As more and more people are taking advantage of music on the go, personal audio systems are pumping up the volume to the detriment of the listener's hearing. Children, teenagers, and young adults are listening to many hours of music daily at volumes exceeding the globally recommended public health limit of 70 decibels of average leisure noise exposure for a day for a year.

During the 180th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, held virtually June 8-10, Daniel Fink, from The Quiet Coalition, and audiologist Jan Mayes talked about the current research into personal audio system usage and the need for public health hearing conservation policies. Their session, "Personal audio system use can harm auditory health," took place Thursday, June 10, at 11:35 a.m. Eastern U.S.

"Nonoccupational noise exposure in everyday life comes from a handful of noise sources: personal listening systems, especially for younger people; transit noise, home appliances; power tools; and entertainment (sports events, movies, parties (weddings, bar mitzvahs, birthday parties, etc.), NASCAR races, etc.)," Fink said.

In 2017, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported almost 25% of American adults, age 20-69, have noise-induced hearing loss. Acquired hearing loss is associated with communication difficulties, social isolation, increased risk of falls and accidents, and health complications, including dementia in later life.

Auditory health risk is highest for people using personal audio systems for more than an hour a day at more than 50% volume over a five-year period. Disputing a recent Wall Street Journal article claiming 85 decibels is safe for children and teens, Fink said 85 decibels is not a safe exposure for anyone.

"People think the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health 85 dBA recommended exposure level for noise is safe," he said. "But a noise level that won't prevent hearing loss in factory workers or heavy equipment operators is far too high for a young child whose ears have to last an entire lifetime."

Fink and Mayes will talk about the need for personal audio system noise emission standards and public education on their use "to prevent an imminent noise-induced hear loss epidemic when today's younger generations reach midlife."

"This isn't just a theoretical problem. Most people get too much noise every day," Fink said, citing studies from Western Michigan University and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, and the University of Michigan School of Public Health and Apple.

Source

This UK farmer is using cow dung power to farm cryptocurrency  

 

Philip Hughes, a man who resides in the Hendwr farm, located in the Denbighshire county, Wales, UK, is no ordinary farmer. While in a place like a farm, one would expect that cows would generally be reared for their milk, Hughes has been using the energy produced from his "cow muck" to actually farm cryptocurrency.

 

In the image below is Philip Hughes, the guy at the center, with Josh Riddett (more on him later) towards his left.

 

Anaerobic digesters have been put up to help him with this task. The digesters are the devices that process the waste to produce electricity. A third of it is to power the mining rigs, while the remainder is utilized for powering his farm itself. The rigs consist of GPUs and are used to mine Ethereum.

 

Philips has also started leasing out his digesters. So a lot of the mining rigs running here also belong to his lessees who use this renewable energy to farm crypto-coins. One of the people who appears to aid him in this business is Josh Riddett, who runs Easy Crypto Hunter. The firm, based in Manchester, sells and hosts mining rigs and it has been targeting small-scale renewable electricity generators, like Hughes', for its business. So far, Riddett says that he has been successfully able to set up his equipment at 42 sites.

 

Source and image: BBC

This UK farmer is using cow dung power to farm cryptocurrency

Bitcoin now legal tender in El Salvador, first nation to adopt cryptocurrency

Central American nation hopes to lower remittance costs and boost investment. 

Bitcoin now legal tender in El Salvador, first nation to adopt cryptocurrency

Early Tuesday morning, large portions of the web sputtered out for about an hour. The downed sites shared no obvious theme or geography; the outages were global, and they hit everything from Reddit to Spotify to The New York Times. (And yes, also WIRED.) In fact, the only thing they have in common is Fastly, a content-delivery network (CDN) provider whose predawn hiccup reverberated across the internet.

 

You may not have heard of Fastly, but you likely interact with it in some fashion every time you go online. Along with Cloudflare and Akamai, it’s one of the biggest CDN providers in the world. And while Fastly has been vague about what specific glitch caused Tuesday’s worldwide disruptions, the incident offers a stark reminder of how fragile and interconnected internet infrastructure can be, especially when so much of it hinges on a handful of companies that operate largely outside of public awareness.

 

Special Delivery

 

To understand how a Fastly problem can quickly become everyone’s problem, it’s worth spending a minute on the role CDNs play in the internet ecosystem. While it’s tempting to think of the internet as amorphous—they even call it “the cloud”—the articles you read, the movies and songs you stream, the photos you post, they all live on physical servers. And while that content might be primarily hosted on a cloud provider, you still need a way to get it to people quickly and efficiently. 

 

That’s where a CDN comes in. By operating servers around the globe, CDNs can whittle down the distance between your smartphone and the internet experience of your choice. Think of it as the internet’s equivalent of a relay man in baseball: Rather than try to throw the ball to home plate on their own, an outfielder will instead toss it to an infielder, who in turn fires it to the catcher. It’s faster and more efficient.

 

“It basically enables really high performance for content, whether that’s streaming video or a site or all the little images that pop up when you go to an ecommerce site,” says Angelique Medina, director of product marketing at the network monitoring firm ThousandEyes. “Serving it really close to the user takes away a lot of the load time, and it enables everyone to have a really great experience when they’re surfing the web.”

 

Take this article that you’re reading right now. Chances are you’re reading a copy of it held in the cache of what's known as a “point of presence,” a server somewhere in your region. A Fastly network map indicates that the company operates POPs in at least 58 cities around the world, including multiples in densely populated areas like Los Angeles, London, and Singapore. It lists their combined global capacity at a whopping 130 terabits per second.

And that’s not all! CDNs don’t just store content closer to the devices that crave it. They also help direct it across the internet. “It is like orchestrating traffic flow on a massive road system,” says Ramesh Sitaraman, a computer scientist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who helped create the first major CDN as a principle architect at Akamai. “If some link on the internet fails or gets congested, CDN algorithms quickly find an alternate route to the destination.”

 

So you can start to see how when a CDN goes down, it can take heaping portions of the internet along with it. Although that alone doesn’t quite explain how the impacts on Tuesday were so far-reaching, especially when there are so many redundancies built into these systems. Or at least, there should be.

 

CDNs Consolidated

 

Again, it’s not clear exactly what happened at Fastly. “We identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across our POPs globally and have disabled that configuration,” a company spokesperson said in a statement. “Our global network is coming back online.”

 

“Service configuration” can mean any number of things; the only certainty is that whatever the root cause, it had wide-ranging effects. According to Fastly’s incident report page, every continent other than Antarctica felt the impact. Even after Fastly had fixed the underlying issue, it cautioned that users could still see a lower “cache hit ratio”—how often you can find the content you’re looking for already stored in a nearby server—and “increased origin load,” which refers to the process of going back to the source for items not in the cache. In other words, the cupboards are still fairly bare.

 

That an outage occurred is surprising, given that CDNs are typically designed to weather these tempests. “In principle, there is massive redundancy,” says Sitaraman, speaking about CDNs generally. “If a server fails, others servers could take over the load. If an entire data center fails, the load can be moved to other data centers. If things worked perfectly, you could have many network outages, data center problems, and server failures; the CDN’s resiliency mechanisms would ensure that the users never see the degradation.”

 

When things do go wrong, Sitaraman says, it typically relates to a software bug or configuration error that gets pushed to multiple servers at once.

 

Even then, the sites and services that employ CDNs typically have their own redundancies in place. Or at least, they should. In fact, you could see hints of how diversified various services are in the speed of their response this morning, says Medina. It took Amazon about 20 minutes to get back up and running, because it could divert traffic to other CDN providers. Anyone who relied solely on Fastly, or who didn’t have automated systems in place to accommodate for the disruption, had to wait it out.

 

“The outage was the result of monoculture,” says Roland Dobbins, principal engineer of security firm Netscout. He suggests that every organization with a substantial online presence should have multiple CDN providers to avoid precisely this sort of situation.

 

Their options, though, are increasingly limited. Just as the cloud has largely been subsumed by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, three CDN providers—Cloudflare, Akamai, and Fastly—dominate the flow of content online. “There’s a lot of concentration of usage within very few service providers,” Medina says. “Whenever any one of those three providers has an issue, typically it’s not something that lasts a very long time, but it has a major impact across the internet.”

 

That’s a big part, Medina says, of why these sorts of outages have been more frequent of late, and why they’ll only continue to get worse. Baseball needs a cutoff man; intersections need traffic cops. The fewer of those there are to rely on, the more connections get missed, and the bigger the crashes.

 

Additional reporting by Lily Hay Newman.

How an Obscure Company Took Down Big Chunks of the Internet (may require free registration)

People who have Crohn's disease often seek to ease their symptoms by changing what they eat, and new research suggests the Mediterranean diet may be their best bet.

The study evaluated one of the commonly used diets for Crohn's disease, known as the specific carbohydrate diet (SCD), comparing it with the Mediterranean diet, which is sometimes recommended by doctors for its heart health benefits, but not for inflammatory bowel diseases like Crohn's.

The scientists found that both diets reduced symptoms almost equally, but the study concluded that the greater ease of following the Mediterranean diet might make it one that patients would prefer to follow.

"Physicians are seeing patients who are on increasingly restrictive diets," said study co-author Dr. Arun Swaminath. He is an associate professor in the Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell and an assistant professor at Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research at Northwell Health in New York.

The downside of these tightly controlled eating regimens is that patients may not be getting enough calories or nutritional variety, he said. An easier-to-follow diet may help with that.

"It's the idea of helping my patients avoid a pathway of increasingly restrictive foods for them to feel like they're being healthy enough to control the underlying problem. If I can keep them away from that dark pathway, I feel like I've done something good," Swaminath said.

Crohn's disease involves the immune system and is characterized by abdominal symptoms, such as pain and diarrhea, and chronic inflammation, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Together with ulcerative colitis (another inflammatory bowel disease), it affects about 3 million people in the United States.

The study was conducted in 33 sites across the United States between September 2017 and October 2019. The study included 191 patients who were randomly assigned to one of the two diets, following it for 12 weeks. The participants received prepared food for the first six weeks.

