But his off-the-grid existence appears to be at risk.

“River Dave,” as he’s known by boaters and kayakers, is behind bars after being accused of squatting for 27 years on private property in Canterbury. As the owner of the land seeks to tear down the cabin, Lidstone has been jailed since July 15 on a civil contempt sanction.

“You came with your guns, you arrested me, brought me in here, you’ve got all my possessions. You keep ’em,” he told a judge at a hearing Wednesday. “I’ll sit here with your uniform on until I rot, sir.”

Jodie Gedeon, an avid kayaker who befriended Lidstone about 20 years ago, is working with other supporters to help him, including organizing a petition drive and collecting money to cover property taxes.

“He’s just a really, really, big caring guy, and just chooses to live off the grid,” she said. “It really is about humanity, it really is about compassion, empathy ... he’s not hurting anybody.”

Merrimack County Superior Court Judge Andrew Schulman agreed that Lidstone isn’t hurting anyone, but said the law is clearly on the landowner’s side.

“You’re doing your own thing in the ‘Live Free or Die’ state, so there’s a lot of sympathy to you for that,” he said. “But there’s a lot of weight on the other side of the balance sheet, and not just about what the (landowner) wants to do with the land, but the weight I feel to uphold the judgment of the court and the rule of law.”

Gedeon and other supporters came out to a town selectboard meeting on Monday. Board members said the town currently has no standing in the property dispute.

But even if there were a way to allow Lidstone to stay, it would be an uphill battle. His home is in violation of local and state zoning and environmental regulations, and there is no access to a road.

“You guys are in a quandary. So are we,” selectman Robert Steenson said.

The woodlot Lidstone calls home is just a few miles away from Interstate 93. But it’s hidden by the trees; it’s on 73 acres that’s been used for timber harvests. The property has been owned by the same family since 1963. There are no plans at this time to develop it.

Lidstone has claimed that years ago, the owner gave his word — but nothing in writing — allowing him to live there. But in the eyes of the current owner, he’s a squatter and needs to go.

Property owner Leonard Giles, 86, of South Burlington, Vermont, didn’t even know Lidstone was there until the town administrator found out in 2015 and told him, expressing concern “with regard to the solid and septic waste disposal and the potential zoning violations created by the structure,” according to Giles’ complaint in 2016.

The judge suggested Wednesday that Giles and town officials work with a mediator, but Giles’ lawyer said the logistics would be too daunting.

“We’ve got to recognize the fact that this was a managed woodlot, with income which is supposed to support my elderly client in his retirement. At some point, how far is he supposed to go in order to turn his woodlot into a habitable lot for somebody else who’s there trespassing?” said attorney Lisa Snow Wade. “He just wants his land back.”

Lidstone, who doesn’t have an attorney, insisted his cabin is a hunting and fishing camp, not a home.

“Why do you need a road to it? Do you think I’m an idiot? You’re going to put a septic tank in for a hunting camp?” he said.

He also argued that Giles doesn’t own the property but is being pressured by the town.

“He’s a heck of a nice old man, I’ve talked with him a couple of times. This is not his fault, this is not my fault,” he said. “It’s lying, cheating corrupt judges like you that are stepping on little people like me. But I’m telling you, sir, you step on me, I’m going to bite your ankle.”

Lidstone, a bearded, small-framed, spritely man, has resisted efforts to leave since a judge issued an order for him to vacate in 2017. Following that, both sides had attempted to reach some sort of agreement for him, but were unsuccessful, according to court documents.

Currently, Lidstone can be released if one of three things happen: he agrees to leave, the cabin is demolished by Giles, or 30 days have passed since he was jailed. Another hearing will be held next week.

He hasn’t had any other contact with law enforcement, unlike the case of a man in Maine called the ” North Pond Hermit,” who also lived in the woods for nearly three decades and pleaded guilty in 2013 to multiple burglary and theft charges.

Over the years, Lidstone, a U.S. Air Force veteran and a father of four who has made money as a woodsman, has been known to invite kayakers and boaters into his home, sharing stories about his life in the wild.

The wooden, two-level A-frame cabin was profiled by a local television show in 2018. There is a small, cluttered kitchen with pots hanging from the ceiling, some appliances, and curtains on the windows. His porch has a footstool with a base made of stacked beer cans. He converted a wood stove into a beehive. He’s attached lights, a mirror and a pulley for a clothesline to logs supporting the cabin. There are piles of firewood.

Nearby is a gravel path leading to vegetable garden plots outlined by logs and some berry bushes. Lidstone gets his water from a stream.

Lidstone’s decision to live in the woods is “exactly the lifestyle he wants,” said his brother, Vincent Lidstone, 77, of Lafayette, Georgia.

“What they’re doing to him isn’t right for anybody, whether he’s my brother or anybody’s brother,” he said. “He’s 81 years old. Leave him alone.”

Vincent Lidstone said he lost touch with his brother through the years, but described how the two of them and a cousin enjoyed spending time outdoors. They grew up in Wilton, Maine.

“We lived in the woods,” he said. “We camped, fishing, hunting. The three of us did everything together for a lot of years.”

It’s unclear where Lidstone would go. Vincent Lidstone said he doesn’t have the resources to help him. The Associated Press reached two of his three sons, who said they haven’t been in touch with their father recently. His daughter didn’t respond to a message seeking comment.

Gedeon said the matter hasn’t been discussed by her group yet.

“We want to see him be able to live out his remaining years where he is,” she said.

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It was the start of something big, crypto-enthusiastic Miamians hoped: Magic City would become the crypto capital of the world. And as from today, thanks to the city’s tech-obsessed mayor, Francis Suarez, Miami looks like it is one step closer to that dream. The city launched its own cryptocurrency, MiamiCoin, which claims to allow city citizens to earn Bitcoin “in their sleep.”

On Tuesday, Okcoin was the first crypto exchange to list MiamiCoin. The idea is to fill the city’s coffers via speculation. People can mine the coin (which is less difficult and thus less energy intensive than mining Bitcoin or Ethereum), and revenue from the coin will be diverted to the city’s treasury. As investors buy the coin, its value will ideally continue to go up, and that cash will be used to fund infrastructure projects or events in the city. 

MiamiCoin, which is listed as $MIA on exchanges, is the product of CityCoins, a project that “gives communities the power to improve their cities, while providing crypto rewards to individual contributors and city governments alike.” MiamiCoin is the first CityCoin to be released, though a cryptocurrency for San Francisco is on the way, too, according to the website. The project works hand-in-hand with the Miami government.

Bitcoin comes into all of this because the blockchain MiamiCoin runs on, Stacks, is built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. So, MiamiCoin miners are rewarded with small amounts of Bitcoin by inadvertently contributing to the Bitcoin blockchain. 

Mayor Francis Suarez, who previously invited persecuted Chinese Bitcoin miners to Miami after the country cracked down on the industry, said that the coin could earn the city “millions of dollars” in an interview last week. Despite emphatically not being Bitcoin and having complex layers of mechanics, Suarez said that MiamiCoin was “like a Bitcoin.” 

Not all Bitcoiners agree with that sentiment.

"Miami would be better off converting long term treasury holdings to Bitcoin. While MiamiCoin’s novelty will likely generate some traction after its launch, I think it will fade away. All the while Bitcoin will continue to grow faster than the internet itself,” said Brady Swenson, Head of Education at Swan Bitcoin, an app that automates Bitcoin purchases, and the host of podcasts Swan Signal Live and Citizen Bitcoin. "MiamiCoin will not benefit from Bitcoin’s global network effect, nor accrue the corresponding exponential gains in purchasing power.”

CityCoins told Motherboard in an email that MiamiCoin is “a project that aims to make citizens of any city stakeholders that are incentivized to participate in their city's success” and that the rewards earned are “really just the start.” This is because Miami’s government will have its own wallet, and a portion of the coins mined—30 percent—will end up in that wallet, which can then be used to improve the city. 

As for what the money could be used for, Suarez told Fox Business that the funds could be used to help “eliminate homelessness completely”  and “increasing our police force.”

The City of Miami didn’t immediately respond to Motherboard’s request for comment.

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Known as Si.427, the tablet bears a field plan measuring the boundaries of some land.

The tablet dates from the Old Babylonian period between 1900 and 1600 BCE and was discovered in the late 19th century in what is now Iraq. It had been housed in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum before Dr Daniel Mansfield from the University of New South Wales tracked it down.

