The school holidays are here, and parents struggling to get their children to bed will no doubt be thinking: what is wrong with you? I would do anything to get more sleep!

Children seem to do everything possible to avoid sleep, yet many adults can't seem to get enough of it. It may seem kids' resistance to sleep, and adults' longing for it, are underpinned by different factors. But it's likely similar issues are at play for both.

Factors such as as insufficient sleep, behavioural sleep issues and sleep disorders may explain our strong feelings towards sleep, and why they differ at different stages of our lives.

How much sleep is enough?

Reports from the Sleep Health Foundation indicate four in ten Australian adults don't get enough sleep. We don't know exactly what this number is for children, but one Swedish study showed it could be about the same for them.

Research has shown sleep is essential for a child's development, but the amount needed varies with age. Children aged 3-5 years should get 10 to 13 hours of sleep daily, including naps—while those aged 6-12 years should get 9 to 11 hours. Adults 18 years and older should aim to sleep between 7 and 9 hours.

Insufficient sleep in kids isn't always easy to identify. They may not be able to communicate when they are sleepy, or may not even recognise sleep deprivation in themselves. Children are unlikely to know how much sleep they should be getting, so they look to their parents as a guide.

There are telltale signs when children are suffering from insufficient or poor sleep, including poorer behaviour, overactivity, poorer performance at school and poorer physical growth.

Meanwhile, adults are usually aware of their own lack of sleep and can report increased sleepiness, trouble staying awake, difficulty concentrating, poorer memory and slower reaction times.

An accumulation of sleep loss over many years can even lead to "sleep debt" in adults. This increases sleepiness and can worsen the impact of further sleep loss. These changes can happen so gradually we don't always notice them, but they're probably why many adults are desperate to get more sleep.

Fear of missing out

Difficult behaviour around bedtime is the most common sleep issue among children. Refusing to get into (or stay) in bed, not settling into sleep, waking up during the night, getting up very early—all of these are examples of sleep behaviour problems in children.

Such behaviours may start at a young age without a trigger, or may follow significant life events such as moving houses, family upsets or starting school. Children can also develop behavioural sleep problems due to FOMO (fear of missing out), or not understanding why the grownups are allowed to stay awake.

In adults, behavioural sleep problems are often described as poor sleep hygiene or poor sleep habits. It's when you promise yourself you'll only watch one more episode of a show, or only scroll through your feed for ten more minutes—and then fail to cut yourself off.

Having an irregular sleep schedule and not prioritising sleep are symptoms of behavioural sleep issues in adults. While children usually have someone to tell them when they need to go to bed, adults must set their own (often poor) sleep routines.

Bedtime doesn't have to be all-out war

On the bright side, setting rules around sleep can help both children and adults overcome their sleep issues.

Children and adults should both go to bed and wake up around the same time daily. They should also develop a consistent bedtime routine of around 30 to 60 minutes to prepare for sleep each night. This is especially important for children. It could include taking a warm bath or reading a book.

Stimulating activities should be avoided, such as watching TV, using social media, playing video games or doing vigorous physical activity.

It also helps to have a sleep-friendly bedroom: a dark, quiet and welcoming environment free from distractions such as computers, phones or TV. Night lights are useful for children who don't like the dark.

And finally, during the day both children and adults should limit their caffeine consumption, including from energy drinks, soda, tea and coffee. Outdoor exercise is a great option if possible. Napping is normal in pre-school children, but should be limited in older kids and adults.

More serious sleep disorders

Some sleep issues may not always be related to behaviour. It's possible a sleep disorder may be causing issues around sleep for an adult or child.

Examples of "parasomnias", or abnormal sleep behaviours, include sleepwalking, sleep talking, nightmares and sleep terrors. These behaviours are generally more common in children than adults, although we don't know why. Most children outgrow them as they age.

Parasomnias can be caused by stress, traumatic life events and sleep loss or can also be hereditary. In adults they're more often a result of stress, trauma, mental health illness or neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson's disease.

Fortunately, treatment for these behaviours generally isn't needed unless they're frequent, distressing or risk injury. Sleep apnoea is also common. While it presents slightly differently in children and adults, signs include snoring, increased efforts to breath during sleep, pauses in breathing and gasping.

Sleep apnoea can result in sleep loss which can lead to either a resistance to, or strong desire for, sleep. If you suspect you or your child may have a sleep disorder, consult your GP.

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The Lambda variant has been reported in Australia. Dr. Seshadri Vasan, CSIRO scientist and COVID-19 project leader, has been studying the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 since its emergence.

Dr. Seshadri Vasan, CSIRO scientist and COVID-19 project leader, said:

"As of 7 July 2021, GISAID—the world's largest database of SARS-CoV-2 virus genome sequences—had a total of 2.22 million entries of which 2,235 constitute the Lambda variant.

"Of the 2,235 Lambda genome sequences on GISAID, three were isolated from cats in Peru and the remaining 2,232 from humans. The variant has spread to 29 countries including Australia, which recorded the Lambda variant on 3 April 2021, isolated from a 28-year-old male in Sydney.

"Many of the affected locations are in South America, predominantly Peru, although the first sample collection appears to be from Argentina on 8 November 2020.

"The Lambda variant has an eclectic set of mutations, many of which appear to be immune evasions—that is, allowing the virus to evade a person's immune response. Six of the key mutations in the virus' spike protein appear as three 'pairs' of substitution mutations in close proximity.

"Outside the spike, one of the changes (the 106-108 deletion in 'nsp6') is common to the Alpha, Beta and Gamma variants of concern. Interestingly, the L452Q substitution is a moderately radical change, and we encounter something similar (the L452R substitution) in both the Delta variant of concern and the Epsilon variant of interest.

"At this stage, the Lambda variant is definitely of structural interest, but will require further epidemiological evidence and peer-reviewed studies on infectivity and impact on vaccines to determine if it is a variant of concern."

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In 1966, The Beatles cemented the plight of lonely older people in the popular imagination with "Eleanor Rigby," a song that turned pop music on its head when it stayed at No. 1 on the British charts for four weeks. Today, the impact of loneliness in old age on life and health expectancy has been categorically quantified for the first time in a study by scientists at Duke-NUS Medical School (Singapore), Nihon University (Tokyo, Japan) and their collaborators, published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

"We found that lonely older adults can expect to live a shorter life than their peers who don't perceive themselves as lonely," said the study's lead author, Assistant Professor Rahul Malhotra, head of research at Duke-NUS' Centre for Aging Research and Education (CARE). "Furthermore, they pay a penalty for their shorter life by forfeiting potential years of good health."

Associate Professor Angelique Chan, executive director of CARE and a senior author of the study, noted, "Besides being the year associated with the coronavirus disease, 2019 was also when the number of adults aged over 30 made up half the total global population for the first time in recorded history, marking the start of an increasingly aging world. In consequence, loneliness among seniors has become an issue of social and public health concern."

Research Project Professor Yasuhiko Saito, from the College of Economics, Nihon University, a senior co-author of the study, added, "This study is timely because stay-at-home and physical distancing measures instituted since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic have only intensified concern for the mental and physical well-being of older persons."

Key findings: Loneliness has real, physical consequences

The study findings show that people aged 60 who perceive themselves to be sometimes lonely or mostly lonely can expect to live three to five years less, on average, compared to peers who perceive themselves as never lonely. Similarly, at ages 70 and 80, lonely older persons can, on average, expect to live three to four and two to three years less, respectively, compared to non-lonely peers.

Using the same dataset, the researchers found that the perception of loneliness has a similar impact on two types of health expectancy—remaining years of life lived in a self-rated state of good health as well as remaining years of life lived without being limited when going about 'activities of daily living'. Such activities include routines like bathing and dressing, rising from or settling into a bed or chair, and preparing meals.

At age 60, sometimes lonely or mostly lonely seniors can expect to spend three to five fewer years of their remaining life, on average, without limitations in daily living activities, compared to never-lonely peers. At age 70, their active life expectancy goes down to two to four fewer years, on average. At age 80, it is at one to three fewer years, on average.

How common is loneliness among older adults in Singapore?

Singapore is a particularly relevant setting for studying how loneliness impacts older adults because the country has a rapidly aging population, and a 'collectivistic' culture, in which relationships and the interconnectedness between people are central—in contrast to an 'individualistic' culture, where each individual's needs and desires are considered to be more important. Previous studies found levels of loneliness to be higher in collectivistic societies, suggesting loneliness may have a more detrimental impact in Singaporean society.

In 2016 and 2017, CARE researchers conducted a study—known as the Transitions in Health, Employment, Social Engagement, and Intergenerational Transfers in Singapore (THE SIGNS) study—to look into factors influencing health, well-being, and activity and productivity levels in older Singaporeans. Nationally representative data, collected from more than 2,000 older Singapore citizens and permanent residents, showed that a third (34 percent) perceived themselves to be lonely. This proportion increased with age, from 32 percent among those aged 60–69 years, to 40 percent among those aged 80 and above.

More males (37 percent) were lonely, relative to females (31 percent). Across education levels, the proportion of lonely older Singaporeans was lowest (33 percent) among those with no formal education, and highest (38 percent) among those with higher-than-tertiary education. This proportion was nearly 10 percent higher among seniors who lived alone (43 percent) compared to those who did not live alone (33 percent).

"Building on THE SIGNS study, our recent findings highlight the population health impact of loneliness, and the importance of identifying and managing it among older adults," said Asst Prof Malhotra. "This is part of a series of studies to assess the impact of important health and social constructs, like loneliness, sensory impairments, obesity, gender and education, on life and health expectancy among older adults."

"With older persons at potentially greater risk of loneliness as a result of pandemic control measures, there has been increasing policy interest in loneliness around the world," said Assoc Prof Chan. "In 2018, the UK launched a national strategy for tackling loneliness and, in 2021, Japan appointed a 'Minister of Loneliness'. We hope this study helps galvanize more policies to tackle loneliness among older persons."

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NASA’s helicopter on Mars just keeps flying and flying

For NASA, taking some risk has paid off handsomely.

On Monday, NASA's Ingenuity helicopter made its ninth and most ambitious flight yet.

 

This time, the space agency said, the tiny flier took to the skies for 166.4 seconds and reached a maximum speed of 5 m/s. This is equivalent to 10 mph, or a brisk run. During this flight, Ingenuity covered about 625 meters.

 

A little more than two months have passed since Ingenuity's first flight, on April 19 of this year. During that initial test, the helicopter hovered to about 3 meters above the ground before landing again. Since then, the engineering team behind the helicopter has pushed the vehicle higher, farther, and faster across the surface of Mars.

 

In flying farther and farther, Ingenuity is showing off some of the benefits of using powered flight to explore other worlds. The distance Ingenuity traveled during this single flight, NASA engineer Keri Bean noted, is about the same distance that the NASA's Spirit rover traveled during the entirety of its prime mission on the red planet.

 

For Monday's flight, NASA flew from the Perseverance rover and took a shortcut to reconnoiter the Séítah region, which interests scientists but is likely impassable to the rover due to its sandy ripples. In making this flight, the NASA Science Mission Directorate acknowledged it was taking a risk and might lose the helicopter as it was pushing the vehicle and its software past "safe" limits.

 

"We believe Ingenuity is ready for the challenge, based on the resilience and robustness demonstrated in our flights so far," NASA said. "Second, this high-risk, high-reward attempt fits perfectly within the goals of our current operational demonstration phase. A successful flight would be a powerful demonstration of the capability that an aerial vehicle, and only an aerial vehicle, can bring to bear in the context of Mars exploration."

