After months of pursuing a "COVID zero" strategy, Australia has been struggling to bring a resurgence of coronavirus cases under control, with more than 10 million people under lockdown in its two largest cities and the capital Canberra.

Residents of Sydney, going into an eighth week under stay-at-home orders, will now face heftier fines for flouting rules or lying to contact tracers, with current restrictions proving insufficient to stop the spread.

Lockdown restrictions were also extended across the entire state of New South Wales for the first time this year, coming into force on Saturday afternoon for at least seven days.

Police would boost patrols and checkpoints while hundreds more defence force personnel will help enforce stay-at-home orders as the outbreak in the most populous state of New South Wales hit another daily record of 466 community cases.

"Today is the most concerning day of the pandemic that we've seen," state premier Gladys Berejiklian told reporters in Sydney.

Describing efforts to curb the outbreak as a war against the "diabolical" Delta strain, Berejiklian said Australia was facing a significant threat from the outbreak.

"For some time, we thought Australia was different to other parts of the world, but we're not."

Police commissioner Mick Fuller said he had sought additional powers after officers reported people using loopholes to evade restrictions.

Residents are still allowed to leave their homes for exercise, shopping, health care and essential work—but police would ramp up efforts to enforce restrictions, he said.

Rules for leaving Sydney were also tightened to prevent the outbreak from spreading further into other regions.

The nation's capital, which is surrounded by New South Wales, was sent into lockdown earlier this week while the second-largest city of Melbourne is battling its own outbreak.

The resurgence has increased criticism of the country's sluggish vaccine roll-out, with just a quarter of eligible Australians so far fully vaccinated.

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As extreme heat waves struck parts of the United States and Europe, the globe averaged 62.07 degrees (16.73 degrees Celsius) last month, beating out the previous record set in July 2016 and tied again in 2019 and 2020. the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Friday. The margin was just .02 degrees (.01 Celsius),

The last seven Julys, from 2015 to 2021, have been the hottest seven Julys on record, said NOAA climatologist Ahira Sanchez-Lugo. Last month was 1.67 degrees (0.93 degrees Celsius) warmer than the 20th century average for the month.

"In this case first place is the worst place to be," NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad said in a press release. "This new record adds to the disturbing and disruptive path that climate change has set for the globe."

"This is climate change," said Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann. "It is an exclamation mark on a summer of unprecedented heat, drought, wildfires and flooding."

Earlier this week, a prestigious United Nations science panel warned of worsening climate change caused by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas and other human activity.

Warming on land in western North America and in parts of Europe and Asia really drove the record-setting heat, Sanchez-Lugo said. While the worldwide temperature was barely higher than the record, what shattered it was land temperature over the Northern Hemisphere, she said.

Northern Hemisphere temperatures were a third of a degree (.19 degrees Celsius) higher than the previous record set in July 2012, which for temperature records is "a wide margin," Sanchez-Lugo said.

July is the hottest month of the year for the globe, so this is also the hottest month on record.

One factor helping the world bake this summer is a natural weather cycle called the Arctic Oscillation, sort of a cousin to El Nino, which in its positive phase is associated with more warming, the NOAA climatologist said.

In this Monday, July 26, 2021, file photo, cows graze as smoke rises from the Dixie Fire burning in Lassen National Forest, near Jonesville, Calif. A historic drought and recent heat waves tied to climate change have made wildfires harder to fight in the American West. On Friday, Aug. 13, 2021, U.S. weather officials said Earth in July was the hottest month ever recorded. Credit: AP Photo/Noah Berger, File

Even with a scorching July and a nasty June, this year so far is only the sixth warmest on record. That's mostly because 2021 started cooler than recent years due to a La Nina cooling of the central Pacific that often reduces the global temperature average, Sanchez-Lugo said.

"One month by itself does not say much, but that this was a La Nina year and we still had the warmest temperatures on record ... fits with the pattern of what we have been seeing for most of the last decade now," said University of Illinois meteorology professor Donald Wuebbles.

While the world set a record in July, the United States only tied for its 13th hottest July on record. Even though California, Nevada, Oregon and Washington had their hottest Julys, slightly cooler than normal months in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas, Missouri, Alabama, Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire kept the nation from approaching record heat levels.

The last time the globe had a July cooler than the 20th century average was in 1976, which was also the last year the globe was cooler than that normal.

"So if you're younger than 45 you haven't seen a year (or July) where the mean temperature of the planet was cooler than the 20th century average," said Princeton University climate scientist Gabriel Vecchi.

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In 1981, a team of American scientists, led by cardiologist Herbert Benson of Harvard Medical School, traveled to the Himalayan regions of northern India to research the meditation practices of Tibetan Buddhist hermits. They were interested particularly in the practice of tummo, which in Tibetan refers to a millennium-old tantric meditation technique. Advanced practitioners were said to be able to raise their own internal body temperatures at will. With the support of the fourteenth Dalai Lama, Benson spent the next decade studying practitioners of tummo and other meditation techniques, tracking their vitals and body-heat output while they meditated.

Benson’s findings were astounding. In meditative states, the monks had remarkable control over their body temperature and oxygen intake. They could use their body heat to dry wet towels placed around them, where most people would shiver uncontrollably. They could raise the temperature of their fingers and toes by as much as 17 degrees. Some could even spend a night on a rocky ledge at an elevation of 15,000 feet in the Himalayas, where temperatures fell to zero degrees Fahrenheit, while they wore only woolen or cotton shawls. Benson’s research stunned many in the West and paved the way for several decades of scientific interest in Buddhist or Buddhist-derived meditation.

This dialog has produced thousands of scientific papers on the neurological and clinical effects of meditation. It has also brought “mindfulness” into Western popular culture. The scientists—whom New York Times columnist David Brooks has called “the neural Buddhists”—study the effects of meditation. They conduct brain scans of monks meditating in fMRI machines. They develop clinical meditation programs, such as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, to treat psychopathologies. And some even integrate concepts from Buddhist psychology and philosophy into their research.

How did scientists become interested in Buddhist-derived meditation? First, Jon Kabat-Zinn, the creator of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, veiled Buddhist concepts with psychological and biological language and thereby created a standardized, replicable program of meditation, ready for export. Second, the Buddhist tradition contains an extensive discourse on the nature of the mind.

This discourse is of great interest to neuroscientists and psychologists, who are in desperate need of anything that might help alleviate America’s mental health crisis. Third, from a historical perspective, a novel form of Buddhism known as “Buddhist modernism” emerged in the nineteenth century as a hybrid of Buddhist and Western discourses. Westerners and Asian Buddhists strategically reconfigured Buddhism as a “rational” and “scientific” religion, an idea that still influences scientists and even some Buddhists today. Finally, many scientists who study meditation have their own meditation practices, and they use their research to better understand—or even to legitimize—those practices.

Buddha and Mind

Mindfulness has become a buzzword. The concept is typically defined as “a kind of nonelaborative, nonjudgmental, present-centered awareness in which each thought, feeling, or sensation that arises in the attentional field is acknowledged and accepted as it is.” It is a skill that one cultivates through meditation practice, whereby one learns to pay attention to the phenomena of one’s experience from a detached perspective. An increasingly popular subject of clinical research, with 1,153 studies published on it in 2020 alone, mindfulness has been said to reduce stress and enhance emotional regulation, to alleviate symptoms of depression, anxiety, addiction, chronic pain, and eating disorders, to increase attention span, and to improve immune system function. And mindfulness programs have been adapted to a range of uses, from classrooms to the U.S. military to Silicon Valley corporations—Google, for example, now has a mindfulness program called “Search Inside Yourself.” Mindfulness has received a lot of attention from journalists too. In 2016, Time produced a special issue on mindfulness; and many articles tout the benefits of mindfulness, including “mindful sex” and “mindful diets.”

Not many people know that mindfulness is a translation of sati, a Pāli term used in the scriptures of the Theravāda school of Buddhism. It is one of the eight practices of the Noble Eightfold Path, which a Buddhist must follow in order to attain enlightenment. According to the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, or “Discourse on the Establishing of Mindfulness”—an ancient text on which many modern meditation movements are based—the practitioner is supposed to cultivate mindfulness of the body, sensations, the mind, and mental qualities; this is supposed to be the only way “for the purification of beings, for the overcoming of sorrow and lamentation, for the destruction of suffering and grief, for reaching the right path, for the attainment of Nirvana.”

How did this ancient religious term end up in modern parlance? In the 1970s, Jon Kabat-Zinn was a professor of medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and also a practitioner of Zen meditation. He kept his two identities of molecular biologist and Buddhist meditator separate until 1979, when he founded the Stress Reduction and Relaxation Program, which eventually became Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. His goal was to reframe mindfulness in language that would reach Westerners. He wanted to strip mindfulness meditation of its cultural baggage and export it to secular contexts, while still retaining its “liberating” potential: He promoted “a universal dharma understanding that is congruent with Buddhadharma but not constrained by its historical, cultural, and religious manifestations associated with its countries of origin and their unique traditions.” (“Dharma” is the doctrine taught by the Buddha.) In Buddhism, the main problem of existence is dukkha, which means “suffering” or “unsatisfactoriness,” and all the Buddha’s teachings aim at finding an end to dukkha. Kabat-Zinn chose to translate the central concept of dukkha as “stress.” In doing so, he changed the goal of meditation from the soteriological attainment of nirvana to one that was palatable to Westerners and measurable scientifically, namely stress reduction. Mindfulness is presented as secular; but, given its origin and goals, that characterization is questionable, and has caused considerable debate after being introduced into public schools.

Sara Lazar, professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, is one of many scientists who made use of Kabat-Zinn’s standardized, eight-week mindfulness program in her own research. Her lab studies the neuroscience of meditation and yoga, and her primary interest is in how meditation affects brain structure and function. Meditation, she tells me, targets many different neural mechanisms, from emotional regulation to cognitive control. “After you have been regularly meditating for a while, you start to change how you view the world and how you view yourself,” she says, adding that these changes have correlates detectable in the brain.

While much of Lazar’s research has examined the neural correlates of mindfulness meditation in treating psychopathologies such as depression, she recognizes that meditation can have transformational effects beyond that. “Of course, meditation was originally developed not for cognition or emotional regulation,” she says, but “for spiritual development.”

Traditionally, spiritual development would mean perceiving the world more in accordance with Buddhist doctrine: understanding on a deeper level that craving is the cause of suffering, that the self is an illusion, and that beings are reborn according to their karma.

Much of the doctrine is not acceptable to a modern Western worldview, so researchers of meditation have to cherry-pick the parts of Buddhism they like and ignore the rest. For example, they might draw from certain passages of the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta about developing mindfulness of the breath and body but overlook other passages about meditating over a corpse at a charnel ground. Or they might integrate into their research the Dalai Lama’s teachings on compassion, but they stop listening when he gets to the teachings on rebirth.

