The persistence of bogus reviews raises big questions for Amazon.

This week, Amazon acknowledged reality: It has a problem with bogus reviews.

The trouble is that Amazon pointed blame at almost everyone involved in untrustworthy ratings, and not nearly enough at the company itself. Amazon criticized Facebook, but it didn’t recognize that the two companies share an underlying problem that risks eroding people’s confidence in their services: an inability to effectively police their sprawling websites.

Learning from the masses is a promise of the digital age that hasn’t panned out. It can be wonderful to evaluate others’ feedback before we buy a product, book a hotel or see a doctor. But it’s so common and lucrative for companies and services to pay for or otherwise manipulate ratings on all sorts of websites that it’s hard to trust anything we see.

The persistence of bogus reviews raises two big questions for Amazon: How much attention does it really devote to stopping bogus customer feedback? And would shoppers be better off if Amazon re-evaluated its essence as an (almost) anything-goes online bazaar?

Amazon’s rules prohibit companies from offering people money or other incentives for reviews. Amazon says that it catches most bogus ratings and works to stay ahead of rule breakers. Still, the global industry of review fraud operates actively on Amazon and everyone knows it.

Amazon seems to have been prodded by the Federal Trade Commission, according to Vox’s Recode publication, and by journalists into taking some action to crack down on manipulated ratings.

After a Wall Street Journal columnist wrote this week about buying a RAVPower electrical charger that came with a postcard offering a $35 gift card in exchange for a review, the vendor said on Thursday that it had been banned from Amazon. (The statement is in Chinese, and I read it via Google Translate.) That followed bans on several other large sellers that appeared to have been buying reviews for years.

If government lawyers and newspaper columnists spot sellers openly manipulating reviews, how hard is the company looking for them?

Maybe you’re thinking that this is just how the world works: Caveat emptor. When I read ratings of products on Amazon or of physicians on Zocdoc, the feedback is helpful but I take it with a grain of salt.

But unfortunately lots of people are harmed by bogus reviews, and they’re not always easy for us to spot. The Washington Post recently wrote about a family fooled by bought-off Google ratings for an alcohol addiction treatment center. I wrote last year about research that found that Amazon catches many bought-off reviews, but only months later and after shoppers showed signs of feeling misled into buying a product.

I wish that Amazon would take more responsibility for the problem. In its statement this week, the company blamed social media companies and poor enforcement by regulators for bogus reviews. Amazon has a point. Fraudulent online ratings are a big business with many enablers. Facebook and China’s WeChat app don’t do enough about forums where companies coordinate review manipulation.

But Amazon didn’t say much about what it could do differently. For example, the University of California researchers I spoke with last fall found that bought-off reviews were far more common among Chinese vendors and for products for which there were many vendors selling a nearly identical product. Maybe that means that Amazon should more closely police sellers based in China? Or that it would be helpful to cap the number of sellers that list the same bathroom caddy?

Strong reviews also help sellers appear prominently when we search for products on Amazon, which creates a huge financial incentive to cheat. Should Amazon reconsider how it accounts for ratings in search results? The company didn’t say.

Most of all, it’s disappointing that Amazon doesn’t acknowledge that bogus reviews are a consequence of its choice to opt for quantity over quality.

People can buy almost anything on Amazon and from almost any seller. That can be great for shoppers, but it comes with trade-offs. Being an everything store — and one that tries to operate with as little human intervention as possible — makes it harder for Amazon to root out fake or dangerous products and bought-off reviews.

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The number of COVID-19 jabs administered in China has passed the one billion mark, health officials said Sunday, more than a third of the doses given worldwide.

The announcement by the National Health Commission comes after the number of shots administered globally surpassed 2.5 billion on Friday, according to an AFP count from official sources.

It is unclear what percentage of China's population has now been inoculated but its vaccination drive got off to a slow start after a successful fight against the virus left little sense of urgency to get jabbed.

A lack of transparency and previous vaccine scandals have also led to resistance among residents.

Authorities have set an ambitious target of fully vaccinating 40 percent of the country's nearly 1.4 billion people by the end of this month.

Some provinces are offering vaccines for free to encourage people to roll up their sleeves. Residents in central Anhui province have been given free eggs, while some living in Beijing have received shopping coupons.

A recent outbreak of the more contagious Delta variant of the virus in the southern city of Guangzhou has also served as a wake-up call for many dragging their feet.

China reported 23 new coronavirus cases Sunday.

The country has four conditionally approved vaccines, whose published efficacy rates remain behind rival jabs by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, which have 95 percent and 94 percent success rates respectively.

China's Sinovac previously said trials of its shot in Brazil showed around 50 percent efficacy in preventing infection and 80 percent in preventing cases requiring medical intervention.

Sinopharm's two vaccines have efficacy rates of 79 percent and 72 percent respectively, while the overall efficacy for CanSino's stands at 65 percent after 28 days.

Many of them require two doses.

China is expected to produce more than three billion vaccine doses this year, state news agency Xinhua reported in April.

Health authorities have not said when China will reach herd immunity or what proportion of its vaccine doses will be sold abroad.

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The antitrust overhaul package unveiled in Congress targeting Big Tech, if enacted, could have far-reaching effects on how people use the internet and on America's biggest and most successful companies.

The five bills, due for a committee vote on Wednesday, could pave the way for a reorganization or breakup of giants such as Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon while reshaping the entire internet ecosystem.

The measures would stop tech giants from operating a platform for third parties while offering competing services on those platforms, dealing a major blow to the likes of Apple and Amazon.

Lawmakers also are seeking to ban tech firms from prioritizing their own products or services, with Google clearly in mind.

Another measure would require data "portability" and "interoperability," which could make it easier for people to quit Facebook, for example, while keeping their data and contacts.

The largest tech firms additionally would be barred from acquiring competitors under the package, which would also add funds for antitrust enforcement.

Fiona Scott Morton, a Yale University professor and former US official who has written extensively on Big Tech, said the legislation stems from the failure of antitrust enforcement in the US and elsewhere to make a dent in the dominance of major technology firms.

"This is regulation, it's not antitrust anymore," Morton said.

If the bills are enacted, she noted, Apple might have to sell or shut down its music service so that it doesn't discriminate against rivals such as Spotify.

"Apple would have to choose," she said.

Representative David Cicilline led an investigation which concluded that Big Tech firms had too much power, leading to a series of antitrust overhaul bills introduced in Congress.

An interoperability requirement "would be very profound for consumers because it would let people join social networks other than Facebook and (Facebook-owned) Instagram and stay in contact with their friends," Morton noted.

The package comes amid signs of a more aggressive posture by Washington against dominant tech firms, including President Joe Biden's nomination of Lina Khan—a prominent advocate of breaking up Big Tech—to head the Federal Trade Commission, one of the agencies charged with antitrust enforcement.

'Risky' path

The House Judiciary Committee has scheduled a vote Wednesday on the package, which has some support from Republicans in addition to the Democratic leadership, signaling a likelihood of passage in the full House of Representatives. The fate in the Senate is less clear.

The measures come following a 16-month investigation in the House led by antitrust subcommittee chairman David Cicilline which concluded that tech giants were abusing their dominant positions and had too much power in the economy.

Christopher Sagers, a Cleveland State University professor specializing in antitrust law, said the package represents a radical approach to dealing with tech firms' growing power.

The bills "would make the platforms operate more like airlines or utility companies, which have to provide their services to anyone who wants them, and not give anyone (or themselves) discriminatory advantages," Sagers said.

"These laws also could bring an end to some products that are very popular," he added.

"I'm not sure how Apple could continue even selling its own mobile software, for example, if iOS devices or the App Store were denominated 'covered platforms,' and there could be consequences for products like Amazon Prime, Google Maps, books digitized in the Google Books project, and who knows what else."

But Sagers said the impact might not be bad in the long run because "markets rearrange themselves and new competitors turn up to replace them... But it is to say that these laws seem risky and I find their consequences hard to predict."

Apple might be forced to stop offering its own music service under proposed US legislation to avoid discriminating against rival apps like Spotify.

Blank smartphones?

Other analysts offered stark warnings against unforeseen consequences of upending the massively successful firms on which many consumers rely in their daily lives.

Iain Murray, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said the measure might mean a firm such as Apple would need to shut its App Store, ship "blank phones" without any apps, or spin off its phone division.

"For the most part, the average consumer will see her user experience severely degraded," he said in a statement.

The legislation mirrors Europe's Digital Markets Act and is likely to "distort" competition, according to Aurelien Portuese of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank which often reflects the industry's views.

Portuese said the legislation comes amid a wave of resentment toward Big Tech but may ultimately hurt consumers by allowing less efficient firms to gain in the marketplace.

"Consumers may no longer be able to benefit from large companies' economies of scale," Portuese said in a statement.

The legislative package "reveals a profound lack of practical understanding of how the tech industry operates, and needs to operate, in order to remain competitive, relevant, profitable and innovative," said analyst Olivier Blanchard at Futurum Research in a blog post.

"Do Big Tech companies hold too much power? You could argue that, sure.

"But if the objective is to keep very large, very powerful companies in check, Congress could approach the problem by establishing guardrails that protect consumers and competition without taking a wrecking ball to an entire system."

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What's With All This Ooey, Gooey Sea Snot?

A phlegmy film is coating the coast around Istanbul—and warmer water could be to blame.

This story originally appeared on Atlas Obscura and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

 

For months the waters around Istanbul, Turkey, have been coated with a gloopy film. Sometimes creamy, sometimes khaki, it can appear slightly dreamy or superlatively gross, depending on the vantage. From overhead, it’s almost romantic, like clouds glimpsed from space, white squiggles marbling Earth’s blue. Up close, the stuff is much more phlegmy. The shore-hugging substance is sometimes known as “sea snot,” and it’s easy to see why. It looks like the marine equivalent of a big, wet sneeze.

 

Sea snot is more scientifically known as “marine mucilage,” and it’s an ecosystem of its own. In a 2009 paper in the journal PLOS One, a team of scientists led by Roberto Danovaro, a marine biologist at Italy’s Polytechnic University of Marche, described it as a “gelatinous” stage of marine snow, the jumble of organic material—such as feces and fragments of dead plants and animals—that drifts from the surface to the ocean floor.

 

The snot is produced by a bunch of microorganisms, one Turkish research team explained in a UNESCO bulletin called Harmful Algae News, especially microalgae known as diatoms. These petite algae are known to exude polysaccharides, sugary carbohydrates that can get quite sticky. Sampling sea snot that clotted several locations in the Sea of Marmara in 2007 and 2008, the researchers also identified species of dinoflagellates and more.