The diets affected their symptoms, and at 12 weeks about 42.4% had symptomatic remission with SCD and 40.2% with the Mediterranean diet, according to the report.

The SCD includes unprocessed meats, fresh fruits and non-starchy vegetables. It restricts certain legumes, all grains, certain sweeteners, canned fruits and vegetables, and certain dairy products. The Mediterranean diet is low in red and processed meats and features fresh fruits and vegetables, nuts, fish, lean meats, whole grains, small amounts of dairy and uses olive oil as its primary source of fat.

Diet isn't the only line of defense against Crohn's disease. For more than 20 years, since the first biologic medication was approved, there has been a blossoming of different medical therapies, Swaminath said. Prior to that, existing medications including steroids and immune modulators were repurposed to treat the disease.

"While admittedly, we haven't cured everybody or gotten everyone into a medicine-induced remission, we can help most people get to essentially a normal quality of life," Swaminath said.

Still, some people want an alternative to immunosuppressive therapy, according to the study, and high-quality data on diets for Crohn's disease is lacking.

Swaminath said that the people who were included in the study had mild to moderate disease. If someone is really sick and already malnourished, most physicians would not put them into a diet strategy, he added.

More than half the patients in the study were already taking a biologic medication, the researchers noted.

"What that means is, despite being on therapy, clearly they're on the therapy because it's working and they were better than they were before, but they still have symptoms that weren't cured," Swaminath said. "And if we can get half of those patients better by changing their diet or adopting one of these strategies, that really, I think, is valuable."

The findings were published online recently in the journal Gastroenterology.

Diet isn't a substitute for medication, but more of an adjunct, said Dr. Elie Abemayor, chief of the division of gastroenterology at Northern Westchester Hospital in Mount Kisco, N.Y. He was not involved in the study.

The two diets both try to reduce inflammation, but the Mediterranean diet is more palatable, he said.

When a patient is having more significant active inflammation, there's some belief that following a less inflammatory diet over the short term helps people and possibly lowers the likelihood of the patient progressing to a more significant inflammatory condition and disease, Abemayor said.

"I think that, in the short term, it is beneficial. I think longer term whether keeping people on Mediterranean diets or putting them on the SCD diet, I don't think that the jury's in on that yet, but I think probably in terms of general health it's probably a better diet for everybody to be on a Mediterranean-type diet," Abemayor said.

Some research is investigating whether the gut microbiome may play a role, Abemayor said, and whether people are more likely to respond to different kinds of treatment depending on their microbiome.

"I think that's where a lot of these treatments for gastrointestinal conditions are going to be headed, to stratify people based on genetics, based on maybe their microbiome, based on other kinds of things which separate one group from another," Abemayor said.

Source

Solar farms could double as pollinator food supplies

To fight pollinator decline, 8 states put habitats alongside solar facilities. 

Solar farms could double as pollinator food supplies

LONDON (AP) — Dozens of websites went down briefly around the globe Tuesday, including CNN, The New York Times and Britain’s government home page, after an outage at the cloud computing service Fastly, illustrating how vital a small number of behind-the-scenes companies have become to running the internet.

The sites that could not be reached also included some Amazon pages, the Financial Times, Reddit, Twitch and The Guardian.

San Francisco-based Fastly acknowledged a problem just before 6 a.m. Eastern. About an hour later, the company said:

“The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied.” Most of the sites soon appeared to be back online.

The company said in an emailed statement that it was a “technical issue” and “not related to a cyber attack.”

Still, major futures markets in the U.S. dipped sharply minutes after the outage, which came a month after hackers forced the shutdown of the biggest fuel pipeline in the U.S.

Fastly is a content-delivery network, or CDN. It provides vital but behind-the-scenes cloud computing “edge servers” to many of the web’s popular sites. These servers store, or “cache,” content such as images and video in places around the world so that it is closer to users, allowing them to fetch it more quickly and smoothly.

Fastly says its services mean that a European user going to an American website can get the content 200 to 500 milliseconds faster.

Internet traffic measurement by Kentik showed that Fastly began to recover from the outage roughly an hour after it struck at mid-morning European time, before most Americans were awake.

“Looks like it is slowly coming back,” said Doug Madory, an internet infrastructure expert at Kentik. He said “it is serious because Fastly is one of the world’s biggest CDNs and this was a global outage.”

Brief internet service outages are not uncommon and are only rarely the result of hacking or other mischief.

Fastly stock jumped about 6% by midday as investors shrugged off the problem.

Still, the incident highlighted the relative fragility of the internet’s architecture given its heavy reliance on Big Tech companies — such as Amazon’s AWS cloud services — as opposed to a more decentralized array of companies.

“Even the biggest and most sophisticated companies experience outages. But they can also recover fairly quickly,” Madory said.

When the outage hit, some visitors trying to access CNN.com got a message that said: “Fastly error: unknown domain: cnn.com.” Attempts to access the Financial Times website turned up a similar message, while visits to The New York Times and U.K. government’s gov.uk site returned an “Error 503 Service Unavailable” message, along with the line “Varnish cache server,” which is a technology that Fastly is built on.

Source

Children who consume too much sugar could be at greater risk of becoming obese, hyperactive, and cognitively impaired, as adults, according to the results of a new study of mice led by QUT and published by Frontiers in Neuroscience.

The study resulted in a reduced risk of sugar-induced weight gain and other health problems when the mice were given a much smaller daily dose of sucrose, supporting World Health Organization calls for a reduction in sugar intake by humans.

One of the lead authors, QUT neuroscientist Professor Selena Bartlett, says many children, adolescents, and adults in more than 60 countries, including Australia, have a diet consisting of more than four times the sugar (100g) recommended by the World Health Organization (25g per person per day).

"More work needs to be done in the investigation of the long-term effects of sugar on adolescents and adults but our results with the mouse model are very promising," said Professor Bartlett.

"Recent evidence shows obesity and impulsive behaviors caused by poor dietary habits leads to further overconsumption of processed food and beverages but the long-term effects on cognitive processes and hyperactivity from sugar overconsumption, beginning at adolescence, are not known," said Professor Bartlett.

"Our study found long-term sugar consumption (a 12-week period with the mice which started the trial at five weeks of age) at a level that significantly boosts weight gain, elicits an abnormal and excessive stimulation of the nervous system in response to novelty. It also alters both episodic and spatial memory. These results are like those reported in attention deficit and hyperactivity disorders.

"Human trials would need to be done but it suggests a link to the long-term overconsumption of sugar, beginning at a young age, which occurs more commonly in the Western Diet and an increased risk of developing persistent hyperactivity and neurocognitive deficits in adulthood."

Professor Bartlett said while the concept of 'sugar addiction' and the classification of sugar as a substance of abuse were still being debated, there is increasing evidence of overlap in the brain circuitry and molecular signaling pathways involved in sugar consumption and drug abuse.

"People consume sugar and food to regulate energy balance, but also for pleasure and comfort. This hedonistic desire for palatable food is reward-driven and overeating can impact upon and even override our ability to regulate," Professor Bartlett said.

"It is increasingly considered that unrestricted consumption of high-sugar food and beverages within the Western Diet might be linked to the increased obesity epidemic. A strong association between attention-deficits/hyperactivity disorders and being overweight or obese have also been revealed.

"Taken together, these data suggest that sugar-induced obesity may participate to the developing pathogenesis of ADHD-like symptoms in western countries. In children, high sugar consumption correlates with hyperactivity and in adults, with inattention and impulsivity.

"What has been unclear though, is whether chronic overconsumption of sucrose—starting from childhood—would have the same negative impact on our nervous system, emotions or cognition throughout adulthood as other addictive drugs.

"This study on mice goes a long way to resolving that question. Our results show for the first time that long-term consumption of sucrose leads to significant weight gain and produces persistent hyperactivity and learning impairments."

Co-lead author Dr. Arnauld Belmer added that while the overall sugar consumption has dropped since the mid-1990s, obesity rates have climbed.

"This rise in obesity rates could result from a delayed effect of excess sugar, suggesting that adult obesity may be driven by high sugar intake over a life span," Dr. Belmer said.

"Interestingly, our investigation with the mice found reducing the daily sucrose intake four-fold did prevent sugar-induced increase in weight gain, supporting the WHO's recommendation to restrict sugar intake by this amount would be effective. It could also limit the other negative consequences including hyperactivity and cognitive impairment."

Source

Some leaders in health care have called for an end to annual health check visits, saying they're a waste of time for patients and overworked primary care physicians and don't reduce the risk of death.

A new Northwestern Medicine study found while there is no clear proof that regular check-ups help adults live longer or prevent cardiovascular events like heart attacks or strokes, they still have many health benefits—especially for at-risk populations—and should continue.

Routine check-up visits (they don't have to necessarily be done annually) can lead to better detection and treatment of chronic illnesses such as depression and hypertension, an increase in vaccinations and screenings for diseases like cancer, and improve how a patient actually feels after visiting with a doctor (patient-reported outcomes), the study found.

"While it is disappointing that I can't tell my patients a visit with me or my colleagues will help them live longer, it is good to know there are proven, measurable benefits," said senior study author Dr. Jeffrey Linder, chief of the division of general internal medicine and geriatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and a Northwestern Medicine physician.

The study is a review of 32 studies conducted between 1963 and 2021. It will be published June 8 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

"I was surprised at how many benefits we found when we dug into the data, given the negative messaging around these exams," said first study author David Liss, research associate professor of medicine (general internal medicine and geriatrics) at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. "Especially when it relates to patient-reported outcomes. If you walk away feeling healthy, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

"I think a lot of the critics meant to say 'Don't do these annual exams for low-risk patients,' but the message came out to not do these exams at all, which is problematic."

'Sick visits' don't allow for all the necessary screenings

For at-risk populations, these exams are still vital, Liss said. They include patients who are ethnic/racial minorities; overdue for preventive services and have uncontrolled risk factors, such as diet, exercise and smoking; low self-rated health; don't have a single source of trusted care; or live in geographic areas with low access to primary care providers.

