That vikings crossed the Atlantic long before Christopher Columbus is well established. Their sagas told of expeditions to the coast of today’s Canada: to Helluland, which scholars have identified as Baffin Island or Labrador; Markland (Labrador or Newfoundland) and Vinland (Newfoundland or a territory farther south). In 1960 the remains of Norse buildings were found on Newfoundland.

But there was no evidence to prove that anyone outside northern Europe had heard of America until Columbus’s voyage in 1492. Until now. A paper for the academic journal Terrae Incognitae by Paolo Chiesa, a professor of Medieval Latin Literature at Milan University, reveals that an Italian monk referred to the continent in a book he wrote in the early 14th century. Setting aside the scholarly reserve that otherwise characterises his monograph, Mr Chiesa describes the mention of Markland (Latinised to Marckalada) as “astonishing”.

In 2015 Mr Chiesa traced to a private collection in New York the only known copy of the Cronica universalis, originally written by a Dominican, Galvano Fiamma, between around 1339 and 1345. The book once belonged to the library of the basilica of Sant’Ambrogio in Milan. In Napoleonic times, the monastery was suppressed and its contents scattered. The owner of the Cronica let Mr Chiesa photograph the entire book and, on his return to Milan, the professor gave the photographs to his graduate students to transcribe. Towards the end of the project one of the students, Giulia Greco, found a passage in which Galvano, after describing Iceland and Greenland, writes: “Farther westwards there is another land, named Marckalada, where giants live; in this land, there are buildings with such huge slabs of stone that nobody could build them, except huge giants. There are also green trees, animals and a great quantity of birds.”

Mr Chiesa says that giants were a standard embellishment of faraway places in Norse folklore and, indeed, Galvano cautioned that “no sailor was ever able to know anything for sure about this land or about its features.” The Dominican was scrupulous in citing his sources. Most were literary. But, unusually, he ascribed his description of Marckalada to the oral testimony of “sailors who frequent the seas of Denmark and Norway”.

Mr Chiesa believes their accounts were probably passed on to Galvano by seafarers in Genoa, the nearest port to Milan and the city in which the Dominican monk is most likely to have studied for his doctorate.

His thesis raises a new question: why does the eastern seaboard of America not feature on any known Genoese map of the period? But it could help explain why Columbus, a Genoese, was prepared to set off across what most contemporaries considered a landless void.

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An international team of researchers has reported the discovery of hand and foot prints from Quesang, in the Tibetan Plateau. The fossil impressions, which date to between 169,000 and 226,000 years ago and seem to have been created intentionally, could represent the earliest known art of its kind.

Called parietal art, this form of ancient visual expression typically crops up on cave walls but can also be made on the ground, as appears to be the case for the recent Tibet discovery. The fossil is a series of hand and foot impressions, none of which overlap.

Besides potentially being the oldest known parietal art, the site is the earliest evidence for hominins so high on the Tibetan Plateau, which sits about 12,000 feet above sea level. The team’s work describing the fossilized prints was published this week in Science Bulletin.

The fossil printsPhoto: D.D. Zhang et al. / Science Bulletin

“How footprints are made during normal activity such as walking, running, jumping is well understood, including things like slippage,” said Thomas Urban, a research scientist at Cornell University’s tree ring laboratory and a co-author of the new paper, in an email to Gizmodo. “These prints, however, are more carefully made and have a specific arrangement—think more along the lines like how a child presses their handprint into fresh cement.”

The prints—five from hands and five from feet—were made in what was then mud near the Quesang Hot Spring. The mud lithified into travertine rock over the millennia. Different handprints near the site were discovered by lead author David Zhang in 1988 near a modern bathhouse, but the prints that the authors believe are artwork weren’t found until 2018. Though the estimated date range for the fossils is broad, even the most recent age predates cave paintings like those at Lascaux and Sulawesi by over 120,000 years.

Image showing the positions of each print. Graphic: D.D. Zhang et al. / Science Bulletin

Based on the size of the prints, the team believes the artists could have been a 7-year-old and a 12-year-old. (The footprints were 7-year-old sized, but the handprints were larger.) That conclusion assumes that the prints were made by Homo sapiens, though, which the researchers aren’t sure about. If the species of human that made the prints was not Homo sapiens, the age guesses may be off. The timeline for the prints roughly aligns with Denisovan-like remains that were found on the Tibetan plateau, so that’s one alternative candidate for the track-makers.

A three-dimensional scan of the Quesang print panel, showing the depth gradient of the prints.Image: D.D. Zhang et al. / Science Bulletin

the prints are art at all is also up for interpretation. According to Matthew Bennett, a geologist at Bournemouth University who specializes in ancient footprints and trackways, it’s likely that these ancient imprints were intentional. “It is the composition, which is deliberate, the fact the traces were not made by normal locomotion, and the care taken so that one trace does not overlap the next, all of which shows deliberate care,” Bennett told Gizmodo in an email.

“Whether such a behavior is artistic depends on the definition one applies—but it gets into a class of behaviors that is generally more complex that is seen with other animals,” Urban said. “Symbolic behaviors such as language, religion, and art must have simpler manifestations early in the human story—so if you’re looking for the earliest art, don’t go looking for the Mona Lisa or you’ll likely be disappointed.”

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The researchers have found out that if they remove the liquid electrolyte and use a sulfide-based solid electrolyte instead, they are able to overcome the volatility issues. As things stand, the battery can be charged 500 times with 80% battery health at room temperature. According to the report, a start-up called Unigrid Battery has licensed the new technology and will develop it further in an attempt to commercialise it.

Commenting on the development, Darren Tan, the lead author of the research and founder of Unigrid Battery, said:

“With this battery configuration, we are opening a new territory for solid-state batteries using allow anodes such as silicon.

The solid-state silicon approach overcomes many limitations in conventional batteries. It presents exciting opportunities for us to meet market demands for higher volumetric energy, lowered costs, and safer batteries, especially for grid energy storage.”

With the new technology, we could see electric vehicles extending their range by a considerable amount and if it can be scaled down enough to fit in smartphones then we might be looking at batteries that don’t need charging for a week, never mind every 24 hours.

New lithium-ion batteries could revolutionise electric vehicles

Move comes as government seeks to limit fallout of looming real estate collapse.

Bitcoin outlawed in China as country bans all cryptocurrency transactions

In 1650 B.C., the citizens of Tall el-Hammam in present-day Jordan witnessed a meteor light up the skies like nothing they’d ever seen before. The impact was 1,000 times stronger than the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima and caused temperatures of 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit. The city was flattened instantly and no one survived.

Now, a new study has posited that this cataclysmic event may have inspired the Biblical tale of Sodom and its fiery destruction.

While none of Tall el-Hammam’s 8,000 inhabitants lived to tell the tale, experts believe that people in neighboring regions witnessed the blast and spread the story of its destruction via word of mouth. According to The Conversation, these accounts eventually led to a written version that then found its way into the Bible.

As published in the Scientific Reports journal, the study concluded that neither volcanos nor earthquakes could’ve caused the molten metals and ceramics unearthed at Tall el-Hammam over the last 15 years. These would’ve required far higher temperatures to liquefy — such as a meteoric explosion known as a “cosmic airburst.”

An illustration of the cosmic airburst that’s believed to have killed at least 8,000 people and flattened two cities.

While chronicling what exactly happened 3,600 years ago may seem impossible, study co-author James Kennett focused squarely on the tangible evidence. According to The Sun, that led him and his team to zero in on the molten glass and molten metals buried in five feet of scorched earth.

“We saw evidence for temperatures greater than 2,000 degrees Celsius (or 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit),” said Kennett.

He and his colleagues believe that a meteor that exploded into a fireball some 2.5 miles above the Earth would have been more than enough to set the entire city on fire. Clothing and wood would have burned up in an instant while metals, mud bricks, and pottery boiled and melted. Meanwhile, the people on the scene would have been blinded and torn apart by a fireball and shockwave moving at 740 miles per hour.

Such unprecedented destruction, the researchers claim, could very well have inspired the kinds of apocalyptic tales that made it into early religious texts.

“We present evidence that in 1650 B.C.E., a cosmic airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam, a Middle-Bronze-Age city in the southern Jordan Valley northeast of the Dead Sea,” the study said. “There is an ongoing debate as to whether Tall el-Hammam could be the Biblical city of Sodom.”

The southern Levant, with the Tall el-Hammam site and Dead Sea to the north.

After further analysis, it appears that few events in known history would have compared with the cosmic airburst at Tall el-Hammam.

Using known meteoric impacts and nuclear detonations from the past, the researchers used an impact calculator to compare the destruction at Tall el-Hammam with similarly devastated sites around the world — such as the Tunguska event in Russia in 1908 and the comet that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

The impact of the Tunguska event, as superimposed on the Dead Sea area.

Ultimately, questions still remain. But what we do know for sure is that the area was left in ruins after the event, with Tall el-Hammam and more than 100 other settlements abandoned for centuries. Some believe that the high levels of salt in the ground because of the meteor had left the Earth unsuitable for crop growth, leaving the area uninhabited.

In the end, it certainly seems plausible that this apocalyptic incident affected inhabitants of the region so deeply that the story was handed down for hundreds of years — and remains chilling to this day.

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The Linux Foundation teamed up with edX to survey several professionals and hiring managers to gain insights on open-source job skill demands, the hottest skills, and the state of the industry.

Here, let me mention some key highlights of the report.

Hiring Open-Source Talent is a Priority

While open-source skills were always in demand, it is now a priority in 2021.

Considering every type of service and product development relies on some form of open-source technology, 97% of the hiring managers agree to prioritize open-source talents.

The prime reason for this boost is the boom of cloud-native technologies surpassing Linux skill demand for the first time in history.

And, it is crucial to manage and scale cloud technologies to keep up with the demands.

Hence, the skills for cloud/container technologies are the most popular right now. And followed by the others. Here are the hottest skill sets right now:

• Cloud and container technologies (46%)

• Linux development and administration (35%)

• Networking technologies (26%)

• DevOps practises (24%)

• Security practises (23%)

Kubernetes, an open-source technology, has influenced this in a big way, and likely 4x times than usual, candidates are starting to get Kubernetes certification programs as per the report.

Of course, no matter what, you still need the foundations of working with Linux systems to expand your skillset to the cloud, networking, machine learning, and others.

Lack of Talent Gap With Growing Demands

Even if the demand for cloud, DevOps, networking, administration, and others have increased, there is still a big gap of talented candidates eligible for the roles.

Yes, the certification programs and eLearning courses by The Linux Foundation and edX have improved things. Still, the sudden growth opportunities will take time to be filled up by capable developers.

