“We’ve set up a system now where new ideas can’t unseat existing dominant ideas,” says lead author Johan Chu, a strategy and organizations scholar at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. “We are inundated with choices,” he says, but “more is not better.”

In a series of studies over the last few years on competition and consumer markets—scrutinizing everything from mutual funds to Korean pop songs—Chu developed a theory he calls “durable dominance.” The theory posits that consumers with too many choices will tend to become overwhelmed and react by choosing a familiar option. Second, it holds that when many of the options on the market are newcomers, the newbies compete so intensely amongst themselves that they can’t compete with the established dominant choice—in the case of research, that often means papers that had become the popular option before the market was so competitive.

Thanks to the explosion of new research papers in the last few decades, Chu thought the scientific literature was “a perfect testbed” for his durable dominance theory. So he and his coauthor James Evans analyzed 1.8 billion citations from 90 million papers, across 241 subjects on Web of Science. They found that the most popular subjects on the search database, such as molecular biology, grow by more than 100,000 new papers every year. And in these mega-fields, the top 1% of papers get the vast majority of citations. What’s more, even the rankings of these highly cited papers rarely change; the top-cited article in molecular biology came out in 1976 and has been number one since 1982.

Chu and Evans also found that the odds of a paper reaching the top 0.1% of highly cited studies in a given year declines precipitously with field size. When the rare paper does break through, it usually does so in less than 12 months, suggesting that popularity comes from social media, news coverage, or via existing networks of people who are already well-connected in the subject area—rather than from citations in other work. Even iterative papers that seem to be written with the intent to eclipse older studies are not being cited in the largest fields, Chu says, based on his analysis of how effectively such papers introduce new ideas that disrupt the existing literature. The results imply that even if every new study was groundbreaking, there are just too many new papers now for readers to spend meaningful time on them.

But should we even expect that there is some healthy rate at which new papers overturn the canon? Many researchers assume turnover drives progress across fields, but that’s an assumption worth testing, says sociologist Russell Funk at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Funk, who was not involved in this study—and calls it a “really cool, well done paper”—expects that replacing canon does indeed help fields move forward. But it’s worth asking by what measure, he says. And Funk wonders whether a stagnant canon can be useful in some cases—for example, in interdisciplinary fields where researchers specialize in different subjects such that shared touchstone papers provide common ground for nascent ideas. Chu isn’t sure what an optimum turnover rate would be—he didn’t test it in this study—but says he’d expect it to vary by field size, as well as, among other factors, field maturity and the timescales involved in new research studies.

Several recent studies do hint that innovation is slowing down in research, Funk notes. “The advancement of scientific knowledge is kind of becoming a victim of its own success.” If that is the case, solutions seem hard to come by. Perhaps graduate students and their advisors could focus on non-canonical experiments. But even so, those potentially groundbreaking papers would be harder to publish and less well-read, Chu notes, creating a catch-22 for any junior researcher trying to secure an academic post. One useful next step, he suggests, would be to investigate different journals’ review processes, to see if reviewers push the authors of new papers to cite older canon. This could reveal one way that older papers are staying entrenched.

Ironically, the theory of durable dominance had been kicking around the literature for a few years, itself an example of a new idea that wasn’t unseating older works—that is, perhaps, until Chu’s PNAS paper went viral on Twitter, largely courtesy of scientists. As of this writing, it’s been tweeted more than 1,800 times.

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According to research, to remove as much plaque as possible more is better—with the best results at three to four minutes. Does that mean we should double our brushing time?

Dentists began recommending we should brush our teeth for two minutes in the 1970s, and later on, to use a toothbrush with soft bristles.

However, today's consensus is mostly based on studies published since the 1990s, which looked at brushing times, techniques and toothbrush type.

These studies showed two minutes of brushing led to good (but not excellent) plaque reduction. But, while brushing longer than two minutes is shown to remove more plaque, there's still a lack of research which has looked at whether more than two minutes of brushing is linked with better long-term oral health compared with two minutes.

However, based on what we know of the harms of plaque overgrowth, it's likely that removing more of it each time we brush is linked to better oral health. It's also important to note that this lack of evidence is because long-term studies can be difficult to conduct.

When we brush our teeth, we do so with the main aim of removing microbes (known as dental plaque) from tooth surfaces. This plaque is an accumulation of bacteria, fungi and viruses that live together in a community known as a microbial biofilm. Biofilms are very sticky and can only be removed by brushing.

Many things can make it easier for these microbes to grow, including rough areas on the tooth's surface (such as from some fillings), being unable to reach certain areas with a toothbrush (like the spaces between teeth), or having braces. In fact, plaque biofilms re-grow on our teeth within hours of brushing—which is why we're advised to brush twice a day.

Not brushing our teeth properly or for long enough can lead to higher levels of plaque, which may ultimately activate our body's immune response—eventually leading to inflammation and conditions such as gingivitis. Inflammation is usually not painful, but often causes bleeding gums when brushing and sometimes bad breath. Biolfilms can also cause tooth decay.

Proper technique

The aim of brushing our teeth is to reduce as much plaque on each tooth as possible.

Credit: The Conversation

Current evidence suggests that spending more time brushing—up to four minutes each time you brush—leads to cleaner teeth. This longer brushing time means we can more effectively clean our teeth and get those hard-to-reach places.

But be careful not to brush too often (such as more than two times a day) and avoid brushing hard or using abrasive toothpastes and brushes, as this can also cause damage to our teeth and gums—especially when using a toothbrush with hard bristles or abrasive toothpastes.

There are many different brushing techniques you can use to brush your teeth properly. One of the most recommended ones is the modified "Bass" technique, which is intended to clean at and below the gum line—the area where plaque forms first and is most likely to cause inflammation.

You should always brush your teeth with a gentle force—though precisely how hard this should be is currently not conclusive. Gentle brushing is preferred so that we don't damage the hard and soft tissues in our mouth.

Many factors can affect which type of technique, brush and toothpaste or floss you use. For example, people who may have damaged the surface of their teeth from drinking too many acidic fizzy drinks may have weaker teeth.

This may mean they're more susceptible to further tooth damage if they use abrasive toothpastes and harder bristles. It's worth consulting your dentist to know what you should use to brush.

Interdental cleaning—which most of us know simply as flossing—is also recommended alongside brushing our teeth. Studies have found that both tooth decay and gingivitis can be reduced by flossing.

The most effective way of flossing is sliding the floss between the gums and tooth and holding it firmly against the tooth—such that the floss "hugs it"—and rubbing along the surface of the tooth in a gentle up and down motion, gently advancing the floss beneath the gum line.

Interdental brushes, which can be pushed between the teeth at the gum level, can be even more effective. Less is known about other cleaning aids—including tooth picks, water jets, or tongue clears—and how effective they are.

While we may be used to the advice that we should brush our teeth twice a day for two minutes each time, it's important that we also concentrate on using proper technique to ensure that we're brushing thoroughly and properly. Brushing for longer than two minutes may also help us ensure that we remove more plaque off of our teeth—which will likely lead to better dental health.

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In the summer of 1942, Ed Wilson, age thirteen, decided that it was time to get serious about research. He had already determined that he wanted to be an entomologist, a choice made partly out of interest and partly out of injury. As a child, he’d been fascinated with marine life. One day, he jerked too hard on a fish he caught, and one of its needlelike spines lodged in his right eye. The lens had to be removed, and, following the surgery, to see something clearly he needed to hold it up near his face. Insects were just about the only animals that submitted to this treatment.

That summer, Wilson was living with his parents in Mobile, Alabama, in a run-down house that had been built by his great-grandfather. He resolved to survey every species of ant that lived in an overgrown lot next door. This proved to be quick work, as there were only four species. But one of them turned out to be, as Wilson put it nearly eighty years later, “the find of a lifetime—or at least of a boyhood.” It was a species that Wilson had never seen before; nor, it seems, had anyone else north of Brazil.

That species is now known formally as Solenopsis invicta and informally as the red imported fire ant. Native to South America, the creature has, from a human perspective, many undesirable characteristics. Its sting produces first a burning sensation—hence the name—and then a smallpox-like pustule. It has a voracious appetite and will consume anything from tree bark to termites to the seeds of crops like wheat and sorghum. Red imported fire ants have been known to kill fledgling birds, young sea turtles, and even, on occasion, baby deer. They construct rigid mounds that damage harvesting equipment. When a colony is disturbed, hundreds, even thousands of ants are dispatched, more or less instantaneously, to attack the intruder. Wilson once stuck his arm into one of these mounds and described the pain as “immediate and unbearable.” As he observed to his companions, “It was as though I had poured kerosene on my hand and lit it.”

Red imported fire ants were, almost certainly, introduced into the United States in cargo unloaded at the port of Mobile. When Wilson conducted his survey of the vacant lot, they had probably been in the city for several years but hadn’t ventured very far. This soon changed. The ants began to spread in a classic bull’s-eye pattern. In 1949, while Wilson was an undergraduate at the University of Alabama, he was hired by the state’s Department of Conservation to conduct a study of Solenopsis invicta. Since no one knew much about the species, the teen-age enthusiast counted as an expert. Wilson found that the ants had already pushed west into Mississippi and east into Florida. He was, he later recalled, “exhilarated” by his first professional gig, which gave him the self-confidence to pursue his insect-driven dreams.

By 1953, the red imported fire ant had spread as far north as Tennessee and as far west as Texas, and the so-called Fire Ant Wars had begun. In an early skirmish, the state of Mississippi provided farmers with chlordane, an indiscriminate, organochlorine pesticide long since banned. It made little difference. Next, the U.S. Department of Agriculture embarked on a campaign to spray heptachlor and dieldrin—two similar insecticides that are also now banned—over millions of acres of farmland. The campaign killed countless wild birds, along with vast numbers of fish, cows, cats, and dogs. The ants kept marching on. (“The research basis of this plan was minimal, to put it mildly,” Walter R. Tschinkel, an entomologist at Florida State University, has observed.) Undaunted, the U.S.D.A. launched itself into a new battle, this time claiming that it was going to eliminate the ants entirely, using Mirex, yet another since-banned organochlorine. In the late nineteen-sixties, more than fourteen million acres were sprayed with Mirex, which is a potent endocrine disrupter. The effort appears to have had the perverse effect of helping Solenopsis invicta spread, by exterminating any native ants that might have stood in its way.

As the U.S.D.A. was raining down destruction, Wilson’s career was taking off. He received a Ph.D. from Harvard and was offered a position on the university’s biology faculty. The job was supposed to be temporary, but by the time he was twenty-nine he had been granted tenure.

