A new approach to analyze satellite measurements of Earth's cloud cover reveals that clouds are very likely to enhance global heating.

The research, by scientists at Imperial College London and the University of East Anglia, is the strongest evidence yet that clouds will amplify global heating over the long term, further exacerbating climate change.

The results, published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also suggest that at double atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations above pre-industrial levels, the climate is unlikely to warm below 2°C, and is more likely on average to warm more than 3°C.

Pre-industrial CO2 levels were around 280 ppm (parts per million), but current levels are approaching 420 ppm, and could approach double the pre-industrial amount by mid-century if significant emissions cuts are not made. The amount of climate warming predicted from a doubling of pre-industrial CO2 levels is known as the 'climate sensitivity' - a measure of how strongly our climate will react to such a change.

The largest uncertainty in climate sensitivity predictions is the influence of clouds, and how they may change in the future. This is because clouds, depending on properties such as their density and height in the atmosphere, can either enhance or dampen warming.

Co-author Dr. Paulo Ceppi, from the Grantham Institute—Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial, said: "The value of the climate sensitivity is highly uncertain, and this translates into uncertainty in future global warming projections and in the remaining 'carbon budget' - how much we can emit before we reach common targets of 1.5°C or 2°C of global warming.

"There is therefore a critical need to more accurately quantify how clouds will affect future global warming. Our results will mean we are more confident in climate projections and we can get a clearer picture of the severity of future climate change. This should help us know our limits—and take action to stay within them."

Low clouds tend to have a cooling effect, as they block the sun from reaching the ground. High clouds, however, have a warming effect, as while they let solar energy reach the ground, the energy emitted back from the Earth is different. This energy can be trapped by the clouds, enhancing the greenhouse effect. Therefore, the type and amount of cloud a warming world will produce impacts further warming potential.

Inspired by ideas from the artificial intelligence community, the researchers developed a new method to quantify relationships between state-of-the-art global satellite observations of clouds, and the associated temperature, humidity and wind conditions. From these observed relationships, they were then able to better constrain how clouds will change as the Earth warms.

They found it was very likely (more than 97.5% probability) that clouds will amplify global heating, by both reflecting less solar radiation and enhancing the greenhouse effect. These results also suggest that a doubling of CO2 concentrations will lead to around 3.2°C of warming. This is the highest confidence of any study so far, and is based on data from global observations, rather than local regions or specific cloud types.

Co-author Dr. Peer Nowack, from the School of Environmental Sciences and Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and Imperial's Grantham Institute and Data Science Institute, said: "Over the last few years, there's been a growing amount of evidence that clouds probably have an amplifying effect on global warming. However, our new approach allowed us for the first time to derive a global value for this feedback effect using only the highest quality satellite data as our preferred line of evidence.

"Our paper makes a major step towards narrowing the most important uncertainty factor in climate sensitivity projections. As such, our work also highlights a new pathway in which machine learning methods can help us constrain the key remaining uncertainty factors in climate science."

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Throughout history, people of different cultures and stages of evolution have found ways to adapt, with varying success, to the gradual warming of the environment they live in. But can the past inform the future, now that climate change is happening faster than ever before?

Yes, say an international team of anthropologists, geographers and earth scientists in Canada, the U.S. and France led by Université de Montréal anthropologist Ariane Burke.

In a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Professor Burke and her colleagues make a case for a new and evolving discipline called "the archeology of climate change."

It's an interdisciplinary science that uses data from archeological digs and the palaeoclimate record to study how humans interacted with their environment during past climate-change events such as the warming that followed the last ice age, more than 10,000 years ago.

What the scientists hope to identify are the tipping points in climate history that prompted people to reorganize their societies to survive, showing how cultural diversity, a source of human resilience in the past, is just as important today as a bulwark against global warming.

"The archaeology of climate change combines the study of environmental conditions and archaeological information," said Burke, who runs the Hominin Dispersals Research Group and the Ecomorphology and Paleoanthropology Laboratory.

"What this approach allows us to do identify the range of challenges faced by people in the past, the different strategies they used to face these challenges and ultimately, whether they succeeded or not."

For instance, studying the rapid warming that occurred between 14,700 and 12,700 years ago, and how humans coped with it as evidenced in the archeological record, can help climate specialists model possible outcomes of climate change in the future, Burke said.

Her paper is co-authored with UdeM anthropologist Julien Riel-Salvatore and colleagues from Bishop's University, Université du Québec à Montréal, the University of Colorado and the CNRS, in France.

Historically, people from different walks of life have found a variety of ways to adapt to the warming of their climate, and these can inform the present and help prepare for the future, the researchers say.

For example, traditional farming practices—many of which are still practiced today—are valid alternatives that can be used to redesign industrial farming, making it more sustainable in the future, they say.

Indigenous cultures have a major role to play in teaching us how to respond to climate change -in the Canadian Arctic, for instance, Indigenous people have a detailed knowledge of the environment that's key to be essential to planning a sustainable response, said Burke.

"Similarly, indigenous farmers all over the world cultivate a wide variety of crop types that won't all respond to changing climate conditions in the same way," she said. "They are preserving crop diversity in the global food chain and if and when the main crop types we currently rely on fail, this diversity could well prove to be a lifeline.

Another example is the readoption in northeastern North America of multi-cropping agriculture based on the "three sisters": corn, squash and beans. "There are archeological models for that," said Burke, "and the point is to use them to come up with more sustainable, locally scaled ways of farming that will ensure food security in the years to come.

"The archeology of climate change: the case for cultural diversity," by Ariane Burke et al, was published July 19 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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A swarm of more than 141 earthquakes is rattling Yellowstone National Park, geologists said.

The U.S. Geological Survey said Friday that an ongoing earthquake swarm that began at 5:52 p.m. Thursday is centered beneath Yellowstone Lake. There have been 40 earthquakes bigger than a magnitude 2, and two have been above a 3.0 magnitude, USGS said.

In the past day, there have been 10 earthquakes with a 2.5 magnitude or greater, according to USGS. The largest was a 3.1-magnitude quake that shook beneath Yellowstone Lake at 8:12 a.m. Mountain Time.

The earthquake swarm is nothing to worry about, geologists said.

"Earthquake sequences like these are common and account for roughly 50% of the total seismicity in the Yellowstone region," USGS said on Twitter. "This swarm is similar to one that occurred in about the same place during December 2020."

Some people, however, still worry earthquakes in Yellowstone are a sign that the "supervolcano" that lies beneath the park will soon erupt, which could have regional and global consequences.

"Such a giant eruption would have regional effects such as falling ash and short-term (years to decades) changes to global climate," USGS said on its website. "Those parts of the surrounding states of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming that are closest to Yellowstone would be affected by pyroclastic flows, while other places in the United States would be impacted by falling ash (the amount of ash would decrease with distance from the eruption site)."

The USGS doesn't think an eruption at Yellowstone is likely for thousands of years. Even with the current swarm, the alert level at the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory is green, which is normal.

Earthquakes in Yellowstone typically happen in swarms, according to the park. Swarms happen in many places where there is volcanic activity and occur for a number of reasons. The most common is when water gets into faults in the Earth's crust, according to USGS.

Source

Limitations of the program held Intuit back from innovating

After almost 20 years, TurboTax maker Intuit has announced that it will no longer be participating in the IRS' Free File program that allows Americans to file their taxes for free.

The IRS has been working with Intuit, H&R Block and a number of other tax software companies since 2001 on its Free File program that provides free online tax preparation and electronic filing services to individuals making under $72,000.

However, in a new blog post, Intuit has said that it will be leaving the program once this tax season ends in October. The reason behind the company's decision is due to the limitations of the Free File program and conflicting demands from those outside of the program.

Free File program

Through its nearly 20 years of participation in the Free File program, Intuit has helped the IRS exceed its goal of increasing electronic filing to 80 percent and making free tax preparation available to 70 percent of tax filers in the US.

Now though, the company has said that it is unable to continue participating in the program as doing so would prevent it from delivering all of the benefits that help its customers make more money, save more and invest for the future.

Once its free from the limitations of the Free File program, Intuit plans to remove obstacles in tax preparation by importing data beyond the tax return, provide access to tax and finance experts for personalized support free of charge or at a portion of the cost elsewhere, use AI to proactively intervene when customers make mistakes or appear confused, direct deposit refunds into free, high yield accounts and extend free refund advances to its customers.

Although Intuit is leaving the IRS' program, the company remains committed to free tax filing and will still offer similar services to its customers as it works to accelerate innovation to address all of their financial problems.

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MOSCOW, July 19 (Reuters) - Russia said on Monday it had successfully tested a Tsirkon(Zircon) hypersonic cruise missile, a weapon President Vladimir Putin has touted as part of a new generation of missile systems without equal in the world.

The defence ministry said in a statement that the missile had been fired from the Admiral Gorshkov, a warship located in the White Sea, and travelled at around seven times the speed of sound before hitting a ground target on the coastline of the Barents Sea more than 350 km (217 miles) away.

"The tactical and technical characteristics of the Tsirkon missile were confirmed during the tests," the ministry said.

Some Western experts have questioned how advanced Russia's new generation of weapons is, while recognising that the combination of speed, manoeuvrability and altitude of hypersonic missiles makes them difficult to track and intercept.

Russia plans to fit the Tsirkon missile system to its submarines and surface ships.

Putin announced an array of new hypersonic weapons in 2018 in one of his most bellicose speeches in years, saying they could hit almost any point in the world and evade a U.S.-built missile shield.