It was also reported that the professionals have been using DevOps practices more than ever (with 88% use, compared to 58% of professionals using it in 2018). And, this is a good thing.

Companies are starting to make hiring decisions on the basis of an open-source skill set, which is highly influential for a candidate.

Open-Source Community Growth & The Future

The report highlights the fact that the open-source skillset is in great demand. And, not just certifications, professionals contributing to open-source projects are more likely to get hired than the rest. 44% of the hiring managers would prefer such talents.

So, this should be good for the growth of the open-source community and the job industry at the same time.

And I think this is a good time for you to develop and explore open-source skill sets while contributing to the open-source community. If you’re wondering, you might want to start looking at The Linux Foundation training courses and certifications to get started.

Feel free to let me know your thoughts about this report in the comments down below.

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People may have walked along the shore of a lake in New Mexico 23,000 years ago. 

23,000-year-old footprints suggest people reached the Americas early

But we are also in the throes of a pandemic, and when we come down with sore throats and runny noses, how do we tell if it's COVID-19 or something else?

The short answer is that there's no rule, according to Dr. Mary Hayden, a professor at Rush University and head of the university's Division of Infectious Diseases. The symptoms are so similar that "there's really nothing that clearly differentiates one illness from the other," making it nearly impossible to reliably self-diagnose.

But here are some quick tips from experts for when you're wondering whether you have COVID-19, and that could help you protect yourself and the people around you.

Watch for symptoms, such as loss of smell, that don't match up with common illnesses.

Loss of smell is a symptom that is "more suggestive of COVID," said Hayden, "especially if you don't have nasal congestion."

People with COVID-19 may lose their sense of smell without getting any of the other cold symptoms such as a sore throat or blocked nose, which is a "clue," said Hayden.

This loss of smell is also different from when you get a blocked nose and can't smell anything, or breathe properly. People with COVID-19 also get dysosmia, which is where "everything you taste tastes terrible," said Aniruddha Hazra, assistant professor in the University of Chicago Medicine's Section of Infectious Diseases and Global Health.

Websites offer lengthy checklists of symptoms that fit more with specific illnesses. This helps you identify symptoms that don't square with conditions you typically get. For example, if you have a fever, said Hayden, this should rule out allergies because people with allergies don't typically run a higher temperature.

Decide when to get tested, and how to choose the right test.

There are two different tests: Rapid antigen tests, which were popular during the beginning of the pandemic, and polymerase chain reaction tests, called PCR tests.

PCR tests are "the gold standard," said Hazra, because they're much more sensitive, working by picking up genetic material specific to COVID-19 with the ability to detect "tiniest traces" of the virus.

But this doesn't mean that rapid tests don't have their uses. It depends on the situation, said Hazra. Even if a test isn't perfect, "this doesn't mean it can't be used in an educated way," he said.

Despite being more reliable, PCR tests are slower than rapid tests, taking 24 to 48 hours to provide results. So if you need answers in a matter of minutes, rapid antigen tests are your best call. You can use these if you have symptoms and you're trying to decide whether you should go to work, or to see your grandma, said Hayden.

These tests are actually "comparable to PCR tests" when you have symptoms, added Hazra. But if you're worried you have asymptomatic COVID-19 after you've been exposed to someone with a confirmed case, or you've been to a big event and are concerned that you got the virus, you should take a PCR test. Rapid tests often don't pick up on asymptomatic cases, which could lead to a false negative test result.

"The best way to give yourself peace of mind is to get tested five days after exposure if you have no symptoms," said Hazra.

You can go to a testing center or to your doctor for a PCR test, said Hazra. The rapid tests most available in the U.S. are BinaxNOW tests by health care company Abbott Laboratories.

But there is a cost barrier to these tests in the U.S. that isn't found in Europe, said Hazra. In Denmark, a rapid test is available for the equivalent of $3, whereas in America a pack of two tests costs more than $20.

"There's still obviously an access issue," said Hazra, particularly for communities hit the hardest by COVID-19, which are often working-class and may not be able to afford home tests.

The test "has to be accessible for it to really make a difference," said Hazra.

Weigh your specific circumstances.

For people who are vaccinated, said Hazra, the vaccine should give them some "peace of mind," because the likelihood of getting sick is small, and people who do have breakthrough infections will experience a milder form of the virus.

But you should think about why you're getting tested, according to Hayden. If you work from home and never go out, you don't need to worry about getting tested, she said. But if you're in contact with other people, especially those who are immunocompromised or not vaccinated, you should get tested regardless of your vaccination status.

People who are immunocompromised also could be subject to specific caveats and complexities, said Hayden. Small studies have shown that some people who have kidney transplants, for example, have not developed antibodies after two, or even three vaccine doses.

These are people who could be particularly affected by those who transmit the disease. We need to think about the "chains of transmission," Hayden said.

If you have the virus, you might "expose someone who got a little sick, who then exposes someone else who got really sick," said Hayden.

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Delirium is a medical term used to describe confused thinking and reduced awareness of surroundings - a not uncommon state of mind for the sickest hospitalized patients.

As it turns out, severe cases of COVID-19 are enough to trigger something similar. In fact, initial investigations have suggested delirium occurs in up to 80 percent of ICU patients with COVID-19, possibly as a result of loss of oxygen to the brain or widespread inflammation.

Now a new analysis of critically ill COVID-19 patients at a single hospital in Michigan has found even more evidence that delirium is a very common symptom of the disease - one that could possibly slow patient recovery if it's not addressed.

Using medical records and discharge surveys from 148 patients checked into the ICU between March and May 2020, researchers have found more than 70 percent of the cohort experienced a prolonged disturbance in their mental abilities.

In most cases, the delirium lasted for days. But nearly a third of participants left hospital without demonstrating they'd fully recovered from their delirium.

Of those who were discharged with signs of cognitive impairment, nearly half required skilled nursing care to get by at home. Their persistent confusion reduced their ability to look after themselves, according to follow-up phone surveys conducted between month one and month two of being discharged.

"These results align with previous data demonstrating a high incidence of delirium in critically ill patients with COVID-19," the authors conclude.

"Moreover, the median duration of delirium (10 days) is relatively long compared with other critically ill populations."

It's not yet clear whether these severe impairments are a result of the SARS-CoV-2 virus itself, which seems to cause an unusual number of neurological symptoms that can persist for six months or more, or if it's a sign of critical illness more broadly.

Generally, cognitive impairment is seen in about 20 percent of patients in acute care facilities, so it's expected to a certain extent. But the current pandemic seems to have at least tripled that number.

While the mechanism behind COVID-19 delirium remains a mystery, researchers in Michigan say it is clear that ICU patients infected with the coronavirus are experiencing "considerable neuropsychological burden" both during their hospital stay and after being discharged.

"Overall, this study highlights another reason why getting vaccinated and preventing severe illness is so important," says anesthesiologist Phillip Vlisides from Michigan Medicine.

"There can be long term neurological complications that perhaps we don't talk about as much as we should."

Early on in the pandemic, for instance, checking patients for symptoms of delirium was not commonplace. 

Even when delirium was observed, exercise regimes and other novel strategies for improving cognitive performance, like face-to-face time with family or breathing trials, were rarely introduced, possibly because protective equipment was not easily available at the time.

The likely result is that many patients with severe cases of COVID-19 have been discharged from hospital with serious cognitive impairments, which were not addressed properly.

And that's a big problem. Delirium is generally associated with prolonged hospitalization and illness recovery.

In the new Michigan study, for instance, those patients experiencing delirium had longer stays at the hospital and ICU. They also spent more time relying on mechanical ventilation.

"Whatever creative ways we can implement delirium prevention protocols is likely to be very helpful," says Vlisides.

"That includes consistent communication with family members, bringing in pictures and objects from home, and video visits if family cannot safely visit."

As it turns out, those patients disproportionately vulnerable to severe forms of COVID-19, like those from racial and ethnic minority communities, are also the most likely to experience delirium while hospitalized.

In fact, researchers in Michigan found half the patients in the delirium group were African American - a damning reflection of ongoing disparities in US healthcare.

Further research at more acute care facilities and among larger and more diverse cohorts will be needed before we can say with any certainty who is most at risk of experiencing delirium when hospitalized with COVID-19.

While the study in Michigan found female patients are more likely to fall in the delirium group, other initial studies suggest male patients in the ICU are more susceptible to cognitive impairment.

If it turns out that delirium really is such a common experience for those with severe COVID-19, we need to start to recognize and treat the symptoms as early as possible. Otherwise, it could prove much harder for the sickest COVID-19 patients to get back on their feet.

The study was published in BMJ Open. 

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The antibody has rare characteristics that make it a valuable addition to the limited set of broadly reactive antibody therapeutic candidates, researchers reported Sept. 15 in the journal Cell Reports.

The technology, called LIBRA-seq, has helped speed up the discovery of antibodies that can neutralize SARS-CoV-2. It also enables researchers to screen antibodies against other viruses that have not yet caused human disease but which have a high potential of doing so.

"This is one way to proactively build a repertoire of potential therapeutics" against future outbreaks, said Ivelin Georgiev, Ph.D., director of the Vanderbilt Program in Computational Microbiology and Immunology and associate director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Infection, Immunology and Inflammation.

"The pathogens keep evolving, and we're basically playing catch-up," said Georgiev, associate professor of Pathology, Microbiology & Immunology and a member of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Center.

A more proactive approach that anticipates future outbreaks before they occur is needed to prevent a repeat of COVID-19, "or something worse happening in the future," he said.

In their report, Georgiev and his colleagues describe the isolation of a monoclonal antibody from a patient who had recovered from COVID-19 that "shows potent neutralization" against SARS-CoV-2. It also is effective against variants of the virus that are slowing efforts to control the pandemic.

The antibody has uncommon genetic and structural characteristics that distinguish it from other monoclonal antibodies commonly used to treat COVID-19. The thought is that SARS-CoV-2 will be less likely to mutate to escape an antibody it hasn't "seen" before.

LIBRA-seq stands for Linking B-cell Receptor to Antigen Specificity through sequencing. It was developed in 2019 by Ian Setliff, Ph.D., a former graduate student in Georgiev's lab who now works in the biotechnology industry, and by Andrea Shiakolas, a current Vanderbilt graduate student.

Setliff wondered if he could map the genetic sequences of antibodies and the identities of specific viral antigens, the proteins markers that antibodies recognize and attack, simultaneously and in a high-throughput way. The goal was to find a faster way of identifying antibodies that will hone in on a specific viral antigen.

With the help of VUMC's core genomics laboratory, Vanderbilt Technologies for Advanced Genomics (VANTAGE), the Vanderbilt Flow Cytometry Shared Resource, and Vanderbilt University's Advanced Computing Center for Research and Education (ACCRE), Georgiev put Setliff's idea to the test. It worked.

