PORTLAND, Ore. — Can your body really be biologically younger without using drugs in less than two months? It may sound like an advertisement for some anti-aging cream, but a new study reveals people can actually reverse the aging process through diet and lifestyle changes.

In a groundbreaking clinical trial, scientists discovered that by balancing DNA methylation, participants reduced their biological age by over three years in just eight weeks. Researchers say aging is the main driver of chronic disease. Therefore, turning back the clock in a person’s DNA can help them stay healthier and live longer.

Basically, DNA methylation is the process that switches gene off. Study authors explain that methylation is the pattern of accumulating damage leading to greater and greater loss of cell function. This damage comes from the stress and strain of aging and disease.

Which lifestyle changes lead to younger DNA?

Over eight weeks, researchers monitored the results of a treatment program focusing on diet, sleep, exercise, relaxation guidance, and supplemental probiotics and phytonutrients. The randomized controlled clinical trial involved 43 healthy men between the ages of 50 and 72. Results show committing to these lifestyle changes produced “statistically significant” reductions in the biological aging of cells.

“The combined intervention program was designed to target a specific biological mechanism called DNA methylation, and in particular the DNA methylation patterns that have been identified as highly predictive of biological age,” study leader Kara Fitzgerald says in a media release.

“We suspect that this focus was the reason for its remarkable impact. These early results appear to be consistent with, and greatly extend, the very few existing studies that have so far examined the potential for biological age reversal. And it is unique in its use of a safe, non-pharmaceutical dietary and lifestyle program, control group, and the extent of the age reduction. We are currently enrolling participants for a larger study which we expect will corroborate these findings.”

McGill University’s leading epigeneticist, Moshe Szyf PhD, adds this natural approach to de-aging the body specifically targets the methylation process in the human body. Szyf notes the results may lead to additional therapies which target the body’s genetic makeup, without resorting to medications.

“What is extremely exciting is that food and lifestyle practices, including specific nutrients and food compounds known to selectively alter DNA methylation, are able to have such an impact on those DNA methylation patterns we know predict aging and age-related disease,” Dr. Fitzgerald concludes.

“I believe that this, together with new possibilities for us all to measure and track our DNA methylation age, will provide significant new opportunities for both scientists and consumers.”

The study appears in the journal Aging.

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Boeing said Friday it was working to address questions about its 787 Dreamliner from US air safety regulators after again suspending new deliveries of the jet.

The questions concern the inspection method for new planes following production problems that led to an earlier pause in deliveries. With approval from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Boeing had resumed deliveries of the widebody Dreamliner in March after a five-month halt.

"Boeing still needs to show that its proposed inspection method would meet FAA's federal safety regulations," the agency said. "The FAA is waiting for additional data from Boeing before determining whether the company's solution meets safety regulations.

"Since the FAA has not approved Boeing's proposal, Boeing chose to temporarily stop deliveries to its customers."

A Boeing spokesperson said there was no impact on 787 planes already in service.

"We are working to provide the FAA with additional information concerning the analysis and documentation associated with the verification work on undelivered 787s," a Boeing spokesperson said.

"We continue to work closely with the FAA in a transparent and timely manner."

The latest suspension concerns Boeing's proposal for a statistical analysis of data that allows for more narrow reviews, The Wall Street Journal said, citing people familiar with the matter.

Until the agency's questions are satisfied about more targeted inspections, the FAA is requiring Boeing to undertake broad inspections that are time-consuming and labor-intensive, the newspaper reported.

The Journal also described a number of quality issues, including gaps where the plane's body joins together.

Boeing has described this year as "inflection point" for the aviation industry, with its recovery hopes boosted by COVID-19 vaccinations after the pandemic devastated travel demand in 2020.

The company's prospects have also improved since the FAA cleared the 737 MAX to resume service in November after a 20-month grounding following two fatal crashes.

But Boeing's recovery has hit speed bumps due to production interruptions on both the MAX and the Dreamliner.

Boeing had halted deliveries of the MAX for about six weeks this spring due to electrical problems discovered during the manufacturing process.

The company resumed deliveries earlier this month after the FAA approved the company's fix for the issue.

Shares of Boeing fell 1.9 percent to $246 in morning trading.

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In a study of adults with normal kidney function, those who had frequent depressive symptoms were more likely to later experience a rapid decline in kidney function. The study will appear in an upcoming issue of CJASN.

Depression is a common condition in middle-aged and older adults, and it can contribute to a variety of mental and physical problems. Previous research has found a link between depressive symptoms and rapid kidney function decline in patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD). To look for a potential link in adults with normal kidney function as well, a team led by Xianhui Qin, MD (Nanfang Hospital, Southern Medical University, in China) examined information on 4,763 individuals with healthy kidneys when they enrolled in the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS).

At the start of the study, 39% of participants had high depressive symptoms, and during a median follow-up of 4 years, 260 (6%) participants experienced rapid kidney function decline. There was a significant association between depressive symptoms at the start of the study and rapid decline in kidney function during follow-up. Participants with frequent depressive symptoms were 1.4-times more likely to experience rapid kidney function decline than participants with infrequent depressive symptoms, after adjustments.

"CKD is a leading risk factor for cardiovascular disease, kidney failure, and mortality worldwide. Therefore, the identification of more modifiable risk factors may possibly reduce the huge burden of CKD and its related complications by leading to early detection and prevention," said Dr. Qin. "While our study does not show causality, it demonstrated that high depressive symptoms were significantly associated with rapid decline in kidney function among Chinese adults with normal kidney function. If further confirmed, our data provide some evidence for depressive symptom screening and effective psychosocial interventions to improve the prevention of CKD."

An accompanying Pantiet Voice article provides the perspective of a two-time kidney transplant recipient with an American-Born Chinese background.

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A neighbourhood in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou has been locked down as officials rush to quell an uptick in cases in the area.

The industrial hub north of Hong Kong home to nearly 15 million people has reported 20 new cases of the coronavirus in the past week.

A notice by the Guangzhou municipal health bureau issued Saturday identified five streets in Liwan district in the city centre as "high-risk areas" and ordered residents to stay indoors until door-to-door testing is completed.

Markets, schools and entertainment venues in the area were shut.

The city government has rushed to conduct mass testing and about 700,000 people had been tested by Wednesday.

China has largely controlled the spread of the virus and has tightened quarantine rules after a surge in cases in neighbouring countries.

The mini-outbreak in Guangzhou is believed to be linked to a 75-year-old woman who tested positive for the virus variant first identified in India, local health officials said.

The total number of confirmed infections in China to date stands at 91,061, with 4,636 deaths, according to the latest figures from the National Health Commission.

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Waking up just one hour earlier could reduce a person's risk of major depression by 23%, suggests a sweeping new genetic study published May 26 in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.

The study of 840,000 people, by researchers at University of Colorado Boulder and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, represents some of the strongest evidence yet that chronotype—a person's propensity to sleep at a certain time —influences depression risk.

It's also among the first studies to quantify just how much, or little, change is required to influence mental health.

As people emerge, post-pandemic, from working and attending school remotely— a trend that has led many to shift to a later sleep schedule—the findings have important implications.

"We have known for some time that there is a relationship between sleep timing and mood, but a question we often hear from clinicians is: How much earlier do we need to shift people to see a benefit?" said senior author Celine Vetter, assistant professor of integrative physiology at CU Boulder. "We found that even one-hour earlier sleep timing is associated with significantly lower risk of depression."

Previous observational studies have shown that night owls are as much as twice as likely to suffer from depression as early risers, regardless of how long they sleep. But because mood disorders themselves can disrupt sleep patterns, researchers have had a hard time deciphering what causes what.

Other studies have had small sample sizes, relied on questionnaires from a single time point, or didn't account for environmental factors which can influence both sleep timing and mood, potentially confounding results.

In 2018, Vetter published a large, long term study of 32,000 nurses showing that "early risers" were up to 27% less likely to develop depression over the course of four years, but that begged the question: What does it mean to be an early riser?

