"Everybody in the world needs to do this."

11:10 am ET Update: Although the launch was delayed nearly an hour due to unspecified issues, Blue Origin's New Shepard spacecraft successfully took off from West Texas on Wednesday morning and safely landed 10 minutes and 18 seconds later. The capsule crested at an altitude of 107 km.

 

This was Blue Origin's second human spaceflight and garnered widespread attention because among the crew was Star Trek actor William Shatner, a guest of Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos. “That’s unlike anything I’ve ever felt before," Shatner said upon landing. "Everybody in the world needs to do this."

 

Blue Origin will now target one more crew flight in 2021, with six yet-unnamed passengers, likely to take place in December. The cadence for human suborbital missions should ramp up to 6 to 12 passenger flights in 2022. The main impediment to increasing cadence is believed to be heat shield refurbishment—there is plenty of demand from customers, even at prices of $1 million and higher for a seat on early missions.

 

Original post: Admittedly, there are many reasons to be cynical about today's human spaceflight on Blue Origin's New Shepard launch system.

 

The company founded by Jeff Bezos has not covered itself in glory of late, falling years short of delivering rocket engines to a key customer, United Launch Alliance, and suing another—NASA—after failing to win a contract to build a lunar lander. Thanks to Blue Origin's lawsuit, NASA's work with SpaceX on the Human Landing System has been on hold for nearly five months.

 

Then there are the recent revelations about a "toxic" work culture at the company. Some former and current employees, all unnamed except Alexandra Abrams, who left the company in 2019, have decried a sexist workplace and other cultural ills that have held Blue Origin back from fulfilling its potential.

 

On the eve of the New Shepard-18 flight, which will carry actor William Shatner briefly into space and above Earth's atmosphere, Abrams said she hoped the crew of four will have a safe and nominal flight. But she was pulling no punches when it came to Blue Origin, its founder Jeff Bezos, and how far she felt the reality of Blue Origin's actions had strayed from his soaring vision.

 

"I grew up on Star Trek, and I remember when Jeff Bezos toured Shatner around Blue in Kent, Washington, in 2019," she said. "To me, Shatner’s presence serves as a reminder of how unlike the aspirational Federation we are today, and will continue to be, if nothing changes. Star Trek is about exploring our shared humanity and evolution as a species; I worry we're becoming the Ferengi of our own story."

 

Bezos seems oblivious to this kind of criticism. In response to an article about Abrams and concerns of many other employees in the newspaper he owns, The Washington Post, Bezos tweeted an image of a 1995 article in Barron's criticizing Amazon. "Listen and be open, but don’t let anybody tell you who you are," Bezos said. "This was just one of the many stories telling us all the ways we were going to fail."

 

But it's not at all clear that Bezos is listening or being open to valid criticism of Blue Origin.

 

Finally, there can be no question that inviting Shatner to fly as a guest on just the second human flight of New Shepard is a marketing ploy. This mission lacks the novelty of the first crewed flight—carrying Bezos—and interest would otherwise have been low for sending two millionaires (Chris Boshuizen and Glen de Vries) and Blue Origin employee Audrey Powers into space for a few minutes.

 

I asked Twitter followers on Tuesday whether they thought the spectacle of flying Shatner to space was more "marketing" or more "marvelous," and by a three-to-one margin they voted for "marketing."

 

 

As someone who has written about space for decades and watched most episodes of most Star Trek series, I would say that flying Shatner into space is marvelous marketing. This flight does not solve any of the problems at Blue Origin, which are substantial. Due to poor management, the company has under-delivered. But Captain Kirk is finally going to space, and it's thanks to Blue Origin and Jeff Bezos.

 

There are a lot of things to be upset about in the world today, but sending Shatner to space, after he's delivered so much joy to so many for so many years, is not one of them.

 

The launch is scheduled to occur at 9:00 am CT, local time, in West Texas, or 14:00 UTC. The webcast will begin 90 minutes beforehand.

 

William Shatner safely goes to space and back [Updated]

A state-of-the-art summary of evidence shows there is a moderate level of evidence linking 10 milligrams of lutein/zeaxanthin per day with eye function. Five mg/day was insufficient to have an effect and sufficient research was lacking to determine impacts at the 5-10 mg level.

While more research would be helpful, this "study of studies" finds that the indicator of normal eye structure called macular pigment optical density (MPOD) improved with intake of the carotenoid lutein/zeaxanthin. Macular pigment is a key structure in the eye protecting the retina from damaging blue light.

Lutein/zeaxanthin is found in leafy green vegetables, squash, corn, egg yolks, avocados and dietary supplements.

The state of the art evidence titled "The Effect of Lutein/Zeaxanthin Intake on Human MPOD: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis," is published in the peer-reviewed journal Advances in Nutrition. The review focused on 46 human studies, totaling 3,189 participants with healthy eyes. MPOD is a measure of lutein/zeaxanthin concentration in the macula and is associated with visual function.

This systematic review reports that lutein and zeaxanthin intake at doses 10 mg or more increases macular pigment density in adults with healthy eyes. It should be noted that these studies are conducted over a relatively short time period (months rather than years). An important gap is to study whether levels below 10 mg, when consumed regularly as part of a diet over years (not just a few months), has impact on macular pigment comparable to short-term higher supplementation.

According to senior author Dr. Karen Robinson, "Our review was the first to evaluate the effects of both dietary and supplemental sources of lutein on healthy eyes. Daily lutein supplements of 10 mg or more increased macular pigment after 3 months. Studies of dietary sources of lutein generally used lower daily doses of lutein over a short period of time (6 months or less)."

Source

Now in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, it's important to be vaccinated for COVID-19 and the flu. And you can get both shots at the same time.

"In most places, flu starts circulating by November, December. So it's recommended that everyone complete their flu vaccine by October," says Dr. Priya Sampathkumar, a Mayo Clinic infectious diseases specialist.

Flu cases were low in 2020. And health experts attribute that to the COVID-19 pandemic and the preventive measures put in place to reduce the spread of COVID-19.

"We're afraid that with, in a lot of places, masking recommendations being relaxed, that flu will spread more easily. And the fact that no one had flu last year means there's a lot more people who are vulnerable this year," says Dr. Sampathkumar.

Flu and COVID-19 are caused by respiratory viruses and have similar symptoms.

"It's very, very hard—almost impossible—to distinguish the two just based on symptoms. Some cases of COVID can be very mild and present exactly like the flu. Some cases of flu can be very severe and present like COVID. So really, the only way to know for sure when you have a respiratory illness is to get tested," says Dr. Sampathkumar.

And if you haven't been vaccinated for COVID-19 yet or need a third dose or a booster, you can get your flu shot and COVID vaccination at the same time.

"It's perfectly safe to get both at the same time," she says.

Source

Since last October, Russia's natural population has declined by 997,000, according to The Washington Post. The natural population is determined by the difference between the country's death rate and birth rate. 

"[The] overwhelming share of this decline is associated with an increase in mortality, which is also reflected in the dramatic drop in life expectancy that fell by about 4 years," Alexey Raksha wrote in a Facebook post about the change, per the Post. "In turn, an overwhelming share of this increase in mortality is due to Covid-19."

The drop comes as Russia battles a brutal fourth wave of COVID-19.

On Wednesday, the country recorded its highest daily COVID-19 deaths with 984 fatalities reported, an increase from Tuesday's high of 973 deaths. 

Despite a rising death toll and reports that 11 percent of the country's COVID-19 patients were in serious condition, the country has refused to lock down. 

Some Russian regions, however, have imposed vaccine mandates for people in certain industries like healthcare, education, retail and government. 

"Any measure that can encourage more people to get vaccinated is good because only vaccination saves from death," President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, previously said.

Data from Our World in Data showed that just over 30 percent of Russia was fully vaccinated against COVID-19.

Source

Russia was quick to develop and launch its Sputnik vaccine when the coronavirus pandemic struck last year, but take-up has been slow, with many Russians citing distrust of the authorities and fear of new medical products.

The nasal spray is to be applied in two doses in a clinic in St Petersburg, according to the document published on the state register of medicines, which did not provide the planned timing of the clinical tests.

President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday Russia needed to speed up its vaccination campaign against COVID-19 as the country recorded its highest single-day death toll since the start of the pandemic.

Russian authorities said in June it a nasal spray vaccine suitable for children aged 8-12 had been tested and the plan was to launch the new product in September. (Reporting by Anastasia Teterevleva and Polina Nikolskaya; writing by Andrey Ostroukh; editing by Mark Heinrich)

Source

By ADITYA KALRA in New Delhi and STEVE STECKLOW in London Filed Oct. 13, 2021, 11 a.m. GMT

Amazon.com Inc has been repeatedly accused of knocking off products it sells on its website and of exploiting its vast trove of internal data to promote its own merchandise at the expense of other sellers. The company has denied the accusations.

But thousands of pages of internal Amazon documents examined by Reuters – including emails, strategy papers and business plans – show the company ran a systematic campaign of creating knockoffs and manipulating search results to boost its own product lines in India, one of the company’s largest growth markets.

The documents reveal how Amazon’s private-brands team in India secretly exploited internal data from Amazon.in to copy products sold by other companies, and then offered them on its platform. The employees also stoked sales of Amazon private-brand products by rigging Amazon’s search results so that the company’s products would appear, as one 2016 strategy report for India put it, “in the first 2 or three … search results” when customers were shopping on Amazon.in.

Among the victims of the strategy: a popular shirt brand in India, John Miller, which is owned by a company whose chief executive is Kishore Biyani, known as the country’s “retail king.” Amazon decided to “follow the measurements of” John Miller shirts down to the neck circumference and sleeve length, the document states.

The internal documents also show that Amazon employees studied proprietary data about other brands on Amazon.in, including detailed information about customer returns. The aim: to identify and target goods - described as “reference” or “benchmark” products - and “replicate” them. As part of that effort, the 2016 internal report laid out Amazon’s strategy for a brand the company originally created for the Indian market called “Solimo.” The Solimo strategy, it said, was simple: “use information from Amazon.in to develop products and then leverage the Amazon.in platform to market these products to our customers.”

The Solimo project in India has had international impact: Scores of Solimo-branded health and household products are now offered for sale on Amazon’s U.S. website, Amazon.com.

The 2016 document further shows that Amazon employees working on the company’s own products, known as private brands or private labels, planned to partner with the manufacturers of the products targeted for copying. That’s because they learned that these manufacturers employ “unique processes which impact the end quality of the product.”

The document, entitled “India Private Brands Program,” states: “It is difficult to develop this expertise across products and hence, to ensure that we are able to fully match quality with our reference product, we decided to only partner with the manufacturers of our reference product.” It termed such manufacturer expertise “Tribal Knowledge.”

This is the second in a series of stories based on internal Amazon documents that provide a rare, unvarnished look, in the company’s own words, into business practices that it has denied for years.

Amazon has been accused before by employees who worked on private-brand products of exploiting proprietary data from individual sellers to launch competing products and manipulating search results to increase sales of the company’s own goods.

In sworn testimony before the U.S. Congress in 2020, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos explained that the e-commerce giant prohibits its employees from using the data on individual sellers to help its private-label business. And, in 2019, another Amazon executive testified that the company does not use such data to create its own private-label products or alter its search results to favor them.

But the internal documents seen by Reuters show for the first time that, at least in India, manipulating search results to favor Amazon’s own products, as well as copying other sellers’ goods, were part of a formal, clandestine strategy at Amazon – and that high-level executives were told about it. The documents show that two executives reviewed the India strategy – senior vice presidents Diego Piacentini, who has since left the company, and Russell Grandinetti, who currently runs Amazon’s international consumer business.

