But social platforms are also becoming familiar to younger kids, with parents in a new national poll reporting that half of children aged 10-12 years and a third of children ages 7-9 use their devices to engage with others on social media apps.

And while most parents track their kids' use of social media, one in six aren't using any parental controls for their child's social apps, according to the University of Michigan Health C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health.

"There continues to be debate over how soon is too soon when it comes to using social apps and how parents should oversee it," said Sarah Clark, M.P.H., Mott Poll co-director.

"Our poll looks at how often tweens and younger children use social platforms and how closely parents are monitoring these interactions."

The nationally representative report is based on responses from 1,030 parents with at least one child aged 7-12.  

Keeping up with kids on social apps

Parents cited several challenges in watching over their kids' social media use with one in five saying they couldn't find the information they needed to set up parental controls. Another two in five said it was too time-consuming to monitor social media, while a little more than a third believed parent controls are a waste of time because children would find a loophole around parental controls.

Clark said parents should be helping kids navigate the social media world to help them understand the harms of oversharing and interacting with strangers.

"If parents are allowing younger children to engage in social media, they should take responsibility for making the child's online environment as safe as possible," Clark said. "If parents can't commit to taking an active role in their child's social media use, they should have their child wait to use these apps." 

In deciding which apps are appropriate and safe for their child, nearly three in four parents polled said they consider if the app has parental controls while more than three in five looked at an app's age rating or if it's needed for school.

Most parents are currently using at least one parent control feature, with nearly two thirds using a parental block on certain sites and three fifths requiring parent approval for new contacts. More than half also used privacy settings, daily time limits and passcodes for certain content.

A third of parents say their child was taught in school about safe use of social media apps, and these parents are more likely to say their child uses social media apps.

But many parents expressed concerns about social apps, especially when it came to their child's privacy, exposure to inappropriate content and vulnerability to adult predators.

Two-thirds of parents expressed concerns about their child sharing private information through apps. The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) addresses this issue by requiring the operators of apps and other online services to provide parental control over release of private information.

However, only 56% of parents reported using privacy settings that limit the collection of data through children's apps.

Half of parents polled also thought their child would be unable to spot an adult user, yet just three in five require their child to get parent approval for new contacts on social media apps.

"It may be difficult to recognize an adult masquerading as a kid on social media so parents need to take a gatekeeping role for younger kids," Clark said.

Other parents worried children might encounter adult images or other content that wasn't age appropriate.

Clark recommends parents research apps they're considering allowing their child to use, including versions that cater to kids. This may include modified versions of apps popular with teens, such as Facebook's Messenger Kids or TikTok's "younger user" section. Other apps, designed specifically for pre-teens, try to limit the online risks by restricting certain activities (e.g., posting photos or using private chats) and offering dashboards or reports for parents to monitor their child's use of the app.

"Parents should look into whether the content is curated to allow only youth-friendly programming or whether there is a moderator that weeds out inappropriate content," Clark said.

"They should also utilize parental blocks or passcodes for certain sites or content."

A third of parents also aren't confident that their child could recognize what information is true versus false on social media apps. Clark recommends parents talk to their kids about identifying credible sources. They may encourage children to rely on sites or information sources recommended by the school or educational apps for example.

Helping children recognize altered images and videos may be more challenging. Parents should have ongoing conversations with young children about what they read and see on social apps and help them recognize disinformation and altered images, Clark said since such content may lead to distorted perceptions of body image or encourage dangerous actions.

Schools may also be a key partner in promoting safe use of social media apps for children by identifying educational apps and sites with appropriate content for grade-level assignments, Clark noted. Some schools offer training on protecting personal information, recognizing fake images or information, and how to report inappropriate behavior on social media for example.

"Parents should be guiding children toward safe use of social media apps through both parental controls and having regular conversations with their kids to teach them online safety rules," Clark said.

"For young kids who are using these apps for the first time, it's especially important for their parents to stay vigilant about content they're engaging with and who they're talking to. Parents should also be transparent that they plan to monitor their child's profiles, posts and interactions on social media until they're older."

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Website visitors were brought to a page that had been taken over by Turkish hacktivist group RootAyyildiz.

"Do not be like those who forgot Allah, so Ally made them forget themselves. Here they really went astray," the site read.

The message was also written in Turkish.

Links to the hackers' Instagram and Facebook were also listed on the webpage.

RootAyyildiz has claimed responsibility for a number of other cyberattacks targeting politicians around the world.

A declassified report released by the National Intelligence Council in March listed the group's hack on the Biden-Harris presidential campaign website, vote.joebiden.com, which lasted more than a day.

"In November, hackers promoting Turkish nationalist themes breached and defaced a website previously established for a candidate in the U.S. presidential campaign, according to U.S. cybersecurity press," the NIC stated in the report.

Biden's website displayed a message in Turkish with the country's flag and a photo of the 34th Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Abdul Hamid II.

Trump's "about" section of his website was also hacked back in October 2020.

The page was replaced with one that claimed the site had been "seized" and listed a series of allegations claiming his administration was responsible for the coronavirus pandemic and foreign interference in the 2020 elections.

"We have evidence that completely discredits Mr Trump as a president. Proving his criminal involvement and cooperation with foreign actors manipulating the 2020 elections," a message on the hacked site said.

At the time, Trump's team said they were aware of the hack but that there was no threat of a data breach due to the disruption.

Trump is expected to provide a videotaped testimony from New York City on Monday for a case about his security team's crackdown on a protest outside Trump Tower in the early days of his presidential campaign in 2015.

Video showed one of the demonstrators being struck in the head by Trump's then-head of security Keith Schiller while trying to retrieve a protest sign Schiller confiscated.

Lawyers are seeking a deposition from Trump to determine if he is responsible for Schiller's conduct.

Trump had previously stated in a 2016 affidavit that he shouldn't be deposed because he was unaware of the altercation and was not involved in hiring security personnel.

However, State Supreme Court Justice Doris Gonzalez of the Bronx ordered the deposition to be held on Monday.

The suit is one of at least 10 civil cases pending against Trump.

Newsweek reached out to Trump's office for comment.

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The decision was based on earlier studies testing the safety of a modified form of adenovirus—a type of virus that causes respiratory infections—known as the Ad5 and contained in the Russian jab.

"Use of the Sputnik V vaccine in South Africa, a setting of a high HIV prevalence and incidence, may increase the risk of vaccinated males acquiring HIV," the South African Health Product Regulatory Authority said in a statement.

It added that the company behind the application for the use of Sputnik V in South Africa had no proof the formula would be safe "in settings of high HIV prevalence".

The country worst-hit by the pandemic in Africa also has the world's highest number of people living with HIV.

It has been struggling with vaccine hesitancy.

Just over a quarter of 40 million targeted for vaccination by early 2022 are fully jabbed to date.

South Africa is this week set to begin vaccinating children as young as 12 and offering booster shots to certain immuno-compromised citizens.

It is currently offering the single-dose Johnson & Johnson—which also contains an adenovirus but of a different type—and the rMNA Pfizer/BioNTech jab.

The Chinese-made Sinovac has also been approved.

The World Health Organization has not yet given Sputnik V the green light for emergency use, although it is being administered in at least 45 countries.

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The national coronavirus task force said Monday that 34,325 new infections over the past day raised the pandemic-long total to 8,027,012. It also said 998 people died of COVID-19 in the previous day, bringing the total number of deaths to 224,310.

The death toll is minutely lower than the record 1,002 tallied on Saturday, but shows the country continuing to struggle with the virus as vaccination rates remain low.

Russian authorities have tried to speed up the pace of vaccinations with lotteries, bonuses and other incentives, but widespread vaccine skepticism and conflicting signals from officials stymied the efforts. The task force said Monday that about 45 million Russians, or 32% of the country's nearly 146 million people, are fully vaccinated.

Despite the mounting toll, the Kremlin has ruled out a new nationwide lockdown like the one early on in the pandemic that badly hurt the economy, eroding President Vladimir Putin's popularity. Instead, it has delegated the power to enforce coronavirus restrictions to regional authorities.

Some of Russia's 85 regions have restricted attendance at large public events and limited access to theaters, restaurants and other venues.

However, daily life is going on largely as normal in Moscow, St. Petersburg and many other Russian cities.

