first entered Louisiana State Penitentiary in the early 60s, at the age of 18. I was in and out of that place for the rest of the decade. Back then, if you were young, black and had a record, police in New Orleans would come looking for you when they had a backlog of unsolved cases: it was called cleaning the books.

In 1969, I was locked up for a robbery I didn't do and, while inside, I joined the Black Panthers. Three years later, an inmate was stabbed to death on my prison block and, because of my politics, the authorities saw a chance to pin it on me. In 2001, I was cleared of this killing but, by then, I had spent 29 years alone in a cell.

It was a dimly lit box, 9ft by 6ft, with bars at the front facing on to the bare cement walls of a long corridor. Inside was a narrow bed, a toilet, a fixed table and chair, and an air vent set into the back wall.

Some days I would pace up and down and from left to right for hours, counting to myself. I learned to know every inch of the cell. Maybe I looked crazy walking back and forth like some trapped animal, but I had no choice – I needed to feel in control of my space.

At times I felt an anguish that is hard to put into words. To live 24/7 in a box, year after year, without the possibility of parole, probation or the suspension of sentence is a terrible thing to endure.

I was kept in the closed cell restricted (CCR) wing of the penitentiary, which is also known as Angola, after the slave plantation that was on the site prior to the prison. Three times a week I was let out for an hour to go to the exercise yard, where I was kept separate from other prisoners by razor wire.

The wardens tried to discourage us from talking, but we defied them. We were beaten up and prisoners were found hanging in their cells. Whenever I was disciplined, it was for talking. I didn't care, I refused to let them dehumanise me.

The worst punishment was the "cold box", our name for the cell within Camp J. It was down a long hallway through three sets of secure doors, and when they pushed me inside, the isolation was total. They would keep me there for a month, in blocks of 10 days, shoving food through a slot in the door. I went for days without speaking to anyone. That kind of sensory deprivation was torture for me – to survive I knew I had to keep my mind active.

One pastime I had was smuggling out praline candies that I made on my cell floor. I traded tobacco to get the ingredients of sugar, peanuts and powdered milk. I made them using a cold drink can for a pot and burning toilet paper to melt sugar.

Another thing I did was to fold up toilet paper into squares and stick them to the floor with toothpaste to make a chessboard. I would call out moves to other inmates. When we were in nearby cells I played with Herman Wallace or Albert Woodfox. Like me, they were Black Panthers kept in solitary because they were seen as a threat. They had started a chapter of the Panthers, which had helped mobilise inmates to curb some of the abuse going on inside Angola at the time.

They are still in solitary after nearly 38 years – more than any other inmate in the American prison system. They were convicted of killing a prison guard in 1972, but there's a lot of evidence that they're innocent.

Since my conviction was overturned in 2001, I have travelled constantly, educating people about the widespread use of solitary confinement in America. The words of the US Constitution prohibit what is called "cruel and unusual punishment", and yet that phrase could have been written to describe solitary confinement.

When I walked out of Angola, I didn't realise how permanently the experience of solitary would mark me. Even now my sight is impaired. I find it very difficult to judge long distances – a result of living in such a small space. Emotionally, too, I've found it hard to move on. I talk about my 29 years in solitary as if it was the past, but the truth is it never leaves you. In some ways I am still there. I made a statement when I was released that although I was free of Angola, it would never be free of me. Until Herman and Albert can join me on the outside, I have to make good on that promise.

As told to Paul Willis

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The fast-moving outbreak was first detected in mid-June in Sydney, Australia's largest city, which has reported more than 600 new infections in each of the last four days.

The virus has spread to Melbourne, the nation's second-most populous city, and has seeded New Zealand's first outbreak in six months.

The neighboring nations have succeeded in using lockdowns to stamp out clusters throughout the pandemic. But the delta variant is proving more challenging.

Victoria state Premier Daniel Andrews said he is losing hope of eliminating the latest outbreak in Melbourne, which entered its sixth lockdown on Aug. 5.

Victoria reported 55 new community infections on Friday. But most new patients were infectious before they began isolating, making "today a bad day," Andrews said.

"We are right on the edge of this getting away from us and it's not because contact tracing aren't doing everything they can; they are. It's not because we didn't lock down fast enough; we did," Andrews said.

"It's this delta variant. It's so wildly infectious it will find every breach of every rule and it will potentially spread because of that," he said.

A previous outbreak in Melbourne swelled to 725 cases in a day in August last year before a suppression strategy drove daily infections down to zero in October.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said on Friday she is determined to eliminate the new outbreak from her country.

The virus, first detected in New Zealand's largest city of Auckland on Tuesday, has spread to the capital, Wellington.

Health authorities said three people in Wellington who recently visited Auckland had tested positive.

The outbreak has grown to 31 cases, and some patients were diverted from an Auckland hospital after one person may have unknowingly been infectious while being treated there, officials said.

New Zealand's government on Tuesday hurriedly put the entire nation into a strict lockdown after the first community case was found. Genome testing has linked the outbreak to an infected traveler who returned from Sydney earlier this month and was quarantined. Authorities don't yet know how the virus escaped quarantine.

All of New Zealand will remain in lockdown until at least next Tuesday.

Sydney's lockdown was extended through September on Friday and tougher restrictions were imposed, including a curfew and compulsory mask wearing outdoors.

The city of 5 million has been locked down since June 26, 10 days after the delta variant was first detected in an unvaccinated limousine driver who became infected while transporting a U.S. cargo aircrew from Sydney Airport.

New South Wales state Premier Gladys Berejiklian said increasing vaccination rates is key to easing the city's pandemic restrictions.

The new restrictions were the result of her asking police and health officials for a final list of "what else can we throw at this," she said.

"I don't want us to ever look back and say we didn't try, we didn't put everything into this," Berejiklian said.

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The foray, the second spacewalk in two months and relayed on state television, is part of China's heavily promoted space programme which has already seen the nation land a rover on Mars and send probes to the moon.

In June, three crew arrived at the station, where they are set to remain in space for a total of three months in China's longest crewed mission to date.

On Friday, astronauts Nie Haisheng and Liu Boming successfully exited the Tianhe core module to install foot stops and a workbench on the station's robotic arm, said the China Manned Space Agency in a statement.

Video footage showed the astronauts working outside the spacecraft while tethered to it with a long rope.

Their tasks also include working on a thermal unit and adjusting a panoramic camera, state broadcaster CCTV reported.

This marks only the third spacewalk for Chinese astronauts, after the first in 2008—when Zhai Zhigang made China the third country to complete a spacewalk after the Soviet Union and the United States.

The second took place in early July, when Liu and the third crew member Tang Hongbo left the station.

It is China's first crewed mission in nearly five years and a matter of huge prestige as the country marks the 100th anniversary of the ruling Communist Party.

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The findings, published August 19, 2021, in Nature Human Behaviour, show that two key brain functions, which allow us to attend to new information and to focus on what's important in a given situation, can in fact improve in older individuals. These functions underlie critical aspects of cognition such as memory, decision making, and self-control, and even navigation, math, language, and reading.

"These results are amazing, and have important consequences for how we should view aging," says the study's senior investigator, Michael T. Ullman, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Neuroscience, and Director of Georgetown's Brain and Language Lab.

"People have widely assumed that attention and executive functions decline with age, despite intriguing hints from some smaller-scale studies that raised questions about these assumptions," he says. "But the results from our large study indicate that critical elements of these abilities actually improve during aging, likely because we simply practice these skills throughout our life."

"This is all the more important because of the rapidly aging population, both in the US and around the world," Ullman says. He adds that with further research, it may be possible to deliberately improve these skills as protection against brain decline in healthy aging and disorders.

The research team, which includes first author João Veríssimo, Ph.D., an assistant professor at the University of Lisbon, Portugal, looked at three separate components of attention and executive function in a group of 702 participants aged 58 to 98. They focused on these ages since this is when cognition often changes the most during aging.

The components they studied are the brain networks involved in alerting, orienting, and executive inhibition. Each has different characteristics and relies on different brain areas and different neurochemicals and genes. Therefore, Ullman and Veríssimo reasoned, the networks may also show different aging patterns.

Alerting is characterized by a state of enhanced vigilance and preparedness in order to respond to incoming information. Orienting involves shifting brain resources to a particular location in space. The executive network inhibits distracting or conflicting information, allowing us to focus on what's important.

"We use all three processes constantly," Veríssimo explains. "For example, when you are driving a car, alerting is your increased preparedness when you approach an intersection. Orienting occurs when you shift your attention to an unexpected movement, such as a pedestrian. And executive function allows you to inhibit distractions such as birds or billboards so you can stay focused on driving."

The study found that only alerting abilities declined with age. In contrast, both orienting and executive inhibition actually improved.

The researchers hypothesize that because orienting and inhibition are simply skills that allow people to selectively attend to objects, these skills can improve with lifelong practice. The gains from this practice can be large enough to outweigh the underlying neural declines, Ullman and Veríssimo suggest. In contrast, they believe that alerting declines because this basic state of vigilance and preparedness cannot improve with practice.

"Because of the relatively large number of participants, and because we ruled out numerous alternative explanations, the findings should be reliable and so may apply quite broadly," Veríssimo says. Moreover, he explains that "because orienting and inhibitory skills underlie numerous behaviors, the results have wide-ranging implications."

"The findings not only change our view of how aging affects the mind, but may also lead to clinical improvements, including for patients with aging disorders such as Alzheimer's disease," says Ullman.

