Science & Technology - October 2021

During a solar flare, highly charged particles are expelled from the Sun at high speeds. According to the US Space Weather Prediction Center, the coronal mass ejection departed the sun at a speed of 973 km/s and is predicted to arrive at Earth on October 30.

On October 28, around 9.05 pm IST, a solar flare was observed on the Sun. During a solar flare, highly charged particles are expelled from the Sun at high speeds.

Earth’s atmosphere protects us humans from these particles. But they can interact with Earth’s magnetic field, induce strong electric currents on the surface and affect man-made structures such as satellites, power grids, and even disrupt our internet connection.

Analysis by the US Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) showed that the coronal mass ejection departed the Sun at a speed of 973 km/s and is predicted to arrive at Earth on October 30 with effects likely to continue on October 31.

When these particles cause disturbances to Earth’s magnetosphere it is called a geomagnetic storm. The release from SWPC added that the impact of this storm to our technology would be nominal.

“It is difficult to gauge the full impact. We are expecting to see auroras. The injection of currents in the ionosphere are expected which will, in turn, induce fluctuations in Earth’s magnetic field,” explained Prof Dibyendu Nandi from the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research.

He added that there are chances of disruptions in navigational networks and global navigation satellite system receivers but “we expect the coronal mass ejection (expulsions of magnetised plasma from the sun’s corona) to have moderate speed so these chances are low.”

Prof Nandi is part of the Center of Excellence in Space Sciences India at IISER Kolkata which had predicted this solar flare.

This is an X1-class solar flare that occurred on October 28. The classification system for solar flares uses the letters A, B, C, M, and X.

“It is similar to magnitudes in the Richter scale used to quantify earthquakes. The X-1 class flare has a high magnitude of radiation, but the highest ever observed in the modern era is an X45 flare in 2003 (termed the Halloween storms),” explained Shravan Hanasoge, Associate Professor at the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.

The Halloween solar storm led to transformer malfunction and power loss in Sweden and caused multiple satellites to fail.

“We sometimes forget that we live with a star, and the complex phenomena that it exhibits can have serious impact on our lives. For instance, there was a superstorm in 2012 that narrowly missed directly hitting Earth. Estimates have suggested that if it had hit us, we could have suffered damage of trillions of dollars and taken decades to recover. Although directed towards Earth, the X1 storm of two days ago will have little to no impact on our infrastructure,” Prof. Hanasoge added.

The most impactful was the Tropical Rainforest in Sumatra, which removed about 1.2 million tons from the atmosphere, but released another 4.2 million

Sites containing some of the world’s most treasured forests, including the Yosemite National Park and Indonesia’s Sumatra rainforest, have been emitting more heat-trapping carbon dioxide than they have absorbed in recent years, a UN-backed report said.

According to the report released Thursday, factors like logging, wildfires and clearance of land for agriculture are to blame. The excess carbon turns up from just 10 of 257 forests classified among UNESCO World Heritage sites.

The Switzerland-based International Union for Conservation of Nature and UNESCO, the UN’s cultural and educational agency, said their report provides the first-ever assessment of greenhouse gases produced and absorbed in UNESCO-listed forests. The study was based on information collected through on-site monitoring and from satellites.

The study adds to growing signs that human activities and the fallout from climate change — which scientists say has made weather extremes like drought and wildfires more likely — have transformed some natural carbon sinks that suck up CO2 from the air into net sources of it over the last two decades.

“All forests should be assets in the fight against climate change,” said Tales Carvalho Resende, a co-author of the report who works at Paris-based UNESCO. “Our report’s finding that even some of the most iconic and best protected forests, such as those found in World Heritage sites, can actually contribute to climate change is alarming.”

The consequences of climate change will be on many minds as world leaders gather in Glasgow starting this weekend for a key United Nations climate conference known as COP26.

The 10 sites that were net sources of carbon from 2001 to 2020 were
*Tropical Rainforest Heritage of Sumatra, Indonesia
*Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve, Honduras
*Yosemite National Park, United States
*Waterton Glacier International Peace Park, Canada & United States
*Barberton Makhonjwa Mountains, South Africa
*Kinabalu Park, Malaysia
*Uvs Nuur Basin, Russia & Mongolia
*Grand Canyon National Park, United States
*Greater Blue Mountains Area, Australia
*Morne Trois Pitons National Park, Dominica

All told, however, the net carbon emissions from the 10 sites together amount to little compared to the total of roughly 190 million tons of carbon dioxide that are absorbed each year by all 257 UNESCO-listed forests. Of those, about 80 sites were net neutral, while the rest were net absorbers of carbon.

The 10 sites accounted for nearly 5.5 million tons of net carbon emissions. The most impactful was the Tropical Rainforest in Sumatra, which removed about 1.2 million tons from the atmosphere, but released another 4.2 million — making for net emissions of about 3 million tons. That was from a combination of logging and wood harvesting, as well as the impact of agriculture, the study found.

In the United States, Yosemite generated a net of approximately 700,000 tons of carbon, largely due to a bout of devastating wildfires in the area in recent years.

Tales Carvalho Resende pointed to four “really huge wildfires” over the last decade at World Heritage sites. “World Heritage sites serve as a laboratory — as observatories for environmental changes,” he added. “What is happening at World Heritage sites is just the tip of the iceberg…in terms of emissions, it represents only a small portion of the whole picture.”

In the shark’s-eye view, the researchers found no significant difference between a swimming person, a paddling surfer or a meandering seal or sea lion.

Written by Sabrina Imbler

Baby white sharks learn to hunt on the fly. Although months-old pups feast on fish and other small fry, older juveniles are finally big enough to tackle seals and other meatier meals.

It might seem easy to spot a blubbery seal in the waves. But young white sharks have less-than-stellar eyesight and are also likely colourblind, rendering the ocean in shades of gray. So you can hardly blame a young white shark for seeing an appetisingly shadowy oval above and chomping.

For decades, scientists have floated this theory of “mistaken identity” as an explanation behind unprovoked shark bites on humans, which are rare. A paper published Wednesday in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface puts this theory to the test. Based on their simulations of how a juvenile white shark sees the world, they found no meaningful difference between a plump sea lion, a person paddling on a surfboard or even a person paddling on their own — supporting the theory that sometimes, sharks make mistakes.

Charles Bangley, a marine ecologist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia who was not involved with the research, said the paper supports common-sense advice for anyone hoping to avoid being bitten by a shark: Swim in calm, clear water away from seals and other prey.

Catherine Macdonald, a lecturer at the University of Miami and the co-founder of the marine science program Field School, said the study was “well-executed” and opened up new questions about sharks and people. “Does it make a difference if it’s an honest mistake?” Macdonald said. “We can’t tolerate those risks to people regardless.”

Baby white sharks are blissfully unaware of the bad rap they are born into. “White sharks have been described as these mindless killers,” said Laura Ryan, a neurobiologist at Macquarie University in Australia and an author on the paper. But she hopes they may begin to be seen “in another light by understanding their world.”

White sharks, along with bull sharks and tiger sharks, are responsible for most injuries and fatal bites to humans — who are most often surfers. And the most frequent biters appear to be juveniles, between 8-10 feet long. But white sharks usually release a person after the first bite, which may suggest they do not actively hunt humans as prey.

“As a general rule for shark bites, the vast majority of them are one and done,” Macdonald said.

Although mistaken-identity theory made logical sense, it would seem easily debunked on the basis of our own visual perception: The average sighted person could likely distinguish between the silhouette of a surfer and a seal paddling side by side.

Recent investigations into shark vision have expanded scientists’ understanding of how the cartilaginous predators see their environment: probably in grayscale and with a minimal ability to see detail. To try to see the world as a shark, Ryan said to imagine taking your eye examination underwater without goggles; things are a little less sharp. As such, the visual cues a hunting shark most relies on are probably motion and brightness contrast.

Spurred by this knowledge, the researchers did an experiment. From the bottom of aquariums at the Taronga Zoo in Sydney, the researchers attached a GoPro to an underwater scooter traveling at the speed of a cruising shark. They recorded videos of two sea lions, one fur seal, swimming people and people paddling on three different types of surfboards (the boards came from the personal collection of Ryan, who surfs).

Ryan and colleagues edited the GoPro footage in a computer program to translate the lens of a video camera to the retinas of a young white shark. They stripped the video of some color and rotated them all so the overhead objects moved from the bottom to the top of the screen. Then the researchers ran the videos through a series of statistical analyses at a range of resolutions to glean whether a juvenile white shark might be able to discern between the objects.

In the shark’s-eye view, the researchers found no significant difference between a swimming person, a paddling surfer or a meandering seal or sea lion. Ryan said she was surprised that sharks might confuse even a swimming person without a surfboard with a seal.

The study suggests young sharks must be using other tactics to distinguish between people and prey, Macdonald said, adding that the number of people in the water has increased significantly in recent years without an associated spike in bites.

“They eat seals every day, and bites on people are incredibly rare.” Macdonald said. “So if they’re not solving the problem visually, then how do we think they’re solving it?” If the answer lies with a shark’s other senses, such as scent, this could determine what interventions would make sense to prevent encounters in the wild, she added.

Ryan continues to surf. Whenever thoughts of sharks come up, she used to think about statistics: how a bite is not likely to occur. After this study, she reminds herself of something new: “I find some comfort in knowing that they’re not mindless killers.”

The reason behind the tomb’s strength is that it was constructed from the deposits of the eruptions of the nearby Alban Hills volcano.

The mausoleum of a first-century BCE Roman nobleman’s daughter has recently been the subject of research providing insights into the materials that went into its construction. The Tomb of Caecilia Metella, situated on the outskirts of Rome, is closely associated with the much larger context of the archaeological site of Capo di Bove. The site corresponds to the period of Imperial Rome (27 BCE to 476 CE).

Architecturally, the structure of the Tomb of Caecilia Metella consists of a cylindrical dome on a square podium. “The concrete of the cylindrical wall’ deserved a closer inspection because ‘it remains highly cohesive despite 2050 years of exposure due to infiltration of rainwater, groundwater and high humidity,” the paper states.

Science behind the strong substance

The reason behind the tomb’s strength is that it was constructed from the deposits of the eruptions of the nearby Alban Hills volcano. In the case of the tomb, the binding agent in the mortar was calcium-aluminum-silicate-hydrate, and the aggregate consisted of alluvial deposits and Pozzolanelle tephra.

Rocks and ash ejected out of a volcano (aka tephra) were used by ancient Greeks as cementing material as early as the mid-first millennium BCE (nearly 200-300 years before Imperial Rome). The material is now known as Pozzolona, after the place in Italy (Pozzuoli), that has one of the primary deposits of this variety of volcanic ash.

These have been documented by Roman historians like Vitruvius (80-15 BCE), who, while referring to these structures, said they “over a long passage of time do not fall into ruins”. A contemporary Roman historian-archaeologist, Esther Boise van Deman, refers to the period as “an Epoch in the history of concrete construction”.

The binding material of the tomb was produced from the reaction between lime and aggregate tephra. The podium was made of tuff rock, which is made when volcanic ash is solidified after an eruption, and lava rock, which, as the name suggests, is a rock made of post-eruption-magma.

Micro morphology studies

The study employed scanning electron microscopy, revealing the micro morphologies of the building structure and X-ray diffraction to study the chemical composition as well as the structure of the material.

The key to the durability of the structure could, however, be the interface between the aggregate and the mortar.

The aggregates, derived from volcanic tephra in this case, continued to remain reactive long after the structure was built and contributed to further strengthening of the material. For instance, the tomb was exposed to rain for centuries. This caused the leucite crystals (part of tephra aggregate), rich in potassium, to dissolve into the cementing matrix and make it rich in potassium.

A similar characteristic is seen in other Roman structures from the time, e.g. the Theatre of Marcellus and the Markets of Trajan. While the same process would produce cracks in modern concrete, the same process strengthened the binder, creating a new fabric in the wake.

Lead co-authors of the study published in the Journal of the American Ceramic Society, Admir Masic, said in a release: “Understanding the formation and processes of ancient materials can inform researchers of new ways to create durable, sustainable building materials for the future.”

While most countries generated less carbon emissions during the economic crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic, Brazil in 2020 emitted 2.16 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent

Brazil’s greenhouse gas emissions increased by 9.5 per cent in 2020 largely due to increased deforestation in the Amazon during the second year of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro’s government, said a report published on Thursday by climate change experts.

While most countries generated less carbon emissions during the economic crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic, Brazil in 2020 emitted 2.16 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e), up from 1.97 billion in 2019, according to the study.

Including greenhouse gas removal by secondary forests and protected areas, net emissions rose 14 per cent last year to 1.52 GtCO2e, according to the SEEG study sponsored by the Climate Observatory advocacy group.

“Deforestation continues to dominate our emissions, with an upward trend in the very year in which Brazil should start meeting Paris Climate Agreement targets,” said Tasso Azevedo, a climate expert coordinating the SEEG study.

The rise in deforestation will put Brazil at a disadvantage in climate negotiations at COP26, beginning on Sunday in Glasgow, said Climate Observatory head Marcio Astrini. “Brazil has achieved the feat of being perhaps the only large emitter that polluted more during the first year of the pandemic,” he said.

Brazil will step up its Paris Accord targets at COP26 as it tries to recover credibility for its environmental policies, bringing forward to 2050 from 2060 its goal for carbon neutrality, or net zero gas emissions.

At an Earth Day summit hosted in April by U.S. President Joe Biden, Bolsonaro promised to end illegal deforestation in the Amazon by 2030. But he continues to push for commercial mining and agriculture there, including on protected indigenous lands.

Environmental activists warn that those distant climate targets are at odds with what is now happening in the Amazon, with authorities turning a blind eye to illegal logging and mining, which has pushed the world’s largest tropical forest toward a point of no return.

The reason that tusks are currently limited to modern mammals lies in a specific arrangement of teeth that mammals inherited from the broader family of synapsids.

Written by Asher Elbein

Elephants have them. Pigs have them. Narwhals and water deer have them. Tusks are among the most dramatic examples of mammal dentition: ever-growing, projecting teeth used for fighting, foraging, even flirting.

So why, across the broad sweep of geologic history, do such useful teeth only appear among mammals and no other surviving groups of animals? According to a study published Wednesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, it takes two key adaptations to teeth to make a tusk — and the evolutionary pathway first appeared millions of years before the first true mammals.

Around 255 million years ago, a family of mammal relatives called dicynodonts — tusked, turtle-beaked herbivores ranging in stature from gopher-size burrowers to six-ton behemoths — wandered the forests of the supercontinent Pangea. A few lineages survived the devastating Permian extinction period, during which more than 90% of Earth’s species died out, before being replaced by herbivorous dinosaurs.

“They were really successful animals,” said Megan Whitney, a paleontologist at Harvard University and lead author of the study. “They’re so abundant in South Africa that in some of these sites, you just get really sick of seeing them. You’ll look out over a field and there’ll just be skulls of these animals everywhere.”

To work out how these animals evolved their tusks, Whitney and her colleagues collected bone samples from 10 dicynodont species, among them the tiny, big-eyed Diictodon and the tank-like Lystrosaurus. They looked at how their canines attached to the jaw, whether they regularly regenerated lost teeth, like many reptiles do, and for indicators that their teeth grew continuously.

Many mammal families have evolved long, saber-toothed fangs or ever-growing incisors for gnawing. Several early dicynodonts also had a pair of long canine teeth poking from their beaks. But these teeth, like most animal teeth, are composed of a substance called dentine, capped by a hard, thin covering of enamel. Tusks have no enamel, Whitney said, and grow continuously even as the comparatively softer dentine gets worn away.

Examining the dicynodont skulls, the team found that a shift occurred midway through the group’s evolution: the appearance of soft tissue attachments supporting the teeth, akin to the ligaments present in modern mammals. And like modern mammals, dicynodonts didn’t continuously replace their teeth.

Both of these shifts laid the groundwork for the development of an ever-growing, well-supported tooth — a tusk. Afterward, Whitney said, late dicynodonts developed tusks at in at least two different lineages, and possibly more.

This evolutionary pathway is reminiscent of another group of tusked animals: elephants. Early elephant relatives had enlarged canines that were covered with enamel, Whitney said. Later members of the family reduced the enamel to a thin band on one side of the tooth, like a rodent incisor, allowing the tooth to grow continuously. Finally, they ditched the enamel entirely.

“You’re providing the means for a tusk to evolve if you unlock the evolution of reduced tooth replacement and soft tissue attachments,” Whitney said. “Once you have a group that has both conditions, you can go a long time of animals playing with different tooth combinations, and you start to see these independent developments of tusks.”

The reason that tusks are currently limited to modern mammals, then, lies in a specific arrangement of teeth that mammals inherited from the broader family of synapsids, the group that includes mammal forerunners like dicynodonts.

Even with those prerequisites, Whitney said, an adaptation like tusks isn’t inevitable. But it is available, and multiple mammal groups — elephants, whales, deer, pigs and walruses — have found uses for them.

“Mammals are kind of stuck with our teeth, unlike something like a shark, which has a conveyor belt of terror,” Whitney said. “So an ever-growing tooth is pretty brilliant if you’re only replacing your tooth once.”

The researchers said they believe it is the first case of asexual reproduction in any avian species where the female had access to a mate.

Endangered California condors can have “virgin births,” according to a study released Thursday.

Researchers with the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance said genetic testing confirmed that two male chicks hatched in 2001 and 2009 from unfertilized eggs were related to their mothers. Neither was related to a male.

The study was published Thursday in the the Journal of Heredity. It’s the first report of asexual reproduction in California condors, although parthenogenesis can occur in other species ranging from sharks to honey bees to Komodo dragons.

But in birds, it usually only occurs when females don’t have access to males. In this case, each mother condor had previously bred with males, producing 34 chicks, and each was housed with a fertile male at the time they produced the eggs through parthenogenesis.

The researchers said they believe it is the first case of asexual reproduction in any avian species where the female had access to a mate.

“These findings now raise questions about whether this might occur undetected in other species,” said Oliver Ryder, the study’s co-author and director of conservation genetics for the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance.

The non-profit alliance runs the San Diego Zoo and Safari Park and has been involved in a California condor breeding program that helped bring the giant vultures back from near-extinction.

With 10-foot (3-meter) wingspans, California condors are the largest flying birds in North America. They once ranged throughout the West Coast. But only 22 survived in the 1980s when the U.S. government captured them and placed them in zoos for captive breeding. About 160 were bred at the San Diego Zoo and Safari Park.

There are now more than 500 California condors, including more than 300 that have been released into the wild in California, Arizona, Utah and Mexico.

The asexual reproduction was discovered some years ago during widespread testing of genetic material collected over decades from condors, both living and dead, in breeding programs and in the wild.

“Among 467 male California condors tested in the parentage analysis, no male qualified as a potential sire” of the two birds, the study said.

California condors can live up to 60 years, but both males were sickly. One was less than 2 years old when he died, and the other lived less than eight years.

The problem cropped up shortly after the spacecraft’s October 16 liftoff on a 12-year journey.

NASA is debating whether to try to fix a jammed solar panel on its newly launched Lucy spacecraft, en route to explore an unprecedented number of asteroids.

The problem cropped up shortly after the spacecraft’s October 16 liftoff on a 12-year journey.

After measuring the electric current this week, NASA reported Wednesday that one of Lucy’s two giant, circular solar panels is only between 75 per cent and 95 per cent extended. A lanyard is holding it in place.

Any attempt at reopening the wing — which is 24 feet in diameter — would not occur before mid-November.

So far, the problem has not affected Lucy’s outbound flight, so there’s no rush to figure out the next step, officials said. Everything else on the spacecraft — already 3.7 million miles (6 million kilometers) away — is working properly.

The mission’s lead scientist, Hal Levison of Southwest Research Institute, said the team is encouraged that the combined power from both solar panels “is keeping the spacecraft healthy and functioning.”

“It’s too early to determine longer range implications to the entire mission,” Levison said in an email Thursday. While the problem is concerning, “our team is working this very diligently and carefully to find a workable solution.”

The nearly $1 billion mission seeks to explore seven so-called Trojan asteroids that share Jupiter’s orbit around the sun and another space rock closer to home. Lucy should swoop within 600 miles (965 kilometers) of each target.

The mission's lead scientist, Scott Bolton of Southwest Research Institute, said there might not be a hard cutoff at the bottom of the storm.

Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, a storm so big it could swallow Earth, extends surprisingly deep beneath the planet’s cloud tops, scientists have reported.

NASA’s Juno spacecraft has discovered that the monster storm, though shrinking, still has a depth of between 200 miles (350 kilometers) and 300 miles or so (500 kilometers.) When combined with its width of 10,000 miles (16,000 kilometers), the Great Red Spot resembles a fat pancake in new 3D images of the planet.

The mission’s lead scientist, Scott Bolton of Southwest Research Institute, said there might not be a hard cutoff at the bottom of the storm.

“It probably fades out gradually and keeps going down,” Bolton said at a news conference.

The research was published Thursday in the journal Science.

The Great Red Spot is probably the tallest Jovian storm measured so far with Juno’s microwave and gravity-mapping instruments, Bolton said. Thousands of storms rage across the gas giant at any given time beautiful and colourful swirls, plumes and filaments covering the entire planet, as seen by the spacecraft’s camera.

Still ahead for Juno: measuring the depth of the polar cyclones, which might penetrate even deeper beneath the clouds.

“I wouldn’t want to be too quick to guess that we’ve seen the deepest,” Bolton told reporters. “But the Great Red Spot is the largest and that makes it special by itself, and you might expect that it might be deeper just because of that.”

By contrast, some of the surrounding jet streams extend an estimated 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometres) into Jupiter.

Launched in 2011, Juno has been orbiting the solar system’s largest planet since 2016. NASA recently extended the mission by another four years, to 2025.

Tang makes the condoms using polyurethane, a material used in transparent wound dressings that is thin and flexible yet strong and waterproof.

A Malaysian gynaecologist has created what he says is the world’s first unisex condom that can be worn by females or males and is made from a medical grade material usually used as a dressing for injuries and wounds.

Its inventor hopes the Wondaleaf Unisex Condom will empower people to take better control of their sexual health regardless of their sex or sexual orientation.

“It’s basically a regular condom with an adhesive covering,” said John Tang Ing Chinh, a gynaecologist at medical supplies firm Twin Catalyst. “It’s a condom with an adhesive covering that attaches to the vagina or penis, as well as covering the adjacent area for extra protection,” Tang said.

The adhesive is only applied to one side of the condom, he added, meaning it can be reversed and used by either sex. Each box of Wondaleaf contains two condoms, and will cost 14.99 ringgit ($3.61). The average price for a dozen condoms in Malaysia is 20-40 ringgit.

Tang makes the condoms using polyurethane, a material used in transparent wound dressings that is thin and flexible yet strong and waterproof.

“Once you put it on, you often don’t realise that it’s there,” he said, referring to dressings made from the material. Tang said the Wondaleaf had gone through several rounds of clinical research and testing and would be available commercially via the firm’s website this December.

“Based on the number of clinical trials we have conducted, I am quite optimistic that given time it will be a meaningful addition to the many contraceptive methods used in the prevention of unintended pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases,” Tang said.

Named Terropterus xiushanensis, it belonged to an extinct arthropod group called Eurypterids.

Are you scared of the tiny five-inch scorpion? To further trigger your arachnophobia, meet the one-meter-long scorpion that ruled the South China sea about 400 million years ago.

Named Terropterus xiushanensis, it belonged to an extinct arthropod group called Eurypterids.

This group first appeared during the Ordovician age or 480 million years ago and reached its peak of diversity in the Silurian period (430 million years ago). The group went completely extinct by the end of the Permian era or about 280 million years ago.

The fossil was described from the Fentou Formation from Wuhan, Hubei, South China. The new species was seen to have special basket-like appendages for capturing its prey and so was placed under a group of eurypterids called mixopterids.

“Our knowledge of mixopterids is limited to only four species in two genera, which were all based on a few fossil specimens from the Silurian Laurussia 80 years ago,” said lead author Han Wang in a release. She is from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology and Center for Excellence in Life and Paleoenvironment, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The other four species of mixopterids were previously reported from Norway, New York, Estonia, and Scotland. This is the first record mixopterids from Gondwana. “Future work, especially in Asia, may reveal a more cosmopolitan distribution of mixopterids and perhaps other groups of eurypterids,” adds the paper recently published in Science Bulletin.

The new species had an enlarged limb and was characterised by a unique arrangement of spines. The team adds that this large arthropod may have played an important role as one of the top predators. By studying the difference in morphology, they hope to unravel the complex evolutionary history and relationship of this group.

Sitting Bull, whose Lakota name was Tatanka-Iyotanka, helped bring together the Sioux tribes of the Great Plains against white settlers taking tribal land and U.S. military forces trying to expel Native Americans from their territory.

A sample of Sitting Bull’s hair has helped scientists confirm that a South Dakota man is the famed 19th century Native American leader’s great-grandson using a new method to analyze family lineages with DNA fragments from long-dead people.

Researchers said on Wednesday that DNA extracted from the hair, which had been stored at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, confirmed the familial relationship between Sitting Bull, who died in 1890, and Ernie LaPointe, 73, of Lead, South Dakota.

“I feel this DNA research is another way of identifying my lineal relationship to my great-grandfather,” said LaPointe, who has three sisters. “People have been questioning our relationship to our ancestor as long as I can remember. These people are just a pain in the place you sit – and will probably doubt these findings, also.”

The study represented the first time that DNA from a long-dead person was used to demonstrate a familial relationship between a living individual and a historical figure – and offers the potential for doing so with others whose DNA can be extracted from remains such as hair, teeth or bones.

The new method was developed by scientists led by Eske Willerslev, director of the Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre at the University of Cambridge.

The researchers took 14 years to discover a way of extracting useable DNA from the hair, which was degraded after being stored at room temperature before being handed over by the Smithsonian to LaPointe and his sisters in 2007. Willerslev said he read in a magazine about the Smithsonian turning over the lock of hair from Sitting Bull’s scalp and reached out to LaPointe.

“LaPointe asked me to extract DNA from it and compare it to his DNA to establish relationship,” said Willerslev, senior author of the research published in the Science Advances. “I got very little hair and there was very limited DNA in it. It took us a long time developing a method that, based on limited ancient DNA, can by compared to that of living people across multiple generations.”

The novel technique centered on what is known as autosomal DNA in the genetic fragments extracted from the hair. Traditional analysis involves specific DNA in the Y chromosome passed down the male line or specific DNA in the mitochondria -powerhouses of a cell – passed down from mothers to children. Autosomal DNA instead is not gender specific.

“There existed methods, but they demanded for substantial amounts of DNA or did only allow to go to the level of grandchildren,” Willerslev said. “With our new method, it is possible to establish deeper-time family relationships using tiny amounts of DNA.”

Sitting Bull, whose Lakota name was Tatanka-Iyotanka, helped bring together the Sioux tribes of the Great Plains against white settlers taking tribal land and U.S. military forces trying to expel Native Americans from their territory. He led Native American warriors who wiped out federal troops led by George Custer at the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn in what is now the U.S. state of Montana.

Two official burial sites exist for Sitting Bull, one at Fort Yates, North Dakota and the other at Mobridge, South Dakota. LaPointe said he does not believe the Fort Yates site contains any of his great-grandfather’s remains.

“I feel the DNA results can identify the remains buried at the Mobridge, South Dakota site as my ancestor,” LaPointe said, raising the possibility of moving the Mobridge remains to another location in the future.

Recently, efforts to save the whales have resulted in new restrictions on US lobster fishing, and pushback from the fishing industry about those new rules.

A type of whale that is one of the rarest marine mammals in the world lost nearly 10 per cent of its population last year, a group of scientists and ocean life advocates said on Monday.

The North Atlantic right whale numbered only 366 in 2019, and its population fell to 336 in 2020, the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium said. The estimate is the lowest number in nearly two decades.

Right whales were once abundant in the waters off New England, but were decimated during the commercial whaling era due to their high concentrations of oil. They have been listed as endangered by the US government for more than half a century.

The whales have suffered high mortality and poor reproduction in some recent years. There were more than 480 of the animals as recently as 2011. They’re vulnerable to fatal entanglement in fishing gear and collisions with large ships, and even when they survive, they often emerge less fit and less able to feed and mate, said Scott Kraus, chair of the consortium.

“No one engaged in right whale work believes that the species cannot recover from this. They absolutely can, if we stop killing them and allow them to allocate energy to finding food, mates and habitats that aren’t marred with deadly obstacles,” Kraus said.

The whales feed and mate off New England and Canada. They then travel hundreds of miles in the fall to calving grounds off Georgia and Florida before returning north in the spring.

The whale consortium was founded in the mid-1980s by a group of science institutions including the New England Aquarium and today includes dozens of members from academia, industry, government and elsewhere.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the arm of the federal government that monitors and regulates ocean issues, cautioned that the group’s estimate is preliminary and has not yet been peer reviewed. However, the agency shares the consortium’s concern about the loss of right whales, said Allison Ferreira, a spokesperson for the agency.

“North Atlantic right whales are one of the most imperiled species on the planet, and the latest estimate shows that the substantial downward trajectory of right whale abundance documented over the last decade continues,” Ferreira said.

The whales, which can weight 135,000 pounds (61,235 kilos) have been a focus of conservationists for generations. Recently, efforts to save the whales have resulted in new restrictions on US lobster fishing, and pushback from the fishing industry about those new rules.

The rules are designed to reduce the number of rope lines that link buoys to lobster and crab traps, and went into effect this year. However, the rules also resulted in a flurry of lawsuits, and a federal judge ruled this month that fishermen can continue to fish until further notice in an area off the coast of Maine that had been slated for restriction from their gear.

While the world struggles to curb climate change, countries such as Gabon are trying to work out exactly how much carbon is locked in their mangroves.

The towering trees in Gabon’s impenetrable mangrove swamps have helped to make the Central African country one of the world’s few net absorbers of carbon as the plants sequester the greenhouse gas four times faster than forests on land.

While the world struggles to curb climate change and UN talks on the issue begin at the end of the month, countries such as Gabon are trying to work out exactly how much carbon is locked in their mangroves.

“We do not really have a lot of information on the mangrove forests compared to the terra firma forests,” said Vincent Medjibe, who collects carbon data for Gabon’s National Parks Agency. “We’re working on it.”

Across the estuary from the mangrove-rich Pongara National Park, the growing capital Libreville exemplifies the threat mangroves face. In one outer neighbourhood, dry tussocks and muddy holes are what remain of a former swamp that has been illegally cleared for construction.

As well as storing carbon, the swamps are rich in wildlife and serve as natural flood defences. A resident who gave her name only as Christella said she was worried her future neighbours didn’t realise the danger. “They’re in a basin of sorts and when the heavy rains come, the water can rise,” she said.

The positive news is that awareness is growing. In the last 20 years, mangroves have recovered from being one of the world’s fastest-shrinking habitats to one of the best-protected with over 40 per cent in a legally protected area, a July report by a coalition called the Global Mangrove Alliance found.

Gabon only began to realise the full extent of its mangroves in 2018 when a study in the journal Nature Geoscience used satellite imagery to discover some of the estuary’s trees were more than 65 metres high, taller than the Sydney Opera House, making them the world’s tallest mangroves.

NASA earth scientist Lola Fatoyinbo, who co-authored the study, said knowledge was improving rapidly. “Science has gotten better, our understanding of their role as really important carbon sinks has gotten better and so awareness has become greater,” she told Reuters.

Mangroves are found in over 100 countries. Those that lack monitoring capacity can use an online map and data platform called Global Mangrove Watch. It sends out alerts in near real-time when it picks up signs of disturbance.

In Gabon, public awareness drives are designed to reduce the pressure on Libreville’s mangroves and the country’s space observatory is helping to track the mangroves that fringe nearly half of the 1,485 km coast, head of environmental protection Stanislas Stephen Mouba told Reuters.

“There’s a very huge logistical aspect if you want to cover all the mangroves of Gabon, but with this kind of tool we can use it as an early warning system…they can say ‘oh, we have to send people here,'” he said.

Decades of climate talks have spawned a host of acronyms and jargon. Here is a guide:

Representatives from nearly 200 countries will meet in Glasgow, Scotland, from October 31 to November 12 to flesh out the rules of a new global climate pact.

Decades of climate talks have spawned a host of acronyms and jargon. Here is a guide:

PARIS AGREEMENT: Successor to the Kyoto Protocol, the international climate treaty that expired in 2020.Agreed in December 2015, the Paris Agreement aims to limit the rise in the average global surface temperature. To do this, countries that signed the accord set national pledges to reduce humanity’s effect on the climate that are meant to become more ambitious over time.

GREENHOUSE GASES: The carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted by the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, diesel, gasoline or petrol, kerosene and natural gas is the main “greenhouse gas” responsible for warming the Earth’s atmosphere. But there are others such as methane, which is produced by cows and waste dumps, that are much more potent than CO2 but much shorter-lived in the atmosphere.

1.5 DEGREES: The Paris accord legally bound its signatories collectively to limit greenhouse gas emissions to keep the temperature rise “well below” 2.0 degrees Celsius this century. But the countries also promised to “pursue efforts” to keep the rise below 1.5C, which scientists say would help to avert some of the most catastrophic effects.

Soberingly, the world has already heated up by just over 1C since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Even if all the pledges made so far are delivered, it is still on track for an average rise of 2.7C this century, a United Nations report said.

COP26: The Conference of the Parties (COP) is the supreme body of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), made up of representatives from each country that signed the Paris Agreement and which meets every year. COP26, the 26th annual meeting, is being held under a British presidency, albeit a year late because of the coronavirus pandemic.

NATIONALLY DETERMINED CONTRIBUTIONS: NDCs are the pledges that each country makes to reduce its emissions and adapt to climate change from 2020 onward. Countries have to update and expand their NDCs every five years. All signatories have submitted new pledges for Glasgow. In sum, they are nowhere near enough, and a main aim of the conference is to use the negotiation process to increase them.

‘JUST TRANSITION’: The term used to describe a shift to a low-carbon economy that keeps the social and economic disruption of moving away from fossil fuels to a minimum while maximising the benefits for workers, communities and consumers.

CLIMATE FINANCE: Richer countries agreed in 2009 to contribute $100 billion together each year by 2020 to help poorer countries adapt their economies and lessen the impact of rising seas, or more severe and frequent storms and droughts. In 2015 they agreed to extend this goal through to 2025, but the target has yet to be met. To put things in perspective, a U.S. Energy Department official estimated that the United States alone needs to invest $1 trillion a year to meet its new climate targets.

CBDR: The principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities” (CBDR), was enshrined in the Kyoto accord. It says that developed countries, which produced more emissions in the past as they built their economies, should take the lead in fighting climate change. The issue is always one of the most thorny in climate talks. The Paris Agreement sought to bind major rapidly developing economies such as China and Brazil into the global effort to cut emissions, adding the words “in light of different national circumstances”. It does not, however, require them to make any immediate pledges to cut their emissions.

‘LOSS AND DAMAGE’: Although richer countries have agreed to provide them with funding to address the impact of climate change, poorer countries continue to press for an agreed basis to assess liability for the losses and damage caused by climate change, and calculate compensation.

By analysing the connectome of just a small part of the fly brain the team identified dozens of new neuron types and pinpointed neural circuits that appear to help flies make their way through the world.

Written by Emily Anthes

The brain of a fruit fly is the size of a poppy seed and about as easy to overlook.

“Most people, I think, don’t even think of the fly as having a brain,” said Vivek Jayaraman, a neuroscientist at the Janelia Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Virginia. “But, of course, flies lead quite rich lives.”

Flies are capable of sophisticated behaviors. And their specksize brains are tremendously complex, containing about 100,000 neurons and tens of millions of connections, or synapses, between them.

Since 2014, a team of scientists at Janelia, in collaboration with researchers at Google, have been mapping these neurons and synapses in an effort to create a comprehensive wiring diagram, also known as a connectome, of the fruit fly brain.

The work is time-consuming and expensive, even with the help of state-of-the-art machine-learning algorithms. But the data they have released so far is stunning in its detail, composing an atlas of gnarled neurons in many crucial areas of the fly brain.

And now, in a new paper being published Tuesday in the journal eLife, neuroscientists are beginning to show what they can do with it.

By analysing the connectome of just a small part of the fly brain — the central complex, which plays an important role in navigation — Jayaraman and his colleagues identified dozens of new neuron types and pinpointed neural circuits that appear to help flies make their way through the world. The work could help provide insight into how all kinds of animal brains, including our own, process a flood of sensory information and translate it into appropriate action.

It is also a proof of principle for the young field of modern connectomics, which was built on the promise that constructing detailed diagrams of the brain’s wiring would pay scientific dividends.

“It’s really extraordinary,” Dr. Clay Reid, a senior investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, said of the new paper. “I think anyone who looks at it will say connectomics is a tool that we need in neuroscience — full stop.”

The only complete connectome in the animal kingdom belongs to the humble roundworm, C. elegans. Biologist Sydney Brenner, who would later go on to win a Nobel Prize, started the project in the 1960s. His small team spent years on it, using colored pens to trace all 302 neurons by hand.

When the Janelia Research Campus opened in 2006, Gerald Rubin, its founding director, set his sights on the fruit fly.

Several different teams at Janelia have embarked on fly connectome projects in the years since, but the work that led to the new paper began in 2014, with the brain of a single, 5-day-old female fruit fly.

Researchers cut the fly brain into slabs and then used a technique known as focused-ion beam scanning electron microscopy to image them, layer by painstaking layer. The microscope essentially functioned like a tiny, precise nail file, filing away an exceedingly thin layer of the brain, snapping a picture of the exposed tissue and then repeating the process until nothing remained.

“You’re simultaneously imaging and cutting off little slices of the fly brain, so they don’t exist after you’re done,” Jayaraman said.

The team then used computer vision software to stitch the millions of resulting images back together into a single, 3D volume and sent it off to Google. There, researchers used advanced machine-learning algorithms to identify each individual neuron and trace its twisting branches.

Finally, the Janelia team used additional computational tools to pinpoint the synapses, and human researchers proofread the computers’ work, correcting errors and refining the wiring diagrams.

Last year, the researchers published the connectome for what they called the “hemibrain,” a large portion of the central fly brain, which includes regions and structures that are crucial for sleep, learning and navigation.

The connectome, which is accessible free online, includes about 25,000 neurons and 20 million synapses, far more than the C. elegans connectome.

“It’s a dramatic scaling up,” said Cori Bargmann, a neuroscientist at Rockefeller University in New York. “This is a tremendous step toward the goal of working out the connectivity of the brain.”

Once the hemibrain connectome was ready, Jayaraman, an expert on the neuroscience of fly navigation, was eager to dive into the data on the central complex.

The brain region, which contains nearly 3,000 neurons and is present in all insects, helps flies build an internal model of their spatial relationship to the world and then select and execute behaviors appropriate for their circumstances, such as searching for food.

“You’re telling me you can give me the wiring diagram for something like this?” Jayaraman said. “This is better industrial espionage than you could get by getting insights into the Apple iPhone.”

The researchers hypothesise that fly brains may be wired to prioritize information about the global environment when they are navigating, but also that these circuits are flexible, so that when such information is inadequate, they can pay more attention to local features of the landscape.

Other members of the research team identified specific neural pathways that seem well suited to helping the fly keep track of its head and body orientation; anticipate its future orientation and traveling direction; calculate its current orientation relative to another desired location; and then move in that direction.

Imagine, for instance, that a hungry fly temporarily abandons a rotting banana to see whether it can rustle up something better. But after a (literally) fruitless few minutes of exploration, it wants to return to its previous meal.

The connectome data suggests that certain brain cells, technically known as PFL3 neurons, help the fly pull off this maneuver. These neurons receive two critical inputs: They get signals from neurons that track the direction the fly is facing as well as from neurons that may be keeping tabs on the direction of the banana.

After receiving those signals, the PFL3 neurons then send out their own message to a set of turning neurons that prompt the fly to veer off in the correct direction. Dinner is served, again.

“Being able to trace that activity through that circuit — from sensory back to motor through this complex intermediate circuit — is really amazing,” said Brad Hulse, a research scientist in Jayaraman’s lab who led this part of the analysis. The connectome, he added, “showed us a lot more than we thought it was going to.”

And the group’s paper, a draft of which includes 75 figures and stretches to 360 pages, is just the beginning.

“It just really provides this ground truth for exploring this brain region further,” said Stanley Heinze, an expert on insect neuroscience at Lund University in Sweden. “It’s just enormously impressive.”

One could have asked — some did — why a fruit fly’s brain circuitry matters.

“I get asked this at the holidays a lot,” Hulse said.

Flies are not mice or chimps or humans, but their brains perform some of the same basic tasks. Understanding the basic neural circuitry in an insect could provide important clues to how other animal brains approach similar problems, said David Van Essen, a neuroscientist at Washington University in St. Louis.

Gaining a deep understanding of the fly’s brain “also gives us insights that are very relevant to the understanding of mammalian, and even human, brains and behavior,” he said.

Creating connectomes of larger, more complex brains will be enormously challenging. The mouse brain contains roughly 70 million neurons, the human brain a whopping 86 billion.

But the central complex paper is decidedly not a one-off; detailed studies of regional mouse and human connectomes are in the pipeline, Reid said: “There’s a lot more to come.”

Journal editors, consider yourselves warned.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

The company and NASA want to make sure any toilet leaks won’t compromise the capsule launching early Sunday from Kennedy Space Center or another one that’s been parked at the International Space Station since April.

SpaceX is taming some toilet troubles in its Dragon capsules before launching four more astronauts.

The company and NASA want to make sure any toilet leaks won’t compromise the capsule launching early Sunday from Kennedy Space Center or another one that’s been parked at the International Space Station since April.

During SpaceX’s first private flight last month, a tube came unglued, spilling urine onto fans and beneath the floor, said William Gerstenmaier, a SpaceX vice president who used to work for NASA. The same problem was recently discovered inside the Dragon capsule at the space station, he told reporters Monday night.

NASA astronaut Raja Chari, the spacecraft commander, said Tuesday that he has “complete confidence” in the repairs. SpaceX jumped quickly on the issue, he noted, with hundreds of people working on it to ensure the crew’s safety.

As for the Dragon capsule in orbit, less urine pooled beneath the floor panels than the one that carried a billionaire and three others on a three-day flight, Gerstenmaier said. That’s because the NASA-led crew only spent a day living in it before arriving at the space station.

SpaceX is conducting tests to make sure the spilled liquid didn’t weaken the orbiting capsule during the past six months, Gerstenmaier said. Any structural damage could endanger astronauts during their flight back to Earth next month. The final tests should be completed later this week, he noted.

This will be SpaceX’s fourth launch of NASA astronauts and its fifth passenger flight overall. NASA turned to SpaceX and Boeing to transport crews to and from the space station, following the retirement of the shuttle fleet in 2011. U.S. astronauts hitched rides on Russian rockets until SpaceX took over the job last year.

Boeing has yet to launch anyone. A repeat test flight of its Starliner capsule, without a crew, is off until next year because of valve trouble.

Once he launches atop SpaceX’s Falcon rocket, German astronaut Matthias Maurer will become the 600th person in space, according to NASA statistics. He said at a news conference Tuesday that he offered the designation to U.S. crewmate Kayla Barron, who will be the 601st.

The tracks likely belonged to a two-legged ancestor of the giant, long-necked, four-legged sauropods that evolved later in the Mesozoic Era.

Written by Corinne Purtill

For more than 50 years, the giant fossilised footprints have been one of the most tantalising finds in Australian paleontology.

At the time of their discovery, scientists believed the three birdlike tracks had been made 200 million to 250 million years ago by a two-legged predator. The tracks were the first evidence that dinosaurs roamed Australia in the Triassic, when the creatures first appeared on the planet.

By 2003, some paleontologists even suspected that the footprints represented the world’s earliest evidence of a giant carnivorous dinosaur, one that may have stood up to 6 1/2 feet high at the hip.

But new analysis has brought down this Australian idol. The tracks belonged to a smaller, meeker herbivore no taller than a person, not a ferocious giant carnivore, scientists said in a paper published Thursday in the journal Historical Biology.

While the antipodes may be losing their claim to carnivorous Triassic dinosaur fame, the prints are still a significant contribution to Australia’s paleontological record, said Anthony Romilio, a research associate at the Dinosaur Lab at the University of Queensland and co-author of the new study. The tracks likely belonged to a two-legged ancestor of the giant, long-necked, four-legged sauropods that evolved later in the Mesozoic Era.

“It’s the only occurrence of these bipedal forms of these dinosaurs in Australia,” Romilio said. Sauropods are not found again in the continent’s fossil record for about 50 million more years.

Miners laboring in a tunnel some 700 feet below the Earth’s surface near Brisbane were the first to spot the prints. As the miners excavated coal, the fossilized tracks, each larger than a dinner plate, took shape in the darkness.

“Having a bird footprint, a gigantic bird footprint on the ceiling, that’s something to tell someone about,” Romilio said.

Reports of the mysterious tracks made their way out of the mine. In a 1964 paper on the discovery, Henry Ross Edgar Staines, a paleontologist with the Geological Survey of Queensland, and J.T. Woods of the Queensland Museum measured the biggest track at nearly 17 inches from heel to the tip of the longest toe. They declared it to be Eubrontes, a genus of fossilised footprints left by upright carnivores. A plaster cast of the print was placed on display in the Queensland Museum.

After the mine’s closure, that cast and a simple, cartoonlike drawing of the three footprints included in the 1964 paper were the only visual records of the tracks that researchers could access. Scientific publications over the years described the largest print as anywhere from 15 to 18 inches, Romilio said.

When Romilio and his colleagues analysed the plaster cast using advanced 3D imaging techniques, a number of discrepancies with those earlier accounts emerged. Indentations at the front of the print appeared to be drag marks left by the dinosaur’s claws, not impressions of the claws themselves. A bump near the heel that previous researchers measured as part of the foot was actually part of the rock surrounding the fossil.

