Quick thinking: On Oct. 11, Kuljinder Kinda, a Sikh electrician from Punjab, India, and his friends were hiking in Golden Ears Provincial Park when a group ahead told them to call for help, NBC News reported.

• The five friends didn’t have service on their phones and couldn’t find any park personnel for the 10 minutes that they searched. Instead, they came up with the idea to fashion together a makeshift rope out of their turbans and other clothing to pull the men back up.

• They weren’t afraid for their own safety, rather they worried about the stranded men.

• “In Sikhi, we are taught to help someone in any way we can with anything we have, even our turban,” Kinda said.

• The friends made a rope roughly 33 feet long and tugged the other two hikers out of the lower falls.

• Ridge Meadows Search and Rescue Manager Robert Laing, who arrived at the scene after the rescue, commended Kinda and his friends for their bravery and said that the two men fell in because they didn’t see the waterfall hazard signs.

• “I’ve never heard of anything like this before and it was quite impressive,” Laing told Global News.

• “Several people are injured each year as a result of slips or falls,” he added. “It seems about once every one to two years, someone will be swept over the falls and die as a result of their injuries.”

• The act of kindness echoed that of an incident last October in Calgary, Alberta, when several elderly Sikh men rushed to the aid of two teen girls who fell through the ice in a frozen pond and also unfurled their turbans to fish them out.

Featured Image via NBC News

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The findings were published as a pre-print on MedRxiv earlier this month. It has not been peer-reviewed.

The patient, a 47-year-old woman who has not been named, was first hospitalized with COVID-19 at the National Institutes of Health campus in Bethesda, Maryland, in the spring of 2020, Science News reported.

After ten months, during which she showed mild or no symptoms of the coronavirus, her doctors found that she was still testing positive for the virus, the study said.

The woman had been immunocompromised after a successful blood cancer treatment three years prior left her with low levels of B cells, which produce antibodies, the study said.

She continued testing positive for the coronavirus, which her doctors thought were false positives picking up on harmless bits of the virus left after the infection was cleared, according to the study.

When the woman's viral load rose again this March, the doctors sequenced its genome. They found that it was very similar to the coronavirus she was carrying ten months earlier and was unlike any strain circulating in the general population at the time, the study said.

The woman received treatment and finally cleared the infection in April, 335 days after she was first tested, the study said. She has now had multiple negative COVID-19 tests, Science News reported.

Studies like this one provide information about COVID-19 infection for people with a weakened immune system.

Immunocompromised people are less likely to mount a strong response to COVID-19 with two doses of vaccine, leaving them more vulnerable to infection.

US regulatory agencies in August approved a third dose of vaccine for immunocompromised people in the hope it would help bolster their immune response.

These types of studies also help scientists understand how the virus evolves. For instance, a study on a woman with HIV who carried the coronavirus for 216 days found that it had mutated at least 30 times.

This article was originally published by Business Insider.

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Through mathematical modeling, the ECDC forecasted the disease burden between now and the end of November 2021. This model showed that countries with low COVID-19 vaccination coverage that plan to relax non-pharmaceutical community mitigation strategies run a high risk of seeing a significant surge in cases, hospitalisations and mortality. This forecast was published in the ECDC's latest Rapid Risk Assessment report released on 30 September.

At the beginning of October, 75% of adults in the EU were fully vaccinated. However, only 61.1% of the total population in the EU/EEA have been fully vaccinated to date, and as such we can't be complacent. The ECDC's modeling scenarios indicate that the potential burden of disease risk in the EU from the Delta variant is high from now to the end of November, unless vaccination coverage can be increased rapidly in the total population in the next few weeks.

Dr. Andrea Ammon, director of the ECDC said: "We need to remain vigilant and continue to use common sense to prevent the spread of the virus. This means getting a full course of vaccination as soon as the opportunity arises and maintaining physical distancing, washing hands, avoiding crowded spaces, and wearing a mask when necessary."

This article will answer five key questions about the Delta variant.

1. What are the symptoms of infection by the Delta variant? Do they differ from those of infection by the original strain?

Following the outbreak of the novel coronavirus pandemic in China in 2019, health officials alerted the public to watch out for the hallmark symptoms: fever, continuous coughing, and a loss of taste and smell.

As the Delta variant spread around the globe, evidence is growing that its symptoms may be different. In particular, coughing and loss of the sense of taste and smell aren't as common any more, according to data from the ECDC.

Ironically, symptoms arise as the body tries to do something about the infection and rises to the body's call for help. For example, a fever is detrimental to viruses. Heat inactivates many viruses and COVID-19 is no exception.

Reasons for changes in symptoms boil down to evolution. When a virus mutates, it could cause differences in the symptoms. Sometimes there are advantages for the virus to do this. For example, any symptom that increases the rate of spread of the virus is an inherent benefit.

2. Why exactly is the Delta variant more contagious than the original coronavirus?

Viruses need access to their hosts' cells to reproduce. Having achieved this, they hijack the genetic material of the cell under siege to make more viruses that can then spread the disease.

The speciality of the Delta variant lies in its spike protein. The word 'corona' in coronavirus means 'crown' in Latin. The crown's spikes attach and latch onto a person's cells. The more a virus can cling on to a host's cells, the more successful it will be in taking over the cells for its own purposes, that is, to create more viruses to spread.

To its advantage, the Delta variant has several mutations affecting its spike protein structure: these allow Delta to attach very tightly, compared to other variants. Once it gets hold of a person's cell receptors, it can stay attached very securely, and that means it can reproduce and spread efficiently.

As a result of this genetic lottery we know that as it mutates, the Delta variant is indeed more contagious than its predecessors. To add to its infection abilities, the Delta variant produces higher numbers, its viral load, in the respiratory tract, specifically the nasal passages.

3. Can existing vaccines protect against the Delta variant? What are the health implications of catching the Delta variant, for the unvaccinated?

"Currently, it is difficult to ascertain whether a decrease in [vaccine] effectiveness against the Delta variant infections is mainly due to waning immunity over time or due to the strain partially escaping vaccine," said Dr. Zoi-Dorothea Pana, specialist in pediatrics, epidemiology and infection control at the European University, Cyprus.

However, the main priority is that vaccine effectiveness against severe disease, hospitalization and death was maintained during the spread of the Delta variant. As summarized in the ECDC's latest Rapid Risk Assessment, this aspect needs to be carefully monitored over time, particularly among the elderly.

For those who have been vaccinated, the risk of hospitalization or experiencing more than five symptoms in the first week of illness is reduced.

"From a community perspective, results suggest that outbreaks of the Delta variant in unvaccinated populations might lead to a greater burden on healthcare services," explained Dr. Pana.

4. How widespread is COVID infection in children? What role do schools play in transmission of the variant?

According to the ECDC and the World Health Organization (WHO), children seem to be equally susceptible to COVID-19 infection as other age groups. Based on current evidence, transmission of the virus from and between children can be influenced by many factors. "These include severity, viral load and shedding duration, the variant of concern, [and] duration of exposure, as well as environmental and physiological factors specific to each child," said Dr. Pana.

ECDC risk assessment reports in July and September 2021 suggested that overall, COVID-19 transmission in the school setting is not the primary cause behind community transmission. Dr. Pana emphasized: "What is important is that when outbreaks occur in schools, appropriate mitigation measures are implemented."

According to an ECDC study, schools need to be prepared with a combination of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs): quarantines, closures and social distancing. "Synergy from the promotion of full vaccination coverage, implementation of layered NPIs (adapted on community transmission levels) and support of rigorous contact testing seems to be a balanced way to move forward," advised Dr. Pana.

5. Is the Delta variant more dangerous for children?

The good news is that children in Europe and worldwide continue to have much lower hospitalization rates, intensive hospital care admissions and death rates than all other age groups infected by COVID-19.

However, as there is increased risk of Delta transmission among unvaccinated young children in particular, we still need to protect them in the coming months, in all settings. Mitigation protective strategies may include approaches that prevent crowding, alongside hygiene and measures to minimize transmissions, that is, the 3 W's: wear a mask, wash your hands and watch your distance.

For younger children, 'cocooning' is an additional option. "A cocoon vaccination strategy refers to vaccination for all family members and any other individuals who come into regular contact with the child," explained Dr. Pana.

"The best way to protect our children from this pandemic and those in the future is to increase the level of education and awareness," said Dr. Pana. "Adoption of a safe lifestyle rather than a mandatory mitigation strategy is to be promoted," she continued. Long-term, Dr. Pana would like to see critical thinking skills fostered in education, as well as science and health literacy, to counter the rising tide of fake news.

One of the European Commission's activities to prepare for the increased threat of variants is the support of the clinical research network VACCELERATE. Formed in February 2021 under the HERA Incubator, the new European bio-defense preparedness plan, the network will address research questions on interests such as the effects of third booster shots and of reduced doses of the vaccine in adolescents.

A member of the COVID team advising the Cypriot government, Dr. Pana is now working with funding from the VACCELERATE program. She concluded: "With the added value from specific expertise in the platform, combined with equal access to all citizens, VACCELERATE is a service for the EU community and for all children across the European region."

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Apple once again took the world by surprise earlier this week when it announced a so-called polishing cloth that’s supposed to help keep its devices clean and tidy.

And just like any other product, the polishing cloth doesn’t come cheap, with the Cupertino-based tech giant selling it for no less than $19.

Needless to say, it was just a matter of time until the cloth became a meme and everybody started to make fun of it, claiming once again that Apple is being ridiculous by charging $19 for a piece of cloth.

Especially when, in theory, you should be able to clean your devices with much cheaper materials that don’t cost more than a couple of bucks.

And yet, despite everybody making so much fun of the polishing cloth, quite a lot of people actually bought in anyway, so right now, the new “accessory” is sold out at Apple’s online store. In other words, if you’re trying to get the cloth today, you won’t receive it until late November, and the more orders are sent, the more the shipping is pushed back.

Not available in retail stores

This could mean two things: either the demand for the polishing cloth is really strong or Apple itself hasn’t prepared too many of them, so the inventory got cleared out pretty fast.

Regardless of what happened, however, it’s pretty clear that Apple’s existing inventory ran out quickly, and this can only be good news for the company in the short term. Despite all the jokes that is, as this once again proves there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

It’ll be interesting, however, if the Apple Polishing Cloth will end up being sold in retail stores, especially as the new MacBook Pro models will be up for grabs beginning next week.

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South Korea’s first domestically produced space rocket reached its desired altitude but failed to deliver a dummy payload into orbit in its first test launch.

The South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, still described the test as an “excellent accomplishment” that takes the country a step further in its pursuit of a space launch programme.

Live footage showed the 47-metre (154ft) rocket soaring into the air with bright yellow flames shooting out of its engines following blastoff at Naro Space Center, the country’s lone spaceport, on a small island off its southern coast.

After the launch, the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (Kari), the country’s space agency, reported that Nuri’s first and second stages separated properly and that the third stage carried the payload – a 1.4-tonne block of stainless steel and aluminium – 435 miles above Earth. But Moon, who observed the launch at the Naro spaceport, said in a televised speech that the payload did not stabilise in orbit after being separated from the third stage.

Officials from Kari and South Korea’s science ministry provided no more immediate details on what went wrong.

The launch, which took place at 5pm (0900 BST), was delayed by an hour because engineers needed more time to examine the rocket’s valves. There had also been concerns that strong winds and other conditions would pose challenges for a successful launch.

“Although [the launch] failed to achieve its objectives perfectly, it was an excellent accomplishment for a first launch,” Moon said.