In a written response to questions for this report, Amazon said: “As Reuters hasn’t shared the documents or their provenance with us, we are unable to confirm the veracity or otherwise of the information and claims as stated. We believe these claims are factually incorrect and unsubstantiated.” The company did not elaborate. The statement also did not address questions from Reuters about the evidence in the documents that Amazon employees copied other companies’ products for its own brands.

The company said the way it displays search results doesn’t favor private-brand products. “We display search results based on relevance to the customer’s search query, irrespective of whether such products have private brands offered by sellers or not,” Amazon said.

Amazon also said that it “strictly prohibits the use or sharing of non-public, seller-specific data for the benefit of any seller, including sellers of private brands,” and that it investigates reports of its employees violating that policy.

Piacentini and Grandinetti didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The unfiltered insight the documents offer into Amazon’s aggressive use of its market power could intensify the legal and regulatory pressure the company is facing in many countries.

Amazon is under investigation in the United States, Europe and India for alleged anti-competitive practices that hurt other businesses. In India, the allegations include unfairly favoring its own branded merchandise. Amazon declined to comment on the investigations.

Jonas Koponen, an antitrust attorney with Linklaters LLP in Brussels, said the Reuters findings on Amazon’s practices in India would likely interest the European Commission, which is probing whether the company has used non-public seller data to boost its own retail business. India has cooperation agreements with the United States and the European Commission to exchange information related to enforcement of antitrust laws.

“When any one competition authority is looking into aspects of one of these globally present organizations’ behavior, they will certainly be interested in understanding what evidence there is in other parts of the world and the extent to which that evidence relates to the practices that they themselves are investigating,” Koponen said.

The documents also support criticism of Amazon laid out by Lina Khan, the new chair of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, or FTC. Khan published a paper in 2017 that argued that Amazon’s private-brand business raised anti-competitive concerns.

Lina Khan, who became chair of the Federal Trade Commission in June, speaks at a Senate confirmation hearing in April. She wrote in 2017 that Amazon’s private-brand business has “anticompetitive implications.” Saul Loeb/Pool via REUTERS

“Use information from Amazon.in to develop products and then leverage the Amazon.in platform to market these products to our customers.”

An internal Amazon document lays out the strategy for Solimo, a private brand the company created in India

“It is third-party sellers who bear the initial costs and uncertainties when introducing new products; by merely spotting them, Amazon gets to sell products only once their success has been tested,” she wrote. “The anticompetitive implications here seem clear.”

Amazon filed a petition in June with the FTC asking that Khan recuse herself from all matters related to the company because of “her repeated proclamations that Amazon has violated the antitrust laws.”

Khan and the FTC didn’t respond to requests for comment.

In the first article in this series, Reuters reported in February that Amazon had for years given preferential treatment to a few big sellers on its Indian platform, and used those sellers to circumvent regulations designed to protect the country’s small retailers. That report triggered action by India’s main financial crime-fighting agency, which sought information and documents from Amazon. In addition, the nation’s antitrust watchdog submitted the story as an exhibit in a court battle with Amazon over its investigation into the company’s alleged anti-competitive practices. The court rejected Amazon’s request to halt the probe.

“We are committed to extending cooperation to all authorities in India and are confident about our compliance,” Amazon said in its statement to Reuters.

Like many other retailers, Amazon views its own brands as a major driver of increased profitability. Private-brand products often have higher profit margins than normal retail brands because production and marketing costs can be lower.

An internal email sent by Amazon executive Grandinetti to a group of company executives in December 2018 stated: “We believe that over the next several years, Private Brands will be one of the most important growth and profitability drivers in the Consumer business.” Grandinetti added that company executives believed private brands “can achieve 10% penetration” of the company’s consumer business worldwide over the next five years.

Introducing Amazon’s own brands was especially critical in India. The company began its e-commerce foray there in 2013, and soon recorded millions of dollars in losses, one internal document shows. To make the business “sustainable in the long run,” the 2016 Private Brands document notes, Amazon embarked on a strategy centered on introducing its existing private brands, such as AmazonBasics, and new ones tailored to India.

The 2016 document stated a goal: offer Amazon’s own goods in 20% to 40% of all product categories on Amazon.in within two years. Amazon would achieve profitability in its private-brand business by “only launching products that will provide more margin than comparable reference brand products.”

Amazon predicted private-brand sales would reach nearly $600 million by 2020 in India, according to a 2017 internal business strategy document. “We will be amongst the Top 3 brands in each sub-category that we play in,” the document stated.

Whether it achieved that sales goal isn’t clear; Amazon doesn’t disclose its private-brand sales in India. The company didn’t comment on the strategic goals and other details from the documents reported in this article.

The India strategy for boosting sales of Amazon’s own products was reviewed by senior company executives, including Russell Grandinetti, who currently heads the company’s international consumer business. Grandinetti is seen here during a visit to Dubai in 2017. REUTERS/Ahmed Jadallah

An Amazon press release in 2018 revealed just how successful its private-brand business was becoming in India. Celebrating “record sales” during an annual promotion, the release stated, “Amazon Brands saw its best performance ever with 11X jump over last Great Indian Festival.”

Today, Amazon.in lists thousands of Amazon-branded offerings – from garbage bags, bed sheets and soap to air conditioners and televisions. According to the website, many are best-sellers.

One key person involved in 2016 with Amazon’s private-brand business in India was Amit Nanda, who later became a country director of the program, according to his LinkedIn profile. He holds an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, one of the nation’s top business schools. Before joining Amazon in 2014, according to his LinkedIn profile, he worked at Citibank and the Indian arm of consumer-goods giant Unilever.

As Amazon was reviewing its private-brand strategy in India in 2016, Amazon India employees had a meeting with Grandinetti. A longtime Amazon manager, at the time he was in charge of content for Kindle, the company’s popular reading device. But Amazon had announced that he would soon lead its international consumer business, including India.

During the meeting, Nanda was assigned various tasks, according to one Amazon document. Among them: The India private brands “business should be large and profitable. Build for scale.”

Nanda declined to comment for this story.

‘Glance views’

With its population of 1.3 billion people and a growing middle class, India represents a huge and potentially lucrative market for Amazon. But it’s also a country where foreign e-commerce players face a complex and protectionist regulatory regime.

The country’s brick-and-mortar retailers comprise an important political constituency for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Concerned that predatory pricing could hurt these merchants, India prohibits foreign e-commerce players from selling most goods directly to consumers, as they do in many other countries. Amazon and other foreign companies are restricted to operating an online marketplace of third-party sellers, with no one vendor allowed to hold an advantage over another. As a result, Amazon sells most of its private brands through other vendors.

In launching its private-brand business, internal documents show how Amazon used its Indian website to gain a clear edge for its own products on the platform. The creation of its Solimo brand offers a case study.

According to the internal documents, the word Solimo is derived from Solimões - the name for the upper stretches of the Amazon River in Brazil.

Amazon created a brand called Solimo for the Indian market. The brand has gone global: Today, scores of Solimo products are offered for sale on Amazon’s U.S. website. REUTERS/Aditya Kalra

With the Solimo line, Amazon aimed to offer items that equaled or exceeded the quality of competing brands but were 10% to 15% cheaper, the 2016 Private Brands document shows. Amazon employees studied different product categories, and compared their overall market size with how well those segments were doing on Amazon.in. They then targeted categories such as home furnishings. Amazon found that furnishings was a $2 billion business in India - but its own website’s three-month sales in mid-2014 totaled about $1 million.

In its analysis, Amazon used a metric called “glance views” that quantified which products were being viewed by customers on its website.

Explaining why it zeroed in on glance views, the 2016 Amazon document noted that monitoring its India website traffic provides “an opportunity to influence interested customers who are actively considering” a purchase in a product category.

Amazon has said some of the data its private-brand teams use in launching products is public – such as the website’s rankings of best-selling merchandise. This is how Amazon described the system to a U.S. congressional subcommittee last year: “Like anyone else at Amazon or in the general public, members of these teams can also visit Amazon’s product detail pages to learn a product’s best seller ranking and read customer reviews and star ratings to assess whether a product is selling well in Amazon’s store.”

But seven current and former Indian sellers on Amazon.in told Reuters they can’t access internal sales data of rival brands offered on the website.

Four of the sellers said they can access glance views, but only for their own products. Amazon has access to more data on sellers, including the number of product units shipped and details about customer returns, the 2016 document shows, giving it an advantage in market intelligence.

Amazon’s own use of the data to develop and promote its private-brand products “destroys the level playing field,” said one current seller, who asked to remain anonymous.

Amazon said in its statement that it “does not give preferential treatment to any seller on its marketplace.” The company also said it “identifies selection gaps based on customer preferences at an aggregate level only and shares this information with all sellers.”

How to ‘replicate’ products

Once Amazon’s private-brand employees had decided which categories to enter, they reviewed sales and customer-review data on Amazon.in to identify “reference” or “benchmark” brands to “replicate,” the 2016 private-brand document showed.

In the case of Solimo, the 2016 document stated that to ensure the brand’s goods meet “customer requirements in terms of performance we identify and replicate these reference products.” Amazon had no comment on the Solimo project.

Amazon’s strategy also called for manufacturers of its private-brand products to use other companies’ goods as models to develop samples for pre-production testing.

Among the brands Amazon employees planned to “benchmark,” the document states, were American ones – “Old Navy/GAP” men’s shirts. The document does not indicate whether the employees followed through.

Gap Inc, which owns the Old Navy and Gap brands, declined to comment.

The rival products Amazon targeted also included other brands popular in India. For pots and pans, a “reference brand” was Prestige, one of India’s largest kitchen-equipment companies. For men’s shirts, the benchmarks included Peter England and Louis Philippe, both made in India by conglomerate Aditya Birla Group.

Amazon also targeted John Players, a menswear brand then owned by Indian conglomerate ITC Ltd.

Chandru Kalro, managing director of TTK Prestige, which owns the Prestige brand in India, told Reuters, “We have no knowledge of us being a ‘reference brand’ for Amazon and we don’t know what it means to be an Amazon reference brand.”

Aditya Birla Group declined to comment. ITC did not respond to a request for comment.

An Amazon document listed brands of conglomerates led by two prominent Indian business figures as among those the U.S. e-commerce firm was targeting for copying. From left: Kumar Mangalam Birla and Kishore Biyani.

“We concluded to follow the measurements of Business Shirt of John Miller for Xessentia because of wide acceptance with our customer base.”

An explanation in an internal Amazon document of why the company decided to copy John Miller shirts

In early 2016, Amazon private-brand employees were internally noting the success of Xessentia, a clothing brand they had launched on Amazon.in in partnership with a seller. The seller owned the brand; Amazon designed the products.

Sales of Xessentia men’s business shirts were surging, and in the first quarter of 2016 had become that category’s second-most popular brand on the India site after the American brand Arrow, licensed to the Indian company Arvind Fashions. To create the Xessentia line, Amazon had used Louis Philippe as the benchmark brand, because it was “premium and popular,” the 2016 document said.

But something was amiss: About one in every 12 Xessentia shirts was being returned in the first quarter of 2016 for sizing issues. More than 350 were returned because customers complained they were too small.

Amazon employees conducted a “deep dive,” the 2016 document reports, by poring over a year’s worth of data from Amazon.in, including customer complaints and return numbers for Xessentia, Arrow and seven other brands. They found that a brand of men’s business shirts in India called John Miller had far outsold Xessentia shirts, despite carrying “a similar” average selling price. John Miller also had about half the rate of customer returns for “quality issues.”

This table, from a 2016 document, shows the internal data Amazon accessed when deciding which men’s business shirt to use as the “benchmark” for copying. Employees took into account several metrics, including number of shirts sold, percentage of customer returns due to quality issues and average selling price (ASP), in choosing to copy the John Miller brand.

The upshot: “Our learning is that our customer is different from the Louis Philippe customer and doesn’t prefer this fit,” the 2016 document stated. “We concluded to follow the measurements of Business Shirt of John Miller for Xessentia because of wide acceptance with our customer base.”