"A lot of people only see a doctor when there is a problem," Liss said. "But that often doesn't leave time to talk about vaccinations or cancer screenings. It's easy to see the value in routine checkups because there are multiple recommended services that could be discussed in these visits."

Cost should not be a factor because every patient with Medicare coverage and many insured patients under age 65 can get an annual wellness visit for $0 copay, Liss said.

The study examined a variety of factors, including mortality (risk of premature death) and cardiovascular outcomes (heart attacks or heart disease), which did not benefit from general health checks.

However, several remaining factors saw added benefits from routine check-ups, including chronic disease detection (e.g. increases in statin or depression prescriptions); risk factor control (improved blood pressure, cholesterol readings); clinical preventive services (more screenings and vaccinations); and patient-reported outcomes.

'The patient is the only person who knows how they feel'

Physicians are increasingly talking about "patient-reported outcomes" or "self-reported outcomes" as a measure of someone's health, almost equivalent to lab results or scan readings.

"It speaks to peoples' states of mind," Liss said. "There's a general sense of health when they walk away from these visits, maybe thinking, 'Hey, I'm not as unhealthy as I thought I was.' The patient is the only person who knows how they actually feel. The feelings people carry with them are important to their health and wellbeing over time."

Seeing a consistent and trusted source of primary care is important to foster relationships and makes it easier to reach out to doctors when there is a problem, Liss said, adding that just talking to someone about your concerns can make you feel better.

Source

A new study comparing different ways of encouraging people to reduce their alcohol intake has found telling people alcohol causes cancer makes them want to drink less, and encouraging them to count their drinks helps them do it.

Lead author Professor Simone Pettigrew from The George Institute for Global Health said that harmful alcohol use in Australia is a major health issue—it is associated with increased risk of injury, chronic diseases including alcohol-related cancers, and premature death. And it's not just heavy drinkers—even moderate drinkers are at increased risk of several types of cancer.

"There are limited resources available for alcohol harm-reduction campaigns, so it's important to find out which messages resonate best to ensure they have the best chance of working," she said.

"Many people don't know that alcohol is a carcinogen—it's important information that drinkers should have access to. But telling people alcohol causes cancer is just part of the solution—we also need to give them ways to take action to reduce their risk."

In this randomized trial, 8,000 adults who broadly represented the Australian drinking public completed a series of three online surveys over a period of six weeks.

As part of these surveys, some participants saw the Western Australian Government's Spread advert which informs drinkers that alcohol use increases their risk of cancer, some saw simple messages about how to change their drinking habits, and others saw combinations of the Spread ad and the simple messages.

The effect of these combinations on drinkers' attempts to reduce their intake and the actual amount of alcohol consumed were then measured.

"We found that pairing information about alcohol and cancer with a particular practical action—counting their drinks—resulted in drinkers reducing the amount of alcohol they consumed," said Prof Pettigrew.

With alcohol consumption accounting for around seven percent of early deaths, the World Health Organization recommended in 2018 that Member States should aim for a reduction of harmful alcohol use by at least ten percent by 2025.

An estimated one in six Australians consumes alcohol at levels that put them at risk of a related disease or injury during their lifetime, and one in four at levels placing them at risk of harm on a single occasion at least monthly.

"Although per capita alcohol consumption appears to be decreasing over time in Australia, at 9.5 litres of pure alcohol per person per year it remains too high. Drinkers need help to understand their risk and take action," said Prof Pettigrew.

"These findings provide new evidence to support investment in the most effective forms of public education to address alcohol harm across the population," she added.

Source

Authorities in 92 countries shut down 113,000 websites and online marketplaces selling counterfeit or illicit medicines and medical products last month, including vast quantities of fake COVID-19 tests and face masks, Interpol said Tuesday.

"As the pandemic forced more people to move their lives online, criminals were quick to target these new 'customers'," Jurgen Stock, secretary general of the international police agency, said in a statement.

Unauthorised COVID testing kits accounted for over half of all the medical devices seized from May 18 to 25, the agency said, while Italian authorities found more than 500,000 fake surgical masks and 35 machines for their production and packaging.

Police arrested 227 people worldwide and recovered pharmaceutical products worth $23 million.

"Whilst some individuals were knowingly buying illicit medicines, many thousands of victims were unwittingly putting their health and potentially their lives at risk," Stock said.

Fake and illicit drugs were also found concealed in shipments of clothes, jewellery, toys and food.

The roughly nine million devices and drugs seized was the highest number since Interpol began coordinating the fake medicine campaigns, known as Pangea operations, in 2008.

Source

A new study found that when people were given larger portions of macaroni and cheese for lunch, they ate more, as much as 43% more when the portion size was increased by 75%.

Those who ate faster or took bigger bites also tended to eat more food.

"I think both of our main findings have implications for health and how much we eat. And one step further, weight maintenance and weight gain," said study author Paige Cunningham, a doctoral student at Pennsylvania State University.

The researchers gathered 44 men and women for a weekly lunch for four weeks, giving them different-sized portions of macaroni and cheese in random order, served with water. They videotaped the meals so they could assess the speed at which participants ate, as well as the size of their bites.

Study participants ranged in age from 18 to 68 years old. About two-thirds were women. About 45% were overweight or obese.

The speed of eating didn't change with bigger portion sizes. The participants ate more when they ate faster or took larger bites, and also when they took more bites or ate for a longer time.

The reason for people eating more when they ate faster could be a matter of the body's response to how long food spends in a person's mouth.

"When we eat really quickly, obviously the food is spending less time in our mouth. And when we take really large bites, the food is spending less time in our mouths. So, these signals take longer, it takes longer for these signals to tell us to stop eating and we ended up eating more when we take larger bites and eat faster," Cunningham said.

Knowing that people eat more when their portion sizes are bigger, one recommendation is to be aware of the portions you're giving yourself. A person can also offset consuming more energy or calories than they need by choosing foods that have fewer calories per gram.

"If we're eating foods that offer less energy, we'll consume less energy and still be able to eat these satisfying portions," Cunningham said.

These can be water-rich foods, such as fruits and vegetables, said study co-author Barbara Rolls, professor in the nutritional sciences department in the College of Health and Human Development at Penn State.

Though slowing down eating might be an option for reducing overconsumption, it's hard to do, Rolls said, and some evidence suggests that eating speed is a genetically based behavior.

"I think it's clear that if people could be more mindful, slow down and pay attention, it could help them to eat less. But it's like all of the things around weight management, it's tough to actually get people to do it," Rolls said.

In her lab, they sometimes change the calorie density of food, reducing it by 30% without people noticing, Rolls said. They do this by mixing in more vegetables, using more herbs and spices and just a little bit less fat, but maintaining high palatability. People can make these little changes at home, too.

The research will be presented this week at the American Society for Nutrition virtual annual meeting. Findings presented at medical meetings are considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal. The research was funded by Jenny Craig, Inc., and the U.S. National Institutes of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.

"I'm honestly not surprised," said Dana Hunnes, an adjunct assistant professor in the Fielding School of Public Health at UCLA, who was not involved in the study. "There's been some data over the years that has indicated that as portion sizes have grown, people also tend to eat more."

It can take between about 15 to 20 minutes for your body to acknowledge you're getting full and starting to go through the digestion process, Hunnes said.

"It was interesting that they came to a conclusion that faster eating and larger bites also was related to eating more, but again that doesn't really surprise me because I think it's pretty well known that when people eat faster it takes longer to get full, and so therefore you tend to eat more and then larger bites, just bite for bite is getting more calories in," she said.

Hunnes, who advocates for a plant-based, whole foods diet, said she doesn't like to see people be hungry when they're trying to trim their portions or eat healthier. She recommends piling your plate with low-calorie fresh vegetables, fruit and whole grains.

"That's a great start," Hunnes said. "You won't feel hungry because it's going to fill up your stomach."

Source

In young women, Staphylococcus saprophyticus is a main cause of urinary tract infections (UTI), reaching 20% prevalence.

Understanding the epidemiology of this microorganism can help identify its origin, distribution, causes, and risk factors. Now, ITQB NOVA researchers led by Maria Miragaia showed evidence that Staphylococcus saprophyticus can originate in food, namely in the meat-production chain.

Europe is the world's second-biggest producer of pork, the most favored meat type in these countries. One of the contaminants of that meat is S. saprophyticus, which is found also in the environment, the gut and rectal flora of pigs, and in the human gastrointestinal tract, vagina, and perineum.

In the study published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, by using a combination of phenotypic, genomic, and pan-genome wide association approaches, researchers identified two different lineages (G and S) of S. saprophyticus. The lineage G, from food origin and transmitted to humans by contact with food products, and lineage S, from human origin. Both are associated with disease and may be transmitted directly or indirectly between persons within the community, showing not only a local but an extensive geographic distribution.

In order to understand if these bacteria causing urinary tract infections could be related to the ones in pork, the research group looked at S. saprophyticus from a slaughterhouse and compared them to those causing human urinary tract infections. The team analyzed bacteria collected from UTI worldwide over 20 years, and from UTI and pork meat production chain in Portugal.

Single nucleotide polymorphism-based Maximum likelihood tree of 480 S. saprophyticus recovered from different sources. Credit: Opeyemi U. Lawal, Maria J. Fraqueza, Ons Bouchami, Peder Worning, Mette D. Bartels, Maria L. Gonçalves, Paulo Paixão, Elsa Gonçalves, Cristina Toscano, Joanna Empel, Ma?gorzata Urba, M. Angeles Domínguez, Henrik Westh, Hermínia de Lencastre, and Maria Miragaia

The results revealed that bacteria from the slaughterhouse (equipment, meat, workers colonization) were similar to human UTI bacteria and had the same antibiotic resistance profile. Although S. saprophyticus pig's colonization rate was extremely low (1%), 35% of slaughterhouse samples were contaminated. The presence of an antiseptic resistance gene (qacA) by all the lineage G bacteria could be part of the explanation for the ineffective cleaning procedures that were used. "S. saprophyticus strains of animal origin (lineage G) enters the slaughterhouse through food animals, persist on the equipment, disseminate and contaminate the meat processing chain and humans. Human colonization is a crucial step for the later occurrence of UTI," explains Opeyemi Lawal, first author of the study developed during his Ph.D.