“The midair engine ignitions and the separations of the rockets, fairings [covering the payload] and the dummy satellite worked smoothly. All this was done based on technology that is completely ours,” he added.

After relying on other countries to launch its satellites since the early 1990s, South Korea is now trying to become the 10th nation to send a satellite into space with its own technology.

Officials say such an ability would be crucial for the country’s space ambitions, which include plans for sending more advanced communications satellites and acquiring its own military intelligence satellites. The country is also hoping to send a probe to the moon by 2030.

Nuri is the country’s first space launch vehicle built entirely with domestic technology. The three-stage rocket is powered by five 75-ton class rocket engines placed in its first and second stages.

Scientists and engineers at Kari plan to test Nuri several more times, including conducting another launch with a dummy device in May 2022, before trying with a real satellite.

South Korea had previously launched a space launch vehicle from the Naro spaceport in 2013. It was a two-stage rocket built mainly with Russian technology. That launch came after years of delays and consecutive failures. The rocket, named Naro, reached the desired altitude during its first test in 2009 but failed to eject a satellite into orbit, and then exploded shortly after takeoff during its second test in 2010.

It was unclear how North Korea, which had been accused of using its space launch attempts as a disguise for developing long-range missile technology, would react to Thursday’s launch.

People celebrate as they watch the launch on TV at Seoul railway station. Photograph: Ahn Young-joon/AP

While pushing to expand its nuclear and missile programme, the North had shown sensitivity about South Korea’s increasing defence spending and efforts to build more powerful conventionally armed missiles.

In a speech to Pyongyang’s rubberstamp parliament last month, the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, accused the US and South Korea of “destroying the stability and balance” in the region with their allied military activities and a US-led “excessive arms buildup” in the South.

While Nuri is powered by liquid propellants that need to be fuelled shortly before launch, the South Koreans plan to develop a solid-fuel space launch rocket by 2024, which could be cheaper to build and prepared for launch more quickly. Such rockets would also be ideal for more sensitive space launches, including those involving military intelligence satellites.

South Korea’s space ambitions have been boosted in recent years as the Trump and Biden administrations took steps to ease decades-long US restrictions that capped Seoul’s missile development before eventually allowing its ally to build conventional weapons with unlimited range and warhead weight. In easing the so-called missile guidelines, the US also removed a limit on the power of solid-fuel rockets South Korea could build for space launch purposes.

South Korea currently has no military surveillance satellites of its own, which leaves it relying on US spy satellites to monitor North Korea. Officials have expressed hopes of launching domestically developed, low-orbit military surveillance satellites using the country’s own solid-fuel rockets in the next several years.

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Chronic kidney disease linked to heat stress could become a major health epidemic for millions of workers around the world as global temperatures increase over the coming decades, doctors have warned.

More research into the links between heat and CKDu – chronic kidney disease of uncertain cause – is urgently needed to assess the potential scale of the problem, they have said.

Unlike the conventional form of chronic kidney disease (CKD), which is a progressive loss of kidney function largely seen among elderly people and those afflicted with other conditions such as diabetes and hypertension, epidemics of CKDu have already emerged primarily in hot, rural regions of countries such as El Salvador and Nicaragua, where abnormally high numbers of agricultural workers have begun dying from irreversible kidney failure.

CKDu has also started to be recorded as affecting large numbers of people doing heavy manual labour in hot temperatures in other parts of Central America as well as North America, South America, the Middle East, Africa and India.

Kidneys are responsible for fluid balance in the body, which makes them particularly sensitive to extreme temperatures. There is an emerging consensus that CKDu should be recognised as a heat stress-related injury, where workers are developing subtle damage to their kidneys each day while they are in the field. This in turn can develop into severe kidney disease or complete renal failure over time.

This repetitive low-grade assault on the kidneys does not necessarily come with symptoms, so workers may not even know they are getting sick over time until things get so bad that they end up with end-stage kidney disease, said Dr Cecilia Sorensen, director of the global consortium on climate and health education at Columbia University.

“I think we just have no idea what the scope of the problem is because we’re not doing surveillance for it,” she said. “There are some regions that are clearly hotspots but in terms of its prevalence and how serious a problem it is, I don’t even think we’ve begun to wrap our brains around it.”

The documented epidemics, however, have similar characteristics. Those affected tend to be people who work in hot conditions outdoors and come from disproportionately vulnerable backgrounds – socially and economically – with limited access to medical care or insurance, or live in areas with modest healthcare infrastructure.

A former sugar cane worker with kidney problems, left, carries a mock coffin during a protest in Nicaragua, where tens of thousands of workers in the sector have been hit by CKDu. Photograph: Esteban Félix/AP

Sorensen said that, according to current data, it appears that the severity of the kidney damage gets worse the more vulnerable and desperate the worker is. She says that those who have no control over their working conditions or are incentivised to work for longer hours with no breaks, such as workers paid for how many berries they pick or how much sugar cane they cut, are likely to be those worst affected.

“They’re getting sick from the work that they’re doing, but they have no other options, and there’s very little regulatory oversight in the work environment that prevents this from happening. It’s a huge blind spot and a human rights issue,” she said.

Dr Ramón García Trabanino, a clinical nephrologist and medical director at El Salvador’s Centre of Hemodialysis, first noticed an unusual number of CKD patients saturating his hospital as a medical student more than two decades ago.

“They were young men,” he said, “and they were dying because we didn’t have the budget or the capacity to give them dialysis treatment. We did the best we could, but they kept dying and more kept coming.”

Since then he has started researching similar epidemics in Mexico, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama.

“If you take a look at the maximum temperature maps in the region in Central America, you will notice that they match the regions where we are describing the disease, the hotspots,” he said. “El Salvador and Nicaragua – every year we have a fight for the first place for the country with the highest mortality due to CKD. Our mortality rates are about 10 times higher than what we should expect. The number of new patients is overwhelming.”

Abnormally high numbers of agricultural workers have begun dying from irreversible kidney failure in hot, rural regions

< View the graphic at the source page. >

Guardian graphic. Source: BMC Public Health, Hansson, E, Mansourian, A, Farnaghi, M et al. Note: The CKD burden is the proportional mortality odds ratio (Nicaragua), mortality ratio (Guatemala, Mexico, Costa Rica), and hospital admissions rate ratio (El Salvador). Note: Mortality ratio is a comparison within each country, not a comparison within the entire region

Although the consensus view is that CKDu is related to heat exposure and dehydration, some scientists believe exposure to agrochemicals and infectious agents, as well as genetic makeup and risk factors related to poverty, malnutrition, and other social determinants of health, are also likely to play a role.

Prof Richard Johnson, of the University of Colorado’s school of medicine, said: “What is less clear is the fact that recurrent heat stress is not just a problem in the sugar cane fields of Nicaragua. Even in our own societies, the possibility that heat stress and dehydration can be playing a role in kidney disease is not as appreciated.”

Prof Tord Kjellstrom, of the Australian National University’s national centre for epidemiology and population health, said that heat stress is not getting the attention it needs in debates around how to mitigate the worst effects of the climate emergency.

“As the number and intensity of hot days increases, more and more working people will face even greater challenges to avoid heat stress, particularly the two-thirds of the global population who live in tropical and sub-tropical areas. Heat exhaustion threatens the livelihoods of millions and undermines efforts to reduce poverty,” said Kjellstrom, who is also a former member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“Global heating is a serious threat both to workers’ lives and the livelihoods of millions of people. Emerging policies on climate must take this into account if we are to have any chance of getting to grips with what is ahead.”

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Former President Donald Trump's new social media platform was reportedly hacked within hours of its announcement.

Trump announced he was launching a new media company, Trump Media & Technology Group, and its "Truth Social" app on Wednesday. The "Truth Social" app will begin a beta launch for "invited guests" in November, with a nationwide rollout planned for early 2022, according to a press release.

But people were able to sign up to create accounts using a publicly available link, Drew Harwell, a technology reporter for The Washington Post, said on Twitter late on Wednesday.

"I literally just registered 'mikepence.' The site hasn't even launched yet and it's already this vulnerable," Harwell added. In a subsequent tweet, he revealed that account had been suspended.

In another tweet, Harwell said it appeared the "donaldjtrump" account on Truth Social had been hacked. A screenshot Harwell shared showed the pinned post on the account was of a defecating animal.

However, it's not clear if that account belongs to the former president.

Reporter Drew Harwell shared a screenshot on Twitter showing the "donaldjtrump" handle on TRUTH Social appeared to have been hacked.
TWITTER/DREWHARWELL

Meanwhile, Mikael Thalen, a reporter for The Daily Dot, tweeted that he was able to create an account using the handle @donaldtrump before the public domain for the site was taken down.

"Was just able to setup an account using the handle @donaldtrump on 'Truth Social,' former President Donald Trump's new social media website," Thalen tweeted. "Although the site is not officially open, a URL was discovered allowing users to sign up anyway."

In a follow-up tweet, Thalen added: "For those asking, the public domain for what appeared to be the mobile beta of Trump's new social media platform 'Truth Social' has been taken offline. I did manage to grab a screenshot of the Account Settings menu before access was blocked."

In a statement, Trump said his goal in launching Trump Media & Technology Group and the "Truth Social" app is to create a rival to the Big Tech companies that expelled him after the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

"I created TRUTH Social and TMTG to stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech," he said. "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 had spoken about launching his own social media site since he was banned from Twitter, previously his favorite megaphone, over the risk of inciting violence. He also remains indefinitely suspended from other sites, including Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.

In May, he unveiled a new section on his existing website called "From the Desk of Donald J. Trump." The blog was soon abandoned after a reported decline in visitors.

A spokesperson for Trump Media & Technology Group has been contacted for comment.

UPDATE10/21/21, 6:25 a.m. ET: This article was updated to add a picture.

This illustration photo shows a person checking the app store on a smartphone for "Truth Social," former President Donald Trump's social networking platform.
CHRIS DELMAS/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

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The former-CEO of an Australian mobile software company has been sentenced to more than nine years in prison for his role in a massive horoscope text-messaging fraud that bilked $50 million from hundreds of thousands of U.S. cell phone users. 

Michael Pearse, 52, was accused of helping develop software that would auto-subscribe unwitting cell-phone customers to premium text-messaging services they hadn’t actually signed up for, prosecutors said.

Investigators say Pearse’s company, Bullroarer, developed the software for a premium text-messaging company called Tatto Inc., which fraudulently signed up subscribers from a list provided by Mobile Messenger, a U.S. firm that added the charges to a person’s mobile bill.

Between 2011 and 2013, prosecutors say Tatto billed hundreds of thousands of phone subscribers $9.99 a month for unsolicited text message horoscopes and jokes. Most customers would delete the messages thinking they were spam.

The charges would continue, however, until the subscriber noticed them on their bill and unsubscribed from the service. Efforts to challenge the previous charges often proved difficult, prosecutors said. In all, the scheme took in $50 million in fraudulent charges, $10 million of which went to Pearse, prosecutors said.

“Michael Pearse played a vital role in an international consumer-fraud conspiracy that swindled hundreds of thousands of mobile-phone customers out of millions,” said Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York.

Pearse was arrested in Australia in 2018 and extradited to the United States. He pleaded guilty in June to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. As part of his plea agreement, Pearse was ordered to pay back $10.2 million and forfeit three properties he owned in Australia. On Wednesday, he was sentenced to 109 months in federal prison.