Further comparisons showed the tracks shared more characteristics with Evazoum, a genus of plant-eating dinosaur prints, than the carnivorous Eubrontes: an inward-pointing gait, a shorter middle toe, splayed toes and a narrower overall foot. The researchers now believe the largest track is 13 inches long, and belonged to a dinosaur that stood about 4 1/2 feet high at the hip.

Ross Staines, the paleontologist who first published on the prints, died in 1996. His daughter, Dr. Roslyn Dick, believes he would have welcomed the new insight into his findings.

“My father would have been very thrilled that someone else had taken his work and done more research about the topic,” said Dick, a Brisbane dentist who said Staines always kept a geologist’s pick in the trunk of the family car for impromptu fossil digs. “Dad liked things to be well done and appreciated the scientific process to uncover the ‘truth.’ ”

Some 300 million tonnes of plastic waste are produced annually, according to the United Nations Environment Programme

A group of recyclers in the Philippines is trying to ease the country’s worsening plastic waste crisis by turning bottles, single-use sachets and snack food wrappers that clog rivers and spoil beaches into building materials.

The Plastic Flamingo, or “The Plaf”, as they are commonly known, collect the waste, shred it and then mould it into posts and planks called “eco-lumber” that can be used for fencing, decking or even to make disaster-relief shelters.

“(It) is 100% upcycled material, 100% made from plastic waste materials, we also include some additives and colorants and it is rot-free, maintenance-free, and splinter-free,” said Erica Reyes, The Plaf’s chief operating officer.

Having collected over 100 tonnes of plastic waste to date, the social enterprise is doing its bit to address a local problem that has global ramifications. Approximately 80% of global ocean plastic comes from Asian rivers, and the Philippines alone contributes a third of that total, according to a 2021 report by Oxford University’s Our World in Data.

The Philippines does not have a clear strategy on tackling its plastics problem and its environment department has said it has been in contact with manufacturers to identify ways to manage waste.COVID-19, though, has made the battle against plastic waste harder to win.

Some 300 million tonnes of plastic waste are produced annually, according to the United Nations Environment Programme, a problem that has been exacerbated by the pandemic which sparked a rush for plastic face shields, gloves, takeaway food containers and bubble wrap as online shopping surged.

“People are unaware of how to dispose of these plastics,” said Allison Tan, The Plaf’s marketing associate. “We give that avenue that instead of putting it in landfills or oceans…you give it to recycling centres like us and we would upcycle them into better products.”

As well as tackling waste problems, the group says it is in talks with other non-government organisations to help rebuild houses destroyed by typhoons using their sustainable building materials.

It was found that the closest wild relative of the domesticated goats was the bezoar ibex.

Goats and dogs were among the first animals to be domesticated by humans. Bone remains found in archaeological sites and advances in genetics have, over the last three to four decades, compelled archaeologists and evolutionary biologists to understand the process of this domestication.

Taking DNA from the remains of 32 goats that died some 10,000 years ago in western Iran, a recent study tries to ascertain the history of goat (Capra hircus) domestication.

Domestication was one of the key moments in the history of humanity that propelled human societies towards urbanisation and sedentary agriculture, a marked transition from the hunting-gathering lifestyle of the Palaeolithic. The Neolithic period (10000 years ago) associated with domestication has been the subject of research for archaeologists, anthropologists, and biologists alike.

The four sites from where the assemblages were sourced are located in the Zagros mountain ranges that run from the Iran-Iraq-Turkey border in the North West to the Straits of Hormuz in the South East. These four sites are Ganj Dareh, Tepe Abdul Hosein, Asiab, and Ali Kosh and date to 9600-7000 cal BCE. Most of these sites have been subject to regular archaeological excavations since the 1960s.

Usually, animal bones recovered from an archaeological site are classified according to sex (female/male) and age (juvenile/subadult/adult, etc).

Management regimes

The cull profiles or harvest profiles tell us a lot about the management practices of the animals. Under most goat/sheep management regimes, males are culled at a very young age (18-24 months) and herders maintain a stock of only a few males for breeding. Females are culled at a later age, only after the peak reproductive years. This is very much reflected in the bone assemblages of goats from Ganj Dareh and Tepe Abdul Hosein.

An interesting find was that of hoofprints in a mud-brick recovered from Ganj Dareh, indicating the management of goats at the site.

DNA study

For genetic analysis, the study targeted both biparentally inherited nuclear DNA, uniparentally inherited mitochondrial DNA, and Y-chromosome DNA.

Kevin G Daly, Research Fellow in Trinity’s School of Genetics and Microbiology and first author of the paper, said in a release: “This first livestock keeping shaped the goats’ genomes. There were signs of reduced Y chromosome diversity – fewer males were allowed to breed, leading to an increased tendency of relatives mating. Surprisingly, the Zagros goat appeared to not have undergone a population bottleneck often associated with domestication and lacked strong signals of selection found in later domestic goats.”

The nuclear DNA was compared with those from wild populations as well as later domestic populations. It was found that the closest wild relative of these domesticated goats was the bezoar ibex, a species extant to this day in the region. Most genomes from Ganj Dareh and Tepe Abdul Hosein bear a close resemblance to other ancient and modern goat genomes from Eastern and Central Asia.

The Fertile Crescent

Domestication has, by and large, considered the western half of the Fertile Crescent to be of more importance in terms of domestication of plants and animals. The Fertile Crescent is a moniker for an arc-shaped geographical region stretching from Egypt to Iran, where the domestication of most commercially important species like wheat, barley, cattle (and goats) took place.

However, the story of domestication is far from linear, with multiple centres of domestication spread across space and time. It is a story that is made even more complicated by human-mediated introductions of populations to newer parts of the world that resulted in newer varieties.

As the study suitably demonstrates, Western Iran, part of the Eastern part of the Fertile Crescent, and one that was considered somewhat of a ‘domestication backwater,’ could be a worthy contender as a centre of domestication for goats. ‘Ancient genomic data…indicate[s] that the eastern Fertile Crescent was one of three regions key in shaping the Neolithic goat gene pool,’ the paper adds.

The first piece of bone from the supersized skeleton - the skull alone is 2.62 meters long and two meters wide - was found in 2014.

A private, anonymous U.S. collector bought the fossilised remains of ‘Big John’, the largest triceratops dinosaur ever discovered by paleontologists, for 6.65 million euros ($7.74 million) at a Paris auction on Thursday.

Big John – named after the owner of the land where the dinosaur’s bones were found – roamed modern-day South Dakota more than 66 million years ago.

“It’s being acquired by an American collector, and that individual is absolutely thrilled with the idea of being able to bring a piece like this to his personal use,” said Djuan Rivers, a representative for the buyer.

The first piece of bone from the supersized skeleton – the skull alone is 2.62 meters long and two meters wide – was found in 2014.

By 2015, paleontologists had unearthed 60% of the skeleton, a rare feat, made of over 200 pieces which were painstakingly put together in Italy, to prepare for the Paris auction.

The skull showed a traumatic lesion, which researchers said was likely the work of another triceratops striking it from behind.

“The history behind this and the curation of it is absolutely impressive, so to be able to be a part of preserving something of this nature that was actually found in the U.S., in South Dakota, is also something extremely special,” Rivers said.

The name triceratops means “three-horned face”. The hammer price at the Drouot auction house, before commission and other costs, was 5.5 million euros.

Drouot had estimated the skeleton would fetch between 1.2-1.5 million euros. It sold to an unidentified private U.S. buyer.

“It’s a record for Europe,” said auctioneer Alexandre Giquello, who described exponential growth in the relatively new market of dinosaur fossils. “We’re creating a market. “Auction house Christie’s sold a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton for $31.8 million in New York last year.

The study noticed that the local aromatic rice varieties such as Radhatilak, Gobindabhog, Badsabhog, Dudheswar accumulated the lowest amount of arsenic.

About 200 million people worldwide are reported to be affected by the consumption of arsenic via contaminated groundwater and food crops. The health risks to humans include chronic respiratory disease, liver fibrosis, cardiovascular diseases, skin cancer, and lung cancer.

A study published in Environmental Research last month describes how fifteen rice varieties uptake and store arsenic. The team studied the buildup of arsenic in the root, shoot, and fractions of grains. They also cooked the rice in different methods to understand how much arsenic we may be ingesting.

What is arsenic, why does rice take it up?

Arsenic is a natural component found in our earth’s crust. The arsenic concentration of Earth’s crust is just 1 to 1.8 mg/kg. It is toxic in its inorganic form and studies have found inorganic arsenic in many rice varieties and rice-based products.

Though pesticides that contain arsenic are mostly banned now, studies have shown that arsenic can remain in the soil for centuries.

Rice plants have a higher tendency to take up arsenic than other cereals as they are grown under submerged soil conditions. This environment increases the dissolved concentration of the chemical that is readily available for the plant.

A paper published in April suggested that arsenic uptake by rice plants can increase with climate change. They note that “elevated temperature can increase arsenic concentrations in rice tissue, exacerbating an existing threat to rice quality and human health.”

Which rice varieties store more arsenic?

Previous studies from various countries have shown that some rice varieties (EPAGRI 108, TCSY 837 and Kalijira) have a tendency to accumulate less arsenic in grains while others (BRRI dhan 47, BRRI dhan 32 and IIY 416) accumulate a higher amount.

In the recent work, the team tested 15 rice varieties from three distinct groups — local aromatic rice, high yielding varieties and hybrid rice — in a naturally contaminated field following standard cultivation practices.

They studied the shoot, root at three different growth stages and all fractions of grains (polished rice, bran, husk) for arsenic accumulation.

They noticed that the local aromatic rice varieties such as Radhatilak, Gobindabhog, Badsabhog, Dudheswar accumulated the lowest amount of arsenic.

“This study has confirmed worrisome levels of arsenic in some popular high yielding (Swarna masuri, CR dhan, Pratikhya) and hybrid varieties (Pro-agro, CR dhan, Arize, Rajalaxmi, Ajay) in the market,” says the first author of the paper Rubina Khanam, Scientist from the Crop Production Division of the ICAR-National Rice Research Institute, Cuttack. “The good news is to those consuming local aromatic and few high yielding varieties (Satabdi, Swarna) on a regular basis. We recommend that farmers of arsenuc contaminated areas grow these varieties to curb arsenic toxicity to humans.”

How do I know if my rice has arsenic?

“Currently, there are no home tests that you can do. The best way to be safe is to cook rice in the traditional gruel way and discard the water. A major part of grain arsenic will be eliminated. Try not to pressure cook rice,” says Professor Biswapati Mandal, a co-author from the Department of Agricultural Chemistry and Soil Science, Bidhan Chandra Krishi Viswavidyalaya, West Bengal.

The team adds that our government can give incentives and persuade farmers to grow those screened varieties that accumulate less arsenic in the contaminated areas.

Today, half of Gorongosa’s females are tuskless. The females who survived the war are passing the trait on to their daughters.

Written by Elizabeth Preston

A deep-enough wound will leave a scar, but a traumatic event in the history of an animal population may leave a mark on the genome itself. During the Mozambican Civil War (1977-92), humans killed so many elephants for their lucrative ivory that the animals seem to have evolved in the space of a generation. The result: A large number are now naturally tuskless.

A paper published Thursday in Science has revealed the tooth-building genes that are probably involved. One of those same genes is linked to a syndrome in human females that causes abnormal tooth growth. In both humans and elephants, the mutation is lethal to males.

Although evolving to be tuskless might spare some surviving elephants from poachers, there will probably be long-term consequences for the population.

Normally, both male and female African elephants have tusks, which are really a pair of massive teeth. But a few are born without them. Under heavy poaching, those few elephants without ivory are more likely to pass on their genes. Researchers have seen this phenomenon in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park, where tuskless elephants are now a common sight.

Female elephants, that is. What no one has seen in the park is a tuskless male.

“We had an inkling” that whatever genetic mutation took away these elephants’ tusks was also killing males, said Shane Campbell-Staton, an evolutionary biologist at Princeton University

To learn more, Campbell-Staton and his co-authors started with long-term data, including prewar video footage of Gorongosa’s elephants.

They calculated that even before the war, nearly 1 in 5 females were tuskless. This might reflect earlier conflict and poaching pressure, Campbell-Staton said. In well-protected elephant populations, tusklessness can be as low as 2%.

Today, half of Gorongosa’s females are tuskless. The females who survived the war are passing the trait on to their daughters. Mathematical modeling showed this change was almost certainly because of natural selection and not a random fluke. In the decades spanning the war, tuskless females had more than five times greater odds of survival.

And the pattern of tusklessness in families confirmed the scientists’ hunch: It seems to be a dominant trait, carried by females, that is lethal to males. That means a female with one copy of the tuskless mutation has no tusks. Half of her daughters will have tusks, and half will be tuskless. Among her sons, though, half will have tusks, and the other half will die, perhaps before birth.

The team sequenced the genomes of 11 tuskless females and seven with tusks, looking for differences between the groups. They also searched for places in the genome showing the signature of recent natural selection without the random DNA reshuffling that happens over time. They found two genes that seemed to be at play.

Both genes help to build teeth. The one that best explains the patterns scientists saw in nature is called AMELX and is on the X chromosome, as the team expected. That gene is also involved in a rare human syndrome that can cause tiny or malformed teeth in females — specifically, the top teeth between the front teeth and canines, which are analogous to an elephant’s tusks. The human syndrome also kills males, because it results from a missing chunk of DNA that includes not just the tooth gene but also other crucial genes nearby.

In the elephant genome, “We don’t know what the exact changes are causing this loss of tusks, in either one of those genes,” Campbell-Staton said. That is one of the things the researchers hope to figure out next.

They also want to learn what life is like for a tuskless elephant. Elephants normally use their tusks to strip tree bark for food, dig holes for water and defend themselves. “If you don’t have this key tool, how do you have to adjust your behavior in order to compensate?” Campbell-Staton said.

And the rise of tusklessness may impact not just individual elephants but also the population as a whole, since fewer males are being born, Campbell-Staton said.

“I think it’s a very elegant study,” said Fanie Pelletier, a population biologist at the Université de Sherbrooke in Quebec, who was not involved in the research but wrote an accompanying article in Science. “It’s a very complete story as well. All the pieces are there,” she said.

In her own research, Pelletier has studied bighorn sheep in Canada. As trophy hunters targeted the males with the biggest horns, the sheep evolved to have smaller horns.

The change in sheep is subtle, she said, unlike the elephants’ total loss of tusks. And the elephants’ genetic change has actually compounded their problems, Pelletier said. Even if poaching stopped tomorrow, tusklessness would keep indirectly killing males, and it could take a long time for the frequency of this trait to drop to normal levels.

Campbell-Staton agreed that although the elephants have evolved to be safer from poachers, this is not a success story.

“I think it’s easy when you hear stories like this to come away thinking, ‘Oh, everything’s fine. They evolved, and now they’re better, and they can deal with it,’” he said. But the truth is that species pay a price for rapid evolution. “Selection always comes at a cost,” he said, “and that cost is lives.”

The team hopes to be able to deliver its first northern white rhino calf in three years

One of the world’s last two northern white rhinos, a mother and her daughter, is being retired from a breeding programme aimed at saving the species from extinction, scientists said on Thursday.

Najin, 32, is the mother of Fatu who is now the only donor left in the programme, which aims to implant artificially developed embryos into another more abundant species of rhino in Kenya.

There are no known living males and neither of the two remaining northern white rhinos can carry a calf to term. Northern white rhinos, which are actually grey, used to roam freely in several countries in east and central Africa, but their numbers fell sharply due to widespread poaching for their horns.

A Biorescue team led by researchers from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Germany has been racing against time to save the world’s most endangered mammal.

“The team has reached the decision to retire the older of the two remaining females, 32-year-old Najin, as a donor of egg cells,” Biorescue said in a statement, citing ethical considerations.

Najin’s advanced age, and signs of illness, were also taken into account, they said. Scientists hope to implant embryos made from the rhinos’ egg cells and frozen sperm from deceased males into surrogate mothers.

“We have been very successful with Fatu… So far we have 12 pure northern white rhino embryos,” David Ndeereh, the acting deputy director for research at the Wildlife Research and Training Institute, a Kenyan state agency, told Reuters. “We are very optimistic that the project will succeed.”

The team hopes to be able to deliver its first northern white rhino calf in three years and a wider population in the next two decades.

The animals were found to have been grouped by age at the time of their deaths, with hatchlings and eggs in one area while skeletons of juveniles were clustered nearby.

A vast trove of fossils unearthed in Argentina’s southern Patagonia region is offering the oldest-known evidence that some dinosaurs thrived in a complex and well-organized herd structure, with adults caring for the young and sharing a communal nesting ground.

Scientists said on Thursday the fossils include more than 100 dinosaur eggs and the bones of about 80 juveniles and adults of a Jurassic Period plant-eating species called Mussaurus patagonicus, including 20 remarkably complete skeletons.

“It is a pretty dramatic scene from 193 million years ago that was frozen in time,” said paleontologist Diego Pol of the Egidio Feruglio Paleontological Museum in Trelew, Argentina, who led the research published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Mussaurus, which grew to about 20 feet (6 meters) long and about 1.5 tons, possessed a long neck and tail, with a small head. It was bipedal as an adult but newborns were quadrupedal. Mussaurus lived early in the Jurassic, the second of three periods comprising the age of dinosaurs. It was a relatively large beast for its time – much bigger than contemporaneous meat-eating dinosaurs. Dinosaurs became true giants later in the Jurassic.

“The site is one of a kind,” Pol said. “It preserves a dinosaur nesting ground including delicate and tiny dinosaur skeletons as well as eggs with embryos inside. The specimens we have found showed that herd behavior was present in long-necked dinosaurs since their early history. These were social animals, and we think this may be an important factor to explain their success.”

The animals were found to have been grouped by age at the time of their deaths, with hatchlings and eggs in one area while skeletons of juveniles were clustered nearby. The eggs were arranged in layers within trenches. Adults were found alone or in pairs. This phenomenon, called “age segregation,” signals a complex social structure, the researchers said, including adults that foraged for meals and cared for the young. The researchers suspect that members of the herd returned to the same spot during successive seasons to form breeding colonies.

“The young were staying with the adults at least until they reached adulthood. It could be that they stayed in the same herd after reaching adulthood, but we don’t have information to corroborate that hypothesis,” said paleontologist and study co-author Vincent Fernandez of the Natural History Museum in London. Herd behavior also can protect young and vulnerable individuals from attack by predators.

“It’s a strategy for the survival of a species,” Fernandez said. The oldest previous evidence for dinosaur herd behavior was from about 150 million years ago. The nesting ground was situated on the dry margins of a lake featuring ferns and conifers in a warm but seasonal climate. The eggs are about the size of a chicken’s, and the skeleton of a hatchling fits in the palm of a human hand. The adults got as heavy as a hippo.

A scanning method called high-resolution X-ray computed tomography confirmed that the embryos inside the eggs indeed were of Mussaurus. Mussaurus was a type of dinosaur called a sauropodomorph, which represented the first great success story among herbivorous dinosaurs. Sauropodomorphs were an evolutionary forerunner to a group called sauropods known for long necks and tails and four pillar-like legs. The largest land animals in Earth’s history were the sauropod successors of sauropodomorphs, as exemplified by a later denizen of Patagonia called Argentinosaurus that reached perhaps 118 feet (36 meters) in length and upwards of 70 tons.

“Although (the launch) failed to achieve its objectives perfectly, it was an excellent accomplishment for a first launch,” South Korean President Moon Jae-in said in a televised speech.

South Korea’s first domestically produced space rocket reached its desired altitude but failed to deliver a dummy payload into orbit in its first test launch on Thursday.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who observed the launch on-site, still described the test as an “excellent accomplishment” that takes the country a step further in its pursuit of a satellite launch program.

Live footage showed the 47-metre rocket soaring into the air with bright yellow flames shooting out of its engines following blastoff at Naro Space Center, the country’s lone spaceport, on a small island off its southern coast.

Lim Hye-sook, the country’s science minister, said Nuri’s first and second stages separated properly and that the third stage ejected the payload – a 1.5-ton block of stainless steel and aluminum – at 700 kilometres above Earth.

But she said launch data suggested that the third stage’s engine burned out early after 475 seconds, about 50 seconds shorter than planned, failing to provide the payload with enough speed to stabilize in orbit.

Officials from the Korea Aerospace Research Institute, the country’s space agency, said debris from the payload would have landed somewhere in waters south of Australia. The institute was planning to form an inspection committee soon to analyze what went wrong and map out adjustments before the rocket’s next test launch.

The launch, which took place at 5 p.m. (0800 GMT), had been delayed by an hour because engineers needed more time to examine the rocket’s valves. There had also been concerns that strong winds and other conditions would pose challenges for a successful launch.

“Although (the launch) failed to achieve its objectives perfectly, it was an excellent accomplishment for a first launch,” Moon said in a televised speech. “The separations of the rockets, fairings (covering the payload) and the dummy satellite worked smoothly. All this was done based on technology that is completely ours.”

After relying on other countries to launch its satellites since the early 1990s, South Korea is now trying to become the 10th nation to send a satellite into space with its own technology.

Officials say such an ability would be crucial for the country’s space ambitions, which include plans for sending more advanced communications satellites and acquiring its own military intelligence satellites. The country is also hoping to send a probe to the moon by 2030.

Nuri is the country’s first space launch vehicle built entirely with domestic technology. The three-stage rocket is powered by five 75-ton class rocket engines placed in its first and second stages. It is designed to deliver a 1.5-ton payload into orbit 600 to 800 kilometers (372 to 497 miles) above Earth.

“The launch left some frustration, but it’s meaningful that we confirmed we have obtained core technology” for space launches, said Lim, the minister.

Scientists and engineers at KARI plan to test Nuri several more times, including conducting another launch with a dummy device in May 2022, before trying with a real satellite.

South Korea had previously launched a space launch vehicle from the Naro spaceport in 2013, which was a two-stage rocket built mainly with Russian technology. That launch came after years of delays and consecutive failures. The rocket, named Naro, reached the desired altitude during its first test in 2009 but failed to eject a satellite into orbit, and then exploded shortly after takeoff during its second test in 2010.

While Nuri is powered by liquid propellants that need to be fueled shortly before launch, the South Koreans plan to develop a solid-fuel space launch rocket by 2024, which could be cheaper to build and prepared for launch more quickly. Such rockets would also be ideal for more sensitive space launches, including those involving military intelligence satellites.

South Korea’s space ambitions received a boost in recent years as the Trump and Biden administrations took steps to ease decades-long U.S. restrictions that capped Seoul’s missile development before eventually allowing its ally to build conventional weapons with unlimited range and warhead weight. In easing the so-called missile guidelines, the U.S. also removed a limit on how powerful South Korea’s solid-fuel rockets can be for space launch purposes.

South Korea currently has no military surveillance satellites of its own, which leaves it relying on U.S. spy satellites to monitor North Korea. Officials have expressed hopes of launching domestically developed, low-orbit military surveillance satellites using the country’s own solid-fuel rockets in the next several years.

The new paper also reveals domestic horses spread across Eurasia along with the Bronze Age Sintashta culture, which possessed spoke-wheeled chariots, around 3,800 years ago.

Written by Sabrina Imbler

For thousands of years, the grassy plains of Europe and Asia were home to a mosaic of genetically distinct horse lineages. But a single lineage galloped ahead to overtake and replace all the other wild horses. This domesticated lineage became the horse of our modern imagination: slender legs, a muscular back and a mane that shimmers in the wind.

For decades, scientists had tried to sleuth out when and where modern horses were first domesticated but had yet to find the smoking hoof they needed.

Now, in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature, scientists have finally solved the mystery. After collecting and sequencing 273 ancient horse genomes, a team of 162 authors concluded that modern horses were domesticated around 4,200 years ago in steppes around southern Russia, near where the Volga and Don rivers intersect.

This new paper comes as close as currently possible to solving the mystery of the origins of the domestic horse, according to Peter Heintzman, a paleogenomics researcher at the Tromso campus of The Arctic University of Norway, who was not involved with the research. “It’s a monumental effort,” Heintzman said, noting that they collected a “wall of data” from “hundreds of horses.”

Ludovic Orlando, a paleogeneticist and research director of the Center for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse in France and an author on the paper, has toiled over this question for a decade.

In recent years, scholars homed in on a Botai settlement in the Kazakh steppes that was brimming with horses’ bone fragments and clay pots that were lined with what appeared to be mare’s milk. This was the earliest archaeological evidence of horse domestication, and seemed promising as the birthplace of modern horses.

But in 2018, a team of researchers including Orlando sequenced the genomes of the horse bones at Botai. To the researchers’ surprise, the Botai horses did not give rise to modern horses, but were instead the direct ancestors of Przewalski’s horses, a stocky lineage originally thought to be the last wild horses on the planet. They revealed Przewalski’s were not wild after all, but instead the feral descendants of domestics. So the puzzle of the origins of modern horses remained unsolved. “Every time I was expecting something, it was wrong,” Orlando said.

He said that to solve the mystery, “we decided to be exhaustive and really look everywhere.”

Everywhere, in this case, meant across Eurasia. Starting in 2016, Orlando collected samples across the region from archaeological collections and new digs, essentially every ancient horse bone they could get their hands on.

To preserve the remains for the future, the researchers drilled tiny holes into the ancient horses’ inner ears, teeth and other bones to retrieve tiny samples.

As the researchers gradually mapped the horse genomes across time and space, the picture became sharper. A little more than a year ago, they were able to pinpoint the precise location: the Volga-Don region in what is now Russia.

With such a gargantuan data set, the researchers ended up answering additional horsey historical details. They found modern horses had two stark genetic differences from other ancient lineages — one gene linked to docility and another to a stronger backbone — which may have facilitated the animals’ spread.

Domestic horses transformed human history, allowing people to travel great distances and develop new technologies of warfare. “Everyone wanted the horse,” Orlando said.

Accordingly, the paper’s genetic findings “constitute major advances in our understanding of the human societies which bred these horses,” said Pauline Hanot, a postdoctoral researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research who was not involved with the research.

The study also knocked down ideas about horses’ role in earlier human history. For instance, one preexisting theory suggested a pastoralist people called the Yamnaya were able to migrate on horseback in massive numbers into Europe around 5,000 years ago. But the new genetic map found no evidence; the researchers point out oxen, not horses, could have been the driving factor of their expansion.

The new paper also reveals domestic horses spread across Eurasia along with the Bronze Age Sintashta culture, which possessed spoke-wheeled chariots, around 3,800 years ago.

After taming all of this horse data, Orlando has taken on a new hobby: He started taking riding lessons.

Like all other humans, he rides domestic horses — descendants of the ancient animals that galloped in southern Russia.

“I would not dare approach a Przewalski’s horse,” Orlando said. “They kill wolves. I am not that fast of a runner.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

The length of the occupation remains unclear, though it may have been a decade or less, and perhaps 100 Norse people were present at any given time, the study author said.

Long before Columbus crossed the Atlantic, eight timber-framed buildings covered in sod stood on a terrace above a peat bog and stream at the northern tip of Canada’s island of Newfoundland, evidence that the Vikings had reached the New World first.

But precisely when the Vikings journeyed to establish the L’Anse aux Meadows settlement had remained unclear – until now.

Scientists on Wednesday said a new type of dating technique using a long-ago solar storm as a reference point revealed that the settlement was occupied in 1021 AD, exactly a millennium ago and 471 years before the first voyage of Columbus. The technique was used on three pieces of wood cut for the settlement, all pointing to the same year.

The Viking voyage represents multiple milestones for humankind. The settlement offers the earliest-known evidence of a transatlantic crossing. It also marks the place where the globe was finally encircled by humans, who thousands of years earlier had trekked into North America over a land bridge that once connected Siberia to Alaska.

“Much kudos should go to these northern Europeans for being the first human society to traverse the Atlantic,” said geoscientist Michael Dee of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, who led the study published in the journal Nature.

The Vikings, or Norse people, were seafarers with Scandinavian homelands: Norway, Sweden and Denmark. They ventured through Europe, sometimes colonizing and other times trading or raiding. They possessed extraordinary boat-building and navigation skills and established settlements on Iceland and Greenland.

“I think it is fair to describe the trip as both a voyage of discovery and a search for new sources of raw materials,” Dee said. “Many archaeologists believe the principal motivation for them seeking out these new territories was to uncover new sources of timber, in particular. It is generally believed they left from Greenland, where wood suitable for construction is extremely rare.”

Their wooden vessels, called longboats, were propelled by sail and oars. One surviving example, called the Oseberg ship, is roughly 70 feet.

The Viking Age is traditionally defined as 793-1066 AD, presenting a wide range for the timing of the transatlantic crossing. Ordinary radiocarbon dating – determining the age of organic materials by measuring their content of a particular radioactive isotope of carbon – proved too imprecise to date L’Anse aux Meadows, which was discovered in 1960, although there was a general belief it was the 11th century.

The new dating method relies on the fact that solar storms produce a distinctive radiocarbon signal in a tree’s annual growth rings. It was known there was a significant solar storm -a burst of high-energy cosmic rays from the sun – in 992 AD.

In all three pieces of wood examined, from three different trees, 29 growth rings were formed after the one that bore evidence of the solar storm, meaning the wood was cut in 1021, said University of Groningen archaeologist Margot Kuitems, the study’s first author.

It was not local indigenous people who cut the wood because there is evidence of metal blades, which they did not possess, Dee said. The length of the occupation remains unclear, though it may have been a decade or less, and perhaps 100 Norse people were present at any given time, Dee said. Their structures resembled Norse buildings on Greenland and Iceland.

Oral histories called the Icelandic Sagas depict a Viking presence in the Americas. Written down centuries later, they describe a leader named Leif Erikson and a settlement called Vinland, as well as violent and peaceful interactions with the local peoples, including capturing slaves.

The 1021 date roughly corresponds to the saga accounts, Dee said, adding: “Thus it begs the question, how much of the rest of the saga adventures are true?”

Due to late frost and rains, there will be virtually no acacia honey this year, for the second year in a row.

French beekeepers expect their worst harvest in decades as unseasonably cold and wet weather due to climate change has prevented bees from producing honey.

Beekeepers association UNAF said that based on information received from regional associations it expects the honey harvest for 2021 to come in at 7,000 to 9,000 tonnes, or about a third of the 2020 harvest.

“This will be worst harvest in the history of our organisation, the worst in at least 50 years,” UNAF president Christian Pons told Reuters on Tuesday.

Pons said beekeepers across Europe have been hit by bad weather and climate change will have a lasting impact on honey production. UNAF said 2021 will be a disastrous year for honey as, with the exception of a few rare areas in France, conditions have been very difficult for bees in spring and summer, with long periods of frost, cold, rain and northerly winds.

“Climate change, which beekeepers have felt for more than 15 years, is really hitting us,” UNAF said, adding that flowering seasons are becoming earlier and shorter. In many places, the honey season is now over after July, while before it lasted for several weeks in the summer.

Due to late frost and rains, there will be virtually no acacia honey this year, for the second year in a row, while rosemary, thyme and heather honey production, as well as chestnut and sunflower honey harvests, have been poor to virtually zero.

Forest, mountain and pine honey harvests have also been disappointing as the flowering season was too short and only lavender honey in the Mediterranean southeast of the country produced a good harvest, UNAF said.

The organisation estimates that France consumes about 40,000 tonnes of honey per year and imports more than 30,000 tonnes, while export volumes this year will be very low. “Little by little, climate change is hurting our business. At this rate, there will be less and less French honey,” he said.

The disparity between climate goals and fossil fuel extraction plans — termed the “production gap” — will widen until at least 2040, the report found.

The world needs to cut by more than half its production of coal, oil and gas in the coming decade to maintain a chance of keeping global warming from reaching dangerous levels, according to a U.N.-backed study released Wednesday.

The report published by the U.N. Environment Program found that while governments have made ambitious pledges to curb greenhouse gas emissions, they are still planning to extract double the amount of fossil fuels in 2030 than what would be consistent with the 2015 Paris climate accord’s goal of keeping the global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Even the less ambitious goal of capping global warming at 2 degrees C by the end of the century compared to pre-industrial times would be overshot, it said.

Climate experts say the world must stop adding to the total amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere by 2050, and that can only be done by drastically reducing the burning of fossil fuels as soon as possible, among other measures.

The report, which was released days before a U.N. climate summit begins October 31 in Glasgow, found most major oil and gas producers — and even some major coal producers — are planning on increasing production until 2030 or even beyond.

It also concluded that the group of 20 major industrialized and emerging economies have invested more into new fossil fuel projects than into clean energy since the start of 2020.

The disparity between climate goals and fossil fuel extraction plans — termed the “production gap” — will widen until at least 2040, the report found.

This would require increasingly steep and extreme measures to meet the Paris emissions goal, UNEP said.

“There is still time to limit long term warming to 1.5°C, but this window of opportunity is rapidly closing,” said the agency’s executive director, Inger Andersen, adding that governments should commit to closing the gap at the Glasgow climate summit.

The report, which had more than 40 researchers contributing, examine 15 major fossil fuel-producing countries.

For the United States, they found that government projections show oil and gas production increasing to 17% and 12%, respectively, by 2030 compared to 2019 levels. Much of that would be exported, meaning the emissions from burning those fossil fuels would not show up in the U.S. inventory although they would add to the global total.

U.S. coal production is projected to decline by 30% over the coming decade compared to 2019.

Certain viral molecules facilitate intercellular spreading of protein aggregates that are hallmarks of brain diseases.

Some viral diseases may possibly contribute to neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disorder, according to a study.

The research, published in the journal Nature Communications, is based on laboratory experiments which showed that certain viral molecules facilitate intercellular spreading of protein aggregates that are hallmarks of brain diseases.

The team led by researchers at the University of Bonn in Germany noted that aggregates of misfolded proteins, which occur in so-called prion disease have the ability to pass from one cell to another, where they transfer their abnormal shape to proteins of the same kind.

As a result, they said, the disease spreads across the brain. A similar phenomenon occurs in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, which also exhibit assemblies of misfolded proteins, according to the researchers Transmission of aggregates could involve direct cell-to-cell contact, the release of “naked” aggregates into extracellular space or packaging in vesicles, which are tiny bubbles surrounded by a lipid envelope that are secreted for communication between cells.

“The precise mechanisms of transmission are unknown,” said Ina Vorberg, a professor at the University of Bonn. “However, it is an obvious guess, that aggregate exchange by both direct cell contact and via vesicles depends on ligand-receptor interactions,” Vorberg said.

The researchers need that this is because in both scenarios, membranes need to make contact and fuse. This is facilitated when ligands are present that bind to receptors on the cell surface and then cause the two membranes to fuse, they said.

The researchers performed an extensive series of studies with different cell cultures. They investigated the intercellular transfer of either prions or aggregates of tau proteins, as they occur in similar form in prion diseases or Alzheimer’s disease.

Mimicking what happens as a result of viral infection, the researchers induced cells to produce viral proteins that mediate target cell binding and membrane fusion. Two proteins were chosen as prime examples: SARS-CoV-2 spike protein S, which stems from the virus causing COVID-19, and vesicular stomatitis virus glycoprotein VSV-G, which occurs in a pathogen that infects cattle and other animals. Cells expressed receptors for these viral proteins, namely the LDL receptor family, which act as docking ports for VSV-G, and human ACE2, the receptor for the spike protein.

“We could show that the viral proteins are incorporated both into the cellular membrane and into the extracellular vesicles,” Vorberg said. “Their presence increased protein aggregate spreading between cells, both by direct cell contact or by extracellular vesicles,” he added.

The viral ligands mediated an effective transfer of aggregates into recipient cells, where they induced new aggregates.

“The ligands act like keys that unlock the recipient cells and thus sneak in the dangerous cargo,” Vorberg said. “Certainly, our cellular models do not replicate the many aspects of the brain with its very specialised cell types, she added.

“The brains of patients suffering from neurodegenerative diseases sometimes contain certain viruses. They are suspected to cause inflammation or to have a toxic effect, thus accelerating neurodegeneration,” Vorberg said. “However, viral proteins could also act differently: They could increase intercellular spreading of protein aggregates already ongoing in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s,” she added.

Li said the samples indicate volcanic activity was still occurring on the moon as recently as 2 billion years ago

Moon rocks brought back to Earth by a Chinese robotic spacecraft last year have provided new insights into ancient lunar volcanic activity, a researcher said Tuesday.

Li Xianhua said an analysis of the samples revealed new information about the moon’s chemical composition and the way heat affected its development.

Li said the samples indicate volcanic activity was still occurring on the moon as recently as 2 billion years ago, compared to previous estimates that such activity halted between 2.8 billion and 3 billion years ago.

“Volcanic activities are a very important thing on the moon. They show the vitality inside the moon, and represent the recycling of energy and matter inside the moon,” Li told reporters.

China in December brought back the first rocks from the moon since missions by the U.S. and former Soviet Union in the 1970s.

On Saturday, China launched a new three-person crew to its space station, a new milestone in a space program that has advanced rapidly in recent years.

China became only the third country after the former Soviet Union and the United States to put a person in space on its own in 2003 and now ranks among the leading space powers.

Alongside its crewed program, it has expanded its work on robotic exploration, retrieving the lunar samples and landing a rover on the little-explored far side of the moon. It has also placed the Tianwen-1 space probe on Mars, whose accompanying Zhurong rover has been exploring for evidence of life on the red planet.

China also plans to collect soil from an asteroid and bring back additional lunar samples. The country also hopes to land people on the moon and possibly build a scientific base there. A highly secretive space plane is also reportedly under development.

The military-run Chinese space program has also drawn controversy. China’s Foreign Ministry on Monday brushed-off a report that China had tested a hypersonic missile two months ago. A ministry spokesperson said it had merely tested whether a new spacecraft could be reused.

It is already too late to save the glaciers of the eastern Alps, which scientists now say are past the point of no return and will be gone completely in the next few decades.

Scientists are venturing inside otherworldly ice caves growing beneath Austria’s doomed glaciers to study why they are melting even faster than expected, and understand the fate that will befall glaciers elsewhere if climate change is not halted.

It is already too late to save the glaciers of the eastern Alps, which scientists now say are past the point of no return and will be gone completely in the next few decades. The eerie blue caverns beneath them hold clues as to how the ice — which built up over millennia and melted over decades — collapsed far faster than expected. That could help communities that depend on glaciers in other parts of the world to better manage their decline.

“We can’t do anything anymore for eastern Alpine glaciers. But here we can see what happens if we do nothing for the other glaciers,” said Andrea Fischer, who brought a photographer into the caverns beneath the Jamtalferner glacier in the Tyrolean Alps, towering above the Austrian border with Switzerland.

The Jamtalferner is among Austria’s 30 largest glaciers and one of 10 where scientists take very precise measurements annually, documenting the now irreversible decline.

The hollows are eroding the glaciers from within, as warmer air and meltwater come into contact with ever more of the ice, until it collapses.

“These holes are a typical sign of collapse that we observe. It is also a reason it happens so quickly – the ice is completely eroded and this process is not visible from the surface, then suddenly it all implodes,” Fischer, acting director of the Austrian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Interdisciplinary Mountain Research, told Reuters.

The study found that plasma from humans who had been vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2 produced antibodies that were cross-reactive, or provided protection, against SARS-CoV-1 and the common cold coronavirus (OC43).

COVID-19 vaccines and prior coronavirus infections can provide broad immunity against other, similar coronaviruses, according to a study.

The findings, published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, build a rationale for universal coronavirus vaccines that could prove useful in the face of future epidemics.

“Until our study, what hasn’t been clear is if you get exposed to one coronavirus, could you have cross-protection across other coronaviruses. And we showed that is the case,” said study lead author Pablo Penaloza-MacMaster, assistant professor at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, US.

The three main families of coronaviruses that cause human disease include Sarbecovirus, which includes the SARS-CoV-1 strain responsible for the 2003 outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), as well as SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19.

The other two are Embecovirus, which includes OC43, often responsible for the common cold, and Merbecovirus, which is the virus responsible for Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), first reported in 2012.

The study found that plasma from humans who had been vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2 produced antibodies that were cross-reactive, or provided protection, against SARS-CoV-1 and the common cold coronavirus (OC43). The researchers found that mice immunised with a SARS-CoV-1 vaccine developed in 2004 generated immune responses that protected them from intranasal exposure by SARS-CoV-2.

They also found prior coronavirus infections can protect against subsequent infections with other coronaviruses. Mice that had been immunised with COVID-19 vaccines and later were exposed to the common cold coronavirus (HCoV-OC43) were partially protected against the common cold, but the protection was much less robust, according to the study. The reason, the scientists explained, is because both SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 are genetically similar — like cousins of one another — while the common cold coronavirus is more divergent from SARS-CoV-2.

“As long as the coronavirus is greater than 70 per cent related, the mice were protected,” Penaloza-MacMaster said. “If they were exposed to a very different family of coronaviruses, the vaccines might confer less protection,” he said.

Given how different each coronavirus family is, the study authors said a universal coronavirus vaccine may not be possible. However, there may be a path forward for developing a vaccine for each coronavirus family, they said.

“Our study helps us re-evaluate the concept of a universal coronavirus vaccine,” Penaloza-MacMaster said. “It’s likely there isn’t one, but we might end up with a generic vaccine for each of the main families of coronaviruses,” he said.

For example, the scientist said, a universal Sarbecovirus vaccine can be made for SARS-CoV-1, SARS-CoV-2 and other SARS-related coronaviruses, and a universal Embecovirus for HCoV-OC43 and HKU1 that cause common colds.

In the study, Penaloza-MacMaster and Northwestern Medicine physician Igor Koralnik evaluated immune responses in humans who received SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, as well as in COVID-19 patients admitted to Northwestern Memorial Hospital. “We found that these individuals developed antibody responses that neutralised a common cold coronavirus, HCoV-OC43,” Penaloza-MacMaster said. “We are now measuring how long this cross-protection lasts,” he added.

Gadgil, while blaming the ecologically damaging activities like stone quarrying for disasters happening in Western Ghats, dismissed the suggestion that the time is over for implementing the report to protect the hills.

“Things are getting worse in Western Ghats”, says eminent ecologist Madhav Gadgil as he urged the people on the “grassroots” to “sufficiently pressure” the elected representatives to take measures to end disasters in areas along its traverse including Kerala.

Gadgil and the report prepared by the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP) headed by him are back in news after over two dozen people lost their lives in landslides and flash floods occurred in the past few days in the hilly regions of Western Ghats in central Kerala districts of Kottayam and Idukki. “It is most unfortunate that things have to come to this kind of dire situation,” he said.

The report, popularly known as Gadgil committee report submitted to the Union Environment Ministry in 2011, suggested steps to preserve the ecologically frail Ghats, a treasure trove of wildlife containing more than 30 per cent of all species of plant, fish, reptile, amphibian, bird and mammal found in the whole country.

“The way forward is to actually implement (the WGEEP report) through proper democratic process. The way forward is that the communities living in Western Ghats should assert their constitutional democratic rights,” the ecologist told PTI in a telephonic interview.

Gadgil, while blaming the ecologically damaging activities like stone quarrying for disasters happening in Western Ghats, dismissed the suggestion that the time is over for implementing the report to protect the hills. “That is of course a completely nonsensical statement because things are getting worse there. No question of time is over for implementing this,” he said, responding to a query.

Asked why such disasters are taking place only in Kerala part of Western Ghats, Gadgil said, “that is a misunderstanding” and states like Goa and Maharashtra are experiencing the same year after year.

Older than great Himalayan mountain chain, the Western Ghats running parallel to the country’s western coast, approximately 30-50 km inland, traverse the states of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Goa, Maharashtra and Gujarat. The chain of mountains cover an area of around 140,000 sq. km. in a 1,600 km long stretch that is interrupted only by the 30 km Palghat Gap.

According to Gadgil, the WGEEP report should be implemented with the complete participation of the people and the 73rd and 74th amendments to the Constitution mandate people’s participation in decision making.

Referring to the “Plachimada case” in Kerala, where local residents fought a legal battle against Coca-Cola company for water rights, Gadgil said the Kerala High Court has clearly ruled that the gram panchayats have the rights for protecting the livelihood and health of innocent people.

“So these rights are accepted, they are constitutional, they should be implemented for the country…for Western Ghats and people should insist for their rights at the higher level”, Gadgil said.

To a question whether he favours legal route to get the WGEEP report implemented to protect lives and livelihood of people in Western Ghats, Gadgil said, “somehow I feel that you should not rely on courts to correct the misgovernance in our country”. “It is not the question only of courts. It is the question of people getting organised and insisting on their constitutional rights.”

Gadgil said the recommendations of his report should be discussed at the level of every local body — gram panchayats, ward sabhas and municipalities — their feedback should be sought and through the democratic process the decision should be made.

“That is strongly insisted in the report”, he said. Gadgil called for sufficient participation of people living in Ghats in the decision making. He urged the people to “sufficiently pressure” to make the elected representatives who today are not listening to them to listen to their voice. “For that pressure should come from below”, Gadgil said.

The report authored by Gadgil panel and submitted to the Union Environment Ministry 10 years ago (in August 2011) has recommended protection of Western Ghats by designating the entire hilly region as an Ecologically Sensitive Area (ESA). However, the report did not see the light. Instead, the central government in 2012 formed a working group on Western Ghats under Indian space scientist K Kasturirangan to examine the Gadgil Committee report.

The Kasturirangan panel submitted its report to the Environment Ministry reducing the area to be protected ecologically in Western Ghats to only 37 per cent. Slamming the Kasturirangan panel report, Gadgil alleged that it advocated sabotage of democratic process, which is the essence of his WGEEP report.

“I strongly object to people saying the Kasturirangan report was a dilution (WGEEP). It was a perversion because the report prepared by Kasturirangan (panel) has specifically said that the local communities have no role in decision making. This is against our Constitution”, he said. “So don’t call it dilution. Kasturirangan (panel) perverted the whole (report) and advocated sabotage of democratic process”, Gadgil pointed out.

