• Following a diet that contains fewer processed foods is a way to slow climate change and boost health

• People who follow the Planetary Health Diet had a 30% lower risk of early death compared to others, researchers found

• Every major cause of death, including cancer and heart disease, was affected

MONDAY, June 10, 2024 (HealthDay News) — A plant-based eating regimen designed to save the Earth also saves people's lives, a large study confirms.

"Shifting how we eat can help slow the process of climate change," said corresponding author Dr. Walter Willett, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. "And what's healthiest for the planet is also healthiest for humans."

Known as the Planetary Health Diet (PHD), the regimen emphasizes minimally processed plant foods, while modest intake of meat and dairy foods are allowed.

While other studies have shown that plant-based diets have benefits for the planet and people alike, most have looked at one point in time. The new study drew on health data from more than 200,000 men and women who were followed for up to 34 years.

Researchers found those whose diets most closely hewed to the PHD regimen had a 30% lower risk of early death compared to those whose diets were the least like it.

That was true for every major cause of death -- cancer, heart disease and lung disease, the study found. None of the participants had major chronic illnesses at the outset.

They completed dietary questionnaires every four years and were scored based on intake of 15 food groups, including veggies, poultry, whole grains and nuts.

Those whose eating habits were closest to the PHD had a bigger positive impact on the environment as well, the study showed.

Compared to those with the lowest adherence, their impact included 29% lower greenhouse gas emissions; 21% lower fertilizer needs; and 51% lower cropland use.

The findings were published online June 10 in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Research grants from the National Institutes of Health supported the study.

Using less land for food production is a key to promoting re-forestation, researchers said. Re-forestation is key to reducing greenhouse gas levels that fuel climate change.

"The findings show just how linked human and planetary health are," Willett said in a Harvard news release. "Eating healthfully boosts environmental sustainability -- which in turn is essential for the health and well-being of every person on earth."

Source

If you’ve ever spoken to someone and later felt that you would have better spent your time talking to a brick wall, you’ll surely identify with the observations of Rebecca West. “There is no such thing as conversation,” the novelist and literary critic wrote in her collection of stories, The Harsh Voice. “It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.”

If someone feels that their conversations have left no impression on those around them, then that is the definition of existential isolation. You’ve probably experienced this on a bad date, at an awful dinner party, or during an interminable family gathering.

Psychological research has identified many habits and biases that impose barriers between ourselves and others—and if we wish to have greater connection with the people around us, we must learn how to overcome them. The good news is that corrections are very easy to put into practice. Tiny tweaks to our conversational style can bring enormous benefits.

Let’s begin with the sins of inattention. “The art of conversation is the art of hearing as well as of being heard,” declared the early 19th-century essayist William Hazlitt in his On the Conversation of Authors, published in 1820. “Some of the best talkers are, on this account, the worst company.”

Hazlitt noted that many of his literary acquaintances—who included Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Stendhal, and William Wordsworth—were so keen to show off their wit and intelligence that they lacked the basic civility of listening to others. He instead recommended that we imitate the painter James Northcote, who, he claimed, was the best listener and—as a result—the best converser that he knew. “I never ate or drank with Mr Northcote; but I have lived on his conversation with undiminished relish ever since I can remember,” Hazlitt wrote. Who wouldn’t want to leave their acquaintances feeling this way?

The simplest way of achieving this is to ask more questions, yet surprisingly few people have cultivated this habit effectively. While studying for a PhD in organizational behavior at Harvard University, Karen Huang invited more than 130 participants into her laboratory and asked them to converse in pairs for a quarter of an hour through an online instant messenger. She found that, even in these 15 minutes, people’s rates of question-asking varied widely, from around four or fewer at the low end to nine or more at the high end.

Asking more questions can make a big difference to someone’s likeability. In a separate experiment, Huang’s team analyzed recordings of people’s conversations during a speed-dating event. Some people consistently asked more questions than others, and this significantly predicted their chance of securing a second date.

It’s easy to understand why questions are so charming: They demonstrate your wish to build mutual understanding and give you the chance to validate each other’s experiences. But even if we do pose lots of questions, we may not be asking the right kind. In her analyses, Huang considered six different categories of questions. You can see the examples below:

1. Introductory
Hello!
Hey, how’s it going?

2. Follow-up
I’m planning a trip to Canada.
Oh, cool. Have you ever been there before?

3. Full switch
I am working at a dry cleaner’s.
What do you like doing for fun?

4. Partial switch
I’m not super outdoorsy, but not opposed to a hike or something once in a while.
Have you been to the beach much in Boston?

5. Mirror
What did you have for breakfast?
I had eggs and fruit. How about you?

6. Rhetorical
Yesterday I followed a marching band around.
Where were they going? It’s a mystery.

Huang found that follow-up questions, which ask for more information about a previous point, are much more appealing than the “switch” questions that change topic, or the “mirror” questions that simply copy what someone has already asked you. The most superficial are the introductory questions—essential social niceties, but which hardly demonstrate a genuine interest in another person.

You might also avoid boomerasking—that’s the habit of posing a question as an excuse to talk about yourself. We could ask about someone’s profession, for example—not because we care how their job is going, but because we want to brag about our own promotion. Emerging research suggests that this habit is particularly unlikeable.

The act of asking elaboration questions can become self-perpetuating. Once someone had made the effort to draw out their partner with one enquiry, it became much easier to ask another.

The Art of Attention

People are acutely aware of whether they are being listened to attentively, and their perception of receiving active attention from another predicts their feelings of trust, and contributes to the well-being boost that typically comes from strong social connections. The more attentive we are to someone, the happier they feel.

Unfortunately, many of us rely on the wrong cues to signal our interest in others. People can display their attention with nonverbal body language, such as leaning forward, nodding, or making empathetic facial expressions; they can employ “paralinguistic” cues such as murmuring sounds of assent or approval; or they may verbally acknowledge what the other person has said. While nonverbal and paralinguistic cues are often genuine signs of attention, they can also be feigned—and if we rely on these alone, our conversation partners may assume the worst.

It is much safer to demonstrate your attention explicitly in the words that you say. Paraphrasing what the other person has said, for example, offers direct proof that you have processed their remark. This is another reason why follow-up questions are so powerful: The details that you include provide the necessary confirmation that you were intent on hearing what they had to say.

Be careful to focus on the core point that the person has been trying to convey. If someone describes a bad date to you, for example, it’s no good inquiring about the bar or giving your opinions on the film that they watched.

You can validate what they are thinking and feeling or perhaps, after acknowledging what they have said, offer an alternative interpretation that may open their mind to a new way of seeing the situation. You must show that you are at least trying to see things their way before offering your alternative take.

As you converse, avoid being distracted by your surroundings. Each time that you show your mind is wandering, you weaken the connection that could have arisen from more attentive listening.

The practice of “phubbing”—or phone snubbing, constantly interrupting a conversation to check your smartphone—is similarly disruptive. In one observational study, researchers watched 100 pairs of participants conversing in local coffee shops. Some naturally took out their phones and held them in their hands or placed them on the table, while others left them out of sight. At the end of the conversation, the researchers asked each person to fill out a questionnaire exploring the experience, and they found that the mere presence of the phones on the table reduced the pair’s feelings of empathy for each other, resulting in a less fulfilling conversation.

The Fast Friends Procedure

Given Hazlitt’s Law, we might conclude that we should always allow our acquaintance to take center stage. This advice can be found in many influential etiquette guides, but psychological research shows that it is misguided: We should feel free to take our fair share of the airtime. The creation of a shared reality between two people relies on us understanding each other.

We should try to create conversations that allow both parties to open up about deeper thoughts and feelings to identify points of common ground. Arthur Aron has powerfully demonstrated the advantages of self-disclosure, using an experimental paradigm that is sometimes known as the “fast friends procedure.”

Aron’s participants were first sorted into pairs. They were then given a series of 36 questions to discuss over the next 45 minutes. Half the pairs saw questions that stimulated small talk:

• How did you celebrate last Halloween?
• Describe the last pet you owned.
• Where did you go to high school?

This was the low self-disclosure condition. They were perfectly reasonable questions—the kind you might happily ask on a first date—but they weren’t necessarily going to provide many profound insights into someone’s inner life.

The rest of the participants were asked to discuss more probing questions:

• What would constitute a perfect day for you?
• If you were able to live to the age of 90 and retain either the mind or body of a 30-year-old for the last 60 years of your life, which would you want?
• Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die?

This was the high self-disclosure condition. The aim was to get the pairs to open up to each other about their specific thoughts and feelings, with answers that more directly reflected the idiosyncrasies of their minds. In each case, the participants were asked to engage equally. “One of you should read aloud the first slip and then both do what it asks,” they were told.

