A cargo ship travelling through Cambridgeshire has become stuck in a river.

The Baltic Arrow is currently in the River Nene, Wisbech, after the captain reported "grounding" at about 08:49 BST on Tuesday.

The cargo ship was sailing from Riga, in Latvia, to the Port of Wisbech with timber in packs.

A port spokesperson said it was a "rare situation" but because the tide had fallen the plan was to wait "until [the] vessel is afloat at next high water to free her from the banks".

The cargo ship was being sailed under the flag of St Kitts and Nevis to the Port of Wisbech.

Six crew members and two local pilots were on board.

There have been no reported injuries on the 80-metre (262ft) long vessel and the captain has not reported any damage.

A spokesperson from Wisbech Port added that a full investigation will be carried out to find out why it grounded.

They said: "Since tide has fallen away, plan is to wait until vessel is afloat at next high water to free her from banks with additional tug assistance and continue her pilotage safely into Wisbech Port.

"This is a rare situation to happen at Wisbech. We hope to have vessel freed this evening and bring her alongside for discharging as usual."

Grounding can be described as the vessel no longer being afloat and the hull of the ship touching the river bed.

On this occasion, it was down to the tide going out whilst part of the vessel was in contact with the bank, the port spokesperson said.

They added: "All berths at Wisbech port are NAABSA berths which stands for 'not always afloat but safely aground' so technically all vessels ground whilst moored here during low water.

"The river bed is very soft and sludgy here and the vessel is designed to safely ground so we are confident of no ongoing issues."

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For centuries, Western scholars have touted the fate of the native population on Easter Island (Rapa Nui) as a case study in the devastating cost of environmentally unsustainable living. The story goes that the people on the remote island chopped down all the trees to build massive stone statues, triggering a population collapse. Their numbers were further depleted when Europeans discovered the island and brought foreign diseases, among other factors. But an alternative narrative began to emerge in the 21st century that the earliest inhabitants actually lived quite sustainably until that point. A new paper published in the journal Science Advances offers another key piece of evidence in support of that alternative hypothesis.

As previously reported, Easter Island is famous for its giant monumental statues, called moai, built some 800 years ago and typically mounted on platforms called ahu. Scholars have puzzled over the moai on Easter Island for decades, pondering their cultural significance, as well as how a Stone Age culture managed to carve and transport statues weighing as much as 92 tons. The first Europeans arrived in the 17th century and found only a few thousand inhabitants on a tiny island (just 14 by 7 miles across) thousands of miles away from any other land.

Since then, in order to explain the presence of so many moai, the assumption has been that the island was once home to tens of thousands of people.

But perhaps they didn't need tens of thousands of people to accomplish that feat. Back in 2012, Carl Lipo of Binghamton University and Terry Hunt of the University of Arizona showed that you could transport a 10-foot, 5-ton moai a few hundred yards with just 18 people and three strong ropes by employing a rocking motion. [UPDATE: An eagle-eyed reader alerted us to the 1980s work of Czech experimental archaeologist Pavel Pavel, who conducted similar practical experiments on Easter Island after being inspired by Thor Heyerdahl's Kon Tiki.

Pavel concluded that just 16 men and one leader were sufficient to transport the statues.]

In 2018, Lipo proposed an intriguing hypothesis for how the islanders placed red hats on top of some moai; those can weigh up to 13 tons. He suggested the inhabitants used ropes to roll the hats up a ramp. Lipo and his team later concluded (based on quantitative spatial modeling) that the islanders likely chose the statues' locations based on the availability of fresh water sources, per a 2019 paper in PLOS One.

In 2020, Lipo and his team turned their attention to establishing a better chronology of human occupation of Rapa Nui. While it's generally agreed that people arrived in Eastern Polynesia and on Rapa Nui sometime in the late 12th century or early 13th century, we don't really know very much about the timing and tempo of events related to ahu construction and moai transport in particular.

 

In his bestselling 2005 book Collapse, Jared Diamond offered the societal collapse of Easter Island (aka Rapa Nui), around 1600, as a cautionary tale. Diamond controversially argued that the destruction of the island's ecological environment triggered a downward spiral of internal warfare, population decline, and cannibalism, resulting in an eventual breakdown of social and political structures.

Challenging a narrative

Lipo has long challenged that narrative, arguing as far back as 2007 against the "ecocide" theory. He and Hunt published a paper that year noting the lack of evidence of any warfare on Easter Island compared to other Polynesian islands. There are no known fortifications, and the obsidian tools found were clearly used for agriculture. Nor is there much evidence of violence among skeletal remains. He and Hunt concluded that the people of Rapa Nui continued to thrive well after 1600, which would warrant a rethinking of the popular narrative that the island was destitute when Europeans arrived in 1722.

 

For their 2020 study, the team applied a Bayesian model-based method to existing radiocarbon dates collected from prior excavations at 11 different sites with ahu. That work met with some mixed opinions from Lipo's fellow archaeologists, with some suggesting that his team cherry-picked its radiocarbon dating—an allegation he dismissed at the time as "simply baloney and misinformed thinking." They filtered their radiocarbon samples to just those they were confident related to human occupation and human-related events, meaning they analyzed a smaller subset of all the available ages—not an unusual strategy to eliminate bias due to issues with old carbon—and the results for colonization estimates were about the same as before.

 

Enlarge / Binghamton University's Robert J. DiNapoli stands next to a rock garden on Rapa Nui, or Easter Island.

Robert J. DiNapoli

 

The model also integrated the order and position of the island's distinctive architecture, as well as ethnohistoric accounts, thereby quantifying the onset of monument construction, the rate at which it occurred, and when it likely ended. This allowed the researchers to test Diamond's "collapse" hypothesis by building a more precise timeline of when construction took place at each of the sites. The results demonstrated a lack of evidence for a pre-contact collapse and instead offered strong support for a new emerging model of resilient communities that continued their long-term traditions despite the impacts of European arrival.

Fresh evidence

Now Lipo is back with fresh findings in support of his alternative theory, having analyzed the landscape to identify all the agricultural areas on the island. "We really wanted to look at the evidence for whether the island could in fact support such a large number of people," he said during a media briefing. "What we know about the pre-contact people living on the island is that they survived on a combination of marine resources—fishing accounted for about 50 percent of their diet—and growing crops," particularly the sweet potato, as well as taro and yams.

 

He and his co-authors set out to determine how much food could be produced agriculturally, extrapolating from that the size of a sustainable population. The volcanic soil on Easter Island is highly weathered and thus poor in nutrients essential for plant growth: nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium primarily, but also calcium, magnesium, and sulfur. To increase yields, the natives initially cut down the island's trees to get nutrients back into the soil.

 

When there were no more trees, they engaged in a practice called "lithic mulching," a form of rock gardening in which broken rocks were added to the first 20 to 25 centimeters (about 8 to 10 inches) of soil. This added essential nutrients back into the soil. "We do it ourselves with non-organic fertilizer," said Lipo. "Essentially we use machines to crush rock into tiny pieces, which is effective because it exposes a lot of surface area. The people in Rapa Nui are doing it by hand, literally breaking up rocks and sticking them in dirt."

 

There had been only one 2013 study aimed at determining the island's rock-garden capacity, which relied on near-infrared bands from satellite images. The authors of that study estimated that between 4.9 and 21.2 km2 of the island's total area comprised rock gardens, although they acknowledged this was likely an inaccurate estimation.

 

Enlarge / A map of results from the analysis of rock gardens on Easter Island.

Carl Lipo

 

Lipo et al. examined satellite imagery data collected over the last five years, not just in the near-infrared, but also short-wave infrared (SWIR) and other visible spectra. SWIR is particularly sensitive to detecting water and nitrogen levels, making it easier to pinpoint areas where lithic mulching occurred. They trained machine-learning models on archaeological field identifications of rock garden features to analyze the SWIR data for a new estimation of capacity.

 

The result: Lipo et al. determined that the prevalence of rock gardening was about one-fifth of even the most conservative previous estimates of population size on Easter Island. They estimate that the island could support about 3,000 people—roughly the same number of inhabitants European explorers encountered when they arrived. "Previous studies had estimated that the island was fairly covered with mulch gardening, which led to estimates of up to 16,000 people," said Lipo. "We're saying that the island could never have supported 16,000 people; it didn't have the productivity to do so. This pre-European collapse narrative simply has no basis in the archaeological record."

 

"We don't see demographic change decline in populations prior to Europeans' arrival," Lipo said. "All the [cumulative] evidence to date shows a continuous growth until some plateau is reached. It certainly was never an easy place to live, but people were able to figure out a means of doing so and lived within the boundaries of the capacity of the island up until European arrival." So rather than being a cautionary tale, "Easter Island is a great case of how populations adapt to limited resources on a finite place, and do so sustainably."

 

 

Binghamton University archaeologist Carl Lipo has shed light on some of the ancient mysteries of Easter Island (Rapa Nui) through his ongoing research. Credit: Binghamton University, State University of New York

 

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During its T85 Titan flyby on July 24, 2012, the Cassini spacecraft registered an unexpectedly bright reflection on the surface of the lake Kivu Lacus. Its Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) data was interpreted as a roughness on the methane-ethane lake, which could have been a sign of mudflats, surfacing bubbles, or waves.

 

“Our landscape evolution models show that the shorelines on Titan are most consistent with Earth lakes that have been eroded by waves,” says Rose Palermo, a coastal geomorphologist at St. Petersburg Coastal and Marine Science Center, who led the study investigating signatures of wave erosion on Titan. The evidence of waves is still inconclusive, but future crewed missions to Titan should probably pack some surfboards just in case.

Troubled seas

While waves have been considered the most plausible explanation for reflections visible in Cassini’s VIMS imagery for quite some time, other studies aimed to confirm their presence found no wave activity at all. “Other observations show that the liquid surfaces have been very still in the past, very flat,” Palermo says. “A possible explanation for this is at the time we were observing Titan, the winds were pretty low, so there weren’t many waves at that time. To confirm waves, we would need to have better resolution data,” she adds.

 

The problem is that this higher-resolution data isn’t coming our way anytime soon. Dragonfly, the next mission to Titan, isn’t supposed to arrive until 2034, even if everything goes as planned.

 

To get a better idea about possible waves on Titan a bit sooner, Palermo’s team went for inferring their presence from indirect cues. The researchers assumed shorelines on Titan could have been shaped by one of three candidate scenarios. They first assumed there was no erosion at all; the second modeled uniform erosion caused by the dissolution of the bedrock by the ethane-methane liquid; and the third assumed erosion by wave activity. “We took a random topography with rivers, filled up the basin-flooding river valleys all around the lake. Then, we then used landscape evolution computer model to erode the coast to 50 percent of its original size,” Palermo explains.

Sizing the waves

Palermo’s simulations showed that wave erosion resulted in coastline shapes closely matching those actually observed on Titan.

 

The team validated its model using data from closer to home. “We compared using the same statistical analysis to lakes on Earth, where we know what the erosion processes are. With certainty greater than 77.5 percent, we were able to predict those known processes with our modeling,” Palermo says.

 

But even the study that claimed there were waves visible in the Cassini’s VIMS imagery concluded they were roughly 2 centimeters high at best. So even if there are waves on Titan, the question is how high and strong are they?

 

According to Palermo, wave-generation mechanisms on Titan should work just like they do on Earth, with some notable differences. “There is a difference in viscosity between water on Earth and methane-ethane liquid on Titan compared to the atmosphere,” says Palermo. The gravity is also a lot weaker, standing at only one-seventh of the gravity on Earth. “The gravity, along with the differences in material properties, contributes to the waves being taller and steeper than those on Earth for the same wind speed,” says Palermo.

 

But even with those boosts to size and strength, could waves on Titan actually be any good for surfing?

Surf’s up

“There are definitely a lot of open questions our work leads to. What is the direction of the dominant waves? Knowing that can tell us about the winds and, therefore, about the climate on Titan. How large do the waves get? In the future, maybe we could tell that with modeling how much erosion occurs in one part of the lake versus another in estimated timescales. There is a lot more we could learn,” Palermo says. As far as surfing is concerned, she said that, assuming a minimum height for a surfable wave of around 15 centimeters, surfing on Titan should most likely be doable.

 

The key limit on the size and strength of any waves on Titan is that most of its seas are roughly the size of the Great Lakes in the US. The largest of them, the Kraken Mare, is roughly as large as the Caspian Sea on Earth. There is no such thing as a global ocean on Titan, and this means the fetch, the distance over which the wind can blow and grow the waves, is limited to tens of kilometers instead of over 1,500 kilometers on Earth. “Still, some models show that the waves on Titan be as high as one meter. I’d say that’s a surfable wave,” Palermo concluded.

 

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A small spacecraft landed in Inner Mongolia on Tuesday, bringing samples from the far side of the Moon back to Earth.

 

This was not China's first robotic mission to return a few pounds of dust and pebbles from the lunar surface—that came with the Chang'e 5 mission in December 2020. However, this was the first time any space program in the world returned material from the Moon's far side.

 

The successful conclusion of this mission, which launched from Earth nearly two months ago, marked another significant achievement for China's space program as the country sets its sights on landing humans on the Moon by the year 2030.

Answering scientific questions

Consisting of an orbiter, a lander, an ascent vehicle, and a return spacecraft, this complex mission launched on May 3. Although the Chang'e 6 mission consisted of similar elements to the Chang'e 5 lunar return mission three and a half years ago, the challenge of operating on the far side of the Moon is that there is no line-of-sight communications with Earth. This necessitated the launch and operation of a relay spacecraft.

 

Scientists are greatly intrigued by the opportunity to study the far side of the lunar surface, which varies significantly from the near side in terms of the thickness of the crust, volcanic activity, and its composition.

 

"The CE-6 samples, being the first obtained from the far side of the Moon, are expected to answer one of the most fundamental scientific questions in lunar science research: what geologic activity is responsible for the differences between the two sides?" said Zongyu Yue, a geologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, recently.

