BOISE, Idaho (AP) — Scientists in Idaho this summer plan to remove the 62,000-pound (28,100-kilogram) stainless steel lid on one of the world’s most powerful nuclear test reactors for a rare internal overhaul.

The Advanced Test Reactor at the Idaho National Laboratory is being refurbished and improved with new components and experimental capacity, the scientists said in interviews this week.

The nine-month and $170 million effort, called a core internals changeout, started last month and is scheduled to be finished around the end of the year.

An additional $100 million has been spent over the last three years on replacing external equipment to keep the test reactor going.

Experiments at the reactor help the U.S. Navy’s nuclear-powered war fleet stay at sea longer, bolster NASA’s space exploration, and advance life-saving medical treatments. The reactor also plays a key role in the effort to keep commercial nuclear power plants running longer and creating new and safer reactors to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“ATR is an absolutely beautiful reactor,” said Sean O’Kelly, associate lab director in charge of the test reactor. “There has never been one like it on the planet.”

The reactor is configured so it can run multiple tests simultaneously. Some of the best testing slots face a decade-long wait for room to run experiments, and other slots are booked years in advance.

The ATR is unique because unlike commercial nuclear reactors that produce heat that’s turned into energy, the ATR produces neutrons so that new materials and fuels can be tested to see how they react in high-radiation environments. The test reactor’s unique cloverleaf design includes a core that’s surrounded by beryllium metal to reflect the neutrons.

But all those neutrons puts wear on the internal parts of the test reactor, meaning it would lose the ability to conduct experiments if it is not refurbished.

The reactor’s designers foresaw that problem and created a reactor with internal components that can be periodically replaced. The current changeout is the sixth since the reactor started operating in 1967 and the first in 17 years.

O’Kelly and Hans Vogel, director of the ATR Strategic Irradiation Capabilities Division, said that the most difficult challenge will come this summer when workers take off the stainless steel lid, exposing the inside of test reactor.

“Removing the reactor top head itself, that’s a 30-ton lift that we do, and that is a very infrequent evolution,” Vogel said, adding that will be followed by roughly three months of changing internal hardware.

O’Kelly and Vogel said the U.S. has looked at building a new test reactor that would cost billions of dollars, but so far opted to stick with the ATR.

It’s the most powerful test reactor of its kind in the world, producing 250 megawatts at full power. China has a test reactor that can produce 125 megawatts, followed by a test reactor in Belgium that can produce 100 megawatts. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee has one that can produce 85 megawatts.

The advantage with more power, O’Kelly said, is that fuels and materials can be tested to their limits.

“You don’t want fuel that is designed for 100 megawatts, and the first time you go to 103 megawatts, it fails,” he said. “You build a safety margin in, and we have to test to that safety margin.”

Additionally, the ATR has what O’Kelly describes as the ability to maintain “a constant gradient of neutron flux throughout the core. ATR has this constant curvature of flux, so the experimenters have a fixed power and they know exactly what the power is in that region.”

He said other test reactors can be more challenging for experiments because the environment is changing during the experiment.

The Advanced Test Reactor has been used to develop reactors and fuel that can last the 30-year lifespans of nuclear-powered U.S. warships. Because they don’t need refueling, the ships can spend more time on their missions, meaning the Navy needs to build fewer ships.

The USS Idaho, a Virginia-class nuclear-powered attack submarine, benefits from work done at the ATR. The submarine is scheduled to launch in 2023 and spend three decades in service.

Late this year or early next year, scientists expect the ATR will be put back together and have completed required safety testing.

“ATR will be able to run for at least another 15 to 20 years,” said O’Kelly, adding this internal changeout might not be the last. “We are planning to do at least one more (core internals changeout) in the lifetime of ATR in the 2030s.”

Source: Powerful US nuclear test reactor getting rare major overhaul

The Covid-19 outbreak is likely to have a long-lasting impact on India’s labour market.

In the third week of May, the unemployment rate across rural and urban India spiked as the second wave of Covid-19 persisted, according to independent think tank Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE).

Economists believe that some of these job losses may be “long-term in nature.”

“The second wave as well as the mismanagement is definitely going to make the employment situation worse,” said Jyotsna Jha, director at Centre for Budget and Policy Studies. “The jolt to the recovery process is going to push out some businesses from the market, leading to closures and therefore long-term job losses.”

India’s lockdown cost

While the pandemic has pushed several industries and small businesses into a tight spot, the current job crisis finds its roots in pre-pandemic times, economists said. The demonetisation of Rs500 and Rs1,000 notes in 2016 dented the demand and rendered many jobless. Also, the poor implementation of a new tax regime—good and services tax—had hurt the small and medium enterprises, which employs around 110 million non-farm labourers.

Due to these factors “the economy was already dealing with slow growth and sluggish employment when Covid-19 hit,” said Ashwini Deshpande, professor of economics and the founding director of the Centre for Economic Data and Analysis at Ashoka University.

Now this rising unemployment, fuelled by the pandemic-led lockdowns, threatens to translate into a “vicious cycle” of a severe economic downturn.

“Lower surplus available for reinvestment and lowering of incomes in all sectors will impact the demand adversely. It will create a vicious circle of low demand, investment and income,” said Jha. She added that the worst impact of these headwinds will be in the form of not only lowering incomes but also in terms of loss of livelihoods.

This means that the Narendra Modi government can fix the snowballing job crisis only by supporting demand and consumption.