Additionally, by studying genomic data of bacteria collected from patients attending three hospitals in the Lisbon area, the researchers were able to clearly understand that the transmission of these pathogenic bacteria from both lineages (G and S) occurs between persons within the community. With this deep-structured analysis, researchers were also able to identify putative new virulence factors for this unexplored bacterium. The team will continue to search for reservoirs of this bacterium in humans and animals, and to study the mechanisms of S. saprophyticus dissemination and disease to provide the groundwork towards strategies to combat this pathogen.

A proposed model for the dissemination and transmission of S. saprophyticus in thecommunity. Credit: Opeyemi U. Lawal, Maria J. Fraqueza, Ons Bouchami, Peder Worning, Mette D. Bartels, Maria L. Gonçalves, Paulo Paixão, Elsa Gonçalves, Cristina Toscano, Joanna Empel, Ma?gorzata Urba?, M. Angeles Domínguez, Henrik Westh, Hermínia de Lencastre, and Maria Miragaia

"This a clear example of how food manipulation can impact in human health, and how important it is to educate consumers regarding good individual hygiene practices to avoid spreading of infectious diseases," says Maria Miragaia, head of the Bacterial Evolution and Molecular Epidemiology Lab.

"This adds to the list of bacteria that are transmitted to humans through contact with animals and animal-derived food. But the exact mechanisms associated to the conversion from a colonizer to an infectious agent remains to be clarified," adds Henrik Westh from the Copenhagen University Hospital—Amager and Hvidovre, University of Copenhagen (Denmark).

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Jeff Bezos to fly to the edge of space in first New Shepard crewed mission 

Jeff Bezos to fly to the edge of space in first New Shepard crewed mission

Google has been fined €220 million by France's competition authority for favouring its own services in online advertising.

The tech giant was found to have given "preferential treatment" to Google's own "proprietary technologies" in digital adverts, the authority said.

Google has not contested the facts and the fine was agreed as part of a settlement procedure, it added.

The company also said it had agreed with the French watchdog on a number of solutions to improve its online advertising market.

In a blog post, Google said that changes would be made over the coming months, and would eventually be rolled out globally.

Google maintains a dominant position in the online advertising market and is facing antitrust lawsuits from authorities in several countries.

What was the French complaint about?

The case against Google over its online advertising market was first brought by three media organisations; News Corp, the Le Figaro group and the Rossel La Voix group. Le Figaro later withdrew from the procedure.

The companies had complained that Google was promoting its own services under the brand name Google Ad Manager.

The decision was referred to France's competition authority, which confirmed in a statement that Google had agreed to the €220 million fine.

Google had "abused its dominant position on the market for ad servers for website and mobile application publishers", the authority said.

The practises were "particularly serious" because they impacted Google's competitors on the SSP Market - where publishers sell advertising space - and the SSP AdX bidding platform.

Google was, therefore, able to increase its dominant position on ad servers for sites and applications, the authority added.

Isabelle de Silva, president of the French competition watchdog, described the decision as "particularly significant".

"It is the first decision in the world to examine the complex algorithmic bidding processes by which online display advertising operates," de Silva said.

"This sanction and these commitments will restore a level playing field for all players, and the ability of publishers to make the most of their advertising space."

How has Google responded?

While Google did not comment on the fine imposed, the company confirmed it had been working with the French authority for two years to improve its ad markets.

"Google proposed commitments aimed at improving the interoperability of the Google Ad Manager services with third-party ad server and ad serving platform solutions," the watchdog said.

These changes would "put an end to the provisions that favoured Google", it added.

Amendments would include increasing customers' access to data, to help them buy ad space from publishers more efficiently.

"We are committed to working proactively with regulators everywhere to make improvements to our products," said Maria Gomri, legal director of Google France.

"We have agreed on a set of commitments to make it easier for publishers to make use of data and use our tools with other ad technologies," she added in a blog post.

"We will be testing and developing these changes over the coming months before rolling them out more broadly, including some globally."

The French authority had noted that Google has a particular responsibility not to distort competition due to its dominance, especially as many other publishers had suffered a loss in paper subscription sales and paper advertising revenue.

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Children on vegan diets have a healthier cardiovascular profile and less body fat than their omnivore peers, but the diets may affect growth, bone mineral content and micronutrient status, according to researchers from UCL and the Children's Memorial Health Institute in Warsaw.

The peer-reviewed study, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, also found that children following vegetarian diets had a lower risk of nutritional deficiencies compared to the omnivores, but a less healthy cardiovascular profile.

For the study, 187 healthy five- to 10-year-olds in Poland were recruited in 2014-2016. Of those, 63 children were vegetarians, 52 vegans and 72 omnivores. The team then collected data on growth, body composition, cardiovascular risk, and micronutrient status in vegetarian or vegan children and compared them to the group of children who consumed meat in their diet.

The omnivores were selected so that they closely matched the vegetarians and vegans in terms of their sex, age, maternal education and place of residence (rural/urban). The average duration of exposure to meatless diets was 5.3 years for vegans and 5.9 years for vegetarians.

After considering children's family circumstances, patterns of early nutrition and growth, and physical activity, the team concluded that the vegan and vegetarian diets may play a causal role in the differences to health outcomes among children.

Professor Jonathan Wells (UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health), who steered the study, said: "We know that people are increasingly being drawn to plant-based diets for several reasons, including promoting animal welfare and reducing our impact on the climate. Indeed, a global shift towards plant-based diets is now recognized to be crucial for preventing climate breakdown, and we strongly support this effort.

"We also know that until now research into the health impact of these diets on children has been largely limited to assessments of height and weight and conducted only in vegetarian children. Our study provides a substantial insight into the health outcomes in children following vegetarian and vegan diets."

The study found that children following vegan diets were on average 3 cm shorter, had 4–6% lower bone mineral content and were more than three times more likely to be deficient in vitamin B-12 than the omnivores. At the same time, they also had 25% lower levels of low-density lipoproteins (LDL)—the unhealthy form of cholesterol and lower levels of body fat.

First author, Dr. Małgorzata Desmond (UCL and the Children's Memorial Health Institute, Warsaw) explained: "We found the vegans had higher intakes of nutrients that indicated an 'unprocessed' type of plant -based diet, which is in turn linked to lower body fat and better cardiovascular risk profile. On the other hand, their lower intakes of protein, calcium, and vitamins B12 and D may explain their less favorable bone mineral and serum vitamin concentrations.

"We were initially surprised by the poor cardiovascular health profile of the vegetarian children, but their dietary data showed that they were eating a relatively processed type of plant-based diet, with less healthy levels of fiber and sugars compared to the vegans. So, we are learning that just eating plant-based diets is no guarantee of health, we still need to select healthy foods."

The team highlighted the necessity for supplementary vitamin B12 and vitamin D on plant-based diets and that more needs to be done to raise awareness of this among families of vegetarian and vegan children.

Co-author, Professor Mary Fewtrell (UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health) explained: "Maximizing bone health in children is recommended with the aim of reducing future osteoporosis and fracture risk.

"We found that vegan children had lower bone mass even after accounting for their smaller body and bone size. This means they may enter adolescence, a phase when bone-specific nutrient needs are higher, with a bone deficit already established. If such deficits are caused by a diet that persists into adolescence, this might increase the risk of adverse bone outcomes later in life."

Professor Wells added: "Our research shows that we need to provide more advice to the public as to how they can eat healthily on plant-based diets. This is particularly relevant for children, as they may have higher nutrient needs while they are growing. We aim to conduct further research, to help maximize the health benefits of plant-based diets in children."

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Consuming large amounts of daily caffeine may increase the risk of glaucoma more than three-fold for those with a genetic predisposition to higher eye pressure according to an international, multi-center study. The research led by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai is the first to demonstrate a dietary—genetic interaction in glaucoma. The study results published in the June print issue of Ophthalmology may suggest patients with a strong family history of glaucoma should cut down on caffeine intake.

The study is important because glaucoma is the leading cause of blindness in the United States. It looks at the impact of caffeine intake on glaucoma, and intraocular pressure (IOP) which is pressure inside the eye. Elevated IOP is an integral risk factor for glaucoma, although other factors do contribute to this condition. With glaucoma, patients typically experience few or no symptoms until the disease progresses and they have vision loss.

"We previously published work suggesting that high caffeine intake increased the risk of the high-tension open angle glaucoma among people with a family history of disease. In this study we show that an adverse relation between high caffeine intake and glaucoma was evident only among those with the highest genetic risk score for elevated eye pressure," says lead/corresponding author Louis R. Pasquale, MD, FARVO, Deputy Chair for Ophthalmology Research for the Mount Sinai Health System.

A team of researchers used the UK Biobank, a large-scale population-based biomedical database supported by various health and governmental agencies. They analyzed records of more than 120,000 participants between 2006 and 2010. Participants were between 39 and 73 years old and provided their health records along with DNA samples, collected to generate data. They answered repeated dietary questionnaires focusing on how many caffeinated beverages they drink daily, how much caffeine-containing food they eat, the specific types, and portion size. They also answered questions about their vision, including specifics on if they have glaucoma or a family history of glaucoma. Three years into the study later they had their IOP checked and eye measurements.

Researchers first looked at the relationship looked between caffeine intake, IOP and self-reported glaucoma by running multivariable analyses. Then they assessed if accounting for genetic data modified these relationships. They assigned each subject an IOP genetic risk score and performed interaction analyses.

The investigators found high caffeine intake was not associated with increased risk for higher IOP or glaucoma overall; however, among participants with the strongest genetic predisposition to elevated IOP—in the top 25 percentile—greater caffeine consumption was associated with higher IOP and higher glaucoma prevalence. More specifically, those who consumed the highest amount of daily caffeine- more than 480 milligrams which is roughly four cups of coffee—had a 0.35 mmHg higher IOP. Additionally, those in the highest genetic risk score category who consumed more than 321 milligrams of daily caffeine—roughly three cups of coffee—had a 3.9-fold higher glaucoma prevalence when compared to those who drink no or minimal caffeine and in lowest genetic risk score group.

