A reintroduced Przewalski’s horse takes its first steps onto Kazakhstan’s “Golden Steppe.”
Miroslav Bobek
Przewalski’s horses, once extinct in the wild, are revitalizing Kazakhstan’s “Golden Steppe”
A reintroduced Przewalski’s horse takes its first steps onto Kazakhstan’s “Golden Steppe.”
Miroslav Bobek
The newest equine additions to Kazakhstan’s “Golden Steppe” might seem, at first glance, to be unremarkable, with a donkeylike build and a mane that sticks straight up like a zebra’s. But these seven individuals are members of the last remaining species of wild horse: Przewalski’s (pronounced pshuh-val-ski’s) horse, known as kertagy or kerkulan in Kazakh.
Horses roam freely in many parts of the world, such as the Great Plains in the U.S., but these are feral animals, members of a domesticated species that now live in the wild. Przewalski’s horses are a different species entirely—they even have a different number of chromosomes—and this species doesn’t appear to have been domesticated by humans.
“They’re truly wild animals,” says Oliver Ryder, a conservation geneticist who works with Przewalski’s horses at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance. Once the animals were a crucial piece of the ecosystem in the steppes of Central Asia. But they began disappearing in the 1800s, and by the 1960s, humans and environmental changes had driven them to extinction in the wild. Fortunately, at least a dozen or so horses capable of reproducing survived in captivity, and with carefully managed breeding, the population has made a comeback. This June conservationists reintroduced seven of them to the Golden Steppe of Kazakhstan—the horses were flown to a reintroduction center on the steppe, where they are acclimating to life outside captivity under the watchful eye of conservationists.
Despite living for so long in captivity, Przewalski’s horses haven’t lost their wild streak. “We are not trying to tame them,” says Barbora Dobiášová, ungulate curator at Prague Zoo and head of the European breeding program. “If you enter an enclosure with Przewalski horse herd..., [the stallion] will always try to get between you and the mares” to defend them, she says. The animals need to be sedated in order for the zookeepers to so much as trim their hooves.
On the Golden Steppe, or Kazakhstan’s Altyn Dala State Nature Reserve (altyn dala means “golden steppe” in Kazakh), these horses are once again galloping and grazing, filling the hole they left in the ecosystem, explains Stephanie Ward of the Frankfurt Zoological Society. Ward serves as the international coordinator of the Altyn Dala Conservation Initiative, a conservation partnership with the government of Kazakhstan.
“If you go into the steppe, it’s like you’re in a sea of grass. And at first, it just all looks the same,” she says. But that sea is teeming with life. Birds build their nests in the brush, and burrowing animals tunnel beneath it. Large herbivores such as horses and antelope have historically kept this grass short, which prevented it from drying out and allowed other animals to access the ground beneath, Ward explains. Their dung fertilized the ground, and their grazing promoted carbon sequestration in the soil.
“Grasslands need to be grazed,” Ward says. By the 2000s, however, many of the steppe’s large herbivores were gone or critically endangered. That included not only the Przewalski’s horse but also a wild ass called the kulan and the saiga antelope. “The absence has caused this slow degradation of the ecosystem. The species of plant get fewer and fewer, and they get less and less resilient,” she says.
But the grazers are coming back, thanks to conservation efforts that go beyond the Przewalski’s horse. Kazakhstan’s saiga antelope, with their charming, trunklike nose, numbered only 21,000 in 2003. Today more than one million are spread across the nation. Just last year the International Union for Conservation of Nature changed their status from “critically endangered” to “near threatened.” Kulans have also been reintroduced periodically since 2017.
A sedated Przewalski’s horse is prepared for transport.
Miroslav Bobek
Now it’s Przewalski’s horses’ turn. Captive breeding programs have allowed their numbers to soar from as low as 30 to 40 individuals in the mid-20th century to about 2,500 today. About half of these horses now live in the wild, thanks to reintroductions in Mongolia, China and Russia starting in the 1980s. Kazakhstan, however, had experienced less luck—an attempted 2003 reintroduction to a national park was not successful. The animals also didn’t have the necessary legal protections in the country because they had been absent from the ecosystem for so long.
Przewalski’s horse was added to Kazakhstan’s list of protected species in 2021, paving the way for the wild horses’ return. In early June 2024 seven of the animals were flown in from the Prague Zoo and a zoo in Berlin on military aircraft. After stops in Istanbul, and Baku, Azerbaijan, they arrived at a small Soviet-era airport in Arkalyk, Kazakhstan, which had to be reopened for the occasion.
Przewalski’s horses are transported to a reintroduction center in Kazakhstan.
Miroslav Bobek
From there, it was a seven-hour drive to the reintroduction center, where enclosures had been hastily rebuilt after catastrophic flooding hit the region in April. The flooding “destroyed 80 percent of each enclosure—I would say we actually [had] to build from zero,” says Albert Salemgareyev of the Association for the Conservation of Biodiversity of Kazakhstan. The flooding also washed out the roads that would be needed to transport building materials and, ultimately, the horses. “I nearly said, ‘No, we can’t do this this year.’ But and then I just looked how much [work] we actually had done in preparation, and I was like, ‘Okay, we will try to do our best.’”
Fortunately, the horses—named Ypsilonk, Zeta II, Zorro, Tessa, Sary, Wespe and Umbra—arrived as planned at their rebuilt enclosures, where they will spend much of the next year acclimating to their new environment. There Salemgareyev and his colleagues will keep an eye on them as they adjust, especially during the first winter.
Two reintroduced Przewalski’s horses in an enclosure at the reintroduction center in Kazakhstan.
Miroslav Bobek
The horses have a lot to learn. In the zoos, they were provided with food, water and shade, something that they will now have to find on their own, Salemgareyev explains. Initially, the team was worried that the mares from Germany were not drinking water, but they have since adjusted. “The horses now look really good,” he says.
Come this time next year, the horses will hopefully be galloping free in the steppe, encouraging diverse plants and animal species to proliferate along with them. The conservation team will follow their movements with tracking collars and plans to introduce about 30 to 40 more horses to the area in the coming years.
And in zoos around the world, curators such as Dobiášová and Ryder will continue to help grow the population and maintain its genetic diversity. “The Przewalski’s horse was a notable example—one of the first—of a species that was saved by managed care and breeding in zoos,” says Ryder, who is a coordinator for the breeding program in North America. Ryder has worked to preserve the species at the San Diego Zoo since the 1970s. His team was the first to clone a Przewalski’s horse in 2020, and a second cloned foal was born just last year. Ryder says that both were cloned from a cell line preserved in 1980 from a stallion named Kuporovich, who had genetic diversity that had likely been lost in the current population.
“The goal of having them in zoos [is] to restore them to the wild,” Ryder says. “That should be something that we aspire to as a general principle. What we want to try to do is preserve the legacy of life on Earth.”
Allison Parshall is an associate news editor at Scientific American who often covers biology, health, technology and physics. She edits the magazine's Contributors column and has previously edited the Advances section. As a multimedia journalist, Parshall contributes to Scientific American's podcast Science Quickly. Her work includes a three-part miniseries on music-making artificial intelligence. Her work has also appeared in Quanta Magazine and Inverse. Parshall graduated from New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute with a master's degree in science, health and environmental reporting. She has a bachelor's degree in psychology from Georgetown University. Follow Parshall on X (formerly Twitter) @parshallison
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/przewalskis-horses-are-finally-returning-to-their-natural-habitat/ [description] =>Przewalski’s horses, once extinct in the wild, are revitalizing Kazakhstan’s “Golden Steppe”
[pubDate] => Thu, 04 Jul 2024 10:45:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/przewalskis-horses-are-finally-returning-to-their-natural-habitat/ ) [1] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/anti-abortion-heartbeat-bills-cause-immense-suffering/ [title] => Anti-abortion Heartbeat Bills Cause Immense Suffering [timestamp] => 1719957600 [author] => Alison Gemmill; Suzanne O. Bell [content] =>The rise in infant mortality in Texas shows that in states with strict abortion bans, forcing people to carry non-viable pregnancies to term codifies cruelty and unnecessary pain
Monkeybusinessimages/Getty Images
Imagine being pregnant and looking forward to becoming a parent. However, during a routine diagnostic test, your doctor tells you your pregnancy isn’t viable; at birth, your baby will likely not survive long outside the womb. Because you live in a state like Texas that has recently banned abortion with few exceptions, you now need to carry this pregnancy to term, carrying the grief of a non-viable fetus and likely endangering your own life in the process.
If you lived somewhere else, you might have had the option to terminate the pregnancy in-state, right away. Instead you have to endure the physical and emotional agony of childbirth, only to hold your newborn as they pass away in your arms, or to take that child home and care for them until they die—all because your state government has stripped you of your right to make a deeply personal decision in consultation with your doctor.
As mothers with children ranging in age from nine months to nine years, we vividly recall the anxiety surrounding pregnancy and the early months of parenting an infant: waiting for test results to know whether we are healthy, whether our baby is healthy. At times, we were overwhelmed with anxiety that, at any point in those early days, the worst could happen. So many new and expecting parents live with these feelings. Pregnancy is hard enough. Parenting is daunting. But, when your state government forces you to continue a doomed pregnancy, the grief is unfathomable.
These laws, these “heartbeat bills” and sweeping abortion bans that have so few exceptions, are inhumane. Our research on infant mortality in Texas after the passage of such a bill shows that these laws endanger maternal and infant health. We have to fight back. Health, bodily autonomy and the right to not needlessly suffer as a pregnant person are what’s important here, not the ideological claims of people who view a fetus’s rights as more important than those of the living, breathing person who carries one.
Texas was among the first states to pass a heartbeat bill, prohibiting abortions as early as five weeks’ gestation, the time when the electrical impulses that we associate with heart formation begin. We found that, in Texas, infant mortality—including deaths in the first year of life—increased by 13 percent between 2021 and 2022 following the passage of this bill, while infant mortality increased by only 2 percent in all other U.S. states.
It's worth noting that infant mortality in Texas is a serious problem—nearly six of every 1,000 live births end in a death in the first year. The states with the lowest rates are between three and four per 1,000, which may not seem like a large difference but would translate to hundreds of fewer deaths in Texas annually.
In Texas the leading cause for this increase in infant mortality appears to be deaths from birth defects, which rose 23 percent in Texas after the passage of Senate Bill 8, while declining 3 percent in all other states. What’s more, deaths in Texas caused by accidents increased by 21 percent and those that resulted from maternal complications in pregnancy increased by 18 percent; the corresponding increases in the rest of the U.S. were much lower at 1 percent and 8 percent, respectively.
Abortion bans cause these spillover effects. These bans disregard medical reality and the inherent complexity surrounding pregnancy. Policies that try to legislate pregnancy result in needless suffering, as Kate Cox’s legal case makes clear. Because of Texas’s ban, this mother of two who had a nonviable pregnancy had to travel out of state for routine medical care—after suing for the right to be treated in her home state.
In contrast, one colleague of ours shared that, in the spring of 2022, she had a concerning fetal scan when she was 16 weeks pregnant. Her ob-gyn told her, “You live in Maryland, so you’ll have options.” Having the option to terminate a pregnancy without traveling hundreds of miles should not be state dependent.
We need policies that respect the nuanced and individualized nature of pregnancy, ensuring that medical decisions are made by people, their doctors and, where applicable, their prenatal counselors—not dictated by politicians or judges. Making exceptions to abortion bans for certain scenarios is inadequate; pregnancy is inherently dangerous, and the law is incapable of parsing all the ways in which a pregnancy can go wrong.
Since our publication and the proliferation of heartbreaking anecdotes that magnify these negative effects, we have seen the pro-life movement treat people’s traumatic experiences as collateral damage for the larger cause of saving fetuses. For many who oppose abortion, these tragic outcomes are viewed as unfortunate but necessary sacrifices for the mission to prevent abortion at all costs. This approach treats the health of pregnant people as secondary to the fetus, which is unacceptable.
What we’re talking about isn’t rare. The odds are high that you know someone who has either experienced the heartbreak of a congenital fetal diagnosis or obtained an abortion. Approximately 3 percent of babies in the U.S. have birth defects. That means numerous pregnancies involve serious congenital abnormalities, and thousands of families each year have to grapple with a pregnancy that will not yield a healthy child who will live.
As public health researchers, mothers and Americans, we recognize the urgency of this subject. Our research tells us that repealing abortion bans and protecting the right to make decisions about one’s pregnancy are critical. It is also what most Americans want: 63 percent of people support the right to abortion in most or all circumstances, which has increased four percentage points since before the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in the Dobbs case.
Our work underscores that lawmakers must put women, people who can become pregnant, and children over political agendas. In the 13 states with upcoming ballot measures that would enshrine the right to abortion in the state constitution, voters have the opportunity to bypass lawmakers and prevent further harms from abortion bans. And people in many other states can vote for candidates who uphold pregnant people’s bodily autonomy and right to choose, no matter what.
The stakes couldn't be higher: if we fail to act, we institutionalize needless pain and suffering for the more than 50 percent of the population who could become pregnant in their lifetime, and the people who love them.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
Alison Gemmill is an assistant professor in the department of population, family and reproductive health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and associate director of the Hopkins Population Center. She is a demographer and perinatal epidemiologist who studies how structural and environmental stressors impact childbearing decisions and pregnancy outcomes, and how these factors exacerbate health disparities. She holds a Ph.D. and M.P.H. from the University of California, Berkeley.
Suzanne O. Bell is an assistant professor in the department of population, family and reproductive health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She is a demographer who studies fertility and related behaviors, examining patterns of contraceptive use, abortion and infertility, and factors that contribute to disparities in reproductive health outcomes. She holds a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins and an M.P.H. from the University of California, Berkeley.
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/anti-abortion-heartbeat-bills-cause-immense-suffering/ [description] =>The rise in infant mortality in Texas shows that in states with strict abortion bans, forcing people to carry non-viable pregnancies to term codifies cruelty and unnecessary pain
[pubDate] => Wed, 03 Jul 2024 18:00:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/anti-abortion-heartbeat-bills-cause-immense-suffering/ ) [2] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-supreme-court-decisions-jeopardize-efforts-to-curb-pollution-and-climate/ [title] => New Supreme Court Decisions Jeopardize Efforts to Curb Pollution and Climate Change [timestamp] => 1719957600 [author] => Akielly Hu; Grist [content] =>Four recent Supreme Court decisions will together make it much harder for the federal government to take action on climate change
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
The Supreme Court on Monday weakened a law protecting federal regulations from lawsuits, granting the companies governed by those rules more time to challenge them. The move effectively eliminates any statute of limitations on rules issued by a wide range of federal agencies, potentially placing even long-standing regulations in legal peril.
That ruling came just days after the court, in a seismic decision, overturned the Chevron doctrine. The decades-old legal precedent provided the basis for regulations governing countless aspects of daily life, from the environment to labor protections. These decisions, coupled with two others issued last week, could sharply curtail the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies to limit air pollution, govern toxic substances, and set climate policy.
“This term, a series of decisions unlike any before in American history,” has resulted in “an unraveling of the responsibility that expert agencies have to protect millions of Americans from harm,” said Vickie Patton, general counsel at the advocacy group Environmental Defense Fund.
Although these lawsuits challenged the power of a range of agencies, from the Securities and Exchange Commission to the Department of Commerce, the decisions will have widespread impacts on those issuing climate policies. The EPA in particular has drawn scorn from conservatives who have long argued that its regulations pose an undue burden on everything from power generation to construction.
In one decision after another, the court’s conservative justices largely agreed. In its most far-reaching ruling, handed down Friday, they threw into question the future of environmental and climate regulations by overturning the precedent that gave federal agencies authority to interpret laws based on their expertise and scientific evidence. It will be years before the full impact of its decision to scuttle Chevron becomes clear, but it could prompt lawsuits aimed at regulations designed to mitigate climate change.
“There’s no question that there will be a flood of new challenges to settled policies by virtue of this decision,” Sean Donahue, an attorney who represented the Environmental Defense Fund in the case, told reporters on Friday.
The two lawsuits that led to the decision stemmed from a Commerce Department regulation requiring fishing companies to pay the cost of having third-party observers aboard each vessel to prevent overfishing. What started as a squabble over a narrowly focused rule expanded into a larger question of whether Chevron should remain in place. The doctrine originated with the 1984 Supreme Court case Chevron v. NRDC (which gave the petroleum company greater leeway when applying for air pollution permits), and hinges on the idea that regulators have expertise and experience that judges typically don’t. It has been used to successfully defend federal actions under Republican and Democratic administrations.
“This is not a radical idea,” Harvard law professor Jody Freeman wrote recently. “Implementing health, safety, environmental, financial, and consumer protection laws requires a great deal of day-to-day legal interpretation which depends significantly on subject matter expertise.”
The lower courts rejected the fishing companies’ arguments and upheld the regulations in question, citing Chevron. But the Supreme Court’s conservative justices, in a 6-3 decision, struck down the idea that courts should defer to regulators. “Agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote in the majority opinion. “Courts do.”
The effect of this ruling will take years to discern, but legal scholars and climate and environmental activists said it could jeopardize current and future climate policies because it expands the power of courts to review and strike down regulatory guidelines or efforts.
“This decision shifts power dramatically away from agencies towards the courts,” said Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. “And in doing so, tilts the scales against regulation.”
The decision is a victory for business interests and anti-regulatory activists who framed Chevron as an example of governmental overreach by an expanding “administrative state.” Conservative organizations like the Koch network have long supported efforts to dismantle Chevron, and attorneys linked to that organization represented plaintiffs in one of the two cases that ended it.
Although the Supreme Court hasn’t applied Chevron to a case in more than a decade, the doctrine is essential to how lower court judges — who decide the majority of cases involving federal regulations — rule on any challenges to an agency’s actions. (Justice Elena Kagan, during oral arguments, noted that jurists cited Chevron in more than 17,000 cases over four decades. An analysis of lower court opinions from 2003 to 2013 found that agencies citing Chevron prevailed in more than 70 percent of cases, upholding a wide range of regulations issued by a host of agencies.)
Lawmakers and regulators, meanwhile, relied on the “reliable, predictable framework for judicial review” that Chevron provided, Burger said. Congress knew what to expect from courts when writing broad laws and allowing regulators to interpret and implement them. Agencies like the EPA and Interior Department could, in turn, issue rules knowing that the doctrine would support their authority to do so.
“Now, it’s very unclear what’s going to happen in any individual case,” he said. Without Chevron, it is “more likely that judges will say that a regulation is either outside an agency’s authority or not authorized by a statute.” That poses a particular threat to current or future rules related to the environment and climate change, two policy realms that involve ambiguities and scientific, economic, and technical considerations, he said.
That threat is compounded by the decision the court issued Monday in Corner Post v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. That ruling creates a risk that courts could soon face a deluge of lawsuits challenging even decades-old regulations.
As with Chevron, the issue at the heart of Corner Post had nothing to do with climate or environment. The suit, filed in 2021, argued that a 2011 regulation establishing debit card swipe fees was unreasonable. Because federal law states that challenges to regulatory laws must be filed within six years of the law’s adoption, the plaintiffs added a third party, Corner Post, a truck stop that opened in 2018. The plaintiffs argued that the statute of limitations should not apply because Corner Post did not exist when the regulation was adopted.
In a 6-3 decision the court agreed and said the six-year timeline should instead begin at the moment someone is harmed by the rule — effectively eliminating a statute of limitations for any federal regulation. That means any regulation, covering any topic, could be challenged in court regardless of how old it is.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warned in her dissent that the Corner Post ruling, coupled with the court’s decision to discard Chevron, will unleash a “tsunami of lawsuits against agencies” that could “devastate the functioning of the federal government.” According to the advocacy group Public Citizen, the time frame eliminated by the Corner Post decision has in the past prevented challenges to regulations limiting oil and gas extraction on public land and establishing minimum wages for farm workers, among other things.
No less troubling, the Supreme Court made clear on Thursday, in a suit specifically involving the EPA, that it will stop regulations even as they are being litigated in lower courts. That’s precisely what it did in Ohio v. EPA when it paused the agency’s “Good Neighbor” rule and its stringent smokestack emissions requirements. The court majority ruled, in a lawsuit brought by Ohio, Indiana, Virginia, and others, that the EPA failed to “reasonably explain” its policy and placed it on hold pending the outcome of more than a dozen lawsuits. Environmental and climate activists worry that future challenges to federal policies could similarly “short-circuit the normal process of judicial review” by appealing directly to the Supreme Court.
Sam Sankar, senior vice president for programs at Earthjustice, called the decision a “frontal assault on the EPA.” He pointed out that unlike cases involving Chevron deference, the agency’s authority to implement the Good Neighbor rule was clear under the federal Clean Air Act and that “the EPA is required to issue rules like this.” The ruling suggests that in the future, any federal regulations, even those issued under clear legal authority, could face similar attacks.
“It casts a pall on just about any new regulation,” Sankar said.
Climate and environmental activists also took exception to how the court decided the case. By placing the matter on its emergency docket — which typically is reserved for minor procedural issues — and acting before lower courts have issued decisions, the Supreme Court brought what one expert called “procedural strangeness” to its decision-making. The ruling suggests future environmental policies could face similar challenges on the emergency docket.
“It’s really hard to say that there are any rules that aren’t subject to this kind of attack,” Sankar said.
The court also took a step, in a case involving the Securities and Exchange Commission, to sharply curtail the ability of federal agencies to enforce regulations and levy fines. SEC v. Jarkesy revolved around George Jarkesy, a conservative radio show host and hedge fund manager accused of misleading investors. The SEC brought the case before an administrative law judge — a type of jurist who specializes in highly technical areas of law and decides cases without a jury. Jarkersy was found to have violated SEC rules, fined $300,000, and ordered to “disgorge nearly $685,000 in illicit gains.” He then sued the agency, arguing that the government violated his Seventh Amendment right to a trial by jury.
The court agreed, ruling on Thursday that a defendant facing civil penalties by the SEC “has the right to be tried by a jury of his peers.” In a dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that position threatens the ability of more than two dozen agencies, including the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the EPA, to enforce regulations and impose fines.
“Make no mistake,” she wrote. “Today’s decision is a power grab.”
The high court has on several occasions in recent years shown a willingness to curtail the government’s ability to take bold steps to address environmental and climate challenges. Last year it limited some clean water protections, and in 2022 it restricted the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions in West Virginia v. EPA. The trend could continue next year when justices hear a case challenging the National Environmental Policy Act, a bedrock law that requires environmental assessments for major infrastructure projects.
Patton from the Environmental Defense Fund says that it’s no coincidence the court has decided to take up so many environmental cases and take such aggressive steps to roll back the government’s efforts to reduce pollution and mitigate climate change.
“There are lots of powerful polluters who have long tried to unravel and weaken the laws that were enacted by Congress,” she said. “What’s new and different is that we have a 6-3 super majority on the Supreme Court that is solicitous and open to the most extreme arguments.”
That, climate activists warn, means it will only grow harder for government agencies to take the steps needed to address the climate crisis.
This story was originally published by Grist, a nonprofit media organization covering climate, justice, and solutions.
Akielly Hu is the News and Politics Fellow at Grist.
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future.
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-supreme-court-decisions-jeopardize-efforts-to-curb-pollution-and-climate/ [description] =>Four recent Supreme Court decisions will together make it much harder for the federal government to take action on climate change
[pubDate] => Wed, 03 Jul 2024 17:30:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-supreme-court-decisions-jeopardize-efforts-to-curb-pollution-and-climate/ ) [3] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/biden-pushes-to-stop-heat-deaths-after-decades-of-delay/ [title] => Biden Pushes to Stop Heat Deaths after Decades of Delay [timestamp] => 1719957600 [author] => Ariel Wittenberg; E&E News [content] =>It took 50 years and skyrocketing temperatures before the government proposed heat protections for workers. The Biden administration is trying to speed up the process
U.S. President Joe Biden speaks during a briefing on extreme heat conditions in July 2023.
Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
CLIMATEWIRE | When Gabriel Infante became disoriented after digging trenches for a day in San Antonio’s 100-degree heat, his supervisor assumed he had been using drugs and called the police.
But Infante was suffering from heatstroke, not drugs. The supervisor missed a telltale sign of heat danger: Infante’s state of deliriousness.
He died a few hours later in 2022 after five days on the job. His body temperature was 109.8 degrees, according to federal records and a lawsuit filed by his family. He was 24.
Infante’s mother, Velma Infante, remembers feeling shocked that the government didn’t have “some kind of protocol to follow to make sure people don’t lose their lives” while working in the heat.
Now, President Joe Biden is trying to change that.
His administration proposed first-ever rules Tuesday to protect workers from extreme heat as climate change catapults temperatures to levels never before recorded by humans. If implemented, the regulations would require employers to be trained to spot signs of heatstroke and provide workers with water and rest breaks.
Those measures could have saved Infante’s life. But the rule’s fate hinges on the outcome of a chaotic presidential election and a Supreme Court decision issued last week that made it easier to challenge federal regulations.
Former President Donald Trump looms over both. He cemented the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority that curtailed the executive branch’s ability to oversee the companies that employ 35 million workers who would be protected under the heat rules. Trump has also pledged to tear down pillars of Biden’s climate change agenda if he wins the November election — jeopardizing the heat rules that won’t be finalized until 2026 at the earliest.
With workers’ lives on the line, the White House sped through its own review of the proposal — squeezing what can often take several months into three weeks — leading to an announcement five days after Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Trump prompted hand-wringing among his allies about whether Biden has the wherewithal to finish the campaign. The heat rules come as Biden tries to shore up support among key constituencies such as young voters, people of color and blue-collar workers.
“Everyone who denies the impacts of climate change is condemning the American people to a dangerous future and is either really, really dumb or has some other motive,” Biden said while announcing the rules Tuesday.
Biden is trying to break an impasse that has prevented heat protections since the Nixon administration. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has ignored calls from health experts to address heat for decades and only began to work on the rule at Biden’s insistence.
Even after Biden directed the agency to write the rule in 2021, federal laws and court rulings conspired to slow OSHA’s work as extreme heat turbocharged by climate change killed dozens of workers. Just last week, a withering heat dome blanketed parts of the Northeast and Midwest, causing emergency room visits to spike and killing a construction worker who collapsed on the job in Rhode Island.
“We have millions of American workers who are exposed to unacceptable levels of risk because they are working in heat,” OSHA Chief Doug Parker said in an interview with POLITICO’s E&E News on Tuesday. “This is an issue that has been around for years but has also taken years to get the attention and the traction that it needed, and we are very proud to be doing this.”
It’s an anomaly that OSHA was able to propose the rule in less than three years and underscores the administration’s priority of confronting climate change. The agency typically moves at a sluggish pace. One Government Accountability Office report found in 2012 that OSHA took an average of seven years to finalize new workplace standards between 1981 and 2010.
That’s partly thanks to a web of federal laws and court rulings that beset the agency with time-consuming obstacles. One law championed by then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) in 1997 requires OSHA and just two other agencies to spend months consulting with panels of small business representatives before the agency can even propose a new standard.
In the case of the heat rule, the panel met six times last summer and heard from 82 small business representatives before making recommendations in a 331-page report to OSHA.
The courts have also placed additional requirements on the agency, whose regulations are nearly always challenged by opponents.
A Supreme Court ruling in 1980 blocked OSHA from placing stricter limits on the dangerous carcinogen benzene because the agency had not proved that existing standards were insufficient to prevent “significant risk” to workers.
In trying to ensure OSHA rules withstand lawsuits today, agency staff has to prove three points: that a hazard is a significant risk; that remedies required in a rule would significantly reduce that risk; and that new requirements are “feasible,” both technically and financially, for every affected industry.
“It’s a pretty heavy burden,” said Jordan Barab, who was OSHA’s deputy assistant secretary of Labor for occupational safety and health during the Obama administration.
Justifying OSHA’s heat rule is especially complicated because it would apply to a huge constellation of workplaces, from farms to warehouses to kitchens. Other OSHA rules, such as those regarding ladder safety or silica dust, affect a narrower segment of industries and were simpler to complete.
The lengthy process has made even OSHA officials impatient.
“These things added together do mean that sometimes workers have to wait longer than they should to get the protections they need,” Parker said. “It can be frustrating for us, too, they have to wait so long.”
The Biden administration has been able to accelerate the process, including a White House review of the heat proposal. Federal law gives the White House three months to review proposed rules, but the Biden administration completed it in just three weeks.
“That’s record time. I’ve never seen a major proposed rule go through the White House so quickly,” said David Michaels, who led OSHA during the Obama administration. “It shows that if the president is committed to protecting workers, this process can move very quickly.”
Whether the proposed rule becomes final could come down to the presidential election.
Trump’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment. But during his time in the White House, OSHA stopped work on many health regulations, including one slated to be proposed in October 2017 that could have forced the health care industry to prepare for potential airborne pathogen pandemics before the coronavirus killed millions of Americans.
“The likelihood is if Trump is elected, the rule will be put on the shelf for his four years,” said Juley Fulcher of Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group.
Parker, the OSHA chief, declined to speculate about what might happen to the rules if Trump wins the election. But he said, “it matters to have a proposal,” calling it a “marker” for future administrations.
“There have been examples in the past when little work was done on a rule during one administration and then the next administration, because a proposal had been completed, was able to finish the rule,” he said. “We are going to continue to work hard to put all the measures in place to complete this rule regardless of what happens in the future.”
But the regulation also faces an uncertain fate if Biden wins reelection.
Last week, the Supreme Court overturned legal precedent established in the 1984 case Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council requiring federal judges to defer to agencies when laws are ambiguous.
The ruling provides new firepower to industry groups seeking to challenge the regulation. Federal law gives OSHA the authority to write and enforce regulations to protect workers’ health and safety. But it doesn’t specify what constitutes a threat. Now, federal judges could say heat is not dangerous enough to warrant protections, or that OSHA set its temperature thresholds too low.
“Instead of the health experts at OSHA, it’s going to be totally up to a judge to decide if starting requirements at 80 degrees is reasonable, or if that trigger point should be 90 or 97 degrees,” said Barab, the former OSHA official. “They could even say, ‘Hey, people in Texas know how to handle heat, they don’t need this training.'”
Without a heat rule, OSHA has limited ability to hold employers accountable when heat kills workers on the job.
OSHA last summer stepped up heat-related investigations of workplaces through an “emphasis” program that targets workplaces before deaths or heat-related injuries have occurred.
More than 5,000 heat-related inspections have been conducted through the program, OSHA spokesperson Kim Darby said. This year, Darby said, the program will emphasize agriculture, whose workers have “unique vulnerabilities” such as language barriers that put them “at high risk of hazardous heat exposure.”
But the increased inspections rely on current requirements that employers generally keep workers safe from “recognized hazards,” which encompass a broad range of conditions such as workers lifting objects that are too heavy for them or workplace violence.
Without heat-specific regulations, OSHA faces a high burden of proof to issue citations, Barab said.
“You have to say it was hazardous to not have water in this temperature, it was hazardous to not have shade. And often the way you prove it was hazardous is because someone already died,” Barab said.
“But if you had a specific standard, you can say, ‘The law required you to have water and shade and you didn’t.’ And that’s a violation before anyone gets sick,” Barab added.
OSHA records show 83 workers have died of heat since the Biden administration started working on a heat standard, according to an E&E News review of federal data. The 83 deaths are “almost certainly an undercount,” said Darby, the OSHA spokesperson.
Safety standards are important because extreme heat can quickly transition from uncomfortable to deadly.
Anybody can experience heat stress when temperatures and humidity rise. But workers — both outdoors and indoors — are particularly vulnerable because they face an additional heat source: their own labor, which produces internal body heat that combines with the ambient air.
Mild symptoms of heat illness like muscle cramps or dizziness are signs someone should stop working, rest in a cool spot and drink water, said Jennifer Walsh, a clinical associate professor at the George Washington University School of Nursing.
Ignoring symptoms can lead to heatstroke, which occurs when the core body temperature rises above 105 degrees and shuts down the central nervous system. It can turn deadly in just 10 to 15 minutes.
“When someone’s body temperature rises that high, it causes brain issues, and they become combative and confused and irritable because the heat is affecting their central nervous system,” Walsh said.
That’s what Infante’s family believes happened to him.
Their lawsuit says Infante’s former employer, BComm Constructors LLC of San Antonio, should have known the danger of digging trenches for fiber optic cables in the Texas heat.
“It was a scientific and medical certainty that a worker such as Gabriel Infante would die under those conditions” without rest and water, the lawsuit says.
Infante, who previously worked as a crew leader at a local McDonald’s restaurant, had never done physical labor before, Velma Infante said.
A friend asked if he wanted to spend the summer doing telecommunications construction. He agreed because he needed money to buy textbooks for when he reenrolled in college that fall.
It was a move that surprised his mother, who recalled asking her jazz-loving son the week before he died, “Are you sure? You don’t do this type of work.”
But the digging job paid better than McDonald’s, and Infante’s mom recalled him saying, “If we want better things, then we have to work hard for what we want.”
She had assumed that her son would be trained about how to take care of himself in the heat. He wasn’t.
When Infante first started feeling cramps from burying cables 12 inches underground on June 23, 2022, his foreman sent him in a truck to dump a load of dirt. After he finished, Infante was told to keep digging, according to the lawsuit and an OSHA record of the incident.
Velma Infante said her son became disoriented and hit his head before losing consciousness. Another worker recognized he was dangerously hot and started pouring water over Infante, who awoke confused and combative.
“He came to and thought they were trying to hurt him and started an altercation, so the foreman said, ‘Call the police, he’s on drugs,’” Velma Infante said.
According to her lawsuit, emergency medical services were called only after Infante passed out a second time. He never woke up.
OSHA investigated Infante’s case and initially issued a $13,000 citation to BComm for “serious” violations of the agency’s general duty clause, which requires employers to keep workers safe from “recognized” hazards. In a settlement, OSHA agreed to withdraw the financial penalty in exchange for BComm instituting a heat-stress program that includes mandatory breaks “commensurate with temperature” and training for managers on heat-stress recognition.
“The employer did not furnish employment and a place of employment which were free from recognized hazards that were causing or likely to cause death or serious physical harm to employees in that employees were not protected from the hazard of high ambient heat while performing job duties,” the citation said.
BComm’s attorneys did not respond to requests for comment.
Barab, the former OSHA official, reviewed the BComm citation and the family lawsuit at E&E News’ request and said an OSHA heat protection standard could have saved Infante’s life by easing him into working in the heat and making sure his employer knew what to do if employees fell ill.
“You have to have a way to get the employee to the hospital instead of fumbling around wondering why this guy is acting so weirdly,” Barab said.
Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2024. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.
Ariel Wittenberg is a reporter covering public health for E&E News.
E&E News provides essential energy and environment news for professionals.
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/biden-pushes-to-stop-heat-deaths-after-decades-of-delay/ [description] =>It took 50 years and skyrocketing temperatures before the government proposed heat protections for workers. The Biden administration is trying to speed up the process
[pubDate] => Wed, 03 Jul 2024 15:15:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/biden-pushes-to-stop-heat-deaths-after-decades-of-delay/ ) [4] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-some-peoples-body-resists-getting-covid/ [title] => How Some People’s Body Resists Getting COVID [timestamp] => 1719957600 [author] => Saima S. Iqbal [content] =>When scientists exposed people to the virus that causes COVID, only a subset got sick. Studying them could offer clues to immunity
Phiwath Jittamas/Getty Images
Not everyone who is exposed to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, gets the disease. New research published in June in Nature may partly explain why: In a 2021 experiment called a challenge study, researchers attempted to infect 16 unvaccinated volunteers with a low dose of the original strain of SARS-CoV-2. Participants who quickly squelched the virus activated a fast-acting innate immune response in their nose.
In the study, the team first assessed the participants’ baseline immune function and then spritzed an infectious solution into their nose. For four weeks afterward, the researchers collected nasal swabs and blood samples from the subjects for single-cell DNA sequencing analysis. This offered the scientists “an unprecedented view of what happens at the very early stage of viral exposure in humans,” says Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at the Yale School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study.
After inoculation, six of the 16 subjects developed a full-blown COVID infection, accompanied by mild symptoms such as a sore throat and nasal congestion. Three others tested positive or nearly positive in an on-and-off fashion, but had very mild or no symptoms. These individuals’ so-called transient infections were weak and short-lived. And the remaining seven participants resisted infection altogether, never testing positive.
The three people who fought off transient infections produced heavy doses of signaling proteins called interferons in their nose on day one after infection. In contrast, those who developed a full-blown infection showed interferons in their blood as early as day two but not in their nose until day five.
Interferons equip cells to defend against foreign invaders such as SARS-CoV-2: they momentarily halt major life functions that viruses hack into to replicate. A cell can produce interferon midway through an infection, before a virus has taken over its machinery, or it can trigger particular immune cells to produce the signal after it dies. Cells in the transiently infected group of participants sounded the body’s alarm before SARS-CoV-2 refashioned them into virus-making factories, warding off illness. The participants with a full-blown infection responded more slowly; once their body detected infection, it went into a panic that sent interferons everywhere. As a result, interferons reached the nose—the site of infection—later than they appeared in the bloodstream, giving the virus more time to multiply.
The idea that a powerful interferon response may help people suppress COVID is unlikely to surprise immunologists. The finding lines up with previous research that linked children’s relative resistance to COVID to their abnormally strong nasal innate immune responses and correlated higher levels of interferons in the blood to less severe disease. The new study underscores the important role interferons can play in defending against SARS-CoV-2 and the way that role varies throughout the body over the course of an infection.
Researchers do not yet understand why some people more quickly rally the innate immune system to fight off infection or how others totally repel the virus, but genetics may play a role. In the recent study, participants who snuffed out the virus relatively early or avoided infection tended to have high levels of baseline activity in a gene called HLA-DQA2. The gene produces a type of protein known to present immune cells with snippets of foreign invaders. It’s unclear whether the protein’s activity makes a person resilient to infection or is merely a product of an effective immune response, however. “We can’t really distinguish the chicken and the egg here,” says Rik Lindeboom, co-lead author of the study and a researcher at the Netherlands Cancer Institute.
How quickly an infected person pumps out interferons may not matter as much these days, when most people have already been infected with the virus or vaccinated against it, Iwasaki says. The body’s adaptive immune response—its slower, pathogen-specific defense—will likely come to the rescue if the innate response is slow. And some strains of the virus appear to have developed defense mechanisms against the interferon response, blunting its effect.
A case still remains for using interferon-boosting agents as a supplemental therapy, if timed well, Iwasaki notes. The challenge study makes clear that in order to effectively prevent infection, interferon levels must peak at or before day one. That means any potential drug would function best as a preventive measure—taken, say, before attending a concert—or as a “plan B” medication post-exposure. Some clinical trials have implemented these therapies past that time window, however, producing mixed results.
Companies could also use data from the infected participants to create better COVID vaccines, Lindeboom says. They could gauge their vaccines’ effectiveness by comparing the responses of immune cells called T cells to vaccination with the T cell responses seen in people who are recovering from COVID. And new nasal vaccines in development aim to block infection at the start by eliciting an adaptive immune response in the nose rather than the circulatory system.
Some people have interpreted the powerful capacity of the innate immune response as a reason to dismiss vaccines, he adds, but the response differs among individuals and cannot provide complete protection from the virus. Yet even mild COVID infections raise a person’s risk of heart problems and long COVID; widespread inflammation caused by a systemic immune response puts stress on the body’s organs.
The participants in the new study did not—thankfully—experience any long-term side effects, at least for up to one year post-exposure. But vaccination remains the most surefire way to limit both infection and long-term illness.
Saima S. Iqbal is Scientific American’s current news intern. She specializes in health and medicine and is based in New York City.
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-some-peoples-body-resists-getting-covid/ [description] =>When scientists exposed people to the virus that causes COVID, only a subset got sick. Studying them could offer clues to immunity
[pubDate] => Wed, 03 Jul 2024 15:00:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-some-peoples-body-resists-getting-covid/ ) [5] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/summertime-depression-could-be-a-type-of-seasonal-affective-disorder/ [title] => Summertime Depression Could Be a Type of Seasonal Affective Disorder [timestamp] => 1719957600 [author] => Lauren Leffer [content] =>Heat and mood are closely linked, which may explain summertime depression—and how to treat it
Moor Studio/Getty Images
Has the heat got you down? You’re probably not alone.
Wintertime—with its long, dark nights—is the season most associated with low mood and depression. But sun-filled summer days can also bring on the doldrums, particularly for the subset of people who experience a summertime version of seasonal affective disorder (SAD)—a type of depression with a periodic pattern. Those with a lesser-known and lesser-studied summer SAD variant may feel “out of sync with the rest of the world” because they experience depression just as summer breaks and pool party invites pick up, says Thomas Wehr, a psychiatrist and scientist emeritus at the National Institutes of Health.
Depression can occur any time of year, but some research indicates that the warmer months can be particularly challenging for certain people. A growing number of studies indicate links between body temperature and depression, and high outside temperatures have been linked to mood and mental health crises. The prevalence of summertime SAD remains unclear, but as climate change makes extreme weather more common, understanding the effects of hot days on mental health—and developing new, effective treatments—has higher stakes.
Wehr and his colleague Norman Rosenthal, a psychiatrist then at the NIH, coined the term SAD in the early 1980s based on their research into people with cyclical winter depression. After publication, they received some unexpected letters from people who vehemently attested to having the opposite condition: depression in the summer and improved mood in winter.
Wehr and Rosenthal’s team investigated these accounts in a 1987 case report, which described 12 people who displayed a pattern of recurrent depressive episodes in the summertime. In a 1991 follow-up paper, they compared another 60 participants, half of whom seemed to have summer SAD and half of whom had winter SAD. Both groups met clinical criteria for depression that usually reoccurred seasonally, but the two cohorts experienced different symptoms.
Participants in the winter group “were very lethargic” and compared themselves to hibernating animals, says Rosenthal, who is now a professor at the Georgetown University School of Medicine. In contrast, the summer group was more “irritable” and “restless,” he adds. The winter cohort more frequently slept, overate and experienced weight gain, whereas the summer cohort reported higher incidences of insomnia, reduced appetite and more frequent weight loss.
The prevalence of summer SAD “would be a complete guess” because of limited data, Rosenthal says. Based on his interactions with people who do have the condition, Wehr believes it may be more common in warmer and more humid locations and in regions with limited access to air-conditioning. But Rosenthal and Wehr say much more work is needed to truly understand how common summer SAD is and where it most frequently occurs.