Mansfield and Norman Wildberger, an associate professor at UNSW, had previously identified another Babylonian tablet as containing the world’s oldest and most accurate trigonometric table. At the time, they speculated the tablet was likely to have had some practical use, possibly in surveying or construction.

The ancient clay tablet was engraved with a stylus to describe a field containing marshy areas, as well as a threshing floor and nearby tower. Photograph: UNSW Sydney

That tablet, Plimpton 322, described right-angle triangles using Pythagorean triples: three whole numbers in which the sum of the squares of the first two equals the square of the third – for example, 32 + 42 = 52.

“You don’t just accidentally come up with trigonometry, you’re usually doing something practical,” Mansfield said. Plimpton 322 set him on a quest to find other tablets from the same period that contained Pythagorean triples, eventually leading him to Si.427.

“Si.427 is about a piece of land that’s being sold,” Mansfield said. In the cuneiform script, with its characteristic wedge-shaped indentations, the tablet describes a field containing marshy areas, as well as a threshing floor and nearby tower.

The rectangles depicting the field have opposite sides of equal length, suggesting surveyors of that time period had devised a way to create perpendicular lines more accurately than before, according to Mansfield.

“Much like we would today, you’ve got private individuals trying to figure out where their land boundaries are, and the surveyor comes out but instead of using a piece of GPS equipment, they use Pythagorean triples.”

Though Plimpton 322 and Si.427 both use Pythagorean triples, they predate the Greek mathematician Pythagoras by more than 1,000 years.

“Once you understand what Pythagorean triples are, your society has reached a particular level of mathematical sophistication,” Mansfield said.

Si.427 contains three Pythagorean triples: 3, 4, 5; 8, 15, 17; and 5, 12, 13.

The Babylonians used a base 60 number system – similar to how we keep time today – which made working with prime numbers larger than five difficult.

Si.427, described in a study in the journal Foundations of Science, dates from a period of increasing private land ownership. “Now that we know what problem the Babylonians were solving, that recolours all the mathematical tablets from this period,” Mansfield said. “You see mathematics being developed to address the needs of the time.”

One thing that puzzles Mansfield about Si.427 is the sexagesimal number “25:29” – similar to 25 minutes and 29 seconds – that is etched in large font on the back of the tablet.

“Is it part of a calculation that they performed? Is it an area that I haven’t come across yet? Is it a measurement of something?” he said. “It’s really annoying to me because there’s so much about the tablet that I understand. I’ve given up trying to figure out what that one is.”

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These cellular sensors detect subtle changes in blood pressure and adjust hormone levels to keep it in check. Scientists have long suspected that these barometers, or "baroreceptors," existed in specialized kidney cells called renin cells, but no one has been able to locate the baroreceptors until now.

The new findings, from UVA Health's Dr. Maria Luisa S. Sequeira-Lopez and colleagues, finally reveal where the barometers are located, how they work and how they help prevent high blood pressure (hypertension) or low blood pressure (hypotension). The researchers hope the insights will lead to new treatments for high blood pressure.

"It was exhilarating to find that the elusive pressure-sensing mechanism, the baroreceptor, was intrinsic to the renin cell, which has the ability to sense and react, both within the same cell," said Sequeira-Lopez, of UVA's Department of Pediatrics and UVA's Child Health Research Center. "So the renin cells are sensors and responders."

Sensing blood pressure

The existence of a pressure sensor inside renin cells was first proposed back in 1957. It made sense: The cells had to know when to release renin, a hormone that helps regulate blood pressure. But even though scientists suspected this cellular barometer had to exist, they couldn't tell what it was and whether it was located in renin cells or surrounding cells.

Sequeira-Lopez and her team took new approaches to solving this decades-old mystery. Using a combination of innovative lab models, they determined that the baroreceptor was a "mechanotransducer" inside renin cells. This mechanotransducer detects pressure changes outside the cell, then transmits these mechanical signals to the cell nucleus, like how the cochlea in our ear turns sound vibrations into nerve impulses our brain can understand.

The researchers have unlocked exactly how the baroreceptors work. They found that applying pressure to renin cells in lab dishes triggered changes within the cells and decreased activity of the renin gene, Ren1. The scientists also compared differences in gene activity in kidneys exposed to lower pressure and those exposed to higher pressure.

Ultimately, when the baroreceptors detect too much pressure outside the renin cell, production of renin is restricted, while blood pressure that is too low prompts the production of more renin. This marvelous mechanism is vital to the body's ability to maintain the correct blood pressure. And now, after more than 60 years, we finally understand how and why.

"I feel really excited about this discovery, a real tour de force several years in the making. We had a great collaboration with Dr. [Douglas] DeSimone from the Department of Cell Biology," Sequeira-Lopez said. "I am also excited with the work to come, to unravel the signaling and controlling mechanisms of this mechanotransducer and how we can use the information to develop therapies for hypertension."

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Why Even the Fastest Human Can’t Outrun Your House Cat

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Wuhan, a provincial capital of 11 million people in central China, is the latest city to undergo city-wide testing. Three cases were confirmed there on Monday, its first non-imported cases in more than a year.

China has largely curbed COVID-19 at home after the initial outbreak that devastated Wuhan and over time spread to the rest of China and globally. Since then, authorities have tamped down and controlled the disease whenever it pops up with quick lockdowns and mass testing to isolate infected people.

The current outbreaks, while still in the hundreds of cases in total, have spread much more widely than previous ones, reaching multiple provinces and cities including the capital, Beijing. Many of the cases have been identified as the highly contagious delta variant that is driving a resurgence in many countries.

The National Health Commission said Tuesday that 90 new cases had been confirmed the previous day, 61 locally spread ones and 29 among people who had recently arrived from abroad.

Most of the local cases are still in Jiangsu province, where an outbreak started at the airport in Nanjing, the provincial capital, and has spread to the city of Yangzhou, 105 kilometers (65 miles) away. Authorities reported 45 new cases, five in Nanjing and 40 in the city of Yangzhou, which was conducting a second round of mass testing[.]

Five other provinces and the cities of Beijing and Shanghai reported new local cases in the single digits. In Shanghai, the nation's largest city, a driver working at one of its two main airports tested positive. Beijing has reported a total of five cases in recent days.

Government-affiliated scientists have said that Chinese vaccines are less effective against the new strains of the coronavirus but still offer some protection. Only Chinese vaccines are currently being given in China, where authorities say more than 1.6 billion doses have been administered.

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The Grattan Institute is on a similar theme. It has proposed a $10 million per week lottery, paying out ten $1 million prizes per week from Melbourne Cup day. One vaccination gets you get one ticket. Two gets you two tickets.

The costs are tiny compared to what's at stake. Treasury modeling released on Tuesday puts the cost of Australia-wide lockdown at $3.2 billion per week.

Paying people to get vaccinated fits the government's criteria of a response that's "temporary, targeted and proportionate."

And the published research on small payments shows they are extraordinarily effective, often more effective than big ones.

A few years back, Ulrike Malmendier and Klaus Schmidt of US National Bureau of Economic Research discovered that a small gift persuaded the subject of an experiment to award contracts to one of two fictional companies 68% of the time instead of the expected 50%.

Small payments can be more effective than big ones

A gift three times as big cut that response to 50%, which was no better than if there had been no gift at all.

The effect of small payments to pregnant British smokers has been dramatic.

Offered £50 in vouchers for setting a quit date, plus £50 if carbon monoxide tests confirmed cessation after four weeks, £100 after 12 weeks and £200 in late pregnancy in addition to the counseling and free nicotine replacement therapy given to the other pregnant smokers, those offered the payment were more than twice as likely to quit—22.5% compared with 8.6%.

Never mind that these small sums ought to have made no financial sense.

The gifts were minuscule compared with the money the recipients would have saved anyway by not smoking, yet they worked so well that the researchers estimated the cost of the lives saved at just £482 per quality-adjusted year.

Around 5,000 British miscarriages each year are attributable to smoking during pregnancy. The participants randomly assigned the offer of a payment not to smoke gave birth to babies that were on average 20 grams heavier.

The incentives can be even smaller.

Mai Frandsen at the University of Tasmania has trialed offering smokers half as much—a A$10 voucher on signing up, then $50 per checkup in addition to support from a pharmacist. The results are encouraging.