“The government needs to give direct income support to those who have been rendered unemployed; payroll support to small enterprises so that they don’t have to retrench workers during lockdowns and expand the reach of MNREGA (job scheme) in rural areas. Along with this, it must consider urban employment guarantee and/or a universal basic income,” Deshpande said.

This, she believes, will ensure minimum purchasing power in the hands of the people that would be the cornerstone of a gradual recovery.

Source: The Covid-19 pandemic has left thousands of Indians unemployed—perhaps forever

Face masks are among the most simple, easy-to-use, and effective measure against the airborne transmission of infectious respiratory diseases, but their usefulness against COVID-19 is still under debate. Some earlier investigations found that masks were apparently not effective under certain conditions. Others found high efficacies, but a conclusive explanation for the apparent contradictions and inconsistencies had not been given.

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry (MPIC), the Medical Center of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, and the Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin together with partners from China and the U.S. used observational data and a novel quantitative model of airborne virus exposure to elucidate how the efficacy of face masks depends on characteristic regimes of airborne virus concentration.

In most situations, even simple surgical masks are effective

"For the airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2, we find that usually just a minor fraction of exhaled respiratory particles contains viruses. Most environments and contacts are under virus-limited conditions, where face masks, including simple surgical masks, have a high efficacy in preventing the spread of COVID-19," explains Yafang Cheng, the head of a Minerva Research Group at the MPIC. "Our study provides a detailed and novel mechanistic understanding of population-average mask efficacy, which explains why regions with a higher percentage of the population wearing masks have better control of the pandemic."

In virus-rich indoor environments with high infection probability, however, more advanced masks (N95/FFP2) and other protective equipment are required to prevent airborne transmission. The strong dependence of mask efficacy on airborne virus concentration highlights the importance of combining masks with other protective measures such as ventilation and distancing to keep the infection probability low.

"The combination of high-efficiency masks with other protective measures is particularly important for hospitals, medical centers, and other indoor environments, where high risk patients may encounter high virus concentrations," says Christian Witt, head of the Research Area Pneumology at the Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin. "Masks will remain an important protective measure against SARS-Cov-2 infection—even for vaccinated persons, especially when the protection provided by vaccination decreases over time."

The approach can be used to assess protection against more infectious mutants

"Our approach and results of relating the effectiveness of protective measures to the infection probability and basic reproduction number are applicable to a wide range of respiratory viruses and diseases, including coronaviruses, rhinoviruses, and influenza. They can also be used to assess the efficacy of masks and other preventive measures against new and more infectious mutants of SARS-CoV-2." says Hang Su, research group leader at the MPIC. "Our investigations also show that aerosol transmission does not necessarily lead to very high reproduction numbers as observed for measles, and that relatively low reproduction numbers do not rule out airborne transmission."

Moreover, the study demonstrates how important high compliance and correct use of masks are to ensure their effectiveness in reducing the reproduction number of COVID-19. To reduce the reproduction number from ~3 as originally observed to below 1, at least 60-70% compliance would be required for surgical masks (~40% for N95/FFP2 masks). Higher rates of compliance would be required for more infectious variants of SARS-CoV-2, which re-emphasizes that masks should be combined with other protective measures like ventilation and distancing for efficient reduction of infection probabilities and reproduction numbers.

"Our study explains quantitatively why and how face masks are highly effective in virus-limited environments and less effective in virus-rich environments—both at the individual and the population average level related to observed infection rates and effective reproduction numbers. This has not been achieved before and is essential to overcome inconclusive earlier results, arguments, and discussions. We are confident, that the mechanistic insights and quantitative results gained in our study constitute a scientific breakthrough that will help to settle the ongoing debate about the usefulness of masks and promote efficient mitigation of the COVID pandemic," summarizes Ulrich Pöschl, director of the MPIC Multiphase Chemistry Department.

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These types of medication—GLP-1 receptor agonists—are a newer class of FDA-approved therapeutics that are generally used in addition to metformin for control of blood sugar or to induce weight loss in patients with obesity.

Researchers from Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School and University Hospital Zurich in Switzerland used electronic health record (EHR) data of patients with asthma and type 2 diabetes who initiated treatment with GLP-1R agonists, finding lower rates of asthma exacerbations and reduced asthma symptoms as compared to those who initiated other type 2 diabetes medications.

Their findings were published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

"We have demonstrated really for the first time that this class of medications used to treat type 2 diabetes and obesity may also have benefit for our patients who have asthma," said lead author Katherine Cahill, MD, medical director of Clinical Asthma Research in the Division of Allergy, Pulmonary, and Critical Care Medicine at VUMC.

"In a six-month period, type 2 diabetes patients who received this form of medication to improve blood sugar control also had better control of their asthma disease and symptoms compared to those who took alternative therapies," she said.

Cahill's study was a retrospective, observational study, so definitive prospective studies such as a clinical trial in patients with asthma, with and without comorbid type 2 diabetes, are required to confirm these medications provide benefit for asthma.

"For patients who have type 2 diabetes and asthma it means that some of their medications for type 2 diabetes may actually help their asthma control," Cahill said.

"For patients who have asthma but may not have type 2 diabetes it means that there could be a new class of medications that could be used for treatment."

In preclinical models completed at VUMC, GLP-1R agonists have been shown to reduce allergic airway inflammation and viral-induced airway inflammation. To translate these findings into human disease, Cahill and colleagues took advantage of the widespread use of GLP-1R agonists for the treatment of type 2 diabetes and available clinical information in EHR data.