In court filings, Pearse — who served as a volunteer firefighter in Australia  — argued that he played only a secondary role in the scheme and didn’t use the money he received to finance a lavish lifestyle. A message left with his attorney wasn’t immediately returned.

Prosecutors said nine others have pleaded guilty in the case. The two purported ringleaders, Darcy Wedd and Fraser Thompson, who ran Mobile Messenger, were convicted at trial in 2017. Wedd is serving 10 years in prison and Thompson five years.  

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Trapped in amber: Fossilized dinosaur-era crab bridges evolutionary gap

Vikings inhabited North America exactly 1,000 years ago, a new study finds.

Counting tree rings reveals that wooden objects previously found at an archaeological site on Newfoundland’s northern peninsula were made from trees felled in the year 1021. That’s the oldest precise date for Europeans in the Americas and the only one from before Christopher Columbus’ voyages in 1492, geoscientists Margot Kuitems and Michael Dee and colleagues report October 20 in Nature.

Researchers have assumed that Norse Vikings built and lived at the site, called L’Anse aux Meadows, roughly 1,000 years ago. But earlier attempts to more precisely date the settlement, which included three dwellings and other structures made of timber and turf and is now a UNESCO historic site, were inconclusive. Evidence of a possible second Viking settlement in Newfoundland from around 1,000 years ago remains preliminary (SN: 4/1/16).

The new study focused on four wooden objects found at L’Anse aux Meadows, which was first excavated in the 1960s. It’s not clear how the objects were used, but each had been cut with metal tools. On three of the finds, Kuitems and Dee, both of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, and their team identified an annual tree growth ring that displayed a signature spike in radiocarbon levels. Other researchers have dated that spike to the year 993, when a surge of cosmic rays from solar activity bombarded Earth and increased the planet’s atmospheric levels of radioactive carbon.

Counting growth rings out to the edge of each wooden object starting at the year 993 ring yielded the same age — 1021.

Despite its precision, that date leaves unanswered when Vikings first set foot in the Americas. L’Anse aux Meadows might have been part of Vinland, a region in what’s now eastern Canada that is described in 13th century Icelandic texts as having been settled by Vikings.

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Also: CANCEL COLUMBUS DAY: SUN STORMS PINPOINT EUROPEANS BEING IN CANADA IN 1021 A.D.

Columbus was not the first European to reach the Americas. The Vikings got there centuries before, although exactly when has remained unclear. Here, an international team of scientists show that Europeans were already active in the Americas in 1021 AD.

The Vikings sailed great distances in their iconic longships. To the west, they established settlements in Iceland, Greenland and eventually a base at L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, Canada. However, it has remained unclear when this first transatlantic activity took place. Here, scientists show that Europeans were present in the Americas in 1021 AD—precisely 1,000 years ago this year. This date also marks the earliest known point by which the Atlantic had been crossed, and migration by humankind had finally encircled the entire planet.

A solar storm solution

In this study, the chopping of wood by Vikings at L'Anse aux Meadows was dated to exactly the year 1021 AD. The three pieces of wood studied, from three different trees, all came from contexts archaeologically attributable to the Vikings. Each one also displayed clear evidence of cutting and slicing by blades made of metal—a material not produced by the indigenous population. The exact year was determinable because a massive solar storm occurred in 992 AD that produced a distinct radiocarbon signal in tree rings from the following year.

"The distinct uplift in radiocarbon production that occurred between 992 and 993 AD has been detected in tree-ring archives from all over the world," says Associate Professor Michael Dee (University of Groningen), director of the research. Each of the three wooden objects exhibited this signal 29 growth rings (years) before the bark edge. "Finding the signal from the solar storm 29 growth rings in from the bark allowed us to conclude that the cutting activity took place in the year 1021 AD" says Dr. Margot Kuitems (University of Groningen), first author of the paper.

Microscope image of a wood fragment from the Norse layers at L’Anse aux Meadows. Credit: Petra Doeve, University of Groningen

How far, how often?

The number of Viking expeditions to the Americas, and the duration of their stay over the Atlantic, remain unknown. All current data suggest that the whole endeavor was somewhat short lived, and the cultural and ecological legacy of this first European activity in the Americas is likely to have been small. Nonetheless, botanical evidence from L'Anse aux Meadows has confirmed that the Vikings did explore lands further south than Newfoundland.
 

< View the video at the source page. >

This video introduces ECHOES - Exact Chronology of Early Societies, a 5-year project funded by the European Research Council and based at the University of Groningen. Its central aim is to develop a new approach to radiocarbon dating, one that is accurate to the exact calendar year. The technique will be built on the recent discovery of annual rises, or ‘spikes’, in the concentration of radiocarbon in the atmosphere. Credit: ESRIG - Energy and Sustainability Research Institute Groningen, Pix Videos

The sagas

1021 AD is the earliest year in which European presence in the Americas can be scientifically proven. Previous dates for the Viking presence in the Americas have relied heavily on the Icelandic Sagas. However, these began as oral histories and were only written down centuries after the events they describe. Whilst contradictory and at times fantastical, the Sagas also suggest encounters occurred, both violent and amiable, between the Europeans and the indigenous people of the region. However, little archaeological evidence has been uncovered to support such exchanges. Other medieval accounts also exist, which imply prominent figures on the European mainland were made aware the Vikings had made landfall across the Atlantic.

The study is published in Nature.

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Emily P. Terlizzi, M.P.H., and Tina Norris, Ph.D., from the National Center for Health Statistics in Hyattsville, Maryland, described the percentage of U.S. adults who had taken prescription medication for their mental health or received counseling or therapy from a mental health professional in the last 12 months using data from the National Health Interview Survey.

The researchers found that 20.3 percent of adults had received any mental health treatment in the previous 12 months in 2020, including 16.5 and 10.1 percent who had taken prescription medication and received counseling or therapy, respectively. Compared with men, women were more likely to have received any mental health treatment. Non-Hispanic White adults were more likely to have received any mental health treatment compared with non-Hispanic Black, Hispanic, and non-Hispanic Asian adults (24.4, 15.3, 12.6, and 7.7 percent, respectively). The percentage of adults who had taken medication for their mental health increased, and the percentage who had received counseling or therapy decreased as the level of urbanization decreased.

"While the percentage of adults who had taken medication for their mental health increased with age, the percentage who had received counseling or therapy decreased with age," the authors write.

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The impact of extreme heat on the human body is not unlike what happens when a car overheats. Failure starts in one or two systems, and eventually it takes over the whole engine until the car stops.

That’s according to Mike McGeehin, environmental health epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “When the body can no longer cool itself it immediately impacts the circulatory system. The heart, the kidneys, and the body become more and more heated and eventually our cognitive abilities begin to desert us – and that’s when people begin fainting, eventually going into a coma and dying.”

Between 1998 and 2017, more than 166,000 people died due to heat, according to the World Health Organization, and countries around the world are experiencing a year on year rise in record-breaking high temperatures. For many people, unendurable heat is becoming the new normal. It is most likely to disproportionately affect the poor, the sick – those with chronic conditions, or heart and kidney disease in particular – and older people.

Each organ responds differently to extreme heat exposure, with symptoms that quickly become fatal or cause lingering damage from which the body may never fully recover.

“Every human being is at risk from extreme heat – it’s a fact of life, your body needs to function in a certain environment,” says McGeehin. “And when that environment becomes extreme then you are at risk.”

Heart

To sweat and cool off, blood flow shifts from the central organs to the periphery of the body, causing a fall in blood pressure in these vital organs. The heart starts to beat faster to compensate, but if the person does not replenish their water reserves, blood pressure can drop dangerously and cause fainting, explains Dr Pieter Vancamp, post-doctoral researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. Vancamp published a book this year about how the human body deals with external challenges, such as extreme heat.

In the worst-case scenario, it can lead to heart failure if left untreated. In the last decade, 384 people died in the US while working in extreme heat, including farm workers and waste collectors, according to a recent investigation. University of Edinburgh researchers found exposure to extreme heat increases the risk of heart disease in firefighters.

Brain

The hypothalamus is our in-house thermostat. Located in the brain, it regulates body temperature using information passed to it by temperature sensors in our skin, muscles, and other organs.

When high temperatures are detected, the brain initiates a cascade of responses to help us cool down, such as sweating, increased respiration and the impulse to seek water and cooler environments. But when the system overheats, these responses start to fail, and miscommunication can occur in the brain, contributing to confusion, dizziness and altered behaviour, says Vancamp.

“A normal cell works best at around 37C. When you increase the temperature even by a few degrees … the communication between nerve cells starts to malfunction. And that’s the moment when communication with the body starts to deteriorate,” he says.

In about 20% of people who survive heatstroke, the brain may never fully recover, “leaving a person with personality changes, clumsiness, or poor coordination”, according to research by UCLA’s School of Medicine.

Kidneys

Kidneys regulate blood concentrations of water and salt. So, the organs are the immediate interface between us and the climate crisis – because when it starts getting hot, we lose a lot of water and salt through sweat, says Dr Richard Johnson, professor of medicine and head of renal diseases and hypertension at the University of Colorado.

Hormones produced in the brain are required by the kidneys to do their job, but when the heat affects the brain and disrupts the normal level of these chemicals, the kidneys (and other organs) suffer, he says. Johnson says that his research and others also show that recurrent heat stress and dehydration could cause chronic kidney disease. A report last year described an “epidemic of chronic kidney disease as non-traditional origin in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica and Guatemala,” and that “chronic kidney disease has been reported on sugarcane farms as well as cotton, corn and rice farms,” in working-age people.

Liver

The liver is susceptible to extreme heat. During heatstroke – when the body’s internal temperature crosses 40C – damage to liver cells can be seen by the increased levels of liver enzymes in the blood, says Dr Edward Walter, a consultant and anaesthetist at the Royal Surrey county hospital.

“The liver requires highly regulated temperature – and we found that recurrent heat stress caused low-grade liver damage that was quite noticeable, but … it’s not known at this time is if that can lead to chronic liver disease,” adds Johnson. “But it’s an area that probably should be investigated.”

Gut

As blood flows away from central organs to deal with heat, the limited oxygen can impede normal functioning. In the gastrointestinal tract this can cause inflammation and, in extreme cases, nausea and vomiting.

In 2013, researchers at University hospital Zurich found an increased risk of inflammatory bowel disease flare-ups during heatwaves, in what they described as the first study to link the climate crisis to bowel disease.

Extreme heat can also cause “leaky gut”, in which toxins and pathogenic bacteria to seep in to the blood, increasing the likelihood of infections, says Walter. It is almost possible to develop a kind of sepsis infection by being hot, he says. “Gut permeability seems to be a big, big problem.”

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Using this novel approach, researchers say diseased cells are removed from the body, treated with drugs, and then placed back in the tumor. They are delivered with a payload of medications that activate the immune system’s T cells. The injured cancer cells appear to act as a distress signal that spurs them into action.

“When you create cells that have DNA damage but are not killed, under certain conditions those live, injured cells can send a signal that awakens the immune system,” says senior author Professor Michael Yaffe in a university release.

An effective cancer treatment for many types

Immunotherapy – which stimulates the immune system to kill tumors – only works for a handful of cancers. The new method could enable it to be used against many forms of the disease.

In experiments, it completely eliminated tumors, melanomas, and breast cancers in 40 percent of treated mice. When the same rodents were injected with cancer cells months later, T cells recognized and destroyed them before new tumors could form.

The MIT team improved the performance of immunotherapy drugs called checkpoint blockade inhibitors. They take the brakes off of T cells that have become “exhausted” and unable to attack tumors. Adding chemotherapy drugs helped injured cells send signals that attract the immune system’s attention.