"Glaucoma patients often ask if they can help to protect their sight through lifestyle changes, however this has been a relatively understudied area until now. This study suggested that those with the highest genetic risk for glaucoma may benefit from moderating their caffeine intake. It should be noted that the link between caffeine and glaucoma risk was only seen with a large amount of caffeine and in those with the highest genetic risk," says co-author Anthony Khawaja, MD, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Ophthalmology University College London (UCL) Institute of Ophthalmology and ophthalmic surgeon at Moorfields Eye Hospital. "The UK Biobank study is helping us to learn more than ever before about how our genes affect our glaucoma risk and the role that our behaviors and environment could play. We look forward to continuing to expand our knowledge in this area."

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Even moderate smartphone use may influence teens' diet and weight, according to a new study of more than 53,000 Korean adolescents. Teens who used a smartphone for more than 2 hours per day were significantly more likely to eat more junk food and fewer fruits and vegetables than those spending less time on their phone. Teens spending more than 3 hours per day on a smartphone were significantly more likely to be overweight or obese.

"While earlier studies have shown that TV watching is an important factor that increases the risk of obesity in children and adolescents, little is known about the effects of modern screen time such as smartphone use on diet and obesity," said Hannah Oh, ScD, assistant professor at Korea University and the study's senior author. "Our data suggest that both smartphone usage time and content type may independently influence diet and obesity in adolescents."

Childhood obesity is becoming more prevalent in many countries, including Korea and the U.S. Children with obesity are more likely to be obese as adults and face a higher risk of heart disease, diabetes and other health problems.

Seaun Ryu, a master's student at Korea University and the study's first author, will present the research at NUTRITION 2021 LIVE ONLINE.

The researchers analyzed data from the Korea Youth Risk Behavior Web-Based Survey, a nationally representative sample of over 53,000 Korean adolescents 12-18 years old. After accounting for variables such as socioeconomic status that may influence both obesity and smartphone ownership, the researchers examined the prevalence at which participants engaged in healthy behaviors (eating fruits and vegetables) and unhealthy behaviors (skipping breakfast and consuming fast food, chips, instant noodles or carbonated or sweetened beverages) relative to the amount of daily smartphone use and the types of content used.

The relative odds of reporting various behaviors (skipping breakfast, consuming food types) or being overweight according to the reported type of smartphone use. Credit: Hannah Oh and Seaun Ryu, Korea University

The prevalence of unhealthy behaviors and overweight rose with increasing daily smartphone use. Teens spending 5 or more hours per day on their phone were more likely to report consuming carbonated and noncarbonated sugar-sweetened beverages, fast food, chips, and instant noodles compared to those spending less than 2 hours per day on their phone.

Teens who reported using their phones more for information search and retrieval overall had healthier eating behaviors than those using their phones more for chatting/messenger, gaming, video/music and social networks. Respondents who used their smartphone most frequently for gaming, video/music or webtoon/web-novel were more likely to be overweight or obese.

Oh said potential drivers behind these trends could include exposure to food marketing in digital spaces, an increased propensity toward "mindless" eating while using a smartphone, inadequate sleep, or the displacement of time that would otherwise be spent on physical activity. She stressed the need to monitor food marketing targeting adolescents in digital media and, if warranted, work to prevent teens from being exposed to aggressive marketing or misleading messages about unhealthy foods. On the flip side, she noted that smartphones could be leveraged to improve public health through nutrition-tracking apps or by using digital platforms to make information about healthy eating more accessible.

"Adolescents of today are digital natives, who have grown up in close contact with digital devices such as smartphones, and thus are likely to be heavily influenced by them," said Oh and Ryu. "Efforts should be taken to maximize the positive effects and minimize the negative effects of smartphone use on adolescent health."

The researchers cautioned that the study was not designed to determine the temporal relationship between obesity and smartphone use; a longitudinal, prospective study would be needed to assess changes in body weight and smartphone use over time.

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USGS Astrogeology Science Center/ Wheaton/ NASA/ JPL-Caltech

On Monday NASA’s Juno space probe, which has been orbiting Jupiter since 2016, will get a close-up look at Jupiter’s biggest moon Ganymede, the agency said in a press release. It will be the closest NASA has gotten to the largest moon in the solar system for more than 20 years— Galileo cruised by Ganymede in 2000— coming within 645 miles of its surface. The information Juno gathers will give insight into the moon’s composition and ice shell, as well as provide data for future missions to Jupiter.

 

“Juno carries a suite of sensitive instruments capable of seeing Ganymede in ways never before possible,” said principal investigator Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “By flying so close, we will bring the exploration of Ganymede into the 21st century, both complementing future missions with our unique sensors and helping prepare for the next generation of missions to the Jovian system.”

 

Those missions include NASA’s Europa Clipper (launch date still TBD) and the European Space Agency’s JUpiter ICy moons Explorer [JUICE] mission, slated to launch next year and arrive at Jupiter in 2029 (and kudos to the ESA for going the extra mile on that acronym).

 

Ganymede is bigger than Mercury and is the only moon in the solar system with its own magnetosphere, which NASA describes as “a bubble-shaped region of charged particles” that surrounds it. The JunoCam, which has taken many of the most striking photos of Jupiter during its mission will only be able to snap about five images during the flyby, since Ganymede will appear and fade from view all within a 25-minute window. Three hours before Juno gets to its closest point near Ganymede, its science instruments will begin collecting data.

 

“Literally every second counts,” said Matt Johnson, Juno mission manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “On Monday, we are going to race past Ganymede at almost 12 miles per second (19 kilometers per second).” And less than 24 hours later, Juno will make its 33rd science pass of Jupiter, he added.

 

Juno is expected to get closest to Ganymede at about 1:35PM ET on Monday. You can track where Juno is now with NASA’s Eyes on the Solar System interactive.

NASA’s Juno probe will get close to Jupiter’s moon Ganymede on Monday

They meet once a month on Zoom: a dozen doctors from around the country with distinguished careers in different specialities. They vary in ethnicity, age and sexual orientation. Some work for the best hospitals in the U.S. or teach at top medical schools. Others are dedicated to serving the most vulnerable populations in their communities. 

The meetings are largely a support group. The members share their concerns about what’s going on in their hospitals and universities, and strategize about what to do. What is happening, they say, is the rapid spread of a deeply illiberal ideology in the country’s most important medical institutions. 

This dogma goes by many imperfect names — wokeness, social justice, critical race theory, anti-racism — but whatever it’s called, the doctors say this ideology is stifling critical thinking and dissent in the name of progress. They say that it’s turning students against their teachers and patients and racializing even the smallest interpersonal interactions. Most concerning, they insist that it is threatening the foundations of patient care, of research, and of medicine itself.

These aren’t secret bigots who long for the “good old days” that were bad for so many. They are largely politically progressive, and they are the first to say that there are inequities in medicine that must be addressed. Sometimes it’s overt racism from colleagues or patients, but more often the problem is deeper, baked into the very systems clinicians use to determine treatment.

“There’s a calculator that people have used for decades that predicts the likelihood of having a successful vaginal delivery after you've had a cesarean,” one obstetrician in the Northeast told me. “You put in the age of the person, how much they weigh, and their race. And if they’re black, it calculates that they are less likely to have successful vaginal delivery. That means clinicians are more likely to counsel black patients to get c-sections, a surgery they might not actually need.” 

There’s no biological reason for race to be a factor here, which is why the calculatorjust changed this year. But this is an example of how system-wide bias can harm black mothers, who are two to three times more likely to die in childbirth than white women even when you control for factors like income and education, which often make racial disparities disappear.

But while this obstetrician and others see the problems endemic in their field, they’re also alarmed by the dogma currently spreading throughout medical schools and hospitals. 

I’ve heard from doctors who’ve been reported to their departments for criticizing residents for being late. (It was seen by their trainees as an act of racism.) I’ve heard from doctors who’ve stopped giving trainees honest feedback for fear of retaliation. I’ve spoken to those who have seen clinicians and residents refuse to treat patients based on their race or their perceived conservative politics. 

Some of these doctors say that there is a “purge” underway in the world of American medicine: question the current orthodoxy and you will be pushed out. They are so worried about the dangers of speaking out about their concerns that they will not let me identify them except by the region of the country where they work. 

“People are afraid to speak honestly,” said a doctor who immigrated to the U.S. from the Soviet Union. “It’s like back to the USSR, where you could only speak to the ones you trust.” If the authorities found out, you could lose your job, your status, you could go to jail or worse. The fear here is not dissimilar. 

When doctors do speak out, shared another, “the reaction is savage. And you better be tenured and you better have very thick skin.”

“We’re afraid of what's happening to other people happening to us,” a doctor on the West Coast told me. “We are seeing people being fired. We are seeing people's reputations being sullied. There are members of our group who say, ‘I will be asked to leave a board. I will endanger the work of the nonprofit that I lead if this comes out.’ People are at risk of being totally marginalized and having to leave their institutions.” 

While the hyper focus on identity is seen by many proponents of social justice ideology as a necessary corrective to America’s past sins, some people working in medicine are deeply concerned by what “justice” and “equity” actually look like in practice. 

“The intellectual foundation for this movement is the Marxist view of the world, but stripped of economics and replaced with race determinism,” one psychologist explained. “Because you have a huge group of people, mostly people of color, who have been underserved, it was inevitable that this model was going to be applied to the world of medicine. And it has been.”  

‘Whole Areas of Research Are Off-Limits’

“Wokeness feels like an existential threat,” a doctor from the Northwest said. “In health care, innovation depends on open, objective inquiry into complex problems, but that’s now undermined by this simplistic and racialized worldview where racism is seen as the cause of all disparities, despite robust data showing it’s not that simple.”

