"It looks like our first rocks reveal a potentially habitable sustained environment," said Ken Farley, project scientist for the mission, in a statement Friday. "It's a big deal that the water was there for a long time."

The six-wheeled robot collected its first sample, dubbed "Montdenier" on September 6, and its second, "Montagnac" from the same rock on September 8.

Both samples, slightly wider than a pencil in diameter and about six centimeters long, are now stored in sealed tubes in the rover's interior.

A first attempt at collecting a sample in early August failed after the rock proved too crumbly to withstand Perseverance's drill.

The rover has been operating in a region known as the Jezero Crater, just north of the equator and home to a lake 3.5 billion years ago, when conditions on Mars were much warmer and wetter than today.

The rock that provided the first samples was found to be basaltic in composition and likely the product of lava flows.

Volcanic rocks contain crystalline minerals that are helpful in radiometric dating.

This in turn could help scientists build up a picture of the area's geological history, such as when the crater formed, when the lake appeared and disappeared, and how climate changed over time.

"An interesting thing about these rocks as well is that they show signs for sustained interaction with groundwater," NASA geologist Katie Stack Morgan told a press conference.

The scientists already knew the crater was home to a lake, but couldn't rule out the possibility that it had been a "flash in the pan" with floodwaters filling up the crater for as little as 50 years.

Now they are more certain groundwater was present for much longer.

"If these rocks experienced water for long periods of time, there may be habitable niches within these rocks that could have supported ancient microbial life," added Stack Morgan.

The salt minerals in the rock cores may have trapped tiny bubbles of ancient Martian water.

"Salts are great minerals for preserving signs of ancient life here on Earth, and we expect the same may be true for rocks on Mars," added Stack Morgan.

NASA is hoping to return the samples to Earth for in depth lab analysis in a joint mission with the European Space Agency sometime in the 2030s.

Source

Singapore’s Home Team Science and Technology Agency (HTX) will be deploying two robots named “Xavier” that the agency says use cameras with a 360-degree field of vision and analytics software to detect “undesirable social behaviors” in real time. First reported by Business Insider, the robots are designed to detect activities such as public smoking, violation of pandemic restrictions (i.e., groups of more than five people), and illegally selling goods on the street. Other behaviors the agency said the robots can snitch on include the use of motorized vehicles or motorcycles on pedestrian walkways and “improperly parked bicycles.”

The Xavier robots roll around on a “patrol route pre-configured in advance by public officers,” though they can deviate as necessary to avoid slamming into pedestrians or other obstacles. The plan is for the two robots to relay reports of such activity to a central police hub as well as confront violators directly with warning messages, with the first three weeks of deployment starting on Sept. 5 in Toa Payoh Central.

“Once Xavier detects any of the above, it will trigger real-time alerts to the command and control centre, and display the appropriate message (depending on the scenario) to educate the public and deter such behaviours,” HTX wrote in a press release. If necessary, the agency added, officers on duty at the command center can “activate additional resources to respond to on-ground situations when necessary.”

The robots can also be remotely controlled by officers present in the control center, who can also activate a two-way intercom that would allow them to talk to members of the public directly.

“The deployment of ground robots will help to augment our surveillance and enforcement resources,” Lily Ling, the director of the Singapore Food Agency’s East Regional Office, said in the release. “For instance, the surveillance of illegal hawkers can be manpower intensive as officers need to be deployed at various areas across the island. The adoption of robotics technology can be used to enhance such operations, and reduce the need for our officers to do physical patrols.”

This isn’t Singapore’s first robot rodeo. In 2020, Singapore’s National Parks Board and GovTech agency deployed a four-legged Boston Dynamics robot, of the famous “Spot” model, to wander parks barking at folks about social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic. Singaporean authorities have also flown a fleet of dozens of drones over parks to give officers a “high vantage point” by which they could observe the number and density of visitors present.

Singapore has an infamously harsh legal code often considered one of the strictest in the world. It tried to control the spread of the novel coronavirus with far-reaching measures like mandatory quarantines for visitors, a Bluetooth contract tracing system, business shutdowns, and border restrictions, with the aforementioned Spot playing a small but highly visible role. The virus eventually wreaked havoc there regardless as more contagious variants emerged and this summer health authorities switched from a policy of eradication to control.

As of Sept. 7, according to CNN, the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine estimates show Singapore has had nearly 69,000 cases (although just 55 deaths). Singapore has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world but, as CNN reported, an outbreak of the very infectious Delta variant has stalled attempts to roll back pandemic restrictions and return more of a semblance of normalcy to daily life.

As of Sept. 7, according to CNN, the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine estimates show Singapore has had nearly 69,000 cases (although just 55 deaths). Singapore has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world but, as CNN reported, an outbreak of the very infectious Delta variant has stalled attempts to roll back pandemic restrictions and return more of a semblance of normalcy to daily life.

FULL ARTICLE: https://gizmodo.com/singapore-police-to-deploy-snitch-bots-that-search-for-1847629866

The rain pattered lightly on the harbour of the Belgian port city of Ghent when, on 21 June 2021, a team of professional divers slipped below the surface into the emerald murk. The Brazilian tanker, heavy with fruit juice bound for Australia, had already crossed the Atlantic Ocean, but its journey wasn’t halfway done as the divers felt their way along the barnacled serration of its hull. They were looking for the sea chest, a metallic inlet below the water line, through which the ship draws seawater to cool its engines. Tucked inside, they found what they were looking for: three long sacks, each wrapped in a thick black plastic bag and trussed with black and white striped nautical rope.

The sacks were heavy. Each one weighed as much as a sheep and, shaped like a body bag, could feasibly have contained one. As the Belgian police opened the first bag, a stack of crimson bricks slid out. Had this cargo reached Australia, where high demand and meagre supply has pushed the price of a kilo of cocaine to eight times its equivalent cost in North America, the haul would have been worth more than A$64m (£34m).

Smuggling tens of millions of dollars of class A drugs across the ocean requires total secrecy and a significant amount of international logistical coordination. But the police knew about the alleged plot thanks to intelligence gleaned from a device that had, since its launch in 2018, become something of a viral sensation in the global underworld.

Chin’s team had watched a torrent of information flow toward them, like a thousand wiretaps chirruping simultaneously

An0m, as it was called, looked like any off-the-shelf smartphone, a polished pebble of black glass and aluminium. The device had been modified to remove many of its core functions. An0m could not be bought in a shop or on a website. You had to first know a guy. Then you had to be prepared to pay the astronomical cost: $1,700 for the handset, with a $1,250 annual subscription, an astonishing price for a phone that was unable to make phone calls or browse the internet.

Almost 10,000 users around the world had agreed to pay, not for the phone so much as for a specific application installed on it. Opening the phone’s calculator allowed users to enter a sum that functioned as a kind of numeric open sesame to launch a secret messaging application. The people selling the phone claimed that An0m was the most secure messaging service in the world. Not only was every message encrypted so that it could not be read by a digital eavesdropper, it could be received only by another An0m phone user, forming a closed loop system entirely separate from the information speedways along which most text messages travel. Moreover, An0m could not be downloaded from any of the usual app stores. The only way to access it was to buy a phone with the software preinstalled.

Users’ confidence in An0m was, it seemed, bolstered by some novel functionality included on every device. In the past, phones marketed to hyper security-conscious users were sold with the option to remotely wipe the device’s data. This would enable, say, a smuggler to destroy evidence even after it had been collected. To counter the ploy, police investigators had started to use Faraday bags – containers lined with metal that would prevent a phone from sending and receiving a kill signal. The An0m phone came with an ingenious workaround: users could set an option to wipe the phone’s data if the device went offline for a specified amount of time. Users could also set especially sensitive messages to self-erase after opening, and could record and send voice memos in which the phone would automatically disguise the speaker’s voice.

Big Bang’s targets’ alleged crimes ranged from drug trafficking to attempted murder. What they had in common was their choice of texting app

An0m was marketed and sold not so much to the security conscious as the security paranoid; its embedded suite of anonymising digital tools went far beyond the requirements of the average user. According to Australian police, it was the ideal telecommunications channel to arrange the safe passage of A$64m of cocaine across the world. An0m was not, however, a secure phone app at all. Every single message sent on the app since its launch in 2018 – 19.37m of them – had been collected, and many of them read by the Australian federal police (AFP) who, together with the FBI, had conceived, built, marketed and sold the devices.

On 7 June 2021, more than 800 arrests were made around the world, all of people who had in some way fallen under suspicion thanks to a treacherous device that sent information into the hands of the AFP. In Belgium, two weeks later, the divers did not have to hunt for the sacks of cocaine for long; they already knew precisely where to look.

Operation Ironside (or Operation Trojan Shield, as it was known in North America and elsewhere) was the largest coordinated law enforcement effort in Australian history. Commander Richard Chin, head of transnational operations in the AFP, had taken to calling 7 June, the day when their work would be realised in a series of searches and arrests involving 4,000 Australian officers, “Big Bang”. If all went to plan, it would be a moment with the potential to reshape the criminal world.

Local police forces began to make arrests at 2pm. Chin, the son of immigrants from Brunei, whose mother had pleaded with him not to pursue such a dangerous vocation, is quietly spoken and assiduously private, a born watcher. During Big Bang, he paced his operations room in the AFP’s national headquarters in Canberra, feeling a complex blend of relief and apprehension. Relief because it had required enormous effort to keep Operation Ironside a secret from his wider colleagues. And apprehension because, after 18 months of planning, this was the moment of reckoning, the climax of an unprecedented scheme of imagination, daring and legal complexity, involving law-enforcement agencies from 16 countries. “Every intervention had required a careful assessment of tactical risk,” Chin recalls. Success would, he believed, not only remove violent criminals from the streets, but also help establish precedents for police working at the frontiers of modern technology. If the convoluted legal underpinnings of this mass surveillance operation were to collapse, criminals could gain an advantage that would take years to win back.

‘We positioned ourselves as a small, bespoke brand coming into the organised crime marketplace,’ says commander Richard Chin, centre, who led Operation Ironside in Australia. Illustration: Guardian Design/Getty/Australian Federal Police/Reuters

During the months leading up to Big Bang, Chin and his team had been able to watch this torrent of information flow toward them, like a thousand wiretaps chirruping simultaneously. The AFP claims it tracked only criminals on the platform (an assertion that, until every collected message has been read and assessed, cannot be confirmed with absolute certainty). Big Bang’s targets constituted a diverse array of underworld figures: Italian mobsters, stud-jacketed bikers, neighbourhood drug barons. Their alleged crimes ranged from drug trafficking to money laundering to attempted murder. What they had in common was their choice of texting app.

The scheme was seeded 10 years earlier, in Vancouver. There, in 2008, Vincent Ramos, a young entrepreneur who started out as a bathtub salesman before progressing to smartphones, founded Phantom Secure, a telecoms company that promised users absolute privacy. It was a prescient selling point. After years in which data has been endlessly mined, the idea that users of technology now want to avoid online surveillance is widespread in Silicon Valley; Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, recently pronounced: “The future is private.” In 2008, however, both the sentiment and the technology that enabled secure communication were niche concerns.

In contrast to An0m’s bespoke technology, Phantom Secure’s phones were off-the-shelf BlackBerries modified to remove the camera, microphone and GPS tracking software, and installed with a remote-wipe feature. Every message sent from one device to another was encrypted and routed through servers in Panama and Hong Kong. To build word-of-mouth interest in his new product, Ramos offered free devices to high-profile “influencers” – rappers and athletes for whom privacy was a primary concern. For paying customers, the seemingly basic functionality came at an exorbitant cost: according to court documents, a Phantom Secure phone and subscription could set you back as much as $2,000 for a six-month contract. It was a fair price to pay, Ramos assured prospective clients, for total discretion.

To launch a desirable encrypted phone, the AFP and FBI not only needed to think like a tech startup, they had to become a tech startup

On the company’s website, Phantom Secure phones were marketed to the “sophisticated executive”. While it was company policy not to collect the names of clients, Ramos soon became aware that his customers were not, in fact, legitimate businessmen, but criminals drawn by the promise of a means to communicate with one another beyond the reach of law enforcement. Ramos made no checks on his clientele. He did not believe it was his responsibility to moderate how his phones were being used. He was a mere humble salesman of aftermarket BlackBerries – albeit one who drove a Lamborghini, owned properties in Las Vegas and Canada, and had a net worth of $10m.

In 2015, the San Diego office of the FBI began investigating Owen Hanson, a musclebound former University of Southern California American football player who, after his real estate business collapsed during the 2007 economic crisis, had turned to drug-trafficking. Hanson was a Phantom Secure customer. An undercover FBI agent gained Hanson’s trust and, eventually, was given his own Phantom Secure device. Hanson idolised Hollywood gangsters (his username on the Phantom Secure app was “Don Corleone”), had a silver-plated AK-47 in his office stamped with the Louis Vuitton logo, and owned a restaurant with a backroom he referred to as the “wise-guy room”. He was not overly cautious about concealing his criminal undertakings in public, let alone on a device that promised ultimate privacy. In acquiring its first Phantom Secure phone, the FBI had gained access to the criminal equivalent of WhatsApp: a messaging service filled with accumulating piles of digital evidence.

Much of Hanson’s business was conducted in Australia, a country that had become popular with international organised crime gangs due to the high mark-up on illegal drugs. (“Australians are known to pay extremely high prices,” a spokesperson for the AFP says. Despite the Covid pandemic, in 2020 the AFP identified a 22% increase in the total weight seized of methamphetamine, cocaine, heroin and MDMA.) By the time of Hanson’s arrest, which took place in the car park of a Park Hyatt Golf Club in Carlsbad, California, in September 2015, he regularly shipped cocaine to Australia for $175,000 a kilogram. Two years later Hanson was imprisoned for 21 years and three months on charges of drug trafficking and racketeering. The logistics were planned on Phantom Secure phones, devices that had come to dominate the Australian criminal market, where high-level traffickers like Hanson demanded anyone with whom they did business also use a device.

An0m needed to be used and tested, then very slowly, like any other brand, it could take market share

The FBI now began a two-and-a-half-year joint venture with the AFP, known as Operation Safe Cracking, to infiltrate the wider Phantom Secure network, which was embedded in countries across the world. With the help of one of Phantom Secure’s distributors – an individual who had agreed to become a confidential human source, passing information to law enforcement – the FBI arrested Ramos in early March 2018. They offered him a deal: the possibility of leniency in sentencing if he agreed to place a backdoor in the Phantom Secure network to allow law enforcement to monitor criminal communications. Either because of a lack of technical knowhow, or fear for his safety, Ramos refused, and pleaded guilty to running a criminal enterprise, a charge for which he was sentenced to nine years in prison. Without an “in”, the FBI was left with no choice but to shut down the Phantom Secure servers, raiding dozens of offices and assuming control of more than 180 associated web domains.

The disappearance of such a well-embedded encrypted platform left a major gap in the market, a gap that presented law enforcement with an unprecedented opportunity. Agents reasoned: what if, rather than attempting to infiltrate an existing encrypted phone network, we built our own?

To launch a desirable encrypted phone product, the AFP and FBI not only needed to think like a tech startup, they effectively had to become a tech startup (it remains unclear which of the international agencies took the leading role in masterminding and developing the operation). The aim was to create word-of-mouth, albeit within a single, highly specific demographic. This required the marketing of exclusivity: a downplaying of public presence to create an aura of discretion and selectness. “We positioned ourselves as a small, bespoke brand coming into the organised crime marketplace,” says Chin. The aim was to assure prospective clients of the product’s “security, privacy and anonymity”.

The An0m application and the bespoke operating system on which it was run, called ArcaneOS, according to a Vice report (the AFP would not confirm this detail and the FBI declined to comment), was provided by a former distributor of the Phantom Secure phones, whom the FBI recruited in 2018 in exchange for the possibility of a reduced sentence. The confidential source was paid $180,000 by the FBI in salary and expenses, and built “a master key” that, the FBI explained in court documents, “surreptitiously attaches to each message and enables law enforcement to decrypt and store the message as it is transmitted”. Every message sent via An0m was effectively BCC’d to the police.

To gain the trust of criminal networks, the AFP introduced a pilot scheme: in October 2018, agents passed 50 An0m devices to three trusted distributors in Australia. The plan was that these distributors, believing An0m to be the next generation of Phantom Secure, would vouch for the device’s security and begin selling them to organised criminal gangs. “An0m needed to be used and tested, shown to have useful functionality, then very slowly, like any other brand, it could take market share by building a network of people who like using it,” says Chin.