The race is on

Beyond scientific inquiry, however, the mission has significance for the emerging race between China and the United States to build international coalitions to explore and, eventually, build outposts on the surface of the Moon. With the Chang'e program, which will next turn its attention to the south pole of the Moon, China has established both the seriousness of its intent and validated its technical approach.

 

It is a huge leap, of course, to move from small robotic missions to human landings. But China has also recently test fired the core stage of the rocket, the Long March 10, that will land humans on the Moon. It is also working on a spacecraft and lunar lander similar in scope to what NASA did with the Apollo program in the 1960s and 1970s.

 

Whereas China has taken a 100 percent government-led approach to returning to the Moon, NASA is working extensively with commercial partners such as SpaceX and Axiom Space to develop a lunar lander and spacesuits for its Artemis program. This process leads to more uncertainty, but NASA's hope is that working with private companies will ultimately lower the cost of lunar exploration and make its deep-space program more sustainable in the long run.

 

The race—especially as China stacks up successful milestones like returning samples from the far side of the Moon—is definitely on.

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United States prosecutors have secured a deal with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange requiring the long-embattled publisher to plead guilty to one count of espionage for his role in making public classified documents concerning the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The agreement, which follows more than a decade of efforts by Assange, 52, to avoid extradition from the United Kingdom, would draw to a close one of the longest-running national security investigations in US history. The deal was first disclosed in court documents made public in the UK.

Assange and his legal team, which have denied the accusations levied by the US, could not be immediately reached for comment.

“Julian Assange is free,” WikiLeaks wrote in a statement posted to X. “He left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of 24 June, after having spent 1901 days there.”

A letter US prosecutors filed in the US District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands on Monday indicates that Assange will enter his guilty plea at a Wednesday hearing in Sapian, the island territory’s capital, having refused to travel to the continental US. He is then expected to return to his home country of Australia, having already served the expected 62-month sentence in London prison.

The case against Assange centers around the publishing of more than 750,000 stolen US documents by WikiLeaks between 2009 and 2011. It has drawn enormous attention for its clear implications on press freedoms internationally. Organizations such as the Committee to Protect Journalists in the US have for years warned the case could severely imperil the ability of journalists to obtain and publish classified information—even though the nation’s highest court has long recognized the right of journalists to do so.

Ahead of the 2016 US presidential election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, WikiLeaks published a trove of emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee. The leak, which embarrassed the DNC and won Assange praise from right-wing figures, was later revealed to be the work of notorious Russian hacking groups known as Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear, both affiliated with Moscow’s GRU military intelligence agency.

US prosecutors initially charged Assange with a single count under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for allegedly conspiring with Chelsea Manning, who provided WikiLeaks with the trove of classified material related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to gain unauthorized access to government computers. Prosecutors later added an additional 17 charges under the Espionage Act—a move widely condemned as an attack on the free press.

Assange, forcibly removed from the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2019 after seven years asylum, has been held in Belmarsh prison in London pending the outcome of his extradition hearings, which were delayed repeatedly over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic. His attorneys argued that due to his deteriorating mental health, extradition to the US would increase the likelihood of suicide.

US prosecutors secured, on appeal, permission to extradite the award-winning journalist, who married his longtime partner, Stella Moris, while in jail in 2022, by offering UK courts a slate of written assurances. Among other concessions, the US promised not to subject Assange to “special administration measures,” a term referring to the practice of wiretapping certain defendants’ phone calls citing national security concerns.

“This period of our lives, I’m confident now, has come to an end,” said Moris—now Assange—in a video prerecorded last week. “I think by this time next week, Julian will be free.”

Kristinn Hrafnsson, WikiLeaks editor in chief, said in the same video captured outside Belmarsh that he hoped to see Assange for the last time inside its walls. “If you’re seeing this, it means he is out.”

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KEY TAKEAWAYS

The Living Computers Museum was a testament to the computers of yore, set up by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. It gave people a chance to interact with the hardware that forged a path for the hardware we use today, but unfortunately, it shut its doors around the time of the pandemic after Paul Allen passed away. Now, the museum is holding an auction of 150 iconic items, with all proceeds going to charity.

The Living Computers Museum shuts its doors with three big auctions for charity

As reported by Geekwire, the museum is splitting its sales into three separate auctions. Each one comes with its own theme and contains items that helped shape computing today. The first auction is titled "Firsts: The History of Computing," an online sale that closes on September 12th:

This auction pays homage to Allen’s role shaping the modern computing landscape. A highlight of the sale is a computer which Allen helped restore and on which he worked, a DEC PDP-10: KI-10. Built in 1971, it’s the first computer that both Allen and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates ever used prior to founding Microsoft. It’s estimated to fetch $30,000 to $50,000.

The second auction is titled "Pushing Boundaries: Ingenuity," which will go live on September 10th. The star item for this auction is a letter from Albert Einstein to President Roosevelt, believed to be the starting spark for the Manhattan Project. It is expected to sell for $4-6 million.

The third is called "Over the Horizon: Art of the Future" which focuses on interstellar travel and closes September 12th. The main headliner for this auction is Chelsey Bonestell’s painting “Saturn as Seen from Titan,” which is expected to fetch $30,000-50,000.

If you'd like to know more, check out the official Christie's page for the auctions and sign up for notifications. Who knows - you may get to buy a piece of iconic computing history.

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A new study has examined how warming seawater intrudes between coastal ice sheets and the ground they rest on. The warm water melts cavities in the ice, allowing more water to flow in, expanding the cavities further in a feedback loop. This water then lubricates the collapse of ice into the ocean, pushing up sea levels.

The researchers used computer models to show that a “very small increase” in the temperature of the intruding water could lead to a “very big increase” in the loss of ice – ie, tipping point behaviour.

It is unknown how close the tipping point is, or whether it has even been crossed already. But the researchers said it could be triggered by temperature rises of just tenths of a degree, and very likely by the rises expected in the coming decades.

Sea level rise is the greatest long-term impact of the climate crisis and is set to redraw the world map in coming centuries. It has the potential to put scores of major cities, from New York City to Shanghai, below sea level and to affect billions of people.

The study addresses a key question of why current models underestimate the sea level seen in earlier periods between ice ages.

Scientists think some ice sheet melting processes must not be yet included in the models.

“[Seawater intrusion] could basically be the missing piece,” said Dr Alexander Bradley of the British Antarctic Survey, who led the research. “We don’t really have many other good ideas. And there’s a lot of evidence that when you do include it, the amount of sea level rise the models predict could be much, much higher.”

Previous research has shown that seawater intrusion could double the rate of ice loss from some Antarctic ice shelves. There is also real-world evidence that seawater intrusion is causing melting today, including satellite data that shows drops in the height of ice sheets near grounding zones.

“With every tenth of a degree of ocean warming, we get closer and closer to passing this tipping point, and each tenth of a degree is linked to the amount of climate change that takes place,” Bradley said. “So we need very dramatic action to restrict the amount of warming that takes place and prevent this tipping point from being passed.”

The most important action is to cut the burning of fossil fuels to net zero by 2050.

Bradley said: “Now we want to put [seawater intrusion] into ice sheet models and see whether that two-times sea level rise plays out when you analyse the whole of Antarctica.”

Scientists warned in 2022 that the climate crisis had driven the world to the brink of multiple “disastrous” tipping points, including the collapse of Greenland’s ice cap and the collapse of a key current in the north Atlantic, disrupting rains upon which billions of people depend for food.

Research in 2023 found that accelerated ice melting in west Antarctica was inevitable for the rest of the century, no matter how much carbon emissions are cut, with “dire” implications for sea levels.

The new research, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, found that some Antarctic ice sheets were more vulnerable to seawater intrusion than others. The Pine Island glacier, currently Antarctica’s largest contributor to sea level rise, is especially vulnerable, as the base of the glacier slopes down inland, meaning gravity helps the seawater penetrate. The large Larsen ice sheet is similarly at risk.

The so-called “Doomsday” glacier, Thwaites, was found to be among the least vulnerable to seawater intrusion. This is because the ice is flowing into the sea so fast already that any cavities in the ice melted by seawater intrusion are quickly filled with new ice.

Dr Tiago Segabinazzi Dotto, of the UK’s National Oceanography Centre, welcomed the new analysis of the ocean-ice feedback loop under ice sheets.

“The researchers’ simplified model is useful for showing this feedback, but a more realistic model is highly needed to evaluate both positive and negative feedbacks,” he said. “An enhancement of observations at the grounding zone is also essential to better understand the key processes associated with the instability of ice shelves.”

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But fewer people know that burning fossil fuels doesn’t just cause global warming — it also causes global cooling. It is one of the great ironies of climate change that air pollution, which has killed tens of millions, has also curbed some of the worst effects of a warming planet.

Tiny particles from the combustion of coal, oil and gas can reflect sunlight and spur the formation of clouds, shading the planet from the sun’s rays. Since the 1980s, those particles have offset between 40 and 80 percent of the warming caused by greenhouse gases.

And now, as society cleans up pollution, that cooling effect is waning. New regulations have cut the amount of sulfur aerosols from global shipping traffic across the oceans; China, fighting its own air pollution problem, has slashed sulfur pollution dramatically in the last decade.

The result is even warmer temperatures — but exactly how much warmer is still under debate. The answer will have lasting impacts on humanity’s ability to meet its climate goals.

“We’re starting from an area of deep, deep uncertainty,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and research lead for the payments company Stripe. “It could be a full degree of cooling being masked.”

Most of the cooling from air pollution comes through sulfur aerosols, in two ways. The particles themselves are reflective, bouncing the sun’s rays away and shading the Earth. They also make existing clouds brighter and more mirror-like, thus cooling the Earth.

Coal and oil are around 1 to 2 percent sulfur — and when humans burn fossil fuels, that sulfur spills into the atmosphere. It is deadly: Sulfur dioxide has been linked to respiratory problems and other chronic diseases, and air pollution contributes to about 1 in 10 deaths worldwide.

Over the past few decades, countries have worked to phase out these pollutants, starting with the United States and the European Union, followed by China and India. China has cut its sulfur dioxide emissions by over 70 percent since 2005 by installing new technologies and scrubbers on fossil fuel plants. More recently, the International Maritime Organization instituted restrictions in 2020 on the amount of sulfur allowed in shipping fuels — one of the dirtiest fuels used in transportation. Shipping emissions of sulfur dioxide immediately dropped by about 80 percent. Mediterranean countries are planning a similar shipping regulation for 2025.

“There has been a pretty steep decline over the last 10 years,” said Duncan Watson-Parris, an assistant professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California at San Diego.

A bunkering barge, right, supplies fuel to a container ship with “green methanol,” which comes from low carbon sources,

at PSA Tuas Port terminal in Singapore on May 27.

© Roslan Rahman/AFP/Getty Images

These moves have saved lives — according to estimates, around 200,000 premature deaths have already been avoided in China, and the new shipping regulations could save around 50,000 lives per year. But they have also boosted global temperatures. Scientists estimate that the changes in aerosols from the new shipping rule alone could contribute between 0.05 and 0.2 degrees Celsius of warming over the next few decades.

Some researchers have suggested that the changes to ocean shipping regulations may have been a big contributor to last year’s record heat — and that aerosols may have been masking much more heat than previously thought. Satellite images have shown that cloud changes declined after sulfur emissions went down.

“The data from NASA satellites shows that in regions where this should be expected, there’s a very strong increase in absorbed solar radiation,” said Leon Simons, an independent researcher and a member of the Club of Rome of the Netherlands, pointing to shipping areas affected by the new rules. “And also in this period you see sea surface temperatures increasing in the same region.”

In one new paper, scientists at the University of Maryland argued that the decrease in aerosols could double the rate of warming in the 2020s, compared to the rate since 1980. But other researchers have critiqued their results.

Many experts believe the effect is likely to be modest — between 0.05 and 0.1 degrees Celsius. “I don’t think it’s possible to get better than a factor of two, in terms of how uncertain we are,” said Michael Diamond, a professor of meteorology and environmental science at Florida State University.

Some scientists see the shipping regulation as an analog to a way that researchers are exploring to halt global warming: purposefully brightening clouds using less polluting methods. In Alameda, Calif., researchers recently released sea salt aerosols into the atmosphere as a first step to study how the particles could brighten clouds and reflect sunlight. City officials later halted the project, despite reports showing that the experiment was safe.

But the real issue is still ahead. Currently, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that aerosols are masking about 0.5 degrees Celsius of global warming. But that value could be as high as 1 degree or as low as 0.2 degrees — and the difference could be the difference between meeting the goals of the 2015 Paris agreement or not.

If aerosols have been masking cooling much more than expected, for example, the world could be poised to blow past its climate targets without realizing it.

Almost 200 of the world’s nations pledged in the Paris agreement to keep warming below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), compared to preindustrial levels. Scientists believe that many dangerous impacts, from the collapse of coral reefs to the melting of major ice sheets, will occur somewhere between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius.

“It’s not just a story of greenhouse gas emissions,” said Robert Wood, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Washington. “Whether you clean up rapidly, or whether you just fumble along with the same aerosol emissions, could be the difference of whether you cross the 2-degree Celsius threshold or not.”

No scientists are advocating a halt to aerosol clean up efforts — the death tolls from air pollution are simply too high. “There are really good reasons to want to be cleaning up air pollution,” Diamond said. “The public health benefits are really important.”

But researchers worry that cleaning up air pollution without halting fossil fuel use — as, for example, in China — could be a recipe for even greater and faster warming. “We need to make sure that we’re doing it at the same time as cleaning up methane and cleaning up CO2,” Diamond said. Cutting methane emissions, he noted, could help offset the effects of declining aerosols. Methane has a warming effect, but like aerosols, doesn’t remain in the atmosphere for very long.