The efforts led by Setliff and Shiakolas culminated in a manuscript describing proof-of-concept development of the LIBRA-seq technology that was published in the journal Cell in 2019.

"It would have been impossible three or four years ago to move at the speed that we are right now," Georgiev said. "A lot has changed in a very short period of time when it comes to monoclonal antibody discovery as well as vaccine development."

There is no time to lose. "If we give the virus enough time," he said, "there will so many other variants that arise," one or more of which—by evading current vaccines—may be even worse than the delta variant.

"That's exactly why you need to have as many options as possible," Georgiev said. The antibody described in this paper "basically gives you another tool in the toolbox."

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SYDNEY, Australia — In the war against the coronavirus’s Delta variant, few if any democracies have demanded as much of their people as Australia.

In the middle of the latest lockdowns, the police in Sydney gave hefty fines to three moms with strollers chatting in a park. Melbourne’s playgrounds were wrapped in police tape, and traveling from a state with Covid to one without — for the lucky few granted permission by the authorities — requires two-week stints in quarantine at a hotel or a remote former mining camp.

There are now two Australias. In Perth, offices, pubs and stadiums are crammed and normal as ever — the payoff for a closed-border approach that has made Western Australia an island within an island. In Sydney, residents are approaching their 14th week of lockdown. The working-class areas with the highest infection rates have faced a heavy police presence, and, until recently, a 9 p.m. curfew and just an hour of outdoor exercise per day.

Is the sacrifice worth it?

Police officers on bicycles stopping a group of young men to enforce Covid rules outside a service station in suburban Sydney this month.Credit...Matthew Abbott for The New York Times

A Covid cleaner on a nearly empty ferry in Sydney last month.Credit...Matthew Abbott for The New York Times

Australia is at a crossroads with Covid. The confidence and pride of 2020, when lockdowns and isolation brought Covid outbreaks to heel, have been replaced by doubt, fatigue and a bitter battle over how much freedom or risk should be allowed in a Delta-defined future.

Some states are trying desperately to hold on to what worked before, while New South Wales and Victoria, home to the country’s biggest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, are being forced by Delta outbreaks to find a more nuanced path forward. Prime Minister Scott Morrison has thrown his weight behind a plan to reopen when 80 percent of adults are fully vaccinated. But the road ahead may not be smooth — as shown by protests this week over a vaccine mandate — and state leaders are still insisting that they will go it alone.

“We might be looking at the country turning the clock back on itself,” said Tim Soutphommasane, a political theorist at the University of Sydney. “There is an explicit insularity and parochialism that now dictates debate.”

The world has come to see the country through that lens — through the actions of its blinkered politicians. To some American conservatives, Australia has even become the world’s largest prison — its citizens all but barred from leaving or returning to the country, with governments reflexively locking people in their homes at any sign of the virus.

Covid testing in Sydney last month.Credit...Matthew Abbott for The New York Times

Lining up to be vaccinated in Sydney last month.Credit...Matthew Abbott for The New York Times

But many Australians, while frustrated, see something else. Asked if the sacrifices have been worth it, they look to their neighbors, their community leaders, the millions of people waiting in long lines for vaccines and the tens of thousands of Australians who would have died of Covid without all the restrictions.

Their answer, with caveats or zeal, has generally been the same: “Yes, it is worth it,” or “Yes, we believe it will be.”

To understand why, I explored both Australias, the one with Covid, where roughly half the country’s population is trapped at home, and the one that has so far managed to keep it out. In both, I heard the same message — critics need to reimagine freedom not as the personal autonomy that Americans cherish but rather as a collective right with responsibilities. Epidemics are a test of society’s commitment to the greater good, they argue, and if any country has failed, it’s the United States, not Australia.

Visiting the Pre-Covid Past

Western Australia is roughly six times the size of California, but it has just 2.7 million people. It combines a vast, red Mars-like landscape in the north and east, rich in minerals, with a fertile southwestern coastal section that includes the city of Perth and the wine and surfing region of Margaret River.

Traveling through nearly all of it in August after 14 days of quarantine 2,000 miles away near Darwin, I heard two refrains about Covid: “We’ve been so lucky” and “It’s because we’re so compliant.”

Only nine people have died from Covid in Western Australia. If it were a country, that would place its death rate below just about every nation.

It was like traveling back to 2019. Pubs and stadiums with people hugging. Hospitals quiet. No masks — anywhere.

An impromptu performance by Joel Jackson, an Australian actor, at the CinefestOZ 2021 Grand Finale at the Monkey Bar in Vasse, Western Australia, last month.Credit...David Dare Parker for The New York Times

CinefestOZ 2021 Grand Finale at the Monkey Bar in Vasse last month.Credit...David Dare Parker for The New York Times

It was like traveling back to 2019. Pubs and stadiums with people hugging. Hospitals quiet. No masks — anywhere.

“For us over here, it feels so surreal to see what’s happening in the eastern states,” said Kate Harris, the manager of a bookstore in the trendy area of Fremantle. “We’re pretty happy.”

That experience is the nucleus of Australians’ tolerance for restrictions. Less liberty is medically necessary — because only 49 percent of the country’s adult population has been fully vaccinated under the initially plodding campaign — and it is accepted because life without Covid still feels possible.

Western Australia, which has had only a few short, sharp lockdowns, has the lowest unemployment rate in the country. Off the back of a surge in iron ore prices, the state recently announced its largest budget surplus ever.

“If the question is why do we put up with these restrictions, it’s because in most cases we’ve been able to put up with them for a pretty short period of time,” said Ian Mackay, a virologist and risk expert at the University of Queensland, another state enjoying life without a current outbreak.

More important, he added: “We’ve saved even more lives than we expected to save.”

In the United States and Britain, nearly 2,000 people per million have died of Covid. In Australia, that figure is less than 50. More people have died in Florida of Covid this week than in Australia during the entire pandemic.

Enjoying a sunset in Margaret River, Western Australia, this week.Credit...David Dare Parker for The New York Times

A recent birthday celebration at a winery’s restaurant in Margaret River. Credit...David Dare Parker for The New York Times

No one claims the approach has been without cost. In Margaret River, I met Rob Gough, a Californian who moved to Australia in 2003. Inside the popular pub that he and his wife own, with surf photos on the walls and “Eye of the Tiger” playing over the speakers, his eyes filled with tears as he spoke about missing his mother’s 80th birthday a few weeks earlier.

“It’s like, I just want to go there and give her a hug,” he said.

I eased into the question. Is it worth it?

“As long as you have zero Covid here, you may as well run with it,” he said.

A day earlier, I’d been at the CinefestOZ film festival, with events at Margaret River wineries, brew-pubs and crowded movie theaters. I could see a freedom there that few Americans now know: a freedom from fear.

Judi Levine, an Australian producer who had returned from Los Angeles for a project, told me she was less appalled by the rules in Australia than by the way Americans had behaved. Her daughter works at a university in Ohio where students who had tested positive for Covid were found to be hosting a party a few days later.

“The U.S. takes this business of civil liberties to a place which doesn’t necessarily take into consideration the greater community,” she said. “So where Australia says we are doing this for the greater good and taking care of yourself and your fellow people is the priority, Americans tend to say, ‘Oh, well, you’re entitled to do whatever you want; put yourself first.’”

Living With Covid

In Sydney, communal responsibility has become both accepted and suffocating.

The communities hit hardest are filled with young essential workers whose movements have kept Delta going, albeit with a reproduction rate far below what the variant would be doing without lockdowns.

When I called Mayor Chagai, a basketball coach and leader in the South Sudanese community whom I’d written about four years ago, he said he’d been busy.

“I’ve been dealing with it in so many ways, because a lot of families and community members and youth are affected by the lockdown and actually the virus,” he said. “We have 85 families sick, about 700 people.”

Gabriel Dut picking up food dropped off by Mayor Chagai, a community leader and basketball coach in the Sydney area. Mr. Dut is living under strict lockdown restrictions with his seven children.Credit...Matthew Abbott for The New York Times

Nao Sugimoto helps her son Ehis, 8, with schoolwork at home in Campsie, near Sydney, this month. Ms. Sugimoto, a single mother, has struggled to look after her children during the extended lockdown.Credit...Matthew Abbott for The New York Times

To help, he’d been delivering food and hosting online question-and-answer sessions about vaccines. He’d even created a committee of his former players who were working with the police to explain to young people why staying home and getting vaccinated were important.

“The government is imposing a lot on us,” he said, “but the virus is what has locked people in.”

Many Australians see overreach all around them. There is little scientific evidence to support curfews, and Australia’s lockdowns have exacted a heavy and unequal toll.

Rosanna Barbero, who runs a community organization in Western Sydney, cited the long-term costs: families with many children and only one computer for remote schooling; small-business owners drowning in debt.

“It’s so much easier to follow the lockdown rules if you’re in a position of privilege and comfort,” Ms. Barbero said. “There’s a gender element, a race element, and there’s a class element.”

But even she said that while more help was needed, the lockdowns were worth enduring.

A worker from CleanCorp, a Sydney-based cleaning company, using an antibacterial spray during a deep clean of a Sydney business.Credit...Matthew Abbott for The New York Times

Chinatown in central Sydney last month.Credit...Matthew Abbott for The New York Times

The lack of freedom has certainly produced a new sense of urgency around vaccination. About 83 percent of New South Wales residents 16 or older have now had at least one dose of a Covid vaccine. In Blacktown, where Mr. Chagai lives, that figure is past 90 percent.

And after three months of lockdowns, case numbers have finally started falling in New South Wales, to around 1,000 a day. Last Wednesday, Sydney’s curfews were lifted, and restaurants will open soon for the vaccinated. In Melbourne, playgrounds are alive again with the sound of children.

So while Australia’s critics in America shift their attention to rising deaths, many Australians are looking forward to a summer with fewer restrictions — and less fear than most of the world.

“We should feel proud,” said Dr. Mackay, the Queensland virologist. “We’re still doing well.”

Seating in Manly Beach, Sydney, that was taped off to ensure social distancing.Credit...Matthew Abbott for The New York Times

Damien Cave is the bureau chief in Sydney, Australia. He previously reported from Mexico City, Havana, Beirut and Baghdad. Since joining The Times in 2004, he has also been a deputy National editor, Miami bureau chief and a Metro reporter. @damiencave

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Since the pandemic began, people tell me they've been thinking a lot more about kindness. Maybe they've noticed the mutual aid groups that have sprung up around the world to help during lockdowns, or perhaps it's because the cessation of normal everyday life has forced them to reconsider their values and what really matters in life.