Asian Buddhists, in turn, have sought to associate their religion with the prestige of science. The Dalai Lama, in particular, has been a champion of the dialog between Buddhism and science. In 1991, he founded the Mind and Life Institute, with the purpose of “bridging science and contemplative wisdom to foster insight and inspire action toward flourishing.” The organization has hosted more than 30 dialogs between the Dalai Lama and scientists, and the spiritual leader has also spoken at several neuroscience conferences.

Buddhism’s extensive discourse on the nature of the mind is especially important in this regard. Many Buddhist texts across traditions discuss topics such as the nature of the self, the relationship between mind and reality, and the cultivation of positive states such as compassion. Non-Buddhist spiritual practices have also been subject to scientific study, most notably yoga and transcendental meditation, which are both derived from Hindu traditions. Yet Buddhism is more in vogue these days. Lazar attributes the popularity of Buddhism over other traditions partly to the Buddhist emphasis on the mind: “In transcendental meditation and yoga, when they talk about the effects of those practices, they often talk a lot about the effects on the body. Especially in yoga, they talk a lot about energy and chakras,” which are harder to translate into scientific terms. In contrast, Buddhism is more appealing to neuroscientists and psychologists, she says, because “Buddhism is all about the mind, about quieting the mind and learning about the mind, transforming the mind, and we have many tools for studying the mind, both subjectively and objectively.”

A good example of this use of Buddhist philosophy is the research of Judson Brewer, professor of psychiatry at Brown’s medical school and director of research and innovation at Brown’s Mindfulness Center. Brewer studies habit formation and addiction, and applies mindfulness as a treatment for smoking, emotional eating, and anxiety. He has been successful in developing innovative treatments for addiction: Using one of his mindfulness programs, participants were shown to quit smoking at about five times the rate of patients undergoing the normal, gold-standard treatment for smoking.

Brewer credits this success to the Buddhist model of craving, which for him fits perfectly with modern psychological models. When he started his residency in psychiatry, he noticed that his “patients with addictions were using the same terminology as the Buddhist scholars: craving, clinging, getting caught up in their craving,” he tells me. His model for addiction draws on a Buddhist concept called “dependent origination,” which the Buddha was supposed to have discovered on the night of his enlightenment, as described in some of the earliest scriptures. Dependent origination describes twelve links of a cause-and-effect loop that keep a being trapped in the rounds of painful existence and rebirth. To Brewer, the details closely resemble psychological models of reward-based learning. The Buddha, moreover, gives practical steps to escape this loop, which Brewer employs in his mindfulness programs for addiction. He even makes the bold claim that “Buddhist psychology is exactly the same as modern-day psychology.” For Brewer, “Buddhism is very much a scientifically based approach.”

Scientific Buddhism

Where did this notion of a “scientific” Buddhism come from? And what makes it so easy for scientists to embrace a few practical “life hacks” of Buddhism, such as its ideas about craving, and ignore others, more cosmological, such as its ideas about rebirth? It is hard to imagine modern scientists selectively embracing parts of Christianity or Islam in the same way.

In The Making of Buddhist Modernism, which was begun with an NEH Summer Stipend, David McMahan, professor of religious studies at Franklin & Marshall College, details the development of “Buddhist modernism,” a detraditionalized, demythologized form of Buddhism fused with Western discourses. The idea that Buddhism is compatible with science came from two historical circumstances of the nineteenth century.

The first historical circumstance was European colonialism. Missionaries in Asian countries such as Burma and Ceylon (modern Myanmar and Sri Lanka) sought to diminish the prestige of Buddhism in order to spread Christianity. One of the missionaries’ rhetorical strategies was to align Christianity with science and technology. Buddhists responded in turn by construing Buddhism as the real religion of science and technology. In Pānadurē in the British colony of Ceylon in 1871, a Buddhist monk and a Christian missionary debated each other in front of five thousand people over which religion was the more scientific. One prominent Buddhist reformer, Anagarika Dharmapala, a Sinhalese nationalist, perceived a crisis of legitimacy for his religion. At the World’s Parliament of Religions, held in Chicago in 1893 as part of the World’s Fair, he presented a radical reinterpretation of Buddhism, one that would be more attractive to his Western audience. For example, he declared that “pure” Buddhism lacked rituals and ceremonies and had no doctrines of heaven and hell realms, even though those were universal features of Buddhism as it was actually practiced. Instead, he claimed that the Buddha himself understood Darwinian evolution, and that his teaching was rational, nondogmatic, individualistic, and psychological rather than metaphysical. Dharmapala and other figures like him went to great lengths to present Buddhism as scientific, creating an image that has stuck, not only among Westerners but also among Asian Buddhists.

European colonialism inspired another important aspect of Buddhist modernism, namely the emphasis on meditation. Historically, most Buddhists have never meditated. The practice was traditionally reserved for specialized monks, who undertook it with a lifelong commitment to fundamentally altering their experience of reality. It was considered too difficult and time-consuming for laypeople, and even today most Buddhists in Asian countries, including many monks, do not meditate. The first modern meditation movement for laypeople was started in response to British rule in Burma. When the British took power in 1885, many Burmese, especially the monk Ledi Sayadaw, perceived an existential threat to Buddhism. In order to maintain support for Buddhism among the laity, Sayadaw began teaching meditation widely, spreading the technique with the aid of books and pamphlets, now possible after the British expansion of print culture in Burma. He reinvented a meditation technique called Vipassana. His technique was highly simplified and required no extensive study of texts—a radical break from traditional procedures. While by no means the only influential modern meditation movement, the Vipassana movement of Burma has had a massive impact on secular mindfulness.

The second historical development was the Victorian crisis of faith. In the late nineteenth century, educated Westerners began increasingly to question the central tenets of Christianity and the authority of the Bible. This widespread loss of faith was spurred on by recent scientific discoveries, especially the theory of evolution, which seemed to render many Christian beliefs untenable. Fearing the nihilistic implications of these discoveries, a number of influential figures sought alternative belief systems that might reconcile science and religion. A prominent example was Paul Carus, a German-born immigrant to America, who grew up as a conservative Christian but began to doubt his faith. Carus went on a search for a “religion of science,” a belief system that could capture the essence of all religions yet be compatible with a scientific worldview. He identified Buddhism as the best manifestation of that belief system because, he argued, it lacked supernatural revelation and a creator God. He got this impression in part from hearing Dharmapala and others like him at the World’s Parliament of Religions. Carus became highly sympathetic to Buddhism and began promoting his understanding of it to the West.

The idea of a scientific Buddhism initially formulated by these late nineteenth-century figures has influenced the Western perception of the religion ever since. Other thinkers in the nineteenth century made ideologically driven attempts to align the Buddhist doctrine of karma with Darwinian natural selection. S. N. Goenka, a highly influential Vipassana teacher who died in 2013, popularized the idea that his meditation style was itself a kind of internal science, “empirical” in its emphasis on first-person experience (in Goenka’s rhetoric, the Buddha did not intend to start a religion; instead, he was a “super-scientist”). Others drew parallels between Buddhism and physics, especially quantum mechanics, beginning with Fritjof Capra in his 1975 The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism. Historians identify the neuroscientific study of meditation as the latest manifestation of this long trend to legitimize Buddhism.

Problems of Mindfulness

The scientific study of meditation is not without its problems. A 2017 review by a number of leading mindfulness researchers raised various challenges, including the difficulty of defining mindfulness and methodological issues for interpreting results. It acknowledged that the media tend to exaggerate the potential benefits of mindfulness, falsely portraying it as “an essentially universal panacea.”

Indeed, a lot of research has highlighted the benefits of meditation, but very little has highlighted the harm that can come from it. With such enthusiasm for mindfulness, researchers often do not report harm from the practice, simply because they are not looking for it. That is starting to change with The Varieties of Contemplative Experience project at Brown. This project documents distressing and challenging experiences reported by Western Buddhist meditators; on the most extreme end, these can be destabilizing, inducing, for example, psychosis or depersonalization disorder, which can in some cases last for years. The researchers at Brown speculate that these negative meditation experiences might be the inevitable result of transferring meditation from its traditional role in monasteries to the novel cultural context of the secular West.

Humanities scholars have also highlighted the importance of cultural context. Some disapprove of scientists’ eagerness to extract meditation from its traditional role in Buddhist soteriology and repurpose it for their own ends. Bernard Faure, professor of Japanese religion at Columbia, writes that “to decontextualize meditation techniques and lump them together under a vague, generic rubric is to misunderstand these practices, as well as their potential effects on the human brain.” For him, the science of meditation misses the mark:

While mental states achieved by meditators may be interesting for neuroscience (as are all unusual psychological phenomena, such as, say, autism) their soteriological context—liberation from samsara, pursuing the bodhisattva path, and so forth—which is to say, the kind of context that matters most to Buddhists—is deemed irrelevant by scientists. Similarly, the literature on meditation has a tendency to ignore cultural differences in order to emphasize some vague universality in human experience.

Likewise, in his book Why I Am Not a Buddhist, Evan Thompson, philosophy professor at the University of British Columbia, makes a case against “Buddhist exceptionalism.” Buddhist exceptionalism is the idea that Buddhism is superior to other religions in being uniquely rational or uniquely compatible with science, or that it is not so much a religion as a philosophy of life or therapy. He takes issue with recent books titled Why Buddhism Is True and Buddhist Biology for claiming to validate Buddhism with science. In his view, using neuroscience to explain Buddhist doctrine is a conceptual mistake. “Contrary to neural Buddhism,” he writes in his book, “the status of the self, the value of meditation, and the meaning of ‘enlightenment’ aren’t matters that neuroscience can decide. They’re inherently philosophical matters that lie beyond the ken of neuroscience.” And he worries that the dialogs at the Mind and Life Institute have become corrupted by the desire of Buddhist-converted scientists, committed a priori to the value of meditation, to use their research to legitimize Buddhism.

The scientific study of meditation is indeed partly motivated by the personal experience of scientists. Many of them had their own serious meditation practices and benefited from meditation before studying it scientifically. Others took the opposite course, motivated by early mindfulness research to start meditating. Perhaps there are larger cultural forces at work. Perhaps the neural Buddhists, with their materialistic worldviews, still thirst for spirituality: the life-affirming orientation, the social identity based on shared moral purpose, and even the notion of transcendence that religions are uniquely suited to satisfy. In which case, scientific Buddhism may seem irresistible, with its appeal to empiricism, its emphasis on personal experience, and its eschewal of ritual and tradition. This ahistorical reinterpretation of Buddhism can certainly seem like a breath of fresh air to the modern white, upper-middle class Westerner, who, disillusioned with the Christianity or the Judaism of her upbringing, is still not fully satisfied with what our secular culture has to offer.

About the author

James Flynn is a former editorial intern at Humanities and a graduate student in history at Yale.