Asked what would have prompted leaders like Praksash Javadekar and the Sangh Parivar organisations in Kerala, who had earlier supported his report, to become silent on it later, the ecologist said they had talked to him before the 2014 Lok Sabha elections that paved the way for the BJP getting power at the Centre but “they went completely silent” later. Javadekar became Union Environment Minister in 2014.

“They went completely silent. They did not respond to any of my emails…That is their choice. Let it be,” Gadgil said. The Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP) was appointed by Jairam Ramesh in February 2010 during his tenure as the Union Environment Minister in the Congress-led UPA to draw up a roadmap for preserving the biodiversity of the ecologically sensitive hills. Ramesh has blamed the non implementation of the Gadgil committee report as the major reason for frequent occurrences of floods and landslides in hilly areas of Kerala.

The former Union Environment Minister told PTI that the report has continuing relevance for the entire Western Ghats extending over six states but sadly it has been mothballed while ecological destruction continues unabated. A mountain chain and one of the largest biodiversity hotspots in the world, the Western Ghats was added to a list of world heritage sites by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) in the year 2018.

It will feature alongside an extremely rare 3,000-year-old sun pendant described by the British Museum as the most significant piece of Bronze Age gold ever found in Britain.

The British Museum will display what it says is the world’s oldest surviving map of the stars in a major upcoming exhibition on the Stonehenge stone circle.

The 3,600-year-old “Nebra Sky Disc,” first discovered in Germany in 1999, is one of the oldest surviving representations of the cosmos in the world and has never before been displayed in the U.K., the London museum said Monday.

The 30 centimetre bronze disc features a blue-green patina and is decorated with inlaid gold symbols thought to represent the sun, the moon and constellations.

The “World of Stonehenge” exhibition planned for next year will be the first time the disc has been loaned out from Germany for 15 years. The U.K. is only the fourth country the disc has travelled to after it was discovered buried in the ground in eastern Germany.

It will feature alongside an extremely rare 3,000-year-old sun pendant described by the British Museum as the most significant piece of Bronze Age gold ever found in Britain.

“The Nebra Sky Disc and the sun pendant are two of the most remarkable surviving objects from Bronze Age Europe,” said Neil Wilkin, the exhibition’s curator.

“While both were found hundreds of miles from Stonehenge, we’ll be using them to shine a light on the vast interconnected world that existed around the ancient monument, spanning Britain, Ireland and mainland Europe,” he added. “It’s going to be eye-opening.”

The exhibition aims to share a wider history of the mythology and cosmology surrounding the 4,500-year-old Stonehenge in southern England. Hundreds of artefacts from across Britain and Europe telling the story of Stonehenge will also be displayed.

The exhibition runs from Feb.17 to July 17, 2022.

Greenidge has said it’s in compliance with its permits and that the plant is 100% carbon neutral, thanks to the purchase of carbon offsets, such as forestry programs and projects that capture methane from landfills.

An obstacle to large-scale bitcoin mining is finding enough cheap energy to run the huge, power-gobbling computer arrays that create and transact cryptocurrency. One mining operation in central New York came up with a novel solution that has alarmed environmentalists. It uses its own power plant.

Greenidge Generation runs a once-mothballed plant near the shore of Seneca Lake in the Finger Lakes region to produce about 44 megawatts to run 15,300 computer servers, plus additional electricity it sends into the state’s power grid. The megawatts dedicated to Bitcoin might be enough electricity to power more than 35,000 homes.

Proponents call it a competitive way to mine increasingly popular cryptocurrencies, without putting a drain on the existing power grid.

Environmentalists see the plant as a climate threat.

They fear a wave of resurrected fossil-fuel plants pumping out greenhouse gasses more for private profit than public good. Seeing Greenidge as a test case, they are asking the state to deny renewal of the plant’s air quality permit and put the brakes on similar projects.

“The current state of our climate demands action on cryptocurrency mining,” said Liz Moran of Earthjustice. “We are jeopardizing the state’s abilities to meet our climate goals, and we set the stage for the rest of the country as a result.”

The former coal plant, in a touristy region known for its glacial lakes and Riesling wines, was converted to natural gas by Greenidge and began producing electricity in 2017. Bitcoin mining at the plant, which has a 106-megawatt capacity, started in earnest last year. The company said it was “bringing a piece of the world’s digital future” to upstate New York.

“For decades, this region has been told it would see new industries and opportunities,” Greenidge said in a prepared statement. “We are actually making it happen, and doing it fully within the state’s nation-leading high environmental standards.”

Bitcoin miners unlock bitcoins by solving complex, unique puzzles. As the value of Bitcoin goes up, the puzzles become increasingly more difficult, and it requires more computer power to solve them. Estimates on how much energy Bitcoin uses vary.

Greenidge said it mined 729 bitcoins over three months ending Sept. 30. The value of cryptocurrency fluctuates, and on Friday, one bitcoin was worth over $59,000.

Opponents are frustrated that Greenidge applied to run a power plant but are now operating a mine that is taking up more of the plant’s power.

Greenidge says mining was not part of the plan when the plant came back online and note they continue to provide power to the grid. From January through June, Greenidge said it used 58% of its power for mining.

Supporters see it as an economic boon in a part of upstate New York that could use the help. Douglas Paddock, chairman of the Yates County Legislature, testified at a public hearing this week that the plant has brought 45 high-paying jobs and made a “significant contribution” to the area through tax payments and capital investments.

Some opposition to the plant centers on the potential effects of its water withdrawals from Seneca Lake. But air quality issues have taken center stage as the state Department of Environmental Conservation reviews the plant’s air emission permits.

Greenidge has said it’s in compliance with its permits and that the plant is 100% carbon neutral, thanks to the purchase of carbon offsets, such as forestry programs and projects that capture methane from landfills.

Opponents claim the plant undercuts the state’s efforts to dramatically slash greenhouse gas emissions in the coming decades under its 2019 climate law.

A large coalition of environmental groups and other organizations this week asked Gov. Kathy Hochul to deny the air permit for Greenidge and to take a similar action to keep an existing plant near Buffalo from becoming a mining site. The coalition wants Hochul to set a “national precedent” and enact a statewide moratorium on the energy intensive “proof-of-work” cryptocurrency used by bitcoin miners.

Environmentalists estimate that there are 30 plants in New York that could be converted into mining operations.

“I really think more than anything, this plant is a significant test for whether the state’s climate law is really worth anything,” said Judith Enck, who served as the EPA’s regional northeastern U.S. administrator under President Barack Obama.

Around the country, there are other power plants being used for cryptocurrency mining under different types of arrangements.

In Venango County, Pennsylvania, a generation plant that converts coal waste into power is being used to mine bitcoins and can provide electricity to the grid when needed. Stronghold Digital Mining has plans to replicate that kind operation at two other sites in Pennsylvania.

And in Montana, a coal-fired generating station is now providing 100% of its energy to Marathon Digital Holdings for bitcoin mining under a power purchase agreement.

“We had previously done what many miners do, which is you find an industrial building, set it up for mining and then you contract for power from the grid,” Marathon CEO Fred Thiel said. “And we wanted to flip that model upside down because we knew that there are lots of underutilized energy generation sources in the U.S.”

Thiel said that harmful emissions are low because of the quality of the coal and pollution controls, and that the plant would be carbon offset by the end of next year. He said his company is focused on moving toward renewable energy, saying cryptocurrency miners can provide crucial financial incentives to build more clean energy projects.

New York state has yet to make a determination on Greenidge’s permits.

Greenidge said that even if the plant ran at full capacity, its potential emissions equate to 0.23% of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions reduction target for 2030.

However, state Environmental Commissioner Basil Seggos tweeted last month that “Greenidge has not shown compliance with NY’s climate law” based on goals in that law.

“New York state is leading on climate change,” Seggos said in a prepared statement, “and we have some major concerns about the role cryptocurrency mining may play in generating additional greenhouse gas emissions.”

A 2016 study ran by University of Queensland, calculated there were around 330,000 koalas left in Australia.

About 400 Australian koalas will be vaccinated against chlamydia as part of a trial that researchers say they hope could play a significant role in the longer-term survival of the animals. Chlamydia, a sexually transmitted disease also found in humans, has spread widely among Australian koalas, affecting half the animals in some areas.

“It is a cruel disease that causes debilitating conjunctivitis, bladder infections and at times, infertility,” Amber Gillett, Australia Zoo Wildlife Hospital Wildlife veterinarian and coordinator of research, said in a statement on Friday as the trial began.

The bacterial disease, which can be spread from mothers to their newborns, can also cause blindness, researchers say. The koalas will each receive one dose of the vaccine and will be microchipped before being released into the wild.

“While this vaccination will directly benefit each of the animals, the trial will also have a focus on the protection provided by vaccination,” said Peter Timms, professor of microbiology at the University of the Sunshine Coast, which is leading the trial.

Although in many cases chlamydia can be treated with antibiotics, the researchers said they hope the vaccine will help improve the survival and reproduction of the animals.

Estimates of koala populations vary as they are difficult to count in the wild. A 2016 study ran by University of Queensland, calculated there were around 330,000 koalas left in Australia.

A study commissioned by the World Wildlife Fund estimated that more than 60,000 koalas had been killed, injured or affected in some way by Australia’s devastating bushfires in 2019 and early 2020.

The findings highlight the importance of restoring missing predators such as sea otters to marine ecosystems, whose feeding has cascading genetic effects throughout the environment.

Written by Lesley Evans Ogden

Jane Watson studied sea otters for decades, but it was in the 1990s that the ecologist in British Columbia observed they had a destructive habit. While conservationists were working diligently to restore damaged sea grass meadows elsewhere in the world’s oceans, it seemed ironic that in northern Vancouver Island’s sea grass habitat, which is much healthier than others in the world, the furry floaters would swoop in and dig for clams, dislodging the aquatic vegetation.

As she and others examined the sandy bottoms pockmarked with clam-digging pits, Watson anecdotally noted that in places with long-established otter populations, the grass, known also as eelgrass, seemed to flower more frequently.

She wondered: Were these disruptive otters influencing plant reproduction? She sat on the idea for decades, but her curiosity later inspired one of her undergraduate students at Vancouver Island University. Years later, that hunch has been proved correct in a paper published in Science and led by that former student, Erin Foster, now a research affiliate at the Hakai Institute.

Foster and her colleagues’ research shows that sea otters are like elephants of the eelgrass. Their disturbance, as they dig for clams and dislodge eelgrass roots, stimulates sexual reproduction among the vegetation. That sexual activity, in contrast to reproduction through natural cloning, boosts eelgrass genetic diversity and improves the resilience of the ecosystems in which both the otters and the eelgrass live.

The findings highlight the importance of restoring missing predators such as sea otters to marine ecosystems, whose feeding has cascading genetic effects throughout the environment.

Mary O’Connor, a sea grass ecologist at the University of British Columbia’s Biodiversity Research Centre who was not involved in the study, praised the research, saying that while genetic effects of major predators on other parts of ecosystems are understood in ecological theory, “it’s really hard to see it, and they’ve made it clear.”

Eelgrass, Foster said, has two modes of reproduction. It can reproduce asexually, cloning from roots. Or eelgrass can reproduce sexually, producing flowers that get pollinated and produce seeds. Sexual reproduction, producing unique combinations across distinct plants, is like playing the genetic lottery. Cloning, in contrast, makes every offspring genetically the same.

So while pursuing her doctorate at the University of Victoria, Foster devised a sophisticated test for whether sea otters were influencing eelgrass reproduction. In collaboration with Watson and 11 other ecologists, evolutionary biologists and geneticists, Foster looked at eelgrass genetic signatures, snipping samples of plant tissue from three types of sites along the coast of the Great Bear Rainforest and Western Vancouver Island.

At some sites, sea otters had been absent for more than a century, a long-term effect of the European fur trade. At others, reintroduced otters had been present for decades. And in a third subset of survey sites, otters had been present for less than 10 years. Painstakingly collecting eelgrass shoots for DNA analysis, Foster predicted that eelgrass meadows with a longer-term otter presence should have higher levels of genetic diversity.

She also tested for effects of latitude, depth, meadow size and temperature. But she found that the most influential factor for eelgrass genetic diversity was the length of sea otter occupancy. Sea otter digging increased opportunities for seedlings to sprout, increasing eelgrass genetic diversity by up to 30%.

The team notes that otters are not the only driving force behind eelgrass genetic diversity. In the past, eelgrass flowering may have been promoted by now extinct or rare megafauna or by Indigenous traditional harvesting of eelgrass rhizomes and seeds, a practice that declined with European colonisation.

Sea grass meadows provide rich food and protective habitats for marine life all over the world. The patches of sea grass supporting otters in these remote coasts of British Columbia are unusually pristine, but elsewhere, many face threats from agricultural runoff, boating and coastal development. By better understanding the factors that could make this life-supporting undersea carpet more genetically healthy, said Chris Darimont, a co-author of the study also at the Hakai Institute, this sea otter research shows “another way that a predator can hedge our bets against an uncertain future.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Scientists hope Lucy's close-up fly-by of seven Trojans will yield new clues to how the solar system's planets came to be formed some 4.5 billion years ago and what shaped their present configuration.

NASA launched a first-of-its kind mission on Saturday to study Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids, two large clusters of space rocks that scientists believe are remnants of primordial material that formed the solar system’s outer planets.

The space probe, dubbed Lucy and packed inside a special cargo capsule, lifted off on schedule from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 5:34 a.m. EDT (0934 GMT), NASA said. It was carried aloft by an Atlas V rocket from United Launch Alliance (UAL), a joint venture of Boeing Co and Lockheed Martin Corp.

Lucy’s mission is a 12-year expedition to study a record number of asteroids. It will be the first to explore the Trojans, thousands of rocky objects orbiting the sun in two swarms – one ahead of the path of giant gas planet Jupiter and one behind it.

The largest known Trojan asteroids, named for the warriors of Greek mythology, are believed to measure as much as 225 kilometers (140 miles) in diameter. Scientists hope Lucy’s close-up fly-by of seven Trojans will yield new clues to how the solar system’s planets came to be formed some 4.5 billion years ago and what shaped their present configuration.

Believed to be rich in carbon compounds, the asteroids may even provide new insights into the origin of organic materials and life on Earth, NASA said.

“The Trojan asteroids are leftovers from the early days of our solar system, effectively the fossils of planet formation,” principal mission investigator Harold Levison of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, was quoted by NASA as saying.

No other single science mission has been designed to visit as many different objects independently orbiting the sun in the history of space exploration, NASA said.

As well as the Trojans, Lucy will do a fly-by of an asteroid in the solar system’s main asteroid belt, called Donald Johanson in honor of the lead discoverer of the fossilized human ancestor known as Lucy, from which the NASA mission takes its name.

The Lucy fossil, unearthed in Ethiopia in 1974, was in turn named for the Beatles hit “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”

Lucy the asteroid probe will make spaceflight history in another way. Following a route that circles back to Earth three times for gravitational assists, it will be the first spacecraft ever to return to Earth’s vicinity from the outer solar system, according to NASA.

The probe will use rocket thrusters to maneuver in space and two rounded solar arrays, each the width of a school bus, to recharge batteries that will power the instruments contained in the much smaller central body of the spacecraft.

When fruit flies were exposed to varying concentrations of acetic acid they exhibited different reactions.

Most animals, including humans, exhibit a sensory disconnect while asleep. They respond only to relevant stimuli or triggers and this is necessary to save the animal from danger.

A recent study in Nature conducted an experiment to understand the response of the sleeping fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) to olfactory or smell stimuli, and the results were quite telling. Since its first use in 1910, D. melanogaster has become one of the most commonly used model organisms for experiments in genetics, one of the reasons being the ease with which it can be bred in even the most basic of laboratories.

The first author of the study Alice French, from the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial University, said in a release: “Sleep puts you in a vulnerable position, such as being at risk of predation. Therefore, we need to be able to respond to potential threats so that we wake up and act. If it’s a sound, like a loud bang, the processing our brains need to do is relatively simple. However, to actively decode the sounds and smells around us that may or may not be relevant to us, different parts of the brain must remain alert.”

The team found that much like humans, fruit flies are able to discern the nature of the stimulus.

Vinegar experiment

The experiment involved observing fruit flies that were asleep being treated with bubbles of vinegar (acetic acid) solution of varying concentrations.

Another parallel experiment treated asleep fruit flies with odourless bubbles in order to assess a baseline response, with which to compare the former group.

Acetic acid was chosen for the study as it is a strong attractant for the fruit fly. At lower concentrations, acetic acid can stimulate the expulsion of the egg from the oviduct and also promotes gathering. However, at higher concentrations, acetic acid mimics the smell of rotten food and can be quite repugnant to fruit flies.

When fruit flies were exposed to varying concentrations of acetic acid – attractive (1-5%), repulsive (10%), and neutral (10%) – they exhibited different reactions.

Attractive odours elicited the strongest response while the repulsive and neutral ones triggered an inferior response.

The response also is contingent on the time of the day. Fruit flies experience deep sleep early in the night, but light sleep later at night. Quite expectedly, their awakening in response to the stimuli was more likely later at night than earlier.

Drunk vs sleep-deprived state

In order to broaden the ambit of the study beyond just acetic acid, further experiments were conducted with 12 more compounds, in different concentrations (i.e. 26 odour conditions in all).

Then the same was tested on sets of fruit flies that were either sleep deprived, starved, or sedated with ethanol vapours. This was done in order to assess the relationship between the response and the internal state of the flies.

It was observed that flies became less responsive to stimuli when sedated with alcohol than they ‘would have woken them up when they were sober’.

Similarly, sleep deprivation had a similar effect in that flies subjected to ‘forced wakefulness’ were less responsive to attractive odours (1-5% acetic acid) than their rested counterparts.

What is happening in the fruit fly’s brain?

The study also sheds light on an intricate neural architecture that governs sense perception, one that discriminates between important and irrelevant stimuli, depending on our internal state.

Two parts of the fly brain are involved here:

*the mushroom body, which plays an important role in insect olfaction or sensing of smells
*the fan-shaped body, which plays a crucial role in sleep

A set of neurons transmits the output from the mushroom body to neurons in the fan-shaped body. This mechanism, the authors suggest, could underpin the ability of insects to sense olfaction while asleep.

Further, the paper identifies two ‘gates’ that are responsible for governing this behaviour. The first ‘gate’ consists of a set of neurons that detects odour, while the second one releases dopamine and forms connections with the output neurons of the mushroom body. Suppression of either of these two gates markedly reduced the response of flies to food stimuli.

When such serial awakening experiments in humans were conducted in the 1960s, humans exhibited similar behaviour. “We can remain sound asleep in front of a TV playing an action movie, and yet wake upon the perception of a quieter but relevant stimulus, such as the sound of our own name being called or a baby cooing,” the paper states.

Other organisms subject to these experiments also showed a similar pattern. Dogs, while asleep, woke up to relevant acoustic stimuli such as food reward; cats were also able to filter out irrelevant stimuli from insignificant ones, an observation shared by rats as well.

– The author is a freelance science communicator. (mail[at]ritvikc[dot]com)

More than half of all patients reported weight loss, fatigue, fever or pain. Roughly one in five survivors experienced a decrease in mobility.

More than half number of people diagnosed with COVID-19 experience post-COVID symptoms, known as long COVID, up to six months after recovering, according to a study.

The researchers at Penn State College of Medicine in the US noted that governments, health care organisations and public health professionals should prepare for the large number of COVID-19 survivors who will need care for a variety of psychological and physical symptoms.

During their illnesses, many patients with COVID-19 experience symptoms, such as tiredness, difficulty breathing, chest pain, sore joints and loss of taste or smell, they said.

The study, published in the journal JAMA Network Open, reviewed 57 reports that included data from 250,351 unvaccinated adults and children who were diagnosed with COVID-19 from December 2019 through March 2021. Among those studied, 79 per cent were hospitalised, and most patients (79 per cent) lived in high-income countries. Patients’ median age was 54, and the majority of individuals (56 per cent) were male.

The researchers analysed patients’ health post-COVID during three intervals at one month (short-term), two to five months (intermediate-term) and six or more months (long-term).

According to the findings, survivors experienced an array of residual health issues associated with COVID-19. Generally, these complications affected a patient’s general well-being, their mobility or organ systems. Overall, one in two survivors experienced long-term COVID manifestations. The rates remained largely constant from one month through six or more months after their initial illness.

The researchers noted several trends among survivors. More than half of all patients reported weight loss, fatigue, fever or pain. Roughly one in five survivors experienced a decrease in mobility. Nearly one in four survivors experienced difficulty concentrating or were diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorders. Six in ten survivors had chest imaging abnormality and more than a quarter of patients had difficulty breathing.

Chest pain and palpitations were among the commonly reported conditions. Nearly one in five patients experienced hair loss or rashes. Stomach pain, lack of appetite, diarrhoea and vomiting were among the commonly reported conditions.

“These findings confirm what many health care workers and COVID-19 survivors have been claiming, namely, that adverse health effects from COVID-19 can linger,” said study co-lead investigator Vernon Chinchilli from Penn State. “Although previous studies have examined the prevalence of long COVID symptoms among patients, this study examined a larger population, including people in high-, middle- and low-income countries, and examined many more symptoms,” Chinchilli added.

The researchers noted that the mechanisms by which COVID-19 causes lingering symptoms in survivors are not fully understood. These symptoms could result from immune-system overdrive triggered by the virus, lingering infection, reinfection or an increased production of autoantibodies — antibodies directed at their own tissues, they said. The SARS-CoV-2 virus, the agent that causes COVID-19, can access, enter and live in the nervous system, the researchers said. As a result, nervous system symptoms such as taste or smell disorders, memory impairment and decreased attention and concentration commonly occur in survivors, they added.

South Korea’s push into space comes as it speeds ahead with its own military ballistic missile systems after agreeing with the United States this year to end all bilateral restrictions on them.

South Korea plans to test its first domestically produced space launch vehicle next week, a major step toward jumpstarting the country’s space programme and achieving ambitious goals in 6G networks, spy satellites, and even lunar probes.

If all goes well, the three-stage NURI rocket, designed by the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) to eventually put 1.5-ton payloads into orbit 600 to 800km above the Earth, will carry a dummy satellite into space on Thursday.

South Korea’s last such booster, launched in 2013 after multiple delays and several failed tests, was jointly developed with Russia. The new KSLV-II NURI has solely Korean rocket technologies, and is the country’s first domestically built space launch vehicle, said Han Sang-yeop, director of KARI’s Launcher Reliability Safety Quality Assurance Division. “Having its own launch vehicle gives a country the flexibility of payload types and launch schedule,” he told Reuters in an email.

Military and civilian benefits

It also gives the country more control over “confidential payloads” it may want to send into orbit, Han said. That will be important for South Korea’s plans to launch surveillance satellites into orbit, in what national security officials have called a constellation of “unblinking eyes” to monitor North Korea.

So far, South Korea has remained almost totally reliant on the United States for satellite intelligence on its northern neighbour.

In 2020 a Falcon 9 rocket from the U.S. firm Space X carried South Korea’s first dedicated military communications satellite into orbit from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

NURI is also key to South Korean plans to eventually build a Korean satellite-based navigation system and a 6G communications network. “The program is designed not only to support government projects, but also commercial activity,” Oh Seung-hyub, director of the Launcher Propulsion System Development Division, told a briefing on Tuesday.

South Korea is working with the United States on a lunar orbiter, and hopes to land a probe on the moon by 2030.

Trial launch

Given problems with previous launches, Han and other planners said they have prepared for the worst. The launch day may be changed at the last minute if weather or technical problems arise; the craft will carry a self-destruct mechanism to destroy it if it appears it won’t reach orbit; and media won’t be allowed to observe the test directly.

At least four test launches are planned before the rocket will be considered reliable enough to carry a real payload. According to pre-launch briefing slides, the rocket’s planned path will take it southeast from its launch site on the south coast of the Korean peninsula, threading its way over the ocean on a trajectory aimed at avoiding flying over Japan, Indonesia, the Philippines, and other major land masses.

“This upcoming launch may be remembered as the hope and achievement of Korean rocketry historically no matter the launch is successful or not,” Han told Reuters.

Sensitive technology

Space rockets on the Korean peninsula have been fraught with concerns over their potential use for military purposes, leaving South Korea’s efforts lagging more capable programmes in China and Japan.

“Modern rocketry in Korea couldn’t devote its capability much in R&D of rockets because of long-standing political issues,” Han said. The United States has viewed North Korea’s own satellite launch vehicles as testbeds for nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile technology. A North Korean space launch in 2012 helped lead to the breakdown of a deal with the United States.

“North Korea, of course, will not look favourably on South Korea’s rapidly advancing space capabilities, which are far more technologically advanced than those possessed by the North,” said James Clay Moltz, a space systems expert at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School.

South Korea’s push into space comes as it speeds ahead with its own military ballistic missile systems after agreeing with the United States this year to end all bilateral restrictions on them.

“There is no concern on military applications in NURI launch vehicle development,” said Chang Young-keun, a missile expert at the Korea Aerospace University. Unlike the liquid-fuelled NURI, South Korea’s military missiles use solid fuel, which is better for weapons, he added.

South Korea is not seen as a “threat” by either Russia or China, so it seems unlikely to affect their space programs, which are already highly militarized, Moltz said. “Many space launch technologies are inherently dual-use,” he said, but noted that he hopes NURI’s development will “not lead to an arms race in space, but instead a safer ‘information race’” where South Korea has better intelligence to head off any future crisis.

The HeLa cell line — a name derived from the first two letters of Henrietta Lacks’ first and last names — was a scientific breakthrough.

The chief of the World Health Organisation on Wednesday honored the late Henrietta Lacks, an American woman whose cancer cells were taken without her knowledge during the 1950s and ended up providing the foundation for vast scientific breakthroughs, including research about the coronavirus.

The recognition from WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus came more than a decade after the publication of “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” Rebecca Skloot’s book about the discrimination in health care Black Americans faced, the life-saving innovations made possible by Lacks’ cells and her family’s legal fight over their unauthorised use.

“What happened to Henrietta was wrong,” Tedros said during a special ceremony at WHO Geneva headquarters before handing the Director-General’s Award for Henrietta Lacks to her 87-year-old son Lawrence Lacks as several of her other descendants looked on.

Lacks died of cervical cancer on October 4, 1951 at age 31. The tissue taken from her at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore provided the first human cells to be successfully cloned. Reproduced infinitely ever since, HeLa cells have become a cornerstone of modern medicine, including the development of the polio vaccine, genetic mapping and even COVID-19 vaccines.

Tedros noted that Lacks lived at a time when racial discrimination was legal in the United States and that it remains widespread, even if no longer legal in most countries.

“Henrietta Lacks was exploited. She is one of many women of color whose bodies have been misused by science,” he said. “She placed her trust in the health system so she could receive treatment. But the system took something from her without her knowledge or consent.”

“The medical technologies that were developed from this injustice have been used to perpetuate further injustice because they have not been shared equitably around the world,” Tedros added.

The HeLa cell line — a name derived from the first two letters of Henrietta Lacks’ first and last names — was a scientific breakthrough. Tedros said the cells were “foundational” in the development of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines, which can eliminate the cancer that took her life.

As of last year, WHO said, less than 25% of the world’s low-income countries and fewer than 30% of lower-middle-income countries had access to HPV vaccines through national immunisation programs, compared to over 85% of high-income countries.

“Many people have benefited from those cells. Fortunes have been made. Science has advanced. Nobel Prizes have been won, and most importantly, many lives have been saved,” Tedros said. “No doubt Henrietta would have been pleased that her suffering has saved others. But the end doesn’t justify the means.”

WHO said more than 50 million metric tonnes (55 million tons) of HeLa cells have been distributed around the world and used in more than 75,000 studies.

Last week, Lacks’ estate sued a U.S. biotechnology company, accusing it of selling cells that doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital took from her without her knowledge or consent as part of “a racially unjust medical system.”

“We stand in solidarity with marginalised patients and communities all over the world who are not consulted, engaged or empowered in their own care,” Tedros said.

“We are firm that in medicine and in science, Black lives matter,” he added. “Henrietta Lacks’ life mattered — and still matters. Today is also an opportunity to recognise those women of color who have made incredible but often unseen contributions to medical science.”

These bat viruses, along with more than a dozen others discovered in recent months in Laos, Cambodia, China and Thailand, may also help researchers better anticipate future pandemics.

Written by Carl Zimmer

In the summer of 2020, half a year into the coronavirus pandemic, scientists travelled into the forests of northern Laos to catch bats that might harbor close cousins of the pathogen.

In the dead of night, they used mist nets and canvas traps to snag the animals as they emerged from nearby caves, gathered samples of saliva, urine and feces, then released them back into the darkness.

The fecal samples turned out to contain coronaviruses, which the scientists studied in high-security biosafety labs, known as BSL-3, using specialised protective gear and air filters.

Three of the Laos coronaviruses were unusual: They carried a molecular hook on their surface that was very similar to the hook on the virus that causes COVID-19, called SARS-CoV-2. Like SARS-CoV-2, their hook allowed them to latch onto human cells.

“It is even better than early strains of SARS-CoV-2,” said Marc Eloit, a virus expert at the Pasteur Institute in Paris who led the study, referring to how well the hook on the Laos coronaviruses binds to human cells. The study was posted online last month and has not yet been published in a scientific journal.

Virus experts are buzzing about the discovery. Some suspect that these SARS-CoV-2-like viruses may already be infecting people from time to time, causing only mild and limited outbreaks. But under the right circumstances, the pathogens could give rise to a COVID-19-like pandemic, they say.

The findings also have significant implications for the charged debate over COVID’s origins, experts say. Some people have speculated that SARS-CoV-2’s impressive ability to infect human cells could not have evolved through a natural spillover from an animal. But the new findings seem to suggest otherwise.

“That really puts to bed any notion that this virus had to have been concocted or somehow manipulated in a lab to be so good at infecting humans,” said Michael Worobey, a University of Arizona virus expert who was not involved in the work.

These bat viruses, along with more than a dozen others discovered in recent months in Laos, Cambodia, China and Thailand, may also help researchers better anticipate future pandemics. The viruses’ family trees offer hints about where potentially dangerous strains are lurking and which animals scientists should look at to find them.

Last week, the U.S. government announced a $125 million project to identify thousands of wild viruses in Asia, Latin America and Africa to determine their risk of spillover. Eloit predicted that there were many more relatives of SARS-CoV-2 left to find. “I am a fly fisherman,” he said. “When I am unable to catch a trout, that doesn’t mean there are no trout in the river.”

When SARS-CoV-2 first came to light, its closest known relative was a bat coronavirus that Chinese researchers found in 2016 in a mine in southern China’s Yunnan province. RaTG13, as it is known, shares 96% of its genome with SARS-CoV-2. Based on the mutations carried by each virus, scientists have estimated that RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2 share a common ancestor that infected bats about 40 years ago.

Both viruses infect cells by using a molecular hook, called the “receptor-binding domain,” to latch onto their surface. RaTG13’s hook, adapted for attaching to bat cells, can only cling weakly to human cells. SARS-CoV-2’s hook, by contrast, can clasp cells in the human airway, the first step toward a potentially lethal case of COVID-19.

To find other close relatives of SARS-CoV-2, wildlife virus experts checked their freezers full of old samples from across the world. They identified several similar coronaviruses from southern China, Cambodia and Thailand. Most came from bats, while a few came from scaly mammals known as pangolins. None was a closer relative than RaTG13.

Eloit and his colleagues instead set out to find new coronaviruses.

They traveled to northern Laos, about 150 miles from the mine where Chinese researchers had found RaTG13. Over six months they caught 645 bats belonging to 45 different species. The bats harbored two dozen kinds of coronaviruses, three of which were strikingly similar to SARS-CoV-2 — especially in the receptor-binding domain.

In RaTG13, 11 of the 17 key building blocks of the domain are identical to those of SARS-CoV-2. But in the three viruses from Laos, as many as 16 were identical — the closest match to date.

Eloit speculated that one or more of the coronaviruses might be able to infect humans and cause mild disease. In a separate study, he and colleagues took blood samples from people in Laos who collect bat guano for a living. Although the Laotians did not show signs of having been infected with SARS-CoV-2, they carried immune markers, called antibodies, that appeared to be caused by a similar virus.

Linfa Wang, a molecular virus expert at the Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore who was not involved in the study, agreed that such an infection was possible, since the newly discovered viruses can attach tightly to a protein on human cells called ACE2.

“If the receptor-binding domain is ready to use ACE2, these guys are dangerous,” Wang said.

Genetic patchwork

Paradoxically, some other genes in the three Laotian viruses are more distantly related to SARS-CoV-2 than other bat viruses. The cause of this genetic patchwork is the complex evolution of coronaviruses.

If a bat infected with one coronavirus catches a second one, the two different viruses may end up in a single cell at once. As that cell begins to replicate each of those viruses, their genes get shuffled together, producing new virus hybrids.

In the Laotian coronaviruses, this gene shuffling has given them a receptor-binding domain that is very similar to that of SARS-CoV-2. The original genetic swap took place about a decade ago, according to a preliminary analysis by Spyros Lytras, a graduate student at the University of Glasgow in Scotland.

Lytras and his colleagues are now comparing SARS-CoV-2 not just to the new viruses from Laos, but to other close relatives that have been found in recent months. They are finding even more evidence of gene shuffling. This process — known as recombination — may be reshaping the viruses from year to year.

“It’s becoming more and more obvious how important recombination is,” Lytras said.

He and his colleagues are now drawing the messy evolutionary trees of SARS-CoV-2-like viruses based on these new insights. Finding more viruses could help clear up the picture. But scientists are divided as to where to look for them.

Eloit believes the best bet is a zone of Southeast Asia that includes the site where his colleagues found their coronaviruses, as well as the nearby mine in Yunnan where RaTG13 was found.

“I think the main landscape corresponds to north Vietnam, north Laos and south China,” Eloit said.

The U.S. government’s new virus-hunting project, called DEEP VZN, may turn up one or more SARS-CoV-2-like viruses in that region. A spokesperson for USAID, the agency funding the effort, named Vietnam as one of the countries where researchers will be searching and said that new coronaviruses are one of their top priorities.

Colin Carlson, a biologist at Georgetown University, suspects that a virus capable of producing a COVID-like outbreak might be lurking even farther away. Bats as far east as Indonesia and as far west as India, he noted, share many biological features with the animals known to carry SARS-CoV-2-like viruses.

“This is not just a Southeast Asia problem,” Carlson said. “These viruses are diverse, and they are more cosmopolitan than we have thought.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

The Shenzhou-13 spaceship is expected to be launched into space on a Long March-2F rocket early Saturday morning from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on the edge of the Gobi Desert in northwestern China.

China is preparing to send three astronauts to live on its space station for six months, a new milestone for a program that has advanced rapidly in recent years. It will be China’s longest-ever crewed space mission and set a record for the most time spent in space by Chinese astronauts.

The Shenzhou-13 spaceship is expected to be launched into space on a Long March-2F rocket early Saturday morning from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on the edge of the Gobi Desert in northwestern China.

The first crew who served a 90-day mission aboard the main Tianhe core module of the space station returned in mid-September.

The new crew has two veterans of space travel. Pilot Zhai Zhigang, 55, performed China’s first spacewalk. Wang Yaping, 41 and the only woman on the mission, carried out experiments and led a science class in real-time while traveling on one of China’s earlier experimental space stations. Ye Guangfu, 41, will be traveling into space for the first time.

The mission is expected to continue the work of the initial crew, who conducted two spacewalks, deployed a 10-meter (33-foot) mechanical arm, and held a video call with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. China Manned Space Agency Deputy Director Lin Xiqiang said the rocket was fueled and ready to fly.

“All systems conducting the Shenzhou-13 mission have undergone a comprehensive rehearsal. The flight crew is in good condition and our pre-launch preparations are in order,” Lin said at a Thursday briefing.

The crew’s scheduled activities include up to three spacewalks to install equipment in preparation for expanding the station, verifying living conditions in the module and conducting experiments in space medicine and other areas, Lin said.

China’s military, which runs the space program, has released few details but says it will send multiple crews to the station over the next two years to make it fully functional. Shenzhou-13 will be the fifth mission, including un-crewed trips to deliver supplies. When completed with the addition of two more modules, named Mengtian and Wentian, the station will weigh about 66 tons, a fraction of the size of the International Space Station, which launched its first module in 1998 and will weigh around 450 tons when completed.

China was excluded from the International Space Station largely due to U.S. objections over the Chinese program’s secretive nature and close military ties. It made plans to build its own space stations in the early 1990s and had two experimental modules before starting on the permanent station. U.S. law requires congressional approval for contact between the American and Chinese space programs, but China is cooperating with space experts from countries including France, Sweden, Russia and Italy.

China has sent 14 astronauts into space since 2003, when it became only the third country after the former Soviet Union and the United States to do so on its own.

Along with its crewed missions, China has expanded its work on lunar and Mars exploration, including placing a rover on the little-explored far side of the Moon and returning lunar rocks to Earth for the first time since the 1970s.

China this year also landed its Tianwen-1 space probe on Mars, whose accompanying Zhurong rover has been exploring for evidence of life on the red planet. Other programs call for collecting soil from an asteroid and bring back additional lunar samples. China has also expressed an aspiration to land people on the moon and possibly build a scientific base there, although no timeline has been proposed for such projects. A highly secretive space plane is also reportedly under development.

The researchers said that they had discovered radio signals from 19 distant red dwarf stars or M dwarfs.

On October 13, several news websites reported that Earth has received its first radio signals from outside our solar system and speculated that it could be ‘aliens calling.’

The articles were based on a paper published on October 11 in Nature Astronomy. The researchers said that they had discovered radio signals from 19 distant red dwarf stars or M dwarfs. M dwarfs are stars smaller than our Sun and are known to have magnetic field strength about thousand times of the magnetic field of our Sun.

The study team used the world’s most powerful radio telescope called LOFAR or Low Frequency Array situated in the Netherlands for their exoplanet search.

Interaction between star and its planets

In a release, the team notes that the radio signals could be coming from interactions between the M dwarf and planets around them. Dr. Joseph Callingham, lead author of the discovery, said the team is confident these signals are coming from the magnetic connection of the stars and unseen orbiting planets, similar to the interaction between Jupiter and its moon, Io.

“Our own Earth has aurorae, commonly recognised here as the northern and southern lights, that also emit powerful radio waves – this is from the interaction of the planet’s magnetic field with the solar wind,” he said. “But in the case of aurorae from Jupiter, they’re much stronger as its volcanic moon Io is blasting material out into space, filling Jupiter’s environment with particles that drive unusually powerful aurorae.

“Our model for this radio emission from our stars is a scaled-up version of Jupiter and Io, with a planet enveloped in the magnetic field of a star, feeding material into vast currents that similarly power bright aurorae.”

So is there a planet around this M-dwarf?

Sujan Sengupta, from the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bengaluru, who was not involved in the study explains: “Firstly, there is no way to determine if there is really an interaction. Secondly, if it’s due to the interaction of the magnetic fields of two objects, there is no way to prove that it’s a planet. We know very well that these kinds of stars (M-dwarfs) have a very strong magnetic field and emit radio waves through standard mechanisms. But how the detected low frequency radio signal has originated needs further research.”

Dr. Sengupta is Professor and Chair of the Theoretical Astrophysics Group at IIA and his area of research includes brown dwarfs (astronomical objects which have the size between that of a giant planet and that of a small star), extrasolar planets and neutron stars.

He adds that since these are the only planet hosting stars showing low frequency radio emission, the observation needs to be confirmed by other radio telescopes and by other groups independently.

“If they claim to have discovered a planet for the first time through radio emission, they must find out the mass of the secondary object. Otherwise it may be a brown dwarf or even an unresolved low mass companion (another M dwarf with strong magnetic field). If they cannot characterise the secondary object, they cannot claim it to be a planet just from an unusual radio signal from the star. It might be a possibility only. I think it’s too early to say that the detected low frequency radio wave implies the presence of a planet around the star,” he notes.

The mineral-rich island has become a hot prospect for miners seeking anything from copper and titanium to platinum and rare earth minerals, which are needed for electric vehicle motors.

Among the glaciers and turquoise fjords of southwestern Greenland, a mining company is betting rock similar to the one the Apollo missions brought back from the moon can address some of Planet Earth’s climate change problems.

“This rock was created in the early days in the formation of our planet,” says geologist Anders Norby-Lie, who began exploring anorthosite at the remote mountain landscape in Greenland nine years ago.

More recently, it has excited mining companies and investors hoping to sell it as a relatively sustainable source of aluminium as well as an ingredient to make fibreglass.

The government elected in April has placed it at the centre of its efforts to promote Greenland as environmentally responsible and even the U.S. space agency NASA has taken note.

The mineral-rich island has become a hot prospect for miners seeking anything from copper and titanium to platinum and rare earth minerals, which are needed for electric vehicle motors. That could appear an easy solution to Greenland’s challenge of how to grow its tiny economy so it can realise its long-term goal of independence from Denmark, but the government campaigned on an environmental platform and needs to honour that.

“Not all money is worth earning,” Greenland’s mineral resources minister Naaja Nathanielsen told Reuters in an interview in the capital Nuuk. “We have a greener profile, and we’ve been willing to make some decisions on it pretty quickly.”

Already the government has banned future oil and gas exploration and wants to reinstate a ban on uranium mining. That would halt development of one of the world’s biggest rare earth deposits, named Kuannersuit in Greenlandic and Kvanefjeld in Danish because the deposit also contains uranium. Kuannersuit, whose operator was in the final stages of securing a permit to mine, was a flashpoint issue in April’s election because locals fear the uranium it contains could harm the country’s fragile environment.

“As far as we are concerned, uranium is a political issue which is being driven by exaggerated and misleading claims,” licence holder Greenland Minerals CEO John Mair told Reuters. The mine could bring in royalties of around 1.5 billion Danish crowns ($233 million) each year, the government has said. By contrast, revenue from two small mines operating in the country is negligible, and Nathanielsen says the government’s budget plans do not assume any mining revenue.

The Danish money trap

Some see little point in mineral exploitation until Greenland has achieved independence. A Danish colony until 1953, the semi-autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark has the right to declare independence through a simple vote, but that is likely to be a distant prospect.

Greenland has commissioned work to draft a constitution for a future independent Greenland. Meanwhile, Greenland’s 57,000 people rely on fishing and grants from Denmark. The grants would be reduced in proportion to future earnings from mining, prompting some to say the minerals should be left in the ground for now.

“Under the current agreement, large-scale mineral extraction makes no sense,” Pele Broberg, minister for business and trade, told Reuters. “Why should we do that while we’re subject to another country?”

Others are concerned the government is deterring investment in large-scale mining of more conventional minerals, which they say is the way to diversify the economy and make it capable of standing alone. Jess Berthelsen, head of Greenland’s labour union SIK, had hoped the planned mine at Kuannersuit and other large-scale projects would create jobs and said the Danish grants held Greenland back.

“Sometimes I wish Denmark would stop sending money, because then people in this country would start waking up. It’s lulling us to sleep,” he said.

Business lobbyists meanwhile worry about government’s plan to reinstate a uranium ban – only eight years after it was lifted.

“The companies are used to being under pressure from authorities, but they are not used to this kind of instability,” Christian Keldsen, head of Greenland Business Association, said.

Local support

Those living nearest to the standout mineral in the government plans for sustainable mining tend to support the pursuit of new income.

“We have to find other ways to make money. We can’t just live off fishing,” said Johannes Hansen, a local fireman and carpenter living in Qeqertarsuatsiaat. The town of around 160 people is about 50 minutes by boat from the planned anorthosite mine.

Greenland Anorthosite Mining, which is developing the mine, has a plan to ship 120 tonnes of crushed anorthosite to potential customers in the fibreglass industry where it says it has value as a more environmental alternative to kaolin. The company, which hopes to have an exploration permit by the end of 2022, says anorthosite melts at a lower temperature than kaolin, has a lower heavy metal content and produces less waste and greenhouse gas emissions. The bigger aim is for anorthosite to be used as an alternative to bauxite to produce aluminium, one of the minerals seen as central to reducing emissions because it can be used to make vehicles lighter and is fully recyclable.

Greenland Anorthosite Mining says aluminium can be produced more easily than when bauxite ore, the primary source of aluminium, is used, and again produces less waste compared with existing processes. Anorthosite also fits in with European Union ambitions to diversify mineral sources. It is found in Canada and Norway, as well as Greenland, while bauxite is concentrated in a belt around the Equator.

Asuncion Aranda, who is heading an EU-funded research project into anorthosite, said the technology had been seen to work although research is needed to cut costs and minimise the environmental impact. “We don’t know yet if our process will be competitive from the start compared with the established production method,” she said. “If all goes well and the aluminium industry is in, then we could see the first commercial production in eight to ten years.”

Unearthly ambitions

While the EU is focused on earthly uses and curbing emissions, NASA has ambitions to find new environments for human activity. It has been using crushed anorthosite powder from a smaller Greenland mine already in production, operated by Canadian-based Hudson Resources, to test equipment as part of a space race that would involve mining on the moon and even establishing communities there.

“The deposits in Greenland and elsewhere are not exactly like the moon, but they’re pretty darn close,” said John Gruener, a space scientist at NASA’s Johnson Space Centre.”

If we’re really going to live off the land at the south pole of the moon, which everybody is interested in now, we will have to learn how to deal with anorthosite, the dominant rock that’s there,” he said. “Having another supply of anorthosite from Greenland is great.”

Climate campaigners are not so sure. Greenpeace has campaigned against deep sea mineral extraction, saying it risks disturbing ecosystems we have not even begun to understand and puts forward similar arguments against mining in space.