Like the mucus launched from human nostrils, sea snot can smell foul, and slimes whatever it touches. And in addition to discouraging swimmers and deterring fishing, the gunk can be a nuisance for corals, scientists have found. From December 2020 to early March 2021, H. Barış Özalp, a marine biologist at Turkey’s Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, measured the effects of sea snot on reefs in the Çanakkale Strait. Özalp found that some of the creatures were dripping with the stuff. It looked as though they had been blasted with ectoplasm, or wrapped in a spider’s web, and the substance seemed to be killing some of the branches. A thick coating can deprive the corals of oxygen, and other research teams have worked to suss out sea snot’s effect on mussels, crabs, and other sediment-dwellers. Danovaro’s team found that the sticky matrix can also entrap viruses, and potentially ferry them around marine ecosystems.

Sea snot has coated portions of the Mediterranean several times in recent years. In March 2007, Danovaro’s team reported, it fouled more than 1,550 miles of Italy’s coastline, and clusters stuck around for five months. Researchers suspect it’s urged on by several factors, though the precise mechanisms of what causes a snot bloom are somewhat mysterious. “We actually know very little about the interactions between chemistry, biology, and physics that lead to these extreme events,” writes Uta Passow, an oceanographer at Canada’s Memorial University who studies marine snow, in an email.

 

These substances are always in the water, Passow adds—but when they go from discrete and microscopic to massive clumps easily visible to the naked eye, something is out of whack. Passow says that warming and an influx of nutrients could both nudge a system off balance if the “right” organisms thrive and weather conditions don’t break up and dilute the aquatic boogers. Danovaro’s team found that some nasty cases—the snot that sprawled the most and hung on the longest—coincided with higher-than-average water temperatures. “In light of the warming trend of the Mediterranean Sea, the mucilage phenomenon could increase in the future,” the team wrote.

 

As for the sea snot currently choking the Sea of Marmara: Reuters reported that Turkish environment minister Murat Kurum and other officials are examining whether pollution and sewage are contributing, and will hatch a plan in June 2021. Extreme snot events are “a ‘call for help’ from the system,” Passow says. And while marine creatures and nearby landlubbers wait for a hand, the water could use a tissue—a really, really absorbent one.

What's With All This Ooey, Gooey Sea Snot? (may require free registration)

Two Viking burials, separated by an ocean, contain close kin

Two Viking Age warriors from the same family died hundreds of kilometers apart.

Roughly a thousand years ago, a young man in his early 20s met a violent end in England. 800 kilometers (500 miles) away, in Denmark, an older man who had survived a lifetime of battles died sometime in his 50s. At first glance, there’s nothing to suggest a connection between them over such a distance. But according to a recent study of their DNA, the two men were second-degree relatives: half-siblings, uncle and nephew, or grandfather and grandson.

 

Today, their skeletons lie side-by-side in the National Museum of Denmark, reunited after centuries, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.

 

Geneticists sequenced the pair’s DNA as part of a much larger study, which sampled and sequenced ancient DNA from more than 400 human skeletons at sites across Europe and Greenland. That data revealed that Vikings were much more ethnically diverse than historians have often assumed, and it helped track the migrations that defined the Viking Age. Against the backdrop of those larger patterns, the ancient DNA from two skeletons, buried hundreds of kilometers apart under very different circumstances, told a much more personal story.

 

“This is a big discovery because now you can trace movements across space and time through a family,” Jeannette Varberg of the National Museum of Denmark said.

 

Given what is known about the Viking Age, it’s easy to imagine at least the broad strokes of this family’s story. The 50-year-old may have been a veteran of raids along the coast of continental Europe, or a returning veteran of raids on the British Isles; his bones showed evidence of old, long-healed wounds sustained in combat. But he lived to a relatively old age for his time and occupation (as they say, beware an old man in a profession where men usually die young).

 

The 20-year-old may have may have died during a raid on the English coast, or he may have been caught up in King Æthelred the Unready’s purge of Danes living in England in 1002. He ended up in a mass grave in Oxford, England, with his skull shattered by the blows that killed him. It’s reasonable to speculate that the two men knew each other, or at least knew of each other, but there’s not enough evidence for archaeologists to say whether they lived at the same time, or which of them was born first.

 

“It’s very difficult to tell if they lived in the same age or they differ maybe by a generation, because you have no material in the grave that can give a precise dating,” Varberg said.

 

It’s plausible that the young man who died in England went to battle with thoughts of impressing a sibling, an uncle, or a grandfather back in Denmark; perhaps they fought side-by-side, or perhaps he was hoping to live up to his elder’s stories. Then again, it’s equally plausible that the veteran warrior who died in Denmark remembered the stories of a sibling or older relative who died in battle far to the west.

 

Either way, the pair of warriors are an excellent reminder of what ancient DNA—and archaeology, more generally—can tell us about the past, from sweeping large-scale patterns of human movements to the much more personal lives of individual people and families. And once in a great while, both kinds of stories emerge from the same study.

Two Viking burials, separated by an ocean, contain close kin

Eating less red meat is standard medical advice for preventing colorectal cancer, but the way it causes cells to mutate has remained unclear, and not all experts were convinced there was a strong link.

A new paper in the journal Cancer Discovery has now identified specific patterns of DNA damage triggered by diets rich in red meat -- further implicating the food as a carcinogen while heralding the possibility of detecting the cancer early and designing new treatments.

Prior research establishing the connection was mainly epidemiologic, meaning that people who developed the condition were surveyed on their eating habits, and researchers spotted associations with colorectal cancer incidence.

But a lack of clarity around the biology meant that the case wasn't quite slam dunk, and in 2019, one team of researchers made waves when they declared they only had a "low" degree of certainty that reducing consumption would prevent cancer deaths.

"When we say red meat is carcinogenic, and that it impacts incidence of cancer, there has to be some plausible way by which it does it," Dana-Farber Cancer Institute oncologist Marios Giannakis, who led the new study, told AFP.

After all, scientists discovered long ago which chemicals in cigarette smoke are to blame for cancer, and how certain bands of UV light penetrate the skin and trigger mutations in genes that control how cells grow and divide.

To address the knowledge gap, Giannakis and his colleagues sequenced DNA data from 900 patients with colorectal cancer, who were drawn from a much larger group of 280,000 health workers participating in a years-long studies that included lifestyle surveys.

- Detective work -

The strength of this approach is that the people documenting their diet had no way of knowing of their future cancer diagnosis, rather than asking people to recall their eating habits after they became ill.

The analysis revealed a distinct mutational signature -- a pattern that had never before been identified but was indicative of a type of DNA damage called "alkylation."

Not all cells that contain these mutations will necessarily become cancerous, and the signature was present in some healthy colon samples too.

The mutation signature was significantly associated with intake of red meat, both processed and unprocessed, prior to the patient's diagnosis of cancer, but not with the intake of poultry, fish or other lifetsyle factors that were examined.

"With red meat, there are chemicals that can cause alkylation," explained Giannakis.

The specific compounds are nitroso compounds that can be made from heme, which is plentiful in red meat, as well as nitrates, often found in processed meat.

The mutation patterns were strongly associated with the distal colon -- the lower part of the bowels that leads to the anal canal, which is where past research suggested colon cancer linked to red meat mostly occurs.

What's more, among the genes that were most affected by the alkylation patterns were those that previous research has shown are among the most common drivers of colorectal cancer when they mutate.

Taken as a whole, the multiple lines of evidence build up a compelling argument, said Giannakis, likening the research to careful detective work.

- Moderation urged -

In this case, the suspicious mutation signature has a lot to answer for: patients whose tumors had the highest levels of alkylation damage had a 47 percent greater risk of colorectal cancer-specific death, compared to patients with lower levels of damage.

But Giannakis, also a practicing doctor, said it was important to focus on how the research can be used to help patients.

Future work might help physicians identify which patients are genetically predisposed to accumulating alkylation damage, then counsel them to limit their red meat intake.

Identifying patients who have already started to accrue the mutational signature could help identify who's at greater risk of developing cancer, or catch the disease at an earlier stage.

And because the amount of alkylation damage appears to be a biomarker of patient survival, it could possibly be used to tell patients about their prognosis.

Finally, understanding the biological pathway through which colorectal cancer occurs paves the way for medicines that interrupt or reverse the process, preventing the disease.

Giannakis stressed the takeaway message is not that people should totally abstain from red meat: "My recommendation would be that moderation and a balanced diet is key."

High levels of tumor alkylation damage were only seen among patients eating on average more than 150 grams (five ounces) a day, roughly equal to two or more servings.

Source

• A study by Public Health England showed infection rates increasing across all age groups, but are highest among people aged 20 to 29

• More than 11,000 new cases of the disease were reported on Thursday, along with 19 deaths, according to the Department Health

The UK recorded the most coronavirus cases in a day since mid-February, amid warnings the current wave of infections driven by the highly transmissible delta variant may still be weeks from peaking.

More than 11,000 new cases of the disease were reported on Thursday, along with 19 deaths, according to the Department Health. A study by Public Health England showed infection rates increasing across all age groups, but are highest among people aged 20 to 29. Separately, the government said eight in 10 adults have now had their first vaccine dose.

The data illustrates how the delta variant, first identified in India, upended the government’s plan to lift remaining pandemic restrictions this month. Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a four-week delay on Monday to allow more adults to receive a second dose of the vaccine, which data show significantly increases protection against the new strain.

“It is important to take up the offer of the vaccine to protect yourself and others," PHE Medical Director Yvonne Doyle said in an emailed statement. “Case rates have increased across all age groups and regions around England, and we are seeing further increases in hospitalizations."

Research from Imperial College London published Thursday found the prevalence of Covid-19 in England is increasing exponentially, driven by younger age groups that haven’t been vaccinated.

The current infection surge will “definitely" lead to more hospital admissions and deaths, England’s Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty told a medical conference on Thursday, according to the Press Association.

“The height of that surge is still uncertain and we’ll have to see how this goes over the next several weeks," he said. He also warned the National Health Service should brace for another wave of infections over the winter.

The latest data show a surge in cases in Cornwall, which hosted last week’s Group of Seven summit, with 411 cases reported in the seven days to July 12.

A third wave of coronavirus infections is likely to hit India by October, and although it will be better controlled than the latest outbreak the pandemic will remain a public health threat for at least another year, according to a Reuters poll of medical experts.

The June 3-17 snap survey of 40 healthcare specialists, doctors, scientists, virologists, epidemiologists and professors from around the world showed a significant pickup in vaccinations will likely provide some cover to a fresh outbreak.

Of those who ventured a prediction, over 85% of respondents, or 21 of 24, said the next wave will hit by October, including three who forecast it as early as August and 12 in September. The remaining three said between November and February.

But over 70% of experts, or 24 of 34, said any new outbreak would be better controlled compared with the current one, which has been far more devastating - with shortage of vaccines, medicines, oxygen and hospital beds - than the smaller first surge in infections last year.

"It will be more controlled, as cases will be much less because more vaccinations would have been rolled out and there would be some degree of natural immunity from the second-wave," said Dr Randeep Guleria, director at All India Institute Of Medical Sciences (AIIMS).

