Chinese astronauts successfully performed the country's first tandem spacewalk on Sunday, working for seven hours on the outside of the new Tiangong station in orbit around Earth.

Tiangong's construction is a major step in China's ambitious space programme, which has seen the nation land a rover on Mars and send probes to the Moon.

Three astronauts blasted off last month to become the station's first crew, where they are to remain for three months in China's longest crewed mission to date.

On Sunday morning, two of them exited the station for around seven hours of work in the first spacewalk at Tiangong, the China Manned Space Agency said.

"The safe return of astronauts Liu Boming and Tang Hongbo to the Tianhe core module marks the complete success of the first spacewalk in our country's space station construction," the space agency said.

Their tasks involved elevating a panoramic camera outside the Tianhe core module, as well as testing the station's robotic arm which will be used to transfer future modules around the station, state media said.

The astronauts installed foot stops on the robotic arm and, with its support, carried out other assembly work, added the space agency.

In a video clip of Liu leaving the cabin, he exclaimed: "Wow, it's too beautiful out here."

Tang Hongbo and Liu Boming (R) performed the first spacewalk on China's new space station Tiangong.

Television footage showed the astronauts preparing for the spacewalk by donning gear and conducting health checks while exercising.

Liu and Tang were later shown opening the hatch and exiting the module separately, wearing newly developed suits said to weigh some 130 kilograms.

They were supported from inside the station by the mission commander Nie Haisheng, a decorated air force pilot who is on his third space mission.

This was the first of two spacewalks planned for the mission, both expected to last six or seven hours.

It was also the first time since 2008 that Chinese astronauts went outside their spacecraft. Back then, Zhai Zhigang made China the third country to complete a spacewalk after the Soviet Union and the United States.

This is China's first crewed mission in nearly five years, and a matter of huge prestige as the country marks the 100th anniversary of the ruling Communist Party this month with a massive propaganda campaign.

To prepare, the crew underwent more than 6,000 hours of training.

The Chinese space agency is planning a total of 11 launches through to the end of next year, including three more crewed missions. They will deliver two lab modules to expand the station, along with supplies and astronauts.

Graphic showing the component parts of China's space station currently in place.

'Beyond words'

On Sunday, state television showed footage of the astronauts' daily lives on Tiangong, including setting up an exercise bike and working out on a treadmill.

One crew member was shown eating with chopsticks, while another did a handstand and somersault after mealtime.

The mission attracted a flurry of discussion online, with a hashtag about the spacewalk garnering 200 million views on China's Twitter-like platform Weibo.

One user wrote: "How much I'm moved by each step of achievement is beyond words."

President Xi Jinping has said the construction of China's first space station is opening "new horizons" in humanity's bid to explore the cosmos.

China's ambition to build an orbiting outpost of its own was fuelled in part by a US ban on its astronauts on the International Space Station, a collaboration between the United States, Russia, Canada, Europe and Japan.

The ISS is due for retirement after 2024, although NASA has said it could potentially remain functional beyond 2028.

Tiangong is expected to have a lifespan of at least 10 years, and China has said it would be open to international collaboration on the station.

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The great sleep divide

Sleep deficits are robbing poor people and racial minorities of health and earning power.

Remember the line from that old folk song?

 

If living were a thing that money could buy

 

You know the rich would live and the poor would die.

 

Sadly, there’s little “if” about it. On average, the poor live less healthy lives and are more than three times as likely to die prematurely as the rich. That’s true for many well-documented reasons, including less healthy diets with too much processed food, polluted neighborhoods and a lot more toxic stress. In recent years, however, researchers have added one more factor to this mix: It turns out that the poor, as well as socially disadvantaged racial minorities, sleep much less well on average than the rich, which can take a major toll on their physical and mental health.

 

“We used to think that sleep problems were limited to Type A professionals, and they certainly aren’t immune, but low-income individuals and racial minorities are actually at greatest risk,” says Wendy Troxel, a senior behavioral and social scientist at the RAND Corporation, who coauthored an analysis of socioeconomic disparities in sleep and health in the 2020 Annual Review of Public Health.

 

Inadequate sleep among low-income adults and racial minorities contributes to higher rates of illnesses, including cardiovascular disease and dementia, both of which are more common among these groups, Troxel and her coauthors point out. One study they cite attributes more than half of the differences in health outcomes between whites and Blacks, for example, to differences in quantity or quality of sleep. You might think of this as the great sleep divide.

The sleep-health-inequality nexus

Poor sleep has become such a widespread complaint that US scientists have been sounding alarms for years about an epidemic of unrest among Americans. More than one in three US adults sleeps less than seven hours a night, the minimum recommended by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. About seven out of 10 high school students fail to get the eight to 10 hours a night recommended for their age group. And each year, one in four Americans suffers from insomnia, while up to 7 percent of men have obstructive sleep apnea severe enough to leave them sleepy during the day. (For many, sleep issues such as insomnia were worsened by the pandemic, with one metastudy reporting that nearly 40 percent of people reported sleep problems during the first half of 2020.)

 

It’s still commonly assumed that poor sleep is a symptom rather than a cause of other medical or mental problems, according to Troxel. Yet today we know poor sleep can also cause illness. People with sleep apnea suffer more cardiovascular disease and stroke, as well as increased inflammation, which may contribute to illnesses including heart disease, cancer and arthritis. For teenagers, one study has shown, each hour of lost sleep comes with a 23 percent increase in the risk of tobacco, alcohol or marijuana use and a 58 percent increase in suicide attempts. Insufficient sleep may even make people more vulnerable to viruses and less likely to benefit from a vaccine.

 

But here’s where the great sleep divide comes in. Over the years, researchers repeatedly have found evidence that people in poverty get less sleep than those with more money. In 2013, for instance, a large CDC survey found that 35.2 percent of people earning below the poverty level reported sleeping less than six hours in an average 24-hour period, compared with 27.7 percent of those earning more than four times the poverty level.

 

The disparities are even sharper among racial groups. A rigorous 2015 study involving both lab tests and self-reports from more than 2,000 US participants found that, compared with whites matched for age and sex, Blacks were five times as likely to sleep for shorter periods. Hispanics and Chinese Americans were roughly two times as likely to get fewer hours of sleep than whites.

 

Several economic, social and physical factors contribute to these differences and their related harm to health, school performance and productivity.

 

Merely living in low-income neighborhoods is a risk factor for poor sleep, for a slew of reasons that include more light and noise pollution and less access to green spaces. “It’s said that your zip code matters as much as your genetic code,” says Troxel, who has gathered evidence demonstrating that where people live affects their health.

 

She and her colleagues compared groups of residents in two low-income neighborhoods in Pittsburgh, only one of which received public investments in housing and green space. They found that even as both groups of residents slept more poorly over time—a natural consequence of aging—those who lived nearer to the neighborhood improvements showed less of a decline.

 

For African Americans, markedly higher rates of sleep apnea sabotage slumber, says Girardin Jean-Louis, a sleep researcher at New York University. One reason for this difference is that non-Hispanic Blacks are 1.3 times as likely to be overweight or obese as non-Hispanic whites, federal data show, and this excess weight can partially close off breathing during sleep. During sleep studies, Jean-Louis and his fellow researchers have seen people waking up as often as 200 times a night—a predicament that can become a cruel trap. Poor sleep can affect people’s metabolism and even the hormones that regulate appetite, leading to further unhealthy weight gain.

 

Stress is an additional impediment to sleep—and socially and financially disadvantaged people, not surprisingly, tend to have more of it. Financial problems, a relative lack of control over one’s life, and systematic racism can all interfere with getting sufficient rest, Troxel says.

 

Blacks, for example, consistently report more job-related stress than whites. On average they are more likely to work in jobs with little sense of control, work at more than one low-wage job at a time and live in poverty even when employed, research shows. In a sad irony, however, even as whites tend to sleep better as they advance in their careers and become more responsible at work, the opposite is true for Blacks. The specific reasons remain unknown, but some researchers cite “ John Henryism”—named after the legendary Black “steel-driving man”—in which Black people overwork to prove they can succeed.

 

As Jean-Louis and other researchers have found, Blacks tend to spend less time than whites in slow-wave sleep, the deep slumber that supports physical and mental health. In a longitudinal study involving home and lab studies of 210 elderly people, including 150 African Americans, Jean-Louis is exploring the degree to which this deficit may contribute to higher rates of heart disease and dementia.

 

Whatever its causes, the sleep divide creates a devastating vicious cycle. Poor sleep makes people less healthy, which in turn may further trouble their sleep. And in yet another malicious feedback loop, poor sleep can contribute to more vehicle accidents and reduced productivity and income. All of which, of course, create more reasons to toss and turn.

Making sleep health a community priority

Some of the reasons for the sleep divide are profound and depressingly familiar, having bedeviled policymakers for decades. There’s frankly little hope that any of the huge issues researchers cite, such as poverty, racial discrimination and environmental injustice, will be solved anytime soon. Still, Troxel and other scientists say the new attention to sleep is a major step forward, guiding them to imagine smaller “socioecological” steps to improve sleep health and its cascade of consequences.

 

“In many cases sleep health is modifiable,” says Rebecca Robbins, a sleep researcher at Harvard Medical School.

 

Troxel, Robbins and Jean-Louis have all been focusing on strategies to do just this. In New York City, Jean-Louis has been recruiting barbers and church leaders as local ambassadors to spread the word about sleep health. “The patients just aren’t coming to the clinic or the hospital,” he says. “We have to go to them.”

 

Jean-Louis has teamed up with Robbins and other researchers to adapt videotaped educational materials about sleep apnea that featured older white men to include narratives from Black people. They’ve installed these videos on iPads that they distribute to local barbershops and churches.

 

Sleep hygiene education is sorely needed, Jean-Louis adds, given the depth of public misunderstanding about common sleep disorders. He says he’s often been dismayed, for instance, to hear people insist that snoring is a healthy sign of deep sleep, when in fact it often signals a problem such as sleep apnea. His usual response is to say, “This is God’s way of saying there’s something wrong.”

 

Changes in laws and regulations could also go far to improve sleep health, according to Jean-Louis and Troxel. Improved local noise ordinances, building codes for reducing light pollution, and more humane schedules for overnight shift work, which is more prevalent among African Americans, could all help reduce the sleep divide.

 

Major national debate has focused on one relatively straightforward change, which scientists contend could help tens of millions of Black, white, rich and poor children and their families sleep better: namely, delaying school start times by as much as an hour. The science is solid. For their physical and mental health, teens need a lot more sleep than they’re getting.

 

Many school districts that have moved back their starting clocks have seen benefits including more alert students, better academic outcomes and fewer car accidents. So far, however, fewer than 20 percent of US middle and high schools have made the change, Troxel notes. (When schools closed for the pandemic, many set their remote schedules later, and some surveys of students suggest that this has allowed students more sleep.)