“This describes a new concept of immunogenic cell injury rather than immunogenic cell death for cancer treatment,” Prof. Yaffe reports.

“We showed that if you treated tumor cells in a dish, when you injected them back directly into the tumor and gave checkpoint blockade inhibitors, the live, injured cells were the ones that reawaken the immune system.”

Several clinical trials combining the therapies are underway. The study in the journal Science Signaling sheds fresh light on the best approach.

Striking the right cancer-killing balance

The drugs that worked best were those that cause DNA damage. They activate cellular pathways in tumors that respond to stress. The chemicals send out distress signals that provoke T cells to destroy injured cells and any other tumor cells nearby.

“Our findings fit perfectly with the concept that ‘danger signals’ within cells can talk to the immune system, a theory pioneered by Polly Matzinger at NIH in the 1990s, though still not universally accepted,” the study author adds.

Researchers also tried injecting DNA-damaging drugs directly into the tumors, instead of treating cells outside the body. However, this was ineffective because the chemotherapy drugs also harmed T cells and other immune cells near the tumor.

Also, injecting the injured cells without checkpoint blockade inhibitors had little benefit.

“You have to present something that can act as an immunostimulant, but then you also have to release the preexisting block on the immune cells,” Prof. Yaffe concludes.

Yaffe now hopes to test the approach in patients whose tumors have not responded to immunotherapy. First, study authors will need to carry out more tests to determine which drugs, and at which doses, would be most beneficial for different types of tumors.

The researchers are also further investigating exactly how the injured tumor cells stimulate such a strong T cell response.

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

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“Our findings can help to better identify, understand and treat canine hyperactivity, impulsivity and inattention. Moreover, they indicated similarity with human ADHD, consolidating the role of dogs in ADHD-related research,” says Professor Hannes Lohi, head of a canine gene research group at Helsinki, in a university release.

“Dogs share many similarities with humans, including physiological traits and the same environment. In addition, ADHD-like behavior naturally occurs in dogs. This makes dogs an interesting model for investigating ADHD in humans,” adds doctoral researcher Sini Sulkama.

Dogs at home alone more often more at risk

Prof. Lohi’s team examined over 11,000 dogs during their extensive behavioral survey. Researchers used questions and measures which scientists often utilize during human ADHD research. The results show that puppies and male dogs are more prone to ADHD-like behavior. However, an owner’s behavior can influence this as well, as dogs which don’t get enough attention, stay home alone much of the time, or don’t get enough exercise show more behavioral changes.

“We found that hyperactivity, impulsivity and inattention were more common in young dogs and male dogs. Corresponding observations relating to age and gender in connection with ADHD have been made in humans too,” Dr. Jenni Puurunen reports.

“As social animals, dogs can get frustrated and stressed when they are alone, which can be released as hyperactivity, impulsivity and inattention. It may be that dogs who spend longer periods in solitude also get less exercise and attention from their owners,” Sulkama says.

Along with how a dog owner takes care of their pet, the study also finds that a person’s previous experience with dogs plays a role as well. The team discovered a link between hyperactivity and impulsivity and the owner’s previous choices in dogs.

“People may pick as their first dog a less active individual that better matches the idea of a pet dog, whereas more active and challenging dogs can be chosen after gaining more experience with dogs,” Sulkama explains.

Dogs may also develop obsessive-compulsive disorder

Study authors find that certain breeds are more likely to display ADHD-like characteristics. Much of this comes down to their genes and the traits many of these breeds have been bred to display over many generations.

“Hyperactivity and impulsivity on the one hand, and good concentration on the other, are common in breeds bred for work, such as the German Shepherd and Border Collie. In contrast, a more calm disposition is considered a benefit in breeds that are popular as pets or show dogs, such as the Chihuahua, Long-Haired Collie and Poodle, making them easier companions in everyday life. Then again, the ability to concentrate has not been considered as important a trait in these breeds as in working breeds, which is why inattention can be more common among pet dogs,” Prof. Lohi says.

Unfortunately, just like humans, the study finds those with ADHD often develop other conditions such obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). In dogs, this presents itself in behaviors like tail chasing, continuous licking surfaces or themselves, or staring at “nothing.”

“The findings suggest that the same brain regions and neurobiological pathways regulate activity, impulsivity and concentration in both humans and dogs. This strengthens the promise that dogs show as a model species in the study of ADHD. In other words, the results can both make it easier to identify and treat canine impulsivity and inattention as well as promote ADHD research,” Sulkama concludes.

The findings appear in the journal Translational Psychiatry.

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A total of 17 new local cases were reported for Oct. 19, up from nine a day earlier, data from the National Health Commission (NHC) showed on Wednesday.

The new cases were reported in eight cities and administrative divisions, more than four for Oct. 18, the bulk of which were in northern and northwestern China. Three separate cases were also reported in recent days in the south and southwest of China.

Among the cases was one in the capital city Beijing, which is busy gearing up for its hosting of the 2022 Winter Games in February, where officials vowed stringent efforts against the virus.

Almost half of the 26 local cases found on Monday and Tuesday were of close contacts of an elderly couple who had travelled in the provinces of Shaanxi and Gansu and the Chinese region of Inner Mongolia before being confirmed as COVID-19 patients on Sunday.

It remains unclear whether the married couple were the source of the outbreak, or where they had contracted the virus.

After the couple's travel history was disclosed, many cities scrambled to trace their close contacts, requiring people who had been to places where those with detected cases had travelled to report to local authorities and get tested.

The city of Jiayuguan in northwestern Gansu province even launched its second round of city-wide testing after an initial round yielded no positive results, following reports that some of those with cases recently visited the city.

Officials have not disclosed how those with cases reported on Monday and Tuesday contracted the virus, but tentative signs indicated there might be multiple sources of the virus across China, which could complicate the country's efforts to seek zero infections.

Three out of the five local cases found this week in Erenhot city, in Inner Mongolia, did not appear to have any connection with infected travellers in other cities, but were linked to a case detected on Oct. 13, a person who worked at a local logistics hub. It is unclear how this person was infected. Reporting by Ryan Woo, Roxanne Liu, Stella Qiu and Liangping Gao Editing by Jacqueline Wong and Peter Graff)

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Although many questions remain to be answered about the long-term consequences of the transplant, which involved a brain-dead patient followed only for 54 hours, experts in the field said the procedure represented a milestone.

“We need to know more about the longevity of the organ,” said Dr. Dorry Segev, professor of transplant surgery at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine who was not involved in the research. Nevertheless, he said: “This is a huge breakthrough. It’s a big, big deal.”

Researchers have long sought to grow organs in pigs suitable for transplantation into humans. A steady stream of organs — which could eventually include hearts, lungs and livers — would offer a lifeline to the more than 100,000 Americans currently on transplant waiting lists, including the 90,240 who need a kidney. Twelve people on the waiting lists die each day.

An even larger number of Americans with kidney failure — more than a half million — depend on grueling dialysis treatments to survive. In large part because of the scarcity of human organs, the vast majority of dialysis patients do not qualify for transplants, which are reserved for those most likely to thrive after the procedure.

The surgery, carried out at N.Y.U. Langone Health, was first reported by USA Today on Tuesday. The research has not yet been peer-reviewed nor published in a medical journal.

The transplanted kidney was obtained from a pig genetically engineered to grow an organ unlikely to be rejected by the human body. In a close approximation of an actual transplant procedure, the kidney was attached to a person who had suffered brain death and was maintained on a ventilator.

The kidney, attached to blood vessels in the upper leg outside the abdomen, started functioning normally, making urine and the waste product creatinine “almost immediately,” according to Dr. Robert Montgomery, the director of the N.Y.U. Langone Transplant Institute, who performed the procedure in September.

Although the organ was not implanted in the body, problems with so-called xenotransplants — from animals like primates and pigs — usually occur at the interface of the human blood supply and the organ, where human blood flows through pig vessels, experts said.

The fact that the organ functioned outside the body is a strong indication that it will work in the body, Dr. Montgomery said.

“It was better than I think we even expected,” he said. “It just looked like any transplant I’ve ever done from a living donor. A lot of kidneys from deceased people don’t work right away, and take days or weeks to start. This worked immediately.”

Last year, 39,717 residents of the United States received an organ transplant, the majority of them — 23,401 — receiving kidneys, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, a nonprofit that coordinates the nation’s organ procurement efforts.

Genetically engineered pigs “could potentially be a sustainable, renewable source of organs — the solar and wind of organ availability,” Dr. Montgomery said.

Reactions to the news among transplantation experts ranged from cautiously optimistic to wildly effusive, though all acknowledged the procedure represented a sea change. The prospect of raising pigs in order to harvest their organs for humans is bound to raise questions about animal welfare and exploitation, though an estimated 100 million pigs already are killed in the United States each year for food.

While some surgeons speculated that it could be just months before genetically engineered pigs’ kidneys are transplanted into living human beings, others said there was still much work to be done.

“This is really cutting-edge translational surgery and transplantation that is on the brink of being able to do it in living human beings,” said Dr. Amy Friedman, a former transplant surgeon and chief medical officer of LiveOnNY, the organ procurement organization in the greater New York area.

The group was involved in the selection and identification of the brain-dead patient receiving the experimental procedure. The patient was a registered organ donor, and because the organs were not suitable for transplantation, the patient’s family agreed to permit research to test the experimental transplant procedure.

Dr. Friedman said she envisioned using hearts, livers and other organs grown in pigs, as well. “It’s truly mind-boggling to think of how many transplants we might be able to offer,” she said, adding, “You’d have to breed the pigs, of course.”

Other experts were more reserved, saying they wanted to see whether the results were reproducible and to review data collected by N.Y.U. Langone.

“There’s no question this is a tour de force, in that it’s hard to do and you have to jump through a lot of hoops,” said Dr. Jay A. Fishman, associate director of the transplantation center at Massachusetts General Hospital.

“Whether this particular study advances the field will depend on what data they collected and whether they share it, or whether it is a step just to show they can do it,” Dr. Fishman said. He urged humility “about what we know.”

Many hurdles remain before genetically engineered pigs’ organs can be used in living human beings, said Dr. David Klassen, chief medical officer of the United Network for Organ Sharing.

While he called the surgery “a watershed moment,” he warned that long-term rejection of organs occurs even when the donor kidney is well-matched, and “even when you’re not trying to cross species barriers.”

The kidney has functions in addition to clearing blood of toxins. And there are concerns about pig viruses infecting recipients, Dr. Klassen said: “It’s a complicated field, and to imagine that we know all of the things that are going to happen and all the problems that will arise is naïve.”

Xenotransplantation, the process of grafting or transplanting organs or tissues between different species, has a long history. Efforts to use the blood and skin of animals in humans go back hundreds of years.

In the 1960s, chimpanzee kidneys were transplanted into a small number of human patients. Most died shortly afterward; the longest a patient lived was nine months. In 1983, a baboon heart was transplanted into an infant girl known as Baby Faye. She died 20 days later.

Pigs offered advantages over primates for organ procurement — they are easier to raise, reach maturation faster, and achieve adult human size in six months. Pig heart valves are routinely transplanted into humans, and some patients with diabetes have received pig pancreas cells. Pig skin has also been used as temporary grafts for burn patients.

The combination of two new technologies — gene editing and cloning — has yielded genetically altered pig organs. Pig hearts and kidneys have been transplanted successfully into monkeys and baboons, but safety concerns precluded their use in humans.