How your genes influence when you wake up

To get a clearer sense of whether shifting sleep time earlier is truly protective, and how much shift is required, lead author Iyas Daghlas turned to data from the DNA testing company 23 and Me and the biomedical database UK Biobank. Daghlas then used a method called "Mendelian randomization" that leverages genetic associations to help decipher cause and effect.

"Our genetics are set at birth so some of the biases that affect other kinds of epidemiological research tend not to affect genetic studies," said Daghlas, who graduated in May from Harvard Medical School.

More than 340 common genetic variants, including variants in the so-called "clock gene" PER2, are known to influence a person's chronotype, and genetics collectively explains 12-42% of our sleep timing preference.

The researchers assessed deidentified genetic data on these variants from up to 850,000 individuals, including data from 85,000 who had worn wearable sleep trackers for seven days and 250,000 who had filled out sleep-preference questionnaires. This gave them a more granular picture, down to the hour, of how variants in genes influence when we sleep and wake up.

In the largest of these samples, about a third of surveyed subjects self-identified as morning larks, 9% were night owls and the rest were in the middle. Overall, the average sleep mid-point was 3 a.m., meaning they went to bed at 11 p.m. and got up at 6 a.m.

With this information in hand, the researchers turned to a different sample which included genetic information along with anonymized medical and prescription records and surveys about diagnoses of major depressive disorder.

Using novel statistical techniques, they asked: Do those with genetic variants which predispose them to be early risers also have lower risk of depression?

The answer is a firm yes.

Each one-hour earlier sleep midpoint (halfway between bedtime and wake time) corresponded with a 23% lower risk of major depressive disorder.

Put another way, if someone who normally goes to bed at 1 a.m. goes to bed at midnight instead and sleeps the same duration, they could cut their risk by 23%; if they go to bed at 11 p.m., they could cut it by about 40%.

It's unclear from the study whether those who are already early risers could benefit from getting up even earlier. But for those in the intermediate range or evening range, shifting to an earlier bedtime would likely be helpful.

Light days, dark nights key

What could explain this effect?

Some research suggests that getting greater light exposure during the day, which early-risers tend to get, results in a cascade of hormonal impacts that can influence mood.

Others note that having a biological clock, or circadian rhythm, that trends differently than most peoples' can in itself be depressing.

"We live in a society that is designed for morning people, and evening people often feel as if they are in a constant state of misalignment with that societal clock," said Daghlas.

He stresses that a large randomized clinical trial is necessary to determine definitively whether going to bed early can reduce depression. "But this study definitely shifts the weight of evidence toward supporting a causal effect of sleep timing on depression."

For those wanting to shift themselves to an earlier sleep schedule, Vetter offers this advice:

"Keep your days bright and your nights dark," she says. "Have your morning coffee on the porch. Walk or ride your bike to work if you can, and dim those electronics in the evening."

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Both studies looked at people who had been exposed to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) about a year earlier, The New York Times reported. Cells that remember the virus persist in the bone marrow and may produce antibodies whenever needed, according to a study published in the journal Nature. The other study, posted online at the biology research site BioRxiv, showed that these memory B cells continue maturing and strengthening for at least 12 months after initial infection with the coronavirus.

Together, the findings suggest that most people who have recovered from SARS-CoV-2 infection and were later vaccinated will not require booster shots, The Times said. But it is likely that vaccinated people who were never infected will still need booster shots, as will some people who were infected but did not produce a strong immune response against the virus.

"The papers are consistent with the growing body of literature that suggests that immunity elicited by infection and vaccination for SARS-CoV-2 appears to be long-lived," Scott Hensley, Ph.D., an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the research, told The Times.

The memory B cells that are produced in response to coronavirus infection and boosted by vaccines are so powerful that they can fight off even variants of the virus, eliminating the need for boosters, according to Michel Nussenzweig, M.D., Ph.D., an immunologist at Rockefeller University in New York City, who led one of the studies. "People who were infected and get vaccinated really have a terrific response, a terrific set of antibodies, because they continue to evolve their antibodies," Nussenzweig told The Times. "I expect that they will last for a long time."

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A new study published in Nature Communications demonstrates that a consortium of bacteria designed to complement missing or underrepresented functions in the imbalanced microbiome of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) patients, prevented and treated chronic immune-mediated colitis in humanized mouse models. The study's senior author, Balfour Sartor, MD, Midget Distinguished Professor of Medicine, Microbiology and Immunology, Co-Director of the UNC Multidisciplinary IBD Center, said the results are encouraging for future use treating Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis patients.

"The idea with this treatment is to restore the normal function of the protective bacteria in the gut, targeting the source of IBD, instead of treating its symptoms with traditional immunosuppressants that can cause side effects like infections or tumors," Sartor said.

The live bacteria consortia, called GUT-103 and GUT-108, were developed by biotech firm Gusto Global. GUT-103 is comprised of 17 strains of bacteria that work together to protect and feed each other. GUT-108 is a refined version of GUT-103, using 11 human isolates related to the 17 strains. These combinations permit the bacteria to stay in the colon for an extended amount of time, as opposed to other probiotics that are not capable of living in the gut and pass through the system quickly.

GUT-103 and GUT-108 were given orally three times a week to "germ-free" mice (no bacteria present) that had been specially developed and treated with specific human bacteria, creating a humanized mouse model. The therapeutic bacteria consortia worked by addressing upstream targets, rather than targeting a single cytokine to block downstream inflammation responses, and reversed established inflammation.

"It also decreased pathobionts—bacteria that can cause harm—while expanding resident protective bacteria, and produced metabolites promoting mucosal healing and immunoregulatory responses," Sartor said. "Simply put—the treatment increased the good guys and decreased the bad guys."

Because of the robust results seen in this study, and the need for more alternative therapies for Crohn's disease, Sartor would like to see GUT-103 and GUT-108 studied in Phase 1 and 2 clinical trials in the future. He plans to continue his work with Gusto Global to further explore uses of the bacterial consortia.

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Rough night of sleep? Relying on caffeine to get you through the day isn’t always the answer, says a new study from Michigan State University.

Researchers from MSU’s Sleep and Learning Lab, led by psychology associate professor Kimberly Fenn, assessed how effective caffeine was in counteracting the negative effects of sleep deprivation on cognition. As it turns out, caffeine can only get you so far.

The study — published in the most recent edition of Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition — assessed the impact of caffeine after a night of sleep deprivation. More than 275 participants were asked to complete a simple attention task as well as a more challenging “placekeeping” task that required completion of tasks in a specific order without skipping or repeating steps.

Fenn’s study is the first to investigate the effect of caffeine on placekeeping after a period of sleep deprivation.

“We found that sleep deprivation impaired performance on both types of tasks and that having caffeine helped people successfully achieve the easier task. However, it had little effect on performance on the placekeeping task for most participants,” Fenn said.

She added: “Caffeine may improve the ability to stay awake and attend to a task, but it doesn’t do much to prevent the sort of procedural errors that can cause things like medical mistakes and car accidents.”

Insufficient sleep is pervasive in the United States, a problem that has intensified during the pandemic, Fenn said. Consistently lacking adequate sleep not only affects cognition and alters mood, but can eventually take a toll on immunity.

“Caffeine increases energy, reduces sleepiness and can even improve mood, but it absolutely does not replace a full night of sleep, Fenn said. “Although people may feel as if they can combat sleep deprivation with caffeine, their performance on higher-level tasks will likely still be impaired. This is one of the reasons why sleep deprivation can be so dangerous.”

Fenn said that the study has the potential to inform both theory and practice.

“If we had found that caffeine significantly reduced procedural errors under conditions of sleep deprivation, this would have broad implications for individuals who must perform high stakes procedures with insufficient sleep, like surgeons, pilots and police officers,” Fenn said. “Instead, our findings underscore the importance of prioritizing sleep.”

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New research by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) climate scientists and collaborators shows that satellite measurements of the temperature of the troposphere (the lowest region of the atmosphere) may have underestimated global warming over the last 40 years.