 

A paradigm shift is implied in all of these sleep strategies. Sleep has traditionally been seen as a purely individual responsibility: Don’t drink coffee at night; keep the room dark; don’t look at your phone in bed, etc., etc. Troxel, Jean-Louis and other scientists argue that we need to widen our perspective to reimagine sleep as a public health opportunity.

 

“We need to think of population-level interventions,” says Troxel, “including policies to ensure that healthy sleep is not merely a luxury for those who can afford it.”

The great sleep divide

US regulators on Friday announced an antitrust settlement with Silicon Valley chip maker Broadcom, accused of abusing its clout in the market for set-top boxes for internet or streaming television services.

Broadcom pressured AT&T, Charter, and Comcast and other service providers into agreements that precluded them from buying chips from its competitors, according to the Federal Trade Commission.

"America has a monopoly problem," FTC Bureau of Competition acting director Holly Vedova said in a release.

"Today's action is a step toward addressing that problem by pushing back against strong-arm tactics by a monopolist in important markets for key broadband components."

A consent order approved by the FTC to settle the complain requires Broadcom to no longer make customers source components exclusively from the company. No monetary penalty was announced.

"While we disagree that our actions violated the law and disagree with the FTC's characterizations of our business, we look forward to putting this matter behind us," Broadcom said in response to an AFP inquiry.

The company based in San Jose, California, said the consent order worked out with US regulators is similar to a settlement announced late last year with the European Commission regarding the same chips.

Executive vice-president Margrethe Vestager at that time said producers of set-top-boxes and internet modems, telecom and cable operators as well as consumers would benefit from increased competition between chipmakers.

"We are pleased to move toward resolving this Broadband matter with the FTC on terms that are substantially similar to our previous settlement with the EC involving the same products," Broadcom said.

"We are equally pleased that the FTC investigation into our other businesses has been closed without action."

Commission chair Lina Khan did not take part in the vote to accept the settlement deal with Broadcom, according to the FTC.

The prominent advocate of breaking up Big Tech firms was sworn in as chair of the FTC agency in June, ramping up the potential for antitrust enforcement.

"Today's complaint reflects the commission's commitment to enforcing the antitrust laws against monopolists, including in high-technology industries," Vedova said.

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The prime minister has finally acknowledged that Australia will eventually have to learn to live with Covid.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has finally outlined a Covid exit plan, which will include the end of lockdowns and travel restrictions for vaccinated Australians — but it’s not clear when.

Perhaps the mix of a road map and uncertainty about the timing of our journey was always inevitable, but I’m still wondering whether the glimmer of a future without lockdowns and travel restrictions is enough to make most Australians want to celebrate or scream.

The costs of where we are now, stuck in phase one, are increasingly clear. Many of us are locked at home lamenting the canceled vacations or the missed weddings and funerals, while businesses have once again been thrown into uncertainty and deeper debt.

What’s worse, the transition plan that suddenly appeared today after weeks of intense public pressure was late on arrival, and it will be slow going for a painfully obvious reason — because vaccination rollout continues to be constrained and slow.

I keep thinking of something Richard Holden, an economist at the University of New South Wales, told me this week while I was reporting on Australia’s relentless pursuit of “Covid zero.”

“The vaccine rollout is 9 to 12 months behind,” he said. “The costs we’re seeing now — if we hadn’t been too slow, we could have avoided all of them.”

That’s what seems to be so frustrating. Even as we follow the daily news conferences and numbers of new Covid cases; even as we call and call again to schedule a vaccination, if we are even eligible, we can’t help but think: It didn’t need to be like this.

With a different bet on a different vaccines a few months ago by the federal government, with more diversification of options, more people would be vaccinated by now and the Delta variant would not be moving as quickly through the population, nor would it be as frightening.

And yet, as any psychologist will tell you, there’s no use looking back at things that cannot be changed. Looking ahead, there is a need for stamina, but also cause for hope.

The good news starts with some current Covid math: Throughout the outbreak of the past few weeks, no more than three people have been in intensive care at a time, and no one has died.

As Professor Stuart Turville, a virologist from the Kirby Institute, told the ABC, the Delta variant is both more contagious and not nearly as deadly.

“Looking at the 28-day follow-up after infection, the death rate for the original variants was 1.9 percent mortality,” he said. “So far, the Delta variant is showing 0.3 percent mortality.”

Over time, there is more room for confidence. Peter Collignon, a physician and microbiology professor at the Australian National University, whom I often talk to about the pandemic, reminded me this week that Australia is better off now than it was a year ago because even though the vaccine rollout has been slow, more than 7 million jabs have already been given.

And the people with the highest rates of vaccination, he noted, are the most vulnerable people — Australians older than 70.

In the next three months, if more vaccine supplies reach Australia as scheduled, the likelihood of death and hospitalization will continue to go down because more people will be protected by vaccines. And then, as the prime minister announced today, everyone will have been offered a vaccine, and life will start to return to some semblance of “normal.” We’ll probably still have to get a Covid test before traveling internationally, but hey, at least we’ll be traveling.

Is it all too slow? Yes. Is that rage-inducing? Absolutely, and even more so if you’ve been paying attention. People like Mr. Collignon and Mr. Holden, for example, warned months ago that this winter would be bad if the vaccine rollout wasn’t up to speed. And they were right.

But at the same time, finally, there is an endpoint in sight — a horizon, as government officials have called it. And so that anger might as well be leavened with longing and hope.

In other words, even though the road out of Covid still feels achingly long, with the prime minister talking hopefully about next year, as if that’s just around the corner, it’s worth remembering that there will be plenty of reasons to feel better along the way.

We are officially and gradually, jab by jab, getting unstuck and less complacent.

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There are plenty of negatives associated with smart technology—tech neck, texting and driving, blue light rays—but there is also a positive: the digital age is not making us stupid, says University of Cincinnati social/behavioral expert Anthony Chemero.

"Despite the headlines, there is no scientific evidence that shows that smartphones and digital technology harm our biological cognitive abilities," says the UC professor of philosophy and psychology who recently co-authored a paper stating such in Nature Human Behaviour.

In the paper, Chemero and colleagues at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management expound on the evolution of the digital age, explaining how smart technology supplements thinking, thus helping us to excel.

"What smartphones and digital technology seem to do instead is to change the ways in which we engage our biological cognitive abilities," Chemero says, adding "these changes are actually cognitively beneficial."

For example, he says, your smart phone knows the way to the baseball stadium so that you don't have to dig out a map or ask for directions, which frees up brain energy to think about something else. The same holds true in a professional setting: "We're not solving complex mathematical problems with pen and paper or memorizing phone numbers in 2021."

Computers, tablets and smart phones, he says, function as an auxiliary, serving as tools which are good at memorization, calculation and storing information and presenting information when you need it.

Additionally, smart technology augments decision making skills that we would be hard pressed to accomplish on our own, says the paper's lead author Lorenzo Cecutti, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Toronto. Using GPS technology on our phones, he says, can not only help us get there, but lets us choose a route based on traffic conditions. "That would be a challenging task when driving round in a new city."

Chemero adds: "You put all this technology) together with a naked human brain and you get something that's smarter...and the result is that we, supplemented by our technology, are actually capable of accomplishing much more complex tasks than we could with our un-supplemented biological abilities."

While there may be other consequences to smart technology, "making us stupid is not one of them," says Chemero.

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For crops, climate change is literally a growing problem.

 

The warming of our planet has increased the odds of drought worsening throughout the world. In the US, it’s threatening soybean, corn, and wheat production, and the future isn’t looking much wetter. So with water in short supply, we might try to plant crops that manage it more efficiently. “A big focus today is breeding for a changing climate,” says Abraham Stroock, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Cornell University. “We want to discover new traits and their genetic origins for resilience in a hot and dry climate of our future—of our today in many parts of the world.”

But first, researchers have to better understand how existing plants manage their water flow. Stroock and his colleagues have developed a nanoscale sensor called AquaDust that uses tiny fluorescent dyes to illuminate how water moves through plant tissue—a minimally invasive way for breeders and biologists to assess crops’ health at the microscopic level. Their work is described in a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in June. 

Water is vital for plants. It keeps cells hydrated and is critical for photosynthesis. But it’s also under tension. Plants work to draw water out of the soil and up into their leaves. Meanwhile, the surrounding atmosphere is pulling that water out through evaporation, especially when the air is hot and dry. The measure of this tension is called “water potential.” Knowing a plant’s water potential matters because it correlates with its growth, yield, and the delicate balance between water loss and carbon dioxide uptake. During a drought, a plant with very negative water potential might dry up and die.

 

Currently, the gold standard for measuring this tension is a tool called the Scholander pressure chamber. It’s about the size and shape of an open lunch box, and it contains a pressure gauge and sample chamber, plus an external tank of pressurized gas. After sealing a leaf in the chamber, the researcher turns up the pressure, which forces the liquid out of the plant to get a reading. But this technology is decades old, it's heavy, and if you want to get a reading across an entire leaf, you have to cut it off and destroy it, says Stroock, a coauthor on the PNAS study and the associate director of the Cornell Institute for Digital Agriculture.

 

So Stroock’s team is taking a different approach, one that keeps the leaves alive.

 

They started by developing nanoparticles they dubbed AquaDust, microscopic sensors made from a hydrogel that expands or contracts in response to changes in water availability. The particles can be mixed into a solution, creating a pinkish liquid.

 

For the current study, the researchers injected the solution into maize leaves, which they chose, in part, because the crop is critical to worldwide food supply. The nanosensors coated the outside of the leaf’s cells, swelling or shrinking based on how much water was available.

 

The dye molecules in AquaDust fluoresce at different wavelengths, depending on their proximity to each other, and these wavelengths can be measured with an instrument called a spectrometer. When water is readily available, the nanoparticles swell, pushing the dyes apart and creating a peak in the green wavelength the dyes emit. When there’s not much water, the nanoparticles shrink, and the dyes move closer together, resulting in a peak in the yellow wavelength. Then the researchers can convert the emission spectrum readings into water potential measurements, all without harming the plant.

 

The technique can be applied to different locations along the leaf to track water flow, says Piyush Jain, a study coauthor and mechanical engineering PhD candidate at Cornell. “What that allows us to do is basically model the water flow through different tissues, starting from the stem to different parts of the leaf,” he says.

 

The researchers focused their AquaDust measurements on the area just beneath the leaf’s surface, where plants carry out important functions like taking in CO2, releasing water vapor into the atmosphere, and packaging sugars created by photosynthesis. To breed crops that manage water better, having a better grasp of the biology and behavior of water at such critical points will be very helpful, the researchers say.

 

Ultimately, the technology might be used in real-world situations, like for workers in fields or greenhouses. It might even be possible to someday spray AquaDust over a field and then use a multispectral camera to quickly measure water potential across hundreds of plants.