“We need to be finding sustainable solutions, not looking for more sources in new frontiers. There is so much we just don’t know about these environments,” said Kevin Brigden, senior scientist at Greenpeace Research Laboratory. Asked about the concerns, Greenland’s resource ministry said in an emailed statement it did not expect minerals extracted in Greenland to be used only for green technology. “But we work actively to optimise the green profile and utilise our resources in the service of the good cause,” it said.

In Europe, lab-grown coffee would need to be approved as "Novel Food" before being marketed.

With climate change threatening traditional coffee farming, Finnish scientists say they have produced coffee from cell cultures with an aroma and taste resembling the real thing.

The VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland may have come up with a more sustainable alternative to growing coffee beans by floating cell cultures in bio-reactors filled with a nutrient medium used to make various animal- and plant-based products.

Heikki Aisala, the VTT researcher in charge of evaluating the process, said cups of cellular coffee probably could not pass standard taste tests just yet, but had lots of potential for a multi-billion-dollar global industry.

“Not like of course 100%. It tastes like a combination of different types of coffees. We’re not there yet with the commercial variety, but it certainly does resemble coffee at the moment,” said Aisala.

VTT Research Team Leader Heiko Rischer said lab-grown cell cultures offered a more sustainable way to make coffee, given that because of high demand, countries were devoting ever larger tracts of land to grow coffee beans, leading to deforestation.

Rischer said the environmental benefits of lab-grown coffee included reduced use of pesticides and fertilizer and less need to ship coffee beans long distances to markets. In Europe, lab-grown coffee would need to be approved as “Novel Food” before being marketed. But will discriminating coffee aficionados drink it?

Satu, a barista at a Helsinki coffee shop, thinks so. “I think some day we’re going that way because of all the natural coffee sources vanishing, so we have to move along…If it tastes good and the aroma is coffee based, so why not? I think it’s possible,” she said.

After searching for years for its host star with the Keck II telescope in Hawaii, the study team concluded it was orbiting a white dwarf that is too faint to directly observe.

Written by Becky Ferreira

When our sun enters its death throes in about 5 billion years, it will incinerate our planet and then dramatically collapse into a dead ember known as a white dwarf. But the fate of more distant planets, such as Jupiter or Saturn, is less clear.

On Wednesday in the journal Nature, astronomers reported observing a tantalising preview of our solar system’s afterlife: a Jupiter-size planet orbiting a white dwarf some 6,500 light years from here.

Known as MOA-2010-BLG-477Lb, the planet occupies a comparable orbit to Jupiter. The discovery not only offers a glimpse into our cosmic future, it raises the possibility that any life on “survivor” worlds may endure the deaths of their stars.

“While there is quite a lot of evidence of rocky planetary debris orbiting around white dwarfs, we have very few data points of intact planets,” said Joshua Blackman, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tasmania and lead author of the study. “The fate of our solar system is likely to be similar to MOA-2010-BLG-477Lb,” he added in an email. “The sun will become a white dwarf, the inner planets will be engulfed, and the wider-orbit planets like Jupiter and Saturn will survive.”

The planet was first spotted because of the light-warping effects of its gravitational field, a phenomenon known as microlensing. After searching for years for its host star with the Keck II telescope in Hawaii, Blackman and his colleagues concluded it was orbiting a white dwarf that is too faint to directly observe.

Astronomers using a different method last year reported spotting another intact Jupiter-like planet, known as WD 1856 b, closely orbiting a white dwarf. But MOA-2010-BLG-477Lb circles its hidden stellar husk at nearly 3 times the distance between Earth and the sun, making it the first known planet to occupy a Jupiter-like orbit around a white dwarf. WD 1856 b, by contrast, orbits its white dwarf every 1.4 days, suggesting that it migrated into its current position after the death of its star, though the exact mechanics of that journey are still being hashed out.

Andrew Vanderburg, an assistant professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who led the team that discovered WD 1856 b, said the conclusions of the new study appear solid. He also noted that planets with wide orbits around white dwarfs are probably more abundant than those in tight orbits, but that the latter group are simpler to detect.

“If I had to guess, I would say that theirs is a much more common population because it just has to stay there and have nothing happen to it,” Vandenburg said. “That feels to me like the most likely outcome, at least at this point in the universe’s history.”

Dying stars spew out harmful radiation as they grow into a phase called red giants and introduce turbulence in their systems that could obliterate life. But there are some speculative scenarios that might preserve the habitability of white dwarf systems.

“There are a lot of things that have to go right,” Vanderburg said. He imagines a planet distant from a red giant star that then moves inward after the star becomes a white dwarf and retains “enough water to potentially be a nice place to live” when the star turns into a white dwarf.

Because white dwarfs are small and dim, such a planet would have to be in a very close orbit for liquid water to exist. However, if life were to emerge on a world like Jupiter’s moon Europa, which might contain a subsurface ocean warmed by Jupiter’s tidal forces, it could potentially survive at a greater distance from the star.

“If humanity is somehow still around in 5 billion years, we would probably have a better chance of surviving the sun’s red giant phase on a moon of Jupiter than on Earth,” Blackman said.

The International Energy Agency now projects that humanity’s emissions of carbon dioxide will reach a peak by the mid-2020s and then drop slowly in the decades thereafter.

Written by Brad Plumer

Clean energy technologies such as wind turbines, solar panels and electric vehicles are advancing so rapidly that the global use of fossil fuels is now expected to peak by the mid-2020s and then start declining, the world’s leading energy agency said Tuesday.

But there’s a catch: The transition away from coal, oil and natural gas isn’t happening fast enough to avoid dangerous levels of global warming, the agency said, unless governments take much stronger action to reduce their planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions over the next few years.

The International Energy Agency’s annual World Energy Outlook, a 386-page report that forecasts global energy trends to 2050, comes just weeks before world leaders gather for a major United Nations climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, to discuss how to accelerate the shift away from fossil fuels and prevent the planet from overheating.

“The world has made a remarkable amount of progress on clean energy over the past decade,” Fatih Birol, the agency’s executive director, said in an interview. “But there’s still so much more that needs to happen.”

The new report finds that the world has made significant strides in the fight against climate change. Wind and solar power are the cheapest source of new electricity in most markets and growing briskly. Sales of electric vehicles worldwide hit records last year. Across the globe, approvals for new coal-fired power plants, a major source of emissions, have slowed dramatically in recent years, as governments and banks have increasingly refused to finance them.

Governments are also stepping up their policies to curb emissions. The European Union has been increasing the price it charges large polluters to emit carbon dioxide. India has ratcheted up efficiency standards for new air-conditioners. China has said it would stop financing new coal plants overseas.

As a result, the International Energy Agency now projects that humanity’s emissions of carbon dioxide will reach a peak by the mid-2020s and then drop slowly in the decades thereafter. Global coal use is expected to fall between now and 2050, despite an uptick this year driven by increased industrial activity in China, while global oil demand is expected to enter into permanent decline by the 2030s, as people switch to electricity to fuel their cars.

That alone would be a remarkable shift. Ever since World War II, global carbon dioxide emissions have been on a seemingly inexorable upward trajectory, with only temporary dips during recessions, as the world relied on ever greater quantities of fossil fuels to power homes, cars and factories. A turning point is now in sight, the report says.

Even so, this shift is still nowhere near enough to avert some of the most perilous consequences of climate change, the agency warned.

Current energy policies will still put the world on track to heat up roughly 2.6 degrees Celsius by 2100 compared to preindustrial levels, the report found. Last month, the United Nations warned that such an outcome would be “catastrophic,” noting that countries are already suffering much higher risks of deadly heat waves, droughts, floods and wildfires after just 1.1 degrees Celsius of global warming to date.

Many world leaders hope to limit average global warming to around 1.5 degrees Celsius to avoid some of the most dire and irreversible risks from climate change, such as widespread crop failures or ecosystem collapse.

To meet that goal, it won’t be enough for global emissions to simply peak and then decline gently in the decades ahead, as they are currently on track to do, the International Energy Agency said. Instead, the world’s nations would have to move much faster to slash emissions nearly in half this decade and stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere altogether by around 2050.

Earlier this year, the agency laid out a detailed road map for what such an effort might look like. By 2030, for instance, electric vehicles would have to make up more than half of new car sales globally, up from just 5% today. By 2035, wealthy countries would have to shut down virtually all fossil-fuel power plants in favor of cleaner technologies like wind, solar or nuclear power. By 2040, all of the world’s remaining coal plants would have to be retired or retrofitted with technology to capture and bury their carbon emissions.

Nations would need to triple their investment in clean energy over the next decade, to roughly $4 trillion per year, the agency said. Most of that increased spending would need to flow to developing countries, which have been responsible for the bulk of emissions growth in recent years but have often struggled to gain access to financing.

“So far only about 20% of clean energy investments are going to emerging countries,” Birol said. “That needs to change. This is a race that no one wins unless everyone finishes the race.”

The report noted that many countries are contemplating more forceful action, at least on paper. More than 50 countries, including China and the United States as well as the European Union, have now announced targets to get to “net zero” — that is, to reach the point where they are no longer adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere — over the next few decades.

If every country followed through on that promise, the world could potentially limit total global warming to around 2.1 degrees Celsius by 2100, the report found. But even this outcome is far from assured, since most of the nations pledging to go net zero have not yet enacted policies to achieve that goals.

The project assembles information from eight databases that count at least 4,500 known exoplanets, tens of millions of galaxies, and more than 1.5 billion light sources from the Milky Way alone.

The final frontier has rarely seemed closer than this — at least virtually. Researchers at one of Switzerland’s top universities are releasing open-source beta software that allows for virtual visits through the cosmos including up to the International Space Station, past the Moon, Saturn or exoplanets, over galaxies and well beyond.

The program — called Virtual Reality Universe Project, or VIRUP — pulls together what the researchers call the largest data set of the universe to create three-dimensional, panoramic visualisations of space.

Software engineers, astrophysicists and experimental museology experts at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, or EPFL, have come together to concoct the virtual map that can be viewed through individual VR gear, immersion systems like panoramic cinema with 3D glasses, planetarium-like dome screens, or just on a PC for two-dimensional viewing.

“The novelty of this project was putting all the data set available into one framework, when you can see the universe at different scales — nearby us, around the Earth, around the solar system, at the Milky Way level, to see through the universe and time up to the beginning — what we call the Big Bang,” said Jean-Paul Kneib, director of EPFL’s astrophysics lab.

Think a sort of Google Earth — but for the universe. Computer algorithms churn up terabytes of data and produce images that can appear as close as one meter (about three feet), or almost infinitely far away — as if you sit back and look at the entire observable universe.

VIRUP is accessible to everyone for free — though it does require at least a computer and is best visualised with VR equipment or 3D capabilities. It aims to draw in a broad array of visitors, both scientists looking to visualise the data they continue to collect and a broad public seeking to explore the heavens virtually.

Still a work in progress, for now, the beta version can’t be run on a Mac computer. Downloading the software and content might seem onerous for the least-skilled computer users, and space — on a computer — will count. The broader-public version of the content is a reduced-size version that can be quantified in gigabytes, a sort of best-of highlights. Astronomy buffs with more PC memory might choose to download more.

The project assembles information from eight databases that count at least 4,500 known exoplanets, tens of millions of galaxies, hundreds of millions of space objects in all, and more than 1.5 billion light sources from the Milky Way alone. But when it comes to potential data, the sky is literally the limit: Future databases could include asteroids in our solar system or objects like nebulae and pulsars farther into the galaxy.

To be sure, VR games and representations already exist: Cosmos-gazing apps on tablets allow for mapping of the night sky, with zoom-in close-ups of heavenly bodies; software like SpaceEngine from Russia offers universe visuals; NASA has done some smaller VR scopes of space.

But the EPFL team says VIRUP goes much farther and wider: Data pulled from sources like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey in the United States, and European Space Agency’s Gaia mission to map the Milky Way and its Planck mission to observe the first light of the universe, all brought together in a one-stop-shop for the most extensive data sets yet around.

And there’s more to come: when the 14-country telescope project known as the Square Kilometer Array starts pulling down information, the data could be counted in the petabytes — that’s 1,000 terabytes or 1 million gigabytes.

Strap on the VR goggles, and it’s a trippy feeling seeing the Moon — seemingly the size of a giant beach ball and floating close enough to hold — as the horizon rotates from the sunny side to the dark side of the lunar surface.

Then speed out to beyond the solar system and swing by Saturn, then up above the Milky Way, swirling and flashing and heaving — with exoplanets highlighted in red. And much farther out still, imagine floating through small dots of light that represent galaxies as if the viewer is an unconscionably large giant floating in space.

“That is a very efficient way of visiting all the different scales that compose our universe, and that is completely unique,” says Yves Revaz, an EPFL astrophysicist. ”A very important part of this project is that it’s a first step toward treating much larger data sets which are coming.”

Entire galaxies seem to be strung together by strands or filaments of light, almost like representation of neural connections, that link up clusters of light like galaxies. For one of the biggest pictures of all, there’s a colorful visualisation of the Cosmic Microwave Background — the radiation left behind from the Big Bang.

“We actually started this project because I was working on a three-dimensional mapping project of the universe and was always a little frustrated with the 2D visualisation on my screen, which wasn’t very meaningful,” said Kneib, in a nondescript lab building that houses a panoramic screen, a half-dome cinema with bean-bag seating, and a hard-floor space for virtual-reality excursions.

“It’s true that by showing the universe in 3D, by showing these filaments, by showing these clusters of galaxies which are large concentrations of matter, you really realise what the universe is,” he added.

The rover would collect soil that contains oxides and NASA would use separate equipment to extract oxygen from that soil.

Australia has agreed to build a 20-kilogram semi-autonomous lunar rover for NASA to take to the Moon as early as 2026 in search of oxygen.

The rover would collect soil that contains oxides and NASA would use separate equipment to extract oxygen from that soil, a government statement said. Oxygen extracted from the lunar surface would ultimately be used to sustain a human presence on the moon and support future missions to Mars.

Australian Space Agency deputy head Anthony Murfett said NASA had been impressed by technology used to remotely control from 1,600 kilometers huge dump trucks that transport iron ore from mines in northwest Australia.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the agreement would strengthen a relationship with Australia related to space exploration that dates back more than 50 years.

The agreement depends on the rover meeting a range of conditions during its development.

The process includes heating decomposed peat to a high temperature in a furnace for 2-3 hours.

Peat, plentiful in bogs in northern Europe, could be used to make sodium-ion batteries cheaply for use in electric vehicles, scientists at an Estonian university say.

Sodium-ion batteries, which do not contain relatively costly lithium, cobalt or nickel, are one of the new technologies that battery makers are looking at as they seek alternatives to the dominant lithium-ion model.

Scientists at Estonia’s Tartu University say they have found a way to use peat in sodium-ion batteries, which reduces the overall cost, although the technology is still in its infancy.

“Peat is a very cheap raw material – it doesn’t cost anything, really,” says Enn Lust, head of the Institute of Chemistry at the university.

The process includes heating decomposed peat to a high temperature in a furnace for 2-3 hours. The university expects the government to fund a small-scale factory in Estonia to try out the technology.

Distillers in Scotland dry malt over peat fires to flavour whisky, and some northern European countries use peat to fuel factories and households, or as fertiliser.

As bogs are drained to mine peat, they release trapped carbon dioxide, raising environmental concerns. But the Estonian scientists say they are using decomposed peat, a waste product of traditional extraction methods that is usually discarded.

Sodium-ion batteries using peat will need to prove they are commercially viable and can be scaled up, Lukasz Bednarski, a market analyst and the author of a book on batteries, told Reuters.

China’s battery giant CATL in July became the first major automotive battery maker to unveil a sodium-ion battery. “I think that companies will increasingly try to commercialise the sodium-ion battery, especially after the CATL announcement,” said Bednarski.

Less powerful sodium-ion batteries are likely to be used together with lithium-ion technology to bring down the overall cost of a battery pack, he said.

Some scholars have argued that tobacco may have been the first plant domesticated in North America - and for sociocultural rather than food purposes.

Scientists have unearthed evidence of a milestone in human culture – the earliest-known use of tobacco – in the remnants of a hearth built by early inhabitants of North America’s interior about 12,300 years ago in Utah’s Great Salt Lake Desert.

Researchers discovered four charred seeds of a wild tobacco plant within the hearth contents, along with stone tools and duck bones left over from meals. Until now, the earliest documented use of tobacco came in the form of nicotine residue found inside a smoking pipe from Alabama dating to 3,300 years ago.

The researchers believe the nomadic hunter-gatherers at the Utah site may have smoked the tobacco or perhaps sucked wads of tobacco plant fibre for the stimulant qualities offered by the nicotine it contained. After tobacco use originated among the New World’s native peoples, it spread worldwide following the arrival of Europeans more than five centuries ago.

Tobacco now represents a worldwide public health crisis, with 1.3 billion tobacco users and more than 8 million annual tobacco-related deaths, according to the World Health Organisation.

“On a global scale, tobacco is the king of intoxicant plants, and now we can directly trace its cultural roots to the Ice Age,” said archaeologist Daron Duke of the Far Western Anthropological Research Group in Nevada, lead author of the research published on Monday in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.

The seeds belonged to a wild variety of desert tobacco, named Nicotiana attenuata, that still grows in the area. “This species was never domesticated but is used by indigenous people in the region to this day,” Duke said.

The Great Salt Lake Desert today is a large dry lake bed in northern Utah. The hearth site at the time was part of a vast marshlands, with a chillier clime during the twilight of the Ice Age. It is called the Wishbone site owing to duck wishbones found in the hearth. The hearth remnants were found eroding out of the barren mud flats where wind has been peeling away sediment layers since the marshlands dried up about 9,500 years ago.

“We know very little about their culture,” Duke said of the hunter-gatherers. “The thing that intrigues me the most about this find is the social window it gives to a simple activity in an undocumented past. My imagination runs wild.”

Artifacts there included small sharp stone cutting tools and spear tips made of a volcanic glass called obsidian, used for hunting large mammals. One spear tip bore the remains of blood proteins from a mammoth or mastodon – elephant relatives that later went extinct.

“We surmise that tobacco must have figured into the ecological knowledge base of those who settled the interior of the North American continent, some 13,000-plus years ago,” Duke said.

Tobacco domestication occurred thousands of years later elsewhere on the continent, in the Southwestern and Southeastern United States and in Mexico, Duke added. “We don’t know when exactly tobacco was domesticated, but there was a great florescence of agriculture in the Americas within the last 5,000 years. Evidence for the use of tobacco, both direct – seeds, residue – and indirect – such as pipes -increases during these times alongside the domestication of food crops,” Duke added.

Some scholars have argued that tobacco may have been the first plant domesticated in North America – and for sociocultural rather than food purposes. “There is no doubt that people would have already been at least casually tending, manipulating and managing tobacco well before the population and food-requirement incentives that drove investments in agriculture,” Duke said.

OneWeb, backed by Bharti Group, announced that it entered an arrangement with NewSpace India Limited (NSIL), the commercial arm of ISRO, to launch its satellite in India from 2022.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday launched the Indian Space Association (ISpA), an industry body of government and private companies which aims to supplement the Centre’s efforts in commercial space exploration and space-based communication.

“Today is the day the Indian space sector receives new wings. For 75 years since independence, Indian space has been dominated by a single umbrella of Indian government and government institutions. Scientists of India have made huge achievements in these decades, but the need of the hour is that there should be no restrictions on Indian talent, whether it is in the public sector or in the private sector,” Modi said while inaugurating the industry body.

Represented by founding members such as Larson & Toubro, Nelco (Tata Group), OneWeb, Bharti Airtel, MapmyIndia, Walchandnagar Industries and Ananth Technology Ltd and other members like Godrej, Hughes India, Azista-BST Aerospace Pvt Ltd, BEL, Centum Electronics and Maxar India, the organisation aims to “engage with stakeholders across the ecosystem for the formulation of an enabling policy framework”, said a government release.

OneWeb, backed by Bharti Group, announced that it entered an arrangement with NewSpace India Limited (NSIL), the commercial arm of ISRO, to launch its satellite in India from 2022.

OneWeb is building its initial constellation of 648 low-earth orbit satellites and has already put 322 satellites into orbit. Its services are expected to start this year to the Arctic region including Alaska, Canada, and the UK. By late 2022, it will offer its high-speed, low latency connectivity services in India and the rest of the world.

NASA has confirmed that its set to launch its latest mission, to explore asteroids, to learn more about the early days of our solar system.

NASA has confirmed that it is set to launch its latest mission which will look to explore asteroids, to learn more about the early days of our solar system. The Lucy spacecraft is currently scheduled to liftoff on October 16 at 2:34 am Pacific Time (3:04 pm IST October 17).

If you wish to experience the historic launch event, you will be able to watch it online via NASA TV. NASA says that the mission will entail, the spacecraft to complete a 12-year journey to eight different asteroids.

The spacecraft will travel to the outer solar system during the course of the 12-year mission. Lucy will explore ancient asteroids, known as Trojan asteroids that are said to circle the Sun.

NASA has described Trojan asteroids as the “time capsules from the birth of our solar system”. Trojan asteroids “circle the Sun in two swarms, with one group leading ahead of Jupiter in its path, the other trailing behind it.” They have been named after characters in Greek mythology.

The Trojan asteroids are said to orbit in the same path as the largest planet in our solar system which is Jupiter. Lucy is set to be the first spacecraft to visit these asteroids in this region of our solar system.

The spacecraft will aid in procuring data, which will in turn help scientists delve deep into the solar system’s ancient history.

“With Lucy, we’re going to eight never-before-seen asteroids in 12 years with a single spacecraft. This is a fantastic opportunity for discovery as we probe into our solar system’s distant past”, Tom Statler, NASA scientist said in a statement, while speaking about the project.

NASA hopes that the Lucy mission will “revolutionise our knowledge of planetary origins and the formation of the solar system.”

As part of the 12 years-long mission, Lucy will explore a “record-breaking number of asteroids.”

“The spacecraft will fly by one asteroid in the solar system’s main belt and seven Trojan asteroids. Lucy’s path will circle back to Earth three times for gravity assists, which will make it the first spacecraft ever to return to our planet’s vicinity from the outer solar system,” NASA said in a statement.

PM Modi to Launch Indian Space Association Live News: Prime Minister Narendra Modi has launched the Indian Space Association (ISpA), which is an industry body focused on space policy and growth in the country.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has launched the Indian Space Association (ISpA). At the virtual launch event, PM Modi said that the government can no longer act as a handler for the Space sector, but rather has to work as an enabler. He said that the government’s policies will help ensure innovation in the private space sector. ISRO’s facilities will also be opened up to the private sector, he said during his address.

ISpA is a private industry body to help boost space technology in India. ISpA’s founding members include OneWeb, Bharti Airtel, Mapmyindia, Walchandnagar Industries, and Ananth Technology Limited among others. ISpA will participate and work with ISRO and others on the issue of policy around space technology and domain. It will focus on capacity building and space economic hubs and incubators in India.

MapMyIndia is also part of the Indian Space Association. MapMyIndia has already partnered with ISRO and will use the latter's satellites to help add more information on its own maps. "We are bringing on 4D mapping technology to make detailed maps of India," Verma says. 

The radioactive material lingered in forests because their ecosystems recycled nutrients so efficiently, meaning that wild mushrooms will show contamination for much longer than other agricultural products.

Around 95% of wild mushroom samples collected in Germany in the last six years still showed radioactive contamination from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, albeit not above legal limits, the German food safety regulator said on Friday.

Elevated concentrations of caesium-137 and caesium-134 isotopes bearing the characteristic signature of the Chernobyl blast were found especially in southern Germany, the federal office for consumer protection and food safety (BVL) said.

However, none of the 74 samples tested exceeded the legal limit of 600 becquerels of radiation per kg.

The BVL said the radioactive material lingered in forests because their ecosystems recycled nutrients so efficiently, meaning that wild mushrooms will show contamination for much longer than other agricultural products.

Concern at the long-term impact of nuclear disasters has fuelled public opposition to nuclear power, and in Germany triggered a decision, shortly after the accident at Japan’s Fukushima plant in 2011, to abandon it altogether.

Environmental and ethical concerns around the meat industry have driven interest in vegetable alternatives and the potential for lab-grown products.

Japan’s famed Wagyu beef, a delicacy that can cost more than $200 a pound at some top restaurants, could become much more affordable in the form of a lab-grown replica.

Japanese scientists say they have succeeded in recreating Wagyu, renowned for its fat marbling, in a laboratory to produce something that could eventually look and taste like the real steak.

Wagyu beef comes from a breed of black cattle, most famously cultivated in the Kobe area of Western Japan.

Osaka University researchers led by Michiya Matsusaki used 3-D bioprinters and bovine stem cells to replicate Wagyu’s distinctive marbling in a solid steak-like piece, rather than a minced form that has typified other attempts at cultured meat.

It currently takes about three to four weeks to generate a cubic centimetre of cultured meat, so it’s not ready for the grocer’s aisle just yet. But as the techniques and efficiency improve, the method could produce something that mimics the real thing, Matsusaki said.

“If we are able to quickly produce a lot of meat from a few cells, there’s a chance we can better respond to food and protein shortage issues in the future,” Matsusaki told Reuters.

Environmental and ethical concerns around the meat industry have driven interest in vegetable alternatives and the potential for lab-grown products. That has spurred strong growth in developers of real meat alternatives, including plant-based burger maker Impossible Foods Inc which is preparing for a public listing that could exceed $10 billion, sources say.

Matsusaki said the bioprinting and culture techniques developed in his lab could also have applications in human medicine, such as growing replacements for damaged muscles. It now takes about 10,000 yen ($89.40) to produce a single gram of lab-grown Wagyu, but with more automation, the price could drop such that it would be marketable for the general public within five years, Matsusaki said.

A 2017 study observed that changes in the behaviour of nocturnally migrating birds in response to light stimuli disappeared immediately after lights were switched off.

Cities are no safe havens for avian life. Birds collide into buildings very often because windows reflect the surrounding environment or offer avenues that look open. Birds that have nocturnal migratory patterns (i.e. migrate by the night) are particularly adversely affected by night lights of the city.

“Artificial lights can cause them to migrate too early or too late and miss ideal climate conditions for nesting, foraging and other behaviours,” the International Dark Sky Association states.

A recent study on the metropolis of Chicago, US, finds strong support for the relationship between bird mortality and artificial lighting. Of all American cities, Chicago presents the greatest light pollution risk to migratory birds. The study was conducted using a bird collision dataset collected at McCormick Centre, one of the major cultural centres of the city, over a 21 year long period.

“Chicago poses the greatest potential risk from light pollution to migrating birds of all cities in the United States and over 40,000 dead birds have been recovered from McCormick Place alone since 1978,” the paper states.

The data revealed that collision driven mortality bears a strong correlation with migration traffic, the area of lighted windows in a building and local weather conditions.

In spring and autumn, collision rates were 11 and 6 times higher when windows were lit, as opposed to when they were darkened. Whether or not a particular window was lit was the most important factor in deciding whether a bird collided into it. Darkening a window even reduced collision incidences on nearby windows.

The study predicts a 53% (autumn) to 59% (spring) decrease in collisions upon reduction of lighting to minimum levels that have been recorded historically. They also predict an increase of 46% (autumn) to 116% (spring) if all the windows were to be lit.

Naturally, switching off all the lights on all nights might not be commercially feasible, so it is suggested that reducing light pollution for the largest 25% of migration events, for even that leads to a reduction in collisions in no small measure.

Nocturnal bird behaviour

A 2017 study observed that changes in the behaviour of nocturnally migrating birds in response to light stimuli disappeared immediately after lights were switched off. Contrary to what is usually believed, building height may not be that important a factor in bird collision compared to the lit window-area.

Reports of birds colliding with buildings go back to as early as the nineteenth century. While referring to Porzana carolina, a small waterbird, an 1884/5 report on bird migration in the Mississippi Valley noted how “in 1884, an electric stood in their path and lured them to destruction’ and ‘were killed or wounded by striking the-light tower”.

In the wake of recent research on the subject, citizen-driven initiatives to switch off outdoor lights at night have gained traction in the recent past. Authorities have now started to issue advisories during peak migration season and when weather conditions are favourable for avian movement. Population declines in general notwithstanding, the number of bird collisions at the McCormick Centre plummeted quite abruptly once light out programmes commenced in 1999.

India and light pollution

Light pollution and other ‘by-products’ of rapid urbanisation threaten birds – and other animals – in the Indian subcontinent as well, as a review rightly notes. Some migratory birds that are particularly vulnerable are those whose migratory routes pass through India, include common crane, bar-headed goose, falcon, northern wheatear, Amur falcon etc.

Adverse effects of artificial lights on nocturnal ecology are observed on other species like bats, loris and insects. Light also deters sea turtles from moving to the beach at night to lay eggs. Hatchlings use light-cues from the horizon to move towards the ocean – however, artificial sources draw them away from the ocean, leading to their death.

A study on the tammar wallaby showed how artificial lights create a perception of a change in day length and lead to delayed births and the suppression of melatonin (a hormone responsible for the sleep-wake cycle).

Like birds, species of migratory fish too bear the brunt of the untoward consequences of anthropogenic lights. Artificial lighting has also altered predator-prey relations.

Scientists have planned to carry out more studies to unravel the climatic evolution of Mars and also search for remains of ancient aqueous life.

By studying the pictures sent by NASA’s Perseverance rover, researchers have now confirmed that Mars’ Jezero crater was once a lake. Although the crater is currently dry and wind-eroded, the area used to be fed steadily by a small river 3.7 billion years ago. The team also found evidence of flash floods that occurred in the ancient lake.

The findings were published Thursday in the journal Science.

“If you look at these images, you’re basically staring at this epic desert landscape. It’s the most forlorn place you could ever visit,” says Benjamin Weiss, professor of planetary sciences in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and a member of the analysis team in a release. “There’s not a drop of water anywhere, and yet, here we have evidence of a very different past. Something very profound happened in the planet’s history.”

Scientists have planned to carry out more studies to unravel the climatic evolution of Mars and also search for remains of ancient aqueous life. Samples collected by Perseverance will eventually be returned to Earth and scientists can further probe them.

“We now have the opportunity to look for fossils,” says team member Tanja Bosak, associate professor of geobiology at MIT. “It will take some time to get to the rocks that we really hope have samples for signs of life. So, it’s a marathon, with a lot of potential.”

Launched on July 30, 2020, the Perseverance rover landed on the Jezero crater on February 18, 2021. Its main job is to search for signs of ancient life and collect samples of rock for a possible return to Earth.

The rover’s two cameras, Mastcam-Z and the SuperCam Remote Micro-Imager (RMI) have helped capture images of Mars. Once the images are sent to Earth, the research team processes and combines the images. Their analysis revealed that the sediment must have been deposited by flowing water.

“The most surprising thing that’s come out of these images is the potential opportunity to catch the time when this crater transitioned from an Earth-like habitable environment to this desolate landscape wasteland we see now. These boulder beds may be records of this transition and we haven’t seen this in other places on Mars,” adds Benjamin Weiss.

The study on source apportionment of atmospheric pollution will help in assessment of contributions and temporal variability of sources that influence the area, the study said.

Mineral dust and biomass burning from northwest India and Pakistan polluted cities like Delhi and the Arabian Sea area, a new study has found.

The Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES) in Nainital, an autonomous research institute under the Department of Science and Technology (DST), along with Indian and foreign collaborators, studied the chemical composition and source apportionment of the total suspended particulate (TSP), which includes all the aerosols and air pollution in the central Himalayan region.

“Mineral dust, biomass burning, secondary sulfate, secondary nitrate from northwest India and Pakistan polluted cities like Delhi, the Thar Desert, and the Arabian Sea area, and long-range transported marine-mixed aerosols are the main sources of aerosols in the central Himalayan region,” said the Ministry of Science and Technology which shared the findings of the study. “This dust transport and forest fires are the main sources of TSP particularly in pre-monsoon period (March-May) when TSP concentration peaks in the region,” it said.

An aerosol is a collection of solid particles or liquid droplets dispersed in air. The study on source apportionment of atmospheric pollution, which elucidates the atmospheric chemistry, emission source origins, and transport pathways of aerosol over the central Himalayan region, will help in assessment of contributions and temporal variability of sources that influence the area through regional transport as well as climate impacts assessment, the study said.

“There is a knowledge gap regarding the primary and secondary organic carbon (POC, SOC) fractions, along with a lack of statistical methods for identifying and quantifying the sources of air pollutants at a receptor location in the central Indian Himalaya,” the study noted.

The study revealed that the main aerosol sources in Nainital were

*mineral dust (34 per cent)
*biomass burning (27 per cent)
*secondary sulfate (20 per cent)
*secondary nitrate (9 per cent)
*long-range transported marine mixed aerosols (10 per cent)

There was predominance of mineral dust in spring and summer and biomass burning and secondary sulfate in winter.

Afghanistan gets the worst score on the report, which says its ongoing conflict has damaged its ability to cope with risks to water and food supplies, climate change, and alternating floods and droughts.

A vicious cycle linking the depletion of natural resources with violent conflict may have gone past the point of no return in parts of the world and is likely to be exacerbated by climate change, a report said on Thursday.

Food insecurity, lack of water and the impact of natural disasters, combined with high population growth, are stoking conflict and displacing people in vulnerable areas, the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) think-tank said.

IEP uses data from the United Nations and other sources to predict the countries and regions most at risk in its “Ecological Threat Register”.

Serge Stroobants, IEP director for Europe, the Middle East and North Africa said the report identified 30 “hotspot” countries – home to 1.26 billion people – as facing most risks. This is based on three criteria relating to scarcity of resources, and five focusing on disasters including floods, droughts and rising temperatures.

“We don’t even need climate change to see potential system collapse, just the impact of those eight ecological threats can lead to this – of course climate change is reinforcing it,” Stroobants said.

Afghanistan gets the worst score on the report, which says its ongoing conflict has damaged its ability to cope with risks to water and food supplies, climate change, and alternating floods and droughts. Conflict in turn leads to further resource degradation, according to the findings.

Six seminars including governments, military institutions and development groups last year returned the message that “it is unlikely that the international community will reverse the vicious cycles in some parts of the world”, IEP said.

This is particularly the case in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa, which has seen more and worsening conflicts over the last decade, it said. “With tensions already escalating, it can only be expected that climate change will have an amplifying effect on many of these issues,” the report said.

The discovery may also offer insights into the origins of Papuans and Indigenous Australian people who share Denisovan DNA.

Genetic traces in the body of a young woman who died 7,000 years ago furnish the first clue that mixing between early humans in Indonesia and those from faraway Siberia took place much earlier than previously thought.

Theories about early human migration in Asia could be transformed by the research published in the scientific journal Nature in August, after analysis of the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), or the genetic fingerprint, of the woman who was given a ritual burial in an Indonesian cave.

“There is the possibility that the Wallacea region could have been a meeting point of two human species, between the Denisovans and early homo sapiens,” said Basran Burhan, an archaeologist from Australia’s Griffith University. Burhan, one of the scientists who participated in the research, was referring to the region of Indonesia that includes South Sulawesi, where the body, buried with rocks in its hands and on the pelvis, was found in the Leang Pannige cave complexes.

The Denisovans were a group of ancient humans named after a cave in Siberia where their remains were first identified in 2010 and scientists understand little about them, even details of their appearance.

The DNA from Besse, as the researchers named the young woman in Indonesia, using the term for a new born baby girl in the regional Bugis language, is one of the few well-preserved specimens found in the tropics. It showed she descended from the Austronesian people common to Southeast Asia and Oceania but with the inclusion of a small Denisovan portion, the scientists said.

“Genetic analyses show that this pre-Neolithic forager… represents a previously unknown divergent human lineage,” they said in the paper.

Since scientists have until recently thought North Asian people such as the Denisovans only arrived in Southeast Asia about 3,500 years ago, Besse’s DNA changes theories about patterns of early human migration.

The discovery may also offer insights into the origins of Papuans and Indigenous Australian people who share Denisovan DNA.

“Theories about migration will change, as theories about race will also change,” said Iwan Sumantri, a lecturer at Hasanuddin University in South Sulawesi, who is also involved in the project. Besse’s remains provide the first sign of Denisovans among Austronesians, who are Indonesia’s oldest ethnic grouping, he added. “Now try to imagine how they spread and distributed their genes for it to reach Indonesia,” Sumantri said.

By studying particulate matter in ice cores, scientists can pinpoint past events such as major fires, volcanic eruptions and even industrial smelting.

Written by Katherine Kornei

When it comes to records of human history, do not overlook Earth’s only uninhabited continent.

Researchers recently found soot preserved in Antarctic ice that they have linked to fires set in New Zealand by Maori settlers, the islands’ first human inhabitants. Finding evidence of conflagrations thousands of miles away is a dramatic example of early humanity’s environmental impact, the team suggests.

These results were published Wednesday in Nature.

Since the 1960s, researchers have been extracting long cores of ice from Antarctica, Greenland and other snowy locales. Ice cores, which are made up of layers of snow that accumulated annually and were compressed over time, consist of more than just ice, however. They can also contain particulate matter such as soot and volcanic ash that was once airborne.

By studying particulate matter in ice cores, scientists can pinpoint past events such as major fires, volcanic eruptions and even industrial smelting.

In 2008, McConnell and his colleagues began analysing six ice cores drilled in Antarctica. Working with roughly 3-foot-long sections of ice at a time, the team melted each one and fed the resulting liquid into an instrument that turned it into aerosols. The researchers then passed those aerosol particles through a laser that caused any soot present to heat up and glow.

“We measure that incandescence,” McConnell said.

Using this technique, the researchers calculated the rate at which soot particles had fallen over Antarctica over the past two millenniums. They found that four of the ice cores, all collected from continental Antarctica, exhibited roughly constant rates over time. But two other ice cores, both collected from James Ross Island on the northern Antarctic Peninsula, exhibited a roughly threefold uptick in soot beginning in the late 13th century.

That discrepancy was baffling. “What was different about the northern Antarctic Peninsula?” McConnell said.

The team turned to atmospheric modeling to investigate the mystery. The soot that ultimately settled on James Ross Island could have only come from a few locations, the researchers found. “Because of atmospheric circulation, New Zealand, Tasmania and Southern Patagonia fit the bill,” McConnell said.

To home in on the most likely source, the researchers analysed published records of charcoal found in each of the three places. Charcoal reveals that woody material was burned nearby, and changes in its abundance over time can be traced, just like soot records in ice.

Only New Zealand exhibited a pronounced uptick in charcoal abundance at the end of the 13th century, consistent with the ice core records from the northern Antarctic Peninsula.

“We see this big peak, which we call the initial burning period, around 700 years ago,” said Dave McWethy, an ecologist at Montana State University who studies charcoal in New Zealand and a co-author of the study.

But finding signatures of those fires thousands of miles away in Antarctica was a big surprise, McWethy said. “No one knew that it could travel that far and actually be recorded in ice cores.”

The increase in fire activity in New Zealand at the end of the 13th century is most likely linked to the arrival of Maori, researchers have proposed. Like other Indigenous groups, Maori used fire to make their environment more habitable, said McWethy. “Fire is an amazing tool for peoples around the world.”

Over 90% of New Zealand was forested when Maori settlers arrived, and burning parts of the landscape would have facilitated travel through the dense forest, McWethy said. “It’s pretty impenetrable.”

Fire would also have been important for clearing land to grow crops such as taro, yam and kumara, said Kelly Tikao, a researcher of Maori traditions at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand who is of Ngai Tahu, Ngati Mamoe and Waitaha ancestry, who was not involved in the research. Besides enabling agriculture, burning parts of the landscape would have promoted the growth of wild but edible plants such as bracken fern that thrive after fires, Tikao said.

The Maori used fire deliberately, but there was never an intent that it destroy their landscape, Tikao added.

“Our very philosophy of who we are is based on the elements of the Earth, fire being one of them,” she said. “When you believe the land is yourself, the last thing you want to do is kill it.”

The study illuminates the environmental conditions that allowed Acheulean populations to thrive at the margins of the monsoon in the Thar Desert until at least 177,000 years ago.

Populations of ancient humans using Acheulean stone toolkits persisted in India until about 177,000 years ago, shortly before the earliest expansions of our own species, Homo sapiens, across Asia, according to a study published on Wednesday.

The longest lasting tool-making tradition in prehistory, known as the Acheulean, was characterised by distinctive oval and pear-shaped stone handaxes and cleavers associated with Homo erectus and derived species such as Homo heidelbergensis.

Latest research led by the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany re-examined a key Acheulean site at the margins of the monsoon zone in the Thar Desert, Rajasthan.

The study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, shows the presence of Acheulean populations until about 177,000 years ago, shortly before the earliest expansions of Homo sapiens across Asia.

The timing and route of the earliest expansions of our own species across Asia have been the focus of considerable debate. However, a growing body of evidence indicates Homo sapiens interacted with numerous populations of our closest evolutionary cousins, the researchers said.

Identifying where these different populations met is critical to revealing the human and cultural landscape encountered by the earliest members of our species to expand beyond Africa, they said.

The researchers noted that although fossils of ancient human populations are extremely rare in South Asia, changes in the stone tool kits they made, used, and left behind can help resolve when and where these encounters may have occurred.

The latest research reports the relatively recent occupation of the site of Singi Talav by Acheulean populations up to 177,000 years ago.

The site was once thought to be amongst the oldest Acheulean sites in India, but now appears to be one of the youngest, according to the researchers. These dates show the persistence of Acheulean populations in the Thar Desert after their disappearance in eastern Africa around 214,000 years ago and Arabia 190,000 years ago, they noted.

The study illuminates the environmental conditions that allowed Acheulean populations to thrive at the margins of the monsoon in the Thar Desert until at least 177,000 years ago.

“This supports evidence from across the region indicating that India hosted the youngest populations using Acheulean toolkits across the world,” said Jimbob Blinkhorn of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, the lead author of the study. “Critically, the late persistence of the Acheulean at Singi Talav and elsewhere in India directly precedes evidence for the appearance of our own species, Homo sapiens, as they expanded across Asia,” Blinkhorn added.

The researchers noted that the site of Singi Talav, set on a lakeside close to the modern town of Didwana at the edge of the Thar Desert, was first excavated in the early 1980’s, revealing multiple stone tool assemblages.

The largest assemblage shows a focus on the production of stone handaxes and cleavers that are typical of the Acheulean, they said. However, the techniques needed to accurately date these assemblages were not available at the time of their discovery.

“The lakeside setting has ideal preservation conditions for an archaeological site, enabling us to return 30 years after the first excavation and readily re-identify the main occupation horizons again,” said Blinkhorn.

The researchers used luminescence methods to directly date the sediment horizons occupied by ancient human populations. These methods rely on the ability of minerals like quartz and feldspar to store and release energy induced by natural radioactivity, allowing scientists to determine the last time sediments were exposed to light.

“Ours is the first study to directly date the occupation horizons at Singi Talav, enabling us to understand both when ancient humans lived here and created the stone tool assemblages, and how these occupations compare with other sites across the region,” said Julie Durcan of the University of Oxford in the UK.

The Thar Desert sits at the western edge of the modern Indian summer monsoon system, and its habitability to ancient human populations likely fluctuated significantly. The researchers examined plant microfossils, known as phytoliths, as well as features of soil geochemistry to reveal the ecology of the site at the time the Acheulean toolkits were produced.

“This is the first time the ecology of an Acheulean site in India has been studied using these methods, revealing the broader character of the landscape that these populations inhabited,” said Professor Hema Achyuthan of Anna University, Chennai, who also participated in the excavations at the site. “The results from the two methods we applied complement each other to reveal a landscape rich in the types of grasses that flourish during periods with enhanced summer monsoons,” Achyuthan added.

Animal bones and pottery found in the septic tank could shed light on the lifestyle and diet of people living at that time, as well as ancient diseases, the antiquities authority said.

Israeli archaeologists have found a rare ancient toilet in Jerusalem dating back more than 2,700 years, when private bathrooms were a luxury in the holy city, authorities said Tuesday.

The Israeli Antiquities Authority said the smooth, carved limestone toilet was found in a rectangular cabin that was part of a sprawling mansion overlooking what is now the Old City. It was designed for comfortable sitting, with a deep septic tank dug underneath.

“A private toilet cubicle was very rare in antiquity, and only a few were found to date,” said Yaakov Billig, the director of the excavation. “Only the rich could afford toilets,” he said, adding that a famed rabbi once suggested that to be wealthy is “to have a toilet next to his table.”

Animal bones and pottery found in the septic tank could shed light on the lifestyle and diet of people living at that time, as well as ancient diseases, the antiquities authority said.

The archaeologists found stone capitals and columns from the era, and said there was evidence of a nearby garden with orchards and aquatic plants — more evidence that those living there were quite wealthy.

Parabon bioinformatician Dr. Janet Cady, who spearheaded the work, said in a release that this new imputation technology can also help study challenging forensic samples.

About 2000 years, how did the Egyptians look like? Did they have dark skin and curly hair? A Virginia-based lab has now recreated the faces of three mummies using their DNA. The three men were predicted to have a light brown complexion, with dark eyes and hair and no freckles.

Their findings were published last month at the International Symposium on Human Identification held in Florida, US.

Parabon NanoLabs predicted the faces of mummies that belonged to an ancient Nile community called the Abusir el-Meleq. This site is believed to have been inhabited from at least 3250 BC to 700 CE. Studies have shown that this area was of great religious significance. They were devoted to Osiris or the god of the dead.

In 2017, researchers from Germany published a paper in Nature detailing how they extracted the ancient DNA from these mummies and what the genomes suggest about their ancestry.

Using this DNA, Parabon NanoLabs carried out a comprehensive study and used the information to reconstruct the faces. The company writes that “this is the first time comprehensive DNA phenotyping has been performed on human DNA of this age.”

The lab used new models to predict the ancestry, skin pigmentation, and face morphology of the three mummies. “Interestingly, their ancestry was determined to be more similar to the modern Mediterranean and Middle Eastern individuals than to modern Egyptians.”