The research appears in the Journal of Climate.

The team studied four different properties of tropical climate change. Each property is a ratio between trends in two “complementary” variables. Complementary variables — like tropical temperature and moisture — are expected to show correlated behavior. This correlated behavior is governed by basic, well-understood physical processes.

The first three properties considered by the team involved relationships between tropical temperature and tropical water vapor (WV). WV trends were compared with trends in sea surface temperature (SST), lower tropospheric temperature (TLT) and mid- to upper tropospheric temperature (TMT). The fourth property was the ratio between TMT and SST trends. All four ratios are tightly constrained in climate model simulations, despite model differences in climate sensitivity, external forcings and natural variability. In contrast, each ratio exhibits a large range when calculated with observations. Model trend ratios between WV and temperature were closest to observed ratios when the latter are calculated with datasets exhibiting larger tropical warming of the ocean surface and troposphere.

For the TMT/SST ratio, model-data consistency depended on the combination of observations used to estimate TMT and SST trends. Observational datasets with larger warming of the tropical ocean surface yielded TMT/SST ratios that were in better agreement with model results.

“Such comparisons across complementary measurements can shed light on the credibility of different datasets,” according to LLNL’s Stephen Po-Chedley, who contributed to this study. “This work shows that careful intercomparison of different geophysical fields may help us determine historical changes in climate with greater precision.”  

If climate model expectations of these relationships between tropical temperature and moisture are realistic, the findings reflect either a systematic low bias in satellite tropospheric temperature trends or an overestimate of the observed atmospheric moistening signal.

“It is currently difficult to determine which interpretation is more credible,” said LLNL climate scientist Ben Santer, lead author of the paper. “But our analysis reveals that several observational datasets — particularly those with the smallest values of ocean surface warming and tropospheric warming — appear to be at odds with other, independently measured complementary variables.”

Other Livermore scientists include Jeffrey Painter and Mark Zelinka. The LLNL team collaborated with Carl Mears and Frank Wentz from Remote Sensing Systems, John Fyfe and Nathan Gillett from the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis, Environment and Climate Change, Qiang Fu from the University of Washington, Susan Solomon from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Andrea Steiner from the University of Graz, Austria, and Cheng-Zhi Zou from the National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Work at LLNL was funded by the Department of Energy’s Regional and Global Model Analysis Program-area in the Earth and Environmental Systems Sciences Division and by several LDRD grants.

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The discipline of computer science has historically made effective use of peer-reviewed conference publications as an important mechanism for disseminating timely and impactful research results. Recent attempts to "game" the reviewing system could undermine this mechanism, damaging our ability to share research effectively.

I want to alert the community to a growing problem that attacks the fundamental assumptions that the review process has depended upon. My hope is that exposing the behavior of a community of unethical individuals will encourage others to exert social pressure that will help bring colluders into line, invite a broader set of people to engage in problem solving, and provide some encouragement for people trapped into collusion by more senior researchers to extricate themselves and make common cause with the rest of the community. My motivation for writing this Viewpoint is because I became aware of an example in the computer-architecture community where a junior researcher may have taken his own life instead of continuing to engage in a possible collusion ring.

Collusion rings extend far beyond the field of computer architecture. I will share another data point, from artificial intelligence and machine learning. I will keep some of the details (like the identity of the specific conference) vague because I think naming names could do more harm than good. Since my goal is to raise awareness of the issue and help people understand how widespread it is, I do not think such details are essential.

Let me start with a reminder about several salient attributes of the review process. What I describe is not precisely what is used by any specific conference but it matches well with the three or four big conferences I have been involved in organizing.

• The peer-review process is carried out by a program committee consisting of one or two program chairs, several-hundred area chairs, and approximately 5,000 reviewers. Reviewers are asked to declare conflicts of interest so they are not assigned to review papers that would compromise their partiality.
• Authors submit papers with their names withheld for reviewing ("blind"). One notable conference received 10,000 submissions last year, up from an all-time high of 1,000 only six years earlier.
• Reviewers "bid" on specific submitted papers based on the paper titles/abstracts to indicate those they are qualified to review.
• Reviewers are assigned papers by the program chair(s), attempting to respect their bids while avoiding disclosed conflicts of interest.
• Reviewers read their assigned papers and submit reviews. They share their reviews with one another and try to reach a consensus recommendation (accept/reject) for each paper, which the area chairs and program chairs use to build the conference's technical program.

Overall, stakes are high because acceptance rates are low (15%–25%), opportunities for publishing at any given conference are limited to once a year, and publications play a central role in building a researcher's reputation and ultimate professional success. Academic positions are highly competitive, so each paper rejection—especially for graduate students—has a real impact on future job prospects. Some countries correlate promotion and salary decisions to the number of papers accepted at a specific set of high-profile conferences (and journals).

Given the intensity of the process, researchers push themselves very hard to do the best work that they can. The week or two leading up to a conference deadline is exceptionally stressful, with researchers neglecting other responsibilities, running their computers at capacity, and getting very little sleep. Even so, hard work does not appear to be enough to guarantee success—the review process is notoriously random. In a well-publicized case in 2014, organizers of the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference formed two independent program committees and had 10% of submissions reviewed by both. The result was that almost 60% of papers accepted by one program committee were rejected by the other, suggesting that the fate of many papers is determined by the specifics of the reviewers selected and not just the inherent value of the work itself.

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A Yale study has found that a self-conducted test involving the thumb and palm of one hand could help alert thousands of people each year to their risk of having a hidden aortic aneurysm.

Aortic aneurysms are the 13th most common cause of death among Americans, killing about 10,000 people each year. They affect adults of all ages.

If an aneurysm is detected early enough, a patient can be kept safe via restricting exercise, radiographic monitoring, or surgery.

But aortic aneurysms are hard to detect in advance, physicians say.

"The biggest problem in aneurysm disease is recognizing affected individuals within the general population before the aneurysm ruptures," said Dr. John A. Elefteriades, the William W.L. Glenn Professor of Surgery at Yale and emeritus director of the Aortic Institute at Yale New Haven Hospital. He is senior author of the new study, published in the American Journal of Cardiology.

For at least the past two decades, Elefteriades said, he and his colleagues have included the thumb-palm test in lectures to medical students and used the test for patients who might be at risk of carrying an aneurysm.

Yet despite its frequent usage, the test's accuracy had not been evaluated in a clinical setting, the researchers said.

The test is simple: Holding up one hand and keeping the palm flat, the patient flexes their thumb as far as possible across the palm. If the thumb crosses beyond the far edge of the flat palm, the patient may be harboring a hidden aneurysm.

Being able to move the thumb in that way is an indication that a patient's long bones are excessive and their joints are lax—possible signs of connective tissue disease throughout the body, including the aorta.

The researchers said it is important to emphasize that not everyone who tests positive is an aneurysm carrier. Also, they noted, aneurysms often take decades to progress to the point of rupture and a positive test is not cause for panic.

For the study, the researchers gave the test to 305 patients undergoing cardiac surgery for a variety of disorders, including aortic aneurysms. "Our study showed that the majority of aneurysm patients do not manifest a positive thumb-palm sign, but patients who do have a positive test have a high likelihood of harboring an aneurysm," Elefteriades said.

Based on their findings, Elefteriades and his colleagues said the thumb-palm test should be included in standard physical examinations of patients—particularly those who have a family history of aortic aneurysm.

"Spreading knowledge of this test may well identify silent aneurysm carriers and save lives," Elefteriades said.

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A pair of researchers, one from the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland the other the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Norway has found that it is possible to track mood trends in large groups of people by studying their Twitter posts. In their paper published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, Eric Mayor and Lucas Bietti describe their analysis of large amounts of Twitter data from people tweeting in several densely populated counties in the U.S.