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Thanks to a big donation, Caltech has funded a sci-fi-sounding project.

Where the sun always shines: Putting solar in space

Unlike humans, the cuttlefish analog of episodic memory doesn't deteriorate with age.

Cuttlefish remember the what, when, and where of meals—even into old age

Intermittent fasting, also known as time-restricted eating, could also be a cost-efficient intervention to prevent type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease, and liver cancer, a team from the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California says. Fasting for a longer period could also better protect against infectious diseases like COVID-19 and even save people from dying of sepsis.

Intermittent fasting is a dietary regimen that’s growing in popularity. The diet holds people to eating between an eight-hour window and could have multiple health benefits besides weight loss. Researchers fed a high-fat, high-sugar diet to mice from two different age groups — equivalent to 20 and 42-year-old humans.

The team ran tests and compared the outcomes of time-restricted eating (TRE) on fatty liver disease, glucose regulation, muscle mass, performance and endurance, and sepsis survival rates. Researchers also worked at night to match the animals’ circadian clocks, working with night vision goggles and specialized lighting.

Regardless of age, sex or weight loss, TRE strongly protected against fatty liver disease. Estimates show that up to 20 percent of U.S. adults have non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, where there are small amounts of fat in their livers. This can lead to serious liver damage, including cirrhosis, over more time passes.

Can intermittent fasting prevent serious hospital complications?

Oral glucose tolerance tests given to mice after 16 hours of fasting indicated that intermittent fasting was associated with a lower increase in blood glucose and a faster return to normal blood sugar levels in both young and middle-aged males, with a significant improvement in glucose tolerance in young and middle-aged females. Similarly, middle-aged mice on TRE were able to restore normal blood sugar levels more efficiently than control mice, who had food available at all times.

The researchers also found that intermittent fasting may protect both males and females from sepsis-induced death. This is a particular danger in ICUs, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.

After administering a toxin that induced a sepsis-like condition in the mice, the researchers monitored survival rates for 13 days and found that TRE protected both male and female mice from dying of sepsis.

A muscle boost for seniors

Professor Satchidananda Panda says the intermittent fasting diet even enabled male mice to preserve and add muscle mass and improve muscle performance. Study authors did not observe the same effect in females. The team says this is a major finding for the elderly, who are at the highest risk of fall-related injuries.

“For many TRE clinical interventions, the primary outcome is weight loss, but we’ve found that TRE is good not only for metabolic disease but also for increased resilience against infectious diseases and insulin resistance,” Panda says in a university release.

“This was our first time studying female mice, and we weren’t sure what to expect,” adds Dr. Amandine Chaix, an assistant professor at the University of Utah. “We were surprised to find that, although the females on TRE were not protected from weight gain, they still showed metabolic benefits, including less-fatty livers and better-controlled blood sugar.”

The findings appear in the journal Cell Reports.

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The deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) origami base-pair key-in-lock method they devised yields sphere-like icosahedral shells that kill viruses by clamping around each virion (the complete, infective form of a virus outside a host cell) until it is dead, dead, dead.

"Computational methods are an integral part of our work, from the initial design phase to the data processing for the final cryogenic electron microscopy," explains Hendrik Dietz,   a professor of biomolecular nanotechnology at TUM. "In one way or another, all members of my team are using computer modeling."

Shawn Douglas, a professor of molecular engineering at the University of California at San Francisco, said the work by Dietz and his team "is a remarkable demonstration of the power and versatility of DNA origami hierarchical assembly by non-covalent shape complementarity, a method that was also pioneered by the Dietz Lab. These new icosahedral shells are beautiful and inspiring artifacts of molecular engineering. I am excited to see how the team and their collaborators can adapt this system for in vivo applications in the coming years." 

The method uses a combination of software engineering, computational chemistry, and complementary DNA base-pair key-in-lock scaffolding to create icosahedral "traps" that snap shut around a target virus, isolating it harmlessly from both infecting and duplicating, and resulting in its eventual death.

The genetic engineering involved in the process does not tamper with human DNA; instead, the researchers use the universal building blocks of DNA—synthetic versions of the nucleotides cytosine, guanine, adenine, and thymine. A "virus trap" composed of locked-in-place isometric triangles is constructed in a spherical shape. A specific combination of nucleotides is first modeled in simulation to be the correct size to handle the target virus, then constructed using synthetic DNA from scientific laboratory suppliers. A coating is then inserted into the shell's interior to trap the virus inside, and a cap is added to block its exit. In practice, the virus victim's blood is flooded with the traps, which safely capture the individual virions and destroy them.

Dietz' TUM lab used a battery of software to model, simulate, validate, construct, and test prototype traps, the first of which were designed for hepatitis-B. The virus traps were tested in vitro (in a test tube or elsewhere outside the body) and were observed to be capable of trapping a targeted virus through the use of single-particle cryo-electron microscopy, which harnesses computationally intensive machine learning algorithms, according to Dietz. Subsequent in vivo (within a living organism) testing on mice showed the DNA-origami traps were capable of targeting individual virions inside the body, disarming them without disrupting bodily functions, and finally destroying them with natural immunological mechanisms. Human trials, however, are years away.

Dietz said the interior of the shells were coated with "antibodies specific for the hepatitis-B virus. You can think of the shells as a generic platform; depending on your selection of inner coatings, you can 'program' them to be specific for a user-defined target virus."

To ease the future work of applying this virus-killing methodology to all the viral strains that plague the human condition, the researchers "pre-engineered" a computer library of shell designs with different internal diameters. Depending on the size of the next target virus, the appropriate shell designs are available on hard disk, ready to be constructed with synthetic DNA, then functionalized with the appropriate antibody coating.

In addition to hepatitis-B, the researchers have already tested the methodology on viruses associated with maladies such as adenocarcinoma, a type of cancer for which viruses are a major risk factor, albeit only in vitro cell cultures. Aside from tackling coronaviruses next, there are many other acute viral infections that today can only be prevented by vaccines, but for which there are no sure-fire treatments after infection has occurred. The flexibility of the virus-killing method holds promise for the treatment of even the most dangerous viruses.

The Dietz Lab is working with Brandeis University's Fraden Lab to move from proof of concept to mass-production capabilities for constructing traps for all sorts of virus.

"Dynamical simulations of our model made predictions for how the assembly kinetics (shells assembled as a function of time) depends on the subunit concentration and strength of interactions between subunits. The simulations show that overly strong interactions lead to poor assembly (incomplete or malformed shells), as was seen in the experiments," said computational scientist Michael Hagan, a professor at Brandeis University. "The simulations also predict that certain sets of subunit interactions lead to highly efficient assembly pathways in which subunits assemble hierarchically (into small multi-subunit clusters, which then assemble into complete shells). We are working with the Fraden lab and the Dietz Lab to experimentally test this prediction."

R. Colin Johnson is a Kyoto Prize Fellow who has worked as a technology journalist for two decades.

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As reported by Heise Online, Manuel Hoferlin, the Digital Agenda committee chairman, thinks Apple is going on a “dangerous path” while undermining “safe and confidential communication.”

Although CSAM scan is only going to be available in the US when it launches, Hoferlin says this will be “the largest surveillance instrument of history” and could make Apple lose access to large markets whether the company keeps with this strategy.

Apple, on the other hand, tried to explain that the CSAM scan is not going to analyze every people’s photos on their iPhones. Not only that, the company announced last week that the system will be able to be audited by third parties.

Apple explained that it will publish a Knowledge Base article with the root hash of the encrypted CSAM hash database. Apple will also allow users to inspect the root hash database on their device and compare it against the database in the Knowledge Base article.

Apart from that, the company continues to offer clarity around the CSAM detection feature. In addition to a detailed frequently asked questions document published last week as well, Apple also confirmed that CSAM detection only applies to photos stored in iCloud Photos, not videos.

Apple also reinforced that if a user does not use iCloud Photos, then no part of the CSAM detection process runs. This means that if a user wants to opt out of the CSAM detection process, they can disable iCloud Photos.

Apple believes its on-device implementation of CSAM detection is far better than the server-side implementations used by other companies. Those implementations, Apple explains, require that a company scan every single photo stored by a user on its server, the majority of which are not CSAM.

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The results, published in Frontiers in Nutrition, bring critically needed scientific backing to the efforts to popularize and return millets to diets, especially as staples, to combat the growing prevalence of obesity and being overweight in children, adolescents and adults.

The study showed that consuming millets reduced total cholesterol by 8%, lowering it from high to normal levels in the people studied. There was nearly a 10% decrease in low- and very low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (commonly viewed as 'bad cholesterol') and triacylglycerol levels in blood. Through these reductions, the levels went from above-normal to normal range. In addition, consuming millets decreased blood pressure with the diastolic blood pressure decreasing by 5%.

Dr. S Anitha, the study's lead author and Senior Nutritionist at ICRISAT, explained, "We were very surprised by the number of studies that had already been undertaken on the impact of millets on elements that impact cardiovascular diseases. This is the very first time anyone has collated all these studies and analyzed their data to test the significance of the impact. We used a meta-analysis, and results came out very strongly to show significant positive impact on risk factors for cardiovascular disease."

The study also showed that consuming millets reduced BMI by 7% in people who were overweight and obese (from 28.5 ± 2.4 to 26.7 ± 1.8 kg/m2), showing the possibility of returning to a normal BMI (<25 kg/m2). All results are based on consumption of 50 to 200 g of millets per day for a duration ranging from 21 days to three months.