Lotteries are cheaper still. The Grattan Institute's suggestion of a $10 million per week payout sounds like a lot, but it isn't when divided by Australia's population.

A preliminary analysis of Ohio's Vax-a-Million lottery found it increased takeup by 50,000-80,000 in its first two weeks at a cost of US$85 per dose.

Beer, doughnuts, dope

Other incentives offered with apparent success in the US include free beer, donuts and (in Washington state) free cannabis.

They needn't work for everyone. A survey conducted by the Melbourne Institute in June found that of those who were willing to get vaccinated but hadn't got around to it, 54% would respond to a cash incentive.

Of those who weren't willing or weren't sure, only 10% would respond to cash.

If you were paid a cash incentive, would you get vaccinated as soon as possible?

But the important thing about vaccination is that not everyone needs to do it.

The Grattan Institute believes 80% of the population needs to be vaccinated before we can reopen borders.

The national cabinet has adopted a lower target: 80% of Australians over 16, which is 65% of the population.

Vaccination expert Julie Leask says when it comes to child vaccines, most non-vaccinating parents are simply "trying to get on with the job of parenting." If it's made easy for them, they'll do it.

There's not a lot to be gained by trying to reach these who actually don't want to be vaccinated. Try too hard, and you'll get their backs up.

The tragedy of the government's COVID vaccine rollout (aside from the difficulties with assuring supply) is that the government hasn't made it easy.

Vaccination ought to be easy

The government could have made it easy. When it sought advice last year from departments including the treasury, it was told to do what's done for the flu vaccine—to distribute it through employers and pharmacies as well as general practitioners, so as to make it almost automatic.

The best part of a year later, it's a view the prime minister is coming round to. Most of us don't go to the doctor very often—it's out of our way.

For a government that came to office promising to slash red tape for business and offered businesses incentives to invest, this government appears not to have fully grasped the importance of red tape and incentives when it comes to health.

It might yet. Prime Minister Scott Morrison said yesterday he had investigated something along the lines put forward by Albanese. General Frewen, in charge of the COVID taskforce, said it wasn't needed "right now."

When the time comes, if we remain under-vaccinated, Morrision can reach for it.

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Progress on the regulatory side of things remains murky, though.

 SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night

The Jamaican sprinter and her Olympic-record time captured everyone's attention. What's under foot, though, might have been a factor when Elaine Thompson-Herah broke a 33-year-old Olympic record in the women's 100 meters.

It's shaping up as a fast track surface at Olympic Stadium. Runners are certainly on track to setting personal, Olympic and possibly even world-record times over the next week at the Tokyo Games.

The brick-red track is made by Mondo, a company that's been around since 1948 and has been the supplier for 12 Olympic Games.

This particular surface, according to the company, features "three-dimensional rubber granules specifically designed with a selected polymeric system that are integrated in the top layer of MONDOTRACK WS that are added to the semi-vulcanized compound. The vulcanization process guarantees the molecular bond between the granules and the surrounding matter, creating a compact layer."

Translation: It's speedy.

"Feels like I'm walking on clouds," U.S. 100-meter sprinter Ronnie Baker explained of the surface. "It's really smooth out there. It's a beautiful track. One of the nicest I've run on."

IS IT REALLY THAT FAST?

Maybe. Sometimes, it's just fast runners in tip-top shape who make it look fast. Only time will really tell. The track also has been baking in the Tokyo sun with little use, making it extra firm.

Competitors start in their heat of the men's 100-meters with empty seats as a backdrop in the Olympic Stadium at the 2020 Summer Olympics, Saturday, July 31, 2021, in Tokyo. Credit: AP Photo/Jae C. Hong

"Oh, it's fast," American 800-meter runner Clayton Murphy said. "Might take world records to win."

WHEN WAS THE TRACK INSTALLED?

The track went in over four months, from August to November 2019. It hasn't seen much action since the surface was put in. The athletes are breaking it in with style.

"You just feel it, man, you just feel it," South African sprinter Akani Simbine said. "You know what fast tracks feel like. And for us, this track feels really quick and I am looking forward to running quick on it."

WHY SO BOUNCY?

Mondo says on its website that the main objective was to "maximize the speed of athletes and improve their performance." The top layer is vulcanized rubber to help with elasticity. There are also "air-filled cavities" in the lower layer, which assist with "shock absorption, energy storage and immediate kinetic response."

Alex Rose, of Samoa, and Diane Van Es, of Netherlands, colapse after competing during the first round of the women's 5,000-meter at the 2020 Summer Olympics, Friday, July 30, 2021, in Tokyo. Credit: AP Photo/Morry Gash

More to the point: It helps racers fly down the track.

"Some tracks absorb your motion and your force," American 400-meter hurdler and world-record holder Sydney McLaughlin said. "This one regenerates it and gives it back to you. You can definitely feel it."

SO WHAT WORLD RECORDS MAY FALL?

Keep close watch on the men's and women's 400 hurdles. McLaughlin set the mark (51.90 seconds) on June 27 at the U.S. Olympic trials, breaking the record that had belonged to teammate Dalilah Muhammad. They will be the gold-medal favorites Wednesday—and may break the mark again.

Karsten Warholm of Norway recently broke the men's 400 hurdles mark when he went 46.70. He eclipsed a record that had stood since 1992. Can he break it again?

"Maybe someone else will do it," Warholm cracked. "I've done my job."

Marie-Josee Ta Lou, of Ivory Coast, wins a women's 100-meter semifinal at the 2020 Summer Olympics, Saturday, July 31, 2021, in Tokyo. Credit: AP Photo/Petr David Josek

GOTTA BE THE SHOES, TOO?

The other factor in these records could be the technological advances in the spikes. Nike's Vaporfly model of shoe shook up the world of distance running a few years ago, with carbon-plated technology credited for helping runners shave minutes off their times. That sort of technology is moving its way into the spikes for sprinters.

Thompson-Herah also has a theory on fast times after running 10.61 seconds to break the Olympic mark of the late Florence Griffith Joyner. "My training," she said. "Doesn't matter the track or the shoes."

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Britain's state-run healthcare service warned Saturday that devices used by people with COVID to monitor blood-oxygen levels at home may give inaccurate readings for people with darker skin.

The warning concerned pulse oximeters, currently being used by many of those at risk of severe COVID symptoms to check their blood-oxygen levels. Below a certain reading, they need to be hospitalised.

The NHS, the UK state-funded health service, supplies them to those with virus symptoms, aged over 65 or clinically vulnerable.

The NHS said in a statement that "there have been reports that pulse oximeters can be less accurate for people with darker skin because they may show higher readings of the oxygen level in the blood".

The devices, clipped on to a finger, work by shining a light through a person's skin to measure the level of oxygen in the blood.

Updated guidance for virus sufferers on the main NHS website now warns: "There have been some reports they may be less accurate if you have brown or black skin.

"They may show readings higher than the level of oxygen in your blood."

But the important thing is to check regularly whether to see if they are going down, it adds.

Habib Naqvi, director of the NHS Race and Health Observatory, said the issue affected "black (and) Asian diverse communities".

Members of ethnic minorities, particularly Black Africans and Bangladeshi, have suffered the highest death rates from the virus in Britain.

The death toll from COVID in the United Kingdom stood at 129,583 Saturday, one of the highest in the world.

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• Data shows ice sheet lost 8.5bn tons of surface mass on Tuesday
• All-time record temperature of 19.8C in region on Wednesday

Greenland’s vast ice sheet is undergoing a surge in melting, with the amount of ice vanishing in a single day this week enough to cover the whole of Florida in two inches of water, researchers have found.

The deluge of melting has reached deep into Greenland’s enormous icy interior, with data from the Danish government showing that the ice sheet lost 8.5bn tons of surface mass on Tuesday alone. A further 8.4bn tons was lost on Thursday, the Polar Portal monitoring website reported.

The scale of disappearing ice is so large that the losses on Tuesday alone created enough meltwater to drown the entire US state of Florida in two inches, or 5cm, of water. Ice that melts away in Greenland flows as water into the ocean, where it adds to the ongoing increase in global sea level caused by human-induced climate change.

“It’s a very high level of melting and it will probably change the face of Greenland, because it will be a very strong driver for an acceleration of future melting, and therefore sea-level rise,” said Marco Tedesco, a glacier expert at Columbia University and adjunct scientist at Nasa.

