Yes, in some ways. A new study shows Twitter users post even more misinformation after other users correct them.

So, you thought the problem of false information on social media could not be any worse? Allow us to respectfully offer evidence to the contrary.

Not only is misinformation increasing online, but attempting to correct it politely on Twitter can have negative consequences, leading to even less-accurate tweets and more toxicity from the people being corrected, according to a new study co-authored by a group of MIT scholars.

The study was centered around a Twitter field experiment in which a research team offered polite corrections, complete with links to solid evidence, in replies to flagrantly false tweets about politics.

“What we found was not encouraging,” says Mohsen Mosleh, a research affiliate at the MIT Sloan School of Management, lecturer at University of Exeter Business School, and a co-author of a new paper detailing the study’s results. “After a user was corrected … they retweeted news that was significantly lower in quality and higher in partisan slant, and their retweets contained more toxic language.”

The paper, “Perverse Downstream Consequences of Debunking: Being Corrected by Another User for Posting False Political News Increases Subsequent Sharing of Low Quality, Partisan, and Toxic Content in a Twitter Field Experiment,” has been published online in CHI ’21: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

The paper’s authors are Mosleh; Cameron Martel, a PhD candidate at MIT Sloan; Dean Eckles, the Mitsubishi Career Development Associate Professor at MIT Sloan; and David G. Rand, the Erwin H. Schell Professor at MIT Sloan.

From attention to embarrassment?

To conduct the experiment, the researchers first identified 2,000 Twitter users, with a mix of political persuasions, who had tweeted out any one of 11 frequently repeated false news articles. All of those articles had been debunked by the website Snopes.com. Examples of these pieces of misinformation include the incorrect assertion that Ukraine donated more money than any other nation to the Clinton Foundation, and the false claim that Donald Trump, as a landlord, once evicted a disabled combat veteran for owning a therapy dog.

The research team then created a series of Twitter bot accounts, all of which existed for at least three months and gained at least 1,000 followers, and appeared to be genuine human accounts. Upon finding any of the 11 false claims being tweeted out, the bots would then send a reply message along the lines of, “I’m uncertain about this article — it might not be true. I found a link on Snopes that says this headline is false.” That reply would also link to the correct information.

Among other findings, the researchers observed that the accuracy of news sources the Twitter users retweeted promptly declined by roughly 1 percent in the next 24 hours after being corrected. Similarly, evaluating over 7,000 retweets with links to political content made by the Twitter accounts in the same 24 hours, the scholars found an upturn by over 1 percent in the partisan lean of content, and an increase of about 3 percent in the “toxicity” of the retweets, based on an analysis of the language being used.

In all these areas — accuracy, partisan lean, and the language being used — there was a distinction between retweets and the primary tweets written by the Twitter users. Retweets, specifically, degraded in quality, while tweets original to the accounts being studied did not.

“Our observation that the effect only happens to retweets suggests that the effect is operating through the channel of attention,” says Rand, noting that on Twitter, people seem to spend a relatively long time crafting primary tweets, and little time making decisions about retweets.

He adds: “We might have expected that being corrected would shift one’s attention to accuracy. But instead, it seems that getting publicly corrected by another user shifted people’s attention away from accuracy — perhaps to other social factors such as embarrassment.” The effects were slightly larger when people were being corrected by an account identified with the same political party as them, suggesting that the negative response was not driven by partisan animosity.

Ready for prime time

As Rand observes, the current result seemingly does not follow some of the previous findings that he and other colleagues have made, such as a study published in Nature in March showing that neutral, nonconfrontational reminders about the concept of accuracy can increase the quality of the news people share on social media.

“The difference between these results and our prior work on subtle accuracy nudges highlights how complicated the relevant psychology is,” Rand says. 

As the current paper notes, there is a big difference between privately reading online reminders and having the accuracy of one’s own tweet publicly questioned. And as Rand notes, when it comes to issuing corrections, “it is possible for users to post about the importance of accuracy in general without debunking or attacking specific posts, and this should help to prime accuracy and increase the quality of news shared by others.”

At least, it is possible that highly argumentative corrections could produce even worse results. Rand suggests the style of corrections and the nature of the source material used in corrections could both be the subject of additional research.

“Future work should explore how to word corrections in order to maximize their impact, and how the source of the correction affects its impact,” he says.

The study was supported, in part, by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, the Omidyar Group, Google, and the National Science Foundation.

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BERLIN (AP) — German regulators have launched an investigation into Google’s position in the market, and how the search engine and advertising giant handles user data.

The Federal Cartel Office, or Bundeskartellamt, said Tuesday that it has started proceedings against Google entities in Germany, Ireland and California based on new provisions in German competition law that apply to large digital companies. Similar probes were launched into the activities of Facebook and Amazon in recent months.

Google denied that its practices breach German competition rules.

Under provisions which came into force in January, the Federal Cartel Office can ban companies that are of “paramount significance for competition across markets” from engaging in practices deemed to be anti-competitive.

“Due to the large number of digital services offered by Google, such as the Google search engine, YouTube, Google Maps, the Android operating system or the Chrome browser, the company could be considered to be of paramount significance for competition across markets,” the head of the regulatory body, Andreas Mundt, said in a statement.

A second probe will examine Google’s data processing terms, which are often lengthy and difficult for users to understand.

“A key question in this context is whether consumers wishing to use Google’s services have sufficient choice as to how Google will use their data,” Mundt said.

The regulators said it would examine whether Google requires users to agree to the processing of their data if they want to use its services, “without giving them sufficient choice as to whether, how and for what purpose such data is processed.”

The cartel office said it would also examine how the company’s data processing policy affects information it obtains on users from third-party websites and apps.

Google said it would cooperate with the probe, but insisted that it gives consumers easy means to control how their information is used and that it limits the use of their personal data.

“People use Google because our services are helpful to them, not because they are forced to do so or because they can’t find alternatives,” said Google spokesman Ralf Bremer.

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Throughout the pandemic, doctors have seen evidence that men with COVID-19 fare worse, on average, than women with the infection. One theory is that hormonal differences between men and women may make men more susceptible to severe disease. And since men have much more testosterone than women, some scientists have speculated that high levels of testosterone may be to blame.

But a new study from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis suggests that, among men, the opposite may be true: that low testosterone levels in the blood are linked to more severe disease. The study could not prove that low testosterone is a cause of severe COVID-19; low levels could simply serve as a marker of some other causal factors. Still, the researchers urge caution with ongoing clinical trials investigating hormonal therapies that block or lower testosterone or increase estrogen as a treatment for men with COVID-19.

The study appears online May 25 in JAMA Network Open.

"During the pandemic, there has been a prevailing notion that testosterone is bad," said senior author Abhinav Diwan, MD, a professor of medicine. "But we found the opposite in men. If a man had low testosterone when he first came to the hospital, his risk of having severe COVID-19—meaning his risk of requiring intensive care or dying—was much higher compared with men who had more circulating testosterone. And if testosterone levels dropped further during hospitalization, the risk increased."

The researchers measured several hormones in blood samples from 90 men and 62 women who came to Barnes-Jewish Hospital with symptoms of COVID-19 and who had confirmed cases of the illness. For the 143 patients who were admitted to the hospital, the researchers measured hormone levels again at days 3, 7, 14 and 28, as long as the patients remained hospitalized over these time frames. In addition to testosterone, the investigators measured levels of estradiol, a form of estrogen produced by the body, and IGF-1, an important growth hormone that is similar to insulin and plays a role in maintaining muscle mass.

Ball-and-stick model of the testosterone molecule, C19H28O2, as found in the crystal structure of testosterone monohydrate. Credit: Ben Mills/Wikipedia

Among women, the researchers found no correlation between levels of any hormone and disease severity. Among men, only testosterone levels were linked to COVID-19 severity. A blood testosterone level of 250 nanograms per deciliter or less is considered low testosterone in adult men. At hospital admission, men with severe COVID-19 had average testosterone levels of 53 nanograms per deciliter; men with less severe disease had average levels of 151 nanograms per deciliter. By day three, the average testosterone level of the most severely ill men was only 19 nanograms per deciliter.

The lower the levels of testosterone, the more severe the disease. For example, those with the lowest levels of testosterone in the blood were at highest risk of going on a ventilator, needing intensive care or dying. Thirty-seven patients—25 of whom were men—died over the course of the study.

The researchers noted that other factors known to increase the risk of severe COVID-19, including advanced age, obesity and diabetes, also are associated with lower testosterone. "The groups of men who were getting sicker were known to have lower testosterone across the board," said first author Sandeep Dhindsa, MD, an endocrinologist at Saint Louis University. "We also found that those men with COVID-19 who were not severely ill initially, but had low testosterone levels, were likely to need intensive care or intubation over the next two or three days. Lower testosterone levels seemed to predict which patients were likely to become very ill over the next few days."

In addition, the researchers found that lower testosterone levels in men also correlated with higher levels of inflammation and an increase in the activation of genes that allow the body to carry out the functions of circulating sex hormones inside the cells. In other words, the body may be adapting to less testosterone circulating in the bloodstream by dialing up its ability to detect and use the hormone. The researchers don't yet know the implications of this adaptation and are calling for more research.

"We are now investigating whether there is an association between sex hormones and cardiovascular outcomes in long COVID-19, when the symptoms linger over many months," said Diwan, who is a cardiologist. "We also are interested in whether men recovering from COVID-19, including those with long COVID-19, may benefit from testosterone therapy. This therapy has been used in men with low levels of sex hormones, so it may be worth investigating whether a similar approach can help male COVID-19 survivors with their rehabilitation."

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The research team of Gero, a Singapore-based biotech company in collaboration with Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo NY, has presented a study in Nature Communications on associations between aging and the loss of the ability to recover from stresses.

Recently, scientists have reported the first promising examples of biological age reversal by experimental interventions.

Indeed, many biological clock types properly predict more years of life for those who choose healthy lifestyles or quit unhealthy ones, such as smoking. Still unknown is how quickly biological age is changing over time for the same individual, and distinguishing between the transient fluctuations and the genuine bioage change trend.

The emergence of big biomedical data involving multiple measurements from the same subjects brings about a whole range of novel opportunities and practical tools to understand and quantify the aging process in humans. A team of experts in biology and biophysics presented results of a detailed analysis of dynamic properties of the fluctuations of physiological indices along individual aging trajectories.

Healthy human subjects turned out to be very resilient, whereas the loss of resilience turned out to be related to chronic diseases and elevated all-cause mortality risks. The rate of recovery to the equilibrium baseline level after stresses was found to deteriorate with age. Accordingly, the time needed to recover was getting longer and longer. Being around two weeks for 40-year-old healthy adults, the recovery time stretched to six weeks for 80-year-olds on average in the population. This finding was confirmed in two datasets based on two kinds of biological measurements—blood test parameters and physical activity levels recorded by wearable devices.

"Calculation of resilience based on physical activity data streams has been implemented in the GeroSense iPhone app and made available for the research community via web-based API," said the first author of the study, Tim Pyrkov, head of the mHealth project at Gero.

If the trend holds at later ages, the extrapolation shows a complete loss of human body resilience, that is the ability to recover, at some age around 120 to 150 years. The reduced resilience was observed even in individuals not suffering from major chronic disease and led to the increase in the range of the fluctuations of physiological indices. As we age, more time is required to recover after a perturbation, and on average, we spend less and less time close to the optimal physiological state.

