Street in Fort York.

• The fastest Tim Hortons in greater Montreal is in the Quartier DIX30 shopping mall in Brossard.

This Tim Hortons outside Quartier DIX30 has the fastest Wi-Fi of any outlet near Montreal. (Photo: Sean Cooper)

And here's how our 20 winners stack up:

< View the graphic at the soure page. >

Fastest" determined by download speed on mobile speed tests conducted using the Ookla Speedtest platform from Jan. 1, 2021 to October 4, 2021. 

This all sounds like fun trivia, but free Wi-Fi can be very important for Canadians because limited-data 4G plans are still so common. Every megabyte you download onto your phone over Wi-Fi is one that doesn't get charged to Virgin or Fido. However, in big cities, all three major wireless carriers showed faster speeds than most Tim Hortons locations, so it might be time to upgrade to an unlimited data plan instead of relying on Timmies. For more on that, see our 2021 edition of Fastest Mobile Networks Canada.

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• She applied to entry-level software engineering jobs from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. for six months straight.

• 357 rejections, 40 interviews, and 2 offers later, she's making more than double her old salary.

Sophia Cheong's career started at a Korean BBQ restaurant in California, where she worked as a hostess while completing her bachelor's degree in business administration.

After graduating from Fullerton College, she was promoted to assistant general manager and, later, the director of operations. Then, a coworker started teaching her how to code.

"I fell in love," Cheong told Insider. "I know it's cliche, but I felt like it was my true passion ... I was getting up every morning really excited to learn."

Like the millions of Americans who quit their jobs during "The Great Resignation," the pandemic gave Cheong the opportunity to exit the restaurant industry and switch career paths, something she had been wanting to do for some time. With restaurant closures forcing layoffs, she volunteered to be among those let go.

Cheong immediately used the money she had saved from restaurant paychecks to enroll in a 13-week software engineering boot camp called Hack Reactor where she completed over 1,000 hours of full-stack coding.

One week after graduation, she set out on the job hunt.

Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Cheong applied to every entry-level software engineering job or internship she could find, spanning 18 countries around the world, she said. On top of submitting applications, she reached out to tech recruiters every day and created an online portfolio.

"I was pretty naive. I thought I'd have a job after a month because Hack Reactor has such a good reputation," she said. "But then one month turned to two months and then three and four, and I started thinking, 'Oh my God, why am I not getting a job? What's wrong with me?'"

© Sophia Cheong A screenshot of Sophia Cheong's 359 applications around the world. Sophia Cheong

Constantly hearing about the national labor shortage and the ever-growing demand for tech talent didn't help her morale. According to US labor statistics, the shortage of engineers in the US will exceed 1.2 million by 2026.

Six months later, Cheong had interviewed with 40 employers and been rejected 357 times by companies big and small. She told Insider that most interviewers asked why she had switched careers, and how her experience in the service industry would help her succeed in tech.

"Every time I would ask them why they didn't continue with me, they'd say 'the other candidate is more senior than you,'" Cheong said, adding that recruiters would suggest to reach out in a year after she had more experience.

The same week Cheong was supposed to head back to working at the restaurant, she received two job offers. One, a junior software engineer position at HOMEE, would pay 120% more than her previous salary, she said.

"We're all about taking chances with the newcomers," Cheong said the company's chief technology officer Mitch Pirtle told her during the interviewing process. "We know how hard it is to get your foot in that door."

As she accepted her new position, Cheong posted about the strenuous job hunt on LinkedIn. Hundreds of job applicants struggling to find work flooded the comment section, asking for advice and sharing similar stories of constant rejections.

"I know there are shortages about just about everywhere," Cheong told Insider. "But I also feel like there are so many people looking for jobs at the same time. I just don't know why it hasn't balanced out yet."

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Hearing the mourning dove again was a revelation, but with it came a realization: I’d not listened to one in many years.