So far, India has only fully vaccinated about 5% of its estimated 950 million eligible population, leaving many millions vulnerable to infections and deaths.

While a majority of healthcare experts predicted the vaccination drive would pick up significantly this year, they cautioned against an early removal of restrictions, as some states have done.

When asked if children and those under 18 years would be most at risk in a potential third wave, nearly two-thirds of experts, or 26 of 40, said yes.

"The reason being they are a completely virgin population in terms of vaccination because currently there is no vaccine available for them," said Dr Pradeep Banandur, head of epidemiology department at National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS).

Experts warn the situation could become severe.

"If children get infected in large numbers and we are not prepared, there is nothing you can do at the last minute," said Dr Devi Shetty, a cardiologist at Narayana Health and an advisor to the Karnataka state government on pandemic response planning.

"It will be a whole different problem as the country has very, very few paediatric intensive care unit beds, and that is going to be a disaster."

But 14 experts said children were not at risk.

Earlier this week, a senior health ministry official said children were vulnerable and susceptible to infections but that analysis has shown a less severe health impact.

While 25 of 38 respondents said future coronavirus variants would not make existing vaccines ineffective, in response to a separate question, 30 of 41 experts said the coronavirus will remain a public health threat in India for at least a year.

Eleven experts said the threat would remain for under a year, 15 said for under two years, while 13 said over two years and two said the risks will never go away.

"COVID-19 is a solvable problem, as obviously it was easy to get a solvable vaccine. In two years, India likely will develop herd immunity through vaccine and exposure of the disease," said Robert Gallo, director of the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland and international scientific advisor, Global Virus Network.

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New coronavirus infections hit a pandemic high in Moscow on Monday, tripling in just weeks and forcing Russia's capital to close its Euro fan zone and extend other curbs.

Some 9,056 new cases were recorded in the megapolis of 12 million in the past 24 hours, up from 3,000 two weeks ago and a new daily record since the COVID-19 pandemic began in early 2020, according to official statistics.

Faced with the spike, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, who has been rolling out restrictions for nearly a week, said that the city would limit gatherings and close the Euro 2020 fan zone outside of the Luzhniki stadium.

"I didn't want to do this, but we have to," Sergei Sobyanin wrote on his website.

"Starting today, we will limit mass events to a maximum of 1,000 people."

"We are temporarily stopping all mass entertainment events and we'll also have to close dance halls and fan zones," he wrote.

The move came a day after he warned that the city was facing a new wave of infections, likely because of new COVID variants.

"It's tripling, there's an enormous dynamic that we have not seen during the previous waves," he said, adding that cases jumped from 3,000 to 7,000 in just days and predicting they would pass the 9,000 mark on Friday.

Over the past week, the mayor has introduced a series of new restrictions in an effort to contain the wave of infections, including declaring a "work-free" week, closing venues, and ordering mandatory vaccinations of people working in the service industry in the city.

Also on Friday, Sobyanin extended until June 29 several measures that were announced last weekend, like the closure of food halls in malls, zoos, playgrounds, and the closure of bars and restaurants between 11:00 pm and 6:00 am.

Curbs tightened in Euro host St Pete

Russia's second city of Saint Petersburg, the country's worst COVID hotspot after Moscow, is hosting seven Euro 2020 matches—including a quarter-final—and is expected to see thousands of football fans from Europe.

On Monday, Saint Petersburg also announced a tightening of restrictions, including no food sales in its fan zones.

The increase in cases in Russia comes as the country struggles to encourage Russians to get vaccinated, even though the country launched a mass campaign of free jabs in December and has developed and approved four vaccines—Sputnik V, EpiVacCorona, CoviVac and the one-dose Sputnik Light.

Since December only 19 million out of a national population of 146 million have received at least one dose of a vaccine, according to the Gogov website which tallies COVID figures from the regions and the media in the absence of a national statistics office.

In Moscow, just 1.8 million out of a population of 12 million, have gotten inoculated.

Russia overtook Britain on Thursday as the European country to record the most COVID deaths with 127,992.

However the Rosstat statistics agency, which uses a broader clinical definition of fatalities linked to COVID-19, says at least 270,000 Russians have died from coronavirus.

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A small feasibility study has suggested that tai chi has the potential to reduce depression, anxiety and stress plus improve sleep in people who have had a stroke. The research is presented today at EuroHeartCare—ACNAP Congress 2021, an online scientific congress of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC).

Depression occurs in approximately one-third of stroke survivors and is linked with greater disability and mortality rates. Individuals with post-stroke depression frequently also report anxiety, stress, and poor sleep.

Tai chi focuses on releasing tension in the body, incorporating mindfulness and imagery into movement, increasing awareness and efficiency of breathing, and promoting overall relaxation of body and mind.

"Mind-body interventions are commonly used among adults to lessen depressive symptoms," said study author Dr. Ruth Taylor-Piliae of the University of Arizona, Tucson, US. "Tai chi practice allows the individual to quiet the mind by dwelling in the present and setting aside unnecessary negative emotions, such as depression."

This study examined the feasibility of using tai chi in people with previous stroke. A total of 11 stroke survivors reporting depression symptoms were enrolled in the study. They were on average 70 years old, and 55% were men.

All stroke survivors attended the tai chi intervention classes, three times each week, for a total of eight weeks. The intervention had been planned for 12 weeks but was shortened due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Each class consisted of a 10-minute warm-up period, 40-minutes of tai chi exercise, and a 10-minute cool-down period. Participants were gradually taught 24 basic movements from the Wu style of tai chi (an average of two new movements per week).

Measurements were taken at the start of the study and repeated after the eight-week intervention. Symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress were assessed using standardised questionnaires. Sleep was assessed during night-time using a triaxial accelerometer, which detects movement. Specifically, the researchers examined sleep efficiency (percentage of time spent sleeping), the amount of time awake after initially being asleep, and the total time awake after going to bed.

After eight weeks of tai chi, the researchers observed significant reductions in symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress compared to baseline, along with better sleep efficiency, less wakefulness after sleep onset, and less time awake.

Dr. Taylor-Piliae said: "At baseline the participants reported mild to moderate symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress. I was surprised and pleased with the improvements we observed in these self-reported symptoms and in sleep with just an eight-week intervention."

The researchers also took blood samples at baseline and eight weeks to measure markers of oxidative stress and inflammation which have previously been associated with post-stroke depression. They found lower activity of the oxidative stress marker after the intervention but no significant changes in any of the inflammatory markers.

Dr. Taylor-Piliae explained: "Our ultimate goal is to see whether tai chi lowers depressive symptoms in stroke survivors and also improves biochemical markers associated with depression."

She concluded: "The results of this feasibility study should be interpreted with caution because of the small sample size and lack of a control group. More research is needed before recommendations can be made about tai chi for people who have had a stroke. We hope to do a randomised trial with a 12-week tai chi intervention in a larger group of patients."

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The combination of sea level rise, tides, storm surge and waves has increased the overtopping of natural and artificial coastal protection by nearly 50% in the last two decades. This revelation comes from an international study coordinated by IRD, involving international partners . The study was published in Nature Communications on June 18th 2021.

By combining satellite data and digital models, the researchers have shown that coastal overtopping, and consequently the risk of flooding, is set to further accelerate over the 21st century, by up to 50-fold under a high emission global warming scenario, especially in the tropics. This increase is principally caused by a combination of sea level rise and ocean waves.

Low-lying coastal regions host nearly 10% of the world's population. In addition to ongoing erosion and rising sea levels, these areas and their unique ecosystems are facing destructive hazards, including episodic flooding due to overtopping of natural/artificial protection, as in the case of Hurricane Katrina, which hit the United States in 2005, Cyclone Xynthia in Europe in 2010, and Typhoon Haiyan in Asia in 2013 (the largest tropical cyclone ever measured). These episodic events are expected to become more severe and more frequent due to global warming, while the consequences will also increase due to increased anthropogenic pressure, such as coastal and infrastructure development, rapid urbanization. Although the magnitude and frequency of these events remain uncertain, scientists believe that countries in the tropics will be particularly affected.

Despite the significant role ocean waves play in determining coastal sea levels, their contribution to coastal flooding had previously been largely overlooked, mainly due to a lack of accurate coastal topographic information.

Measuring past events to estimate future risks

In this study, French researchers from IRD, CNES, Mercator Océan, together with Dutch, Brazilian, Portuguese, Italian and Nigerian colleagues, combined an unprecedented global digital model for surface elevation with new estimates of the extreme sea levels. These extreme water levels contain tides, analysis of wind-driven waves and existing measurements of natural and artificial coastal defenses.

The study started by quantifying the increase in global submersion events that occurred between 1993 and 2015. To accomplish this, satellite data was used to define two key parameters for coastal topography: the local beach-slope and maximum subaerial elevation of the coasts. The extreme level of coastal waters was calculated in hourly timesteps in order to identify the potential annual number of hours during which coastal defenses could be overtopped in each area.

"The combination of tides and episodes of large waves is the main contributor to episodes of coastal overflow," says Rafaël Almar, a researcher in coastal dynamics at IRD, and the coordinator of the study. "We identified hot-spots, where the increase in risks of overtopping is higher, such as in the Gulf of Mexico, the Southern Mediterranean, West Africa, Madagascar and the Baltic Sea."

Acceleration during the 21st century

The scientists also performed an initial global assessment of the potential coastal overtopping over the 21st century, by taking into account different sea-level rise scenarios. Results show that the number of overtopping hours could increase with a faster pace than the average rate of sea-level rise. "The frequency of overtopping is accelerating exponentially and will be clearly perceptible as early as 2050, regardless of the climate scenario. By the end of the century, the intensity of the acceleration will depend on the future trajectories of greenhouse gas emissions and therefore the rise in sea-level. In the case of a high emissions scenario, the number of overtopping hours globally could increase fifty-fold compared with current levels," Rafaël Almar warns. "As we go along the 21st century, more and more regions will be exposed to overtopping and consequent coastal flooding, especially in the tropics, north-western United States, Scandinavia, and the Far East of Russia."

Further studies will be needed on the local and regional levels to flesh out these global projections, which provide a solid basis for proposing effective adaptation measures in the hotspots identified.

Source

Swinburne researchers have collected unique insights that help explain why 50% of older Australia want to do more on the internet, but are reluctant to take selfies and share posts on social media.

"Reluctant selfies: older people, social media sharing and digital inclusion' by Swinburne's lecturer in Media and Communications Dr. Diana Bossio and Associate Professor of Media and Communications Anthony McCosker has just been published in the Journal of Media and Cultural Studies.

They found older people's reluctance to engage on social media and take selfies isn't about lacking technical skills. In fact, older people actively incorporate technology into their lives, for example with email, online shopping and reviewing.

Instead, it's social and cultural fears, as well as barriers to online participation that are behind older people holding back on social media.