The highest concentrations of cases are mostly in comparatively urbanized western Russia and in the developed areas along the Pacific Coast such as Vladivostok and Khabarovsk, but the sparsely populated Siberian region of Sakha and Chukotka in the extreme northeast also show high case rates of more than 150 infections per 100,000 people over a seven-day period.

Russia's coronavirus death toll is Europe's largest. The official record ranks Russia as having the fifth-most pandemic deaths in the world following the United States, Brazil, India and Mexico.

However, state statistics agency Rosstat, which also counts deaths in which the virus wasn't considered the main cause, has reported a much higher pandemic death toll—about 418,000 people with COVID-19 as of August. Based on that number, Russia would rank as the fourth hardest-hit nation in the world, ahead of Mexico.

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Instead, he sends patients outside to soak in the healing powers of nature, combining the benefits of exercise with the therapeutic effects of fresh air and green space.

"Going back millions of years, we've evolved outdoors," said Zarr, a pediatrician who recently relocated to Ottawa, Canada, from Washington, D.C. "Why should we exist indoors? We need to be outdoors. The health benefits of being in nature are obvious."

The idea isn't new. The 16th century Swiss physician Paracelsus declared that "the art of healing comes from nature, not from the physician." In Japan, public health experts promote shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing, as a key to physical and psychological health.

The premise is backed up with science. A 2018 meta-analysis in the journal Environmental Research reviewed more than 140 studies and found exposure to green space was associated with wide-ranging health benefits, including lower blood pressure and cholesterol, and lower rates of diabetes, stroke, asthma, heart disease and overall death.

In a 2020 study in Frontiers of Psychology, researchers analyzed 14 studies involving college students and concluded that as little as 10 minutes of sitting or walking in natural settings reduced stress and improved mental health.

"There's an increasing amount of evidence that time in nature as opposed to time in an indoor environment is beneficial," said Donald Rakow,

associate professor at Cornell University's School of Integrative Plant Science in Ithaca, New York, and one of the 2020 study's authors. "Being out in nature is not going to solve every mental or physical condition, but it really can be part of an overall treatment approach."

The Environmental Research analysis called for more studies to establish why nature promotes better health, but suggested several possibilities, including the benefits of sunlight, the idea that microorganisms in nature can strengthen our immune systems and the mere fact that being outside encourages physical activity.

Zarr didn't need more convincing. What he wanted was a way to get doctors and their patients to take the health benefits of nature more seriously. So in 2017 he founded Park Rx America, a nonprofit that encourages health care professionals to incorporate nature into their treatment plans.

"Prescribing nature is not part of our training," he said. "And then the environment we work in is often so sterile. Doctors don't get much time outdoors during the day, so maybe it's not on our minds."

Why an actual prescription?

"It does make a difference," Zarr said. "The likelihood of doing what you intend to do goes up when you write it down. And the Rx symbol is universal. It's an easy way for people to relate."

Park Rx America has signed up more than 1,000 health care providers and partnered with other organizations to promote the strategy. Its website provides a prescription template, but one size doesn't fit all.

Rather than assign an activity and a location, Zarr and his colleagues ask patients what they can do and like to do, whether it's sitting on a bench or running a marathon, before writing it up.

"If they say, 'I see myself eating lunch outside,' I say, 'OK, let's start there,'" he said. "It might be the only time they breathe fresh air. Over time we'll change the prescription."

At Cornell, where academic rigor leads to stress, the health clinic encourages students to spend more time outside and incorporate nature prescriptions into their electronic health records.

"It really makes a difference," said Rakow, who co-directs a network of more than two dozen colleges around the country implementing similar programs. "Whether it's an antibiotic or nature, people are much more inclined to follow up when they know that their health professional has prescribed it."

Both experts are confident the trend is growing and that the bad effects of COVID-19 – more time indoors, anxiety, weight gain, to name a few – underscore the need and the desire to get outside.

"The pandemic really firmed up my opinions on this," Zarr said. "It's put a strain on everyone. We need to get out of the virtual world and go outdoors."

Rakow hopes for an awakening similar to what he saw during the years he directed the Cornell Botanic Gardens.

"Each year at the reunions, alumni would visit and ask, 'When did they build this?'" he said. "I would tell them, 'It's always been here.'"

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Cases of psychosis have soared over the past two years in England as an increasing number of people experience hallucinations and delusional thinking amid the stresses of the Covid-19 pandemic.

There was a 75% increase in the number of people referred to mental health services for their first suspected episode of psychosis between April 2019 and April 2021, NHS data shows.

The rise continued throughout the summer, with 12,655 referred in July 2021, up 53% from 8,252 in July 2019.

Much of the increase has been seen over the last year, after the first national lockdown, according to data analysed by the charity Rethink Mental Illness. More than 13,000 referrals were made in May 2021, a 70% rise on the May before when there were 7,813 referrals.

The charity is urging the government to invest more in early intervention for psychosis to prevent further deterioration in people’s mental health from which it could take them years to recover.

It says the statistics provide some of the first concrete evidence to indicate the significant levels of distress experienced across the population during the pandemic.

A study earlier this month found that anxiety and depression around the world increased dramatically in 2020, with an estimated 76m extra cases of anxiety and 53m extra cases of major depressive disorder than would have been expected had Covid not struck. Women and young people were disproportionately affected, the researchers said.

Psychosis can involve seeing or hearing things that other people do not (hallucinations) and developing beliefs that are not based on reality (delusions), which can be highly distressing. It can be a symptom of mental illness such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or severe depression, but psychosis can also be a one-off, potentially triggered by a traumatic experience, extreme stress or drug and alcohol misuse.

Despite the continued pressure on mental health services, Rethink Mental Illness is highlighting the importance of rapid access to treatment to prevent further episodes of psychosis and reduce people’s risk of developing severe mental illness.

Nice guidelines for people experiencing a suspected first episode of psychosis state they should receive an assessment within two weeks. However, the charity fears that if the increase in referrals is sustained, more people will have to wait longer for vital treatment.

Brian Dow, the deputy chief executive of Rethink Mental Illness, said: “Psychosis can have a devastating impact on people’s lives. Swift access to treatment is vital to prevent further deterioration in people’s mental health which could take them years to recover from.

“These soaring numbers of suspected first episodes of psychosis are cause for alarm. We are now well beyond the first profound shocks of this crisis, and it’s deeply concerning that the number of referrals remains so high. As first presentations of psychosis typically occur in young adults, this steep rise raises additional concerns about the pressures the younger generation have faced during the pandemic.

“The pandemic has had a gamechanging effect on our mental health and it requires a revolutionary response. Dedicated additional funding for mental health and social care must go to frontline services to help meet the new demand, otherwise thousands of people could bear a catastrophic cost.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Care said: “It is vital everyone can get the right support when they need it and we are delivering the fastest expansion in mental health services in NHS history, backed by an additional £2.3bn a year by 2023/24, benefiting hundreds of thousands more people.

“On top of this, we’ve invested an additional £500m this year to help people whose mental health has been particularly impacted by the pandemic. All NHS mental health providers have established 24/7 urgent helplines, which have answered around three million calls during the pandemic.”

‘My head told me to deal with hearing voices’

Tom Dunning, 30, has a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, social anxiety disorder and PTSD.

“I was about 22 or 23 when I first started experiencing symptoms of psychosis. It was pretty much overnight having after finishing my degree that my head told me to deal with hearing voices. Hearing them was a daily occurrence and it pretty much made me feel scared of myself because I didn’t think anything was wrong so I couldn’t tell anyone how I felt.

“I had experienced bullying in my childhood and now I felt like my own mental health was bullying me by the voices telling me to do things.

Everyone around me started to notice differences and knew something was wrong but I was scared to acknowledge that. I eventually saw my GP and it was the first time that I thought I needed support but it was also the first time that I knew it was something I could get through.”

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It is a dream for some and a nightmare for others – but could living forever become a reality within our lifetime?

The answer coming out of the scientific labs in Silicon Valley is a resounding “Yes”.

In the wake of the summer space race between Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, the world’s richest men are taking on a new challenge – immortality.

Amazon boss Bezos, 57, is one of the main backers of Altos Labs, which has raised £200million and just opened a new laboratory in Cambridge.

But Bezos, worth £150billion, is far from being the only one taking on the grim reaper.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin, 48, has invested more than £600million in a “longevity lab” called Calico.