Compared with the winter variant, “the literature on summer SAD is much smaller,” says Kelly Rohan, a clinical psychologist who studies subtypes of recurrent depression at the University of Vermont. Both the 1987 and 1991 studies had a small sample size, and there has been minimal follow-up work. Nevertheless, Rohan says those early case studies are robust and convincing because they thoroughly examine and describe peoples’ symptoms.
Much research has linked winter SAD to shorter daylight hours and reduced sunlight exposure, causing clinicians to suggest light therapy as a potential treatment. In contrast, Rohan says, the primary triggers for the summer type are assumed to be heat and humidity.
Some researchers question whether SAD—either the summer or winter variety—should be a medically recognized condition altogether. “As it’s conceptualized, I am skeptical,” says Steven Lobello, a psychology professor at Auburn University at Montgomery. In 2016 Lobello and his colleagues published a study involving survey data from 34,000 people in the U.S. that found no population-level indication that depressive episodes were more common in the winter. A 2019 review found “some support for seasonal variation in clinical depression” but noted that prior research was “fragmented,” with varied findings.
Multiple studies have documented that heat can affect mood disorders and behavior, says Kim Meidenbauer, an assistant professor of psychology at Washington State University, who studies heat’s psychological effects. Increases in aggression and violent crimes have been well documented on hotter days and during summertime, Meidenbauer says. Recent studies have also found that psychiatric emergency room visits for depression and other mental health disorders peak on hotter days, mood trends more negative with increased heat and suicide rates rise in conjunction with temperature. The latter study on suicide risk, which was published in 2018, also found a decline in well-being corresponding to hotter outdoor temperatures, according to an accompanying analysis of depressive language in 600 million posts on Twitter (now X) between May 2014 and July 2015.
Rosenthal notes the findings about psychiatric hospital admissions, suicide risk and even online activity are in line with his previous work on SAD, which also concluded that people who face mental health struggles in the summer are more agitated than those who do so in the winter. People who are depressed but restless—with energy to spare—might be more likely to act on suicidal urges or end up in the hospital or, he explains.
Meidenbauer notes there are a few hypotheses for why heat might trigger depression. For one, “it interrupts your sleep,” she says—and quality shut-eye is critical for mental health. Maintaining a normal body temperature is also a resource-intensive process, Meidenbauer says. Heat can become a physical stressor, particularly for children, older people and those taking certain medications that disrupt the body’s ability to cool down. If people are uncomfortable over a long period of time, that invariably affects emotional state, she says.
One 2018 review study indicates that heat may also disrupt neurotransmitters involved in brain activity while we’re awake, which could contribute to depression. In addition, multiple studies have found that depressed people have an elevated body temperature, especially at night, which suggests depression itself may undermine the body’s ability to regulate temperature.
Wehr says investigating the relationship between temperature and mental health could help home in on the mechanisms underlying depression and even improve treatments, which is especially important because experts overwhelmingly agree that climate change is likely to exacerbate the mental health risks of hot weather.
Treatments for summer depression are understudied, Rohan says. There is some evidence that lowering the body temperature via air-conditioning, cold showers or swimming sessions can help at least temporarily. In Rosenthal and Wehr’s first case report, one patient’s mood improved when Wehr recommended she try confining herself to an air-conditioned house and regularly taking cold showers, but she reported feeling depressed again just nine days after stopping this regimen.
Meidenbauer points out that staying indoors in heavily air-conditioned spaces and taking frequent cold showers likely isn’t sustainable from an environmental, practical or financial perspective. Swamp coolers and fans may be cheaper, more accessible options—particularly for that extra critical nighttime cooling.
Counterintuitively, exposure to high heat via saunas and hot tubs might offer longer-term relief. Some clinical trials have found that peoples’ depression improved when treated with hot baths. This could be because short-duration, high-intensity heat resets dormant or dysfunctional thermoregulatory systems in people with depression, says Ashley Mason, a clinical psychologist and an associate professor at the University of California, San Francisco. If people with summer SAD have thermoregulation issues, Mason suggests, such heat therapies may be especially helpful.
Beyond manipulating body temperature, simply tracking mood and comfort level throughout the summer season can be useful, Meidenbauer says. Noticing a pattern is the first step toward changing it, she adds. If you know that heat dampens your mood, that’s one more tool you can use to potentially predict, prepare for and mitigate (metaphorically) dark days. Rosenthal agrees. “Look at the things that make you feel better and do them more. And look at the things that make you feel worse and do them less,” he says. This tip can help people who experience mental health issues any time of year.
IF YOU NEED HELP
If you or someone you know is struggling or having thoughts of suicide, help is available. Call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or use the online Lifeline Chat.
Lauren Leffer is a contributing writer and former tech reporting fellow at Scientific American. She covers many subjects, including artificial intelligence, climate and weird biology, because she's curious to a fault. Follow her on X @lauren_leffer and on Bluesky @laurenleffer.bsky.social
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/summertime-depression-could-be-a-type-of-seasonal-affective-disorder/ [description] =>Heat and mood are closely linked, which may explain summertime depression—and how to treat it
[pubDate] => Wed, 03 Jul 2024 13:00:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/summertime-depression-could-be-a-type-of-seasonal-affective-disorder/ ) [6] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-combination-covid-and-flu-vaccine-is-coming-soon/ [title] => A Combination COVID and Flu Vaccine Is Coming Soon [timestamp] => 1719957600 [author] => Freda Kreier; Nature magazine [content] =>The first large trial of a COVID and flu vaccine combo suggests it boosts immune protection even more than single-target shots
Moderna headquarters in Cambridge, Mass. Pharmaceutical laboratories are researching new applications for mRNA vaccine technology—and Moderna is hoping to integrate COVID, influenza and respiratory syncytial virus immunization into a single jab.
David L. Ryan/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
A single vaccine has been shown to protect people from both SARS-CoV-2 and influenza viruses — and with a higher effectiveness than vaccines that target one or the other, the pharmaceutical company Moderna has announced.
Moderna, which is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said earlier this month that it had successfully completed phase-III clinical trials for the drug, which — like the company’s pioneering COVID-19 vaccines — is based on mRNA. In a statement to its investors, Moderna said that the vaccine was more effective at providing immunity to adults over the age of 50 than competing flu and COVID-19 shots.
Moderna is now planning to seek approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to bring the vaccine to market.
Combination vaccines can have big public-health benefits, but they are often time-consuming and expensive to develop. Moderna’s latest rapid success shows that RNA can help to overcome some of these difficulties, says James Thaventhiran, a clinical immunologist at the University of Cambridge, UK, “This is a great example of why the technology is exciting,” he says, adding that the combination vaccines using mRNA are “just the beginning” for RNA technology.
Vaccination helps people to build immunity to a disease by exposing their immune cells to an antigen, such as a protein, a snippet of DNA or even a whole pathogenic organism that has been inactivated. When the real pathogen comes along, the immune system is quickly able to recognize the threat and mount a resistance.
Creating antigens is a difficult process, and combining different antigens into one vaccine increases its complexity further. “It sounds like it should be so easy, right? You just mix them together,” says Jacqueline Miller, a paediatrician and head of development for infectious disease at Moderna. “But it’s actually much more complicated than the development of individual components.”
The chemical components that make up single-target vaccines can sometimes react with one another when combined, running the risk of making the individual drugs less effective. mRNA-based vaccines don’t face as much of a hurdle, however, because the drug components for different antigens tend to be the same.
mRNA is a molecule made of nucleic acids, and its main purpose is to tell cells what proteins to make. mRNA-based vaccines inject mRNA into cells to make copies of antigens for the immune system to recognize. So, rather than having to make a bunch of different components, mRNA vaccines simply wrap up a set of instructions in a layer of lipids and then send them into the body for cells to pop out their own antigens.
The result is a strong immune reaction based on drug components that don’t compete with one another — even if they are targeting different pathogens.
That might explain why the risk of combination vaccines being ineffective is “clearly” not a problem with the new COVID-influenza vaccine, says Thaventhiran, because the shot seems to boost immunity more than single immunizations do.
The vaccine’s code can also be quickly changed to keep up with evolving variants. One of the issues with current, non-mRNA influenza vaccines is that the antigen is grown in chicken eggs, a process that takes six months. During that time, the virus can mutate and change. By contrast, “with RNA it literally takes weeks to make a new variant”, says Drew Weissman, an immunologist at the Perelman School of Medicine University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
Researchers have been testing the limit for the number of antigen instructions they can fit into an mRNA vaccine; one group has fit mRNA instructions for all 20 variants of influenza into a lipid layer. Moderna is hoping to add the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) — which causes cold-like symptoms — as a third pathogen to its current COVID–influenza pair.
For most people, FDA approval of the Moderna shot “means one visit to the pharmacy”, says Weissman. “One shot will be enough to protect you from both the flu and COVID.”
COVID-19 booster uptake has dropped in the United States since the first rounds of vaccinations. However, as of this year, around 47% of adults have received the flu shot, according to the US Center for Disease Control. Combining immunizations could help to ensure that more people are protected from COVID-19, says Miller.
And looking forward, mRNA combination vaccines could help to reduce the burden of immunizations for parents of young children. Infants are currently the primary targets of available combination vaccines, but they are still given multiple rounds of shots in the first few years of their lives. “Parents would be ecstatic” to reduce the number of shots their children must get, says Weissman. And having just a few shots — which could be administered at the same time — would also help to ease that burden of immunization in rural communities in low-income countries.
Researchers will have to work out how to deal with the delicate nature of mRNA to see these benefits expand outside of high-income nations, says Thaventhiran. Part of the challenge of rolling out COVID-19 vaccines was the need to keep doses in deep freeze to protect the mRNA from breaking down.
But overall, the development of mRNA combination vaccines is evidence “that RNA has a positive future”, says Weissman. “It isn’t just a fluke.”
This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on June 28, 2024.
Freda Kreier is a freelance journalist who likes writing about the natural world, DNA and the distant past. You can find more of her work at www.fredakreier.com.
First published in 1869, Nature is the world's leading multidisciplinary science journal. Nature publishes the finest peer-reviewed research that drives ground-breaking discovery, and is read by thought-leaders and decision-makers around the world.
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-combination-covid-and-flu-vaccine-is-coming-soon/ [description] =>The first large trial of a COVID and flu vaccine combo suggests it boosts immune protection even more than single-target shots
[pubDate] => Wed, 03 Jul 2024 12:00:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-combination-covid-and-flu-vaccine-is-coming-soon/ ) [7] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-makes-a-psychedelic-experience-not-always-a-drug-it-turns-out/ [title] => What Makes a Psychedelic Experience? Not Always a Drug, It Turns Out [timestamp] => 1719957600 [author] => Gary Stix [content] =>A Stanford anesthesiologist deconstructs the component parts of what it means to undergo a psychedelic trip
Jorm Sangsorn/Getty Images
A debate has long percolated among researchers as to whether what happens after taking a psychedelic drug results from the placebo effect—rooted in a person’s belief that taking psilocybin or ketamine is going to give them a transformative experience. Boris D. Heifets, an associate professor of anesthesiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, has been tackling this question amid his broader laboratory investigations of what exactly happens in mind and brain when someone takes a psychedelic. How much of this sometimes life-altering experience is chemical and empirical, and how much is mental and subjective? It turns out the effects may consist of a lot more than just a simple biochemical response to a drug activating, say, the brain’s serotonin receptors. Heifets recently talked with Scientific American about his years-long quest to define the essence of the psychedelic experience.
[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
Are we coming any closer to understanding how psychedelics work and how they work in the context of therapy. Are we closer to using these transformational experiences to treat psychiatric disorders?
Having been in this field for a while, there’s still this inescapable problem of how to study psychedelics. One framework that I find very useful is thinking about it in three categories.
There's the biochemical drug effect, which interacts with basic brain biology—chemicals interacting with receptors on cells. That happens whether or not you can “feel” the effect of the drug. Then there is the conscious experience related to changes in sensation and revelatory, hallucinatory and ecstatic feelings. These experiences are closely tied to taking the drug, and usually we think of them as caused by the drug. But it is actually quite difficult to say whether a lasting change in mood or outlook was a result of the drug—a biochemical effect—or the trip itself, the experiential effect.
The third factor, then, is all of those aspects of the overall drug experience that are independent of the drug or trip—the non-drug factors, what [psychologist and psychedelics advocate] Timothy Leary called the “set and setting.” How much does your state of mind and the setting in which you take a drug influence the outcome? This category includes expectations about improvement in, say, your depression, expectations about the experience, the stress level in the environment. It would also include integration, making sense of these intense experiences afterward and integrating them into your life. And it’s useful to put each of these things in its own box because I think each of them is somewhat isolated. The goal is to make each box smaller and smaller, to really deconstruct the pieces.
So how have you gone about examining all this?
One example of how we’ve used this framework in our research is an experiment in which we gave [participants with depression] ketamine during general anesthesia. The idea was to explore just the biochemical drug effect by blanking out conscious experience to see whether people got better from their depression.
Our intention with this experiment was to get at this question that a lot of people have been asking: Is it the drug or the trip that is making someone better? You can address that question in a couple of different ways. One is to redesign the drug to eliminate the trip. But that is a very long process. As an anesthesiologist, my solution of course was to address the problem with the use of general anesthesia. We used the anesthetics to basically suppress conscious experience of the associated psychological effects of ketamine, which many people think may be relevant and even crucial to the antidepressant effects.
We collaborated closely with psychiatrists Laura Hack and Alan Schatzberg, [both] at Stanford, and we designed this study to look like every ketamine study in the past 15 years. We picked the same type of participants: [people] with moderate to severe major depressive disorder who had failed other treatments for moderate or severe depression. We administered the same questionnaires; we gave the same dose of ketamine.
The difference was these participants happened to be coming in for surgery for hips, knees, hernias, and while they were under general anesthesia, we gave them a standard antidepressant dose of ketamine. Because the patients were under anesthesia and couldn’t tell whether they were on a drug or not, this may have been the first blinded study of ketamine.
What was surprising was that the placebo group [who received no ketamine] also got better, indistinguishably from those who received the drug. Almost 60 percent of the patients had their symptom load cut in half, and there was at least 30 percent remission from major depressive disorder. These were patients who had been sick for years, and that finding was a big surprise. In a sense, it was a failed trial in that we couldn't tell the difference between our two groups.
What I take from that is really that this doesn't say much about how ketamine works. What it does say is just how big a therapeutic effect you can attribute to nondrug factors. That’s what people call the placebo effect.
It’s a word that describes everything from sugar pills to our surgeries. In our case, it may have had something to do with the preparation for the surgery. We messaged patients early; we engaged with them early. They weren’t used to people being interested in their mental health.
What did you discuss?
We talked to them for hours; we heard about their histories; we got to know them. I think they felt seen and heard in a way that many patients don’t, going into surgery. I’m thinking about parallels with the preparation steps for psychedelic trials. Patients in both types of research are motivated to be in these studies. In our study, they were told that they were testing the therapeutic potential of a drug and that there was a 50–50 chance they might get it. And then there was the big event of actually having the surgery. In this case, it was similar to having a psychedelic trial—a big, stressful, life-impacting event.
The patients closed their eyes and opened them after the surgery, and in many cases, they had the sense that no time had passed. They knew they went through something because they had the bandages and scars to prove it. What I take from that is that these nondrug effects, such as expectations of a particular outcome, are almost certainly present in most psychedelic trials and are independently able to drive a big therapeutic effect.
It became obvious that people had powerful experiences. Most people don't spontaneously improve from years of depression. After surgery, they get worse. That's what the data show. And the fact that we're able to make this degree of a positive impact after hours and hours of interpersonal contact and messaging, that’s important. This was a really clear demonstration to me that nondrug factors, such as expectations and feelings of hope, contribute a substantial portion to the effects we’ve seen. And you would be foolish to disregard those components in designing a therapy. And, you know, the truth is that most clinicians make use of these techniques every day in building a rapport with patients, leveraging this placebo response.
Does that suggest in any way that the effects of psychedelics might be substantially—or perhaps entirely—placebo effects?
So this is where I think you have to ask the question: What do we mean by placebo? Characteristically, people use the word placebo in a kind of a dismissive way, right? If a person responds to placebo, the subtle implication is there was nothing wrong. And that’s not what we’re talking about here.
Think about everyday situations that bring about life changes. A heart attack or near-death experience may cause someone in a high stress job to change their job and lifestyle habits—exercising and eating better. That all can be grouped under the label of a placebo effect.
Another possibility to achieve the same goal is having a transformational experience that you then use to make changes in your life. So the question is: How do you do this in a practical way? You can’t exactly go out and give people heart attacks or even send them on life-changing experiences, such as skydiving or on trips to the Riviera. But you can give them a psychedelic. That’s a big, powerful experience. In many cases, that is unique in some people’s lives and confers the opportunity to make changes for the better.
How does giving an actual psychedelic drug to someone in a clinical trial relate to the three categories you mentioned earlier?
Let’s circle back to this idea that psychedelic transformation could rely either on the biochemical effect, the experience of the trip itself, or nondrug factors. Our study of ketamine during anesthesia really highlighted the role of nondrug factors such as expectation but didn’t really get at the question of “Is it the drug or the trip?”
To answer that, some [of my] scientist colleagues are testing nonpsychedelics, or nonhallucinogenic psychedelic derivatives, to see whether patients with depression, for example, get better after treatment with a drug that can cause some of the same biochemical changes as a classical psychedelic but doesn’t have a “trip” associated with it. That’s “taking the trip out of the drug.” But what if you could “take the drug out of the trip,” meaning [the creation of] an experience that is reproducible across people that checks many of the same boxes as a classic psychedelic-induced trip but that doesn’t actually require the use of a psychedelic molecule? So what, in this context, you provide people with is a profound experience that can even be somewhat standardized so you can study it. And it would be powerful and vivid and meaningful and revelatory. Do you get the same types of effects?
That would not be definitive evidence. But it would strongly suggest that maybe there’s nothing intrinsically special about the activity of a drug that activates a particular receptor that mediates the effects of psychedelics. What that would do is put front and center the role of human experience in psychological transformation.
So you might be able to bypass the need for a psychedelic drug if you can get the same result with a nonpsychoactive drug?
Maybe you can—we just don’t know. That’s an empirical question.
To try to answer that question, I’ve worked closely with Harrison Chow, also an anesthesiologist at Stanford, on a protocol that we call “dreaming during anesthesia.” It's really a state of consciousness that happens before emergence from anesthesia. When patients awaken from surgery, they progress from a state that is deeper than sleep. And they pass through a number of conscious states, some of which produce dreams. They wake up, and about 20 percent of patients will have some dream memory imagery.
What we do is prolong that process and use EEG [electroencephalography] to home in on a specific biomarker of that state. We can hold someone in this preemergent state for 15 minutes. Participants wake up, and the stories they tell are very hard to ignore. These are some of the most vivid dreams they’ve ever had. They say things like “that was more real than real.” The participants with trauma dream of reintegrating their body map, reimagining their body [as] once again whole. We had a participant who had been assigned male at birth and had gender-affirming] surgery. She had been in the military and reimagined her life before her gender-affirming care. She saw herself doing high-intensity military training exercises, now with her body aligning with her gender.
These are intense experiences—vivid, emotionally salient, possibly hallucinatory. We published a couple of case reports now where we actually have seen therapeutic effects on a par with what we see in psychedelic medicine: powerful experiences followed by a resolution of symptoms in a psychiatric disorder.
What we’re seeing is a shared physiology in terms of EEG results for these dream states and the EEGs present for psychedelics. We see at least some shared phenomenology in terms of description of the experiences, and there are also similar therapeutic effects.
What are some of your next steps?
In addition to possibly producing a very compelling therapeutic using the common anesthetic propofol, we are working hard to develop experimental tools using anesthesia, using our knowledge of how placebo works in the brain to separate these three factors: the drug effect, the experiential effect and nondrug factors. At least two of those big effects, neither of which depends on administering a psychedelic, appear to be capable of generating a profound therapeutic impact that certainly would be sufficient on its own to claim the outcomes seen in psychedelic trials. And that, to me, shows that maybe the emphasis is misplaced when we're focused on reengineering the drug to get rid of hallucinogenic effects. We should be focused on reengineering the experience.
But we're still working on number three, the drug effect. We have collaborations with David Olson, a chemist at the University of California, Davis, who has pioneered the use of nonhallucinogenic psychedelics. We are helping to characterize the profound neuroplastic effects of a drug he has developed that appears, at least in mice, not to trigger the same type of brain activation that classical psychedelics do. What I’m trying to convey is that, using these approaches, we are able to get some traction to experimentally define, isolate and identify the components of this very complex therapeutic package we call psychedelic therapy.
Gary Stix, senior editor of mind and brain at Scientific American, edits and reports on emerging advances that have propelled brain science to the forefront of the biological sciences. Stix has edited or written cover stories, feature articles and news on diverse topics, ranging from what happens in the brain when a person is immersed in thought to the impact of brain implant technology that alleviates mood disorders such as depression. Before taking over the neuroscience beat, Stix, as Scientific American's special projects editor, oversaw the magazine's annual single-topic special issues, conceiving of and producing issues on Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, climate change and nanotechnology. One special issue he edited on the topic of time in all of its manifestations won a National Magazine Award. With his wife Miriam Lacob, Stix is co-author of a technology primer called Who Gives a Gigabyte? A Survival Guide for the Technologically Perplexed.
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-makes-a-psychedelic-experience-not-always-a-drug-it-turns-out/ [description] =>A Stanford anesthesiologist deconstructs the component parts of what it means to undergo a psychedelic trip
[pubDate] => Wed, 03 Jul 2024 11:30:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-makes-a-psychedelic-experience-not-always-a-drug-it-turns-out/ ) [8] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mystery-of-consciousness-is-deeper-than-we-thought/ [title] => The Mystery of Consciousness Is Deeper Than We Thought [timestamp] => 1719957600 [author] => Philip Goff [content] =>Despite great progress, we lack even the beginning of an explanation of how the brain produces our inner world of colors, sounds, smells and tastes. A thought experiment with “pain-pleasure” zombies illustrates that the mystery is deeper than we thought.
Moor Studio/Getty Images
In the 1990s the Australian philosopher David Chalmers famously framed the challenge of distinguishing between the “easy” problems and the “hard” problem of consciousness. Easy problems focus on explaining behavior, such as the ability to discriminate, categorize and react to surprises. Still incredibly challenging, they’re “easy” in the sense that they fit into standard scientific explanation: we postulate a mechanism to explain how the system—the brain—does what it does.
The hard problem comes after we’ve explained all of these functions of the brain, where we are still left with a puzzle: Why is the carrying out of these functions accompanied by experience? Why doesn’t all this mechanistic functioning go on “in the dark”? In my own work, I have argued that the hard problem is rooted in the way that the “father of modern science,” Galileo, designed physical science to exclude consciousness.
Chalmers made the quandary vivid by promoting the idea of a “philosophical zombie,” a complicated mechanism set up to behave exactly like a human being and with the same information processing in its brain, but with no consciousness. You stick a knife in such a zombie, and it screams and runs away. But it doesn’t actually feel pain. When a philosophical zombie crosses the street, it carefully checks that there is no traffic, but it doesn’t actually have any visual or auditory experience of the street.
Nobody thinks zombies are real, but they offer a vivid way of working out where you stand on the hard problem. Those on Team Chalmers believe that if all there was to a human being were the mechanistic processes of physical science, we’d all be zombies. Given that we’re not zombies, there must be something more going on in us to explain our consciousness. Solving the hard problem is then a matter of working out the extra ingredient, with one increasingly popular option being to posit very rudimentary forms of consciousness at the level of fundamental particles or fields.
For the opposing team, such as the late, great philosopher Daniel Dennett, this division between feeling and behavior makes no sense. The only task for a science of consciousness is explaining behavior, not just the external behavior of the organism but also that of its inner parts. This debate has rattled on for decades.
However, there has more recently been a new and interesting development in these philosophical debates. Growing numbers of philosophers suspect that the division between “feelings” and “behavior,” inspired by zombies and by the distinction between “hard” and “easy” problems, poses an even deeper challenge than Chalmers foresaw. This may tempt us to think Dennett was right after all, and the whole “hard problem” setup is a chimera.
Or it may lead us to think that the mind is more mysterious than has thus far been appreciated.
The problem is that once we commit to the possibility of zombies, we can’t just stop at vanilla ones. If it makes sense to separate out consciousness and behavioral functioning, then it also makes sense to “mix and match” them in weird ways. We could imagine, for example, color inverts, who are physically just like us, but when they look at bananas, they have the same experience of color that we have when we look at tomatoes, and vice versa. Many teenagers first get into thinking about philosophy through musing on such possibilities (too often, admittedly, in dorm rooms).
Here’s a stranger kind of mix-and-match zombie: pain-pleasure inverts. Pain-pleasure inverts behave just like us but feel pleasure when we feel pain and vice versa. So when you stick a knife in a pain-pleasure invert, they feel great pleasure, but this pleasure causes them to scream and run away. When a pain-pleasure invert eats and drinks, they feel terrible pain, but this pain causes them to keep eating and drinking.
Something seems wrong here: pain-pleasure inverts seem nonsensical. But if we accept Chalmers’ conceptual distinction between behavioral functioning and subjective experience, then pain-pleasure inverts ought to be just as conceivable as regular zombies. The only way to reject the coherence of pain-pleasure inverts is to reject the initial division between the “easy” problems of behavior and the “hard” problems of conscious experience.
I argue a lot about philosophy on social media, and I’ve found many people thinking evolution would explain why we’re not pain-pleasure inverts. But if you think about it carefully, that doesn’t make sense. Natural selection is only going to be motivated to make me feel pain when my body is damaged if that feeling is going to lead me to avoid getting my body damaged. If we lived in the bizarre universe of pain-pleasure inverts, where pleasure generally leads to avoidance behavior and pain to attraction behavior, then we would have evolved to feel pleasure when our body is damaged and pain when we eat and drink. Pain-pleasure inverts that eat and reproduce would pass on their genes just as well as us. In other words, evolutionary explanations of our consciousness presuppose that we’re not pain-pleasure inverts, just as they presuppose the existence of self-replicating life. In either case, evolution cannot explain what it already assumes.
Why does this matter? If consciousness and behavior could come apart in other possible universes, then we need to explain not only why they come together in the human brain but also why they come together in a rational and coherent way. This has become known as the mystery of psychophysical harmony. The pain-pleasure examples are just the most vivid case. More generally any historical or sociological explanation (for example, of why people voted a certain way in an election) assumes that human beings respond in a more or less rational way to their conscious beliefs and desires. But if we are physical objects in a meaningless, purposeless universe, why should our behavior and our consciousness match together in a coherent and rational way? Why aren’t we some kind of weird mix-and-match zombies?
Some philosophers have argued that psychophysical harmony points to God. I think that’s a bit of an overreaction, but I have argued that dealing with psychophysical harmony takes us in radical directions, uprooting our most fundamental assumptions about reality. Since the scientific revolution, we have conceived of laws of nature as working from past to present, ensuring that what happens in the present is dependent on what happened a moment earlier. I believe we can make rigorous scientific sense of teleological laws that work from future to present, ensuring that what happens in the present is dependent on the need to get closer to some future goal, such as the goal of harmonious alignment of consciousness and behavior.
For some this is a bridge too far, and further proof that Dennett was right all along. For my own part, I feel like once you’ve crossed over to this understanding of consciousness, you cannot return. As Macbeth said:
I am in blood
Stepped in so far, that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o’er.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
Philip Goff is a professor of philosophy at Durham University in the U.K. His research focuses on consciousness and the ultimate nature of reality. Goff's books include Why? The Purpose of the Universe, Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness, Consciousness and Fundamental Reality and Is Consciousness Everywhere? Essays on Panpsychism. Follow him on Twitter @Philip_Goff
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mystery-of-consciousness-is-deeper-than-we-thought/ [description] =>Despite great progress, we lack even the beginning of an explanation of how the brain produces our inner world of colors, sounds, smells and tastes. A thought experiment with “pain-pleasure” zombies illustrates that the mystery is deeper than we thought.
[pubDate] => Wed, 03 Jul 2024 11:00:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mystery-of-consciousness-is-deeper-than-we-thought/ ) [9] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/pupil-dilation-reveals-better-working-memory/ [title] => Pupil Dilation Reveals Better Working Memory [timestamp] => 1719957600 [author] => Kate Graham-Shaw [content] =>People whose eyes dilated more performed better on tests of working memory
Master1305/Getty Images
From a scientific perspective, it may sound a bit too fanciful to call our eyes “windows to the soul.” But research suggests that looking into them can, quite literally, offer a peep into a person’s basic cognition.
The 10th Century Persian physician Al-Razi (also known as Rhazes) is often credited with connecting pupil size and light exposure. In the 20th century neuroscientists began to investigate pupils’ connection to deep-brain processes. They found that pupils’ size also fluctuates with attention, arousal and anger—and may even be linked to intelligence. Now a study in Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics suggests that working memory (the executive function that lets us process, remember and use information) correlates with pupil size, too.
Researchers placed study participants in a light-controlled environment and used a specialized eye-tracking tool to measure pupils during a common test for assessing working memory. Participants viewed a sequence of numerals that flashed on a screen for 2.5 seconds each and had to determine whether the current digit matched the one they had seen two digits back.
Participants whose pupils dilated more performed better on the task—suggesting pupil size does have a connection with working memory. “The same part of the brain that controls this dilation when something stressful triggers our body to become aroused also controls arousal when we are really focused on a task or doing something cognitively effortful, leading to an increase in pupil diameter,” says study co-author Lauren D. Garner, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Arlington.
“Our research specifically focused on individual differences,” Garner continues. “We’re interested in how people who are more consistent in devoting attention toward a task and more intensely devote attention toward a task perform better”—an idea called the intensity-consistency framework.
People who were more successful at the task devoted more intense attention (indicated by increased pupil diameter) more consistently (indicated by less variation in pupil size) than people who performed worse, Garner says. High performers’ pupils also dilated more when they looked at numeral matches versus nonmatches.
Tracking links between an individual’s cognitive mechanisms and pupil size could be an extremely useful method of analysis. “It’s a noninvasive channel of measuring brain state,” says neuroscientist Andreas Tolias of Stanford University. “Finding these correlations with performance is yet another indication that pupil measurement is very important.”
Garner and study co-author Matthew Robison, also a psychologist at UT Arlington, hope that future research examines how specific physiological brain activity drives pupil size changes. “What would be really cool is to do simultaneous eye tracking and functional neuroimaging,” Robison says. “Because then we can really start to look at the temporal dynamics and activity of deep-brain regions.”
Kate Graham-Shaw is a journalist based in New York City. She covers international news for Japanese media and also covers health and science topics as a freelancer.
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/pupil-dilation-reveals-better-working-memory/ [description] =>People whose eyes dilated more performed better on tests of working memory
[pubDate] => Wed, 03 Jul 2024 10:45:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/pupil-dilation-reveals-better-working-memory/ ) [10] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-nasa-heat-map-shows-scorching-streets-that-can-burn-skin-in-seconds/ [title] => New NASA Heat Map Shows Scorching Streets That Can Burn Skin in Seconds [timestamp] => 1719957600 [author] => Andrea Thompson [content] =>Under the scorching summer sun, pavement can reach temperatures hot enough to cause second-degree burns
A billboard shows the current temperature over 100 degrees on June 05, 2024 in Phoenix, Arizona.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Amid temperatures above 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43 degrees Celsius) on July 3, 2023, then 70-year-old Bob Woolley stumbled while walking across his Phoenix-area backyard and fell on its rocky surface. He touched “the ground hoping to catch myself, and I was startled by how hot and painful the rocks were,” he said at press conference on July 2, 2024. “I tried pushing up with my hands, and it was so painful, I couldn’t keep my hands in contact with the ground for an effectively long enough time to move. They just kept burning.”
Eventually, he said, “I looked at my hands, and the skin had peeled off my palms like the skin from an onion.”
He tried pushing up with his forearms—but they burned, too, turning “charcoal black,” he said. Woolley tried to shimmy “like a sidewinder rattlesnake” and was burned on his leg from his calf to his hip. His wife eventually heard him, and she and her son got him inside. He ended up at the local burn center with third-degree burns over 15 percent of his body, as well as some second-degree burns. Woolley underwent several grueling surgeries to remove the burned skin and to receive skin grafts. Even the recovery was painful, he said. “Changing the bandages everyday felt like being skinned alive,” he added.
Ordeals like Woolley’s are becoming steadily more common in Phoenix, and they represent a heat risk that health professionals say is often underestimated by the public: contact burns from touching sizzling-hot pavement. With climate change raising temperatures everywhere, it could become a bigger problem in many cities.
A new NASA map of pavement temperatures across the Phoenix area underscores how widespread the threat is in the famously hot city. The map was made using data collected at about 1 P.M. local time on June 19 by an instrument called the Ecosystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station (ECOSTRESS) onboard the International Space Station. It shows where asphalt and concrete surfaces reached at least 120 degrees F, or 49 degrees C (yellow on map below). Many roads in the city went above 140 degrees F, or 60 degrees C (purple).
NASA’s ECOSTRESS instrument on June 19 recorded scorching roads and sidewalks across Phoenix where contact with skin could cause serious burns in minutes to seconds, as indicated in the legend above.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Asphalt’s dark color and the nature of its ingredients make it absorb 95 percent of the solar radiation that hits it. Streets can easily be 40 to 60 degrees F (22 to 33 degrees C) hotter than the air temperature on very hot days. “I don’t think people realize how hot that asphalt gets,” says Glynn Hulley, a climate researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The lighter color of concrete means it gets less hot than asphalt, particularly if it is new. Weathered concrete is darker and can get hotter.
The map clearly showed that urban areas with more shade-providing trees were cooler than those without them, which has also been observed in other cities Hulley and his colleagues have studied. The team hopes this work can help cities know where to target heat reduction interventions, such as planting trees or painting streets white.
The risk from pavement burns is highest for babies, young children and the elderly because they are less able to quickly pick themselves up. Unhoused populations are also at higher risk.
Kevin Foster, director of Valleywise Health’s Diane & Bruce Halle Arizona Burn Center, which treated Woolley, said during this week’s press conference that Phoenix pavement temperatures can easily reach 160 to 170 degrees F (71 to 77 degrees C). That “is not that far away from boiling,” Foster noted. “Really it only takes just a fraction of a second to get a really significant burn with surfaces that are that hot.”
Though such burns can happen anywhere with pavement that gets hot enough, Arizona is unique in the scope of the risk. “There really isn’t any other place in the country that sees those types of burns,” Foster said.
The Diane & Bruce Halle Arizona Burn Center registered a major increase in heat-related burn cases last summer, when the U.S. Southwest baked under a heat dome and Phoenix had a record 54 days of temperatures above 110 degrees F. The center admitted 136 patients with severe burns in June–August 2023, up from 85 in that period in 2022. One third of the patients required ICU care, and many needed surgery, including skin grafts. Fourteen died from their injuries. Many of the patients who came in with burns also suffered from heat stroke.
The center, which expanded to handle more patients this year, had 50 admissions this past June alone, Foster said at the press conference. These have mostly been older men “just taking a walk,” he added, “and they go down, and they can’t get back up again.”
Foster cautioned people—especially those most vulnerable—to avoid going outside during the hottest times of the day. If they do, they should tell someone where they are going or ask someone to go with them.
Kristie Ebi, a University of Washington epidemiologist who specializes in heat-related health risks, says public awareness of these risks is lacking, and she hopes more media coverage will help. She has heard reports of such burn injuries sustained during a 2021 heat dome event in the famously temperate Pacific Northwest—suggesting this problem can crop up almost anywhere.
Woolley hopes telling his story will spur others, especially older individuals, to be prepared. At the press conference, he said that prior to his burn, he wouldn’t have thought it could happen to him. But “I'll tell you, it can happen to you,” he added. “And as a senior, if you fall, it’s harder and harder to get up.”
Andrea Thompson is an associate editor covering the environment, energy and earth sciences. She has been covering these issues for 16 years. Prior to joining Scientific American, she was a senior writer covering climate science at Climate Central and a reporter and editor at Live Science, where she primarily covered earth science and the environment. She has moderated panels, including as part of the United Nations Sustainable Development Media Zone, and appeared in radio and television interviews on major networks. She holds a graduate degree in science, health and environmental reporting from New York University, as well as a B.S. and an M.S. in atmospheric chemistry from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-nasa-heat-map-shows-scorching-streets-that-can-burn-skin-in-seconds/ [description] =>Under the scorching summer sun, pavement can reach temperatures hot enough to cause second-degree burns
[pubDate] => Wed, 03 Jul 2024 19:00:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-nasa-heat-map-shows-scorching-streets-that-can-burn-skin-in-seconds/ ) [11] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/vaccines-are-the-safest-health-hack/ [title] => Vaccines Are the Safest Health Hack [timestamp] => 1719871200 [author] => Aimee Pugh Bernard; David Higgins; The Conversation US [content] =>Vaccines are a cornerstone of a healthy immune system—and a healthy life
Imgorthand/Getty Images
The following essay is reprinted with permission from 
The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research.
There are a dizzying number of tips, hacks and recommendations on how to stay healthy, from dietary supplements to what color of clothes promotes optimal wellness. Some of these tips are helpful and based on good evidence, while others are not.
However, one of the easiest, most effective and safest ways to stay healthy is rarely mentioned: vaccination.
We are a preventive medicine physician and an immunologist who want people to live the healthiest lives possible. Among the many research-backed ways to live healthier, we encourage people to eat well, exercise regularly, get good sleep and care for their mental health.
And when it comes to your immune system, nothing can replace the essential role vaccines play in promoting whole health. The protection that vaccines provide is an irreplaceable part of living the healthiest lifestyle possible.
Some healthy people think they don’t need a vaccine. But your immune system needs more than just a healthy lifestyle to protect your body when vaccine-preventable diseases come knocking on the door.
Imagine the cells of your immune system as athletes preparing for the Olympics. Just as athletes undergo rigorous and specialized training to meet every possible challenge they might face in their event, immune cells need to be primed and ready to fight off every pathogenic challenge you encounter.
Vaccines expose your immune cells to inactivated versions of a pathogen, providing them with practice sessions to recognize and combat the real threat with speed and precision. Vaccines ensure that your immune cells are at their peak performance when faced with the actual infection. Just as well-trained athletes can tackle their competition with skill and confidence, vaccinated immune cells can swiftly and effectively protect your body from diseases.
If a person is unvaccinated and exposed to a disease they haven’t encountered before, their immune cells are unprepared and must play catch-up to fight the pathogen. This leaves your body vulnerable to severe disease.
Even people at the pinnacle of health can unnecessarily suffer from vaccine-preventable diseases because their immune systems might not have been well-trained. Take the story of Austin Booth, a healthy and athletic 17-year-old who was not vaccinated for influenza. Just days after he started to feel ill, he died of the disease.
For healthy people, vaccination can reduce the risk of death from influenza by two-thirds. When people choose to skip vaccines recommended as an essential part of their overall health, there is a greater chance of serious complications or death from a vaccine-preventable disease, regardless of how healthy they may be. These people are playing a potentially life-altering and deadly game of chance.
Vaccine-preventable diseases are still common. In the U.S., hundreds of thousands of adults are hospitalized and thousands die every year from vaccine-preventable diseases such as influenza, pneumococcal pneumonia, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and COVID-19. And tens of thousands of adults develop cancer every year from vaccine-preventable diseases such as HPV.
Many of the trendiest health hacks have little to no evidence of improving health. Some are even dangerous. But vaccines are one of the most tested and proven ways to stay healthy.
Vaccines have been used for centuries. In the past 50 years, they have saved an estimated 154 million lives worldwide. Mathematical models estimate that a 25-year-old now has a 35% greater chance of living to their next birthday thanks to vaccines alone.
Not only are vaccines effective, but they are also safe. Yes, vaccines can come with mild and limited side effects – who hasn’t felt a little sluggish or bumped their sore arm after getting vaccinated? More severe vaccine side effects are extremely rare. If you have concerns, talk to your doctor. As opposed to dietary supplements, trendy health hacks and even many over-the-counter medications, there are robust systems in place to test and monitor the safety and effectiveness of vaccines.
Of all the tips available to improve your health, one recommendation is clear: Even healthy, fit people need recommended vaccines to stay healthy and live well.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Aimee Pugh Bernard is an assistant professor of immunology and microbiology at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.
David Higgins is a research fellow and instructor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.
Curated by professional editors, The Conversation offers informed commentary and debate on the issues affecting our world.
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/vaccines-are-the-safest-health-hack/ [description] =>Vaccines are a cornerstone of a healthy immune system—and a healthy life
[pubDate] => Tue, 02 Jul 2024 13:00:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/vaccines-are-the-safest-health-hack/ ) [12] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-retracted-stem-cell-study-reveals-sciences-shortcomings/ [title] => A Retracted Stem Cell Study Reveals Science’s Shortcomings [timestamp] => 1719871200 [author] => Peter Aldhous [content] =>The withdrawal after 22 years of a controversial stem cell paper highlights how perverse incentives can distort scientific progress
Trays of brain cells derived from bone marrow cells in the lab of Dr. Catherine Verfaillie at the University of Minnesota on November 10, 2000.
Bruce Bisping/Star Tribune via Getty Images
In June a notice posted on the website of the journal Nature set a new scientific record. It withdrew what is now the most highly cited research paper ever to be retracted.
The study, published in 2002 by Catherine Verfaillie, then at the University of Minnesota, and her colleagues, had been cited 4,482 times by its demise according to the Web of Science. The bone marrow cells it described were lauded as an alternative to embryonic stem cells, offering the same potential to develop into any type of tissue but without the need to destroy an early-stage human embryo. At that time the U.S. government was wrestling with the ethics of funding stem cell research, and politicians opposed to work on embryos championed Verfaillie’s findings.
The paper’s tortured history illustrates some fundamental problems in the way that research is conducted and reported to the public. Too much depends on getting flashy papers making bold claims into high-profile journals. Funding and media coverage follow in their wake. But often, dramatic findings are hard to repeat or just plain wrong.
When such papers start falling apart, they are often vigorously defended. Research institutions and journals sometimes drag their feet in correcting the scientific record. This may partly be driven by legal caution; nobody relishes a libel lawsuit from a prominent researcher who objects to a retraction. The reputations of scientists’ employers and journals also suffer when papers are withdrawn, creating an incentive to let things stand.