 

And while that’s still a far-off development, AquaDust sounds like useful technology, says Irwin Goldman, professor of horticulture at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who wasn’t involved in the study. “Using any sort of remote sensing technology—in this case they’re using nanosensors—is an enormous leap forward,” he says. “My sense of this technology is that it is the future, really.”

 

Breeders have focused on developing drought-resistant crops for some time, says Goldman. “For at least the last 15 years, there’s been a sense in the plant-breeding community that we need to be incorporating selection for greater resilience in our crops as part of our breeding programs, that it’s not enough to just breed higher-yielding or better quality, or for disease resistance,” he says. But, he points out, it will be a long process to identify which plants best defy water loss and which genes are linked to that resiliency, before then pairing them with other desirable traits like good nutrition and flavor. “Once we identify the genes, that’s very helpful, but it doesn’t necessarily get us all the way to the end of the project,” he says. “We still have to find useful combinations.”

 

For now, AquaDust is primarily a research tool, not something that’s ready to be rolled out at scale that farmers or breeders could use to, say, assess 1,000 plants in an hour. For one thing, the injected solution itself contains water, which must evaporate before anyone can take a measurement. “We wait for about a day to get the leaf to come back into its natural state,” says Jain.

 

AquaDust’s application and readout methods would need to be refined before it could be ready for such high-throughput measurements or commercial products. But in the meantime, being able to precisely target the flow of water within plants might help researchers solve some mysteries. One of them, says Stroock, is whether plants ever allow the innermost layers of their leaves, called mesophyll, to dry out. For years, the conventional wisdom was that they avoid it, but indirect measurements by other labs now suggest that it’s a possibility. Being able to test this directly with AquaDust could fundamentally alter our understanding of how plants manage their water and how they handle the stress caused by dry inner tissue, he says.

 

“We believe there are very exciting questions to answer in the lab that take precedence over commercialization,” Stroock says. “Right now, Iowa farmers are not calling us to say, ‘Can we cover our field with AquaDust?’”

 

Those farmers are probably just hoping for rain. But, someday, technology like nanosensors might help them out when those hopes run dry.

Which Crops Can Survive Drought? Nanosensors May Offer Clues

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(HealthDay)—The Delta variant of COVID-19 is upending any return to normalcy in some parts of the United States, with locales like Los Angeles County urging vaccinated folks to once again don masks indoors.

Infectious disease experts said these places are acting with an abundance of appropriate caution, given that the Delta variant is more transmissible and potentially more dangerous.

But the danger to any one individual may rely on his or her vaccination status.

Delta doesn't pose any significant risk of illness to people who are vaccinated, the experts stressed. But there's a chance they could get a "breakthrough infection" and spread it to others, even if their own infection results only in the sniffles or no illness at all, the experts said.

The Delta variant, which originated in India, is 50 to 80 times more transmissible than the original Alpha strain of COVID-19, according to Dr. Tina Tan. She is a professor specializing in pediatric infectious diseases at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, in Chicago.

So, "even if you are vaccinated or if you had COVID in the past, you might still be able to get this particular infection and transmit it, but you yourself might not get that sick from it," Tan said.

As for masks, "we know that masking works," she said.

"It doesn't matter which variant, we know that masking works, especially in an indoor setting. People need to realize the pandemic is not over," Tan said. "They need to still continue to be cautious."

The World Health Organization (WHO) recently reiterated that everyone should wear masks, and countries like Israel have reinstituted mask requirements as infections with the Delta variant increase. Some cities in Australia have initiated fresh lockdowns over the Delta variant, while countries like Malaysia have extended their stay-at-home orders.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced in May that fully vaccinated Americans could forgo masks in most settings, and earlier this week its director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky,, stood by that advice in multiple television appearances.

But Walensky also said that local policymakers need to have a free hand in protecting their communities.

"Those masking policies are not to protect the vaccinated—they are to protect the unvaccinated," Walensky said on NBC's "Today" show, noting that "everybody should consider their own situation if they would feel more comfortable wearing a mask."

The evidence suggests that people vaccinated against COVID-19, particularly if they received the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, will be protected against this new strain, experts said.

"I am not aware of any evidence that fully vaccinated individuals need to wear masks as protection against the Delta variant," said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, in Baltimore. "The data supports the notion that fully vaccinated people, especially those vaccinated with the mRNA vaccines, are highly protected against this variant."

Dr. Vivek Cherian, of the University of Maryland's St. Joseph Medical Center in Baltimore, agreed that "there's a very, very low chance of getting breakthrough infections" from the Delta variant in fully vaccinated people.

"If you do, there's also a very low chance you're going to be symptomatic and almost zero chance of being hospitalized," Cherian said.

But Delta's high level of infectiousness means it poses a greater risk to unvaccinated people, particularly in parts of the United States where vaccination rates have lagged, he added.

Cherian said he's also concerned about the risk to people who are only halfway through their COVID-19 shots.

"Some people have a sense of security when they've only received one of the two doses," he said. "The coverage isn't that great with that. There's still a decent chance you can get infected."

The muddled mask messaging is due in part to the fact that each individual public health agency is playing to a different audience, Cherian said.

"The WHO essentially has to address the entire world. Every country has different rates of vaccination. Even in the United States, every state and every county has different rates of vaccination," Cherian said. "So it's very hard to come out with an overarching recommendation, and if you do come out with one, it's always best to err on the side of caution."

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Every one of the little green and red arrows on the Marine Traffic Live Map is either a cargo ship or tanker. And each one is crewed by a team of individuals who work in an almost invisible industry supporting our 21st century lifestyles.

Manufactured goods such as trainers, TVs and textiles travel from east to west on containerships, whilst oil flows from the US and the Middle East into Asia and beyond.

The International Chamber of Shipping’s (ICS) often-quoted message should not be forgotten: “About 90% of world trade is carried by the international shipping industry. Without shipping, the import/export of affordable food and goods would not be possible – half the world would starve and the other half would freeze!”

It is a sobering thought, and especially poignant today – 25 June – which since 2011 has been set aside to acknowledge how much the global population owes its seafarers.

According to ICS statistics, there are around 1.6 million seafarers that sail on international merchant vessels. For these people, life at sea can be dangerous and lonely. They often spend months on ship, rarely going ashore during their sea time, and away from the friends and family that so many of us take for granted to keep us mentally and emotionally healthy and well.

The pandemic has only put more strain on the industry. In March 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic spread across the world, travel restrictions left hundreds of thousands of seafarers stuck onboard their ships, working way past their contracted dates as they were unable to return to shore for repatriation.

At the time, few states acknowledged seafarers as key workers, making travel extremely difficult, if not impossible. Since then a number of countries have acknowledged their status and more recently, certain states have rolled out vaccination programmes.

Championed by the International Maritime Organization (IMO), in 2020 the Day of the Seafarer campaign was focussed on urging governments to recognise seafarers as key workers and ease travel restrictions to enable crew changes. This year’s campaign follows on from this sentiment, but also calls for a fair future for seafarers during the pandemic and beyond.  

IMO Secretary General Kitack Lim said: “I am especially pleased that IMO will be amplifying the voices of seafarers themselves as they discuss what a fairer future would look like to them under the hashtag #FairFuture4Seafarers.

Seafarers, we are listening – and we will make sure you are heard.”

To hear from the seafarers themselves go to: https://www.imo.org/en/About/Events/Pages/Day-of-the-Seafarer-2021.aspx

UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in his message today: “Seafarers must be recognised as key workers who deliver an essential service, and be given access to transit and travel. Seafarers must also have equitable access to vaccines, as nobody is safe until everyone is safe…We must acknowledge that the future of world trade depends on the people who operate ships. All stakeholders must work together to ensure a fair future for seafarers.”

There are some that believe today’s dedications are empty and take away from the fact that there is not enough action to seek change. Maritime consultant Frank Coles wrote on LinkedIn that “We should be mourning the lack of action not celebrating the weakness of the industry to not take care of its own.”

This may be true, but if Day of the Seafarer does nothing else it will hopefully make this largely invisible industry a little more visible. 

Right now, it has never been more important to put seafarers in the spotlight and showcase how important their work is in the modern world. It is an opportunity to dwell on and renew our respect for an industry that impacts our daily lives, in or out of a pandemic.

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For more than a decade, Joel Moskowitz, a researcher in the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley and director of Berkeley's Center for Family and Community Health, has been on a quest to prove that radiation from cellphones is unsafe. But, he said, most people don't want to hear it.

"People are addicted to their smartphones," said Moskowitz. "We use them for everything now, and, in many ways, we need them to function in our daily lives. I think the idea that they're potentially harming our health is too much for some people."

Since cellphones first came onto the market in 1984, they have gone from clunky devices with bad reception to today's sleek, multifunction smartphones. And although cellphones are now used by nearly all American adults, considerable research suggests that long-term use poses health risks from the radiation they emit, said Moskowitz.

"Cellphones, cell towers and other wireless devices are regulated by most governments," said Moskowitz. "Our government, however, stopped funding research on the health effects of radiofrequency radiation in the 1990s."

Since then, he said, research has shown significant adverse biologic and health effects—including brain cancer—associated with the use of cellphones and other wireless devices. And now, he said, with the fifth generation of cellular technology, known as 5G, there is an even bigger reason for concern.

Berkeley News spoke with Moskowitz about the health risks of cellphone radiation, why the topic is so controversial and what we can expect with the rollout of 5G.

Berkeley News: I first heard you speak about the health risks of cellphone radiation at Berkeley in 2019, but you've been doing this research since 2009. What led you to pursue this research?

Joel Moskowitz: I got into this field by accident, actually. During the past 40 years, the bulk of my research has been focused on tobacco-related disease prevention. I first became interested in cellphone radiation in 2008, when Dr. Seung-Kwon Myung, a physician scientist with the National Cancer Center of South Korea, came to spend a year at the Center for Family and Community Health. He was involved in our smoking cessation projects, and we worked with him and his colleagues on two reviews of the literature, one of which addressed the tumor risk from cellphone use.

At that time, I was skeptical that cellphone radiation could be harmful. However, since I was dubious that cellphone radiation could cause cancer, I immersed myself in the literature regarding the biological effects of low-intensity microwave radiation, emitted by cellphones and other wireless devices.

After reading many animal toxicology studies that found that this radiation could increase oxidative stress—free radicals, stress proteins and DNA damage—I became increasingly convinced that what we were observing in our review of human studies was indeed a real risk.

While Myung and his colleagues were visiting the Center for Family and Community Health, you reviewed case-control studies examining the association between mobile phone use and tumor risk. What did you find?

Our 2009 review, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, found that heavy cellphone use was associated with increased brain cancer incidence, especially in studies that used higher quality methods and studies that had no telecommunications industry funding.

Last year, we updated our review, published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, based on a meta-analysis of 46 case-control studies—twice as many studies as we used for our 2009 review—and obtained similar findings. Our main takeaway from the current review is that approximately 1,000 hours of lifetime cellphone use, or about 17 minutes per day over a 10-year period, is associated with a statistically significant 60% increase in brain cancer.