Tedesco said a patch of high pressure is sucking and holding warmer air from further south “like a vacuum cleaner” and holding it over eastern Greenland, causing an all-time record temperature of 19.8C in the region on Wednesday. As seasonal snow melts away, darker core ice is exposed, which then melts and adds to sea level rise.

“We had these sort of atmospheric events in the past but they are now getting longer and more frequent,” Tedesco said.

“The snow is like a protective blanket so once that’s gone you get locked into faster and faster melting, so who knows what will happen with the melting now. It’s amazing to see how vulnerable these huge, giant areas of ice are. I’m astonished at how powerful the forces acting on them are.”

Greenland’s melting season usually lasts from June to August. The Danish government data shows that the island has lost more than 100bn tons of ice since the start of June this year and while the severity of melting is less than in 2019 – when 11bn tons of ice was lost in a single day – the area affected is much larger in 2021.

“It’s hard to say if it will be a record year for melting this year but there is a ton of warm and moist air over the ice sheet that’s causing an amazing amount of melt,” said Brad Lipovsky, a glaciologist at the University of Washington.

“The alarming thing to me is the political response, or lack of it. Sea-level rise is like a slow-moving train, but once it gets rolling you can’t stop it. It’s not great news.”

If all the ice in Greenland melted, the global sea level would jump by about 6 meters (20ft), and although this is unlikely to happen on any sort of foreseeable timescale, scientists have warned that the world’s largest island is reaching a tipping point due to the pressures exerted upon it by global heating.

Greenland’s ice is melting faster than any time in the past 12,000 years, scientists have calculated, with the ice loss running at a rate of around one million tons a minute in 2019. Greenland and the earth’s other polar region of Antarctica have together lost 6.3tn tons of ice since 1994.

This rate of ice loss, which is accelerating as temperatures continue to increase, is changing ocean currents, altering marine ecosystems and posing a direct threat to the world’s low-lying coastal cities, which risk being inundated by flooding. A 2019 research paper found the Greenland ice sheet could add anything between 5cm and 33cm to global sea levels by the end of the century. The world is on track for “the mid to upper end of that”, Lipovsky said.

“It’s very worrisome,” said Tedesco. “The action is clear – we need to get to net zero emissions but also we need to protect exposed populations along the coast. This is going to be a huge problem for our coastal cities.”

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The Delta variant is much more contagious, more likely to break through protections afforded by the vaccines and may cause more severe disease than all other known versions of the virus, according to an internal presentation circulated within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, the director of the agency, acknowledged on Tuesday that vaccinated people with so-called breakthrough infections of the Delta variant carry just as much virus in the nose and throat as unvaccinated people, and may spread it just as readily, if less often.

But the internal document lays out a broader and even grimmer view of the variant.

The Delta variant is more transmissible than the viruses that cause MERS, SARS, Ebola, the common cold, the seasonal flu and smallpox, and it is as contagious as chickenpox, according to the document, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times.

The immediate next step for the agency is to “acknowledge the war has changed,” the document said. Its contents were first reported by The Washington Post on Thursday evening.

The document’s tone reflects alarm among C.D.C. scientists about Delta’s spread across the country, said a federal official who has seen the research described in the document. The agency is expected to publish additional data on the variant on Friday.

“The C.D.C. is very concerned with the data coming in that Delta is a very serious threat that requires action now,” the official said.

There were 71,000 new cases per day on average in the United States, as of Thursday. The new data suggest that vaccinated people are spreading the virus and contributing to those numbers — although probably to a far lesser degree than the unvaccinated.

Dr. Walensky has called transmission by vaccinated people a rare event, but other scientists have suggested it may be more common than once thought.

The agency’s new masking guidelines for vaccinated people, introduced on Tuesday, were based on the information presented in the document. The C.D.C. recommended that vaccinated people wear masks indoors in public settings in communities with high transmission of the virus.

But the internal document hints that even that recommendation may not go far enough. “Given higher transmissibility and current vaccine coverage, universal masking is essential,” the document said.

The agency’s data suggest that people with weak immune systems should wear masks even in places that do not have high transmission of the virus. So should vaccinated Americans who are in contact with young children, older adults, or otherwise vulnerable people.

There are roughly 35,000 symptomatic infections per week among 162 million vaccinated Americans, according to data collected by the C.D.C. as of July 24 that was cited in the internal presentation. But the agency does not track all mild or asymptomatic infections, so the actual incidence may be higher.

Infection with the Delta variant produces virus amounts in the airways that are tenfold higher than what is seen in people infected with the Alpha variant, which is also highly contagious, the document noted.

The amount of virus in a person infected with Delta is a thousandfold more than what is seen in people infected with the original version of the virus, according to one recent study.

The C.D.C. document relies on data from multiple studies, including an analysis of a recent outbreak in Provincetown, Mass., which began after the town’s Fourth of July festivities. By Thursday, that cluster had grown to 882 cases. About 74 percent were vaccinated, local health officials have said.

Detailed analysis of the spread of cases showed that people infected with Delta carry enormous amounts of virus in their nose and throat, regardless of vaccination status, according to the C.D.C. document.

“This is one of the most impressive examples of citizen science I have seen,” said Dr. Celine Gounder, an infectious disease specialist at Bellevue Hospital Center in New York. “The people involved in the Provincetown outbreak were meticulous in making lists of their contacts and exposures.”

Infection with the Delta variant may be more likely to lead to severe illness, the document noted. Studies from Canada and Scotland found that people infected with the variant are more likely to be hospitalized, while research in Singapore indicated that they are more likely to require oxygen.

Still, the C.D.C.’s figures show that the vaccines are highly effective in preventing serious illness, hospitalization and death in vaccinated people, experts said.

“Overall, Delta is the troubling variant we already knew it was,” said John Moore, a virologist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York. “But the sky isn’t falling and vaccination still protects strongly against the worse outcomes.”

The post C.D.C. Internal Report Calls Delta Variant as Contagious as Chickenpox appeared first on New York Times.

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A Covid outbreak first discovered in the Chinese city of Nanjing has spread to five provinces and Beijing, with state media calling it the most extensive contagion after Wuhan.

Almost 200 people have been infected since the virus was first detected at the city's busy airport on 20 July.

All flights from Nanjing airport will be suspended until 11 August, according to local media.

Officials also began city-wide testing amid criticism for their "failure".

All 9.3 million of the city's residents - including those visiting - will be tested, said state-controlled Xinhua news.

Posts on social media show long lines of people queuing, and authorities have reportedly urged people to wear masks, stand one metre apart and avoid talking while they wait.

Officials said the highly contagious Delta variant of the virus was behind the infections, adding that cases had spread further because of how busy the airport is.

Ding Jie, a health official in Nanjing, told reporters the cases were linked to cleaners who worked on a flight from Russia that arrived in the city on 10 July.

The cleaners did not follow strict hygiene measures, Xinhua News reported.

The airport management has been rebuked, with a senior disciplinary body of the Communist Party saying it had "problems such as lack of supervision and unprofessional management".

Testing has shown that the virus has now spread to at least 13 cities including Chengdu and the capital Beijing.

However, experts quoted by the Global Times said they believed the outbreak was still at an early stage and could be controlled.

Local officials in Nanjing said that seven of those infected were in critical condition.

The new spike in cases has led some on Chinese social media to speculate about whether the Chinese vaccines were working against the Delta variant.

It is unclear if those infected were vaccinated.

A number of South East Asian countries relying on Chinese vaccines have recently announced they will use other jabs.

China has so far managed to keep the virus largely under control by closing borders and moving quickly to stamp out local outbreaks.

< Watch the video at the source page. >

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Australia's third-largest city of Brisbane and other parts of Queensland state will enter a snap COVID-19 lockdown from Saturday as authorities race to contain an emerging outbreak of the Delta strain.

Millions of residents in the city and several other areas will be placed under stay-at-home orders from Saturday afternoon for three days, state Deputy Premier Steven Miles said.

"The only way to beat the Delta strain is to move quickly, to be fast and to be strong," Miles said.

Six new cases were reported Saturday in a cluster of the Delta variant initially linked to a school student, resulting in pupils and teachers at two schools being placed into isolation.

Genome sequencing had connected the cluster to returned overseas travellers in hotel quarantine but the exact source of transmission remained unclear, Chief Health Officer Jeannette Young said.