So Amazon revised the fit of Xessentia shirts to copy John Miller’s sizing, matching it down to the neck, shoulder, armhole, sleeve and waist dimensions.

This table, from the 2016 document, shows how Amazon changed the measurements of men's shirts it had designed for a brand called Xessentia because many customers returned them saying they were too small. Amazon had been using the measurements of an Indian brand called Louis Philippe for the shirts, but decided to change to John Miller, another Indian brand, in response to the complaints. The "variance" refers to the difference in measurements between the old Xessentia shirts, based on the Louis Philippe brand, and the new Xessentia shirts, based on the John Miller brand. (Note: The table misspells the Louis Philippe brand name.)

Amazon didn’t reply to questions about its Xessentia project. Arvind Fashions declined to comment.

John Miller is a brand owned by retail mogul Kishore Biyani. Amazon and Biyani later became business partners in India, but had a falling out.

Amazon is now embroiled in a legal battle with Biyani over the proposed sale of his retail assets to Reliance, which is run by billionaire Mukesh Ambani, considered India’s wealthiest man. Ambani and Amazon are fierce rivals, with the Indian magnate in recent years launching his own e-commerce business.

A spokesperson for Biyani’s Future Group said the company was “shocked and surprised” to learn that Amazon was using Indian brands to build its own. “They are in a powerful position of being both an online marketplace operator and a seller and collector of data,” the spokesperson said in a statement to Reuters. “This is leading to misuse of consumer and seller data giving them the power to kill Indian entrepreneurs and their brands.”

After the launch of Xessentia, Amazon introduced a brand of U.S.-and-European-style clothes in India called Symbol.

“For every product line identified for launch, we will identify an optimal reference brand based on customer reviews and size of business,” state the plans for Symbol and another private brand. “The replication of the ‘Fit’ of this reference brand will be a crucial step in our product development process.”

The Symbol brand is still going strong. On Oct. 11, 11 of the top 25 best-selling men’s formal shirts on Amazon.in carried the Symbol brand name.

‘Systematic campaign of copying’

Amazon has been repeatedly accused in the United States of copying product designs.

In 2018, home-goods retailer Williams-Sonoma Inc filed a federal lawsuit against Amazon, accusing the e-commerce giant of copying its proprietary designs for chairs, lamps and other products for an Amazon private brand called Rivet.

“Amazon has engaged in a systematic campaign of copying,” the lawsuit alleged. The exhibits filed in the case included pictures of similar-looking products from Amazon and a Williams-Sonoma brand. In court filings, Amazon denied the copying allegations. Last year, the two parties reached a confidential settlement. Both didn’t comment about the case for this story.

Joey Zwillinger, co-founder of Allbirds Inc, a San Francisco-based maker of sustainable footwear and apparel, told Reuters that around 2016 or 2017, Amazon began inviting his company to sell its goods on the e-commerce giant’s platform. Allbirds said no.

Then, in 2019, Amazon introduced a wool-blend sneaker that closely resembled a popular Allbirds wool shoe – and sold for much less. Zwillinger said the Amazon product used cheaper material but that the design was so similar, “it’s hard to tell the difference in a silhouette.”

Two examples of alleged copying by Amazon - a chair and a coffee table - appear in exhibits filed in a U.S. federal court by home-goods retailer Williams-Sonoma Inc. The Williams-Sonoma products are on the left; Amazon’s are on the right. Last year, the two parties reached a confidential settlement.

Allbirds didn’t sue. There are always subtle differences in designs, and copycat cases can be time-consuming, Zwillinger said. But he and Allbirds’ other co-founder posted online a letter to Bezos, noting that the Amazon product was “strikingly similar to our Wool Runner” sneaker. Writing that Allbirds was “flattered at the similarities,” they offered to help Amazon use more sustainable materials in its product.

Zwillinger told Reuters that they didn’t receive a response. Amazon had no comment.

In India, Amazon didn’t just knock off products for itself. One of its employees suggested that another seller consider replicating a company’s products.

In 2020, Amazon India employee Aditi Singh advised Mohit Anand, who was then selling products on Amazon.in, on how he could succeed on the platform. She suggested that Anand “replicate” a furniture company’s products, according to a recording of a phone call reviewed by Reuters.

Noting that an Indian furniture brand called DeckUp was selling well on Amazon.in, Singh suggested that if Anand were to “replicate DeckUp’s range” and charge lower prices, then the products “will sell very well” on Amazon.in. Anand told Reuters that he didn’t take the advice.

Utheja Pulluri, DeckUp's founder and a former Amazon India employee, said that as long as the e-commerce giant was “not sharing confidential data on us, I don’t have a problem … This appears to be business guidance, a generic insight.”

Singh referred a Reuters request for comment to Amazon’s public relations team. The company didn’t comment.

‘Search seeding’ and ‘sparkles’

How high products rank when customers search the Amazon website is critical to online sellers’ success. An internal document in 2017 noted that more than half of users’ clicks on search results are for the products listed in the top eight.

Amazon has said its search algorithms don’t favor its private-brand products. Asked during the 2019 congressional hearing whether Amazon alters algorithms to direct consumers to its own goods, associate general counsel Nate Sutton replied: “The algorithms are optimized to predict what customers want to buy regardless of the seller.”

Yet the internal Amazon documents show that in India, Amazon manipulated search results to favor its own products.

The company used a technique called “search seeding” to boost the rankings of its AmazonBasics and Solimo brand goods, according to the 2016 private-brand report. Referring to Amazon’s product codes – known as ASINs, or Amazon Standard Identification Numbers – the report stated: “We used search seeding for newly launched ASINs to ensure that they feature in the first 2 or three ASINs in search results.”

The document also referred to another technique that gave Amazon an edge: “search sparkles.”

“We have aggressively used search sparkles on PC, Mobile and App to specifically promote Solimo products on relevant customer searches from ‘All Product Search’ and Category search,” the 2016 private-brand report said.

According to one current and two former Amazon employees, search seeding and search sparkles are digital techniques the company has used to direct customers to certain products.

Two of the sources said Amazon has used seeding to alter search rankings to boost products, such as new ones, whose sales are so low that there’s insufficient data for the company’s technology to rank them. Sparkles are banners that Amazon has planted above search results to direct customers to certain products the company wants to promote.

While such tools have legitimate uses to assist online shoppers find certain hot new products, using search seeding to boost the rankings of Amazon’s own products hurts rival merchants’ sales on the platform, one of the former employees said.

Search seeding and sparkles were both used to promote AmazonBasics products on the company’s India platform, the 2016 document reveals. Within months of the launch of AmazonBasics in India in 2015, four of its products were “#1 Bestsellers in their category week after week,” the 2016 document said. It added that “promos” were placed on “detail pages of competitor products to direct traffic to AmazonBasics brands products.”

Piyush Tulsian, a New Delhi retailer of computer accessories, told Reuters he used to earn about $1,500 a month selling mouse pads on Amazon.in made by Logitech International, which is headquartered in Switzerland.

Piyush Tulsian, a retailer who sells products on Amazon.in, said his sales of Logitech mouse pads dropped after customers who viewed details about the mouse pad were shown an ad for a cheaper product being sold under an Amazon brand. Tulsian is seen here in his New Delhi shop last month. REUTERS/Anushree Fadnavis

Then, about two years ago, he said he started noticing that his sales were dropping. He said he discovered that customers who viewed details about the Logitech mouse pad he was selling for $21 were shown an advertisement for an AmazonBasics pad that was about 60% cheaper. The Logitech product also began appearing much lower in search results, he said.

“It’s very frustrating,” said Tulsian, who is 36. “They are mistreating sellers.” He said he stopped selling the Logitech mouse pad on Amazon.in and was stuck with 150 unsold ones.

Amazon had no comment. Logitech declined to comment.

Controversy over the business practices of foreign e-commerce companies in India has heated up in recent months. In June, the government proposed draft regulations that threaten to impose further restrictions on Amazon and other e-commerce companies, including local players, after receiving complaints by consumers and traders of unfair business practices. The proposed rules could restrict Amazon and others from selling their own private-brand products in India.

Later that month, India’s commerce minister accused large e-commerce companies of flouting local laws and said he had observed “a little bit of arrogance,” particularly by American ones. The other big platform in India is Flipkart, owned by American retail giant Walmart Inc. Flipkart didn’t comment.

In early July, Amazon announced it would introduce to India a program it already offers businesses elsewhere. Called the “Intellectual Property Accelerator” program, it gives certain sellers on Amazon.in access to services provided by intellectual-property experts and law firms.

One aim, Amazon said, is to help sellers “protect their brands.”

A worker sorts packages for delivery in a van outside an Amazon facility in the Indian city of Ahmedabad earlier this year. REUTERS/Amit Dave

Additional reporting by Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco

The Imitation Game

By Aditya Kalra and Steve Stecklow

Illustration and art direction: Catherine Tai

Photo editing: Kerk Chon

Edited by Peter Hirschberg

REUTERS INVESTIGATES

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Five winepresses, treading floor, warehouses, and pottery kilns among the major finds.

At a site in Yavne, archaeologists have discovered the largest complex of winepresses known in the world. The presses date back to the Byzantine Period.

Archaeologists uncover ruins of medieval wine factory at Israel’s Yavne site

The individual, who was discovered in an eleventh-century Islamic necropolis from the city of Segorbe, near Valencia in Spain, was given this nickname by archaeologists due to his unusual height – 190 cm (6 feet 3 inches).

His skeleton had suggested that he might have some African ancestry. Most of Spain had been progressively conquered by Arabs and Berbers from Northwest Africa from the eighth century onwards, creating one of the major centres of medieval European civilisation.

The ancient DNA analysis was carried out by Marina Silva and Gonzalo Oteo-Garcia, who had been working on the University of Huddersfield’s Leverhulme Trust doctoral scholarship programme in evolutionary genomics. They found that the “Giant” carried highly specific North African genetic lineages on both his male and female lines of descent – the Y-chromosome and the mitochondrial DNA – the oldest individual known to have this particular pattern of ancestry. This suggested that his recent ancestry was indeed amongst the newly Islamicised Berber populations of medieval Northwest Africa.

But a more detailed examination revealed a more complex situation. The male and female lines of descent account for only a small fraction of our overall ancestry – that from our father’s father’s father and our mother’s mother’s mother, and so on.

Image courtesy University of Huddersfield

His genome-wide ancestry showed that he also carried a significant amount – likely more than half – of local Spanish ancestry in his chromosomes. Moreover, stable isotope analyses suggested that he most likely grew up locally meaning the ‘Giant’s’ Berber ancestry was in fact due to migration from an earlier generation. He therefore belonged to a settled community that had thoroughly intermixed local Spanish and immigrant North African ancestry.

What was especially striking revealed Professor Martin Richards, Director of the University of Huddersfield’s Evolutionary Genomics Research Centre, was that he was very unlike modern people from Valencia, who carry little or none of his Berber genetic heritage.

This can be explained by the changing political situation following the Christian reconquest of Spain as Dr Oteo-Garcia explained: “The decree of expulsion of Moriscos ­from the Valencia region, that is, Muslims who had already been forcibly converted to Christianity, was followed by the resettlement by people from further north, who had little North African ancestry, thereby transforming the genetic variation in the region.”

Dr Silva, who now works at London’s Francis Crick Institute, adds, “The impact of this dramatic change in population, resulting from a brutal political decision hundreds of years ago, can finally be witnessed directly using ancient DNA, as seen here in the ancestry of the ‘Segorbe Giant’ and his contemporaries.”

The article, “Biomolecular insights into North African-related ancestry, mobility and diet in eleventh-century Al-Andalus,” by Marina Silva,
Gonzalo Oteo-García and Martin B. Richards, appears in Scientific Reports. Click here to read it.

