One of the most unlikely passengers on the AI gadgets hype train is the toothbrush. With claims of using advanced algorithms and companion apps to help you brush your teeth better, toothbrushes have become a tech product for some brands.

 

So-called "AI toothbrushes" have become more common since debuting in 2017. Numerous brands now market AI capabilities for toothbrushes with three-figure price tags. But there's limited scientific evidence that AI algorithms help oral health, and companies are becoming more interested in using tech-laden toothbrushes to source user data.

AI toothbrushes

Kolibree was the first company to announce a "toothbrush with artificial intelligence." The French company debuted its Ara brush at CES 2017, with founder and CEO Thomas Serval saying, "Patented deep learning algorithms are embedded directly inside the toothbrush on a low-power processor. Raw data from the sensors runs through the processor, enabling the system to learn your habits and refine accuracy the more it’s used."

 

That's pretty much how other AI toothbrush companies describe their products: There's a vague algorithm working with an unnamed (likely cheap) processor and sensors to gather information, including how hard, fast, or frequently you brush your teeth. Typically, Bluetooth connectivity enables syncing this data with an app, purportedly letting users see interpretations of their brushing habits and how they could improve.

 

Kolibree now licenses its technology to Colgate-branded AI toothbrushes. The associated app, Colgate Connect, allows users to order Colgate products, sometimes at a discount. Other companies selling "AI toothbrushes" with connected e-commerce apps are Procter & Gamble's (P&G's) Oral-B, Philips, and Oclean, which announced a new tech-equipped toothbrush in July. Unlike many other toothbrushes, Oclean's X Ultra can work with Wi-Fi.

 

An Oclean spokesperson told Ars Technica via email:

 

The toothbrush’s chip and accelerometer collect user behavior data. The embedded algorithm processes this data, and the brushing data is uploaded to the cloud in real time (no need to open the app once Wi-Fi is connected). Data processed on the toothbrush is displayed on the screen with limited dimensions, while cloud-processed results are shown on the mobile app with more dimensions and AI suggestions (based on recent or long-term brushing habits).

Assuming you could find an AI toothbrush that delivers on its claims by helpfully pointing out that you tend to miss your top-right molar, there's reason to be skeptical about the necessity of such technology and the underlying motivations a brand may have in releasing an app-connected toothbrush.

AI toothbrushes help companies sell, develop products

Outside of toothbrushes, personal care brands have been seeking new ways to make money beyond selling units. As Stéphane Bérubé, CMO at beauty brand L’Oréal, put it, the industry can get value from selling services instead of just products. "I believe that the company that just sells products will not be successful," she said at a 2018 marketing conference.

 

AI toothbrushes follow a similar approach. Toothbrushing tips act as a service, while the connected apps offer ways to potentially diversify a company's business, make more revenue through product sales, and get an intimate understanding of how people use a product. The Oral-B toothbrush app, for example, can provide users information about their toothbrushing habits and recommend P&G products to buy while providing purchase links.

 

P&G has also discussed using AI in general as a way to get information that could help shape product development. As explained by P&G CIO Vittorio Cretella in a 2022 blog post, "algorithms can be defined to process consumer feedback on product changes and flag R&D engineers in real time, along with recommending adjustments accordingly.” As P&G's R&D team has pointed out, traditional methods for collecting data on consumers, like surveys and focus groups, rely on self-reporting that can be inaccurate. Using tech to gather information about the way people use products is a way for corporations to address that flaw.

 

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One of the things that the James Webb Space Telescope was designed to do was look at some of the earliest objects in the Universe. And it has already succeeded spectacularly, imaging galaxies as they existed just 250 million years after the Big Bang. But these galaxies were small, compact, and similar in scope to what we'd consider a dwarf galaxy today, which made it difficult to determine what was producing their light: stars or an actively feeding supermassive black hole at their core.

 

This week, Nature is publishing confirmation that some additional galaxies we've imaged also date back to just 300 million years after the Big Bang. Critically, one of them is bright and relatively large, allowing us to infer that most of its light was coming from a halo of stars surrounding its core, rather than originating in the same area as the central black hole. The finding implies that it formed through a continuing burst of star formation that started just 200 million years after the Big Bang.

Age checks

The galaxies at issue here were first imaged during the JADES (JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey) imaging program, which includes part of the area imaged for the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Initially, old galaxies were identified by using a combination of filters on one of Webb's infrared imaging cameras.

 

Most of the Universe is made of hydrogen, and figuring out the age of early galaxies involves looking for the most energetic transitions of hydrogen's electron, called the Lyman series. These transitions produce photons that are in the UV area of the spectrum. But the redshift of light that's traveled for billions of years will shift these photons into the infrared area of the spectrum, which is what Webb was designed to detect.

 

What this looks like in practice is that hydrogen-dominated material will emit a broad range of light right up to the highest energy Lyman transition. Above that energy, photons will be sparse (they may still be produced by things like processes that accelerate particles). This point in the energy spectrum is called the "Lyman break," and its location on the spectrum will change based on how distant the source is—the greater the distance to the source, the deeper into the infrared the break will appear.

 

Initial surveys checked for the Lyman break using filters on Webb's cameras that cut off different areas of the IR spectrum. Researchers looked for objects that showed up at low energies but disappeared when a filter that selected for higher-energy infrared photons was swapped in. The difference in energies between the photons allowed through by the two filters can provide a rough estimate of where the Lyman break must be.

 

Locating the Lyman break requires imaging with a spectrograph, which can sample the full spectrum of near-infrared light. Fortunately, Webb has one of those, too. The newly published study involved turning the NIRSpec onto three early galaxies found in the JADES images.

Too many, too soon

The researchers involved in the analysis only ended up with data from two of these galaxies. NIRSpec doesn't gather as much light as one of Webb's cameras can, and so the faintest of the three just didn't produce enough data to enable analysis. The other two, however, produced very clear data that placed the galaxies at a redshift measure roughly z = 14, which means we're seeing them as they looked 300 million years after the Big Bang. Both show sharp Lyman breaks, with the amount of light dropping gradually as you move further into the lower-energy part of the spectrum.

 

There's a slight hint of emissions from heavily ionized carbon atoms in one of the galaxies, but no sign of any other specific elements beyond hydrogen.

 

One of the two galaxies was quite compact, so similar to the other galaxies of this age that we'd confirmed previously. But the other, JADES-GS-ZZ14-0, was quite distinct. For starters, it's extremely bright, being the third most luminous distant galaxy out of hundreds we've imaged so far. And it's big enough that it's not possible for all its light to be originating from the core. That rules out the possibility that what we're looking at is a blurred view of an active galactic nucleus powered by a supermassive black hole feeding on material.

 

Instead, much of the light we're looking at seems to have originated in the stars of JADES-GS-ZZ14-0. Most of those stars are young, and there seems to be very little of the dust that characterizes modern galaxies. The researchers estimate that star formation started at least 100 million years earlier (meaning just 200 million years after the Big Bang) and continued at a rapid pace in the intervening time.

 

Combined with earlier data, the researchers write that this confirms that "bright and massive galaxies existed already only 300 [million years] after the Big Bang, and their number density is more than ten times higher than extrapolations based on pre-JWST observations." In other words, there were a lot more galaxies around in the early Universe than we thought, which could pose some problems for our understanding of the Universe's contents and their evolution.

 

Meanwhile, the early discovery of the extremely bright galaxy implies that there are a number of similar ones out there awaiting our discovery. This means there's going to be a lot of demand for time on NIRSpec in the coming years.

 

Nature, 2024. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07860-9  (About DOIs).

 

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You wake in the middle of the night to the sound of your child’s screams. You run into their room, where you find them thrashing about their bed as though battling an invisible monster. You call their name, but they don’t respond.

This situation sounds, and feels, like a parent’s nightmare — or perhaps a scene from Stranger Things. In fact, it’s known as a night terror, and, while disturbing, it’s not an uncommon occurrence in children, nor is it a harmful one.

What are night terrors?

Think of a night terror as a nightmare taken to the next level to include sound and motion. It can be frightening to observe, as the person appears to be in great distress.

“A child having a night terror might sit up in bed. They might act very afraid and upset. They may even be shouting or screaming or kind of flail and thrash about,” Tyanna C. Snider, a pediatric psychologist at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Ohio, told HuffPost.

“You might also see some more fear or panic symptoms like sweating, rapid heart rate, faster breathing,” she added. In spite of all this, the child remains asleep.

“Typically, the child will not even respond if someone tries to help,” Dr. Jonathan Miller, chief of pediatric primary care at Nemours Children’s Health in Delaware, told HuffPost.

“They can be very difficult, and honestly, almost nearly impossible to console,” Snider said.

The good news is that night terrors end without any intervention. “After a few minutes, or sometimes longer, the child calms down and goes back to sleep,” Miller said.

Bizarrely, and in contrast to a nightmare, the child will have no memory of their night terror the next morning — though parents often need some time to recover from the scare!

While adults can get night terrors, they are seen more frequently in children under the age of 13, Snider said. Some children only have a night terror once, while in others they are recurring, but most kids won’t have them once they reach adolescence.

“Night terrors in adults are often related to underlying anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder,” Miller said. He added that adults are also more likely to be injured during a night terror when they move around or get out of bed.

In children, night terrors are not uncommon. Estimates of their prevalence range widely, from 1-30%. A 2022 study involving 324 children who were followed from ages 1-3 found that the incidence was 16.7–20.5%.

Sleepwalking, sleep talking and night terrors are all considered sleep disorders, or parasomnia. While a person may walk or talk during a night terror, walking or talking during sleep doesn’t necessarily mean that a night terror is taking place.

“Sleepwalking may be associated with night terrors, but it is not a night terror itself,” Miller said. Interestingly, while people are often able to recall their nightmares, they usually have no recollection of night terrors, sleepwalking or  sleep talking.

Usually, Snider said, night terrors occur “within that first third of the night, because they’re happening during non-REM sleep.”

How should I handle a night terror?

If you believe your child is having a night terror, there is little to do other than wait for it to pass. Miller suggests that you:

•     Sit quietly near your child.
•     Make sure they don’t get hurt by thrashing or running around.
•     Wait patiently until your child goes back to sleep, usually within a few minutes.

While it is hard to see your child in this strange type of distress, Snider suggested that you “keep in mind that the child won’t have memory of this night terror, and that they’re not in any real danger.”

You may have heard that it is dangerous to awaken a person having a night terror. While it won’t physically harm the person, experts do recommend against it, as it can be disorienting for the child.

“Don’t try to wake your child,” Miller advised. “This usually doesn’t work, and kids who do wake up are likely to be confused and upset.”

It’s worth mentioning any night terrors your child has to your pediatrician, as they are sometimes associated with obstructive sleep apnea or reflux, both medical conditions that can be treated. If your child’s night terrors are frequent, you may be advised to consult a sleep specialist.

Is there any treatment for night terrors?

There is no medication or therapy to treat night terrors. (However, if the person having night terrors is diagnosed with PTSD or anxiety, there are various treatments for those conditions.)

“The best treatment is prevention,” Snider explained. Children who aren’t getting enough sleep are more prone to night terrors, she said, as are children experiencing stress.

Miller said that a person susceptible to night terrors may be triggered by:

•     Insufficient sleep
•     Illness
•     Certain medications
•     A change in sleep environment (such as sleeping in a new place or away from home)
•     Anxiety or stress
•     Caffeine
•     Disturbances in sleep, such as obstructive sleep apnea and reflux.

If your child is having frequent night terrors, you may be able to find a pattern in terms of when they occur — generally during the first few hours of your child’s sleep.

“Sometimes you can identify and kind of pinpoint a time frame, and waking your child up 10 to 15 minutes before [the night terror is likely to happen] can sometimes prevent them from happening,” Snider said.

If your child does have a night terror, it may help to know that the only one to remember it will be you.

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Their findings were published in Biofilm in an article titled, “Pseudomonas aeruginosa quorum sensing and biofilm attenuation by a di-hydroxy derivative of piperlongumine (PL-18).”

The Indian long pepper is sometimes used in combination with other herbs in Ayurvedic medicine. It is used to improve appetite and digestion, as well as to treat stomach aches, heartburn, indigestion, intestinal gas, diarrhea, and cholera. The researchers turned to the plant to explore its protection against antibiotic resistance.

Many plants’ secondary metabolites are essential for plant protection against microbial pathogens. These compounds have long been considered an important source for drug discovery. The synthesis of new derivatives of these metabolites increases the probability of finding new drugs for many therapeutic purposes.

In the study, sixteen derivatives of Piperlongumine (PL), an amide alkaloid from Piper longum L., were screened for Quorum Sensing Inhibition (QSI). Quorum Sensing (QS) uses auto-inducers to control bacterial concentration. PL-18 had the best QSI activity.

PL-18 both reduced bacterial virulence and disrupted the biofilms that protected their sample bacteria. The researchers noted: “The transcriptome study of treated P. aeruginosa showed that PL-18 indeed reduced the expression of QS and iron homeostasis related genes, and upregulated sulfur metabolism related genes. Altogether, PL-18 inhibits QS, virulence, iron uptake, and biofilm formation. Thus, PL-18 should be further developed against bacterial infection, antibiotic resistance, and biofilm formation.”

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Some men are at increased risk for prostate cancer. You are at increased risk for getting or dying from prostate cancer if you are African-American or have a family history of prostate cancer.

For some men, genetic factors may put them at higher risk of prostate cancer. You may have an increased risk of getting a type of prostate cancer caused by genetic changes that are inherited if:

• You have more than one first-degree relative (father, son, or brother) who had prostate cancer, including relatives in three generations on your mother’s or father’s side of the family.
• You were diagnosed with prostate cancer when you were 55 years old or younger.
• You were diagnosed with prostate cancer, and other members of your family have been diagnosed with breast, ovarian, or pancreatic cancer.

Different people have different symptoms for prostate cancer. Some men do not have symptoms at all. If you have any of the following symptoms, be sure to see your doctor right away:

•     Difficulty starting urination
•     Weak or interrupted flow of urine
•     Frequent urination, especially at night
•     Difficulty emptying the bladder completely
•     Pain or burning during urination
•     Blood in the urine or semen
•     Pain in the back, hips, or pelvis that doesn’t go away
•     Painful ejaculation

Keep in mind that these symptoms may be caused by conditions other than prostate cancer.

Cancer screening means looking for cancer before it causes symptoms. The goal of screening for prostate cancer is to find cancers that may be at high risk for spreading if not treated, and to find them early before they spread.