Still, a lot of scientific questions remain — and until they are answered, the world won’t know exactly how much warming falling aerosols will unmask.

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The planet Jupiter is particularly known for its so-called Great Red Spot, a swirling vortex in the gas giant's atmosphere that has been around since at least 1831. But how it formed and how old it is remain matters of debate. Astronomers in the 1600s, including Giovanni Cassini, also reported a similar spot in their observations of Jupiter that they dubbed the "Permanent Spot." This prompted scientists to question whether the spot Cassini observed is the same one we see today. We now have an answer to that question: The spots are not the same, according to a new paper published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

 

“From the measurements of sizes and movements, we deduced that it is highly unlikely that the current Great Red Spot was the ‘Permanent Spot’ observed by Cassini,” said co-author Agustín Sánchez-Lavega of the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain. “The ‘Permanent Spot’ probably disappeared sometime between the mid-18th and 19th centuries, in which case we can now say that the longevity of the Red Spot exceeds 190 years.”

 

The planet Jupiter was known to Babylonian astronomers in the 7th and 8th centuries BCE, as well as to ancient Chinese astronomers; the latter's observations would eventually give birth to the Chinese zodiac in the 4th century BCE, with its 12-year cycle based on the gas giant's orbit around the Sun. In 1610, aided by the emergence of telescopes, Galileo Galilei famously observed Jupiter's four largest moons, thereby bolstering the Copernican heliocentric model of the solar system.

 

It's possible that Robert Hooke may have observed the "Permanent Spot" as early as 1664, with Cassini following suit a year later and multiple more sightings through 1708. Then it disappeared from the astronomical record. A pharmacist named Heinrich Schwabe made the earliest known drawing of the Red Spot in 1831, and by 1878 it was once again quite prominent in observations of Jupiter, fading again in 1883 and at the onset of the 20th century.

Perhaps the spot is not the same...

But was this the same Permanent Spot that Cassini had observed? Sánchez-Lavega and his co-authors set out to answer this question, combing through historical sources—including Cassini's notes and drawings from the 17th century—and more recent astronomical observations and quantifying the results. They conducted a year-by-year measurement of the sizes, ellipticity, area, and motions of both the Permanent Spot and the Great Red Spot from the earliest recorded observations into the 21st century.

 

The team also performed multiple numerical computer simulations testing different models for vortex behavior in Jupiter's atmosphere that are the likely cause of the Great Red Spot. It's essentially a massive, persistent anticyclonic storm. In one of the models the authors tested, the spot forms in the wake of a massive superstorm. Alternatively, several smaller vortices created by wind shear may have merged, or there could have been an instability in the planet's wind currents that resulted in an elongated atmospheric cell shaped like the spot.

 

Sánchez-Lavega et al. concluded that the current Red Spot is probably not the same as that observed by Cassini and others in the 17th century. They argue that the Permanent Spot had faded by the start of the 18th century, and a new spot formed in the 19th century—the one we observe today, making it more than 190 years old.

 

But maybe it is?

Others remain unconvinced of that conclusion, such as astronomer Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute in Texas. “What I think we may be seeing is not so much that the storm went away and then a new one came in almost the same place," he told New Scientist. "It would be a very big coincidence to have it occur at the same exact latitude, or even a similar latitude. It could be that what we’re really watching is the evolution of the storm.”

 

The numerical simulations ruled out the merging vortices model for the spot's formation; it is much more likely that it's due to wind currents producing an elongated atmospheric shell. Furthermore, in 1879, the Red Spot measured about 24,200 miles (39,000 kilometers) at its longest axis and is now about 8,700 miles (14,000 kilometers). So, the spot has been shrinking over the ensuing decades and becoming more rounded. The Juno mission's most recent observations also revealed the spot is thin and shallow.

 

The question of why the Great Red Spot is shrinking remains a matter of debate. The team plans further simulations aiming to reproduce the shrinking dynamics and predict whether the spot will stabilize at a certain size and remain stable or eventually disappear like Cassini's Permanent Spot presumably did.

 

Geophysical Research Letters, 2024. DOI: 10.1029/2024GL108993  (About DOIs).

 

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It seems safe to say that most people don’t get a dog in order to marginally lower their odds of developing heart disease. Pet effect research falls into a strange family of science that measures the practical health outcomes of things people typically do for decidedly non-practical-health-related reasons, like get married or have children.

 

At the same time, there’s evidence—much of it anecdotal—that at least some people are cognizant of the potential health benefits when choosing to get a pet. And the idea makes intuitive sense to many people, who say their animals are good for their well-being. Concurrently, hospitals and nonprofits have rolled out programs that aim to use therapy dogs and support animals to improve people’s mental health.

 

James Serpell began studying the pet effect in the early 1980s, as a young animal behavior researcher. At the time, spending on pets was rising in the United States; people were beginning to treat pets more like family members. But there was little research on people’s relationships with their animals. “Why are we doing this?” Serpell wondered. “What’s it all about?”

 

In an influential 1991 paper comparing non-pet-owners with people who had recently adopted an animal, he supplied some of the first published data suggesting that new pet owners experienced a measurable reduction in minor health problems. New dog owners also pursued more physical activity, compared to people who had cats or no pets at all.

 

In the decades since, researchers have published dozens of studies comparing pet owners to non-pet-owners. The results are mixed—sometimes pointing toward health benefits, and sometimes not.

 

Some of that data may reflect the realities of human-animal relationships—which, like any other kind of relationship, can vary for all sorts of reasons. “It doesn't mean that my lived experience or anyone else's lived experience is wrong,” said Megan Mueller, a human-animal interaction expert at Tufts University. “What it means is that it's different for different people.”

 

For some people, she said, having a pet can bring stressors. The caretaking responsibilities may be too taxing; the pet may exacerbate family tensions or trigger allergies; the owner may be unable to afford pet food or veterinary care.

 

The results, some experts say, are also muddied by longstanding issues with research methods. The problem is that there are differences between the people who choose to own pets and the people who don’t.

 

“What happens is we try to compare people with pets, to people without pets, and then we say, ‘People with pets have X, Y, and Z differences.’ It actually is a really invalid way of approaching the research question,” said Kerri Rodriguez, who directs the Human-Animal Bond Lab at the University of Arizona. A study finding that cat owners are more likely to be depressed, for example, may be picking up on a real connection. But it could just be that people already experiencing depression are likelier to get cats.

 

Today, Rodriguez mostly studies service animals, especially for veterans at risk for PTSD. In this context, it’s possible to conduct randomized trials—for example, randomly choosing who will get a support animal now, and who will go onto a waitlist to get a companion animal later. Some research on service dogs—including a recent controlled, but not randomized, trial that Rodriguez was involved with—has shown clear benefits.

 

How much those benefits apply to typical pet owners, experts say, is unclear. And it’s hampered by the inability to conduct those kinds of randomized trials. (“You can’t randomize people to pet ownership,” said Rodriguez.)

 

Rodriguez said she’s interested in studies that track the association between human-pet relationships and health metrics over time, checking in with people again and again and collecting larger amounts of data. One such study, for example, found a slower rate of executive decline among older pet owners.

 

Serpell, after his 1991 study, largely moved on to other research questions. “I basically concluded that this type of research was too difficult,” he said. “And even if you did it, the results you would get would always be questionable.”

 

Those doubts have not deterred interest in the field from the companies that lead the pet industry, which is today valued globally at more than $300 billion.

 

Almost from the start, the quest to understand the pet effect has been entangled with industry money. Serpell’s earliest work was funded by what is now known as the Waltham Petcare Science Institute, a division of Mars, Inc., which owns a portfolio of pet food and veterinary care brands in addition to its famous candy business. “There was no other source of funding, really,” recalled Serpell, who’s now an emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “Nobody else was willing to put money into this field.”

 

In 2008, Mars entered a partnership with the National Institutes of Health in order to spur more research into animal-human interactions. In the first year, the pet product provider ponied up $250,000, while the federal government supplied $1.75 million. (The NIH partnership ended in 2022, although Mars continues to underwrite research on pets and human health.)

 

In 2010, a group of pet industry heavyweights launched the Human Animal Bond Research Institute, or HABRI. Key funders have included Petco, Purina, and Zoetis, a veterinary pharmaceuticals firm. “Pets and animals make the world a better place, and we’re going to use science to prove it,” said founding director Steven Feldman in a 2014 talk at a conference for pet bloggers.

 

The nonprofit has spent more than $3 million funding research on human-animal interactions. Companies also directly fund university research: One prominent research lab at the University of Arizona—separate from Rodriguez’s research group—includes a sponsor page on its website featuring the logos of Nestle Purina, Mars Pet Care, veterinary drugmaker Elanco, and other pet product companies.

 

"Funding from the pet industry has transformed the field, and without it, we would not have the science that we have,” said Mueller. (Like Serpell and Rodriguez, Mueller has received industry funding for some of her research.)

 

Did that funding shape the field’s findings? “I think it has largely been done in a really ethical way,” said Mueller. She and Rodriguez both said they had never felt pressure to produce a particular result. Waltham, when it entered the partnership with NIH, gave up the right to select who would get the funding. Industry-funded studies have found—and published—results suggesting little benefit from pets.

 

"I really think that field has done a good job of publishing a lot of findings that are maybe not what people would expect,” said Mueller.

 

Herzog said he has seen little evidence that industry money has changed the science. Mostly, he said, “they’ve funded pretty good studies.” But there are ways it can change the field. "It's always been a source of great ambivalence, I think, for everybody involved,” said Serpell. “You try and work around it, by getting whoever funds the work to stay off your back and let you do the work, and if they don’t like the results, that probably means the next time you apply to them for funding, you won’t get it.”

 

The funding can shape the questions that the field asks—or avoids. “Industry-funded studies tend to produce results that favor the sponsor’s interest,” said Marion Nestle, an emeritus professor at New York University who has spent decades studying corporate influence on science. Sponsors influence what gets studied, Nestle said, and they select for studies that they think will produce positive results. And, she said, research suggests sponsorship can shape the way results are interpreted—often without researchers being aware of the influence at all.

 

Controlling the focus of the research can also steer scientists away from certain topics entirely. “For obvious reason, these companies don't wish to draw attention to the darker side of the human-pet relationship,” said Serpell, referring to research areas such as dog bites.

 

In a recent Zoom interview, Feldman, the HABRI president, said funders “can tell us what kind of things they're hoping to see,” and the organization will try to accommodate those requests. “But then, once the process of funding a project begins, there's absolutely no influence there whatsoever.”

 

HABRI embraces negative results, or those that don’t show a clear effect from pet ownership, and not just positive findings, Feldman said. But, he acknowledged, they may choose to emphasize positive results. “We try and be very true to the science, but if we take a slightly more optimistic view as to the body of work than researchers who take a different perspective, I think that helps generate a lot of positive behavior in the real world.”

 

Herzog, Feldman suggested, was making a name for himself with naysaying—in ways that, perhaps, sometimes defy common sense. A 2021 HABRI survey found that nearly 9 in 10 pet owners report that their pets benefit their mental health. “I kind of think pet owners might be on to something,” Feldman said.

 

Herzog agrees that having a pet can have real benefits. At the end of a recent conversation, he reflected on his cat, Tilly, who died in 2022. She used to watch TV with him in the evenings, and she would curl up on a rocking chair in his basement office while he worked. The benefits of their relationship, Herzog said, were real but perhaps hard to measure—among the intangible qualities that are difficult to capture on research surveys.

 

"If you'd asked me, ‘Did Tilly improve the quality of your life?’ I'd say absolutely,” he said. “My health? Nah.”

 

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

 

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Why it matters: Existing U.S. infrastructure is ill-equipped to handle record-setting temperatures in the Midwest and Northeast.

State of play: School days and even school years, which are now bookended by heat waves, are being shortened in response to heat.

• In New Jersey and New York, some school districts set early dismissal, local outlets reported. One moved the time of its graduation ceremony to avoid the day's peak heat.

• Massachusetts' second-largest school district ended the school year a couple days early amid the heat wave because many of its buildings don't have air conditioning. Schools in Newton, Massachusetts, cancelled after-school activities.

Summer camp is being modified, too.

• Camps in Augusta, Mich., switched to slower paced activities and indoor games.

• Camp North Star in Poland Spring, Maine, is moving outdoor activities like tennis and soccer from 1:30 p.m. to 9:30 a.m. to beat the heat, the Washington Post reports.

What we're watching: Heat is becoming policy, A proposed bill in New York, which passed in the legislature and awaits Gov. Kathy Hochul's signature, would prevent students from going into classrooms that are 88 degrees.

•  "Kids are sweltering, teachers are sweltering in a lot of these buildings," said state Sen. James Skoufis (D).

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The News

This week, more than 1,000 temperature records broke around the world, many of them shattered by extreme heat. Hundreds have perished while making the Hajj pilgrimage to Islam’s holiest site, Mecca, while some 100 million people are under a heat advisory in the United States. The total number of heat-related deaths isn’t yet clear, but at least hundreds have died in an unseasonably early heat wave; in India, which has seen some of the most extreme temperatures, at least 100 people have died in the last three months due to heat.

The heatwaves are “the fingerprint of climate change,” experts said, and are a glimpse of what’s to come as human-induced climate change continues to amplify extreme weather. “It should be obvious that dangerous climate change is already upon us,” a climate scientist told The Washington Post. “People will die because of global warming on this very day.”

SIGNALS

Semafor Signals: Global insights on today's biggest stories.

Early heat waves may be more deadly

Sources:  Science News, WRAL News, The Hill

It’s early in the summer for these kinds of temperatures, and scientists say that might make the heat even more dangerous. Earlier-than-usual heat can catch people by surprise, one climate scientist said, because their bodies don’t have enough time to acclimate to rising temperatures. Climate change also means heat waves are coming earlier and earlier every year, putting more people at risk. As extreme weather becomes more common, experts say it’s crucial that cities update their infrastructure to handle the heat. “The longer it takes us to catch up the more lives are on the line,” said the director of climate resilience and sustainability at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, a US-based climate non-profit.