These findings are influenced by comparisons that show that millets are much higher in unsaturated fatty acids, with 2 to 10 times higher levels than refined wheat and milled rice as well as being much higher than whole grain wheat.

"This latest review further emphasizes the potential of millets as a staple crop that has many health benefits. It also strengthens the evidence that eating millet can contribute to better cardiovascular health by reducing unhealthy cholesterol levels and increasing the levels of whole grains and unsaturated fats in the diet," said Professor Ian Givens, a co-author of the study and Director at University of Reading's Institute of Food, Nutrition and Health (IFNH) in the UK.

"Obesity and being overweight are increasing globally in both wealthy and poorer countries, so the need for solutions based on healthier diets is critical. This new information on the health benefits of millets further supports the need to invest more in the grain, including in its whole value chain from better varieties for farmers through to agribusiness developments," said Dr. Jacqueline Hughes, director general, ICRISAT.

The study identified a number of priority future research areas including the need to study all different types of millets, understand any differences by variety alongside the different types of cooking and processing of millets and their impact on cardiovascular health. Given the positive indicators to date, more detailed analysis on the impact of millets on weight management is also recommended. All relevant parameters are also recommended to be assessed to gain a deeper understanding of the impacts millets consumption on hyperlipidemia and cardiovascular disease.

"A key recommendation from the study is for government and industry to support efforts to diversify staples with millets, especially across Asia and Africa. Given that millets are hardy and climate smart, returning to this traditional staple makes a lot of sense and is a critical solution that could be the turning point of some major health issues," said Joanna Kane-Potaka, a co-author and executive director of the Smart Food initiative, ICRISAT.

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The researchers analyzed a panel of antibodies generated by people in response to the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine and found that delta was unable to evade all but one of the antibodies they tested. Other variants of concern, such as beta, avoided recognition and neutralization by several of the antibodies.

The findings, published Aug. 16 in the journal Immunity, help explain why vaccinated people have largely escaped the worst of the delta surge.

In previous studies, co-senior author Ali Ellebedy, associate professor of pathology and immunology, of medicine and of molecular microbiology, had shown that both natural infection and vaccination elicit lasting antibody production. But the length of the antibody response is only one aspect of protection. The breadth matters, too. An ideal antibody response includes a diverse set of antibodies with the flexibility to recognize many slightly different variants of the virus. Breadth confers resilience. Even if a few antibodies lose the ability to recognize a new variant, other antibodies in the arsenal should remain capable of neutralizing it.

"The fact that delta has outcompeted other variants does not mean that it's more resistant to our antibodies compared to other variants," said co-senior author Jacco Boon, associate professor of medicine, of molecular microbiology and of pathology and immunology. "The ability of a variant to spread is the sum of many factors. Resistance to antibodies is just one factor. Another one is how well the variant replicates. A variant that replicates better is likely to spread faster, independent of its ability to evade our immune response. So delta is surging, yes, but there's no evidence that it is better at overcoming vaccine-induced immunity compared to other variants."

To assess the breadth of the antibody response to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, Ellebedy and colleagues—including co-first authors Aaron Schmitz, a research specialist; Jackson S. Turner, an instructor in pathology and immunology; and Zhuoming Liu, a staff scientist—extracted antibody-producing cells from three people who had received the Pfizer vaccine. They grew the cells in the laboratory and obtained from them a set of 13 antibodies that target the original strain that began circulating last year.

The researchers tested the antibodies against four variants of concern: alpha, beta, gamma and delta. Twelve of the 13 recognized alpha and delta, eight recognized all four variants, and one failed to recognize any of the four variants.

Scientists gauge an antibody's usefulness by its ability to block virus from infecting and killing cells in a dish. So-called neutralizing antibodies that prevent infection are thought to be more powerful than antibodies that recognize the virus but can't block infection, although both neutralizing and non-neutralizing antibodies contribute to defending the body.

The researchers found that five of the 13 antibodies neutralized the original strain. When they tested the neutralizing antibodies against the new variants, all five antibodies neutralized delta, three neutralized alpha and delta, and only one neutralized all four variants.

"In face of vaccination, delta is relatively a wimpy virus," Ellebedy said. "If we had a variant that was more resistant like beta but spread as easily as delta, we'd be in more trouble."

The antibody that neutralized all four variants of concern—as well as three additional variants tested separately—was called 2C08. In animal experiments, 2C08 also protected hamsters from disease caused by every variant tested: the original variant, delta and a mimic of beta.

Some people may have antibodies just as powerful as 2C08 protecting them against SARS-CoV-2 and its many variants, Ellebedy said. Using publicly available databases, the researchers discovered that about 20% of people infected or vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2 create antibodies that recognize the same spot on the virus that is targeted by 2C08. Moreover, very few virus variants (.008%) carry mutations that allow them to escape antibodies targeting that spot.

"This antibody is not unique to the person we got it from," Ellebedy said. "Multiple antibodies targeting this area have been described in the literature; at least one is under development as a COVID-19 therapy. Similar antibodies have been generated by people infected in Italy and people infected in China and people vaccinated in New York. So it's not limited to people of certain backgrounds or ethnicities; it's not generated only by vaccination or by infection. A lot of people make this antibody, which is great because it is very potent and neutralizes every variant we tested."

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Researchers performed thermal and microwave (a technique which is unique to the University of Liverpool) paleomagnetic analysis on rock samples from ancient lava flows in Eastern Scotland to measure the strength of the geomagnetic field during key time periods with almost no pre-existing, reliable data. The study also analyzed the reliability of all of the measurements from samples from 200 to 500 million years ago, collected over the last ~80 years.

They found that between 332 and 416 million years ago, the strength of the geomagnetic field preserved in these rocks was less than quarter of what it is today, and similar to a previously identified period of low magnetic field strength that started around 120 million years ago. The researchers have coined this period "the Mid-Palaeozoic Dipole low (MPDL)."

Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study supports the theory that the strength of the earth's magnetic field is cyclical, and weakens every 200 million years, an idea proposed by a previous study lead by Liverpool in 2012. One of the limitations at the time was the lack of reliable field strength data available prior to 300 million years ago, so this new study fills in an important time gap.

The Earth's magnetic field shields the planet from huge blasts of deadly solar radiation. It is not completely stable in strength and direction, both over time and space, and has the ability to completely flip or reverse itself with substantial implications.

Deciphering variations in past geomagnetic field strength is important as it indicates changes in deep Earth processes over hundreds of millions of years and could provide clues as to how it might fluctuate, flip or reverse in the future.

A weak field also has implications for life on our planet. A recent study has suggested that the Devonian-Carboniferous mass extinction is linked to elevated UV-B levels, around the same as the weakest field measurements from the MPDL.

Liverpool palaeomagnetist and lead author of the paper, Dr. Louise Hawkins, said: "This comprehensive magnetic analysis of the Strathmore and Kinghorn lava flows was key for filling in the period leading up the Kiman Superchron, a period where the geomagnetic poles are stable and do not flip for about 50 million years.

"This dataset compliments other studies we have worked on over the last few years, alongside our colleagues in Moscow and Alberta, that fit between the ages of these two locations.

"Our findings, when considered alongside the existing datasets, supports the existence of an approximately 200-million-year long cycle in the strength of the Earth's magnetic field related to deep Earth processes. As almost all of our evidence for processes within the Earth's interior is being constantly destroyed by plate tectonics, the preservation of this signal for deep inside the Earth is exceedingly valuable as one of the few constraints we have.

"Our findings also provide further support that a weak magnetic field is associated with pole reversals, while the field is generally strong during a Superchron, which is important as it has proved nearly impossible to improve the reversal record prior to ~300 million years ago."

The paper, "Intensity of the Earth's magnetic field: evidence for a Mid-Paleozoic dipole low," is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Published recently in Scientific Reports, the study assessed the dental cell damage caused by the use of carbamide peroxide teeth-whitening treatments.

It found that a recommended application of just 10 percent carbamide peroxide gel on teeth (35 percent carbamide peroxide gel can be purchased online) reduces the enamel protein content by up to 50 percent.

"We have always been interested in the effect of peroxide-based tooth whitening on the tooth structure and its link to sensitivity," says Laurent Bozec, an associate professor in U of T's Faculty of Dentistry who led the study. "Here, we wanted to further understand the impact on the enamel itself and deep inside the pulp."

Bozec had been looking at the effect of using hydrogen peroxide in root canal treatment prior to this study and found that it was causing damage to collagen locally. This led him to investigate how peroxide penetrates through the enamel and dentine before reaching the dental pulp—and checking what damage it may cause along the way.

The study found that the loss of enamel protein content resulted in a greater penetration of the whitening agent inside the tooth, and can lead to an increase in dental pulp cell mortality. The team used an in-house dentine perfusion chamber to make their measurements. At carbamide peroxide concentrations around 35 percent, the researchers found that dental pulp cells did not survive the exposure.

"Many home tooth-whitening products have such a high concentration of peroxide gel—for example, 35 percent—and yet, little is known about what it does to the inside of our teeth," says Bozec. "We believe this is the first study of its kind to show the toxic effects of using a tooth-whitening agent. Our hope is that people will opt for a lower concentration of peroxide if they decide to use a tooth-whitening product as they are so much less harmful to your teeth."