Prior studies have shown that people's moods can in some ways be tied to their circadian rhythm, with factors such as sleepiness and hunger having a big impact on how they feel. In this new effort, the researchers wondered if people might also experience cyclic moods based on other factors, such as having to go to work. To find out, they obtained 25 million self-referencing tweets typed by people in multiple densely populated counties in the U.S. They theorized that self-referencing tweets, such as "I want to do this or that," or "I don't want to do this other thing," would offer clues as to how happy or unhappy an individual was during different parts of their day or even their week. They also noted which emojis people used to express how they were feeling.

After analyzing the tweets, the researchers found some patterns. They noted that the people who posted the tweets they were studying appeared to be happier in the late afternoon to evening than during the day. They also noticed that as a whole, the tweeters also seemed to become less happy on Sunday afternoons and remained unhappy until around the following Thursday—and then held that level of happiness until Sunday came around. The researchers suggest that people are not very happy about going to work. They start experiencing a drop in mood hours before their weekends are over—long before Monday rolls around. Then their mood starts picking up as the weekend approaches. Similarly, the group as a whole seemed to feel down as work began each day, but began to feel better as quitting time approached.

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The world may temporarily breach the 1.5-Celsius warming mark within the next five years, according to an updated assessment of global climate trends released Thursday.

The World Meterological Organization and Britain's Met Office said there was a 40 percent chance of the annual average global temperature surpassing 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures—the aspirational warming limit of the Paris climate accord.

According to the Met Office's updated global 10-year climate prediction, there is a 90 percent chance of at least one year between 2021-2025 being the hottest on record.

The annual average global temperature over the next five years is likely to be at least 1C warmer than pre-industrial levels, within a range of 0.9C-1.8C warmer, it said.

"These are more than just statistics," said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas.

"Increasing temperatures mean more melting ice, higher sea levels, more heatwaves and other extreme weather, and greater impacts on food security, health, the environment and sustainable development."

The Global Annual to Decadal Climate Update, released on Thursday, showed that the chance of breaching 1.5C had roughly doubled compared to a similar assessment made last year.

The WMO said this increase was largely down to improved datasets used to predict temperatures, rather than a sudden increase in the rate of warming.

The landmark 2015 Paris climate deal saw nations commit to limit global temperature rises to "well below" 2C above pre-industrial levels.

The accord strives towards a safer cap of 1.5C, but pledges made by nations under the Paris accord to date leave Earth on the path to warming roughly twice as much by the end of the century.

Experts greeted Thursday's announcement with caution.

Joeri Rogelj, director of research at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London, said a single year above 1.5C would not mean the Paris goals had been breached.

"But this is nevertheless very bad news," he said.

"It tells us once again that climate action to date is wholly insufficient and emissions need to be reduced urgently to zero to halt global warming."

The WHO said the new assessment showed an increased likelihood of tropical cyclones in the Atlantic, as well as increased rainfall in high-latitude regions and the Sahel compared with the recent past.

"To limit global warming to 1.5C—or what the parties to the Paris Agreement thought 1.5C meant when they signed it –- we need to hit the brakes on emissions now and stop global warming in the next 30 years or so," said Myles Allen, professor of geosystem science at the University of Oxford.

"That hasn't changed, apart from the fact that five years have passed since Paris and we are still only talking about hitting the brakes."

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Moderna’s data in kids ages 12-17 “consistent with a vaccine efficacy of 100%”

The company plans to seek FDA authorization in early June.

Moderna’s data in kids ages 12-17 “consistent with a vaccine efficacy of 100%”

The Boston-based startup has quietly been testing its self-driving tech in the Mojave desert.

Remote piloting and automated assistance software is slowly creeping into non-commercial aircraft. Compared to self-driving tech, these systems have had an easier ride with air safety regulators due to their co-existence with human operators. But, a handful of fledgling autonomous flight companies are striving to change that. Today, one of those startups, Boston-based Merlin Labs, is announcing a partnership that will bring its on-board automation software to a fleet of 55 King Air utility aircraft. 

The pact with aerospace company Dynamic Aviation coincides with Merlin's emergence from stealth mode, marking the first time its tech for fixed-wing aircraft will be used publicly. Over the past several months, the startup has been quietly testing its proprietary software on a range of planes, including twin turboprop aircraft, at its dedicated flight facility at the Mojave Air & Space Port. The trials include the first aircraft from its Dynamic Aviation partnership.

Merlin says it has raised $25 million in funding from backers including Google Ventures, the venture capital arm of Alphabet. We already know that Google co-founder Larry Page has previously bankrolled flying car startups Aero and Kitty Hawk, so the company's involvement here is hardly surprising. The search giant's parent also operates a self-driving car division in Waymo.

Like its chief rival Reliable Robotics, Merlin's ultimate goal is to populate the heavens with a whole host of pilotless planes shuttling passengers and cargo. The company says its autonomy platform is "aircraft agnostic" allowing it to be retrofitted to existing and new models. “This deal represents a major commercial milestone as well as Merlin’s commitment to support larger and more complex aircraft,” said Matthew George, Merlin co-founder and CEO.

Source: Google-backed autonomous flight company Merlin will power a fleet of 55 aircraft

Scans show some brains have a stronger link between the part that processes sound and that which controls the mouth and throat

Scientists have shed light on why everyday sounds such as chewing, drinking and breathing can be so maddening to some people that it drives them to despair.

While the familiar munching and slurping of the dinner table are innocuous enough to most, those with misophonia – literally a hatred of sound – can find them profoundly irritating, to the point that they become disgusted, anxious, angry and even violent.

Now, brain scans performed by researchers at Newcastle University have revealed that people with misophonia have stronger connectivity between the part of the brain that processes sounds and the part of the so-called premotor cortex which handles mouth and throat muscle movements.

When people with misophonia were played a “trigger sound”, the scans showed that the brain region involved in mouth and throat movement was overactivated compared with a control group of volunteers who did not have the condition.

“What we are suggesting is that in misophonia the trigger sound activates the motor area even though the person is only listening to the sound,” said Dr Sukhbinder Kumar, a neuroscientist at Newcastle University. “It makes them feel like the sounds are intruding into them.”

Kumar and his colleagues believe that trigger sounds activate what is called the brain’s mirror neuron system. Mirror neurons are thought to fire when a person performs an action, but also when they see others make particular movements.

Activating the mirror neuron system with trigger sounds did not make people with misophonia involuntarily start chewing or swallowing. But the researchers believe it can produce an urge to through what they call “hyper-mirroring.” Dr Kumar said some people with the condition mimic the sound that sets them off because it brings them some comfort, perhaps by reasserting control over the sensations they feel.

In some respects, memory is poor. In others, it is astonishingly good 

We’ve all felt the fog come over us when we mistake someone’s name right after being introduced, fail to remember where we left our car in the parking lot or tell a friend the same story twice. Our memory is rarely as reliable as we’d like.

But at times, it also surprises us. We may somehow remember family stories told to us long ago, the names of our middle school teachers or trivia facts buried deep in back of our brain. Despite the standard glitches, our memory can retain far more than either experts or we expect.

Conclusions about its reliability vary tremendously. Some studies conclude that memory is extremely accurate, whereas others conclude that it is not only faulty but utterly unreliable. Even memory experts can struggle to predict how accurate our recollections are. In a recent study at the University of Toronto, such experts were asked to predict the accuracy of memories of events that happened two days earlier. While recollections of these events were very good—more than 90 percent correct on average—the experts predicted they would be only 40 percent correct. Why is our memory so mysterious?

Studies that conclude memory is good typically test recollections of more recent events and emphasize the astounding accuracy of their details. In the University of Toronto study, researchers measured memories of verifiable experiences by focusing on those regarding an audio guided tour of a hospital. Two days after taking part in the tour, participants were asked to recall what had happened. While, on average, they recalled only 15 or 22 percent of the events that they had experienced, the memories they did recall were, on average, 93 or 94 percent correct. These results are broadly consistent with those of similar studies, including one at the National Institute of Mental Health in which people were asked to memorize a set of photographs and then draw them later. Taken together, these studies suggest that although we don’t recall a large fraction of what we experience, what we do remember is accurate, at least for a few days. This is helpful for us all to know.