And Paypal founder Peter Thiel, 54, has pledged £2million to the similarly-tasked SENS Research Foundation.

Jeff Bezos ( Image: Getty Images)

Meanwhile Russian tech mogul Yuri Milner, 59 – worth around £3billion – has handed grants worth millions of pounds to the science of anti-ageing.

Longevity expert Michael Rae, 50, from California’s Bay Area, tells the Sunday People that the science of living forever is making huge leaps forward.

As well as being backed by Thiel, his SENS group has also had meetings with Bezos.

And with big-money backing, he is optimistic the secret to eternal life can be cracked by 2050.

Because the technology is so expensive to develop, it will be available only to the rich at first.

Yuri Milner ( Image: Getty Images)

But scientists believe that once it is rolled out to the general population, life expectancy could be raised to around 1,000 years.

They claim the only causes of death will then be bad luck – and stupid mistakes.

Rae revealed: “Bezos is taking a gamble on a technology that is harder to realise – but it’s going to have a really big payoff if they can make it work.

“Reprogramming technology is exciting because, if we can wind the clock back and make our cells youthful again, that will help to finally break the link between age and death.

Paypal founder Peter Thiel ( Image: Getty Images)

“Will this happen in five years or 10 years? Absolutely not.

“But in a quarter of a century, quite possibly yes.

“Especially now that there has been this large infusion of money and Bezos has so many talented scientists working for him.”

Here, we look at the five main theories on achieving immortality – and how soon the phrase “within our lifetime” will cease to have any meaning.

Stopping bodies ageing

They say that death and taxes are the two things you cannot avoid.

But the SENS Research Foundation, based in Mountain View, California, believes ageing is a disease that can be tackled like any other.

Its goal is to “comprehensively repair the damage that builds up in our bodies over time”.

Can ageing be stopped? ( Image: Getty Images/Image Source)

One research strand is asking if backup copies of cells can be created to replace malfunctioning ones.

The new cells would be implanted in our flesh so they can take over when our system starts to degrade.

This would mean we can refurbish our bodies time and again – like we replace faulty chips in a computer.

Michael Rae, 50, a science writer at the foundation, explains: “The Big Kahuna is when we get to the point that your life expectancy is no longer a function of your age.

“Right now, every year you live, you’re closer to your doom. Once you take away ageing, it becomes open-ended. That doesn’t mean you’re immortal – you can still be murdered or hit by a catastrophic infection like Ebola, or die in a plane crash.

“But you are no longer going to be more vulnerable to disease and death.

“At that point, if you do the maths on how unlikely it is to die, it gives a life expectancy of about 1,000 years.

“You can still die the next day, or live to 2,000 years. It becomes about what happens in your life.”

Cryogenics and artificial intelligence

Some scientists believe that in the future a computer will store our DNA code and will send out warnings when we need gene therapy – warding off fatal diseases by removing genetic mutations.

Implanted microchips would also alert doctors to the ageing of our cells.

They even hope to back up our personalities online so that if we die we could be downloaded to a robot or hologram, keeping us going well beyond our 81-year life expectancy.

Are cryogenics the key? ( Image: Getty Images)

Russian billionaire Dmitry Itskov is putting his money behind this idea and has founded a non-profit called the 2045 Initiative to fund the research.

Another aspect of the immortality industry – said to be worth £151bn worldwide – is cryogenic freezing, storing corpses in liquid nitrogen at a temperature of -196°C.

Since 1972, Alcor in Arizona has preserved 149 clients, including 28 Brits, at £165,000 each… with the hope of bringing them back to life when technology advances enough.

Anti-ageing drugs

Longevity expert Michael Rae is hopeful that death from serious disease will plummet in the next decade as anti-ageing drugs currently in development hit the market.

He said: “One rejuvenation technology I suspect is going to be coming pretty quickly, in the next 10 years, is with drugs called senolytics.

“There are certain cells that stop reproducing themselves and become metabolically abnormal.

“They start excreting all kinds of inflammatory factors that make them more prone to becoming cancerous.

“Senolytic drugs selectively kill those cells – there’s evidence that the body becomes rejuvenated in a wide variety of ways when you use them.

“These drugs should be effective in eliminating a number of age-related diseases, which is a big step forward.

“The immune system can already remove these damaged cells – but it seems it either falls apart as we age or it’s just incomplete.

“We’re working on a range of ways to make it easier for your immune system to clear those cells out.

“One thing we’re looking at to do this is by using engineered cells that will do the job for you.”

Are there any ethical concerns?

It is hard to imagine a world where people live to 1,000 years old.

The Earth is overpopulated already and headed for an environmental disaster.

So what effect would a population explosion have, as living conditions become even more cramped and we consume record amounts of meat and fuel?

Michael Rae bats aside these concerns.

Concerns on the ethics off immortality ( Image: Getty Images)

He is more worried about the thousands who die every day from age-related issues.

And he pleads for world leaders – and the public – to start donating to research centres such as SENS.

He said: “The big concern I have about the research is that it’s not going fast enough because it’s not being funded adequately.

“We’re not going half as fast as I’d like – every day that we’re delayed, we have another 110,000 people dead from this plague of ageing.

“I watched my grandparents die. My grandfather was living on oxygen and had a hard time walking around by the time he passed.

“My grandmother was almost blind and needed help getting out of bed.

“I’ve done a variety of things to keep myself healthy, but I’m conscious the science is not developing as quickly as I would want.

“Beyond that, yes there are concerns. If we unshackle people from the ageing process, the population is going to increase over time and that could pose certain ecological constraints.

< View the video at the source page. >

“It’s certainly going to pose a need for rethinking things like retirement ages and pension plans – and the way we structure our lives around ageing and dying.

“But one has to maintain a sense of proportion. These things have technical fixes.

“We have to be better about using resources on all kinds of fronts because the world is already headed for an environmental disaster.

“Are we really saying the solution to things like our ecological problems is that people have to keep dying of cancer and heart attacks?”

Biological reprogramming technology

Amazon boss Jeff Bezos is reported to be one of the main backers of Altos Labs, a collection of state-of-the-art research centres in Cambridge, Japan and California headed by US scientist and cancer expert Richard Klausner.

The scientists here are using £200million of funding to develop something known as “biological reprogramming technology”.

This will allow the cells in our body to be rejuvenated, turning back the clock and reversing the ageing process.

There is also hope that the research will bring an end to life-changing conditions such as Parkinson’s, heart disease and cancer – as our cells will no longer degenerate and mutate.

One new scientist on the team, Spaniard Manuel Serrano, says he was offered five times his salary to move to Cambridge to work for Altos Labs, showing the firm is recruiting the best and brightest in the business.

Expert Michael Rae told us: “Reprogramming technology is taking a cell that has accumulated age-related changes that are dysfunctional and winding the clock back.

“You remove some of those abnormal changes, so it behaves like a youthful cell.

“Once you’ve done that it starts ageing again. So eventually you will have to wind it back again and again – but that’s fine as long as you keep up with it.

“In some ways that is even more exciting because if you are 70 years old and you can wind the clock back, you’ve done a lot for that person.

“Bezos is in his 50s – so he has made a bet that’s going to pay out at a very good time for him.”

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Wages are up and businesses face staffing shortages, while the experience of a sustained public health emergency has prompted myriad Americans to reevaluate their work options.

"This [pandemic] has been going on for so long, it's affecting people mentally, physically," Danny Nelms, president of the Work Institute, a consulting firm, told the Wall Street Journal. "All those things are continuing to make people be reflective of their life and career and their jobs. Add to that over 10 million openings, and if I want to go do something different, it's not terribly hard to do."

The "Great Resignation" in the United States was preceded by a far greater - decades-long, arguably - stagnation in worker wages and benefits. In lower-end jobs, earnings have not matched the pace of inflation, while work grew more informal and precarious. Workers' rights activists now see a vital moment for a course correction. October has been a banner month for American organized labor, with major strikes across various industries sweeping the country.

"Workers are harder to replace and many companies are scrambling to manage hobbled supply chains and meet pandemic-fueled demand for their products. That has given unions new leverage, and made striking less risky," my colleagues reported.