It is the sound of do-nothing summer afternoons in the pre-internet portion of my youth. Those were untold hours spent draped across the blue couch in my parents’ bedroom, immobilized by the un-air-conditioned upstairs air.

I’d look out across Spanish tile and into the trees, searching in vain for the bird. What felt like boredom at the time was really an indulgence.

Coo-OOH, ooh, ooh, ooh.

So many of the headlines about the effects of climate change center on the more of it all. More blistering heat. More invasive mosquitos. More devastating floods.

But I have become preoccupied by the apparent absence of the mourning dove. This sort of lamentation is far from novel in a post-"Silent Spring" world. But DDT was banned nationwide 10 years before I was born. The mourning dove's call is my loss. And it is one that unlocks in me an incandescent anger over what we’ve done to the planet, the sort that curdles into a despair that can feel bottomless.

It is an eerie loss too, made all the more unsettling because it is not exactly provable. There are no reliable data on Los Angeles’ mourning dove population.

And mourning doves are far from endangered: They are one of the most abundant bird species in North America and found across the U.S. year-round. There are tens of millions of mourning doves, also called turtle doves, in the U.S., and it is legal to hunt them in most states, including California.

Still, data from a 2018 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service report show that mourning dove populations are declining in many states, including California. The report said the state had experienced a nearly 4% drop in its mourning dove population each year over the preceding 10 years.

“In any given local area, mourning doves might be less common and heard than they were 10 or 20 or 50 years ago,” said Kimball Garrett, ornithology collections manager of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

I had called Garrett to ask about the local mourning dove population. I told him that earlier during the pandemic, while walking in my Central L.A. neighborhood, I had been delighted to hear the wistful call — a song used by males to attract females. But it happened only once, and not again.

Turns out, I am not alone in noticing an absence.

“I have heard people say that they’ve seen and heard fewer,” Garrett said.

I got the sense that Garrett is accustomed to validating the worries of addled callers nursing one avian anxiety or another. But there also was more than just reassurance in his voice.

“I am not discounting at all your observation that you don’t hear them as often as you used to,” he said. “I am sure that is happening.”

Plenty of bird species are doing just fine in L.A. — and some far worse than the mourning dove. Maybe I should have picked another to mourn. Consider the ivory-billed woodpecker, which the U.S. government declared extinct Sept. 27. Despite many searches mounted over the years, the woodpecker hadn't been seen in decades.

But Garrett didn’t think my grief was misplaced.

"There’s no reason you shouldn’t lament the … fact that you don’t hear [mourning doves] because it is such an evocative song,” he said. “The fact that abundant birds decline in a certain area so that you can’t hear them is pretty important.”

Garrett told me about an Angeleno who contacts him every year or so to inquire about the local population of spotted doves, a species native to South Asia that was introduced to L.A. around 1915. Unlike the mourning dove, it has long shown clear signs of decline here. And when they speak, Garrett confirms what the caller undoubtedly already knows: There are fewer spotted doves than before.

The caller’s name is William Jordan, and he’s the author of books including 1991's “Divorce Among the Gulls,” a collection of essays about the natural world. Jordan, 76, has lived in Culver City for 30 years. There was a time when spotted doves were common there. He would wake up in the morning to their sonorous calls. “It was a lovely sound,” he said.

But about 15 years ago, Jordan began to hear it less.

“I haven’t seen one in ages,” he said. “When a species like that leaves, you feel so empty.”

Jordan worries about what he calls the "innate rapacious greed" of man.

“To me,” he said, “civilization is just a stucco tsunami that is covering everything — and things disappear.”

Among the things that are gone: the street trees that sheltered the mourning doves of my youth. The Arizona ashes, mighty and deciduous, with craggy bark and saw-tooth-edged leaves, were removed by the city of Beverly Hills following the adoption of the 1996 Focused Street Tree Master Plan. City staff noted that the ashes, then about 70 years old, suffered “severe health-related problems” tied to “the use of chemical injections over many years for the control of insects.”