VUMC colleagues Shinji Toki, Ph.D., Melissa Bloodworth, MD, Ph.D., Stokes Peebles, MD, and Kevin Niswender, MD, Ph.D., had previously shown in preclinical models of asthma that this class of medications reduces inflammation in the lung as well as how the lung responds to certain challenges like allergies and viruses. Other early preclinical data also suggest it is possible this therapy could have benefits in the airway for other airway diseases.

"In our study we found that patients with asthma received benefits from this medication because they had improved asthma control, so fewer asthma symptoms, and fewer acute flares, or what we call exacerbations, of their asthma," Cahill said.

"Our study demonstrated that the patients reported better breathing symptoms and fewer reports of shortness of breath and cough."

One member of the class of medications that induces early satiety, leading to weight loss, is already approved for the treatment of obesity. Future studies will investigate if the drug could improve outcomes for patients with both asthma and obesity.

Cahill and VUMC colleagues have received National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding to initiate a randomized, controlled clinical trial of GLP-1R agonists in asthma during the next year.

"Our next step is to take this medication and study it in patients with asthma. Here at Vanderbilt, we are going to actually be looking at patients who are obese and have asthma and assess whether the drug actually makes their asthma better or not," Cahill said.

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As an associate professor of nursing with a background in public health, and as a mother of two curious kids, I field this question fairly often. So here's the science behind why we get most vaccines in our arm.

It's worth noting that most, but not all, vaccines are given in the muscle—this is known as an intramuscular injection. Some vaccines, like the rotavirus vaccine, are given orally. Others are given just beneath the skin, or subcutaneously—think of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. However, many others are given in the muscle.

But why is the muscle so important, and does location matter? And why the arm muscle—called the deltoid – in the top of the shoulder?

Muscles have immune cells

Muscles make an excellent vaccine administration site because muscle tissue contains important immune cells. These immune cells recognize the antigen, a tiny piece of a virus or bacteria introduced by the vaccine that stimulates an immune response. In the case of the COVID-19 vaccine, it is not introducing an antigen but rather administering the blueprint for producing antigens. The immune cells in the muscle tissue pick up these antigens and present them to the lymph nodes.

Injecting the vaccine into muscle tissue keeps the vaccine localized, allowing immune cells to sound the alarm to other immune cells and get to work.

Once a vaccine is recognized by the immune cells in the muscle, these cells carry the antigen to lymph vessels, which transport the antigen-carrying immune cells into the lymph nodes. Lymph nodes, key components of our immune system, contain more immune cells that recognize the antigens in vaccines and start the immune process of creating antibodies.

Clusters of lymph nodes are located in areas close to vaccine administration sites. For instance, many vaccines are injected in the deltoid because it is close to lymph nodes located just under the armpit. When vaccines are given in the thigh, the lymph vessels don't have far to travel to reach the cluster of lymph nodes in the groin.

Muscles keep the action localized

Muscle tissue also tends to keep vaccine reactions localized. Injecting a vaccine into the deltoid muscle may result in local inflammation or soreness at the injection site. If certain vaccines are injected into fat tissue, the chance of irritation and inflammation reaction increases because fat tissue has poor blood supply, leading to poor absorption of some vaccine components.

Vaccines that include the use of adjuvants—or components that enhance the immune response to the antigen—must be given in a muscle to avoid widespread irritation and inflammation. Adjuvants act in a variety of ways to stimulate a stronger immune response.

Yet another deciding factor in vaccine administration location is the size of the muscle. Adults and children ages three and older tend to receive vaccines in their upper arm in the deltoid. Younger children receive their vaccines mid-thigh because their arm muscles are smaller and less developed.

Another consideration during vaccine administration is convenience and patient acceptability. Can you imagine taking down your pants at a mass vaccination clinic? Rolling up your sleeve is way easier and more preferred. Infectious disease outbreaks, as in flu season or amid epidemics like COVID-19, require our public health system to vaccinate as many people as possible in a short time. For these reasons, a shot in the arm is preferred simply because the upper arm is easily accessible.

All things considered, when it comes to the flu shot and the COVID-19 vaccine, for most adults and kids, the arm is the preferred vaccination route.

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Middle-aged folks who regularly turn to TV for entertainment appear to have a greater risk of decline in their reasoning and memory later in life, three new studies suggest.

Researchers found that even moderate amounts of TV viewing were associated with worse performance on cognitive tests as people aged. Regular TV viewers also experienced greater brain atrophy.

The investigators couldn't say whether TV itself is directly behind this brain decline, or if it's the amount of sedentary couch time folks accumulate while watching television.

"I don't think it's necessarily the act of watching TV itself that is bad for brain health, but that it may potentially be a proxy measure of sedentary behavior," said Priya Palta, an assistant professor of medical sciences and epidemiology at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City. She's a lead researcher for one of the studies.

All three studies were presented virtually Thursday at the American Heart Association's Epidemiology, Prevention, Lifestyle and Cardiometabolic Health Conference. Findings presented at medical meetings are considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

It makes sense that prolonged sedentary behavior could eventually rob people of brain power, said American Heart Association President Dr. Mitch Elkind, chief of the Division of Neurology Clinical Outcomes Research and Population Sciences in the Department of Neurology at Columbia University.