In the "strictest lockdown" the city has enforced, residents will only be allowed to leave their homes for essential reasons, including buying groceries and exercising.

Brisbane's snap lockdown comes as Australia's largest city of Sydney and its surroundings completed a fifth week of lockdown, with authorities struggling to stop the spread of a Delta variant outbreak there.

"We cannot afford to be complacent just because we have done so well so far. We all we have to comply with these restrictions," Miles said.

Sydney recorded 210 new local cases on Saturday, slightly down from the record number reached earlier in the week.

Police were out in force around the city, attempting to prevent anti-lockdown protesters from gathering after thousands poured through the streets and sparked violent clashes with officers last week.

With close to just 14 percent of the population fully vaccinated, authorities around the country continue to rely on lockdowns to reduce people's movements and slow the spread of the virus.

On Friday, the country's Prime Minister Scott Morrison outlined a long road out of restrictions—setting a target of 80 percent of the population to be fully vaccinated before the government would reopen borders and end lockdowns.

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You call this a glitch?

Russia said a "software failure" caused its Nauka module to suddenly and unexpectedly fire its thrusters after docking with the International Space Station this week.

The engine burn caused the orbiting lab to tilt 45 degrees at a rate of about half a degree a second. The station automatically fired thrusters on its Russian Zvezda module and an attached Progress cargo craft to compensate, creating a brief tug of war between the module and the station.

After about an hour, officials were able to regain attitude control. Commands were sent to Nauka to not only shut off the thrusters but ensure they cannot inadvertently fire again. NASA insisted the seven astronauts onboard the ISS were not harmed nor in any real peril during the undesirable thruster burn, which started at 1634 UTC on Thursday.

Russia's Roscosmos today shed some more light on what went wrong. We're told Nauka, also known as the Multipurpose Laboratory Module, had about three hours earlier docked with the station after a problematic rendezvous. The module, which was built on and off over the past 25 years, suffered significant issues with its propulsion and other systems as it approached the ISS yesterday. It had lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on July 21.

"On July 29, the Nauka Multipurpose Laboratory Module was docked with the International Space Station," said Roscosmos bigwig Vladimir Solovyov, who oversees the Russian part of the ISS.

"At all stages of the module's flight, its rendezvous system worked reliably and stably," the cosmonaut continued, putting the best positive spin possible on the situation. "During the final rendezvous, slight fluctuations were noticed, which were eliminated by the docking system. This resulted in smooth docking and touchdown at rated speeds, which in turn resulted in mechanical coupling."

After Nauka was attached to the space station, the module's software incorrectly made its thrusters fire for separation, we're told.

"The docking mechanics worked reliably, without any comments and led to the closure of both docking mechanisms of the station and the module," Solovyov said.

"Due to a short-term software failure, a direct command was mistakenly implemented to turn on the module's engines for withdrawal, which led to some modification of the orientation of the complex as a whole.

"This situation was quickly countered by the propulsion system of the Zvezda module. At the moment, the station is in its normal orientation, all the ISS and the multipurpose laboratory module systems are operating normally. A reliable internal power and command interface was created, as well as a power supply interface that connected the module to the station."

The next steps involve ensuring the station is A-OK and functioning properly after this mishap, or as Roscomos put it, "completing a set of procedures with the Nauka module propulsion system to ensure unconditional safety of the International Space Station and the entire crew."

The Nauka module will also be prepared for use by the station's inhabitants. It is set up to host science experiments, and sports an airlock for space walks and a docking port for visiting craft. Russia ditched its Pirs module from the space station to allow Nauka to slot in.

"The crew is now busy balancing the pressure in the Nauka module," said Solovyov. "This is a rather lengthy procedure, because the total volume of the module is about 70 cubic meters. In the afternoon, the crew will open the hatches, enter the module, turn on the necessary means of purifying the atmosphere and begin normal regular work."

As a result of this drama, Boeing's launch of its unmanned Starliner spacecraft to the ISS has been put off until August 3 at the earliest. ®

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A Tesla Megapack burst into flames at ‘Victorian Big Battery’

Evolutionary chaos as butterflies, wasps, and viruses have a three-way war

The evolutionary pressures result in some pretty complicated host interactions.

Evolutionary chaos as butterflies, wasps, and viruses have a three-way war

Watching X-rays flung out into the universe by the supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy 800 million light-years away, Stanford University astrophysicist Dan Wilkins noticed an intriguing pattern. He observed a series of bright flares of X-rays—exciting, but not unprecedented—and then, the telescopes recorded something unexpected: additional flashes of X-rays that were smaller, later and of different "colors" than the bright flares.

According to theory, these luminous echoes were consistent with X-rays reflected from behind the black hole—but even a basic understanding of black holes tells us that is a strange place for light to come from.

"Any light that goes into that black hole doesn't come out, so we shouldn't be able to see anything that's behind the black hole," said Wilkins, who is a research scientist at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. It is another strange characteristic of the black hole, however, that makes this observation possible. "The reason we can see that is because that black hole is warping space, bending light and twisting magnetic fields around itself," Wilkins explained.

The strange discovery, detailed in a paper published July 28 in Nature, is the first direct observation of light from behind a black hole—a scenario that was predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity but never confirmed, until now.

"Fifty years ago, when astrophysicists starting speculating about how the magnetic field might behave close to a black hole, they had no idea that one day we might have the techniques to observe this directly and see Einstein's general theory of relativity in action," said Roger Blandford, a co-author of the paper who is the Luke Blossom Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and Stanford and SLAC professor of physics and particle physics.

How to see a black hole

The original motivation behind this research was to learn more about a mysterious feature of certain black holes, called a corona.

Material falling into a supermassive black hole powers the brightest continuous sources of light in the universe, and as it does so, forms a corona around the black hole. This light—which is X-ray light—can be analyzed to map and characterize a black hole.

The leading theory for what a corona is starts with gas sliding into the black hole where it superheats to millions of degrees. At that temperature, electrons separate from atoms, creating a magnetized plasma. Caught up in the powerful spin of the black hole, the magnetic field arcs so high above the black hole, and twirls about itself so much, that it eventually breaks altogether—a situation so reminiscent of what happens around our own Sun that it borrowed the name "corona."

"This magnetic field getting tied up and then snapping close to the black hole heats everything around it and produces these high energy electrons that then go on to produce the X-rays," said Wilkins.

As Wilkins took a closer look to investigate the origin of the flares, he saw a series of smaller flashes. These, the researchers determined, are the same X-ray flares but reflected from the back of the disk—a first glimpse at the far side of a black hole.

"I've been building theoretical predictions of how these echoes appear to us for a few years," said Wilkins. "I'd already seen them in the theory I've been developing, so once I saw them in the telescope observations, I could figure out the connection."

Future observations

The mission to characterize and understand coronas continues and will require more observation. Part of that future will be the European Space Agency's X-ray observatory, Athena (Advanced Telescope for High-ENergy Astrophysics). As a member of the lab of Steve Allen, professor of physics at Stanford and of particle physics and astrophysics at SLAC, Wilkins is helping to develop part of the Wide Field Imager detector for Athena.

"It's got a much bigger mirror than we've ever had on an X-ray telescope and it's going to let us get higher resolution looks in much shorter observation times," said Wilkins. "So, the picture we are starting to get from the data at the moment is going to become much clearer with these new observatories."

Co-authors of this research are from Saint Mary's University (Canada), Netherlands Institute for Space Research (SRON), University of Amsterdam and The Pennsylvania State University.

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How Gravity Turns Me Upside Down

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On Earth, things evolve into crabs—could the same be true in space?

Evolution experts were kind enough to answer Ars' questions about alien crabs.

 

Many organisms on planet Earth aren't crabs. Dogs, for instance—definitely not crabs. Science also suggests that humans are not, in fact, crabs. But a surprising number of creatures either are crabs or look a lot like them. For example, a hermit crab has a distinctly crab-like appearance but is not technically a real crab. Hermit crabs are not alone; over the history of life on Earth, there have been five separate cases in which decapod crustaceans have evolved this way, a process common enough that it has picked up a formal term: carcinization.

 

Around a year ago, this evolutionary process captured the imagination of the Internet. Headlines like “Why everything eventually becomes a crab” and “Why Does Evolution Keep Turning Everything Into Crabs” popped up. PBS even made a video.