For the average worker in a developed Western economy, there are reasons for encouragement. "The truth is people in the 1960s and '70s quit their jobs more often than they have in the past 20 years, and the economy was better off for it," wrote Thompson in the Atlantic. "Since the 1980s, Americans have quit less, and many have clung to crappy jobs for fear that the safety net wouldn't support them while they looked for a new one.

But Americans seem to be done with sticking it out. And they're being rewarded for their lack of patience: Wages for low-income workers are rising at their fastest rate since the Great Recession."

In social democratic Western Europe, a stronger safety net has led to somewhat less disruption in the workforce. But similar trends are at play: "Data collated by the OECD, which groups most of the advanced industrial democracies, shows that in its 38 member countries, about 20 million fewer people are in work than before the coronavirus struck," noted Politico Europe. "Of these, 14 million have exited the labor market and are classified as 'not working' and 'not looking for work.' Compared to 2019, 3 million more young people are not in employment, education or training."

A survey published in August found that a third of all Germany companies were reporting a dearth in skilled workers. That month, Detlef Scheele, head of the German Federal Employment Agency, told Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper that the country would need to import 400,000 skilled workers a year to make up for shortfalls in a host of industries, from nursing care to green tech companies. Pandemic-era border closures and rising wages in Central and Eastern European countries have led to shortages of meatpackers and hospitality workers in countries like Germany and Denmark.

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The 2019 letter from a Microsoft Corp. MSFT +0.18% engineer reporting an affair with Bill Gates that preceded his exit from the board wasn’t the first time some Microsoft directors encountered the billionaire’s inappropriate behavior with female employees.

More than a decade earlier, Microsoft executives discovered emails between Mr. Gates and a midlevel female employee at the company while Mr. Gates was still an employee at Microsoft and chairman of the board, according to people familiar with the matter. In the messages, the then-married Mr. Gates was flirtatious and propositioned the female employee, the people said.

Two top Microsoft executives, then-General Counsel Brad Smith and then-Chief People Officer Lisa Brummel, met with Mr. Gates and told him the behavior was inappropriate and needed to stop, the people said. Mr. Gates didn’t deny the exchanges, told the executives in hindsight it wasn’t a good idea and said that he would stop, the people said.

The executives briefed some members of Microsoft’s board, the people said, and a board committee discussed the matter. The board concluded no further action was warranted because there wasn’t physical interaction, the people said.

Microsoft spokesman Frank Shaw said that in 2008, shortly before Mr. Gates retired as a full-time employee, the company became aware of the emails sent in 2007. In the emails, Mr. Gates proposed meeting the female employee outside of work and off campus, Mr. Shaw said. “While flirtatious, they were not overtly sexual, but were deemed to be inappropriate,” he said. Mr. Shaw said the employee never made a complaint about the incident, which hasn’t been previously reported.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Gates, Bridgitt Arnold, said in a written statement: “These claims are false, recycled rumors from sources who have no direct knowledge, and in some cases have significant conflicts of interest.”

Mr. Gates, one of the world’s richest people, was Microsoft’s chief executive until 2000, a full-time employee until 2008 and chairman until 2014. He served on the Microsoft board for more than four decades until he resigned his seat in March 2020. The following year, Mr. Gates and his wife, Melinda French Gates, filed to end their marriage of 27 years. The divorce was finalized in August. The two continue to jointly lead the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the world’s largest philanthropies.

At the time Mr. Gates resigned from the Microsoft board, a board committee had hired a law firm to investigate a female engineer’s 2019 letter alleging a prior sexual relationship with Mr. Gates, The Wall Street Journal reported in May. This wasn’t the same woman that Mr. Gates earlier had been warned not to pursue, some of the people familiar with the matter said. Mr. Shaw said that the relationship occurred around 2002 but Microsoft didn’t become aware of it until 2019.

The Journal has since learned more details about how Microsoft’s board managed the 2019 investigation. Mr. Smith, who is now Microsoft’s president and vice chair, and CEO Satya Nadella were among the executives who reviewed the 2019 letter, according to people familiar with the matter.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, in glasses, and President and Vice Chair Brad Smith during the company’s annual shareholders meeting in 2017.
PHOTO: DAVID RYDER/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Microsoft’s board chair at the time, John W. Thompson, asked other members of the committee reviewing the letter not to share the existence of the investigation with the full Microsoft board citing concerns about the sensitive nature of the matter, the people said. Board members who read the letter had to return their copy to Microsoft’s general counsel, the people said.

Several lawyers who advise boards said that typically, when a board decides whether to conduct an investigation, the full board makes a decision to move forward for approval and the full board is aware of a continuing investigation.

“If you’re going to conduct an investigation that needs independent advisers, you need board approval,” said David Berger, a partner who specializes in corporate governance at law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati, who also advises boards.

Microsoft’s Mr. Shaw said under the board’s governance guidelines, it delegated the nominating and governance committee authority to hire outside lawyers. “While governance best practices are always evolving, the Board Chair and the Committee, with advice from outside legal counsel, decided to use the responsibility given to it and move forward with the initial stages of the review, recognizing that the matter could then move to the full Board in its later stages,” he said in a written statement.

Mr. Gates relinquished his board seat after some directors decided he should step down but before the investigation was completed, the Journal previously reported. Mr. Gates’s spokeswoman has said he had an affair almost 20 years ago, it ended amicably and the board’s review played no role in his departure. Microsoft said the board committee conducted a thorough review and provided support to the employee who made the complaint.

Bill Gates, shown at a conference in 2008, served on the Microsoft board for more than four decades.
PHOTO: TOSHIYUKI AIZAWA/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Several current and former Microsoft board members and executives said they believed the concerns about Mr. Gates’s behavior with female employees were properly handled. They said attitudes and protocols have changed in recent years with the #MeToo movement.

Maria Klawe, a Microsoft director from 2009 to 2015 who said she wasn’t aware of any concerns about Mr. Gates and female employees, said more broadly she felt he behaved at times as though rules didn’t apply to him.

“He certainly gave the impression that he felt that he had a standing that gave him a particular, a set of rights, that other people wouldn’t have,” said Ms. Klawe, president of math and science-focused Harvey Mudd College.

Mr. Shaw and Ms. Arnold, the spokeswoman for Mr. Gates, declined to comment on Ms. Klawe’s remarks.

Much earlier than the 2019 letter and the 2007 emails, at least one Microsoft board member was notified by a top executive about a romantic relationship that Mr. Gates, then the CEO, was having with a female Microsoft executive in 1992, according to a person familiar with the matter. The full board wasn’t informed of the matter, the person said. The woman wasn’t Ms. French Gates, this person said.

Ms. French Gates was a Microsoft employee when she first met Mr. Gates in 1987. They married in 1994 and Ms. French Gates stopped working at Microsoft in 1996, the same year the couple had the first of their three children.

Mr. Shaw said Microsoft isn’t aware of any report of a concern raised about a romantic relationship between Mr. Gates and a female employee in that time frame. Ms. Arnold declined to comment.

Mr. Gates remains a technical adviser to Mr. Nadella, who took over as Microsoft’s board chair in June for Mr. Thompson, who is now lead independent director. A Microsoft spokesman said at the time the chairman change was unrelated to Mr. Gates’s exit from the board.

“He’s very engaged on things that he cares about,” Mr. Nadella said when asked about Mr. Gates during a recent conference. Mr. Nadella said that the company had changed from when Mr. Gates was its leader and that he and his team were responsible for shaping its current workplace culture. “We’re not perfect by any stretch,” Mr. Nadella said, “but we care deeply about all topics of our culture and we’re working it every day.”

—Aaron Tilley contributed to this article.

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CHIAYI, Taiwan — Taiwanese prosecutors said that a couple were suspected of setting a fire and negligent homicide after 46 people were killed and dozens of others injured last week in the island’s deadliest building blaze in more than two decades.

The prosecutors accused the 51-year-old woman, who was identified only by her surname, Huang, of failing to extinguish an incense coil when she left the 13-story mixed-used building in the southern port city of Kaohsiung early Thursday. The 52-year-old man, surnamed Kuo, was accused of failing to remind Ms. Huang to put out the incense.

The unattended coil, which was in her room on the building’s first floor, sparked a blaze that quickly engulfed the higher floors, making it difficult for the residents — mostly poorer and older people who had been asleep at the time — to escape.