Wilson thought of himself as a naturalist in the venerable tradition of Joseph Banks, the English botanist who sailed with Captain Cook in 1768. Wilson loved to explore places no entomologist had surveyed before, and once spent ten months collecting ants from New Caledonia to Sri Lanka. But he was fated to follow a different path. Wilson became a professional biologist just as it was becoming clear that the biosphere was unravelling. Though he resisted the knowledge at first, later he would become perhaps the most important chronicler of this crisis—the nation’s first great post-naturalist.

Wilson is now ninety-two and lives in a retirement community in Lexington, Massachusetts. He’s the subject of a new biography, “Scientist: E. O. Wilson: A Life in Nature” (Doubleday), by the journalist Richard Rhodes. Rhodes, who’s the author of more than twenty books, including “The Making of the Atomic Bomb,” interviewed his subject several times before COVID hit and they had to switch to the phone. During one of Rhodes’s visits, he ran into an old friend, Victor McElheny, a journalist who lives in the same retirement community and, as it happened, had written a biography of Wilson’s nemesis, James Watson. “Small world,” Rhodes observes.

Wilson’s dispute with Watson was an academic turf battle and, at the same time, something more than that. In 1953, Watson and his collaborator Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA—the famous double helix. Three years later, Watson joined Harvard’s biology department. Though he was only twenty-eight when he arrived, he treated the two dozen other members of the department with an offhand contempt. Specimen collecting, he suggested, was for hobbyists. Henceforth, real scientists would study life by examining its molecular structure. The brilliance of Watson’s discovery, combined with his sublime self-assurance, intimidated many of his older colleagues. Wilson, who’d been hired at Harvard the same year, has described Watson as “the Caligula of biology.” When, owing to an offer from Stanford, Wilson received tenure ahead of Watson, the latter stomped through the halls of the Biological Laboratories declaiming, according to some sources, “Shit, shit, shit, shit!,” and to others, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!” Eventually, the differences between the traditionalists and the molecularists were judged insurmountable, and, in an intellectual version of speciation, Harvard’s biology department split in two.

Wilson continued to collect ants. He spent a sabbatical conducting field work on Trinidad and Tobago and in Suriname. But he was, by his own description, fiercely ambitious, and he yearned to make a bigger contribution to science—a contribution more like Watson’s. One of the obstacles, he decided, was math; he had never even taken an upper-level course in the subject. At the age of thirty-two, he enrolled in calculus and sat awkwardly in the lecture room with some of the same undergraduates he was teaching.

Around this time, Wilson began collaborating with a Princeton professor named Robert MacArthur, who possessed all the mathematical skills he lacked. In 1967, the two published “The Theory of Island Biogeography.” The book was an effort to explain how island ecosystems come into being, a puzzle that had fascinated both Charles Darwin and his rival, Alfred Russel Wallace. It combined field observations with a tangle of equations to account for why larger islands harbor more species than smaller ones, and also why distant islands host fewer species than similar-sized islands situated near a mainland. Wilson and MacArthur proposed that the keys to understanding island biogeography are the rate at which new species immigrate to an island (or evolve there) and the rate at which established species wink out. “There’s nothing more romantic than biogeography,” Wilson once told the author David Quammen.

Though Wilson and MacArthur boldly labelled their work on island biogeography the theory, it was still just a theory. Wilson, the field biologist, was eager to test it on the ground. The difficulty lay in finding the right islands; for a rigorous experiment, these would have to be empty. Wilson hit on the idea of using clumps of mangrove north of Key West. The cays were so small—about forty feet in diameter—that the only breeding animals on them were insects, spiders, and, occasionally, wood lice. Wilson persuaded the National Park Service to let him fumigate six of them. Then one of his graduate students, Daniel Simberloff, who’s now a professor at the University of Tennessee, spent a year monitoring the “defaunated” cays. It was painstaking, mud-splattered work, but, at least as far as Wilson was concerned, it paid off. Those cays closest to the shore were quickly recolonized. Species diversity rose, and then levelled off, just as Wilson and MacArthur’s theory had predicted. On the sixth, more distant islet, recolonization took longer, and the eventual number of resident species was lower—more confirmation. Though some of the details of “The Theory of Island Biogeography” have since been discarded, it’s still considered a classic. A paper that appeared on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary noted that it remains one of the world’s “most influential texts on ecology and evolution.”

As many of Wilson’s colleagues soon realized, the significance of the theory extended well beyond actual islands. Through logging and mining and generalized sprawl, the world was increasingly being cut up into “islands” of habitat. The smaller and more isolated these islands, be they patches of forest or tundra or grassland, the fewer species they would ultimately contain. Wilson had moved on to new research questions, and initially didn’t concern himself much with the implications of his own work. When the first surveys of deforestation in the Amazon appeared, though, he was, in his words, “tipped into active engagement.” In an article in Scientific American, in 1989, he combined data on deforestation with the predictions of his and MacArthur’s theory to estimate that as many as six thousand species a year were being consigned to oblivion. “That in turn is on the order of 10,000 times greater than the naturally occurring background extinction rate that existed prior to the appearance of human beings,” he wrote.

The same year that Wilson published his article in Scientific American, a group of insect fanciers installed what are known as malaise traps in several nature reserves in Germany. Malaise traps look like tents that have blown over on their sides, and they’re designed to capture virtually anything that flies into them. The group, the Krefeld Entomological Society, was interested in how insects were faring in different types of parks and protected areas. Every summer from then on, society members set out new traps, usually in different preserves. In 2013, they resampled some of the sites they’d originally sampled back in 1989. The contents of the traps were a fraction of what they’d been the first time around.

Over the next three summers, the group members resampled more sites. The results were similar. In 2017, with the help of some outside experts, they published a paper documenting a seventy-five-per-cent decline in “total flying insect biomass” in the areas surveyed. These areas were exactly the sort of habitat fragments that, according to Wilson’s theory, were destined to lose species. Nevertheless, the findings were shocking. In 2019, a second group of researchers published a more rigorous and extensive study, and its findings were even more dire. In the course of just the previous decade, grasslands in Germany had, on average, lost a third of their arthropod species and two-thirds of their arthropod biomass. (Terrestrial arthropods include spiders and centipedes in addition to insects.) In woodlands, the number of arthropod species had dropped by more than a third, and biomass by forty per cent. “This is frightening” is how one of the paper’s authors, Wolfgang Weisser, a biologist at the Technical University of Munich, put it.

In the years since, many more papers have appeared with comparable findings. Significant drops have been found in mayfly populations in the American Midwest, butterfly numbers in the Sierra Nevadas, and caterpillar diversity in northern Costa Rica. While many species appear to be doing just fine—for instance, the spotted lanternfly, an invasive species from Asia, which was first detected in Pennsylvania around 2014, and has since spread to at least ten other states, including New York—there is, as was noted in the introduction to a recent special issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences devoted to the state of the insect world, “ample cause for concern.”

Dave Goulson, an entomologist at the University of Sussex, is one of the experts the Krefeld group contacted to help make sense of its data. Like Wilson, Goulson could be described as a naturalist turned post-naturalist; he decided to study insects because he found them enthralling, and now he studies why they’re in trouble.

“I have watched clouds of birdwing butterflies sipping minerals from the muddy banks of a river in Borneo, and thousands of fireflies flashing their luminous bottoms in synchrony at night in the swamps of Thailand,” he writes in “Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse” (Vintage). “I have had enormous fun. But I have been haunted by the knowledge that these creatures are in decline.”

Goulson bemoans the fact that many people consider insects to be pests. He wants readers to appreciate just how amazing they really are, and sets off his chapters with profiles of six-legged creatures. Males of many species of earwigs have two penises; if disturbed during mating, they snap off the one they’re using and beat a quick escape. Female jewel wasps sting their prey—large cockroaches—to induce a zombielike trance. Then they chew off the tips of the roaches’ antennae, use the stumps to guide the stupefied creatures back to their burrows, and lay their eggs inside them. Aging termites of the species Neocapritermes taracua develop pouches around their abdomens that are filled with copper-rich proteins. If an intruder is gaining the upper hand—or leg—in a fight, the elderly termites, in effect, blow themselves up to protect the colony, a practice known as suicidal altruism. The proteins react with chemicals stored in their salivary glands to become highly toxic compounds.

Insects are, of course, also vital. They’re by far the largest class of animals on Earth, with roughly a million named species and probably four times that many awaiting identification. (Robert May, an Australian scientist who helped develop the field of theoretical ecology, once noted, “To a first approximation, all species are insects.”) They support most terrestrial food chains, serve as the planet’s chief pollinators, and act as crucial decomposers. Goulson quotes Wilson’s observation: “If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed 10,000 years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”

Like insects themselves, the threats to them are numerous and diverse. First, there’s habitat loss. Since Wilson’s article in Scientific American appeared, in 1989, South America has lost at least another three hundred million acres of tropical forest, and Southeast Asia has experienced similar losses. In places like the U.S. and Britain, which were deforested generations ago, the hedgerows and weedy patches that once provided refuge for insects are disappearing, owing to ever more intense agricultural practices. From an insect’s perspective, Goulson points out, even fertilizer use constitutes a form of habitat destruction. Fertilizer leaching out of fields fosters the growth of certain plants over others, and it’s these others that many insects depend on.

Climate change, light pollution, and introduced species present further dangers. The Varroa destructor mite evolved to live on (and consume the body fat of) Asian honeybees, which are smaller than their European counterparts. When European honeybees were imported to East Asia, the mites jumped hosts, and when European bees were taken to new places the mites hitched a ride. Varroa mites carry diseases like deformed-wing virus, and they’ve had a devastating effect on European honeybees, probably causing the loss of hundreds of thousands of colonies. In the U.S. (and in many other countries), European honeybees are treated as tiny livestock. They’re carted around to pollinate crops like apples and almonds, and their health is carefully monitored. But what’s been the impact of imported parasites and pathogens on other bees, not to mention ants, beetles, crickets, dragonflies, moths, thrips, and wasps? “For 99.9 per cent of insect species, we know simply nothing,” Goulson laments.

Then, there are pesticides. Since the Fire Ant Wars, which were prominently featured in Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” a great many have been taken off the market. New ones, however, have replaced them. Goulson is particularly concerned about a class of chemicals known as neonicotinoids. Neonics, as they’re often called, are, in some respects, even more toxic than Mirex and chlordane. They were first marketed in the nineteen-nineties; by 2010, more than three million pounds a year were being applied to crops in the U.S., and almost two hundred thousand pounds to crops in Great Britain. Neonics are water-soluble, which means they can leak into soils and ponds and potentially be taken up by other plants. There’s a good deal of controversy over the dangers they pose to non-target insects, especially bees; in 2018, the European Union found the evidence of harm compelling enough to ban three key neonics from outdoor use. (The chemicals continue to be applied in many European countries under “emergency authorizations.”) Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, including the U.S., their use continues apace. “Carson may have won a battle, but not the war,” Goulson observes.