The findings come out of the 60+ Online project, a workshop program to develop digital media skills and literacy among people aged 60 and over.

Dr. Bossio and Associate Professor McCosker say that research participants expressed fear around sharing personal content on social media because:

• They felt like they didn't have the necessary online social skills to gauge the kinds of self-expression that are appropriate for online spaces. As one participant remarked: "no one wants to see grandma on social media."

• They didn't feel like they understood what they saw as complex social boundaries and languages around how to interact with others online. Basically: "I'm going to make a fool of myself if I try to do what my grandkids do on social media."

All participants wanted to make better use of social media. This research forms part of a wider effort to increase participation in digital media among people aged 60 and over.

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A team of researchers led by Curtin University has discovered a new way to improve the absorption rate of medicinal cannabis when taken orally, which could potentially be used to treat neurological disorders such as Alzheimer's disease, multiple sclerosis and traumatic brain injuries in the future.

Published in the journal PLOS ONE and funded by industry partner Zelira Therapeutics, the researchers were able to create tiny capsules containing cannabinoids which, when taken orally, were absorbed by the body faster and penetrated the brain quicker in mice models with neurological diseases, than when it was delivered in liquid form.

Lead researcher, Associate Professor Ryu Takechi from the Curtin Health Innovation Research Institute (CHIRI) and the School of Population Health at Curtin University, said there has been a growing interest in the use of cannabidiol to treat various neurological diseases, but there are limitations due its poor absorption and sensitivity to light and stomach acid when consumed orally.

"Cannabidiol is found in medicinal cannabis and is a popular natural remedy for people living with neurological and metabolic diseases. Due to limitations in absorption, we aimed to design and test a new drug delivery method," Associate Professor Takechi said.

"Our team was able to significantly improve the absorption and brain delivery of cannabidiol by administering it in a novel microcapsule form, in combination with a naturally occurring bile acid.

"With this new capsulated form, we were able to improve the brain delivery of cannabidiol remarkably by 40 times in animal models and we were also able to protect the drug from oxidation and degradation by light, which helps extend product shelf-life."

Associate Professor Takechi said the findings may be helpful in supporting the clinical use of medicinal cannabis in the treatment of neurological disorders.

"In this study, we were able to show for the first time that a bile acid actually increased the uptake and retention of cannabidiol within the brain. This shows that bile acids, could be used to enhance the delivery of cannabidiol when taken orally, particularly when treating neurological disorders," Associate Professor Takechi said.

"Further research is needed to test whether this type of drug delivery method could be successful in human studies, but our findings are very promising."

Zelira CEO Dr. Oludare Odumosu said he was delighted with the outcome of the collaboration with Associate Professor Takechi and his team.

"The new encapsulation technology appears to significantly improve the efficiency with which cannabinoid-based drugs can be delivered into the brain. This could lead to improvements in the effectiveness of cannabinoid therapies to treat neurological disorders while reducing cost and enhancing safety," Dr. Oludare Odumosu said.

This research was a collaborative effort involving researchers from CHIRI, the Curtin Medical School and the School of Population Health at Curtin University, the University Newcastle and the University of Otago.

Source

The Lithium Mine Versus the Wildflower

The deposit could power 400,000 clean-energy car batteries. There’s just one roadblock: a rare, fragile species of buckwheat, which for a mine might mean extinction.

Whatever act of violence occurred in the midsummer heat on that lonely white hill in Nevada, there was no one around to see it. By the time Naomi Fraga arrived there in mid-September, the air had cooled but the evidence of a selective massacre remained: Where there had once been plants, there were now hundreds of empty holes. A few mangled stems, severed from their roots, lay half buried in the chalky dirt. What alarmed Fraga more than the dead or missing were the survivors. The white hill, located on a high desert ridge about halfway between Reno and Las Vegas that was once part of an ancient caldera, was home to a wide variety of Great Basin flora. There were various species, including saltbushes and sagebrush. But only one appeared to have fallen victim to the unseen attack—a buckwheat. As she walked around the scene, Fraga’s first reaction was disbelief. What, or who, had it out for this particular plant?

 

The stricken species was named Eriogonum tiehmii, or Tiehm’s wild buckwheat. (Tiehm is pronounced like “team.”) Fraga had first met the plant in late spring, when the rains coax out a single pale yellow puffball of a blossom. Fraga thought it was adorable. It would make a splendid addition to a garden in Whoville. But the bloom lasts only a month. Most of the year the plant lies dormant; its plump leaves dry out and fade to a charmless gray.

 

Fraga is a botanist who considers herself to be in the service of plants. Many people love plants. They will tenderly care for them, encourage flowering or fruit, take an interest in the bark and leaves on a trail. A scientist may devote a lifetime to studying a single species. But to Fraga, these acts of appreciation, while welcome, are rooted in selfishness, not service. In her work as conservation director at the California Botanic Garden, near Los Angeles, she is frequently asked why a person should care about a rare plant. Sometimes she poses this question to herself, like a catechism. Fraga doesn’t mean to get “all woo-woo” on you, but here it is: Her answer is not rooted in beauty or usefulness or even a sense of curiosity or wonder, but because a species exists uniquely on this earth. Fraga knows that most people don’t feel this way. It is a level of respect that plants do not often receive.

 

What called her to the service of the Tiehm’s buckwheat was its rarity. Fraga often hikes to the top of the white hill, where she can look out over the complete universe of the plant. At the time of her initial visit, the latest count was 44,000 buckwheats across 10 acres, rooted in eight patches of white earth. Some time ago—perhaps thousands of years, or maybe tens of thousands, nobody can say—seeds found their way into this soil, which lacks important nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen, and is extremely alkaline, more like baking soda than loam. But wild buckwheats, which are relatively distant cousins of the crop used to make flour for pancakes, are a tenacious genus of plant, known for making do with whatever soil they happen upon. Evolution ran its course, and a new species emerged. The plant learned to grow there and, as far as anyone knew, only there. There were no competitors for that toxic soil. Until, that is, the lithium mine.

 

In mining terms, the alkaline soil is called overburden—material that’s stripped away to access desired material below. The value of lithium has soared recently as the reality of climate change hits home. The element is at the heart of the batteries that will power millions of electric cars and a renewable energy grid. In April, President Biden set a goal of halving US emissions from 2005 levels by 2030, and global demand for lithium-ion batteries is expected to quintuple by then. Until now, lithium has come almost exclusively from overseas, but as the rest of the world makes a similar scramble for resources, this supply is growing increasingly precarious. The mine that was proposed for this Nevada spot, known as Rhyolite Ridge, wouldn’t solve that shortage on its own, but it would make a dent—about 20,000 tons of battery-grade material per year, enough to power about 400,000 electric cars. The total value of the mine’s resources was estimated at $10 billion.

 

Even an amateur geologist viewing the landscape could see how hopelessly the habitat and the resource are intertwined. The white patches in which the buckwheat grow are outcrops of a rock called searlesite, where much of the lithium is locked. The mine would swallow much of the buckwheat’s habitat—60 percent of the plants would be removed in phase one of the project, rising to 90 percent during phase two, according to conservationists. To compensate, the mine owners, who deny the loss would be that high, planned to transplant the buckwheat or grow it from seed in unoccupied soil nearby. As a plant that has not naturally colonized any other home, it is not clear if they would survive the move.

 

No one doubts the value of lithium to mitigate climate change. But there would be costs wherever the element was extracted from the ground, and here that cost would come at the expense of a plant. Fraga had decided the buckwheat was hers to protect. That September day, she couldn’t make sense of what she saw. She knew the summer had been unusually dry, which meant that animals were seeking moisture wherever they could, perhaps in the roots of plants. Maybe they had caused the destruction. But her first thought was that it had something to do with the mine. All she knew for certain was that, while she was away, nearly half of an entire species had been destroyed. Fraga looked out over the hill. She wondered if she had already failed this plant.

 

Lithium is a feisty element. When it’s bonded with other elements to form a compound known as a salt, it may act as a mood stabilizer. But on its own it’s erratic, always wanting to give up an electron and take on a charge. It must remain under seal; the briefest contact with humid air or water will cause it to combust in a popping, sparking flame. These qualities also make it a perfect material for batteries, which are about taming the ephemeral—a spark, a flame—and bottling it up for later. Inside a battery, lithium ions and their liberated electrons will happily shuttle through an electrolyte from one end, the anode, to the other, the cathode, generating power along the way. And because lithium is the lightest metallic element, relatively little mass is required to store a lot of juice. In a Tesla Model S, only 3 percent of the battery pack is lithium metal, according to some outside estimates.

 

That level of efficiency, though, was long in coming. The first rechargeable battery was invented in 1859 by Gaston Plante, and it involved lead and acid. The same basic chemistry still creates the spark that starts a gas-powered car engine, but the design is as heavy and toxic as it sounds, and not powerful enough for many modern uses, like keeping a car running at high speed for a long time. By the end of the last century, scientists believed that lithium-based designs could pack more punch, going longer without weighing things down. It would take decades of experiments to work out the chemistry, and a viable commercial model emerged only in the 1990s. Three scientists who made it possible were awarded the Nobel Prize in 2019.

 

It is a miraculous thing that in 2021 a car can drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco on a single electric charge and without spewing exhaust, or that a solar farm can compete with a gas plant by storing electrons overnight. These advances have arrived in the nick of time for a transition away from fossil fuels. The rising demand for new electric cars and trucks is expected to lead to a tripling of the energy capacity of new batteries between 2020 and 2025. These batteries aren’t perfect. They will need to get smaller, more recyclable, more powerful, and also more diversified, with versions that depend on other resources, such as sodium or manganese. In the interim, though, the world needs a lot more lithium.

 

Lithium is abundant in the Earth’s crust, but there is rarely enough found in one place to go to the trouble of digging it up. The element is most common near volcanoes where rock has been formed by slow-cooling magma. In some places, the lithium from those volcanic rocks leaches out and finds its way into the water table, forming a brine that can be pumped from the ground and evaporated, leaving lithium-bearing compounds behind. Until recently, Australian rocks and Andean brines have supplied enough lithium to satisfy most of the world’s needs. But the scramble to shift from fossil fuels has inspired a search closer to home. The US has the fourth-largest lithium deposits in the world, most of them in Nevada, but only one active brine operation, located in the state’s Clayton Valley, immediately to the east of Rhyolite Ridge. In both places, the lithium is the product of explosive volcanic eruptions that took place about 6 million years ago. The lithium was leached out of volcanic ash, then either remained in ground water, to be mined as a brine in the valley, or was absorbed by clays and sediments that now rest atop the ridge. The lithium trapped in clay or sediments is much harder to extract.