While using a lower concentration of peroxide—such as five percent—would be less harmful to dental cells, consumers often opt for increased peroxide concentrations to see an immediate teeth-whitening effect. The study shows the need for a compromise between the concentrations of peroxide used, exposure time, desired patient outcomes and side effects experienced. This should be tested in-vivo prior to market release and patients should be made aware of the impact these procedures on their oral health, the researchers recommend.

"There is the potential to use either non-peroxide-based or a controlled peroxide release agent that will not cause the same damage," says Bozec. "I believe that is the future of tooth-whitening."

Bozec notes that the study, which included contributions from Boris Hinz, a distinguished professor at the Faculty of Dentistry, involved an international collaboration and the involvement students in the doctor of dental surgery program. They included Sabrina Nguyen and Ola Redha, a visiting Ph.D. student from University College London.

"I worked with Professor Bozec previously at UCL for the last seven years and was fortunate to have him invite me to work on and complete this project here at the Faculty of Dentistry," says Redha.

"It's been fascinating to undertake research at the highest level at both U.K. and Canadian universities."

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The spacecraft will provide the first up-close look at these building blocks of the early solar system.

 

On July 30, Emily Gramlich boarded a C-17 military transport plane at Buckley Space Force Base. Gramlich, a test engineer at Lockheed Martin, had never been on this sort of aircraft before. C-17s—which look a bit like overfed sky sharks—have a lot more legroom than a commercial plane. But the open-plan square footage was necessary, because the cargo took up a lot of space. Encased in a giant shipping container was a spacecraft, being shuttled from its birthplace in Colorado to Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The spacecraft’s name is Lucy, and it will soon be on a much longer trip: a 12-year journey to eight different asteroids.

 

Lucy’s liftoff, with a window of opportunity that begins October 16, will take it to the so-called Trojan asteroids, which orbit the Sun in the same ellipse as Jupiter, but either ahead of or behind the giant planet. They have remained gravitationally trapped in Jupiter’s orbit since the solar system’s early days, billions of years ago. They’re like a freeze-frame of the way that distant part of the solar system used to be—and no spacecraft has ever visited them.

 

It’s fitting, then, that Lucy itself resembles a giant pair of eyeglasses: Two behemoth solar arrays, each roughly circular and 24 feet across, are attached to the much-smaller spacecraft body. The solar panels look like lensed (and creepily intense) eyes, bridged by the part of Lucy that has all the instruments and communications equipment. The mission, led by the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, was first approved in 2017, and—after a few years of design work—assembly, test, and launch operations started at Lockheed Martin in August 2020.

 

That work culminated in this trip from Colorado to the launch site in Florida. Every half hour, Gramlich—who’d helped test Lucy back at Lockheed—would unbuckle herself from the seat to record temperature and humidity data, keeping track of the environment inside the shipping container, to see what the spacecraft was exposed to. This box, which from the outside looks like a space-age panic room, is essentially a tiny clean room. Nicknamed the “Cassini container,” it has previously taken eight other spacecraft across the country, including the eponymous one that went to Saturn.

 

Lucy had definitely been through worse than a boxed-up, half-continent flight at cruising altitude. At the Lockheed Martin facility outside of Denver, engineers had shaken, heated, cooled, and shone simulated sunlight at the craft, to make sure it could handle the extremes of space—and launch. They had tried out the software code, and checked the flow of electricity to its many components. All systems were nominal, as they say. And so all the systems schlepped down to Florida, where Lucy was about to go through a final gauntlet of tests before launch from the southern Space Coast.

 

“It is a high-stress job, these missions that are taking off to other planets,” says Gramlich. The launch window is narrower than it would be for, say, a satellite heading to Earth orbit. And so having Lucy pass its penultimate exams—and safely make its way to Kennedy—in time for takeoff was a big milestone. “Now, at the launch site, there’s a new level of excitement,” she says.

 

The Lucy mission gets its moniker from the fossilized partial skeleton of an early human ancestor, Australopithecus afarensis, discovered in 1974, which altered ideas about human origins and evolution. The research team hopes this spacecraft will do for planetary science what that skeleton did for paleoanthropology, by giving us a look at the formation and evolution of our solar system.

 

In the solar system’s infancy, debris orbited in a squished disk around a young Sun. Chunks and motes of material stuck together, snowballed, and matured into the tidy planets we see today. Asteroids are essentially the discard pile from that process. “They’re the leftover bits from this very early time before there were planets,” says Tom Statler, the Lucy program scientist at NASA.

 

He likens asteroid study to pyramid research—if the pyramids, in this metaphor, are Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, and the Trojan asteroids are the material from which they were built. You can only learn so much about how those great structures came to be from the finished triangular product. Find the abandoned construction area, and you can infer a lot more about their genesis. “The objects that eventually became Trojans formed all over the outer solar system and got transported to and trapped where they are now,” says Statler. “The Trojans are some of the leftovers that got swept up and left there.”

 

And even though our own planet is rocky, and not a gas giant, studying the outer planets will give us information about how it formed. “It’s become clearer and clearer that no planet develops in isolation,” says Statler. “The Earth is the way it is because the solar system is the way it is ... To understand the Earth, we need to understand how the other planets formed and developed.”

 

Lucy will rely on three main instruments: L’LORRI, L’TES, and L’Ralph. The “L” prefix denotes that they are part of the Lucy mission, because they are each based on devices that have flown before. LORRI and Ralph were instruments aboard the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper belt. “L’LORRI,” then, means “Lucy Lorri,” says Michael Vincent, assistant director of the Southwest Research Institute’s space operations department. OTES was part of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft to asteroid Bennu, and it hailed in part from an instrument called TES, which had previously flown on the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft. “The devil that we knew is what we wanted to stick with,” says Vincent. (Also, one of the scientists on the mission has a French background and was, Vincent jokes, “trying to class up the place.”)

 

L’LORRI is essentially a fancy camera, sharp enough that it can take clear pictures of 200-foot craters from 600 miles away, mapping them to reveal an asteroid’s history. It can also hunt for rings and satellites, and will help Lucy navigate toward the asteroids. After all, picking out which distant dot to aim for isn’t simple. “These things aren’t big out there, and we’re going lickety split,” says Vincent.

 

L’TES works kind of like those non-contact thermometers you might know from Covid-19 screenings, but instead of being aimed at a forehead, the instrument points at a spot on an asteroid and takes its temperature by detecting the infrared radiation coming from it. “Over time, you kind of build up an overall picture by sweeping over and over different surfaces,” says Vincent. Their goal is to measure “thermal inertia,” or how fast or slow parts of the asteroid heat up or cool down—an indicator of what materials it’s made of. Sand, for instance, holds heat differently from rock, which you may have noticed if you’ve ever taken a long walk on the beach at sunset.

 

Finally, there’s L’Ralph, which packs two sub-instruments. One called LEISA analyzes infrared radiation, separating it into different wavelengths that correspond, like fingerprints, to different substances—rocks, ices, organic compounds, and hydrated minerals—and, within those, to the differences between, say, methane and water ice. The other is a five-color camera called MVIC, which can detect light from the ultraviolet down to the near infrared, a span that includes all visible light. The different colors help reveal asteroids’ compositions. Hydrated minerals called phyllosilicates, for instance, will appear in the red, while troilite, an iron sulfide mineral, will show up in the violet.

The Southwest Research Institute’s Carly Howett is the instrument scientist for L’Ralph. Usually, red is her favorite band, because it tends to be brighter than the others, and shows more detail. “If we see activity in the violet band and it lights up, maybe it will be my new favorite,” she says. But no matter what the images show, she’s excited to witness small worlds that no one else has discovered before. “Seeing new things for the first time never gets old,” she says.

 

But it will take a long time for Lucy to reach these asteroids; there’s a reason the gas giants they’re floating among are called the “outer planets.” Before it even heads out there, the spacecraft will fly by Earth twice and get two Hot-Wheels-racing-track boosts, so-called gravity assists. Gramlich is looking forward to those mission moments, in 2022 and 2024, when when the spacecraft will whip around this planet. Humans like her—in the right place at the right time—will be able to look up and see something they designed, built, tested, and lit a fire under.

 

Finally, four years after launch, Lucy will cruise by a non-Trojan asteroid—one not coincidentally named Donaldjohanson after one of the Lucy skeleton’s discoverers—and do a sort of dress rehearsal. After testing out its instruments passing by that interstitial destination, the spacecraft will continue traveling for more than two years before it reaches the Trojans. It will spend more than a year spying on five asteroids orbiting “ahead” of Jupiter, which range in size from half a mile to 40 miles wide. All of these surveilings are flybys. “Fingers crossed,” says Cory Prykull, Lucy’s assembly, test, and launch operations lead at Lockheed, “we don’t plan to have any landings.”

 

After those drive-bys, the mission will take a surprising turn: one toward home. Lucy will shoot all the way back to Earth, swing around our planet, and get another gravity assist that will fling it toward the asteroid flock orbiting “behind” Jupiter. To us, it will seem like a light lilting across the sky, here again and then gone forever, on its way to distant places that humans might never see up close. That trip back to Earth, then back toward the Trojans, takes more than four years.

 

But while Lucy will head back to the outer planetary parts of the solar system, the spacecraft still has one last job to do. In 2033, when Lucy reaches the “behind Jupiter” asteroids, it will hit up a binary asteroid duo boasting 70- and 65-mile widths. Simply flying by the pair, as Lucy will have done with its other targets, will allow scientists to compare data about these asteroids to information from the “ahead” swarm. After this encounter, Lucy will have finished its primary mission but will remain in a stable orbit, coasting among the Trojans.