After the 45 minutes were up, the participants were asked to describe how close they felt to their partner using a seven-point scale, a higher score indicating greater closeness.

The people in the high self-disclosure condition rated their relationship as 4, while those in the small talk condition rated themselves as 3. This would be a relatively large effect size for any single psychological intervention, but it’s especially noteworthy when you consider that most people’s lasting friendships do not score much higher.

These results have now been replicated in large studies, which have also shown that it is just as effective during remote communication as face-to-face interactions. Self-disclosure can even increase connection among people from different social groups, increasing closeness regardless of differences in demographic factors, such as age or immigration status, that you may expect to pose as barriers to friendship.

When asked to predict how they will feel during the exchange, most people expect that the fast friendship procedure will be painfully awkward. When they engage in the task, however, the conversation flows far more smoothly than they expected, and afterward they report feeling a greater sense of connection with their partners than they had thought possible.

People expect their partners to be indifferent to them and to be bored by their self-disclosure. But people are far more interested in our innermost thoughts and feelings than we imagine. Self-disclosure requires a leap of faith, but when we make it, we tend to land safely.

People who have undertaken heightened self-disclosure begin to show some of the physiological markers of social connection. When we form a shared reality with someone, our brains and bodies begin to synchronize as we both read and respond to the world in the same way. Our hormonal responses to stress become attuned, for example—so that levels of cortisol rise and fall in tandem as we experience the same events.

The warm feelings of affection and trust that arise from self-disclosure seem to be aroused by the release of natural opioids in the brain, which encourages further bonding. To prove this, in 2019 a group of Canadian scientists turned to a drug called naltrexone that blocks the brain’s opioid signaling. Someone who is given morphine after taking naltrexone won’t feel the pain relief or sense of bliss that typically accompanies the drug. If opioids can explain some of the buzz we get from social connection, then participants who have taken naltrexone should not reap such large benefits from the fast friends procedure.

The researchers recruited around 160 participants for their study, who were divided into pairs. Half were given naltrexone, and the others a placebo, before they each discussed the 36 self-disclosure questions. After their chat, each participant took a series of questionnaires describing how the conversation had evolved. As expected, the participants who had taken the naltrexone were less open in the conversations and this blunted the mood boost people normally experience following the exchange.

Needless to say, using the 36 questions must be conducted with tact and discretion. While you might slip one or two into a conversation, you would look odd if you rolled them out whenever you met a new acquaintance—unless, of course, you explain what you are doing.

More importantly, you should draw on the spirit of this research by being a little more transparent about your deeper thoughts and feelings. Whether you are describing a secret dream, expressing an unexpected emotional reaction to a news story, or talking about a particularly precious memory, be generous with the information that you provide.

Eschewing small talk in favor of deeper conversations should boost your long-term life satisfaction. Researchers recently equipped 486 participants with a small “electronically activated recorder” that allowed the scientists to eavesdrop on the participants’ interactions. The scientists found that the amount of time someone spent in small talk about daily banalities made almost no difference to their contentment, whereas deeper conversations involving the exchange of meaningful information about their circumstances and interests had a significant impact. When you bare your soul, others will often respond in kind—and you will all feel better for it.

The Novelty Penalty

We must look at one final psychological phenomenon, known as the “novelty penalty.” The term comes from an experiment by Gus Cooney, one of the researchers who discovered the liking gap—the disparity between how much someone thinks another person likes them, versus how much they actually do. His team first placed participants into groups of three. While alone, each member watched one of two short videos: a TED talk about the intelligence of crows or an interview with the owner of a specialist soda shop.

The trio then met as a group, and one member—the speaker—was asked to describe the video he or she had seen, while the other two members listened for two minutes. In some groups, the listeners and speakers had all watched the same video, while in others, the speaker spoke about the clip that the listeners hadn’t seen.

You would expect that learning something new would be far more enjoyable and interesting than hearing something that is already known to you. But the listeners had the opposite reaction: They tended to prefer hearing about the video they had just seen, remaining underwhelmed by the talk that contained fresh information. This is the novelty penalty: a general preference to hear about familiar experiences.

You will have almost certainly noticed the novelty penalty when you have returned from an exotic holiday. Your mind is still full of all the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of the places and the amazing people that you met along the way. As you try to describe the experience, however, you may find people’s eyes glazing over. It’s not that your audience doesn’t care. They simply don’t have enough knowledge to immerse themselves in your descriptions and understand why the trip was so special to you. The informational gaps could create a feeling of distance that undermines the sense of a shared reality.

One strategy to avoid this would be to focus on topics that are equally familiar to both parties. You may think that it’s cool to talk about music that no one else listens to, or films no one else has seen—but this can have the very opposite effect. Looking for shared interests or common experiences to discuss is much healthier.

But avoiding all unfamiliar topics is far from the ideal way of building social connection; if a subject is central to your life and represents an important element of your personality, you need to find a way to express it—otherwise your shared reality with the other person will always have an important part missing. In these cases, you can escape the novelty penalty with vivid storytelling that helps to put the other person in your shoes. If you know that the person is a gastronome, for example, start out by discussing the food you ate on the trip, which should act as a bridge to their own interests and experiences.

As you move onto less familiar terrain, you must make sure that you provide enough details to avoid creating unnecessary informational gaps. Think carefully about their baseline knowledge, so that you don’t patronize them—if necessary, you should ask how familiar the subject already is—and use this to gauge the elements that you need to include to ease their understanding.

In Cooney’s experiments, speakers reduced the novelty penalty if they gave a more complete narrative of the videos under discussion. When they were recounting the recent scientific discoveries about crow intelligence, for example, it helped to describe the inspiration for the research, and a general overview of the main conclusions (crows are smart!), followed by more in-depth accounts of the individual findings. They ended by describing how we could train crows to pick up litter in sports stadiums—and how our understanding of crow intelligence might change the way we think about the human mind. With this level of detail, the speakers enjoyed the discussions almost as much as the discussion of the topic that was already familiar.

You might also remember the novelty penalty when the roles are reversed, and you are struggling to engage with someone else’s experiences. In the past, your general reluctance to ask questions might have prevented you from seeking out the additional information that would allow you to close the gap in understanding.

Whoever we are talking to, and whatever we are talking about, we should be looking for balance—in the exchanges between partners, in the depth of the discussion and in the familiarity of the topics. This is the crux of our fifth law of connection: In conversation, demonstrate active attention, engage in self-disclosure, and avoid the novelty penalty, to build mutual understanding and contribute to the merging of our minds. Whether we are on a first date or meeting a lifelong friend, each sentence we speak offers a new opportunity for greater connection.

Excerpt adapted from The Laws of Connection: The Scientific Secrets of Building a Strong Social Network by David Robson. Published by Pegasus Books on June 4, 2024.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

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

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of May): Nearly 2,400 news posts

We didn’t have to wait long, though, until we could take a closer look at the images from the tracking camera stationed in the Gulf of Mexico where the maneuver happened.

The video that SpaceX made public on Saturday shows the so-called landing burn, during which the Supper Heavy reignites 13 of all 33 Raptor engines:

Despite it being Starship’s fourth test flight, it was only a second attempt to land the Super Heavy. During the third flight, there were problems with fuel delivery to the Raptor engines and SpaceX lost the booster some 460 meters over the Gulf of Mexico.

This time it was a different story. Fixes to address the issues from the previous flight worked and the 71-meter (232 feet) tall stainless steel tube performed a flawless splashdown landing.

Landing on the water is a way to test Super Heavy’s landing capabilities before SpaceX moves to its original plan – landing the booster on the launch pad using huge steel “chopsticks.” However, it would be too risky for the ground infrastructure to do these early tests directly on the pad.

That might change soon, though, as Elon Musk hinted on X: “Next landing will be caught by the tower arms.”

Landing on the Starbase launch pad in Boca Chica, Texas, requires high precision. Once SpaceX finds a way how to reliably land and catch Super Heavy and the Starship upper stage, it will open the way to rapid reusability of the space transportation system.

As we have already reported, the fifth flight could theoretically occur within just a few weeks. That’s due to the success of the fourth test and the completion of its full mission profile. Federal Aviation Administration has no reason to investigate and mishap, thus significantly reducing the time to obtain the necessary flight license for SpaceX.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

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

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of May): Nearly 2,400 news posts

Imagine you had a friend who gave different answers to the same question, depending on how you asked it. “What’s the capital of Peru?” would get one answer, and “Is Lima the capital of Peru?” would get another. You’d probably be a little worried about your friend’s mental faculties, and you’d almost certainly find it hard to trust any answer they gave.