Dangerous climate change is here, but some people don’t buy it

Sources:  Pew Research Center, World Meteorological Organization, The New York Times

The threat of climate change is grave but research shows many people are still skeptical of the climate crisis’ effect on their lives. Between 2000 and 2019, extreme heat killed an estimated 489,000 people per year, according to the World Meteorological Organization; Last year, 14% of Americans said there was no concrete evidence of climate change. The effects of climate change may be irreversible, but scientists say humans could lessen future warming by stopping greenhouse gas emissions. A seminal 2023 UN report advised that nations would need to immediately stop using fossil fuels to prevent dangerous overheating in the next decade.

Extreme heat is more dangerous than people realize

Sources:  The Associated Press, TIME

Many people don’t realize how quickly extreme heat can become deadly, experts told The Associated Press, particularly when conditions are humid. In fact, extreme heat kills more people in the US each year than hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes combined. And heat strikes quickly; When the body gets too hot, organs start to fail, and the window for treatment closes swiftly. People don’t understand that heat “can kill you, and it will kill you,” climate journalist Jeff Goodell said, and people who have low socioeconomic status or certain medical conditions are most at risk. “The most vulnerable individuals—the people least likely to have air conditioning—are also the ones least likely to have a park nearby to cool off in,” an environmental scientist said.

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Atrial fibrillation is the most common type of irregular heart rhythm and can lead to blood clots or stroke if left untreated, according to the American Heart Association.

To prevent further complications from atrial fibrillation, people with the condition are often prescribed anti-clotting medications and medications to control heart rate, said Eli Zimmerman, MD, associate professor in the Ken and Ruth Davee Department of Neurology's Division of Stroke and Vascular Neurology, and a co-author of the study.

"Genetic differences can impact how different people metabolize medications. This is particularly relevant when multiple medications used for the same condition, like atrial fibrillation, are impacted by these differences in metabolism," said Zimmerman, who is also associate dean for student affairs. "Our research group has looked at these differences and how they can cause negative effects."

The study reviewed health records from Medicare beneficiaries aged 65 years or older with atrial fibrillation who started taking the anticoagulant medications apixaban or rivaroxaban in addition to diltiazem or metoprolol, medications which lower heart rate, between 2012 and 2020.

Patients receiving diltiazem were 20% more likely to experience bleeding-related hospitalization and death, according to the study. Risks were highest with higher doses of medications. There were no significant differences in rates of stroke, systemic embolism or hemorrhaging, according to the findings.

"These are significant because they show that while there are some benefits to using diltiazem over metoprolol, and vice versa, differences in metabolism may introduce some increased risks of bleeding in those taking diltiazem," Zimmerman said.

Moving forward, Zimmerman said his research group will continue to investigate what causes different reactions to the same medications and identify ways to potentially monitor drug levels.

"Next steps may include thinking about the need or the practicality of monitoring of drug levels, which is our postulated mechanism of increased risk of bleeding," Zimmerman said.

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These neuropsychiatric symptoms can also act as early warning signs and help people with lupus potentially identify a coming flare when their disease worsens for a period.

“Many people don’t know that neuropsychiatric symptoms, including confusion, hallucinations, and vivid nightmares, can be part of autoimmune diseases like lupus,” says James Alan Bourgeois, a professor in the psychiatry and behavioral sciences department at the University of California, Davis, and coauthor of the study in eClinicalMedicine.

“If someone presents with new psychotic symptoms and has other autoimmune symptoms, and a family history of autoimmune disease, a provider is advised to clinically evaluate him or her for lupus before assuming a patient has schizophrenia or other primary psychotic disorder.”

“It’s important that clinicians talk to their patients about these types of symptoms and spend time writing down each patient’s individual progression of symptoms,” says lead author Melanie Sloan, a researcher in the public health and primary care department at the University of Cambridge.

“Patients often know which symptoms are a bad sign that their disease is about to flare, but both patients and doctors can be reluctant to discuss mental health and neurological symptoms, particularly if they don’t realize that these can be a part of autoimmune diseases.”

Lupus, formally known as systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), is an autoimmune inflammatory disease known for its effect on many organs, including the brain. According to the Lupus Foundation of America, about 1.5 million people in the US have lupus, and an estimated 5 million globally. The majority of those with lupus—nine out of 10—are people who were designated female at birth.

The researchers surveyed 676 people living with lupus and 400 clinicians. They also conducted detailed interviews with 69 people living with systemic autoimmune rheumatic diseases (including lupus) and 50 clinicians.

In the study, the team asked patients about the timing of 29 neuropsychiatric symptoms (such as depression, hallucinations, and loss of balance). In interviews, patients were also asked if they could list the order of symptoms that usually occurred when their disease was flaring.

One of the more common symptoms reported was disrupted dream sleep, experienced by three in five patients, a third of whom reported this symptom appearing over a year before the onset of lupus.

Just under one in four patients reported hallucinations, although for 85% of these, the symptoms did not appear until around the onset of the disease or later.

When the researchers interviewed the patients, however, they found three in five lupus patients and one in three with other rheumatology-related conditions reported increasingly disrupted dreaming sleep just before their hallucinations. These nightmares were often vivid and distressing, involving being attacked, trapped, crushed, or falling.

The study interviewers found that using the term “daymares” to talk about hallucinations often led to a “lightbulb moment” for patients, and they felt that it was a less frightening and stigmatized word.

Patients experiencing hallucinations were reluctant to share their experiences. Many specialists said they had never considered nightmares and hallucinations as being related to disease flares.

“For many years, I have discussed nightmares with my lupus patients and thought that there was a link with their disease activity,” says senior author David D’Cruz, a professor at King’s College London.

“This research provides evidence of this, and we are strongly encouraging more doctors to ask about nightmares and other neuropsychiatric symptoms—thought to be unusual, but actually very common in systemic autoimmunity—to help us detect disease flares earlier.”

The importance of recognizing these symptoms was highlighted by reports that some patients had initially been misdiagnosed or even hospitalized with a psychotic episode or suicidal ideation, which was only later found to be the first sign of their autoimmune disease.

The UK-registered charity The Lupus Trust funded the work.

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This groundbreaking study focuses on a drug called tirzepatide, which is already used to treat type 2 diabetes.

Obstructive sleep apnea is not just a problem that disrupts sleep; it can also lead to serious health issues like heart disease and high blood pressure because it lowers oxygen levels in the blood.

Despite being a common condition that affects nearly 936 million people worldwide, the primary treatment has been using machines at night to help keep the airway open, known as CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) therapy.

However, not everyone can tolerate this machine, making the search for alternative treatments crucial.

The study conducted by Dr. Atul Malhotra and his team was detailed in a recent edition of the New England Journal of Medicine. It involved two major trials across nine countries including the U.S., Australia, and Germany, and included 469 participants who were obese and suffered from moderate-to-severe OSA.

These participants were divided into groups, some receiving the drug through injections and others receiving a placebo, over a period of 52 weeks.

The results were promising. Tirzepatide significantly reduced the number of times breathing was interrupted during sleep, outperforming the placebo. This suggests that the drug could potentially reduce or even eliminate the need for CPAP machines for some individuals.

The research also indicated that tirzepatide could address both the sleep disorder and obesity simultaneously, offering a dual benefit that could enhance overall treatment effectiveness.

Aside from helping with breathing issues, tirzepatide also showed potential in reducing risks for heart-related conditions and in helping individuals lose weight. The main side effect noted was mild stomach issues, which is relatively minor compared to the benefits the drug could offer.

Dr. Malhotra highlighted that while CPAP machines have been the go-to for handling OSA, their effectiveness heavily depends on regular use, which not all patients can manage.

Tirzepatide offers a more accessible treatment option for those who struggle with mechanical devices like CPAP. The combination of this drug with weight management strategies could potentially improve heart health and alleviate OSA symptoms more comprehensively.

This development in drug therapy is a significant leap forward for OSA treatment, providing a new layer of hope for many who have found existing methods difficult to handle.

It marks a shift towards more personalized care, targeting the underlying mechanisms of sleep apnea more directly and effectively.

As the researchers look to the future, they plan to conduct further studies to understand the long-term impacts of tirzepatide.

This ongoing research could pave the way for a new standard of care, transforming how obstructive sleep apnea, particularly in those diagnosed with obesity, is treated worldwide.

It’s a potential game-changer for millions, promising better sleep, better health, and a better quality of life.

If you care about sleep, please read studies about herb that could help you sleep well at night, and these drugs could lower severity of sleep apnea by one third.

For more information about sleep, please see recent studies that coffee boosts your physical activity, cuts sleep, affects heartbeat, and results showing how to deal with “COVID-somnia” and sleep well at night.

The research findings can be found in New England Journal of Medicine.

Source

This article breaks down the impact of alcohol on diabetes management, supported by research, in simple terms.

Firstly, alcohol influences blood sugar levels, but not always in the way you might expect. For individuals with diabetes, especially those on insulin or medications that stimulate insulin production, alcohol can increase the risk of hypoglycemia, or low blood sugar.

This effect can occur because alcohol interferes with the liver’s ability to release glucose into the bloodstream.

Normally, if your blood sugar dips too low, your liver would break down stored glucose to stabilize levels. Alcohol delays this process, sometimes causing dangerous lows several hours after drinking.

Conversely, some alcoholic drinks, particularly those high in sugar like certain beers and cocktails, can cause blood sugar levels to rise immediately after consumption.

This can be a problem for managing diabetes, as it adds another variable to the already complex task of blood sugar regulation.

Moreover, alcohol can impact weight, which is a key aspect of diabetes management. Alcoholic drinks are typically high in calories and can lead to weight gain, making diabetes harder to manage.

Weight gain can increase insulin resistance, which is particularly problematic in type 2 diabetes. Keeping alcohol consumption moderate or low is generally advised to avoid these extra calories.

Alcohol also affects diabetes medications and their efficacy. It can interact with several drugs used in diabetes management, amplifying their effects and increasing the risk of side effects such as hypoglycemia.

For instance, some medications used to lower blood sugar, when combined with alcohol, can lead to liver damage over time. It’s crucial for those with diabetes to discuss their alcohol use with their healthcare provider to ensure safe interaction with their medications.

Furthermore, chronic alcohol consumption can have long-term effects on diabetes management. Regular heavy drinking can lead to a decrease in insulin sensitivity, which makes it harder to control your blood sugar levels.

It can also contribute to complications associated with diabetes, such as nerve damage and cardiovascular disease, due to its effects on blood pressure and triglyceride levels.

For those who choose to drink, there are several guidelines to follow to minimize risks:

•     Always check blood sugar before drinking, as alcohol can mask the symptoms of hypoglycemia.

•     Never drink on an empty stomach. Food helps regulate blood sugar levels and slows the absorption of alcohol.

•     Monitor blood sugar levels before bed to prevent nighttime hypoglycemia.

•     Stick to moderate consumption (one drink per day for women and two for men, as defined by U.S. health authorities).

Education and awareness are vital. Individuals with diabetes should be educated on the potential impacts of alcohol on their condition and how to manage these risks.

They should also be encouraged to communicate openly with their healthcare providers about their alcohol intake to effectively integrate this aspect into their overall diabetes management plan.

In summary, while moderate alcohol consumption can be part of a social lifestyle, it comes with significant considerations for people with diabetes.

Understanding these impacts and how to manage them can help prevent complications and ensure effective long-term control of diabetes.

Source

Intermittent fasting can help people with Type 2 diabetes lose weight, lower blood pressure and improve blood sugar levels, a rigorous new study has found.

The new research, published Friday in the journal JAMA Network Open, found that intermittent fasting had striking metabolic benefits that surpassed even the effects of prescription medications for people with newly diagnosed diabetes. Here are the findings:

• Over the course of 16 weeks, people who were assigned to practice intermittent fasting lost more weight and improved their blood sugar control to a greater extent than people who were given metformin or empagliflozin, two commonly prescribed diabetes medications.

• The research focused on a form of fasting called the 5:2 diet, in which people eat normally for five days a week and then fast for two days, consuming just 500 to 600 calories on their fasting days.

• After 16 weeks, the fasting group lost an average of 21 pounds, almost double the 12 pounds on average that the people taking metformin lost. Those who were prescribed empagliflozin lost an average of about 12.8 pounds during the study.

• Previous studies have examined whether intermittent fasting can help people with Type 2 diabetes, but they have been mostly small and did not compare the diet head-to-head with medications.

• The study involved more than 330 overweight and obese adults who had recently been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes.

Courtney Peterson, an expert who was not involved in the study, said the results were “exciting.”

“Often times we assume that drugs are more powerful than lifestyle approaches,” said Peterson, an associate professor of nutrition sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “But here they showed that a lifestyle approach was more effective for lowering blood sugar than putting people on drugs. That’s a very powerful statement.”

The 5:2 fasting diet

The 5:2 diet was first popularized a decade ago by a BBC documentary and a best-selling book, “The Fast Diet: Lose Weight, Stay Healthy, and Live Longer with the Simple Secret of Intermittent Fasting,” by British physician Michael Mosley, along with co-writer Mimi Spencer.

The new study of the 5:2 diet took place in China, which has more people with Type 2 diabetes than any other country in the world. At least 141 million adults in China have diabetes and half the population is overweight or obese.

The authors of the new study recruited adults with Type 2 diabetes and then split them into three groups. In the first two groups, participants were assigned to take either metformin or empagliflozin. In the third group, participants were taught to follow the 5:2 diet. Women consumed just 500 calories on each of their two weekly fasting days, while men consumed no more than 600 calories — equivalent to about a quarter of their usual caloric intake.