The authorities zeroed in on the couple, who are partners, on Friday. Ms. Huang was detained after being interrogated, while Mr. Kuo was freed on about $2,000 bail, prosecutors in Kaohsiung said. The two have not yet been formally charged.

Ms. Huang “should have paid attention to whether the flame was fully extinguished, but she was negligent and did not fully do it,” according to a statement posted on Monday by the prosecutors.

A Taoist priest holding a ceremony in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, on Friday for the victims of the fire.Credit...I-Hwa Cheng/Reuters

The couple could not be reached for comment. It was unclear if they had lawyers.

Ten years ago, Ms. Huang was sentenced to seven months in prison by a court in Kaohsiung for having two teenagers throw petrol bombs in a debt dispute, according to the government-backed Central News Agency.

In Taiwan, a conviction on recklessly setting a fire can bring up to one year in prison, and negligent homicide carries a penalty of up to five years.
The fire’s death toll — the second-highest of any building fire in Taiwan since 1995, when a blaze broke out in a karaoke club in the central city of Taichung, killing 64 — has raised broader concerns about lax safety standards in the island’s aging structures. The once-prosperous building in Kaohsiung’s waterfront district, built in the 1980s, was partly abandoned and had deteriorated rapidly in recent years.

The blaze also highlighted the lack of support for poor and older people who are desperate for housing and often have no choice but to live in dilapidated buildings.

Among residents it had become known as a “ghost building.” Piles of garbage had accumulated on lower floors and in the stairwells, which fire officials said had accelerated the spread of the fire and impeded rescue efforts.

Piles of garbage had accumulated in the building’s lower floors and in the stairwells, which fire officials said accelerated the spread of the fire and impeded rescue efforts.Credit...Lam Yik Fei/Getty Images

At the time of the fire, the building was inhabited by squatters, gamblers, sex workers and older and poorer people. The average age of those killed in the fire was 62.

On Monday, Taiwan’s interior minister, Hsu Kuo-Yung, ordered local officials to create an inventory of all the island’s older buildings within one month, and to complete inspections of the public safety and fire facilities of such structures within three months. In Kaohsiung alone, at least 34 older buildings have already been identified by the authorities as “high-risk.”

The island’s Ministry of Health and Welfare also said over the weekend that it had ordered local governments to step up services for older people living alone in Taiwan. The country’s population is aging rapidly, and an estimated one in five citizens will be older than 65 by 2025.

The social department of Kaohsiung’s government has also said it would give $3,200 to each household affected by the fire to help with resettlement efforts.

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 Russian spacecraft returns to Earth with movie crew aboard

Early on Thursday, a fire tore through the 13-story building in Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s main port city, killing at least 46 people and injuring dozens. The blaze, Taiwan’s deadliest in decades, underscored concerns about the island’s lax safety standards.

At least 41 other people were being treated for injuries, local fire officials said. The cause of the fire was under investigation, said Lee Ching-hsiu, the city’s fire chief.

Surveillance footage from a neighboring building showed a flash of light on the first floor, and soon the entire floor was engulfed in flames, according to local news reports. Photos and videos circulating online showed dazed and soot-covered older residents being escorted out of the charred building, some on stretchers.

Firefighters received the first calls for help around 3 a.m. on Thursday and extinguished the blaze about four hours later. By the afternoon, they were still looking for survivors in the building, which was inhabited by about 120 families, mostly low-income and older residents living between the seventh and 11th floors.

“It was a sea of flames,” Lin Chuan-fu, 57, a Kaohsiung resident who lives near the building, said in a telephone interview.

Mr. Lin said a loud explosion woke him up around 3 a.m., and he went into the street to see what was happening. He said the flames had moved quickly from the ground floor to the higher floors. He added that he was worried that some of the older residents living on the higher floors would have had a hard time evacuating in the dark.

“They might not have had enough time to get out,” he said.

Built in the 1980s, the commercial and residential building near the Love River in central Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s third-biggest city, once hummed with restaurants, karaoke lounges and a movie theater. But conditions in the building began to deteriorate after a fire broke out there in 1999, according to local reports. While no one died in that fire, the building was partly abandoned.

Recent photos and videos showed what appeared to be alarming safety conditions inside the building, including exposed electricity cables, corroded water pipes and heaps of detritus obstructing dark stairwells.

Several developers tried to take over and renovate the building in recent years, according to Apple Daily, a local news outlet. But those efforts met with resistance from the building’s residents.

Taiwan has a spotty record when it comes to fire safety. The tragedy on Thursday was Taiwan’s deadliest building fire since 1995, when a blaze broke out in a karaoke club in the central city of Taichung, killing 64 people. That fire was the deadliest in a string of major blazes that occurred in Taiwan around the time, and led some to raise questions about whether the self-governing island, in its push to democratize and grow economically, had overlooked basic safety concerns in the rush to develop.

In 2018, an explosion at an oil refinery in northern Taiwan set off a fire that took hours to extinguish. In July, four people, including one firefighter, died in a fire at a quarantine hotel in central Taiwan after management told guests to stay in their rooms even after the alarm sounded. The hotel had been inspected by fire officials just two months before.

Lin Chin-rong, the deputy mayor of Kaohsiung, said the building had been inspected by the police and fire officials four times since 2019. He said that an inspection notice had been posted on the building as recently as Tuesday, but that a barrier had prevented fire officials from going to the higher floors.

He added that local fire officials and government construction workers had been in touch with the building’s self-appointed representatives in the days before the fire broke out.

“It is very unfortunate that such a bad thing happened before the improvements could be completed,” Mr. Lin said.

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However, the five-year-old greyhound has an unusual job — he is a ghost detector and uses his amplified senses to sniff out any sinister activity.

He even has his own personal harness, with ‘Spooky Doo’ embroidered on it, a tongue-in-cheek reference to his cartoon counterpart Scooby Doo.

His owners Brian Sterling-Vete and partner Helen Wuorio run a Manchester-based paranormal investigation agency called Paranormal Rescue in their spare time.

In a post on her website, Helen described the couple as ‘approaching the subject from an open-minded objective scientific position’.

She said: “We share a hobby-cum-new professional obsession that tries to solve old mysteries and scientifically tries to solve riddles that seem to have a paranormal twist.”

The couple adopted Bond from a greyhound rescue center, and his new life as a four-legged paranormal investigator began, taking him to many allegedly haunted places in the Greater Manchester area and even further afield.

A video sent by BBC news shows exactly what happens during one of these investigations, of a former police station in Bolton, which Brian believes is haunted after Bond seemed to react after one of their previous visits.

The former police station is now a dormitory, but staff have often reported a sense of dread as they approached the basement that used to house prisoners.

In the video, Brian Bond describes as a “very good sensory equipment” on their ghost hunting missions.

“Far better than the electronic equipment in many ways because he automatically senses things and notifies us.”

Bond and Brian explored the basement of the old police station in Bolton (Photo: BBC)

Bond and Brian go from room to room checking the old cells, some of which are dimly lit and cramped, before stopping outside a particular cell.

“Bond was chasing something only he could see around the building, pulling my wife behind him on the tip and eventually settling in this cell.” Added Brian.

Bond had previously reacted to the cell, and it turned out to have a tragic story behind it – two prisoners allegedly took their own lives there, 100 years before.

This time, Bond seems reluctant to re-enter the cell, which Brain attributes to his previous reaction.

Greg Paton, one of the staff at the college, said, “I can only say that dogs know many things people do not know, and I believe in him.”

Whether you are a skeptic or a believer, there is one thing that is certain: Bond takes his new job very seriously.

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An analysis of radio waves emitted by the encounter, known as AT2019dsg, has shown that it was fairly ordinary, at least as far as a black hole tearing apart a star goes. That means that the event wasn't energetic enough to produce the neutrino months later – that the events were merely coincidental.

"Instead of seeing the bright jet of material needed for this, we see a fainter radio outflow of material," said astronomer Kate Alexander of Northwestern University. "Instead of a powerful firehose, we see a soft wind."

The death of a star by a black hole isn't a neat and tidy process. When an errant star comes close enough to a black hole that it's snared by the latter object's gravity, the colossal tidal force of the black hole – the product of its gravitational field – first stretches and then pulls the star so hard that it's torn apart.