There is no standard test to screen for prostate cancer. Two tests that are commonly used to screen for prostate cancer are a blood test called a prostate-specific antigen (PSA) and a digital rectal examination. PSA is a substance made by the prostate, and the levels of PSA in the blood can be higher in men who have prostate cancer. But the PSA level may also be elevated in other conditions that affect the prostate.

The recommendations about prostate cancer screening are:

• Men who are 55 to 69 years old should make individual decisions about being screened for prostate cancer with a prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test.
• Before making a decision, men should talk to their doctor about the benefits and harms of screening for prostate cancer, including the benefits and harms of other tests and treatment.
• Men who are 70 years old and older should not be screened for prostate cancer routinely.

This recommendation applies to men who:

•     Are at average risk for prostate cancer.
•     Are at increased risk for prostate cancer.
•     Do not have symptoms of prostate cancer.
•     Have never been diagnosed with prostate cancer.

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Supervised by select paediatric hospitals, eligible babies will be given gradually increasing doses of peanut powder each day for at least two years, to reduce sensitivity.

Oral immunotherapy has been available in clinical trials and some specialist allergy centres around the globe, but this is the first time it has ever been adopted as a national model of care for peanut allergies.

Australia is often dubbed the "allergy capital of the world", with one in 10 infants diagnosed with food sensitivities.

Peanut allergy affects about 3% of Australians at 12 months old and – unlike other food allergies – few children outgrow it, making it the most common food allergy among school-aged children.

“[This] might be the game changer we have all wanted to stop this terrible allergy in its tracks,” Assistant Minister for Health Ged Kearney said.

The free programme is only available to children under 12 months who have already been diagnosed with a peanut allergy and are receiving care at one of ten participating hospitals across the country.

The dosing schedule will be carefully calculated for each child, until they reach a “maintenance dose” which they will remain on for two years, programme lead Tim Brettig told the BBC.

Some children may experience side effects including an allergic reaction, but for most children in this age group they are mild and do not require treatment, he said.

The aim is to raise their tolerance threshold and lower the risk - and anxiety - posed by exposure to peanuts, with results measured by a food allergy test at the end of the treatment.

"In some cases, [the threshold] might be so high that they can eat peanut in their diet freely, for others it might raise it to a level where accidental exposures wouldn't result in an allergic reaction."

“Ultimately, we want to change the trajectory of allergic disease in Australia so that more children can go to school without the risk of a life-threatening peanut reaction," said Professor Kirsten Perrett, Director of the National Allergy Centre of Excellence (NACE).

NACE will evaluate the programme for both effectiveness and safety with the hope of extending it to more hospitals, and potentially other food allergies.

However, doctors have stressed that families should not try oral immunotherapy at home unsupervised.

"It's definitely not a programme for everybody," Dr Brettig said.

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Most respiratory illnesses have very similar symptoms at the start: sore throat, congested or runny nose, headache, fatigue and fever. This may progress to a dry cough.

Best case scenario is that you have "a cold" (which can be any one of hundreds of viruses, most commonly rhinovirus), which is short-lived and self-limiting.

But some respiratory illnesses can be much more serious. Here is a brief guide to some important bugs to know about that are circulating this winter, and how to work out which one you have.

Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV)

For most people an RSV infection will feel like "a cold"—annoying, but only lasting a few days.

However, for babies, older adults and people with immune issues, it can lead to bronchiolitis or pneumonia, and even become life-threatening.

RSV isn't seasonal, which means you are just as likely to get it in summer as in winter. However, it is highly contagious so we noticed it disappearing almost completely during COVID lockdowns.

There is now a rapid-antigen test (RAT) for RSV which also checks for influenza and COVID, and is the best way of finding out if RSV is what is causing symptoms.

Recently, a preventative immune therapy has become available for high risk babies (nirsevimab) and there are also vaccines for higher risk adults. Nirsevimab is also available to all babies for free in Western Australia and Queensland.

But there are no specific treatments. Adults who get it simply have to ride it out (using whatever you need to manage symptoms).

Babies and higher risk patients need to present to an emergency department if they test positive for RSV and are also looking or feeling very unwell (this might mean rapid shallow breathing, fevers not coming down with paracetamol or ibuprofen, a baby not feeding, mottled-looking skin, or going blue around the mouth).

If a patient has developed a bronchiolitis or pneumonia, they may need to be hospitalized.

Influenza

Once you have had the "true flu" (influenza), you will find it frustrating when people call their sniffly cold-like symptoms a "flu."

Influenza infections generally start with a sore throat and headache which quickly turns into high fevers, generalized aches and excessive fatigue. You feel like you have been hit by a truck and may struggle to get out of bed. This can last a week or more, even in people who are generally fit and healthy.

Influenza is a major public health issue internationally, with 3–5 million cases of severe illness and 290,000 to 650,000 respiratory deaths annually.

People who are at greater risk of complications from influenza include pregnant women, children under five, adults aged 65 and over, First Nations peoples, and people with chronic or immunosuppressive medical conditions. For this reason, annual vaccination is recommended and funded for vulnerable people.

Vaccination is also readily available for all Australians who want it, through pharmacies as well as medical clinics, usually at a cost of less than A$30. In some states, it's free for all residents.

Influenza is seasonal, with definite peaks in the winter months. This is why vaccines are offered from early autumn.

If you think you may have influenza, there are now home-testing RATs: all current influenza RATs are in combination with COVID RATs, as the symptoms overlap.

Treatment for most people is to manage symptoms and try to avoid spreading it around. Doctors can also prescribe antivirals to vulnerable patients; these work best if started within 48 hours of symptoms.

COVID

It has been less than five years since COVID-19, caused by SARS-CoV-2, started to spread around the world in pandemic proportions.

Although COVID is no longer a public health emergency, it still causes more deaths than influenza and RSV combined.

Unlike RSV and influenza, only those aged over 70 are in a high-risk age group for COVID. Other factors besides age may put you at higher risk of becoming very unwell when infected by this virus. This includes having other respiratory diseases (such as asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, also known as COPD), diabetes, cancer, kidney disease, obesity or heart disease.

Unlike most respiratory viruses, SARS-CoV-2 tends to set off inflammation beyond the respiratory system. This can involve a range of other organs including the heart, kidneys and blood vessels.

Although most people are back to their usual work or study after a week or two, a significant proportion go on to experience extended symptoms such as fatigue, breathlessness, brain fog and mood changes. When these last more than 12 weeks, without any other explanation for symptoms, it's called long COVID.

COVID vaccines can prevent serious illness and have been monitored for several years now for their safety and effectiveness. Current vaccination recommendations are based on age and immune status. It's worth discussing them with your doctor if you are unsure whether you would benefit or not.

Antivirals can treat COVID in higher-risk people who contract it, whether vaccinated or not.

Specific advice about what to do if you test positive on a RAT will vary according to your current state guidelines and workplace, however the general principles are always: avoid spreading the virus to others, and give yourself time to rest and recover.

What if it's not one of those?

So you've done your combined RSV/flu/COVID RAT and the result is negative. But you still have symptoms. What else could it be?

More than 200 different viruses can cause cold and flu symptoms, including rhinovirus (mentioned above), adenovirus and sometimes even undefined pathogens.

If an illness progresses to a cough which will not go away, and/or you start coughing up sputum, this could be a bacterial infection, such as pertussis (whooping cough), streptococcus pneumoniae, haemophilus influenzae or moraxella catarrhalis. So it's worth getting assessed by a GP who may do a chest Xray and/or test your sputum, particularly if they suspect pneumonia.

You also may also start out with what is clearly a viral infection but then get a secondary bacterial infection later. So if you are getting more unwell over time, it's worth getting tested, in case antibiotics will help.

However, taking antibiotics for a purely viral illness will not only be useless, it can contribute to harmful antibiotic resistance and give you unwanted side effects.

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Developed in conjunction with scientists, clinicians and researchers from Flinders University, QUT, the University of Sydney and the Immunisation Coalition, the online calculator provides a personalized risk assessment of developing long COVID 6 months after infection.

Associate Professor Kirsty Short from UQ's School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences said the tool will be useful in helping tackle the obstinate disease.

"At least 65 million people globally are thought to suffer from the post-acute sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC), more commonly known as long COVID," Dr. Short said.

"It's an incredibly debilitating disease causing more than 200 symptoms across 10 different organ systems and can affect individuals quite differently. Common symptoms include fatigue, brain fog and shortness of breath."

Dr. Short said while diagnosing and treating long COVID is still in its infancy, there is now a strong understanding of the risk factors associated with the condition's development.

"The calculator takes into account a range of personal factors including age, sex, comorbidities, vaccination status, number of previous infections and use of antiviral medications," she said.

"All of this data allows our research-backed algorithm to provide a personalized risk assessment of developing long COVID. Users see their risk results either as 'a chance' or 'per million people'. The interface is user-friendly and easy to navigate for people of all ages and technological proficiencies."

Associate Professor John Litt from Flinders University, a co-lead on the calculator project, said by helping to identify those who might be at higher risk, the tool allows for proactive measures and early interventions to potentially mitigate the severity and duration of long COVID symptoms.

"While many adults don't see COVID-19 as a big issue now, many are concerned about getting long COVID," he said. "The chance of suffering long COVID increases with every bout of COVID-19 a person catches."

Dr. Short said the project also puts a spotlight on the controllable factors that can lead to long COVID.

"Incomplete vaccination, missed drug treatment during acute infection and repeat infections are the greatest controllable influencers that increase risk, so there are actions you can take right now to reduce that," she said.

"Health managers and individuals in conjunction with clinicians can use the risk assessment tool for shared decision making on vaccination, infection-avoidant behaviors and pursuing early treatment during acute infection.

"Knowing your personal risk and the steps you can take to protect your health can help us win the war against long COVID."

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You might sensibly ask why that happened and, for that matter, how it was possible it would happen.

You might be curious about how to quickly reconstitute the financial system from less legible sources of credit when it is down. (Which: probably less important as a takeaway, but it is quite colorful.)

Brief necessary technical context

Something like 20% of the readership of this column has an engineering degree. To you folks, I apologize in advance for the following handwaviness. (You may be better served by the Preliminary Post Incident Review.)

Many operating systems have a distinction between the “kernel” supplied by the operating system manufacturer and all other software running on the computer system. For historical reasons, that area where almost everything executes is called “userspace.”

In modern software design, programs running in userspace (i.e. almost all programs) are relatively limited in what they can do. Programs running in kernelspace, on the other hand, get direct access to the hardware under the operating system. Certain bugs in kernel programming are very, very bad news for everything running on the computer.

CrowdStrike Falcon is endpoint monitoring software. In brief, “endpoint monitoring” is a service sold to enterprises which have tens or hundreds of thousands of devices (“endpoints”). Those devices are illegible to the organization that owns them due to sheer scale; no single person nor group of people understand what is happening on them. This means there are highly variable levels of how-totally-effed those devices might be at exactly this moment in time. The pitch for endpoint monitoring is that it gives your teams the ability to make those systems legible again while also benefitting from economies of scale, with you getting a continuously updated feed of threats to scan for from your provider.

One way an endpoint might be effed is if it was physically stolen from your working-from-home employee earlier this week. Another way is if it has recently joined a botnet orchestrated from a geopolitical adversary of the United States after one of your junior programmers decided to install warez because the six figure annual salary was too little to fund their video game habit. (No, I am not reading your incident reports, I clarify for every security team in the industry.)

In theory, you perform ongoing monitoring of all of your computers. Then, your crack security team responds to alerts generated by your endpoint monitoring solution. This will sometimes merit further investigation and sometimes call for immediate remedial work. The conversations range from “Did you really just install cracked Starcraft 2 on your work PC? … Please don’t do that.” to “The novel virus reported this morning compromised 32 computers in the wealth management office. Containment was achieved by 2:05 PM ET, by which point we had null routed every packet coming out of that subnet then physically disconnected power to the router just to be sure. We have engaged incident response to see what if any data was exfiltrated in the 47 minutes between detection and null routing. At this point we have no indications of compromise outside that subnet but we cannot rule out a threat actor using the virus as a beachhead or advanced persistent threats being deployed.”

(Yes, that does sound like a Tom Clancy novel. No, that is not a parody.)

Falcon punched

Falcon shipped a configuration bug. In brief, this means that rather than writing new software (which, in modern development practice, hopefully goes through fairly extensive testing and release procedures), CrowdStrike sent a bit of data to systems with Falcon installed. That data was intended to simply update the set of conditions that Falcon scanned for. However, due to an error at CrowdStrike, it actually caused existing already-reviewed Falcon software to fail catastrophically.

Since that failure happened in kernelspace at a particularly vulnerable time, this resulted in Windows systems experiencing total failure beginning at boot. The user-visible symptom is sometimes called the Blue Screen of Death.

Configuration bugs are a disturbingly large portion of engineering decisions which cause outages. (Citation: let’s go with “general knowledge as an informed industry observer.” As always, while I’ve previously worked at Stripe, neither Stripe nor its security team necessarily endorses things I say in my personal spaces.)

However, because this configuration bug hit very widely distributed software running in kernelspace almost universally across machines used by the workforce of lynchpin institutions throughout society (most relevantly to this column, banks, but also airlines, etc etc), it had a blast radius much, much larger than typical configuration bugs.

Have I mentioned that IT security really likes military metaphors? “Blast radius” means “given a fault or failure in system X, how far afield from X will we see negative user impact.” I struggle to recall a bug with a broader direct blast radius than the Falcon misconfiguration.

Once the misconfiguration was rolled out, fixing it was complicated by the tiny issue that a lot of the people needed to fix it couldn’t access their work systems because their machine Blue Screen of Death’ed.

Why? Well, we put the vulnerable software on essentially all machines in a particular institution. You want to protect all the devices. That is the point of endpoint monitoring. It is literally someone’s job to figure out where the devices that aren’t endpoint monitored exist and then to bring them into compliance.

Why do we care about optimizing for endpoint monitoring coverage? Partly it is for genuinely good security reasons. But a major part of it is that small-c compliance is necessary for large-C Compliance. Your regulator will effectively demand that you do it.

Why did Falcon run in kernelspace rather than userspace?

Falcon runs in kernelspace versus userspace in part because the most straightforward way to poke its nose in other programs’ business is to simply ignore the security guarantees that operating systems give to programs running in userspace. Poking your nose in another program’s memory is generally considered somewhere between rude and forbidden-by-very-substantial-engineering-work. However, endpoint monitoring software considers that other software running on the device may be there at the direction of the adversary. It therefore considers that software’s comfort level with its intrusion to be a distant secondary consideration.