That’s exactly what’s happening with many large language models (LLMs), the ultra-powerful machine learning tools that power ChatGPT and other marvels of artificial intelligence. A generative question, which is open-ended, yields one answer, and a discriminative question, which involves having to choose between options, often yields a different one. “There is a disconnect when the same question is phrased differently,” said Athul Paul Jacob, a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

To make a language model’s answers more consistent—and make the model more reliable overall—Jacob and his colleagues devised a game where the model’s two modes are driven toward finding an answer they can agree on. Dubbed the consensus game, this simple procedure pits an LLM against itself, using the tools of game theory to improve the model’s accuracy and internal consistency.

“Research exploring self-consistency within these models has been very limited,” said Shayegan Omidshafiei, chief scientific officer of the robotics company Field AI. “This paper is one of the first that tackles this, in a clever and systematic way, by creating a game for the language model to play with itself.”

“It’s really exciting work,” added Ahmad Beirami, a research scientist at Google Research. For decades, he said, language models have generated responses to prompts in the same way. “With their novel idea of bringing a game into this process, the MIT researchers have introduced a totally different paradigm, which can potentially lead to a flurry of new applications.”

Putting Play to Work

The new work, which uses games to improve AI, stands in contrast to past approaches, which measured an AI program’s success via its mastery of games. In 1997, for example, IBM’s Deep Blue computer beat chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov—a milestone for so-called thinking machines. Nineteen years later, a Google DeepMind program named AlphaGo won four out of five games against former Go champion Lee Sedol, revealing another arena in which humans no longer reigned supreme. Machines have also surpassed humans in checkers, two-player poker, and other “zero-sum” games, in which the victory of one player invariably dooms the other.

Posing a far greater challenge for AI researchers was the game of Diplomacy—a favorite of politicians like John F. Kennedy and Henry Kissinger. Instead of just two opponents, the game features seven players whose motives can be hard to read. To win, a player must negotiate, forging cooperative arrangements that anyone could breach at any time. Diplomacy is so complex that a group from Meta was pleased when, in 2022, its AI program Cicero developed “human-level play” over the course of 40 games. While it did not vanquish the world champion, Cicero did well enough to place in the top 10 percent against human participants.

During the project, Jacob—a member of the Meta team—was struck by the fact that Cicero relied on a language model to generate its dialog with other players. He sensed untapped potential. The team’s goal, he said, “was to build the best language model we could for the purposes of playing this game.” But what if instead they focused on building the best game they could to improve the performance of large language models?

Consensual Interactions

In 2023, Jacob began to pursue that question at MIT, working with Yikang Shen, Gabriele Farina, and his adviser, Jacob Andreas, on what would become the consensus game. The core idea came from imagining a conversation between two people as a cooperative game, where success occurs when a listener understands what a speaker is trying to convey. In particular, the consensus game is designed to align the language model’s two systems—the generator, which handles generative questions, and the discriminator, which handles discriminative ones.

After a few months of stops and starts, the team built this principle up into a full game. First, the generator receives a question. It can come from a human or from a preexisting list. For example, “Where was Barack Obama born?” The generator then gets some candidate responses, let’s say Honolulu, Chicago, and Nairobi. Again, these options can come from a human, a list, or a search carried out by the language model itself.

But before answering, the generator is also told whether it should answer the question correctly or incorrectly, depending on the results of a fair coin toss.

If it’s heads, then the machine attempts to answer correctly. The generator sends the original question, along with its chosen response, to the discriminator. If the discriminator determines that the generator intentionally sent the correct response, they each get one point, as a kind of incentive.

If the coin lands on tails, the generator sends what it thinks is the wrong answer. If the discriminator decides it was deliberately given the wrong response, they both get a point again. The idea here is to incentivize agreement. “It’s like teaching a dog a trick,” Jacob explained. “You give them a treat when they do the right thing.”

The generator and discriminator also each start with some initial “beliefs.” These take the form of a probability distribution related to the different choices. For example, the generator may believe, based on the information it has gleaned from the internet, that there’s an 80 percent chance Obama was born in Honolulu, a 10 percent chance he was born in Chicago, a 5 percent chance of Nairobi, and a 5 percent chance of other places. The discriminator may start off with a different distribution. While the two “players” are still rewarded for reaching agreement, they also get docked points for deviating too far from their original convictions. That arrangement encourages the players to incorporate their knowledge of the world—again drawn from the internet—into their responses, which should make the model more accurate. Without something like this, they might agree on a totally wrong answer like Delhi, but still rack up points.

For each question, the two systems play roughly

1,000 games against each other. Over the course

of these numerous iterations, each side learns

about the other’s beliefs and modifies its

strategies accordingly.

Eventually, the generator and the discriminator begin to agree more as they settle into something called Nash equilibrium. This is arguably the central concept in game theory. It represents a kind of balance in a game—the point at which no players can better their personal outcomes by shifting strategies. In rock-paper-scissors, for example, players do best when they choose each of the three options exactly one-third of the time, and they will invariably do worse with any other tactic.

In the consensus game, this can play out in many ways. The discriminator might observe that it gets a point when it says “correct” every time the generator sends the word “Honolulu” for Obama’s birthplace. The generator and discriminator will learn, after repeated play, that they will be rewarded for continuing to do this, and neither will have any motivation to do anything else. this consensus represents one of many possible examples of Nash equilibrium for this question. The MIT group also relied on a modified form of Nash equilibrium that incorporates the players’ prior beliefs, which helps keep their responses grounded in reality.

The net effect, the researchers observed, is to make the language model playing this game more accurate and more likely to give the same answer, no matter how the question is asked. To test the effects of the consensus game, the team tried out a set of standard questions on various moderate-size language models with 7 billion to 13 billion parameters. These models routinely got a higher percentage of correct responses than models that hadn’t played, even much bigger ones with up to 540 billion parameters. Playing the game also improved a model’s internal consistency.

In principle, any LLM could benefit from playing the game against itself, and 1,000 rounds would take only a few milliseconds on a standard laptop. “A nice benefit of the overall approach,” Omidshafiei said, “is that it’s computationally very lightweight, involving no training or modification of the base language model.”

Playing Games With Language

After this initial success, Jacob is now investigating other ways of bringing game theory into LLM research. Preliminary results have shown that an already strong LLM can further improve by playing a different game—tentatively called the ensemble game—with an arbitrary number of smaller models. The primary LLM would have at least one smaller model serving as an ally and at least one smaller model playing an adversarial role. If the primary LLM is asked to name the president of the United States, it gets a point whenever it chooses the same answer as its ally, and it also gets a point when it chooses a different answer than its adversary’s. These interactions with much smaller models can not only boost an LLM’s performance, tests suggest, but can do so without extra training or parameter changes.

And that is just the start. Because a variety of situations can be viewed as games, the tools from game theory can be brought into play in various real-world settings, said Ian Gemp, a research scientist at Google DeepMind. In a February 2024 paper, he and colleagues focused on negotiation scenarios that require more elaborate exchanges than just questions and answers. “The main objective of this project is to make language models more strategic,” he said.

One example he discussed at an academic conference is the paper review process for acceptance by a journal or conference, especially after one’s initial submission received a harsh review. Given that language models assign probabilities to different responses, researchers can construct game trees similar to those designed for poker games, which chart the available choices and their possible consequences. “Once you do this, you can start to compute Nash equilibria and then rank a bunch of rebuttals,” Gemp said. The model essentially tells you: This is what we think you should say back.

With the benefit of game theory’s insights, language models will be able to handle even more sophisticated interactions, rather than being limited to question-and-answer-type problems. “The big payoff going forward has to do with longer conversations,” Andreas said. “The next step is to have an AI interact with a person, not just another language model.”

Jacob views the DeepMind work as complementary to the consensus and ensemble games. “At a high level, both these methods are combining language models and game theory,” he said, even if the goals are somewhat different. While the Gemp group is casting commonplace situations into a game format to help with strategic decisionmaking, Jacob said, “we’re using what we know about game theory to improve language models in general tasks.”

Right now, these efforts represent “two branches of the same tree,” Jacob said—two different ways to enhance the functioning of language models. “My vision is that in a year or two, these two branches will converge.”

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

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

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of May): Nearly 2,400 news posts

A single course of this life-saving medicine can not only destroy disease-causing invaders in the human body; it can also have an "immense" impact on the gut and its resident collection of microbes.

This impact can sometimes lead to an overgrowth of certain bacteria or fungi. For instance, women have up to a 30 percent chance of developing a yeast infection after antibiotic treatment.

Scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are working on a solution. They have discovered a new antibiotic, called lolamicin, that can hone in on gram-negative pathogens while leaving other microbes alone.

There's still a long road ahead before the drug can be tested on humans, but researchers are hopeful it can serve as a blueprint for future antibiotic development.

Gram-negative bacteria are common causes of infections in the bowels, lungs, bladder, and blood, and they are notoriously difficult to kill. Their resistance to current antibiotics is one of the most urgent threats facing global human health today.