The AFP began a grassroots marketing campaign, identifying so-called influencers – “well-known crime figures who wield significant power and influence over other criminal associates”, according to a US indictment – within criminal subcultures. They could raise the profile of the An0m devices, in much the same way that brands collaborate with popular figures on social networks to increase awareness of their products.

Decoded An0m messages led to 800 arrests around the world, and the seizure of stolen goods, cash, weapons and drugs worth millions of dollars Illustration: Guardian Design/Getty/AAP Image/Australian Federal Police

In Australia the AFP targeted two key individuals: “Mafia Man”, an individual with alleged links to Italian organised crime in Australia, whose endorsement of An0m, Chin says, “brought a lot of credibility”, and Hakan Ayik – now known as Hakan Reis – a 42-year-old member of the so-called Aussie Cartel, a gang responsible for smuggling an estimated $1.5bn of drugs into Australia every year.

Reis, cartoonishly musclebound and often photographed topless and flexing, had fled Australia in 2010 to avoid arrest, and became An0m’s first official user and influencer. His unwitting support of the AFP’s efforts directly resulted in the arrest and charge of many criminal associates, Chin says. AFP Supt Jared Taggart told the Australian Daily Telegraph: “It’s like a family tree – you could probably trace almost all devices back to him.” (Reis is currently a fugitive believed to be hiding in Turkey; the AFP has expressed “significant concerns for the safety and welfare of [his] wife and two children”.)

As soon as An0m devices were in the wild, the AFP began to receive and decipher messages sent via the app. “On a daily basis, we were receiving messages about drug distribution, drug importation into Australia and elsewhere,” says Chin. Some users felt so confident in its security that, in many cases, they dispensed with all euphemisms, naming specific drugs and weight measurements. “If they were talking about money, they’d describe the exact amounts. These were not coded conversations, they were black and white,” says the AFP’s assistant commissioner, Nigel Ryan.

(Not all communications on the platform were, seemingly, as explicit as Ryan suggests; lawyers for one defendant who is accused of conspiring to commit murder, assert that the case is “actually built on a very shaky foundation” and that “not a single message… or conversation” supports the case.)

An0m’s success in Australia was soon replicated overseas, with distributors in Spain, Turkey, the Netherlands, Finland, Mexico and Thailand, as well as, allegedly, at least one British citizen, James Flood, believed to be living in Spain. Soon there were as many An0m phone users in Germany, Spain and the Netherlands as there were in Australia. As An0m’s reach expanded to 12,000 devices in more than 90 countries, the operation’s net was forced to expand accordingly.

While Chin and his staff had unprecedented access to millions of messages, the operation quickly revealed the care and sophistication with which major criminal organisations run their communication policies. Gangs would compartmentalise activities using assorted brands of encrypted devices. Members involved in smuggling drugs into a port might use An0m devices, while those involved in the distribution of those drugs employed a rival service, such as Sky Global, EncroChat, or MPC. The idea was to protect separate parts of the operation if one group or set of devices became compromised.

The decoded messages presented the AFP with a pressing ethical dilemma: when to interfere to prevent a single planned crime and risk compromising the wider operation, and when to allow crimes to take place, preserving the integrity of the wider operation. Eventually, the AFP decided to intervene primarily in instances where there was a “serious chance someone might get killed”, Chin says. During the 18 months leading up to 7 June, the agency acted on 21 such threats to life – in one, the police intervened directly to prevent an imminent alleged murder plot from taking place.

Such actions were used sparingly. Whenever authorities instigated raids or arrests based solely on intelligence harvested from An0m, there was a risk that the pattern of interventions would give away the fact that the phones were compromised.

So far, 289 alleged offenders have been charged, and A$49m in cash, 4,788kg of drugs and 138 weapons seized in Australia alone

In March 2021, An0m’s popularity exploded after the dismantling by Belgian police of Sky Global, a rival service. An0m’s active user base tripled.

The surge in activity caused a drastic increase in the amount of information Chin and his team had to parse, increasing the potential threats to life to unmanageable proportions for the AFP. The An0m scheme had become untenably successful. Moreover, the FBI’s wiretap authorities related to the case were due to expire in June. The date for Big Bang was set.

To minimise the risk of exposure, few individuals at the agency had been told about Operation Ironside (during the takedown of Sky Global, several police officers were charged with working with organised criminal gangs on the service). “The vast majority of the AFP wouldn’t have known the operation was occurring,” says Chin. When, a week before Big Bang, wider personnel at the AFP were informed of what the team had been working on, there was widespread shock. “I was amazed at the scale,” one police officer involved in raids in Sydney tells me.

While the majority of raids took place on 7 June, police activity leading up to that day led some users to suspect their phones might be compromised. Some listed their devices in local classified pages. Most, however, continued to send messages unwittingly. As a result of Operation Ironside, as of 25 July, 693 search warrants have been issued, 289 alleged offenders charged, and A$49m in cash, 4,788kg of drugs and 138 firearms and weapons seized in Australia alone. Six illegal drug labs have been dismantled.

As mainstream phone providers and app makers from the Facebook-owned WhatsApp to Signal have increasingly touted end-to-end encryption as a key selling point, police everywhere have pushed for the implementation of backdoors that allow them to access messages to investigate alleged crimes. A legal case between the FBI and Apple, whereby the former demanded the company create a tool that would allow it to access messages on an iPhone 5C to use in its case against the San Bernardino shooters, became a touchpoint in a debate over civil liberties in a digital world. The An0m network represented a creative sidestep: why debate tech companies on privacy issues through costly legal battles if you can simply trick criminals into using your own monitored network?

Still, the organisational difficulties of such an ambitious and far-reaching surveillance operation were matched by the legal complexities involved in bringing together forces from different countries, each subject to different laws. It was not by chance that the FBI chose to partner with the AFP and trial An0m in Australia. There, since 2018, the Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Tola) has allowed government agencies to compel telecommunications providers to allow authorities to intercept criminal messages – powers that are not yet available to police elsewhere in the world.

Tola did not allow the AFP to share the millions of decrypted messages it was gathering with overseas agencies. The FBI had the necessary keys to decrypt the messages, but not the messages themselves. Working with San Diego lawyers, the FBI devised an ingenious, if arguably questionable, scheme. A third, currently unidentified, country apparently governed by laws that provided authority to accept the data, agreed to take the AFP’s massive cache of messages.

The fact that US law wasn’t suitable for such an operation may be more a criticism of US law than of the operation

Without the encryption keys, this was no more than a digital mass of unreadable noise. But the third country then agreed to share the cache with the FBI under a mutual legal assistance treaty, in exchange for the encryption keys. Once the exchange took place, both parties could read the messages. (The FBI was careful to avoid the surveillance of US citizens via the ruse: these messages were automatically excluded from the cache sent to the FBI. The AFP read these messages and, if they contained a credible threat to life on US soil, informed the FBI accordingly.)

Critics may argue that the FBI used the AFP and the “third” country to circumvent the rules – a contravention of the spirit of the law, if not the letter. “That’s a fair objection,” says Stewart Baker, an expert in US privacy law, former general counsel of the National Security Agency and assistant secretary for the United States Department of Homeland Security, “though it cuts both ways. The fact that US law wasn’t suitable for such an operation may be more a criticism of US law than of the operation.”

In the wake of the recent Pegasus scandal, where spyware software designed to catch criminals and terrorists was allegedly used by governments to monitor journalists and dissidents, could the operation raise concerns for those who might want to use An0m-like secure communications networks for legitimate users? “I doubt it,” says Baker, “though I recognise that journalists always think the story should be about them.” He believes the governments involved deployed a careful vetting procedure that made it unlikely that journalists and other non-criminals would be able to use An0m. But there is nothing to prevent an authoritarian, oppressive regime from conning critics and dissidents into using a similar bogus service with the promise of privacy.

Now that the workings have been revealed, An0m is a trick that could surely never be repeated in the world of organised crime. The revelations will push criminals away from technology, even if it makes their work more laborious and slow-moving. Besides, the AFP estimates that messages harvested via An0m represent only a fraction of criminal communications sent in Australia during the 18 months An0m was on the market.

“It is true that the groups will adapt accordingly,” says Chin. “I guess all I can say is that we have skills and capabilities to adapt, too.”

Source

Economics Prize

Citation: Pavlo Blavatskyy, "for discovering that the obesity of a country's politicians may be a good indicator of that country's corruption."

In the popular imagination, corruption and politics often go together like chocolate and peanut butter, only with far less desirable outcomes. According to Blavatskyy, a researcher with the Montpellier Business School in France, prior studies have shown that political corruption (like bribery and extortion) can lower a country's economic growth, increase costs for road construction, deter foreign investment, and increase public debt, among other adverse effects. But measures used to determine how corrupt a given country's political leaders might be tend to be highly subjective. In this paper, Blavatskyy proposes an alternative, more quantifiable methodology for assessing corruption: the body mass index (BMI) of political leaders.

Since medical records are generally not obtainable (if they are kept at all) for political leaders, Blavatskyy decided to test whether computer vision/machine learning could determine a person's BMI using facial recognition. He selected 299 sample images of the faces of political leaders from 15 post-Soviet states, "because corruption is perceived to be a significant problem in the region." Those samples were then subjected to a computer vision algorithm to obtain estimations of BMI for each politician. (Let's leave aside for the moment that BMI is a highly imperfect means of determining a person's body composition, despite its prevalence in the medical profession.)

He found that most of the politicians in the data set had quite high BMIs: 96 were obese (BMI between 35 and 40), while 13 were severely obese (BMI greater than 40). Only 10 boasted a BMI within the normal range, and none was underweight. Furthermore, when Blavatskyy compared his data with measures of corruption in those 15 states, he found a high correlation between the two. For instance, the Baltic countries (Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia) and Georgia are deemed least corrupt, and their political leaders have the lowest median BMI. The correlation wasn't perfect, but Blavatskyy still concluded that this could be a viable method for assessing political corruption. However, he was careful to note that these results "do not necessarily imply that individual obese politicians are more corrupt than non-obese politicians."

Medicine Prize

Citation: Olcay Cem Bulut, Dare Oladokun, Burkard Lippert, and Ralph Hohenberger, "for demonstrating that sexual orgasms can be as effective as decongestant medicines at improving nasal breathing."

Rare is the scientific paper that opens with an anecdote about the time Sigmund Freud let a pal perform experimental nasal surgery on him, but this is that paper. Chances are that you, like me, were unaware that, back in 1897, a German otolaryngologist named Wilhelm Fliess—a close friend and confidant of Freud—came up with a theory of "reflex nasal neurosis," positing that there was a physiological connection between the nose and the genitalia in humans, in the form of "genital spots located on the nasal turbinate." There was never any scientific validity to Fliess' theory, but that didn't stop Freud from referring a patient, whom he had diagnosed with the condition, for surgery. Yes, it ended badly, with "recurrent nasal bleeding and a disfigured nose," per the authors.

Nonetheless, the authors of the recent study wondered if perhaps there might be something to Fliess' theory over a century later. Certainly not genital spots in the nose—that's long been debunked—but perhaps sex could help unclog a stuffed nose. After all, studies have shown that physical exercise and hormonal changes can open up nasal airways. Why not sex? It's a kind of physical exercise.

Eighteen heterosexual couples (all health care workers or partners of health care workers) participated in this study, with measurements of nasal resistance and flow taken before sex to establish a baseline, right after climaxing, 30 minutes after orgasm, an hour after orgasm, and three hours after climaxing. The experiment was repeated the next day, with participants administering a nasal decongestion spray before having sex. (In a nod to gender equity, "the data were only obtained if both individuals [in a couple] experienced sexual orgasm.")

Bulut et al. found that sex could indeed improve nasal congestion as effectively as nasal decongestant for up to 60 minutes, returning to baseline levels within three hours. Granted, a good 12-hour nasal spray would last much longer, but it's less fun. And some people might experience adverse effects from nasal spray, so having a natural substitution method for congestion would be helpful. The authors hope that there will be further studies to investigate whether masturbation has a similar effect for singletons.

Peace Prize

Citation: Ethan Beseris, Steven Naleway, and David Carrier, "for testing the hypothesis that humans evolved beards to protect themselves from punches to the face."

Having a thick, full beard has been perceived as highly masculine in many cultures throughout the ages. But Beseris et al. thought there might be more to it than cultural preferences. Perhaps, they reasoned, human beards can provide protection in a fight. After all, the mandible (typically covered by a beard) is the most commonly fractured bone during a fight, and this may have been a serious injury in eras lacking modern surgical treatments. The researchers decided to test the hypothesis that thick facial hair protects the face from blunt trauma resulting from strikes during a fight.

Since it wasn't practical to take fully bearded skin samples from human cadavers, the team used skin samples from domestic sheep. Sheep fleece isn't a perfect match for human hair, but it's reasonably close. The samples were placed over a bone analog made of a fiber epoxy composite. One-third of the samples were furred, one-third were sheared, and one-third were plucked, and all were subjected to blunt force via an anvil dropped from a specified height.

The researchers found that the furred samples absorbed almost 30 percent more energy than the sheared and plucked samples, indicating "that hair is indeed capable of significantly reducing the force of impact from a blunt strike and absorbing energy, thereby reducing the incidence of failure," the authors wrote in their paper. Assuming the same is true of human facial hair, "this may explain why facial hair is associated with high masculinity, social dominance, and behavioral aggressiveness, as it may function as a true indicator of invulnerability to facial injury."

Physics Prize

Citation: Alessandro Corbetta, Jasper Meeusen, Chung-min Lee, Roberto Benzi, and Federico Toschi, "for conducting experiments to learn why pedestrians do not constantly collide with other pedestrians."

Pedestrian traffic is a fascinating case study in dynamic collective behavior, and hence it holds much interest for physicists. This paper explores how human walkers continuously adjust the path of their trajectory as they encounter oncoming pedestrian traffic in order to avoid collisions and maintain a comfortable personal space. "Not only is this scientific topic fascinating because of its connections with the physics of emerging complexity, pattern formation, and active matter, but it is also extremely relevant for its applications for the design, safety, and performance of civil facilities," the authors wrote.

Physicists typically model such systems as interacting matter particles, with social forces acting on people in similar ways to physical forces. But modeling such a complex system is difficult, in part because of a dearth of high-quality experimental data. So Corbetta et al. set up a six-month pedestrian-tracking experiment at three train stations in Eindhoven, Netherlands, and collected data from October 2014 to March 2015 with the help of four overhead Microsoft Kinect sensors. They collected over 100,000 pedestrian trajectories each day, amounting to about 5 million total, and used that data to build a better model for pedestrian interactions best described as "binary collision avoidance" (two people trying not to bump into each other). The authors believe their approach can be extended to more complex and denser crowd interactions.

Kinetics Prize

Citation: Hisashi Murakami, Claudio Feliciani, Yuta Nishiyama, and Katsuhiro Nishinari, "for conducting experiments to learn why pedestrians do sometimes collide with other pedestrians."

Murakami et al. decided to conduct an experiment to study the self-organized patterns that emerge in human crowds, like spontaneous lane formation, which provide a functional benefit to the collective system. The team hypothesized that, despite the prevalence of the aforementioned interacting-particles model in such research, it can't explain certain empirical observations. For instance, prior studies have found that interactions between pedestrians are influenced not by the current positions of their neighbors (distance-dependent physical force) but by anticipating their neighbors' future positions. In other words, "pedestrians in a crowd are not just passively repelled by other pedestrians, but actively find a passage through a crowd by anticipating and negotiating with neighbors to avoid collisions in advance," the authors wrote.

The researchers recruited 54 male university students and had them walk repeatedly along a straight corridor, with a waiting area on either end. They divided the participants into two groups walking in different directions, after assuming randomly selected starting positions. The twist: some of the participants were "distracted walkers," instructed to peruse their mobile phones while strolling down the corridor (the authors note that distracted walking is a major cause of pedestrian accidents). Their movements were tracked via video recordings.

The team found that the addition of distracted walkers into the mix delayed pattern formation in the crowd and led to more collisions between pedestrians, regardless of whether they were looking at their phones or not. "These results imply that avoidance maneuvers are normally a cooperative process and that mutual anticipation between pedestrians facilitates efficient pattern formation," the authors concluded. "Our findings may influence various fields, including traffic management, decision-making research, and swarm dynamics."

Entomology Prize

Citation: John Mulrennan Jr., Roger Grothaus, Charles Hammond, and Jay Lamdin, "for their research study 'A New Method of Cockroach Control on Submarines.'"