In the last chapter of “Silent Earth,” Goulson offers dozens of actions we can take to “change our relationship with the small creatures that live all around us.” Some involve tending one’s own garden—for instance, trying “to reimagine ‘weeds’ such as dandelion as ‘wildflowers.’ ” Others are regional or national in scope: “plant streets and parks with flowering, native trees” or “introduce pesticide and fertilizer taxes.” The list is long enough that nearly everyone who wants to can find some recommendation to follow, but it’s heavily tilted toward reducing the use of pesticides, which, as “Silent Earth” makes clear, is just one of the many hazards insects are facing.

Wilson, who’s been called the “father of biodiversity,” has a bigger idea. In “Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life” (2016), he argues that the only way to preserve the world’s insects—and, for that matter, everything else—is to set aside fifty per cent of it in “inviolable reserves.” He arrived at the figure, he explains, using the principles of island biogeography; on fifty per cent of the globe, he calculates, roughly eighty-five per cent of the planet’s species could be saved. The task of preserving—or, in many places, restoring—half the world’s habitat is, he acknowledges, daunting. The alternative, though, is to grow dandelions while the world burns: “The only hope for the species still living is a human effort commensurate with the magnitude of the problem.” ♦

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Interested in driving a Tesla, but don't want to spend the money buying one? Next month there will be 100,000 of them to rent from Hertz.

The company is responding to both a huge increase in demand for electric vehicles and a need to cut emissions to limit climate change by investing heavily in Tesla. From November, the Tesla Model 3 will be available to rent "at Hertz airport and neighborhood locations in US major markets and select cities in Europe."

Electric vehicles need to be easy to recharge, so Hertz is also installing thousands of charges spread across its existing locations, as well as there being 3,000 Tesla Superchargers available for customers to use. And as EVs are still quite new and different, Hertz will be offering "a premium and differentiated rental experience," which includes digitized guidance for a quick education on how they work.

Purchasing 100,000 Teslas means the EVs will make up over 20% of Hertz's fleet, with the company planning to expand their availability to 65 markets by the end of 2022, and 100 markets the following year. And to help spread the word, Hertz is teaming up with Tom Brady for a new "Hertz, Let's Go!" campaign, which will involve Brady "renting, recharging and using an EV at a Hertz airport location."

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The infamous twin paradox sends the astronaut Alice on a blazing-fast space voyage. When she returns to reunite with her twin, Bob, she finds that he has aged much faster than she has. It’s a well-known but perplexing result: Time slows if you’re moving fast.

Gravity does the same thing. Earth — or any massive body — warps space-time in a way that slows time, according to Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. If Alice lived her life at sea level and Bob at the top of Everest, where Earth’s gravitational pull is slightly weaker, he would again age faster. The difference on Earth is modest but real — it’s been measured by putting atomic clocks on mountaintops and valley floors and measuring the difference between the two.

Physicists have now managed to measure this difference to the millimeter. In a paper posted earlier this month to the scientific preprint server arxiv.org, researchers from the lab of Jun Ye, a physicist at JILA in Boulder, Colorado, measured the difference in the flow of time between the top and the bottom of a millimeter-tall cloud of atoms.

The work is a step toward studying physics at the intersection of general relativity and quantum mechanics, two theories that are famously incompatible. The new clock takes a fundamentally quantum system — an atomic clock — and intertwines it with gravity’s pull.

In the experiment, Ye’s team used an optical lattice clock, a cloud of 100,000 strontium atoms that can get tickled by a laser. If the laser’s frequency is just right, the electrons orbiting each atom will be excited to a higher, more energetic orbit. Because only a tiny range of laser frequencies motivate the electrons to move, measuring this frequency provides an extremely precise measurement of time. It’s like a quantum grandfather clock, where the ticking comes from the oscillations of the laser light rather than the swing of a pendulum.

The atomic clock in Jun Ye’s laboratory features a blue laser beam that excites a cloud of strontium atoms inside the round window.

G.E. Marti/JILA

The researchers divided their clock into two — they looked at their cloud on a camera, then drew two imaginary boxes around the top and bottom halves. They then compared the ticking frequency of the top and bottom halves, finding that the time experienced by the atoms at the top of the cloud is 0.00000000000000001% shorter than the time experienced by those at the bottom.

The specific way they measured the shift — comparing two parts of the same cloud — allowed them to cancel out a lot of noise that was common to both parts. It’s like measuring a sailboat in rough seas. Even as it lurches up and down unpredictably, the distance between the keel and mast will always stay constant. While a clock made of a cloud of atoms can drift due to any number of things — electric fields, magnetic fields, the laser light itself, heat from the environment — the difference in frequencies between the top and bottom of the cloud remains the same. Measuring that difference revealed the effect of gravity. “That’s not trivial to do,” said Andrew Ludlow, an atomic clock expert at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, who was not involved with the research.

According to the preprint, this demonstration is a step toward studying the union of general relativity and quantum mechanics. (The authors declined to be interviewed until the paper is published in a peer-reviewed journal.)

Relativity describes a space-time in which objects have well-defined properties and move predictably from one location to another. In quantum theory, by contrast, an object can be in a “superposition” of many properties at once, or it can suddenly jump into a particular location. These two descriptions match their respective realms of reality well, but they’re incongruous when taken together.

So what happens when both quantum mechanics and relativity are necessary to describe a phenomenon?

Take the case where a massive object is put into a superposition of two possible locations at the same time. General relativity says that any object with mass should bend the fabric of space-time. But what if that object is in a superposition? Is the geometry of space-time also in a superposition?

In order to study such questions, physicists are always looking for systems where both gravity and quantum mechanics are important. “Clocks are for sure one of the most promising systems to test these types of features,” said Flaminia Giacomini, a theoretical physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. Clocks naturally straddle the line between quantum mechanics and relativity. They tell time, which is an inherently relativistic concept. They’re also fundamentally quantum: The way the electrons move from one energy level to another is by passing through a superposition of being in both levels.

If Ye’s team improves their clock’s sensitivity by about another factor of 10 — a few years from now, at the current rate of improvement — they can start searching for gravitational effects in the behavior of their atoms. The first signatures of this would appear in a process called decoherence.

Decoherence is responsible for the transition from the weird world of quantum mechanics to the ordinary world of everyday experience. Each time the environment interacts with a quantum system, it can be seen as a tiny measurement made on the system — a way for the environment to learn something about the quantum system and destroy its “quantumness.” Physicists have gotten very good at shielding their quantum experiments from anything in the environment that would disturb them. But they can’t shield them from gravity.

As the atoms in Ye’s clock move up and down in the cloud, experiencing a variation in the flow of time, gravity will alter the way they interact with each other and cause an observable change in their dynamics. It still won’t be quantum gravity per se, where gravity is quantized into fundamental particles called  gravitons. But it would be a valuable instance of quantum mechanics and gravity interweaving to cause a new phenomenon.

“Whatever can help us learn what type of behavior gravity has when both quantum and gravitational effects play a role, I think is going to be very, very helpful for future research,” Giacomini said.

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Levels of climate-heating gases in the atmosphere hit record levels in 2020, despite coronavirus-related lockdowns, the UN’s World Meteorological Organization has announced.

The concentration of carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gas, is now 50% higher than before the Industrial Revolution sparked the mass burning of fossil fuels. Methane levels have more than doubled since 1750. All key greenhouse gases (GHG) rose faster in 2020 than the average for the previous decade and this trend has continued in 2021, the WMO report found.

The data shows the climate crisis continues to worsen and send a “stark” message to the nations meeting at the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow in a week’s time, according to WMO chief Prof Petteri Taalas: “We are way off track.”

The negotiators at the summit must deliver action to keep alive the goal of ending GHG emissions by 2050 and avoiding the worst climate impacts. Only stopping emissions will stabilise the levels of the gases and halt the temperature rises that drive the increasing damage from heatwaves, floods and droughts.

“At the current rate of increase in GHG concentrations, we will see a temperature increase by the end of this century far in excess of the Paris Agreement targets of 1.5C to 2C,” said Taalas. “[Rising levels of GHGs] have major negative repercussions for our daily lives and wellbeing, and for the future of our children and grandchildren.”

“It is hoped Cop26 will see a dramatic increase in commitments,” he said. “We need to transform our commitment into action that will have an impact on GHGs. We need to revisit our industrial, energy and transport systems and whole way of life – the needed changes are economically affordable and technically possible. There is no time to lose.”

The burning of coal, oil and gas is the biggest source of CO2, which is the cause of 66% of global heating. CO2 emissions fell by about 5% in 2020 due to Covid restrictions, compared to 2019. But many billions of tonnes of CO2 were still pumped into the atmosphere, meaning the Covid economic slowdown “did not have any discernible impact on the atmospheric levels of GHG and their growth rates”, the WMO said.

< View the graph showing rise in Atmospheric CO2 at the source page. >

About half of the CO2 from human activities remains in the atmosphere, with the other half soaked up by oceans and trees and plants on land. But the WMO warned that global heating is damaging the ability of the natural world to take up emissions with, for example, the Amazon now having flipped from absorbing CO2 to emitting it as wildfires, droughts and logging destroy trees.

Methane accounts for 16% of global heating and the majority of its emissions are caused by human activity such as cattle farming and fossil fuel production. Methane is a potent and relatively short-lived GHG, so cutting emissions has a rapid impact. Ahead of Cop26, the US and EU pledged to cut methane emissions by 30% by 2030.

The other major GHG is nitrous oxide, responsible for 7% of global heating. These emissions mostly come from the overuse of chemical fertilisers in farming and cattle manure. The GHG data is collected by the WMO’s Global Atmosphere Watch Programme.

Levels of atmospheric GHGs are higher than ever experienced by the human race, and the highest for 3-5 million years. At that time, global temperature was 2-3C hotter and sea level was 10-20 meters higher than today, said Talaas: “But there weren’t 7.8 billion people then.”

“The true success, or failure, of Cop26 will be written in our skies in the form of greenhouse gas concentrations. This WMO report provides a brutally frank assessment of what’s been written there to date. So far, it’s an epic fail,” said Prof Dave Reay, at the University of Edinburgh.

“The small window of opportunity to stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations at a level that meets the Paris climate goals is about to vanish,” he said. “Will this 26th Cop find success where the previous 25 have fallen short? Our atmosphere will bear witness.”