The predicted loss of resilience even in the healthiest, most successfully aging individuals, might explain why we do not see an evidential increase of the maximum lifespan, while the average lifespan was steadily growing over recent decades. The divergent fluctuations of physiological indices may mean that no intervention that does not affect the decline in resilience may effectively increase the maximum lifespan and hence may only lead to an incremental increase in human longevity.

Aging in humans is a complex and multi-stage process. It would, therefore, be difficult to compress the aging process into a single number, such as biological age. Gero's work shows that longitudinal studies open a whole new window on the aging process and produce independent biomarkers of human aging, suitable for applications in geroscience and future clinical trials of anti-aging interventions.

"Aging in humans exhibits universal features common to complex systems operating on the brink of disintegration. This work is a demonstration of how concepts borrowed from physical sciences can be used in biology to probe different aspects of senescence and frailty to produce strong interventions against aging," says Peter Fedichev, co-founder and CEO of Gero.

Accordingly, no strong life extension is possible by preventing or curing diseases without interception of the aging process, the root cause of the underlying loss of resilience. We do not foresee any laws of nature prohibiting such an intervention.

Therefore, the aging model presented in this work may guide the development of life-extending therapies with the strongest possible effects on healthspan.

"This work by the Gero team shows that longitudinal studies provide novel possibilities for understanding the aging process and systematic identification of biomarkers of human aging in large biomedical data. The research will help to understand the limits of longevity and future anti-aging interventions. What's even more important, the study may help to bridge the rising gap between the health- and life-span, which continues to widen in most developing countries," says Brian Kennedy, distinguished professor of biochemistry and physiology at National University Singapore.

"This work, in my opinion, is a conceptual breakthrough, because it determines and separates the roles of fundamental factors in human longevity—aging, defined as progressive loss of resilience, and age-related diseases, as 'executors of death' following the loss of resilience. It explains why even most effective prevention and treatment of age-related diseases could only improve the average but not the maximal lifespan unless true antiaging therapies have been developed," says prof. Andrei Gudkov, Ph.D., sr. vice president and chair of the Department of Cell Stress Biology at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, a co-author of this work and a co-founder of Genome Protection, Inc., a biotech company that is focused on the development of antiaging therapies.

"The investigation shows that recovery rate is an important signature of aging that can guide the development of drugs to slow the process and extend healthspan," commented David Sinclair, Harvard Medical School professor of genetics.

"The research from Gero surprisingly comes to a similar quantification of human resilience—a proposed biomarker of aging—based on two very different kinds of data: blood test parameters and physical activity levels recorded by wearable devices. I'm very excited to see how Person-generated Health Data, including data from commercial wearables, can help create individual, longitudinal profiles of health that will be instrumental to shed light on lifetime-scale health phenomena, such as aging," said Luca Foschini, co-founder and chief data scientist at Evidation Health.

Two aging markers

The authors characterized the dynamics of physiological parameters on time scales of human lifespan by a minimum set of two parameters. The first is an instant value, often referred to as the biological age, and is exemplified in this work by the Dynamic Organism State Index (DOSI). The quantity is associated with stresses, lifestyles and chronic diseases and can be computed from a standard blood test.

The other parameter—the resilience—is new and reflects the dynamic properties of the organism state fluctuations: it informs how quickly the DOSI value gets back to the norm in response to stresses.

When does aging start?

Age-related changes in physiological parameters start from birth. However, various parameters change in different ways at different stages of life, see, e.g., a previous work by the same authors published in Aging US in 2018).

The data from the Nature Communications work shows that there is a good differentiation between the growth phase (mostly complete by the age of 30 and following the universal growth theory by Geoffrey West and aging. At 40+ years, aging manifests itself as a slow (linear, sub-exponential) deviation of physiological indices from their reference values.

How often should one measure biological age?

Physiological parameters are naturally subject to fluctuations around some equilibrium level. Glucose levels rise and drop after having a meal, the number of sleeping hours is slightly different each day. Yet, one can collect a longitudinal dataset, that is a series of such measurements for the same person, and observe that the average levels are different between individuals. Resilience also requires repeated measurements, since one needs to know exactly when recovery was achieved to calculate the resilience.

Importantly, resilience also provides a convenient guide on how often repeated measurements should be taken. As a rule of thumb, the period of observation required for the robust bioage determination should comprise multiple stress and recovery events. For the most healthy individuals such an observation period would amount to several months and should increase with age. During that time, a robust bioage determination would require several data points per recovery time, that is ideally one measurement in a few days.

Wearable technology comes into play

In 2021, the only practical way to achieve a high (once-per-day or better) sampling rate is to use mobile/wearable sensor data.

In another paper, the authors have focused on wearable/mobile sensor data. They have built a wearable DOSI, which they called GeroSense, and reported its validation tests in Pyrkov et al. Aging (Albany NY) 13.6 (2021): 7900. GeroSense can be used to compute resilience. Population study shows that the number of individuals showing signs of the loss of resilience increases exponentially with age and doubles every eight years at a rate matching that of the Gompertz mortality law (the observation by B. Gompertz from 1827, who observed for the first time that the all-cause mortality rate doubles every eight years).

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Police say it’s likely the 39-year-old got stuck trying to retrieve his mobile phone after dropping it

Police in Catalonia are investigating the death of a man who is thought to have become trapped inside a large dinosaur statue while trying to retrieve his mobile phone.

Officers were called to the statue in Santa Coloma de Gramenet, a satellite town of Barcelona, after a man and his son noticed something inside the papier-mache stegosaurus on Saturday afternoon.

A spokeswoman for the regional police force, the Mossos d’Esquadra, said the death of the 39-year-old man was not being treated as suspicious.

“A father and son noticed that there was something inside and raised the alarm,” she said.

“We found the body of a man inside the leg of this dinosaur statue. It’s an accidental death; there was no violence. This person got inside the statue’s leg and got trapped. It looks as though he was trying to retrieve a mobile phone, which he’d dropped. It looks like he entered the statue head first and couldn’t get out.

The spokeswoman said officers had called in firefighters to help cut into the statue so the body of the man could be removed.

“We’re still waiting for the autopsy results, so we don’t know how long he was in there, but it seems he was there for a couple of days,” she added.

According to local media, the dead man had been reported missing by his family a few hours before his body was discovered.

Source: Missing man found dead inside Spanish dinosaur statue

For millennia, silver has been utilized for its antimicrobial and antibacterial properties. Although its use as a disinfectant is widely known, the effects of silver's interaction with bacteria on the silver itself are not well understood.

As antibiotic-resistant bacteria become more and more prevalent, silver has seen steep growth in its use in things like antibacterial coatings. Still, the complex chain of events that lead to the eradication of bacteria is largely taken for granted, and a better understanding of this process can provide clues on how to best apply it.

In Chemical Physics Reviews, researchers from Italy, the United States, and Singapore studied the impacts an interaction with bacteria has on silver's structure.

When monitoring the interaction of silver nanoparticles with a nearby E. coli culture, the researchers found the silver undergoes several dramatic changes. Most notably, the E. coli cells caused substantial transformations in the size and shape of the silver particles.

It is often assumed the silver stays unmodified in this process, but the work done by the team shows this not to be true.

The electrostatic interaction between the silver and the bacteria causes some of the silver particles to dissolve as it releases ions to penetrate the bacterial cells. This dissolution modifies the shape of the silver particles, shrinking and rounding them out from triangular shapes into circles.

These effects are even more pronounced if the E. coli cells are pretreated with a molecule to increase the permeability of their membranes before they meet the silver.

"It seems from this study that silver is 'consumed' from the interaction," said Guglielmo Lanzani, one of the authors on the paper and director of the Center for Nano Science and Technology of IIT-Instituto di Tecnologia.

Fortunately, this "consumption" likely does not impact silver's antimicrobial properties, because the effect is so small.

"We think this does not affect the efficiency of the biocidal process and, due to the tiny exchange of mass, the lifetime is essentially unlimited," said Giuseppe Paternò, a researcher at IIT and co-author of the study. "The structural modifications, however, affect the optical properties of the metal nanostructures."

Direct investigations of processes like these are difficult, because laboratories are controlled environments that cannot fully capture the complexities of a biological setting of bacterial cells.

Nevertheless, the group is planning further experiments to explore the chemical pathways that lead to the structural changes in silver. They hope to uncover why silver works better than other materials as an antibacterial surface, and why bacterial membranes are particularly vulnerable to silver, while other cells remain less affected.

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German lawmakers greenlit a bill that would allow for some autonomous vehicles to hit public roads as early as next year. But those looking for a driverless joyride on the Autobahn will still have to wait.

Driverless busses and other autonomous vehicles could soon hit the streets of Germany after lawmakers in the lower house of parliament approved new rules for self-driving cars.

The measure now passes to the upper chamber or parliament, the Bundesrat, for approval before it can take effect.

Once approved, it would be the world's first legal framework for integrating autonomous vehicles in regular traffic, according to the German government.

What will be allowed?

The bill, passed by Bundestag lawmakers in a late-night session on Thursday, changes traffic regulations to allow for autonomous vehicles to be put into regular use across Germany.

The bill specifically concerns vehicles with fully autonomous systems that fall under the "Level 4" classification — where a computer is in complete control of the car and no human driver is needed to control or monitor it.

According to the Transportation Ministry, the bill was written to be as flexible as possible, with the new regulations not requiring a human driver to be on standby.

"Individual permits, exceptions and requirements — such as the presence of a safety assurance driver who is always ready to intervene — would not be necessary," the ministry said in a statement.

Until now, self-driving vehicles required special permits —largely confined to "People Movers" on commercial and industrial areas.

What vehicles could be on the roads?

Starting in 2022, the German government says the bill would allow for driverless shuttle busses to be put into use, as well as autonomous public transportation busses that would drive on set routes.

Autonomous vehicles would also be permitted to transport goods, and "dual-mode vehicles" could be used for automated valet parking.

Self-driving cars for the general public would also be permitted in regular traffic, although experts estimate it will take years before the vehicles become established in the market, public broadcaster Deutschlandfunk reported.

While the end goal for researchers to reduce the rate of fatal traffic accidents with self-driving cars,major hurdles still remain in honing the safety of autonomous vehicles.

What has the reaction been?

Transportation Minister Andreas Scheuer praised the bill's passing in the Bundestag, urging for it to be put into action as soon as possible.

"Germany will be the first country worldwide to take autonomous vehicles from the research laboratories to the streets," he said in a statement. "We are now a major step closer to that goal."

Germany's powerful auto industry also welcomed the move, eyeing it as a major opportunity to become a "global market leader" in the field.

"Consumers, the industry and Germany as a central hub will benefit enormously from this," said Hildegard Müller, the president of the German Association of the Automotive Industry (VDA).

Opposition lawmakers with the Greens also voiced their support for the bill, saying it could help in the battle against climate change — but that a larger strategy for how to apply the technology is still missing.

"Autonomous driving could be a second chance for car traffic when it comes to protecting the climate," Özdemir wrote in an article for Die Zeit newspaper.

"What's been completely missing until how is a political vision of how we can use this technology for road safety, for improving quality of life and for climate protection," he added.

Source: Germany aims to get self-driving cars on the roads in 2022

Efficacy of Chinese vaccines is “not high”—officials back 3rd dose

Protection wanes by 6 months; Experts call for high-risk people to get 3rd dose.

Efficacy of Chinese vaccines is “not high”—officials back 3rd dose

New research from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King's College London has found that people on a social media suicide support forum are most likely to post to the site during the early hours of Monday morning.