Submarines constitute a closed system when operating underwater; they recycle their air via purification, for instance. That makes controlling cockroach populations aboard subs a unique challenge, since it's impossible to fumigate with the usual insecticides without the toxic vapors lingering in the air. According to Mulrennan et al., both diesel and nuclear submarines employ carboxide fumigation for cockroach control (or at least it was standard practice in 1971, when this study was published.) But there weren't any uniform regulations.

To explore alternatives, the researchers treated eight submarines with a commercially prepared aerosol called dichlorvos. They also made sure all cabinets, drawers, and void spaces were opened and all ventilation systems turned off. After two hours, all the vessels were ventilated for an hour before crew members were allowed to reboard. Mulrennan et al. counted all the dead cockroaches right after ventilation to determine an initial kill count, and after 24 hours, any remaining roaches were flushed out. They also took air samples inside all the submarines to determine the concentration of dichlorvos before and after ventilation.

The results: dichlorvos proved to be 97 to 100 percent effective in controlling cockroaches on the vessels after 24 hours, and the air concentration of the chemical dissipated rapidly to safe levels within one to four hours. The treatment had no effect on any cockroach eggs, however, so the authors recommended re-treating submarines after two weeks (by which time any lingering eggs would have hatched). It's worth noting that science has progressed significantly since 1971. The European Union banned the use of dichlorvos in 1998, and the US EPA has restricted its use since 1995 because of concerns of lingering toxic effects—such as a 2010 study showing an increased risk of ADHD in children.

Listing image by Rick Friedman/Corbis via Getty Images

Sex can relieve nasal congestion, and other work honored by 2021 Ig Nobels

Leiden University scientist Carel Ten Cate said that what was interesting about the vocal expression of the waterfowl, nicknamed "Ripper", was not so much the message, but that he could imitate humans at all.

"It's definitely based on the human voice, even though the pronunciation is a bit odd - which might be the Australian accent, I don't know," said Ten Cate, who published his findings in the Netherlands' Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society biological research journal.

He said he had at first wondered whether the recordings, made in the 1980s, could be a hoax, but they were made by living ornithologist Peter Fullagar, who co-authored the paper. The recordings had been kept in a sound archive and referenced occasionally until Ten Cate rediscovered them in the course of his research on vocal learning in birds.

Ten Cate said Ripper had a bit more in his repertoire - he could also make a noise like the sound of a door closing and its latch clicking.

Some species of animals, and notably birds such as parrots and songbirds, are capable of mimicking human speech. But the phenomenon is rare - if somewhat more common in animals raised by humans.

"To find a species quite outside these groups...in a duck, that's quite extraordinary. So it's an independent evolutionary occurrence of the ability for vocal learning - that's very special," Ten Cate said. (Reporting by Toby Sterling Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Source

Led by Professor Daniel Tenen and Dr. Henry Yang, the scientists devised ModTect—a new computational software that can identify RNA modifications using pre-existing sequencing data from clinical cohort studies. With ModTect, the team carried out their own novel pan-cancer study covering 33 different cancer types. They found associations between these RNA modifications and the different survival outcomes of cancer patients.

"This work is one of few studies demonstrating the association of mRNA modification with cancer development. We show that the epitranscriptome was dysregulated in patients across multiple cancer types and was additionally associated with cancer progression and survival outcomes," explained Dr. Henry Yang, Research Associate Professor from CSI Singapore.

"In the past decade, the ability to sequence the Human Genome has transformed the study of normal processes and diseases such as cancer. We anticipate that studies like this one, eventually leading to complete sequencing of RNA and detecting modifications directly in RNA, will also have a major impact on the characterisation of disease and lead to novel therapeutic approaches," commented Prof Tenen, Senior Principal Investigator from CSI Singapore.

The team's breakthrough was published in Science Advances on 4 August 2021.

What are RNA modifications?

While most people are familiar with DNA, RNA plays just as much of a vital role in the human body's cellular functions. Unlike DNA, which has the double-helix structure that most people are familiar with, RNA is a family of single-stranded molecules that perform various essential biological roles.

For example, messenger RNA (mRNA) conveys genetic information that directs the production of different proteins. Imagine DNA as an expansive library filled with books that carry instructions on how to make different proteins. Each letter in the sequences of words that make up the books' contents are called nucleotides, which are small molecules that are used to store genetic information. To make sure these instructions are followed, mRNA makes copies of the books and carries them from a cell's nucleus, where DNA is stored, to the ribosomes. These ribosomes are the "factories" where proteins are synthesized. Without RNA, the valuable genetic instructions stored in our cells would never be used.

Additional types of RNA perform other important functions. Some help catalyze biochemical reactions, just like enzymes, while others regulate gene expression.

Small chemical modifications to RNA can sometimes occur and alter the function and stability of the molecules. The study of these modifications and their effects is called "epitranscriptomics." Research in the past has suggested a link between the development of diseases like Alzheimer's disease and cancer with certain RNA modifications. However, despite multiple attempts to study these associations in deeper detail, the study of epitranscriptomes has proven to be difficult until this breakthrough by scientists from CSI Singapore.

In large patient cohorts, collecting and processing patient samples is challenging. Detecting RNA modifications often involves technically complex processes, such as treating the samples with chemicals that are difficult to access. These techniques often also require the use of large quantities of sample that are hard to obtain for rarer conditions. Because of this, scientists have been limited in their capacity to establish relationships between specific RNA modifications and various human diseases.

Software makes epitranscriptomics easier

The software that the CSI Singapore team created uses RNA sequences available from other large clinical cohort studies. To detect modifications in these RNA sequences, ModTect looks for mismatch signals and deletion signals. Mismatch signals arise when the experimental enzymes scientists use to turn RNA back into DNA incorporates random nucleotides during sequencing. Deletion signals, on the other hand, are when the enzymes sometimes skip a portion of the sequence. Together, these signals are referred to as "misincorporation signals."

Unlike other models, ModTect does not require a database of misincorporation signal profiles corresponding to different types of RNA modifications to identify or classify them. ModTect can even identify new signal profiles that drastically differ from what has been previously recorded.

By applying the software to around 11,000 cancer patient RNA-sequencing datasets, the CSI Singapore team was able to embark on a novel study that investigated the associations between RNA modifications and clinical outcomes in patients. ModTect was able to utilize these large datasets and process them with robust statistical filtering. It unveiled that some types of epitranscriptome were associated with cancer progression and survival outcomes in patients. This finding highlighted the potential use of RNA modifications as biomarkers—molecules that can be used to test for diseases.

Unraveling the mystery of sequence differences that escape detection

As explored before, the transmission of genetic information from DNA in a cell's nucleus to RNA molecules that carry it to a cell's ribosomes is a critical process. However, this transmission process is not perfect and leads to differences in RNA-DNA sequences. The sites of these mismatches have been widely documented. However, it is unclear whether these observations are caused by modifications in mRNA and why these sites have escaped detection by Sanger sequencing (one of the most popular methods of DNA sequencing).

The group at CSI Singapore uncovered a potential explanation as to why these RNA modification signals have eluded detection over the years. They explained how some epitranscriptomes impede the use of standard reverse transcriptase (RT), the enzyme that is used to convert RNA into DNA. This enzyme is used by scientists in genome sequencing and its use is one of the most critical steps for experimental success. Hence, RNAs that had these impeding modifications were under-represented in Sanger sequencing techniques.

To combat this, the team used newly developed RT enzymes that have been known for their ability to bypass the effects of these modification sites. This allowed them to observe epitranscriptomes that were originally undetectable with Sanger sequencing.

The discipline of epitranscriptomics is still an emerging and rapidly developing field with around 170 RNA modifications being detected so far. By harnessing ModTect, Prof Tenen and his team were able to provide novel insights into the relationships between human diseases—like cancer—and such RNA modifications. The software will be publicly available on Github for other scientists to use.

The team is hopeful that their contribution will help further research that establishes any potential causal or mechanistic relationships between RNA modifications and tumor formation.

Source

This an example of heliotropism, which literally means moving in relation to the sun. We can see it most clearly as spring arrives and various species burst into flower—you might even get the feeling that some flowers are watching you as they move.

Many of us probably first got to know of heliotropism at home, kindergarten or primary school by watching the enormous yellow and black flowering heads of aptly name sunflowers, which moved as they grew.

These flowers track the course of the sun spectacularly on warm and sunny, spring or summer days. Sometimes they move through an arc of almost 180⁰ from morning to evening.

So with the return of sunny days and flowers in full bloom this season, let's look at why this phenomenon is so interesting.

The mechanics of tracking the sun

A number flowering species display heliotropism, including alpine buttercups, arctic poppies, alfalfa, soybean and many of the daisy-type species.

So why do they do it?

Flowers are really in the advertising game and will do anything they can to attract a suitable pollinator, as effectively and as efficiently as they can. There are several possible reasons why tracking the sun might have evolved to achieve more successful pollination.

Fly traps have somewhat similar mechanics to heliotropism. Credit: Shutterstock

By tracking the sun, flowers absorb more solar radiation and so remain warmer. The warmer temperature suits or even rewards insect pollinators that are more active when they have a higher body temperature.

Optimum flower warmth may also boost pollen development and germination, leading to a higher fertilization rate and more seeds.

So, the flowers are clearly moving. But how?

For many heliotropic flowering species, there's a special layer of cells called the pulvinus just under the flower heads. These cells pump water across their cell membranes in a controlled way, so that cells can be fully pumped up like a balloon or become empty and flaccid. Changes in these cells allow the flower head to move.

When potassium from neighboring plant cells is moved into the cells of the pulvinus, water follows and the cells inflate. When they move potassium out of the cells, they become flaccid.

These potassium pumps are involved in many other aspects of plant movement, too. This includes the opening and closing of stomata (tiny regulated leaf apertures), the rapid movement of mimosa leaves, or the closing of a fly trap.

Credit: Aaron Burden/Unsplash

But sunflowers dance differently

In 2016, scientists discovered that the pin-up example of heliotropism—the sunflower—had a different way of moving.

They found sunflower movement is due to significantly different growth rates on opposite sides of the flowering stem.

On the east-facing side, the cells grow and elongate quickly during the day, which slowly pushes the flower to face west as the daylight hours go by—following the sun. At night the west-side cells grow and elongate more rapidly, which pushes the flower back toward the east over night.

Everything is then set for the whole process to begin again at dawn next day, which is repeated daily until the flower stops growing and movement ceases.

While many people are aware of heliotropism in flowers, heliotropic movement of leaves is less commonly noticed or known. Plants with heliotropic flowers don't necessarily have heliotropic leaves, and vice versa.

Heliotropism evolves in response to highly specific environmental conditions, and factors affecting flowers can be different from those impacting leaves.

The leaves of Queensland box, Lophostemon confertus, which track the sun. Credit: Krzysztof Ziarnek, Kenraiz/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

For example, flowers are all about pollination and seed production. For leaves, it's for maximizing photosynthesis, avoiding over-heating on a hot day or even reducing water loss in harsh and arid conditions.

Some species, such as the Queensland box, arrange their leaves so they're somewhat horizontal in the morning, capturing the full value of the available sunlight. But there are also instances where leaves align vertically to the sun in the middle of the day to minimize the risks of heat damage.

Plants are dynamic

It's easy to think of plants as static organisms. But of course, they are forever changing, responding to their environments and growing. They are dynamic in their own way, and we tend to assume that when they do change, it will be at a very slow and steady pace.

Heliotropism shows us this is not necessarily the case. Plants changing daily can be a little unsettling in that we sense a change but may not be aware of what is causing our unease.

As for me, I still keep a watchful eye on those Queensland boxes.

Source

The researchers compared data on shifting weather patterns between AD750 and 1750 with examples of preserved roofs built in China during the millennium. They found that during periods with heavier snowfall, roofs were built with steeper slopes, while warmer periods gave rise to buildings with more gently sloping roofs.

The study covered two large swings in the global climate: the medieval warm period, which roughly ran from the tenth to the 13th century, and the little ice age, which saw shorter summers and bitter winters between the 15th and 19th centuries.

Changing weather patterns may have spurred innovation too, as the researchers note that frigid weather around 1700 coincided with new methods that made the construction of steeper and straighter roofs safer and more reliable.

It's incredible to think that something as subtle as the angles of pitched roofs might intimately reflect changes in the weather over ten centuries. It's a compelling story, but as someone who has studied architectural history for many years, I have some doubts.

Four typical roof designs from four different climate periods. Credit: Li et al. (2021)/Science Advances

Architecture and the climate

The researchers made two basic points. One, that roofs are built steeper in eras and places with heavier snowfall. And two, that there is a close correlation between weather patterns and roof angles that betrays a sensitivity in architecture to very small changes in the climate.

The first point is fairly easy to prove and probably undisputed among academics. A carpenter will correct the roof angle once a building has collapsed under heavy snow, and showing this with the example of historic buildings in China has its merit.

The second point, to my mind, is not coherently proven by this study and may even be impossible to prove. The researchers mention studying around "200 [building] remains over a millennium," but it's not clear whether these are equally spaced out across the study period. They could get away with it being historians as opposed to, let's say, medical doctors, where sample size is the litmus test of sound methodology.

It's also unclear why roofs in warm times should become less steep. The researchers ought to be commended for trying to address this problem though, as the study notes that Chinese people may have failed to maintain steeper roofs in times when snowfall was less severe due to "costs and the diverse need for sunshine and rainfall sheltering." The researchers nonetheless do not develop this point or explain why flatter roofs should be more cost effective.

Heavy snowfall demands roof designs which don’t buckle under pressure. Credit: Lu Yang/Shutterstock

Building a roof is not a collective event akin to population decline, infant mortality or market prices, however. It depends on the conscious decision of a particular person—a client, architect or artisan. To prove a connection, the researchers would need a theory of how builders would be able to react to tiny changes in the climate with tiny changes in roof angles. Exaggerating this climate connection in architecture might imply, wrongly, that premodern societies were predominantly shaped by some inexplicable harmony between people and nature, with an ability to respond to tiny changes in the environment that were lost in later periods.

Such fine-scale responses between building and weather as far as I know, do not happen in the present. Snowfalls became lighter and less frequent in the UK throughout the 20th century, but it would be unconvincing to tie this to the proliferation of modern flat roofs, which have become just as popular in snowy Russia. And even a fundamental decision such as choosing between a flat roof or a pitched one seems to defy climatic necessities, as the lamentably high number of leaking flat roofs in rain-swept Glasgow where I live demonstrates.

Nonetheless, the study provides an eloquent reminder of how natural variation in the weather has been an influence on architecture throughout history, often as much as changing styles and tastes.

Most of the buildings we live, work and socialize in were designed with little thought paid to the unprecedented weather extremes that climate scientists warn are in store this century. That will have to change. Historians may one day study the era we live in and note how architecture regained a sense of environmental limits, as leaky and inefficient designs were swept away by buildings that were resilient in the face of increasing storms.

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Dylan Ehler came into the world running. He pummeled and squirmed his way through his mom’s pregnancy, kicked the hell out of her in the womb. He was a boy in constant motion. He moved when he slept. Almost as soon as he was crawling he was climbing. His parents—Ashley Brown and Jason Ehler—would walk into their living room, in a gray-green house in a place called Bible Hill near the town of Truro in Nova Scotia, to find him perched on the windowsill, grasping at the ledge above.

 

When they brought Dylan home from the hospital, the three of them slept curled together on the sectional, bunking down in the living room. By his third birthday, he was still getting up in the night to crawl into bed with his parents. Dylan had bright, round, rosy cheeks and mussy, brown hair when it wasn’t buzzed short. He had one hazel eye and one that was half-hazel, half-blue. The only words he could say were “mama” and “dada,” but he found other ways to speak. He’d taken to sliding his hand into his dad’s and, with a gentle tug, leading him around the house that way.

 

In the weeks after his third birthday, in April 2020, the atmosphere in the family’s gray-green semi-­detached was tense. The town was in lockdown from the pandemic, and Ashley and Jason both lost their jobs. Money was tighter than usual, and it was usually pretty tight. They were in an ongoing battle with the neighbors; Jason says they thought he was repeatedly egging their house. Lily, Ashley’s 12-year-old daughter from a previous relationship, was in school remotely, which meant she was home all day. And Dylan was Dylan, running around the house with a smile, blink-and-you’d-miss-him like always.

 

Three-quarters of Nova Scotia is blanketed by gnarled firs, spruce, and pines, vegetation so wild and dense that for years the province held the title of lost-person capital of North America. Truro sits at the innermost point of an inlet off of Cobequid Bay, which in turn is an offshoot of the Bay of Fundy, a body of water governed by the highest tides on the planet and home to one of the most comprehensive fossil records in the world; 300 million years of life are imprinted on its shoreline cliffs.