 

Why spend so much time going to so many targets? Aren’t they all ... rocks? In this case, the diversity is the point: “There’s no such thing as ‘just another asteroid,’” says Statler.

 

As the mission progresses, Lucy will use a high-gain antenna to send back images and data from its rendezvous points. But since its last meeting won’t occur till 2033, the final bits of data won’t make their way to Earth until 12 years after launch. “You have to be really patient when you’re studying the outer solar system, that’s for sure,” says Cathy Olkin, the mission’s deputy principal investigator.

 

Now that Lucy has touched down in Florida, the craft is undergoing final checks. During the first week in August, the Lucy team ran through an “operational readiness test,” which Olkin says means “sitting at the console preparing and pretending—really practicing—for launch. We went through it as if it were happening.”

 

Then, engineers tested every copper path to make sure the electricity was flowing and that computers and instruments were working as they had before shipping—Gramlich’s specialty. “I love this test,” says Gramlich, “because it gets to turn on all the components at the same time.” It shows the spacecraft’s organs working together to do what they’re supposed to: make some science happen.

 

Lucy will also get a final communications check, to ensure the craft can talk and listen to Earth. At some point, the team will even shine a bright flashlight at the back of the instruments to make sure stray photons don’t slip through where they’re not supposed to and contaminate the measurements.

 

Closer to launch, when Lucy is perched at the top of the rocket, Gramlich and her team will test the electrical aspects one last time. The instruments’ covers will then come off, and the spacecraft will get a final inspection. They’ll power Lucy on and prepare for the 3 … 2 … 1.

 

“When the spacecraft lifts off from the ground,” says Gramlich, “that’s when we on the test team take a breath.”

NASA’s Lucy Mission Gets Ready to Fly by the Trojan Asteroids

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"The calculation took 108 days and nine hours" using a supercomputer, the Graubuenden University of Applied Sciences said in a statement.

Its efforts were "almost twice as fast as the record Google set using its cloud in 2019, and 3.5 times as fast as the previous world record in 2020", according to the university's Center for Data Analytics, Visualization and Simulation.

Researchers are waiting for the Guinness Book of Records to certify their feat, until then revealing only the final ten digits they calculated for pi: 7817924264.

The previous world-record pi calculation had achieved 50 trillion figures.

Pi represents the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, with an infinite number of digits following the decimal point.

Researchers nevertheless continue to push calculations for the constant – whose first 10 figures are 3.141592653 – ever further using powerful computers.

The Swiss team said that the experience they built up calculating pi could be applied in other areas like "RNA analysis, simulations of fluid dynamics and textual analysis".

© Agence France-Presse

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When German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt first began excavating on a Turkish mountaintop 25 years ago, he was convinced the buildings he uncovered were unusual, even unique.

Atop a limestone plateau near Urfa called Gobekli Tepe, Turkish for "Belly Hill", Schmidt discovered more than 20 circular stone enclosures. The largest was 20m across, a circle of stone with two elaborately carved pillars 5.5m tall at its centre. The carved stone pillars – eerie, stylised human figures with folded hands and fox-pelt belts – weighed up to 10 tons. Carving and erecting them must have been a tremendous technical challenge for people who hadn't yet domesticated animals or invented pottery, let alone metal tools. The structures were 11,000 years old, or more, making them humanity's oldest known monumental structures, built not for shelter but for some other purpose.

The structures were 11,000 years old, or more, making them humanity's oldest known monumental structures

After a decade of work, Schmidt reached a remarkable conclusion. When I visited his dig house in Urfa's old town in 2007, Schmidt – then working for the German Archaeological Institute – told me Gobekli Tepe could help rewrite the story of civilisation by explaining the reason humans started farming and began living in permanent settlements.

The stone tools and other evidence Schmidt and his team found at the site showed that the circular enclosures had been built by hunter-gatherers, living off the land the way humans had since before the last Ice Age. Tens of thousands of animal bones that were uncovered were from wild species, and there was no evidence of domesticated grains or other plants.

Schmidt thought these hunter-gatherers had come together 11,500 years ago to carve Gobekli Tepe's T-shaped pillars with stone tools, using the limestone bedrock of the hill beneath their feet as a quarry.

Situated in modern-day Turkey, Gobekli Tepe is one of the most important archaeological sites in the world (Credit: Michele Burgess/Alamy)

Carving and moving the pillars would have been a tremendous task, but perhaps not as difficult as it seems at first glance. The pillars are carved from the natural limestone layers of the hill's bedrock. Limestone is soft enough to work with the flint or even wood tools available at the time, given practice and patience. And because the hill's limestone formations were horizontal layers between 0.6m and 1.5m thick, archaeologists working at the site believe ancient builders just had to cut away the excess from the sides, rather than from underneath as well. Once a pillar was carved out, they then shifted it a few hundred metres across the hilltop, using rope, log beams and ample manpower.

Schmidt thought that small, nomadic bands from across the region were motivated by their beliefs to join forces on the hilltop for periodic building projects, hold great feasts and then scatter again. The site, Schmidt argued, was a ritual centre, perhaps some sort of burial or death cult complex, rather than a settlement.

That was a big claim. Archaeologists had long thought complex ritual and organised religion were luxuries that societies developed only once they began domesticating crops and animals, a transition known as the Neolithic. Once they had a food surplus, the thinking went, they could devote their extra resources to rituals and monuments.

Gobekli Tepe, Schmidt told me, turned that timeline upside down. The stone tools at the site, backed up by radiocarbon dates, placed it firmly in the pre-Neolithic era. More than 25 years after the first excavations there, there is still no evidence for domesticated plants or animals. And Schmidt didn't think anyone lived at the site full-time. He called it a "cathedral on a hill".

More than 25 years after the first excavations there, there is still no evidence for domesticated plants or animals.

If that was true, it showed that complex ritual and social organisation actually came before settlement and agriculture. Over the course of 1,000 years, the demands of gathering nomadic bands together in one place to carve and move huge T-pillars and build the circular enclosures prompted people to take the next step: to regularly host large gatherings, people needed to make food supplies more predictable and dependable by domesticating plants and animals. Ritual and religion, it seemed, launched the Neolithic Revolution.

The next day, I drove with Schmidt to the hilltop before dawn. I wandered, mystified and awestruck, among the pillars as Schmidt, his head wrapped in a white cloth to protect it from the blazing sun, oversaw a small team of German archaeologists and workers from the small village down the road.

Gobekli Tepe's circular structures have changed the way archaeologists look at the beginnings of civilisation (Credit: Hatice Turkoglu/Getty Images)

Schmidt had just published his first reports on Gobekli Tepe the year before, setting the small world of Neolithic archaeology experts abuzz. But the site still had a sleepy, forgotten feel, with excavation areas covered by makeshift corrugated steel roofs and potholed dirt roads winding up to the mountaintop dig site from the valley below.

Schmidt's take on the site's striking T-pillars and large, round "special buildings" captivated colleagues and journalists when they were first published in the mid-2000s. Breathless media reports called the site the birthplace of religion; the German magazine Der Spiegel compared the fertile grasslands around the site to the Garden of Eden.

Soon, people from around the world were flocking to see Gobekli Tepe for themselves. Within a decade, the hilltop was totally transformed. Until the civil war in nearby Syria disrupted tourism in the region in 2012, work on the site often slowed to a crawl as busloads of curious tourists crowded around open excavation trenches to see what some were calling the world's first temple and made it impossible to manoeuvre wheelbarrows on the narrow paths.

Over the past five years, the mountaintop on the outskirts of Urfa has been reshaped once again. Today, roads and car parks and a visitor's centre can accommodate curious travellers from around the world. In 2017, corrugated steel sheds were replaced by a state-of-the art, swooping fabric-and-steel shelter covering the central monumental buildings. The Şanlıurfa Archaeology and Mosaic Museum, built in 2015 in central Urfa, is one of Turkey's largest museums; it features a full-scale replica of the site's largest enclosure and its imposing T-pillars, allowing visitors to get a feel for the monumental pillars and examine their carvings up close.

In 2018, Gobekli Tepe was added to the Unesco World Heritage register, and Turkish tourism officials declared 2019 the "Year of Gobekli Tepe", making the ancient site the face of its global promotion campaign. "I still remember the site as a remote place on a mountaintop," said Jens Notroff, a German Archaeological Institute archaeologist who began working at the site as a student in the mid-2000s. "It's changed completely."

Gobekli Tepe was constructed more than 11,000 years ago, right on the cusp between a world of hunter-gatherers and a world of farmers (Credit: Giulio Ercolani/Alamy)

Schmidt, who died in 2014, didn't live to see the site's transformation from dusty mountaintop dig to major tourist attraction. But his discoveries there spurred global interest in the Neolithic transition – and in the last few years, new discoveries at Gobekli Tepe and closer looks at the results of earlier excavations are upending Schmidt's initial interpretations of the site itself.

Work on foundations needed to support the site's swooping fabric canopy required archaeologists to dig deeper that Schmidt ever had. Under the direction of Schmidt's successor, Lee Clare, a German Archaeological Institute team dug several "keyhole" trenches down to the site's bedrock, several metres below the floors of the large buildings. "We had a unique chance," Clare said, "to go look in the lowest layers and deposits of the site."