The following year, he threatened to deploy hypersonic missiles on ships and submarines that could lurk outside U.S. territorial waters if the United States moved to deploy intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Europe.

Washington has not deployed such missiles in Europe, but Moscow is worried it might.

Reporting by Anton Kolodyazhnyy and Alexander Marrow; Editing by Andrew Osborn

Source

The Moon's orbit is "wobbling" — and that plus climate change will wreak havoc on the ground

At the time of this writing, at least 120 people have been confirmed dead because of severe flooding in Western Europe. It is tragically likely that, when this story is over, the number will be significantly higher. A German weather service (DWD) spokesman told CNN that in some areas there has not been this much rainfall in 100 years.

These extreme weather events are inextricably linked to climate change, politicians and experts have noted. But there is another culprit, one above, that is also affecting the weather: a "wobble" in the orbit of the Moon.

Indeed, only days before the flooding, a study in the journal Nature Climate Change by scientists from NASA and the University of Hawaii warned that the Earth may experience record flooding in the mid-2030s because of changes in the Moon's orbit.

"Climate change causes a rise in sea levels which in turn increases the rate of high-tide floods," Harvard professor and astronomer Avi Loeb told Salon by email. "The gravitational force of the Moon pulls water in the oceans in its direction. The strength of the Moon's pull changes from year to year, as the moon 'wobbles' in its orbit, slightly altering its position relative to Earth on a rhythmic 18.6-year cycle." In one half of the cycle, Loeb explained, the moon's force on the Earth causes low tides to grow and high tides to shrink; during the other half, high tides get bigger and low tides get lower.

"We are currently witnessing the tide-amplifying part of the cycle and the next tide-amplifying cycle begins in the mid-2030s," Loeb pointed out. "By then, global sea levels will have risen enough to make those higher-than-normal high tides particularly troublesome."

But while the Moon's orbit is not something that humans can readily control, man-made climate change is the other half of the equation. 

"Only if we take up the fight against climate change decisively, we will be able to prevent extreme weather conditions such as those we are experiencing," German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier proclaimed. Environment Minister Svenja Schulze publicly stated that "Climate Change has arrived in Germany."

"We will be faced with such events over and over," Armin Laschet, the premier of North Rhine-Westphalia and a candidate to replace Merkel as German Chancellor, declared in a statement. "And that means we need to speed up climate protection measures, on European, federal and global levels, because climate change isn't confined to one state."

While the extent to which climate change contributed to the historic flooding remains unclear, Laschet's warning in particular is indisputable.

Indeed, climate scientists say perfect storm of variables is falling into place to imperil coastal cities.

"Climate change increases sea level relentlessly  and that is what increases nuisance flooding as well as all storm surges and coastal erosion," Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, wrote to Salon. "But the biggest effects are when things are aligned: high tide, a major storm with storm onshore wind component that piles up water along the coast and then adds big waves on top. The process is highly nonlinear, and the biggest effects are with big waves on a very high tide."

Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Department of Global Ecology told Salon by email that the planet has natural variability when it comes to hot or cold spells, wet or dry periods. "It is the extremes that get us, not the change in average conditions. Coral bleachings happen when an ocean heat wave is exacerbated by global warming — turning an event that corals were adapted to into one that they are not prepared to confront," said Caldeira. 

What the new study reminds us, he added, is the presence of a 18.6 year lunar cycle of waxing and waning tidal amplitudes. "This 18.6 year cycle, mapped on top of the daily monthly and other cycles, allow us to predict when the sea level rise caused by melting glaciers and thermally expanding seas will be most likely to impact human and natural systems," he noted.

Caldeira expressed hope that our knowledge about the impending coastal city disaster will compel policymakers to take the necessary steps to offset climate change. Unfortunately, he noted, "seas go up and down with the natural cycles, but human interference in the climate system causes the seas to move in one direction only — and that direction is up."

He added, "It is likely to be tens of thousands of years, at least, before nature can fully reverse human influence on sea level."

Source

Slow train across Siberia offers glimpse of Russia’s rail ambitions

Redevelopment of a 4,300 km Soviet-era line aims to propel the network into this century. 

On the shore of Lake Baikal, deep in eastern Siberia, one of the most ambitious feats of modern Russian rail engineering is nearing completion.

 

The Baikalsky tunnel, carved through 7 km of mountain rock, has taken seven years to build, with construction teams laboring in temperatures as low as minus 60° Celsius (-76° Fahrenheit).

 

Designed to withstand the weekly earthquakes that strike this remote corner of Russia, it is the flagship project of the redevelopment of one of the country’s most iconic rail lines that aims to propel the Soviet-era train network into the 21st century.

 

The Baikal-Amur Mainline, cousin to the Trans-Siberian railway, runs for 4,300 km from the town of Tayshet through some of the world’s toughest terrain all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

 

State-run Russian Railways (RZD) is investing $17 billion over a decade as part of an ambitious plan that aims to carry not just passengers but also grab a bigger slice of the billions of dollars worth of goods and raw materials that are transported annually from Asia to Europe.

 

“Russia has advanced,” Vladimir Goncharov, the engineer in charge of the Baikalsky tunnel told the Financial Times from Severobaikalsk, a sleepy town on the northern tip of Lake Baikal, the world’s largest freshwater lake.

 

“When I started building tunnels in 2007, there were big problems with financing. Now there are none. I believe that every year, the problem of staff and financial resources gets resolved quickly. Today Russia has everything we need for building and developing railway infrastructure.”

 

His optimism understates the Herculean task to modernize Russia’s creaking rail network—the funding of the massive upgrade has been the subject of national discussion for years.

 

The four-day journey along the BAM takes passengers through soaring mountain ranges, over fast-flowing rivers and across thick taiga forest, interspersed with a series of railway towns built for construction workers in the Soviet days and frozen in time.

 

Severobaikalsk is one of them. The largest town on Lake Baikal, with a population of 23,000, it looks out on to the cold beauty of the deep-blue water, surrounded by peaks capped with snow even in summer.

 

The town’s main attraction is its train station, built by workers from Leningrad—now St. Petersburg—in the shape of a sail in tribute to their city’s maritime traditions. Lyudmila, an assistant at a local food store, moved to Severobaikalsk a few years ago to join relatives working on the railways. “This town is great. I love it here,” she enthused, eager to speak to a rare visitor. “It’s beautiful, clean, safe, but it’s expensive. The railway is the single big employer. Every family has somebody working for the railways.”

 

The BAM was conceived in the 1930s as an alternative to the Trans-Siberian in case conflict with China made that line unusable. But construction was delayed until the 1970s, and while the line opened in 1989, the last of its 10 tunnels was only completed in 2003.

 

Victor, now 74, recalled his decade in charge of the construction workers in Severobaikalsk from 1977-87 with a deep sense of patriotism.

 

“The feeling of pride and belonging to the great construction project was true for all the people living along the route,” he said. “In difficult times for the country, its people unite and perform difficult tasks.”

 

Russia hopes the route will become a viable Asia-Europe transit corridor, carrying goods to western markets and tapping shifting demand for mineral resources such as coal.

 

It is marketing rail as a faster, safer, and more ecologically friendly alternative to shipping, with the recent blockage of the Suez Canal giving leverage to Moscow’s argument.

 

“Some 98 percent of the transit cargo volume between Europe and Asia uses the Suez Canal. It takes 40-45 days. By railway it’s twice as fast,” Oleg Belozerov, RZD general director, told the FT.

 

Rail has also become cheaper than the marine alternative. The cost of taking cargo from Asia to Europe by train, based on the Eurasian Rail Alliance index, is half the price of doing so by sea, as measured by the World Container Index.

 

Yet Russia faces stiff competition from China, which is planning a New Silk Road of upgraded transport infrastructure to Western Europe that will run through dozens of countries, as part of its One Belt One Road initiative.

 

Trackmen installing railroad tracks on the Baikal-Amur Mainline in 1984.

 

A design sketch (painted by Viktor Mekhantiev) for a poster, translated from the Russian as 'The Taiga Parts Before the Baikal-Amur Mainline,' features a student worker, dressed in a sweater adorned with a Lenin badge and holding his hands outstretched, and stands in front of a large group of student workers, 1976.

 

Russia's President Vladimir Putin holds a video link-up with the construction site of the second Baikal tunnel, a major facility of the Baikal-Amur Mainline and Trans-Siberian Railway modernization program, in 2018.

 

Belozerov said Russia’s upgraded rail lines could take at least 10 percent of the total container volumes that transit from the country’s Far East ports to its western border, which would be a 10-fold rise.

While the Siberian rail lines operated at maximum capacity to transport 144 million tonnes of cargo last year, the upgrade will boost this to 180 million tonnes by 2025.

The rail project will also help the redevelopment of east Siberia, which is rich in natural resources. The region “has a huge development potential and can become the locomotive for the development of the national economy," Belozerov said.

He is unconcerned by the global shift away from fossil fuels or the fact that coal accounts for nearly a third of Russia’s rail shipments, mainly to China. Although Beijing has pledged to become carbon-neutral by 2060, demand from India, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand will remain strong, Belozerov insisted.

Yet the mammoth task of reviving Russia’s crumbling rail infrastructure will still require huge effort, massive investment, and decades to complete.

Finding workers willing to do the job is another issue. One official has even proposed sending prisoners to complete the work, according to a Kommersant report, an idea reminiscent of the Soviet regime. Activists have also criticized the environmental impact of rail redevelopment on the delicate Siberian ecosystem.

Even when the upgrades are complete, Russia will lag well behind China, which is rolling out fleets of high-speed trains. The average speed on Russia’s rail network is just 43 km per hour, according to RZD.