Another reason Falcon ran in kernelspace was, as Microsoft told the WSJ, Microsoft was forbidden by an understanding with the European Commission from firmly demoting other security software developers down to userspace. This was because Microsoft both a) wrote security software and b) necessarily always had the option of writing it in kernelspace, because Microsoft controls Windows. The European Commission has pushed back against this characterization and pointed out that This Sentence Uses Cookies To Enable Essential Essay Functionality.

Regulations which strongly suggest particular software purchases

It would be an overstatement to say that the United States federal government commanded U.S. financial institutions to install CrowdStrike Falcon and thereby embed a landmine into the kernels of all their employees’ computers. Anyone saying that has no idea how banking regulation works.

Life is much more subtle than that.

The United States has many, many different banking regulators. Those regulators have some desires for their banks which rhyme heavily, and so they have banded into a club to share resources. This lets them spend their limited brainsweat budgets on things banking regulators have more individualized opinions on than simple, common banking regulatory infrastructure.

One such club is the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council. They wrote the tgreatest crossover event of all time if your interests are a) mandatory supervisory evaluations of financial institutions and b) IT risk management: the FFIEC Information Technology Examination Handbook's Information Security Booklet.

The modal consumer of this document is probably not a Linux kernel programmer with a highly developed mental model of kernelspace versus userspace. That would be an unreasonable expectation for a banking supervisor. They work for a banking regulator, not a software company, doing important supervisory work, not merely implementation. Later this week they might be working on capital adequacy ratios, but for right now, they’re asking your IT team about endpoint monitoring.

The FFEITC ITEH ISB (the acronym just rolls off the tongue) is not super prescriptive about exactly what controls you, a financial institution, have to have. This is common in many regulatory environments. HIPAA, to use a contrasting example, is unusual in that it describes a control environment that you can reduce to a checklist with Required or Optional next to each of them. (HIPAA spells that second category “Addressable”, for reasons outside the scope of this essay, but which I’ll mention because I don’t want to offend other former HIPAA Compliance Officers.)

To facilitate your institution’s conversation with the examiner who drew the short straw, you will conduct a risk analysis. Well, more likely, you’ll pay a consulting firm to conduct a risk analysis. In the production function that is scaled consultancies, this means that a junior employee will open U.S. Financial Institution IT Security Risk Analysis v3-edited-final-final.docx and add important client-specific context like a) their name and b) their logo.

That document will heavily reference the ITEH, because it exists to quickly shut down the line of questioning from the examiner. If you desire a career in this field, you will phrase that as “guiding the conversation towards areas of maximum mutual interest in the cause of 'advanc[ing] the nation’s monetary, financial, and payment systems to build a stronger economy for all Americans.'” (The internal quotation is lifted from a job description at the Federal Reserve.)

Your consultants are going to, when they conduct the mandatory risk analysis, give you a shopping list. Endpoint monitoring is one item on that shopping list. Why? Ask your consultant and they’ll bill you for the answer, but you can get my opinion for free and it is worth twice what you paid for it: II.C.12 Malware Mitigation.

Does the FFEITC have a hugely prescriptive view of what you should be doing for malware monitoring? Well, no:

Management should implement defense-in-depth to protect, detect, and respond to malware. The institution can use many tools to block malware before it enters the environment and to detect it and respond if it is not blocked. Methods or systems that management should consider include the following: [12 bullet points which vary in specificity from whitelisting allowed programs to port monitoring to user education].

But your consultants will tell you that you want a very responsive answer to II.C.12 in this report and that, since you probably do not have Google’s ability to fill floors of people doing industry-leading security research, you should just buy something which says Yeah We Do That.

CrowdStrike’s sales reps will happily tell you Yeah We Do That. This web page exists as a result of a deterministic process co-owned by the Marketing and Sales departments at a B2B software company to create industry-specific “sales enablement” collateral. As a matter of fact, if you want to give CrowdStrike your email address and job title, they will even send you a document which is not titled Exact Wording To Put In Your Risk Assessment Including Which Five Objectives And Seventeen Controls Purchasing This Product Will Solve For.

CrowdStrike is not, strictly speaking, the only vendor that you could have installed on every computer you owned to make your regulators happy with you. But, due to vagaries of how enterprise software sales teams work, they sewed up an awful lot of government-adjacent industries. This was in part because they aggressively pursued writing the sort of documents you need if the people who read your project plans have national security briefs.

I’m not mocking the Federal Financial Institutions Examining Council for cosplaying as having a national security brief. (Goodness knows that that happens a lot in cybersecurity... and government generally. New York City likes to pretend it has an intelligence service, which is absolutely not a patronage program designed to have taxpayers fund indefinite foreign vacations with minimal actual job duties.)

But money is core societal infrastructure, like the power grid and transportation systems are. It would be really bad if hackers working for a foreign government could just turn off money. That would be more damaging than a conventional missile being fired at random into New York City, and we might be more constrained in responding.

And so, we ended up in a situation where we invited an advanced persistent threat into kernelspace.

It is perhaps important to point out that security professionals understand security tools to themselves introduce security vulnerabilities. Partly, the worry is that a monoculture could have a particular weakness that could be exploited in a particular way. Partly, it is that security tools (and security personnel!) frequently have more privileges than is typical, and therefore they can be directly compromised by the adversary. This observation is fractal in systems engineering: at every level of abstraction, if your control plane gets compromised, you lose. (Control plane has a specific meaning in networking but for this purpose just round it to “operating system (metaphorical) that controls your operating systems (literal).”)

CrowdStrike maintains that they do not understand it to be the case that a bad actor intentionally tried to bring down global financial infrastructure and airlines by using them as a weapon. No, CrowdStrike did that themselves, on accident, of their own volition. But this demonstrates the problem pretty clearly: if a junior employee tripping over a power cord at your company brings down computers worldwide, the bad guys have a variety of options for achieving directionally similar aims by attacking directionally similar power cords.
When money stops money-ing

I found out about the CrowdStrike vulnerability in the usual fashion: Twitter. But then my friendly local bank branch cited it (as quote the Microsoft systems issue endquote) when I was attempting to withdraw cash from the teller window.

My family purchased a duplex recently and is doing renovation prior to moving in. For complex social reasons, a thorough recitation of which would make me persona non grata across the political spectrum, engaging a sufficient number of contractors in Chicago will result in one being asked to make frequent, sizable payments in cash.

This created a minor emergency for me, because it was an other-than-minor emergency for some contractors I was working with.

Many contractors are small businesses. Many small businesses are very thinly capitalized. Many employees of small businesses are extremely dependent on receiving compensation exactly on payday and not after it. And so, while many people in Chicago were basically unaffected on that Friday because their money kept working (on mobile apps, via Venmo/Cash App, via credit cards, etc), cash-dependent people got an enormous wrench thrown into their plans.

I personally tried withdrawing cash at three financial institutions in different weight classes, as was told it was absolutely impossible (in size) at all of them, owing to the Falcon issue.

At one, I was told that I couldn’t use the tellers but could use the ATM. Unfortunately, like many customers, I was attempting to take out more cash from the ATM than I ever had before. Fortunately, their system that flags potentially fraudulent behavior will let a customer unflag themselves by responding to an instant communication from the bank. Unfortunately, the subdomain that communication directs them to runs on a server apparently protected by CrowdStrike Falcon.

It was not impossible at all financial institutions. I am aware of a few around Chicago which ran out of physical cash on hand at some branches, because all demand for cash on a Friday was serviced by them versus by “all of the financial institutions.” (As always happens during widespread disturbances in infrastructure, there quickly arises a shadow economy of information trading which redirects relatively sophisticated people to the places that are capable of servicing them. This happens through offline social networks since time immemorial and online social networks since we invented those. The first is probably more impactful but the second is more legible, so banking regulators pretend this class of issues sprang fully formed from the tech industry just in time to bring down banks last year.)

I have some knowledge of the history of comprehensive failures of financial infrastructure, and so I considered doing the traditional thing when convertibility of deposits is suspended by industry-wide issues: head to the bar.

A hopefully unnecessary disclaimer: the following is historical fact despite rhyming with stereotype.

Back in 1970, there was a widespread and sustained (six months!) strike in the Irish banking sector. Workers were unable to cash paychecks because tellers refused to work. So, as an accommodation for customers, operators of pubs would cash the checks from the till, trusting that eventually checks drawn on the accounts of local employers would be good funds again.

Some publicans even cashed personal checks, backed by the swift and terrible justice of the credit reporting bureau We Control Whether You Can Ever Enjoy A Pint With Your Friends Again. This kept physical notes circulating in the economy.

As I told my contractors, to their confusion, I was unable to simply go down to the local bar to get them cash with the banks down. I don’t have sufficient credit with the operator of the local bar, as I don’t drink.

I told them, to their even greater confusion, that I had considered going down to the parish and buying all their cash on hand with a personal check. Churches, much like bars, have much of their weekly income come through electronic payments but still do a substantial amount of cash management through the workweek heading into the weekend. I’m much more a known quantity at church than I am at the friendly neighborhood watering hole. (Also, when attempting to workaround financial infrastructure bugs to get workers their wages, consider relying on counterparties with common knowledge of James 5:4.)

I eventually resolved the issue in a more boring fashion: I texted someone I reasonably assumed to have cash and asked them to bring it over.

Financial infrastructure normally functions to abstract away personal ties and replace favor-swapping with legibly-priced broadly-offered services.

Thankfully, while this outage was surprisingly deep and broad, banks were mostly back to normal on the following Monday.

Source

If you've watched any Olympics coverage this week, you've likely been confronted with an ad for Google's Gemini AI called "Dear Sydney." In it, a proud father seeks help writing a letter on behalf of his daughter, who is an aspiring runner and superfan of world-record-holding hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone.

 

"I'm pretty good with words, but this has to be just right," the father intones before asking Gemini to "Help my daughter write a letter telling Sydney how inspiring she is..." Gemini dutifully responds with a draft letter in which the LLM tells the runner, on behalf of the daughter, that she wants to be "just like you."

 

Every time I see this ad, it puts me on edge in a way I've had trouble putting into words (though Gemini itself has some helpful thoughts). As someone who writes words for a living, the idea of outsourcing a writing task to a machine brings up some vocational anxiety. And the idea of someone who's "pretty good with words" doubting his abilities when the writing "has to be just right" sets off alarm bells regarding the superhuman framing of AI capabilities.

 

But I think the most offensive thing about the ad is what it implies about the kinds of human tasks Google sees AI replacing. Rather than using LLMs to automate tedious busywork or difficult research questions, "Dear Sydney" presents a world where Gemini can help us offload a heartwarming shared moment of connection with our children.

 

The "Dear Sydney" ad.

 

It's a distressing answer to what's still an incredibly common question in the AI space: What do you actually use these things for?

Yes, I can help

Marketers have a difficult task when selling the public on their shiny new AI tools. An effective ad for an LLM has to make it seem like a superhuman do-anything machine but also an approachable, friendly helper. An LLM has to be shown as good enough to reliably do things you can't (or don't want to) do yourself, but not so good that it will totally replace you.

 

Microsoft's 2024 Super Bowl ad for Copilot is a good example of an attempt to thread this needle, featuring a handful of examples of people struggling to follow their dreams in the face of unseen doubters. "Can you help me?" those dreamers ask Copilot with various prompts. "Yes, I can help" is the message Microsoft delivers back, whether through storyboard images, an impromptu organic chemistry quiz, or "code for a 3D open world game."

 

Microsoft's Copilot marketing sells it as a helper for achieving your dreams.

 

The "Dear Sydney" ad tries to fit itself into this same box, technically. The prompt in the ad starts with "Help my daughter..." and the tagline at the end offers "A little help from Gemini." If you look closely near the end, you'll also see Gemini's response starts with "Here's a draft to get you started." And to be clear, there's nothing inherently wrong with using an LLM as a writing assistant in this way, especially if you have a disability or are writing in a non-native language.

 

But the subtle shift from Microsoft's "Help me" to Google's "Help my daughter" changes the tone of things. Inserting Gemini into a child's heartfelt request for parental help makes it seem like the parent in question is offloading their responsibilities to a computer in the coldest, most sterile way possible. More than that, it comes across as an attempt to avoid an opportunity to bond with a child over a shared interest in a creative way.

 

It's one thing to use AI to help you with the most tedious parts of your job, as people do in recent ads for Salesforce's Einstein AI. It's another to tell your daughter to go ask the computer for help pouring their heart out to their idol.

Source

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Mechanisms of swarm formation

Hybrid swarms may form due to any number of factors, from climatic changes that influence the ranges of the parent species to human introductions of invasive species. Their effects may be minute and local, or, if we view our global spread as a human/Neanderthal/Denisovan swarm, positively earthshaking.

 

In humans, the swarm likely developed due to the itinerant and adaptable nature of our ancestors. We simply traveled more than other species and thus came into contact with other human species more frequently.

 

The mechanisms behind the formation of other naturally occurring swarms are less well understood. While stable hybrid zones may occur as the result of hybrids between two species adapting to ecological conditions that were inhospitable to either parent species, the reasons that sometimes lead to hybrids subsuming their parent species entirely are mysterious.

 

In one fascinating recent case, it was discovered that the brooding brittle star (Amphipholis squamata) was likely the result of multiple hybridization events that resulted in a potentially asexual form of reproduction. The species is nearly circumglobal in distribution and is absent only from deep sea abysses and polar regions.

 

Hybridization may lead to the presence of polyploid genomes, in which there are more than two copies of each chromosome. Polyploidy appears to be linked to reversion to asexual means of reproduction, even in organisms whose parent species originally reproduced sexually. (This does not always occur, of course—mammals and birds, for example, cannot reproduce asexually.) The brittle star’s clonal reproduction strategy is effective because it allows the swarm to colonize any new area where it arrives, drifting on clumps of debris. Its diverse genome may allow it to be more resilient to differing ecological demands—including parasites that are unique to certain environments.

 

Hybrid swarms created by human interventions are better understood, mainly because we can more easily ascertain how species come into contact. This may be due to species purposely or accidentally introduced, or it may be due to our disruptions of ecosystem barriers that kept species separate.

 

In one remarkable instance, the construction of a dam trapped two herring species, alewives (Alosa pseudoharengus) and blueback herring (A. aestivalis), in the Kerr Reservoir on the border between North Carolina and Virginia. These fish, which typically spawn in freshwater and live in saltwater as adults, had different breeding habits under natural conditions. However, when prevented from engaging in their natural reproductive cycles, they interbred and eventually became a hybrid swarm. The entire population comprised individuals of hybrid ancestry, with multiple backcrosses among the hybrids.