Broad-spectrum antibiotics can kill both gram-negative and gram-positive bacteria. But scientists say there is a critical need to find medicine that can target gram-negative bacteria specifically, as they're more likely to be resistant to our current antibiotics. This gives more microbes that are useful to human health a chance of being spared.

A drug like lolamicin could be just the ticket. In laboratory dishes, when lolamicin was pitted against 130 drug-resistant strains of common gram-negative bacteria, like E. coli, K. pneumoniae, and E. cloacae, the medicine killed every single one, succeeding where many other antibiotics failed.

In living rodents, lolamicin also successfully treated acute pneumonia and blood infections, all while sparing the gut microbiome.

In fact, scientists found the medicine had "no effect on gram-positive bacteria or on non-pathogenic gram-negative commensal bacteria" that were living in the mice.

That's an exciting discovery given that even a short course of antibiotics can cause a rapid decrease in the diversity of microbe species living in the human gut, and this can persist for months before returning to normal.

The health consequences of those changes are not well understood, but they do seem to leave a patient open to secondary infections after using certain antibiotics.

Lolamicin is different. Unlike amoxicillin (a broad-spectrum antibiotic) or clindamycin (a gram-positive-only antibiotic), this new medicine does "not cause any substantial changes" to the gut microbiome of mice in the month or so after treatment.

During this time, mice that had been treated with lolamicin were exposed to a bacterial infection, which often develops in the colon following antibiotic usage: Clostridioides difficile.

Those mice treated with lolamicin did not develop C. difficile infections at nearly the same rate as those treated with clindamycin or amoxicillin.

Given that the US alone experiences roughly 500,000 C. difficile infections every year, 30,000 of which are fatal, the development of a microbiome-sparing antibiotic could be life-saving.

Scientists are now working to refine their work to ensure that pathogens do not become resistant to lolamicin over time.

"The intestinal microbiome is central to maintaining host health, and its perturbation can result in many deleterious effects, including C. difficile infection and beyond," the authors conclude.

"Consequently, pathogen-specific antibiotics such as lolamicin will be critical to minimizing collateral damage to the gut microbiome; this microbiome-sparing effect would make such antibiotics superior for patients compared with antibiotics in current clinical practice."

The study was published in Nature.

Source

< Watch the video at the source page. >

• Biking is associated with less knee pain and arthritis, according to a recent study.

• Researchers found that the more time a person spent bicycling in their lifetime, the less likely they were to have knee pain and signs of osteoarthritis later in life.

• Physical therapists explain what exercise may be best for your knees.

As we age, it’s essential to incorporate exercises that are low impact and easy on joints, especially if you struggle with arthritis pain. New research shows that a particular workout may help prevent knee pain and arthritis altogether: biking.

A study published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise looked at how bicycling over a lifetime impacts knee pain and arthritis. This was a retrospective study within the Osteoarthritis Initiative (OAI), where researchers investigated over 2,600 OAI participants in their 60s with complete data on bicycling, knee pain, and x-ray evidence of knee osteoarthritis.

Participants filled out a self-administered questionnaire to classify bicycling during four time periods throughout a participant’s lifetime (ages 12-18, 19-34, 35-49, and > 50 years old). They researchers used this information to evaluate the effect of prior bicycling (any history of biking, history for each time period, number of periods cycling) on three outcomes at the 48-month OAI visit. The three outcomes were frequent knee pain, x-ray evidence of osteoarthritis, and symptomatic osteoarthritis.

Results showed that people who biked at any point in their lives were 17% less likely to develop knee pain, and 21% less likely to develop arthritis with pain in the knee joint, than those who did not. Even more, researchers found that the more time people spent biking, the less likely they were to have knee pain and signs of osteoarthritis later in life. The study also suggests that the exercise may help build muscle around the knees without jarring the joints—which could happen with activities like running.

So, how may biking specifically prevent knee pain and arthritis? Since it is a low-impact activity, it puts less stress on the knee joints compared to high-impact exercises like running, says Alex Aksanov, P.T., D.P.T., M.H.S., founder of Stay Active Physical Therapy. “This helps avoid wear and tear on the knee joints,” he explains. Biking also promotes joint mobility by keeping the knee joint moving throughout its full range of motion, which helps maintain flexibility and prevent stiffness often associated with arthritis, Aksanov points out.

Additionally, biking aids in the circulation of synovial fluid within the knee joint, says Aksanov. “Synovial fluid lubricates the joint, reducing friction and providing essential nutrients to the cartilage, which helps in preventing the degeneration associated with arthritis.” Lastly, Aksanov notes that the rhythmic and low-impact nature of biking can help nourish the cartilage by promoting the flow of nutrients and oxygen. “This helps in maintaining the health of the cartilage, which is crucial for joint health,” he explains.

Biking also strengthens the muscles around the knees, particularly the quadriceps, hamstrings, and calf muscles, says Aksanov. “Stronger muscles help stabilize and support the knee joint, reducing the risk of injury and easing the strain on the joints.” Aksanov continues: “The resistance encountered while pedaling, whether from the bike’s gears or terrain, provides a consistent workload for the muscles. This resistance forces the muscles to work harder and leads to muscle hypertrophy and growth over time.”

But, the muscle-building powers of bicycling are only as impactful as how hard you’re pedaling, says Karena Wu, P.T., D.P.T., clinical director and owner of ActiveCare Physical Therapy. Biking can build muscles in the leg joint if the resistance is high enough, she explains. “If you have to push hard on the pedals and move at a specific rate (i.e. not very slow), you will contract the muscles more, which will build muscle strength around the knee joint,” she says.

When it comes to biking versus running, there’s no contest when it comes to the best exercise for your knees. Biking is low-impact, and places less stress on the joints, offering a smooth, controlled motion that maintains joint health without excessive strain, says Aksanov. “The resistance in biking can be adjusted to ensure balanced muscle engagement, avoiding imbalances that might contribute to knee pain.”

In contrast, running is a high-impact activity where each stride subjects the knees to significant force, increasing the risk of knee pain and injuries such as runner’s knee, Aksanov explains. “While running strengthens knee supporting muscles and burns more calories, its repetitive impact can lead to wear and tear on knee cartilage.” Overall, biking poses a lower risk of knee injuries and promotes joint mobility and flexibility, making it a better option for individuals with knee pain, Aksanov advises.

The bottom line

This study suggests that biking, over the long term, may be associated with less breakdown and wear and tear in the knee joints, says Wu. “This has been demonstrated as less reported complaints of knee pain, less evidence of knee osteoarthritis on [x-rays], and less symptomatic arthritis on [x-rays].” These results are important for individuals to know so that they can try to avoid knee issues in the future and understand another benefit of this type of exercise, Wu explains.

Overall, the study underscores the importance of regular physical activity and suggests that incorporating bicycling into one’s routine can be a proactive measure to support long-term knee health and a reduction of osteoarthritis, Aksanov adds.

Still, while biking can be a fantastic activity for individuals to prevent knee pain and arthritis, it’s essential for individuals to listen to their bodies, start gradually, and consult a healthcare professional for personalized advice and recommendations, says Aksanov.

Source

The universal equation has been shown to accurately predict the flapping frequency of birds, insects and even long-extinct prehistoric creatures like the flying reptiles, pterosaurs. It even translates to the flapping flippers of swimming creatures like whales and penguins.

The study is published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.

Scientists have long thought that the frequency of flaps should relate to the natural resonance frequency of the wing to save energy. But finding the relationship between wing and body shape to the rate of flapping has proven difficult.

Danish physicists from Roskilde University derived the new formula from basic concepts in physics, including dimensional analysis. It shows that flapping frequency is proportional to the square root of the animal’s body mass divided by the wing’s surface area.

This simple relationship was tested by plotting its predictions against published data on wingbeat frequencies for bees, dragonflies, beetles, mosquitos, bats and a variety of different birds.

The equation was even tested against fin stroke frequencies for penguins and several whale species.

“Data for birds, insects, bats, and even a robotic bird—supplemented by data for whales and penguins that must swim to stay submerged—show that the constant of proportionality is to a good approximation the same across all species; thus the equation is universal,” the authors write.

“Differing by almost a factor 10,000 in wing/fin-beat frequency, data for 414 animals from the blue whale to mosquitoes fall on the same line. As physicists, we were surprised to see how well our simple prediction of the wing-beat formula works for such a diverse collection of animals,” they add.

The physicists applied their formula to the largest known flying animal, Quetzalcoatlus northropi– an extinct pterosaur which lived at the time of the dinosaurs. Quetzalcoatlus stood as tall as a giraffe when on the ground and had a wingspan of more than 10 metres.