The study, which has been published in BMC Psychiatry, suggests that there is a clear variation in behavior throughout the week and throughout the day. The researchers hope that this means that targeted support to at risk populations can be made more readily available to those most in need.

The researchers looked at the timings at which users of the Reddit forum 'SuicideWatch' posted online. The forum is a moderated online community for individuals who are either at risk of, or know someone who is at risk of suicide.

The data, which was taken between 1st December 2008 and 31st August 2015, amounted to 90,518 posts. Over the course of a given week, posts to the forum were at their highest on Mondays between 02:00 and 05:00 in the morning. Posts trended downwards from Tuesday to Saturday. This was in stark contrast to data taken from the control group 'AskReddit,' a separate forum on the same site in which users can ask general questions of each other, which saw most content posted in the later hours of the day.

Dr. Rina Dutta, the study's Primary Investigator from King's IoPPN said "Monday has often been identified as the day of the week which has the highest risk of someone taking their own life. From the data that we've studied, we can see a clear trend over weekly cycles that closely follows the suicide timing patterns reported in some earlier studies."

The timings of the posts suggest that active users are experiencing disturbances to their sleep, and may represent a potentially modifiable risk factor for suicidal thoughts and behaviors.

Dr. Dutta said, "Extensive use of social media has been associated with disturbed sleep, anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem. Reducing the use of social media during the night hours might be an effective means of providing targeted psychological interventions in some individuals."

The researchers believe that using this data can be used to target at risk populations with greater levels of support.

"Given that we have a clear indication as to when at risk people are posting to this forum, it is challenging but certainly not implausible to envisage providing higher levels of moderation on Reddit during times of increased posting about suicidality.

If developed in the right way, we might have the capacity to target otherwise unreachable populations to deliver suicide prevention messaging and interventions where and when they are needed most."

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration is facing new pressure to resolve a mystery that has vexed its predecessors: Is an adversary using a microwave or radio wave weapon to attack the brains of U.S. diplomats, spies and military personnel?

The number of reported cases of possible attack is sharply growing and lawmakers from both parties, as well as those believed to be affected, are demanding answers. But scientists and government officials aren’t yet certain about who might have been behind any attacks, if the symptoms could have been caused inadvertently by surveillance equipment — or if the incidents were actually attacks.

Whatever an official review concludes could have enormous consequences. Confirmation that a U.S. adversary has been conducting damaging attacks against U.S. personnel would unleash calls for a forceful response by the United States.

For now, the administration is providing assurances that it takes the matter seriously, is investigating aggressively and will make sure those affected have good medical care.

The problem has been labeled the “Havana Syndrome,” because the first cases affected personnel in 2016 at the U.S. Embassy in Cuba. At least 130 cases across the government are now under investigation, up from several dozen last year, according to a U.S. defense official who was not authorized to discuss details publicly. The National Security Council is leading the investigation.

People who are believed to have been affected have reported headaches, dizziness and symptoms consistent with concussions, with some requiring months of medical treatment. Some have reported hearing a loud noise before the sudden onset of symptoms.

Particularly alarming are revelations of at least two possible incidents in the Washington area, including one case near the White House in November in which an official reported dizziness.

The new higher number of possible cases was first reported by The New York Times. CNN first reported the case near the White House and an additional incident in November.

Advocates for those affected accuse the U.S. government of long failing to take the problem seriously or provide the necessary medical care and benefits.

“The government has a much better understanding of it than it has let on,” said Mark Zaid, a Washington lawyer who represents several people affected. Zaid has obtained National Security Agency documents noting it has information dating to the late 1990s about an unidentified “hostile country” possibly having a microwave weapon “to weaken, intimidate, or kill an enemy over time.”

Chris Miller, the acting defense secretary during the last months of the Trump administration, created a Pentagon team to investigate the suspected attacks. That was after he met a soldier late last year who described how, while serving in a country Miller wouldn’t identify, he had heard a “shrieking” sound and then had a splitting headache.

“He was well-trained, extremely well-trained, and he’d been in combat before,” Miller told The Associated Press. “This is an American, a member of the Department of Defense. At that point, you can’t ignore that.”

Defense and intelligence officials have publicly promised to push for answers and better care for people with symptoms. Lt. Col. Thomas Campbell, a Defense Department spokesman, said the causes of any incidents “are areas of active inquiry.” Officials have not identified a suspected country, though some people affected suspect Russian involvement.

CIA Director William Burns testified before Congress that he would make the investigation “a very high priority to ensure that my colleagues get the care that they deserve and that we get to the bottom of what caused these incidents and who was responsible.”

Burns receives daily updates on the investigation, which covers employees who have reported cases this year. He has met with those reporting injuries as have other top CIA officials. The agency has worked to reduce the wait time for its employees to receive outpatient treatment at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

The CIA also replaced its chief medical officer with a doctor seen internally as more sympathetic to possible cases.

“We were treated so awfully in the past,” said Marc Polymeropoulos, a 26-year CIA veteran who was diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury following a 2017 visit to Russia. “Now they’re putting people in place who not only believe us but are going to advocate for our health care.”

One key analysis identified “directed, pulsed radio frequency energy” as the most plausible culprit. Published in December by the National Academy of Sciences, the report said a radio frequency attack could alter brain function without causing “gross structural damage.” But the panel could not make a definitive finding on how U.S. personnel may have been hit.

And a declassified 2018 State Department report cited “a lack of senior leadership, ineffective communications, and systemic disorganization” in responding to the Havana cases. The report says the cause of the injuries was “currently unknown.” The document was published by George Washington University’s National Security Archive.

The report also noted that the CIA ultimately closed its Havana station, a victory for a potential adversary.

Dr. James Giordano, a neurology professor at Georgetown University, consulted with the State Department on the Havana cases and has been briefed on more recent incidents in the U.S. and abroad. In reviewing records of people affected in Havana, Giordano noted evidence of neurological injuries in several people, suggesting they may have been hit with radio waves.

He identified two possible culprits: a device intentionally used to target potential victims or a tool that used directed energy waves to conduct surveillance that may have unintentionally harmed the people targeted. One of the November attacks outside the White House had “substantial similarities” to the Havana cases, Giordano said, adding that he was not authorized by the government to be more specific.

“It’s very difficult, if not impossible, to fake or misrepresent certain findings to objective clinical evaluations,” Giordano said. “I mean, there are certain things you can’t make your nerves do or not do.”

Other scientists remain skeptical. Dr. Robert Baloh of the University of California, Los Angeles, argued that scans of healthy people’s brains sometimes display mini-strokes and that any possible weapon would be too large or require too much power to be deployed without detection.

Baloh said the growing number of cases considered directed energy attacks is actually linked to “mass psychogenic illness,” in which people learning of others with symptoms begin to feel sick themselves.

“Many people are hearing about it and that’s how it gets propagated,” Baloh said.

Lawmakers from both parties are pushing the Biden administration to take this seriously. A bill introduced in both the House and Senate on Wednesday would bolster the payment of disability benefits for traumatic brain injuries suffered in the incidents.

“There’s no greater priority than ensuring the health and safety of our people, and the anomalous health incidents that have afflicted our personnel around the world are of grave concern,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, in a statement. Rep. Devin Nunes, the committee’s top Republican, said the people reporting symptoms “were apparently subject to attack.”

Polymeropoulos, the former CIA officer, said he believed the U.S. would ultimately identify what was behind the incidents and who is responsible.

“The actual intelligence is going to take us to the truth on this,” he said. “If we find that a certain adversary did this, there’s going to be uncomfortable decisions on what to do.”

Source: Growing mystery of suspected energy attacks draws US concern

From trash to jet fuel in 60 minutes—and 220º C

Researchers found a way to make fuel from plastic—critics wonder if it's practical.

From trash to jet fuel in 60 minutes—and 220º C

China will likely ban all bitcoin mining soon

Country’s top financial regulator homes in on the source.

Bitcoin took investors on another rollercoaster ride over the weekend after a top regulator in China announced a crackdown on mining, a new tack in the country’s ongoing fight against the cryptocurrency.

 

The government will “crack down on bitcoin mining and trading behavior and resolutely prevent the transfer of individual risks to the society,” said the statement, which was issued by the Financial Stability and Development Committee of the State Council, the country’s cabinet equivalent. The committee is chaired by Vice Premier Liu He, who acts as President Xi Jinping’s top representative on economic and financial matters.

 

“The wording of the statement did not leave much leeway for cryptocurrency mining,” Li Yi, chief research fellow at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, told the South China Morning Post. “When all mining activities are banned in China, it will be a turning point for the fate of bitcoin, as a large chunk of its processing power is taken out of the picture.”

 

The Chinese government isn’t just worried about financial stability, either. A commentary piece in Xinhua News, the Communist Party’s official media outlet, elaborated on the government’s stance, voicing concerns about bitcoin’s role in money laundering, drug trafficking, and smuggling. It also mentioned bitcoin’s profligate energy use. Last week, China warned financial institutions not to participate in crypto-transactions or related services.

 

China isn’t the only country concerned about the role of bitcoin and other cryptocurrency in illegal activities. Late last week, the US Treasury Department announced that businesses must report cryptocurrency transactions greater than $10,000 to the Internal Revenue Service. “Cryptocurrency already poses a significant detection problem by facilitating illegal activity broadly including tax evasion,” the Treasury Department said. And earlier this month, news leaked that three US agencies, including the IRS, the Department of Justice, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, were investigating crypto-exchange Binance for potential criminal violations. A significant portion of illicit bitcoin makes its way through the Binance exchange, according to a 2020 report by Chainalysis.

 

China’s hardening stance toward bitcoin comes as the highest-valued cryptocurrency is under increasing scrutiny for its outsize carbon footprint. Fewer than two weeks ago, Elon Musk announced that Tesla would no longer be accepting bitcoin to buy one of its electric vehicles. When Tesla’s bitcoin purchase policy was announced, the bitcoin cost of a Model 3 produced about 400 metric tons of carbon dioxide, compared with just 8.85 metric tons to make and drive the car over its lifetime. When Musk canceled the policy—a decision apparently influenced by Ars’ coverage—the Model 3’s bitcoin carbon footprint had swelled to more than 500 metric tons. “We are concerned about rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions,” he wrote in a tweet.

 

The bitcoin network demands a staggering amount of energy. Today, it uses as much power as the Netherlands to maintain its normal operations. That load must be particularly obvious to the Chinese government, since a recent Nature Communications paper estimated that 75 percent of all bitcoin mining happens in China.

 

The combination of bitcoin’s high price and its tremendous energy demand has pushed miners to take extreme positions. Miners in China have flocked to provinces such as Inner Mongolia, where cheap coal power makes mining more profitable. The scale of these facilities reflects how much money investors have sunk into the projects. At least one mining facility in Inner Mongolia draws more than 50 MW. Similarly large operations are popping up in the US, too. In upstate New York, a private equity firm bought and revamped an abandoned power plant just to mine bitcoin. When its data centers are completed, mining will consume 79 percent of the power plant’s capacity, or 85 MW.

 

China’s warning to bitcoin miners is certain to push many operations out of the country. At least one bitcoin observer said that he anticipates miners pushed out of China will set up operations in Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and Afghanistan.

China will likely ban all bitcoin mining soon

Eternally five years away? No, batteries are improving under your nose

Under the hood, lithium-ion batteries have gotten better in the last decade.

It’s hard to write about battery research around these parts without hearing certain comments echo before they’re even posted: It’ll never see the market. Cold fusion is eternally 20 years away, and new battery technology is eternally five years away.