 

A similar situation occurred in fish breeding ponds in Croatia. Four different species of water frog (genus Pelophylax) ended up in the same ponds, some native and some introduced. Five different hybrid forms were discovered, potentially interbreeding with each other as well, suggesting the formation of a hybrid swarm.

 

Accidental human interventions in natural ecosystems have created similar results. Lakes in Switzerland have become eutrophic—poor in oxygen due to excessive algal growth facilitated by agricultural runoff. These ecosystem changes have disrupted the natural patterns of feeding and breeding that once kept multiple species of whitefish separate. Lack of oxygen has forced them into more frequent encounters because only certain zones of the lakes are habitable. They have begun interbreeding as a result, thus creating hybrid swarms and collapsing the boundaries that once differentiated them as species.

The swarms we know

When Homo sapiens trooped out of Africa some 50,000–60,000 years ago, we could not have known that our distant relatives awaited on other continents—and were viable mates. But around 10,000 years later, we encountered Neanderthals, who had been inhabiting Europe and Asia for more than 400,000 years.

 

Another 10,000 years later, we met the Denisovans, another little-understood lineage that had colonized Asia. We shared a common ancestor with both groups and retained sufficient compatibility to mate and produce viable offspring. Some scientists argue that this ancestor was likely Homo heidelbergensis, though other candidate species have been considered as well. The smaller populations of Neanderthals and Denisovans, as well as those of other yet unidentified hominins, were swallowed by the swarm and contributed genetic variants that are present in many populations today.

 

Both groups appear to have offered non-African humans a number of genetic advantages, including tolerance to colder temperatures and resistance to certain diseases, enabling our species to achieve its current global dominance, stretching to the hottest and coldest portions of Earth. Neanderthals may have even enhanced fertility, making women less likely to miscarry—an advantage carried by women with Neanderthal DNA to this day.

 

Conversely, they passed along some deleterious mutations, including increased susceptibility to certain viruses—COVID among them. People with Neanderthal DNA also appear to be more inclined toward addiction.

 

Our spectacular swarm has since begotten additional swarms. Among the most headline-grabbing are killer bees, so named for their heightened aggression. Scientists typically refer to them as Africanized bees because the swarm was initiated by Apis mellifera scutellata, an African subspecies of the European honeybee imported to Brazil from South Africa and Tanzania in 1956 to introduce their heat tolerance genes. Typical European honeybee subspecies had floundered in the steamy Brazilian climate, producing negligible amounts of honey.

 

The African bees proved far more adaptable than anticipated—they soon escaped cultivation and moved northward at a rapid pace. Along the way, they hybridized with other populations of feral honeybees. By 1990, the swarm had reached the southern border of the United States.

 

While in some ways the hybrid worker bees are not as fit as workers from European subspecies, they seem to be more resistant to the parasitic mite Varroa destructor—thought to be a contributor to colony collapse disorder affecting honey bees throughout North America due to its capacity to transmit disease. This advantage may have allowed the swarm to move even further north.

 

So, single, random factors can influence whether a swarm succeeds or fails. Had the mite not been introduced from Asia, European honey bee genes may have prevailed in the southern United States—and the African strain’s genes would not have been particularly advantageous. But, since it was, the African genes carried by the swarm gave the hybrids an edge and allowed them to advance further.

A new set of swarms

Among vertebrate animals, fish are some of the most prolific hybridizers due to their reproductive habits. Many are broadcast spawners, meaning that females lay eggs and males spray their sperm over them. So they don’t actually “have sex” in the way humans do. They disperse their gametes into the environment in close proximity in the hopes that they will pair.

 

“Compared to many mammals, for example, where internal sex occurs, it's harder for hybrids to occur,” Fant says. “But in plants and in fish, it's more common. You release eggs and sperm into the environment and then hope that it finds a match.”

 

If closely related species spawn in the same area—as is the case with the aforementioned herrings and whitefish—they may cross-fertilize. Some of the most recently identified swarms are fish due to the prevalence of these types of events.

 

The introduction of the red shiner (Cyprinella lutrensis) to American river systems where it is not native has led to the formation of a hybrid swarm due to crossing with the related blacktail shiner (Cyprinella venusta), for example. Intriguingly, many of the hybrids most closely resemble the red shiner—a phenomenon called cryptic introgression. Had genetic analysis not been done to determine the parentage of these fish, appearances would have suggested that the red shiner had just pushed its relatives out. Instead, genetically, those relatives were swallowed by the swarm.

 

While these swarms of tiny fish range over miles of river, some swarms are compact. One study found that miniature swarms comprising various subspecies of the common wall lizard (Podarcis muralis) had formed in German cities—these swarms seemed to extend for ranges of only hundreds of meters. Some of the subspecies were native and others had been accidentally introduced from France and Italy. The swarms themselves appeared to have interbred with each other, further exchanging genetic material.

 

Here again, we face the challenge of defining hybrid swarms. If these are simply variations of the same species, are they really hybrids in a meaningful sense?

 

These localized phenomena among very closely related organisms pale in comparison to some truly massive swarms that seem to have developed right under our noses—as a result of our own activities. As it turns out, much of the population of wild rice (Oryzias rufipogon) may actually be a hybrid swarm, carrying a mix of domestic genes that escaped agricultural strains. The domestic species is believed to have been developed in Asia some 9,000 years ago, possibly on multiple occasions in different regions.

 

Humans have since carried this species, O. sativa, across the globe. Nearly all of what we now consider to be wild rice appears to carry genes from domestic rice. While rice is largely self-pollinating, it can also be pollinated by wind and insects. These mechanisms may have facilitated the movement of domesticated genes into the wild, ultimately resulting in the formation of swarms.

 

Compellingly, the major varieties of domestic rice, indica and japonica, share genetic sequences with wild rice found in the regions where they are cultivated. These sequences code for non-shattering grains and upright growth habits. While they are not always expressed in wild populations—grains that do shatter protect the seeds from complete destruction by insects feeding on them and are thus advantageous to wild strains—the genes remain in the populations. What was once thought to be the wild-origin species of cultivated rice may thus be the result of rice that has gone wild, breeding its parent species out of existence—or at least fundamentally altering it.

Swarms threaten endangered species

Hybridization is a powerful evolutionary force. While it has conferred numerous benefits to organisms, including ourselves, it also constitutes a significant threat to threatened and endangered species.

 

“Is hybridization good or bad? There's no answer to that,” Taylor said. “It's context-dependent. Especially in a changing world, hybridization might introduce genetic variation that's really adaptive. And we can't predict what's going to be good or bad under what scenario, even [in cases of] human-caused hybridization, which, I would argue, we should try to reduce as much as possible.”

 

There’s a long list of cases where hybridization is making conservation challenging. The recovery of the threatened Colorado greenback cutthroat trout (Oncorhynchus clarki stomias) and the related Colorado River cutthroat trout (Oncorhynchus clarkii pleuriticus) have been impeded by the incursion of introduced rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) in the Arkansas River basin, for example. The entry of rainbow trout into the ecosystem has resulted in hybrid swarms that threaten the genetic integrity of the related species.

 

In Scotland, red deer (Cervus elaphus scoticus), while not threatened, are an emblematic and charismatic species. Introduced sika deer (C. nippon) from Japan have heavily interbred with the native species, with some populations composed of 40 percent hybrid individuals. The hybrids seem to be intermediate in physical appearance, tending toward the spotted coats and smaller stature of the sika deer.

 

Similarly, the endangered koloa maoli, or Hawaiian duck (Anas wyvilliana) has been nearly erased on several Hawaiian islands by the introduction of mallard ducks (Anas platyrhynchos) in the 1800s. While the population on Kauaʻi remains pure, those on other islands carry substantial portions of mallard DNA and are often intermediate in appearance. Every bird sampled on Oahu, Maui, and Hawaii had hybrid ancestry, indicating that mallard introgression had resulted in a hybrid swarm. In a similar case, the Mariana mallard, an island subspecies of mallard, which had formed a hybrid swarm by interbreeding with mainland mallards, was later completely erased by increased introgression of mallard DNA.

 

“When you become rarer, you become less picky,” Fant said. “There is a phenomenon where as a species becomes rarer and rarer, it becomes more and more likely to hybridize with a more common species.”

 

The ecological consequences of these events are poorly understood. While hybridization may confer adaptive benefits, it may also introduce deleterious mutations. Taylor points out that hybrids formed between Carolina chickadees (Poecile carolinensis) and black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus) in Boulder, Colorado seem to suffer consequences. Not only do they have higher metabolic rates, but they may also be cognitively impaired. Chickadees cache food in order to survive the winter. Their inability to remember where their food is stored might have serious implications for their survival.

 

The consequences are clearer in the case of Spartina species, known as cordgrasses—though in this case, the species benefits but the environment itself suffers. These grasses grow in coastal salt marshes and readily hybridize with related species. In San Francisco Bay, hybrids between native S. foliosa and the introduced S. alterniflora have formed swarms that have aggressively intruded on valuable mudflat habitat, which is crucial for shorebird foraging. New programs are attempting to remove these hybrids and restore these ecosystems to prevent impacts on other organisms.

 

As human disruption of the natural world continues, hybrid swarms may continue to take advantage of our sloppy stewardship. “They will decide the best combination of genes and sometimes if habitats change sufficiently, [organisms] are no longer well adapted, and so the hybrid becomes better adapted,” Fant warned.

 

The human swarm would thus be well-advised to brace itself for all manner of new swarms if we continue our disregard for the natural world. We have already wrought killer bees. What other monsters might we unintentionally create?

 

Richard Pallardy is a science writer based in Chicago. He has worked with publications such as National Geographic, Science Magazine, New Scientist, and The Biologist.

 

Source

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The result is among the findings now released from SAMHSA's National Survey on Drug Use and Health for 2023. The federal agency's sweeping annual poll is closely tracked by mental health and addiction experts.It includes a broad range of questions asked to Americans ages 12 and older living in the community, not in care facilities.

The most common type of mental health treatment was meeting with a provider in an outpatient setting, like at an office of a therapist or school counseling center.

Among adolescents, the biggest increase from 2022 was in the number getting medication for mental health treatment. SAMHSA estimates that 13.9% of those age 12 to 17 received such a prescription in 2023. That is up from 12.8% the year before, though the agency said that the increase was not statistically significant.

The share of adults receiving mental health treatment has also climbed, from 21.8% in the 2022 survey to 23% in 2023. Among adults, 16.3% got prescription medication for mental health treatment, compared to 15.2% in 2022.

SAMHSA officials said they saw the increase as a positive development, citing efforts to normalize and destigmatize seeking out mental health treatment.

"We think it's a good thing that more people are accessing and connecting with mental health treatment. Certainly that has been a focus of the Biden Harris administration to make treatment more accessible, to help people know that treatment and services and supports are available," Assistant Secretary for Mental Health and Substance Use Miriam Delphin-Rittmon told reporters at a briefing Tuesday.

Rates of adolescents getting mental health treatment has increased virtually every year since 2009 in SAMHSA's survey results, though the agency has cautioned against directly comparing against results from before 2021 due to changes in how the survey was done.

In 2022, the survey estimated that 7.7 million ages 12 to 17 years old had received mental health treatment of some kind, or 29.8%. The increase amounts to more than 500,000 additional adolescents getting treatment in 2023, SAMHSA said.

The rate of adolescents reporting having a major depressive episode has remained roughly flat since 2021, at 18.1% of those 12 to 17 years old, or 4.5 million.

Psychiatrists classify a major depressive episode as a period of feeling depressed for at least two weeks, to the point where the person has problems with daily tasks like sleeping and eating or thoughts of death or suicide.

"The report shows us that we must remain steadfast in our efforts to address the mental health and substance use crises," Delphin-Rittmon said.

Rates of vaping and marijuana use

SAMHSA's survey found that traditional cigarette use has continued to slow nationwide, dropping to 13.7% or 38.7 million adolescents and adults overall in 2023.

Meanwhile, nicotine vaping has increased to 9.4% of adolescents and adults, or 26.6 million people, up from 8.3% in 2022.

Around 11.7% of people vaping nicotine were underage, similar to last year's results. Other federal surveys have reported finding that e-cigarette use in high school students could be declining significantly, but levels in middle school students have not.

SAMHSA said its survey found that marijuana use overall was roughly flat from last year, at 21.8% or 61.8 million adolescents and adults smoking or taking weed.

Among only users too young to legally use marijuana — which is illegal under age 21, even in states that have otherwise legalized it — SAMHSA found that underage use has decreased to 18.4%.

The decline was too small to be statistically significant, the agency cautioned, and is above the 17.9% it was in 2021.

The most common mode of using marijuana was smoking, at 77% of those adolescents and adults who have used marijuana in the past year. Close to half of users said they had consumed edible or beverage products containing it.

Alcohol use declining

While trends of using most substances did not see major shifts in 2023's survey, alcohol use did see a statistically significant drop.

In 2023, 47.5% of adults and adolescents — about 134.7 million Americans — reported drinking alcohol in the past month, down from 48.7% in 2022.

But rates of alcohol abuse were virtually unchanged in 2023, at 21.7% reporting binge drinking and 5.8% reporting "heavy alcohol use," defined as binge drinking for at least five days a month.

Around 10.2% of adolescents and adults (28.9 million people) reported drinking to the point where they met the criteria of alcohol use disorder.

By age, rates of alcohol use disorder remain highest in young adults ages 18 to 25. More than 15% of young adults met the criteria for alcohol use disorder.

Source

But Google's search hub doesn't always deliver the most accurate or useful results for financial products, according to a new study from personal finance website WalletHub. Far from showing searchers top-notch results, the search engine often yields responses that can cost people $202 on average, and up to more than $1,000 when looking for certain types of credit cards, the study found.

WalletHub evaluated Google's results for commonly queried credit card and banking terms, and conducted a survey in which it asked consumers about how useful, accurate and aligned with their searches the results they received were.

"Consumers are putting a lot of trust in Google and its top results," WalletHub CEO Odysseas Papadimitriou told CBS MoneyWatch. "So what we asked was, 'Is Google really doing its job and serving the best results?'"

WalletHub analysts evaluated results for credit card and banking-related terms including "best airline credit card," "best no interest credit cards," "best jumbo money market rates," "best CD rates," and more commonly searched terms.