Funding information

The National Endowment for the Humanities has, since the early 1970s, funded hundreds of projects on various traditions within the history of Buddhism as it has been practiced across the globe, from India to Tibet, to China, to Japan, and, more recently, the United States. These projects involved religion studies, philosophy, art and architectural history, and translation into English. Leading Buddhists whose lives and thought have been studied with NEH support include twentieth-century figures such as D. T. Suzuki, a key figure in Zen Buddhism, and Alan Watts, a convert to Buddhism who wrote popular books in English about Eastern religious traditions, and several important early figures such as the sixth-century Indian-born monk Paramartha, whose translation projects shaped the tradition of Chinese Buddhism, and the fourteenth-century Japanese Zen master Gido Shushin. In 2002, David McMahan of Franklin & Marshall College received a summer stipend to study the making of modern Buddhism. More recently, NEH awarded $60,000 to the production company Rattapallax to support a short documentary on the poet Allen Ginsberg’s trip to India in 1962, after which Ginsberg helped popularize Buddhism in the United States, and $400,000 to the Asia Society in New York to support a traveling exhibition called “Comparative Hell: Asian Religious Traditions and Depictions of the Afterlife.”

Republication statement

This article is available for unedited republication, free of charge, using the following credit: “Originally published as “Buddha and Mind” in the Summer 2021 issue of Humanities magazine, a publication of the National Endowment for the Humanities.” Please notify us at publications@neh.gov if you are republishing it or have any questions.

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A patient of mine, a bright and thoughtful young man in his early 20s, came to see me for debilitating anxiety and depression. He had dropped out of college and was living with his parents. He was vaguely contemplating suicide. He was also playing videogames most of every day and late into every night.

Twenty years ago the first thing I would have done for a patient like this was prescribe an antidepressant. Today I recommended something altogether different: a dopamine fast. I suggested that he abstain from all screens, including videogames, for one month.

Over the course of my career as a psychiatrist, I have seen more and more patients who suffer from depression and anxiety, including otherwise healthy young people with loving families, elite education and relative wealth. Their problem isn’t trauma, social dislocation or poverty. It’s too much dopamine, a chemical produced in the brain that functions as a neurotransmitter, associated with feelings of pleasure and reward.

When we do something we enjoy—like playing videogames, for my patient—the brain releases a little bit of dopamine and we feel good. But one of the most important discoveries in the field of neuroscience in the past 75 years is that pleasure and pain are processed in the same parts of the brain and that the brain tries hard to keep them in balance. Whenever it tips in one direction it will try hard to restore the balance, which neuroscientists call homeostasis, by tipping in the other.

As soon as dopamine is released, the brain adapts to it by reducing or “downregulating” the number of dopamine receptors that are stimulated. This causes the brain to level out by tipping to the side of pain, which is why pleasure is usually followed by a feeling of hangover or comedown. If we can wait long enough, that feeling passes and neutrality is restored. But there’s a natural tendency to counteract it by going back to the source of pleasure for another dose.

If we keep up this pattern for hours every day, over weeks or months, the brain’s set-point for pleasure changes. Now we need to keep playing games, not to feel pleasure but just to feel normal. As soon as we stop, we experience the universal symptoms of withdrawal from any addictive substance: anxiety, irritability, insomnia, dysphoria and mental preoccupation with using, otherwise known as craving.

Our brains evolved this fine-tuned balance over millions of years in which pleasures were scarce and dangers ever-present. The problem today is that we no longer live in that world. Instead, we now live in a world of overwhelming abundance. The quantity, variety and potency of highly reinforcing drugs and behaviors has never been greater. In addition to addictive substances like sugar and opioids, there is also a whole new class of electronic addictions that didn’t exist until about 20 years ago: texting, tweeting, surfing the web, online shopping and gambling. These digital products are engineered to be addictive, using flashing lights, celebratory sounds and “likes” to promise ever-greater rewards just a click away,

Yet despite increased access to all of these feel-good drugs, we’re more miserable than ever before. Rates of depression, anxiety, physical pain and suicide are increasing all over the world, especially in rich nations. According to the World Happiness Report, which ranks 156 countries by how happy their citizens perceive themselves to be, Americans reported being less happy in 2018 than they were in 2008. Other wealthy countries saw similar decreases in self-reported happiness scores, including Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Japan, New Zealand and Italy. The Global Burden of Disease study found that the number of new cases of depression world-wide increased 50% between 1990 and 2017, with the highest increases in regions with the highest income, especially North America.

It’s hard to see cause and effect when we’re chasing dopamine. It’s only after we’ve taken a break from our drug of choice that we’re able to see the true impact of our consumption on our lives. That’s why I asked my patient to give up videogames for a month, enough time to allow his brain to reset its dopamine balance. It wasn’t easy, but he was motivated by the counterintuitive idea that abstaining from the thing that made him feel good in the short-term might actually make him feel better in the long-term.

To his surprise, he did feel better than he had in years, with less anxiety and less depression. He was even able to return to playing videogames without negative effects, by strictly limiting his playing time to no more than two days a week, for two hours a day. That way he left enough time in between sessions for the brain’s dopamine balance to be restored.

He avoided videogames that were too potent, the ones that he couldn’t stop playing once he started. He designated one laptop for gaming and a different one for school, to keep gaming and classwork physically separated. Finally, he committed to playing only with friends, never with strangers, so that gaming strengthened his social connections. Human connection itself is a potent and adaptive source of dopamine.

Not everyone plays videogames, but just about all of us have a digital drug of choice, and it probably involves using a smartphone—the equivalent of the hypodermic needle for a wired generation. Reducing phone use is notoriously difficult, because at first it causes the brain’s pleasure-pain balance to tilt to the side of pain, making us feel restless and cranky. But if we can keep it up long enough, the benefits of a healthier dopamine balance are worth it. Our minds are less preoccupied with craving, we are more able to be present in the moment, and life’s little unexpected joys are rewarding again.

—Dr. Lembke is a psychiatrist and professor at Stanford University. This essay is adapted from her new book “Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence,” which will be published on Aug. 24 by Dutton.

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Toys can be a child’s most treasured possession, and single father Nick Hardman, 37, is taking that one step further by creating specialist teddies for children with medical conditions.

Working out of his garage in Morley, Leeds, Hardman uses his 3D printer to make shunt valves, tracheostomies, pacemakers, and hearing aids, which can be fitted to teddy bears – so children with medical conditions can have a toy that looks just like them.

“I used to have no idea about all of these medical conditions,” says Hardman, a father-of-two who works in automation.

“My eyes have really been opened to how many children out there are going through something really difficult and don’t understand why they are having to wear a medical contraption that makes them look different to their friends. Now they can have a teddy who looks just like them and they aren’t so alone.”

Hardman first used his 3D printer to create 12,500 PPE items for hospitals when supplies were short at the beginning of the pandemic, but then moved on to making small toys for his two children as well as other customers.

Then, in Autumn 2020, he was contacted by a parent of a child with hydrocephalus – a condition which often requires patients to wear a shunt valve to drain excess fluid from the brain – who asked him to make an accessible toy for them.

“I didn’t know what a shunt valve looked like, but after doing some research it seemed fairly simple to recreate,” explains Hardman. “It took a couple of hours for me to print one, then I attached it to the teddy and uploaded a few pictures to my Facebook page before sending it to the little boy.

One of Nick Hardman’s creations – a teddy bear wearing a magnetic stoma bag and a chest coil

Within days 68,000 people had liked the photos and I started getting dozens of requests for similar teddies. I couldn’t believe it.”

Hardman got to work creating a whole range of medical accessories, which he then attached to various teddies, including one going through dialysis, one with a cochlear implant and a foot splint, as well as a set of Braille dominos for a young girl learning Braille.

“It was a whole new world to me, but I loved it,” says Hardman.

“I realised the toys needed to be safe for the children to play with, so I raised some money and sent them off to a lab to make sure they were compliant with toy safety standards.

“They advised me to make a few changes, such as ensuring the plastic didn’t contain certain chemicals and there were no choking hazards. Then I bulk bought a load of flat pack teddies, which I stuffed in my garage before adding on the medical accessories.”

Soon Hardman was sending his specialised toys all over the world, including Australia, Canada and America, as well as being contacted by a play therapist who suggested he should create a Berlin Heart – an assistant device which is used to take over the function of a child’s own heart when it becomes too weak to pump sufficient amounts of blood around the body, and is often used when children are waiting for a heart transplant.

“When I learnt what a Berlin Heart does, I knew I needed to help,” says Hardman. “I purchased a giant teddy from Amazon, named him Eddie the Teddy, worked out how to do the heart surgery and did the world’s first Berlin Heart surgery on a 1.2m tall teddy bear.

“I wrote to Great Ormond Street Hospital and asked them if they wanted to take care of Eddie until they found a child who needs him.

They said yes, and so I shipped him off the next day.”

Now Hardman hopes to create a not-for-profit business to allow him to buy more 3D printing machines and produce toys on a larger scale so hospitals can purchase a range of specialist teddies from him to help play therapists talk to children about the procedures they’re going through in an accessible way.

“At the moment it’s just a hobby,” explains Hardman. “I print the medical accessories in bulks of around 24, which can take up to 19 hours, and I only charge families £20 for each toy. Thankfully, I’ve had donations made which cover the plastic costs, but I’m hoping to find a toy company who can donate some teddies or dolls.

A teddy Hardman made for a little boy with foot splints, a peg feed and a peg feed machine

“The teddies are a way to explain and normalise operations the children might be having, or why they are suddenly having to wear hearing aids or a shunt valve when before they didn’t need to.

“If they have a certain condition and they have a toy just like them, it helps the children understand what’s going on. I’ve had calls with more than 70 play therapists across the country and from that I’ve been told there aren’t many toys like it, but they’re desperately needed to help these children not only understand why they’re different, but to feel less alone.”

For more information about the toys, visit Nick Hardman’s Facebook page here.

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Western Australia became the latest state to impose tighter curbs on travel from New South Wales and its state capital, which posted a record 390 new infections Friday.

Western Australia premier Mark McGowan said from Tuesday would-be travellers will have to secure an exemption to enter his state, provide a negative COVID test, show proof of at least one vaccine dose, undergo 14 days home quarantine and install a tracking app on their phone.

If Sydney's cases go above 500 a day, travellers will have to undergo a mandatory 14-day hotel quarantine and exemptions will be limited to a small number including the armed forces.

McGowan said the measures—which are more restrictive than many international borders—were "tough" but "entirely fair".

In Queensland, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said she was also "very very concerned" about the situation in New South Wales and warned that more border restrictions were on the way.

"No one should be crossing that border to go into New South Wales," she said. "We do not want to see this virus creeping north and if we have to implement harder measures we will."

There is growing anger at Sydney's failure to bring its seven-week-old outbreak under control, as cases spread to the countryside and across state borders.

More than 10 million Australians are in lockdown as the Sydney cluster—which started with an overseas flight crew—grew to 6,874 cases.

Authorities have indicated that a Sydney lockdown could remain in some form until October, but have refrained from further citywide restrictions.

Residents are still allowed to leave their homes for exercise, shopping, health care and essential work. Critics argue that is not restrictive enough.

As anger grows, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison backed Western Australia's move. "I do welcome the requirements for vaccination," he said.