On their fasting days, the participants consumed sparse amounts of food: An egg for breakfast, a couple servings of fruit or vegetables for lunch, and a light salad for dinner. Each meal was paired with a low-calorie meal-replacement drink that contained healthy fats, protein, vitamins, minerals and other nutrients. On their non-fasting days, the participants would eat normally for breakfast and lunch and then have a light dinner with a meal-replacement drink.

Significant and sustained improvements

In addition to losing weight, the fasting group saw their HbA1c, a long-term measure of their blood sugar levels, drop 1.9 percent — significantly more than the groups taking medication. About 80 percent of participants in the fasting group saw their HbA1c fall below 6.5 percent, the cutoff for diabetes, compared to 60 percent of the participants on metformin and 55 percent of the people taking empagliflozin.

Eight weeks after the study ended, the researchers followed up with the participants and found that most of the people in the fasting group had maintained blood sugar levels below the threshold for diabetes, suggesting that the diet “significantly and sustainably improves HbA1c levels,” the authors wrote.

The researchers found that the fasting group also had greater reductions in their waist circumference, blood pressure levels and triglycerides, a type of fat that circulates in the blood, compared with the participants taking medication.

The researchers cautioned that more studies were needed to examine the long-term effectiveness of the 5:2 diet with meal replacements for Type 2 diabetes. But they said their findings suggest that the diet might be a good initial lifestyle intervention for people with early-stage diabetes.

Fasting combined with meal replacements

Peterson said the study was large, rigorous and cleverly designed because it essentially combined two dietary interventions — intermittent fasting and meal replacements — that have been shown to help people with diabetes.

Many studies have found that diets that incorporate low-calorie meal-replacement shakes, soups and bars help people lose weight and lower their blood sugar levels. A number of studies have also indicated that the 5:2 diet helps people improve their blood sugar control.

Peterson said that one downside of the 5:2 diet is that people often see impressive results in the first few months, but that after about six months to a year on the diet, “they start falling off.”

“It does seem to have an advantage in the short term, but in the long term which is a year or more, it doesn’t seem to be better than a standard low-calorie diet,” she added.

She also stressed that more long-term research was needed. But in the meantime, she said that people with newly diagnosed Type 2 diabetes might consider discussing with their doctor whether it is worth trying the 5:2 diet in combination with meal replacement shakes like Optifast, Ensure, Soylent or others.

She noted that while participants in the study did not experience many adverse events on the fasting regimen, about 6 percent of people on the diet reported symptoms of low-blood sugar, which can potentially be dangerous.

“People should absolutely work with their doctor if they want to try this,” Peterson said. “They shouldn’t try it on their own.”

Source

Millions of Americans – particularly those in the highly populated Interstate 95 corridor are under heat-related advisories or alerts as the squelching heat is expected to hit record-breaking temperatures in some areas. In some places, the humidity will bring the heat index values as high as the mid-100s.

Forecasters with the National Weather Service (NWS) said Saturday they expect the high temperatures to be in the mid-to-upper 90s from the central and southern Plains to the East Coast.

"These temperatures remain the most anomalous and dangerous for early summer over portions of the Midwest/Ohio Valley east to the Mid-Atlantic," it said.

Brian Ford takes to time to cool off by taking off his shoes, drinking water, and sitting in front of a fan as he works the Uncle Scotty's Favorites food concession stand at the Middletown Pride Festival, Friday, June 21, 2024, in Middletown, Ohio.

Carolyn Kaster / AP

Thennie Freeman, director of the Washington, D.C., Department of Parks and Recreation, told CBS News that they are asking people to be mindful of how hot and dangerous it can be and to avoid overheating by staying inside or going to cooling centers.

"Heat exhaustion is a real thing. And so we want our residents to be safe from extreme heat," Freeman said. "Drink plenty of water, wear loose fit clothing, wear a hat, stay out. Avoid the heat in the sun during these peak hours as much as possible."

There was no escaping the sun for New York City tourists waiting to see the Statue of Liberty Saturday.

 "I'm switching out shirts every other hour," Grant Leavitt of Arizona told CBS News.

New York City health officials said heat-related emergency room visits this week were 500% higher than the average day in June.
 
Even though temperatures in Washington, D.C., cracked 100 degrees Saturday, grill masters fired up their barbecues for a popular annual event.

And in the Midwest, humidity levels in the Ohio River Valley made it feel like triple digits, and some looked for relief on the river in Dublin, Ohio.

"Even anything remotely strenuous on days like this it's pretty exhausting," kayaker Chad Brennan told CBS News.

Relentless heat expands

Millions of residents across the country have had their lives disrupted by days of unusually high temperatures.

In Michigan, utility crews from several states were working feverishly Friday to restore power to thousands of suburban Detroit customers, two days after severe storms knocked out their power, leaving residents suffering amid a heat wave expected to linger through Saturday.

A worker, right, takes a drink of water while working in temperatures above 90F (32C) at a gas line work site, Thursday, June 20, 2024, on a street in Boston.

Steven Senne / AP

About 12,000 homes and businesses remained without power Friday afternoon in Oakland County, a suburban area north of Detroit hit hard by Wednesday night's storms that cut power to about 75,000 homes and businesses at its peak, said Brian Calka, DTE Energy's vice president of distribution operations.

Between 500 and 600 crew members from utilities in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois were working with about 1,000 DTE Energy utility workers and another 1,000 tree-trimming contractors to get the power back on amid the heat. Calka said the utility's goal is to get the power back on for all its customers by late Friday or early Saturday.

Utility crews were working 16-hour shifts to get the power back on and they were urged to deal with the heat by taking more breaks because they are wearing jeans, long-sleeved shirts, rubber gloves and hardhats for their work, Calka said.

"They are working in very, very tough conditions," he said.

In Idaho, officials said two people in their 60s have died of heat-related causes — the state's first heat-related deaths of the year. Health officials did not release additional information about the victims Friday, including where they died.

< Watch the video at the source page. >

This month's sizzling daytime temperatures were 35 times more likely and 2.5 degrees F hotter (1.4 degrees C) because of the warming from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas — in other words, human-caused climate change. That is according to World Weather Attribution, a collection of scientists that run rapid climate attribution studies that have not been peer-reviewed.

Flash flooding concerns amid heat

The excessive heat wasn't the only weather-related issue in some states.

"So we're off the charts currently," Washington University geophysics professor Dr. Michael Wysession told CBS News. "We now have a record 12 months straight of global temperature records. When the world gets warmer we increase our severe weather events.

Interestingly, we actually get more flash floods."

Widespread showers and thunderstorms that sparked flash flooding in parts of New England and the Great Lakes will continue on Saturday with "plentiful moisture" that will increase the chance for locally heavy downpours, the NWS said.

Several small-town tourist meccas in northern Minnesota continued to be inundated by floodwaters after a deluge of rain earlier this week, prompting the closure of major roads and leaving a costly trail of damage.

And in south-central Minnesota, copious rain has ended a three-year drought, but is flooding fields and killing crops.

 "Instead of 10,000 lakes, Minnesota is, I don't know, 150,000 lakes at this point," farmer Owen Gohlke joked to CBS News.

To the west, several South Dakota campers who'd gathered to see a now-canceled race at Huset's Speedway near Sioux Falls were rescued by boat Friday, Minnehaha County Chief Deputy Jeff Gromer said. No one was injured.

The governor of Iowa sent helicopters to a small town to evacuate people from flooded homes Saturday.

Sirens blared at 2 a.m. in Rock Valley, Iowa, population 4,200, where people in hundreds of homes were told to get out as the town could no longer take the rain that has slammed the region. The city lacked running water because wells were unusable.

"We've got National Guard helicopters coming in where people are on their roofs — literally on their roofs or the second floor because their first floor is completely flooded," Mayor Kevin Van Otterloo said.

"We've had so much rain here," he said. "We had four inches last night in an hour and a half time. Our ground just cannot take anymore."

This image provided by the Sioux County Sheriff shows the City of Rock Valley, Iowa on Saturday, June 22, 2024. Sioux County Sheriff via AP

Gov. Kim Reynolds ordered a disaster proclamation for Sioux County, which includes Rock Valley. Drone video posted by the local sheriff showed no streets, just roofs and the tops of trees above water.

NWS forecasters said the highest chance for potentially significant heavy rainfall will be along the Upper Great Lakes and Upper Mississippi Valley and in parts of southern New England.

Meanwhile, temperatures in the western and central U.S. will rise as well. In much of the interior Pacific Northwest, Great Basin and California, the temperatures will be in the mid-90s to low 100s on Saturday.

"Monsoon-like conditions" prompt evacuations

In New Mexico and Nevada, the temperatures will still be hot but "monsoon-like conditions" will remain over the region. Highs over the weekend will be in the mid- to upper 100s with scattered showers and storms bringing the threat for locally heavy downpours.

The heavy rain and flash flood warnings prompted New Mexico officials to order some mandatory evacuations, with shelters set up for displaced residents.

Up to 2 inches (5 centimeters) of rain had fallen by late Friday with additional rainfall up to 1.5 inches (3.8 centimeters) expected overnight, the weather service said.

There was flash flooding with multiple road closures on the north and west sides of Las Vegas, the weather service said.

Source

Sunday, 23 June

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9
• When: 5:03 – 9:03 p.m. UTC
• Where: Florida, US
• Why: SpaceX will use a Falcon 9 rocket to launch 22 Starlink satellites into a low Earth orbit. The batch is known as Starlink Group 10-2 if you want to identify it on apps like ISS Detector. Like most Starlink launches, SpaceX will probably land the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket so that it can be reused in the future.

Monday, 24 June

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9
• When: 3:45 – 7:45 a.m. UTC
• Where: California
• Why: On the other side of the country, several hours later, SpaceX will launch another batch of 20 Starlink satellites known as Starlink Group 9-2. This batch will also feature 13 direct-to-cell Starlink satellites. Against, the first stage of the Falcon 9 will likely be reused.

Tuesday, 25 June

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Starlink
• When: 9:07 – 1:07 p.m. UTC
• Where: Florida, US
• Why: Seemingly making up for the lack of launches two weeks ago, SpaceX will launch a third batch of Starlink satellites atop a Falcon 9. This is Starlink Group 8-9. As with the other missions, these Starlink satellites will have an anti-reflective coating to reduce glare and help astronomers.

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon Heavy
• When: 9:16 – 11:16 p.m. UTC
• Where: Florida, US
• Why: On the same day, SpaceX will launch a Falcon Heavy rocket carrying the GOES-U satellite, the fourth and last next-gen geostationary weather satellite for NASA and NOAA. It will be situated 35,800km above the equator to monitor weather conditions across the US.

Wednesday, 26 June

• Who: Firefly Aerospace
• What: Alpha
• When: 4:00 a.m. UTC
• Where: California, US
• Why: Firefly Aerospace will launch an Alpha rocket carrying NASA’s ELaNa (Educational Launch of Nanosatellites 43 mission into orbit. The payloads include CatSat, KUbeSat 1, MESAT 1, OwlSat, R5-S2-2.0, R4-S4, REAL, Serenity, SOCI-I and TechEdSat 11. The mission will aptly be named “Noise of Summer.” These ELaNa missions see NASA partner with universities to attract and develop students’ interest in STEM fields. Students benefit from hands-on experience in all phases of a space mission, while NASA benefits by testing new technologies at a relatively low cost.

Thursday, 27 June

• Who: Galactic Energy
• What: Ceres 1S
• When: 4:30 a.m. UTC
• Where: Yellow Sea
• Why: Galactic Energy will perform a sea launch with its Ceres 1S rocket carrying three Yunyao 1 satellites. These satellites are used for meteorology and contribute to earthquake forecasting.

Friday, 28 June

• Who: China National Space Administration (CNSA)
• What: Long March 7A
• When: 11:30 a.m. – 29 June, 11:30 a.m. UTC
• Where: Wenchang, China
• Why: This rocket will be launching an unknown payload.

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9
• When: 10:55 a.m. – 2:55 p.m. UTC
• Where: Florida, US
• Why: SpaceX will use a Falcon 9 to launch a batch of 22 Starlink satellites into a low Earth orbit. This group is known as Starlink Group 10-3. As a bit of background, SpaceX is planning to launch thousands of Starlink satellites so that they can provide internet anywhere on Earth.

Recap

• The first launch we got last week was a Falcon 9 carrying Starlink satellites. The first stage also performed a landing.

• Next up, a Rocket Lab Electron rocket launched five Kineis IoT satellites. The mission was dubbed “No Time Toulouse”.

• Next, SpaceX launched another Falcon 9, but instead of Starlink satellites, it launched the SES ASTRA 1P mission. Afterward, the first stage landed on a droneship in the Atlantic Ocean.

• The final launch of the week was a Long March 2C carrying the Space-based multi-band astronomical Variable Objects Monitor (SVOM) from Sichuan Province, China. SVOM is a France-China mission that is studying the distant explosions of stars.

That’s all for this week; check in next time!

Source

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On a Wednesday morning in late January 1896 at a small light bulb factory in Chicago, a middle-aged woman named Rose Lee found herself at the heart of a groundbreaking medical endeavor. With an X-ray tube positioned above the tumor in her left breast, Lee was treated with a torrent of high-energy particles that penetrated into the malignant mass.

 

“And so,” as her treating clinician later wrote, “without the blaring of trumpets or the beating of drums, X-ray therapy was born.”

 

Radiation therapy has come a long way since those early beginnings. The discovery of radium and other radioactive metals opened the doors to administering higher doses of radiation to target cancers located deeper within the body. The introduction of proton therapy later made it possible to precisely guide radiation beams to tumors, thus reducing damage to surrounding healthy tissues—a degree of accuracy that was further refined through improvements in medical physics, computer technologies and state-of-the-art imaging techniques.