 

The virtues of this location are extolled by Bernard Rowe, managing director of Ioneer, the Australian mining company that owns the mining claims over Rhyolite Ridge. Rowe spoke over Zoom from Australia, where the pandemic has kept him for the past year, but his virtual background was set to a photo of the white Nevada hill. He first climbed it in 2016, three years before Fraga. A geologist by training, he had spent the previous decade scouring the American Southwest, mostly for new gold and copper deposits, and had rented a farmhouse in the nearby town of Dyer. At the top of the hill, he saw scars where prospectors in the 1920s had probed for boron, used then in fiberglass and today in all sorts of things, including smartphone screens. The boron deposit was so-so in quality. And the sediment was not as rich in lithium as pure rock, nor as easy to access as brines. But now that lithium was so valuable, Rowe saw an opportunity: two in-demand minerals in one spot, there for the taking.

 

Ioneer promised to operate thoughtfully, or as thoughtfully as an open-pit mine could. It would not leach out the lithium and boron with extreme heat, and instead would use a less-carbon-intensive method it had developed involving sulfuric acid. The company said it would dispose of those chemicals carefully, and highlighted plans to use autonomous mining vehicles to reduce traffic and pollution. It also secured the nearly unanimous support of neighbors. Talk to anyone in this erstwhile gold-mining region and expect to be regaled with enthusiasm for the arrival of “white gold.”

 

There was, of course, one problem: the buckwheat. Rowe knew from the start that the ridge was home to a species that the Bureau of Land Management considered “sensitive.” This meant the mine would need a plan for the plant. The mining would happen at the base of the hill, where plenty of buckwheat plants would need to be dug up. But they would be replanted, and, he said, pointing over his shoulder to the white hill, “we’re not planning to touch that.” The portion on high ground would remain intact. Rowe told me that the mine is ultimately a friend to the buckwheat—a catalyst for its protection—and argues that a concerted effort to replant the buckwheat in other areas can only help it repopulate. “If you do nothing with this plant, it will be gone,” he said. In the whole history of this plant, only the mine had stepped in to fund substantial studies and protect it.

 

And besides, the mine would produce an element necessary to mitigate climate change—a misfortune that will eventually wreak havoc on all plants, on this ridge and everywhere else. “We can’t just close our eyes and ears to the fact that we need lithium,” Rowe said.

 

There is a reason the buckwheat ended up on the BLM’s list of sensitive plants, and his name is Jerry Tiehm. He is the curator at the herbarium at the University of Nevada-Reno where he tends to a vast collection of flora, kept dried and pressed in a row of metal cabinets. This includes seven species in the tiehmii clan. Tiehm always refers to his plants by their scientific name, holding them at a little distance. He likes most plants. There is a peppergrass, which springs with great enthusiasm from the cracks of dried lake bottoms, that he might even love. But that species was named after a lucky man called Davis. Tiehm is 69 years old and needs knee surgery, but he plans to spend the summer finding plants driving around in his GMC Yukon. Nevada remains a place of botanical mystery. He feels a responsibility to decipher it.

 

Tiehm begins the story of how he found the buckwheat with one of his sayings: “Strange habitats yield strange plants.” In the spring of 1983, he was part of a band of botanists hired by the New York Botanical Garden and dispersed to survey the vast territory stretching from the Sierra Nevada to the Rockies. It involved a lot of solo wandering and long, disappointing days. But the spring morning when he turned a corner on the road through Rhyolite Ridge and saw that odd white hill, he knew there would be something. Sure enough, before him was a type of wild buckwheat that he did not recognize. He pressed a few plants and mailed them to a colleague who knew the genus better than he did. Soon after, Tiehm received a phone call and learned that he had become, once again, the namesake of a flower.

 

Tiehm went part-time on botany for a while. He found work in Reno as a casino bellman and limo driver and did a little consulting work for gold mines and geothermal exploration projects. In 1994, he was asked by the BLM to go back to the ridge and do a formal census of his namesake. He searched well beyond its 10-acre habitat, hiking into some of the nearby mountains where he could see similar patches of white earth from the highway. But he didn’t find it there. He noted the old mining scars, so he suggested in his report that the BLM restrict mineral extraction in the area, which the agency declined to do. He didn’t press the issue. Apart from this odd plant, who would want this lonely hill?

 

Then, two years ago, Tiehm found himself driving down to Rhyolite Ridge with Elizabeth Leger, a fellow botanist and his boss at the university. She was conducting a study, with money from Ioneer, to see whether the buckwheat could be safely moved from the mining pit. She needed to gather the native soil to grow seedlings in the greenhouses on campus. Leger had taken on the research knowing that transplanting might not work. In 1987 government scientists had tried to move the Crosby buckwheat, another lover of strange soils, to make room for a gold mine north of Reno. It grew happily in its new home at first. Then, 30 years later, one of Leger’s graduate students decided to check in. They found the habitat choked with other plants, barely a buckwheat to be found. Luckily, Crosby’s buckwheat had other homes besides the gold mine. Tiehm’s did not. “In my opinion,” Tiehm says, “this plant is not going to grow in any other place you put it.”

 

But it wasn’t Tiehm’s project. He was just there as a guide. “I’m good at knowing what’s not my business,” he says. Still, it was a strange position to be in. Without him, the buckwheat could very well have been tilled as overburden, and no one would have been the wiser. Would it matter? The buckwheat is an endangered species, he believes. Yet he can see also how much the world needs lithium. He can see the road to clean energy is an imperfect one, not without collateral damage. Who is he to decide where the hammer should fall?

 

In Esmeralda County, Nevada, a three-hour drive to Costco is a routine grocery run. Roughly 900 people live over 3,580 square miles in two valleys on either side of Rhyolite Ridge, which is a botanical meeting point. One side is a forest of Joshua trees, the northernmost of the Mojave, and the other is a sea of sagebrush, the start of the Great Basin. For Fraga, driving to the ridge from her home on the outskirts of Los Angeles is a multiday trip.

 

When Fraga and I arrived there on a bright day last October, the first thing she saw was a pair of ATV tracks cut deep into the hill and straight through the buckwheat. “You’ve gotta be friggin’ kidding me,” she said as she hopped out of the passenger side of a dust-covered Toyota Tacoma at the foot of the white hill. Fraga is 41 years old and was wearing leggings tucked into hiking shoes, her hair in a ponytail under a baseball cap. The Tacoma's driver, Patrick Donnelly, is the Nevada director for the Center for Biological Diversity, a conservation group leading the cause for the buckwheat’s protection. He made a note to report the new damage to the BLM and grumbled about how it should have already put up a fence.

 

The habitat is protected on three sides by rhyolitic cliffs, and the air is still. But as we climbed up, the quiet was interrupted by the occasional rumble of a mining truck installing protective barriers over Ioneer’s bore holes. We stopped to observe it. This is public land, so all of us—joyriders, miners, botanists, journalists—had a right to be there. But everyone looked like a trespasser to someone else. Donnelly was feeling especially paranoid. A few months earlier, during a pitstop for sandwiches at a store in Dyer, the pair spotted a poster that said MISSING above a photograph of the Tiehm’s buckwheat in bloom. Ioneer had advertised a $5,000 reward for sightings outside the path of the lithium mine. The poster was a long shot; professional botanists like Tiehm had tried and failed to find any rogue buckwheat colonies. Fraga thought the poster placed an unwelcome target on the plant, even though it clearly said “do not collect.” Maybe it would encourage a local to dig it up and then miraculously find it somewhere else. Not long after, a researcher from the University of Nevada-Reno, checking on a buckwheat transplant experiment, found the summer massacre.

 

The discovery kicked off an investigation by the US Fish and Wildlife Service. A preliminary report by UNR concluded that the damage was caused by rodents, not people. But Fraga and Donnelly remained skeptical. The evidence was circumstantial and could have happened after the fact. They had never seen a single species targeted so systematically and at such a suspicious time. Then again, if people had done the damage, why had they left the job half finished? We picked our way over the chalky hillside, sidestepping dormant buckwheats. Fraga picked up a severed plant and asked if it looked as if it had been gnawed by rodent teeth or cut with shears. It was hard to tell.

 

Fraga is from a working-class suburb of Los Angeles. When she was a child, her parents, immigrants from Chihuahua, Mexico, did not hike or camp; her mother did clerical work in various offices, and her father worked long hours driving a truck. There were barely any plants to look at in the industrial sprawl of the southern San Gabriel Valley. But in college, her biology coursework led to a volunteer job at the local botanical garden, where her job was to digitize the plant specimens of 19th-century botanical explorers. She fell in love with their single-minded passion, a quality she also found in the people she met at the garden, who were crazy about plants. “All they could do was talk all day about them,” she says. Fraga had been unaware that people like that existed.

 

For most people, plants are at the outer edge of our “moral circle,” a term popularized by the bioethicist Peter Singer. We hold them at a greater distance than our family or strangers or most animals. Their ways of communicating are unfamiliar, and their foundational role in our lives is harder to understand. When Fraga’s father learned what she planned to do with her biology degree, he didn’t understand why she wouldn’t want to work with people. A few years ago she took him searching for rare flowers in the mountains close to home, to help him see what she saw in plants. He told her he appreciated her skilled driving on dirt roads.

 

This emotional distance extended to academia. In graduate school, Fraga’s focus was a family of desert plants called monkey flowers, which produce quirky blossoms but are weedy and hard to love. The species she chose as her dissertation topic was rare, and, as it happened, in the path of a future development. The plant had previously failed to get protection because not enough research had been done. Inspired, Fraga dug into her research and wrote a conservation plan detailing how to best protect the flower. She would have to figure out a way to speak a little louder to advocate for certain plants, she decided. She met Donnelly while conducting field work near Death Valley. They became close friends, and years later he asked for her help saving a rare buckwheat, the Tiehm’s. Fraga told him she would do what she could.

 

Fraga often calls her time with buckwheat an “experiment.” She is a scientist, not an activist, and finds it strange to have stepped over this invisible barrier, putting herself at odds with government scientists she knows from botanical listservs and desert plant conferences. Where Fraga is measured with her words, Donnelly is prone to blurt out sharp opinions. He has hit UNR and the local BLM office with so many open records requests that state officials began to avoid using the word Tiehm’s in emails. “Sometimes you have to sue the motherfuckers!” he says.

 

Donnelly first became aware of the plant’s plight in 2019, and shortly after that his organization successfully sued to stop Ioneer from exploring the terrain. That fall, they petitioned the US Fish and Wildlife Service to declare Tiehm’s buckwheat an endangered species. “If the Endangered Species Act has any meaning at all, this plant gets listed,” he says. Donnelly had seen plenty of plant destruction throughout his career. And yet the damage to the buckwheat last summer hit him especially hard. “It was like seeing a good friend of mine get murdered,” he says. When Donnelly thought about giving up, Fraga reminded him there were still plants left to save.

 

The Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973 on a nearly unanimous vote that reflected a collective awakening to the accelerating crisis of extinction. This was quickly challenged when an endangered fish called the snail darter got in the way of the partially built Tillicoe Dam, in Tennessee. In 1978, the Supreme Court ruled for the fish and affirmed the intent of the law: to protect species at “whatever the cost.”