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The Arabian Peninsula — which today includes Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — has long served as a key crossroads between Africa, Europe and Asia. Recent archaeological, fossil and DNA findings suggest that analyzing the Middle East and its people could reveal more about how modern humans first made their way out of Africa and to the rest of the world.

Until now, the genetics of Arab populations was largely understudied. In the new study, researchers conducted the first large-scale analysis of the genetics of a Middle Eastern population, examining DNA from 6,218 adults randomly recruited from Qatari health databases and comparing it with the DNA of people living in other areas of the world today and DNA from ancient humans who once lived in Africa, Europe and Asia.

"This study is the first large-scale study on an Arab population," study co-senior author Younes Mokrab, head of the medical and population genomics lab at Sidra Medicine in Doha, Qatar, told Live Science.

The scientists found that DNA from Middle Eastern groups made significant genetic contributions to European, South Asian and even South American communities, likely due to the rise and spread of Islam across the world over the past 1,400 years, with people of Middle Eastern descent interbreeding with those populations, they said.

"Arab ancestry is a key ancestral component in many modern populations," Mokrab said. "This means what would be discovered in this region would have direct implications to populations elsewhere."

The new findings also suggest that the ancestors of groups from the Arabian Peninsula split from early Africans about 90,000 years ago. This is about the same time as ancestors of Europeans and South Asians split from early Africans, supporting the idea that people migrated from Africa to the rest of the world via Arabia, the researchers said. 

"Arabia is a cornerstone in the early migrations out of Africa," Mokrab said.

Later, the Arabian Peninsula groups apparently split from ancestral Europeans about 42,000 years ago and then South Asian populations about 32,000 years ago. "Previously, Arab populations were considered to arise from broad European populations," Mokrab said.

(Image credit: Shutterstock)

After modern humans left Africa, they encountered — and sometimes interbred with — other now-extinct human lineages, such as the Neanderthals and the Denisovans, whose ancestors left Africa long before modern humans did and were found virtually exclusively in Europe and Asia. "The timelines discovered in our study for when Arabs diverged from other populations explain why Neanderthal DNA is far rarer in Arab populations than in populations that later mixed with ancient hominins," Mokrab said.

Moreover, after comparing modern human genomes with ancient human DNA, the scientists discovered that a unique group of peninsular Arabs may be the most ancient of all modern Middle Eastern populations, Mokrab said. Members of this group may be the closest relatives of the earliest known farmers and hunter-gatherers to occupy the ancient Middle East, the researchers said.

Ancestral Arab groups apparently underwent multiple splits 12,000 to 20,000 years ago, the scientists noted. This coincides with the way Arabia became drier, with some groups moving to more fertile areas, giving rise to settler communities, and others continuing to live in the arid region, which was more conducive to nomadic lifestyles, the researchers said.

The new study discovered high rates of inbreeding in some peninsular Arab groups dating back well into ancient times, likely resulting from the tribal nature of these cultures raising barriers to intermarriage outside tribal groups. Inbreeding can highlight rare mutations that may increase the risk of disease, so these new findings might help to reveal the causes of certain genetic disorders and lead to precision medicine to help diagnose and treat diseases in the communities represented in the study, the researchers said.

The scientists detailed their findings online Oct. 12 in the journal Nature Communications.

Originally published on Live Science.

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The new report is called No One Left Behind, the UK’s Digital Divide in 2021 and shows how the digital divide doesn’t only affect older people and those with poor internet connections but also those who are financially and socially disadvantaged too. It’s common for people to say that a smartphone and an internet connection are luxury items, but this is increasingly false as more aspects of life demand you to have these products and services.

One area which the report focused on, in particular, was the role of technology under the coronavirus. Many people were asked to work from home, bank and access public services online and even order groceries online. Those without online access couldn’t do these things and either had to continue interacting face-to-face, exposing themselves to the virus, or rely on others to help them.

The digital divide only compounds the issues around digital literacy, according to the report. It found that 23% in the lowest income households were not confident using a search engine to access government services to apply for a passport; this figure decreased to 5% in the richest households. Using this information, the report suggested that the most vulnerable in society are at risk of not being able to access essential support which is more and more moving online.

Lacking digital literacy skills also appears to hurt employment chances. The report found that 63% of those looking for work say they would benefit from digital skills training compared to just 36% of the general population. Vodafone believes this shows employability could be directly linked with digital skills.

Finally, the report said that the digital divide meant families had to make a choice over whether parents did their work on the computer or gave it up for their child to continue with their school lessons. Of the respondents, 29% said they were forced into this choice during the past year meaning that either the parent's work or the child’s education was affected while those in richer households could perform both tasks concurrently, allowing them to get ahead in life.

Commenting on Vodafone UK would play a part in addressing the issue, CEO Ahmed Essam said:

“At Vodafone we have put tackling digital inclusion at the heart of our business with our commitment to connect one million people by the end of 2022.”

The new report is now available for download for those who want to read it.

Source

Of the many fears during the pandemic, one has been particularly pernicious: governments’ fear of their people. Former US president Donald Trump admitted to playing down the risks of the coronavirus to “reduce panic”. Jair Bolsonaro, president of Brazil, blamed the press for causing “hysteria”.

The UK government delayed its lockdown, fearing the British population would rapidly become fatigued by restrictions. And, in my home country of Denmark, the authorities tried not to draw public attention to pandemic preparations in early 2020, to avoid “unnecessary fear”.

But Denmark pivoted to a strategy of trusting its citizens with hard truths. The buy-in that ensued led to low death rates and laid the groundwork for a vaccination rate of 95% for everyone aged above 50 (and 75% for the population in general). In September 2021, my country announced that COVID-19 is no longer classified as a “critical threat”.

Before the pandemic, I had studied Danes’ responses to crises, including a 2015 lethal terrorist attack in which a lone Islamist gunman attacked a free-speech event and a synagogue. My colleagues and I concluded that the majority of Danes did not lash out against Muslims or call to restrict their rights after these events, in part because of clear messaging from politicians. That is not to say that irrational, harmful behaviour does not happen, but the likelihood of mass panic in the face of crises is over-rated, especially if authorities and the media keep their heads.

In March 2020, I began to study pandemic responses at home and abroad, and I became an adviser to the Danish government. My overall message was: don’t assume that the public will panic. That assumption is counterproductive, and not borne out by research.

During a pandemic, rapid behavioural change is crucial, so people cannot be asked to ‘keep calm and carry on’. They need clear information if they are to take the crisis seriously enough to listen and to know how to act. In early March 2020, that was my message on social media, in the media and, ultimately, to the Danish government.

When Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen announced a lockdown on 11 March 2020, the rhetoric of the government had changed towards impressive clarity and acknowledgement of uncertainty. The #FlattenTheCurve graph (popularized by The Economist magazine a few days earlier) was used to show how an uncontrolled epidemic would strain hospitals. This created a sense of urgency and crisis, but not panic. And Frederiksen clearly acknowledged uncertainty. “We stand on unexplored territory in this situation,” she said. “Will we make mistakes? Yes, we will.”

One might argue that Danish authorities dared to trust their citizens only because they knew that the citizens trusted them. After all, Denmark often tops international studies of trust. But I think this experience is relevant elsewhere. Research consistently finds that in the face of disaster, people react with solidarity, not panic. For example, a study after a Chinese earthquake showed that people became more willing to share resources with strangers and do charity work (L.-L. Rao et al. Evol. Hum. Behav. 32, 63–69; 2011). Evidence from terrorist attacks in France and elsewhere echoes the Danish experience: if political leaders lead by example, the average citizen does not turn against the rights of people from minority ethnic groups. Even during the epitome of presumed pandemic panic — hoarding — most people waited patiently in line with their packets of toilet paper.

The idea that the public is incapable of dealing effectively with the unpleasant truth stymies pandemic management. It leads authorities to communicate in self-defeating ways. My group’s research shows that messages should communicate self-efficacy: people who feel that they know what to do, and how, are likely to comply (F. Jørgensen et al. Br. J. Health Psychol. 26, 679-696; 2021). Governments that underestimate their people focus on what the public cannot do.

Authorities that distrust the population also downplay negative or complicated facts. Rather than explaining emerging evidence of, say, waning immunity or new variants, paternalistic authorities resort to vague reassurances. Our research shows that vagueness inhibits vaccine acceptance and decreases trust in authorities (M. B. Petersen et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 118, e2024597118; 2021).

Upholding trust is key: it is the best predictor of vaccine acceptance and an antidote to misinformation. Danish health authorities talked clearly about severe, potentially fatal, side effects when they suspended the use of specific vaccines, even though the side effects are extremely rare. My research and others’ shows that this decision — with explicit descriptions of trade-offs and efficacy — did not harm overall support for vaccination or trust in health authorities (K. M. Sønderskov et al. Dan. Med. J. 68, A03210292; 2021).

In 1997, political scientist and economics Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom warned that policymakers were creating “cynical citizens with little trust in one another” by acting without regard for people’s ability to think for themselves. Perhaps such problems persist because governments have increasingly relied on behavioural advice rooted in research on psychological biases. Although such research does not intend to promote the view that populations are irrational, it routinely highlights errors in human decision-making, which can amplify views already popular among political elites.

What can be done to ease this mutual distrust? To borrow from game theory, only the authorities can act as first mover. If authorities do not dare to trust, citizens never will.

Nature 598, 237 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02758-2

COMPETING INTERESTS

The author declares no competing interests.

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The study is published in the scientific journal JAMA Neurology. Its co-authors at the University, scientists from the Institute of Neuroscience and Physiology at Sahlgrenska Academy, wrote it jointly with colleagues in Moscow and Munich.

The scientists followed five male Russian cosmonauts working on the permanently manned International Space Station (ISS), which is in orbit 400 km from Earth's surface.

The adverse effects on the body of long periods in space have been known for some time. The negative changes include atrophic muscles, decreasing bone mass, deteriorating vision and altered bacterial flora in the gut.

Evidence of brain damage

Blood samples were taken from the cosmonauts 20 days before their departure to the ISS. On average, they then stayed in space for 169 days (approximately five and a half months). The participants' mean age was 49.

After their return to Earth, follow-up blood samples were taken on three occasions: one day, one week, and about three weeks respectively after landing. Five biomarkers for brain damage were analyzed. They were neurofilament light (NFL), glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP), total tau (T-tau), and two amyloid beta proteins.

For three of the biomarkers—NFL, GFAP and the amyloid beta protein Aβ40—the concentrations were significantly elevated after the space sojourn. The peak readings did not occur simultaneously after the men's return to Earth, but their biomarker trends nonetheless broadly tallied over time.

"This is the first time that concrete proof of brain-cell damage has been documented in blood tests following space flights. This must be explored further and prevented if space travel is to become more common in the future," says Henrik Zetterberg, professor of neuroscience and one of the study's two senior coauthors.

Several studies underway

"To get there, we must help one another to find out why the damage arises. Is it being weightless, changes in brain fluid, or stressors associated with launch and landing, or is it caused by something else? Here, loads of exciting experimental studies on humans can be done on Earth," he continues.

The notion that the changes concerned may have a bearing on brain function is substantiated by changes also seen in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the brain after space travel. Further support is provided by clinical tests of the men's brain function that show deviations linked to their assignments in space. However, the present study was too small to investigate these associations in detail.

Zetterberg and his coauthors at the University, scientist Nicholas Ashton and Professor Kaj Blennow, are currently discussing follow-up studies with their other fellow researchers involved in the study, and also with national and international space research institutes.

"If we can sort out what causes the damage, the biomarkers we've developed may help us find out how best to remedy the problem," Zetterberg says.

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Climate change is the perfect example. The basics are simple: the climate is heating up due to fossil fuel use. But the nitty gritty is so vast and complicated that our understanding of it is always evolving. Evolving so rapidly, in fact, that it's basically impossible for humans to keep up.