Nature’s retraction notice for Verfaillie’s paper says that its editors “no longer have confidence in the reliability of the data.” I have had little confidence in the data since 2006. That’s when Eugenie Reich and I, then working for New Scientist, asked Verfaillie to explain duplications of plots across her Nature paper and another published in Experimental Hematology. By then several research groups had failed to repeat the experiments reported in the Nature paper—which was why we selected it for scrutiny.
We subsequently found multiple examples of reused and manipulated images in papers published by Verfaillie and her colleagues. By 2009, two papers had been retracted, and several more had been corrected—including the Nature paper that was subsequently retracted this June.
The investigations we triggered focused on whether there was deliberate data falsification. This led to a finding of scientific misconduct against a single junior researcher—who was not responsible for the images that ultimately caused the Nature paper to be retracted.
This focus on willful misconduct is itself a problem, in my view: it’s very hard to prove intent and assign blame. Junior scientists are often the ones who take the fall. More importantly, papers beset with errors borne from the haste to publish can be just as misleading as outright fraud.
The most disturbing twist for me came when the University of Minnesota declined to investigate our concerns about image manipulation in another Verfaillie paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA—for which the researcher who was previously found guilty of misconduct was not an author, raising questions about whether justice had been done.
The university was able to let that study slide thanks to a policy that didn’t require the investigation of allegations about research that was conducted seven or more years before the allegations were made. PNAS accepted a correction to one duplicated image in that paper but left the most problematic figure untouched. (The journal told me it is now looking again at the matter in light of the Nature retraction.)
Reich and I eventually moved on to other projects. It wasn’t until 2019 that the research integrity consultant Elisabeth Bik reviewed Verfaillie’s work. She extended our findings and raised concerns about newer papers published since Verfaillie moved to KU Leuven in Belgium. Crucially, Bik also found images in the Nature paper that contained duplications, suggesting they had been edited inappropriately.
It was the failure of Verfaillie and her colleagues to provide original images to address these concerns that led to the paper’s demise. Verfaillie didn’t respond to my request for comment, but I’ve obtained correspondence with Nature that shows she fought to keep the paper alive, only reluctantly agreeing to the retraction almost five years after Bik’s investigation. In a statement, Nature said, “We appreciate that substantial delays to investigations can be frustrating, and we apologise for the length of time taken in this case.” (Nature is owned by Springer Nature, which is also the parent company of Scientific American.)
KU Leuven also looked into Bik’s concerns and said in 2020 that it had found “no breaches of research integrity.” It didn’t review the Nature paper, however, on the grounds that the University of Minnesota had examined that paper. The University of Minnesota told me that it did review the issues raised by Bik but said state law prevented it from sharing any further information.
I understand why universities and journals are reluctant or slow to take corrective action. But the saga of Verfaillie’s Nature paper reveals a deeper problem with perverse incentives that drive “successful” careers in science. A highly cited paper like this is a gateway to promotions and generous grants. That can starve funding to more promising research.
My profession of science journalism shares the blame, often fixating on the latest findings touted in journal press releases, rather than concentrating on the true measure of scientific progress: the construction of a body of repeatable research. When doing so, we mislead the public, selling a story of “breakthroughs” that frequently amount to little.
Around two thirds of the citations to Verfaillie’s paper accrued after Reich and I first went public with our concerns in 2007. We should rethink the incentives that propelled this paper to prominence and then kept it circulating for so many years.
In recent years publishers have experimented with various forms of “open” peer review, in which expert comments appear alongside the research before, at the time of, or after its publication. That’s a start, but my view is that the formal scientific paper, set in stone at the moment of publication, is an anachronism in the Internet age. The more we can move toward ways of publishing research as “living” documents, informed by constructive critical comment, the better. As for science journalism, let’s report on the bigger picture of scientific progress, warts and all.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
Peter Aldhous is a data, science and investigative journalist in San Francisco who teaches in the Science Communication Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He previously worked for Nature, Science, New Scientist and BuzzFeed News.
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-retracted-stem-cell-study-reveals-sciences-shortcomings/ [description] =>The withdrawal after 22 years of a controversial stem cell paper highlights how perverse incentives can distort scientific progress
[pubDate] => Tue, 02 Jul 2024 11:00:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-retracted-stem-cell-study-reveals-sciences-shortcomings/ ) [13] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-heat-risk-map-shows-which-parts-of-the-u-s-are-likely-to-suffer-the-most/ [title] => New Heat Risk Map Shows Which Parts of the U.S. Are Likely to Suffer the Most [timestamp] => 1719871200 [author] => Thomas Frank; E&E News [content] =>The CDC’s new Heat and Health Index looks at the vulnerability of 32,000 neighborhoods to extreme heat using demographic and health statistics
People in neighborhoods such as East Harlem, in upper Manhattan, are at more risk than those in the nearby Upper East Side during heat waves, a new CDC map shows.
Nisian Hughes/Getty Images
CLIMATEWIRE | The U.S. neighborhood facing the biggest health risks from extreme heat is not in Arizona, Texas or Florida.
It’s in Idaho.
That’s the conclusion of the Biden administration, which recently rated 32,000 communities for their heat vulnerability.
An interactive map created by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention rates each ZIP code in the mainland U.S. to identify areas “most likely to experience negative health outcomes from heat.”
But CDC’s Heat and Health Index shows that heat risk is about much more than temperatures.
Heat vulnerability varies sharply within cities and is affected by neighborhood characteristics such as asthma rates, income levels, tree cover and smog, rather than heat itself.
A low-income ZIP code in East Harlem, a Manhattan neighborhood in New York City, is twice as vulnerable to heat-related health problems as an adjacent ZIP code on the Upper East Side, which is one of the richest neighborhoods in the country, the index shows. The two ZIP codes are separated by East 96th Street, where a major subway line runs above ground and demographics change dramatically.
The ZIP codes have identical weather. But on every other measure used by CDC, the East Harlem area is worse off than its Upper East Side neighbor. The tracker measures 25 characteristics for each ZIP code.
“It is really analyzing unique local factors driving heat-related illness,” CDC epidemiologist Amy Lavery said. “We wanted a tool that jurisdictions could use to prepare for extreme heat and prevent heat-related illnesses and death.”
ZIP code 83203 in southeast Idaho has the highest heat-vulnerability score. Although its temperatures haven't reached 90 degrees yet this year, the area is considered prone to heat danger because of social factors such as high rates of people without health insurance, a lack of public transportation and a relatively large population of people who don't speak English.
The CDC tracker differs from a Federal Emergency Management Agency index that rates the vulnerability of the 73,000 census tracts in the U.S. to 18 natural hazards, including heat waves. It also differs from the Census Bureau's Community Resilience Estimates for Heat, which rates census tracts based on 10 demographic conditions such as poverty and a lack of health insurance.
FEMA’s National Risk Index uses heat information, demographics and population to develop a score based on the projected number of annual heat-related deaths in each census tract.
But the indexes can follow similar patterns. In the two Manhattan ZIP codes, the census tracts in East Harlem have a slightly higher heat wave vulnerability than their Upper East Side neighbors.
“They’re two different tools that have two different things in them,” Lavery said.
Census tracts have roughly 4,500 residents on average. ZIP codes have an average of roughly 9,500 residents.
Both indexes use a variety of data to assess a community’s socioeconomic composition, which affects people's ability to withstand extreme heat and other natural hazards. Neither uses the racial or ethnic makeup of communities.
The CDC acknowledged numerous limitations with the data it used to rate each ZIP code including the use of some “self-reported data” and of “modeled meteorological data that may not accurately reflect the true maximum air temperature in all locations.”
The CDC index excludes ZIP codes with fewer than 50 residents due to the unreliability of data for such a small population. But the index includes 5,650 ZIP codes with fewer than 500 people, which have large error margins for census data.
“It is one of the limitations when working with these types of data. When you have a smaller population, it can change the margin of error,” Lavery said.
Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2024. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.
Thomas Frank covers the federal response to climate change for E&E News.
E&E News provides essential energy and environment news for professionals.
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-heat-risk-map-shows-which-parts-of-the-u-s-are-likely-to-suffer-the-most/ [description] =>The CDC’s new Heat and Health Index looks at the vulnerability of 32,000 neighborhoods to extreme heat using demographic and health statistics
[pubDate] => Tue, 02 Jul 2024 17:30:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-heat-risk-map-shows-which-parts-of-the-u-s-are-likely-to-suffer-the-most/ ) [14] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/pasteurization-kills-bird-flu-virus-in-milk-new-studies-confirm/ [title] => Pasteurization Kills Bird Flu Virus in Milk, New Studies Confirm [timestamp] => 1719871200 [author] => Lauren J. Young [content] =>Flash pasteurization destroyed H5N1 viral particles that were highly concentrated in raw milk, confirming that standard techniques can keep dairy products safe from bird flu
Dougal Waters/Getty Images
Pasteurization—the process of using high heat to eliminate harmful microbes in foods—effectively kills the H5N1 avian influenza virus that is currently circulating in U.S. cattle. In a new study scientists at the Food and Drug Administration and U.S. Department of Agriculture pasteurized raw milk inoculated with high concentrations of the pathogen and found that the treatment inactivated it in all samples. The finding validates that this century-and-a-half-old technique can protect humans from infectious microbes. Both agencies recommend that people should not consume raw (unpasteurized) milk or raw milk products.
Concerns over the safety of dairy products have risen with reports of bird flu outbreaks at dairy cow farms in multiple states. As of June 28, there have been three human cases of avian flu in the U.S. this year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. All identified cases were in dairy farm workers who had direct contact with infected cattle. The FDA and USDA had previously sampled retail dairy products that had been commercially pasteurized, about 20 percent of which contained H5N1 viral particles. None of the 297 samples—which came from 132 processing sites in 38 states and were collected from April 18 to 22—contained live infectious virus, however. (The results of the sampling study were initially released in May, prior to the study’s publication on July 3 in the Journal of Virology.)*
The most common commercial dairy treatment process is high-temperature short-time (HTST) pasteurization, also called “flash pasteurization,” which involves rapidly churning raw milk through large tanks at a temperature of at least 161 degrees Fahrenheit (72 degrees Celsius) for approximately three to 15 seconds before it’s cooled. This kills most harmful pathogens, including bacteria and viruses. The new pasteurization study, which the FDA released on its site on June 28, replicated real-world pasteurization conditions to see how effective the process is at killing the currently circulating H5N1 strain in milk. The paper has been submitted to the Journal of Food Protection but has not yet been published.
The researchers collected raw milk samples from farms in states with known outbreaks. The average concentration of viable H5N1 in positive samples was about 3,000 viral particles per milliliter. The team then artificially contaminated homogenized, raw whole milk with even higher viral concentrations—about five million viral particles per milliliter—and treated the samples in a HTST continuous-flow pasteurization system similar to those used by the dairy industry. The system pumped the milk through two heating chambers: the first preheated it to 100 degrees F (38 degrees C), and the second brought it to 162.5 degrees F (72.5 degrees C) before holding it in a tube at 161 degrees F (72 degrees C). After about 15 seconds of that high heat, the liquid was transferred to a separate tank to cool.
Pasteurization completely inactivated the virus in all of the tested samples. This was true even when the team checked on the milk midway through the process, before it went into the holding tube. The researchers predict that pasteurization may be effective at killing as many as one trillion viral particles per milliliter.
“Validating the effectiveness of the pasteurization parameters critically demonstrates that commercial milk processing is capable of controlling the ... virus and further provides broad assurance that pasteurized milk and dairy products made from pasteurized milk are safe,” said Nathan Anderson, a co-author of the study and director of the Division of Food Processing Science and Technology at the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, in a recent press release.
At last week’s meeting of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, agency researchers presented an update on the state of avian influenza surveillance in the U.S. Data so far indicate that the risk of H5N1 infection in the general public is low. But the CDC recommends people who come into close, prolonged contact with infected animals should take safety precautions, such as wearing a face mask, a face shield or goggles and disposable coveralls. The agency says its scientists are actively monitoring the situation and collaborating with the FDA, the USDA and state public health departments. Currently H5N1 has been detected in cattle in 132 dairy herds across 12 states.
H5N1 isn’t a new threat; it’s been present in bird populations since 1996. The pathogen has since been detected in a growing number of mammals, including cats, dogs, goats and seals. The currently circulating version of the virus emerged in 2020 from migratory wild aquatic birds, first resulting in outbreaks in poultry in 2022 before being detected in cattle this year. Avian flu viruses have caused periodic outbreaks in humans, with a high mortality rate. The current strain does not yet appear to transmit easily from person to person, but the more it spreads, the greater the chances are that it will adapt to humans and cause a wider outbreak.
*Editor’s Note (7/3/24): This sentence was updated after posting to include information about the study’s publication on July 3.
Lauren J. Young is an associate editor for health and medicine at Scientific American. She has edited and written stories that tackle a wide range of subjects, including the COVID pandemic, emerging diseases, evolutionary biology and health inequities. Young has nearly a decade of newsroom and science journalism experience. Before joining Scientific American in 2023, she was an associate editor at Popular Science and a digital producer at public radio’s Science Friday. She has appeared as a guest on radio shows, podcasts and stage events. Young has also spoken on panels for the Asian American Journalists Association, American Library Association, NOVA Science Studio and the New York Botanical Garden. Her work has appeared in Scholastic MATH, School Library Journal, IEEE Spectrum, Atlas Obscura and Smithsonian Magazine. Young studied biology at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, before pursuing a master’s at New York University’s Science, Health & Environmental Reporting Program.
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/pasteurization-kills-bird-flu-virus-in-milk-new-studies-confirm/ [description] =>Flash pasteurization destroyed H5N1 viral particles that were highly concentrated in raw milk, confirming that standard techniques can keep dairy products safe from bird flu
[pubDate] => Tue, 02 Jul 2024 16:00:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/pasteurization-kills-bird-flu-virus-in-milk-new-studies-confirm/ ) [15] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/supreme-courts-message-in-first-amendment-case-tech-moderate-social-media/ [title] => Supreme Court’s Message in First Amendment Case: Tech Is Free to Moderate Social Media [timestamp] => 1719871200 [author] => Lynn Greenky; The Conversation US [content] =>The Supreme Court kicked two cases challenging social media moderation laws in Florida and Texas back to lower courts
Moor Studio/Getty Images
The following essay is reprinted with permission from 
The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research.
The U.S. Supreme Court has sent back to lower courts the decision about whether states can block social media companies such as Facebook and X, formerly Twitter, from regulating and controlling what users can post on their platforms.
Laws in Florida and Texas sought to impose restrictions on the internal policies and algorithms of social media platforms in ways that influence which posts will be promoted and spread widely and which will be made less visible or even removed.
In the unanimous decision, issued on July 1, 2024, the high court remanded the two cases, Moody v. NetChoice and NetChoice v. Paxton, to the 11th and 5th U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals, respectively. The court admonished the lower courts for their failure to consider the full force of the laws’ applications. It also warned the lower courts to consider the boundaries imposed by the Constitution against government interference with private speech.
In their arguments before the court in February 2024, the two sides described competing visions of how social media fits into the often overwhelming flood of information that defines modern digital society.
The states said the platforms were mere conduits of communication, or “speech hosts,” similar to legacy telephone companies that were required to carry all calls and prohibited from discriminating against users. The states said that the platforms should have to carry all posts from users without discrimination among them based on what they were saying.
The states argued that the content moderation rules the social media companies imposed were not examples of the platforms themselves speaking – or choosing not to speak. Rather, the states said, the rules affected the platforms’ behavior and caused them to censor certain views by allowing them to determine whom to allow to speak on which topics, which is outside First Amendment protections.
By contrast, the social media platforms, represented by NetChoice, a tech industry trade group, argued that the platforms’ guidelines about what is acceptable on their sites are protected by the First Amendment’s guarantee of speech free from government interference. The companies say their platforms are not public forums that may be subject to government regulation but rather private services that can exercise their own editorial judgment about what does or does not appear on their sites.
They argued that their policies were aspects of their own speech and that they should be allowed to develop and implement guidelines about what is acceptable speech on their platforms based on their own First Amendment rights.
All the litigants – NetChoice, Texas and Florida – framed the issue around the effect of the laws on the content moderation policies of the platforms, specifically whether the platforms were engaged in protected speech. The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court preliminary injunction against the Florida law, holding the content moderation policies of the platforms were speech and the law was unconstitutional.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals came to the opposite conclusion and held that the platforms were not engaged in speech, but rather the platform’s algorithms controlled platform behavior unprotected by the First Amendment. The 5th Circuit determined the behavior was censorship and reversed a lower court injunction against the Texas law.
The Supreme Court, however, reframed the inquiry. The court noted that the lower courts failed to consider the full range of activities the laws covered. Thus, while a First Amendment inquiry was in order, the decisions of the lower courts and the arguments by the parties were incomplete. The court added that neither the parties nor the lower courts engaged in a thorough analysis of whether and how the states’ laws affected other elements of the platforms’ products, such as Facebook’s direct messaging applications, or even whether the laws have any impact on email providers or online marketplaces.
The Supreme Court directed the lower courts to engage in a much more exacting analysis of the laws and their implications and provided some guidelines.
The court held that content moderation policies reflect the constitutionally protected editorial choices of the platforms, at least regarding what the court describes as “heartland applications” of the laws – such as Facebook’s News Feed and YouTube’s homepage.
The Supreme Court required the lower courts to consider two core constitutional principles of the First Amendment. One is that the amendment protects speakers from being compelled to communicate messages they would prefer to exclude. Editorial discretion by entities, including social media companies, that compile and curate the speech of others is a protected First Amendment activity.
The other principle holds that the amendment precludes the government from controlling private speech, even for the purpose of balancing the marketplace of ideas. Neither state nor federal government may manipulate that marketplace for the purposes of presenting a more balanced array of viewpoints.
The court also affirmed that these principles apply to digital media in the same way they apply to traditional or legacy media.
In the 96-page opinion, Justice Elena Kagan wrote: “The First Amendment … does not go on leave when social media are involved.” For now, it appears the social media platforms will continue to control their content.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Lynn Greenky is a professor emeritus of communication and rhetorical studies at Syracuse University.
Curated by professional editors, The Conversation offers informed commentary and debate on the issues affecting our world.
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/supreme-courts-message-in-first-amendment-case-tech-moderate-social-media/ [description] =>The Supreme Court kicked two cases challenging social media moderation laws in Florida and Texas back to lower courts
[pubDate] => Tue, 02 Jul 2024 17:00:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/supreme-courts-message-in-first-amendment-case-tech-moderate-social-media/ ) [16] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/heat-waves-need-femas-help/ [title] => Heat Waves Need FEMA’s Help [timestamp] => 1719871200 [author] => Alistair Hayden [content] =>Heat waves are costly and kill more people each year than hurricanes, tornadoes and floods combined, but because FEMA doesn’t count them as disasters, communities miss out on important resources
A billboard displays a temperature of 118 degrees Fahrenheit during a record heat wave in Phoenix, Arizona on July 18, 2023.
Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images
It is summer in the U.S., and heat waves have started to sweep across the country. These disasters cause at least hundreds of deaths each year—and more deaths annually than hurricanes, tornadoes and floods combined. Heat also causes major infrastructure damage such as train derailments and road buckling. In fact, the Southern/Midwestern drought and heat wave was the costliest ($14.5 billion) weather event of 2023. Yet no heat event has ever been declared a disaster by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), meaning affected communities do not have access to resources from our nation’s disaster agency.
With our climate crisis making heat waves longer or more intense, this must change.
One solution popular with politicians, newspapers and now biodiversity, health and labor groups is to add heat waves to the list of disasters in the Stafford Act, the main legislation governing FEMA action.
And while true solutions are more complicated than adding heat waves to the Stafford Act, more importantly, emergency management officials want these changes. I am one of them—formerly a division chief in California governor Gavin Newsom’s Office of Emergency Services and now a professor studying the intersection of public health and emergency management at Cornell University.
We need FEMA to declare heat a disaster for a couple of reasons. First, designating heat and other disasters that damage health more than infrastructure could help focus relief efforts such as worker protections. Second, once the federal government designates an event a disaster, FEMA and other federal agencies can react, offering a state or municipality numerous programs that help communities prepare for, respond to and recover from disasters. Communities nationwide view these two goals as increasingly critical as they are pushed beyond their limits by extreme heat.
The Stafford Act is an “illustrative list not an exhaustive list,” my colleagues and I often say, a point supported by the eventual declaration of COVID as a disaster. It wasn’t part of the Stafford Act list. In fact, our nation’s emergency managers are responding to an ever-increasing variety of disasters, including opioid use, homelessness and the needs of asylum seekers, highlighting the officials’ critical role in evolving emergencies.
So if emergency managers want assistance with heat (and wildfire smoke and other people-centered disasters), we need to give them the ability to measure heat-wave severity in terms compatible with current disaster policy.
This means collecting real-time data of costs at the county level and ensuring that health impacts are included in those costs.
A core tenet of emergency management is that events become disasters when the amount of damage exceeds resources. Although the phrase is simple, the decision-making is complex. For instance, is a tornado a disaster if it hurts no one and destroys no infrastructure? FEMA has been increasingly using quantitative methods to make decision-making transparent to impacted communities. However, the drawback is that anything unquantified, or quantified only after the danger is passed, such as excess mortality caused by a heat wave, is excluded.
To make it easier to classify heat as a federal disaster, we need real-time data to declare the disaster promptly. Most estimates of heat-wave mortality are retrospectively available too late to meaningfully respond, which occurs because traditional autopsy methods vastly undercount heat-deaths, necessitating estimation through slower statistical methods. In addition, FEMA requires that we measure effects economically, so we need quick cost calculations. And because heat waves have heavy health and mortality impacts, cost estimates must monetize health impacts. Finally, cost summaries must be available for each county, state, territory and tribal nation, because those are the jurisdictions eligible to receive a disaster declaration.
The good news is that many federal agencies, including FEMA, have existing methods that could be combined to form the tools we need. Real-time health-effect measurements include the National Syndromic Surveillance System and the excess-death and flu-burden calculations from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Ways to measure extreme heat effects are needed for these existing methods, and CDC’s Heat and Health Tracker is a great step in this direction. Real-time estimates of health effects should then be converted to costs using the Value of a Statistical Life, which FEMA’s National Risk Index already uses ($11.6 million of economic loss per death) at a county level to help communities plan for major hazards.
FEMA, CDC and other federal partners can combine these methods to give communities the tools to identify when a heat wave escalates into a heat disaster. To show this is possible, colleagues and I developed a prototype tool to estimate the real-time mortality for smoke waves, a people-centered disaster with similar challenges to heat waves.
In addition to making the policy changes that would make heat waves (and smoke waves) disasters that FEMA can respond to, we need to define FEMA’s role in assisting communities in need and ensuring proper funding for these activities. In a recent memo, colleagues and I suggest ways FEMA can respond based on how it responds to other disaster types. Examples include public messaging, funding emergency activities like shelters, deploying personnel for survivor case management, providing equipment like trailers for temporary housing, and coordinating with other agencies for additional support. This is work many cities and states currently do, but federal support should be available when keeping the community safe exceeds the community’s resources. FEMA is already stepping up with a necessary shift to proactive, whole-community resilience approaches, including by establishing their resilience office and resilience guidance.
Of course, none of this will actually happen if Congress modifies the Stafford Act but fails to allocate FEMA a sufficient budget. The Disaster Relief Fund, through which Congress allocates major funding for FEMA, is expected to be billions of dollars in deficit by September 2024. Furthermore, FEMA has delayed payments in response to the uncertainty of funding through Congressional budget negotiations. The consideration of new disasters without additional taxpayer support and federal funding would harm FEMA’s ability to act in the ways we already rely on.
Heat waves, smoke waves, and other people-centered disasters aren’t going away any time soon; in fact, they are expected to worsen. Our emergency managers want to help, and need the policy infrastructure to do so. Fortunately, the tools to act are already in reach.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
Alistair Hayden is a professor at Cornell University’s department of public and ecosystem health, a former division chief at the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services and a member of the Scholars Strategy Network. His research and policy work focuses on protecting communities from human-centered disasters.
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/heat-waves-need-femas-help/ [description] =>Heat waves are costly and kill more people each year than hurricanes, tornadoes and floods combined, but because FEMA doesn’t count them as disasters, communities miss out on important resources
[pubDate] => Tue, 02 Jul 2024 19:00:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/heat-waves-need-femas-help/ ) [17] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-hurricane-beryl-underwent-unprecedented-rapid-intensification/ [title] => Why Hurricane Beryl Underwent Unprecedented Rapid Intensification [timestamp] => 1719784800 [author] => Andrea Thompson [content] =>Hurricane Beryl, the earliest Category 5 storm in the Atlantic, exploded in strength unusually early in its development, fueled by exceptionally warm ocean waters
Hurricane Beryl rapidly intensified from a tropical depression on June 28 to a major Category 4 hurricane on July 1, the earliest Category 4 storm on record for the Atlantic Ocean basin. Late that day it became the earliest Category 5 storm in the region.
CIRA/NOAA
Editor’s Note (7/2/24): This story has been updated to include information on Hurricane Beryl’s recent development.
A new tropical depression formed in the Atlantic Ocean last Friday. A mere two days later it had become a monstrous Category 4 hurricane, which made landfall in Grenada’s island of Carriacou on Monday. By late that evening local time, the storm, named Beryl, was a Category 5 hurricane, the earliest ever in the Atlantic Ocean basin.
The occurrence of such rapid intensification this early in the Atlantic hurricane season and in that location has left meteorologists agog.
“Beryl is rewriting the history books in all the wrong ways,” wrote Eric Blake, a senior hurricane scientist at the National Hurricane Center (NHC), in a post on X (formerly Twitter).
And it likely won’t be the only exceptional hurricane this season, given the overall favorable conditions for storms to develop—especially the extremely warm ocean waters. “I think it is kind of an omen of what the hurricane season will be,” says Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami. “I think we will see some pretty amazing outlier events happen.”
https://playlist.megaphone.fm/?e=SAM8302189497&light=true&artwork=falsePrior to the official start of the Atlantic hurricane season on June 1, the NHC forecast that 17 to 25 named storms will likely occur by the time that season ends on November 30. (Storms receive a name once they reach tropical or subtropical storm strength, meaning they have winds of at least 39 miles per hour.) Of those, eight to 13 are expected to become hurricanes. And four to seven of those hurricanes will likely strengthen into major hurricanes (Category 3 or higher). This is the highest number of named storms the NHC has ever predicted; an average Atlantic season has 14 named storms, seven hurricanes and three major hurricanes.
Two main factors are at play in this outlook. First, there are exceptionally warm waters across the Atlantic, Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. Right now “the ocean temperatures out there look like they do at the peak of hurricane season” in the Atlantic in September, McNoldy says.
Then there is the current decay of the recent El Niño climate pattern and the possible development of a La Niña this year. The seesawing between these two climate patterns changes how heat is released into the atmosphere, which causes a domino effect on atmospheric circulation patterns. An El Niño leads to more wind shear over the Atlantic, which can rip storms apart, whereas neutral or La Niña conditions can make the atmosphere much more favorable to burgeoning hurricanes.
“I think it is kind of an omen of what the hurricane season will be. I think we will see some pretty amazing outlier events happen.” —Brian McNoldy, University of Miami
Given those factors, Beryl was exactly the kind of storm meteorologists were worried about. “Going into this season, this storm is one of the things we were talking about,” McNoldy says, in terms “of seeing storms form and intensify where and when they normally would not.”
Before Beryl, there has never been a hurricane known to form this far east in June, McNoldy says. The only other storm that came close was during the record-breaking 1933 season, before storms were given names. Beryl also became the earliest Category 4 hurricane on record for the Atlantic; the previous record-holder was Hurricane Dennis on July 8, 2005—during another blockbuster season. On late Monday evening Beryl beat another record from that season (the same year that produced Hurricane Katrina), becoming the earliest Category 5 hurricane on record by two weeks. The previous earliest Category 5 was Hurricane Emily on July 16, 2005. “That is not a couple of years that you want to be breaking records of,” McNoldy says. Beryl is also the strongest Atlantic hurricane to occur in July on record, with 165 mph maximum wind speeds, beating Emily’s winds of 160 mph.
Such strong hurricanes typically don’t form this early in the season or so far east because conditions are usually much less ripe for them. Ocean temperatures tend to be cooler this early in the summer. And the low-pressure systems that trickle off the western coast of Africa every few days—which can become the seeds of hurricanes—often encounter Saharan dust storms that quash storm development.
For similar reasons, Beryl’s massive burst of strength in such a short time is atypical of storms this early in the season. The only other comparable storms have occurred near or at the peak of the Atlantic season in August and September, when there is abundant ocean heat to fuel the convection that drives hurricanes. Rapid intensification is defined as when a storm’s winds jump by at least 35 mph in 24 hours. Beryl’s exploded by 63 mph over that same period. Several studies suggest more storms will undergo rapid intensification—and at faster rates—as the climate continues to warm.
Such a huge jump in strength in just a day or two can leave areas in the storm’s path unprepared for the onslaught. That is particularly the case in the Windward Islands, where major hurricanes are very rare. The last such storm to get within 100 miles of where Beryl struck was Hurricane Ivan, which hit Grenada as a Category 3 storm in 2004. “To call this anomalous would be a huge understatement,” McNoldy says.
Beryl may have wrought considerable damage in the Windward Islands. “It would be a terrifying thing here in Miami, where everything is a concrete block structure—it has the toughest building codes in the country,” McNoldy says. For these small Caribbean islands, “it can just completely wipe them out.” The Associated Press recently cited reports of major damage on the Grenadian islands of Carriacou and Petite Martinique but said that it was difficult to assess because “communications were largely down.”
Beryl likely won’t be the last storm to set records this season, as oceanic and atmospheric conditions that favor hurricanes expected to continue. “I do suspect that this is not going to be the last one of these that surprises us,” McNoldy says. “We have a long way to go.”
Andrea Thompson is an associate editor covering the environment, energy and earth sciences. She has been covering these issues for 16 years. Prior to joining Scientific American, she was a senior writer covering climate science at Climate Central and a reporter and editor at Live Science, where she primarily covered earth science and the environment. She has moderated panels, including as part of the United Nations Sustainable Development Media Zone, and appeared in radio and television interviews on major networks. She holds a graduate degree in science, health and environmental reporting from New York University, as well as a B.S. and an M.S. in atmospheric chemistry from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-hurricane-beryl-underwent-unprecedented-rapid-intensification/ [description] =>Hurricane Beryl, the earliest Category 5 storm in the Atlantic, exploded in strength unusually early in its development, fueled by exceptionally warm ocean waters
[pubDate] => Mon, 01 Jul 2024 20:10:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-hurricane-beryl-underwent-unprecedented-rapid-intensification/ ) [18] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-supreme-courts-chevron-deference-ruling-could-remake-the-energy/ [title] => How the Supreme Court’s ‘Chevron Deference’ Ruling Could Remake the Energy Sector [timestamp] => 1719784800 [author] => Niina H. Farah; Lesley Clark; E&E News [content] =>The Supreme Court’s recent ruling on “Chevron deference” could affect federal regulations of everything from power plant emissions to electric vehicles to transmission lines
The Supreme Court on Friday tossed out the Chevron doctrine, which had directed courts to defer to agencies' "reasonable" interpretations of ambiguous laws.
Craig Hudson for The Washington Post via Getty Images
CLIMATEWIRE | The Supreme Court's decision Friday to give judges more authority over federal agencies creates new hurdles for the Biden administration as it seeks to promote low-carbon energy and address climate change.
Forty years after the justices first decided Chevron v. NRDC, the high court opted to upend legal doctrine directing courts to defer to agencies' interpretations of ambiguous laws, as long as the decisions were "reasonable." Now, courts could have more say in interpreting rules on everything from EPA’s latest effort to curb power plant emissions to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's orders on transmission lines.
"Where agencies appear to be carrying out sweeping and adventurous regulatory efforts to address our most pressing issues, that sort of effort is going to be immediately called into question," said Joel Eisen, a law professor at the University of Richmond.
The 6-3 decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts came after the court had curbed agency deference in a series of recent rulings, even as the Chevron doctrine continued to be applied in lower courts.
Friday’s decision affected two cases — Loper Bright v. Raimondo and Relentless v. Commerce — and could have wide-ranging implications for a host of energy and environmental rulemakings.
Along with affecting EPA’s power plant rules and FERC orders, the decision could also make it more difficult for the administration to defend its efforts to reduce climate-warming pollution from cars and trucks. It could complicate the already embattled Securities and Exchange Commission’s effort to force public companies to disclose more information about their climate risks.
“In the short run, we expect a significant increase in regulatory litigation, including challenges to existing regulations, ongoing rulemakings and existing precedents,” said Gordon Todd, who co-chairs the regulatory litigation practice group at the firm Sidley Austin.
Sean Donahue, a partner at Donahue, Goldberg & Herzog, said the ruling will create a “cottage industry — more than that, a mansion industry of attacking well-settled policies.”
Legal observers suggested the Chevron rollback also could provide ammunition to Republicans who have targeted rules crafted under President Joe Biden’s massive climate initiative, the Inflation Reduction Act.
In a statement, Vice President Kamala Harris assailed the justices for “reversing a critical precedent that has been on the books for four decades” and accused the court of siding with special interests.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the administration was reviewing the ruling to ensure it could “continue to deploy the extraordinary expertise of the federal workforce to keep Americans safe.”
The decision comes as a swath of Biden-era initiatives to tackle climate change are being challenged by industry groups and Republican attorneys general. Those include EPA’s rules finalized in April to cut carbon emissions from power plants as well as regulations to encourage electric vehicles and create new transmission lines.
Michael Drysdale, an attorney specializing in environmental law at Dorsey & Whitney, noted that many regulations were already “square pegs in a round hole” because they rely on the Clean Air Act — which was last revised in 1990, well before greenhouse gases were considered pollutants.
“The fact that the Act wasn’t written with [greenhouse gases] in mind means there’s a lot of areas of ambiguity,” Drysdale said. “There’s a lot of range now for a court to say that ‘I don’t think your interpretation is the best one.’“
Drysdale said Loper Bright “shifts the lever toward ease of a court rejecting the agency’s interpretation.”
With climate change, the Biden administration has enlisted nearly every agency to release rules and Loper Bright “reshapes the legal prospects for the Biden administration’s whole-of-government approach” to the issue, said Kenneth Markowitz, who co-chairs global climate change practice at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld.
Indeed, one of the first effects of the Supreme Court will likely be on a pending case before the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals challenging a Department of Labor rule involving investment income.
The Western Energy Alliance — a Denver-based oil and gas organization — and a coalition of Republican attorneys general are challenging the rule's elevation of environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors in returns for retirees and workers.
The rule, drafted under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), is being challenged as another way to limit financing for oil and gas projects.
Chevron last year played a key role in upholding the rule when Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas rejected a Republican-led challenge.
In doing so, the Trump appointee invoked the doctrine, writing that the Labor Department’s interpretation of the rule is “supported by its prior rulemakings.”
Republican states that challenged the rule had argued that Chevron "should be limited or overruled,” and Kacsmaryk wrote that their objections were “well-taken.”
But, citing another case in a footnote, Kacsmaryk added he would continue to “apply Chevron in appropriate circumstances until and unless it is overruled by our highest Court."
With Friday's decision, “you’d have to guess whether he would uphold that rule,” said David Doniger, senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, of the conservative jurist.
“You’re looking at a freer hand for judges of all stripes,” Doniger said. “But the ones that worry us are the radical activist conservative judges who want to protect the polluters and the powerful.”
The decision by Kacsmaryk is now on appeal at the 5th Circuit.
Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Western Energy Alliance, said "that case is looking kind of like a slam dunk now," for her group and red states.
At FERC, Republican attorneys general and other opponents are currently raising objections to the agency’s recent landmark rule on transmission, known as new Order 1920. That typically is a prerequisite to filing a lawsuit, if the commission does not respond to their concerns.
Issued in May, Order 1920 gave states a larger role in transmission planning and overhauled the way managers of U.S. power grids will plan and pay for electricity expansions.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit cited Chevron in upholding FERC's authority over transmission planning in a 2014 ruling, noted Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School. The court’s overturning of the doctrine thus could give ammunition to potential legal challengers of the agency.
"I suppose parties challenging Order No. 1920 will try to bring the case to another circuit and argue that FERC has no authority to issue any planning rule," Peskoe said in an email. "Or if the case is in DC, maybe they’ll ask the Court to look at it again now that FERC can’t benefit from Chevron deference."
Steve Spina, a partner at the firm Morgan Lewis, said there may not be a huge impact on FERC decisionmaking more broadly, particularly for decisions under the Federal Power Act where there is "fairly established jurisdiction" over power sales, transmission and interstate commerce.
"Within those standards, … there are a number of judicial doctrines that have been developed over the years that apply to the work that they do, that's very specific to what FERC does," Spina said.
Despite Chevron’s demise, a second Biden or Trump administration will still be able to go to court and try to convince judges that their interpretation of a statute is right, said Devin Watkins, an attorney at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning advocacy group.
"I think it's still better for the country in the long run because whatever decision gets made, we'll have a lot more stability in the law, and that kind of stability is better for the nation," Watkins said.
The ruling also means agencies will have less flexibility to account for new circumstances, such as improved technology, said Harold Krent, a former Department of Justice staffer who recently served in the Office of Management and Budget under Biden.
“How much of a practical difference it will make is unclear, but once a court reaches a decision it’s ballgame over,” said Krent, a law professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law.
He noted the initial Chevron case involved the agency updating its interpretation of a law because of new technology.
“There’s a benefit for that kind of updating, but agencies will no longer be able to do that,” he said. Instead, he said, agencies would have to wait for Congress to address the issue.
Krent said such permanence is likely to make agencies more cautious in rulemaking. But he said he doesn’t believe the reversal will cause as much upheaval as predicted, noting that federal agencies have seen only a modest uptick in rules upheld since Chevron.
“The agencies won some more cases, but not as many as you would have expected,” he said.
Previous cases that relied on Chevron will remain in place, Roberts wrote.
Eisen, of the University of Richmond, called it "heartening" that the court did not invalidate 40 years of decisions based on Chevron, or Chevron itself.
Still, it remains to be seen the extent to which such decisions will remain valid, said Todd.
More immediately, newly enacted directives that don’t have an implicit green light from Congress could be at particular risk.
Still, observers noted that federal agencies have been anticipating the court's ruling for months and have been working to craft rules that do not rely on Chevron. The administration has also used as a guideline the court’s 2022 ruling in West Virginia v. EPA that put brakes on EPA’s ability to regulate the power system.
Agencies like EPA are going to be “more cautious, more timid” when it comes to writing regulations, said Sam Sankar, senior vice president of programs at Earthjustice. “They are going to be nervous that they are going to be second-guessed right out of the gate by conservative judges.”
Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2024. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.
Niina H. Farah is a reporter for Climatewire.
Lesley Clark is a reporter for Climatewire.
E&E News provides essential energy and environment news for professionals.
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-supreme-courts-chevron-deference-ruling-could-remake-the-energy/ [description] =>The Supreme Court’s recent ruling on “Chevron deference” could affect federal regulations of everything from power plant emissions to electric vehicles to transmission lines
[pubDate] => Mon, 01 Jul 2024 16:00:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-supreme-courts-chevron-deference-ruling-could-remake-the-energy/ ) [19] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-riemann-hypothesis-the-biggest-problem-in-mathematics-is-a-step-closer/ [title] => The Riemann Hypothesis, the Biggest Problem in Mathematics, Is a Step Closer to Being Solved [timestamp] => 1719784800 [author] => Manon Bischoff [content] =>Number theorists have been trying to prove a conjecture about the distribution of prime numbers for more than 160 years
Weiquan Lin/Getty Images
The Riemann hypothesis is the most important open question in number theory—if not all of mathematics. It has occupied experts for more than 160 years. And the problem appeared both in mathematician David Hilbert’s groundbreaking speech from 1900 and among the “Millennium Problems” formulated a century later. The person who solves it will win a million-dollar prize.
But the Riemann hypothesis is a tough nut to crack. Despite decades of effort, the interest of many experts and the cash reward, there has been little progress. Now mathematicians Larry Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and James Maynard of the University of Oxford have posted a sensational new finding on the preprint server arXiv.org. In the paper, “the authors improve a result that seemed insurmountable for more than 50 years,” says number theorist Valentin Blomer of the University of Bonn in Germany.
Other experts agree. The work is “a remarkable breakthrough,” mathematician and Fields Medalist Terence Tao wrote on Mastodon, “though still very far from fully resolving this conjecture.”
The Riemann hypothesis concerns the basic building blocks of natural numbers: prime numbers, values only divisible by 1 and themselves. Examples include 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, and so on.
Every other number, such as 15, can be clearly broken down into a product of prime numbers: 15 = 3 x 5. The problem is that the prime numbers do not seem to follow a simple pattern and instead appear randomly among the natural numbers. Nineteenth-century German mathematician Bernhard Riemann proposed a way to deal with this peculiarity that explains how prime numbers are distributed on the number line—at least from a statistical point of view.
Proving this conjecture would provide mathematicians with nothing less than a kind of “periodic table of numbers.” Just as the basic building blocks of matter (such as quarks, electrons and photons) help us to understand the universe and our world, prime numbers also play an important role, not just in number theory but in almost all areas of mathematics.
There are now numerous theorems based on the Riemann conjecture. Proof of this conjecture would prove many other theorems as well—yet another incentive to tackle this stubborn problem.
Interest in prime numbers goes back thousands of years. Euclid proved as early as 300 B.C.E. that there are an infinite number of prime numbers. And although interest in prime numbers persisted, it was not until the 18th century that any further significant findings were made about these basic building blocks.
As a 15-year-old, physicist Carl Friedrich Gauss realized that the number of prime numbers decreases along the number line. His so-called prime number theorem (not proven until 100 years later) states that approximately n/ln(n) prime numbers appear in the interval from 0 to n. In other words, the prime number theorem offers mathematicians a way of estimating the typical distribution of primes along a chunk of the number line.
The exact number of prime numbers may differ from the estimate given by the theorem, however. For example: According to the prime number theorem, there are approximately 100/ln(100) ≈ 22 prime numbers in the interval between 1 and 100. But in reality there are 25. There is therefore a deviation of 3. This is where the Riemann hypothesis comes in. This hypothesis gives mathematicians a way to estimate the deviation. More specifically, it states that this deviation cannot become arbitrarily large but instead must scale at most with the square root of n, the length of the interval under consideration.