A few years ago, Elon Musk’s Hyperloop proposed a superfast magnetic train line between Moscow and St. Petersburg, but this could be a step too far for Siberia.

“I doubt a magnet rail could be implemented in our climate. The summer is very short and the winter is tough,” Goncharov, the engineer, said. “Maybe Elon Musk has not tested his magnetic monorail at minus 50° C.”

Russia’s rail upgrade in numbers

• 4,300 km | Baikal-Amur Mainline length
• $17 billion | Russia's rail upgrade investment
• 43 km | Speed on rail network, per hour

Slow train across Siberia offers glimpse of Russia’s rail ambitions

Hubble is back, thanks to backup hardware

Next up is getting the scientific instruments back out of safe mode. 

Hubble is back, thanks to backup hardware

This Is How Aliens Might Search for Human Life

(May require free registration to view)

A Neanderthal carved a geometric design in bone 51,000 years ago

Here's more evidence that Neanderthals were as creative and cultured as us.

 

During the Middle Ages, people ventured into the cave now called Einhornhohle to collect unicorn bones. It’s tempting to wonder whether those medieval cryptid hunters would be disappointed or fascinated to learn that the bones they unearthed from the cave actually belonged to ancient bison, deer, cave lions, bears, and other animals that died 50,000 years ago. Archaeologists began excavating the cave in 2017, and while cleaning and sorting their trove of non-unicorn bones, they discovered the handiwork of a long-dead Neanderthal artisan.

 

Around 51,000 years ago, someone carved a geometric design into the second phalanx, or toe bone, of a giant deer. The carver was almost certainly a Neanderthal, based on the bone’s radiocarbon-dated age, because no one but Neanderthals lived in Europe until around 45,000 years ago. As archaeologist Dirk Leder of the Lower Saxony State Service for Cultural Heritage and his colleagues put it, Einhornhohle is “situated along the northern boundary of the world known to be inhabited by Neanderthals,” in the Harz Mountains of northern Germany.

 

Three parallel lines cut diagonally across the surface of the bone. Another of set of parallel lines cross the first three at a more-or-less right angle; the carver was a few degrees off, but that’s still respectably precise for someone eyeballing their measurements and working with a flint blade. At the base of the bone (the end closer to the leg), the carver added four short lines, roughly parallel but not lined up quite as precisely as the others. Leder and his colleagues describe the resulting pattern as “offset chevrons.”

Neanderthal arts and crafts

Whatever you call the geometric design, carving it would have taken planning, effort, and a good supply of small, sharp flint blades. Leder and his colleagues can vouch for that because they tried it themselves, using cow phalanges and hand-knapped blades of Baltic flint, the stone a north German Neanderthal bone-carver would most likely have had access to. They examined the carvings under a microscope, looking for tiny tool marks that could reveal how the carver’s blade moved across the bone surface to create each line. Then they tried to replicate what they saw.

 

Each line in the relatively simple pattern took several steps—and about 10 minutes—to carve. The whole pattern represents about 1.5 hours of work, not counting preparation time. If you want to create your own Neanderthal bone art, here are step-by-step instructions:

 

First, boil the bone. Leder and his colleagues found that boiled bone was soft enough to carve without cracking and clean enough to firmly grip. Now, hold the edge of your blade vertically and cut across the bone with a sawing motion, which should etch the beginnings of a line into the surface. Next, hold the blade horizontally against the bone and scrape the surface, moving toward the cut you just made. That makes a long, straight cut with one steep side and one wide, shallow side. Repeat those steps in order until the engraving is about 2 mm deep. Then do the same thing nine more times.

 

Be prepared to replace your blade every five minutes or so. “Two blades were used to make each incision, as their edges became dull within just a few minutes,” wrote Leder and his colleagues. You’ll need at least 20 flint blades for this project, which means you’ll either need to make them yourself or convince someone with the right skills to make art supplies for you.

 

Summing all this up, the Neanderthal who etched this pattern into a deer bone 51,000 years ago wasn’t just making an idle doodle. This was a legitimate project; it took imagination to plan the design and figure out that a few individual lines would add up to a more complex pattern. It took resources and planning to assemble the tools, and it took time and effort to actually carve the pattern.

 

Giant deer, also called Irish elk, lived across most of Eurasia during the Paleolithic, but they were rare north of the Alps at the time of the carving, 50,000 years ago.

 

This diagram shows the cutting and scraping motions used to carve the lines into the bones, along with close-up views of the results.

 

This diagram highlights the pattern etched into the bone, the angles at which the lines intersect, and the length of each line.

What was the point?

Of course, we have no way to know what, if anything, the pattern of intersecting lines meant to the person who carved it; we can only speculate. Perhaps the lines were a counter, a mnemonic, or a symbol with spiritual or cultural meaning. Or perhaps someone just enjoyed carving, really liked diagonal lines, and wanted to spend some time creating something pretty. That’s a very human impulse, after all.

The bone itself may offer a few clues, albeit vague ones. A deer phalanx is too small to make a useful tool, but any bone from a giant deer might have been considered valuable or important. Giant deer, now extinct, once stood about 2 meters (6 feet) tall at the shoulders and weighed between 450 and 700 kilograms (1 and 1.5 tons). The males boasted antlers about 3.5 meters (11 feet) wide.

“The use of a giant deer phalanx—a very impressive herbivore—as raw material emphasizes the special character of the modified item, particularly given the paucity of giant deer at 55,000 to 35,000 years ago north of the Alps,” wrote Leder and his colleagues.

Sometimes, microscopic examination of an artifact like this one can reveal faint traces of rubbing or polishing, which might suggest that someone had worn the object as a pendant or tied onto clothing. But in this case, Leder and his colleagues say it’s hard to tell if a few slight polish marks and chips are the result of wear, damage done during carving, or damage from thousands of years of being buried in the cave. Leder and his colleagues suggest one possibility, though.

“The base of the phalanx, on the other hand, is suitable as a platform on which the item stands upright, with the chevrons pointing upwards,” they wrote. (Please appreciate the subtle beauty of “the base of the phalanx, on the other hand” while also noting that your faithful correspondent can take neither blame nor credit for it.)

Credit for the artists

But the carved deer bone from Einhornhohle clearly tells us that Neanderthals were creative, abstract thinkers who could, and did, make art.

Evidence that Neanderthals could think symbolically, create art, and plan a project like this one has been piling up for the last few years. Neanderthals in Spain painted the walls of caves and made shell jewelry painted with ocher pigment around 64,000 years ago. About 50,000 years ago, Neanderthals in France spun plant fibers into thread. And in central Italy, between 55,000 and 40,000 years ago, Neanderthals used birch tar to hold their hafted stone tools in place, which required a lot of planning and complex preparation. And archaeologists have found several pieces of bone and rock from the Middle Paleolithic—the time when Neanderthals had most of Europe to themselves—carved with geometric patterns like cross-hatches, zigzags, parallel lines, and circles.

The common factor in many of these finds is that they predate the arrival of our species in what was previously the Neanderthals’ world—in this case, by at least 5,000 years. “The cultural influence of Homo sapiens as the single explanatory factor for abstract cultural expressions in Neanderthals can no longer be sustained,” wrote Leder and his colleagues.

Nature Ecology and Evolution, 2021 DOI: 10.1038/s41559-021-01487-z  (About DOIs).

A Neanderthal carved a geometric design in bone 51,000 years ago

If we want to look for life on Europa, we’d better bring a drill

Impacts and radiation ensure any interesting chemicals won't last at the surface.

If we want to look for life on Europa, we’d better bring a drill

Our brains “read” expressions of illusory faces in things just like real faces

"For the brain, fake or real, faces are all processed the same way."

Human beings are champions at spotting patterns, especially faces, in inanimate objects—think of the famous "face on Mars," which is essentially a trick of light and shadow, in images taken by the Viking 1 orbiter in 1976. And people are always spotting what they believe to be the face of Jesus in burnt toast and many other (so many) ordinary foodstuffs. There was even a now-defunct Twitter account devoted to curating images of the "faces in things" phenomenon.

 

The phenomenon's fancy name is facial pareidolia. Scientists at the University of Sydney have found that, not only do we see faces in everyday objects, our brains even process objects for emotional expression much like we do for real faces rather than discarding the objects as "false" detections. This shared mechanism perhaps evolved as a result of the need to quickly judge whether a person is a friend or foe. The Sydney team described its work in a recent paper published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

 

Lead author David Alais, of the University of Sydney, told The Guardian:

We are such a sophisticated social species and face recognition is very important... You need to recognize who it is, is it family, is it a friend or foe, what are their intentions and emotions? Faces are detected incredibly fast. The brain seems to do this using a kind of template-matching procedure. So if it sees an object that appears to have two eyes above a nose above a mouth, then it goes, "Oh I'm seeing a face." It’s a bit fast and loose and sometimes it makes mistakes, so something that resembles a face will often trigger this template match.

Alais has been interested in this and related topics for years. For instance, in a 2016 paper published in Scientific Reports, Alais and his colleagues built on prior research involving rapid sequences of faces that demonstrated that perception of face identity, as well as attractiveness, is biased toward recently seen faces. So they designed a binary task that mimicked the selection interface in online dating websites and apps (like Tinder), in which users swipe left or right in response to whether they deem the profile pictures of potential partners attractive or unattractive. Alais et al. found that many stimulus attributes—including orientation, facial expression and attractiveness, and perceived slimness of the online dating profiles—are systematically biased toward recent past experience.