Such a classic story of human intervention: The chemicals were meant to help. Instead, trees were felled. Twenty five years later, all sorts of damage is evident.

But over in Culver City, Jordan is lucky: He’s heard mourning doves, as recently as a month or so ago. He enjoys their song, which he said “doesn’t have any sharp edges to it.”

“It’s one of the great sounds of nature — of urban ecology,” he said.

I agree. And I worry that my children will never hear the mourning dove. It will not be a part of their lazy summers, already rendered less so by modern life.

There is little time to stare out the window and into the trees, searching for something unseen.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

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More than 100 million Indians have not turned up for their second coronavirus vaccine dose, official data showed, raising concerns of a resurgence in the disease despite a relatively low infection rate.

Apart from leaving these people at risk of catching Covid-19, their “vaccine truancy” endangers India’s target of inoculating all adults by 31 December, a target that is in any case unlikely to be met owing to the earlier shortage of vaccines at the start of the inoculation campaign.

“We have seen this complacency with tuberculosis patients. They start taking the drugs and after a few weeks, they feel better so they stop even though they have to take them for six months,” said Bhavna Dewan, a health worker in Nainital. “It’s a similar mentality with the vaccine. I’m sure they feel one dose is enough because no one is falling ill.”

Mansukh Mandaviya, India’s health minister, is urging states to address the issue. From next month, he said, health workers will make door-to-door visits to find the truants.

The figure of 103.4m missed doses comes just a week after India celebrated administering 1bn doses thanks to the efforts of health workers who trekked over mountains, picked their way through landslide rubble, crossed turbulent rivers, and braved jungles to reach the remotest hamlets.

Domestic workers in India, many of whom have lost their jobs after the coronavirus outbreak

India has administered first doses to 725 million people, or to 77% of its’ 944 million adults, and second doses to 316 million, or 34%.

But some experts are wondering if giving the second dose might prove to be even more of a challenge if complacency, spawned by the belief that the worst is over, has set in.

For the last 29 days, new daily cases have been below 30,000. In the past few days, they have hovered around 13-to-15,000 a day, the lowest for eight months.

Life has returned to something very close to normal. People are celebrating festivals with abandon, socialising, shopping, and eating out. The low daily new infection rate has made many Indians believe a third wave is unlikely. Experts have also been saying that, barring a new variant, a third wave seems a remote prospect.

Still, Dr Satyajit Rath, a scientist at the National Institute of Immunology, said the 103.4 million figure was only a cause for concern if people never get their second shot.

“If people have always dallied a little in coming in for their second dose, maybe coming a week or two or a month later than prescribed because they were busy, then it is not alarming. It simply means that many of these 103.4 million people will catch up. But if a larger percentage of people are coming in late, then it is concerning. But we don’t know,” he said.

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The country has taken a zero tolerance approach to the virus since it first emerged in central China in 2019, stamping out emerging flare-ups with border closures, targeted lockdowns and strict quarantines.

Although the hard-line measures have kept the number of new cases far lower than most countries, the world's most populous nation is currently grappling with small outbreaks in at least eleven provinces.

The resurgence prompted officials this week to lock down Lanzhou city -- with a population of over four million -- and Ejin in the Inner Mongolia region.

After confirming one new case, authorities in Heihe in Heilongjiang province followed suit Thursday, ordering people to stay at home and forbidding residents from leaving the far northern city except in emergencies, according to a local government statement.

Officials in the city -- which borders Russia to the north -- have also begun testing 1.6 million residents and tracing close contacts of the infected person, the statement said.

State media reported that bus and taxi services had been suspended and vehicles were not allowed to leave the city.

China reported 23 new domestic cases on Thursday, less than half of the previous day's number, in a sign that the country's tough disease controls may be working.

Lanzhou, which has been under lockdown since Tuesday, recorded just one new case, while Ejin -- home to around 35,000 -- added seven, according to government statements.

Tens of thousands more people remain under targeted lockdowns of housing compounds in several cities, including Beijing.