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Claudia*, a sailor from Lichfield in her late 30s, is not Italian. She has never been to Italy. She has no Italian family or friends. And she has no idea why a belligerent Italian couple have taken over her inner voice, duking it out in Claudia’s brain while she sits back and listens.

“I have no idea where this has come from,” says Claudia, apologetically. “It’s probably offensive to Italians.” The couple are like the family in the Dolmio pasta sauce adverts: flamboyant, portly, prone to waving their hands and shouting. If Claudia has a big decision to make in her life, the Italians take over.

“They passionately argue either side,” Claudia says. “It’s really useful because I let them do the work, so I don’t get stressed out by it.” These disagreements always take place in a kitchen, surrounded by food. Claudia hasn’t given the Italians names – yet. But they did help Claudia make a major life decision, encouraging her to quit her job as a scientist two years ago and fulfil a lifelong dream of running away to sea.

“They were chatting non-stop before I handed in my notice,” Claudia sighs. “I’d wake up and they’d be arguing. I’d be driving to work and they’d be arguing. It was exhausting, to be honest.” The woman was in favour of Claudia going, but her husband was wary. “He’d be saying: ‘It’s a stable job!’ And she’d go: ‘Let her enjoy life!’” The woman prevailed, and Claudia left to work on a flotilla in Greece (although she’s now back in the UK temporarily, due to Covid). She’s much happier, even if she did have to have neurolinguistic programming to get the shouting to calm down. “They’re quieter now,” Claudia says with relief. “Less shouting. They just bicker.”

Most of us have an inner voice: that constant presence that tells you to “Watch out” or “Buy shampoo” or “Urgh, this guy’s a creep”. For many of us, this voice sounds much like our own, or at least how we think we sound. But for some people, their inner voice isn’t a straightforward monologue that reproaches, counsels and reminds. Their inner voice is a squabbling Italian couple, say, or a calm-faced interviewer with their hands folded on their lap. Or it’s a taste, feeling, sensation or colour. In some cases, there isn’t a voice at all, just silence.

“Like a tiny island, surrounded by an infinite ocean,” is how Justin Hopkins describes his brain. “The tiny island is where all the conscious things seem to happen, but it’s surrounded by this infinite, inaccessible stuff.” Hopkins, who is 59 and works for a social enterprise in London, doesn’t have an inner voice. There is no one in his brain to blame, shame or criticise. In his head, there is emptiness: just the still warm air before a rustling breeze.

“There’s nothing there,” says Hopkins. “And I don’t think there ever has been.” Of course, Hopkins has thoughts: we all do. But the inner monologue that fills our brain while the engine stands idling isn’t there. It’s been clicked off, permanently. “When I am alone and relaxed, there are no words at all,” he says. “There’s great pleasure in that.” He can easily while away an hour without having a single thought. Unsurprisingly, Hopkins sleeps like a baby.

What makes someone like Hopkins lack an inner voice so completely? “That’s a really good question,” says the neuroscientist Dr Helene Loevenbruck of Grenoble Alpes University’s laboratory of psychology and neurocognition. “I don’t know.” Loevenbruck is one of a handful of neuroscientists in the world who has studied the inner voice. She explains that it is created in a network of different areas in our brain, including the inferior parietal lobe, the inferior frontal gyrus and the superior temporal cortex.

In order to understand how the inner voice works, you need to understand how human thought translates into action. “Whenever we do any action, our brain makes a prediction of the sensory consequences of that action,” says Loevenbruck. Say you want to fetch a glass of water. “Your brain sends the appropriate motor signals to your hand, but it also generates a sensory prediction of the command,” she says. “Before you’ve even picked up the glass, your brain has made a prediction of what the motor command will do, which means you can correct for mistakes before you make an error. This system is very efficient, and it’s why humans can do so many actions without making errors.”

The same principle applies with human speech. Every time our mouths move to form a word, our brain is simultaneously generating a predictive simulation of that speech in our brain, to correct for error. “The current understanding of inner speech is that we do the same as in overt speech – make predictions in our mind of what we will say – but we don’t actually send the motor commands to our speech muscles,” Loevenbruck concludes. “This simulated auditory signal is the little voice we hear in our brain.”

Loevenbruck explains that, for the most part, we hear what she terms “inner language”. But not always. “You can have expanded and more condensed forms of inner speech,” she says. “People may experience them as abstract representations of language, without sound … some people say their inner voice is like a radio that’s on all day long. Other people don’t have a voice at all, or they speak in abstract symbols that don’t involve language.” Loevenbruck can’t explain why some people experience the inner voice differently: we are at the limits of neuroscience, already the most slippery of all the branches of human knowledge.

She explains that deaf people tend to experience the inner voice visually. “They don’t hear the inner voice, but can produce inner language by visualising hand signs, or seeing lip movements,” Loevenbruck says. “It just looks like hand signing really,” agrees Dr Giordon Stark, a 31-year-old researcher from Santa Cruz. Stark is deaf, and communicates using sign language.

His inner voice is a pair of hands signing words, in his brain. “The hands aren’t usually connected to anything,” Stark says. “Once in a while, I see a face.” If Stark needs to remind himself to buy milk, he signs the word “milk” in his brain. Stark didn’t always see his inner voice: he only learned sign language seven years ago (before then, he used oral methods of communication). “I heard my inner voice before then,” he says. “It sounded like a voice that wasn’t mine, or particularly clear to me.”

The broadcaster Jenni Murray lives in author Hannah Begbie’s brain. Well, not Murray exactly, but a facsimile of Murray, with the same kind but quizzical voice, and a scarf flung loosely over her shoulder. “My inner voice is a duologue, like I am in a constant state of interviewing myself,” says Begbie, who is 44 and lives in London. “The interviewing always happens in a plush radio studio,” she says. “There’s nice rich crushed-velvet walls. There’s a warmth and a colour to it.” The duologue can be about anything, trivial or serious.

“Jenni might say: ‘When did you eventually decide to take the plunge on those shoes?’” Begbie says. “And I go: ‘Well Jenni, that’s an interesting question.’” Murray’s gentle, firm questioning has nudged her into making big life decisions: before Begbie quit her job as a literary agent, Murray helped her rehearse her reasons for doing so, in her head. “It’s a way of organising the chaos of my mind,” Begbie says. She is aware it is odd. “I’ve never met Murray,” Begbie says. “I know it’s ludicrous.”

Former librarian Mary Worrall’s inner voice has always been a TV screen, or sometimes a slide projector, that is continuously playing inside an attic, inside her head. The attic is accessed by a spiral staircase behind her left ear, explains Worrall, who is 71 and lives in Birmingham. “There’s not a great deal of sound,” she says. “It’s just images really, like a film is playing.” When Worrall’s inner voice reminds her to pick up some washing powder, she doesn’t hear the words, “buy washing powder.” Instead, she sees herself reaching for a box of washing powder on a TV screen in the attic.

“It’s an emotion,” says Mona*, a 53-year-old CEO from Telford, of her inner voice. “The closest way I could describe it would be in terms of colour.” Her inner voice doesn’t manifest itself obviously: it never chatters away. Rather, Mona has to turn her attention to it in order to perceive it. “When I’m going about my day, the inner voice isn’t talking to me in the English language,” Mona says. “It’s something that sits underneath and behind what I do.”

The voice becomes more insistent when she is in a situation that requires her to be emotionally deft. Mona often works with troubled children, and was recently in a situation where a teenager was being angry and outspoken. At first, Mona’s instinct was to remonstrate with her. But then Mona’s inner voice made itself felt to her in a wash of the colour grey. “I had this profound sense that this young person was in real trouble … I felt a sense of sadness and despondency, and saw a foggy cloud.” Her inner voice was right: Mona later confirmed that the young person was going through a difficult time in her personal life.

Many of the people I speak to learned late in life that their inner voices were not the norm. For years, Worrall thought that other people also had attics in their brains. “I thought everyone else was like this!” she laughs. Mona only outlined the contours of her inner voice to her husband of 30 years in advance of our phone interview. “You don’t ever really realise your inner voice is different,” says Mona. “It’s not something you talk about.”

Unknowable, inscrutable, uniquely our own: inner voices are our lifelong confidantes and secret friends. It’s only a shame no one gets to meet them, but us. “I wish I could invite someone in,” says Worrall. “It would be so nice if I could download the attic on to some sort of hard drive, so other people could look at it.”

Additional reporting by Rachel Obordo. *Some names have been changed

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The tool's three co-lead researchers are University of Queensland virologist Dr. Kirsty Short, CoRiCal instigator from Flinders University Associate Professor John Litt and GP Dr. Andrew Baird.

Dr. Kirsty Short said the Immunization Coalition COVID-19 Risk Calculator (CoRiCal) was an online tool to support GPs and community members in their discussions about the benefits and risks of COVID-19 vaccines.

"This tool is really designed to help people make an informed decision around vaccination based on their current circumstances and also see their risk for getting COVID-19 under different transmission scenarios," Dr. Short said.

"Users can access the tool and input their age, sex, community transmission and vaccination status to find out their personalized risk calculation.

"For example, you can find out your chance of being infected with COVID-19 versus your chance of dying from the disease.

"You can also find out your chance of developing an atypical blood clot from the AstraZeneca vaccine and see this data in the context of other relatable risks—like getting struck by lightning or winning OzLotto."

The CoRiCal COVID Risk Calculator is in its pilot stage but will be continuously updated in line with the latest health and scientific advice, including risk assessments on Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, pre-existing medical conditions such as obesity and diabetes, and long COVID.

The CoRiCal project included a team of GPs, medical scientists, public health physicians, epidemiologists and statisticians.

Associate Professor John Litt, Immunization Coalition Scientific Advisory Committee member, said he hoped that CoRiCal would help GPs save time and create an accurate assessment of an individual's risk of COVID-19 or one of the vaccines.

"GPs are spending a lot of time trying to explain the risks of COVID-19 and the various vaccines to their patients," Dr. Litt said.

"An accurate, evidence-based tool that is transparent and unaligned with professional groups should help GPs in their task of facilitating COVID vaccination for their patients."

Melbourne-based GP Dr. Andrew Baird said CoRiCal was adaptable for booster doses, new viral strains, new vaccines, younger age groups, international markets and even for other infectious diseases.

"It presents risk using simple bar-charts, so that it's easy to compare the risks for different outcomes related to COVID-19 and vaccines," Dr. Baird said.

"CoRiCal may help Australia to move towards 90 percent, 95 percent, or even more of the 16 and over population being fully vaccinated.

"The higher the rate of vaccination in the population, the better it will be for individuals, communities, mental health, health services, and the country."

Dr. Baird said while CoRiCal had been developed for GPs and other health professionals, it was important that people could easily access this information online without a consultation.