 

That risk seems to have paid off handsomely. Not only does NASA have Ingenuity back safe and sound, scientists will be able to study images of a region they otherwise would have missed.

NASA’s helicopter on Mars just keeps flying and flying

Spiders eating snakes, oh my! Here are the photographs to prove it

Some species of spider can conquer snakes that are 10 to 30 times their size.

What's a spider with a discriminating palate to do when it gets tired of chowing down on its usual insect-heavy fare? A few nibbles of fresh snake might do the trick. Yes, some species of spider do indeed occasionally feast on snakes, according to a recent paper published in the American Journal of Arachnology. And that paper is chock-full of pictures to prove it.

 

Scientists had previously believed that spiders consumed live insects or other arthropods almost exclusively, but more recent research has shown their diets are more diverse. According to co-authors Martin Nyffeler (an arachnologist at the University of Basel) and J. Whitfield Gibbons (a herpetologist at the University of Georgia), various spider species have been found to feed on earthworms, velvet worms, bristle worms, slugs, snails, shrimp, crayfish, freshwater crabs, bats, mice, voles, rats, shrews, frogs, fish, newts, and salamanders, among other prey. There have also been multiple observed instances of spiders overpowering and feeding on snakes—usually baby or juvenile snakes.

 

Nyffeler and Gibbons decided to conduct the first synthesis of the various documented cases, poring through published reports, Google pictures, Google books, social media sites, scientific  journals, and relevant academic dissertations and theses. The team ultimately found 319 individual reports of spiders preying on snakes, most of them naturally occurring incidents, although about seven percent were laboratory feeding trials or staged field experiments. Nearly 80 percent of those reports included photos or videos documenting the gruesome acts for posterity.

 

Out of more than 49,000 known species of spider, the authors found 30 that had been observed to eat snakes in the wild, plus 11 other species shown to do so in captivity or staged field experiments. About half of all the documented cases involved widow spiders (exclusively females) of the Theridiid family, some of which appear to be "expert snake catchers," most notably the Australian feedback spider, the African button spider, Israeli and Iranian widow spiders, and four North American species. Tarantulas (Theraphosidae family) are the second most common spider family to feed on snakes, as these spiders hunt them in trees or on the ground. Large orb-weaving spiders (Araneidae and Nephilidae families) are the third most common to target snakes.

 

These three spider families accounted for 80 percent of all reported instances of feeding on snakes to date. As for their serpentine victims, the documented cases in the wild involved 86 species of snake from seven families, with another five species involved in captivity or staged incidents. These included brown snakes, crayfish snakes, garter snakes, green snakes, king snakes, ringneck snakes, racers, scarlet snakes, and rat snakes.

 

Juvenile scarlet snake  entrapped on web of <em>Latrodectus geometricus</em>, observed in a private residence in Georgia

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

Different families of spiders kill their snake-y prey in different ways. For instance, black widows rely on their strong, tough webs to ensnare the snake in the web's vertical viscid threads. Then the widow will cover the snake in more sticky silk and bite it one or more times to release its neurotoxin venom. Once the snake has been immobilized, the widow raises its prey off the ground—a process that can take several hours—and kills and feeds at its leisure.

Tarantulas don't spin webs, but their bites also administer a powerful neurotoxin venom that can quickly immobilize a snake. A 1926 report described how a tarantula will grab a snake by the head and bite, holding on as the snake tries to shake it off. Once the venom kicks in, the tarantula will crush the snake and suck out all the yummy soft parts, leaving behind a "shapeless mass."

Orb-weaving spiders also catch the occasional small snake in their webs, and like the widow, they will wrap its prey in silk and administer a few venomous bites. The spider then "extracts the dissolved tissue from its victim by the process of extra-intestinal digestion," the authors wrote. (That is, the spider expels digestive enzymes from its intestinal tract, which break down the tissues into liquid for easy slurping.) Spiders typically only eat part of the snake, leaving the rest to scavengers like ants, wasps, and flies.

"While the effect of black widow venom on snake nervous systems is already well researched, this kind of knowledge is largely lacking for other groups of spiders," said Nyffeler. "A great deal more research is therefore needed to find out what components of venoms that specifically target vertebrate nervous systems are responsible for allowing spiders to paralyze and kill much larger snakes with a venomous bite."

Nyffeler and Gibbons also found that some black widow spiders can overpower snakes 10 to 30 times their own size. They cited one particularly extreme example documented by National Geographic in 1933, in which an 8-gram garter snake was trapped in the web of a cobweb spider weighing just 0.0225 grams. "Hence this snake was 355 times heavier than the spider," they wrote. Similarly, tarantulas (which can weigh as much as 50 grams) have been documented killing much larger and heavier pit vipers.

DOI: American Journal of Arachnology, 2021. 10.1636/JoA-S-20-050  (About DOIs).

Spiders eating snakes, oh my! Here are the photographs to prove it

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

BOULDER, Colo. — A five-minute workout that scientists call “strength training for your breathing muscles” is proving to lower blood pressure as well as or even better than traditional exercise and prescription drugs. Researchers from the University of Colorado-Boulder say this groundbreaking exercise makes use of a hand-held device which provides resistance as the user breathes. Simply put, as you suck in air, the tube tries to suck it back in.

Researchers call this technique High-Resistance Inspiratory Muscle Strength Training (IMST). Although doctors in the past have recommended patients with breathing disorders use these devices at low power for about 30 minutes, the new study finds a five-minute, high-intensity burst can improve cardiovascular health among older adults.

In the United States, estimates show nearly two-thirds of people over age 50 have elevated blood pressure. This puts many of them at risk of suffering from heart disease, heart attacks, or a stroke. Moreover, researchers say less than half of these Americans are getting enough exercise to improve their condition.

“There are a lot of lifestyle strategies we know can help people maintain cardiovascular health as they age. But the reality is, they take a lot of time and effort and can be expensive and hard for some people to access,” says lead author Daniel Craighead in a university release. “IMST can be done in five minutes in your own home while you watch TV.”

Blood pressure exercise better than walking every day

Scientists originally developed IMST in the 1980s to help critically ill patients deal with respiratory diseases. By inhaling vigorously through the device, a patient can strengthen their diaphragm and other breathing muscles thanks to the resistance the IMST creates in the body.

Unlike the low-level workouts for sick patients, study authors examined a group of 36 healthy adults between 50 and 79 years-old. These participants all had a systolic blood pressure (the top number) above the normal level of 120 mm/Hg.

During the study, half of these adults did 30 inhalations per day at high resistance six days a week for six weeks. The other half did a “placebo” exercise, featuring a much lower resistance setting on the device.

Results show participants in the IMST group saw their systolic blood pressure fall by an average of nine points. That kind of improvement, researchers say, is generally better than what high blood pressure patients see from walking 30 minutes a day five days a week. The study finds the IMST results are even on par with certain blood pressure-lowering drugs prescribed to patients.

Perhaps more importantly, study authors find people doing IMST saw their blood pressure continue to stay low even after they stopped the breathing workouts for six weeks.

“We found not only is it more time-efficient than traditional exercise programs, the benefits may be longer lasting,” Craighead adds.

Additionally, IMST patients experienced a 45-percent improvement in vascular endothelial function — or the ability for the arteries to expand. Participants also had a significant increase in their levels of nitric oxide, which is key to the arteries dilating and preventing plaque from building up. The team adds markers for inflammation and oxidative stress decreased as well.

A better alternative for older women?

The study finds this quick breathing workout may be a great alternative to exercise for one group in particular — postmenopausal women.

Senior author Doug Seals’ lab discovered that postmenopausal women taking supplemental estrogen don’t reap the benefits of aerobic exercise as much as older men do. This is especially true for vascular endothelial function. The new report finds using IMST helps these women just as much as male participants.

“If aerobic exercise won’t improve this key measure of cardiovascular health for postmenopausal women, they need another lifestyle intervention that will,” Craighead says. “This could be it.”

On top of strengthening a patient’s breathing, researchers say the early results show IMST also impacts a user’s brain function and overall fitness too.

“If you’re running a marathon, your respiratory muscles get tired and begin to steal blood from your skeletal muscles,” Craighead, an assistant research professor in the Department of Integrative Physiology, explains. “The idea is that if you build up endurance of those respiratory muscles, that won’t happen and your legs won’t get as fatigued.”

For now, it’s still unclear how exactly IMST directly contributes to lowering blood pressure. The team suspects this kind of resistance training sparks the cells lining blood vessels to produce more nitric oxide. This enables a user to relax.

“It’s easy to do, it doesn’t take long, and we think it has a lot of potential to help a lot of people,” Craighead concludes.

The findings appear in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

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A virologist works with her colleague in the P4 lab of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in Wuhan, in central China’s Hubei province, in 2017.

In the past month, we’ve seen a second wave of interest in the theory that the Covid-19 pandemic began with a lab leak.

Last spring, the media accurately reported the scientific consensus that Covid (also known as SARS CoV-2) is a natural virus that probably evolved much the same way as the last two deadly human coronaviruses, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS-COV) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS-COV): namely, from bats, probably by way of an intermediate species like a raccoon dog, a ferret badger, or even a feral cat. Ever since the SARS outbreak of 2002–03, after all, paper after paper and countless popular pieces have warned that, sooner or later, nature would produce the next big SARS.

Now some—latching on to new reporting, researchers’ open letter to Science magazine calling for greater investigation into the virus’s origins, and the Biden administration’s willingness to use the possibility of a lab leak to demand more transparency from China—argue media outlets were too quick to dismiss the lab leak theory. Substacker Matt Yglesias even called the media’s deeply skeptical coverage of lab leak theories a “fiasco” and “a huge fuckup.”

Despite the allure of this contrarianism, though, 20 years of post-SARS research into the origins and spread of bat coronaviruses point to a natural origin for Covid-19. Upon closer inspection, the so-called “new” evidence that has entranced pundits is neither new nor compelling. Lab leak theory proponents are also glossing over serious flaws in their proposed narratives of Covid-19’s origin. And loose talk about a lab leak elevates tensions between China and the United States, undermining the collaborative research we need to understand this pandemic and prevent the next one.

There are two major variants of the “lab leak” theory in circulation: (1) Covid evolved naturally and leaked pure and uncut from the Wuhan Institute of Virology when researchers were archiving wild bat coronaviruses for study, and (2) scientists at the WIV engineered or altered Covid from a natural virus or viruses, either through benevolent gain-of-function research, in which scientists make a virus more dangerous in order to understand it better, or through bioweapons research.

(Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas entertained a particularly fringe version of this last variation, speculating that China might even have attacked Wuhan with a biological weapon.)

On May 23, The Wall Street Journal reported that three employees at the Wuhan Institute of Virology sought hospital care for respiratory symptoms in mid-November. This could have been an early cluster of Covid cases, even though the symptoms were also consistent with seasonal flu.

The story was taken by many as fresh evidence in favor of the lab leak theory. Pundit Nate Silver confidently tweeted that, in light of this revelation, he now considered a lab leak more likely than a natural origin for Covid-19.

In fact, the Journal’s reporting actually made the case for a lab leak weaker, relative to what the State Department had previously claimed. On January 15, the department published a “fact sheet” asserting that “several researchers” at the Wuhan Institute of Virology “became sick” with respiratory symptoms in “autumn” of 2019, “before the first identified case of the outbreak.” The Journal clarified that the number of allegedly sick researchers was just three people and established that they sought treatment in mid-November, i.e., the beginning of flu season—rather than earlier in the fall. The Journal didn’t say that anyone was hospitalized and instead noted that it is common in China to seek minor medical care at a hospital instead of going to a family doctor. So we’re left with a story of three people going to the doctor with flu-like symptoms during flu season.