The capital, which will host the Winter Games in February, has also curbed access to tourist sites and urged residents not to leave unless necessary.

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The placebo effect can bring powerful relief—but what does that look like in your brain? A new study finds fake therapies and fake side effects have a real impact on your brainstem, a hub of pain processing, affecting it in opposite ways. The work could help scientists develop better treatments for chronic pain. 

It’s “a major rigorous contribution to the field,” says Ted Kaptchuk, a biomedical scientist at Harvard Medical School who was not involved with the study. Still, he cautions that more work is needed to see whether this laboratory-based study translates to the real world.

Scientists have known about the placebo effect for more than 400 years. In 1572, a French philosopher wrote that “there are men on whom the mere sight of medicine is operative.” Yet researchers have struggled to understand why patients given a nonactive therapy such as a sugar pill still feel relief. They’ve also been confounded by the opposite phenomenon: When patients are told a placebo has harmful side effects, they often feel bad afterward—the so-called “nocebo” effect.

To find the signature of these two effects in brain, researchers brought 27 participants—13 men and 14 women with an average age of 23—into their laboratory at the University of Melbourne. The scientists strapped a device called a thermode to their arm, which heated up to a moderately painful temperature. Afterward, the researchers told the participants they were applying one of three creams to the affected area: a pain reliever, a pain inducer (which would make the heat feel worse), and a control cream with no effect. In reality, all three substances were petroleum jelly. 

All the while, the team scanned the volunteers with a high-resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine to detect which parts of their brain were most active. Most participants in the study experienced either the placebo or nocebo effect. About one-third reported lower levels of pain when the “pain reliever” was applied, whereas slightly more than half reported more pain when the “pain inducer” was applied. 

The fMRI results reflected these responses. Both the placebo and nocebo effects influenced activity in the brainstem, the researchers report this week in The Journal of Neuroscience. The placebo effect increased activity in an area called the rostral ventromedial medulla, which relays pain information, and decreased activity in the periaqueductal gray, which helps the body suppress pain. The nocebo effect induced the opposite change. (The findings may seem counterintuitive, but multiple areas of the brainstem act in complex ways when it comes to creating the sensation of pain, the authors say.) 

The approach is excellent, says Tor Wager, a neuroscientist who studies the placebo effect at Dartmouth College. “It was done at ultra–high resolution, which makes it much better for identifying [parts of] the brainstem that play key roles in pain control.” Though other studies have shown brain activity in response to both the placebo and nocebo effects, he and other experts say the new work offers the most detailed view yet of how the brain responds to these phenomena. 

The results may offer a route for future treatments of chronic pain, says Lewis Crawford, a neuroscientist at the University of Sydney School of Medical Sciences and the study’s lead author. 

Doctors have applied electrical impulses to the brainstem—an approach known as deep brain stimulation—to treat burning “neuropathic” pain, which can be caused by nerve damage, as well as carpal tunnel syndrome, and cancer-related pain (such as that resulting from nervous system tumor invasion or radiation-induced nerve damage) with only mixed success for decades, he notes.

Part of the problem was an inability to identify exactly which parts of the brainstem are responsible for controlling the modulation of pain, Crawford says. By localizing placebo- and nocebo-induced sensations to more precise brain areas, the new study could help narrow down targets for stimulation, he says. 

Placebo or not, that’s a valuable dose of good news. 

doi: 10.1126/science.acx9483

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Researchers tested the pill used for depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder because it was known to reduce inflammation and looked promising in smaller studies.

They've shared the results with the U.S. National Institutes of Health, which publishes treatment guidelines, and they hope for a World Health Organization recommendation.

"If WHO recommends this, you will see it widely taken up," said study co-author Dr. Edward Mills of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, adding that many poor nations have the drug readily available. "We hope it will lead to a lot of lives saved."