“The field up to now has been stuck in the preclinical primate stage, because going from primate to living human is perceived as a big jump,” Dr. Montgomery said.

The kidney used in the new procedure was obtained by knocking out a pig gene that encodes a sugar molecule that elicits an aggressive human rejection response. The pig was genetically engineered by Revivicor and approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use as a source for human therapeutics.

Dr. Montgomery and his team also transplanted the pig’s thymus, a gland that is involved in the immune system, in an effort to ward off immune reactions to the kidney.

After attaching the kidney to blood vessels in the upper leg, the surgeons covered it with a protective shield so they could observe it and take tissue samples over the 54-hour study period. Urine and creatinine levels were normal, Dr. Montgomery and his colleagues found, and no signs of rejection were detected during more than two days of observation.

“There didn’t seem to be any kind of incompatibility between the pig kidney and the human that would make it not work,” Dr. Montgomery said. “There wasn’t immediate rejection of the kidney.”

The long-term prospects are still unknown, he acknowledged. But “this allowed us to answer a really important question: Is there something that’s going to happen when we move this from a primate to a human that is going to be disastrous?”

The post In a First, Surgeons Attached a Pig Kidney to a Human — and It Worked appeared first on New York Times.

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Globally, four in 10 adults suffer from gastrointestinal disorders, which can adversely affect quality of life. Probiotics, which are microorganisms that have been clinically shown to improve gut health, could help relieve gastrointestinal disorders for individuals and keep them healthy. However, traditional probiotic carriers are largely restricted to and consumed as supplements and dairy products (e.g. yogurt and cultured milk). Consumers who are lactose intolerant and vegans would find this limiting as they would not be able to enjoy the health benefits associated with probiotic consumption.

A research team led by Prof Liu Shao Quan from the Department of Food Science and Technology, National University of Singapore, has developed a fermented coffee beverage which is rich in clinically proven probiotics suitable for consumption by the general population. The researchers used a mass spectrometry-based metabolomics technique to discover health-promoting metabolites in the probiotic coffee (see Figure). Metabolomics is an analytical approach which can be used for the analysis and identification of bioactive compounds in food products.

The research team developed the coffee drink by adding specially selected nutrients to brewed coffee, followed by carefully chosen probiotics. Through a natural fermentation process, each cup of coffee can contain at least 1 billion live probiotics. It can also be stored for at least six months under ambient conditions without compromising on probiotic viability. The probiotic fermentation process provides the coffee drink with healthy metabolites such as indole-3-lactate, 1H-indole-3-carboxaldehyde, 4-hydroxyphenylactate, and 3-phenyllactate. Apart from enhancing gut health, these metabolites are scientifically proven to also elicit antimicrobial, immunomodulatory and antilipolytic effects. The research findings can potentially provide consumers with a better choice for their daily caffeine fix.

Prof Liu said, "By infusing probiotics into an everyday beverage enjoyed by the masses, the health benefits of probiotic consumption can be unlocked to mainstream audiences."

Ms Alcine Chan, a Ph.D. student on the research team said, "We have ensured that the original coffee flavors are not compromised despite having the probiotic fermentation element. For example, acidic compounds which are commonly produced by probiotics breaking down the sugars in the beverage could lead to unpleasant sourness in the taste. This is addressed by carefully devising a formulation that ensures the sourness is not prominent."

The research team has filed a patent for the probiotic coffee formulation and hopes to collaborate with industry partners to commercialize the research outcome and bring the benefits of the probiotic coffee drink to the wider public.

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Suraj Kumar (middle) was convicted of killing his wife with a cobra bite

Last week, an Indian man was given a rare double-life sentence for killing his wife by making a cobra bite her. Soutik Biswas and Ashraf Padanna piece together the events leading to the grisly murder.

In April last year, 28-year-old Suraj Kumar paid 7,000 rupees ($92; £67) for a spectacled cobra, one of the most venomous snakes in the world. Trade in snakes is illegal in India, so Suraj made the clandestine purchase from a snake catcher, Suresh Kumar, in the southern state of Kerala.

Suraj drilled a hole in a plastic container for air to flow in, put the cobra inside, and took it home.

Thirteen days later, he put the container in a bag and trudged to his in-laws' home, about 44 km (27 miles) away, where his wife Uthra was recovering from a mysterious snake bite.

Suraj and Uthra had met two years earlier, via the services of a matrimonial broker. Suraj's father was an auto-rickshaw driver and his mother a homemaker. Uthra, who was three years younger than Suraj and suffered from learning disabilities, came from a significantly more well-off family - her father was a rubber trader and her mother was a retired school principal.

When the couple married, Suraj accepted a dowry from Uthra's parents of 768 grams of gold (worth about $32,000 at today's rates), a Suzuki sedan and 400,000 rupees in cash. He also received 8,000 rupees a month from her parents "to look after their daughter", investigators said.

It was her parents' home Uthra returned to after being released from hospital, where she was treated for the snake bite. It had put her there for 52 days and required three painful surgeries to heal her affected leg. She had been bitten by a Russell's viper - a highly venomous earth-coloured snake responsible for thousands of deaths in India every year.

Then on the night of 6 May, investigators say, while Uthra was still recuperating, she accepted a glass of fruit juice from Suraj which was laced with sedatives. When the mixture had put her under, Suraj brought out the container with the cobra, overturned it, and dropped the five-foot-long snake on his sleeping wife.

But rather than attack her, the snake slithered away. Suraj picked it up and flung it on Uthra, but again it slithered off.

Suraj tried a third time - he held the reptile by its trademark hood and pressed its head near Uthra's left arm. The agitated cobra, using the fangs at the front of the mouth, bit her twice. Then it slinked off to a shelf in the room and stayed there all night.

"Cobras don't bite unless you provoke them, Suraj had to catch it by its hood and force it to bite his wife," says Mavish Kumar, a herpetologist.

Suraj washed the juice glass, destroyed a stick he had used to safely handle the snake and deleted incriminating call records on his mobile phone, according to investigators.

When Uthra's mother entered the room the next morning, she told the police she saw her daughter lying on the bed with "her mouth open, and her left hand dangling on one side".

She said Suraj was also in the room.

"Why didn't you check whether she was awake?" Manimekhala Vijayan asked her son-in-law.

"I didn't want to disturb her sleep," Suraj told her.

Uthra slept on the bed on the left in this room where she was killed

The family rushed Uthra to the hospital, where the doctors pronounced her dead by poisoning and called the police.

The autopsy report found two pairs of puncture wounds, less than an inch apart, on her left forearm. Blood and viscera samples revealed the presence of cobra venom and sedative drugs. Cobra venom can kill in hours by paralysing respiratory muscles.

Acting on a complaint by Uthra's parents, the police arrested Suraj on 24 May in connection with his wife's unusual death. After a 78-day investigation and with charges running into more than 1,000 pages, the trial began.

More than 90 people, including herpetologists and doctors, testified. The prosecution built its case using Suraj's call records, internet history, a dead cobra exhumed from the back garden, a stash of sedatives in the family car and evidence that he bought not one but two snakes.

Investigators said that Suraj had also purchased the Russell's viper which had bitten Uthra months before she died.

Suresh, the snake catcher, turned on Suraj and confessed to selling him both snakes. A herpetologist told the court that it was highly unlikely a cobra would have entered the couple's bedroom through a raised window. The crime scene was even recreated, using a live cobra, a snake handler and a dummy of the victim on a bed.

Police found the plastic container in which Suraj kept the cobra that killed his wife

"Cobras are not very active at night. Every time we dropped a cobra on the supine dummy, it slithered to the floor and went into a dark corner of the room," Mavish Kumar said. "Even when we provoked the cobra, it did not try to bite."

He then caught the neck of one cobra and "induced" the bite on a piece of chicken tied to the plastic hand of the dummy. The distance between the bites was the same as it had been on Uthra's arm.

"This is a case of diabolical and ghastly uxoricide," said Judge M Manoj, referring to the murder of a wife. Judge Manoj sentenced Suraj to life in prison, saying he had schemed to kill Uthra and "disguise it as a death from an accidental cobra bite".

According to investigators, the fatal cobra bite was Suraj's third, not second, attempt to kill his wife in just four months.

Suraj, who worked as a collection agent for a local bank, met the snake catcher Suresh in February last year, and bought the Russell's viper from him for 10,000 rupees. He took the snake home in a plastic container and hid it under a heap of firewood in a shed.

Then on 27 February, Suraj released the snake on the landing of the first floor of his home, investigators said, and asked his wife to go upstairs to fetch his mobile phone.

Uthra saw the viper coiled up on the marble floor and raised an alarm, her mother told the police. Suraj came up, picked up the snake with a stick, and left the house. He put it back in the container.

On the night of 2 March, Suraj tried again. He laced his wife's pudding with sedatives, and released the viper in the bedroom while she slept.

The murder took place on the ground floor of this house in Kollam district

This time, investigators said, the snake attacked. Uthra woke up screaming in pain, bites on her leg, and Suraj threw the snake out of the window.

"Snakebite cases are common in Kerala, so we didn't suspect any foul play here," said Vijayasenan Vidhyadharan, Uthra's father. (About 60,000 people die of snakebites in India every year.)

It took more than two hours that night to find a hospital that provided critical care treatment. Uthra was suffering from swelling and haemorrhage.

Three skin transplant surgeries later, she returned home to her parent's two-storey house in a verdant village in Kollam to rest.

Suraj remained with his son and parents at his home in Pathanamthitta. But he was already plotting again.

"While his wife was in the hospital, Suraj was trawling the internet about handling snakes and learning about snake venom," said Anoop Krishna, one of the investigators.

Suraj (middle) had been planning to kill his wife for more than a year, police say

Investigators say Suraj had been plotting the murder since the birth of his son, Dhruv, in 2019. His internet history revealed that he searched venomous snakes and watched snake videos on YouTube, including a channel by a locally well-known snake handler. One of the snake-handler's most popular videos is about the "dangerous and aggressive Russell's viper".

Suraj reportedly told his friends that his wife was "haunted by the curse of a serpent" in her dreams, in which she was "destined to die of snakebite".

In reality, Suraj was determined to kill his wife, steal her money, and marry another woman, investigators said.

"He planned it meticulously and succeeded in the third attempt," said Apukuttan Ashok, the lead investigating police officer. Public prosecutor Mohanraj Gopalakrishnan called the case a "milestone in police investigations in India, when prosecutors could decisively prove that an animal was used as a weapon of murder".

Suraj received a rare double life sentence for the crime. According to Gopalakrishnan, he showed no remorse.

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A little less than a year ago, China made history by bringing samples of the moon back to Earth—the first new moon rocks brought back to Earth since the last Apollo mission in 1972. The point of the mission, called Chang’e-5, was not just to demonstrate the country’s technological prowess in space and further its lunar exploration ambitions, but also to probe these samples and solve some of the mysteries behind how the moon has evolved over its 4.5 billion-year history.

And that scientific work has an arguably more tantalizing goal: using the history of the moon to understand what kinds of resources are sitting on or below the lunar surface that could help future lunar colonists more easily sustain their homes. The most important of these potential resources is water, in the form of ice—which we know the moon has truckloads of waiting to be mined.

The first insights from the Chang’e-5 samples just might mean that water on the moon runs deeper than we’d thought.

In a trio of studies published in Nature on Tuesday, Chinese scientists have learned that the moon evolved more slowly than once thought. Volcanic activity and interior heating did not slow down in the regions formerly home to the Chang’e-5 samples until almost a billion years past what previous estimates predicted. This volcanic activity seems to have purged these regions of a lot of water, so that the present-day Chang’e-5 moon rocks are less hydrated than their Apollo counterparts.