One thing I think we should address upfront is how controversial this research is. Some scientists have said that these findings are without basis and that there isn't enough evidence that cellphone radiation is harmful to our health. How do you respond to that?

Well, first of all, few scientists in this country can speak knowledgeably about the health effects of wireless technology. So, I'm not surprised that people are skeptical, but that doesn't mean the findings aren't valid.

A big reason there isn't more research about the health risks of radiofrequency radiation exposure is because the U.S. government stopped funding this research in the 1990s, with the exception of a $30 million rodent study published in 2018 by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences' National Toxicology Program, which found "clear evidence" of carcinogenicity from cellphone radiation.

In 1996, the Federal Communications Commission, or FCC, adopted exposure guidelines that limited the intensity of exposure to radiofrequency radiation. These guidelines were designed to prevent significant heating of tissue from short-term exposure to radiofrequency radiation, not to protect us from the effects of long-term exposure to low levels of modulated, or pulsed, radiofrequency radiation, which is produced by cellphones, cordless phones and other wireless devices, including Wi-Fi. Yet, the preponderance of research published since 1990 finds adverse biologic and health effects from long-term exposure to radiofrequency radiation, including DNA damage.

More than 250 scientists, who have published over 2,000 papers and letters in professional journals on the biologic and health effects of non-ionizing electromagnetic fields produced by wireless devices, including cellphones, have signed the International EMF Scientist Appeal, which calls for health warnings and stronger exposure limits. So, there are many scientists who agree that this radiation is harmful to our health.

Why did the government stop funding this kind of research?

The telecommunications industry has almost complete control of the FCC, according to Captured Agency, a monograph written by journalist Norm Alster during his 2014-15 fellowship at Harvard University's Center for Ethics. There's a revolving door between the membership of the FCC and high-level people within the telecom industry that's been going on for a couple of decades now.

The industry spends about $100 million a year lobbying Congress. The CTIA, which is the major telecom lobbying group, spends $12.5 million per year on 70 lobbyists. According to one of their spokespersons, lobbyists meet roughly 500 times a year with the FCC to lobby on various issues. The industry as a whole spends $132 million a year on lobbying and provides $18 million in political contributions to members of Congress and others at the federal level.

It reminds me of when the U.S. Surgeon General released a landmark report in 1964 that linked cigarettes with dangerous health effects, including cancer and heart disease. Even though the 10-person committee consulted more than 7,000 articles already available in biomedical literature, the report's findings were very controversial when they came out.

Yes, there are strong parallels between what the telecom industry has done and what the tobacco industry has done, in terms of marketing and controlling messaging to the public. In the 1940s, tobacco companies hired doctors and dentists to endorse their products to reduce public health concerns about smoking risks. The CTIA currently uses a nuclear physicist from academia to assure policymakers that microwave radiation is safe. The telecom industry not only uses the tobacco industry playbook, it is more economically and politically powerful than Big Tobacco ever was. This year, the telecom industry will spend over $18 billion advertising cellular technology worldwide.

You mentioned that cellphones and other wireless devices use modulated, or pulsed, radiofrequency radiation. Can you explain how cellphones and other wireless devices work, and how the radiation they emit is different from radiation from other household appliances, like a microwave?

Basically, when you make a call, you've got a radio and a transmitter. It transmits a signal to the nearest cell tower. Each cell tower has a geographic cell, so to speak, in which it can communicate with cellphones within that geographic region or cell.

Then, that cell tower communicates with a switching station, which then searches for whom you're trying to call, and it connects through a copper cable or fiber optics or, in many cases, a wireless connection through microwave radiation with the wireless access point. Then, that access point either communicates directly through copper wires through a landline or, if you're calling another cellphone, it will send a signal to a cell tower within the cell of the receiver and so forth.

The difference is the kind of microwave radiation each device emits. With regard to cellphones and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, there is an information-gathering component. The waves are modulated and pulsed in a very different manner than your microwave oven.

What, specifically, are some of the health effects associated with long-term exposure to low-level modulated radiofrequency radiation emitted from wireless devices?

Many biologists and electromagnetic field scientists believe the modulation of wireless devices makes the energy more biologically active, which interferes with our cellular mechanisms, opening up calcium channels, for example, and allowing calcium to flow into the cell and into the mitochondria within the cell, interfering with our natural cellular processes and leading to the creation of stress proteins and free radicals and, possibly, DNA damage. And, in other cases, it may lead to cell death.

In 2001, based upon the biologic and human epidemiologic research, low-frequency fields were classified as "possibly carcinogenic" by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) of the World Health Organization. In 2011, the IARC classified radiofrequency radiation as "possibly carcinogenic to humans," based upon studies of cellphone radiation and brain tumor risk in humans. Currently, we have considerably more evidence that would warrant a stronger classification.

Most recently, on March 1, 2021, a report was released by the former director of the National Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which concluded that there is a "high probability" that radiofrequency radiation emitted by cellphones causes gliomas and acoustic neuromas, two types of brain tumors.

Let's talk about the fifth generation of cellphone technology, known as 5G, which is already available in limited areas across the U.S. What does this mean for cellphone users and what changes will come with it?

For the first time, in addition to microwaves, this technology will employ millimeter waves, which are much higher frequency than the microwaves used by 3G and 4G. Millimeter waves can't travel very far, and they're blocked by fog or rain, trees and building materials, so the industry estimates that it'll need 800,000 new cell antenna sites.

Each of these sites may have cell antennas from various cellphone providers, and each of these antennas may have microarrays consisting of dozens or even perhaps hundreds of little antennas. In the next few years in the U.S., we will see deployed roughly 2.5 times more antenna sites than in current use unless wireless safety advocates and their representatives in Congress or the judicial system put a halt to this.

How are millimeter waves different from microwaves, in terms of how they affect our bodies and the environment?

Millimeter wave radiation is largely absorbed in the skin, the sweat glands, the peripheral nerves, the eyes and the testes, based upon the body of research that's been done on millimeter waves. In addition, this radiation may cause hypersensitivity and biochemical alterations in the immune and circulatory systems—the heart, the liver, kidneys and brain.

Millimeter waves can also harm insects and promote the growth of drug-resistant pathogens, so it's likely to have some widespread environmental effects for the microenvironments around these cell antenna sites.

What are some simple things that each of us can do to reduce the risk of harm from radiation from cellphones and other wireless devices?

First, minimize your use of cellphones or cordless phones—use a landline whenever possible. If you do use a cellphone, turn off the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth if you're not using them. However, when near a Wi-Fi router, you would be better off using your cellphone on Wi-Fi and turning off the cellular because this will likely result in less radiation exposure than using the cellular network.

Second, distance is your friend. Keeping your cellphone 10 inches away from your body, as compared to one-tenth of an inch, results in a 10,000-fold reduction in exposure. So, keep your phone away from your head and body. Store your phone in a purse or backpack. If you have to put it in your pocket, put it on airplane mode. Text, use wired headphones or speakerphone for calls. Don't sleep with it next to your head—turn it off or put it in another room.

Third, use your phone only when the signal is strong. Cellphones are programmed to increase radiation when the signal is poor, that is when one or two bars are displayed on your phone. For example, don't use your phone in an elevator or in a car, as metal structures interfere with the signal.

Also, I encourage people to learn more about the 150-plus local groups affiliated with Americans for Responsible Technology, which are working to educate policymakers, urging them to adopt cell tower regulations and exposure limits that fully protect us and the environment from the harm caused by wireless radiation.

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A new University of Kentucky College of Medicine study suggests that time-restricted eating may be able to help people with Type 2 diabetes reduce nocturnal hypertension, which is characterized by elevated blood pressure at night.

The study published in PNAS June 22 found that time-restricted eating, a routine in which eating is restricted to a specific window of time during each day, helped prevent and improve diabetes-related nocturnal hypertension in mice.

Study authors Ming Gong, Ph.D., M.D., professor in the Department of Physiology, and Zhenheng Guo, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Nutritional Sciences, are hopeful their findings will mean time-restricted eating could offer similar benefits for people.

"We are excited about these findings and the implications they could have in future clinical studies," said Guo. "In addition to lifestyle changes like diet and exercise, time-restricted eating could have a healthy impact on people with Type 2 diabetes."

Normally, blood pressure falls at night and increases upon awakening, in line with the body's circadian rhythm. In some hypertensive patients, the typical nighttime decrease does not occur. This "nondipping" blood pressure is prevalent in patients with Type 2 diabetes and is associated with increased events of cardiovascular disease.

The study found that imposing time-restricted feeding prevented diabetic mice from developing nondipping blood pressure. The practice also effectively restored the disrupted blood pressure circadian rhythm in mice that already had nondipping blood pressure.

Researchers restricted the mice's access to food to eight hours during their typical active awake times every day. When food availability was increased to 12 hours, the practice was still effective in preventing and treating nondipping blood pressure. Guo says this is evidence that the effects were caused by the timing of feeding and not calorie restriction.

In addition to the study's significance for future clinical research in people, Gong says it's adding to scientists' understanding of the causes and mechanisms of nondipping blood pressure in diabetes, which is currently not fully understood.

"There are already many studies that show the health benefits of time-restricted eating, particularly for metabolic issues," Gong said. "This is the first basic science research focused on how it impacts nondipping blood pressure related to diabetes and it reveals that the daily timing of food intake could play a critical role."

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Near-death experiences are known from all parts of the world, various times and numerous cultural backgrounds. This universality suggests they may have a biological origin and purpose, but exactly what this could be has been largely unexplored.

A new study conducted jointly by the University of Copenhagen (Denmark) and the University of Liege (Belgium) and published in Brain Communications shows how near-death experiences in humans may have arisen from evolutionary mechanisms.

"Adhering to a preregistered protocol, we investigated the hypothesis that thanatosis is the evolutionary origin of near-death experiences," says Daniel Kondziella, a neurologist from Rigshospitalet, Copenhagen University Hospital.

When attacked by a predator, as a last resort defense mechanism, animals can feign death to improve their chances of survival, one example being the opossum. This phenomenon is termed thanatosis, also known as death-feigning or tonic immobility. "As a survival strategy," Kondziella adds, "thanatosis is probably as old as the fight-or-flight response."

Charlotte Martial, neuropsychologist from the Coma Science Group at ULiège explains: "We first show that thanatosis is a highly preserved survival strategy occurring at all major nodes in a cladogram ranging from insects to fish, reptiles, birds and mammals, including humans. We then show that humans under attack by big animals such as lions or grizzly bears, human predators such as sexual offenders, and 'modern' predators such as cars in traffic accidents can experience both thanatosis and near-death experiences. Furthermore, we show that the phenomenology and the effects of thanatosis and near-death experiences overlap."

Steven Laureys, neurologist and head of GIGA Consciousness research unit and Centre du Cerveau (ULiège, CHU Liège) is excited: "In this paper, we build a line of evidence suggesting that thanatosis is the evolutionary foundation of near-death experiences and that their shared biological purpose is the benefit of survival."