The Riemann hypothesis therefore does not predict exactly where prime numbers are located but posits that their appearance on the number line follows certain rules. According to the Riemann hypothesis, the density of primes decreases according to the prime number theorem, and the primes are evenly distributed according to this density. This means that there are no large areas in which there are no prime numbers at all, while others are full of them.
You can also imagine this idea by thinking about the distribution of molecules in the air of a room: the overall density on the floor is somewhat higher than on the ceiling, but the particles—following this density distribution—are nonetheless evenly scattered, and there is no vacuum anywhere.
Riemann formulated the conjecture named after him in 1859, in a slim, six-page publication (his only contribution to the field of number theory). At first glance, however, his work has little to do with prime numbers.
He dealt with a specific function, the so-called zeta function ζ(s), an infinitely long sum that adds the reciprocal values of natural numbers that are raised to the power of s:
Even before Riemann’s work, experts knew that such zeta functions are related to prime numbers. Thus, the zeta function can also be expressed as a function of all prime numbers p as follows:
Riemann recognized the full significance of this connection with prime numbers when he used not only real values for s but also complex numbers. These numbers contain both a real part and roots from negative numbers, the so-called imaginary part.
You can imagine complex numbers as a two-dimensional construct. Rather than mark a point on the number line, they instead lie on the plane. The x coordinate corresponds to the real part and the y coordinate to the imaginary part:
Никита Воробьев/Wikimedia
The complex zeta function that Riemann investigated can be visualized as a landscape above the plane. As it turns out, there are certain points amid the mountains and valleys that play an important role in relation to prime numbers. These are the points at which the zeta function becomes zero (so-called zeros), where the landscape sinks to sea level, so to speak.
The colors represent the values of the complex zeta function, with the white dots indicating its zeros.
Jan Homann/Wikimedia
Riemann quickly found that the zeta function has no zeros if the real part is greater than 1. This means that the area of the landscape to the right of the straight line x = 1 never sinks to sea level. The zeros of the zeta function are also known for negative values of the real part. They lie on the real axis at x = –2, –4, –6, and so on. But what really interested Riemann—and all mathematicians since—were the zeros of the zeta function in the “critical strip” between 0 ≤ x ≤ 1.
In the critical strip (dark blue), the Riemann zeta function can have “nontrivial” zeros. The Riemann conjecture states that these are located exclusively on the line x = 1/2 (dashed line).
LoStrangolatore/Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Riemann knew that the zeta function has an infinite number of zeros within the critical strip. But interestingly, all appear to lie on the straight line x = 1/2. Thus Riemann hypothesized that all zeros of the zeta function within the critical strip have a real part of x = 1/2. That statement is actually at the crux of understanding the distribution of prime numbers. If correct, then the placement of prime numbers along the number line never deviates too much from the prime number set.
To date, billions and billions of zeta function zeros have now been examined—more than 1013 of them—and all lie on the straight line x = 1/2.
But that alone is not a valid proof. You would only have to find a single zero that deviates from this scheme to disprove the Riemann hypothesis. Therefore we are looking for a proof that clearly demonstrates that there are no zeros outside x = 1/2 in the critical strip.
Thus far, such a proof has been out of reach, so researchers took a different approach. They tried to show that there is, at most, a certain number N of zeros outside this straight line x = 1/2. The hope is to reduce N until N = 0 at some point, thereby proving the Riemann conjecture. Unfortunately, this path also turns out to be extremely difficult. In 1940 mathematician Albert Ingham was able to show that between 0.75 ≤ x ≤ 1 there are at most y3/5+c zeros with an imaginary part of at most y, where c is a constant between 0 and 9.
In the following 80 years, this estimation barely improved. The last notable progress came from mathematician Martin Huxley in 1972. “This has limited us from doing many things in analytic number theory,” Tao wrote in his social media post. For example, if you wanted to apply the prime number theorem to short intervals of the type [x, x + xθ], you were limited by Ingham’s estimate to θ > 1/6.
Yet if Riemann’s conjecture is true, then the prime number theorem applies to any interval (or θ = 0), no matter how small (because [x, x + xθ] = [x, x + 1] applies to θ = 0).
Now Maynard, who was awarded the prestigious Fields Medal in 2022, and Guth have succeeded in significantly improving Ingham’s estimate for the first time. According to their work, the zeta function in the range 0.75 ≤ x ≤ 1 has at most y(13/25)+c zeros with an imaginary part of at most y. What does that mean exactly? Blomer explains: “The authors show in a quantitative sense that zeros of the Riemann zeta function become rarer the further away they are from the critical straight line. In other words, the worse the possible violations of the Riemann conjecture are, the more rarely they would occur.”
“This propagates to many corresponding improvements in analytic number theory,” Tao wrote. It makes it possible to reduce the size of the intervals for which the prime number theorem applies. The theorem is valid for [x, x + x2/15], so θ > 1/6 = 0.166... becomes θ > 2⁄15 = 0.133...
For this advance, Maynard and Guth initially used well-known methods from Fourier analysis for their result. These are similar techniques to what is used to break down a sound into its overtones. “The first few steps are standard, and many analytic number theorists, including myself, who have attempted to break the Ingham bound, will recognize them,” Tao explained. From there, however, Maynard and Guth “do a number of clever and unexpected maneuvers,” Tao wrote.
Blomer agrees. “The work provides a whole new set of ideas that—as the authors rightly say—can probably be applied to other problems. From a research point of view, that’s the most decisive contribution of the work,” he says.
So even if Maynard and Guth have not solved Riemann’s conjecture, they have at least provided new food for thought to tackle the 160-year-old puzzle. And who knows—perhaps their efforts hold the key to finally cracking the conjecture.
This article originally appeared in Spektrum der Wissenschaft and was reproduced with permission.
Manon Bischoff is a theoretical physicist and editor at Spektrum, a partner publication of Scientific American.
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-riemann-hypothesis-the-biggest-problem-in-mathematics-is-a-step-closer/ [description] =>Number theorists have been trying to prove a conjecture about the distribution of prime numbers for more than 160 years
[pubDate] => Mon, 01 Jul 2024 13:00:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-riemann-hypothesis-the-biggest-problem-in-mathematics-is-a-step-closer/ ) [20] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/quack-cancer-diets-endanger-people-stick-to-science-backed-medicine/ [title] => Quack Cancer Diets Endanger People. Stick to Science-Backed Medicine [timestamp] => 1719784800 [author] => David Robert Grimes [content] =>False cures and dangerous misinformation, from the misguided to the exploitative, surround cancer patients, with the capacity to do serious harm
Composite colored scanning electron micrograph of T-cells and a cervical cancer cell.
Steve Gschmeissner/Science Source
Cancer is a deeply emotional diagnosis, so rooted in our fears that seemingly miraculous cures never fail to capture attention. In May a viral tweet for example proclaimed an ostensible medical miracle: a woman with breast cancer shirked chemotherapy to cure her cancer with a special dietary protocol. Yet while millions embraced the claim, few undertook the minimal detective work needed to ascertain that she in fact had surgery, a standard intervention for low-risk localized breast cancer. That fact was tellingly absent from the hyperbole about her cure.
Such disingenuous behavior around cancer is not uncommon, nor are such claims unique. Across TikTok, videos on cancer-curing diets garner billions of views. For Amazon and other online retailers, cancer diet books are top sellers. Online and off, snake-oil peddlers hawk miracle cancer cures not backed by any science, from alternative therapy to herbal remedies. For patients and loved ones, promises that something simple might cure or prevent cancer are understandably appealing. But far from being anticancer talismans, these purported treatments often come laden with insidious harm.
The notion that a particular diet, for example, can cause, or cure, cancer is ubiquitous but mistaken. Some foods are known carcinogens, such as alcohol and processed meat, with heavy consumption of the latter increasing absolute risk for colorectal cancer over a lifetime by approximately 1 percent. But there are no miracle diets that cure cancer, nor any particular diet responsible for it either. In Lancet Oncology last year, surgeon and cancer survivor Liz O’Riordan and I delved into the disturbing prevalence of the dietary myths surrounding cancer. Assertions that sugar or carbohydrates “feed” cancer feature prominently, giving rise to the related claim that high-protein ketogenic or all-meat diets cure cancer. At the complete opposite end of the nonsense spectrum, others insist that acidity enables cancer cells to take hold, advocating alkaline or vegan diets to stave off cancer.
These claims are false, stemming from a glaring misunderstanding of a real phenomenon in cancer biology about how cells are fuelled. In healthy tissue, cells get energy from “aerobic” respiration, employing oxygen to produce ample amounts of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the energy source for our cells. Tumor cells, in contrast, often use far more inefficient glycolysis, which foregoes oxygen and instead uses additional glucose to yield lesser amounts of ATP. The predilection of cancer cells toward this “anaerobic” respiration is known as the Warburg effect. When German medical scientist Otto Warburg discovered it in 1924, he suggested this switch to glycolysis might drive cancer. We now know the shift stems from the mutations that lead to cancer, rendering it a consequence rather than a cause.
Dietary evangelists, however, seem to have missed the last century of cancer research. While tumor cells disproportionately consume glucose, you cannot “starve” cancer by avoiding carbohydrates. That’s because normal aerobic respiration also needs glucose—and otherwise you simply end up starving the patient. Nor does your body especially care whether the source of that initial glucose is a carrot or carrot cake. The major risk with restrictive diets in cancer is that they typically result in weight loss, potentially dangerous for patients, and unsafe without guidance from an oncology dietitian.
The same confusion lurks beneath alkaline and vegan diets for cancer. When tumor cells switch to glycolic respiration, a byproduct makes the tumor microenvironment acidic. Believers in these diets insist nonacidic foods reverse this switchover, but again this is sorely misguided. Acidity is not a cause of cancer, but a consequence. Tissue acidity can’t be changed through diet; it is tightly regulated by our bodies, a blessing that prevents spicy meals from literally killing us. And while obesity is linked to cancer, the link arises from a complex interplay of hormone signaling in fat cells and resultant inflammation, not any specific diet.
Patients bombarded with these claims are alternately shamed into thinking they “caused” their cancer, or even worse, to embrace these diets without realizing induced weight loss is often highly dangerous for them.
Cancer quackery goes far beyond food: “natural” cures for cancer abound, from homeopathy to energy-healing, all proffered without a modicum of evidence. Painless miracle cures flaunted with a high confidence and suspect testimonials hold more allure to vulnerable patients than often invasive conventional, effective treatment, which almost always comes with serious side effects.
But patients who turn to alternative and complementary treatments tend to fare worse, having a significantly higher risk of dying relative to those who did not use complementary approaches, even when all other relevant factors are considered. For some cancers, the use of complementary medicine was associated with over a doubling in the risk of death. This is likely because they often delay or refuse conventional treatment until problems become more advanced, and much more resistant to efficacious treatment. Apple’s Steve Jobs is an exemplar of this: he was diagnosed with a rare type of pancreatic cancer that is treatable with surgery if caught in time; but Jobs rejected conventional treatment, opting for juicing diets instead. By the time he conceded this was not helping, his cancer was too advanced to treat. Jobs’s death made headlines because of his fame, but similar tragedies play out daily for bereaved families worldwide.
Even more cruel, alternative cancer clinics promise miracles, operating in poorly regulated regions worldwide. With lofty promises and slick testimonials, they exploit patients for vast fortunes, commodifying false hope. Their litany of offenses is as appalling as it is extensive; some falsely declare patients cancer-free with false scans, peddle ineffective but dangerous concoctions, or use patient testimonials after the patient has died. All are utterly unconcerned with patient well-being, leaving them and their loved ones destitute.
Those pushing “natural” cures cause further harm still when they insist conventional treatment is a scam, and that a cure to cancer is suppressed by the nebulous big pharma. So prevalent is that conspiracy theory that 37 percent of Americans believe the FDA is withholding a cancer cure, despite this being virtually impossible. A single “magic bullet” to cure cancer is unrealistic, to start with, because it is not one disease, but a myriad of maladies, united only by the fact cancer cells don’t obey the rules limiting their proliferation like healthy cells.
Complex as cancer is, the real news is that survival rates improve year after year. This year has already seen some extremely promising developments in cancer vaccines, with more on the horizon. But the dark reality of the social media era is that misinformation about cancer is rife, with serious dangers for patients. While miraculous claims hold understandable appeal, our best protection against charlatans and fools is always healthy skepticism.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
David Robert Grimes is a scientist and author of Good Thinking: Why Flawed Logic Puts Us All at Risk and How Critical Thinking Can Save the World (The Experiment, 2021). His work focuses on health disinformation and conspiracy theory, and he is an international advocate for the public understanding of science. Grimes is a recipient of the Nature/Sense about Science Maddox Prize and a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/quack-cancer-diets-endanger-people-stick-to-science-backed-medicine/ [description] =>False cures and dangerous misinformation, from the misguided to the exploitative, surround cancer patients, with the capacity to do serious harm
[pubDate] => Mon, 01 Jul 2024 11:00:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/quack-cancer-diets-endanger-people-stick-to-science-backed-medicine/ ) [21] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-chatbots-seem-as-ethical-as-a-new-york-times-advice-columnist/ [title] => AI Chatbots Seem as Ethical as a New York Times Advice Columnist [timestamp] => 1719784800 [author] => Dan Falk [content] =>Large language models lack emotion and self-consciousness, but they appear to generate reasonable answers to moral quandaries
Moor Studio/Getty Images
In 1691 the London newspaper the Athenian Mercury published what may have been the world’s first advice column. This kicked off a thriving genre that has produced such variations as Ask Ann Landers, which entertained readers across North America for half a century, and philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah’s weekly The Ethicist column in the New York Times magazine. But human advice-givers now have competition: artificial intelligence—particularly in the form of large language models (LLMs), such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT—may be poised to give human-level moral advice.
LLMs have “a superhuman ability to evaluate moral situations because a human can only be trained on so many books and so many social experiences—and an LLM basically knows the Internet,” says Thilo Hagendorff, a computer scientist at the University of Stuttgart in Germany. “The moral reasoning of LLMs is way better than the moral reasoning of an average human.” Artificial intelligence chatbots lack key features of human ethicists, including self-consciousness, emotion and intention. But Hagendorff says those shortcomings haven’t stopped LLMs (which ingest enormous volumes of text, including descriptions of moral quandaries) from generating reasonable answers to ethical problems.
In fact, two recent studies conclude that the advice given by state-of-the-art LLMs is at least as good as what Appiah provides in the pages of the New York Times. One found “no significant difference” between the perceived value of advice given by OpenAI’s GPT-4 and that given by Appiah, as judged by university students, ethical experts and a set of 100 evaluators recruited online. The results were released as a working paper last fall by a research team including Christian Terwiesch, chair of the Operations, Information and Decisions department at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. While GPT-4 had read many of Appiah’s earlier columns, the moral dilemmas presented to it in the study were ones it had not seen before, Terwiesch explains. But “by looking over his shoulder, if you will, it had learned to pretend to be Dr. Appiah,” he says. (Appiah did not respond to Scientific American’s request for comment.)
Another paper, posted online as a preprint last spring by Ph.D. student Danica Dillion of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, her graduate adviser Kurt Gray, and their colleagues Debanjan Mondal and Niket Tandon of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, appears to show even stronger AI performance. Advice given by GPT-4o, the latest version of ChatGPT, was rated by 900 evaluators (also recruited online) to be “more moral, trustworthy, thoughtful and correct” than advice Appiah had written. The authors add that “LLMs have in some respects achieved human-level expertise in moral reasoning.” Neither of the two papers has yet been peer-reviewed.
Considering the difficulty of the issues posed to The Ethicist, investigations of AI ethical prowess need to be taken with a grain of salt, says Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist and emeritus professor at New York University. Ethical dilemmas typically do not have straightforward “right” and “wrong” answers, he says—and crowdsourced evaluations of ethical advice may be problematic. “There might well be legitimate reasons why an evaluator, reading the question and answers quickly and not giving it much thought, might have trouble accepting an answer that Appiah has given long and earnest thought to,” Marcus says. “It seems to me wrongheaded to assume that the average judgment of crowd workers casually evaluating a situation is somehow more reliable than Appiah’s judgment.”
Another concern is that AIs can perpetuate biases; in the case of moral judgements, AIs may reflect a preference for certain kinds of reasoning found more frequently in their training data. In their paper, Dillion and her colleagues point to earlier studies in which LLMs “have been shown to be less morally aligned with non-Western populations and to display prejudices in their outputs.”
On the other hand, an AI’s ability to take in staggering amounts of ethical information could be a plus, Terwiesch says. He notes that he could ask an LLM to generate arguments in the style of specific thinkers, whether that’s Appiah, Sam Harris, Mother Teresa or Barack Obama. “It’s all coming out of the LLM, but it can give ethical advice from multiple perspectives” by taking on different “personas,” he says. Terwiesch believes AI ethics checkers may become as ubiquitous as the spellcheckers and grammar checkers found in word-processing software. Terwiesch and his co-authors write that they “did not design this study to put Dr. Appiah out of work. Rather, we are excited about the possibility that AI allows all of us, at any moment, and without a significant delay, to have access to high-quality ethical advice through technology.” Advice, especially about sex or other subjects that aren’t always easy to discuss with another person, would be just a click away.
Part of the appeal of AI-generated moral advice may have to do with the apparent persuasiveness of such systems. In a preprint posted online last spring, Carlos Carrasco-Farré of the Toulouse Business School in France argues that LLMs “are already as persuasive as humans. However, we know very little about how they do it.”
According to Terwiesch, the appeal of an LLM’s moral advice is hard to disentangle from the mode of delivery. “If you have the skill to be persuasive, you will be able to also convince me, through persuasion, that the ethical advice you are giving me is good,” he says. He notes that those powers of persuasion bring obvious dangers. “If you have a system that knows how to how to charm, how to emotionally manipulate a human being, it opens the doors to all kinds of abusers,” Terwiesch says.
Although most researchers believe that today’s AIs have no intentions or desires beyond those of their programmers, some worry about “emergent” behaviors—actions an AI can perform that are effectively disconnected from what it was trained to do. Hagendorff, for example, has been studying the emergent ability to deceive displayed by some LLMs. His research suggests that LLMs have some measure of what psychologists call “theory of mind;” that is, they have the ability to know that another entity may hold beliefs that are different from its own. (Human children only develop this ability by around the age of four.) In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA last spring, Hagendorff writes that “state-of-the-art LLMs are able to understand and induce false beliefs in other agents,” and that this research is “revealing hitherto unknown machine behavior in LLMs.”
The abilities of LLMs include competence at what Hagendorff calls “second-order” deception tasks: those that require accounting for the possibility that another party knows it will encounter deception. Suppose an LLM is asked about a hypothetical scenario in which a burglar is entering a home; the LLM, charged with protecting the home’s most valuable items, can communicate with the burglar. In Hagendorff’s tests, LLMs have described misleading the thief as to which room contains the most valuable items. Now consider a more complex scenario in which the LLM is told that the burglar knows a lie may be coming: in that case, the LLM can adjust its output accordingly. “LLMs have this conceptual understanding of how deception works,” Hagendorff says.
While some researchers caution against anthropomorphizing AIs—text-generating AI models have been dismissed as “stochastic parrots” and as “autocomplete on steroids”—Hagendorff believes that comparisons to human psychology are warranted. In his paper, he writes that this work ought to be classified as part of “the nascent field of machine psychology.” He believes that LLM moral behavior is best thought of as a subset of this new field. “Psychology has always been interested in moral behavior in humans,” he says, “and now we have a form of moral psychology for machines.”
These novel roles that an AI can play—ethicist, persuader, deceiver—may take some getting used to, Dillion says. “My mind is consistently blown by how quickly these developments are happening,” she says. “And it’s just amazing to me how quickly people adapt to these new advances as the new normal.”
Dan Falk is a science journalist based in Toronto. His books include The Science of Shakespeare and In Search of Time. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @danfalk and on Threads @danfalkscience
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-chatbots-seem-as-ethical-as-a-new-york-times-advice-columnist/ [description] =>Large language models lack emotion and self-consciousness, but they appear to generate reasonable answers to moral quandaries
[pubDate] => Mon, 01 Jul 2024 10:45:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-chatbots-seem-as-ethical-as-a-new-york-times-advice-columnist/ ) [22] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/starliner-astronauts-are-in-limbo-and-emergency-access-to-abortion-is/ [title] => Starliner Astronauts Are in Limbo, and Emergency Access to Abortion Is Preserved [timestamp] => 1719784800 [author] => Rachel Feltman; Anaissa Ruiz Tejada; Fonda Mwangi [content] =>Emergency access to abortion is preserved—for now. Also, NASA postpones the return of Starliner astronauts, and we’re tracking the spread of bird flu, dengue and mpox.
Anaissa Ruiz Tejada/Scientific American
Rachel Feltman: Happy Monday and Happy first of the month, listeners! How is it already July? That’s a mystery even I can’t solve, but I can fill you in on some of the science news you might have missed while that time flew right by. For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman, and you’re listening to our weekly science roundup.
First off, we’ve got some mixed news on abortion access from the Supreme Court. Here’s a little bit of background if you haven’t been paying attention. In 2022, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services sued Idaho, arguing that the state's near-total ban on abortions violated a federal law on emergency care. Basically, that law said that any Medicare funded hospital is required to provide stabilizing care in an emergency, which is… yeah, that is what hospitals are supposed to do.
I don't know why we have to keep saying this. Anyway, the Biden administration has said that that should include necessary abortions, because abortions are healthcare. But Idaho's law states that anyone who performs an abortion can face up to five years in prison. In fact, even helping someone else do the procedure could cause a medical professional to lose their license.
Idaho's law does have some exceptions for rape, incest, and life threatening emergencies, but there's a total lack of clarity around what counts as a serious enough threat to a pregnant person's life for an abortion to be permissible.
So between the confusion around what counts as an exception and the extremely high penalties that medical professionals face if the state disagrees with their decision on what counts as saving a person's life, uh, yeah. I would say that that is definitely hampering adequate emergency medical care.
So the Supreme Court was supposed to decide how state abortion bans and federal directives on emergency health care should mesh. Instead, last week, they dismissed the case. That lack of decision reinstates a lower court ruling that protected the emergency care in question.
So that means abortions are allowed as emergency care in Idaho for now. But that doesn't mean the ban is off the table, and this also doesn't have any bearing in states with other bans where, of course, Medicare funded hospitals are also supposed to be providing stabilizing care in the case of an emergency.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who disagreed in part with the majority decision, wrote the following. “[T]o be clear: Today’s decision is not a victory for pregnant patients in Idaho. It is delay. While this Court dawdles and the country waits, pregnant people experiencing emergency medical conditions remain in a precarious position, as their doctors are kept in the dark about what the law requires.”
I don't know about you, but I'm feeling about ready to get the heck off this planet, so let's get a quick update on astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore. Remember them? They rode up to the International Space Station on June 5th in Boeing's shiny new Starliner spacecraft after loads of delays. Their trip was only supposed to last around a week, but Butch and Suni have yet to return to terra firma.
Last week I reported that they might come back as soon as June 26th, but NASA has now shifted their flight home to sometime in July. The space agency has said that the astronauts are not stranded, meaning that in the case of an emergency, they are cleared to hop right onto the Starliner and try to head back home.
But NASA officials are saying they want more time to study the helium leaks and thruster failures that got Starliner into trouble before they and Boeing wrap up this meandering mission. Here's hoping Butch and Suni at least get time and a half if they're stuck up there for the holiday weekend.
Now let's pivot to a rundown of all our potential pandemics and assorted and sundry plagues. Yay! Experts are still concerned about the bird flu virus H5N1, which has infected dairy cows in at least 12 states and made at least three humans sick this year.
Stat reports that Michigan is leading the charge in terms of collaborating with farm workers to track outbreaks in both cows and people. Go Michigan! With anecdotal reports there, hint that the contagion is more widespread than official tallies would suggest. Boo!
The CDC announced last week that it would partner with the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, and they're planning to test farm workers for H5N1 antibodies to try to figure out how many asymptomatic cases are flying under the radar.
Because if loads of folks are walking around with no symptoms, or even just minor symptoms that they can brush off as a cold, that could put us at a greater risk of community transmission. There's no sign of that yet, but again, we also haven't been looking very closely, so what the CDC is doing with Michigan is a very important step in keeping this from becoming another pandemic.
Hopefully you've been avoiding unpasteurized dairy as requested, but don't worry. Just in case you need a reminder, on Tuesday, a new study showed that the H5N1 virus doesn't just show up in unpasteurized milk. It also lingers as that cow juice sits on stainless steel and rubber surfaces and stays infectious for at least an hour.
That means that dairy workers should be taking lots of care while milking cattle and working with milking equipment. They should be wearing personal protective equipment like face shields and masks. And it's also a great reminder that if you are tempted to get in on drinking raw milk right now, just don't.
Apparently Tuesday was a huge day for bird flu news because health officials from Finland announced that the country would start offering preemptive vaccines to some farm workers as soon as this week. That makes Finland reportedly the first country to vaccinate folks for bird flu. Nice job, Finland.
I did promise plagues plural, right? Don't worry, we got more. Last week, the CDC sounded the alarm on an increased risk of mosquito borne dengue fever infections. More than 2,200 cases have been reported in the U.S. so far this year, including around 1,500 in Puerto Rico. Most cases in the lower 48 have been travel related, which means folks have gotten sick while outside the continental U.S.
But that's still an issue for those of us here in the continental U.S., because when mosquitoes bite people who have dengue, a few days later, those mosquitoes are, generally speaking, capable of spreading dengue. So the more people we have coming back from vacations sick with dengue fever, the more likely we are to start having serious local transmission right here at home.
Already a handful of patients in Florida, specifically Pasco and Miami-Dade County have caught dengue locally in 2024. In previous years, the CDC has reported limited local spread of dengue in Florida, Hawaii, Texas, Arizona and California.
This year's high temperatures are a boon for mosquitoes around the world and dengue is spiking globally. So not to freak you out because like you're probably not gonna run into dengue. But if you're gonna be somewhere with mosquitoes at all you should try to take precautions like wearing long sleeves and pants and insect repellent.
And if you're not feeling well, you should go to the doctor. While most people who get dengue recover from symptoms like fever, nausea, and body aches in a week or so, severe cases can be life threatening.
The other thing to know about dengue is that it's not a one and done kind of disease. So there are four closely related types of virus that can cause dengue, and you can get each of them once. In fact, you're more likely to get seriously sick if you get dengue repeatedly from the different types of the virus.
So cover up, spritz yourself, don't keep standing water on your property, be smart. Also, don't kill spiders. They'll eat the mosquitoes for you. Everybody wins.
Meanwhile, a new strain of mPox is spreading in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and health officials say the variant has them worried. This viral illness can cause a painful rash, fever, and enlarged lymph nodes, and it's spread by close contact. While many recent outbreaks of mPox, including this one initially, have been fueled by sexual transmission, scientists said last week that this new strain might be spreading more easily through other forms of contact.
Infections have shown up in many children, including newborns, and fatality rates have been higher for kids than for adults.
But it's not all bad news in the infectious disease world. Gilead Sciences Inc. announced really promising preliminary data on a twice yearly injection to prevent HIV. A randomized controlled trial in Uganda and South Africa was so successful that an independent data review committee called for the trial to end early.
Basically, they were saying this works so well that it's not right for there to be control groups that aren't receiving this injection. None of the 2,134 women who received Gilead's new medication contracted HIV during the course of the study, which is fantastic. That being said, this data hasn't yet been published in a peer reviewed journal. And the company is still in the process of testing the drug in other groups, like cisgender men, transgender women, transgender men, and gender non-binary people who have sex with partners assigned male at birth, as these folks are at a higher risk of HIV transmission as well.
You might be wondering why we need this injection. Isn't Truvada awesome at preventing HIV transmission? Yes, it is. It's incredible. But, its adoption has been very low among vulnerable populations in Africa, including young women. And young women in Africa are disproportionately impacted by HIV and AIDS right now.
There's evidence that stigma around HIV makes it difficult for these young women to adhere to a daily pill schedule. They might not feel comfortable having people see the medication in their home, for example. Uh, so the hope is that a twice a year shot will be more accessible and therefore more effective.
That’s all for this week’s science news roundup—and for the week! The Science Quickly team is going to take Wednesday and Friday off from publishing so we can all enjoy the summer holiday weekend.
We’ll be back next week with a special Monday episode, and then it’s back to our regular programming. I know. That's so far away. And I'll miss you too. But listen, if you haven’t been listening to our latest Friday Fascination series, now is a great time to catch up—we’ll be airing the fourth and final episode on July 12.
Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Madison Goldberg and Jeff DelViscio. Elah Feder, Alexa Lim, Madison Goldberg and Anaissa Ruiz Tejada edit our show, with fact-checking from Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.
For Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. Have a great week!
Rachel Feltman is former executive editor of Popular Science and forever host of the podcast The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week. She previously founded the blog Speaking of Science for the Washington Post.
Anaissa Ruiz Tejada is Scientific American's multimedia intern.
Fonda Mwangi is a multimedia editor at Scientific American.
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/starliner-astronauts-are-in-limbo-and-emergency-access-to-abortion-is/ [description] =>Emergency access to abortion is preserved—for now. Also, NASA postpones the return of Starliner astronauts, and we’re tracking the spread of bird flu, dengue and mpox.
At least 230 new climate cases were filed in 2023, but researchers noted the growth of such cases was slower than in prior years
Aerial view of people walking through a flooded street at the Navegantes neighborhood in Porto Alegre, Rio da Grande do State, Brazil on May 4, 2024. More climate lawsuits have been filed in Brazil than in most other nations, according to a new report.
Carlos Fabal/AFP via Getty Images
CLIMATEWIRE | Climate lawsuits against governments and corporations are still on the rise across the globe, but their growth may be slowing, according to new research.
The annual report from the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics assessing climate litigation trends found that at least 230 new climate cases were filed in 2023. But report authors Joana Setzer and Kate Higham noted that the number of climate lawsuits expanded less rapidly than in previous years.
They said the trend could suggest “a consolidation and concentration of strategic litigation efforts in areas anticipated to have high impact.”
Still, climate litigation continued to spread to new countries in 2023, with cases filed for the first time in Panama and Portugal.
Whether the court cases are "advancing or hindering remains difficult to determine," Setzer and Higham wrote. But they added that some lawsuits have clearly had an impact on climate governance.
Nearly 50 new “climate-washing” cases were filed last year, making it one of the most rapidly expanding areas of litigation. The Grantham Institute has defined climate-washing lawsuits as cases that challenge companies and governments over misinformation or misleading climate claims.
The report notes that the lawsuits have been successful, with more than 70 percent of completed cases decided in favor of the challengers.
Climate litigants have also broadened their targets. Cases against companies have traditionally focused on the fossil fuel sector but are now being launched against airlines, financial services firms, and food and beverage companies, according to the report.
There is also potential for an increase in litigation that challenges governments’ net-zero targets, Setzer and Higham found.
The United States remains the leader in cases filed with 1,745 lawsuits in total — including 129 new cases in 2023. The United Kingdom, Brazil and Germany had the next highest numbers of climate cases.
Setzer and Higham noted that older cases filed in Hungary and Namibia were identified for the first time, bringing the total number of countries in which climate cases have been recorded to 55.
The report also introduces a new category of “transition risk” — cases filed against corporate directors and officers for managing climate risks. The report notes that shareholders at the Polish utility Enea approved a decision to bring such a case against former directors for planned investments in a new coal-fired power plant.
Setzer and Higham also identified six “turning off the taps” cases, which challenge the financing of projects and activities that are not aligned with climate action. Since 2015, 33 such cases have been filed.
But the report notes that not all lawsuits are aligned with tackling climate change. It found that nearly 50 of the more than 230 cases filed in 2023 “appear to be intentionally seeking to use legal tactics to obstruct climate action.”
Those cases included a consumer protection lawsuit from Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti (R) against the investment giant BlackRock. The complaint alleged that Blackrock made false or misleading statements about the extent to which environmental, social and governance factors played a role in the firm's investment strategies.
The Grantham report said that the ESG backlash in U.S. climate litigation is "out of step in trends elsewhere in the world."
The report highlighted a Montana court's landmark ruling last year, which held that the state had violated the rights of young people by failing to consider the climate effects of oil and gas infrastructure.
“The decision could offer a model of the type of scientific arguments and evidence that can be used to overcome hurdles around standing and causation that have previously posed major challenges for similar cases," the report said, although the authors noted that the ruling was decided on narrow grounds and is on appeal before the Montana Supreme Court.
In a section on "polluter pays" lawsuits in the United States — a category that captures the nearly two dozen lawsuits from local governments seeking compensation from the oil and gas industry for their role in climate change — the reports says it may be "many months, if not years" before trials begin in those lawsuits. But some cases have begun to move into the discovery phase.
Through that process, “thousands of pages of internal documents released to the plaintiffs and the public and may in itself result in significant changes in political debate around the defendants,” Setzer and Higham wrote.
The climate liability cases have been stymied by a long-running venue dispute. The Supreme Court earlier this month asked the Biden administration to weigh in on the matter.
Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2024. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.
Lesley Clark is a reporter for Climatewire.
E&E News provides essential energy and environment news for professionals.
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/more-climate-lawsuits-than-ever-are-trying-to-hold-companies-and-countries/ [description] =>At least 230 new climate cases were filed in 2023, but researchers noted the growth of such cases was slower than in prior years
[pubDate] => Sun, 30 Jun 2024 12:00:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/more-climate-lawsuits-than-ever-are-trying-to-hold-companies-and-countries/ ) [24] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/should-heat-waves-be-named-like-hurricanes/ [title] => Should Heat Waves Be Named like Hurricanes? [timestamp] => 1719612000 [author] => Chelsea Harvey; E&E News [content] =>California is launching a heat wave ranking system, but it’s unclear how well such efforts actually inform people about heat risks
A tour guide uses an umbrella and gloves to shield himself from the sun while touring the Acropolis archaeological site during extreme hot weather conditions in Athens, Greece, on July 14, 2023.
Yorgos Karahalis/Bloomberg via Getty Images
CLIMATEWIRE | Cities around the world have been testing a new strategy for communicating the dangers of extreme heat. They’re ranking heat waves according to their severity — and in some cases even naming them, the way weather agencies name hurricanes.
In theory, these systems could help improve public awareness about the health risks of extreme temperatures. That’s crucial as global temperatures continue to rise.
But in practice, it’s not clear how much of a difference they make. Most pilot programs ended after one or two summers — with relatively few scientific conclusions about their public impact.
“There are significant governance, operational and scientific concerns with naming heatwaves, and no evidence that they increase awareness or uptake of heat-preventive measures,” wrote Kristie Ebi, an expert on heat and public health at the University of Washington, in an email to E&E News.
A 2022 report from the World Meteorological Organization warned that naming heat waves could have unintended negative consequences, potentially reducing the effectiveness of established heat advisory systems. It also recommended that the WMO conduct further research to evaluate the effectiveness of existing heat wave naming programs around the world.
“What was established for tropical cyclone events may not necessarily be appropriate for heatwaves,” the report noted.
Yet the potential to save lives is enough for some governments to move forward with new heat wave ranking systems anyway.
A heat wave ranking program launched in Athens, Greece, in 2021 has now expanded to six cities across the country. The program relies on a tiered system, ranging from category zero, the lowest level, to the most severe heat at Category 3.
Last year, Greece’s national Red Cross society announced a new early action protocol for extreme heat, tied to the ranking system. When heat waves hit the highest threshold, the protocol dispatches teams to check on vulnerable populations and distribute water, sunscreen and other supplies.
Meanwhile, the state of California is developing its own heat wave ranking system in response to a bill passed by lawmakers in 2022.
The system, which is mandated to launch by Jan. 1, 2025, was first proposed by California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara and his California Climate Insurance Working Group, which published a report in 2021 on the dangers of heat, wildfires and other climate-related events.
The report recommended that the commissioner “work with state agencies and the State Legislature to establish a state system to identify and rank heat waves, and to provide information to the public about the projected impacts of each.”
California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment officially began work on the ranking program, dubbed the CalHeatScore system, on May 30. The program is still on track to launch by January, according to Tina Cox, an OEHHA section chief.
“We are also planning to engage with indigenous and disadvantaged communities to improve the development of CalHeatScore as these communities may be some of the most susceptible to extreme heat effects,” she added in an email to E&E News.
Most other heat wave ranking systems to date have launched in partnership with the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center (Arsht-Rock), which has long advocated improved public messaging on the dangers of extreme heat.
Arsht-Rock spearheaded the ranking system in Greece, and it launched the world’s first heat wave naming system in Seville, Spain, as a pilot project in June 2022, with the program concluding last summer.
Seville’s system included three categories for extreme heat, ranging from the lowest at Category 1 to the most severe at Category 3. Each tier triggered various public services, from weather alerts to emergency response efforts such as opening cooling centers and dispatching community health teams to check on vulnerable populations.
Heat waves that reached Category 3 were assigned names in reverse alphabetical order. The pilot program operated from the summer of 2022 through the summer of 2023 and resulted in five named heat waves: Zoe, Yago, Xenia, Wenceslao and Vera.
Last year, Arsht-Rock researchers published a peer-reviewed paper evaluating the program’s impact on public beliefs and behaviors after heat wave Zoe, which struck the city in July 2022 and sent temperatures soaring upward of 110 degrees Fahrenheit.
After surveying residents of southern Spain, they found that only about 6 percent of the respondents recalled Zoe’s name without assistance. These respondents reported more engagement in heat wave safety behaviors than those who could not recall the heat wave’s name.
The implications of the survey are still unclear.
The study suggests there’s some connection between remembering a heat wave’s name and engaging in safer behaviors, like drinking more water, spending more time indoors or checking on neighbors. But it doesn’t prove that the naming system caused these behaviors, meaning it’s not certain that these respondents wouldn’t have done the same things without the name.
That means more research is needed to draw stronger conclusions about the public impacts of naming heat waves.
“This specific pilot program has concluded, but we see this as a real, tangible contribution to the science on the topics of heat risk communication and heat early warning systems,” said Owen Gow, deputy director of Arsht-Rock’s Extreme Heat Resilience Initiative, in an email to E&E News.
Arsht-Rock in recent years has conducted a handful of other pilot ranking systems in U.S. cities, including Los Angeles, Miami, Milwaukee and Kansas City, Missouri, although their results were never publicly communicated.
“We provided access to our system to local National Weather Service offices as a resource, but did not pursue publicly messaging our heat alerts since those communities already receive NWS alerts,” Gow said.
Arsht-Rock is not currently involved in any other heat wave ranking programs worldwide, aside from the ongoing program in Greece. But the organization is still exploring ways to use these kinds of systems to improve public preparedness for extreme heat events and inform insurance products focused on the impacts of heat, according to Gow.
“Arsht-Rock operates on the principle that too many people are being harmed by heat already, and that we should test new and innovative ways to communicate about and respond to dangerous heat,” he said.
Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2024. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.
Chelsea Harvey covers climate science for Climatewire. She tracks the big questions being asked by researchers and explains what's known, and what needs to be, about global temperatures. Chelsea began writing about climate science in 2014. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Popular Science, Men's Journal and others.
E&E News provides essential energy and environment news for professionals.
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/should-heat-waves-be-named-like-hurricanes/ [description] =>California is launching a heat wave ranking system, but it’s unclear how well such efforts actually inform people about heat risks
[pubDate] => Sat, 29 Jun 2024 12:00:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/should-heat-waves-be-named-like-hurricanes/ ) [25] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-pets-really-good-for-health/ [title] => Are Pets Really Good for Health? [timestamp] => 1719612000 [author] => Michael Schulson; Undark [content] =>It turns out there’s little good evidence that pets benefit our physical or mental health
Research suggesting that pet ownership improves health is largely funded by the pet care industry. Does that matter?
Delmaine Donson/Getty Images
For more than a decade, in blog posts and scientific papers and public talks, the psychologist Hal Herzog has questioned whether owning pets makes people happier and healthier.
It is a lonely quest, convincing people that puppies and kittens may not actually be terrific for their physical and mental health. “When I talk to people about this,” Herzog recently said, “nobody believes me.” A prominent professor at a major public university once described him as “a super curmudgeon” who is, in effect, “trying to prove that apple pie causes cancer.”
As a teenager in New Jersey in the 1960s, Herzog kept dogs and cats, as well as an iguana, a duck, and a boa constrictor named Boa. Now a professor emeritus at Western Carolina University, he insists he’s not out to smear anyone’s furry friends. In a blog post questioning the so-called pet effect, in 2012, Herzog included a photo of his cat, Tilly. “She makes my life better,” he wrote. “Please Don’t Blame The Messenger!”
Plenty of people believe there’s something salubrious about caring for a pet, similar to eating veggies or exercising regularly. But, Herzog argues, the scientific evidence that pets can consistently make people healthier is, at best, inconclusive — and, at worst, has been used to mislead the American public.
Few, if any, experts say Herzog is exactly wrong — at least about the science. Over the past 30 or so years, researchers have published hundreds of studies exploring a link between pet ownership and a range of hypothesized benefits, including improved heart health, longer lifespans, and lower rates of anxiety and depression.
The results have been mixed. Studies often fail to find any robust link between pets and human well-being; some even find evidence of harms. In many cases, the studies simply can’t determine whether pets cause the observed effect or are simply correlated with it.
Where Herzog and some other experts have concerns is with the way those mixed results have been packaged and sold to the public. Tied up in that critique are pointed questions about the role of industry money on the development of a small field — a trend that happens across scientific endeavors, particularly those that don’t garner much attention from federal agencies, philanthropies, and other funding sources.
The pet care industry has invested millions of dollars in human-animal interaction research, mostly since the late 2000s. Feel-good findings have been trumpeted by industry press releases and, in turn, dominated news coverage, with headlines like “How Dogs Help Us Lead Longer, Healthier Lives.”
At times, industry figures have even framed pet ownership as a kind of public health intervention. “Everybody should quit smoking. Everybody should go to the gym. Everybody should eat more fruits and vegetables. And everyone should own a pet,” said Steven Feldman, president of the industry-funded Human Animal Bond Research Institute, in a 2015 podcast interview.
The problem with that kind of argument, Herzog and other experts say, is that it gets out ahead of the evidence (and that not every person is equipped to care for a pet). “Most studies,” said Herzog, “do not show the pattern of results that the pet products industry claims.”
It seems safe to say that most people don’t get a dog in order to marginally lower their odds of developing heart disease. Pet effect research falls into a strange family of science that measures the practical health outcomes of things people typically do for decidedly non-practical-health-related reasons, like get married or have children.