"Since the first assessment report (AR) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1990, we estimate that the number of studies relevant to observed climate impacts published per year has increased by more than two orders of magnitude," scientists explain in a new paper, led by first author and quantitative data researcher Max Callaghan from the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC) in Germany.

"This exponential growth in peer-reviewed scientific publications on climate change is already pushing manual expert assessments to their limits."

This struggle is its own problem, of course, because how can humans ever grasp the problem of climate change, if the size of the problem defies our ability to objectively analyze it, measure it, and understand it?

Even conventional meta-analysis studies performed by human scientists are limited to considering just "dozens to hundreds of studies".

One solution to this 'big literature' dilemma calls for a very different kind of entity doing the reading – using artificial intelligence (AI), rather than humans, to sift through the almost limitless and ever-expanding mountain of published climate science.

In their new study – yes, another one to add to the list – Callaghan and co. did just that, using a deep-learning language analysis AI tool called BERT to identify and classify over 100,000 scientific studies detailing the impacts of climate change.

While the researchers acknowledge that automated analyses like this are no substitute for the careful assessments of human experts, at the same time, their method can do things human's simply can't.

In this case, that meant crunching vast amounts of data, identifying a huge range of different kinds of climate impacts, mapping them out across every continent, and interpreting them in the context of anthropogenic contributions to historical temperature and precipitation trends.

We need to be careful with it, though, because machine-learning analyses like this – especially at such staggering scale – can contain false positives and other kinds of uncertainties, the researchers say.

"While traditional assessments can offer relatively precise but incomplete pictures of the evidence, our machine-learning-assisted approach generates an expansive preliminary but quantifiably uncertain map," the researchers write.

Before that, however, the AI analysis has already generated some troubling statistics.

According to the study, 80 percent of global land area (excluding Antarctica), already shows trends in temperature and/or precipitation that can be attributed at least in part to human influence on the climate – and these climate impacts already touch an estimated 85 percent of the world's population.

Of course, we didn't need any artificial superbrain to tell us that climate change was a giant problem, but what's telling is where climate impacts can and can't be clearly discerned – based on where studies have been geographically focused.

For around half (48 percent) of the world's land – hosting three quarters (74 percent) of the global population – high levels of evidence of impacts on human and natural systems were co-located with attributable temperature or precipitation trends.

In other words, in places like western Europe, North America, and South and East Asia, there's a lot of overlap between impacts on the natural world and research into human-caused contributions to climate change.

In other places, however, the links aren't as strong – but maybe only because, ironically enough, there's not enough climate science yet looking into those specific regions.

"The lack of evidence in individual studies is because these locations are less intensively studied, rather than because there is an absence of impacts in these areas," the researchers suggest, noting this "attribution gap" is due to both geographic characteristics (inhospitable or sparsely populated areas) and economic considerations (low-income countries are significantly less studied).

"Ultimately, we hope that our global, living, automated and multi-scale database will help to jump start a host of reviews of climate impacts on particular topics or particular geographic regions," the team concludes.

"If science advances by standing on the shoulders of giants, in times of ever-expanding scientific literature, giants' shoulders become harder to reach. Our computer-assisted evidence mapping approach can offer a leg up."

The findings are reported in Nature Climate Change.

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"Our goal is clear: To accelerate the development of innovation."

 The first Arab mission to Mars is delivering some interesting science

Now it has, and the pre-Viking Era skis are so intact the organization says they’re the best-preserved prehistoric pair on record.

Gizmodo picked up on the discovery of the missing prehistoric ski. Archaeologist Runar Hole and his trekking companion Bjørn Hessen found it during a field check in September of this year. Secrets of the Ice soon thereafter sent out a team to excavate the wooden ski. The chilly Digervarden climate had frozen it into the ice patch.

In the video above, Secrets of the Ice shows how its archaeological team recovered the ski in late September. After Hole and Hessen eyed the ski, they knew they needed to come back with better digging equipment. The video shows how the team used snow shovels, ice axes, and lukewarm water to free the ski on its return trip.

As the organization’s images of the ski show, it’s astoundingly complete. The ski still has its twisted-birch bindings as well as a leather strap and wooden plug for a hole at the ski’s foothold. It measures about six feet long and seven inches wide. Like its sister ski, this new one also has a hole at its front end; something that would’ve made it easy for the rider to drag the skis with a rope when leaving the mountains.

Espen Finstad/Secrets of the Ice

Secrets of the Ice says the story behind who left the skis is still a total mystery. The archaeologists speculate that the skis—which somebody had repaired numerous times—could’ve been left behind by a hunter. Although they have no idea if said hunter from the “Roman Iron Age” died alongside their skis. It’s hard to believe that they would’ve just abandoned such valuable items, the archaeologists say. Which means the next time we hear from Secrets of the Ice things may be grim. (But also educational.)

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Penn State researchers used data on diet and mental health collected from more than 24,000 U.S. adults between 2005 and 2016. They found that people who ate mushrooms had lower odds of having depression.

According to the researchers, mushrooms contain ergothioneine, an antioxidant that may protect against cell and tissue damage in the body. Studies have shown that antioxidants help prevent several mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression.

"Mushrooms are the highest dietary source of the amino acid ergothioneine—an anti-inflammatory which cannot be synthesized by humans," said lead researcher Djibril Ba, who recently graduated from the epidemiology doctoral program at the College of Medicine. "Having high levels of this may lower the risk of oxidative stress, which could also reduce the symptoms of depression."

White button mushrooms, which are the most commonly consumed mushroom variety in the U.S., contain potassium, which is believed to lower anxiety. In addition, certain other species of edible mushrooms, especially Hericium erinaceus, also known as Lion's Mane, may stimulate the expression of neurotrophic factors such as nerve growth factor synthesis, which could have an impact on preventing neuropsychiatric disorders including depression.

According to the researchers, college-educated, non-Hispanic white women were more likely to eat mushrooms. The average age of surveyed participants was 45, and the majority (66%) were non-Hispanic white people. The investigators observed a significant association between mushroom consumption and lower odds of depression after accounting for socio-demographics, major risk factors, self-reported diseases, medications and other dietary factors. They said, however, that there was no clear additional benefit with relatively high mushroom intake.

"The study adds to the growing list of possible health benefits of eating mushrooms," said Joshua Muscat, a Penn State Cancer Institute researcher and professor of public health sciences.

The team conducted a secondary analysis to see if the risk of depression could be lowered by replacing a serving of red or processed meat with a serving of mushrooms each day. However, findings show that this substitution was not associated with lower odds of depression.

Prior to this research, there have been few studies to examine the association between mushroom consumption and depression, and the majority have been clinical trials with fewer than 100 participants. The researchers said this study highlights the potential clinical and public health importance of mushroom consumption as a means of reducing depression and preventing other diseases.

The researchers noted some limitations that could be addressed in future studies. The data did not provide details on the types of mushrooms. As a result, the researchers could not determine the effects of specific types of mushrooms on depression. Food codes issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture were used to determine mushroom intake; therefore, some entries may have been misclassified or inaccurately recorded.

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A new cancer treatment can wipe out tumours in terminally ill patients, scientists have discovered.

In a landmark trial, a cocktail of immunotherapy medications harnessed patients’ immune systems to kill their own cancer cells and prompted “a positive trend in survival”, according to researchers at the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), London, and the Royal Marsden NHS foundation trust.

One patient, who was expected to die four years ago, told the Guardian of the “amazing” moment nurses called him weeks after he joined the study to say his tumour had “completely disappeared”. The 77-year-old grandfather is now cancer-free and spent last week on a cruise with his wife.

Scientists found the combination of nivolumab and ipilimumab medications led to a reduction in the size of tumours in terminally-ill head and neck patients. In some, their cancer vanished altogether, with doctors stunned to find no detectable sign of disease.

Combining the two immunotherapy drugs could prove an effective new weapon against several forms of advanced cancer, experts believe. Results from other trials of the drug combination have previously suggested similar benefits for terminally-ill kidney, skin and bowel cancer patients.

As well as boosting the long-term survival chances of patients, scientists said, the immunotherapy treatment also triggered far fewer side-effects compared with the often gruelling nature of “extreme” chemotherapy, which is the standard treatment offered to many patients with advanced cancer.

The results from the phase 3 trial, involving almost 1,000 dying head and neck cancer patients, were early and not statistically significant but were still “clinically meaningful”, the ICR said, with some patients living months or years longer and suffering fewer side effects.

“These are promising results,” Prof Kristian Helin, the ICR chief executive, told the Guardian. “Immunotherapies are kinder, smarter treatments that can bring significant benefits to patients.”

About 12,000 people in the UK are diagnosed with head and neck cancer every year and many will be diagnosed at advanced stages. There is an urgent need for better, kinder treatments for these patients that can keep them alive longer than the current standard of care.

When Barry Ambrose, 77, from Bury St Edmunds, was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2017, he was told that it had already spread to his lungs – and that hospital palliative care was his only option.

But in a turn of events that saved his life, Ambrose was offered the chance to join the new study. “When I was told about the trial … I didn’t hesitate to join – what did I have to lose? It turned out to be a lifeline.

“Although I had to make biweekly trips from Suffolk to the hospital for the treatment, I had virtually no side-effects and was able to carry on as normal doing the things I love: sailing, cycling, and spending time with my family.”

Within about eight weeks of starting the treatment, scans revealed the tumour in his throat had been eradicated.

“When the research nurses called to tell me that, after two months, the tumour in my throat had completely disappeared, it was an amazing moment,” said Ambrose. “While there was still disease in my lungs at that point, the effect was staggering.”

He later underwent chemotherapy, followed by surgery. He currently has no evidence of disease.

“The treatment I’ve received at the Royal Marsden has been second to none and I’m so fortunate they’ve continued to find treatment that works for me – they’re the gift that keeps on giving,” said Ambrose. Last week he enjoyed a cruise off the coast of the UK with his wife, Sue.

The results of the trial show the immunotherapy combination enjoyed a particularly high success rate in a group of patients whose tumours had high levels of an immune marker called PD-L1.

Survival rates in those with high levels of PD-L1 who received the immunotherapy cocktail were the highest ever reported in a firstline therapy trial of relapsed or metastatic head and neck cancer.

These patients lived an average of three months longer than those having chemotherapy. The median overall survival for these patients was 17.6 months, the highest average ever reported in this group of patients.

Researchers said they hoped future findings from the CheckMate 651 trial, funded by Bristol Myers Squibb, will show further benefits of the therapy in patients with advanced head and neck cancers.

“Despite the lack of statistical significance, these results are clinically meaningful,” said Prof Kevin Harrington, professor of biological cancer therapies at the ICR and consultant clinical oncologist at the Royal Marsden, who led the CheckMate 651 trial. “We will need to do longer follow-up to see whether we can demonstrate a survival benefit across all patients in the trial.”

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Sydney's more than five million residents have been subjected to a 106-day lockdown, designed to limit the march of the highly transmissible Delta variant.

With new infections now falling—New South Wales state recorded 477 cases on Sunday—and more than 70 percent of over-16s double vaccinated, Sydney was dusting off the cobwebs.

A handful of venues—including some bars and slot machine rooms—planned to open at 12:01 am local time to vaccinated customers.

"Be the first to have a cold schooner, and be the first to catch up with friends," said owners of Easts in the city's famed Bondi neighbourhood.

Hairdressers will be among those businesses throwing open their doors later in the day, although many have been booked out for weeks to come by shaggy-haired customers.

Since June, shops, schools, salons and offices have been closed for non-essential workers and there have been unprecedented restrictions on personal freedom.

There were bans on everything from travelling more than five kilometres from home, visiting family, playing squash, browsing in supermarkets to attending funerals.