These results were similar to the 2017 paper which wrote that “ancient Egyptians shared more ancestry with Near Easterners than present-day Egyptians, who received additional sub-Saharan admixture in more recent times.”

The forensic artist created the likely appearance of the mummies at age 25. They used special three-dimensional face morphology studies to predict principal components of the faces such as the size of the head, the distance between facial features.

Parabon bioinformatician Dr Janet Cady, who spearheaded the work, said in a release that this new imputation technology can also help study challenging forensic samples.

Strip cropping, as seen in the U.S., is when wheat is grown along with corn and soyabean, in the same farm in an alternative manner

A paper has appeared recently in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA (PNAS) titled: “Integrated farming with intercropping increases food production while reducing environmental footprint” (see: Q. Chai et al., PNAS September 21, 118(38)e2106382118 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2106382118). This work found that (1) “relay planting” enhances yield, (2) within-field rotation or “strip rotation”, allowing strips for planting other plants (such as grass, fruits) besides the major crop was more fruitful, (3) “soil munching,” that is, available means such as crop straw, in addition to the major crop such as wheat or rice, and (4) “no-till” or a reduced tillage, which increases the annual crop yield up by 15.6% to 49.9%, and decreasing the environmental footprint by 17.3%, compared with traditional monoculture cropping. This led to the conclusion that small farm holders can grow more food and have reduced environmental footprint.

How do these factors apply to the small farmers of India? Current statistics reveal that our country has a significant population of small farmers, many owning less than 2 hectares of land. About 70% of its rural households still depend primarily on agriculture for their livelihood, with 82% of farmers being small and marginal. The total production of food-grains in 2017-18 was estimated to be 275 million tons. Some others have pointed out that only 30% of all farmers borrow from formal sources. The farm loan waivers from the state governments have been helpful in this regard, but yet, over 50% struggle to borrow from Shylockian sources.

Relay planting

The site “Relay Cropping- GK Today” explains this in some detail. Relay planting means the planting of different crops in the same plot, one right after another, in the same season. Examples of such relay cropping would be planting rice (or wheat), cauliflower, onion, and summer gourd (or potato onion, lady’s fingers and maize), in the same season. Why do this? Well, less risk since you do not have to depend on one crop alone. It also means better distribution of labour, insects spread less, and any legumes actually add nitrogen to the soil! We have read about how small farmers in Telangana, Karnataka and Maharashtra are actually doing this and earning money out of such relay farming. They plant onions, turmeric, chillies, ginger, garlic and even some native fruits, thus making profit, during these relay times. ‘GK Today’ does, however, point out the difficulties involved in such relay cropping, namely mechanisation here can be difficult, plus the management requirements are somewhat higher. It is here that women come in handy. Women plant materials for home food, such as greens, leafy vegetables and pulses such as green grams, Finger millet (ragi in Hindi, kezhwaragu in Tamil) horse gram (chane ki dal in Hindi, kudure gram in Kannada, and kollu in Tamil), cowpeas, and also grass (all of which add to the nitrogen to the soil and also to the world around us, fixing nitrogen not just under our feet but also in the air we breathe; the carbon dioxide, ozone, and the oxides of nitrogen and phosphorus that we inhale every day from the filthy atmosphere is at least nullified a little, thanks to relay cropping)!

Strip cropping

Strip cropping has been used in the U.S. (where the fields are larger than those in India), where they grow wheat, along with corn and soyabean, in the same farm in an alternative manner. However, this needs large lands. In India, where there are large fields (such as the ones owned by cities and state governments), the land is divided into strips, and strips of grass are left to grow between the crops. Planting of trees to create shelters has helped in stabilising the desert in Western India.

“Strip crop - a ray of hope” is the title given by the site ‘Vikaspedia’, which discusses Western Karnataka (and the nearby Telangana and Northern Tamil Nadu), dry belts with frequent droughts, where 80% of the farmers depend on groundnut as their option. The Karnataka Watershed Development (KAWAD), together with the AME Foundation, persuaded the farmers to stop using finger millets, fodder and groundnuts.

Soil mulching and no-till

While these methods are not easy for small farmers in India, they could be practised at least in larger farms such as the ones owned by industry and governments. Soil mulching requires keeping all bare soil covered with straw, leaves, and the like, even when the land is in use. Erosion is curtailed, moisture retained, and beneficial organisms, such as earthworms, kept in place. The same set of benefits are also offered by not tilling the soil.

These four methods suggested by the international group are worth following in India.

The study by IIT Kharagpur scientists adds a clue to the puzzle of the formation of the Moon

The key findings of a study led by IIT Kharagpur researchers could help us understand the formation and evolution of the Earth. They have studied a meteorite that fell near the town of Katol in Nagpur District of Maharashtra on May 22, 2012, reporting for the first time, presence of veins of the mineral bridgmanite, which is the most abundant mineral in the interior of the Earth, within the Katol L6 Chondrite meteorite. This finding adds evidence to the Moon-forming giant impact hypothesis.

Abundant mineral

“Bridgmanite is the most volumetrically abundant mineral of the Earth’s interior. It is present in the lower mantle (from 660 to 2700 km), and it is important to understand its formation mechanism to better comprehend the origin and evolution of planetary interiors,” says Sujoy Ghosh, Department of Geology and Geophysics, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, who designed the study and is the lead author of the paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (the U.S.).

The Moon-forming giant impact hypothesis is that long ago, nearly 4.5 billion years ago, the Earth collided with a planet the size of Mars named Thela, and the force of this impact was so huge as to melt the Earth down from the surface to a depth of 750 km to 1,100 km. The hypothesis goes that this caused the Earth to be bathed in a magma ocean, and the ejecta from the collision led to the formation of the Moon.

This is the most favoured hypothesis on the formation of the Moon and the present finding by the Kharagpur team lends further support to it.

Magma ocean

"Earth was an ocean of magma in the past. The heavier iron and nickel went to the core while the lighter silicates stayed in the mantle. By studying the meteorite, we can understand more details about the formation of the Earth and other planets," says Kishan Tiwari, research scholar from the Department of Geology and Geophysics, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur and an author of the paper, in an email to The Hindu.

“Bridgmanite consists of magnesium, iron, calcium aluminum oxide and has a perovskite structure,” says Dr Ghosh. He further explains that while the crystal structure of natural bridgmanite has been reported in other meteorites such as the Tenham and Suizhou meteorites, their chemical composition does not fully match with the terrestrial bridgmanite present in the Earth's interior between 660 and 2700 km depth.

“Our findings led to numerous other advances to understand how the Earth’s core formed about 4.5 billion years ago,” says Dr Ghosh. This finding could also help investigations of high-pressure phase transformation mechanisms in the deep Earth, which the group is planning to continue in future studies.

Which high-risk sub-group and age sub-group to start with has to be determined by reviewing hospitalisation and mortality data from India: Chandrakant Lahariya

In August, the Indian drug regulator (DCGI) granted an emergency use approval for Zydus Cadila’s DNA vaccine for use in adults and children aged 12 years and above. Recently the Subject Expert Committee of DCGI greenlighted Covaxin for children above two years. The vaccines are yet to be introduced in the national vaccination programme. The National Immunization Technical Advisory Group (NTAGI) Chairperson Dr. N.K. Arora had said children with comorbidities will be prioritised to receive the vaccine “immediately and healthy children can be immunised subsequently”. In an email, immunologist Dr. Satyajit Rath, formerly with the Delhi-based National Institute of Immunology and Dr. Chandrakant Lahariya, Physician-epidemiologist and vaccines expert discuss who needs the vaccine first and if healthy children need to be vaccinated.

Which subgroup of children and adolescents needs to get the vaccine on priority — the immunocompromised, adolescents, or those with comorbidities?

Satyajit Rath: This issue is somewhat complicated. Firstly, immunocompromised individuals, children or adults, may not, in fact, respond effectively to vaccination either. So simply saying that they are a vaccination priority is likely to be inadequate, and we need evidence (which we do not have) about what vaccination schedules might work well for them. Secondly, while it is true that children with the known comorbidities (which are not common among children) ought to be a priority for vaccination, there is another issue as well. In some instances, the nature of severe COVID-19 illness may be somewhat different in children (the so-called MIS-C), and we do not know, as far as I am aware, the predisposing factors for that. That all said, it is probably best, all other things being equal, to prioritise school-going children over younger children for vaccination, since that might have somewhat more of an effect on the spread of infection.

Chandrakant Lahariya: The current scientific evidence does not support vaccination of all healthy children. There is some experience and data now on use of a few specific COVID-19 vaccines in 12-17 years. Since COVID-19 vaccines are developed using different platforms, each needs its own data. Of the two COVID-19 vaccines being considered for use in the children in India, have so far been used only on 500-1,500 children in the trials. In fact, one of these vaccines — the Zydus vaccine (ZyCoV-D) — has not been used on any age group outside the clinical trials. Scientifically, we know that vaccines may have some the rare adverse events which can only be identified after their programmatic roll-out and effective adverse events following immunisation (AEFI) surveillance.

We also know that the efficacy of these have been tested against moderate-to-severe COVID-19, which are relatively low in children. Then, the experience of COVID-19 vaccines already in use in adolescents indicates that the risk of rare adverse events is relatively higher in adolescents than in adults. Putting these two together, there is less benefit and higher risk in vaccinating children and that’s why we should wait for more safety data to be available to recommend COVID-19 vaccination beyond the high-risk groups in older children.

Which high-risk sub-group to start with and which age sub-group has to be determined by review of the hospitalisation and mortality data from COVID-19 pandemic in India. That will provide fair insight where to start. Based upon such available data, starting with the high-risk children in 16-17 years could be one approach. Once full vaccine coverage of, let’s say 70-80% in that sub-group is achieved, it can be opened for high-risk children aged 12-15 years. Even the list of what constitutes high risk children should be based upon evidence and could be dynamic with possibility of inclusion of more conditions, once evidence is available. With available evidence, I don’t think India should consider vaccinating any child younger than 12 years before early next year.

Do we need small trials among children and adolescents with comorbidities before deciding to vaccinate them?

S.R.: I worry that we tend to treat vaccines as drugs, which they are not. Their safety certainly needs to be tested carefully with evidence. However, the comorbidities we are talking about are more relevant for the severity of COVID-19 disease, and not so much for vaccine safety, I think. So, yes, we need standard safety trials of all vaccines in children of appropriate age groups before approving and deploying them. But I do not think that large numbers of individuals with comorbidities need to be part of these safety trials.

C.L.: There is no need for additional clinical trials. The purpose of additional clinical trials in children is to examine dose tolerability, immunogenicity and safety. That much information is available. We need to remember these findings are always interpreted with findings of full trial in adults. However, the rare adverse events which cannot be picked by the clinical trials but can be different and at a higher rate in children, is what is of interest to experts involved in decision making. This requires the use of vaccines in programmes and a stronger and sensitive adverse-event reporting system which can capture such information.

Which comorbidities in children and adolescents make them more susceptible to severe disease and even death?

C.L.: The selection of comorbidities as criteria for vaccine eligibility is going to be complex and challenging. It has to factor in the operational feasibility, where the process to show comorbidity is not far too complicated. I think, in the beginning, it could be a narrow list of conditions to define high risk children, which can be expanded with further deliberations. Some such as immunocompromised children, those on long term therapies and illnesses and diabetic are common considerations. Easiest way to arrive on such a list is to use the available COVID-19 hospitalisation data and analyse which children required hospitalisation and what were the common morbidities they had.

Are there sufficient data for disease severity and long COVID in children (12 years and younger) and adolescents without comorbidities? In the absence of such data, should India be in a hurry to vaccinate them?

S.R.: There is evidence that even very young children can indeed suffer from severe COVID-19. I am not sure what would be considered “sufficient” evidence. Since there is no substantial risk in giving vaccines, once safety-tested with standard protocols, I am not sure why we would think in terms of “hurry” in vaccinating children. Vaccination, after all, provides not only the individual gain of protection from severe illness but also of reduction (however modest) in the magnitude and duration of virus spread to other people.

Are vaccines needed for healthy children and adolescents, especially since Covaxin supply is still limited and millions of adults are yet to be vaccinated with first/second dose, and nearly 60% of children have already been naturally infected?

S.R.: Well, vaccines are certainly needed for everyone. As an aside, again, I do not think that guesses about the proportions of people in various groups already infected/vaccinated, which depend on sero-surveys, are well founded. Many if not most of these sero-surveys have been modest in size, yet we are assuming that they correctly reflect reality. Also, we tend to assume that this percentage (60%) is uniformly seen in all children across the country, which is quite unlikely. Finally, I continue to think that vaccination carries value even for previously infected individuals. So we need vaccines.

Our inability to provide them adequately does, however, create a depressing situation of having to make priority choices, and in this sense, adults are clearly a higher priority for COVID-19 vaccination.

C.L.: The healthy children in India do not need vaccination, at least not at present. It is not about vaccine availability alone. India has reached a stage where there is more COVID-19 vaccine supply then demand. However, just because a country has more availability, it should not start vaccinating children. At the same time, that does not mean healthy children would never need COVID-19 vaccines. They may, in future. As an example, if a new variant emerges which causes moderate to severe disease in children at a rate higher than at present, then we may have to vaccinate healthy children.

The Zydus vaccine uses a novel vaccine platform, and outside the trial, the vaccine has not been used for vaccinating adults. Should such a vaccine be allowed to be used on adolescents without large-scale use in adults first?

S.R.: Since I do not think there are extraordinary risks with either the platform or the route of administration, I find the standard regulatory processes sufficient for determining whether to approve vaccine usage in children.

C.L.: It can be, at least theoretically. However, parents and people need to understand that none of the countries had rolled out vaccines for any subgroup of children without data being thoroughly examined and reviewed by the experts. None of the COVID-19 vaccines has been used in children in any country before millions of shots were administered to adults. There has been a time lag of around six months or longer use of a vaccine in adults before use in children. This was the approach even when there was a high rate of disease transmission in those settings.

While the FDA has granted an emergency use approval (EUA) for Pfizer vaccine for children in stages beginning with adolescents, the Subject Expert Committee has greenlighted Covaxin for all children above two years and the DCGI has granted an EUA for Zydus vaccine for those older than 12 years including adults. How prudent is this approach by the SEC and DCGI?

C.L.: Every country has their own regulatory approval approach and the criteria to give such authorisation. What we need to remember is that the regulatory approvals are focused upon data from clinical trials, examining whether the protocol was followed and if it meets pre-defined safety, efficacy and other agreed criteria. However, what is important to understand is that the licensing of vaccines is completely delinked from programmatic use of vaccines. Licensing does not mean it should be rolled out in a program. The decision on the second part is taken by an independent group of experts, who recommend vaccine introduction based upon a completely different set of considerations such as burden of diseases, risks and benefit, operational feasibility. They can and they do use data from other countries as well, to make a decision and even demand for limited roll-out and/or more data before decision making. What we need to remember is that the number of participants in the clinical trials of COVID-19 vaccines in children have been around one third of what other countries have done and that is limited data to consider full-fledged roll-out in children. When it comes to vaccinating kids, there is no such urgency as it was for the adult population, who are at higher risk. The decision to vaccinate kids has to be based upon calm assessment of scientific evidence, with use of as much data as possible, even if that means a few more weeks or months of waiting.

The Great Red Spot is probably the tallest Jovian storm measured so far with Juno's microwave and gravity-mapping instruments, the mission's lead scientist said.

Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, a storm so big it could swallow Earth, extends surprisingly deep beneath the planet’s cloud tops, scientists reported on October 28.

NASA’s Juno spacecraft has discovered that the monster storm, though shrinking, still has a depth of between 200 miles (350 kilometers) and 300 miles or so (500 kilometers.) When combined with its width of 10,000 miles (16,000 kilometers), the Great Red Spot resembles a fat pancake in new 3D images of the planet.

The mission's lead scientist, Scott Bolton of Southwest Research Institute, said there might not be a hard cutoff at the bottom of the storm.

“It probably fades out gradually and keeps going down," Mr. Bolton said at a news conference.

The research was published on October 28 in the journal Science.

The Great Red Spot is probably the tallest Jovian storm measured so far with Juno's microwave and gravity-mapping instruments, Mr. Bolton said. Thousands of storms rage across the gas giant at any given time — beautiful and colorful swirls, plumes and filaments covering the entire planet, as seen by the spacecraft's camera.

Still ahead for Juno is measuring the depth of the polar cyclones, which might penetrate even deeper beneath the clouds.

“I wouldn't want to be too quick to guess that we've seen the deepest," Mr. Bolton told reporters. "But the Great Red Spot is the largest and that makes it special by itself, and you might expect that it might be deeper just because of that.”

By contrast, some of the surrounding jet streams extend an estimated 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) into Jupiter.

Launched in 2011, Juno has been orbiting the solar system’s largest planet since 2016. NASA recently extended the mission by another four years, to 2025.

Now, a study by U.S. researchers analysed remnants of ancient asteroids and modelled the effects of their collisions to show that the strikes took place more often than previously thought.

Between 2.5 and 4 billion years ago it was not uncommon for asteroids or comets to hit the Earth. In fact, the largest ones, more than 9 kilometres wide, altered the chemistry of the planet’s earliest atmosphere.

Now, a study by U.S. researchers analysed remnants of ancient asteroids and modelled the effects of their collisions to show that the strikes took place more often than previously thought. These strikes may have delayed when oxygen started accumulating on Earth, says a Harvard University press release. The new models can help scientists understand more precisely when the planet started its path toward becoming the Earth we know today.

The researchers found existing planetary bombardment models underestimate how frequently asteroids and comets would hit Earth. The new, higher collision rate suggest impactors hit the planet roughly every 15 million years, about 10 times higher than current models.

The scientists realised this after analysing records of what appear to be ordinary bits of rock. They are actually ancient evidence, known as impact spherules, that formed in the fiery collisions each time large asteroids or comets struck the planet.

Researchers modelled how all these impacts would have influenced the atmosphere. They essentially found that the accumulated effects of meteorite impacts by objects larger than 9 kilometres probably created an oxygen sink that sucked most of the oxygen out of the atmosphere.

The findings align with the geological record which shows that oxygen levels in the atmosphere varied but stayed relatively low until around 2.4 billion years ago. Then the bombardment slowed down and the Earth then went through a major shift in surface chemistry triggered by the rise of oxygen levels known as the Great Oxidation Event.

Inputs from the fasted insulin levels created a memory that improved the fed insulin inputs, finds a study

In a study that examined the effect of insulin on liver cells taken from mice, researchers have uncovered how insulin amounts shape the flow of information through the signalling network. The study also provides insights into the degree to which major and minor components are important in keeping this signalling process intact. This knowledge can direct further studies to identify targets for therapy.

Larger role of insulin

Insulin is a hormone secreted by the b cells of the pancreas. It is commonly associated with an ability to regulate glucose metabolism. However, later studies (from around 1949 until recently) have shown it plays a larger role and helps in growth and maintenance of tissues. Despite years of study, fundamental details as to how differential amounts of insulin impact cells are unknown.

An important mechanism in the cell is insulin signalling, which is a series of biochemical reactions that convey information about availability of insulin and the necessity to regulate the glucose in the blood. There are two main pathways for insulin signalling, named AKT and ERK, which together balance metabolism and growth. These specifically control storage of glucose in the liver and also stimulate glucose transport in skeletal muscle and fat. Abnormalities in insulin signalling thus impact health and survival itself of organisms and the study addresses an important piece of the puzzle.

Study design

The study was done on liver cells isolated from mice. The experimental design mimicked both normal levels of insulin, as in a healthy individual, and abnormal levels of insulin that is associated with pathophysiology. “This was achieved by treating cells with (a) low fasted concentrations of insulin (b) high fed concentrations of insulin (c) very high hyperinsulinemic levels (d) pulsatile fasted insulin followed by fed insulin and (e) continuous or repeat exposure to fed insulin levels,” says Namrata Shukla from Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai, the first author of a paper on this work published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study was a collaboration between TIFR Mumbai, TIFR Hyderabad and Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.

Ullas Kolthur-Seetharaman from TIFR (Mumbai and Hyderabad), who led the work, explains that previous studies employed different, often very high amounts of insulin to investigate changes in signalling.

While these have revealed the components, the network properties and robustness of signaling has not been assessed by varying insulin inputs.

“Our study employs multiple regimes of insulin, both normal and abnormal, which together have illustrated how changes in levels of insulin is able to shape the flow of information within cells,” he says.

The study found that the inputs from the fasted insulin levels created a memory that improved the fed insulin inputs. “ It also elucidates the detrimental impact of constant high insulin as in the case of uncontrolled feeding habits, without a fasting phase, and its effects on signaling molecules that govern tissue maintenance and growth,” says Prof Kolthur-Seetharaman.

Future interventions

“Finally, it identifies potential novel regulatory components and parameters whose modulation could lead to better therapeutic interventions in the future to reduce tissue damage, beyond the usual impact on blood glucose,” he adds.

Ranjith Padinhateeri and Shantanu Kadam from IIT Bombay collaborated with the TIFR group on the mathematical modelling or simulation part of the study.

Differences between the memory B cells triggered by infection, vaccination might also underlie the heightened responses of hybrid immunity

Yet another study has shown that a combination of natural infection with a single dose of vaccine provides greater immunity than either natural infection without vaccination or full vaccination in infection-naïve individuals. People without prior infection but fully vaccinated with the Pfizer or AstraZeneca vaccine showed a decline in neutralising antibodies over a period of three to seven months. But the decline was much less in vaccinated people with prior infection.

Though 500 health-care workers with or without prior infection were vaccinated, those with hybrid immunity — natural immunity from an infection combined with the immunity provided by the vaccine — had a higher and more durable neutralising antibody response. The hybrid immunity offers stronger protection than just infection or full vaccination alone.

Neutralising antibodies

The study, posted in the preprint server medRxiv on October 19 (preprints are yet to be peer-reviewed), has found that in 500 health-care workers, the neutralising antibodies were twofold more in people immunised with Pfizer vaccine following natural infection compared with people immunised with Pfizer vaccine but without prior infection.

In the case of people vaccinated with AstraZeneca following natural infection, the neutralising antibodies were threefold more than in vaccinated people with no prior infection.

Early evidence

One of the early evidences of hybrid immunity being better than full vaccination in people without a prior infection came in end-April. The results posted in preprint server medRxiv found that vaccination led to increased levels of neutralizing antibodies against variants in people who had been previously infected compared with those without a prior infection.

An earlier study posted on August 25 in the preprint server medRxiv found that compared with vaccine-induced immunity from two doses of Pfizer vaccine, natural immunity conferred longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalisation caused by the Delta variant in Israel. But naturally infected individuals who were given a single dose of the vaccine showed additional protection against the Delta variant; the protection level conferred by hybrid immunity was even higher than the one offered by natural infection or full vaccination.

Soon after vaccines were rolled out, researchers began to notice higher levels of antibodies in people who were naturally infected prior to vaccination compared with vaccinated people without prior infection. In short, the hybrid immunity from natural infection followed by vaccination provided superior immunity than either natural infection alone or full vaccination.

Contrary point

However, a study published recently in the journal Science observed that “boosting of pre-existing immunity from prior infection with vaccination mainly resulted in a transient benefit to antibody titers with little-to-no long-term increase in cellular immune memory”.

There is a growing body of evidence that protection from natural immunity can be potent, and researchers are beginning to acknowledge this. However, scientific consensus about the exact strength or durability of the natural immunity post natural infection is not known. Also, the strength and durability of natural immunity might not be uniform and might vary between people depending on the nature and duration of infection (asymptomatic or symptomatic) and severity of disease (mild, moderate or severe).

“Antibody levels are really variable after recovering from infections, and those at the lower end of the spectrum might be more susceptible to reinfections,” Deepta Bhattacharya, Professor of immunology at the University of Arizona told NBC News. “But after a single vaccine in people who have recovered from COVID-19, antibodies skyrocket up, including those that neutralize variants of concern.”

Researchers at Rockefeller University in New York City looked at how different types of immunity would protect against potential variants. They modified the coronavirus spike protein such that it contained 20 naturally occurring mutations. In the lab, the modified spike protein was tested against antibodies from people belonging to three groups — those who have been fully vaccinated without prior infection, people with prior infection but not vaccinated, and people with hybrid immunity. They found the modified spike proteins were able to evade the antibodies from the first two groups but not antibodies from people with hybrid immunity. The study is posted in the preprint server BioRxiv.

In August, CDC published a study in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) where they showed that unvaccinated people without previous infection are twice as likely to be reinfected compared with vaccinated people with a prior infection. This study prompted the CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky to urge all Americans to take a vaccine even if previously infected. “If you have had COVID-19 before, please still get vaccinated,” she appealed.

Immunological edge

The immunological advantage from hybrid immunity arises mostly from memory B cells. While the bulk of antibodies after infection or vaccination decline after a short while, the memory B cells, which evolve in the lymph nodes, get triggered on subsequent infection or vaccination. So when people who recovered from COVID-19 are re-exposed to the spike protein, the memory B cells are capable of churning out highly potent antibodies.

“Differences between the memory B cells triggered by infection and those triggered by vaccination — as well as the antibodies they make — might also underlie the heightened responses of hybrid immunity. Infection and vaccination expose the spike protein to the immune system in vastly different ways,” Dr. Michel Nussenzweig, an immunologist at the Rockefeller University in New York City told Nature.

Dr. Nussenzweig’s team isolated hundreds of memory B cells from people at various time points after infection and vaccination. They found that unlike after full vaccination, antibodies produced by natural infection continued to grow in potency and their breadth against variants for a year after infection. According to Nature, unlike after vaccination, the memory B cells formed after natural infection are more likely to make antibodies that block immune-evading variants.

But two studies have found that memory B cells in the fully vaccinated people without prior infection are growing in number and gaining mutations up to 12 weeks after the second dose, which allows the B cells to recognise and neutralise variants.

India-based data are needed that reveal whether the vaccines continue to protect against hospitalisations and death

The SARS-CoV-2 vaccination programme in India began on 16 January, this year. It has been close to eight months since the time individuals who were vaccinated early on received the second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. This set includes healthcare and other frontline workers, followed by high-risk individuals, including the elderly. Countries such as the U.K., Israel, and the U.S. have started administering booster doses of vaccines, and this has led to the question of whether India should start considering booster doses as well.

Three criteria

For booster doses to be recommended as a policy decision, three criteria need to be met. First, it should be clear that the immunity offered by a vaccine wanes with time, and this results in an increase in the probability of breakthrough infections. Second, for a disease that runs a mild course in a majority of individuals, it should be evident that the lowered efficacy of vaccines with the passage of time is true not only for infection, but also for moderate-to-severe disease necessitating hospitalisation and/or causing death. Third, it is important to prove that the administration of a booster dose reduces the probability of such severe disease, thereby saving lives and reducing the burden on healthcare.

Studies from Israel and the U.S. suggested that the incidence of breakthrough infections increased progressively with the passage of time from the second dose of mRNA vaccines. The study from Israel found this to be true for severe infections as well , with the finding that individuals above the age of 60 were especially vulnerable. A report which analysed the effectiveness of the AstraZeneca Vaxzevria vaccine (which goes by the name of Covishield in India) by Public Health England, found an increased incidence of breakthrough infections after 20 weeks post-vaccination. The effectiveness against hospitalisation and death, though lower, was largely preserved, suggesting that the vaccine continued to be protective against these outcomes. Similar to the mRNA vaccine results, a greater waning of immunity was observed among individuals who were above the age of 65 years and among individuals with underlying medical conditions. While the loss of effectiveness of vaccines against hospitalisations and death are not universally convincing, the data in favour of that being the case for the immunocompromised and the elderly seem consistent.

What is lacking is a biomarker of either cellular and/or antibody mediated immunity which correlates with protection, especially as the former may have an important role to play in long-term protection.

Protective doses

Will the addition of a booster protect against such breakthrough infections, including those that are severe? The results of a study from Israel, although debated for its methodology, seem to suggest that boosters are protective, when given at least 5 months after the initial 2 doses. Whether the same holds true for non-mRNA vaccines is not known. Data from the COV-BOOST trial suggested that an mRNA vaccine resulted in a stronger booster effect no matter what the primary vaccine was, and this was used to guide the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) recommendations in the U.K.. If India decides to recommend boosters, this data needs to be considered to decide the choice of booster recommended.

The biggest argument against booster doses is that of vaccine equity. It is a known fact that even a single dose of a vaccine protects against hospitalisation and death. In a world in which vaccine shortages have resulted in so many people being left unvaccinated, is it fair to deprive some of protection against hospitalisation and death, while protecting others from an infection that is likely to be mild?

Difficult questions

Even within a country, there are a few difficult questions to be answered. When a common vaccine is used for all age groups, should the first dose of the vaccine for a 15-year old be prioritised over a booster dose for a 65-year old? Or should we prioritize arresting transmission by targeting universal vaccination, as transmission has the potential of selecting newer variants? Should we wait for such newer variants and target specific boosters against them, as is the strategy for an influenza vaccine? Should preventing infections, even mild, among healthcare workers be a priority, considering that they are in close contact with immunosuppressed individuals on a daily basis?

We need data from India to know whether both the available vaccines continue to protect against hospitalisations and death, and whether this is true across all risk groups. In the absence of such data, the extrapolation from studies across the world would suggest that those with immunosuppressive conditions and the elderly might benefit from a booster dose, as has been suggested by the World Health Organization. For the other trade-offs, models that simulate transmission across groups (for example, in schools), hospitalisation rates with varying losses of vaccine effectiveness, and the likely protective effects of boosters in altering such burdens on the healthcare system will be useful to make informed decisions.

Duncan McLaren once stated that “Famine is not caused by a shortage of food; it is caused by a shortage of justice”. Similarly, while many parts of the world wait with eager anticipation for individuals to receive their first dose, it is key that if we recommend booster doses of vaccines, we do it in a way that is just and based on sound scientific principles.

(Lancelot Pinto is a consultant respirologist at P.D. Hinduja National Hospital and Medical Research Centre, Mumbai.)

Deadly bacterium found in spray used by victims.

A made-in-India aromatherapy spray is being pulled off retail giant Walmart’s shelves in the United States after a medical investigation linked it to melioidosis, a rare disease that has sickened at least four, and may have caused two deaths, in the country. The spray was reported to contain a bacterium, Burkholderia pseudomallei, that causes a rare but deadly disease called melioidosis, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said in a statement on Friday.

The spray, “Better Homes and Gardens Lavender & Chamomile Essential Oil Infused Aromatherapy Room Spray with Gemstones”, was found on October 6 in the home of a Georgia resident who became ill with melioidosis in late July.

Other than mentioning that the spray was manufactured in India, no other details on the spray’s origins were disclosed.

The contaminated spray was sold at 55 Walmart stores on the company’s website from February to October 21 of this year, when Walmart pulled the remaining bottles of the spray and related products from its store shelves.

A spokesperson for Walmart, in response to queries from The Hindu, said that the room spray was manufactured by “Flora Classique Inc.” and sold under the “Better Homes & Gardens” brand. “We pulled the product from the shelves of about 55 stores where it was part of a pilot programme,” the spokesperson wrote.

Flora Classique, an online search showed, is registered in Wildomar, California, the U.S. Its website says it is “...affliated with Ramesh Flowers Pvt Ltd. In Tuticorin India, one of the largest manufacturers and exporters of Home Fragrance and Home Decor products in India since its inception in 1982”. Since 2018, the company has been a part of the Gala Candles Group, a German company.

The CDC has been testing blood samples from patients as well as soil, water and consumer products in and around patients’ homes since they began receiving samples in May.

A sample of the Better Homes & Gardens spray tested positive for the bacterium this week and genetic analysis revealed that it was similar to the strains found in South Asia, the CDC statement noted.

Melioidosis is a rare but serious disease in the United States with 12 cases reported annually. The causative bacterium is extremely elusive and hard to detect and the disease symptoms it manifests are frequently mistaken for other diseases.

The true burden of the disease is unknown in India but a 2016 modelling study by scientists at the University of Oxford predicted a global incidence of around 165,000 cases worldwide with an estimated case fatality of 89,000 (54%). This study suggested melioidosis to be endemic to India with an annual incidence of close to 52,500 cases. Treatment usually involves a long intensive course of intravenously delivered anti-microbial therapy.

Gene editing helps create resilient, high-yield rice without foreign DNA: Indian Agricultural Research Institute

Even as the Centre investigates allegations that unauthorised genetically modified (GM) rice was exported to Europe, it is yet to decide on a research proposal from its own scientists which would allow plants to be genetically modified without the need for conventional transgenic technology. Unlike the older GM technology which involves the introduction of foreign DNA, the new proposal involves the use of gene editing tools to directly tweak the plant’s own genes instead.

Scientists at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute are in the process of developing resilient and high-yield rice varieties using such gene editing techniques, which have already been approved by many countries, and they hope to have such rice varieties in the hands of the Indian farmers by 2024. However, the proposal for Indian regulators to consider this technique as equivalent to conventional breeding methods, since it does not involve inserting any foreign DNA, has been pending with the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee for almost two years.

Editorial | Plugging the leak: On the GM rice controversy

The IARI has previously worked on golden rice, a traditional GM variety which inserted genes from other organisms into the rice plant, but ended trials over five years ago due to agronomic issues, said Director A.K Singh. India has not approved any GM food crop for commercial cultivation.

Newer technologies

The Institute has now moved to newer technologies such as Site Directed Nuclease (SDN) 1 and 2. They aim to bring precision and efficiency into the breeding process using gene editing tools such as CRISPR, whose developers won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2020.

“In this case, you are just tweaking a gene that is already there in the plant, without bringing in any gene from outside. When a protein comes from an outside organism, then you need to test for safety. But in this case, this protein is right there in the plant, and is being changed a little bit, just as nature does through mutation,” said Dr. Singh. “But it is much faster and far more precise than natural mutation or conventional breeding methods which involve trial and error and multiple breeding cycles. It is potentially a new Green Revolution.”

Also read: The science behind GM crops

A research coalition under the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), which includes the IARI, is using these techniques to develop rice varieties which are drought-tolerant, salinity-tolerant and high-yielding. They could potentially be ready for commercial cultivation within three years, said Dr. Singh.

However, the draft guidelines for such gene-editing techniques have been stuck with GEAC for almost two years. In a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi last year, a group of senior scientists calling themselves the India Agriculture Advancement Group (IAAG) expressed concern over the “inordinate delay”.

A senior official said the guidelines had been submitted to GEAC in January 2020, after an extended public consultation and expert review process under the aegis of the Department of Biotechnology and approval from its Review Committee on Genetic Manipulations.

No foreign DNA

“The SDN 1 and SDN 2 categories of genome edited plants do not contain any foreign DNA when they are taken to the open field trials,” said the IAAG letter, which argued against further consultation with State Governments. Signatories include the former heads of the ICAR, the National Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the Indian Institute of Science.

“The U.S., Canada, Australia and Japan are among the countries which have already approved the SDN 1 and 2 technologies as not akin to GM, so such varieties of rice can be exported without any problem,” said Dr. Singh. The European Food Safety Authority has also submitted its opinion that these technologies do not need the same level of safety assessment as conventional GM, though the European Union is yet to accept the recommendation, he said.

President Moon Jae-in, who observed the launch on-site, still described the test as an “excellent accomplishment”

South Korea’s first domestically produced space rocket reached its desired altitude but failed to deliver a dummy payload into orbit in its first test launch on Thursday.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who observed the launch on-site, still described the test as an “excellent accomplishment” that takes the country a step further in its pursuit of a satellite launch program.

Live footage showed the 47-meter (154 foot) rocket soaring into the air with bright yellow flames shooting out of its engines following blastoff at Naro Space Center, the country’s lone spaceport, on a small island off its southern coast.

Lim Hye-sook, the country’s Science Minister, said Nuri rocket’s first and second stages separated properly and that the third stage ejected the payload – a 1.5-ton block of stainless steel and aluminum – at 700 kilometers (435 miles) above Earth.

But she said launch data suggested that the third stage’s engine burned out early after 475 seconds, about 50 seconds shorter than planned, failing to provide the payload with enough speed to stabilize in orbit.

Committee to analyse what went wrong

Officials from the Korea Aerospace Research Institute, the country’s space agency, said debris from the payload would have landed somewhere in waters south of Australia. The institute was planning to form an inspection committee soon to analyse what went wrong and map out adjustments before the rocket’s next test launch.

The launch, which took place at 5:00 p.m. (0800 GMT), had been delayed by an hour because engineers needed more time to examine the rocket’s valves. There had also been concerns that strong winds and other conditions would pose challenges for a successful launch.

“Although (the launch) failed to achieve its objectives perfectly, it was an excellent accomplishment for a first launch,” Mr. Moon said in a televised speech.

“The separations of the rockets, fairings (covering the payload) and the dummy satellite worked smoothly. All this was done based on technology that is completely ours,” he added.

After relying on other countries to launch its satellites since the early 1990s, South Korea is now trying to become the 10th nation to send a satellite into space with its own technology.

Officials say such an ability would be crucial for the country’s space ambitions, which include plans for sending more advanced communications satellites and acquiring its own military intelligence satellites. The country is also hoping to send a probe to the moon by 2030.

Nuri is the country’s first space launch vehicle built entirely with domestic technology. The three-stage rocket is powered by five 75-ton class rocket engines placed in its first and second stages. It is designed to deliver a 1.5-ton payload into orbit 600 to 800 kilometers (372 to 497 miles) above Earth.

“The launch left some frustration, but it's meaningful that we confirmed we have obtained core technology” for space launches, said Ms. Lim, the Minister.

Scientists and engineers at KARI plan to test Nuri several more times, including conducting another launch with a dummy device in May 2022, before trying with a real satellite.

South Korea had previously launched a space launch vehicle from the Naro spaceport in 2013, which was a two-stage rocket built mainly with Russian technology. That launch came after years of delays and consecutive failures. The rocket, named Naro, reached the desired altitude during its first test in 2009 but failed to eject a satellite into orbit, and then exploded shortly after takeoff during its second test in 2010.

Speculation over North Korea’s reaction

It wasn’t clear how North Korea, which had been accused of using its space launch attempts in past years as a disguise for developing long-range missile technology, would react to Thursday’s launch.

While pushing to expand its nuclear and missile program, the North had shown sensitivity about South Korea’s increasing defense spending and efforts to build more powerful conventionally armed missiles.

In a speech to Pyongyang’s rubber-stamp parliament last month, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un accused the U.S. and South Korea of “destroying the stability and balance” in the region with their allied military activities and a U.S.-led “excessive arms buildup” in the South.

While Nuri is powered by liquid propellants that need to be fueled shortly before launch, the South Koreans plan to develop a solid-fuel space launch rocket by 2024, which could be cheaper to build and prepared for launch more quickly. Such rockets would also be ideal for more sensitive space launches, including those involving military intelligence satellites.

South Korea’s space ambitions received a boost in recent years as the Trump and Biden administrations took steps to ease decades-long U.S. restrictions that capped Seoul’s missile development before eventually allowing its ally to build conventional weapons with unlimited range and warhead weight. In easing the so-called missile guidelines, the U.S. also removed a limit on how powerful South Korea's solid-fuel rockets can be for space launch purposes.

South Korea currently has no military surveillance satellites of its own, which leaves it relying on U.S. spy satellites to monitor North Korea. Officials have expressed hopes of launching domestically developed, low-orbit military surveillance satellites using the country’s own solid-fuel rockets in the next several years.

Insights can be applied to diagnosing neurodevelopmental disorders like autism, improving road safety and enhancing the reliability of eyewitness testimonies

Our brains pay attention to details, but may sometimes fail to notice even marked differences. This phenomenon of overlooking a visual change, or ‘change blindness’, has been studied by a research group at the Centre for Neuroscience and the Department of Computer Science and Automation, Indian Institute of Science (IISc).

They have developed a novel computational model of eye movement that can predict a person’s ability to detect changes in their visual environment, in a study published in PLoS Computational Biology.

The researchers believe that successful change detection may be linked to enhanced visual attention – how some people are better at selectively focusing on specific objects.

In the study, the team first checked for change blindness among 39 persons by showing them an alternately flashing pair of images that have a minor difference between them.

“We expected some complex differences in eye movement patterns between subjects who could do the task well and those who could not. Instead, we found some very simple gaze-metrics that could predict the success of change detection,” Sridharan Devarajan, Associate Professor at the Centre for Neuroscience, and corresponding author of the paper.

Successful change detection was found to be linked to two metrics: how long the subjects’ gaze was fixated at a point, and the variability in the path taken by their gaze between two specific points (‘saccade amplitude’).

“Subjects who fixated for longer at a particular spot, and whose eye movements were less variable were found to detect changes more effectively,” according to the findings.

Based on these observations, the researchers developed a computational model that can predict how well a person might be able to detect changes in a sequence of similar images shown to them. The model also takes into consideration various biological parameters, constraints and human bias.

“Since biological neurons are ‘noisy’, they do not encode the image precisely,” according to Mr. Devarajan. There is a lot of variability in the way neurons encode – process and/or respond to – images in the brain, which can be captured by a mathematical representation called the Poisson process.

“Other researchers have previously developed models that focus either only on eye movement or on change detection, but the model developed by the IISc. team goes one step further and combines both. The researchers also tested their model against a state-of-the-art deep neural network called DeepGaze II, and found that their model performed better at predicting human gaze patterns in free-viewing conditions – when the subjects were casually viewing the images. While DeepGaze II could predict where a person will look if presented with an image, it did not work as well as the IISc-developed model at predicting the eye movement pattern of a person searching for a difference in the images,” according to the findings.

In the future, the researchers also plan to incorporate artificial neural networks with ‘memory’ into the model – to more realistically mimic the way our brains retain recollections of past events to detect changes. The authors say that the insights into understanding change blindness provided by their model could help scientists better understand visual attention and its limitations. Some examples of areas where such insights can be applied include diagnosing neurodevelopmental disorders like autism, improving road safety while driving or enhancing the reliability of eyewitness testimonies.

Samples indicate volcanic activity was still occurring on the moon as recently as 2 billion years ago.

Moon rocks brought back to Earth by a Chinese robotic spacecraft last year have provided new insights into ancient lunar volcanic activity, a researcher said on Tuesday.

Li Xianhua said an analysis of the samples revealed new information about the moon’s chemical composition and the way heat affected its development.

Mr. Li said the samples indicate volcanic activity was still occurring on the moon as recently as 2 billion years ago, compared to previous estimates that said such activity halted between 2.8 billion and 3 billion years ago.

“Volcanic activities are a very important thing on the moon. They show the vitality inside the moon, and represent the recycling of energy and matter inside the moon,” Mr. Li told the reporters.

China in December brought back the first rocks from the moon since missions by the U.S. and former Soviet Union in the 1970s.

On Saturday, China launched a new three-person crew to its space station, a new milestone in a space program that has advanced rapidly in recent years.

China became only the third country after the former Soviet Union and the United States to put a person in space on its own in 2003 and now ranks among the leading space powers.

Alongside its crewed program, it has expanded its work on robotic exploration, retrieving the lunar samples and landing a rover on the little-explored far side of the moon.

It has also placed the Tianwen-1 space probe on Mars, whose accompanying Zhurong rover has been exploring for evidence of life on the red planet.

China also plans to collect soil from an asteroid and bring back additional lunar samples.

The country also hopes to land people on the moon and possibly build a scientific base there. A highly secretive space plane is also reportedly under development.

The military-run Chinese space program has also drawn controversy.

China’s Foreign Ministry on Monday brushed-off a report that China had tested a hypersonic missile two months ago. A ministry spokesperson said it had merely tested whether a new spacecraft could be reused.

As the number of such cases will increase in Chennai in the days to come, animal rescuers start focussing on letting people know how not to kill the bird with kindness

It can sometimes be hard to tell what killed an exhausted migratory bird — the exhaustion of long-distance flying or the kindness of its benefactors.

The Indian pitta is susceptible to both. Animal rights activist and rescuer Shravan Krishnan is once again doing what he has done over the years, around this time — educating Chennai residents on the do’s and dont’s of pitta rescue and care. One can sense the message coming with a gust of urgency.

Through the first half of this week, Besant Memorial Animal Dispensary at Theosophical Society, found residents from different addresses — one from KK Nagar, two from Thiruvanmiyur and another from Adyar — entering the portals of the facility carrying injured and dehydrated pittas they had found in their stomping grounds. The pitta brought in from KK Nagar has a broken wing.

Setting out from regions as far as the Himalayan foothills, Pittas are known for bumpy landings in their wintering grounds, being disoriented, dehydrated and sometimes hugely injured.

In well-meaning but uninformed hands that have rescued these birds, they may be in for a greater ordeal.

Sharvan particularly points out one assumption that significantly adds to the bird’s distress.

“It is a small, colourful-looking bird, and people may get confused and take it for a baby bird.”

One can visualise the “care” that does the bird more harm than good.

“They are small birds and so, highly prone to stress. Too much of handling and too many people around them would definitely stress them out,” observes Shravan.

The animal rescuer runs through a few points that ought to be ticked while nursing a pitta back to its wings.

“Firstly, do not pick them up immediately and drop them at a rescue centre unless their condition warrants it. You keep them in a cardboard box in a dark, quiet, cool room. If you can afford to keep it in air-conditioning, nothing like it. Or, just any cool room — may be, the bathroom — will do.”

The pitta grows only to be adorably tiny, and its stubby tail helps it retain a picture of “babyishness” through its lifetime. Look what happens when people do not know the pitta, let alone this facet about it.

“Many people kind of give them milk and other things. They are mostly insectivorous. Do not feed them anything: Just keep a bowl of water with ORS,” says Shravan.

That advice applies to any bird — migratory or otherwise — found dehydrated or disoriented.

And, a distressed pitta is not a photo op.

“Do not handle the bird too much, taking photographs and selfies.” Circle back to the point about what can happen to pittas that face “too much handling”.

“After a day or two, it the bird is fine, release it at the same spot where you picked it up,” says Shravan. “If it is completely down, has a broken leg, a broken wing, then bring it to the rescue centre. Out of a hundred cases, only a few would be like that.”