“Whole research areas are off-limits,” he said, adding that some of what is being published in the nation’s top journals is “shoddy as hell.” 

Here, he was referring in part to a study published last year in the Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences. The study was covered all over the news, with headlines like “Black Newborns More Likely to Die When Looked After by White Doctors” (CNN), “The Lack of Black Doctors is Killing Black Babies” (Fortune), and “Black Babies More Likely to Survive when Cared for by Black Doctors” (The Guardian).

Despite these breathless headlines, the study was so methodologically flawed that, according to several of the doctors I spoke with, it’s impossible to extrapolate any conclusions about how the race of the treating doctor impacts patient outcomes at all. And yet very few people were willing to publicly criticize it. As Vinay Prasad, a clinician and a professor at the University of California San Francisco, put it on Twitter: “I am aware of dozens of people who agree with my assessment of this paper and are scared to comment.” 

“It’s some of the most shoddy, methodologically flawed research we’ve ever seen published in these journals,” the doctor in the Zoom meeting said, “with sensational conclusions that seem totally unjustified from the results of the study.”

“It’s frustrating because we all know how hard it is to get good, sound research published,” he added. “So do those rules and quality standards no longer apply to this topic, or to these authors, or for a certain time period?”

At the same time that the bar appears to be lower for articles and studies that push an anti-racist agenda, the consequences for questioning or criticizing that agenda can be high. 

Just ask Norman Wang. Last year, the University of Pittsburgh cardiologist was demoted by his department after he published a paper in the Journal of the American Heart Association (JAHA) analyzing and criticizing diversity initiatives in cardiology. Looking at 50 years of data, Wang argued that affirmative action and other diversity initiatives have failed to both meaningfully increase the percentage of black and Hispanic clinicians in his field or to improve patient outcomes. Rather than admitting, hiring and promoting clinicians based on their race, he argued for race-neutral policies in medicine. 

“Long-term academic solutions and excellence should not be sacrificed for short-term demographic optics,” Wang wrote. “Ultimately, all who aspire to a profession in medicine and cardiology must be assessed as individuals on the basis of their personal merits, not their racial and ethnic identities.”

At first, there was little response. But four months after it was published, screenshots of the paper began circulating on Twitter and others in the field began accusing Wang of racism. Sharonne Hayes, a cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic, implored colleagues to “rise up.” “The fact that this is published in ‘our’ journal should both enrage & activate all of us,” she wrote, adding the hashtag #RetractRacists.

Soon after, Barry London, the editor in chief of JAHA, issued an apology and the journal retracted the work over Wang’s objection. London cited no specific errors in Wang’s paper in his statement, just that publishing it was antithetical to his and the journal’s values. Retraction, in a case like this, is exceedingly rare: When papers are retracted, it’s generally because of the data or the study has been discredited. A search of the journal’s website and the Retraction Database found records of just two retractions in JAHA: Wang’s paper and a 2019 paper that erroneously linked heart attacks to vaping.

After the outcry, the American Heart Association (AHA), which publishes the journal, issued a statement denouncing Wang’s paper and promising an investigation. In a tweet, the organization said it “does NOT represent AHA values. JAHA is editorially independent but that’s no excuse. We’ll investigate. We’ll do better. We’re invested in helping to build a diverse health care and research community.” 

As the criticism mounted, Wang was removed from his position as the director of a fellowship program in clinical cardiac electrophysiology at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and was prohibited from making any contact with students. His boss reportedly told him that his classroom was “inherently unsafe” due to the views he expressed.

Wang is now suing both the AHA and the University of Pittsburgh for defamation and violating his First Amendment rights. To the doctors on the Zoom call, his case was a stark warning of what can happen when one questions policies like affirmative action, which, according to recent polling, is opposed by nearly two-thirds of Americans, including majorities of blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. 

“I’m into efforts to make medicine more diverse,” a doctor from the Zoom group said. “But what’s gone off the rails here is that there is an intolerance of people that have another point of view. And that's going to hurt us all.”

JAHA isn’t the only journal issuing apologies. In February, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) released a podcast hosted by surgeon and then-deputy journal editor Edward Livingston, who questioned the value of the hyper focus on race in medicine as well as the idea that medicine is systemically racist. 

“Personally, I think taking racism out of the conversation will help,” Livingston said at one point. “Many of us are offended by the concept that we are racist.”

It’s possible Livingston’s comments would have gone unnoticed but JAMA promoted the podcast on Twitter with the tone-deaf text: “No physician is racist, so how can there be structural racism in health care?” 

Even more than in the case of Norman Wang, this tweet, and the podcast it promoted, led to a massive uproar. A number of researchers vowed to boycott the journal, and a petition condemning JAMA has received over 9,000 signatures. In response to the backlash, JAMA quickly deleted the episode, promised to investigate, and asked Livingston to resign from his job. He did.

If you try to access the podcast today, you find an apology in its place from JAMA editor-in-chief Howard Bauchner, who called Livingston’s statements, “inaccurate, offensive, hurtful and inconsistent with the standards of JAMA.” Bauchner was also suspended by JAMA pending an independent investigation. This Tuesday, JAMA announced that Bauchner officially stepped down. In a statement, he said he is “profoundly disappointed in myself for the lapses that led to the publishing of the tweet and podcast. Although I did not write or even see the tweet, or create the podcast, as editor in chief, I am ultimately responsible for them.” 

Shortly after this announcement, the New York Times reported that “JAMA’s reckoning” led to a backlash from some JAMA members, who wrote in a letter to the organization that “there is a general feeling that the firing of the editors involved in the podcast was perhaps precipitous, possibly a blot on free speech and also possibly an example of reverse discrimination.” Bauchner’s last day at JAMA is June 30.

Calling Out Patients

What happened to Norman Wang, Edward Livingston, and Howard Bauchner contribute to what one clinician described as a “a chilly atmosphere.” That chill extends to teaching the next generation of doctors. 

“Some attending physicians are hesitant to provide constructive criticism to trainees over fears of being perceived as racist,” a doctor in the Northeast said. “You ask yourself, ‘Is this worth bringing up?’ You second guess yourself.”

The doctor said this ideology has impacted how some trainees and physicians respond when they encounter bias from patients, which is hardly uncommon for people working in health care. Female doctors are mistaken for nurses. Black doctors are mistaken for aides. Patients refuse care from doctors who aren’t white. 

A Jewish doctor in the Northeast told me about encountering antisemitism at work. 

“Years ago, I had a guy slowly roll up his sleeve and put his arm down on the table in front of me and he had a big swastika tattoo. And he says my name and repeats it slowly three times. Clearly he is saying he knows I’m Jewish. And I looked at his arm and said, ‘Does it hurt to get a tattoo? I never learned much about that.’ He actually chuckled.”

The doctor kept seeing the patient, who gradually stopped doing drugs, got a job, and pieced his life together. “Twelve years later,” he said, “I was leaving that program and on our last visit, he had a terrible rash on his arm. I said we had to treat that rash, and this big, tough guy started crying. He said, ‘I knew I was going to see you. I was trying to rub it off.’ How about that? People are changeable, but it takes time and it can’t be done by scolding.”

This was what he was taught in his training years ago: You meet patients where they are, help them as much as you can, and hope they are better off for the encounter. 

That philosophy, however, is changing. Increasingly, the doctors told me, this next generation of trainees seem to believe it’s also their duty to confront patients about their own prejudice — whether they’re open to it or not. 

Last year at Harvard Medical School, a seasoned psychiatrist interviewed an elderly white patient about his battle with substance abuse on Zoom. The patient talked about shame. He felt so much guilt over his drinking and his past behavior, he said that the only person he could have ever confided in was an Eskimo in Alaska who didn’t speak English — and even then, he would have to slit his throat.

It was the sort of thing health-care workers occasionally hear. Historically, the guideline in a situation like that would be to ignore it: They were there to discuss addiction, not the patient’s insensitivity. But a Native American student named Victor Anthony Lopez-Carmen observing the session on Zoom was disturbed. He wrote about it later in Teen Vogue: “His words sparked an immediate, visceral reaction. I felt my blood pressure rise and anxiety overtake my mind and body. My next reaction was to look at how the rest of my classmates were responding. The blank, remote expression on some of their faces, and the silence that followed, remains burned into my psyche.”

When neither the psychiatrist nor any of his fellow students paused in the moment to educate the elderly man about his “violent and racist language,” as Lopez-Carmen described it, he complained. In response, the school organized a session for faculty and students on, Lopez-Carmen writes, “confronting anti-Indigenous racism in the field of medicine.”

Should clinicians police their patients’ language to protect the feelings of their health-care providers? One doctor from the Zoom chat said, unequivocally, no. 

“How would chastising, and possibly shaming, a patient — however expertly — affect their comfort in confiding sensitive information important to their care? Patients' life experiences, stories, attitudes, beliefs, whatever they may be, are data that help us take good care of them.”

As major medical institutions formalize their commitments to social justice ideology, the sentiment that medical professionals need to put aside their feelings in service of treating patients seems increasingly old-fashioned. Some institutions, including Harvard Medical School, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Medical Association (AMA), the largest association of physicians and medical students in the U.S., have released statements acknowledging their own history of racism, a trend one of the doctors described as “confessional.”

In an 83-page report released in May, the AMA pledged address its “white supremacist” past, which includes horrific 19th-century practices like performing surgeries on enslaved people without anesthesia as well as the organization’s endorsement of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. But it’s not just ancient history the organization is concerned about: the report also mentions the JAMA podcast that cost Edward Livingston and Howard Bauchner their jobs, referring to the podcast as an “egregious, harmful error.” 

The report recommendations rely heavily on diversity training, but as one of the doctors on the Zoom call said, “more diversity trainings are not going to change anything, but they are going to waste time we already don’t have to spare.”

There are, of course, an array of diversity trainings, including some that simply lay out anti-discrimination laws and others that require white people to confess their privilege. Trainings that may have seemed obviously racist just a few years ago — like separating employees into “affinity groups” or “caucuses” based on race — are now commonplace, including at large corporations, small non-profits, and medical institutions. (My wife, a nurse in Seattle, recently joined the “white caucus” at her hospital, and noted that she felt very strange asking to join a whites-only group.) 