The pill, called fluvoxamine, would cost $4 for a course of COVID-19 treatment. By comparison, antibody IV treatments cost about $2,000 and Merck's experimental antiviral pill for COVID-19 is about $700 per course. Some experts predict various treatments eventually will be used in combination to fight the coronavirus.

Researchers tested the antidepressant in nearly 1,500 Brazilians recently infected with coronavirus who were at risk of severe illness because of other health problems, such as diabetes. About half took the antidepressant at home for 10 days, the rest got dummy pills. They were tracked for four weeks to see who landed in the hospital or spent extended time in an emergency room when hospitals were full.

In the group that took the drug, 11% needed hospitalization or an extended ER stay, compared to 16% of those on dummy pills.

The results, published Wednesday in the journal Lancet Global Health, were so strong that independent experts monitoring the study recommended stopping it early because the results were clear.

Questions remain about the best dosing, whether lower risk patients might also benefit and whether the pill should be combined with other treatments.

The larger project looked at eight existing drugs to see if they could work against the pandemic virus. The project is still testing a hepatitis drug, but all the others—including metformin, hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin—haven't panned out.

The cheap generic and Merck's COVID-19 pill work in different ways and "may be complementary," said Dr. Paul Sax of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, who was not involved in the study. Earlier this month, Merck asked regulators in the U.S. and Europe to authorize its antiviral pill.

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A major experiment has been used to search for an elusive sub-atomic particle: a key component of the matter that makes up our everyday lives.

The search failed to find the particle, known as the sterile neutrino.

This will now direct physicists towards even more interesting theories to help explain how the Universe came to be.

Prof Mark Thomson, the executive chair of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), which funds the UK's contribution to the Microboone experiment, described the result as ''pretty exciting''.

That is because a sizeable proportion of physicists have been developing their theories on the basis that the existence of the sterile neutrino was a possibility.

''This has been out there for a long time now and generated a lot of interest,'' Prof Thomson told BBC News.

''The result is really interesting because it has an influence on emerging theories in particle physics and cosmology.''

The Microboone experiment is based at the US Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois - just outside Chicago. But physicists from many countries are involved with the project.

Microboone's electronics racks are located just above the detector, on a platform that blocks significant amounts of cosmic radiation that could affect the accuracy of the results

Neutrinos are ghostly sub-atomic particles that permeate the Universe, but barely interact with the everyday world around us. Each second, billions of them pass right through the Earth - and everyone living on it.

Neutrinos come in three known types, or flavours - the electron, muon and tau. In 1998, Japanese researchers discovered that neutrinos changed from one flavour to another as they travelled.

This flavour-flipping cannot fully be explained by the current "big theory" of sub-atomic physics - called the Standard Model. Some physicists believe that finding out why the neutrino has such a tiny mass - which is what allows them to change flavour - will give them a deeper understanding of how the Universe works and specifically how it came into being.

Anti-matter

Current theories suggest that, shortly after the Big Bang, there were equal amounts of matter and its shadowy mirror-image anti-matter. However, when matter collides with anti-matter, they violently annihilate each other, releasing energy. If there were equal amounts in the early Universe, they should have cancelled each other out.

Instead, most of the Universe today is made of matter, with much smaller amounts of anti-matter.

Some scientists believe that, contained within the neutrino's flavour-changing, is the cosmic sleight-of-hand that enabled some matter to survive after the Big Bang and create the planets, stars and galaxies that make up the Universe.

In the 1990s, an experiment called the Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector experiment at the US Department for Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico saw the production of more electron neutrinos than could be explained by the three-neutrino flavour-flipping theory. That result was confirmed by a separate experiment tin 2002.

Physicists proposed the existence of a fourth flavour called the sterile neutrino. They believed this form of the particle could explain the over-production of electron neutrinos and, crucially, give an insight into why the particles change flavour.

They were named sterile neutrinos because they are predicted not to interact with matter at all, whereas other neutrinos can - though very rarely. Detecting a sterile neutrino would have been a bigger discovery in sub-atomic physics than the Higgs boson because, unlike other forms of neutrino and the Higgs particle, it is not part of the current Standard Model of physics.