Morrison's conservative government has largely delegated responsibility for the pandemic response to states.

Lockdowns, testing, travel restrictions and vaccine rollouts are mostly dictated by state governments who have often publicly bickered about strategy.

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The Norwegian mountains can be quite inhospitable during the colder months. Nevertheless, there are plants that cope splendidly with the biting temperatures. They include the dwarf birch Betula nana and the black crowberry Empetrum hermaphroditum. Both thrive in arctic-alpine conditions, which makes them typical representatives of tundra vegetation.

Up until now, it has been unclear how the growth of dwarf birch and crowberry is influenced by specific environmental conditions. In the alpine regions of Norway, a project has been underway for 30 years that aims to change that. "We wired up some of the plants here and fitted them with so-called data loggers that record the measurements," explains Prof. Dr. Jörg Löffler from the Department of Geography at the University of Bonn. A pin-like sensor records the diameter of the trunk—minute by minute, 365 days a year, to an accuracy of less than a thousandth of a millimeter. At the same time, the researchers measure solar radiation, temperature in the root zone and just above the soil surface, and soil moisture.

Shrinkage against frost damage

In the current study, researchers analyzed nearly 500 million measurements from 40 plants between 2015 and 2019. "We mainly studied how the microclimate, that is, the conditions encountered by the individual plant, affects its growth," says Svenja Dobbert, who is doing her doctorate in Prof. Löffler's research group. This revealed a striking rhythm in both dwarf birch and crowberry. During the colder months, their trunk diameter shrank significantly in each case—a process that was reversed in the spring. However, it was not until late summer that the deficits were made up to such an extent that actual growth began.

"Due to low temperatures in the colder months, there is hardly any liquid water available for the plants," Dobbert says, explaining the finding. "They also reduce their trunk diameter by actively reducing the water content of their cells to avoid frost damage." Just how important this strategy is for both species to thrive is demonstrated by another observation—plants that shrank very little during the winter often showed little or no growth the following summer.

A second important finding is that he deciduous dwarf birches usually grew better after a mild winter. They therefore seem to generally benefit from warmer winters. With the evergreen crowberries it was the other way around. "In cold winters, there is usually less snowfall," Löffler says. "This could be an advantage for evergreen species because they can then keep up photosynthetic activity for longer and hence enter the growth phase earlier in the spring." It is therefore possible that climate change is causing an increasing spread of deciduous species and a concomitant displacement of evergreen species. Since the leaves of deciduous plants have a comparatively large surface area (in contrast, those of evergreen species are usually needle-like), this effect could contribute to the further greening of arctic-alpine regions.

The microclimate is crucial

"However, our results also show that microclimatic conditions can be extremely different depending on the location," explains Löffler. For instance, at exposed, windy locations, snow cover tends to be very thin. The deciduous dwarf birch however requires a sufficiently thick insulating layer of snow in winter. It then has to use fewer resources to protect itself from frost. Without this warming blanket, the dwarf birch has a difficult time. The evergreen crowberry, in contrast, benefits from the extra sunlight during such snow-free periods. "Overall, our measurements prove that global climate data provide little valid evidence for local vegetation effects," emphasizes the geographer. "Studies like ours can potentially help us better model such complex effects and in turn better predict the effects of climate change on plant life."

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Last week, NASA’s Perseverance rover shot for a new milestone in the search for extraterrestrial life: Drilling into Mars to extract a plug of rock, which will eventually get fired back to Earth for scientists to study. Data sent to NASA scientists early on August 6 indicated a victory—the robot had indeed drilled into the Red Planet, and a photo even showed a dust pile around the borehole.

 

“What followed later in the morning was a rollercoaster of emotions,” wrote Louise Jandura, chief engineer for sampling and caching at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a blog post yesterday describing the attempt. While data indicated that Perseverance had transferred a sample tube into its belly for storage, that tube was in fact empty. “It took a few minutes for this reality to sink in but the team quickly transitioned to investigation mode,” Jandura wrote. “It is what we do. It is the basis of science and engineering.”

 

By now, the team has a few indications of what went wrong in what Katie Stack Morgan, deputy project scientist of the Mars 2020 mission, calls “the case of the missing core.”

 

“We've successfully demonstrated the sample caching process, yet we have a tube with no core in it,” she says. “How could it be possible that we have carried out all of these steps perfectly and successfully, yet there is no rock—and no anything—in the tube?”

 

One theory, of course, was that the rover had simply dropped the core sample. But there were no broken pieces on the surface. Also, Stack Morgan says, the tube was “very clean, not even dusty, suggesting that there was perhaps nothing that had ever gotten into the tube.”

 

NASA scientists now think that the core was actually pulverized in the drilling process, then scattered around the borehole. “That would explain why we don't see any pieces in the hole and why we don't see any pieces on the ground, because they have basically become part of the cutting,” says Stack Morgan. “So we started to think about why that happened, because that is not a behavior that the engineers saw in the very extensive test set of rocks that they cored prior to launch.”

 

Perseverance is drilling in Jezero Crater, which used to cradle a lake, and therefore may have been home to ancient microbial life. (It's been relying on the Mars helicopter, Ingenuity, to scout ahead for spots to dig.) By digging into the rock instead of just sampling dust at the surface, the rover will provide vital clues about the geological history of the planet. The Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars in 2012, also drilled, but it was designed to grind the rock instead of extracting cores. This time, NASA engineers want samples that let them observe the rock as it was laid down so they can analyze it for hallmarks of life—some microbes, for instance, leave behind characteristic minerals.

 

For Perseverance, the drilling process actually begins inside the rover, in a section called the adaptive caching assembly. Here, a robotic arm takes a tube out of storage and inserts it into the “bit carousel,” a storage container for all of Perseverance’s coring bits. The carousel then rotates, presenting the tube—which is about the same shape and size as a laboratory test tube—to the 7-foot-long arm that’ll actually do the drilling. “We pick up that coring bit, and that has the tube inside,” said Jessica Samuels, surface mission manager for Perseverance, in an interview before the first drilling attempt. “And now at that time we're ready to actually acquire the sample.”

 

To get that rock, the drill on the larger robotic arm both rotates into the ground (the way you’d use an apple corer) and hammers into it. All the while, the rover is sensing its progress as it drills. This data feeds into an algorithm that automatically adjusts the drilling, for instance adding more or less hammering. Once the robot has bored far enough, it has to break the rock sample off, so it’ll actually shift the drill. “It causes the tube inside the coring bit to actually shift to the side to cause that core-break motion,” said Samuels.

 

Ideally, the robot will come up with a chalk-sized piece of Mars. Perseverance will actually repeat this process many more times, taking multiple samples from the crater. Think of it like drawing a blood sample: The phlebotomist swaps tubes in and out as they fill up, only Perseverance swaps the containers as they fill with rock.

 

Once a tube is full, the drilling arm then docks it back in the bit carousel within the adaptive caching assembly. Now the smaller arm picks up the sample and shuttles it around to different stations. There’s a probe, for example, that measures the volume of the sample, and a camera that snaps photos of the tube. Then it’s off to a dispenser that plops a seal into the tube, and then yet another station that pushes down on the seal to activate it. The camera takes a few more pictures of the sample, just to make sure everything looks good, and finally it is sent back to temporary storage in the robot’s belly.

 

The robot is expected to collect about three dozen samples as it rolls around Mars. “We drive around with these tubes, until we're ready to drop them off in a collective cache,” said Samuels. The tubes will wait in this cache until a future Mars sample return mission picks them up and ferries them to Earth. “The science team is looking for all different types of rocks—sedimentary, igneous—to be able to bring back because they're going to tell us different things about Mars,” she continued. Once the retrieval mission returns, scientists from many different institutions will be able to study the geology of the Red Planet.

The robot is doing this autonomously. Like its sibling rovers, Perseverance can’t rely on a human on Earth to constantly pilot it around Mars—it takes up to 20 minutes for radio signals to travel between the two planets. So Perseverance is largely a set-it-and-forget-it kind of science machine. “It is completely hands-off, from the beginning where the sample tube is taken out of storage, and all the way through the sample acquisition process, all the way to the point where it goes back into storage,” said Samuels. “All of that is autonomous.”

 

And while the first drilling attempt didn’t exactly go as planned, what initially seemed like a problem might actually provide vital clues about the Martian geology. Going into the maneuver, Stack Morgan and other NASA scientists reckoned the rock was either a sedimentary or a basalt (crystalized magma). Given how the rock behaved when drilled, now they are leaning towards basalt, which crystallizes at depth to form coarse grains. “When we started to core this rock, it basically broke up along these kind of disintegrating grain boundaries,” says Stack Morgan.

 

This is exciting because Perseverance is drilling in a former lake bed. If it can drill into sedimentary rock—layers of muck laid down by the lake—that could potentially provide signatures of microbial life. But igneous rock like basalt provides a timeline: Scientists can date when the magma turned into hard rock.

 

In other words, Perseverance may have stumbled onto something exhilarating. “Honestly, the best-case scenario would have been that we successfully cored this rock,” says Stack Morgan. “But the next-best scenario is that we have potentially discovered a sequence of rocks where we have the opportunity both to explore the habitability of this area, while also providing those age constraints that tell us exactly when Jezero Crater was habitable.”

 

NASA hasn’t yet released a date for Perseverance’s next move, but chief engineer Louise Jandura wrote in her blog post that the rover will leave the first borehole behind and continue to the next sampling location, which the Ingenuity helicopter has identified as likely to be sedimentary rock “that we anticipate will align better with our Earth-based test experience.”

 

“The hardware performed as commanded but the rock did not cooperate this time,” she continued. “It reminds me yet again of the nature of exploration. A specific result is never guaranteed no matter how much you prepare.”

Why Perseverance's First Mars Drilling Attempt Came Up Empty

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A drama has been unfolding in the corridor outside Matthew Wooller’s lab at the University of Alaska. That’s where he and his colleagues tape up large sheets of paper mapping levels of strontium, nitrogen, and oxygen isotopes. These numbers tell the life story of a woolly mammoth that lived more than 17,000 years ago: its birth, its expulsion from the herd as it reached adolescence, its travels back and forth across the Brooks Mountains in northern Alaska, and finally its death from starvation.

 

That story, published today as a paper in Science, is the first to map out the life of a single woolly mammoth. It’s based on the isotopes that make up one of the animal’s tusks, which Wooller and his coauthors used to map its movements and puzzle out what it ate. This data is starting to fill in the gaps in scientists’ knowledge about how mammoths behaved, and it could be a new method for mapping the movements of other prehistoric species, as well. By giving scientists a better idea of how mammoths responded to stressors at the end of the last ice age, the research could also help them make better predictions about what will happen to today’s large mammals as global warming transforms the environment.

 

“It was like a soap opera emerging right in front of our eyes,” says Wooller of the chronology his team pieced together in their hallway. “It was kind of beautiful.”