Kindness might once have been considered something of a soft topic, but it has begun to be taken seriously within academic research. When developmental psychologist Robin Banerjee – who is leading a new study on kindness in partnership with the BBC – surveyed past research, he found just 35 papers on kindness in psychology journals in the whole of the 1980s. In the past decade, there were more than 1,000. 

But there is still plenty to discover, so the BBC has just launched a huge online public science project called the Kindness Test, in collaboration with a team from the University of Sussex in the UK. It's open now and many thousands of people from all over the globe have already completed it. The hope is that this research will start the process of obtaining a fuller picture of kindness in today's world.

Here's what some of those thousand research papers can already tell us, and what is still to be discovered:

WHAT WE ALREADY KNOW

Acting kindly makes us feel good

One morning, people walking down a street in the Canadian city of Vancouver were asked to take part in an experiment run by the American psychologist Elizabeth Dunn. They were given an envelope containing either a $5 or $20 note. Half the people were instructed to spend the money on themselves. The other half were instructed to use the money to buy a present for someone else or to donate the money to charity. In both cases, they had until 17:00 that day to spend the money.

The Kindness Test

What role does kindness play in your life? Join our study and help us to understand your experiences.

The Kindness Test is designed to explore everyday kindness. Most people would probably say they have a good idea about what it means to be kind and what it feels like to give and receive kindness. But we want to better understand what it is, where and when it is experienced, and what impact it has. Our goal is to explore how people's perspectives might vary across different groups, and how kindness might relate to health, well-being, and other social and psychological experiences. Visit thekindnesstest.org before 4 October 2021 to complete our questionnaire.

That evening, the researchers spoke to all the participants. The first group said they'd bought a variety of things for themselves, such as sushi, earrings and coffee. People from the second group bought toys for their relatives, edible gifts or gave money to homeless people in the street. Then the researchers asked each participant to rate their mood.

Whether they had $5 or $20 made no difference, nor did what they bought. What mattered was who they spent their money on. The people who had spent it on someone else felt significantly happier than those who treated themselves.  

This is just one of many studies which has found that acting kindly can improve your well-being. In a meta-analysis Oliver Scott Curry at the University of Oxford found that behaving kindly can have a small to medium effect on our well-being. 

Neuroscientific research confirms that the warm glow we experience when we do something nice for someone shows up in our brain’s reward system.

Speaking to me on the BBC radio programme The Kindness Test, Sussex University neuroscientist Dan Campbell-Meiklejohn told me that this can seem counterintuitive. "Kindness can cost us, yet we experience a sense of reward in parts of our brain when we are kind to others, just as we do when eat yummy food or have a pleasant surprise. These parts of the brain become active and motivate us to do them again and again."

Kindness is contagious

Kind acts can have a ripple effect. Just hearing that someone else has behaved kindly can motivate us to do the same. In a now classic study of social norms by Robert Cialdini and his colleagues, when a notice in a hotel bathroom told people that the majority of guests choose to reuse their towels, the more likely they were to be kind to the planet and keep their towels instead of having them replaced with fresh ones.  

Shoppers who bought something for others felt better afterwards compared with those who bought for themselves (Credit: Getty Images)

Many different lab studies have found that people "pay it forward", if they receive kindness they are then kinder to others. For example in a study by Monica Bartlett back in 2006, people were asked to complete a dull task on a computer before it was "accidentally" unplugged. For some participants, a stooge would kindly sort out the problem for them, saving them from wasting time starting all over again. The other half of the participants were shown a funny film instead. Those on the receiving end of kindness were more likely to agree to help the experimenters by taking part in another study.

It should be noted that later research has shown that paying it forward isn't always positive. Greed, as well as kindness, can be paid forward to complete strangers too.

Acting kindly can make you feel less anxious

When students who experience social anxiety were asked to perform acts of kindness for four weeks, such as doing their roommate's washing up or donating to charity, their social anxiety and desire to avoid social situations was reduced, compared with a group who weren't asked to do the kind acts.

Jennifer Trew from Simon Fraser University, who conducted the study, believes acting kindly may have helped the students to have more positive expectations about social situations, instead of dreading them. It was notable that the biggest effect was at the start.

Even toddlers can be kind

Toddlers are of course famous for their tantrums. We tend to assume that at such a young age they can never understand another's perspective. They often appear unmoved if their sibling howls in distress, but experiments show that they are capable of kindness.

In one study, a researcher is hanging up washing, but then runs out of pegs. Meanwhile, it's been arranged that the toddler playing nearby opens a box, finding either another peg, a marble to use in their own game or a useless piece of plastic. Digital analysis of their body language showed that on the whole they were just as delighted to find the peg for the researcher as they were at finding the marble for themselves. Research with older children and teenagers has also found a capacity for kindness.  

Young children often show signs of kindness, despite their age (Credit: Getty Images)

WHAT WE WANT TO KNOW

So there is plenty that we already know about kindness from experiments conducted in the lab. These studies are sometimes small, but when put together a picture of the state of the kindness starts to emerge. Yet even some of those working in the field have argued that the whole idea of kindness still needs to be unpacked and that more research is needed on how individuals differ in their kindness, and how it impacts societies.

Our research project, the Kindness Test, looks at the place of kindness in everyday life. and these are among the many questions it addresses:

What are the most common kind acts that people carry out?

Is the most common act of kindness picking up something a stranger has dropped, giving money to charity, paying someone a compliment, or maybe something else? And who do we tend to be kindest to?  

Neuroscientific research shows that our brains have a different emotional response to news stories of others coming to harm, depending on where in the world those people are. "It takes many more people abroad to have the same effect as a story about a single individual at home," says Dan Campbell-Meiklejohn. "So some charities and age groups have a massive challenge to overcome our emotional responses and to get support to those people that need it the most."

So how does this play out in everyday life?  Are we kindest to friends and family, to people like us or to strangers?

Compassion is easier when people are close by (Credit: Getty Images)

Where do people most often experience kindness?

In their homes? Out in the street in the city? In the countryside? Or maybe at work? A huge sample of people is needed in order to answer this kind of question.

How is kindness viewed at work?

In the cut-throat world of business, is there a place for kindness? Hopefully we've all worked with kind people, so we know kind acts do take place at work, and many of us wouldn't have survived in our jobs without colleagues showing us the ropes. But is kindness viewed as a strength at work and encouraged, or perceived as a weakness which could lose you your competitive edge?

What prevents us from being kind?

We all know that kindness can be a good thing and many of us try to be kind when we can. But it's not always easy. So what are the barriers to being kinder? Is it that we don't notice when someone needs something, that we're afraid of looking weak, or perhaps with strangers we're embarrassed to offer help in case they don't need it or we're mistaken about a situation, or we're just too shy to speak at all? Perhaps with Covid-19 around us, we prefer to keep our distance? There could be all sorts of reasons preventing us from being kinder. Or is it that we're just selfish and not bothered?

HOW TO TAKE PART   

The Kindness Test asks for your views on kindness. There are no right or wrong answers. If you fill it in, at the end you get a sneak preview of some of the results so far. Please go to thekindnesstest.org to take part.

And thank you to the thousands who already have. You're very kind.

*Claudia Hammond is the presenter of The Kindness Test on BBC Radio 4 and visiting professor of the public understanding of psychology at the University of Sussex.

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Art historians have known about the Cupid's existence since an X-ray analysis in 1979.

Since 1979, art historians have known that Johannes Vermeer's Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (circa 1657-1659) featured an overpainted figure of a Cupid in the background. Most assumed Vermeer himself had painted over the figure. Now, thanks to a major restoration by the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden in Germany, the overpainting has been removed to reveal the Cupid. That process also revealed that someone else painted over the Cupid in the 18th century, after the artist's death, causing a rethinking of how the painting should be interpreted. The fully restored canvas is now on view to the public for the first time at the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, one of many galleries that form the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.

 

The use of various X-ray imaging techniques—especially synchrotron radiation—has become a powerful tool for the nondestructive analysis of great works of art. For instance, European scientists in 2008 used synchrotron radiation to reconstruct the hidden portrait of a peasant woman painted by Vincent van Gogh. The artist (known for reusing his canvases) had painted over it when he created 1887's Patch of Grass. The synchrotron radiation excites the atoms on the canvas, which then emit X-rays of their own that can be picked up by a fluorescence detector. Each element in the painting has its own X-ray signature, so scientists can identify the distribution of each in the many layers of paint.

 

In 2019, we reported on the work of a team of Dutch and French scientists who used high-energy X-rays to unlock Rembrandt's secret recipe for his famous impasto technique, believed to be lost to history. And in 2020, an international team of scientists used synchrotron radiation to determine the cause of alarming signs of degradation to Edvard Munch's famous painting The Scream. The team's analysis revealed that the damage is not the result of exposure to light, but humidity—specifically, from the breath of museum visitors, perhaps as they lean in to take a closer look at the master's brushstrokes.

 

Once mistakenly attributed to Rembrandt, Vermeer's Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window is one of the earliest-known examples of the Dutch master's use of pointillé, a technique similar to embossing or engraving that involves punching dots. It was popular in the 15th century for decorating armor and firearms and was used on handmade book bindings in the 17th century. Vermeer's version incorporated tiny white globules of paint to capture effects of the light. It's sometimes cited as evidence that Vermeer used optical aids, most likely a camera obscura or a double-concave lens, although this remains a controversial hypothesis.

 

Paint samples were analyzed in the 1960s, revealing nothing unusual about the artist's choice of materials. He used pigments common to the Baroque era, including blue azurite, lead-tin yellow, vermillion, madder lake, and lead white. The painting was first subjected to X-ray analysis in 1979, revealing the Cupid lurking under the overpainting and making this another example of Vermeer's "painting within a painting" canvases. Scientists subjected Girl Reading a Letter to infrared reflectography in 2009, and in preparation for this latest restoration, the painting was examined via macro X-ray fluorescent scanning—to map the distribution of elements—and stereomicroscopy as well.

 

Vermeer's painting in the workshop.

First image of article image gallery. Please visit the source link to see all images.

Conservationist Christoph Scholzel initially removed multiple layers of varnish, first applied in the 19th century and renewed repeatedly, which had gradually turned yellowish-brown with age. That's when he noticed the paints used in the central background where the Cupid was hidden had different solubility properties than those used elsewhere. Subsequent analysis showed that there were old layers of a binding agent, as well as a layer of dirt, between the paints in that area and the paints used by the Dutch master. This implies that several decades must have elapsed between Vermeer completing Girl Reading a Letter and the overpainting of the Cupid. The latter could not have been done by Vermeer.