Applying the formula to the ancient beast, they found it would have beaten its wings with a frequency of about 0.7 Hertz, or about 42 times a minute.

Source

The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), looked at survey responses from 4,636 people in England (with an average age of 67) between 2018 and the end of 2020.

Co-author Professor Andrew Steptoe, of the UCL Department of Behavioural Science & Health, said, "It might be expected that older people who were already socially isolated would be particularly vulnerable to the disruptions and restrictions of the pandemic.

"In fact, our study suggests the opposite—that isolated older people were somewhat protected from the negative aspects of pandemic restriction, perhaps because they had less to lose in terms of social connections."

The researchers analyzed data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, a nationally representative population study in England. Participants were interviewed in 2018-19 and twice in 2020—in June/July and November/December.

Just under a third (29%) of respondents were classed as socially isolated, depending on frequency of contact with friends and family, whether they lived with a partner and whether they participated in clubs, organizations or societies.

Prior to the pandemic, these socially isolated older adults had worse quality of life and life satisfaction and greater loneliness, but during 2020 their decline in these areas was less than their more socially connected peers. Life satisfaction declined about half as much, leading to isolated older adults having similar satisfaction with life during the pandemic as adults who were more socially connected.

Lead author Claryn Kung, a senior researcher at the UCL Department of Behavioural Science & Health, said, "It is likely that socially connected older men and women experienced a greater disruption in their habitual routines and rhythms. In contrast, more isolated individuals may have experienced relatively fewer changes in their daily lives, with their usual routines and arrangements possibly being less prone to disruptions by restrictions during the pandemic.

"Our findings highlight the need to care for isolated older adults, but also to be attentive in times of crises to the impact of major disruptions in social activity."

In contrast to these effects, the study found that isolated adults experienced a greater decline in their levels of physical activity, widening the gap between the two groups, and remained more likely to be worried about their future finances. They did not on average change their likelihood of internet use, whereas more socially connected peers used the internet more.

The study received support from the UK's National Institute for Health and Social Care Research (NIHR) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) as well as the US National Institute on Aging.

Source

A new analysis attempts to provide some clarity through the haze, collating data from numerous studies involving more than 200,000 participants.

Where individual studies have suggested that psychosis occurs in anywhere from 1 to 70 percent of all cannabis users, the new analysis finds that roughly 1 in 200 (or just 0.5 percent) may experience a psychotic episode, which can involve hallucinations, delusions and paranoia.

"No research has yet synthesized and compared the findings obtained from different study designs and populations" on the rates of psychosis associated with cannabis use, the team behind the analysis explains in their paper.

Past research has suggested genes for schizophrenia could explain why some cannabis users develop psychosis while others don't. High-potency cannabis has also become more common and has been found to double the risk of psychosis in young adults.

This new analysis finds similarly, with young adults and women, people with pre-existing mental health conditions such as bipolar disorder found to be more at risk of psychosis than others.

However, two genes previously linked to psychosis in cannabis users, COMT and AKT1, showed no apparent link in this analysis, prompting cause for a rethink.

Individuals who had been exposed to the drug earlier and more frequently than others were also not at any higher risk of psychosis in this particular analysis of acute psychotic episodes. Daily use may still carry a higher risk of developing psychosis in the long run, though.

And of all the demographic factors analyzed, only age (younger) and gender (female) showed a correlation with psychotic episodes; education level and socioeconomic status had no apparent effect.

Tabea Schoeler, a statistical geneticist at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, and colleagues selected 162 high-quality studies for their analysis.

Most of the 201,283 participants had been part of observational studies assessing the experiences of recreational cannabis users, and looking for links to demographic, social, and genetic factors.

Around 15 percent had participated in studies testing medicinal cannabis products and documenting their side effects, while a slim 1 percent had been involved in experimental studies studying the effects of THC in healthy volunteers.

"The availability of these three distinct lines of evidence provides a unique research opportunity as their findings can be synthesized, be inspected for convergence, and ultimately, contribute to more evidence-based harm-reduction initiatives," Schoeler and colleagues write.

Rates of cannabis-associated psychosis varied substantially across different types of studies: Observational studies and experimental research reported high rates of 19 percent and 21 percent respectively, whereas medicinal cannabis studies reported far lower but still significant rates of psychosis, in around 2 percent of participants.

"This indicates that risk of acute psychosis-like symptoms exists after exposure to cannabis, irrespective of whether it is used recreationally, administered in controlled experiments, or prescribed as a medicinal product," the team writes.

However, "not every individual exposed to cannabis is equally at risk" due to those predicting factors the analysis identified – age, gender, mental health conditions and THC potency.

Source

Before May 2018, he was a healthy but chronically worried start-up founder who regularly did 20-mile (32-kilometer) bike rides. When he suddenly became barely able to walk, with blurry vision and spiking blood pressure, emergency room doctors suspected a stroke, but couldn't pinpoint the cause of his illness.

A close friend, however—"one of the most optimistic people I know," he said—pointed out Bhojwani often lacked faith that things would work out, and suggested that had pushed him to burn out.

"I started looking at the world very differently, literally the next day," said Bhojwani, who lives in New York City. He started meditating and taking a moment every morning to feel grateful to be alive. He also found purpose by co-founding a nonprofit, Asana Voices, a South Asian advocacy organization.

In the years since, he hasn't had any similar health crises, despite working longer hours. He credits his newfound positive outlook.

"After there was a life-changing event, it kind of forced me to become optimistic," he said. "I can't even imagine living life the way I did back then."

Optimism in itself is hardly a cure-all, but numerous studies over the decades have demonstrated a link between a positive outlook and good health outcomes.

Hayami Koga, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, poses for a portrait in Cambridge, Mass., on May 23, 2023. Credit: Kaoru Gleissner via AP

A LONGER, HEALTHIER LIFE?

Experts say a standard for measuring someone's relative optimism has long been the 10-question Life Orientation Test-Revised, published in 1994. (Sample question: On a scale of 1 to 5, respondents are asked how strongly they agree with the statement, "In uncertain times, I usually expect the best"?)

Generally, optimism is defined as the "expectation that good things will happen, or believing the future will be favorable because we can control important outcomes," said Hayami Koga, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies.

She was the lead author on a 2022 study that found optimism associated with longer life spans and a greater chance of living past 90. In another study, published in May in JAMA Psychiatry, she and other researchers said optimists generally maintained better physical functioning as they aged. They looked at 5,930 postmenopausal women over a 6-year period.

"We know that more optimistic people are more likely to live a healthier life, with healthier habits, eating healthier, having more exercise," Koga said.

CAN I LEARN TO BE AN OPTIMIST?

Some people are born more optimistic but it can definitely be learned, too, said Sue Varma, clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at New York University and author of "Practical Optimism: The Art, Science, and Practice of Exceptional Well-Being."

Optimism training, she said, can improve life satisfaction and lessen anxiety.

This cover image released by Avery Books shows "Practical Optimism: The Art, Science, and Practice of Exceptional Well-Being" by Sue Varma, MD.

Credit: Avery via AP

"Even if you were not born with this natural disposition to anticipate favorable outcomes and see the glass as half full, there are skills that you can learn," Varma said.

Begin by noticing how you deal with uncertainty, she said. Do you tend to worry? Assume the worst?

Try to reframe the thought in an objective manner. "Is there a silver lining? Is this a problem to be solved or a truth to be accepted?" said Varma, noting that her book builds upon the work of Martin Seligman, one of the fathers of positive psychology.

Try to envision the best possible outcome and a step-by-step path to get there. Varma asks her clients to describe the path in detail until the problem is resolved, and encourages them to bask in their success.

"Then you are already approaching your day and your life as if things have worked out," she said. "And you tend to be more proactive, more positive, more resilient, more buoyant in the face of obstacles."

Finding a sense of purpose also can help. Volunteering would be beneficial, but for those who can't find the time, Varma suggested trying to remake your role at work to align better with your interests. That could be as simple as a very social person organizing outings with co-workers.

Trying to master a skill, whether a sport, a musical instrument, a language or a hobby such as knitting or chess can help prevent you from ruminating on negative possibilities.

Even with these and other interventions, it's not easy to change your mindset, Varma noted. But practice helps.

"It's a toolset, it's a mindset," she said. "I have to practice it every day in my mind."

Source

Reality often seems stranger and more dazzling than the most inspired fiction. Space, for instance, can warp, stretch, and ripple, like rubber, as Einstein taught us. And yet we travel through it, as passengers on Earth, at 150 miles per second—without feeling the slightest resistance. How can that be?

This is among the questions with which Matt Strassler, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University, opens his new book, Waves in an Impossible Sea: How Everyday Life Emerges from the Cosmic Ocean. His answer: Our tangible world—chairs and trees and dogs and human beings—exists not “within” the universe but is made “of” the universe itself, built from the same waves that constitute space.