Any migratory bird can suffer similarly from the effects of long-distance flying, and Shravan draws attention to how the orange-headed thrush has been brought into the dispensary many a time. However, the pittas are unfortunately light-years ahead in the matter, proving to be delicate darlings among long-distance migratory birds.

Pittas are affected in this manner in their other wintering grounds as well. “With Bengaluru in its migration path, such cases are reported from the city. An organisation called Avian Reptile Rehabilitation Centre (ARRC) in Bengaluru addresses this issue among others. We interact with ARRC regularly around issues of this nature that pertain to migratory birds, and also about the issue of birds being put in danger on account of kite-flying with the manja thread. This is rampant in Bengaluru. In Chennai, the situation is better because of the ban, but it still happens.”

Shravan points out that most facets of caring for pittas the right way apply to other migratory birds that have a rough landing after a long journey.

“Most of the migratory birds are susceptible to dehydration, but Pitta is huge in this respect; I would get 30 to 40 calls, and many people would not know what it is, with some mistaking it for a kingfisher.”

To find help for a pitta in distress or any other bird, migratory or resident, call 9445070909.

There are some concerns about how early and how mild the disease has to be for the drug to work, says Dr. Kang.

On October 11, just 10 days after Merck announced via a press release the highly encouraging news of an interim analysis of a phase-3 trial using the antiviral drug molnupiravir, the company has submitted an emergency use authorisation application to the FDA. Preliminary data, which is yet to be peer-reviewed, shows molnupiravir can reduce risk of hospitalisation or death by 50% in non-hospitalised adult patients with mild-to-moderate COVID-19 disease. That molnupiravir is an oral drug is a major advantage in treating patients as it would not require hospitalisation. In an email, Dr. Gagandeep Kang, Professor of Microbiology at CMC, Vellore, explains the other advantages that the drug will have, if granted an EUA.

Since it is an oral drug unlike Remdesivir, can molnupiravir (if given an EUA) substantially change the way COVID-19 disease is managed?

Yes, molnupiravir has significant promise. But there are some concerns about how early and how mild the disease has to be for molnupiravir to work. It seems important to treat within the first few days of diagnosis or symptoms and the drug does not work towards the more severe end of the spectrum, including what is considered moderate disease.

Why was the drug tested only in people older than 60 years and those with at least one risk factor associated with poor outcomes?

The study was designed to include people with at least one risk factor for severe disease, because the goal was to study progression to severe disease. Had completely healthy people been included the study size would have needed to be much larger to get clear outcomes. Merck’s selection strategy of people at risk of severe disease led to a clear answer on efficacy in mild disease, such that the study was stopped for efficacy with data on 775 people.

What is the precise mechanism by which the drug prevents the SARS-CoV-2 virus RNA replication process through “error catastrophe”? Besides blocking replication, can the drug also reduce the viral load in humans? Like in ferrets, can the drug also block virus transmission in humans?

Molnupiravir is a pro-drug, which means that it needs to undergo processing in the body to become active. It is metabolised to a ribonucleoside analog, which is essentially a sugar molecule linked to a molecule that resembles a nucleic acid. Nucleic acids are needed to make RNA, and if molnupiravir is used, the viral enzyme instead of using real cytidine or uridine uses a molecule that is generated by metabolism of molnupiravir called NHC-TP. The virus has a proof-reading mechanism but the viral exnuclease which is responsible for removing mistakes does not recognize NHC-TP as an error, so that when the viral RNA polymerase is making copies of RNA that contains molnupiravir, then it randomly replaces cytidine or uridine. This causes more mutations that can be survived by the virus or it becomes unable to replicate — this is called lethal mutagenesis or error catastrophe. A Phase IIa study conducted earlier this year showed a reduction in viral load in the upper respiratory tract, which will indirectly reduce transmission.

How has the drug performed against other viruses, including influenza, tested in the past?

The drug has performed well against influenza in animal studies and was set to go into phase-1 trials in 2020. It has also worked well against Ebola and Chikungunya.

Can the virus develop resistance to molnupiravir considering that the drug can induce several point mutations in the virus at random locations?

It is always possible for a virus to develop mutations that will render an antiviral ineffective, but molnupiravir’s mode of action makes it a little less likely than for many other antivirals. If multiple antivirals are available then using a combination that targets different steps in the replication of the virus is the best way to delay the development of resistance. Both remdesivir and molnupiravir target the same enzyme but in different ways, so while ideal to have the same target, it may be worthwhile to test a combination therapy, with the caveat that giving IV infusions as required for remdesivir negates the ease and reach of an oral drug such as molnupiravir.

Is there a possibility that the nucleoside analog can turn out to be mutagenic? Though none were seen in the trial, what are the chances that the drug might cause serious adverse events?

There are opinions that molnupiravir may potentially drive mutagenesis in viral RNA and mammalian DNA. Scientists from Emory who developed the drug say they have not seen any evidence of mutagenicity. In April 2021, Merck reported results of preclinical research using assays that should identify the ability of drugs to induce mutations — animals were given molnupiravir at high doses and for longer times than in human clinical trials, and no evidence of mutagenicity or genotoxicity was found. But the clinical trials excluded pregnant and breastfeeding women and required men to not donate sperm and required either abstinence or contraception for all genders.

Since Merck has signed non-exclusive agreements with generic manufacturers in India to produce the drug for low- and middle-income countries, will we see the drug becoming accessible to people in these countries unlike the vaccines?

With eight Indian companies manufacturing the drug, I assume it will become accessible, but indiscriminate use should be prevented. The last thing we want is for a promising drug to become useless if it is inappropriately used, as happens all too often with antibiotics in India.

Since the virus replication blocking mechanism may not be affected by variants that might emerge in future, can the drug be seen as a substitute for vaccines especially in countries deprived of vaccines?

The drug is not yet in the market and vaccine supply is increasing so this is not an either/or situation. An antiviral to be used in early treatment of an infected person with 50% efficacy in those with conditions predisposing to severity has a role that is very different from vaccines that are intended to protect prior to exposure.

As in the trial, will the drug be restricted for use only in unvaccinated people belonging to the approved categories?

Restricting the drug to unvaccinated individuals makes no sense whatsoever, but using it for people at risk does. The reason for not giving it to vaccinated individuals in the trial was because vaccination reduces the risk of progression to severe disease, which is what the trial wanted to measure. But once the trial is done, we want to prevent progression to severe disease in all infected individuals, vaccinated or unvaccinated. Vaccinated individuals who are older and have co-morbidities continue to have a higher risk of severe disease and certainly should be given the drug if they develop symptoms,

A Merck spokesperson has said what is regarded as a “moderate” case in India is considered severe in the U.S. How does one define “moderate” disease?

The Indian definition was 90-93% oxygen saturation for moderate disease, while anything lower than 93% would be considered severe in the US. The important thing about definitions in trials is that they should be the same measured using the same protocol.

In mice, BET inhibitors used alone or in combination with anti-androgen drugs was found effective

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur, have discovered that a particular gene (DLX1) which plays an important role in the development of jaws, skeleton, and interneurons in the brain has an important role to play in the growth and development of prostate cancer.

The DLX1 protein is found at elevated levels in prostate cancer patients, the reason why the DLX1 protein has been used as a urine-based biomarker. Now the team of researchers led by Dr. Bushra Ateeq, Professor at the Department of Biological Sciences and Bioengineering, IIT Kanpur has found that the DLX1 protein, which is expressed at higher levels in the prostate cancer cells, has a huge role in the growth and development of the tumour and the spread of the cancer to other organs in the body (metastasis).

Using small molecules as inhibitors, the researchers have shown in mice a new therapeutic strategy to treat people with DLX1-positive prostate cancer.

First, the researchers found around 60% of the prostate cancer tissues have higher levels of DLX1 protein. And when the team genetically ablated the DLX1 gene that produces the protein, the ability of cancer cells to grow, develop and spread to other parts of the body was compromised.

“We used mice models to further ascertain the role of DLX1 protein in prostate cancer growth and metastasis,” says Sakshi Goel from IIT Kanpur and first author of a paper published in Nature Communications.

To carry out the experiments in mice, the researchers first genetically engineered prostate cancer cells that expressed higher levels of DLX1 protein to generate the cells which cannot produce the DLX1 protein. Both types of cancer cells were then implanted in two groups of mice. While mice that had received cancer cell implants expressing higher levels of the protein developed huge tumour, the mice that were implanted with DLX1-ablated cancer cells developed only small tumours, and had fewer cancer cells migrating to other organs.

The second experiment on mice was to examine the ability of cancer cells to metastasis and grow in bones. “Prostate cancer cells have a tendency to metastasize in bones. So, we checked the role of DLX1 protein in cancer metastasis,” says Goel. For this, they used cancer cells that were either DLX1-ablated or those expressing higher levels of the protein, and implanted the cancer cells into the tibia (bone) of the mice. A month after implant, the tumour growing in the tibia was monitored using CT scan. Mice implanted with cancer cells with elevated levels of DLX1 exhibited more bone damage than the cells that were DLX1-ablated. “These findings proved the role of DLX1 in prostate tumour growth and bone metastases,” Goel says.

Androgen receptor is responsible for promoting the development of prostate cancer. Also, about 50% of prostate cancer harbour an aberrant gene which is a product of two genes (TMPRSS2 and ERG) being fused together and results in production of higher levels of ERG protein.

“Interestingly, exploring the association between these important factors revealed that about 96% of TMPRSS2-ERG fusion-positive prostate cancer patients show high levels of DLX1 protein as well. In concert with this, about 70% of the patients with high androgen receptor signaling also have elevated DLX1 protein levels,” says Prof. Ateeq.

The researchers have further shown that both androgen receptor and fusion gene product, ERG are responsible for increased level of DLX1 in prostate cancer cells. Having understood the mechanism responsible for prostate cancer growth and development, and it’s spread to distant organs, the researchers turned their attention to finding a way to reduce the expression of DLX1 protein in the cancer cells. They found that a particular protein (Bromodomain and extra terminal or BET) assists the function of both androgen receptor and ERG. “We found that if the BET protein is inhibited using small molecules, the function of both the androgen receptor and the ERG protein to upregulate DLX1 gets inhibited. As a result, the expression of the DLX1 protein and its tumorigenic potential is reduced,” says Goel.

Preclinical mice studies showed that administering BET inhibitors alone or in combination with anti-androgen drugs resulted in about 70% reduction in tumour burden along with diminished distant metastases. “Those prostate cancer patients with higher levels of DLX1 may benefit by this treatment strategy. There are several commercially available diagnostics tests for detecting DLX1 levels, therefore it is relatively easy to categorize the patients who could respond to BET inhibitors,” says Prof. Ateeq.

At the heart of this technology are synthetic frameworks of silica and alumina with nanometer-sized pores that are rigid and inflexible

Chemists, when they are designing or building new molecules, can be thought of as architects and builders. An organic chemist can plan a blueprint for a new molecule, and synthesize it with precision out of atoms of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and so on. After centuries of fine-tuning this skill, chemists in the early 20th century moved up to synthesizing long, thread-like one-dimensional polymers. The polyethylene of plastic bags is made from repeating units of the ethylene molecule, (importantly, the units are linked by the same firm chemical bonds as are seen within an organic molecule. This provides the stability that ensures that a shirt made from polyester-mixed yarn is long lasting). In biological systems, proteins are 1-dimensional polymers of amino acids.

Adding new dimensions

In recent years, this has been taken to a new level by the creation of extended 2- or 3-dimensional structures from linking together molecular units just as was done for polymers, but in two or three dimensions. The basic units go on fitting together to form large networks, like a wire mesh fence. The network is constructed by repeated additions of a molecule with symmetry. A few such networked sheets, when stacked one over another, form a functional 2-D entity. Because words like polymer do not do justice to this complex arrangement of atoms, such molecular networks are called frameworks.

Uses for these Covalent Organic Frameworks (COFs) take advantage of their stability, large surface area, controlled pore sizes, and tunable chemical environments. Just as you choose the size of the ‘pore’/hole in a wire mesh, frameworks can be designed to act as sieves in separating out molecules of a specified size. The smallest whiff of a toxic gas could be sensed - in an industrial environment, or in airline baggage. They are also suitable for both storing energy (as capacitors) and for conducting it (along membranes in fuel cells).

Metal Organic frameworks (MOFs) are structured like COFs but have metals in complexes with organic entities. The choice of metals is wide, from Beryllium to Zinc, though relatively abundant metals are preferred for economic and environmental reasons. They offer great advantages: for gas storage, as in the case of hydrogen storage in fuel cells; in catalysis, where they replace very expensive metals; in sensors; and in drug-delivery – anti-cancer and other drugs with severe side effects can be trapped in the porous confines of MOFs, to be released in small and steady doses.

Use of zeolites

Zeolites are highly porous, 3-D meshes of silica and alumina. In nature, they occur where volcanic outflows have met water. Synthetic zeolites have proven to be a big and low-cost boon. One biomedical device that has entered our lexicon during the pandemic is the oxygen concentrator. This device has brought down the scale of oxygen purification from industrial-size plants to the volumes needed for a single person. At the heart of this technology are synthetic frameworks of silica and alumina with nanometer-size pores that are rigid and inflexible. Beads of one such material, zeolite 13X, about a millimeter in diameter, are packed into two cylindrical columns in an oxygen concentrator.

The chemistry here is tailored to the task of separating oxygen from nitrogen in air. Being highly porous, zeolite beads have a surface area of about 500 square meters per gram. At high pressures in the column, nitrogen is in a tight embrace, chemically speaking, with the zeolite. Interaction between the negatively charged zeolite and the asymmetric nucleus (quadrupole moment) of nitrogen causes it to be preferentially adsorbed on the surface of the zeolite.

Oxygen remains free, and is thus enriched. Air has 78% nitrogen, 20.9% oxygen and smaller quantities of argon, carbon dioxide, etc. Once nitrogen is under arrest, what flows out from the column is 90%-plus oxygen. After this, lowering the pressure in the column releases the nitrogen, which is flushed out, and the cycle is repeated with fresh air.

Global volunteer efforts have made available very detailed instructions on building your own oxygen concentrator, with locally available resources. In India, IISc has transferred the technology of making oxygen concentrators to over 20 companies.

(Co-authored with molecular modeler Dr. Sushil Chandani)

dbala@lvpei.org and sushilchandani@gmail.com

While previous studies have suggested that Venus may have been a much more hospitable place in the past, with its own liquid water oceans, a recent study by astrophysicists led by the University of Geneva found that Venus is unlikely to have harboured any ocean anytime in the past.

The researchers simulated the climate of the Earth and Venus at the very beginning of their evolution, when the surface of the planets was still molten. The high temperatures seen in Venus meant that any water would have been present in the form of steam. Using sophisticated three-dimensional models of the atmosphere, similar to those scientists use to simulate the Earth's current climate and future evolution, the team studied how the atmospheres of the two planets would evolve over time and whether oceans could form in the process, a release says.

“Thanks to our simulations, we were able to show that the climatic conditions did not allow water vapour to condense in the atmosphere of Venus,” says Martin Turbet of the University of Geneva and the first author of a paper published in Nature. This means the temperatures never got low enough for the water in its atmosphere to form raindrops that could fall on its surface. Instead, water remained as a gas in the atmosphere, and oceans never formed. “One of the main reasons for this is the clouds that form preferentially on the night side of the planet. These clouds cause a very powerful greenhouse effect that prevented Venus from cooling as quickly as previously thought,” he says in a release.

Lucy’s $981 million mission is the first to aim for Jupiter’s so-called Trojan entourage: thousands — if not millions — of asteroids that share the gas giant’s expansive orbit around the sun.

A NASA spacecraft named Lucy rocketed into the sky with diamonds on Saturday on a 12-year quest to explore eight asteroids.

Seven of the mysterious space rocks are among swarms of asteroids sharing the Jupiter's orbit, thought to be the pristine leftovers of a planetary formation.

An Atlas V rocket blasted off before dawn, sending Lucy on a roundabout orbital journey spanning nearly 4 billion miles (6.3 billion kilometers).

Lucy is named after the 3.2 million-year-old skeletal remains of a human ancestor found in Ethiopia nearly a half-century ago.

That discovery got its name from the 1967 Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” prompting NASA to send the spacecraft soaring with band members' lyrics and other luminaries’ words of wisdom imprinted on a plaque.

The spacecraft also carried a disc made of lab-grown diamonds for one of its science instruments.

The paleoanthropologist behind the fossil Lucy discovery, Donald Johanson, said he was filled with wonder about this “intersection of our past, our present and our future.”

“That a human ancestor who lived so long ago stimulated a mission which promises to add valuable information about the formation of our solar system is incredibly exciting,” said Mr. Johanson, of Arizona State University, who traveled to Cape Canaveral for the launch.

Jupiter’s asteroids

Lucy’s $981 million mission is the first to aim for Jupiter’s so-called Trojan entourage: thousands — if not millions — of asteroids that share the gas giant’s expansive orbit around the sun.

Some of the Trojan asteroids precede Jupiter in its orbit, while others trail it.

Despite their orbits, the Trojans are far from the planet and mostly scattered far from each other. So there’s essentially zero chance of Lucy getting clobbered by one as it swoops past its targets, said Southwest Research Institute’s Hal Levison, the mission’s principal scientist.

Lucy’s travels

Lucy will swoop past Earth next October and again in 2024 to get enough gravitational oomph to make it all the way out to Jupiter’s orbit. On the way there, the spacecraft will zip past asteroid Donaldjohanson between Mars and Jupiter. The aptly named rock will serve as a 2025 warm-up act for the science instruments.

Drawing power from two huge circular solar wings, Lucy will chase down five asteroids in the leading pack of Trojans in the late 2020s. The spacecraft will then swoop back toward Earth for another gravity assist in 2030 that will swing it back out to the trailing Trojan cluster, where it will zip past the final two targets in 2033.

It’s a complicated, circuitous path that had NASA’s science mission chief, Thomas Zurbuchen, shaking his head at first. “You’ve got to be kidding. This is possible?” he recalled asking.

Lucy will pass within 600 miles (965 kilometers) of each target; the biggest one is about 70 miles (113 kilometers) across.

“Are there mountains? Valleys? Pits? Mesas? Who knows? I’m sure we’re going to be surprised,” said Johns Hopkins University’s Hal Weaver, who’s in charge of Lucy’s black-and-white camera.

“But we can hardly wait to see what ... images will reveal about these fossils from the formation of the solar system,” he said.

NASA plans to launch another mission next month to test whether humans might be able to alter an asteroid's orbit — practice in case Earth ever has a killer rock headed this way.

The crew will do three spacewalks to install equipment in preparation for expanding the station; assess living conditions in the Tianhe module and conduct experiments in space medicine and other fields

China's Shenzhou-13 spacecraft carrying three Chinese astronauts docked on October 16 at its space station, kicking off a record-setting six-month stay as the country moves toward completing the new orbiting outpost.

The spacecraft was launched by a Long March-2F rocket at 12:23 a.m. on October 16 and docked with the Tianhe core module of the Tiangong space station at 6:56 a.m., approximately six and a half hours later.

The two men and one woman are the second crew to move into the space station, which was launched last April. The first crew stayed three months.

The new crew includes two veterans of space travel. Zhai Zhigang (55) and Wang Yaping (41) and Ye Guangfu (41) who is making his first trip to space.

They were seen off by a military band and supporters singing “Ode to the Motherland,” underscoring the weight of national pride invested in the space program, which has advanced rapidly in recent years.

The crew will do three spacewalks to install equipment in preparation for expanding the station; assess living conditions in the Tianhe module and conduct experiments in space medicine and other fields.

China’s military-run space program plans to send multiple crews to the station over the next two years to make it fully functional.

When completed with the addition of two more sections — named Mengtian and Wentian — the station will weigh about 66 tons, much smaller than the International Space Station, which launched its first module in 1998 and weighs around 450 tons.

Two more Chinese modules are due to be launched before the end of next year during the stay of the yet-to-be-named Shenzhou-14 crew.

China's Foreign Ministry on October 15 renewed its commitment to cooperation with other nations in the peaceful use of space.

Spokesperson Zhao Lijian said sending humans into space was a “common cause of mankind.” China would “continue to extend the depth and breadth of international cooperation and exchanges” in crewed spaceflight and “make positive contributions to the exploration of the mysteries of the universe,” he said.

China was excluded from the International Space Station largely due to U.S. objections over the Chinese program’s secretive nature and close military ties, prompting it to launch two experimental modules before starting on the permanent station.

U.S. law requires congressional approval for contact between the American and Chinese space programs, but China is cooperating with space experts from other countries including France, Sweden, Russia and Italy. Chinese officials have said they look forward to hosting astronauts from other countries aboard the space station once it becomes fully functional.

China has launched seven crewed missions with a total of 14 astronauts aboard — two have flown twice — since 2003, when it became only the third country after the former Soviet Union and the United States to put a person in space on its own.

China has also expanded its work on lunar and Mars exploration, including landing a rover on the little-explored far side of the Moon and returning lunar rocks to Earth for the first time since the 1970s.

This year, China also landed its Tianwen-1 space probe on Mars, whose accompanying Zhurong rover has been exploring for evidence of life on the red planet.

Other Chinese space programs call for collecting soil from an asteroid and bringing back additional lunar samples. China has also expressed an aspiration to land people on the moon and possibly build a scientific base there, although no timeline has been proposed for such projects. A highly secretive space plane is also reportedly under development.

Space rockets on the Korean peninsula have been fraught with concerns over their potential use for military purposes, leaving South Korea’s efforts lagging more capable programmes in China and Japan.

South Korea plans to test its first domestically produced space launch vehicle next week, a major step toward jump starting the country’s space programme and achieving ambitious goals in 6G networks, spy satellites, and even lunar probes.

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If all goes well, the three-stage NURI rocket, designed by the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) to eventually put 1.5-ton payloads into orbit 600 to 800 km above the Earth, will carry a dummy satellite into space on Thursday.

South Korea’s last such booster, launched in 2013 after multiple delays and several failed tests, was jointly developed with Russia.

The new KSLV-II NURI has solely Korean rocket technologies,and is the country's first domestically built space launch vehicle, said Han Sang-yeop, director of KARI's Launcher Reliability Safety Quality Assurance Division.

"Having its own launch vehicle gives a country the flexibility of payload types and launch schedule," he told Reuters in an email.

Military and civilian benefits

It also gives the country more control over “confidential payloads” it may want to send into orbit, Han said.

That will be important for South Korea’s plans to launch surveillance satellites into orbit, in what national security officials have called a constellation of “unblinking eyes” to monitor North Korea.

So far, South Korea has remained almost totally reliant on the United States for satellite intelligence on its northern neighbour.

In 2020 a Falcon 9 rocket from the U.S. firm Space X carried South Korea’s first dedicated military communications satellite into orbit from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

NURI is also key to South Korean plans to eventually build a Korean satellite-based navigation system and a 6G communicationsnetwork.

“The program is designed not only to support government projects, but also commercial activity,” Oh Seung-hyub, director of the Launcher Propulsion System Development Division, told a briefing on Tuesday.

South Korea is working with the United States on a lunar orbiter, and hopes to land a probe on the moon by 2030.

Trial launch

Given problems with previous launches, Han and other planners said they have prepared for the worst.

The launch day may be changed at the last minute if weather or technical problems arise; the craft will carry a self-destruct mechanism to destroy it if it appears it won't reach orbit; and media won’t be allowed to observe the test directly.

At least four test launches are planned before the rocket will be considered reliable enough to carry a real payload.

According to pre-launch briefing slides, the rocket’s planned path will take it southeast from its launch site on the south coast of the Korean peninsula, threading its way over the ocean on a trajectory aimed at avoiding flying over Japan, Indonesia, the Philippines, and other major land masses.

"This upcoming launch may be remembered as the hope and achievement of Korean rocketry historically no matter the launch is successful or not," Han told Reuters.

Sensitive technology

Space rockets on the Korean peninsula have been fraught with concerns over their potential use for military purposes, leaving South Korea’s efforts lagging more capable programmes in China and Japan.

"Modern rocketry in Korea couldn't devote its capability much in R&D of rockets because of long-standing political issues," Han said.

The United States has viewed North Korea’s own satellite launch vehicles as test beds for nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile technology. A North Korean space launch in 2012 helped lead to the breakdown of a deal with the United States.

"North Korea, of course, will not look favourably on South Korea’s rapidly advancing space capabilities, which are far more technologically advanced than those possessed by the North,"said James Clay Moltz, a space systems expert at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School.

South Korea’s push into space comes as it speeds ahead with its own military ballistic missile systems after agreeing with the United States this year to end all bilateral restrictions onthem.

"There is no concern on military applications in NURI launch vehicle development," said Chang Young-keun, a missile expert at the Korea Aerospace University. Unlike the liquid-fuelled NURI,South Korea’s military missiles use solid fuel, which is better for weapons, he added.

South Korea is not seen as a "threat" by either Russia or China, so it seems unlikely to affect their space programs, which are already highly militarised, Moltz said.

"Many space launch technologies are inherently dual-use," he said, but noted that he hopes NURI’s development will "not lead to an arms race in space, but instead a safer ‘information race’" where South Korea has better intelligence to head off any future crisis.

The first crew who served a 90-day mission aboard the main Tianhe core module of the space station had returned in mid-September

China is preparing to send three astronauts to live on its space station for six months — a new milestone for a program that has advanced rapidly in recent years.

It will be China's longest-ever crewed space mission and set a record for the most time spent in space by Chinese astronauts. The Shenzhou-13 spaceship is expected to be launched into space on a Long March-2F rocket early Saturday morning from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on the edge of the Gobi Desert in northwestern China.

The first crew who served a 90-day mission aboard the main Tianhe core module of the space station returned in mid-September.

The new crew has two veterans of space travel. Pilot Zhai Zhigang, 55, performed China’s first spacewalk. Wang Yaping, 41 and the only woman on the mission, carried out experiments and led a science class in real-time while traveling on one of China’s earlier experimental space stations. Ye Guangfu, 41, will be traveling into space for the first time.

The mission is expected to continue the work of the initial crew, who conducted two spacewalks, deployed a 10-meter (33-foot) mechanical arm, and held a video call with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

China Manned Space Agency Deputy Director Lin Xiqiang said the rocket was fueled and ready to fly. “All systems conducting the Shenzhou-13 mission have undergone a comprehensive rehearsal. The flight crew is in good condition and our pre-launch preparations are in order," Mr. Lin said at a Thursday briefing.

The crew's scheduled activities include up to three spacewalks to install equipment in preparation for expanding the station, verifying living conditions in the module and conducting experiments in space medicine and other areas, Lin said.

China’s military, which runs the space program, has released few details but says it will send multiple crews to the station over the next two years to make it fully functional. Shenzhou-13 will be the fifth mission, including un-crewed trips to deliver supplies.

When completed with the addition of two more modules — named Mengtian and Wentian — the station will weigh about 66 tons, a fraction of the size of the International Space Station, which launched its first module in 1998 and will weigh around 450 tons when completed.

China was excluded from the International Space Station largely due to the U.S. objections over the Chinese program’s secretive nature and close military ties. It made plans to build its own space stations in the early 1990s and had two experimental modules before starting on the permanent station.

U.S. law requires congressional approval for contact between the American and Chinese space programs, but China is cooperating with space experts from countries including France, Sweden, Russia and Italy.

China has sent 14 astronauts into space since 2003, when it became only the third country after the former Soviet Union and the United States to do so on its own.

Along with its crewed missions, China has expanded its work on lunar and Mars exploration, including placing a rover on the little-explored far side of the Moon and returning lunar rocks to Earth for the first time since the 1970s.

China this year also landed its Tianwen-1 space probe on Mars, whose accompanying Zhurong rover has been exploring for evidence of life on the red planet.

Other programs call for collecting soil from an asteroid and bring back additional lunar samples. China has also expressed an aspiration to land people on the moon and possibly build a scientific base there, although no timeline has been proposed for such projects. A highly secretive space plane is also reportedly under development.

The compound, described in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, targets a key human protein called transmembrane serine protease 2 (TMPRSS2) that coronaviruses harness to enter and infect human cells.

Scientists have developed a chemical compound that they say could prevent infection from SARS-CoV-2 virus or reduce the severity of COVID-19 if given early in the course of an infection.

The compound, called MM3122, interferes with a key feature of many viruses that allows them to invade human cells, according to the researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in the US.

The compound, described in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, targets a key human protein called transmembrane serine protease 2 (TMPRSS2) that coronaviruses harness to enter and infect human cells.

“Great vaccines are now available for SARS-CoV-2, but we still need effective antiviral medications to help curb the severity of this pandemic,” said study senior author James W Janetka, a professor at Washington University.

“The compound we are developing prevents the virus from entering cells,” Janetka said.

Janetka said that the ultimate goal of the study is to advance the molecules into an inhibitor that can be taken by mouth, and that could become an effective part of drug inhibitors against COVID-19.

The new drug compound potently blocks TMPRSS2 and another related protein called matriptase, which are found on the surface of the lung and other cells, according to the researchers.

“Many viruses including SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, as well as other coronaviruses and influenza depend on these proteins to infect cells and spread throughout the lung,” they said.

After the virus latches onto a cell in the airway epithelia, the human protein TMPRSS2 cuts the virus’s spike protein, activating the spike protein to mediate fusion of the viral and cellular membranes, initiating the process of infection.

MM3122 blocks the enzymatic activity of human protein TMPRSS2 which perturbs the activation of the spike protein and suppresses membrane fusion.

“The SARS-CoV-2 virus hijacks our own lung cells’ machinery to activate its spike protein, which enables it to bind to and invade lung cells,” Janetka said.

“In blocking TMPRSS2, the drug prevents the virus from entering other cells within the body or from invading the lung cells in the first place if, in theory, it could be taken as a preventive,” he added.

The researchers are testing the compound in mice in combination with other treatments that target other key parts of the virus.

“This may help develop an effective broad-spectrum antiviral therapy that would be useful in COVID-19 and other viral infections,” they added.

“Studying cells growing in the lab that were infected with SARS-CoV-2, MM3122 protected the cells from viral damage much better than remdesivir, a treatment already approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for patients with COVID-19,” the researchers said.

“An acute safety test in mice showed that large doses of the compound given for seven days did not cause any noticeable problems,” they added.

The researchers also showed that the compound was as effective against the original Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV).

“The majority of inhibitors of viral infection work by blocking steps of replication once the virus is inside the cell,” said study co-author Sean Whelan, a professor at Washington University.

“Dr Janetka has identified and refined a molecule that stops the virus from entering the cell in the first place. As the target of MM3122 is a host protein, this may also pose a larger barrier to the emergence of viruses that are resistant to the inhibitor,” Whelan added.

Google’s new carbon footprint reporting tool, similar to one Microsoft already provides, shows the emissions associated with the electricity that was used to store and process a customer’s data.

Alphabet Inc's Google will tell its cloud customers the carbon emissions of their cloud usage and open satellite imagery to them for the first time for environmental analysis, as part of a push to help companies track and cut carbon budgets.

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The new features were among announcements Google Cloud made Tuesday to kick off its annual customer conference, which is being held virtually this year due to the pandemic.

Also read | Google to prohibit ads on content that deny climate change

The leading Western cloud vendors Google, Microsoft Corp and Amazon.com Inc have been competing on sustainability offerings for years. They aim to serve companies that are under pressure from stakeholders to rethink operations in light of climate change.

Google's new carbon footprint reporting tool, similar to one Microsoft already provides, shows the emissions associated with the electricity that was used to store and process a customer's data. In addition, Google will now warn customers when they are wasting energy on inactive cloud services.

The new mapping offering, Google Earth Engine, had been used by tens of thousands of researchers, governments and advocacy groups since 2009. But Google now is letting businesses in on the service, which includes many huge geospatial datasets such as Landsat and the software needed to analyse them. Amazon has a similar initiative.

Also read | Google to let you know flights with lower carbon emissions

"This is something we have now realised is applicable to a lot of these commercial opportunities," said Jen Bennett, a technical director at Google Cloud.

Earth Engine could help ensure supply chains are sustainable and predict operation challenges from extreme weather, according to Google. Unilever Plc, which tested the technology for the past 12 months, scrutinised its palm oil sources in Indonesia, though it could not be learned whether that led to any shifts in practices.

Red-Eye Bushbrown is endemic to the Western Ghats

A rare butterfly, Chenkannan Tavitan (Red-Eye Bushbrown), has been spotted at Paithalmala in Kannur district.

Chief Conservator of Forests (Northern Circle) D.K. Vinod Kumar told The Hindu that endemic to the Western Ghats, the butterfly is commonly found over 1,200 metres above sea level. They were previously reported in some parts of Wayanad.

Mostly found in areas north of the Palakkad Pass, Red-Eye Bushbrown is evolutionarily relevant. The life cycle of this butterfly, which lays eggs in grass, has not yet been scientifically described, he said.

Mr. Kumar said the species was spotted by a team of observers comprising V.C. Balakrishnan, Girish Mohan P.K., and Rajendran T.M., and Paithalmala Eco Tourism watcher Menom Veettil Antony.

Besides, the team found rare butterflies like Travancore Twilight Butterfly and Coorg Forest Hopper.

V. Ratheesan, Taliparamba range officer, said the discovery of the species underscored the ecological significance of Paithalmala, a major tourist destination.

In what way has the discovery of the two Laureates made the process greener, cheaper and more precise?

The story so far: The 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to German scientist Benjamin List of the Max Planck Institute and Scotland-born scientist David W.C. MacMillan of Princeton University “for the development of asymmetric organocatalysis”. Developed by the duo in 2000, this novel technique of catalysis is an efficient, “precise, cheap, fast and environmentally friendly” way to develop new molecules.

What is catalysis?

Catalysis is a term used to describe a process in the presence of a substance (the catalyst) that controls and influences the rate and/or the outcome of the reaction. The substance — the catalyst — which helps in achieving this remains intact and is not consumed during the reaction and neither becomes a part of the final product. The catalyst is subsequently removed so as not to add impurity to the final product. Catalysts are often used to produce new and functional molecules that are utilised in drugs and other everyday substances. For example, catalysts in cars transform toxic substances in exhaust fumes to harmless molecules. When silver is put in a beaker along with hydrogen peroxide, the latter suddenly breaks down to form water and oxygen. The silver, which initiated the reaction, does not get consumed or affected by the reaction.

Editorial | Simple, but brilliant: On 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

The Nobel release points out that in 1835, the renowned Swedish chemist Jacob Berzelius started to see a pattern. “He listed several examples in which just the presence of a substance started a chemical reaction, stating how this phenomenon appeared to be considerably more common than was previously thought. He believed that the substance had a catalytic force and called the phenomenon itself catalysis.”

What were the conventional catalysts used before the discovery of asymmetric organocatalysis?

Two very different catalysts —metals and enzymes— were routinely used by chemists before Dr. List and Dr. MacMillan developed the asymmetric organocatalysts. As the name denotes, metal catalysts often use heavy metals. This makes them not only expensive but also environmentally unfriendly as sufficient care needs to be taken to ensure the final product does not contain even traces of the catalyst. There are several other challenges when metal catalysts are used. The heavy metals used in these catalysts are often highly sensitive to the presence of oxygen and moisture. Hence, industrial application of this class of catalysts required equipment that ensured no contact with either oxygen and moisture, which made the process expensive.

In the case of enzyme catalysts, the problem arises from their very large sizes. They are often 10,000 times larger than the actual target medicine and can take just as long to make. Enzymes, which are proteins found in nature, are wonderful catalysts. Our bodies also contain thousands of such enzyme catalysts which help make molecules necessary for life. Many molecules exist in mirror images — left-handed and right-handed. But the molecules of interest will be one of the two mirror images. Many enzymes engage in asymmetric catalysis, which help in producing only one mirror image. They also work in a continuous fashion — when one enzyme is finished with a reaction, another one takes over. In this way, they can build complicated molecules with amazing precision.

What makes asymmetric organocatalysts superior to metal and enzyme catalysts?

Unlike enzyme catalysts which are huge, asymmetric organocatalysts are made of a single amino acid. They are not only environmentally friendly but also quicken the reaction and make the process cheaper. Most importantly, asymmetric organocatalysts allow only one mirror image of the molecule to form as the catalysts are made from a single, circular amino acid. Chemists often want only one of these mirror images, particularly when producing drugs.

Organic catalysts have a stable framework of carbon atoms, to which more active chemical groups can attach. These often contain common elements such as oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur or phosphorus. This means that these catalysts are both environmentally friendly and cheaper to produce.

Organocatalysts can allow several steps in the molecule production process to be performed in an unbroken sequence. This is achieved by cascade reactions in which the product of the first reaction step is the starting material for the subsequent one, thus avoiding unnecessary purification operations between each reaction step. This helps in considerably reducing waste in chemical manufacturing. Before organocatalysts could be used, it was often necessary to isolate and purify each intermediate product to prevent the accumulation of a large volume of unnecessary byproducts. This led to loss of some of the substance at every single stage of the process.

How have asymmetric organocatalysts been utilised by chemists and other industries?

Ever since the two laureates developed the novel concept of asymmetric organocatalysis, the field has witnessed rapid development. Since 2000, the asymmetric organocatalysis research area has flourished. A huge number of cheap and stable organocatalysts, which can be used to drive a huge variety of chemical reactions and applications, has been developed. This period is referred to as the ‘organocatalysis gold rush’. Currently, the area is “well established in organic chemistry and has branched into several new and exciting applications”.

Besides helping the generation of novel molecules used in various industries, pharmaceutical companies have used asymmetric organocatalysis to “streamline the production of existing pharmaceuticals”. Thanks to a multitude of catalysts that can break down molecules or join them together, “they can now carve out the thousands of different substances we use in our everyday lives, such as pharmaceuticals, plastics, perfumes and food flavourings”. The fact is, according to the release, it is estimated that 35% of the world’s total GDP in some way involves chemical catalysis.

How does the work of three Physics Nobel laureates contribute to our understanding of complex physical systems?

The story so far: The Nobel Prize in Physics for 2021 has been awarded to climatologists Syukuro Manabe of Princeton University, U.S., and Klaus Hasselmann of Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany, and physicist Giorgio Parisi of Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. The prize has been given for their “groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of complex physical systems”. Professors Manabe and Hasselmann will share half the prize and Professor Parisi will receive one-half of the prize. Professors Manabe and Hasselmann bagged the Prize “for the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming”. Professor Parisi won “for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales”.

How is their work linked?

Though the prize-winning work done by the laureates are in different areas, they are broadly linked, as they fall under the umbrella of complex systems, climate on the one hand, and spin liquids on the other, the former a phenomenon that spans length scales ranging from centimetres to the size of the planet and the latter a description of what goes on at a microscopic level. The Nobel is being given to climatologists for the first time since its inception in 1901, and this sends out a message that cannot be repeated too often: there is a solid physics basis to climate science, on which the laureates have spent decades, and many other scientists have striven to establish.

Editorial | Handling complexity: On 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics

What is the context of Syukuro Manabe’s work?

The incoming short wavelength radiation from the Sun is absorbed by the Earth and re-emitted outwards as long wavelength radiation. The atmosphere absorbs a part of this outgoing radiation and warms up. This is known as the green-house effect. The green-house effect has been known from the work of French mathematician Joseph Fourier two hundred years ago, although it was given its name much later. This warming of the atmosphere and the ground below it is affected by greenhouse gases — water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane and other such. The greenhouse effect also has a positive impact: it keeps the surface of the earth warm and makes life possible. However, when the percentage of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere increases, this warming also increases and can rise to a degree that is harmful to life itself. Around the close of the 19th century, Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius estimated that should the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere double, this would cause its temperature to increase by 5-6 degrees.

What is Manabe’s key contribution to climate science?

In the 1950s and 1960s, Professor Manabe and collaborators made pioneering attempts at modelling atmospheric warming due to the increase in carbon dioxide. He estimated that a doubling of carbon dioxide would lead to a temperature rise of 2 degrees. His model confirmed that the rise in temperature was, indeed, due to the increase in carbon dioxide, because it predicted rising temperatures close to the ground and cooling of outer layers of the atmosphere. If the warming had been due to the Sun’s radiation, it would have been uniform. It was Professor Manabe’s model that pinned the quantitative impact of warming due to carbon dioxide.

What are the important aspects of Hasselmann’s work?

The term, weather, refers to day-to-day variations in temperature and rainfall, whereas climate describes long-time effects and also seasonal and average behaviour over a long time. While it is very difficult to predict the former, the latter appears predictable, as for instance, in the anticipated regularity of monsoons year after year. The striking aspect of Professor Hasselmann’s work is that he built a connection between the rapid, randomly varying, “noise-like” weather patterns and inferred from these the “signal” of climate. He built a stochastic climate model that connects the two. He did this around 1980. According to information released by the Nobel Academy, Professor Hasselmann later developed methods to identify the human fingerprint on climate change. The models that he built carried information about warming due to solar radiation, the greenhouse gases and other causes, each of which could be separated. His study, followed by that of others, demonstrated the human impact on climate change through several observations.

Does the knowledge of nerve impulses which can perceive temperature and pressure when initiated help to treat pain?

The story so far: The 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was jointly awarded to David Julius, 66, at the University of California, San Francisco, and Ardem Patapoutian, 54, at Scripps Research, La Jolla, California, “for their discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch”.

Editorial | Sensing heat: On 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

What is the significance of their work?

The two researchers discovered the molecular mechanism by which our body senses temperature and touch. Being able to do this opens the field for a lot of practical chemistry whereby individual cells and pathways can be tweaked, suppressed or activated to quell pain or sensation. How the body senses external stimuli is among the oldest excursions of natural philosophy. Entire schools of philosophy were based on speculating how the senses influenced the nature of the reality we perceive. Only when physiology developed as an independent discipline and anatomy came into its own did it become widely accepted that specific sensations were the result of different categories of nerves getting stimulated. Thus, a caress or a punch induces cells in our bodies to react differently and convert into specific patterns of electrical stimulation that is then conveyed via the nerves to the central nervous system. Since the Nobel Prizes came to be, at least three of them were for establishing key principles for how sensations travelled along skin and muscle sensory nerve fibres. Much like the length, thickness, material and incident force on their strings elicit specific tones out of a guitar or a piano, there are specific nerve fibre types that in tandem create a response to touch, heat and proprioception, or the sense of our body’s movement and position in space. However, the prominence of molecular biology means that physiology wanted to go a level deeper and find out what specific proteins and which genes are responsible in this symphony of the nerves.

In 2009, it was hypothesised that globe skimmer dragonflies (Pantala flavescens) can migrate thousands of kilometres across the Indian Ocean, from India via the Maldives to Africa, and back again. Now, an international research team led by Lund University in Sweden used models and simulations to verify this.

Marine biologist Charles Anderson observed globe skimmer dragonflies in Maldives, which had flown in from, he assumed, India. When they flew off again, it was towards East Africa.

Since the dragonflies are too small to be fitted with transmitters, the researchers examined physiological aspects and calculated how long a globe skimmer dragonfly could stay airborne using the energy that can be stored in its body. In addition, the researchers used meteorological wind models to determine if there are winds that can facilitate the migration.

The found that it was indeed possible for the dragonflies to migrate from India to East Africa and return to India. The globe skimmer dragonfly does not rely on fat stored in its body to fly such long distances. Instead, it takes advantage of favourable winds present during certain periods of the year.

According to the simulated migration experiments using wind models, about 15% of the dragonflies could manage the migration from India to Africa in the spring. In the autumn, 40% could make the same journey in the opposite direction.

This decision of U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission was awaited by specialists

Now it is official. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) decisively upheld the Linear No-Threshold model to prescribe radiation safety standards, ending the protracted controversy on the topic. Radiation protection specialists worldwide were eagerly awaiting the NRC’s decision.

Over six years ago, during February 2015, Dr. Carol S. Marcus, Mr. Mark L. Miller, Certified Health Physicist, and Dr. Mohan Doss, and others, through three petitions requested the NRC, “to amend its regulations based on what they assert is new science and evidence that contradicts the linear no-threshold (LNT) dose-effect model that serves as the basis for the NRC’s radiation protection regulations."

The model

The LNT model states that biological effects such as cancer and hereditary effects due to exposure to ionising radiation increase as a linear function of dose, without threshold.

The petitioners support “radiation hormesis,” a concept that posits that low doses of ionising radiation protect against the deleterious effects of high doses of radiation and result in beneficial effects to humans.

The NRC denied the three petitions because they failed to present an adequate basis supporting the request to discontinue use of the LNT model. “The NRC has determined that the LNT model continues to provide a sound regulatory basis for minimizing the risk of unnecessary radiation exposure to both members of the public and radiation workers. Therefore, the NRC will maintain the current dose limit requirements,” the NRC declared recently.

Petitioners’ proposed substantial increase in dose limits to workers; raise the public dose limits to be the same as the worker doses; end differential doses to pregnant women, embryos and fetuses, and children less than 18 years of age; remove the As Low As Is Reasonably Achievable (ALARA) principle entirely from the regulations because they claim that ‘‘it makes no sense to decrease radiation doses that are not only harmless but may be hormetic’’.

No proof of a threshold

“Convincing evidence has not yet demonstrated the existence of a threshold below which there would be no stochastic effects from exposure to low radiation doses. As such, the NRC’s view is that the LNT model continues to provide a sound basis for a conservative radiation protection regulatory framework that protects both the public and occupational workers. Despite the various studies cited by the petitioners, uncertainty and lack of consensus persist in the scientific community about the health effects of low doses of radiation.” the NRC, asserted.

The LNT model helps the agencies to regulate radiation exposures to diverse categories of licensees, from commercial nuclear power plants to individual industrial radiographers and nuclear medical practices.

The NRC noted that although there are studies and other scholarly papers that support the petitioners’ assertions, there are also studies and findings that support the continued use of the LNT model, including those by national and international authoritative scientific advisory bodies.