Based on that finding, the decision was made to remove the overpainting to restore Girl Reading a Letter as Vermeer had intended. For this, Scholzel used a fine scalpel, monitoring the process under a microscope in order to retain what is likely the last original varnish layer applied by the artist himself. Here's what the painting's once-blank background now depicts, per Hyperallergic:

The blond-haired god of love and desire holds a bow in his right hand and gazes out at the viewer from the picture on the wall, enclosed by a thick black frame. On the floor behind him are two masks, possible symbols of deception; Cupid tramples over one of them with his right foot in an allegory of faithfulness and true love. Vermeer's famous ethereal light streams through the open window, lending the scene a transcendent, spiritual glow.

"It is in Girl Reading a Letter that Vermeer discovers his own, distinct style. It marks the beginning of a series of paintings in which individuals, generally women, pause during an activity to find a moment of calm, and to reflect," said museum director Stephan Koja. "Restoring the Cupid in the background shows us the master from Delft's true intention. Beyond the superficial romantic context, it makes a fundamental statement on the nature of true love. Until now, we could only see this as a fragment. Now we know what a key role it plays in his oeuvre."

From a technical standpoint, "The changed appearance of the Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, including the overpainting removed at the borders of the canvas, gives us an opportunity to reconsider the painting's composition and how it works visually," said Uta Neidhardt, the museum's head conservator and exhibition curator. "The borders appear curiously unfinished—perhaps Vermeer covered it with an actual wooden frame, which is why he left them in such an 'open' condition. If we assume that he had planned to use such a construction, we immediately recall the experimental works by church interior painters from Delft, with their trompe-l'oeil curtains, or Pieter de Hooch's intricate interiors.

Restored Vermeer painting finally reveals hidden Cupid in background

(To view the article's image gallery, please visit the above link)

The Linux Foundation and edX's latest annual Open Source Jobs Report highlights an explosion of interest in cloud technologies that has bumped Linux off the skillset top spot for the first time.

"Much of the world is rebounding from the economically crippling lockdowns of COVID-19, and hiring people with the right skills is proving to be a challenge," Clyde Seepersad, senior veep and general manager for training and certification at the Linux Foundation, claimed in the report's introduction.

"Nowhere is this more true than in the technology sector. The talent gap that existed before the pandemic has worsened due to an acceleration of cloud-native adoption as remote work has gone mainstream. With talent shortages around the globe, training existing staff has become more important to meet the needs of migra­tions to the cloud and leverage open source technologies tied to those migrations."

The latest in the Linux Foundation's annual investigation series, the report surveyed hiring managers and open-source professionals between June and July with over 200 hiring managers – 47 per cent of whom were based in North America, giving the results a geographical slant – and 750 professionals offering their opinions on job market demand and trends.

Contain yourselves

By far the biggest area of growth in the report was Kubernetes, the open-source container orchestration system originally developed by Google and brought under the Linux Foundation in 2015 as a gift to the newly formed Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). According to the report's findings, demand for Kubernetes certifications rose a whopping 455 per cent from 2019 to 2021.

That growth likely caused something of an upset, having pushed cloud and cloud-related technologies to the top of the "hottest skillsets" list – bumping Linux development and administration to second place for the first time since the Linux Foundation began releasing its Open Source Jobs Reports.

On this front, the foundation appeared a little defensive. "While cloud-native technologies surpassed Linux for the first time in the history of the Jobs Report, it should be noted that it is essential to have at least basic Linux skills to deploy and maintain a robust cloud infrastructure adequately," the report warned. "It is also likely that fluency in Linux skills (as open source lingua franca) may be implied for many hiring managers when looking for cloud talent."

"The requirements I hear are that organisations want to flexibly deploy their applications without constraint; commercial, technological or otherwise," Martin James, sales veep at enterprise open-source database specialist Percona, told The Register. "Hence the combined growth of open source, the cloud, and Kubernetes is not a surprise.

"More companies now understand how these technologies can benefit them, and they need expert support from people and vendors who have the relevant skill sets. There are interesting projects in progress, such as the Data on Kubernetes community, which help to widen the talent pool, and empower people to work together to turn 'nice ideas' into practical approaches that anybody can use."

Finding those with the right skills is still challenging, however. 92 per cent of responding hiring managers said they had difficulty finding open-source talent, but only 88 per cent said they were willing to pay for certifications – and just 58 per cent said they were increasing training for existing employees, despite 92 per cent of employee respondents having requested more training.

Those figures, which suggest a divide between what companies need and what companies are willing to pay for, drove a clear conclusion in the report: a full two-thirds of developers need more training in order to do their jobs.

The findings also highlighted the impact of the pandemic, which saw in-person attendance at industry events and conferences knocked off employees' top priorities for the first time since the foundation began the report series. "COVID-19 has led to some permanent changes in open source workplaces," the report claimed, "and rightly so. In the war for talent, it is time to look closely at employee satisfaction and the impact of non-monetary factors in creating rewarding professional experiences.

"Regarding COVID-19's effect on workers, 30 per cent report that they experienced an increase in workload due to the pandemic. Other impacts include the 22 per cent who were forced at some point to reduce their hours, take unpaid leave, or lost their job (16 per cent of those who lost a job report they have not yet found a new one). Only 21 per cent stated that the pandemic did not affect their work."

A warning bell was sounded by the report on the topic of discrimination: 98 per cent of hiring managers claimed to proactively encourage diversity in hiring, up from 88 per cent the year before, yet 18 per cent of employees reported being discriminated against or made to feel unwelcome owing to personal characteristics – up from 11 per cent in 2020 and eight per cent in 2019.

"Reports of discriminatory activity or exclusion having more than doubled in three years could be related to increased awareness and willingness for individuals to speak out," the report suggested, "or it could be partly driven by a backlash against movements to advance equality in marginalised communities. To continue positive progress, the industry must take concrete steps to increase diversity and become more welcoming to all."

Despite this, the report's overall tone is upbeat. 97 per cent of responding hiring managers declared open-source talent acquisition a priority, while 50 per cent had increased their hiring this year over last. Oddly, while the overwhelming majority claimed to be focusing on open-source talent, only 44 per cent said they were after staff who have contributed to open-source projects.

"It is time for professionals to skill up by taking advantage of training courses and taking certification exams to prove their proficiencies," concluded the Linux Foundation and edX, both of whom offer training courses and certification exams designed to prove proficiencies. "The data in this year's report demonstrates that their careers depend on it more than ever.

"For enterprises, it means that they now need to be more responsive to training and certification requests from their staff – because competing firms are aggressive about making training, hiring, and retention a priority."

"The demand for open source skills demonstrated in the survey is no surprise and more proof that open source is essential across all of today's digitalised businesses," Amanda Brock, chief exec at not-for-profit open-source advocacy outfit OpenUK, told The Register.

"The need for people with experience of contributing back to open source projects is growing too as we see businesses follow the journey from user to contributor, which is particularly important when they want to have influence. It shows that contributing is becoming more important, which is a really significant element of the whole open source ethos.

"The UK is on the precipice of becoming a centre for open source that is globally unrivalled and just needs a few more steps in the skills and education aspects - from code to commercial to governance and security - for us to see this happen. Our Kubernetes community is a great example. Not only are we the 5th biggest global contributor to a critical project that makes the cloud work, but if you look across the Kubernetes and CNCF leadership a huge proportion are in the UK."

The full report is available to download now, while the raw data behind it has been published to data.world under the Community Data License Agreement – Permissive for those who want to dive a little deeper. ®

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[Also at]

An average annual fee at an English public institution amounts to approximately $12,330 when converting to USD using purchasing power parity, As well as England, the United States, Australia, Canada, Chile, Japan and South Korea all have tuition fees in excess of $4000. Countries in continental Europe like Spain, France and Germany all tended to have far lower fees by comparison, while Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland all have no fees at all.

England's tuition fees weren't always so high, however. Since the beginning of the 2000s, annual costs have increased by 700 percent.

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The companies were facing international outrage after pulling a Russian opposition voting app off their online marketplaces in response to authorities' escalating pressure, including arrest threats.

Google and Apple, whose operating systems run on 99 percent of the world's smartphones, have a stranglehold on the markets for the applications that allow users to do everything from watch movies to hail a ride.

"The app stores are the new frontier for censorship," Natalia Krapiva, tech legal counsel at rights group Access Now told AFP. "We're witnessing a new stage of assault on digital rights."

The companies face a growing pile of new legislation, legal trouble and regulators scrutiny over worries their dominance is a competition-killing monopoly.

Concerns recently had been about consumers' choice and app developers ability to avoid paying Apple an up to 30 percent cut on purchases made via its App Store.

But after an app advising opposition supporters on how to vote out Kremlin allies in Russia's parliamentary election was removed from the app stores of both Apple and Google, advocates warned of another threat.

"As long as Apple maintains a stranglehold over what software millions of people (use)... the App Store will continue to be a convenient chokepoint for government censorship and crackdowns on dissent," said Evan Greer, director of digital advocacy group Fight for the Future.

The digital world has been an incubator for opposition from the Arab Spring to Hong Kong's pro-democracy protests by giving people a way to communicate and organize movements rapidly.

Yet that same technology can be turned against people, as was demonstrated by the scandal around Pegasus, a hugely invasive spyware that can essentially turn a phone into a pocket listening device.

Limits of Big Tech

Allegations that the software has been used by governments worldwide to eavesdrop on human rights activists, business executives and politicians sparked a global uproar in July.

In the case of Russia, pressure has been building after Moscow accused the US tech giants of election interference and demanded they remove the app.

"This demonstrates the limits of Big Tech to resist crackdowns with regards to dissent, in Russia and elsewhere, during elections and outside them," said David Levine, an election integrity fellow at think tank Alliance for Securing Democracy.

Sources close to the decision to pull the opposition app said both companies faced threats of criminal charges or the jailing of staff and general "bullying" from authorities.

Levine noted this type of escalating pressure could become a "page in the playbook" for repressive governments.

The firms are for-profit, yet because of their global reach and key role in mass communication, can end up being called on to combat hate, lies and repression on their devices or platforms.

As a result, Big Tech can and will get entangled in these type of fights on delicate matters with the governments of places where they do business.

"Giant IT companies are going to have to think about how they operate in these markets, like how far they'll go in terms of complying and cutting off the freedom of people to see things," said Kathryn Stoner, a Stanford political science professor.

Especially for social media companies like Facebook, the role of information gatekeeper is one that the firms have played with widely varying outcomes.

The case in Russia, though, has resonated in particular because it touches on something deeply personal, which also has tremendous consequences.

"This is the government going into your house and saying you cannot talk about voting against us," Isabel Linzer, a Research analyst at NGO Freedom House, said.