Costly search results

WalletHub analyzed search results to determine their cost to consumers. For example, when searching for the "best credit cards for bad credit," the first nonsponsored hit directs users to Mastercard's website, where they are exclusively shown Mastercard products. This alone does consumers a disservice, according to Papadimitriou, because it eliminates card alternatives from competitors like Visa and Discover.

"The result that ranks first for 'credit cards for bad credit' is from one of the biggest financial brands in the world," Papadimitriou said. "When you go to that page, it doesn't include cards from competitors that might be superior to Mastercard's own offerings."

"People expect Google to put the best result first, that Google is doing the work for you and putting the best information forward. But what we found is happening is Google blindly follows the biggest brand, and is shortchanging consumers," he said.

He added that the cards Mastercard lists on its site aren't even necessarily the best.

"They just give you some credit cards for bad credit. They don't even pretend to be serving what you ask for," Papadimitriou said.  

Among the most costly credit card search terms, "best credit cards to build credit," ranked highest, costing consumers who selected one of the top products appearing in Google search results $1,095, according to WalletHub. Choosing one of the top results for the banking search term "best jumbo money market rates," could cost consumers, $1,347, the most of any search term in the study.

Google said its results satisfy users, and that it is constantly upgrading its search engine.

"Our research shows that search satisfies the overwhelming majority of user needs for people around the world, and we launch thousands of improvements every year to make Search even better for people," Google said in a statement to CBS MoneyWatch. "Our systems aim to connect people with content that is helpful and original, from a diverse range of sites across the web."

Shortchanging consumers

Take another term, like "best savings account" — based on how much interest it yields. In this case, Google's search results could cost consumers if, for example, Google's top hit offers 4.5% but the best account on the market offers more.

"So they trust Google and proceed and sign up for the 4.5% account, when they could have gotten 5.5% That's how they are being shortchanged," Papadimitiou said.

Big brand bias

Seventy-five percent of consumers surveyed said they believe Google favors big brands in search results. Other drawbacks to Google search results, according to WalletHub, included:

•     Only 41% of results met searchers' intent
•     34% of results only showed advertisers
•     58% of results weren't transparent
•     63% of survey respondents said they believed Google search results were superior last year

"I think that the takeaway here is people should not trust Google blindly; it has a lot of biases," Papadimitriou said.

Source

In a gold-trimmed command center on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi, scientists are seeking to wring moisture from desert skies. But will all their extravagant cloud-seeding tech—planes that sprinkle nanomaterials, lasers that scramble the atmosphere—really work at scale?

In the skies over Al Ain, in the United Arab Emirates, pilot Mark Newman waits for the signal. When it comes, he flicks a few silver switches on a panel by his leg, twists two black dials, then punches a red button labeled FIRE.

A slender canister mounted on the wing of his small propeller plane pops open, releasing a plume of fine white dust. That dust—actually ordinary table salt coated in a nanoscale layer of titanium oxide—will be carried aloft on updrafts of warm air, bearing it into the heart of the fluffy convective clouds that form in this part of the UAE, where the many-shaded sands of Abu Dhabi meet the mountains on the border with Oman. It will, in theory at least, attract water molecules, forming small droplets that will collide and coalesce with other droplets until they grow big enough for gravity to pull them out of the sky as rain.

This is cloud seeding. It’s one of hundreds of missions that Newman and his fellow pilots will fly this year as part of the UAE’s ambitious, decade-long attempt to increase rainfall in its desert lands. Sitting next to him in the copilot’s seat, I can see red earth stretching to the horizon. The only water in sight is the swimming pool of a luxury hotel, perched on the side of a mountain below a sheikh’s palace, shimmering like a jewel.

More than 50 countries have dabbled in cloud seeding since the 1940s—to slake droughts, refill hydroelectric reservoirs, keep ski slopes snowy, or even use as a weapon of war. In recent years there’s been a new surge of interest, partly due to scientific breakthroughs, but also because arid countries are facing down the early impacts of climate change. Like other technologies designed to treat the symptoms of a warming planet (say, pumping sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight into space), seeding was once controversial but now looks attractive, perhaps even imperative. Dry spells are getting longer and more severe: In Spain and southern Africa, crops are withering in the fields, and cities from Bogotá to Cape Town have been forced to ration water. In the past nine months alone, seeding has been touted as a solution to air pollution in Pakistan, as a way to prevent forest fires in Indonesia, and as part of an effort to refill the Panama Canal, which is drying up.

Apart from China, which keeps its extensive seeding operations a closely guarded secret, the UAE has been more ambitious than any other country about advancing the science of making rain. The nation gets around 5 to 7 inches of rain a year—roughly half the amount that falls on Nevada, America’s driest state. The UAE started its cloud-seeding program in the early 2000s, and since 2015 it has invested millions of dollars in the Rain Enhancement Program, which is funding global research into new technologies.

This past April, when a storm dumped a year’s worth of rain on the UAE in 24 hours, the widespread flooding in Dubai was quickly blamed on cloud seeding. But the truth is more nebulous. There’s a long history of people—tribal chiefs, traveling con artists, military scientists, and most recently VC-backed techies—claiming to be able to make it rain on demand. But cloud seeding can’t make clouds appear out of thin air; it can only squeeze more rain out of what’s already in the sky. Scientists still aren’t sure they can make it work reliably on a mass scale. The Dubai flood was more likely the result of a region-wide storm system, exacerbated by climate change and the lack of suitable drainage systems in the city.

The Rain Enhancement Program’s stated goal is to ensure that future generations, not only in the UAE but in arid regions around the globe, have the water they need to survive. The architects of the program argue that “water security is an essential element of national security” and that their country is “leading the way” in “new technologies” and “resource conservation.” But the UAE—synonymous with luxury living and conspicuous consumption—has one of the highest per capita rates of water use on earth. So is it really on a mission to make the hotter, drier future that’s coming more livable for everyone? Or is this tiny petro-state, whose outsize wealth and political power came from helping to feed the industrialized world’s fossil-fuel addiction, looking to accrue yet more wealth and power by selling the dream of a cure?

I’ve come here on a mission of my own: to find out whether this new wave of cloud seeding is the first step toward a world where we really can control the weather, or another round of literal vaporware.

The first systematic attempts at rainmaking date back to August 5, 1891, when a train pulled into Midland, Texas, carrying 8 tons of sulfuric acid, 7 tons of cast iron, half a ton of manganese oxide, half a dozen scientists, and several veterans of the US Civil War, including General Edward Powers, a civil engineer from Chicago, and Major Robert George Dyrenforth, a former patent lawyer. Powers had noticed that it seemed to rain more in the days after battles, and had come to believe that the “concussions” of artillery fire during combat caused air currents in the upper atmosphere to mix together and release moisture. Powers figured he could make his own rain on demand with loud noises, either by arranging hundreds of cannons in a circle and pointing them at the sky or by sending up balloons loaded with explosives. His ideas, which he laid out in a book called War and the Weather and lobbied for for years, eventually prompted the US federal government to bankroll the experiment in Midland.

Powers and Dyrenforth’s team assembled at a local cattle ranch and prepared for an all-out assault on the sky. They made mortars from lengths of pipe, stuffed dynamite into prairie dog holes, and draped bushes in rackarock, an explosive used in the coal-mining industry. They built kites charged with electricity and filled balloons with a combination of hydrogen and oxygen, which Dyrenforth thought would fuse into water when it exploded. (Skeptics pointed out that it would have been easier and cheaper to just tie a jug of water to the balloon.) The group was beset by technical difficulties; at one point, a furnace caught fire and had to be lassoed by a cowboy and dragged to a water tank to be extinguished. By the time they finished setting up their experiment, it had already started raining naturally. Still, they pressed on, unleashing a barrage of explosions on the night of August 17 and claiming victory when rain again fell 12 hours later.

It was questionable how much credit they could take. They had arrived in Texas right at the start of the rainy season, and the precipitation that fell before the experiment had been forecast by the US Weather Bureau. As for Powers’ notion that rain came after battles—well, battles tended to start in dry weather, so it was only the natural cycle of things that wet weather often followed.

Despite skepticism from serious scientists and ridicule in parts of the press, the Midland experiments lit the fuse on half a century of rainmaking pseudoscience. The Weather Bureau soon found itself in a running media battle to debunk the efforts of the self-styled rainmakers who started operating across the country.

The most famous of these was Charles Hatfield, nicknamed either the Moisture Accelerator or the Ponzi of the Skies, depending on whom you asked. Originally a sewing machine salesman from California, he reinvented himself as a weather guru and struck dozens of deals with desperate towns. When he arrived in a new place, he’d build a series of wooden towers, mix up a secret blend of 23 cask-aged chemicals, and pour it into vats on top of the towers to evaporate into the sky. Hatfield’s methods had the air of witchcraft, but he had a knack for playing the odds. In Los Angeles, he promised 18 inches of rain between mid-December and late April, when historical rainfall records suggested a 50 percent chance of that happening anyway.

While these showmen and charlatans were filling their pocketbooks, scientists were slowly figuring out what actually made it rain—something called cloud condensation nuclei. Even on a clear day, the skies are packed with particles, some no bigger than a grain of pollen or a viral strand. “Every cloud droplet in Earth’s atmosphere formed on a preexisting aerosol particle,” one cloud physicist told me. The types of particles vary by place. In the UAE, they include a complex mix of sulfate-rich sands from the desert of the Empty Quarter, salt spray from the Persian Gulf, chemicals from the oil refineries that dot the region, and organic materials from as far afield as India. Without them there would be no clouds at all—no rain, no snow, no hail.

I’m suddenly very aware that I’m on a military base. Couldn’t this giant movable laser be used as a weapon?

A lot of raindrops start as airborne ice crystals, which melt as they fall to earth. But without cloud condensation nuclei, even ice crystals won’t form until the temperature dips below –40 degrees Fahrenheit. As a result, the atmosphere is full of pockets of supercooled liquid water that’s below freezing but hasn’t actually turned into ice.

In 1938, a meteorologist in Germany suggested that seeding these areas of frigid water with artificial cloud condensation nuclei might encourage the formation of ice crystals, which would quickly grow large enough to fall, first as snowflakes, then as rain. After the Second World War, American scientists at General Electric seized on the idea. One group, led by chemists Vincent Schaefer and Irving Langmuir, found that solid carbon dioxide, also known as dry ice, would do the trick. When Schaefer dropped grains of dry ice into the home freezer he’d been using as a makeshift cloud chamber, he discovered that water readily freezes around the particles’ crystalline structure. When he witnessed the effect a week later, Langmuir jotted down three words in his notebook: “Control of Weather.” Within a few months, they were dropping dry-ice pellets from planes over Mount Greylock in Western Massachusetts, creating a 3-mile-long streak of ice and snow.

Another GE scientist, Bernard Vonnegut, had settled on a different seeding material: silver iodide. It has a structure remarkably similar to an ice crystal and can be used for seeding at a wider range of temperatures. (Vonnegut’s brother, Kurt, who was working as a publicist at GE at the time, would go on to write Cat’s Cradle, a book about a seeding material called ice-nine that causes all the water on earth to freeze at once.)

In the wake of these successes, GE was bombarded with requests: Winter carnivals and movie studios wanted artificial snow; others wanted clear skies for search and rescue. Then, in February 1947, everything went quiet. The company’s scientists were ordered to stop talking about cloud seeding publicly and direct their efforts toward a classified US military program called Project Cirrus.

Over the next five years, Project Cirrus conducted more than 250 cloud-seeding experiments as the United States and other countries explored ways to weaponize the weather. Schaefer was part of a team that dropped 80 pounds of dry ice into the heart of Hurricane King, which had torn through Miami in the fall of 1947 and was heading out to sea. Following the operation, the storm made a sharp turn back toward land and smashed into the coast of Georgia, where it caused one death and millions of dollars in damages. In 1963, Fidel Castro reportedly accused the Americans of seeding Hurricane Flora, which hung over Cuba for four days, resulting in thousands of deaths. During the Vietnam War, the US Army used cloud seeding to try to soften the ground and make it impassable for enemy soldiers.

A couple of years after that war ended, more than 30 countries, including the US and the USSR, signed the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques. By then, interest in cloud seeding had started to melt away anyway, first among militaries, then in the civilian sector. “We didn’t really have the tools—the numerical models and also the observations—to really prove it,” says Katja Friedrich, who researches cloud physics at the University of Colorado. (This didn’t stop the USSR from seeding clouds near the site of the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl in hopes that they would dump their radioactive contents over Belarus rather than Moscow.)

< Watch the video at the source page. >

More than 50 countries have dabbled in cloud seeding since the 1940s—to combat droughts, refill hydroelectric reservoirs, keep ski slopes snowy, or even use them as a weapon of war.

To really put seeding on a sound scientific footing, they needed to get a better understanding of rain at all scales, from the microphysical science of nucleation right up to the global movement of air currents. At the time, scientists couldn’t do the three things that were required to make the technology viable: identify target areas of supercooled liquid in clouds, deliver the seeding material into those clouds, and verify that it was actually doing what they thought. How could you tell whether a cloud dropped snow because of seeding, or if it would have snowed anyway?

By 2017, armed with new, more powerful computers running the latest generation of simulation software, researchers in the US were finally ready to answer that question, via the Snowie project. Like the GE chemists years earlier, these experimenters dropped silver iodide from planes. The experiments took place in the Rocky Mountains, where prevailing winter winds blow moisture up the slopes, leading to clouds reliably forming at the same time each day. The results were impressive: The researchers could draw an extra 100 to 300 acre-feet of snow from each storm they seeded. But the most compelling evidence was anecdotal. As the plane flew back and forth at an angle to the prevailing wind, it sprayed a zigzag pattern of seeding material across the sky. That was echoed by a zigzag pattern of snow on the weather radar. “Mother Nature does not produce zigzag patterns,” says one scientist who worked on Snowie.

In almost a century of cloud seeding, it was the first time anyone had actually shown the full chain of events from seeding through to precipitation reaching the ground.

The UAE’s national Center of Meteorology is a glass cube rising out of featureless scrubland, ringed by a tangle of dusty highways on the edge of Abu Dhabi. Inside, I meet Ahmad Al Kamali, the facility’s rain operations executor—a trim young man with a neat beard and dark-framed glasses. He studied at the University of Reading in the UK and worked as a forecaster before specializing in cloud-seeding operations. Like all the Emirati men I meet on this trip, he’s wearing a kandura—a loose white robe with a headpiece secured by a loop of thick black cord.