The diversity industry is now worth billions of dollars, but there have been surprisingly few evaluations of whether or not such trainings actually work. The research that has been done is not encouraging. One study found that these trainings can be counterproductive; another found that positive effects don’t seem to last. 

What’s more, the doctors said, statements like the AMA’s seem destined to create backlash. “You have to wonder about the unintended consequences of these organizations falling over themselves to declare that they're structurally and systemically racist,” one of the doctors said. “Clearly, they think they’re going to get virtue-signaling points. But is it possible these claims are also playing into vaccine hesitancy among people of color? I mean, would you want to get vaccinated at an institution that’s enthusiastically broadcasting to the world, ‘We’re racist!’ I wouldn’t.”

‘I’m Not Going to Treat That White Guy’

There’s clearly a generation gap between these doctors on Zoom, the youngest of whom has been practicing for at least 10 years, and doctors just beginning their career. The older clinicians are more likely to appear politically neutral, at least at work, while younger students and clinicians are more likely to prioritize activism. Those differences can be a major source of tension. 

One prominent organization, White Coats for Black Lives, was formed by medical students in 2014 and now has at least 75 chapters all over the U.S. In addition to publishing a Racial Justice Report Card that grades medical schools, the group encourages medical students to make specific demands of their institutions, including that medical schools and hospitals end all relationships with local law enforcement. 

When asked what severing ties with police would do in his urban emergency room, one ER doctor said it would be a “total disaster.” Police, he told me, are a vital part of emergency operations, from securing crime scenes so emergency responders can see victims to helping transport patients to keeping hospital staff and patients safe when private security is inadequate. 

“I was in a situation once where an ambulance brought in a gunshot victim,” he said. “We brought the patient in, and about 15 minutes later, a group came looking for him. They came to finish him. They were going from room to room, looking for him, and when a couple of guys from hospital security tried to get them to leave, one shot a gun in the air. Luckily enough, we heard police sirens bringing someone else in, and when they heard the sirens, they ran. If not for the police, I don’t know what would have happened.”

As another example of the generation gap, an ER doctor on the West Coast said he sees providers, particularly younger ones, applying antiracist principles in choosing how they allocate their time and which patients they choose to work with.  “I've heard examples of Covid-19 cases in the emergency department where providers go, ‘I’m not going to go treat that white guy, I'm going to treat the person of color instead because whatever happened to the white guy, he probably deserves it.’”

Some in medicine would like to see such race-conscious bias mandated on an institutional level, particularly in regards to Covid-19, which has killed black, Hispanic, and Native American people at three times the rate as whites. These discrepancies are likely due to an array of factors, including income, housing, work, language, pre-existing conditions, access to health care, and, yes, possibly some degree of racism. 

But some politicians and public health officials decided the remedy was to distribute vaccines by race.

In April, Vermont’s Republican Governor Phill Scott announced that any resident over age 16 who identified as a black, indigenous, or a person of color would be eligible for the vaccine before white people, a decision that, according to some legal scholars, likely violated federal law. The CDC itself considered recommending that states prioritize essential workers over the elderly despite the fact that the number one risk factor for dying from Covid is age. The idea had plenty of supporters. Harold Schmidt, a professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, toldthe New York Times, “Older populations are whiter. Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”

Ultimately, the CDC did recommend prioritizing vaccines by age, but race-conscious policies go beyond Covid. In May, the Boston Review published an editorial by physicians Bram Wispelwey and Michelle Morse entitled “An Antiracist Agenda for Medicine.” In it, the doctors argue that in order to address discrepancies in health-care access and outcomes, hospitals should commit to “preferentially admitting patients historically denied access to certain forms of medical care.” That is, they should admit people to health services based on their skin color. 

This idea is not coming from people with no power.

Michelle Morse is a physician at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She was recently appointed to be the first Chief Medical Officer of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. “Dr. Morse’s experience has combined the best of public health, social medicine, anti-racism education, and activism,” said Health Commissioner Dr. Dave A. Chokshi in a press release.  “Health equity requires leaders who propel change and I am grateful that she has joined the Department to help us create a healthier, more equitable, city.”

In the same article in the Boston Review, Dr. Morse and her co-author write that because a study they conducted found that white heart failure patients are more likely to be referred to cardiology specialists than some minority groups, in their own practice they have developed “a preferential admission option for Black and Latinx heart failure patients to our specialty cardiology service.” So when these patients seek care, they are now far more likely to be referred to specialists and admitted to an inpatient service, regardless of whether that’s the most appropriate strategy for their condition, or their primary care providers’ recommendations, or their own personal preferences. 

What the authors don’t mention is that while their own study does show that white heart failure patients are more likely to be referred to specialists, this alone doesn’t demonstrate they’re more likely to have better outcomes: More whites in that very study died soon after discharge. This, according to one physician, is exactly what’s wrong with race-conscious policies.

“We have been working for almost a decade now to keep people from getting unnecessary care and unnecessary hospitalization because there are all these unintended consequences,” he said. “You can get infected with an antibiotic-resistant bug; you can get the wrong medication; errors happen. We’re trying to keep people out of the hospital if they don't need to be there. So when you enact a policy like the one proposed by Michelle Morse, you’re just opening that person up to all these potentially negative consequences.” 

In other words, in an effort to address racial disparities, it’s possible the very patients they are attempting to help will suffer more, not less.

A Moral Panic

The day I spoke to the doctors, I’d spent the morning caught in a labyrinth of hold calls, trying to find a new primary care doctor after my insurance had changed for the fourth time in five years. And I was one of the lucky ones: At least I have insurance, something nearly 30 million Americans in this country lack. Besides the problems with accessing health care at all, the doctors themselves told me the disparities in medicine aren’t imagined. Minority populations, especially poor ones, do have worse outcomes than whites in all sorts of metrics. 

“We’ve got this opportunity right now to advance really important, progressive reforms,” one doctor said. “Every American understands that the system doesn’t work, that we need better public health, we need better primary care.” But this physician is concerned that “the people leading the woke effort have a deeply unsophisticated understanding of how change occurs in this country. It’s dangerous. I’m fearful there’s going to be a counter-reaction that's going to be huge and vicious and ugly.” 

Others fear the same. Another doctor on the call, a psychologist, called the new orthodoxy a “moral panic” and “symbolic crusade,” like Prohibition, in which the outcome is less important than the sacredness of the movement.

“What happens with symbolic crusades is they overreach and you get a tremendous backlash,” he continued. “If hospitals actually adopt a policy of what can be construed as favoring black people in the ICU, can you imagine what conservative media would do with that? It would play into every fear that what this is really about is suppressing liberty, chilling free speech. I didn’t used to think those fears were legitimate. Now I do. I get it.”

Source: https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/what-happens-when-doctors-cant-speak

COVID-19 continues to claim lives around the world and is infecting millions more. Although several vaccines have recently become available, making significant strides towards preventing COVID-19, what about the treatment of those who already have the infection? Vaccines aren't 100% effective, highlighting the need—now more than ever—for effective antiviral therapeutics. Moreover, some people can't receive vaccines due to health issues, and new variants of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, that can penetrate vaccine-conferred immunity, are being reported, indicating that we need to think beyond prevention.

Given this need, a team of researchers based in Japan, the US, and the UK launched a project to develop effective therapeutics. This team included several researchers based at Tokyo University of Science: Visiting Professor Koichi Watashi, Dr. Hirofumi Ohashi, Professor Shin Aoki, Professor Kouji Kuramochi, and Assistant Professor Tomohiro Tanaka. Their goal was clear and simple: finding a cure for COVID-19.

To achieve this goal, the researchers first established an experimental system for screening drugs that may help to control infections. This system used a type of cells called VeroE6/TMPRSS2 cells, which were manipulated to efficiently be infected with and produce SARS-CoV-2. "To determine whether a drug of interest could help combat infection by SARS-CoV-2, we simply had to expose VeroE6/TMPRSS2 cells to both the drug and SARS-CoV-2 and then observe whether the drug's presence served to hinder the virus's efforts to infect cells," explains Professor Watashi.

The researchers used this experimental system to screen a panel of drugs that are already approved for clinical use, including drugs like remdesivir and chloroquine that have already being approved or are being trialed as treatments for COVID-19. In an exciting outcome, the researchers found two drugs that provided effective SARS-CoV-2 suppression:

cepharanthine, which is used to treat inflammation, and nelfinavir, which is approved for the treatment of HIV infection.

Cepharanthine inhibited the entry of the virus into cells by preventing the virus from binding to a protein on the cell membrane, which it uses as a gateway. In contrast, nelfinavir worked to prevent the virus from replicating inside the cell by inhibiting a protein that the virus relies on for replication. Given that these drugs have distinct antiviral mechanisms, using both of them together could be especially effective for patients, with computational models predicting that combined cepharanthine/nelfinavir therapy can hasten the clearance of SARS-CoV-2 from a patient's lungs by as few as 4.9 days.

So, does this mean we will be seeing these new drugs in COVID-19 treatment centers? Of course, the drug duo isn't ready to be rolled out into healthcare systems just yet. These findings justify further research into the clinical potential of cepharanthine/nelfinavir therapy, and only following this can we say for sure that it is useful and helpful.

Nevertheless, given the ongoing nature of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ever-increasing death toll, the development of cepharanthine/nelfinavir therapy may provide clinicians and patients with a much-needed new treatment option.

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India on Saturday issued "one last notice" to Twitter to comply with new IT regulations that the social media giant says threaten privacy guarantees.

Digital rights activists say New Delhi's latest rules could be used by the government to identify authors of critical posts on social media sites.

But the government argues they are needed to investigate national security offences and cases involving sexually explicit material.

India's electronics and IT ministry said Saturday it was "dismayed" over Twitter's "non-compliance" and flagged the May 26 deadline, when the new rules came into force.

"The refusal to comply demonstrates Twitter's lack of commitment and efforts towards providing a safe experience for people of India on its platforms," its notice said.