"That is as much election interference as it would be to go and stuff a ballot box," she added.

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The committee roundly rejected approving boosters for everyone 16 and up.

FDA advisors green-light Pfizer boosters for people 65+ and at-risk groups

Software developers and IT workers can improve their sense of well-being and their perception of themselves if they partake in mindful breathing, a trio of boffins have found.

Birgit Penzenstadler, assistant professor of software engineering at Sweden's Chalmers University of Technology, Richard Torkar, professor of software engineering at Chalmers and University of Gothenburg, and Cristina Martinez Montes, a doctoral student at Chalmers, recently completed two small group studies of how tech types took to breathing exercises.

The trio describe the results of their research in a paper [PDF] titled, "Take a deep breath. Benefits of neuroplasticity practices for software developers and computer workers in a family of experiments."

Their goal was to "explore the use of neuroplasticity practices, more specifically, the use of a breathing practice, in terms of its benefits for software developers and computer workers with respect to their attention awareness, well-being, perceived productivity, and self-efficacy."

The study assumes – reasonably enough – that physical, mental, and emotional resilience matter in the context of work and that software developers and IT workers tend to push themselves, or get pushed by management, to the extent that their health suffers.

"Sleep deprivation is often worn as a badge of honor [among developers]," the authors explain, noting that the overall cost of sleep deprivation in the US has been estimated at $411bn annually. "In addition, the pandemic has taken a toll on well-being and productivity."

When people work from home, the boffins say, they tend to be less motivated, less productive, and less committed.

A recent study by researchers from Microsoft – perhaps not an entirely disinterested party when it comes to office and remote work policies – comes to a similar conclusion, that remote work hinders productivity and innovation.

The breathing paper cites a 2020 survey the authors oversaw that found physical activity was the most popular way for software developers to address stress. While acknowledging the value of physical exercise, the paper argues that not everyone can participate and that physical workouts may not adequately address mental well-being.

Various researchers have looked at how mental exercises can improve mental health. In 2019, for example, researchers from Stanford University and Santa Clara University described how mindfulness promotes more innovative thinking. While focused breathing may seem to data-driven types like airy mysticism, it's nonetheless mainstream enough that it's been incorporated into Apple Watch.

To see how breathwork affects software developers, Penzenstadler, Torkar, and Montes took 146 volunteers who spent at least 70 per cent of their time working at a screen through different iterations of a program called Rise 2 Flow. The regime, which not everyone completed to the same degree, consisted of focused breathing exercises – three rounds of seven minutes each with brief relaxation pauses in between, followed by a 20-min relaxation – and other interactions (conversations on Zoom, supplementary reading materials, periodic surveys, and so on).

And after the 12 week survey period, they concluded that deliberate breathing work was worthwhile.

'Resilience'

"The data indicates usefulness and effectiveness of an intervention for computer workers in terms of increasing well-being and resilience," the paper says. "Everyone needs a way to deliberately relax, unplug, and recover. Breathing practice is a simple way to do so, and the results call for establishing a larger body of work to make this common practice."

What the study didn't find was an increase in perceived productivity – those results were inconclusive. But Penzenstadler told The Register in an email that wasn't unexpected.

"We are not surprised that the results didn’t show a direct increase in perceived productivity as we only have their self-assessment but no tests," she said. "So we have to rely on their awareness, and any overall awareness increase also makes people more aware of when they are not paying attention, so the self-assessment could be more critical than at the beginning of the study.

"When people are less stressed and more joyful, they get more done as a side effect and make less errors (other research has shown that). In our exit interviews, there were mentions thereof, just the survey data didn’t show it significantly, so our hypothesis is still that it does over time increase productivity in a healthy sustainable way."

Asked how employers should see this research, Penzenstadler said, "Companies can take away that encouraging and facilitating programs like this is worthwhile because it has the potential to decrease sick days (e.g., stress-induced migraines, burnout symptoms). Secondly, it has the potential to increase employee retention (higher well-being, and a company that cares about it, is a good reason to stay). And a long-term employee who is feeling well and supported is more productive."

Penzenstadler is presently engaged in running a third round of this study, as detailed on the program website. Interested IT types can probably still sign up.

The data and code for the first two rounds of Rise 2 Flow have been released online for anyone interested in trying to replicate the results. ®

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The findings, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, suggest that the so-called Camel Site actually dates to between 7,000 and 8,000 years ago. As Arab News reports, this timeline would likely make the sculptures the world’s oldest surviving large-scale, three-dimensional animal reliefs. In contrast, Egypt’s Pyramids of Giza are 4,500 years old, while England’s Stonehenge was built about 5,000 years ago.

Researchers dated the carvings through a chemical analysis and an examination of tool marks found at the site, reports Daniel Bardsley for the National.

“They are absolutely stunning and, bearing in mind we see them now in a heavily eroded state with many panels fallen, the original site must’ve been absolutely mind blowing,” lead author Maria Guagnin, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, tells the National. “There were life-sized camels and equids two or three layers on top of each other.”

Ancient artists carved the images into three rocky spurs, notes Ewelina Lepionko for Albawaba. In addition to about a dozen camels, the artwork depicts two animals that may be donkeys, mules or horses.

The original estimate of the artworks’ age was based partly on the existence of other camel reliefs made in Jordan around that time. But radiocarbon dating, analysis of weathering patterns and other dating methods suggested a much older origin. Additionally, a stone mason found no signs of pottery or the use of metal tools at the site.

“Every day the Neolithic was more likely, until we realized it was absolutely a Neolithic site we were looking at,” Guagnin tells the National.

As Stephanie Pappas reports for Live Science, the camels’ carvers used tools made out of a stone called chert, which was brought in from at least nine miles away. They would have needed some type of scaffolding to reach the higher parts of the rocky surface. Carving each relief took between 10 and 15 days; the ambitious project was likely a communal effort.

Some of the camels depicted in the reliefs have bulging necklines and round bellies—typical features of the animals during mating season. This suggests that the site was tied to fertility or a specific time of year.

“Communities of hunters and herders tend to be very dispersed and mobile, and it’s important for them to meet at regular times during the year, to exchange information, spouses and so on,” Guagnin tells Haaretz’s Ariel David. “So whatever the symbolism of the sculptures, this may have been a place to bring the whole community together.”

Patterns of weathering on the sculptures show they were reengraved and reshaped over time.

“Neolithic communities repeatedly returned to the Camel Site, meaning its symbolism and function was maintained over many generations,” says Guagnin in a statement.

At the time of the statues’ creation, around the sixth millennium B.C.E., the Arabian Peninsula was filled with grassland and much wetter than it is now. The region’s inhabitants built thousands of stone monuments known as mustatils across tens of thousands of square miles. Guagnin says it’s unclear whether the same group that created the Camel Site also made the mustatils. Other two-dimensional engravings have been found in the area, but nothing on par with the Camel Site.

“Part of the difficulty in dating the site is that there are no parallels to it, so it was difficult to imagine what it was linked to,” Guagnin tells Haaretz. “… Quite a few Neolithic depictions of fauna are equally life-size, detailed and naturalistic but they are two-dimensional. This made us think that the Camel Site is part of this wider tradition but has a special place within that because it’s the only spot where we have it so concentrated and where we have high relief to the point that it looks like the animal is coming out of the rock.”

Guagnin adds that the camels shown in the images were probably wild. The earliest domestication of camels likely took place around 1200 B.C. Neolithic people in Arabia herded cattle, sheep and goats and probably hunted wild camels.

With erosion continuing to degrade the sculptures, the researchers say it’s important to learn as much about them as possible.

“Preservation of this site is now key, as is future research in the region to identify if other such sites may have existed,” says Guagnin in the statement.

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The people who happen to be in a city center at any given moment may seem like a random collection of individuals. But new research featuring a simple mathematical law shows that urban travel patterns worldwide are, in fact, remarkably predictable regardless of location—an insight that could enhance models of disease spread and help to optimize city planning.

Studying anonymized cell-phone data, researchers discovered what is known as an inverse square relation between the number of people in a given urban location and the distance they traveled to get there, as well as how frequently they made the trip. It may seem intuitive that people visit nearby locations frequently and distant ones less so, but the newly discovered relation puts the concept into specific numerical terms. It accurately predicts, for instance, that the number of people coming from two kilometers away five times per week will be the same as the number coming from five kilometers twice a week. The researchers' new visitation law, and a versatile model of individuals' movements within cities based on it, was reported in Nature.

“This is a super striking, robust result,” says Laura Alessandretti, a computational social scientist at the Technical University of Denmark, who was not involved in the study but co-wrote an accompanying commentary. “We tend to think that there are lots of contextual aspects that affect the way we move, such as the transportation system, the morphology of a given place, and socioeconomic aspects. This is true to some extent, but what this shows is that there are some robust laws that apply everywhere.”

The researchers analyzed data from about eight million people between 2006 and 2013 in six urban locations: Boston, Singapore, Lisbon and Porto in Portugal, Dakar in Senegal, and Abidjan in Ivory Coast. Previous analyses have used cell-phone data to study individuals' travel paths; this study focused instead on locations and examined how many people were visiting, from how far and how frequently. The researchers found that all the unique choices people make—from dropping kids at school to shopping or commuting—obey this inverse square law when considered in aggregate. “The result is very simple but quite startling,” says Geoffrey West, an urban scaling theorist at the Santa Fe Institute and one of the paper's senior authors.

One explanation for this strong statistical pattern is that traveling requires time and energy, and people have limited resources for it. “There is something really very fundamental at play here. Whether you live in Senegal or in Boston, you try to optimize your day,” says study lead author Markus Schläpfer of ETH Zurich's Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore. “At the core is the effort that people are willing to invest collectively to travel to certain locations.”

Understanding these patterns is important not only for planning the placement of new shopping centers or public transportation but also for modeling disease transmission within cities, says Kathleen Stewart, a geographer and mobility researcher at the University of Maryland who was not involved in the study.

Many researchers estimate travel with “gravity models,” which assume that movement between cities is proportional to their population sizes. But these models do not account for travel patterns within cities—information that is particularly critical in tackling disease transmission. Northeastern University epidemiologist Sam Scarpino, who was not involved in the study, says models based on this new finding might better track that flow. For example, New York City residents are more likely to make short, frequent trips within their own borough (such as Manhattan or the Bronx) and fewer trips to a distant borough.

“Those organizational patterns have really profound implications on how COVID will spread,” Scarpino says. In a smaller rural location, where many people regularly go to the same church or grocery store, the entire town will experience sharp peaks of infections as the virus sweeps through the community. But in a bigger city, the propagation takes longer, he explains, because mini epidemics can occur in each neighborhood somewhat separately.