Risk calculations in CoRiCal are based on a modeling framework developed by UQ School of Public Health's Professor Colleen Lau and Dr Helen Mayfield, and QUT's Professor Kerrie Mengersen.

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"When we look around, we spontaneously perceive the form, size, movement and color of a scene. Equally spontaneously, we perceive the number of items before us. This ability, shared with most other animals, is an evolutionary fundamental: it reveals immediately important quantities, such as how many apples there are on the tree, or how many enemies are attacking," said co-author, Professor David Burr from the Universities of Sydney and Florence.

Information about numbers is so important that it is thought most species have a dedicated 'number sense," Professor Burr, from the School of Psychology said.

Given the importance of the spontaneous perception of quantity, the scientists asked if it may be revealed by a primitive, automatic physiological response.

The pupil light reflex is probably the most automatic physiological response: it constricts in light and dilates in darkness. "Recent research from our laboratory shows that pupil size is also regulated by cognitive and perceptual factors," said senior author Professor Paola Binda from the University of Pisa.

The present study took advantage of this discovery. To a group of adult participants, the researchers presented images with a variable number of dots (18 or 24), which were either isolated, or connected by lines (see Fig. 1). Connecting the dots into dumbbell shapes causes the dots to appear fewer (although they are the same number), a well-known illusion. The participants observed the patterns passively, without paying special attention to the number of objects in them, or any other attribute.

Even though the number of pixels (black or white) were the same for all patterns, the diameter of participants' pupils varied according to the perceived number of dots; they were greatest when the perceived number was high, and least when it was low.

"This result shows that numerical information is intrinsically related to perception," said Dr. Elisa Castaldi from Florence University. "This could have important, practical implications. For example, this ability is compromised in dyscalculia which is a dysfunction in mathematical learning, so our experiment may be useful in early identification of this condition in very young children. It is very simple: subjects simply look at a screen without making any active response, and their pupillary response is measured remotely."

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Adobe has reportedly joined the list of companies requiring employees in the US to be vaccinated against COVID-19 due to President Joe Biden's mandate for government contractors.

CNBC reported that Adobe employees have until Dec. 8 to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19; anyone who misses that deadline will be placed on unpaid medical leave. The company was said to have informed employees of the new policy in an email sent on Oct. 22.

This shouldn't prove to be a problem for many people: Adobe Chief People Officer Gloria Chen reportedly said in the email that, per a recently conducted internal survey, 93.5% of the company's US employees have already been at least partially vaccinated against COVID-19.

Chen also said that Adobe would consider exemptions for religious or medical reasons, CNBC reported, but information about the exemption process wasn't provided. (Adobe didn't immediately respond to our request for more information about this vaccination requirement.)

Adobe's mandate follows similar requirements from Google, Facebook, and Netflix, among others, but the company reportedly specified that its decision was prompted by President Biden's September announcement that federal contractors would have to get a COVID-19 vaccine.

IBM announced similar rules in response to President Biden's mandate, so Adobe isn't alone in that regard, and other companies will follow. But they'll have to act fast: People will have to start the vaccination process no later than Oct. 27 or Nov. 24 depending on which brand they receive.

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The new governor of a north-western Iranian province was slapped in the face by an angry man during his inauguration on Saturday in an unusual breach of security in the Islamic Republic.

A motive for the attack in Iran’s East Azerbaijan province remained unclear, though it targeted a new provincial governor who once served in the country’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard and reportedly had been kidnapped at one point by rebel forces in Syria. One report referred to it as a personal dispute.

The new governor, Brig Gen Abedin Khorram, had taken the podium in the provincial capital of Tabriz when the man strode out from offstage and immediately swung at the official. Video aired by state television recorded the gathered crowd gasping in shock and the sound of the slap echoing on the sound system. It took several seconds before plainclothes security forces reached him.

They dragged the man off through a side door, knocking down a curtain. Others rushed in, knocking into each other.

Later footage showed Khorram returning to the stage to speak to the unsettled crowd, now all standing up.

“I do not know him of course but you should know that, although I did not want to say it, when I was in Syria I would get whipped by the enemy 10 times a day and would be beaten up,” he said. “More than 10 times, they would hold a loaded gun to my head. I consider him on a par with those enemies but forgive him.”

Though Khorram said he did not know the man, the state-run IRNA news agency later described the attacker as a member of the Guard’s Ashoura Corps, which Khorram had overseen. IRNA described the attack as due to “personal reasons”, without elaborating.

Later, the semi-official Fars news agency said the man who slapped the governor had been upset that his wife received a coronavirus vaccination from a male nurse, as opposed to a female nurse.

Khorram had been recently nominated by Iran’s hard-line parliament to serve as the provincial governor under the government of Ebrahim Raisi, a protege of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was elected president this year.

Khorram had been among 48 Iranians held hostage in 2013 in Syria, later released for 2,130 rebels, according to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based thinktank that has long been critical of Iran.

The incident comes amid anger in Iran over the precarious economic situation despite its support abroad for regional militias and others, including the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. Iran’s economy has been hammered since Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew the US from Tehran’s nuclear deal with world powers in 2018.

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The ancient Egyptians were carrying out sophisticated mummifications of their dead 1,000 years earlier than previously thought, according to new evidence which could lead to a rewriting of the history books.

The preserved body of a high-ranking nobleman called Khuwy, discovered in 2019, has been found to be far older than assumed and is, in fact, one of the oldest Egyptian mummies ever discovered. It has been dated to the Old Kingdom, proving that mummification techniques some 4,000 years ago were highly advanced.

The sophistication of the body’s mummification process and the materials used – including its exceptionally fine linen dressing and high-quality resin – was not thought to have been achieved until 1,000 years later.

Professor Salima Ikram, head of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo and a leading expert on the history of mummification, told the Observer: “If this is indeed an Old Kingdom mummy, all books about mummification and the history of the Old Kingdom will need to be revised.”

She added: “This would completely turn our understanding of the evolution of mummification on its head. The materials used, their origins, and the trade routes associated with them will dramatically impact our understanding of Old Kingdom Egypt.

“Until now, we had thought that Old Kingdom mummification was relatively simple, with basic desiccation – not always successful – no removal of the brain, and only occasional removal of the internal organs. Indeed, more attention was paid to the exterior appearance of the deceased than the interior. Also, the use of resins is far more limited in the Old Kingdom mummies thus far recorded. This mummy is awash with resins and textiles and gives a completely different impression of mummification. In fact, it is more like mummies found 1,000 years later.”

It is among major discoveries to be revealed in National Geographic’s documentary series, Lost Treasures of Egypt, starting on 7 November. It is produced by Windfall Films, and the cameras follow international archaeologists during the excavation season in Egypt. The mummification discovery will feature in episode four – entitled Rise of the Mummies – on 28 November.

Painting on the wall of Khuwy’s tomb. Photograph: Ian Glatt/National Geographic/Windfall Films

Ikram appears in that episode with fellow archaeologist Dr Mohamed Megahed, who says of the latest discovery: “If it’s really Khuwy, this is a breakthrough in Ancient Egyptian history.”

The mummy’s discovery in a lavish tomb in the necropolis at Saqqara was filmed in National Geographic’s earlier season. The investigation into its dating and analysis emerges in the new series. Hieroglyphs revealed that it belonged to Khuwy, a relation of the royal family who lived over 4,000 years ago.

Tom Cook, the series producer for Windfall Films, said: “They knew the pottery in the tomb was Old Kingdom but [Ikram] didn’t think that the mummy was from [that period] because it was preserved too well. They didn’t think the mummification process [then] was that advanced. So her initial reaction was: this is definitely not Old Kingdom. But over the course of the investigation she started to come round [to the idea].”

Ancient embalmers bathed bodies in expensive resins from tree sap, preserving the flesh before they wrapped the corpse. This mummy is impregnated with high-quality resins and wrapped in the highest-grade of bandages.

Ikram says in the programme: “It’s extraordinary. The only time I’ve [seen] so much of this kind of good quality linen has been in the 21st dynasty.”

The 21st dynasty of Egyptian Pharaohs reigned more than 1,000 years after Khuwy lived.

Carolyn Payne, National Geographic’s commissioning editor, said that what makes this series so unusual is that it follows a whole group of different archaeologists across a season: “We did see some amazing finds.”

The documentary observes: “With every new body archaeologists unearth, the story of the mummies of Egypt becomes clearer.”

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A dispute with management was the reported motive for the man's actions.

Employees noticed excrement in the building the following day.

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A 61-year-old man from Ireland has been sentenced to six months in prison for releasing rats in his former workplace, BBC News and The Sun reports. 

John O'Neill brought two live rats to Cork County Council's offices on February 9, where he worked at the time, after an alleged dispute with a manager. Security camera footage captured O'Neill entering the building with an item covered by his jacket and leaving shortly afterward, BBC News added. 

The offices were covered with excrement when O'Neill's coworkers came to work the next day, the publication reports. Pest control subsequently identified the rats as the source. 

The cost of cleaning and the damage caused cost the company €3,000, or around $3,493, according to BBC News.

A dispute with management was the reported motive for O'Neill's actions

O'Neill pleaded guilty to criminally damaging the Cork County Council offices at the Bandon District Court, The Sun reports. 

According to the newspaper, O'Neill told Detective Garda Michael Brosna that a dispute with management was his motive and expressed "genuine" remorse for his actions. 

O'Neill's lawyer Diarmuid O'Shea told the judge that the dispute "built-up" and that he was eventually admitted to hospital due to stress. 

"He has asked me to apologize to his former co-workers admitting this was shocking behavior which he does not understand himself," O'Shea told the judge. 

"He caught the rats and brought them to work. He must have realized this was not a good thing to do," the judge responded. "He had a difficulty with one colleague but his actions impacted on all his colleagues there."

O'Neill worked for the council for 23 years but retired "when this matter came to light at some financial loss to himself," The Sun reports. 

Bandon District Court and Cork County Council did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

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Named after Apollo's twin sister Artemis, NASA's lunar mission is getting ready for its first uncrewed test flight. As per the American space agency, the Orion space capsule has been stacked up with the SLS rocket and is ready for pre-launch tests for the next few weeks.

The process will include a health and status check of various systems and communication lines between the spacecraft and ground control. Moreover, there will be procedures to ensure the functionality of different systems including core stage and boosters. As a standard protocol, NASA will also run a countdown sequencing simulation.

Wet Dress Rehearsal will be quite crucial for the mission. Before you get any ideas, 'wet' refers to the loading up of supercold liquid propellants into the rockets. The team at NASA will also practice its ability to scrub the launch.