This is called a tidal disruption event (TDE). It releases a brilliant flare of light, glowing brightly as half of the debris from the disintegrated star swirls into a disc around the black hole, generating immense heat and light before it's pulled inexorably beyond the event horizon. The other half of the debris gets flung out into space.

AT2019dsg, first detected on 9 April 2019, was just such an event, from a galaxy 750 million light-years away. X-ray and radio observations confirmed a supermassive black hole 30 million times the mass of the Sun undergoing a TDE. Nearly six months later, on 1 October 2019, a neutrino called IC191001A was detected at the IceCube neutrino detector in Antarctica, clocking in at a whopping energy level of over 200 teraelectronvolts.

Neutrinos are called 'ghost particles' because their mass is almost zero, they travel at near light-speed, and they don't really interact with normal matter; to a neutrino, the Universe would be all but incorporeal. Occasionally, however, they do interact, and this is how IceCube works. When a neutrino interacts with the Antarctic ice, it can create a flash of light. With detectors tunneled deep under that ice, those flashes really stand out.

Based on characteristics such as how the light propagates, and how bright it is, scientists can work out the energy level of the neutrino, and the direction from whence it came. IC191001A came from the direction of AT2019dsg, so closely that scientists calculated just a 0.2 percent chance that the neutrino and TDE were unrelated.

But that raised some significant issues.

"If this neutrino somehow came from AT2019dsg, it begs the question: Why haven't we spotted neutrinos associated with supernovae at this distance or closer?" said astronomer Yvette Cendes of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian.

"They are much more common and have the same energy velocities."

The research team, led by Cendes, used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile to observe AT2019dsg for over 500 days in radio wavelengths. They found that the TDE continued to brighten in radio wavelengths for around 200 days, at which point it peaked and began to slowly dim.

They also calculated the total amount of energy in the TDE outflow: It was about as much energy emitted by the Sun over 30 million years. That's pretty standard for a TDE, as well as type Ib and type Ic supernovae.

In order to produce a neutrino as energetic as IC191001A, the energy of the outflow would need to have been around 1,000 times greater.

In addition, it would need to have had a strange geometry, which AT2019dsg's outflow did not. AT2019dsg is really rather ordinary, after all. Since IC191001A is not ordinary, a new explanation might be warranted.

But there's a lot we still don't know about neutrinos, and TDEs for that matter. This means AT2019dsg is going to continue being of interest.

"We're probably going to check in on this one again," Cendes said. "This particular black hole is still feeding."

The research has been published in The Astrophysical Journal.

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Its outlines are faint, only discernible at an angle, but the world’s oldest drawing of a ghost has been discovered in the darkened vaults of the British Museum.

A lonely bearded spirit being led into the afterlife and eternal bliss by a lover has been identified on an ancient Babylonian clay tablet created about 3,500 years ago.

It is part of an exorcist’s guide to getting rid of unwanted ghosts by addressing the particular malaise that brought them back to the world of the living – in this case, a ghost in desperate need of a companion. He is shown walking with his arms outstretched, his wrists tied by a rope held by the female, while an accompanying text details a ritual that would to dispatch them happily to the underworld.

Dr Irving Finkel, curator of the Middle Eastern department at the British Museum, said the “absolutely spectacular object from antiquity” had been overlooked until now.

“It’s obviously a male ghost and he’s miserable. You can imagine a tall, thin, bearded ghost hanging about the house did get on people’s nerves. The final analysis was that what this ghost needed was a lover,” he said.

“You can’t help but imagine what happened before. ‘Oh God, Uncle Henry’s back.’ Maybe Uncle Henry’s lost three wives. Something that everybody knew was that the way to get rid of the old bugger was to marry him off. It’s not fanciful to read this into it. It’s a kind of explicit message. There’s very high-quality writing there and immaculate draughtsmanship.

“That somebody thinks they can get rid of a ghost by giving them a bedfellow is quite comic.”

As a world authority on cuneiform, a system of writing used in the ancient Middle East, Finkel realised that the tablet had been incorrectly deciphered previously. The drawing had been missed as the ghost only comes to life when viewed from above and under a light. Forgotten since its acquisition by the museum in the 19th century, the tablet has never even been exhibited.

Irving Finkel, a world authority on cuneiform script, tells the story of his ghostly discovery in The First Ghosts. Photograph: Dave Cherry

Finkel said: “You’d probably never give it a second thought because the area where the drawings are looks like it’s got no writing. But when you examine it and hold it under a lamp, those figures leap out at you across time in the most startling way. It is a Guinness Book of Records object because how could anybody have a drawing of a ghost which was older?”

While half the tablet is missing and it is small enough to fit in a person’s hand, the back bears an extensive text with the instructions for dealing with a ghost that “seizes hold of a person and pursues him and cannot be loosed”. The ritual involves making figurines of a man and a woman: “You dress the man in an everyday shift and equip him with travel provisions. You wrap the woman in four red garments and clothe her in a purple cloth. You give her a golden brooch. You equip her fully with bed, chair, mat and towel; you give her a comb and a flask.

“At sunrise towards the sun you make the ritual arrangements and set up two carnelian vessels of beer. You set in place a special vessel and set up a juniper censer with juniper. You draw the curtain like that of the diviner. You [put] the figurines together with their equipment and place them in position… and say as follows, Shamash [god of the sun and judge of the underworld by night].”

The text ends with a warning: “Do not look behind you!”

Finkel believes the tablet was part of a library of magic in the house of an exorcist or in a temple.

The ghost has appeared just in time for Halloween. Its discovery features in Finkel’s forthcoming book, The First Ghosts: Most Ancient of Legacies, to be published on 11 November by Hodder & Stoughton.

He himself has never seen a ghost, “even in the shadier vaults of the British Museum”, which is “riddled with ghosts”, he said. “In the King’s Library, more than one person has seen a head and shoulders moving along but at a peculiar height. That was dismissed by sceptics, but it turns out that the original floor under the present floor was actually low, which means that they were about right.”

He hopes to exhibit the Babylonian tablet, noting that such an artefact brings us closer to our ancestors: “All the fears and weaknesses and characteristics that make the human race so fascinating, assuredly were there in spades 3,500 years ago.

“I want people to know about this culture. Egypt always wins in Hollywood. If the Babylonian underworld is anything like it was described, then they’re all still there. So just remember that.”

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RTS,S proves that shots can work against parasites. But to eradicate this disease, scientists say we need more than just one tool.

 

 

When Patrick Duffy started his career at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in 1991, scientists were already a few years into testing a first-of-its-kind vaccine that would protect against malaria. Thirty years later, the World Health Organization has finally recommended the product of that research as a malaria intervention for children under age 5 in Africa. The RTS,S vaccine, also called Mosquirix, is the first vaccine to protect against a parasite.

 

Duffy, now the chief of the Laboratory of Malaria Immunology and Vaccinology at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is excited about its potential to reduce the toll of a disease that kills more than 400,000 people every year. But he’s well aware that this vaccine isn’t a universal solution. “This prevents clinical malaria in children,” he says. But it doesn’t stop transmission of the parasite from mosquitoes to humans, and it doesn’t protect everyone who is vulnerable. “What about pregnant women? What about elimination?” he asks. “I feel as though this is a base upon which improvements can be made.”

 

Scientists at the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) first conceived of RTS,S in the 1980s, targeting children under 5, who account for over 65 percent of malaria fatalities. People develop immunity to the parasite as they age, so adults don’t become as seriously ill as children if they are infected. This vaccine is meant to speed up that process, giving kids protection until their immune systems are stronger.

 

But it took a long time to test the vaccine. GSK partnered with organizations including Walter Reed, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and clinics in seven African countries to run clinical trials. The European Medicines Agency assessed the vaccine as safe and effective after Phase III clinical trials conducted by GSK from 2009 to 2011 found it was 50 percent effective at preventing serious illness. But WHO officials were still not convinced it would work in a real-world context, because the vaccine requires four doses, delivered as shots, over the course of 18 months. So GSK ran an additional pilot program in 2019, testing the product in Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi.

 

Although health ministries in each country have to approve the vaccine, a recommendation by the WHO is a big endorsement. But scaling up manufacturing to make millions of doses, organizing national health systems to distribute them, and getting financial aid from nonprofits and other countries takes time. “There is still a lot of work to do before the vaccine would be available more broadly,” says Ashley Birkett, director of the malaria vaccine initiative at PATH, a nonprofit that helped develop the vaccine.