The authors propose that the acquisition of language enabled humans to transform these events from relatively stereotyped death-feigning under predatory attacks into the rich perceptions that form near-death experiences and extend to non-predatory situations.

"Of note, the proposed cerebral mechanisms behind death-feigning are not unlike those that have been suggested to induce near-death experiences, including intrusion of rapid eye movement sleep into wakefulness," Kondziella explains.

"This further strengthens the idea that evolutionary mechanisms are an important piece of information needed to develop a complete biological framework for near-death experiences."

No previous work has tried to provide such a phylogenetic basis. Laureys concludes that "this may also be the first time we can assign a biological purpose to near-death experiences, which would be the benefit of survival."

Kondziella adds that "after all, near-death experiences are by definition events that are always survived, without exception."

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More than 80 percent of people around the world consider themselves to be religious or spiritual. But research on the neuroscience of spirituality and religiosity has been sparse. Previous studies have used functional neuroimaging, in which an individual undergoes a brain scan while performing a task to see what areas of the brain light up. But these correlative studies have given a spotty and often inconsistent picture of spirituality.

A new study led by investigators at Brigham and Women's Hospital takes a new approach to mapping spirituality and religiosity and finds that spiritual acceptance can be localized to a specific brain circuit. This brain circuit is centered in the periaqueductal gray (PAG), a brainstem region that has been implicated in numerous functions, including fear conditioning, pain modulation, altruistic behaviors and unconditional love. The team's findings are published in Biological Psychiatry.

"Our results suggest that spirituality and religiosity are rooted in fundamental, neurobiological dynamics and deeply woven into our neuro-fabric," said corresponding author Michael Ferguson, Ph.D., a principal investigator in the Brigham's Center for Brain Circuit Therapeutics. "We were astonished to find that this brain circuit for spirituality is centered in one of the most evolutionarily preserved structures in the brain."

To conduct their study, Ferguson and colleagues used a technique called lesion network mapping that allows investigators to map complex human behaviors to specific brain circuits based on the locations of brain lesions in patients. The team leveraged a previously published dataset that included 88 neurosurgical patients who were undergoing surgery to remove a brain tumor. Lesion locations were distributed throughout the brain. Patients completed a survey that included questions about spiritual acceptance before and after surgery. The team validated their results using a second dataset made up of more than 100 patients with lesions caused by penetrating head trauma from combat during the Vietnam War. These participants also completed questionnaires that included questions about religiosity, such as, "Do you consider yourself a religious person? Yes or No?".

Of the 88 neurosurgical patients, 30 showed a decrease in self-reported spiritual belief before and after neurosurgical brain tumor resection, 29 showed an increase, and 29 showed no change. Using lesion network mapping, the team found that self-reported spirituality mapped to a specific brain circuit centered on the PAG. The circuit included positive nodes and negative nodes—lesions that disrupted these respective nodes either decreased or increased self-reported spiritual beliefs.

Results on religiosity from the second dataset aligned with these findings. In addition, in a review of the literature, the researchers found several case reports of patients who became hyper-religious after experiencing brain lesions that affected the negative nodes of the circuit.

Lesion locations associated with other neurological and psychiatric symptoms also intersected with the spirituality circuit.

Specifically, lesions causing Parkinsonism intersected positive areas of the circuit, as did lesions associated with decreased spirituality. Lesions causing delusions and alien limb syndrome intersected with negative regions, associated with increased spirituality and religiosity.

"It's important to note that these overlaps may be helpful for understanding shared features and associations, but these results should not be over-interpreted," said Ferguson. "For example, our results do not imply that religion is a delusion, that historical religious figures suffered from alien limb syndrome, or that Parkinson's disease arises due to a lack of religious faith. Instead, our results point to the deep roots of spiritual beliefs in a part of our brain that's been implicated in many important functions."

The authors note that the datasets they used do not provide rich information about the patient's upbringing, which can have an influence over spiritual beliefs, and that patients in both datasets were from predominantly Christian cultures. To understand the generalizability of their results, they would need to replicate their study across many backgrounds. The team is also interested in untangling religiosity and spirituality to understand brain circuits that may be driving differences. Additionally, Ferguson would like to pursue clinical and translational applications for the findings, including understanding the role that spirituality and compassion may have in clinical treatment.

"Only recently have medicine and spirituality been fractionated from one another. There seems to be this perennial union between healing and spirituality across cultures and civilizations," said Ferguson. "I'm interested in the degree to which our understanding of brain circuits could help craft scientifically grounded, clinically-translatable questions about how healing and spirituality can co-inform each other."

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NASA still trying to identify what took Hubble offline

Space agency needs to know exactly what's wrong in order to switch to backup hardware.

NASA still trying to identify what took Hubble offline

The global cryosphere—all of the areas with frozen water on Earth—shrank by about 87,000 square kilometers (about 33,000 square miles, an area about the size of Lake Superior) per year on average between 1979 and 2016, as a result of climate change, according to a new study. This research is the first to make a global estimate of the surface area of the Earth covered by sea ice, snow cover and frozen ground.

The extent of land covered by frozen water is just as important as its mass because the bright white surface reflects sunlight so effectively, cooling the planet. Changes in the size or location of ice and snow can alter air temperatures, change the sea level and even affect ocean currents worldwide.

The new study is published in Earth's Future, AGU's journal for interdisciplinary research on the past, present and future of our planet and its inhabitants.

"The cryosphere is one of the most sensitive climate indicators and the first one to demonstrate a changing world," said first author Xiaoqing Peng, a physical geographer at Lanzhou University. "Its change in size represents a major global change, rather than a regional or local issue."

The cryosphere holds almost three-quarters of Earth's fresh water, and in some mountainous regions, dwindling glaciers threaten drinking water supplies. Many scientists have documented shrinking ice sheets, dwindling snow cover and loss of Arctic sea ice individually due to climate change. But no previous study has considered the entire extent of the cryosphere over Earth's surface and its response to warming temperatures.

The percentage of each area that experiences ice, snow or frozen ground at some point during the year (1981–2010). Credit: Peng et al. (2021) Earth’s Future https://doi.org/10.1029/2020EF001969

Contraction in space and time

Peng and his co-authors from Lanzhou University calculated the daily extent of the cryosphere and averaged those values to come up with yearly estimates. While the extent of the cryosphere grows and shrinks with the seasons, they found that the average area covered by Earth's cryosphere has contracted overall since 1979, correlating with rising air temperatures.

The shrinkage primarily occurred in the Northern Hemisphere, with a loss of about 102,000 square kilometers (about 39,300 square miles), or about half the size of Kansas, each year. Those losses are offset slightly by growth in the Southern Hemisphere, where the cryosphere expanded by about 14,000 square kilometers (5,400 square miles) annually. This growth mainly occurred in the sea ice in the Ross Sea around Antarctica, likely due to patterns of wind and ocean currents and the addition of cold meltwater from Antarctic ice sheets.

The estimates showed that not only was the global cryosphere shrinking but that many regions remained frozen for less time. The average first day of freezing now occurs about 3.6 days later than in 1979, and the ice thaws about 5.7 days earlier.

"This kind of analysis is a nice idea for a global index or indicator of climate change," said Shawn Marshall, a glaciologist at the University of Calgary, who was not involved in the study. He thinks that a natural next step would be to use these data to examine when ice and snow cover give Earth its peak brightness, to see how changes in albedo impact the climate on a seasonal or monthly basis and how this is changing over time.

To compile their global estimate of the extent of the cryosphere, the authors divided up the planet's surface into a grid system. They used existing data sets of global sea ice extent, snow cover and frozen soil to classify each cell in the grid as part of the cryosphere if it contained at least one of the three components. Then they estimated the extent of the cryosphere on a daily, monthly and yearly basis and examined how it changed over the 37 years of their study.

The authors say that the global dataset can now be used to further probe the impact of climate change on the cryosphere, and how these changes impact ecosystems, carbon exchange and the timing of plant and animal life cycles.

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The United Nations on Thursday recognised a new record high temperature for the Antarctic continent, confirming a reading of 18.3 degrees Celsius (64.9 degrees Fahrenheit) made last year.

The record heat was reached at Argentina's Esperanza research station on the Antarctic Peninsula on February 6, 2020, the UN's World Meteorological Organization said.

"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," said WMO secretary-general Petteri Taalas.

"The Antarctic Peninsula is among the fastest-warming regions of the planet—almost 3C over the last 50 years.

"This new temperature record is therefore consistent with the climate change we are observing."

The WMO rejected an even higher temperature reading of 20.75C (69.4F), reported on February 9 last year at a Brazilian automated permafrost monitoring station on the nearby Seymour Island, just off the peninsula which stretches north towards South America.

The previous verified record for the Antarctic continent—the mainland and its surrounding islands—was 17.5C (63.5F) recorded at Esperanza on March 24, 2015.

The record for the wider Antarctic region—everywhere south of 60 degrees latitude—is 19.8C (67.6F), taken on Signy Island on January 30, 1982.

Verification process

In checking the two reported new temperature records, a WMO committee reviewed the weather situation on the peninsula at the time.

It found that a large high-pressure system created downslope winds producing significant local surface warming.

Past evaluations have shown that such conditions are conducive for producing record temperatures, the WMO said.

The World Meteorological Organization confirmed a record high temperature for Antarctica at the Esperanza Base on February 6, 2020.

The experts looked at the instrumental set-ups and the data, finding no concerns at Esperanza.

However, an improvised radiation shield at the Brazilian station on Seymour Island led to a demonstrable thermal bias error for the permafrost monitor's air temperature sensor, making its reading ineligible to be signed off as an official WMO weather observation.

The new record at Esperanza will be added to the WMO's archive of weather and climate extremes.

The archive includes the world's highest and lowest temperatures, rainfall, heaviest hailstone, longest dry period, maximum gust of wind, longest lightning flash and weather-related mortalities.

The lowest temperature ever recorded on Earth was minus 89.2C (minus 128.6F) recorded at Vostok station in Antarctica on July 21, 1983.

Global warming concerns

Antarctica's average annual temperature ranges from about minus 10C (14F) on the coast to minus 60C (minus 76F) at the highest parts of the interior.

"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," said Taalas.

The Earth's average surface temperature has gone up by 1C since the 19th century, enough to increase the intensity of droughts, heat waves and tropical cyclones.

But the air over Antarctica has warmed more than twice that much.

Recent research has shown that warming of two degrees Celsius could push the melting of ice sheets atop Greenland and the West Antarctic—with enough frozen water to lift oceans 13 metres (43 feet)—past a point of no return.

"This new record shows once again that climate change requires urgent measures," said WMO first vice president Celeste Saulo, the head of Argentina's national weather service.

"It is essential to continue strengthening the observing, forecasting and early warning systems to respond to the extreme events that take place more and more often due to global warming."