 

Conservationists like Donnelly have since wielded a singularly powerful tool: petitions to protect threatened species. The government can delay or reject those petitions, and often does. (There is a current backlog of more than 500 petitioned species.) But each successful listing adds up to a larger strategy of protecting biodiversity and offers a way to protect the waters, the old growth forests, and the hillsides on which species live and that other laws do not so clearly protect. Some conservationists will admit (perhaps after a few drinks) that it is rather peculiar to have made species the basic subunit of conservation. Modern biology has taught us that a species is a messy concept; drawing neat categories based on reproductive rules or genetics or physiology is often impossible. A few years ago, the entire group of monkey flowers that Fraga studied was swept from one genus to another. But the category of “species” is now part of the legal philosophy that holds us back from far wider ecological destruction.

 

That rationale does not fully account for Donnelly’s deep “personal relationship with an inanimate being,” as he puts it. He advocates for dozens of Nevada species, and yet it is Tiehm’s buckwheat that he thinks about all the time. It is the most extreme example of rarity he has ever known, always flickering at the edge of nonexistence. All it would take is another incident like last summer’s. “We’re the only ones paying attention,” he says. “I feel a level of personal responsibility.”

 

We stopped to catch our breath halfway up the white hill, which is tremendously steep, on our way to the best spot to view the buckwheat’s universe. Fraga believed the extinction of any species was a tragedy, whether or not anyone had studied it or even laid eyes upon it, but she knew that wouldn’t satisfy most people. As we paused, Fraga noted that if the government had funded more studies of this rare plant in the 1990s, after Tiehm had surveyed it, she would be more prepared to make a case for it for those, unlike her and Donnelly, who don’t instinctively feel an emotional connection to a plant living on a remote Nevada ridge. She could say more about its role in the ecosystem: the food and shelter it provides to animals, the way it acts as a landing pad for pollinators like bees. The buckwheat is unlikely to become a cash crop or yield chemicals in its leaves that would kill an antibiotic-resistant superbug. But what if its genes harbor secrets that other plants could use to adapt to harsh places? We know what the mine offers, but we’ve been given so little time to understand this plant. Perhaps if more forethought was given to how to preserve and advocate for rare things before they are threatened, they would not be in such a fix. Now judgment day is here, and the only true research on the plant is being funded by a mine.

 

The environmental ethicist Katie McShane compares our reverence for species to the word freedom. Everyone believes in it, but nobody knows what it means. “Even if you agree that it has value, it doesn’t tell you what to do when that value conflicts with my needs,” she says.

 

Comparing the value of things, weighing the costs and benefits of one against the other, is increasingly the preoccupation of environmentalists. Sometimes those competing things both have a claim in the natural world; sometimes one has a claim to bettering human life. Or the planet as a whole. If the mine at Rhyolite Ridge were digging for gold or copper, perhaps it would be easier to dismiss its value. Everyone benefits from raw materials, but it can be easy to say that you don’t “need” gold or that dollar value isn’t paramount. With lithium, denial is harder. Donnelly and Fraga both agree that the country—the world—needs to wean itself from fossil fuels. Lithium and sunshine are abundant in the desert Southwest, and so the transition to green energy will likely bring a new level of industrialization to its landscape. Mines and solar power plants will compete with rare buckwheat and desert tortoises. But in the absence of those mines and power plants, the desert will still suffer. For all their harsh conditions and seeming barrenness, deserts are fragile places, the life there is easily imperiled by higher temperatures and more frequent droughts. The conditions demand we formulate a moral equation: What is the value of the mine versus the value of the plant?

 

All mines have a dirty side, whether or not their products are “green.” They can destroy landscapes or pollute water supplies or expel greenhouse gases. Historically, mining companies have cared little about those impacts, doing the bare minimum to adhere to regulations. But lithium miners face extra pressure to act responsibly, explains Alex Grant, a technical adviser who works with those mines. Electric vehicle buyers are likely to care, for example, that 25 percent of their car’s lifetime carbon impact comes from the battery supply chain. So automakers, seeking to enhance their climate-friendly reputations, have increasingly leaned on lithium suppliers to burn less coal and seek certifications attesting that their mines do not ruin waters and habitats.

 

It is impossible to make every cost go away. As Grant sees it, there is no alternative to digging up lithium. The status quo of fossil-burning cars is not an option. What did opponents of lithium mining expect? A return to the horse and buggy? “We don’t need every project,” he says. “Some of them might have impacts that we should not accept. But we’re going to need a large fraction of them, that’s for sure.”

 

Each project seems to have its own set of costs that someone will find unacceptable, which makes deciding which ones should be allowed to move forward yet more difficult. In Nevada’s far north, Thacker Pass, another major lithium project close to digging, is held up by disputes with indigenous groups and ranchers over water rights and pollution. The same is true in places like Chile and Bolivia. Alternatives that appear more ecologically appealing, like brines near California’s Salton Sea, have been talked about for decades, but the technology and financing behind those projects is uncertain. We could look to the oceans, maybe; deep-sea mining could offer lithium on a scale that would make any terrestrial mine seem puny. But the environmental costs of that approach are arguably even less well understood, and potentially enormous.

In that context, the fate of a humble flower seems like a very small thing when the lithium can be had so soon, and with few extra complications. Mining interests, ranchers, and developers have long argued that the process of listing endangered species should factor in economic costs, like the lost value of a mine or the expense of keeping a species on life support when it seems natural forces could select it out of existence.

 

To Fraga, this is all a logical trap. Certain arguments for the plant may be emotional or reverent. But perhaps our rush for lithium is also emotional and prevents us from thinking on a longer time scale. “Rhyolite Ridge is not the only great hope for lithium,” she says. Perhaps we could wait a little longer for our domestic lithium, maybe pay a little more in the interim, work out the compromises that are required to mine in other places. Naysayers might point to the damage brought about by a warming climate and say Tiehm’s buckwheat is a doomed species no matter what. Better to sacrifice it now for the greater good of alternative energy. Fraga disagrees. The buckwheat clearly needs help, but it can hardly be written off as a goner. The mine is a death sentence to a species that could live on, evolve, contribute in ways that we have not had the time to comprehend.  As she sees it, protecting this plant is a service to our future, both for ourselves and for other species.

Some years, the springtime blankets the Nevada desert with superblooms of color. Dull-brown hills turn to waves of blue and purple and gold. But when Fraga visited the white hill in April, the previous 12 months had been the state’s driest on record, and Rhyolite Ridge was as thirsty and barren as it had been the previous fall. The chalky soil should have a slight bounce, like walking on moss, but instead it crumbled underfoot. Fraga still hoped to see signs of life. The plant had been dormant since the incident last summer, and this was the season when she could begin to truly assess the damage.

 

The visit happened at an uncertain time. Leger’s team at UNR had recently reported back on its transplant efforts. They didn’t look promising.  In the campus greenhouses, the buckwheat grew well in soil gathered from the habitat, but not in the similar soil gathered from unoccupied sites nearby. The plant was picky. The team also learned that the buckwheat was popular with insects—more so than any of its neighbors. It was a small thing, but it is unusual to know these kinds of details about a rare plant, Leger told me. There is a lot more to learn.

 

Leger also worries for the plant. As she was preparing her findings, a DNA analysis from US Fish and Wildlife had affirmed that the summer damage was done by rodents, which was alarming. “They cannot be legislated, and they are the most creative creatures when it comes to overcoming fences or barriers,” she says. “This is an area that needs immediate attention and research.” If it was going to survive, the buckwheat would need protection from more than just the mine.

 

In early June, the buckwheat won its first major victory. After a series of delays and lawsuits, Fish and Wildlife issued a preliminary decision: Listing the Tiehm’s buckwheat was warranted. While the government is often recalcitrant in fights over listing species, there were many threats to cite: ATV drivers, rodent massacres, climate change—and, crucially, the mine. The combination of last year’s damage and the mine's initial dig would mean losing up to 88 percent of the plants, they calculated, and based on Leger’s results the transplant idea seemed ill-advised. But the battle is not over. Rowe says Ioneer is working with private botanical consultants on a new, “expanded” protection plan, with a more aggressive time frame involving more test transplants and more soils than UNR had attempted. It will be up to the government to decide whether the science bears out.

 

In the meantime, Fraga and Donnelly continue making pilgrimages to the ridge. Within a few moments of arriving that dry April morning, Fraga spotted it: a hint of soft green. And another. And another. Some of the young buckwheats looked like seedlings, springing from undisturbed white soil; others seemed to be grafting from the damaged roots. Fraga crouched down and cupped a tender shoot. It was small and delicate; she couldn’t be certain what another hot summer might do to it. But she was surprised and feeling hopeful. In a few weeks’ time, in May, there might even be a blossom or two. Perhaps, she speculated, the plant has a natural cycle that we don’t yet comprehend. A single buckwheat can live for centuries. Our human eyes have beheld this species for such a brief time. Who are we to say how resilient it is?

The Lithium Mine Versus the Wildflower

The Amazon Appstore has announced that it will be reducing its cut of developer revenue from 30% to 20% for developers that earn less than $1 million in revenue per year. The new terms, which Amazon is calling the Amazon Appstore Small Business Accelerator Program, will also provide developers with AWS promotional credit in an amount equivalent to 10 percent of the developer’s revenue if they earn less than $1 million in revenue per year. If a developer chooses to use those AWS credits, that brings their total Amazon Appstore revenue share up from 70% to an equivalent of 90%.

DISCLAIMER: I publish apps in the Amazon Appstore which earn me revenue. I earn less than $1 million per year and will therefore qualify for this program and will financially benefit from this change. For that reason, my opinions are biased, so I will list only the facts and keep my opinions out of this article.

Apple announced last year that it will reduce its App Store’s developer revenue cut from 30% to 15% for developers that earn less than $1 million in revenue per year. This change went into effect at the start of 2021. Earlier this year, Google announced that it too will reduce the Play Store’s cut form 30% to 15%, but only for the first $1 million in annual revenu earned by all developers. That change will go into effect on July 1st.

This change by the Amazon Appstore brings its revenue share more closely in line with the new policies of Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store. However, if smaller Amazon Appstore developers don’t use the extra 10% in AWS credits, which expire 12 months after being earned, they will not benefit as much from Amazon’s new policy as they would from Apple or Google’s new policies. Conversely, for developers that already spend more than 10% of their annual revenue on AWS fees, the new Amazon Appstore program will be more beneficial than Apple or Google’s program. Developers must link their AWS accounts to their Amazon Appstore accounts, once the new program launches, in order to receive the extra 10% AWS credit.

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Drugs that are being trialed to treat leukemia could also be used to fight bowel cancer after a breakthrough by Hudson Institute of Medical Research scientists.

In a world-first, researchers found that the drugs could potentially be used to fight bowel cancer, using Nobel Prize-winning genetic screening technology CRISPR.