 

Isotopes are variations on a specific element. Strontium, for example, has four stable, naturally-occurring isotopes: 84Sr, 86Sr, 87Sr, and 88Sr. Each has the same number of protons, but they have different numbers of neutrons. These isotopes are found all over the place—in rocks, water, and on the seafloor—but in site-specific ratios. That means the ratio of 87Sr to 86Sr, for example, becomes like an address for a specific area. Thousands of years ago, as the mammoths grazed on the grassy tundra, those isotopes would have traveled from the soil to their food to their bodies. “You are what you eat, isotopically,” Wooller says.

 

For a person, isotopes get distributed into every part of the body, from hair and teeth to bones. For a mammoth, that included the tusks, which grow from a point that attaches to the base of the skull. Every day, minerals and isotopes would have traveled through the bloodstream and been deposited at this base in layers that built up over time. Like the rings in a tree trunk, these layers provide a record of where the mammoth went during its lifetime—from birth at the very tip of the tusk, until death when layers were no longer added to the base.

Although the world has changed considerably since woolly mammoths roamed, the unique isotope ratios in Alaskan rocks and soil have more or less stayed the same. By matching the isotope profiles in the tusk with the isotopes in the current landscape, the researchers could track where the mammoth dined over the years.

 

“Strontium isotopes change with geology, so that changes really, really slowly,” says Clément Bataille, a geologist at the University of Ottawa and a coauthor on the paper. In order for the isotopic composition of an area to change, lots of new soil would have had to form—and that hasn’t happened much in this part of Alaska since the early Holocene epoch, when this woolly mammoth was alive. Northern Alaska has remained fairly pristine, Bataille adds, because there hasn’t been much glaciation or human activity to move the soil and rocks around.

 

First, the team had to create an isotopic map, which they did by taking samples from the teeth of modern day rodents that live across Alaska. Because scientists know these rodents don’t migrate long distances, they knew their teeth would give a good picture of what specific areas look like isotopically.

 

Then Wooller selected a tusk that was more than 5 feet long, part of a pair that was discovered alongside other bones, including a lower jawbone. Over the years, fossils can get separated, getting picked up by rivers or slowly slipping down mountainsides. But finding all these pieces together meant the researchers could be pretty sure this marked the spot where the animal died—and that was important, because it helped them start to work through the mammoth’s biography. “Our starting point was its end point,” he says.

 

DNA from the remains revealed the mammoth was male, but to get more information the researchers split the tusk in half to get a better look at those rings of deposited mineral. They used a laser to take tiny samples from each layer, from the material at the tip that recorded the mammoth’s earliest days, to the part at the base that recorded his last.

When they overlaid the tusk data onto their isotopic rodent map, the researchers found that the mammoth was born in the lower Yukon basin and spent his early years grazing in the interior of Alaska, between the Brooks and Alaska mountain ranges. When he reached sexual maturity at about 16 years old, the mammoth broadened his range, moving farther north into the Brooks mountains. The scientists tracked him as he migrated between the interior of Alaska and the northern slope of the mountain range, possibly seeking food as the seasons changed, sometimes traveling over 300 miles in just a few months.

 

“That was very surprising to me,” says Bataille of these ranges, which were much larger than he’d expected. “It definitely asks the question why. What happened? Why is he doing this? Why is he moving this way, and so fast?”

 

This indication that mammoths needed a very large habitat to thrive could give us clues about why they went extinct, says David Nogués-Bravo, an associate professor of historical biogeography at the University of Copenhagen, who was not involved in the study. During this mammoth’s life, sometime at the very end of the last ice age, the Earth was warming up. Boreal forests were starting to take over the mammoths’ home on the grassy plains. Humans may have shown up and started hunting them too. By about 6,000 years after this mammoth’s death, the species was almost extinct. It’s hard for scientists to tease apart how different stressors could have collided to wipe out the mammoths, but having this basic data about their home ranges and how much they moved around could help them build models to recreate what might have happened.

 

Nogués-Bravo says techniques like isotopic mapping are a big step forward because they could help scientists trace the process of extinction. "It’s really opening up a big window to help us understand why species go extinct," he says. That could ultimately help scientists anticipate what might happen to other large animals, like elephants, in the coming years as climate change and human interference limit their habitats.

 

But there are limits to how fine a picture the data from this tusk can paint. Nogués-Bravo says these maps are probably pretty accurate at giving a sense of where the animal generally was. But they aren’t GPS. “I’m more skeptical about the specific routes that they tried to model,” he says. To trace those routes, researchers would need really accurate isotope data from every square kilometer of the area, which is a level of detail their rodent-based map doesn’t have.

 

Still, while the portrait is a bit blurry, it’s an unprecedented look at what a single mammoth was doing during its life. For example, as Wooller and Bataille examined the base of the tusk, they started to see signs of trouble. The patterns of the strontium isotopes revealed that the animal was moving less and less, staying in a relatively small area and not migrating the hundreds of miles it had before. Scientists estimate that mammoths usually lived into their sixties or seventies, but at only 28 years old, this mammoth was starting to die. Over the last year of its life, the levels of nitrogen isotopes in its tusk started to spike, a pattern that indicates starvation in mammals. “It was like we captured what caused it to die,” says Wooller, though why the mammoth stopped moving and eating normally is still a mystery.

 

Now the researchers would like to apply this technique to tusks from other mammoths. Wooller is curious about whether other males behaved similarly to the one they tracked, and whether females had different migratory patterns than males. He also wonders how those movements changed as the planet kept heating up, so he wants to examine tusks from mammoths that lived during different time periods. That might offer more clues about whether they changed their range in response to the advance of the boreal forest, or because of the presence of humans. This technique could also be used on the teeth and antlers of other species that were alive during this time, like caribou or musk oxen, to see how each animal reacted to this changing world.

 

“What we’re showing here is that there’s a very rich and wonderful record that can be gained from this tusk,” says Wooller. Each is a vault of information, an entire life story waiting to be read.

A Mammoth Tusk Reveals a Woolly (and Unprecedented) Tale

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Analysis used new technique for determining effective temperatures of red supergiants

There’s new evidence of a large cold spot partly causing dimming of Betelgeuse

Anecdotally, those who meditate say it helps to calm their minds, recenter their thoughts and cut through the "noise" to show what really matters. Scientifically, though, showing the effects of meditation on the human brain have proved to be tricky.

A new study from Binghamton University's Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science tracked how practicing meditation for just a couple of months changed the brain patterns of 10 students in the University's Scholars Program.

The seed for the research came from a casual chat between Assistant Professor Weiying Dai and lecturer George Weinschenk, MA '01, Ph.D. '07, both from the Department of Computer Science.

Weinschenk is a longtime meditation practitioner whose wife worked as an administrator at the Namgyal Monastery in Ithaca, which is the North American seat of the Dalai Lama's personal monastery.

"I developed very close friendships with several of the monks," he said. "We would hang out together, and I even received instruction from some of the Dalai Lama's teachers. I took classes there, I read a lot and I earned a three-year certificate in Buddhist studies."

Dai has studied brain mapping and biomedical image processing, and while earning her Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh, she tracked Alzheimer's disease patients using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans.

"I'm interested in brain research to see how our brains are really functioning and how all different kinds of disease affect our brain," she said. "I really have zero medical training, but I pick up all this knowledge or background from reading the literature and talking with the experts."

The two faculty members had neighboring offices and shared a conversation one day about their backgrounds. Weinschenk mentioned that he had been asked to teach a semester-long class for the Scholars Program on meditation.

"I told Weiying, 'Yeah, meditation really can have a transformative effect on the brain,'" Weinschenk said. "She was a little skeptical, especially about whether such a short amount of time spent learning how to meditate, whether that would make any difference. She suggested we might be able to quantify such a thing with modern technology."

For the fall 2017 semester, Dai secured grant funding, and their collaboration began. Near the beginning of the semester, she took the participants to Cornell University for MRI scans of their brains. Weinschenk taught students how to meditate, told them to practice five times a week for 10 or 15 minutes, and asked them to keep a journal record of their practice. (The syllabus also included other lessons about the cultural transmissions of meditation and its applications for wellness.)

"Binghamton University Scholars are high achievers who want to do the things they are assigned and do well on them, so they didn't require much prompting to maintain a regular meditation routine," he said. "To guarantee objective reporting, they would relate their experiences directly to Weiying about how frequently they practiced."

The results, recently published in the journal Scientific Reports, show that meditation training led to faster switching between the brain's two general states of consciousness.

One is called the default mode network, which is active when the brain is at wakeful rest and not focused on the outside world, such as during daydreaming and mind-wandering. The other is the dorsal attention network, which engages for attention-demanding tasks.

The findings of the study demonstrate that meditation can enhance the brain connection among and within these two brain networks, indicating the effect of meditation on fast switching between the mind wandering and focusing its attention as well as maintaining attention once in the attentive state.

"Tibetans have a term for that ease of switching between states—they call it mental pliancy, an ability that allows you to shape and mold your mind," Weinschenk said. "They also consider the goal of concentration one of the fundamental principles of self-growth."

Dai and Weinschenk are still parsing through the data taken from the 2017 MRI scans, so they have yet to test other Scholars Program students. Because Alzheimer's disease and autism could be caused by problems with the dorsal attention network, Dai is making plans for future research that could use meditation to mitigate those problems.

"I'm thinking about an elderly study, because this population was young students," she said. "I want to get a healthy elderly group, and then another group with early Alzheimer's disease or mild cognitive impairment. I want to see whether the changes in the brain from meditation can enhance cognitive performance. I'm writing the proposal and trying to attract the funds in that direction."

Though once skeptical about the subject, "I'm pretty convinced about the scientific basis of meditation after doing this study," she added. "Maybe I'll just go to George's class when he teaches it so that I can benefit, too!"

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The AM-III is apparently a semiconductor which can reportedly pass electric current. The AM-III is made of carbon which can also be used to make a bulletproof window and is a semiconductor almost as efficient as silicon, reports say.

AM-III's ability to be used as a photoelectric device can make it a product of interest to manufacture weapons due to its ability to withstand extreme temperatures.

The ultrastrong semiconducting device has wide applications however mass production is still a long way off. The new material developed by scientists in northern China can reportedly leave deep scratches on a diamond.

Reports say the bulletproof quality of the AM-III is maybe twenty to hundred times better than a conventional product available in the market.

The transparent AM-III can also be produced in various shapes and sizes, according to scientists.

Diamonds are commonly known as the hardest material in the world and is also the most scratch-resistant material found on the planet.

A Diamond is considered matchless in toughness and scratch-resistant qualities. It is also the hardest and most durable gemstone on the planet.

Diamonds are found in several countries with Russia, Botswana, Canada, Angola, South Africa, DR Congo, Nambia, Lesotho, Tanzania and Australia being the top producers.

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Source of Dinosaur-killing asteroid possibly found in darkest corner of Asteroid Belt

Beer brewing is nearly as old as agriculture itself, but few have taken the science and traditions of brewing beer as seriously as the Germans. So it's no surprise then that a team of German chemists went to town and counted up all the different kinds of molecules in commercially available beer, but even they were surprised by how many they found.