Given that conclusion, it makes sense that memory performance drops when an experiment probes memory of a random subset of all of the events that happened (as opposed to the subset that an individual recalls). In one study with this type of design, researchers at Harvard Medical School focused on memories of a prescribed walk around a city. In their experiment, different people walked the same route but at different times. And as they did so, researchers recorded their experiences with a helmet-mounted video camera. The next day, the researchers tested each participant’s memory by asking them to judge whether different video clips were drawn from things that they had experienced or the experiences of others. The fact that the clips they did not experience were taped by different participants walking the same route at different times made the task particularly challenging. Average memory performance on this task was low (56 percent correct) and only slightly higher than guessing (50 percent correct). These results suggest that when we are asked about whether we have experienced a particular event, we tend to get confused by things that are similar to those that actually happened. That is consistent with recent work suggesting that when police are compiling faces for a lineup, the results will be more accurate if the faces that an eyewitness has to choose among are more distinct.

A number of other factors can also impact memory performance. Because we tend to forget things with time, such performance depends on how much of it has elapsed since an event. Following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, memories of verifiable events one week after were fairly accurate (88 percent correct) but declined modestly over the first year (to 77 percent correct). Another important factor is training. In one study, six weeks of memory training improved the number of words that participants could recall from a list one day after viewing them (from 16.1 to 56.2 of 72 possible words), and those training effects persisted for at least four months, the longest time frame tested.

These results may help experts predict memory performance in real-world scenarios. Yet often their estimates are far off the mark. This discrepancy is reflected in the University of Toronto study in which the highly reliable memory performance of the participants was vastly underestimated by the panel of memory experts. I suspect that the pessimism of the experts followed from their research’s emphasis on how memory works (as opposed to how well it does so). Research focused on how has a natural tendency to focus on a system’s flaws because some of the most useful insights into how a system works are reflected in the specific ways it fails. As a field matures, however, there is a natural progression from qualitative descriptions of how to quantitative predictions that include how well. The University of Toronto study is a reminder that it is important for memory research to take this next step toward understanding our memory enough to accurately predict, and appreciate, its power.

Source

I study the effects of exercise on the body. So it's perhaps unsurprising that when I'm not in the lab, I like to keep active by hitting the gym or going for a run. But for many people it's much harder to get out and move their bodies. Modern life doesn't always make it easy to maintain a healthy, active lifestyle.

Yet even for someone like me, exercise isn't always enjoyable. I have to repeatedly push myself to the point of tiredness and discomfort, in the hope that I will get fitter and stay healthy. Surely the health benefits of a hot bath or a stint in a sauna—a far more attractive proposition—can't be compared? Yet this is the question I have dedicated myself to answering. And the evidence, thus far, is promising.

The term "exercise is medicine" is rightfully well publicized. It's one of the best ways to stay healthy, yet medicine doesn't work if you aren't prepared to take it. Exercise adherence is very poor, with many people unwilling to exercise due to lack of time and motivation. And for those who are older or have chronic diseases, exercise can also cause pain, which for obvious reasons limits exercise further.

Globally, about 25% of adults don't meet the minimum recommended physical activity levels of 150 minutes of moderate intensity activity or 75 minutes of vigorous intensity activity per week, or a combination of both. In the UK the figures are even worse, with around 34% of men and 42% of women not achieving these guidelines. Sadly, such high levels of sedentary behavior are thought to be linked to about 11.6% of UK deaths annually.

In a world where many of us are working nine-to-five office jobs and our daily tasks can be completed by a mere click of a button, it's easy to see why the modernisation of societies have led to higher levels of sedentary behavior. There is an urgent need to find alternative strategies to improve health that people are willing to follow.

In an effort to find such a solution, I'm looking into how hot baths and saunas affect the body. Throughout human history, multiple cultures around the world have used heat therapy to improve health. But until recently, the benefits of bathing were anecdotal and largely viewed as unscientific. However, in the last few decades evidence has been growing and today we know that regular bathing in a sauna or hot tub can help reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease—and may well have wider health benefits too.

Our recent review of the research found that regular sauna or hot tub bathing can indeed bring about some similar health benefits to that of low to moderate intensity aerobic exercise, such as walking, jogging and cycling. On first glance, comparing a hot bath or sauna to a jog might seem illogical—after all, the former tends to be seen as relaxing and the latter tiring—but they are more similar than you may think.

The next time you are in a hot tub, bath or sauna, take a moment to listen to your body. You will initially be hit by a pleasant sensation of heat that increases your body temperature and you will start to feel hot and sweaty. This is accompanied by a subtle elevation in heart rate. Starting to sound familiar? Yes—these bodily responses take place during exercise too.

As part of a group of researchers at Coventry University, I've compared the similarities and differences between the physiological responses of exercise and heating. In order to do this, I ask volunteers to undergo the same duration of hot tub bathing and moderate intensity cycling. While exercise is more adept at increasing energy expenditure, we have found comparable elevations in core body temperature and heart rate.

The similarities also go beyond what you can physically feel. By doing ultrasound scans of the arteries, I also observe similar increases in blood flow.

Importantly, away from the lab, long-term observational studies have demonstrated that the application of heat at rest, or what academics like to call "passive heating", has the potential to be pleasurable, practical and potent at improving health.

But as the old saying goes, when something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Before you contemplate canceling your gym membership and investing the savings in a Jacuzzi, know that regular saunas or baths are unable to replicate all the health benefits of exercise training, such as promoting fat loss and increasing muscle mass. Using hot baths or saunas shouldn't be considered as a substitute for exercise. But it can mimic some of the health benefits—and we think that when used in conjunction with exercise, it can give rise to greater health.

From Japan to Rome

Sitting and sweating in hot bodies of water or hot steamy rooms is an activity that has been at the center of multiple cultures across the globe for millennia.

The Romans, for example, are famous for their love of hot baths. Bathing in their neighborhood thermae—the communal baths—were considered a relaxing social activity. Other similar practices have occurred all over the world. These include the likes of onsen (hot spring) bathing, which is a central part of Japanese culture, and jjimjilbang (public bathhouses) that are common in South Korea. In your standard hot tub, such bathing tends to involve being submerged up to your shoulder in hot water at around 38-40°C for anywhere up to 60 minutes.

Traditional dry saunas are a popular pastime in many Nordic countries, and have been for centuries. Originally fuelled by wood burning fires and more commonly now with electrical heating elements, these are usually heated to 70-110°C with a humidity between 5-20%. Nowadays, higher humidity levels are often achieved by pouring water over heated stones. Heating bouts are normally between 5-30 minutes and are usually separated by a short cold shower, before repeating the process. Incredibly, there are around 3 million saunas in Finland alone, a country of 5.5 million people.

All of these cultures—and the many other historic and current cultures for which bathing is popular—extol the health benefits of these practices. And we now know they have been right all along. The benefits are not only restricted to physical health: heat therapy can also act as an antidepressant. In this regard, the social aspect of group bathing is likely to be important.

The thought of stripping off one's clothes and bathing or sweating in close proximity to several strangers may not be everyone's cup of tea, yet in countries where saunas or hot baths are integrated within daily life, the general public appear to be reaping the benefits.

In the first long-term observational study of its kind, in middle-aged Finnish men, it was found that sauna bathing frequency was associated with a decreased risk of fatal cardiovascular disease. Those who participated in four to seven sauna sessions per week had an astonishing 50% reduction in the risk of fatal cardiovascular disease when compared to those who went once a week. The same study also showed that sauna attendance was associated with a significant decreased in the risk of dementia and Alzeimher's disease. It's not such a surprise that the Finns refer to saunas as "the poor man's pharmacy".

Meanwhile, researchers from Japan have shown that higher frequencies of habitual hot tub bathing have protective effects against fatal and non-fatal cardiovascular events.

While these long-term observational studies illustrate a reduction in the risk of cardiovascular disease through regular heat exposures, it's worth flagging that they only show a relationship. In other words, we cannot definitively prove whether heat protects us against cardiovascular disease or if it's some other factor that has positively changed over the years, such as diet or activity levels.