How do we understand those waves? With quantum field theory, which Strassler argues underlies all of reality. It tells us that everything in our universe is made up of fields, much like our familiar electric and magnetic fields. Particles like protons, electrons, and Higgs bosons are excitations of these fields. How these fields are built and give rise to particles is at the heart of Strassler’s book.

The principle of relativity runs like Ariadne’s thread through the narrative to keep us from getting lost.  

These are weighty concepts, and yet Strassler writes with enviable conversational simplicity, drawing parallels between the waves and vibrations we know in our everyday lives—especially those in music (of which he is a connoisseur)—and the waves and particles of modern physics. In places, he coins delightfully pithy phrases that feel intuitive, for instance the “Higgsiferous ether” for the Higgs field which is at the heart of what imparts mass to certain particles in the universe. The law of inertia is the “coasting law.” A scalar field—a field for a property, like temperature or pressure, which is defined only by a value at every point in space and not a direction—is “non-pointing.”

Strassler also pitches frequent questions about physics in the form of conversations he has had with his students and non-scientist friends. This provides a fun narrative frame and an easy way to resolve any doubts a novice reader might have about the tricky concepts he’s explaining. For instance, Strassler recounts a conversation he had in a coffee shop about the seemingly paradoxical notion that because all motion is relative, we can be both stationary and in motion at the same time: You don’t feel the ground you stand on hurtling around the sun at 150 miles a second. Every fact of the physical universe has to be consistent with this deceptively simple-sounding principle of relativity, which runs like Ariadne’s thread through the narrative to keep us from getting lost.

Strassler uses the relativity principle and the coasting law (law of inertia) to demolish a common misconception—a physics fib, or “phib” as he calls it—about the Higgs boson, an elementary particle that gets lots of time in the spotlight. The particle arises from the “Higgsiferous ether”—aka the Higgs field—and the phib is that it’s a kind of treacly soup which, by virtue of its resistance to motion, “gives objects mass.” If this phib were true, it would mean that the Higgs slows objects down, whereas in fact it allows them to coast, according to the coasting law.  If the phib were true, the Higgs field would also slow moving objects but have no impact on stationary objects, a state of affairs that would be inconsistent with the relativity principle.

It’s more accurate, Strassler suggests, to think of the Higgs field as a “stiffening agent” that interacts with the fields of many different particles and turns them from floppy to stiff, much like the gravitational field turns a floppy pendulum that’s swinging all over a place into a bob swinging with metronomic precision. The very things we call particles, in Strassler’s vocabulary, should be called “wavicles”—wavy manifestations of fields, like the different harmonic modes of vibration on a violin or guitar string when it is plucked.

What the Higgs field does is interact with other fields’ “resonant frequencies.” (A resonant frequency is the natural frequency at which a field vibrates when set vibrating and left undisturbed.)  The Higgs field interacts strongly with wavicle fields with high resonant frequencies—like those of the top quark and electrons—which are then stiffened, so that their masses can be said to come from the Higgs mechanism. By contrast, the Higgs field interacts negligibly with wavicle fields with low resonant frequencies, like those of gluons which hold together the quarks that make up protons and neutrons. The latter fact is why everyday objects like human bodies, which get almost all their masses from protons and neutrons, have scarcely anything to do with the Higgs boson: 99 percent of their mass comes from the energy of interaction between the quarks and the gluons.

Waves in an Impossible Sea seems mostly aimed at the reader who has read very little about physics. Strassler spends quite a bit of time explaining simple concepts, such as waves and inertia, which many readers of popular physics books should already understand, and may find tedious to revisit. But paradoxically, he omits much of the history of modern physics, which forces him to compress other key ideas. (“I, too, risk contributing to myth-making here,” he concedes in one endnote. “… I am drastically abridging the complex prehistory of Einstein’s ideas …”)

Take symmetry. It’s intimately connected to the existence of conservation laws for energy and other fundamental properties. But the book does not dwell on why the breaking of this symmetry for the electromagnetic and weak forces gives rise to the Higgs mechanism. Historically this was a significant development leading to the discovery of the Higgs field, and touching on it would have illuminated an important principle.

Nevertheless, Strassler’s efforts to illuminate fundamental aspects of the universe’s makeup are commendable—and enjoyable to read: To understand the dance of fields at work in our ordinary, everyday lives is to realize that there’s nothing ordinary about them. As Strassler writes, we are all “wavicle-creatures,” and “the universe sings everywhere, in every thing.”

Source

In their study, published in the journal JAMA Ophthalmology, the group researched case histories of 200,000 older patients looking for an association between regular consumption of melatonin and the development of AMD.

Prior research has shown that as they age, many people begin to experience degeneration of the macula, a central part of the retina.

Currently, approximately 11 million people in the U.S. alone are experiencing vision loss due to AMD. Medical scientists have been looking for ways to prevent or stop the progression of the disease for many years. Some progress has been made, but there is still no cure.

In recent years, research teams have been finding that people taking melatonin supplements may be less likely to develop the condition. In 2020, one team found that the higher levels of melatonin can prevent retinal damage due to AMD.

The following year, another team found that patients with AMD tended to have lower-than-average amounts of melatonin in their blood and tears. In this new effort, the research team looked at the medical records of 200,000 older people covering the years 2008 to 2023 looking for an association.

They found that out of 121,523 patients aged 50 years or older who had no evidence of AMD, many were regular users of melatonin supplements. They also found that many patients who began taking melatonin supplements after developing AMD experienced slower degradation than patients who did not begin to take the supplements.

Melatonin is a hormone that is produced naturally in the brain; it has been strongly associated with the sleep cycle. The brain makes more of it in response to darkness. Because of that, several companies make and sell melatonin as a dietary supplement intended to help people having trouble going to sleep.

This new study adds more evidence that regular consumption of melatonin could ward off the development and progression of AMD.

Source

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

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

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of May): Nearly 2,400 news posts

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

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

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of May): Nearly 2,400 news posts

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

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

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of May): Nearly 2,400 news posts

LOBUCHE, NEPAL— Here on the flanks of Mount Everest, Kaji Bista has spent a decade keeping a lonely watch over a largely abandoned scientific laboratory, waiting for the day one of the world’s highest research stations might once again hum with activity.

“This used to be a vibrant place abuzz with researchers, [but] not anymore,” Bista told this reporter during a recent visit to the Pyramid International Laboratory-Observatory, a joint Italian-Nepalese facility that opened in 1990. The gleaming three-story structure sits at 5050 meters in a remote valley, not far from the renowned base camp used by climbers attempting to reach Everest’s summit. For more than 2 decades, it served as a rare haven for scientists seeking to keep an eye on changing conditions on Earth’s tallest mountain. In 2015, however, shifting scientific priorities cost the lab most of its funding, and its 15-person staff dwindled to just Bista. Now, the tall, soft-spoken man, who grew up in eastern Nepal near its border with India, spends 10 months a year working to keep the aging facility functioning. “My emotional attachment with the lab … keeps me going,” he said.

Bista began working at the lab in 2006, when researchers were regularly making the 8-day trek from the nearest airport to the station. It was originally established to settle a disagreement between Italian and U.S. mountaineers over whether Everest or K2, a mountain straddling the Pakistan-China border, was the world’s tallest. Researchers used GPS measurements to prove Everest was taller, as the Italian climbers maintained. But that work ultimately evolved into a plan, backed by the National Research Council of Italy (CNR) and the Nepal Academy of Science and Technology (NAST), to develop a facility that could do much more.

The Pyramid laboratory and its adjacent lodge went on to provide a comfortable base of operations—as well as electricity and communications gear—for more than 500 expeditions involving more than 200 researchers from dozens of scientific institutions, according to Ev-K2-CNR Recognized Association, an Italian nonprofit that manages the lab for NAST. Those expeditions, as well as data collected by weather and other instruments connected to the lab, have yielded more than 1500 papers, says climate scientist Sudeep Thakuri, dean of the Graduate School of Science & Technology at Mid-West University in Nepal. He says the lab has played an important role not only in his own studies of the region’s glaciers, but also in studies of regional biodiversity, the long-range transport of pollutants, and how people have adapted to living at high altitudes. A string of automated weather stations associated with the lab, which monitor conditions along a 3000-meter gradient rising to 5600 meters, “provide the longest possible time series [of] weather data from such a high elevation,” Thakuri says.