 

This was followed by a 2019 paper in the Journal of Vision, which extended that experimental approach to our appreciation of art. Alais and his co-authors found that we don't assess each painting we view in a museum or gallery on its own merits. They also found that we're prone to a "contrast effect": that is, perceiving a painting to be more attractive if the work we've seen before it was less aesthetically appealing. Instead, the study revealed that our appreciation of art shows the same "serial dependence" systemic bias. We judge paintings as being more appealing if we view them after seeing another attractive painting, and we rate them less attractive if the prior painting was also less aesthetically appealing.

 

The next step was to examine the specific brain mechanisms behind how we "read" social information from the faces of other people. The phenomenon of facial pareidolia struck Alais as being related. "A striking feature of these objects is that they not only look like faces but can even convey a sense of personality of social meaning," he said, such as a sliced bell pepper that seems to be scowling or a towel dispenser that seems to be smiling.

 

The "face on Mars"—an image taken by the Viking Orbiter in 1976— is one of the best-known examples of pareidolia.

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

 

Facial perception involves more than just the features common to all human faces, like the placement of the mouth, nose, and eyes. Our brains might be evolutionarily attuned to those universal patterns, but reading social information requires being able to determine if someone is happy, angry, or sad or whether they are paying attention to us. Alais' group designed a sensory adaptation experiment, and it determined that we do indeed process facial pareidolia in much the same way as we do for real faces, according to a paper published last year in the journal Psychological Science.

This latest study admittedly has a small sample size: 17 university students, all of whom completed practice trials with eight real faces and eight pareidolia images prior to the experiments. (The trial data were not recorded.) The actual experiments used 40 real faces and 40 pareidolia images, selected to include expressions ranging from angry to happy and falling into four categories: high angry, low angry, low happy, and high happy. During the experiments, subjects were briefly shown each image and then rated the emotional expression on the angry/happy rating scale.

The first experiment was designed to test for serial effects. Subjects completed a sequence of 320 trials, with each of the images shown eight times in randomized order. Half of the subjects completed the portion using real faces first and the pareidolia images second. The other half of the subjects did the opposite. The second experiment was similar, except both real faces and pareidolia images were randomly combined in the trials. Each participant rated a given image eight times, and those results were averaged into a mean estimate of the image's expression.

“What we found was that actually these pareidolia images are processed by the same mechanism that would normally process emotion in a real face,” Alais told The Guardian. “You are somehow unable to totally turn off that face response and emotion response and see it as an object. It remains simultaneously an object and a face.”

Specifically, the results showed that subjects could reliably rate the pareidolia images for facial expression. The subjects also showed the same serial dependency bias as Tinder users or art gallery patrons. That is, a happy or angry illusory face in an object will be perceived as more similar in expression to the preceding one. And when real faces and pareidolia images are mixed, as in the second experiment, that serial dependence was more pronounced when subjects viewed the pareidolia images before the human faces. Alais et al. concluded that this is indicative of a shared underlying mechanism between the two, which means "expression processing is not tightly bound to human facial features," they wrote.

"This 'cross-over' condition is important as it shows the same underlying facial expression process is involved regardless of image type," said Alais. "This means that seeing faces in clouds is more than a child's fantasy. When objects look compellingly face-like, it is more than an interpretation: they really are driving your brain's face detection network. And that scowl, or smile—that's your brain's facial expression system at work. For the brain, fake or real, faces are all processed the same way."

DOI: Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2021. 10.1098/rspb.2021.0966

DOI: Psychological Science, 2020. 10.1177/0956797620924814  (About DOIs).

Our brains “read” expressions of illusory faces in things just like real faces

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

In 2015, 170 countries worldwide adopted the Paris Agreement, with the goal limiting the average global temperature increase to 1.5°C. Following the agreement, many countries and cities proposed targets for greenhouse gas mitigation.

However, the UNEP Emissions Gap Report 2020 shows that, without drastic and strict actions to mitigate the climate crisis, we are still heading for a temperature increase of more than 3°C by the end of the 21st century.

A new study published in the journal Frontiers in Sustainable Cities presents the first global balance sheet of greenhouse gasses (GHGs) emitted by major cities around the world. The aim was to research and monitor the effectiveness of historical GHG reduction policies implemented by 167 globally distributed cities that are at different developmental stages.

While only covering 2% of the Earth's surface, cities are big contributors to the climate crisis. But current urban GHG mitigation targets are not sufficient to achieve global climate change targets by the end of this century. "Nowadays, more than 50% of the global population resides in cities. Cities are reported to be responsible for more than 70% of GHG emissions, and they share a big responsibility for the decarbonization of the global economy. Current inventory methods used by cities vary globally, making it hard to assess and compare the progress of emission mitigation over time and space," says co-author Dr. Shaoqing Chen, of Sun Yat-sen University, China.

The biggest polluters

First, the authors conducted sector-level GHG emission inventories of the 167 cities—from metropolitan areas such as Durban, South Africa, to cities such as Milan, Italy. Then, they analyzed and compared the carbon reduction progresses of the cities based on the emission inventories recorded in different years (from 2012 to 2016). Lastly, they assessed the cities' short-, mid-, and long-term carbon mitigation goals. The cities were chosen from 53 countries (in North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Oceania) and were selected based on representativeness in urban sizes and regional distribution. The degree of development was distinguished based on whether they belonged to developed and developing countries according to the UN classification criteria.

The results showed that both developed and developing countries have cities with high total GHG emissions, but that megacities in Asia (such as Shanghai in China and Tokyo in Japan) were especially important emitters. The inventory of per capita emissions showed that cities in Europe, the US, and Australia had significantly higher emissions than most cities in developing countries. China, classified here as a developing country, also had several cities where per capita emissions matched those of developed countries. It is important to note that many developed countries outsource high carbon production chains to China, which increases export-related emissions for the latter.

The researchers also identified some of the most important sources of greenhouse gas emissions. "Breaking down the emissions by sector can inform us what actions should be prioritized to reduce emissions from buildings, transportation, industrial processes and other sources," says Chen. Stationary energy—which includes emissions from fuel combustion and electricity use in residential and institutional buildings, commercial buildings, and industrial buildings—contributed between 60 and 80% of total emissions in North American and European cities. In one third of the cities, more than 30% of total GHG emissions were from on-road transportation. Meanwhile, less than 15% of total emissions came from railways, waterways, and aviation.

Lastly, the findings show that the levels of emissions increase and decrease varied between the cities over the study period. For 30 cities, there was a clear emission decrease between 2012 and 2016. The top four cities with the largest per capita reduction were Oslo, Houston, Seattle, and Bogotá. The top four cities with the largest per capita emissions increase were Rio de Janeiro, Curitiba, Johannesburg, and Venice.

Policy recommendations

Of the 167 cities, 113 have set varying types of GHG emission reduction targets, while 40 have set carbon neutrality goals. But this study joins many other reports and research that show that we are a long way off achieving the goals set by the Paris Agreement.

Chen and colleagues make three key policy recommendations. First: "Key emitting sectors should be identified and targeted for more effective mitigation strategies. For example, the differences in the roles that stationary energy use, transportation, household energy use, and waste treatments play for cities should be assessed."

Second, development of methodologically consistent global GHG emission inventories is also needed, to track the effectiveness of urban GHG reductions policies. Lastly: "Cities should set more ambitious and easily-traceable mitigation goals. At a certain stage, carbon intensity is a useful indicator showing the decarbonization of the economy and provides better flexibility for cities of fast economic growth and increase in emission. But in the long run, switching from intensity mitigation targets to absolute mitigation targets is essential to achieve global carbon neutrality by 2050."

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Photo by PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images

Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson and a crew of Virgin Galactic employees nailed a clean touchdown in New Mexico on Sunday after launching to space aboard the company’s SpaceShipTwo spaceplane. The mission, dubbed Unity 22, marked the fourth test flight to space for the vehicle and the first for Branson, the 70-year-old daredevil entrepreneur who’s been waiting over a decade for his debut trek to the edge of space.

 

The SpaceShipTwo plane, dubbed VSS Unity, took off at 10:40AM ET attached to the belly of Virgin Galactic’s twin-fuselage WhiteKnight plane. Unity dropped from the center of the carrier craft at an altitude of around 45,000 feet roughly 50 minutes after takeoff. Moments later VSS Unity ignited its single rocket engine to blast to the edge of space, reaching 53.5 miles above the ground. The crew basked in a few moments of weightlessness before gliding back to land in New Mexico at Spaceport America, the central hub for Virgin Galactic’s nascent space tourism business.

Virgin Galactic

Branson shared congratulatory hand shakes with his fellow crew members as VSS Unity entered microgravity, later calling the flight “an experience of a lifetime,” as heard on plane’s choppy communications line to ground control. Once landed, Branson hopped out of VSS Unity and skipped toward a crowd of photographers, children, and relatives just outside Spaceport America. He could barely contain his excitement in a post-flight ceremony: “I was upside down a few minutes ago” he started.

 

“I think like most kids I have dreamt of this moment as a kid, but honestly nothing could prepare you for the view of Earth from space,” Branson said. Then, in full salesman mode, he called Virgin Galactic “the spaceline for Earth” and delivered on a promise to announce something “very exciting” after his flight: He revealed a partnership with fundraising company Omaze to give out two seats on VSS Unity, and — “with my Willy Wonka hat on,” he quipped — a personal tour of Spaceport America. “And I promise lots of chocolate in the factory,” he added.

 

Virgin Galactic president Mike Moses told reporters “the ship looked perfect” at touchdown, besides a possible antenna issue that caused a live video feed from inside the cabin to glitch during key moments of the flight.