It is only after the successful completion of the wet dress rehearsal, the American space agency will reveal the actual launch date for the Artemis I test mission. For now, NASA is aiming to get things up and running for the February 2022 launch window.

The Artemis mission will enable NASA to return to the Moon. The US had successfully landed its crewed Apollo 11 mission on Earth's natural satellite in 1969. It was followed by six more missions counting up to Apollo 17. All of which made a successful lunar landing save for the number 13, which had to return to the Earth due to malfunction in the Oxygen tank module.

This time around, the idea is to build the infrastructure required for long-term missions including the base camp on the lunar surface. The US will also establish the Gateway in lunar orbit, which will serve as a communication hub and space lab. This will be crucial considering that the International Space Station (ISS) is likely to retire in 2024 with a possible life extension till the end of this decade.

The expertise from the lunar base camp will come in handy for humanity's future plans of setting up human colonies on the red planet.

NASA plans to launch Artemis I lunar test mission in February 2022

A case study from early 2021 indicated that much of the harmful content from groups like Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Bajrang Dal wasn't flagged on Facebook or WhatsApp due to the lack of technical know-how needed to spot content written in Bengali and Hindi. At the same time, Facebook reportedly declined to mark the RSS for removal due to "political sensitivities," and Bajrang Dal (linked to Prime Minister Modi's party) hadn't been touched despite an internal Facebook call to take down its material. The company had a white list for politicians exempt from fact-checking.

Facebook was struggling to fight hate speech as recently as five months ago, according to the leaked data. And like an earlier test in the US, the research showed just how quickly Facebook's recommendation engine suggested toxic content. A dummy account following Facebook's recommendations for three weeks was subjected to a "near constant barrage" of divisive nationalism, misinformation and violence.

As with earlier scoops, Facebook said the leaks didn't tell the whole story. Spokesman Andy Stone argued the data was incomplete and didn't account for third-party fact checkers used heavily outside the US. He added that Facebook had invested heavily in hate speech detection technology in languages like Bengali and Hindi, and that the company was continuing to improve that tech.

The social media firm followed this by posting a lengthier defense of its practices. It argued that it had an "industry-leading process" for reviewing and prioritizing countries with a high risk of violence every six months. It noted that teams considered long-term issues and history alongside current events and dependence on its apps. The company added it was engaging with local communities, improving technology and continuously "refining" policies.

The response didn't directly address some of the concerns, however. India is Facebook's largest individual market, with 340 million people using its services, but 87 percent of Facebook's misinformation budget is focused on the US. Even with third-party fact checkers at work, that suggests India isn't getting a proportionate amount of attention. Facebook also didn't follow up on worries it was tip-toeing around certain people and groups beyond a previous statement that it enforced its policies without consideration for position or association. In other words, it's not clear Facebook's problems with misinformation and violence will improve in the near future.

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Also:  Facebook dithered in curbing divisive user content in India  &  In India, Facebook Grapples With an Amplified Version of Its Problems.

There’s been nothing like these cyclone seasons for at least several centuries.

300-year-old tree rings confirm recent uptick in hurricane-driven rainfall

It was a fabled kingdom known in ancient times as the Island of Gold, a civilisation with untold wealth that explorers tried in vain to find long after its unexplained disappearance from history around the 14th century. The site of Srivijaya may finally have been found – by local fishing crews carrying out night-time dives on the Musi River near Palembang on the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

Their extraordinary catches are treasures ranging from a lifesize eighth-century Buddhist statue studded with precious gems – worth millions of pounds – to jewels worthy of kings.

A fisher prepares to freedive with a hookah breathing system, and iron chain for a weight belt, in the Musi River at Palembang in search of sunken treasure. Photograph: Images courtesy of Wreckwatch Magazine

Dr Sean Kingsley, a British maritime archaeologist, said: “In the last five years, extraordinary stuff has been coming up. Coins of all periods, gold and Buddhist statues, gems, all the kinds of things that you might read about in Sinbad the Sailor and think it was made up. It’s actually real.”

He described the trove as definitive evidence that Srivijaya was a “waterworld”, its people living on the river like modern boat people, just as ancient texts record: “When the civilisation ended, their wooden houses, palaces and temples all sank along with all their goods.”

He said: “Bobbing above snapping crocodiles, the local fishers – the modern sea people of Sumatra – have finally unlocked the secret of Srivijaya.”

Research will be published in the latest issue of Wreckwatch magazine, which Kingsley edits. The Srivijayan study forms part of a 180-page autumn publication which focuses on China and the Maritime Silk Road.

< View the Map at the source page. >

Kingsley noted that, at its height, Srivijaya controlled the arteries of the Maritime Silk Road, a colossal market in which local, Chinese and Arab goods were traded: “While the western Mediterranean world was entering the dark ages in the eighth century, one of the world’s greatest kingdoms erupted on to the map of south-east Asia. For over 300 years the rulers of Srivijaya mastered the trade routes between the Middle East and imperial China. Srivijaya became the international crossroads for the finest produce of the age. Its rulers accumulated legendary wealth.”

Ancient and early modern Palembang on Sumatra was largely built in the water and then sank. Photograph: Tropenmuseum, Collectie Stichting Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen

He writes: “From the shallows have surfaced glittering gold and jewels befitting this richest of kingdoms - everything from tools of trade and weapons of war to relics of religion. From the lost temples and places of worship have appeared bronze and gold Buddhist figurines, bronze temple door-knockers bearing the demonic face of Kala, in Hindu legend the mythical head of Rahu who churned the oceans to make an elixir of immortality. Bronze monks’ bells and gold ceremonial rings are studded with rubies and adorned with four-pronged golden vajra sceptres, the Hindu symbol for the thunderbolt, the deity’s weapon of choice.

“Exquisite gold sword handles would have graced the sides of royal courtesans, while bronze mirrors and hundreds of gold rings, many stamped with enigmatic letters, figures and symbols, earrings and gold necklace beads resurrect the splendour of a merchant aristocracy going about its daily dealings, stamping shipping manifests, in the palace complex.”

Why the kingdom collapsed is unknown. Kingsley speculates that it may have been Asia’s answer to Pompeii, falling victim to Indonesia’s bubbling volcanoes. “Or did the fast-silting, unruly river swallow the city whole?”

Gold and ruby-studded jewellery, 8th-10th centuries, found in the river. Photograph: Images courtesy of Wreckwatch Magazine

Without official excavations, evidence that could answer such questions will be lost. Treasures now retrieved by the fishers are simply being sold before archaeologists can properly study them, ending up with antiquities dealers, while the fishers using dangerous diving equipment and buckets receive a pittance of the true value.

“They are lost to the world,” Kingsley warned. “Vast swathes, including a stunning lifesize Buddhist statue adorned with precious gems, have been lost to the international antiquities market. Newly discovered, the story of the rise and fall of Srivijaya is dying anew without being told.”

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• Former President Donald Trump's social network has 30 days to comply with the agreement, the nonprofit said.

• If Truth Social doesn't comply, it could be sued or forced to rebuild the entire platform.

Former President Donald Trump's new social network Truth Social has 30 days to stop violating a free and open-source software licensing agreement before its access is permanently terminated or the platform faces legal action, the Software Freedom Conservancy said.

The Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG), which announced the upcoming launch of Truth Social on Wednesday, appears to have violated a license agreement by snatching the code of the decentralized social network Mastodon and refusing to abide by its terms, The Verge reported.

While platforms are entitled to reuse Mastodon's code, as Gab already has, the Software Freedom Conservancy, a non-profit that enforces free and open-source software licenses, said they must comply with the Affero General Public License (or AGPLv3).

A condition of the APGLv3 is that every user can receive the complete corresponding source for the website based on that code. "That's how AGPLv3's cure provision works - no exceptions - even if you're a real estate mogul, reality television star, or even a former POTUS," said the Software Freedom Conservancy.

Truth Social doesn't comply with that provision, per The Verge, and violated the license by referring to its services as "proprietary." It shows that it fails to mention that it lifted the code from somewhere else, Gizmodo reported.

It also attempted to remove references that would make the alleged Mastodon rip-off obvious, The Verge said. The media outlet reported that a "sighting" of the Mastodon logo was listed as a bug and noted that there were visual similarities and direct references to Mastodon in the site's underlying HTML.

The Software Freedom Conservancy is insisting that TMTG offers all users access to the Truth Social source code. If it fails to do so, then the rights and permissions to the Mastodon software would be permanently terminated. It could force the group to rebuild the entire platform, The Verge said.

Failing to do this, the media outlet added, the Software Freedom Conservancy could sue for violating the terms of the license used.

Mastodon's founder, Eugene Rochko, told Vice that Truth Social's platform appears to be "absolutely" based on his company's code. Rochko subsequently told Talking Points Memo that he intends to seek legal counsel on the situation.

Insider's Cheryl Teh noted that Trump's new social media platform looks remarkably similar to Twitter.

Shortly after its launch, Twitter users had already found a way to create mock accounts of the former president and Vice President Mike Pence on Truth Social.

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Led by Professor Shulamit Levenberg, Ph.D. student Rita Beckerman from the Stem Cell and Tissue Engineering Laboratory in the Technion's Faculty of Biomedical Engineering presents a novel treatment approach, using an autograft of muscle cells engineered to take in sugar at increased rates. Mice treated in this manner displayed normal blood sugar levels for months after a single procedure. The group's findings were recently published in Science Advances.

Muscle cells are among the main targets of insulin, and they are supposed to absorb sugar from the blood. In their study, Prof. Levenberg's group isolated muscle cells from mice and engineered these cells to present more insulin-activated sugar transporters (GLUT4). These cells were then grown to form an engineered muscle tissue, and finally transported back into the abdomen of diabetic mice. The engineered cells not only proceeded to absorb sugar correctly, improving blood sugar levels, but also induced improved absorption in the mice's other muscle cells, by means of signals sent between them. After this one treatment, the mice remained cured of diabetes for four months—the entire period they remained under observation. Their blood sugar levels remained lower, and they had reduced levels of fatty liver normally displayed in type 2 diabetes.

"By taking cells from the patient and treating them, we eliminate the risk of rejection," Prof. Levenberg explained. These cells can easily integrate back into being part of the body and respond to the body's signaling activity.

Currently around 34 million Americans, just over 1 in 10, suffer from diabetes, 90% of them from type 2 diabetes. An effective treatment—and one that is a one-time treatment rather than daily medication—could significantly improve both quality of life and life expectancy of those who have diabetes. The same method could also be used to treat various enzyme deficiency disorders.

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SINGAPORE – With 84% of Singaporeans fully vaccinated against Covid-19, one of the highest percentages worldwide, many had expected authorities would by now be easing, not maintaining, social distancing and other contagion-curbing restrictions.