 

That skepticism is understandable when a new battery design promises a revolution, but it risks missing the fact that batteries have gotten better. Lithium-ion batteries have reigned for a while now—that’s true. But “lithium-ion” is a category of batteries that includes a wide variety of technologies, both in terms of batteries in service today and the ones we've used previously. A lot can be done—and a lot has been done—to make a better lithium-ion battery. In fact, gains in the amount of energy they can store have been on the order of five percent per year. That means that the capacity of your current batteries is over 1.5 times what they would have held a decade ago.

 

Lithium-ion batteries have evolved, whether you noticed or not. Here's how.

Why does the Li-ion roar?

It’s helpful to start by defining what makes a battery “lithium-ion.” The stars of the show are obviously lithium atoms, which give up an electron easily to form ions. Every battery has a cathode and anode, with a separator and electrolyte sitting between the two. On the cathode side, lithium is found in a metal oxide compound, where it will stay as long as each atom is holding that electron. Once separated from the electron, lithium ions will move across the separator to collect at the anode. The freed electrons can’t cross the separator, so instead they move through whatever circuit is connected to the battery’s two electrodes.

 

During charging, lithium ions and electrons accumulate in the anode. During discharge, electrons flow through the circuit and lithium ions move through the separator again, reuniting as lithium settles back into the structure of the cathode material.

An actual battery is formed from three layers of materials: cathode material deposited on a metal foil, the separator layer, and anode material deposited on another metal foil. Stack these flat, and you have a pouch- or prismatic-style battery like you might find in your phone or a Chevy Bolt. Roll the layers up in a coil, and you have a cylindrical battery like those in power tools or a Tesla.

 

You can’t get rid of the lithium and still call this a lithium-ion battery, but everything else is fair game. There are many different materials used for the cathode, and you can change the separator or try another chemistry for the electrolyte. There are even options for the anode material, though one has dominated for a long time.

 

Early attempts at lithium-ion batteries tried using solid lithium metal for the anode, but this produced serious stability problems. (Problems that are still being worked on today.) The breakthrough was the use of graphite for the anode. Graphite consumes valuable space while not contributing additional energy capacity, but its sheet-like structure gives lithium ions safe housing while greatly improving cycle life and safety. This enabled the first Sony lithium-ion batteries in 1991.

 

Even the first lithium-ion batteries had greater energy density than nickel-metal hydride batteries, holding more charge in less space while weighing less. They also operate with a higher cell voltage, which can be useful. Of course, it’s not all sunshine and unicorns. Lithium-ion batteries are more expensive, and the organic solvent used for the electrolyte is flammable, creating a fire risk that must be carefully managed.

 

Nickel-metal hydride batteries continue to be used in rechargeable AA and AAA batteries, as well as hybrid vehicles that don’t need as much energy storage. But the lithium-ion battery dominates where space and weight is at a premium, in places like a laptop or electric vehicle.

A very particular set of skills

Batteries have more than one or two important characteristics, and so they are often represented by a spider chart (like the one below). “There’s energy density, there is power density, there is cost, there is cycle life, there is calendar life, there is safety,” Argonne National Laboratory’s Venkat Srinivasan told Ars. “What typically happens is that, in batteries, it’s a compromise of these different things.” Even just sticking to lithium-ion batteries, there are configurations and designs that can emphasize certain of these characteristics at the expense of something else. Energy density could be boosted a bit, for example, but maybe it comes at a higher cost or with a reduced cycle life.

This may be one of the causes of the frustration or skepticism directed toward news about battery research. A study may identify a way to significantly improve one characteristic, generating an exciting top-line conclusion. But the design may be impractically poor in some other way. While battery researchers learn from what does and doesn’t work, this means that a lot of laboratory batteries you may read about will never hit the market.

 

However, this also means there are a lot of knobs that can be used to customize a specific battery design. Even seemingly subtle things, like the exact thickness of the anode or cathode layer that gets deposited on its metal foil, can affect behavior. The thicker the cathode relative to its foil backing, for example, the greater the energy density of your battery, since less of the total volume is taken up by the foil. But a thicker material layer also means a longer journey for lithium ions and electrons. That generates more heat during battery operation and leads to shorter cycle life. Keep the cathode thinner, on the other hand, and it can handle higher charge and discharge rates, since the shorter journey is easier.

 

In small devices, where space is at a premium, more expensive designs that maximize energy density are preferred. Electric vehicles are different, since the cost of the battery is a large portion of the overall price—adding a 20 percent premium to the battery could easily push a car beyond your budget. Cycle life has to be much greater, too. Reduced battery life in a phone after two years is generally viewed as par for the course these days. Significantly reduced battery life in a car after two years would be a deal-breaker.

 

Since electric vehicles are currently on the edge of affordability and (at least for some) acceptable range and charge time, small battery improvements are much more visible here.

Engineering, status report!

Lots of those improvements relate to the engineering of the whole battery system, rather than changes to the chemistry of the battery itself. This stuff is much less likely to make news (do not wait for my upcoming story titled “Car manufacturer reduces copper in new model by 1.8 percent!”), but a lot of little things add up.

 

Some of this has to do with reducing the materials that aren’t the anode or cathode or electrolyte. “We’ve also been cutting back on the thickness of the separator material we are using,” Srinivasan said. “It used to be... 25 microns thick and today it’s... 12, 13 microns thick […] The copper and aluminum foils we use to pull current out of the battery—again, it’s not an active component, they don’t store energy, but you need them to get the current out. We’ve been making them thinner and thinner so that we can minimize extra weight and volume in the battery.”

 

The form factor of the cell package can be optimized for cost and performance, as illustrated by Tesla’s iterations on the size and construction of the cylindrical cells they use.

 

Particularly for vehicles, the total battery pack is far more than just one cell. Like the battery chemistry, it’s very much a balancing act—part tetris, part safety, part performance. Some electronic devices eschew a standard rectangular pouch battery for complex shapes that take advantage of any available space, for example. Vehicles can present a similar space-filling puzzle, although early designs that packed in batteries here or there largely gave way to flat “skateboard”-style packs that can be used as structural components. Even there, the simpler the pack, with minimized packaging and wiring, the more storage you get per cubic foot (and per dollar).

One key to safety, performance, and longevity is temperature management. Most electric vehicles actively warm the pack for charging when it’s too cold, and they cool the battery pack as it generates heat. That helps prevent the fire risk and reduces capacity degradation. Along with configuring higher voltages, it also allows for high charge rates.

 

“The more energy you put in a tight space, the more you have to pay attention to your thermal management,” Argonne National Lab chemical engineer Andrew Jansen explained. “One of the nice things about lithium-ion systems is they’re very energy-efficient. Your energy efficiency is often around 94 to 95 percent, but that still means you have 5 percent of wasted energy when you charge off the battery.” That wasted energy ends up as heat, which can damage battery components if not managed properly.

 

Some things—like faster charging—might be easy to notice in use or highlighted in a product’s marketing. Since companies tend not to give out detailed technical specs (especially if they're not the ones making the battery), critical functions like thermal management or cell-level charge-balancing tend to fly under the radar. But improvements at the battery pack level have necessarily occurred alongside improvements inside the cells.

Real chemistry between these two

The anode side of the cell has afforded less freedom for tailoring batteries to different needs. Graphite has been the only safe solution—so far. Using silicon for an anode has been almost as tempting as the old lithium-metal design because it holds a lot of lithium; a silicon anode would be 10 times more energy dense than graphite. But loading up a silicon anode with lithium atoms as you charge the battery causes it to expand by around 300 percent, causing obvious problems.

 

Nonetheless, silicon is increasingly appearing in batteries. Incorporating just a few percent silicon in your graphite anode bumps up the energy density slightly without the destructive side effects. “You take a graphite that gives you about 340 milliamp-hours per gram,” Jansen said, “and with a little bit of silicon in there, that graphite-silicon combination will give you, say, 400 or 450 milliamp-hours per gram.”

 

“If you add too much silicon, the battery will collapse,” Srinivasan told Ars. “So what companies are doing is they’re tweaking and adding a little bit more silicon every year, learning how this behaves, trying to make it better, and ultimately getting it to a stage where you can get the increased energy density without sacrificing cycle life or calendar life of the battery.”

 

The cathode side is where lithium-ion batteries really taste the rainbow. A number of different chemistries are in common use today, and this is what produces most of the variations in battery characteristics. There’s lithium in the form of cobalt oxide (LCO), manganese oxide (LMO), iron phosphate (LFP), nickel manganese cobalt oxide (NMC), and nickel cobalt aluminum oxide (NCA). If you shop for cylindrical lithium-ion cells (such as the common 18650 cell that looks like a bigger AA battery), you’ll find these acronyms can explain why their charge capacities vary.

 

LCO batteries have very high energy density but a limited cycle life, and they're commonly found inside laptops and phones. LMO batteries can better handle high rates of charge and discharge; these are already likely in your power tools. The other three are the stars of electric vehicles, which prioritize cycle life and cost. Tesla has mostly opted for an NCA chemistry, while NMC is the most common in other brands (though LMO appeared in early models). LFP batteries have a lower energy density but better stability and longevity, in addition to high discharge rates, making them a good option for stationary grid storage batteries or shorter-range vehicles.

Each of these chemistries has evolved over time. “The cobalt oxide itself has gotten better and better and better, especially in the last ten years,” Srinivasan said. “We’ve been doing things like coating the surface of the cobalt oxide, changing what the electrode and electrolyte sees, minimizing the reactions that we don’t want, and ensuring that the reactions that we do want are the ones that occur. Ten years ago, I used to think that we are capped out on cobalt-oxide-based cells. Well, guess what, in the last ten years we’ve always found a way to make it better and better and better and get a little bit more every year.”

 

For nickel manganese cobalt oxide (NMC) cathodes, the recipes have changed in a pretty straight-forward way. An equal-parts chemistry labeled NMC111 or NMC333 has long dominated—cobalt helps with stability, but it's the highest-cost ingredient (in addition to human rights problems). Lower-cobalt formulations like NMC622 and NMC811 are on the upswing because they are both cheaper and have significantly higher energy density.

 

“But you need to solve some of the basic problems of high-nickel materials,” said Jansen, “and that’s when they start putting coatings on the cathode particles that try to keep the structure together so it doesn’t decompose with repeated cycling.”

The truth is out there

So where’s the proof that all this has been going on behind the scenes? If you look, the data bears out a number of trends. Energy density has a prominent trend. The original commercial lithium-ion battery, produced by Sony in the early 1990s, had an energy density of under 100 watt-hours per kilogram. That number has climbed over time, with the familiar cylindrical 18650 cells on the market hitting 200 watt-hours per kilogram by 2010. According to BloombergNEF, batteries used in electric vehicles have gotten as high as 300 watt-hours per kilogram in the last couple of years.

 

That has been easy to see if you’ve followed EVs at all, as the early options had nowhere near the range of what we see today. The first Tesla Model S offered about 210 miles of range, while it can now be purchased with up to 390 miles. The first Nissan Leaf could go about 75 miles, while a 2020 model can go 225 miles.

 

That’s not entirely down to increased energy density in the battery cells, of course. There are other variables, like the efficiency of the vehicle and the number of cells in the pack. That’s part of what makes it hard for consumers to notice whether the cells themselves have changed.

 

The complexities are apparent if you look at phones. One could compare stats on battery life of phone models over the years, and perhaps even energy capacity numbers for their batteries. But did the capacity increase because the cells became more energy dense, or because the manufacturer managed to squeeze a slightly larger battery in the case? Battery life isn’t a reliable indicator, either, because phones with more powerful hardware could have a larger power draw than their predecessors. On the flip side, software improvements for power efficiency could get you more life out of the same battery.