 

The town is best known for being the headquarters of one of the world’s oldest underwear factories; it is a quiet, pastoral kind of place that offers little by way of excitement but ambling Holsteins. So in the early months of the pandemic, 32-year-old Ashley joined TikTok, the app she’d seen all over social media, as an escape. When she had time, she’d upload the clips in batches. She posted a video of her swaying in a hoodie and baseball cap, backlit in red, to a Nelly song. In another, soundtracked by the trap hit “What’s Poppin,” she blows puffs of smoke from a joint toward the camera. “I’m gonna get you high today,” she riffs in a third. In one clip, Dylan sits beside her, smiling widely: “You ever just look at somebody,” she mouths along to the meme, “and think to yourself, ‘this motherfucker is going to be the reason I go to jail?’”

 

One April afternoon she stood in the kitchen and pulled the phone in close, her brown bangs falling across her forehead. A TikTok filter called Euphoric Makeup swept deep purple across her eyes and sharply contoured her cheekbones. In the years since the Disney movie Frozen had come out, more than 100,000 people had participated in a popular, if sinister, meme that had made its way to TikTok, a parody of the movie’s song “Do You Want to Build a Snowman?” Ashley began to sing along: “Will you help me hide a body?” a high-pitched voice-over asked. “Come on, we can’t delay / No one can see him on the floor / Get him out the door before he can decayyyyyyy.” She uploaded the video, a few of her followers liked it, and she went back to an utterly unremarkable day.

Weeks turned to months in a pandemic blur. Breakfast, potty time, playtime, storytime. Ashley and Jason’s world grew smaller, revolving more tightly around Lily and Dylan as Covid continued. Dylan was the kind of kid who went looking for joy. He loved the rain. One afternoon he stood outside in his patched green parka, the fuzzy fur lining of his hood matting in the storm. He leaned his head up and stuck his tongue out as far as it would go, rain pattering against his cheeks as he licked the droplets, his face beaming with glee. Jason captured the moment on video, not knowing then that his son’s face in that frame would soon be seen the world over.

 

Ashley grew up around cars—her dad, Norman Brown, still runs a mechanic’s shop out of his garage about a 10-minute drive west along the two-lane highway that ribbons its way through this part of Colchester County. Norman used to drag race at derbies, before he sold his Monte Carlo to build his own mud car. He started taking it and his daughter to rallies instead. It made sense that Ashley would find work as a detailer for the Hyundai dealer a mile away from her house in Bible Hill.

 

Jason grew up down the road from Truro, in Masstown, a farm village of about 150 people. He went west in his early twenties thinking he’d maybe work on the oil rigs. When that didn’t pan out, he moved back home. He met Ashley one night at a friend’s place. He looked tough with a tattooed spider crawling down his right hand. But she liked his kind, hazel eyes that creased at the corners, his booming laugh and hulking frame. They began to party together, and eventually they began to live together. Ashley’s family didn’t much like him. He was loud and gruff. They thought he was a bad influence. Her dad felt Jason’s quick temper made it difficult to hold down a job, and the couple dabbled in drugs. Jason was arrested once for shoplifting from the gas station, and then again from the liquor store. Ashley faced charges too. Police accused the couple of running a scam, bilking the government out of more than $55,000 (Canadian) by claiming welfare to which they weren’t entitled. (The charges were later dropped.)

 

They certainly weren’t perfect, but they were a family. For years Jason had wanted a child of his own. He was stepfather to Lily, but he’d been keen to have another kid. To Ashley, it never seemed like the right time. But when she turned 29, things had started to settle down. She had steady work, and they weren’t partying as much as they once did. Jason was working full-time, too, delivering water bottles for the Canadian Springs plant. Ashley said even her mom, Dorothy Dowe Parsons, who has struggled with alcoholism, was sober by then. So when he asked again, she said yes. Nine months later, Dylan was born.

 

One morning in May 2020, Ashley was just trying to keep her head on straight. The pandemic was dragging on. She was exhausted. Outside, Jason says, their neighbor’s buddy was banging on their windows, pissed about the egging and spoiling for a fight. Jason woke up angry. Ashley can’t remember exactly why, but things escalated fast, and she hit him. Jason sprang out of bed, and, suddenly, everyone was yelling. He’d kill her, he shouted after her. He grabbed her phone and smashed it on the kitchen’s tiled floor. Someone in the neighborhood called the cops. Ashley was charged with assault, and Jason for uttering threats and mischief. Both were released on an order to appear in court later that summer. (The charges were withdrawn after the two went to a court counseling program.)

 

In the meantime, a judge issued them a no-­contact order. For days, Jason stayed with his parents, a 15-­minute drive away, while Ashley took care of Dylan and Lily at home. The couple’s moms acted as intermediaries, shuttling Dylan between houses. Jason made sure that he saw Dylan almost every day; he was a devoted dad that way. But the situation also created tensions. Jason didn’t like that Dorothy was helping to care for his son, even if she was just ferrying him back to his home in Bible Hill. He didn’t trust her, in part, he says, because of her history of slipping in and out of sobriety. One day, in the fuss of it all, he didn’t realize until her car had pulled away that he’d forgotten to kiss Dylan goodbye.

 

The next morning, Ashley awoke around first light to find Dylan tucked in beside her. They spent a few minutes cuddled in bed. Then she got her boy up and took him to the coffee stop down the road. She ordered him his favorite breakfast, a chocolate glazed doughnut, and, as usual, he ate the icing off the top before zeroing in on the rest. She took her coffee to go, and the pair headed home.

 

Though Ashley enjoyed the morning with Dylan, she was tired. It had been a long time since she’d been a single parent. So when she got a text from her friend Vanessa, inviting her over for a coffee, she was relieved: She needed a break. She messaged her mom to ask if she could watch Dylan for a while, then packed him a bag—pullups, a snack. She drove by Truro’s dormant smokestacks and over Lepper Brook. The water was unusually high.

The neighborhood where Ashley’s mother lives was described to me as “the slums of Truro.” It’s the kind of place where people paper over their windows with skull-and-crossbones flags, where beer bottles sag in the creek bed. Dorothy’s house, shingled a muted gray-blue, is down the street from a halfway house and 450 feet away from Lepper Brook, a stream that flows to the mouth of the Salmon River, and from there to the Bay of Fundy. Dorothy had a puppy, and the dog was one of the only family members who could keep up with Dylan, nipping at his heels. She’d mentioned to Ashley that she was going to take the pair out to play in her backyard, which held a picnic table and a deep-freezer and opened on to dead-end Elizabeth Street. Ashley joked that Dorothy had better put both babies on a leash. “Dylan’s a runner. He needs one.” At around 11 am, Ashley pulled out of the driveway to go meet her friend. Like the sediment that lines the banks of a river, tragedy builds in layers, too, a series of tiny and inconspicuous choices that look clear only after the force of their cataclysmic outcomes.

 

At about 1:15 pm, Dorothy and Dylan were out in the yard. She turned around to tie her puppy to its lead, and when she turned again, she couldn’t find her grandson. She ran into the street, yelling for him. Her yells turned into screams, and she pleaded with her neighbors to call 911. The police arrived at the house just 4 minutes later. They fanned out, canvassing locals, searching the area’s nooks and crannies for anywhere a playful toddler might hide.

 

When Ashley’s father showed up at her friend’s front door, he was stone-faced. She had not been expecting him. She knew instantly something was wrong. “Get in the car,” he said. She complied, tucking her slender frame into the truck’s passenger seat like she had so many times when she was young. “Dylan is missing,” he told her, eyes on the road. For much of the rest of the ride, the two sat in silence, a harbinger of the quiet to come. “By the time we get there, they might have found him,” she thought to herself. She was certain they would find him.

 

Firefighters and search-and-rescue volunteers were called in, trudging waist-deep into the creek. For six hours, they searched the area, finding nothing. When a rescue volunteer pulled one of Dylan’s little gray rain boots from an errant shopping cart submerged in Lepper Brook, it didn’t look good. An hour and a half later, another volunteer found his other boot, stuck in the muck about 60 feet downstream.

 

For days, police investigators and ground rescue volunteers searched. A local pilot traced Dylan’s name into his flightpath in the sky. On stoops across the province, firefighters and parents left pairs of rain boots out for Dylan, beacons of hope in the night.

In the hours after Dylan went missing, a theory began to take shape: that Dylan had taken off running, made it to the creek. He didn’t yet know how to swim.

 

A dive team combed the riverbeds from below, using an underwater camera to take pictures they could later scan for something, anything, they may have missed. A helicopter flew low overhead, looking for Dylan and flagging areas of interest for searchers on the ground.

 

The next day, more and more Truro residents joined in. Word of Dylan’s disappearance spread—first across the province, then the country, then the continent. Thousands of web sleuths descended on Facebook groups created to discuss details of the case, armed with keyboards and curiosity. The same day, a family friend started a GoFundMe campaign. Jason and Ashley turned to Facebook for support, using it to plan searches, organize fundraisers, and update their community. The couple knew that keeping Dylan’s picture circulating, too, was critical.

 

A missing child captures the compassionate and curious among us, the ones with savior complexes, and the people who recognize themselves in these parents’ nightmares. Before long, Dylan had become a symbol for a collection of people awash with pain and nowhere to put it.

 

Two days after Dylan disappeared, Jason and Ashley were frantic. It felt surreal; their son still hadn’t been found. That morning, Ashley received a message from her sister-in-law. Don’t go on Facebook, she warned. It was too late: Ashley already had a stream of messages from strangers accusing her of killing her son. An internet sleuth had discovered her TikTok page and posted the videos she’d made to Facebook. Forty-eight hours after her son went missing, online detectives declared her suspect number one. Missing-­person cases are magnets for psychics and obsessives, and a medium named Jada Brooke, who said she was based in the New York area, joined the conversations in one of the Facebook groups that had sprung up to dissect Ashley’s and Jason’s behavior. In a Facebook Live post, she described visions she’d seen of the boy. She told followers that a family member of Dylan’s called her to ask for her help. Soon, she was offering theories of the case and information she said came from locals.

 

Brooke also talked about Ashley and Dorothy, refusing to mention them by name. “The family is known to be into dark magic.” She then added, “As somebody who’s involved in magic myself and does rituals, I believe Dylan was offered as a sacrificial sentiment to Satan on the pink full Scorpio moon. I think they thought they were doing a good thing. And part of me thinks that’s why the mother and grandmother are not showing more remorse. What they did is simply killing a child.”

 

In another group, people criticized Ashley for getting a haircut. Was that a new nose piercing, they wondered. “It just seems they look better as time passes,” wrote Zoe Jackson. “All that new shit would be the least of my concerns with a missing baby.” Another member responded: “These devils are digging their graves. Keep on buying. Their time is well on its way.” In another, they mocked Jason’s search attempts, saying, “It’s just him lurking in the bushes.” They excoriated him even for sleeping. “I would be searching nonstop until my feet were bleeding if my child vanished,” wrote Kelly Plaine.

 

The vitriol spilled over into real life. People started standing outside their Bible Hill home glowering and taking photos, or following them in their cars. Someone at the area hospital looked up health records for Ashley, Lily, and Dylan, a privacy breach. When Jason and Ashley put up a memorial for Dylan in Bible Hill’s Holy Well Park—a blanket laden with teddy bears, a toy fishing rod, the boy’s first-ever pair of rain boots hanging from the tree overhead—locals tore it apart and dug a hole beneath it, looking for bones.

 

Later that week, in a video now viewed tens of thousands of times, Jada Brooke fanned the flames. She’d spoken to a family member of Dylan’s, she said, who was “on our side and agrees that something’s not right here.” “I had a vision of him being kicked down a set of stairs … That was actually verified to me,” she told viewers, providing no evidence. She said she’d had a vision of a shallow grave between two trees, 5 or 6 feet apart, on a property that also held a red and white truck. That led a Truro resident named Dawn to a field that held a red and white horse trailer. Inspired, a band of residents broke into the trailer. They found a pile of dry hay, which Brooke called suspicious for its lack of mold. Brooke triumphantly pointed out that the trailer, which sat in front of a stand of trees, was proof her vision had been accurate. “If I go quiet or something in the group for a while, just remember, I have six kids of my own, I home-school four. I’m a very involved mother. My kids don’t go missing, you know what I mean?”

 

The abuse spilled beyond accusations about the couple’s parenting. Jason received scam ransom notes from online trolls; one included a doctored picture of Dylan’s face, battered with bruises over his right eye and a deep gash on his lip. “You must transfer 3 bitcoins,” the message read, “within 72 hours.” The sender, a Facebook account under the name Brad, told Jason he’d release his son once the transfer was made, and if he didn’t, he’d never see him again. “You have 3 days to save Dylan’s life,” he wrote.

 

After six days, with no new evidence—no footprints or debris or credible sightings—the police called off their search. Nothing but rain boots. But Jason didn’t stop. He walked the creek bed day after day, drawing dozens of locals to help. The GoFundMe page would raise about $12,500 for the family. Ashley and Jason offered it up as a reward for any information.

 

Jason handed out lapel pins, a blue ribbon and a green ribbon intertwined. He gave away key chains bearing his son’s face. He ordered bumper stickers of Dylan looking upward, mismatched eyes scanning the sky. “Do you want some swag?” he asked me sadly, the first time we met. He handed me a green and blue bracelet and a sticker. Maybe, he said, if I put it on my car back home, two provinces over, someone there would see it and call in a sighting.

 

In Canada, parents receive a benefit if one of their children goes missing or dies in a likely crime. Because local police didn’t label the incident a crime, Ashley and Jason didn’t qualify. “No one gives you a pamphlet on how to be a missing child’s mother,” Ashley says. By October, with the province’s lockdown lifted and the dealership fully open again, she went back to work.

 

For months, Facebook group members examined the case’s scant evidence, gnashing details like bolts of hardening chewing gum. It was a dizzying, dystopian fun house of rumor and speculation. Theories raged: To many, the grandmother’s story didn’t track. Others believed she was covering for her daughter. That the family was collecting money on a GoFundMe page meant they’d gotten rid of Dylan because they needed the money—for booze or drugs or both. At one point, the groups’ ranks topped 23,000 people, the same as the entire population of Truro.

 

By the end of September 2020, the harassment and threats had gotten so bad that one group member began to research the laws that govern cyberbullying in the province and even contacted a local lawyer named Allison Harris. Harris knew about the missing boy—Dylan’s story was in the news for weeks after his disappearance—but she was shocked to learn about the abuse the online sleuthing community had spawned. Just a year and a half out of law school, Harris exudes an air of utter unflappability. She speaks in clipped, exacting sentences, and even her smile seems precise when it reveals a perfectly centered gap between her front teeth. Harris was one of just two lawyers in the province who had argued online personal injury cases in court. She told the group member to have Ashley and Jason get in touch and, after hearing their story, offered her services pro bono.

 

Together the three of them set to work documenting thousands of abusive screenshots, hundreds of awful messages, dozens of death threats. They wrote letters to the administrators of two of the Facebook groups, asking them to shut down. At first, both refused, though one changed her mind after becoming the target of a harassment campaign within her own group. “This case has surprised me,” Harris says. “Instead of appreciating that they’re doing damage and harm, they seem to feel they have a right to have these groups.” (Still, the groups were like a hydra: When one shut down, Ashley and Jason’s most vocal detractors simply started others under untraceable noms de plume like “Holiday Precious.”)

 

The administrators of the second group were local Truro residents: a couple named April Moulton and Tom Hurley who lived down the road from the backyard where Dylan was last seen. Moulton, who has dyed red hair and Cheshire-cat eyes, was certain she was doing critical work, her stout hands weighed down with silver rings on almost every finger as she examined the minutiae of the case, parsing rumored fiction from rumored fact, Hurley shuffling back and forth behind her. They didn’t know Jason or Ashley before Dylan’s story hit headlines, but they emerged as two of the most vocal proponents demanding justice for the boy. They knew as well as anyone what it was to lose a child.

 

Two years ago, Hurley’s son Nick died. He was 31, he hadn’t been sick; he was simply alive one day and dead the next. The couple was devastated. Nick, Moulton’s stepson, had been a bright light, quick to laugh or share a joint with her as he got older. And when Dylan Ehler’s story ripped across the news, a year later almost to the day, she felt summoned, called to help. “I was starting to get dreams,” she says. “I feel like he is reaching out wanting to be found, but he’s scared.” She’d never met Dylan, but she would do whatever she had to do to bring him home. She started a Facebook group, too, one that examined the case from every angle and explored each theory. As time dragged on, she grew fixated on managing the group, posting through the night.