"Very few countries have taken as stringent or extreme an approach to managing COVID as Australia," Tim Soutphommasane, an academic and former Australian race discrimination commissioner, told AFP.

There will still be limits on mass gatherings and international borders and schools will not fully reopen for a few weeks yet.

But otherwise daily life will look more like normal.

'You've earned it'

For most of the pandemic, Australia successfully suppressed infections through border closures, lockdowns and aggressive testing and tracing.

But the Delta variant put paid to any dream of "COVID-zero", at least in the largest cities of Melbourne and Sydney which are now pivoting to "living with COVID".

"It's a big day for our state," said New South Wales' recently appointed conservative premier Dominic Perrottet.

After "100 days of blood, sweat and no beers," he said, "you've earned it."

But despite the celebratory mood, there are lingering concerns about what reopening will bring.

Perrottet encouraged patrons to treat staff with kindness, with fears that bans on the unvaccinated could lead to protests and confrontation.

There are also fears that reopening will inevitably bring a rash of new infections.

The Australian Medical Association this week pilloried Perrottet when he appeared to shift the focus away from health and onto the economic recovery.

"The AMA supports gradual opening up of the economy and the loosening of restrictions, but it is critical to observe the impact of each step on transmission and case numbers," the doctors' body said.

"Otherwise New South Wales may still see hospitals become completely overwhelmed despite high vaccination rates."

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A little over a decade ago, a clutch of scientific studies was published that seemed to show that survivors of atrocities or disasters such as the Holocaust and the Dutch famine of 1944-45 had passed on the biological scars of those traumatic experiences to their children.

The studies caused a sensation, earning their own BBC Horizon documentary and the cover of Time (I also wrote about them, for New Scientist) – and no wonder. The mind-blowing implications were that DNA wasn’t the only mode of biological inheritance, and that traits acquired by a person in their lifetime could be heritable. Since we receive our full complement of genes at conception and it remains essentially unchanged until our death, this information was thought to be transmitted via chemical tags on genes called “epigenetic marks” that dial those genes’ output up or down. The phenomenon, known as transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, caught the public imagination, in part because it seemed to release us from the tyranny of DNA. Genetic determinism was dead.

A decade on, the case for transgenerational epigenetic inheritance in humans has crumbled. Scientists know that it happens in plants, and – weakly – in some mammals. They can’t rule it out in people, because it’s difficult to rule anything out in science, but there is no convincing evidence for it to date and no known physiological mechanism by which it could work. One well documented finding alone seems to present a towering obstacle to it: except in very rare genetic disorders, all epigenetic marks are erased from the genetic material of a human egg and sperm soon after their nuclei fuse during fertilisation. “The [epigenetic] patterns are established anew in each generation,” says geneticist Bernhard Horsthemke of the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany.

The study of epigenetics seems to reinforce the case that it’s not nature versus nurture, but nature plus nurture

Even at the time, sceptics pointed out that it was fiendishly difficult to disentangle the genetic, epigenetic and environmental contributions to inherited traits. For one thing, a person shares her mother’s environment from the womb on, so that person’s epigenome could come to resemble her mother’s without any information being transmitted via the germline, or reproductive cells. In the past decade, the threads have become even more tangled, because it turns out that epigenetic marks are themselves largely under genetic control. Some genes influence the degree to which other genes are annotated – and this shows up in twin studies, where certain epigenetic patterns have been found to be more similar in identical twins that in non-identical ones.

This has led researchers to think of the epigenome less as the language in which the environment commands the genes, and more as a way in which the genes adjust themselves to respond better to an unpredictable environment. “Epigenetics is often presented as being in opposition to genetics, but actually the two things are intertwined,” says Jonathan Mill, an epigeneticist at the University of Exeter. The relationship between them is still being worked out, but for geneticist Adrian Bird of the University of Edinburgh, the role of the environment in shaping the epigenome has been exaggerated. “In fact, cells go to quite a lot of trouble to insulate themselves from environmental insult,” he says.

Whatever that relationship turns out to be, the study of epigenetics seems to reinforce the case that it’s not nature versus nurture, but nature plus nurture (so genetic determinism is still dead). And whatever the contribution of the epigenome, it doesn’t seem to translate across generations.

All the aforementioned researchers rue the fact that transgenerational epigenetic inheritance is still what most people think of when they hear the word epigenetics, because the past decade has also seen exciting advances in the field, in terms of the light it has shed on human health and disease. The marks that accumulate on somatic cells – that is, all the body’s cells except the reproductive ones – turn out to be very informative about these, and new technologies have made it easier to read them.

A model of DNA methylation – the process that modulates genes. The influence of environment or lifestyle on this process is being studied. Photograph: Laguna Design/Science Photo Library

Different people define epigenetics differently, which is another reason why the field is misunderstood. Some define it as modifications to chromatin, the package that contains DNA inside the nuclei of human cells, while others include modifications to RNA. DNA is modified by the addition of chemical groups. Methylation, when a methyl group is added, is the form of DNA modification that has been studied most, but DNA can also be tagged with hydroxymethyl groups, and proteins in the chromatin complex can be modified too.

Researchers can generate genome-wide maps of DNA methylation and use these to track biological ageing, which as everyone knows is not the same as chronological ageing. The first such “epigenetic clocks” were established for blood, and showed strong associations with other measures of blood ageing such as blood pressure and lipid levels. But the epigenetic signature of ageing is different in different tissues, so these couldn’t tell you much about, say, brain or liver. The past five years have seen the description of many more tissue-specific epigenetic clocks.

Mill’s group is working on a brain clock, for example, that he hopes will correlate with other indicators of ageing in the cortex. He has already identified what he believes to be an epigenetic signature of neurodegenerative disease. “We’re able to show robust differences in DNA methylation between individuals with and without dementia, that are very strongly related to the amount of pathology they have in their brains,” Mill says. It’s not yet possible to say whether those differences are a cause or consequence of the pathology, but they provide information about the mechanisms and genes that are disrupted in the disease process, that could guide the development of novel diagnostic tests and treatments. If a signal could be found in the blood, say, that correlated with the brain signal they’ve detected, it could form the basis of a predictive blood test for dementia.

Details about smoking habits can be detected from the epigenome – researchers are working on a clinical application for these observations. Photograph: Chris Rout/Alamy

While Bird and others argue that the epigenome is predominantly under genetic control, some researchers are interested in the trace that certain environmental insults leave there. Smoking, for example, has a clear epigenetic signature. “I could tell you quite accurately, based on their DNA methylation profile, if someone was a smoker or not, and probably how much they smoked and how long they had smoked for,” says Mill.

James Flanagan of Imperial College London is among those who are exploiting this aspect of the epigenome to try to understand how lifestyle factors such as smoking, alcohol and obesity shape cancer risk. Indeed, cancer is the area where there is most excitement in terms of the clinical application of epigenetics. One idea, Flanagan says, is that once informed of their risk a person could make lifestyle adjustments to reduce it.

Drugs that remodel the epigenome have been used therapeutically in those already diagnosed with cancer, though they tend to have bad side-effects because their epigenetic impact is so broad. Other widely prescribed drugs that have few side-effects might turn out to work at least partly via the epigenome too. Based on the striking observation that breast cancer risk is more than halved in diabetes patients who have taken the diabetes drug metformin for a long time, Flanagan’s group is investigating whether this protective effect is mediated by altered epigenetic patterns.

Meanwhile, the US-based company Grail – which has just been bought, controversially, by DNA sequencing giant Illumina – has come up with a test for more than 50 cancers that detects altered methylation patterns in DNA circulating freely in the blood.

Based on publicly available data on its false-positive and false-negative rates, the Grail test looks very promising, says Tomasz K Wojdacz, who studies clinical epigenetics at the Pomeranian Medical University in Szczecin, Poland. But more data is needed and is being collected now in a major clinical trial in the NHS. The idea is that the test would be used to screen populations, identifying individuals at risk who would then be guided towards more classical diagnostic procedures such as tissue-specific biopsies. It could be a gamechanger in cancer, Wojdacz thinks, but it also raises ethical dilemmas, that will have to be addressed before it is rolled out. “Imagine that someone got a positive result but further investigations revealed nothing,” he says. “You can’t put that kind of psychological burden on a patient.”

Last month the NHS launched a trial of Grail’s Galleri blood test, designed to detect epigenetic modifications that identify more than 50 types of cancer. Photograph: Grail

The jury is out on whether it’s possible to wind back the epigenetic clock. This question is the subject of serious inquiry, but many researchers worry that as a wave of epigenetic cosmetics hits the market, people are parting with their money on the basis of scientifically unsupported claims. Science has only scratched the surface of the epigenome, says Flanagan. “The speed at which these things happen and the speed at which they might change back is not known.” It might be the fate of every young science to be misunderstood. That’s still true of epidenetics, but it could about to change.

Sequencing the epigenome

Until recently, sequencing the epigenome was a relatively slow and expensive affair. To identify all the methyl tags on the genome, for example, would require two distinct sequencing efforts and a chemical manipulation in between. In the past few years, however, it has become possible to sequence the genome and its methylation pattern simultaneously, halving the cost and doubling the speed.

Oxford Nanopore Technologies, the British company responsible for much of the tracking of the global spread of Covid-19 variants, which floated on the London Stock Exchange last week, offers such a technology. It works by pushing DNA through a nanoscale hole while current passes either side. DNA consists of four bases or letters – A, C, G and T – and because each one has a unique shape in the nanopore it distorts the current in a unique and measurable way. A methylated base has its own distinctive shape, meaning it can be detected as a fifth letter.

The US firm Illumina, which leads the global DNA sequencing market, offers a different technique, and chemist Shankar Balasubramanian of the University of Cambridge has said that his company, Cambridge Epigenetix, will soon announce its own epigenetic sequencing technology – one that could add a sixth letter in the form of hydroxymethyl tags.

Protein modifications still have to be sequenced separately, but some people include RNA modifications in their definition of epigenetics and at least some of these technologies can detect those too – meaning they have the power to generate enormous amounts of new information about how our genetic material is modified in our lifetime. That’s why Ewan Birney who co-directs the European Bioinformatics Institute in Hinxton, Cambridgeshire, and who is a consultant to Oxford Nanopore, says that epigenetic sequencing stands poised to revolutionise science: “We’re opening up an entirely new world.”

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I started yawning, and that was it. That was the sign a migraine was beginning, that I was rolling slowly down that padded cliff. It was inevitable that this would happen half an hour before my interview with neurologist Dr Peter Goadsby, the man forcing the world to take migraines seriously, inevitable but not ideal, so I sipped my water and watched as he scrolled through his Zoom backgrounds. Beach scene? Too casual. Meeting room with framed certificates? Too formal. Home study, with heaving bookcase? Just right.

How much do I know about migraine, Dr Goadsby asked politely, and I took a moment to consider. On one hand, too much. I have one now, I said. I’ve had them regularly since I was a child, an early memory being the evening I found I could no longer read a book and thought, oh well, nice while it lasted. A couple of years ago I was diagnosed as having had a series of strokes when I developed a blind spot in my right eye and later found that blind spot to be a “persistent aura”, the scintillating light that typically arrives at the beginning of a migraine, but in my case, never left. I have become so accustomed to breathing through headaches that I was reassured when I first felt labour pains – I knew this agony, I had survived it monthly. But on the other hand, I know very little. Something to do with blood vessels? Chocolate?

“Everything you’ve said so far,” he replied, “is unfortunately a very common experience. And that’s what is extraordinary to me. I mean, it’s extraordinary, isn’t it? That you, who seem like not a completely crazy person at all,” thank you, “have managed to go through life not really being focused on that pain. People accept their own normality, is my conclusion.”