WIV leadership told World Health Organization investigators probing the origins of Covid that they had a normal amount of seasonal illness among their staff in the fall of 2019. But like other biosafety labs, the WIV collects and freezes yearly serum samples from the people who work there, and WIV officials told the investigators that serum samples for all staff and students in the bat coronavirus group subsequently tested negative for Covid antibodies. We have only their word to go on because the lab hasn’t been independently audited, but if that’s true, it’s a devastating blow to the lab leak theory—since, if Covid-19 escaped a lab, by far the easiest way for it to do so would be in the body of an infected staffer. Even if the Wuhan Institute of Virology is lying and some of its people had Covid in mid-November, that wouldn’t prove they caught it at work because the best available evidence suggests, by then, Covid was already circulating in Wuhan.

The problems with the lab leak theorists’ case, however, extend well beyond their overreliance on the ambiguous stories of WIV staffer sickness. Put simply, their narratives of viral sampling, evolution, and transmission don’t add up.

Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan who has published extensively on emerging viruses, including Covid, MERS, and Ebola, has taken considerable heat on Twitter for arguing that Covid is likely of natural origin.*

She first takes aim at the popular version of the lab leak theory that posits that Covid was taken from nature and escaped in its wild form. The problem with that scenario, she told me, is that a swab from a bat contains very little infectious virus.

Each bat weighs less than half an ounce, and each sample is basically a Q-tip swiped briefly over a bat’s mouth or anus.

These samples are stored in vials in the freezer; they’re not likely to spill or leak, the way disaster movies have primed us to suppose.

“These samples are not like huge vials of blood,” Rasmussen said. “It’s not like a big Erlenmeyer flask of green liquid.”

Researchers would have to grow the virus in cells in order to stand a real chance of infecting people, she added, and it’s difficult to grow viruses from these swabbed samples even if you try to. There’s not much virus in them, and what you get tends to be contaminated with virus-killing detritus. “Technically it’s very challenging to directly isolate virus from field samples from wild animals. So that makes it unlikely that just handling those samples would result in some kind of infection.” Finally, Rasmussen added, the chemical solution that’s used to stabilize the viral RNA for sequencing is a very potent disinfectant its own right.

Then there are those who find it deeply suspicious that virus hunters haven’t produced any wild Covid-19 yet. Chinese scientists have already tested over 80,000 samples from animals, according to the first report of the WHO-China Joint Inquiry into the origins of the pandemic, but have yet to find Covid or a plausible direct ancestor in the wild. Lab leak proponents often bring this up as an argument against a natural origin. If, after all these months, investigators still can’t find Covid in nature, the reasoning goes, then maybe it’s not natural after all. “80,000 animals have been sampled since, with not one shred of connection to Covid found,” author James Surowecki scoffed on Twitter. Similar reasoning led Trump’s former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, Scott Gottlieb, to suggest on Face the Nation last month that the case for a natural origin of Covid has weakened.

Eighty thousand samples sounds like a lot, but it’s nothing in a country like China, which boasts over 7,500 native species of vertebrates. Besides, many of the animals tested in the first wave were pigs, chickens, and cows from farms across China, exotic farmed animals, and zoo animals. And since scientists often sample multiple bodily fluids per animal, 80,000 samples doesn’t even mean 80,000 individual animals. Critically, these samples appear to have been taken without any known or suspected link to early human cases of Covid. The secret to viral detective work is shoe-leather epidemiology: You’re most likely to find the earlier hosts if you start with early human cases of the mystery virus and take samples from their pets, their livestock, etc.—not from random populations.

Tracking a virus to its source can take years, and there’s no guarantee of success. It took 15 years to trace SARS definitively to bats. Failure to find a natural reservoir for a disease is not evidence of a nonnatural origin: Ebola has been around for over 40 years, and scientists are pretty confident that bats are its natural reservoir, but nobody has ever been able to culture Ebola from a bat.

If you can’t follow the path from early sick people to the sick animals in their lives, the search becomes less like detective work and more like playing the lottery: Even if a species is a viral reservoir, the virus might only be found in a tiny subpopulation. An isolated bat roost may have brewed a viral vintage found nowhere else in the world. Scientists had an edge in finding the intermediate host for MERS because the seroprevalence—the percentage of camels that carry MERS—is unusually high. Up to 100 percent of some camel cohorts tested positive for the virus. Once scientists heard stories about MERS patients having contact with camels, all they had to do was dip into various camel populations and pull up some MERS.

The Covid-19 case is much trickier. Any detective will have a better shot at cracking a case if they start with a fresh crime scene. That’s what SARS investigators had to work from, given that two of the earliest cases were a waitress and a customer at a civet restaurant, and all the restaurant’s remaining civets tested positive. The civets were still at the scene of the crime, so to speak. With Covid-19, we don’t have a crime scene. The virus first made headlines because of an outbreak at the Hunan Wholesale Seafood Market, but it turned out that there were earlier cases with no known ties to the market. In fact, there’s no reason to assume that the spillover to humans happened anywhere near Wuhan. The first human case of Covid could have been infected hundreds of miles away, perhaps closer to the horseshoe bat caves of southern China.

And it’s not as if bat coronavirus hunters are coming up empty. New SARS-like bat coronaviruses are being found all the time, in addition to the hundreds of similar viruses that were already known to science. Experts have been warning us for years that any one of these common, natural bat viruses could mutate and start a pandemic, since bat colonies are constantly producing new SARS-type coronaviruses. One four-year study of wild Chinese horseshoe bats found that just over 9 percent of the animals carried a SARS-type coronavirus. The adorable flying mammals who give us tequila are perfect viral incubators: They like to roost with other species of bats, and their relatively long lives give viruses plenty of time to mix and match. Interspecies jumps—even between kinds of bats—are a great way to select for new mutations.

China’s economy has grown explosively over the past 25 years. Development is bringing people closer to bats and other wildlife through deforestation, mining, construction, and even bat cave tourism. The $80 billion wild animal trade incentivizes trappers to spelunk around in remote areas where they may encounter bats or animals infected by bats.

Moreover, demand for wild animals as luxury items brought a steady stream of animals from the rural south to major cities, including Wuhan. So it’s not that surprising that the first major outbreak of Covid-19 happened in Wuhan, a city of 11 million spread over 3,200 square miles, which is known as the Chicago of China because it so accessible by air, rail, road, and water. You can get on the fast train in Wuhan and be in Guandong Province, the home of the original SARS outbreak, in under four hours.

While we can’t rule out the possibility that Covid-19 was genetically engineered, even leading lab-leakers agree that it bears no apparent signs of genetic manipulation. It looks like a perfectly natural virus. And to alter a virus in a way that leaves no traces, you have to start with a virus that’s extremely similar to the virus you end up with.

“Even if you’re doing the most sophisticated gain-of-function research you could possibly be doing, you have to start with a virus that’s at least close. We would estimate 99 percent, [or] even higher than that, 99.9,” Dr. Robert F. Garry, an expert on the molecular mechanisms of viral pathogenesis at the Tulane University School of Medicine and a co-author of an influential paper arguing for the natural origins of Covid, told the podcast This Week In Virology.

Furthermore, he told me by email, there’s no way to use laboratory tricks to overcome this need for a close source virus. Even if researchers were to cut and paste different natural viruses together, each component virus would have to be in the 99 percent similarity range.

There is no evidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or anyone else, ever had any strain that similar to Covid-19. Lab leak boosters argue that the WIV is highly suspect because it was doing risky gain-of-function research with bat coronaviruses. But if it didn’t have wild viruses almost exactly like Covid-19, it couldn’t have engineered it, period.

As far as anybody knows, the closest strain the WIV had is a bat virus called RaTG13 that’s 96 percent similar to Covid-19, but the gulf between 96 percent and >99 percent is vast. The two viruses probably shared a common ancestor between 25 and 65 years ago, which is practically geological time for fast-mutating viruses. 

If RaTG13 were used as a backbone for Covid-19, Rasmussen told me, you’d expect to see big chunks of exact similarity with coherent chunks of new information added in—like a student cutting and pasting a few original paragraphs into a plagiarized essay. Instead, she explains, Covid-19 differs from RaTG13 by over 1,000 point mutations spread through the virus like raisins in a pudding. Nobody knows what any of these little mutations do; most of them probably don’t do anything. They look like the genetic noise that accumulates in 50 years of viral evolution. They’d be a nightmare to clone in by hand, and there would be no reason to do so.

Rasmussen notes another major piece of new evidence against a lab origin: If Covid-19 were invented as part of a benevolent gain-of-function experiment, the goal would be to make it more transmissible, or more lethal to people, in order to study that strain in the lab. But when current strains of Covid-19 are cultured in cells in the laboratory, the virus tends to mutate fast and become less contagious to humans.

“When you work with this particular virus in the lab, it becomes less capable of being a human pathogen and becomes more of a cell culture adapted virus,” Rasmussen says. “So that suggests, again, that it’s unlikely that this virus, if it were being passaged extensively in cell culture, would jump out of cell culture into people and start a pandemic.”

What we’re left with is this: If the WIV had a secret strain (or strains) at least 99 percent similar to Covid-19, it got that raw material from the wild. That would mean there’s at least one wild virus that’s at least 99 percent similar to Covid-19 somewhere in nature, where humans had contact with it at least once. So far, it hasn’t been found, but it’s got to be out there, whether Covid is 100 percent natural or human-tweaked. So, given that Covid (or its direct ancestor) must exist in nature, it’s more likely that it got out naturally (like SARS and MERS) than that it took an undetectable detour through a secure biolab.

If Covid-19 were bioengineered, that would mean the WIV lab found the now-untraceable Covid-19 precursor strain(s), and even though its main job is publishing about the cool viruses it finds, it never published it or talked about it, not even to the small army of American and international scientists it collaborates with. Then it embarked on a painstaking process of undetectably tweaking the Secret Ancestor into Covid-19, its manipulation succeeded, and then multiple layers of biosecurity failed, and Covid-19 escaped.

It’s not impossible. But it involves a number of exceptions to rules—a number of carefully designed systems failing.

Meanwhile, the natural origin theory just involves countless bat roosts with millions of bats doing what they do best: generating new viruses like the world’s most chaotic supercomputer.

All theories of the origins of Covid-19 should be investigated, including lab origin theories. We should go wherever the science takes us. In mid-May, 18 respected scientists with relevant expertise published an open letter in the journal Science arguing that both zoonotic and laboratory origin hypotheses “remain viable.” This letter was seized upon as additional grounds to support the lab leak theory, seemingly by people who hadn’t read it very carefully. The authors didn’t offer any new evidence, or even an argument, for why the lab leak theory deserves to be taken more seriously. Their focus was criticizing China’s stranglehold over the raw data on the origins of the pandemic and calling for a more transparent investigation. 

These are entirely valid criticisms, but on their own, they don’t move the needle on the likelihood of a lab leak. The fact that China is being secretive about Covid-19 isn’t evidence for any particular theory. China is a totalitarian regime that is notoriously secretive about everything. It should be noted that the origins of both SARS and MERS were shrouded in troubling official secrecy before they were confirmed to be natural phenomena.