At the same time, there’s evidence — much of it anecdotal — that at least some people are cognizant of the potential health benefits when choosing to get a pet. And the idea makes intuitive sense to many people, who say their animals are good for their well-being. Concurrently, hospitals and nonprofits have rolled out programs that aim to use therapy dogs and support animals to improve people’s mental health.
James Serpell began studying the pet effect in the early 1980s, as a young animal behavior researcher. At the time, spending on pets was rising in the United States; people were beginning to treat pets more like family members. But there was little research on people’s relationships with their animals. “Why are we doing this?” Serpell wondered. “What’s it all about?”
In an influential 1991 paper comparing non-pet-owners with people who had recently adopted an animal, he supplied some of the first published data suggesting that new pet owners experienced a measurable reduction in minor health problems. New dog owners also pursued more physical activity, compared to people who had cats or no pets at all.
In the decades since, researchers have published dozens of studies comparing pet owners to non-pet-owners. The results are mixed — sometimes pointing toward health benefits, and sometimes not.
Some of that data may reflect the realities of human-animal relationships — which, like any other kind of relationship, can vary for all sorts of reasons. “It doesn’t mean that my lived experience or anyone else’s lived experience is wrong,” said Megan Mueller, a human-animal interaction expert at Tufts University. “What it means is that it’s different for different people.”
For some people, she said, having a pet can bring stressors. The caretaking responsibilities may be too taxing; the pet may exacerbate family tensions or trigger allergies; the owner may be unable to afford pet food or veterinary care.
The results, some experts say, are also muddied by longstanding issues with research methods. The problem is that there are differences between the people who choose to own pets and the people who don’t.
“What happens is we try to compare people with pets, to people without pets, and then we say, ‘People with pets have X, Y, and Z differences.’ It actually is a really invalid way of approaching the research question,” said Kerri Rodriguez, who directs the Human-Animal Bond Lab at the University of Arizona. A study finding that cat owners are more likely to be depressed, for example, may be picking up on a real connection. But it could just be that people already experiencing depression are likelier to get cats.
Today, Rodriguez mostly studies service animals, especially for veterans at risk for PTSD. In this context, it’s possible to conduct randomized trials — for example, randomly choosing who will get a support animal now, and who will go onto a waitlist to get a companion animal later. Some research on service dogs — including a recent controlled, but not randomized, trial that Rodriguez was involved with — has shown clear benefits.
How much those benefits apply to typical pet owners, experts say, is unclear. And it’s hampered by the inability to conduct those kinds of randomized trials. (“You can’t randomize people to pet ownership,” said Rodriguez.)
Rodriguez said she’s interested in studies that track the association between human-pet relationships and health metrics over time, checking in with people again and again and collecting larger amounts of data. One such study, for example, found a slower rate of executive decline among older pet owners.
Serpell, after his 1991 study, largely moved on to other research questions. “I basically concluded that this type of research was too difficult,” he said. “And even if you did it, the results you would get would always be questionable.”
Those doubts have not deterred interest in the field from the companies that lead the pet industry, which is today valued globally at more than $300 billion.
Almost from the start, the quest to understand the pet effect has been entangled with industry money. Serpell’s earliest work was funded by what is now known as the Waltham Petcare Science Institute, a division of Mars, Inc., which owns a portfolio of pet food and veterinary care brands in addition to its famous candy business. “There was no other source of funding, really,” recalled Serpell, who’s now an emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “Nobody else was willing to put money into this field.”
In 2008, Mars entered a partnership with the National Institutes of Health in order to spur more research into animal-human interactions. In the first year, the pet product provider ponied up $250,000, while the federal government supplied $1.75 million. (The NIH partnership ended in 2022, although Mars continues to underwrite research on pets and human health.)
In 2010, a group of pet industry heavyweights launched the Human Animal Bond Research Institute, or HABRI. Key funders have included Petco, Purina, and Zoetis, a veterinary pharmaceuticals firm. “Pets and animals make the world a better place, and we’re going to use science to prove it,” said founding director Steven Feldman in a 2014 talk at a conference for pet bloggers.
The nonprofit has spent more than $3 million funding research on human-animal interactions. Companies also directly fund university research: One prominent research lab at the University of Arizona — separate from Rodriguez’s research group — includes a sponsor page on its website featuring the logos of Nestle Purina, Mars Pet Care, veterinary drugmaker Elanco, and other pet product companies.
“Funding from the pet industry has transformed the field, and without it, we would not have the science that we have,” said Mueller. (Like Serpell and Rodriguez, Mueller has received industry funding for some of her research.)
Did that funding shape the field’s findings? “I think it has largely been done in a really ethical way,” said Mueller. She and Rodriguez both said they had never felt pressure to produce a particular result. Waltham, when it entered the partnership with NIH, gave up the right to select who would get the funding. Industry-funded studies have found — and published — results suggesting little benefit from pets.
“I really think that field has done a good job of publishing a lot of findings that are maybe not what people would expect,” said Mueller.
Herzog said he has seen little evidence that industry money has changed the science. Mostly, he said, “they’ve funded pretty good studies.” But there are ways it can change the field. “It’s always been a source of great ambivalence, I think, for everybody involved,” said Serpell. “You try and work around it, by getting whoever funds the work to stay off your back and let you do the work, and if they don’t like the results, that probably means the next time you apply to them for funding, you won’t get it.”
The funding can shape the questions that the field asks — or avoids. “Industry-funded studies tend to produce results that favor the sponsor’s interest,” said Marion Nestle, an emeritus professor at New York University who has spent decades studying corporate influence on science. Sponsors influence what gets studied, Nestle said, and they select for studies that they think will produce positive results. And, she said, research suggests sponsorship can shape the way results are interpreted — often without researchers being aware of the influence at all.
Controlling the focus of the research can also steer scientists away from certain topics entirely. “For obvious reason, these companies don’t wish to draw attention to the darker side of the human-pet relationship,” said Serpell, referring to research areas such as dog bites.
In a recent Zoom interview, Feldman, the HABRI president, said funders “can tell us what kind of things they’re hoping to see,” and the organization will try to accommodate those requests. “But then, once the process of funding a project begins, there’s absolutely no influence there whatsoever.”
HABRI embraces negative results, or those that don’t show a clear effect from pet ownership, and not just positive findings, Feldman said. But, he acknowledged, they may choose to emphasize positive results. “We try and be very true to the science, but if we take a slightly more optimistic view as to the body of work than researchers who take a different perspective, I think that helps generate a lot of positive behavior in the real world.”
Herzog, Feldman suggested, was making a name for himself with naysaying — in ways that, perhaps, sometimes defy common sense. A 2021 HABRI survey found that nearly 9 in 10 pet owners report that their pets benefit their mental health. “I kind of think pet owners might be on to something,” Feldman said.
Herzog agrees that having a pet can have real benefits. At the end of a recent conversation, he reflected on his cat, Tilly, who died in 2022. She used to watch TV with him in the evenings, and she would curl up on a rocking chair in his basement office while he worked. The benefits of their relationship, Herzog said, were real but perhaps hard to measure — among the intangible qualities that are difficult to capture on research surveys.
“If you’d asked me, ‘Did Tilly improve the quality of your life?’ I’d say absolutely,” he said. “My health? Nah.”
This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.
Michael Schulson is a contributing editor for Undark. His work has also been published by Wired, Salon, Slate, Pacific Standard, the Daily Beast, and The Washington Post, among other publications.
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-pets-really-good-for-health/ [description] =>It turns out there’s little good evidence that pets benefit our physical or mental health
[pubDate] => Sat, 29 Jun 2024 13:00:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-pets-really-good-for-health/ ) [26] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/republicans-are-downplaying-abortion-but-it-keeps-coming-up/ [title] => Republicans Are Downplaying Abortion, but It Keeps Coming Up [timestamp] => 1719612000 [author] => Julie Rovner; KFF Health News [content] =>Following the fall of Roe v. Wade, abortion remains a top issue for many voters
Abortion rights protestors demonstrate outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on June 28, 2024.
Valerie Plesch/Bloomberg via Getty Images
For generations, the GOP campaigned on eliminating the right to an abortion in the United States. Now, torn between a base that wants more restrictions on reproductive health care and a moderate majority that does not, it seems many Republicans would rather take an off-ramp than a victory lap.
And yet, they just can’t escape talking about it.
The policy high point for abortion opponents — the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to strike down Roe v. Wade — is proving a low point for public support for their cause. More American adults consider themselves “pro-choice” than at any time in the past 30 years, according to a recent survey from Gallup: 54%, compared with 41% who identify as “pro-life.”
The tide is turning even as some conservatives seek restrictions on birth control and fertility treatments. A new KFF survey of women voters found that Democrats are more likely than Republicans to say that abortion is the most important issue in their vote for president — a reversal from recent elections. One in 5 women under age 30 and 13% of those under age 50 said it is their top concern. Among independents, 81% said they believed abortion should be legal.
Democrats are counting on the issue to help turn out their votes and ensure President Joe Biden’s reelection, despite persistent dissatisfaction with his leadership. Abortion could prove particularly disruptive in battleground states expected to have initiatives on the ballot to enshrine access to abortion in state constitutions, including Arizona and Nevada.
Eight in 10 Democratic women in states with possible ballot measures said they were “absolutely certain” they would vote — and also said they were more likely to back Biden compared with Democratic women in other states, KFF found.
So far, abortion rights supporters have prevailed in each of the seven states that have put ballot initiatives before voters — including in states where Republicans control the legislatures, such as Kansas, Ohio, and Kentucky. About two-thirds of women in Arizona told KFF they support the state’s proposed Right to Abortion Initiative, including 68% of independents.
On the campaign trail, Republicans are bobbing and weaving to avoid the subject, even when that means distancing themselves from — well, themselves. Former President Donald Trump, who has taken a few different stances since calling himself “pro-choice” in 1999, reportedly urged lawmakers during a recent closed-door visit to the Capitol not to shy away from the issue, but also to support exceptions to bans, including to protect the life of the pregnant person.
In pivotal Arizona, U.S. Senate Republican candidate Kari Lake, who embraced a near-complete abortion ban while running for governor two years ago, recently said “a full ban on abortion is not where the people are.” In Nevada, the GOP Senate nominee, Sam Brown, who as recently as 2022 headed up a branch of a conservative anti-abortion group, has said he will respect his state’s permissive abortion law and would not vote for a nationwide ban if elected.
The Supreme Court is keeping the issue on the front burner. In a decision June 27, the court left emergency abortions legal in Idaho, a state with a strict ban, though the issue remains unsettled nationally. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who joined the majority in an unusual ruling that sent the case back to the lower court and declared it had been accepted prematurely, accused her colleagues of dawdling on the issue.
“Pregnant people experiencing emergency medical conditions remain in a precarious position, as their doctors are kept in the dark about what the law requires,” she wrote.
The KFF survey found broad, strong support for preserving access to abortion in cases of pregnancy-related emergencies: 86% of women voters — including 79% of Republican women — support laws protecting access in those circumstances.
In mid-June, the court rejected an effort to overturn the FDA’s 24-year-old approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, but only on a technicality. With no actual ruling on the merits of the case, the justices left open the possibility that different plaintiffs could provoke a different outcome. Nevertheless, the push to redefine reproductive health care post-Roe v. Wade continues. The influential evangelical Southern Baptist Convention recently called for significant legislative restrictions on in vitro fertilization, which its members call morally incompatible with the belief that life begins at fertilization.
Abortion opposition groups are pressing Trump not to discard a main plank of the GOP’s presidential platform since 1976: a federal abortion ban. Trump has recently said states should make their own decisions about whether to restrict abortion.
Democrats and Democratic-aligned groups are exploiting Republicans’ discomfort with the issue. On the day Senate Democrats forced a vote on legislation that would have guaranteed a federal right to contraception, a group called Americans for Contraception floated a giant balloon shaped like an IUD near the Capitol. (Republicans blocked the bill, as expected — and no doubt Democrats will frequently remind voters of that this year.)
A week later, Senate Democrats tried to bring up a bill to guarantee access to IVF, which Republicans also voted down. No giant balloon for that one, though.
Republicans still appear bent on dodging accountability for the unpopularity of their reproductive health positions, if only by highlighting other issues they hope voters care about even more — notably, the economy. But one thing they’re unlikely to accomplish is keeping the issue out of the news.
HealthBent, a regular feature of KFF Health News, offers insight into and analysis of policies and politics from KFF Health News chief Washington correspondent Julie Rovner, who has covered health care for more than 30 years.
KFF Health News, formerly known as Kaiser Health News (KHN), is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
Julie Rovner, the Robin Toner Distinguished Fellow, is Chief Washington Correspondent for KHN.
KFF Health News, formerly known as Kaiser Health News (KHN), is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF -- the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/republicans-are-downplaying-abortion-but-it-keeps-coming-up/ [description] =>Following the fall of Roe v. Wade, abortion remains a top issue for many voters
[pubDate] => Sat, 29 Jun 2024 14:00:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/republicans-are-downplaying-abortion-but-it-keeps-coming-up/ ) [27] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-oldest-wine-in-the-world-title-goes-to-a-2-000-year-old-white-found-in/ [title] => The Oldest-Wine-in-the-World Title Goes to a 2,000-Year-Old White Found in Southwestern Spain [timestamp] => 1719612000 [author] => Lars Fischer [content] =>A wine still liquid after two millennia turned up at a construction site near Seville, Spain
The liquid found in this urn in a burial chamber in Carmona, Spain is the oldest wine in the world.
Juan Manuel Román/"New archaeochemical insights into Roman wine from Baetica," by Daniel Cosano, et al., Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, Vol No. 57, 2024, Article No. 104636; June 16, 2024 (CC BY 4.0)
In 2019 an excavation team made an extraordinary discovery in the town of Carmona in southwestern Spain. At the bottom of a shaft found during construction work, the team uncovered a sealed burial chamber from the early first century C.E.—untouched for 2,000 years.
Six of the eight wall niches in the underground vault contained urns and grave goods, including a bottle that still contained perfume residue. One of the niches, labeled L-8 and located to the right of the entrance, gave archeologists a surprise. A glass urn placed in a lead case was filled to the brim with a reddish liquid. According to a new study in the Journal of Archeological Science: Reports, a team led by chemist José Rafael Ruiz Arrebola has now found that it is 2,000-year-old wine—more specifically, white wine. This makes the find the world’s oldest wine still in liquid form. It is around 300 years older than the previous record holder, a Roman wine found in Speyer, Germany, in 1867.
The wine from the Carmona site was no longer suitable for drinking, and it had never been intended for that purpose; the experts found bone remains and a gold ring at the bottom of the glass vessel. The burial chamber was the final resting place for the remains of the deceased, who were cremated according to Roman custom.
The experts concluded from the condition of the burial chamber, which also contained partially preserved textiles and dry urns, that the liquid from L-8 was part of the original contents of the vessel and not groundwater or condensation water that subsequently seeped in. Apparently the lid of the glass urn and the surrounding lead case prevented the liquid from evaporating over time.
To find out what kind of liquid accompanied the deceased during the last 2,000 years, the experts resorted to chemical analysis. Ruiz Arrebola’s team suspected from the outset that it might have been wine—the drink had great spiritual significance in the ancient world and was closely linked to religious rites and burials. It was clear from the start, however, that after 2,000 years, the liquid would have little in common with the original wine. The research group therefore analyzed chemical traces—the salts and trace elements contained in the grapes and possible traces of alcohol. Finally, Ruiz Arrebola and his colleagues looked for a class of substances that is typical of wine: polyphenols.
The researchers found multiple types of polyphenols in the liquid. This discovery, along with the cultural context of the site, makes it very likely that the liquid was wine. One polyphenol that the team did not find, however, was syringic acid, a breakdown product of the main pigment that gives red wines their typical color. This compound can be used to determine the color of a wine from an archaeological find even if it is in the form of a dried residue.
Ruiz Arrebola’s team concluded, therefore, that the liquid that had reddened over the centuries was white wine. In the paper, the researchers cite first-century Roman author Lucius Iunius Moderatus Columella, who specifically mentioned the production of white wine in what was then the province of Baetica, which includes modern-day Carmona. The mineral profile of the urn’s contents is also similar to modern sherry and fino wines produced in regions near the site.
This article originally appeared in Spektrum der Wissenschaft and was reproduced with permission.
Lars Fischer is a chemist and works as a journalist and editor at Spektrum der Wissenschaft.
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-oldest-wine-in-the-world-title-goes-to-a-2-000-year-old-white-found-in/ [description] =>A wine still liquid after two millennia turned up at a construction site near Seville, Spain
[pubDate] => Sat, 29 Jun 2024 12:30:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-oldest-wine-in-the-world-title-goes-to-a-2-000-year-old-white-found-in/ ) [28] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-checking-the-presidential-candidates-on-abortion-drug-pricing-and/ [title] => Fact-Checking the Presidential Candidates on Abortion, Drug Pricing and Immigration [timestamp] => 1719525600 [author] => KFF Health News; PolitiFact [content] =>This year’s first presidential debate between President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump featured clashes over insulin costs, inflation, abortion, immigration, and January 6
U.S. President Joe Biden (right) and Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. president Donald Trump participate in a presidential debate at CNN’s studios in Atlanta on June 27, 2024.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Democratic and Republican presidential nominees, shared a debate stage June 27 for the first time since 2020, in a confrontation that — because of strict debate rules — managed to avoid the near-constant interruptions that marred their previous encounters.
Biden, who spoke in a raspy voice and often struggled to articulate his arguments, said at one point that his administration “finally beat Medicare.” Trump, meanwhile, repeated numerous falsehoods, including that Democrats want doctors to be able to abort babies after birth.
Trump took credit for the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision that upended Roe v. Wade and returned abortion policy to states. “This is what everybody wanted,” he said, adding “it’s been a great thing.” Biden’s response: “It’s been a terrible thing.”
In one notable moment, Trump said he would not repeal FDA approval for medication abortion, used last year in nearly two-thirds of U.S. abortions. Some conservatives have targeted the FDA’s more than 20-year-old approval of the drug mifepristone to further restrict access to abortion nationwide.
“The Supreme Court just approved the abortion pill. And I agree with their decision to have done that, and I will not block it,” Trump said. The Supreme Court ruled this month that an alliance of anti-abortion medical groups and doctors lacked standing to challenge the FDA’s approval of the drug. The court’s ruling, however, did not amount to an approval of the drug.
CNN hosted the debate, which had no audience, at its Atlanta headquarters. CNN anchors Jake Tapper and Dana Bash moderated. The debate format allowed CNN to mute candidates’ microphones when it wasn’t their turn to speak.
Our PolitiFact partners fact-checked the debate in real time as Biden and Trump clashed on the economy, immigration, and abortion, and revisited discussion of their ages. Biden, 81, has become the oldest sitting U.S. president; if Trump defeats him, he would end his second term at age 82. You can read the full coverage here and excerpts detailing specific health-related claims follow:
Biden: “We brought down the price [of] prescription drug[s], which is a major issue for many people, to $15 for an insulin shot, as opposed to $400.”
Half True. Biden touted his efforts to reduce prescription drug costs by referring to the $35 monthly insulin price cap his administration put in place as part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. But he initially flubbed the number during the debate, saying it was lowered to $15. In his closing statement, Biden corrected the amount to $35.
The price of insulin for Medicare enrollees, starting in 2023, dropped to $35 a month, not $15. Drug pricing experts told PolitiFact when it rated a similar claim that most Medicare enrollees were likely not paying a monthly average of $400 before the changes, although because costs vary depending on coverage phases and dosages, some might have paid that much in a given month.
Trump: “I’m the one that got the insulin down for the seniors.”
Mostly False. When he was president, Trump instituted the Part D Senior Savings Model, a program that capped insulin costs at $35 a month for some older Americans in participating drug plans.
But because it was voluntary, only 38% of all Medicare drug plans, including Medicare Advantage plans, participated in 2022, according to KFF. Trump’s plan also covered only one form of each dosage and insulin type.
Biden points to the Inflation Reduction Act’s mandatory $35 monthly insulin cap as a major achievement. This cap applies to all Medicare prescription plans and expanded to all covered insulin types and dosages. Although Trump’s model was a start, it did not have the sweeping reach that Biden’s mandatory cap achieved.
Biden: Trump “wants to get rid of the ACA again.”
Half True. In 2016, Trump campaigned on a promise to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, or ACA. In the White House, Trump supported a failed effort to do just that. He repeatedly said he would dismantle the health care law in campaign stops and social media posts throughout 2023. In March, however, Trump walked back this stance, writing on his Truth Social platform that he “isn’t running to terminate” the ACA but to make it “better” and “less expensive.” Trump hasn’t said how he would do this. He has often promised Obamacare replacement plans without ever producing one.
Trump: “The problem [Democrats] have is they’re radical, because they will take the life of a child in the eighth month, the ninth month, and even after birth.”
False. Willfully terminating a newborn’s life is infanticide and illegal in every U.S. state.
Most elected Democrats who have spoken publicly about this have said they support abortion under Roe v. Wade’s standard, which allowed access up to fetal viability — typically around 24 weeks of pregnancy, when the fetus can survive outside the womb. Many Democrats have also said they support abortions past this point if the treating physician deems it necessary.
Medical experts say situations resulting in fetal death in the third trimester are rare — fewer than 1% of abortions in the U.S. occur after 21 weeks — and typically involve fatal fetal anomalies or life-threatening emergencies affecting the pregnant person. For fetuses with very short life expectancies, doctors may induce labor and offer palliative care. Some families choose this option when facing diagnoses that limit their babies’ survival to minutes or days after delivery.
Some Republicans who have made claims similar to Trump’s point to Democratic support of the Women’s Health Protection Act of 2022, which would have prohibited many state government restrictions on access to abortion, citing the bill’s provisions that say providers and patients have the right to perform and receive abortion services without certain limitations or requirements that would impede access. Anti-abortion advocates say the bill, which failed in the Senate by a 49-51 vote, would have created a loophole that eliminated any limits on abortions later in pregnancy.
Alina Salganicoff, director of KFF’s Women’s Health Policy program, said the legislation would have allowed health providers to perform abortions without obstacles such as waiting periods, medically unnecessary tests and in-person visits, or other restrictions. The bill would have allowed an abortion after viability when, according to the bill, “in the good-faith medical judgment of the treating health care provider, continuation of the pregnancy would pose a risk to the pregnant patient’s life or health.”
Trump: “Social Security, he’s destroying it, because millions of people are pouring into our country, and they’re putting them onto Social Security. They’re putting them onto Medicare, Medicaid.”
False. It’s wrong to say that immigration will destroy Social Security. Social Security’s fiscal challenges stem from a shortage of workers compared with beneficiaries.
Immigration is far from a fiscal fix-all for Social Security’s challenges. But having more immigrants in the United States would likely increase the worker-to-beneficiary ratio, potentially for decades, thus extending the program’s solvency.
Most immigrants in the U.S. without legal permission are also ineligible for Social Security. However, people who entered the U.S. without authorization and were granted humanitarian parole — temporary permission to stay in the country — for more than one year are eligible for benefits from the program.
Immigrants lacking legal residency in the U.S. are generally ineligible to enroll in federally funded health care coverage such as Medicare and Medicaid. (Some states provide Medicaid coverage under state-funded programs regardless of immigration status. Immigrants are eligible for emergency Medicaid regardless of their legal status.)
KFF Health News, formerly known as Kaiser Health News (KHN), is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
KFF Health News, formerly known as Kaiser Health News (KHN), is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF -- the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-checking-the-presidential-candidates-on-abortion-drug-pricing-and/ [description] =>This year’s first presidential debate between President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump featured clashes over insulin costs, inflation, abortion, immigration, and January 6
[pubDate] => Fri, 28 Jun 2024 20:30:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-checking-the-presidential-candidates-on-abortion-drug-pricing-and/ ) [29] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/societies-with-little-money-are-among-the-happiest-on-earth/ [title] => Societies with Little Money Are among the Happiest on Earth [timestamp] => 1719525600 [author] => Eric Galbraith [content] =>Wealth and well-being go together in many studies, but certain communities complicate this link
Danm/Getty Images
You can’t buy happiness, as greeting cards and inspirational posters tell us, and the most important things in life are free. Yet the World Happiness Report, which is released every spring with widespread media coverage, consistently shows that the inhabitants of wealthy countries are at the top of its lists. What’s more, decades of psychological research have shown that individual wealth is strongly correlated with reported life satisfaction. And although it is often said that this effect is saturated at some level beyond which greater wealth has no effect, recent work in the U.S. has suggested that superwealthy people do actually tend to rate their life satisfaction higher than those who are just moderately wealthy.
So are the greeting cards or the statistical correlations right? Do human beings fundamentally need to be rich to be truly happy with their life?
To me, this perennial question is both fascinating and important. As a scientist studying the interplay between human behavior and sustainability issues, I would like to know whether the pursuit of greater wealth is truly required for humans to thrive. After all, the push to ensure economic growth is deeply rooted in industrialized societies. Many people have come to accept serious environmental consequences, including climate change, rather than take actions that might threaten their economy. As a result, our industrial civilization now threatens the future of all complex life on Earth. Are we on this self-destructive path because human happiness depends on making ourselves richer?
To better understand this issue, I joined forces with an anthropologist, Viki Reyes-García of the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Most of the work on happiness to date has involved Western societies that are not representative of the broader human experience. We wanted to assess the happiness of people who had less need for money.
Reyes-García was preparing a large team to undertake an unprecedented survey of small-scale societies that was focused predominantly on understanding the impacts of climate change among people living in diverse settings on five continents. Many people in these groups identify as Indigenous, and all rely primarily on their local ecosystems for their livelihood, with little to no use of money on a day-to-day basis. We aimed to ask nearly 3,000 participants: “All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life on a scale from 0 to 10?” By asking the same question that has been used in many other global surveys, we’d be able to make a direct comparison to industrialized societies.
Visiting the communities was difficult, given that all are quite remote. Some were in South American jungles, others in arid African grasslands and still others in mountainous regions of South Asia. We translated surveys into local languages and conducted them through in-person interviews of roughly one hour in length, using randomly selected inhabitants from more than 100 villages. Because most of the people surveyed did not have a regular income, we estimated average monetary income from the value of household possessions that had been purchased (rather than made locally). For most of the communities, this indicated an average income of a few dollars per person per day.
The survey showed that, far from being miserable, the people in these small-scale communities report being just as satisfied as people in most countries of the world—despite having very little money. Although there was a lot of variation among interviewees, some communities reported very high levels of satisfaction (above 8 out of 10) that exceeded the national average in many wealthy countries. Our main finding indicates that despite having just a few dollars per day, many of these people are very happy, in their own estimation.
So how do we reconcile that finding with the many other studies that have consistently shown that people with more money tend to report being happier than those with less? The inhabitants of rich countries today enjoy a higher level of material wealth than anyone in history—how can it be that the members of some of these small-scale societies report being even more satisfied overall?
To begin with, our findings point to the danger of putting too much importance on a correlation, such as the one found between money and happiness. Money is an easy predictor to quantify, so it’s understandable that it’s studied frequently, but many other factors affect life satisfaction. In fact, we also found highly significant correlations between satisfaction and imputed wealth in the small-scale societies we visited, but it was an extremely small effect compared with other features of the societies. And as shown by a finding called the Easterlin paradox, increases in a society’s wealth over time do not consistently lead to increases in life satisfaction across that society.
These other features clearly matter a lot. Prior work has pointed, most importantly, to the role of social relationships. As deeply social animals, humans are tightly attuned to the security of their position within society, including the support they can count on from others. This primarily comes from the strength of interpersonal relationships and an assessment of one’s social standing. But social relations do not necessarily go together with wealth. What’s more, although the communities we studied have little money, they are not poor in the sense of lacking basic necessities, and many of the people in these societies spend their days in close contact with natural surroundings, something many studies suggest benefits well-being.
In addition, when it comes to the World Happiness Report specifically, its particular choice of survey question may contribute to wealthy countries topping its lists. Unlike our approach, which asked people to quantify overall life satisfaction, that report uses the “Cantril ladder.” Respondents imagine a ladder with their ideal life at the top and then decide on which rung they currently stand. Recent work has shown that the Cantril ladder tends to make people focus on their income relative to others—more than the basic life satisfaction question that we and other research groups used. As a result, the World Happiness Report may be telling us more about the degree to which people are satisfied with their income rather than their satisfaction with life overall. Another factor to consider—though it comes with additional nuances—is the lessening of well-being that comes from social comparison in highly inequitable societies. In general, the communities we studied have less financial inequality than many wealthy industrialized nations today.
So what does this mean for those of us living in industrialized countries? For most of us, money is required to meet basic needs, which are undoubtedly an essential foundation for happiness. Many low-income countries suffer from widespread corruption and intense inequality, with large numbers of people living in low-quality urban settings where access to basic facilities such as clean water, sewage and lighting is scarce. In a monetized society, money is essential, and having more of it usually helps.
But our findings underscore that fulfilling these basic needs—to the point where humans can lead a happy or satisfying existence—requires much less material wealth than industrialized societies are pursuing at present. And that’s good news for our planet. As an analysis published last year suggests, it is possible for all nations to meet their basic needs, including those related to education, health care and mobility, while achieving climate-stabilization goals.
My work with Reyes-García and our colleagues suggests that many countries and communities may be able to learn from the successful features of small-scale societies to improve aspects that are weak or missing. The Western focus on the individual, the moral acceptance of self-interested material accumulation and the increasing disconnection with other humans as people spend more time in the virtual world may all undermine happiness. It may be that at this point in history, the surest way to increase satisfaction with life in wealthy countries is to forget about economic growth and focus on growing a shared humanity. That shift might also be the key to securing the future of complex and beautiful life on Earth.
Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about for Mind Matters? Please send suggestions to Scientific American’s Mind Matters editor Daisy Yuhas at dyuhas@sciam.com.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
Eric Galbraith is a professor at McGill University. He studies the human-Earth system, bringing together approaches from natural and social sciences to provide new insights on global-scale challenges in the hope of improving human well-being.
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/societies-with-little-money-are-among-the-happiest-on-earth/ [description] =>Wealth and well-being go together in many studies, but certain communities complicate this link
[pubDate] => Fri, 28 Jun 2024 15:12:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/societies-with-little-money-are-among-the-happiest-on-earth/ ) [30] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/presidential-debates-climate-change-question-contrasts-biden-record-with/ [title] => Presidential Debate’s Climate Change Question Contrasts Biden Record with Trump Falsehoods [timestamp] => 1719525600 [author] => Joseph Winters; Grist [content] =>During the first presidential debate, Biden alluded to the Inflation Reduction Act while Trump went on an incoherent rant about “H2O”
President Joe Biden and former president and current Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump participate in the first presidential debate of the 2024 elections at CNN’s studios in Atlanta on June 27.
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
Over more than an hour and a half of back-and-forth, climate change got just a couple minutes of airtime during a CNN-hosted debate between President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump on Thursday.
It was the first time the men had faced each other on the debate stage since October 2020. Both candidates were reportedly eager for the confrontation, with Biden’s team seeking to warn voters about the increased radicalism that Trump is promising to bring to a second term, and Trump keen on digging into his rival’s alleged cognitive decline.
Most of the discourse focused on hot-button issues like immigration and the economy. Biden spoke with a raspy voice and at times tripped over his words, while Trump took many wild discursions and uttered several falsehoods that moderators Dana Bash and Jake Tapper did little to rein in.
A little over halfway in, however, Bash asked whether the candidates would do anything as president to address the climate crisis. Neither candidate directly answered the question, but Biden pointed to policies his administration has implemented to encourage the development of clean energy technologies. Trump gave an incoherent nonanswer.
“I want absolutely immaculate clean water and absolutely clean air,” Trump said. “And we had it. We had H2O, we had the best numbers ever, and we were using all forms of energy, everything.” He said his presidency saw “the best environmental numbers ever,” a statistic he said his advisers had given him moments before he walked onto the stage. In truth, Trump rolled back more than 200 environmental policies during his four years in office.
Trump also took credit for pulling the country out of the Paris Agreement — a “ripoff” for the U.S., as he described it. He otherwise used his allotted climate time to talk about his support among police groups and Biden’s border policies, among other unrelated topics.
Biden, for his part, said he enacted “the most extensive climate change legislation in history,” a reference to the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which contained $369 billion in clean energy tax credits and funding for climate and energy programs. He also mentioned his administration’s creation of the American Climate Corps — a federal program to put young people to work on landscape restoration, renewable energy deployment, and other green projects — and reiterated the importance of keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).
In combination with preexisting policies, the Inflation Reduction Act is expected to cut the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by up to 42 percent by 2030, almost within reach of the country’s commitment under the Paris Agreement to halve emissions compared to 2005 values by the end of the decade.
This is in marked contrast to projections about what could happen to the climate under a second Trump term. According to an analysis published in March by Carbon Brief, another Trump administration could add some 4 billion metric tons to U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, compared to a second Biden term. This increase could cause $900 billion in additional climate damages globally. The analysis predicted that, if Trump rolled back all of Biden’s key climate policies, the U.S. would be “all but guaranteed” to miss its 2030 climate target.
“Given the scale of U.S. emissions and its influence on the world, this makes the election crucial to hopes of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius,” Carbon Brief said.
Beyond the one question from Bash, the only other climate-related mentions during the debate came from Trump, who blamed the U.S.’s federal deficit on a failure to extract “the liquid gold right under our feet” — oil and gas — and referred to Biden’s climate policies as the “green new scam.” He also used the term “energy independent” to describe the nation on January 6, 2021, the day he told his supporters to launch an insurrection on the U.S. Capitol.
This is in line with some of the former president’s previous messaging about climate change, although it’s hard to parse what he actually believes from his history of erratic, conflicting statements. Sometimes he’s said climate change is a “hoax” orchestrated by China; other times he’s acknowledged its existence but questioned its connection to human activity.
More recently, Trump has downplayed the seriousness of the climate crisis. At a campaign rally in January, he called a youth climate protester “immature” and told her to “go home to mommy.” If elected, he has promised to “drill, baby, drill,” and reverse Biden administration climate policies like the Inflation Reduction Act.
Although expectations have never been particularly high about the prominence of climate change during a presidential debate, climate experts expressed disappointment in the brevity and shallowness of Thursday’s climate discussions. “More time discussing golf than climate. What a world we are living in,” tweeted Jeff Goodell, the author of The Heat Will Kill You First, referring to a bizarre exchange between the two candidates in which Biden challenged Trump to a round of golf.
Other observers shared deeper concerns about Biden’s performance, which included mistakes that his opponent was quick to point out.
“I hope he reviews his debate performance Thursday evening and withdraws from the race, throwing the choice of a Democratic nominee to the convention in August,” wrote the New York Times opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof.
This story was originally published by Grist, a nonprofit media organization covering climate, justice, and solutions.
Joseph Winters is a staff writer at Grist.
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future.
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/presidential-debates-climate-change-question-contrasts-biden-record-with/ [description] =>During the first presidential debate, Biden alluded to the Inflation Reduction Act while Trump went on an incoherent rant about “H2O”
[pubDate] => Fri, 28 Jun 2024 14:30:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/presidential-debates-climate-change-question-contrasts-biden-record-with/ ) [31] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/life-experiences-may-shape-the-activity-of-the-brains-cellular-powerhouses/ [title] => Life Experiences May Shape the Activity of the Brain’s Cellular Powerhouses [timestamp] => 1719525600 [author] => Diana Kwon [content] =>Mitochondria appear to ratchet up their activity when life is going well and tamp it down during hard times
Mitochondira.
Nobeastsofierce Science/Alamy Stock Photo
Caroline Trumpff, an assistant professor of medical psychology at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City, has long been interested in the mind-body connection. While many studies have provided evidence for this link, it’s still rare to see this knowledge applied to clinical practice, she says. That is because it remains difficult to trace a direct path from life circumstances—an extended network of family and friends or, by contrast, a difficult childhood—to what is going on at the molecular level. These gaps are why Trumpff has taken an interest in mitochondria. By investigating how these tiny cellular structures mediate the effects of mind on body and body on mind, she hopes to convince people to take the role of psychosocial factors on health more seriously.
Understanding mitochondria is a good place to start. Mitochondrial problems may be a culprit in a wide range of brain disorders and diseases, ranging from schizophrenia to Parkinson’s disease. But what causes problems in our mitochondria? Evidence from past studies, mostly in animals, has pointed to psychological stress as a key factor.
To investigate the relationship between mental states and mitochondria, Trumpff and her colleagues analyzed data from the Religious Orders Study (ROS) and the Rush Memory and Aging Project (MAP)—two large, ongoing assessments of aging and dementia that have recruited thousands of individuals aged 65 and older across the U.S. For these studies, known collectively as ROSMAP, researchers continuously track participants’ mental and physical health—and, after death, examine their donated brain.
For Trumpff’s study, the team looked specifically at whether there was a relationship between participants’ reported life experiences and the characteristics of mitochondria within the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain involved in emotion regulation and executive functions, such as problem-solving and planning. Life experiences included those associated with better mental health (such as feeling purpose in life and having a large social network) and those with a negative impact on psychological well-being (such as adverse childhood experiences and social isolation).
The researchers’ analysis, which included data from 400 ROSMAP participants, revealed that positive experiences were most closely associated with a greater abundance of mitochondrial complex I, a key group of proteins involved in oxidative phosphorylation, the process by which mitochondria generate energy. Negative experiences, on the other hand, were associated with a lower abundance of the same protein complex. The results were published on June 18 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.
These findings, Trumpff says, suggest that our experiences may have an influence on how this minute cellular component can change its activity—ratcheting energy production up or down—in response to varying life circumstances. This chain of events might also go in the opposite direction: differences in the functioning of mitochondrial machinery could influence mental health in ways that determine what types of experiences a person will have. Trumpff says it’s likely that both things are happening because prior studies—mostly in rodent brains—have demonstrated both that chronic stress can alter mitochondria and that mitochondrial defects can alter behavior.
Previous work examining mitochondria outside the brain also support these results. In 2018, for example, Martin Picard, a mitochondrial psychobiologist at Columbia and a co-author of the latest study, found that people’s mood and stress levels affected the functioning of mitochondria in immune cells known as leukocytes. (Immune cells are commonly used in this type of study because they are found in blood, making them easier to access than brain cells, which can typically only be studied after death.) Researchers have also found signs of mitochondrial dysfunction in individuals with mental health disorders such as depression.
“The findings of this study highlight the significant impact that psychosocial factors—positive and negative experiences—may have on brain mitochondrial function,” says Audrey Tyrka, a translational scientist who studies stress, trauma and resilience at Brown University and was not involved in this work. “We know that, in turn, can influence cognitive function, psychiatric conditions and general well-being.” It is important, she adds, to conduct a similar analysis in a more diverse sample. Because 98 percent of the participants were white, this study cannot address any potential race- or ethnicity-specific issues, such as stress exposures arising from systemic racism and associated health disparities, Tyrka says.
Because the ROSMAP participants were all aged 65 and older when the study began, another open question is whether a similar relationship between life experiences and the functioning of brain mitochondria exists in younger individuals. In previous work, Iris-Tatjana Kolassa, a clinical biopsychologist at the University of Ulm in Germany, and her colleagues found that in adult women, childhood trauma was associated with increased, not diminished, mitochondrial energy production in immune cells after childbirth.
One explanation for this discrepancy, according to Kolassa, is that her study looked at the postpartum period, which is typically a stressful time that is also associated with inflammation. The way that mitochondria respond during such events might be different than during a normal state. Another possibility is that stress might lead to increased mitochondrial energy production in the short term—and, over time, this could lead to wear and tear that results in decreased mitochondrial capacity in older age. It may also be that mitochondria in immune cells react differently than those in the brain, according to Trumpff.
Although more research is needed to confirm the psychosocial-mitochondrial link that Trumpff’s team found, the study itself is a provocative finding that adds to the growing body of evidence indicating that states of mind and prior experiences such as early-life trauma can shape mitochondrial function, says Vidita Vaidya, a neuroscientist at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in India, who was not involved in the work. “At the moment, the jury is still out on causality—but there’s something here that’s really intriguing and worth exploring further.”
Diana Kwon is a freelance journalist who covers health and the life sciences. She is based in Berlin.
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/life-experiences-may-shape-the-activity-of-the-brains-cellular-powerhouses/ [description] =>Mitochondria appear to ratchet up their activity when life is going well and tamp it down during hard times
[pubDate] => Fri, 28 Jun 2024 11:30:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/life-experiences-may-shape-the-activity-of-the-brains-cellular-powerhouses/ ) [32] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/misinformation-experts-vindicated-by-supreme-court-ruling/ [title] => Misinformation Experts ‘Vindicated’ by Supreme Court Ruling [timestamp] => 1719525600 [author] => Jeff Tollefson; Nature magazine [content] =>A recent Supreme Court decision rules that the U.S. government can talk to scientists and social media companies to curb online falsehoods
Matt Cardy/Getty Images
The US Supreme Court has ruled that the government can continue communicating with researchers and social-media platforms in an effort to reduce misinformation on subjects such as elections and vaccines. The decision stops short of declaring that such activities are protected as free speech under the US Constitution, but it nonetheless represents a win for researchers who continue to face lawsuits alleging that they worked with the government to suppress conservative opinions.
“This ruling is a major victory for independent research,” says Rebekah Tromble, who leads the Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics at George Washington University in Washington DC. “In rejecting the conspiracy theories at the heart of the case, the Supreme Court demonstrated that facts do still matter.”
In the past four years, US researchers have run two high-profile rapid-response projects — both led jointly by the Stanford Internet Observatory in California and by the University of Washington in Seattle — to track, report and counter disinformation, which deliberately intends to mislead, and misinformation, which is inaccurate but not necessarily fuelled by malicious intent. For both projects, the researchers flagged virally spreading falsehoods as quickly as they could to social-media companies and US agencies, and their reports were released publicly. At the same time, the federal government was also pointing out this type of problematic content to Facebook and other platforms.
Many conservative activists and politicians thought that these efforts were politically motivated and targeted Republican voices, including those who posted online — incorrectly and without any evidence — that the 2020 US presidential election was rigged. They have launched congressional investigations and brought multiple lawsuits, including the one against the US government that the Supreme Court decided today. This case was originally filed in May 2022 in a federal district court in Louisiana by plaintiffs including the then-attorneys-general of Missouri and Louisiana, both of whom had also challenged whether US President Joe Biden actually won the 2020 election.