The researchers were using CRISPR to identify new targets for bowel cancer tumors when they realized that the gene KMT2A—usually associated with Acute Myeloid Leukemia—promotes bowel cancer. It does this by fuelling uncontrolled growth of the tumor, and encouraging the cancer cells ability to 'self-renew," preventing the tumor from regression or differentiation.

They then trialed two agents that inhibit KMT2A and found that these block bowel cancer growth and self-renewal, with very little damage to normal cells. These inhibitors are very similar to others which are currently in clinical trials to treat leukemia.

"Targeting this gene, KMT2A, reverses the aggressiveness of bowel cancer cells, and re-educates them to become normal cells," said Dr. Chunhua Wan, first author of the paper published in Science Advances.

How targeted therapy works against bowel cancer

Targeted therapy is a relatively new way of treating bowel cancer. It has many advantages over conventional therapies such as chemotherapy and radiotherapy, as it only affects cancer cells, is better tolerated by patients and has fewer side effects.

"Due to limited therapeutic options, bowel cancer patients, especially those diagnosed at late stages, have very poor outcomes. Our findings may pave the way to developing new targeted therapies and benefit the treatment of bowel cancer patients," said Associate Professor Ron Firestein.

About bowel cancer

• Bowel cancer is the second deadliest cancer in the Australian general population

• About 300 Australians are diagnosed with bowel cancer every week and more than 100 Australians die from the disease

• Australian women have an eight percent risk and men have a 10 percent risk of developing bowel cancer.

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A group of Oakland University researchers used data from medical studies around the world to examine the impact of resistance training on type 2 diabetes risk.

Their findings, published in the journal Sports Medicine, showed that resistance training such as weight lifting and resistance band exercise is helpful for controlling blood sugar and blood lipid (LDL, HDL and Triglycerides) levels—two of the most prominent risk factors for type 2 diabetes—in those at risk for the disease.

"Previous studies have shown that resistance training is effective for controlling glycemic (blood sugar) and blood lipid levels in adults who already have type 2 diabetes," said Raza Qadir, a recent OUWB graduate and the paper's lead author.

"Our research showed that resistance training is also useful for controlling those same variables, in addition to reducing body fat, in people who are at risk for developing the disease."

Along with Qadir, Elise Brown, an assistant professor in OU's School of Health Sciences, Taylor Todd, a student in OU's School of Health Sciences and Nicholas Sculthorpe, a professor in the School of Health and Life Sciences at the University of the West of Scotland, were co-authors on the paper. In addition, Brown served as faculty mentor to Qadir.

The OU researchers pulled data from controlled clinical trials that tracked cardiometabolic outcomes in adults with type 2 diabetes risk, comparing those who underwent a resistance training intervention with those who did not. Cardiometabolic outcomes refer to common risk factors that are linked to both cardiovascular diseases (e.g., coronary artery disease) and metabolic conditions (e.g., obesity, type 2 diabetes) such as abnormal blood lipid and blood sugar levels, high blood pressure and increased abdominal fat.

Sculthorpe performed the data analysis, which showed that resistance training, when performed over a period of at least 12 weeks, is effective in lowering blood sugar, body fat and blood lipids in adults who are at risk for type 2 diabetes.

"These findings have implications for type 2 diabetes prevention efforts," said Qadir, adding that long-term studies are needed to determine if regular resistance training can prevent the disease altogether. "If we can prevent the disease, we can avoid the health complications and costs associated with it."

The complications are many and varied. They include nerve, kidney and vision problems, along with increased risk for cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death globally. Moreover, type 2 diabetes affects over 400 million people worldwide and has an estimated annual global cost of $1.3 trillion.

Looking at the data, the researchers found that the clinical trials that demonstrated the most significant improvements in cardiometabolic outcomes for patients at risk for type 2 diabetes employed specific training parameters—namely the use of free weights or resistance bands at intensities above 60% one-repetition maximum, with 10 to 15 repetitions at a time. This means an individual is using an intensity that is above 60% of the maximum amount of resistance they can move through an appropriate range of motion for one repetition using correct technique.

These findings align with exercise recommendations from the American Diabetes Association and American College of Sports Medicine for adults with type 2 diabetes, Qadir said. He noted that, in addition to supporting cardiometabolic health, resistance training is also used to improve athletic performance, body composition and bone density.

"Those benefits just strengthen the case for resistance training," he said.

Qadir started working on the project as an M1 in OUWB's Embark program, which provides students with scholarly research experiences under the supervision of a faculty mentor. His responsibilities on the project included design and conception of the study, screening of titles, abstracts, and full text articles, data extraction, risk of bias assessment, and manuscript draft and revisions. Qadir credits his faculty mentor, Elise Brown, with making his experience immensely valuable.

"She was the best mentor I could have asked for," he said. "She gave me full responsibility, while guiding me through every step of the research process."

Qadir graduated from OUWB in May and will serve a transitional year residency at St. Mary Mercy Livonia Hospital before moving on to an advanced residency in anesthesiology at the University of Chicago Medical Center. He believes his research experiences will make him a better physician to his future patients.

"As physicians, we should be experts in the critical appraisal of medical literature," he said. "Because a lot of times data gets misused or misinterpreted, which leads to conflicting reports and confusion among the public. Patients are going to ask our opinions on these topics, so we need to be able to evaluate the studies ourselves and provide the most accurate information."

He added, "This whole experience has given me an appreciation for everything that goes into research and hopefully will springboard my career and allow me to do more research in the future."

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(HealthDay)—The coronavirus pandemic has had an unexpected side effect—a wave of bad reactions to alcohol-based hand sanitizers.

Vapors from the products can cause headache, nausea and dizziness, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which advises consumers to use the products in well-ventilated areas.

"We have received increasing reports of these side effects since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic," the agency said in a news release. "Most people experienced minor or minimal effects; however, some cases required treatment by a health care professional."

The incidents likely occurred when people used sanitizers in enclosed spaces or places with poor air circulation.

The FDA said it is continuing to monitor reports of adverse events involving hand sanitizers.

"At this time, we are not making any changes to the Drug Facts label for hand sanitizers but will inform the public if additional information becomes available," the agency said.

It reminded consumers that hand sanitizers should be used in a well-ventilated area. If you are applying them in an enclosed area such as a car, open a window until the product is dry and vapors have cleared, the FDA advised.

"Make sure your hands are completely dry and vapors have cleared before doing any activities involving heat, sparks, static electricity or open flames," it added. "Read and follow the directions and warnings on the OTC Drug Facts label."

The FDA noted that some hand sanitizers may be contaminated with harmful ingredients, so it's important to check the agency's "do-not-use" list to determine if the product you have is safe.

If you develop side effects from a hand sanitizer or someone accidentally ingests it, contact a health care provider or poison control at 800-222-1222 or online. Call 911 if the person has trouble breathing or becomes unconscious, the FDA said.

Hand sanitizers should be stored out of children's reach and sight. Swallowing even a small amount can cause alcohol poisoning in children, which could result in serious illness or death, the agency warned.

Source

(HealthDay)—Dietary interventions, like the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet and low sodium consumption, can improve cardiovascular risk factors in a relatively short time period, according to a study published in the June 1 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

Stephen P. Juraschek, M.D., Ph.D., from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, and colleagues assessed effects of sodium reduction on cardiac biomarkers, alone or combination with the DASH diet. Four hundred, twelve adults with systolic blood pressure (BP) 120 to 159 mm Hg and diastolic BP 80 to 95 mm Hg were randomly assigned to either the DASH diet or a control diet. Participants consumed each of three sodium levels for four weeks: low (50 mmol/day), medium (100 mmol/day), and high (150 mmol/day).

The researchers found that the DASH diet reduced high-sensitivity cardiac troponin I (hs-cTnI) by 18 percent and high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hs-CRP) by 13 percent. However, there was no decrease noted in N-terminal pro-B-type natriuretic peptide (NT-proBNP), compared to the control diet. Independent of diet, lowering sodium from high to low levels reduced NT-proBNP by 19 percent, but did not alter hs-cTnI and mildly increased hs-CRP (9 percent). Compared with the high sodium-control diet, combining DASH with sodium reduction lowered hs-cTnI by 20 percent and NT-proBNP by 23 percent, but hs-CRP was not significantly changed.

"We used highly sensitive markers of subclinical cardiovascular disease to show how two dietary strategies can improve distinct mechanisms of subclinical cardiac injury in a relatively short time period, suggesting that the improvements in cardiovascular disease risk factors observed from a reduced-sodium, DASH diet may also reduce concurrent cardiac damage," Juraschek said in a statement. "Our study has important clinical implications, and these findings should strengthen public resolve for public policies that promote the DASH dietary pattern and lower sodium intake in the United States and globally."

Source

A five-year-old girl who was stuck in India for 18 months while her parents were in Australia has finally been reunited with her mother.

Johannah was visiting her grandparents in India when the pandemic struck and Australia's borders were closed.

The little girl flew into Sydney on Monday, and is now in quarantine with her mother, Drisya.

"Oh my god, it was so exciting, it's not something that can be described in words," Drisya told the BBC.

Drisya and Johannah's father, Dilin, had been trying desperately to bring their young daughter to Sydney, however cancelled flights and rules on unaccompanied minors prevented their reunion.

Through a Facebook support group dedicated to Australians stuck in India, they were introduced to a couple - Linda and Joby - who were planning to move to Sydney themselves, and offered to accompany Johannah on the flight.

"We got to know Linda over some weeks, and we trusted them," Drisya said, adding, "They both took care of my child, it was so nice of them, we would like to express our gratitude to them."

Linda and Joby also accompanied a second child on the Qatar flight, who was about the same age as Johannah.

Drisya and Dilin are not the only parents to turn to other families for help - Australian media has reported on a number of parents relying on people who have agreed to act as the child's guardian during the flight.

Johannah, 5, was visiting her grandparents in Kerala state when the pandemic saw borders closed and flights cancelled

Drisya, who had found it hard to sleep during the ordeal and often cried through the night, said the relief was enormous.

"I could see how much my child missed me, she was just clinging onto me - even now she doesn't leave me. It's been a long wait."

Only one parent is allowed to join unaccompanied children in quarantine, so Johannah will see her father when the 14-day isolation is finished.

And it seems he had better come with berries, because that is what Johannah is looking forward to the most. "In her imagination, Australia is a land of strawberries, she loves berries, so getting into Australia is like getting into a strawberry farm," Drisya laughed.

Unaccompanied children in India

At the start of June, updated figures from Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) showed there were 203 minors in India separated from their parents - although some have since returned on repatriation flights.

Most of the children, like Johannah, have been living with extended family members.

Dilin described their struggle to be reunited at an Australian Senate committee hearing last month.

He said there was a lack of support from the government, and rules that were out of their control were preventing her from being with them, including her age - Johannah was too young to fly alone on both the government's repatriation flights and commercial flights.