"It definitely rings true to me that both sedentary behavior and the things that go along with it like obesity and high blood pressure and diabetes could lead to a gradual accumulation of brain injury over time," Elkind said. "The brain is also supplied by the blood vessels, and diseases of the heart and the blood vessels can lead to brain problems like cognitive decline and even dementia."

Two of the studies focused on participants in the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) study, a long-term research effort focused on the health effects of hardened arteries.

More TV time, less gray matter

Palta's study involved nearly 6,500 participants who tended to watch about the same amount of television over a roughly six-year period of time in the mid-1980s to mid-1990s.

The people were placed in three groups—those who never or seldom watched TV, those who sometimes watched, and those who often or very often watched—and underwent a series of brain performance tests as they grew older to track changes in their abilities.

"We found that compared to participants that reported watching very little television, participants that reported watching moderate or high amounts of television had about a 7% greater decline in cognitive function, based on their performance on cognitive tests over 15 years," Palta said.

A second study also used ARIC data but focused on about 970 people with relatively stable TV viewing habits who underwent additional brain scans to track changes in their brain structure.

This research team found that people who sometimes or frequently watched TV had lower volumes of deep gray matter more than a decade later in life, which indicates greater brain atrophy or deterioration, said lead researcher Kelley Pettee Gabriel, a professor of epidemiology in the School of Public Health at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Gray brain matter is involved in muscle control, vision, hearing, decision-making and other important brain functions. The more volume of gray matter in a person's brain, the better their ability to remember and reason, typically.

The third study also focused on gray brain matter, but used a different set of data drawn from the long-term Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults study.

About 600 people were asked the average number of hours they spent in front of the tube daily during follow-up visits that occurred every five years for two decades.

Twenty years into the study, researchers conducted MRI brain scans to assess how much gray matter each participant still had.

This study also found that greater TV viewing was associated with lower volume of gray brain matter later in life.

For every extra hour of TV a person watched, on average, they lost about 0.5% of gray matter—similar to the annual rate of brain deterioration in seniors, said lead researcher Ryan Dougherty, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.

Exercising when not on the couch isn't enough

This might not be something that can be addressed by working out when you're not being a couch potato, either.

In all of the studies, the physical activity and exercise habits of people did not impact the association between the hours they spent watching TV and their decline in brain function and gray matter volume.

These findings suggest "that this sedentary behavior may impart a unique risk with respect to brain and cognitive health," Dougherty said in a conference news release. "This is an important finding since it is now well accepted that the neurobiology of dementia, including brain atrophy, begins during midlife. That's a period where modifiable behaviors such as excessive television viewing can be targeted and reduced to promote healthy brain aging."

"Even if you go for a run, that's good and you can get your 30 minutes a day of physical activity, but if you spend the rest of the time sitting in an office at a desk and not moving at all, that may take away some of the benefits of exercise," Elkind said. "Overall, I would say the more movement, the better. Try to get some activity in every hour, even if you have to set a little reminder to do it."

There's also a chance that other more mentally stimulating sedentary activities might not be as harmful to future brain health.

"Watching TV is what we would classify as a cognitively passive sedentary behavior—a sedentary behavior that does not require much concentration or thought," Palta said. "This is in contrast to mentally active sedentary behaviors, like reading, that would be more cognitively stimulating or require more brain work."

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As Shi and Gao note, the new strain of influenza virus was first discovered in a duck in China back in 2010. By 2014, outbreaks had been seen in Japan and South Korea in both domestic and wild birds. And by 2016, it had been found in birds in India, Russia Mongolia, the U.S. and parts of Europe. By 2020, outbreaks had been seen in 46 countries. Shi and Gao note that this history indicates that the virus is able to spread very rapidly. Even more concerning was a report of crossover infections in seven Russian farm workers this past December. The authors note that the infected workers did not have any symptoms (they were tested for safety reasons) and there was no indication that the virus was transmissible from one person to the next. But they point out, that once a crossover has been made, it generally does not take a virus long to adapt to spread to other victims—they note how quickly the virus mutated to jump from duck to duck and then to other bird species. They also note that the virus has been found to be quite lethal, with massive die-offs in multiple outbreaks. The Russian workers were tested, for example, after 101,000 hens died.

On a more optimistic note, Shi and Gao note that it is not too late to take preventive measures that could prevent a pandemic. They suggest that vigilant surveillance of farms, live markets and wild birds, along with the implementation of standard infection control measures, could slow the spread of the virus, giving pharmaceutical companies time to develop a vaccine for it.

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Researchers in the study, published in the Clinical Infectious Diseases journal on Thursday, said their findings underscored the public health threat of animal coronaviruses.

The researchers said they had tested nasal swab samples taken from 301 pneumonia patients at a hospital in the east Malaysian state of Sarawak. Eight of the samples, mostly from children under 5 years old, came back positive for a canine coronavirus.

Further genomic sequencing found that the new strain, named CCoV-HuPn-2018, shared characteristics of other coronaviruses known to have infected cats and pigs but was mostly similar to one that is known to have infected dogs.

It also contained a genetic deletion, or mutation, that was not found in any known canine coronaviruses but was present in human strains such as SARS-COV and SARS-COV-2, the virus behind the COVID-19 pandemic. The source of the SARS-COV-2 coronavirus itself, whether animal or other, remains unclear.

The paper's authors said the findings indicated that the virus likely recently jumped from animals to humans, but stressed that more studies were needed to determine whether it can be transmitted between people.