Yet on the basis that cardiovascular disease is primarily caused by diseases of the artery, it's probable that improvements in blood vessel health—which we now know occurs with regular heat therapy—is a large reason for the reduction in the risk of cardiovascular disease.

Harnessing heat for health

To explore why this is the case, let's take a deeper look at some of the physiological responses and long-term health benefits that can occur through elevations in body temperature.

When your temperature begins to rise, you must find a way to lose excess heat in order to regulate body temperature. One of the principal mechanisms that facilitates heat dissipation from the body is an increase in blood flow to your skin, which is in part supported by the vasodilation (widening) of your arteries and capillaries. This elevation in blood flow, which I measure through ultrasound scans, also promotes the production of various molecules in the blood that help cell growth, repair and protection of your blood vessels.

Although the basic physiological responses of saunas and hot baths are similar, they are not identical. The biggest difference is that hot baths have the added influence of hydrostatic pressure—the force exerted by the water. This assists in the return of blood to your heart. Albeit not proven yet, it has been speculated that this could make hot tub therapy advantageous over sauna for improving cardiovascular health.

The earliest lab-based research into the health benefits of heat therapy took place in the late 1990s and early 2000s. One of the first studies revealed that both sauna and hot water bathing, once or twice per day, five times per week, over four weeks, enhanced the function and wall structure of the heart in patients with chronic heart failure.

Other research conducted at a similar time looked at infrared saunas that, contrary to traditional saunas, use radiation to heat you from the inside out at a temperature of 50-60°C, typically without humidity. In addition to benefits for the heart, it was found that four weeks of sauna use improved blood pressure, exercise tolerance, fitness levels and reduced hospital admissions.

Meanwhile, research into daily hot tub therapy for three weeks was shown to lower blood glucose levels in patients with type 2 diabetes. This is important because having high blood sugar for excessive periods of time can cause serious damage to your blood vessels. Although this early research did have methodological limitations, such as the lack of standardized heating protocols, it has inspired much of today's work.

More recently, numerous studies guided by Chris Minson at the University of Oregon have started to highlight some of the mechanisms by which hot tub therapy can keep us healthy. In these studies, the core body temperatures of participants were increased by around 1.5°C for 60 minutes by sitting in water at 40.5°C. This was then repeated three to five times per week, over eight to ten weeks.

Following this period, improvements in artery health and blood pressure were observed in sedentary healthy adults and obese women with polycystic ovary syndrome. The team also reported reductions in a range of factors related to cardiovascular disease risk, such as fasting glucose (levels of circulating blood sugar after an overnight fast), total cholesterol (overall levels of circulating blood fats) and chronic low-grade inflammation (small but long-term rise in immune cells) in patients with polycystic ovary syndrome.

These findings indicate that hot tub therapy can benefit both diseased and healthy populations in a variety of different ways.

How safe is it?

Before you hop in the tub and try to recreate this, I want to point out that the water temperatures and lengths of time mentioned above are not representative of your everyday bath. In your conventional bath tub, the temperature will gradually drop. Accordingly, when using my hot tub in the lab, I must carefully monitor my volunteers for safety reasons: I measure their core body temperature (using a rectal thermometer), blood pressure and constantly check in with how comfortable they are with the heat of the water.

Anyone who has sat in a hot tub or sauna for a bit too long probably already knows why I do this. On standing, heat exposure can lead to dizziness, a loss of balance and increase the risk of fainting. This is caused by a phenomenon called orthostatic hypotension, where a combination of the widening of the blood vessels caused by the heat, and a change in the posture of your body (such as going from sitting to standing), results in a large drop in blood pressure and a decrease in blood flow to your brain. This can, unsurprisingly, be dangerous.

It's also worth mentioning that you can often become dehydrated as you continuously sweat. This can contribute to feeling what is often described as a "heat hangover", with an accompanying headache and fatigue, that people may be familiar with. So it's sensible to always drink plenty of water and if you start feeling light headed, get out of your bath or sauna slowly.

But the health benefits don't solely depend on maintaining high core body temperatures. So your run-of-the-mill hot bath might still do the trick. Researchers from Liverpool John Moores University have demonstrated that when core body temperature was only increased by around 0.6°C and repeated three times per week for six weeks, the growth of new blood vessels, increases in insulin sensitivity (more effective use of blood glucose) and improvements in fitness still occured.

This is thought to be linked to an increase in blood flow to your skin, which is not reliant on attaining a high core temperature. The elevation in blood flow results in an increase in the frictional force between the blood and the inside of your blood vessel walls. This triggers the release of molecules into the bloodstream. When this response is repeated over months, these molecules assist in the formation of new blood vessels and repair damaged ones. This can help lower blood pressure as well as increase oxygen and glucose delivery to the muscle, which collectively can reduce cardiovascular disease risk and improve fitness.

While we are a far cry from being able to recommend an ideal heat therapy to improve health, it's possible that only a fortnight of regular hot tub therapy may lower your fasting blood glucose (levels of circulating blood sugar after an overnight fast). Improvements in blood vessel health, meanwhile, seem to require a couple of months.

Heat therapy vs exercise

Although highly dependent on the magnitude of the exercise and heating stimulus, our recent review found that both exercise and heat therapy can promote cardiovascular health by comparable improvements in fitness, blood vessel health, blood pressure and glucose levels. Promisingly, there are also some encouraging signs for similar improvements in cardiac function and wall structure, as well as chronic low-grade inflammation in diseased populations.

Protection against fatal cardiovascular disease is further increased in those who regularly exercise and frequently bathe in contrast to either independently. Meaning that doing both exercise and heating is likely the best option.

This is partially due to the energy expenditure of a single hot tub session typically being markedly lower than exercise. We know that long term weight management is essentially dependent on expending more energy than you take in, this means that just using saunas or hot tubs is not going to help much if your aim is to lose weight.

On top of this, sitting in a bath or sauna obviously doesn't require physical movement. As such, your muscles don't need to contract, and your bones aren't stressed by the ground reaction forces from walking or running. It is therefore likely that heat is inferior at improving muscle mass and bone density which are really important aspects of health especially as you age.

Personally, I think the most exciting prospect of this research is for people who are unable to exercise, or those who find it very hard to start. When someone is unable to exercise, heat therapy—whether in hot tubs or saunas—could be viewed as a "gateway therapy" to future exercise participation. This is because heat can increase fitness and functional capacity.

It's therefore also a promising method for those that suffer pain during exercise due to chronic diseases. A good example is peripheral artery disease, where the arteries in the legs become blocked by fatty deposits. This causes a lack of blood flow to the muscle and severe pain. Because heating increases blood flow, heat can have therapeutic potential here.

Hot tub bathing after exercise

Physical inactivity is a major culprit driving the progression of chronic diseases and ultimately premature death worldwide. Many people don't meet the recommended physical activity guidelines, but on the bright side 20-40% take part in some form of structured exercise or physical activity in their weekly routines. Just not enough. Therefore, maximizing the health benefits from smaller amounts of exercise could be of great value.

I'm currently investigating whether post exercise hot tub bathing can extend and intensify the health benefits of exercise. My pilot data is promising. In the future I will be taking more invasive measurements, such as blood samples, to look into whether heating after exercise can increase the number of circulating molecules that have a role in enhancing blood vessel health. Although my research is still in its early stages, we think it's probably best to try and maintain the increase in body temperature after exercise in order to optimize health benefits.

So if jumping into a hot bath after exercise can bring about greater health benefits, post-exercise heating would also be an attractive option for anyone who isn't quite active enough.

The future of heat research

Research into the health benefits of heat is in its infancy. More long-term clinical trials in a range of healthy and diseased populations are needed before we can start to fully understand how to harness its full potential. This will enable us to start establishing the most effective temperatures, durations, frequencies and types of heating to improve specific health pointers for particular groups of people.

To date, a large number of heating studies have pushed participants to the point of thermal discomfort to promote health.