 

In late January 2021, Jason and Ashley filed a lawsuit against Moulton and Hurley, asking the court to order the couple to shut down their Facebook group and stop posting about their family. (Group members chimed in. “I can assure you I would be completely devastated if that was my child or grandchild, I wouldn’t have time or energy to even consider taking people to court to sue them.”) When the courier tried to serve Hurley with papers in his yard, he ran into his mobile home, shouting profanities behind him before slamming the door. Harris eventually hired a special investigator, who returned to Hurley’s home escorted by police, to get the documents into his hands.

 

The case slogged along, and after two months Harris started making headway. Her clients didn’t want money; they just wanted the couple to agree not to post publicly about their family or contact them ever again. By the end of April, the couples were inching toward a settlement, and it looked like they were finally going to sign that agreement. On May 1, Moulton opened her Facebook account and typed: “This child is gone missing and they’re taking me to court to not ever mention his name again because I’ve been looking for him for a year! His name is Dylan Norman John Ehler!! His name is Dylan! His name is Dylan! His name is Dylan!” she incanted. “Don’t ever forget his name! This will be the last time I ever get to mention his name before I sign those papers!!” But it would not be the last time. She decided not to sign.

 

The rise of “internet detectives,” as Harris calls them, has drawn thousands of people with spare time, curiosity, and a streak of vigilantism to forums like Websleuths.com. And crowdsourcing justice can work: Michelle McNamara’s tireless quest to identify the Golden State Killer started there, and the Netflix documentary Don’t F**k With Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer explores how armchair detectives across the world banded together to identify Canadian murderer Luka Magnotta. “I think people see that documentary and they want to be that person,” Harris says. “They want their fame for being able to do that.” Someone like Moulton, Harris says, really believes she is seeking justice for Dylan, evidence be damned. “She’s trying to help this little boy at whatever cost,” Harris says. “They’re not thinking of these people as real people. They can’t be.”

 

From Dorothy’s house to the creek bed where Dylan’s first rain boot was found takes a couple of minutes at a brisk clip. Stretches of unfenced land lead down to the water; wizened tree roots and matted grasses create resting points along the shore. Dylan’s other boot was found lodged in a pocket of debris below the water’s surface, 60 feet from the first boot, just before the fork where Lepper Brook dips into the Salmon River. The river winds on for miles beyond the fork, past floodplains and brick chimneys, over waterfalls and under skeletal steel bridges. While most rivers flow in one direction, the Salmon is a tidal river, which means it runs in two. Every day, a tidal bore sends a wave 6 feet high rippling up the river, straight into town, and then back out again. The water, a mix of silt and clay, is a ruddy chocolate brown all the way out to the estuary where the river meets the bay.

 

The Bay of Fundy is a funnel of ferocity. From above, it’s a depression in the sandstone of Canada’s east coast, bordered by the provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, and the state of Maine. There, peace is thin on the ground. Most oceans, on average, have a tidal range of 3 feet. The range in Fundy is 53. Imagine the force created by the pounding hooves of 24 million charging horses, and still Fundy’s tides are stronger.

 

The search and rescue team had attached RF trackers to a mannequin about Dylan’s weight and height, then dropped it into Lepper Brook, tracking it as it disappeared into deep, invisible pockets under the water. It took less than an hour for the mannequin to be swept up by those powerful tides.

 

“Nature was working against Dylan from square one,” says Tom Fitzpatrick, president of the team that led the search on the ground. The banks of the brook were so swollen that the currents knocked full-grown men off their feet. Fitzpatrick’s crew has spent almost 6,000 hours searching for Dylan, speaking to fishers and beachcombers and tidal experts to better understand what they’re up against. They’ve searched racetracks, gravel pits, cheese factories—anywhere else there’s been a tip, a possible sighting. Fitzpatrick is watchful, peering out of his car windows for scavenging birds or misshapen lumps of clay when he crosses the river each day. Four members of his crew have left the team, unable to cope with the unanswered questions still swirling around the case. “Did I miss him? Did I miss something?” Fitzpatrick says. “That’s a heavy load to carry home.”

 

Fitzpatrick is confident he knows what happened that day. “We think the child was in the backyard and his grandmother got distracted—we’re not sure by what and not sure how long. We think the child went out the corner of the yard, behind the neighbor’s house. There’s a path that leads down to the brook, and just below there’s a bit of a logjam,” he says, pausing. “About 50 feet down the water from there is where we found the first boot.” He can’t bring himself to say it, exactly, that the boy was caught up in the tides, so forceful and thick with mud that, underwater, it’s impossible to see.

 

On the day I visited, Ashley sat cross-legged in her dim living room, folding neat white squares of paper into origami shapes. On the squares, she’d written words like hope and strength in marker. The room is somewhere between time capsule and shrine. Dylan’s rain boots sat on a wooden bookshelf. “Missing” posters papered the windows. Art from people across the continent, commemorating Dylan, hung on the walls alongside Dylan’s list of things to do each day. (“Brush teeth. Learning time. Time with Lily. Lunch time.”)

 

Since Dylan disappeared, Ashley has retreated into herself, drifting from friends and family who haven’t shown up for her this year. She avoids her old grocery store now, suspicious eyes trailing her down the aisles. She no longer speaks to her mom, who she feels hasn’t apologized for her role in what happened. She rarely speaks to Jason’s family, who she says believed she was involved once they saw the TikTok videos she made.

 

In late May, April Moulton finally agreed to settle the court case. “It’s going to feel good to let go of one thing,” Ashley says, resigned. By July, Tom Hurley settled too. Meanwhile, the other Facebook group, run by anonymous critics, carries on. Ashley and Jason could go to court to compel Facebook to reveal who’s behind the accounts and then, if the company were to relinquish the data, could file suit. They’ll probably have to let it go, though, Ashley says. They don’t have the money.

 

They’ve talked about leaving, about starting anew someplace else. “We want to disappear,” Jason says. “Not until we get answers,” he adds. They’ve talked about having another child together, about reversing the tubal ligation surgery Ashley had the year after Dylan was born. “In one way, you think that is something you might want, and then in another way, you’d feel like, that’s wrong,” she says. “What if you had another boy and he resembled Dylan, but then at the same time you feel like, we’re replacing him?” Jason asks. Ashley adds, “There are circumstances where parents do have another kid to kind of replace what was lost, and then that child’s living up to a standard of a child that’s missing. Who can compare to that, right? That wouldn’t be fair.” No one gives you a pamphlet on how to be the parent of a missing child.

 

When Jason wakes up in the night, he takes long drags from a joint to fall back to sleep. When Ashley does, she doesn’t bother trying to find sleep again. She gets up, another morning in an endless day. At 4 am, she sits alone at the kitchen table, sipping black coffee in the dark. “Once I’m awake, I’m awake. And my mind starts going,” she says. “Every morning you wake up and there’s a couple of seconds where you don’t … where you forget. And then it hits you again. And you’re like, this is my life.”

 

The preceding months have brought depths of disappointment neither Ashley nor Jason thought possible. New tips are no longer a source of excitement, but an inevitable letdown. Jason filed a complaint with the police commissioner, alleging that the police were negligent in their initial investigation and search because they didn’t send out an Amber Alert. Since then, the cops will meet only with Ashley and only if new information comes in. If Dylan was the son of the mayor or the chief of police, Jason later says, this story would have a different ending. “Dylan would be home.” (The police say Jason is misconstruing facts online, and declined to comment further, citing the open missing-persons case.)

 

The couple hired a private investigator, Dave Worrell. He told the parents what Jason, by then, already believed: that Dylan’s grandmother’s timeline didn’t check out, that it could be investigated further. Dorothy says she passed a polygraph administered by the police. “They can investigate all they want,” she adds. “I have nothing to hide.”

 

In their home, Ashley and Jason and I talked for hours. Her hands never stopped moving. At her feet was a bin, holding near a hundred folded white paper boats. They’re for Dylan, she says. Tomorrow would be the anniversary of the day he disappeared, and, in a tribute, they’re going to send them out to sea.

 

A few days later, early one Saturday morning, Jason, Ashley, and Jason’s twin brother, Justin, climb into their white SUV and drive through Bible Hill, Truro, and Masstown and on toward familiar shores. The morning is misty gray, and they pass winding driveways, where wary barn cats keep neighborhood watch. The gravel turns to sand, and they pull into a makeshift parking spot in front of the rolling dunes of Fundy.

 

Jason pulls gear out of his trunk: neon orange vests, a briefcase holding the drone that he’ll fly up and down the shoreline. We pass orange tape tied to cedar branches and pieces of driftwood, markers made by another couple who come looking for Dylan sometimes. Jason has spent months begging for people to come help, scouring thousands of photographs for traces as small as the patches on Dylan’s jacket. Because while he believes that his son might still be alive—must still be alive—that someone took him from the backyard that day and vanished, the only clues in the case point to the water.

 

The dry grass crunches underfoot as we walk. We’ve gone 3 miles and will walk the line once more. I think of the bumper sticker, Dylan’s eyes trained upward. Out on the dunes, it starts to rain. Detritus has washed up here, scraps the tides have deigned to return: soggy red Tim Hortons coffee cups, cracked scalloped shells, one of the eight boots Jason threw into the creek last year to see how far they would go.

 

Early on, someone at Wings of Mercy, a volunteer search support group, told Jason to be careful, that it’s easy to get lost in the looking. But no body means hope, and his hope is a pilot light. He’ll come out here on the same day again next week, because he does this every week, walking the shores of the river and the bay, then going home to post the footage to a Facebook group dedicated to his ongoing search. In his hand will be a binder filled with images and maps of where he’s already been and where he thinks they should try again. The tidal force means the landscape’s always shifting, so there is value here in retracing steps, looking for anything human against the loam.

 

He walks interminably on, trudging his way along the shoreline of a bay where the water never runs clear.

Rain Boots, Turning Tides, and the Search for a Missing Boy

The world's oldest painted pottery may have been for drinking beer at a funeral.

At a 9,000-year-old burial site in China called Qiaotou, archaeologists recently unearthed a number of ceramic vessels. Some of the vessels were shaped like the long-necked, round-bellied bronze pots that people used for alcoholic drinks millennia later. And that made Dartmouth College anthropologist Jiajing Wang and his colleagues wonder whether these earlier clay versions might have once held beer, too.

 

Bits of the residue left inside eight of the 13 pots turned out to contain phytoliths (fossilized plant remains) from rice, tubers, and a plant called Job’s tears. Starch molecules in the residue showed signs of being heated and fermented. Wang and his colleagues also found yeast and mold, key ingredients in fermentation.

 

“Our results revealed that the pottery vessels were used to hold beer, in the most general sense—a fermented beverage made of rice, a grain called Job’s tears, and unidentified tubers,” said Wang. “This ancient beer, though, would not have been like the IPA that we have today. Instead, it was likely a slightly fermented and sweet beverage, which was probably cloudy in color.”

“A drink to the living, a toast to the dead”

This cloudy, sweet rice beer would have been the product of a considerable amount of work. Around 9,000 years ago, people in southern China were just starting to farm rice. The Shangshan culture had seen its people settling in villages, but most of them still relied on hunting and foraging for much of their food. Evidence from other archaeological sites tells us that tubers and acorns were the staples of most people’s diets. Rice appears to have been a luxury crop at the time, and rice beer—considering the extra effort and time required to make it—would have been reserved for very special occasions.

 

In this case, someone buried these drinking vessels in several “pottery pits” dug into a large burial platform—an 80-meter-long, 50-meter-wide, 3-meter-high flat mound of earth surrounded by a 10- to 15-meter-wide, 2-meter-deep ditch. The platform was the final resting place of at least two people, whose skeletons lay near the pottery pits. All this indicates that the special occasion at Qiaotou was probably a funeral or a later ritual to honor the dead.

 

The people who attended the ritual at Qiaotou had their rice-and-tuber beer in vessels befitting the occasion. The ceramics found in the platform were finely made and decorated with a white slip formed by an outer layer of white clay. A few of them had been painted with abstract patterns of lines and dots, making the Qiaotou drinking vessels the oldest painted pottery that archaeologists know of.

 

This is an example of one of the long-necked drinking vessels, along with images of the microscopic traces of ancient beer found inside.

 

Wang and his colleagues say these vessels may be the oldest known painted pottery in the world.

Brewing with mold

The dried residue of ancient beer was still stuck to the insides of some of those vessels 9,000 years later, offering a friendly reminder that if you don’t wash your dishes, future archaeologists will probably know. That’s especially true if you’re drinking something like early beer.

“Prehistoric brews are likely akin to a porridge that contains insoluble materials, including starches and other plant additives not fully digested during the brewing process,” explained Wang and his colleagues. “These residue materials are useful for identifying alcohol-related artifacts.” Wang and his colleagues compared the starch molecules, phytoliths, and bits of fungi to a database of Asian plants, another database of microbes, and starches produced by the researchers' own experiments with ancient brewing techniques.

The mold in particular offered an important clue about how the Shangshan people made their beer. Traces of mold found in the drinking vessels from Qiaotou matched two species that help kick-start the brewing process in modern sake.

To turn a grain like barley, rice, or wheat into a beer, you need some chemistry to happen. First, enzymes have to convert the starches in the grain into sugars. Next, yeast has to turn those sugars into alcohol and (usually) carbon dioxide. Certain species of mold added to the mix can help start both of those processes. Qiaotou is now the world’s oldest evidence of people using mold starters to make beer.

Wang speculated about how the first mold starters were put to use by humans, saying, “If people had some leftover rice and the grains became moldy, they may have noticed that the grains became sweeter and alcoholic with age. While people may not have known the biochemistry associated with grains that became moldy, they probably observed the fermentation process and leveraged it through trial and error.”

At another Shangshan site called Jiahu, archaeologists previously found traces of a different beer recipe, which included rice, honey, and fruits. Wang and his colleagues say that more chemical analysis of the beer residues on the Qiaotou vessels may reveal whether the beer at Qiaotou also included honey or fruit.

PLoS ONE, 2021 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0255833  (About DOIs).

9,000 years ago, funerals in China involved a lot of beer

Amazon plans to expand the education and skills training benefits it offers to its U.S. employees with a total investment of $1.2 billion by 2025. Through its popular Career Choice program, the company will fund full college tuition, as well as high school diplomas, GEDs, and English as a Second Language (ESL) proficiency certifications for its frontline employees—including those who have been at the company for as little as three months. Amazon is also adding three new education programs to provide employees with the opportunity to learn skills within data center maintenance and technology, IT, and user experience and research design.

“Amazon is now the largest job creator in the U.S., and we know that investing in free skills training for our teams can have a huge impact for hundreds of thousands of families across the country,” said Dave Clark, CEO of Worldwide Consumer at Amazon. "We launched Career Choice almost ten years ago to help remove the biggest barriers to continuing education—time and money—and we are now expanding it even further to pay full tuition and add several new fields of study.”

This new investment builds on years of experience supporting employees in growing their careers, including some unique initiatives like building more than 110 on-site classrooms for our employees in Amazon fulfillment centers across 37 states. Today, over 50,000 Amazon employees around the world have already participated in Career Choice and we’ve seen first-hand how it can transform their lives.”

<  View the five (5) photos at the source page. >

Starting in January, Amazon frontline employees will have access to even more education benefits through Career Choice:

• Funding for college tuition.  More than 750,000 operations employees across the U.S. will be eligible to have their full college tuition paid for at hundreds of education partners across the country. In addition to funding associate and bachelor’s degrees, Amazon’s Career Choice will also fund high school completion, GEDs, and ESL proficiency certifications.

• Pre-paid fees. Amazon will pay employees’ tuition and fees in advance rather than offering reimbursement after coursework completion, ensuring employees don’t need existing funds to start accessing the education options they want.

• Limitless learning. Amazon frontline employees will have access to annual funds for education as long as they remain at the company, with no limit to the number of years they can benefit.

• Fast starts. All 750,000 U.S. hourly employees are eligible to participate in Career Choice 90 days after starting at Amazon. This makes all 400,000 employees who joined the company since the start of the pandemic eligible to access Amazon-funded education opportunities.