But that’s exactly what officials are doing as the island nation seeks to cope with its largest outbreaks since the start of the pandemic.

Singapore’s Ministry of Health (MoH) announced on Wednesday (October 20) that stricter curbs introduced in late September as part of a so-called “stabilization phase” implemented to minimize health care system strains would be extended for another month as daily cases have soared to all-time highs.

As other nations begin pursuing reopening strategies and treating the coronavirus as endemic, Singapore’s experience is now being looked upon as a sobering case study, particularly for countries that have until now kept cases low by relying on strict measures but are under mounting pressure to manage, rather than eradicate, Covid-19.

Singapore’s daily cases hit a record 3,994 on October 19, with the seven-day average number of new infections more than tripling in the last month. The overall death toll has more than quadrupled over the same period, rising to 280 on October 21 from just 65. Authorities, meanwhile, have attested to rising pressure on hospitals and healthcare workers.

“At the current situation, we face considerable risk of the healthcare system being overwhelmed,” said Lawrence Wong, Singapore’s finance minister and co-chair of a multi-ministry Covid-19 task force. “It’s not simply a matter of having extra beds or purchasing new equipment… our medical personnel are stretched and fatigued.”

As of Wednesday, about 89% of isolation beds and 67% of intensive care unit (ICU) beds, including those for non-Covid-19 patients, were filled in public hospitals, according to the MoH. That is despite only around 1% of cases requiring oxygen supplementation and 0.1% requiring ICU care over the last 28 days, with 98.6% of cases showing mild or no symptoms.

Around 10% of infected patients are being admitted to hospitals due to more severe symptoms or co-morbidities, with around 100 unvaccinated seniors per day. A substantial number of seniors have forgone vaccination for various reasons despite being given priority access to Covid-19 vaccines ahead of other demographic groups in February.  

Two men wait outside a clinic after being vaccinated on June 24, 2021, in Singapore. Photo: AFP via NurPhoto / Suhaimi Abdullah

A large proportion of severe outcomes and coronavirus deaths have since been linked to unvaccinated seniors, who are proving to be the Achilles’ heel of the city-state’s pandemic response. Unvaccinated patients made up 54.7% of 495 severe cases recorded in recent days, with others being vaccinated but with co-morbidities, said the MoH earlier this week.  

At a press conference on Wednesday, Health Minister Ong Ye Kung told media that queues for beds for both Covid-19 and non-Covid patients have formed at certain hospitals, and that the MoH would open up more ICU beds if necessary, although that will be “at the expense of further degradation of normal service and normal medical care.”

Since the “stabilization phase” began on September 27, the number of new infections appears to be plateauing, though there is no sign that cases are falling. Social gatherings were capped to a maximum of two while work-from-home has become the city-state’s default arrangement. Those measures will be reviewed after two weeks but will otherwise remain in place until November 21.

Businesses and retailers have lamented the latest month-long extension of Covid-19 restrictions, the latest in successive rounds of rule-tightening since May that have left affected sectors reeling. A support package for businesses and workers worth S$640 million (US$475 million) was announced in the wake of the extended restrictions.  

Food and beverage (F&B) businesses across Singapore have been among the hardest hit by start-stop measures to reduce transmission, and industry groups have appealed to the government for greater leniency. Taskforce co-chair Wong maintains that it is still “too risky” to allow five people from the same household to publicly dine in together.

At the same time, the city-state began welcoming quarantine-free entry to vaccinated travelers from the United States and some European nations this week, arguably exposing Singapore to greater risk than permitting fully vaccinated residents to patronize restaurants in higher numbers in accordance with past pledges for more freedoms for the immunized.

With policymakers previously holding up a high vaccination rate as the key prerequisite for a phased reopening, public sentiment has been divided over the stuttering pace of plans to “live with Covid.” As frustrations rise with what is seen as an overly cautious approach, some experts are have questioned the use of blanket restrictions amid rising endemicity.

Paul Tambyah, president of the Asia Pacific Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infection, says the current rate of transmission in Singapore has illustrated the limits of broad non-pharmaceutical interventions. “There is no good evidence that the measures put in for the ‘stabilization phase’ have had an impact on case numbers or on ICU utilization rates,” Tambyah said.

Paul Tambyah (L) and Lawerence Wong (R) have divergent views on how to handle Covid-19. Picture: Facebook

“There is a need to target the vulnerable to concentrate resources and avoid unintended consequences of blanket restrictions,” he added.  

Tambyah has said that he does not think loosening the restrictions to the previous set of measures in place earlier this year, in which the maximum group size for public gatherings was five, would lead to a surge in infections.

Tambyah is also chairman of the opposition Singapore Democratic Party (SDP), which last month published an eight-point plan detailing how Singapore can more effectively deal with and exit the Covid-19 pandemic. The report criticized the government’s multi-ministerial task force as being “plagued with a distinct lack of coherence and direction.”

“The reactive nature of the multi-ministerial task force’s approach in dealing with outbreaks of infections has led to stop-start, on-again/off-again policies, which had impacted adversely on both employers and employees [and has] left Singaporeans confused and frustrated,” said the SDP’s healthcare panel, which authored the alternative strategy.   

Tambyah told Asia Times that the SDP’s suggestions would be submitted to the task force pending public feedback.

“Basically, we would stop testing asymptomatic individuals, have a dedicated ambulance hotline for those who need oxygen, empower the general practitioners to make clinical decisions on hospitalization and other practical suggestions.”

With the coronavirus “already endemic almost all over the world,” the disease expert said non-pharmaceutical interventions such as strict caps on gatherings of vaccinated individuals and differentiated measures for the vaccinated and unvaccinated “would not have a significant impact on the transmission at this stage in the pandemic.”

Singapore introduced so-called “vaccination-differentiated safe management measures” at restaurants in August, with only fully vaccinated people allowed to dine in. Last week, it extended those rules to prohibit unvaccinated people from dining in at open-air hawker centers or even entering shopping centers, with some exceptions.

People relax during lunch break at the Raffles Place financial business district in Singapore on September 14, 2021. Photo: AFP / Roslan Rahman

“The disease is all over Singapore right now and the priority should be reaching out to the unvaccinated seniors and protecting the vulnerable rather than taking measures which adversely affect the bulk of the population with little benefit,” Tambyah maintains, saying he hopes ongoing restrictions “will be lifted in a month or earlier.”

Health Minister Ong told reporters on Wednesday that the current wave of infections will not last “indefinitely” and will peak at some point in a “new equilibrium with the virus” as the population builds up better immunity and more people receive booster shots, which have recently been made available to people aged 30 years and older.

“Hopefully this [new equilibrium] will come in the next few months. There may not be a peak but a plateau followed by a downturn. It is very hard to tell,” said Tambyah. “The aim is to reach a low level of endemicity, like the Zika virus, which appears in Singapore every now and again with a few imported cases and a handful of local cases every year.”

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Sweating, headaches, fatigue, dehydration – the ways heat exhaustion affects the human body are well documented. As temperatures inch up year by year we need to change the way we live, creating cooler places that provide refuge from heat.

But what about wildlife? We know mass die-offs are becoming more common as heatwaves sweep terrestrial and marine ecosystems, but incremental increases in temperature, which are much harder to study, are harming almost all populations on our planet.

Spectacled flying-foxes, orphaned during a mass die-off caused by heat stress, at Tolga bat hospital in Queensland, Australia. Photograph: Dave Pinson/Alamy

Earlier this year, for the first time, a paper was published on the impact of heat stress in large Arctic seabirds. Normally, research on species in that corner of the world is about adaptations to the cold, but in an era of climate chaos, learning to live with heat is the new challenge.

Emily Choy, a biologist from McGill University in Montreal, Canada, has been studying a colony of thick-billed murres on the cliffs of Coast Island in Hudson Bay after reports of birds dying in their nests on warm days. These black-plumed birds spend summer months perched on cliffs in full sun with little shade. Males and females alternate 12-hour shifts sitting on their eggs.

When the adults leave the nest to cool down, the eggs and chicks are more exposed to the sun and predators. A lot can be lost 

Dr Henry Häkkinen, ZSL

Their high metabolisms keep them warm when diving in waters that are 8C and cooler, so when faced with temperatures of 21C, the birds struggle to keep cool, panting and flapping their wings, according to the paper published in the Journal of Experimental Biology. As the Arctic warms at twice the global rate, these temperatures are becoming increasingly common.

“When we compared our data, we could really only do comparisons with desert species that are well adapted for heat,” says Choy. “Most of the work that has been done on thermal physiology in Arctic species has focused on heat conservation.

Thick-billed murres on Coast Island in Hudson Bay, Canada, are leaving their nests more often to cool down, meaning eggs are vulnerable to predators. Photograph: Douglas Noblet

“Murres are cold-adapted and basically specialised for Arctic environments, so they are quite sensitive and could be possible canaries in the coalmine for the impacts of climate change,” she adds.

As well as undergoing physical changes, animals across the world are changing their behaviour – murres, for example, are spending more time getting into the water to cool off, leaving their eggs exposed to gulls and Arctic foxes. For parents, it’s a trade-off between keeping cool enough to avoid heat stress and protecting their young.

Many birds with similar ecological niches are at risk. Endangered bank cormorants risk overheating when sitting on eggs on exposed, rocky cliffs in southern Africa, according to research published in Conservation Physiology.

“This puts a lot of stress on the adults, and when the adults leave the nest to cool down, the eggs and chicks are more exposed to the sun and predators. A lot of eggs and chicks can be lost in a particularly hot summer,” says Dr Henry Häkkinen from the Zoological Society of London, one of the paper’s authors. Great skuas in Shetland are spending more time bathing to avoid overheating, again leaving eggs and chicks exposed to predators.

Lots of animals face similar challenges. Research shows that in hotter temperatures grizzly bears in Alberta, Canada, look for more closed, shaded vegetation, while in Greece, brown bears are more likely to be active at night. Making these changes has knock-on effects and is a trade-off for spending less time hunting for food, or looking out for predators.

Grizzly bears in Alberta, Canada, were found to spend time looking for shaded vegetation in hotter temperatures, which could impact on hunting time. Photograph: Michael Wheatley/Alamy

Although heatstroke is an issue, the main cause of mortality is a change in behaviour that leads to wildlife being more vulnerable in their environment. “I think heat stress is the very obvious big thing, but that is really the far extreme of climate change impacts. That’s really the worst case,” says Dr Daniella Rabaiotti, a researcher at the ZSL Institute of Zoology. “Often I think we’re seeing population level effects that aren’t this big population crash from heat stress, but I don’t think we have a full understanding of quite how widespread these impacts are at the moment.”