They also said it was unclear whether the virus could make people sick, noting that it was possible it was merely "carried" in the patient's airways without causing disease.

There are seven coronaviruses known to cause disease in humans: four that cause the common cold, and three that cause the diseases commonly known as SARS, MERS and COVID-19. (Reporting by Rozanna Latiff; Editing by Hugh Lawson)

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Physicists quantify this tendency to spread by counting the number of possible ways the dye molecules can be arranged.

There’s one possible state where the molecules are crowded into the thimble. There’s another where, say, the molecules settle in a tidy clump at the pool’s bottom. But there are uncountable billions of permutations where the molecules spread out in different ways throughout the water. If the universe chooses from all the possible states at random, you can bet that it’s going to end up with one of the vast set of disordered possibilities.

Seen in this way, the inexorable rise in entropy, or disorder, as quantified by the second law of thermodynamics, takes on an almost mathematical certainty. So of course physicists are constantly trying to break it.

One almost did. A thought experiment devised by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1867 stumped scientists for 115 years. And even after a solution was found, physicists have continued to use “Maxwell’s demon” to push the laws of the universe to their limits.

In the thought experiment, Maxwell imagined splitting a room full of gas into two compartments by erecting a wall with a small door. Like all gases, this one is made of individual particles. The average speed of the particles corresponds to the temperature of the gas—faster is hotter. But at any given time, some particles will be moving more slowly than others.

What if, suggested Maxwell, a tiny imaginary creature—a demon, as it was later called—sat at the door. Every time it saw a fast-moving particle approaching from the left-hand side, it opened the door and let it into the right-hand compartment. And every time a slow-moving particle approached from the right, the demon let it into the left-hand compartment.

After a while, the left-hand compartment would be full of slow, cold particles, and the right-hand compartment would grow hot. This isolated system would seem to grow more orderly, not less, because two distinguishable compartments have more order than two identical compartments. Maxwell had created a system that appeared to defy the rise of entropy, and thus the laws of the universe.

“He tried to prove a system where the entropy would decrease,” said Laia Delgado Callico, a physicist at King’s College London. “It’s a paradox.”

Two advances would be crucial to solving Maxwell’s demon. The first was by the American mathematician Claude Shannon, regarded as the founder of information theory. In 1948, Shannon showed that the information content of a message could be quantified with what he called the information entropy. “In the 19th century, no one knew about information,” said Takahiro Sagawa, a physicist at the University of Tokyo. “The modern understanding of Maxwell’s demon was established by Shannon’s work.”

The second vital piece of the puzzle was the principle of erasure. In 1961, the German American physicist Rolf Landauer showed that any logically irreversible computation, such as the erasing of information from a memory, would result in a minimal nonzero amount of work converted into heat dumped into the environment, and a corresponding rise in entropy.

Landauer’s erasure principle provided a tantalizing link between information and thermodynamics. “Information is physical,” he later proclaimed.

In 1982, the American physicist Charles Bennett put the pieces of the puzzle together. He realized that Maxwell’s demon was at core an information-processing machine: It needed to record and store information about individual particles in order to decide when to open and close the door. Periodically it would need to erase this information. According to Landauer’s erasure principle, the rise in entropy from the erasure would more than compensate for the decrease in entropy caused by the sorting of the particles. “You need to pay,” said Gonzalo Manzano, a physicist at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information in Vienna. The demon’s need to make room for more information inexorably led to a net increase in disorder.

Then in the 21st century, with the thought experiment solved, the real experiments began. “The most important development is we can now realize Maxwell’s demon in laboratories,” said Sagawa.

In 2007 scientists used a light-powered gate to demonstrate the idea of Maxwell’s demon in action; in 2010, another team devised a way to use the energy produced by the demon’s information to coax a bead uphill; and in 2016 scientists applied the idea of Maxwell’s demon to two compartments containing not gas, but light.

“We switched the roles of matter and light,” said Vlatko Vedral, a physicist at the University of Oxford and one of the study’s co-authors. The researchers were ultimately able to charge a very small battery.

Others wondered if there might be less demanding ways to use information to extract useful work from a similar system. And research published in February 2021 in Physical Review Letters seems to have found a way to do so. The work makes the demon into a gambler.

The team, led by Manzano, wondered if there was a way to implement something like Maxwell’s demon but without the information requirements. They imagined a two-compartment system with a door, as before. But in this case, the door would open and close on its own. Sometimes particles would randomly separate themselves into hotter and colder compartments. The demon could only watch this process and decide when to turn the system off. In theory this process could create a small temperature imbalance, and therefore a useful heat engine, if the demon was smart about when to end the experiment and lock any temperature imbalance in place, much as a smart gambler on a hot streak knows when to leave the table. “You can either play all night on the roulette table, or you can stop if you win $100,” said Édgar Roldán, a physicist at the International Center for Theoretical Physics in Italy who was a co-author on the study. “We’re saying we don’t need such a complicated device as Maxwell’s demon to extract work in the second law. We can be more relaxed.” The researchers then implemented such a gambling demon in a nanoelectronic device, to show it was possible.

Ideas like this could prove useful in designing more efficient thermal systems, like refrigerators, or even in developing more advanced computer chips, which may be approaching a fundamental limit dictated by Landauer’s principle.