Maybe it’s comforting to think that Covid-19 was carelessly released or even deliberately engineered by a handful of hubristic scientists. That seems like a relatively easy problem to control. We could ban risky research or tighten up biosecurity protocols and the problem would be solved.

By contrast, in order to deal with the ongoing natural virus threat from bats and other animals, we have to deal with much tougher problems. We have to deal with deforestation, climate change, and the international wildlife trade. We’ll need to address agricultural practices, including at home (which, after all, is where swine flu began). All this will require massive scientific and social cooperation, domestically and internationally. In the absence of hard evidence, careless lab leak speculation or overstating the case for a lab leak relative to other origin stories amounts to the casual slander of distinguished Chinese scientists. Reckless allegations undermine the research, the international relationships, and the policymaking we need to fight this pandemic and future pandemics effectively. 

*This sentence has been updated to reflect Dr. Rasmussen’s current position at the University of Saskatchewan.

Lindsay Beyerstein is an investigative journalist, podcaster, and documentary filmmaker in Brooklyn.

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Using a cast is not more effective than a brace for treating broken ankles, according to University of Warwick researchers—a conclusion that could hasten the decline of the tradition of signing a cast.

With little difference in the clinical effectiveness of either method, the researchers conclude that the choice of which to use should be down to cost and patient preference, with some evidence suggesting that the flexibility of the removable brace could prove more appealing to patients.

The research reports the results of the Ankle Injury Rehabilitation (AIR) Trial at Warwick Clinical Trials Unit at the University of Warwick, and is published today (6 July) in the BMJ. This four-year trial funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) aimed to compare cast to functional brace in the treatment of individuals with an ankle fracture.

Ankle fractures are very common and tend to occur when you land on your foot and twist it. They are most commonly related to sports, traffic accidents or falls in older people, though it is an injury that everyone is susceptible to. Not all ankle fractures will require surgery, but in all cases patients will need to keep their foot immobilised typically for a period of around six weeks to allow the bones to heal.

As part of the AIR trial, 669 patients were randomly given either a cast (334 patients) or removable brace (335 patients) to immobilise their foot following an ankle fracture. Those with the brace were given information advising them to take the boot off around three times a day and perform repetitions of ankle movement exercises. The cast group were not given specific ankle movement exercises from the trial as they were unable to remove their cast, nor move their ankle.

They were then followed up four months afterwards with a questionnaire that asked them if they had any pain or functional problems. Specifically, patients were asked about problems with pain when walking, stiffness, swelling, climbing stairs,

running, jumping, squatting, use of supports and activities. Their answers were combined into a score called the Olerud Molander Ankle Score (OMAS), and these scores combined for each group and compared.

The research showed no statistically significant difference in the scores of those using a cast and those using a boot after four months. The results were also the same when comparing those who received surgery and those who didn't.

Lead author Professor Rebecca Kearney of Warwick Medical School at the University of Warwick said: "With cast not being better, it comes down to a decision on the cost of the interventions, patient preferences and if there's a difference in complications, which we did not find evidence of. Patients should discuss their preference with their clinician, who should take into account these factors.

"When people think of ankle fractures they think of the pain, swelling, and not being able to do things. But it has more far-reaching consequences than just the immediate physical limitations of a broken bone, which we're only just starting to appreciate."

Like many types of broken bone, ankle fractures have traditionally been treated by using the familiar cast that generations have signed their names on in sympathy. In more recent years, it has become just as common to use a removable brace—at one time referred to as the 'Beckham boot', after being popularised by former professional footballer David Beckham.

The brace is a plastic boot that comes in two halves with Velcro to wrap round and secure it. They're designed to be walked on and being removable allows patients to perform leg exercises and keep their leg clean.

Professor Kearney, who was supported by an NIHR Fellowship for this research, adds: "If you keep the ankle really still it allows the bones to heal up, but that's not great if all the joints around it stiffen up and all the muscles weaken. The idea behind the boot is that you can do movement exercises with the ankle and walk on it to encourage weight-bearing. In theory, that could result in decreased muscle wastage and joint stiffness. In practice though, it didn't result in better functional outcomes.

"It was also clear in the quantitative data that when patients swapped treatments, they swapped in predominantly one direction—from the cast to the brace."

Source

Why roads in the Pacific Northwest buckled under extreme heat

The Pandemic Changed Sleep Habits. Maybe That’s a Good Thing

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Did lead poisoning cause downfall of Roman Empire? The jury is still out

A new video from the American Chemical Society revisits longstanding academic debate

There are any number of factors that contribute to the demise of an entire civilization, like the collapse of the Roman Empire circa 476 AD. The empire's slow decline is typically attributed to barbarian invasions, failed military campaigns, economic challenges, government corruption, and an over-reliance on slave labor, among other factors. But it's also been suggested that the toxic effects of lead poisoning on increasingly erratic rulers may also have contribute to its demise—a debate that has been revisited in a new Reactions video from the American Chemical Society.

 

Lead has a number of properties that make it attractive for practical use. It's cheap, widely available, corrosion resistant when exposed to air and water, has a low melting point, and is highly malleable, which means it's easy to fashion into a wide range of products. But lead is also highly toxic if it finds its way into the human body, which is why we use it far less these days compared to even 100 years ago. Common symptoms of lead poisoning include anemia, nerve disorders, memory loss, inability to concentrate, and even infertility. Lead exposure may also be a factor in malaria, rickets, gout, and periodontal disease.

 

Since 1943, scientists have known that lead can have adverse effects on neurological development in children, leading to behavioral problems and lowered intelligence. That's because it can easily replace calcium. Calcium is how neurons in the brain communicate, and if lead replaces it, there is either too little communication among neurons, or too much. This can cause erratic mood swings, or difficulty processing information, for instance.

 

As the Reactions video points out, the ancient Romans loved their lead. They used it in pipes, to line coffins, in their pots, and their utensils. They also used lead acetate as a sweetener, in an era where cane sugar and honey were quite scarce. They did have an abundance of grapes, and used to boil down the juice in their lead pots. Lead ions would leach into the juice and combine with the acetate from the grapes. The resulting syrup was very sweet and used in wines and a wide variety of foods. In fact, of the 450 recipes in a cookbook from that era (the Apicius cookbook), 100 called for those syrups. The Romans also loved their wine, with aristocrats consuming between 1 and 5 liters every day. Researchers who recreated some of the syrups found lead concentrations around 60 times higher than the EPA allows in public drinking water.

 

The current debate about lead poisoning's potential role in the downfall of the Roman Empire dates back to a 1983 paper in the New England Journal of Medicine by Jerome Nriagu, who was studying the diets of Roman emperors between 30 BC and 220 AD. Nriagu noted that 19 of the 30 emperors showed a preference for "lead-tainted" food and wine, concluding many likely suffered from gout and lead-poisoning as a result. 

 

Claudius, for instanced, is described as exhibiting "disturbed speech, weak limbs, an ungainly gait, tremor, fits of excessive and inappropriate laughter and unseemly angry, and he often slobbered." Legend has it that Caligula once wished to appoint his horse, Incitatus, as a consul—although historians generally believe this was politically motivated gossip, or that Caligula intended it as a prank. Nero was said to mutilate people in the arena while dressed in animal skins.

 

But was lead poisoning the cause of all those symptoms, and hence the eventual collapse of the empire? Nriagu's hypothesis earned the support of geochemist Clair Patterson, whose work convinced governments to ban lead in gasolines in 1975. But it was hotly disputed by others, most notably the classicist John Scarborough, who accused Nriagu of sloppy research. Nriagu in turn told the Washington Post in 2016 that Scarborough "knows nothing" about lead poisoning.

There have been many scientific papers in the ensuing decades looking at various aspects of the lead poisoning question. For instance, in 2014, French researchers studied how the lead pipes used in the Roman aqueducts might have contaminated the water consumed by ancient Romans. Specifically, they measured concentrations of lead isotopes in sediment from the Tiber River and Trajanic Harbor, and compared those levels to the amount of lead isotopes found in ancient Roman pipes.

 

While their estimates revealed that the water from those pipes could have had as much as 100 times lead than spring water from the region, the team nonetheless concluded that these concentrations weren't likely to have caused serious health issues. The authors added that, in their opinion, Nriagu's theory that lead poisoning led to the fall of the Roman empire had been largely debunked.

 

Of course, there could be other, just as likely factors for the legends surrounding the strange behavior and ailments of ancient Roman rulers, such as traumatic brain injuries, strokes, or tumors. But there is some evidence that lead poisoning was an issue for the ancient Romans, even if it didn't directly contribute to the collapse of the empire. For instance, a 2010 study of dental enamel taken from more than 200 burials at 33 sites in Britain, Ireland, and Rome (circa the first to fourth centuries AD) found a marked increase in lead levels in the British samples, and a wide range of lead levels in the Roman enamel samples.

In a 2019 study, archaeologists examined several skeletons from London during the Roman era for signs of exposure to toxic levels of lead. The team sampled 30 thigh bones, as well as 70  bones from the Iron Age as a control. They found that the Iron Age skeletons contained just 0.3 to 2.9 micrograms of lead per gram, whereas the ones from the Roman empire had between 8 to 123 micrograms per gram. Those are sufficiently high levels to cause widespread health effects, including hypertension, fertility issues (and subsequent population decline), kidney disease, neural damage, gout, and so forth.

 

That said, according to archaeologist Janet Montgomery of the University of Durham, bone also absorbs lead and other metals from the soil, so it can be challenging to rule out post-burial contamination as a source for these higher levels of lead. "You do not know if the lead you are measuring [in bone] has accumulated from fairly low level exposure over a long time, or derives from one period of high exposure many years in the past, or something in between," she told Chemistry World.

 

Archaeologist Kristina Killgrove, writing at Forbes, pointed out there were no lead coffins, or many lead grave goods, at these sites that could have contributed to this kind of contamination. But she did note that it's unclear if skeletons of people who lived in Rome during the same period (as opposed to London) would also show high levels of lead, which requires additional study. "While the question of the effects of lead poisoning on the Roman Empire is far from settled, [this] research adds to the growing body of scientific data drawn from multiple sources that show human-created lead pollution was a serious problem two thousand years ago," Killgrove concluded.

 

Listing image by iSidhe/iStock/Getty Images

Did lead poisoning cause downfall of Roman Empire? The jury is still out

The thorny ethics of displaying Egyptian mummies to the public

Exhibits are popular, but curators must grapple with issues of cultural, racial sensitivity.

In 1823, the chief surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital, John Warren, prepared to autopsy a 2,500-year-old corpse. Warren figured examining the Egyptian mummy—a gift from a patron that had been placed in the hospital’s surgical ward to collect quarters from gawkers—would advance knowledge of the ancients. He carefully began cutting through the old linen, and then stopped. He had exposed a blackened but exquisitely preserved head: high cheekbones, wisps of brown hair, gleaming white teeth. As Warren later recounted, this was a person, and “being unwilling to disturb” him further, he stopped there.

 

Fast forward to last October, when the press was on hand as Egyptian archaeologists opened the first of a cache of 59 recently discovered mummies for the whole world to see, revealing a perfectly wrapped body. Video of the event went viral, and the Twitter pushback followed: “Even in death POC can’t escape the prying and opportunistic advances of white people,” wrote one user, in a tweet that gained nearly a quarter-million likes.

 

The question of whether it is unseemly, ghoulish, disrespectful, or even racist to display ancient corpses, or whether it's a noble contribution to science and education, has nagged mummy displays since Warren took up his scalpel nearly 200 years ago. And the Black Lives Matter movement’s focus on issues of cultural ownership and appropriation has only added fuel to a persistent ethical dilemma for museums and experts who study mummies.