 

"Everything" is clear hyperbole—the overwhelming majority of things on Earth are not crabs and seemingly have no plans to become them. But if there are benefits to having a crab-like shape on Earth, should we view that as a general rule of life? Could it hold true on other planets? If the process of carcinization operates here, it's not unreasonable to expect that it might happen elsewhere.

 

Because we take these things far too seriously, Ars spoke to experts on crabs, evolution, and alien life to find out. The answer: it's highly speculative, given that we haven't found life—crab-like or otherwise—anywhere else, but it's not wholly impossible.

OK, but why crabs?

The reasons creatures evolved crabby features are still unknown, though there are numerous hypotheses. According to Jo Wolfe, a researcher at Harvard University's Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, carcinization could be a mixture of genes and the environment. However, Wolfe—who penned a paper on the topic last March—also noted that there are still no definitive answers.

 

“There is no clear-cut reason why being a crab is better than not being a crab,” she told Ars.

 

Yet crab-like forms are common enough that a number of the things we call crabs aren't all that closely related to crabs. For instance, a hermit crab is a decapod crustacean and part of a group called Anomura. Though they evolved to have crab-like features, they are not true crabs, which are in the infraorder Brachyura.

 

Wolfe said that the similar body plans may evolve because the body shape of a crab could have some advantages. Crab bodies tend to be compact and quite flat, with their abdomens folded up below. This could make them smaller targets for predators and could allow the crabs the ability to run and hide in smaller crevasses.

 

Claws might be a boon as well, Wolfe said. (Even though, again, having claws doesn't make a species a crab—lobsters have huge claws but aren't crabs.) But defending that argument is made harder by the fact that claws have multiple functions. Some crabs don't even use their claws for predation; a male fiddler crab, for instance, uses his one massive claw for sexual display.

 

Wolfe also suggested that there are probably genetic limits to carcinization. The genetic makeup of a species that evolved a crab-like body plan would need to have the right building blocks for the process. So, for example, both shrimp and crabs have a genetic toolkit that lets them produce many limbs and exoskeletons, while humans do not—meaning, most likely, there are no human-relative crabs on the horizon.

When does being a crab make sense?

Right now, there's no evidence that there is any life, much less crab life, on other planets. Even if we found aliens that looked like crabs, they obviously wouldn't be crabs as we've defined them. With the right environment, however, crab-like aliens could hypothetically evolve elsewhere. Wolfe noted that any creatures on these theoretical planets would still need to have the right genetic building blocks to be capable of evolving into crab-like forms. And a converse is also true: planets different from Earth are less likely to have crabs.

 

For example, a planet like Naboo in Star Wars—which has land, bodies of water, rock, etc.—could be home to crabs, Wolfe said. On Earth, there are terrestrial crabs, which evolved from their marine kin. There are also terrestrial false crabs, such as the terrifying coconut crab. But largely, it seems that water or some kind of liquid on a planet would increase the odds of crabs being there.

 

If the form of a crab works because it makes it easier to scurry away into rocks and such, then some kind of rocky geography could also help a planet's chances of carcinization. Going back to the Star Wars analogy, planets like the desert world Tatooine or the gas giant Bespin (home of Cloud City) probably wouldn't have what it takes.

 

Crab-like creatures could also fill specific niches in planets with Earth-like environments, according to Arik Kershenbaum, a zoologist at the University of Cambridge and the author of 2020's The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy. Some crab species hang out at the bottom of the ocean and either eat the waste that flows down from higher in the water column or eat the other species that use the waste for nutrients.

 

Assuming another planet has aquatic life that dies and sinks to the bottom, that niche could also exist there. “You could see the sort of evolutionary game playing out very similarly to what presumably happened on Earth,” he told Ars.

 

This doesn't necessarily mean that the niche would be filled by crab-like critters, however. There are some benefits that crabs do have, like claws, multiple legs to scuttle around on, and segmented bodies, Kershenbaum said. But he said that our guesses about the purposes of evolutionary traits aren't always accurate. Further, he noted that in many cases, species simply inherit traits from previous generations, even after those traits no longer contribute to survival.

So they would be on Earth-like planets?

It seems likely that if there are space crabs, they'd probably come about on planets that have environments similar to Earth's. For her part, Wolfe doesn't necessarily expect that the emergence of life would need to be restricted to Earth-like planets. There could be all kinds of strange forms that evolve to live in alien environments. “I think that you could [have crab-like creatures on other planets]. I also think you could get things that don't look like anything on Earth at all,” she said.

 

Kershenbaum doesn't think that life in the stars needs to look exactly like life on Earth. Rather, weird and wacky alien life is just more likely to be rare by comparison. For example, there are plenty of rocky planets out there that probably have water on them, which could be a necessary precursor to life. But it's possible that life could exist in settings that are distinctly different from Earth—like spores living in the acidic atmosphere of Venus.

 

“It seems likely that Earth-like planets are going to be relatively well-stocked with life compared to weird and wonderful planets,” he said. “More reasonable life is more likely to be common.”

 

Charles Marshall, director of the University of California Museum of Paleontology, said, however, that it's a fairly narrow group of species that have evolved to become crabby on Earth. Moreover, these species are already pretty similar to crabs. “You've already got to be so close to being a crab before you evolve into a crab, it's kind of a moot point,” he told Ars. “Life is produced in an enormous amount of morphologies, and crabbiness is just one of them.”

 

The presence of crabby creatures on a planet could suggest the planet has the potential to develop into something interesting, Marshall added. He said that if he were to send a probe into space to look for life, he'd expect to see many worm-shaped things—they're quite common on Earth and have been around for more than 500 million years. For something to carcinize, there needs to be a vibrant ecology surrounding it. There would need to be predators for the organism to protect itself or hide from, plus a good variety of food. Worm-like forms probably don't need all of that.

 

“Finding a crab might be indicative of a rich enough biosphere and a rich enough genomic potential that you may yet expect to evolve something like humans,” he said. “Therefore, searching for something like a crab might be a good idea. If [a planet hasn't] evolved something crab-like, you know you've found a world that's still relatively simple.”

On Earth, things evolve into crabs—could the same be true in space?

(HealthDay)—People fully vaccinated against COVID-19 should be tested for the virus if they come into contact with infected people, whether or not they have symptoms, say updated testing guidelines from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The agency previously said that fully vaccinated people did not need to be tested after exposure to the virus unless they had symptoms, The New York Times reported.

Fully vaccinated people should wear a mask in public indoor spaces after exposure, the agency said. Three to five days later, they should be tested. If the results are negative, they can stop wearing masks indoors. If the results are positive, they should isolate at home for 10 days, the guidance states.

The new testing advice was released Tuesday, the same day the CDC issued new mask guidelines that recommend that the fully vaccinated wear a mask indoors if they live in a high-transmission area.

The agency also recommended that vaccinated people in close contact with unvaccinated people, including children under 12, consider wearing masks in public indoor spaces whatever the transmission rates in the local community. In a shift, the agency also recommended universal masking in schools.

"Our updated guidance recommends vaccinated people get tested upon exposure regardless of symptoms," CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told the Times. "Testing is widely available."

Even though fully vaccinated people may still get infected, people with these "breakthrough" infections tend to have mild or no symptoms because vaccines provide strong protection, according to the Times.

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Drinking less than six Australian-standard glasses of alcohol a week is associated with the lowest risk of developing atrial fibrillation, but not all alcohol is created equal, new research from the University of Adelaide shows.

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is an irregular and rapid heart rate that can increase risk of stroke, heart failure and other heart-related complications. Symptoms include heart palpitations, shortness of breath and weakness.

Past research has shown that binge drinking and consumption of large amounts of alcohol increases your risk of developing atrial fibrillation but it was not clear whether consumption of low amounts of alcohol increases your risk of developing AF.

This study, published today in JACC: Clinical Electrophysiology , used data from the UK Biobank, a large-scale research database with health information collected from half a million UK volunteers.

Lead author Samuel Tu from the University of Adelaide's Centre for Heart Rhythm Disorders, said researchers found that those who consumed less than six Australian standard drinks of alcohol per week had the lowest risk of developing AF.

"We also found that beer and cider consumption was associated with a greater risk of atrial fibrillation, compared to red wine and white wine consumption,'' he said.