We take the elevator to the third floor, where I find cloud-seeding mission control. With gold detailing and a marble floor, it feels like a luxury hotel lobby, except for the giant radar map of the Gulf that fills one wall. Forecasters—men in white, women in black—sit at banks of desks and scour satellite images and radar data looking for clouds to seed. Near the entrance there’s a small glass pyramid on a pedestal, about a foot wide at its base. It’s a holographic projector. When Al Kamali switches it on, a tiny animated cloud appears inside. A plane circles it, and rain begins to fall. I start to wonder: How much of this is theater?

The impetus for cloud seeding in the UAE came in the early 2000s, when the country was in the middle of a construction boom. Dubai and Abu Dhabi were a sea of cranes; the population had more than doubled in the previous decade as expats flocked there to take advantage of the good weather and low income taxes. Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of Abu Dhabi’s royal family—currently both vice president and deputy prime minister of the UAE—thought cloud seeding, along with desalination of seawater, could help replenish the country’s groundwater and refill its reservoirs. (Globally, Mansour is perhaps best known as the owner of the soccer club Manchester City.) As the Emiratis were setting up their program, they called in some experts from another arid country for help.

Back in 1989, a team of researchers in South Africa were studying how to enhance the formation of raindrops. They were taking cloud measurements in the east of the country when they spotted a cumulus cloud that was raining when all the other clouds in the area were dry. When they sent a plane into the cloud to get samples, they found a much wider range of droplet sizes than in the other clouds—some as big as half a centimeter in diameter.

The finding underscored that it’s not only the number of droplets in a cloud that matters but also the size. A cloud of droplets that are all the same size won’t mix together because they’re all falling at the same speed. But if you can introduce larger drops, they’ll plummet to earth faster, colliding and coalescing with other droplets, forming even bigger drops that have enough mass to leave the cloud and become rain. The South African researchers discovered that although clouds in semiarid areas of the country contain hundreds of water droplets in every cubic centimeter of air, they’re less efficient at creating rain than maritime clouds, which have about a sixth as many droplets but more variation in droplet size.

So why did this one cloud have bigger droplets? It turned out that the chimney of a nearby paper mill was pumping out particles of debris that attracted water. Over the next few years, the South African researchers ran long-term studies looking for the best way to re-create the effect of the paper mill on demand. They settled on ordinary salt—the most hygroscopic substance they could find. Then they developed flares that would release a steady stream of salt crystals when ignited.

Those flares were the progenitors of what the Emiratis use today, made locally at the Weather Modification Technology Factory. Al Kamali shows me a couple: They’re foot-long tubes a couple of inches in diameter, each holding a kilogram of seeding material. One type of flare holds a mixture of salts. The other type holds salts coated in a nano layer of titanium dioxide, which attracts more water in drier climates. The Emiratis call them Ghaith 1 and Ghaith 2, ghaith being one of the Arabic words for “rain.” Although the language has another near synonym, matar, it has negative connotations—rain as punishment, torment, the rain that breaks the banks and floods the fields. Ghaith, on the other hand, is rain as mercy and prosperity, the deluge that ends the drought.

The morning after my visit to the National Center of Meteorology, I take a taxi to Al Ain to go on that cloud-seeding flight. But there’s a problem. When I leave Abu Dhabi that morning there’s a low fog settled across the country, but by the time I arrive at Al Ain’s small airport—about 100 miles inland from the cities on the coast—it has burned away, leaving clear blue skies. There are no clouds to seed.

Once I’ve cleared the tight security cordon and reached the gold-painted hangar (the airport is also used for military training flights), I meet Newman, who agrees to take me up anyway so he can demonstrate what would happen on a real mission. He’s wearing a blue cap with the UAE Rain Enhancement Program logo on it. Before moving to the UAE with his family 11 years ago, Newman worked as a commercial airline pilot on passenger jets and split his time between the UK and his native South Africa. He has exactly the kind of firmly reassuring presence you want from someone you’re about to climb into a small plane with.

Every cloud-seeding mission starts with a weather forecast. A team of six operators at the meteorology center scour satellite images and data from the UAE’s network of radars and weather stations and identify areas where clouds are likely to form. Often, that’s in the area around Al Ain, where the mountains on the border with Oman act as a natural barrier to moisture coming in from the sea.

If it’s looking like rain, the cloud-seeding operators radio the hangar and put some of the nine pilots on standby mode—either at home, on what Newman calls “villa standby,” or at the airport or in a holding pattern in the air. As clouds start to form, they begin to appear on the weather radar, changing color from green through blue to yellow and then red as the droplets get bigger and the reflectivity of the clouds increases.

Once a mission is approved, the pilot scribbles out a flight plan while the ground crew preps one of the four modified Beechcraft King Air C90 planes. There are 24 flares attached to each wing—half Ghaith 1, half Ghaith 2—for a total of 48 kilograms of seeding material on each flight. Timing is important, Newman tells me as we taxi toward the runway. The pilots need to reach the cloud at the optimal moment.

Once we’re airborne, Newman climbs to 6,000 feet. Then, like a falcon riding the thermals, he goes hunting for updrafts. Cloud seeding is a mentally challenging and sometimes dangerous job, he says through the headset, over the roar of the engines. Real missions last up to three hours and can get pretty bumpy as the plane moves between clouds. Pilots generally try to avoid turbulence. Seeding missions seek it out.

When we get to the right altitude, Newman radios the ground for permission to set off the flares. There are no hard rules for how many flares to put into each cloud, one seeding operator told me. It depends on the strength of the updraft reported by the pilots, how things look on the radar. It sounds more like art than science.

Newman triggers one of the salt flares, and I twist in my seat to watch: It burns with a white-gray smoke. He lets me set off one of the nano-flares. It’s slightly anticlimactic: The green lid of the tube pops open and the material spills out. I’m reminded of someone sprinkling grated cheese on spaghetti.

There’s an evangelical zeal to the way some of the pilots and seeding operators talk about this stuff—the rush of hitting a button on an instrument panel and seeing the clouds burst before their eyes. Like gods. Newman shows me a video on his phone of a cloud that he’d just seeded hurling fat drops of rain onto the plane’s front windows. Operators swear they can see clouds changing on the radar.

1. A plane flies near a cloud that has been targeted for seeding, searching for updrafts of air.

2. The pilot activates flares on the plane’s wing, which spray ­moisture-absorbing particles into the sky.

3. Water droplets form around the seeding particles, then collide with other nearby droplets.

4. When the droplets become heavy enough, they fall as rain.

But the jury is out on how effective hygroscopic seeding actually is. The UAE has invested millions in developing new technologies for enhancing rainfall—and surprisingly little in actually verifying the impact of the seeding it’s doing right now. After initial feasibility work in the early 2000s, the next long-term analysis of the program’s effectiveness didn’t come until 2021. It found a 23 percent increase in annual rainfall in seeded areas, as compared with historical averages, but cautioned that “anomalies associated with climate variability” might affect this figure in unforeseen ways. As Friedrich notes, you can’t necessarily assume that rainfall measurements from, say, 1989 are directly comparable with those from 2019, given that climatic conditions can vary widely from year to year or decade to decade.

The best evidence for hygroscopic seeding, experts say, comes from India, where for the past 15 years the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology has been conducting a slow, patient study. Unlike the UAE, India uses one plane to seed and another to take measurements of the effect that has on the cloud. In hundreds of seeding missions, researchers found an 18 percent uptick in raindrop formation inside the cloud. But the thing is, every time you want to try to make it rain in a new place, you need to prove that it works in that area, in those particular conditions, with whatever unique mix of aerosol particles might be present. What succeeds in, say, the Western Ghats mountain range is not even applicable to other areas of India, the lead researcher tells me, let alone other parts of the world.

If the UAE wanted to reliably increase the amount of fresh water in the country, committing to more desalination would be the safer bet. In theory, cloud seeding is cheaper: According to a 2023 paper by researchers at the National Center of Meteorology, the average cost of harvestable rainfall generated by cloud seeding is between 1 and 4 cents per cubic meter, compared with around 31 cents per cubic meter of water from desalination at the Hassyan Seawater Reverse Osmosis plant. But each mission costs as much as $8,000, and there’s no guarantee that the water that falls as rain will actually end up where it’s needed.

One researcher I spoke to, who has worked on cloud-seeding research in the UAE and asked to speak on background because they still work in the industry, was critical of the quality of the UAE’s science. There was, they said, a tendency for “white lies” to proliferate; officials tell their superiors what they want to hear despite the lack of evidence. The country’s rulers already think that cloud seeding is working, this person argued, so for an official to admit otherwise now would be problematic. (The National Center of Meteorology did not comment on these claims.)

By the time I leave Al Ain, I’m starting to suspect that what goes on there is as much about optics as it is about actually enhancing rainfall. The UAE has a history of making flashy announcements about cutting-edge technology—from flying cars to 3D-printed buildings to robotic police officers—with little end product.

For the UAE, it’s almost irrelevant whether cloud seeding works. There’s soft power in being seen to be able to bend the weather to your will.

Now, as the world transitions away from the fossil fuels that have been the country’s lifeblood for the past 50 years, the UAE is trying to position itself as a leader on climate. Last year it hosted the annual United Nations Climate Change Conference, and the head of its National Center of Meteorology was chosen to lead the World Meteorological Organization, where he’ll help shape the global consensus that forms around cloud seeding and other forms of mass-scale climate modification. (He could not be reached for an interview.)

The UAE has even started exporting its cloud-seeding expertise. One of the pilots I spoke to had just returned from a trip to Lahore, where the Pakistani government had asked the UAE’s cloud seeders to bring rain to clear the polluted skies. It rained—but they couldn’t really take credit. “We knew it was going to rain, and we just went and seeded the rain that was going to come anyway,” he said.

From the steps of the Emirates Palace Mandarin Oriental in Abu Dhabi, the UAE certainly doesn’t seem like a country that’s running out of water. As I roll up the hotel’s long driveway on my second day in town, I can see water features and lush green grass. The sprinklers are running. I’m here for a ceremony for the fifth round of research grants being awarded by the UAE Research Program for Rain Enhancement Science. Since 2015, the program has awarded $21 million to 14 projects developing and testing ways of enhancing rainfall, and it’s about to announce the next set of recipients.

In the ornate ballroom, local officials have loosely segregated themselves by gender. I sip watermelon juice and work the room, speaking to previous award winners. There’s Linda Zou, a Chinese researcher based at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi who developed the nano-coated seeding particles in the Ghaith 2 flares. There’s Ali Abshaev, who comes from a cloud-seeding dynasty (his father directs Russia’s Hail Suppression Research Center) and who has built a machine to spray hygroscopic material into the sky from the ground. It’s like “an upside-down jet engine,” one researcher explains.

Other projects have been looking at “terrain modification”—whether planting trees or building earthen barriers in certain locations could encourage clouds to form. Giles Harrison, from the University of Reading, is exploring whether electrical currents released into clouds can encourage raindrops to stick together. There’s also a lot of work on computer simulation. Youssef Wehbe, a UAE program officer, gives me a cagey interview about the future vision: pairs of drones, powered by artificial intelligence, one taking cloud measurements and the other printing seeding material specifically tailored for that particular cloud—on the fly, as it were.

I’m particularly taken by one of this year’s grant winners. Guillaume Matras, who worked at the French defense contractor Thales before moving to the UAE, is hoping to make it rain by shooting a giant laser into the sky. Wehbe describes this approach as “high risk.” I think he means “it may not work,” not “it could set the whole atmosphere on fire.” Either way, I’m sold.

So after my cloud-seeding flight, I get a lift to Zayed Military City, an army base between Al Ain and Abu Dhabi, to visit the secretive government-funded research lab where Matras works. They take my passport at the gate to the compound, and before I can go into the lab itself I’m asked to secure my phone in a locker that’s also a Faraday cage—completely sealed to signals going in and out.

After I put on a hairnet, a lab coat, and tinted safety goggles, Matras shows me into a lab, where I watch a remarkable thing. Inside a broad, black box the size of a small television sits an immensely powerful laser. A tech switches it on. Nothing happens. Then Matras leans forward and opens a lens, focusing the laser beam.

There’s a high-pitched but very loud buzz, like the whine of an electric motor. It is the sound of the air being ripped apart. A very fine filament, maybe half a centimeter across, appears in midair. It looks like a strand of spider’s silk, but it’s bright blue. It’s plasma—the fourth state of matter. Scale up the size of the laser and the power, and you can actually set a small part of the atmosphere on fire. Man-made lightning. Obviously my first question is to ask what would happen if I put my hand in it. “Your hand would turn into plasma,” another researcher says, entirely deadpan. I put my hand back in my pocket.

Matras says these laser beams will be able to enhance rainfall in three ways. First, acoustically—like the concussion theory of old, it’s thought that the sound of atoms in the air being ripped apart might shake adjacent raindrops so that they coalesce, get bigger, and fall to earth. Second: convection—the beam will create heat, generating updrafts that will force droplets to mix. (I’m reminded of a never-realized 1840s plan to create rain by setting fire to large chunks of the Appalachian Mountains.) Finally: ionization. When the beam is switched off, the plasma will reform—the nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen molecules inside will clump back together into random configurations, creating new particles for water to settle around.

The plan is to scale this technology up to something the size of a shipping container that can be put on the back of a truck and driven to where it’s needed. It seems insane—I’m suddenly very aware that I’m on a military base. Couldn’t this giant movable laser be used as a weapon? “Yes,” Matras says. He picks up a pencil, the nib honed to a sharp point. “But anything could be a weapon.”

These words hang over me as I ride back into the city, past lush golf courses and hotel fountains and workmen swigging from plastic bottles. Once again, there’s not a cloud in the sky. But maybe that doesn’t matter. For the UAE, so keen to project its technological prowess around the region and the world, it’s almost irrelevant whether cloud seeding works. There’s soft power in being seen to be able to bend the weather to your will—in 2018, an Iranian general accused the UAE and Israel of stealing his country’s rain.

Anything could be a weapon, Matras had said. But there are military weapons, and economic weapons, and cultural and political weapons too. Anything could be a weapon—even the idea of one.

Source

Physicists have a long list of open problems they consider important for advancing the field of quantum information. Problem 5 asks whether a system can exist in its maximally entangled state in a realistic scenario, in which noise is present. Now Julio de Vicente at Carlos III University of Madrid has answered this fundamental quantum question with a definitive “no” [1]. De Vicente says that he hopes his work will “open a new research avenue within entanglement theory.”