 

The issue is the topic of academic forums and scholarly papers, but the implications are real, both in Egypt and abroad. “It's a huge subject of debate in our field right now,” said Pamela Hatchfield, the former president of the American Institute for Conservation, a professional association of art conservators.

 

In April, onlookers watched as 22 mummies were transported to a new museum in a lavish parade through the streets of Cairo. By one estimate, at least 350 institutions around the world display Egyptian mummies, and the abiding fascination with the ancient kingdom of the pharaohs has made those displays a vital draw for museums, leaving scientists and curators to weigh increasingly fraught questions: Should mummies whose linen wrappings have been removed be re-wrapped for sensitivity? Ought the body, linens and all, be placed back in its coffin? And should that coffin be open, closed, or removed from display altogether?

 

For Heba Abd el Gawad, an Egyptologist in Cairo, the idea of displaying human remains is “disturbing.” But, she said, she cannot speak for all Egyptians and that different perspectives should be considered. “Being an expert or a specialist,” she said, “doesn't mean I have to dictate to people how they should feel about their ancestors, and even if they see them as their ancestors or not.”

 

Among the American museums that have reconsidered how they display mummies in recent years is the Rhode Island School of Design Museum in Providence. The museum had a 2,100-year-old mummified priest named Nesmin in residence since 1938. Lying wrapped next to his coffin, he was a hit with sixth-grade field trips. But in April 2014, he was moved to a more conspicuous central hall and soon became the focus of a debate over how to treat racial and cultural histories.

 

Some critics called the display disrespectful, or even offensive. In 2016, the museum held a public discussion. One researcher with Egyptian roots said she was “struck at having to see one of my ancestors on display this way.” She offered hymns and moments of silence, and said she “wanted to bring flowers” to the old mummy.

 

After long reflection, the museum staff gently lifted Nesmin back into his coffin in August 2018. Then, they shut the lid, returning the mummy to eternal darkness.

A crocodile

Advocates for greater modesty say mummies did not agree to have their bodies put on public display, and that cultural respect demands they be removed from view. Other experts argue that ancient Egyptians embraced the union of death and life, and that the dead were mummified to give the spirit a body, and thus would have welcomed some modern interaction with the living. But those arguments fly against the current demand for greater cultural sensitivity.

 

“Everyone is afraid to speak up,” said Jasmine Day, a scholar and president of the Ancient Egypt Society of Western Australia in Perth, who said objections to displaying mummies are coming from “the fashionably offended.” She said she is “alarmed to hear about the wave of conservatism and risk aversiveness sweeping through the world of museums.”

 

Some critics maintain that racism infused the White-dominated collection of antiquities. White explorers, collectors, and archaeologists brought mummies by the hundreds back from Egypt in the 1800s and early 1900s, though many of them were dug up by Egyptian tomb raiders or bought from Egyptian authorities.

 

A French tourist reported in 1833 that “it would be hardly respectable” to return from Egypt “without a mummy in one hand and a crocodile in the other.”

 

At the entrance to the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum in Baltimore lies a partially unwrapped female called the Goucher mummy, with her arms crossed on her chest. In 2008, Sanchita Balachandran, associate director and conservator at the facility, said she worked for weeks to try to stabilize the condition of the mummy. “I spent a lot of time with just her,” Balachandran said, and developed “a personal relationship with a human being, with a person.” As a result, she said that her feelings about public exposure of the mummy have evolved.

 

“I think people are very disturbed by encountering a real person just lying there,” she said. Balachandran said she is conflicted about the display and has gradually become more protective of the Goucher mummy. Before the pandemic closed the museum, “people used to come in and take selfies of her, right? And I would say, ‘You know what, she doesn't give you her consent to be photographed. So you can't do that.’”

 

Activists and scholars calling for change say mummies have long been objectified by museums, which treat them as artifacts. Indeed, despite Warren’s 19th-century epiphany that the mummy in his care, named Padihershef, was a human being, the corpse remains under a glass case at the old surgical ward of the hospital, his head still unwrapped, staring forever skyward.

 

The ethical view of mummies began changing in the United States after the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s, and its echoes for Indigenous Americans. In 1990, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act required the return of Indigenous remains to tribes in the U.S. Afterward, museum officials began to look uncomfortably at the Egyptians in their holdings. “When you begin to think about it, you know, what is the difference between Native American remains and Egyptian remains?” said Gina Borromeo, chief curator and curator of ancient art at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum.

 

“Do mummified human remains belong in an art museum? He's not an art object. He's a human being,” said Ingrid Neuman, a senior conservator who agonized alongside Borromeo when students began raising objections to the display of Nesmin during a packed meeting in 2016. “I think that a human body is different than a painting on the wall in a museum.”

 

The clash of opinions brackets the dilemma for museums. In choosing how to display mummies, whose voice counts: The perceived wishes of the ancients? Modern Egyptians? Scientists and scholars? Or museum patrons? In a Skype interview, Abd el Gawad said the views of modern Egyptians like herself are too often ignored because of the “racist colonial misperception” that “the human remains coming from ancient Egypt are unclaimed and uncontested.”

 

“We are not seen as the ancestors of the ancient Egyptians,” she said.

 

Others argue it is far from obvious what the ancient Egyptians—who desperately sought immortality—would have wanted, or who should speak for them now. Day, the Australian researcher, agrees that mummies deserve respect, but thinks removing them panders to a modern aversion to seeing the dead. Museums should “display mummies in a way that presents them as people, not ‘here is an object in an art museum,’” she said via Skype. But museums can humanize ancient Egyptians, she added, by using “Human Remains” warning signs, hushed rooms, darkened lighting, and limited access to mummy displays.

 

Peter Lacovara, a former senior curator at the Carlos Museum in Atlanta and currently the director of the Ancient Egyptian Heritage and Archaeology Fund in New York, calls objections to the display of mummies “uninformed” about the ancient Egyptian religion. “More than anything, Egyptians wanted to be seen, they wanted their likenesses to be seen. They wanted to be remembered,” Lacovara said. “They wanted to be part of the world of the living. And of course, this is what museum displays do.”

 

Mimi Leveque, a Boston consulting conservator who has inspected or preserved more than 40 mummies, suggested that, handled correctly, mummies can be deeply edifying. “If treated with respect," she said, "a body has a tremendous amount to tell us." Leveque said she often worked on mummies in museum labs open to public view, which invariably boosted the number of visitors to the museum. “People wanted to see it."

 

Leveque also said she believes the old Egyptians would have approved, and that museums are in fact helping to deliver on an ancient desire to be well-remembered into posterity. “From the point of view of the person who was excavated, what they wanted was to have their personality remembered, their name repeated," she said. "The ancient Egyptians said that if your name is remembered, even if your body doesn't make it, you will have an eternity.”

 

In that light, where better for a mummy to end up, she suggested, than in a museum? "[Mummies] are in, what is in effect, a glorious tomb," she said. "Isn't that what these museums are?”

 

Even if that's true, however, Abd el Gawad suggests that at least some of the wishes of the ancients are known, and not open for interpretation. There are very clear instructions on what ancient Egyptians wanted to happen to their bodies after death, she said, "and that doesn't include unwrapping mummies or displaying mummies out of the coffin."

The thorny ethics of displaying Egyptian mummies to the public

Rising coronavirus cases in Israel, where most residents are inoculated with the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, offer "a preliminary signal" the vaccine may be less effective in preventing mild illness from the Delta variant, a top expert said Monday.

But Ran Balicer, chairman of Israel's national expert panel on COVID-19, stressed it was "too early to precisely assess vaccine effectiveness against the variant" first identified in India in April that is surging across the globe.

That is partly due to the overall low number of cases among fully vaccinated Israelis, and because exposure to the virus and the likelihood of being tested are not evenly distributed across the population, further complicating efforts to reach conclusions about the data.

Balicer, also the chief innovation officer at Clalit, Israel's largest health maintenance organisation (HMO), told AFP that the Delta variant's emergence as the "dominant strain" in the country has led to a "massive shift in the transmission dynamic".

Israel's vaccine rollout that began in December was one of the world's fastest, making the Jewish state a closely-watched case study on whether mass inoculation offers a path out of the pandemic.

Vaccinations had brought transmission down to about five local new cases per day, but that figure has risen to around 300 in recent days, with the Delta variant raging.

About half of the daily cases are among children, and half are among mostly vaccinated adults.

"To some extent that could be expected since 85 percent of Israeli adults are vaccinated," Balicer said.

"But the rates in which we see these breakthrough cases make some believe they extend beyond that expected point and suggest some decrease in vaccine effectiveness against mild illness—but not severe illness—is likely."

The number of severe cases among vaccinated Israelis has risen in recent days from roughly one every two days up to five cases per day, Balicer said.

He said it was also too early to draw conclusions about the vaccine's effectiveness against serious illness caused by the Delta variant.

But, he added, experts "remain hopeful that the vaccine effectiveness against serious illness will remain as high as it was for the alpha strain" identified for the first time in Britain in December.

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett warned Sunday, ahead of a weekly cabinet meeting, that "with the Delta variant running amok," Israel may have to reintroduce certain restrictions that were lifted last month to curb transmission.

Balicer said it was unlikely Israel could contain rising cases without further restrictions being reimposed, but voiced hope they would be mild and that Israel's "vaccine wall" of inoculated citizens will help reduce further spread.

"It is encouraging that we still maintain zero deaths for the last twelve days," he further said.

Source

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. — A groundbreaking microchip that can measure stress hormones in real-time from a drop of blood has been developed. Researchers believe the innovation could drastically change the daily health of people without the need for cumbersome laboratory set-ups.

Cortisol, and other stress hormones, regulate many aspects of physical and mental health including sleep quality. High levels of cortisol can result in poor sleep, which increases stress that can contribute to panic attacks, heart attacks and other issues. Researchers used the same technology used to make computer chips to build sensors thinner than a human hair that can detect biomolecules at low levels.

The scientists were able to test the device on 65 blood samples from patients.

“The use of nanosensors allowed us to detect cortisol molecules directly without the need for any other molecules or particles to act as labels,” says Reza Mahmoodi, a postdoctoral scholar at Rutgers University, in a statement.

Mehdi Javanmard, an associate professor also with the university’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, says patients can monitor their hormone levels and better manage chronic inflammation and stress at a lower cost. “Our new sensor produces an accurate and reliable response that allows a continuous readout of cortisol levels for real-time analysis,” he explains. “It has great potential to be adapted to non-invasive cortisol measurement in other fluids such as saliva and urine.

“The fact that molecular labels are not required eliminates the need for large bulky instruments like optical microscopes and plate readers, making the readout instrumentation something you can measure ultimately in a small pocket-sized box or even fit onto a wristband one day,” he adds.

Stress may have hit levels unseen for many Americans thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. In one recent survey, half of Americans admit they don’t think they’ll ever fully recover from the stress they battled during the pandemic.

The research was published in the journal Science Advances.

Source

When brewing giant Coors launched a new advertising campaign earlier this year, the format came as a surprise to many.

The company was planning to infiltrate people’s dreams to get them to buy, and presumably drink, Coors beer.

Coors encouraged people to watch a short online video before bed, then play an eight-hour “soundscape” through the night. If successful, this “targeted dream incubation” would trigger “refreshing dreams” of Coors, according to the company.