Reaching such high temperatures for long lengths of time are challenging to tolerate and impractical in real-world scenarios. Given that long-term adherence will underpin any lasting health benefits, finding heat therapies that are practical, tolerable and capable of improving health will be key. Directing research towards more convenient and enjoyable types of heating will ensure better uptake. And once all of this work has been done, I hope that healthcare practitioners may one day recommend the use of heat independently and alongside exercise to enhance health.

So while exercise remains the best way to improve your health, research shows that bathing in a sauna or hot tub are alternative options for those who are either unwilling or unable to take part in enough exercise. I will certainly continue to jump in my bath after the gym—and on my days off. Why not dip a toe in?

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Researchers at RSA Conference 2021 demonstrated how Tesla and Mobileye autopilots can be tricked by “phantom” images.

It’s a common movie plot device, the main character thinking they saw someone step onto the road, so they swerve and end up in a ditch. Now imagine it’s real — sort of — and instead of a trick of the light or the mind, that image comes from a cybercriminal projecting, for a split second, something the car autopilot is programmed to respond to. Researchers from Georgia Tech and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev demonstrated that sort of “phantom attack” threat at RSA Conference 2021.

The idea of showing dangerous images to AI systems is not new. Techniques usually involve using modified images to force the AI to draw an unexpected conclusion. All machine-learning algorithms have this Achilles heel; knowing which attributes are key to image recognition — that is, knowing a bit about the algorithm — makes it possible to modify images so as to hinder the machine’s decision-making process or even force it to make a mistake.

The novelty of the approach demonstrated at RSA Conference 2021 is that the autopilot was shown unmodified images — an attacker need not know how the algorithm works or what attributes it uses. The images were briefly projected onto the road and nearby stationary objects, with the following consequences:

In a variation on the theme, the images appeared for a fraction of a second in a commercial on a billboard by the side of the road, with essentially the same outcome:

Thus, the authors of the study concluded, cybercriminals can cause havoc from a safe distance, with no danger of leaving evidence at the scene of the crime. All they need to know is how long they have to project the image to fool the AI (self-driving cars have a trigger threshold to reduce their likelihood of producing false positives from, for example, dirt or debris on the camera lens or lidar).

Now, a car’s braking distance is measured in dozens of feet, so adding a few feet to allow for better situation assessment wasn’t a big deal for AI developers.

Length of time required to show a phantom image to Tesla and Mobileye recognition systems. Source

However, the figure of a couple of meters applies to the Mobileye artificial vision system and a speed of 60 km/h (about 37 mph). In that case, response time is about 125 milliseconds. Tesla’s autopilot response threshold, as experimentally determined by the researchers, is almost three times as long, at 400 milliseconds. At the same speed, that would add almost 7 meters (about 22 feet). Either way, it’s still a fraction of a second. Consequently, the researchers believe such an attack could come out of the blue — before you know it, you’re in a ditch and the image-projecting drone is gone.

One quirk in the system inspires hope that autopilots will ultimately be able to repel this type of attack: Images projected onto surfaces that are unsuitable for displaying pictures are very different from reality. Perspective distortion, uneven edges, unnatural colors, extreme contrast, and other oddities make phantom images very easy for the human eye to distinguish from real objects.

As such, autopilot vulnerability to phantom attacks is a consequence of the perception gap between AI and the human brain. To overcome the gap, the authors of the study propose fitting car autopilot systems with additional checks for consistency in features such as perspective, edge smoothness, color, contrast, and brightness, and ensuring results are consistent before making any decision. Like a human jury, neural networks will deliberate on the parameters that help distinguish real camera or lidar signals from a fleeting phantom.

Doing so would, of course, add to systems’ computational load and effectively lead to the parallel operation of several neural networks at once, all necessarily trained (a long and energy-intensive process). And cars, already small clusters of computers on wheels, will have to turn into small clusters of supercomputers on wheels.

As AI accelerators become widespread, cars may be able to carry several neural networks, working in parallel and not draining power, on board. But that’s a story for another day.

Source: Tesla and Mobileye autopilots duped by “phantoms”

COVID cases after vaccination are still very rare—variants aren’t changing that

Numbers are an undercount, but they offer more data that vaccines are highly effective.

COVID cases after vaccination are still very rare—variants aren’t changing that

Simulations suggest that the approach can achieve early wildfire detection with 99 percent accuracy

The speed at which a wildfire can rip through an area and wreak havoc is nothing short of awe-inspiring and terrifying. Early detection of these events is critical for fire management efforts, whether that involves calling in firefighters or evacuating nearby communities.

Currently, early fire detection in remote areas is typically done by satellite—but this approach can be hindered by cloud cover. What’s more, even the most advanced satellite systems detect fires once the burning area reaches an average seize of 18.4 km2 (7.1 square miles). 

To detect wildfires earlier on, some researchers are proposing a novel solution that harnesses a network of Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and a fleet of drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The researchers tested their approach through simulations, described in a study published May 5 in IEEE Internet of Things Journal, finding that it can detect fires that are just 2.5 km2 (just under one square mile) in size with near perfect accuracy.

Their idea is timely, as climate change is driving an increase in wildfires around many regions of the world, as seen recently in California and Australia.

“In the last few years, the number, frequency, and severity of wildfires have increased dramatically worldwide, significantly impacting countries’ economies, ecosystems, and communities. Wildfire management presents a significant challenge in which early fire detection is key,” emphasizes Osama Bushnaq, a senior researcher at the Autonomous Robotics Research Center of the Technology Innovation Institute in Abu Dhabi, who was involved in the study.

The approach that Bushnaq and his colleagues are proposing involves a network of IoT sensors scattered throughout regions of concern, such as a national park or forests situated near communities. If a fire ignites, IoT devices deployed in the area will detect it and wait until a patrolling UAV is within transmission range to report their measurements. If a UAV receives multiple positive detections by the IoT devices, it will notify the nearby firefighting department that a wildfire has been verified.

The researchers evaluated a number of different UAVs and IoT sensors based on cost and features to determine the optimal combinations. Next, they tested their UAV-IoT approach through simulations, whereby 18 UAVs patrolled 400 square kilometers of forest, and each square kilometer harbored 420 IoT sensors. The system could detect fires covering 2.5 km2 with greater than 99 percent accuracy. For smaller fires covering 0.5 km2 the approach yielded 69 percent accuracy.

These results suggest that, if an optimal number of UAVs and IoT devices are present, wildfires can be detected in much shorter time than with the satellite imaging. But Bushnaq acknowledges that this approach has its limitations. “UAV-IoT networks can only cover relatively smaller areas,” he explains. “Therefore, the UAV-IoT network would be particularly suitable for wildfire detection at high-risk regions.”

For these reasons, the researchers are proposing that UAV-IoT approach be used alongside satellite imaging, which can cover vast areas but with less wildfire detection speed and reliability.

Moving forward, the team plans to explore ways of further improving upon this approach, for example by optimizing the trajectory of the UAVs or addressing issues related to the battery life of UAVs.

Bushnaq envisions such UAV-IoT systems having much broader applications, too. “Although the system is designed for wildfire detection, it can be used for monitoring different forest parameters, such as wind speed, moisture content, or temperature estimation,” he says, noting that such a system could also be extended beyond the forest setting, for example by monitoring oil spills in bodies of water.

Source: Drones and Sensors Could Spot Fires Before They Go Wild

Using a technique called optogenetics, researchers added light-sensitive proteins to the man’s retina, giving him a blurry view of objects.

A team of scientists announced Monday that they had partially restored the sight of a blind man by building light-catching proteins in one of his eyes. Their report, which appeared in the journal Nature Medicine, is the first published study to describe the successful use of this treatment.

LINKÖPING, Sweden — As millions of people around the world line up for their coronavirus vaccination, could the next vaccine breakthrough make diabetes a thing of the past? Researchers in Sweden say a clinical study of a potential vaccine for type 1 diabetes has produced encouraging results.