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The sky isn't falling, but scientists have found that parts of the upper atmosphere are gradually contracting in response to rising human-made greenhouse gas emissions.

Combined data from three NASA satellites have produced a long-term record that reveals the mesosphere, the layer of the atmosphere 30 to 50 miles above the surface, is cooling and contracting. Scientists have long predicted this effect of human-driven climate change, but it has been difficult to observe the trends over time.

"You need several decades to get a handle on these trends and isolate what's happening due to greenhouse gas emissions, solar cycle changes, and other effects," said Scott Bailey, an atmospheric scientist at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, and lead of the study, published in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics. "We had to put together three satellites' worth of data."

Together, the satellites provided about 30 years of observations, indicating that the summer mesosphere over Earth's poles is cooling four to five degrees Fahrenheit and contracting 500 to 650 feet per decade. Without changes in human carbon dioxide emissions, the researchers expect these rates to continue.

Since the mesosphere is much thinner than the part of the atmosphere we live in, the impacts of increasing greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, differ from the warming we experience at the surface. One researcher compared where we live, the troposphere, to a thick quilt.

"Down near Earth's surface, the atmosphere is thick," said James Russell, a study co-author and atmospheric scientist at Hampton University in Virginia. "Carbon dioxide traps heat just like a quilt traps your body heat and keeps you warm." In the lower atmosphere, there are plenty of molecules in close proximity, and they easily trap and transfer Earth's heat between each other, maintaining that quilt-like warmth.

That means little of Earth's heat makes it to the higher, thinner mesosphere. There, molecules are few and far between. Since carbon dioxide also efficiently emits heat, any heat captured by carbon dioxide sooner escapes to space than it finds another molecule to absorb it. As a result, an increase in greenhouses gases like carbon dioxide means more heat is lost to space—and the upper atmosphere cools. When air cools, it contracts, the same way a balloon shrinks if you put it in the freezer.

This cooling and contracting didn't come as a surprise. For years, "models have been showing this effect," said Brentha Thurairajah, a Virginia Tech atmospheric scientist who contributed to the study. "It would have been weirder if our analysis of the data didn't show this."

While previous studies have observed this cooling, none have used a data record of this length or shown the upper atmosphere contracting. The researchers say these new results boost their confidence in our ability to model the upper atmosphere's complicated changes.

< Watch the video of the images at the source page. >

These AIM images span June 6-June 18, 2021, when the Northern Hemisphere noctilucent cloud season was well underway. The colors — from dark blue to light blue and bright white — indicate the clouds’ albedo, which refers to the amount of light that a surface reflects compared to the total sunlight that falls upon it. Things that have a high albedo are bright and reflect a lot of light. Things that don’t reflect much light have a low albedo, and they are dark. Credit: NASA/HU/VT/CU-LASP/AIM/Joy Ng

The team analyzed how temperature and pressure changed over 29 years, using all three data sets, which covered the summer skies of the North and South Poles. They examined the stretch of sky 30 to 60 miles above the surface. At most altitudes, the mesosphere cooled as carbon dioxide increased. That effect meant the height of any given atmospheric pressure fell as the air cooled. In other words, the mesosphere was contracting.

Earth's Middle Atmosphere

Though what happens in the mesosphere does not directly impact humans, the region is an important one. The upper boundary of the mesosphere, about 50 miles above Earth, is where the coolest atmospheric temperatures are found. It's also where the neutral atmosphere begins transitioning to the tenuous, electrically charged gases of the ionosphere.

Even higher up, 150 miles above the surface, atmospheric gases cause satellite drag, the friction that tugs satellites out of orbit. Satellite drag also helps clear space junk. When the mesosphere contracts, the rest of the upper atmosphere above sinks with it. As the atmosphere contracts, satellite drag may wane—interfering less with operating satellites, but also leaving more space junk in low-Earth orbit.

The mesosphere is also known for its brilliant blue ice clouds. They're called noctilucent or polar mesospheric clouds, so named because they live in the mesosphere and tend to huddle around the North and South Poles. The clouds form in summer, when the mesosphere has all three ingredients to produce the clouds: water vapor, very cold temperatures, and dust from meteors that burn up in this part of the atmosphere. Noctilucent clouds were spotted over northern Canada on May 20, kicking off the start of the Northern Hemisphere's noctilucent cloud season.

Because the clouds are sensitive to temperature and water vapor, they're a useful signal of change in the mesosphere. "We understand the physics of these clouds," Bailey said. In recent decades, the clouds have drawn scientists' attention because they're behaving oddly. They're getting brighter, drifting farther from the poles, and appearing earlier than usual. And, there seem to be more of them than in years past.

"The only way you would expect them to change this way is if the temperature is getting colder and water vapor is increasing," Russell said. Colder temperatures and abundant water vapor are both linked with climate change in the upper atmosphere.

Currently, Russell serves as principal investigator for AIM, short for Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere, the newest satellite of the three that contributed data to the study. Russell has served as a leader on all three NASA missions: AIM, the instrument SABER on TIMED (Thermosphere, Ionosphere, Mesosphere Energetics and Dynamics), and the instrument HALOE on the since-retired UARS (Upper Atmospherics Research Satellite).

TIMED and AIM launched in 2001 and 2007, respectively, and both are still operating. The UARS mission ran from 1991 to 2005. "I always had in my mind that we would be able to put them together in a long-term change study," Russell said. The study, he said, demonstrates the importance of long-term, space-based observations across the globe.

In the future, the researchers expect more striking displays of noctilucent clouds that stray farther from the poles. Because this analysis focused on the poles at summertime, Bailey said he plans to examine these effects over longer periods of time and—following the clouds—study a wider stretch of the atmosphere.

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As we emerge from the pandemic, we're starting to see the return of an age-old ritual: the handshake.

Many of us went a year or more without clasping someone else's hands. But as vaccination rates go up and social distancing restrictions fall, we're starting to press the flesh again.

"I am shaking people's hands when they offer it to me," said Sheila Nezhad, a candidate for mayor of Minneapolis. Nezhad, who recently started in-person campaigning, has been exchanging fist bumps, elbow bumps and the traditional grip-and-grin, even though it was little disorienting at first to put 'er there.

"It kind of felt like getting back on the bike after having not ridden one for a while," she said.

Not everyone is happy that the handshake is making its way back. Though it's a deeply ingrained way of expressing friendship and respect, some medical experts wish it were gone for good.

"I don't think we should ever shake hands again, to be honest with you," said White House health adviser Anthony Fauci back in April 2020. "Not only would it be good to prevent coronavirus disease, it probably would decrease instances of influenza dramatically in this country."

"It's never been safe," said Dr. Gregory Poland, a Mayo Clinic physician and professor specializing in infectious diseases and vaccines.

Handshaking carries the risk of transmitting a host of undesirable conditions, including norovirus, food poisoning and "hand-borne transmission of fecal bacteria," Poland said.

"We're not talking about a minor issue," he said. "Would you lick someone's hand?"

Handshaking may have started as an ancient custom to demonstrate to a stranger that you had no weapon in your hand. But "you are, in fact, bearing at some level, a bioweapon" on your unwashed hand, Poland said.

"I'm not going to shake hands," said Dr. Mark Sklansky, a professor and pediatric cardiologist at UCLA. "I think it's really a bad habit."

Sklansky campaigned against disease-spreading handshakes before COVID-19, writing articles like "Banning the Handshake From the Health Care Setting," published by JAMA in 2014.

More recently he's been writing songs for music videos, urging people not to shake on it. (Sample lyric: "Dear kindhearted friend, I know you mean well extending your hand when we meet. But let me be open. Please listen to me. I'd prefer not to shake when we greet.")

We all seemed to agree to put a pause on handshaking during COVID-19.

"It's unfortunate that we needed a pandemic to shake some sense into people on how disease is transmitted," said Sklansky, who's worried that the opportunity to kill the handshake is slipping through our fingers.

Recently, he's been at social gatherings where "sure enough, people reach out to shake my hand." (He won't.)

Even if there weren't a pandemic or colds or stomach flu to worry about, handshakes also carry the risk of a social gaffe.

Guides to giving a proper handshake make the maneuver sound as hard as mastering your golf stroke. Your grip should be firm. But not too firm. Don't swing your hand too vigorously. Don't offer a sweaty hand. No more than three pumps.

Get it wrong, and you could end up like Vice President Kamala Harris, who got grief for appearing to wipe her hand after shaking hands with South Korean President Moon Jae-in at the White House last month.

So much can go wrong with a handshake. You have to wonder why we bother.

Clasping or shaking hands as a symbol of friendship, trust and hospitality was practiced by Babylonian kings and ancient Romans and promoted by 18th-century Quakers as a more egalitarian greeting than bowing.

It's become an international ritual of agreement, respect and congratulations in modern business, politics and sports.

"A handshake has always been our personal olive branch," said Maralee McKee, founder of the Orlando-based Etiquette School of America.

While it's clearly culturally ingrained, David Givens, an anthropologist and director of the Center for Nonverbal Studies in Spokane, Wash., said our desire to shake on it may go deeper than protocol.

Our fellow primates—chimpanzees and gorillas—also reach out and touch their companions' palms and fingertips. The surface of the hand is rich with nerve endings, making it "an information-gathering organ," Givens said.

The handshake is literally the personal touch, formal and intimate at the same time.

Scientists studying "social chemosignaling" are trying to determine if shaking hands is one way in which we send subliminal chemical signals to each other, signals that help shape our behavior.

But right now, we are in a socially awkward time of handshake uncertainty, when some people are comfortable shaking hands and some are not.

"It's about 50-50, maybe 55-45, with 55 being for handshaking," McKee said.

In other words, you have to be on your toes socially to avoid making someone uncomfortable by offering a handshake or offending someone by refusing to accept one.

St. Paul-based etiquette expert Juliet Mitchell said that while the pandemic "didn't kill the handshake, we've got to acknowledge not everything is back to business as usual."

If you're not comfortable accepting an offered handshake, McKee and Mitchell advise being ready to respond with a polite deferral.

Instead of recoiling, keep your hands to your side, maintain eye contact, smile, nod or slightly bow while saying something gracious like, "I'm currently not shaking hands, but it's so very nice to meet you."

Then just move on, and don't over-apologize, Mitchell said.

If you want, you can offer an alternative gesture of greeting, which could range from a fist bump, an elbow bump, a namaste gesture or the wai gesture of Thailand. Movie fans could consider a Wakanda forever salute or a Vulcan "live long and prosper" greeting.

McKee advocates what she calls the social distance greeting, which involves placing the palm of your right hand on your chest slightly above your heart with your fingertips touching your collar bone while smiling and looking the other person in the eye.

These hands-free alternatives are almost certainly likely to be more hygienic than the traditional handshake. Experiments have shown that handshakes transfer more bacteria than fist bumps or even high-fives, and that the longer and firmer the handshake, the more bugs are exchanged.