A team involving nearly 200 scientists from five countries developed and built the Micro Booster Neutrino Experiment, or Microboone, in order to find it. Microboone consists of 150 tonnes of hardware in a space that's the size of a lorry.

Its detectors are highly sensitive: its observations of the sub-atomic world have been likened to looking in ultra-high definition.

The team has now announced that four separate analyses of data gathered by the experiment show "no hint" of the sterile neutrino.

A new chapter

But this result is not so much the end of the story, but the beginning of a new chapter.

Dr Sam Zeller from Fermilab says that the non-detection does not have to contradict previous findings.

"The earlier data doesn't lie," she said.

"There's something really interesting happening that we still need to explain. Data is steering us away from the likely explanations and pointing toward something more complex and interesting, which is really exciting."

Prof Justin Evans, from the University of Manchester, believes that the puzzle posed by the latest findings marks a turning point in neutrino research.

"Every time we look at neutrinos, we seem to find something new or unexpected," he said.

"Microboone's results are taking us in a new direction, and our neutrino programme is going to get to the bottom of some of these mysteries."

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Astronomers with the Breakthrough Listen project scan the sky for signs of extraterrestrial life, but a promising lead turned out to be a false alarm.

 

A Strange Radio Signal Was Just From Earth, Not Aliens

X-rays may have revealed the first planet outside our galaxy

And so, researchers have taken their high-powered microscopes to the protective 'skin' of bacteria, peering down into the depths of how this membrane is organized, revealing more detail than ever before.  

Gram-negative bacteria like Escherichia coli have outer membranes to hold their innards in place, and protect them from the hustle and bustle of bacterial life. These membranes have a fabulous collection of tools, including outer-membrane proteins and toxins like lipopolysaccharides studding the surface.

But once you know this, more questions arise – how does all this fabulousness fit together? What's the ratio of 'studs' to membrane across the whole bacterium? This is where the new research comes in.

"The outer membrane is a formidable barrier against antibiotics and is an important factor in making infectious bacteria resistant to medical treatment. However, it remains relatively unclear how this barrier is put together, which is why we chose to study it in such detail," explained University College London biophysicist and senior author Bart Hoogenboom.

"By studying live bacteria from the molecular to cellular scale, we can see how membrane proteins form a network that spans the entire surface of the bacteria, leaving small gaps for patches that contain no protein."

The researchers used an atomic force microscope for this task, which is a microscope that continuously pokes the surface of the membrane to determine what the shape looks like. It's a little like reading braille, except with lasers instead of fingertips.

The team then produced a wonderful image of the bacterial membrane – which they call the sharpest images ever of living bacteria – showing the density of the outer-membrane proteins across the surface.

Atomic force microscopy scans showing the outer membrane. (Benn et al., PNAS, 2021)

As you can see in the image above, there are lots of tiny holes across the surface. These are beta barrel proteins, called porins, that form tunnels through the bacteria's membrane to allow molecules to diffuse through. Meanwhile, the small sections of smooth surface are the lipopolysaccharides which can expand as the cell grows.

"We conclude that the outer membrane is a mosaic of phase-separated lipopolysaccharide-rich and outer-membrane protein-rich regions, the maintenance of which is essential to the integrity of the membrane and hence to the lifestyle of a gram-negative bacterium," the team writes in the new paper.

Of course, scientists don't stare at E. coli with huge microscopes just for the fun of it, as nice as that would be. There are good reasons for us to need this level of detailed understanding.

"The textbook picture of the bacterial outer membrane shows proteins distributed over the membrane in a disordered manner, well-mixed with other building blocks of the membrane. Our images demonstrate that that is not the case, but that lipid patches are segregated from protein-rich networks just like oil separating from water, in some cases forming chinks in the armor of the bacteria," explains first author and UCL biochemist Georgina Benn.