"Our findings suggest that responsible consumption of alcohol up to six drinks per week is safe in terms of minimizing your risk of atrial fibrillation. For those currently consuming alcohol, drinking red or white wine could potentially be a safer alternative to other types of alcoholic beverages."

"Importantly, these findings do not apply to people who already suffer from atrial fibrillation, who may find that cutting down their alcohol consumption may reduce their symptoms."

Researchers also investigated whether the recommended number of drinks per week differed for men and women.

"A key question that we sought to answer in this study is whether the effect of alcohol is different in women and men in terms of developing atrial fibrillation,'' Mr Tu said.

"The answer to that is no—less than six drinks per week is the cut-off for both men and women."

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Of all the creatures on Earth, humans manipulate their environments the most. But, how far can we push it before something drastic happens?

Scientists are calling for a better understanding of past extreme climate change events in an attempt to anticipate future changes.

Enter geoarchaeologist and anthropologist C. Michael Barton at Arizona State University. The School of Human Evolution and Social Change researcher, along with Foundation Professor Sander van der Leeuw and an international and interdisciplinary team, published their analysis this week in the journal Nature Geoscience. The paper describes past abrupt climate changes, what led up to the "tipping points" for those events, and what followed.

"We've been putting a lot of chemicals into the atmosphere and changing the heat of the atmosphere for a long time, and really intensively for 150 years," Barton said. "And, things are still chugging along. Temperatures are slowly going up globally, but we haven't seen a huge, dramatic shift. However, complex systems are potentially vulnerable if you push too much."

Barton studies Earth's many systems—specifically the water cycle and landscapes—and how humans alter these systems.

"People tend to look at how far you can push things before suddenly everything changes," Barton said. "And that's what's considered the tipping point."

Systems are everywhere

For a complex systems specialist like Barton, almost everything can be viewed as systems or cycles. A tree grows and dies, and the decay returns nutrients to the soil. Water cycles through the Earth in different forms like rain, runoff and evaporation.

Some of Earth's major systems include the hydrosphere (water), the atmosphere (air) and the cryosphere (ice). All these systems are connected. This research on tipping points looks at the history of these systems to quantify small changes that can lead up to an abrupt, massive change, while also measuring how one abrupt change can trigger abrupt changes in other systems.

The paper explores prior research with sediment cores in the Gulf of Alaska, dust records in North Africa and ice cores from Greenland. All of this pre-historic data gives Earth system modelers and scientists a better idea of what Earth was really like hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Scientists have also been extensively studying Earth's oceans. This includes the current levels of salt and oxygen, changes in circulation patterns, and influxes of fresh water from melting ice sheets. Current ocean conditions can be compared to historic data gathered from the composition of the ocean floor, to make inferences about past ocean currents.

Major changes have happened before

The authors note past instances of extreme climate events happening so quickly that humans either had difficulties adapting, or were unable to adapt, to the new environment.

For example, about 1,500 years ago, abrupt cooling occurred in Europe, leading to changes in the vegetation. The authors note the cooling may have been caused by a natural phenomenon—volcanic eruptions. The vegetation and farming changes were so extreme that people experienced famine and societal reorganization. This timing correlates with the transformation of the Eastern Roman Empire.

The authors note how climate events centuries ago triggered drastic changes or even collapse in ancient civilizations due to unforeseen societal vulnerabilities.

One example is the ancient city of Angkor, which was located in present-day Southeast Asia. The people living in Angkor altered the natural water cycle by diverting water to grow crops. As the city grew, the water system in that region became so strained that it passed a tipping point. The system couldn't handle more intense droughts and floods, and the city of Angkor collapsed.

Many unknowns remain

Arizonans know that the last few years have been drier and hotter than usual. Barton said it's not yet clear whether we've passed a tipping point in the Southwest region.

It's normal to see slight fluctuations in precipitation and temperature year to year. But recent studies of ancient climate make Barton wonder if the drier weather patterns have become the new normal for our lifetimes.

Barton also noted that researchers still don't know why some weather systems change. For example, past monsoon rains have shifted without warning and for unknown reasons. This can be catastrophic for human populations, as those who depend on the monsoon experience intense drought, while others do not have the infrastructure to handle the influx of water.

There are still gaps in this field of research. More raw data needs to be collected and quantified, and some existing data lacks the precision and quality needed to create test models and simulate future abrupt changes.

The researchers also call for more analysis on the interactions between environmental systems and human societies during periods of climate change.

Lastly, improvements in Earth system models will help scientists be able to simulate possible abrupt changes humans may see in the near future. Current models are very good at simulating more gradual climate change, but are not yet able to simulate well-documented past abrupt changes.

The authors hope this paper raises awareness of the field, and that more people will understand how analyzing the long-term past could help us in the near future.

For example, one component of tipping points research is identifying early warning signals. These are smaller fluctuations in a system before an abrupt change. The authors say these warning signals exist, but when the entire world is the focus, it can be challenging to trace how small changes in one system can warn of an abrupt change in another.

There is evidence of past warning signals. For example, there were abnormal shifts in the climates of the North Pacific Ocean region and around Greenland before the major melting of Earth's last ice age.

"All the components can change really, really fast," Barton said. "The whole system can drop into a different state… How do we know when we're getting too close?"

The authors leave the reader with this final thought: "As humans, we try to anticipate the future. We are now well aware that complex systems, including the coupled social and ecological systems that now dominate our planet, can undergo abrupt changes…. If we cannot model abrupt change in the past, we cannot hope to predict them in the future."

The paper "Past abrupt changes, tipping points and cascading impacts in the Earth system" published July 29 and is co-authored by more than 30 researchers from across the world, including Barton and van der Leeuw.

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Engineer and YouTuber Mark Rober has created a robot that can make domino murals at lightning speed, and has shown it off with a video of it arranging 100,000 dominoes into a Super Mario Bros.-themed mural in just over 24 hours. Rober says it would take a team of seven humans a week to do the same thing.

 

The robot, named the “Dominator,” achieves this by putting down 300 dominoes at a time — which are, of course, loaded into it by another robot. Rober says in the video that the current version of the Dominator is the culmination of years of work from him and his team, and he goes into how the device actually works, as well as showing some of the failed designs that led to the final product.

 

If the name Mark Rober rings a bell, it may be because we’ve covered some of his exploits in the past, from a glitter-powered device meant to deter porch pirates, a giant Super Soaker, a dart-tracking dartboard, and a moving basketball hoop. Helping him build the robot and code the software was a team of three other people. He also enlists domino artist and YouTuber Lily Hevesh to act as a human opponent for the Dominator (a la Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter playing Jeopardy versus IBM’s Watson). You can watch her video to see what it’s like for someone skilled in laying down dominoes to go up against the robot.

Image: Mark Rober

 

Rober’s video briefly touches on the robot’s construction, but there’s a series of blog posts written by the team that go into immense amounts of detail on everything from how the project went from idea, to prototype, to robot, how the software and hardware operate, and more. One of the more interesting sections is about the robot’s navigation — it uses GPS for most of it, but it turns out that making the robot align the dominoes correctly without knocking any over in the process took a lot of trial and error. The team ended up using a camera and marker system to solve what it called “the last centimeter problem,” after testing out a few other options.

Image: Baucom Robotics

Of course, one of the most satisfying parts of the video is seeing the 100,000 dominoes get knocked down — a task that also required some engineering work, and that delightfully makes use of a Mario-themed prop. It’s a joy to watch a years-long project like this come together, and while this particular robot may not be capable of doing complex household tasks or delivering pizza (though if it could, it’s obvious which chain it would work for), it can absolutely stack dominoes with the best of them.

Robot arranges 100,000 dominoes into a Super Mario Bros. mural in one day

Historian recreates Thomas Cromwell’s London mansion in exquisite detail

Why yes, there are floor plans for the 58 rooms, plus servants' attic garrets.

Tudor England was a treacherous place for ambitious courtiers, as the steady rise and sudden tragic fall of Thomas Cromwell—one of the chief architects of the English Reformation under King Henry VIII—makes clear. Cromwell had just completed work on a magnificent private mansion in London when he fell out of the king's favor and was summarily beheaded. Now, a British historian has produced the most detailed analysis yet of both that mansion and the townhouse in which Cromwell lived prior to its completion, presented in a new paper published in the Journal of the British Archaeological Association.