On their own, these findings might seem to say there’s less water on the moon than we hope. But Clive Neal, a planetary geologist at the University of Notre Dame, told The Daily Beast it’s all about properly interpreting the new findings.

In his view, the results actually suggest “there’s a water signature that’s enduring a long time throughout these regions of the moon,” despite billions of years of violent volcanic activity. These samples “are derived from sources that still have a hydration signature.” And the presence of that signal means the moon’s water might be much more resilient than we think.

“The fact that they've got a water abundance out of these samples is something to sort of look at in terms of ‘Wow, there is still a hydration signal.’ It might be a source that’s only just been tapped,” said Neal.

The obsession with water on the moon is twofold: it’s a resource that could be turned into something that moon settlers could drink to stay alive. But it’s also something that could be converted into rocket fuel, which would turn the moon into a kind of interplanetary gas station for cheap refueling (versus hauling all necessary propellant during launch from Earth). That’s why NASA is launching a rover named VIPER in 2023 to prospect and study water on the moon.

It’s going to take many more studies to really narrow down what the real history of water on the moon is, and what that means for future lunar exploration. But while the U.S. is busy preparing VIPER and the return of astronauts to the moon later this decade, China’s new moon rocks are filling up the curiosity gap pretty well.

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The pigs graze on farmland between the runways and clear residue from the sugar beet harvest that attracts geese, according to BBC. Because the airport is below sea level, the farmland is fertile, which also attracts geese, according to BBC. In 2020, Schiphol Airport recorded 150 bird strikes.

A BBC correspondent remarked on how the pigs are “sensitive, intelligent creatures” and asked how they feel being close to runways.

“Here they’ve got like four soccer fields and they have the same houses, the same water system, the same feed system, and they have the same houses, the same water system, the same feed system, so for us this is really normal to keep them this way,” farmer Josse Haarhuis said.

“The few weeks they’ve been here, there were no birds seen in this field,” said Yvonne Versteeg, who is in charge of flora and fauna at the airport.

In addition to the pigs, Schiphol Airport also uses bird-scaring technology such as sound generators and green lasers to keep the geese away.

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In some ways, accounts of “human origins” play a similar role for us today as myth did for ancient Greeks or Polynesians. This is not to cast aspersions on the scientific rigour or value of these accounts. It is simply to observe that the two fulfil somewhat similar functions. If we think on a scale of, say, the last 3m years, there actually was a time when someone, after all, did have to light a fire, cook a meal or perform a marriage ceremony for the first time. We know these things happened. Still, we really don’t know how. It is very difficult to resist the temptation to make up stories about what might have happened: stories which necessarily reflect our own fears, desires, obsessions and concerns. As a result, such distant times can become a vast canvas for the working out of our collective fantasies.

Let’s take just one example. Back in the 1980s, there was a great deal of buzz about a “mitochondrial Eve”, the putative common ancestor of our entire species. Granted, no one was claiming to have actually found the physical remains of such an ancestor, but DNA sequencing demonstrated that such an Eve must have existed, perhaps as recently as 120,000 years ago. And while no one imagined we’d ever find Eve herself, the discovery of a variety of other fossil skulls rescued from the Great Rift Valley in east Africa seemed to provide a suggestion as to what Eve might have looked like and where she might have lived. While scientists continued debating the ins and outs, popular magazines were soon carrying stories about a modern counterpart to the Garden of Eden, the original incubator of humanity, the savanna-womb that gave life to us all.

Many of us probably still have something resembling this picture of human origins in our mind. More recent research, though, has shown it couldn’t possibly be accurate. In fact, biological anthropologists and geneticists are now converging on an entirely different picture. For most of our evolutionary history, we did indeed live in Africa – but not just the eastern savannas, as previously thought. Instead, our biological ancestors were distributed everywhere from Morocco to the Cape of Good Hope. Some of those populations remained isolated from one another for tens or even hundreds of thousands of years, cut off from their nearest relatives by deserts and rainforests. Strong regional traits developed, so that early human populations appear to have been far more physically diverse than modern humans. If we could travel back in time, this remote past would probably strike us as something more akin to a world inhabited by hobbits, giants and elves than anything we have direct experience of today, or in the more recent past.

Ancestral humans were not only quite different from one another; they also coexisted with smaller-brained, more ape-like species such as Homo naledi. What were these ancestral societies like? At this point, at least, we should be honest and admit that, for the most part, we don’t have the slightest idea. There’s only so much you can reconstruct from cranial remains and the occasional piece of knapped flint – which is basically all we have.

What we do know is that we are composite products of this original mosaic of human populations, which interacted with one another, interbred, drifted apart and came together mostly in ways we can only still guess at. It seems reasonable to assume that behaviours like mating and child-rearing practices, the presence or absence of dominance hierarchies or forms of language and proto-language must have varied at least as much as physical types, and probably far more.

Perhaps the only thing we can say with real certainty is that modern humans first appeared in Africa. When they began expanding out of Africa into Eurasia, they encountered other populations such as Neanderthals and Denisovans – less different, but still different – and these various groups interbred. Only after those other populations became extinct can we really begin talking about a single, human “us” inhabiting the planet. What all this brings home is just how radically different the social and physical world of our remote ancestors would have seemed to us – and this would have been true at least down to about 40,000BC. In other words, there is no “original” form of human society. Searching for one can only be a matter of myth-making.

Over recent decades, archeological evidence has emerged that seems to completely defy our image of what scholars call the Upper Palaeolithic period (roughly 50,000–15,000BC). For a long time, it had been assumed that this was a world made up of tiny egalitarian forager bands. But the discovery of evidence of “princely” burials and grand communal buildings has undermined that image.

Rich hunter-gatherer burials have been found across much of western Eurasia, from the Dordogne to the Don. They include discoveries in rock shelters and open-air settlements. Some of the earliest come from sites like Sunghir in northern Russia and Dolní Věstonice in the Moravian basin, and date from between 34,000 and 26,000 years ago.

What we find here are not cemeteries but isolated burials of individuals or small groups, their bodies often placed in striking postures and decorated – in some cases, almost saturated – with ornaments. In the case of Sunghir that meant many thousands of beads, laboriously worked from mammoth ivory and fox teeth. Some of the most lavish costumes are from the conjoined burials of two boys, flanked by great lances made from straightened mammoth tusks.

Of similar antiquity is a group of cave burials unearthed on the coast of Liguria, near the border between Italy and France. Complete bodies of young or adult men, including one especially lavish interment known to archaeologists as Il Principe (“the Prince”), were laid out in striking poses and suffused with jewellery. Il Principe bears that name because he’s also buried with what looks to the modern eye like regalia: a flint sceptre, elk antler batons and an ornate headdress lovingly fashioned from perforated shells and deer teeth.

Another unexpected result of recent archaeological research, causing many to revise their view of prehistoric hunter-gatherers, is the appearance of monumental architecture. In Eurasia, the most famous examples are the stone temples of the Germus mountains, overlooking the Harran plain in south-east Turkey. In the 1990s, German archaeologists, working on the plain’s northern frontier, began uncovering extremely ancient remains at a place known locally as Göbekli Tepe. What they found has since come to be regarded as an evolutionary conundrum. The main source of puzzlement is a group of 20 megalithic enclosures, initially raised there around 9000BC, and then repeatedly modified over many centuries.

A megalithic enclosure at Göbekli Tepe in south-east Turkey. Photograph: Xinhua/Rex/Shutterstock

The enclosures at Göbekli Tepe are massive. They comprise great T-shaped pillars, some over 5 metres high and weighing up to 8 tonnes, which were hewn from the site’s limestone bedrock or nearby quarries. The pillars, at least 200 in total, were raised into sockets and linked by walls of rough stone. Each is a unique work of sculpture, carved with images from the world of dangerous carnivores and poisonous reptiles, as well as game species, waterfowl and small scavengers. Animal forms project from the rock in varying depths of relief: some hover coyly on the surface, others emerge boldly into three dimensions. These often nightmarish creatures follow divergent orientations, some marching to the horizon, others working their way down into the earth. In places, the pillar itself becomes a sort of standing body, with human-like limbs and clothing.

The creation of these remarkable buildings implies strictly coordinated activity on a really large scale. Who made them? While groups of humans not too far away had already begun cultivating crops at the time, to the best of our knowledge those who built Göbekli Tepe had not. Yes, they harvested and processed wild cereals and other plants in season, but there is no compelling reason to see them as “proto-farmers”, or to suggest they had any interest in orienting their livelihoods around the domestication of crops. Indeed, there was no particular reason why they should, given the availability of fruits, berries, nuts and edible wild fauna in their vicinity.

And while Göbekli Tepe has often been presented as an anomaly, there is in fact a great deal of evidence for monumental construction of different sorts among hunter-gatherers in earlier periods, extending back into the ice age.

In Europe, between 25,000 and 12,000 years ago, public works were already a feature of human habitation across an area reaching from Kraków to Kyiv. Research at the Russian site of Yudinovo suggests that “mammoth houses”, as they are often called, were not in fact dwellings at all, but monuments in the strict sense: carefully planned and constructed to commemorate the completion of a great mammoth hunt, using whatever durable parts remained once carcasses had been processed for their meat and hides. We are talking here about really staggering quantities of meat: for each structure (there were five at Yudinovo), there was enough mammoth to feed hundreds of people for around three months. Open-air settlements like Yudinovo, Mezhirich and Kostenki, where such mammoth monuments were erected, often became central places whose inhabitants exchanged amber, marine shells and animal pelts over impressive distances.

So what are we to make of all this evidence for princely burials, stone temples, mammoth monuments and bustling centres of trade and craft production, stretching back far into the ice age? What are they doing there, in a Palaeolithic world where – at least on some accounts – nothing much is ever supposed to have happened, and human societies can best be understood by analogy with troops of chimps or bonobos?

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, some have responded by completely abandoning the idea of an egalitarian golden age, concluding instead that this must have been a society dominated by powerful leaders, even dynasties – and, therefore, that self-aggrandisement and coercive power have always been the enduring forces behind human social evolution. But this doesn’t really work either.

Evidence of institutional inequality in ice age societies, whether grand burials or monumental buildings, is sporadic. Richly costumed burials appear centuries, and often hundreds of miles, apart. Even if we put this down to the patchiness of the evidence, we still have to ask why the evidence is so patchy in the first place. After all, if any of these ice age “princes” had behaved like, say, bronze age (let alone Renaissance Italian) princes, we’d also be finding all the usual trappings of centralised power: fortifications, storehouses, palaces. Instead, over tens of thousands of years, we see monuments and magnificent burials, but little else to indicate the growth of ranked societies, let alone anything remotely resembling “states”.

To understand why the early record of human social life is patterned in this strange, staccato fashion we first have to do away with some lingering preconceptions about “primitive” mentalities.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many in Europe and North America believed that “primitive” folk were not only incapable of political self-consciousness, they were not even capable of fully conscious thought on the individual level – or at least conscious thought worthy of the name. They argued that anyone classified as a “primitive” or “savage” operated with a “pre-logical mentality”, or lived in a mythological dreamworld. At best, they were mindless conformists, bound in the shackles of tradition; at worst, they were incapable of fully conscious, critical thought of any kind.