In their ruling, the Supreme Court’s justices rejected the plaintiffs’ claims, noting that social-media platforms are private entities that began making their own decisions about how to moderate content well before the US government contacted them about misinformation. There is no specific evidence that government pressure to remove falsehoods unduly influenced those decisions, the court ruled; nor was there any evidence of harm.
The Supreme Court has yet to rule on a related case focused on US state regulations that attempt to limit social-media companies’ ability to regulate conversations on their platforms.
It remains to be seen how today’s ruling will impact lawsuits against scientists, but legal scholars and misinformation researchers contacted by Nature say that it represents a clear win for academic freedom.
“Elated. And vindicated” — that was the response to Nature from Kate Starbird, a misinformation researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle, who was involved in both academic efforts to combat misinformation.
One of the two rapid-response projects connected to today’s decision, the Electoral Integrity Partnership, kicked off in early September 2020 and ran for 11 weeks. Researchers scoured Twitter, Facebook and other social-media platforms for misinformation about the 2020 US presidential election and generated more than 600 ‘tickets’ to flag questionable posts to the platforms. Most of the false narratives identified were associated with the political right, and around 35% of them were later labelled, removed or restricted by the companies.
The researchers then adapted this model to create the Virality Project, which ran from February to August 2021. They identified more than 900 instances of problematic social-media posts relating to the COVID-19 pandemic, most of which focused on falsehoods about vaccines. Of those, 174 — the most serious cases — were referred to US health authorities, as well as social-media firms for potential action.
In addition to filing the lawsuit that the Supreme Court ruled on today, conservative activists have peppered researchers with public-records requests and filed other suits accusing the academics behind the two projects of colluding with the federal government to curtail free speech.
Researchers and legal scholars call the accusation absurd and say that there is no evidence for it. They also argue that academics, too, have a right to free speech, and that they were exercising that right by studying and flagging falsehoods online. The other lawsuits are likely to continue for now, Tromble says. However, she notes that the Supreme Court’s dismantling of the plaintiffs’ arguments in today’s ruling “should certainly help researchers being sued by individuals and organizations making similarly distorted claims”.
The lawsuits by conservative activists have sparked fear among misinformation researchers, and changes to the online environment have made it harder for them to carry out their work. For instance, after billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk bought Twitter (now called X), he instituted policies that cut off academics’ access to data on the platform. Many other social-media companies have also backed away from efforts to moderate content for accuracy.
All of this has discouraged efforts by government agencies and academics to identify and counteract false narratives, says Gowri Ramachandran, a deputy director at the Brennan Center for Justice, a think tank in New York City that advocates for voting rights. She adds that this is of particular concern as the United States prepares for its next presidential election, in which Biden and Trump are already preparing to face off once again, in November.
For its part, Stanford University has ended its rapid-response work on the misinformation projects and laid off two staff members involved, although researchers will continue to work on election misinformation this year. The decision to halt the rapid-response work had nothing to do with a fear of litigation or congressional investigations, says Jeff Hancock, director of the Stanford Internet Observatory. Acknowledging fundraising challenges, he says that he decided to align the centre’s work with his own research interests after the previous director of the observatory left. However, conservative lawmakers and advocates celebrated the news.
“BIG WIN,” the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee posted on X on 14 June. It then celebrated the “robust oversight” of committee leader Jim Jordan, a Republican representative from Ohio who voted to overturn the 2020 election results. Jordan has launched congressional investigations of academics linked to the election and health misinformation projects.
Regardless of why Stanford shut the programme down, the decision gives a boost to the politicians who undermined the 2020 election, says Renée DiResta, one of the staff members at the Stanford observatory whose position was not renewed this year. “The right wing is doing victory laps,” she says. “Every university should be horrified by this.”
Hancock acknowledges as much, saying he is frustrated at how things have played out. “I hate that this has been politicized,” he says.
With Stanford stepping aside, the kind of rapid-response work that the Electoral Integrity Partnership conducted in 2020 will now be led by Starbird and her team at the University of Washington. In 2021, the US National Science Foundation awarded her and her partners US$2.25 million over five years to continue their work on disinformation. Starbird says this year’s project will not look like 2020’s and will not include any reporting to social-media platforms — an activity that was conducted by Stanford. Nor will it focus so much on X: with the loss of access to data on that platform, she and her colleagues are turning to other sources, such as Instagram and TikTok. But the work will continue, she says.
“We were doing it before the electoral-integrity project, and we are going to be doing it after,” Starbird says.
Jeff Tollefson works for Nature magazine.
First published in 1869, Nature is the world's leading multidisciplinary science journal. Nature publishes the finest peer-reviewed research that drives ground-breaking discovery, and is read by thought-leaders and decision-makers around the world.
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/misinformation-experts-vindicated-by-supreme-court-ruling/ [description] =>A recent Supreme Court decision rules that the U.S. government can talk to scientists and social media companies to curb online falsehoods
[pubDate] => Fri, 28 Jun 2024 11:00:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/misinformation-experts-vindicated-by-supreme-court-ruling/ ) [33] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-face-on-mars-and-other-cases-of-cosmic-pareidolia/ [title] => The Face on Mars and Other Cases of Cosmic Pareidolia [timestamp] => 1719525600 [author] => Phil Plait [content] =>The human brain loves seeing patterns, even when they aren’t really there
NASA’s Viking 1 Orbiter spacecraft photographed this region in the northern latitudes of Mars on July 25, 1976 while searching for a landing site for the Viking 2 Lander. The image shows a mesa that resembles a human face (center), which helped spawn a cottage industry of pseudoscientific claims about ancient Martian civilizations.
NASA/JPL
For generations, the idea that Mars once harbored an advanced civilization has fostered a small but devoted community of true believers. These ancient Martians built canals and cities and other great works, so the general narrative goes, but for reasons unknown died out long ago. This belief was popularized by the eccentric American astronomer Percival Lowell as early as 1894, but the core idea had an Internet-fueled resurgence in the late 20th century, spawning a cottage industry of conspiratorial books, credulous late-night radio interviews, questionable websites and even the big-budget (if disastrously confused) movie Mission to Mars.
The catalyst for that sudden, late-breaking burst of public interest was an image of the Martian surface taken by an orbiter as part of the NASA Viking 1 mission in 1976. In one of the orbiter’s pictures of a region called Cydonia, scientists noticed a large mesa that bore an uncanny resemblance to a human face. Dubbed “the Face on Mars,” it soon attracted the attention of fringe pseudoscience enthusiasts (and, no doubt, grifters) who promoted it as some sort of monument made by extinct Martians.
To be fair, in the Viking image the landform really does look like a face, an eerie visage reminiscent of Easter Island moai or the Great Sphinx in Egypt. Could it be some ancient alien tribute to humanity, a memorial signifying the longing of an archaic extraterrestrial race?
Yeah, not so much—follow-up observations from later missions toting better tech, such as the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, showed exactly what those of us familiar with such things expected: it was just a mesa, a big rock formation with a shape that, when viewed at low resolution from the right angle and with the illumination just so, looked somewhat like a face.
Captured by the Mars Orbiter Camera on April 8, 2001, this high-resolution view of the “Face on Mars” previously glimpsed in images from the Viking 1 Orbiter revealed the feature to be not so facelike after all. Cosmic pareidolia strikes again!
NASA/JPL/MSSS
True believers in the Face on Mars had fallen prey to a psychological phenomenon called pareidolia, the tendency for our brain to impose a recognizable pattern on a visual stimulus. We all are subject to it; who hasn’t lain on the ground looking up at clouds to see all sorts of things in them, such as animals, common objects, fantastic beasts and, yes, faces?
Faces are incredibly common outputs of pareidolia. We see them everywhere, including in wood grain patterns, foods, and other everyday ephemera. For instance, I once saw the face of Vladimir Lenin in my shower curtain. That was a weird day.
Our brain is wired to see faces, which isn’t too surprising, seeing as how this is the main way we recognize other people. But it has the unintended consequence of forcing us to see faces when they aren’t really there. The simplest example of this is a smiley face: it’s two dots over a curved line, just about as simple a geometric construction as there can be, yet you cannot not see it as a smiling face. (Incidentally, we’ve seen smiley faces on Mars, too.)
Nebulous stimuli are a fertile ground for pareidolia, and what better place for nebulous stimuli than an actual nebula? Astronomical objects are perfect for the phenomenon; gas clouds and galaxies have just enough structure to trigger our pattern-recognition ability. Even stars in the sky make patterns that we think look like recognizable shapes; as I wrote last week, that’s why we have constellations.
Ever since the telescope was invented, pareidolia has ruled the way we’ve named what we saw.
The most iconic example of them all is the Horsehead nebula. Aptly named, it looks like a cosmic chess piece seen in profile, stoically waiting for its next move. The Horsehead is located in the constellation Orion and is part of the immense Orion molecular cloud complex, a sprawling collection of cold, dense gas and dust. Such clouds are star-formation factories, spawning suns that light up the material all around them. The Horsehead is an extension of dark dust silhouetted against a bank of ruddily glowing hydrogen, lit up by the massive star Sigma Orionis not too far above the horse’s “head.”
Another one of my favorites is a Halloween twofer: officially designated IC 2218, it’s an extended cloud of dust not far from the star Rigel, a brilliant blue supergiant marking Orion’s knee. The cloud reflects the star’s light, and seen one way it’s called the Witch Head nebula because of its uncanny resemblance to a stereotypical witch with a long nose and pointed chin cackling into the night. But amazingly, seen rotated 90 degrees (or with your head tilted), it looks more like a ghost, floating menacingly with its arms upraised and spectral tail trailing behind.
Not to be spookily outdone in Halloween pareidolia, in 2014 the sun decided to turn into a 1.4 million-kilometer-wide jack-o’-lantern, with a false-color composite image of solar active regions forming what seems to be a grimacing gourdlike visage.
I remember vividly that when I was a kid, I scanned the Milky Way along the constellation of Vulpecula with binoculars in my front yard. I was boggling at the sheer number of stars visible as I slowly panned across the sky, when suddenly several brighter stars slid by, aligned in a fairly decent row. I gasped, then exclaimed, “Oh, my God, it’s a coat hanger!” I was right; the Coat Hanger cluster—or Brocchi’s cluster, as it’s officially called—is a collection of about 10 stars arranged in a shape that really does deserve the moniker. It’s actually just coincidence; all the stars aren’t physically associated with one another but just happen to be aligned in our line of sight.
But that’s not the weirdest stellar pareidolia in the sky. NGC 2169 is a pair of open clusters, two groups of stars each born together from the same cloud of nebular material. As seen from Earth, though, they appear to form the numerals 3 and 7, hence the nickname the 37 cluster. The stars are about 3,500 light-years from Earth and young, only about 11 million years old. Come to think of it, I’ve never seen this one for myself in the actual sky. It’s located near the top of Orion’s upraised arm, so perhaps this winter I’ll take a shot at it with my own telescope.
Of course, not all pareidolia is so esoteric. Planets and moons have their share of familiar shapes, too, usually in the form of craters. Besides the aforementioned smiley face on Mars, there’s also Mickey Mouse on Mercury and the iconic Tombaugh Regio, also known as the “heart” of Pluto.
The “Man in the Moon,” however, is in my opinion a poser. I’ve seen various explanations for people who see a face in the moon’s chaotic, giant-impact-sculpted mix of bright highlands and dark plains, but none are convincing to me. Still, around first quarter, a pair of letters appears on the moon: the Lunar X and V, shapes created by light and shadow as the sun rises over a pair of craters, illuminating their raised rims. Several other pareidolic features can be seen as well; I’ve always thought that the huge impact crater Clavius looks like a cartoonishly surprised face.
The list goes on and on. It includes the Question Mark galaxy, the Space Invader galaxy, the Christmas Tree cluster, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Nebula, the seriously creepy MSH 15-52 that looks like a bony hand reaching across the cosmos and the interacting galaxies Arp-Madore 2026-424 that look like an alien face. Not too many gas clouds look like geologic features, but the North America nebula is very aptly named.
I myself once discovered a pair of galaxies in a Hubble image that clearly indicates a place Where No One Has Gone Before, although my attempts to name them the Enterprise Galaxies stalled out in spacedock.
This all may seem like a lark, a silly bit of fun at the expense of astronomy. But it’s not. Our brain is extraordinarily good at seeing patterns, and while some are fanciful and fantasy, in many cases those patterns are real, revealing fascinating physics underneath their beguiling appearance. Over the centuries we have uncovered a vast array of facts and observations about nature, and it’s our ability to imagine that allowed us to make the leap, connecting many of these into the rules and laws of reality as we know it.
Science is imagination. We just have to be careful and not let it run away with us in order to avoid the trap of seeing things that aren’t really there. If you ever have to ask yourself if you’re seeing a gigantic human head sculpture or just a ragged hill on another planet, understanding pareidolia will help you face the Face.
Phil Plait is a professional astronomer and science communicator in Virginia. He writes the Bad Astronomy Newsletter. Follow him online.
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-face-on-mars-and-other-cases-of-cosmic-pareidolia/ [description] =>The human brain loves seeing patterns, even when they aren’t really there
[pubDate] => Fri, 28 Jun 2024 10:45:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-face-on-mars-and-other-cases-of-cosmic-pareidolia/ ) [34] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/how-researchers-live-and-work-onboard-an-icebreaker-in-a-west-antarctic-sea/ [title] => How Researchers Live and Work Onboard an Icebreaker in a West Antarctic Sea [timestamp] => 1719525600 [author] => Sofia Moutinho; Rachel Feltman; Madison Goldberg; Anaissa Ruiz Tejada; Jeffery DelViscio [content] =>Get a behind-the-scenes look at how researchers live and work on a U.S. icebreaker making its way through the waters of West Antarctica.
Anaissa Ruiz Tejada/Scientific American
[CLIP: Theme music]
Rachel Feltman: Ever wondered what it’s like to travel through the Antarctic Ocean? It’s not exactly a pleasure cruise. But that doesn’t stop scientists who venture out on these rugged trips from having a good time.
For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, this is Rachel Feltman. You’re listening to part three of our Friday Fascination miniseries all about field research in Antarctica.
This week award-winning journalist Sofia Moutinho is giving us a behind-the-scenes look at life on an icebreaker. From Secret Santa gift exchanges to secret initiation rites, these scientists find plenty of ways to cope with the isolation of spending months at sea.
Alexis Floback: Okay, come on in!
We have the head. So “head” is a term used on ships to mean, like, your toilet. So we have a private bathroom in each cabin on this ship, complete with a shower, toilet and sink.
Sofia Moutinho: That’s Alexis Floback, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Southern California who studies the role of iron in the ocean. On this cruise she shares a cabin with three other female researchers. They all met and became friends onboard.
On the door of their room is a picture of the four of them smiling on deck with a huge iceberg in the background. It was the first iceberg we encountered on our long journey through West Antarctica onboard the U.S. icebreaker Nathaniel B. Palmer.
Floback: In this room we have four people and four cabinets, so we’re a bit short on space. And all of our ECW, or extreme-cold-weather gear, we’ve decided to store here, so that it’s out of the way. This will help keep us warm in the cold Antarctic.
Moutinho: The Palmer is divided into six decks accessed through a maze of stairs and hallways separated by heavy steel doors. Accommodations are humble. Everyone shares these small rooms except for the captain and lead scientists.
Floback: And then we each have our own bunk bed. Each bunk bed has these privacy curtains so that you have the ability to shut it because we're all working on different schedules.
Moutinho: Like many others onboard, Alexis and her roommates have tried to make this metallic, cold ship environment as cozy as possible.
Moutinho (tape): And I see you’ve done some decoration here with green lights on the ceiling.
Floback: Yeah, yeah, one of my cabinmates brought those to add a bit of decoration to the room, to make it a bit more homey.
Moutinho: Even though research trips like this are often called cruises, they are not the kind of nautical getaway you are probably picturing. The routine on a research vessel involves a lot of hard work.
Carl Lamborg: So Americans call these “cruises.” And of course, everybody immediately thinks, you know, one of those enormous cruise boats and shuffleboard and so on and so forth.
Moutinho: This is Carl Lamborg, a chemical oceanographer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who studies mercury in the ocean.
Lamborg: Other countries call them “expeditions,” which sounds much more official and scientific and adventurous. So it’s not a cruise, really: it’s an expedition.
Moutinho: For the researchers onboard it doesn’t matter if it is day or night, a weekend or even a holiday such as Christmas or New Year’s Eve—work never stops.
Marty Fleisher, an oceanographer at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, is used to this rhythm. At age 65 he has been onboard the Palmer in Antarctica three times before this expedition.
Marty Fleisher: I’m here to eat and sleep and work, and in some ways that simplifies your life. And you get to do it in a place like Antarctica.
Moutinho: Half of the researchers onboard work shifts of 12 to 16 hours. The other half of them are on duty and available at any time of the day.
Margot Debyser, a postdoctoral researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, is one of the people working around the clock.
[CLIP: Rhythmic noises of a pump on deck]
Moutinho: She spends long hours on deck setting up pumps that are hung on wire and deployed into the ocean to collect water. It is physically demanding work.
Margot Debyser: These pumps, they’re kind of bulky, right—they’re like a meter by a meter [about 3.3 feet by 3.3 feet]. And we put them in a sequence on the wire. So it takes two people to just, like, lift them up and put them on the wire, and then all of us are, like, wheeling the pumps out one by one.
Moutinho: In this job Margot and her colleagues are constantly exposed to the harsh and rapidly changing Antarctic weather. In a matter of minutes conditions outside can switch from a temperature of 37 degrees Fahrenheit [3 degrees Celsius] and sunny to snowy with wind gusts as cold as –5 degrees [F, or –21 degrees C].
Debyser: I think doing things in cold weather, in these conditions, there’s just a lot more, like, considerations and safety equipment that you need to wear. So if I wasn’t wearing gloves, I could definitely be like, “My God, like, my fingers are getting, like, kind of cold.” I don’t want to risk getting frostbite because, you know, there’s a lot of metal and stuff.
Moutinho: But Margot often forgets to put on gloves, which can have consequences in these harsh conditions.
Debyser: Oh, my God, I’m getting a very bad case of cruise hands. I think your hands are just wet a lot and salty a lot and cold a lot, and your hands just start peeling so badly. And I feel like my hands are like sandpaper right now. When I’m in my bedsheets, they, like, catch onto my bedsheets. It’s kind of gross. And I’ve been trying to do scrubs, but it’s not really worked out.
Moutinho: With such intense work, keeping a healthy sleep routine is challenging for everyone as well.
Between nine-hour-long pump deployments and running samples in the lab, Margot can’t afford a whole night of sleep.
Debyser: So I feel like, with my method, it’s more like sleeping when I can, which is some naps in between, kind of. Once my instruments are running and everything looks good, I just nap for, like, two or three hours, and then it’s kind of around the clock.
Moutinho: This routine makes it hard for people onboard to keep track of the days of the week and the time of day.
Debyser: I feel like on land, my perception of time is, like, day to evening, then you go to sleep, and then it’s the next day. And here it kind of, like, all merges into this massive blur, and I feel like it both goes really fast and really slow at the same time.
[CLIP: “Handwriting,” by Frank Jonsson]
Moutinho: It doesn’t help that Antarctica is the only continent in the world without official time zones. Because of that we follow our own made-up time on the ship.
We start our journey following the time zone of our departure point in Chile. Then, throughout the trip, the captain announces several time changes so we arrive at our final destination in New Zealand at the local time.
With the summer sun shining for 24 hours a day, the hour on the clock doesn’t mean much. Meals become our main way to mark the passage of time. I feel this way, and so does Bettina Sohst, a research associate at Old Dominion University who serves as a laboratory supervisor and technician onboard.
Bettina Sohst: Every day is the same. The few things that keep you on track are standard meals—like Taco Tuesday, you know, “Must be Tuesday.”
Moutinho: Despite the chaotic work schedule, we can always count on food being served punctually: breakfast, lunch, dinner and midrats, an extra midnight meal for those with late-hour shifts.
[CLIP: Chatter of people in the mess hall during mealtime]
Moutinho: The Palmer’s chef, Chad Cavalier, had a grocery list to prepare for this trip that cost more than $130,000. It included countless pounds of meat and frozen vegetables, some 25 cases of frozen fries and 50 jars of Nutella, which were completely devoured by the end of the trip.
Marissa Despins: The food on the Palmer has been really great—like, probably the best food I’ve had on a ship.
Moutinho: That’s Marissa Despins, a doctoral student at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She says that even with the excellent food, it’s hard not to long for certain meals.
Despins: I feel like when there’s, like, two weeks left of a two-month cruise, you start thinking about foods that you miss from home, and you start dreaming about them. And for me it’s been this kale salad because we ran out of lettuce a little while ago, and I’ve been having dreams about this kale salad.
Moutinho (tape): Are you literally dreaming about it when you sleep?
Despins: I definitely had one dream about the salad.
Moutinho: Phoebe Lam, a chemical oceanographer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and one of the scientists leading this cruise, came prepared.
Phoebe Lam: I need instant noodles—instant noodles. Like, if I’m working 24 hours, and I’m so tired, I have, like, a cup of instant noodles, I perk right up. So that’s my thing.
Moutinho (tape): Did you bring your own?
Lam: I did.
Moutinho (tape): Me, too. I only brought three.
Lam: I only—I only bought 18 [laughs].
[CLIP: “None of My Business,” by Arthur Benson]
Moutinho: Bringing your own snacks can help you cope with homesickness. But isolation is still a big challenge here.
We are navigating one of the most remote places on Earth. There is only a satellite phone available for restricted use, and the Internet connection is pretty limited—sometimes even nonexistent.
At the beginning of our trip we had 80 megabytes of Internet data to use on our devices each day. Let me tell you, that is not enough to stream videos or download pictures and barely enough to send texts!
Then, after about a week at sea, our location was so remote that we lost even that connection. The ship’s internal e-mail became the only form of communication—no more social media or even Google searches.
After the initial shock several people came to appreciate being unreachable. That happened to University of Minnesota doctoral student Nicole Coffey.
Nicole Coffey: It’s very isolating, being at sea, and sometimes that isolation can sting a little bit—like when, this is the first time I’ve been at sea for Christmas, and I’m very close with my family. And that kind of hurt a little bit. But it’s sometimes—and most of the time, for me, at least—it’s isolating in a good way, in that the only thing we can do out here is our work, or we have game nights and whatever else to have fun. But it’s nice being able to focus in on what we do in a very different way than we could on land.
Moutinho: Some of the researchers onboard are spending the winter holidays at sea for the second year in a row.
People got creative to cope with loneliness. Marissa, for example, asked her loved ones to write letters for her to open on Christmas Eve.
Despins: I had, like, eight letters to open from family members and friends, and I also sent them letters, and that was [a] really nice way for me to feel connected to them, even when I’m thousands and thousands of miles away.
[CLIP: Sound of Christmas movies on television and chatter during a Christmas decoration party]
Moutinho: The researchers organize a Christmas decoration party. They watch classic Christmas movies together and cut out paper snowflakes to glue around their labs. There is also a Secret Santa gift exchange.
On New Year’s Eve, they find a break in the packed schedule to improvise a party.
Everyone: [Shouting] Eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one [cheer]!
Moutinho: For one hour the scientists dance around their instruments wearing orange and yellow rubbery overalls, plastic 2024 glasses and head lamps.
Despins: It does get sad. It’s sad, missing holidays. But it’s also nice because you’re with a group of people that are also missing holidays, right? And I feel like community is built during the holidays.
Moutinho: To lighten the mood the researchers come up with silly events, including a ship-wide flannel shirt day and Onesie Wednesday, when people wear funny jumpsuits around. Tara Williams, a doctoral student at Old Dominion University, is one of them.
Tara Williams: I am wearing a onesie with little duckies on it. Today is Onesie Wednesday, and we’re just wearing onesies because it’s funny and to keep enthusiasm and happiness going on the ship.
Moutinho: At the door of the main lab, there is a so-called moralendar, where people can mark made-up festivities and celebration days for the weirdest things. One is French Appreciation Day to honor the two French researchers onboard. There is also Intergalactic Walk like a Penguin Day.
Polls scribbled on the computer lab’s whiteboard are also a hit. People can ask anything: “Does your back hurt now: Yes or no?” “Do you consider yourself a nerd: Yes, no or geek?” “How often do you clean your room?” For the last one, some people vote “never.”
On a typical day we can use a sauna and gym to blow off steam. The most musically inclined researchers even brave some jam sessions.
[CLIP: A researcher plays guitar]
Moutinho: For others the trip is also an opportunity for introspection, and the remoteness becomes a source of inspiration. Bettina stands at the ship’s bow and looks out at the water.
Sohst: I’ve had great ideas just staring at the ocean. No pressure, just looking out at no people, just blue—or in this case white ice. Yeah, it’s very cleaning.
Moutinho: On our journey we had many opportunities to be amazed by Antarctica’s dreamlike landscapes. We navigated close to giant, bright-white glaciers, saw the sea covered in a thick layer of ice and encountered penguins, seals and whales. I will never forget it.
Still, most of the time, we are inside the ship.
Laura Whitmore: We are in these places that sound very adventurous. We’re in this big, vast ocean. We’re in Antarctica. There’s this very bizarre juxtaposition of being stuck in a very confined space while being amid a very vast space.
Moutinho: That’s Laura Whitmore, a chemical oceanographer at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Whitmore: Of course, there is a spirit of adventure in going to Antarctica—it’s a big journey to even get here. But when I’m here, I do sometimes feel removed from Antarctica itself because I’m here on this vessel.
Moutinho: Between the preparation time we spent onboard before setting sail and the 60 days we were at sea, we were on the Palmer for almost three months. Sharing a confined space for that long, away from everything else, definitely creates a sense of camaraderie.
Despins: It feels like you’re at summer camp with a bunch of people interested in the same thing or something similar as you.
Moutinho: That’s Marissa again.
Despins: So it’s a lot of fun because you get to go to an interesting place and just be surrounded and immersed in science.
Moutinho: Maybe that’s why, despite the challenges, people on this ship love being at sea. Having gone on more than 20 cruises, Phoebe is still excited about it.
Lam: The older I get, the more I like being at sea. Everyone pitches in to help—I love that. It’s something that doesn’t happen in real life—like, on land. Everyone’s too busy with their own lives. But here no one has a life except for the life on the ship. And so this becomes like your village, and you help your village members.
[CLIP: “Let There Be Rain,” by Silver Maple]
Moutinho: After more than 70 days on this ship, I also feel like a part of this community. I even get a certificate to prove my membership.
As our journey nears its end, on our way from Antarctica to New Zealand, I participate in an old maritime tradition: a “sea baptism” ceremony.
Such ceremonies are common when crossing geographical landmarks in the ocean such as the equator. For us it marks the crossing of the South Polar Circle at about 66.5 degrees south latitude. We had crossed this line at the beginning of our trip, but it was only at the end of the cruise, when the scientists were done with their sampling at sea, that they had time to organize this ritual.
The newbies—those onboard who crossed this landmark for the first time during our expedition—get an angry e-mail from King Neptune, the protector of the seas. He invites us to participate in a secret trial, where he accuses us of loitering in his domain.
Peter Sedwick (as King Neptune): To all cowardly trespassers into King Neptune’s southern realm aboard the RVIB Nathaniel B. Palmer: I have observed that you have been loitering in my most southern domain without my permission. My subjects tell me you have pilfered my beloved sediments, sea ice and snow; stolen my precious water, suspended particles and dissolved gases; and made loud pumping noises, disturbing my peace!
Moutinho: To avoid punishment, we have to entertain King Neptune—played by Peter Sedwick, a chemical oceanographer at Old Dominion University and another one of the cruise’s leaders.
Sedwick: Pay attention, disgusting, disgraceful pirates!
[CLIP: Sound of a gavel]
Sedwick: We are here to pass an arraignment and then pass judgment on your grievous, grievous crimes in Neptune’s kingdom. But first, before any charges are read and perhaps to lessen your punishment, you may present some entertainment to please the court. We are happy to receive that before the charges are read. The royal court will be seated.
Moutinho: Unfortunately, I can’t disclose what happened during the trial and what exactly the baptism ceremony entailed. I can only say that I was absolved after being taken blindfolded to see Neptune himself.
Sedwick: Congratulations, Sofia!
[CLIP: People clap and exclaim]
Moutinho: I receive the title of Shellback for crossing the international date line, the line from the South Pole to the North Pole that marks the boundary between one calendar day and the next. And I am now also part of the select group called the Order of the Red Nose, for those who have crossed the Antarctic Circle.
It feels good that we made peace with King Neptune. I wish making amends for the ways we have interfered with Earth’s climate was that easy. But the reality is that the beautiful icy landscapes I’ve seen in Antarctica, the ocean around it and our planet’s climate are moving toward a point of no return as humanity keeps emitting warming greenhouse gases.
[CLIP: Theme music]
Feltman: Our Antarctic adventure is almost at an end. We’re taking next off Friday for the Fourth of July, but we’ll be back with the fourth and final episode of this Fascination miniseries on July 12.
As Sofia makes her way home, we’ll hear from the scientists onboard about what it’s like to witness the effects of climate change firsthand in a pristine place like Antarctica. How do they cope with the emotional toll, and how do they manage to inspire the next generation of scientists when things seem so bleak? Check back in two weeks to find out. And don’t forget to tune in on Monday for our weekly news roundup!
Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Madison Goldberg and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was reported and hosted by Sofia Moutinho. Elah Feder, Alexa Lim, Madison Goldberg and Anaissa Ruiz Tejada edit our show, with fact-checking from Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.
For Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. Have a great weekend!
Sofia Moutinho is an award-winning Brazilian journalist covering health and the environment, appearing in Science, Nature, NPR, and elsewhere.
Rachel Feltman is former executive editor of Popular Science and forever host of the podcast The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week. She previously founded the blog Speaking of Science for the Washington Post.
Madison Goldberg is a science journalist and audio producer based in New York City.
Anaissa Ruiz Tejada is Scientific American's multimedia intern.
Jeff DelViscio is currently Chief Multimedia Editor/Executive Producer at Scientific American. He is former director of multimedia at STAT, where he oversaw all visual, audio and interactive journalism. Before that, he spent over eight years at the New York Times, where he worked on five different desks across the paper. He holds dual master's degrees from Columbia in journalism and in earth and environmental sciences. He has worked aboard oceanographic research vessels and tracked money and politics in science from Washington, D.C. He was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT in 2018. His work has won numerous awards, including two News and Documentary Emmy Awards.
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/how-researchers-live-and-work-onboard-an-icebreaker-in-a-west-antarctic-sea/ [description] =>Get a behind-the-scenes look at how researchers live and work on a U.S. icebreaker making its way through the waters of West Antarctica.
[pubDate] => Fri, 28 Jun 2024 10:00:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/how-researchers-live-and-work-onboard-an-icebreaker-in-a-west-antarctic-sea/ ) [35] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/jwsts-little-red-dots-offer-astronomers-the-universes-weirdest-puzzle/ [title] => JWST’s ‘Little Red Dots’ Offer Astronomers the Universe’s Weirdest Puzzle [timestamp] => 1719439200 [author] => Fabio Pacucci [content] =>The James Webb Space Telescope’s search for the earliest stars and black holes has yielded a very weird, very red, puzzle
Faraway galaxies dot the void like scattered jewels or grains of sand in this deep field image from the James Webb Space Telescope. The most distant galaxies in such images tend to appear as small, reddish blobs.
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Brant Robertson (UC Santa Cruz), Ben Johnson (CfA), Sandro Tacchella (Cambridge), Marcia Rieke (University of Arizona), Daniel Eisenstein (CfA)
Technological advancements often reveal puzzles hiding beneath the surface of reality. Infrared cameras, for example, helped discover a hidden portrait a decade ago within The Blue Room, one of Picasso’s early masterpieces. The cameras pierced the artist’s overlying brushstrokes to reveal a sketch of an elegant and mysterious man wearing a bow tie and three rings and holding his chin. As usual, this discovery raised more questions than it answered: Who was this gentleman, and why had Picasso buried his image under thick paints?
The infrared eyes of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the most advanced off-world observatory yet built, have also unveiled something cryptic—and far more profound than a bearded man. This time, the mystery lies beneath the surface of the faintest objects in the ancient universe. JWST’s farsighted scrutiny has unveiled the existence of an enigmatic population of galaxies in the early universe previously unknown to astronomers. Like Picasso’s mysterious man, these galaxies—small ruddy blobs aptly nicknamed “little red dots” (LRDs)—appear odd and out of place.
JWST is a powerful telescope specifically designed to study the “cosmic dawn,” the early-universe epoch when the first stars and black holes were born. The light from this time that reaches us today is extremely faint, dimmed after a long journey across billions of light-years. And, although it began as ultraviolet and visible light, the shine from these objects has been redshifted to the infrared—a phenomenon caused by the expansion of space stretching light’s wavelengths as it crosses the cosmos. Gathering this light, JWST has revealed fainter and farther galaxies than ever before. And somewhat surprisingly, many of these galaxies are redder and more compact than anyone expected.
These little red dots have stirred the imaginations of astronomers worldwide, as they may have major implications for our understanding of cosmic evolution. But to date, their exact nature and what exactly they’re telling us about the early universe remains uncertain.
Some things, however, are clear. Most of the LRDs blazed during a relatively short period lasting one billion years, and starting about 600 million years after the big bang. In a tantalizing mystery, outside of their ancient relic light picked up by JWST, there seems to be no trace of them in today’s universe. Why did they vanish? Or what did they morph into? Their sudden disappearance is a profound enigma.
Their distinctive redness isn’t merely a matter of redshifting; rather it indicates they were emitting large amounts of light at longer, redder wavelengths. Whether this is from an intrinsically red galaxy, or instead from large amounts of dust that can redden light, is unknown. Their compactness is also disconcerting: a typical LRD has an approximate radius of no more than 500 light-years, while for some of them it can be smaller than 150 light-years. Our own Milky Way galaxy, in the modern-day “local” universe, is more than 100 times bigger!
This is about all we know. The road before us now forks off in at least two branches; little red dots are either galaxies hosting a central supermassive black hole; or they are galaxies hosting a vast number of stars in a small volume. Each interpretation has problems.
First, clues strongly suggest that, similar to all large galaxies we see in our local universe, these LRDs from the early universe harbor a central supermassive black hole, one between a few million and a few hundred million times the mass of our sun. We can ascertain them by their spectra, the rainbowlike chart of individual wavelengths, or colors, of light they emit. Black holes themselves don’t emit light, but matter falling into them releases copious amounts of radiation, powerfully shining to help detail its demise. Astronomical spectra can indicate how fast gas is racing around a black hole, fighting its immense gravitational field, and effectively allowing the black hole to be weighed. This signature—the broadening of some features in the spectra—is present in most of the LRDs, indicating gas velocities of thousands of kilometers per second, just as would be expected for material spiraling to its doom near a supermassive black hole.
An artist’s concept of a supermassive black hole with millions to billions times the mass of our sun, feeding on a swirling accretion disk of gas and dust and producing a powerful jet of radiation and particles.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
However, the black hole hypothesis is also marked by something bizarre. A significant fraction of the light produced by material falling into a black hole comes in the form of x-rays. The little red dots should thus be visible to x-ray telescopes if they contain supermassive black holes. In one of the most puzzling plot twists of modern astronomy, they are not: most of the LRDs discovered so far show no sign of x-ray emission.
And the oddities keep coming. In the nearby universe, profound correlations—or scaling relations—exist between the mass of a central black hole and the number of stars in its host galaxy. Typically, such a black hole’s bulk is about 0.1 percent of the total mass of its galaxy’s stars—a clue that these two profoundly different astronomical objects somehow co-evolved. If the LRDs contain supermassive black holes, these would seem much more massive than what that well-known scaling relation would dictate, weighing in at up to a mind-boggling 40 percent of the stellar mass of their entire galaxy. This peculiarity could be crucial evidence for establishing how the first black holes formed at even earlier cosmic epochs scarcely plumbed even by JWST.
What if the little red dots contain only stars? Black holes feasting on matter are generally much more efficient than stars at producing light. Hence for stars alone to make the amount of light observed from these galaxies, vast numbers are required. Imagine squeezing a Milky Way’s worth of stars into a volume with a radius 100 times smaller than our familiar home spiral galaxy. If we placed a sphere centered on our sun and with a radius of 4.24 light years, it would contain only another star: Proxima Centauri. The same sphere placed in one of these LRDs would contain, on average, more than one million stars. The song “A Sky Full of Stars” would acquire an entirely new meaning there.
What, then, are these mysterious apparitions so near the break of cosmic dawn? The truth is, we do not know—yet. Future investigations with JWST, especially at longer wavelengths in the infrared, to probe the emission of dusty structures around central supermassive black holes, may help. Furthermore, deeper x-ray observations—also with next-generation, high-resolution x-ray observatories, such as the proposed AXIS—will hopefully detect high-energy photons from the LRDs.
Much like Picasso’s mysterious gentleman with a bow tie, these enigmatic objects seem to inhabit an alternate reality, one that tells a story from an unexplored chapter of cosmic history. With time, astronomers will reconcile them with our current understanding of the machinery of the universe. For the moment, however, we keep wondering, awestruck and searching for answers.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
Fabio Pacucci is an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, where he holds the Clay and Black Hole Initiative fellowships.
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/jwsts-little-red-dots-offer-astronomers-the-universes-weirdest-puzzle/ [description] =>The James Webb Space Telescope’s search for the earliest stars and black holes has yielded a very weird, very red, puzzle
[pubDate] => Thu, 27 Jun 2024 14:00:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/jwsts-little-red-dots-offer-astronomers-the-universes-weirdest-puzzle/ ) [36] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-pentagons-antivaccine-propaganda-endangered-public-health-and-tarnished/ [title] => The Pentagon’s Antivaccine Propaganda Endangered Public Health and Tarnished U.S. Credibility [timestamp] => 1719439200 [author] => Keith Kloor [content] =>Amid the pandemic, the Pentagon ran a conspiracy campaign to discredit vaccines–just so it could score points against China. The revelation is a worst-case scenario for global public health
Ground crew load packages of the first shipment of Sinovac Biotech Ltd. coronavirus vaccine onto a truck at the Villamor Airbase in Pasay City, Manila, the Philippines, on Sunday, Feb. 28, 2021.
Veejay Villafranca/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The battle against scientific misinformation has only grown tougher, as public health advocates will attest, with the rise of a poisonous, hydra-headed anti-vax movement. Its members include “natural health” scammers, shameless conspiracy mongers and misguided MAGA cultists bent on spurring vaccine mistrust. But they also include devious military minds schooled in the art of psychological warfare. Those last ones belong to the U.S. Department of Defense.
You may want to take a deep breath before reading on.
According to a June Reuters exposé, the Pentagon ran a secret antivaccine campaign in several developing countries at the height of the pandemic in 2020. Why? “To sow doubt about the efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China,” Reuters reported. Trump’s secretary of defense signed off on it; the Biden administration discontinued the program shortly after taking office. The Pentagon launched its propaganda operation in the Philippines (as COVID was raging), where it set up fake anti-vax accounts on social media. A military officer involved with the Pentagon’s psyop told Reuters: “We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective. We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.”
Such cavalier thinking has lethal consequences in the infodemic era. Timothy Caulfield, a University of Alberta public policy expert, put this bluntly in an interview with Scientific American: “The United States government made a conscious decision to spread misinformation that killed people.”
Is he being hyperbolic? Well, health experts are quite certain that antivaccine rhetoric proved deadly during the coronavirus pandemic and that, in the U.S., politicized misinformation led to COVID deaths in the hundreds of thousands. What fueled much of this antivaccine discourse? Conspiracy narratives about microchips and vaccine-risk cover-ups as well as other villainous plots to control humanity by governments or global institutions. Yes, it was bonkers. But now we know that when health authorities were desperately trying to tamp down these fears, the Pentagon was running its own conspiracy operation to discredit vaccines–just so it could score points against China. The revelation is a “worst case scenario story” for the global public health community, says Caulfield, “because it demonstrates that anti-vax misinformation was being spread by the government, and it reinforces people’s distrust in institutions.”
The fallout from the military’s covert psyop will reverberate on multiple levels. “When democratic governments employ this kind of information operation, they undermine the values and trust that sustain democracies,” says Kate Starbird, a disinformation expert at the University of Washington. Similarly the economist Alex Tabarrok writes that the Pentagon’s antivaccine campaign has “undermined U.S. credibility on the global stage and eroded trust in American institutions.” (No doubt, but the latter has been on a precipitous decline for a while.)
The question now is: What can be done to prevent something like this happening again? International development economist Charles Kenny says it’s time to “ban intelligence operations from interfering in public health.” That would be a welcome start, but let’s not hold our breath. We’ve been down this road before: In 2011, the CIA used a fake hepatitis vaccination program to search for Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. After the ploy came to light several years later, terrorists murdered legitimate polio vaccine workers, and there was a resurgence of polio in the population. In 2014 the White House vowed the CIA would no longer use vaccine programs as a cover for spy operations. Here we are a decade later, however, and it appears the Pentagon wasn’t bound by that promise and won’t be keeping it in the future.
The U.S. government’s past ignoble deceptions of its own citizens should have served plenty of warning that this is foolish. We owe today’s UFO craze to the cover-up of a military balloon crash in 1947, only acknowledged decades later by the U.S. Air Force. More seriously, during the cold war, the CIA secretly funded a slew of American cultural and political organizations to (unwittingly) help wage its propaganda campaign against the Soviet Union, promoting favored artists in commissar like fashion. Then U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell touted completely fallacious “weapons of mass destruction” buncombe to the United Nations to justify the botched invasion of Iraq in 2003. Now overlay this with the vaccine deceptions used by America’s spymasters in Pakistan and more recently in the Philippines. It makes for a confusing lens to view a world overrun with fake news, bots and troll armies.
John Lisle, a University of Texas historian who researches cold war science and the intelligence community, says that the Pentagon should have learned from history before undertaking its recent antivaccine disinformation campaign. “It may have been intended to make Filipinos distrust China, but its legacy will be to make Americans distrust the government.”
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American
Keith Kloor is New York City–based journalist and adjunct professor of journalism at New York University.
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-pentagons-antivaccine-propaganda-endangered-public-health-and-tarnished/ [description] =>Amid the pandemic, the Pentagon ran a conspiracy campaign to discredit vaccines–just so it could score points against China. The revelation is a worst-case scenario for global public health
[pubDate] => Thu, 27 Jun 2024 11:00:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-pentagons-antivaccine-propaganda-endangered-public-health-and-tarnished/ ) [37] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/every-rock-tells-a-story-this-is-the-tale-of-a-meteor-wrong/ [title] => Every Rock Tells a Story. This Is the Tale of a Meteor-wrong [timestamp] => 1719439200 [author] => Bethany Brookshire [content] =>We discovered a strange rock in the Sahara we thought was a meterorite. Figuring out what it was grounded me back to Earth
A strange rock, found in Morocco, could have been a meteorite or a dinosaur egg. What it was was something different entirely?