New discoveries at Gobekli Tepe and closer looks at the results of earlier excavations are upending Schmidt's initial interpretations of the site

What Clare and his colleagues found may rewrite prehistory yet again. The digs revealed evidence of houses and year-round settlement, suggesting that Gobekli Tepe wasn't an isolated temple visited on special occasions but a rather a thriving village with large special buildings at its centre.

The team also identified a large cistern and channels for collecting rainwater, key to supporting a settlement on the dry mountaintop, and thousands of grinding tools for processing grain for cooking porridge and brewing beer. "Gobekli Tepe is still a unique, special site, but the new insights fit better with what we know from other sites," Clare said. "It was a fully-fledged settlement with permanent occupation. It's changed our whole understanding of the site."

Meanwhile, Turkish archaeologists working in the rugged countryside around Urfa have identified at least a dozen other hill-top sites with similar – if smaller – T-pillars, dating from around the same time period. "It's not a unique temple," said Austrian Archaeological Institute researcher Barbara Horejs, an expert on the Neolithic who was not part of the recent research efforts. "That makes the story much more interesting and exciting." Turkish Culture and Tourism Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy went as far as saying that this area could be referred to as the "pyramids of south-east Turkey".

New discoveries made over the last few years may rewrite prehistory yet again (Credit: Izzet Keribar/Getty Images)

Rather than a centuries-long building project inspiring the transition to farming, Clare and others now think Gobekli Tepe was an attempt by hunter-gatherers clinging to their vanishing lifestyle as the world changed around them. Evidence from the surrounding region shows people at other sites were experimenting with domesticated animals and plants – a trend the people of "Belly Hill" might have been resisting.

Clare argues the site's stone carvings are an important clue. Elaborate carvings of foxes, leopards, serpents and vultures covering Gobekli Tepe's pillars and walls "aren't animals you see every day," he said. "They're more than just pictures, they're narratives, which are very important in keeping groups together and creating a shared identity."

When I first wandered across the site more than 15 years ago, I remember a feeling of great distance. Gobekli Tepe was built 6,000 years before Stonehenge, and the exact meaning of its carvings – like the world the people there once inhabited – is impossible to fathom.

That, of course, is part of the Gobekli Tepe's tremendous magnetism. As thousands of visitors marvel at a place most people had never heard of a decade ago, researchers will continue trying to understand why it was built in the first place. And each new discovery promises to change what we now know about the site and the story of human civilisation.

"The new work isn't destroying Klaus Schmidt's thesis; it stands on his shoulders," said Horejs. "There's been a huge gain of knowledge, in my view. The interpretation is changing, but that's what science is about."

Ancient Engineering Marvels is a BBC Travel series that takes inspiration from unique architectural ideas or ingenious constructions built by past civilisations and cultures across the planet.

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Mindfulness is said to do many things for our psyche: it can increase our self-control, sharpen our concentration, extend our working memory and boost our mental flexibility. With practice, we should become less emotionally reactive – allowing us to deal with our problems more calmly. 

One ‘benefit’ that you might not expect to gain, however, is heightened egotism. Yet a recent study suggests that, in some contexts, practicing mindfulness really can exaggerate some people’s selfish tendencies. With their increased inward focus, they seem to forget about others, and are less willing to help those in need. 

This finding, alone, should not be a cause for you to cease meditating, if you do find it useful in other ways. But it adds to a growing body of research suggesting that mindfulness training can have undesirable side effects as well as potential benefits – and many psychologists now believe that the potentially negative consequences of certain meditative practices should be advertised alongside the hype. 

The ‘me’ in meditation

The study comes from Michael Poulin, an associate professor in psychology at the State University of New York at Buffalo, who wanted to investigate whether the effects of mindfulness might depend on its cultural context and the existing values of the people who are practicing it.

He was particularly interested in the ways people think about themselves – their “self-construal”. Some people take a more independent viewpoint, focused on personal characteristics. If they are asked to describe themselves, they might emphasise their intelligence or their sense of humour. People with an interdependent view, on the other hand, tend to think of themselves in terms of their relations to others. If they are asked to describe themselves, they might say that they are a “daughter” or “father” or “college freshman” – things that emphasise social roles or group membership.

Within any population, there will be a mix of both attitudes, but on average interdependence is higher in Asian countries like China and India – where Buddhism originated – whereas people in the US, UK and Europe tend to be more independent-minded.

Mindfulness comes with many potential benefits - but for the independent-minded, a selfishness boost could be an unexpected side-effect (Credit: Getty)

To see whether this would influence the effects of mindfulness in the West, Poulin invited 366 college students into the lab and first gave them a questionnaire measuring their independence or interdependence. 

Half were then asked to perform a meditation focused on the sensation of breathing. The control group were given a “sham” meditation that involved sitting and letting their mind wander for 15 minutes. The exercise may have been relaxing, but it wasn’t designed to increase their mindfulness. 

Next came a test of pro-social behaviour, in which the students were told about a new project to help fund a charity for the homeless. They were then given the opportunity to stuff envelopes with marketing material advertising the scheme, which would be sent to the university’s alumni – but they were told there was no obligation to do so, if they wished to leave early. 

Sure enough, Poulin found that the effects of the meditation depended on people’s existing attitudes. If they were already interdependent, then the people who took the mindfulness exercise were willing to spend much more time on the charitable task; overall, they stuffed about 17% more envelopes than the control group. If they were independent-minded, however, the exact opposite occurred – the mindfulness had made them even more self-centred, so they were less willing to help the homeless. Overall, they stuffed around 15% fewer envelopes than the control group. 

To be sure the finding was robust, Poulin’s team conducted a second experiment, in which the participants were first given a short text written either in the first-person singular (I), or first-person plural (we). As they read the text, they had to click on all the pronouns – a simple task known to prime either independent or interdependent thinking. They then completed the meditation tasks and, to test their pro-sociality, were asked whether they wanted to devote time to chat online with potential donors for the homelessness charity. 

Once again, the mindfulness exercise exaggerated the effects of their self-perception, driving increased altruism among the interdependent-minded, and decreased altruism among the more independent-minded. 

Given that many Americans score highly on measures of the independent self-construal, that’s a lot of mindfulness practitioners who may be affected. 

‘McMindfulness’ 

The finding provides new material for critics of the mindfulness movement. 

Ronald Purser, a professor of management at San Francisco State University, has been chief among them. In his book McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality, published in 2019, he described the ways that the ancient practices have become divorced from the original Buddhist teachings.

Mindfulness has become a stripped-down, DIY, self-help technique – Ronald Purser

“Mindfulness practice was intended to lead to the clear insight that despite appearing separate, all phenomena – including our sense of self – are, in their true nature, relative and interdependent,” he tells me. In many of its new incarnations in the West, however, it is marketed as a tool to boost productivity and performance. “Mindfulness has become a stripped-down, DIY, self-help technique,” says Purser – another tool to get ahead of others. He was not surprised by Poulin’s findings – anecdotally, he had heard of similar effects. 

Thomas Joiner, a professor of psychology at Florida State University and author of Mindlessness: The Corruption of Mindfulness in a Culture of Narcissism, is similarly emphatic. He says that the Buddhist practices have been “perverted” into “a self-focused, self-glorification mechanism”. Like Purser, he believes that Poulin’s paper helps to show the consequences of this. “I think it makes my case that when you take genuine mindfulness and drop it into certain context, a monstrosity can result.” 

The Middle Way 

It is fair to say that Purser’s and Joiner’s views on mindfulness fall at the more extreme end of the spectrum; in general, psychologists studying mindfulness remain optimistic about the practice’s potential to improve wellbeing in many areas of life. 

There does, however, seem to be increasing concern that some the benefits have been overhyped, and that the potential downsides have been under-investigated. Some studies suggest that mindfulness can heighten anxiety and trigger panic attacks in certain people, for example – a danger that is not often mentioned in the many books, apps and courses promoting the practice. 

We need much more transparency about these less-desirable side-effects – including its potential to increase selfish behaviour. “I absolutely think that those who promote or practise mindfulness should be aware of this potential issue,” says Poulin.

There are many different mindfulness techniques, and research shows that some may increase compassion (Credit: Getty)

We also need greater research into the many kinds of mindfulness techniques. Mindful breathing, which Poulin used in his experiment, is the most popular mindfulness exercise, and if you have only a superficial interest in the field, it may be the only technique you know. But there are many others, each of which may help to develop a particular set of skills. 

Tania Singer, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, has provided some of the strongest evidence for the diverse effects of the different techniques with a detailed nine-month trial. Over many sessions, the participants completed exercises aimed at improving “presence”, such as mindful breathing, as well as techniques such as “loving kindness meditation”, which involved deliberately thinking about our sense of connection with others – including close friends and complete strangers. They also took part in pair work aimed at “mindful listening”, in which each person had to pay particular attention to another’s descriptions of emotional situations. 

All the while, Singer tracked the effects with detailed questionnaires, including measures of compassion – which increased significantly following the loving-kindness meditation and pair work. Intriguingly, these exercises also seemed to produce the biggest reduction in people’s stress responses. “You learn not just to listen empathically; you learn to open up your own vulnerability.” This allowed the participants to recognise the “shared humanity” of positive and negative feelings, she says – a mindset that subsequently helped them to better cope with stressful situations in the rest of their life.

Poulin agrees that these other mindfulness techniques may counteract the effects he had observed, for people who follow a comprehensive programme. He is more concerned about overly simplistic courses that market mindfulness as a simple way to gain a brain boost. “With the rise of apps and the use of mindfulness within corporations to increase productivity, for example, sometimes the moral dimension of mindfulness is lacking,” he says. 