 

But it wasn’t until the new millennium, with the arrival of targeted radiopharmaceuticals, that the field achieved a new level of molecular precision. These agents, akin to heat-seeking missiles programmed to hunt down cancer, journey through the bloodstream to deliver their radioactive warheads directly at the tumor site.

 

Today, only a handful of these therapies are commercially available for patients—specifically, for forms of prostate cancer and for tumors originating within hormone-producing cells of the pancreas and gastrointestinal tract. But this number is poised to grow as major players in the biopharmaceutical industry begin to invest heavily in the technology.

 

AstraZeneca became the latest heavyweight to join the field when, on June 4, the company completed its purchase of Fusion Pharmaceuticals, maker of next-generation radiopharmaceuticals, in a deal worth up to $2.4 billion. The move follows similar billion-dollar-plus transactions made in recent months by Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS) and Eli Lilly, along with earlier takeovers of innovative radiopharmaceutical firms by Novartis, which continued its acquisition streak—begun in 2018—with another planned $1 billion upfront payment for a radiopharma startup, as revealed in May.

 

“It’s incredible how, suddenly, it’s all the rage,” says George Sgouros, a radiological physicist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore and the founder of Rapid, a Baltimore-based company that provides software and imaging services to support radiopharmaceutical drug development. This surge in interest, he points out, underscores a wider recognition that radiopharmaceuticals offer “a fundamentally different way of treating cancer.”

 

Treating cancer differently, however, means navigating a minefield of unique challenges, particularly in the manufacturing and meticulously timed distribution of these new therapies, before the radioactivity decays. Expanding the reach of the therapy to treat a broader array of cancers will also require harnessing new kinds of tumor-killing particles and finding additional suitable targets.

 

“There’s a lot of potential here,” says David Nierengarten, an analyst who covers the radiopharmaceutical space for Wedbush Securities in San Francisco. But, he adds, “There’s still a lot of room for improvement.”

Atomic advances

For decades, a radioactive form of iodine stood as the sole radiopharmaceutical available on the market. Once ingested, this iodine gets taken up by the thyroid, where it helps to destroy cancerous cells of that butterfly-shaped gland in the neck—a treatment technique established in the 1940s that remains in common use today.

 

But the targeted nature of this strategy is not widely applicable to other tumor types.

 

The thyroid is naturally inclined to absorb iodine from the bloodstream since this mineral, which is found in its nonradioactive form in many foods, is required for the synthesis of certain hormones made by the gland.

 

Other cancers don’t have a comparable affinity for radioactive elements. So instead of hijacking natural physiological pathways, researchers have had to design drugs that are capable of recognizing and latching onto specific proteins made by tumor cells. These drugs are then further engineered to act as targeted carriers, delivering radioactive isotopes—unstable atoms that emit nuclear energy—straight to the malignant site.

 

The first such agents to hit the market were strictly for obtaining images of tissues within the body. Using relatively benign, short-lived isotopes, these products enabled the precise illumination of cancerous tissues on PET scans, helping doctors diagnose and map the location of malignant cells with greater accuracy. This innovation then paved the way for radiopharmaceuticals equipped with more potent—and lethal—radioactive payloads, now with the aim of not just imaging tumor cells but killing them.

 

The strategy took time to establish itself in routine cancer treatment, though.

 

The first marketed therapy to combine radioactive isotopes with a cell-targeting molecule—a drug called Quadramet, approved by US regulators in 1997—offered palliative relief for bone pain caused by cancer but was not designed to shrink tumors. Few clinicians ever bothered to prescribe it.

 

The early 2000s then saw the arrival of two new drugs for lymphoma, both of which were tagged with radioactive particles and aimed at CD20, a marker on malignant blood cells. Although these drugs worked extremely well in clinical trials, helping to shrink tumors in an overwhelming majority of study participants, they struggled to gain widespread acceptance in clinical practice. Neither could compete against rituximab, a blockbuster nonradioactive medication that also targets CD20, leading to their eventual discontinuation. Neither is available for patients today.

 

Following these commercial setbacks, interest in radiopharmaceuticals diminished and investment in their advancement stalled. “In those days, pharma companies didn’t want to touch radioactive agents with a 10-foot pole—even if that pole was made of lead,” says Neil H. Bander, founder and chief scientific officer of Convergent Therapeutics, a radiopharmaceutical-focused startup based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “The concept of a radioactive drug was anathema to them.”

 

But efforts at universities continued, including at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, where Bander—who spent 40 years at the medical school and is now an emeritus professor there—began trials with radiolabeled antibody drugs to treat prostate cancer, beginning in 2000.

 

These drugs were designed to bind a receptor protein found on the surface of prostate cancer cells, known as prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA). Once bound, they’re internalized by these cells and deliver their radioactive freight directly to the genetic core of the tumor cells. (Bander cowrote an article discussing this and other PSMA-based therapies in the 2024 Annual Review of Medicine.)

Nuclear options

Around the same time, in Europe, clinicians were making strides in developing radiolabeled agents aimed at another target: somatostatin receptors. These proteins, which are present in rare cancers of the neuroendocrine system, mediate hormone signaling that can drive tumor growth. Researchers discovered that hormone-mimicking molecules loaded with radioactive isotopes would bind to these receptors and shrink tumors effectively.

 

Clinicians experimented with different radioactive payloads under compassionate-use protocols that allow seriously ill patients to have access to experimental treatments, using unstable forms of elements like yttrium and indium before largely coalescing around an isotope of lutetium. This rare earth metal was preferred for being gentler on the kidneys and having a longer half-life, benefiting manufacturing and logistics. At one clinic in Bad Berka, Germany, over a thousand patients were treated within a decade, showing extended survival rates compared with what’s typical of conventional treatment.

 

In parallel, several fledgling pharmaceutical companies began establishing the regulatory foundation for wider acceptance. A French firm called Advanced Accelerator Applications (AAA) shepherded one lutetium-labeled drug through randomized trials and, in 2017, reported that this therapy markedly slowed the progression of intestinal tumors compared to the existing standard of care. The drug, marketed as Lutathera, quickly won approval from European and US regulators alike.

 

That’s when Novartis took notice. Although the Swiss drug giant had dabbled in radiopharmaceuticals in the past, now it was all-in. Within weeks of Lutathera getting the go-ahead in Europe, Novartis swiftly clinched a deal to acquire AAA for nearly $4 billion. A year later, it onboarded a small Indiana firm called Endocyte for over $2 billion more.

 

“It was like somebody flipped a switch,” Bander says. The industry’s revitalized interest in radiopharmaceuticals had suddenly surged into high gear.

 

The Endocyte acquisition brought a PSMA-targeted agent that would prove to be a real game-changer — both for patients with certain difficult-to-treat cases of advanced prostate cancer and for Novartis’s bottom line.

 

In a randomized clinical trial, the drug, when added to standard care, more than doubled the average time before disease progression—from under four months to more than eight—and extended recipients’ lifespans by several months as well.

 

Lutathera, it should be noted, had shown impressive clinical efficacy as well. But neuroendocrine tumors are rare, and this scarcity means that Lutathera might never achieve the much-coveted “blockbuster” threshold of generating $1 billion in sales per year. By comparison, the PSMA-targeted prostate therapeutic, approved in 2022 under the brand name Pluvicto, addresses a disease so common that about one in seven men will receive a diagnosis during their lifetimes. As such, it came just $20 million shy of reaching blockbuster status less than two years after its market debut.

Beta version

Pluvicto and Lutathera are both built around small protein sequences, known as peptides. These peptides specifically bind to target receptors on cancer cells—PSMA in the case of prostate cancer and somatostatin receptors in the case of Lutathera—and deliver radiation through the decay of unstable lutetium.

 

Administered via infusion into the bloodstream, these drugs circulate throughout the body until they firmly attach to the surfaces of tumor cells they encounter. Anchored at these target sites, the lutetium isotope then releases two types of radiation that aid in cancer treatment. The primary emission consists of beta particles, high-energy electrons capable of penetrating tumors and surrounding cells, tearing into DNA and causing damage that ultimately triggers cell death.

 

Also produced in lesser amounts are gamma rays, which don’t cause much tissue damage but allow healthcare providers to track in real time where the drug is distributed in the body. This allows them to monitor the treatment’s progress and adjust strategies accordingly. “You can actually image where the dose goes and have more understanding,” says Thomas Hope, a nuclear medicine specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, who has consulted for RayzeBio (before its acquisition by BMS earlier this year) in addition to other radiopharmaceutical drugmakers not mentioned in this story.

 

Numerous other therapies now in clinical trials also use radioactive lutetium and other beta-emitting isotopes. But current research efforts and substantial industry investments are progressively shifting toward drugs that rely on alpha-emitting isotopes instead.

 

Compared to beta particles, alpha particles are larger and more energetic. This feature allows them to shred DNA through breaking both strands of the double helix, leading to highly localized cellular annihilation. “It’s basically like a cannonball going off inside the cell,” says John Valliant, founder and CEO of Fusion Pharmaceuticals, a Canadian company whose alpha-emitting radiopharmaceuticals were the draw for AstraZeneca’s recent takeover of the company.

 

Another key advantage of alpha particles is their limited travel distance. They tend to penetrate only around 50 to 100 micrometers—roughly the width of a human hair. This stands in stark contrast to beta particles, which can traverse millimeters of tissue before their energy is depleted. As a result, therapies that employ alpha particles achieve highly localized effects: They ravage tumor tissue while sparing nearby healthy cells from injury.

 

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Welcome to Edition 6.49 of the Rocket Report! I want to open this week's report with a hearty congratulations to Rocket Lab for the company's 50th launch since Electron's debut in 2017. This is a fine achievement for a company founded in New Zealand, a country with virtually no space program.

 

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets and a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Electron celebrates its 50th. On Thursday, Rocket Lab launched its 50th Electron mission, "No Time Toulouse."  The mission successfully deployed five Internet-of-Things satellites for the French company Kinéis. This is a nice milestone for the company founded by Peter Beck in New Zealand. With this mission, Rocket Lab becomes the fastest company to go from one launch to 50 launches of a privately developed rocket, surpassing even SpaceX. The company's first Electron mission came about seven years ago.

 

A rare feat... “The launch industry is not an easy or forgiving one. Making it to your first launch is not a given, so reaching 50 Electron launches is an enormous achievement and a rare feat in the history of spaceflight,” Beck said. Ars will have more about this feat, the past, and the future of Rocket Lab in a forthcoming article based on a recent interview with Beck.

 

Isar raises $70 million more. Germany-based small launch vehicle developer Isar Aerospace has raised more than 65 million euros ($70 million) in an extension of an earlier funding round, Space News reports. The company said Thursday that its "extended" Series C round was now valued at 220 million euros, bringing its total fundraising to date to 400 million euros. This is more than any other launch startup in Europe. It's an impressive total.

 

Lighting up the spectrum... Among the participants in the latest round is the NATO Innovation Fund, a new venture fund backed by 24 of NATO’s 32 member states. The company said the additional funding will go toward efforts to scale up production of its Spectrum small launch vehicle. Isar is advancing toward stage testing of the Spectrum rocket, which is intended to carry 1 metric ton to low-Earth orbit. The vehicle's debut launch may occur next year. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

 

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Rocket Lab inks big Electron contract. The launch company said this week it has signed the largest Electron deal in its history with the Japanese Earth observation company Synspective. The Japanese firm agreed to purchase an additional 10 launches on Electron. Rocket Lab has been the sole launch provider for Synspective since 2020, successfully launching four missions for the company to date. (This announcement explains why, when I interviewed Rocket Lab chief Peter Beck this week, he was in Japan.)

 

A positive experience on Electron... In addition to the 10 new dedicated launches signed this week, another two launches for Synspective have already been booked and are scheduled to fly this year from Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand. The launches in the new deal will take place from 2025 to 2027. "This agreement gives us a solid foundation and confidence, as Rocket Lab is an innovative launch provider," said Motoyuki Arai, the founder and chief executive of Synspective. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

 

Matthew Brown to be taken down? The US Securities and Exchange Commission has sued a self-proclaimed venture capitalist, Matthew Brown, for making a "bogus offer" to acquire Virgin Orbit in the weeks before the launch company went bankrupt. According to the lawsuit filed Monday and reported by Bloomberg, Matthew Brown "made false and misleading statements and omissions about his investment experience and funds available to make such an offer." The SEC asserted that Brown sent Virgin Orbit a fabricated screenshot of his company’s bank account, claiming it held $182 million when, in reality, it had a balance of less than $1.

 

Brown intends to fight the allegations... "The SEC’s complaint is filled with egregious errors, fabrications, and biased allegations that undeniably favor the culprit, Virgin Orbit’s Management," a statement from a representative for Brown and his companies said. Brown's intervention came in the final days before Virgin Orbit declared bankruptcy, as the small launch company sought to find a buyer to preserve its LauncherOne rocket. Dan Hart, the former chief executive officer of Virgin Orbit, told the publication that the Brown bid was “an unneeded distraction” when the leadership team was “trying to find a path forward for the company." Ultimately, no such path could be found.

 

Autonomously designed engine is fired up. A Dubai-based company, LEAP 71, says it has developed a "Large Computational Engineering Model" that can autonomously design rocket engines. To that end, LEAP 71 co-founder Lin Kayser said the company's engineering model autonomously designed a small rocket engine in two weeks. Then the kerosene-liquid oxygen engine was 3D printed in copper and test fired. With 1,124 pounds of thrust, the engine generated 20,000 horsepower and completed all of its tests, including a long-duration burn, the company said.

 

Putting the rapid in rapid iteration... "Each new design iteration takes only about 15 minutes and is ready to print again," Kayser told Ars in an email. "The idea is to reduce engineering time and maximize testing iterations. Most rocket startups are still stuck in the long process of reengineering when they get their test results; we hope to eliminate that." Notably, the company also claims this is the first liquid-fueled rocket engine to be developed in the United Arab Emirates.