A team from Linköping University finds injecting the protein GAD (or glutamic acid decarboxylase) into a patient’s lymph nodes effectively preserves their ability to produce insulin. In patients with type 1 diabetes, the body’s immune system starts attacking the cells which make insulin. Once all of these cells are destroyed, the body is no longer able to regulate its blood sugar levels.

Unfortunately, just like people with type 2 diabetes who have to monitor their blood sugar constantly, type 1 diabetes patients must take insulin for the rest of their lives. Researchers set out to see if they could slow or possibly completely stop this process.

Training the body to tolerate GAD

Professor Johnny Ludvigsson says one strategy scientists have focused on is altering the way the immune system reacts to encountering GAD. In type 1 diabetes patients, the immune system commonly forms antibodies to attack the protein GAD65. For years, Prof. Ludvigsson has been studying the possibility of making the human body more tolerant of GAD so the immune system stops damaging insulin cells.

“Studies have shown that even an extremely small production of insulin in the body is highly beneficial for patient health.

People with diabetes who produce a certain amount of insulin naturally do not develop low blood sugar levels, hypoglycemia, so easily. They have also a lower risk of developing the life-threatening condition ketoacidosis, which can arise when the insulin level is low,” says Ludvigsson, a senior professor in the Department of Biomedical and Clinical Sciences, in a university release.

In a phase 2 clinical study, called DIAGNODE-2, researchers gathered 109 participants between 12 and 24 years-old who had been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes within the past six months. One group received three monthly injections of a substance called GAD-alum in each patient’s lymph nodes. The other participants received a placebo to serve as a control group.

The team then measured the each person’s natural insulin production at the start of the experiment and 15 months later. They also monitored the group’s long-term blood sugar levels (HbA1c) and how much supplementary insulin patients needed each day.

Having a certain gene is key to the vaccine’s success

Researchers note that genetic factors appear to play a role in how well patients respond to potential diabetes vaccines. With that in mind, the DIAGNODE-2 team looked at several variants called HLA genes. These genes know to look for proteins on the surface of cells and function as “holders” of those proteins. HLA genes then expose certain proteins to immune cells which pass by.

If a protein comes from something harmful like bacteria, immune cells go to work and attack it. Unfortunately, this process also leads to the immune system mistakenly attacking helpful proteins, like insulin producers.

Study authors discovered the HLA gene variant HLA-DR3-DQ2 is responsible for exposing GAD65 proteins to the immune system and triggering type 1 diabetes. Ludvigsson notes that nearly half of the patients in the new study had the HLA-DR3-DQ2 gene variant.

Moreover, although the GAD-alum vaccine did not create a significant difference in insulin production between the treatment and placebo groups, the injections did produce positive results in patients with the HLA gene variant. The shots also do not appear to produce adverse side-effects.

“The patients in the subgroup with the DR3-DQ2 type of HLA genes did not lose insulin production as quickly as the other patients. In contrast, we did not see any significant effect in the patients who did not have this HLA type,” Ludvigsson reports.

“Treatment with GAD-alum seems to be a promising, simple and safe way to preserve insulin production in around half of patients with type 1 diabetes, the ones who have the right type of HLA. This is why we are looking forward to carrying out larger studies, and we hope these will lead to a drug that can change the progress of type 1 diabetes,” the study author concludes.

The study appears in the journal Diabetes Care.

Source

As COVID-19 cases surge in many countries, several could face oxygen shortages similar to India's.

The "key indicator" of a looming crisis is often not how much oxygen is needed at the moment, but how swiftly demand is rising, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports. The Bureau looked at Laos as an example. The southeast Asian nation's current oxygen need is modest at 2,124 cubic meters per day, but that's a "nearly 200-fold increase from mid-March."

All told, data collected by the Bureau shows that more than 30 countries, including Fiji, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Mongolia, Angola, and Kyrgyzstan, now need at least twice as much oxygen — one of the most crucial treatments for severe COVID-19 infections — as they did two months ago.

Activists told the Bureau the trend could lead to the "total collapse of health systems" in lower- to middle-income countries. Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar could be particularly vulnerable because they rely on Indian-made oxygen and equipment. "You'd imagine if they start to see peaks [in infections] of the same degree [as India], then it could be even worse, because India needs all the [oxygen] supply," said Zachary Katz, the vice president of essential medicines at the Clinton Health Access Initiative. 

Source

ST. LOUIS, Mo. — It’s never a good day to find out you have COVID-19, but a new study finds there is likely a silver lining to contracting the virus. Researchers say patients with mild cases of coronavirus still have antibodies protecting them from reinfection nearly a year later. In fact, a team at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis believes this protection from COVID will likely last for the rest of their lives.

Researchers explain that initial reports claiming COVID antibodies fade away quickly after an infection did not have all the facts. Their findings reveal that although the number of immune cells making antibodies drops once the patient is healthy, they never totally go away.

“Last fall, there were reports that antibodies wane quickly after infection with the virus that causes COVID-19, and mainstream media interpreted that to mean that immunity was not long-lived,” says senior author Ali Ellebedy, PhD, an associate professor of pathology and immunology, medicine, and molecular microbiology, in a university release.

“But that’s a misinterpretation of the data. It’s normal for antibody levels to go down after acute infection, but they don’t go down to zero; they plateau. Here, we found antibody-producing cells in people 11 months after first symptoms. These cells will live and produce antibodies for the rest of people’s lives. That’s strong evidence for long-lasting immunity.”

Ellebedy adds that COVID antibody production is naturally sky-high while people deal with the virus. After the infection clears, these specialized immune cells (long-lived plasma cells) move to the bone marrow. Once they settle in there, they start churning out low levels of COVID antibodies to help protect against reinfection.

Scientists find COVID-fighting immune cells keep working ‘indefinitely’

To find out how long coronavirus immunity really lasts, Ellebedy and the team started collecting both blood and bone marrow samples from people who recovered from mild cases of COVID-19. Researchers gathered 77 participants who volunteered to give blood every three months starting a month after their infection. Only six of these patients needed hospitalization during their illness.

Eighteen participants also provided bone marrow samples seven to eight months after their infections. Five returned four months later to provide a second bone marrow sample — nearly one year after contracting COVID-19. For comparison, the team also collected bone marrow from 11 people who never had coronavirus.

The results reveal COVID antibodies in the blood dropped off quickly within a few months of clearing the virus. However, these antibodies did not disappear entirely, they leveled off and scientists still detected them in patients 11 months later.

Moreover, 15 of the bone marrow samples from coronavirus patients contained antibody-producing cells which target COVID-19. The bone marrow from the five patients who came back to give a second sample still had these cells present four months later. On the other hand, all 11 people who did not get COVID-19 did not have any of these antibody-producing cells in their bone marrow.

For COVID patients, researchers say there’s no reason to think these cells will ever leave the human body.

“People with mild cases of COVID-19 clear the virus from their bodies two to three weeks after infection, so there would be no virus driving an active immune response seven or 11 months after infection,” Ellebedy explains. “These cells are not dividing. They are quiescent, just sitting in the bone marrow and secreting antibodies. They have been doing that ever since the infection resolved, and they will continue doing that indefinitely.”

Do people getting the vaccine or dealing with severe COVID infections have the same protection?

Although it appears mild cases result in life-long protection, study authors note people dealing with more severe symptoms could have less protection.

“It could go either way,” admits first author Jackson Turner, PhD, an instructor in pathology and immunology. “Inflammation plays a major role in severe COVID-19, and too much inflammation can lead to defective immune responses. But on the other hand, the reason why people get really sick is often because they have a lot of virus in their bodies, and having a lot of virus around can lead to a good immune response. So it’s not clear. We need to replicate the study in people with moderate to severe infections to understand whether they are likely to be protected from reinfection.”

The team is now examining if people receiving the COVID-19 vaccine will enjoy the same long-lasting immunity. Currently, the CDC says anyone receiving both doses of the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines will have full protection starting two weeks after their second shot. The same goes for people two weeks after receiving the one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

The study appears in the journal Nature.

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