 

In a new study published in Frontiers in Chemistry on July 20, chemistry researchers with Technical University of Munich (TUM) and Helmholtz Zentrum München, Neuherberg, Germany (HZM-Neuherberg), used advanced mass spectrometry techniques to reveal the incredible metabolic complexity of many commercially available beers from around the world, revealing tens of thousands of distinct types of molecules that make up the characteristics of your favorite brew.

 

"Beer is an example of enormous chemical complexity," said Professor Philippe Schmitt-Kopplin, head of the Comprehensive Foodomics Platform at TUM and the Analytical BioGeoChemistry research unit at the Helmholtz Center in Munich. 

 

"And thanks to recent improvements in analytical chemistry, comparable in power to the ongoing revolution in the technology of video displays with ever-increasing resolution, we can reveal this complexity in unprecedented detail."

 

Researchers used two powerful mass spectrometry methods on 467 different types of beer from the US, Latin America, Europe, Africa, and East Asia, brewed from barley alone or from a mix of barley and either wheat, rice, or corn. 

 

They found around 7,700 molecular building blocks with unique masses and formulas – around 80% of which have not yet been described in chemical databases. And with each formula covering up to 25 different molecular structures, this puts the total number of unique molecules in any given brew well into the tens of thousands.

 

The two analytical methods complemented each other to provide the deepest look yet into the chemistry of one of humanities oldest – and favorite – past times. Evidence of beer brewing dates back thousands of years to at least 7,000 BCE, and humanity's oldest existing code of law, decreed by Babylonian king Hammurabi sometime between 1792 and 1750 BCE, dedicated no less than four laws for regulating the production, purity, and sale of beer.

 

"We show that this diversity originates in the variety of raw materials, processing, and fermentation," said first author Stefan Pieczonka, a PhD student at TUM. "The molecular complexity is then amplified by the so-called ‘Maillard reaction’ between amino acids and sugars which also gives bread, meat steaks, and toasted marshmallow their ‘roasty’ flavor."

 

"This complex reaction network is an exciting focus of our research," they added, "given its importance for food quality, flavor, and also the development of novel bioactive molecules of interest for health."

 

Since this is serious science, researchers point out that their technique could be an important step towards safer foods in the future. "Our mass spectrometry method, which takes only 10 minutes per sample, should be very powerful for quality control in food industry," Schmitt-Kopplin said, "and set the basis of novel molecular markers and non-targeted metabolite profiles needed in foodstuff inspection."

True to form, German scientists count up beer molecules. Turns out there's ale-lot

The new particle has two charmed quarks, one up antiquark, and one down antiquark.

The exotic family of particles known as tetraquarks has a surprising new member. Dubbed Tcc+, it's the first tetraquark to contain two heavy quarks and two light antiquarks, and it's the longest-lived exotic matter particle yet discovered. Representatives for the LHCb collaboration at CERN's Large Hadron Collider made the announcement last week at the European Physical Society Conference on High Energy Physics in Germany, hosted jointly by Universität Hamburg and DESY.

 

Quarks are the most fundamental building blocks of matter, first proposed in 1964 by Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig. Quarks come in six different flavors, all differing in mass and charge: up, down, strange, charm, bottom, and top (from lightest to the heaviest), along with their corresponding antiquarks. They typically clump together in groups of two or three to form hadrons, held together by force-carrying particles known as gluons. Ordinary baryons are hadrons that include the proton and neutron of an atom, each made up of three-quark combinations, while hadronic particles known as mesons are formed from quark-antiquark pairs. Think of quarks as the LEGO bricks of the subatomic world, mixing and matching in various combinations to form more complicated structures.

 

Gell-Mann thought there might be more exotic hadrons formed from quark combinations of four or even five quarks, but these existed solely in the realm of theory until quite recently. That's because such exotic heavy particles decay very rapidly into more stable byproduct particles within fractions of a second. It's those byproducts that show up in particle accelerator detectors, amounting to distinctive signatures for their heavier precursor particles. But it's extremely difficult to tease out those signatures from all the noise in the vast amounts of data produced in particle collisions.

 

Japanese physicists found the first experimental evidence for tetraquarks in 2003, and the family has been growing ever since. For instance, LHCb physicists confirmed the discovery of the tetraquark Z(4430) in 2014, several years after it first showed up in the Belle detector at Japan's KEKB accelerator. Two years later, in 2016, physicists analyzing 2002-2011 data from Fermilab's now-retired Tevatron accelerator discovered another new tetraquark—dubbed X(5568)—made up of quarks of four different flavors: up, down, strange, and bottom. Prior tetraquarks were typically composed of at least two quarks of the same flavor, making X(5568) something of an anomaly even among this class of exotic particles.

 

Last year, CERN announced yet another new addition to the growing family of tetraquarks: a collection of two charm quarks and two anti-charm quarks that made up a massive tetraquark. It was the first such particle discovered with more than three quarks composed entirely of just one type of quark. It was also the first to be composed entirely of heavier quarks. Just the year before, the LHCb collaboration had discovered two pentaquarks, confirming that discovery in 2019, along with the discovery of a third pentaquark.  

 

The new Tcc+ tetraquark only lasts a mere one-quintillionth of a second before decaying into a pair of mesons, each with one heavy quark and one light antiquark. That's still roughly ten times longer than its siblings. It owes that relative stability to its unusual structure: two heavy charm quarks and two light anti-quarks, a combination physicists call a "double charm" tetraquark. That makes the tetraquark only slightly heavier than its meson byproducts, and thus it decays a bit more slowly. The longer lifetime also means this is the first time physicists have been able to precisely measure the mass of a tetraquark, showing up as a large peak, or "bump," in the data.

 

The discovery brings us one step closer to a better understanding of the complicated underlying rules that govern how these exotic particles are combined, and it paves the way for a future discovery of even heavier exotic hadrons—perhaps a tetraquark that replaces the two charm quarks with two bottom quarks (dubbed Tbb), which would have an even longer lifetime. For now, significant questions still remain about how these exotic particles are made. As Ars' John Timmer reported last year:

There are two possibilities that are being considered. In one case, the new high-quark-count particles are made the same way that familiar ones are: gluons bind them tightly together into a single particle. An alternative, however, is that the large number of quarks comes about because two more familiar particles are tightly associated. So, a tetraquark could simply be a tight association of a pair of two-quark particles. A pentaquark would be put together from a two-quark meson associating with a three-quark particle.

"Right now, it's not yet clear," Syracuse University postdoc and LHCb physicist Ivan Polyakov told Symmetry magazine. "We have measured its mass and the width of the peak very precisely. This will prompt theorists to make more accurate calculations and hopefully develop a deeper understanding of exotic hadrons." And once the latest upgrades to the LHCb detector are complete, there's a good chance even more exotic hadrons will be discovered.

Physicists discover new kind of tetraquark—the longest-lived yet found

Ever wonder how cheap, no-name products on Amazon AMZN -0.32% can amass hundreds, sometimes thousands, of nearly perfect star ratings, with just a handful of negative reviews?

Here’s one way: Some sellers are reaching out to unhappy buyers to revise or delete their negative reviews, in exchange for refunds or gift cards. With fewer disgruntled shoppers, the overall average star rating rises.

Sellers who ship products via Amazon aren’t supposed to reach out to customers outside of Amazon’s official channel—in fact, it’s a violation of the terms they agree to on the retail platform.

In March, New Yorker Katherine Scott picked out an oil spray bottle for cooking, based on nearly 1,000 glowing Amazon reviews of the product, which had a 4.5-star rating average. When the $10 sprayer arrived, she found the item didn’t work as advertised: Instead of a mist, it produced a stream of oil, she said. “It was like a Super Soaker gun instead of a spray-paint can, which defeats the purpose of the product,” she said. She left a negative review.

A week later, Ms. Scott received an email from someone claiming to be from the customer-service team of the oil sprayer’s brand, Auxtun—correspondence which I have reviewed.

“We are willing to refund in full,” the representative wrote. “We hope you can reconsider deleting comments at your convenience okay?”

The message concluded, “When we do not receive a response, we will assume that you did not see it, and will continue to send emails.”

The seller shouldn’t have had her email address. Sellers who fulfill orders themselves do receive customer names and mailing addresses. But for orders that Amazon itself fulfills, customer data is supposed to be shielded from sellers and brands.

Sellers are permitted to communicate with buyers through Amazon’s built-in messaging platform, which hides the customer’s email address. Amazon’s terms of service also prohibit sellers from requesting that a customer remove a negative review or post a positive one.

“We do not share customer email addresses with third-party sellers,” an Amazon spokesman told me.

Meanwhile, brands, which can be distinct from sellers, may reach out to unsatisfied customers through Amazon’s messaging service, but they also aren’t allowed to ask customers to remove negative reviews.

Ms. Scott asked for a refund but didn’t want to delete her review. Another representative reached out the next day and declined to issue her refund. “A bad review is a fatal blow to us,” read the email. “Could you help me delete the review? If you can, I want to refund $20 to you to express my gratitude.” (This was twice what Ms. Scott paid.) A few hours later, she received another plea from the same email address.

“It was so creepy. They emailed me directly about it over and over,” Ms. Scott said.

Ms. Scott contacted Amazon twice about the matter. I reviewed Amazon’s chat transcripts and emails.

In an April 16 customer-service chat, an Amazon agent told Ms. Scott, “I am forwarding to the team who will get back to you on this within 48 hours. They will make sure the seller will be no longer associated with Amazon.” She said no one got back to her.

When she received more unwanted emails in July, Ms. Scott called Amazon’s support hotline. A rep told her via email that the case would be investigated, but Amazon wouldn’t be able to release the outcome of the investigation.

The listing—and its positive reviews—remained live after Ms. Scott’s complaints. But after I asked Amazon to comment on the situation for this column, the listing disappeared, and both the brand, Auxtun, and the seller, HoHousstore, no longer appear to be on Amazon. “The issue you’re highlighting was detected by our internal processes, and the appropriate enforcement actions were taken,” the Amazon spokesman said. Neither Auxtun nor HoHousstore responded to requests for comment.

It wasn’t an isolated incident. In this kitchenware niche, at least a dozen other customers said in reviews that they were pressured to revise their initial low ratings.

Many top search results currently in Amazon’s “oil spray” category feature the same design, sold under different brands and sellers.

One product, with more than 4,600 ratings, has telling reviews. “Product doesn’t work and company will bother you till you change review,” a customer wrote. “Seller offers $20-$30 to delete negative reviews,” said another. Both gave the spray one star. Neither the seller nor the brand responded to requests for comment via Amazon’s internal messaging system.

Sellers and brands sometimes find ways to reach customers away from Amazon’s watchful gaze. Ms. Scott thinks that a “free gift” insert for a cooking thermometer in the oil spray’s packaging—which prompted her to enter her email address and order ID—was how the brand was able to link the negative review with her address. The Amazon spokesman said the insert is a violation of company policy.