He tells a story. Aged 17 in Sydney, Goadsby went to get his learning permit before starting driving lessons, but when asked to read the chart on the wall, he couldn’t make out even the largest letters. His mum told him he’d hurt his eyes from studying too hard and a few weeks later he returned, but still couldn’t read the letters. “I always thought I was normal, and then I got glasses. I wouldn’t consider myself stupid, maybe a bit… self-contained. But I realised it’s easy to have something that’s profoundly not normal and not really notice. So I was never surprised when people with headache didn’t recognise what was going on.” Though a billion people suffer from migraine (190,000 migraine attacks are experienced every day in England alone), it often takes a drastic change, like my sight failing, for them to seek treatment.

“It doesn’t matter how severe someone says a headache is – from a broad societal perspective, the thing that really counts is what the headache stops them doing. It’s the disability side of things, because people with migraine are in a very productive demographic. I remind my colleagues and any funders who care to listen, that migraine is a disorder of taxpayers.” It’s an argument that works. “Migraine is finally having its time.”

Though he brushes off the claim with gentle modesty, this is in a large part due to Goadsby’s pioneering research. “It’s due to technology really,” he insists. Two hundred years ago, he offers as an example, people with epilepsy would have been burned at the stake as witches. “So when you think about migraines, which are more complex than most other neurological problems in the sense that there’s no apparent marker – I can look at you, but can’t tell you’ve got migraine – brain imaging is crucial. You can image people’s brain during an attack and it shows differences. That focuses the mind. And specific treatments have been helpful in this regard. If you’ve got a treatment that’s for migraine, that implies migraine must be a thing. Whereas if the treatments are nonspecific,” because in the recent past, people with migraine have been prescribed drugs created to treat other things, like depression or epilepsy, “perhaps it’s not. As that technology has evolved – imaging, genetics, pharmacology, research time – that’s given migraine a leg up.”

‘You can’t help but be optimistic’: Dr Peter Goadsby. Photograph: Ken McKay/ITV/Shutterstock

As, of course, has he. Goadsby first became interested in migraine as a medical student in Australia. “The appeal was the challenge and the frustration. It seemed so neglected. It was seen as a ‘silly subject’.” Many doctors believed it was a psychosomatic condition related to stress. And pain disorders are difficult to research, as pain is subjective. Plus, there’s the gender thing. Goadsby sighs. “Go back 40 years. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to work out that, if three out of every four people with migraine are women, and there’s a comorbidity, a biological problem of anxiety and depression, and there are periods involved, what is that going to produce? Some stupid interpretations from doctors, who say they’re crazy.” He seems really quite cross. “But there’s such profound biology going on, with circulating oestrogen levels, I’ve never understood why they would think it was anything other than biological. You don’t need a craziness explanation, because you’ve got biology sitting in front of you. I think there was a protective mechanism for a long time, where physicians hate to say they don’t know, hate to accept that they’re impotent in something. So the alternative to ‘I don’t know,’ is, ‘The person in front of me is crazy.’ So it’s a disorder of women. So what? Get a grip and move on!”

In 1985, Goadsby met a Swedish physician named Lars Edvinsson who shared his interest in a molecule called “calcitonin gene-related peptide” (CGRP), which neurons use to communicate. Edvinsson suspected it had a key role in migraine; Goadsby agreed. They formed a partnership that continues today. And this year, along with Edvinsson and two other scientists, Goadsby won the prestigious Brain Prize. Their discovery that a biological mechanism triggers an attack, where blood vessels surrounding the brain open up causing pain, led to a new group of drugs that stop CGRP getting to its receptor, either by blocking the receptor or binding to CGRP itself. Goadsby had long suggested that there were “nerve-based mechanisms that might be important. But this was resisted by the mainstream for some time, because it didn’t fit with the narrative.” Migraine had long been considered to be a vascular disease, linked to the regulation of blood flow in the brain, rather than neurological in origin. “We turned out to be correct. And fortunately, in science, correct still wins.” Previous treatments had debilitating side-effects and only relieved the symptoms, never actually preventing the migraine, but these new drugs – they’re called Gepants – have been shown to improve the quality of life of many sufferers.

When Goadsby got a message that the foundation behind the Brain Prize wanted to speak to him, he avoided calling back, certain he must have filled in a grant form wrong. Migraine, he says, is a “Cinderella problem”. Not all diseases are treated equally – just as Cinderella could only watch from the kitchen as fabulous clothes and marvellous invitations were delivered for her stepsisters, some diseases miss out on research funding, celebrity-led campaigns and public awareness. Upon calling, and being awarded the prize (worth more than £1m) Goadsby said, “Cinderella has arrived at the ball as a welcome guest – and got the glass slipper.”

And since then he has found a niche sort of celebrity. “The Daily Mail interviewed me,” he chuckles, “and I said, ‘Can I ask, why do you do so much on migraine’? And they said, ‘Because it’s common! We do common!’ I felt like such an idiot. One in three adult females in the country are interested in it, so there’s a chance that someone who picks up the Daily Mail, or indeed the Guardian is too. But having come through neurology in an era when ‘common’ was not what neurologists did – they tended to do abstruse and rare – it was an important thing to hear.”

Common. When he said my experience – the pain, the blindness, the ignorance – was common, I was taken aback, slightly hurt. I got over it. But I realised migraine has become as much a part of my identity as my voice or taste in desserts, and oddly personal with it. I am not alone in carrying around a sort of migraine mythology, the feeling that these are not exactly headaches, instead some sort of painful portal, a kind of poem. The author Siri Hustvedt wrote about a migraine aura phenomenon called Alice in Wonderland syndrome, where the “migraineur” (a word suitably pretentious for the community I find myself in) feels parts of their body ballooning or shrinking.

We were correct – and in science correct still wins

For me it’s usually my hand. I get periods of intense déjà vu, and the yawning, and a kind of quick, swaddling depression. It’s not just a headache, is what I’m saying. Which makes it ripe for artists to play with. In Joan Didion’s 1968 essay In Bed (which she said received a bigger response than anything else she’d ever written), she describes both a “pleasant… euphoria” and the slightly uncanny horror of it all. “I had no brain tumour,” she wrote, “no eyestrain, no high blood pressure, nothing wrong with me at all: I simply had migraine headaches, and migraine headaches were, as everyone who did not have them knew, imaginary.” That no one dies of migraine, she adds, “seems, to someone deep into an attack, an ambiguous blessing”. Afterwards, purified, “I notice the particular nature of a flower in a glass on the stair landing. I count my blessings.”

It’s partly because these migraine side-effects are so blousy and cryptic that I found Goadsby’s findings on the “premonitory phase” particularly interesting. “People might get some neck discomfort, or some brain fog, like they’re just off their game. They can get some mood change, and they might feel fatigued, they might yawn, they might pass more urine, they might crave sweet things, all before the pain actually starts. What it always sounded like to me,” and what he went on to prove, “was that the attack had already begun.” Previously we might have thought sugar triggered a migraine, but his work showed that the migraine, already slithering its way through the brain, had dragged the migraineur to a sweet shop. “People would have light sensitivity, and say bright lights trigger their attack. But some of this must be that they noticed the light because their attack had already started. The horse had already long since bolted. So to understand migraine, you’ve got to push back even further.”

Goadsby holds a particular respect for the people who willingly acted as his guinea pigs, consenting to attacks being triggered for their experiments. “Frankly, the only reason to do that is because you want to do something good for society. It’s the only logical reason for it, so that never ceases to amaze me. I was talking to someone earlier today who’d had a dreadful 30-odd years of migraine, nothing worked, then went on one of these antibodies and has had, he said, nearly three years of feeling just ‘normal’.” He grins. “And you think to yourself, well? What can I say? ‘Great.’” He laughs. “It’s not a very long conversation.”

What he’s talking about is the end of migraine, a major debilitating disease, one that led a doctor to recently advise me to “come to terms with my disability”. “Yes, this is just the beginning,” he promises. Even those who don’t respond to these new medications will benefit from the increased focus. And eventually the tablets will come off patent, so generic manufacturers will be able to make them for pennies, something he’s particularly excited about. “That’s not just going to change the developed world, but impact poor people who, of course, are just suffering as much, but with many different problems, too – you know, they have to go out and get water – they don’t need the misery of migraine on top. You can’t help but be optimistic when you realise that the world will be a better place. It’s just a matter of being patient.”

He talks about the moments that have led to his breakthroughs, and those that came after, with a fizzing enthusiasm that makes me briefly believe I understand the science, and a little breathless, too. “One thing that was pretty spectacular – it was the first time that people have done something called ‘immunopharmacology’. So instead of using antibodies to manipulate the immune system, what you’re doing is using the antibody as a drug…” He dashes off to get a parcel from the front door and returns midsentence, casual, “…so to speak.”

An important moment occurred recently, when, in a consultation with a migraine patient, he realised he was about to write his first prescription for one of the drugs he had created. “There are few examples in my life where I would use the word surreal, but that would be one of them.” Did the patient know that he was responsible for the drugs that would save him? “No.” He looks up, with a very small smile. “And I didn’t think there was any reason to tell him.”

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At a rowdy rally to protest against mask mandates in New York on Monday, some participants carried Australian flags and joined in with chants such as “Save Australia”.

Many Australians were puzzled by what seemed a sudden, unbidden show of support, but this spectacle was the culmination of a months-long effort in conservative US media to portray Australia’s coronavirus response as having brought the country to the brink of authoritarianism.

Polling suggests that Australians overwhelmingly support vaccine mandates, but prominent figures on the American right have had crucial assistance from their counterparts across the Pacific in creating a dystopian image of the country, which they have wielded as a weapon in the polarised pandemic politics of the US.

Days before the New York event, Tucker Carlson devoted the opening monologue on his nightly Fox News program to the proposition that Australia “looks a lot like China did at the beginning of the pandemic” and painted lockdowns in the darkest possible hues, connecting them with the 2019 Australian federal police raids on the ABC.

Carlson, whose show is the highest-rated news program on US cable television, according to Adweek, also seized upon the use of the phrase “new world order” by the New South Wales chief health officer, Dr Kerry Chant, at a press conference.

That phrase has long been invoked by conspiracy theorists as a term for the imposition of a worldwide totalitarian government by a shadowy global elite. After Carlson played the relevant clip of Chant, he remarked: “The new world order. She said it out loud.”

But Carlson did not have to make his case alone. For a local view, he interviewed the director of the libertarian Institute for Public Affairs, Gideon Rozner, who readily agreed with Carlson’s take, and claimed: “I don’t think it’s possible to say that Australia right now is a functioning liberal democracy.”

Carlson’s Fox News colleague Laura Ingraham has pursued the idea of an Australian dystopia even more aggressively, if anything, on the cable news channel and on her conservative talk radio program.

And again, she has drawn on fringe figures in Australia to lend her message authority. On Thursday, she hosted self-styled “freedom lawyer” Tony Nikolic, who has tried to sue Chant and the NSW health minister, Brad Hazzard, over mandatory vaccination.

Ingraham has been on the attack over Australia’s pandemic response since at least August, when she interviewed Liberal National MP George Christensen, after a video of his anti-lockdown parliamentary speech had been removed from Facebook for breaching the platform’s Covid misinformation policy.

The video of that interview, containing a lengthy excerpt of the banned speech, remains on Ingraham’s own Facebook page.

Far-right websites join in

The usefulness of the nightmare vision of Australia can be seen in the way the New York rally and its dark message were boosted internationally by rightwing influencers and media.

This feedback loop between Australia’s fringe right and the major organs of US rightwing media has been in place throughout the pandemic, but it has become particularly intense as Australia – once a border-controlled, Covid-free oasis – has struggled with outbreaks in New South Wales and Victoria.

Heidi Beirich is co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, an NGO set up to combat transnational far right extremist groups.

Asked about the American far right’s depiction of Australia’s Covid response, Beirich wrote in an email: “We’ve seen more and more cases where the far right brings up concerns, usually based on disinformation, about horrors taking place in other similar countries.”