The Pyramid International Laboratory-Observatory once had 15 staff members, but lab Manager Kaji Bista has spent much of the past decade working alone to maintain the aging facility. Athar Parvaiz

CNR did not respond to questions from Science about why it cut funding for the laboratory. But Suresh Kumar Dhungel, a senior scientist at NAST, says discussions with CNR officials have resulted in moves to resume laboratory operations, including an annual payment of about $10,000 to NAST. And Agostino Da Polenza, president of Ev-K2-CNR, says it is working to “regenerate” lab programs. Researchers have recently renewed agreements with research teams that operate weather and other instruments, for example. And Da Polenza says his group plans to launch a crowdfunding campaign later this year to raise more money. “We hope that researchers worldwide, research organizations, and mountain enthusiasts will participate,” he says.

In the meantime, a few researchers are still trekking to the lab. During this reporter’s recent visit, a team from France’s Research Institute for Development had just hooked a sensor to the lab’s renewable power grid. Glaciologist Ines Dussaillant of the World Glacier Monitoring Service at the University of Zurich, a member of the team, said the instrument will help monitor precipitation as part of an effort to understand the behavior of the Mera Glacier, a large nearby ice sheet. “To have [the Pyramid laboratory] is incredible,” she said. “It allows us to measure things which we wouldn’t [otherwise] be able to measure. … I hope that it continues to serve science.”

Bista, who receives a small stipend, hopes to keep it functioning. He does his best to repair balky instruments. “When I face any problem, I take directions from the experts in Italy and then act accordingly,” he said. But sometimes it can take months for spare parts to arrive. During the recent visit, he stood outside the lab in a light snowfall, pointing at a suite of climate sensors up the slope that had failed. “I am helpless and have no clue how to fix it,” he said.

Yet, Bista has not lost hope. “This laboratory will soon be renovated,” he said. “This is my belief.”

Source

The results come from a poll of 2,000 people surveyed by Talker Research, which found, thankfully, that our belief in true love rises among those in more serious relationships. While 70% believe in true love overall, that jumps to 88% for those married or engaged.

Belief in the existence of true love dips to 79% for those in serious relationships, meaning one in five Americans with a steady partner don’t actually think it’s true love.

Believing in “the one” or true love as a concept naturally falls among singles: 64% believe it may be possible and are keeping their hearts and minds open. However, that belief drops again for those divorced, widowed, or separated (62%).

Of those who are married and who do believe in true love, 85% said their partner really is their one true love. Good answer, folks!

Unfortunately, 10% of married respondents who believe in true love actually said they’ve experienced true love before, but not with their current partner. Don’t worry, your secret is safe with us!

Men and women were remarkably absolutely united in their belief in true love, with 70% of both genders feeling true love is real. Women, however, were less likely to believe they were currently in a relationship with their one true love. Just 50% of women who put their faith in the concept of true love felt they were currently experiencing it, compared to 58% of men.

When it comes to love and politics, Democrats are the most likely to give true love a chance, with 74% believing in it versus 71% of Republicans and 65% of Independents.

While some people may be gearing up for some summer romance, the quest to find true love is not at the forefront for many. Just 30% of those who are not currently with their true love are currently looking for their special person.

Survey methodology:

This random double-opt-in survey was conducted by market research company Talker Research, whose team members are members of the Market Research Society (MRS) and the European Society for Opinion and Marketing Research (ESOMAR). Data was collected from April 3 to April 8, 2024. The margin of error is +/- 2.2 points with 95 percent confidence.

Source

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

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

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of May): Nearly 2,400 news posts

Researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems (TMOS) in Australia have been on a quest to make night vision accessible and wearable, doing away with bulky and expensive headsets and lens attachments.

Their new findings allow all the complex light processing to take place along a simpler, narrower pathway, which essentially means the tech can be packaged up as a night-vision film that weighs less than a gram and can be placed across existing lensed frames.

Having an everyday pair of night-vision spectacles, that look much the same as reading or driving glasses, could change the way we work and play after dark. There's so much potential, from finding your off-leash dog in the park on a late-night walk, to enhanced safety behind the wheel and on foot.

So why aren't we already walking around with our night shades on? Traditional night vision involves a complex system that sees light photons pass through an objective lens, into an electronic image-intensifier tube made up of a two important parts. First, the photocathode converts photons into electrons, which then flow into the microchannel plate, made up of millions of holes to massively multiply electrons. Next, the electrons land on a phosphor-coated screen, and when they hit the phosphors, they 'glow' green, illuminating the scene being viewed through the night-vision system.

Traditional night-vision processing requires bulky mechanics TMOS

This method, understandably, would be impossible to currently squeeze onto an ultra-thin piece of plastic film.

Instead, TMOS researchers used metasurface-based upconversion technology, which essentially provides an easier pathway for light photons to be processed. The photons travel through a resonant metasurface, where they mingle with a pump beam. The non-local lithium niobate metasurface boosts the energy of the photons, and draws them into the visible light spectrum without the need to convert them to electrons first. It also doesn't require cryogenic cooling – which reduces 'noise' for sharper images in traditional night vision – so can do away with even more of the bulky night-vision goggle mechanics.

A simpler process of photon manipulation delivers clear night vision through a thin film that could fit over traditional lenses – for all your after-dark kangaroo watching, and much moreTMOS

“These results promise significant opportunities for the surveillance, autonomous navigation, and biological imaging industries, amongst others," said chief investigator Dragomir Neshev. "Decreasing the size weight and power requirements of night-vision technology is an example of how meta-optics, and the work TMOS is doing, is crucial to Industry 4.0 and the future extreme miniaturisation of technology.”

This new tech also captures the visible and non-visible (or infrared) light in one image as you look through the 'lens.' Traditionally, night-vision systems capture side-by-side views from each spectrum, so they can't produce identical images. What does that mean for the user? Basically, a better-quality view of what's in the dark.

“This is the first demonstration of high resolution up-conversion imaging from 1550-nm infrared to visible 550-nm light in a non-local metasurface," said author Rocio Camacho Morales. "We choose these wavelengths because 1,550 nm, an infrared light, is commonly used for telecommunications, and 550 nm is visible light to which human eyes are highly sensitive. Future research will include expanding the range of wavelengths the device is sensitive to, aiming to obtain broadband IR imaging, as well as exploring image processing, including edge detection.”

The latest work improves on their previous research into night vision using a gallium arsenide metasurface. This time, they found that the lithium niobate metasurface delivered more efficient light processing over a wider surface area.

“People have said that high efficiency up-conversion of infrared to visible is impossible because of the amount of information not collected due to the angular loss that is inherent in non-local metasurfaces," said lead author Laura Valencia Molina. "We overcome these limitations and experimentally demonstrate high efficiency image up-conversion.”

The study was published in the journal Advanced Materials.

Source: ARC Centre of Excellence for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems (TMOS)

Source

Source:  University College London

Summary:  Adolescents with an internet addiction undergo changes in the brain that could lead to additional addictive behavior and tendencies, finds a new study.

FULL STORY

Adolescents with an internet addiction undergo changes in the brain that could lead to additional addictive behaviour and tendencies, finds a new study by UCL researchers.

The findings, published in PLOS Mental Health, reviewed 12 articles involving 237 young people aged 10-19 with a formal diagnosis of internet addiction between 2013 and 2023.

Internet addiction has been defined as a person's inability to resist the urge to use the internet, negatively impacting their psychological wellbeing, as well as their social, academic and professional lives.

The studies used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to inspect the functional connectivity (how regions of the brain interact with each other) of participants with internet addiction, both while resting and completing a task.

The effects of internet addiction were seen throughout multiple neural networks in the brains of adolescents. There was a mixture of increased and decreased activity in the parts of the brain that are activated when resting (the default mode network).

Meanwhile, there was an overall decrease in the functional connectivity in the parts of the brain involved in active thinking (the executive control network).

These changes were found to lead to addictive behaviours and tendencies in adolescents, as well as behaviour changes associated with intellectual ability, physical coordination, mental health and development.

Lead author, MSc student, Max Chang (UCL Great Ormond Street Institute for Child Health) said: "Adolescence is a crucial developmental stage during which people go through significant changes in their biology, cognition, and personalities. As a result, the brain is particularly vulnerable to internet addiction related urges during this time, such as compulsive internet usage, cravings towards usage of the mouse or keyboard and consuming media.

"The findings from our study show that this can lead to potentially negative behavioural and developmental changes that could impact the lives of adolescents. For example, they may struggle to maintain relationships and social activities, lie about online activity and experience irregular eating and disrupted sleep."

With smartphones and laptops being ever more accessible, internet addiction is a growing problem across the globe. Previous research has shown that people in the UK spend over 24 hours every week online and, of those surveyed, more than half self-reported being addicted to the internet.

Meanwhile, Ofcom found that of the 50 million internet users in the UK, over 60% said their internet usage had a negative effect on their lives -- such as being late or neglecting chores.

Senior author, Irene Lee (UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health), said: "There is no doubt that the internet has certain advantages. However, when it begins to affect our day-to-day lives, it is a problem.