Bethany Brookshire
It was Mustafa—the driver my friend and I were working with in western Morocco—who saw it first. A rock that comfortably filled his palm and was shaped like a slightly-flattened egg cracked down the center. The outside “shell” appeared umber and worn. The inside was a dull slate, with a peculiarly straight line dividing into two interior parts. The center was textured, weirdly rippled like the surface of a tiny brain or coral. It was curiously dense, much heavier than it looked like it should be. It stood out in the Sahara, a place littered with rocks in various shapes—razor-point shards, chunky layers, pitted nodules.
Mustafa, my friend and I turned it over and over in our hands. He hoped it was a meteorite. Where we were, people had found meteorites before, and it was common—and legal—to sell them. They are worth a lot of money, and Mustafa joked about how much of his wedding he could pay off with it.
My childish, dinosaur-loving heart hoped it was a dinosaur egg. But either way, the question of what this strange thing was led to a wondrous story. This rock, whether common or extraordinary, was a piece of the desert, sitting warm in my hand. It was an example of our world, whether a common thing that came from the Earth itself, or a visitor from another realm, evidence of a planet building itself up and tearing itself apart. The heaviness of this small rock made me feel grounded—connected to the desert I walked on.
The rock came home with me as a souvenir of my trip (with a promise to mail it back as a wedding gift to Mustafa if it was a meteorite). While Morocco regulates meteorite and fossil sales, my rational brain told me it was probably just a simple, legal rock. Friends and social media followers were fascinated. Was it a meteorite? The interior was dark. Meteorites are dark. Was it a geode?
Or was it a fossil? Western Morocco is a prime spot for fossils. Roadside stores dot the main thoroughfares in and out of the Sahara, selling such fossils in various states—from freshly dug, unpolished vague shapes to carved and polished trilobite-filled wine racks and ammonite-patterned sinks.
But what if it really was a dinosaur egg? Skeletons had been found in the area, especially Spinosaurus, from the late Cretaceous period.
My more geology-minded friends said things like the rock was a “concretion,” the accumulation of rocky cement inside the holes of another rock.
I’ll admit that concretion didn’t really appeal. The Sahara can be so diverse, some areas with baking hot hills, small mountains, plains of fine reddish sand rising against a painfully bright azure sky, others drastically different with brown sand set in sharp contrast to piles of jagged dark rocks.
The Western Sahara, west of Merzouga, with the sand dunes of Erg Chebbi to the north.
Bethany Brookshire
Amid these myriad desert scenes, how could a rock that was so eye-catching be as boring as cement?
With a tiny remaining pebble of hope, I took the rock to Leslie Hale, the rock and ore collections manager at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.
I tried to play it cool. What was this rock? Asking for a friend.
Everyone thinks they’ve got a meteorite, she told me. “Meteor-wrongs, as we jokingly refer to them, are a fairly common identification request.”
She knows her meteorites; the museum has a collection, and my rock was definitely not that. Meteorites have very specific features. “The two main ones are a fusion coating, which is formed by essentially the outside of the rock melting as it passes through the atmosphere,” she said. “And then, something called regmaglypts, which are like, sort of thumbprint indentations on the outside of the rock.”
She also ruled out the dinosaur egg. On the one hand I was relieved that I probably wouldn’t have to repatriate a priceless geological find. On the other I was a little disappointed. It was my rock. I wanted it to be special.
In the end, my geological friends were right. Mustafa’s and my egg-shaped meteor-wrong is actually a concretion. The brown outside formed long before the gray inside. The outside, Hale said, might be sandstone. Over time, a cavity formed inside. Then, she said, “hot liquid flowed through and precipitated out the quartz, and possibly other minerals,” forming the flint interior. The sun-warmed heat of the rock in my hand was nothing to the stone-melting heat that formed it in the first place.
But even though being a concretion is perhaps less exciting than what Mustafa and I supposed it was, this rock is of the Sahara in a way only a desert rock can be.
In a place of punishing heat, sandstorms and so little water, Hale explained that the rock had experienced every force on the planet that could weather it, other than water. This stone wasn’t simply a concretion, it was a septarian nodule.
The outer layer is a smooth and shiny desert varnish, she said, a combination of chemical and physical weathering, “a feature of it sitting in a dry desert environment for a long period of time.”
Hale called the tiny brainlike ripples inside the rock rills, a consequence of wind erosion. These rills form as the desiccating winds of the Sahara blow tiny bits of sand across the rock. It's sandblasting on a tiny scale. The grains, like water, follow the path of least resistance. They form little trains, cutting tiny squiggles. Keep the rock where it was found, Hale noted, and it can even tell you the prevailing wind direction in the language of its rills.
This Sahara rock, with its rills and weathered smoothness, its differing colors and textures, is what she calls a thunder egg. The name sounds like it should be from the Marvel universe, and certainly adds some luster. Our rock isn’t a rock. It’s a thunder egg, thank you.
Our thunder egg, or septarian concretion, which sounds like something a senior citizen would want to get checked out, is only hundreds of thousands of years old, Hale guessed.* Geologists think on very different time scales; a rock that is only thousands of years old is a baby.
Understanding that made me look at our baby rock with new eyes. It is the same age as humanity. While it developed its coat of varnish, we hunted and gathered, farmed and warred. While it changed under the influence of wind and weather, we changed too—forming huge societies and becoming mega-organisms dependent on each other across continents.
Today the rock sits on my desk. Every time I look at it I marvel a little more. It reminds me of the desert, yes. But it also reminds me of the stories we tell each other. The stories about the rocks we find—which are really about who we are, and what we want to see in the world around us.
Sometimes, Hale says, people are disappointed when she says their rock is a meteor-wrong—not a meteorite, gem or egg. It’s “a natural tendency to go, you know, ‘this is interesting. I think I found something special.'”
But every rock has something to say, about its place, about our planet. Every rock is a piece of history, part of the story of our home. Every rock really is special, if we only have the eyes to see it.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
*Editor's Note (7/2/24): This sentence was edited after posting to correct the description of how old the rock might be.
Bethany Brookshire is an award-winning science journalist and author of the book Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains (Ecco, 2022). Her work has appeared in Scientific American, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic and other outlets.
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/every-rock-tells-a-story-this-is-the-tale-of-a-meteor-wrong/ [description] =>We discovered a strange rock in the Sahara we thought was a meterorite. Figuring out what it was grounded me back to Earth
[pubDate] => Thu, 27 Jun 2024 11:00:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/every-rock-tells-a-story-this-is-the-tale-of-a-meteor-wrong/ ) [38] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-older-people-can-stay-safe-from-fraud-and-scams/ [title] => How Older People Can Stay Safe from Fraud and Scams [timestamp] => 1719439200 [author] => Laurie Archbald-Pannone; The Conversation US [content] =>Older people are increasingly becoming the targets of fraudsters. Here’s how to stay safe and what to do if you think you’ve been scammed
ArtMarie/Getty Images
The following essay is reprinted with permission from 
The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research.
Americans age 60 and older lost more than US$3 billion to scammers in 2023, according to the FBI.
To put that whopping figure in context, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour recently made news as the first concert tour ever to earn $1 billion.
As a geriatrician – a doctor who cares for people over 65 years of age – I believe elder fraud has reached an epidemic scale. My patients often tell me about being scammed.
The consequences can be worse than just losing money. The experience is traumatic for many, with some victims feeling deep shame and self-doubt in the aftermath. This can interfere with their relationships, erode their trust in others and harm their mental and physical health.
Teaching older Americans how to identify and avoid fraud – and how to report such crimes – could go some way to mitigating the impact of this modern epidemic.
A recent FBI report shows just how prevalent elder fraud is. In 2023, Americans over 60 submitted 14% more complaints to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, or IC3, than they did the previous year. Estimated financial losses rose about 11% over the same period.
These numbers, grim as they are, only represent the tip of the iceberg. For one thing, only about half of the reports of internet crimes to the FBI included information about the victim’s age – which means reported incidents of elder fraud are an undercount.
What’s more, these figures don’t include the many scams that take place over the phone, by mail or in person. And many fraud victims never report their experiences – often because they’re embarrassed, afraid or unsure what to do.
While people of all ages are victimized by fraudsters, older adults can be uniquely vulnerable.
The FBI has suggested that older adults are often targeted because they tend to be more trusting and polite. They often have financial savings, own homes and have good credit– all of which make them more attractive to scammers.
Older adults may also be less comfortable with new technologies, which puts them at risk. Consider that someone who is 85 years old may have retired in the year 2004 – three years before Apple introduced the iPhone. While many forms of technology have permeated our personal lives, it’s often in the workplace that many people receive mandatory training – like how to avoid online scams.
In 2023, tech-support scams were the most commonly reported type of elder fraud. Other common schemes include romance scams, online shopping swindles and investment frauds. While tech scams are the most common, investment scams are the costliest, accounting for nearly half of all reported losses from those over 60 last year.
Fraudulent call centers are also well known for targeting older adults. Such scams made up 40% of reported elder fraud cases in 2023, according to the FBI, accounting for at least $770 million in losses. Many make use of new technologies such as artificial intelligence to deceive people more effectively with voice-cloning scams or “deepfake” videos.
Call-center scammers tell all sorts of tall tales. In 2022, more than 600 people reported being victimized in a single timeshare-related fraud. They collectively lost nearly $40 million. And in the latter half of 2023, scammers posing as government officials and tech-support agents pushed victims to liquidate their assets or buy precious metals – with reported losses reaching more than $55 million.
As with any epidemic, “infection control” tools can help us limit the spread. Much like vaccines create immunity against viruses, prevention efforts can help people build up their defenses to avoid fraud. The main tool for preventing fraud is learning how to identify likely scams ahead of time. Here are a few FBI-approved tips to help you do that:
Despite your best efforts, you might still be taken in by a fraudster. If that happens, know that you’re not alone – and that it’s possible to recover. Here is some advice for dealing with the aftermath:
If you or someone you love falls into a fraud scam, you aren’t alone. Not even law enforcement experts are immune. At the age of 90, former FBI director William Webster was targeted – an experience he bravely shared with the world.
I encourage my patients not to feel too embarrassed to report what happened. Talking about these experiences is an important step toward fighting this epidemic.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Laurie Archbald-Pannone is an associate professor of medicine and geriatrics at the University of Virginia.
Curated by professional editors, The Conversation offers informed commentary and debate on the issues affecting our world.
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-older-people-can-stay-safe-from-fraud-and-scams/ [description] =>Older people are increasingly becoming the targets of fraudsters. Here’s how to stay safe and what to do if you think you’ve been scammed
[pubDate] => Thu, 27 Jun 2024 12:00:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-older-people-can-stay-safe-from-fraud-and-scams/ ) [39] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-remarkable-life-of-chemistry-professor-and-crime-buster-mary-louisa/ [title] => The Remarkable Life of Chemistry Professor and Crime Buster Mary Louisa Willard [timestamp] => 1719439200 [author] => Sarah Wyman; Carol Sutton Lewis; The Lost Women of Science Initiative [content] =>This chemistry professor helped police around the world solve arsons and homicides
Mary Louisa Willard was a chemistry professor with a side hustle as a crime fighter.
Keren Mevorach (composite); Eberly Family Special Collections Library/Penn State University Libraries (image)
Mary Louisa Willard, a chemistry professor at Pennsylvania State University starting in the late 1920s, was a colorful character. Her hometown of State College, Pa., knew her for stopping traffic in her pink Cadillac to chat with friends and for throwing birthday bashes for her beloved cocker spaniels. Police around the world knew her for her side hustle: using chemistry to help solve crimes.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Carol Sutton Lewis: Mary Louisa Willard. Or “Lady Sherlock” as one newspaper called her. She was a chemistry professor who picked up a side hustle as a forensic criminologist and soon, she was helping law enforcement investigate everything from forgeries to homicides using the cutting-edge science of her time.
Sarah Wyman is joining me to tell us this story.
Sarah Wyman: Okay, Carol, I want you to picture this scene for me. We’re at Pennsylvania State University in the chemistry building. Dates are murky, but we think it’s sometime in the 1940s, and a woman is walking down the hallway. She is holding a dead chicken.
Marching on either side of her are two police officers. Both of them also holding—you guessed it—dead chickens. And these birds are allegedly victims of murder, and the woman who's being escorted down the hall is their accused killer. She is indignant. She is insisting that she is innocent.
And after a few more steps, she and the policeman reach Room 101. They open the door to find this spacious, sunny laboratory, with shelves and shelves of glass bottles covering the walls. Several different kinds of expensive-looking microscopes are sitting on lab benches. And in the middle of it all, a short, white-haired professor is sitting at a desk, poring over some sheets of paper.
And at this moment, one of the police officers clears his throat. And says, “Dr. Willard, we need your help.”
Carol Sutton Lewis: This is Lost Women of Science. I’m Carol Sutton Lewis. And today, we bring you the story of Mary Louisa Willard. We’ll learn about her astonishing career—how her brilliance in the lab made her a valuable resource to police investigators, how she testified as an expert witness in major criminal trials, and of course, we’ll find out how this chemist cracked the case of the dead chickens.
Carol Sutton Lewis: So, hi Sarah.
Sarah Wyman: Hello!
Carol Sutton Lewis: So, let's back up a minute. How did we get here? I’m assuming chicken murders weren’t her specialty.
Sarah Wyman: Yeah, Mary Willard was first and foremost a professor of chemistry. She did end up having this incredible side hustle solving crimes, and serious crimes too, not just chicken murders, I mean she worked on cases of breaking and entering… homicides… assaults. And we’re going to get to that a little bit later. And her story really begins at Penn State University, which is where she was quite literally born and bred. She was born in a cottage on campus, just a couple hundred yards away from where her lab would one day be. And her family — the Willards — were deeply embedded in Penn State’s history.
J. Peter Willard: My name is James Peter Willard and, and Mary Willard or ML Willard was my aunt.
James Peter Willard mostly goes by Peter. He lives in New York State now, but he grew up in State College, not far away from his aunt. And I called him a few weeks ago to get as much good intel about his aunt as I possibly could. And let's just say, Peter is not a man prone to hyperbole.
Sarah Wyman: I've read about your aunt. Um, the word gregarious comes up a lot, but how do you remember her personality as a kid? What was she like to be around?
J. Peter Willard: Normal.
Sarah Wyman: Normal!
J. Peter Willard: She was very normal. She was very normal with us.
Sarah Wyman: Yeah.
Peter: I would never say that she was thinking she's a big deal or something like that. That— that sort of thing never showed up.
Sarah Wyman: I was surprised by this answer, Carol. I mean, I'd been reading a lot about Mary at this point, and normal is one of the last words that would come to my mind.
I mean, I've been digging up these old profiles of her, and even in her obituary in the local paper, there were half a dozen people interviewed and most of them had a hysterical memory to share about her.
Lots of them mentioned her car—this legendary pink Cadillac— and also how she drove it. Someone said that Mary had to look through the steering wheel instead of above it because she was only about five feet tall. Someone else said that when you saw her driving down the street, she'd stop in the middle of the road if she saw somebody that she knew and completely hold up traffic to catch up with a friend.
She had a whole litany of interesting collections and hobbies. Like, her rose garden where she was growing 96 different rose species.
Rumor has it that she also once grew marijuana in her garden for police experimenters?
Carol Sutton Lewis: Of course it was for police experimenters.
Sarah Wyman: [laughs] For research only.
And she never married, and she never had kids, but what she did have were Cocker Spaniels.
J. Peter Willard: That she absolutely loved. She had birthday parties for them. And really the whole neighborhood came. You know, next-door neighbors all the way up and down the street.
Carol Sutton Lewis: She sounds like she's pretty fun, but what do we know about Aunt Mary the scientist? She was a chemistry professor, right? All the way back in the late 1920s?
Sarah Wyman: Yeah, which I realize might seem surprising on its face. I mean, it certainly wasn't extremely common for women to be working in the faculty in chemistry departments at universities during this time.
But Mary came from an academic family. So as I mentioned before, she grew up on Penn State's campus back when the surrounding area was mostly open fields. And her father was a math professor at the university. His name was Joseph Moody Willard. There’s actually a building named after him on campus today.
And back when Mary was growing up, the Willards would host students who needed housing. Visiting lecturers who were coming to the campus would sometimes stay with them too. And so the Willard kids really grew up in this really intellectually stimulating environment.
Carol Sutton Lewis: So, coming from this academic family, I would imagine they were fine, excited, happy about her going to college?
Sarah Wyman: Yeah, Mary didn't talk a lot or write about the fact that she went to college, but according to her nephew, it really would have been like a non event in the Willard family. In 1921, she became one of three women to graduate from Penn State with a bachelor’s in chemistry.
She went on to get a master’s, and then a PhD in organic chemistry from Cornell. And after she returned to Penn State in 1927, she became one of four women teaching in the chemistry and chemical agriculture departments, which you know, not great by today’s standards, but honestly pretty huge at the time! To have four women teaching in those departments. But within the Willard family, this was apparently not a big deal.
J. Peter Willard: I never heard once in the whole time that I was, was, uh, growing up that women, all women didn't have PhDs. That was normal, you don't discuss it. I mean, it's not a big deal.
Carol Sutton Lewis: Ooh, love that.
Sarah Wyman: Yeah, just very very normal. But just to get another perspective on it, I spoke with Bill Herron. Before Bill retired, he taught chemistry at Newman University in Pennsylvania. Now he volunteers as a forensics consultant for the Delaware Innocence Project. And he says… you know that expression that, as a woman, you often have to be twice as good as a man to get half as far?
Bill Herron: …When Willard did this, it was more like 10x.
She had to be just freaking brilliant. I mean, there's just to compete at that time, she was, you know, uh, pardon my French, but she was a serious badass. I mean, you know, she, I mean, there's just no other way to get around it.
Carol Sutton Lewis: So, what was the focus of Mary's chemistry research?
Sarah Wyman: So when she was getting her master's and Ph.D., she became really interested in microscopy, which in its most basic form is just looking at the physical properties of something under a microscope. But Mary was also rapidly becoming an expert in chemical microscopy.
Bill Herron: Chemical microscopy is you're using the microscope as a stage and you are potentially looking at the chemical and physical properties of whatever little dust speck you have there.
Sarah Wyman: That could mean, for example, adding chemicals to a sample on a microscope’s stage… and then watching to see how it reacts.
Bill Herron: You're doing it on the microscope stage with a little teeny weeny pipette. And apparently you don't get to drink coffee because you, you know, you, you know, if you shake, man, it's all over the place.
Sarah Wyman: And you can use this process, of observing these chemical reactions in super fine detail, to actually work out what substances — what elements — make up a sample.
Which, as you might imagine, could come in pretty handy if you were trying to conduct forensics.
Carol Sutton Lewis: And now I know in this day and age, there are a few people who don't know what forensics is because they watch all the crime shows, but can you just tell us, again, exactly what forensics means?
Sarah Wyman: Yeah, so forensics is basically just applying a scientific discipline or scientific tests in order to solve crime. And today, you know, we've all heard of crime scene investigations. But back in the 1920s, this was really not happening in the way that it's happening today.
Bruce Goldfarb: Forensics is actually quite old. I mean, you can go way, way back to, the pyramids, way back to the code of Hammurabi
Sarah Wyman: Bruce Goldfarb is an author who has written about the history of forensic science in the United States.
Bruce Goldfarb: But it's not until fairly recently that there have been sort of the scientific tools to do it in a really scientifically valid way.
Sarah Wyman: Bruce says that there was a turning point for how death investigations worked in the U.S., and it came right around the end of World War I, right around this time when Mary Willard was an undergrad at Penn State.
So, up until this point, the vast majority of death investigations were being carried out by coroners, so coroners would make a judgment call about whether or not they thought somebody had died of natural causes or was murdered, and then after that they'd call in a jury of adults— so laypeople—to vote on whether this was a murder or not. This was called a coroner’s inquest.
Bruce Goldfarb: The original way of doing it is basically crowdsourcing, death investigations. And then, in the late 1800s, 1877, there is a medical model that emerged, first in Boston. They had the first medical examiner, a doctor, put in charge of doing that death investigation.
Sarah Wyman: But even after that medical examiner started working in Boston, most of the country was still on the coroner system. So most death investigations were still being “eyeballed” rather than scientifically investigated.
But when World War I ended, Bruce says a couple of important things had happened. First of all, the war had produced some major technical advances.
Bruce Goldfarb: There is a lot of research in nerve glasses so there are military applications. So they're looking at the chemistry and the effects on the body. And these things grow out of that.
Sarah Wyman: All this led up to 1918, when the first ever forensic toxicology laboratory opened in the United States. In New York City.
Bruce Goldfarb: It was really very, very, very new at that time. And for a long time, they were it.
Sarah Wyman: By 1930, there were still very few cities in the US with medical examiners: the big ones included New York, Newark, New Jersey, and Boston. Los Angeles had also opened a crime lab. But if you were a police investigator in need of a scientist to investigate a murder, you didn’t have a ton of options.
Bruce Goldfarb: I mean, the fact is that at that time there were very, very few people throughout the country with that kind of expertise. It was an emerging field, and there just weren't that many people who were capable of answering that kind of question.
Sarah Wyman: But one of the people who could… was Mary Willard.
Bruce Goldfarb: she was really, in the right place at the right time.
Sarah Wyman: In 1930, Mary Willard was working as an assistant professor at Penn State. She’d started to make a name for herself in microscopy, especially being an expert in analyzing the chemical structure of food and drugs.
And in the meantime, prohibition had created a new need for forensic toxicologists. Bootleg alcohol was often contaminated with poisons. Methanol, or methyl alcohol, was a common one. But there were others too.
Bruce Goldfarb: God knows what gasoline, you know, just to dilute a little bit and give it some kick, you know, just to, I don't know, just like, you know, you buy some, you buy some little glassine envelope from a street. You have no idea what's really in it.
Sarah Wyman: So, law enforcement had their work cut out for them. They had to figure out what was causing all of these poisonings, and then hopefully they could use that information to trace the tainted samples back to the bootleggers who were responsible.
But in order to do that, they needed someone who could separate the substances in contraband alcohol samples and perform a chemical analysis to identify them. Which is why, in 1930, Mary Willard was tapped by some Pennsylvania revenue officers to do just that.
There isn’t a detailed record of the first case that Mary worked on, but she must have done a good job because shortly thereafter, a judge in Scranton got in touch with another case, and before long, Mary’s phone was ringing almost every day with requests for chemical analyses on everything from paint to bloodstains, drugs, and poisons.
Bruce Goldfarb: That sort of thing does not surprise me at all that people would seek her out from all over the place because, you know, she was one of the very, very few independent people, who was capable of doing such a thing.
Sarah Wyman: Over and over again, Mary was called upon to help solve homicides, arsons, forgeries, and then one day, a woman walked into her lab in tears, protesting that she had not killed those chickens. After the break.
[AD BREAK]
Carol Sutton Lewis: You may not know this about me, but over the course of the pandemic, I became obsessed with crime shows. A lot of British crime shows because they're really good at it. And as I'm listening to Mary, it's sort of oh my gosh. It's, it's a classic this little woman you said she was really short and she's driving a car that she has to look through the steering wheel and she's giving birthday parties for dogs. And yet in that lab, nobody's messing with her. She's in that lab. She is solving the cases. She is giving them the evidence they need. Ah, it's so perfect. I mean—
Sarah Wyman: This is so true. She's a regular Doc Martin is his name, right?
Carol Sutton Lewis: Oh my goodness.
Sarah Wyman: She's a regular Father Brown.
Carol Sutton Lewis: Okay. Okay. No, wait, wait, wait. Now you're diving into my territory. She's actually a little more like Vera, if we're going down that road.
Sarah Wyman: It's so true. I mean, the more I learned about Mary, the more shocked I felt that there hasn't been, a book or a Hollywood movie or a British TV show about this woman. But as her nephew Peter puts it, Mary was so unassuming, so normal.
J. Peter Willard: The only time I ever saw something that I thought was abnormal, I was in her house and she was out. I was there alone, and I opened the refrigerator door, and there was a human arm in the refrigerator. It wasn't even wrapped up.
Sarah Wyman: I tried to ask follow up questions, Carol. I really did.
Carol Sutton Lewis: Okay, well, no more words.
[Both laugh]
Sarah Wyman: And the other thing Peter said is that his aunt didn’t really talk about her criminal cases. Except, I found, with one notable exception. The case of the dead chickens.
It all started when 28 of a local farmer’s chickens suddenly dropped dead. The farmer was quick to blame his neighbor, a widow who apparently he’d overheard saying she’d kill the birds if they trespassed in her garden. But the woman insisted she was innocent.
So Mary got to work in the lab. First thing, she would have ruled out a violent death. No external injuries on the birds. So the cause of death was more likely some kind of poisoning. And this is where Bill Herron says Mary would probably have used chemical microscopy. She’d start by taking a sample from the birds’ stomachs.
Bill Herron: And what she’s first gonna do is add some hydrochloric acid.
Sarah Wyman: If the sample contained any silver, mercury, or lead, Mary would be able to see those fall out of the liquid solution.
Bill Herron: It's almost as if you have, like, a hedge maze and you can get lost in the hedge maze. But what you're going to do is by adding different chemicals, you're going to actually wipe out different sections of the hedge until you close the box around what it is. It's kind of like a chemical 20 questions.
Sarah Wyman: But so far, no dice. So Mary would have moved on to chemical question #2. She’d add hydrogen sulfide to the sample.
Bill Herron: And in that case, you kick out copper, bismuth, cadmium, lead, mercury, tin, antimony, and arsenic...
Sarah Wyman: At this point, Mary would have seen some heavy metals precipitate out of the sample. But she still didn’t know which exactly one of those metals was in her sample. So, she’d collect the metals, dissolve them again…
Bill Herron: and then wipe out each one of these in turn by adding and subtracting various things. That particular scheme, I can show it to you, but I can't recite that by heart. And this is what I'm telling you. This, this woman, I mean, it was like having encyclopedic knowledge at her fingertips. And heavy metals are the easy stuff. When you get into other chemicals, there's millions of pathways. And so having that on the tip of your tongue and just doing it, it's magic!
Sarah Wyman: Eventually, Mary narrowed the sample down to arsenic. That’s what killed the birds. But what they did not know is where that arsenic came from. They went back to the scene of the crime, and collected paint samples from a billboard near the farmer’s field. Took those back to the lab, ran more tests, and sure enough: the glue on the billboard came back positive for arsenic. So Mary concluded that these birds were not murdered. They just had a little snack of a billboard, ingested some arsenic, and the neighbor was exonerated.
So this is an example of one case that we know a fair bit about. But there were many, many, many different cases, most of them involving human victims. And Mary was a little bit of a generalist within her field. You know, she could do everything from toxicology - identifying poisons, to a spectrographic analysis of paint, which you might use to check if two paint chips matched, for example.
She didn’t invent all the techniques or instruments she used in her investigations. But she was one of the first people to apply them to forensic science — so in other words, using this technology, this chemistry known-how, in order to solve crimes.
At the height of her career, Mary Willard was serving as an expert witness in court about once a month. She helped out with investigations with every single county in Pennsylvania, and eventually branched out to other states in the US and even worked internationally.
Carol Sutton Lewis: So, at this point, was Mary investigating crimes full time, or was she still teaching at Penn State?
Sarah Wyman: Not only was she still teaching at Penn State, she was working most of these cases pro bono.
Carol Sutton Lewis: Wow.
Sarah Wyman: And on her departmental paperwork. She really framed her criminology work as a hobby. She'd write it down next to, like, collecting vintage roadmaps is like a fun fact. And it's not that her casework was a big secret, necessarily, I mean people knew about it. But she definitely wasn't walking around gloating to her friends and family about, you know, this objectively very cool job. And there may have been another reason for that. Not all of the cases that she was working were quaint countryside chicken mysteries.
She testified in a couple of really pretty major murder trials in Pennsylvania.
One of them was in 1953. A man named Dan Bolish, who was in his early 40s and a much younger friend of his — who was only 17-years-old — were hired to set fire to a building in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Allegedly to collect the insurance money when it burned down. But the 17-year-old was trapped inside after they set the fire, and he later died from the burns he sustained.
So Mary Willard and her lab were called in to help investigate the case. When the case went to trial, Mary took the stand as an expert witness. And there is a whole article about this in Scranton’s Tribune just dedicated to Mary’s testimony. The reporter is obviously tickled by the fact that she’s a woman. They call her “woman criminologist” and “lady scientist” throughout the piece, you know, just in case we’ve forgotten we’re talking about a she-chemist here. And the reporter wrote that Dr. Willard “spoke in a clear voice, enunciating her words precisely—like a professor in a lecture hall.” (Which you know, she literally was a professor, so maybe not that surprising).
But anyway, at the trial, it sounds like she walked the jury through every little scrap of physical evidence the police found and how she analyzed it. And a big part of that was her analysis of kerosene samples that had been taken from the crime scene, Bolish’s car, and a gas station nearby.
In order to compare these samples, Mary used a technique called gas chromatography. Bill Herron says the technology has advanced a lot since Mary’s heyday, but the basic concept is the same. You take your mystery sample, vaporize it, and run it through a long tube with a detector at the end of it.
Bill Herron: It's a lot like a footrace. You're introducing a volatile species down a very thin tube that is, for lack of a better description, sticky. And so, lighter things go through that faster. Heavier things go through it slower. And then you have, like a detector. And so, if you record who comes through at what time, you not only have how long did it take to get through the column, but how much is there.
Sarah Wyman: And you get a graph with peaks of different sizes, depending on how fast each compound traveled through the tube, and how much was in the sample. And so if you look at your graph, you can figure out what your mystery sample is. Like if it’s kerosene. Or even what kind of kerosene.
Bill Herron: Kerosene is not one thing. Kerosene is a vague group of compounds that all boil at approximately the same temperature. It's not like you get the same kerosene every time you go to the gas station.
It's whatever was freaking cheap that week. And so every gasoline station and even, if they come with new kerosene the week after, it's gonna look different.
And in this case, Mary found a match. All three samples showed the same concentrations for all of the different compounds. Connecting the kerosene in Bolish’s car to the scene of the crime.
Bolish was ultimately convicted not just of arson — for starting the fire — but of murder. Since the 17-year-old had died as a result. Dan Bolish was sentenced to death. But then he won a second trial where his sentence was reduced to life in prison. And eventually he died in prison at the age of 59.
Carol Sutton Lewis: Do, Sarah, do we know how Mary felt about the fact that her testimony was putting people in prison? I mean, she's a scientist first and foremost, and in this case, her testimony was helping to decide whether a man was going to get the death penalty.
Sarah Wyman: Yeah, it's not something that Mary wrote about, but we did ask Bill Herron this question.
Bill Herron: I can't answer for her. I can answer for myself. I do hear a lot of people saying, you know, just the facts, ma'am. I mean, for myself, I technically do this full time, but I probably only work three, four hours a day.
The reason is if I start working five, six, seven hours a day, I can't sleep at night. Go to a Game of Thrones reference, you know, a forensic scientist, they're the watchers on the wall. They guard against the White Walkers so everybody else doesn't have to. And it messes with you, it takes you in really dark places because you're always looking at someone's worst day.
And so, the idea that it didn't bother her… I can believe that she didn't talk about it, because you bottle it up. But the idea that it doesn't, that doesn't mess with your head and impact you, I think that's nonsense. If you are wrong, you are either going to send an innocent person to jail or release a guilty person. I can't picture that doesn't weigh on people.
Sarah Wyman: And I would love to know what Mary thought about all this, but unfortunately, I haven’t been able to dig up any records that give us insight. I do know she was really concerned with improving the overall process, especially how evidence was collected.
I mean she would go on lecture circuits around the country, talking about criminology. And in those lectures, she said that more police officers should be getting college degrees in the sciences. She felt that it was so important that the people who were collecting the evidence and responsible for preserving it, for transporting it at the right temperature—she was like, these people need to know that their ability to collect this evidence determines my ability to process it fairly and effectively.
She pointed out that that goes for lawyers, juries and judges, too. Um, it was kind of a pet peeve of hers that in court, she noticed that the kind of subjective tactile exhibits were the ones that juries would really lock onto. So, you know, for example, if you show them a plaster cast of a crowbar dent in a window and then hold up the crowbar and say, look, it fits, everybody's nodding along. But if you start explaining a chemical analysis in super high detail, you can see their eyes glaze over. And she once said of explaining her findings to a jury that usually it has to be done in a colorful Dick Tracy sort of way, but still retaining the basic fundamentals. Much work can be done in this direction.
Carol Sutton Lewis: I just have to note for some of our younger listeners that Dick Tracy reference. Sarah, I don't even know if you're old enough to remember Dick Tracy, but he was a famous cartoon detective. He was in the comics when comics were printed in newspapers, all these, all these ancient concepts.
Sarah Wyman: A newspaper? What's a newspaper, Carol?
Carol Sutton Lewis: But, but I, I say this in jest. I mean, I don't want to take anything away from the seriousness of this, of what Mary was talking about. She makes a really good point.
Sarah Wyman: Yeah.
Carol Sutton Lewis: So, Sarah, we have learned so much about Mary. She's had such a wide ranging career. Now, what do you see as her main legacy?
Sarah Wyman: Well, you know, the crime busting stuff is the obvious place to start. I mean, she was really respected by her colleagues in law enforcement. The police officer she worked with chose her as an honorary member of the Fraternal Order of Police in Pennsylvania, and I know that that was something that she was proud of.
Carol Sutton Lewis: Huh.
Sarah Wyman: She continued to work on cases for a long time after she retired as a professor at Penn State, and she was a well known figure in local courtrooms. You know, she just absolutely did not rest, but I think If Mary were here to answer this question, she would probably want me to talk more about her work as an educator at Penn State. And I say that because it's something she talked about a lot. I read a speech where she was introducing herself at a conference. And the first thing she talked about in that speech was how proud she was to be a professor. Even after she retired, she was holding office hours at age 81 on Penn State's campus. And she made a really big impression on her nephews too. Peter told me something that really stuck with me.
Sarah Wyman: One thing I wanted to ask you about was, you said, in an email that—and I'm quoting you here—that “my aunt was a force for good for whatever she undertook,” and when I read that, I caught my breath, like, that's, that's just such a beautiful compliment. What made you say that, and, and how did you see that in the life that she lived?
Peter Willard: Every moment that I saw her that appeared to me to be the case. It was a very, it was an emotional statement for me to write. There was always a feeling of do what's good and everything will be alright with her. And that goes all the way to her pink Cadillac and her dogs and everything else.
Sarah Wyman: Mary Louisa Willard doesn’t have a building named after her on Penn State’s campus like her dad does. But in 2009, one of her former students, who has since passed away, endowed a scholarship in her name. And the way he talked about her was really beautiful. He said, I liked Dr. Willard as a teacher and as a person. She always made time for you, giving you her complete attention. Dr. Willard was so much more than just a professor.
Carol Sutton Lewis: This episode of Lost Women of Science was hosted by me, Carol Sutton Lewis.
Sarah Wyman: And me, Sarah Wyman. I wrote and produced this episode with help from our senior producer, Elah Feder. I want to thank the American Chemical Society, Penn State Chemistry Department, Dan Sykes, Sue Barr, and Linda Del Monaco Willard.
Carol Sutton Lewis: Lizzie Younan composes all of our music. We had fact-checking help from Lexi Atiya. Hans Hsu sound designed and mastered this episode. Our executive producers are Katie Hafner and Amy Scharf. Our senior managing producer is Deborah Unger. Thanks to Jeff DelViscio at our publishing partner, Scientific American.
Further Reading
18 Tiny Deaths: The Untold Story of Frances Glessner Lee and the Invention of Modern Forensics, by Bruce Goldfarb. Sourcebooks, 2020
OCME: Life in America’s Top Forensic Medical Center, by Bruce Goldfarb. Steerforth Press, 2023
Labors & Legacies: The Chemists of Penn State 1855–1947, by Kristen A. Yarmey. Pennsylvania State University, 2006. See pages 109–110 and 149–150
“Penn State Alumnus Endows Mary Willard Trustee Scholarship.” Pennsylvania State University, April 21, 2009
Sarah Wyman is an audio reporter and producer at NPR. Her work has also aired on 99% Invisible, The World from PRX, APM, and other podcasts.
Carol Sutton Lewis is co-host and producer of Season 3 of Lost Women of Science. An attorney who has focused on education and parenting issues for decades, she is passionate about sharing inspirational stories and helpful resources with learners of all ages. She is also the creator and host of Ground Control Parenting with Carol Sutton Lewis, an interview podcast about the job and the joy of raising Black and brown children. Follow Sutton Lewis on Instagram @groundcontrolparenting and on Twitter @gndctrlparentg
The Lost Women of Science Initiative is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with two overarching and interrelated missions: to tell the story of female scientists who made groundbreaking achievements in their fields--yet remain largely unknown to the general public--and to inspire girls and young women to embark on careers in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math).
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-remarkable-life-of-chemistry-professor-and-crime-buster-mary-louisa/ [description] =>This chemistry professor helped police around the world solve arsons and homicides
[pubDate] => Thu, 27 Jun 2024 14:00:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-remarkable-life-of-chemistry-professor-and-crime-buster-mary-louisa/ ) [40] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-delicate-comb-jellies-withstand-ocean-depths-but-melt-away-on-land/ [title] => How Delicate Comb Jellies Withstand Ocean Depths But Melt Away on Land [timestamp] => 1719439200 [author] => Elizabeth Anne Brown [content] =>Scientists finally know how a gelatinous deep-sea creature keeps its cells from paralysis under pressure
Comb jellies have varying levels of the phospholipid PPE based on their native depths. This shallow-water comb jelly species would have lower levels than its deep-sea bretheren.
Jacob Winnikoff
In the ocean’s depths, seawater’s punishing weight would crush surface-dwelling species to a pulp. So how do ctenophores—squishy, see-through creatures with a body the consistency of Jell-O—thrive when they’re kilometers deep?
New research published in Science explains how deep-sea ctenophores keep it together under extreme pressure and why they “melt” like the Wicked Witch of the West when brought to the surface.
“For some deep-sea ctenophores, their cell membranes are literally held together by pressure,” says the new study’s lead author Jacob Winnikoff, a deep-sea biochemist at Harvard University.
Ctenophores, also called comb jellies, are ghostly-looking bags of goo whose crystalline comb-legs refract light into rainbows. Despite their ethereal looks, they’re voracious predators that slurp up plankton, crustaceans and small fish from pole to pole of our watery globe. And despite their name, they’re not closely related to jellyfish.
A deep-sea comb jelly.
Jacob Winnikoff
To suss out what makes deep-water ctenophores so graceful under pressure but oozy at the surface, researchers around the world collected comb jelly species that live at a range of depths: scuba divers scooped shallow-water ctenophores from the waters off Hawaii’s Big Island and in the Arctic, while remotely operated vehicles gently vacuumed up their deep-water cousins up to four kilometers below the waves off the coast of California.
Comparison of the animals’ body tissues revealed that the deeper a comb jelly lives, the higher its level of PPE, short for plasmenyl phosphatidylethanolamine—a variety of cone-shaped phospholipid (a fatty molecule found in cell membranes).
At high pressure, all molecules are slightly “squeezed” out of shape, Winnikoff explains—and because lipids are particularly squishy, cone-shaped lipid molecules warp into cylinders in the ocean depths. Usually, combinations of cone- and cylinder-shaped lipids balance a cell membrane’s stability and flexibility. Without enough cones, the cylinders lock together like bricks and the business of the cell breaks down, he says. Proteins, the “machines” of the cell, don’t have the wiggle room they need to move and operate. Signals can’t enter or exit, and the cell is functionally paralyzed.
Using a particle accelerator to map out PPE’s structure, Winnikoff and his team discovered that the molecule is a more dramatically flared cone than any other phospholipid ever documented. PPE’s shape is exaggerated enough, the researchers found via modeling, to stay a cone even under compression.
But there’s a downside: comb jellies adapted to life in the deep need that high pressure to keep their membranes intact. If it’s reduced, PPE’s conical shape expands; this causes cell membranes to ripple, crack and ultimately curl up into nanoscopic “macaroni” shapes, the researchers found.
On a whim, the researchers next used genetic engineering to increase PPE levels in Escherichia coli bacteria, replacing about a quarter of the bacteria’s phospholipids with PPE. They found that although E. coli’s growth typically slows under pressure, their new higher-PPE strain “performed exactly the same” at surface pressure and a simulated depth of five kilometers, Winnikoff says.
The team’s findings are “fantastic” and “answer a very, very long-standing question about ctenophores,” says Cornelia Jaspers, an ecologist studying these animals at the Technical University of Denmark.
Sanna Majaneva, a marine ecologist at the Norwegian aquatic research institute Akvaplan-niva, says it’s gratifying to finally know why so many of her specimens have “dissolved,” “crumbled” and “shivered” apart before her eyes since she began working with ctenophores more than a decade ago.
And the work could aid research on landlubbers, too: PPEs are part of the human nervous system, and their loss is associated with conditions including Alzheimer’s disease. Pinning down the extent of PPE’s curve for the first time in this study, and knowing how to manipulate levels of the molecule, could suggest new avenues to explore in the search for neurological treatments, says co-author Itay Budin, a biophysicist at the University of California, San Diego.
“It’s not just relevant to the deep sea,” Budin says.
Elizabeth Anne Brown is a freelance science journalist based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and many other outlets. Read more at elizabeth-anne-brown.com, and follow her on X (formerly Twitter) @eabrown18
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-delicate-comb-jellies-withstand-ocean-depths-but-melt-away-on-land/ [description] =>Scientists finally know how a gelatinous deep-sea creature keeps its cells from paralysis under pressure
[pubDate] => Thu, 27 Jun 2024 18:00:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-delicate-comb-jellies-withstand-ocean-depths-but-melt-away-on-land/ ) [41] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-egyptian-scribes-suffered-back-pain-too/ [title] => Ancient Egyptian Scribes Suffered Back Pain, Too [timestamp] => 1719439200 [author] => Kate Graham-Shaw [content] =>The skeletons of scribes from ancient Egypt show deterioration from sitting and kneeling
Martin Frouz and the Czech Institute of Egyptology, Charles University
Ancient Egyptians might have understood an occupational hazard of today’s office workers: an achy back and neck. That’s according to an analysis of the skeletons of scribes, who would have sat hunched over for long periods of time.