 

Branson was “feeling good, feeling excited, feeling ready” ahead of his flight to space, riding a bike to the spaceport before sunrise, flanked by two white Range Rovers. He said he started the morning off with a visit from Elon Musk, who was in New Mexico to watch the mission in person. Onboard SpaceShipTwo with Branson were two pilots, Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci, and three other crew members in the cabin: Chief Astronaut Instructor Beth Moses, Lead Operations Engineer Colin Bennett, and Vice President of Government Affairs and Research Operations Sirisha Bandla. The crew tested out Virgin Galactic’s cabin experience.

Photo by PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield awarded Branson and the crew gold-colored pins to inaugurate their new status to Virgin Galactic as commercial astronauts, having flown above the 50-mile-line deemed to be space by the Federal Aviation Administration.

 

Branson’s flight was a golden opportunity to attract potential customers for Virgin Galactic’s space tourism business, so the atmosphere at Spaceport America on Sunday was full of marketing and theatrics. For attendees, the spaceport looked like a music festival, sitting next to the runway VMS Eve took off from. Dozens of guests watched the mission on a giant screen at the center of a stage set up just outside the main building of Spaceport America. Stephen Colbert hosted the mission’s livestream and singer-songwriter Khalid performed a new single on the stage. A fleet of Range Rovers towed VSS Unity back to Spaceport America after landing.

Photo by PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images

Space tourism ready for takeoff

Virgin Galactic previously planned to fly Branson as a passenger on a later test flight, but earlier this month the company announced he’d be bumped up to fly on Unity 22 as a crew member instead. That set Branson up to make it to space ahead of his rival Jeff Bezos, another billionaire who plans to fly his space company’s New Shepard rocket to the edge of space on July 20th. It’s a PR-heavy display of competition, but for Branson, who turns 71 on July 18th, it’s executing a decades-long dream to go to space. And for Virgin Galactic, flying its billionaire founder is seen as a show of confidence that SpaceShipTwo is safe for anyone to fly. In 2014, the company suffered a mid-flight disaster during a test flight that killed one pilot and severely injured another. After that flight, Branson vowed to travel on a future flight before the company started flying customers.

 

The Unity 22 mission marks a key step forward for the company’s development of SpaceShipTwo as it tries to lead a burgeoning space tourism market catered to wealthy adventure-seekers. Virgin Galactic was founded in 2004 and has already sold roughly 600 tickets priced around $250,000 a pop, but it hasn’t flown any of those passengers yet. The company has two more test missions planned this year before kicking off its commercial space tourism business in 2022. But like any launch, that plan hinges on the outcome of Sunday’s test flight. Vehicle inspections and weeks of post-mission data reviews will inform how it plans to move forward, the company has said.

 

Also vying for a slice of the space tourism market is Bezos’ Blue Origin — which hasn’t announced its ticket price point yet — and Musk’s SpaceX. Like Virgin’s SpaceShipTwo, Blue Origin’s crew vehicle is suborbital, though it’s a gumdrop-shaped capsule that launches vertically atop a 5-story-tall rocket and ascends to an altitude of 62 miles. Blue Origin’s July 20th flight with Bezos, the company’s first to fly humans, will include Bezos’ brother Mark, aviation legend Wally Funk, and the undisclosed winner of a $28 million auction for a fourth seat. SpaceX’s space tourism plans are even more involved; its Crew Dragon capsule will launch to orbit for a few days for a price of roughly $55 million per seat.

 

The competitive space industry vibes flared in the weeks leading up to Unity 22. Blue Origin threw shade at Virgin Galactic in a snarky tweet two days before Branson's flight, alleging Branson isn’t really reaching space because SpaceShipTwo flies a few miles below the boundary of space recognized by an international sports organization. Jeff Bezos had more positive vibes on Saturday, wishing Branson good luck in an Instagram post. Musk has been cordial throughout, keeping a distance from the PR war and meeting up with Branson in New Mexico. “Thanks for being so typically supportive and such a good friend, Elon,” Branson tweeted to Musk on the eve of his flight.

Virgin Galactic successfully sends Richard Branson to the edge of space

New research presented at this year's European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) taking place online (9-12 July), suggests that three commonly prescribed classes of drugs that are not themselves antibiotics—proton pump inhibitors (PPIs), beta-blockers and antimetabolites—could lead to antibiotic resistant infections caused by bacteria from the Enterobacteriaceae family. These antibiotic resistant infections are in turn linked to longer hospital stays and potentially greater risk of death.

The observational study underscores the importance of commonly used non-antimicrobial drugs (NAMDs) as a risk factor for antibiotic resistance, researchers say.

Bacteria are thought to develop antibiotic resistance largely due to repeated exposure through over-prescribing, making recent antibiotic use a key risk factor for drug resistance. But in up to half of patients harbouring drug resistant bacteria when they are admitted to hospital, there is no identifiable risk factor.

Commonly used NAMDs help to treat diseases and manage symptoms of chronic conditions, but they can cause unwanted side effects. A few commonly used NAMDs have recently been found to have a significant impact on the bacterial composition of the gut microbiome. However, the role of NAMD use as a risk factor for infection with antibiotic-resistant bacteria has not been systematically studied.

To address this, researchers examined data from 1,807 adults admitted to a tertiary-level academic hospital in Tel Aviv, Israel between January 1, 2017 and April 18, 2019, with a diagnosis of upper urinary tract infection, and a positive urine or blood culture growing Enterobacteriaceae. Use of 19 non-antimicrobial drug classes prior to hospital admission was retrieved from electronic medical records.

Antimicrobial drug-resistant organisms were identified in over half of patient samples (944/1,807). And multidrug-resistant organisms (resistant to 3 or more classes of antibiotics) were identified in around a quarter of episodes (431/1,807).

Analyses found that use of seven common drug categories was associated with increased resistance to antimicrobial drugs—SSRIs which help people manage symptoms of depression; typical antipsychotics used to treat mental health conditions such as schizophrenia; Anti 10A inhibitors for stroke prevention in patients with atrial fibrillation; PPIs which reduce the production of stomach acid; beta-blockers which help treat heart problems; and antimetabolites (chemotherapy drugs) commonly used to treat cancers and inflammatory diseases.

The researchers also found that three drug classes (PPI, beta-blockers and antimetabolites) were significantly associated with resistance to third-generation cephalosporins, trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole, and fluoroquinolones. Antimetabolites appeared to have the strongest impact on antibiotic resistance.

"Our findings highlight the importance of non-antimicrobial drug exposure as a risk factor for antibiotic resistance, says lead author Dr. Meital Elbaz from Tel Aviv Medical Center in Israel. "We urgently need larger studies with more drug classes to confirm the discovery and to clarify the biological link between common prescription drugs and antibiotic resistance."

The authors point out several limitations of their study including that exposure to NAMD was based on medical records, and information about dosage and duration of use was lacking. In addition, for some drugs, the number of patients was too small to achieve statistical significance.

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Virgin Galactic will become the first rocket company to launch the boss when Richard Branson straps into one of his sleek, shiny space planes this weekend.

The self-described tie-loathing adventurer and troublemaker will join five company employees for Sunday's test flight from New Mexico's southern desert—the company's fourth trip to the edge of space.

Branson assigned himself to Virgin Galactic's first full-scale crew, jumping ahead of Blue Origin's Jeff Bezos, an even richer rocketeer looking to launch himself into space. Bezos' liftoff is set for July 20 from West Texas.

A brief look at Branson's ride and company:

BOSS ON BOARD

Just a week shy of turning 71, the London-born founder of the Virgin Group says he's "not apprehensive at all and it is the dream of a lifetime" to ride into space. The longtime fitness fanatic put in extra effort to prepare for the brief up-and-down flight. "I'm in my 70s now so you either let yourself go or you get fit and enjoy life." His wife, children and grandchildren will be there as he climbs aboard the rocket plane that's attached to a dual-fuselage aircraft for takeoff. During the three to four minutes of weightlessness, "I'll be looking back at our beautiful Earth and taking it all in and realize that only 500 other people have done this." Closer to 600, actually, but still a relatively small number. Upon landing, he'll celebrate with "a great, great grin on my face."

This Saturday, May 22, 2021 image provided by Virgin Galactic shows the release of VSS Unity from VMS Eve and ignition of the rocket motor over Spaceport America, N.M. After reaching nearly 50,000 feet (15,000 meters), Unity will be released from the specially designed aircraft, and drop for a moment or two before its rocket motor ignites to send the craft on a steep climb toward space. Credit: Virgin Galactic via AP, File

WHO ELSE IS FLYING

Two pilots are needed to fly the rocket plane from the time it's released from the mothership to shoot into space until it glides down to a runway. It will be the third trip to space for chief pilot David Mackay, a Scottish-born test pilot for the Royal Air Force who went on to fly for Branson's Virgin Atlantic, and the second for chief flight instructor Michael Masucci.

Chief astronaut instructor Beth Moses, a former NASA engineer, is also launching for the second time. Joining Branson as space rookies are lead operations engineer Colin Bennett and Sirisha Bandla, a vice president. The six will grab a lift from mothership pilots C.J. Sturckow, a former NASA astronaut, and Kelly Latimer.