 

I've got a personal interest in cameras. I recently bought a new one to replace a decade-old DSLR of the same brand. The size and shape of the lithium-ion battery remains identical, but the new one has a capacity of 1900 milliamp-hours while the old one was 1500 milliamp-hours. That’s an increase of 27 percent. (And it’s not the biggest available currently.)

 

Does that mean the new camera lasts 27 percent longer than my old one? Far from it! I can expect to shoot fewer than half as many photos before needing to recharge. The new (mirrorless, if you’re hip to photography lingo) camera shoots at higher resolution, has a more active auto-focus system, contains a higher resolution and brighter screen, and what used to be a passive optical viewfinder is now a second, tiny screen—all adding up to a comparatively ravenous appetite for electrons.

 

Lithium-ion batteries have come a long way from their origins in the early '90s.

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

 

But there's also a big trend that has little to do with performance. The cost of lithium-ion batteries has fallen dramatically—with huge effects on electric vehicles. A recent study noted that “the real price of lithium-ion cells, scaled by their energy capacity, has declined by about 97 percent since their commercial introduction in 1991.” The early lithium-ion cells in the 1990s were around $3,000 per kilowatt-hour. By the early 2000s, that was nearer to $500 per kilowatt-hour.

In terms of electric vehicles, BloombergNEF estimates that the average price of a complete battery pack was about $1,180 per kilowatt-hour in 2010. By 2020, it was down to around $130 per kilowatt-hour. Ultimately, this is what makes it possible to produce a car with 300-mile range that someone not named “Jeff Bezos” can plausibly afford.

There’s also more to a battery than the simple sum total of electrons it can push before the meter reads zero. Unlike internal combustion vehicles, where engine performance more or less maps to “how much of a dangerous idiot can I be on the road?”, battery performance relates to charging as much as discharging. (Ars Automotive Editor Jonathan Gitlin is now free to challenge me to a duel.) Fast charging is key to making electric vehicles convenient for more use cases, so this is another priority for battery development.

Faster charging depends on everything from cell design to pack layout and temperature management to charging station infrastructure. Manufacturers have to understand how their batteries respond to various levels of fast charging and settle on a safe and reasonable trade-off of life cycle degradation for the convenience of a quick top up.

Industry standards for charging stations (including plug shapes) have evolved over time, pushing to higher maximum charge rates. A charger in your garage can push a few kilowatts of AC power, which the vehicle’s charging system converts to DC on its way into the battery. Fast charging stations deliver much more power, converted to DC on the other side of the plug so you can exceed what the vehicle’s charging system can manage. Earlier vehicles and stations could push charging to 50 kilowatts, while Tesla’s superchargers initially went as high as 150 kilowatts. The newest Tesla superchargers can reach 250 kilowatts, while new Electrify America stations are capable of 350 kilowatts—assuming a vehicle comes along that can take it.

A Tesla Model 3 can hit peak charge rates around 250 kilowatts, and a Porsche Taycan can nudge a little higher. But other vehicles are generally a little more conservative, with the Chevy Bolt limited to 50 kilowatts and the new Volkswagen ID.4 capable of 125 kilowatts.

In general, though, you can charge a vehicle faster today than you could 10 or even five years ago, and companies are focused on pushing these numbers higher. This can’t all be credited to changes in the battery cells, themselves, but they're far from irrelevant here.

The electrons must flow

If progress has been steady all this time, there’s obviously more on the way (stay tuned on that). First, there will be more in the incremental vein, as we have yet to reach the theoretical limits of lithium-ion. For example, when Tesla laid out its plans last year, there were many little things that added up to a hoped-for increase of around 50 percent in vehicle range and decrease of around 50 percent in per-kilowatt-hour cost. That came from cathode material tweaks, a high-silicon-content anode, a larger cylindrical cell design, a redesigned battery pack, and new manufacturing methods. Who knows how long it will take for all this to materialize, though Elon Musk claimed it would only be around three years.

Beyond the incremental, less predictable battery revolutions are also coming to placate the impatient. (Just don’t expect flying cars to be close behind.) The race to develop solid-state batteries that ditch liquid electrolytes—and perhaps also the bulk of the anode—seems to be heating up. That could bring sudden improvements in safety, longevity, or energy density.

Researchers have also long been chasing lithium-air batteries that could realize a huge jump in energy density. And beyond lithium, there are other entirely different chemistries in development out there. At some point, one of them should click for one application or another.

Lithium-ion or not, an explosion of grid-scale battery installations is coming as prices continue to fall. The nascent art of lithium-ion battery recycling is also sure to mature and expand, improving the sustainability of these batteries by recovering and resetting their chemical building blocks.

Adopt cold-fusion-like skepticism of any of these future-looking statements as you please, but today’s batteries aren’t those of 20 or even 10 years ago. The same thing is bound to be true in another 10 years—even if that progress doesn’t come in a single, giant leap with global fanfare.

Eternally five years away? No, batteries are improving under your nose

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This Evolutionary Gift May Protect Coral From Climate Change (may require free registration)

The Long, Strange Life of the World’s Oldest Naked Mole Rat

These death-defying rodents do not age normally. Will their weird biology help extend human life spans, or are those ambitions a dead end?

 

Joe has looked old since the day he was born, back in 1982. He’s pink and squinty and wrinkly. His teeth are weird: His incisors sit outside his lips to keep the dirt out of his mouth as he digs tunnels for his tube-shaped body.

 

“He looks remarkably the same,” says Rochelle Buffenstein, a comparative biologist who has studied naked mole rats since the 1980s when she was doing her doctoral work in Cape Town, South Africa. That’s where she met Joe. (He doesn’t have an official name, so we’re going with Joe.) A few years later, Buffenstein was starting her own research on vitamin D metabolism in mole rats because they spend all their time in dark tunnels, away from the sun. She moved to Johannesburg with a few subjects to begin her work, leaving Joe behind. He was eventually shipped off to the Cincinnati Zoo. But he and Buffenstein would soon reunite.

In the late 1990s, Buffenstein noticed something odd: Her mole rats just wouldn’t die.

 

“They were more than 15 years old, which is by rodent standards extremely long-lived,” Buffenstein says. “So I thought, ‘Wow, they should be only living a maximum of six years; they’re living more than double their maximum life span.’” She pivoted to aging research, knowing that the field was important but understudied. In the early 2000s, Joe’s other half at the zoo passed away, and he needed a new mate. Buffenstein offered to help him start a new colony at her lab in New York and took him in. Since then, he has traveled with Buffenstein to research posts in New York, Texas, and California.

 

Today, Joe is still a wrinkly rodent with a taste for root veggies. But he’s now Buffenstein’s oldest naked mole rat, the oldest ever recorded—Joe turns 39 this year. That’s nine times older than typical mice live, and five times more than other similarly sized rodents.

 

When Buffenstein set out to study how naked mole rats age, she wanted a sort of before and after picture of their biology—to determine when their bones, or organs, or even antioxidant levels change. She waited. Then waited some more. “It was very frustrating," Buffenstein says. "Because you want to see this change happen, so that you can then delve down to what's changed.”

 

Back then, Buffenstein was one of just a few researchers looking at mole rats and aging. Now mole rats are all the rage, and labs around the world are exploring their basic biology with the goal of using those insights to develop drugs that might prevent the ravages of age in people. Because humans and gorillas get hypertension. Mice and zebrafish get cancer. Kangaroos and dogs get arthritis. An endless list of diseases of aging plague an endless list of animals. The “and”s are so prevalent that any “but” makes scientists’ eyes spring open. Joe is a “but.” Mole rats enjoy incredibly long and healthy lives before they expire.

 

“The naked mole rat says it's not inevitable,” says Buffenstein, who now works for Google’s biotech spinoff, Calico Labs, which does R&D to combat aging and associated diseases. "They clearly have a blueprint to stave off aging.”

 

But what is that blueprint? It could be that their cells are teeming with protective molecules; that a large set of genes are unexpectedly switched on or off; or that the very makeup of their immune system, organs, or cell membranes are radically different. (Perhaps even too radically different.) Mole rat researchers haven’t yet managed to harness these shrively fountains of youth. Maybe their unique anti-aging tricks are destined to extend human life—or maybe they’re just an inevitable dead end.

 

Joe barely ages, but you do. As you get older, your cell function deteriorates, making your body more susceptible to disease and—eventually—death. Your DNA accrues damage from oxidizing molecules, which also attack proteins and fats, tearing you apart microscopically from the inside. Old “senescent” cells stop replicating. Reserves of rejuvenating stem cells dry up. Communication between cells breaks down, and inflammation cranks up. There’s no single force that drives cellular aging; it’s a network of feedback loops. Enzymes read genes like a grocery list of different proteins to prepare, and those proteins might protect that enzyme, or that gene, or some body-wide process. Your body is programmed to tolerate these bumps and bruises. “While we are young, that repair actually works almost flawlessly,” says Vera Gorbunova, a biogerontologist who studies mole rats at the University of Rochester. When aging sets in, though, “now damage outpaces repair.” Gene-reading enzymes falter, misfolded proteins gum up the brain, sputtering mitochondria weaken muscles, and cancers bloom.

What begins life as a balanced merry-go-round of mistakes and repairs, devolves into a creaky wooden roller coaster—thrown off keel by rusted machinery and lackluster repair jobs; more susceptible to gusts of wind, and a brutal hell on your spine.

 

As the damage from aging accumulates, it also accelerates. Your body observes something called the Gompertz mortality law, a mathematical model that quantifies how the intrinsic risk of death increases exponentially as an animal gets older. Although life spans vary for different species, the shape of the Gompertz curve is canon. A lab mouse’s risk of dying doubles every three months or so. For a dog it’s about every three years. Once a human turns 25, their risk of dying doubles every eight years. Naked mole rats don’t play by these rules.

 

In 2018, Buffenstein and her colleagues at Calico published a paper showing that naked mole rats defy the Gompertz mortality law. Even at 35, Joe hadn’t statistically doubled his risk of dying compared to when he was 2. Naked mole rats still die, of course, but the risk stays nearly flat. “They haven't read the textbooks,” Buffenstein says. “They don't know how they’re meant to behave.”

 

Mole rats like Joe certainly exhibit weird behaviors that are (presumably) unrelated to aging. For one thing, they’re eusocial, a rarity among mammals. That means that one queen rules over the entire colony. She mates with up to three males and remains fertile even 30 years after puberty. (For a human that would equate to having babies at 300 years old.) Joe, as it happens, is a rare breeding male. His late mother, like every mole rat's mother, was a queen, and she kept other females reproductively repressed with acts of dominance—pushing and shoving that may sometimes look aggressive, depending on the despot.

 

Joe has seen dynasties rise and fall. He and his colony mates have spent their years cleaning the nest, caring for the queen, and guarding against intruders as designated workers or xenophobic soldiers. Most of them live relatively healthy lives. And because they live in deep desert burrows, mole rats have few natural predators.

 

So what does kill a naked mole rat? “They beat each other up,” says Martha Delaney, a veterinary pathologist at the University of Illinois. Naked mole rats are extreme xenophobes. They’ll attack outsiders, push and bite each other, and banish colony members as outcasts.