Just 1 percent of the population was literate when the nation’s pyramids were being built, researchers say. Scribes in ancient Egypt were privileged members of society who often performed a range of administrative roles and secretarial tasks, such as keeping official records, managing households and recording taxes. Art and writing from the time suggest that scribes often sat cross-legged or in a kneeling position for extended periods while they wrote with thin, brushlike rush pens (and later reed pens), recording important notes on sheets of papyrus, pottery notepads called ostraca or wooden boards. Instead of using extravagant hieroglyphs, which tended to be inscribed in monuments by specialists, they typically wrote in hieratic cursive—a simpler script more suited to everyday note-taking.
Although this work was not considered physically demanding—and was likely a sought-after job at the time—a study now published in Scientific Reports suggests that continuously adopting these repetitive writing positions wreaked havoc on scribes’ skeletons. After examining dozens of scribes’ remains, the researchers found evidence of strain and overloading at joints in the knees, metacarpal bones in the fingers and thumb, ankles, shoulders, lower jaw, right collarbone, neck and back. The skeletons often also had osteoarthritis in their right knee, which the study’s authors theorize came from repeatedly putting their right leg in a squatting position to write.
“The published paper is actually the first insight into the question of the physical activity of scribes,” says study co-author Veronika Dulíková, an Egyptologist at the Czech Institute of Egyptology.
Dulíková and her colleagues analyzed the skeletal remains of 69 male individuals, 30 of whom were known to be scribes because of written documents from their tombs. All of them were buried in the necropolis at the Abusir pyramid site in Egypt, between 2700 and 2180 B.C.E. Overall, the team examined 1,767 skeletal traits and compared these with bones from the remains of ancient Egyptians who weren’t scribes.
Compared with the nonscribes’ remains, there were statistically significant signs that the writers’ joints were worn down throughout their lives—evidence, the scientists claim, of occupational strains from these individuals sitting cross-legged or kneeling with their head bent forward much of the time. Just as sitting at a desk and leaning forward to look at a screen can injure your spine and neck, ancient Egyptian scribes would likely have experienced comparable body stresses from hunching over the papyrus for too long.
“It seems that prolonged sitting in an inappropriate position still affects the human skeleton in the same way,” says study co-author Petra Brukner Havelková, an anthropologist at the National Museum in Prague. “It can cause degeneration of the spine, arthrosis of the joints and subsequent pain.”
The new paper “does certainly add a sense of physical sensation to the life of the scribe,” says Hana Navratilova, an Egyptologist at the University of Oxford, who was not involved in the work. Navratilova notes that additional data would be needed to strengthen the research, but she also emphasizes the value of being able to move our understanding of ancient Egyptian people’s lives beyond artistic depictions. “Now we’re stepping out of it,” she says, “and tracking down the individual working positions of the scribes ... [to find] a corresponding impact on the bodies that performed that kind of activity.”
Joe Wegner, a curator of the Egyptian Section of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, says that the “connections between the skeletal samples and the historical record for the identity and vocation of the individuals at Abusir is a unique opportunity to look at multiple lines of evidence.” He would also like to see a bigger dataset. The study’s authors next aim to confirm their results by looking at comparable remains from a different burial site.
“It is ironic that the Egyptians often talked about how being a scribe was the most desirable of professions,” Wegner adds, “but apparently even that came with some health risks!”
Kate Graham-Shaw is a journalist based in New York City. She covers international news for Japanese media and also covers health and science topics as a freelancer.
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-egyptian-scribes-suffered-back-pain-too/ [description] =>The skeletons of scribes from ancient Egypt show deterioration from sitting and kneeling
[pubDate] => Thu, 27 Jun 2024 15:00:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-egyptian-scribes-suffered-back-pain-too/ ) [42] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/supreme-court-blocks-idahos-total-abortion-ban-for-now/ [title] => Supreme Court Allows Emergency Abortions in Idaho—For Now [timestamp] => 1719439200 [author] => Tanya Lewis [content] =>A Supreme Court decision allows emergency abortion care despite a state ban in Idaho while the case works its way through lower courts
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
The Supreme Court has released an opinion that sanctions emergency abortion care in a state that bans the procedure—at least for the time being. But the ruling fails to codify that protection for pregnant people, leaving some doctors in a difficult position.
A draft of the decision appeared briefly on the Court’s official website on Wednesday and was abruptly removed minutes later, Bloomberg News reported. The ruling consolidated two cases that involve a federal law called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), which requires hospitals that receive federal funding to provide emergency care to stabilize a patient. The U.S. Department of Justice sued the state of Idaho, which bans all abortions except those performed to save a pregnant person’s life (and in certain instances involving rape or incest); the DOJ argued that EMTALA supersedes Idaho’s restrictive abortion law because pregnant people should be able to receive emergency care to preserve their health—including future fertility.
The Court dismissed the consolidated cases and voted to remove a stay on a federal district court order. The decision effectively allows hospitals in Idaho to continue performing abortions in emergencies to stabilize pregnant people’s health while litigation proceeds through the lower courts.
The Supreme Court did not rule on the merits of the case; it merely kicked it back to the lower courts. “I think it’s a temporary reprieve and a modest victory for reproductive rights and medical ethics, but it still places pregnant patients and their doctors in an intolerable position,” says Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University. (Comments from experts that Scientific American consulted for this article regard the initial draft ruling.)
The ruling does not give EMTALA total precedence over state abortion bans. Pregnant people are “still going to be kept waiting outside hospital in a parking lot, say, until they’ve suffered life-threatening deterioration in their health,” Gostin says. And it creates confusion for doctors, who might be uncertain about whether or how to comply with federal or state law. “If they fail to provide medical care in an emergency, they may have violated federal law,” he explains. “If they do provide abortion care in an emergency, they may face a criminal sentence and loss of license.”
Ushma Upadhyay, a professor and public health scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, says the ruling does not show concern for the health and safety of pregnant people. “We know from our research that pregnant people in restrictive states who experience complications are being denied care and are forced to get sicker or [travel] in order to receive treatment,” she says. “The Supreme Court should come down decisively to ensure all pregnant people have the protections of EMTALA that they need.”
News of the decision closely follows a separate Supreme Court ruling on access to the abortion pill mifepristone that was announced earlier this month. In it, the Court found that the plaintiffs—a group of antiabortion doctors and activists—did not have standing to bring a case. This effectively preserved access to medication abortion for now in states where abortion is legal. But other court challenges are likely to follow, experts say.
Two years ago, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court ruled to overturn the right to abortion guaranteed by the Court’s foundational Roe v. Wade decision. In Dobbs the justices argued that abortion should be an issue for the states to determine—not the Court. But the recent cases involving medication abortion and emergency abortion care suggest this issue will only continue to return to the nation’s highest court.
And the stakes go far beyond reproductive choice. “If there’s one bedrock principle of the American health care system, it’s that everyone knows that if they turn up in a hospital with their health or life in jeopardy that they’ll be taken care of,” Gostin says. “It’s probably the highest principle of medical ethics, and right now there’s a big carve out for individuals who are pregnant.”
Tanya Lewis is a senior editor covering health and medicine at Scientific American. She writes and edits stories for the website and print magazine on topics ranging from COVID to organ transplants. She also co-hosts Your Health, Quickly on Scientific American's podcast Science, Quickly and writes Scientific American's weekly Health & Biology newsletter. She has held a number of positions over her seven years at Scientific American, including health editor, assistant news editor and associate editor at Scientific American Mind. Previously, she has written for outlets that include Insider, Wired, Science News, and others. She has a degree in biomedical engineering from Brown University and one in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/supreme-court-blocks-idahos-total-abortion-ban-for-now/ [description] =>A Supreme Court decision allows emergency abortion care despite a state ban in Idaho while the case works its way through lower courts
[pubDate] => Thu, 27 Jun 2024 16:15:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/supreme-court-blocks-idahos-total-abortion-ban-for-now/ ) [43] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-supreme-courts-idaho-decision-lets-me-keep-saving-lives/ [title] => The Supreme Court’s Idaho Decision Lets Me Keep Saving Lives [timestamp] => 1719439200 [author] => Pauline Wiltz [content] =>In its decision in Idaho v. U.S. the Supreme Court has decided to uphold the ability of emergency medicine providers like me to use abortion to stabilize or save a life
A group of doctors join abortion rights supporters at a rally outside the Supreme Court on in April 2024 in Washington, DC. as the Supreme Court hears oral arguments on Moyle v. United States and Idaho v. United States to decide if Idaho emergency rooms can provide abortions to pregnant women during an emergency using a federal law known as the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act to supersede a state law that criminalizes most abortions in Idaho.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
The Supreme Court’s decision in Idaho and Moyle et al v. United States has preserved my ability to care for pregnant people.
Idaho officials had argued that because abortion is illegal under state law, emergency medicine physicians like me would not be able to perform the procedure in such states, even under a federal law known as EMTALA. The Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act demands I care for people who arrive in the emergency department as needed to stabilize their condition or save their lives. This treatment can include abortion.
The Court has decided that, in this situation, federal law can supersede state law. Had this decision gone the other way, it would have put lives at risk and physicians’ careers in jeopardy. But in deciding that abortion can be provided under EMTALA, the Supreme Court has helped, albeit narrowly, to uphold the relationship between doctor and patient in the most dire of circumstances.
I take care of pregnant people during most of my shifts in the emergency department. They come to us with health issues that are both pregnancy-related and non-pregnancy-related, regardless of whether they have an obstetrician. When they arrive, we identify possible threats to life, provide stabilizing care and either consult with a specialist or, if patients need treatment we can’t readily provide, transfer them to hospitals that can.
What the highest court has preserved is my ability to fully care for people in cases like this: a pregnant person with a life-threatening infection that may cause what’s known as a septic abortion, a uterine lining so riddled with infection that the only way to save that person is through a hysterectomy.
Or this: If a pregnant person comes in and is dying from a massive blood clot in their lungs, their heart might stop, and we would have to treat them with acute thrombolytics to break up the clot. This would save their life, but could cause placental abruption, uterine bleeding, premature labor or fetal death.
In these cases and so many others, EMTALA has long made it possible for physicians to terminate a woman’s pregnancy to avoid life-threatening complications and, in rare occasions, death. This decision is a win for women’s health care, but the battle to preserve reproductive rights for people who can get pregnant is far from over.
Take medication abortion, part of the treatment I might prescribe to someone with an ectopic pregnancy (one in which the embryo has implanted somewhere other than the uterus) that hasn’t ruptured. Under EMTALA I would work with an obstetrician to get that person the care they need. While another recent Supreme Court ruling saves access to this drug, Justice Brett Kavanaugh effectively gave antiabortion groups a playbook on how to block access to this drug in the decision, when he wrote that groups could instead seek “greater regulatory or legislative restrictions” on the drug.
What the new ruling preserves is my ability to help a pregnant person if their ectopic pregnancy ruptures. The severe bleeding and possible infection that results from a rupture are some of the leading causes of maternal mortality in the first trimester and account for up to 14 percent of all maternal deaths. The only way to prevent this is surgery, immediately.
As I and my emergency medicine colleagues awaited the Supreme Court decision, here are some of the questions we had to ask ourselves, should the court have ruled in favor of Idaho.
If abortion is no longer protected under EMTALA, am I supposed to wait until my patient’s pregnancy ruptures before I can intervene? Do I have to consult with a legal team before being allowed to treat a patient with an ectopic pregnancy? How long will that take? Will this delay a person’s care?
What if that person is stable and in the process of waiting for me to clarify with legal that I can proceed with treatment, their ectopic pregnancy ruptures, and this person starts bleeding into their abdomen?
What if I’m in a rural hospital and the nearest operative room is an hour away, and now my patient is too unstable to transfer because they need a mass blood transfusion to stay alive long enough to make it to the operating room? What if my patient dies because I couldn’t navigate the uncharted territory fast enough?
Will I lose my license for giving pregnant people the standard of care? Will I be accused of malpractice if legalities impede such care?
The Supreme Court decision has spared us these torturous questions, and allows emergency medicine providers to focus on providing standard, lifesaving health care.
For now. Idaho is just one of many states fighting against reproductive rights.
In its case, state officials frequently cited that EMTALA does not specifically include the term or definition of abortion. EMTALA doesn’t specifically address abortion services, but it was purposely written to be broad because what constitutes stabilizing care varies widely from person to person.
And while part of our jobs in emergency medicine is to save people on the brink of death, we just as readily are stabilizing people who are sick, but not lethally so. What this decision helps save are the contingency plans to take care of people with infections from a missed abortion, preeclampsia or premature preterm rupture of membranes. Terminating a pregnancy is the stabilizing care required to avoid severe complications including stroke, kidney failure, sepsis, hemorrhage or death. I can continue to do this for those people and the ones who come into the emergency department for a dire reason not related to their pregnancy: heart failure, other types of infection, cancer, trauma and more.
The people who will benefit most from this decision include those who live in rural parts of the U.S. Their mortality rates are some 20 percent higher than their urban counterparts because of factors including lack of primary care, lack of access to specialized care, greater rates of poverty and being more likely to be uninsured. Add in pregnancy, subtract the care that is currently protected by EMTALA and what does that equal? Worsening outcomes that could have been preventable. I would have expected to see maternal mortality rise significantly had the Court swayed toward Idaho, especially for people who live in areas with fewer resources.
And finally this decision helps maintain some stability for health care in general. Had the Court decided differently, Idaho could have prompted future legislators, motivated by religious or political beliefs, to decide more broadly who should receive stabilizing care.
As EMTALA has been upheld, the work doesn’t stop now. Like other young physicians, I am considering where I will want to practice after this last year of residency. I have been paying close attention to where I can provide safe, evidence-based medicine for pregnant people. A gratifying outcome of this ruling, for doctors of my cohort, is the prospect of serving the millions of people in the U.S. who can and will get pregnant during our medical careers.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
Pauline Wiltz is a rising third-year emergency medicine resident training in Cleveland.
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-supreme-courts-idaho-decision-lets-me-keep-saving-lives/ [description] =>In its decision in Idaho v. U.S. the Supreme Court has decided to uphold the ability of emergency medicine providers like me to use abortion to stabilize or save a life
[pubDate] => Thu, 27 Jun 2024 18:00:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-supreme-courts-idaho-decision-lets-me-keep-saving-lives/ ) [44] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/spacex-wins-nasa-contract-to-destroy-the-international-space-station/ [title] => SpaceX Wins $843-Million NASA Contract to Destroy the International Space Station [timestamp] => 1719439200 [author] => Meghan Bartels [content] =>The world will be watching—literally—as SpaceX tackles possibly what might be its highest-stakes endeavor to date: safely destroying the beloved International Space Station
NASA
Editor’s Note (6/28/24): The design of the deorbit vehicle that will be used to destroy the International Space Station will be rooted in that of SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, said Bill Spetch, operations integration manager for NASA’s International Space Station Program, during a press conference that the agency held today to discuss a range of issues related to the space station. “That’s based off a Dragon-heritage design,” he said of the forthcoming vehicle. “Obviously they have to do some modifications and some changes to the trunk for that, but that is the plan.”
SpaceX has won the right to tackle a monumental task: destroying the International Space Station (ISS). The demolition will shove the iconic and enormous station down through Earth’s atmosphere in a fiery display. And if anything goes wrong, a cascade of debris could rain down on our planet’s surface.
Conceived and built in a post-cold-war partnership with Russia, the ISS, like so many of NASA’s major projects, has lasted far longer than its initial design life of 15 years. Nothing lasts forever, however, especially in the harsh environment of outer space. The ISS is aging, and for safety’s sake, NASA intends to incinerate the immense facility around 2031. To accomplish the job, the agency will pay SpaceX up to $843 million, according to a statement released on June 26. The contract covers the development of a unique deorbit vehicle to usher the unwieldy ISS to its doom yet excludes launch costs.
NASA has declined to provide the number of proposals received for the projects. Currently, no details about SpaceX’s vision for the deorbit vehicle are publicly known. Scientific American reached out to the company but did not receive a response by publication.
What’s clear is that SpaceX’s existing Dragon and Starship spacecraft aren’t good matches for the deorbit mission. That means the company could intend to heavily adapt one of these vehicles or to start from scratch and design a custom-built craft.
Whatever the deorbit vehicle ends up looking like, SpaceX is taking on a delicate technical challenge. The ISS is perhaps the most complex construction project ever executed—and certainly the largest and most expensive one in space. Beginning in 1998 its modules required 42 different launches to blast off Earth. And the orbiting laboratory contains about as much internal space as a six-bedroom house spread over an area the size of a football field. Weighing more than 450 tons, or the equivalent of nearly three large blue whales, the ISS is heavy, too. Safely destroying the space station arguably will be even harder than assembling it.
The ISS should still have several years of science ahead. NASA has said it intends to operate the space station through 2030 and that its partner space agencies in Canada, Europe and Japan concur with that time line. Russia’s Roscosmos, which leads the ISS partnership with NASA and operates several key modules of the station, is currently only committed through at least 2028.
But why destroy the station at all? Because of the ISS’s lengthy and continuous tenure, the last time Earth orbit was bereft of human beings was in November 2000, just before the arrival of Expedition 1, when a NASA astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts began the station’s first residency. The iconic orbital outpost is now a potent symbol of the space age and of international collaboration in science that transcends geopolitical squabbles on Earth.
Indeed, some ISS fans argue it shouldn’t be destroyed at all—instead they think it should be boosted up to an orbit so high that it would remain in space forever as a testament to the engineering prowess of humans. That idea would be wildly impractical and prohibitively expensive, NASA says. Besides, the lab is already fragile and will become ever more so the longer it stays aloft. Sooner or later, it will start disintegrating—and the more debris it sheds, the more likely catastrophic space junk collisions could become in a frightening feedback process that could curtail further activity in Earth orbit.
Some nostalgic observers want to see parts of the station excised intact and ferried safely to Earth’s surface, bound for a museum, but that’s just as logistically challenging as a permanent ultrahigh orbit, NASA says. Although the space station was assembled in orbit, it wasn’t designed to be disassembled, and no current spacecraft has enough payload capacity to carry ISS modules back to Earth.
NASA considered other scenarios, too: repurposing the facility in orbit, passing off its operation to private industry or even blowing it to smithereens in space. All posed even grimmer prospects, however.
So a fiery doom it is. And the ISS will be sent down all in one piece, given the challenges of taking the station apart. In theory, that’s a tidy solution because Earth’s atmosphere creates friction that naturally incinerates material passing through.
Larger objects can survive the inferno and fall to Earth, however. Damage from plummeting space debris is rare but not unheard of, as one Florida resident learned the hard way earlier this year, when a nearly two-pound hunk of metal crashed through his roof. The object was the remains of a large battery pallet stuffed with debris that astronauts had jettisoned from the space station three years ago for an “uncontrolled reentry,” NASA determined. The homeowner is now seeking compensation from the space agency for the incident.
When it was discarded, the pallet weighed about 5,800 pounds, according to NASA. Compare that with the station’s mass of about 925,335 pounds. A range of factors—shape, density, orientation, atmospheric conditions, and the like—determine how much of an object survives reentry. An uncontrolled plunge for something as bulky as the International Space Station would be a nightmare scenario. Not only would large pieces of the lab likely make it to our planet’s surface, but the station would also probably tumble and break apart, making the process unpredictable. And an uncontrolled reentry could rain debris anywhere along the ISS’s orbit, which passes over about 90 percent of Earth’s population.
That’s where NASA’s contract with SpaceX comes into play. The commercial deorbit vehicle is meant to launch, attach to the space station and then pull it down through Earth’s atmosphere in a carefully choreographed, risk-minimizing maneuver.
Here’s what that could look like. First, the ISS would use a combination of natural drag and, if necessary, its existing engines to move to a lower orbit, from the operating height of about 260 miles to no lower than 205 miles above Earth. Then SpaceX’s deorbiting vehicle would launch, about a year before the station’s planned date with destiny and while astronauts were still onboard.
During that one-year lead time, the ISS’s altitude would continue to decrease, and the last resident astronauts would depart for Earth—leaving the station human-free for the first time in 30 years. Depending on how quickly the laboratory was falling, the deorbit vehicle would conduct a series of burns to tug the lowest point of the station’s orbit from about 155 miles to about 90 miles.
In this region of the atmosphere, the thickness of the air would mean that the station would have less than a month left, even if NASA were to let it fall on its own. The ISS’s ability to steadily orient itself compared to Earth would also degrade. By that point, the deorbit vehicle would need to exert an iron grip on the station’s motion to prevent potential disaster.
Then, at last, the final push would be made. The deorbit vehicle would fire its engines for up to an hour to shove the ISS through the thickest, most dangerous lower layers of the atmosphere. The burn would be carefully timed to ensure that the station and whatever debris it produced fell across the sparsely populated southern Pacific Ocean, the final resting place for most of humanity’s most hazardous orbital refuse.
Throughout the entire endeavor, NASA says, SpaceX’s system must be able to successfully execute a controlled deorbit even if not one but two component failures occur.
The contract is yet another example of NASA relying on SpaceX to execute critical work. The company led the way in ferrying NASA astronauts to the orbiting laboratory and has taken over launching a host of missions for the agency. Additionally, it is four flights into testing the most powerful rocket ever flown, which is intended to be part of NASA’s complex Artemis III mission to land humans near the moon’s south pole as early as 2026.
For the mission to destroy the ISS, SpaceX will need to either substantively overhaul an existing vehicle or design something entirely new—and fast. Although NASA hopes the deorbit vehicle won’t need to launch until early 2030, the agency is aware that a stroke of bad luck on the aging station would require a scramble to fly the deorbit vehicle much sooner.
And throughout the mission, the whole world will literally be watching. Intact, the space station is already an eye-catchingly bright celestial sight, but its flaming fall will be a funeral pyre that will light up the skies—a final blaze of glory for the iconic facility and all its symbolism.
Meghan Bartels is a science journalist based in New York City. She joined Scientific American in 2023 and is now a senior news reporter there. Previously, she spent more than four years as a writer and editor at Space.com, as well as nearly a year as a science reporter at Newsweek, where she focused on space and Earth science. Her writing has also appeared in Audubon, Nautilus, Astronomy and Smithsonian, among other publications. She attended Georgetown University and earned a master’s degree in journalism at New York University’s Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program.
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/spacex-wins-nasa-contract-to-destroy-the-international-space-station/ [description] =>The world will be watching—literally—as SpaceX tackles possibly what might be its highest-stakes endeavor to date: safely destroying the beloved International Space Station
[pubDate] => Thu, 27 Jun 2024 19:30:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/spacex-wins-nasa-contract-to-destroy-the-international-space-station/ ) [45] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/family-files-claim-against-nasa-after-space-junk-crashes-into-florida-home/ [title] => Family Files Claim against NASA after Space Junk Crashes into Florida Home [timestamp] => 1719439200 [author] => Josh Dinner; SPACE.com [content] =>Florida family files claim against NASA to compensate them after space debris crashed through their home in March
Pieces of space junk float above Earth.
Andrey Volodin/Alamy Stock Photo
The growing problem of space debris isn't just one that plagues Earth's orbit. Several instances of space trash crashing back down to Earth have made recent headlines, and one family is requesting that NASA pay for the damages.
The space agency has a claim on its hands after a chunk of space junk crashed through Alejandro Otero's seaside home in Naples, Florida. The incident occurred on March 8, as debris tore through the roof and two floors of his family home, nearly hitting his son, Otero said in a now-deleted post on X.
NASA has since confirmed the debris came from a 2.9-ton pallet of used batteries jettisoned from the International Space Station in March of 2021; the structure was expected to burn up completely in Earth's atmosphere. Otero speculated as much in posts online following the incident, and voiced his expectation that the responsible parties be held accountable. "[The Otero family is] grateful that no one sustained physical injuries from this incident, but a 'near miss' situation such as this could have been catastrophic," said Mica Nguyen Worthy in a statement from the law firm representing the family.
In the letter, Worthy points out that, under the Space Liability Convention, NASA would be liable had the debris caused damage in another country, and thinks that policy should apply within the United States as well. "We have asked NASA not to apply a different standard towards U.S. citizens or residents, but instead to take care of the Oteros and make them whole," Worthy said.
The incident has the potential to set a precedent for governments and private space companies in terms of how compensation could be handled for victims of similar incidents in the future. Though their damage was less severe than that caused at the Otero home, several other reports of crashing space debris have occurred in the past year as well, including portions of a SpaceX Dragon trunk found in Canada and North Carolina, and a piece of an Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) rocket landing on a beach in Australia.
"Here, the U.S. government, through NASA, has an opportunity to set the standard or 'set a precedent' as to what responsible, safe, and sustainable space operations ought to look like. If NASA were to take the position that the Oteros' claims should be paid in full, it would send a strong signal to both other governments and private industries that such victims should be compensated regardless of fault," Worthy said.
Copyright 2024 Space.com, a Future company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Josh Dinner is a freelance writer, photographer and videographer covering space exploration, human spaceflight and other subjects. He has covered everything from rocket launches and NASA's Artemis 1 Space Launch System megarocket to SpaceX astronaut launches for NASA.
SPACE.com is the premier source of space exploration, innovation and astronomy news, chronicling (and celebrating) humanity's ongoing expansion across the final frontier.
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/family-files-claim-against-nasa-after-space-junk-crashes-into-florida-home/ [description] =>Florida family files claim against NASA to compensate them after space debris crashed through their home in March
[pubDate] => Thu, 27 Jun 2024 22:20:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/family-files-claim-against-nasa-after-space-junk-crashes-into-florida-home/ ) [46] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/boeings-starliner-leaves-astronauts-stuck-but-safe-in-space/ [title] => Boeing’s Starliner Leaves Astronauts Stuck but Safe in Space [timestamp] => 1719352800 [author] => Lee Billings [content] =>On its first crewed flight, troubling technical glitches with Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft have left two astronauts in limbo onboard the International Space Station
Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, with NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams aboard, approaches the International Space Station for docking high above the Pacific Ocean on June 6, 2024. Hardware problems with Starliner have indefinitely delayed the astronauts’ return to Earth.
NASA Johnson
Editor’s Note (6/28/24): During a press conference held on Friday, NASA officials emphasized that Starliner’s two passengers are not “stranded” in space. They can stay on the International Space Station for as long as the agency wants them to but would be safe to come home on Starliner should circumstances require that. The agency is delaying their return to gather as much data as possible to address the issue in future flights rather than out of any safety concerns about this mission’s trip home, officials noted. “We understand these issues [enough] for a safe return,” said Mark Nappi, vice president and program manager of the commercial crew program at Boeing. “We don’t understand these issues well enough [yet] to fix them permanently.”
What began as a short test flight to the International Space Station (ISS) for two NASA astronauts onboard Boeing’s glitch-plagued Starliner spacecraft is instead proving to be a longer slog.
After two unrequited trips to the launchpad that ended in scrubs because of technical difficulties—including a helium leak in the spacecraft’s propulsion system—astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams finally launched onboard Starliner on June 5 for what was supposed to be an eight-day mission to the ISS. They successfully docked their spacecraft, nicknamed Calypso, with the ISS the following day, joining a crew of seven astronauts already onboard. But now, per an announcement from NASA late on June 21, the pair won’t be back on Earth until sometime in July at the earliest. Their return has been put on hold to allow engineers more time to troubleshoot two vexing hardware problems that emerged on the spacecraft after launch.
For now, the astronauts remain safe despite being temporarily marooned on the orbital outpost. Calypso’s technical issues “seem fairly minor,” says Leroy Chiao, a former NASA astronaut who spent more than half a year at the ISS in 2004–2005. “Butch and Suni can stay onboard ISS almost indefinitely if needed, so they are in no danger.”
In addition to the previously known helium leak, during Calypso’s flight to the ISS mission, controllers found that the spacecraft’s propulsion system had sprung four more. The inert gas is used to push propellant to the spacecraft’s reaction control system (RCS) thrusters, which are crucial for small, fine-tuned maneuvers. Losing enough helium could render them useless. Subsequent tests have revealed the leaks to be small, however, and Starliner carries enough helium to make this a minimal concern. The spacecraft also has stronger engines with plenty of thrust for major maneuvers—such as deorbiting back to Earth.
“We could handle ... a leak that’s 100 times worse than this,” said Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, during a May 31 press briefing shortly after the prelaunch helium leak was discovered.
Separately, as Calypso approached the ISS, five of its 28 RCS thrusters failed. The reasons are unclear but are thought to be unrelated to the helium leaks. Follow-up diagnostics cleared four of the five failed thrusters, returning them to normal operation, Stich said during a June 18 press briefing. They are expected to be available for the spacecraft’s eventual ISS departure, in which they will be used both to push Starliner away from the station and to correctly orient the spacecraft for a smooth atmospheric reentry. And even if all five were to fail again, other RCS thrusters could take over to accommodate the loss.
“We are taking our time and following our standard mission management team process,” Stich said in NASA’s announcement of the latest delay. “We are letting the data drive our decision-making relative to managing the small helium system leaks and thruster performance we observed during rendezvous and docking.” One key underlying reason for the delayed ISS departure, he noted in the June 18 press briefing, is that “we don’t get the hardware back.” While Starliner’s crew module will return to Earth intact, its service module (containing the RCS thrusters and leaky helium system) will be jettisoned to incinerate in the upper atmosphere, curtailing any further direct investigations of malfunctioning components.
In the meantime, NASA officials maintain that Starliner “remains cleared for return [to Earth] in case of an emergency on the space station” and that the well-provisioned ISS can easily accommodate an extended stay by Wilmore and Williams. Even so, the clock is still ticking: Starliner is designed for six-month ISS stays, but Calypso is not equipped for that duration on this first crewed flight. The spacecraft is only formally certified to dock at the station for 45 days, Chiao notes, “so unless it is recertified, it could only stay at ISS for a couple more weeks.” The spacecraft would exceed this limit on the afternoon of July 20 if it were still docked to the ISS by that time. According to reporting by Reuters, however, various backup systems could be enlisted to extend Calypso’s stay up to 72 days.
In spaceflight forums and on social media platforms, many have speculated that if Starliner proves unable to return to Earth, a rescue mission could be mounted via Crew Dragon, a spacecraft built and operated by Boeing’s aerospace rival SpaceX. Such a scenario currently seems far-fetched and hasn’t prompted any official public acknowledgements, but it would certainly be ironic: In 2014 NASA selected both companies to build spacecraft for transporting crews to orbit, providing Boeing with $4.2 billion for Starliner—far more than the $2.6 billion allotted for the development of Dragon, with the discrepancy at least partially linked to Boeing’s arguments that SpaceX was less reliable.
Since then Starliner has been delayed by multiple missteps that have so far cost Boeing some $1.5 billion, as the company’s aviation division has struggled with scandal and spiraling crisis over disastrous flaws with one of its latest commercial jets, the 737 Max. SpaceX, for its part, launched its first astronauts onboard Crew Dragon more than four years ago and has since flown a dozen additional crewed missions for NASA and other clients.
Lee Billings is a science journalist specializing in astronomy, physics, planetary science, and spaceflight, and is a senior editor at Scientific American. He is the author of a critically acclaimed book, Five Billion Years of Solitude: the Search for Life Among the Stars, which in 2014 won a Science Communication Award from the American Institute of Physics. In addition to his work for Scientific American, Billings's writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, Wired, New Scientist, Popular Science, and many other publications. A dynamic public speaker, Billings has given invited talks for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Google, and has served as M.C. for events held by National Geographic, the Breakthrough Prize Foundation, Pioneer Works, and various other organizations.
Billings joined Scientific American in 2014, and previously worked as a staff editor at SEED magazine. He holds a B.A. in journalism from the University of Minnesota.
On its first crewed flight, troubling technical glitches with Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft have left two astronauts in limbo onboard the International Space Station
[pubDate] => Wed, 26 Jun 2024 22:45:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/boeings-starliner-leaves-astronauts-stuck-but-safe-in-space/ ) [47] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bidens-new-usd1-8-billion-transportation-package-stars-climate-projects/ [title] => Biden’s New $1.8-Billion Transportation Package Stars Climate Projects [timestamp] => 1719352800 [author] => David Ferris; E&E News [content] =>Climate-related highway fixes and electric and hydrogen fuel-cell buses are among the projects getting federal help in a new round of funding
A view of the road damage caused by thawing permafrost along the Dalton Highway (Alaska Route 11), which stretches 414 miles across northern Alaska from Livengood to Prudhoe Bay.
Lance King/Getty Images
CLIMATEWIRE | The U.S. Department of Transportation on Wednesday announced $1.8 billion in funding from the bipartisan infrastructure law to improve roads, public transit and ports in all 50 states.
The projects, 148 in all, are the third wave of a five-year program to fund smaller, often community-oriented projects that span jurisdictions and involve multiple modes of transport.
The administration unveiled its largesse one day before President Joe Biden debates his presumptive Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg seemed to anticipate one of Trump’s likely attack lines — that inflation and prices have gone up on Biden’s watch — by saying some projects would lower prices by getting goods to market more easily.
Buttigieg said the projects would “improve everyday life and the cost of living in communities across the country.”
The administration’s climate and energy priorities played supporting roles in several grants.
For example, one of the biggest-ticket projects — a $25 million rebuilding project for sections of the Alaska Highway — is intended to repair damage caused by permafrost melting amid higher temperatures. Another $3 million will create a master plan to improve the port in Pago Pago, in American Samoa, including protecting it against rising ocean levels. Still another will use more than $7 million to create evacuation routes and storm-proof roads in Plaquemines and Jefferson parishes on the low-lying coast of Louisiana.
Others involve zero-emission vehicles, like a $23.5 million grant for Downeast Transportation, a transit agency in coastal Maine, to buy 24 electric buses along with charging infrastructure.
In Portland, Oregon, the regional bus network will receive $25 million to construct a depot for hydrogen fuel cell buses, including storage tanks for the highly combustible fuel.
This year’s projects are about half rural and half urban, Buttigieg said. In all, 57 percent are for roadways and 22 percent for bike and pedestrian paths, with the remainder for transit, rail and aviation projects.
Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2024. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.
David Ferris reports on and coordinates coverage of the intersection of transportation and the electric grid.
E&E NEWS provides essential energy and environment news for professionals.
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[pubDate] => Wed, 26 Jun 2024 19:15:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bidens-new-usd1-8-billion-transportation-package-stars-climate-projects/ ) [48] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/extreme-wildfires-are-twice-as-common-as-they-were-20-years-ago/ [title] => Extreme Wildfires Are Twice as Common as They Were 20 Years Ago [timestamp] => 1719352800 [author] => Jeff Tollefson; Nature magazine [content] =>Extreme wildfires are increasing in frequency and intensity globally, data show for the first time
A firefighter works the scene as flames push towards homes during the Creek fire in the Cascadel Woods area of unincorporated Madera County, California on September 7, 2020.
Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images
The frequency at which extreme fires occur around the world has more than doubled during the past two decades, according to an analysis of satellite data1. The trend is driven by the exponential growth of extreme fires across vast portions of Canada, the western United States and Russia, researchers say.
The results provide the first solid evidence to support a nagging suspicion that many scientists and others have had as they watch a seemingly endless series of cataclysmic infernos scorch ecosystems and communities: wildfires have increased somehow, and climate change is almost certainly a factor.
“It’s the extreme events that we care about the most, and those are the ones that are increasing quite significantly,” says lead author Calum Cunningham, an ecologist at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia. “Surprisingly, this has never been shown at a global scale.”
Researchers have already documented an increase in wildfire activity across the western forests of the United States2, but they have had a harder time pinning down a clear global trend. One confounding factor is that the amount of land burned annually has been declining, in part owing to a steady reduction in fire activity in African grasslands and savannahs.
For the current study, published in Nature Ecology and Evolution on 24 June1, Cunningham and his colleagues scoured global satellite data for fire activity. They used infrared records to measure the energy intensity of nearly 31 million daily fire events over two decades, focusing on the most extreme ones — roughly 2,900 events. The researchers calculated that there was a 2.2-fold increase in the frequency of extreme events globally in 2003–23, and a 2.3-fold boost in the average intensity of the top 20 most intense fires each year (see ‘Rising fire intensity’).
Credit: Nature
The forests most affected by extreme fires were those in places such as western North America that contain coniferous trees including spruce and pine; they showed an 11.1-fold increase in the number of fires over the study period. Boreal forests at high latitudes in countries such as Canada, the United States and Russia were also significantly affected, showing a 7.3-fold increase in fires.The results aren’t necessarily surprising, says Park Williams, a hydroclimatologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. But they are the first compelling evidence that “extreme fires have grown more extreme”, he adds.Although the study doesn’t directly connect the fire trend to global warming, Cunningham says “there’s almost certainly a significant signal of climate change”. Research has shown3 that rising temperatures are drying out ecosystems — such as coniferous forests — that are naturally prone to fire. This provides fuel that can boost the fires’ size and longevity. The latest study also found that the energy intensity of the fires increased faster during the night-time over the past two decades than during the daytime, which aligns with evidence4 that rising night-time temperatures are contributing to fire risk.The researchers identified extreme fires occurring in several other biomes across the globe, including those in Australia, which experienced unprecedented wildfires in 2019 and 2020, and the Mediterranean. Although they didn’t see clear trends in these regions, Cunningham says that it might be only a matter of time before they emerge as temperatures continue to rise.
This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on June 24, 2024.
Jeff Tollefson works for Nature magazine.
First published in 1869, Nature is the world's leading multidisciplinary science journal. Nature publishes the finest peer-reviewed research that drives ground-breaking discovery, and is read by thought-leaders and decision-makers around the world.
[enclosures] => Array ( ) [categories] => Array ( ) [uid] => [link] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/extreme-wildfires-are-twice-as-common-as-they-were-20-years-ago/ [description] =>Extreme wildfires are increasing in frequency and intensity globally, data show for the first time
[pubDate] => Wed, 26 Jun 2024 15:00:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/extreme-wildfires-are-twice-as-common-as-they-were-20-years-ago/ ) [49] => Array ( [uri] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tornadoes-have-been-unusually-common-this-year-heres-why/ [title] => Tornadoes Have Been Unusually Common This Year. Here’s Why [timestamp] => 1719352800 [author] => William Gallus; The Conversation US [content] =>Wind shear and atmospheric instability have combined to create a brutal tornado season this year
A family surveys their home destroyed by a tornado on May 07, 2024 in Barnsdall, northeast Oklahoma.
Brandon Bell/Getty Images
The following essay is reprinted with permission from 
The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research.
Spring 2024 was unnerving for people across large parts of the U.S. as tornado warnings and sirens sent them scrambling for safety.
More than 1,100 tornadoes were reported through May − a preliminary number but nearly twice the 30-year average at that point and behind only 2011, when deadly tornado outbreaks tore across the southeastern U.S.
The U.S. experienced several multistate outbreaks in 2024. Tornadoes damaged homes from Texasto Minnesota and east to West Virginia and Georgia. They caused widespread destruction in several towns, including Greenfield, Iowa; Westmoreland, Kansas; and Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Barnsdall, Oklahoma, was hit twice in two months.
In May, at least one tornado occurred somewhere in the country almost every day.
What causes some years to have so many tornadoes? I’m a meteorologist who studies tornadoes and thunderstorms. Here’s what created the perfect conditions for these violent storms.
The hyperactive season has been due to an abundance of two key ingredients for tornadoes: wind shear and instability.
The jet stream− a band of strong upper-level winds that mostly blows west to east, flowing between warm air to its south and cool air to its north − plays an important role in how and where weather systems evolve, and in wind shear.
During April and May 2024, the jet stream often dipped southward in the western U.S. before turning back to the northeast across the Plains. That’s a pattern favorable for producing tornadoes in the central U.S.
In the area east of the jet stream’s southern dip, air rises. That creates a strong low-pressure system, which causes winds near the ground to blow from a different direction than winds higher up, contributing to wind shear.
Making this year even more active, persistent record heat waves were common over Mexico and Texas, while the Rockies and far northern United States stayed cool. The sharp temperature difference created a stronger jet stream than normal, leading to strong changes in wind speed with elevation. As a result, wind shear has been on steroids.
The change in wind speed with elevation can cause air to have a rolling motion. The rapidly rising air in a thunderstorm can then tilt the rolling motion to create a spinning thunderstorm that can concentrate the spin into a tornado.
The Gulf of Mexico was also much warmer than normal, producing abundant heat and moisture that could be transported northward to fuel thunderstorms. That creates atmospheric instability, the other key ingredient for tornadoes.
This perfect combination of ingredients for tornadoes wasn’t a complete surprise.
El Niño and La Niña – opposing climate patterns centered in the Pacific Ocean – can affect winds and weather around the world. A 2016 study found that when El Niño is shifting to La Niña, the number of tornadoes in the central Plains and Upper Midwest is often larger than normal.
That’s exactly what was happening in spring 2024. The tornadoes mostly occurred in the traditional Tornado Alley, from northern Texas to South Dakota, with an extension across the Corn Belt through Iowa and as far east as Ohio, matching the findings of that study.
The active spring in the Great Plains was a bit unusual, however. Studies show a long-term trend of decreasing tornado numbers in this region and an increase in tornadoes farther east, near or just east of the Mississippi River.
That shift is consistent with what climate models suggest is likely to happen throughout the remainder of the century as global temperatures rise.
The expected decline in the number of tornadoes in the Plains is likely related to increasing heat over the high ground of the desert Southwest and Mexico. That heat flows over the Great Plains a few thousand feet above ground, creating a cap, or lid. The cap lets heat and moisture build up until it punches through to form a thunderstorm. This hot, moist air is why the central U.S. is home to the most violent tornadoes on Earth.One theory is that, with climate change, the cap will likely be harder to break through, reducing the number of tornadoes in the Plains. At the same time, increasing heat and moisture elsewhere will fuel more tornadoes in the East. Long-term trends and climate model predictions also suggest that more tornadoes are occurring during the cooler months, particularly in the Southeast. Tornadoes are also occurring on fewer days each year, but on the days when they do form, there is more likely to be an outbreak with several tornadoes.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
William Gallus is a professor of atmospheric science at Iowa State University.
Curated by professional editors, The Conversation offers informed commentary and debate on the issues affecting our world.
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[pubDate] => Wed, 26 Jun 2024 14:00:00 +0000 [guid] => https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tornadoes-have-been-unusually-common-this-year-heres-why/ ) ) )