The seller might have been able to look up her name and mailing address in sales records provided by Amazon, and use that information to find her email address. In April, after Ms. Scott purchased the oil spray bottle, Amazon stopped including names and mailing addresses in records of most Amazon-fulfilled purchases. Sellers now typically see only a buyer’s city, state and ZIP Code.

Ben Hendin of Tulsa, Okla.—who was featured in my report on the fake Amazon-review economy—said he heard from a seller four times after posting a negative review of an unsatisfactory $17 finger splint. The seller increased the amount of money it was willing to pay for him to delete the review, eventually reaching $40.

When Mr. Hendin asked how this seller got his contact info, the representative replied: “Boss found it through social software search for names.” The people who reached out to Mr. Hendin didn’t respond to my requests for comment.

James Thomson, a former Amazon employee who is now a partner at brand consultancy Buy Box Experts, said some third-party tools take customers’ shipping information and match it to known email addresses. He emphasized that the practice violates Amazon’s rules and that he wouldn’t recommend sellers or brands use these tools.

One company, called Matic Chain, offers an email extraction service for Amazon sellers. A company representative told me over email that it uses Google GOOG -0.14% and social media to match buyers’ names with contact information. When I asked if the company knew this was a violation of Amazon policy, the rep didn’t respond.

Another business, called ZonBoost, says it provides email addresses from reviews for up to $60 a piece. ZonBoost didn’t respond to requests for comment.

“Amazon provides a great deal of help content, proactive coaching, warnings and other assistance to sellers to ensure they remain compliant with our clearly stated policies. We have clear policies for both reviewers and selling partners that prohibit abuse of our community features, and we suspend, ban and take legal action against those who violate these policies,” the Amazon spokesman said. “Bad actors that attempt to abuse our system make up a tiny fraction of activity on our site and we use sophisticated tools to combat them and we make it increasingly difficult for them to hide.”

The spokesman also said, “In 2020, we stopped more than 200 million suspected fake reviews before they were ever seen by a customer, and more than 99% of reviews enforcement was driven by our proactive detection.”

The Wall Street Journal has reported cases where Amazon employees were accused of accepting bribes in exchange for information that benefited third-party sellers. Amazon said at the time that it disciplines any employee in violation of the company’s policies, and has installed systems to restrict and audit what employees can access.

No matter the method a seller or brand might use to obtain customers’ information, the result is the same. It’s hard to trust the authenticity of reviews, and you might be less inclined to leave your own negative review of a product, out of fear of seller retaliation.

So, what can you do?

Don’t use your name in Amazon reviews. I encourage people to leave as many Amazon reviews as possible. But if you do, keep your real name or initials out of the write-up to prevent the seller or brand from contacting you off-platform.

Go to Your Account and under “Ordering and shopping preferences,” click Your Amazon Profile. There, you can change your public name. Click “Edit your public profile” then “Edit privacy settings” to manage what appears on the profile. You can also choose to hide all activity.

Save all of your communications. If you receive any questionable and potentially abusive emails or messages, download or make screenshots of them, so you can forward them to Amazon customer service.

Report abuse to Amazon. An Amazon spokesman said customers can report abuse by emailing community-help@amazon.com. Provide as much detail and as many screenshots as possible. Next to reviews, there is also a “Report Abuse” link.

Block their email address. By replying to the seller or brand, you could be confirming your email address belongs to a legitimate customer, and it might continue to send you messages through different accounts. Instead, in Gmail, click the three dots in the top right corner of the email message to block the sender. In Outlook, select a message, then in the menu bar, go to Message > Junk Mail > Block Sender.

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Watch Out, Beyond Burgers—the Fungi Renaissance Is Here

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The company said it has installed fuelling stations at its Dufftown distillery in north-eastern Scotland which use technology developed by its parent company William Grant and Sons. It will convert its production waste and residues into an Ultra-Low Carbon Fuel (ULCF) gas that produces minimal carbon dioxide and other harmful emissions.

Glenfiddich said the transition to using fuel made from the distillery’s waste product is part of a “closed-loop” sustainability initiative. Stuart Watts, distillery director at William Grant, said traditionally Glenfiddich has sold off spent grains left over from the malting process to be used for a high-protein cattle feed.

However, through anaerobic digestion – where bacteria break down organic matter, producing biogas – the distillery can also use the liquid waste from the process to make fuel and eventually recycle all of its waste products this way.

“The thought process behind this was ‘What can we do that’s better for us all?’,” Watts said.

Earlier this year, Nova Innovation installed a series of underwater turbines off the west coast of Scotland, with its turbines generating renewable energy to power local Scotch whisky distilleries.

Last year, the Government announced a £10m fund to assist UK distilleries with transitions to low-carbon fuels, such as hydrogen and biomass.

Glenfiddich is not the only one using its waste products to fuel its vehicles. In 2012, independent whisky maker Tullibardine became the world’s first distillery to supply ingredients to make biofuel for vehicles from its waste products.

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Millions of people in Brisbane and surrounding areas have spent just eight days under stay-at-home orders after an outbreak of more than 100 cases spread among several school communities.

Deputy Queensland premier Steven Miles said the region had achieved "something quite incredible" by seemingly bringing the outbreak under control.

"It looks like we may have been able to contain a Delta outbreak in just eight days of lockdown, just 10 days from when the first case was notified," he told reporters.

Restrictions on leaving the city and gatherings will remain in place for at least two weeks.

Authorities also announced a snap three-day lockdown for the northern city of Cairns, after a taxi driver spent 10 days infectious in the 150,000-strong community.

They will join millions of people in Melbourne and Sydney under stay-at-home orders, with Australia's biggest city about to enter a seventh week of lockdown.

New South Wales state recorded 262 new cases Sunday, taking the outbreak that began in Sydney in mid-June to more than 5,000 cases.

State premier Gladys Berejiklian urged Sydney residents to get jabbed, with supermarket and fast-food workers taking priority in a fresh vaccination drive Sunday.

"This is a race. We're keen to sprint to get those vaccination rates up," she said.

Limited supply and pockets of vaccine hesitancy have slowed efforts to inoculate Australians, with just over 20 percent of the population now fully vaccinated.

Health officials are now expecting supplies will be boosted in September, with the Moderna vaccine arriving for the first time and Pfizer imports set to increase.

Australia managed to avoid the worst of the pandemic for the past 18 months, but lockdowns have struggled to contain repeated outbreaks of the highly-infection Delta variant.

The nation has recorded about 36,000 cases of COVID-19 and 935 related deaths to date in a population of 25 million.

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To prepare for eventually sending astronauts to Mars, NASA began taking applications Friday for four people to live for a year in Mars Dune Alpha. That's a 1,700-square-foot Martian habitat, created by a 3D-printer, and inside a building at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The paid volunteers will work a simulated Martian exploration mission complete with spacewalks, limited communications back home, restricted food and resources and equipment failures.

NASA is planning three of these experiments with the first one starting in the fall next year. Food will all be ready-to-eat space food and at the moment there are no windows planned. Some plants will be grown, but not potatoes like in the movie "The Martian." Damon played stranded astronaut Mark Watney, who survived on spuds.

"We want to understand how humans perform in them," said lead scientist Grace Douglas. "We are looking at Mars realistic situations."

The application process opened Friday and they're not seeking just anybody. The requirements are strict, including a master's degree in a science, engineering or math field or pilot experience. Only American citizens or permanent U.S. residents are eligible. Applicants have to be between 30 and 55, in good physical health with no dietary issues and not prone to motion sickness.

That shows NASA is looking for people who are close to astronauts, said former Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield. And, he said. that's a good thing because it is a better experiment if the participants are more similar to the people who will really go to Mars. Past Russian efforts at a pretend Mars mission called Mars 500 didn't end well partly because the people were too much like everyday people, he said.

This 2021 photo provided by ICON and NASA shows construction of the Mars Dune Alpha 1,700-square-foot Martian habitat, being made by a 3D-printer, inside a building at Johnson Space Center in Houston. To prepare for eventually sending astronauts to Mars, NASA began taking applications Friday, Aug. 6, 2021, for four people to live for a year in Mars Dune Alpha - a 1,700-square-foot Martian habitat, created by a 3D-printer, and inside a building at Johnson Space Center in Houston. The paid volunteers will work a simulated Martian exploration mission complete with spacewalks, limited communications back home, restricted food and resources and equipment failures. Credit: ICON/NASA via AP

For the right person this could be great, said Hadfield, who spent five months in orbit in 2013 at the International Space Station, where he played guitar and sang a cover video of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."

"Just think how much you're going to be able to catch up on Netflix," he said. "If they have a musical instrument there, you could go into there knowing nothing and come out a concert musician, if you want."

There could be "incredible freedom" in a "year away from the demands of your normal life."

Attitude is key, said Hadfield, who has a novel "The Apollo Murders" coming out in the fall. He said the participants need to be like Damon's Watney character: "Super competent, resourceful and not relying on other people to feel comfortable."

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A 3-planet system may expand out to 5, and one of its members is pretty small.

Researchers announce the smallest exoplanet discovered yet

In an extraordinary Olympic Games where mental health has been front and center, acts of kindness are everywhere. The world’s most competitive athletes have been captured showing gentleness and warmth to one another – celebrating, pep-talking, wiping away one another’s tears of disappointment.

Kanoa Igarashi of Japan was disappointed when he lost to Brazilian Italo Ferreira in their sport’s Olympic debut.

Not only did he blow his shot at gold on the beach he grew up surfing, but he was also being taunted online by racist Brazilian trolls.

The Japanese-American surfer could have stewed in silence, but he instead deployed his knowledge of Portuguese, helping to translate a press conference question for Mr. Ferreira on the world stage.

The crowd giggled hearing the cross-rival translation and an official thanked the silver medalist for the assist.

“Yes, thank you, Kanoa,” said a beaming Mr. Ferreira, who is learning English.

Days later, at the Olympic Stadium, Gianmarco Tamberi of Italy and Mutaz Barshim of Qatar found themselves in a situation they’d talked about but never experienced – they were tied.

Both high jumpers were perfect until the bar was set to the Olympic-record height of 2.39 meters (7 feet, 10 inches). Each missed three times.

They could have gone to a jump-off, but instead decided to share the gold.

“I know for a fact that for the performance I did, I deserve that gold. He did the same thing, so I know he deserved that gold,” Mr. Barshim said. “This is beyond sport. This is the message we deliver to the young generation.”

After they decided, Mr. Tamberi slapped Mr. Barshim’s hand and jumped into his arms.

“Sharing with a friend is even more beautiful,” Mr. Tamberi said. “It was just magical.”

Earlier, on the same track, runners Isaiah Jewett of the United States and Nijel Amos of Botswana got tangled and fell during the 800-meter semifinals. Rather than get angry, they helped each other to their feet, put their arms around each other, and finished together.

Many top athletes come to know each other personally from their time on the road, which can feel long, concentrated, and intense – marked by career moments that may be the best or worst of their lives.