It’s unclear how many people took part in the dream manipulation – the top Google search result for “Coors dreams” is currently the song Dreams, performed by the Irish pop-rock band the Corrs – but experts warn that the Coors campaign is not just a gimmick, and may have opened a door to a troubling future.

“They’re trying to push an addictive drug on people who are naive to what’s being done to them. I don’t know if it can get much worse than that,” Bob Stickgold, a cognitive neuroscientist and professor of psychiatry at Harvard medical school, said of Coors’ efforts, which he believed could potentially be replicated by other companies.

“Anything you could imagine an advertising campaign for, at all, could arguably be enhanced by weaponizing sleep,” Stickgold said.

Stickgold was one of the co-authors of a recent open letter which sounded the alarm over companies using targeted dream incubation in June. The letter was signed by 35 sleep and dream researchers from around the world.

“TDI-advertising is not some fun gimmick, but a slippery slope with real consequences,” the letter warned. “The potential for misuse of these technologies is as ominous as it is obvious.”

The concept of dream incubation – “techniques employed during wakefulness to help a person dream about a specific topic” – has been around for thousands of years, according to researchers.

In the more recent past, Salvador Dalí was given to the practice of holding a spoon while napping, in an attempt to enhance his creativity. When Dalí began to fall into a deeper slumber, and hopefully dream, the spoon would drop from his hand on to a pre-positioned dinner plate, waking him up in a state where he could remember the images or scenes he had – briefly – dreamt.

Over the past decade research has shown that people’s dreams can be more targeted, and that humans can be highly susceptible to thoughts or ideas introduced while they sleep.

A 2014 study found that smokers exposed to the smell of cigarettes and rotten eggs while they slept smoked 30% fewer cigarettes during the following week, while Stickgold said other work had shown that racial bias can be reduced by targeted dream incubation.

While much of the research so far has been aimed at positive results, scientists fear the threat of dream advertising is real, and in an increasingly wired world it is not likely to be limited to willing participation.

“Something like 30 million people have these listening, Alexa-type devices in their bedroom. And those devices can play anything they want whenever they want and advertisers could buy advertising time, [for adverts] they want played at 2.30 in the morning,” Stickgold said.

“You could have this sort of 1984 situation where advertisers buy advertising time on these devices, and nobody ever knows they’re hearing them.”

It wouldn’t be an entirely straightforward process. To sell a project involuntarily through dreams, the potential advertising campaign would have to be linked to adverts people see while they are awake.

Stickgold said it could potentially be done by playing a certain sound every time a product – a Coors beer, or a Corrs album, for example – is seen during a television or YouTube advert.

Replaying that sound while someone is sleeping, potentially through a home device, would, in theory, then trigger dreams about how nice it would be to drink a beer, or listen to an Irish guitar and violin-driven musical ensemble.

It’s a sobering thought, and in an effort to avoid such scenarios, the June letter called for stricter regulation on advertising, to prevent products being thrust into dreams. Stickgold said the Federal Trade Commission already restricts some subliminal advertising, such as the flashing of words or images during films or TV shows, and would be able to intervene.

“One way we could go in the US is to get a ruling from the FTC, that any attempts to manipulate people while they’re sleeping, whether it’s specifically through dream induction, or through other processes of sleep-dependent learning, would similarly count as unfair trade processes,” Stickgold said.

The commission is yet to comment on whether it will wade into the issue, even as researchers say some companies are actively examining the potential to worm their way into dreams.

Our slumber may be safe for the moment, but scientists believe this is a real threat.

“We believe that proactive action and new protective policies are urgently needed,” Stickgold and his fellow sleep experts wrote.

“To keep advertisers from manipulating one of the last refuges of our already beleaguered conscious and unconscious minds: our dreams.”

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Colon and rectal cancers are rising in younger adults, though researchers aren’t sure why. A new study of women and diet suggests that sugar-sweetened drinks may play a role.

Rates of colorectal cancer in people under 50 have increased sharply in recent years. Compared with people born around 1950, those born around 1990 have twice the risk for colon cancer and four times the risk for rectal cancer.

While sales of sugar-sweetened drinks have been decreasing in recent years, the percentage of calories consumed in sugary drinks rose dramatically between 1977 and 2001. During those years, the figure rose from 5.1 percent of total calories consumed to 12.3 percent among 19- to 39-year-olds, and from 4.8 percent to 10.3 percent among children 18 and under. By 2014 those figures had dropped, but 7 percent of calories consumed by Americans overall were still from sugary drinks.

The new study, published in the medical journal Gut, examined the link between colorectal cancer and sweet drinks in 94,464 female registered nurses who were enrolled in a long-term prospective health study between 1991 and 2015, when they were 25 to 42 years old. They also looked at a subset of 41,272 nurses who reported their intake of sugary drinks at ages 13 to 18.

The study included intakes of soft drinks, sports drinks and sweetened teas. The researchers also recorded fruit-juice consumption — apple, orange, grapefruit, prune and others.

Over an average 24 years of follow-up, they found 109 cases of colorectal cancer among the nurses (the absolute risk for colon cancer in younger people is still small). But compared with women who averaged less than one eight-ounce serving of sugar-sweetened drinks a week, those who drank two or more had more than double the relative risk for the disease.

Each additional serving of sweet drinks increased the risk by 16 percent. A serving a day in adolescence was linked to a 32 percent higher risk, and replacing sugary drinks with coffee or reduced-fat milk led to a 17 to 36 percent relative risk reduction. (They had no data on coffee sweetened with sugar.)

“I was really interested to see that the study was on women,” said Caroline H. Johnson, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health who has published widely on the environmental risks for colon cancer but was not involved in this work. “The focus has mostly been on males. It will be interesting to see if it’s confirmed in men.”

There was no association of the consumption of fruit juice or artificially sweetened drinks with early-onset colorectal cancer. The analysis controlled for various factors that can affect colon cancer risk, including race, B.M.I., menopausal hormone use, smoking, alcohol consumption and physical activity.

The study showed only an association, so could not prove cause and effect. But Nour Makarem, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health who was not involved in the research, said, “This is robust evidence, novel evidence that higher intakes of soda are involved in a higher risk for colorectal cancer. We know that sugar-sweetened beverages have been linked to weight gain, glucose dysregulation and so on, which are also risk factors. So there’s a plausible mechanism that underlies these relationships.”

The senior author of the study, Yin Cao, an associate professor of surgery at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, said that metabolic problems, such as insulin resistance and high cholesterol, as well as inflammation in the gut could play a larger role as a cause of cancer in the younger population than in older people, but that the exact potential mechanisms have not yet been pinpointed.

“One hypothesis is that increased weight gain is causing the increase in risk,” she said, “but we controlled for obesity. Still, it might be one of the things contributing. In studies in mice, high fructose corn syrup has been found to contribute to cancer risk independent of obesity.

“This is the first time sugar-sweetened beverages have been linked to early-onset colorectal cancer,” she continued, “and this study still needs to be replicated. But researchers and clinicians should be aware of this largely ignored risk factor for cancer at younger ages. This is an opportunity to revisit policies about how sugar-sweetened beverages are marketed, and how we can help reduce consumption.”

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BERLIN (AP) — A man in Austria was bitten by a 1.6-meter (5 1/4-foot) python during an early-morning visit to the toilet at his home on Monday, police said.

The reptile, which apparently escaped from a neighbor’s apartment and may have slithered through the drains, was cleaned and handed back to its owner.

The 65-year-old victim “felt a ‘nip’ in the genital area” shortly after sitting on the toilet at home in Graz just after 6 a.m., according to a statement from police in Styria province. He then looked into the toilet and discovered the albino reticulated python.

The snake apparently had escaped unnoticed from the apartment of the man’s 24-year-old neighbor. It wasn’t immediately possible to figure out how it escaped and how it got into the toilet, but police said it may have made its way through the drains.

A reptile expert was called to retrieve the snake, which was returned to his owner. Police said the younger man kept 11 non-venomous constrictor snakes and a gecko in his apartment, in terrariums and drawers. He faces an investigation on suspicion of causing bodily harm by negligence.

The victim sustained only minor injuries, police said.

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Emergency responders in Canada are currently battling more than 180 wildfires in British Columbia amid an intense heat wave that has left hundreds dead in the Pacific Northwest.

About 70% of the active fires were likely caused by lightning strikes, according to the British Columbia Wildfire Service's dashboard. Chris Vagasky, a meteorologist with the company Vaisala, says a lightning detection network uncovered more than 700,000 lightning strikes in the area between June 30 and July 1.

About 95 miles northeast of Vancouver, residents in the village of Lytton were forced to evacuate to avoid a spreading fire that began Wednesday afternoon.

While two residents have already been confirmed dead by the British Columbia Coroners Service, others are still missing.

For three days, Lytton suffered through record-breaking heat, reaching up to 121 degrees Fahrenheit. Then on Wednesday, the fire started and the village's roughly 250 residents were forced to flee.

Lytton resident Jeff Chapman was with his parents as they noticed smoke and flames in the distance. He helped them climb into a freshly-dug trench, before fleeing when he realized there wasn't enough space. The fire arrived in just 10 minutes, he told the CBC.

He ended up lying near railroad tracks only to watch a power line fall on top of the trench where his parents were.

"I just can't get it out of my mind," Chapman told the network.

Now about 90% of Lytton is burned, according to Brad Vis, a member of Parliament representing the area.

In response to Lytton's devastation, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced federal aid would be sent to help the village rebuild.

The fires come amid a massive heat wave for the region. Extreme heat can intensify the risk of wildfires.

Lisa Lapointe, chief coroner for the British Columbia Coroners Service, said last week in a statement that 486 "sudden and unexpected deaths" had been reported in the last six days of June.

"͞While it is too early to say with certainty how many of these deaths are heat related," Lapointe said, "it is believed likely that the significant increase in deaths reported is attributable to the extreme weather B.C. has experienced and continues to impact many parts of our province."

The coroners service said between June 25 and July 1, 719 overall deaths were reported, which is three times the number that would be expected for the same period.

The U.S. is also being pummeled by heat, with the northwest and north-central U.S. feeling extreme temperatures. Many areas continue to experience temperatures in the 90s and 100s, according to the National Weather Service.

Scientists say the warming climate is making heat waves more frequent and intense. The health risks from them may also be greater early in the summer, when people are less accustomed to higher temperatures.

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Getting vaccinated in Australia is like "The Hunger Games" a top health official admitted Monday, as the country battles scarce supplies during a growing COVID-19 outbreak.

A vaccine shortage has led to panicked efforts by people looking to get jabbed, said Brad Hazzard, health minister for the country's most populous state New South Wales.

"It is almost a sense now of The Hunger Games of people chasing vaccine," he said of desperate residents turning up at mass vaccination centres or making regular calls to medical facilities in the hope of securing an appointment.

Set in a dystopian future, the wildly popular Hunger Games books and films saw a group of young people selected annually to participate in a televised battle to the death.

Just seven percent of Australia's roughly 25 million residents have been fully vaccinated, one of the lowest proportions for any developed nation.

The country's conservative government bet heavily on AstraZeneca, and developing a homegrown vaccine, which failed in trials.

Many Australians have shunned the available AstraZeneca offering—now only recommended for those aged over 60—and tried to secure appointments to get the Pfizer shot.

But the odds have not been in their favour as efforts to get more doses of Pfizer and other vaccines remain hampered by late decisions on ordering and limited global supply.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison is under growing pressure to increase the vaccination rate, as an outbreak in locked-down Sydney grew to more than 300.