 

Malaria is a complicated parasite that has evolved alongside humans for thousands of years. Unlike respiratory viruses like the flu that spread through the air, malaria is spread by mosquitoes. They pick up the parasite from the blood of infected people, and then bite others in the community, passing the parasite along to them. While the SARS-CoV-2 virus has around 10 genes that code for 29 proteins, Plasmodium falciparum, one of five parasites that cause malaria, has a much larger genome that codes for over 5,000 proteins.

 

The parasite also has a complex life cycle. When infected mosquitoes bite someone, tiny spores called sporozoites enter the bloodstream and travel to the liver, where they start to multiply by splitting themselves into pieces. Those then travel out of the liver and into the heart, lungs, and bloodstream, where they infect red blood cells and start to make people sick with flu-like symptoms, nausea, and chills. In severe cases, malaria can cause brain damage, seizures, breathing difficulty, and organ failure.

 

With so many stages of infection, it’s been hard to find a good target for a vaccine. What's needed is a protein that will elicit a strong immune response from the infected person, and—if disabled at the right moment—will halt the progress of the disease, says Duffy. The RTS,S vaccine carries antigens that replicate part of one protein in the sporozoites, training the immune system to catch the pathogen before it enters the liver.

 

During GSK’s 2019 pilot program, the vaccine prevented serious disease in only 30 percent of the children. That’s low compared with childhood vaccines for diseases like polio and rubella, which have efficacies of 99 percent and 97 percent, respectively. But it could still save a third of the more than 270,000 children who die from malaria every year.

 

“The key thing here is the scale of the problem,” says Marta Tufet, head of policy at Gavi, a nonprofit that works with the WHO, UNICEF, foundations, and countries to distribute vaccines to children in the world’s poorest countries. “Even a very modestly effective vaccine can confer substantial benefit and protection and translate to tens of thousands of lives saved every year.” She also points out that in the pilot program, the vaccine reached many children who didn’t have access to more common prevention methods, like bed nets that keep out mosquitoes. “The vaccine provides a good platform to meet more vulnerable kids,” she says.

Still, there is lots of room for improvement, says Prakash Srinivasan, assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute at the Bloomberg School of Public Health: “The goal is not to prevent deaths in 30 percent of the kids. The goal is to prevent every single death.”

 

Srinivasan says a vaccine that would prevent all deaths might include several different antigens that would target the parasite at different stages of its life cycle and the infection. Some researchers are investigating vaccines that would prevent the parasite from entering red blood cells, but those haven’t reached clinical trials yet. Other potential solutions target transmission by creating antigens that disrupt its sexual reproduction phase, which happens while it’s living in its mosquito host. This would stop the insects from spreading infection from one person to another.

 

Duffy says RTS,S could also be improved by using a different mix of chemicals, called an adjuvant, to deliver the antigens and provoke the immune system to make more antigens. RTS,S also only includes a small section of the sporozoite protein, so including more of the protein might also help boost protection.

 

But changes to how the vaccine is delivered could improve protection too. “When RTS,S was being developed, it was considered another vaccine that needed to be delivered through existing systems,” says Duffy, meaning given alongside other early childhood vaccines, which are scheduled according to a child’s age. But Duffy says that RTS,S is more like the flu shot: Its effectiveness fades after several months as the number of antigens in the bloodstream starts to dwindle. That means that the timing of the shot matters, not only the child’s age. He points to studies that took a seasonal approach, delivering the vaccine right before the rainy season when malaria cases usually spike, and combining the vaccine with antimalarial drugs that are given prophylactically to prevent an infection from becoming a serious illness. The combination of tools increased the vaccine’s effectiveness to over 75 percent.

 

“This is a real opportunity for complementarity,” says Ashley Birkett of PATH, and that will be important because no one form of prevention is perfect. People don’t always use bed nets, and those nets don’t always work perfectly. Homes often aren’t designed to keep mosquitoes out. Mosquitoes have evolved to withstand many insecticides used to control malaria spread, and the parasites can become resistant to antimalarial drugs too.

 

It will also take time to work out the logistics of vaccine approval, distribution, and funding. In a written statement to WIRED, a GSK spokesperson said the company is already producing doses and has committed to selling them for no more than the cost of production plus an additional 5 percent. But that price, and how many doses GSK makes each year, will depend on demand. According to the spokesperson, the more that’s needed, the less it will cost. But none of those calculations can be made if there isn’t funding to buy the vaccine.

 

Birkett estimates that with all the complications of marshaling that funding, receiving national approvals, and rolling out distribution, it may be a decade before the RTS,S vaccine becomes common in every country that needs it. GSK has already pledged to supply 15 million doses annually, but the WHO predicts that by 2036, the demand for the vaccine could skyrocket to as much as 110 million doses every year. “We're not going to be in a situation where three years from now every child in Africa that could benefit from this vaccine is going to have it,” Birkett says.

The Malaria Vaccine Is a Big Deal, but Not a Silver Bullet

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"Each one of these tells us a chapter of the story that we're all a part of."

NASA’s Lucy mission will soon be in the sky, with a launch set for Saturday

Probably not, if annual influenza vaccination rates are any indication, especially if you're under the age of 65. According to a Houston Methodist review published in the Journal of the American Heart Association, Americans with heart disease continue to have low vaccination rates every year despite higher rates of death and complications from influenza.

The flu vaccination rate for American adults who are less than 65 years of age and have heart disease is less than 50%, compared to 80% in older adults with heart disease.

"It seems that younger Americans with high-risk conditions have not gotten the same memo that their older counterparts have received about the importance of getting the influenza vaccine," says Dr. Priyanka Bhugra, internal medicine specialist at Houston Methodist and lead author of the JAHA article. "That's dangerous, considering people with heart conditions are particularly vulnerable to influenza-related heart complications, whether they've reached retirement age or not."

It's well-known that the flu can lead to significant respiratory symptoms such as pneumonia, bronchitis and bacterial infection of the lungs. The virus' effects on the heart have historically been harder to parse out, in part because many patients already have a known predisposition to cardiac events and in part because the cardiac event often occurs weeks after the onset of the flu.

• But here's what recent research has shown:

• Cardiovascular deaths and influenza epidemics spike around the same time.

• Patients are six times more likely to experience a heart attack the week after influenza infection than they are at any point during the year prior or the year after the infection.

• In one study looking at 336,000 hospital admissions for flu, 11.5% experienced a serious cardiac event.

• Another study looking at 90,000 lab-confirmed influenza infections showed a strikingly similar rate of 11.7% experiencing an acute cardiovascular event.

• One in eight patients, or 12.5%, admitted to the hospital with influenza experienced a cardiovascular event, with 31% of those requiring intensive care and 7% dying as a result of the event, another study found.

The reason influenza stresses the heart and vascular system so much has to do with the body's inflammatory response to the infection.

Inflammation occurs when your body's "first responders"—white blood cells and what they produce in order to protect you—convene in an area and get to work fighting an infection, bacteria or virus. When you're sick, you can typically feel the effects of these "combat zones" in the swelling, tenderness, pain, weakness and sometimes redness and increased temperature of your joints, muscles and lymph nodes.

The increased activity can also cause a traffic jam of sorts, leading to blood clots, elevated blood pressure and even swelling or scarring within the heart. The added stressors make plaque within your arteries more vulnerable to rupture, causing a blockage that cuts off oxygen to the heart or brain and results in heart attacks or strokes, respectively.

Additionally, non-cardiac complications from the viral illness, including pneumonia and respiratory failure, can make heart failure symptoms or heart arrhythmia much worse.

In short, the added stress on the cardiovascular system could be overwhelming to an already weakened heart muscle.

Because influenza viruses are constantly mutating, scientists alter the vaccine each year to match the likely prevalent strands. On average, it's effective at preventing infection 40% of the time. While that might not sound great—especially in comparison to the highly effective mRNA COVID-19 vaccines—it's enough to significantly lower the risk of severe illness in most people.

Lately, studies have been able to show that not only is the vaccine effective at protecting the general population and the most vulnerable age groups (over 65 and under 2) from severe cases of the flu, but it's also protective against cardiovascular mortality as well, especially among the high-risk population.