Those feelings have often been amplified at the pandemic-delayed Tokyo Games, where there is an unmistakable yearning for normalcy and, perhaps, a newfound appreciation for seeing familiar faces.

Restrictions designed to prevent the spread of COVID-19 have meant Olympians can’t mingle the way they normally do.

After a hard-fought, three-set victory in the beach volleyball round-robin final on Saturday at Shiokaze Park, Brazilian Rebecca Cavalcanti playfully poured a bottle of water on American Kelly Claes’ back as she did postgame interviews.

The U.S. team had just defeated Brazil but the winners laughed it off, explaining that they’re friends.

“I’m excited when quarantine’s done so we can sit at the same table and go to dinner with them. But it’s kind of hard in a bubble because we have to be away,” said Sarah Sponcil, Ms. Claes’ teammate.

For fellow American Carissa Moore, the pandemic and its accompanying restrictions brought her closer with the other surfers.

The reigning world champion said she typically travels to surfing competitions with her husband and father. But all fans were banned this year, and Ms. Moore admitted she struggled without their reassuring presence in the initial days of the Games.

Ms. Moore had flown to Japan with the U.S. team 10 days before the first heat, and soon adjusted to living in a home with the other surfers, including Caroline Marks, whom Ms. Moore considered the woman to beat.

Ms. Moore said she didn’t know Ms. Marks well before the Tokyo Games but on the night she was crowned the winner and Ms. Marks came in fourth, her rival was the first to greet her.

“Having the USA Surf team with me, it’s been such a beautiful experience to bond with them,” Ms. Moore said. “I feel like I have a whole another family after the last two weeks.”

After the punishing women’s triathlon last week in Tokyo, Norwegian Lotte Miller, who placed 24th, took a moment to give a pep talk to Belgium’s Claire Michel, who was inconsolable and slumped on the ground, sobbing.

Ms. Michel had come in last, 15 minutes behind winner Flora Duffy of Bermuda – but at least she finished. Fifty-four athletes started the race but 20 were either lapped or dropped out.

“You’re a [expletive] fighter,” Ms. Miller told Ms. Michel. “This is Olympic spirit, and you’ve got it 100%.”

This story was reported by The Associated Press. AP reporters Pat Graham, Jimmy Golen, and Jim Vertuno contributed.

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But the experience of long-term pain is complicated and varies between individuals, making it difficult to explain and quantify, let alone diagnose and manage.

Now, in a large study of over 21,500 people who visited the University of Pittsburgh's severe pain management clinics, perioperative specialist Benedict Alter and colleagues have developed a new method to try to help work this out.

"We found that how a patient reports the bodily distribution of their chronic pain affects nearly all aspects of the pain experience, including what happens three months later," the team wrote in their paper.

Using a computer clustering analysis of patient body pain maps and pain assessments, the researchers discovered that patients fit into nine groups of chronic pain, as defined in the image below.

What's more, these patterns of pain distribution could predict pain intensity, pain quality, pain impact, physical function, mood, sleep and indicate likely patient outcomes.

Above: Body pain maps for each of the nine identified chronic pain clusters, with colored heat scale indicating frequency of pain.

For example, while the group of patients experiencing lower back pain radiating below the knee (group F) had worse physical function difficulties than those experiencing neck and shoulder pain (E) or neck, shoulder and lower back pain (G), these patients reported less anxiety, depression, and sleep disturbance than the other two groups.

A subset of over 7,000 patients completed a follow-up questionnaire, three months after filling out the initial body pain map and questionnaire. Patients experiencing abdominal pain (group showed the most progress, with almost half reporting significant improvement.

Those with neck, shoulder and lower back pain (group G), however, demonstrated the worst outcomes on follow-up, with only 37 percent reporting improvements. This group shared characteristics with the two widespread pain groups, causing the team to ponder if this subgroup may be an early stage in developing generalized, widespread chronic pain. The researchers recommend a long term study to monitor pain duration and stability over time within this group.

What's more, their findings that the more widespread the pain, the more persistent it is, are consistent with a recent MRI study in fibromyalgia patients that found the more widespread reported pain is on body maps, the more changes observed in brain connectivity around the pain-processing parts of the brain.

"A case can be made that reports of widespread pain collected with digital pain body maps are diagnostic of pathophysiological changes in pain processing," Alter and team suggest.

This ability for body pain maps to indicate likely patient outcomes could help identify patients at risk of poor outcomes even from their first pain clinic visit.

Above: each row on the vertical axis represents an individual patient out of the entire cohort (N = 21,658 unique patients) organized by pain body map cluster membership.

With up to 40 percent of adults in the US currently experiencing chronic pain - which is likely to increase with the potential impacts of long term COVID-19 - diagnostic tools such as this could make a massive difference in many people's lives.

There's still a lot of work to do to untangle all these relationships, and the researchers caution that this is an observational study so they cannot establish causation.

"Outcome data do not address specific therapies, and therefore, it remains unclear which specific treatment may be helpful for a particular body map cluster," they wrote.

However, Alter and team believe their study supports the idea that chronic pain is a disease process and these aspects of how its physical distribution manifests will be "important for future developments in diagnosis and personalized pain management".

This research was published in PLOS One.

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To most people, giraffes are merely adorable, long-necked animals that rank near the top of a zoo visit or a photo-safari bucket list.

But to a cardiovascular physiologist, there's even more to love. Giraffes, it turns out, have solved a problem that kills millions of people every year: high blood pressure. Their solutions, only partly understood by scientists so far, involve pressurised organs, altered heart rhythms, blood storage – and the biological equivalent of support stockings.

Giraffes have sky-high blood pressure because of their sky-high heads that, in adults, rise about 6m (19ft) above the ground – a long, long way for a heart to pump blood against gravity. To have a blood pressure of 110/70 at the brain – about normal for a large mammal – giraffes need a blood pressure at the heart of about 220/180. It doesn't faze the giraffes, but a pressure like that would cause all sorts of problems for people, from heart failure to kidney failure to swollen ankles and legs.

In people, chronic high blood pressure causes a thickening of the heart muscles. The left ventricle of the heart becomes stiffer and less able to fill again after each stroke, leading to a disease known as diastolic heart failure, characterised by fatigue, shortness of breath and reduced ability to exercise. This type of heart failure is responsible for nearly half of the 6.2 million heart failure cases in the US today.

Giraffes maintain extraordinarily high blood pressure, and yet it doesn't seem to cause them health problems (Credit: C. Aalkjær & T. Wang / AR Physiology 2020)

When cardiologist and evolutionary biologist Barbara Natterson-Horowitz of Harvard and UCLA examined giraffes' hearts, she and her student found that their left ventricles did get thicker, but without the stiffening, or fibrosis, that would occur in people. The researchers also found that giraffes have mutations in five genes related to fibrosis. In keeping with that find, other researchers who examined the giraffe genome in 2016 found several giraffe-specific gene variants related to cardiovascular development and maintenance of blood pressure and circulation. And in March 2021, another research group reported giraffe-specific variants in genes involved in fibrosis.

The giraffe has another trick to avoid heart failure: the electrical rhythm of its heart differs from that of other mammals

And the giraffe has another trick to avoid heart failure: the electrical rhythm of its heart differs from that of other mammals. In giraffes, the ventricular-filling phase of the heartbeat is extended, Natterson-Horowitz found. (Neither of her studies has been published yet.) This allows the heart to pump more blood with each stroke, allowing a giraffe to run hard despite its thicker heart muscle. "All you have to do is look at a picture of a fleeing giraffe," Natterson-Horowitz says, "and you realise that the giraffe has solved the problem."

Natterson-Horowitz is now turning her attention to another problem that giraffes seem to have solved: high blood pressure during pregnancy, a condition known as preeclampsia. In people, this can lead to severe complications that include liver damage, kidney failure and detachment of the placenta. Yet giraffes seem to fare just fine. Natterson-Horowitz and her team are hoping to study the placentas of pregnant giraffes to see if they have unique adaptations that allow this. 

People who suffer from hypertension are also prone to annoying swelling in their legs and ankles because the high pressure forces water out of blood vessels and into the tissue. But you only have to look at the slender legs of a giraffe to know that they've solved that problem, too. "Why don't we see giraffes with swollen legs? How are they protected against the enormous pressure down there?" asks Christian Aalkjær, a cardiovascular physiologist at Aarhus University in Denmark who wrote about giraffes' adaptations to high blood pressure in the 2021 Annual Review of Physiology.

Giraffes minimise swelling with the same trick that nurses use on their patients: support stockings

In part, at least, giraffes minimise swelling with the same trick that nurses use on their patients: support stockings. In people, these are tight, elastic leggings that compress the leg tissues and prevent fluid from accumulating. Giraffes accomplish the same thing with a tight wrapping of dense connective tissue. Aalkjær's team tested the effect of this by injecting a small amount of saline solution beneath the wrapping into the legs of four giraffes that had been anesthetised for other reasons. Successful injection required much more pressure in the lower leg than a comparable injection in the neck, the team found, indicating that the wrapping helped resist leakage.

One look at the slender legs of the giraffe reveals that they don't suffer the ankle swelling common in humans with high blood pressure (Credit: Getty Images)

Giraffes also have thick-walled arteries near their knees that might act as flow restrictors, Aalkjær and others have found. This could lower the blood pressure in the lower legs, much as a kink in a garden hose causes water pressure to drop beyond the kink. It remains unclear, however, whether giraffes open and close the arteries to regulate lower-leg pressure as needed. "It would be fun to imagine that when the giraffe is standing still out there, it's closing off that sphincter just beneath the knee," says Aalkjær. "But we don't know."

Aalkjær has one more question about these remarkable animals. When a giraffe raises its head after bending down for a drink, blood pressure to the brain should drop precipitately – a more severe version of the dizziness that many people experience when they stand up suddenly. Why don't giraffes faint?

At least part of the answer seems to be that giraffes can buffer these sudden changes in blood pressure. In anesthetised giraffes whose heads could be raised and lowered with ropes and pulleys, Aalkjær has found that blood pools in the big veins of the neck when the head is down. This stores more than a litre (0.2 gallons) of blood, temporarily reducing the amount of blood returning to the heart. With less blood available, the heart generates less pressure with each beat while the head is down. As the head is raised again, the stored blood rushes suddenly back to the heart, which responds with a vigorous, high-pressure stroke that helps pump blood up to the brain.

It's not yet clear whether this is what happens in awake, freely moving animals, though Aalkjær's team has recently recorded blood pressure and flow from sensors implanted in free-moving giraffes and he hopes to have an answer soon.

So – can we learn medical lessons from giraffes? None of the insights have yet yielded a specific clinical therapy. But that doesn't mean they won't, says Natterson-Horowitz. Even though some of the adaptations are probably not relevant for hypertension in humans, they may help biomedical scientists think about the problem in new ways and find novel approaches to this far-too-common disease.

* This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, and is republished under a Creative Commons licence.

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