Australia has seen 30,000 virus cases since the pandemic began, but several major cities imposed snap lockdowns to limit small outbreaks in recent weeks.

Hazzard said it was "easy to be critical" of the federal government's efforts in hindsight, "but I think they did their best."

But he warned "until we get enough vaccine—and enough GPs actually at the front-line able to provide that vaccine into arms—we will continue to have effectively The Hunger Games going on here," he said.

Last week Morrison revealed a four-stage plan to reopen Australia's borders and end the cycle of snap lockdowns, a plan which depends on a large portion of the population being vaccinated.

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New Zealand has recorded its warmest June since recordkeeping began, as ski fields struggle to open and experts predict shorter southern winters in the future.

A range of factors led to the record, including more winds coming from the milder north rather than the Antarctic south, and unusually warm ocean temperatures, said Gregor Macara, a climate scientist at the government-owned National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research.

He said the vagaries of weather will change from month to month. "But the underlying trend is of increasing temperatures and overall warming," Macara said.

The average temperature in June was 10.6 degrees Celsius (51 Fahrenheit), the research agency reported Monday. That's 2 degrees C above the 30-year average for June and more than 0.3 C higher than the previous record set in 2003 and again in 2014. Recordkeeping began in 1909.

Macara said the average temperature in New Zealand had increased by about 1 C over the past century. He said that if the trend continues, people can expect later and milder winters, followed by earlier springs.

The situation is putting pressure on ski fields a week out from when many students take their winter school holidays. Snow cameras at several of the larger resorts show exposed rocks and earth sprinkled with a dusting of snow on many runs. Some fields have used snowmaking machines to open some runs while keeping other lifts closed.

Rachel Ashton plays with her pug, Frankie, on the summit of Mount Roskill as the sunsets on a crisp winter evening in Auckland, New Zealand, on June 23, 2021. New Zealand has recorded its warmest June since recordkeeping began, as ski fields struggle to open and experts predict shorter southern winters in the future. Credit: Jason Oxenham/New Zealand Herald via AP

Paul Anderson, the chief executive of NZSki, which operates Coronet Peak, Mt Hutt and The Remarkables ski fields, remained upbeat.

"We'd always like a bit more snow on the ground," he said. "But we've got some good snow arriving tomorrow, and then a cool four or five days for snowmaking."

Anderson said his company has been adapting to the changing conditions by investing in snowmaking equipment and lifts that can withstand high winds.

"It's really clear that climate change is a reality. You can't argue with that science," Anderson said. 'But it is over a very long period of time."

Some farmers have welcomed the milder weather.

"This year it has been a godsend," said Jim Galloway, the Hawke's Bay provincial president of advocacy group Federated Farmers.

He said that's because the warmer weather coupled with rain has finally allowed some grass to grow, providing feed for sheep and cattle. That follows two years of drought conditions in his region.

People enjoy a warm day under a gingko tree in Cornwall Park, Auckland, New Zealand, on June 12, 2021. New Zealand has recorded its warmest June since recordkeeping began, as ski fields struggle to open and experts predict shorter southern winters in the future. Credit: Sylvie Whinray/New Zealand Herald via AP

"It's helped a lot, but there's a long way to go," Galloway said. "There's not a lot of ground water. The dams are still empty, basically."

And Galloway said that while droughts are nothing new for farmers, he worries that a warming climate is making them happen more frequently.

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Why are gold deposits found at all? Gold is famously unreactive, and there seems to be little reason why gold should be concentrated, rather than uniformly scattered throughout the Earth's crust. Now, an international group of geochemists have discovered why gold is concentrated alongside arsenic, explaining the formation of most gold deposits. This may also explain why many gold miners and others have been at risk from arsenic poisoning. This work is presented at the Goldschmidt conference, after recent publication.

Gold is prized for its purity and stability. It's also rare enough to retain its value—the World Gold Council estimates that all the gold ever mined in the world would fit into a 20 x 20 x 20-meter cube. Additionally, because it is one of the most inert metals in the whole periodic table, it doesn't easily react with other substances. So why should gold come together in sufficient quantity to mine—in other words, why do gold deposits exist?

Some gold is found as gold nuggets, but an appreciable amount is bound up with minerals. Gold is known to be related to iron- and arsenic-containing minerals, such as pyrite and arsenopyrite. These minerals act sort of like a sponge, and are capable of concentrating gold up to 1 million times more than is found elsewhere in nature, such as in the hot spring waters that transport gold. This gold becomes chemically bound in these minerals, so it is invisible to the naked eye.

The scientific team studied the action of the gold-concentrating minerals using the intense X-rays beam produced by the European Synchrotron (ESRF) at Grenoble in France, which can probe the chemical bonds between the mineral and gold.

They found that when the mineral is enriched with arsenic, gold can enter mineral structural sites by directly binding to arsenic (forming, chemically speaking, Au(2+) and As(1-) bonds), which allows gold to be stabilised in the mineral. However, when the arsenic concentration is low, gold doesn't enter the mineral structure but only forms weak gold-sulfur bonds with the mineral surface.

A giant gold deposit in W. Australia (SuperPit). Pyrite and arsenopyrite are the major ore minerals concentrating invisible gold together with arsenic. Credit: Gleb Pokrovski

Lead researcher, Dr. Gleb Pokrovski, directeur de recherche at CNRS, GET-CNRS-University of Toulouse Paul Sabatier, said, "Our results show that arsenic drives the concentration of gold. This arsenic-driven gold pump explains how these iron sulfides can massively capture and then release gold, so controlling ore deposit formation and distribution. In practical terms, it means that it will make it easier to find new sources of gold and other precious metals, which bind to arsenic-containing iron sulfides. It may also open the door to controlling the chemical reactions, and if we can improve gold processing, we can recover more gold."

The new model identifies just why gold tends to be found with arsenic. Dr. Pokrovski said, "It has been known for centuries that gold is found with arsenic, and this has caused severe health problems for gold miners. Now we know what happens at an atomic level, we can begin to see if there's anything we can do to prevent this."

The noxious link between arsenic and gold is well-known in France and elsewhere in the world, including at the Salsigne mine near Carcassonne. This was one of Western Europe's largest gold mines, and the world's largest arsenic producer at one time. It closed in 2004, but the environmental consequences of the arsenic pollution still persist in the region.

Dr. Jeffrey Hedenquist, University of Ottawa, said, "Geologists as well as prospectors have long known that gold can be associated with arsenic-rich minerals, and over the past few decades, others have quantified this association. The findings of Dr. Pokrovski and his team now help to explain why we see this association, caused by an atomic-scale attraction between gold and arsenic, with this marriage arranged by the structure of certain minerals."

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Glaciers in High Mountain Asia have been melting more quickly in recent years due to rising summer temperatures. Glacier melt prevails now even in areas where glaciers were previously growing, a team of researchers led by the University of St Andrews has concluded.

Using declassified satellite images acquired by the US Corona spy satellite in the 1960s and Hexagon spy satellites in the 1970s along with several modern satellites, the glaciologists examined the behaviour of glaciers in various regions across High Mountain Asia, which includes the Himalayan region but also other major mountain ranges such as the Pamir, Tien Shan and the mountains of Tibet.

The results, published in Nature Communications, have implications for future projections of ice loss from the region and raise concerns about the sustainability of the region's glaciers as a reliable water source in decades to come.

The behaviour of glaciers provides the clearest indication of the impact of climate change in high mountain regions. The glacierised regions of High Mountain Asia are the source of some of Asia's largest rivers, which hundreds of millions of people rely on for their basic needs.

Lead author Dr. Atanu Bhattacharya, of the School of Geography and Sustainable Development at the University of St Andrews, who recently moved to JIS University, Kolkata, India, said: "The results show just how much glaciers have thinned and receded since the 1960s and provide the first multi-temporal record of glacier fluctuations in several regions of High Mountain Asia including the Himalaya, Tibetan Mountain Ranges, Tien Shan and Pamir over almost six decades."

Glaciers in Poiqu basin, central Himalaya. A lake is now present where the glacier tongue was a few decades ago. Credit: J B Pronk

Dr. Tobias Bolch, of the School of Geography and Sustainable Development at the University of St Andrews, who initiated and guided the study, said: "The rate of mass loss from glaciers across most regions of High Mountain Asia has consistently increased since the 1960s and ice loss is now occurring even in regions where glaciers had lost little mass for several decades."

The work also examined the link between glacier mass loss and the changing climate. The team combined measurements from a network of high-altitude weather stations with modelled climate data to examine the main climatic drivers of ice loss in the different regions across High Asia.

Dr. Kriti Mukherjee of the University of Northern British Columbia, Canada, said: "The results show that substantial increases in ice loss rates have been primarily driven by higher summer temperatures while changes in precipitation have driven the variability."

The paper, "High Mountain Asian glacier response to climate revealed by multi-temporal satellite observations since the 1960s," by Bhattacharya, A., Bolch, T., Mukherjee, K., King, O., Menounos, B., Kapitsa, V., Neckel, N., Yang, W. and Yao, T. is published in Nature Communications.

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Is the “Dragon Man” skull actually from a new hominin species?

Homo longi's place in our extended family tree is far from settled.

The reported discovery of a new hominin species from China created a lot of buzz last week. Its discoverers—paleoanthropologists Xijun Ni, Qiang Ji, Chris Stringer, and their colleagues—say that a skull discovered near Harbin, in northeast China, has a combination of features that's so different from Neanderthals, Denisovans, and Homo sapiens that it must be a separate species. The researchers have named the find Homo longi after the river where the skull was unearthed. Based on statistical comparisons of the skull's measurements with skulls from other hominins, Ni and colleagues say that Homo longi is a sister species to Neanderthals, Denisovans, and us.

 

But that's still very much open for debate among paleoanthropologists, and the debate raises questions about how (or whether) we should draw lines between hominin species.

Meet the Harbin skull

Based on uranium-series dating, the Harbin skull lay buried for at least 146,000 years, but it's in remarkably good shape. Fossil hominin skulls often end up crushed or warped by the weight of the earth above them after many millennia in the ground, but the Harbin skull isn't distorted at all. It's also intact, even though the only tooth still attached is a left molar. That's unusual in itself, because teeth usually are the most common hominin fossil finds.

 

The skull has a wide face with small, flat cheekbones, set underneath the dome of the skull. The face doesn't stick out in front of the skull like an australopithecine or a modern ape, although the upper jaw still protrudes a bit. Large eye sockets sit beneath heavy, curving brow ridges. The braincase is as large as a modern person's, but it's long and low rather than high and round. The jaw once held large molars that look like they belong to an older member of our family tree—or a Denisovan.

 

Each of those individual features has been seen before in other hominin species. Species like Homo erectus and Homo heidelbergensis have long, low cranial vaults like the Harbin skull. But they also both have a bulge of bone called an occipital torus (or occipital bun) at the back of their skulls. Long, low skulls and occipital buns are both usually signs of an older branch of the human family tree: traits inherited from our last common ancestor with modern apes, rather than new ones evolved as our paths diverged. The Harbin skull's heavy brow ridges, protruding upper jaw, and big, robust molars are also considered archaic features.

Old and new

On the other hand, a relatively flat face that sits just beneath the brows, instead of sticking out front, is a hallmark of modern humans. So are the skull's small, low cheekbones and its large cranial capacity (about 1,420 milliliters, if you're counting). Then again, the Harbin skull is just impressively large in general. As Ni and colleagues wrote, "its enormous overall size sets it apart from nearly every other fossil," so we can't be sure how big its braincase was in relation to its body size.