 

“They’re lovely, lovely animals,” Melissa Holmes says with great sincerity. Holmes is a behavioral neuroscientist at the University of Toronto who works with more than 1,000 naked mole rats. The inner workings of mole rats’ odd eusocial structure earns them a reputation for aggression. “But for animals that live in such large groups, they are remarkably stable,” she says.

 

Holmes has had her colonies for 12 years. “And in some of my colonies, we’ve never had an injury, ever,” she says. “That's amazing—that animals live together for years with that lack of aggression.”

 

It’s not that naked mole rats never age or get sick. They do. But their bodies somehow slow those processes down. While typical mammals’ bones get more brittle and thin over the years, mole rat bones keep the same mineral content and remain just as solid. People tend to tack on more fat with age. Naked mole rats? Nope.

 

“But the most striking system,” says Buffenstein, “is cardiovascular.” Human veins and arteries normally stiffen with time. The more rigid those walls get, the harder the heart has to pump. Blood pressure goes up. Risk of death goes up. Naked mole rat blood vessels stay springy throughout life. “Every measure that we've looked at in heart function is unchanged from six months to 24 years,” she says.

 

In humans, heart disease is the leading cause of death. Cancer is second. About 40 percent of people in the US develop cancer in their lifetimes. For naked mole rats, the probability is well below 1 percent. In a 2008 study, Buffenstein reported no cancers at all in a group of 800 mole rats. As of 2021, Buffenstein says she’s only found five cancers in over 3,000 necropsies.

 

“They do age very well,” says Delaney “They’re very well adapted, just kind of like a physiological marvel.” Delaney primarily studies naked mole rats in zoos, scanning biopsies and tissue slices to tease out how they died. She has found a couple cancers in two naked mole rats (“after evaluating hundreds and hundreds,” she says). Neither cancer was fatal. Naked mole rats do develop kidney and brain lesions with age, but those rarely turn into disease.

 

This unexpected resilience means there may be something about their biology that we can capture in pill form—or possibly one day as gene therapy—for humans. “And that's why I think they're so popular now,” says Delaney, “As research models for not just cancer, but age related diseases.” But popular or not, the true payoff remains elusive.

 

Scientists want to sort out what to tweak in our biology to mimic the mole rat’s longevity. Take cancer. Mole rats are so great at avoiding cancer that researchers think their cells might be hardwired with protective molecules that stop mutated cells before they take over. For example, naked mole rat cells amass large amounts of a protein called p53, which is known to suppress tumors. Last year, Buffenstein reported that they show 10 times more of it in their connective tissue than in humans and mice—and it’s more stable.

 

And remember how human aging is linked to DNA and other cellular odds and ends falling apart? A protein called NRF2, or nuclear factor erythroid 2-related factor 2, may protect against that descent into disorder. It’s a transcription factor, meaning it sticks to DNA and activates certain genes that protect the cell. NRF2 works as a sort of crossing guard for antioxidants, detoxicants, and proteins that keep other proteins from misfolding. “Every time I look, it seems to be regulating something else that's equally important for aging and longevity,” says Buffenstein. Heart disease, diabetes, depression, she continues, “just about every disease that you can think of seems to have an accompanying low level of NRF2.”

 

All mammals, including people, naturally make this protein, but Buffenstein recently found that the naked mole rat version is more active, either because it’s more abundant or better at binding. Drug developers have also noticed that NRF2 is involved in medications approved to treat specific diseases. For example, metformin, a diabetes drug, also activates NRF2 and is being studied for anti-aging. Rapamycin, an immunosuppressant prescribed after organ transplants, activates NRF2 and extends life span by about 25 percent in male and female mice. Clinical trials are underway to test it against human aging. Perhaps NRF2 helps mole rats escape the onset of multiple aging-related diseases simultaneously.

 

But here’s the thing about putting drugs to new uses: More isn’t always better. NRF2 levels that are too low or too high can lead to cancerous growths. The same is true for p53. “We've always got to be careful, because so many disease states have hijacked the same proteins to make them work in their favor, too,” says Buffenstein. “It's that very fine line of figuring out how this will help you, versus how this could be used to kill you.”

 

It’s unlikely mole rats have only one unique mechanism that mitigates a disease as diffuse as cancer, much less aging. The naked mole rat likely gets its longevity from more than just one gene that protects against DNA damage, or one enzyme that keeps misfolded proteins from gumming up the brain—it emerges from multiple adaptations, each working in tandem to keep the body alive.

 

And many labs are looking into where those adaptations are hiding. A treatment for humans may come from any distinct process they uncover, or even many separate ones. “It's not a single solution,” says Gorbunova. “We have to really study from multiple angles."

 

So mole rats are unquestionably weird, and that might well be useful, but they might also turn out to be too weird. Their isolated, predator-free, underground existence, says Rich Miller, a University of Michigan biogerontologist, might be too unique to translate. “It's not a safe bet,” he says. Miller doesn't study naked mole rats, but he has studied animal aging for over 50 years and is an expert in testing interventions like rapamycin and metformin, leading one of three labs of the National Institute on Aging’s Interventional Testing Program for almost two decades. "They are so weird and, in many ways, so different from the other kinds of slow-aging mammals," he says. For example, levels of one particular antioxidant called thioredoxin reductase 2 are elevated among the long-lived rodents, primates, and birds Miller has studied. But it’s not in naked mole rats.

 

To be sure, they’re still mammals. (“We are fairly similar to rodents,” Gorbunova says. “It's not like they're some kind of sea sponge.”) But while a Tesla is a car, its spare parts won’t fix your cousin’s Ford Pinto. Maybe the really good stuff is built differently—and is irreconcilably untranslatable.

 

Naked mole rats may be full of such "idiosyncrasies," says Steve Austad, a biogerontologist at the University of Alabama Birmingham who has studied aging in animals since the 1980s. But Austad doesn’t dismiss unique lessons as untranslatable. Rather than just focusing on this one species, he suggests that studying a diverse array of long-lived mammals, like bowhead whales and Brandt’s bats, will point out important overlaps. “It could be that there are certain tricks that nature has invented time and time and time again,” he says. “I'd say it's probably something that's more likely to be relevant to humans.”

 

And Gorbunova, who has studied tissue from dozens of species in her lab, says interest in unconventional animal subjects is growing. Now, she says, “people believe in it.”

 

The drugs aren't here yet, but the biotech tools to decode animal secrets have gotten supercharged. Genome analysis is faster and more reliable than ever. Buffenstein's team is reexamining the naked mole rat genome—the published version isn’t adequate for finding new genes, she says. “You don't know if you're not seeing something because it's really lost or because the genome is of poor quality.” Annotating the sequence from scratch will help trace which genes are critically present, and which are critically unusual or absent. Better tech is also giving researchers an intimate look at the mole rat epigenome—the set of molecular ride-alongs that stick to DNA throughout their lives.

 

As biotech tools have gotten more refined, the search for mole rat secrets has split off in every imaginable direction. Gorbunova, the biologist from Rochester, has spent years focused on a starch-like molecule called hyaluronan. Naked mole rat cells churn out tons of the stuff, and her lab has connected it to their sturdiness against osteoarthritis and cancer. Ewan St. John Smith, a neurophysiologist at the University of Cambridge, identified the gene variation and protein that keeps Joe and his conspecifics from feeling stinging pain from acid. Other labs are analyzing the animals’ gut microbiome or tinkering with reprogrammed mole rat stem cells. Their mitochondria churn out tons of a peptide that correlates with long human health span, and their mole rat brains seem impervious to high levels of another that correlates with Alzheimer’s. Their bodies are exceptional at dismantling dysfunctional proteins, and surprisingly tolerant of others. Their taste for living in crowded, low-oxygen burrows makes them less prone to seizures and may have adapted their pain receptors.

 

And on lab benches not far from where Joe’s friends sleep and squeak, Buffenstein has also pinpointed surprising weirdness in their immune systems. Since they fend off disease so well, she expected to find a festival of natural killer cells—the quick-moving hit squad that zaps cancerous cells and pathogens in humans before they can turn into bigger problems. “Again, these little critters drove me crazy,” she says. “We couldn't find natural killer cells at all.” More lethal T cells may pick up the slack, Buffenstein says. They’ve also got a much higher proportion of macrophages and neutrophils—the invader-eating white blood cells that turn into pus. That front line is “ready to pounce on anything that's foreign and destroy it almost instantly,” Buffenstein says. For mole rat (and human) health, there are still many more questions than answers.

 

“I sort of like the fact that the animals are winning,” Buffenstein says, “and we haven't quite got there yet.”

 

Buffenstein and her team will celebrate Joe’s 40th next year. As far as we can tell, he’ll just want a few nibbles of sweet potato, some quality time with his queen, and maybe a little wrinkle cream. He’ll be the first to live so shockingly long. And, perhaps, not the last.

The Long, Strange Life of the World’s Oldest Naked Mole Rat (may require free registration)

China on Monday dismissed as "totally untrue" reports that three researchers in Wuhan went to hospital with an illness shortly before the coronavirus emerged in the city and spread around the globe.

Since infecting its first victims in the central Chinese city in late 2019, the pathogen has afflicted almost every country in the world, killing more than 3.4 million people and pummelling national economies.

Beijing has always fiercely fought the theory that it could have escaped from one of its laboratories.

Citing a US intelligence report, the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that the trio from the Wuhan Institute of Virology were affected as early as November 2019, suffering from "symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illness".

China disclosed the existence of an outbreak of pneumonia cases in Wuhan to the World Health Organization (WHO) on December 31, 2019.

Asked about the reports on Monday, Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian described them as "totally untrue".

He told reporters that, according to a statement from the institute, it "had not been exposed to COVID-19 before December 30, 2019, and a "zero-infection" record is kept among its staff and graduate students so far".

The coronavirus was, however, taken to the lab for study, according to Chinese authorities.

The theory that the killer virus leaked from a Chinese lab was fuelled by, among others, the administration of former US president Donald Trump.

But in March, after a four-week stay in Wuhan, a joint study by the WHO and Chinese experts deemed such an explanation "extremely unlikely".

Experts favor the generally accepted theory of the natural transmission of the virus from an animal—probably a bat—to humans, through another animal that has not yet been identified.

Some believe, however, that WHO specialists did not have enough space to work freely during their investigation in Wuhan.

Source

A 2019 software update impacted the range and charging speed of some Model S and Model X vehicles.

Tesla could be forced to pay out millions in compensation due to a software update it released back in 2019 to help protect the battery in its electric vehicles.

As Electrek reports, the software update was released to "protect the battery and improve battery longevity," but it came with two big side effects. The first was a reduction in range, and the second was reduced charging rates at Supercharger stations for Model S and Model X vehicles with 85kWh batteries. The affected models were sold by Tesla until 2016.

The reduced range was significant and typically saw a drop of between 12 and 30 miles per charge within a matter of weeks following the update. Adding "much slower" charging into the mix just increased the frustration at what Tesla had done, which in turn triggered a number of lawsuits. In Norway, 30 owners banded together to sue Tesla and they have now won, with the judge awarding each owner $16,000 in compensation.

Tesla decided not to respond to the lawsuit, which it may now regret. There are thought to be over 10,000 Tesla owners impacted by the 2019 software update in Norway, and they could all decide to attempt to claim the $16,000 compensation resulting in millions needing to be paid out by the company. That may not be the end of the pain, though. Similar lawsuits have been started in other territories, including the US. Tesla currently has a few weeks in which to appeal the case, and it seems likely it will appeal considering the potential repercussions if it doesn't.