For the time being, though, our laws of the universe are safe, even when placed under the greatest scrutiny. What has changed is our understanding of information in the universe, and with it our appreciation of Maxwell’s demon, first a troublesome paradox, and now an invaluable concept—one that has helped to illuminate the remarkable link between the physical world and information.

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The Treasury Department issued a report Thursday that outlines measures. Among the proposed changes, businesses that receive "cryptoassets" with a fair market value of more than $10,000 would have to report it to the IRS. That's something businesses already have to do when with cash transactions of $10,000 or more.

The report explains that while the share of business transactions that involve cryptocurrency remains small, the new reporting requirement is necessary to discourage businesses from concealing such transactions from the IRS in the future.

The report notes that cryptocurrency "already poses a significant problem by facilitating illegal activity broadly, including tax evasion."

Another policy change would require payment-services providers to file Form 1099 reports in order to discourage businesses from attempting to hide their income by using alternatives to traditional banks.

Digital currencies were holding on to gains late Thursday after the release of the Treasury Department report. The price of Bitcoin was up 2.5% to roughly $40,401, according to the online brokerage Coinbase. A day earlier, the price of Bitcoin and other digital currencies fell sharply after China's banking association issued a warning over the risks associated with digital currencies.

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Arctic sea ice looks set to be an early victims of rising temperatures, with each fraction of a degree making a big difference: the chance of it disappearing entirely in summer is 10 times greater if Earth warms by 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels compared to 1.5C, the goal set by the 2015 Paris Accord.

The alarming finding comes from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) in a report timed to coincide with a ministerial meeting this week of the Arctic Council in Reykjavik, which gathers countries bordering the region.

"The Arctic is a real hotspot for climate warming," said Jason Box, a glaciologist at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland.

In less than half a century, from 1971 to 2019, the Arctic's average annual temperature rose by 3.1C, compared to 1C for the planet as a whole.

That's more than previously suspected. In a 2019 report on Earth's frozen spaces, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that Arctic surface air temperature has likely increased "by more than double the global average".

Forest fires

According to researchers, a turning point came in 2004 when the temperature in the Arctic surged for largely unexplained reason.

Since then, warming has continued at a rate 30 percent higher than in previous decades.

The region is now experiencing "more and longer lasting winter warm events," Box told AFP.

During the summer months from June to September, there is added heat from the ocean, which is increasingly free of ice and the insulation it provides.

And the warming is not coming to an end any time soon.

According to forecasts in the report, by the end of the century average temperatures in the Arctic are expected to rise 3.3 to 10 degrees above the average for the period 1985-2014.

The final figure depends on how rapidly humanity draws down greenhouse gas emissions.

According to researchers, a turning point came in 2004 when the temperature in the Arctic surged for largely unexplained reason.

Warming has immediate consequences for the Arctic ecosystem, including changes in habitat, food habits and interactions between animals—including the iconic polar bear—and the migration of some species.

From Siberia to Alaska, forest fires have also become a problem.

"This is what 3C looks like, it's not just numbers, it's forests on fire," said Box.

"The impacts of wild land fires are not limited to public safety concerns, such as protecting life and property," said US researcher Michael Young, Arctic Council Wildland Fire Projects Coordinator.

"The smoke they produce also contains carbon dioxide and black carbon, which both contribute to climate change."

Global impact

The consequences are also dramatic for the four million people who live in the region, especially indigenous peoples.

"Hunters in northwestern Greenland report that the period when travel by dog sleds on sea ice is possible has decreased from five to three months," said Sarah Trainor, director of the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy.

"Indigenous hunters and fishermen in Canada and Russia have reported thinner seals, decreased health of wildlife and a greater prevalence of worms in fish and sea mammals," she added.

A warmer Arctic is also more humid, with rain replacing snow.

"Reindeer herders in Fennoscandia (Finland and Scandinavia) and Russia have experienced major losses in their herds due to extreme snowfall and rain-on-snow events," added Trainor, as layers of frozen rain prevent reindeer from reaching the lichen they eat.

"No one on Earth is immune to Arctic warming," the AMAP report said, noting its effects were felt far and wide.

The melting of hundreds of billions of tonnes of ice each year in Greenland leads to rising sea levels, which endanger the lives of people living thousands of kilometres away.

The receding ice has opened up economic opportunities—often to the dismay of environmental activists—including new fishing zones, new commercial shipping routes, and easier access to potential mineral and oil and gas resources.

However, notes Trainor, "the potential for expansion of these industries is tempered by efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions and achieve goals established under the Paris Agreement."

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Ford as promised this week officially unveiled the F-150 Lightning, an all-electric version of the nation’s best-selling vehicle.

The new F-150 Lightning features an all-new frame utilizing “the strongest steel ever put in an F-150 frame,” an aluminum alloy body, new independent rear suspension and dual in-board motors with standard 4x4. It's also the most aerodynamic F-150 ever created, with a sculpted hood and newly shaped running boards to reduce drag.

Ford is offering two battery packages. The standard-range battery will afford an EPA-estimated 230 miles of range while the extended-range option is said to be good for 300 miles on a full charge.

Pricing starts at $39,974 MSRP before any federal or state tax credits for a commercial-oriented entry model and climbs to $52,974 MSRP for a mid-series XLT model.

The first batch of third-gen Lightnings should start rolling off the assembly line in spring 2022. A $100 deposit can reserve your spot in line today.