Endorsed by authority

Authoritative scientific advisory bodies such as the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the National Council for Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP), the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), that have a specialty in the area of radiation protection support the continued use of the LNT model. The National Cancer Institute (NCI), the National Institute of Occupational safety and Health (NIOSH) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) also endorse the use of LNT model.

The NRC gave due weight to NCRP Commentary No. 27: ‘‘Implications of Recent Epidemiologic Studies for the Linear-Non-threshold Model and Radiation Protection,’’ released in April 2018. The commentary assesses currently available epidemiological evidence and concludes that the LNT model should continue to be utilised for radiation protection purposes.

The NRC received over 3,200 comment submissions, with 635 of those being unique, including submissions from certified health physicists, nuclear medicine professionals, scientific associations, federal agencies and concerned citizens. There were 100 unique comment submissions that agreed with the petitioners. The NRC responded to all questions. Its procedures to arrive at its decision are a model for other regulators to emulate. (Details available at The Federal Register: The Daily Journal of the United States Government, proposed rule - Linear No-Threshold Model and Standards for Protection Against Radiation.)

(The writer is a former Secretary, Atomic Energy Regulatory Board.

ksparth@yahoo.co.uk)

The fact of black holes having masses over 100 times the solar mass has puzzled the community

Scientists from Chennai Mathematical Institute, with their collaborators, have analysed data from the LIGO-VIRGO observatories and estimated the fraction of the binary black hole mergers detected so far that show potential to form intermediate mass black holes. This throws light on the puzzle of how intermediate mass black holes form.

Black holes form when a massive star undergoes a supernova explosion towards the end of its lifetime. The black hole forms from the remnants of the explosion. However, there are factors that place limits on the mass of a black hole so formed. According to physicist K.G. Arun of Chennai Mathematical Institute, black holes with masses between approximately 45-135 times the solar mass are unlikely to be produced by standard stellar evolution as the pair-instability process either limits the max mass of the black hole or completely disrupts the star during the supernova explosion. What puzzles astronomers and cosmologists is that gravitational wave detectors have seen several such “intermediate mass black holes”.

Mergers of black holes and ‘kicks’ that hold a key to puzzles
 

The two detectors of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) made the first observation of a pair of binary black holes on September 19, 2014.

Since then with other gravitational wave observatories about 40 mergers have been detected, of which nearly five have masses above 100 times solar mass.

One of the theories of intermediate mass black hole formation has to do with ‘hierarchical growth’. That is, if the black holes exist among a dense cluster of stars, the remnant (black hole) of a merger can pair up with another black hole close by to form a binary. This can eventually merge to form a second remnant which is more massive. This process, happening in a hierarchical manner, can explain intermediate mass black hole formation.

Kicks in mergers

During the mergers, gravitational waves take away energy and linear momentum, as a reaction, the remnant black hole acquires an opposite momentum. This is the “kick” it receives. These kicks can be quite large, giving it a velocity of up to 1000 kilometres per second. If this kick velocity is above the escape velocity of the star cluster in which the black hole is formed, it literally escapes from the environment and moves out. This prevents it from undergoing further hierarchical mergers.

The extent of the kick received by the remnant can be calculated from the masses of the merging black holes and their spin. “As GW observations give an estimate of these, we can calculate the kick imparted to every remnant black hole in the population of binary black holes reported by LIGO/Virgo till date,” says Parthapratim Mahapatra, Ph. D. student, Chennai Mathematical Institute, who is the first author of a paper on this work published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The kick estimates help understand which mergers have the possibility of undergoing further hierarchical mergers and forming into intermediate mass black holes.

There have been recent studies using astrophysical models to understand whether the components of some of the binaries are formed hierarchically. “This is a complementary approach as we are interested in the prospects of the remnants participating in further mergers and not whether the observed binaries contain one or more of the black holes which are hierarchically formed,” says Prof. Arun, in whose lab the work was done, in an email to The Hindu.

Using the state-of-the-art understanding of the escape speeds of star clusters and using the kick magnitudes they have inferred for different observed events, the group has calculated what fraction of the remnants may remain in-cluster (provided they originally merged in the cluster). “We find that as many as 17 out of 40 remnants may be retained by the nuclear star clusters,” says Prof. Arun.

After reports showed an increase in myocarditis and pericarditis cases, Denmark, Sweden and later Finland paused use in people under 30 years

On October 6, Sweden and Denmark suspended the use of Moderna’s mRNA vaccine for younger age groups after reports pointed to an increase in the number of myocarditis and pericarditis cases. Myocarditis causes inflammation of heart muscle which can limit the organ’s ability to pump blood and can cause changes in heartbeat rhythms, while pericarditis causes inflammation of the outer lining of the heart.

A day later, Finland followed suit and paused the use of the Moderna vaccine in people younger than 30 years. Both Finland Health institute and the Swedish Public Health Agency now recommend Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine for people younger than 30 years as there is greater experience with the vaccine in this age group. The Swedish Agency said its decision is valid till December 1 this year.

Slightly higher risk

“A Nordic study involving Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark found that men under the age of 30 who received Moderna Spikevax had a slightly higher risk than others of developing myocarditis,” Mika Salminen, director of the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare told Reuters.

The Swedish Public Health Agency said that the connection [of myocarditis and pericarditis] is “especially clear when it comes to Moderna vaccine Spikevax, especially after the second dose”. For an individual, the risk of being affected by myocarditis and pericarditis is small.

Questions on risk

Why three countries have paused Moderna vaccine
 

Meanwhile, the U.K., Hong Kong and Norway, have recommended administering only a single dose of the Pfizer vaccine for children aged 12 years and older.

On why the Moderna vaccine has a relatively increased risk of myocarditis and pericarditis after the second dose compared with Pfizer, Immunologist Dr. Satyajit Rath, formerly with the Delhi-based National Institute of Immunology says in an email that since the serious adverse events are extremely rare it is not even absolutely certain that there is really an increase in this ‘risk’ of myocarditis with the Moderna vaccine over the Pfizer vaccine. “The two vaccines have not been used in the same populations, and there may well be differences in the people who have received one versus the other which could contribute to this so-called difference in risk (rather than the vaccine),” says Dr. Rath. “Some minor difference in the chemical composition of the two vaccines may have contributed to this so-called risk; even though they are both mRNA vaccines, they are not identical.” He also mentions the higher dosage of 100 microgram used in the Moderna vaccine compared with 30 microgram for Pfizer might be another possibility.

Just one dose

“One dose provides good protection against a severe disease course, and the protection will probably be better among adolescents at this age than for older age groups,” says Camilla Stoltenberg, Director-General of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health in a release. “We consider that the offer of one dose provides the clearest benefit for the individual adolescent when the benefit is weighed against possible disadvantages of the vaccine. The second dose will be considered when there is more knowledge from other countries that have come further in the vaccination of this age group.”

Studies in Israel have shown that within six months there is a reduction in vaccine effectiveness in preventing infection after two doses of the Pfizer vaccine. Based on this data, Dr. Rath says there is no evidence to indicate how long a single dose of COVID vaccines will remain effective for.

“I do not expect that duration to be dramatically different from the one in adults. But in the first place, that is simply a guess, and in the second place, we have no idea of such a duration with a single dose even in adults,” he says.

Young adults, adolescents and young children rarely suffer from severe disease. However, they are likely to get infected and transmit the virus to others even while not suffering from COVID-19 disease. Vaccination of adolescents and young children can help in breaking the transmission chain. But should young adults, adolescents and young children, who are not at great risk of severe risk, be given two doses of even the Pfizer vaccine that has an extremely small risk of causing inflammation of the heart for the sake of breaking the transmission chain?

“The greatest transmission-limiting effect of the vaccines is achieved when two vaccine doses are given. The NIPH [Norwegian Institute of Public Health] has assessed that for this age group [12-15 years], which to a lesser extent than adults and older adolescents has contributed to transmission. The individual considerations of offering vaccination are more important than the benefit to society of limiting transmission,” the NIPH said in a release.

Even earlier, evidence showed a tiny risk of myocarditis and pericarditis when young adults received the second dose of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. The risk was overwhelmingly seen in males and after the second dose. “It is hard to get any grip on why males are more affected, because we have no idea, even if it turns out to be a real and reliable association (between vaccine and illness), what the mechanism involved is,” says Dr. Rath. “We do know that, independent of COVID-19 disease or vaccines, myocarditis is somewhat more common in men than in women. But again, we have no clarity about why this is so.”

Resolves on its own

Now, two studies published in The New England Journal of Medicine have reported based on field data that myocarditis is extremely rare and predominantly seen in males and is mild. The condition resolves on its own within a month.

The first NEJM study found that of the nearly 5.1 million people vaccinated with the Pfizer vaccine between December 20, 2020 and May 31, 2021 in Israel only 136 cases of myocarditis were reported. Of the 136 cases, 129 people (95%) had only mild myocarditis.

The study found that the incidence of myocarditis after two doses of vaccination was highest among males. They found that myocarditis occurred in the population at a “rate of approximately 1 per 26,000 males and 1 per 2,18,000 females after the second vaccine dose, with the highest risk again among young male recipients”.

The study also found that the “overall risk difference between the first and second doses was 1.76 per 100,000 persons with the largest difference among male recipients between the ages of 16 and 19 years”.

The second study published in NEJM carried out in Israel looked at the incidence of myocarditis after full vaccination with the Pfizer vaccine in a large health-care organisation. The study found 54 cases of myocarditis from 2.5 million vaccinated health-care organisation members aged 16 years and above. In all, 76% of cases of myocarditis were mild, and the highest incidence (10.69 cases per 1,00,000 persons) was reported in male patients between the ages of 16 and 29 years.

Samples dated to later volcanic lava

Remnants of solidified lava brought back by a Chinese lunar mission were 1 billion years younger than material acquired by other missions decades ago, according to an article in Science, suggesting the moon cooled down later than thought.

Samples brought back by U.S. and Soviet missions were more than 2.9 billion years old. The samples acquired on China’s Chang'e-5 mission late last year were around 1.96 billion years old suggesting volcanic activity persisted longer than believed.

Last December, the uncrewed Chinese probe touched down on a previously unvisited part of a massive lava plain, the Oceanus Procellarum or “Oceans of Storms,” bringing back lunar samples.

One of the main objectives of Chang'e-5, named after the mythical Chinese goddess of the moon, was to find out how long the moon remained volcanically active. “The Oceanus Procellarum region of the Moon is characterised by high concentrations of potassium, thorium, and uranium,elements that generate heat through long-lived radioactive decay and may have sustained prolonged magmatic activity on the nearside of the Moon,” wrote the article’s authors.

Tidal heating?

The article said the heat source for the magmatic activity might also be the so-called “tidal heating,” or heat generated by the gravitational tug and pull of the Earth.

The Chang'e-5 mission made China the third country to have retrieved lunar samples, after the United States and the Soviet Union, which launched the last successful mission to acquire material from the moon.

China plans to launch the Chang'e-6 and Chang'e-7 lunar missions, also uncrewed, in the next five years to explore the south pole of the moon.

Indian Space Association (ISpA) represents homegrown and global corporations with advanced capabilities in space and satellite technologies

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will launch the Indian Space Association, a grouping of space and satellite companies, at a virtual event on October 11, the industry body said on Thursday.

Indian Space Association (ISpA) represents homegrown and global corporations with advanced capabilities in space and satellite technologies.

Its founding members include Bharti Airtel, Larsen & Toubro, Nelco (Tata Group), OneWeb, Mapmyindia, Walchandnagar Industries and Ananth Technology Limited.

Other core members include Godrej, Hughes India, Azista-BST Aerospace Private Limited, BEL, Centum Electronics and Maxar India.

"We are truly honoured to have the Hon'ble Prime Minister grace the launch ceremony and outline his vision for the growth of India's space industry and making our nation a global leader in the space arena," ISpA Director General A. K. Bhatt said in a statement.

L&T-NxT Senior Executive Vice President for Defence, Jayant Patil has been appointed as the first chairman of ISpA, while Bharti Airtel's Chief Regulatory Officer Rahul Vatts will serve as vice chairman.

Students wishing to pursue medical sciences will be able to do so in one of the best known institutions in the country. The Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, on Wednesday, announced that it would start offering medical courses from next year.

At the convocation ceremony on Wednesday, which was held virtually, IISc director Govindan Rangarajan, spoke about the institution’s history. It started in 1909 with the establishment of the general chemistry department, quickly followed by electrical technology and organic chemistry department. “Even though we are called Indian Institute of Science, right from the beginning, we have had both science and engineering equally represented. Twelve years ago, a lot of interdisciplinary departments were created. Now, starting next year, we are planning yet another change. After about 100 years of excellence in science and engineering, we are planning to start a postgraduate medical school on campus,” he said.

This May, the then Union Minister of Education Ramesh Pokhriyal, chairing a meeting with the directors of IISc, IITs, IIITs, IISERs, and NITs, had announced that with regard to the National Education Policy – 2020, IISc and IIT Kharagpur would soon start courses in medical sciences.

Quantum computing

Expanding on research teams, Prof. Rangarajan said that apart from brain computation and data science, biomedical systems and devices, and cyber security, IISc was venturing into the new area of quantum computing which is becoming very critical for future technological progress. “There is one more area where we plan to venture into. We are going to start Kotak-IISc AI-ML Centre on campus in a new building,” he added. Supported by Kotak Mahindra Bank Ltd., the centre will focus on “creative education and innovative research on AI, ML, and financial technology solutions”.

The winners are German scientist Benjamin List of the Max Planck Institute and Scotland-born scientist David WC MacMillan of Princeton University

The Nobel Prize for chemistry has been awarded to German scientist Benjamin List of the Max Planck Institute and Scotland-born scientist David WC MacMillan of Princeton University.

They were cited for their work in developing a new way for building molecules known as “asymmetric organocatalysis.” The winners were announced Wednesday by Goran Hansson, secretary-general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

The Nobel panel said Mr List and Mr MacMillan in 2000 independently developed a new way of catalysis.

“It's already benefiting humankind greatly,” Pernilla Wittung-Stafshede, a member of the Nobel panel, said.

Speaking after the announcement, Mr List said the award was a "huge surprise.” “I absolutely didn't expect this," he said, adding that he was on vacation in Amsterdam with his family when the call from Sweden came in.

Mr List said he did not initially know that Mr MacMillan was working on the same subject and figured his hunch might just be a “stupid idea” until it worked.

“I did feel that this could be something big," he said.

It is common for several scientists who work in related fields to share the prize. Last year, the chemistry prize went to Emmanuelle Charpentier of France and Jennifer A. Doudna of the United States for developing a gene-editing tool that has revolutionized science by providing a way to alter DNA.

The prestigious award comes with a gold medal and 10 million Swedish kronor (over $1.14 million). The prize money comes from a bequest left by the prize's creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1895.

On Monday, the Nobel Committee awarded the prize in physiology or medicine to Americans David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for their discoveries into how the human body perceives temperature and touch.

The Nobel Prize in physics was awarded Tuesday to three scientists whose work found order in seeming disorder, helping to explain and predict complex forces of nature, including expanding our understanding of climate change.

Over the coming days prizes will also be awarded for outstanding work in the fields of literature, peace and economics.

Growth in solar energy is critical this year as the country’s solar energy generation growth slowed to 24.75% in September amid coal crisis

The country's solar energy output growth slowed in September, a Reuters analysis of government data showed, at a time when coal-fired utilities are facing a shortage of a fuel that accounts for more than 70% of the country’s power generation.

Growth in solar energy is critical this year as half of the country’s 135 coal-fired power plants have fuel stocks of less than three days. The nation expects the coal shortage to last for upto six months.

State-run Coal India, which accounts for over 80% of the country’s coal output, saw production grow at the slowest rate in six months and supplies at the slowest rate in seven months during September as rain affected output in key mining regions.

Solar energy generation growth slowed to 24.7% year-on-year in September from 41% in August, an analysis of federal grid regulator POSOCO’s daily load despatch data showed.

Other key sources of electricity generation also fell in September, the data showed, with hydro declining 5% and gas-fired power falling 31.6% compared with the previous year.

A seasonal change in the country’s power consumption patterns could also increase stress on coal-fired utilities saddled with an acute shortage, and lead to power outages, analysts say.

“Renewable energy will not be available early in the day and immediately after sunset, when power demand generally peaks during winter in India,” a Singapore-based power sector analyst said.

Victor Vanya, director at power analytics firm EMA Solutions, said that higher humidity in the coming weeks could lead to a surge in power demand driven by higher air-conditioning requirements, and a rapid deterioration in coal stocks.

“If humidity remains high in the next 2 weeks, there is a high probability for India to end up in a ‘China-like scenario’,” he told Reuters. Coal supply shortages in China have led to power restrictions in parts of the country.

However, CRISIL, a unit of ratings agency S&P, forecast 15%-16% growth in solar output during the six months ending March 2022 and a slowdown in overall power demand growth would ease constraints on India’s coal-fired power plants.

“This will further be supported by 5%-6% and 3%-4% growth in generation from nuclear and hydro sources,” CRISIL told Reuters, adding that widespread outages were unlikely.

The Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded one half jointly to Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann and the other half to Giorgio Parisi. It was awarded for their groundbreaking contributions to the understanding of complex physical systems.

Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann were cited for their work in “the physical modeling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming”.

Giorgio Parisi was cited for his work in “the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales.” 

The panel said Mr. Manabe and Mr. Hasselmann “laid the foundation of our knowledge of the Earth’s climate and how humanity influences it".

After the announcement, Mr. Parisi said that “it’s very urgent that we take very strong decisions and move at a very strong pace” in tackling climate change. “It’s clear for future generations that we have to act now,” he added.

Despite some recent advances, it found that 107 countries remain off track for a target to sustainably manage their water resources by 2030.

Global water resource management is “fragmented and inadequate” and countries should urgently adopt reforms to ramp up financing and boost cooperation on emergency warning systems ahead of a looming crisis, the UN weather agency said on Tuesday.

Climate change is expected to increase water-related hazards such as droughts and floods while the number of people living with water stress is expected to soar due to growing scarcity and population growth, the report warned.

Wake up to the looming water crisis, multi-agency #ClimateServices for #Water report warns
About 3.6 billion people have inadequate access to water at least 1 month per year. By 2050, this is expected to rise to more than 5 billion

Details https://t.co/YhOPw5hF8c pic.twitter.com/5kM54XSUtG

— World Meteorological Organization (@WMO) October 5, 2021

“We need to wake up to the looming water crisis,” said Petteri Taalas, secretary-general of the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization.

‘The State of Climate Services 2021: Water’, a collaboration between the WMO, international organisations, development agencies and scientific institutions, estimates that the number of people with inadequate access to water will top 5 billion by 2050 versus 3.6 billion in 2018.

It calls for more financing and urgent action to improve cooperative water management, naming the need for better flood warning systems in Asia and drought warning systems in Africa.

#ClimateServices for #Water report:
In past 20 years, terrestrial water storage (on land surface and subsurface, incl soil moisture, snow and ice) has fallen 1 cm per year. At global level this is HUGE
Biggest losses in Antarctica and Greenland
➡️https://t.co/YhOPw5hF8c pic.twitter.com/JbPCIKm2xM

— World Meteorological Organization (@WMO) October 5, 2021

Despite some recent advances, it found that 107 countries remain off track for a target to sustainably manage their water resources by 2030.

“Some 60% of national meteorological and hydrological services – the national public agencies mandated to provide basic hydrological information and warning services to the government, the public, and the private sector – lack the full capacities needed to provide climate services for water,” the report said.

Taalas said at a press briefing that these “major gaps” in data were worst in Central Asia, Africa and among island states. In some cases, he said information gaps can prove deadly, such as when Zimbabwe opened its dams during Cyclone Idai in 2019, which exacerbated flooding in downstream Mozambique.

“This was one example where better coordination between Zimbabwe and Mozambique would have avoided casualties,” he said. Overall, more than 300,000 people have been killed by floods and more than 700,000 by droughts and their impact on food production, the WMO said.

The robots can handle as many as 168,000 parcels weighing up to 15 kg a day and only need to be recharged every four hours for 5 minutes.

There’s a new addition to Greece’s postal service: a fleet of yellow robots sorting through the mail.

Fifty-five small, four-wheeled autonomous mobile robots — or AMR’s — powered by artificial intelligence, glide around Hellenic Post’s sorting centre in Athens, speeding up an often arduous process.

They scan the postal code, weigh the package and, directed by sensors, empty it into the corresponding mail sacks set up around a platform.

The robots are part of the state-owned company’s digital restructuring programme, which aims to tackle growing numbers of parcels from online shopping during the coronavirus pandemic.

“Until recently, sorting has been carried out by manual labour with a high demand in time, often with errors occurring, causing delivery delays for our customers and increased costs for the company,” Hellenic Post Chief Executive George Constantopoulos told Reuters.

Up to 80% of parcel sorting has been handed over to the robots and Constantopoulos said the process was up to three times faster, ensuring next-day delivery. The robots can handle as many as 168,000 parcels weighing up to 15 kg a day and only need to be recharged every four hours for 5 minutes.

“The purpose is not to replace human workers with robots, but rather to augment human workforces and make them more efficient,” Constantopoulos said.

The project targets a 2028 launch with a landing in 2033, a five-year journey in which the spacecraft will travel some 3.6 billion kilometers.

The United Arab Emirates on Tuesday announced plans to send a probe to land on an asteroid between Mars and Jupiter to collect data on the origins of the universe, the latest project in the oil-rich federation’s ambitious space program.

The project targets a 2028 launch with a landing in 2033, a five-year journey in which the spacecraft will travel some 3.6 billion kilometers.

The UAE’s Space Agency said it will partner with the Laboratory for Atmospheric Science and Physics at the University of Colorado on the project. It declined to immediately offer a cost for the effort.

The project comes after the Emirates successfully put its Amal, or ‘Hope’, probe in orbit around Mars in February. The car-size Amal cost $200 million to build and launch. That excludes operating costs at Mars. The Emirates plans to send an unmanned spacecraft to the moon in 2024.

The country, which is home to Abu Dhabi and Dubai, also has set the ambitious goal to build a human colony on Mars by 2117.

Although coral reefs cover a tiny fraction of the ocean floor, they provide outsized benefits to people. Their fish supply a critical protein source to 1 billion people.

Written by Catrin Einhorn

The world lost about 14% of its coral reefs in the decade after 2009, mainly because of climate change, according to a sweeping international report on the state of the world’s corals.

The decline underscores the catastrophic consequences of climate change while also offering some hope that some coral reefs can be saved if humans move quickly to rein in greenhouse gases.

“Coral reefs are the canary in the coal mine telling us how quickly it can go wrong,” said David Obura, one of the report’s editors and chair of the coral specialist group for the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

The 14% decline, he said, was cause for deep concern. “In finance, we worry about half-percent declines and half-percent changes in employment and interest rates.”

Especially alarming, the report’s editors said, is the trajectory. The first global bleaching event occurred in 1998, but many reefs bounced back. That no longer appears to be the case.

“Since 2009, it’s a constant decline at the global level,” said Serge Planes, a research scientist at the Center for Island Research and Observatory of the Environment in Moorea, French Polynesia, who also edited the report.

Although coral reefs cover a tiny fraction of the ocean floor, they provide outsized benefits to people. Their fish supply a critical protein source to 1 billion people. Their limestone branches protect coasts from storms.

Their beauty supports billions of dollars in tourism. Collectively, they support an estimated $2.7 trillion per year in goods and services, according to the report, which was issued by the International Coral Reef Initiative, a partnership of countries and organizations that works to protect the world’s coral reefs.

Perhaps 900 species of coral exist, and the researchers noted that some appear more resilient to the heat and acidification that accompany climate change. Unfortunately, those tend to be slower-growing and not the more familiar, reef-building varieties that support the richest biodiversity.

Terry Hughes, who directs a center for coral reef studies at James Cook University in Australia and who was not involved with the analysis, also cautioned that the vast data underlying it, collected by more than 300 scientists in 73 countries, may skew toward healthier reefs.

“Researchers and monitoring programs often abandon sites that become degraded, or don’t establish new studies there, because nobody wants to study a reef that is covered in silt and algae instead of corals,” Hughes said.

Still, he and the report both emphasized that corals could recover or regenerate if the world limited global warming. “Many of the world’s coral reefs remain resilient and can recover if conditions permit,” the report said.

Although tackling climate change is the most important factor in saving coral reefs, scientists said, reducing pollution is also critical. Corals need to be as healthy as possible to survive the warming temperatures that have already been locked in. Harmful pollution often includes human sewage and agricultural runoff that can cause algae blooms, as well as heavy metals or other chemicals from manufacturing. Destructive fishing practices also harm reefs.

The report comes just before world leaders convene next week to discuss a new global agreement on biodiversity. While some are pushing to protect the most pristine reefs, Obura said this approach would not suffice.

“People are so dependent on reefs around the world, we need to focus a lot of effort on the mediocre reefs, or all the other reefs, as well,” Obura said. “We need to keep them functioning so that people’s livelihoods can continue.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

The cells changed their shapes from round to amoebalike and squeezed out of tiny holes in the follicle.

Written by Gina Kolata

Every person, every mouse, every dog, has one unmistakable sign of aging: hair loss. But why does that happen? Rui Yi, a professor of pathology at Northwestern University, set out to answer the question.

A generally accepted hypothesis about stem cells says they replenish tissues and organs, including hair, but they will eventually be exhausted and then die in place. This process is seen as an integral part of aging.

Instead Yi and his colleagues made a surprising discovery that, at least in the hair of aging animals, stem cells escape from the structures that house them.

“It’s a new way of thinking about aging,” said Dr. Cheng-Ming Chuong, a skin cell researcher and professor of pathology at the University of Southern California, who was not involved in Yi’s study, which was published Monday in the journal Nature Aging.

The study also identifies two genes involved in the aging of hair, opening up new possibilities for stopping the process by preventing stem cells from escaping.

Charles K.F. Chan, a stem cell researcher at Stanford University, called the paper “very important,” noting that “in science, everything about aging seems so complicated we don’t know where to start.” By showing a pathway and a mechanism for explaining aging hair, Yi and colleagues may have provided a toehold.

Stem cells play a crucial role in the growth of hair in mice and in humans. Hair follicles, the tunnel-shaped miniature organs from which hairs grow, go through cyclical periods of growth in which a population of stem cells living in a specialized region called the bulge divide and become rapidly growing hair cells.

Sarah Millar, director of the Black Family Stem Cell Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who was not involved in Yi’s paper, explained that those cells give rise to the hair shaft and its sheath. Then, after a period of time, which is short for human body hair and much longer for hair on a person’s head, the follicle becomes inactive and its lower part degenerates. The hair shaft stops growing and is shed, only to be replaced by a new strand of hair as the cycle repeats.

But while the rest of the follicle dies, a collection of stem cells remains in the bulge, ready to start turning into hair cells to grow a new strand of hair.

Yi, like most scientists, had assumed that with age the stem cells died in a process known as stem cell exhaustion. He expected that the death of a hair follicle’s stem cells meant that the hair would turn white and, when enough stem cells were lost, the strand of hair would die. But this hypothesis had not been fully tested.

Together with a graduate student, Chi Zhang, Yi decided that to understand the aging process in hair, he needed to watch individual strands of hair as they grew and aged.

Ordinarily, researchers who study aging take chunks of tissue from animals of different ages and examine the changes. There are two drawbacks to this approach, Yi said. First, the tissue is already dead. And it is not clear what led to the changes that are observed or what will come after them.

He decided his team would use a different method. They watched the growth of individual hair follicles in the ears of mice using a long wavelength laser that can penetrate deep into tissue. They labeled hair follicles with a green fluorescent protein, anesthetized the animals so they did not move, put their ear under the microscope and went back again and again to watch what was happening to the same hair follicle.

What they saw was a surprise: When the animals started to grow old and gray and lose their hair, their stem cells started to escape their little homes in the bulge. The cells changed their shapes from round to amoebalike and squeezed out of tiny holes in the follicle. Then they recovered their normal shapes and darted away.

Sometimes, the escaping stem cells leapt long distances, in cellular terms, from the niche where they lived.“If I did not see it for myself I would not have believed it,” Yi said. “It’s almost crazy in my mind.”

The stem cells then vanished, perhaps consumed by the immune system.

Chan compared an animal’s body to a car. “If you run it long enough and don’t replace parts, things wear out,” he said. In the body, stem cells are like a mechanic, providing replacement parts, and in some organs like hair, blood and bone, the replacement is continual.

But with hair, it now looks as if the mechanic — the stem cells — simply walks off the job one day.

Genes and hair loss

But why? Yi and his colleagues’ next step was to ask if genes are controlling the process. They discovered two — FOXC1 and NFATC1 — that were less active in older hair follicle cells. Their role was to imprison stem cells in the bulge. So the researchers bred mice that lacked those genes to see if they were the master controllers.

By the time the mice were 4 to 5 months old, they started losing hair. By age 16 months, when the animals were middle-aged, they looked ancient: They had lost a lot of hair and the sparse strands remaining were gray.

Now the researchers want to save the hair stem cells in aging mice.

This story of the discovery of a completely unexpected natural process makes Chuong wonder what remains to be learned about living creatures.

“Nature has endless surprises waiting for us,” he said. “You can see fantastic things.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Specifically designed panels can be retrofitted onto existing seawalls, simulating the natural shoreline ecosystem that provides habitats for organisms such fish, algae and invertebrates that flat seawalls cannot.

In sight of Sydney’s iconic Harbour Bridge, marine scientist Mariana Mayer Pinto gingerly steps into the dark waters to examine a seawall covered with hexagonal concrete panels marked with divots that are thronged with kelp, seaweed and barnacles.

About 50% of the natural shore of the harbour has been transformed by seawalls and pilings, which do not support biodiversity the same way a natural coastline would.

Sydney’s Institute of Marine Science (SIMS) with the help of scientists from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and Macquarie University have crafted a solution using three-dimensional concrete panels in what they call the “Living Seawalls” project.

Specifically designed panels can be retrofitted onto existing seawalls, simulating the natural shoreline ecosystem that provides habitats for organisms such fish, algae and invertebrates that flat seawalls cannot.

“We have seen a total of more than 90 species colonising these diverse panels and we see 30 to 40 percent more species on the panels in the living seawalls then on the unmodified parts of the seawall,” said project co-leader Mayer Pinto, a professor at UNSW.

In just several months, the panels are colonised by marine life, and since many of the organisms are filter feeders like oysters and barnacles, the water quality of the harbour improves, Mayer Pinto said. Popular in Australia, the panels have also been installed in Wales and Singapore.

The project has also been selected as one of 15 finalists for the Earthshot Prize by the Royal Foundation of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. Mayer Pinto said that she hopes coastal structures built in the future would be ecologically sustainable, designed not only for humans, but also for nature. “I grew up on the ocean, the ocean’s my happy place so I really want my kids to be able to enjoy the ocean as I did growing up and for that we really need to take a bit more care of it.”

Kenya has five species of sea turtles. All are internationally recognized as endangered, and protected under local law with a penalty of life imprisonment.

As soon as he gets a call from a fisherman who’s accidentally caught a turtle off Kenya’s Indian Ocean coastline, Local Ocean Conservation’s Fikiri Kiponda jumps into his car to save it.

The work is far removed from the 44-year-old’s previous career as an accountant. He now dedicates himself to protecting endangered turtles that face multiple threats — from pollution to being sold for food, traditional medicinal purposes or the making of jewelry.

When Kiponda gets a call for help, he hurries to check the turtle for injuries that need to be treated in the organization’s rehabilitation center. Then it is released back into Watamu National Marine Park.

“The moment I tag a healthy turtle and release it back to the ocean where it is supposed to be, the feeling is just overwhelming,” he said.

Kenya has five species of sea turtles. All are internationally recognized as endangered, and protected under local law with a penalty of life imprisonment.

Local Ocean Conservation works on grassroots solutions with local communities. Kiponda and others regularly visit to speak about the importance of a healthy ocean to livelihoods.

Over 350 fishermen in Watamu have collaborated with the group for years. Previously, when they caught turtles in their nets, they often would kill them for food, traditional medicinal purposes or to keep their shells as trophies.

The ingestion of plastics in the ocean remains another threat to the turtles, causing internal blockages that can be fatal.

The mission was launched in 2018, flying once past Earth and twice past Venus on its journey to the solar system’s smallest planet.

A joint European-Japanese spacecraft got its first glimpse of Mercury as it swung by the solar system’s innermost planet while on a mission to deliver two probes into orbit in 2025.

The BepiColombo mission made the first of six flybys of Mercury at 11:34 p.m. GMT Friday, using the planet’s gravity to slow the spacecraft down.

After swooping past Mercury at altitudes of under 200 kilometers, the spacecraft took a low resolution black-and-white photo with one of its monitoring cameras before zipping off again.

The European Space Agency said the captured image shows the Northern Hemisphere and Mercury’s characteristic pock-marked features, among them the 166-kilometre-wide Lermontov crater.

The joint mission by the European agency and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency was launched in 2018, flying once past Earth and twice past Venus on its journey to the solar system’s smallest planet.

Five further flybys are needed before BepiColombo is sufficiently slowed down to release ESA’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter and JAXA’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter. The two probes will study Mercury’s core and processes on its surface, as well as its magnetic sphere.

The mission is named after Italian scientist Giuseppe ‘Bepi’ Colombo, who is credited with helping develop the gravity assist maneuver that NASA’s Mariner 10 first used when it flew to Mercury in 1974.

Some of the alterations are driven by the work of a single protein from the parasite called SAP05, which stands in the way of the plant’s maturation.

Written by Veronique Greenwood

A mustard plant infected with a certain parasite grows strangely, its development warped by tiny invaders. Its leaves take on odd shapes, its stems form a bushy structure called a witches’ broom and it may grow flowers that do not produce seed. Most peculiarly of all, it lives longer than its uninfected brethren, in a state of perpetual adolescence.

“It looks like it stays in a juvenile phase,” said Saskia Hogenhout, a scientist at the John Innes Centre in England, who studies the life cycle of the parasite, which is called Aster Yellows phytoplasma.

The plant’s neighbors grow old, reproduce and die, but the phytoplasma’s eerily youthful host persists. It becomes something like a mix between a vampire that never ages and a zombie host whose body serves the needs of its parasite, namely, tempting sap-sucking insects to feast on the plant’s bodily fluids as long as possible. When the insects ingest the parasite, they spread it to new hosts, and the whole “Night of the Living Dead-meets-Dracula” cycle repeats.

https://t.co/fidoJ7DMyR online! SAP05 protein effectors of the obligate parasite #phytoplasma simultaneously prolong plant lifespan and induce witch’s broom-like proliferations. #ZombiePlants #Parasite #MPMI #plantpath #plantsci. https://t.co/OtTrg1H8R0 pic.twitter.com/ihpcwM9aGV

— Saskia Hogenhout (@SaskiaHogenhout) February 17, 2021

How the parasite exerts such wide-ranging control is a subject of more than casual curiosity among scientists — phytoplasmas can cause destructive disease in crop plants like carrots. In a paper published in September in the journal Cell, Hogenhout and her colleagues reveal that some of these creepy alterations are driven by the work of a single protein from the parasite called SAP05, which stands in the way of the plant’s maturation.

SAP05 is not the first substance made by this phytoplasma that the scientists have linked to the symptoms it causes. The team sequenced the parasite’s genome some time ago and has pinpointed a handful of proteins that it may use to zombify its victims. But in the new paper, they explain how SAP05 seems to drive some of the more surprising effects, like the life-span extension.

It turns out that SAP05 binds to two groups of plant proteins that control the expression of genes used in development. Once it latches onto them, it causes them to be broken down by the plant’s own garbage disposal machinery. As a result, the plants appear frozen in time, unable to progress.

That makes sense, from the parasite’s perspective. If host plants were to mature normally, they would grow flowers and produce seeds, putting all of their energy toward making the next generation of plants. Before long they would drop their leaves and wither away.

“You can imagine that this situation is not a perfect situation for the parasite,” Hogenhout said.

Parasites benefit from the plant being sterile, so they can focus its energy toward making the microbe’s offspring. They also benefit from the plant staying alive and full of tasty juices as long as possible, the better to facilitate insects feeding on it.

Intriguingly, however, the scientists found that SAP05 attaches to a very specific piece of the cell disposal machinery to accomplish this goal. By tweaking the composition of that piece, they could radically curtail SAP05’s effects. Plants — in this case Arabidopsis thaliana, the diminutive mustard plant that’s a common lab model — with this modification did not grow into witches’ broom shapes, and they did not live longer than uninfected plants.

But that didn’t mean they were better off. Plants engineered to evade SAP05 had notably shorter lives when they were infected by the parasite. It seems that SAP05 may provide some protection against the stress of an infection, making it easier for the host to bear. Without that, the plant may be freer to continue its maturation, but it is also taking a greater hit from the disease than the zombie plants, which are more impervious to the parasite’s other effects. The zombies live on, protected by the organism that rides within them.

This control is likely exquisitely timed with the life cycle of the sap-feeding insects, Hogenhout said. After the insects feed on a plant, infecting it with the parasite, they lay eggs on it. At the same time that the parasite is taking over, the eggs are maturing.

When the young insects hatch, perhaps 10 days later, there is just enough time left in the plants’ extended life span for them to feast heartily on their juices before taking flight. Along for the ride will be their good friend, the phytoplasma.

“The parasite has now proliferated, just in time,” Hogenhout said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

The team of scientists led by George Church, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, will use genetic engineering to develop a cold-resistant elephant or an ‘Arctic elephant’. Several news reports have pointed out that the company has received $15 million in initial funding.

Last month, a company named Colossal, announced that it has started a landmark de-extinction project to resurrect the woolly mammoth, which went extinct roughly 10,000 years ago.

The team of scientists led by George Church, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, will use genetic engineering to develop a cold-resistant elephant or an ‘Arctic elephant’. Several news reports have pointed out that the company has received $15 million in initial funding.

The team has selected over 50 traits that will enhance the cold-resistant ability of an Asian elephant. These include shaggy coats, smaller ears, cold-adapted forms of haemoglobin and excess adipose tissue production.

The idea is to use these genes and with the help of CRISPR technology insert them into the Asian elephant’s genome. The team will then create an embryo that carries the traits of a woolly mammoth.

The embryo will be implanted into a surrogate African elephant. The gestation in the elephant’s womb will take place for around 18-22 months and a hybrid ‘Arctic elephant’ will be born.

But why a woolly mammoth and why now?

Colossal mentions on its website that one of the core goals for reviving the mammoth is to revert the now-overshrubbed forests into natural arctic grasslands, which will help with carbon emissions.

The tundra, which is now a mossy forest, used to be a grassland and the team said that bringing back the mammoths could help bring back the steppe (unforested grassland) ecosystem and help in “reversing the rapid warming of the climate”.

They said that grazing mammoths will help re-establish the grassland ecosystem and prevent the thawing and release of greenhouse gases that are now trapped in the arctic permafrost.

Dr George Church told the IndianExpress.com that for carbon sequestration – preserving the methane from being released and bringing new carbon dioxide into the frozen soil – models have shown that about 100 ‘Arctic elephants’ would be needed.

“We would need an area of somewhere between one and three million square kilometre at first to have an impact. But considering there are about 20 million square kilometre of Arctic, that’s a small fraction,” he added.

When will an ‘Arctic elephant’ be born?

Ben Lamm, the founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences, told reporters that one can see the first generation of ‘Arctic elephant’ calves in four to six years. “Our goal is a little over a decade before we get full reintroduction,” he added.

Lamm said that the short-term plan includes developing veterinary reproductive technologies for endangered species in particular, and for endangered environments and ecosystems.

“Look at this like the Apollo programme. When humankind went to the moon, we actually developed a lot of great technologies, including technologies that are allowing us to have this conversation today. And so we think there’s a lot of applications of the technologies that will come out of these synthetic wombs, multiplex editing which can be used for protecting critically endangered species, in agriculture, and for veterinary use,” he added.

Ethical questions

Professor Adrian M Lister from the Division of Vertebrates and Anthropology at Natural History Museum London told the IndianExpress.com that this plan raises many ethical questions, “Especially since we are talking about a highly intelligent, social animal, not a lab animal like a fruit fly or a nematode worm.”

He added that it was quite likely that there would be many failed experiments (abortions or malformed births) before they might have a successful pregnancy and a functioning offspring.

“Second, do we really know enough about the elephant’s adaptations to be sure we can fully equip it for life in the Arctic? This is a tropical animal that lives in equatorial daylight and climatic regime, eating trees and tall tropical grasses. They may be able to engineer a thick coat and fat layer, for example, but there may be many other necessary physiological or biochemical adaptations that we are not aware of. Will these animals thrive in such an alien environment?” he asked.

Coastal development, land clearing, and agriculture have all had their share of the blame, leading to the low oxygen content in water, disease, bleaching – a pattern observed across the Caribbean.

It is no news that human impact has adversely affected marine biodiversity. A recent study that used fossilised shark scales found that Caribbean shark populations have witnessed a steep decline since the mid-Holocene. The Holocene is a time period in the history of the Earth that began 10,000 years ago.

Cartilaginous fish like sharks, sawfish and rays have tiny, sharp tooth-shaped scales on their bodies that help them move through the water and also prevent microorganisms from taking up lodging on shark’s skin. These are called dermal denticles (dermal = of the skin, denticle = teeth-like). The study employed deposits of dermal denticles as proxies of past shark populations as well as their species composition. There are currently over 500 species of sharks.

Sediment study

In order to source mid-Holocene shark assemblages, researchers collected sediment containing denticles from the mid-Holocene reefs and compared them with those from the modern reefs.

Researchers identified five morphotypes of dermal denticles, with each corresponding to a particular ecological group of sharks. The approach allows for almost direct reconstruction of the past shark population size and species composition.

I’m excited to share our new paper, out now in @PNASNews. We used #fossil #shark scales (denticles) preserved in coral reef sediments to reconstruct the pre-exploitation baseline of a reef shark community in Caribbean Panama. https://t.co/Sbl0sOm0J2 @odealab @mccauley_lab (1/18) pic.twitter.com/vvxAx1abkm

— Erin Dillon (@erinmdillon) July 6, 2021

Almost all species of sharks witnessed a decline from the mid-Holocene to the present. Shark abundance in the mid-Holocene was nearly thrice higher than the present-day reefs.

Denticles corresponding to pelagic sharks registered the largest reduction in number. By contrast, the demersal sharks did not show that much of a decline. Pelagic organisms are those that are attached to the surface of the ocean, while demersal or benthic organisms live at the bottom. In the present day, benthic sharks are more abundant in number than pelagic sharks like the fast swimming requiem and hammerhead sharks that live near the shore.

The authors note the possible reasons for this shift – it could be that sharks of the yesteryears could have been larger, resulting in more denticle accumulation.

Role of overfishing

The decline in shark numbers post-industrialisation in Caribbean reefs also bears a close resemblance to the decline observed in this study from the mid-Holocene to the present day.

Another recent study published in 2020 found, via video monitoring, that overfishing had almost entirely exterminated sharks from several reefs. Indeed, historical records from the early twentieth or nineteenth centuries talk of ‘seas teeming with sharks,’ and early second millennium CE archaeological records also show evidence of shark teeth.

Substantial degradation in the populations of not only sharks but marine carnivores, in general, took place. well before coral disease and bleaching

The authors note how ‘modern-day Panamanian fisheries selectively catch pelagic sharks,’ which ‘implicates’ overfishing as a key factor in reducing numbers of pelagic sharks, as noted above.

But what about the decline in the numbers of nurse sharks, that live close to the bottom of the ocean and have little monetary value? Could a reason other than overfishing be at play? Coastal development, land clearing, and agriculture have all had their share of the blame, leading to the low oxygen content in water, disease, bleaching – a pattern observed across the Caribbean. That, and overfishing targets not only sharks but also other fish that serve as food for sharks.

The ecological impacts of reduction in the populations of sharks and marine carnivores, such as that on food webs, are still in the process of being studied.

The authors hope that diving into ancient fossil palimpsests that predate human impact could help in setting more robust baselines for biodiversity restoration targets in these areas.

– The author is a freelance science communicator. (mail[at]ritvikc[dot]com)

Merck said it expects to produce 10 million courses of the treatment by the end of 2021, with more doses coming next year.

Merck & Co Inc’s experimental oral drug for COVID-19, molnupiravir, reduced by around 50% the chance of hospitalization or death for patients at risk of severe disease, according to interim clinical trial results announced on Friday.

Merck and partner Ridgeback Biotherapeutics plan to seek U.S. emergency use authorization for the pill as soon as possible, and to submit applications to regulatory agencies worldwide.

Today we announced positive interim data for our investigational #COVID19 #antiviral treatment. Learn more about our latest news: https://t.co/v1DDAa4RjN $MRK pic.twitter.com/na2O4Y5N3D

— Merck (@Merck) October 1, 2021

Due to the positive results, the Phase 3 trial is being stopped early at the recommendation of outside monitors. “This is going to change the dialogue around how to manage COVID-19,” Robert Davis, Merck’s chief executive officer, told Reuters.

If authorised, molnupiravir, which is designed to introduce errors into the genetic code of the virus, would be the first oral antiviral medication for COVID-19. Rivals including Pfizer Inc and Swiss pharmaceutical Roche Holding AG are racing to develop an easy-to-administer antiviral pill for COVID-19 but so far, only antibody cocktails – which have to be given intravenously – are approved for treating non-hospitalized COVID-19 patients.

A planned interim analysis of 775 patients in Merck’s study found that 7.3 per cent of those given molnupiravir were either hospitalised or had died by 29 days after treatment, compared with 14.1 per cent of placebo patients. There were no deaths in the molnupiravir group, but there were eight deaths of placebo patients.

“Antiviral treatments that can be taken at home to keep people with COVID-19 out of the hospital are critically needed,” Wendy Holman, Ridgeback’s CEO, said in a statement.