She added: “This has happened a lot since the pandemic as anti-mask and anti-vax conspiracies have thrived among the far right, especially online.”

It has also been cemented by the cross-pollination between some Sky News Australia personalities and some of their Fox News counterparts in the US. When Sharri Markson, a journalist with the Australian and a Sky host, went on Carlson’s show in August to denounce the YouTube ban on Sky News as “the most extreme cancellation of free speech imaginable”, it gave Carlson the opportunity once again to characterise Australia as a “Covid dictatorship”.

The idea of Australian tyranny has spread far beyond the rightwing media bubble. Florida governor Ron De Santis – whose state’s Covid death rate is some 50 times Australia’s – suggested the US should review diplomatic relations with the country, asking whether it was freer than communist China.

Further down the pecking order, and even further to the right, the response to Monday’s rally struck the same notes that conservative media hosts have for months.

The British anti-Islamic activist and convicted criminal Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, also known as Tommy Robinson, posted wildly on rightwing social media platform Gettr about the rally, and repeatedly invoked the idea that Australia had descended into authoritarianism.

Robinson’s posts were dutifully echoed by the likes of Milo Yiannopoulos and at least one Proud Boys chapter, with each using the only social media platform still available to them, the anything-goes messaging app Telegram.

The rightwing activist Andy Ngo also plugged the antivaccination event, without troubling to measure it against the reality of Australia’s pandemic response.

Their coverage was echoed by their Australian counterparts such as Avi Yemini, who gleefully received and promoted news of the rally on Telegram.

Far-right US websites have also joined in. In the past week, conspiracy-minded outlets have been describing Australia as moving towards “a complete tyranny” on the basis of a Victorian home quarantine trial that requires participants to send selfies to prove where they are.

In reaction to the same story, Gatweway Pundit boss Jim Hoft claimed that “AUSTRALIA IS LOST”.

The patriot movement website Redoubt News warned its readers about “Police entering homes without a warrant? Military personnel enforcing lockdown compliance?”

The real goal may be discernible in the attempts to construe Australia’s response as a warning about what might happen in the US, and to tie it to American liberals, even though no governing Democrat has introduced any comparable restrictions.

The Daily Caller made it plain in a Wednesday headline asserting that “Australia’s COVID Police State Is The Future Liberals Secretly Want”, atop an article which asserted, without evidence, that Australia’s restrictions “have been depicted by many American liberals and corporate media outlets as a ‘model’ to emulate”.

Beirich, the anti-extremism researcher, said that the far right mobilisation of the idea of Australia’s lockdown as “America’s dystopian future”, and the transnational collaboration around the idea, “shows that the far right scene in many places comes together nowadays in ways that it couldn’t before – and that’s due to social media and the web, where this disinformation and conspiracy material flourishes”.

Australia may not be so much an object of genuine concern for the right in America as it is a cudgel with which to beat their enemies closer to home.

The Australians who help them receive, in return, a short turn in the global spotlight and an opportunity to represent their own views as majority opinion.

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The national coronavirus task force reported Saturday that 968 people in Russia died of COVID-19 over the past day—about 100 more daily deaths than were recorded in late September. The task force said more than 29,000 new infections also were confirmed in the past day.

Authorities blame the steep rise on the country's low vaccination rate. Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova said Friday that 47.8 million Russians, or almost 33% of Russia's nearly 146 million people, had received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine, and 42.4 million, or about 29%, were fully vaccinated.

The coronavirus task force reports has reported a total of about 7.8 million cases and 215,453 deaths in the pandemic.

However, the task force records only deaths directly caused by the virus. Reports by Russia's state statistical service Rosstat that tally coronavirus-linked deaths reveal significantly higher mortality numbers.

Rosstat on Friday revealed the latest data showed more than 254,000 deaths of people with COVID-19 in the first eight months of this year compared to 163,000 deaths of patients who had the coronavirus for the whole of 2020.

The coronavirus task force only counts the deaths of patients for whom COVID-19 was considered the main cause. Rosstat includes people who had COVID-19 but died of other causes, and those for whom the coronavirus was suspected but not confirmed.

The Kremlin has shrugged off the idea of imposing a new nationwide lockdown, delegating the power to tighten restrictions to regional authorities. In some areas of the country, including Moscow and St. Petersburg, life remains largely normal, with businesses operating as usual and mask mandates loosely enforced.

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The poll of 2,000 cat and dog owners also shows that 81 percent wouldn’t think twice before saving their pet from immediate danger. Six in 10 (59%) would willingly fight another person to save their four-legged friend.

Say hello to my little friend

Sixty-two percent would even describe their pet as their “best friend,” while three in five agree that their pet is their “soulmate.”

Conducted by OnePoll on behalf of Figo Pet Insurance, the survey also reveals that pet owners often search for similar affirmations of love from their pets as they do from their partners. That includes their pet “following them around” (63%), “giving them kisses” (59%) and sleeping in their bed (53%) as the top signs of endearment.

Research also showed that 84 percent of Gen Z (ages 18-24) are likely to include their pet in their wedding or a milestone event. More than three-fourths of Gen Zers are likely to get a tattoo inspired by them as well. Of those who own multiple species of pets, 48 percent admit they’ve bonded to one in particular — including 80 percent who feel more tied to their dog than their cat.

Regardless of which pet they bond more with, two-thirds (67%) believe that because they are so connected, they can read each other’s minds. Four in five pet owners believe that their pet significantly impacts their mental health in a positive way.

Furthermore, more than one-third of the survey admit turning to their pet for a boost of serotonin at least once every single day of the week.

“The connection we have with our pets goes much further than just owner and companion. Our pets comfort us when we’re sad, stick by us through ups and downs and provide unconditional love like no other relationship can. Our pets are family, and while they may not be able to verbalize their affection for us, any pet parent can attest to the strength and depth of their devotion,” says Lizbeth Bastidas, claim supervisor and certified vet technician in a statement.

No hesitation in pet health

Because of being the most loyal companion, more than two-thirds of pet owners feel obligated in some way to repay their pet for all they do for them. Eight in 10 say it is likely that they will take their pet to the vet straight away if they even suspect something is wrong.

Almost one in five add they would pay more than $7,000 to save their pet’s life, and 53 percent would willingly go into debt or spend any amount necessary to save them from immediate danger. Although only one-third have pet insurance, 54 percent of pet owners agree that it is a good way to repay their pet.

Of those who have pet insurance, one in three say it has come in handy three to four times. Of those who don’t, two in five believe it is too expensive.

“With the growing cost of vet care in the U.S., the sad reality is that many pet parents will at some point face an expensive vet bill that could put them in a terrible position – having to choose between their beloved companion and their financial health. Our pets are there for us through thick and thin, and many pet parents would do anything to return the favor. This is especially true today, when pet medical care has advanced so drastically; sophisticated cancer treatments, alternative therapies, pain management and the list goes on. Pet insurance lightens the financial, mental and emotional load for pet owners, ensuring that cost does not dictate their pet’s care,” Bastidas adds.

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Delta variant does not appear to make children sicker

The Delta variant of the coronavirus does not appear to cause more severe disease in children than earlier forms of the virus, a UK study suggests. Earlier this year, the research team found the Alpha variant of the virus did not appear to make children sicker than the so-called wild, or original, form of the virus, first seen in China. New data suggests that kids also do not get any sicker from Delta than they did from Alpha. Researchers compared two groups of school-age children with COVID-19: 694 infected with the Alpha variant between late December 2020 and early May 2021, and 706 infected with Delta between late May and early July. As reported on Thursday on medRxiv ahead of peer review, children infected with Delta had slightly more symptoms. But in both groups, very few children needed to be hospitalized and long periods of illness were uncommon. In both groups, half of the children were sick for no more than five days. The researchers lacked information on differences between the groups that might have influenced the results, such as whether lockdowns were in place, and the effects of different seasons. "Our data suggest that clinical characteristics of COVID-19 due to the Delta variant in children are broadly similar to COVID-19 due to other variants," the researchers concluded. That appears to jibe with data reported by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). "Although we are seeing more cases in children ... these studies demonstrated that there was not increased disease severity in children," CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said of the Delta-driven wave in a statement. "More children have COVID-19 because there is more disease in the community."

Secondary immune response stronger after infection than vaccination

In COVID-19 survivors, important components of the body's immune response called memory B cells continue to evolve and get stronger for at least several months, producing highly potent antibodies that can neutralize new variants of the virus, a new study has found. By comparison, vaccine-induced memory B cells are less robust, evolving for only a few weeks and never "learning" to protect against variants, researchers reported in a paper published on Thursday in Nature. COVID-19 vaccines do induce more antibodies than the immune system does after a coronavirus infection. But the immune system response to infection appears to outshine its response to vaccines when it comes to memory B cells. Regardless of whether antibodies are induced by infection or vaccine, their levels drop within six months in many people. But memory B cells stand ready to produce new antibodies if the body encounters the virus. Prior to this study, there had been little data on how vaccine-induced B cells compare to infection-induced B cells. The researchers caution that the benefits of stronger memory B cells after infection do not outweigh the risks that come with COVID-19. "While a natural infection may induce maturation of antibodies with broader activity than a vaccine does, a natural infection can also kill you," said study leader Michel Nussenzweig of Rockefeller University, in a statement. "A vaccine won't do that and, in fact, protects against the risk of serious illness or death from infection."

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The veteran journalist and head of Philippine news site Rappler told Reuters in an interview after winning the award that Facebook’s algorithms “prioritize the spread of lies laced with anger and hate over facts.”

Her comments add to the pile of recent pressure on Facebook Inc FB-Q +0.25%increase, used by more than three billion people, which a former employee turned whistleblower accused of putting profit over the need to curb hate speech and misinformation. Facebook denies any wrongdoing.

A representative for Facebook in the Philippines did not respond to requests for comment on Ressa’s remarks.

Ressa shared the Nobel with Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov on Friday, for what the committee called braving the wrath of the leaders of the Philippines and Russia to expose corruption and misrule, in an endorsement of free speech under fire worldwide.

Facebook has become the world’s largest distributor of news and “yet it is biased against facts, it is biased against journalism,” Ressa said.

“If you have no facts, you can’t have truths, you can’t have trust. If you don’t have any of these, you don’t have a democracy,” she said. “Beyond that, if you don’t have facts, you don’t have a shared reality, so you can’t solve the existential problems of climate, coronavirus.”

Ressa has been the target of intense social-media hatred campaigns from President Rodrigo Duterte’s supporters, which she said were aimed at destroying her and Rappler’s credibility.

“These online attacks on social media have a purpose, they are targeted, they are used like a weapon,” said the former CNN journalist.

Rappler’s reporting has included close scrutiny of Duterte’s deadly war on drugs and a series of investigative reports into what it says is his government’s strategy to “weaponize” the internet, using bloggers on its payroll to stir up anger among online supporters who threaten and discredit Duterte’s critics.

Duterte has not commented on Ressa’s award. The presidential palace, Duterte’s spokesperson, his chief legal counsel, and communications office did not respond to Reuters requests for comment.

Facebook in March 2019 removed an online network in the Philippines for “co-ordinated inauthentic behaviour”, and linked it to a businessman who has previously said he helped manage the president’s social media election campaign in 2016.

Filipinos top the world in time spent on social media, according to 2021 studies by social media management firms.

Platforms like Facebook have become political battlegrounds and have helped strengthen Duterte’s support base, having been instrumental in his election victory in 2016 and a rout by his allies in midterm polls last year.

The Philippines will hold an election in May to choose a successor to Duterte, who under the constitution is not allowed to seek another term.

That campaign “will be a battle for facts,” Ressa said. “We are going to keep making sure our public sees the facts, understands it. We are not going to be harassed or intimidated into silence.”

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