Musk, SpaceX sued for sexual harassment. SpaceX and its chief executive, Elon Musk, have been sued by eight engineers who say they were illegally fired for raising concerns about alleged sexual harassment and discrimination against women, Reuters reports. The engineers, four women and four men, claim Musk ordered their firing in 2022 after they circulated a letter calling the billionaire a "distraction and embarrassment" and urging executives to disavow sexually charged comments he had made on social media. The lawsuit was filed in state court in Los Angeles.

 

SpaceX denies wrongdoing... The lawsuit says Musk's conduct fostered a "pervasively sexist culture" at SpaceX where female engineers were routinely subjected to harassment and sexist comments and their concerns about workplace culture were ignored. Senior engineers, for example, used euphemisms for sexual acts and male genitals to describe rocket components, according to the lawsuit. SpaceX has denied wrongdoing, saying the 2022 letter was disruptive and the workers were properly fired for violating company policies. The company has also denied that Musk was involved in the decision to fire the engineers.

 

Vega C split from Arianespace is stuck for now. The European Space Agency has been asked to mediate the ongoing negotiations to transfer operations of the Vega C rocket from Arianespace to its manufacturer, Avio, European Spaceflight reports. At issue is Avio's desire to market its Vega C rocket, perhaps because the Italian company does not believe Arianespace has been aggressive enough in selling the rocket to potential customers. While Avio and Arianespace have agreed to part company on Vega C, it's not clear how the 17 missions currently under contract will be negotiated.

 

Getting back to space... European Space Agency officials have held several meetings with both parties over the last three weeks. As a result of these discussions, the space agency's director general, Josef Aschbacher, said that “conditions for the transfer of Vega C from Arianespace to Avio are clear.” However, he also admitted that there are still “open items” that need to be resolved and that it is still “up to the two companies.” Meanwhile, as Avio and Arianespace finalize divorce terms, the Italian rocket builder is still working toward returning Vega C to flight following a December 2022 failure. It's possible a return-to-flight mission could happen later this year. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

 

Some insight into SpaceX share sales. In May 2022, SpaceX offered its employees the opportunity to sell shares of the privately held company at a price of $70 to select investors, an internal document reveals. Obtained by TechCrunch, the discounted price was offered to only a handful of investors with close ties to SpaceX founder Elon Musk or his companies, including Andreessen Horowitz, Aliya Capital Partners, and Gigafund. This price represented a huge discount over the price paid during a primary sale that year, in which SpaceX sold shares to investors to raise capital. During a sale that year, the price was $270.

 

Preferred vs common stock ... The main reason for this discounted price is that employees own common stock, and investors who buy into primary rounds typically buy preferred stock that entitles them to dividends and liquidation preferences. They are the first to be paid their investment back if the company ever sells itself. It is not clear when, if ever, SpaceX will go public. Secondary sales like this remain one of the only ways that employees have to sell their shares. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Launch date set for Falcon Heavy. NASA says the two-hour launch window for its GOES-U mission will open at 5:16 pm ET (21:16 UTC) on Tuesday, June 25. The environmental satellite will launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This will be the first Falcon Heavy launch of the year.

 

First flight of the big rocket this year... The GOES-U satellite, the final addition to the GOES-R series, will help to prepare for two kinds of weather—Earth and space weather. The GOES satellites serve a critical role in providing continuous coverage of the Western Hemisphere, including monitoring tropical systems in the eastern Pacific and Atlantic oceans, NASA said. They also observe the Sun. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

 

Blue Origin rolls into Lane 1. After years of lobbying, protests, and bidding, Jeff Bezos' space company is now a military launch contractor, Ars reports. The US Space Force announced late last week that Blue Origin will compete with United Launch Alliance and SpaceX for at least 30 military launch contracts over the next five years. These launch contracts have a combined value of up to $5.6 billion. For more than a decade following its formation from the merger of Boeing and Lockheed Martin rocket programs, ULA was the sole company certified to launch the military's most critical satellites. This changed in 2018 when SpaceX started launching national security satellites for the military. In 2020, despite protests from Blue Origin seeking eligibility, the Pentagon selected ULA and SpaceX to continue sharing launch duties.

 

Lane 1 now, Lane 2 soon... Over the next five years, the Space Force wants to tap into new launch capabilities from emerging space companies. The procurement approach for this new round of contracts, known as NSSL Phase 3, is different from the way the military previously bought launch services. Instead of grouping all national security launches into one monolithic contract, the Space Force is dividing them into two classifications: Lane 1 and Lane 2. The Space Force's contract announced Thursday was for Lane 1, which is for less demanding missions to low-Earth orbit. These missions include smaller tech demos, experiments, and launches for the military’s new constellation of missile-tracking and data-relay satellites. This fall, the Space Force will award up to three contracts for Lane 2, which covers the government's most sensitive national security satellites. Two of these winners will almost certainly be ULA and SpaceX. It is less certain whether a third bidder, Blue Origin, will be awarded any of these contracts.

 

Long March 10 undergoes test firing. China’s main space contractor has carried out a successful static fire test of a rocket first stage designed to take astronauts to the Moon, Space News reports. A Long March 10 first stage test article was fired in the Fengtai district of Beijing on Friday, June 14. This is the rocket that will be used for China's initial lunar missions involving humans. The country has set the goal of landing astronauts on the Moon by 2030. The rocket, at least, would seem to be making steady progress toward this goal.

 

Three engines on this test ... The test article had three YF-100K kerosene-liquid oxygen engines installed across its 5.0-meter diameter. The full Long March 10 first stage will be powered by seven such engines. The rocket’s second stage will have two similar stages attached to it. The engines may have been limited to three due to the capacity of the test stand. The static fire was, however, deemed a complete success, with simultaneous firing of the three engines. “The test is basically a comprehensive verification of our first-stage,” Xu Hongping, an engineer with CASC, told Chinese state television. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Next three launches

June 20: Falcon 9 | Astra 1P | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 21:35 UTC

June 22: Long March 2C | Space Variable Objects Monitor | Xichang Satellite Launch Center, China | 07:00 UTC

June 23: Falcon 9 | Starlink 10-2 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 17:03 UTC

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In 1996 the United States hit peak potato. Americans were eating 64 pounds of the vegetables each year—more than at any point since modern records began in 1970. A record-breaking harvest had flooded the country with so many spuds that the government had to pay farmers to give them away. In the White House, the Clintons were foisting potatoes—fried, marinated, boiled, garlicked—onto princesses and presidents at official dinners.

“It was a crazy time,” says Chris Voigt, whose long career as a potato-pusher started in the potato frenzy of the late 1990s. “Literally you could buy buckets of french fries.” But as Voigt made his way up in the potato industry, all the way to executive director of the Washington State Potato Commission, the American potato was undergoing a dramatic shift in fortunes.

The average American is now eating 30 percent fewer potatoes than during the vegetable’s heyday, down to an all-time low of 45 pounds per year. The drop in consumption of fresh potatoes—for boiling, roasting, mashing, and steaming—has been even faster. In 2019, frozen potato consumption overtook fresh potatoes for the first time, opening up a gulf that has continued to widen since the pandemic. Most of those frozen potatoes are eaten as french fries.

This has seen potato fields become battlegrounds for the future of food in America. In December 2023, reports emerged that US dietary guidelines might change to declassify potatoes as a vegetable, mirroring the approach taken in Britain. There was such an uproar that US Department of Agriculture secretary Thomas Vilsack was forced to write a letter reassuring senators that his agency had no such plans.

That reclassification may have failed, but the potato has had a spectacular fall from grace. Once this miraculous nutrient-dense vegetable was the fuel of human civilization. Now the spud in the US has become synonymous with a garbage, industrialized food system that pours profits into a handful of companies at the expense of people’s health.

America’s favorite vegetable is facing a Sophie’s Choice moment. Should we accept that fresh spuds have lost the fight against the tide of fries, hash browns, and waffles, or is there hope for a potato renaissance? Can the humble spud achieve the rehabilitation it deserves?

The white potato is a criminally underrated food. Compared with other carb-loaded staples like pasta, white bread, or rice, potatoes are rich in vitamin C, potassium, and fiber. They’re also surprisingly high in protein. If you hit your daily calorie goal by eating only potatoes, then you’d also exceed your daily goal for protein, which is 56 grams for a man aged 31–50.

Chris Voigt knows this because for 60 days in 2010 he ate nothing but potatoes. And a little oil. And one time some pickle juice. But the point is, for two months Voigt didn’t just survive on potatoes, he thrived. By the end of his diet Voigt had lost 21 pounds, his cholesterol was down 41 percent, and he’d stopped snoring. “I think I’ve personally proven that the potato is highly nutritious, no matter how you eat—whether you boil it or fry it, cook it in the oven, or steam it,” Voigt says.

Voigt adopted his unusual diet in protest against a recommendation from the National Institute of Medicine to exclude white potatoes from a federal voucher program for women and children on low incomes. The institute argued that Americans already ate white potatoes in ample quantities and didn’t need any encouragement to eat more. As Washington’s potato chief, Voigt, naturally, disagreed. “Nutritionally and scientifically it just didn’t make sense,” he says—potatoes are loaded with exactly the kinds of vitamins that pregnant women need.

In 2015 the institute came around to Voigt’s point of view, concluding that Americans weren’t getting enough starchy vegetables, and therefore potatoes should be eligible for the voucher scheme. It was a rare victory for the pro-potato camp at a time when the vegetables have come under increasing fire. “They’re pretty amazing in my opinion,” says Joanne Slavin, a nutrition professor at the University of Minnesota who helped come up with the 2010 federal dietary guidelines for Americans, which counted potatoes in the recommendation that people eat 2.5 cups of vegetables each day.

Potatoes aren’t just amazing from a nutritional point of view—they are one of the original disruptive food technologies. First domesticated in the Andes and then brought to Europe by Spanish colonizers in the mid-1500s, wherever potatoes were grown they supercharged local societies. Potatoes were well suited to growing in cool, wet, European climates and produced veritable bounties compared with established crops like wheat, barley, and oats.

An acre of field could serve up over 10 metric tons of potatoes, according to the diary of an 18th-century British farmer. The same area of wheat would yield only 650 kilograms, so it’s little wonder that leading thinkers started singing the potato’s praises. “No food can afford a more decisive proof of its nourishing quality, or of its being peculiarly suitable to the health of the human constitution,” wrote the philosopher Adam Smith in his influential treatise The Wealth of Nations.

“Potatoes can be grown in really small plots and marginal land,” says Nathan Nunn, an economist at the University of British Columbia who wrote a paper concluding that the introduction of the potato accounted for about a quarter of the population growth in the Old World between 1700 and 1900. Settlements close to areas that were suitable for potato cultivation grew and urbanized more quickly. French soldiers born in villages that could grow potatoes were a half-inch taller in the years after the potato came to the country.

Nowhere in Europe was the promise of the potato more evident than in Ireland. The potato probably reached its shores in the early 17th century. A century later the population had doubled to 2 million, and by 1845 it had soared to 8.5 million people—more than 90 percent of whom were utterly dependent on the potato, writes John Reader in Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent. When a fungal disease wiped out nearly all of Ireland’s potato harvest in 1845, over a million people died in what became known as the Great Famine, and a similar number emigrated to North America, Australia, or to Great Britain—where the government continued to export grain, meat, and even potatoes from Ireland despite the raging famine.

The same qualities that made potatoes a runaway success in Europe—their cheapness, ubiquity, and nutritional density—are a large part of why in recent years they have acquired the status of a second-class vegetable. One Danish observational study found that eating a lot of potatoes—unlike other vegetables—was associated with a higher risk of type 2 diabetes. Other studies have found that potato consumption is linked to cardio-metabolic risk factors like high blood pressure and cholesterol, but the evidence on whether this leads to more disease and deaths is murky.

The issue is that the way we eat potatoes has changed. Americans now eat 21 pounds of frozen (mostly fried) potatoes and a further 3.7 pounds of potato chips each year. And while deep-frying potatoes doesn’t deplete their nutritional content (it actually increases levels of dietary fiber), it does add a whole bunch of fat and salt, which we know are bad. The problem is that the potato industry is dependent on these deep-fried products, which are a major growth area, while fresh potato sales continue to decline.

“I hate it when we try to simplify things and put healthy foods over here and unhealthy foods over there,” says Voigt. “You really have to look at the entire diet that you’re consuming. That’s my philosophy on it.” But recent growth in frozen potatoes is buoyed by all-day breakfasts and a vogue for loaded fries, which skews the equation firmly to the unhealthy side of the balance.

The shift in consumption also means that the frozen potato processors have a lot of sway over how potatoes are perceived in the US. “French fries are a huge source of fiber, because that’s what people actually eat,” says Slavin, who points out that some of her work has been sponsored by the potato industry. Voigt, of the Washington Potato Commission, where frozen french fries are the state’s top agricultural export, tried to convince me that deep-fried and salted potatoes don’t meet the definition of ultra-processed food. Slavin disagreed, saying that french fries are “without question” ultra-processed.

The demands of the frozen potato industry have also shaped which potatoes make it into fields, says Mark Taylor, a retired potato researcher. Potatoes destined for potato chips need to be relatively dry and low in sugar, which helps them take up oil and stops them from browning too quickly as they’re deep-fried. McDonald’s is picky about which potato it uses for its fries, which is partly why a single variety—the Russet Burbank—accounts for about 70–80 percent of all frozen French fry production in the US and Canada.

This dominance of a few potato varieties is one reason why spuds have also lagged behind other staple crops in terms of development. Yield is a measure of how much crop is produced in a given hectare of farmland. Improvements in fertilizer, equipment, farming techniques, and crop varieties all push yields upwards, which means we can grow more food on less land.