Some of the recent findings:

• Adults who received the vaccine were 37% less likely to be hospitalized for the flu and 82% less likely to be admitted to the ICU because of it.

• Among people admitted to the hospital with the flu, those vaccinated were 59% less likely to be admitted to the ICU. Vaccinated patients admitted to the ICU spent four fewer days in the ICU than unvaccinated patients.

• Vaccination was associated with a lower risk of cardiovascular events (2.9% vs 4.7%) if the patient got the flu. Among the highest-risk patients with more active coronary disease, vaccination was associated with considerably better outcomes.

• Patients admitted to the hospital with acute coronary syndrome were randomly assigned to either receive a flu vaccine or not before discharge. Major cardiovascular events occurred less frequently in the vaccine group than the control group (9.5% vs. 19%).

As a result of the demonstrated benefits conferred by influenza vaccination and the risks posed by flu infection among those with cardiovascular disease, the CDC and numerous other international societies strongly recommend annual influenza vaccination in patients with cardiovascular disease.

Clinicians should ensure high rates of influenza vaccination, especially in those with underlying chronic conditions, to protect against acute cardiovascular events associated with influenza.

Unfortunately, many heart patients visit their cardiologist more frequently than their primary care providers, and cardiology practices typically do not provide flu vaccinations, though proposed recommendations may change in the future. Until then, it is incumbent upon both the cardiology provider and the primary care provider to communicate the increased risk to their patients and the importance of getting vaccinated.

For patients with heart conditions, there are two important steps you can take to reduce your risk:

• Make sure you do obtain your influenza vaccine from your local pharmacy or primary care provider. The earlier you get it, the better it is at protecting you, as you never know when the virus may begin to spread.

• Make sure you are taking your medications and following your recommended diet, exercise and stress reduction plans. If your heart condition is stable and you end up with the flu, chances are you'll experience fewer, less severe complications than if your heart condition is poorly managed.

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Moderna boosters are recommended for the same groups eligible for a Pfizer booster.

FDA advisors unanimously green-light Moderna boosters for people 65+, high-risk

The Cretaceous–Paleogene mass extinction saw a snake-splosion of biodiversity.

How a mass extinction resulted in the rise of the snakes

The woman had no luggage and held a drink container in her right hand, according to CBS Denver. The outlet decided not to release the video because the woman was allegedly experiencing a medical issue. 

The incident happened at Gate A-37 around 5 o’clock in the morning on Sept. 19, police told CBS Denver. Only passengers with airline tickets can usually access the gates, according to CBS Denver.

Police officers said they had a “report of an intoxicated female completely nude,” CBS Denver reported. “Officers … responded and located the female running around the concourse having some type of medical issue. Paramedics were called code 10 (which indicates an emergency response). The female was transported to University Hospital by ambulance due to an undetermined medical episode,” the report stated, according to CBS Denver.

“The terminal operations team and Denver Police responded and were able to escort her out of there and it was up to DPD from there,” Denver International Airport public information officer, Stephanie Figueroa, told OutThere Colorado.

In September, a woman was spotted walking through an airport wearing only a bikini. She was allegedly catching a Spirit Airlines flight, according to the clip posted to Instagram, however the airline called the video “unverified.”

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A woman in Canada awoke in shock earlier this week when a rock crashed through the ceiling of her home and landed on her bed, narrowly missing her but spraying grit and other debris on her face, as her dog barked frantically.

Police were called and the culprit was initially suspected to be a construction site nearby, where work must have sent the fist-sized projectile onto the woman’s pillow. But when the construction workers said they had not set any blasts – but had just seen an explosion in the sky – the consensus quickly became that the rock was a meteorite, the Canadian Press reported.

Ruth Hamilton had been fast asleep in Golden, a small town amid the Rocky Mountains, in British Columbia, on 3 October when her dog began barking and she woke with a start.

“I’ve never been so scared in my life,” she said. “I wasn’t sure what to do so I called 911 and, when I was speaking with the operator, I flipped over my pillow and saw that a rock had slipped between two pillows.”

It turned out there had been a meteorite shower in the skies above the western Canadian region that night. Hamilton plans to keep the space rock and is very relieved she wasn’t injured.

“I was in shock and I just sat here for a few hours shaking,” she said. “The odds of that happening are so small so I’m pretty grateful to be alive.”

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Researchers with the University of Technology Sydney have discovered 46 specific harmful effects of using social networks. These include physical detriments, mental health problems, impacts on work or school productivity, and security or privacy issues.

To call this a risk to global health would be an understatement. More than 3.6 billion people, about half the global population, use social networks such as Facebook and Instagram. Researchers say the best way to avoid these dangers is to be more aware of them and practice moderation when going online.

“Social media harms have mostly been studied from a psychopathological perspective. They have received less attention from information systems researchers,” says Dr. Eila Erfani, Deputy Head of the UTS School of Information, Systems and Modelling, in a university release.

“Information systems looks at the impact of technology on people and organizations in order to better meet their needs. Identifying and understanding how to reduce adverse outcomes from social media use is part of that challenge,” Erfani continues. “The World Health Organization has recognized the need for further research on information technology addiction and the need to develop strategies for preventing and treating this problem.”

Six degrees of social media harm

Study authors broke the dozens of social media dangers down into six specific fields.

• Cost of social exchange: This includes both psychological harms, such as depression, anxiety, or jealousy, and other costs to users like wasting time, energy, and even money.

• Annoying content: These harms appear when users view content that annoys, upsets, or irritates them. This typically includes disturbing, violent, sexual, or obscene content.

• Privacy concerns: These are threats to personal privacy related to storing, repurposing, or sharing personal information with third parties.

• Security threats: These are harms from fraud or deception which can emerge from phishing or social engineering scams.

• Cyberbullying: This includes any abuse or harassment by groups or individuals who send abusive messages, lie about others, stalk individuals, or spread rumors.

• Low performance: This refers to the negative impact social media use can have on job or academic performance.

“Much of the research on social network use has focused on its benefits and potential, but we were interested in comprehensively identifying the negative impacts that have been associated with social media use,” says PhD candidate and study author Layla Boroon.

“We reviewed more than 50 research articles published between 2003 and 2018. Some of the most common negative impacts included psychological harms such as jealousy, loneliness, anxiety and reduced self-esteem, as well as things like exposure to malicious software and phishing risks.”

The findings appear in the Journal of Global Information Management.

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Mix-and-match COVID boosters are as good—if not better than—all the same shots

The research found that patients who used proton pump inhibitors (PPIs)—a class of drugs commonly prescribed to treat heartburn, acid reflux and ulcers—were more likely to have smaller probing depths in the gums (the gap between teeth and gums). When gums are healthy, they fit snuggly against the teeth. However, in the presence of harmful bacteria, the gap deepens, leading to inflammation, bone loss and periodontitis, also known as gum disease.

The findings, published last month in Clinical and Experimental Dental Research, may be linked to the side effects of PPIs, which include changes in bone metabolism and in the gut microbiome, says lead investigator Lisa M. Yerke, DDS, clinical assistant professor in the Department of Periodontics and Endodontics at the UB School of Dental Medicine.

"PPIs could potentially be used in combination with other periodontal treatments; however, additional studies are first needed to understand the underlying mechanisms behind the role PPIs play in reducing the severity of periodontitis," says Yerke.

Additional investigators include first author and UB alumnus Bhavneet Chawla, and Robert E. Cohen, DDS, Ph.D., professor of periodontics and endodontics in the UB School of Dental Medicine.

The study sought to determine whether a relationship exists between PPI use and gum disease. The researchers analyzed clinical data from more than 1,000 periodontitis patients either using or not using PPIs. Probing depths were used as an indicator of periodontitis severity.

Only 14% of teeth from patients who used PPIs had probing depths of 6 millimeters or more, compared to 24% of teeth from patients who did not use the medication. And 27% of teeth from patients using PPIs had probing depths of 5 millimeters or more, compared to 40% of teeth from non-PPI users, according to the study.

The researchers theorized that PPIs' ability to alter bone metabolism or the gut microbiome, as well as potentially impact periodontal microorganisms, may help lessen the severity of gum disease.

Additional studies are under development to determine if this relationship can be found in other populations of patients with gum disease, and to learn to what extent the relationship can be directly attributed to PPIs, says Yerke.

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