"I worked in a warehouse setting for years but knew I wanted to help people and had been curious about healthcare. In just nine months, I became a certified clinical medical assistant while working at Amazon in Tracy, California, thanks to Career Choice," said former Amazon operations employee and Career Choice graduate Patricia Soto. "A career in healthcare would have been difficult to obtain without tuition support from Amazon and an internship opportunity to apply my new skills."

Additional new skills training programs

In addition to the expanded Career Choice benefits, Amazon is also launching three new upskilling programs—all tuition-free for participants—to provide even more career advancement opportunities for its employees:

AWS Grow Our Own Talent

AWS Grow Our Own Talent offers on-the-job training and job placement opportunities to Amazon employees and entry-level candidates with nontraditional backgrounds. The training will help them pursue roles to innovate within Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers and safely deliver high-quality cloud computing services to customers. Participating employees are hired into roles like data center technicians and operations technicians, and complete in-person, on-the-job training for up to six months.

Surge2IT

Surge2IT is designed to help entry-level IT employees across Amazon’s operations network pursue careers in higher-paying technical roles through self-paced learning resources. The course helps employees develop the skills necessary to advance their career in the IT field, such as supporting the Amazon Robotics picking and stowing technology. Participants who complete the course and move up at Amazon can make an additional $10,000 a year.

The User Experience Design and Research (UXDR) Apprenticeship

The UXDR Apprenticeship program combines instructor-led training and real-world experience in a one-year program that offers employees the opportunity to learn and develop skills in research and design on teams across Amazon, including Prime Video, Alexa, AWS, and Amazon Fashion. Graduates are ready for jobs that help improve the experience of Amazon customers, from making payments easier on Amazon sites to designing features that make devices more accessible.

"Today, there are not enough workers to fill every open job in the United States, which means that businesses are struggling to hire—especially for roles that require specific or technical skill sets," said Cheryl Oldham U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation senior vice president. "When large employers like Amazon commit to investing in their people through upskilling programs, especially in technical fields, it helps to ensure that the business community has access to a workforce pipeline that meets their needs today and in the future. At the Chamber Foundation, we work with employers across the country to pursue solutions that ensure American workers have the right skills to best support and grow our economy and we applaud Amazon for the investment they’re making in the workforce."

Upskilling 2025

Two years ago, Amazon announced Upskilling 2025, a $700 million commitment to train 100,000 U.S. employees by 2025 to help them transition into in-demand, higher-paying jobs. Since the launch of Upskilling 2025 in 2019, more than 70,000 employees have participated in one of Amazon’s nine upskilling programs. With today’s additional investment and expanded education benefits for employees, the company is more than tripling its original pledge—with plans to invest $1.2 billion in these programs and provide free skills training to 300,000 employees over the next four years, the equivalent of more than 30% of the company’s current workforce in the U.S.

Amazon has seen a surge in applications to participate in education programs since the start of the pandemic, reflecting increased interest from employees to fortify their skillsets. Amazon Technical Academy, an upskilling program that helps Amazon employees from all backgrounds become software engineers in nine months, received thousands of applications, with interest increasing 460% over the past 18 months. To accommodate a surge in demand, Amazon scaled all of its upskilling programs, adapting to work-from-home schedules, and welcoming more participants by pivoting from in-person to virtual training. In addition to the new and expanded programs outlined above, Amazon employees have free access to the following skills training programs:

Amazon Technical Academy

Amazon Technical Academy trains employees from across the company to become Amazon software engineers. The nine-month long internal training program does not require a computer science background or a degree. Amazon Technical Academy has placed 98% of its graduates into software development engineer roles within Amazon, with their salary and compensation packages increasing an average of 93% as a result. This year more than 40% of Amazon Technical Academy graduates came from Amazon’s operations network.

The Amazon Technical Apprenticeship

This program creates paths to technical jobs, primarily for veterans and military spouses looking to transition into technical professions. Amazon currently employs over 40,000 U.S. veterans and military spouses across multiple businesses and recently announced plans to hire 100,000 U.S. veterans and military spouses by 2024.

AWS Training and Certifications

AWS Training and Certifications program offers Amazon employees access to more than 500 free digital courses to build cloud computing knowledge. As part of this program, AWS TechU offers an accelerated 48-week career-development program that blends project-based learning and on-the-job training to help early-career employees in technical fields advance their skills.

Machine Learning University

A state-of-the-art training program curated and delivered by Amazon employees. It helps employees with a background in technology and coding gain graduate-level skills in machine learning and AI to solve customer problems.

The Mechatronics and Robotics Apprenticeship

Program participants learn the skills and technical knowledge needed to pursue a technical maintenance role supporting Amazon’s robotics technology. Hundreds of Amazon apprentices have earned nearly 3,000 certifications to date. Upon completion of their apprenticeship, participants could make an additional $16,000 on average each year in their new roles at Amazon.

Explore Amazon’s full roster of education and skills training programs.

The American Upskilling Study

Amazon’s new investment in free access to education programs for employees comes as the first-ever Amazon-Gallup American Upskilling Study shows how access to skills training can help companies recruit more workers and help workers build skills for rewarding careers. The analysis found that U.S. workers who completed upskilling programs over the past year have seen an average salary increase of 8.6%—the equivalent of an additional $8,000 in their annual earnings.

The expectation of this salary boost, along with new skills that will help employees move into more technical and resilient industries, have made access to upskilling opportunities one of the most sought-after employee benefits by American workers right now. Currently, 70% of workers interested in upskilling say they would switch to a new job if offered free skills training. For young adults entering the labor market, employer-funded upskilling is more important than paid vacation time.

Access the full findings of the new Amazon-Gallup study.

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A new interpretation of quantum mechanics sees agents as playing an active role in the creation of reality. Blake Stacey outlines the case for QBism and its radical potential.

The pandemic shut down our university when I was in the middle of giving a lecture. We had been anticipating the possibility for a few days, but it was still impeccable timing. I finished my spiel, out came the phones, and suddenly we weren't going to see each other post-spring break after all. For the rest of the term, I did what so many teachers found themselves doing: gamely trying to soldier on. I scrounged and borrowed a whiteboard, easel and webcam, set myself up in the nicest light the house had to offer, and did my best to convey graduate-level physics to an audience of tiny rectangles. And like so many other teachers, I learned there's nothing like a radical change of circumstances for driving one to re-evaluate what the essential ideas of a subject must be. In my case, this was complicated by the minor detail that the course I was teaching involved a lot of quantum mechanics, and the physics profession hasn't yet figured out what exactly the essential ideas of quantum mechanics are.

Oh, we know how to do the calculations. Nobody could have designed a laser or a computer chip if we didn't know that much. But the story that our textbooks tell is implicitly a tale of defeat, in a subtle way. They drop a chapter or three of mathematical arcana upon the poor student, not out of cruelty, but because we can't yet do any better. Complex numbers, matrix algebra, partial differential equations, spectral theory --- not only do the topics grow intimidating rather quickly, they also (if we are scrupulously honest) look rather arbitrary. Out of all the mental contrivances that the Mathematics department can serve up, why does quantum physics rely upon such a particular selection, and why do we employ those tools in the way that we do?

It is difficult to avoid turning philosophical about such matters. Questions like "What is the relation between our mathematical abstractions and physical reality?" feel as though they ought to be followed by a "like, dude". The history of attempts to answer such questions is complicated and contentious and written in no one place. Sometimes, the ideas themselves seem as if they are retreating from clarity. At other times, one wonders if philosophers and physicists wish to write as though clarity were the enemy.

I first started to care about the "interpretation" of quantum physics several years after I began using it. Many physicists don't care about such things at all, or they grow out of it rather than into it. It does indubitably feel strange that we would have to "interpret" a scientific theory; such language seems like it would belong more to critics of free verse or abstract art. ("What I feel the sculptor is trying to say...") But sometimes, when we're trying to develop the theory in new directions, or find the clearest way to teach it to the next generation, or we've just had one too many late nights wondering what it all means, we have to get our fingers philosophical.

Sometimes, the ideas themselves seem as if they are retreating from clarity. At other times, one wonders if philosophers and physicists wish to write as though clarity were the enemy.

After navigating the various viewpoints on offer, I found myself drawn to one that had only recently been articulated, the QBism laid out by Christopher Fuchs and Ruediger Schack. QBism has elements that are radical --- perhaps subversive, even --- while at the same time showing how some things we do as part of "weekday physics" are philosophically respectable after all. And, beyond providing a story to tell about the equations we already have on the books, it points to the tantalizing possibility that we can discover where those equations come from.

The QBist take on quantum mechanics is that, at its core, quantum mechanics is a theory of actions and consequences. A QBist looks for objectivity on a different level than the adherents of many other interpretations do. And the kind of lesson that we think the equations are whispering about reality are, in some quarters, downright scandalous. We resort to jargon like "normative structural realism" and "participatory realism" to give our intuitions shape and form. No existing school of philosophy seems quite right for where the physics wants to go; we'll agree with many predecessors, but often with a caveat or a qualification. Perhaps the best place to start is with that capital B.

The Q in QBism came from Quantum, of course, and the B originated with "Bayes". In the wide spectrum of ways to think about probability, "Bayesianism" encompasses a variety of schools of thought which hold that a probability is a value that an agent asserts, a quantitative expression of a degree of belief. Probabilities encode expectations, and without someone around to do the expecting, there would be no probabilities. Before there were weather forecasters, there were no forecasts, even though the world had plenty of weather. In the proto-QBist days, around the turn of the millennium, the idea was just that the probabilities in quantum physics could be understood in a Bayesian way. But "Bayesian" is a broad label, and those early attempts were not very good at narrowing it down; nor, as further investigation revealed, were they internally self-consistent. That early "Quantum Bayesianism" took several more years to mature into QBism.

QBism regards quantum mechanics as a "user's manual". In this interpretation, quantum mechanics is about what happens at the interface between an agent and the rest of nature. Most of the mathematical entities employed in the theory, like the "wavefunctions" of which so much has been said, boil down to being bundles of expectations. Whose expectations? Yours, or mine, or those of whoever has picked up the user's manual and is trying to benefit from its guidance. Expectations for what? For the consequences of the user's own actions. What kind of actions? Any kind, in principle. Very often, physicists think of a "quantum measurement" as something that requires a laboratory to pull off. But in principle, the act of smelling a rose has every right to be considered a "quantum measurement". It is only that roses are big and we manipulate them clumsily, so one's expectations about a rose will be too fuzzed out for invoking quantum mechanics to be worthwhile in practical terms.

QBism has elements that are radical --- perhaps subversive, even --- while at the same time showing how some things we do as part of "weekday physics" are philosophically respectable after all.

Following the genre conventions of information-theory books, let's name our agent Alice. She has a system of interest before her --- perhaps an atom, perhaps an ion-trap quantum computer or a rose or a loaf of sourdough bread. She contemplates the possible actions she might take upon the system. By using quantum mechanics, she can assign probabilities to the possible consequences of each action, in a self-consistent way. Then she makes a choice and reaches out, taking action and experiencing the result. She can then update her expectations for future experiences in accord with this measurement outcome --- with the new fact that she, in synergy with the system, has brought into being. Prior to the measurement, Alice's uncertainty was not due to ignorance of an outcome already there, waiting to be uncovered, but rather her recognition that the fact of the outcome did not yet physically exist. It is this last realization, the principle that measurement outcomes aren't just waiting to be read off but instead require participation to elicit, that opens up the radical new possibilities of quantum physics.

This is at least an internally coherent narrative about the mathematics, which is the first thing we ask of an interpretation. But what does it say about nature that quantum mechanics is such a good user's manual for you or me or Alice to employ? Why this particular sage advice for swimming in the madness and salt of the world? Here we move into the realm of speculation; it is one thing to provide a narrative and another to successfully extract a lesson from it.

Consider again Alice measuring an atom. Her wavefunction for the atom encodes her personal expectations for future experiences, and her changing her wavefunction for it upon obtaining a novel experience is a transformation within her. But both Alice and the atom participate in the measurement event; both partake in the creation of a new fact for the pair of them. And if the atom can participate in such ongoing acts of creation when the other player is an agent, surely it can do so when the other player is not. That is to say, whatever fundamental capacity for creation the atom brings to an event, it should bring whether or not the other participant is a conscious agent, let alone a trained quantum mechanic. As one of our papers said, "Certainly QBism has creation going on all the time and everywhere; quantum measurement is just about an agent hitching a ride and partaking in that ubiquitous process."

It is this last realization, the principle that measurement outcomes aren't just waiting to be read off but instead require participation to elicit, that opens up the radical new possibilities of quantum physics.

This kind of imagery has predecessors. It's not unlike Karen Barad's notion of "intra-actions", or Alfred North Whitehead's "actual occasions" and "throbs of experience". William James wrote of "new being com[ing] in local spots and patches". And John Archibald Wheeler went all in. For him, the generation of a measurement outcome was the "elementary quantum phenomenon". "Is the entirety of existence," he would ask, "rather than being built on particles or fields of force or multidimensional geometry, built upon billions upon billions of elementary quantum phenomena, those elementary acts of 'observer-participancy,' those most ethereal of all the entities that have been forced upon us by the progress of science?" He would say, "In some strange sense the quantum principle tells us that we are dealing with a participatory universe." But what exactly is that "quantum principle"? There, Wheeler said, physics lacks a good answer: "We understand any other principle of physics in enough completeness to summarize it, beginning with a good name, in a dozen words---but not this."

Now, for all our sympathies with Wheeler, QBism does diverge from his vision and terminology in some ways. For one, "observer" is to us far too passive a word; it carries the connotation of leaning back, not of pounding the pavement and wearing out the shoe-leather. That's why we talk instead of agents, as I did above. So, “agent-participancy”, then.

But Wheeler did have his finger on the right question. We need to nail down that "quantum principle"! The next level of sophistication, the next stage of understanding, is surely to abstract away the "agent-". What can we say of the situations where the "ubiquitous process" has nobody along for the ride, no agent Alice to partake? The first step to answering that, we think, is to quantify just how involved an agent is in eliciting an outcome. If Alice is a good user of quantum theory, then her expectations for one measurement must tie together with her expectations for another, rather than being a wild free-for-all. Exactly how the theory says her beliefs should mesh is an indicator of how her participation matters. Indirectly, it is a clue to what participation means.

So far, this is still only imagery. But by teasing apart the mathematics of quantum theory, unraveling the convenient conventions from the deep enigmas, perhaps the imagery can be made more precise and more evocative than ever before.

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Construction on the World Trade Center 1 (the North Tower) and World Trade Center 2 (the South Tower) began in the 1960s. They were constructed from steel and concrete, using a design that was groundbreaking at the time. Most high-rise buildings since have used a similar structure.

The investigatory reports into the events of September 11, 2001 were undertaken by the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

FEMA's report was published in 2002. This was followed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology's three-year investigation, funded by the US Federal Government and published in 2005.

Some conspiracy theorists seized on the fact the NIST investigation was funded by the federal government—believing the government itself had caused the twin towers' collapse, or was aware it would happen and deliberately didn't act.

While there have been critics of both reports (and the investigations behind them weren't flawless)—their explanation for the buildings' collapse is widely accepted. They conclude it was not caused by direct impact by the aircraft, or the use of explosives, but by fires that burned inside the buildings after impact.

Why did the towers collapse as they did?

Some have questioned why the buildings did not "topple over" after being struck side-on by aircraft. But the answer becomes clear once you consider the details.

Aircraft are made from lightweight materials, such as aluminum. If you compare the mass of an aircraft with that of a skyscraper more than 400 meters tall and built from steel and concrete, it makes sense the building would not topple over.

The towers would have been more than 1,000 times the mass of the aircraft, and designed to resist steady wind loads more than 30 times the aircrafts' weight.

That said, the aircraft did dislodge fireproofing material within the towers, which was coated on the steel columns and on the steel floor trusses (underneath the concrete slab). The lack of fireproofing left the steel unprotected.

As such, the impact also structurally damaged the supporting steel columns. When a few columns become damaged, the load they carry is transferred to other columns. This is why both towers withstood the initial impacts and didn't collapse immediately.

Progressive collapse

This fact also spawned one of the most common conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11: that a bomb or explosives must have been detonated somewhere within the buildings.

These theories have developed from video footage showing the towers rapidly collapsing downwards some time after impact, similar to a controlled demolition. But it is possible for them to have collapsed this way without explosives.

The buckling of columns initiated by floor failure. Credit: FEMA / https://www.fema.gov/pdf/library/fema403_ch2.pdf

It was fire that caused this. And this fire is believed to have come from the burning of remaining aircraft fuel.