They finally got her a seat on a chartered plane with a private company, however that flight was cancelled when the Australian government brought in a controversial ban on all arrivals from India - which has since been lifted.

With limited flights between the two countries, the couple did not want to risk flying back to India to be with Johannah, in case they could not return.

They finally got her a seat on a chartered plane with a private company, however that flight was cancelled when the Australian government brought in a controversial ban on all arrivals from India - which has since been lifted.

With limited flights between the two countries, the couple did not want to risk flying back to India to be with Johannah, in case they could not return.

There has been widespread criticism of how the government has handled Australians stranded overseas - especially those who are vulnerable. The BBC has approached the DFAT for comment on this article.

Drisya told the BBC on Thursday, however, that in the past few weeks they had received more support, including a dedicated case worker who said they could get an expedited visa for Drisya's mother to fly from India to Australia with Johannah.

"But she isn't in a position to travel," Drisya explained, adding "there are many elements including the language barrier. That was our last option."

"The government is at least doing something now.... Hopefully they'll do much more. There are so many people who are still stranded in India."

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COVID-19 has wreaked havoc on India and with that, many have come forward to lend a helping hand. Governments, organizations, and individuals have joined forces to help the people of India deal with this health crisis and large-scale pandemic emergencies. In this ordeal, the tech giant, Google, has also made sure to support India by providing the right tools people require to keep up to date with the latest information and research about COVID-19. The company also announced grants worth $18 million to aid emergency relief work, in April, through Google.org.

Google has played a key role in aiding the non-profit organizations working in India to get urgent help to the people in need along with strengthening public health campaigns and providing authentic health information. With a major focus on rural areas of India, Google is working towards developing workforce and healthcare infrastructure as the country is emerging from the health crisis it faced during the past months. It is also aiding ARMMAN, Apollo Medskills, PATH, and GiveIndia to develop oxygen generation plants.

With new grants worth $15 million to PATH and GiveIndia, Google.org will also be aiding in the procurement and installation of almost 80 oxygen generation plants in healthcare facilities located in rural and high-need areas. Both the organizations, PATH and GiveIndia, will collaborate to supervise the oxygen generation project. Google will aid Apollo Medskills as well to give frontline health workers specialized training in COVID-19 management.

Google has also committed to providing a $500,000 grant to the non-profit organization, ARMMAN that will provide skill development programs to 40,000 Auxiliary Nurse Midwives (ANMs) and Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) in 15 states of India.

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Report says robotic process automation to shrink headcount by 30 per cent and boost profits — yet the outsourcers keep talking about hiring sprees

The Bank of America’s global research team has predicted that India’s IT outsourcers are planning three million job cuts by 2022, with "low-skill" humans to be replaced by robotic process automation.

The prediction is found in a report [PDF] titled “Robo Sapiens: Future of Work Primer”.

A section of the report, headed “Robots won’t take over the world but we can’t ignore risks,” includes a section on robotic process automation (RPA) that opens by noting that in 2005 the difference between the wage for a UK or North American techie and their Indian equivalent was $92,000. By 2019 that gap had narrowed to around $40,000.

“India-based IT outsourcers appear to be planning for a 3 million/30 per cent reduction in ‘low-skilled’ roles globally by 2022 because of RPA up-skilling,” the report states, with $100B of salary savings the result — along with, presumably, a restoration of price competitiveness for Indian outsourcers.

The report continues: “It offers a boon for IT services companies that successfully implement RPA — likely a $10bn opportunity, as well as a vibrant new software niche.

“Given that robots can function for 24 hours per day, this represents a significant saving of up to 10:1 vs. human labor.”

The Register tracks India’s big four outsourcers — Infosys, HCL, TCS, and Wipro — and in public statements such as quarterly results announcements they almost always reveal an intention to hire thousands of new workers, and efforts to keep staff attrition rates low.

The big four recruit tens of thousands of staff each year, and most have increased rates of pay in recent months to help with staff retention.

The Register has checked the four companies’ most recent quarterly results announcements, and all mention intention to hire — and often to expand into new offshore destinations to find talent. Some have also signalled the desire for new hires in the UK and USA over a multi-year period.

Automation was mentioned by all but Wipro, but in the context of automation projects for customers rather than internal automation. All four also tout their RPA expertise as something they can offer to clients.

Evidence of internal RPA projects capable of delivering 30 per cent staff cuts starting from next year is also hard to find.

None of which proves that the Bank of America’s assessment is incorrect. It could be that the Bank sees new hires as coming into higher-skilled roles that are less likely to be automated away.

But on the face of it the research report’s assertion of a 30 per cent headcount reduction is not supported by the big outsourcers’ frequent statements. ®

Source

China successfully launches three astronauts to new space station

Services giant given a week’s notice of interrogation as e-tax service continues to splutter

Infosys has been hauled in by India’s Ministry of Finance to explain the glitchy e-tax system it developed for the nation.

The portal was launched on June 8th, with much ministerial fanfare about how it would benefit India.

The next day government figures stopping smiling, because the portal proved significantly sub-optimal. India’s Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman called out Infosys in tweets.

The portal has remained glitchy ever since. So glitchy, in fact, that on Monday the Central Board of Taxes was forced to permit the resumption of manual filing of some tax forms.

Now the Ministry has revealed it’s summoned Infosys to a two-hour meeting on June 22nd, at which senior officials and stakeholders will line up to ask Infosys to “answer queries, clarify issues, and receive inputs on the working of the portal, to remove glitches and sort out issues faced by the taxpayers.”

The Ministry’s announcement of the meeting precedes the event by a week but offers no detail on remediation work or deadlines for its delivery.

Electronic tax filings matter to India, because its tax base remains under-developed, especially for personal income tax. The nation has previously attempted to make filing for taxes easier and less susceptible to corruption and tried education schemes that position paying taxes as a patriotic act.

With the nation now in deep economic strife thanks to a certain pandemic, Infosys’s glitchy portal is therefore not just an embarrassment, but potentially also a bigger problem.

Infosys has not responded to previous inquiries on the matter from The Register, other than to direct us to tweets from its executives. No such missives relevant to the portal have appeared in recent days. ®

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A cold spot and a stellar burp led to strange dimming of Betelgeuse

The star ejected a gas bubble, and lower temps condensed heavier elements into dust.

 

In December 2019, astronomers noticed a strange, dramatic dimming in the light from Betelgeuse, a bright red star in the Orion constellation. They puzzled over the phenomenon and wondered whether it was a sign that the star was about to go supernova. Several months later, they had narrowed the most likely explanations to two: a short-lived cold patch on the star's southern surface (akin to a sun spot), or a clump of dust making the star seem dimmer to observers on Earth. We now have our answer, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature. Dust is the primary culprit, but it is linked to the brief emergence of a cold spot.

 

As Ars' John Timmer reported last year, Betelgeuse is one of the closest massive stars to Earth, about 700 light years away. It's an old star that has reached the stage where it glows a dull red and expands, with the hot core only having a tenuous gravitational grip on its outer layers. The star has something akin to a heartbeat, albeit an extremely slow and irregular one. Over time, the star cycles through periods when its surface expands and then contracts.

 

One of these cycles is fairly regular, taking a bit over five years to complete. Layered on that is a shorter, more irregular cycle that takes anywhere from under a year to 1.5 years to complete. While they're easy to track with ground-based telescopes, these shifts don't cause the sort of radical changes in the star's light that would account for the changes seen during the dimming event.

 

In late 2019, Betelgeuse dimmed so much that the difference was visible to the naked eye. The dimming persisted, decreasing in brightness by 35 percent in mid-February, before brightening again in April 2020.

 

Telescopes pointed at the giant were able to determine that—rather than a tidy, uniform drop in luminance—Betelgeuse's dimming was unevenly distributed, giving the star an odd, squished shape when viewed from Earth. That raised lots of questions about what was going on with the giant, with some experts speculating that because of Betelgeuse's size and advanced age, the strange behavior was a sign of a supernova in the making.

 

By mid-2020, astronomers had changed their tune. An international team of observers happened to have the Hubble Space Telescope pointed at Betelgeuse before, during, and after the dimming event. Combined with some timely ground observations, this UV data indicated that a big burp that formed a cloud of dust near the star may have caused the star to get darker.

 

"With Hubble, we could see the material as it left the star's surface and moved out through the atmosphere, before the dust formed that caused the star to appear to dim," said Andrea Dupree, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who made those observations. She is also a co-author on the new paper.

The findings last year showed that an outer layer of the star, called the photosphere, had begun unevenly accelerating outward right before Betelgeuse began to dim. At its peak, the photosphere was moving at around 7 kilometers per second, reversing the outward push as the dimming of the star became more dramatic.

 

Dupree and her colleagues suggested that as the star expanded in one of its usual cycles, a portion of the surface accelerated much more rapidly, thanks to a convection cell that had traveled from the interior of the star to its surface. Those two events combined pushed out sufficient material far enough from the star that it cooled down, forming stardust. That dust could account for the dimming.

 

The new Nature paper expands on those earlier observations due to images captured by the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) in January and March 2020. "For once, we were seeing the appearance of a star changing in real time on a scale of weeks," said co-author Miguel Montargès, from the Observatoire de Paris, France, and KU Leuven, Belgium.

 

Those images, combined with earlier observations in January and December 2019, allowed astronomers to directly witness the stardust formation, matching the observations of Dupree and her colleagues last year. The ESO team concluded that a gas bubble was ejected and pushed further out by the star's outward pulsation. When a convection-driven cold patch appeared on the surface, the local temperature decrease was sufficient to condense the heavier elements (like silicon) into solid dust, forming a dusty veil that obscured the star's brightness in its southern hemisphere. The astronomers speculate that a similar expelling of dust from cool stars could end up becoming building blocks of planets.

 

The ESO team found no evidence to support the impending supernova hypothesis. "The lack of an explosive conclusion might seem disappointing, but [these] results go beyond explaining one brief wink of a nearby star," University of Washington astronomer Emily Levesque (who is not a co-author) wrote in an accompanying Nature commentary. She raises the prospect of other red supergiants also showing signs of dimming. "Next-generation facilities focused on monitoring stellar brightness over time, or on studying the signature of dust in the infrared spectra of stars, could prove invaluable for expanding the lessons learned here."

 

One of those next-generation facilities is ESO's Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), slated to achieve first light in 2026. "With the ability to reach unparalleled spatial resolutions, the ELT will enable us to directly image Betelgeuse in remarkable detail," said co-author Emily Cannon of KU Leuven. "It will also significantly expand the sample of red supergiants for which we can resolve the surface through direct imaging, further helping us to unravel the mysteries behind the winds of these massive stars."

 

DOI: Nature, 2021. 10.1038/s41586-021-03546-8 (About DOIs).

 

Listing image by ESO/M. Montargès et al.

A cold spot and a stellar burp led to strange dimming of Betelgeuse