Stewart adds: “The authors demonstrate that their visitation law—that takes into account both travel distance and frequency of visits in a way that other models do not—outperforms gravity models when it comes to predicting flows between locations.”

This article was originally published with the title "Math Transit" in Scientific American 325, 4, 16-17 (October 2021)

doi:10.1038/scientificamerican1021-16

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Puncture-proof tires have been an intriguing concept for many years. Tire maker, Michelin, has been working on it since 2005 and after more than a decade of work, it is now closer to reality. The company took its puncture-proof tires for a spin for the first time, on an electric vehicle, in line with the company's goals of being more sustainable in the future. 

More than three billion tires are produced annually around the world. Once beyond their lifetime, these tires usually end up in landfills. They are also at risk of catching fire and releasing toxic fumes into the atmosphere. Like with other things manmade, one way of making tires more eco-friendly is to make them out of naturally occurring material. The second is to reduce instances that cause wear and tear and render the tires useless. French tire manufacturer, Michelin, is using both these approaches to make its tires more 'green' in the future. 

Through its Vision Concept, the company wants to make tires that are airless, rechargeable, connected, and sustainable. The Unique Punctureproof TIre System (UPTIS) is the airless tire that, thanks, to its unique design, does not require air filling and, never gets punctured either. 

The company released a teaser video in 2017 to help garner excitement for the work. You can see how they look in the video below.  

According to its Concept note, UPTIS combines an aluminum wheel and has a flexible load-bearing structure which is made out of glass fiber reinforced plastic (GFRP). The company is confident that with this design, it can continue to deliver the performance of conventional Michelin tires.

The company recently took the Uptis out in public for the first time and even invited a limited number of people for the test drive.

"The truly distinctive structure of the MICHELIN Uptis prototype, or its ‘weirdness’ as we have often heard it called, really attracted the attention of many visitors and left a lasting impression on them," said Cyrille Roget, Michelin Group Technical and Scientific Communications Director. "It was an exceptional experience for us, and our greatest satisfaction came at the end of the demonstration when our passengers, who were admittedly a little wary at first, said they felt no difference compared with conventional tires." While we do not know the price range of these tires yet, the company said they were on track for tires to reach the market by 2024. 

During the initial phase, these tires will also contain recycled plastic waste; and over time, the company will replace 100 percent of the tire components with organic or recyclable materials. 

This might really be the first time that man has 'reinvented the wheel. 

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Why it matters: The paper is a rebuke of the Biden administration's push to open up booster shots for everyone.

What they're saying: "Even if boosting were eventually shown to decrease the medium-term risk of serious disease, current vaccine supplies could save more lives if used in previously unvaccinated populations than if used as boosters in vaccinated populations," the scientists wrote.

• They did say booster doses could be appropriate for immunocompromised people, and indeed that population can get a third dose of an mRNA vaccine.

The bottom line: Medical ethicists and scientists have not supported widespread booster shots, as the vaccines are still extremely effective in preventing severe COVID-19 and death, and considering a majority of the world still hasn't gotten one shot.

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“It was already clear to Breit and Wheeler that this would be almost impossible to implement in practice,” explains Zhangbu Xu of the Brookhaven National Laboratory. A direct conversion would require a laser that emits gamma-ray photons in a highly concentrated steel. However, research has not yet been able to develop such a laser.

Alternatively, Breit and Wheeler postulated a method in which accelerated heavy ions serve as a light source instead of a photon beam. Because strongly positively charged atomic nuclei generate strong electromagnetic fields around them at extremely high acceleration, their physical properties resemble those of photons under certain conditions. According to the theory of Breit and Wheeler, an ion is surrounded by a cloud of light particles as it moves through a particle accelerator. When two of these atomic nuclei move towards each other in an accelerator and almost collide, their photon clouds interact. Part of it is greatly accelerated and the high-energy light particles collide. According to the theory, pairs of electrons and positrons should arise in this process.

A team led by Zhangbu Xu from the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) has now experimentally tested the almost hundred-year-old theory using the STAR detector on the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). According to their publication in the Physical Review Letters, they collided gold nuclei accelerated to 99.99 percent of the speed of light. They examined the released decay products for pairs of electrons and positrons whose mass distribution, energy and quantum states corresponded to those of the Breit-Wheeler effect. In total, the physicists were able to find 6,085 electron-positron pairs with the appropriate features. In an additional experiment, the scientists also checked whether the photons generated during the collision had the characteristics of normal light particles, which was also confirmed.

“Our results provide clear evidence for the direct, one-step generation of matter-antimatter pairs from the collision of light – as described theoretically by Breit and Wheeler,” explains Daniel Brandenburg. It has therefore been proven that the direct conversion of light into matter is possible.

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A team at Brown University has developed a system that uses dozens of silicon microchips to record and transmit brain activity to a computer. Dubbed “neurograins,” the chips—each about the size of a grain of salt—are designed to be sprinkled across the brain’s surface or throughout its tissue to collect neural signals from more areas than currently possible with other brain implants.

 

“Each grain has enough micro-electronics stuffed into it so that, when embedded in neural tissue, it can listen to neuronal activity on the one hand, and then can also transmit it as a tiny little radio to the outside world,” says lead author Arto Nurmikko, a neuroengineer at Brown who led the development of the neurograins. The system, known as a brain-computer interface, is described in a paper published August 12 in Nature Electronics.

 

Alongside other Brown researchers, as well as collaborators from Baylor University, the University of California at San Diego, and Qualcomm, Nurmikko began working on the neurograins four years ago with initial funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. So far, the researchers have only tested the neurograins in rodents, but they hope their prototype will lay the groundwork for human studies. In addition to recording brain activity, the neurograins can also stimulate neurons with tiny electrical pulses, making them an intriguing avenue to explore for treating brain disorders like epilepsy and Parkinson’s or restoring brain function lost to injury.

 

The team implanted the system in a rat, performing a craniotomy to place 48 of the neurograins on the cerebral cortex—the outer layer of the brain—arranging the microchips to cover most of the motor and sensory areas. A thin, thumbprint-sized patch that attached to the scalp acted as the external communications hub, receiving signals from the neurograins like a miniature cell phone tower, processing them, and charging the chips wirelessly.

 

The researchers tested out the system while the animal was under anesthesia and found that the neurograins were able to record spontaneous cortical activity in the unconscious rat. However, the quality of the signals wasn’t as good as those acquired by commercial chips used in most brain-computer interface research. These interfaces have been in development since the 1970s, and in recent years have allowed a small number of paralyzed patients to control tablet devices, type on a computer at increasingly faster speeds just by thinking about it, or move a robotic limb or on-screen cursor.

 

For people with brain and spinal injuries, these systems could eventually restore communication and movement, allowing them to live more independently. But currently, they’re not all that practical. Most require clunky set-ups and can’t be used outside of a research lab. People outfitted with brain implants are also limited in the types of actions they can perform because of the relatively small number of neurons the implants can record from at once. The most common brain chip used, the Utah array, is a bed of 100 silicon needles, each with an electrode at the tip that sticks into the brain tissue. One of these arrays is about the size of Abraham Lincoln’s face on a US penny and can record activity from a few hundred surrounding neurons.

 

But many of the brain functions that researchers are interested in—like memory, language, and decision making—involve networks of neurons that are widely distributed throughout the brain. “To understand how these functions really work, you need to study them at the systems level,” says Chantel Prat, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Washington who is not involved in the neurograins project. Her work involves non-invasive brain-computer interfaces that are worn on the head rather than implanted.

 

The ability to record from many more neurons could enable much finer motor control and expand what’s currently possible with brain-controlled devices. Researchers could also use them in animals to learn how different brain regions speak to each other. “When it comes to how brains work, the whole really is more important than the sum of the parts,” she says.

 

Florian Solzbacher, co-founder and president of Blackrock Neurotech, the company that manufactures the Utah array, says a distributed neural implant system might not be necessary for many near-term uses, like enabling basic motor functions or the use of a computer. However, more futuristic applications, like restoring memory or cognition, would almost certainly require a more complicated set-up. “Obviously, the Holy Grail would be a technology that could record from as many neurons as possible throughout the entire brain, the surface and the depth,” he says. “Do you need that in its entire complexity right now? Probably not. But in terms of understanding the brain and looking at future applications, the more information we have, the better.”

 

Smaller sensors could also mean less damage to the brain, he continues. Current arrays, even though already tiny, can cause inflammation and scarring around the implant site. “Typically, the smaller you make something, the less likely it is to be detected by the immune system as a foreign object,” says Solzbacher, who wasn’t involved in the Brown study. When the body detects a foreign object like a splinter, it tries to either dissolve and destroy it, or encapsulate it with scar tissue.

 

But while smaller may be better, it isn’t necessarily foolproof, Solzbacher cautions. Even miniscule implants could trigger an immune response, so the neurograins will also need to be made of biocompatible materials. A major hurdle with developing brain implants has been trying to minimize harm while building a long-lasting implant, to avoid the risk of replacement surgeries. Current arrays last around six years, but many stop working much sooner because of scar tissue.

 

If neurograins are the answer, there's still the question of how to get them in the brain. In their rodent experiment, the Brown researchers removed a large portion of the rat’s skull, which, for obvious reasons, wouldn’t be ideal in humans. Current implanted arrays require drilling a hole into a patient’s head, but the Brown team wants to avoid invasive brain surgery entirely. To do that, they’re developing a technique to insert the neurograins involving thin needles that would be threaded into the skull with a special device. (Neuralink is pursuing a similar “sewing machine”-like robot for delivering its coin-shaped brain implant.)

 

The safety and longevity of the microchips will need to be tested in awake and freely-moving rodents, which the Brown team plans to do next. Then, they’ll move on to studies in monkeys. Ultimately, Nurmikko envisions that the rat set-up could be scaled up to 770 neurograins, covering the surface area of a human brain.

 

With so much neural data being collected by all these chips, decoding what all these signals mean will be a challenge. The Brown team wants to be able to record from thousands—and eventually, hundreds of thousands—of neurons. All those brain signals will need to be decoded and translated into commands to be relayed to the external devices that will carry out the user’s desired actions. That will require a much more sophisticated parsing of neural information than today’s simpler systems can provide.

 

In the meantime, Nurmikko’s team wants to see if they can make the neurograins even smaller, so that putting hundreds of them in the brain would cause minimal damage. That, Nurmikko says, is a microelectronics problem. “You’re doing this Honey, I Shrunk the Kids kind of thing,” he says. “But the chip comes back and it may not quite do what you want it to do and then you have to reiterate. That’s the blood, sweat, and tears part of this journey.”