 

According to Ni and colleagues, anthropologists have never seen all of those features together in this exact combination until the Harbin skull. It's what paleoanthropologists call a mosaic, with some traits that look like they come from older lineages and some that seem more like ours.

 

Mosaics are common in the hominin family tree. But the important question about the Harbin skull is whether its combination of features is really the trademark of a whole separate species, related to—but distinct from—Neanderthals, Denisovans, and us.

 

Paleoanthropologists have unearthed several Neanderthal skulls, but the only Denisovan fossils known so far are a few teeth, a finger bone, and a single skull fragment from Denisova Cave in Siberia as well as a jawbone from Xiahe in northern China. In other words, we don't have many examples to compare the Harbin mandible to if we want to say whether it looks like a Denisovan skull. There's no shortage of Homo sapiens skulls to look at, of course, and it's clear that, whatever the Harbin skull once was, it didn't belong to a member of our species (spoiler alert: depending on how we define our species).

 

Looking at skulls from modern humans, however, should remind us how much diversity in size, shape, and appearance can exist within a species, especially one that's adapted to live in environments all over the world. The Harbin cranium could be well within the normal range of diversity for Denisovans, who were also a very widespread species, or it could be something completely different. We just don't have enough information about Denisovan skulls to know yet.

Denisovan or Homo longi?

When Ni and colleagues did their statistical analysis, they pointed out that the Harbin skull fell into a group along with the 160,000-year-old Denisovan mandible from Xiahe, which anthropologists identified based on proteins still preserved within it. In other words, Harbin and Xiahe probably belong to the same species or to closely related species. Meanwhile, the one molar still attached to the Harbin skull looks remarkably like two Denisovan molars from Denisova Cave in Siberia.

 

The Harbin skull also fits in well with a 200,000-to-260,000-year-old skull found in Dali County in northwestern China, a roughly 300,000-year-old skull found in Hualong Cave in eastern China, and a 260,000-year-old skull from Jinniushi (sometimes spelled Jinniushan) Cave in China. All three of those fossils have been described as looking like something in between Homo erectus and modern humans.

 

It's possible—although still mostly fodder for speculation—that all or some these fossils, along with some from Taiwan and northern China whose molars look an awful lot like the Xiahe ones, could turn out to be an East Asian group of Denisovans.

 

That would still make the Harbin cranium an important find. It doesn't have to represent a brand-new-to-science species to be a valuable piece of a mostly unwritten chapter of our evolutionary story. Denisovan remains are still extremely scarce, and it's increasingly clear that East Asia was an important place for our ancestors during the Early and Middle Paleolithic.

 

Then again, at least some of the Asian hominin fossils might also turn out to be, as Ni and colleagues claim, a distinct species. Only more evidence can clear up that debate, and Ni and colleagues acknowledge that in one of their recent papers. "More mandibular specimens for the Harbin population, or cranial specimens corresponding to the Xiahe mandible, will test how close the Harbin and Xiahe humans are morphologically," they wrote, "while new genetic material will test the relationship of these populations to each other and to the Denisovans."

DNA, proteins, and other evidence

DNA testing would provide the clearest answer. At one time, biologists classified species and figured out their relationships based on whether things looked alike. Now, the question often comes down to genetics. For a lot of older hominin species, of course, that's impossible; no australopithecine or early Homo DNA survives, so paleoanthropologists are stuck with how the bones look. But we do have Neanderthal, Denisovan, and of course Homo sapiens genomes. If ancient DNA can be retrieved from the Harbin cranium, most of the debate could be resolved.

 

Even without DNA, there may be another option. The genes in DNA code for proteins, which are the building blocks of an organism. And proteins may survive in ancient bones longer than DNA. Back in 2019, University of Copenhagen anthropologist Fredo Welker told Ars Technica that proteome analysis like the kind that identified Xiahe as a Denisovan could be the key to discovering more Denisovan fossils, already unearthed and sitting in museum collections.

 

Of course, the best ancient DNA samples in the world won't resolve the much more complicated question of how we should define a species in the first place—a debate Homo longi just walked right into the middle of.

Splitters, lumpers, and hybrid fitness

Even with whole genomes to compare, scientists don't always agree on what counts as a species, a subspecies, or just a diverse population. Classically, if two organisms can't interbreed, they count as separate species. We know that Neanderthals, Denisovans, and Homo sapiens spent most of the Early and Middle Paleolithic hooking up on several continents, and the evidence still lingers in our genes. And predictably, some anthropologists argue that we should call Neanderthals and Denisovans subspecies of Homo sapiens if we're going to call them anything different at all.

 

According to paleoanthropologist John Hawks, when members of different species have a hybrid baby, that offspring usually doesn't have a good chance of reproducing. Some hybrids, like mules, are sterile, while others may face other challenges. The amounts of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA in modern genomes, Hawks told Ars, "suggest that hybrids between these lineages of humans were common and successful. That's what we would expect if they were not speciating."

 

Others argue that there's enough genetic and physical difference among the three groups to consider them separate species.

 

Comparison between the Denisovan genome recovered from a fossil fragment at Denisova Cave and fragments of Denisovan DNA present in modern human genomes suggests that the two came from distinct populations that had split apart around 300,000 years ago. That means they "therefore could be almost as different, one from the other, as Neanderthals from Denisovans," anthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology told Ars in 2019. (Analysis of Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes suggest that the two sister species diverged between 445,000 and 473,000 years ago.)

 

If we consider Neanderthals and Denisovans separate species, should what we're calling Denisovans actually be two or three separate species? Ironically, that may be the best argument in favor of Homo longi as a new species.

 

So where does that leave Homo longi? Until we have more evidence, it's difficult to tell. And it's more likely that new evidence will decide where the debate can really begin.

 

The Innovation, 2021 DOI: 10.1016/j.xinn.2021.100130 (About DOIs).

Is the “Dragon Man” skull actually from a new hominin species?

Antarctica logged a new high temperature record of 64.94 degrees Fahrenheit (18.3 Celsius) in 2020, scientists with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) confirmed this week.

The temperature, which was reported on Feb. 6, 2020, and verified by the United Nations (U.N.) agency on Thursday, was recorded at the Argentine Esperanza Research Station. 

The U.N. agency said the previous all-time high for Antarctica was 63.5 degrees, which was recorded on March 24, 2015, at the same research station.

WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas noted that the new record was “consistent with the climate change we are observing.”

“The Antarctic Peninsula (the northwest tip near to South America) is among the fastest warming regions of the planet, almost 3°C over the last 50 years. This new temperature record is therefore consistent with the climate change we are observing,” Taalas said in a statement. “WMO is working in partnership with the Antarctic Treaty System to help conserve this pristine continent.”

According to The Washington Post, the Argentine Esperanza Research Station is used to study climate science, meteorology and oceanography, among other fields.

While scientists confirmed the temperature record, the WMO also said this week that a report of a higher temperature of 69.35 degrees that was recorded at a Brazilian automated permafrost monitoring station on Feb. 9, 2020, was inaccurate.

“Verification of this maximum temperature record is important because it helps us to build up a picture of the weather and climate in one of Earth’s final frontiers. Even more so than the Arctic, The Antarctic, is poorly covered in terms of continuous and sustained weather and climate observations and forecasts, even though both play an important role in driving climate and ocean patterns and in sea level rise,” Taalas said.

According to a review conducted by a WMO committee at the time of both recorded temperatures, the area’s high pressure caused downward sloping winds that ultimately compressed and warmed the area rapidly, otherwise known as föhn. The committee said the föhn increased the temperatures in both research stations. 

An analysis of the Brazilian research station found, however, that a radiation shield that had to be improvised caused an error in the temperature that was initially recorded. 

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Russia reported its fifth record for daily COVID-19 deaths in a row on Saturday, as countries around the world rushed to contain the rapid spread of the highly contagious Delta variant.

The variant has propelled a resurgence of the virus which has already killed nearly four million people, forcing numerous nations to reimpose restrictions well over a year after the pandemic first swept the world.

Thousands of troops and police hit the streets in Indonesia to enforce a partial lockdown imposed on Saturday, as the country recorded a record 27,913 new daily cases as well as 493 deaths.

Mosques, restaurants and shopping malls were shuttered in the capital Jakarta, across the main island of Java and on Bali after the daily caseload quadrupled in less than a month, with the Delta variant blamed.

The overwhelmed healthcare system is teetering on the brink of collapse as jammed hospitals turn away patients, leading desperate families to hunt for oxygen tanks to treat the sick and dying at home.

"The stricter restrictions came too late," said Jakarta resident Maya Puspita Sari.

"Before, people who got COVID-19 were strangers, but now it's also the people closest to me who are infected... The virus is getting so much closer and it's terrifying."

Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, Myanmar ordered two million people in the second city of Mandalay to stay at home Friday as the coup-hit country struggles to contain coronavirus cases.

New measures were also put in place in Portugal, with a night curfew entering into force for nearly half the population in a bid rein in rising Delta infections.

New waves in Russia, Iran

Russia has so far ruled out a new lockdown to fight surging Delta cases, even as it reported 697 more deaths on Saturday—setting a new nationwide record for the fifth straight day.

Second city Saint Petersburg hosted a Euro 2020 quarter-final between Spain and Switzerland on Friday night, with concern raised after hundreds of cases were detected among spectators attending games across the continent.

Russia had hoped its vaccination campaign would tamp down a new wave, but it has met with widespread scepticism and a sluggish rollout, with only 16 percent of the 146 million population jabbed.

AFP journalists saw hundreds of people waiting at vaccination points across Moscow on Friday.

"I've been queueing for about two hours already," 21-year-old student Svetlana Stepereva said in the northeast of the capital.

"I want to get a jab and feel safe."

This week President Vladimir Putin urged Russians to "listen to experts" rather than rumours about the virus and vaccines.

Iran, battling the Middle East's deadliest outbreak of the coronavirus, has warned it could be hit by yet another wave of infections.

"It is feared that we are on the way to a fifth wave throughout the country," President Hassan Rouhani told a meeting of Iran's anti-virus taskforce, warning the public to be careful as "the Delta variant has spread" in southern provinces.

Delta rises in Africa, Fiji

The Delta variant, first identified in India and now present in at least 85 countries, has driven outbreaks in places that had previously been able to mostly avoid the pandemic's ravages.

Fiji, which went an entire year without recording any community coronavirus cases until Delta arrived in April, recorded its biggest-ever infection increase on Saturday.

Authorities reported two deaths and warned of more to come as the virus threatens to overwhelm the South Pacific nation's health system.

Africa has also been largely spared the worst of the pandemic, but infection numbers have increased in the continent for six weeks running, driven by the Delta variant.

Deaths rose by 15 percent across 38 African countries to nearly 3,000 in the same period.

"The speed and scale of Africa's third wave is like nothing we've seen before," Matshidiso Moeti, the World Health Organization's regional director for Africa, said this week.

South Africa, the continent's worst-hit country, posted a new record of 24,000 cases on Friday.

"We are indeed... in the eye of the storm of the third wave," Deputy Health Minister Joe Phaahla said.

Meanwhile in Italy 300 healthcare workers have lodged a legal challenge against the requirement that they get vaccinated against coronavirus, according to media reports.

"This isn't a battle by anti-vaxxers but a democratic battle," constitutional lawyer Daniele Granara, who helped build up the case, told the Giornale di Brescia newspaper.

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