ROCKET PLANE

Virgin Galactic's space plane, Unity, will take off attached to a specially designed double aircraft nicknamed Eve after Branson's late mother. After reaching nearly 50,000 feet (15,000 meters), the plane will be released and drop for a moment or two before its rocket motor ignites to send the craft on a steep climb toward space, exceeding 3 G's, or three times the force of Earth's gravity. The motor will shut off once the craft reaches space—a maximum altitude of about 55 miles (88 kilometers) is anticipated—enveloping the ship in silence as everyone but the pilots unbuckle, float and gaze out the 17 windows at Earth and the black void of space. After a few minutes of weightlessness, the occupants will strap back in as the plane reorients itself for entry—folding up its wings, then folding them back down in unique technique known as feathering. The rocket plane will glide back, NASA space shuttle style, to conclude about 15 minutes of free flight.

This image provided by Virgin Galactic shows, from left, Chief Pilot Dave Mackay, Lead Operations Engineer Colin Bennett, Chief Astronaut Instructor Beth Moses, Founder of Virgin Galactic Richard Branson, Vice President of Government Affairs and Research Operations Sirisha Bandla and pilot Michael Masucci. Just a week shy of turning 71, the London-born founder of the Virgin Group will become only the second septuagenarian in space. Credit: Virgin Galactic via AP, File

TRACK RECORD

Founded in 2004, Virgin Galactic got its start when Branson teamed up with aircraft designer Burt Rutan to provide the necessary spaceship technology. A 2007 rocket motor test in California's Mojave Desert left three workers dead and three more injured. Then in 2014 the rocket plane Enterprise—named after the "Star Trek" ship—broke apart during a test flight, killing one pilot and seriously injuring the other. Unity, the replacement ship named by the late physicist Stephen Hawking, began flight tests in 2016. It made its first trip to the edge of space with two pilots in 2018 and the second in 2019, both times from Mojave. The operations moved to New Mexico's Spaceport America, with the plane soaring from there on May 22 to achieve the company's third spaceflight.

WHAT'S NEXT

After Branson's launch, Virgin Galactic plans two more test flights this summer and fall before inviting paying customers on board. The next one will include more company employees, and the last will have Italian Air Force members conducting research. If all goes well, the first of the more than 600 confirmed ticket holders will climb aboard next year. The company plans to reopen reservations once Branson soars. Initial tickets went for $250,000; no word on whether that will change. Branson promises a surprise after his ride to "give more people the chance to become an astronaut—because space belongs to us all." In the meantime, scientists are lining up for research rides, including Southwest Research Institute's Alan Stern, who was behind NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto and beyond.

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Two factors that play a key role in climate change—increased climate warming and elevated ozone levels—appear to have detrimental effects on soybean plant roots, their relationship with symbiotic microorganisms in the soil and the ways the plants sequester carbon.

The results, published in the July 9 edition of Science Advances, show few changes to the plant shoots aboveground but some distressing results underground, including an increased inability to hold carbon that instead gets released into the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas.

North Carolina State University researchers examined the interplay of warming and increased ozone levels with certain important underground organisms—arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) - that promote chemical interactions that hold carbon in the ground by preventing the decomposition of soil organic matter, thereby halting the escape of carbon from the decomposing material.

"The ability to sequester carbon is very important to soil productivity—in addition to the detrimental effects of increasing greenhouse gases when this carbon escapes," said Shuijin Hu, professor of plant pathology at NC State and corresponding author of the paper.

Present in the roots of about 80% of plants that grow on land, AMF have a win-win relationship with plants. AMF take carbon from plants and provide nitrogen and other useful soil nutrients that plants need in order to grow and develop.

In the study, researchers set up plots of soybeans with increased air temperatures of about 3 degrees Celsius, plots with higher levels of ozone, plots with higher levels of both warming and ozone, and control plots with no modifications. The resulting experiments showed that warming and increased ozone levels make soybean roots thinner as they save resources to get the nutrients they need.

Soybean cultivars are often sensitive to ozone, Hu said. Ozone levels have been somewhat stable or even declining in some parts of the United States over the past decade but have risen dramatically in areas of rapid industrialization, like India and China, for example.

"Ozone and warming have been shown to be very stressful to a lot of crops—not just soybeans—and a lot of grasses and tree species," Hu said. "Ozone and warming make the plants weak. Plants try to maximize nutrient uptake, so their roots become thinner and longer as they need to exploit the sufficient volume of soil for resources. This weakness results in a reduction of AMF and faster root and fungal hyphal turnovers, which stimulates decomposition and makes carbon sequestration more difficult. These cascading events may have profound effects underground, although the plant shoots appear normal in some cases."

Hu said he was surprised that the plant shoots weren't greatly affected by the stresses of warming and ozone; the biomass of plant leaves in both control and experimental plots was about the same.

Perhaps even more surprisingly, Hu said that more warming and ozone changed the type of AMF that colonize soybean plants.

The study showed that levels of an AMF species called Glomus decreased with more warming and ozone, while a species called Paraglomus increased.

"Glomus protects organic carbon from microbial decomposition while Paraglomus is more efficient at absorbing nutrients," Hu said. "We didn't expect these communities to shift in this way."

Hu plans to continue to study the systems surrounding carbon sequestration in soil as well as other greenhouse gas emissions from soil, like nitrous oxide, or N2O.

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Mystery Solved: How Plant Cells Know When to Stop Growing

The discovery could have a profound effect on cell research for many species of plants and animals, as well as the future of crops.

 

It’s been a longstanding enigma in biology: How do cells know how big they are?

 

The answer, it turns out, was hidden inside Robert Sablowski’s computer files, collecting virtual dust since 2013. “I had the data for years and years, but I wasn’t looking in the right way,” says Sablowski, a plant cell biologist at the John Innes Center in Norwich, England. He had, for an earlier project, been investigating a protein called KRP4. By fusing it with a fluorescent jellyfish protein to make it shine, Sablowski could study it inside a plant cell, but he had no idea that it would be key to understanding cell size regulation.

 

For organisms to develop, their cells must undergo a pattern of growth, DNA replication, and division. But scientists who study this process, known as the cell cycle, have long noticed that the divisions aren’t necessarily identical—cells often split asymmetrically, and their size is somehow corrected later. In a study published in Science last month, Sablowski and his colleagues revealed just how plants are doing this: The cells use their own DNA as a sort of measuring cup. While the discovery was made by studying a plant called Arabidopsis, it could have broad implications for understanding cell size regulation in animals and humans, and may even influence the future of crop production.

 

Identifying how cells assess their own size has been complicated, because most cellular proteins scale with the size of the cell itself. Sablowski compares the situation to trying to measure yourself with your own arm. “You can’t do it, because your arm grows in proportion to your body,” he says. “You need an external reference to know how big you are.” What doesn’t change as the cell grows, however, is its DNA. Scientists have long speculated that a cell could use its DNA as some kind of indicator to gauge its size, but Sablowski’s team is the first to show proof of this process.

 

“It’s been a profound mystery for many, many decades in biology, how cells are able to accomplish this task of almost magically knowing what their size is,” says Martin Howard of the John Innes Center, who helped develop the mathematical models needed for the breakthrough. Shape and size regulation are important because they are closely tied to how a cell functions: Too large and it can be difficult for the cell to quickly retrieve information contained in its own DNA; too small and the cell doesn’t have enough space to split properly, causing errors in division and growth that could lead to disease.

 

Arabidopsis is actually a weed, according to Sablowski, but it’s considered a model organism in plant biology because it’s easy to grow and matures quickly. That means it’s already been well studied by other researchers in the field. “The community for Arabidopsis has been critical,” says Marco D'Ario, a graduate student at the John Innes Center who designed and helped perform the experiment. “The same experimental setup that took us three or four years—without the community, it easily would have taken 10 to 15.”

 

The team grew Arabidopsis in pots for about six weeks, then chopped off the plants’ tiny growing tip, the part where new leaves and flowers emerge, to observe its continued growth under a microscope. They could track, at about 1,000X magnification, the location and size of each cell in the growing tip at different stages of the cell cycle. Sablowski and D’Ario traded shifts, checking on the cells every other hour over two days. “We had the equipment, we had the material. We just needed to roll up our sleeves and do the 48-hour experiment to get the data that nobody else had,” Sablowski says.

Sablowski and D’Ario were specifically watching the behavior of KRP4, a protein that controls how long it takes the cell to grow before moving on to the next stage of its cycle: DNA replication. (This is the same protein Sablowski saw fluorescing eight years prior in a separate experiment.) During the growth phase, the pair saw KRP4 floating freely in the nucleus of the cell, preventing it from replicating too early.

 

Just before division, however, Sablowski and D’Ario noticed that the KRP4 was no longer free-floating, but had attached itself to the cell’s own DNA—ensuring that each of the two daughter cells it would split into would receive an equal amount of the protein. “The DNA would act as a measuring cup,” Sablowski says, “which is used to take a fixed amount of KRP4 out of the pool that exists in the cell.” Any KRP4 left in the pool would be wiped away by another protein before the division. Then the cycle would begin once again with the new daughter cells.

 

The secret to cell size regulation, the scientists realized, lies in the concentration of KRP4 in each new cell. Though the daughter cells inherit an equal amount of KRP4, because they might be different sizes, the concentration of this protein in each cell isn’t necessarily the same. As the scientists observed under the microscope, smaller cells started with a higher concentration of KRP4 and spent more time growing. For bigger cells, the concentration was diluted, so they grew less. Overall, this balanced out any asymmetries in cell size across the plant’s growing tip. Mystery solved.

 

The team attributes much of this success to good luck, thanks to the old files on Sablowski’s computer. In those images, “we could see the chromosomes shining with KRP4, and the small cells shining more than the bigger cells,” Sablowski remembers. “And then we had our initial concept.”