Sklansky is convinced that even long-held cultural norms can change over time if we realize how unhealthy they are. (He points out that smoking used to be a common practice among doctors.)

"It's not an easy task" to stop handshaking, he said. "But I'm not going to give up."

For his part, Givens said that in the future, we may find polite ways to apply Purell after meeting someone, but he's confident we'll keep shaking hands.

"A lot of people are saying 'good riddance.' But I don't think it's going to completely die out," he said.

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Study offers evidence, based on gravitational waves, to show that the total area of a black hole’s event horizon can never decrease.

There are certain rules that even the most extreme objects in the universe must obey. A central law for black holes predicts that the area of their event horizons — the boundary beyond which nothing can ever escape — should never shrink. This law is Hawking’s area theorem, named after physicist Stephen Hawking, who derived the theorem in 1971.

Fifty years later, physicists at MIT and elsewhere have now confirmed Hawking’s area theorem for the first time, using observations of gravitational waves. Their results appear today in Physical Review Letters.

In the study, the researchers take a closer look at GW150914, the first gravitational wave signal detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), in 2015. The signal was a product of two inspiraling black holes that generated a new black hole, along with a huge amount of energy that rippled across space-time as gravitational waves.

If Hawking’s area theorem holds, then the horizon area of the new black hole should not be smaller than the total horizon area of its parent black holes. In the new study, the physicists reanalyzed the signal from GW150914 before and after the cosmic collision and found that indeed, the total event horizon area did not decrease after the merger — a result that they report with 95 percent confidence.

Their findings mark the first direct observational confirmation of Hawking’s area theorem, which has been proven mathematically but never observed in nature until now. The team plans to test future gravitational-wave signals to see if they might further confirm Hawking’s theorem or be a sign of new, law-bending physics.

“It is possible that there’s a zoo of different compact objects, and while some of them are the black holes that follow Einstein and Hawking’s laws, others may be slightly different beasts,” says lead author Maximiliano Isi, a NASA Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. “So, it’s not like you do this test once and it’s over. You do this once, and it’s the beginning.”

Isi’s co-authors on the paper are Will Farr of Stony Brook University and the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics, Matthew Giesler of Cornell University, Mark Scheel of Caltech, and Saul Teukolsky of Cornell University and Caltech.

An age of insights

In 1971, Stephen Hawking proposed the area theorem, which set off a series of fundamental insights about black hole mechanics. The theorem predicts that the total area of a black hole’s event horizon — and all black holes in the universe, for that matter — should never decrease. The statement was a curious parallel of the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy, or degree of disorder within an object, should also never decrease.

The similarity between the two theories suggested that black holes could behave as thermal, heat-emitting objects — a confounding proposition, as black holes by their very nature were thought to never let energy escape, or radiate. Hawking eventually squared the two ideas in 1974, showing that black holes could have entropy and emit radiation over very long timescales if their quantum effects were taken into account. This phenomenon was dubbed “Hawking radiation” and remains one of the most fundamental revelations about black holes.

“It all started with Hawking’s realization that the total horizon area in black holes can never go down,” Isi says. “The area law encapsulates a golden age in the ’70s where all these insights were being produced.”

Hawking and others have since shown that the area theorem works out mathematically, but there had been no way to check it against nature until LIGO’s first detection of gravitational waves.

Hawking, on hearing of the result, quickly contacted LIGO co-founder Kip Thorne, the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech. His question: Could the detection confirm the area theorem?

At the time, researchers did not have the ability to pick out the necessary information within the signal, before and after the merger, to determine whether the final horizon area did not decrease, as Hawking’s theorem would assume. It wasn’t until several years later, and the development of a technique by Isi and his colleagues, when testing the area law became feasible.

Before and after

In 2019, Isi and his colleagues developed a technique to extract the reverberations immediately following GW150914’s peak — the moment when the two parent black holes collided to form a new black hole. The team used the technique to pick out specific frequencies, or tones of the otherwise noisy aftermath, that they could use to calculate the final black hole’s mass and spin.

A black hole’s mass and spin are directly related to the area of its event horizon, and Thorne, recalling Hawking’s query, approached them with a follow-up: Could they use the same technique to compare the signal before and after the merger, and confirm the area theorem?

The researchers took on the challenge, and again split the GW150914 signal at its peak. They developed a model to analyze the signal before the peak, corresponding to the two inspiraling black holes, and to identify the mass and spin of both black holes before they merged. From these estimates, they calculated their total horizon areas — an estimate roughly equal to about 235,000 square kilometers, or roughly nine times the area of Massachusetts.

They then used their previous technique to extract the “ringdown,” or reverberations of the newly formed black hole, from which they calculated its mass and spin, and ultimately its horizon area, which they found was equivalent to 367,000 square kilometers (approximately 13 times the Bay State’s area).

“The data show with overwhelming confidence that the horizon area increased after the merger, and that the area law is satisfied with very high probability,” Isi says. “It was a relief that our result does agree with the paradigm that we expect, and does confirm our understanding of these complicated black hole mergers.”

The team plans to further test Hawking’s area theorem, and other longstanding theories of black hole mechanics, using data from LIGO and Virgo, its counterpart in Italy.

“It’s encouraging that we can think in new, creative ways about gravitational-wave data, and reach questions we thought we couldn’t before,” Isi says. “We can keep teasing out pieces of information that speak directly to the pillars of what we think we understand. One day, this data may reveal something we didn’t expect.”

This research was supported, in part, by NASA, the Simons Foundation, and the National Science Foundation.

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A diet higher in fatty fish helped frequent migraine sufferers reduce their monthly number of headaches and intensity of pain compared to participants on a diet higher in vegetable-based fats and oils, according to a new study. The findings by a team of researchers from the National Institute on Aging (NIA) and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), parts of the National Institutes of Health; and the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, were published in the July 3 issue of The BMJ.

This study of 182 adults with frequent migraines expanded on the team's previous work on the impact of linoleic acid and chronic pain. Linoleic acid is a polyunsaturated fatty acid commonly derived in the American diet from corn, soybean, and other similar oils, as well as some nuts and seeds. The team's previous smaller studies explored if linoleic acid inflamed migraine-related pain processing tissues and pathways in the trigeminal nerve, the largest and most complex of the body's 12 cranial nerves. They found that a diet lower in linoleic acid and higher in levels of omega-3 fatty acids (like those found in fish and shellfish) could soothe this pain pathway inflammation.

In a 16-week dietary intervention, participants were randomly assigned to one of three healthy diet plans. Participants all received meal kits that included fish, vegetables, hummus, salads, and breakfast items. One group received meals that had high levels of fatty fish or oils from fatty fish and lowered linoleic acid. A second group received meals that had high levels of fatty fish and higher linoleic acid. The third group received meals with high linoleic acid and lower levels of fatty fish to mimic average U.S. intakes.

During the intervention period, participants monitored their number of migraine days, duration, and intensity, along with how their headaches affected their abilities to function at work, school, and in their social lives, and how often they needed to take pain medications. When the study began, participants averaged more than 16 headache days per month, over five hours of migraine pain per headache day, and had baseline scores showing a severe impact on quality of life despite using multiple headache medications.

The diet lower in vegetable oil and higher in fatty fish produced between 30% and 40% reductions in total headache hours per day, severe headache hours per day, and overall headache days per month compared to the control group. Blood samples from this group of participants also had lower levels of pain-related lipids. Despite the reduction in headache frequency and pain, these same participants reported only minor improvements in migraine-related overall quality of life compared to other groups in the study.

Migraine, a neurological disease, ranks among the most common causes of chronic pain, lost work time, and lowered quality of life. More than 4 million people worldwide have chronic migraine (at least 15 migraine days per month) and over 90% of sufferers are unable to work or function normally during an attack, which can last anywhere from four hours to three days. Women between the ages of 18 and 44 are especially prone to migraines, and an estimated 18% of all American women are affected. Current medications for migraine usually offer only partial relief and can have negative side effects including sedation, and the possibility of dependence or addiction.

"This research found intriguing evidence that dietary changes have potential for improving a very debilitating chronic pain condition like migraine without the related downsides of often prescribed medications," said Luigi Ferrucci, M.D., Ph.D., scientific director of NIA.

The NIH team was led by Chris Ramsden, a clinical investigator in the NIA and NIAAA intramural research programs, and UNC adjunct faculty member. Ramsden and his team specialize in the study of lipids—fatty acid compounds found in many natural oils—and their role in aging, especially chronic pain and neurodegenerative conditions. The UNC team was led by Doug Mann, M.D., of the Department of Neurology, and Kim Faurot, Ph.D., of the Program on Integrative Medicine. Meal plans were designed by Beth MacIntosh, M.P.H., of UNC Healthcare's Department of Nutrition and Food Services.

"Changes in diet could offer some relief for the millions of Americans who suffer from migraine pain," said Ramsden. "It's further evidence that the foods we eat can influence pain pathways."

The researchers noted that these findings serve as validation that diet-based interventions increasing omega-3 fats while reducing linoleic acid sources show better promise for helping people with migraines reduce the number and impact of headache days than fish-oil based supplements, while reducing the need for pain medications. They hope to continue to expand this work to study effects of diet on other chronic pain conditions.

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In 2009, famed music producer Phil Spector was found guilty of the murder of actress Lana Clarkson, who was found dead from a single gunshot to her mouth at close range in Spector's California mansion.

During the trial, the attorney argued that Spector couldn't have been the shooter because his white dinner jacket only had a handful blood droplets on it. If he shot Clarkson, the jacket would be covered with blood.

After watching a film about the trial, UIC Distinguished Professor Alexander Yarin was intrigued by the scientific questions it raised. Yarin and his colleagues from Iowa State University—Assistant Professor James Michael and Associate Professor Daniel Attinger— started researching blood spatter, and their recent papers show how Spector could be the shooter and remain relatively free of blood droplets.

The researchers discovered that the gases released from a gun's muzzle brakes escape in a series of turbulent vortex rings, which causes a phenomenon called "blood back spatter"—the blood that travels back toward the shooter—to reverse direction away from the shooter.

"At shortrange shooting, the muzzle gasses interfere with the blood back spatter and deflect droplets," Yarin said. "We did simulations with my Ph.D. student Gen Li and found that there are scenarios where droplets can be turned around completely and land behind the victim. Experiments of Dr. Michael confirmed that prediction."

In addition, the researchers noted that a shooter could stand in a certain position or at a specific angle and all backward blood spatter would be turned around, keeping the shooter clean.

"Essentially, I believe this proves that a shooter could have been guilty. There is an explanation for how his outfit could have been basically clean. And the explanation is essentially physically sound," Yarin said.

The researchers plan to continue investigating the blood spatter as they examine a variety of interesting situations and variables.

"We want to go much further," he said. "You have the effect of skin, which may not be that significant, but the effect of surrounding bones can be very significant," he said. A cranial wound, Yarin noted as an example, does not result in an immediate spatter; it is delayed.