You’ll probably see a correlation between how much range of a species is lost, and how hard it is going to get hit

Dr Daniella Rabaiotti, ZSL

Her research focuses on endangered wild dogs, which – unlike Arctic birds – are well adapted to heat. But rising temperatures are making it too hot for them to hunt and pup survival is plummeting. “They’re not getting as much food because they have less time to hunt,” says Rabaiotti.

Habitat loss is key in exacerbating wildlife’s ability to respond to the climate crisis. Humans have destroyed so much habitat, many populations of wild animals have been left fragmented and unable to move and find cooler areas in response to changes in their environment. Wild dogs, Ethiopian wolves, red wolves, tigers, lions and cheetahs have all lost more than 90% of their ranges.

“Animals suffer when they can’t do anything,” says Rabaiotti. “You’ll probably see a correlation between how much range of a species is lost, and how hard it is going to get hit by climate change.”

In terms of knowing what conservation efforts to implement in which places, we need to keep using and gathering data from long-term projects, says Rabaiotti. This is because impacts are often localised and environment specific. “A lot of climate change is focused on very large-scale impacts,” she says. “If you’re someone working on the ground to conserve that species, that only tells you what’s going to happen in the future, not how to fix it.”

Bees flock to water during an intense drought in South Africa. Studies of bumblebees found the insects are very vulnerable to extreme temperatures. Photograph: Derek Turner / Barcroft Media

It may also be that heat is restructuring populations in ways that we don’t understand yet because we haven’t been looking out for it. Research from 2020 suggested that the expansion or decline of bumblebee species could be driven by their resistance to heat stress during extreme weather events.

“Several studies show that bumblebees are extremely sensitive to extreme temperatures but not all species are equal when it comes to heat stress,” says Prof Pierre Rasmont from the Université de Mons, one of the paper’s authors. Boreal and Arctic species, for example, appear to be highly sensitive to heat stress. “Mechanisms triggering these responses to stressful temperatures are still under-explored in bumblebees and further studies are needed to understand physiological responses to environmental stresses.”

Research is just starting to scratch the surface of understanding how heat affects ecosystems. Stresses induced by hot temperatures can cause all kinds of problems, including the growth of organisms, fertility, immunity, mortality and changes in behaviour.

As the climate crisis escalates we will need to know more about how heat is affecting populations across the planet. “I think it’s just really key if there’s a species of conservation importance that we ask these questions – how is the population going to be impacted? And how do we stop those impacts? That’s where I would like to see more research,” says Rabaiotti.

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* Qantas to speed up plans to restart flights amid strong demand (Adds daily COVID-19 cases and fatalities)

MELBOURNE, Oct 22 (Reuters) - Melbourne residents flocked to the city's pubs, restaurants and hair salons in the early hours of Friday after the world's most locked-down city emerged from its latest spate of restrictions designed to combat the spread of COVID-19.

Australia's second-largest city has so far endured 262 days, or nearly nine months, of restrictions during six separate lockdowns since March 2020, representing the longest cumulative lockdown for any city in the world.

Argentina's capital, Buenos Aires, last year went through 234 straight days of lockdown.

In Melbourne, people were seen cheering and clapping from their balconies, while cars honked horns continuously at 11:59 p.m. on Thursday when lockdown restrictions in place since early August ended.

Many venues, including food outlets and even haircutters, opened at the unusual hour for the occasion.

Josh Mihan, owner of The Bearded Man barber shop in Melbourne, told Reuters he is nearly booked out for the next month and he is encouraging customers to make appointments for Christmas.

"We all love cutting hair and being on the floor is such a lovely feeling, being around people," he said. "I have urged our customer base, make sure you have booked in your Christmas cut."

Similar jubilant scenes were seen in the country's largest city https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/sydney-emerges-pandemic-lockdown-beer-hand-2021-10-11, Sydney, almost two weeks ago, when authorities started easing restrictions as COVID-19 vaccination rates rose.

Just over 70% of adults in Australia are now fully vaccinated and many residents are planning to fly overseas again as international border restrictions start to ease from November https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/australia-ease-international-travel-curbs-sources-2021-10-01.

From Nov. 1, fully vaccinated international travellers arriving in Sydney and Melbourne will no longer need to quarantine.

Qantas Airways Ltd said on Friday that it would speed up plans to restart flights to many destinations and upsize some planes amid "massive demand".

Qantas said it would launch a new route from Sydney to Delhi in early December and bring forward plans for flights to Singapore, Fiji, Johannesburg, Bangkok and Phuket.

"This is a wonderful day - Australia is ready for take-off," Prime Minister Scott Morrison said shortly after the Qantas announcement. A quarantine-free travel bubble between Australia and Singapore could operate from next month, Morrison said, if an agreement is reached as expected.

A LONG LOCKDOWN

Even with Delta outbreaks across Australia's southeast from late June, coronavirus numbers are still far lower than those of many comparable nations, with some 152,000 cases and 1,590 deaths.

The state of Victoria, of which Melbourne is the capital, reported 2,189 new local COVID-19 cases and 16 deaths on Friday, making it the centre of the Delta outbreak in Australia.

Daily cases in New South Wales, home to Sydney where the Delta variant was first detected in June, dropped slightly to 345. The state recorded a further five deaths.

With a once-stuttering vaccine rollout gaining momentum, authorities no longer plan to rely on extended lockdowns to suppress the virus.

It has been an arduous period, especially for those in Melbourne running a business.

"We've been open for a year, and this is our fourth lockdown. It's been very difficult," said David Boyle, the head chef at the up-market Farmer's Daughters restaurant in Melbourne.

Under more relaxed rules, restaurants and cafes can reopen with up to 20 people indoors and 50 outdoors - all of whom must be vaccinated - while 10 guests can gather at homes. Masks will remain mandatory.

The reopening will be a boost for Australia's A$2 trillion ($1.5 trillion) economy after recent lockdowns pushed it to the brink of a second recession in as many years.

At Melbourne's once bustling Journal Cafe, waitress Sullivan Kovacs said business was still modest on Friday and that customer numbers would increase once office workers and trades people returned to the city en masse.

"A lot of the traffic comes from people working in the city, and a lot of the tradies haven't gone back to work yet," Kovacs said. ($1 = 1.3259 Australian dollars)

(Reporting by Melanie Burton and Sonali Paul in Melbourne; Additional reporting by Renju Jose; Writing by Jonathan Barrett; Editing by Peter Cooney, Richard Pullin and Jane Wardell)

Source

CDC advisory panel unanimously approves expanded COVID vaccine boosters

GALILEE, Israel, Oct. 21, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Archeologists have uncovered for the first time mosaic floors from a lost, legendary basilica reportedly built over the house of Jesus' apostles Peter and Andrew in biblical Bethsaida. According to archeological director Mordechai Aviam, "We identified a large apse in the east and uncovered two inscriptions. While the smaller one mentions a deacon and a building project, the larger inscription is a half medallion and speaks of the bishop and reconstruction of the building." The excavation known as the El Araj Excavation Project is a joint undertaking of the Kinneret Institute for Galilean Archeology at Kinneret College and Nyack College, NY. It is sponsored by the Center for the Study of Ancient Judaism and Christian Origins (CSAJCO) and the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C.

Next year, work on the site will resume, buildings from the Roman period village will be excavated, and the entire church will be cleared with the aim to answer the question: "Who buried the Byzantine Church of the Apostles?"

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: In 724 C.E., a Bavarian bishop named Willibald visited holy sites along the Sea of Galilee in his pilgrimage to the Holy Land. He reported: "And thence they went to Bethsaida, the residence of Peter and Andrew, where there is now a church on the site of their house."

Since 2016, the Kinneret Institute for Galilee Archeology at Kinneret College, and Nyack College, New York, have conducted excavations led by Mordechai Aviam and Steven Notley at the site of Beit HaBek (al-A'raj) in an attempt to identify the lost city of Bethsaida. Not only have they discovered a large and previously unknown Jewish village dated to the Roman period but also a large basilica that measures 27x16m from the Byzantine period. The excavators have now identified this church with the Church of the Apostles mentioned by Bishop Willibald.

To the surprise of the excavators, although the outer walls were preserved to a height of one meter, not a single opening was identified. It is possible that directly on the same walls of the church, a sugar factory was erected in the Middle Ages. Its builders had no interest in the mosaics and so the interior area was filled with dirt, inadvertently burying the church.

It is also possible that the remains of the church were intentionally enclosed by a wall after it was destroyed in the earthquake of 749 C.E. It was cleaned and renewed in such a way that the church was preserved and commemorated. Other churches in the region were also abandoned, but perhaps because of the great importance attached to the house of Peter and Andrew, the basilica in Bethsaida was especially preserved.

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TRUTH Social will be created through a new company formed by a merger of the Trump Media and Technology Group and a special acquisition company (SPAC), according to a press release distributed by both organizations.

“We live in a world where the Taliban has a huge presence on Twitter, yet your favorite American President has been silenced. This is unacceptable," Trump said in a written statement included in the release.

"I am excited to send out my first TRUTH on TRUTH Social very soon. TMTG was founded with a mission to give a voice to all. I'm excited to soon begin sharing my thoughts on TRUTH Social and to fight back against Big Tech," he said.

The social network, set for a beta launch next month and full rollout in the first quarter of 2022, is the first of three stages in the company's plans, followed by a subscription video-on-demand service called TMTG+ that will feature entertainment, news and podcasts, according to the news release.

In a slide deck on its website, the company envisions eventually competing against Amazon.com's AWS cloud service and Google Cloud.

A Trump representative who declined to be named confirmed the contents of the TMTG news release to Reuters. Trump spokesperson Liz Harrington also tweeted a copy.

"For so long, Big Tech has suppressed conservative voices," the former president's son, Donald Trump Jr., told Fox News in an interview. "Tonight my father signed a definitive merger agreement to form what will ultimately be the Trump Media and Technology Group and TRUTH Social - a platform for everyone to express their feelings."

Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms banned Trump from their services after hundreds of his supporters rioted at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

That protest came after a speech by Trump in which he falsely claimed that his November election loss was due to widespread fraud, an assertion rejected by multiple courts and state election officials.

The deal will list Trump Media & Technology Group on Nasdaq through a merger with Digital World Acquisition Corp, a blank-check acquisition firm led by former investment banker Patrick Orlando.

Trump Media & Technology Group will receive $293 million in cash that Digital World Acquisition Corp had in trust, assuming no shareholder of the acquisition firm chooses to redeem their shares, according to the statement.

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Source : https://www.reuters.com/world/us/former-us-president-donald-trump-launches-new-social-media-platform-2021-10-21/