"We would advise that young people enforce sensible time limits for their daily internet usage and ensure that they are aware of the psychological and social implications of spending too much time online."

Mr Chang added: "We hope our findings will demonstrate how internet addiction alters the connection between the brain networks in adolescence, allowing physicians to screen and treat the onset of internet addiction more effectively.

"Clinicians could potentially prescribe treatment to aim at certain brain regions or suggest psychotherapy or family therapy targeting key symptoms of internet addiction.

"Importantly, parental education on internet addiction is another possible avenue of prevention from a public health standpoint. Parents who are aware of the early signs and onset of internet addiction will more effectively handle screen time, impulsivity, and minimise the risk factors surrounding internet addiction."

Study limitations

Research into the use of fMRI scans to investigate internet addiction is currently limited and the studies had small adolescent samples. They were also primarily from Asian countries. Future research studies should compare results from Western samples to provide more insight on therapeutic intervention.

Source

The average global temperature for the 12-month period to the end of May was 1.63 degrees Celsius (2.9 degrees Fahrenheit) above the pre-industrial average - making it the warmest such period since record-keeping began in 1940, the Copernicus Climate Change Service said.

This 12-month average does not mean that the world has yet surpassed the 1.5 C (2.7 F) global warming threshold, which describes a temperature average over decades, beyond which scientists warn of more extreme and irreversible impacts.

In a separate report, the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said there is now an 80% chance that at least one of the next five years will mark the first calendar year with an average temperature that temporarily exceeds 1.5C above pre-industrial levels - up from a 66% chance last year.

Speaking about the findings, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres emphasized how quickly the world was heading in the wrong direction and away from stabilizing its climate system.

"In 2015, the chance of such a breach was near zero," Guterres said in a speech marking World Environment Day.

With time running out to reverse course, Guterres urged a 30% cut in global fossil fuel production and use by 2030.

"We need an exit ramp off the highway to climate hell," he said, adding: "The battle for 1.5 degrees will be won or lost in the 2020s."

'WAY OFF TRACK'

Carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels - the main cause of climate change - hit a record high last year despite global agreements designed to curb their release and a rapid expansion in renewable energy.

Coal, oil and gas still provide more than three quarters of the world's energy, with global oil demand remaining strong.

The latest climate data show that the world is "way off track" from its goal of limiting warming to 1.5 C - the key target of the world's 2015 Paris Accord, WMO Deputy Secretary-General Ko Barrett said.

"We must urgently do more to cut greenhouse gas emissions, or we will pay an increasingly heavy price in terms of trillions of dollars in economic costs, millions of lives affected by more extreme weather, and extensive damage to the environment and biodiversity," Barrett said.

Barrett described the cooling effect of La Nina weather conditions, which are expected to take hold later this year, as "a mere blip in the upward curve" in the heat felt across the globe.

"We all need to know that we need to reverse this curve and we need to do it urgently," she said.

While last year registered as the warmest calendar year on record at 1.45 C (2.61 F) above pre-industrial temperatures, at least one of the next five years is likely to be even warmer than 2023, the WMO data show.

Scientists at Copernicus said there were some surprising developments - such as the steep loss of Antarctic sea ice in recent months - but that the overall climate data were in line with projections of how rising greenhouse gas emissions would heat the planet.

"We have not seen anything like this in the last several thousand years," said Copernicus Director Carlo Buontempo.

Guterres took aim at fossil fuel companies.

"The Godfathers of climate chaos – the fossil fuel industry – rake in record profits and feast off trillions in taxpayer-funded subsidies," he said.

Drawing a comparison with many governments' restrictions on advertising for harmful substances like tobacco, he said, "I urge every country to ban advertising from fossil fuel companies, and I urge news media and tech companies to stop taking fossil fuel advertising."

(Reporting by Kate Abnett in Brussels, Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber in Geneva, and Valerie Volcovici in Washington, D.C.; Editing by Katy Daigle, Alexander Smith, Alexandra Hudson)

Source

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

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

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of May): Nearly 2,400 news posts

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

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

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of May): Nearly 2,400 news posts

They found a weak spot in our DNA that is present in 95% of people with the disease.

It makes it much easier for some immune cells to go haywire and drive excessive inflammation in the bowels.

The team have found drugs that already exist seem to reverse the disease in laboratory experiments and are now aiming for human trials.

Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis are the most common forms of inflammatory bowel disease. They are estimated to affect half a million people in the UK.

It often starts as a teenager or young adult.

Lauren Golightly, who is now 27, had her first symptoms when she was 16 years old and had stomach cramps and blood in her poo.

But this was put down to partying and it was not until she was 21 and having surgery to remove her appendix that doctors realised she had Crohn’s disease.

Three years ago she needed an emergency stoma after part of her intestines had “shut down” and still has to “take a lot of pain medication” because of the number of operations she has needed.

“It’s not the life I’d aspire to be living,” she says.

So what is going wrong?

One part of the immune system that is highly implicated in IBD are white blood cells called macrophages.

These flood the linings of the intestines where they release chemicals – called cytokines – that lead to massive inflammation.

Inflammation is part of the body’s normal response to infection, but too much for too long can have devastating health consequences.

The group of researchers at the Francis Crick Institute and University College London performed a deep genetic analysis to try to unpick the cause of the IBD.

They discovered a section of genetic code – or DNA – that turns out to be the macrophage’s “master regulator” of inflammation.

It sits right at “the top of the pyramid” says Dr James Lee, from the Francis Crick Institute.

The gene controls the suite of inflammatory chemicals the macrophages release, and some people are born with a version that make their body prone to responding excessively.

Dr Lee told me: “This is undoubtedly one of the central pathways that goes wrong for people to get inflammatory bowel disease.

“It is the process by which one of the most important cells that causes inflammatory bowel disease goes wrong.”

World free from IBD?

Further experiments, detailed in the journal Nature, showed drugs that are already approved for other conditions such as cancer were able to calm this excessive inflammation.

These were performed using samples from patients with IBD.

“We found not only how and why it goes wrong, but potentially a new way of treating these diseases,” says Dr Lee.

Yet, there is not going to be an new IBD treatment imminently.

The researchers have a head start as drugs already exist, but they need to find a way of targeting just the macrophages so they do not cause side effects throughout the body.

The drugs would also need to be precisely calibrated to calm the IBD, but not leave a patient susceptible to infection by switching off the good side of inflammation in fighting disease.

They aim is to start clinical trials within five years.

"This research is a really exciting step towards the possibility of a world free from Crohn's and colitis one day," Ruth Wakeman, from the charity Crohn's & Colitis UK said.

She added: “Crohn's and colitis are complex, lifelong conditions for which there is no cure, but research like this is helping us to answer some of the big questions about what causes them.”

However, genetic susceptibility is still only half the story. It also takes something to trigger the development of IBD, with diet and antibiotic use all implicated.

Symptoms of IBD

•     diarrhoea
•     stomach pain or cramps
•     blood in poo
•     bleeding from your bottom
•     fatigue
•     losing weight without trying

The disease is distinct from irritable bowel syndrome (or IBS) although some of the symptoms overlap. A diagnosis of IBD is only made if there is inflammation in the bowels.

Source

The pieces required to assemble the Vera C. Rubin Observatory - which includes a ground-based telescope and the camera - traveled in several vehicles to the summit of Cerro Pachón in the Coquimbo region, on the edge of the Atacama desert, some 565 kilometers north of Santiago.

"Everything that we needed for operations [is] now on the summit and ready for checkout and hopefully for installation a little bit later this year," said Stuartt Corder, chief science officer of the AURA association of universities and deputy director of the NOIRLab center, which will operate the observatory.

According to its website, the Rubin Observatory is a complex, integrated system consisting of an eight-meter wide-field ground-based telescope, the camera, and an automated data processing system.

It will generate approximately 20 terabytes of data per night and its ten-year exploration will produce a catalog database of 15 petabytes.

The goal of the exploration will be to understand the nature of dark energy and dark matter in the universe - of which only a small part is known - as well as studying the possibility of Earth colliding with asteroids, or stars and planets close to the sun.

"That's a really inspiring moment where you can say - we're starting. We're standing here at the precipice, getting ready to start a campaign that in ten years, we hope will answer the questions of ... when the universe was made and started into motion ... and how will it continue to evolve in the future?"

The result might not depart from what we already know, but they will help refining our understanding of the universe, Corder said.
AURA is a consortium of 47 U.S. institutions and three international affiliates that operate astronomical observatories for the National Science Foundation and NASA. It is responsible for managing, among others, the NOIRLab center.

Chile hosts much of the world's investment in astronomy thanks to the clear skies of its Atacama Desert, the driest desert on earth.

Source