Any time we try to change our mental function, it has the potential to create widespread consequences for our behaviour – and we should be cautious of any product or service that claims to offer a “quick fix”. It is time, in other words, to be a bit more mindful about the way we use mindfulness.

David Robson is the author of The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes. His next book is The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Change Your World, to be published in early 2022. He is @d_a_robson on Twitter.

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Twist on the "Leidenfrost effect" could one day be used in microfluidics applications

MIT scientists reveal why water drops move faster on a hot, oil-coated surface

There are still uncertainties, but data from the rings rules out a layered model.

Saturn’s core is a big, diffuse, rocky slushball

A US government agency has formally opened a probe into Tesla's so-called Autopilot system following a spate of well-publicised crashes over the past few years.

The investigation covers over three-quarters of a million vehicles, which has got to be a decent chunk of the US inventory shifted by Tesla since the start of the 2014 model year. It is estimated that in past three years alone, Tesla has sold a combined 430,592 units of Model X, Model S, and Model 3 in the United States.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) said it was looking into the "level 2" Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS), which it said consists of lane-keeping and cruise control functions.

"Most incidents took place after dark and the crash scenes encountered included scene control measures such as first responder vehicle lights, flares, an illuminated arrow board, and road cones," the agency said in a statement [PDF] today. "The involved subject vehicles were all confirmed to have been engaged in either Autopilot or Traffic Aware Cruise Control during the approach to the crashes."

Of the 11 crashes highlighted by the ODI, four took place this year. Its evaluation of the Autopilot system will focus on technology installed in Tesla Models S, Y, X and 3 between 2014 and the present day. The ODI potentially has the power to order a mass recall [PDF] of the affected cars if it believes they are unsafe. The manufacturer then needs to offer consumers a remedy.

Many Tesla crashes have involved the use of the Autopilot driver assistance function, which is more super-cruise-control than a fully autonomous driving capability. In 2019, a smash in Florida occurred just 10 seconds after a driver enabled Autopilot. The car's systems failed to detect a white lorry across a junction in front of it.

Also that year, a Model 3 driven on Autopilot crashed into a police car that had pulled up behind a broken-down vehicle. The driver said he was "checking on his dog" at the time. Autopilot is supposed to be functional only if the driver has their hands on the steering wheel. The tech was criticised by the US National Transportation Safety Board in a 2020 report which found that "system limitations" in Autopilot and the victim being overly trusting of the car's Autopilot software were to blame for a fatal crash which killed an Apple engineer. Tesla refused to describe to investigators how the system operated.

The Californian Department of Motor Vehicles, a licensing agency, said in May that Tesla chief exec Elon Musk overstated the Autopilot system's capabilities. Tests from a US-based consumer rights organisation in April were claimed to show that Autopilot could be enabled by fastening the driver-side seatbelt and hanging a weight off the steering wheel, bypassing safety features intended to ensure a human at the wheel is paying some attention to the road ahead.

The SAE automotive automation levels system measures the degree of automation a self-driving system provides. It has five levels, ranging between 1 (driver assistance) and level 5 (full automation requiring no human monitoring or intervention). ®

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The research team, supported by the Institute for Innovative Materials, Processing and Numerical Technologies (IMPACT), identified key COVID-19 safety measures for car journeys through their study on optimal car ventilation.

Findings suggest:

• all windows should be open for car travel below 30 mph

• however, once speed increases above this, it is more effective for only two opposite windows, one in the front and one in the back, to be opened—occasionally—to create a diagonal flow of air. For example, driver side window and rear passenger side window.

Project lead Professor Chenfeng Li says, "When a COVID-19 patient coughs, saliva containing the virus is expelled in the form of droplets. Large-size droplets fall quickly to the ground, while small-size droplets evaporate quickly. These droplets of saliva disappear in the air in seconds, but the small-size droplets release the contained virus into the air after evaporation, which can survive up to an hour and remain infectious.

The virus can survive on surfaces and remain infectious for different periods of time, dependent on the surface type. It is the dispersing of these small droplets that we focused on in our study."

The study produced simulations that demonstrate the effects of a driver coughing in a moving car at various speeds. The small saliva droplets disperse in varying formations depending on which windows are open.

Professor Li said, "This car transmission study gives some interesting findings. Based on our scenario, and unsurprisingly, optimal ventilation comes from having all four windows open for city driving (up to 30mph).

However, perhaps surprisingly, the diagonal flow from the driver side window to the rear passenger side window is the most effective option for getting the virus out of the car when driving above 30mph. This is because a sustained and dominant air flow from the front to the rear is formed when two diagonally opposite windows are open and the other two are closed.

At higher driving speed, this strong diagonal air flow is more effective to discharge the virus particles out of the car than the turbulent air flow formed by opening all four windows.

The process is so effective that it's only necessary to do it for 10 seconds at a time, every 5 to 10 minutes, or whenever somebody coughs or sneezes."

We can also conclude that sitting at the front is a lot safer than sitting at the back, because of the increased contamination within the rear part of the car due to the fact that the in-car air flow predominantly moves from the front to the rear, trapping some of the virus particles in the rear zone."

As part of the research, the use of face masks was also studied. The results showed that wearing a face covering reduces the emission of the virus by 90% and that the intake of the virus by passengers was reduced by 70%.

Professor Li concluded: "At a time when restrictions are lifting across the UK and we will be traveling more, it is important to take steps to ensure we are limiting any potential exposure to the virus. This study sets out our recommendations for optimal ventilation and reduced transmission."

Professor Li sits on the Welsh Government Coronavirus (COVID-19) Technical Advisory Group. His findings supported recent guidelines for taxis and private hire vehicles.

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Crows recently demonstrated an understanding of the concept of zero. It’s only the latest evidence of animals’ talents for numerical abstraction.

The intelligence of corvids like ravens and crows is well known. Recently, crows were even shown to have a numerical ability seen in few other species so far: a grasp of the concept of the empty set — the numerosity zero.Photograph: Arterra/Getty Images

But rigorous experiments during the past two decades have shown that even animals with very small brains can perform incredible feats of numerical cognition. One mechanism common to all of them seems to be a system for approximating numerosity that’s correct most of the time but is sometimes imprecise in specific ways. Animals are most effective, for instance, at distinguishing numerosities far apart in magnitude—so comparing a group of six dots to three dots is easier than comparing six to five.

 

When the difference between two numerosities is the same, it’s easier to deal with smaller quantities than larger ones: Discriminating 34 items from 38 is much more difficult than discriminating four from eight.

 

Those strengths and weaknesses were reflected in animals’ neural activity. In the prefrontal cortex of monkeys, researchers found neurons that were selectively tuned to different numerosities. Neurons that responded to three dots on a screen also responded weakly to two and four, but not at all to more distant values, such as one or five. (Humans demonstrate this approximate sense of quantity, too. But they also associate numerosities with specific number symbols, and a different population of neurons represents those exact quantities.)

 

That observation seems to imply that a “sense” of number is innate and deeply rooted in the brains of animals, including humans. “Underlying the sense of number, there is a very ancient, fundamental psychophysical law,” Vallortigara said.

 

Once “you realize that almost every animal, or maybe even every animal, has some ability to do a numerical task, then you start wanting to know, what’s the threshold? What’s the limit?” said Scarlett Howard, a postdoctoral research fellow at Deakin University in Australia who studies numerical cognition in honeybees. If animals had this natural, hard-wired ability for telling quantities apart, scientists wanted to determine what other abilities might emerge with it.

 

First up was arithmetic. Several species have demonstrated that they can essentially add and subtract. In 2009, researchers led by Rosa Rugani, a psychologist and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions global fellow at the University of Padova in Italy, found that when newly hatched chicks were presented with two groups of items on which they had imprinted, the days-old birds tended to approach the larger group. Then the team obscured the groups of objects with screens and moved some of the items from behind one screen to the other while the chicks watched. No matter how many items were moved, the chicks consistently chose the screen that hid more of them. They seemed to be performing computations akin to addition or subtraction to keep track of each hidden group’s changing numerosity. No training was required for them to do this. “They deal spontaneously with these kinds of numerosities,” Rugani said.

 

Wild monkeys can do something similar. While monkeys watched, scientists placed several pieces of bread in a closed box, then periodically removed one or more of them. The monkeys could not see how many pieces remained, but they continued to approach the box until the last piece was removed—which suggested that they performed subtraction to inform their foraging.

 

Honeybees, meanwhile, can be taught simple arithmetic. In 2019, Howard and her colleagues trained the insects to note the colors and numbers of objects they saw, and then to add one to numbers of blue objects or subtract one from numbers of yellow objects. For example, if the bees flew through a maze that contained three blue shapes, and they were then presented with a choice between two or four items, they consistently chose the group of four.

 

“They’re able to do these tasks because in their natural environments, they have to learn so much,” Howard said. No one knows whether the bees add or subtract in the wild without training—such behavior has never been observed, but scientists also haven’t had reason to look for it until now. Still, the bees already have all the building blocks for doing arithmetic at their disposal. And “their environment can be its own sort of training ground,” Howard added.