‘Neurograins’ Could be the Next Brain-Computer Interfaces

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In the past I had often fervently wished that one day everyone would be passionate and excited about scientific research. I should have been more careful about what I had wished for. The crisis caused by the lethal COVID-19 pandemic and by the responses to the crisis have made billions of people worldwide acutely interested and overexcited about science. Decisions pronounced in the name of science have become arbitrators of life, death, and fundamental freedoms. Everything that mattered was affected by science, by scientists interpreting science, and by those who impose measures based on their interpretations of science in the context of political warfare.

One problem with this new mass engagement with science is that most people, including most people in the West, had never been seriously exposed to the fundamental norms of the scientific method. The Mertonian norms of communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism have unfortunately never been mainstream in education, media, or even in science museums and TV documentaries on scientific topics.

Before the pandemic, the sharing of data, protocols, and discoveries for free was limited, compromising the communalism on which the scientific method is based. It was already widely tolerated that science was not universal, but the realm of an ever-more hierarchical elite, a minority of experts. Gargantuan financial and other interests and conflicts thrived in the neighborhood of science—and the norm of disinterestedness was left forlorn.

As for organized skepticism, it did not sell very well within academic sanctuaries. Even the best peer-reviewed journals often presented results with bias and spin. Broader public and media dissemination of scientific discoveries was largely focused on what could be exaggerated about the research, rather than the rigor of its methods and the inherent uncertainty of the results.  

Nevertheless, despite the cynical realization that the methodological norms of science had been neglected (or perhaps because of this realization), voices struggling for more communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism had been multiplying among scientific circles prior to the pandemic. Reformers were often seen as holding some sort of a moral higher ground, despite being outnumbered in occupancy of powerful positions. Reproducibility crises in many scientific fields, ranging from biomedicine to psychology, caused soul-searching and efforts to enhance transparency, including the sharing of raw data, protocols, and code. Inequalities within the academy were increasingly recognized with calls to remedy them. Many were receptive to pleas for reform.

Opinion-based experts (while still dominant in influential committees, professional societies, major conferences, funding bodies, and other power nodes of the system) were often challenged by evidence-based criticism. There were efforts to make conflicts of interest more transparent and to minimize their impact, even if most science leaders remained conflicted, especially in medicine. A thriving community of scientists focused on rigorous methods, understanding biases, and minimizing their impact. The field of metaresearch, i.e., research on research, had become widely respected. One might therefore have hoped that the pandemic crisis could have fostered change. Indeed, change did happen—but perhaps mostly for the worst.

Lack of communalism during the pandemic fueled scandals and conspiracy theories, which were then treated as fact in the name of science by much of the popular press and on social media. The retraction of a highly visible hydroxychloroquine paper from the The Lancet was a startling example: A lack of sharing and openness allowed a top medical journal to publish an article in which 671 hospitals allegedly contributed data that did not exist, and no one noticed this outright fabrication before publication. The New England Journal of Medicine, another top medical journal, managed to publish a similar paper; many scientists continue to heavily cite it long after its retraction.

The hottest public scientific debate of the moment—whether the COVID-19 virus was the product of natural evolution or a laboratory accident—could have been settled easily with a minimal demonstration of communalism (“communism,” actually, in the original Merton vocabulary) from China: Opening the lab books of the Wuhan Institute of Virology would have alleviated concerns immediately. Without such openness about which experiments were done, lab leak theories remain tantalizingly credible.

Personally, I don’t want to consider the lab leak theory—a major blow to scientific investigation—as the dominant explanation yet. However, if full public data-sharing cannot happen even for a question relevant to the deaths of millions and the suffering of billions, what hope is there for scientific transparency and a sharing culture? Whatever the origins of the virus, the refusal to abide by formerly accepted norms has done its own enormous damage.

"By the end of 2020, only automobile engineering had no scientists publishing on COVID-19. By early 2021, the automobile engineers had their say, too."

The pandemic led seemingly overnight to a scary new form of scientific universalism. Everyone did COVID-19 science or commented on it. By August 2021, 330,000 scientific papers were published on COVID-19, involving roughly a million different authors. An analysis showed that scientists from every single one of the 174 disciplines that comprise what we know as science has published on COVID-19. By the end of 2020, only automobile engineering didn’t have scientists publishing on COVID-19. By early 2021, the automobile engineers had their say, too.

At first sight, this was an unprecedented mobilization of interdisciplinary talent. However, most of this work was of low quality, often wrong, and sometimes highly misleading. Many people without subject-matter technical expertise became experts overnight, emphatically saving the world. As these spurious experts multiplied, evidence-based approaches—like randomized trials and collection of more accurate, unbiased data—were frequently dismissed as inappropriate, too slow, and harmful. The disdain for reliable study designs was even celebrated.

Many amazing scientists have worked on COVID-19. I admire their work. Their contributions have taught us so much. My gratitude extends to the many extremely talented and well-trained young investigators who rejuvenate our aging scientific workforce. However, alongside thousands of solid scientists came freshly minted experts with questionable, irrelevant, or nonexistent credentials and questionable, irrelevant, or nonexistent data.

Social and mainstream media have helped to manufacture this new breed of experts. Anyone who was not an epidemiologist or health policy specialist could suddenly be cited as an epidemiologist or health policy specialist by reporters who often knew little about those fields but knew immediately which opinions were true. Conversely, some of the best epidemiologists and health policy specialists in America were smeared as clueless and dangerous by people who believed themselves fit to summarily arbitrate differences of scientific opinion without understanding the methodology or data at issue.

Disinterestedness suffered gravely. In the past, conflicted entities mostly tried to hide their agendas. During the pandemic, these same conflicted entities were raised to the status of heroes. For example, Big Pharma companies clearly produced useful drugs, vaccines, and other interventions that saved lives, though it was also known that profit was and is their main motive. Big Tobacco was known to kill many millions of people every year and to continuously mislead when promoting its old and new, equally harmful, products. Yet during the pandemic, requesting better evidence on effectiveness and adverse events was often considered anathema. This dismissive, authoritarian approach “in defense of science” may sadly have enhanced vaccine hesitancy and the anti-vax movement, wasting a unique opportunity that was created by the fantastic rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines. Even the tobacco industry upgraded its reputation: Philip Morris donated ventilators to propel a profile of corporate responsibility and saving lives, a tiny fraction of which were put at risk of death from COVID-19 because of background diseases caused by tobacco products.

Other potentially conflicted entities became the new societal regulators, rather than the ones being regulated. Big Tech companies, which gained trillions of dollars in cumulative market value from the virtual transformation of human life during lockdown, developed powerful censorship machineries that skewed the information available to users on their platforms. Consultants who made millions of dollars from corporate and government consultation were given prestigious positions, power, and public praise, while unconflicted scientists who worked pro bono but dared to question dominant narratives were smeared as being conflicted. Organized skepticism was seen as a threat to public health. There was a clash between two schools of thought, authoritarian public health versus science—and science lost.

Honest, continuous questioning and exploration of alternative paths are indispensable for good science. In the authoritarian (as opposed to participatory) version of public health, these activities were seen as treason and desertion. The dominant narrative became that “we are at war.” When at war, everyone has to follow orders. If a platoon is ordered to go right and some soldiers explore maneuvering to the left, they are shot as deserters. Scientific skepticism had to be shot, no questions asked. The orders were clear. 

Who gave these orders? Who decided that his or her opinion, expertise, and conflicts should be in charge? It was not a single person, not a crazy general or a despicable politician or a dictator, even if political interference in science did happen—massively so. It was all of us, a conglomerate that has no name and no face: a mesh and mess of half-cooked evidence; frenzied and partisan media promoting parachute journalism and pack coverage; the proliferation of pseudonymous and eponymous social media personas which led even serious scientists to become unrestrained, wild-beast avatars of themselves, spitting massive quantities of inanity and nonsense; poorly regulated industry and technology companies flexing their brain and marketing power; and common people afflicted by the protracted crisis. All swim in a mixture of some good intentions, some excellent thinking, and some splendid scientific successes, but also of conflicts, political polarization, fear, panic, hatred, divisiveness, fake news, censorship, inequalities, racism, and chronic and acute societal dysfunction.

Heated but healthy scientific debates are welcome. Serious critics are our greatest benefactors. John Tukey once said that the collective noun for a group of statisticians is a quarrel. This applies to other scientists, too. But “we are at war” led to a step beyond: This is a dirty war, one without dignity. Opponents were threatened, abused, and bullied by cancel culture campaigns in social media, hit stories in mainstream media, and bestsellers written by zealots. Statements were distorted, turned into straw men, and ridiculed. Wikipedia pages were vandalized. Reputations were systematically devastated and destroyed. Many brilliant scientists were abused and received threats during the pandemic, intended to make them and their families miserable.

Anonymous and pseudonymous abuse has a chilling effect; it is worse when the people doing the abusing are eponymous and respectable. The only viable responses to bigotry and hypocrisy are kindness, civility, empathy, and dignity. However, barring in-person communication, virtual living and social media in social isolation are poor conveyors of these virtues.

Politics had a deleterious influence on pandemic science. Anything any apolitical scientist said or wrote could be weaponized for political agendas. Tying public health interventions like masks and vaccines to a faction, political or otherwise, satisfies those devoted to that faction, but infuriates the opposing faction. This process undermines the wider adoption required for such interventions to be effective. Politics dressed up as public health not only injured science. It also shot down participatory public health where people are empowered, rather than obligated and humiliated.

A scientist cannot and should not try to change his or her data and inferences based on the current doctrine of political parties or the reading du jour of the social media thermometer. In an environment where traditional political divisions between left and right no longer seem to make much sense, data, sentences, and interpretations are taken out of context and weaponized. The same apolitical scientist could be attacked by left-wing commentators in one place and by alt-right commentators in another. Many excellent scientists have had to silence themselves in this chaos. Their self-censorship has been a major loss for scientific investigation and the public health effort. My heroes are the many well-intentioned scientists who were abused, smeared, and threatened during the pandemic. I respect all of them and suffer for what they went through, regardless of whether their scientific positions agreed or disagreed with mine. I suffer for and cherish even more those whose positions disagreed with mine.

There was absolutely no conspiracy or preplanning behind this hypercharged evolution. Simply, in times of crisis, the powerful thrive and the weak become more disadvantaged. Amid pandemic confusion, the powerful and the conflicted became more powerful and more conflicted, while millions of disadvantaged people have died and billions suffered.

I worry that science and its norms have shared the fate of the disadvantaged. It is a pity, because science can still help everyone. Science remains the best thing that can happen to humans, provided it can be both tolerant and tolerated.

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