According to the FEMA report, fire within the buildings caused thermal expansion of the floors in a horizontal and outwards direction, pushing against the rigid steel columns, which then deflected to an extent but resisted further movement.

With the columns resisting movement there was nowhere else for the concrete floors to expand. This led to an increased buildup of stress in the sagging floors, until the floor framing and connections gave in.

The floors' failure pulled the columns back inwards, eventually leading to them buckling, and the floors collapsing. The collapsing floors then fell on more floors below, leading to a progressive collapse.

This explanation, documented in the official reports, is widely accepted by experts as the cause of the twin towers' collapse. It is understood the South Tower collapsed sooner because it suffered more damage from the initial aircraft impact, which also dislodged more fireproofing material.

The debris from the collapse of the North Tower set at least ten floors alight in the nearby World Trade Center 7, or "Building 7," which also collapsed about seven hours later.

While there are different theories regarding how the progressive collapse of Building 7 was initiated, there is consensus among investigators fire was the primary cause of failure.

Both official reports made a range of fire safety recommendations for other high-rise buildings, including to improve evacuation and emergency response. In 2007, the National Institute of Standards and Technology also published a best practice guide recommending risk-reducing solutions for progressive collapse.

What does this mean for high-rise buildings?

Before 9/11, progressive collapse was not well understood by engineers. The disaster highlighted the importance of having a "global view" of fire safety for a building, as opposed to focusing on individual elements.

There have since been changes to building codes and standards on improving the structural performance of buildings on fire, as well as opportunities to escape (such as added stairwell requirements).

At the same time, the collapse of the twin towers demonstrated the very real dangers of fire in high-rise buildings. In the decades since the World Trade Center was designed, buildings have become taller and more complex, as societies demand sustainable and cost-effective housing in large cities.

Some 86 of the current 100 tallest buildings in the world were built since 9/11. This has coincided with a significant increase in building façade fires globally, which have gone up sevenfold over the past three decades.

This increase can be partly attributed to the wide use of flammable cladding. It is marketed as an innovative, cost-effective and sustainable material, yet it has shown significant shortcomings in terms of fire safety, as witnessed in the 2017 Grenfell Disaster.

The Grenfell fire (and similar cladding fires) are proof fire safety in tall buildings is still a problem. And as structures get taller and more complex, with new and innovative designs and materials, questions around fire safety will only become more difficult to answer.

The events of 9/11 may have been challenging to foresee, but the fires that led to the towers' collapse could have been better prepared for.

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While previous studies have linked peanut consumption with improved cardiovascular health among Americans, researchers in this study specifically examined the link between peanut consumption and the incidence of different types of stroke (ischemic and hemorrhagic) and cardiovascular disease events (such as stroke and ischemic heart disease) among Japanese men and women.

"We showed for the first time a reduced risk for ischemic stroke incidence associated with higher peanut consumption in an Asian population," said lead study author Satoyo Ikehara, Ph.D., specially appointed associate professor of public health in the department of social medicine at the Osaka University Graduate School of Medicine in Suita, Japan. "Our results suggest that adding peanuts to your diet has a beneficial effect on the prevention of ischemic stroke."

Peanuts are rich in heart-healthy nutrients, such as "monounsaturated fatty acids, polyunsaturated fatty acids, minerals, vitamins and dietary fiber that help lower risk of cardiovascular disease by reducing risk factors, including high blood pressure, high blood levels of 'bad' cholesterol and chronic inflammation," Ikehara said.

Researchers examined the frequency of how often people reported eating peanuts in relation to stroke occurrence and cardiovascular disease. The analysis includes people who were recruited in two phases, in 1995 and 1998-1999, for a total of more than 74,000 Asian men and women, ages 45 to 74, from the Japan Public Health Center-based Prospective Study. Participants completed a comprehensive lifestyle survey, which included a questionnaire about the frequency of peanut consumption. They were followed for approximately 15 years—through 2009 or 2012, depending on when they were originally enrolled.

The incidence of stroke and ischemic heart disease were determined by linking with 78 participating hospitals in the areas included in the study.

Researchers adjusted for other health conditions, smoking, diet, alcohol consumption and physical activity, as detailed by participants in the questionnaires. According to medical records, researchers noted 3,599 strokes (2,223 ischemic and 1,376 hemorrhagic) and 849 cases of ischemic heart disease developed during the follow-up period.

The levels of peanut consumption were ranked in four quartiles, with 0 peanuts a day as the least intake compared to 4.3 unshelled peanuts a day (median) as the highest. Compared to a peanut-free diet, researchers found eating about 4-5 unshelled peanuts per day was associated with:

• 20% lower risk of ischemic stroke;

• 16% lower risk of total stroke; and

• 13% lower risk of having cardiovascular disease (this included both stroke and ischemic heart disease).

• A significant association was not found between peanut consumption and a lower risk of hemorrhagic stroke or ischemic heart disease.

The link between peanut consumption and lowered risk of stroke and cardiovascular disease was consistent in both men and women.

"The beneficial effect of peanut consumption on risk of stroke, especially ischemic stroke was found, despite the small quantity of peanuts eaten by study participants," Ikehara said. "The habit of eating peanuts and tree nuts is still not common in Asian countries. However, adding even a small amount to one's diet could be a simple yet effective approach to help reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease."

The American Heart Association recommends eating about five servings of unsalted nuts per week; one serving is ½ ounce (2 tablespoons) of nuts. Besides peanuts, the Association also says other healthy nut options include unsalted cashews, walnuts, pecans, macadamia nuts and hazelnuts.

Several limitations were noted in the study, including the validity and reliability of peanut consumption measurements in the data collection and analysis. Bias caused by these measurements may lead to errors in the association. However, a measurement error correction analysis was performed, and the associations proved to be accurate.

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It is widely known that switching from a fat or carbohydrate-based diet to one that features more vegetables results in more flatulence—particularly if the switch is to cruciferous vegetables. But as the researchers with this new effort have noted, little research has been done to learn more about the association between diet and flatulence.

To learn more about the impact of switching to a plant-based diet on digestion and the gut biome, the researchers enlisted the assistance of 18 healthy, adult male volunteers. Each was asked to eat a western-style diet and then to switch to the plant-based Mediterranean diet for two weeks.

Over the study period, the volunteers were asked to count the number of times they defecated each day and to capture and weigh each stool sample. Each of the volunteers was also asked to count the number of times they passed gas. The volunteers were also asked to submit to randomized testing that involved measuring the amount of gas that was emitted during episodes of flatulence, using balloons.

The researchers found that the change in diet did not change the number of times the volunteers defecated each day—but it did change the amount of material discharged. The researchers found the plant-based diet doubled the stool size on average. The researchers note this was due to a huge increase in the mass of bacterial growth and excretion. The data also showed that the number of flatulence episodes increased by seven times per day on the plant-based diet—and each discharge had approximately 50% more gas. The researchers note this was due to fermenting of plant material in the gut.

The researchers suggest their experiments show that a plant-based diet promotes more healthy types of gut bacteria which leads to better overall gut health.

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Calculations indicate the magnet should allow fusion to break even, energy-wise.

Fusion startup builds 10-foot-high, 20-tesla superconducting magnet

The telescope is ready. So is the rocket. It's time.

The James Webb telescope has a bona fide launch date

The ability of the mind to generate the symptoms of illness is known as the "nocebo" effect. The nocebo effect is the unpopular twin brother of the placebo effect. Whereas the placebo effect alleviates pain and the symptoms of illness, the nocebo effect does the opposite: it generates pain and symptoms.

A 2018 study found that almost half of participants in placebo trials experience side-effects, even though they are taking inert substances. There was a similar finding in the first major trial of the Pfizer COVID vaccine in 2020. In the placebo group—who were not given the vaccine—between a quarter and a third of people reported fatigue, a similar number reported headaches, and around 10% reported muscle pain.

Indeed, Martin Michaelis and Mark Wass, bioscientists at the University of Kent, recently suggested that "for some vaccinated people the knowledge that they have been vaccinated may be sufficient to drive side-effects."

Your brain on placebos

Unlike its unpopular brother, the placebo effect is so well known that it needs little introduction. But in many ways, the placebo effect has become so familiar that it's easy to forget how strange it really is. It's bizarre that pain relief and healing can take place without actual treatment. And that powerful positive physiological effects can occur without any real physiological intervention.

Research has shown that a vast array of different conditions benefit from placebos. This includes acne, Crohn's disease, epilepsy, ulcers, multiple sclerosis, rheumatism, Parkinsons's disease and colitis. A recent study also found that placebos had a highly significant effect on erectile dysfunction.

Comparisons of placebos to antidepressants suggest that the placebo effect can play an important role in the treatment of depression. A 2008 study found no significant difference between leading antidepressants and placebos. In a 2018 study, antidepressants fared slightly better, but their effect was still only found to be "mostly modest" compared with placebos.

All of this isn't simply a matter of suggestion or delusion: real and measurable physiological changes occur. Studies have found that, when taken as painkillers, placebos decrease neurological activity related to pain and make use of many of the same neurotransmitters and neural pathways as opioids. Similarly, researchers have found that, when taken by people with Parkinson's disease, placebos can stimulate the release of dopamine, which reduces the symptoms of the condition.

Mind control and consciousness

Researchers looking into placebos have found that some factors, such as expectancy of treatment, different personality types and the patient-physician relationship, can have some bearing on the effects.

We also know that placebos can activate reward pathways in the brain—and increase levels of opioid and dopamine activity. That said, the underlying causes of the placebo effect are still mysterious.

Perhaps though, nocebo and placebo effects only seem mysterious because we are looking at them from the wrong perspective. And by this, I mean maybe if we consider an alternative view of consciousness, the placebo and nocebo effect could begin to make more sense.

The brain and the mind

In modern western culture, the mind is usually seen as a byproduct of the brain—a kind of shadow cast by neurological processes. Mental phenomena such as thoughts, memories and feelings are thought to be produced by brain activity.

If we have psychological problems, they are thought to be due to neurological imbalances that can be corrected by medication. But if this assumption is correct, how is it possible for mental processes to influence the body as well as the brain in such a powerful way?

Indeed, the difficulties of explaining consciousness purely in terms of brain processes have grown so acute that some philosophers and scientists have adopted an alternative view: that consciousness is not a direct product of the brain, but a fundamental universal quality—like mass or gravity.

This is something I look at in my recent book, Spiritual Science and it's a view that has been adopted by some contemporary philosophers—including David Chalmers and Thomas Nagel. Chalmers suggests that consciousness "does not seem to be derivable from physical laws" and believes it could be "considered a fundamental feature, irreducible to anything more basic." Nagel also suggests that the "mind is not just an afterthought or an accident or add on, but a basic aspect of nature."

Other scientists and philosophers—such as Christof Koch and Phillip Goff—have adopted similar theories, which suggest that the mind or consciousness is a basic quality of material particles.

These approaches are not yet widely accepted, and would need to gather more evidence to support them. And there are some difficult issues that need to be addressed: for example, if consciousness is a fundamental quality, how does it end up in individual conscious beings such as ourselves? Or, if consciousness exists in particles of matter, how does the consciousness of those particles combine to produce larger conscious entities such as human beings?

More mainstream scientists still hope that a neurological explanation of consciousness will be found, that will help to throw some light on "rogue" phenomena like the nocebo and placebo effects. But taking the philosophical idea of consciousness as fundamental might suggest that the mind is in some way more powerful than the brain and the body, and so could influence the latter in a profound way—and it might help explain one day why placebo pills can bring about real physiological and neurological changes in many people.

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Pigeons, Curves, and the Traveling Salesperson Problem

"At first I thought, 'It's a hoax, it can't be true.' But it turned out to be true." 

Confirmed: A duck named Ripper learned how to say “You bloody fool!”

Airbus is to implement a software update for its A330 aircraft following an incident in 2020 where all three primary flight computers failed during landing.

The result was a loss of thrust reversers and autobrake systems and the pilots having to use manual braking to bring the aircraft, a China Airlines A330-302, to a halt just 30 feet before the end of the runway. The incident happened at Taipei Songshan Airport on 14 June 2020.

The flight, CI202 from Shanghai with 87 passengers and nine cabin crew members, had been uneventful. The landing, however, was anything but.

The final report [PDF] published by the Taiwan Transport Safety Board (TTSB) and reported in The Aviation Herald details the incident as it unfolded.

It was raining at the airport as the aircraft approached so the runway was wet (although still well within margins). The captain disengaged the autopilot at approximately 773 feet and continued the approach. The A330 touched down between 1,500 and 2,000 feet from the runway threshold and then, judging by the report, everything went to Hell.

Three seconds after touchdown, an autobrake system fault was recorded. A second after that, faults were recorded on the primary flight control computers and the spoilers were retracted. Reverse thrust could not be applied and, a few seconds later, the captain called to the first officer to assist with manual braking. Both pilots then applied full brakes and the aircraft was eventually brought to a halt.

"Seems the pilots did a good job," a tame Airbus pilot told The Register. "You know it's bad when the captain tells the FO to help him on the brakes to stop the aircraft!"

As for the cause, the report pointed to the three Flight Control Primary Computers (FCPCs) becoming inoperative almost at the same time. Ground spoiler functionality needs one FCPC, autobrake arming needs two, and thrust reversers require an unlock signal from either FCPC1 or FCPC3.

According to the report: "The root cause was determined to be an undue triggering of the rudder order COM/MON monitoring concomitantly in the 3 FCPC. At the time of the aircraft lateral control flight law switching to lateral ground law at touch down, the combination of a high COM/MON channels asynchronism and the pilot pedal inputs resulted in the rudder order difference between the two channels to exceed the monitoring threshold."

The result was FCPC1 failing. Control of the flight system was then handed over to FCPC2 and 3 in sequence, both of which also experienced COM/MON channel asynchronism and became inoperative.

COM (Command) and MON (Monitor) is a standard protocol for Airbus Fly By Wire aircraft, with the monitor watchdog switching to another computer (command) in the event inputs diverge outside of acceptability. As our Airbus pilot put it: "Stick monkey (or autopilot) puts in command and clever Franco-German computer monitors input for correctness."

In this instance, the aircraft was shifting from flight to ground law as the pilot was applying the rudder (not particularly unusual, especially if there is crosswind on landing). Since the rudder deflects differently between ground and flight law a conflict occurred and the system was flagged as faulty. Then the same thing cascaded through the second and third FCPCs.

Airbus noted that it was the first triple fault at touchdown since the A330/A340 aircraft had entered service (and the electrical rudder-fitted family had put in 44.3m flight hours up to April 2020).

The immediate action taken was to remind operators of what to do in the event of such a triple failure. Longer term, however, is a software enhancement "to address the root cause."

According to the report, Airbus's modification, which is targeted to arrive by Q3 2022 for the A330-200 and A330-800, Q3 2023 for the A330-300, and mid 2024 for the A330-900, will include:

• Decrease of the COM/MON asynchronism level for the flight/ground information treatment
• Improvement of the COM/MON rudder order monitoring robustness in case of ground to flight and flight to ground transitions
• Higher unitary monitoring robustness during such transitions
• Avoid cascading/"domino's" effect that leads to several PRIM fault

The Register asked Airbus for its response to the report, but the aviation giant has yet to comment.

In a world of increasing automation, the incident serves as a reminder of the importance of keeping a human backup in the loop. ®

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Last October, a large group of scientists made their way to Yuri Milner’s super-mansion in the Los Altos Hills above Palo Alto. They were tested for covid-19 and wore masks as they assembled in theater on the property for a two-day scientific conference. Others joined by teleconference. The topic: how biotechnology might be used to make people younger.

Milner is a Russian-born billionaire who made a fortune on Facebook and Mail.ru and previously started the glitzy black-tie Breakthrough Prizes, $3 million awards given each year to outstanding physicists, biologists, and mathematicians. But Milner’s enthusiasm for science was taking a provocative and specific new direction. As the scientific sessions progressed, experts took the stage to describe radical attempts at “rejuvenating” animals.

That meeting has now led to the formation of an ambitious new anti-aging company called Altos Labs, according to people familiar with the plans. Altos is pursuing biological reprogramming technology, a way to rejuvenate cells in the lab that some scientists think could be extended to revitalize entire animal bodies, ultimately prolonging human life.

The new company, incorporated in the US and in the UK earlier this year, will establish several institutes in places including the Bay Area, San Diego, Cambridge, UK and Japan, and is recruiting a large cadre of university scientists with lavish salaries and the promise that they can pursue unfettered blue-sky research on how cells age and how to reverse that process.