Global yields of wheat, maize, and rice have all risen by more than 150 percent since the 1960s, but potato yields have only increased by around 72 percent. A big part of the problem is that potatoes’ genetics make it fiendishly difficult to breed more productive varieties. “It’s a nightmare to breed,” says Taylor, but pressure from climate change and new diseases means that we’ll have to try harder to unlock new potential from this maybe-miraculous crop. Yet at the same time, frozen potato producers continue to put their finger on the scale, bending breeder’s attention towards varieties that fry and freeze better than before.

Today the potato is at a crossroads. The history of the potato is the history of humanity, say Tom and Meredith Hughes, who have a collection of 8,000 potato-related artifacts. The married couple have curated exhibitions at the Smithsonian, the United States Botanic Garden, and Canada’s National Museum of Science and Industry. “We saw a path forward with a mission to explore the world through the eyes of the potato, and that’s what we’ve been doing for 50 years,” says Tom on a video call.

“Everywhere we’ve gone, we’ve collected potato things,” Meredith says, as Tom holds up to the screen a small Chinese horse bell shaped like a tuber and then a chunk of Chuño—potato prepared the ancient South American way, frozen overnight and then dried in the Andean sun. But now the bulk of the Potato Museum collection is in storage in New Mexico and the Hughes are looking to sell. “This has become a real burden for us, financially and physically,” says Tom.

So far they’ve had no takers, although they say an auctioneer valued the collection at $1 million. In the meantime they’re putting it online in a series of YouTube videos, each one exploring a different aspect of their collection: potato toys, tools, T-shirts, and tunes.

The potato too is struggling to generate the enthusiasm it once did in the anglophone world. At the same time as becoming synonymous with its least healthy preparations, the potato has been squeezed at the margins by the rise of pasta and rice in the Western diet, as well as being a victim of the low-carb diets popularized in the 1990s and 2000s.

A few people are still plugging the potato’s potential benefits. The pseudonymous science bloggers behind Slime Mold Time Mold are running an informal trial where they invite readers to try their own riffs on Chris Voigt’s potato-only diet. A few participants who ate only potatoes and dairy—almost a replica of the 19th-century Irish diet—reported that they’d lost weight over the month. Another who tried potatoes, eggs, and olive oil had less success.

The potato industry is also arming itself to fight back against what it sees as nutritional misinformation. The marketing and promotion board Potatoes USA is using AI social media listening tools to find examples of “inaccurate nutrition information” online and respond. A human always reviews any dubious information, but the system speeds the whole process up, says chief marketing officer Kim Breshears.

The potato is ripe for a rebrand, says Voigt, but the industry has nothing like the marketing resources of the beef or dairy industry, which have poured money into efforts to remain central to the American diets. Potatoes USA has its AI listening tools, and is trying to nudge amateur athletes to join “Team Potato” with branded jackets and running gear. Compare that with the iconic long-running campaign from the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association: “Beef—it’s what’s for dinner.”

If these efforts to buoy potato enthusiasm feel lackluster, perhaps we need a tastier spud. In the early 2000s Mark Taylor, the potato breeder, helped create a new variety called Mayan Gold, which tapped into the genetic diversity of the original Andrean potatoes. Nutty and flaxen-fleshed, the idea was to appeal to the same gourmet market that gets excited about heirloom tomatoes. It was tasty, Taylor says, but sales struggled thanks to the financial crisis. “The bottom fell out of that one quite quickly.”

The future of the American potato might be outside of its borders. A large portion of the potatoes grown in Washington, one of the leading potato-producing states, are sold as french fries in Japan, which is increasingly a major destination for American potatoes. In late 2021, McDonald’s Japan flew in three Boeing 747s laden with frozen french fries to ease shortages caused by shipping bottlenecks.

Back on home soil things look less rosy. “One of the biggest reasons why in-home potato consumption has dropped off is because we’re just no longer cooking potatoes,” says Voigt.

Even the potato faithfuls, Tom and Meredith, admit that they don’t eat as many potatoes as they once used to.

Once in the 1980s, Tom says he had a business call with a potato marketing organization where he mentioned in passing that french fries shouldn’t be the only way to consume potatoes. They didn’t call again. “That destroyed 50 years of income for us,” Meredith jokes. The future of the potato—it turns out—is an extremely serious business.

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In the urgent quest for a more sustainable global food system, livestock are a mixed blessing. On the one hand, by converting fibrous plants that people can’t eat into protein-rich meat and milk, grazing animals like cows and sheep are an important source of human food. And for many of the world’s poorest, raising a cow or two—or a few sheep or goats—can be a key source of wealth.

 

But those benefits come with an immense environmental cost. A study in 2013 showed that globally, livestock account for about 14.5 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, more than all the world’s cars and trucks combined. And about 40 percent of livestock’s global warming potential comes in the form of methane, a potent greenhouse gas formed as they digest their fibrous diet.

 

That dilemma is driving an intense research effort to reduce methane emissions from grazers. Existing approaches, including improved animal husbandry practices and recently developed feed additives, can help, but not at the scale needed to make a significant global impact. So scientists are investigating other potential solutions, such as breeding low-methane livestock and tinkering with the microbes that produce the methane in grazing animals’ stomachs. While much more research is needed before those approaches come to fruition, they could be relatively easy to implement widely and could eventually have a considerable impact.

 

The good news—and an important reason to prioritize the effort—is that methane is a relatively short-lived greenhouse gas. Whereas the carbon dioxide emitted today will linger in the atmosphere for more than a century, today’s methane will wash out in little more than a decade. So tackling methane emissions now can lower greenhouse gas levels and thus help slow climate change almost immediately.

 

“Reducing methane in the next 20 years is about the only thing we have to keep global warming in check,” says Claudia Arndt, a dairy nutritionist working on methane emissions at the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi, Kenya.

The methane dilemma

The big challenge in lowering methane is that the gas is a natural byproduct of what makes grazing animals uniquely valuable: their partnership with a host of microbes. These microbes live within the rumen, the largest of the animals’ four stomachs, where they break down the fibrous food into smaller molecules that the animals can absorb for nutrition. In the process, they generate large amounts of hydrogen gas, which is converted into methane by another group of microbes called methanogens.

 

Most of this methane, often referred to as enteric methane, is belched or exhaled out by the animals into the atmosphere—just one cow belches out around 220 pounds of methane gas per year, for example. (Contrary to popular belief, very little methane is expelled in the form of farts. Piles of manure that accumulate in feedlots and dairy barns account for about a quarter of US livestock methane, but aerating the piles or capturing the methane for biogas can prevent those emissions; the isolated cow plops from pastured grazing animals generate little methane.)

 

Modifying microbes

Tinkering with the bovine microbiome could also provide new ways of reducing methane emissions. An analysis of 750 Danish dairy cows suggests that in addition to the animal’s genetics, the mix of microbes in its rumen also has an independent effect on the amount of methane a cow produces.

 

Shifting the balance toward microbial species that use the rumen’s hydrogen to produce other molecules such as acetate, propionate, and fatty acids, which—unlike methane—can all be used as energy sources by the grazer, is one promising option, says Leluo Guan, an animal microbiome researcher at the University of British Columbia. Guan is now part of a team studying the fate of hydrogen in the rumen, tracking how much goes into methane and how much to these more beneficial molecules. By comparing high- and low-methane-emitting animals, they hope to identify ways to shift the hydrogen balance toward less methane.

 

“Basically, you need to take the hydrogen and put it someplace else efficiently,” says Matthias Hess, a microbiologist at the University of California, Davis. Working with artificial rumens—sealed chambers in the laboratory—Hess aims to make this nudge more precise by using the gene-editing technology CRISPR to alter rumen microbes in ways that reduce methane production. He hopes to have useful lab results in two or three years and modified microbiota ready to transplant into animal rumens within five to seven years. What he learns in his artificial rumen research should also apply to other methane-emitting environments such as wastewater lagoons and manure piles, he says.

 

Even if Guan, Hess, and others succeed in creating a less methanogenic microbe mix, however, it’s not clear whether it will be possible to deploy such a mix in real animals. The microbiomes of ruminant animals are notoriously resistant to change: When researchers eradicate the existing microbes and replace them with new ones, the microbiome often reverts to its former state quickly.

 

Acting early in an animal’s life might yield better success. Morgavi and his colleagues treated nine newborn calves with the 3-NOP additive for the first 14 weeks of their lives. Because 3-NOP starves methanogens of hydrogen, it puts them at a disadvantage in the rumen’s ecosystem during this crucial period when microbes are colonizing the rumen.

 

Sure enough, the treated calves ended up with different microbial communities from those of eight untreated control calves—and, crucially, this difference persisted for the entire 60 weeks of the experiment, the researchers reported in 2021 in Scientific Reports. This suggests there might be a critical window during which farmers could shape the rumen’s biota for the animal’s lifetime, says Morgavi, who adds that the study still needs to be validated by other groups and under other conditions.

Methane-reducing jabs

Another way to shift the rumen’s microbial community away from methanogenesis could be to vaccinate livestock against methanogenic microbes. Such a vaccine, researchers hope, would prime the animal’s immune system to produce antibodies that bind to the methanogens in the rumen and inactivate them. Because vaccination is already well accepted by farmers and animals would only need occasional booster shots, it could be a more practical solution than daily feed supplements.

 

A team led by immunologist Neil Wedlock, of AgResearch, a research institute owned by the New Zealand government, has been working for nearly two decades to develop such a vaccine in sheep. So far, the team has shown that vaccinated sheep do produce lots of methanogen-targeting antibodies in their saliva—enough to inactivate all the methanogens in the rumen. They’ve also shown that this reduces methane production in test-tube cultures. If a vaccine works, the team hopes it can reduce methane emissions by about 30 percent, Janssen says. So far, however, they haven’t produced consistent reductions in methane emissions from live animals.

 

With the world facing an urgent need to reduce methane to contain climate change and little political will to reduce consumption of beef and milk, controlling enteric methane may be one of our best hopes to meet crucial climate goals, says Montgomery. However, it will take time for today’s promising research to mature into deployable technologies.

 

“Realistically, I’m not expecting we’re going to have a 30 percent reduction in livestock methane by 2030,” says Montgomery. “But could we imagine a 50 percent reduction by 2050? Definitely—and maybe more.”

 

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, a nonprofit publication dedicated to making scientific knowledge accessible to all. Sign up for Knowable Magazine’s newsletter.

 

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The groundbreaking test, described in a recent Nature Communications paper, measures the amounts of just eight proteins in the blood.

Using artificial intelligence, the researchers discovered that the combined pattern of these proteins could accurately distinguish Parkinson’s patients from healthy people every single time. Even more impressively, the test flagged nearly eight out of every 10 individuals in the earliest stage of the disease before movement issues arise.

This progress builds on growing evidence that Parkinson’s, while mainly a brain disorder, also involves distinct changes in the rest of the body, especially related to inflammation. The eight-protein signature includes several markers of an overactive immune system and stress within cells, pointing to biological processes that go off course years before the disease’s hallmark brain changes cause neurons to die.

Methodology & Results

To develop the test, the scientists first cast a wide net, comparing blood samples from a small group of recently diagnosed Parkinson’s patients and healthy individuals. This revealed a number of proteins with differing levels between the two groups, hinting at the involvement of inflammation and cellular stress responses. The team then designed a targeted test to precisely measure the most promising of these proteins. They validated it in a larger group, including Parkinson’s patients, healthy controls, and, importantly, people with a sleep disorder called REM sleep behavior disorder (RBD), considered a key early warning sign of Parkinson’s. The test performed well, clearly separating Parkinson’s patients from healthy folks.

Next, the researchers used computer models to zero in on the most telling proteins, landing on a panel of just eight. A model based on only these eight could correctly identify Parkinson’s 100% of the time in the test group. Intriguingly, it also flagged about 80% of the “pre-motor” RBD group as having Parkinson’s-like changes, fitting with the fact that over 80% of such individuals eventually develop the disease.

To further put the test through its paces, the scientists applied it to samples collected over time from a separate group of 54 people with RBD. Remarkably, it classified nearly 80% as having a Parkinson’s-like protein signature up to seven years before any were diagnosed with the disease based on emerging movement symptoms. Though not perfect, it provides a strong foundation for a screening tool to identify high-risk individuals for early interventions.

Limitations

While tremendously encouraging, the study does have limitations. Diagnosis of RBD was based on sleep tests and neurological exams rather than brain autopsies, so it’s possible some participants had a different underlying condition. Additionally, RBD represents just one path to Parkinson’s. More work is needed to see if the protein signature holds up across different types of patients. Larger studies with more diverse groups of people will be key to validating the test for widespread screening.

Discussion & Takeaways

All in all, the study signifies concrete progress toward a long-sought aim in Parkinson’s research: a simple, affordable test to detect the disease early enough to intervene before substantial brain cell loss occurs. The fact that it homes in on inflammatory proteins also bolsters the growing idea that Parkinson’s is not just a brain condition but a body-wide disease with red flags that can be spotted in the blood. Figuring out how these inflammatory changes relate to, and perhaps even drive, the clumping of the culprit protein alpha-synuclein could unleash a whole new wave of targeted treatments to slow or halt the disease process.

The journey from a promising blood test to a widely used diagnostic and screening tool is a long one, requiring more validation and fine-tuning. But for the millions living with or at risk of Parkinson’s and their loved ones, studies like this one offer a much-needed glimmer of hope. A future when a routine blood draw could catch Parkinson’s in its earliest stages, allowing for a quick start of protective therapies, may not be as far-fetched as we once thought. While not a cure, early detection would be a pivotal first step in rewriting the Parkinson’s narrative from one of unstoppable decline to one of proactive care and better quality of life.

“As new therapies become available to treat Parkinson’s, we need to diagnose patients before they have developed the symptoms. We cannot regrow our brain cells and therefore we need to protect those that we have,” says Professor Kevin Mills from UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health in a media release.

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