Source: Tesla Fined $16K Per Owner for Throttling Battery Capacity, Charging Speed in Norway

While organic compounds have been confirmed on the Martian surface and near-surface areas since 2018, new Earth-based experiments point to a potentially tantalizing series of signatures from Curiosity’s Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument that could indicate the presence of organic salts at the rover’s Gale Crater location.

What’s more, the new research from a team led by J. M. T. Lewis, an organic geochemist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, points to further potential evidence that organic salts might be prevalent across the Martian terrain. The hard part is conclusively detecting them.

For decades, scientists theorized that organic compounds were almost certainly to have been preserved to some detectable degree in the Martian surface environment. In 2018, Curiosity’s instruments allowed Eigenbrode et al. to conclusively prove that they were in fact there.

In turn, if organic compounds were present at one time, their by-products — organic salts — would still be around as well, even given the harsh radiation environment of Mars compared to Earth.

While organic compounds and organic salts can form from the presence of microbial life, they can also form from geologic processes.

Though not confirmed, organic salts would be further evidence that organic matter once existed on Mars’ surface, and, if they are still present, could support hypothetical microbial life on Mars today, as some life on Earth uses organic salt as food/energy.

Salty puzzle piece.🧂@NASA has found that organic salts are likely present on Mars & I may be able to detect them. They're the chemical remnants of organic compounds that may provide important clues to the planet’s carbon cycle and potential for past life. https://t.co/EaGHUoGqTi pic.twitter.com/nSZVDhewBY

— Curiosity Rover (@MarsCuriosity) May 20, 2021

The analysis on potential organic salt detections and Earth-based lab work from Lewis et al. centered on Curiosity’s SAM instrument — a chemistry instrument suite inside the rover composed of a mass spectrometer, a gas chromatograph, and a tunable laser spectrometer.

According to NASA, SAM is designed to “address the present and past habitability of Mars by exploring molecular and elemental chemistry relevant to life. SAM addresses carbon chemistry through a search for organic compounds, the chemical state of light elements other than carbon, and isotopic tracers of planetary change.”

In practice, SAM takes surface soil and drill samples and places them inside an oven that is then heated to around 1,000° C to extract gases. The temperature at which gases are released from the sample reveal what elements it is comprised of.

But when it comes to organic salts, it’s not that simple. 

“When heating Martian samples, there are many interactions that can happen between minerals and organic matter that could make it more difficult to draw conclusions from our experiments, so the work we’re doing is trying to pick apart those interactions so that scientists doing analyses on Mars can use this information,” said Lewis, lead author of the study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.

In short, the gases released by organic salts are difficult to pin directly to them because those types of salts only release simple gases that other common components of the Martian soil release as well.

But why are organic salts so important?  Why try and see if they’re there at all in the SAM record from Curiosity?

“In our efforts to characterize indigenous Martian organic matter, we must contend with a near-surface record that has been substantially altered by radiation and oxidation,” notes an opening section in Lewis et al.’s paper. “Under such conditions, much of the surficial organic record on Mars may have decomposed into organic salts, which are challenging for flight instruments to conclusively identify.”

“If organic salts are widespread on the Martian surface, their composition and distribution could offer insight into the less-altered organic record at depth, and they may play an important role in near-surface carbon cycling and habitability.”

To this end, finding them conclusively — or at least building a case for where the Martian robotic fleet might have detected them — would be of crucial importance toward building a more grounded understanding of Mars’ past and present habitability.

So what did Lewis et al. find?

Like the now-true prediction that organic compounds existed on the Martian surface or near-surface area, for decades scientists have predicted that those now-known organic compounds could be broken down into salts.

Those salts would be far more likely to survive in large quantities than organic molecules belonging to living organisms. So finding them is key.

But this returns us to the original problem: organic salts release very common gases when exposed to the 1,000° C heat in SAM. So if the salts are indeed there, how could one point to their potential detection within common gases?

The answer turned out to be related to a long-held concern about organic salt detection: perchlorates.

Perchlorates are salts containing the ion ClO4. They are common on Mars, and scientists had long been concerned with how perchlorates would affect the potential detection of organic salts. The Lewis et al. research was largely aimed at understanding that effect, but in so doing, found very strong, potential indirect detections of organic salts in SAM data.

According to a portion of the results section of Lewis et al.’s paper regarding analysis of SAM data on various samples (RN4, GB, and OG3) compared to the team’s lab mixtures: “The CO2 peaks generated by our mixtures of Ca or Mg acetate [organic salts] with perchlorates were a closer fit with the 380° C peak in RN4. The CO2 peaks observed between ~400° C and 500° C in GB and OG3 were consistent with the decomposition of a mixture of Ca acetate, Mg acetate, and Mg oxalate, and perchlorates.”

“If Mg oxalates and Ca or Mg acetates were significant CO2 contributors in GB and OG3 it would suggest that a unit with appreciably high levels of these phases exists somewhere within Gale crater. If such a unit can form at one locality on Mars, it is likely that organic salt deposits could occur elsewhere on the planet.”

The referenced “mixtures of Ca or Mg acetate” relate to the experiment at hand, where Lewis et al. mixed organic salts (Fe, Ca, and Mg oxalates and acetates) with perchlorates that are known to be present in the Martian soil.

Additional SAM data analysis showed a potential signature of Fe oxalates and acetates present in Mars’ famous/infamous dust — indicating a potential organic salt component to “regional or global dust.”

But how to be sure?

Thankfully, Curiosity’s CheMin instrument — Chemistry and Mineralogy — is capable of making such a detection if the organic salts are in high enough concentrations. Sadly, it has made no such detections.

Additionally, neither Perseverance nor any other surface robotic mission aside from Curiosity carries instrumentation to permit organic salt detections. Still, even if a positive identification proves elusive, going deeper under the Martian surface where soil and organic material would be better preserved is an area of Martian exploration deep into planning.

The European Space Agency’s ExoMars rover, slated to launch in 2022, will carry a drill developed by NASA Goddard that can burrow down 2 meters beneath the surface.

Source: Potential organic salt detection from Curiosity yields further evidence for past organics on Mars

A drug dealer was tracked down after sharing a photo of Stilton cheese.

Carl Stewart, 39, was identified through his fingerprints after police analysed the image he posted in an online chat.

He was jailed for 13 years and six months after admitting conspiracy to supply heroin, cocaine, ketamine and MDMA at Liverpool Crown Court.

The dealer, of Gem Street, Liverpool, was also sentenced for transferring criminal property.

Stewart posted the photo on the encrypted messaging service EncroChat, which had been cracked by police.

Det Insp Lee Wilkinson, of Merseyside Police, said he went by the name Toffeeforce and was involved in supplying large amounts of drugs.

The detective said "his love of Stilton cheese" ultimately led to his downfall after his palm and fingerprints were analysed and it was established they belonged to Stewart.

Source

A study of 1,095 patients hospitalized with COVID-19 discovered that two easily measurable signs of health—respiration rate and blood-oxygen saturation—are distinctly predictive of higher mortality. Notably, the authors said, anyone who receives a positive COVID-19 screening test can easily monitor for these two signs at home.

This context is lacking in current guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which tells people with COVID-19 to seek medical attention when they experience overt symptoms such as "trouble breathing" and "persistent pain or pressure in the chest"—indications that may be absent even when respiration and blood oxygen have reached dangerous levels, the authors say.

"These findings apply to the lived experience of the majority of patients with COVID-19: being at home, feeling anxious, wondering how to know whether their illness will progress and wondering when it makes sense to go to the hospital," said Dr. Neal Chatterjee of the University of Washington School of Medicine.

Chatterjee and fellow cardiologist Dr. Nona Sotoodehnia were co-lead authors of the paper, which was to be published May 24 in the journal Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses.

They said the findings suggest that, for some people with COVID-19, by the time they feel bad enough to come to the hospital, a window for early medical intervention might have passed.

"Initially, most patients with COVID don't have difficulty breathing. They can have quite low oxygen saturation and still be asymptomatic," said Sotoodehnia. "If patients follow the current guidance, because they may not get short of breath until their blood oxygen is quite low, then we are missing a chance to intervene early with life-saving treatment."

The researchers examined the cases of 1,095 patients age 18 and older who were admitted with COVID-19 to UW Medicine hospitals in Seattle or to Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. The study span was March 1 to June 8, 2020. The lone exclusions were people who chose "comfort measures only" at time of their admission.

While patients frequently had hypoxemia (low blood-oxygen saturation; 91% or below for this study) or tachypnea (fast, shallow breathing; 23 breaths per minute for this study), few reported feeling short of breath or coughing regardless of blood oxygen.

The study's primary measure was all-cause in-hospital mortality. Overall, 197 patients died in the hospital. Compared to those admitted with normal blood oxygen, hypoxemic patients had a mortality risk 1.8 to 4.0 times greater, depending on the patient's blood oxygen levels. Similarly, compared to patients admitted with normal respiratory rates, those with tachypnea had a mortality risk 1.9 to 3.2 times greater. By contrast, other clinical signs at admission, including temperature, heart rate and blood pressure, were not associated with mortality.

Nearly all patients with hypoxemia and tachypnea required supplemental oxygen, which, when paired with inflammation-reducing glucocorticoids, can effectively treat acute cases of COVID-19.

"We give supplemental oxygen to patients to maintain blood oxygen saturation of 92% to 96%. It's important to note that only patients on supplemental oxygen benefit from the life-saving effects of glucocorticoids," Sotoodehnia said. "On average our hypoxemic patients had an oxygen saturation of 91% when they came into the hospital, so a huge number of them were already well below where we would've administered life-saving measures. For them, that care was delayed."

The findings have relevance for family-medicine practitioners and virtual-care providers, who typically are first-line clinical contacts for people who have received a positive COVID-19 test result and want to monitor meaningful symptoms.

"We recommend that the CDC and [World Health Organization] consider recasting their guidelines to account for this population of asymptomatic people who actually merit hospital admission and care," Chatterjee said. "But people don't walk around knowing WHO and CDC guidelines; we get this guidance from our physicians and news stories."

Sotoodehnia recommended that people with positive COVID-19 test results, particularly those at higher risk of adverse outcomes due to advanced age or obesity, buy or borrow a pulse oximeter and monitor for blood-oxygen below 92%. The clip-like devices fit over a fingertip and can be purchased for under $20.

"An even simpler measure is respiratory rate—how many breaths you take in a minute. Ask a friend or family member to monitor you for a minute while you're not paying attention to your breathing, and if you hit 23 breaths per minute, you should contact your physician," she said.

Source

All over the world, countries are confronting population stagnation and a fertility bust, a dizzying reversal unmatched in recorded history that will make first-birthday parties a rarer sight than funerals, and empty homes a common eyesore.

© Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times A family eating hotpot at a restaurant in Beijing. China’s population is projected to contract sharply this century.

Maternity wards are already shutting down in Italy. Ghost cities are appearing in northeastern China. Universities in South Korea can’t find enough students, and in Germany, hundreds of thousands of properties have been razed, with the land turned into parks.

Like an avalanche, the demographic forces — pushing toward more deaths than births — seem to be expanding and accelerating. Though some countries continue to see their populations grow, especially in Africa, fertility rates are falling nearly everywhere else. Demographers now predict that by the latter half of the century or possibly earlier, the global population will enter a sustained decline for the first time.

© Kim Hong-Ji/Reuters Siblings in Seoul, South Korea. The country’s fertility rate is the lowest in the developed world.

A planet with fewer people could ease pressure on resources, slow the destructive impact of climate change and reduce household burdens for women. But the census announcements this month from China and the United States, which showed the slowest rates of population growth in decades for both countries, also point to hard-to-fathom adjustments.