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All Those Electric Vehicles Pose a Problem for Building Roads

Pfizer’s COVID vaccine can stay in normal fridge for up to a month, FDA says

Change extends fridge storage from 5 days to a month—significantly aiding logistics.

Pfizer’s COVID vaccine can stay in normal fridge for up to a month, FDA says

The researchers used a national database of the Japan Government, based on the annual survey of all children born in the certain period of the year 2001. In 47,015 eligible children from the database over time, watching television or videos as a primary form of "play" and also daily duration of television-watching were assessed in the earlier years of life. The same children at elementary school were assessed yearly from the ages of 7 to 12 years to measure any concerns about visual acuity raised by their parents.

The Okayama University team first observed that if children had high television exposure at the ages of 1.5 years or 2.5 years, parents showed significant concerns around their children's eyesight in the second half of the study. This observation was consistent for children of both sexes and did not change based on parameters such as residential area or parents' education. Deeper analysis showed parents of children aged 2.5 years who watched television for greater than or equal to 2 hours/day had much greater concern for their children's visual acuity compared to those of children who watched television for up to 1 hour daily. However, as a child's age increased, their parent's concern during later years decreased.

To ensure uniformity of the results, the researchers re-analyzed the responses of a smaller pool of participants—those who participated in all surveys conducted when the children were between 7 to 12 years of age. Not only did the responses from this group reiterate their primary findings, but it was also found that the proportion of concerned parents increased as the children aged from 7 to 12 years. Visual acuity seems likely to deteriorate with age.

"This nationwide population-based longitudinal study is the first to demonstrate that television-watching only in the earlier years of life, but not in the later years, leads to the later consequence of visual acuity problems at elementary school age," conclude Professor Matsuo Toshihiko and Professor Yorifuji Takashi.

Hence, carefully monitoring a child's television exposure up to the age of three could be a critical factor in healthy eyesight development. The research suggests that younger children should be encouraged to try more traditional ways of playing.

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A stroke happens when blood supply to the brain is interrupted or reduced, preventing brain tissue from getting oxygen and nutrients. This causes brain cells to become damaged or die.

Risks of stroke vary by race and ethnicity. African American men and women are more likely to have a stroke than any other population in the country. Dr. Maisha Robinson, a Mayo Clinic neurologist, talks about what African American adults can do to lower their risk of stroke.

Everyone is at risk of stroke. But minorities are at greatest risk.

"We don't understand exactly all the reasons behind this, but what we know is that the similar risk factors for stroke, which are apparent in the entire population, are more common, particularly in African Americans," says Dr. Robinson.

She says African Americans are not only at increased risk of having a stroke, but they're also at increased risk of being debilitated by or dying from a stroke.

"Knowing your numbers, being able to assess the situation and then addressing the situation with regard to blood pressure, cholesterol, diabetes, weight, diet is very important, especially in that population," says Dr. Robinson.

Stroke is a medical emergency. Symptoms include difficulty speaking, paralysis or numbness in the face, arm or leg, difficulty seeing, difficulty walking or a sudden intense headache.

It's important to act quickly and call 911 if you or someone you are with shows signs of having a stroke.

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In the United States, incidence rates of early-onset colorectal cancer have nearly doubled between 1992 and 2013 (from 8.6 to 13.1 per 100,000), with most of this increase due to early-onset cancers of the rectum. Approximately 1 in 10 diagnoses of colorectal cancer in this country occur in people under 50.

Researchers have observed the rise particularly among people born since the 1960s in studies from the United States, Canada, Australia, and Japan. During the same period there have been major changes in diets among younger generations across the developing world. Such changes include decreases in consumption of fruits, non-potato vegetables, and calcium-rich dairy sources. This is coupled with an increase in processed foods (e.g., meats, pizza, macaroni and cheese, etc.) and soft drinks. Average nutrient intakes of fiber, folate, and calcium among the U.S. population are also lower than recommended.

The increase in early onset colorectal cancer is concerning to researchers because these cancers often have worse outcomes than those diagnosed in older people. It has led to recommendations that colorectal cancer screening begin at younger ages.

Previous research has outlined potential risk factors for early-onset colorectal cancer including greater consumption of processed meat, reduced consumption of vegetables and citrus fruit, greater body mass index, sedentary lifestyles, greater alcohol use, smoking, reduced aspirin use, and diabetes. However, researchers have yet to perform a comprehensive, large-scale evaluation that compares the magnitude of these risks with those for late-onset colorectal cancer and assesses whether the risks for early-onset colorectal cancer correlate with specific types of colorectal cancer.

Using data pooled from 13 population-based studies, researchers here studied 3,767 colorectal cancer cases and 4,049 controls in people under 50 and 23,437 colorectal cancer cases and 35,311 controls in people 50 or above years.

Early-onset colorectal cancer was associated with not regularly using aspirins, greater red meat intake, lower educational attainment, heavier alcohol use, and (interestingly enough) also alcohol abstinence. Researchers also found that lower total fiber intake was linked more strongly to rectal than colon cancer.

Several other colorectal cancer risk factors trended toward an association with early-onset colorectal cancer, including history of diabetes and lower folate, dietary fiber, and calcium intake. However, neither BMI nor smoking were risk factors in the early-onset group, in contrast to the late-onset group.

According to Richard Hayes, the senior investigator for this research: "this first large-scale study of non-genetic risk factors for early-onset colorectal cancer is providing the initial basis for targeted identification of those most at risk, which is imperative in mitigating the rising burden of this disease."