From quantum sensors to quantum computers, many technologies require quantum mechanically entangled particles to operate. The properties of such particles are correlated in a way that would not be possible in classical physics. Ideally, for technology applications, these particles should be in the so-called maximally entangled state, one in which all possible measures of entanglement are maximized.

Scientists predict that particles can exist in this state in the absence of experimental, environmental, and statistical noise. But it was unclear whether the particles could also exist in a maximally entangled state in real-world scenarios, where noise is unavoidable.

To fill this knowledge gap, de Vicente turned to mathematics. He proved that, if any noise is introduced to a quantum system, it is impossible to simultaneously maximize all entanglement measures of the system, and the system cannot exist in a maximally entangled state. While de Vicente’s finding solves one open problem, he says that it raises many more, including what conditions are required in order to simultaneously maximize multiple entanglement measures of a system.

–Ryan Wilkinson

Ryan Wilkinson is a Corresponding Editor for Physics Magazine based in Durham, UK.

References

    1. J. I. de Vicente, “Maximally entangled mixed states for a fixed spectrum do not always exist,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 133, 050202 (2024).

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That's because a major ocean current, the Atlantic Meridional Ocean Current (AMOC), which runs from the Gulf of Mexico to about Svalbard, Norway, could cease to run. Today it carries enormous amounts of warm water to the north Atlantic, where it cools, sinks and sharply changes direction, moving off the eastern coast of Greenland, then through the mid-Atlantic (and under the northeastern-bound AMOC) and on to the southern Atlantic Ocean. The heat it releases in the process keeps northern European ports ice-free.

Under global warming, the saline northeastern AMOC mixes with cool freshwater from the melting Arctic, and with increased rainfall characteristic of global warming. This freshwater reduces the current's density and salinity, so its cooling and sinking in the northern Atlantic is reduced, and thus its southward flow is reduced.

In 1995, climate modelers projected that the AMOC's circulation would stop by 2200. Observations have been available since 2004, and indeed parts of the AMOC do appear to be slowing down.

But until now, climate models have not been able to peer closely at the AMOC, including its many streams and gyres and inputs.

Now, using a climate model that takes a more detailed look at the AMOC, scientists have a better view of its future, finding details earlier models missed. In this new, more resolute model, the AMOC abruptly collapses in some regions, and unexpectedly increases in others.

The findings are published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

"Our high-resolution model study uncovers a startling twist: the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) may strengthen in the subarctic Atlantic due to warming," said Gerrit Lohmann, a co-author on the study from the Alfred Wegener Institute at the Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research at the University of Bremen in Germany, "defying the widespread belief that this vital current system is uniformly weakening."

The large global climate models used for climate change projections typically divide the land and ocean into 100 kilometer by 100 kilometer areas, to accommodate time and computing availability. As "low resolution" models, they can miss smaller physical features, such as eddies and gyres in the ocean.

Lohmann and collaborators used a recently-developed high resolution climate model called the Community Earth System Model which reduced the prior grid sizes of 1° of latitude and longitude on each side to 0.1°, or about 17 kilometers.

They assumed the atmosphere's carbon dioxide level would increase at a high rate—the IPCC's RCP 8.5 scenario, with carbon dioxide increasing quickly over the century to a level of about 1,250 parts per million (ppm) in 2100.

Both the high- and low-resolution models showed an overall slowdown in the AMOC, by about 8 million cubic meters of water per second from 2000 to 2100, with a sharp decline near the year 2020. (By comparison, the AMOC's total flow rate is an estimated 15 to 20 million cubic meters of water per second, transporting about 1.3 million billion joules of energy per second.) But on a smaller, more regional scale, parts of the AMOC collapsed abruptly, and in other parts even strengthened over time.

"Advanced climate models now reveal that, under extreme greenhouse gas emissions (RCP 8.5), the AMOC could experience sharp declines in some areas while paradoxically increasing in the Arctic," Lohmann said. "This unexpected regional strengthening occurs despite an overall weakening trend in AMOC activity."

Besides regional variations and ocean eddies, the high-resolution model showed tipping points that were unknown from lower resolution studies.

A tipping point is when a system suddenly changes from one kind of state to another—a threshold where an additional small change causes the system to suddenly transition to a new state. For example, you can eat and eat while wearing pants, but at some point the bottom of your pants are suddenly going to rip, and they will forever after be in a different condition. That's a tipping point for pants.

Subsystems of the climate system have tipping points; for example, studies of Greenland Ice Sheet's past have estimated it will experience a tipping point when the Earth has warmed about 2.5°C above the preindustrial level. When the tipping point is reached, the melting of the entire ice sheet could be inevitable.

The scientists found that at the smaller scales, parts of the AMOC have tipping points that do not appear in previous models of the general AMOC.

"The findings highlight the urgent need to incorporate regional dynamics into AMOC forecasts, as these localized shifts could have profound impacts on climate and marine ecosystems," said Lohmann.

"As we face an uncertain climatic future, these insights underscore the critical importance of advancing climate models to anticipate and respond to dramatic changes in our planet's systems." What's more, the feedback between the overall AMOC and small scale AMOC "could change in the future," he said.

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The research, published in the BMC Nutrition Journal, was led by Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) and Universidad de las Americas, and shows a nearly linear relationship between higher frequency of eating breakfast and greater life satisfaction in children and adolescents aged between 10 and 17 years old across 42 countries including Britain.

The highest life satisfaction score was identified in participants who had breakfast daily, whereas the lowest life satisfaction score was observed in children who never had breakfast.

Among the 42 countries studied, children who ate breakfast every day in Portugal had the highest levels of life satisfaction. In contrast, the lowest life satisfaction scores were found in children from Romania who never ate breakfast, indicating potential socio-economic factors also influencing the results.

Among children who ate breakfast every day, children in England had the fifth lowest mean life satisfaction scores, behind only Romania, Hungary, Germany and Austria.

Senior author Lee Smith, Professor of Public Health at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU), said, "Our study was wide-ranging and found a consistent association between frequency of breakfast and life satisfaction, and there are several potential reasons for this. There have been previous studies that show low mood among adolescents who have not eaten breakfast and also higher instances of anxiety, stress and depression.

"Moreover, consuming an adequate breakfast provides the necessary energy and nutrients for optimal cognitive functioning and enhances concentration, memory, and learning ability.

"Another reason could be the mix of vitamins and minerals that we get from our daily breakfast, and not regularly getting those may result in lower life satisfaction over time. A regular routine that includes breakfast can also bring structure and a positive tone to the rest of the day.

"Results did show some inconsistencies between countries, which might be influenced by diverse cultures and lifestyles and socio-economic factors. However, despite this, our results show that in all the countries examined, reported life satisfaction is overall higher in those who eat breakfast daily than in those who never eat breakfast."

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Researchers are calling it limbic-predominant amnestic neurodegenerative syndrome (LANS), and they hope that their work makes it easier for medical professionals to care for and counsel patients with various forms of memory loss.

LANS presents with a different set of brain changes to Alzheimer's, and it tends to progress slower and with milder symptoms, mostly impacting those over the age of 80.

Similar to Alzheimer's, a definitive diagnosis is only available upon autopsy.

To help those living with memory loss, neurologist Nick Corriveau-Lecavalier and his colleagues at the Mayo Clinic, along with other institutions in the US and Spain, have provided an official framework by which to distinguish LANS from Alzheimer's.

"In our clinical work, we see patients whose memory symptoms appear to mimic Alzheimer's disease, but when you look at their brain imaging or biomarkers, it's clear they don't have Alzheimer's," says senior author and Mayo neurologist David Jones.

"Until now, there has not been a specific medical diagnosis to point to, but now we can offer them some answers.

Notable differences include degeneration in distinct brain areas, indicated in cool colors. (Mayo Clinic)

The more precise diagnosis considers factors such as age, the severity of memory loss, brain scans, and biomarkers.

In a trial, the new diagnostic criteria successfully categorized dozens of patients who had died with Alzheimer's disease or LANS, based only on health data from when they were alive. The success rate was not perfect, but the accuracy was over 70 percent.

As it turns out, the set of clinical criteria for LANS has a high likelihood of being associated with brain changes caused by limbic-predominant age-related TDP-43 encephalopathy – aka LATE.

In the study, most patients with LATE brain changes scored the highest for a LANS diagnosis, but the authors note that while the two terms are "highly associated", LANS can technically cover any form of dementia that leads to degeneration of the limbic system.

(Medical gallery of Blausen Medical 2014/BruceBlaus/CC BY 3.0/Wikimedia Commons)

The brain changes in LATE are highly common in elderly folk, occurring in about 40 percent of autopsied brains beyond age 85. They are marked by a buildup of protein, called TP-43, in the limbic system, which is a brain network involved in regulating memory, emotions, and behavior.

These brain changes are distinctly different to the tau protein tangles that occur in Alzheimer's disease, and which tend to accumulate in parts of the brain involved in spatial awareness and spatial reasoning.

In 2019, an international consensus report recommended that LATE brain changes should be part of the dementia classification system.

Alzheimer's and LANS have significant overlaps in symptoms, which means they are often conflated. Sometimes LANS can even arise alongside Alzheimer's, complicating matters even more.

But the two diseases are distinct.

LATE brain changes. (Mayo Clinic)

Sifting through available studies on both forms of dementia, researchers at the Mayo Clinic have identified some key clinical differences in how LANS and Alzheimer's present in patients.

Patients with LANS tend to first suffer from episodic memory loss, which reduces their ability to recall contextual details or names of objects and people, and reduces verbal fluency. But their visuospatial processing is relatively preserved compared to those with Alzheimer's.

Additionally, MRI studies suggest that a loss of volume in the hippocampus is associated with LANS more so than Alzheimer's, where losses in volume tend to be focused in the neocortex.

LANS also appears to come on slower and with more mild effects than the faster rate of decline seen in Alzheimer's disease, and the even steeper rate of decline observed in those who have both LANS and Alzheimer's.

"One example that can be a potential source of clinical conundrums is the limbic variant Alzheimer's disease, where tau predominantly localizes to the limbic system and therefore qualifies for LANS," the authors explain.

"The advanced LANS criteria in combination with visual assessment of tau-PET can help in determining which pathology has the highest likelihood of driving clinical symptoms."

Disentangling the various forms and mechanisms of dementia is clearly tricky work, but the team at Mayo plans to continue refining their LANS classification.

The study was published in Brain Communications.

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"Skipping breakfast, historically, hasn't been something necessarily healthy," Dr. Lopez-Jimenez says.

He adds that missing the first meal of the day isn't good for your heart.

"There are numerous studies showing that people who skip breakfast have an increased risk for heart disease and many other ailments," he says.

Not only that, there's also some evidence to suggest that heart attacks are more likely to happen in the morning.

"Part of it is the high adrenaline state that occurs early in the morning. If you match that with no food, no calories at all, what happens is that the body says, 'Well, with no food, I could die from starvation, so I have to do some extra things.' And those extra things are basically crunching the glands that make adrenaline. And essentially, the body gets into this rush of adrenaline," says Dr. Lopez-Jimenez.

And for those wanting to lose weight through fasting, breakfast is not the right meal to miss.

"People who skip breakfast, many times they're able to do that because they have a pretty large dinner," says Dr. Lopez-Jimenez. "So you're feeding the body with calories at the time when your body is just about to go to sleep, when you need calories the least."

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This rod-shaped pathogen is a member of the rabies virus family that causes encephalitis—inflammation and swelling in the brain. And it is spread mainly by sandflies, but mosquitoes and ticks can also spread it.

The initial symptoms are similar to the flu, but they can rapidly advance (over 24 to 48 hours) to encephalitis, coma and death. Children under the age of 15 are the most vulnerable.

Exactly how the virus enters the central nervous system and causes encephalitis is poorly understood. It has been proposed that when an infected insect bites a person to get their blood meal, they secrete their saliva containing the virus.

The virus then spreads into the person's bloodstream and infects immune cells called monocytes (a type of white blood cell), where it replicates, undetected by the immune system. The virus then gets transported to the central nervous system and enters the brain by disrupting the protective blood-brain barrier.

Six hours after the person has become infected, the Chandipura virus secretes a protein called phosphoprotein inside brain cells, and this might explain why it causes death so rapidly.

Unfortunately, there are no antiviral drugs to treat people infected with the Chandipura virus. And there is no vaccine.
Fairly recent problem, driven by climate change

The Chandipura virus is named after the village in Maharashtra, India, where it was first identified in 1965. But the first big outbreak didn't occur until 2003 in Andhra Pradesh (a state in the south of India) where 329 children tested positive for the virus with 183 of them dying. And in 2005, an outbreak in Gujarat, (a state in the north-west) was reported with 26 cases and a high fatality rate of 78%.

The latest outbreak, affecting over 100 people in Gujarat, had a particularly heavy toll on children under 15. The rapid spread of the virus and the severity of symptoms has concerned public health officials.

Since the virus was first discovered in India in 1965, most of the cases have been restricted to the Indian subcontinent. However, the geographical distribution of the virus extends beyond India. It was detected in sandflies in west Africa in 1991 and 1992, and in hedgehogs in Senegal (1990-96). Antibodies to the Chandipura virus have also been found in wild monkeys in Sri Lanka in 1993.

The emergence of Chandipura virus in India is probably related to climate change and its spread is facilitated by warming temperatures.

Several diseases spread by bugs have spiked in recent years as a result of climate change. For example, this summer, India reported a high number of cases of mosquito-borne viruses, including Zika, dengue and Nipah.

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Egypt’s oldest pyramid, The Stepped Pyramid of Djoser, may have been built using some seriously high-tech kit. At least that’s according to a new study published in July.

The authors found that the Pyramid of Djoser, which served as a kind of proto-pyramid for those that would follow, could have used a sophisticated hydraulic lift at its core during construction. The lift would have been used to raise the colossal stones needed for the pyramid through a chamber in a “volcano fashion”, the authors wrote.

The pyramid was built as the final resting place of Djoser, the first or second pharaoh of Egypt’s third Dynasty during the Old Kingdom period, a mind-boggling 4,700 years ago.

Located just south of modern-day Cairo and 17 kilometres (10.5 miles) south of the Great Pyramids of Giza, the pyramid of Djoser rises in six stepped layers from the Saqqara Plateau to an impressive height of 62 metres – as tall as a 14-storey building.

Its exact method of construction, like all of Egypt’s pyramids, is shrouded in mystery. This hydraulic lift system, if proven, would represent a sophisticated engineering solution for its time, potentially explaining how ancient Egyptians managed to build such massive structures with the technology available to them.