The strain of longer lives and low fertility, leading to fewer workers and more retirees, threatens to upend how societies are organized — around the notion that a surplus of young people will drive economies and help pay for the old. It may also require a reconceptualization of family and nation. Imagine entire regions where everyone is 70 or older. Imagine governments laying out huge bonuses for immigrants and mothers with lots of children. Imagine a gig economy filled with grandparents and Super Bowl ads promoting procreation.

“A paradigm shift is necessary,” said Frank Swiaczny, a German demographer who was the chief of population trends and analysis for the United Nations until last year. “Countries need to learn to live with and adapt to decline.”

The ramifications and responses have already begun to appear, especially in East Asia and Europe. From Hungary to China, from Sweden to Japan, governments are struggling to balance the demands of a swelling older cohort with the needs of young people whose most intimate decisions about childbearing are being shaped by factors both positive (more work opportunities for women) and negative (persistent gender inequality and high living costs).

The 20th century presented a very different challenge. The global population saw its greatest increase in known history, from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 6 billion in 2000, as life spans lengthened and infant mortality declined. In some countries — representing about a third of the world’s people — those growth dynamics are still in play. By the end of the century, Nigeria could surpass China in population; across sub-Saharan Africa, families are still having four or five children.

But nearly everywhere else, the era of high fertility is ending. As women have gained more access to education and contraception, and as the anxieties associated with having children continue to intensify, more parents are delaying pregnancy and fewer babies are being born. Even in countries long associated with rapid growth, such as India and Mexico, birthrates are falling toward, or are already below, the replacement rate of 2.1 children per family.

© Luis Tato/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Families in sub-Saharan Africa are often still having four or five children. By the end of the century, Nigeria could surpass China in population.

The change may take decades, but once it starts, decline (just like growth) spirals exponentially. With fewer births, fewer girls grow up to have children, and if they have smaller families than their parents did — which is happening in dozens of countries — the drop starts to look like a rock thrown off a cliff.

© Chang W. Lee/The New York Times A village school in Gangjin County, South Korea, has enrolled illiterate older people so that it can stay open as the number of children in the area has dwindled.

“It becomes a cyclical mechanism,” said Stuart Gietel Basten, an expert on Asian demographics and a professor of social science and public policy at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. “It’s demographic momentum.”

Some countries, like the United States, Australia and Canada, where birthrates hover between 1.5 and 2, have blunted the impact with immigrants. But in Eastern Europe, migration out of the region has compounded depopulation, and in large parts of Asia, the “demographic time bomb” that first became a subject of debate a few decades ago has finally gone off.

© Poras Chaudhary for The New York Times Even in countries like India that have long been associated with rapid growth, birth rates are falling toward, or are already below, the replacement rate of 2.1 children per family.

South Korea’s fertility rate dropped to a record low of 0.92 in 2019 — less than one child per woman, the lowest rate in the developed world. Every month for the past 59 months, the total number of babies born in the country has dropped to a record depth.

© Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times A couple in Acciaroli, Italy. The population of many Italian villages has dramatically aged and shrunk in numbers.

That declining birthrate, coupled with a rapid industrialization that has pushed people from rural towns to big cities, has created what can feel like a two-tiered society. While major metropolises like Seoul continue to grow, putting intense pressure on infrastructure and housing, in regional towns it’s easy to find schools shut and abandoned, their playgrounds overgrown with weeds, because there are not enough children.

Expectant mothers in many areas can no longer find obstetricians or postnatal care centers. Universities below the elite level, especially outside Seoul, find it increasingly hard to fill their ranks — the number of 18-year-olds in South Korea has fallen from about 900,000 in 1992 to 500,000 today. To attract students, some schools have offered scholarships and even iPhones.

To goose the birthrate, the government has handed out baby bonuses. It increased child allowances and medical subsidies for fertility treatments and pregnancy. Health officials have showered newborns with gifts of beef, baby clothes and toys. The government is also building kindergartens and day care centers by the hundreds. In Seoul, every bus and subway car has pink seats reserved for pregnant women.

© How Hwee Young/EPA, via Shutterstock Playing pool in a retirement community in Beijing. China’s rapid slowdown in population growth will pose economic challenges.

But this month, Deputy Prime Minister Hong Nam-ki admitted that the government — which has spent more than $178 billion over the past 15 years encouraging women to have more babies — was not making enough progress. In many families, the shift feels cultural and permanent.

“My grandparents had six children, and my parents five, because their generations believed in having multiple children,” said Kim Mi-kyung, 38, a stay-at-home parent. “I have only one child. To my and younger generations, all things considered, it just doesn’t pay to have many children.”

© Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times Children in Munich, Germany. The fertility rate in Germany has increased after the country expanded access to child care and paid parental leave, but it remains below the rate of replacement.

Thousands of miles away, in Italy, the sentiment is similar, with a different backdrop.

In Capracotta, a small town in southern Italy, a sign in red letters on an 18th-century stone building looking on to the Apennine Mountains reads “Home of School Kindergarten” — but today, the building is a nursing home.

Residents eat their evening broth on waxed tablecloths in the old theater room.

“There were so many families, so many children,” said Concetta D’Andrea, 93, who was a student and a teacher at the school and is now a resident of the nursing home. “Now there is no one.”

The population in Capracotta has dramatically aged and contracted — from about 5,000 people to 800. The town’s carpentry shops have shut down. The organizers of a soccer tournament struggled to form even one team.

About a half-hour away, in the town of Agnone, the maternity ward closed a decade ago because it had fewer than 500 births a year, the national minimum to stay open. This year, six babies were born in Agnone.

“Once you could hear the babies in the nursery cry, and it was like music,” said Enrica Sciullo, a nurse who used to help with births there and now mostly takes care of older patients. “Now there is silence and a feeling of emptiness.”

In a speech last Friday during a conference on Italy’s birthrate crisis, Pope Francis said the “demographic winter” was still “cold and dark.”

More people in more countries may soon be searching for their own metaphors. Birth projections often shift based on how governments and families respond, but according to projections by an international team of scientists published last year in The Lancet, 183 countries and territories — out of 195 — will have fertility rates below replacement level by 2100.

Their model shows an especially sharp decline for China, with its population expected to fall from 1.41 billion now to about 730 million in 2100. If that happens, the population pyramid would essentially flip. Instead of a base of young workers supporting a narrower band of retirees, China would have as many 85-year-olds as 18-year-olds.

China’s rust belt, in the northeast, saw its population drop by 1.2 percent in the past decade, according to census figures released on Tuesday. In 2016, Heilongjiang Province became the first in the country to have its pension system run out of money. In Hegang, a “ghost city” in the province that has lost almost 10 percent of its population since 2010, homes cost so little that people compare them to cabbage.

Many countries are beginning to accept the need to adapt, not just resist. South Korea is pushing for universities to merge. In Japan, where adult diapers now outsell ones for babies, municipalities have been consolidated as towns age and shrink. In Sweden, some cities have shifted resources from schools to elder care. And almost everywhere, older people are being asked to keep working. Germany, which previously raised its retirement age to 67, is now considering a bump to 69.

Going further than many other nations, Germany has also worked through a program of urban contraction: Demolitions have removed around 330,000 units from the housing stock since 2002.

And if the goal is revival, a few green shoots can be found. After expanding access to affordable child care and paid parental leave, Germany’s fertility rate recently increased to 1.54, up from 1.3 in 2006. Leipzig, which once was shrinking, is now growing again after reducing its housing stock and making itself more attractive with its smaller scale.

“Growth is a challenge, as is decline,” said Mr. Swiaczny, who is now a senior research fellow at the Federal Institute for Population Research in Germany.

Demographers warn against seeing population decline as simply a cause for alarm. Many women are having fewer children because that’s what they want. Smaller populations could lead to higher wages, more equal societies, lower carbon emissions and a higher quality of life for the smaller numbers of children who are born.

But, said Professor Gietel Basten, quoting Casanova: “There is no such thing as destiny. We ourselves shape our lives.”

The challenges ahead are still a cul-de-sac — no country with a serious slowdown in population growth has managed to increase its fertility rate much beyond the minor uptick that Germany accomplished. There is little sign of wage growth in shrinking countries, and there is no guarantee that a smaller population means less stress on the environment.

Many demographers argue that the current moment may look to future historians like a period of transition or gestation, when humans either did or did not figure out how to make the world more hospitable — enough for people to build the families that they want.

Surveys in many countries show that young people would like to be having more children, but face too many obstacles.

Anna Parolini tells a common story. She left her small hometown in northern Italy to find better job opportunities. Now 37, she lives with her boyfriend in Milan and has put her desire to have children on hold.

She is afraid her salary of less than 2,000 euros a month would not be enough for a family, and her parents still live where she grew up.

“I don’t have anyone here who could help me,” she said. “Thinking of having a child now would make me gasp.”

Source: Long Slide Looms for World Population, With Sweeping Ramifications

Official's phone logs offer blow-by-blow account of the disaster as it unfolded.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s office knew of looming natural gas shortages on February 10, days before a deep freeze plunged much of the state into blackouts, according to documents obtained by E&E News and reviewed by Ars.

Abbott’s office first learned of the likely shortfall in a phone call from then-chair of the Public Utility Commission of Texas DeAnne Walker. In the days leading up to the power outages that began on February 15, Walker and the governor’s office spoke 31 more times.

Walker also spoke with regulators, politicians, and utilities dozens of times about the gas curtailments that threatened the state’s electrical grid. The PUC chair’s diary for the days before the outage shows her schedule dominated by concerns over gas curtailments and the impact they would have on electricity generation. Before and during the disaster, she was on more than 100 phone calls with various agencies and utilities regarding gas shortages.

After the blackouts began, Abbott appeared on Fox News to falsely assert that wind turbines were the driving force behind the outages.

It had partners like Boeing and GE.

India's information technology (IT) ministry has written to all social media companies asking them to take down any content that refers to an "Indian variant" of the coronavirus, according to a letter issued on Friday which was seen by Reuters.

The World Health Organization said on May 11 that the coronavirus variant B.1.617, first identified in India last year, was being classified as a variant of global concern.

The Indian government a day later issued a statement saying media reports using the term "Indian Variant" were without any basis, saying the WHO had classified the variant as just B.1.617.

In a letter to social media companies on Friday, the IT ministry asked the companies to "remove all the content" that names or implies "Indian variant" of the coronavirus.

"This is completely FALSE. There is no such variant of Covid-19 scientifically cited as such by the World Health Organisation (WHO). WHO has not associated the term 'Indian Variant' with the B.1.617 variant of the coronavirus in any of its reports," stated the letter, which is not public.

A senior Indian government source told Reuters the notice was issued to send a message "loud and clear" that such mentions of "Indian variant" spread miscommunication and hurt the country's image.

The IT ministry could not be reached for comment.

Around the world, coronvirus variants have generically been referred to by doctors and health experts on the basis of where the are identified. This includes South Africa and Brazil variants.

A social media executive said it would be difficult to take down all content using the word as there would be hundreds of thousands of such posts, adding that "such a move would lead to keyword based censorship going forward."

The Indian government is facing increased criticism over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic, with Prime Minister Modi and state authorities being blamed for not adequately planning for the ongoing second wave of coronavirus infections.

India has the second-highest tally of COVID-19 cases in the world and has been reporting around 250,000 infections and 4,000 deaths daily.

Source: India asks social media firms to remove reference to 'Indian variant' of coronavirus