Nowadays, no reputable scholar would make such claims: everyone at least pays lip service to the psychic unity of mankind. But in practice, little has changed. Scholars still write as if those living in earlier stages of economic development, and especially those who are classified as “egalitarian”, can be treated as if they were literally all the same, living in some collective group-think: if human differences show up in any form – different “bands” being different from one another – it is only in the same way that bands of great apes might differ. Political self-consciousness among such people is seen as impossible.

And if certain hunter-gatherers turn out not to have been living perpetually in “bands” at all, but instead congregating to create grand landscape monuments, storing large quantities of preserved food and treating particular individuals like royalty, contemporary scholars are at best likely to place them in a new stage of development: they have moved up the scale from “simple” to “complex” hunter-gatherers, a step closer to agriculture and urban civilisation. But they are still caught in the same evolutionary straitjacket, their place in history defined by their mode of subsistence, and their role blindly to enact some abstract law of development which we understand but they do not. Certainly, it rarely occurs to anyone to ask what sort of worlds they thought they were trying to create.

Now, admittedly, this isn’t true of all scholars. Anthropologists who spend years talking to indigenous people in their own languages, and watching them argue with one another, tend to be well aware that even those who make their living hunting elephants or gathering lotus buds are just as sceptical, imaginative, thoughtful and capable of critical analysis as those who make their living by operating tractors, managing restaurants or chairing university departments.

French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in the Brazilian Amazon, c1936. Photograph: Apic/Getty Images

One of the few mid-20th-century anthropologists to take seriously the idea that early humans were our intellectual equals was Claude Lévi-Strauss, who argued that mythological thought, rather than representing some sort of pre-logical haze, is better conceived as a kind of “neolithic science” as sophisticated as our own, just built on different principles. Less well known – but more relevant to the problems we are grappling with here – are some of his early writings on politics.

In 1944, Lévi-Strauss published an essay about politics among the Nambikwara, a small population of part-time farmers, part-time foragers inhabiting a notoriously inhospitable stretch of savanna in north-west Mato Grosso, Brazil. The Nambikwara then had a reputation as extremely simple folk, given their very rudimentary material culture. For this reason, many treated them almost as a direct window on to the Palaeolithic. This, Lévi-Strauss pointed out, was a mistake. People like the Nambikwara live in the shadow of the modern state, trading with farmers and city people and sometimes hiring themselves out as labourers. Some might even be descendants of runaways from cities or plantations.

For Lévi-Strauss, what was especially instructive about the Nambikwara was that, for all that they were averse to competition, they did appoint chiefs to lead them. The very simplicity of the resulting arrangement, he felt, might expose “some basic functions” of political life that “remain hidden in more complex and elaborate systems of government”. Not only was the role of the chief socially and psychologically quite similar to that of a national politician or statesman in European society, he noted, it also attracted similar personality types: people who “unlike most of their companions, enjoy prestige for its own sake, feel a strong appeal to responsibility, and to whom the burden of public affairs brings its own reward”.

Modern politicians play the role of wheelers and dealers, brokering alliances or negotiating compromises between different constituencies or interest groups. In Nambikwara society this didn’t happen much, because there weren’t really many differences in wealth or status. However, chiefs did play an analogous role, brokering between two entirely different social and ethical systems, which existed at different times of year. During the rainy season, the Nambikwara occupied hilltop villages of several hundred people and practised horticulture; during the rest of the year they dispersed into small foraging bands. Chiefs made or lost their reputations by acting as heroic leaders during the “nomadic adventures” of the dry season, during which times they typically gave orders, resolved crises and behaved in what would at any other time be considered an unacceptably authoritarian manner. Then, in the rainy season, a time of much greater ease and abundance, they relied on those reputations to attract followers to settle around them in villages, where they employed only gentle persuasion and led by example to guide their followers in the construction of houses and tending of gardens. They cared for the sick and needy, mediated disputes and never imposed anything on anyone.

How should we think about these chiefs? They were not patriarchs, Lévi-Strauss concluded; neither were they petty tyrants; and there was no sense in which they were invested with mystical powers. More than anything, they resembled modern politicians operating tiny embryonic welfare states, pooling resources and doling them out to those in need. What impressed Lévi-Strauss above all was their political maturity. It was the chiefs’ skill in directing small bands of dry-season foragers, of making snap decisions in crises (crossing a river, directing a hunt) that later qualified them to play the role of mediators and diplomats in the village plaza. And in doing so they were effectively moving back and forth, each year, between what evolutionary anthropologists insist on thinking of as totally different stages of social development: from hunters-gatherers to farmers and back again.

Nambikwara chiefs were in every sense self-conscious political actors, shifting between two different social systems with calm sophistication, all the while balancing a sense of personal ambition with the common good. What’s more, their flexibility and adaptability enabled them to take a distanced perspective on whichever system obtained at any given time.

Let’s return to those rich Upper Palaeolithic burials, so often interpreted as evidence for the emergence of “inequality”, or even hereditary nobility of some sort. For some odd reason, those who make such arguments never seem to notice that a quite remarkable number of these skeletons bear evidence of striking physical anomalies that could only have marked them out, clearly and dramatically, from their social surroundings. The adolescent boys in Sunghir and Dolní Věstonice had pronounced congenital disfigurements; other ancient burial sites have contained bodies that were unusually short or extremely tall.

It would be extremely surprising if this were a coincidence. In fact, it makes one wonder whether even those bodies, which appear from their skeletal remains to be anatomically typical, might have been equally striking in some other way; after all, an albino, for example, or an epileptic prophet would not be identifiable as such from the archaeological record. We can’t know much about the day-to-day lives of Palaeolithic individuals buried with rich grave goods, other than that they seem to have been as well fed and cared for as anybody else; but we can at least suggest they were seen as the ultimate individuals, about as different from their peers as it was possible to be.

A reconstruction of an Upper Paleolithic mammoth hunter settlement at Dolní Věstonice in the Czech Republic. Photograph: Album/Alamy

This suggests we might have to shelve any premature talk of the emergence of hereditary elites. It seems very unlikely that Palaeolithic Europe produced a stratified elite that just happened to consist largely of hunchbacks, giants and dwarves. Second, we don’t know how much the treatment of such individuals after death had to do with their treatment in life. Another important point here is that we are not dealing with a case of some people being buried with rich grave goods and others being buried with none. The very practice of burying bodies intact, and clothed, appears to have been exceptional in the Upper Palaeolithic. Most corpses were treated in completely different ways: de-fleshed, broken up, curated, or even processed into jewellery and artefacts. (In general, Palaeolithic people were clearly much more at home with human body parts than we are.)

The corpse in its complete and articulated form – and the clothed corpse even more so – was clearly something unusual and, one would presume, inherently strange. In many such cases, an effort was made to contain the bodies of the Upper Palaeolithic dead by covering them with heavy objects: mammoth scapulae, wooden planks, stones or tight bindings. Perhaps saturating them with such objects was an extension of these concerns about strangeness, celebrating but also containing something dangerous. This too makes sense. The ethnographic record abounds with examples of anomalous beings – human or otherwise – treated as exalted and dangerous; or one way in life, another in death.

Much here is speculation. There are any number of other interpretations that could be placed on the evidence – though the idea that these tombs mark the emergence of some sort of hereditary aristocracy seems the least likely of all. Those interred were extraordinary, “extreme” individuals. The way their corpses were decorated, displayed and buried marked them out as equally extraordinary in death. Anomalous in almost every respect, such burials can hardly be interpreted as proxies for social structure among the living. On the other hand, they clearly have something to do with all the contemporary evidence for music, sculpture, painting and complex architecture. What is one to make of them?

This is where seasonality comes into the picture. Almost all the ice age sites with extraordinary burials and monumental architecture were created by societies that lived a little like Lévi-Strauss’s Nambikwara, dispersing into foraging bands at one time of year, gathering together in concentrated settlements at another. True, they didn’t gather to plant crops. Rather, the large Upper Palaeolithic sites are linked to migrations and seasonal hunting of game herds – woolly mammoth, steppe bison or reindeer – as well as cyclical fish-runs and nut harvests. This seems to be the explanation for those hubs of activity found in eastern Europe at places like Dolní Věstonice, where people took advantage of an abundance of wild resources to feast, engage in complex rituals and ambitious artistic projects, and trade minerals, marine shells and furs. In western Europe, equivalents would be the great rock shelters of the French Périgord and the Cantabrian coast, with their deep records of human activity, which similarly formed part of an annual round of seasonal congregation and dispersal.

Archaeology also shows that patterns of seasonal variation lie behind the monuments of Göbekli Tepe. Activities around the stone temples correspond with periods of annual superabundance, between midsummer and autumn, when large herds of gazelle descended on to the Harran plain. At such times, people also gathered at the site to process massive quantities of nuts and wild cereal grasses, making these into festive foods, which presumably fuelled the work of construction. There is some evidence to suggest that each of these great structures had a relatively short lifespan, culminating in an enormous feast, after which its walls were rapidly filled in with leftovers and other refuse: hierarchies raised to the sky, only to be swiftly torn down again. Ongoing research is likely to complicate this picture, but the overall pattern of seasonal congregation for festive labour seems well established.

Such oscillating patterns of life endured long after the invention of agriculture. They may be key to understanding the famous Neolithic monuments of Salisbury Plain in England, and not just because the arrangements of standing stones themselves seem to function (among other things) as giant calendars. Stonehenge, framing the midsummer sunrise and the midwinter sunset, is the most famous of these monuments. It turns out to have been the last in a long sequence of ceremonial structures, erected over the course of centuries in timber as well as stone, as people converged on the plain from remote corners of the British Isles at significant times of year. Careful excavation shows that many of these structures were dismantled just a few generations after their construction.

Children of the Nambikwara Sarare tribe in Mato Grosso state, Brazil. Photograph: André Penner/AP

Still more striking, the people who built Stonehenge were not farmers, or not in the usual sense. They had once been; but the practice of erecting and dismantling grand monuments coincides with a period when the peoples of Britain, having adopted the Neolithic farming economy from continental Europe, appear to have turned their backs on at least one crucial aspect of it: they abandoned the cultivation of cereals and returned, from around 3300BC, to the collection of hazelnuts as their staple source of plant food. On the other hand, they kept hold of their domestic pigs and herds of cattle, feasting on them seasonally at nearby Durrington Walls, a prosperous town of some thousands of people – with its own Woodhenge – in winter, but largely empty and abandoned in summer.

All this is crucial because it’s hard to imagine how giving up agriculture could have been anything but a self-conscious decision. There is no evidence that one population displaced another, or that farmers were somehow overwhelmed by powerful foragers who forced them to abandon their crops. The Neolithic inhabitants of England appear to have taken the measure of cereal-farming and collectively decided that they preferred to live another way. We’ll never know how such a decision was made, but Stonehenge itself provides something of a hint since it is built of extremely large stones, some of which (the “bluestones”) were transported from as far away as Wales, while many of the cattle and pigs consumed at Durrington Walls were laboriously herded there from other distant locations.

In other words, and remarkable as it may seem, even in the third millennium BC coordination of some sort was clearly possible across large parts of the British Isles. If Stonehenge was a shrine to exalted founders of a ruling clan – as some archaeologists now argue – it seems likely that members of their lineage claimed significant, even cosmic roles by virtue of their involvement in such events. On the other hand, patterns of seasonal aggregation and dispersal raise another question: if there were kings and queens at Stonehenge, exactly what sort could they have been? After all, these would have been kings whose courts and kingdoms existed for only a few months of the year, and otherwise dispersed into small communities of nut gatherers and stock herders. If they possessed the means to marshal labour, pile up food resources and provender armies of year-round retainers, what sort of royalty would consciously elect not to do so?