According to the authors, an enclosure nearby may have acted as a kind of “check dam”, designed to capture water and sediment from the surrounding area.

Known as ‘Gisr el-Mudir', the proposed dam is possibly the world's oldest monumental stone structure. Previous hypotheses as to its purpose have ranged from a cattle pen to a fortress to a celebratory arena for the pharaoh.

Map of the Saqqara plateau showing the water course from the Gisr el-Mudir dam to the water treatment facility near Djoser pyramid. The water is then transferred to the pyramid's network of pipes to power the hydraulic elevator. - Image credit: Paleotechnic of Paris, France

A series of compartments dug into the ground outside the pyramid would then have served as a water treatment facility – no less than 400 metres long and 27 metres deep. As water passed through each compartment, sediment would settle out, providing cleaner water for use in the construction process.

Taken together, Gisr el-Mudir and the trench would form a sophisticated system capable of controlling both water quality and flow.

From here, water would then flow into shafts located inside the pyramid itself. Inside these shafts, the researchers propose that a float system was used. The rising water level in the shafts would help lift this float, which could carry building stones to where they were needed.

Afterwards, the shaft could be drained using a plug system at its base, allowing the process to begin all over again.

This work opens up a new line of research for the scientific community: the use of hydraulic power to build the pyramids of Egypt," says Xavier Landreau, President of Paleotechnic and lead author of the study.

"It not only piques curiosity about the level of technical knowledge possessed by the architects of these structures, surpassing previous estimations but also challenges the established historical narrative."

Impressive though this system and the work to uncover it is, one question remains on Landreau and his team's mind: where was the tomb of the pharaoh located?

"Could the hydraulic system, likely employed in pyramid construction, have been used to inter the king in his ultimate resting place, within the pyramid's core?" he asks.

About the expert

Xavier Landreau is president of Paleotechnic and the lead author of the study. Paleotechnic conducts multidisciplinary research to answer questions about the origins of our civilization and stands out for its interdisciplinary methods, which combine hydrology, geotechnics, physics, mathematics, materials science, and history.

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Relatively few people say they drink raw milk. Only 3% of U.S. adults report having consumed raw milk in the past 12 months, while 4% were not sure whether they had, according to a new nationally representative Annenberg Public Policy Center health survey of nearly 1,500 empaneled U.S. adults conducted in July.

But many more people say they do not use a thermometer to ensure that their food is heated to a temperature high enough to kill bacteria and viruses, including avian influenza A viruses like the H5N1 strain now found in U.S. cattle. And most are unsure what internal food temperatures kill bacteria and viruses, according to the survey.

Using a food thermometer

Only about 1 in 4 U.S. adults (27%) report using a thermometer either "often" or "all the time" to check whether the meat, poultry, or fish they consume has reached an internal temperature that makes the food safe to eat. A similar proportion (29%) say they "never" use a thermometer to check food temperatures while 20% say they do "rarely" and 20% "sometimes."

"Using a food thermometer to determine that meat, poultry, fish, and eggs have been cooked to a safe internal temperature, one that kills bacteria such as E. coli and salmonella, is a way of protecting yourself from food poisoning," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) of the University of Pennsylvania. "Every cook should have a food thermometer within ready reach in the kitchen or near the grill."

The data come from the 20th wave of a nationally representative panel of 1,496 U.S. adults, conducted for the Annenberg Public Policy Center by SSRS, an independent market research company. This wave of the Annenberg Science and Public Health (ASAPH) Knowledge survey was fielded July 11–18, 2024, and has a margin of sampling error (MOE) of ± 3.6 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. See the topline and methodology for details.

Most unsure of correct food temperatures to kill viruses such as bird flu

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), "While there is no evidence that anyone in the United States has gotten infected with avian influenza A viruses after eating properly handled and cooked poultry products, uncooked poultry and poultry products (like blood) could have been the source of a small number of avian influenza A virus infections in people in Southeast Asia.

The USDA reported in May as part of testing of 96 dairy cows that the virus had been detected in the meat of one "cull" cow but it did not enter the food chain and the USDA is confident that the meat supply is safe: "While we have multiple safeguards in place to protect consumers, we continue to recommend consumers properly handle raw meats and cook to a safe internal temperature."

The APPC survey finds that most U.S. adults do not know the correct temperatures to heat food to in order to kill the H5N1 virus, or bird flu. Thinking about the virus, the survey respondents were asked to indicate which of the measures below "will kill the H5N1 virus," and to select all that apply. Over half of those surveyed (51%) indicated "not sure" on this item and 4% incorrectly said "none will kill":

• Heating poultry to at least 165 degrees Fahrenheit (CORRECT): Fewer than 4 in 10 (38%) selected this option as correct. According to the CDC, cooking poultry and eggs to an internal temperature of 165 degrees kills bacteria and viruses, including H5N1.

• Heating ground beef to at least 165 degrees Fahrenheit (CORRECT): This is true, but less than 1 in 3 people surveyed (29%) selected it. (In fact, the CDC recommends heating ground beef to at least 160 degrees.)

• Heating steak to a least 145 degrees (CORRECT): Just over 1 in 5 (21%) selected this as correct. According to the CDC, whole cuts of beef should be heated to 145 degrees then allowed to rest for three minutes.

• Freezing beef to a temperature of at least 20 degrees Fahrenheit (INCORRECT): Only 7% chose this thinking it is correct (it is not). Bird flu survives indefinitely while frozen and remains infectious, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

• Heating beef to at least 120 degrees (INCORRECT): Only 10% chose this, but it is not correct.

A survey found that over half of U.S. adults (51%) were not sure of the correct temperatures to heat food to in order to kill viruses and bacteria and ensure that the food is safe to eat. Given a series of items and told to select all that apply, 38% correctly chose heating poultry to 165 degrees Fahrenheit, 29% chose heating ground beef to 165 degrees, and 21% chose heating steak to 145 degrees. From an Annenberg Public Policy Center survey of 1,496 U.S. adults in July 2024. Credit: Annenberg Public Policy Center

The bird flu outbreak

Unpasteurized or raw milk comes from animals including cows, sheep, and goats, and it has not been pasteurized to kill harmful germs.

Unpasteurized dairy products are estimated to "cause 840 times more illnesses and 45 times more hospitalizations than pasteurized products." The CDC says that consuming unpasteurized milk and products made from it "can expose people to germs such as Campylobacter, Cryptosporidium, E. coli, Listeria, Brucella, and Salmonella."

In fact, 171 people were sickened and 22 hospitalized from September 2023 to March 2024 in a salmonella outbreak connected to unpasteurized milk from Raw Farm, in Fresno, Calif., according to the New York Times, which said this is the largest recorded outbreak in over two decades linked to raw milk.

In June, the FDA reported in an open letter that bird flu, or the H5N1 avian influenza virus, has been detected in cow's milk. The presence of H5N1 bird flu was confirmed in cattle in the United States in mid-March 2024. As of July 25, 2024, there had been 13 human cases of bird flu in the United States since April 2024, four following exposure to cows and nine following exposure to poultry in Colorado. As of mid-July, 168 cattle herds in 13 states—and over 100 million poultry in 48 states—were affected.

Raw milk and bird flu

As of mid-June 2024, the FDA concluded "that the totality of evidence continues to indicate that the commercial milk supply [which is pasteurized] is safe." The FDA says it does not currently know whether the H5N1 virus can be transmitted to humans through consumption of raw milk products from infected cows, though a study with mice concluded that the virus in "untreated milk can infect susceptible animals that consume it" and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) says this suggests that drinking raw milk "may pose a risk of transmission to people."

The Annenberg survey finds that 15% of respondents think drinking raw milk increases the chances of getting bird flu, while 33% think it has no effect one way or the other on the chances of getting bird flu. Nearly half of those surveyed (49%) are not sure.

What people know of pasteurization and the risks of raw milk

According to the CDC, pasteurization "is crucial for milk safety, killing harmful germs that can cause illness" and the NIH says "dairy milk purchased in the grocery store has been pasteurized—heated to a level high enough and long enough to kill most viruses or bacteria in the milk."

Yet the current survey shows just over half of those surveyed (54%) know that unpasteurized milk is less safe to drink than pasteurized milk. While 6% say raw milk is safer to drink and 13% say it is just as safe, 27% say they are not sure which is safer.

The survey also finds that:

• Bacteria and viruses: 62% think it is likely that raw milk contains bacteria and viruses that can make you sick, while 16% say it is unlikely and 22% are not sure.

• Effectiveness of pasteurization: 77% know pasteurization is effective at killing bacteria and viruses in raw milk, while 4% say it is not effective and 20% are not sure.

• Nutrients: Over a quarter of those surveyed (26%) say raw milk has more nutrients than pasteurized milk, 30% think it has "about the same amount of nutrients as pasteurized milk," and 40% are not sure.

While those who advocate for drinking raw milk contend that pasteurization destroys valuable nutrients, the FDA says that raw milk "is not nutritionally superior" to pasteurized milk.

Bird flu and the seasonal flu vaccine

Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed do not know that the seasonal flu vaccine will not help prevent bird flu—21% think it does help a person who is exposed to the H5N1 bird flu from developing severe illness and 44% are not sure whether it does. Just over a third of those surveyed (35%) know that the seasonal flu vaccine does not help someone exposed to bird flu from developing severe illness.

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Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of June): 2,839 news posts

Drug effects may last longer than we thought

The Estonian microbiome cohort was established in 2017, and in addition to oral and blood samples, had been collecting stool samples from 2509 participants. Using data from this cohort, Oliver Aasmets and other researchers from the University of Tartu, Estonia found out that changes in gut microflora constitution could be detected in people who had taken antibiotics anytime in the past five years. The changes noted in taking these drugs were more significant than the changes caused by whatever diseases were being managed.

Drug effects noted beyond antibiotics

While the classic case of drug-microflora interactions involves antibiotics, Aasmets et al found similar interactions involving non-antibiotic drugs, including benzodiazepines, antidepressants, and proton pump inhibitors. In the case of benzodiazepines, the impact on gut microflora was more widespread and lasted longer when compared to the impact from several classes of antibiotics. This counter-intuitive finding is explained by drugs that are targeted at human cells also having the ability to eliminate certain strains of bacteria, and inducing antimicrobial resistance genes in others.

Drug effects are temporarily summative

The observed effects of these drugs were noticed to increase if the drugs were used for longer periods of time or if multiple drug classes were employed during patient management. This implies that older patients, who are often on multiple drugs for long periods of time will face a greater disruption to their gut microflora constitution, a hypothesis which is backed up by the study.

Clinical significance

It is the greatest fear of any microbiologist to face a superbug that has mutated to be able to survive any agent used against it. To prevent this from happening, strict care is employed in the prescription of antibiotics. With this study, it has become clear that antibiotics are not the sole driver of antimicrobial resistance mutations and gut microflora disturbance. Benzodiazepines like Valium also contribute significantly in this regard. Not only that, these effects can remain for a significant amount of time into the future. With that in mind, prescribers should show as much care while prescribing benzodiazepines, antidepressants, and proton pump inhibitors as they do while prescribing antibiotics.

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On Monday, July 22, the Earth experienced its warmest day in recent history, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service. On that day, the daily global average temperature reached 17.15°C (62.87°F), an increase from the previous record of 17.09°C (62.76°F) set just the day prior, on July 21, 2024. All this extra heat is wreaking havoc on the planet, including making seafood potentially more dangerous for human consumption.

"The prevalence of Vibrio [bacteria] in seafood is expected to increase both globally and in Europe because of climate change, especially in low-salinity or brackish waters," the European Food Safety Authority succinctly stated in its new report. It added that "resistance to last-resort antibiotics is increasingly found in some Vibrio species." Vibrio, or V. vulnificus, the Cleveland Clinic explained, is a type of bacteria that can enter the human body after eating “uncooked or undercooked shellfish" or through an open wound in brackish water (the water found in areas where rivers meet the sea). The bacteria, it noted, can “lead to sepsis, shock, and large, spreading blisters that destroy tissues.” And while right now the bacteria is rare, the medical journal StatPearls noted that V. vulnificus “has the highest number of seafood-related deaths in the United States.” 

As you may recall, in 2023, an outbreak of Vibrio hit the U.S., causing numerous illnesses and one death in Connecticut, New York, and North Carolina. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention noted in the conclusion of its investigation, "A notable feature of these cases, beyond their severe clinical outcomes, is that they occurred in the wake of record-breaking U.S. heat waves. Although these cases reported during July–August cannot be solely attributed to the heat waves, the relationship between vibriosis incidence and environmental conditions favorable to Vibrio growth, namely elevated water surface temperatures and low salinity, is well-documented."

Experts, including seafood purveyors, do all they can to prevent its spread, including harvesting shellfish in shaded areas, flash freezing, and maintaining cooler temperatures throughout the transport of the products.

To determine just how dire the situation can become if global temperatures continue to rise, the European Food Safety Authority reviewed data spanning the last twenty years and "found in approximately 20% of the tested seafood samples, with one out of five positive samples containing pathogenic strains."

It added that due to the increase in extreme weather events, Europe specifically has seen a rise in Vibrio infections.

"Warmer coastal waters have led to an expansion of areas where Vibrio bacteria can multiply, resulting in a higher risk of infections from the consumption of contaminated seafood, it stated. Like in the U.S., vulnerable regions include those with brackish or low-salinity waters (the Baltic Sea, Baltic and North Sea transitional waters, and the Black Sea) and coastal areas.

European waters are not alone in this threat. In 2023, the U.S. Department of Agriculture also stated that climate change "is expected" to both expand the range and season of Vibrio infections due to sea surface temperatures rising, and to also increase the cost of treatment. It noted that U.S. cases of illness from Vibrio infections "may increase 50% by 2090" compared to 1995 case rates "with moderate increases in greenhouse gas concentrations." however, it added that Vibrio infections may increase by "more than 100% if global warming is not mitigated." The annual total cost of these illnesses will more than double to $6.1 billion in 2090 under the lower emissions scenario and more than triple to nearly $8.6 billion under the higher emissions scenario. It added, "Across both scenarios, about 95% of total costs are attributable to deaths caused by Vibrio infections."

And really, this week's intensely warm weather isn't a one-off. As the Copernicus Climate Change Service also reported that prior to July 2023, the previous daily global average temperature record was 16.8°C (62.24°F), which the Earth hit on August 13, 2016. However, since July 3, 2023 "there have been 58 days that have exceeded that previous record." 

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