Some people briefed by the company have been told that its investors include Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person, who stepped down as CEO of Amazon in July and weeks later risked his life by jumping into a rocket capsule to reach outer space. Milner and his wife Julia confirmed through a spokesperson they are investors in Altos through a foundation.

Altos is certain to draw comparisons to Calico Labs, a longevity company announced in 2013 by Google co-founder, Larry Page. Calico also hired elite scientific figures and gave them generous budgets, although it’s been questioned whether the Google spinout has made much progress. Calico has also started a lab whose focus is reprogramming; it published its first preprint on the topic this year.

Among the scientists said to be joining Altos are Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte, a Spanish biologist at the Salk Institute, in La Jolla, California, who has won notoriety for research mixing human and monkey embryos and who has predicted that human lifespans could be increased by 50 years. Salk declined to comment.

Also joining is Steve Horvath, a UCLA professor and developer of a “biological clock” that can accurately measure human aging. Shinya Yamanaka, who shared a 2012 Nobel Prize for the discovery of reprogramming, will be an unpaid senior scientist and will chair the company’s scientific advisory board.

Yamanaka’s breakthrough discovery was that with the addition of just four proteins, now known as Yamanaka factors, cells can be instructed to revert to a primitive state with the properties of embryonic stem cells. By 2016, Izpisúa Belmonte’s lab had applied these factors to entire living mice, achieving signs of age reversal and leading him to term reprogramming a potential “elixir of life.”

The results of such mouse experiments, while tantalizing, were also frightening. Depending on how much reprogramming occurred, some mice developed ugly embryonic tumors called teratomas, even as others showed signs their tissues had become younger.

“Although there are many hurdles to overcome, there is huge potential,” Yamanaka said in an email, in which he confirmed his role in Altos.

Mid-life crisis?

It’s been said that young people dream of being rich, and rich people dream of being young. That paradox is one that people like Milner, age 59, and Bezos, who is 57 years old, may feel acutely. Forbes currently ranks Bezos as the world’s richest person, with a net worth of around $200 billion. Milner’s wealth is estimated at $4.8 billion.

Bezos Expeditions, the investment office of Amazon’s founder, did not reply to an email seeking comment.

People familiar with the formation of Altos say that initially Milner’s interest in reprogramming was philanthropic. After the meeting at his home, a non-profit called the Milky Way Research Foundation sponsored by Milner awarded three-year grants, of $1 million a year, to several longevity researchers. The proposals were considered by an advisory board including Yamanaka and Jennifer Doudna, who shared a Breakthrough Prize in 2015 and later a Nobel in 2020 for her co-discovery of CRISPR genome editing.

Sometime during 2021, however, a new plan emerged to make the research move even faster by turning the idea into a well-funded company that is now Altos. That effort took shape under the direction of Richard Klausner, the one-time chief of the National Cancer Institute and now an entrepreneur. Klausner, who previously helped start companies like Juno Therapeutics and cancer-test company Grail, is known for organizing large, and lucrative, financial bets on new biotechnologies.

According to an incorporation filing in the UK for Altos Labs, Klausner is CEO of the new company. Klausner did not respond to attempts to contact him by email and phone. Like Milner, he also lives in Los Altos Hills.

A number of startups are pursuing reprogramming technology, including Life Biosciences, Turn Biotechnologies, AgeX Therapeutics, and Shift Bioscience in the UK, although these efforts have not yet led to any treatments tested on people in clinical trials.

“There are hundreds of millions of dollars being raised by investors to invest in reprogramming, specifically aimed at rejuvenating parts or all of the human body,” says David Sinclair, a researcher at Harvard University who last December reported restoring sight to mice using the technique.

Sinclair describes the field as “nascent” but thinks it has unique promise. “What else can you do that can reverse the age of the body?” he says. “In my lab we are ticking off the major organs and tissues, for instance skin, muscle and brain —to see which we can rejuvenate.” Sinclair says he is not involved in Altos but he did speak at the 2020 meeting and applied for an award from Milky Way.

A science business

Altos hasn’t made an official announcement yet, but it was incorporated in Delaware this year and a securities disclosure filed in California in June indicates the company has raised at least $270 million, according to Will Gornall, a business school professor at the University of British Columbia who reviewed the document. In addition to Bezos and Milner, the company may have additional wealthy tech figures and venture capitalists as investors.

Other hires made by Altos include Peter Walter, whose laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco, is behind a molecule that shows remarkable effects on memory. Also joining is Wolf Reik, a reprogramming specialist who recently resigned as the director of the Babraham Institute in the UK after the center said he was taking a job “with another research organization” now believed to be Altos. Walter and Reik declined to comment.

At least initially, Altos will be funding researchers with no immediate expectation for products or revenues. According to one person briefed by Klausner and Milner, the initial output of the company will be “great science.”

Altos is luring university professors by offering sports-star salaries of $1 million a year or more, plus equity, as well as freedom from the hassle of applying for grants. One researcher who confirmed accepting a job offer from Altos, Manuel Serrano of the Institute for Research in Biomedicine, in Barcelona, Spain, said the company would pay him five to 10 times what he earns now.

“The philosophy of Altos Labs is to do curiosity-driven research. This is what I know how to do and love to do,” says Serrano, who plans to move to Cambridge, UK to join an Altos facility there. “In this case, through a private company, we have the freedom to be bold and explore. In this way it will rejuvenate me.”

Any treatment for a major disease of aging could be worth billions, but Altos isn’t counting on making money at first. “The aim is to understand rejuvenation,” says Serrano. “I would say the idea of having revenue in the future is there, but it’s not the immediate goal.”

In 2013, Serrano was the first scientist to genetically engineer mice to produce Yamanaka factors. They all developed tumors as their cells reverted to an embryonic stage. Still, the work hinted that time could be reversed inside a living animal. “You introduce the factors and they do the magic. It’s very simple experimentally, even if it is not understood,” says Serrano.

The major question now is how to tailor reprogramming to see if it can safely rejuvenate animals without killing them, and whether the process can be carried out using ordinary drugs, rather than via genetic engineering. “To me the Yamanaka factors are not realistic for use in the clinic,” Serrano says. “They involve the introduction of genes, some of which are oncogenic. This is hard to pass through the filter of regulatory agencies.”

Some experts say investment in anti-aging techniques is something government funding agencies are not able to do quickly enough.

“If you see something in the distance that looks like a giant pile of gold, then you should run quickly,” says Martin Borch Jensen, chief scientific officer of Gordian Biotechnology. To speed research, Jensen says this year he will be giving out $20 million worth of rapid turn-around “Impetus” grants using funds from donors.

“There’s a big bet now,” Jensen says. “It’s ‘Let’s see if reprogramming works. Let’s see if molecular clocks can be biomarkers.’ If it does work, it’s going to have a huge impact.”

Too early?

Some researchers question whether reprogramming is a technology that can really benefit from hundreds of millions in commercial investment. Alejandro Ocampo, who used to work in Izpisúa Belmonte’s Salk lab, and is now a professor at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, is skeptical that reprogramming technology is ready to turn into medicine any time soon.

“I think the concept is strong, but there is a lot of hype. It’s far away from translation,” he says. “It’s risky and it’s a long way from a human therapy.” One problem is that reprogramming doesn’t just make cells act younger but also changes their identity—for instance, turning a skin cell into a stem cell. That is what makes the technology too dangerous to try on people yet.

Ocampo also worries that there is too much money, and too many companies, trying to get into the research area. “I think it’s moving too fast. I don’t know if we should have five to eight reprogramming companies —it looks too quick,” he says. “How many papers have there even been in in vivo reprogramming? It’s the same as the number of companies.”

On the other hand, the technique has an indisputable, repeatable, effect in laboratory experiments when applied to individual cells. “You can take a cell from an 80-year old  and, in vitro, reverse the age by 40 years. There is no other technology that can do that,” says Ocampo.

What’s more, reprogramming is also recognized as a key process that occurs naturally when a fertilized egg turns into an embryo and, nine months later, leads to a fresh-faced baby. Somehow, the DNA of the parents is scrubbed, renewed, and restarted. After trillions of baby animals have been born over a billion years, Ocampo thinks it’s safe to say that “reprogramming is one of the experiments that has been reproduced the most.”

Altos will also be working with a related technology for measuring the relative age of a cell, or a person. That biological-clock technique, pioneered by Horvath, involves measuring the “epigenetic” marks on genes. These molecular features turn genes on and off, but their pattern becomes disorganized as people age. Such a biomarker of aging would be an important way to measure the effect of any longevity or age-reversal drug that is developed. It’s difficult to run a medical study that demonstrates life extension, since it would take too long, but a biomarker could be employed instead.

There is also a strong scientific connection between aging clocks and reprogramming, since reprogramming appears to work by remodeling the epigenetic marks in a cell’s genome to an immature or naive state. That means Altos will be working at the leading edge of both causing and measuring rejuvenation.

Young and rich

Bezos is said to have a fairly long-standing interest in longevity research, and he previously invested in an anti-aging company called Unity Biotechnology. Rumors of the billionaire making a seismic-sized splash into the field have swirled for months.

While Technology Review could not confirm the scope of his stake in Altos, what’s sure is that getting older is on his mind. In his final letter to Amazon shareholders, Bezos included a quote ruminating on death and decay that he’d found in a book by the biologist Richard Dawkins: “Staving off death is a thing that you have to work at…If living things don’t actively work to prevent it, they would eventually merge with their surroundings and cease to exist as autonomous beings. That is what happens when they die.”

Bezos meant that nations, companies, and individuals have to fight to remain distinct, original and unique. Rewinding the clock to your younger days could be one way to do that.

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After a first attempt brought up an empty tube, the rover finally cored a sample.

 

As the Perseverance rover drilled into a rock on Wednesday to collect a sample from Jezero Crater on Mars, Justin Simon, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, felt both nervous and excited. He has the honor of serving as the “sample shepherd,” leading the effort from millions of miles away, but the pressure’s on. “These samples not only will allow us to understand the geology of the crater but also minerals likely related to the history of water there,” he said yesterday.

 

But first, the rover had to actually capture a chunk of rock in a test-tube-sized container. An initial attempt in early August had come up empty. That first rock, nicknamed “Roubion,” simply crumbled to dust as the drill bored into it, and none of those bits made it into the container.

Simon can now breathe a sigh of relief. Perseverance’s second try, with a different rock, appears to have successfully extracted a Martian core slightly thicker than a pencil.

 

“We got that image of just a spectacular-looking core, a fantastic-looking cylinder, broken off cleanly. It looks geologically very interesting, something scientists of the future will enjoy working on,” says Ken Farley, a Caltech geochemist and project scientist of the Perseverance mission, which is led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

 

But the analysis of the new sample is going to take awhile, because NASA scientists haven’t been able to get clear photographs due to low lighting conditions, which makes the images tough to interpret. To add more drama for the scientists, when Perseverance did a “percuss-to-ingest” procedure—shaking the sample to make sure the tube wasn't overfilled, which would make the system jam when it’s stored—one image appeared to show an empty sample tube. (They’re pretty sure they got the sample, but they’re going to try taking more images in better light over the next couple of days.)

 

Perseverance’s first drill attempt, which essentially pulverized the sample, wasn’t a complete failure, as it yielded evidence suggesting the rock had been weathered, worn down by a river flowing into the lake crater billions of years ago. “It always had been possible that this lake was a transient event, like maybe a comet, rich in water, hit Mars and made lakes, and then it boiled away or froze within tens of years. But that would not produce the weathering we see,” said Farley in an interview earlier this week.

 

Since that rock was too powdery, the scientists then piloted the rover to a new area, looking for a different kind of rock to sample, using the Ingenuity copter to scout ahead. Perseverance trundled slightly to the west, where on a ridgeline the researchers found a larger, boulder-like rock, which they nicknamed “Rochette” and which seemed less likely to disintegrate when the rover deployed its tools on it. “It looks like a rock that, if you could throw it, would clank down on the ground. A good, healthy rock,” Farley said.

 

Before each sampling attempt, Perseverance performs reconnaissance by snapping a bunch of photos of a candidate rock. Last weekend, it also performed an abrasion test to see if Rochette was durable enough to sample. The rover is equipped with a rotary percussive drill (with extra drill bits) that both spins and hammers into the rock. This tool helps clear away dust and chip through the weathered outer layer. The abrasion was spectacularly successful, according to Farley, so the scientists decided to go ahead with grabbing a sample. Perseverance extended its 7-foot-long robotic arm, fired up the drill, and carefully extracted a core sample. Then it rotated the arm’s “hand” so that the sample tube could be inspected.

Images from the rover’s Mastcam-Z instrument—a pair of zoomable cameras that shoot images of the landscape from atop the rover—showed that rock indeed made it into the tube this time. After the percuss-to-ingest maneuver, Mastcam-Z took a second set of pictures. One showed that there was no material stuck in the mouth of the tube, which is desirable, since the tube needs to be cleanly closed and stored away. But another image seemed to show darkness in the tube, which worried the researchers: The move could have shaken the rock out of the tube, leaving it empty. Or they could simply be dealing with bad lighting and the interference of shadows; Farley compares the angle of the photo to looking down a pipe on a sunny day. Despite that inconclusive image, “everyone seems confident that it’s in there,” he says.

 

At that point, the researchers could have assumed the rock was collected properly and instructed Perseverance to seal up the tube and proceed. But just to be sure, they’ve decided to take more images under different lighting conditions, and then make the go/no-go decision on Saturday. In the unlikely scenario the rover accidentally shook the entire sample out of the tube, they could bore again. That way they’re not storing an empty tube after so much work.

 

Once a rock sample is confirmed, Perseverance will stow it in its belly and continue exploring. If all goes according to plan, Perseverance will amass dozens of rock samples from throughout Jezero Crater over the next couple of years, then cache them for a future sample return mission to pick up. They will expand scientists’ understanding of this neighboring world’s past, when it was likely less arid and more friendly to life.

 

“It’s exciting to explore an ancient habitable world,” said Simon. He and other scientists believe that some 4 billion years ago, Jezero Crater was flooded with water, as it looks like the remains of a river delta. On Earth, deltas provide not just water but also nutrient-rich silt, and their ecosystems are home to numerous species. Jezero’s ancient delta might have once hosted Martian microbes, but long ago the planet lost most of its water and its atmosphere, and the climate changed dramatically. By 8 billion years ago, it had become a desiccated, barren world.

 

“Every rock we can get from Mars tells its own story. There are multiple stories to be told from layers in the crater floor,” said Kirsten Siebach, a planetary geologist at Rice University in Houston, speaking earlier this week. The crater doesn’t just hold evidence of a long-lost lake, but also lava flows. Based on the minerals within them, many of the rocks appear volcanic, she said, though scientists haven’t found clear signs of a fissure or a volcano that lava could have bubbled or exploded out of billions of years ago.

 

These are the layers of history that Siebach hopes Perseverance can probe with its new rock samples. The rover’s arm has other useful tools mounted on it, including the SHERLOC and WATSON cameras, and PIXL, which uses x-ray fluorescence to pick out chemical elements.

 

“Perseverance is looking for evidence of biomarkers, signs of habitable environments. That’s why we went to a delta,” said Ryan Anderson, a physical scientist at the US Geological Survey’s Astrogeology Science Center, speaking earlier this week. “Fine-grain sediments are good at trapping organic molecules, which bond with clay molecules.” These could be the potential signatures of an ancient, life-friendly world, a history written in the rocks.

 

The rover has 43 sample tubes, most of which NASA scientists hope to fill. Perseverance will then leave that rock collection in the crater and wander into other terrain. Considering that the rocks strewn around the ground have already gone undisturbed for eons, NASA doesn’t expect little green men to steal the bounty, or for it to be covered by a sandstorm, like the fictional one that stranded Matt Damon.

 

“What we all hope is that the samples will represent the most diverse representation of environments we can get. This is a huge leap for us as a space-exploring species. The only other samples of Mars are from meteorites,” said Pamela Conrad, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution of Science in Washington, DC. Occasional meteorites striking the Red Planet’s surface fling bits into space, some of which eventually make their way to Earth. But unlike Perseverance’s rock samples, those pieces of Martian terrain have been corrupted by impacts and space radiation, making it tough for scientists to learn much about the world’s history.

 

At the moment, though, Perseverance is awaiting instructions from NASA scientists. “Its robotic arm is literally in a pose like the Statue of Liberty, with the tube pointed upward,” Farley says. The untiring rover will stay in that position for a few days until NASA’s sure it has its first sample and is ready to move on.

Second Time’s the Charm: NASA’s Perseverance Drills a Mars Rock

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