Recall that for Lévi-Strauss, there was a clear link between seasonal variations of social structure and a certain kind of political freedom. The fact that one structure applied in the rainy season and another in the dry allowed Nambikwara chiefs to view their own social arrangements at one remove: to see them as not simply “given”, in the natural order of things, but as something at least partially open to human intervention. The case of the British Neolithic – with its alternating phases of dispersal and monumental construction – indicates just how far such intervention could sometimes go.

The political implications of this are important, as Lévi-Strauss noted. What the existence of similar seasonal patterns in the Palaeolithic suggests is that from the very beginning, or at least as far back as we can trace such things, human beings were self-consciously experimenting with different social possibilities.

It’s easy to see why scholars in the 1950s and 60s arguing for the existence of discrete stages of political organisation – successively: bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states – did not know what to do with Lévi-Strauss’s observations. They held that the stages of political development mapped, at least very roughly, on to similar stages of economic development: hunter-gatherers, gardeners, farmers, industrial civilisation. It was confusing enough that people like the Nambikwara seemed to jump back and forth, over the course of the year, between economic categories. Other groups would appear to jump regularly from one end of the political spectrum to the other. In other words, they threw everything askew.

Seasonal dualism also throws into chaos more recent efforts at classifying hunter-gatherers into either “simple” or “complex” types of social organisation, since what have been identified as the features of “complexity” – territoriality, social ranks, material wealth or competitive display – appear during certain seasons of the year, only to be brushed aside in others by the exact same population. Admittedly, most professional anthropologists nowadays have come to recognise that these categories are hopelessly inadequate, but the main effect of this acknowledgment has just been to cause them to change the subject, or suggest that perhaps we shouldn’t really be thinking about the broad sweep of human history at all any more. Nobody has yet proposed an alternative.

Meanwhile, as we’ve seen, archaeological evidence is piling up to suggest that in the highly seasonal environments of the last ice age, our remote ancestors were behaving much like Nambikwara. They shifted back and forth between alternative social arrangements, building monuments and then closing them down again, allowing the rise of authoritarian structures during certain times of year then dismantling them. The same individual could experience life in what looks to us sometimes like a band, sometimes a tribe, and sometimes like something with at least some of the characteristics we now identify with states.

With such institutional flexibility comes the capacity to step outside the boundaries of any given structure and reflect; to make and unmake the political worlds we live in. If nothing else, this explains the “princes” and “princesses” of the last ice age, who appear to show up, in such magnificent isolation, like characters in some kind of fairytale or costume drama. If they reigned at all, then perhaps it was, like the ruling clans of Stonehenge, just for a season.

If human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements, assembling and dismantling hierarchies on a regular basis, perhaps the question we should ask is: how did we get stuck? How did we lose that political self-consciousness, once so typical of our species? How did we come to treat eminence and subservience not as temporary expedients, or even the pomp and circumstance of some kind of grand seasonal theatre, but as inescapable elements of the human condition?

In truth, this flexibility, and potential for political self-consciousness, was never entirely lost. Seasonality is still with us – even if it is a pale shadow of its former self. In the Christian world, for instance, there is still the midwinter “holiday season” in which values and forms of organisation do, to a limited degree, reverse themselves: the same media and advertisers who for most of the year peddle rabid consumerist individualism suddenly start announcing that social relations are what’s really important, and that to give is better than to receive.

Among societies like the Inuit or the Kwakiutl of Canada’s Northwest Coast, times of seasonal congregation were also ritual seasons, almost entirely given over to dances, rites and dramas. Sometimes, these could involve creating temporary kings or even ritual police with real coercive powers. In other cases, they involved dissolving norms of hierarchy and propriety. In the European middle ages, saints’ days alternated between solemn pageants where all the elaborate ranks and hierarchies of feudal life were made manifest, and crazy carnivals in which everyone played at “turning the world upside down”. In carnival, women might rule over men and children be put in charge of government. Servants could demand work from their masters, ancestors could return from the dead, “carnival kings” could be crowned and then dethroned, giant monuments like wicker dragons built and set on fire, or all formal ranks might even disintegrate into one or other form of bacchanalian chaos.

What’s important about such festivals is that they kept the old spark of political self-consciousness alive. They allowed people to imagine that other arrangements are feasible, even for society as a whole, since it was always possible to fantasise about carnival bursting its seams and becoming the new reality. May Day came to be chosen as the date for the international workers’ holiday largely because so many British peasant revolts had historically begun on that riotous festival. Villagers who played at “turning the world upside down” would periodically decide they actually preferred the world upside down, and took measures to keep it that way.

Medieval peasants often found it much easier than medieval intellectuals to imagine a society of equals. Now, perhaps, we begin to understand why. Seasonal festivals may be a pale echo of older patterns of seasonal variation – but, for the last few thousand years of human history at least, they appear to have played much the same role in fostering political self-consciousness, and as laboratories of social possibility.

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The team finds that sleep can enhance a person’s ability to learn challenging motor tasks since it helps the brain to process and focus on the new skill. After a short sleep, study participants were able to perform more quickly and more efficiently than if they did not have the extra rest.

During their experiment, researchers asked participants to perform a challenging motor task with and without sleep. Volunteers played a computer game that asked them to move a cursor by using specific arm muscles.

Study authors paired each command to move the cursor in a particular direction with a unique sound. After practicing, the participants played the game blindfolded and moved the cursor based on the corresponding sounds alone.

Making rehab better for patients

Some participants then took a 90-minute nap and were able to perform the motions better than those who did not. Northwestern PhD graduate Larry Cheng says the team believes the approach could enhance rehabilitation therapies for stroke patients and other neurological disorders.

“We used targeted memory reactivation or TMR, whereby a stimulus that has been associated with learning is presented again during sleep to bring on a recapitulation of waking brain activity,” researchers write in the journal JNeurosci.

“Our demonstration that memory reactivation contributed to skilled performance may be relevant for neurorehabilitation as well as fields concerned with motor learning, such as kinesiology and physiology.”

“Present findings support the conclusion that execution-based components of motor skill can be reactivated during sleep, resulting in enhanced performance after awakening,” Cheng’s team adds in a statement to SWNS. “By extension, activating motor control networks during sleep may be an integral part of the mechanism for consolidation of motor skills.”

“Furthermore, these findings open the door to future applications of TMR to augment the learning of a wide variety of motor skills,” the study authors tell SWNS. “Nightly TMR may even be useful in a clinical context to supplement daily rehabilitation efforts for patients hoping to decrease motor impairments due to stroke or neurological dysfunction.”

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Russia's COVID-19 task force reported 1,015 coronavirus-related deaths in the past 24 hours, the highest single-day toll since the start of the pandemic, as well as 33,740 new infections, just shy of a record daily rise, with authorities blaming the surge on a slow vaccination campaign.

Deputy Prime Minister Tatiana Golikova proposed that Oct. 30 to Nov. 7 be deemed non-working days to combat rising infections. Russia has taken similar steps at previous times during the pandemic, notably for around a month when it first struck in March last year.

Speaking at a government coronavirus meeting, Golikova said people should have to present QR codes on their mobile phones to show they were vaccinated or had recovered from COVID, in order to get access to some public events or places.

Russia's regions should take independent decisions about whether unvaccinated pensioners should be told to self-isolate and about offering incentives such as extra holiday to vaccinated workers, she said.

The Kremlin, too, repeated the call for people to get inoculated.

"There is a tradition of blaming the state for everything. Of course, the state feels and knows its share of responsibility," Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters, acknowledging more could have been done to explain the importance of vaccination to the public.

"But a more responsible position is needed from all citizens of our country," he said. "Now each of us must show responsibility...and get vaccinated."

Many Russian regions plan to keep cafes, museums and other public venues open only to those who have recently recovered from COVID-19 or have proof of inoculation with a Russian vaccine or a negative coronavirus test.

The Orlovsky region, around 325 km (200 miles) south of Moscow, had run out of hospital beds, the RIA news agency quoted Governor Andrei Klychkov as saying.

Russia's health ministry last week asked retired vaccinated medics to return to hospitals to help tackle the latest wave of the virus.

Lawmaker Andrei Makarov on Tuesday said 1,100 medical professionals had died due to complications from COVID-19 so far this year, up from 485 in 2020, TASS news agency reported.

In Crimea, the peninsula Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014, health officials said people working in sectors such as tourism, hospitality, education and healthcare would have to get vaccinated.

Employers have been instructed to ensure that at least 80% of their employees are inoculated with the first dose of a vaccine by Nov. 15, TASS cited the regional branch of health regulator Rospotrebnadzor as saying. (Reporting by Dmitry Antonov, Anton Zverev and Gleb Stolyarov; Writing by Alexander Marrow; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)

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This is what determines all our differences, from the unique ways we look, to our resistance or susceptibility to diseases such as HIV. Certain tiny tweaks in the genetic code can be incredibly helpful not only for the individual, but society.

The more we know about these special genes (and the people who have them) the better, as it might be possible to create drugs that can mimic useful genetic differences.

With that in mind, researchers are searching for people around the world who might be resistant to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Your genes could hold the keys to potentially treating COVID-19.

"The introduction of SARS-CoV-2 to a naive population, on a global scale, has provided yet another demonstration of the remarkable clinical variability between individuals in the course of infection, ranging from asymptomatic infections to life-threatening disease," a team of researchers, led by immunologist Evangelos Andreakos from the Academy of Athens, writes in a new paper.

"Our understanding of the pathophysiology of life-threatening COVID-19 has progressed considerably since the disease was first described in December 2019, but we still know very little about the human genetic and immunological basis of inborn resistance to SARS-CoV-2."

Although we might not have much information about this inborn resistance, it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. The researchers note that sometimes whole households can be infected, with just a spouse being spared, while there's been other reports of people somehow avoiding COVID even after being in the 'line of fire' multiple times.

There's also been some serious research into this already, but so far, the results have only revealed small differences.

For example, we reported last year that blood type (particularly type O blood) seemed to show a slight resistance to severe SARS-CoV-2 infection. Then there's been other studies looking at proteins such as the ACE2 receptor or TMEM41B that the coronavirus seems to require to either enter or replicate once inside the cell.  

The researchers have suggested that we need to be doing more to uncover those secret few in the population who might be genetically resistant to SARS-CoV-2. And they have some ideas about how.

"We propose a strategy for identifying, recruiting, and genetically analyzing individuals who are naturally resistant to SARS-CoV-2 infection," the team writes.

"We first focus on uninfected household contacts of people with symptomatic COVID-19. We then consider individuals exposed to an index case without personal protection equipment, for at least 1 hour per day, and during the first 3-5 days of symptoms in the index case."

This would then be checked with negative PCR tests and negative blood work four weeks after the exposure, particularly looking for T cells to confirm that the person hasn't been infected in the past.  

If this sounds like you – good news! The researchers are still looking for participants for their research.

"We have already enrolled more than 400 individuals meeting the criteria for inclusion in a dedicated resistance study cohort," the researchers wrote.  

"The collaborative enrolment of study participants is continuing (link here), and subjects from all over the world are welcome."

With vaccines, promising drugs, and more understanding about the virus, we're seeing life – in some places – start to look a bit more normal.

But COVID will likely be with us for a long time yet to come, and finding people who have some genetic way of being spared by the virus could be a real boon for the rest of us – especially if new, highly virulent strains emerge.

This perspective was published in Nature Immunology.

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