 

"These two houses were the homes of this great man; they were the places where he lived with his wife and two daughters, where his son grew up," said Nick Holder, a historian and research fellow at English Heritage and the University of Exeter, who authored the new paper. "It was also the place he went back to at night after being with Henry VIII at court and just got on with the hard graft of running the country. No one else has looked at these two houses in quite as much detail, comparing all the available evidence. This is about as close as you are going to get to walking down these 16th-century corridors."

 

There was a time when historians considered Thomas Cromwell to be a rather insignificant court figure during Henry VIII's reign. That view began to shift in the 1950s as historians realized just how much Cromwell may have influenced the king and Parliament during a particularly chaotic period in British history. Much of that chaos, it must be said, stemmed from the monarch's impetuous nature, particularly when it came to wives.

 

Cromwell's star had already been rising at court when Henry VIII first stated his desire to have his marriage to Queen Catherine of Aragon annulled so that he could marry Anne Boleyn. It was Cromwell who first tried, and failed, to get the pope's approval for the annulment. So naturally, Cromwell became a staunch champion of the so-called doctrine of royal supremacy, which claimed that the reigning king was also the Supreme Head of the Church of England, thereby granting Henry the power to annul the marriage himself.

Cromwell was instrumental in getting the House of Commons to recognize royal supremacy in March 1532. Sir Thomas More resigned as Lord Chancellor soon after, marking a huge victory for Cromwell and the reformation movement. Parliament enacted legislation to formally break with Rome in 1534, and Cromwell became the king's principal secretary and chief minister. More was subsequently executed for refusing to swear an oath of succession to accept the king's new powers.

 

Henry VIII married Anne Boleyn on January 25, 1533, and Cromwell's position at court seemed secure; the king named him Royal Vicegerent in 1535. Then the marriage to Anne began to sour, driven in part by her inability to give Henry a male heir. But she also instructed her chaplains to speak out against Cromwell because of a legislative disagreement over what to do with the proceeds from the dissolution of monasteries. Plus, the king's notorious wandering eye had by now fallen on Jane Seymour.

 

Most historians agree that Cromwell played a key role in smearing Anne's reputation with accusations of infidelity. She was executed on May 19, 1536, and by the end of the month, Henry had married Jane Seymour, forcing Parliament to issue a new Act of Succession to recognize the new queen. Cromwell's faithful service was again richly rewarded; he became Lord Privy Seal and was named a baron in 1536. By then, construction of his grand London manor on Throgmorton Street was already underway.

 

Holder has been researching the medieval friaries of London for more than a decade, and his earliest reconstructions of the floor plans for both the manor and Cromwell's tenement house near Austin Friars were included in his 2011 doctoral dissertation. This latest paper is the first time Holder has fully presented the historical evidence he gathered to make those reconstructions, drawing on letters, leases, surveys, and inventories. And it includes an artist's illustration, based on all that research, of what the mansion probably looked like.

 

Portrait of Thomas Cromwell by Hans Holbein the Younger.

 

Detail of an early 17th-century survey showing Cromwell's first house in Austin Friars, London.

 

Floor plan of Cromwell's first house in Austin Friars, London.

 

Detail of a 17th-century survey of Cromwell's mansion.

 

Detailed ground-floor plan of Cromwell's mansion.

 

Reconstructed elevation of Cromwell's mansion on Throgmorton Street frontage.

 

Detail of the "Copperplate" map view of the 1550s. (1) denotes Cromwell's mansion.

 

Cromwell likely paid 4 pounds a year in rent for his London townhouse—one of ten tenements owned and rented out by an Augustinian friary. There were 14 rooms across three stories, with at least one cellar and a handful of attic garrets in the roof for servant housing. It was Cromwell's primary family residence; his book-lined private office was located in the ground-floor parlor.

For his reconstruction, Holder relied upon two inventories of the house and its contents, providing a room-by-room description, including the coats of arms of two former patrons, Cardinal Wolsey and Thomas Grey. According to Holder, this suggests that, despite his ruthless reputation at court, Cromwell still retained some private loyalties.

Those inventories also provide some insight into Cromwell's religious leanings. "We think of Cromwell as Henry VIII's henchman, carrying out his policy, including closing down the monasteries, and we know that by about 1530, Cromwell became one of the new Evangelical Protestants," said Holder. "But when you look at the inventory of his house in the 1520s, he doesn't seem such a religious radical, he seems more of a traditional English Catholic. He's got various religious paintings on the wall, he's got his own holy relic, which is very much associated with traditional Catholics, not with the new Evangelicals, and he's even got a home altar. In the 1520s, he seems like much more of a conventional early Tudor Catholic gentleman."

Cromwell had been quietly buying up properties around his London townhouse for several years, including acquiring (by apparently illegal means) a 22-foot strip of land that technically belonged to a neighbor, in order to have a larger garden. Construction was delayed in late 1536 when most of the workmen were conscripted to put down a rebellion in Yorkshire (the Pilgrimage of Grace uprising). Holder estimates that Cromwell spent roughly 1,600 pounds on the residence, which seems to have served multiple functions: family residence, administrative base, and an excellent venue for entertaining prestigious visitors.

The new mansion boasted 58 rooms, plus at least a dozen servants' garrets and several storage cellars for wine and beer. It spanned two main blocks built around three courtyards, linked by a long frontage on Throgmorton Street and by connecting galleries at the rear of the house with windows overlooking the courtyard. There were several kitchens (including a separate pastry kitchen) on the ground floor, a good-sized larder, a buttery and pantry, a chapel, a stable, and a porter's lodge.

A large stair tower led to the first floor, which featured a waiting room and parlor, as well as several bedrooms—including what was likely Cromwell's private and family chambers, located in the west block with a view of the garden. "The family apartment even included a separate bathroom with a plaster ceiling," Holder wrote. The heated halls were likely hung with rich tapestries, and one of the halls featured bay windows—an unusual architectural feature in Tudor homes. The second floor consisted of a series of bedchambers along the street frontage, likely reserved for Cromwell's staff and senior household servants. The other servants were probably housed in the various attic garrets.

There was also a storage space for Cromwell's considerable personal armory, including several sets of German plate armor, almost 100 head pieces and helmets, and 759 bows with hundreds of sheaves of arrows. The large, detached garden may have included a bowling alley and tennis court, although it's possible these were never finished.

The mansion was completed in the summer of 1539, but Cromwell did not enjoy the luxury for long. Jane Seymour died in 1537, and Cromwell convinced the king to marry Anne of Cleves, passing on reports of her beauty and a flattering portrait painted by Hans Holbein the Younger. But Henry was not at all happy when he finally met Anne in person, declaring, "I like her not!" He still went ahead with the wedding but apparently had trouble performing on their wedding night because he found her so unattractive. The marriage was never officially consummated.

Cromwell was one of only two courtiers who knew that secret, and when it inevitably leaked at court, Cromwell was blamed. Blabbing about the king's humiliating inability to perform sexually wasn't exactly solid legal grounds for execution, but Cromwell had made plenty of enemies during his rise to power, and they were all too happy to manufacture a variety of trumped-up charges: corruption, protecting people suspected of Catholic sympathies, and so forth. "This then is my reward for faithful service!" Cromwell reportedly said, right before he was tossed in the Tower of London and condemned to death without a trial.

Meanwhile, Anne of Cleves was just fine with having the marriage annulled and was rewarded handsomely for her cooperation. Henry next married Catherine Howard on the very day Cromwell was beheaded, July 28, 1540. (Howard suffered the same fate the following year, and Henry subsequently married his sixth and final wife, Catherine Parr.) I'm sure it was little consolation to Cromwell that the king later expressed regret for executing "the most faithful servant he ever had." Naturally, Henry blamed his ministers for presenting him with "pretexts" and false accusations.

As for Thomas Cromwell's grand London mansion, it was among the assets seized by the state; some of the furniture went to Anne of Cleves as part of her annulment settlement. The house remained unused for three years and was then purchased by a trade group called the Drapers' Company in 1543 for an estimated 1,200 pounds, per Holder. And it's a good thing the drapers did, since the group's archives held a "treasure trove" of relevant documents—including the surveys and inventories Holder used to create such a complete picture of Cromwell's London homes.

DOI: Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 2021. 10.1080/00681288.2021.1923812  (About DOIs).

Historian recreates Thomas Cromwell’s London mansion in exquisite detail