In the trial, which enrolled patients around the world, molnupiravir was taken every 12 hours for five days. The study enrolled patients with laboratory-confirmed mild-to-moderate COVID-19, who had symptoms for no more than five days. All patients had at least one risk factor associated with poor disease outcome, such as obesity or older age.

Merck said viral sequencing done so far shows molnupiravir is effective against all variants of the coronavirus, including highly transmissible Delta. The company said rates of adverse events were similar for both molnupiravir and placebo patients, but did not give details of the side effects.

Merck has said data shows molnupiravir is not capable of inducing genetic changes in human cells, but men enrolled in its trials have to abstain from heterosexual intercourse or agree to use contraception. Women of child-bearing age cannot be pregnant and also have to use birth control.

Merck said it expects to produce 10 million courses of the treatment by the end of 2021, with more doses coming next year. The company has a U.S. government contract to supply 1.7 million courses of molnupiravir at a price of $700 per course.

CEO Davis said Merck has similar agreements with other governments worldwide, and is in talks with more. The company said it plans to implement a tiered pricing approach based on country income criteria. Merck has also agreed to license the drug to several India-based generic drugmakers, which would be able to supply the treatment to low- and middle-income countries.

Molnupiravir is also being studied in a Phase 3 trial for preventing coronavirus infection in people exposed to the virus. Merck officials said it is unclear how long the FDA review of the drug will take. “I believe that they are going to try to work with alacrity on this,” said Dean Li, head of Merck’s research labs.

The researchers built machine learning models, which assigned a probability of human infection based on patterns in virus genomes.

Machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence (AI), may predict the likelihood that any animal-infecting virus will jump to humans, according to a study.

Researchers at the University of Glasgow in the UK noted that most emerging infectious diseases of humans such as COVID-19 are zoonotic — caused by viruses originating from other animal species. Identifying high-risk viruses earlier can improve research and surveillance priorities.

Our manuscript on predicting the zoonotic risk of novel viruses when all you have is a genome is now published in @PLOSBiology – a thread. 1/10

(with @SimonAB and @DanielStreicker)https://t.co/hc5EA357iC pic.twitter.com/xRNFKZP6iO

— Nardus Mollentze (@NardusMollentze) September 28, 2021

However, identifying zoonotic diseases prior to emergence is a major challenge because only a small minority of the estimated 1.67 million animal viruses are able to infect humans.

To develop machine learning models using viral genome sequences, the researchers first compiled a dataset of 861 virus species from 36 families. They then built machine learning models, which assigned a probability of human infection based on patterns in virus genomes. Machine learning is the study of computer algorithms that can improve automatically through experience.

The researchers applied the best-performing model to analyse patterns in the predicted zoonotic potential of additional virus genomes sampled from a range of species.

The study, published in the journal PLOS Biology, found that viral genomes may have generalisable features that are independent of virus taxonomic relationships and may preadapt viruses to infect humans. The researchers were able to develop machine learning models capable of identifying candidate zoonoses using viral genomes.

The researchers noted that these models have limitations, as computer models are only a preliminary step of identifying zoonotic viruses with the potential to infect humans. Viruses flagged by the models will require confirmatory laboratory testing before pursuing major additional research investments, they said.

While these models predict whether viruses might be able to infect humans, the ability to infect is just one part of broader zoonotic risk, according to the researchers. This risk is also influenced by the ability of the virus to transmit between humans, and the ecological conditions at the time of human exposure, they said.

“Our findings show that the zoonotic potential of viruses can be inferred to a surprisingly large extent from their genome sequence,” the authors of the study noted. “By highlighting viruses with the greatest potential to become zoonotic, genome-based ranking allows further ecological and virological characterisation to be targeted more effectively,” they added.

Simon Babayan from the University of Glasgow noted that a genomic sequence is typically the first, and often only, information on newly-discovered viruses. “The more information we can extract from it, the sooner we might identify the virus’ origins and the zoonotic risk it may pose,” Babayan said. “As more viruses are characterised, the more effective our machine learning models will become at identifying the rare viruses that ought to be closely monitored and prioritised for preemptive vaccine development,” he added.

Earth Sciences Minister Jitendra Singh said the two proposed MPAs are essential to regulate illegal unreported and unregulated fishing.

India has extended its support for protecting the Antarctic environment and co-sponsoring a proposal of the European Union for designating East Antarctica and the Weddell Sea as Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), the Ministry of Earth Sciences said on Thursday.

Addressing a high-level ministerial meeting held virtually on Wednesday, which saw participation from different countries of the European Union, Earth Sciences Minister Jitendra Singh said the two proposed MPAs are essential to regulate illegal unreported and unregulated fishing.

He urged the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) member countries to ensure that India remains associated with the formulation, adaptation and implementation mechanisms of these MPAs in future. “India supports sustainability in protecting the Antarctic environment,” Singh said.

“India has extended support for protecting the Antarctic environment and for co-sponsoring the proposal of the European Union for designating East Antarctica and the Weddell Sea as Marine Protected Areas (MPAs),” the MoES said.

Singh said the proposal to designate East Antarctica and the Weddell Sea as MPAs was first put forth to the commission in 2020 but a consensus could not be reached at that time. He said, since then, substantial progress has been made with Australia, Norway, Uruguay and the United Kingdom agreeing to co-sponsor the proposal. The minister added that by the end of October 2021, India would join these countries in co-sponsoring the MPA proposals.

Singh informed the EU delegates that India had embarked on Antarctic expedition in 1981, through the Southern Indian Ocean sector and since then, there has been no turning back. He said till date, India had completed 40 expeditions with plans for the 41st expedition in 2021-22.

Singh said this is the first time India is considering co-sponsoring an MPA proposal at CCAMLR and getting aligned with countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Korea, New Zealand, South Africa and the USA, which are also proactively considering supporting the MPA proposals.

The minister said India’s decision to consider extending support and co-sponsoring the MPA proposals is driven by conservation and sustainable utilisation principles and adhering to the global cooperation frameworks such as Sustainable Development Goals, UN Decade of Oceans, Convention on Biodiversity, etc., to which India is a signatory.

The high-level ministerial meeting was hosted virtually by Virginijus Sinkevicius, Commissioner for Environment, Oceans and Fisheries, EU. It was attended by ministers, ambassadors and country commissioners from nearly 18 countries. The meeting aimed to increase the number of co-sponsors of the MPA proposals and reflected on a joint strategy and future actions for their swift adoption by CCAMLR.

CCAMLR is an international treaty to manage Antarctic fisheries to preserve species diversity and stability of the entire Antarctic marine ecosystem. It came into force in April 1982. India has been a permanent member of CCAMLR since 1986. Work pertaining to CCAMLR is coordinated in India by the Ministry of Earth Sciences through its attached office, the Centre for Marine Living Resources and Ecology (CMLRE) in Kochi, Kerala.

A marine protected area provides protection for all or part of its natural resources. Certain activities within an MPA are limited or prohibited to meet specific conservation, habitat protection, ecosystem monitoring, or fisheries management objectives. Since 2009, CCAMLR members have developed proposals for MPAs for various regions of the Southern Ocean. CCAMLR’s scientific committee examines these proposals. After CCAMLR members agree upon them, elaborate conservation measures are set out by the commission.

“We’ll try to mass-produce them and hopefully reintroduce them into the wild,” said Matt Kier, a botanist with Hawaii’s Department of Land and Natural Resources’ Rare Plant Program.

A fern species that was believed to be extinct when the last known specimen died on Hawaii’s Big Island has been found on the island of Kauai.

The native pendant kihi fern, which only grows on the trunks of trees, was believed to be extinct for several years until a team from the Hawaii Plant Extinction Prevention Program found another specimen on Kauai earlier this year, Hawaii Tribune-Herald reported Thursday.

The last known Big Island specimen of the fern, or Adenophorus periens, was found dead in 2015. That prompted it to be listed as critically endangered and possibly extinct. With the discovery of new specimens on Kauai, it’s no longer considered possibly extinct, the Hilo newspaper reported.

There were nearly 1,300 known specimens of the ferns throughout the state in 1994, but by 2012 there were only 31 on Kauai and less than 10 on the Big Island.

Five of the ferns were discovered at three locations on Kauai, said Matt Kier, a botanist with Hawaii’s Department of Land and Natural Resources’ Rare Plant Program.

“So, we’ll try to mass-produce them and hopefully reintroduce them into the wild, which means we may bring them back to the Big Island,” Kier said.

After 12 days on the space outpost, they are set to return to Earth with another Russian cosmonaut.

A Russian actor and a film director rocketed to space Tuesday on a mission to make the world's first movie in orbit, a project the Kremlin said will help burnish the nation's space glory.

Actor Yulia Peresild and director Klim Shipenko blasted off for the International Space Station in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft together with cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov, a veteran of three space missions. Their Soyuz MS-19 lifted off as scheduled at 1:55 p.m. (0855 GMT) from the Russian space launch facility in Baikonur, Kazakhstan and arrived at the station after about 3½ hours.

Shkaplerov took manual controls to smoothly dock the spacecraft at the space outpost after a glitch in an automatic docking system.

The trio reported they were feeling fine and spacecraft systems were functioning normally.

Peresild and Klimenko are to film segments of a new movie titled “Challenge,” in which a surgeon played by Peresild rushes to the space station to save a crew member who suffers a heart condition. After 12 days on the space outpost, they are set to return to Earth with another Russian cosmonaut.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the mission will help showcase Russia's space prowess.

“We have been pioneers in space and maintained a confident position,” Peskov said. “Such missions that help advertise our achievements and space exploration in general are great for the country.” Speaking at a pre-flight news conference Monday, 37-year-old Peresild acknowledged that it was challenging for her to adapt to the strict discipline and rigorous demands during the training.

“It was psychologically, physically and morally hard,” she said. “But I think that once we achieve the goal, all that will seem not so difficult and we will remember it with a smile.” Shipenko, 38, who has made several commercially successful movies, also described their fast-track, four-month preparation for the flight as tough.

“Of course, we couldn't make many things at the first try, and sometimes even at a third attempt, but it's normal,” he said.

In this handout photo released by Roscosmos Space Agency, actress Yulia Peresild, centre, film director Klim Shipenko, above, and cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov wave prior to the launch to the International Space Station, ISS, at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Tuesday, Oct. 5, 2021. | Photo Credit: AP

Shipenko, who will complete the shooting on Earth after filming the movie's space episodes, said Shkaplerov and two other Russian cosmonauts now on board the station — Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov — will all play parts in the new movie.

Russia's state-controlled Channel One television, which is involved in making the movie, has extensively covered the crew training and the launch.

“I'm in shock. I still can't imagine that my mom is out there,” Peresild's daughter, Anna, said in televised remarks minutes after the launch.

Dmitry Rogozin, head of the Russian state space corporation Roscosmos, was a key force behind the project, describing it as a chance to burnish the nation's space glory and rejecting criticism from some Russian media.

Some commentators argued that the film project would distract the Russian crew and could be awkward to film on the Russian segment of the International Space Station, which is considerably less spacious compared to the U.S. segment. A new Russia lab module, the Nauka, was added in July, but it is yet to be fully integrated into the station.

On the space station, the three newcomers join Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency; NASA astronauts Mark Vande Hei, Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur; Roscosmos cosmonauts Novitskiy and Dubrov; and Aki Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

Novitskiy, who will star as the ailing cosmonaut in the film, will take the captain's seat in a Soyuz capsule to take the film crew back to Earth on October 17.

The project targets a 2028 launch with a landing in 2033, a five-year journey in which the spacecraft will travel some 3.6 billion kilometres

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) on October 5 announced plans to send a probe to land on an asteroid between Mars and Jupiter to collect data on the origins of the universe, the latest project in the oil-rich federation’s ambitious space programme.

The project targets a 2028 launch with a landing in 2033, a five-year journey in which the spacecraft will travel some 3.6 billion kilometres (2.2 billion miles).

The UAE’s Space Agency said it will partner with the Laboratory for Atmospheric Science and Physics at the University of Colorado on the project. It declined to immediately offer a cost for the effort.

The project comes after the Emirates successfully put its Amal, or “Hope”, probe in orbit around Mars in February. The car-size Amal cost $200 million to build and launch. That excludes operating costs at Mars.

The Emirates plans to send an unmanned spacecraft to the moon in 2024. The country, which is home to Abu Dhabi and Dubai, also has set the ambitious goal to build a human colony on Mars by 2117.

The winners — Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi — were announced by Goran Hansson, secretary-general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

The Nobel Prize for physics has been awarded to scientists from Japan, Germany and Italy.

Syukuro Manabe (90) and Klaus Hasselmann (89) were cited for their work in “the physical modeling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming”.

The second half of the prize was awarded to Giorgio Parisi (73) for “the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales.”

The panel said Mr. Manabe and Mr. Hasselmann “laid the foundation of our knowledge of the Earth’s climate and how humanity influences it".

Starting in the 1960s, Mr. Manabe demonstrated how increases in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would increase global temperatures, laying the foundations for current climate models.

About a decade later, Mr. Hasselmann created a model that linked weather and climate, helping explain why climate models can be reliable despite the seemingly chaotic nature of the weather.

He also developed ways to look for specific signs of human influence on the climate.

Mr. Parisi “built a deep physical and mathematical model” that made it possible to understand complex systems in fields as different as mathematics, biology, neuroscience and machine learning.

After the announcement, Mr. Parisi said that “it’s very urgent that we take very strong decisions and move at a very strong pace” in tackling climate change.

“It’s clear for future generations that we have to act now,” he added.

The winners were announced on October 5 by Goran Hansson, secretary-general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Last year, the prize went to American Andrea Ghez, Roger Penrose of Britain and Reinhard Genzel of Germany for their research into black holes.

The prestigious award comes with a gold medal and 10 million Swedish kronor (over $1.14 million). The prize money comes from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1895.

On Monday, the Nobel Committee awarded the prize in physiology or medicine to Americans David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for their discoveries into how the human body perceives temperature and touch.

Over the coming days prizes will also be awarded for outstanding work in the fields of chemistry, literature, peace and economics.

Scientists find two of four existing models show significant prediction skills for up to 10 years

A new study from the University of Hyderabad (UoH) in collaboration with the University of Exeter (UK) claims to have found out decadal prediction skills for the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) to enable monsoon forecast for the next 5-10 years in advance.

Scientists analysed retrospective decadal forecasts, with initial conditions from 1960 to 2011 from existing four models and found that two models — MIROC5 from Japan, and CanCM4 from Canada — show significant prediction skills for up to 10 years, with strongest leads up to two years.

Interestingly, the predictability of IOD comes from the subsurface ocean signals in the Southern Ocean. The El Nino-Southern Oscillation events, which occur in the tropical pacific, are also well known as a major climate driver. IOD affects the global climate with a positive phase characterised by above normal sea surface temperature in the equatorial eastern Indian Ocean, and below normal temperatures in the western equatorial Indian Ocean.

Strong positive IOD events in 2019, 2007, 1997,1994, 1967 1963, 1961, etc. are associated with strong rains along the Indian monsoon trough region. Conversely, it also causes below normal rainfall in Indonesia and Australia, heat waves in Japan and Europe, and East Africa, and fires in Australia and Indonesia.

The latest extreme positive IOD occurred in 2019 summer, contributing to the unprecedented wildfire season in Australia, floods in East Africa and above normal rainfall and floods in India. The impact can be seen all the way till Europe and Americas as well. Negative IOD affects the Indian monsoon trough. In fact, this was prominent till August and is a likely factor for the below normal rainfall in north India.

While predicting IOD well in advance would be beneficial for the society, the lead prediction skills are limited to a few months with just 1-2 models showing the skills to predict the eastern Indian Ocean temperatures at the lead of a few seasons to one year.

Scientists say better decadal prediction skills are possible given the improved models and larger number of observations assimilated.

The research was carried out by professor K. Ashok, research student Feba Francis, and Satish Shetye, a former chair professor of Centre for Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, UoH, in collaboration with Mat Collins of University of Exeter, said an official release. It was featured in ‘Frontiers in Climate’ journal.

Patent

Meanwhile, Advanced Centre of Research in High Energy Materials, a DRDO’s centre of excellence at UoH, has recently been granted a patent for their invention ‘Green Method for the Synthesis of Bis(Fluoroalkyl)Carbonate’. Project scientist Balaka Barkakaty and her two assistants Saheli Dey and Nitesh Singh are the inventors of this patent. This patented invention outlines an ‘easy, green, no-solvent and cost-effective method’ for producing various types of bis(fluoroalkyl)carbonates in high purity and high yields.

David Julius, Ardem Patapoutian share the Nobel Prize for physiology

Two U.S.-based scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine on October 4 for their discovery of the receptors that allow humans to feel temperature and touch.

David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian focused their work on the field of somatosensation, that is the ability of specialised organs such as eyes, ears and skin to see, hear and feel.

“This really unlocks one of the secrets of nature,” said Thomas Perlmann, secretary-general of the Nobel Committee, in announcing the winners. “It's actually something that is crucial for our survival, so it's a very important and profound discovery.” The committee said Mr. Julius, 65, used capsaicin, the active component in chilli peppers, to identify the nerve sensors that allow the skin to respond to heat.

Mr. Patapoutian found separate pressure-sensitive sensors in cells that respond to mechanical stimulation, it said.

The pair shared the prestigious Kavli Award for Neuroscience last year.

“Imagine that you're walking barefoot across a field on this summer's morning,” said Patrik Ernfors of the Nobel Committee. “You can feel the warmth of the sun, the coolness of the morning dew, a caressing summer breeze and the fine texture of blades of grass underneath your feet. These impressions of temperature, touch and movement are feelings relying on somatosensation."

“Such information continuously flows from the skin and other deep tissues and connects us with the external and internal world. It is also essential for tasks that we perform effortlessly and without much thought,” said Mr. Ernfors.

Mr. Perlmann said he managed to get hold of both of the winners before the announcement.

“I [...] only had a few minutes to talk to them, but they were incredibly happy,” he said. “And as far as I could tell they were very surprised and a little bit shocked, maybe.”

Last year's prize went to three scientists who discovered the liver-ravaging hepatitis C virus, a breakthrough that led to cures for the deadly disease and tests to keep the scourge from spreading though blood banks.

The prestigious award comes with a gold medal and 10 million Swedish kronor (over $1.14 million). The prize money comes from a bequest left by the prize's creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1895.

The prize is the first to be awarded this year. The other prizes are for outstanding work in the fields of physics, chemistry, literature, peace and economics.

Today's Cache dissects big themes at the intersection of technology, business and policy. Written by John Xavier, tech news lead at The Hindu

NASA's split tilts the balance in favour of private operators

Private enterprises have changed the dynamics of low-Earth orbit (LEO) and outer space missions. The change has made NASA re-think its future missions, and how it will execute them. That’s why the agency is splitting its human spaceflight unit by creating two new mission directorates.

The reorganisation will separate the unit’s human space exploration into two parts. One will make the agency focus on longer-term mission like travel to moon and Mars. The other will look at near-term operations of the International Space Station (ISS) and other near-to-Earth missions.

This change at the core of NASA’s structure reveals how commercialisation of space travel is making the top space agency cede power to private enterprises, such as SpaceX. It also underscores the importance of corporations in future missions.

The split creates two leadership roles at the agency. Jim Free, who retired from NASA in 2017, will return to the agency to lead the longer-term missions. He will define and manage projects focused on moon and Mars missions. His unit will also take charge of the Artemis programme that seeks to put humans on the lunar landscape once again in 2024.

The near-Earth missions will be led by Kathy Lueders, whose unit will focus on rocket launches, ISS management and commercialisation of LEO.  Beyond short- and long-term missions, the division of labour within the space agency will also help it handle commercial players effectively.

Take the case of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. The two billionaires are racing against each other to put LEO satellites in the sky. For now, Musk’s Starlink is far ahead in the race with nearly 1,300 LEO satellites in space. Bezos’ Kuiper has signed a contract with United Launch Alliance (ULA) to send its satellites up. Its planned constellation will dot the sky with over 3,000 LEO satellites.

Even as the competition intensifies, Amazon has filed a harshly worded complaint with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), accusing Musk of “launching rockets without approval [and] building an unapproved launch tower”.

In a separate move, Bezos’ space company Blue Origin has challenged NASA’s decision to award a $2.9 billion lunar lander contract to Musk’s SpaceX. These ‘star-wars’ fought on Earth will idea land on Lueders’ turf. Between Free and Lueders’, the latter may find more action on the ground and a little over.

The Indian Astronomical Observatory (IAO) located at Hanle near Leh in Ladakh is becoming one of the globally promising observatory sites, according to a recent study.

This is due to its advantages of more clear nights, minimal light pollution, background aerosol concentration, extremely dry atmospheric condition and uninterrupted monsoon, the Department of Science and Technology said.

Researchers from India and their collaborators carried out a detailed study of the night time cloud cover fraction over eight high altitude observatories, including three in India, the DST said.

The researchers used reanalysis data combined from assimilation and observation extending over 41 years, along with 21 years of data from satellites. The study classified the quality of observable nights for different astronomical usages like photometry and spectroscopy on a daily basis.

Eight observatories

They analysed datasets for the Indian Astronomical Observatory (IAO) in Hanle and Merak (Ladakh), and Devasthal (Nainital) in India, Ali Observatory in the Tibet Autonomous Region in China, South African Large Telescope in South Africa, University of Tokyo Atacama Observatory and Paranal in Chile, and the National Astronomical Observatory in Mexico.

The team found that the Hanle site which is as dry as Atacama Desert in Chile and much drier than Devasthal and has around 270 clear nights in a year and is also one of the emerging sites for infrared and submillimetre optical astronomy. This is because water vapour absorbs electromagnetic signals and reduces their strength, the DST said in a statement. The research led by Dr. Shantikumar Singh Ningombam of Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA), Bengaluru,and scientists from Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES) in Nainital, a DST institute and collaborators from St. Joseph's College, Bengaluru, and the National Institute of Meteorological Sciences, South Korea, University of Colorado and Chemical Sciences Laboratory, NOAA, U.S. has been published in the Monthly Notices for Royal Astronomical Society.

They found Paranal, located in a high-altitude desert in Chile, to be the best site in terms of clear skies with around 87% of clear nights in a year. IAO Hanle, and Ali observatories, which are located around 80 km from each other, are similar to each other in terms of clear night skies.

They found that Devasthal has a slightly larger number of clear nights compared to the other sites in the subcontinent but are affected by monsoons for about three months in a year. However, night observations at IAO Hanle from 2m-Himalayan Chandra Telescope (HCT) are possible throughout the year without any interruption due to monsoon.

Due to the advantages of more clear nights, minimal light pollution, background aerosol concentration, extremely dry atmospheric conditions, and uninterrupted monsoon, this region is becoming one of the promising sites globally for the next generation of astronomical observatories, it said.

From the murky waters of a lake in Chennai, researchers isolated an alga that breaks down low density polyethylene

Researchers from University of Madras and Presidency College, Chennai, have isolated an alga species that shows promise as an agent of biodegradation of plastic sheets. It is a preliminary study that has been published in Scientific Reports and needs further research and development before it can be translated to the industry.

According to the Central Pollution Control Board’s annual report for the year 2011-12, the plastic waste generated in a year amounted to 5.6 million metric tonnes. Only 60% of the plastic used in India was collected and recycled. The metros alone contributed some 21.2% of the total waste, led by Delhi, followed by Chennai, Kolkata and Mumbai.

The usual means of disposal of plastic waste involves incineration, land-filling and recycling. These methods have limitations and also sometimes produce side-effects that are hazardous to the environment. Hence, researchers are on the lookout for biodegradation methods that are safe and environment friendly. It is in this context that the present study gains importance.

Common alga, epiphyte

In earlier studies, species of bacteria that degrade plastic have been studied. In the present study, this role is played by the microalga Uronema africanum Borge. This is a species of microalgae that is commonly found in Africa, Asia and Europe. In Rangoon, Burma, it was noted to be an epiphyte, attaching itself to other algae and plants.

Sanniyasi Elumalai, Professor in the Department of Biotechnology, University of Madras, and his graduate students Preethy P. Raj and Dinesh Kumar Gunasekar, along with post-doctoral fellow Rajesh Kanna Gopal from Presidency College, came upon a plastic bag which was colonised by, as they came to know later through study, three species of microalgae.

“We collected a polyethylene carry bag colonised by green, luxuriously grown photosynthetic microalgae and samples of water,” says Prof. Elumalai. “Viewing the collected polyethylene sample under a light microscope showed that it was colonised by microalgae… Abrasions were seen on the surface of the polyethylene sheet at different magnifications.”

Showed potential

The samples were collected at the Kallukuttai lake area near Taramani railway station, in Chennai. When they did a closer examination of the microalgal growth, they found one species, Uronema africanum Borge, showed potential to degrade plastic.

They first had to identify which species the alga belonged to, and in this they were helped by Dr. B. Babu of Madras Christian College, Chennai, whom they acknowledge in the paper.

In the experiments, they tested the microalga on low-density polyethylene, in sheets which are highly resistant to degradation, into simpler molecules. “We saw that the isolated algae Uronema africanum produced enzymes, hormones, and some polysaccharides which slowly degrade [the sheets], and the structural integrity of the polymer [breaks down] and it disintegrates into monomers,” says Prof. Elumalai.

After incubation of the algae in the polyethylene sheet for thirty days, they noticed under the microscope that there were aberrations, grooves, ridges and furrows in the material of the sheets. Following it up with gas chromatography and mass spectrum analysis, they found that there was a huge difference in the composition of supernatant fluids of controls and experimental sample.

Breaking down plastic

“The microalgae produce different kinds of extra cellular polysaccharides, enzymes, toxins such as cyanotoxins, hormones which react with the polymer sheets (polymer bonds) and break them up into the simpler monomers which will not have harmful effect in the atmosphere,” says Prof Elumalai.

In their analysis, the researchers used the facilities of Central Leather Research Institute, Chennai, and Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore.

The researchers are planning to collaborate with industry to take up this technology in to a pilot scale and finally large-scale study.

researchers combined and centrifuged glass flakes with poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) to make a transparent composite.

Inspired by the inner layer of mollusc shells, scientists at McGill University, Canada, have developed stronger and tougher glass (Science). The glass material does not shatter on impact and has the resiliency of plastic. Potential uses could be to improve cell phone screens in the future.

The researchers combined and centrifuged glass flakes with poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) to make a transparent composite. A transparent composite was created by doping the glass flakes to alter the refractive index of PMMA to increase the optical clarity and make it at par with glass. The new material is not only three times stronger than the normal glass, but also more than five times more fracture-resistant, says the university press release. The fabrication method is robust and scalable, and the composite may prove to be a glass alternative in diverse applications, the release adds.

The scientists created the new glass and acrylic composite material that mimics nacre or mother of pearl. Nacre has the rigidity of a stiff material and durability of a soft material as it is made of stiff pieces of chalk-like matter that are layered with soft proteins that are highly elastic.

The researchers mimicked the architecture of nacre by using layers of glass flakes and acrylic. Initially, the material is opaque, but is made optically transparent like glass by tuning the refractive index of the acrylic seamlessly blended with the glass.

The researchers plan to improve the glass to change its properties, such as colour, mechanics and conductivity.

Going by past experience, the FDA might greenlight the vaccine for young children in a matter of weeks. The company expects to submit data of children 2–4 years and 6 months to 1 year by the end of the year.

Pfizer has submitted to the FDA Phase 2/3 trial data of mRNA vaccine on children 5–11 years for initial review. A formal submission to request for emergency use authorisation is expected in the coming weeks.

On September 20, Pfizer released details of the trial that showed the vaccine was safe and generated a “robust” antibody response in young children. Going by past experience, the FDA might greenlight the vaccine for young children in a matter of weeks. The company expects to submit data of children 2–4 years and 6 months to 1 year by the end of the year.

In an email, Dr. Gagandeep Kang, Professor of Microbiology at CMC Vellore, and Dr. Chandrakant Lahariya, physician-epidemiologist, discuss whether young children should be vaccinated and if that would further exacerbate vaccine inequity globally.

Considering that children below 11 years rarely suffer from severe disease and death, is it necessary to vaccinate young children?

Gagandeep Kang: All decisions about children needing to be vaccinated are based on assessment of risk and benefit. Here, when making decisions for public health, we also need to separate the benefits of vaccination against disease and against infection. If the risk from disease is low, then the risks of side-effects of vaccination need to be evaluated against the potential benefits of preventing a few cases. When we come to protection afforded by vaccines against infection, we need to understand whether infected children are a source of infection for the community. If children transmit infections, without themselves having severe disease, there may still be a benefit in vaccination. However, decisions need to be based on evidence, and as with other infectious diseases, transmission by children may be dependent on the amount of virus circulating in the community as well as the prior exposure of the community, and this will vary by geography.

Chandrakant Lahariya: Conducting clinical trials of COVID-19 vaccines in all age groups that are affected by the pathogen/disease is a standard process. However, the licensing and availability of an effective vaccine does not mean we need to find an arm to administer it. At present, there is not enough evidence to prioritise all children in 12–17 years over the vaccination of adults.

Is it safe to vaccinate young children considering the small risk of myocarditis (inflammation of heart muscle) and pericarditis (inflammation of the outer lining of the heart) seen in adolescents and young adults after the second dose of the mRNA vaccine?

Gagandeep Kang: Myocarditis and pericarditis have been reported after the mRNA vaccines, particularly in young males. These are not common side-effects, and as with every other vaccine, we need to balance the small risk and the potential benefit.

The data provided by Pfizer are likely to be sufficient for approval. It is for public health authorities to decide whether they want to introduce vaccination into national immunisation programmes. Even if public health authorities in a country decide not to introduce the vaccine, it is possible that parents may decide, with the advice of their doctors, that they want to achieve protection for their children. In that case, would we want to override the decisions of parents for their children?

Is the trial carried out on just 2,268 participants aged 5–11 years sufficient to understand the safety profile of the vaccine?

Gagandeep Kang: Yes, that is sufficient information for approval. Usually, safety assessments are carried out in a few thousand individuals across a much wider age range. We already have data for older children and adults. The vaccines are generally safe as no strong signals have been detected in the trials. The small risk of viral myocarditis was identified in adults and adolescents after the mRNA vaccine was widely used, indicating that in the countries that are reporting the data, there is effective monitoring of adverse events following immunisation. Understanding the level of risk is important for all decisions regarding introduction and continued use of vaccines. If decisions are made to introduce vaccines in young children, post-introduction monitoring for safety will need to continue as for all other vaccines.

Chandrakant Lahariya: The information on the safety of vaccines is generated from the data of all trial participants. The subgroup provides an indication on safety profile. However, more than safety, the smaller trials in children examine immunogenicity (whether vaccines are generating immune response); dose response (what dose of vaccine generates comparable immune response) and reactogenicity to various doses. What we need to remember is that trials are designed to identify common adverse events. However, rare adverse events which happen at a frequency lower than one in trial size can only be identified after roll-out of vaccines. That’s why the post-marketing surveillance (after vaccine roll-out) and stronger AEFI reporting systems are very relevant.

Unlike 30 microgram dosage given to adults, is reducing the dosage of vaccines to 10 microgram in children 5–11 years likely to make the vaccine safer?

Gagandeep Kang: When there is a side-effect of a vaccine, it does not always depend on the amount of active ingredients in the vaccine. It could also depend just on the presence or absence of one of the ingredients and how the vaccinated person responds to it. If there was a dose response, as in a higher dose carries a higher risk, then it is possible that there would be a lower risk in young children or with a lower dose. However, we do not know that at this time.

Chandrakant Lahariya: The rare systemic adverse events, such as viral myocarditis, are not dose-dependent. The purpose of reduced dose is to achieve a similar level of immune response and reduce or minimise local reactions, which sometimes are reported at higher frequency in children. Moreover, if the same immune response can be achieved with a lower dose of the vaccine, more children can be vaccinated.

Director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Dr. Anthony Fauci was quoted as saying that he expects approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in a few weeks and vaccination of young children might begin by the end of October. After booster shots for certain categories of adults, does vaccination of young children further impact the supply of precious vaccines to low- and middle-income countries and thus further exacerbate vaccine inequity?

Gagandeep Kang: Yes, vaccinating children at a time when vulnerable people in other parts of the world have not been vaccinated is a problem for global vaccine equity. However, all countries make their decisions for the benefit of their citizens first, and then think about the rest of the world.

Chandrakant Lahariya: Every country is free to determine what criteria it wishes to adopt to vaccinate different sets of population groups. The vaccination decisions are based upon the burden of disease, safety and efficacy of vaccines and availability of supply. All of these are considered together.

If a country gives importance to availability of supply of vaccines to administer to additional population groups, it has the right to do so, but then, in doing so, it fails in ethical and moral principles of vaccination drives.

According to a survey published last month, only 26% of parents of young children are ready to immediately vaccinate their children, while 40% wish to wait and watch and 25% don’t want to vaccinate. Is the reluctance to vaccinate young children peculiar to this vaccine or do we see it whenever a new vaccine is introduced?

Gagandeep Kang: All parents want to ensure that they do their best for their children. When a disease is severe and the risk of infection is high, and a vaccine is likely to protect, then it is more likely that parents will want to vaccinate their children. When data on vaccine safety are limited, or disease is not severe in children and the risk of infection is low, parents are less likely to vaccinate their children. This cannot be considered peculiar to any particular vaccine.

While Central universities are doing well, few State universities stand out

While we have highlighted the importance of introducing humanities and social sciences in the IITs, the roles that universities and colleges play in educating their youngsters need to be pointed out. During the British colonial rule, while on one hand they charged exorbitant amounts as taxes for their revenue, there were some academicians too, who set up colleges and universities in the Bombay, Madras and Bengal Presidencies. In Bombay, they set up a regular academic college, and medical and law colleges. In Madras, they set up the Madras Presidency College in 1840, and in Bengal the Calcutta Presidency College in 1817.

All these offered quality and contemporary education. In addition, Christian missionaries also started some colleges in Delhi, undivided Punjab, Madras and Assam. Notable among these is the Christian Medical College at Vellore, which continues to offer world-class clinical practice and research to this day.

Royal initiatives

Quite besides these are the schools and colleges started by the Maharajas and Princely State Kings across India, particularly in the South. They have been the bedrock of imparting knowledge and wisdom, history, geography, and religions, over the last century. They have produced scholars, historians, writers and poets, civil servants, judges, chief ministers, governors and Presidents of India, and also M.S. Swaminathan of the Green Revolution and M. Visvesvaraya, the famous dam builder, and also the Nobel Prize winners (C.V. Raman, S Chandrasekhar and most recently Venky Ramakrishnan who is an alumnus of the century-old M.S. University Vadodara).

Outstanding institution

One outstanding institution founded in 1909 at Bangalore through the joint efforts of J.N. Tata and the Maharaja of Mysore is the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), which has been spearheading research in science and technology from the very beginning. Outstanding research in genetics, molecular and cell biology, and protein structure and function has been going on from the very beginning. In recent times, IISc has become world-famous for its achievements in computer science and software technology. Thanks to the series of books on this subject by Dr. V. Rajaraman (which has been the Bible for thousands of students) and the investment by Shri. N.R. Narayanamurthy, who founded Infosys Foundation, India has become a world-leader in software. They have made many graduates from IITs and universities to turn to this area and flock to Silicon Valley in California for jobs, and do very well there.

Moving on to two Central Universities at Delhi, namely, Delhi University with its North and South campuses, and Jawaharlal Nehru University or JNU, we find quite notably that apart from their proven expertise in the areas of economics, humanities and social sciences, they have been doing remarkably well in science and biotechnology. The North Campus has been a forerunner in botany and plant sciences, and the South Campus in medical and biotechnology. And JNU, apart from its distinction in economics (Prof. Utsa Patnaik, who estimated how the British Empire impoverished India by 500 trillion dollars to become the richest Empire in the world), has also an active genetics and biotechnology group (Prof. Anand Ranganathan) that works on TB and Malaria, thus protecting us from these diseases.

But, alas, none of the 400+ State universities successfully stand out in their achievements – be it in language and literature, economics, technology and its use. The lone exception may be Punjab University which has come to the service of the community through its excellent rice production, successful fight against swarms of locusts, and also in the history of the Punjabi language. We have already referred to the work being done at the Jadavpur and Presidency Universities at Kolkata, and also the Osmania University at Hyderabad, in certain areas of science and technology, besides language, literature and economics should be mentioned.

Private universities

Recently, several non-profit private universities have been started and are doing excellent service in software sciences (Azim Premji University), genetics, molecular biology and virology, sociology and history (Ashoka University), and SRM University in Chennai and Amaravati. May there be more such private and non-governmental universities!

dbala@lvpei.org

Identification holds prospect for cultivation in areas with high soil salinity amid climate change

The discovery of a new plant protein by an Indian scientist, in collaboration with researchers from Germany, is set to improve the salt stress tolerance of crops and has opened possibilities of making farmland with high salinity amenable to cultivation.

Assistant Professor with the Department of Botany at the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) Dr Tariq Aftab, working with seven other collaborators from Germany, identified the new protein, HvHorcH, which plays an important role in conferring salt stress tolerance in barley.

The research was carried out at the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research in Gatersleben in Germany when Dr Aftab was a Guest Scientist at the Institute having been awarded the Leibniz-DAAD Research Fellowship in 2012-13. After several subsequent years of further studies and trials, the new discovery was reported in the September issue of the International Journal of Molecular Sciences.

After completing his Ph.D from AMU, Dr Aftab worked as a Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources in New Delhi where he was involved in acquisition, evaluation and identification of climate resilient wheat and rice genetic resources for tolerance to heat, drought and salt stresses. He has also worked as Visiting Scientist at the Department of Plant Biology, Michigan State University, East Lansing on a Raman Fellowship awarded by the University Grants Commission.

Tell us about the relevance of the protein discovery

Salt stress tolerance of crop plants is a trait with increasing value for future food production. The area of farmland worldwide that can be cultivated is declining because of increasing drought periods and the increasing salinity of the soil in several regions of the earth. Global climate change, which is predicted to be accompanied by prolonged and intensified drought periods, is likely to aggravate this situation even further. Intensified irrigation attempts to combat drought ultimately increase soil salinity and thus eventually impede farmland cultivation when salinity reaches threshold levels that can no longer be tolerated by crop plants.

It is, therefore, an eminent goal for a global sustainable food supply to improve the salt stress tolerance of crop plants in order to push these thresholds of soil salinity upwards so that more farmland with high-salinity soil will still be amenable to agriculture.

How is it an addition to the existing knowledge?

The detection and identification of expression patterns of novel genes/proteins upgrade our knowledge of their function in stress adaptation and can offer the foundation of efficient approaches in developing stress-tolerant plants. The identification of this protein will open new horizons in developing stress-resilient crop plants.

Why was barley chosen for research? Can the outcome be applied to other crops directly or does it require further research.

Barley is commonly used in bread and other food products, and as a source of malt for alcoholic beverages. As you know, Germany is famous for a variety of breads, therefore, a lot of research is being conducted on this plant.

Further studies are needed to check the presence of this protein in other plants and if the gene responsible for encoding this protein can successfully be transferred to other crop plants.

Can you explain the process?

The protein sample was first separated by gel electrophoresis, then transferred to a nitrocellulose membrane, and finally stained with a primary antibody that specifically binds to this protein. Another fluorescent secondary antibody binds to the primary antibody and provides a means of detection via photography. To further study the function of HvHorcH during salt stress, a transgenic approach in Arabidopsis thaliana was applied. The gene responsible for this protein was transferred in A. thaliana to check its function. These results indicated that the expression of HvHorcH in root tips enhances salt tolerance in the plants.

How did you name the protein?

Since this is newly identified protein shows homology with the previously identified Jacalin-Related Lectin (JRL) horcolin from barley coleoptiles, therefore, we named the gene as HvHorcH.

What is the significance of the discovery for India and how can it be taken forward?

Like in other countries, salt stress is a major threat to the food security in India too. Therefore, scientists are making efforts to identify the novel proteins which are expressed in these stressful conditions in order to create more tolerant and future ready crops.

If approved, molnupiravir would be 1st oral antiviral COVID-19 drug

An antiviral pill developed by U.S. drug maker Merck & Co could half the chances of dying or being hospitalized for those most at risk of contracting severe COVID-19, with experts hailing it as a potential breakthrough in how the virus is treated.

If it gets authorization, molnupiravir, which is designed to introduce errors into the genetic code of the virus, would be the first oral antiviral medication for COVID-19.

Merck and partner Ridgeback Biotherapeutics said they plan to seek U.S. emergency use authorization for the pill as soon as possible and to make regulatory applications worldwide.

"An oral antiviral that can impact hospitalization risk to such a degree would be game changing," said Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

Current treatment options include Gilead Sciences Inc's infused antiviral remdesivir and generic steroid dexamethasone, both of which are generally only given once a patient has already been hospitalized.

"This is going to change the dialogue around how to manage COVID-19," Merck Chief Executive Robert Davis told Reuters.

Existing treatments are "cumbersome and logistically challenging to administer. A simple oral pill would be the opposite of that," Adalja added.

The results from the Phase III trial, which sent Merck shares up more than 9%, were so strong that the study is being stopped early at the recommendation of outside monitors.

Shares of Atea Pharmaceuticals Inc, which is developing a similar COVID-19 treatment, were up around 20% on the news.

Shares of COVID-19 vaccine makers Pfizer Inc and Moderna Inc were off more than 2% and 14%,respectively.

Michael Yee, a biotechnology analyst at Jefferies, said the share move indicated that investors believe "people will be less afraid of COVID and less inclined to get vaccines if there is a simple pill that can treat COVID."

Pfizer and Swiss drugmaker Roche Holding AG are also racing to develop an easy-to-administer antiviral pill for COVID-19. For now, only antibody cocktails which have to be given intravenously are approved for non-hospitalized patients.

A planned interim analysis of 775 patients in Merck's study looked at hospitalizations or deaths. It found that 7.3% of those given molnupiravir were hospitalized and none had died by 29 days after treatment, compared with hospitalization of 14.1% of placebo patients. There were also eight deaths in the placebo group.

"Antiviral treatments that can be taken at home to keep people with COVID-19 out of the hospital are critically needed,” Wendy Holman, Ridgeback's CEO, said in a statement.

Scientists welcomed the potential new treatment to help prevent serious illness from the virus, which has killed almost 5 million people around the world.

“A safe, affordable, and effective oral antiviral would be a huge advance in the fight against COVID," said Peter Horby, a professor of emerging infectious diseases at the University of Oxford.

In the trial, which involved patients from around the world, molnupiravir was taken every 12 hours for five days.

The study enrolled patients with laboratory-confirmed mild-to-moderate COVID-19, who had symptoms for no more than five days. All patients had at least one risk factor associated with poor disease outcome, such as obesity or older age.

Merck said viral sequencing done so far shows molnupiravir is effective against all variants of the coronavirus including the highly transmissible Delta,which has driven the recent worldwide surge in hospitalizations and deaths.

It said rates of adverse events were similar for both molnupiravir and placebo patients, but did not give details.

Merck has said data shows molnupiravir is not capable of inducing genetic changes in human cells, but men enrolled in its trials had to abstain from heterosexual intercourse or agree to use contraception. Women of child-bearing age in the study could be pregnant and also had to use birth control.

Merck said it expects to produce 10 million courses of the treatment by the end of 2021, with more coming next year.

The company has a U.S. government contract to supply 1.7 million courses of molnupiravir at a price of $700 per course.

Davis said Merck has similar agreements with othergovernments, and is in talks with more. Merck said it plans a tiered pricing approach based on country income criteria.

Merck has also agreed to license the drug to several India-based generic drugmakers, which would be able to supply the treatment to low and middle-income countries.

Molnupiravir is also being studied in a Phase III trial for preventing infection in people exposed to the coronavirus.

Merck officials said it is unclear how long the FDA review will take, although Dean Li, head of Merck's research labs,said, "They are going to try to work with alacrity on this."

The agile Cnemaspis jackieii or Jackie’s Day Gecko is among 12 species of geckos recorded from the Western Ghats

When actor and martial artist Jackie Chan moved fast and ducked every danger on screen, little did he know that a gecko in the Western Ghats will be named after him as a tribute to his agility.

Researchers from the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS); Centre for Ecological Sciences (CES), Indian Institute of Science; and the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bengaluru, have discovered 12 new species of geckos from the Western Ghats. They have also rediscovered populations of some species which have not been reported since their original discovery over 100 years ago.

The researchers have named one of the new species Cnemaspis jackieii or Jackie’s Day Gecko for its ability to move rapidly and sneak into the smallest crevices to escape when approached, reminiscent of Mr. Chan’s famous stunts.

The study published in the international journal Zoological Research is authored by Saunak Pal, Zeeshan A. Mirza, Princia D’souza and Kartik Shanker. “Commonly known as ‘dwarf geckos’ or even ‘day geckos’, geckos of the genus ‘Cnemaspis’ are known to be distributed in Africa, Indo-Sri Lanka and southeast Asia,” said Mr. Pal, who carried out extensive field visits across the Western Ghats to collect morphological data, distribution information, specimens and tissue samples.

The researchers found that geckos of the genus Cnemaspis are amongst some of the most ancient reptiles known from the Western Ghats, with their origin dating back to over 60 million years ago. The study confirms that these geckos originated even before the Indian plate collided with Asia and diversified across distinct biogeographic barriers in the Western Ghats mountains.

Mr. Mirza from the NCBS examined type specimens of known species in the collection of the Natural History Museum, London, and examined the osteology of Indian species. Princia Dsouza from the CES, IISc, generated molecular data essential for phylogenetic analysis for the collected specimens. This study was part of a larger survey of frogs, lizards and snakes of the Western Ghats, supported by the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund between 2009 and 2014. The project, led by Mr. Shanker from CES, IISc, aimed to map the diversity and distribution of these groups in the Ghats, towards discovering species, documenting diversity and using this information towards conservation prioritisation.