"This new way of looking at the outer membrane means that we can now start exploring if and how such order matters for membrane function, integrity and resistance to antibiotics."

The team will be investigating how we can use this new knowledge to outsmart antimicrobial resistance in gram-negative bacteria such as E. coli.

Like the stars or black holes in far flung galaxies, once you've found something, there are always more questions to answer.  

The research has been published in PNAS.

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The Xiaohe people's cattle-focused economy and difference in appearance have long posed questions about their origins. This led to speculation that they may have been the ancestors of migrants.

Researchers have proposed they originated from early dairy farmers of southern Russia (Afanasievo) or central Asian oasis farmers with Iranian plateau links.

A fragment of Tocharian B from a Buddhist kingdom at Tarim Basin edge. (Public Domain)

But a new genomic study that included analysis of the earliest discovered human remains of the region, has found that Xiaohe originated from an ancient Pleistocene population of hunter-gatherer humans that had largely disappeared by the end of the last ice age.

"Archaeogeneticists have long searched for Holocene Ancient North Eurasian populations in order to better understand the genetic history of Inner Eurasia. We have found one in the most unexpected place," said Seoul National University population geneticist Choongwon Jeong.

The Tarim basin, in what's now China's Xinjiang Region, is a dry inland sea with small oases and riverine corridors, fed by runoff from the isolating high mountains that surround it. Human activity here can be dated back to at least 40,000 years ago, and it's long been an intersection between the East and West – as a place along the renowned Silk Road.

Hundreds of human remains, naturally mummified by arid, cold, and salty soils, have been discovered in this basin since the 1990s. These brown-haired and long-nosed people were buried within unique coffins, like upside-down boats, in cemeteries.

Aerial view of the Xiaohe cemetery. (Wenying Li/Xinjiang Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology)

They were accompanied by felted and woven woolen clothing, bronze artifacts, cattle, sheep, goats, wheat, barley, millet, and even cheese. 

Their farming and irrigation techniques suggested a link to the desert people with ties to the Iranian plateau. Others suspected they came through the Eurasian steppe from Russia, like their northern Dzungarian Basin neighbors. 

They have even been associated with the movement east of Indo-European group of languages (from which English eventually emerged), as Buddhist texts from the Tarim Basin hold records of Tocharian, a now extinct branch of this family of languages.

However, after analyzing the genomes of 13 individuals of the Tarim Basin (from 2100 to 1700 BCE) along with five Dzungarian individuals (from 3000 to 2800 BCE), Jilin University geneticist Fan Zhang and team found none of these proposed origins were correct.

The Tarim mummies belong to an isolated gene pool of ancient Asian origins that can be traced all the way back to the early Holocene 9,000 years ago, well before Bronze Age farming communities emerged. This group of once hunter-gathers were likely to have had a much wider distribution previously, as their genetic traces are found through to Siberia.

"Despite being genetically isolated, the Bronze Age peoples of the Tarim Basin were remarkably culturally cosmopolitan, '' explained Harvard University anthropologist Christina Warinner. "They built their cuisine around wheat and dairy from West Asia, millet from East Asia, and medicinal plants like Ephedra from Central Asia."

The Xiaohe people look to be the most direct ancestors of pre-farming Asian populations that we know of, the researchers said. Their northern neighbors from the Dzungarian Basin also seem to be a mix of this ancient population as well as the Siberian migrants.

"The Tarim mummies' so-called Western physical features are probably due to their connection to the Pleistocene Ancient North Eurasian gene pool," the researchers wrote in their paper, explaining that the extreme genetic isolation kept them different from neighboring groups. This points "towards a role of extreme environments as a barrier to human migration."

This research was published in Nature.

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Also:  Mystery Of The Tarim Basin Mummies Continues & The surprising origins of the Tarim Basin mummies & DNA from mysterious Asian mummies reveals their surprising ancestry & Bronze Age Tarim mummies aren't who scientists thought they were.