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According to the researchers, approximately one third of adults are obese and require much larger doses of vitamin D to satisfy their requirement. "This vitamin D metabolite is better absorbed in patients with fat malabsorption syndromes and since it is not as fat soluble, it does not gets diluted in the body fat and is effective in raising and maintaining blood levels of 25-hydroxyvitamin D in obese people," explained corresponding author Michael F. Holick, Ph.D., MD, professor of medicine, physiology and biophysics and molecular medicine at Boston University School of Medicine.

Healthy adults, adults with a fat malabsorption syndrome and obese adults were compared to evaluate if a more water-soluble form of vitamin D3 known as 25-hydroxyvitamin D3 was more effective than the same dose of vitamin D3 in improving their vitamin D status. The researchers observed that compared to healthy adults only about 36 percent of orally ingested vitamin D3 was found in the blood of patients with fat malabsorption syndromes including patients who had gastric bypass surgery. When the same adults ingested 25-hydroxyvitamin D3 the patients with fat malabsorption syndromes were able to absorb it as well as the healthy adults thereby raising their vitamin D status to the same degree. A similar observation was made in the obese subjects compared to the healthy controls. "Therefore using 25-hydroxyvitamin D3 could be a novel approach for treating vitamin D deficiency in patients with fat malabsorption syndromes and obese adults," added Holick.

Vitamin D deficiency not only results in bone loss increasing risk for fracture but causes the painful bone disease osteomalacia. Patients who are vitamin D deficient with osteomalacia have unrelenting achiness in their bones and muscles. Vitamin D deficiency has been associated with an increased risk of many chronic illnesses including multiple sclerosis, type 1 diabetes, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, depression, neurocognitive dysfunction and Alzheimer's disease as well as infectious diseases including COVID.

These findings appear online in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

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Called A-76 and roughly the shape of Manhattan but more than 70 times bigger, it was picked up on satellite images and is "currently the largest berg in the world", the ESA said Wednesday.

The iceberg is around 170 kilometres (105 miles) long and 25 kilometres wide, with an area of 4,320 square kilometres, slightly larger than the Spanish island of Majorca.

The berg, which broke off the western side of the Ronne Ice Shelf, was originally spotted by the British Antarctic Survey and confirmed using images from the Copernicus satellite.

It takes the place as the world's largest from the A-23A iceberg—approximately 3,880 sq km in size—which is also in the Weddell Sea.

In November last year, what was then the world's largest iceberg appeared to be on a collision course with a remote South Atlantic island home to thousands of penguins and seals, threatening to impede their ability to gather food.

The iceberg, known as A68a, had also broken off from the Larsen Ice Shelf, which has warmed faster than any other part of Earth's southernmost continent.

A68a, which was 160 kilometres long and 48 kilometres across, broke apart before it could cause any damage to the abundant wildlife in the British Overseas Territory of South Georgia.

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

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

Major chunks of the Peninsula's Larsen Ice Shelf—which had been stable for more than 10,000 years—disintegrated within days in 1995, and again in 2002. This was followed by the breakup of the nearby Wilkins Ice Shelf in 2008 and 2009.

A process known as hydrofracturing was likely the main culprit in both cases, earlier research has shown.

Hydrofracturing occurs when water -– which is heavier than ice –- pours through cracks in the surface of ice shelves caused by surface warming, violently forcing the fractures to zip open, causing and iceberg to break off.

Icebergs are traditionally named after the Antarctic quadrant in which they were originally detected, then a sequential number.

If they break apart more letters are added to differentiate the fragments.

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The China Manned Space Agency gave no details on what the reasons were, and said only that a new launch time would be "determined later," the Xinhua News Agency reported.

The blast-off was to have taken place just days after China landed a rover on Mars, as it hustles ahead with its extraterrestrial ambitions.

Beijing has pumped billions into its space programme in a bid to make up ground on pioneers Russia and the United States, with ambitious projects in Earth orbit and the landing of uncrewed craft on the Moon and Mars.

But it was heavily reprimanded by the United States and many experts for a potentially dangerous breach of space etiquette for letting a massive rocket segment free-fall to Earth earlier this month after launching the core module of China's space station.

In the now-delayed mission, the Tianzhou-2 cargo craft was to have blasted off on a 14-tonne Long March 7 rocket, and had been expected to carry essentials such as food and space suits to the core module.

The space station—named Tiangong, meaning "heavenly palace"—will need around 10 missions in total to complete assembly in orbit.

Hao Chun, director of the China Manned Space Engineering Office, said the construction of the space station has entered a "critical stage".

It is expected to remain in low Earth orbit for up to 15 years.

With the possible retirement of the International Space Station after 2028, China's could become the only human outpost in Earth orbit.

Although Chinese authorities have said they are open to foreign collaboration on their space station, the scope of that cooperation is as yet unclear.

But the European Space Agency has already sent astronauts to China to train for work inside Tiangong when it is ready.

The latest cargo launch was to have come days after China landed its Zhurong rover on Mars, becoming only the third nation to successfully land a craft on the red planet.

The rover is expected to soon start studying Martian geology, spending around three months taking photos and harvesting data from a vast northern lava plain.

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Top infectious diseases official Dr. Anthony Fauci on Wednesday sought to clarify lingering confusion over the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s new mask guidance, warning many Americans are “misinterpreting” the rule-change to mean everyone can stop wearing their face coverings. 

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