"Needless to state, such non-compliance will lead to unintended consequences including Twitter losing exemption from liability as an intermediary," the ministry said.

"As a gesture of goodwill, Twitter Inc is hereby given one last notice to immediately comply with the rules."

The regulations demand that social media companies give details of the "first originator" of posts deemed to undermine India's sovereignty, state security or public order.

Tech companies are also required to appoint a chief compliance officer for the rules and a "grievance redressal officer", both based in India.

New Delhi last week said most major social media sites had already shared details of their chief compliance officer, contact person and grievance officer, including Koo, ShareChat, Telegram, LinkedIn, Google, Facebook and WhatsApp.

The row between India and Twitter escalated in May after the tech firm marked a tweet from a ruling party spokesman as "manipulated media".

New Delhi accused Twitter and other US tech giants of "double standards" in taking down disputed content.

Delhi police visited Twitter's office to serve a notice ordering it to join an official inquiry into the "manipulated media" label—a move the company described as "intimidation".

There was no immediate comment from Twitter on the latest notice from New Delhi Saturday.

India's IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has said the government respects people's privacy and the new rules are aimed at preventing "abuse and misuse of social media".

But critics say Prime Minister Narendra Modi's administration is seeking to stifle online opposition in what is a huge market for Twitter, Facebook and other tech firms.

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Markets and shopping malls in New Delhi will be allowed to reopen from Monday in a further easing of the COVID-19 lockdown, the chief minister said as infections fall in major Indian cities after weeks of restrictions.

Delhi Metro will also resume services at 50 percent capacity, the city's chief minister Arvind Kejriwal said on Saturday.

Markets and malls will operate on alternate days, with half of them open on any given day.

Offices can also reopen at half capacity but Kejriwal urged people to still try to work from home.

The easing comes after Delhi allowed construction sites and factories to reopen last week.

"They have been open for a week but the COVID-19 situation is still under control, and we have less than 500 fresh cases in the last 24 hours," Kejriwal said.

"It is important to bring the economy back on track now that the COVID-19 situation improving. We pray that the situation remains the same."

The government of Maharashtra state, which includes India's economic powerhouse Mumbai, announced a five-level plan to ease restrictions depending on infection rates and hospital bed occupancy.

In level-one areas—with infection rates below five percent and hospital bed occupancy below 25 percent—all shops, restaurants and malls will be allowed to reopen.

But level-five districts—with infection rates over 20 percent—will remain under severe movement restrictions.

Daily infections reported across India have dropped to about 120,000 from more than 400,000 in May, according to official statistics.

Deaths have also fallen, with 3,380 reported in the previous 24 hours, although this is widely seen as a major underestimate.

At least 344,082 people in the country have lost their lives to the coronavirus, which is now surging in parts of rural India.

Delhi reported about 400 new infections Saturday, down from about 25,000 daily cases when the lockdown was announced seven weeks earlier.

The devastating surge was blamed on new virus variants and the government having allowed most activity to return to normal including mass religious and political gatherings.

India's vaccination programme meanwhile is making slow progress due to shortages, confusion and squabbling between the central government and state authorities.

So far about 180 million people, only 14 percent of the population, have received one dose, and 45 million, or 3.4 percent, two shots.

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In a new study, University of Maine researchers found that culture helps humans adapt to their environment and overcome challenges better and faster than genetics.

After conducting an extensive review of the literature and evidence of long-term human evolution, scientists Tim Waring and Zach Wood concluded that humans are experiencing a "special evolutionary transition" in which the importance of culture, such as learned knowledge, practices and skills, is surpassing the value of genes as the primary driver of human evolution.

Culture is an under-appreciated factor in human evolution, Waring says. Like genes, culture helps people adjust to their environment and meet the challenges of survival and reproduction. Culture, however, does so more effectively than genes because the transfer of knowledge is faster and more flexible than the inheritance of genes, according to Waring and Wood.

Culture is a stronger mechanism of adaptation for a couple of reasons, Waring says. It's faster: gene transfer occurs only once a generation, while cultural practices can be rapidly learned and frequently updated. Culture is also more flexible than genes: gene transfer is rigid and limited to the genetic information of two parents, while cultural transmission is based on flexible human learning and effectively unlimited with the ability to make use of information from peers and experts far beyond parents. As a result, cultural evolution is a stronger type of adaptation than old genetics.

Waring, an associate professor of social-ecological systems modeling, and Wood, a postdoctoral research associate with the School of Biology and Ecology, have just published their findings in a literature review in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the flagship biological research journal of The Royal Society in London.

"This research explains why humans are such a unique species. We evolve both genetically and culturally over time, but we are slowly becoming ever more cultural and ever less genetic," Waring says.

Culture has influenced how humans survive and evolve for millenia. According to Waring and Wood, the combination of both culture and genes has fueled several key adaptations in humans such as reduced aggression, cooperative inclinations, collaborative abilities and the capacity for social learning. Increasingly, the researchers suggest, human adaptations are steered by culture, and require genes to accommodate.

Waring and Wood say culture is also special in one important way: it is strongly group-oriented. Factors like conformity, social identity and shared norms and institutions—factors that have no genetic equivalent—make cultural evolution very group-oriented, according to researchers. Therefore, competition between culturally organized groups propels adaptations such as new cooperative norms and social systems that help groups survive better together.

According to researchers, "culturally organized groups appear to solve adaptive problems more readily than individuals, through the compounding value of social learning and cultural transmission in groups." Cultural adaptations may also occur faster in larger groups than in small ones.

With groups primarily driving culture and culture now fueling human evolution more than genetics, Waring and Wood found that evolution itself has become more group-oriented.

"In the very long term, we suggest that humans are evolving from individual genetic organisms to cultural groups which function as superorganisms, similar to ant colonies and beehives," Waring says. "The 'society as organism' metaphor is not so metaphorical after all. This insight can help society better understand how individuals can fit into a well-organized and mutually beneficial system. Take the coronavirus pandemic, for example. An effective national epidemic response program is truly a national immune system, and we can therefore learn directly from how immune systems work to improve our COVID response."

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Old maps of snow depth on the ice had led researchers to underestimate melting

Sea ice in the coastal Arctic may be thinning far faster than scientists believed.

Ice in places like the Kara, Laptev and Chukchi seas, which border parts of Siberia and Alaska, appears to be shrinking nearly twice as fast as estimates have suggested, according to a study released yesterday.

That's likely because previous research didn't completely account for a key variable in the Arctic: the influence of climate change on snow.

Measuring sea ice thickness is a tricky business. Unlike sea ice extent — the amount of ocean covered by ice at any given time — the thickness can't be measured by looking at satellite images.

Instead, scientists use special satellite instruments to send out radar pulses, which hit the ice, bounce back and tell them the height of the ice that's poking out from the surface of the water. This information helps them calculate the thickness of the ice.

The whole process is "a bit like shouting at a wall a long way away and waiting for the echo to come back," said Robbie Mallett, a Ph.D. student at University College London and the new study's lead author.

But there's a catch.

As snow builds up, it can weigh down the ice, causing it to sit lower in the water. That means scientists must account for the amount of snow on top in order to accurately estimate the thickness of the ice.

Until recently, many research groups were using a snow map developed with data collected by drifting stations scattered across the ocean. The map tells scientists how deep the snow is at different times of the year in different parts of the Arctic.

The trouble is that the data is decades old.

The map doesn't really account for changes in the sea ice over time, particularly changes caused by Arctic warming.

"When it was developed, the Arctic was mostly covered with multi-year ice," said Nathan Kurtz, a NASA sea ice expert who commented on the new research for E&E News.

Multi-year ice has survived more than one season, and it's typically much thicker than first-year ice. But in the last few decades, research suggest, the warming Arctic has seen much of its multi-year ice disappear. The younger ice that remains hasn't had as much time to accumulate snow.

That means the older snow map may not reflect all the realities of the new, warmer Arctic.

The new study uses a more dynamic snow model to estimate ice thickness in the coastal Arctic seas. It finds that ice thickness tends to fluctuate much more dramatically from one year to the next than previous studies have suggested.

It also finds that ice is getting thinner over time — and that these thinning trends are much steeper than previous research indicated.

Sea ice thickness is a less talked-about trend than sea ice extent. But thinner, more fragile ice could have serious implications for both the Arctic climate system and human activities in the Arctic Ocean.

Thinner ice breaks more easily, melts faster in the summer and allows more sunlight to reach the water below. It may accelerate Arctic warming and cause ice extent to shrink even faster. It may make shipping and oil drilling easier, but ice fishing and hunting more difficult, particularly for Indigenous communities.

Sea ice thickness also helps inform climate models, which make projections about how the Arctic will change in the future. That means it's important that the data is accurate.

The new study shows the importance of using up-to-date snow measurements. And it demonstrates how different snow maps produce different results in specific regions of the Arctic.

But it's not the first to point out the issue.

About a decade ago, scientists began modifying the older snow map to update it for a warmer Arctic with younger ice, Kurtz said.

"It seemed to work reasonably well, but still kind of limited," he said. "When we get better techniques, better model data, it's better to start moving towards that."

In more recent years, research institutions have begun shifting to newer, more dynamic snow models.

NASA, for instance, has developed its own model that it's using in studies conducted by ICESat-2, a satellite mission investigating polar climate change, including the height and thickness of the world's ice. It's similar to the snow model used in Mallett's new study, according to Kurtz, the NASA scientist.

At the same time, a 2019 special report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change pointed out that there's still little data available about the depth of snow on sea ice. It's a key limitation on estimates of sea ice thickness, the report suggested.

But there are some trends that are fairly obvious. Arctic sea ice, on average, has gotten thinner over the last few decades as older ice has disappeared and younger ice has taken its place.

While scientists are working on improving their estimates of exactly how fast the ice is thinning and where, better snow data is a step in the right direction, Mallett said.

"It's possible that for the sea ice enthusiasts that do track sea ice thickness, it's about to be a lot more interesting," he said.

Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2021. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.

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