"There's a lot of interest in the phenomena associated with these types of wounds," Yarin said. "We would like to study them and understand them better because there might be several waves of gushes of blood and brain matter from such wounds."

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More vaccine progress: This time, it’s malaria

Two recent papers describe strong protection against a difficult parasite.

 

The development of the COVID-19 vaccines was a triumph of biotechnology. But that triumph has partly obscured the amount of luck involved in the process of vaccine development. We've been trying for decades to produce vaccines against HIV, but no amount of high-tech biology has gotten us there.

 

Malaria is another killer that has so far resisted vaccine efforts, but this spring brought hope that we are making progress. Back in May, a small clinical trial of a relatively traditional vaccine showed an efficacy of over 70 percent. And this week, a new paper describes a very different way of generating highly effective immunity to the malarial parasite.

Why is malaria so hard?

Malaria has resisted vaccination for several reasons. One is that the disease is not caused by just a single infectious agent. Instead, Malaria comes from several related species in the Plasmodium genus. Plasmodium falciparum typically causes more severe illnesses and has thus been the target of most vaccine efforts. But even if we're able to prevent infections by this strain, we won't see the end of malaria.

 

Targeting Plasmodium falciparum hasn't been a simple matter, either, as there are various regional strains that differ in ways that can be significant for immune system recognition. Even a single strain doesn't present an easy target for an immune response, though. The parasites undergo several distinct stages within the human body, with different proteins associated with each. And the parasite can alter other proteins on its surface to act as decoys that distract the immune system.

 

That said, researchers have gradually identified a handful of proteins that are consistently present on the surface of malarial parasites and are essential for their infectivity. That information has led to the development of vaccines that attempt to generate an immune response to these proteins.

Progress report

In a paper published in May, a large international team of researchers gave a progress report on one of those efforts. The work involved a vaccine developed in collaboration with Novavax and uses the same technology that went into the company's successful COVID vaccine. In short, the vaccine starts by taking a Plasmodium falciparum protein and modifying it so that it clusters into virus-sized particles. These particles are then injected alongside a chemical that boosts immune responses.

 

The team enrolled 450 infants in a malaria-prone region of Africa, with two groups given different doses of the vaccine and the third given an unrelated vaccine to serve as a control. The children were given three doses over three months, then a booster a year later. Testing showed that the two vaccine groups generated both antibodies and a T-cell response to the malarial parasite, with the levels being generally higher in the high-dose group. Antibody levels dropped slowly over time but quickly returned after the one-year booster shot.

 

Side effects were mild and typical of those seen with coronavirus vaccines.

 

The vaccine was very effective. Seventy percent of the participants in the placebo group ended up with a malaria infection by six months after the last of the three initial doses. In the two vaccine groups, only 29 and 26 percent of the participants did. That works out to an efficacy of 77 percent, a protection that stayed constant even as the children were followed out to a year after the third dose.

Is that really a vaccine?

While this news is welcome, some researchers still worry about basing a vaccine on a single protein, which could allow the malarial parasites to evolve a way of evading the immune response. Boosters using additional proteins could help manage that risk, but much of the vaccine effort has focused on using parasites that are inactivated either by radiation or genetic mutations. These would necessarily carry most of the proteins that the immune system is likely to see following an infection.

 

Results have been mixed so far, but a paper released today describes a variant on this approach that falls somewhere between a vaccine and a controlled infection.

 

The work relied on several overlapping factors. While resistance against most malarial drugs is widespread in wild populations, we can grow many lab strains that are still vulnerable to the drugs. Some of these drugs—called pyrimethamine—kill the parasites while they're multiplying in liver cells. This is an early, asymptomatic stage of the infection. Stopping the parasite here would mean that none of the complications of malaria will occur.

 

The immunization was a simple extension of this idea—expose people to parasites that are vulnerable to pyrimethamine while treating the patients with the drug. This process allowed the exposed people to develop a robust immune response to the earliest stage of the infection while keeping them from reaching any of the later, more dangerous stages. The researchers tested the same approach using the now-infamous chloroquine, which kills the parasites when they start multiplying in the blood.

 

The trial was a small safety test, with fewer than 10 people in each group (the groups used different doses of malarial parasites and one of the two drugs). And the testing involved people who were willingly infected with malarial parasites multiple times to either boost the vaccination or test its effectiveness.

A more promising future?

The results look promising. While low initial doses of parasites weren't very effective, seven of the eight people who received the high dose were protected from reinfection, indicating that the treatment provides sterilizing immunity. Perhaps more critically, in a group that was later infected by a different parasite strain than the one the participants were vaccinated against, protection remained strong. Seven out of nine participants avoided infection.

 

(Since chloroquine stops the parasites later than pyrimethamine, it's not surprising that people in those groups experienced more malarial symptoms during the vaccination protocol. One person also chose to withdraw from the study due to emotional problems that have been associated with chloroquine use.)

More to do

There's still a lot of work to do, both in terms of optimizing the protocol and understanding how it generates sterilizing immunity without allowing the parasite to get to the most immunogenic stages of infection, when the parasite spreads in blood cells. But if the results hold up in larger tests, the prospect of cross-strain protection is incredibly important. And the drug used for this purpose, pyrimethamine, is already widely employed as a prophylactic against malarial infections in pregnant women.

 

We're still a long way from having straightforward protection against a disease that kills nearly a half-million people every year. Both evolution and medical research regularly generate surprises; these two treatments are very early in the research phase, and evolution will kick in if either is widely adopted.

 

But it's hard not to be excited that lasting immunity against the most dangerous form of malaria might be possible. We may need to combine and modify techniques and find ways to boost immunity and counter new strains that appear. But we'll do so knowing that failure isn't inevitable.

 

The Lancet, 2021. DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(21)00943-0

 

Nature, 2021. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03684-z  (About DOIs).

More vaccine progress: This time, it’s malaria

El Salvador’s Race to Be the Bitcoin Capital of the World

After China’s crackdown, the cryptocurrency crowd is looking for a new haven. The Central American nation thinks it’s the answer.

 

El Salvador’s Race to Be the Bitcoin Capital of the World

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The Experimental African Houses That Outsmart Malaria (May require free registration to view)

Our universe is expanding, but our two main ways to measure how fast this expansion is happening have resulted in different answers. For the past decade, astrophysicists have been gradually dividing into two camps: one that believes that the difference is significant, and another that thinks it could be due to errors in measurement.

If it turns out that errors are causing the mismatch, that would confirm our basic model of how the universe works. The other possibility presents a thread that, when pulled, would suggest some fundamental missing new physics is needed to stitch it back together. For several years, each new piece of evidence from telescopes has seesawed the argument back and forth, giving rise to what has been called the 'Hubble tension.'

Wendy Freedman, a renowned astronomer and the John and Marion Sullivan University Professor in Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago, made some of the original measurements of the expansion rate of the universe that resulted in a higher value of the Hubble constant. But in a new review paper accepted to the Astrophysical Journal, Freedman gives an overview of the most recent observations. Her conclusion: the latest observations are beginning to close the gap.

That is, there may not be a conflict after all, and our standard model of the universe does not need to be significantly modified.

The rate at which the universe is expanding is called the Hubble constant, named for UChicago alum Edwin Hubble, SB 1910, Ph.D. 1917, who is credited with discovering the expansion of the universe in 1929. Scientists want to pin down this rate precisely, because the Hubble constant is tied to the age of the universe and how it evolved over time.

A substantial wrinkle emerged in the past decade when results from the two main measurement methods began to diverge. But scientists are still debating the significance of the mismatch.

One way to measure the Hubble constant is by looking at very faint light left over from the Big Bang, called the cosmic microwave background. This has been done both in space and on the ground with facilities like the UChicago-led South Pole Telescope. Scientists can feed these observations into their 'standard model' of the early universe and run it forward in time to predict what the Hubble constant should be today; they get an answer of 67.4 kilometers per second per megaparsec.

The other method is to look at stars and galaxies in the nearby universe, and measure their distances and how fast they are moving away from us. Freedman has been a leading expert on this method for many decades; in 2001, her team made one of the landmark measurements using the Hubble Space Telescope to image stars called Cepheids. The value they found was 72. Freedman has continued to measure Cepheids in the years since, reviewing more telescope data each time; however, in 2019, she and her colleagues published an answer based on an entirely different method using stars called red giants. The idea was to cross-check the Cepheids with an independent method.

Red giants are very large and luminous stars that always reach the same peak brightness before rapidly fading. If scientists can accurately measure the actual, or intrinsic, peak brightness of the red giants, they can then measure the distances to their host galaxies, an essential but difficult part of the equation. The key question is how accurate those measurements are.

The first version of this calculation in 2019 used a single, very nearby galaxy to calibrate the red giant stars' luminosities. Over the past two years, Freedman and her collaborators have run the numbers for several different galaxies and star populations. "There are now four independent ways of calibrating the red giant luminosities, and they agree to within 1% of each other," said Freedman. "That indicates to us this is a really good way of measuring the distance."

"I really wanted to look carefully at both the Cepheids and red giants. I know their strengths and weaknesses well," said Freedman. "I have come to the conclusion that that we do not require fundamental new physics to explain the differences in the local and distant expansion rates. The new red giant data show that they are consistent."

University of Chicago graduate student Taylor Hoyt, who has been making measurements of the red giant stars in the anchor galaxies, added, "We keep measuring and testing the red giant branch stars in different ways, and they keep exceeding our expectations."

The value of the Hubble constant Freedman's team gets from the red giants is 69.8 km/s/Mpc—virtually the same as the value derived from the cosmic microwave background experiment. "No new physics is required," said Freedman.

The calculations using Cepheid stars still give higher numbers, but according to Freedman's analysis, the difference may not be troubling. "The Cepheid stars have always been a little noisier and a little more complicated to fully understand; they are young stars in the active star-forming regions of galaxies, and that means there's potential for things like dust or contamination from other stars to throw off your measurements," she explained.

To her mind, the conflict can be resolved with better data.

Next year, when the James Webb Space Telescope is expected to launch, scientists will begin to collect those new observations. Freedman and collaborators have already been awarded time on the telescope for a major program to make more measurements of both Cepheid and red giant stars. "The Webb will give us higher sensitivity and resolution, and the data will get better really, really soon," she said.

But in the meantime, she wanted to take a careful look at the existing data, and what she found was that much of it actually agrees.

"That's the way science proceeds," Freedman said. "You kick the tires to see if something deflates, and so far, no flat tires."

Some scientists who have been rooting for a fundamental mismatch might be disappointed. But for Freedman, either answer is exciting.

"There is still some room for new physics, but even if there isn't, it would show that the standard model we have is basically correct, which is also a profound conclusion to come to," she said. "That's the interesting thing about science: We don't know the answers in advance. We're learning as we go. It is a really exciting time to be in the field."

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