 

Why has this taken so long to figure out? Sablowski says it’s a tricky phenomenon to research because it requires studying proteins that are absolutely necessary for growth and division. Any experiments that remove or mutate them can be lethal—killing the cell before scientists get the chance to study it. But this time, in addition to observing the normal cell cycle under the microscope, the researchers were able to tweak the process without a mutation in a follow-up experiment. They destroyed the function of the protein that normally controls KRP4 levels in the nucleus. Without it, the cells in the growing tip stayed alive—but they became abnormally variable in size, confirming the role KRP4 plays in regulating it.

 

For some scientists, the answer to this mystery is satisfyingly straightforward. “I find it beautiful that biology can rely, in such an ingenious way, on components that are already in the cell for an entirely different purpose,” says Ariel Amir, a biophysicist at Harvard University who studies cell size in yeast and bacteria. Amir is particularly interested in whether this process translates to the bacterial cell cycle. “Clearly, the molecular players are going to be different—the proteins are going to be different—but the core idea of using DNA as a template could, in principle, translate to other species,” he says.

 

While current research mostly focuses on cell size, Amir believes the bigger question is really about cell cycle control, or how the phases of growth, DNA replication, and division occur in just the right order and with the right timing to produce a healthy cell. “One dramatic example where cell growth goes berserk is in the case of cancer,” he says, noting the importance of understanding how cells “tick.”

 

Neelima Sinha, a botanist at the University of California, Davis, is intrigued by how this discovery might eventually lead to increased yields for food production. In the process of crop domestication and breeding, humans have inadvertently selected plants with bigger cells, since they often correspond to bigger fruits and grains. Understanding how cell size is regulated, Sinha says, is a first step to learning how to more intentionally influence this relationship ourselves.

 

She also thinks that larger plants could help with the mass production of biofuel, which consists of growing crops, like switchgrass, on marginal lands and converting them into a renewable fuel called ethanol. “The ultimate source of all energy on this planet is the sun,” she says. “And most of the energy we use is being transduced through plants.” Even our fossil fuels, like oil and coal, come from the remains of ancient plants. “So why not use current photosynthesis?” Sinha asks.

 

Growing larger vegetation might also help with carbon sequestration, a climate change mitigation strategy in which people plant greenery to intentionally trap excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. With the right conditions, bigger plants could store more carbon underground in their roots and in the soil. “It’s all about how much mass you create,” Sinha says. “And that is all related to cell growth and cell size and cell division.”

 

While their focus was on plants, the scientists at the John Innes Center are aware of the broader effects this discovery could have. “Knowing what’s happening in plants guides what you should ask next to understand this mechanism in humans,” Sablowski says. He has seen recent work suggesting a similar size regulation process in human cells, where a tumor-suppressor protein—one that, when inactivated, causes many cancers—is inherited in equal amounts to control cell growth.

 

The solution to cell size in plants, Sinha agrees, is much too elegant not to be applicable to other life kingdoms. “Just like scientists say they stand on the shoulders of giants, all research stands on the shoulders of basic pieces of discovery,” she says. “And it’s these basic pieces of discovery that then become the foundation for knowledge to be built upon.”

Mystery Solved: How Plant Cells Know When to Stop Growing

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New fabric passively cools whatever it’s covering—including you

Structured fabric reflects most light, still radiates in the IR.

New fabric passively cools whatever it’s covering—including you

What fractals, Fibonacci, and the golden ratio have to do with cauliflower

Self-selected mutations during domestication drastically changed shape over time

It's long been observed that many plants produce leaves, shoots, or flowers in spiral patterns. Cauliflower provides a unique example of this phenomenon, because those spirals repeat at several different size scales—a hallmark of fractal geometry. This self-similarity is particularly notable in the Romanesco variety because of the distinctive conical shape of its florets. Now, a team of French scientists from the CNRS has identified the underlying mechanism that gives rise to this unusual pattern, according to a new paper published in Science.

 

Fractal geometry is the mathematical offspring of chaos theory; a fractal is the pattern left behind in the wave of chaotic activity. That single geometric pattern repeats thousands of times at different magnifications (self-similarity). For that reason, fractals are often likened to Russian nesting dolls. Many fractal patterns exist only in mathematical theory, but over the last few decades, scientists have found there are fractal aspects to many irregular yet patterned shapes in nature, such the branchings of rivers and trees—or the strange self-similar repeating buds that make up the Romanesco cauliflower.

 

Each bud is made up of a series of smaller buds, although the pattern doesn't continue down to infinitely smaller size scales, so it's only an approximate fractal. The branched tips, called meristems, make up a logarithmic spiral, and the number of spirals on the head of Romanesco cauliflower is a Fibonacci number, which in turn is related to what's known as the "golden ratio."

 

The person most closely associated with the Fibonacci sequence is the 13th-century mathematician Leonardo Pisano; his nickname was "filius Bonacci" (son of Bonacci), which got shortened to Fibonacci. In his 1202 treatise, Book of Calculation, Fibonacci described the numerical sequence that now bears his name: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21... and on into infinity. Divide each number in the sequence into the one that follows, and the answer will be something close to 1.618, an irrational number known as phi, aka the golden ratio. And there is a special "golden" logarithmic spiral that grows outward by a factor of the golden ratio for every 90 degrees of rotation, of which a "Fibonacci spiral" is a close approximation.

 

Scientists have long puzzled over possible underlying mechanisms for this unusual patterning in the arrangement of leaves on a stem (phyllotaxis) of so many plants—including pine cones, daisies, dahlias, sunflowers, and cacti—dating all the way back to Leonardo da Vinci. Swiss naturalist Charles Bonnet (who coined the term "phyllotaxis") noted that these spirals exhibited either clockwise or counterclockwise golden ratios in 1754, while French brothers Auguste and Louis Bravais discovered in 1837 that the ratios of phyllotaxis spirals were related to the Fibonacci sequence.

 

Illustrations of different kinds of phyllotaxis spirals in nature.

 

Simulated morphologies and light micrographs of various cauliflower structures

 

In 1868, German botanist Wilhelm Hofmeister came up with a solid working model. He found that nascent leaves ("primordia") will form at the least crowded part of the meristem, and as the plant grows, each successive leaf will move outward radially, at a rate proportional to the stem's growth. The second leaf, for instance, will grow as far as possible from the first, and the third will grow at a distance farthest from both the first and the second leaves, and so on. It's not a hardcore law of nature or some kind of weird botanical magic: that Fibonacci spiral is simply the most efficient way of packing the leaves.

According to the authors of this latest paper, the spiral phyllotaxis of cauliflower is unusual because those spirals are conspicuously visible at several different size scales, particularly in the Romanesco variety. They maintain that cauliflowers are basically failed flowers. The whole process depends on those branched tips, or meristems, which are made up of undifferentiated cells that divide and develop into other organs arranged in a spiral pattern. In the case of cauliflower, these cells produce buds that would normally bloom into flowers. Those buds develop into stems instead, but unlike normal stems, they are able to grow without leaves and thereby produce even more buds that turn into stems instead of flowers.

This triggers a chain reaction, resulting in that trademark pattern of repeating stems upon stems that ultimately forms the edible white flesh known as the "curd." In the case of the Romanesco variety, its stems produce buds at an accelerating rate (instead of the constant rate typical of other forms of cauliflower). So its florets take on that distinctive pyramid-like shape that showcases the fractal patterns so beautifully.

The puzzle, per the authors, is how these gene regulatory networks that initially evolved to produce flowers were able to change so drastically. So co-author Eugenio Azpeitia and several colleagues combined in vivo experiments with 3D computational modeling of plant development to study the molecular underpinnings of how buds form in cauliflower (both edible cauliflower and the Romanesco variant).

Apparently, this is the result of self-selected mutations during the process of domestication, which over time drastically changed the shapes of these plants. The authors found that, while the meristems fail to form flowers, the meristems do experience a transient period where they're in a flower-like state, and that influences later steps in development. In the case of Romanesco cauliflower, the curd adopts a more conical shape instead of a round morphology. The end result is those fractal-like forms at several different size scales.

"These results reveal how fractal patterns can be generated through growth and developmental networks that alter identities and meristem dynamics," the authors concluded. "Our models now clarify the molecular and morphological changes over time by which meristems gain different identities to form the highly diverse and fascinating array of plant architectures found throughout nature and crops."

DOI: Science, 2021. 10.1126/science.abg5999  (About DOIs).

What fractals, Fibonacci, and the golden ratio have to do with cauliflower

Reconstructing Roman industrial engineering

How a special design increased the efficiency of an ancient watermill.

The Colosseum’s arches, the Pantheon’s dome, the Barbegal watermill’s... elbow flumes? Roman architecture is known for elegance and ingenuity. A curious relic, pieced together in a museum basement, shows that Roman design also boosted the efficiency of an ancient industrial complex built to function rather than impress.

 

The 2nd-century Barbegal watermill complex in southern France was no soaring monument meant to awe the masses. But neither was it a run-of-the-mill mill. It was the most formidable concentration of mechanical power known to have existed in ancient times—an array of 16 waterwheels, capable of grinding an estimated 55,000 pounds of flour on a daily basis.

 

Getting that array to work effectively required careful engineering thousands of years ago. And in the present day, with the mill complex in ruins, an international team of experts in archaeology, geology, and fluid mechanics was needed to piece together clues to the system of wooden chutes that channeled water efficiently through the complex. The key component the research team uncovered was an oddly shaped water gutter, unique in its design: the elbow flume.