But Nieder suspected otherwise. Some animals, he thought, might be able to regard zero as a quantity, even if they didn’t have a symbolic sense of it in the way that humans did. Sure enough, his group demonstrated in 2016 that monkeys have neurons in their prefrontal cortex tuned to a preference for zero rather than other numerosities. The animals also made a revealing mistake when using zero: They mixed up the empty set more often with numerosity one than with numerosity two. “They are perceiving the empty set, or nothing, as a quantity that is next to one on this number line,” Nieder said.

 

In 2018, Howard, Avarguès-Weber, Dyer, and their colleagues found behavioral evidence of this in honeybees as well. To Howard, these findings suggested that what she called “this numerical cognition, this high level of understanding abstract numerical concepts,” is innate. An understanding of zero could be a more general trait across the animal kingdom than had been thought.

That honeybee study raised eyebrows, not just because it showed that an animal with fewer than one million neurons in its brain (compared with the human brain’s 86 billion) could treat zero as a quantity, but because bees and mammals diverged in evolution 600 million years ago. Their last common ancestor “was barely able to perceive anything,” Avarguès-Weber said, much less count. According to Nieder, who was not involved with the insect work, this implied that the ability to grasp the empty set and other numerosities evolved independently in the two lineages.

 

“A whole different neural substrate produced such high-level cognitive capacity,” said HaDi MaBouDi, a cognitive scientist at the University of Sheffield in England. Unfortunately, researchers have so far been unable to study the neural activity of honeybees as they perform numerical tasks, making it difficult to compare their representations of zero with those of monkeys. To get answers about how and why the ability to quantify “nothing” evolved more than once, scientists realized they would have to explore the brain of another animal.

 

A Parallel History

 

And so Nieder and his team turned to crows, which haven’t had ancestors in common with primates for more than 300 million years, and which evolved to have very different brains. Birds do not have a prefrontal cortex; instead, they have their own “intelligence brain centers,” Nieder said, with a distinct structure, wiring, and developmental trajectory.

 

Yet despite these differences, the researchers uncovered a familiar numerical understanding of zero: The crows mixed up a blank screen more often with images of a single dot than they did with images of two, three, or four dots. Recordings of the crows’ brain activity during these tasks revealed that neurons in a region of their brain called the pallium represent zero as a quantity alongside other numerosities, just as is found in the primate prefrontal cortex. “From a physiological point of view, this fits in beautifully,” Nieder said. “We see exactly the same responses, the same type of code, represented in the crow brain as in the monkey brain.”

 

Animals Count and Use Zero. How Far Does Their Number Sense Go?

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That's the conclusion drawn by a new study that sought to find why the cheerful yellow blooms tend to mature facing east, in spite of a more flexible youth in which their orientation changes to face the moving Sun.

The greater warmth and light from the rising Sun attracts more bees in the morning, which results in better growth, earlier pollen production, more plentiful seeds, and higher reproductive success.

"It's quite striking that they face east," said plant biologist Stacey Harmer of the University of California Davis. "It's better for them to face east, as they produce more offspring."

As they grow, young sunflowers (Helianthus annuus) exhibit a particular behavior: The flower head, or capitulum, moves to track the Sun across the sky, as seen in the video below.

In previous research published in 2016, Harmer and her colleagues determined that this tracking aids in both the growth of the plant and flower and in attracting pollinators.

As the sunflower matures, however, its stem stiffens, significantly limiting movement. As this occurs, the capitulum settles into facing east.

Exactly why sunflowers did this remained a mystery to researchers in 2016, so another team led by UC Davis biologist Nicky Creux designed an experiment to find out.

One of the ways to figure out why something does the things it does is to change its situation so that it's no longer doing that thing. With east-facing sunflowers, this is incredibly simple: All you have to do is turn them around. That's exactly what the researchers did, taking measurements and comparing normal, east-facing controls with the turned, west-facing sunflowers.

The first thing the researchers noticed was that the flowers facing east attracted a significantly higher number of bees in the morning. During the rest of the day, the bees showed no preference, which suggests that that morning window could make a big difference.

The east-facing sunflowers also started releasing their pollen earlier in the morning, by about 30 minutes – timing which pretty neatly matched the time delay between peak pollinator visit times.

Follow-up analysis suggests that this all has to do with the temperature of the capitulum. The Sun warms the flower head, which triggers it to release pollen; when warmed artificially, the west-facing flowers showed similar pollen release behavior.

Interestingly, this artificial heating made no difference to pollinator visits, although it's not entirely clear why. The researchers believe that markings on the flowers visible to pollinators under UV light from the Sun may have something to do with it: On the east-facing sunflowers, the flowers were bright, and these markings were distinctly more visible.

The effect on the sunflowers was also remarkable. East-facing sunflowers produced more plentiful and heavier seeds than those facing west. And the pollen from east-facing sunflowers seemed more successful in producing offspring.

The researchers found this out by surrounding sunflowers that produced only seeds and no pollen, with both east- and west-facing sunflowers. Using genotyping, they then determined whether the seed plants were pollinated by east or west pollen. The east-facing sunflowers produced significantly more offspring than the west-facing ones.

All this suggests that, while facing east may not be absolutely key to a sunflower's success, it does provide enough of a boost to make it worthwhile.

"Our results demonstrate that the easterly orientation of mature sunflower capitula plays an important role in managing the floret microclimate and ensuring the correct conditions for anthesis, pollination, and seed development," the researchers wrote in their paper.

The research has been published in New Phytologist.

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Until now, it's often been assumed that our species was responsible for the huge diversity of dog coats due to thousands of years of careful breeding. But a recent analysis of modern and ancient dogs and wolves suggests we might have given ourselves too much credit.

Geneticists have instead found evidence that natural selection more than 10,000 years ago probably provided a genetic basis for the dog coat patterns we see today.

"While we think about all this variation in coat color among dogs, some of it happened long before 'dogs' were dogs," explains geneticist Danika Bannasch from the University of California, Davis.

"The genetics turn out to be a lot more interesting because they tell us something about canid evolution." 

When researchers examined the ancient DNA of early dogs in Eurasia, dating back nearly 5,000 years, they found evidence of several different coat appearances, driven by two key regulators of the agouti-signaling protein (ASIP) gene.

ASIP is known to determine the color of a dog's coat by controlling the expression of yellow pigmentation (which can look tan or white). When combined in different ways, certain modulators of the ASIP gene appear to produce five distinct color patterns: dominant yellow, shaded yellow, agouti (two or more bands of different pigments on a hair), black saddle, and black back, as shown below.

The five distinct patterns of dog coats. (Bannasch et al., Nature Ecology and Evolution, 2021)

When comparing the genomes of modern dogs to modern gray wolves, researchers found agouti dog genes – which can create a range of speckled looks, including salt and pepper – were expressed similarly in both groups.

This indicates a shared relative with both black and white pigments expressed. To figure out who that was, researchers looked back even further. When comparing the genomes of ancient dogs and wolves, dated between 4,000 and 35,000 years old, they once again found similar colorings.

In fact, one particular species of ancient dog from nearly 10,000 years ago – the Zhokhov island dog from Siberia – already showed the black back pattern, making it quite distinct in its Arctic environment.

This suggests the modulators for the ASIP gene were at work in the earliest stages of dog domestication, which is dated somewhere between 14,000 and 30,000 years ago.

"Thus," the authors write, "diversity in ASIP regulatory sequences responsible for color variation today was apparent by 35,000 years in ancient wolves and by 9.5 thousand years in ancient dogs."

Today, Arctic gray wolves, which appear more white, express mostly yellow pigments in their fur, while gray wolves express more black pigments. Dogs can show a little of both, suggesting an exchange of genetic information from the common ancestor of white and gray wolves.

In fact, in the current study, the dominant yellow haplotypes of dogs were nearly identical to the Arctic gray wolves, which suggests they traded genetic information long, long ago.

When the team tried to create an evolutionary tree with their new findings, they discovered the last common ancestor for Arctic gray wolves and dogs probably dates back at least 2 million years.

"We were initially surprised to discover that white wolves and yellow dogs have an almost identical ASIP DNA configuration," says geneticist Chris Kaelin from the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology in Huntsville, Alabama.

"But we were even more surprised when it turned out that a specific DNA configuration is more than 2 million years old, prior to the emergence of modern wolves as a species."

During this time, the icy North of our planet was going through a glaciation period, which means a whiter coat would probably be more advantageous to a canid predator.

When wolves later showed up, they merely carried on this trait. Only much later did humans take up the genetic framework and run wild with it.

The study was published in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

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Speaking at a video conference with officials on the effects of Siberia's record-setting forest fires, he said it was "important" to work on the climate agenda "systematically." 

While Siberia sees an annual wildfire season each summer, the fires have burned with an increasing intensity in recent years, which Russian weather officials and environmentalists have linked to climate change.

The leaders of Siberian regions affected by the fires, as well as of a southern Russian region affected by floods, took part in the conference. 

"In the south (of Russia), the monthly norm of rainfall now falls in a few hours and in the Far East on the contrary, forest fires in drought conditions are spreading rapidly," Putin said. 

He called on authorities to be ready to evacuate more people living in areas affected by the fires, as well as provide economic support for them. 

He also called on officials to calculate the effects of the fires and make plans to reconstruct houses. 

The Russian leader said it was important to do everything to "save the forest riches" and "minimise damage for animals of the taiga", a word used to describe northern Russian forests. 

This week Russia launched a national response centre and deployed additional firefighters to battle the devastating Siberian fires.

In Yakutia, one of the hardest-hit regions this year, fires have already burned through more than 9.4 million hectares (23.2 million acres) — an area larger than Portugal. 

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