Efficient engineering

Maximizing efficiency in the Barbegal mill complex would have been a tricky conundrum, because it was such an elaborate system. A series of aqueducts brought water from the closest river to the top of the hill into which the mill complex was built. The water then flowed over the waterwheels, which were arranged in two rows of eight running in parallel down the hillside. The waterwheels themselves were set into basins hewed from the rock.

 

“The mill complex is special,” said Cees Passchier. He’s a lead author on the study as well as a retired professor of structural geology and tectonics at the University of Mainz in Germany. “It is the only example we know of a Roman multi-mill complex. Normally you only find small mills.”

 

An ordinary mill has a single reservoir. Water from the reservoir runs via a flume to a waterwheel downstream. It’s easy to manipulate the water depth in the reservoir with a dam and a sluice gate. This means the flow of water is already under fine-tuned control before it enters the flume, and the flume itself can be a simple, straight gutter that directs water toward the wheel.

 

But the multitiered Barbegal complex didn’t have a single reservoir. Instead, it had those rows of carved-out basins set in a line running downhill. The basins served a dual purpose: catching the water that fell from one wheel, and simultaneously acting as the source of water for the next wheel in the series. Compared to a single reservoir, the water depth in these basins was harder to control. Passchier and his colleagues think the carefully shaped elbow flume—a roughly seven-foot-long gutter bent up at one end like the tip of a hockey stick—was designed to address this unique challenge.

 

“No such shapes are known from modern mills or from medieval mills,” Passchier said.

Reconstructing the mill

It almost wasn’t known from the Barbegal mills, either. Of the entire industrial complex, only a skeleton remains. The wooden waterwheels and other pieces of machinery have long since rotted away, leaving the inner workings of the Barbegal mills largely a mystery. But clues to the system remain because the mineral-rich water of the area left something behind: calcium carbonate, an old ally of archaeologists.

 

“Even though the wood itself was gone, because being organic it was all deteriorated, the mineral deposits—being a hard ceramic, essentially—remained,” said John Lambropoulos, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Rochester, who was not involved in the research.

Over the years, these carbonate deposits had become a stone-like layer built up in the rock basins and molded onto the wooden machinery. When the mill complex was first excavated in the 1930s, some of these carbonate deposits helped researchers make inferences about the internal machinery, like the dimensions and placement of the waterwheels. But many of the carbonate casts were just fragments, broken up in the intervening centuries. Fortunately, even these were saved—dutifully hauled away and stored in the archaeological museum in Arles, the closest city.

 

“For 80 years, these fragments had been there, somewhere in the giant basement of the museum,” Passchier said. Broken though they were, the carbonate fragments still held the key to the shapes of the wooden machinery they had formed on. Passchier and his colleagues cleaned and organized them. “We found that some fragments fitted together into this elbow shape. And it was clearly part of a water gutter.”

 

To understand where this strange gutter fit into the Barbegal mill complex, the research team looked at the patterns of the carbonate layers—which provide information about how the water flowed—and the dimensions of both the fragments and the mill complex itself. They modeled different possibilities, calculating how the water might have flowed through the mill, and concluded that the elbow-shaped flume had been used to direct water from the basin at the bottom of one waterwheel to the top of the next waterwheel down.

 

But with the fluctuating water depth of the mill complex’s multiple basins, just directing the water wasn’t enough—the flumes at Barbegal are needed to regulate the flow. The flumes had to be steep, so the water would reach a high speed as it dropped away from the basin, Passchier said. But they also had to be shallow, so the water would fall onto the wheel at the correct angle.

 

“You cannot have a steep and a shallow gutter at the same time—so the solution is to make the elbow.”

Giving it the elbow

A sharp drop near where the water exited the basin provided the acceleration for a rapid flow. The bend of the elbow then controlled that flow, the water moving nearly horizontally along the flume’s longer leg until it reached the next wheel.

It was a simple, elegant answer to a complex design puzzle. According to Hubert Chanson, senior professor in hydraulic engineering at the University of Queensland in Australia, it suggests the ancient Romans had a better grasp of fluid mechanics and hydraulic engineering than has sometimes been assumed by scientists and historians.

 

“[Passchier and his colleagues] are basically proposing an idea that the Romans in fact had some understanding that they could improve their efficiency overall,” said Chanson, who reviewed an early draft of the elbow flume manuscript but was otherwise not involved in the research. “Whether it’s correct, who knows? But certainly it’s a very solid approach.”

 

In the modern day, the discovery of the elbow flume is unlikely to have much of an impact on current water management—technology has advanced well beyond the scope of the Barbegal mills in the past two millennia. But to Passchier, teasing out the lost workings of ancient technology is worthwhile nonetheless.

 

“[The elbow flume] is not going to change the way in which we see the world—but there could be other things in archaeology which can help us to find some cheap solutions to problems we have,” Passchier said. “What it shows is that, also in antiquity, people were creative. They had a problem, and they had to find a creative solution.”

Reconstructing Roman industrial engineering

When people see a toothbrush, a car, a tree—any individual object—their brain automatically associates it with other things it naturally occurs with, allowing humans to build context for their surroundings and set expectations for the world.

By using machine-learning and brain imaging, researchers measured the extent of the "co-occurrence" phenomenon and identified the brain region involved. The findings appear in Nature Communications.

"When we see a refrigerator, we think we're just looking at a refrigerator, but in our mind, we're also calling up all the other things in a kitchen that we associate with a refrigerator," said corresponding author Mick Bonner, a Johns Hopkins University cognitive scientist. "This is the first time anyone has quantified this and identified the brain region where it happens."

In a two-part study, Bonner and co-author, Russell Epstein, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, used a database with thousands of scenic photos with every object labeled. There were pictures of household scenes, city life, nature—and the pictures had labels for every mug, car, tree, etc. To quantify object co-occurrences, or how often certain objects appeared with others, they created a statistical model and algorithm that demonstrated the likelihood of seeing a pen if you saw a keyboard, or seeing a boat if you saw a dishwasher.

With these contextual associations quantified, the researchers next attempted to map the brain region that handles the links.

While subjects were having their brain activity monitored with functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, the team showed them pictures of individual objects and looked for evidence of a region whose responses tracked this co-occurrence information. The spot they identified was a region in the visual cortex commonly associated with the processing of spatial scenes.

"When you look at a plane, this region signals sky and clouds and all the other things," Bonner said. "This region of the brain long thought to process the spatial environment is also coding information about what things go together in the world."

Researchers have long-known that people are slower to recognize objects out of context. The team believes this is the first large-scale experiment to quantify the associations between objects in the visual environment as well as the first insight into how this visual context is represented in the brain.

"We show in a fine-grained way that the brain actually seems to represent this rich statistical information," Bonner said.

Source

For decades, there has been great interest in whether omega-3 fatty acids can lower rates of cardiovascular events. In 2018, results from the Reduction of Cardiovascular Events with Icosapent Ethyl-Intervention Trial (REDUCE-IT) were published in the New England Journal of Medicine and showed that a high dose of a purified ethyl ester of eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) in patients at elevated cardiac risk significantly reduced cardiovascular events. Results from the trial led to US. Food and Drug Administration, Health Canada, and European Medicines Agency approval of the prescription drug icosapent ethyl for reducing cardiovascular risk in patients with elevated triglycerides, as well as updates to worldwide guidelines. But prior and subsequent studies of omega-3 fatty acid supplements that combine EPA and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) have had mixed results.

Investigators from Brigham and Women's Hospital and elsewhere conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of 38 randomized controlled trials of omega-3 fatty acids. Overall, they found that omega-3 fatty acids improved cardiovascular outcomes. Results, now published in eClinical Medicine, showed a significantly greater reduction in cardiovascular risk in studies of EPA alone rather than EPA+DHA supplements.

"REDUCE-IT has ushered in a new era in cardiovascular prevention," said senior author Deepak L. Bhatt, MD, MPH, the executive director of Interventional Cardiovascular Programs at the Brigham and lead investigator of the REDUCE-IT trial. "REDUCE-IT was the largest and most rigorous contemporary trial of EPA, but there have been other ones as well. Now, we can see that the totality of evidence supports a robust and consistent benefit of EPA."

Bhatt and colleagues performed a meta-analysis of 38 randomized clinical trials of omega-3 fatty acids, including trials of EPA monotherapy and EPA+DHA therapy. In total, these trials included more than 149,000 participants. They evaluated key cardiovascular outcomes, including cardiovascular mortality, non-fatal cardiovascular outcomes, bleeding, and atrial fibrillation. Overall, omega-3 fatty acids reduced cardiovascular mortality and improved cardiovascular outcomes. The trials of EPA showed higher relative reductions in cardiovascular outcomes compared to those of EPA+DHA.

The researchers note that there are crucial biological differences between EPA and DHA—while both are considered omega-3 fatty acids, they have different chemical properties that influence their stability and strength of the effect that they can have on cholesterol molecules and cell membranes. No trials to date have studied the effects of DHA alone on cardiovascular outcomes.

"This meta-analysis provides reassurance about the role of omega-3 fatty acids, specifically prescription EPA," said Bhatt.

"It should encourage investigators to explore further the cardiovascular effects of EPA across different clinical settings."

Source

mRNA vaccine technology moves to flu: Moderna says trial has begun

Moderna aims for one seasonal shot for flu, COVID-19, respiratory viruses RSV and HMPV. 

mRNA vaccine technology moves to flu: Moderna says trial has begun

Cluster full of black holes may be spitting out stars

If the researchers are right, globular clusters may end up full of black holes.

Cluster full of black holes may be spitting out stars